Less than a week after Jimmy moved into our new digs, he met Marshall Reiner, an elfish, Pan-like, Jewish, East-coast transplant who was looking for a place to live. Marshall, short with dark curly hair, was a perfect blend of East Coast Jew and Hindu Mahatma. Marshall was Woody Allen on Quaaludes—neurotic and laid-back at the same time, and I embraced him, complications and all. Whenever Marshall got too stoned, he’d get extremely anxious and crawl into my bed.
“Girl, please tell me I’m okay, I’m not a failure, am I?” Marshall asked.
I’d put my arms around him and gently spoon him and say, “Honey you’re fine. Just take some deep breaths. You’ll be even better after you take a little nap.”
“Thanks girl, what would I do without you? You’re my barometer.”
Basically, Marshall was asking me to be a loving mother, so my mothering skills expanded beyond the immediate needs of my daughter.
With another pass of fairy godmother’s wand, the four bedrooms, back porch and eventually the tiny space under the stairwell became useful as my family grew. Along with the adult children in my home, I was giving birth to a new surge of creativity and style. My new family helped me unleash dormant talents I didn’t know I possessed—like interior decorating, for one. Before I knew it, each room in my home took on a different personality reminiscent of a Hollywood movie set, and the cast of characters in my play kept appearing.
At a party one night I met Mark America, a brilliant visual artist from London who spoke proper Queen’s English, and I immediately cast him in the role of my set decorator in exchange for rent. Mark was easy on the eyes: gorgeous, blonde, and with a slim, fit, muscular build. After I told Mark that I missed the warmer climate back in L.A., he painted lush green tropical jungle murals of swaying palm trees and warm golden sunsets in the living room, to remind me of my sunny days on Venice Beach. All through that first winter he served me tea and kept me cozy with stories of his naughty days in British boarding schools. Mark, like Marshall, had his own brand of dysfunction. Although he grew up with a proper upper-class education, he had the qualities of an orphan boy like Oliver Twist in Oliver. He, too, appeared to be another motherless child, but he bonded well with his new brothers, Jimmy and Marshall.
In the thrift stores, I found exquisite ’40s rattan furniture. My dear friend Scrumbly, a wiz at the sewing machine, whipped up slipcovers from vintage draperies as a housewarming gift. All this decorating was done on a dime; I was learning quickly how to live like a queen on a welfare budget. Within months, I had a ’50s red Formica kitchen set found at the Purple Heart Thrift Store. Scrumbly had told me about the Foster and Kaiser Warehouse in Oakland where I purchased an original ad for Hellman’s Mayonnaise: a super-sized billboard poster of gigantic salad vegetables large enough to be seen in Oakland as you entered the Bay Bridge. We glued it to one kitchen wall and Mark painted the kitchen in primary colors to accent this miraculous find. Our kitchen resembled a fifties diner and was large enough for feasts and dancing. We didn’t have a jukebox, but we housed the stereo in one of the kitchen cupboards. My roommates helped with all the chores. Cooking, cleaning, and jitterbugging often went on simultaneously.
In exchange for my bi-monthly prescription of sixty Quaaludes provided by Doctor Feel Good—which I paid for with Medi-Cal stickers—I got Nicky, another Venice neighbor and a professional paper hanger, to come up for a weekend and hang the vintage wallpaper for my bedroom. I had found the wallpaper in the dusty back storage area of a small paint and paper store off Mission Street. Nicky even covered the curved Victorian ceiling with the soft-blue and delicate rose floral print. At another thrift store, I found a flawless vanity table and matching chair. It had a beveled mirror like the one my mom had in her bedroom, that I loved so much as a child. I was given the name of a cheap upholsterer, who I paid about $50 to make me a white satin, rolled and tucked deco headboard for my bed. When it was all done, my bedroom was a glorious send-up to my childhood movie favorites. Propped up against that headboard featuring a thriftstore satin nightgown, I felt like Ginger Rogers waiting for Fred to sweep me off my feet.
Before long, Martin, a husky, long-haired, East Coast Italian waiter, stumbled onto our steps. I can’t recall who brought him to one of our parties, or why he stayed, but once I got to know him, he felt like a long lost Italian cousin. Martin was the only house member who had little interest in showbusiness.
When Marshall decided to travel to Morocco and Turkey for a few months, he introduced us to Jerry, Sylvester’s back-up singer. Jerry was a flamboyant African American queen who wanted to sublet Marshall’s room, and I was delighted to replace Marshall with someone so close to Sylvester, the first Cockette on the rise to mainstream fame. Jerry had hopes to take that journey along with Sylvester, and he added a new dimension of color to our house and liked playing the role of Viva’s black daddy who was obviously missing from the picture. Reg had come up only once that first year, at Christmas, to see his daughter. That year, Reg also gave me a Christmas present: his old, used Datsun, in place of the four years of back child-support payments.
After a few months, Marshall returned from Morocco with more exotic herbs and habits. He allowed Jerry to keep his room and he moved himself into a small cubbyhole under the stairway. We always knew when Marshall was in by the smell of beedi cigarette smoke wafting through the hallway, coming from his tiny room under the stairwell.
If you pressed fast forward on the comings and goings of roommates at Clayton Street, it would make your head spin. It started with me and Viva, and then came Jimmy followed by Marshall, then Mark followed by Martin and Jerry. At this point my fabulous housepainter Mark had moved out, leaving six on board. Jimmy, my only roommate without decorator tendencies, had the only room that looked exactly as it did on the day he first occupied it, with his boxes still unpacked. He spent most nights at his boyfriend Billy Orchid’s house, and we often used his room for guests.
John Compton, the Bay Area’s most famous male bellydancer, joined our ranks for a short while, too, and converted the tiny back porch leading to the back door off the kitchen into a tiny bedroom that resembled an exotic stall at an outdoor market in Marrakesh. He brought Jimilla, his six-foot-long pet python with him. I first spotted John on stage at the Renaissance Fair where he melted my heart as he spun in circles balancing a silver tray and sword on top of his pretty head. I lost myself in his seductive black kohl-lined, cobalt-blue eyes. John stayed with us just long enough to teach Viva how to belly dance. He would put the python on top of Viva’s wild curly locks, and little five-year-old Viva posed like a young queen of the Nile, never missing a step, pivoting to the beat.
The only female besides me and Viva to live under my roof was Debbie Debris—Tra-La-La Trent. Debbie, a plump, attractive, hennaed, curly top, renegade Jewish princess, moved in when Jerry left to go on tour. She came to us from L.A. via Berkley, via Marshall’s lover, David Greene. Jimmy and Marshall championed Debbie becoming the next roommate, but I had my reservations. The boys found her quick wit and over-the-top antics amusing, and accused me of being competitive when I protested.
“I’d be happy to have another real girl in the house, but she’s got no boundaries,” I argued.
Before Debbie moved in, she popped over one night while I was holding court in bed with another guest, my friend Jamian Merlin, a fair, long-haired, skinny filmmaker. I introduced Debbie to Jamian, and before I knew it Debbie was auditioning for a role in his next movie. Although Jamian was gay, Debbie said something that triggered Jamian to boast about his oral sex technique with women.
At this point in gay history—or maybe it was just San Francisco—most of the gay men I knew defined themselves as gay, but many in practice were bisexual. Perhaps it was the drug combinations we look that allowed for such open experimentation, but often it was a matter of refusing to be put in a box. Many of my friends were radical hippy anarchists who even countered the counterculture.
Debbie, in her coquettish, sledgehammer st
yle, demanded that Jamian prove his point.
“Put your mouth where my money is, honey!” she said.
Jamian took her challenge and offered to service the both of us.
“No thanks”, I said, “I’ve got the flu, and frankly the thought of a threeway with you guys is making me sicker.” But that didn’t stop Debbie. She whipped off her baggy overalls, giggling, “Don’t mind if I do.” Then she threw herself across my bed, right on top of me, and spread her scull-crushing thighs to allow for Jamian’s face to enter her nether regions. I literally had to wiggle myself out from under the two of them and escape to Viva’s room to get some rest that night.
Once Debbie moved in, she continued to live up to her title, “The Mistress of Offense.” Until then our landlords had never complained about our raucous behavior. Then Debbie took possession of the front room facing the front of the building. One day she decided to clean her birdcage and dump the droppings out the front window where the mess landed on the hood of Dorothy Sag’s precious car just as she was pulling into the driveway. Soon after that incident, Mr. Robinson came up to fix a leak. When he found no one home, he let himself in and got a peek into Debbie’s room with her debris everywhere. Debbie had every article of clothing she owned hanging out of every open drawer along with piles of fabrics, paper and sawdust covering the bed and floor. Fearing there might be a fire hazard, Mr. Robinson entered the room to check the electrical outlets and, in the dark, he tripped over Debbie’s objet d’art on the floor: a life-sized doll she made from a man’s suit, stuffed with rags to make it look like a decapitated corpse. She had also placed a knife in its chest and splattered fake blood all over the shirt. Somewhat tipsy from his Ripple, poor Mr. Robinson nearly had a stroke.
Debbie brought live mice without a cage into our house, and her idea of sculpture was a cow’s tongue she shellacked on a spike and placed on her mantle. The only battle I ever won over Debbie’s impulses was over the mice that kept multiplying and taking over our apartment. Even the boys backed me up on that one, and we set mouse traps everywhere and made her donate the ones still living to a pre-school co-op in the neighborhood.
Over the span of the next three and a half years on Clayton Street, many of my roommates’ family, friends, lovers and tricks spent many a day and night, up to weeks at a time, in our house. Amidst the scents of broccoli, garlic, marijuana and patchouli oil, a few old ghosts lingered in the long hallway, too. I learned from neighbors that in the ’60s, two tenants had died of overdoses in my apartment, and apparently their ghosts were unwilling to vacate the premises. These invisible boarders must have appreciated my leftovers, because on a few occasions items disappeared off our plates accompanied by the flickering of lights.
One night when everyone was out at some big event and I was home for lack of a babysitter, I put Viva to bed and used this rare opportunity to take a long, hot bath in the one bathroom all six of us shared. I ran the hot water, adding lavender and bubbles, and the minute I climbed into the tub and relaxed, I saw the doorknob move and heard noises from outside the bathroom door. Thinking that Viva had gotten out of bed or someone had come home early, I called out, but no one answered. After a few repetitions of the noise and knob jiggling, I got out of the tub, and as I approached the locked door, the doorknob moved again and I heard a loud pounding that came with such force that the door actually buckled. Thinking that this had to be one of my roommates playing a prank, I quickly opened the door and found no one on the other side. I checked every room and found the flat empty except for the sleeping Viva. I was so freaked out, I climbed into bed next to Viva and lay awake until Marshall got home. The next day, Marshall found a friendly ghost-be-gone ritual in one of his esoteric books and used it to smoke out the pranksters. Marshal dressed up for the occasion like a Catholic priest and Sufi dancer. He even had a Catholic incense burner to burn the sage with. As he twirled through the long hallway speaking in tongues, he filled the hallway with thick smoke—and it did the trick. We never had another incident with spirits again.
For this mansion in the Haight, with every square foot utilized, we paid only $37.50 a month each, and the only time we ever heard from the Robinsons was when the sink drain backed up and overflowed into their kitchen. Debbie loved to mock Mr. Robinson’s yelling, “You’s floodin’ us, you’s floodin’ us,” until we turned off the water. Despite everything they endured, Mrs. Robinson was kind enough to braid Viva’s unruly hair, and from time to time on Sundays took her to their Baptist church and allowed me to sleep in. I returned her kindness by taking her daughter, Lisa, along with me and Viva and the boys to the nude beach at Devil Slide. Little Lisa, not as God-fearing as her mama must have hoped, loved to run naked and wild with Viva kicking sand over all the nude boys baking in the sun.
My queer companions were my teachers, heroes and saviors. We valued each other, our drag, vintage items, and our next show. We dressed ourselves and decorated our rooms in the styles and glamour of any age we fancied, from Renaissance courtesans to 1950s rock and rollers. We pioneered recycling, health and fashion trends, shopped at whole-food community co-ops, did yoga, and ate organics and tofu decades before it became trendy. We were living the life yogis have strived for throughout the ages; we lived in the moment.
Once a month we’d hold a monthly house business meeting at Mommy Fortuna’s, a local greasy spoon on Haight Street. Just for fun, we called ourselves ‘The Coffee Shop Coalition’ and dressed like ’50s housewives with our hair up in curlers, and wore housecoats and slippers. No one in the hood ever blinked an eye. This was San Francisco. It was the dawning of a new age, and I thought I had found Shangri-La.
25. FREE DISH
Although my household was not a true commune, we borrowed much of the political and spiritual philosophies of our time. For lack of a better name, I called our home Casa Del Grande Boca—”house of the big mouth”—because no one could keep a secret. Neighboring communes with higher ideals like The Angels of Light, Hunga Dunga, and Kaliflower created food banks and free clinics, lived on strict vegan diets and pooled all their resources. They did free theatre and gave free dance and yoga classes to the community.
We managed to share just about everything, but we followed no rules. When I learned that Kentucky Fried Chicken used battery-caged chickens that never saw the light of day, I swore off KFC, but, at best, I was a quasi-vegetarian. I personally drew the line on giving everything away for the good of the whole, and held on fiercely to my individual boundaries and personal rights to my stuff.
One night at the Angels of Light commune, I popped in during the home birth of baby Govita, who had just made her entrance through Angel Lenore. I found Ralph, a former Cockette true to his title, “Kitchen Slut,” cooking for the clan. I sat at the long table and watched him sauté onions to a caramelized perfection in a gigantic cast-iron pan. Tony Angel, the proud new papa, delivered a bedpan filled with a blob that looked like calves liver to the stove, and as I congratulated him, Ralph began to cut up the mystery meat and ad it into the onions on the stove. Ralph then informed me that the bloody mush was the fresh after birth just discharged from Lenore’s uterus and went on to lecture me on the nutritional value of the placenta.
“This is the only meat we can eat without killing anything,” he said, and then Ralph and Tony invited me to join them for a new life celebration dinner.
“No thanks, don’t care for placenta, it looks too much like the baby calves liver my mother force fed me as a child.”
Asshole Consciousness—a vague philosophy that had something to do with avoiding toilet paper—was another practice of the Angels that I could never warm up to. I dreaded using their bathroom unless I had brought plenty of tissues in my purse. In the Angels toilet next to the commode all you would fine was a coffee can filled with water to wash your butt after a dump, and more often than not, there was never a towel to dry off with. The infamous gender-bending troupes the Angels and the Cockettes shared the same roots, but became a house divided. Hibi
scus, the Cockettes’ founder along with Ralph and a few others, split off from the Cockettes due to ideological differences and formed The Angels of Light. Hibiscus with his new Angels rejected structure and rehearsals and were heavily influenced by Irving, the head of Kaliflower, a commune that swayed heavily toward the left. Irving wrote an editorial in the Kaliflower newsletter berating the Cockettes for their ambition to grow along professional lines.
“They started free and sold out to golddigger dreams of riches and stardom.”
But even after the split, members of both troupes often crossed lines and performed in each other’s shows.
Like me, other newcomers to this community were the gang who lived at The Rancho Del Ruby. Their household mission was to flaunt decadence. Joe Morocco, one of my dancing-mice partners in Cinderella, was their charismatic leader, and his housemates included his lover, Doug, a Midwesterner, Janet Planet, and a few other New Yorkers who revolved in his orbit. They all shared a lavish, sprawling flat on the top floor of a Victorian on Haight Street near the corner of Divisadero. With the added benefit of a huge attic that doubled as a rehearsal studio, it made for a great party house.
The Ranch went through a phase when they converted from being heavy meat eaters to practicing a strict macrobiotic diet, juicing, and taking lots of supplements. This was not done for humanitarian reasons, but to counterbalance all the chemicals they smoked religiously. I myself had given up smoking the deadly PCP, commonly known as Angel Dust, but at Ranch parties, you would often find the guests so dusted on this animal tranquilizer that they stood like zombies holding on to the furniture and swaying for hours. For fear that someone would fall on her, I would have to hold Viva on my lap throughout the party.
My Life, a Four Letter Word Page 11
