Danny and David, both budding filmmakers, co-directed a short 16 mm film of Amber and me playing juvenile delinquents, blowing smoke rings in the mirror of the Ladies Room inside the Castro Theatre while dreams of stardom shined in our eyes, ending with us both playing haggard housewives. The final frames of the film show Amber doing endless loads of laundry intercut with me smashing dirty dishes against my kitchen wall. It was quite a masterful piece of film that opened our show and made Amber and me look like major movie stars—or at least think we were.
With Broken Dishes, I had the opportunity to hone my skills as a producer, and Scrumbly brought in fantastic backup singers, A.C. Griffin and Tom Drain. Amber was dynamic and funny on stage, but very dysfunctional on the home front. I suppose it sounds like the pot calling the kettle black, but I was a lot less fragile than she and could handle a lot more responsibility. I found myself not only wearing the hats of writer, producer, costume designer and performer, but on some days I literally had to do Amber’s laundry before I could get her out of the house to a rehearsal. Amber was so spacey that on one occasion she put her son to bed at a party and by the end of the evening she had forgotten she had a kid and went home without him.
I, the short zaftig brunette with a down-to-earth attitude, and Amber, the tall airy redhead with only one toe on the planet, were quickly forming the female counterparts to the Smother Brothers, sans guitars. We used our differences in physicality and personalities as fodder for our comedy, and our opening number was a sendup to the sister act played by Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen in the movie White Christmas. Amber was unstoppable when it came to writing her songs and monologues; you could never get her to edit a word. I left my lyric writing to Martin, but wrote my own monologues, and we co-wrote our skits together.
30. WHAT To WEAR
I was thirty years old, and had been in San Francisco for only three years by the opening of Broken Dishes in the summer of 1976, the year of the U.S. bicentennial. I found an out-of-town venue for a test run before we opened in the city. I booked two consecutive weekends at the Mendocino Art Center. A few weeks before we were to open in Mendocino, we went up to The Albion Fair to do a little promo and attract the country audience for our upcoming show. Jamian invited us to ride up in his van and camp out overnight. My primary focus was on putting the show promo together, packing costumes, wigs and props, and I made the mistake of leaving the practical camping stuff to Amber. Amber and I were the queens of camp, but she, I soon learned, knew nothing about outdoor camping. Only when we began to unpack our show drag did I learn that Amber forgot the food and cooking aids. She hadn’t even packed a can opener. If it weren’t for the generous hippies we met, our children would have gone hungry that weekend.
One of those generous hippies was Lulu, a young talented dancer from Chicago who lived at Orr Hot Springs in Ukiah. Lulu was a rare breed of openly gay boy in the midst of a very straight rural community. He had a reputation for being a fantastic tap and belly dancer and was beloved by his very straight hippy neighbors. He was at the fair to belly dance. All dressed in our finery, with Lulu in his girly bellydance outfit clinking and clanking along the dusty dirt road to the stage, we were stopped dead in our tracks. A rowdy pack of Hells Angels pulled their motorcycles up and blocked our way. They singled out Lulu at the head of our procession. The leader of their pack yelled in his face, “Hey you, hey you, are you one of those fags we heard about, up here from San Francisco.”
We were well aware of the Hells Angels’ reputation at free concerts, so naturally we were terrified. Lulu looked the bully dead in the eye and with both hands on his hips and in the queeniest voice, said, “Why? What are you going to do to me if I tell you? Fuck me or kill me?”
His delivery was so funny that their leader cracked up and the whole gang followed his laughing like thugs in a Mafia movie. With the Hells Angels laughing their asses off, they gave us a motor escort all the way to the stage and that day the Hells Angels were Lulu’s loudest fans. I saw a magician in Lulu, and I was determined to get him to move to San Francisco to work in our show. A few months later he did just that, and became our third backup boy.
Two weeks after the fair, the Mendocino opening of Broken Dishes did not go off without a hitch. Some of the conservative contributors to the Mendocino Art Center heard about the racy performers from San Francisco and they came out to scrutinize our dress rehearsal. A few members of the board of directors tiptoed into the back of the theatre just as Amber and I were doing “Beauty Secrets,” our opening number. When I threw my arms up in the air, the uninvited guests caught me having a wardrobe malfunction. Both my boobs flung out of the corset that had yet to have the straps sewed on. If that wasn’t bad enough, Amber was flashing her natural red pubes because she forgot to put her panties on under her corset. That’s all these stuffed-shirts needed to see to send them running to complain to the artistic director. They demanded that the show be shut down before it even opened, due to indecency.
Back in our hotel room, as little Sean ran circles around his mom, Amber sat in a full lotus, wringing her hands and weeping, asking the Universe, “Why are they persecuting me for my spiritual work?” She kept casting tarot cards, and chanting Hail Marys. As she searched the tarot for an answer, I sprang into action. I left the hotel with Viva and we walked all over town trying to find some local liberals to become our allies. At a coffee house I met a gay man who had strong connections in the community and he helped me gather up some other people who offered support. They put counter pressure on the director of the Art Center. The word spread quickly around town that censorship was afoot and the stuffy board of directors caved. The following night Broken Dishes was allowed to open as planned.
There were technical problem as well. The theatre had been built with a beautiful skylight in the center over the house seats, and in the summertime it was difficult to make the house dark enough to show the film that opened the show. The tickets were sold for an 8 p.m. curtain, but we had to postpone the show until 9 p.m.
The word-of-mouth controversy gave us more publicity than we could ever have paid for. The doors opened to an oversold house that had been gathering outside for over an hour. More than halfway through the show, all was going very well when an unexpected flash thunderstorm arrived with a bang. With the first crack of thunder, we lost all electrical power in the middle of Amber’s best song, “The Rhinestone Blues.” Amber and Scrumbly, troupers that they were, didn’t miss a beat, and they kept playing and singing in the dark. Just as Amber sang the lyric, “So light my cigarette,” as if God himself had written the scene, on cue, the entire theatre lit up from the lightening flashing overhead. Throughout the remainder of the song, the lightening kept the show illuminated, giving our stagehands time to find candles and flashlights so we could continue the show. That night we won the hearts of our new fans, and even of some enemies. I took credit for my practical knowledge, and Amber thanked magic and witchcraft, but it was clear to me that Broken Dishes had been born by Grace.
31. I LOVE FAGS
I’m not going to tell you about every boy I ever loved or slept with because if I do you’ll only think I’m bragging. Like designer labels, Fag Hag, Bitch, Witch and Whore were terms I wore proudly. Martin Worman taught me that the word fag meant twig. Fags were the boys used as kindling on the pilings used to torch witches. The fags were sacrificed merely for associating with or loving the women who were persecuted for showing their power and their spiritual gifts. Martin explained that fags and hags made one hell of a hot bonfire.
I must have been one of those witches in a previous life, and now I was being reunited with my fellow victims from the past. It was one way to explain my attraction to gay men. My gay lovers were not monogamous and never promised me happy-ever-afters. We were more like polygamists in a Mormon cult (sort of), except that in the gay counterculture, we did it with style. My housemate Marshall loved to tease me about my trysts with gay men. He said I had “fag attraction” and no one could und
erstand why so many queers always ended up in my bed. Neither could I.
I felt adored like Ava Garner in the film One Touch of Venus, who turned from stone to flesh and came down from a pedestal to experience the love of her suitor. I was not like some fag hags, making a sport of getting a gay boy to bed. Most of my lovers evolved naturally out of friendships. I was always surprised when an innocent love crossed the line. I had many intimate affairs; some were one night stands and others lasted longer, but when the lover label faded away—or, as in some cases, was ripped off like a hot Brazilian bikini wax—these relationships always reverted back to lasting friendships.
Many years after my party days ended, while working on my sobriety, I wrote a list of everyone I ever slept with. I came up with 154 names. That number did not include everyone. There were some I didn’t remember. One day I bumped into a chubby chaser trying to pick up women at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting and he approached me at the coffee table at the back of the meeting hall.
“Hi, my name is Billy; didn’t we have sex at Harbin Hot Springs in 1974?” he asked.
Caught off guard, I just stared at him with a quizzical look on my face.
“Don’t you remember?” he said, “I was the guy who Watsued you.”
“I remember Watsu; it’s Shiatsu underwater,” I said and walked away.
The words sex and love were never used in connection with addiction in the ’70s. But today I could admit that I probably fit the criteria for your classic sex and love addict according to the twelve-step model. Sex was never my goal; it was love I ached for.
Innocence and denial was bliss in my big incestuous family where we swapped lovers and rolls more frequently than we changed our drag. Loving unavailable men kept me safe from vulnerability and painful rejection from straight men. I had so many friends, fans and suitors in my delirious youth that I never worried about what tomorrow would bring. I even felt superior to the typical conventional woman who had to rely on one man to meet all her needs when I always had a dozen or more.
My friends and lovers often served as my gay husbands. They mentored me, fed me, dressed me, cared for me and my daughter, and made love to me even when I felt less than worthy. They helped me laugh off my deep loneliness, and when I couldn’t, offered me a shoulder to cry on.
32. JOHN
I met John McGuire in 1973 and his partner Tim McKenna while on a vacation in Mazatlán, Mexico, right after my San Francisco debut of Cinderella. John was short and tan with piercing green eyes, and Tim, his opposite, was long, lean and blond. I literally fell into his arms on the balcony of my motel while running from my crazy traveling companion, Charles Isis. Charles was a bit player I had met among the extras who hung out at the Ranch during Cinderella rehearsals earlier that year. Joe Morocco had invited me to join him and all his housemates on a trip to Mexico. I arranged to have my friend Karen and her little boy stay with Viva for a week at my place in Venice, but when the time came to go, everyone in San Francisco had bowed out except for Charles, and I ended up alone with him on a thirty-hour bus ride down to Mazatlán. The bus ride was only made worse by the fact that, after a few hours in, I realized I had caught scabies during a casual three-way back home in Venice with Dorsey and his fiancée, Karen Dunaway.
I should have known the trip was doomed when my new theater friends cancelled and left me with only Charles, who I barely knew. Charles showed no sympathy as itchy colonies of microscopic scabies were multiplying under my skin faster than fruit flies on a ripe banana.
By the time we arrived in Mazatlán it was Mardi Gras, and the raucous celebrations included gunshots and fireworks. This did not make for a soothing vacation for a tourist with a full-blown case of scabies. I sought help at a Mexican pharmacy, but due to the language barrier, I came away with the wrong remedy, Scabison Emulsion, a lotion intended for lice on livestock. I slathered it liberally all over my body, and as soon as the burning began I jumped into a shower so hot as to be almost fatal. This only caused my pours to open more and the poison began to eat through all seven layers of my skin. After switching to the cold water to slow the burn, I emerged from the bath in my towel crying only to find my traveling buddy Charles up to no good.
Charles was on the bed with two underage Mexican boys. One boy was nodding out while Charles was tying a tourniquet around the arm of the other boy, about to shoot him up with heroin. Horrified, I screamed and ran from the scene—right into the arms of John, who was just coming back from the beach. John took me into his room and he and Tim calmed me down. After awhile we went back to my room to retrieve my clothes. Charles and the boys were out so I packed my things and put them in their room. John and Tim brought me back to the pharmacy to get the antidote for Scabison Emulsion and then invited me to travel back to the U.S. with them the next day.
A month later, when I found my apartment on Clayton Street, I learned that John and Tim were my neighbors, living down the block on the corner of Waller Street. John and I were both short Italian Americans who loved to cook and dance. At that time, John was a chef at an upscale vegetarian restaurant on Polk Street and taught me how to make the best tofu burgers I’ve ever had. I still make them to this day. It was easy to love John, whose compact muscular body reminded me of the bad boys I knew in high school. Our bond was as thick as his chunky marinara sauce, and like a big brother, John was always protective of me and Viva. He fancied the idea of us being a family.
I never knew if John’s partner Tim knew that John, on occasion, would sleep with me, but if Tim knew, he never expressed any jealousy. Tim was Sylvester’s manager before Sylvester became world renowned for his disco hits. The first time I saw Sylvester on stage at The City, a popular gay cabaret and disco, he was making magic by singing a sultry blues that would give Billie and Ella a run for their money. Sylvester was wearing a shimmering wing-sleeved sequined blue dress, and the moody stage lights bouncing off the dress filled the room with sparkles like a disco ball—a preview of the days that would follow when Sylvester’s music filled the discos for decades.
As Tim was working hard to build Sylvester’s fame and fortune, John and I got to sit front-row, center at every one of Sylvester’s shows. After a fun night of blues, and rocking gospel with Sylvester wailing at The City, Sylvester would often invite us back to his home for a small after-hours gathering. I loved those late nights when Sly would take off his wig and put on a comfortable robe, and then we would all pile on his bed where he held court and shared joints and stories. To be in the company of a genius diva stripped down to a warm, earthy goddess at home was a privilege. Like a gracious queen, Sylvester entertained her subjects as she held court in bed. I took notes.
Another thing that John and I had in common was our love of black gospel music, and on Sundays John would take Viva and me to the Glide Memorial Church or to special Bay Area Gospel Choirs competitions. John and I would get down like two old church ladies, stomping and shouting and falling out with the best of them.
One afternoon John came by and told me to get dressed because he was taking me to a party to meet his yoga teacher. We arrived at a deluxe home in the upscale Berkeley Hills. I had no idea of what to expect. I had dressed in my best vintage Dorothy Lamour ’40s print sarong and slipped into my highest heeled platforms and put on my signature bright red lips.
When I entered the ritzy foyer with my heels clanking on the tile floor, a pious group of barefooted yoga students in white pajamas, who were all meditating in the living room, opened their eyes and turned toward me in unison. From their seated lotus positions, their expressions changed from bliss to disdain. But before they could run me off for the rude disturbance, I was greeted by a friendly Indian man with a long salt-and-pepper beard, dressed in traditional Indian garb. As he entered the foyer, John introduced me to his yoga master, Swami Shiva Lignum. John explained later that the name meant God’s Penis in Hindi. Swami Ji took one look at me and embraced me like an old friend, then whisked me away into the kitchen where he was preparing an In
dian feast for his students. That day he taught me and John how to make chapati and kept the other humble students in the front room turning green with envy when they saw that, without ever removing my shoes or doing one single posture, I had been made Swami Ji’s teacher’s pet. After that initial meeting, I became Swami Shiva Lignum’s disciple and joined John in his yoga practice.
33. LENDON
I first met Lendon when he bounded up my steps one afternoon looking for my roommate Jimmy and his lover Gil. Lendon was a Cockette, but he had moved to L.A. just before I arrived on the scene in San Francisco. After a dinner with our roommates, Lendon invited me to join him and the boys at the Stud where every night gorgeous men filled the amyl nitrite-scented dance floor. At the bar, Lendon greeted a few old friends, but for the most part remained close to my side and danced with me the whole night. After we got back home, Jimmy and Gil gave Lendon a blanket and directed him toward the couch, and they went to bed. I don’t recall if I invited him or if he invited himself, but somehow Lendon was sharing my bed. Even after all the attention he had paid to me, it never occurred to me that this magnificent African prince with his regal ebony features and short dreadlocks would ever in a million years want to sleep with me. Sex was instant, easy and natural with him, and Lendon fit me like my favorite pair of cozy flannel pajamas. His dark skin radiated so much warmth that I had to turn off the heater in my room that night.
The next day, Lendon met Viva. In the two years we had lived in San Francisco, Viva rarely saw her dad, and there was a shortage of African American male role models in our immediate community. When she saw Lendon she practically leapt into his arms. Lendon came from warm southern roots and embraced my child, and they bonded instantly, just as we had. Lendon spent the remainder of his week with us. To the outside world we looked like the perfect bi-racial family everywhere we went. When he had to go back to L.A., he invited me to come visit him as soon as I could get away.
My Life, a Four Letter Word Page 13
