My Life, a Four Letter Word

by Dolores DeLuce

  My perfect family fantasy picked up where it left off during the weekend Viva and I stayed with Lendon at his little guest house in the San Fernando Valley. After he played daddy all day and put Viva to bed, we sat in the swing seat under the lemon trees in the back yard on an unusually warm winter night. That night, Lendon held me in his arms and read poetry to me. He chose a poem from Walt Whitman.

  Are you the new person drawn toward me?

  To begin with, take warning—I am surely far different from what you

  suppose;

  Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?

  Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?

  Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction?

  Do you think I am trusty and faithful?

  Do you see no further than this façade—this smooth and tolerant

  manner of me?

  Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?

  Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all Maya, illusion?

  That night we spooned in bed, and I ignored the warning in the poem he read. I drifted off to sleep to the tones of Roberta Flack singing “Killing Me Softly.” This was not the first affair that sent my mind wandering down the aisle, thinking, “Could this bi-boy be the one, the one who will be mine forever?” But it wasn’t long before reality would bitch-slap me upside the head.

  The next night at the Pink Elephant, a Venice gay bar, I introduced Lendon to David Greene, the filmmaker who worked on Broken Dishes. By the end of the night, it became clear that Lendon and David were totally smitten with one another. After closing, David and Lendon asked for my blessing before they went off to consummate their newfound love for one another.

  “Of course, haven’t I been taught to share? Have a good time.”

  I left the bar wearing my comedy mask, but once alone again, the tragedy hit me. On the drive back home, deep sadness and dark despair gripped my heart.

  As I pulled unto the I-10 freeway to head back to pick up Viva from the sitter, my pain once again was highlighted by that damn song “Killing Me Softly,” playing on my car radio. Roberta’s sweet words turned to vinegar but I refused the sour in the pit of my stomach and chocked back the tears. I floored my little VW Bug to 70 miles an hour and let Ms. Flack say it for me, “and then he looked right through me as if I wasn’t there. He was killing me softly with his song…”

  I convinced myself that losing a man to a man was easier than losing him to another woman. Shattered romance is never easy, but this loss came cloaked in adoration. The consolation prize is that both Lendon and David are still together today, and still my good friends after all these years.

  34. WOPS

  Had he not been a queer, Tommy Pace would have made the perfect husband—the Italian/American husband my parents prayed I’d find. Although he was only half Italian, we shared a mutual love for all things Italian, including the insulting slang words like dago or WOP that labeled Italian immigrants without papers when they arrived at Ellis Island. This politically incorrect lingo was the language of our love.

  “Girl, you are just a faggot trapped in a woman’s body, and I’m your dyke trapped in a faggot’s body.” Tommy whispered in my ear as we lay on his tiny bed in a cluttered basement of the small house on Wilmot Street near the Fillmore. I met Tommy while out shopping with Marshall at the Purple Heart Thrift Store on Mission Street. Tommy had long, dark hair and he kept flipping it about like a girl in a shampoo commercial. He was cute enough, but I was so consumed by my own divahood that I didn’t register his gorgeous pouty lips, chiseled high cheekbones and chestnut-brown eyes until months later. Amber already knew Tommy from the Rollover Alice production, and when we were re-mounting Broken Dishes for our first City run, she asked me if we could find a small part for Tommy in the show. Even though we already had too many backup boys, Amber convinced me to give him a little walk-on where he got to usher her boozy starlet character off the stage with a funny line.

  One night, Tommy and I grabbed a bite at Little Joe’s, a popular hole-in-the-wall off of Columbus Ave. in North Beach. The restaurant had only a few tables covered in red-and-white-checkered tablecloths and a long counter where you could watch the cooks stir up hot Italian dishes before your eyes. Garlic filled your nostrils as the pots and pans flew through the air. As the cooks whipped up their bestseller, ziti with broccoli, garlic and olive oil, we waited for a spot to open at the counter. Tommy asked what I thought of him when we first met. I couldn’t remember. “I thought you were fat and spacey,” I said. He wasn’t at all fat, but I knew he was vain and a good verbal love slap was like foreplay. After that night, Tommy followed me around like a puppy.

  Tommy was a macho “Guido” trapped inside a flaming queen, and he played both roles to the hilt. With food and words, we roleplayed the WOP Honeymooners version of Ralph and Alice. Over a steaming bowl of rigatoni, he tenderly whispered sweet nothings like: “pass the cheese you dumb dago bitch,” and “just you wait, one of these days, Mary, one of these days, I’m gonna slip you the salami.”

  I laughed, “You think you have the meat balls for that Renaldo?”

  That night, lying in his bed after a heavy carb loading and a Quaalude chaser, I let Tommy slip me the salami and I allowed the man in me to fall deeply for the woman in him.

  Tommy’s humor made me weak in the knees and he could literally hypnotize me by lightly tickling my arms with his long, sharp fingernails. The first time Tommy tickled my arms, I flashed back to the time when my dad tickled my arms the same way, when I had horrible cramps from my period. Tommy had my dad’s deep, dark eyes, but Daddy never had Tommy’s sharp nails.

  Over the years, Tommy and I would fall in and out of love, but never out of friendship. Our most intimate moments involved food. Like when he ordered Ziti Arabiatta to cheer me up after I aborted an unplanned pregnancy caused not by him, but by his friend and co-star, John Sokoloff, in The Gay Men’s Theatre Collective.

  We had just left the clinic and I was feeling relief. I knew the last thing I needed was another child with an unavailable father. Tommy had been very sweet to me; then, as soon as we ordered, he turned on me. “Girl, what were you thinking when you let the queen fuck you without a rubber?” he said.

  “I don’t know.” I sulked. “It happened after a twilight matinee of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. The movie made me so anxious that John invited me back to his place for drinks to calm my nerves. Well, you know what a lightweight I am. When I admired the upside-down crucifix over his wrought-iron bedpost, I ended up on the bed with my heels over my head and him telling me how good I tasted.”

  “You couldn’t stop there, could you? But no, you just had to have the salami. What were you thinking?” he said. Then the next second he was soothing and worrying over me. “Never mind, eat your meatballs. You need the iron. Are you still cramping?”

  Pasta was the glue that held us together, and over many a meal, we downed starch blockers, a class of diet wonder-drugs that promised freedom to eat as much pasta as you liked without gaining a pound. We ate ourselves into oblivion knowing that starch-blocker claims were too good to be true. After those meals, Tommy would walk behind me cursing as he had to push me up the steep hill on Clayton Street to get me home. Whenever we were out late, he’d pick Viva up from Mrs. Robinson, the sitter, and carry her up to bed. One night I overheard him as he tucked her in.

  “Okay, my queen, now get your butt back to sleep, you know, girl, you need your booty rest.”

  “Mommy says you need to give your booty a rest because you’re the evil queen, I’m still a princess, ’cause I’m only five.”

  By 1977 we were like two old farts together. Tommy and I needed roleplaying to spark our love life. His favorite turn-on was me wearing an ugly flannel nightgown that he bought for me from the Hadassah Thrift Store. He said it made me look like the Polynesian Princess in South Pacific. On nights when I over-ate and felt too bloated for sex, he
made me put on the unflattering flannel nightgown, and it was just enough to send him into a medley. This was Tommy’s way to get me in the mood. He started singing “Happy Talk,” and by the time he began hitting the high falsetto notes of “Bali High,” he had me. It’s amazing that we could have sex at all, since I could never stop laughing. There were days and nights when Tommy made me laugh so hard that I’d wake up the next day with pain in my abdomen as if I had done too many sit-ups at the gym.

  35. EAST Meets WEST

  One morning I crawled out of bed to the sound of mail falling through the slot, and when I gathered the envelopes—mostly bills and letters for my roommates—I saw familiar handwriting on an envelope—my mother’s. I hadn’t visited home for four years, and we talked only on holidays or birthdays; I couldn’t remember the last time she’d written to me. On the surface, a peace treaty between me and my father had been made, but in reality, a cold war still waged.

  I dropped the bills on the kitchen table, poured myself some coffee and went back to bed to open the letter. I needed caffeine for that. It was unusually quiet for a Saturday morning, Viva had a sleep-over with Lisa and Mrs. Robinson took the girls to the park early. As I tore open Mom’s letter I read,

  Dear Dee, I hope you are doing good. Your dad had a quadruple bypass but don’t worry he’s doing really good now. Everything’s back to normal. I would-a told ya sooner but he didn’t want you to know. That’s your father, what can I say? Now that he’s better he wants to take a vacation. We are going to Tahoe to see Aunt Mary and her family. All but Ginny cause she can’t leave her job or her husband for long. Since we are out that far, we thought we’d visit you in San Francisco too. Your brother is so excited to come back to California and I can’t wait to see Viva and your beautiful home. Your father can’t wait too. We’ll take the bus from Lake Tahoe and maybe you can pick us up at the Greyhound station since we don’t know our way around. I’ll call you from Aunt Mary’s when we get there next week with the details. Okay.

  Love Mommy.

  Their timing could not have been worse. Later that day, at the market, I put several brands of disinfectants into my shopping cart although I knew I could ever clean my house enough to meet my mother’s standards, let alone hide anyone’s race or sexual orientation. I could not imagine my dad, a Nixon-loving Republican, conversing with my commie-loving, drag-queen roomies. Short of boarding off Debbie’s room, I was stumped for any ideas on how not to make my parents’ visit an entrance into The Twilight Zone. At dinner, I dropped the bomb about my folks landing on us, and hoped that my roommates might consider toning down the drag to help make my family feel at ease.

  Marshall said, “Girl, what do they think of Jews? I can be your beard if you like.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll dress up as Bessie the maid and call you Missy Deluxe,” Jerry added. I knew that the best I could do was pray that everyone would be out when I brought my parents to see where I lived. The only practical help I got was from Tommy, who offered to find them a bed and breakfast in Little Italy.

  The day they arrived was a typical cold, foggy summer day. I dressed Viva in her prettiest dress and off we went in my VW bug to meet the Greyhound at the downtown station. As my parents stepped off the bus, I saw that my dad was still as handsome as ever, but he looked tired. Mom, ten pounds heavier, was her usual jumble of nerves and my brother, Richie, was fourteen and sporting a shadow of a mustache.

  Viva had just turned six, and she hadn’t seen them except in photographs. She was excited to meet them. Mom made a big fuss over her while Dad hugged me for what felt like a very long time.

  Then he bent down to hug Viva. “Look at you, what a pretty girl you have grown into.”

  We made small talk as their bags were being unloaded from the storage under the bus, and then I helped them carry their luggage to my car. The streets were lined with winos panhandling in front of the station, and I became anxious about their first impression of the City. Mom clutched her purse and began to complain about the weather. I had warned her about the cold summer days, but she had only brought a light sweater.

  I tightly squeezed their luggage in the small trunk of my car and Dad took the front seat, while Mom and Richie, with Viva on his lap, sat in the back.

  “I hope we don’t have to drive on any highways in this contraption,” Mom said. “Ya know, Dee, I didn’t tell ya the whole story about your father because we didn’t want ya to worry. Ya shoulda seen how he suffered, and he never even complained.”

  “How could he? You take the cake in the complaint department,” Richie said.

  Dad was very quiet and didn’t even try to stifle Mom like he used to. He let her ramble on while he silently soaked in the sights of the charming streetcars as we drove past them. But when Mom started to bring to light the gory details of Dad’s surgery, he interrupted her.

  “Gloria, stata chit, it was nothing, I’m just like new, even better than before, the doctor says.”

  “I just want Dee to know in case something could happen. Ya never know. I hope you have a good Doctor, just in case,” she asked.

  Then Mom turned her attention to Viva. “I can’t believe you’re such a big girl already. I hope the new dresses I bought you at Sears still fit. I hope you like them.”

  Viva, on her best behavior, said, “Grandma, I’m sure I’ll like them as long as you taste good.” My brother cracked up.

  “Honey, you mean have good taste,” I said.

  “Isn’t that cute, John, the way she expresses herself,” my mother said.

  “Yeah she’s smart just like her mother,” Dad said.

  I couldn’t help noticing my dad’s effort to make me feel good, and I wanted to melt, but still felt uneasy thinking about their reaction once they saw where I lived and met my roommates.

  As I looked for a place to park on my block an awkward pause filled the air when my parents noticed a bearded man in a ’40s print dress and high heels stumbling down the hill. I didn’t bother to mention that he was one of my roommates. I got lucky and found a spot almost in front of my building. When Mom stepped out of the car, she clutched her bag as though at any second she expected a mugger to lunge at her. I quickly herded the family into my hallway, and the minute my mother saw the long flight of steps she started in with the complaining. “This can’t be good for your father’s heart; it’s dangerous if he has to climb too many hills or stairs.”

  “Mom, it’s going to be fine. Dad can take his time. My friend Tommy found you a beautiful Bed and Breakfast in North Beach. It’s on a street that’s not too steep and you’ll have a room on the first floor. Tommy’s folks always stay there when they come to visit. He’s coming by to take us all there in a big car.

  Viva added, “You guys are going to love my Uncle Tommy, he’s not my real uncle like you, Uncle Richie, but I know him better.”

  “This Tommy, is he your boyfriend, Dee?” Mom asked as she paused on the steps.

  “No Ma; we’re just good friends.”

  When we reached the landing, Jerry popped out of his room to greet us, “Hey, guys, how ya doing?”

  I made the introductions and Jerry, looking quite toned down from his daily flamboyance, extended his hand to my dad and in a deep, masculine voice, a full octave lower than his usual range, said, “Nice to finally meet the folks, I’ve heard so much about you.” Then he turned to my brother, “This could not possibly be your baby brother Richie?”

  “Yeah, they never let me forget it.”

  At that point Jerry invited my folks to tea and coffee and a snack that he had prepared for us.

  “Well this is something. What do they call this, a railroad flat? Reminds me of the place we lived in when we was first married, John,” Mom said.

  We passed by the closed bedroom doors, and I showed them my room and Viva’s room decorated all in pink for the princess of the manor. My folks seemed most impressed with our artsy kitchen and the giant vegetable mural on the wall. Then we adjourned to the living room where
my folks sat on the rattan sectional under the painted palm tree murals.

  “This is so fuckin’ cool, it’s like you guys live in a museum. I want to stay here,” Richie said.

  Viva said, “You can take my princess castle and I can sleep with Mommy.”

  Dad moved forward in his seat and gave Richie a stern look, “Rich, remember I told you, we don’t want to put your sister out. Your mother and I are renting a hotel for us.”

  I was leery of Jerry’s gracious hosting manners as he poured the coffee, acting like the house servant, a brand new role for him. My folks were eating it up.

  “Isn’t that something, the way the men are so helpful here in California?” Mom said. Then she turned to Jerry, “I could use a maid like you back home.”

  I was thinking, oh no, she practically called him Aunt Jemima. I sat there on pins and needles thinking that Jerry might go off at any moment. I had seen him on more than one occasion turn into a very vocal angry Negro over less. He smiled and let the comment go by.

  As everyone was enjoying their sandwiches, I sat there shredding my napkin unconsciously. I was pretty certain that my father had never broken bread with a black man before, so I was surprised when Dad started to interview Jerry as if he were one of my suitors, “So, Dee tells us you’re a singer. Can you make a living from that singing thing you do?”

  “I’m doing all right,” Jerry answered. “But not as well as your paisan, Mr. Frank Sinatra, that’s for sure.” And then he sang out, “But I’m doing it my way.”

  Mom applauded. “That’s really good. I’m sure if Frank ever heard ya sing, he’d give ya a chance, just like he did with Sammy Davis Jr.”

  “That would be wonderful, and do you have any connections to Mr. Sinatra?” he asked my mother.