My Life, a Four Letter Word

by Dolores DeLuce

  When Bill got back from Rome, I wasn’t quite ready to return to the cold foggy summer of San Francisco, so Bill invited me to stay with him until I could find another sublet for July. After his Roman holiday, Bill, started going by the name Willy and living part-time as his alter ego, a suave Italian filmmaker. I stepped into the role of his Juliet of the Spirits. During that month he was my Fellini, and he taught me Italian while making new recipes he learned in Rome, and he followed me everywhere with his Super 8mm camera. We were both actors in need of representation, so Willy turned our search for Hollywood agents into a movie titled Undiscovered, wherein I played a heroine, finding rejection in Hollywood. Viva, Willy and I were so cozy in his tiny love shack that we could have stayed all summer if it were not for Bill’s Latin lover, Lorenzo Bias. Lorenzo felt left out and suspected that I was trying to take his man away from him, especially after Bill took me and Viva home to meet his folks.

  I stepped up my search for another sublet and, instead of a temporary place, I found a permanent rental that required me to sign a year lease. It was an ideal house right off the beach on Breeze Ave. David Baker was delighted to take over my lease in the Castro, so I left my furniture, friends and underground celebrity behind. Without blinking an eye I made a permanent move back to my breezy beach life in Venice with my ambition aimed toward Hollywood.

  Willy and I both were lucky enough to find jobs at SPARC, the Social and Public Arts Resource Center in Venice, a newly established nonprofit started by Judy Baca, a popular Los Angeles muralist, and her lover Donna Deitch, my first film director. SPARC was located in the old Venice Jailhouse, an historical landmark of Venice. One night during off hours when Bill and I were working alone he decided he wanted to have sex inside one of the jail cells that had been converted to SPARC’s art gallery. When I resisted for fear of getting caught, Bill said, “close your eyes and pretend I’m John Travolta,” and then be began to make goofy white-boy Travolta-like disco moves to get me in the mood. He looked more like Dan Akroyd doing the Saturday Night Live sketch of “Two Wild and Crazy Guys.”

  Once again I had found Saturday night fever in another lover and playmate, and I was happy with my sunny good fortune and a paying job at SPARC. I felt I had made a good choice to move back to L.A. The light that had led me to the City by the Bay had been flickering and I wanted to shine on a larger stage. I was fed up with the non-professionalism that came with the darker side of drugs and sex and the likes of saboteurs like Amber. While some of my peers were slipping deeper into darkness, my growing ambition and parenting responsibilities were increasing, and as Viva got older I moved toward sobriety.

  But as I was settling back into Los Angeles, the big fish from the small pond was about to bounce her reality check again.

  In Venice I tried to re-create my San Francisco performance experience on the beach while I pursued a legit career in Hollywood. Lulu and other friends would come down to visit, and I met lots of new friends too. I even produced a mini-musical for SPARC, casting Lulu, Willy, his boyfriend, Lorenzo, myself and Debbie, my ex-roommate who had moved right down the block on the beachfront. The SPARC Grand Opening benefit, Jail House Break featuring The New Venice Players was an instant hit.

  Toward the end of the decade, I managed to get a toe in the door of Hollywood. I earned my first Guild card by winning The $1.98 Beauty Show hosted by Rip Taylor and produced by Chuck Barris, the infamous creator of The Gong Show and The Dating Game. I even got to meet the esteemed author Christopher Isherwood and his life partner, Don Bachardy, through Willy.

  Willy had become an intimate friend to Bachardy. Chris, a very warm and kind-hearted man, completely embraced Willy as part of their family. Because Willy considered me his family, Don and Chris extended their friendship to me. Don also invited me to sit for him one afternoon at his studio where he created two amazing portraits of me that he added to his body of work.

  In those first few years back in Venice, it was impossible to stay away from my beloved community in San Francisco. I went up for every show opening. Shows like Strange Fruit, or performances of The Four Beauties, with Tommy, Lulu, Theresa and Tina, and Crimes Against Nature by the Gay Men’s Theatre Collective kept me going back. I even appeared in a new White Trash Boom-Boom skit; a spoof on Crimes Against Nature, which we called Crimes Against Theatre, a love slap to our gay brothers. Martin Worman and nine other men, including Tommy, David Baker Jr., John Sokoloff and Chuck Solomon, had collectively created this hit about faggots and survival, reminiscent of Brechtian tragicomedy.

  It was during the rehearsals for the Boom-Boom girl’s parody that I aborted the pregnancy created on my date with John, one of Crime’s comrades to see Looking for Mr. Goodbar. While my comrades in Crimes were exorcising their homophobic demons I used my abortion as inspiration for my bit in the parody, Crimes Against Theater. I came up with a piece about a very girly girl who was insecure about her femininity. This was a spin on David Baker’s monologue in the original Crimes, in which he played out his male insecurities with an obsession for jockstraps. In my piece, I wore a tutu made of sanitary napkins and ended my monologue by giving birth to a pillow with a Happy Face on it. Once the pillow was out of me, I threw it at John, my aborted baby’s daddy, sitting in the front row cheering me on. It was my way of telling him he was off the hook.

  By the end of the glorious decade of the ’70s the party drugs of pot, acid and other psychedelics had escalated to heavier substances. Cocaine was not cheap like pot, and therefore only certain people were invited to share. I hated the attitude that cocaine brought to the party, and I found myself abstaining more and more.

  These final years leading up to the ’80s were racked with tragedy in San Francisco. On November 18, 1978 the shocking announcement that 408 American citizens had committed suicide at a communal village they had built in the jungle in Northwest Guyana. The community had come to be known as "Jonestown." The dead were all members of a group known as "The People's Temple" of San Francisco which was led by the Reverend Jim Jones. It would soon be learned that 913 of the 1100 people believed to have been at "Jonestown" at the time had died in a mass suicide. Just nine days later on November 27th 1978, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were killed by former disgruntled supervisor Dan White.

  By May of 1979 Dan White received a slap on the wrist as a result of his famous Twinkie Defense. When the verdict was announced all hell broke loose. Five thousand angry citizens gathered at City hall in an event known as the White Night Riot. I had never been a strong activist like my friend Danny Nicoletta, who worked tirelessly at Harvey’s camera store and on his campaigns. Other friends also fought hard against the Briggs Initiative with its agenda to ban gays from teaching in California schools, but for the most part my performance community lived our politics on stages. Drag queens like Lulu and others did camp parodies of Anita Bryant, who supported Briggs, to spread awareness of her hate propaganda. Harvey had loved us and we loved him, and there was never a Castro Street Fair that we did not participate in. With Harvey’s murder, and these historic events a dark shadow was cast over our gay City. On that night of the White Night Riot while all my friends hit the streets in outrage, I sat home back in L.A. feeling powerless as I watched the news on my television.

  In that dark November, when I was still reeling from all the tragedy, I learned that my friend, Bob Reccio, was found stabbed to death by a trick he picked up in a bar. Bob had built props and costumes for Broken Dishes and, as many of my theater friends did, he returned to New York by the end of the decade. I remember how shocked I was when I got the sad news, and yet not surprised. Having lived through my own rape and abuse from strangers in bars, I always worried about my close gay male friends who played dangerously.

  42. MORE DICK

  By the end of the decade, Ronald Reagan was running for president and the screws were tightening on the welfare elite, so I took a waitress job at the Lafayette Café, a Venice landmark on the Boardwalk.

&
nbsp; During my morning shift, Richard Lambert skated off the boardwalk into a booth in my section. His smiling green eyes looked up from the menu and as he brushed his sandy hair from his eyes and, with a slight southern accent, he order chorizo and eggs. Sitting across from him was Jason, his friend, who I barely noticed once I locked eyes with Richard, who preferred to be called by his nickname, Dick. He was flirty and heaped on the charm each time I went over to fill his cup. He drank many cups of the Lafayette’s rotgut and remained way past the morning rush. I wondered why this gorgeous straight guy was being so friendly to me. By the time he paid the check, he asked for my number, left a very generous tip and then he and Jason rolled out of the cafe.

  I had by then given up my romantic notion about Willy and thought that this could be the Universe gifting me for making a conscious effort to open up to straight men again. The next day, Dick called.

  “Hi, this is Dick, the guy from Lafayette’s. You remember me?” he asked.

  “Wow, I didn’t think you would really call, I said.

  “I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time, but I’m home with a cold and though it’d be nice to get to know you some.”

  “I’m not busy,” I said. With that Dick went on to interview me, asking me my likes and dislikes. At first I thought he was shy and trying to build up courage to ask me out on a date, but over a two-week period and several phone conversations, I learned his history.

  “Daddy was a coal miner. I didn’t want none of that life. I left West Virginia the day after I graduated from high school.”

  I didn’t see Dick for almost a month, but he just liked to talk a blue streak on the phone. I thought it odd, but by our fifth conversation he confessed he was a recovered heroin addict and was getting over Hepatitis B and that’s why we had not gotten together yet.

  By the time I finally sat in a booth across from Dick, I had already realized that he was not as straight as I had hoped. During that conversation, he shared details about his bisexual relationships. He had ended a three-year relationship with a woman who had aborted his child, which sent him back to men and to Jason, his current lover. During the next few months, I gave up on the idea of finding a straight man and hung out with Dick almost daily. Jason was rarely included in any of our time together, and before I knew it, Dick ended his relationship with Jason and was moving into a place just two blocks away from me.

  Dick was in great physical shape—a runner, cyclist and skater—and he made me want to keep up with him. His smooth, hairless, elongated but not overly big muscles and abs were an inspiration. Besides being my workout buddy, a Gemini true to form, he could be just the opposite, a great enabler of my dysfunction. Whenever I fell off my diet and couldn’t get off the couch, he’d bring me cookies and ice cream. I could share every detail of my failed diets and he would listen attentively without judgment. As he sat across the couch over the drone of the TV, I could feel him unconditionally loving me. He was homespun West Virginian good sense mixed with street savvy from his past drug-addicted years, and an expert on our mutual self-destructive natures. The longer I knew him, the more I understood his need to take care of people. As long as there was someone—a bigger mess than himself—he had a purpose. He seemed most alive when coming to my rescue—and when didn’t I need rescuing?

  Dick, usually shy around my theatrical friends, allowed me to drag him to a comedy improv class one night. He surprised me when he got up to do an improvisation and floored everyone with his zany dark humor.

  After being best friends for over a year, Dick invited me to his office Christmas party. He wanted me along because he knew how boring the office geeks at his data-processing job would be, and yet he didn’t want to be rude by turning down their invitation. From the minute Dick picked me up, he started treating me like I was a real date. He was an innocent country boy, wearing his best Sunday duds with his cowlick slicked down with hair grease, out to impress his best girl. When Dick opened the car door for me, I felt like the ingénue Lori in Oklahoma when Curly escorted her to the social in the social in the “Surry with the Fringe on the Top.” As the evening went on, I could tell he was seeing me in a different light. By the end of the night, the inevitable happened, and it was glorious.

  I should have known better because he was a Gemini, and in spite of my extensive knowledge on the subject, I still woke up the next morning swirling in expectations. We were so compatible, and he had told me on more than one occasion that he felt more complete in his relationships with women, plus we were already best buds, and now great sex was added to the stew. What more could a girl ask for? It didn’t take long to realize that that’s not what Dick had in mind at all.

  Over breakfast the next day, Dick said, “You know that cute guy George from your improve class? He gave me his number, but I lost it. Can you get it for me? I think he is super hot.”

  Once again I was hurled into the depths of hell and found myself in prayer, asking for release from this painful unrequited desire. My prayer was answered and within the next twenty-four hours I fell back into our unconditional true love, free from expectations that remained throughout our friendship.

  43. GURU

  On New Year’s Eve 1980, at the stroke of midnight, I found myself fleeing from a desperate comic who was trying to kiss me. I didn’t want to start the decade off with a loser. On the surface I was breaking into films and television, while below the surface a virus was spreading that would explain the mystery of my disco dream I had back in 1977.

  “I told Jesus it would be alright if He changed my name” was a lyric Roberta Flack sang that I listened to religiously. According to the Aramaic language, the original language of the Bible, the words name and nature are synonymous. This song is taken from a Bible story about the Samaritan woman who recognizes the Messiah and gives Jesus permission to change her name. In essence she is saying that she is ready for the leap in consciousness that comes with being initiated to Christ’s way. As the song goes on, Roberta sings the Biblical quote, “The world won’t know you child if I change your name. I told Jesus it would be alright if He changed my name.” Dolores DeLuxe was preparing to have another name change.

  After doing a small role in the indie cult classic, Repo Man, directed by Alex Cox, and winning the title of The $1.98 Beauty Show, it was time to join the Screen Actors Guild. I decided to change my name for the sake of the Italian mama roles I hoped to play. With one foot still in the Underground and the other in Hollywood, I thought it important to find a name that could work in both camps. I figured if I dropped the ‘x’ out of DeLuxe and added a ‘c’ to become DeLuce, it would do the trick. In Italian my new last name, “De Luce,” means “of light.” Dolores DeLuce literally translates to “Sorrows of the Light” and with this minor practical name change, unbeknownst to me, I was giving the Universe permission to change my name and nature.

  On June 1st, 1980, after three years on Breeze Avenue, I moved a few short blocks further north up the Speedway to Paloma Avenue, the street named for Peace. Paloma Avenue is the most luscious of all the walk streets in Venice. It is lined with Jacaranda trees. In June they were in full bloom with a canopy of lavender blossoms. Bougainvillea spilled over the neighbors’ fences and trailed the walkway like a bride’s train dripping fuchsia blossoms on the path. My new home was in a spacious, light, two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a duplex, a stone’s throw from the ocean with a magnificent clear view of the Pacific.

  Once again I took note of a new pattern of threes showing up. My friend Tommy’s last name was Pace (the Italian word for peace), my good friend Eugene’s last name was Peace, and there I was living on Paloma (the Spanish word for dove—the symbol of peace).

  “Give up acid and learn to meditate.” A directive voice gave me specific instructions loud and clear while I soaked in a hot tub, coming down from my very last LSD trip in 1976. I had practiced yoga since 1974 when I met Swami Shiva Lingam, but the act of silence eluded me. I read spiritual books and met the popular gu
rus of the time. I even tried Chaotic Meditation taught by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and T.M., but never found one that worked. The closest I had ever come to accepting a guru came through a book I read in 1974 by Yogananda, The Autobiography of a Yogi. But it wasn’t until that first day in June of 1980 that Yogananda’s words took hold. On the same day I moved into Paloma Avenue, I rediscovered Yogananda’s book in a box while unpacking. As I pulled it out, that old inner voice spoke up again, “Oh good, maybe this can lift me out of this mundane experience,” it said. The mundane experience my inner voice was addressing was the worst flu ever, brought on by the stress and exhaustion of moving. In the midst of chaotic unpacked boxes, I propped myself up on pillows with the mattress still on the floor to take a rest and opened the book at random. I came upon a chapter titled “Finding Your Teacher.” Yogananda’s message to the spiritual seeker in this chapter is that it is not necessary to seek your teacher, but that the right teacher would find his student—but only when that student was ready. I didn’t think I was ready, nor was I looking for a teacher, but I read on. At the end of that chapter, I fell asleep and had an interesting dream.

  In my feverish dream, I am in Manhattan, partying with my San Francisco friends from the Ranch who had since moved back to New York. Once the hard-core drugs came out, I decided to leave and take Viva back to the small apartment on Houston Street on the lower Eastside where we were staying.

  After putting Viva to bed I heard a loud knock coming from the outside door a few feet from my room. When I was leaving the party, my old show pal Joe Morocco told me he’d be stopping by. Assuming that the buzzer did not work, I went into the hall to answer the knock. In place of Joe was a wild-looking black man holding a broken bottle in his hand. When our eyes locked, he lunged toward me with the bottle, but I slipped past him and ran out into the street. I did this to avert him from my room where Viva was sleeping. He began to chase me, and as I ran, the street grew darker and more desolate. Just as he was gaining on me, out of nowhere, a fancy Lincoln Continental pulled up to the curb and the man behind the wheel offered me a lift. I was afraid to get into the car with this stranger, a handsome, African American man in an expensive suit and hat. My mind told me that a man looking that fine in a fancy car in that neighborhood could only be a pimp, but I saw no other option, so I leapt into his car. I slammed the door shut just as the shadowy figure chasing me caught up with us and the car pulled off. Once safe inside the car, I sensed a powerful peaceful energy emanating from this stranger. The man drove me back to the apartment without saying a word. He walked me into the room where I had left my daughter unattended. Once inside, I found my friend, Judy Brewer, looking after Viva, who remained sleeping. Judy greeted the stranger by his name, James, and when I asked her how she knew his name she replied, “Because he’s a Premie.” And then I woke up.