The same year we lost Tommy, only two weeks later, Rodney Price from the Angels of Light passed. Then Divine and Sylvester died a month apart.
Divine was the fairy godmother that turned me into the Pumpkin that led to my rebirth on stage in 1973. In my last phone conversation with Divine, a few months prior to his unexpected death, we discussed our concerns for mutual friends who were infected with the virus. I never imagined I had to worry about Divine, my larger-than-life mother/mentor/friend. His love and humor were my greatest teachers, and when he made a sudden departure from this world, it was a real shock. I think his heart was way bigger than those fake tits he flaunted, and just too big not to break; when it did, he followed after the lost boys into Never-Never Land.
Next to being a movie star, Divine always wanted to be a mother. And to me, she was. In the John Waters film Pink Flamingos, the Egg Lady, Edie Massey, was Divine’s mother. By the ’80s, Edie had moved to Venice and ran a small antique shop on Abbott Kinney Blvd. When I entered the Miss Alternative L.A. Contest hosted by the Landmark Theatres, Edie was one of the judges. When Edie cast her vote for me, she proclaimed in her squeaky little girl voice, “I like her the best because she looks just like a baby Divine.” When I beat out a dozen real drag queens for the title, Edie gave me my crown. Edie’s public recognition of my true lineage to Divine was the best part of winning the contest.
By the mid ’80s, my sweet friend John McGuire had become a successful L.A. interior designer and lived with his partner, Winston Wilde, on his ranch in Malibu. He was closer than a brother to me, and Viva and I were always included in every one of his large family gatherings. When Sylvester died, John offered to fly me to Oakland with him to pay homage to our mutual friend at his memorial at the Oakland Love Center.
John and I held hands as we joined the procession of Sylvester’s family, friends and hundreds of fans. The event was reminiscent of our days at the Black Gospel Churches as hats, furs and fans were flying and many were testifying—but no one louder than the deceased himself. Sylvester’s falsetto tones rang out, loud and clear, over the cries and shouts of the congregation as we stomped and shouted to his biggest hit, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”. As we approached the church altar with the open casket on display, John gripped my hand. There Sylvester lay in all his glory, every last detail selected by his own hand: Red lips to match the red oriental silk kimono, gold eye shadow to highlight the brocade stitching. It couldn’t get any realer than that.
A few short years later, when John had his first major AIDS related setback, I got to rescue him. I climbed in his hospital bed and held him as he lay shivering after an invasive medical procedure. At the end of his days, John went back to Seattle to be in the nurturing arms of his big loving family. A week before he passed, I got to have a long phone conversation with him. I remained close to John’s mom, his sister Mary, and his two gay brothers, Pat and Jim. Every time I hear a gospel choir, I feel it’s John visiting me from beyond the grave.
As I buried several of my gay husbands, my dad prepared for his exit, too. The year before he took ill, on a trip back East, I took my dad and brother to see my guru speak at Radio City Music Hall. Dad had forgotten his hearing aid and was struggling to hear the message, but afterwards he expressed his amazement at seeing so many people with the gift of faith. As we rode the elevator down to the parking level, Dad confided in me that he did not believe in God, and that he feared his death. In that crowded elevator, Dad put his arms around me and said, “You know, I always admired your courage. I wish when I was young I could have been more like you. In those days it was different. I’m sorry I didn’t do right by you.”
“Dad, we both hurt each other. I know we didn’t mean to. Those years led me to have faith. I forgive you Daddy, and I hope you can forgive me and yourself too.”
I told him I’d pray he’d find faith.
A week before my father passed, I flew home just in the nick of time to rescue Dad from the cancer ward where I found him tied down in a straight jacket. The nurse said it was the only way to prevent him from pulling out his IV drip of chemo. I insisted that they let him loose and I spent that night in the ward with him until I could arrange to have him released to home hospice.
With the odor of antiseptics and retching sounds of pain, I dozed off sitting bedside throughout the night. In a fitful sleep, I had a dream in which Bill Franklin appeared and asked me to come home to Venice because he was dying, too. In the dream, I told Willy he would have to wait his turn; I had to help my father die first.
Dad woke me from my nightmare. He was ranting and it took me awhile to calm him. He wanted to get up out of his bed, but he was so weak he could not walk or stand on his own, but he kept insisting. I did my best to lift him up out of bed, and then propped him up against the side of the bed and I held him in my arms so he would not fall. We just stood there swaying back and forth. I said, “Look, Daddy, you always wanted to dance at my wedding, and now we’re dancing.” He laughed. I gently eased him back into his bed. He lifted his trembling hand and stroked my cheek and told me I was his angel. With the help of my brother we arranged for Dad to come home and a few days later, Daddy passed. I held it together until after his funeral, and then came home to Venice.
I managed to have a month more with my loving Willy. In his final days, he kept asking me what items I wanted after he was gone, and I just couldn’t say. It felt too final, but in the end, I asked for his television. Bill put it in his will and allowed me to stay close to him right up until his final curtain.
Dick Lambert, my great enabler and workout buddy, used to shake his head and laugh when I tried to argue my meaning of the Truth. He associated spirituality with his early religion and wanted no part of it. When Dick and I first became friends, I was consumed by my new-found bliss and a bit self-righteous.
“Honey, you took way too much acid in the ’70s,” he said.
I just never understood how someone with so much Light was so resistant to a Higher Power. His heart was always open and he was a consummate caretaker, but when he needed care in the end, it was difficult for him to accept it, even from me. I believed he could have lasted longer, but he let the hospital kill him quick one night. It was just unbearable for him to need help. He was far more comfortable giving than taking.
Viva and I were together when I got the news about Dick’s death. I barely cried, and said to Viva, “If only he’d believed, maybe he’d still be alive.” Viva sobbed uncontrollably. She was twenty and had loved him since she was nine years old.
That afternoon, Viva had an audition in the valley for a TV pilot. She was a so shaken over Dick’s passing that I didn’t want her driving, and I didn’t want her to miss her audition either, so I played Mommy Strongest and volunteered to drive her. It was a particularly beautiful day for L.A., and as I drove over the Sepulveda Pass with Viva still crying, it dawned on me that I’d never see my friend’s youthful firm body or shining face again. I had nothing tangible to hold on to. I never met his family, and I didn’t like his other friends. All I had left was one snapshot of Dick standing in his kitchen while cooking my breakfast, wearing white shorts and a green T-shirt—that great shade that brought out the color of his eyes— holding a frying pan as he smiled out to camera.
Yet life for me went on, and the panoramic view of the San Fernando Valley came into sharp focus when I reached the peak of the hill and saw the sky was blue with white fluffy clouds and I inhaled the beauty of life and the earth and hills around us.
Richard Lambert visits me in my dreams and I still see his face as I walk along the beachfront. To this day, I make a point to look up at the window every single time I pass the last apartment where he lived on the Speedway, as if I expect him still to be at home.
47. MORE LOSS
As a woman living on the edge at the end of time, I felt more familiar with death than life as I buried the dead from the mid ’80s into the mid ’90s. Coming from a long line of Italian drama queens, I had to fie
rcely fight the impulse to throw myself onto the coffins. I knew better than to expect sympathy for being a middle-aged fag hag who was losing my lifelong companions and the people in the straight world I now inhabited just could never know the depth of my loss.
I wrote this entry in my journal after Bill Franklin died:
I feel like the heroine in the film Poltergeist, clawing my way out from a pool of muddy demons. These ghosts beneath my pool keep dragging me back, pulling me under the mud. They wish to keep me there as their eternal companion and I scream for help, for I must live, but I’m so weary. Why won’t they release me? What do they want from me? Maybe I was not all I could have been for them when they were still here, and this punishment is the promise of the vengeful Father-God of my youth. Should I just surrender and allow them to pull me beneath? Just let go and surrender to what feels like death, or do I hold on to the edge trying for one more breath to sustain me? Nothing comes to mind now. I am blanker than a Barbie on vacation. My breath is looking for a place to release and I am holding. Numb, I pray for a safe place to exhale, but I cannot even sense the surface. I am drowning. Horror of quicksand, darkest slime, so dank, pulls me deeper into the earth. Where’s the Mother promised in this dirt? Where’s the Father promised in the heaven I hope I am going to?
Janice wrote me a letter after we lost our good friend Joe Morocco:
When Tommy Pace and Rodney Price died two weeks apart, I thought there was something seriously wrong with my choices in life. Tommy died like a devil, angry and alienated, and Rodney died like an angel of light. Rodney and Tommy died so close together and were such good friends that I think of them now as a black and white ice cream sundae. Now Joe has died and I have the feeling that I will be left in this strange Greek Tragedy with the burden to keep them all alive in memory. All my favorites, going, going, gone…until only my enemies remain and I must fall in love with them out of loneliness, telling them about people I remember, some very well, some not so very well at all.
The night after Tommy’s memorial, Janice played me the tape of the benefit the community had organized for Tommy, called, Give Me the Damn Money. This was a combination fundraiser and a chance for Tommy to attend his own funeral. I had not attended because I was still performing The Last Dance of the Couch Potatoes.
During the benefit, Tommy, hideously deformed by KS lesions, had hid himself up in the balcony to watch the show. Rodney Price, frail and close to death himself from his AIDS complications, was the highlight of the show. In a skit that took place in a clinic waiting room, Rodney, in a wheel chair, dressed in a hospital gown, bantered with another AIDS patient, played by Ann Block. The humor built as they began to top each other with a long list of their complicated symptoms. At the end of the funny dialogue, Rodney performed a song, written by Janice and Scrumbly, called “I Have Less Time Than You,” and then broke into a magnificent tap dance while still seated in his wheel chair.
The irony was that, in actuality, Rodney had more time than Tommy—but only two weeks. From the audience, you could hear the sobs of Antonia, Tommy’s roommate’s daughter, a young child, who knew her uncle Tommy was dying. It was by far the most profound evening of entertainment and a send-up to the spirit of this wild community that was losing its best and brightest. That night, Janice and I watched the tape after Tommy’s memorial and held each other while taking turns sobbing in a twelve-hour marathon cry. It was the most intimate time I had ever spent with a sister.
EPILOGUE
48. SLAP HAPPY
Last year I spent a day in San Francisco with my friend Phillip, who I have known since 1972. I am always happy to be with my fellow survivors here in this brave new world. Phillip, still a gorgeous, glorious queen in his ’50s, has never lost his hair, his looks, his edge or his outrageous style. As we strolled through Golden Gate Park on a Sunday afternoon, past the very spot by the bandshell where I made headlines riding my makeshift dildo chariot, we chatted about days gone, and then caught up on the present.
I told him all about Viva’s incredible talent that has led me to take many a fifteen-hour flight for the past decade to exotic locals like Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, China and Vietnam—destinations I never imagined I would see at this juncture of my life.
Phillip could take almost as much pride in my daughter’s success as I could, since he was one of the creative influences Viva got from our shared journey that led her into dance and acting, and eventually to becoming the gifted jazz and blues singer she is today. I told Phillip all about the first time I arrived in Hong Kong during Viva’s hectic life as she was rehearsing with her new band, preparing to travel to Shanghai, and singing six nights a week at various venues throughout Hong Kong. It was the most inopportune time for a visit from Mama, but there I was because it had been almost a full year since I’d seen her, the longest time we had ever been apart, and I missed her.
Her employer, Jamie, a British expat, took an instant liking to me and on my first night there I got to see my daughter perform at the popular 1996 Bar in Lang Qui Fong, the nightclub district of Central Hong Kong, for Gay Disco Night. Although this was a small bar that normally had no entertainment, on Friday’s Happy Hour, Jamie would put a platform on top of the bar and Viva would step up on the makeshift stage and sing Donna Summers, Ellen Champagne King and Diana Ross disco hits to tracks while the boys ate her up.
That night, Jamie got up to make his introduction and mentioned my presence in the club. Over the microphone he announced in his thick British accent, “We have a mum in the club tonight; its Viva’s mum. We’ve never had a mum in this club before; let’s bring her up to say a few words; let’s welcome Viva’s mum.” Well, it was the first time I was being brought to the stage as the mother of the performer, and little did Jamie or the boys in the house know that this mum was no stranger to performing on bar tops. When I hit the stage, I immediately had a story to brag about my daughter and win the hearts of the audience. I opened with, “I bet you didn’t know that Viva is a second generation fag hag.” I told them all about Viva as a little girl of seven bringing the house down during her singing début with the infamous Cockettes. The Cockettes were gay legend, and many of the gays in the bar were American expats and knew the history. That night, after Viva’s show ended, the boys lined up to meet and greet both mother and daughter. I felt like Judy with Liza as we held court, graciously greeting our fans.
If it weren’t for the miracle of the one great choice I made in my life—the decision to bring Viva into this world—I shudder to think what my fate would have been.
After filling Phillip in on all of Viva’s adventures and mine, I casually mentioned, “You know, Viva just had her fortieth birthday.”
Phillip stopped dead in his track and threw his hands on his hips and screamed, “Girl, how dare you bitch slap me into the future.”
I took note that it was time to start lying about my daughter’s age. Our kind did not think we’d ever see the future. In my heyday, I never imagined life beyond forty, let alone reaching the age of a Medicare recipient with a daughter that old.
In this future of my own creation, I sometimes weep for those glorious days of the seventies. I recently found my old datebooks in the back of a file drawer while doing my 2012 spring de-cluttering. There’s the evidence, with every page so full: Show rehearsals, tap, flamenco, yoga classes, parties, parties and more parties. Just going to breakfast with my seven roommates was an occasion to dress to the nines. My cloudy memory tells me that when my life was that full, I didn’t take the time to appreciate it. But that’s not the truth. I discover from the little notes I left in the margins of those books—notes of gratitude for the joy I felt in the special moments of love and fun. Why did I even save these datebooks? Did I know then that I would need a reminder? Tears make the keyboard slippery as I try to keep my fingers busy so that I can leave a new note of what it’s like today, way past the end of an era. Every page contains a name of a friend, now dead, some of whom I had forgotten were gone.
Then I remember to bitch slap myself to this present moment and awaken to everything I am grateful for in this big little life of mine:
With the rhythm of my every breath and the beating of my heart, I hear a Diana Ross disco lyric that keeps repeating in my brain: “I have the sweetest hangover; I don’t want to get over.”
IN MEMORIAM
1978-87
Harvey Milk; Bob Reccio; Don Logan; Michael Harriman; Mark Bliefeld; Patrick Cowley; Jackson Allen; Chuck Solomon; Hibiscus; Timo; Peach; Coco Vega; Jack; Boyd; Jerry Francle; Frank; Lelani; Edie Massey.
1988:
Peter Hartman; Tommy Pace; Rodney Price; Divine; Sylvester.
1989:
Jamian Merlin; Bobby Star-Steele; Joe Morocco; Brent Jensen; Merritt Buttrick; Dov; Tim McKenna; Clyde Ventura.
1990:
Dick Lambert; Lorenzo Baez; James Sonoma; Dan Albert; Victor Noel; Ernie Banalis; Michael McCarthy; Rodney White; Pat Daly.
1991:
Dorsey; Jerry Masoni; David Venice-Pitch; Jimmy Evans; John McGuire; Jada; Bodi Wind; Paul Michael Lombardi and Dana Garrett.
1992:
Robert Leal; Sam Hale; Erick Ruttucard; Jimmy Drinkovitch; David Oliver; Doris Fish; Tippy; Bill Hudnut.
1993:
Martin Worman; Archie Connelly; Ken Wilkinson; Tom Fleming; Sando Counts; William Passerelli; Arnie Arnubal; Bobby; Baba Scotland.
1994:
Clifford Olsen; Pristine Condition; John Rothermil; Chuck Smith; Charles Isis.
1995 on:
My Dad; Bill Franklin; Marshall Reiner; David Loud; David Baker Jr., Fred Pierce, Goldie Glitters; Cockette Reggie; Russell Clark; Dusty Dawn; Greg Poe.
My Life, a Four Letter Word Page 19
