The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  It is possible that I drove Ole insane, and he simply didn’t want to break up with me. I was a temperamental terror, and most of what I did while we were together was sew costumes and do my homework. I also ran our household, paid the bills, bought our groceries, and balanced the checkbook. I used to buy him beer at the supermarket and I was never carded, not once. I used to do our laundry down the street, and I would cut out Faire costumes on the large, flat floor at the laundromat.

  Since Ole had stopped sleeping with me, I felt free to do more or less whatever I wanted to with whoever I wanted to. What a worthless layabout I was, as rotten as can be imagined! To illustrate the point, I will quote an aria from Ariadne Auf Naxos. Zerbinetta is a coquette, and a layabout like I was, and she is trying to comfort Ariadne, recently deserted by Theseus. Ariadne is planning to die of grief. Zerbinetta counsels her to take another lover, and offers her own story. I am including the German, because that is how I think of it.

  So war es mit Pagliazzo un Mezzetin

  Dann war es Cavicchio, dann Burattin,

  Dann Pasquariello! Ach und zuweilen

  will es mir scheinen, Waren es zwei!

  Doch niemals Launen immer ein Müssen

  Immer ein neues beklommendes Staunen:

  Daß ein Herz sogar sich selber nicht versteht

  That’s how it was with Pagliazzo and Mezzetin,

  then there was Cavicchio and Burattin,

  Then Pasquariello! Oh, and sometimes

  if I remember correctly, there were two!

  But it was never out of a caprice, always a need,

  each time a new, uneasy shock to realize

  that a heart can’t even understand itself.

  —Zerbinetta,Grossmaechtige Prinzessin: Ariadne Auf Naxos, Richard Strauss

  I was intoxicated with my own ability to captivate people, and I never thought through what I would do once somebody fell in love with me. I even did what my mother had wanted me to do all along, although I didn’t do it very well.

  I really hurt a girl named Becky when I was 15. She was beautiful and sweet, and everything a lesbian could have wanted. She fell for me after seeing me at a con and wrote to me. I wrote back and we began a relationship. I knew how to act like a butch lesbian because I was raised with lesbians, but I felt like I was playacting. I just didn’t have what it took to be her girlfriend.

  Her friends scared the living daylights out of me. So many stories of how one girl or another got the hell beaten out of her by her jealous butch girlfriend. If you’re going to involve yourself with a bad imitation of an alcoholic, battering husband, why not just marry an actual alcoholic, physically abusive man? What is the advantage of being a lesbian if the sexual dynamics are just as awful as they are in a bad straight relationship?

  I left Becky without explanation. I was a failure at being a lesbian, and she deserved better than me, that is certain.

  Around that time, I met my best friend Elizabeth Rousseau at Ann Healy’s Irish dance studio in San Francisco. I wanted to be a step dancer. These days we would think of “Riverdance” for what I was doing. Irish country dancing was done in multiples of two, three, or six, and I was already good enough at that to teach it. Step dancers have to remember a great deal of choreography, execute intricate footwork and high kicks with perfect form, and demonstrate physical agility. I became a solo dancer at the Renaissance Faire, as did she. Elizabeth was, and is, a phenomenally good dancer.

  I was living in Laussat Street in San Francisco, and I was 16 years old to her 17. I was doing a great deal of commissioned sewing at the time and many of our visits revolved around sewing, blueberries, Milano cookies and lots and lots of coffee. She did embroidery on linen which was stunningly beautiful, and made tatted lace, even making me a collar and cuffs for an Irish competition dance dress which belonged in a museum. She was, and is, an artist, and she has become a molecular biologist. I hung around with her, and less often with her sister Pam who also worked at the Faire.

  That year, I wore an Irish dress I had made: it incorporated design elements of a corset so that I would not be adding an extra few layers of fabric to the dress. The bodice was double-lined with a sturdy grade of canvas, as well as the medium blue fabric which lined the rest of the dress. Underneath the front closure, which was pewter hook-and-eye fastenings with Celtic interlace, I had built an extra pair of flaps with lacing so that I would be laced down invisibly and the bodice would close over the top. I didn’t care for the look of visible lacing, and I despised lacing down the back because of the nightmare of costume changes. The dress was black velvet over a medium blue underdress. The overdress had panels of dark red velvet in tie-shapes, with the large ends both up and down, to emphasize the hourglass shape, and it had a lot of silver Celtic interlace which I had laid out with my trusty ruler and tailor’s chalk. It sparkled with gems.

  At the Renaissance Faire, I fenced at the fencing booth every chance I got—and dress and tight lacing and all—I once challenged the entire Queen’s Guard to have a bout with me. Two declined: the oldest and wisest two. The rest came. I beat all but one.

  Did they let me win? I hope not!

  In any event, I had made all of them favors of blue velvet ribbon, and the ones I had beaten got a square of chainmail sewn beneath the blue velvet roses on their favors, where the ones I did not fence and the one I did not beat simply got blue velvet roses. What is a “favor?” At the Faire, it was a tradition for women to give men ribbons to signify their favor, and these ribbons were often sold at the Faire. I made my own. They were not always given to men one was dating: it was a friendly thing as often as not, and some men had a huge collection of favors on their doublets or jackets. The ones I made were distinctive, and not much like the ones which were sold.

  Yes, all that nonsense was going on while I was still living and working the Faire with Ole. We even got “handfasted.” Handfasting was allegedly a Celtic tradition, performed by the chieftain of the tribe in remote locations where there was no priest. We believed it was a marriage, meant to run for a year and a day. Historically handfasting was more like a betrothal, and if it were happening as it had back then the engaged couple would never have behaved as though they were married.

  Most of what I remember about our handfasting was what I made us to wear. For him, it was a dark green Irish kilt made of really good wool, with a Scottish jacket in black and silver with a silk shirt. Mine was a dark blue and grey velveteen riding habit, with an off-white silk shirt and petticoat underneath. Both the skirt and the petticoat had a train with a loop, so the length could be managed easily. An Irish band played for us, Ole smashed cake in my face, and I danced with my old Irish country dance teacher Terry O’Neill, which was wonderful fun.

  Ole and I had been handfasted, and I don’t really know why I went along with it. Our relationship was already over long before and we were basically roommates. Several things happened that made me eager to leave San Francisco, and eventually him.

  One day while coming back on BART from a step dance competition which I had won, Ole and I were mugged. We were living on Laussat Street in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, which was not a safe area at all in those days. He had walked down to meet me at BART, and as we walked back to our apartment five guys came around the corner very quickly and grabbed us. I did not see what they did to him, though later he told me they had a knife to his throat. I was pushed backward against one of the short cast-iron fences with the points on top, and I immediately started screaming for help. They demanded money, which I did not have, and Ole told me to give them my backpack. I was very much against this, because in my backpack was both my Red Sonja costume which I set great store by, and also the first-place medal I had just won at my very first step dancing competition.

  Meanwhile, Ole was preoccupied with other things. I already knew that Ole preferred women with enormous boobs despite his interest in me. I was only a 32DD, which was nowhere near as large as the women in his fantasies. Eventua
lly I found out that he wanted to be the large-breasted woman in his fantasies, when he left his water balloons to leak on my shoes in our closet along with some female clothing I did not recognize. When I found this out I went to visit my friend Elizabeth, and I laughed and I cried, and I laughed and I cried. I knew then that I could never be the real object of his sexual fantasies, and I would remain second place to what, water balloons?

  Ole had a good friend, Duncan, who I had known from before. I thought he was a real scumbag, because although I had extricated myself from his immodest proposal when I was ten, I figured I would not be the only very young girl he would attempt to victimize. Once again, the stuff we put up with via the Renaissance Faire was just unbelievable.

  Duncan had been accused of rape, and his girlfriend Laura was incensed with me because I said unequivocally that I believed the accusations. Ole didn’t stand with me though, until Duncan actually went to jail for rape. The best he could come up with was “I always kinda believed Dorothy.” I had been nearly ostracized from our small circle of friends for refusing to pretend that I believed Duncan was innocent.

  Duncan was known in that time as “The Telephone Rapist” because he would call his victims and demand that they do things in their windows where he could watch them from outside. Worse, he assaulted my friend Elizabeth on the massage table, and she was too frightened to take any action against him.

  Over time, Ole became impossible to live with because he became increasingly more dependent on alcohol. Shortly before my eighteenth birthday, Ole drove drunk with me in the car. We had been staying at his father’s house for Christmas, and we drove home Christmas night. He told me that he had had a little something to drink before he left, and he commenced weaving all over the road. I tried to remain calm, and asked him what kind of a little something. He told me he had had some beer and some Laphroaig whiskey, and an impressive list of spirits which made the problem all too clear.

  I asked him to get off the road so I could call my father. He said no, he wanted to drive home himself. I repeated my request, more firmly, and he insisted he was going to make it to the next big city. I demanded he pull off the road right now, because he was not safe to drive.

  So he stopped, very angrily, and pulled into an all-night restaurant because it was quite late. I called my father, who drove down immediately to get me. And get me he did—remember my father hated alcohol with a passion. The idea that I was in the car with a drunk driver was much more distressing to my father than the idea that I, an underage girl, had been living with a much older man for a few years.

  In any event, our relationship did not survive that. I could not forgive him for driving drunk with me in the car. I told him the next morning that I was leaving, and he told me that I had been gone for some time. After that, he drove drunk with Elizabeth in the car. She managed to persuade him to get off the road, and he made a big deal about how at least she had let him “be a man about it!”

  Soon afterwards, Ole married a woman he had met when we were first together, and five years later she left him an AA pamphlet along with divorce papers.

  Chapter 29: The House on the Hill, and the Tacky Mansion (1984–1987)

  Before they learn to say my name

  I heard them wailin’ tryin’,

  Some I detest, because I know

  Politeness has me lyin’!

  Mariah, Mariah

  They call my name Mariah

  Maria, or Myra,

  Or anything but Moira.

  —Moira Greyland, with apologies to Loesser and Loewe

  I changed a few things after I left Ole and turned eighteen. First, I took back my own name. I had gone by Dorothy since I was six because nobody could pronounce Moira, and I was trying to make it so the kids had one less reason to tease me. Now that I was about to go to college, I figured that the social consequences of having an unusual name would be trivial. I discovered that I preferred to tolerate mispronunciations of my name rather than correcting them. These days, the few who find my name impossible to pronounce call me Mimi—It is “MOY-Ruh,” by the way.

  I also cut off more than a foot of red hair, which I regretted very much. My hair had been red from henna since I was about 12, and I decided it was not going to stay that way. Hair dyed with henna cannot be colored anything else, nor can any color near it be evened out. I was advised that if I wanted to be done with my red hair and go back to my natural dirty blond, I would need to cut it off so I did. I hated my hair until it grew out a bit and I decided to go white-blond at the advice of Sebastian, the best hairdresser I had ever known.

  I moved in with my friend Geraldine from the Faire. Geraldine was the mother of Sterling and Aaron, who I had been friends with since I first came to Berkeley as a small child. Geraldine is a fascinating character. She is highly intelligent, erudite, and expert in everything related to historical reenactment as one might find at the Renaissance Faire. I also liked her very much as a human being and enjoyed her company very much.

  She had a lovely house. Truly, it was a marvelous place to live, out in the wild part of Lafayette on top of a hill. It was a half-timbered Elizabethan reproduction house and it looked as though it would have been perfectly at home in the Renaissance Faire. I rented a room from Geraldine, and she also let me use the entire attic for my sewing. I needed a fair amount of room between my sewing machine, my industrial sewing machine, my overlock machine, and the inevitable overworked ironing board. When making costumes, it often seemed to me that the time spent with the ironing board would always exceed the time spent sewing. I did a lot of sewing while listening to Jethro Tull, reveling in the view of the gorgeous green hills out the window.

  I did not own a stick of furniture other than my bed, so Mother bought me an unfinished dresser and a night stand which I eventually sanded and stained. I put my fencing foils and mask above the doorway inside the door, skull-and-crossbones fashion. My room had a little doorway with a right turn entrance and two steps down. It was the first time I had lived alone and it was very freeing. I loved it there.

  At Geraldine’s house, I could practice for several hours a day since I was utterly undisturbed, and nobody would be bothered by my endless scales. I had a small upright piano in Geraldine’s attic, which my mother had gotten me when I began studying at the Conservatory.

  I was single and I dated—briefly—a man I had known for years. He visited me at Geraldine’s house and we had a glorious picnic in her front yard. He was a real adult—even had a job and a car—and I found him to be handsome, charismatic, and irresistible.

  But I left him the same day as our picnic.

  I didn’t stop dating him because I didn’t care about him. He told me he was in an open marriage, and I pressed him for details, saying I needed to talk to his wife and make sure she was OK with him seeing me. He told me his wife was sick and he didn’t want to upset her. I was shocked that he intended for the two of us to betray her and disgusted that he would participate in such a moral travesty.

  I had a very odd “Berkeley” moral code at that time. Open relationships and polyamorous relationships were something I had seen a lot of and they did not surprise me but I was beginning to change my mind about participating in that way. I did not want to be used as comfort for a man having trouble in his marriage. Since then, every time a man has approached me and told me he was in an “open relationship,” I figured it was code for “I’m lying to my wife.”

  I fail to see the point of a polyamorous relationship. Since stability, homemaking and eventually children are the point of a pair-bond, to have an extra woman around merely means one relationship or more is going to end. I have seen it too often and I have had too many poly people weeping on my shoulders over some romantic mishap or other. Just no.

  I loved the house on the hill, and I would have stayed there for a long time, except for something I could never have predicted.

  Geraldine’s son Aaron had friends who had come to stay in one of the spare bedrooms. Their
Rottweiler had bitten their infant daughter, and although they were not happy about it their “punk” sensibilities meant that their dog was acceptable as he was. He would never receive any correction or training, no matter how vicious his behavior. One night, that dog and I faced off on the way from my car to the house after I came home from rehearsal. Although it seemed that the dog and I stood there for an hour with him growling and me trying hard to look bigger, I’m certain it was merely the scariest ten seconds I had had in recent memory.

  I became convinced after that encounter that if I was going to live there I should carry a gun, and then I decided that if I needed to carry a gun to live there, I needed to live somewhere else.

  I called my mother, and she told me that the upper floor at my father’s Oakland house was vacant and I could move in there. I was on reasonably good terms with my mother and father—at least as good as might be expected with time and distance and a complete lack of daily contact. My last significant contact with my father had been him rescuing me from Ole’s drunk driving.

  I had high, if false, hopes.

  I would never have lived with my mother and Lisa again, under any circumstances. At least I was clear about that. I knew that coping with my father would not be as difficult. I would have to take care of him, since left to his own devices he would eat nothing but chocolate cake and chocolate milk—When he would go to the bank, if there was a line he would stand there and scream; ditto with the grocery store. I would be taking a load off Mother and Lisa by stepping in, quite enough to compensate for the financial burden I would create by living in his house. I also thought the commute to classes in San Francisco would be a lot easier from Oakland than from Lafayette.

  My father’s house was a duplex of sorts with an upstairs and a downstairs. It had a large horseshoe driveway, and it looked like a cheap, dilapidated version of a plantation mansion with gigantic pillars. It was in a marginal to downright frightening part of town, across the street from a cemetery a few blocks away from Mills College. I would not have walked anywhere outside that house for all the tea in China. I can imagine that a hundred years ago the area might have been considered most elegant and exclusive, and the house would have been the height of fashion.