But not when we were there. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Every so often when I came home, I would discover young gentlemen climbing the fruit trees outside the house, in such a way that they could see into my kitchen via the sliding glass doors. I let them take all the fruit they wanted. I did not realize at the time that they were “casing the joint.” Not long after that, both the upstairs and the downstairs were broken into, and robbed expertly. Since neither of us had especially grand possessions, they only got my father’s wonderful stereo system, my ornamental knives and my meager jewelry collection.
I did not own any more furniture than I had before, so the apartment was glaringly empty. I had two bedrooms, and one of them held my sewing stuff. I had to get a kitchen table and a chair, or eat on the floor.
The house did not stay empty. Although my father owned nearly as little furniture as I did, he owned a vast, and I mean vast library: much too vast for his downstairs apartment to encompass. Arguably, it needed an entire house of its own and maybe a staff to care for it. Dealing with my father’s library became my task.
I came up with a cheap solution which involved cinder blocks and pine boards, dozens of them. Soon, my upstairs was as full of his books as his own place was. I hated cinder blocks—vaguely ornamental 12-inch square by 4-inch thick hunks of filigree-shaped concrete. I hate keeping hundreds of linear feet of books stacked up in rows to make my living room look like the stacks in a tiny, remote library!
Yes, in Berkeley books are the thing. If you don’t have at least enough books to fill every wall in your house you are not a credible intellectual. If you are allergic to dust, that does not matter. If your house is uncleanable, that does not matter. You must have your books, and your books define you. Wherever you go, they will follow you like a papery anchor around your neck.
Over the next few decades, I gradually reduced my own book collection from thousands of books to hundreds. I have kept a lot of music—mostly operatic scores—but the hundreds of E-Books I have now do not require schlepping or cinder blocks and boards, and I do not miss the physical ones a bit.
I know, I know. I am a heretic. How dare I not decorate my house in Early Book?
I mentioned I had high hopes that things would be better with my father. Well, they were in some ways. Regardless of what I had been taught I ought to feel and to value, I still wanted very much the same things that every other little girl on earth wanted.
When I was very little, my friend Jean and I would play dress-up like little girls do, and I asked my father “how do I look?” He gave me a look of something approaching disgust, and told me that he was “not aware enough of the cultural conventions to give a fair answer.” At the time it hurt, because I wanted my Daddy to think I was pretty and to protect me. Heck, it always hurt. I wanted to be Daddy’s Little Girl, instead of the monster who was ruining his life and “stealing” his boyfriends.”
When I lived with my father, I was still the same person. I needed my father to protect me and even—unreasonably—think that I was pretty. I knew in my head that this would never happen but my heart never quite gave up. I don’t remember how it came up but one day, downstairs in that tacky mansion, my father was talking about my appearance. He told me that I was very androgynous.
Androgynous.
I was 5’6", and 36-22-36. I dressed as well as my tailor’s craft and my mother’s provision would allow me, doing my best to emulate a Forties movie star. I know now that I was about as androgynous as Barbie, but back then it was a blow. I was expected to be sexual, not sexy. Apparently, in my father’s universe, children were sexy, and adult women, as I had become, were nothing.
To him, as a woman, I was nothing. I should have expected it, but I never really gave up hope.
Make no mistake, he made no secret of his admiration for my intelligence, my musicality, and my sense of pitch. He was my biggest fan in terms of my singing. But to see me as a woman, a daughter, his daughter, even a female person of any description? That was not going to happen.
So I was what? An intelligent, androgynous blob of nothing who could sing, but was neither male nor female?
Even though my father did nothing for my sense of myself as a female human being, he could be very kind and even loving in other ways. My wisdom teeth were all impacted, so I had to have my wisdom teeth out. The procedure was going to be long and difficult. Since Novocaine did not work very well on me, I had to be put under at the small dentist’s office my mother had found. When I woke up afterwards I asked for my father, who had driven me there. They told me I could see him when I could walk out to see him.
I stood up right away—terrible mistake. I fell over on my face as though I had been a tree. I couldn’t even break my fall with my hands. I was nauseated for weeks from the pentathol, and my lower lip and chin were numb for a year from the fall.
My father, bless him, did his best to tend me when I was sick. When I was well enough to try to eat again, I asked him to fry me some potatoes and he completely went to pieces. Apparently, cooking was not something he could do. His care for me when I was sick was wonderful. He could hand me yogurt, jello, and pudding, but it all went to hell in a handbasket when I needed actual food.
I was still working at the Southern Renaissance Faire. That year, there were both good and bad things which went on. On the good side, I was fencing. Oh fencing! How I loved it. After hours, a bunch of us would get together and grab anything resembling fencing gear, including sabers, shinai (Japanese bamboo practice weapons for Kendo) and masks. I would routinely fence with a mask, a T-shirt, shorts and a fencing glove, and we would pound on each other for ages.
My father was still horrified that I was fencing. Fencing is warlike, and my being non-feminine in his imagination didn’t mean that I could do masculine things that he did not like. I was forbidden to be either male or female.
Eventually, my harp teacher put a stop to my fencing. I showed up to a lesson with my inner arm all cut up from where the glove didn’t cover it, and she told me I could not possibly play the harp while I was risking injury. She ended my sewing for the same reason. I didn’t care. I wanted to play the harp so badly that I was willing to give up sharp objects.
I got to Faire all kinds of ways, and stayed all kinds of places. The Faire bus only ran during the Faire weekends so we had to arrange for transportation to workshops on our own. That year during workshops, I stayed with people I did not know well and ended up being given a ride from a house in Pasadena to the Faire site in Agoura, which limited my choices about how I would go where and with whom. The person who gave me a ride to Faire raped me. It went on for a long, horrible time. He got to be the human, and I got to be the blow-up doll. If I saw him again I don’t know what I would do, but I hope I never see him again. I did nothing, because I was trapped there and I had no way to get back to the house I was staying at but with him.
I know. It is very common for child sexual abuse survivors to be raped as adults, partly because we tend to have horribly bad boundaries and partly because we don’t see warning signals. It didn’t hurt; a lot of it was my fault. It never occurred to me to make sure I knew what the address was where I had left my car. It never occurred to me to question the person who drove me to the Faire. I had no backup plan. I was an idiot.
Part of the trouble with counterculture organizations is that it is easy to assume that since we are all part of the same community that we have shared goals and therefore safety. These are stupid assumptions but very common ones. Naturally, a counterculture organization is going to be a perfect place for a predator to hide precisely because of the expectation of safety, and partly because counterculture organizations are full of victims who do not fit in in “straight” society and have poor boundaries from their victimization.
Now, of course in a normal family, I would have had some recourse. Not in mine. I screwed up my courage and told my mother what I didn’t dare tell the police. I had been raped, and I didn’t tell any
one.
My mother sighed and pouted and complained that I got more sex than she did.
Yes, she really, really did.
I can still make no sense of her response unless taken in the blunt context of her years-long quest to blame me for her sexual frustration. It hurt so much to hear that from her. Stupid me, wanting my mother to love me and show concern for my safety and bodily integrity! As though a rape had anything to do with sex other than gross physical mechanics! Might as well compare eating dinner at a five-star restaurant with being forcibly intubated and fed that way!
Why would Mother choose this moment to grumble about her sex life? Here is one clue I didn’t see: Lisa had secured her position and no longer needed to provide those kinds of services to get Mother’s cooperation. Lisa had moved out of Mother’s bedroom and into the library, installing a lock on the door.
Of course, in a normal family a mother does not bitch at her daughter about her sexual frustration, but we were very, very far away from normal.
My being in closer contact with my parents had some other notable side effects. Mother was friends with three people in a group marriage: Deborah, her husband Richard, and Deborah’s girlfriend Phyllis.
Deborah was a kind, gentle earth-mother working as a chiropractor. She was kind, nurturing, motherly, and never inappropriate in the least. She was the glue holding the entire unsteady edifice together and she always welcomed me and treated me kindly. Phyllis was a strange, masculine physicist whose great passion turned out to be repairing bicycles. She was intelligent, which is the usual root of my folly.
Deborah’s husband Richard was a hopelessly inadequate man who did Rolfing—a sort of massage—for my family when they visited. Richard touched me in a way I hated during a Rolfing session, and ignored my objections. I found him less appealing than a plate of slugs and his professional ethics reprehensible. It seemed there was no way to get out of the Rolfing my mother had paid for. Next time, I wore my underpants and told him not to touch me there, but he insisted on working on my “pelvic floor” muscles anyway.
I never came back. I didn’t shoot him. Not even when my friend Kat told me that he had done “everything but” with her, while pretending to be faithful to Deborah since they wanted a child. Yes, these are the kind of stupid shenanigans which go on in polyamorous relationships. Fidelity is negotiated, and even then it is lied about. You’d almost think that infidelity as the basis of a relationship might lead to more and more of itself.
I hated Richard.
Phyllis was quite taken with me. I was 18 and she was 36. I had a strong personality, which meant that men and women with daddy-issues got hooked on me very easily. I stupidly let my infatuation with my own attractiveness to let me captivate her. Once she was in love with me, I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the situation. I realized she now thought we had a relationship and I didn’t want to upset her. I was stuck because of my bad boundaries.
I can’t stand having sex with women. It is a chore, like being forced to perform for my mother. Our “relationship” was over almost before it began. As soon as Phyllis felt sure of me she began to treat me very badly, always wanting to tell me how unhappy she was with me. Phyllis was like a tapeworm; causing great pain and wasting without an obvious cause. Emotionally, she was difficult to the point of seeming insane.
I am sure I was not nearly involved enough, and that I caused her a lot of pain and disappointment. Here I was, a usually-straight person, trying to make the best of a bad situation. I probably was not acting at all as though I was in love with her, and as such she was very unhappy with me. I have no doubt that as a lesbian lover, I was a complete and total failure. I couldn’t make sense of her complaints. In the case of a normal complaint like “You’re standing on my foot” or “You left the cap off the toothpaste,” I could do something to fix it. Her complaints were not about what I had done as much as how I always thought and felt the wrong things. I didn’t call her enough and I didn’t say the right things when I called. I had no idea how to give her what she wanted and I stopped wanting to try very quickly. I am certain she sensed my lack of commitment and interest.
I stayed with Phyllis and Deborah and Richard in Southern CA a few times instead of camping out. Some weeks I drove, and once I flew. It might have been for a Faire TV commercial, I don’t remember. As I was getting ready to leave to fly South, Phyllis called me on the phone. I don’t remember anything much about the phone call other than that I had done several things wrong and she was unhappy with me, and my last words to her were “Mea culpa, dammit!” I had no idea how to do right what she thought I had done wrong. Our interactions hurt so much I didn’t know what to do.
It was clear to me I had made a mistake and I didn’t know how to extricate myself from it. I had no idea how to get out of having sex with her. I couldn’t figure out how to tell her that and make it stick. For me, there is nothing quite so non-aphrodisiac as a guilt trip.
One day, Phyllis came to see me at the Faire. I hadn’t expected her to come and as always, I had a heavy performance schedule with back-to-back shows and parades with no break at all until 2 PM. She waited for me at Celt camp for five hours until she passed out from hypoglycemia.
I was horrified. I knew that this was meant to cause me to feel guilty and to do…what? I had no idea. I didn’t feel guilty, though, but furious and disappointed. Phyllis was 36. How could she allow herself to pass out from hunger instead of taking care of herself? Moreover, how could she place the responsibility for that on me?
She came to, declined medical assistance that I offered to get her, and still swaying, told me her sad tale about How Long She Had Waited For Me, and How Sad It All Was. I told her that my schedule was very heavy, and if she had told me ahead of time when she was going to arrive I could have let her know when I would be free, but no, that was not enough.
How can men stand women? If that is what we do, then seriously, how has the species survived?
Now, what I didn’t have the gumption to tell her is that in my heart our relationship had been over from the moment she screamed at me over the phone. I have had many female friends and they do not act that way. If women can be decent human beings with their clothes on, and they turn into raving lunatics with their clothes off, they had better keep their clothes on.
Phyllis still had a final salvo, a final volley, a final way to Express Herself and get me to do whatever it was she wanted me to do provided her aim was to get me to suffer. She said “I thought you’d be happy to know Deborah miscarried the baby.”
Why on earth would I be happy? I wasn’t happy that Deborah lost a child she wanted. I was horrified that Phyllis said that to me. If her aim was to get me to suffer, it worked; if her aim was to get me to feel sorry for her, it completely failed. Now not only had she staged a dramatic scene which left me completely unmoved, but she obviously wanted me to feel pain, and for what?
I concluded that she was out of her head, too dangerous and too damaged. I finally managed to get up the nerve to break up with her. What a relief!
The only clue I ever had to why Phyllis was so twisted came from Deborah. She told me that Phyllis had tried to tell her about some heinous abuse she had suffered, and Deborah had succeeded in convincing her it never happened. This was not a good idea. Years later Deborah confided in me how wacky Phyllis had been and how betrayed she felt by her. They have had no contact at all in years.
One result of my breakup with Phyllis was that I could no longer maintain my pretense of being a lesbian or even bisexual to my mother. I came out of the closet and admitted that I was straight. At first she was upset since this had been a very big deal to her, but since I was over 18 she did not seem to think she could do anything about it. In an interview, she said that she had thought I was kidding. How could I possibly grow up in a family like ours and end up straight? Eventually, she laughed it off. She said she was going to write an article for True Confessions magazine.
“Imagine my SHOCK! My HOR
ROR!!
The day I found out my DAUGHTER was a
HETEROSEXUAL!!”
That fall, I directed an Irish music and dance show at the Renaissance Faire. I made costumes for all the major cast members, choreographed, danced, sang, helped to write the script, and otherwise did way too much. I became so burned out that I quit sewing for a long time after that.
Ole, Duncan, and Laura were all in the show. I was the director, and Laura decided she could do the job better. We quarreled, and she wrote a nasty letter to the director of the Faire about how dreadful I was. He was puzzled, but I felt betrayed and devastated.
I quit the Faire and started college. Apparently, after getting rid of me Duncan, Laura and Ole could not decide which one of them was going to run the show, and they quarreled. I also quietly spoke to Elizabeth and told her that if she wanted to direct the show next year, all she needed to do was to announce auditions and rehearsals at the Renaissance Faire workshops and it would be her show. She did, and she directed the show for the next three years.
Meanwhile, my father and I were still living in the tacky mansion in Oakland. Between the burglaries and the tree-climbing, I began to feel as though that house was no place for man nor beast. By that time, Mother had made a great deal of money with Mists of Avalon, and she intended to buy my father a house.
I wanted to live in North Berkeley because it would be safe, but Mother wanted us to live closer to her. She let me house-hunt with him but then bought Walter a house just half a block away from hers. This was the same block we had all been on since arriving in California in 1972.
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 28
