Anyway, it’s funny about the sewer, because I did come from the bottom; I did feel like nothing before I felt like anything. Through the years, I’ve always studied a lot of self-development stuff, which has sometimes helped me and sometimes not. I’m intense because the work I make is intense and because when I sing I’m intense. I’m just an intense little motherfucker, what can I tell ya? I try, I listen to the Buddhist CDs, the Abraham CDs, to the point where I had one assistant say, “Oh my God, not again, please don’t.” Those CDs are maddening after a while, because you just feel like, “Shut the hell up and get on with it. If you want to be successful, just fucking do what you need to do. If there’s a wall in the way, fine. Let me take a step back, let me make my way around it and get to point B.” That’s how I try to do things now.
Years ago, my husband would walk in and look at me while I did spirit dancing with my friend Marion. We would burn down our villages and build them back up again in our heads. The Honduran housekeeper and the nanny, who were sisters and I think were also Jehovah’s Witnesses, were really freaked out—I’d see these two heads through the door, watching me. Before I met David, during the Vibes era, I also did yoga, and with Ginny Duffy I did creative visualization, which made me understand how I got to where I wanted to be: I always saw myself there. If you can’t see yourself doing what you want, how is it going to happen?
I don’t mind being this intense. When things get to be too much, I space out, I pop into a different reality where I see things differently—that’s been how I’ve lived my life. I always felt like I had this guardian angel, one I talked to my whole life. But now I feel like, “You know, maybe you got a guardian angel, maybe you don’t. But be here now, be compassionate, try and open your freakin’ mind and your eyes to what is happening now.”
What maybe adds to my intensity is that I’m often alone. I’m in hotels a lot, and I’m home by myself when Dec is in school. But I have my dog, and I leave the television on sometimes just to have a talking voice in the background. I keep looking for a job where I won’t have to leave my kid, but I don’t know if it’s possible. Someone said to me once, “Why don’t you just do private events, and then you can be home and make the money you want?” But the whole idea of not making music for the public anymore really freaked me out. And when I write, I have to be by myself, but I want to be with my family. So often I write late at night. I don’t mind getting up in the middle of the night to do that. It works for me, and then I can see them. And of course, I have my imagination, so I’m never totally alone.
During the year when I worked on At Last, my father told me that he went to the doctor and he had skin cancer. And I said, “Dad, skin cancer is easily cured, did they take it out?” He said they got it all, but then he said it had spread to his lymph nodes and I didn’t really hear that part at first.
With my first experiences with the health-care system, I was lucky—when my mother got ovarian cancer, she got great care. I wanted my dad in Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, one of the best places in the country, but he couldn’t go, because his AARP insurance wouldn’t pay. But they would pay for Columbia, which didn’t have as good care as Sloan-Kettering. But I just didn’t have enough money to put him in Sloan. There was a very kind nurse at Columbia who helped me find a hospice for my dad to die in. And that’s what I did. I put him in a really nice hospice, the best I could find.
But when my father was dying, I blamed myself for never selling out—I might have had integrity, but I didn’t have the money to do anything for him. Instead of investing in preventative care, the medical system invests in “you get sick, we take your money, honey.” They don’t want doctors who take your blood and prescribe vitamins, because then that would keep you alive.
I tried a lot of different things when my dad was sick in hospice care. I brought a qigong woman, I brought a healer, but they weren’t having much luck with him. I tried doing reiki too, while the qigong woman worked on him—his head was hot and his feet were cold, and I drew the heat down to his feet. I got all kinds of rocks and stones, and brought another Reiki healer named Michelle, who works with doctors. I also brought all kinds of music, and when one high-pitched vocal played, my dad looked at me like, “What, are you kidding me?” That made me laugh.
I kept telling the doctors and nurses, “Just give him more drugs, because I don’t want him in pain.” My stepmother was not okay with that, probably because she didn’t want to let go. She said, “Why do you want to keep him so doped up? You don’t want him to die, do you?”
When my father did pass, my stepmother said she would send him to be cremated and then we would get the urn back. But I felt like, when he gets cremated, it’s all over, and there he is, just sitting on the friggin’ counter in an urn? So I decided to go to the cremation, and I was surprised when my husband, who was fearful for his own dad’s health, came with me. Earlier I kept telling my father, “When you get better, I’ll take you to the Great Wall of China.” So I brought a silk scarf from China to the cremation. When I asked to see him they said, “That’s extra.” Fine, I said and they showed me a cardboard box. I put the scarf around him and pink flowers over him—over his heart, to heal any sadness.
I called Elen while I was there, and she said, “What’s that music in the background? What are you playing?” I said “Requiem for a Death” or something. She said, “Why don’t you play some Hawaiian music? He played Hawaiian guitar.” So I made them put on some Hawaiian music when I said goodbye to him. As my father was going into the fire, this one song came on, a classic Hawaiian tune called “I Like You,” by Sol Hoopii, and David said, “This is like a Woody Allen movie.” I played the whole album, Master of the Hawaiian Guitar, Volume 2. My dad liked that music. He always brought the world home to us, my dad, and I loved that about him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IN THE SEVENTIES, I was so afraid all the time for the people I knew who were gay, like my sister, Elen. People were so fuckin’ crazy. At first, in the seventies, you thought life was going to get better—especially with Harvey Milk being a city supervisor in San Francisco. That was a time you felt like, “Oh my God, we’re living in a new time where people will finally just let people be who they are.” And then the guy was killed, and it was awful.
Even the police were really cruel to the gay community. They’d raid gay bars, and arrest people, and the whole thing was wrong. I was very worried about my sister because people act so stupid with someone who is different, and gay bashers were coming in from out of state (which still goes on to this day). I’d think, “Oh my God, my sister is a small woman, what is going to happen to her in New York?” I worked with this one musician, a really talented kid, who was beaten because he was gay. The attacker got away with it, because when he went to the hospital, he said, “I’m fine, I’m fine.” Yeah, he was fine, because it was like, what was he going to do? He didn’t want to go to the police. Some people think they’re not going to be taken seriously, so a lot of times, this stuff isn’t even reported.
Elen went to CUNY Queens College but dropped out when she was a freshman to find out why the world was the way it was. So as I said earlier, she had a lot of different jobs. She was a ship’s plumber; she worked on the railroad fixing boxcars; she worked in a garment factory; she was a carpenter, a masseuse, then an acupuncturist. And there came a time when she joined the socialist movement, and she was going to go help poor people fight in Nicaragua. She was still pretty young, and I was like, “Are you shitting me? Why are you going there? Just stay away from that.” But she didn’t listen. And then she went to live in Phoenix, where she saw all these injustices against the Salvadoran refugees and the poor, and a ton of corruption in the local government. Ya know, our mayor, Michael Bloomberg, gets a dollar a year for a salary. He insists on it and he doesn’t take bribes from anybody. But these other guys were corrupt. So she ran for mayor of Phoenix as a Socialist Workers Party candidate. One reason was to help the Salvadoran refugees get sanctuary.
At the time she was working at the Marathon Steel Company in Phoenix, cutting hot steel with a blowtorch. And I happened to be really famous at the time, so People magazine did an article on her in 1985. Dave Wolff went wild, saying, “She can’t even balance a checkbook—how’s she going to balance the city?” I told him, “You don’t understand what she’s talking about doing there. She’s talking about corruption. She’s talking about standing up for people.” She didn’t win, but she called attention to what was important to her. And years later, the same guys she said were corrupt were indicted for corruption.
Me, I don’t think socialism really works. And communism is a load of crap, because every country that has it has communists . . . and a couple of people who happen to be doing really well. Politics is about power. And power corrupts. There’s always someone at the top of the food chain living large.
Elen worried about me, too, which is why she introduced me to Carl and Gregory, so that they could watch over me when she wasn’t there. She really thought society was going to fall apart because it was so evil in the seventies. People were buying Nixon’s and Agnew’s lies. I’d get depressed because my friends and I all thought, “Wow, Americans believe everything they’re told. What happened to the generation that was going to change and save the world?” Elen has always been very upbeat, positive, and compassionate. And in the end she went back to school to become an acupuncturist and an herbalist, which is what she is now. It’s the perfect job for her because she really cares about people.
She came out in her twenties. It took a long, long time for her to come out to herself, and at first, she was bisexual. Later, she was fully out. Elen always wanted to be Peter Pan when we were playing—she always wanted to be the guy. When we made music, she’d play the drums, which none of the girls wanted to do. She was really good. My mother used to try and dress her in girly clothes but Elen would never wear them. Never! We all wore jeans, but we’d have to go into the men’s shop and be fitted for them because they didn’t sell girls’ jeans at the time. I’m sure she was very comfortable like that. My mom even gave Elen a Toni perm. Poor Elen. In the meantime I used to look at that perm and beg Mom to teach me how to do it. I was always cutting my Barbie and Pollyanna dolls’ hair. I lined them all up and put a cloth around their necks, like they were at the beauty parlor. Barbie was a real heartbreaker, but then all of a sudden, Barbie was freakin’ bald. That was a shocker.
So Elen was always a huge inspiration for me. And my involvement with trying to bring an end to AIDS began when Gregory told me he had AIDS in 1985 (after he was in the “She Bop” video). Then he just got sicker and sicker, and he was in the hospital and he couldn’t swallow, so the doctors had to puncture his stomach with a bag thing so they could feed him. It was so messed up. Since there wasn’t much information about AIDS at the time, I didn’t know if he would get sicker if I visited, but I couldn’t stay away. And then when I came back from seeing him, all my friends and everybody were so freaked out and frightened of me, like I was carrying something. I remember one time I cut myself and I was bleeding when I was around Gregory and thought, “Oh my God, I’m bleeding, what about germs? Is he going to get something from me? Am I going to get something from him?” It was just bad.
It was heartbreaking. I just wanted to have our life the way we had it. The whole thing was awful. I saw firsthand what AIDS does to people, so I wanted people to know that they gotta use a condom, they have to have safe sex. Is it worth your whole life? For me, getting involved was the right thing to do. There were other great singers who were loved by the gay community who did not come out to help, and I decided I wasn’t going to be like that. I do remember, though, that Liza Minnelli, Yoko Ono, Kate Pierson, Jean Paul Gaultier, and tons of others spoke out.
So I did things like the Gay Games and the Pride Parade, and my activism was reflected in my music, like everything else in my life. I played the first AIDS benefit in 1985 in Los Angeles. And when Rock Hudson died later that year, Elizabeth Taylor spoke out, and I was like, “Okay, that’s good, because we all need to speak out.” And MAC, the cosmetics company, helped in the beginning, too. We were losing a whole generation of great designers, hair people, and makeup artists.
In 2002, when actor Harvey Fierstein was getting a Human Rights Award, he asked if I would sing “True Colors” at his award dinner, and of course I said yes. I brought my violin player at the time, who was touring with me for the Shine CD—her name was Denny and she was new. I asked her to play “True Colors” with no accompaniment. I thought in this echo-y old bank the sound of a violin and a voice over might be really beautiful. So I sang for Harvey and then he accepted his award and Harvey, being an advocate for the LGBT community, spoke with eloquence and reason. That night it really hit me that I needed to do something, too. I had been working and singing in the clubs promoting Shine and seeing everyone in the audience with no shirts on, and high on cat tranquilizers and ecstasy and speedball, just having unsafe everything. The drugs made them lose their inhibitions.
And as Harvey spoke of new infections among young gay men and the rise in deaths from AIDS-related complications, he said that happy people don’t self-destruct. There was a new expression in the late nineties and early 2000s: “barebacking”—not using a condom when you have sex. They thought you couldn’t die anymore, because people were living with AIDS. But as I said, people were dying from “old AIDS,” because the drug cocktails were so harsh.
So I thought, “Why don’t we make a pride T-shirt and use the proceeds to help fight AIDS?” So on the T-shirt, I put a picture of me from the Cher tour holding the rainbow flag with the words “pride” and “respect.” Because if you respect yourself and your partner, then you won’t put them or yourself in danger. All the proceeds went to the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). During the Cher tour, I would wrap myself with the rainbow flag at concerts and tell the story of how when I was growing up, my mother always said that no matter what we did, we’d always be her kids. We were lucky that way. On Cher’s tour, everything was timed for the visuals she had, so I only had a certain amount of time to talk between songs. That would drive me out of my mind (you know me).
That’s also the time when I heard of the Stay Close campaign through Carmen Cacciatore from FlyLife, a company that does press and promotion in the dance world and gay clubs. Carmen connected me to PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), who came up with the campaign. I was on the PFLAG fire-engine float for the Gay Pride Parade in the summer of 2001—I had on a headdress and my sister was also on the float, dressed as a fireman. Elen wanted to wear a T-shirt that said “Butch” on it and we looked everywhere but couldn’t find one. Finally I said, “Elen, you’re dressed as a fireman—people are going to know.” My mother was also on the float with a little sun hat, waving. It was the first time that we had done Pride together as a family.
In 2002 I was also in the Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade, and I sat in a champagne glass. We were sponsored by a fantastic gay bar called the Abbey. I sang all my dance songs over and over and over.
So that’s why I did the T-shirt. We created it and sold it at the Prides, and the money went to gay nonprofits. I thought that maybe if we promoted gay pride and gay respect, we could put the message out that we’re not trash. The thing about being gay that my sister told me is that you’re made to feel dirty, like you’re having dirty sex, not regular sex. So there’s self-hatred and shame. But an inclusive society is much stronger than an exclusive society. If you keep cutting yourself off at the knees, you’re never gonna stand strong. You can’t just weed out people because they’re gay. You never know who it is who’s going to have the brilliant idea to cure cancer or fix the economy. How ridiculous are we going to get here?
At the time, I was touring for the Body Acoustic CD, and I stood onstage and I said, “Listen, you can ask lawmakers to do whatever you want, but basically, I don’t think they’re in it for us. We’re in it for us. We’re the people that
really change things.”
So I decided maybe there was a way to inspire people without exactly telling them what to do, and instead just bring everyone together. I was inspired by doing PFLAG’s Stay Close campaign with Elen and by my meeting with Judy Shepard, the mother of Matthew Shepard. So we started to think about doing a “True Colors” tour.
Matthew was the University of Wyoming student who was murdered in 1998. He was picked up at a bar by homophobic kids and was beaten and killed. The night he was killed, we didn’t just lose Matthew; three lives were absolutely ruined—Matthew’s and those of the two men that killed him. And why? Because if you raise your kid with fear and hatred, that’s what wins in the end, and it’s a lose-lose situation. I have a kid, and sometimes he gets bullied, like a lot of kids, and I wrote this song for him called “Above the Clouds.” The message of the song was something that Pat Birch told me once. She is a wonderful choreographer that I met when I went on a show called Friday Night Live. (They never put me on Saturday Night Live, for one reason or another.) She said that when she worked with Martha Graham, Martha told her something like, “When you walk with your head above the crowd, you can see far, but then you are also a target. You stand out.” I always remember that when I want to do something different and I get grief for it.
Jeff Beck wrote the piece of music for “Above the Clouds,” and I wrote the song over it. Jeff had been working in a little studio that was in the basement of the Sunset Marquis with keyboardist/writer/producer Jed Lieber. As soon as I heard the music, the lyrics came so fast I almost couldn’t write them down quick enough. My friend Kevin was there with me too and if I stopped, he’d say, “Just keep going, shut up and write it as it is.” The chorus is what I tell anyone who’s going through something like being picked on for being different. “There’s a place where the sun breaks through / And the wind bites cold and hard / Stings my ears and tears my eye / When the day starts to shout out loud / Stand tall / And glide / When you’re all alone in the crowd / Don’t fall / Don’t hide / When you walk above the clouds / When you walk above the clouds.”
Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir Page 26