My Life, a Four Letter Word

by Dolores DeLuce

  Amber and I played fag hags looking for love at a gay disco with a song added by Patrick Cowley called “Doin’ the Discontent.” Patrick was the techno musical genius behind all of Sylvester’s disco hits. Long before the film Victor Victoria, we turned the tables as women playing men, playing women: Amber as a drag version of Cher and me as a drag Bette Midler singing “Beat Around the Bush,” a song Martin Worman contributed. Our assaults on female characters raised a few eyebrows among the queens who swung further to the left than we did. I was pretty outraged when I learned that Teddy Mathis, a drag performer I had shared stages with, was drumming up protest against Broken Dishes, saying that we were politically incorrect. I dished the queen’s criticism with the obvious, “How dare a man, even if he does wear a dress, tell me and Amber—real women and mothers—what the correct political agenda was for our show.” Despite the jealous queen’s objections, we had a remarkable run for over a year.

  Along with producing, performing and mothering Viva and the adult children in my household, the years from 1973 through 1977 were a swirl of activities: parties, shows and more parties—along with some Indie-film roles—alternating with hops to Orr Hot Springs and all points north. I made my first silent film appearance in a grainy Super-8 film by Marc Huestis, Miracle on Sunset Boulevard. Marc cast me as the Great Goddess bringing peace and enlightenment to the disturbed and ageing film diva played by Silvana Nova. Even Viva had a cameo role. Marc later cast both Viva and me in his first serious work, in 1977, Unity. This film was a response to the California Briggs Initiative, which would have legislated discrimination against lesbian and gay teachers had it passed. I got to play a gypsy fortuneteller with her beggar daughter—played by Viva—in a cabaret scene set in Nazi Germany that told the unknown story of the persecution of gays under Hitler. That same year Marc and Danny Nicoletta founded the Gay Film Festival of Super 8 Films, which eventually became the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival.

  In the Castro, the Café Flore on Market Street was the daily hangout, the place to kick off an average day with the best foamy lattes in town and many friends from the neighborhood. David Baker Jr. lived up the block on Beaver Street, and Beaver Bauer lived around the corner on Noe Street with Rodney, Brain and Sham and other Angels. Everything was in short hops; even the best day spa in the world, the Russian Baths, was located a few doors down from the Café Flore on Market. At the Russian Baths you could get a Finnish Sauna in the public room for two bucks and spend the whole day if you liked. The women’s public room was a large space with several levels of wooden benches. It contained a stone sauna that blended the perfect ratio of wet to dry heat. Older European ladies created aroma therapy by placing Eucalyptus branches and grapefruit peels on the sauna, then pouring cold water on the hot rocks to fill the room with herbal citrus steam. Women from all the local communities—gay, straight, young and old, including our children—would hang for hours, alternating hot and cold buckets of water over their naked bodies. The Russian Baths had group and couples rooms as well, so I could share a bath with my male friends in privacy.

  Before Lulu moved to the city to be a back-up boy in Broken Dishes, he lived at the renowned country spa Orr Hot Springs and was a detox expert. After doing a ten-day Master Cleanse with Lulu, he instructed me to meet him at the Russian Baths to end our fast with a cayenne pepper enema. He thought it was a good idea to do our enemas in the sauna to further help our detoxification process—or as Lulu called it, DE-DISH-I-FI-CATION GIRL! We filled our enema bags to the brim with the spicy warm liquid and as our pores released toxins, we took our enemas simultaneously, forgetting that there was only one toilet available in our private sauna room. Lucky for me, I beat Lulu to the pot. I can still hear his cries, wrenching, yelling and banging from the other side of the bathroom door, GIRL! GIRL! HURRY UP BEFORE I SHIT MYSELF. After his sauna trauma, we moseyed on down the road to the Café Flore for a long-awaited danish and latte.

  There was never a dull moment or lack of company to be had in San Francisco. In the mid-’70s, John McGuire and Tim McKenna were more ambitious than any of my other friends, who mostly survived on government subsidies, like SSI and AFDC. As the welfare elite, we believed it was our right and duty to reject the system that waged wars against third world countries and corporations that oppressed poor workers. As artists, we thought it was noble to find ways to make the government pay for our art weather they liked it or not. Many a scamvestite loved to quote Miss Holly Woodlawn from an Andy Warhol film, when she fought with her welfare caseworker, “I was born on welfare and I’m going to die on welfare.”

  John and Tim were the only two gays I knew, except for Harvey Milk, who owned a business on Castro Street. In the summertime, while John and Tim were busy working in the city to afford their new summer house at the Russian River, they would let me stay at the rustic house during the week. They were incredibly generous and didn’t even mind if I invited some of my friends to join me.

  Once I spent a week there with Viva and David Baker Jr. so that we could do the Master Cleanse in a natural environment without the temptations of the city. It was David’s first time fasting but my second go-around with the popular fast. By our sixth day of nothing but water, lemon juice, cayenne pepper and a trace of maple syrup, John and Tim came up on Friday night and decided to throw a party. They had invited a few of my other roommates, too. I went from fast to feast quicker than a New York minute and gorged myself on John’s amazing vegetable lasagna and seven-layered chocolate cake. That night David and I took turns clogging up the fragile septic tank plumbing. John never let me forget it.

  I also studied Flamenco dance with the renowned Rosa Montoya, a Spanish spitfire no taller than me, but whose stage persona was grand and glorious. She could kill an audience with her speeding-bullet footwork. Although I never aspired to be a serious Flamenco dancer, I got to perform the classic Flamenco dance when my fellow dance student, Walter, a Cuban American who performed with the Angels of Light, invited me to perform with him at a special Angels Cabaret Show. The two of us came up with a killer routine to utilize our Flamenco skill. For the skit preceding our dance number, I created an outrageous character: a Mexican lady who owned a restaurant and hired Walter as her waiter to help stomp out the cockroaches. I dressed in an original Flamenco dress of green and white polka dots that had layers of ruffles trailing behind in traditional style. The dress alone was reason to put on this show, and how I acquired it is a whole other story. Suffice it to say, I took the dress off the back of Grasshopper, one of the most frequently wasted drug users of the Mukluk Manor, another commune of our people. That day, Grasshopper was so out of his mind on PCP that I persuaded him to trade outfits right in front of the Midnight Sun on Castro Street, in broad daylight. I still have the dress to this day, and worked it recently in an Indie movie.

  To enhance my character’s stature, I secured two pillows under my skirt at the hips so that I appeared almost as wide as I am tall. I did my hair up in a severe Spanish bun, then penciled big wide spit curls to my cheeks. In the skit, I entered the stage with an extra large Black Flag bug-killing aerosol pump spray, and began cursing at Walter in Spanish and English.

  “Pendejo, maricone, whore, queer, get up off your lazy ass and start killing las cucarachas.”

  Then the music came up and Walter and I broke into a Flamenco dance stomping out the roaches. The hilarious visual of me—four-feet wide by five-feet tall with enormous hips swinging and almost knocking skinny Walter off the stage each time we passed one another—covered up the fact that I was not the best Flamenco Dancer on the stage.

  During those years I swung the pendulum from one extreme to the other: Master Cleanse to lasagna; gospel choirs to Devil Slide; double lattes to coffee enemas; disco dancing to yoga—all the while keeping my sights on building my theater career.

  39. PUNK CLUB

  By the spring of 1977 we brought Broken Dishes to dinner theatre at the Mabuhay Gardens, a Pilipino restaurant on Broadway in North
Beach. It was across the street from the much publicized Condor Club, where Carol Doda made waves in the late ’60s and early ’70s dancing topless and bottomless, and around the corner from Beach Blanket Babylon, Steve Silver’s drag extravaganza. Showtime was at 8 p.m., and after we took our final bows at 10 p.m., the Pilipino restaurant owner turned the stage into the first home for San Francisco’s emerging Punk Rock scene. In our shared dressing room, we tripped over punks and undressed in front of head bangers who drew swastikas and rude remarks on the walls and mirrors. The inconvenience was worth it, because the critics were comparing us to the hit show, Beach Blanket Babylon but saying we were by far the better show with original songs and more bite to our satire. Amber and I both earned nominations—along with Debbie Reynolds—that year for best performers in a Musical by the BATCC-Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. Debbie Reynolds won, but that was the closest we had ever come to getting mainstream recognition. Riding on this critical acclaim, we decided to spend a month tightening up the show and then reopen in June at the Mabuhay Gardens in time to compete for the tourist dollars that Beach Blanket Babylon was raking in.

  During the show meeting, our backup boys, Lulu, Tom Waits and AJ Griffin, along with Scrumbly, Marshall and Danny Nicoletta, all gathered to decide collectively on cuts needed to make the show work for a mainstream audience. Amber balked. She refused to cut one precious word from any of her monologues—and then announced that she was quitting the show because it no longer suited her spiritual needs. Everyone was shocked, but no one more than me. We had all worked for free over the past two years, and now that we were finally in a position to make it pay, Amber pulled the rug right out from under us. I wanted to kill her, but instead I went to the beach.

  I had sensed a change in the wind before this unhappy ending to Broken Dishes. By January of 1977, I moved out of Clayton Street and was living alone with Viva for the first time in a one-bedroom apartment with a spectacular view at the top of Castro and 21st Street. That Easter week, during our dress rehearsals at the Mabuhay Gardens, Viva was almost seven and had come down with the chicken pox. I was full of guilt for having to leave her with a sitter, so I went down to the market on 18th and Castro to pick up a few of her favorite things including eggs to color for her Easter basket. I was rushing to get the shopping done and get home in time to give Viva an oatmeal bath to ease the itch of her chicken pox before I had to leave for rehearsals. At the checkout in the market, I remembered Viva’s applesauce, and I rushed back to the aisle to get it. As I lifted the largest bottle off the shelf, it slipped from my hand and crashed to the floor. I turned to look for a clerk to clean up, and, with one step, I slipped and fell. There I lay on the floor impaled in glass and applesauce. Without making a fuss, I got up and selected another bottle off the shelf and checked out with my groceries.

  I carried the groceries a few steps to the corner bus stop and waited for a bus to take me up the three block steep hill to 21st Street. As I sat the heavy bags at my feet, I looked up at the clock on the Bank of America building across Castro and remembered it was Good Friday. It was 3 o’clock sharp; the exact hour according to my early religious teachings, that Christ died on the cross. My thoughts drifted to a scene in The Greatest Story Ever Told, a film about the crucifixion: The image of black, ominous clouds rolling over the earth, casting frightening shadows as Magadelene and Mother Mary looked on in anguish as Jesus took his last breath on the cross. At that exact moment, the famous San Francisco fog rolled in over the Castro and ate up the last remaining drops of sunlight that were keeping me warm.

  As I waited at the crowded bus stop, all the ghosts of Easters past ran through my mind. I recalled the Easter tweed suit I made on my little Singer sewing machine when I was twelve; then I flashed back to the nuns at St. Anthony’s forcing me to my knees to do the Stations of the Cross; then came the memory of that first Easter weekend I spent in Venice with Mark Anthony, the ex-con who stole my mom’s Easter gift to me—a gold and diamond chip cross—right off my neck as I slept. This gloomy reverie made me wonder if perhaps the slip and fall accident inside the market was brought on by Catholic guilt—my own personal stigmata—to appease the punishing god of my father.

  In the midst of the gay hustle on Castro, I pondered my progressive loss of innocence and all the mini victim dramas I had played out in my less-than-holy life. Just as my pity party was raging in my mind, my ex-roommate, Martin, stumbled out from the Midnight Sun, a popular watering hole at any time of day or night. Martin was sloppy drunk and looked like Judas on a bender. With his long, greasy hair falling in his face, he looked up and noticed me from the distance and started yelling my name.

  “Deluxe, girl—Oh girl—GIRL—MISS DELUXE—OH GIRL!”

  I thought if I had to hear, “OH GIRL” just one more time I would stab myself. This was just one more nail in my cross to bear. In any other city but San Francisco, a diva of my caliber would not be waiting for a bus in the cold fog to carry her groceries up a steep hill. I was having a very bad Good Friday. The next morning, Holy Saturday, while Christ was hibernating in the tomb, and with the fog still hovering over the City, I awoke from a very strange dream. It was so vivid and so weird that I recorded it in my journal.

  A hard driving bass is pumping and Gloria Gaynor is singing “I Will Survive” as I dance on a crowded floor. Gay men all around me pass and snort poppers as the crescendo builds. While spinning, I look up at the disco ball casting sparkles over the gay crowd. The ball spins faster and faster and begins to burrow a hole in the ceiling. As the hole grows larger, I can glimpse into the heavens above. In the sky, a blinding light appears and begins to move rapidly like a meteor picking up speed hurtling toward earth. I’m panicked and try to warn the boys, but no one sees or hears me screaming. The fiery ball keeps coming closer and closer, then crashes down in the middle of the dance floor. Upon landing, the fiery light solidifies into a golden mass shaped like an egg, with light pulsating off of its surface. On shattered glass from the broken skylight, the gay crowd keeps dancing, totally unconscious of the phenomenon in their midst. I grow weary of trying to warn them, so I give up and resume dancing myself. I try to ignore the golden light in the room, too, but it won’t let me. The music starts to fade, and the lively action begins to move in slow motion, and then one by one, each man on the dance floor becomes transparent, dissolves and disappears. The music stops and I’m there left standing all alone on the dance floor. Only the golden egg remains, vibrating, and the light begins to fill the entire space. Slowly I approach the egg, the source of this outstanding light. Tentatively, I reach out to it and then gently touch it. As I place my hand on the giant egg surface, it cracks open and hatches a golden Buddha from within.

  I woke up from the dream, sobbing.

  40. BORN STAR

  After Amber pulled the rug out from under my grand plans, I had it. I did one last show in San Francisco before Viva and I took off for that summer to Venice.

  Odd Numbers was a benefit performance at the UC Extension Performance Space at Waller and Laguna. For one night only, we were paying homage to our community’s favorite song writing team, Scrumbly Koldewyn and Martin Worman.

  At this large space the Angels of Light had run their wonderful Storybook Extravaganza, and Janice Sukitis had mounted her hysterical comedy, Mama, a play based on her real crazy mother’s handling of her dead father’s corpse.

  This night was a mixed bag of the best of Martin and Scrumbly’s favorite tunes from Cockettes days and other shows. Whose idea it was to put Viva in the show, I don’t recall, but ever since Viva had first arrived to the City with me at three years old, she had stood patiently in the wings at every performance, like All About Eve. She had done her homework, and at seven years old was ready to step into my limelight.

  “No Nose Nanook,” a sultry blues metaphor for a party gal addicted to “Blow,” was a song Mink Stole premiered in Vice Palace with Divine. It’s the lament of a young Eskimo girl who rubbed her nose off from too much cavorti
ng and too much snorting, and was the song Martin and Scrumbly chose for Viva to reprise for this show. I got busy making Viva the cutest red velour skating circle skirt with a hoodie, and trimmed the whole thing in white faux fur.

  I was doing “It’s a Scream,” a showstopper from Broken Dishes that Martin wrote for me. It was the lament of a sacrificial virgin about to be thrown into a volcano to appease the Sun God. But in this number, I was the rebellious virgin trying to escape my fate.

  So there I was backstage, putting aside my oversized Sun Headdress to wear the hat of a stage mommy and help Viva get ready for her big debut. I was fretting over Viva’s makeup and giving her a pep talk, worried that she’d get stage fright and forget her lyrics. Viva’s number was up just before mine.

  From the piano, Scrumbly announced the song and Viva stepped out on the big stage to a full house, followed by four backup singers dressed as Eskimos. As she hit her mark under the spotlight, the crowd was already cheering. With all the power and poise of an opera diva, she hit that first note and it was immediately clear that I had a little star on my hands. She belted out those words as if she understood what she was actually singing about. When she reached the bridge, she emphasized the innuendo, singing, “She rubbed her blubber day and night, and now her nose is out of sight.” The crowd was on its feet cheering and gave the longest and loudest standing ovation as little Viva took her bows. Then I had to follow her. I felt like Mama Rose, taking a back seat to Gypsy Rose Lee. Viva was only seven, but it was obvious to me that my child would no longer live in my shadow.

  ACT III

  ENDS OF RAVE

  41. ROAM Built in a Day

  I got an invitation from Bill Franklin to housesit his little beach bungalow in Venice while he went off to Rome for the month of June. The timing could not have been more perfect. I needed the time in the sun and surf to lick my wounds and think about what I would do next after my Broken Dishes dreams had been smashed to bits. David Baker Jr. had just returned to San Francisco from his European tour and was happy to take over my apartment in my absence while I skipped down the coast to my new temporary Venice pad.