My Life, a Four Letter Word

by Dolores DeLuce

  It was Saturday, the day after I had the dream, and Viva’s dad came to pick her up for the weekend. I was still feeling sick, but feebly managed to continue my efforts to get settled in to our new home when I heard a knock on my door. I wasn’t expecting anyone. When I opened the door, my old friend Jamian from San Francisco was standing in my hallway, accompanied by a 6’2” African American bodybuilder. Both men stood topless, glistening and dripping in oils. I couldn’t help notice the contrast between Jamian—a fair, skinny blond with flowing long locks—and his larger-than-life companion, whose biceps, triceps and quadriceps were the size of small mountain ranges. The couple brought to mind Fay Wray and King Kong on the top of the Empire State Building.

  Jamian had only recently moved to South Pasadena and his roommate was Judy the woman who had appeared in my dream the day before. Surprised to see him, or to see anyone for that matter since no one knew I had moved, I asked, “How did you find me here on Paloma?” and Jamian replied, “Girl, I have my ways.” He just happened to be in Venice with his new boyfriend, the ex-Mr. Universe and they were on a break from judging a body building competition down at Muscle Beach.

  Seeing Jamian jogged my memory of the dream since he and his roommate Judy had been followers of the some guru since the late 60’s. Neither of them had ever shared much about that part of their lives with me. And even if Jamian had, I don’t think I would have taken him seriously. The Jamian I was most familiar with was a pure hedonist, a raging queen with a proclivity for big scary muscle men and fist fucking.

  I casually mentioned the dream I had with Judy in it and particularly the part about the stranger James, who Judy called a Premie. Then Jamian explained the meaning of Premie. He said it was a Hindi word that meant lover of the Lord and that it was what the followers of his guru called themselves. He sat across from me, and looked me dead in the eye, and in his queenly affected manner said, “Girl, that was Guru Maharaji and he came to save you!”

  The cynical Dolores DeLuxe, thought, “yeah right,” but the new emerging Dolores of Light took note. In less than twenty-four hours, two representatives of some guru I never heard of, one on the dream plane, the other in the flesh, had shown up at my new home on the street named for Peace, and I hadn’t even sent out a change-of-address notice.

  The next day, with Viva still at her dad’s, I decided to rid myself of the clutter with a yard sale just outside my door. I was still sick with very low energy and my friend Grace from down the block offered to help. By the end of the day, I was feeling better and, while packing up, Grace and I made plans to see a movie at eight.

  As I was changing for the movie, I got a call from Cindy, my friend who had introduced me to Jane Fonda in 1972. I had not seen her in over five years. She asked if she could stop by for a quick visit. I told her I didn’t have much time, but she insisted since she was right down the street at the Rose Café and would only pop in for a few minutes.

  When she showed up I barely recognized her. The last time I had seen Cindy was in Berkeley and she had shaved her head and was spouting her most radical separatist ideas. But when she appeared in my doorway that second day of June 1980 she looked younger and more beautiful than she was back in 1971. Her medium-length light brown hair framed her soft angelic features and I saw the Cindy I first fell for when I heard her blow a mean jazz saxophone with an all girl band in Venice.

  “You must have a new lover, you look radiant.” I said.

  “No, not really. I haven’t been with anyone since I left Berkeley,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you would ever leave Berkeley. Where are you now?” I asked.

  “I live in Miami now.”

  Miami sent up a red flag. I could not picture feisty radical Cindy living in laidback Miami, home of half the countries retirees. This was still a time before Miami had become the cool, hip South Beach we know today.

  “Are you playing with a new band there?” I asked.

  “No, I work in a health food store,” she answered. The twenty questions could have gone on before I got any pertinent details about her current situation, but I didn’t have the time. She then reluctantly said, “My guru lives there. I practice meditation now.”

  I knew this had to be one powerful guru to convert this lesbian separatist. Five years earlier, she wouldn’t even talk to a man, and now she followed one to Miami. She didn’t want to talk about it, but I kept prodding her for details. She finally told me the guru’s name. It was the same guru that Judy and Jamian shared. Then I told her about my dream, and she offered to take me to a video presentation that evening to learn more about her guru.

  The reluctant seeker in me was just open enough to know this was no coincidence, considering the message I read in Yogananda’s book, followed by the mystical trinity of appearances by this guru’s followers, first in the dream, and twice on my doorstep. Again, the mystery of the threes; it must have been happening for a reason. I told Cindy I would like to go at a later date since I had previous plans with my friend Grace. Just then, Grace called and said, “Do you mind if I cancel? Larry just got home a day early from his business trip.”

  That night, Cindy brought me to meet my perfect master. The minute I walked into the hall, the first person I bumped into was Judy. She was so surprised to see me there! As Cindy and I took our seats, I recognized the very man in my dream that had saved me from my dark pursuer. He was sitting at few seats away from us. Later, I learned his name was in fact James, and he too was a follower of the guru.

  When I saw their guru talking on a large video screen, I instantly recognized him. He was a radiant, Buddha-like being who resembled the golden statue I had first seen inside the illumined egg that fell from the sky in my disco dream. Except this golden Buddha was not a statue. He was a living, breathing, chubby jester who had me laughing and then crying tears of joy before the night was over. Throughout the evening’s presentation, I felt the same protective energy that I had glimpsed throughout my life, both in dreams and in my more spiritually awakened moments like after giving birth to Viva. It was the same presence I felt days after I survived my violent rapist and at the other critical turning points in my life. Just a few weeks after that night, I received the Knowledge techniques from my Golden Guru. It wasn’t Jesus, but a change of name and nature had occurred and I began to understand the truth in the gospel as sung by Roberta Flack: “And Jesus said, the world won’t know you child if you change your name.”

  From that moment of initiation, without intention, I was struck celibate. My need for love on the outside was replaced by a deeper source of pure unconditional love. Many of my friends thought I was lost in spiritual madness. I tried to describe the feeling: “It’s like getting a thousand standing ovations from the Universe,” I said as I watched them roll their eyes. While some of my friends dished me, I walked around in a constant state of bliss, but as I went deeper within this protective bubble of peace and love, my playmates were still outside, looking for love in the bars, the bushes and the bathhouses. The very men who had been sleeping with me kept sleeping around with other men, and a dark demon—first identified as the gay cancer—was spreading among them.

  44. LAST ACTS

  I met Jane Fonda for the second time while directing a school production of You Can’t Take It with You. Both Viva and Jane’s daughter, Vanessa, had significant roles in the production, and Jane came to the theater every night of dress rehearsals and performances to help Vanessa get ready to play the Russian count. In this middle-school production at SMASH, The Santa Monica Alternative School House, we had few boys to fill the male roles, so I got the girls into drag. Jane patiently helped Vanessa glue hair on her chest to complete her male character. I reminded Jane of our original meeting back in 1972 and told her how she had inspired me to make changes in my life.

  In the early ’80s I started Tell Mama, a personal-service business for every odd job I could do for cash, offering services from A to Z. While passing out my flyers at the Rose Café to adver
tise my new business, a successful writer friend took one look at my concept and the caricature of me on the flyer with the list of odd jobs I performed, from ADVICE to ZIPPER REPAIR, and commented, “It would be easier to write the sitcom.” To which I replied, “Don’t you dare!”

  I ran home and wrote the pilot and registered it with the Writer’s Guild.

  During the eighties, I earned the title of Miss Alternative L.A. as well as The Knitter to the Stars by creating hand-knit, fashions for the actresses and models in my acting class that were booking big commercial jobs. I became a part-time housekeeper and cook for Dean Martin, and juggled commercial auditions and fittings for celebrities like Rose Anne, Fran Dresher, Julia Roberts, Ellen Burstyn and Lily Tomlin.

  In 1986 Viva turned sweet sixteen and everyone from her school friends to her gay aunts and uncles—including her only straight uncle, my younger brother, Richie, who had since moved to Hollywood to pursue acting—were at her party. More than fifty guests squeezed into my two-bedroom apartment on Paloma Avenue. Teenagers were breakdancing on the hardwood floors in the dining room as I ran around hosting and making homemade pizza for all.

  One of my Tell Mama clients was the famous porn director John Stagliano, also known as Butt Man in the XXX world came to the party. I met John in a dance class and he hired me as his personal assistant/costume designer/set decorator for his X-rated films. John was also a Chippendales dancer and he showed up dressed as Dracula and decided to surprise the birthday gal with a striptease number. Since he was one of my best-paying clients, I couldn’t refuse his gift. Viva and her girlfriends sat in a corner laughing at the old straight guy trying to perform his tired sexy moves on them. After her party, Viva threatened me, “Mom, one of these days I’m going to write a book about you and call it Mommy Queerest.”

  In the midst of life’s peaks and valleys, I started to lose the first of my closest friends to AIDS. One by one, my gay boys began to disappear, just as my disco dream prophesized.

  “Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair?” was one of my favorite Streisand songs since I heard it in the Sixties. But as often as I played that record, I never heeded its warning. I lived for the fair. Like a hot air balloon, I floated way above the humdrum world, convinced that I’d never come down. But that day had come. One by one, all the jesters were disappearing. The merrymakers were busy going back and forth to hospitals for radiation and blood transfusions. The brakes locked on the merry-go-round and the showgirls were flung onto respirators. No longer safe, I found myself alone at the fair.

  In 1988 I unintentionally put my stage career to rest with a new show, The Last Dance of the Couch Potatoes. At that time, the irony in the show’s title escaped me. I wrote a more-than-ambitious three-character multimedia musical comedy about an agoraphobic shut-in addicted to television and junk food, and then played the lead role and more than a half-dozen fantasy characters that were figments of my character’s imaginings induced by overindulgence in caffeine, nicotine, sugar and media. Because I got dizzy from smoking on stage during rehearsals, I started smoking again for the sake of my character. I’d been nicotine-free for twenty years. The cigarette smoke and the one-minute costume changes in between scenes and musical numbers didn’t kill me—but the critics did.

  45. TIME LESS

  With hindsight, I can clearly see that many of my performances and dreams predicted future events. In 1974, during the Gay Pride Parade, glitter rained on the floats of San Francisco’s finest, balloon-titted queens while a dark dirge of campy widows dressed in black, ’40s-style dresses, seated on the back of a flatbed truck, moved in slow motion through the gay streets. Our theatre troupe, Warped Floors, had earned its reputation for countering the counterculture, and that year we outdid ourselves. I even dressed Viva in black rags to play the part of the poor, orphaned child of the Gay Widows. I don’t recall who gets credit for the theme of that parade float, but on the morning of Gay Pride day, either Jorge or Joe Morocco watched one of their roommates waving good-bye to a trick. He made the comment, “Girl, don’t you feel like a Gay Widow after a meaningless one-night stand?” That was all it took for us to don ourselves in our best black and put on our tragedy masks. Against the Technicolor backdrop of the parade that year, as we moved through the crowd, waving our hankies and weeping crocodile tears, our little theatre troupe stood out like an ugly blemish on prom night. From under our veils, we spoke out loud, staged whispers: “Thank you for coming, it would have made him so happy.”

  If we had known we were prophesying our own futures, would we have chosen more wisely or dreamed a different dream?

  In the spring of 1988 I was in the middle of previews for The Last Dance of the Couch Potatoes at the Powerhouse Theater in Venice when I got a call from Tommy’s caretakers. They warned me that it might be too late, but if I hurried there was a chance I’d get to see him one last time to say goodbye. It had been six months since we’d been together, but I talked to him almost daily as he began his intense decline. After a dramatic flight, not unlike the one Bette Midler took in the movie Beaches, I rang the bell at his little home on Wilmot Street. After the frightening thoughts on that flight, the last thing I ever expected to see was Tommy rising up from his deathbed to answer the door while his caretakers lapped up some rare San Francisco sunshine in the backyard—but that’s exactly what happened.

  Tommy came out of his coma just in time for my visit. There he stood in the doorway, no longer the handsome gent pursing his lips and flipping his hair like a girl. My friend was covered in the armor of AIDS-related infections. Tommy resembled a beast I saw in a dream about him ten years before this day. The only areas of his flesh left unravaged were his beautiful fine hands and feet. I sat at his feet and held onto them as he tried to get comfortable on the couch. He refused his morphine drip so that he could fully take in these last moments. We both knew this was the end for him, but we never spoke of it. Instead we talked about the wonderful drag shows and juicy dish.

  With a raspy voice he said, “Girl, remember that night in the pouring rain when you forced me to climb into a dumpster to find your frigging castanets?”

  “Well, who told you to throw them out?” I said.

  “If I didn’t clean out your funky-ass car, who would?

  I wanted to cry, but he could still make me laugh.

  During our pasta binges Tommy used to say, “Girl, we have enough pasta in our systems now that when we die, we can donate our bodies to the Golden Grain Company for recycling.”

  Despite the fact that Tommy had the worst case of K.S. lesions I ever saw, covering what was once his gorgeous face and body, he was the only AIDS victim I ever knew who never lost an ounce of weight. From his deathbed, when he could no longer eat a bite, he planned menus and I ate enough for the two of us. And when it was finally time for him to let go of his body, all that pasta in his system could not glue him to this planet or to me. On every birthday or holiday, Tommy would send me the biggest, tackiest Hallmark card that read, “To My Loving Wife,” and those cards came right up until he left me in August 1988.

  46. TIED ENDS

  During the two months before Tommy died, I had to dress up and show up for my run at the Powerhouse, and then the extension at the Odyssey Theater in West L.A., and through it all I could feel Tommy dying. When I wasn’t on stage, I walked through my days as if my feet were set in cement blocks and I was moving through mud. That same year, I turned myself in to Overeaters Anonymous because I could not stop eating pasta.

  With the counterculture casualties mounting, the party became the Memorial. I wrote a performance piece titled “Gay Widow” in which I spoofed a well-known scene from Chinatown. In the film, Jack Nicholson, as a tough private eye, interrogates Faye Dunaway while slapping her repeatedly. With each slap, Faye changes her response—”She’s my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter…”—revealing that the woman in question was a result of incest Faye’s character suffered at the hands of her powerful, corrupt fa
ther.

  In my camp rendition, I slapped my own face, chanting, “He’s my sister, my mother, my brother, my sister, my child, my husband, my lover.” The lost boys were the stars in my show. They had helped to form the woman I had become. At the end of my piece, I raised my glass: “To fags, hags, drags and performance junkies, art, love and drug addicts alike. Children lost in a diseased society who found one another, like ugly ducklings they glided on swan territory and for a brief moment got to shine. Here’s to the misfits, the queers, the outcasts, the freaks, my friends.”