by Swan Adamson
I was there in the studio when they made their one demo tape. I’m the one who arranged the photographer for their CD cover. That cover, my idea, was so cool. The band members all had their bare legs in the air with their high heels touching. Black Garters, it said, Hoseless. Too bad the demo never got a commercial release.
Being a lesbian didn’t present any weird psychic shocks for me. It seemed completely natural. Comforting, even, after the boring terrors of trying to be Sean’s wife. Living with JD was so much more exciting. JD’s house reminded me of my mom’s when I was growing up. There were always women hanging around. I guess as a first-time lesbian, I was kind of naive. Only slowly did it dawn on me that half of them were in love with JD. JD didn’t discourage adoration. She accessorized with women.
And she’d slept with most of them. The air was thick with simmering melodrama and jealous intrigue. I floated above it all because I was the undisputed number-one concubine in the harem.
In public everything was crazy, fun, exciting. In private it was another story. JD was messing around with heroin. So was just about everyone in Black Garters. I wouldn’t touch the stuff. I’d enrolled in Junior AA when I was fifteen and sneaking around to get high with my friends. JD insisted heroin was nonaddictive. As long as you used a clean needle, she said, smack was okay.
Yeah, right.
In public, she couldn’t keep her hands off me. She wanted everyone to know that we were girlfriends. I was like a trophy to her powers of seduction because I’d been straight and married.
JD has an outgoing personality. She’s short, cute in an androgynous, punky sort of way, and has a perennially hoarse voice. Everyone loved her. Even the dads fell under her spell.
“I can’t tell you how much fun it is to have Venus be a lesbian,” Whitman confided to JD one night when JD and I went over to the dads’ house for dinner. “You’re just such a relief, darling, after that boring straight man she was married to.”
“That’s supposed to be a compliment,” I told JD.
“Now that she’s a lesbian,” Whitman went on, “I can be so much freer and more open with her.”
Daddy caught my eye. “Haven’t you noticed?” he said drily.
Whitman’s attention was fixed on JD. “I always held myself back in front of Venus when she was growing up,” he told her. “I didn’t want her to feel pressured or influenced to be gay. I never used sexually explicit language. And I never allowed John to kiss or fondle me in front of her.”
“I knew what was going on,” I said.
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did.”
“How?” he wanted to know.
“Well, you’ve slept together in the same bed since I was five.”
“Why would you infer from that that we had sex?”
“Yeah,” JD said, “they could have just been good friends who slept together.”
We all laughed. But I realized that I had this whole cache of secrets about the dads that I’d never shared with anyone. Little scenes that I’d witnessed, things I’d overheard, private moments that I’d stumbled into.
Whitman was telling the truth when he said he never allowed my dad to touch or kiss him in front of me. But that apartment in New York was pretty small and I was a good spy. I’d seen them in bed, Daddy with his legs in the air. I’d heard them panting and whispering, and seen how they contrived to secretly touch each other in public. I was always watching to see how they behaved with one another because they were the only long-term couple I knew. They never seemed to get bored with one another.
“JD,” Whitman said, pouring wine, “Venus mentioned that your father’s a doctor.” We were sitting out on one of their suspended terraces overlooking the city. “Does your mother have a profession?”
“Yeah,” JD said, “she’s a professional bitch.”
“Well, then, I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.” Whitman passed some dried spicy Japanese peas. “When were you first aware that you were a lesbian?”
“When I was about fifteen,” JD said.
“I knew I was gay when I was twelve,” Whitman said, munching on the dried peas.
“How did you know?” JD asked.
“I hated sports but wanted to be a cheerleader. John here didn’t figure it out until he was thirty.”
“Slow learner,” said JD, looking at my dad.
“Yes,” Whitman said, “but those are the best kind. They’re always trying to make up for lost time. And they’re so grateful.”
“I knew long before I was thirty,” Daddy said. “I just didn’t know what to do with what I knew. My parents were missionaries, for God’s sake.”
Whitman stroked Daddy’s cheek. The gesture sent a shiver of delight through me. I squeezed JD’s hand. “I taught him everything he knows,” Whitman said.
“You sound like a stage mom,” JD said.
Laughing with the dads. I loved that part of being with JD. We could go to the dads any time. There was this kind of easygoing acceptance of us as a couple. I felt so grownup and so included in their lives. They’d cook for us. Well, Daddy would. He’s a fabulous cook. Whitman is in charge of appearances and hygiene. He sets the table, serves, and cleans up. He praised JD’s table manners. “Always a good sign when someone knows which fork to use,” he whispered.
“She can eat with chopsticks, too,” I said.
“Excellent.” He gave me an impulsive hug. “You finally look happy.”
I was. I honestly was. Both my dads were playful and fun to be around. I felt closer to Whitman than I ever really had before. It was like I was finally allowed into their secret inner circle.
The four of us would sit around and yak, or play Scrabble, or go to the theater, like we used to do in New York. It was the most normal, relaxed time I’d ever spent with the dads. They invited us to go to the beach with them. They even came to a couple of Black Garters gigs.
But it didn’t work the other way around. JD never invited me to visit her folks. She said she despised them, but that never stopped her from cashing their monthly check. I wasn’t working, so that check and what she made from her Black Garter gigs kept the household going. When Whitman hinted that it would be nice to meet her parents, JD freaked. It turned out she wasn’t even out to them.
We kept it going for about a year and a half.
On stage JD was dynamite, but if I had to rate her performance in bed, I’d say she was about a 2. Sexually, it wasn’t much better than being with Sean-Come-Quickly. Only with JD, I always had to be the aggressor. It was not a role I was used to or that I particularly liked. When we were alone together she’d, like, turn off. Nothing I did would arouse her. But in public, with the other women around, she’d act like my girlfriend.
I couldn’t figure it out. It got to be really frustrating.
“Maybe she’s afraid of intimacy,” Mom suggested when I made the mistake of confiding in her. “Jerri was like that.”
I was incredulous. “You’re comparing JD to that dyke who socked you in the jaw? No way!”
Mom used her Glenda-the-Good-Witch voice. “Well, sweetheart, I found Jerri attractive.”
“We’re not talking about you and Jerri,” I said sharply. “We’re talking about me and JD.”
“I am merely suggesting that JD may have intimacy issues, as Jerri did.” Mom’s eyes grew moist. She put down her wineglass. “Well, I had some unresolved self-esteem issues, too.”
“How do you know when you’ve actually found the right person?” I asked my mom.
She shrugged. “I thought your dad was the right person.”
I didn’t want to bail, but I couldn’t see any real future with JD. The band’s problems grew steadily worse. Personalities didn’t mesh. As a business, Black Garters was total chaos. Gigs were canceled. People had to be paid. JD didn’t want to deal with any of the day-to-day shit. She kept shooting up. Everyone acted like smack was way cool. I didn’t use it so I was the boring straight girl.
JD didn�
��t want me to go. She didn’t want to lose me, she said. But I just couldn’t envision myself hanging around, like one of her other women, watching from the sidelines as she picked up new hearts to break and turned into a junkie.
After I split from JD, Mom offered to let me move in with her. But I couldn’t go back home. She was always sick with some mysterious ailment or another, and I didn’t want to take care of her. So she lent me enough money for a month’s rent on a closet-size apartment and I started to look for work. I had no job experience of any kind.
Daddy was just starting his new firm in Portland, so he couldn’t support me. Whitman never offered. He was working freelance as a travel writer, so half the time he was in Europe or out on the road.
The dads did say I could live for free with them, but only if I went to school and worked part time. I said I’d rather just work. What I didn’t say was that my credit-card debt was rising like the fare in a taxi to hell.
“What kind of a job are you looking for?” Daddy asked.
“I’m thinking of being a topless dancer.”
Whitman let out a strangled cry and threw up his hands.
“The tips are good,” I said. “And it can be artistic.”
“It’s not artistic!” Whitman shouted. “Don’t give me that bullshit! Tits are not talent.” He turned angrily to my dad. “John, tell her she can’t do it. Tell her there are some lines that cannot be crossed. Stripping, for Christ’s sake!”
“If it’s so awful, why did you take me to see Gypsy?” I asked defiantly. “She was a stripper.”
“Yes, but she was not my daughter,” Whitman shouted, red in the face.
“I’m not your daughter either!” I snapped.
“That’s very true,” he shot back. “If you were my daughter, you’d be at Smith or Wellesley with a full scholarship.”
“I’m sorry if I can’t measure up to your expectations,” I cried.
“So am I.” He tried to calm down by sucking in his deep yoga breaths. Buddha breaths, he called them.
“Right now,” I said, trying to sound reasonable instead of desperate, “I just need to earn money. I don’t have anything to live on.”
I hoped they’d feel sorry for me.
Whitman was completely unsympathetic. He turned to my dad and said, “I have no authority here. You have to tell her she can’t do it.”
“I’m twenty-one,” I reminded them. “I can do whatever I want.”
“Live here with us,” Daddy said, his voice calm, “and go back to school. I’ll pay your tuition.”
“Higher education is what separates topless dancers from corporate executives,” Whitman said.
“I don’t want to be a corporate executive!”
Whitman turned away as if he couldn’t bear to look at me.
“Without an education,” Daddy warned, “you’re going to be stuck in this rut for the rest of your life.”
“Is that what you want?” Whitman looked at me over his shoulder. “What do you do when your tits start to sag?”
“I’m not talking about a lifetime career,” I said. “I’m talking about earning some money now.”
“I thought you were a lesbian,” Whitman said. “My dear, lesbians do not dance in topless bars.”
“I’m bisexual,” I announced. “I fall in love with the person, not the gender.”
“Well, you’re going to be seeing a whole lot of gender if you start throwing your tits around in a topless club, and it’s all going to be male. Is that what you want? To be a sex object?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Whitman shook his head and turned to my dad. “Tell her,” he said.
“Tell me what? I’m twenty-one years old! I don’t have to listen to you.”
It blew up into one of our larger fights and finally I ran out because I couldn’t deal with the dads’ hostile disapproval.
What was so bad about exotic dancing? You danced for fifteen minutes once an hour. Darlene, who worked at Terry’s Topless, told me she made over two hundred bucks in tips on weekends. The men poked tens and twenties into her G-string.
“All you gotta do is lettem cop a feel,” Darlene explained. She was a single mom saving up for dental hygienist school. “Can you handle a bunch of men pawing you?”
It sounded better than putting on a dorky polyester uniform and flipping burgers at Wendy’s. Or calling strangers and asking them if they wanted their windshields replaced.
And who doesn’t fantasize about being on stage? Being the center of attention. Being the star everyone looks at and wants?
So I did it. Just to show the dads that I wasn’t their fantasy little girl anymore. And because I needed money fast and bad. I applied for and got every credit card that was offered. I charged everything. I was getting credit-card bills for hundreds of dollars.
The first night I was so scared it made me puke. Dancing in a club with your friends and a warm hit of Ecstasy in your brain is one thing. Dancing half-nude, by yourself, on a stage, in front of a bunch of gaping strangers, is something way different. I’m not really graceful. I’m not in really good shape. But there is something about me that men like. “It’s called sex appeal,” Darlene told me. “You gotta translate that into tips.”
Tips were what you worked for at Terry’s Topless because the salary was below minimum wage.
Mom wasn’t overjoyed with my decision, but she wasn’t negative like the dads. I made the mistake of asking her how to strip. “Well, honey, I don’t really know. I suppose you—” She got up and tried to demonstrate.
“You look like an old lady on her way to the chiropractor,” I said. “Didn’t you ever strip for Daddy?”
“No, honey. I always hid under the bedcovers. I was so ashamed of my body.”
I wasn’t ashamed of mine. But if I was going to show off my charms, I wanted to do it in a way that was graceful and romantic. For my number I played “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” and stiffly paraded around the raised wooden runway wearing long gloves, high heels, and lacy satin lingerie that cost a fortune at Victoria’s Secret. When it came time to shed the bra and reveal my luscious porcelain treasures, I couldn’t undo the hook in back. It took me like five minutes of struggling. When I finished my number and teetered offstage, I didn’t hear a single clap. I was so flustered that I’d forgotten the whole point was to get tips poked into my underpants.
I stood there panting, shaking, covered with sweat. “Was I terrible?” I asked Darlene.
“This isn’t a fashion runway,” Darlene said. “You gotta cut to the chase. Shake the components. Make it hot or you’ll go home hungry.”
Together we dreamed up this rockabilly cowgirl outfit. I wore a fringed rawhide G-string, a little fringed leather vest with Velcro that I could easily pop open for a boob flash, and a big Stetson. Instead of high heels I wore red snakeskin boots ($450 at Saks). Around my hips I had a leather holster with two squirt guns. I didn’t go for graceful; I went for down-home heehaw.
That seemed to work. The first night I made forty-five bucks. The second night I made ninety. The one after that, a Saturday, I made a hundred and twenty.
I couldn’t believe the number of propositions I got.
“Just don’t ever date them,” Darlene warned.
“Why not?” There was this one really cute guy who’d become a regular at my sets. I could tell he was interested.
“Just don’t.” Darlene brushed back her hair and showed me a long white scar neatly incised in the side of her neck.
One night Big Bill pulled a box from behind the bar and handed it to me. Inside were a dozen beautiful red roses and a card. “I want you,” was all it said. Big Bill didn’t know who’d sent them.
I thought I knew. Every night he was sitting there at a table, by himself, staring at me with glazed eyes and a dreamy smile. He never came up to stick money into my G-string. He was a little older than me, but not much. Cute. Clean-cut and sort of rumpled. Like a Banana Republic ad.
Weeks went by. More flowers arrived. They always came with short, unsigned messages. “You light my fire.” “To the tattooed tigress.” “In my dreams you’re all mine.”
No man had ever been, like, romantic with me before. I was filled with this glowing sense of mystery. Someone thought I was beautiful! I found myself daydreaming about my secret admirer. I called him Bud Light because that’s all he ever drank.
But Mr. Light never made a move. I figured he was deathly shy. So one night, just for fun, I squirted him with my squirt guns, as part of my topless cowgirl routine. Instead of laughing, he looked at me with this stricken, heart-rending expression, stood up, and left the bar. He never came back. I felt terrible.
But fate works in really weird ways. Three months later I married him.
One night my mother’s old calico cat died. Crookedy was my cat, too. I’d grown up with her. She went back as far as the big Victorian house I’d lived in with Mom and Dad. After we left there, because Mom wasn’t working and couldn’t afford the mortgage payments anymore, I lugged Crookedy around from apartment to apartment and house to house.
Anyway, one morning Mom found Crookedy lying on her special catnip-laced pillow, stiff as a board. She called me and I rushed over and we cried and talked about Crookedy and then Mom said, “What do we do with her body?”
Neither one of us wanted to touch Crookedy. Her eyes were half-closed and her mouth was open and pulled back so you could see her crusty brown fangs. We couldn’t bury her because there was no yard. In the Yellow Pages, I found Pet Away, a service that picked up deceased pets and disposed of them. I called the number and a guy said someone would be right over.
Mom and I were going through waves of shared grief over Crookedy. We’d be okay for a while, then burst into sobs. A part of my life was gone. I was so upset I didn’t even look up when Mom opened the door for the Pet Away man. I just sat on the sofa sniveling and half-watching Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage.
I heard his deep, sincere-sounding voice tell Mom how much it would cost to dispose of Crookedy. It would cost more if she wanted the ashes returned. She had to pay in cash; no checks or credit cards accepted. Mom didn’t have the bread, so I peeled sixty-five from the wad of tip money I carried around.