by John Waters
Let’s talk about the suit pants. Couldn’t they have faux “scraped knees”? You like to see people fall down—here’s the perfect reminder for your customer of the one thing that gives you pleasure. You’ve already done shirts with triple collars, but how about one with an extra arm that hangs in the back under the coat that nobody but me would see or know about? Of course the tie, an item of clothing I love and you seem to rarely design, should be covered with clever soup stains. We know how hard and expensive it is to properly clean a tie, so you can now charge double the price and it will still be a deal, because you’d never have to take it to the dry cleaners.
My dream socks that you would create only for me would be mismatched and stretched out with holes where the big toe sticks through (“summer socks,” we used to call these castaways). Your belts would go around me twice and would be tested for possible autoerotic strangulation use. It would be too vulgar to ask you to design faux “skidmark” underwear, so how about white boxers stained from purposely washing them with a load of brightly colored laundry?
But, Rei, my final wish is a pair of creepily sophisticated faux Pic ’N Pay shoes that I hope you’ll design for me to wear inside my closed (as my will demands) coffin. Like the ones the Moe Howard look-alike, the “shoe bomber,” wore that day on the airplane. Scruffy, ugly oxfords whose hideousness has been negated by your “relentless sobriety,” as the critics have written. Shoes with wires and fuses hanging off them. And real dynamite inside. Scary and aggressive footwear—the perfect accessory to my final outfit. The worms go in, the worms go out; the worms play pinochle on my snout. Now I’ll be ready to blast off into Comme des Garçons heaven.
B A L T I M O R E H E R O E S
Every Friday night of my life I drink. An alcoholic one night of the week, a workaholic the other six. My shrink had even agreed that seemed like a good plan for me. Only I’m better these days. Now I don’t work either day of the weekend unless I have a speaking engagement. And I still only drink too much on Fridays. “Was it fun making your movies?” people always ask. “No!” I respond. “‘Fun’ is being home in Baltimore and going out to scary bars.” So here goes: My Night of a Thousand Drinks.
Bars have always been a big part of living in Baltimore, and the good ones have no irony about them. They’re not “faux” anything. They’re real and alarming. True, Baltimore is changing, but what I make movies about is still there, lurking on the backstreets, the unheralded neighborhoods, off the beaten track. When I was a teenager, before I could legally get into bars, I hung around outside of bars. My mom used to drive me downtown from our safe, then almost countrylike neighborhood to Martick’s, a bar known (at the time) for its bohemian customers. “Well,” she’d sigh as she dropped me off outside, knowing I couldn’t get in because the owner was aware I wasn’t twenty-one, “at least here you might meet some people you could get along with.” I sure wasn’t having much luck elsewhere. I didn’t realize this at the time, but what a brave wonderful chance my mother took by doing that! Even though she was horrified by what I was hoping to become, she encouraged my chances. And she knew that Maelcum Soul was the barmaid there and that my best friend Pat Moran (we met because we had the same boyfriend) sometimes joined her behind the counter selling drinks. I hung out in the alley, or as we started calling it, the “alley-a-go-go.” Pretty soon other lunatic bar customers would come outside to talk to this skinny underage longhaired kid who wanted to make movies. I was in seventh heaven.
My mom didn’t know it, but I had already gotten into a Baltimore bar with fake ID. Pepper Hill was a semi-legal gay club located right next door to the main downtown police station. Who wouldn’t wonder about payoffs? There I saw “Pencil,” my first other-side-of-the-tracks drag freak. He was Baltimore’s male Tralala, and I used to see him in the daytime, too, when I’d hook school and eat at that awful, aptly named Little Restaurant on Howard Street. Pencil was tall and weighed about one hundred pounds, and wore skintight, black girl’s jeans, an angel blouse, and his own bleached hair in some kind of makeshift beehive. He would screech and sashay up and down the street having nell-fits and mincing to horrified truck drivers who would shout insults back. I was shocked. I had already met David Lochary when I was in high school. He was the first person to use the word “gay” to me as we watched Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk at the Hillendale movie theater. “He’s gay,” David sniffed, pointing to the screen before turning to me, “and so are you.” I mean, I had seen “Peaches,” the amazing black drag queen who performed at local frat dances with the very white and heterosexual rock-and-roll band the Upsetters (not to be confused with Carolyn Wasilewski, also aka “Peaches,” the white fourteen-year-old girl delinquent who inspired my movie Cry-Baby by being murdered in 1954 with the name “Paul” written in Mercurochrome on her right thigh). I remember thinking it was strange that all the straight guys in the audience would cheer gay Peaches onstage with the Upsetters, but then beat him up after the show. Already I was learning how confusing show business could be.
I had never known Pencil, but I wanted to know about him. I had heard that he lived with his parents in East Baltimore, way out near the barn where the streetcars turned around and came back toward the city. Rumor had it that this was where Pencil “got lucky” late at night. I also used to see Pencil with his best friend, “Cleopatra,” who, at 6’6", hardly “passed.” Together they would cause quite a ruckus when they showed up at the Municipal Band concert in Mount Vernon Park, which was mostly attended by little old blue-haired ladies. For some reason Pencil always made an appearance just to horrify the crowd. I watched his every move.
Later in life Pencil seemed to vanish from the streets. Once, Pat Moran and I were in my car and we saw him and I told Pat to yell, “Hey, Pencil!” and she did, but he just gave us a dirty look. We had heard that he had hissed to others that he “wasn’t Pencil anymore, but Miss Streisand.” Could have fooled us. I tried to locate Pencil for this book but at first had little luck. “I know someone who saw him on the bus once” was about as close as I could get until I found Doris, the beloved and retired longtime barmaid from Leon’s—Baltimore’s oldest gay bar. She filled me in. Pencil had graduated to “serious drag,” become a hairdresser, and gained weight. He drank too much but had good friends right up to when “he had stomach problems,” moved with his mother and sister to Startex, South Carolina, and died in the late 1990s. Pencil was erased for good. But not from my memory. I never once in my life had so much as a conversation with Pencil but he was a great influence on me—defiantly courageous in the face of hatred, rabidly enticing despite his repellent packaging, and soooo happy to be living a life totally against the laws of the time.
Of course, before Pencil there was “Zorro”—“Lady Zorro.” I wrote about her briefly in Crackpot: the lesbian stripper from Baltimore’s notorious red-light district The Block, whom Divine and I used to go see at the very end of her burlesque career in the sixties. Zorro was so butch, so scary, so Johnny Cash. No actual stripping for her at that point; she just came out nude and snarled at her fans, “What the fuck are you looking at?” To this day Zorro is my inspiration. She gives me courage to go onstage with no props for my spoken-word act. Brave. Without makeup. Like Tilda Swinton at the Oscars.
Imagine my sadness when I saw in The Baltimore Sun the 2001 obituary for Sheila Alberta Bowater, sixty-three years of age. Since part of the headline read “dancer on The Block,” I scanned down and there it was—“Appearing as Lady Zorro…she danced at The Oasis and The Two O’Clock Club…” I couldn’t believe it! Lady Zorro was dead! But then I kept reading and the real shock came. The obituary mentioned her daughter, who lived in Tigard, Oregon. Zorro had a daughter?! I immediately wrote Eileen Murche to express my sympathies and she wrote back: “Dear John, How bizarre that you should contact me regarding my mother Zorro…My mother spoke of you many times. She loved how outrageous you are.”
I was speechless. Zorro knew who I was?! She actually had followed my career later
in her life? Eileen confided to me that she had gone to Catholic school as a child and enclosed great “glamour” photos of her late mom.
“How could Zorro’s daughter possibly be like other little Catholic girls?” Eileen wondered in her letter, adding, “My childhood memories are of strippers, drag queens, drugs, the race track, The Block, and the many faces that passed through the doorway of [her family’s downtown rowhouse] 301 E. 28th Street.” In other words, the exact opposite of how I grew up in an upper-middle-class family at 313 Morris Avenue. What could it possibly be like to have Zorro, the lesbian stripper, as your mom?
I hopped on a plane to find out. Eileen lives in a lovely suburban home outside Portland. She was going through a trial separation from her husband of eleven years (whom I met). Her two small children were in school the day I visited. Eileen was down-to-earth, pretty, and full of gallows humor and amazingly graphic memories. We sat in the club room and she got out her box of Zorro memories. Eileen had quite a story.
Lady Zorro was born out of wedlock on May 23, 1936, in New York City to a mother who wanted to avoid the disgrace of being pregnant in her hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. The child was raised in three different foster home/orphanage environments that were later described as “hellish.” The grandparents somehow found out about the baby, took her home, and legally adopted little Sheila when she was nine years old. She was a hellion from the beginning, butch once she got to high school, with the added problem of having very large breasts. Later, Sheila briefly tried to be a stewardess, but as Eileen remembers hearing from her mom, “a passenger grabbed her ass, and she threw a drink in his face and told him to ‘fuck himself.’” So much for the friendly skies. Sheila somehow ended up in Baltimore working as a stripper with the name of Lady Zorro. The new moniker, her daughter explained, “was because she needed a costume” with a mask “because her face wasn’t that attractive. She had a crooked nose and they wanted to cover it up.” Sheila also got her first girlfriend, fellow stripper Rachel, better known as “Ray.” Lady Zorro and Ray. Ray designed Lady Zorro’s costume and suddenly a star…of sorts…was born. “Z” (as she was known right up to the end by people in the life) had a real rage she brought to the stage, which added a demented hostile sex appeal. An angry stripper with a history of physical and sexual abuse with a great body and the face of a man. Now, there’s a lethal combination. One thing I knew from the moment I laid eyes on her: Lady Zorro, this alternative Blaze Starr, was my kind of burlesque queen.
Z hung with a tough crowd on The Block. The Oasis Nightclub owner, Julius Salsbury, and his stripper girlfriend, Pam Gail, both legendary Baltimore gangster icons, were her close friends. When Julius’s mob connections got him in trouble in 1970, he fled the country and a fifteen-year sentence, never to be heard from again despite decades of publicity since wondering about his whereabouts. “My mother told me the story,” Eileen remembers, “how she drove him dressed in drag because she wore size eleven shoes [which he could get into] and dropped him off at Friendship Airport [now BWI] outside of Baltimore, for a flight to Miami.”
Z may have been a tough cookie in the workplace, but she was a pothead at home once the sixties began. The height of Lady Zorro’s career was between 1956 and 1962, and by the end she gave up even pretending to be a sexpot. And then Zorro surprised everybody by doing something way ahead of her time. This lesbian stripper got pregnant and wanted to have the child. In 1966, when Lady Z was twenty-nine years old, she had a baby girl, Eileen, named after Z’s new girlfriend, who, despite being straight, stayed with Zorro for eighteen years before breaking her heart by running off with a male bookie who “sometimes used their phone.” “And your dad?” I pry. “His name was JC and he wanted to marry Mom even though she was a lesbian. At one point, my mother met his mother with her family in Delaware and the future mother-in-law was just horrified. I only saw my father eight times, but at Christmas and on my birthday he would show up with a gift. But then he went to Florida and I never saw him again.”
Eileen’s first memories? “The racket of drunk people coming in downstairs after [Mom’s] work, the loudness of their voices, the smell of marijuana, the smell of alcohol.” “But when did you begin to realize this wasn’t normal?” I wondered, remembering sitting at the top of the stairs in our family home, feeling safe, listening to my parents and their friends singing show tunes around our piano or playing charades. “When I went to Catholic school and some of the other kids invited me over to their house and their moms stayed home and picked them up from school. I had two mommies, Eileen and Zorro.” But these “mommies” weren’t anything like the gayly correct ones that Heather had in that classic book for children of gay parents. Of course there were benefits of having these two mommies that the other kids didn’t have, such as “making a thousand dollars a night when I was eight years old.” “They had poker parties and would take bennies and stay up for days playing cards.” Eileen recalls the job title I have heard many times in Baltimore: the “hey girl,” who waits on illegal gamblers at a clandestine den. As in “Hey, girl, bring me a beer!” “I served drinks and they would throw quarters in a big box, then dollars, then later in the night it was tens and twenties.” “But how did you get up to go to school?” I worried, like a good dad. “I didn’t,” she said, shrugging.
Yet little Eileen was a straight-A student in Catholic school. Zorro may have been drunk and stoned on weed at home, but she had her daughter “baptized, went through her first communion” with her, and “wanted to give me everything she never had.” “You’re nothing without a college education,” Z would rant as she taught her daughter to sift marijuana seeds. “I smoked pot and drank at eleven,” Eileen says, chuckling. “Rather than play with Barbie dolls I had a little joint-rolling machine. I rolled a mean joint. My mother’s friends thought it was funny. I started to drive then, too.” “What? You drove at eleven years old?” Yep, Zorro “had a Lincoln Continental then and I used to pick her up at the bar because I was worried about her drinking and driving. She was an obnoxious mean-spirited drunk; she would pick fights with anyone. Men, women—she’d kick their ass!”
But Zorro tried in her own misguided way. Eileen remembers being included on Sundays, which all the strippers had off, when they would come over and talk about “what sick fucks men were.” Eileen may have been a child, but the girls were “always nice to me and gave me money.” Instead of bedtime stories Eileen heard about “a guy who would pay a hundred bucks” to a girl “to walk around the dirty floor of the bar and then lick her toes,” or a guy from Hampden “who used to have sex with his mother.” “Motherfucker,” they’d curse at him, but as the strippers explained to the child, “he liked that.” “I’d walk by people having sex in the house,” Eileen remembers with little trace of anger, almost amused at the inappropriate memories that seemed so normal to her at the time. She was even abused by a prominent businessman in Baltimore who, even though he died last year, should still feel guilty in his casket. Starting to feel bad myself for holding Zorro in such high esteem for years, I realize in her defense that I guess lesbian mothers have the same right to be bad parents as straight ones do.
Then it got worse. Eileen’s other mother left and Zorro “had a nervous breakdown and things went downhill after that.” “Z never had sex again,” her daughter remembers. “She never recovered.” Little Eileen would call big Eileen and beg, “Please take me with you,” but her “other mother” was ill-equipped to deal with the situation. “I can’t,” she sadly responded; “you’re not my daughter.” Big Eileen would call sometimes, Zorro’s daughter remembers, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. “Mostly when she was drunk. I only saw her once or twice after that.”
Zorro went on welfare and was in and out of mental institutions. When she was released, “they had her on chloral hydrate and Elavil and she just lay on the couch for years.” Zorro would try to commit suicide and little Eileen would pull the gun from her hand. Eileen even got raped when Zorro’s wallet was
stolen by some psycho at a bar who looked at the address on the ID, went to the house, and attacked the youngster. Zorro’s reaction? “Why didn’t you fight back?”
Yet Eileen continued to excel in school. “My friends thought [my mom] was cool because they could come over and smoke pot at my house and drink. I didn’t care what she was; I just didn’t want her to be fucked-up all the time.” When Zorro was committed for long periods, Eileen remembers trying to keep it a secret and “taking care of myself.” She walked to school every day and the nuns never suspected that their little honor student was living completely unsupervised by herself in the ghetto. “I felt like I was stepping out of one world and then into another. I kept those worlds very separate.”
But then Eileen got caught. The electricity at home was cut off for nonpayment of bills and she “overslept and was late for school,” so she forged her mother’s signature on a note. But the nuns spotted the fake and told Eileen that her mother “needed to call.” “She’s gone,” Eileen blurted out. “But when will she be back?” the nuns asked, startled. “I started crying and told them what happened,” Eileen remembers matter-of-factly, “and they called Child Protective Services and the people across the street lied and said I could stay with them. I did stay with them sometimes but I wanted to be by myself.” “You never said, ‘Help me’?” I wondered. “Never,” Eileen answers proudly. Why should she? She was president of her class!