Role Models

by John Waters

  Eileen never seemed judgmental about her unconventional mom and tried to remember Zorro’s good points for me. Lady Z “read the newspapers every day,” “liked classical music,” and, much to my thrill, “loved Johnny Mathis.” She may have been nuts, but Z was always incredibly proud of her daughter’s academic success. “The roof caved in on our house,” Eileen recollects with a grin, “so the nuns called the St. Vincent de Paul Society to come fix it. We didn’t have heat for a couple years in the house, so my mom wanted the nuns to come. Sister Mary Francis, principal of my school, showed up,” and Zorro “only had a small buzz. She knew how important this was for me.” Zorro, the good mom, “went to turn on the oven to put food in [to cook] and a thousand cockroaches started walking up all over the wall.” And people wonder where I get my movie ideas? Could there be a better scene than this?!

  “One of the founding things that saved my life is the Catholic Church,” Eileen admits, and for once I don’t make a religious wisecrack. Here is what the Catholic Church should be doing instead of condemning movies and denying science. “There were two old ladies who lived next door, and one was a seamstress who used to make me dresses and wanted to save my soul.” Later a priest offered, “‘Hello, Eileen, we need help at the rectory, can you come after school?’ All the people at the church helped me.” “Are you a Catholic today?” I ask. “I am,” she answers evenly.

  Eileen continued on to the College of Notre Dame, moved out of her mother’s house into the dorms, and finally got a boyfriend who “was always there for me—until he slept with my best friend and that was that.” When Eileen graduated from college, Zorro “came and brought a cooler full of beer. Some of her friends from the bar came. She did get drunk.” By then, Zorro had had all her teeth pulled out, so there went the possibility that anyone could imagine she had at one time been a stripper. “Amazingly,” Eileen remembers with a laugh, “even though my mother got welfare, she was a Republican.”

  Zorro started hanging out at the Porthole, a local gay men’s neighborhood bar. Suddenly Z was a fag hag! “She could draw a crowd,” Eileen remembers with a shudder, “her voice was so loud!” Then, like the old days, everybody from the bar would come back to the house to smoke pot. “She was so down and out, I moved back in for a year,” her daughter says, sighing. “Bums would hang out, mentally ill people, people with AIDS. She’d give her shirt off her back. I once stepped over this black woman, six-foot-four, and thought, ‘That’s the ugliest chick I’ve ever seen!’ Then I saw the dick.” After Eileen moved out again, she would “show up every other weekend” and say, “Please don’t be fucked-up,” but Z would announce, “I’m a fuckup! After you are six years old you are a child of the world.” “So I’d drive her to the Rite Aid for cigarettes [Z smoked four packs of Benson & Hedges a day] and buy her a couple of beers.” An enabler? “I never bought her hard alcohol,” Eileen argues with a shrug. “Did you ever try to get your mom to AA?” I ask. “Always tried!” Eileen laughs. “She had a couple DWI [convictions] and she was supposed to go but she traded pot with someone who would sign in for her at meetings.”

  Finally Eileen had had enough. She moved to the West Coast. The only thing she really wanted was to be normal. But Eileen still tried to keep an eye on her mom. “I flew her to Florida when I was on a business trip, fresh out of college, making $30,000. It was a big conference and I told her, ‘Just stay in the hotel room. I have a function I have to go to. Here’s a six-pack of beer, don’t drink anything out of the mini bar, it’s too expensive. I’ll be back.’ Later, I walked into the hotel lobby and I could hear her voice and I looked up to this elevated bar where she was with my name tag on! She had crashed a competitor’s party and was just ranting.”

  “So did that do it?” I say with hope. “Had you finally reached rock bottom?” “No, I kept coming back for more,” Eileen sighs. “I flew her out to my wedding here.” Eileen had warned her future in-laws and they had politely said, “All families have issues.” “You have no fucking idea,” Eileen remembers thinking. “But she [Zorro] would ask people, ‘You got any good shit to smoke?’ and I’m like, ‘Mom, these people do not smoke pot. Stop asking every person that walks through the receiving line!’” “Then I went on my honeymoon,” Eileen says with a forbidding pause, and her mom said to the new mother-in-law, “I’d like to have you and your husband over and your next-door neighbors who were so nice in helping my daughter plan the wedding.” So they came and the hostess-with-the-leastest tried to do her best, but as Eileen later heard the story, Z “had this big jug of red wine she told them she needed for the spaghetti sauce, but she drank the entire gallon and took a Xanax and forgot and took two more and smoked pot so by the time people showed up she was completely fucked-up, dishing all the relatives, the husband—‘He’s adopted! You don’t know if his mother had AIDS.’” The guests just ran. “Did Zorro ever apologize?” I wonder. “Never,” Eileen answers. “I didn’t talk to her for six months after that.”

  But then Z (or Sheila, as she was back to being known by her non-showbiz neighbors) “fell, broke her hip, got a staph infection and pneumonia.” Eileen went back to Baltimore to old home-sweet-home and “broke in the door,” and her mother was almost dead. “Had she called you?” I quizzed. And then Eileen responded with the only answer from our interview about her mom that ever shocked me: “She never wanted to be a burden to me.”

  So, out of “guilt,” Eileen moved Sheila/Zorro, who by now looked like an old haggard man from Baltimore, into her house in Oregon. “People had died of AIDS in there [in her mother’s old place]; everything was ruined. I sold the house, to the crack-dealing lady neighbor who liked Mom, for $11,000 given to me in cash in a paper bag.” When Zorro moved in with her daughter on the West Coast, it was “just hell. I told my husband, ‘I know it’s going to be hard. She doesn’t like you. You don’t like her.’” Eileen tried to make reasonable “house rules”—Zorro was allowed two cases of beer a week, an ounce of pot a month, and whatever pills the doctor would give her. But “she would go crazy and the neighbors across the street told me that while I was at work, my mother would knock on people’s doors and say she ‘had DDTs,’ meaning DTs.” “Once I was on vacation in Mexico and the neighbors were watching Z, and one day there was no answer at the door, so they went in and my mother was sitting out back, naked, listening to the radio. She had a joint in one hand and a cigarette in the other.”

  Eileen can admit that her mother’s death from cancer “was a relief.” “I had to sleep with her at night because she had a morphine pump she kept pulling out.” Eileen even tried to find her father to tell him, “Mom’s dying.” “I found his brother and called but he told me JC ‘never had kids.’” “‘Yes, he did, I’ll send the birth certificate,’” she argued, and “I finally got my father’s address and I was going to call him, and the day before, the phone rang and he said, ‘Eileen, this is your father.’ He explained he left because he had been involved in a scandal with some hookers in Baltimore and it was in the newspapers and he ‘didn’t want to embarrass me.’ He said he didn’t have anything to offer me and I told him I wanted to see him but he said he wasn’t up to it. He had cancer, he explained, and ‘I’m dying.’” “‘Well, you have my number,’” Eileen told him hopefully, “and then I started to get angry and I didn’t call him again and then he died.” No happy endings here.

  “Did Zorro ever get mellow as her last days approached?” I wondered, hoping for a little good news somehow in this story. When “the doctors told her she had twelve weeks to live,” Eileen recalls (she lasted thirteen), her mother wasn’t fazed. “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go” was Z’s immediate response. “I was crying,” Eileen remembers, dry-eyed, “and she looked at me and sang ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.’” Was Zorro ever nice to you?” I ask tactfully. Eileen pauses and answers without rancor, “No; she made me dinner. She showed me her love by feeding me.”

  Remembering the life of one of my longtime idols, Ei
leen is quite levelheaded. “Could you ever see the comedy in your situation when Zorro was alive?” I ask. “NOT AT ALL!” she answers emphatically. Zorro “tormented me, she abused me, and it wasn’t until after she died that I started to appreciate her. I got that phone call from you…” But Zorro obviously did something right, I argue. “She raised a daughter who is reasonably happy and well-adjusted, and isn’t that the best you can say about any mother?” “I always hoped I could have a relationship with her,” Eileen says quietly. “But you did,” I plead. “You were the bright spot in her life always.” Can living in a real John Waters movie ever bring any kind of joy? “I spoke at my mom’s memorial service and said, ‘I spent my whole life trying to not be like her, only to find out at the age of thirty-five, I am like her. I can walk into a room and within ten minutes everybody in the room is standing around me. I’m not in show business, but I am in marketing. I learned how to talk to people…” “To hustle, just like your mom did?” I ask. “Absolutely!” Eileen admits with a twinkle in her eye.

  A sad story? Maybe not. Months later Eileen wrote, asking, “Would you please save that tape we did together for me? It would be a great way for my children to learn about their grandmother after they are twenty-one. They ask me about her all the time, and what was she like? I always smile and tell them she was a piece of work.”

  Boy, I need a drink after the Zorro saga! But where to go? All my really favorite Baltimore monster bars are gone. Like Hard Times, the aptly named blue-collar or no-collar bar once located at the corner of 28th Street and Huntingdon Avenue in the Remington neighborhood, which got closed down in 2001 as neighbors “breathed a sigh of relief” according to the press reports. City environmental and sanitation inspectors had found there was no running water on the premises while it was still open to the public. So what? I mean, I guess you had to piss in the alley out back, but at least there were cute Baltimoreans inside. Dirty drinking glasses? What’s the big deal? Just rinse them out when it rains.

  I wish Morgan’s was still there. I had a real soft spot for this obviously illegal after-hours club in Hampden, which somehow stayed open for years. I think cops went there themselves when they were off duty. This is the only bar in my life that refused me admittance. And for a long time, too. “But he made a lot of movies,” I even heard a friendly mutant stick up for me to the mean, but handicapped, doorman. “Never heard of them,” he sniffed. “Besides, he don’t live in the neighborhood.” Hampden had yet to be discovered by homesteaders, yuppies, and starter families, so my celebrity was meaningless here. I could waltz into Studio 54, the Mudd Club, or any New York “in” restaurant, but not Morgan’s. Finally, after months of my showing up and pleading, the owner, who looked like a weirdly handsome Robert Mitchum on a bummer, came down and we met. I guess by now a couple of locals had vouched I wasn’t undercover. “Go ahead up,” he snarled with a subtle hint of pride in his establishment. Once I climbed those long steps up to the fully operating bar (with booths, for chrissakes!), I wasn’t one bit disappointed. Once again, the local dealers, alcoholics, and hillbilly chicks were partying big-time, and some of them looked great! Here, I realized, was the “upper lower class,” a segment of society that I had never heard described properly in any sociological studies. Not only were they high on drugs, the bar was open and ready to serve beer, and at rock-bottom prices! Believe me, not one hipster would dare go in this joint. Even I, a veteran extreme-bar cultist, was frightened here. I avoided eye contact and tried to watch people in the mirrors on the walls so they didn’t notice me. I started to take friends from New York there and they really seemed to like it. Especially some of the stylish women I know who mostly had only gay male friends at home. Here, they got cruised by real heterosexual men who definitely weren’t closet queens. These guys had never even heard the term “fag hag.” I still laugh with one of my women friends who went home with a really cute guy she met at Morgan’s when she was visiting me. When she complimented him on his accidentally cool wildly patterned thrift store shirt, he answered sexily, “It’s made of rayon. AND I’M A RAYON FOOL!”

  “Isn’t going to these places dangerous?” many of my friends ask me, and they have a point. My notoriety usually protects me in the beginning, but if no one is friendly, especially the bartenders or barmaids, I leave immediately. It’s a slow process getting accepted in the bars, and pretty often my judgment has been solid. Maybe it came from teaching filmmaking to convicts. I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?

  For many years I went to the now-defunct Atlantis, a male strip club located next to the Maryland Penitentiary. I called it “the Fudge Palace” in my movie Pecker. I always took out-of-town guests there, everybody from Gus Van Sant to many of the New York art dealers (both gay and straight) who were participating in the Print Fair at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Even my friend Judge Elsbeth Bothe went with me one night after a long day on the bench. When I told her that “sometimes you get teabagged by the naked dancers if you sit too close,” she didn’t chicken out; she just wore a hat for protection. God, how I miss that place.

  But I like girl strip bars, too. As long as they’re bad ones. No thanks to the high-end “gentlemen’s clubs,” with Playboy Bunny types who want to give you a lap dance while reminding you there is an ATM right inside the lobby. Boots was a favorite go-go-girl place. Located on Eastern Avenue, between Fells Point and Highlandtown, this may have been the lowliest strip club ever. So naturally, for about a year, I hung out there every weekend in the early 1990s. The “talent” was definitely unnerving. One we called “the Moose.” She was a big ox who was a lazy stripper. One night, when it was her turn to dance, she was still in the bathroom located next to the stage, so when she heard her musical cue, she just kicked the bathroom door open as she still sat on the toilet and shook her tits for the audience. Boots was very David Lynch. One regular, a woman customer with a greasy ponytail, jitterbugged with the valve of the radiator every night for hours and nobody questioned it. The barmaid had a hair-trigger temper but I liked to get her talking. She used to tell me “bring Johnny Depp in” as she thrust topless photos of her legal-age go-go daughters into my hands for me to give him. I stupidly invited her to my Christmas party one year and she brought her boyfriend, who entered with a bad attitude and would stop in front of any male guest, glare scarily, and snarl, “Are you a faggot?” Many weren’t but didn’t quite know how to respond, and everybody complained to the bouncer, who had to throw the barmaid and her boyfriend out. I never went back to Boots until many years later, but the same bartender was working there. She was “sober now,” she announced, giving me a very unfriendly look, and I left quickly. Boots closed not too long after, and when the gay Atlantis sadly shut its doors (the location became yet another swanky men’s club), the gay strip club reopened in the old Boots space under the name of Spectrum, which immediately became known as “the Rectum,” and due to the really hideously nelly go-go boys with awful Baltimore accents that some obviously unseasoned manager had hired, it closed down quickly.

  I guess I could go to the Bloody Bucket; it’s still open. That’s not the bar’s real name, but locals call it that. It’s located at 1619 Union Avenue, across from the Pepsi plant in the area of Hampden commonly referred to as “the Bottom.” I wish I owned this place. It’s totally untouched. I’d rename it the Pelt Room but otherwise I wouldn’t change a thing. The crowd that hangs there is unpredictable but definitely not one you’d bring home to Mom (unless she’s Zorro). I love Blanche, the bartender, a woman of a certain age who is an R. Crumb comic come to life. A big, big girl with giant thighs who looks so sexy and powerful in her micro cutoff denim skirt. Cellulite is, in this case, a true beauty mark. Having her serve you a drink while you listen to the customers’ amazing stories is such a great way to start off the weekend. “I was in this terrible car accident,” a drinking buddy there once told me, “some Chinaman [what all blue-collar guys in Baltimore call any type of Asian] ran through a red light
and smashed into the car I was riding in. My head went partially through the windshield, there was glass everywhere. My friend who was driving was pinned behind the steering wheel. I was so pissed off that I wanted to beat up the Chinaman, so I got out of our car, went over to him to punch him out, but when I opened his car door I saw his head was part cut off and he was dead. So I stole his wallet.” “How much did you get?” I asked, excitedly picturing the movie scene. “Twenty bucks,” he said, sighing gloomily.

  The only guzzling events I’ve never had the nerve to attend in Baltimore are “blow-roasts.” Blow-roasts are even more excessive than the scariest straight bars, but they are a local one-night tradition and sometimes even the cops organize them. Tickets are secretly and selectively sold weeks in advance to working-class men at their local neighborhood bars, usually in the county, and the location (union hall or biker clubhouse) is revealed right before the big night. A blow-roast is just like a bull roast; oyster shuckers, pit beef sandwiches, gambling, kegs of beer, and medleys of mayonnaise-based dishes. But at a blow-roast there are also blow jobs. A “two-tier level of hookers works these events,” explains a friend who has attended several times. “The good-looking ones are the strippers and they specialize in acts such as ‘dildo shows,’ where they penetrate each other for your enjoyment while you eat. One of the girls’ specialties was she could shoot a banana from her vagina.” Before I can stop him from telling me more details, he adds, “I saw one guy pick it up off the dirty floor and eat it.” But the real horror are the “b.j. girls,” the “rank ones,” who give blow jobs to men who win them in a raffle. “Biker types escort them around table to table,” my friend continues to explain, “and sell the raffle tickets, and when they sell one hundred dollars’ worth, they draw a number and the winner goes into this dirty little side room where they’ve set up partitions with blankets or sheets and you get blown.” “But what kinds of girls work blow-roasts?” I ask, thinking that this job is surely the lowest one in show business. “Pretty ugly ones,” he remembers when he is forced to picture their faces. Imagine, just imagine, waking up and knowing your job for the day is working a blow-roast! “Suppose a blow-roast girl runs into her father’s friends” I wail, “or even her father?!” “I don’t know,” my friend begs off, “I only went a couple times.” “You went back?!” I marvel, trying to imagine the horror of these events. “Did you get blown?” I finally demand. “Nooooooo!” he shrieks, wishing he had never told me about blow-roasts in the first place. I wish he hadn’t, too. And I’m sorry I had to tell you! But I don’t have a choice—I’ve been drinking.