Role Models

by John Waters

  There’s only one place left to go and that’s the Club Charles, the hipster hangout I have been frequenting for the last thirty years. It may be an “old reliable” but it’s located right across the street from the Charles, the best movie theater in town, and it’s still, weirdly, the coolest bar. But it used to be even better. In the 1970s it was still called the Wigwam and it was known in the press as the scariest bar in Baltimore. You couldn’t even get buzzed in at the front door unless you were a bum. A real one.

  The owner was a Native American woman named Esther Martin, and I lived in awe of her. Born in Oklahoma in 1923, she ran away as a teenager to New York and got a job as a hat-check girl at the Stork Club. Moving to Baltimore in hopes of studying to be a nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she ended up instead working in the nightclubs here until 1951, when she bought a bar and got married to Kent Martin. The Wigwam was the politically incorrect name of their new nightspot, and the teepee-shaped sign advertising “Grub and Firewater” immediately attracted a good clientele. By the time I met Esther in 1980, the neighborhood had changed drastically, and she was a hardworking divorced mother of four. She ran the joint like an iron-fisted Elaine’s, only her clients weren’t celebrities, they were alcoholics, mental patients, and vets. If you received any kind of government check, you were eligible to drink in the Wigwam. If not, get out! Esther would cash the checks, keep all the money, and dole it out to her collection of lunatics because, as one of her daughters remembered her mom explaining, “If they had all their money, they’d just drink it up.” She kept “tickets,” or IOUs, on scraps of paper only Esther knew how to decipher. For some reason, Esther let me and Pat Moran (who was managing the Charles Theater at the time) inside her secret society. It was like being cast in the banquet scene in Buñuel’s Viridiana, where the bums take over the mansion and wreck it, except nobody froze in a tableau of The Last Supper the way they did in the film. No, Esther was watching. And you were allowed to go wild. I saw one homeless guy bite off the nose of another and spit it out on the bar. If you left a cash tip, withered hands would appear from all sides and try to grab it away, but Esther didn’t care. She wasn’t interested in chump change. She wanted your very soul.

  Through the years, Esther and I became friends. In 1980, when the Wigwam became the Club Charles, Esther was okay about artsy hillbillies, gay outcasts, and cool gearheads taking over from the bums. She still owned the joint but the neighbors and police were giving her such a hard time over her clientele that she was afraid they’d take away her liquor license. It was time to retire from behind the bar and go down to her little cubbyhole office in the basement, count the money, and watch over her kingdom. I used to plug the Club Charles on talk shows, and Esther and I both hooted when we talked Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous into using the bar as one of the locations when they did an episode on me. Long before Esther died from diabetes in 2003, she instructed her staff and future staff never to charge me for a drink. And you know what? Somehow, to this day, even new kids who just recently started working behind the bar honor her request.

  But the real reason I loved Esther right from the beginning was her mouth. No one in the world cussed more! She gave the phrase “cursing a blue streak” a refinement that seemed almost noble. “That motherfucking cocksucking son of a bitch” was used as a prefix to almost every name she uttered. When Esther died, I went to the funeral home to pay my respects. I had heard that Esther’s last words were “Move your coat, asshole,” but even though I had gotten to know her four children, Kim, Joy, Dick, and Battle, I felt this wasn’t the time or place to set the record straight. So years later, even though it was hard to ever imagine what kind of peace Esther was resting in, I invited her family to come over to my house to talk. They knew I had a great respect for their mom. And like all children of insane mothers, they had learned to view their upbringing with a certain bemused detachment.

  “Don’t put your fucking on the fucking table, asshole!” was her actual last message to her kids, written on a Post-it note, her favorite method of communication. Not one of the kids is exactly sure what the missing word was, but they agree it could have been “coat.” “Cocksucker!” they immediately shout in unison when I ask what their mother’s favorite cuss word was. Sometimes, Kim remembers, Esther would leave notes that read “Fuck you! Shit! Shit! Shit!” “Mom’s father paid her to cuss as a kid,” explains Dick before Kim adds, “He was a mean asshole. He beat her [remembering her mom’s words] till she pissed herself.” Just a mention of Esther’s foul language makes each sibling go into hilarious imitations of their mother’s tirades. “As my dear sainted mother would say”—Dick laughs and then mimics Esther’s voice—“‘You’re as worthless as a cunt full of cold piss.’” “Shit and fall back in it!” Battle hollers out in loving imitation. Kim remembers fondly her mother telling her and her sister, “A cunt hair will pull a twenty-mule team!” “FUCK! SHIT! PISS! MOTHERFUCKER!” they all start barking joyously, laughing and missing their mother’s almost anti-Tourette’s-syndrome, all-voluntary form of cussing.

  All Esther’s children worked at the bar at one time or another, and they get misty-eyed remembering the bum clientele, or “smoke hounds” as their mother used to call her customers, her army who “took care of stuff” for her. Farmer, Country, Russian George, Hillbilly, Jim Dandy, Indian Willy, Frenchie—and Fay Girl. “She was the hottie,” Joy explains, “long in the tooth, but all the bums loved Fay Girl,” the queen of the grizzled set. “Esther felt love for these people,” Dick remembers. “She’d visit them in the hospital,” Kim adds before Dick continues, “She’d go to Social Security, the VA hospital. She’d look for their veteran’s papers.” “When they died,” Battle remembers proudly, “she’d bury them.” Esther took photographs of them, too. “All around the house,” Kim remembers. “‘Oh, there’s Mary in her coffin.’ Mom always thought she would get a big payoff,” she adds, “and as kids we’d see the suitcases…”

  Ah yes. The mythical suitcases of the dead bums whose souls Esther owned. Up in the attic, still there in the family house where Joy continues to live. A kind of bum burial ground for Esther’s subjects. A carnival of lost souls that shines in the dark of a forgotten harsh kindness. As Esther’s children got older, they had to help their mother go through what was left of the bums’ stuff. “‘You got to help us clean the Captain’s apartment,’” Kim remembers her mother saying. “He had a massive artery blow, and his bed was soaked in blood and Mom had me go down there and dig through all his shit!” “Did he have a diamond in his pocket?” Esther always wondered. “Well, did you ever get left anything of value?” I ask, knowing Esther had somehow amassed a home for her family and five other properties she rented out. Joy remembers, “Earl, a customer, not a real bum, annoying, but he loved Mom, and he told her, ‘I’m leaving you everything.’ He lived a month. And then Mayflower [moving] trucks pull up—not one, not two, there’s a whole block taken up. And they started unloading the most unbelievable antiques. His entire estate was left to Mom.”

  You certainly didn’t want to be on Esther’s bad side. Her clientele was “all alcoholics or mentally ill and Mom was keeper of the asylum,” Battle remembers correctly. Sometimes they needed a stern mother and sometimes they got one. “She would punch somebody full in the face with her fist,” Kim remembers with awe. “There was a rage with Mom,” Battle sighs; “demons.” When one of her bum ladies got hassled by another bar patron, Esther was there to protect her, Dick recalls. “She coldcocked that son of a bitch.” Battle laughs. Dick continues, “And when the fool reached out and kicked at Esther, she went off. She was kicking his guts and saying, ‘This is Esther. You don’t fuck with Esther!’ She worked on the element of surprise,” he marvels, remembering his mom’s fighting methods. “She’d pull out a ‘slapper’ she carried, a rubber hose with lead in it and taped up. I saw her use it on some guy in Rite Aid once. He wouldn’t get out of the way. She walked up and said, ‘Excuse me,’ but he just looked back.” “God,
she had that look!” Battle blurts out with fear and admiration. “She just…Boof! Boof!” Dick explains, whacking an imaginary slapper in the air. “She just beat this guy. He just went down on the ground cowering.”

  I try to picture my own very proper mom beating the shit out of somebody as we shopped for back-to-school clothes, but I just come up blank. It’s hard to imagine a slapper done in tweed. But would I have been excited if my mom had punched out my junior high math teacher who signed my yearbook “To someone who can, but doesn’t”? You bet! Maybe Esther was a real inspiration for Serial Mom. I mean, as one of the ad lines I suggested for that film read: “She meant well.”

  Esther “worked every single day.” Kim remembers, “She loved being behind that bar.” Esther didn’t drink except maybe “a beer” or “crème de menthe.” She was “old school,” her kids tactfully try to explain. “She loved Nixon” and “hated John Kennedy,” they remember, acknowledging the irony. She “had a gun” but for good reason. “She had to pay off the cops,” Joy recalls sadly. “They’d be in there every day playing pinball. She’d get them beer. ‘So-and-so needs a case for a bull roast.’ Then they’d come in with a list—‘This is for the Sergeant.’ Old Crow liquor, four, five hundred bottles, and then she said, ‘Fuck the Sergeant!’ and stopped.” “I’d rather have a daughter in a whorehouse than a son in the police force,” Esther used to rage to anyone who would listen.

  But Esther, in her own way, believed in law and order. “She got robbed every week in the bar,” Joy remembers. “She had a gun to her head many times. I remember being taken shopping with my mother in Hutzler’s [the nicest Baltimore department store] downtown,” Joy continues, when “on the escalator to the mezzanine Esther sees the store detective chasing this black guy. ‘CATCH THAT MOTHERFUCKER!’ Mom yells as the other women looked at my mother with that look I always got [from other mothers] from the time I was a child—the look of horror.” Esther was touchy, too. When she heard two customers complaining about Judy Garland’s live performance in Baltimore, the notorious one where Judy was drunk and staggered around the stage, Esther threw the couple out of the bar. “Here goes Mom,” Joy remembers the tirade, “‘You’re fucking barred! Get out of my fucking bar! If she [Judy] didn’t do another motherfucking thing but The Wizard of Oz, you cocksuckers!’”

  But it wasn’t all fun and games. After Esther and her husband divorced in 1962, “they never spoke but had affection for each other,” Kim recalls. Neither “ever dated anyone else again,” Dick remembers, as Kim adds incredulously, “She did go to the funeral and was that grieving widow.” When the children became teenagers, it got intolerable at home and they ran off to Arkansas and lived with their dad, who got full custody, but the family dynamics were still confusing. “They took us into deposition and asked, ‘Did she [Esther] abuse you?’ and I said, ‘No. I mean, she beat us,’” Dick remembers innocently. Kim and Joy lasted two years and then came home and moved back in with their mother, who acted like nothing had happened. Dick was more bitter and didn’t see Esther for five years. Battle “got Dad the divorce lawyer.”

  Yet all Esther’s children have a great affection for her. “My mom was a beautiful woman,” Battle says proudly. “She made us very independent,” Kim says, laughing good-naturedly. “She loved to take us shopping,” Kim continues. “All her tips were in her bra and she’d pull down her girdle and all this money would fall out.” “She was very pro-education,” Joy remembers, and like Eileen, Zorro’s daughter, all Esther’s kids “loved school.” “It was away from the madness,” as Joy puts it without a hint of sadness. None of them seem overly angry about their alternative upbringing. “It was so much better than childhoods I hear from my girlfriends that were so boring. There never was a dull moment,” says Joy, the one whom all the siblings agree is the most like Esther and who still runs the Club Charles from the same downstairs cubbyhole office as her mother did. Maybe that’s why I interviewed Joy alone, away from the other family members. She married a cop (“He’s an honest one”) and has left all of Esther’s belongings as they were in the house. “Her nightgown is still hanging in the bathroom,” Joy admits.

  “You could have asked Esther the day before she died what we did for a living,” Kim remembers with a shrug, “and she wouldn’t know.” “Because you were no longer working in the bar, it wasn’t real?” I wonder. “Right!” Kim, Battle, and Dick agree instantly. “She would say she was so proud of us to other people, but never to us,” Kim remembers with resignation before adding, “She also never wanted to get involved in our personal lives. ‘Don’t bring that shit in here!’ she’d yell if you were ever moaning about a boyfriend.” Before Dick got married, he said, “we went out with Esther and she started to tell my future wife stories. We were driving cross-country and an in-law in the car was sick as could be. Mom turned to my fiancée and said, ‘Honey, her breath smells like your asshole.’ I only knew Robin a couple of weeks then…,” he trails off good-naturedly. “Nobody lived a life like we had,” Battle says proudly with a warm grin.

  But can I go too far in being inspired by someone else’s good “bad mother”? Can other moms’ militant lunacy ever be funny, even if their ideals are based in raw naked pathology? It’s a question I wrestle with daily. The mother of a friend of mine is a case in point. Jake used to be my FedEx man. Even though he was straight, he had a great sense of humor and sometimes left me Polaroid shots of his penis. I didn’t mind. Just another reason to love FedEx. I originally met Jake at a hetero bar and he drove a souped-up, repainted, secondhand police car. Once we went on a “date.” He strapped a video camera to the hood of his car and we drove around while he filmed us smashing through piles of old dead Christmas trees that residents had left in the alleys and he would set on fire. I could never get Jake to “put out,” but it still was a really romantic night for me, so I stayed in touch. He hinted that his mother was quite a bizarre character and asked me if I’d like to go have dinner at her house. Always up for meeting people with their parents, I eagerly accepted. She lived in a normal suburban garden apartment by herself and looked like anybody’s mother. I did wonder why there was no visible food being prepared as we joined her at the kitchen table. Suddenly she announced, “I decided not to make dinner because I didn’t feel like it.” Oh. Well, okay, I thought as my stomach growled with hunger. Suddenly, with a look of insane glee, she said to her son, “Go on, Jake, tell John what we used to do as a family every Easter.” Jake suddenly paled and tried to change the subject, but she was unstoppable. “We’d ride around in our convertible,” she blurted out, “and laugh at niggers!” Stunned, I sat in my chair, trying to believe my ears. Jake laughed nervously but didn’t deny it. I tried to picture this awful script in my head, wondering, If I turned the races around, could it be a funny scene in a movie? A black family riding around in a convertible laughing at white people? Maybe. If handled properly, with the joke really well set up, and directed by a young, cutting-edge black auteur. But my insane hostess wasn’t finished yet. “I hate women, too!” she cried out for no apparent reason with a bone-chilling happiness. “Go on, Jake,” she continued, much like the insane female storytellers in Salò, “tell John about the time we left a note for our landlord that said”—and here she sang out the words—“WE SAW YOUR PENIS!” By now I was mumbling excuses, gathering my things, and making a run for the car with Jake right behind me, but she wasn’t fazed. “Here!” she yelled to both of us as she chased us to the car, thrusting out two cans of cold beer. “Take a drink for the drive,” she hollered as we leaped inside, me in shock, Jake giggling like a good son, I guess used to his mom’s outlook on the world.

  I’m not sorry I met this woman. Racists are the dumbest people alive, but Baltimore is filled with nutcases who think they are totally levelheaded and their antics have to be repeated to be believed. Like the story this late friend of mine, Gary, loved to tell in horrified remembrance. Gary got in the elevator in his building to go down to the lobby to exit. Already on b
oard was a neighbor lady he barely knew. The elevator stopped again on a lower floor and another female resident silently boarded and then got off one floor below. “You know,” the neighbor lady still in the elevator commented to Gary as they resumed their descent, “she blows niggers.” Gary gasped in horror and ran out as soon as the elevator doors opened but claimed he always regretted not answering truthfully, “I do, too.” Which brings us to the question: If someone is a racist and really cute, could you still have sex with him? I had to admit the answer is yes. I have. You just change the subject or shout, “La la la la la la la,” covering your ears when he speaks his nonsense. If all else fails, stick something in his mouth to shut him up.