The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  There was a fellow in Berkeley who would give me five dollars a month to have advertisements for him on my bicycle spokes, and so once a month, my brother and I would head over to his house on Martin Luther King Junior Way to put his paper circles into our wheels. Also, Rohana and I used to make jewelry together and go to craft fairs with her mother Millea.

  I learned to sew. Sewing was both good and bad. Mother did me a great kindness by showing me how to operate her sewing machine. My friend from the Faire, Sally Schneider, taught me how to sew things together. The first thing I made with my mother’s sewing machine was a shirt: I had come up with the design myself from things I had seen. It was to be a typical Renaissance Faire peasant shirt with a yoke back and a collar. I did not do a good job, and I ruined three yards of lavender cotton fabric.

  My mother was incensed. You would think I had blown up a city by her level of rage. To her I had wasted fabric, and we could not afford it. Worse than that, it was my fault because I had refused to use a pattern. It didn’t matter to her that no patterns existed for what I wanted to make—it was the principle of the thing: If I had used a pattern, I would not have wasted the three yards of fabric.

  But I did not change my evil ways.

  When I was in kindergarten and second grade with nothing to do, I had done a lot of drawing, as in a lot. All that drawing never made me an artist, though. To this day, my drawings have only been workmanlike visual shorthand. I could give a general idea of what I intended to make, but my drawings were nothing that anyone would put on their wall.

  Fortunately, I was better at sewing than I was at drawing. I learned very quickly how to draft patterns with a ruler and a piece of tailor’s chalk, and I could soon make nearly any kind of costume. At the Renaissance Faire, I had to sew my own costumes or pay someone else to if I could not borrow something. One of the first things I learned to make was skirts, both pleated and gored, then shifts, or chemises, then bodices. A corset was like a bodice but with a stronger lining and more boning, and it could often be cut in one piece provided the center front was right on the grain and the laced back was not too diagonal. Of course, the boning obscured any stretch that could have even tried to come in.

  Shapes for corsets and bodices, even shifts, bum rolls, ruffs and hoopskirts were all easy to remember. I have the kind of memory for shapes that let me know what a good curve looks like. It is the same aspect of memory which enables me to spell: I remember what things look like, no matter what language they are in. I would be lost if I tried to spell with rules or phonics.

  The first time I had to make something which really needed a pre-made pattern was a Victorian corset. I had already made several on a straightforward pattern I could easily alter according to the measurements of the girl needing it, recut it—even make a new pattern with my usual ruler and tailoring chalk—but this style of corset used a new pattern which was a nightmare of small curved pieces and gussets. I borrowed the pattern from one of the ladies at Court. It took a few tries, that one, between figuring out how to get the satin to not fray to shreds while putting it together (Fray-Check!) and even having to clip a few seam allowances before sewing the pieces together so that the curves would lie flat. Once I got an overlock machine, which we would call a “serger” today, fraying edges were no longer an issue.

  Sewing was very good for me, but it made a lot of friction with my mother. Not just for the fabric I ruined, but because once I started making things I had heaps of new ways to upset her. Let us not imagine for a moment that she was angry because I was a better seamstress than she had ever been within a few weeks of learning to operate a sewing machine—It could not possibly have been that.

  No, it was because I was an evil hammer-thief.

  One day, she decided I had stolen her hammer and she went nuts over it. It was a reasonable suspicion: I routinely used a hammer with the two-piece tool we used to install grommets, or extra-large eyelets. It was not likely that anybody but I would ever use a hammer in our house. My father didn’t use tools, nor did my brother.

  I had not stolen her hammer. My denial did no good, and she told me again and again that I was lying. Defending myself was pointless: Mother was positive that everything I said was a lie. I was compulsively truthful. I insisted on telling the truth no matter how damning to me, because I didn’t want to get hit any more.

  This was not the first or the only time she had accused me of stealing from her. She routinely accused me of stealing her clothes—a much less reasonable suspicion. Where I was a scrawny child of ten, she was around 250 lbs at just under 5’3". I could not have worn her clothing even if I had wanted to. The accusation itself made me uncomfortable, not just for the punishment which would come with neither evidence nor proof but for the fact that her clothing smelled like her, and I didn’t want to think about that.

  I did lie to her once, that I can remember.

  I took a bath one day, and I wanted to shave my legs like a big girl. I knew my mother would not want me to do so: after all, we did not do anything for men. Or at least I was not supposed to: she shaved her legs all the time. I used her razor, not knowing how to do it properly, and I cut a strip off the front of my shin, about four inches by half an inch. It was superficial, but bled like mad. When my mother heard my screams she burst into the bathroom, like a responsible parent. She asked me what I had done, and I told her that I had been splashing around and the razor fell on me.

  Marion’s drinking was another matter. Alcohol was always around: my mother believed that if my brother and I were allowed to drink alcohol, it would prevent drinking from being a big mystery. Also, alcohol could be relied upon to do to me what pot was supposed to do: make me stupid and encourage me lower my guard. They were always trying to find something that would get me to stop being such a prude! Marion kept sweet alcoholic drinks called “Hereford Cows”—rather like Bailey’s Irish Cream—which my brother and I were encouraged to drink. But for whatever reason, I am not especially interested in drinking—I somehow picked up my father’s horror of alcohol.

  I was oblivious to a lot of my mother’s drinking and never attributed her mood swings to alcohol. My brothers described her as a drunk, though. I knew that often when she got upset she would pour herself a drink, so I thought the moods caused the drunkenness. I also believed, in my childish fashion, that if she drank alcohol when she was upset she would suddenly turn into an alcoholic, and that prospect terrified me since she had spoken so much about the awful things her father had done when he was drunk. Once she got very upset and poured herself a large Bloody Mary. I drank the gin from the top of her tomato juice to keep her from becoming an alcoholic—It tasted horrible.

  My father took me to two movies at the University Theater near UC Berkeley when I was ten. One was “Tommy,” which terrified me. I did not know what a flashback was at the time, but that was the reason I got so violently upset that I had to leave the theater during the show was that I was having flashbacks, and emotionally I was a mess. He was not happy with me about this. The other movie was Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I liked. He loved it and was very happy and excited when he saw it. He seemed to think that the people in the movie really understood what he was trying to do.

  Sometimes I went to the movies alone. It was a one-stop BART ride with a short walk from my house. I met my best friend Jean at the movies; I was ten and she was almost thirteen. She was standing behind me in the line for the bathroom during an intermission, and I told her she had beautiful hair. She and I started talking and became fast friends. I also did something rather dastardly. I looked over my shoulder and said, none too quietly; “I think the movie’s starting.” She looked at me as though I was crazy, and said in a whisper: “No it’s not!” I grinned, shook my head no, grabbed her hand, and hauled her off to the bathroom since the line had vanished.

  Jean adored me as much as I adored her, even though in her words I was “as hard as a New York hooker.” I told her about Mother strangling me in the bathtub and s
he was really nice to me about it. I am sure I told her about the pliers thing too. She saw my mother being a terror but my house was safer for her than it was for me, and I was glad she was there a lot. She got along with my father and with my brother as well. Better than I did.

  Jean loved my family. Her family was conventional, and she felt alone and different around them. It wasn’t just Jean: overall, the people I brought over loved my family. My family was amazing: they read, heck, wrote science fiction, my mother was famous, and everyone was eccentric. Frankly, my friends tended to fit into my family better than I did. Of course, they didn’t see what I saw.

  Mostly. I knew I had to warn people that my parents would probably be nude when they first came over. I also had to warn my friends to not go into the hot tub without a bathing suit, and to make sure never to be alone with the grownups if they could help it. I also tried to tell them that anyone who wanted to give them drugs intended to separate them from their clothing.

  Every form of alternative sexuality and spirituality was not only accepted but expected. Christians were derided, of course, and anyone who believed in God quickly learned to hide it around my family, lest they be subjected to a long, superior lecture meant to shame the believer out of faith.

  My parents loved kids, especially if they had dependent personalities and reasonable intelligence. I had neither, and I refused to do what I was told. I was an enormous disappointment.

  While my social life had begun to bloom, my relationship with my father was going very badly. He mentioned to me every week or so that he wanted to “babysit me” during my “first acid trip.” By acid, my father meant LSD, or Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. It was never presented as a request but as a statement, as though it was a foregone conclusion that I would have one and the only thing to be determined was when and where. He was very disappointed and very angry with me for refusing to take acid with him. Why was it so important that I do so?

  From the accounts of a few of his victims, including Jean a few years later, LSD was simply the means to establish a sexual connection with an otherwise unwilling partner. LSD would preoccupy them with unrelated images and mental experiences, compromise their memory, and immobilize them enough to make escape or protest impossible. This way, he could claim that anything they didn’t like was a hallucination. His real hope was to make sex with him have a positive association.

  I was nervous about my father’s physical attentions. Most of it was made to seem accidental, like too-wet kisses or wandering hands when he managed to get a bunch of people in a group hug, but I was encouraged to create a hard denial in my mind. After all—said my mother—my father liked boys and would never bother with girls, who she claimed he thought were disgusting. Therefore the gooey kisses didn’t mean that, and the wandering hands were accidental.

  I was required to view his wish to babysit me on acid as perfectly benign and fatherly. I was required to ignore what I saw, and heard, and felt, even though my father used to tell me, all the time, “Incest is Nicest spelled sideways.”

  In any event, between my refusal to smoke pot with him, my refusal to take acid with him, and my refusal to go naked around the house, and the fact that my objections grew stronger over time and not weaker, my father came to the inescapable conclusion that he was not going to be able to seduce me. I went from being someone he loved to someone who had ruined his life. This was not your average refusal, because to him I was supposed to be the bearer of his Grand Vision to the future. Getting me involved was an integral part of his plan; for me to be a prude destroyed the whole thing. If I could not be made to understand that sex all the time would eliminate all human problems, how would anyone understand it? My prudishness had ruined his life.

  But I was not finished inadvertently spoiling his fun.

  I would get very angry when people called him a child molester, even though I knew it was true. I knew my father regarded people my age as “romantic” targets. I was loyal to my father, and hoped he would stop. I know this is absurd, but I thought I could get him to understand. Like a child, I tried to talk him out of what he wanted to do. I asked my father repeatedly why he didn’t “pick on someone his own size?” Why did it have to be kids? Why didn’t he want a grownup? He was not interested in my perspective: he wanted what he wanted, and what he wanted was sex with children.

  He was infuriated with me, and felt betrayed. He told me, very clearly, that there was no reason that he would love me any more than any random child he knew. I cried when he told me this, and pleaded with him to tell me it wasn’t true. I told him we had blood ties, and asked how couldn’t it mean anything to him that I was his own daughter: His response was to sneer, and to tell me that we did not have blood ties at all, but only “sperm ties.”

  It got worse from there. He decided that not only had I betrayed him and his vision, but that I was “in league with [my] mother to put [him] in jail.” He told me again and again that he would die in prison, and that it would be all my fault. He let me know in no uncertain terms that he did not trust me and that he would never trust me again. I had crossed the line, and now I was one of them. I had become part of the enemy.

  I didn’t want him to hate me and I was devastated at his rejection. I had believed my father loved me because he was the one who looked at me kindly and held me after my mother beat me up. I bonded to him. To her, never. He was the only kindness I knew. He was the sun in my sky, but the feeling was not mutual.

  Still, I refused to let go of the illusion that he loved me.

  My mother was walking along Prince St. near our house with me one day. She asked me if she could divorce my father, and I became distraught. I was so frightened and upset that I didn’t know what to do. What would happen to me if he left? He was the only kind voice in the house, and the only adult who didn’t hit me. If he left, my life would be over. Of course, I begged and pleaded with my mother to not divorce my him…as though I was a factor in the decision. She was very upset with me and blamed me for her misery, but at least this was not news.

  Not long after that, my mother sent my brother and me to visit with our lesbian neighbor over near the corner of Prince and Deakin, about a block away. I had the sense at the time that Mother had sent us there not so that we would have fun, but because the neighbor lady was very lonely and needed company. It almost seemed like we were to be “borrowed children,” as if we had been taken out of a petting zoo to help her feel better.

  The neighbor lady was hostile and angry, while determined to “do this right.” She did some crafts with us: something involving glitter and tongue depressors and a ceramic cup. I was aware that this was a very strange situation: I knew something was very, very wrong, but I did not know what.

  A few days later she shot herself to death.

  “‘I am half sick of shadows’, said the Lady of Shalott.”

  —Alfred Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott”

  Chapter 17: My Strange Love of Faire (1975–1977)

  “I don’t know love. I was built to protect not to love, so there is no use for me other than this.”

  —Leeloo Dallas, The Fifth Element

  I did everything I could to stay busy—and out of the house. Once I got involved in the Renaissance Faire, the Dickens Christmas Fair, and the SCA I was gone for thirty weekends a year at least. I had ballet lessons and swimming lessons, and I worked hard at everything I did. For years, I lost myself in work, too busy to notice how alone I was.

  Ah, the Faire… Saving grace of my life. I began at the Renaissance Faire when I was nine, courtesy of my uncle Don. He had brought me into the Parade Guild, also known as St. Cuthbert’s Guild. I was to be part of the Heraldic Animals parade, and he had helped me make a Cockatrice mask out of painted plaster over gauze strips over a wire armature, which I wore with the page costume Serpent had made for me; a cockatrice is a two-legged dragon with a rooster’s head. I also carried what they called a “Jingle Johnny” in the parades, which was a long stick with four sticks at
right angles covered with bells on the top.

  When I was eleven, I started doing all three Faires: Northern Faire, Southern Faire, and Dickens Fair. Between the three of them, I was away for thirty weekends a year and that meant I could have some space from the absolute insanity in that “home.” Unlike school, which was populated with normal children, Faire was full of the different, the misfits, the strange; people like me. What a blessing it was to finally be around other misfits, and also to be somewhere that I did a number of things well enough to be noticed in a good way.

  There was a lot of overlap between people who went to the Faire, where primarily the focus was improvisational theater, and the SCA, where the focus was hanging out with friends while in costume. Many of us spent every spare weekend either at the SCA or at the Faire, as well as attending weeknight rehearsals, making costumes, learning new skills—even studying music, dance, or a host of related skills. In any event, we got to dress funny, talk funny, dance and sing and hang out with other people doing the same things. I dragged all my friends to the Faire.

  Not everything at the Faire or SCA was rosy.

  I remember hauling my friend Jessica out of a tent at Southern Faire: she had been invited in there to see some of a man’s drawings. I knew exactly what he meant to do to her, so I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her out, and screamed at him: “Leave her alone; she’s a virgin!”