—Debbie Notkin, Other Change of Hobbit Bookstore
Let us review:
My father was living in the apartment on Telegraph Avenue, using his privacy to his own advantage and the disadvantage of every young man he could induce to join him. My mother and Lisa were now back at Greenwalls, sharing a bedroom and using the living room in ways a living room was never intended to be used.
I did not want to live with my father and his continual abuse of young boys. I also did not want to live with my mother and Lisa. Between their oppressive control, repulsive conduct and what I saw as never-ending hypocrisy, I would rather have slept on the subway. I was gone as much as I could possibly manage, but when I had to come home there were many unpleasant things in the house I had to step over.
My parents had always insisted to me how much they loved children. Now that Mother was making some money, she could get some more children to hang around under the pretense that she would rescue them. Not all of them were underage and not all of them were seduced, but none of them should have been seduced. Moreover, if one is going to devote time and resources to caring for foster children, or “fosterlings” as I always called them, it makes no sense at all to create an intolerable atmosphere for them. I was horrified when the orgies began.
Yes, orgies. Let us not spend more than a moment imagining the gruesome picture of middle-aged fat people committing consensual adultery in the living room. Let us not imagine the total number of showers taken in the week preceding any of these orgies, but I am certain it is less than the total number of human beings. And here I thought that in our enlightened family, male-female interaction of that type was out of style. Where once Mother had complained bitterly of my father “passing her around like a plate of cookies,” she was now passing herself around.
Phil was a neighbor who had moved in two houses down with his wife, Joanne, and their friend, Cynthia McQuillin. Cynthia was a folksinger and recording artist of some note, and not involved in any of the rubbish found in this chapter. I do not know what happened to Joanne, but Phil became sexually involved with both Mother and Lisa. They would tape a sign on the door from the kitchen to the living room, saying “Do Not Enter.” I would leave. It was either that or wait for my homework to be disturbed by noises which defied description.
One day, I was sitting in the car about 50 feet in front of Greenwalls, near Phil Wayne’s house. Mother and Lisa, who were about to drive somewhere with me, told me that they had to go on a drug called Flagyl to treat trichomoniasis, a venereal disease. They told me that they had caught the disease from Isaac (yes, that Isaac) or from his transgendered then-wife Celine.
Why on earth was my mother was having sex with a man who had asked her permission to have sex with me when I was six? Did she have feelings for him, or was she simply willing to get naked and trade microorganisms with anyone willing to do so? How could a mother have feelings for a man who slept with little children?
Oh wait… why am I even asking that?
Isaac was certainly not her only partner who had unusual ideas about the age of consent. I must have been some kind of fuddy-duddy, wanting my mother to be protective of me. Apparently, since I was no longer even a potential source of sexual contact, my mother had to gather her rosebuds where she might—even if some of these rosebuds were tainted with metaphorical nuclear waste.
I am going to think about something other than Isaac and my mother before I start throwing things. I am trying as hard as I can to not feel anything at all right now.
Lisa told me that Phil had gotten her pregnant, and added with obvious pride that he would have married her if she had not had an abortion. She felt her abortion was necessary, because she had severe endometriosis.
Yes, I know. The whole business is absurd. How can Lisa even have a conversation with me like that? She was sexually involved on a long-term basis with my mother, and would have married Phil who was still married to Joanne. She aborted Phil’s child. Why wasn’t she using birth control? How can anyone living in the last several decades be unaware of the most routine consequences of sex?
Anodea hung around a lot. She was a masseuse, a painter, and later on she was my father’s dealer too. When Phil got her pregnant, Mother talked her out of having an abortion. She married Phil, briefly. Their “wedding ceremony” was typical of the pagan weddings of the day: they vowed to love each other “until they died, or until love died.” After all, what could be better for a child than for his parents to stay married only as long as they felt like it? At this point, they are both married to other people.
Despite her involvement with my mother, Lisa was a Puritanical little thing. She was obviously scared of men, absolutely avoided dressing in a way which would have ever made her seem attractive, and wore her religion like a twisted halo. Yes, religion. Before she got to Greenwalls she had been very Christian, and she continued that despite all the pagan rituals, ordinations and orgies.
One might recall that calling a dog’s tail a leg does not make it a leg.
What had happened to Mother and Lisa being lesbians, now that all these guys were involved? Although my father regarded homosexuality as being “natural” to all people, back then nobody doubted that people could function sexually with people regardless of gender; all that was required was a willingness to get naked. It was regarded as a choice, a preference, which could be altered by experience. The assumption was that anyone who tried gay sex would prefer it, so the goal was to make sure they tried it before they got too “hung up.”
These days some people call this “sexual fluidity,” and claim it is “more the person than the plumbing.” Why would a preference for gay sex be more natural, more inborn, and more compelling than a preference for straight sex?
My mother did not seem to think there was any contradiction between identifying as a lesbian while having sex with men, women, and sadly children. One of my teenaged friends, Cyndi, ended up in the orgies. She had first been mixed up with Phil, then later with Lynx, and after that with my mother. She told me that Mother had crashed the car because she had been staring at Cyndi’s breasts. Mother claimed in her testimony that it had been Cyndi’s fault, that Cyndi kept putting her hand on her knee. A semi-truthful account of one of the orgies appears in Lisa’s testimony below.
“MR. DOLAN: Would you call four people together having sex an orgy?
ELISABETH WATERS: No, I don’t think I would.
MR. DOLAN: Have you ever defined this particular episode of these four people together as an orgy?
ELISABETH WATERS: I don’t remember.
MR. DOLAN: How old was Cyndi when this occurred?
ELISABETH WATERS: 19, to the best of my knowledge.
MR. DOLAN: Who was involved in this particular group activity?
ELISABETH WATERS: Cyndi, Phil, Anodea and Marion.
MR. DOLAN: And there was a fourth party, as well?
ELISABETH WATERS: That is four people.
MR. DOLAN: Were you involved in it?
ELISABETH WATERS: No.
MR. DOLAN: Did you witness it?
ELISABETH WATERS: Not really.
MR. DOLAN: Could you explain, please?
ELISABETH WATERS: I was over at Philip and Anodea’s house visiting them, and Cyndi was over there for some reason or another. I think she was chasing after Philip. I think she was having an affair with Philip at the time. And Marion was coming over, and I made some stupid joke about if you really want to make Marion happy, why don’t you jump her when she comes through the door and have sex with her. Probably the stupidest and most tasteless thing I ever said in my entire live, but I never expected them to take me seriously, and when Marion did, they did it. I just sort of rolled over on the other side of the room and closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep.”
Lisa claimed that first she suggested the orgy for Mother’s benefit, and then went to sleep and didn’t participate. No doubt if she went to a bar she’d drink water, if she went to the grocery store she’d wander th
e aisles with an empty cart, and if she went to the opera she’d wear earplugs.
I know that Lisa claimed Cyndi was 19 at the time of the orgies, but I do not believe she was. She had troubles with her own family: When I first met her, she had bruises all over her legs from some violent episode. We were friends back then. I was fifteen, and we were close in age. Her place in our family was not that of an independent adult, but that of an older child who still required care. It might have seemed to her that initiating a sexual relationship with my mother would guarantee an ongoing connection, in the simian way I mentioned above.
In most parts of the universe, if a teenager makes a pass at an adult then the adult is obligated to say no and preserve the relationship’s nonsexual boundary for the good of the child. Sadly, in my family if a teenager makes a pass at an adult and the adult is one of my parents, the parent is bound not only to take advantage of the teenager but to blame them! Not one shred of attention is given to the welfare of the child or the circumstances which might lead a child to do such an unwise thing!
Cyndi was not the only teenager that my mother chose to support. Despite her dislike of any and all aspects of caring for me, my mother was absolutely convinced that she loved children and she took in every waif and stray she could find. I resented them. It hurt so much to see Mother casually replace me, as though I was just a button on a coat. It hurt so much to be told day after day that they were better children than I was, because they were conforming to her ideology and doing what they were told.
Marion would pay for their college and support them, often train them in writing, and spend mountains of time with them. To her credit, she put a lot of people through college. Not everyone made it. After all, living with Mother was very much like being with someone who would pay you handsomely and only ask you to eat arsenic in return. One or two of the fosterlings did well. One became the editor of a major magazine, and another one reached her dream of becoming a veterinary technician.
Lisa tried to convince me I was no different than any fosterling and that my birth in the family gave me no rights at all. My father had already made it clear that he felt that I should have no precedence over any child he met anywhere. In practice, though, I was less important than the fosterlings since they had something my mother and father wanted, either direct sexual access or sycophantic respect and admiration. I had nothing like this to offer my parents. I think it is disgusting to rank one’s children according to what services they can provide. Or at all.
What do you do when your mother and her lesbian lover are having orgies in the living room?
What happens when you have absolutely no connection to your family and you are afraid of being at home? What do you do when you feel you are safer on a BART train than in your own bedroom? What do you do when your bedroom is Grand Central Station, and anyone will walk through there in the middle of the night for any reason at all?
What do you do when you are afraid, ask for help, and you are jeered at? What do you do when you are terrified of being alone and the only response is humiliation? What happens when you know you are an inconvenience to your mother and an obstacle to her sex life?
You leave. I had a backpack, a BART pass, and enough money to refill it. It was clear to me that this was no place to do my homework.
If anyone wants to know why I do not intend to become a writer: I shudder to think what Mother would say about my writing.
9. To The Critic
Trite and true
Rhymes for you
I mete out meter
Never sweeter
The poison inside
You’d only deride
Your love is a farce
Affection is sparse.
You murder with words
I ran, they’re unheard
Unseen and unfelt
The scars on my pelt
Remain to this day
Without going away
I retreat to within
Never feeling my skin
Till I trip or I stumble
Still taking a tumble
I bumble through life
With the slash of your knife
Still fresh in my brain
Unendurable pain!
How can I escape
From your long-ago rape
Except to break free
You no longer own me
——YOU BITCH!!!!!
Chapter 27: The Cat that Walks by Himself (1979–1982)
“I am the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.”
—The Cat, Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
I was already out of the house for thirty weekends a year, and with the SCA it was more than that. Coming home at all was intolerable. Coming home was not a relief, not a safe place, not a place of comfort or familiarity. It was a swamp of unpredictability and chaos, even if I have painted it as being funnier than it seemed at the time.
The stupid things my parents were doing changed every day, as did the cast of characters. If I came home and no stranger was in my bed, I would sleep. If a stranger was in my bed, either I could roust them or look for a couch. Food? Who knows? Cans of this and that, as usual. Shower with who-knows-who wandering into the bathroom? Jam something under the door and make a LOT of noise if any strangers were walking around. Hope that nobody is high and crazy and if they are, have a plan to leave in a hurry and a backup place to stay.
I was in school, of course. I was studying the usual subjects in school, plus some unusual subjects on my own time. I was studying heraldry and blazoning—Medieval coats of arms and identifying what is on them. I also studied Scots and Irish Gaelic on the bus on the way to school, and taught myself to sing in both of them. One teacher allowed me to do the “children’s book” we had been assigned in Scots Gaelic. It was displayed for some time at the Berkeley Public Library. I also read almost all of Dickens on my lunch hours at school, and most of Shakespeare. I regarded the subjects I studied on my own to be ever so much more interesting than the stuff at school.
Some of my teachers were very patient and allowed me to twist other assignments in a way that I liked. My German teachers were quite taken with me. German was easy, because I had already memorized Mozart’s opera Die Zauberfloete (The Magic Flute) in German when I was ten. This gave me a huge head start in vocabulary. I was offered a trip to Germany and a scholarship, but I wasn’t interested. To me, German was a tool I would use for opera. In any event, one German teacher allowed me to learn and recite Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky in German for an exam.
Yes, it is just as weird in German as it is in English. In English, the first verse of Jabberwocky goes thus:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.
In German, it is:
Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben.
Und aller-muemsige Burggoven
Die mohmen Raeth ausgraben.
I took a sewing class, along with fencing, English, and other expected classes. This was self-serving of me: I planned to use the class time to get some work done. I had no expectation that the teacher would have anything much to teach me, since I had already been sewing professionally, and the rest of the class would be making aprons and pot holders.
The things I made were not what one might have expected. I made a white Victorian ballgown for the Dickens Fair with a satin underlay below white eyelet lace for the bodice, a lightweight canvas lining, and a three-tiered skirt. It was gorgeous. I also made a corset from a pattern one of the ladies at the Renaissance Faire had given me.
Stupidly, I showed the ballgown to my mother. I had put a narrow black velvet ribbon around the knife-pleated Bertha neckline, and my mother went insane because she hated my wearing black. She thought it meant I was depressed, and that was not ok. She screamed and yelled, and I cried. I knew perfectly well
that what I had made was glorious and did not need her “help,” but she absolutely forbade me to keep the ribbon on it, so I had to find a way to appease her—she would not allow me to wear it or keep it with the black ribbon.
Adrienne, who had acted as my sewing teacher when I was being homeschooled, came over and brought me to her house. I was still sniffling and crying. She gave me some brown velvet ribbon to use on the neckline so my mother would calm down. It was wider: an inch wide as opposed to the ¼ inch black velvet ribbon I had chosen, but it looked OK. To this day, I cannot figure out why my mother was so upset over the ribbon.
My mother used to humiliate me in public, often reducing me to tears in front of my friends. Whether she thought I was impervious to her words or whether she was unaware of the effect they would have on me, I have met very few people in my entire life who were willing to commit such obvious and vile verbal assaults on anyone anywhere, let alone in front of a large audience.
Was she screaming at me for crashing the car, or burning the dinner? No. It was usually because I had either stayed up until 10 PM or slept till 7 AM, for which she claimed that I had “wasted the whole day.” Although it could be noted that she was a morning person who woke at 3 AM and retired at 8, her schedule did not justify burning me at the proverbial stake.
She seemed to think that everyone witnessing her tirades would sympathize with her, which added to my pain. I found out eventually that this was not the case and that at least one person who watched her was horrified and angry with her conduct. She had attacked me in front of one Bret Culpepper, who was to me the handsomest young man I knew. After she was done and had stalked off in a dramatic huff, he and a few of his friends came close to me, touched my arms and asked me if I was all right. I was stunned. I was afraid that he would laugh at me, but he and his friends responded with care and concern and reminded me that I was a human being.
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 25