by Storm Large
“Shit.” I slumped in my chair.
“Oh, Dude. Do you know who the father is?” he asked, reaching for his cigarettes.
I nodded.
“Is the father . . . married?”
One nod before the sobbing started.
“Duuude.” He sighed a long plume of smoke.
Michael didn’t judge me, though I knew he was disappointed. He was a great friend, took care of me, and let me stay there as long as I needed, before and after.
After the doctor gave me the official, “Yes, you’re pregnant, and no, you can’t stop being pregnant by swearing that much. Come back on the twelfth,” I was shown a picture of my ultrasound. I guess they wanted me to think about my choices, or my options, or something. And I did think about it. The little black-and-white picture looked like a dot floating around some cold cuts. The Dot, that’s what I called it. Dot.
This wasn’t the first time I had seen the Dot; I had been pregnant once before. He was the first man I took up with after I got off heroin. Not only did he not do drugs, he was a drug counselor! Plus all he wanted to do was fuck all day and night. No way! Me too!
He was a stunning male specimen, and that beautiful, demanding cock of his was the perfect kickstand to prop up my sagging self-esteem. I didn’t know what a sociopath was and hadn’t heard about sex addiction yet. What could possibly go wrong?
About two months in, I started to feel funny. I was exhausted and sore. I could barely keep my eyes open much past sundown. The day I came home from a doctor’s appointment, Kickstand was watching porn in my room.
“Hello!” He said with the phoniest happy soundtrack playing behind him, a pile of naked licking girls moaning at him from the screen.
“I’m pregnant.” The words fell with a dull thud. “Which one are you watching?”
“Whu . . . ?”
“No Man’s Land Six?” Awesome.” I crawled into my loft bed, five feet off the ground. It had a tiny sitting area below it. Kickstand shot up from under the loft and stared at me, his eyes shark flat.
“You told me you couldn’t get pregnant.”
That’s what I had thought, too; years ago, a doctor had told me my cervix had some scarring and my uterus was tilted. If I ever wanted to have children, he advised, I would need some corrective surgery. I took that to mean, “Continue to fuck irresponsibly, young lady!”
“Look, don’t worry about it. I got it, okay?”
“Yeah, I was gonna say.” He went back to the lesbian orgy on television. Later, he woke me up pushing my legs apart with his knees cooing, “Well, at least now we don’t have to worry about you getting pregnant.”
The day I had that first abortion was one of the most painful, terrifying, and humiliating days I had ever experienced. And, while I lay in my bed, after the whole ordeal, shaking and bleeding into an adult diaper, Kickstand wanted to comfort me. When I say “wanted” I mean to say “demanded” and when I say “comfort” I mean to say “fuck.”
When I told him it was a medical impossibility, he said a blowjob would be sufficient and why was I being so selfish?
So, with Kickstand’s performance on my mind, I had decided not to tell Mr. Whoopass of my condition. He was doing his thing, being married, and I was doing mine, being a mess, and putting on a happy face while dying on the inside. Mr. Whoopass was a lovely man, and I was pretty sure he loved me, but I was still too terrified to make the call. Michael and the few friends who did know were pressuring me to, though. If we were ever going to be friends, they said, I needed to tell him the truth. The truth that I’m an overly fertile idiot? Yeah, I’ll get right on that. I knew they were right, though.
During the agonizing lead-up to the twelfth, when the Dot and I were scheduled to part ways, I went on a road trip to see my best friend in Los Angeles. She was a better human being than I had ever pretended to be, and being around her always helped. A stunning, red-haired, former model, who, after growing disenchanted with the shallow fashion world, shaved her head and traveled to Tibet to help a bunch of refugees get to Dharamsala. She went on to the American University and wrote for Mother Jones. Later, she taught English in one of the toughest public schools in Los Angeles, but that September, while the ashes of my stupid life were sputtering, she was going to have a small gathering at her apartment in Los Angeles to celebrate her birthday, as well as her rebirth day.
She had been deeply entrenched in studying the Torah, Talmud, the Zohar, and other Jewish tomes, so she could become Orthodox, the ritual of which was to go into a deep pool of rainwater, called a “mikvah,” then, blessed by a rabbi, you emerge a brand new human. Wiped clean and pure. God, if only . . .
Why the heck she wanted me in her life at that time is still a great mystery to me. I suppose, if you can’t be a good example, be a great cautionary tale.
She, too, told me that I should tell Mr. Whoopass about the Dot. I still refused, even though I knew she was right.
My whole six-and-a-half-hour drive from San Francisco to her birthday party in Los Angeles went like this; “Okay, if I can hold my breath until the next speed limit sign, I’ll call him. Oooh, bummer, didn’t make it. Not going to call him.” Then, “If, the next song on the radio is a Rolling Stones song, then I’ll call him. Nope. The Who. Not gonna call him.”
Finally, pulling off the 101 into West Hollywood, I looked at my little phone and said, “Okay, if he calls me today, I will tell him.” We hadn’t talked since early August, nearly a month before, and though the conversation was sweet, we had recommitted ourselves to never speak until he really wasn’t married anymore.
So, I knew I was safe. There was no way he would call me, until he did two hours later.
“Hi!” he said, bright as morning. After some awkward small talk, he asked, “I was just wondering if you were okay.”
My brain churned through the people who knew I was pregnant, and whether there any way or connection to him that he may have heard. “Sure, I’m great!”
“You’ve just been on my mind a lot and I had a crazy dream about you.”
You said if he called today you’d tell him.
“I know we aren’t supposed to be doing this, I just, I don’t know,” he said.
Yes, you do know. I don’t know how, but . . . “Well . . . I . . . do kind of need to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
Deep breath. Do the right thing. “Okay. Here goes, ahem . . .” Lie! Lie! “I used to be a man. There, I said it.”
“Wh . . . what?”
He’s chuckling! “Yeah, see, a long time ago, I was a hockey goalie up in Montreal. My name was Gunther, and, well, I was amazing. But during the Olympic trials in the eighties, I made this amazing, game-winning save but my cup slipped out of my jock and, you know, wham! Oh, it was awful.” Good, please keep laughing. Please do not hate me . . .
“Hey, Storm . . .”
“Wow. I feel so much better having told you . . .”
“Okay, okay. What are you talking about?”
Don’t tell him don’t tell him.
“I’m pregnant.”
Shit.
“Hello?” I held my breath.
“I know,” he said, sighing.
“You know? How the fuck do you know?”
“The dream I had. You were having our baby. I was holding your hand in the hospital room; you were in labor.”
“That’s the dream you had??”
“I was awake, actually. It was more like a head rush. I was in the garage working on my car and I stood up from leaning over and, I don’t know, I saw it.” Great. He’s a psychic. He would later have a dream about the man I started sleeping with to get over him. “Listen, let me send you some money . . .”
“Absolutely not.”
“Come on, I can’t be there, so let me pay for it.”
“No.”
“Storm, please . . .”
“If you can dream my address then you can send
me money. Look, I’m fine, I fucked up, and I’m paying for it. You go back to trying to fix your marriage and forget we even talked about this.”
Bad enough I was knocked up by a married man but to have him secretly mail me his married man’s money to “take care of it” just sounded too gross. I wanted him there, I wanted him to come hold me, I wanted a future. Acting tough was my only move.
He turned out to be pretty resourceful and found a way to get me some money after all. He also insisted that, since he couldn’t be there, we should lift the no-talking rule. “I need to know you’re all right, okay?”
I wasn’t all right by the time I got to the mikvah, but I was pretending to be, for the benefit of my best friend and the rabbis who were officiating at her rebirth. Standing in the temple, watching my friend forging a deeper connection to God, I took a shot at praying. I closed my eyes, held my belly, and had a little chat with the Dot. “Hey, I’m really sorry about this, but you can’t stay here this time. I can barely take care of myself, let alone another little human, and you deserve better.” I then swore to God if the Dot ever returned, under any circumstances, I would bring it into the world and do whatever I could to give it the best life possible. That was the deal.
I closed my eyes and held my belly. The sun was shining and God was blessing my best friend. I hoped God had a little room in his ears to hear me. I opened my eyes and looked down at my big hands on my belly and, for a split second, saw a tiny hand grab my index finger, hold on, then let go.
An hour or so later, there was an earthquake, a small one. Happens all the time in LA, but I took it as God shaking on the deal.
I drove back to San Francisco a day later, feeling even more pregnant and crazy. Crying intermittently, nausea chewing into my guts, then giving way to desperate, animal hunger. My face had plumped and softened and my boobs looked like they were having an allergic reaction to shellfish. I absolutely hated myself. I felt the Dot was good with our deal, and was moving on, but I was still miserable.
I decided I needed one day of silence, of introspection, meditation, and really try to find a little peace with everything. I would take water, some fruit, and a blanket to the beach, sit by myself and stare at the ocean until I forgave myself. The calendar in my head flipped its pages. What’s today? The ninth, okay, driving back to San Francisco today, tomorrow, the tenth, band business, my appointment is the twelfth, so the eleventh. Tuesday.
When I got home I took out my real calendar and a pink high-lighter. I drew a small heart inside of a bigger heart, to mark the day. Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
September 12, I was sitting in the crammed waiting room of the Women’s Needs Center, shoulder-to-shoulder with mostly younger girls, the majority of whom were weeping. All of us were staring up at the television listening to the good folks at CNN talk about how those sorry souls were mercifully unconscious or dead before they even got close to the ground. Well, thank God for that.
I looked down and stared at a parenting magazine one girl was thumbing through, “Lose That Baby Fat!!!” chirped the banner across the cover photo of a lithe and tight mommy jogging with her pink-cheeked miracle in an aerodynamic, off-road stroller. I wondered if that mommy was working out today.
“Storm Lang?”
“Large.”
“Really? Wow. Okay, come with me, please. “
It wasn’t until a few days later that I got my day at the beach. The news screeched with discovered plots to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge, to sprinkle anthrax out of helicopters, of a Mau Mau style uprising of Muslim extremists. No one was safe. We were at war, and we should run out and get as much fucking duct tape as we could carry.
I walked barefoot through the cold autumn sand. The sky frowned gray and hard like angry old men beating the drums of war. The Pacific Ocean looked pissed off, too, with big, black waves, slapping, judging. I stood, small and bleeding, surrounded by beautiful, terrible, and huge.
I was a scoured and empty wrapper from some cheap candy bar nobody wanted. Not even close to that tall-walking, loud-talking, hard-rocking motherfucker that no one could touch. My fans thought I was a badass, a ninja, and a killer. Was that ever me? Or had I just been in a crazy panic for these last few years, so blinded and deafened by the me on stage I couldn’t notice the weak loser I had always been?
It didn’t matter. All that I had been was no longer me, anyway. The me I had built out of fear and fuck yous was gone. I sunk to my knees into the sand, cried and was nothing. Prayed, cursed, and apologized and was nothing. Thought about New York, the lives lost, about how the world was exploding, and I was . . . a girl crying alone in the sand. Useless. Nothing.
“I am nothing.” I said into the wind. Somewhere, another, kinder voice answered from nowhere and everywhere.
“Exactly.”
I always swore that I would leave San Francisco for good when Paradise closed down. And I was pretty sure that would never happen, the owner, Robin, and his pal and manager, Terry, were institutions in my world. But times were tough for live music.
Times were tough in the city for nightclubs in general. Under Mayor Willie Brown, some fancy, and hastily built, lofts sprang up around and on top of rock clubs and bars. Rumor had it that the zoning in South of Market, where most of these clubs did business, had been changed from light industrial to mixed use.
It’s a lot of building code and policy hoo-ha, but the outcome simply was: Rich people bought real estate in and around buildings that housed these establishments, only to be shocked, shocked that those establishments, with their neon bar signs and marquees that announced “Live Music,” actually had live music, served alcohol, and were open late. So, of course, the very upset, fancy new neighbors went about trying to oust the riffraff, the riffraff being musicians, bartenders, waitresses, security, and a ton of other folks who work in the nightclub world, who were there first, and had been there all along. It had always been okay to make a ruckus down there in South of Market. But seemingly out of nowhere, the new, bourgeois dot com kings and queens were having hissy fits and getting clubs shut down. They did this by calling the cops when anyone would take a guitar solo or take out the recycling at three in the morning.
Rose was gone, the management company in New York stopped returning our phone calls after September 11, my band was essentially bust. I hadn’t spoken to nor heard from Mr. Whoopass. I was single, homeless, bandless, and didn’t have anything keeping me in San Francisco. It was time to look for friendlier territory to park my van.
Funny how the Universe eavesdrops on everything you say, even think, and sometimes delivers it all, in exact detail, to the real world.
My second-to-last gig in SF was in December. I sang a few songs at my friend’s birthday at the Café Du Nord. A man named Frank was in the audience. He told me that if I were ever in Portland to come by his club, Dante’s; he would give me a job if I moved there. A week later, my sound engineer, El Fay, told me she was going on a month-long tour, and could I watch her house and her dog, Willma, up in Portland for the month of January.
I had toured through Portland a bunch of times in various bands and always loved the wet, wide, green spaces dotted with some city bits. The smell was lush and fertile with tendrils of roasting coffee and smoke. I also loved the crabby pale residents, every one of whom seemed to be in a band.
Mr. Whoopass lived in Portland.
My last show in San Francisco was New Year’s, goodbye 2001, hello 2002, at The Fillmore. Not a bad sendoff.
While headed north on the 5, my phone rang twice. One was Terry at the Paradise Lounge. “Come to the club. They’re shutting us down and we’re drinking the inventory.” And the other was Mr. Whoopass to tell me he was getting a divorce and “Oh, you’re going to be in town? What are you doing on Friday?”
“Don’t you think you should visit Mom?” my brother John would say, periodically, over the six years I lived in Portland pretending she was dead.
“Nope,” was m
y regular reply, and John never pushed. He was the only one of all of us who kept up with her. He knew how she was, and where she was. Henry was now a father of two and had fired Mom years before. He had tried to let Mom babysit, to let her be a grandmother, but his new wife put a stop to that. There were a few mishaps with bad driving, one involved a lit cigarette ending up in the kid’s car seat, and the other was about some chemically induced blackout where she rolled her car after dropping off his three-year-old son.
Nobody blamed Henry for keeping himself and his family a good distance from Mom, after that. Mom would never meet his third child, a beautiful baby girl named Amelia.
John faithfully remained in contact with Mom. I made him promise to never tell her where I was, give her my phone number, or tell her anything about me, and he always kept his word. Every now and then, Mom would give a card to John, to give to me. He would ask me if I wanted it, if I said yes, he would mail it to me himself.
In her loopy girly handwriting, I’d read about how she was, and what she’d been up to. For years, I got updates this way. There was never any begging, just a sincere promise that things were different. “I am so much better, Stormy.”
She told me how she had started making beaded jewelry, had successfully lobbied the powers that be at her facility to put in a small putting green for the residents, had begun an annual fundraising picnic with donated BBQ and live music, and how she was really kicking ass from her little wheelchair.
They were brief little updates. They were all chatty and positive. And not a single one of them mentioned how she had to have her leg amputated.
It had happened some years before. Because of the paralysis, she couldn’t feel the bone infection from an undetected fracture in her thigh. When the doctors discovered it, it was too late, so off it went.
Her friend wrote to tell me, in an email, how she was doing really well despite her situation, and wondered if I would ever come see her. “She’s doing so much better, Stormy.”
But I was living in Portland, now, happy, healthy. My new band, The Balls, was becoming a Portland institution in the mere three years it had been in existence. Mr. Whoopass and I were living together. He played bass in The Balls and we had been performing every Wednesday at Dante’s, to more and more packed and whacked crowds. We were in demand in Seattle and in San Francisco, and life was good again.