I wasn’t having conscious thoughts of wanting to kiss my best friend—not until it happened, anyway. Jane and I were having a sleepover at her house on my seventeenth birthday. We’d gone to see Saturday Night Fever at the drive-in. We laid in bed, and we held hands. And we touched. And when she rolled over, I leaned over her and I kissed her. It was this glorious kiss. It was everything I had ever felt, turned inside out. The sky opened up. It was fireworks. It was like an explosion went off inside my body, and suddenly, in that moment, I was a new person. I understood what it was I had been missing. I knew that this is who I was. This was my dream. I was going to leave Leavenworth and become famous, and I would have love in my life. I was ready to love … women.
That’s funny, she doesn’t look like a rock star …
Saying hello to old friends at my concert in Leavenworth, 1994
My senior prom date, Maurice Young
READY TO LOVE
I look at you and all I can see is the shadow of my life.
You see this stage is a mirror. You can see me,
but I can’t see past its light.
Others have tried to reach down inside.
I only said that they were wrong.
But when all I’ve got left is me and my pride
I realize you can’t buy love with a song.
Somebody take me out of the night.
Show me what life is made of.
Won’t somebody reach inside of my heart.
I think that I’m ready to love.
A lesson that’s learned too late is a crime.
I can’t stand the pain of what could have been.
It’s such a shame, there’s no one to blame.
Yet no one knows what I’ve seen.
What do you see when you look at me?
Do I really seem so far away?
But the song will go on and you will applaud.
And look at me, I’ll just keep singing.
Somebody take me out of the night.
Show me what life is made of.
Won’t somebody reach inside of my heart.
I think that I’m ready to love.
I think I’m ready to love.
I feel like I’m ready to love.
Senior year of high school was fast approaching, and I decided I wanted to change things—really spend my last year in school being a kid. So I stopped playing at bars. I let the band I had been working with know that I was going to spend this last year being just a normal kid. I devoted myself to school, to that whole social world, and to Jane, who I had started sleeping with on a regular basis. Jane and I spent so much of our time together, it bordered on the obsessive. We even worked together at a fast-food joint. Jane worked the counter and I was the packer. It was a totally boring job, but I was happy with it because Jane and I got to work together.
Until the day I walked in and realized that her name wasn’t on the schedule for the next week. As I looked closer, neither was mine. I asked the manager what was going on and she got a little uncomfortable. “Well, I had to fire Jane because she wasn’t doing a very good job. And, well, just figuring the way you two are, I had to let you go too.” I stared at this woman, shocked. My relationship with Jane was such a private, secret thing, I had no idea that other people could see it, could feel it. And would react to it in such a strange way.
Jane wasn’t making any plans for college, but my parents were pushing it all the time. College, college, college. If college was going to get me out of Leavenworth, then I was all for it. Of course the only thing I was going to study in college was music. And my choices were pretty limited. Juilliard, Oberlin, Eastman, all the other classical music schools where the only thing I could study was classical guitar, which I was definitely not interested in. The only place where it seemed like I could do what I wanted, where I could focus on being the singer–songwriter I always saw myself as, was at Berklee College of Music, in Boston. I applied and was accepted.
As the time to go got closer, my relationship with Jane got more tumultuous. After all, she wasn’t going anywhere, just back to her job at another fast-food place. Right after I graduated from high school, I celebrated my eighteenth birthday. Celebrating might be too strong a word for it. It was miserable. Everyone seemed to forget about it. My father brought home a new sports car for himself, and most of the day seemed focused on that. My mother did give me a set of luggage for graduation, though. I never understood that. Maybe she knew I was ready to leave Leavenworth, or maybe she was telling me to go. Either way, I left shortly thereafter.
I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas Anymore
• • •
MY PARENTS FLEW WITH ME TO BOSTON TO MOVE ME IN at Berklee. I must have brought ten pieces of luggage—everything I owned at the time. I’d never moved anywhere, so I had no idea how much I was supposed to bring. They got me all signed in and dropped me off in my dorm room at Berklee. It was right in the middle of town, on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston’s Back Bay. My parents left and there I was. Alone in a new city. Ready to start my life away from home.
And in walked my roommate—Helene, from New York City. She was all fashion and style, with a huge presence. She was the first Jewish person I ever encountered in my life, and she was just so … different from anyone I was used to. Really out there, ready to make her mark on the world. That first night, we just sat up and talked. When I told her I was from Kansas, her eyes lit up. “Oh my God!” she said, like I was some slightly oddball foreigner. But eventually the conversation got more personal. Helene leaned into me and asked, “Well, do you like boys?”
What a funny question. No one ever asked me before if I liked boys. “Well, sure. They’re fine. They’re okay, I guess.” Helene smiled at me and said “Because I don’t. I like girls.” And I sat straight up, thinking, “She’s just like me! She likes girls!” It was such a revelation! There were other people like me. Other people I could talk to about my desires, in a free and open way. She told me that there were bars we could go to, and she intimated a whole world of women that I had no idea existed. In so many ways, my life started that day, during that conversation with Helene. After that, it was all different. She showed me a way to be, and I followed it.
A couple of weeks later, Helene walks up to me and says, “I found out where the women’s bar is. It’s called Prelude and it’s right down the street.” So off we go. And Helene waltzes right in, “Hey, sister,” she says at the door. I show them Jennifer’s expired ID to get in, and I walk inside. And it was just … wonderful. A room packed with women. Women of all shapes and sizes. Butch, tomboy, lipstick. Jewish women, women of color, white women—just this wonderful mix of people laughing and drinking and having a great time. What struck me most was women dancing together. Women, together, in public. I love to dance. In high school I’d go to the mixers, the dances, with Jane, and all I wanted to do was dance with her, lose myself in the music with her. But of course I couldn’t. Not in Kansas, anyway.
It was shocking and wonderful all at the same time. It opened a door that I didn’t even know existed. As I walked around the city, my whole perspective began to change. I realized that there was a whole gay world out there, a world that I’d never seen before and didn’t even suspect existed. A world where I could be who I am. Where I could, at last, have a real sense of community. I started going to Prelude every weekend. I’d just sit at the bar, sip a drink, and watch.
It’s not like school was a big pull on my time. I’m not quite sure what I expected at Berklee, but whatever it was, I didn’t get it. All of the classes were very theory-driven, very caught up in the idea of music rather than the music itself. I had to learn to play a certain way. Learn all of their rules. I didn’t like it. I thought that music was whatever it wanted to be. Theory just wasn’t where I was at. I wanted to play. Not talk about it; do it.
Jane called me and told me she wanted to come visit. Sitting at the bar at Prelude was great, but it wasn’t a relationship. Even then, I knew that was wh
at I wanted. So I told Jane to fly on up. Her visit ended up with her moving into my dorm with Helene and me. I had to sneak her into the dorm time after time because, clearly, she wasn’t a student there. Eventually, we decided to move into an apartment together. Which would mean, of course, that I had to get a job.
I worked security at Boston Deaconess Hospital. With my uniform and my time clock, I’d walk my rounds making sure everything was okay. It was a real job, something I’m not too fond of. I’d work the morning shift (from eight to five), and sometimes pull a double if they needed me to. And then I’d try and go to school. But the pull of school got less and less. After all, I had a job and I had Jane. But I hated that job, really hated it. I woke up one morning and said to myself, “I want to play music. I played music before and made money, I can do it again. I can.” So I picked up my guitar and walked down into the Park Street subway station. I opened up my guitar case and just started playing all the songs I remembered from playing the bars and stuff. The people would all be standing there, waiting. When there weren’t any trains, the sound down there was beautiful. My voice and the music reverberated through the whole station. People would drop money in, listen for a moment, and, just when I was in the middle of a song, the train would blast through, blaring, and all the people would just disappear. And I’d start singing all over again.
I did it that day and made something like eight dollars in the first hour. I counted it up and realized that it was more than Boston Deaconess was paying me. So I picked up one of my just-earned quarters, called the hospital from the station, and quit right there, on the spot. If I was going to have a job, it was going to be playing music. Music and nothing else.
I started at the top of Boylston Street and worked my way down, stopping in every bar and asking, “Do you have live music?” I got turned down flat at every single place until I got to a little downstairs restaurant and bar across from Hancock Center: Ken’s By George. The manager told me to come back later for an audition. I came back and got a job playing five to nine (during cocktail hour). Five nights a week, fifty bucks cash a night. Two hundred and fifty bucks a week, off the books. I was living large.
I brought that first two hundred and fifty dollars home and showed it to Jane. She plucked it right out of my hand. Suddenly, she was deciding how to spend the money, what to do with it. I was sort of stunned. Why was she taking my money? But I didn’t make a big deal of it. I couldn’t. I would have been making a scene. And, of course, I didn’t do that. I just let it slide off my back.
Playing at Ken’s was great. It offered such freedom. Every night, I would go and just play for four hours. There was such a camaraderie there among the workers; we always had the best time. One woman, a customer, came back to see me a number of times. My age; well-dressed. And she started talking to me, chatting me up. She was clearly interested, and I wasn’t about to let this opportunity pass me by. After work we drove around for a while. And then parked.
When I got home, Jane was upset. Very upset. A couple of days later, we were having breakfast and she just turned around and hit me. Boom! Right across the face. Gave me a black eye and a bloody nose. I was stunned, I didn’t know what to do. “That was for the other night,” she said. “I was just thinking about it and it made me so angry.” That was the moment, I think, when I knew that I had to get out of that relationship. But I didn’t act; I just went numb. I willed myself not to feel, thinking that it was the price I had to pay for stepping out on Jane. It was a repeat of my sister yelling at me or my mother hiding when I was young. I just turned it all off and pretended it wasn’t even there.
Was my relationship with Jane love or addiction? In my head, that is an ongoing debate about many of my relationships. I eventually saw that Jane’s jealousy was more of a sickness than a positive kind of emotion. It was no longer exciting to me; it became suffocating and difficult to take. It got to where I could talk to no one. She didn’t want me to have any friends of my own. To this day, I don’t know what her issues were from childhood. I never knew what circumstances from her own life taught her to snap like that. What I did know was that I had to get out from under her control. She had always hinted at suicide and said that she didn’t think she would be able to go on if I ever left her. I had to get out of that relationship. I even opened up the Yellow Pages one day, to call a therapist for help. I explained to Jane that there was something wrong with me and that I needed to go and talk to someone so that I could figure out how to fix myself. In reality, I needed to go to someone who could help me figure out how to get out of this harmful and abusive relationship.
In the meantime, the door had been opened to other women, and I didn’t want to close it. I started staying out more and more nights, longer and longer.
Finally, Jane decided she’d had enough. She told me she was going back to Kansas. I’m sure she wanted me to try and stop her, but I didn’t. I was relieved. It was hard—trying to reconcile the woman I was becoming with the girl that I had been.
After Jane left, I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I could come and go as I pleased, see whoever I wanted to, like Caroline. Caroline was a regular at Ken’s, and the more she watched me play, the more I developed a crush on her.
Caroline came from a very wealthy family, and she was very smart. She was working as a sales associate at a high-end jewelry store. She was a lot of fun to hang around with, though she was a bit of a partier. I had developed a big crush on Caroline, and, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get next to her because she, of course, had a crush on someone else—one of the other girls in the group that night. I had a classic Melissa-type hopeless obsession. I like you, you like her, blah, blah, blah. We slept together one time, but we never had sex. Caroline was fun—sweet and warm. These were traits Jane hardly ever showed me. It was just nice to wake up with Caroline in the morning, and that’s what inspired me to write the song “Morning,” which has never been recorded. Why do musicians get their hearts broken? So they can write incredibly sad songs.
MORNING
Morning creeps into the window
Its golden fingers touch the sheets where we lay
Morning wraps its arms around me
And whispers in my ear it was all yesterday
Morning, you’re lying here beside me
But somehow now the night feels so many years away
And it’s morning, it’s morning, it’s morning
This moment, the end of all beginning
We just go on with living and be what we are
A memory lingers deep inside me
I must believe you loved me, if just for an hour
Longing to be the one you dream of
But someone else has touched that place in your heart
And it’s morning, it’s morning, it’s morning
Love, love is so unfair
Its eyes are blind and its heart doesn’t care
If it’s left out in the rain
It’s me that feels the pain
Morning there’s no one left to save me
And all you ever gave me was the need to write a song
And it’s morning, it’s morning, it’s morning
One night, I walked into Ken’s for my regular gig and the manager pulled me aside. And fired me. For no reason at all that I can see, Ken’s fired me right then and there. I was sorry about losing the job, sorry to leave a place that had become so familiar to me, but I figured another job couldn’t be too hard to find.
Little did I know. I got a job in a Japanese restaurant in Back Bay. It closed two weeks after I started. Then another job at a piano-bar-type place called 99’s, but I didn’t know enough show tunes to make the gig stick. Finally, I landed a piano-bar job at the Copley Hotel, a famous historic hotel right on Copley Plaza in downtown Boston. Two days before I was supposed to start, the hotel burned down. It was almost funny, but I couldn’t help but feel like someone was trying to tell me something.
Boston was good for me. It op
ened doors I didn’t know existed. It changed me as a woman, as a lesbian, as a performer. But as I looked around this city, I realized that it wasn’t where I wanted to be. I wanted to go west, to Los Angeles. After all, how else do you get to be a rock-and-roll star but by going to L.A.?
But I needed to make some money first, and the easiest place to do that was in Kansas. So I headed home.
Home Again
• • •
AFTER A YEAR IN BOSTON, I WAS ABLE TO LOOK AT LEAVENWORTH with new eyes. There were other gay people there. It was a revelation: a whole queer community that I never even knew had existed when I lived there. I started meeting new people and seeing old friends who, even if they weren’t out of the closet, were open about who they are with their friends. The musical opportunities in Leavenworth, though, are less than stellar. I landed a job with the Army Chapel as its Music Assistant. I moved back in with my parents while I tried to scrape together enough money to buy a car so that I could drive to Los Angeles. I’d see Jane every so often, only through mutual friends. But it wasn’t the same. The passion, the desperate need—it wasn’t there anymore. Generally, I tried to steer clear of her. After the time we had spent together in Boston, she scared me. I had closed all the doors that would allow me to feel anything about her, and I wasn’t about to open them again.
One of my friends was still a senior at Leavenworth High. I was twenty. She was eighteen. Before the end of the school year, I used to drop her off in the mornings and we’d listen to the radio in my car before class. She kept hinting that she knew that I was gay and she was very interested in me. She came on to me in a certain way—a very innocent way. Looking back on it, I now understand that she was looking to experiment and explore her sexuality.
The Truth Is ... Page 4