Chapter Four
7-13-10 Text received in the afternoon 3:45 pm
“In desperate need of a massage. Are you available for a two-hour In call right now? Money no object. Very stressed out. Send rates, location, closest trains. Are you clothed or nude? Erotic? Mutual touching allowed?
Yes I am available now. Can we make it 4:10 pm? What is your name please? Where are you coming from?
(30 seconds later)
My plans have changed, are you available tomorrow? What time?”
His training to be a girl with the dolls; his hair styling, beauty shop performances and the tacit permission by two major adult female figures in his life to cross-dress, all caused him to be confused. Even years later, his mother maintained a subtle, sly, and seemingly non-intentional mindset about encouraging his girlishness; "You just wanted the dolls--so I got them for you." Even after a continual stream of conflicts and fights with other children as he defended himself from haters because he was different, his mother continued privately to indoctrinate him into a very specific level of intimacy with her. She hardly ever acknowledging his maleness. Looking back, he believed that the purpose of her indoctrination was to turn him into a kind of lifetime sister/friend/confidante as an antidote to the cold, cruel, unfeeling world of men in her life. His training was heaviest the years just before adolescence.
*****
He jerked awake, eyes open. School! I’m late! What time was it? His Mom hadn't called him and…wait; there is no school. Aaah relief. School was off and it was summer. He floated back to sleep on his stomach, head buried in the pillow. Just before being shocked awake with the thought of the prison of school, he was having that rapturous and reoccurring dream of flying. It was so easy, all you had to do was think about it and lie on the ground and if you thought hard enough your body would lift. You'd begin to hover. It was so easy, he could do it right now, this instant as he tried to sleep again and return to that floating place. Suddenly he felt something tickling him on the middle of his back. “It’s a spider,” he thought, his eyes opening wide with fear. But no, he could detect buzzing. It was the friendly buzzing of a fly. It lifted off his back, was gone for a few seconds and then landed again near the same place on his back, only lower. It was walking toward his butt. He smiled. The fly seemed to sense that it felt good and enjoyed the dance too, as if it was teasing him. It lifted off yet again and landed; this time close to his neck. He giggled and the fly lifted off, buzzing for a few seconds and immediately coming down again, this time near the middle of his back again. It seemed like a game. Suddenly he loved the fly and wanted to keep it for a pet. It became a tiny, fairy-like thing bringing happiness. The fly wasn't dirty anymore; he didn't mind it walking here and there on the mountainous landing pad of his back. He welcomed it. It felt so good. Now they were friends.
A few hours later he'd had some juice and cereal, and was back in his bedroom. Though it was a warm June day outside, he'd offered to stay in and help his Mother clean windows. The house was a small, aqua colored, ranch-style cookie-cutter two-bedroom rental in St. Paul Park, a suburb of the Twin Cities. It was the summer between his fifth and sixth grades at school. He was eleven.
*****
They were taking a break from cleaning together. Steve and his Mother were both sprawled out on his single twin bed. She had a dust rag in one hand and bottle of Windex in the other. He didn't know how they got to talk about it but his Mother was telling him about other boys she'd dated in High School and how she ended up with his Father.
"So then, did you love Dad when you married him?"
"Oh kid I don't know what love is. I thought I loved Duane. But I think I just married him because everyone told me it was the thing to do and Fred and Edna, your grandparents, they were so perfect. I think I wanted them to be the parents I never had.” She stood then and began cleaning the upper pane of one of the two windows of his bedroom facing the back yard. There was a small, plot of very green grass, and further, a white fence with a thick growth of purple, lilac bushes spilling over. The bushes blocked the view of the neighbor’s house. Her right arm went round and round making squeaking noises. The Windex was disappearing and the pane of glass sparkled invisibly.
“We got married, I was just out of high school. I didn't know what else to do, really. Right away I got pregnant with Gregg and your Father enlisted in the Navy and left. When he came back from the war, he'd changed, he swore and peed in public. I didn't like that. I wanted to leave him, but Fred and Edna talked me out of it."
"What was it like before you met Dad, when you were a kid?" She was becoming more than a Mother. She was a person with feelings and a past. He wanted to know more; the listening made him feel less son and more ersatz sister. He was confused and excited. She talked about adult things he'd never thought of before, but pretended to understand. He was feeling seduced by her words, their sharing felt taboo too; all the more exciting to be listening. Now she was bending over slightly. Steve noticed her breasts moving as she was cleaning the lower pane of the window, one arm spraying, and one arm moving the cleaning rag round and round on the glass as it became invisible.
"I was such a tomboy. I loved playing with boy stuff, outside. I didn't like girls that much. I remember one birthday I got a model plane. There's a picture of me with it in the back yard of our house in Mount Carrol. My sister Nina said I was always scraping and banging up my knees, always falling down and getting into fights with other kids. My Mom wanted to raise us as Catholics so she sent me to an all girl's Catholic school-St. Peters, in Mt. Carroll where the nuns were so mean, oh it was awful kid.” She stopped cleaning now and for a moment, stared out the window at the lilac bush, lazily rustling in the trembling, summer wind. Then she sat down next to him on the bed again, this time leaning forward in a mannish pose with her elbows on both her knees and her bent legs wide open. “One day in school, I think I was about 12, I felt something between my legs. I felt down there and it was blood. Oh God kid, I got so scared, I thought I was dying or something! I went up to the teacher, Sister Grace, I was so afraid, and I said "Sister, I think I'm sick, I don't feel good and there's blood coming out of me..." This nun just stared back at me, really mean-like and dismissing me, "You're not dying,” she said “you're just having your time-your period is what they call it. Here—“ She held out a rough, brown partially folded paper towel. “Go into the girl’s lavatory and stick this up there, then when you get home, tell your Mother and she’ll put a rag up there." That nun was so mean. I think I started crying. “Save your tears for washday, Pauline,” she said. I'll never forget that. So mean.”
Steve said "a period?"
Mother: "Oh yeah kid, that's when the blood comes out of a girl's body, and the blood is used to fertilize the eggs inside, then you get pregnant.”
Steve: "Ew. Do you do that?” He recalled seeing an awful smelly, large, blood-soaked thing in the bathroom wastebasket.
Mother: "Sure, kid, you have to wear a Kotex to catch the blood. Oh kid it's just blood" frowning at his revulsion, then smiling and shaking her head slowly back and forth “And just where do you think you came from?” Steve smiled back at her, turning very red and looked away.
She was so matter-of-fact about her gender. He loved her casual approach to any topic. Whether it dealt with masculine or feminine things. He relished these confessionals. He hardly ever saw her cry. But once he remembered his Grandmother Nan, bullying her at the kitchen table before they were to board a train back to Milwaukee from Savanna. He was about 10. Nan sat at the table in a black and white silk dress and black pumps. She was all dolled up to drive Steve and his Mother to the Savanna train station, to catch the fast-moving Hiawatha Express on the Burlington line. The Burlington line would take them back to Milwaukee, Wisconsin via the scenic route along the winding Mississippi River. He loved to sit in the “Doom car” and watch the river, it was such a living thing as it spread out and snaked it’s way between swampy Subula, Iowa and the rocky, steep cliffs of the Palisades Park on the Illinois side. There were large and small sand bars that were constantly forming and disappearing amidst the blue green and sometimes muddy, rippling or white-capped waves of the Mississippi River.
The two women were both crying. “Stop it, Edna oh please stop it. Why are talking like this to me? Why? Why?” his Mother was begging; he’d never heard such a sound in her voice before; such a pleading note of pain. Nan responded martryllike, tears rolling down her eyes with her hands clasped together as if in prayer, lying on the red and white checked tablecloth in front of her. “You will never know how strong my love for Duane is, it’s much stronger than your love for him. Let me tell you, a Mother’s love is the strongest love in the world.” This was Nan’s clincher line. She kept repeating it, over and over as if to beat his Mom down and make her feel powerless and invisible. Nan definitely had more confidence and the stronger ego. She seemed more mature and grounded than Mother. She hadn’t been stunted by an abusive environment like Mother had. It made him feel sick inside that the two of them were fighting and hurting each other; and even more strange because they weren’t actually hitting each other. All this hurt was being delivered with stinging words between passive, feminine tears; on and on went the blows of emotional pain. Thankfully Nan drove them both to the station and they made the train.
Steve and his Mother formed a “No boys allowed!” very private and secret, virginal maidens’ club. One of her high school stories she shared with him was a madcap date with fat Bob Wagner. She had stayed out too late, and had to climb up the porch trellis to sneak into her bedroom window without waking up her older sister, Nina. Coincidentally, her maiden name was Macbeth and between her, and her other two sisters, Nina and Florence a trio was formed. They liked to refer to themselves as “those three witches from that Scottish play.” There was Nina, the oldest; petite, nervous and strong, the caretaker of the clan; then Florence, the middle sister, a big, broad, chisled-faced masculine woman and major drama queen (who happened to look like a big man in drag when she was made up). Lastly, there was Pauline, his Mother, the baby and the tomboy dreamer of the family. She had to move in with Nina after the Old Man, as she referred to her own father, got drunk and disappeared once too often. Steve was transfixed by the horrors she told of her family life. Many of her scariest stories had to do with the violence that was perpetrated on her family by the Old Man. Often, he would come home in a drunken rage, and beat her Mother. With her Mother screaming and warding off blows, her brothers (Kenny, Ward or Paul, she had three) intervened, pulling him off her. That caused the Old Man to rage even more murderously, calling out anyone unlucky enough to be near. Once when he was particularly loaded, he attacked Florence, the middle sister, and tried to "put his thing in her" (so Mom reported) after he tackled her down to the floor and lay on top, grinding himself into her. Her brothers came to the rescue again and tore him off. One of the brothers had a nervous breakdown in his twenties and later died of pneumonia when he caught a chill after mowing a neighbor’s lawn.
“The Old Man was so mean, we all tried to just keep out of his way, even leave the house, when he came home full of booze.” He saw her eyes change from hard to far away and sad. She sat down next to him again, the Windex and rag she’d left on the floor by the window. Staring up and out of it, his eyes drifted to a peaceful cloud floating by. He couldn’t imagine his own father acting that way in their house. Though brawls in his own family occasionally went down between his brother and his Father, they were neither chronic nor alcohol-based. “Oh kid” her eyes got real sad then “but the worst was when my own Mom died in my arms.”
“God, Mom. What did she die of?” He was very sad now too and scared. Death, whenever it happened in their lives, was always the most awful thing. It was like a monster and no one could do anything when it came. Everything just stopped and was shattered; the world was put on pause and the person who died was gone forever.
“I don’t know kid, I think it was her heart. We called the doctor. She’d been feeling sick for a few days, but we were so poor, no one came, and no one thought of taking her to the hospital. Oh kid, she was so beautiful. And I was only thirteen. She died right there--in my arms. I cried and cried for the longest time.”
He had an image of his Mother as a girl holding her Mother in her arms and he knew what she was talking about. Death was awful enough, but to have a person die while you were touching them or holding them; the image terrified him and he quickly shook it out of his head.
Her trauma followed her into married life. It is almost as though she was cursed. He pondered if he was the happy accident, the blessing from the curse? Or would he end up succumbing to all that God-awful New York stress, and his own crazy gene pool? Maybe one day he would go off, screaming bloody murder as he stormed through the busy streets, tearing off his clothes, standing in then middle of First or Second Avenue having a nervous breakdown in broad daylight, he himself the victim of the curse of the three witchy sisters of Macbeth.
After her family's talent for tragedies, drama followed her in her role as Mother. When he was about three, one Sunday morning, his Father, Duane set himself on fire while trying to clean a hot water heater in the basement with gasoline and a rag. Unfortunately, he’d forgotten to turn off the pilot light. Steve’s eyes opened wide and he was shocked awake to the sounds of animal-like bellowing. He got out bed and toward the noise to the top of the basement stairs. Staring down the steps he saw a creature. It was his Father, screaming and on fire, wrapping himself up in an old army mattress and rolling over and over on the floor to put out the flames that engulfed him. Seconds later his Mother hysterically stuck Steve in the front seat of their big black Buick, while next to him, in the passenger seat, his Father sat shaking and moaning, still partially on fire. Steve sidled next to his Mother as she drove them madly up the Hospital Hill to the only emergency room in town. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of one tiny flame. He stared at it then, as, like a demon, licking, searing and curling the flesh off his Father’s left forearm, just inches from Steve’s face. The flame was yellow and orange but blue closest to the skin. The skin was black and curling off the muscle where the blue was, seeminly burning and laughing as his Father whimpered and his Mother, crying and making muffled screaming sounds continued to drive. Steve remembered bouncing forward and back in the car as his Mother slammed on the brakes in the parking lot, the door of the car jerking open, his Father flying out of the car, like the statue of an insane, rushing, nude, Winged Victory, charging up the front steps of the hospital, which seemed to become a temple with marble steps. He was still clinging to a white stippled, cotton bed spread, wildly wrapped around him, which he’d managed to grab hold of before getting into the car. The attending nurses and doctors must have put out the rest of the flames and immediately submerged him in an ice bath. He was close to death, but saved by numerous skin graft operations. After weeks after he got out of the hospital and convalesced at home. Steve remembered staring at the repulsive, bloody mosaic of boils and skin grafts that covered his Father’s burned, blackened and watering fat, pink, red, patchy torso. While they sat at the dinner table, the site of that bloody healing torso made Steve so sick he was unable to eat and was excused from the table. With plate in hand he settled safely in front of the T.V. in the living room to watch Superman.
Being a rageaholic for most of his life, and especially toward the end, his Father was prone to bouts of screaming phone calls to his railroad employees as he directed which trains and cars went on what tracks in the Milwaukee Road train yard in the city. He also smoked a pack of Parliament recessed filter cigarettes every day. During Steve’s first year in collage, in 1972 his Father died of “the big one.” The heart attack was his second within a three year period. The day after his father died, Nina, his Mom's oldest sister flew up from New Mexico to be with her. Upon returning home, the following week, she was crushed to death in a camper trailer accident in the mountains of New Mexico. When his Mom flew down to be with her husband, Harry H. a few days after the funeral, he stunned her, confessing he'd always had feelings for her and asked her to marry him. Harry had been like a father figure when she was living with he and Nina and felt she couldn’t marry him. A year later, he died of a heart attack. Within another year, her middle sister, the big, funny, drama queen Flo died. She had become a withering shadow of her former self from years of drinking and numerous surgical procedures to try and cure her chronic Raynaud’s Disease. For years she’d been putting secret shots of rum into every glass of milk she drank; and she drank milk like mad. Before she died she’d also drained dry her husband Rudy’s retirement fund, to the tune of some hundred grand.
After the deaths of Duane and Nina in 1972, and Flo in 74, his Mom's misadventures continued as she made one bad decision after another. In the real day to day world of making a living without a husband, she drifted and failed, like an inept child with no sense of self-worth or direction. First she spent thousands of dollars trying to get back into the beauty business by taking a special hair coloring training course with the Roux Hair coloring company in Atlanta. That summer when she returned from her training, Steve opened the trunk of her car to find dozens of giant cardboard heads of hair models with multitudinous shades of every hair color imaginable, all adorning the same identically cloned face of the same model. Then, back in Savanna, Bob Wagner, now a used car salesman, reappeared in her life, and sold her a completely impractical but very expensive flaming red, Pontiac Firebird. He told her how much he loved her and begged her to sleep with him. He didn’t love his wife anymore he said (after) they’d had nine daughters.
Steve drove that Firebird on the highways back from Illinois to Wisconsin. It handled like a stealth fighter jet and rode low and fast on the highway like a cheetah. When he returned home after that first year of college, he found that she’d sold the car back to Wagner a month after he’d sold it to her; losing money on the deal. Then, Wagner fixed her up with another Pontiac that caught fire on her drive back to Wisconsin. So much for his being in love with her.
After a couple of years of these fiascoes, she met the Polish boiler maker Harry G. Harry G. looked like a soggy eyed, sad faced version of Wally Cox with a bald head, bottle-neck glasses, easy smile and an irritating propensity to criticize Pauline, and anything having to do with her family, daily. He forced her to draw up a pre-nuptial agreement so that their estates would never be joined. For years, whenever Pauline and Harry G. dined out, they went Dutch, his Mother always having to pay her own way, even buy her own clothes and car. But, besides his constant hen pecking at her, he was practical, and so handy; he could fix and build anything. This was in contrast to Duane, whose anger and impatience often got in the way of his being able to fix, assemble or build anything much beyond changing a tire on a bicycle. His Mother couldn’t face being alone, and so, fearing failure and wanting security above all else, (even this strange kind) married Harry G. and became, around 1976, a Wisconsin Republican trophy wife living in a spacious two story house with a garden in Waukesha, an upscale suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Steve became an embarrassing inconvenience. He was the gay actor son who would, of course, be famous one day. Living the crazy New York City life-style, Steve’s gayness could only be redeemed by his being discovered and becoming famous. His brother got deeper into selling drugs. Fast forward to 1990 when Steve became sick of being a penniless actor-artist-musician and went to massage school; the next year becoming a licensed massage therapist working at some of the top spas in NYC but specializing in the underground world of sensual, male body work at home. That same year his brother, who’d been selling pot since his college years, was arrested for selling coke. His family continued to deconstruct.
After 9-11, and after his stepfather’s passing, when Steve mentioned any of the stories his Mother had told him of her family during his childhood, she denied everything. Steve assumed Harry G. shamed her into revising and sterilizing any dark, sad, and violent experiences in her life. In her second husband's vision of their happily retired, Republican snowbird life, (summers in northern Wisconsin, winters in sunny Arizona) all the skeletons in her closet had to be burned and put out in the trash. For the sake of Harry's libido, his Mom was required to play the role of the Donna Reed fuck doll American Geisha. She acquiesced, for it was the price of security, but what a price it was.
By the time stingy Harry G. died in 2000, he was worth millions, while Pauline only had a fraction of her former wealth, so much of it spent from her paying her own way since their marriage in 1972. Stingy Harry, always true to form, left his entire estate to his sons, with a clause that Pauline could live for as long as she desired in the Dream Home he’d built for the two of them on the Peshtigo River outside Crivitz, Wisconsin. Unfortunately for Pauline, the property taxes were so high on the property, that she decided the next year to relocate to Arizona and live in the mobile home in Tucson, he’d also left to her. This was valued at a couple of grand. Trusting that Harry's sons would take care of her, his Mother agreed to sign a paper foregoing any ownership rights to their Dream House or his estate. As promised, Harry G.’s family took extraordinary care of her--by never contacting her again.
Did she ever forgive Harry and his family for treating her so badly? Or did she sit in the trailer, night after night, ruminating on how she’d been used and how things might have been different, only if… Maybe she prayed to be able to forgive Harry; for once Steve found a picture of their Dream Home, stuck in her bible. Or maybe she just sat, feeling her second husband’s betrayal and hating him, but telling herself to forget and just let it go as she sat up late, night after night, laughing gently at every opening monologue of Jay Leno on the Tonight Show, alone in her little mobile home made of tin.
