My Life, a Four Letter Word Read online

  My Life, A Four-Letter Word

  Confessions of a Counter Culture Diva

  Dolores DeLuce

  Copyright © 2013 Dolores DeLuce

  All rights reserved.

  Double Delinquent Press

  www.counterculturediva.com

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or parts thereof, in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review.

  This book is dedicated to

  Viva Marie Vinson, my daughter and the light of my life.

  INTRODUCTION

  A VIEW

  From Planet Couch

  I am painfully aware of my lack in this strange new world past middle age where so-called Reality TV has made life cheaper than fast food and where any bimbo can gain fame and fortune for big hair, big mouths, big money, big tits, big families and no talent whatsoever. While Kathy Griffin was building her fortune by living Life on the D List, I was traveling even further down the scale, living my life on the XYZ list: X for X-RATED, Y for Y-BOTHER and Z for ZERO SELF ESTEEM.

  I confess to spending long gaps of time wallowing in despair, with the flickering blue light and rays of radiation keeping me alive. Living on Planet Couch with the TV droning in the background didn’t exactly breed success, and it’s embarrassing to admit that if it weren’t for the relationship I have with my grown daughter Viva today, television would be my only long-term companion.

  I own no property, have no significant other and no grandchildren, and yet I defy the tyranny of nagging voices that tell me I didn’t live my life right. Perhaps if I’d played by the rules, I might have been a credit to my parents and made it big in Hollywood. It was hard to see Johnny Carson retire in 1992 when I was forty-six, knowing I still had not fulfilled my showbiz fantasy—sitting on his set discussing my latest film or sitcom.

  Modern technology has allowed me to never miss a moment of commercial-free TV viewing. With my trigger finger on the fast-forward button of my remote, I can watch an hour-long series in forty-five minutes, or a half-hour sitcom in twenty-two minutes, and feel good about all the time I’m not wasting. But there’s a problem with any untreated addiction: it only gets worse. I can’t imagine living without access to HBO and Showtime. Without television, what would I have to talk about?

  I’m well aware that my mind, unguarded and poorly lit, is a fragile storage space, and if genes don’t lie, I could end up like my mother—living out my twilight years with senile dementia in an Alzheimer’s ward. The closer I draw to my final act, the more passionate I am to tell about the loves, lies, and lessons that will fill the dash between the dates of my birth and death that must one day appear on my tombstone.

  When I turn off the TV long enough to look around my apartment, I notice the warm, peachy light that fills the space I’ve lived in for over thirty years. My spacious rent-controlled apartment, now an empty nest, is a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean and the Venice Boardwalk. I smile at the photos in funky frames of me and my beautiful daughter in all the stages of our lives together. And adding to the clutter on every available shelf are the other pictures of my parents and siblings and their offspring, and my close friends, near and gone. I take great pleasure in the mementos that tell a story about who I am and where I’ve been.

  In my bedroom, better known as the “shoe museum,” I proudly display thirty pairs of high heels—or, as my friend Philipp likes to call them, “my mini-whore hooves.” I was the Imelda Marcos of the welfare class. These shoes date from the Twenties to the Nineties and hang on three walls from an inch-thick molding a foot below my ceiling. The fourth wall features vintage platforms. My feet have grown tired of walking in them, but my eyes never tire of the hot pink, orange and fuchsia spikes, polka-dot and yellow-bowed pumps, and the gold-glitter tap shoes, all of which created the illusion I was more than five feet tall.

  In my twenties, I was the size of an average fourth grader: four foot nine and three-quarter inches, and I could easily slip into a size-five shoe. Due to post-menopausal shrinkage, I’m now an even four foot eight, and can only wear a six wide flat. When I look up at my leopard spring-a-lators—the ones bought at Frederick’s of Hollywood while shopping with Divine for the L.A. premiere of Female Trouble—I’m flooded with memories. The sight of platforms, the ones with the ornate cut-out Deco heels that my pretend husband Tommy dubbed my “Filipino jogging shoes,” brings to mind the many nights he’d have to push me up the glistening, pre-dawn hills of San Francisco after dancing all night at the disco.

  On the ledge are my Sixties black satin opera boots. In another spot rest my punk-rock, black-leather, spiked torture pumps—complete with bondage locks. My walls also feature two pair of sparkling rhinestone pointy-toed pumps I inherited from Tippy, the only petite drag queen I knew.

  When I dust off the Forties open-toe pumps, I recall my performance as the Wacky WAC from Hackensack in the musical Broken Dishes. The star of my shoe collection is the pair of Carmen Miranda six-inch sparkling gold platforms. These show stoppers match the Golden Rays Vegas-style headdress I wore singing mock opera while portraying a sacrificial virgin to the Sun God, who changes her mind about being thrown into a volcano.

  Despite all my praying to Saint Clare, the patron saint of television, I lost faith. When I turned thirty, I told myself that if I didn’t make it in show business by forty, I’d gather up a sufficient stash of barbiturates and quietly check out. By the time I reached forty, I extended this pact even though I knew I could never do that to my daughter. By fifty, after surviving the grief-stricken years through the AIDS holocaust, I started to sum up my net worth by what my heart knows. And now I’m still here collecting Social Security and Medicare and thinking: Well, there’s still Letterman!

  This teenage girl trapped in a post-menopausal body is screaming to get out, so, move over sister hag, Kathy, who sold her memoir for two million; I have some priceless memories to write about too. After all, if Snooky from the Jersey Shore can write a book without having ever read one, my chances look pretty good. And even if my gems hold little interest to the world at large, for me they are precious pebbles collected at life’s edge by the child still alive and kicking within me.

  A FALL Preview

  Lucille Ball is chanting in my brain. She won’t shut up. She keeps asking, “Who am I? Where am I? What am I?”

  “Shut up! I’m on stage at the Palace, a Chinese movie theatre in San Francisco, and Nixon is still in the White House.”

  Lucy says, “Who’s asking?”

  “I’m paranoid because I’m peaking. I shouldn’t have dropped that acid.”

  Lucy keeps her interrogation up. “What am I?”

  “I’m an orange Pumpkin with little green legs kicking wildly and the coachman and two dancing mice are pulling me from a cardboard pumpkin patch.” Lucy is rolling her eyes at me.

  “These are the facts and nothing but the facts ma’am.” I tell Lucy like I’m the cop on Dragnet.

  It’s October 1973. A few minutes, or maybe a few hours ago, some stagehands squeezed me into this hollowed-out, orange day-glow beanbag that stretched over my green tights and leotard. I bobby-pinned a bright green curly wig to my head and glued gigantic glitter eyelashes over my eyes. They were flapping against my lids like sails in a windstorm. Then crayons were melting, splattering like rain in an MGM Musical all over my round pumpkin belly. When I put my hand on the beanbag, I remembered that it wasn’t completely dry when they put it on me, and it still feels tacky.

  The mice and coachman pry me loose and they’re dragging me across the stage. When I look behind me, I notice I’m leaving a long, orange skid-mark on the stage floor. That can’t be good. I close my eyes and through tr
ansparent lids I see a rainbow waterfall. When I open my eyes, I see it’s a stream of lights spilling off pin spots attached to the beams on the ceiling. No matter how hard I close my lids, the lights keep pouring down like colored rain. The mice finally pull me to my feet, and a blinding white light hits me and now we’re dancing to a Tchaikovsky overture. I remember all these steps. I did this dance a hundred times during rehearsals. But I didn’t have the costume then.

  Lucy makes a funny face and, just like Rickie, she says, “You got some splainin’ to do!”

  Yeah, the dress rehearsal, when everything was going haywire because half the costumes were unfinished; and Cinderella who is really Goldie Glitters, a six-foot-tall drag queen, was throwing a temper tantrum, and the director, who really is a choreographer, had a near-fatal heart attack. Or that’s what I thought when I saw large veins popping from his neck as Goldie railed at him: “You have turned my dream into a nightmare.” She was acting like one of those bitches in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the one who puts her hair up in the first act, takes it down in the second, and then pulls it out in the third.

  Lucy started to laugh out loud.

  Now it’s all coming back to me. Pristine Condition, one of the ugly stepsisters, started the whole thing. Pristine—I call him Prissy—is my new best friend, and just a few hours ago we were in my kitchen. Prissy is your average long-haired white boy, but he was in the middle of transforming himself into a Kewpie Doll when he gave me a hit of window-pane acid.

  Just when the celluloid strip was melting on my tongue, Prissy went into a rant about growing up in Hereford, Texas. I thought he was exaggerating as he paced back and forth, telling me some Halloween horror story about when he found his mother dead with her head in the oven. Then Prissy got really agitated and started running and screaming to demonstrate how it was. And that’s when he found his father in the den pulling the trigger of a shotgun jammed in his mouth. I laughed nervously and said, “Boy, girl, you have one hell of an imagination.”

  But Prissy got very quiet and, holding back tears, said, “I’m not making this shit up; that really happened, girl.”

  By the time we left the Castro, Prissy was in a better mood, but I was feeling guilty about leaving my three-year-old daughter with a sitter, even though I knew it was best. The show wouldn’t start until midnight, way past her bedtime. I vaguely recall my driving down Geary Street to the Palace in North Beach, with blurry wavy lights and cars configured in paisley prints on the pavement. I was laughing so hard that tears fell from my eyes as Prissy ruthlessly dished Goldie. “You gotta take pity on the old girl. She’s got varicose veins like the New York subway system. They run from the bottom of her feet clear up to her cock. Girl, you are the only new cast member who hasn’t given anyone a blow job to get your part. That queen cast Prince Charming right off Castro after he let her blow him in the bathroom of “The Midnight Sun”. Then Prissy told me that Prince Charming had a trick up under his crown for tonight’s performance. “When Goldie drops her size-sixteen glass slipper, that swishy Prince is not going to run after her. He’s planning to fit that slipper on his own foot. Girl, just you wait and see. It’ll be way funnier than that tired script those L.A. queers wrote.”

  When we drove past the Palace looking for parking, a mushroom cloud of marijuana smoke hovered over a sea of creatures of the night. Costumed freaks, transvestites, transients, and hookers were waiting for the Chinese patrons to vacate their movie theater. The smell of weed, chemicals, and incense followed us for several blocks to where I finally parked in a back alley. Prissy and I chanted “nam myoho renge kyo” to surround my VW Bug with white light that would hopefully deflect the police from noticing I parked in a red zone. As we walked toward the stage door, a streetcar dropped off a whole load of Judy Garland look-alikes, all singing, “Clang, clang, clang, went the trolley. Ding, ding, ding, goes the bell”. They joined the crowd in front of the theatre as we slipped into the backstage door. When I finally got to a mirror, my makeup was a wreck, and the giant lashes were sticking to my cheeks.

  With five minutes to Showtime, everyone was frantic. Suddenly, someone noticed that Prissy was missing, and I volunteered to help. She was outside, rolling in the gutter in her drag—a magnificent gold lamé couture gown made with inverted bra cups that accentuated the obvious: she was the flat-chested ugly step-sister. I picked up her wig, and with the help of two hot hunky guys, lured her back inside the theater. Prissy insisted on bringing through the stage door a gang of her fans for a free show.

  By the end of my explaining, Lucy took a powder and I was back on stage.

  Oh no, it’s the finale and I’m still dancing. Here come the leaps. What was that director thinking? He knows I’m an untrained dancer.

  Leap. Oh, this is a lot harder in a bean bag. Leap. Okay, just one more. Leap. What was I thinking when I dropped that acid? Okay, here goes nothing: the giant cartwheel finish.

  Oops! I’m on the floor again and I can’t get up. I’m flailing my little arms and legs. The audience is going wild; looks like my number is more hilarious than planned. I’m an overnight sensation.

  As the mice help me up for our bows, I see the audience for the first time. I can see joints being passed down the rows and I hear liquor bottles rolling down the aisles and the applause feels like a tidal wave coming at me. The rowdy patrons are screaming catcalls as they hang off the balcony. The walls of the theatre are pulsating and the audience morphs into one big breathing organism of ecstasy and hedonism.

  As I take my final bow, Divine is sitting in the front row, cheering me on and laughing her ass off. She looks like my long-lost alien mother as she winks with one of her overly exaggerated cat eyes.

  Lucy pops up again, “Who am I?” She asks.

  “I’m a star, just like Divine and all the others,” I tell her.

  My unscripted fall brought down the house, and in that moment I earned my place among the best of San Francisco’s underground superstars. I wondered what took me so long to get here.

  ACT I

  IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

  1. PAIN

  My name, Dolores, is taken from the Latin root word dolor, which means pain and sorrow. Underweight and incubated at birth, I caused her milk to dry up. That’s how my mother, Gloria, a poor girl’s Judy Holiday with a Jersey City accent, defended her choice not to nurse. “After the war when you was born, there was all that surplus rubber. They said the boob wasn’t good for ya, that it wasn’t hygienic. Artificial nipples was the rage.”

  In Latin cultures the name Dolores pays homage to the Mother of Sorrow, the Mother of Christ, Mary. However, when choosing my name, Gloria, the youngest of sixteen siblings wasn’t thinking about the pain of the Virgin Mary—or the pain inherited from her Sicilian family. Gloria wasn’t even thinking about the loss of her eighteen-inch waistline, or the labor it took to deliver me. There were just too many damn Mary’s in our family, so Mom named me after Dolores Del Rio, her favorite movie star.

  Dad added his own pain to the mix. John Grosso, the fourth child, born on the heels of a baby that died under mysterious circumstances, was named after his dead brother. After having four children in America, my grandparents took their young family back to Italy to reclaim the land they had left behind. Once back home in Serra, a lush village in the mountains east of Naples, they found no welcome. My grandfather had to fight a long, drawn-out court battle to win the rights of his property back from his cousin who had been caretaking the land. By the time my grandma was pregnant with the last of their eight children, Grandpa finally won back his property. On the walk home from the courthouse, Granddad’s embittered cousin shot him. My father was only ten when he saw his father shot to death. My grandmother managed to send each of her US-born children back to the States, one by one, to hold claim to their American citizenship. At seventeen, my father buried his pain on the bloodstained land and returned to join his older siblings in New York.

  ***

  My earliest memories ar
e of overcast New Jersey skies. My skinny Uncle Ernie is back from the war and sleeping on a cot in the living room; I’m running to Mom, crying because the boy next door peed on me. The only other image I still hold of our post-WWII flat in Elizabeth is a long flight of steps that led up to our second-floor apartment where three vivid events happened. I recall Mom carrying a bundle up the steps and Daddy following behind her with a suitcase. I remember my aunt making a big fuss and telling me the bundle’s name was Ginny, short for Virginia, another name for the Virgin Mary. When I was two I recall seeing sad Grandma for the first time as she labored slowly up the steps. She was dressed all in black, and my father was thin and handsome, walking behind her carrying her luggage.

  And then there was the day in 1949 that changed my life forever, the day Dad brought home the television set.

  I was three years old and I had no idea what to expect. With my face wedged between the railings on the landing, I watched while Dad and Uncle Ernie struggled to get the gigantic cardboard box up each step. Once the box was in the living room, Dad cut through the cardboard with a bread knife and revealed a large wooden box with a round glass hole in the middle.

  We were the first family in our neighborhood to have a television, and there was much excitement as our relatives and neighbors crowded into the small apartment for the Zenith’s arrival.

  Delicious smells of sausage and peppers mixed with my uncles’ cigars wafting through the atmosphere thick with laughter. Mom even took off her apron with the cherries on it and left the sauce cooking on the stove to show off her new polka dotted dress. Dad and Uncle Ernie lifted up the television as if it was the Madonna statue I saw in a procession at the Feast of San Gennaro, and held it with reverence as Dad contemplated the best place to put it.