Got a Thirst in the Square? London crawling!

There is something dispiriting about finding yourself in a worn out waterfront dive, belly to the bar and looking at a dull, grimy dance pole occupying an empty stage at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, especially when the purpose of your visit is subterfuge. My only companions in this adventure are my neighbor, whose birthday it is, and the completely illustrated bartender who barely pauses from screaming obscenities into her cell phone to say hi and then turn her back to us. I am on a mission.
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Merchants Saloon is the kind of bar where I immediately hear my mother’s voice—she is telling me, after a sharp slap to the head, not to touch ANYTHING. She is right. I cannot help but wonder, taking my seat, how long the spirochaete bacterium causing syphilis can live on a wooden bar top. The décor is rendered in a style that evokes Jackson Pollack before he perfected his craft. Behind the bar is the game room which we can see but decline to visit. It features a pool table framed by bright blue murals of sea monsters (I’m guessing here) painted by a surprisingly competent hand taking orders from a deranged psyche. My interest rises with the realization that the bartender has delivered the final verbal blow to her caller and is now standing before us in a mood of forced conviviality that will become tears after the few drinks she is determined to have right now, with us. Belly up. Newcastles all around. The bad boy has beens of tennis, John McEnroe and Jimmy Conners, appear excited about something but we can’t hear them—whether the sound on the ancient color (color!) TV is down or out, who can say?
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Like most establishments in the historic Warehouse District of Jack London, this place originated in the 19th century. I wish I could tell you it retained its charm. There is a very large, floor-to-ceiling case of many compartments and hatches standing at the back of the bar, to the left, that may once have been what passed for a refrigerator at a time when horse-drawn lories delivered blocks of ice hauled by burly men wielding giant tongs. It seems to have no function now although my guess is that it is the only thing holding the place upright. My companion, however, is charming enough. I observe him through the bottom of my hoisted pint to assess whether he has any idea that my job at this very moment is to keep him away from home for two hours while our friends back at the Phoenix convert the roof to an illuminated wonderland befitting a surprise birthday party. He appears to be clueless. Perhaps I have a knack for this kind of work.
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Our bar tender is a lovely young woman of about 25. Though I have no children of my own, it breaks my mother’s heart to see a person so early in life turn all her aggression into self-mutilating tattoos and piercings. The cherry red hair can be remedied whenever she is ready to let go of what eats her but the metal studs that adorn her face will be troublesome. Alas, this thought only proves that I am too old for the establishment as a dozen young men, wearing ripped clothes and similarly tatted up from head to toe, arrive to brighten her mood and dating prospects—call me old fashioned. Hey! That’s a good idea. Let’s have one. My neighbor agrees. The child whose job it is to serve us asks where that beer is from, a rictus of confusion further ruining her face. Her fellows rack up the pool table and put on some music. It works. We are driven out the door in a drumbeat.
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Our next stop is Heinold’s in the square, a place the New York Times has ranked as “one of the top ten bars in the world,” although I believe they may have been unduly influenced by having also just arrived from Merchants. But it is cozy in here—the wee smallest bar on earth. The floor at Heinold’s pitches forward so precipitously that it is possible to fall flat on the floor simply stepping in ere an amber drop ever moistens one’s lips. Luckily, I know this from previous visits but my neighbor, Matt, flails wildly to stay vertical, inadvertently grabbing a small dog off the lap of a bottle blonde who looks as though she may be a holdover from opening day in 1883. Though the dog appears relieved to be rescued at last, Matt gently returns it. I determine to stick to bottled beer as my safest bet. Matt, emboldened by a near miss, asks the bar tender to draw a pint which he does and then spills a good inch or so setting it on the bar that droops in synch with the floor. Slow learners annoy me. We make our way to the very back—three steps from where we stood at the bar because this one-room ale house is the size of a frontier log cabin. I am sure of this because it IS a log cabin preserved from the days when a young sailor named Jack London frequented the joint to bend elbows and trade stories with sailors from all the seven seas.
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Heinold’s proves that the trash you see blowing all around on windy days is, in fact, going somewhere. The interior is absolutely encrusted with all manner of thing. Oakland’s is the fifth largest port in North America and Jack London Square sits at the heart of it so it is not surprising to see all the Navy and Coast Guard caps pinned to the ceiling, nor the thousands of business cards that have accreted to the walls and every other available surface. More interesting, however, are the framed photographs of thoroughbreds whose last race has long been run, the menu offering chili con carne for 45 cents, the crank-driven peep show, and a picture of the President of the United States—Dwight D. Eisenhower. There are various marine paraphernalia, including life preservers and lanterns. No wonder the bar can hold only 15 people—most choose to sit outside and watch the ships slide up and down the estuary separating Oakland from Alameda.
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Matt and I have never spent any time together alone and this was a concern starting out but beer has our tongues unlocked and we find each other enjoyable for our like minded curmudgeonry about most things political or economical. We run through a few beers solving the Gulf oil spill—drop Sarah Palin’s pie hole over it and slap her ass, the quick intake of breath should have that thing sucked up in a minute. But, speaking of time, it is ticking and I have a job to do. As the late afternoon sun fades, the bar tender, in his white shirt, bow tie, and long, black apron, comes out from behind his station to light the gas lamps that provide the limited indoor illumination. I do a quick mental calculation of how fast fire would consume the business cards, hats, and oxygen in this Petit Trianon and suggest we move on. It is time for me to deliver my pay load to the party and we head up 2nd Street in a cheery mood of unstable footing. Thus, we detour into the International House of Beer—or something like that, I can’t recall; an occupational hazard of this type of reconnaissance and espionage work—it’s on 3rd across from the Buttercup, of all the limited possibilities for innocence in Oakland.
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IHOB is the Disney version of Merchants—heavy on the tattoos, a lot of raven black hair and dress, a décor intended to convey contempt for hip, urban cocktail lounges, but limited piercings and a welcome cleanliness that is positively inviting after where we’ve been for the last hour and a half. Best of all, the beer selection is the widest imaginable. Flights of six stopped at six in a symmetry I do not understand, so I ask for the house favorite—a gambit that always yields spectacular results at any of Oakland’s many medical marijuana dispensaries. Here, however, my request is greeted with a labored sigh suggesting limited patience with rubes. I am told the menu changes daily and asked what flavors and brew styles I enjoy. I end up with two flagons of beer sporting 10% alcohol content—just what the doctor ordered. We are now having the time of our lives and have our arms thrown around anyone willing to suffer the indignity. Gee, this place is swell.
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The customer base is decidedly biker mixed with Cal students slumming in JLS and seasoned with a soupcon of Goth to make a bouillabaisse worthy of Marseilles; that other great port on a par with the splendid je ne sais quoi . . . I am trashed. The place is humming with the buzz of happy voices, laughter and the aroma of piping hot Oakland soul food right out of the smoker. The food is delivered by a young, drop dead gorgeous woman with an Afro that will single headedly return that icon of the 60s to the preeminence it deserves. She is filling orders non-stop (there is no resto in the IHOB, but it is next door to Vegan Soul Food of Oakland; a place with BBQ sauce so good it could be poured over a jigsaw puzzle and you would eat it up and scream for more.) This poor woman, the only server working the bar, is literally running a marathon between IHOB and Vegan Soul. I am about to phone in an abuse complaint when the fierce pitch of my ringtone shatters the air over my head and it falls down on me sharply. It is home base calling for me to reel my sucker in—they are ready to yell “surprise!” So I must yank my happy clam self and the innocent bystander who is my charge from our newly adopted environment and drop us back into our native habitat. I don’t want to go, my new career has just started to take off.

Malcolmina XOX

I am up early and standing at the curb outside my building waiting for a neighbor because we have a date this morning to go to the Laney College flea market—that great, traveling souk that comes to town every Sunday with blaring music, corn roasting on sticks, puppies for sale, and an entire department store complete with cooking demonstrations laid flat on burning asphalt. I am 10 minutes into a large Blue Bottle coffee that has me shaking like a bobble-head Chihuahua in the rear window of a Chevy. But my friend is oblivious because he is putting his makeup on and that takes time as any diva can tell you. I don’t mind waiting. The early morning sunlight spreads across Jack London like butter sliding down a stack of hot, buttermilk pancakes. It’s going to be a great day so it is odd that, waiting for the Age of Transformation to conclude, I should be musing on the nature of revenge.
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What is the revenge of those without power; the antipodal feet of the human bell curve on which the rest of the world securely rests? Do those without power exact a puny, unseen, unfelt revenge and, if so, is that really revenge? Isn’t the essential nature of revenge that it is felt by its target; felt as deeply as the hurt it is intended to remedy?
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When I was a child, I spent hours—no, years—plotting revenge against an older brother who baited me as though I were a caged bear. He pestered, poked, bullied, and hit until I cried in helpless rage. He stole from me, broke what was precious to me, and lied to our parents, blaming me for his faults and they believed him. I hated him so thoroughly, I wished he were dead. That is the revenge of an eight year old.
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As I grew older, I simply gave up, choosing to bide my time under the radar as much as possible until I could break free and escape my cage. Ultimately, it was a good strategy although it left simmering on the back burner feelings of revenge that permanently blackened the pan that cooked them.
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Leaving home, I never once looked back but kept moving forward into some unknown life that would be, whatever else it might have to offer, better. After an entire decade of distilling in the crucible of university, I emerged in Chicago in the 1980s where I stood on the train platform in $1,500 worth of corporate drag every morning, commuting to a corner office so high up that I could look down on the traffic helicopters. I ran the god-damned world of commerce while my brother became an alcoholic who couldn’t hold a job.
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It took a long time to grow weary of a business career based mainly on being what my brother couldn’t be—successful—and eventually, I walked out of my corner office to do work that meant something to me. I forgot about revenge but persisted in a hugely damaging need to be right all the time until the day my brother settled the barrel of a shotgun between his teeth and pulled the trigger. Then my seething righteousness was made painfully evident to me and shown to be hollow. As the eighth anniversary of my brother’s suicide approaches, it is no longer possible for me to savor a win when someone else loses so badly. All of this to say that I do not wish ill on the dominant, straight culture; only that they would get their jackbooted foot off my neck.
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Being an exile in a society that imagines itself progressive is a wound of a thousand daily cuts; rarely a slash, it accretes. I first understood that the world would not be welcoming to me when I was in middle school—that great sorting, when children have their first glimpse of what kind of future they can expect. Children sense the stakes are high and the ethos of elementary school—sharing and mutual respect—give way to social jockeying. I began to hear the boys call each other homo and queer, words that could knock a rival down more surely than a fist; words I’d never heard before growing up in the Eisenhower/Kennedy years.
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One small freedom we enjoyed in my strict Catholic school was the right to get up at any time and go to the dictionary. It was, in fact, the mark of a dedicated young mind at work. Thus entitled, I walked from the back of the room one day all the way to the front and began to ruffle through the big, unabridged book to find out why the names the boys used on each other had such power to devastate. I knew better than to ask anyone; it would mean losing face for not being hip to the point of jaded. As I read what a homo was, my life as I had known it fell away. I knew my emerging sexuality was going to be problematic. I liked girls. But in that moment, there in front of my known world, I learned I was a pariah, something to be made fun of, and fair game to every bully or worse. I did not think I could turn around and face that class or get back to my seat without fainting. I understood then that I would serve a life sentence for a crime I did not commit.
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As Malcolmina flounces to the curb to embrace me with a dozen kisses and escort me up the avenue, it is obvious that gay people are lovers not fighters and therein lies both our greatest strength and most debilitating weakness—we have been slow to demand our rights. Like the unwanted girl children in China and south Asia, we have acclimated to gruel while our fat brothers gorge; taking anything they want from a table where there is no seat for us. Instead, we are left sitting in the dirt with sticks and rocks.
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But wait. Before you collapse weeping, have you seen what we do with sticks and rocks? Using an ancient alchemy, we have ground those rocks against the stone of prejudice and manufactured glitter and eye shadow. We have taken our sticks and pounded them down on packed earth to create the pulsing beat of disco and house. We have taken the vile manure of hatred and created a garden of earthly delights—a culture focused on sensuality and pleasure pulled from the thin air of repression. Any scorn inflicted by the straight majority comes back to them, presto change-o, as something they cannot live without: hair styles, couture, beats, and home décor.
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Perhaps some readers will complain that I borrow too heavily from the black civil rights movement; that it can’t be that bad, at least not for a middle class white girl from the Midwest. I am not trying to draw parallels—to the extent they occur, they occur naturally because I know what it is like to be hated, to be scorned. I know what it is like to be the object of ignorant, unremitting hatred for something over which I have no control and I know to be harmless. I know what it is like to be interpreted to myself wrongly; to be pushed to the extreme outer limits of society; to have my good life broadcast back to me in a series of lies; to be overlooked, shoved aside, and blamed for the ills of society. I know what it is like to live hidden and unobserved—something people of color cannot do with the exception of the few who “pass” and then they pay a terrible price for their invisibility. I used to wish that one day, all the gay people in the world would wake up to find we were purple or green. So that no one could hide; so that all those Republican Congressmen who are closet fags would be revealed. So that all those ministers whose admiring congregations reward them for outright gay bashing in their churches, would be silenced. But now I am older and I know the world does not work that way.
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The LGBT people of my generation have had to hide a huge part of our natural selves just to get by in a world that does not want us. I was 40 years old before I could talk to co-workers about my whole, integrated life without fearing the loss of my job. I know now that my generation has paid dearly for being so marginalized. It is in the pit of ever-anger we carry in our stomachs. Until a person has experienced the humiliation of having their basic human dignity put to a popular vote, which is the very essence of Prop 8 in California, they can never understand the unquenchable rage that I must tame every day. It is hidden in the posture I assume when I say I am okay so as to reassure the straight people who are my friends. I am not okay. I am anything but okay.
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Escorted down the street by Malcolmina XOX, a black drag queen the size of a city bus, I am filled with love for this royal woman who takes not one ounce of shit from anyone. Pink hair flouncing with each step, her yellow skirt blowing in the breezy summer morning, her polka dot handbag swinging like a metronome, she is a monarch butterfly and I her loyal subject. Long may she rule, baby, rule.

Drag: A Force of Resistance

Whatever the actual etymology of "drag" when used to describe cross-dressing cabaret rooted in the theater of the gay community, the operative origin for me will always lie in the idea of resistance, like the wing flaps that slow a jet plane or, in my case, the need to resist the crushing force of the dominant straight culture that simultaneously surrounds and marginalizes LGBT people.
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Straight people are wary of drag, as though they sense that it somehow undermines them without quite knowing why. To them, a drag show is cheaper Streisand tickets. What their reduced admission is actually buying them is a seat before a two-way mirror where they are trapped in a fun house they neither control nor understand. I am talking about real drag now as opposed to talented illusionists who offer a believable Diana Ross or Marlene Deitrich for pennies on the dollar.
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In these popular shows, men expertly made up and practised in every facial expression, posture, gesture, or other nuance of their idol's bearing can be thrilling mimics in an art form aimed at destroying the barrier between reality and artifice. Often as not, the transvestites who perform these Wal-Mart label star reviews are not gay. They are brilliant stage actors whose talent happens to require an evening gown, wig, and the ability to lip synch an entire canon of professional work. Think of Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage and you have the gist of the thing--albeit at the very high end of the lot. Such queens of lesser lights than Mr. Humphries typically play to houses packed with bingo players bussed in from a church in Moline and eager to experience the "real" San Francisco by having the safest possible artificial experience.
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No, no. I am talking about the drag I see in small piano bars and movable clubs that occupy whatever warehouse, bar, or makeshift theater can be rented for an evening or weekend. This is, to me, true drag; of my people, by my people, and for my people as opposed to working for the Yankee (or, as the case may be, tourist) dollar. Here, the Judy, Cher, or Charo you see is more attitude than illusion as evidenced by my favorite drag queen name of the moment: Liza With a P, loosely translated as "I'm gonna stick it in your face whether you like it or not."
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Straight people do not typically see such reviews and, I surmise, would spurn the offer were it to be made as this drag--intended for a gay audience rather than a bus load of day trippers--falls so beautifully under the banner of "blatant," a gay trait straight people have made clear they do not care for, as in: "I'm okay with gay people and several of my friends are gay. I just take exception to those who are so blatant about it." Straight people say this with such heartfelt sincerity I can only assume they do not know they are making fools of themselves with such idiotic palaver.
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And I am not referring to oafs in overalls and gimme caps who can spit a stream of brown tabbacky juice as far as a tree frog in the Amazon can flick its tongue to snap up a bug. No, I refer to people like . . . well, like my co-worker, a lovely woman of staggering intelligence and empathy for all who descends from a patrician family educated for generations at the leading universities in the country. Let's call her Maeve for no other reason than it bears not the remotest resemblance to her real name.
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I shared with Maeve a chapter from a novel I was writing at the time. It included a lesbian sex scene of such decorous modesty that no one under the age of 50 would even recognize it as a sex scene had it not taken place in a bed and referred to a "tangle of arms and legs" from which two women had to recapture their autonomous selves.
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Maeve enjoyed the chapter; how witty it was, how droll, how acutely observed and rendered in language so vivid that she could see the scene in her mind's eye. And therein lay the trouble (I might have said "rub" but judged it too blatant and self-censored) because the very next phrase that fell from her lips was the lumbering dreadnought of the dominant straight majority pushing gay people down and out and into place: "I'm not a prude when it comes to sex scenes. I just don't appreciate it when gay people are so blatant about their sexuality." Oh, really? You don't care for blatant sexuality?
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But let's leave Maeve now because she is dear and in every way a kind and loving soul who would be genuinely horrified to learn she'd given any offense whatsoever, and return to the larger straight culture she unwittingly represents.
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Any admonishment about blatant sexuality aimed at gay people by straight people is as laughably ignorant as it is insulting and, ultimately, enraging. Anyone who has seen a movie, read a book, watched TV, flipped through a magazine, ridden a train, sung along to a tune on the radio, attended a concert, been to the beach on a hot day, looked at a billboard, shopped for clothes, or, to put it succinctly, anyone who has left the house cannot fail to miss that the one rule our standard, straight operating culture uses to advertise who we are, is rampant, vulgar sexuality--hetero, blatant as hell and completely over the top.
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Straight people seem not to notice this at the same time they participate in it vigorously--walking down the street holding hands and tonguing each other to pass the time away until their destination is reached. Many are even pushing their blatant baby carriages as if to advertise they've had sex at least once about 10 months ago. Or, perhaps they are aware but don't care because they are at the top of the cultural food chain and do not give a shit what anyone else may think. It can, in fact, be argued that runaway heterosexuality--particularly the use of women's bodies to sell consumer products--is a major part of the force marginalizing LGBT people and that, patient reader, brings me back to drag a a force of resistance.
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African slaves in the American South used everything at their disposal to subvert the authority of the white "master." They used christianity and separate, inferior churches to plan escape and pass down coded language and signs intended to communicate with each other in field songs and hymns. "Follow the Drinking Gourd," a slave song, clued waiting runaways to the Big Dipper and its orientation to North. "Wade in the Water," a song the overseer assumed was about baptism, told runaways to walk in the river where the tracking dogs could not pick up human scent; quilts depicting life on the plantation and handed down through generations were secretly maps to the underground railway and freedom. But as a gay person in racist, sexist, gay-baiting America, my favorite subversion was the Cake Walk.
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The Cake Walk is a knee wobbling, elbow bending, eye popping, high stepping, ass wiggling, nonsensical dance routinely performed by black slaves on plantations. The white folk enjoyed watching the savage Negro's hilarious dancing never understanding that the slaves were actually mimicking European dances they saw at parties where they were servants. The slaves were making fun of their owners without the southern elite understanding they were being ridiculed. Welcome to drag, my straight friends, welcome to drag.
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When straight people see this kind of drag, they may smirk at the outrageous makeup and insane wigs or laugh at the farcical camp that spares nothing and no one, but an uncomfortable nagging voice welling up from the subconscious warns, en garde, as it should. Marginalized people who have been pushed down as hard as gay people have in the U.S. are going to pop up somewhere and it won't be pretty. This drag, unlike illusion, is not pretty. It is hideous in its portrayal of women--vicious, abusive, sea hags and crones in fright wigs and makeup like razor slashes are telling you something you don't want to know: that's how the straight world appears to us when we are confronted with the viciousness of a society that hounds and stalks and kills us with no remorse. We are holding a mirror up to the society that devalues and dehumanizes us and punishes us so savagely for an accident of birth.
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The last weekend in June is, in San Francisco, a major celebration of LGBT culture. I will be joining several of my queen friends at drag shows where we will laugh at the straight idiots who hate us because we refuse to cry.

The Doctor Is In and Will See You Now

One of my favorite people in the building is my neighbor who came to the U.S. as a teenager from Berlin, his first home away from home having been born in Poland and lived there as a child. He is every woman’s dream European man—suave and cultured, he speaks five languages fluently although English, his fourth language, can wobble when he gets excited about something and, admirable trait #2, he is frequently excited about something. That’s another thing I enjoy about him, his contagious and unsinkable joie de vivre. Daniel loves life and embraces every aspect of it with heart and soul. He is a gourmet cook. He is the sommelier you want at your dinner party and, best of all for me, he is a walking anthology of contemporary culture, haute and base, able to engage in the most erudite conversation on topics ranging from the rise of impressionism in the ateliers of Paris to the dawn of disco in West Berlin to who’s doing what to whom in Hollywood. He knows music; you cannot name a piece by any composer or arranger he does not know. He showed me a picture of him on his first day of kindergarten. He is wearing a full tuxedo with tails and holding a baton. Opera? He can quote from any libretto and sing the major arias. Early jazz standards are his specialty and he has a record collection rivaled only by the Smithsonian.
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Perhaps best of all, Daniel is a true wit. As we walked down Montgomery Street arm-in-arm one splendid evening, a disheveled and grimy man holding a “Jesus hates queers” sign called to us to inquire whether we have considered the wrath of Jesus as a consequence of our lifestyles (in truth, the man’s question was slightly more vulgar). Daniel, my elegant European prince, suavely replied, “The only Hay-Zeus I pay any attention to is the one who trims my bush and blows me.” Then, he swung from his shoulder a Prada bag the size of a steamer trunk and inquired, “You wanna keep your tooth?”
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I should point out that Daniel was, at the moment, Danielle standing over six feet tall in his size 12W stiletto heels. Danielle is one gorgeous woman, I must say and I believe most would agree with me. She favors short dresses that show off legs Tina Turner would kill for, and accents her couture with Tiffany’s jewelry made in China by forgers so skilled even the people at Tiffany’s cannot tell the difference. The wigs, however, come from Japan and it is here—the hair—where no expense is spared and it shows. Danielle announces her arrival anywhere by fabulous coifs in sunset colors: orange, red, pink, purple, and blue. Often, butterflies or dragonflies adorn her up-do, never anything as mundane as a headband or scarf. “Puh-lease,” she snaps when I show her a Hermés I think would look good on her.
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Going out with Danielle invites stares at a minimum and intrusive comment as a rule. Danielle embodies the essence of drag and drag, when done right, is and should be an affront to the dominant culture. I will return to this idea in another post but for now all you need to know is that Danielle confronts the world and engages on her terms. It’s one of the many aspects of her character I sincerely admire. Of the many schools of drag, Danielle is strictly illusion. Were it not for her size, one would never know Danielle is carrying a standard male package tucked up in her thong because Daniel is a certified, credentialed, card-carrying Hollywood makeup artist who worked at Paramount for years. He also did a lot of time behind the counters of Yves Saint Laurent, Kenneth Cole, and Chanel. Even better, he knows skin.
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Daniel ministers to every woman in the building, guiding us through moisturizers, serums, firming lotions, and eye and lip restoring creams. His first gift to me was a collagen mask. I have been shopping with him and can attest to the fact that no sooner is he in the door than throngs of women begin to flock to him as he stands at the counter and delivers 15 minutes of spontaneous instruction on how to rejuvenate the face and décolletage. These women then trail after us buying whatever we buy and asking questions Daniel is always too polite to ignore. Every sales person in every store is dying to attract Daniel to their counter to tout their brand. It is the closest I will ever come to celebrity.
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Daniel routinely monitors my skin and advises on product. Since beginning my regimen with him about four months ago I can honestly say I’ve seen remarkable improvement. I even have independent verification in the many compliments I’ve received in return for a half hour of work each night applying everything it takes to keep me from sliding further down the path to crone. When I jokingly suggested I’d reached the point where shaving would make more sense than plucking, Daniel immediately gave me a run down on the razors he uses to keep Danielle never farther than a makeup case away. He shaves everything—knuckles, toes, back, chest—as an illusionist would.
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Hair, as one might imagine, is a big topic and I have received his version of a total smack down for the sorry state of my mop in that he gently knocked on my door one evening to inquire whether I was busy. When I said no and invited him in, he replied by hoisting his index finger in the air and actually running back to his own loft. When he returned, he had an arm load of gels, sprays, and masques to coax my hair to luster. Even the man who cuts my hair has remarked on the improvement.
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The upshot is—I don’t even buy lip balm anymore without consulting Daniel. No woman in this building would. We are his loyal students and his living creations; his art extended from Danielle to all of us. So when you are at my loft for dinner or a party and an elegant and refined European man approaches you with the line, “I want to do you,” ask if his name is Daniel. If it is, throw yourself into his eager, hairless arms and whisper, “Je suis vôtre.”

The Role of A Lifetime

When she accepted her Tony for portraying the young Big Edie and, after Intermission, middle-aged Little Edie in the runaway Broadway smash Grey Gardens, Christine Ebersole thanked Hollywood for the “role of a lifetime.” But wait, you say, Tony? Broadway? Hollywood? How does Hollywood figure into this?

Using a math all too familiar to women “of a certain age,” Ebersole calculated that her fall from female lead as she aged in Hollywood was in direct, if inverse, proportion to her rise on the stage where acting chops are valued over boob jobs and other heavy lifting. Had she stayed in Hollywood, Ebersole reasoned, she would never have played any Edie. Instead, she played both to such thunderous critical acclaim that fags the world over can recite every line and vamp every gesture Ebersole used to bring both women back to life long enough for us to be enchanted with them and look back to Camelot through a dark lens. Ebersole’s career, in the Hollywood toilet, rose to stratospheric stardom in New York.

In my own version of this very same math, my interpretation of E=mc2 goes like this: Escape El Cerrito = metro-condo, return 2 fun. After 15 years of waiting for accrued equity to launch me to something other than a daily gauntlet of homophobic idiocy, I sold my house in whitechristianland and returned to the city where I am most comfortable among the misfits, outlaws, and genuinely creative. Now that I’m here in the other city by the bay, my life has begun to parallel another grand dame of the boards, Olympia Dukakis or, rather, her most widely seen role, Anna Madrigal.

At 59, I am not the oldest woman in my building of renegades. There is a woman in her mid-sixties. She is corporate counsel for a certain motorcycle gang that calls Oakland home, to the degree that bunch can be said to have counsel of any kind. (She keeps her Hog parked in the garage stall directly below my second floor bedroom and the rumble every morning as she kicks that pig to life is my ersatz alarm clock). Rather, I am the aging hippie lady who opens her door to one and all, comforting the recently dumped, cooking for the abandoned stray, and rolling a joint to make it all better, dear. Okay, this is not 28 Barbary Lane. It is, in fact, better.

To be fair to El Cerrito, my transformation to Ms. Madrigal can definitely be traced to the home of The Gauchos. I even had my own Mary Ann Singleton, the young straight chick who wandered into Gomorrah and was lost in a sea of man and other troubles. The difference being that my straight chick (let’s call her Katrina as she destroyed almost everything she touched) invented Gomorrah. Otherwise, the man troubles necessitated the same herbal smoky contemplations of what went wrong and what to do about it. But a joint in the late-night kitchen of a sleepy suburb is not a life style whereas a loft in an old iron works factory in the Port of Oakland is . . . or could be if managed properly. Enter Ms. Madrigal II.

Just So's You'll Know

It is a few minutes after 10 p.m. on a Sunday evening in early June, 2010. We are just finishing up a party that began almost inaudibly, with the deflowering of a bottle of cabernet on Friday after work and built steadily until, by Saturday night, in the wee small hours, it had become a howling frenzy characterized by several self-inflicted calls to the police to report ourselves for fear that we might soon actually cross the consequential, and not too distant, line that separates the as-of-yet unindicted from the incarcerated.

I face these periodic uber parties the same way I imagine a pioneer woman out on the lonely 19th century prairie might have stoically endured a wall of locusts or a towering cloud of sky-obliterating dust tearing up the known world at 200 mph. Mobile destruction is the defining characteristic of parties in my building—once a warehouse serving the Port of Oakland and now a residence hall for grown up artists, doctors, lawyers, advertising moguls, professional chefs, and Indian chiefs. At some tipping point I am too far past my sell-by date to notice, the party suddenly, synchronized, breaks from its moorings in the host loft and bursts into the hall to hunt out and settle a new hive where the food is better and the liquor cabinet not so ravaged.

This is not the first time this has happened since I moved to the building nine months previously and I am prepared. Knowing that I must protect my property with any and every resource available to me, I keep the swarm away from my unit by containing the revelers on the roof. First, I give them a bottle of Canton, the ginger infused cognac that we have taken to like bees to the blossom, burying our faces deeply in the cocktail shaker to draw out the last drop of sweet goodness. Quickly, however, before the crowd can grow restless, I up the ante with a barrel of beer followed by a donkey pulling a giant, oaken cask of vin on a rustic cart surrounded by garland-festooned maidens singing of the coming rut.

At this point, I take a potty break that extends to a shower, a full-night’s sleep, and breakfast with a friend. Coming home mid-Saturday afternoon, I can hear the party in my building from two blocks away. When I arrive, I am hailed in the hallway as though a sailor long lost at sea and presumed dead. They cannot believe their luck at seeing me before them. If anything ever called for drinks, this is it.

By now, the building truly has become a hive. Industrious worker bees fly in and out of open doors carrying plates of food, newly cooked, cork screw reinforcement, “the CD I’ve been looking for since dawn,” and buckets of ice. Other drones have been dispatched to perform specific tasks essential to the survival of the hive: get propane, buy toilet paper, cocktail olives and a bucket of chicken. People now are laughing and throwing their arms around complete strangers vowing never to part. I’ve had several of the newly devised cocktail christened hammer blow.

Even the stalwarts start to drop after 33 hours although a few wanderers cluster around a laptop, watching Google Earth of someone’s home town. 1990s Euro Pop and dance blares from the second floor—our version of house music. Someone on the roof is screaming “please” at the top of her lungs but in a manner that is asking for trouble rather than trying to fend it off as evidenced by her devilish laughter when the object of her desire relents. It’s 4 a.m. and a third wind, less gusty than the second but by no means trivial, has swept up those who were previously comatose and vivified them enough to reconnect with the source of their banging heads.

The sun is up splintering off the true believers, myself among them, who attend services at the Laney College flea. We are carrying the bucket of chicken and attracting roaming curs at an alarming rate. Once through the buck-a-head gate and safely among the heaving throngs we sober up enough to strategize our morning. First, we diversify our diet with corn-on-a-stick and fish tacos sold from a big truck. Then, we aim and launch into the souk earnestly searching for the Balenciaga parfum at a price more reasonable than the $100/bottle last seen at Nordstrom. We are immediately distracted by a table of nail polish in colors reminiscent of automotive touch up paint and buy several bottles including a small vile of glitter additive. It is, after all, June—the month of pride.