Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (2 page)

I thought of one of her iconic close-up moments with nineteen-year-old me. It was the summer of 1987, after my freshman year in college. She and I were at a turning point. For me, that first year away at college had been a liberating breather from her all-consuming love, a love that had always cloaked me like a cashmere blanket in August. For her, that year was a year of mourning: mourning over my deserting the nest, mourning over the loss of her idealized notion of me as her perfect child, and mourning over my newly declared homosexuality.

After that first year of splashing joyously in the waters of boys, booze, and drugs with impunity, it was a culture shock being back under her roof. To her, anyone who liked more than two drinks was a lush. Drugs were criminal. And sex? I can see her reflection in the makeup mirror dispensing her two warnings with a flick of her mascara wand: “A moment’s pleasure isn’t worth a lifetime of regret” and “A stiff dick knows no conscience.”

I did manage to circumvent her warnings that summer and find a bit of glamour and excitement in the form of a ballet dancer I met at the Copa. Not the Copacabana. This Copa was Beaumont’s “premier” gay bar, with delusions of New York glamour, located on a desolate corner downtown, which had been gasping for air since the mall smothered it in the seventies.

The dancer taught at Dolly Pepperdine’s School of Dance, or Miss Dolly’s, as everyone called it. He’d take me there late at night to show me moves at the barre Miss Dolly never dreamed of teaching. In the mirror, I could see we were being watched. The girls I had grown up with, in their little-girl pigtails and pink leotards, gazed at us from photos on the wall. Some even seemed to giggle.

The first couple of times I went out with the dancer, I lied and told Mama Jean I was going out with this or that high school friend. Before the third date—assignation, really—I thought,
This is ridiculous. I’m in college. She knows I’m gay. I’m nineteen. I’m an adult. Honestly, what’s the big deal?

I marched into the den where Mama Jean was supine on the peach velvet sofa in her maroon-and-pink, velour, zip-up caftan and gold slippers. This early evening she was watching
As the World Turns,
her “story.” It had been taped earlier in the day on the VCR (programmed by me) while she was at work.

I genuflected at the corner of the mirrored coffee table by her head. “Uh, Mom,” I said, my adult bravado starting to waver.

“Um-hm,” she muttered, all but ignoring me as she stared at the TV and sipped a Diet Coke from a plastic, jewel-toned cup, part of a set originally meant for the pool. She hated to be disturbed while she caught up on her stories.

“You know, I’m not going out with Nicole like I told you earlier.”

She was never a fan of Nicole, my best friend since high school. She thought Nicole was pushy and demanded too much of my time. Plus, she didn’t wear enough makeup. I thought ditching Nicole as my evening date pointed us in a positive direction.

“Well, who are you going out with?” Her eyes were still fixed on the TV.

The familiar queasy knot in my stomach—LBD, as in lower-bowel distress—hit, as it always did, whenever I had something to tell her that I knew she wouldn’t like. “Um, Carlos.”

Her head spun at a forty-five-degree angle to face me. “
Who
is Carlos?”

“Carlos Novarro. Carlos Fitzpatrick de Novarro.” That was the dancer’s name.

She put down the Diet Coke and paused her story. Lisa, the reigning diva from
As the World Turns,
was frozen mid-gasp. I had Mama Jean’s full attention. “Who the
hell
is Carlos duh Fitz-whatever?!” She stared me down with a this-better-be-good look.

“He’s a ballet dancer.”

“Is he
gay
?” she asked in the same way she would ask if he was a Democrat.

“Well, yes. That’s kinda the point.”

“Uh-huh…”

I decided to shift gears. “He teaches ballet at Miss Dolly’s.” I threw that out to legitimize him, give him a tutu of respectability.

Silence. She stared at the ceiling with her arms folded over her chest, her face locked in a frown.

I decided to try to impress her with his credentials. My experience with her was that all could be forgiven if you’d made something of yourself in the big city. After all, her childhood friend Henny had become an actor in New York and she always thrilled to see him in those insurance commercials. “Come quick! Henny’s on TV! God, I remember how we used to put on shows in the backyard.” Henny had recently died from complications caused by AIDS. The virus was still a mysterious and uncontrollable forest fire, big cities being the charred open wilderness.

“Well, you know, he used to dance with the New York City Ballet.” I almost smirked.

“New York?!” The interrobang is a punctuation mark that combines a question mark with an exclamation point when a question is asked in excitement or disbelief. It was invented for her.

“Yes. New York City.”

“Have you heard of AIDS?!”

“Have you heard of safe sex?”

“There are only
two
kinds of sex:
oral
and
anal
!”
She’s forgetting vaginal, but that’s her problem.

I was speechless. She lay there, rigid as a corpse. After what seemed like an airless five minutes, I got up and left her to the daytime drama of
As the World Turns
.

When I returned from my date later that night, I slipped into the kitchen through the back door as quietly as a ballet dancer
en pointe
. The kitchen was dark, save for a swath of light spilling through the archway from the den. I turned my back from the light to lock the door. Through the door’s window, I could see Mama Jean’s black Cadillac sitting in the garage like a panther. When I faced the light, it darkened with Mama Jean’s tall shadow, her bubble of hair a circle sitting atop the triangle of her floor-length, satiny nightgown. But once her gold-slippered feet set down stakes—one here, one there, about twenty-four inches apart—her shadow went vertical and she was live and in person. She placed her left hand on her left hip and her right hand on her right hip. I couldn’t see the angry glare in her eyes or her gritted teeth in the dark, but I could feel them. It was as if she had caught me bent over Miss Dolly’s barre.

We were both silent for a moment before she fired like a machine gun her verbal salvo of interrobangs. Each shot was punctuated with the thrust of her perfectly sculpted, red fingernail.

“Where the
hell
have you been?!

“Do you know what time it is?!

“I’ve been worried
sick
!

“How
dare
you keep me up like this when I have to get up for work in the morning!

“Work that’s paying for that precious school of yours!

“Work that pays for the car you drive!

“The car that you use to run the streets all night—with
no
regard for me!

“And you’re
drunk
!”

She took a much-needed breath before firing her last shot: “Where the
hell
did you get that shirt?!”

Finally I spoke. “
You
gave me this shirt!” I was wearing a blue-and-green shirt she’d bought me because “it looks so pretty with your crowning glory,” my copper-red hair.

She walked off in a huff. I stood frozen in place, afraid to take a breath.

Just when I thought it was safe, she reemerged. She assumed her previous hands-on-hips combat position for a final staredown.

The penetrating glare from her ominous shadow held me frozen for what seemed like an eternity before she spoke. Then out of the darkness her words came, no longer in the hysterical rapid-fire of her previous assault, but slowly, with the growl of a wounded lioness. Like a character in one of her soaps.

“You don’t know what love is.”

That’s hitting below the dance belt.
I opened my mouth but stopped short of responding,
A stiff dick knows no conscience, right?
Instead, I shut up while she made her final exit.

I stared at the empty shadow she left behind as I stood in my fog of booze, sex, and youth … wondering. I thought that her definition of love meant I had to do what she wanted, be her perfect Jamie Doll. I was wrong. It would take me another twenty years and getting sober from a silo of booze before I would understand what love was—Mama Jean’s kind, anyway.

Part I

Golden Triangle (1968–87)

When you’re good to Mama, Mama’s good to you.

—John Kander and Fred Ebb,
Chicago

The world wanders into many strange by-paths of affection. The love of a mother for her children is dominant, leonine, selfish, and unselfish.

—Theodore Dreiser

ONE

Break Out the Booze and Have a Ball

I had no business being a child. The playground and its mewling habitu
é
s were not for me. What I saw at my parents’ parties and in movies and TV shows is all I wanted. To be at a cocktail party with a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and my head thrown back in laughter was my idea of heaven. Everything outside of that was filler.

Before I could read, I loved looking at the photo albums of my parents’ wedding day, April 24, 1965. I wondered why Mama Jean was in a cocktail dress and not a long, white gown and veil. But more than that, I was pissed off that my half brothers, Ronny and Jeffrey (nine and eight years older than me), got to go to the wedding
and
the reception, but not me. I couldn’t stand the thought of missing a party.

My tour of the wedding always began with the black-and-white, eight-by-ten, glossy photo of Mama Jean’s marriage announcement. She is in a pose you rarely see anymore: she gazes over her shoulder, which is in the middle of the frame, perpendicular to the viewer. I could almost tell that the triple-pleated shawl lapel of her chiffon dress was a blurry green, the color of a Spanish olive submerged in a martini. Her hair was one solid bouffant flip, a Cat Five—as in it could withstand a Category 5 hurricane, which was often a threat in semitropical Beaumont. The newspaper ran this photo as if she were a movie star, which she was to me.

Next I dove into the photo albums, starting with the wedding mass at St. Anne’s Catholic Church on Calder Avenue, the church where I was baptized and already knew well its altar of pink and green marble statues flanking a disturbingly handsome Jesus on a cross. The photos were snapshots in black and white, three-and-a-half-inch squares with white borders. Most of the shots were taken from the rear of the church looking toward the altar so that you saw the anonymous backs of the wedding guests staring at the backs of my parents as they knelt before the priest. A permanent hush preserved these somber photos. I couldn’t imagine that any of the guests spoke, or if they did, it was in whispers.

Opening the wedding-reception album was like unlocking a soundproof door on a party in full swing. I could almost hear the clamor of laughter, music, and clinking champagne saucers. These photos were in color—cotton-candy,
lickable
color. The women wore dresses of lemon chiffon, strawberry ice cream, birthday-cake blue icing, all trimmed with white gloves and crowned with matching pillbox hats. Mama Jean’s miniature pillbox hat and veil were barely noticeable. Her hair was her crown.
Why don’t the ladies still wear outfits like that?
Already I was nostalgic for a past I hadn’t lived; felt as if then was better than now.

There was Dad—James Earl Sr., Bubba to his family but
never
in front of Mama Jean, J. Earl to colleagues, but usually just Earl
—
without a trace of gray in his close-cropped, dark hair, laughing as he fed a piece of bunny-white wedding cake to Mama Jean. He looked like Dick Van Dyke and had the comedic, easygoing personality to match. My brothers, Ronny and Jeffrey, six and four, were on either side of Mamou, Mama Jean’s mother. She was the only redhead in the bunch and the person from whom I would inherit my red hair.
So where was I?

It was explained to me a few times before I got it, accepted it really. Mama Jean, who grew up in Beaumont down the street from St. Anne’s on Calder, got out of town for a while. After college at Louisiana State University, where she was a Chi Omega, she moved to Louisiana and worked as an elementary-school teacher. She met a man, Len, and he knew how to fly. He was in the Air Force. They got married in Beaumont at St. Anne’s and were celebrated at the country club on the banks of the Neches River. Earl was at the wedding.

They left Beaumont for a honeymoon in Acapulco. After the honeymoon they went wherever the Air Force asked them to go—Louisiana, Alabama, Kansas—creating a Ronny in 1959 and a Jeffrey in 1960. Once, in August of 1963, when the Air Force asked Len to make a quick trip across Kansas with three other officers, he didn’t come back. The plane went down in a wheat field. Everyone survived. Except for Len. Mama Jean, a brand-new widow at twenty-nine, put her boys in her new, black Ford Fairlane with shiny chrome bumpers and returned to Beaumont with a letter of condolence from President Kennedy. Earl was at the funeral, and he remembered thinking how pretty she looked in her black lace veil.

Three months later and just six days after President Kennedy’s assassination, Mama Jean’s father, Big Daddy, died in his sleep. “It always strikes terror to my heart whenever I hear
1963,
” Mama Jean said ever after.

Earl had grown up in Beaumont too, but he never wanted to leave, save for his college years at the University of Texas in Austin. He had never married. Earl had been school friends with Mama Jean’s older brother. That’s why he got to go to her first wedding and to Len’s funeral. When Mamou, who had always been fond of Earl (everyone loved Earl), ran into him at Luby’s Cafeteria at the Gaylynn Shopping Center, a couple of blocks from St. Anne’s, she told him to call Mama Jean.

He did. He took her dancing at the beaux arts costume ball in the Rose Room at the Hotel Beaumont. She was a se
ñ
orita to his caballero. “I needed to have fun and I hadn’t danced in a long time. Your father’s a marvelous dancer.” They were crowned the king and queen of the parquet after they jitterbugged the night away. She liked the way he moved. He liked the way she moved. Everybody liked the way they moved that night. With his ribald jokes—“A guy watches a wobbly floozy on a barstool and asks her, ‘How many does it take to make you … dizzy?’ She answers, ‘Two. And the name’s Daisy’”—he made her laugh for the first time in a long time. “And I needed to laugh,” Mama Jean always said.