I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (3 page)

For a guy who spent the first twenty-odd years of his life drinking from separate water fountains than the white folks, moving to Minnesota must have been the sexual equivalent of the riots you always see in developing nations right after they overthrow the despotic leader. Par-
tay
!

Freddie once told me a story that illustrated the enormity of the cultural jolt. Not long after he arrived, he was riding a city bus, sitting in a window seat, near the back. The bus, already almost full, stopped to pick up more passengers. Last to board the bus was a white woman, attractive, probably in her late twenties. She took the seat right next to Freddie. Just sat down right next to him, like it was a completely normal thing to do.

It was the closest physical proximity he’d ever had to a white woman. Ever! And he was going on thirty. He burst into a cold sweat, his heart racing, his hands shaking, with an overwhelming urge to
get up and run. That’s how deep the taboo went against even
sitting
next to a white woman, and how well he had internalized it. After all, where he grew up, his life had depended on it. You could get lynched for way less—like just
looking
at a white woman.

To think that, shortly after that incident, my dad had not only met a young white woman and introduced her to prostitution but impregnated her too is to realize how deeply transgressive an act my conception was. My dad was doing something he could have
died
for just a few hundred miles to the south.

It tells me just how ballsy Freddie and Linda really were. How nonconformist. How rebellious. How totally punk rock. A black man getting with a white woman in 1964 was better than having a Mohawk in 1978 or a pantyless crotch in 2007. It was a way to say,
Your rules don’t apply to me, and by the way—fuck you.

What a way to start a life.

I’M AMAZED I NEVER TURNED A TRICK.
I never even stripped! Not that I would blame me if I had. Many, if not most, girls of my provenance find themselves trading sex somewhere along the way for cold hard cash (as opposed to engaging in the less overt quid pro quo of a serious relationship with a man of some—or any—means). And to be honest, I always secretly thought I would, too.

But I didn’t, and I’m not sure why.

Fear of sex was definitely a part of it. But there was another intangible thing, a force almost, that prevented me from being able to tap into my sexuality in order to make money or further my career. I was not terribly happy about this thing, either. Mostly because it meant Prince would not be building his next girl group around me. (A pause here for all of those who care to mourn the loss of Tracy Renee 6, the great girl group that would have come after Vanity 6 but before Apollonia 6…)

I remember the exact moment I discovered this predicament. It
was seventh grade, the year of my sexual awakening. I was spending a lot of time alone, and, probably because that year we were living in one of those neighborhoods with the poor-people zoning laws, where XXX theaters are right at the end of the block and the corner store carries as much T&A as PB&J, I’d come across sexually explicit materials on two different occasions. First, I found a book of hard-core pornography on the bus, wedged between the seats. I took it home and, with remarkable speed, managed to think up uses for it.

A short time later, as I walked to school on a snowy day, I happened upon a stack of girlie magazines dropped off outside the aforementioned corner store. Titles like
Cheri, Oui,
and
Hustler.
I stole a couple and stashed them under the bed, where they, too, became interesting reading material when I was bored.

As I said, I had a lot of free time that year.

The thing about it was, there was something very familiar about pornography. Not necessarily the pictures—some were highly explicit and shocked me at first—but the
energy
in the pictures; it was familiar, almost normal. I should say I’d been sexually, er, awake ever since I could remember. Without going into crazy details, let’s just say even at age four, when given a “time out” I knew how to make the minutes pass quickly in ways that were probably not what my foster parents were thinking when they named the time-out spot “the naughty chair.”

Back to my moment of choice, though. I was in the basement with my friend Jody and this kid named Keith, who was somebody’s cousin or nephew and who just happened to be visiting. As happens with seventh graders, the discussion turned to sex, and a dare was put forth: I should French-kiss Keith. In theory, I really liked the idea. I was going to get to kiss this boy (and he was cute) without having to risk “liking” him, with its attendant possibility of rejection. Furthermore, since he was visiting, I would never have to see him again.

Well, my mind may have been in agreement, but my body most definitely was not. As soon as the kiss became imminent, my heart
began to pound and an unbelievable fear took hold. I couldn’t move.

“Go!” Jody urges me. “Kiss him!”

I’m looking at Keith, and he’s just standing there. Waiting. Ready.

“
Kiss
him!”

And…I…just…couldn’t…do…it…

I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t even
force
myself to do it.

Jody, ever the bolder of the two of us, muttered something about my being a loser and stepped right in front of me with a confident, “Okay, then, I’ll do it.” She put her arms around Keith’s neck, and he put his arms around her waist, and right in front of me, they started going at it.

A tsunami of shame washed over me.
What is wrong with me?
Why couldn’t I just kiss the guy? He was standing
right there.
He wanted me to. It would have been so easy.

But something really deep inside had just frozen me to the spot—like a wet tongue on metal when it’s ten below outside—unable to carry out the command that Jody Jeffs, and my mind, had just given.

Even though
I wanted to do it!

It would take me, oh, a couple of decades to figure it out exactly, but eventually I would come to realize that I had two separate but interrelated sexualities: one with myself, and one with men. Two different selves I would spend the next twenty years synthesizing: the one who knew too much too soon and was hypersexual and kind of perverse, and the other, more powerful one that would keep me in check, up to and including trading sex for money.

MY DAD
SWEARS
THEY VOLUNTEERED.
Every last one of them.

“Not
once
did I ever walk up to a woman and say, ‘I’m a
this
and I want you to be a
that.
’ That’s not how it happened.”

He swears it. And I guess I believe him.

Here’s his side of the story:

One night in 1956 he was sitting at a bar, and a woman came up to him. “Can you come upstairs with me?” she asked. “I have a piece of furniture I need help moving.”

My dad, ever the gentleman, was eager to be of service. “I was twenty years old,” he remembers. “A square. Just off the bus. I honestly thought I was going up there to help the girl out.”

So upstairs he goes, to a small room in a building over the bar. Once inside the room, he says, she broke it down for him.

“I want you to be my man,” she told him, point-blank.

“What do you mean?” Freddie asks. Recounting the story, he articulates every word, like “What. Do. You. Mean.” He really sounds like he had no idea what she was talking about.

“I’m a working girl,” she explained. “I make money, and I’ll give it to you, if you’ll be my man.”

Freddie gives a big throaty laugh at the memory. “Man, I didn’t know a hooker from a loaf of bread,” he says, clapping. “I’d heard about them, but I’d never actually
seen
one. But this girl, she just…” He stops. Then he finishes: “I said, ‘Sounds good to me.’ And boom! I was in bidness.

“We went around to all the clubs in Minneapolis, the Key Club and Moby Dick’s. And she made money and she gave it to me. And she fucked me silly.”

Freddie goes on to tell some version of this story—
She came up to me and said she had decided to become a hooker, but she needed a man, and would I do it?
—for every woman he ever “worked” with. The way he tells it lends credence to the adage “There are no victims, only volunteers.” But even though these women were in agreement with trading sex for money, it doesn’t change my mind about the real costs to them of doing so.

Not that anyone has ever asked, but as the child of a prostitute, I don’t really believe there is such a thing as a happy hooker. Even the ones making thousands a night. Yeah, maybe sex work is cool in the
short term, in the same way it’s awesome to smoke cigarettes in your early twenties. It looks cool and feels glamorous. But poll any smoker over the age of forty-five. They all want to quit.

TURNS OUT MY MOM WASN’T REBELLIOUS
so much as she was crazy. This might have been predicted. My dad once told me that when Linda found out she was pregnant she wanted an abortion, and the only reason she didn’t get one is because he essentially locked her in an apartment and kept her there until I arrived.

I was born in Hennepin County General Hospital on September 12, 1964. In fact, one of the first things I asked my mom when I met her was the time of my birth. I’m one of those chicks who’s into astrology (which is a little like saying “I’m one of those guys who’s into blow jobs”) and I’d been waiting a lifetime to find out the hour and minute of my birth so I could calculate my rising sign, which in astrology is the equivalent of
You Are Here
on a map.

“It was in the afternoon,” Linda remembers, sounding quite certain.

“Really?” I’m breathless. I’ve been wondering about this since I cracked my first astrology book, in my teens. “You’re sure?”

“Yep. Positive. I remember because your dad was at the hospital and I was nervous that my mom was going to show up any moment because school was out for the day.” Linda’s mom, Helen, was a second-grade schoolteacher. She could print like nobody’s business. “My mom hated your dad, you know. Hated him.”

Of course she did! My dad was black
and
a pimp. To Helen he must have been a rolling, strolling, overdressed billboard announcing the fact that she was not a typical college-educated elementary schoolteacher, but rather an abandoned wife who raised her only child to be a welfare mom and prostitute. There is, as we say in the news business, a story there. We may never know the details, but
figure the story is the approximate size and shape of Linda’s insanity. Or Freddie’s diamond rings.

“Do you know what time? I mean, exactly?” I’ve tried to find out on a number of occasions by obtaining a copy of my birth record, but Hennepin County General Hospital was torn down in the 1970s and all the actual birth certificates were packed away when the data was computerized, so now when you request your records, they just send you a piece of paper that essentially says,
Yeah, you were born, on September 12, 1964
.

Thanks. I knew that already.

There’s no time of birth on there, or little footprint, or doctor’s signature. Nothing that would say,
You’re specific, there’s only one of you, you are special and wanted.
This is the kind of indignity you suffer when you’re too poor to be born in a hospital with an actual name.
General Hospital.
It means no one claims you, not the Seventh-Day Adventists, or the Methodists, or the Catholics. You don’t really have a tribe. Unless indigents and welfare cases are your tribe.

No wonder I’ve always felt like I was hatched, not born.

“Four ten in the afternoon,” Linda says adamantly. “Yep. School was already out.”

Now
this
is something I can work with. Later, I ask my dad, and he corroborates the Helen part of the story, including the part about seeing her in the waiting room after school. He thinks the time was a little bit earlier, though. Perhaps around three thirty
P.M.

I run off to do my birth chart and immediately discover my birth time is right on the cusp between rising signs. If I was born at 4:10
P.M.
, I’m a Capricorn rising. If I was born at 4:30
P.M.
, I’m an Aquarius rising.

Great. You’d think that would settle the question, but it doesn’t. A teensy bit more research reveals that my parents are either liars, or dimwits, or both. (Surprise.) And here’s how I know.

Because I was born on a Saturday. There’s no school on Saturday.

MY DAD WAS AHEAD OF HIS TIME.
Thanks to his, er, nontraditional job and my mother’s complete inability to take care of me due to her bipolar-y/alcoholic problems (think Britney, early 2008), my dad was my primary caretaker.

Freddie played Mr. Mom twenty years before Bob Saget ever met an Olsen twin. He cooked for me, fed me, bathed me, dressed me, and took me everywhere with him. Pictures from that time consistently show me—always with a fierce look on my face, always dressed to
work
in the RuPaul sense of the word—being toted around in my dad’s arms. Except for when he was dropping me off with a babysitter (“babysitter” being another word for some chick he was fucking), I was his constant companion. His sidekick, talisman, and ultimate accessory. We were inseparable.

Presumably I even attended a drug deal or two.

Later, when I had my own (stroller-hating) son, I started to realize what it might have meant to be carried around by him all the time. When you are a baby being held by someone, you absorb all their energy, you see the world from their viewpoint, you smell their hair. They, in turn, have full access to your face. They can kiss you whenever they want, and you can see all their expressions in extreme close-up, like being in the first row at a movie theater. I don’t know about you, but I get motion sick in the first row.

It’s no wonder, then, that I’ve always felt so connected to my dad. For the first three years of my life I was literally closer to him than I was to anyone else, emotionally, physically, and metaphysically. I’m so close to him, every choice he makes in his life reverberates through mine in a very big way. So when he gets his first major prison sentence, there is only one word for what I am.