Mama Black Widow (30 page)

He said, “No, Miss, today is April 6.”

Soldier was buried. Dear, beautiful, warm, kind, loyal, unforgettable Soldier was buried, and I had had a dick up my ass and missed his funeral.

I started ripping off my dress and the long red wig. An open-mouthed crowd quickly gathered. I flung myself into the gutter and smashed my head against the curb.

I screamed over and over at the top of my voice, “He was the best friend I ever had, and I'm the filthy, stinking, drunken tramp, cock-sucking, asshole-licking, lousy faggot bastard that missed my best friend's funeral. Somebody kill me. Please. Won't one of you kill me? Kill me somebody. Please! Please! Kill me! Kill me! Please!”

My young stud finally got me into his car and away as the police roared to the scene. It was weeks before I got myself together and took a drink.

Three months after Soldier's death from heart failure, I went out to the cemetery and spent all day at the graves of Soldier, Carol and Bessie. Typically, he was helping a guy push his stalled car to a garage when he suffered the fatal attack.

Except for faint lavender circles beneath my slightly less bright hazel eyes, and, of course, the permanent loss of the marvelous vitality and compulsion of the young to leap up into the heavens and rearrange the stars, I hadn't become altogether ugly and broken down at the age of thirty-one.

Mama, on the other hand, by 1959 had aged visibly—much more than her fifty-four years. Her once erect carriage had developed a subtle stoop. And prematurely, her sexy chest and rear end, like her face, had lost its soft roundness and become loose and gaunt, like the withered angular frame of an old woman.

She also became a victim of what she believed to be severe heart trouble and a mysterious but enervating malady affecting her legs.

Doctor Sykes, a competent Westside M.D. and psychiatrist, was Mama's physician in 1957 when the dramatic symptoms of her two complaints surfaced.

He was terminated because Mama said, “I know I got serious things wrong with me, and all that yellow fake does is ask me a thousand embarrassing questions about my mama and papa, and you and Carol, and the other kids and Frank.”

Doctor Sykes told me confidentially that Mama's periodic heart trouble and the extreme weakness and threatened collapse of her legs did not have organic cause, but that symptoms she demonstrated gratified unconscious needs and desires.

He also told me that for her, the complaints had become real and could affect her like real organic disorders. He suggested that perhaps Mama suffered terrible pangs of guilt for past deeds, and great anxiety that I would turn my back on her and leave her.

The symptoms, in effect, shouted for her, “Sweet Pea, see how sick and afflicted I am! I am being punished for my past wrongdoing. You can't leave me now. If you do, I'll die of a heart attack, or perhaps I'll become helpless, unable to walk. Then I will be on your conscience.”

On another occasion, Doctor Sykes gave me his “pedestal reverence” theory as one possible reason, among many, including my fear of failure to perform successfully, why I hadn't been able to have successful sexual intercourse with Dorcas years before.

Doctor Sykes may or may not have been correct about me and Dorcas, but he was right on target about Mama, because she almost always suffered her symptoms when we quarreled and I threatened to leave, or when she suspected that I might leave her forever.

Mama went to a general practitioner who treated her neurosis with saccharine mumbo jumbo and pills galore.

The demand for Mama's “instant success oil” and “enemy destruct powder” and her counseling hocus-pocus fell sharply after the war ended.

Over the years Mama had hired several different lawyers to get Junior free on at least parole. But it seemed impossible. He and Railhead were classified as incorrigible.

Mama visited Junior every month except when he was in solitary, which was quite often. I went with her often during his first years in Joliet. But somehow I got the feeling he would be happier to visit with just Mama. So I wrote him twice a month and put money orders inside my letters for things he might need.

Mama had saved plenty from the big buck boom and sucker explosion years of the war. And she owned the apartment building where we lived.

A friend of Lucy's taught me exotic dancing, and in 1947, I started dancing in small cabarets around the Chicago area that featured female impersonators.

By 1957, exotic dancing had lost, for me, its allure and reasonable income, and its frenetic gyrations had put the torch to my stamina. Lucy encouraged me to work in Spiegel's mailing department—as a female employee, naturally.

I never wore women's clothes in Mama's presence, and unlike I did as a teenager, I didn't now hurt or bait Mama with hateful and accusative references to the twins, Junior, and Papa.

But I could, and did quite often, become hostile toward her and would storm out of the flat when the pressure of her cunning attempts to dominate me became unbearable.

I had been her prisoner since my aware late teens, straining and thrashing to escape the strangling web of her cloying possessiveness and iron determination to hold me by any means.

Lucy, the homosexual, was my only close friend, and through her, I met many other homosexuals and discovered there is among them practically none of the racial bigotry and hatred found in the so-called straight world of the heterosexuals.

On Christmas Eve in 1959, Lucy and I went to a big bash thrown by Stel, an affluent white lesbian and retired Eastern madam, who lived in a fourteen-room house on Warren Boulevard, which was a Mecca for not only a select group of gay people on the Westside, but for many from all sections of Chicago.

All of the nonsexual action was in the spacious basement bistro, which was furnished to resemble the commercial type right down to flashing and rippling neon beer and whiskey signs.

Lucy was mixing business with pleasure. She had been commissioned by a risqué magazine the week before to write anonymous and earthy profiles on diverse gay types.

She sat strategically on a long black vinyl sofa near the door of the barroom away from the hubbub at the bar and tables. And, too, in that spot, she could see all likely subjects for her article, coming and going.

Lucy was well known and liked by everyone. I wasn't surprised, while getting half stinko at the bar, to notice Lucy was having good luck.

In fact, she and her tape recorder were almost hidden by a half-crocked group seated on the sofa and on chairs in a rough circle around where Lucy was seated on the end of the sofa.

They were gesticulating in what looked like a round-robin discussion. It looked interesting, and I had met them all, so I sauntered over and squeezed in beside Lucy on the sofa.

A tall black guy named Art, with a potbelly and graying hair, had a hurt look on his puffy face.

He was saying, “Goddamnit, Lucy, Mother Thomas and me didn't bust up 'cause he caught me eating a broad up. The reason we busted up happened at Mother's birthday party.

“A young fine freak queen kept rubbing his tender round ass against my jones. Shit, I was dumb, drunk and aching to do my thing to that cute freak.

“I took him in one of the johns and was piling this foot of pure hot joy into him when I remembered the big mirror was two-way. Mother was watching, and so were twenty other people.

“He almost had a nervous breakdown and heckled me night and day about how rotten I was to play him cheap before his friends. I woke up one early bright morning with Mother's
tongue in my mouth. She was in drag and slobbery drunk. Her mouth stank like a sewer. I got wide awake and saw that Mother had freaked off with some dirty bastard. Mother's face and lips was crusted with shit.

“I got a golf club and beat his nasty white ass upstairs and down. He peed like a puppy all over the mansion. I did a year in the slammer. Now, Lucy, that's how I busted up with Mother Thomas.”

Lucy turned to an old white queen named Larry, with wispy white hair and a sad face, dressed in a shabby business suit.

Lucy said, “Larry, how is your love life?”

The old man swallowed and looked at Lucy with filmy blue eyes.

He cackled bitterly and said, “It's a damn sight worse than it was when I had money and was younger and had a big house like this one.”

He paused and closed his eyes rapturously.

He said dreamily, “Then I had more than my share of lovely ladies with nice stiff cocks. But now that I'm broke and old as weather, I'm not complaining. I still get beautiful laddies to haul my ashes when my old balls get heavy.”

We all laughed.

Lucy said, “Larry, I don't suppose you would care to say what your secret is?”

The old queen daintily wet his lips with an acrobatic tongue and said, “It's all quite simple. I live over a bar in the tenderloin, and there are never enough cunts hanging around to go around at closing time.

“I sit on my downstairs stoop and case the luscious things when they hit the sidewalk, all hot to pop off from the teasing cunts. And sometimes a laddie will need a bed for the night or a meal.

“I tell you I get some living jewels to grace my humble bed. Every old lonely bitch like me should find himself some room over a bar in the tenderloin.”

Lucy put a fresh reel of tape in the small recorder in her lap.
Princess, a tiny, black middle-aged queen, sat beside me dressed in a gold leather dress and boots and a platinum wig that framed his hard face.

Lucy said, “What's happening with you, Princess?”

He answered in a shrill falsetto, “Everything, Lucy! And it's all groovy. I don't sell reefer and whore anymore. I'm a respectable bitch. I own two restaurants and property in Evanston.”

Lucy said, “Did that Southside hassle iron out with those black studs that were salty because you took Reggie, that cute white stud, in out of the cold and bought him a Cadillac? Remember they were bad-mouthing you, saying you had paddy fever?”

Princess exploded. “I don't give a motherfuck what the goddamn nigger studs said about me. I don't have white fever. Color don't mean shit to me. A stud can be yellow, orange, pin-striped, or black, just so he can con me that I'm happy.

“And Reggie did that for more than a year. I have had more than a hundred white and black studs in the last twenty years. They have busted my head, shot me, stabbed me and swindled me out of my bread.

“Sure I'm a cocksucker and a low-life freak. But I'm a human being, and I need more than my asshole punched. I need affection and companionship. Reggie was a lying, double-crossing, cunt-loving Judas, but he kept my head fucked up with his sweet bullshit. He really had me feeling like an honest to God cunt, and my stupid feet never touched earth for that year he conned me. All the other conniving bastards ripped me off for every red cent and split within a month.”

Lucy said, “Princess, I guess after Reggie, you'll just go for one-night stands? After all, you can't expect to equal Reggie's youth and looks, much less top him.”

Princess sighed and said, “Lucy, I wish I could be satisfied, hitting and running. But I'm a crazy bitch that has to shack with a stud to be content, even though I know the sonuvabitch sure as hell is going to rob me, try to kill me or cripple me and split with a cunt.

“I'm a queer, and for queers, there is no tomorrow, just today. Just when we are certain we have caught the brass ring of happiness, we discover some slick double-crossing stud has dipped it in shit.

“Lucy, I got afraid and stopped looking a long time ago for the end of the gay rainbow because I know what is really waiting there for us—a pot of lonely death.”

The Princess killed my spirits so I went back to the bar to get respirited. In an hour or so Lucy joined me. We were juicing and chattering drunkenly when apparently, magically, from the jungles of Africa, materialized a chieftain, no doubt of the proud, statuesque and beautiful Watusi tribe, wearing a lumber jacket and horribly rough trousers.

He stood between Lucy and me, and I wondered why Lucy introduced him by the Anglo name of Mike Bowers, instead of by some poetic tribal name.

I was so excited I almost tinkled on myself when he caressed my thigh. I mumbled something and went to the john to tinkle and freshen my makeup. I stood in the john palpitating and visualizing his finely chiseled jet-black face and the remarkably large dark eyes so romantic and tragic and wise, as if they had witnessed and shared all the love, sex, tragedy and heartbreak of the world through all time.

And those eyes I was sure had looked into my freak soul and become soft with a tender promise. I was sunk, hooked, and everything was happening in an enchanted fog.

I was floating when I left Stel's with him and got into his ancient Ford and went to his bleak room in a transient hotel on Madison Street. But he and his kitten—gentle lovemaking—made me oblivious to everything but the wonder of his presence.

Mike told me he was almost penniless and without wardrobe because he had recently finished his second term in the federal prison at Atlanta, Georgia, for narcotics trafficking.

He also told me he never knew his father, and his mother was
killed in a fight when he was thirteen. He had made it on his own since then and served three prison terms in his twenty-three years.

I had close to three thousand dollars in a savings account. About two weeks after I met him I had withdrawn fifteen hundred dollars and bought him sparkling new clothes, rented a nicely furnished three-room apartment just three blocks from Mama's building, and he was able to trade in the rattletrap Ford on a used but extremely clean '55 Chevy.

I still worked at Spiegel's and moved my wardrobe of women's clothes from Lucy's place to Mike's, where I spent most of my time.

Mama met Mike and didn't get any attacks, and she didn't seem to mind that I slept with Mike and that I spent only brief moments with her. I guess she felt there was no reason for panic and jealousy over a man. She must have known I was too starry-eyed to suspect that a love affair between two men is a doomed proposition.