It Takes a Woman 
 

    How, one might legitimately ask, did a married hetero male end up on Fire Island in the company of a couple of gay porn stars toking on a pipe full of crystal meth and making wolf noises?  It’s kind of a long story.  First off, I should get something out of the way.  Conventional wisdom once held that boys who like boys were the product of outside forces such as the lack of a father figure or the influence of imperious and domineering women.  The folks who came up with the theory should have checked with me first.  If that kind of childhood could make you gay, I’d have sashayed to my junior high school prom clad in a Balenciaga gown, evening gloves, and heels. 

    So, while the girls in my life didn’t make me like the boys in that way, they certainly led me to them.  You see, in my world, the women have controlled the chess moves, beginning with my grandmother, the grand master.  Anna, a once-beautiful woman with brilliant, emerald-green eyes, had turned the head of many of the men in Athens, including my grandfather, a slender, genteel bank manager, educated in Vienna and fluent in three languages.  After World War II, he was hired by the U.S.  State Department’s Voice of America, a fledgling government agency with the mission to broadcast the truth and the light of democracy to the unenlightened masses of the world. 

    In 1948, my grandmother and their three children, including my then fourteen-year-old mother, Persephone, boarded a cruise ship for America.  They left a life of old-world comfort which included maids, piano lessons, and French tutors, to join my grandfather in Mt. Rainier, Maryland, a non-descript, middle-class neighborhood just outside of Washington, D.C., one commensurate with his government salary.  My grandmother, the product of a spoiled upbringing courtesy of a doting father, never forgave her husband for ripping her from her beloved Athens and plunging her into America whose social egalitarianism and nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic she viewed as boorish and beneath her.   She spent the rest of her years, all forty of them, getting even by employing an effective combination of utter helplessness and absolute intimidation. 

    The strategy included self-imposed segregation and isolation, including the inability to communicate in English (except for the most rudimentary words and phrases which she managed to butcher), never working, learning how to drive a car or write a check.  My grandmother was unable to watch a movie in English unless my grandfather was there to provide her with simultaneous translation.  In America, the country she badmouthed from morning to night, she kept herself as helpless as a newborn.  Within our family, however, my grandmother’s rule was absolute, her ruthlessness a match for that of any banana republic dictator. 

    That’s not to say she didn’t have her lighter side, like the one portrayed in those old propaganda newsreels showing the merciless strongman on a good day, yucking it up with his underlings, petting a dog, or pinching the cheek of a child.   My grandmother could be gregarious and funny, especially in social situations in which she was the center of attention.  She was a good story teller, often recounting her brother’s exploits during the war as part of the resistance, the charms of pre-war Athens, or Greek mythology.  A repository of folksy old-wives tales, quirky expressions, superstitions and myths, my grandmother had the ability to deliver a quip with the timing of a stand-up comedienne.  She could carry a tune, croon the popular love ballads from her youth or break into a traditional folk dance around the coffee table.  On holidays, or when the mood struck her, she would create authentic and delicious multi-course feasts, complete with heaping platters of lamb, moussaka, pasticcio, spanakopita, trays of baklava, and, my grandfather’s favorite, galactobourico, a creamy, philo-dough concoction which tastes much better than it sounds.

    Then, without provocation, or at least none that could be accurately predicted, she would employ her weapon of choice—a vicious, black rage which she unleashed with unvarying results—the derailment and disruption of any semblance of normal family life.  My grandmother’s anger was slash and burn, a full-frontal assault, during which she would work her way relentlessly through everyone and everything that deserved to be sent to hell.  It was a list which included, but was not limited to:

·         the Turks

·         the Jews

·         black people

·          Americans (except for Jerry Lewis who made her laugh and Kirk Douglas who made her swoon, both, oddly enough, Jews)

·          any President after John Kennedy (or, for that matter, before)

·          my grandfather’s side of the family

·         the military junta which ruled Greece from 1967-1974

·         Henry Kissinger (whose adherence to realpolitik lead to U.S. support of the aforementioned)

·         The CIA (Ibid)

·         Israel (see, the Jews)

·         Armenians (just because)

·         American food (she might have had a point here)

·         American music

·         Come to think of it, most things or people whose origins were not Greek. 

    She’d often punctuate her curses with the Greek gesture of derision, the palm-out swat of the hand, the muja, which she enjoyed using on unsuspecting Americans who, thinking she was saying hello, would often wave back to her.

As for homosexuals, or, as she referred to them in Greek, Pusties (pronounced Poo-sties), they were pathetic degenerates.  Their attempts at self-awareness and pride were just another example of a bankrupt and permissive society. 

Though my grandmother’s hate list was long, it was also peripheral.  The hub of her anger was invariably and tightly wound around a family member who was guilty of some slight or lack of deference.  Once my grandmother’s fury was unleashed, resistance was futile.  Challenging her upped the ante, and she was always holding more chips.  If my grandmother had been a prize fighter she’d have had it all—the relentless jab, the ferocious left hook, and the wind to go fifteen rounds.  No one could out yell, out curse, or outlast her.  Argue with her and she’d bury you in a torrent of profanity and the glare of her demonic eyes which reminded me of the creepy gypsy woman from the Wolfman movies.  Slap her (as I saw my grandfather do only once after she’d had at him for two days straight) and she’d come at you with her fists or whatever she could get a hold of (in this instance, a bowl of meatballs). 

    Like a besieged army, all we could do is hunker down and wait her out.   In the whole world, there were three things my grandmother loved unwaveringly, sparing them her vitriol:  Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, best known for his soundtrack to Zorba the Greek; my grandparent’s elderly, diminutive, devoted, and submissive black housekeeper Rosa; and her first grandchild, me.

Though my grandfather was the most frequent recipient of my grandmother’s wrath, none of her children were spared, especially my mother. Perhaps my mother’s beauty reminded my grandmother of the fact that she was no longer beautiful. Perhaps it was the fact that she was the first born and my grandfather’s favorite.  Whatever the reason, my mother’s relationship with her mother was, at its best, one of barely contained mutual disdain. 

    As adolescents, my mother and her siblings had begged my grandfather to do the right thing—by which they meant leave his wife.  Motivated by some combination of love, guilt, obligation and masochism, my grandfather refused.  In response, his children voted with their feet and their identities.  Aunt Mary changed her name to Mardi (she thought it hipper) and learned to play the drums. She married the first of five husbands, a gentle-natured saxophone player, and moved to Greenwich Village to live like a bohemian.  My uncle was drafted into the Army, moved to California, married a Swedish girl and began chasing women.

    My mother, Persephone, whose nickname in Greek, “Phony,” had unfortunate connotations in English, changed her name to Yvonne and chose a local escape route in the form of a good-looking, not terribly bright Italian cab driver named George Bono, whom she married, never loved, and who would not become my father.

    In August of 1957, my mother and grandmother boarded a cruise ship bound for Greece, a vacation that, given the volatile nature of their relationship, seems preposterously ill-advised.  Now, on my dresser, I have a framed copy of a picture taken on that cruise.  It shows my mother and grandmother seated next to each other at a long table strewn with post-dinner detritus—half filled water glasses, bread plates, and empty bottles of wine.   My mother, poised and feline, is turned toward the camera, a cigarette dangling from her manicured fingers, her wrist barely resting on the arm of her chair.  Her smile is small and sly.  Over her shoulder looms my grandmother, her body thrust awkwardly towards the camera as if she fears being left out of the frame.  Her black cat-eye glasses with their dark lenses obscure her no-doubt portentous eyes, heavy red lipstick coats her taut lips.  She’s not smiling.

Following an Atlantic crossing marked by incessant quarrelling, my mother and grandmother arrived in Athens and did their best not to cross paths.  That summer, my mother had a brief, torrid affair with a handsome, poor, happy-go-lucky Athenian musician named Illias He impregnated her, but he wouldn’t become my father either.

    At the end of the summer, my mother arrived back in America pregnant.  George Bono may not have been very smart, but he managed to put things together.  There was drama, divorce and scandal.  The decision was made that I would live with my grandparents until my mother’s life became a suitable one in which to raise a child.  For the next four years I lived with a ya-ya I called Ma-Ma and was visited by a mother I called Yvonne.     

    It’s possible I represented my grandmother’s last chance to made amends for the way she had treated her own children, but there’s no doubt I also served as the bludgeon she used to punish and control my mother.  The ratio of one to the other is a calculation best left to a psychiatrist.  I can attest that  my grandmother showered me with attention, treated me as the golden child, gave me anything I wanted, all the while never passing up an opportunity to remind my mother of every single thing she did for me.  I was swathed in an all-consuming and oppressive love in which I felt both nurtured and menaced―well aware that her adoration would be withdrawn if I ever crossed her.  I made it my business never to do so. 

    My mother’s relationship to me became tinged with an element of guilt on her part for how I was conceived and for giving me up to my grandmother.  As for my relationship with my grandmother, my mother viewed it as a necessary evil, one she was unwilling to challenge or subvert.  Instead, she chose, consciously or not, to lash back at my grandmother with the one weapon at her disposal:  her choice in men.  

    When I was four years old, my mother married a funny, wise-cracking, beer drinking aspiring singer and writer, fresh out of the army, who had fled his small Pennsylvania mining town and his strict Seventh-Day-Adventist upbringing.  In the process, he also changed his name—from Carmin to the more show-biz-viable Vance.   My grandparents didn’t approve of him, but at least my mother was married.

    When I was four, I went to live with my mother and Vance in their small one-bedroom apartment on Colorado Avenue in Washington, D.C.  My mother was a legal secretary.  In between his singing gigs, writing, and waiting for the big break, Vance managed a movie theater; delivered Charlie Chips pretzels and potato chips (I preferred the pretzels); drank too much with his buddies; taught me to appreciate jazz, Hemingway, Groucho, and Bogart; loved me like a son and became my father. 

    We moved a lot.  Sometimes there was a reason: to Englewood, New Jersey, so my father could be closer to professional opportunities and gigs in New York City (that lasted six months); to Miami, where he landed a gig on a cruise ship (a year).  Sometimes, it seemed that we moved just to move. Or, as a mover once told us, “You gotta’ keep moving until you find the right place.”

    I grew up influenced by my father’s taste in movies and music—strongly skewed toward the books, films and jazz of the 40s and 50s.  Vance could quote entire passages from Double Indemnity and Casablanca by heart; he had an encyclopedic knowledge of American popular song, one which his friends used to put to the test with a game.  They’d throw out a word or phrase and he’d come up with a song which contained it.  I never saw him stumped.  Early on, I came to appreciate the grit and the wit of film noir, particularly the strength yet vulnerability embodied by Bogart and the swagger of my mother’s idol, Frank Sinatra, whom she had revered since she was a teenage girl.  To me, these characters seemed more like distant relatives than inaccessible icons.  The back stories and the lore of the celebrities from that era were told so often around the house and integrated so thoroughly into our discourse that, like most legends and myths, they became a way for me to frame and understand the world.  Life was a plot—a story—with heroes and villains and a preordained set of events.  The problem with that world view was that it was essentially passive.  
    Even Bogart had to stick to the script. 

    By the time I was twelve, my father’s fatal flaw, his drinking, had gotten the best of his marriage and he and my mother divorced (it was a failing, with the help of AA, he would overcome—for 28 years and counting).  My mother and I settled in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., where she dated a series of men―nice enough, but notably lacking in their ability to earn a living. 

    Now that my mother was single again my grandparents felt justified about intervening in our lives, presumably on my behalf.  Their methods were not subtle.  When one of my mother’s boyfriends moved in with us, my grandparents showed up at our door.  My grandmother burst in, cursing in Greek, slapping and kicking the guy around the apartment, calling him a bum.  The police came.  He left. 

    In response, my mother kicked things up a notch.  She began to date black men.  For a while, my mother kept her latest phase a secret from my grandparents.  When she got serious with one of them, however, it was left to me to break the news. I tried the angle that he was light-skinned, possibly a mulatto, thinking that might help soften my grandmother’s reaction.  It didn’t.

Since I was the only one in the family spared my grandmother’s rage, I was often dispatched to act as a palliative, or more accurately, a commando dropped behind enemy lines.  For example, here I am, fourteen years old—a  140-pound tranquilizer sporting a shag haircut, tawny-colored-square-toe Frye boots and a touch of acne—knocking at my grandparent’s front door: 

    It opens a few inches. One bloodshot grey-green eye and a narrow swatch of her pale blue nightgown show through the crack.

    “Why are you here so early?” she asks in Greek.

    My grandmother’s question is both a trap and a test, designed to reveal two things:  what do I know and will I resist her.  She knows damn well why I’m here.  My grandfather has been hired by the State Department to be an interpreter for a bunch of Greek officials visiting on a two week study mission.  The particulars of his assignment don’t matter.  The point is that she’ll be left alone.

    I came over to check on you.”  Warm and conciliatory—every once in a while that will cut the legs out from under her.

    She grunts, opens the door and lets me in.  The place is in shambles.  She’s torn open my grandfather’s suitcase and scattered everything around.

    Before I can react, she says, “What kind of monster abandons his wife?”

So much for warm and conciliatory.  There’s no point in arguing, though.  Faced with the truth or logic, her rage will turn on something―or someone―else. 

    “No wonder his children are all shit.  No wonder they’ve never amounted to anything.  Do you know I lived like a princess in Greece?  A princess!  He brought me from the shadow of the Acropolis to this cursed place because he thinks he knows better.”  Her eyes are wild, bearing down on me.  “He thinks he can trap me in this apartment?   He and his good-for-nothing children can all go straight to hell.”

    It could be worse.  No mention yet of faggots, blacks, or Jews. 

    She steps back and throws one hand into the air, making the muja. “There.  I curse them all, even that so-called mother of yours, that one that goes with the blacks and Jews—low class scum—and those, those faggots.” Her face contorts in disgust. “I wouldn’t let those people eat the shit off my shoes.”

(I have to break here and admit that I’m not doing her tirade complete justice.  Certain elements of language just doesn’t translate very well, especially age-old ethnic curses delivered in Greek by a embittered woman hopped up on rancor and self-righteousness.  Anyway . . .)

    This is a pretty bad one—not as bad as the time she pulled out all the photo albums and cut herself out of the pictures, not as bad as when she stood on the edge of the balcony threatening to jump—but pretty bad.

    She paces back and forth, her head thrust forward.  “What do they expect me to do when they treat me, me,” she pounds her chest with her fist, “a lady, like a child.  When they won’t listen to me.  What do they expect me to do?”

Here’s an idea, I think:  How about we start with you shutting the fuck up for five minutes?  Ever since I was a kid I’ve played this game.  I stay cool and composed as I imagine all the things I’d never dare say to her.  It’s satisfying in a cowardly and futile sort of way. 

    Then, perhaps sensing that this time she’s not getting to me, she throws me a change-up.       She takes a step back and looks down at the floor.  In a very quiet voice, she says, “You are the only one, Nicky, there’s no one else but you.  Ever since you were a baby and I rocked you to sleep, you’ve been my angel.”  The anger in her voice is gone, replaced by something else, something which feels real. 

    She looks into my eyes, steps forward, and brings her soft, warm hands to either side of my head and kisses one of my eyes, then the other.  Her smell, the timbre of her voice—high, but not shrill―they’re so familiar, among the first things I can remember.   

    “There’s no one else I love, my Nicky, that’s why I’ve done everything for you.  Only you.”  There’s a singsong quality to the way she’s speaking and now I recognize it.  It’s the voice she used to put me to sleep.  “That’s why I’ve protected you. You are why I live.  It’s you and me.  When I’m gone, when you’ve lost me, you’ll know that no one has loved you like me.  No one ever will.” 

    She’s holds my head and rocks it back and forth the way she did when I was little.

“I cannot lose you.  It’s always been you and me.  If you leave me I will die.  You know this?”  

    I do know this.  Her words resonate through me.  They are stronger than anger, stronger than fear, than pain, or hunger, or sex.  And now I understand the power we have over each other.  This sad, scared, empty, old lady and I are joined in a way no one else can ever understand.  We fit somehow, like dark pieces at the edge of a jigsaw puzzle.  Our connection, as twisted as it is, is as deep as it gets. 

    We’re silent for a moment, just rocking.

    “Rot in hell!” she yells.  She turns from me and spins in circles.  “All of them.” 

    The moment has passed.  This is where I lock down―slam the doors shut like those waterproof hatches on a submarine, spin the handles clockwise until they’re snug, back away, and let her fire the depth charges―for as long as it takes.

    It was a complicated relationship.

    I emerged from adolescence imbued with the attributes of both the spoiled and the abused child: I lacked resiliency and initiative yet had a strong sense of entitlement.  I was self-conscious, unconfident, easily discouraged, reticent, and immensely fearful of confrontation.  Though I got decent grades, I drifted, disengaged, though high school and college.  I had few close friends.  I drank some and did drugs—smoked pot, dropped acid, tried cocaine—but no more than anyone else seemed to be doing at the time.  Well, okay, maybe a little more.

      When I was 17, I lost my virginity to a pretty, blonde, volatile sixteen-year-old named Kathy.  Kathy’s father had died when she was young and she had grown up wild and promiscuous.  I kept my lack of sexual experience a secret from her, fearing she would reject me.  She didn’t.  We stayed together for three years, had sex frequently and became increasingly careless regarding contraception. One afternoon, I sat in a Planned Parenthood clinic, wracked by shame, as a nurse demonstrated how to slide a condom onto an object I would later come to know as a dildo, while somewhere in the back, Kathy had an abortion.  My subsequent liaisons with women were infrequent, but serious and long term. 

    When it came to relationships, my tendency was to mate rather than date.

    During my freshman year in college, an acquaintance parked his drum set in the basement of the house I shared with three other guys.  One day, I put Led Zeppelin on the stereo and took a seat behind the kit.  Turns out I had a decent ear for song structure and rhythm, attributable, no doubt, to my father’s musical influence.  Soon enough, I developed into a competent (as opposed to gifted) drummer, playing in a competent (and equally ungifted) variety band.  Motif was comprised of working professionals for whom the band provided their one creative outlet.  The bass player had a PhD in mathematics, the saxophone player was a lobbyist and the keyboard player was a federal parole officer.  What we lacked in musical virtuosity we made up for in the attributes that really matter for variety bands:  showing up on time and the ability to correctly pronounce the names of the wedding party. Still, I connected with the physicality of drumming, the tremendous primal release, which cleared my mind of everything but the beat.

    At just about the same time, another college buddy, a body builder, encouraged me to begin training with him.  I had been a skinny kid, self conscious about my physique.  Much to my surprise, my body responded quickly to the regimen.  I like the changes and stuck with it.  Within six months I was bench pressing nearly 300 pounds and had transformed myself into something of a brute.  Girls noticed. So did the boys.

    My first prolonged exposure to gay men occurred during high school and college, when I worked part-time in the dining hall at the campus of the George Meany Labor Study Center, under the supervision of its flamboyant, mercurial food service director, Billy Dennis. It was the late-seventies, with gay culture in its unabashed, pre-AIDS heyday.   Mr. Dennis hired only young, cute, straight guys to work in the dining hall and it was there that I and the rest of “his boys,” as he referred to us, learned to manage his combination of paternal benevolence, despotism, and explosive tirades. 

    This was a game I knew how to play.  Very quickly, I became one of Billy Dennis’ favorites. For my birthday one year, he took me and the other boys to D.C.’s notorious leather bar, the Eagle.  It was set deep amidst the ruins of a city which would not recover fully from the ravages of the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King for another twenty years.  Inside the complex, we walked around, timid but amazed, stopping to gawk at the counter displaying an assortment of sex paraphernalia whose purpose we could only imagine.   Tawdry, but, far from being put off by the scene, I enjoyed all the attention we received from the staff and patrons who were shocked and titillated at the sight of a bunch of straight boys corralled in a leather bar.

    I graduated college in 1981 with a degree in Political Science and History and no notion of what to do with myself.  It didn’t help that I had hit the job market in the midst of the deepest economic recession in decades.  I took the first job I could get, working for a construction industry trade association, where I would stay for a few years, then move on to another, then another, gradually increasing my salary and responsibilities.  I’d coasted into a career which, like my life up until now, had neither engaged nor inspired me. 

    It was about this time that my mother, disillusioned by her romantic relationships with men who’d brought nothing to the table except their appetites, began to surround herself with a winning combination—the kind of men she could count on and continue to drive my grandmother to distraction.   Beginning with her beloved hairdresser and roommate, Larry, these men flocked to her, drawn by her looks, her sense of irony, her penchant for the dramatic, her vulnerability and her accepting nature.  My mother soon presided over a cabal of queens.  There was Joe the interior designer, Jean-Claude the secretary, Cary the schoolteacher, Ian the dog groomer and on and on. 

    In them, my mother had finally found the qualities she’d always sought in a man:  loyalty, humor, devotion, generosity, and a love of Billie Holliday. It wasn’t unusual for me to visit her and find her surrounded by them all, watching The Women or listening to the soundtrack from West Side Story.  This was the first time I’d witness the affirmation, bordering on exultation, gay men could shower on certain women.  My mother, who’d grown with little in the way of unconditional affection, now had all she could handle. I’d never see her happier.

    My mother’s days of settling were over.  From now on, any man who wanted to be with her would be required not only to tolerate, but to embrace, her gaggle of gay men—literally.  She transformed her next husband, Michael, from a near-homophobe who referred to homosexuals as “fruits” into a man willing to dress in a Santa outfit and have men sit on his lap to proclaim their Christmas wishes, some of which included him. 

    It is difficult for me now to accurately conjure up my attitudes towards her friends at the time.  I know I enjoyed their company, especially their humor, which was often dipped in a simmering pot of caustic sarcasm.  There was also the matter of my special, even exalted, status among them.  At the same time, as Yvonne’s son, I was also off limits.  This standing gave me the power and the ability to insert myself into the group without having to be part of it.

    Then, with the festivities in full swing, death came to the door like an apocalyptic party crasher. First to go was Jean-Claude, followed by Pascal, then so many I couldn’t keep up.  Some flew off to Paris for experimental treatments and never returned.  Some moved back in with their families, transforming their basements into hospices.  Within a few years, my mother had lost nearly all of them.  Her heart and her soul were, if not irrevocably broken, then certainly gravely wounded.   

    Meanwhile, my grandmother’s, age, chronic asthma, and weak heart finally did what no one else could―subdue her.  In comparison to her life, her death was uncharacteristically free of drama.  One evening in 1987, on her way to dinner with my grandfather, she slumped over in the seat of their car.  By the time they reached the hospital, she was dead.  My aunt and uncle flew in for the funeral.  Having distanced themselves from my grandmother both emotionally and geographically, they had learned to forgive and forget.  They cried inconsolably.  On the other hand, my mother—who hadn’t—didn’t.   

    The effect of my grandmother’s passing on the men in her life contained a few twists and no small measure of irony.  My uncle gathered up all his unpleasant memories involving my grandmother and swept them away, choosing instead to recall an eccentric, yet essentially warm and loving mother.  My grandfather, finally free of the woman who had tormented and belittled him for much of his life, was never able to fill the void created by her loss.  Irreparably shattered, he would die a few years later a miserable and lonely man. 

    As for me, I knew I had lost someone who loved me in a way I’d never be loved again, a realization which caused me both great sadness and tremendous relief. Without me knowing it, my grandmother had also set me up.  As the primary female figure in my life, she had imbedded within me a template against which I would measure other women.  I was a first-generation Greek-Manchurian Candidate, programmed to respond to a specific set of stimuli—in this case a women who could offer up equal measures of nurture and annihilation. 

    As for gender roles, they were about as clear to me, as the song says, a foggy day in London town.  I had a sense of what it meant to be a woman. Women were like my grandmother—a bundle of contradictions designed to ensnare and manipulate:  powerful yet needy, protective yet threatening.  I was much less certain about what men were or what they should do.  After all, I’d never met my biological father, the man I considered my father hadn’t exactly been the model of stability and my grandfather’s role in life had always been to accommodate his wife and absorb the punishment she inflicted upon him. 

    Here I was, quite a package:  a weight-lifting, drum playing under-achiever, the product of a summer fling, having grown up with a grandmother who combined the guile and willfulness of Eva Peron with the destructive capacity of a category-five hurricane, no strong father figure, and a fag-hag mother. 

    I realize I haven’t fully explained the question I posed earlier regarding the specific causes that would lead me all the way to Fire Island and back.  Hey, I said it was a long story.  Which gets us to here.  I knew I was coasting, that something needed to happen.  I felt poised for something, but what?  Life had taken on a noirish hue. You know the story: Our protagonist, brooding, adrift and disillusioned, sits alone in some saloon, wondering what, if anything, is next.  The door swings open and—yeah, you guessed it—in walks a dame.