Belinda (47 page)

But this was bravado. Dad was miserable. He and Ollie were breaking apart.

By February I couldn't stay on Fire Island a day longer. There was still no word from Mom or Marty about me. When Dad had made a call around New Year's, they'd given him the Swiss school spiel.

I told Dad I had to start living again. I had to move into New York, get a place in the Village, get a job, something like that.

Of course, Dad helped me. He picked the place for me, paid the huge bribe you had to cough up just to get a New York apartment, and then he got me some furniture and plenty of clothes. And I was free all right, I could walk through the streets and all and go to movies and do things like a human being, but it was snowing in New York and I was scared to death of the city every moment. It was bigger, uglier, and more dangerous than any place I'd ever been.

I mean, Rome is dangerous, but I understand Rome. Paris I know very well. Maybe I'm kidding myself, but it seems I'm safe in those places. New York? I don't know the basic rules.

Even so, the first two weeks were OK. Dad picked me up all the time to take me to musicals. We made every show in town. He took me to see his apartment salon, which was really unbelievable, I mean, like another world inside.

Now in a very deep way Dad hates being a hairdresser. I mean, he hates it. And if you could see this salon in New York, you'd understand what he has done.

It looks like anything but a beauty salon. It is full of dark woodwork and faded oriental rugs. There are parrots and cockatoos in old brass cages, and there are even European tapestries and those old dusky landscapes from Europe by people no one even knows. I mean, it looks like a gentlemen's club, this place. It is Dad's defense, not only against being a hairdresser but being gay.

For all Dad's gentleness, for all his sweetness, Dad really hates being gay. All the men in Dad's life, even Ollie Boon with his kind of British theatrical voice, are like this place. Dad would smoke a pipe if he could stand it. Ollie does smoke a pipe.

Anyway, everything in the salon was authentic, except maybe the combination. The ladies get tea on old hotel china and silver, the kind you use in your New Orleans house. I mean, it is somber and beautiful, and the other hairdressers are European, and the ladies do book six months ahead of time.

But there is no place to sleep there. I mean, Dad had long ago squeezed himself out. And suddenly Dad was talking about getting another flat in the same building and he and I living there together, and I realized, when he started spending every night at my place, that Ollie Boon had thrown him out.

This was crashing news to me, absolutely crashing. I mean, was I poison? Did I destroy every adult I touched? Ollie loved Daddy. I knew he did. And Dad loved Ollie. But over me they had broken up. I was sick about it. I didn't know what to do. Dad kept pretending he was happy. But he wasn't happy. Just mad at Ollie, and being very stubborn, that's all.

Then it happened. Two men showed up at the salon and showed the other hairdressers a picture of me and asked if I'd been around. Dad was furious when he came in. These men had left a number and he called it. He told them he had recognized his daughter in the picture. What the hell was going on?

The way he described them they were very smooth. They were lawyers. They reminded him he had no rights over me. They said if he interfered with their private investigation, if he even dared to discuss it with anybody or make it public that I was missing, he was in for very expensive trouble indeed.

"Stay put in your apartment, Belinda," Dad said. "Don't you set foot out of the door till you hear from me."

But it didn't take long for the phone to ring. And this time it was Ollie. These lawyers had been to see him at the theater. They told him I was mentally disturbed, had run away, might hurt myself, and that G.G. couldn't be trusted to do what was right for me. If Ollie heard or saw anything of me, he was to call Marty Moreschi directly, and by the way Marty admired Ollie. He would fly out soon himself to discuss the upcoming Crimson Mardi Gras production. He did think it was a better prospect for a film deal than Dolly Rose had been.

What bullshit, as if Marty had time to fly to New York City over a movie deal! It was a threat and Ollie knew it and I knew it.

"Darling, listen to me," Ollie said in his most theatrical voice. "I love G.G. And if you want the bottom line I do not think I can live without G.G. My little experiment of late of no G.G. has not worked out. But we're in over our heads. These people are probably following G.G. They may already know he's seen you. For God's sakes, Belinda. Don't put me in this role. I've never played the villain in any play in my life."

Goodbye New York.

And where do you go when you're a kid on the run? Where do you go when you've had enough of the snow and the icy wind and the dirt of New York City? What was the place the kids on the street called paradise, where the cops didn't even want to bust you because the shelters were full?

I called the airlines immediately. There was a flight out of Kennedy in two hours for San Francisco. I packed one bag, counted up my money, canceled phone service and utilities on the apartment, and split.

I didn't call Dad until I was ready to board. He was horribly upset. The lawyers, or whoever they were, had been to Ollie's house in SoHo. They'd been questioning neighbors. But when I told him I was at the airport and I had only five minutes, he really came unglued.

I'd never heard Dad cry before, really cry I mean. But he did then. He said he was coming. I was to wait for him. We'd go back ro Europe together, he didn't give a damn. He would never forgive Ollie for calling me. He didn't care about the salon. He was really coming apart.

"Daddy, stop it," I told him. "I am going to be all right, and you've got more at stake here than Ollie Boon. Now I will call you, I promise, and I love you Daddy, I can never never thank you enough. Tell Ollie I'm gone, Daddy. Do that for me." Then I was crying. I couldn't talk. The plane was leaving. And there wasn't time to say anything except, "I love you, Dad."

San Francisco was beyond my wildest dreams.

Maybe it would have looked different had I come there direct from Europe, from the colorful streets of Paris or Rome. But after New York in the middle of winter it was the loveliest city I had ever seen.

One day I'd been in the snow and the wind and the next I was walking those warm and safe streets. Everywhere I looked there were brightly painted Victorians. I rode the cable car down to the bay. I walked through the misty woods of Golden Gate Park.

I had never known there were such cities in America. Compared with this, the smoggy stretches of Los Angeles seemed hideous; and Dallas with its towers and freeways was hard and cold.

Immediately I met kids who would help me. And I got the room in the Page Street commune the first night. I felt like nothing could hurt me in San Francisco, which of course was a delusion, and I set about cooking up my false identity and hanging out on Haight Street to meet other runaways and roaming Polk with two gay hustlers who became my best friends.

The first Saturday we got a jug of wine and walked across the Golden Gate to have a party at Vista Point. The sky was clear, and the blue water was full of tiny seemingly motionless sailboats, the city beyond looked pure white. Can you imagine how it looked to me? Even when the fog rolled in, it was like white steam pouring down over the bright towers of the Golden Gate.

But, you know, the happiness didn't last. I got mugged about three weeks after I arrived. Some guy hit me in the doorway on Page Street and tried to steal my purse. I held onto it with both hands, screaming and screaming and, thank God, he ran away. All my traveler's checks were in there. I was terrified, and after that, I hid them under the floorboards in my room.

Then there was the drug bust upstairs on Page Street when the narcs tore up every single thing that belonged to the kids who lived there, I mean ripping the stuffing out of the furniture, pulling the wires out of the TV set, tearing up the carpets, and leaving the doors with the locks broken as they dragged the occupants out in handcuffs never to be seen again.

But through it all I was learning, I was determined to make it on my own. And part of what I needed was some sense of who I had been before. It was for that reason that I went to the second-hand magazines stores and bought back issues of magazines with stories in them about Mother. I got the videotapes of her old movies at the same time. And then the real piece of luck, finding an ad in a video magazine that said they could get you any movie, even one not released in the States. I sent off for Final Score and I got it. But, you know, I never had a machine to see these tapes. But it didn't matter. I had them. I had part of my past with me, even if I did tear off all the labels so nobody else would ever guess.

And one of the things that came clear to me was that the girls on the street were very different from the boys. The girls went nowhere. They got pregnant, on drugs, maybe even became prostitutes. They were often fools for the guys they met. They'd cook and scrub for some broke rock musician and then get thrown in the street. But the boys were a little more smart. They got taken nice places by the gay men they hustled. The gay men kind of romanticized them. The boys could actually use these meetings to move up and out of the world of the street.

Well, I puzzled over this a lot. How did the streets wear out girls, while boys passed through them? Why did girls lose, while boys won? Of course, not all the boys were smart. They lived hand to mouth, too, and kidded themselves about the glamour of their adventures, but they had a kind of freedom that women just never seem to have.

Whatever the case, I decided to behave like one of the boys. To look upon myself as somebody pretty mysterious and special and expect other people to be interested, that kind of thing.

And I found out something else, too. If I put aside my street clothes and punk makeup and wore a Catholic school uniform-and you could get the skirts second-hand on Haight Street-I was really treated quite well wherever I went. I mean, sometimes I had to go to the big hotels. I had to splurge on breakfast at the Stanford Court or the Fairmont. I had to be around the places I'd left. I didn't do anything except eat a good meal and read Variety as I drank my coffee, but I felt good doing that, just sitting there in the restaurant off the lobby and feeling safe. I always wore the Catholic school clothes when I did this. I wore them when I went strolling through the big stores. Somebody's daughter, that was my disguise.

Then one afternoon I opened the paper and there was your picture and an ad for the big book party downtown. Now even without Ollie talking about Crimson Mardi Gras I probably would have noticed it. I'd read all your books when I was a child.

But there was the added thing of reading Crimson Mardi Gras and finding all the old picture books in the Fire Island house. I was really curious. I wanted to see you. And I decided to play it the way a gay boy would have played it, to just go there and make eye contact, as they were always doing it, you know, cruise.

When I saw how handsome you were and how you kept flirting with me, I decided to take this a step further. I heard them talking about the party at the Saint Francis. I bought a book and went ahead to wait for you there.

Of course, you know exactly what happened. But let me tell you that it was one of the strangest experiences I had ever had since I left home. You were like some storybook prince to me, real strong but gentle, a kind of mad lover who painted beautiful pictures, and your house full of toys, well, it bordered on the outright insane.

Hard to analyze and perhaps it is too soon to try. I think you were the most independent person I had ever come across. Nothing touched you, except you wanted me to touch you, that was clear from the start. And as I said before, you were the first older man I had ever made love to. I'd never come across that kind of patience before.

And whereas everybody I had ever known had used their good looks, you didn't even know you were a handsome man. Your clothes didn't fit. Your hair was always messed up. Later on, it was fun transforming you, making you buy new suits and decent jackets and sweaters. Getting you measured for those suits. And you know what happened. You didn't care at all, but you looked terrific. Everybody noticed you when we went out together.

But I'm jumping ahead. The first couple of nights I fell in love with you. I called Daddy from a phone booth in San Francisco and I told him about you, and I knew everything was going to be OK.

But it might have all died that day you showed me the first Belinda paintings and told me that they would never be seen by anyone, that it would wreck your career. I just went crazy when you told me that. You remember. And I really meant to run away from you then, and maybe it would have been better for you if I had. It wasn't that I didn't understand what you'd said about never showing the pictures. It was just too much like what had happened with Final Score.

"Here it goes again," I thought. "I am poison, poison!" And yet the rage in me, the rage against everything was tearing me apart.

But you know what happened, the murder on Page Street and my calling you and then we were together again, and it was like Marty all over again, because I knew I loved you and I wasn't going to leave you, and whatever you did with the paintings, well, that was your decision, or so I kept telling myself.

And I was so happy just to be with you, to be loved by you, that it seemed nothing else mattered in the world.

I called Dad collect from your house, and this time I told him who you were and gave him the number, though I warned him not to use it because you were always there. And Dad was real happy with what was happening.

It turned out he knew your wife Celia, the one who works in New York City; she had come into G.G.'s often, and he got her talking about you, and when I called him the next time, he said you were very much OK from what Celia had said. Celia said the marriage "failed" because you were always working. You wouldn't do anything but paint. Well, that was fine by me.