Rat Bohemia (3 page)

My mother smoked four packages of Chesterfields a day and died of cancer when I was ten. All my memories of her are stained nicotine yellow and accompanied by a deep, painful, hacking cough. Officially, I've given up on smoking. I rarely buy a pack. But some days I just do it. The privacy of a good smoke on a cold day.

Then, at night, I'll lie in bed clutching my breasts, my lungs, that hold in my chest where the burning smoke sits. My mind rolls over as I beg for redemption.

When I pray, I pray to the Jewish God. I pray to the patriarchal Got—not an energy or spirit—but that old white man with a beard sitting up there deciding things. My mother prayed to him. My grandmother prayed to him. And, as far as I am concerned, that is reason enough. We exist together in that moment of panic where my thoughts turn up to the sky.

Judaism isn't that hard to understand. It all boils down to a few basic principles. There is one God. That is sort of the main belief. Second, but also important, is the idea that you can't worship things. You can't bow down before idols. I'm not saying that I think
this way of looking at things is the only or best way. But it is my burden and my gift because I inherited it from my mother. I don't care to know what the reason is that I am gay. But when it comes to being a Jew who only has one God, I know for sure that I was born that way.

My first job was cashier. Then I cleaned up a Catholic school cafeteria. All those girls in green plaid kilts with dusty white skin and matching white food. Instant mashed potatoes. Dishes of mayonnaise. A glass of milk. Instant vanilla pudding. By senior year I started working at J. Chuckles on Forty-second Street in Manhattan. There I earned enough money to buy a camel's hair coat.

My mother, Louisa Rosenthal, was born in Bremen and lost everything during the war. I, Rita, am named for her mother. My brother Howie is named for her father and my older brother Sam is named for her brother. Rest in peace.

She married my dad, a Catholic. But my mother was a person who could not care about things like propriety. She just went through the motions. What could the neighbors do to her now?

“Your mother liked the worst,” my dad said a hundred thousand times. “She liked bratwurst, teawurst, and knockwurst.”

But he pronounced it “woist” like Huntz Hall in those old Dead End Kids movies. It is the way most white people in Queens actually talk.

My mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. She had that fragile, German, movie-star sensuality. She had blue eyes and soft lips. Her mouth was shapely. Her hair was fine and bright. But her eyes were nothing, flat. That worked, though, for the completed beautiful victim look.

I have a photograph of her in a suit with shoulder pads, when
she first came to New York and worked as a clerk at Woolworth's. She had thick lipstick and pale empty eyes. On the way to work some fashion photographer saw her on the bus and invited her into his studio to take a few pictures. Her face was slightly twisted. She held a sultry cigarette.

“Your mother was like Marilyn Monroe,” my father said. “A real doll.”

There are a few other photographs. Louisa and Eddie at Niagara Falls. Louisa and Eddie at Rockaway Beach. Louisa and Eddie eating a Kitchen Sink ice cream sundae at Jahn's Ice Cream Parlour. The kids are in that one too. Me, age three, sitting on my father's lap. Sam, age seven, happy, benign, acting just the way kids are supposed to act. Howie, age ten, looking to the side at the wrong moment, ice cream all over his shirt.

Here is one of the classic Weems family stories. It stars me, age two, sitting in the stroller at the German deli near the house where Louisa bought her teawurst.

“I'm not happy,” I reportedly announced in a booming bawl.

“Why not? ” Mr. Braunstein asked from behind the counter.

“I'm not happy,” I repeated. “Because my daddy isn't here.”

Where was he? Off in a car full of tools to some richer person's more expensive house in a better neighborhood of Queens or Kew Gardens or Forest Hills or some place in the city or out on the island, the North Shore. He held the nails in his mouth and spit them out into place. He carried a hammer in the sling of his work pants thinking about the good old days in the army during the war. Mr. Handsome G.I. Listening to the crap on the car radio. My dad knew all the songs.

Now, after a night of smoking I lie in bed, terrified.

“What am I doing with a cigarette in my hand?” I ask myself stupidly. “I've got to be out of my mind.”

These days everybody is dying. Not just my mother. There's no illusion left to let a person feel immune. Invincible is over.

I didn't get my mother's hair. Sam got it. Mine is blonde and brown, a sign of mixed race. Howie looks even darker, real black Irish, and that's fine. But this in-between kind of washed-out blah sort of shut me down in the beauty department. I got blue eyes, true. But I also got blue skin, really pink nipples that look paraffin-coated. No pubic hair on the insides of my thighs. Thank God. Whenever you see pubic hair in a movie or magazine the girl has never got it down the insides of her thighs. But, in real life there are miles of it out there. There is wall-to-wall carpeting in every household in America. Some girls get embarrassed and some act like they never noticed. But there is a discrepancy between most thighs and the ideal ones. Mine are kind of ideal.

I grew up. I got jobs. I moved far away from my destiny. No husband. No night school. No screaming kids in snow-suits and strollers. No trappings. Not trapped.

My first lover was rough, knowing, leathery. She held my blue body. I was so young I didn't know what lovemaking was. This woman was about forty, named Maria. She was sizable, weighty, assuredly handsome. I had no expectations. I couldn't give anything back. As we were doing it, I just couldn't be free. Lovemaking seemed to revolve around the shifting of weight. It had to do with climbing onto Maria's body. Her whole skeleton was involved. But when she opened my lips and put her mouth on my clitoris I couldn't react. It was too specific. The rest of me felt lonely. I was sixteen. I had no extra flesh. Maria masturbated in front of me. I sat between her legs staring like it was a television set.

After that I just started talking, blabbing on and on. I told her everything I did all day and what I was expecting to do tomorrow. I told her about every song on the radio and which ones I liked, which ones did not deserve to be hits. I told her about the time, when my mother was sick, that some strange accented distant relative I'd never seen before or since, took me to a store in Brooklyn to buy some clothes for the first day of school. I wore size 6X. I didn't understand why we had to go all the way to Brooklyn until we climbed up these shaky wooden stairs to the shop. The place was run by a group of friends who had all been in the same concentration camp. The clerks had numbers on their arms and screamed at each other like they were home in their kitchens. I was so small, their numbers were eye level and kept swinging past my face.

The second time Maria picked me up from work and made me keep on all my clothes. She was smart. Passing her hands over my young breasts, there was no direct touching. No contact. That was the first time in my life that I ever felt sexy. That was the first time I ever felt that thing. Desire.

Further down
, I thought.
Please put your hands further down.
I got angrier and angrier as her hands stayed the same.

“You've got to ask for it,” she whispered. She said it like a threat. “You've got to ask for what you want.”

“Put your hands down there.”

“Down where?”

“In my pants.”

She lifted me onto her lap and fucked me fully clothed.

“
You
are a brave young girl,” she said. “You're a darling girl. Keep your clothes on and it will always feel good.”

The next and final time together, it was my turn to touch. It
was an inquiry. I hadn't yet discovered shame. But Maria's cunt didn't open to my fingers the way mine had to hers. That's when I realized how trust shows in sex. It has nothing to do with how they act or what they say. It shows physically. I learned, instinctively, the telltale signs.

Being a salesgirl was a trap. That was clear from the start. Dad's new girlfriend Erica worked in sales and she was obviously trapped. The staff at J. Chuckles was trapped. The manager was trapped. Even the customers were trapped by the lousy selection of overpriced clothes. I knew that I was only seventeen. I knew I was young. This job was just a moment. It was just about saving up for a camel's hair coat. The coat was so dashing. It was substantial. It was something I had never seen before except on the back of a woman on line at Cinema One.

Saturday afternoons, after work, I went to Shield's Coffee Shop on Lexington Avenue and had an egg salad sandwich on rye. One dollar and five cents with a pickle on the side. I sat at the counter, exhausted, and stared out the window at the people on line at Cinema One. It was New York couples at Christmas time. The kind that went to foreign films. They had good taste. They weren't tacky little hitters from Queens. The girls in tight jeans and sparkle socks from my neighborhood spent their whole lives smoking Marlboros in front of candy stores. Their boyfriends died in car accidents or never got rid of the drug habits they'd picked up in Vietnam. Those girls wore blue eye makeup. They listened to Elton John and Yes and Black Sabbath at parties. They listened to
Tommy
by the Who, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. They did quaaludes with their older boyfriends and then eventually used needles and drank tequila right out of the bottle. They never saw foreign films. I hadn't
either, but I would someday. That was the difference.

Outside the couples were standing on line. I ate my egg salad slowly, watching. Framed by the picture window was a distinguished older couple. The man wore a topcoat. His wife's hair was done. She linked her arm into his. They both looked ahead while discussing so they could watch and comment at the same time. Behind them stood a younger version. The woman's cheeks blushed pink. She had gold earrings. The younger guy wore a scarf and a jacket. His hair was long, hatless. Behind them stood two women, arms linked as well. They were engaged, laughed easily. One had to bend over slightly so the other could speak into her ear. And then something happened that changed my life forever. The two women kissed, romantically. The one nearest the window wore a camel's hair coat.

The next Saturday was Christmas Day. As soon as I could get out of the house, I took the Seven train into the city directly to Cinema One. I sat down in the virtually empty theater and watched the same foreign film those two women had watched. It was called
Cries and Whispers
.

In it, one woman touched another woman's face and kissed it. Another scene showed a different woman take out her breasts while a fourth laid a hand on them. Then the first woman put a piece of glass in her vagina and rubbed the blood across her mouth. Throughout, a clock was ticking and people were whispering in Swedish. The subtitles said, “Forgive me.” I went downstairs into a stall in the ladies' bathroom and masturbated. Then I went up and watched it again.

When I was a girl my father and I were always fighting. If he told me to get out and never come back, I'd be hovering on the front stoop for hours screaming to get back in. If he put his foot down and told me I couldn't go out, I'd do it anyway by going down the fire escape.

Our street, Eighty-second Street in Jackson Heights, was so quiet that me yelling or him yelling was enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. After a few people started complaining my dad got into the habit of calling the local precinct as soon as we'd get into a fight.

“Officer,” he'd say into the telephone. “We have a girl here, out of control.”

There were Spanish kids in Jackson Heights then, but not as many as now. The Spanish and the whites never mixed. That really dates me. There was only one Puerto Rican guy who worked with my dad, but he lived up in the Bronx. There was a psychological divide then that was only violated, occasionally, by a passing beat-up Ford Falcon blasting salsa music from the radio. I didn't know that was the sound of the future. Rice and beans were what you'd have to eat if you didn't amount to anything. They were a threat. Not something delicious, orange and black with pork fat, hot sauce and fried plantains. Out on the street we only saw good-girl German Jews coming home from their violin lessons and lots of Irish kids blaming themselves for everything starting at the age of twelve. I knew a girl who lived two apartments up from ours named Claudia Haas and she started out as a good girl but ended up as a tramp.

My father was a rough guy. He'd already chased Howie out of the apartment and off to California somewhere to find peace and fortune. Dad's second girlfriend had dumped him about a year before and it was taking him longer than usual to find another one, which also put him in a foul mood. So when he tossed me out for the fifteenth time, I shrugged it off and went to the candy store to buy a pack of Salems.

There was Claudia Haas, tight jeans, tight V-neck short-sleeved sexy knit top. She was hanging out, a real hitter from Queens. She was drinking Mateus Rosé out of the bottle and listening to Seals and Crofts on WPLJ radio. The real truth is that Claudia Haas fell in love with me and I fell in love with her even though it wasn't possible on a warm Queens night in 1975 because neither of us knew what a homosexual was. It wasn't a word that was bandied about the newspapers then as it is today. Even I, who had already experienced it, had never uttered the word. I had never conceptualized myself that way.

Claudia and I talked together until late that night. We sat on cars, smoked cigarettes, listened to Yes do
Close to the Edge
and fell in love. Claudia's boyfriend wore his Vietnam army jacket, turned us on to Thai weed, drank beer, listened to Grand Funk Railroad, to War, to Average White Band and Janis Ian, to the Allman Brothers singing “Whipping Post” live at the Fillmore East, to Carly Simon singing “You're so Vain,” to the Stones, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Acoustic Hot Tuna, and the Dead. It was a different, stupid America. We hadn't yet given up trying to get over Vietnam. We reveled in our mediocrity. America wasn't nihilistic yet. We weren't all suffering.