The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (30 page)

Through each incarnation, the piece evolved and became increasingly, and sometimes excruciatingly, personal. Precious chose to illuminate, detail upon detail, her history with dad Tommy Chong—yes, the Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong—who was arrested and put in jail while the
Porcelain Penelope Shows
were, almost like the nightly news, presenting the family saga up to the minute.

It’s true that the director’s role is to parent within certain parameters and I don’t believe I overstepped the boundaries of theater etiquette and neither did Precious. But our relationship was predictably often like that of father and daughter. How could it not be?

Family seemed to be a new perspective in my work; or, if not new, certainly attacked from deeper emotional place after I became a family man.

The often distorted version of highly dysfunctional families seems to include a slew of showbiz legends, rumors, or myths. Take Judy Garland. Her father was purportedly gay, resulting in Judy’s penchant for marrying gay men, including Vincent Minnelli, the father of Liza, who married, at mommy’s behest, Peter Allen and, more recently, the alarming David Gest.

Among the array of dazzling celebrities who attended Garland’s final concerts at the Palace Theater in the summer of 1967, the name that no one had ever heard was Peter Allen’s, a performer Garland had discovered in Hong Kong and subsequently introduced to her daughter, who wound up marrying him (even though he was gay, gay, gay).

On this particular night at the Palace, Garland introduced Allen, gushing and sputtering his praises, as Minnelli made her way to the stage; her hubby remained seated in the audience. Most of us didn’t even see his face.

Thirty-seven years after my friend Caroline and I spent that summer obsessed with grown-up Dorothy, our unorthodox family—Zo, Tia and I—took a trip to New York, where my daughter, Tia and I were lucky to experience a performance that nearly matched Garland’s signature showmanship: Hugh Jackman as Peter Allen in
The Boy from Oz
. The musical-biography script specifically referenced the three-year Allen-Minnelli marriage and re-created the drama of Garland’s death in 1969.

In a direct address to the audience, Jackman as Allen alluded to a long-presumed connection between the star’s demise and the Stonewall riots.

Jackman’s commitment to the role was heart-pumpingly powerful—vulnerable and oh so fucking gay. The moment the light hit him, he pulled you in and didn’t let go. His charisma was electric; not the stuff of puffed-up press releases. My nine-year-old fell madly in love with him. So did I.

I must have been in some denial about the likelihood that Allen’s death from AIDS would be scripted into the musical. Seeing it coming, I wondered if it had been a mistake to bring Tia.

When Allen’s lover died at the top of act two, Tia went into a response mode that was clearly different from the euphoria on her face when she watched the show-stopping musical numbers. She wiped one tear away, then another and repeated the ritual before checking to see if I was crying. Then, very delicately, she wiped one of my tears away—something she had never done before. The people-pleasing plot managed to turn Allen’s death into an over-the-top finale, re-creating his triumphant final performances in his homeland of Australia.

At lunch on the day we were scheduled to return to Los Angeles, Tia and I shared our thrilling experience with my longtime friend Caroline. It seemed impossible to comprehend all that had transpired in the thirty-seven years that separated Judy at the Palace with Allen in the audience and Hugh Jackman playing Allen.

Both Caroline and I had experienced inevitable shifts in terms of our respective careers. As wide-eyed teenagers, we shared the dream that we were destined for long careers as Big Broadway Stars. Instead, life had rewarded us more subtly and less predictably but no less resonantly.

Tia had proven to be an unparalleled force in my life. At seventeen, I never would have imagined a scenario that would include something as harrowing as AIDS or as utterly awesome as being Tia’s father.

It was a fabulous working vacation, directing
The Porcelain Penelope Freak Show
(its most recent title at that juncture) while reliving old memories and creating new ones. Like the defining moment of seeing Liza perform with her mama while her new husband watched from the audience at the Palace in 1967, recalling the summer of 2004 will likely be stirred by the unforgettable performance of Jackman as Allen.

It had not even been six months since my mother’s death when I arrived in the city of my birth to celebrate the centennial of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. I envisioned this vacation as an opportunity to connect with my past through Tia’s eyes, unaware that unresolved feelings about my mother would dominate every memory.

My first solo excursion was to check out the house where my mother spent the past three decades of her life with two different husbands.

CHAPTER 57
               

The divorce between my mother and I became finalized when she became Mrs. Trousdale. Not only had I become dedicated to creating a healthy family, she had embarked on what I perceived (judgmentally) were the final chapters of her man-troubled and booze-riddled years of self demolition. Our visits virtually ended and the intermittent phone calls were strained by my impatience and her feebleness. If she wasn’t actually drunk, she appeared to be hazy, conveniently diagnosed by her husband as having “Alzheimer’s” while admitting his enabler status by telling me that he was determined to “get her to stop drinkin’ all that damn vodka.” Yah, right, as he continued to supply her with the liquid love of her life.

He was an unreliable narrator, to say the least, so reports of her final demise had to be translated with caution. She was drinking; she had stopped drinking. She was in the hospital for some unexplained reason; she was spending most of her time on the couch. I learned that he had moved his office from the upstairs kitchen table to the basement where he could presumably conduct his church business by distancing himself from her final rounds of bleating and braying. One report had her rising up from her sickbed and making her way out the front door, in order to get his attention, by kicking in one of the basement windows.

Then, she died. I have no recollection of our final conversation. Only years later have I begun the process to find ways of honoring and forgiving her. She was a mighty woman—intelligent, beautiful, funny, perceptive—but perhaps doomed by a family and a world that colluded to devalue her obvious gifts. The prolonged crash landing began early and never abated.

I had avoided contact with the hubby after her death so I didn’t know what to expect as I pulled up in front of the little house to discover an overgrown lawn and no vehicle parked in the driveway. Instead, the driveway was littered with a dozen or so oversize black trash bags with brightly colored articles of clothing bursting out of them. Even from a distance, I recognized that they contained my mother’s prized wardrobe.

It appeared that the house had been deserted, but I decided to knock on the front door. I noticed some official-appearing numbers in chalk marking the doorway. I tried opening the front door; it was locked.

I tried the back door; also locked. But a window with a flimsy screen practically begged to be sliced open. Within a few seconds, I found a tool in the rubble, cut an opening in the grated screen, opened the window, reached inside, and easily unlocked the door, a move borrowed from a television crime show.

The house was ravaged. The rancid smell of musty, smoke-saturated mattresses made me gag. Pretending that I was a detective, I tried to ascertain exactly what had happened to the place my mother had called home. Anything of value, including the cherished pieces of her pristinely maintained furniture, was gone.

There was rotting food in the refrigerator, crusty dishes everywhere, but the electricity was on. He must have been evicted while in the process of packing up for an intended escape. He’d likely sold anything of value.

I moved from room to room, conjuring how it had looked before disaster struck. Gone from the guest bedroom was the sewing machine that she’d used to make our Halloween costumes when Joe and I were kids.

In the small master bedroom that used to be decorated in every conceivable hue of lavender, no furniture remained other than a dilapidated mattress propped up against a wall that had previously displayed a gallery of old family photos. Where was the one of my mother as a child, photographed with her parents?

The beloved secretary, a gorgeous piece of furniture that was at least half a century old, containing hundreds of treasures and trinkets she had collected over the past five decades, had evaporated from the living room.

Reticently, I continued my expedition to the basement, having heard from my incarcerated brother that “Wild Bill” had his son living down there during the final months of my mother’s demise. God forbid that mommy or stepson was still there, dead or alive.

Dozens upon dozens of empty Pepsi cans made walking a perilous undertaking. There was a makeshift living area with mismatched blankets serving as room dividers and piles of boxes covered every square inch of the concrete floor. Like father, like son. No bodies.

I spotted a framed photo, its subjects peering out of a box overflowing with junk—it was the one of my mother with her family.

No one in the picture is smiling.

There are four men, including her father (and maybe his brothers?), all with somber expressions etched on their faces. In the foreground, her mother appears to be costumed to play the role of a mother, but it looks staged. My mother’s younger sister, eyes downcast, has one hand on her hip, while my mother, approximately age three, looks gorgeous but forlorn.

A bright pink hatbox from Stix, Baer & Fuller stuck out of another box. Carefully opening the dusty, perfectly cylindrical box, I recognized the pale blue, feathery chiffon hat as the one she had worn on the day of her marriage to Neil, husband number three, in the late Sixties.

No longer able to breathe, I ascended the stairs on tiptoe, precious photo and prize hatbox in hand, giddy with some kind of perverse vengeance, and left.

Later that night, Martha took my daughter and me to the Municipal Opera’s aptly timed production of
Meet Me in St. Louis
, which I felt would provide an antidote to my disturbing discovery, yet the location elicited a scrapbook of snapshots in my mind, many of them inevitably starring my mother.

She had taken me to the Muny when I was the age Tia was on that night. I remember Mommy wearing a black-and-white-striped, tight-fitting dress, trimmed in bright orange, sashaying to her seat, relishing being watched by members of the audience, especially the male members.

Tia and I inevitably received inquisitive looks and our night at the outdoor theater proved that people were even more curious in St. Louis than they are where we live on the West Coast. Our father-daughter bond was apparent, but our teaming is often questioned because I’m white and Tia is black.

The memory of one instance that took place in San Francisco, of all places, still stings. Tia was still in a stroller and we were shopping at a grocery store in the Haight-Ashbury district (formerly hippie territory), when a black woman began shouting at the top of her lungs, “That’s not your baby, mister. That is not your baby!”

Like the proverbial criminal who was compelled to return to the scene of the crime, I went back to my mother’s house in St. Louis on the following day. I brought a throwaway camera to record the evidence for my brother, who was serving time in a prison about three hundred miles outside of the city.

During our most recent phone call, he and I had decided that it would be a bit unwieldy to consider making the three-and-a-half-hour car trip (from St. Louis to the penitentiary in Charleston), especially with Tia in tow. Tia had fluctuated between wanting to visit her Uncle Joe and being understandably apprehensive about stepping inside a real-life prison.

At the last minute, we decided to go. Apparently, though, Joe hadn’t put our names on the visitor’s list since we had not made the visit definite. Tia and I waited an hour for the “necessary paperwork,” and when it was decided that we could enter, it was stipulated that we would have a “no-contact” visit. This treatment is usually only for prisoners who are severely restricted on the inside as a result of severe behavioral disruptions.

“I’m a model prisoner,” my brother teasingly said to Tia. Situated across from us, separated by a thick glass window, he spoke from a telephone. I heard her laugh but Joe could only see the sound of his laughter, resonating regardless of the barrier.

Even though our time was truncated, I was able to tell him about our mother’s house and its sorrowful contents. We listed the things “Wild Bill” must have profited from, engaging in some kind of impromptu, unconscious grief therapy.

When it was time to leave the prison, Tia said her good-byes first and whispered, “I love you” into the receiver in that scratchy voice of hers. I saw his lips say, “I love you, too,” and then it was my turn.

Our “I love you” lines were delivered identically. He placed the outstretched palm of his hand against the window that separated us. I hung up the phone so that I could place my hand as close to his as humanly possible.

Without missing a beat, Tia’s little brown hand intuitively reached out toward my brother’s, replacing mine as she touched him—with her heart if not her flesh.

We are a family, bound by a host of intangibles, including the death of a mother and the life force of a child who may not be blood related but provides the strings to secure our connection.

I had been seeing my doctor every four months; he routinely ordered blood work in order to monitor both the HIV and the hepatitis C viral loads (unlike T-cells, the higher the number, the higher the danger). “I think it’s time,” he said straightforwardly.

Time to start the regime for hep C, which would be nine months to a year of self-injecting a medication that was known to have severe side effects.