Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma (6 page)

Eighth grade was Brenda. Ninth grade, Sandra, the most beautiful girl in the school. In fact, years later she was a homecoming queen at the University of Florida. Alas, my method of operation didn’t change, even with popular and attractive Sandra. School was out and I was gone.

Miami Norland Senior High School: Linda in the tenth grade, Wendy the eleventh, and Dede in the twelfth. Same thing. Best friends all year long, “going steady” in my head, “breaking up” in June. The Dede thing was reminiscent of Penny in the seventh grade but it felt more dangerous now. Like Penny, Dede wasn’t Jewish. It was one thing in the seventh grade when I was 13, but at 18 and a senior, I certainly should know better. I was so confused. Which was worse? Being attracted to a girl or to a goy (someone not Jewish)?? Neither was good.

By the time I graduated from high school in 1965, I still had never uttered the words—queer, lesbian, homosexual—aloud nor told anyone about my fantasy life. In fact, the only time I even thought the words in my head was when I looked into a mirror and referred to myself in the third person as that damned queer. I dated boys as I was expected to do and was even called boy-crazy once by my father. I was thrilled about that because it meant that I was a success at hiding my secret, my truth. That and the colitis were killing me.

I went to the University of Florida in Gainesville in the fall of 1965 as a music major. I was the first woman ever to be in the UF jazz band. I sat in the alto sax solo chair. (I switched from the Sousaphone to the alto saxophone in high school because my band director, Gene Greco, wouldn’t allow a girl to play Sousaphone. Sousaphones were made of metal back then and way too heavy for me to carry in the annual Orange Bowl Parade or in weekly football game half-time shows. The sax was perfect and I loved it.) My career goal changed from Rabbi to high school band director.

College was very different for me. My “dating” pattern wasn’t the same anymore. In 1964, author Rita Mae Brown had been kicked out of one of the women’s residence halls at Florida for being a lesbian, the whispered stories went. I sure didn’t want that to happen to me so I laid low. In fact, I intentionally acted to prevent people from ever guessing about me. I didn’t become “best friends” with any woman, and, instead, dated another music major, a guy named Jake. I met Jake my first day at Florida. He was at my residence hall, waiting for the new (female) music majors to arrive. He was charming and adorable and welcoming, and he knew we were to be in the jazz and marching bands together. I learned that he played in a nightclub band on the weekends, in a jazz band in the African American community, and in the local pit band when Broadway plays came to Gainesville. He paved the way for me to play in those groups as well. We became great friends and each other’s default dates. If a weekend came around and neither of us had a date, we’d go out with each other.

I was dedicated to my music program. I loved playing alto sax whether in the Florida Gator Marching Band, the concert band, the symphonic band, or the jazz band. I also had a sax group for which I transcribed string quartets of the old masters, just to see if we could sound like violins. Sometimes we did.

Just to make absolutely sure no one figured me out at college, I deliberately harassed the three gay men I knew in the music school. I didn’t really know for sure if they were gay but everyone talked about them, so I assumed they were. (They were.) I was so cruel. I said terrible things to them so that people wouldn’t guess that I was just like them. I hated that part of myself. I hated seeing myself—my queer self—in those young men. My heart still hurts when I think about what I did and I offer deep apologies to those guys and to the universe. Sadly, I see many students on college campuses today, 45-plus years later, doing exactly the same thing, lashing out at the part of themselves that they detest.

In my junior year at Florida I re-met a woman I had known only peripherally since the third grade. Mitra. She was a pianist and a composer who had transferred to UF from Miami-Dade Community College. Her music moved me to tears every time I heard her play. I would sit outside her practice room, on the floor of the old wooden music building which was originally the first women’s gym on campus, listening to her creations. Mitra’s music had a hauntingly sad Israeli flavor to it. As an alto saxophone major, I asked her to be my accompanist, but I really wanted to ask her to be my life partner. For the first time—maybe the only time in my life—I was truly in love. She didn’t know and I never told her.

Mitra became my accompanist, my roommate, my best friend. We were inseparable for the remainder of our college careers. When we graduated in December of 1969, she moved to Los Angeles with me, to where my family had relocated from Miami two years earlier. Mitra and I lived together for almost two more years, sharing a one-bedroom apartment on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. Though there was nothing at all sexual about our relationship, I thought of us as a couple. Neither of us dated anyone. She and I were family, and I was happy. Mitra didn’t know I was in love with her, but our lives were easy and fun.

~~~~~~

August, 1971. My grandfather’s haunting question: You’re almost 25. What are you, funny or something? My life with Mitra came to an abrupt end, and the colitis once again took hold of my gut.

My grandfather, Schoney, the one who gave me the creeps and who harassed my brother years earlier, questioned why I wasn’t married. What are you, funny or something? he repeatedly demanded to know. Did he really know? How could he possibly know? But he had to know or he wouldn’t have said it like THAT! I wracked my brain to recall if I slipped up somewhere along the way, left a hint of some sort. I could think of none. I immediately called my old college default date and friend Jake who was now a school band director in Florida. We hadn’t seen or spoken to one another since graduation two years earlier. When I asked if he still wanted to get married—he’d asked me in college to avoid the draft—he responded, “Sure, why not?” Nearly as romantic as my proposal.

We were married three months after my grandfather’s comment. I was pregnant several months later.

9. The Marriage Closet

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1971

U.S. President
: Richard M. Nixon

Best film
: The French Connection; A Clockwork Orange, Fiddler on the Roof, The Last Picture Show

Best actors
: Gene Hackman, Jane Fonda

Best TV shows
: All in the Family; McMillan and Wife; The Electric Company; The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour

Best songs
: Joy to the World, It’s Too Late, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, She’s a Lady, Just My Imagination, One Bad Apple, Take Me Home Country Roads, Don’t Pull Your Love, Knock Three Times

Civics
: U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rules in favor of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools; 26
^th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution lowers voting age to 18.

Popular Culture
: U.S. ping pong team goes to China; All in the Family debuts on TV; Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. opens; University of Michigan Gay Services opens; Gay Activists Alliance adopt lower case Greek lambda as symbol for justice.

Deaths
: Jim Morrison, J.C. Penney; Igor Stravinsky

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The panic was almost more than I could stand. It was my wedding day and I wanted to die. The oldest child, the first grandchild on both sides of the family, the first wedding in my generation of cousins. My parents’ house in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles was like an ant farm of hustle and bustle, with everybody, including Mitra (the person I really wanted to be marrying), doing last minute chores, preparing for the day. My mother made sure everyone had their clothes just right as she and my step-grandmother Mae put the finishing touches on the dresses. My sisters handled the arrangements at the Odyssey Restaurant in Granada Hills where the wedding would take place. The men wisely kept out of the way.

All of the people attending the wedding were “bride’s side” folks. Jake, the man I was marrying, flew in from Florida for our wedding. No one, not even his parents, came with him. But he had comrades in the form of my brother Len and my sister Sherry’s fiancé Barry. It was November, 1971.

I remember when I told my mother that I was going to marry Jake. It took me a couple of weeks to muster up the courage to tell her. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy for either of us but I was focused on my mission: to hide my true identity—fast!

“Mom, I have wonderful news to share with you,” I lied. “Jake and I are going to be married!” She’d met Jake a couple of times when she visited me at the University of Florida.

Silence for a moment. “Jake?” she asked. “That skinny goy from Florida? I haven’t heard you mention him since you graduated. Married? To a goy?”

She was correct on all counts. “Yes. Jake. We’ve been talking quite a bit since I left Florida (not true), and we miss each other (not true). I’m almost 25. It’s time I married.” Oh brother, I thought. Did she really believe me?

Mom was shocked, to say the least. She wasn’t happy that I was marrying someone who was taking me all the way back to Florida, and she sure wasn’t happy that I was marrying someone who wasn’t Jewish. This wasn’t the fairy-tale wedding she had in mind for her first-born, though ironically I don’t remember ever talking with her, or anyone really, about my getting married or what kind of wedding I might want. But for the first time in my life, my mother stopped talking to me. Luckily, the silence lasted for only a short time, right after she consulted with Rabbi Lipschitz in Miami.

This was awful. I wanted to be marrying Mitra. Jake was the wrong person and I knew it. I was deeply conflicted about my actions and in tremendous emotional pain. I remember weighing my options very carefully when I awoke the morning of my wedding: marriage, or suicide. Either one could have happened that day.

Oh my God, my God…what am I doing? I cried, holding myself in my bed, rocking from the power of my sobs. How can I do this? How can I NOT do this? My family was downstairs, buzzing and busying with last minute issues for the family’s first wedding. I can’t! I can’t! I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only cry as the pain of my decision filled my body, filled my soul. My thoughts raced through my head. How can I do this? Disappoint everyone? Disappoint Jake who came 3000 miles, to be left at the alter? Embarrass him and my family? Disappoint my Mom who finally got it together enough to want to celebrate? How can I let them all down?????

I was in a full-blown panic attack! Like a madwoman, I considered my options. Mitra, stop all this for me! Tell me you love me. I’ll do anything to be with you! Tell me! But you can’t. You’re not like me. No one is. I’m the only sick one here. I may as well die. I will NOT tell anyone I’m gay. That’s it! Die!

I fell to my knees, out of control and sobbing so hard that my body ached. I can die. Right here. I can die. I don’t want to be here any more. It’s too much…too much…

I had no idea how to go about ending my life. I calmed myself down, working frantically to get a small tenuous grip on my head and my heart. I decided that whether I got married or committed suicide, my life was over. The Big Lie won. I started to breathe again, feeling a bit more calm now. I took my time. I needed time, to pull myself together, to face this day that I dreaded with every fiber of my being, my self-loathing sitting heavily on my heart.

I often felt alone and isolated as a child and a teenager, felt so different from family and friends with the secrets I carried. I trusted no one, not even myself. My heart played tricks on me because I kept falling in love with girls. My body played tricks on me because of the colitis. My mother was too ill with her own colitis and other health issues to be available to me. My father worked full time, and cared for my three younger siblings and me as best he could during my mother’s illness. There just wasn’t time nor opportunity for extras like dealing with a weird kid. But really, I was just too embarrassed and ashamed to tell my parents how bad I felt and how difficult each day was for me, especially at school. The fecal incontinence caused by the colitis kept me hyper-vigilant about my body, so I kept to myself and hoped and prayed that no one would find out about the truths of my life. Ironically, I was popular in school. The outside appearances completely belied the feelings I had about myself. And now, once again, I felt so isolated and alone on the inside while a giant family event was about to take place in my honor. My wedding.

So this day, in November 1971, was my wedding day, and it was the first time—but not the last—that I seriously thought about suicide. I mused about it occasionally as a teen, but today, my wedding day, I believed if I had the means, I would have followed through. I got married instead. My youngest sister Bebe and I cried together that day. She was crying because I was moving away from her, back to Florida. I was crying because I didn’t want to leave my family or Mitra.

This day was surreal. Was I committing emotional suicide, or was this my first survivor moment? Did I die a kind of death that day by marrying Jake the band director, Jake my old friend from college? The only good news for me was that never again would someone ask me if I were funny or something. The closet door was nailed shut.

10. Ronni and Jake Sitting in a Tree…