New Orleans, February, 1981
Bundled in the back seat of a United Taxi Cab, Maud Ellen and I set off on another one of our adventures: my twenty-one-year-old self to have an abortion, and my mother, lunch. She'd brown-bagged a sandwich to take along. Maud Ellen thought ahead. I never did. My impulses got in the way. I'd never had an abortion, although I'd had pregnancy scares before. Dr. Rosenberg, who'd been my gynecologist since I was fifteen, confirmed it. By the time I was sixteen I'd become one of those girls—you know, the needy, gluttonous, never-getting-enough attention girls who have sex with anyone who says Hi.
So far, I'd been lucky—I never caught an STD, and ignorantly attributed my luck to all the Greek sailors I'd screwed. A phalanx of them had been trouping from the downtown Decatur Street Greek bars to our uptown apartment since I'd been a girl. My mother, a polyglot who took up Modern Greek in her forties, frequented the strip of French Quarter merchant marine bars to "practice speaking Greek," and brought me along as her cute covert child-companion. Honestly, she used me as bait because by this time M.E.'s (as we called her) face was a waning gibbous.
Greeks tend to be clean freaks, and the sailors, who frequent prostitutes in ports, go to doctors. Everything went better with Greek sailors. Natural, exclamatory dramatists: "Sagapo" (I love you) was the first thing they'd exclaim. The only thing I'd ever caught from them was drama, and I loved drama. I was melodramatic and lived with two grandees of the art, my mother Maud Ellen, and my grandmother Mamoo.
When I first suspected I might be pregnant, I'd confessed to my intermediary, Mamoo, the easier person to approach with problems of a sexual nature or anything personal. My mother was as personal as the Great Sphinx.
"Goose," I said, using her nickname, something I'd devised as a child after reading Mother Goose.
"Goose, I'm in, uh, a bit of a position."
"No, dear," she said. "You mean situation. The position is what got you in trouble in the first place."
Great with words and a natural grammarian, Mamoo knew her tenses, punctuation and word choice. I loved Mamoo. She never did anything to stop my carrying on, but she sure knew how to word it.
Then I booked an appointment with Dr. Fransen, our dentist, and had my teeth cleaned. We had no medical insurance. Neither my mother nor my grandmother had yearly gynecological exams or any other kind of doctor as far as I remember, but we regularly had our teeth cleaned. Then I came home and masturbated to relieve anxiety; orgasm is the addict's immediate release.
Although I didn't know it then, I had General Anxiety Disorder, a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder which manifests in panic attacks and psychotic paranoia. Anything could set off anxiety, including sex, which also made me paranoid. It wasn't the act, just the fact that I'd had it so often with so many men.
Anyway, I hoped the whole thing would be over fast.
Keith, the father of the soon-to-be abortion, was my first American "boyfriend." By my then twenty-one years, I'd had sex with dozens of men of every creed, color and political persuasion on five different continents. I'd also had sex with a couple of women – a German au pair and a want-to-be blues singer. For the most part, my assignations were one-night stands.
I never really had a boyfriend. The boys I had sex with were those like the swimmers on the Tulane swim team in the summer of ‘74. "Boy" forms an important distinction. Usually, I went for older men. I lost my virginity to a thirty-something-year-old friend of my mother's that May, a month before my thirty-nine-year-old father hanged himself in June.
Keith was tall and in his late twenties. I met him at Tipitina's my first semester at Loyola University's School of Music. I'd been admitted on a conditional basis; namely, that I learn to play an instrument. I'd been batting around for five years after my father's suicide—quitting high school, working odd jobs, murdering time in the Greek bars, or running off on European adventures funded with money I'd inherited from my father's stepfather who conveniently died right after my father.
I was a magical actor, believing that you simply had to do it, whatever it was, and it would just happen. For example, in Italy, I attempted to get into the Accademia de Belle Arti di Firenzi and failed. I'd been drawing for only a few months. So, I returned home and to my other hobbies: writing song lyrics and chasing older, unavailable men. Last summer, I'd fallen into lust with an English drummer who had a girlfriend. One night after sex he told me to leave because she was heading our way. Afterward, I went out drinking, came home and took forty of Mamoo's phenobarbital pills. The stunt inadvertently jumpstarted my musical career. Realizing I needed structure, I applied to Loyola's music school. Propelled by magical thinking, I thought, "Put my words to music and—bingo—everything will fall into place." Never mind I couldn't play a note or the fact I had suicidal depression medicated with booze.
Keith and I lasted four months. I usually avoided English-speaking men. They might get close or understand me. As much as I wanted connection, I couldn't handle it well. With Keith I lucked out; he was always stoned. We smoked a bit, screwed, then sat and watched TV in his apartment and laughed. He had a lanky cock, which matched his frame, and he wore round, John Lennon gold frames. I fell in love with the album Walls and Bridges the fall of ‘74. Apple Records released the album September 26, 1974, the day before my sixteenth birthday and four months after my father's suicide. It was Lennon's fifth solo album. "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" and "#9 Dream" were hit singles. "#9 Dream" became my anthem. Composed during Lennon's eighteenth-month separation from Yoko One, the song was filled with longing for something intangible. With its non-specific lyrics and nonsense words, the song articulated how I felt about my father. Namely, I didn't feel anything exact, but his absence hurt. I'd ask Keith to keep his glasses on when we fucked. Lying over me missionary style, his long blond hair obliterating his face, I pretended to be someone else being made love to by John Lennon.
A good guy, Keith delivered the money for the abortion to Mamoo in the front parlor. I refused to emerge from my bedroom when he arrived. Technically, my room was the other side of what would have been a double parlor in more extravagant times. We weren't living in extravagant times and didn't have money, since no one held a job. Scrounge, borrow, beg, barter or sell were my models of fund acquisition. Maud Ellen peddled family antiques sub rosa for cash; the energy she exerted writing cover letters to my Great Uncle John could have propelled her into the upper echelon of a Fortune 500 company or to run a small nation.
I sat on my bed listening to the exchange taking place, feeling a combination of shame and relief. Relief the money had arrived and shame that I'd asked Keith to pay. I was also ashamed of having had unprotected sex, again, especially not being on the pill, which I thought made me fat. I went on and off the pill like a yoyo. Everything yo-yoed, especially my weight. Life was a carousel with me changing horses as it turned. Part of me knew my behavior was dangerous; another part of me didn't care to know. The part that cared couldn't stop the part that didn't until too late.
Like now.
At one point (I don't remember when exactly, it may have been later with another abortion—too many goings on to track), I had the wild notion I might want to keep the baby. Or maybe the idea was my way of gaging how my mother felt about me.
Maud Ellen stood in the kitchen at the high-back porcelain sink soaping a pot.
The kitchen looked like something in a lower East village tenement house as drawn by George Booth. Prehistoric linoleum, tacked one layer upon another, covered the middle of the flooring, its edges curling and collecting particulate matter. Dirt, cigarette ashes, and cat litter crept under the peeled edges and stayed there. Gunk amassed around the flip-top bin giving it an Elizabethan color of filth. My mother was a proscenium cleaner—clean what you can see and leave the rest, which in her case meant everything.
Improvised counters made of two porcelain-topped tables sat on either side of a dinky, tin stove. A cat litter box had been strategically placed under the table in front of the window where Mamoo ate her breakfast. There was a light switch on the wall above the stove. An Arabofile, Maud Ellen had taped a postcard of Yassar Arafat forking what appeared to be entrails into his mouth. She wrote "Yum-yum" as the caption underneath.
A 1920s Westinghouse, a pantry masquerading as a fridge, sat next to a water heater in the corner on the opposite side of the room. The one working refrigerator, a small cheap Sears number, was next to the Westinghouse. Light in the room came from a bulb suspended from the yellowed ceiling and a lamp on a marble-topped bureau next to the high-back kitchen sink.
"Mama, maybe we could keep it?" I asked.
She turned the spigot off, turned and looked at me.
"Keep it? My dear, I am not offering myself as a nursemaid to anyone for anything unless it's in exchange for an exodus from here."
Her mouth had its natural downturn. She turned the water back on. I left her to her pot.
She was right. Keeping another mistake wasn't a good idea. She told everyone, "I am the head geriatric and psychiatric nurse at the ‘Crisis Center,'" my mother's term for our house. No point in adding to her duties.
Back to the adventure of the termination.
With Keith's money in our hands, Maud Ellen and I set off to see the wizard. The ride from the "Crisis Center" to the Causeway Medical Suite in Metairie took forty-five minutes. Dr. Rosenberg had recommended the clinic. In the 1980s it was easy to get an abortion in New Orleans. In hindsight, thank Hera I was able to get one; a child can't take care of a baby.
When we arrived at the suite. Maud Ellen paid the driver using some of Keith's funds.
"Thank you so much," she said, giving a casual wave as if we were two débutantes arriving at a soirée, which was absurd since the only debut I'd made was in the Decatur Street Greek bars. (Maud Ellen, however, had a real debut with a satin gown, high gloves, and pumps at the Comus Ball in the 1940s). She followed me inside, carrying her bag lunch. I checked in and sat with her in the waiting room until they called my name.
Eight or so women of varying ages and sizes, planted in hard plastic chairs, listened with me as the nurse explained the procedure. The operation itself would take three to five minutes, but we'd be there a total of four hours for the counseling and recovery.
The valium danced its way into my veins. I felt myself relaxing as the cool speculum slid into my vagina. I'd barely looked at the man positioned between my thighs, now hidden behind a soft white sheet.
You're about nine weeks along," he said.
Guess I'd calculated wrong, or Dr. Rosenberg had. What difference did it make now?
"This won't hurt." Something I couldn't identify traded places with the speculum. The room filled with a suctioning sound. Deep inside I felt a hard twinge.
"Ouch!" Tears welled in my eyes. I wanted Dr. Rosenberg's gentle fingers and the sound of his voice.
I tightened my perineum.
"Relax," the man I couldn't see said. "We're almost done here."
"That hurts!" I cried.
"I'm so sorry. We're done."
The room stilled. Whatever had been in my uterus was gone. I exhaled.
"It's okay. Not your fault," I said and meant it. I remembered what Mamoo had said about my situation and what the positions I'd gotten into had caused.
After the abortion, they wheeled me into the recovery room. I lay flat on my back, staring at yet another ceiling, when I heard my mother's distinctive contralto in the waiting room. She had a voice no one could miss. She taught me how to speak and enunciate clearly. My first theater director, Ty Tracy, was as exacting about articulation as Maud Ellen. He repeatedly stopped rehearsals to scream: "It is ‘meet you.' Say it after me. ‘Meet you.' Not ‘Meetcha.' ‘Meetcha' is back-of-town trash speak or some Russian you don't need!" This was hysterical, since most of the cast were back-of-town. ‘Meetcha' is how they spoke. After Ty met Maud Ellen he said, "My god, your mother is the most divinely articulate woman. I love her." Impressive, as Ty didn't like women.
"What in the name of God do you mean you don't have a water fountain in this place?" she asked, her voice reverberating through the clinic's thin walls. She'd forgotten to pack something to drink.
In moments like those I adored my mother. Eventually we returned to The Crisis Center. The cab ride home had been silent.
I went and washed up in the bathroom. Her mirrored chifforobe sat in the back hall. I ignored my reflection creeping by. I didn't want to see my face. Afterward, I retired to my bedroom to lick my wounds. Piano practice loomed; a musician had to learn to play her instrument. On my bed, I lay back and stared at the paint chips curling on the ceiling.
I wanted to be someone else and somewhere else right at that moment. Mamoo appeared at the threshold, came in and patted my hip.
"I'm glad it's over for you, dear." She paused. "Your mother once had a similar procedure."
"Would be nice if she'd told me herself."
"Call me if you need anything."
She kissed my forehead, turned and disappeared down the hall she'd been disappearing down for years.
I admitted to myself that everything hurt. Good I had Mamoo to let me in on one of life's little revelations, though. Mama would have never revealed her abortion. Loving my mother compared to loving a Sphinx. Maud Ellen had a lot of surface appeal—a formidable intellect with knowledge and love of arcane literature, intolerance for anything or anyone stupid, and a rapier-like wit she used to describe such people—but her emotional core was stone. I thought about the Greek-loving Sphinx and her mouth. In Greek tradition, the sphinx has the haunches of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and the face of a woman. Mythologized as treacherous, she suffocates and eats those who cannot answer her riddle.
July. Even after the abortion, I kept getting into those positions, or as Mamoo had corrected me, situations.
Fast-forward to a July run-in with gonorrhea.
We met through an American musician in a Bourbon Street bar. I was working as a cocktail waitress to supplement monies I'd need for fall term. He was a drummer in the band. I've forgotten his name; he was cute, but he didn't want me. He wanted Paulette, the gazelle-legged waitress with her long blonde mane and all-American face who worked the night shift with me. She had everything I didn't—sylph-like beauty with tiny tits. At five-foot-three, a hundred and twenty-five pounds, with frizzing red hair and double D breasts strapped in a three-inch back-support bra, I couldn't compare. My breasts plummeted the moment I took off my bra, which was why I kept it on when I fucked. The connective tissue had been stretched by the weight I'd gained from a nervous breakdown; I spent ten days in Mandeville Psych or the East Feliciana State Hospital, the same hospital my father had revolved in and out of until his death at age thirty-nine. When I got out, I didn't see my doctor but holed up at Chestnut Street overeating until I ballooned, my breasts along with the rest of me. My recovery was in the Greek bars where I traded my voracious appetite from food to men. Fifteen years and dozens of suitors later I was thin. Years later I discovered that sexual promiscuity is a means of staving off grief.
As Paulette strolled around, the drummer's eyes glued to her ass, my cravings for him grew with each step she took. I wanted him to want me the way her wanted her—first. In fact, I wanted every man I met to like me best. Problems arose as soon as I opened my mouth. Naturally confessional, I told everyone I met everything—about Maud Ellen, our Greeks, my father's suicide, and all the ensuing denial. I knew men weren't interested in my confessions when they wanted to fuck. The Greek sailors didn't speak much English. But I couldn't help myself. Talking about me turned me on and caused them to feel sorry for me. In case they didn't, I'd just given them an excuse to dump me. I became a Pushmi-Pullyu hybrid, a girl-woman trying to go in one direction but being pulled in another, which, in part, explained my attraction to unavailable men. The only people I was intimate with were my mother and my grandmother. "Intimate" with them was a relative term. They were both emotionally unavailable. Mamoo lived in her writing escapades and loving Mama was impossible.
One night after work and quite a few drinks, the drummer—I refuse to remember his name—did what I'd wanted him to. He dropped me immediately afterward and continued his pursuit of Paulette the following day. I suffered in pleasure, silently watching the eye contact between them at the bar. It wasn't her fault she was beautiful, and I was, well, needy.
Two weeks later, during a chorale rehearsal I began to cramp. I practically fainted but got through it and managed to trek home the three-mile distance from Loyola to Chestnut Street on my bicycle. What else could I do? Call Mama to come pick me up on her three-speed Raleigh?
Anyway, I got home, got Maud Ellen. She called Dr. Rosenberg, who said, "Get her to Touro Hospital Emergency. I'll meet you there." We hopped into a United Cab and headed to the very place I'd been born. My mother anchored herself to a chair in the waiting room and in I went.
Touro was not fun. I endured a first examination by an intern and nurse. They removed a vial of pus from my uterus and informed me the doctor would be right in. I got dressed and waited. In walked a short woman in white. I re-explained what I'd already explained, told her all about how the pain had started during chorale.
"Stand on your tip toes and drop all your weight down onto your heels," she said.
My weight fell onto my heels and I almost fainted.
"That's good. Now let's have a look. Get your pants and underwear off."
The plaster on the ceiling was puckered. I didn't want another examination. I wanted to run and hide. As I put my feet in the stirrups, I heard the snapping of her latex gloves.
"I'm going to have to examine your rectum, and it's going to hurt," she said.
I half rose and rested my weight on my elbows. "Why? I just had an exam, and they got pus out."
"That's how I determine the condition of your ovaries," she said, her expression eerily stony.
An urge to slip my right foot from the stirrup and kick her in the mouth hit me. "You already know the condition of my ovaries; they're full of pus."
"Look, Miss," she said, "this is part of the procedure here. If you want to be treated, you have to let me do it my way." She glared and pushed her examining chair back a touch.
My way? Oh, yeah, really, I thought. Not getting the sympathy I wanted, I stopped thinking, pulled both feet from the stirrups and swung them to the floor. "I'm not doing that," I said, stood and gathered my panties and jeans.
"Fine," she said, "You don't get treated." She marched out of the room.
Woozy, I dressed, bolted down the hall and burst through the swinging doors of the emergency waiting room, bellowing, "Mama!" Everyone in there froze. So, did Mama. I collapsed in the seat next to her sobbing, "I want to go home."
"Poots," Maud Ellen said, "Max Rosenberg is on his way." "Poots" was as close as she came to consolation. She handed me a tissue from her purse.
I blew my nose. "Attila the Cunt is in there. I'm not going back in."
The doctor bugged me. Her manner bugged me, too, but something deeper churned: memory. The memory of the weekend last summer in the psych ward right there at Touro after another serious attention-getting-stunt with phenobarbital and booze had almost killed me. Yet another drummer, another unavailable man, I'd pursued and offered myself to as if I was the prettiest petit four of all the petit fours at the bakery. Man, I didn't want to remember the horror of trying to take my own life.
I really wanted to go home, but I agreed to allow Attila to do her job. The big, painful shot of an antibiotic in my butt hurt almost as much as the examination, but I'd stopped bitching.
Dr. Rosenberg came and checked on me. He squeezed my right foot, looked at me and said, "You're going to be all right, kid." His tender touch, like a dad's, and his words made me want to cry.
Maud Ellen, the boatswain of my crises, took public charge of whatever ailed me. In private, she did nothing about my carrying on other than to say, "We can barely hold our cups above water!" Public charge thrust her into the beloved spotlight, yet simultaneously she ignored the truth of what was happening. My acting out would have been alarming for a normal, reflective mother.
She denied her part in the creation of my excessive behaviors. Why had she taken me with her as a child to the bars and put me on display? She had a babysitter in my grandmother at home, right? People didn't know this about us, of course. I imagined they thought we were crazy, but, really, we were creatures of habit. Maud Ellen and Mamoo considered men Olympian, and their laissez-faire attitudes shone when it came to men and sex.
My mother's the-whole-thing-is-overrated sex tutorial never explained her behavior. In retrospect, maybe she brought the sailors home to have someone to talk to other than me and Mamoo? My grandmother was more didactic and liked sex. She described "how delightful" giving a blow job could be. But she never included the potential dangers in her lessons. To be fair, Mamoo had no idea I'd become prone to numerical excess. Well, prone to fuck everything in sight.
Each of us secreted vital pieces of information from the others. We weren't a sit-down-lay-it-on-the-table-be-open-and-discuss-it kind of family. Our solution was to pick up a book and read about someone else's messy life and resolution or not of same. Oh, and down a drink or two or three while reading. Better yet, read all night to avoid rising and facing the horrors of our own lives the next day. And we were a hot bed of narcissists. Living with each other truly required fiction on all our parts.
This was the pattern of my life. Sure, my crazy behavior made me ill and led to hospitals, doctors, and examinations, procedures, poking and prodding in intimate places, but to be honest... honesty is one of my crutches. A crutch because I have the need to tell everyone everything. Such business afforded me something I craved, just as it does now. In a kind of Munchausen syndrome by proxy in reverse, I used my out-of-control behavior to get my mother's attention. And I use my need to divulge everything to get you, my dear reader's, attention now.
As for Maud Ellen, our relationship only worked onstage. What did all the taxis together to the bars, clinics, emergency rooms and doctors' offices really mean?
It was the only way to get each other's attention, also known as love.
The author outside of NORD Theatre, New Orleans, 1977. The dress is one of her great aunt's, from the 1940's.
