OFF THE GRID
Rumi Missabu (1947-2024) was born in Hollywood, took a bus to San Francisco, made a wrong turn, got lost, and was too stubborn to ask for directions. The first place he lived after he ran away was in a water tower with a lesbian poet.
Rumi was an original member of the San Francisco hippie performance troupe, the Cockettes. The Cockettes were high-action, out-front, out-of-the-closet entertainers and the satiric cutting edge of the first wave of Gay Liberation. Rumi left the Cockettes after a year and a half, traveled to Canada, moved to New York, and then hitchhiked home to San Francisco. For 35 years, he lived without a government ID, work record, or social security number. His only form of identification was an expired San Francisco library card that said "Rumi Missabu." Everything had to be done on his own terms. Cue the mystery and rumors. People thought he was in the gutter and then forgot he existed. His legacy was on the verge of being erased by his transient, underground life.
I met Rumi when I was 18 years old. It was a dark and cold June day in Oakland, California. I went to his house and thought I was lost until a man with long, natty, unconditioned, and unkempt black hair answered the door. He was wearing a nurse’s gown, and there was a gold dildo on his table. I found Rumi and the rabbit hole that has since consumed massive amounts of storage on my computer.
I began recording all of our phone calls. After two months of recording on the sly, I broke the news. He responded matter-of-factly, “Of course you have been recording our conversations. I knew it. You always ask the dumbest questions.” Eleven years later, my archive contains 250 recorded interviews and conversations with him. Ask him a question, and watch him twirl. He is rehearsed and consistent. He knows exactly what he wants to say and uses his Valley Girl pauses for effect. There is never, “give me a moment to think.”
The Cockettes were among the first gender-bending, glittered, bearded drag queens to gather national press, but their saga of unfortunate events has already been documented. OFF THE GRID is about a man who never played by the rules. Even though the San Francisco hippie days ended, Rumi kept going. Sure, there was peace and love, but there were also days without food, no money for cigarettes, and no family to call. Why did he do it? How did he do it? Thirty-five years without a paper record is a hard feat to pull off.
OFF THE GRID is Rumi Missabu’s real story in his real words. Part One of a 250-tape series.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
PS: Rumi passed away two weeks after the publication of the physical edition of OFF THE GRID. You can read his obituary here.
MAN ON THE RUN
I attended Los Angeles City College with Cindy Williams from Laverne and Shirley. It was 1967, and I was 19 years old. We had been drama students at the same high school. Actress Sally Field also studied with us. Sally got discovered and put in films right away, but Cindy had to work straight jobs. She was a waitress at the House of Pancakes for a while.
The two of us lived together in Beverly Hills, and she was supporting me. I was taking lots of LSD, smoking lots of reefer, and wasn't able to keep a job. In my last jobs under my real name, James Bartlett, I was temping at Bank of America and Security First National Bank in Downtown Los Angeles.
I started thinking, "I am not meeting my potential in Hollywood." It was so competitive. Had I stayed, I probably would have had all my teeth capped, face planed, hair dyed, and gone the Hollywood route, but I saw something else in my future after I stumbled down to Hollywood Boulevard and saw this movie called She Freaks. I was on LSD, and it blew me away. The movie is about a sleazy older man on his way to town promoting the circus—"Hey, girl, you want a job?” She gets in the car with him, and they go to town to promote the circus. Right away, the lion tamer and the circus owner's son start lusting after her. They fight and end up killing each other. Then, the owner takes a liking to her and asks her to marry him, but he dies on their wedding night. He has a heart attack and dies on top of her, leaving her to be the circus owner. She says, as the first order of business, I'm getting rid of the freaks. This is their livelihood. So they come at her, cut off both of her arms and legs, and throw her into a pit of snakes, and she becomes the star attraction.
After seeing the movie, I returned to the little cottage behind Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where I lived, and left Cindy a short note. I said, “Cindy, I can't take it anymore.”
I got on a Greyhound bus with the addresses of three Los Angeles girls I knew who had moved to the Bay Area and went straight to Berkeley. Winter was coming, and I figured one of these girls would take me in. The first girl was a girl I had a big crush on in high school. She was so smart. She was a year ahead of me and was studying at the University of California, Berkeley. I couldn't find her. The second girl I also had gone to high school with. She wasn't around either. In fact, she was working in England as Samuel Beckett’s secretary. The third girl was a loose, married woman called Sondra Pagic Dyke Rubenstein. I looked her up, and I found her living in West Berkeley. I knocked on her door. She answered in a cold sweat and said I couldn't stay with her because the FBI was watching her house because she was living with the Black Panthers.
She told me, "You know what? I have a friend named Carol Graham, who's a lesbian poet. She lives in a water tower on San Pablo Avenue. You might go down there, and she might take you in." I went to her, and I knocked on the side of the water tower. She said, "Come on up."
The water tower was in the back of a hippie store where everything was free. Canned food, blankets, clothing—whatever you wanted. This biker gang called The Gypsy Joker ran the store.
All we had room for in the water tower were our bedrolls and a work table made out of a door. We did hippie crafts, and I made copper jewelry. I decorated and shellacked pine boxes and put them on consignment in stores. That's how I lived until I started selling kilos of weed. We'd buy a kilo, smoke half, and sell the other half for rent. God knows how I managed all those years, but I did. I turned on, I tuned in, and I dropped out. I took Timothy Leary's mantra for what it was worth.
Most other people who turned on, tuned in, and dropped out eventually dropped back in, but I stayed out. I preferred to stay out as a way to express my anarchistic feelings about my career and what I wanted to do. I never did drop back in until the intervention in 2008. We’ll get to that later. The water tower is the setup for my life story. I was trying to make a living any way I could. I sold the Berkeley Barb newspaper on the corner. We used to buy a bunch of them from the publisher, Max Scherr, and we'd make five cents for every one we sold. I made arts and crafts and all that hippie-dippie stuff and just started living the life of a hippie, enjoying the hippies. At that point, I became a draft dodger and draft resister as well.
My family moved from Hollywood to Idaho when I was 16 or 17. I kind of had an abusive childhood. I felt my parents were prejudiced. That’s one of the early reasons I went off the grid. I didn't want my family's prejudice or their abuse to be part of my adulthood. I wanted to live my own life. After separating from my family, I did not see them for 52 years. I finally reunited with them in 2018 and am so happy I did. I also went off the grid because I didn't want to go the Hollywood route. I saw what that did to people and how fleeting stardom was. I felt some peace and tranquility in coming to Berkeley and becoming spiritually evolved.
In those years, from 1967 to 1969, I became spiritually involved, not with just one religion, organization, or culture, but with everything. I learned the tarot cards, and I graduated to the Egyptian deck. I read the I Ching, and I chanted Hare Krishna and Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō. I read the spiritual teachings of Meher Baba and Gurdjieff. I absorbed as much as I could.
When I saw the avatar Krishnamurti in person, he glowed gold. I just put all of that on myself. I wanted to learn everything that I thought was necessary for my evolution. I took all that with me into adulthood.
SUPER GROUPIE
Before I was a Cockette, I was a groupie. I would go to coffee houses in Los Angeles and hear folk singers at The Troubadour, like Judy Collins, Crosby Stills and Nash, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. When I moved to San Francisco, I started listening to rock music.
There was this band called Cream that had Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton. I went to see them at the old Fillmore Theater on Geary and Fillmore, but I didn’t have a ticket. I went right up to the front door, and a man came up and told me he had an extra ticket. I asked how much, and he said just take it. It was like magic, and I started following English rock groups. I also liked a couple of American groups, like Country Joe and the Fish, who would later serve as my ride when I fled to Canada. I loved another band called the Chambers Brothers. They were a black group with one white guy who was from Canada.
I went to see the Chambers Brothers one night with my roommate Carol. After the show, they invited us to their loft. I had sex with the white guy in the group. Then, the next day, I started itching down there. I told my friend Kenny that I was itching. He told me to take this pill and handed me a big, orange pill that was the size of a horse tranquilizer. I peed bright orange for hours. The pill didn’t work, so I went to the Haight-Ashbury free clinic, and I said, “Doc, I got it bad, and that ain't good. I got bad itching.” He told me I got crabs from the Chambers Brothers, and he gave me a different pill to take.
So many future Cockettes were groupies like Scrumbly, Fayette, Goldie Glitters, and Harlowe. One time, Harlowe came to my house the day after a Led Zeppelin concert. She told me that she'd been tied up, handcuffed to a bed, and left for the maids in the hotel room by Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin. She said he straddled her in the bed, put a fish between her legs, and left her. She already smelled like fish before that happened so I couldn’t tell, but I believed her. It was wild stories like that that brought all of the Cockettes together. Many of us ran in the same circles.
THE COCKETTES
We are now in 1968. All of the Cockettes met in different places. We were a bunch of freaks that came together like magnets. We met in places like the Capri, a gay bar, and in Golden Gate Park. North Beach and Polk Street were the gay neighborhoods in San Francisco then. We also met at the Palace Theater, which eventually became the Cockettes’ home, but before that, we would go to the midnight movies at the Nocturnal Dream Show that Steven Arnold and Sebastian were running and see the most fantastic movies that no one else was showing.
We were exposed to people like directors Kenneth Anger and John Waters. They brought John Waters out with his star Divine. The Palace Theater was one of the first places to show John Waters’s movies like Mondo Trasho and Pink Flamingos. You could have sex and smoke weed in the balcony. It was just total anarchy and freedom.
The charisma of our founder, Hibiscus, ultimately brought the Cockettes together. He had a background in New York show business. “Let's put on a show.” That was the idea. Hibiscus would develop a theme for the early shows every month. No script, just really unstructured. He'd come up with a theme like an all-Southern show called Gone with the Showboat to Oklahoma with songs from movies and assign roles to all of us.
Hibiscus liked to have seven or eight numbers and have the biggest headdress. The rest of us would just have a number or two. It was real anarchy. It was untraditional theater because we would bring people right from the audience into our show. People would be in the front two rows, and suddenly, they would join us to do a sabre dance on stage. They were Cockettes forevermore! It was so loose and practically illegal, but we were never arrested or busted for nudity.
A DRAG QUEEN SCORNED
Let's go to Halloween weekend 1970, when the Cockettes were performing Les Ghouls, the Halloween show where I played Mick Jagger. I couldn't live in the Cockette house because you had to receive an ATD check, which stands for Aid to the Totally Disabled, to qualify. It wasn't easy to get. You had to see a psychiatrist and convince them you were nuts. I lived underground and had no ID. I couldn’t start the process.
Since I couldn’t live in the Cockette house, I decided to live with Cockette Aaron. We lived here, and we lived there. Finally, in mid-October, Aaron got an apartment for us—how he did, being only seventeen years old, I don’t know. The apartment was on Carl and Cole in Haight-Ashbury. Aaron mentioned the first few days we were there that he thought junkies lived in the basement.
One night, Cockette Johnny and I were at a meeting at the Cockette house, and I noticed someone in the bushes. I thought that was weird. “Someone’s in the bush, what’s that about?” We were high and didn’t overthink it.
We went inside and woke up Aaron and sat around the kitchen table with our shirts off. All of a sudden, there was a big knock on the door, and I said, “Who the hell is that? We aren’t expecting anyone.”
I got up, opened the door, and a girl was there. She was sweating, and her hair was stringy. She said, "Billy Moorer’s outside, Billy Moorer’s outside.” I looked behind her to the lobby of the building, and there was no one there. She kept saying, “Billy Moorer is outside, Billy Moorer is outside.”
I'm like, “What are you talking about?” She then asked if we had a back door. I told her that there was a back door off of the little screened-in patio. The stairs went down to the back of the building. She asked, “Can I go through the back?” like she was being chased. I said, “Yeah, fine, just go do your thing.”
I went back to the table, sat down, picked up a joint, took a couple of hits, and passed it around to Aaron and Johnny. All of a sudden, she came to the back door where I had let her out and screamed, “Billy Moorer is outside, and he's coming in!” Following her were nine narcotics officers chasing her through my house with two minors right there at the table, Aaron and Johnny, practically naked, smoking marijuana.
Aaron grabbed the bag of marijuana and started to run across the room. One narcotics officer tackled him to the floor, held the bag of marijuana up in the air, put his pistol to the marijuana, and said, “Ah-ha!” He was going to shoot the pot.
Then, this big, fat, matron cop started to handcuff us and went through everything, looking for more stuff. I told her that she was wasting her time and that there was nothing else there. She went through my headdresses, high heels, and disco platform boots in my closet. She was tearing my house apart in front of us.
Finally, they took the three of us downstairs to the basement, where there were six junkies who had already been busted. Then, they called for a paddy wagon. They took us to Park Station in Golden Gate Park.
Johnny and Aaron were both minors, like I said. They released Johnny to his mother. I told Aaron to lie and say that he was not a minor because otherwise, they would call his parents. We didn’t want to bring them into it. They were bigoted pigs.
We sat there until they transferred us to the Bryant Street jail. When we got there, there were 50 men going into a giant cell block one by one. The sergeant came down the line and told Aaron and me to go to the end of the line. He didn't explain why.
When they let all the men in, the sergeant came up to me and said, “Excuse me, we're just wondering, are you two homos?” I slapped Aaron and said, “What do you mean, homos? When I get out of here, I'm gonna get me some pussy. Pussy, man, pussy juice, pussy juice!” The alternative to going where the men were was the “Queen Tank,” which was directly across from us.
I am pretty sure the reason they asked about us being gay was that I was wearing women’s capri pants and a little halter top with a frilly bottom. While I was with the other men, they said, “We were just wondering—why are you wearing women's clothing?”
I said, “You know what, these are my wife’s. The narcs didn’t even give me a chance to put on my own clothes, so I had to put on something of hers. This is ridiculous. They didn’t even let me change!—pussy juice, pussy juice, god damn it!”
The men believed me, but then they started picking on poor Aaron. They were calling him Hot Whips Margaret, and they were saying, “When the lights go out tonight, we're going to bust your butt.” He was terrified. He cried, saying, “Oh Rumi, I don't know what to do.” I said, “They’re just jiving, just jive back with them. Say you are going to bust their butt first.” I wouldn't let them scare me. I just shot it right back at them.
I saw the queens in the Queens Tank. They were like hard-bitten whores and trannies. They would perform for us. They would make drag out of their little jail uniforms, tie them in knots, and do little shows. It was really amusing.
We were there all day, and eventually, the lights did go out. I thought I was going to have to cancel my performance in Les Ghouls. About 20 minutes after the lights went out, we heard someone yell, “Missabu and Robinson!” We were bailed out by the director of Elevator Girls in Bondage, Michael Kalmen, and the Cockette hippie doctor, Leonce Evans. I ran to the theater and did the show that night.
ELEVATOR GIRLS IN BONDAGE
I was paid very handsomely to make my film Elevator Girls in Bondage. I was paid in cash. The funding came from illicit drugs. Not from the sale of drugs but from the actual manufacturing of drugs—the making of angel dust. Biker gangs sold it. I was in on the actual production at one point. It was so scary. I could have blown up in the lab. I don't want to mention names, but the real person running the operation to raise money for the film was doing it from San Quentin State Prison.
He was a big kingpin. It was really very dangerous, and there were guns involved. I mean, they were biker gangs. I had a job washing and sterilizing the laboratory and another job posing as an art student at the University of California, Berkeley, to secure all the necessary chemicals that went into that crap. I made a fake student ID to get in. It was just awful.
I never did the drugs myself. I didn't approve of it. When I was on the set or around it, my underage friends were not allowed on the premises. There's a scene in Elevator Girls when Jim Paltridge, the film's producer, put a real gun up our butts. I remember that it was cold. I insisted that we bring it to the rooftop, where the scene was shot, and fire it into the sky before I let him do that. There were no blanks.
He said, "No, it's not blank. It's just a gun." I said, "I don't care if it is loaded or not. You're not putting it up our butts unless I test it." I've always been a pacifist and scared of firearms.
CANADA AND NEW YORK ON MY MIND
I decided to go to Canada after Elevator Girls came out. I need a fresh start. I was nervous crossing the border, but I was lucky because I had a friend on the other side in Montreal. His father arranged for a one-way ticket across Canada from Vancouver to Montreal, so I had to get to Vancouver. I flew with Country Joe and the Fish to Seattle. We both did shows in Seattle, and then I planned to take a ferry to Victoria, Canada, and then a bigger boat to Vancouver, where my train ticket was. Physically, I didn't have the train ticket on me.
I had no ID, I just had a letter from Robert's father inviting me as a guest for the summer because he was a citizen. In those days, you didn't need a passport at the border. I showed them the letter and said, "Here's a letter, I'm a guest." They gave me a three-month visa. I took a train across Canada and arrived in Montreal, where I would stay until Aaron or Hibiscus, who were already in New York City, invited me down there. As soon as they did, I was gone.
I ended up staying in Montreal for nine months. Robert and I lived way, way, way out in the boonies with his foster father, who was a florist. There was no foster mother, and we were stranded out there, hardly ever going into the city. We didn't know anybody up there. Somehow, we amused ourselves. Finally, his foster father said we needed to have a meeting. The three of us sat down until his father told me, "Rumi, I think you have overstayed your welcome, and you need to go." It was the same night his father confessed that he was bisexual. I went to Downtown Montreal to the bohemian street Rue Saint-Denis. I had visited there a few times. There were chess players playing all night in the coffee houses, which stayed open until 4:00 or 6:00 AM.
You could sit around a chess game, and they would pass a chillum of tobacco. It was the only way to get a buzz or get high. The whole nine months I was there, the only substances they had were 222s, which were the French equivalents of over-the-counter aspirin laced with codeine. Robert and I would take those like candy, just trying to get a buzz, but all they did was make me constipated. In Downtown Montreal, I rented a cute little room in an attic on the most bohemian street in the city.
In the bohemian area, I met gay people. I started going to discos and parties. Eventually, I met my ride to New York, where Hibiscus and Cockette Aaron were. They had finally invited me to stay with them in New York. It all came together.
Aaron told me he lived in Greenwich Village with his new boyfriend. Turns out they didn’t live in Greenwich Village—they lived in Alphabet City, a very tough part of town. Soon after I arrived, Aaron’s boyfriend got jealous.
Somehow, I managed to get some money somewhere. I have always pulled something out of the rabbit hat. I got a room with just a sink at the Chelsea Hotel for $79 a week. Then, Peter Pan and Jay, my friends from Rome, came to New York, and we moved into a one-bedroom at The Chelsea Hotel with a filmmaker named Sandy Daly. I lived there for the next six months.
In New York, I performed with Hibiscus of the Angels of Light in a fabulous show called The Enchanted Miracle at the Theater for the New City. I also worked with a performance artist called Marta Minujín from Buenos Aires, Argentina. I did three events with her that were so, so wonderful. That was some of the best work I've ever done. These events were called, “Happenings” at the time. We did one called Kidnapped. We kidnapped 40 people in the sculpture garden at the MoMA. We had a fleet of 40 cabs waiting outside the sculpture garden, and we took them to 40 different locations. I took the boy I kidnapped to a rock party hosted by Sly Stone and Mott the Hoople. It was in the Green Tulip room at the Plaza Hotel. It was an after-party after they played at Madison Square Garden. It was so fabulous.
After two and a half years in New York City, I ended up in the Catskills. I went up there with Hibiscus to the theater commune and stayed there. Then I thought, "What the hell am I doing in the Catskills?" The three big events of the day were to get up, wash your hair, and go down the road to see the cows. Again, I lived with no money. Finally, I said, "Okay, I'm done with New York. Let's go back to San Francisco."
GET ME OUT OF HERE
When I was in Upstate New York, I met a girl from Syracuse University. She and two of her student friends were going to drive a car across America. I agreed to go with her, but I'd never been behind the wheel and never learned to drive. My dad and brother were auto body mechanics, and I certainly didn't want to have the same skills as them.
I told the girl, Cheryl, "I can pay for gas, but I can't do any of the driving." We all got in the car and started heading west. I hadn’t met these girls until that morning, except for one. One girl had the whole itinerary planned out. She had relatives across the entire country to stay with.
It was terrible from the very first day. We'd stop to see all of her relatives, and they would want to make us dinner, keep us overnight, bring us to the mall, and bring us to church. I was like, "Oh, I'm trying to get to San Francisco." After three days of visiting these relatives, we arrived in Ohio or somewhere like that. Then, the other girl we were with didn't want to go to the South because she was prejudiced. She wanted to go through the North instead, but it was December.
It was brutal weather. They were fighting amongst themselves over the itinerary, and they would keep driving and driving. Finally, I said, "Let's pull over and get a motel for the night, for Christ's sake. You've been in this car for three days." The one girl said, "My daddy wouldn't like it if I got a hotel room with a man." We just kept going. They were screaming at each other. I didn't know where we were. We stopped at a truck stop in the middle of the night—I don't even know where we were, but there was a little café.
I said to Cheryl, "You know what? Get my things. Get my things. I've got to get out of this situation. I've got to leave." I had a little money, and I knew if I could find out where I was, I could take a bus back to California. She told the other girls, and they hated me. They threw my luggage out of the car and sped off.
As soon as they left, I felt a sense of relief. A whole weight was lifted off of me. I entered a café diner, had a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, and asked the waitress, "So, where am I? What's the biggest city close to here?" She said, "Oklahoma City." Off to Oklahoma City I went!
I saw a couple and waited until they were getting up to pay the bill. I asked, "Pardon me, are you going to Oklahoma City?" They said, "We just came from that direction." "Oh, okay."
I had another piece of pie and some more coffee. It was two hours later that I saw another couple. I asked them, "Pardon me, are you going to Oklahoma City?" They said, "Honey, we're going to Dallas, past Oklahoma City."
"Dallas?" I said, "I'll take it," and got in their car. They were ballroom dancers attending a competition in Dallas. They were nice folks. They dropped me off in downtown Dallas. I looked up, and what did I see? The Texas School Book Depository Building where Oswald shot Kennedy. I was right beneath it. I was like, "Oh my God, what am I doing in Dallas?" I was still a New Yorker.
I call all my friends in New York. I said, "What am I doing? What am I doing in Dallas? Where should I go?" They said, "Go to Austin." I said, "Okay." I stuck out my thumb again, and I went to Austin. It was cool. It was a college town. There were young people. I remember there was live music in all the clubs and bars, which was nice.
I was still thinking, “What am I going to do?” I didn’t know anybody there. I stuck out my thumb again, and this young hippie cowboy picked me up. He said, "Where are you going?" like in She Freaks, the movie that forever changed my life. I said, "Anywhere. Just get out of here." He said, "I'm going to Houston." We started talking, and he asked me if I'd like to go to a job site with him in Houston.
His job was with a crew of Texans to shampoo the carpets at a gated community of empty condos that some millionaire had bought. No one had lived there yet. We shampooed the carpets in every unit. I stayed with him in Houston for two weeks. I was sequestered there in this gated community, living with a whole pack of boys and hippie cowboys.
Finally, on New Year's Eve, a boy named Kenny said, "I hope you're going to stay tonight and go to the dude ranch with us." I said, "Dude ranch? What the hell am I doing in Texas going to a dude ranch? I'm trying to get to California."
I said, "You know what, Kenny, I want you to drive me to the edge of town on New Year's Eve Day." So he did, and I told him goodbye. I couldn't do the dude ranch.
Yet again, I stuck out my thumb, and some Latino farmers picked me up. They were going to New Orleans. I remembered that Cheryl's brother lived in New Orleans. I also knew a friend from Brooklyn whose father did Black exploitation films and reissued Billie Holiday records. His name was Richard. He produced the movie Super Fly. He was in New Orleans making an all-Black version of the opera La Bohème with Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, and Melba Moore and told me if I ever wanted to work on productions behind the scenes, I should come to New Orleans."
I arrived in New Orleans. First, I scoped Cheryl’s brother who lived in the suburbs. He wasn't there. Then, I went into the French Quarter. I rang the doorbell of my friend’s dad. His landlady entered the courtyard and said, "Hello." I introduced myself and said, "I'm here to see Richard. I’ve come from New York." She said, "Oh, my dear, Richard's in New York for Christmas." I said, "Oh, no, he invited me. Now, what am I going to do? It's New Year's Eve.”
Southern hospitality saved the day. She said, "I'll tell you what you do.” Go down to Bourbon Street or Orleans Street tonight at six o'clock and ask for Allan Jaffe." What did I have to lose? Nothing.
I went down the street and walked up to the first bum I saw on the road. He was this drunk and disheveled guy. I asked him, "Pardon me, do you know Allan Jaffe?"
He said, "I am Allan Jaffe." It turned out he and Larry Borenstein, an art dealer, owned half the town, including Richard's building where I had just been. I told him my situation. “My friend Richard is in New York. I'm here. We miscommunicated." He said, "Hey, Steve, go set him up in the rooms. Put him up in Richard's until he gets back. We'll take care of it." He gave me Richard's room while he was away. This all happened in one day.
Then, I discovered two sheets of paper LSD in Richard's refrigerator. I didn't know anybody in New Orleans, but I went to the street every night to party. I befriended two young boys from Washington, D.C., and brought them back. We had a big LSD party. When Richard got back, he discovered that his LSD was missing. He seemed pretty cool with it.
In New Orleans, I supported myself as a thief. I worked with a fence, and we specialized in hood ornaments, men's wingtip shoes, and '30s and '40s trousers.
I met a girl named Victoria at a coffee house by Tulane. I was hanging out with her and we went dancing. We were having a grand old time, and I ended up living with her.
One night, she got a call from a friend back in Mississippi who told her one of their friends had died. All the girls went back for the funeral. I called to see if she was home and discovered that she had driven off the same cliff as the one whose funeral they were attending. It was like a double suicide.
I had a friend named Jimmy Nolen who told me about an artist named John to see in New Orleans. I went to visit him. He told me stories all night. He had two house guests: a woman named Dorothy and her young, gay son named Pogo. They were telling me about life and about living in the French Quarter all of their lives. It was so fascinating. Then they put us all to bed.
John lets us sleep in his loft. The next morning, I went out. When I returned, I asked where Dorothy was. I was semi-invested in her story after she told me about her life. He said, "She went into a charity hospital and died."
I hitchhiked out of New Orleans after four months. On my first ride, I stuck out my thumb and got into a big, shiny Cadillac with tail fins. This overweight guy with big old rings all over his fingers was driving. We started chatting, and he said, "Yes, yes, yes. I'm heading to a Led Zeppelin concert in Baton Rouge." Baton Rouge, fine!
He told me that he had just written a book, that there was a whole box of them in the back, and that I should help myself. I picked up the book and looked at it. It was titled the Bank of America of Louisiana, and it was written by Jim Morrison. I had read about his alleged death.
I realized I was in the car with Jim Morrison. We talked about groupies we both knew in L.A., like Miss Lucy. His story checked out. I played it cool. I knew how to act around a celebrity. I wasn’t all gaga.
He didn't say anything about staging his death. It was like he was just there in the car like every other driver I had hitchhiked with. I had worked with Jim Morrison with the Living Theatre troupe in 1968. We did a show called Paradise Now in San Francisco. It was a loose show that anyone could be in. He looked exactly the same all these years later, except that he had gained a lot of weight. That was the third event of my New Orleans experience that was associated with death. It was spooky there in New Orleans.
HOME SWEET HOME
Finally I arrived in San Francisco. What could I do? I had no money and nowhere to go. I was homeless for half a night. I was sitting in the Greyhound bus depot South of Market. There were a lot of hustlers down at the bus station. A man named Felix came up to me with his toupee on backward, introduced himself, picked me up, and took me home to the ugliest God-awful condo you've ever seen on Nob Hill.
I refer to him as a Polish count of no account. He was actually related to Polish nobility. He was cousins with the Radziwills, the family Jackie Kennedy's sister Lee Radziwell married into. His cousins were princes and horse experts and lived in South Africa. He had a lot of money, but he had no taste.
I was a kept woman for the next year and a half until I discovered his gun in his underwear drawer. He never used it on me. He liked the hardcore Polk Street hustler boys, and I guess he had it for protection. He'd bring them home and needed to be safe.
After I left, I started living in residential hotels. I would live in many of them over the next 22 years. I lived in residential hotels in San Francisco on Polk Street, in the Upper Tenderloin, and on Nob Hill. I lived all over the place. I always had a private bathroom. To support myself, when I first came back to San Francisco, I dabbled in the arts a little for a short period of time. Eventually, everything dried up.
In 1976, after working with Cockette Goldie Glitters, we became really, really close. I lived with Cockette Pristine Condition for a while as well. I helped another artist install a sculpture in the basement of Grace Cathedral. Then I met my friend Cockette Super Joel. He opened a gallery called Art for Art's Sake, and I became his housekeeper and later his gallery representative. I did that for a year and a half and met some fabulous artists and people. I can't remember all the artists who exhibited there. It was the best thing Joel ever did with his money, and there I was. Eventually, Art for Art's Sake and my entire art world dried up, and I had to change occupations. I decided to start working catering jobs and later became a prep cook and got really good at cooking in greasy spoons all over San Francisco.
FLIPPING BURGERS AND MAKING SALSA
I had a dear friend named Scott. He later passed from AIDS. Many people knew many people who died from AIDS, but I didn’t. I only knew Scott. I was isolated.
Scott was very interested in food. He was from Pennsylvania, where his mother was a pro golfer. They had a country club. He had very good taste. He started catering, and I started getting catering jobs from him.
We would take two watermelons the night before somebody's company picnic, drill a hole in them, take a bottle of vodka, and let it saturate the watermelon overnight. The kids at the picnic would get a hold of it and fall over while playing sports. They got drunk! It was just silly.
We'd just do all kinds of crazy things. One time, we had a job where we had to make exactly 150 wontons and deliver them to a famous football player at the Hyatt Hotel. We had so many crazy jobs.
There was another with this woman who owned KSAN radio station. She lived in San Francisco on Russian Hill, but her boyfriend lived in Los Angeles. Every weekend, she'd fly her boyfriend up and pay us to cater a whole lunch. We'd arrive before he got there. She'd stick it in the oven, and then when he came home, she would say, "Oh honey, look what I made."
We worked at a restaurant called the Tortilla Oven on Fisherman's Wharf. I was a prep cook and a dishwasher. You had to load the industrial dishwasher with this drying agent, which was a heavy-duty chemical solution. When working there, I lost all the skin on my hands. I would call the manager at Tortilla Oven and say, "Judy, I can't come to work tonight. I have no skin on my hands."
Another time, I was making chimichangas. I had a cut on my finger with a band-aid on it. I put the filling into the chimichanga, deep-fried the damn thing, and sent it out to the front kitchen. The waitress picked it up and took it to the guy's table. When I realized the band-aid was gone, he was about to cut into his chimichanga. I said, "Maria, get the waiter." She went and snatched it away. When I cut it open, sure enough, there was my band-aid.
This place was gross. It was just terrible. We hired one prep cook, Huey. We only hired him because his reason for leaving his last job was so good: “Too many scumbags.”
Eventually, I got fired because all I did was sit around and smoke. Olga, the second manager, fired me, and then she was fired for stealing.
Whenever someone would ask for formal identification, I would say, "My ID is with my wife. If you don’t believe me, call this number. They would never call the number, so I just got away with it over and over and over again. If I got paid by check, I had to have someone else cash the check. It was all under the table during my years as a prep cook and a housekeeper.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, I NEED HELP
In 2004, I lived in the Castro. I was still off the grid. I took over someone else’s lease, so I didn’t need identification. There was an incident at that apartment. I didn’t have money to pay my rent.
I eventually had to get on welfare. My friends Carl and Larry, who are now landlords, staged an intervention and convinced me that I needed formal assistance. I had never considered getting an ID, but you needed one to get public assistance. It took another couple of years before I got everything together. I had never even had a bank account in my name. We opened a bank account and found my original social security number, stating I hadn't worked since I was 19.
I went to the government agency, and they said, "Where were you all these years? We don't have any record of you working since 1967." I said, "People took care of me because of who they thought I was, but they're all gone now, and can we leave the door open, please?" I got it. Stamp, stamp! That was enough.
Another doctor said, "I see you want to hurt yourself or others." I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "You're mentally disabled." I said, "News to me." I denied it to the hilt and said, "No, of course, I don't want to hurt myself or others." I've never been like that. I've never been depressed or bored. I don't get bored.
I have many young followers in England who tell me that they are bored, that they are so terribly bored. I always tell them to draw a picture, paint a painting, write a story, write a poem, or just do something. I'm never bored and don't want to be depressed or hurt myself because I never know what's around the corner tomorrow and all the exciting opportunities that will present themselves. I also think it is because I am always in love. Whether with someone, consummated or not, or with something. I am just always in love.
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