Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma (3 page)

I was never quite sure if my grandparents—Mae and Schoney—knew I was a lesbian until I visited them in Miami one day in about 1984. I had been out as a lesbian for about five years and active in the Florida lesbian and gay civil rights movement. I was taking a light snooze in one of their comfy chairs while they were sitting side by side on the couch. I heard Mae say to my grandfather in a loud whisper to accommodate his hearing, “Aren’t you so proud of her?” My grandfather replied, “Yes, except for that, uh, one little thing.” Mae responded with what sounded like a whack to his chest—she was only 4’9” and about 110 pounds but powerful in so many ways! “Shut up,” she said to him with hushed gusto. “There’re lots of people like that!” Thank you, Mae.

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When my father’s parents, Polly and Saul, moved to Miami Beach in the mid-1950s, they bought a small eight-unit apartment building in the heart of what is now the Art Deco district. They lived in one unit and rented the others. I remember the storage basement in that building, only four steps down but it felt like an immense underground cave. At least that’s how I fantasized it. It was my grandfather Pop’s domain but he always let me go down there. It was damp and musty-smelling, with only a single hanging light bulb that sometimes swayed and threw eerie shadows on the cement block walls. The room was filled with discarded treasures like clocks and radios and rusted tools. I would go down into that mysterious place where I pretended to be a mad scientist, disemboweling every old electronic thing I could find. I was never frightened there, maybe because my grandfather was always nearby, always enjoying my methodical destruction.

My father’s mother, Pauline, or Polly—my Bubba—was typically old-world. Both she and my grandfather came to the U.S. from Poland in the early 1900s and she maintained much of her Polish culture and language. Her claim to family fame was her outstanding meals, plentiful, traditionally Jewish, and always way too much. “Eat more,” she would say to already-overweight me. “You like it, yes? Eat more!” I ate. She once said to me, “Someday you will eat peanuts off my head, you’re getting so tall.” One day, as a teenager, I did! I put a couple of peanuts on top of her black-gray curly hair and nibbled. She loved that!

I’m the oldest of four children, and my sisters and brother are my closest friends. While my siblings were fairly docile as children, I was outgoing, “boisterous,” my mother said, though I didn’t know what that meant. She also called me “a bull in a china shop.” I was never sure if it was because I was clumsy or just a hyperactive kid who was all over the place. I suspect the latter. Sometimes my mother would say, “Walk like a lady. You walk like a football player.” I had no idea how football players walked but I knew I certainly preferred footballs to dresses. A tomboy of the highest order!

My mother was the typical 1950s Miami Beach mom, beautiful and tan. Her stylish appearance belied the colitis and the resulting arthritis that tried to overtake her body. She was adamant about the family rules, and just as adamant that our following them would keep us safe and healthy and good. For example, one of her primary rules was “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” This literally meant that we children could neither talk nor feel negatively about people, places, or things. We must always be happy. In theory it’s a great and kind idea. In reality, I learned to not trust my feelings, and had no idea how to safely be in natural conflict with people I loved. I would often hear from my parents, “No, you don’t feel that way. You feel this way.” Or “No, you don’t want that toy. You want this toy.” Or “No, you don’t want to go there. You want to go here.” It all came from a place of love, which I never doubted, but it did a hatchet job on my own feelings and desires, which I learned to seriously doubt. It took many years before I realized this, buried along with my inability to feel much emotion. I was oblivious to my wants and needs and desires, and was unable to trust my own judgment. My lack of trust of self and others was profound.

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My mother made sure we lived a traditional, though not old-fashioned, Jewish lifestyle, just like everyone else in our community. We went to the synagogue—Beth Torah in North Miami Beach—on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, then Hebrew school on Sunday mornings. We kept a kosher home, which meant, among other things, that we did not mix milk products with meat. Our home remained kosher, in fact, until after the death of my grandfather Saul in 1961. I remember when my mother got a dishwasher, around the same time as everyone else in our neighborhood. It apparently created a huge dilemma among the mothers: since the kosher laws prohibited mixing milk with meat, how should they wash dairy dishes and meat dishes in the same dishwasher? It was a conundrum but Rabbi Lipschitz, of course, had the solution: wash the dairy dishes, then run an empty cycle with hot water. Wash the meat dishes, then run another empty cycle. That way, dishes don’t touch one another, and the hot water sterilizes everything. Oy!

We kept kosher both in and out of the house until Burger King invented the whopper with cheese in the late 1950s. My father became a whopper-with-cheese junkie! The sin of mixing dairy products with meat products became a thing of the past, at least outside of the house, as we began to examine a more modern approach to both our Jewishness and our diets. The early message from this, which served me well for my life, was about change. Change is necessary and inevitable and doesn’t have to be bad.

My sister Sherry and I shared a bedroom upstairs—meaning three steps up—in our mid-century modern split-level house with those hard terrazzo floors. The back part of the house was the traditional “Florida room” with floor-to-ceiling jalousie windows on three walls, rattan furniture, and the family television. Jalousie windows: those glass-slat things that never fully shut. I think they were the true signifier of 1950s Miami Beach homes. All of the windows in our house were jalousies.

The dining room, separated from the Florida room by a wall of sliding glass doors, had a large table that seated a small army which is what we were at holidays when all the relatives from Up North descended upon us. Aunt Lil from Pittsburgh used to line us kids up whenever she and Uncle Harry came to town. “Bebe, you’re getting to be so pretty. Lenny, you’re so handsome. Sherry, you’re so beautiful. Ronni, you have such a great personality.” Personality?? Screw personality! I wanted to be pretty or handsome or beautiful, too. But I wasn’t. I was an overweight tomboy with a great personality. Swell.

My brother Lenny and youngest sister Bebe shared the other upstairs bedroom. Our parents’ bedroom was on the opposite side of the house but we were only as far away from them as the intercom system through which they could hear our every word. Sherry and I quickly figured out how to muffle the intercom with towels, and then we’d practice the few four-letter words we knew.

Sherry, two years younger than I, was terribly annoying at times. In the early mornings before I awoke, Sher would get out of her bed, climb into mine, and put her nose almost, but not quite, on top of my nose, with her big eyes open wide and a giant grin on her face. Her breathe always woke me up. “AHHHhhhhhhh!!!!” I’d holler, startled but not frightened, because she did this nearly every day. Or if I had a black-and-blue mark on my leg or arm, Sher would push into it with her index finger and ever-so-innocently ask, “Does that hurt?” Cute. And she always won the fart and burp contests we had when adults weren’t around. In fact, she still does!

Len is five years younger than I. He was a genius at creative problem-solving. For example, when he was about nine years old, he had fallen off his bike. The gash on his leg was quite large and bleeding rather profusely. He ran into the house for assistance but when no one was immediately available he went into the bathroom to look for a bandage. He found my box of Kotex, the old kind with the long tail on either end that fit into those  hooks attached to the skinny elastic straps. He wrapped the Kotex around his leg and tied the tails. Voila! Satisfied with his bandage, he went back out on his bike. My friends and I were sitting on a nearby street corner in our neighborhood, singing the words from the current Hit Parade magazine, when Len peddled by, his leg neatly wrapped in my Kotex. I was mortified!

Bebe, seven years younger than I, was a terrible eater. She hated almost all food except eggs and hot dogs. Her method of operation was to chew her food when our parents were watching, then spit the mouthful into a napkin when they were not. She’d hide the napkin in a shoebox in her bedroom closet. I recently asked her whatever happened to that shoebox full of half-chewed food. She said, “Gee, I don’t know. Hamsters? Cockroaches? I don’t know.” Ick!

My father worked for years as a manager in a paint and hardware store in Hollywood, Florida, then started his own wholesale hardware company called LebCo. (Had he been a visionary kind of guy, we might have become Home Depot. I have forgiven him this oversight.) He worked six days a week but always made time to toss a ball or swim in the pool with us kids in the evenings. I remember one Saturday evening when I had a pool party at our house. About twelve of my high school friends were there, playing in the pool, sliding down the curly-q slide, diving from the board, or floating on the inflatable rafts. My father, wanting to know what was going on in the pool lest there be something inappropriate amongst the teen set, decided that my party was the perfect time to clean the tiles that surrounded the pool at water level. That, of course, required his getting into the pool. I was both embarrassed and furious with him, but my father was a favorite with my friends, and ultimately, as usual, he became the life of the party.

I was tremendously excited about going away to the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1965, but my father had serious separation anxiety. My mother, though, championed my leaving, perhaps because she so clearly remembered not being able to go to college herself. My father wanted me to stay home and go to Miami-Dade Community College (You don’t want to go there. You want to go here), especially since Playboy Magazine had just listed the University of Florida as the top party school in the country. But my mother knew it was time for me to leave home, and she made sure my father agreed. Thanks, Mom.

Mine was a good and stable childhood, with a large loving family and strong Jewish roots. The painful events of 1958, however, would guide the choices I made for the rest of my life.

3. The Worst Year of My Life and I’m Only 11!

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1958

U.S. President
: Dwight D. Eisenhower

Best film
: Gigi; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Auntie Mame

Best actors
: David Niven; Susan Hayward

Best TV shows
: Your Hit Parade; Ozzie and Harriet; American Bandstand; The Today Show; The Milton Berle Show; Captain Kangaroo; Leave It To Beaver

Best songs
: At the Hop, Great Balls of Fire, All the Way, Short Shorts, Get a Job, Tequila, Poor Little Fool, Purple People Eater, Yakety Yak, Volare, Tom Dooley

Civics
: first US satellite launched; NASA formed

Popular Culture
: Elvis inducted into Army; Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote, Exodus by Leon Uris ; first gay periodical, One, distributed through US mail; Barbara Gittings founds Daughters of Bilitis.

Deaths
: Alfred Noyes, Michael Todd, W C Handy, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Tyrone Power

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I was the biggest kid in the fifth grade. You can see it in the class photos. Kind of fat, kind of tall, and, well, just sturdy. There was one other girl close to my size but nobody else, not even Big Mike, was bigger than I. In that year:

I started my period almost immediately upon turning eleven, as if that magic age were the ON button for my life. Actually, I think it was, but maybe not so much in a good way;

My beloved Grandma Frances died after her battle with colitis and cancer;

I developed ulcerative colitis myself. My mother already had it;

I fell in love with another girl.

If this is what it’s like to be eleven, I’m really scared to be twelve!

4. I Hate That Word!

I was different. So aware at such a young age. My gut felt the horror of the difference but my young head was baffled.

My uncle often talked, no, bragged, about the guy, the faggot, he beat up when he was in the Navy. The queer. The guy in the dress at the bar who flirted with my uncle, with whom my uncle wanted to have sex until he realized he was about to have sex with a man, not a woman.

And the boys on my block in North Miami Beach, the junior high school boys, and then the high school boys, sometimes called each other queer. I always heard them. Whichever boy was the target du jour seemed to hate it. Sometimes the boys had a collective target, probably an imaginary person—named Sir Richard—who, as the story goes, pranced around Bayfront Park, that lush green expanse of park with fishing boat docks on the western shore of Biscayne Bay in downtown Miami. (Today it’s called Bayside.) Sometimes the boys would tell and re-tell the not-so-funny joke about police putting up a fence around Bayfront Park “to keep the fruits from picking the people.” Sometimes the boys would sing the Puff the Magic Dragon song but they changed the words:

Puff the magic faggot lived in Bayfront Park

And frolicked with the other queers as soon as it got dark.