Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma (5 page)

Civics
: John Glen first American to orbit Earth; Cuba Missile crisis; James Meredith registers at the University of Mississippi

Popular Culture
: first Telstar transmission; Johnny Carson becomes Tonight Show host; Another Country by James Baldwin and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey published; Illinois first state to decriminalize homosexual acts; Bayard Rustin organizes 1963 civil rights march on Washington.

Deaths
: Marilyn Monroe, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ernie Kovacs, William Faulkner

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The Schwartzbergs (of course that’s not their real name) lived next door to us in North Miami Beach. Mother, father, two daughters and a son. My sister Sherry was friends with the youngest daughter but the other two Schwartzberg kids, both older than I, rarely ever spoke to us. Sherry’s and my bedroom overlooked the Schwartzberg’s carport. (Miami Beach houses didn’t have garages, only open-air carports.) The Schwartzberg’s carport wall had two windows, jalousies, just like ours. One was in the living room, the other in the kitchen. No air conditioners protruded out of the windows yet. Back then, even in summer-steamy Miami Beach, hardly anyone had air conditioning.

Our house and the Schwartzberg’s were model homes for the tract in our quiet North Miami Beach neighborhood where kids rode bikes to school, ate fries and drank cherry cokes at Corky’s Deli, and chowed down on those tiny burgers at White Castle. Both families moved in around the same time, in the mid-1950s.

When we first moved to North Miami Beach, my family bought pool privileges at a little motel on Biscayne Boulevard called the Casa Loma, one of those small drive-in over-night places that dotted highways all over the country. Pool privileges meant we paid a fee for the summer season—Memorial Day to Labor Day—to use the motel’s pool to our hearts’ delight. Later, and for several years, we rented a summer cabana at the Golden Nugget Motel on Collins Avenue in Sunny Isles along with other families from Beth Torah Synagogue. The Golden Nugget was a typical mid-century Miami Beach motel, turquoise and orange, adjacent to the ocean, with a coffee shop, pool staff, and activities for children. Each family was assigned its own lockable private stall with a shower and changing space. These cabanas were situated side-by-side in a long row under a shared roof, and each had a table and chairs for eating or playing cards or Mah Jong with other cabana-renters who made up the summer pool-and-beach community.

I enjoyed the pool at the Golden Nugget but I truly loved the beach. The lure of the ocean, the rocking of the waves, the feel of the sand between my toes always took me to imaginary far-away places where I felt safe and warm. During my teen years I was an accomplished surfer and went to the beach almost daily, to Haulover Beach just south of Sunny Isles. But for the years before the pool was built in our back yard, my mother took us kids to the Casa Loma then later to the Golden Nugget every day of the summer, thanks to the Schwartzbergs.

The Schwartzbergs fought like crazy. They screamed and hollered at each other constantly. My mother visibly cringed when the Schwartzbergs got loud, and even our big sheepdog Rusty moved away from that side of our house. Mom hated hearing such meanness among family members. I was afraid to go into the Schwartzberg’s house but my sister Sherry went over there sometimes to play. I remember I had to go get her once, the only time I ever recall entering that house. Mr. Schwartzberg must have been a bookie, I figured, because there was a whole bank of black telephones on a desk in the living room. I never saw so many phones in one place that wasn’t the phone company. Bookies, though illegal, were popular in Miami because of all the dog and horse tracks and, of course, Jai Li. My father used to say that it was the ponies that put me through college. He never mentioned it (the bookie code of silence?) but I sometimes wondered if Mr. Schwartzberg had anything to do with my Dad’s occasional betting, though I don’t recall my parents socializing or even talking much with the Schwartzbergs.

I never could tell what the Schwartzberg fights were about. Sherry and I would sit underneath the jalousie window in our bedroom and listen intently, trying to make out any of their angry words. We just couldn’t imagine how and why people treated each other that way.

When the Schwartzbergs got really cranked up, Mom would pile us kids into the station wagon (what else?!) and take us away to the cabana. The fighting occurred daily, which was fine with us because that meant we were quickly hauled off to where we could swim or surf or work on our tans or walk along Collins Avenue or play endless canasta with our friends by the pool. This bliss lasted until the year we got air conditioning. At the same time the AC was installed, my parents put a large in-ground pool in our back yard. Now when the Schwartzbergs fought, my mother just turned on the air conditioner units that sat in our jalousie windows, effectively muffling the battles of the Schwartzbergs. Between our noise-muffling air conditioning and our new in-ground pool, there was no longer a need for a rented cabana.

It was fun to have a big pool in our yard, I admit, but it just wasn’t the same for me. I was a serious beach bunny and a dedicated surfer. As soon as I could drive a car, I was at Haulover Beach, surfing with the boys, and ignoring the girls who refused to get wet and mess up their 1960’s Gidget hairdos. I easily lost myself in my surfing and, as with my music, I excelled.

Surfing was the best escape for this young Pisces who was personable and popular in school but who preferred alone time to avoid attention or exposure. As long as people saw me as a fine musician or a talented surfer, they didn’t notice my short-comings—the colitis or my sexual orientation—both of which often betrayed me. I retreated and hid in my busy-ness. The best little girl in the world syndrome. My surfing skills, my grades, my tan, and my music were all I needed.

So air conditioning changed how my family lived. No more spying on the Schwartzbergs through the jalousies and no more fleeing to the beach as a family when the Schwartzbergs got into their daily fights. I missed that.

8. All The Girls I’ve Loved Before

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1965

U.S. President
: Lyndon B. Johnson

Best film
: Sound of Music, Dr. Zhivago, Ship of Fools

Best actors
: Lee Marvin, Julie Christie

Best TV shows
: Lost in Space; Green Acres; The Big Valley; The Dean Martin Show; Wild Wild West; I Dream of Jeannie; Hogan’s Heroes; Days of Our Lives; The Dating Game

Best songs
: Ticket to Ride, Day Tripper, Back in My Arms Again, Wooly Bully, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, Downtown, Come See About Me, The In Crowd, I Got You Babe, My Girl, Hang on Sloopy, I Feel Fine

Civics
: First US troops into Viet Nam; Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. arrested in Selma, AL; Malcolm X killed; Watts riots in Los Angeles: Edward White first American to walk in space; Voting Rights Act; Medicaid and Medicare enacted; Detroit Race Riot

Popular Culture
: Bill Cosby in I Spy becomes first African American to headline a TV show; The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader published; Mattachine Society leads first gay rights rally at the UN.

Deaths
: Winston Churchill, Nat King Cole, T. S. Elliot, Adlai Stevenson

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That old Frank Sinatra song All the Girls I’ve Loved Before still rings in my ears. I knew I was a lesbian at a young age but I had no language for it, just crushes. I tried to find reflections of myself in the Sabal Palm Elementary School library, in the North Miami Beach Junior High School library, and in the Encyclopedia Britannica and the World Book Encyclopedia that my parents bought. (One of the ways Jewish parents in my neighborhood showed love for their children was to buy a set of encyclopedias. We had two! ) But I could find nothing. The H sections—for homosexual because I somehow knew THAT word—in both encyclopedias were well worn with my continued attempts to find myself, hoping that if I kept looking, even in the same place, something would magically appear.

Finally, something did, in the 1962 yearbook of the Britannica. There it was: Homosexual: a man who has sex with another man. See Lesbian. I went to the Lesbian entry. Lesbian: a woman from the Greek Isle of Lesbos. See Homosexual. Swell. I had no idea what any of that meant. The next mention of homosexuality was in the 1969 Reuben book Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. More about men, nothing about women. I really was queerer-than-queer, I believed. No woman felt the same way I did, and what did the Isle of Lesbos have to do with it anyway? I was terribly confused and felt so alone.

I spent lots of time reading, escaping, seeking. I was always drawn to books about Margaret Meade or Amelia Earhart or Babe Didrikson, strong women who defied society’s conventions of…what? Expectations? I was never quite sure why those women spoke to me. They just were different. And the 1960 movie Spartacus, so homoerotic! I couldn’t identify that homoeroticism back then when I was 12, but that movie called to me. I felt so connected to the relationship between Spartacus and Marcus. I bet I saw it 20 times.

I remember the girls and women in my life from my very first crush: Miss Falloon, my third grade teacher. Maybe it was because I thought she looked like Sophia Loren in that cool convertible in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, wearing those leather driving gloves and that big hat and a long silky scarf blowing in the wind. I loved Miss Falloon, never mind that I was eight years old and a girl. That didn’t matter to my young heart which broke when Miss Falloon married some really old guy who was maybe 25, but I had another woman waiting in the wings. Even worse than being my teacher though, Mrs. Greenstein was my mom’s best friend, with kids MY age! Apparently I was attracted to older women, which wasn’t a good idea on several accounts, so I told no one. Ever.

I turned 11 in the spring of my fifth grade, 1958, that awful year, the year it really hit me that I was different. I fell head over heels in love with Annette Funicello, the best Mousekateer EVER, and I got my period that year. So did my friend Olivia who was a year ahead of me in school. Olivia lived on my block and had her own bedroom. She often invited me to spend the night. (Her father was famous in our neighborhood because he had a brand new fire-engine-red-with-white-interior Cadillac convertible. We Jews in Miami Beach back then LOVED those big-finned babies!)

Olivia and I played a game whenever I spent the night, which was most weekends during the school year. When it was time to go to bed—and there was only one in Olivia’s room—we would hug and practice kissing, ostensibly preparing each other for kissing boys. We would cover our mouths with our fingers so it wouldn’t be a real kiss, just fingers touching in front of our mouths. Real kissing was reserved for boys. When the school year was over, Olivia moved on to junior high, and I never spent the night with her again.

This did, however set up a pattern that I would maintain until I graduated from high school. I identified some girl as my “girlfriend” at the beginning of each school year in late August, after a summer of surfing, boating, and vacationing around Florida in the family station wagon. The girl—my girlfriend—never knew how I felt. She just thought we were best friends, and we were! But she was never aware that we were “going together.” That was reserved for the secret places of my head and heart. So she also didn’t know when we broke up in the spring, which we always did, just prior to the summer vacation from school. Every year, the same story. New girlfriend in the fall; she was clueless. Broke up in the spring; she was still clueless. And while I would secretly be elated in the fall and heartbroken in the spring, I liked the process. Though it became increasingly frustrating as I got older and went on to high school, it was certainly safe. No one knew I was a lesbian. I told no one and never acted on it outside of my pathetic little Walter Mitty brain. Sadly, this routine set in motion my being in and out of many relationships with women later in my life.

But back to the fifth grade: despite my kissy practice with Olivia, and though my heart was reserved for Mousekateer Annette Funicello, I really liked Dana. I made Dana my best friend in the 5th grade so we could spend lots of time together and I could be close to her. That worked. When summer came, we broke up and I rarely ever saw her again.

In the sixth grade, which back then was the last year of elementary school, I had no interest in Dana. I met Kathleen who, of course, became my new best friend. We “went steady” all year long, except, of course, she didn’t know, and we, of course, “broke up” when summer came, but she didn’t know that, either. And there was another actor that year as well. I was smitten with the character Zelda Gilroy, played by Sheila James on the television program called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Zelda was so strong, so smart. Forty-five years later, Sheila James Kuehl and I are friends in real life.

I attended North Miami Beach Junior High School for grades seven, eight, and nine. In the seventh grade, my “girlfriend” was Penny. Penny was a bit dicey in my head because she wasn’t Jewish. Oy! We were in band together and sat next to one another in the clarinet section. (I started out on clarinet but switched to the Sousaphone after I broke my clarinet. My mother always called me a “bull in a china shop.” The clarinet was way too fragile for me. It’s darned hard to bust a Sousaphone!)

Maybe it was because Penny wasn’t Jewish that I felt a bit more flirtatious with her than the others. Sometimes I walked her home from school. She lived south of 163rd Street where few Jews lived. Whenever I walked Penny home I felt like I was crossing into the badlands, both geographically and behaviorally. Sometimes I put my arm around her waist when we walked. It seemed to be okay with her. That was as bold as I ever got. With anyone. Ever.