TRACING THE ROOTS OF MY UMBRELLA

Originally published on June 11, 1999

Peggy once held down that night auditor's job at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Peachtree back in the early Eighties. Every cuticle of horsepower in management and grunt services alike starting with the owner shined of gay blade, so Mother always referred to herself not as the token female (having owned that role before) but rather, the token straight, sharing a laugh with her accommodating lads. As a woman in struggle and a woman of breeding, she had always prided herself—the mother of a gay son, my youngest sibling—as someone of tolerance and empathy, however misguided as she often was.

In fact Mother was on the job when I took respite on her sofa at the Howell House a hundred steps away in the rather short GT-Ru Paul era after wheeling in from Corpus Christi, poor, thin, and desperate for my own artistic statement. Home was a sixth floor corner one bedroom apartment in that Midtown highrise, rentfree, straight up for acting as the senior-citizens coordinator in a building demographic just over 50% extremely geriatric.

The Ritz-Carlton graced Peachtree directly across the street from the fabulous and famous Fox Theatre, where "Gone With the Wind" premiered back in the 40s at the height of Hollywood glamour. Tucked into the corner of the hotel was the famed Alex Cooley's Electric Ballroom, now under new management and dubbed the Agora Ballroom. I never saw a show at either.

On the Fox side of the block only a parking lot and Third Street separated the elegantly ornate old theatre where I watched the moneyed classes pour into the streets after soaking up bands like the Stray Cats, the Go Gos and Elvis Costello. And me six flights up wishing and twitching I'd had the money to go, and accepting I'd missed the show, miffed I had no camera to mark the spatial moment of my desires.

Beautiful people playing ugly, ugly people playing beautiful, each marked for the glory of the times screaming bloody murder at the winds of freedom flung out to every dick and jane exercising a basic American youth ritual of bringing down a rock show, a right fought for and won about the time I was being born in 1955. But pacing along the sixth floor corner windows, I was blankly gazing, scoping, pinching myself, making assumptions, ripping roaring assumptions about these oddball and crazy people as they laughed and skipped and coughed and cursed, perched from on high was I. Never would I forget these images. Though I was young for my age, I was already 26. Though I was old for my age, I was only 26.

A heritage group had recently saved the Fox from demolition. The grand theatre, still in decent shape with a spit of glistening in her eye, yet aching for major repairs was then owned by a notorious porn mobster headed to jail who was threatening to bulldoze the landmark to spite the city as well as raise funds for his own empire quest. Rumor was Southern Bell wanted to erect another 'scraper on the spot.

One block west on Third and West Peachtree stood the 688 Club, the only only punk club in the city at the time. Punk as in cheap. Cheap tickets. Cheap beer. This was the only life I had for those six weeks rocking out on Jason and the Nashville Scorchers, as this powerful crew were originally called. The Georgia Satellites, as THEY were then known. Pylon. REM. The Swimming Pool Q's. Richard Hell. The Restraints. Punk and nasty. Thew nights bled into all night dream sessions quickening into stark frightening afternoons.

Fashionably thug ugly Chris Wood, the diabetic skinhead lead singer of the Restraints always squeezed off an insulin syringe into his bald skull at some spectacular point in a song during every show. He had a local hit single, an S&M ballad called Whacka Whacka Whacka, where he usually tried, and often successfully to pull a babe onto the stage for a whacking. When the fuss had ended, the girl in suburban clothing was scratched and torn, ass was bared. This was eyeball to eyeball punk rock Atlanta 1982-styled, pre-Genitorturers-GWAR-Mentors razorsharp breakout jones.

I heard through the Carol Reed grape I guess two years later, my first year in DC, that Wood had been convicted of murder, and was in prison for a long string, and that was that. Diabetes and minor rock stardom wasn't enough for this guy. He wanted more more more whacka whacka whacka. But true to the myth he was a soft-talking nice guy when we drank beers together at some jukebox bar in the area which offered up the Whacka single...

Pushing up skin on occasion a few more blocks up West Peachtree at the kindler, gentler, most quaint Bistro was a glitterpunk lesbian band called the Lipstick Stains. The L-Stains, along with another queer band called Weeweepole featuring a pre-drag Ru Paul jacked our jetsons once or twice a week, so the awakening had never been richer or more frivolous for me during my previously coarse life. Packing it up for the Lipstick Stains were three girlz & a boy who knew how to throw pajama parties at the Bistro, doing so with a flourish unique to the scene back in the day, and not a moment too soon as I began digging at the roots of my umbrella...

But that was then, this is now, so pray tell, what on God's green is going on between Matthew and Kubhlai? Does it concern me, GT, the SWORG, the changing of the guard, the seasons, my underwear, what?

Oh yes, I almost forgot, after a number of months, three, four maybe, the gay brigade eventually ran my mother off the job to replace her with another of an endless parade of fey boys. She was notably upset at the time, really digging the convenience and prestigious atmosphere of the office, but she shoved on, kept her senior-citizens duties at the Howell Howell for another couple of years or so, and is still kicking up the dust of all her detractors...

The gay mafia no doubt, like all special interest power groups, lives on...

[My mother does not.]

GT