(OUT OF DARKNESS)
Don’t
call a doctor
Don’t call my momma
Don’t call my preacher
No, I don’t need it
I don’t need it
There
is a movie I used to watch over and over again on late night television called Valley of the Dolls. Three women in 1960's New York meet, become friends, and
pursue careers that lead them down paths they could have never predicted. Anne
Welles is a prim New Englander, (played by Barbara Parkins), who unexpectedly
skyrockets from being a talent agency secretary to being a glamorous TV
model. Neely O’Hara, (played by
Patty Duke), is a determined singer who finds that Hollywood success can easily
spell self-destruction. And Jennifer North, (played by Sharon Tate), is a
beautiful sex symbol torn between the money that her body commands and the
shame of feeling exploited. By the
end of the film, only one of the three narrowly escapes a tragic end.
Based on Jacqueline Susann's best-selling novel about
the dangerous side of Hollywood, this high camp, 1967 melodrama was once
thought of as shocking. The story has everything a gay man loves: sex, money,
fame and drugs. (The word “dolls” refers to the pills abused by the
film’s characters.) Now, drag
queens do impersonations of the screen characters on stage, and gay men repeat
the dialogue word for word while taking shots of liquor and bursting into uproarious
laughter. As an eighteen-year-old living on my own in 1976, Valley of the Dolls was a mirror of my
own life.
I had two new best friends in 1976, Gregory Nicholson
and Raymond McConneghey. They were
my extended family during that first year of living on my own.
Together, we formed a trio reminiscent of the three women in Valley of the Dolls. We would watch the movie over and
over again and recite all of its most popular lines:
Helen
Lawson: Look. They drummed you
right outta Hollywood! So ya come crawlin’ back to Broadway. Well, Broadway doesn’t
go for booze and dope. Now you get outta my way, I got a man waitin’ for me.
Jennifer
North: You told me Gramp’s
been sick, mother, and I know about the oil burner. Okay, I’ll pawn the mink.
He’ll give me a couple hundred for it. Mother, I know I don’t have any talent,
and I know all I have is a body, and I am doing my bust exercises. Goodbye,
mother. I’ll wire you the money first thing in the morning. Goodbye. [Hangs up the phone and starts performing
calisthenics.] Oh, to hell
with them! Let ‘em droop!
Anne
Welles: You’ve got to climb
Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls.
We saw ourselves in each of the
main characters. Gregory was Anne Welles, the prim and proper secretary who
would later be discovered as a model. Gregory looked like he came from New
England, wearing round spectacles, polo shirts and penny loafers. He took the preppy boy look
seriously. He always had a notepad
with him, and wrote poems at the drop of a hat. When I moved out of my father’s place and into my tiny
apartment, Gregory and his family lived a few doors down the block. We both
attended Northwestern High and we both auditioned for the Sidney Poitier role
in the senior class production of To Sir,
with Love. He was cast as the
famous teacher while I got the character role of the principal. At first I resented him for this, but I
later came to love and respect him.
Raymond lived down the block a
little further and always reminded me of the Jennifer North character. He felt people never took him
seriously, so he would make jokes about himself just to beat people to the
punch. Tall, light-skinned and sexy, Raymond had a hairy chest, broad
shoulders, long legs, and a huge ass.
Despite his self-deprecating demeanor, he was beautiful. When he was nervous he would talk very
fast, and sometimes you could not understand what he was saying. This was because he spoke with an
accent and in a language called “Gullah,” a
blend of English and African languages known as the dialect of the “Geechie.” People of the Geechie culture were
descendants of Africans from Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Senegal, and lived in
coastal South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Raymond’s family was South Carolinian Geechie.
I
could never figure out the source of Raymond’s self-esteem issues; I just knew
he used his sexuality to compensate for his lack of confidence. He felt he had
no talent to offer the world, other than his beautiful body, so he slept with
lots of men in order to feel loved, although he seemed to hate the sex afterwards. He forever wanted to find perfect
romantic love and settle down with the man of his dreams. He could quickly turn
moody and, just like the Jennifer North character, feel as if all men had used
him up and tossed him out like a rag doll.
I myself resembled the character
of Neely because I wanted to become a success in entertainment. Greg and
Raymond used to chant at me, “Sparkle, Neely, Sparkle!” (a line from the
movie.) When I did my first
community theater production of Shoes
at the Arena Playhouse in Baltimore, Greg and Raymond were shouting this from
the front row, cheering for me.
They were always encouraging me to never give up on my dream.
To make things perfect, Gregory
and Raymond also loved the music of the Supremes. We would go to the clubs and
dance the night away to Diana’s “Love Hangover.”
If
there’s a cure for this
I don’t want it
Don’t want it
If there’s a remedy
I’ll run from it
From it
Think about it all the time
Never let it out of my mind
If I was Diana then they were my
Supremes, supporting me with a strong background. But we were also the three young, wide-eyed dreamers of Valley of the Dolls, not really ready
for what the world would throw at us.
The night that drew my life tragically parallel to that of Neely O’Hara
came on April 5, 1978.
I had taken a trip to
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was hanging out with my cousins from North
Philly. I thought I was so
independent -- I had been working for the phone company and it was the first
time I’d had a “paid” vacation. I had money in my pockets and was ready to burn
it up.
Always the adventurer, I had
tried pot but my cousins convinced me that the next great high was
hashish. We drove slowly through a
few seedy areas of the city, and various drug dealers approached us with their
offerings. The smell of hash was different than pot. And the high was amazing.
The rest of my vacation was
pretty much a blur. I don’t even know how I got back to Baltimore. When I
returned home, I got ready for work.
I turned on the television set, and a movie was on about Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., starring Paul Winfield and the fabulous Cicely Tyson. I remember being deeply moved by the
story and by Paul Winfield’s portrayal of Dr. King; it seemed as if Dr. King
was speaking right to me, straight out of the television.
The next memory I have is
returning to work at the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company (C&P),
commonly referred to as “Ma Bell.”
We wore head sets in those days and sat in cubicles of four. From the moment
I arrived at the office, the calls seemed to be dropping in my head without the
need of a headset or cable cord. I kept saying, “Directory assistance, may I
help you?” with no one else on the end of any line.
All the operators in the room
were confused. Some ran over to see what was the matter. Others were forced to
continue taking calls, to keep their numbers up. Supervisors came running out
of their cubicles. The bleach blonde shift manager, who always rated my calls
as too long, approached me with a concerned tone. “Dale, what’s the matter?” she asked. “Is there someone we can call for you?”
I started babbling the speech I
had heard earlier in the television movie. “Martin Luther King told me that ‘all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and
Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the
words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last!’ He told me that.
He told me. Martin Luther King told me today.”
The only other male operator who
worked on the floor rushed over to catch me as I collapsed. Since my father was my closet relative
in Baltimore, he was contacted to come get me. He rushed me to Greater
Baltimore Medical Center where the doctors decided to keep me under observation
for the next three days. This would
allow them time to decide whether or not I should be committed to a mental
institution.
At first it was decided that I’d
had a drug flashback. I had somehow smoked a PCP laced joint or the hash -- I
don’t know which. The doctors gave me something to counteract the high I was
experiencing, and I went into a coma for seven days.
After coming out of my coma, I
learned that I had been admitted to the mental ward at Sheppard Pratt
Hospital. I had been diagnosed as
catatonic schizophrenic and my
legal rights as an adult had been handed over to my father.
The next few days were
interesting, to say the least. I hallucinated that I was raped by a nurse and
had become pregnant. Screaming
that I was going to have a baby, I threw myself in the birthing position and
began defecating all over the floor. I later tried to escape the hospital and
injured a male nurse in the process.
The hospital and the state deemed me a danger to myself and others.
After I learned to
calm down, or after the Thorazine took affect, I was released to the “regular
floor” with all the other patients.
There was a beautiful girl named Jodie who stayed in the ward next to
mine. She was thin and frail and
wore lots of make-up. When I first saw her I screamed for joy, because I truly
believed that Diana Ross herself had come to see me in the hospital.
Although it was 1978, Jodie’s
look was very mod. Her wig and make-up looked like Diana right off the cover of
the Diana Ross & the Supremes
Greatest Hits album. She wore a
big teased wig with a lock of hair covering one eye and lots of eye
make-up. She always smiled and
waved when she saw me. She knew that I was so in awe of her beauty and used
that to manipulate me. Later in my
stay, when I was allowed to go outside for short day trips, she convinced me to
buy her some laxatives. I bought her a brand called Correctol, thinking it
could not do any real harm. I later
learned that Jodie was anorexic.
The last time I
saw Jodie, she no longer looked like my idol. Due to her constant bingeing and
purging, she had starved herself to the point where she was too weak to even
care for her appearance. She looked like walking death. Her body had shrunken
and she barely had the strength to lift up her head, which seemed huge. I would look into her eyes, no longer
adorned with long fluttery eyelashes, and see only dark circles around hollow
holes where eyes peeked out.
Although there
were dark moments during my stay at Sheppard Pratt, I had my fun while I was
“recuperating.” Many days went by
where I felt like I was at an out of town college campus, (even though we were
locked in.) As residents, we
attended scheduled classes and group activities; I went to gym, art therapy,
group therapy, and assertiveness training. I had roommates and my own stereo, played ping pong games
and watched TV shows. After a
while, I was even made activities coordinator. I hired a band to entertain the
patients and also planned a movie night. I wanted to rent Valley of the Dolls, but my doctors thought the movie was
inappropriate. There is a scene in the film where Neely O’Hara is getting
better and she also runs the patient activities in the hospital she’s been
committed to. Greg and Raymond would call and I would tell them about all the
things I was doing inside the “crazy house.” Raymond would say, “You really are Neely!”
I got so comfortable there in my environment that I had affairs off and on
site, with other patients as well as “civilians.” There was this one bus driver I had met before I was in the
hospital; he learned where I was, through a Sheppard Pratt nurse who was a
member of his church, and he used to volunteer to pick me up and take me out to
get my hair cut. But that’s not
all we did. He’d pick me up on
Sundays after church, fuck me, cut my hair and return me like nothing ever
happened. He was a well-respected deacon and everyone thought, “Oh, what a nice
man, mentoring a kid like Dale.” One time he took me to a music store after one
of our “”mentoring sessions,” and played the church organ to show me how
talented he was.
Every Monday, I
had an individual therapy appointment with the main hospital doctor assigned to
me, Dr. Parker. Over the twelve months I was at Sheppard Pratt, he was the
doctor I remember the most. He was a pudgy, bald, white man who wore these ugly
wooden clogs. I don’t remember our conversations being very good -- he was not
warm or friendly at all. He would simply
ask if the medication I was taking was making me feel better. I was indeed
becoming more lucid, but I was gaining weight and would drool
uncontrollably. It was all a side
effect of the Thorazine.
My father, still
in denial about my homosexuality, tried to convince the doctors that my illness
was a result of me being molested as a teenager and forced into a life of
homosexuality against my will. He told them that my ex-lover should not be
allowed to visit me. The odd thing is that, looking back on it now, Dr. Parker
was the queerest looking man there. So, although I was no longer seeing my
ex-boyfriend, I can assume that request fell on deaf ears.
Ooh, I
don’t need no cure
I don’t need no cure
I don’t need no cure
I turned
twenty-one at Sheppard Pratt and was released on April 2, 1979 -- almost an
exact year later. For a whiIe, I went to “transition” group therapy while
returning to work at the phone company.
My father had used my benefits to keep my apartment, so I was able to
return to my own place. He had
also used it as a location to rendezvous with his various girlfriends. In the year since I had been away, the
apartment had become dirty and strange.
After waking up with a cockroach crawling up my bed sheets, I moved out
within a month of returning.
I had gotten in touch with my
emotions while at Sheppard Pratt. I had learned how to cry. When I returned home, I took a vow and
promised myself, “Never will I stay in a
job that makes me unhappy.”
Find happiness in what you do, because if you are going to spend that
much of your time doing something, you need to enjoy it. It was time to leave Ma Bell.
Life after Sheppard Pratt picked
up like it had never stopped. Raymond and Greg would tease me on occasion about
my stay in the nut house, but my family never asked me about it and no mention
of it was ever made. I lost contact with Raymond during the eighties, but ran
into him at a gay pride festival in 1992 where he was volunteering at an AIDS
awareness booth. He had lost weight and his health looked very bad. We
exchanged numbers and kept in touch for a while, but his phone number was
eventually cut off and I never learned for sure if he passed away. In Valley
of the Dolls, the Anne Welles character comes out of the tale a survivor,
while the Neely O’Hara character relapses into drug and alcohol addiction.
Eight years later in 1987, Gregory was brutally murdered. Out of our trio, I
was the lone survivor, the one narrowly
escaping a tragic end. I had survived coming out of
the darkness.
Around 1994, Diana Ross appeared
in a movie called Out of Darkness. It was about a woman who suffers
with schizophrenia. The first time
I saw it, a sea of emotions ran through me. There is a scene at the dinner table where Diana’s character
explains to her mother that the medication makes her drool. A chill ran down my back and the tears
flowed. Fifteen years had passed and all the memories of Sheppard Pratt came
back to me. All my life I had imitated Diana Ross, and there she was, imitating
me.
I got the sweetest hangover
I don’t wanna get over
“Life can imitate art, so don’t be surprised when art comes back
to imitate life.”
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