Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (45 page)

Beyond the station, she spun music at clubs in Los Angeles and Orange counties. She played bass guitar in a string of local bands. And she booked her own gigs at the clubs where she had built up clout as the hot local deejay.

Mojo became a mover and shaker at multiple levels of the movement. She started a show called “The English Channel” that featured the latest British imports. With a loan of a couple grand from her big brother Stan, she launched a music import and distribution business, selling albums and music magazines nationally and internationally. Because the radio station and the distribution business operated out of the same office building in downtown Long Beach, she established a cleaning business that cleaned the building. It was the proud, spic-and-span headquarters of her miniature musical empire.

Mary Jo’s musical life and personal life followed nearly parallel paths. But she set the two lives at completely opposite volumes: her musical life at jarring decibels, her personal life at an almost inaudible mute, inaudible especially to Mom and Dad.

Mary Jo met her next significant girlfriend at a raucous band audition in 1984. Mary Jo made it into the band as the bass guitar player and built a long-term relationship with the vocalist, who was another blond bombshell like Mary Jo. They played together in a heavy metal band, a black metal band, a funky groove metal band, and a surf band. They wrote songs together, lived together, and bought a house together. Year after year, they spent holidays with our family and helped take care of Geri together.

Dad pulled Mary Jo aside one evening in the fall of 1985. He didn’t look well. His temples flared. His hands shook. His whole body trembled. He was 61, but he looked much older.

He steered Mary Jo into a corner of a back room where nobody could hear them. He stepped closer toward her, grabbing both of her elbows and squeezing them tightly enough to make them hurt a little bit. He aimed his unsteady blue eyes into her nervous brown ones and demanded that she answer his question: “Are . . . you . . . a lesbian?”

She was prepared. She had known, ever since his objection to her college newspaper article, that his definition of a homosexual—like that of most God-fearing Americans at the time—was that of a sinner, a vile and loathsome person. She knew that she did not fit his definition. “No,” she replied. “Not in the way you think.”

“
What does that mean?” he squinted.

She flinched momentarily. She then composed herself and looked confidently into his eyes. “I’m nothing!” she insisted. She would not be pigeonholed.

He couldn’t respond.

She was invisible.

He didn’t demand anything else from her.

She was free.

A couple years later, Mom conjured up the nerve to broach the topic with Mary Jo in a way that would preclude it from ever being broached again. In a sympathetic voice, Mom told Mary Jo point blank over the telephone: “I don’t want you to tell me about your personal life, because then I’d have to tell Dad.”

“
Oh, God,” Mary Jo sighed.

“
That’s it,” Mom said. “I can’t keep anything from him. As long as I know you always have someone to talk to and you’re happy, then I’m happy, too. But if you tell me, I have to tell Dad.”

The radio station changed ownership many times over the course of seven years. Each time, the station retained its rock-and-rhythm format. In 1988, however, a new owner shifted the format to heavy metal.

To fit the new mood, Mojo switched her handle to “Mary the Maniac.” She liked the new format, too, at first. But eventually, she felt pressured to play the music of the record companies instead of the music of the movement. To make matters worse, she didn’t see or hear much of an available alternative to the corporate repertoire. “By the late 1980s,” she lamented, “there wasn’t much of a movement left anyway.”

Compounding the situation further, compact discs began to replace vinyl albums. The discs left little room for creativity. “They just weren’t as fun to work with,” she recalled. Mary the Maniac began to feel like a human jukebox.

Worst of all, she was “burning out.” Not on the music. Not on the compact discs. Not on the chronic instability of station owners, music formats, and her own bands. Not even on the frenetic energy of the underground club scene. She still felt at home there. She was burning out instead on just one thing: “the constant worry of balancing art and money.” Of being faithful to the movement while putting food on the table. In her late twenties, Mary the Maniac didn’t want to have to worry about money anymore.

“
It gets tiring after all those years of feeling like you’ve got a gun to your head.” She realized that her art could not survive forever under the perpetual financial peril. “It’s not harmonious to be an artist in our society.”

In January 1989, the blond bombshell vocalist attended the funeral of Grandpa Godzisz at Saint Lawrence Martyr Church. He had died of heart failure at the age of 93. It had been expected.

Dad seemed at peace at the funeral. He looked relieved even, as if a big weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Dad had done everything he had needed to do: He had brought his father from Detroit to Los Angeles for the final stages of his life, put his father in the hospital, called a priest to administer the last rites, and made the arrangements for the funeral Mass. Dad had fulfilled his duty as a good son. He could then relax. Mom had lasagna waiting for him at home.

Meanwhile, the real drama of the funeral was unfolding in the vestibule at the back of the church, where the blond bombshell vocalist pulled me aside to inform me of some alarming news. “We’re splitting up,” her voice cracked. “It’s over between me and Mary Jo.” They were still friends, but the vocalist was heartbroken. And remorseful.

“
I stepped out on her,” the vocalist confessed. “And then,” her eyes bugged out just thinking about her own behavior, “I started dating the other woman!” A mutual friend, no less. A mutual jamming partner, no less.

It had all hit too close to home. Mary Jo had thought the relationship was for life. So had the vocalist. But nothing about it could be the same for Mary Jo anymore. The infidelity had hurt her too much. It had hurt the vocalist, too.

“
I really screwed up,” she dropped her head penitently onto my shoulder, crying as I held her.

Those were the only tears shed at the funeral of Grandpa Godzisz.

A few months later, Mom and Dad suggested to Mary Jo that she return to school to study dental hygiene. Pushing 30, Mary Jo liked the idea of a job that would let her control her own schedule, earn decent money, and still play music on the side.

“
Maybe I could have my cake and eat it, too,” she entertained the notion. “Maybe my art could be even purer, because my money could be separate from my art.” She was prepared to lead a professional life entirely separate from her musical one. She was unprepared, however, for the culture shock of life in the mainstream.

The 1980s were a grim decade for gays and lesbians in America, but Mary Jo had avoided much of the grimness. As she launched her professional radio career in Long Beach in 1981 and thrived in the gender-bending club scene, young gay men in Los Angeles and New York began to die of mysterious, incurable ailments. Known first as gay-related immune deficiency (GRID), or the “gay plague,” the affliction was renamed in 1982 as acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), with its cause being designated in 1986 as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Despite the revised nomenclature, the “gay plague” association stuck in the minds of many Americans, notably those who viewed the disease as God’s wrath upon gay men. Lesbians, of course, were among the least at risk of contracting the illness, but that hardly altered the perception of AIDS as a gay disease, underscoring the invisibility of lesbians in society in the 1980s.

In the latter half of the decade, as Mary Jo built her underground empire for those on the social fringe, national polls kept showing that large majorities of Americans felt homosexual relations were not merely unacceptable but should also be illegal. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court echoed the popular opinion, upholding a Georgia anti-sodomy statute that was comparable to anti-sodomy laws on the books in 23 additional states and the District of Columbia at the time. In its decision in
Bowers v. Hardwick
, the court ruled that the right to privacy did not extend to homosexuals engaging in private, consensual, adult sexual conduct—even if the same right did extend, in practice, to heterosexuals. With this 1986 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, homosexuals across America became second-class citizens in the eyes of the highest law of the land.

Mary Jo’s first direct encounter with such hostile social forces came in 1990 at Cerritos College, where she bristled at the sterility of the other women in the dental hygiene program. “They kept talking about boyfriends, marriage, and their fears of treating people with HIV,” she cringed in dismay upon the memory of her classmates. She described one of the women as an “army brat” who constantly made homophobic slurs, “usually something stupid about how Jesus supposedly hated gay people.”

Cerritos College was just five miles from home, but Mary Jo felt as though she had been transported to a different country. “It was really surprising to me. I’d always heard about this other world, but I didn’t know where it really did exist. Then in hygiene school, I realized that this is society! Wow! I wondered how I’d managed to stay on my little yellow brick road for so long.”

Her yellow brick road had led her from the Gumdrop Follies to the musical land of Oz. In the musical land, Mary Jo was never in the closet. If anything, the musical land had pulled her out of the closet. Being gay was never a liability in that land.

“
If anything, it was cool,” she reminisced. “We typically called the deejays at the gay clubs for their top ten songs. And sure enough, those would be the top national hits in a couple months. The gay clubs were always ahead and right on the money.”

But there wasn’t enough money in Oz to remain there forever. So she gritted her teeth through two years of dental hygiene school. “Putting up with the prissy women in that program was the price I had to pay to move on with my life.”

Mary Jo’s next girlfriend was a British lead guitarist. They partied and jammed together with mutual friends from various bands and then played together in their own band. In 1992, they studied together for Mary Jo’s final dental hygiene exams. They lived together until 1994, when something terrible happened.

Strolling out of a public library near their home one Saturday, I found them crying in a parked car on the side of the road, both bleary-eyed and bloodshot in the middle of the afternoon. Barely recognizing them, I walked closer to the car to make sure it was them. The encounter was completely coincidental.

“
Are you guys okay?” I asked lamely.

They were startled. Nobody in the family had ever caught such a close glimpse of their relationship.

“
It’s pretty obvious everything sucks,” Mary Jo muffled her sobs.

I turned and walked away. I felt like I’d entered a place where I shouldn’t have been.

The British lead guitarist had recently returned from a European tour. While on tour, she had started dating another guitar player from another band. Another mutual friend. “It might’ve been okay if it was just a momentary slip,” Mary Jo recounted. “But it wasn’t. It was premeditated. It was continuous.”

To make the situation completely intolerable, the British lead guitarist felt horrible about what she’d done, but she couldn’t stop doing it, even though she wanted to stop. And so she kept doing it, which made her feel even more horrible, which made Mary Jo realize the horrible futility of the whole drill.

Mary Jo ended the relationship. The British lead guitarist moved back to Britain.

Mary Jo coped with the pain in the best way she knew how. In a public yet purgative way. Kind of like the blues. She wrote a song and performed it at a women’s café in the San Fernando Valley, a spotlight fixed on her and her acoustic guitar. The song, called “LoveStruck,” was a sarcastic country ballad that Mary Jo sang with a twang. In the lyrics, she poked fun at herself for having thought she could possibly build a stable, trusting, life-long, committed relationship with such an unstable partner. That kind of misplaced devotion had led only to emotional abuse and self-abuse. The lyrics were perfectly ambiguous with respect to gender and slightly exaggerated for comic effect, but the predominantly lesbian crowd knew exactly how Mary Jo felt. They hooted and hollered in empathy as she sang: