.
One woman pulled two behind her, head down, beelining up the sidewalk. A mom and daughter not making eye contact with anyone each pulled a suitcase behind them. A man stood outside the Hollywood Dive Motel, fresh showered, half dressed, the handle of his suitcase on wheels in his fist. He looked up and down the boulevard, the look on his face said where do I go from here, then he took off walking, wandering aimlessly.
Suitcases.
Homeless people are pulling suitcases today, not the tacky grocery carts of last year. Today’s savvy L.A. homeless gal is pulling a faux Samsonite on wheels as she walks up and down Sunset Boulevard, looking for a place to wait out the night. No doubt it’s a sign that a better class of people is taking to the streets now than the grocery cart pushing tramps of the last couple decades.
Today homeless people have style. I lingered last night outside after the dark came, a time when usually I’m hunkered in my apartment in East Hollywood with booby traps set at the door and underneath the windows. If anyone tries to break in my home, they'll make so much racket, they’ll have to run off, that's my home security system.
Last night I decided to observe this new phenomenon of homeless people pulling suitcases with all their belongings in them instead of those shabby grocery carts we all have gotten so tired of seeing.
A woman stopped in front of the 99 Cent Store, dropped her pink flowered suitcase, stepped off the curb into the street, pulled her skirt up to below her knees, bent her legs, and urinated. I thought how considerate of her to step over to a place where the pee would go down a gutter and drain out to the ocean, instead of leaving it just in a puddle on the sidewalk like those guys who push the grocery carts do.
An approaching car on Sunset Boulevard honked at her to get out of the parking lane, it says no stopping 4 to 7 PM, but she couldn't move because the stream of liquid had not finished pouring out from between her legs onto the asphalt. Other than that no one reacted.
Homeless people stopping to pee and poop on the sidewalk is an ordinary thing to see on L.A. streets.
Pulling suitcases on wheels is the new trend!
The elegant peeing lady wore a bright pink ensemble from head to toe, including the pink flowered suitcase on wheels she pulled and the pink scarf wrapped tight around her head, doubtless to keep the lice from jumping out onto the heads of passers by.
Again, what a considerate homeless woman.
Her entire color coordinated ensemble worked so well, and she retained an air of dignity as she returned to her suitcase, pulled out tissue, reached up and wiped herself, then deposited the tissue in a nearby trash bin.
It’s nice to see the homeless starting to take better care of themselves, and I'm glad they are finally giving up the rattling shopping carts for these much more civilized rolling suitcases. It makes them look less. . . Homeless. Much more acceptable to the rest of us here on Sunset Boulevard in the 5600 block.
Leaning on a parking meter, I watched another glorious sunset, last night, then when I noticed there were more a lot more people out promenading than usual, I was glad to see it at first, my tunnel vision can be so bad. My first thought was, wow, a promenade. L.A. people are finally getting out of their cars and walking, becoming ambulatory…
It’s just a better class of people are becoming homeless today. Their last grasp of dignity is the suitcase versus the grocery cart. The suitcase means you still have a hairline connection with civilized life. You still sleep at least a few nights a week in a motel, your belongings are still folded and clean as you carry them with you everywhere you go. You're not down to the plastic bags of mildew covered treasures the hard core homeless guys carry around in their grocery carts. The new homeless would never even think of stealing a grocery cart, they can still purchase a suitcase, albeit flimsy and cheap, but it’s still a suitcase.
The mom and daughter were heading towards a shelter I know of for women and children. My own daughter and I stayed there 11 months in 2004, hope they could still get in that late. The mom gestured to walk faster, the girl's ponytail flew back and forth, she kept looking back. They were trying to get away from the lady in pink, who at first seemed to be with them. All around me, everywhere I looked last night, I saw clean working class people pulling suitcases after them on the sidewalks.
At least in L.A. you finally see other people when you take a walk. Used to be everybody in this town had a car, now. . .
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Strange things happen to you when you write a blog about Catholic priest sex crimes...
.
This morning, just after putting up a post that got LOTS of hits, the cable guy knocks on my door.
He's standing there with another guy, they stare at me. The one in front I recognize as he came to our house about a week ago for a bad modem.
They stare at me. "Didn't you have an appointment, your cable, is it out?"
"No."
I perked, wished I'd washed my face and primped up a bit this morning, but the door usually doesn't get knocks until afternoon.
They stared at me for a while, it was weird, then said, oh well must have been a mistake.
I closed the door, but then out walking just now, realized, it could have been a cop, undercover working for anyone, got the cable guy- who are not always honest characters, I know from experience- to help him come to my door, so then with a hidden camera in his clipboard or whatever,
They got pictures of me, even interior of my home through the front door.
Honest, they were peering into my apartment as I said, No, I don't have an appointment.
It could have been someone undercover working for anyone. Luckily, I got nothing to hide, everything I write comes from truth and integrity, it's the Church that has been telling lies for decades about the Pedophile Epidemic among Catholic Priests.
Still, it's strange. The cable guys always call five minutes before they come, always.
They never come in twos.
They hesitated way too long and peered too far into my door for me to feel right about their little visit.
It could have been, a PI paid the cable guy to let him dress up and look like a second cable guy and then he had a camera in his sleeve or collar and shot video of me squirming at my front door.
Hopelessly paranoid after a few years listening to and researching to the crimes of the Catholic Church
This morning, just after putting up a post that got LOTS of hits, the cable guy knocks on my door.
He's standing there with another guy, they stare at me. The one in front I recognize as he came to our house about a week ago for a bad modem.
They stare at me. "Didn't you have an appointment, your cable, is it out?"
"No."
I perked, wished I'd washed my face and primped up a bit this morning, but the door usually doesn't get knocks until afternoon.
They stared at me for a while, it was weird, then said, oh well must have been a mistake.
I closed the door, but then out walking just now, realized, it could have been a cop, undercover working for anyone, got the cable guy- who are not always honest characters, I know from experience- to help him come to my door, so then with a hidden camera in his clipboard or whatever,
They got pictures of me, even interior of my home through the front door.
Honest, they were peering into my apartment as I said, No, I don't have an appointment.
It could have been someone undercover working for anyone. Luckily, I got nothing to hide, everything I write comes from truth and integrity, it's the Church that has been telling lies for decades about the Pedophile Epidemic among Catholic Priests.
Still, it's strange. The cable guys always call five minutes before they come, always.
They never come in twos.
They hesitated way too long and peered too far into my door for me to feel right about their little visit.
It could have been, a PI paid the cable guy to let him dress up and look like a second cable guy and then he had a camera in his sleeve or collar and shot video of me squirming at my front door.
Hopelessly paranoid after a few years listening to and researching to the crimes of the Catholic Church
Thursday, January 21, 2010
This is what I always wanted to be doing, right?
.
When I finished writing the feature at City of Angels 8 about the Baselice family tragedy at the hands of Franciscans and the Philadelphia Archdiocese, it was classic Dashiell Hammett. I have this bottle of Jack Daniels in my desk, not because I nip at it all the time, but to keep it out of the reach of my daughter, so it doesn't disappear.
Writing the story of Arthur Baselice II and III, it wasn’t that it was difficult to put the words together, or even the visceral human emotion anyone feels, even a Catholic bishop, at the thought of a boy dying in his twenties without ever really having a chance at a life in the first place, because he was drugged and sodomized starting at age nine for years as part of his altar boy duties.
It wasn’t even the sob-gulp-shock that ran over me when I first saw the picture of Arthur III in court with his mother, so alive and young and vibrant and handsome.
Just somewhere in the middle of all that, the totality of what just this one priest did, one out of at least six thousand, it got to me, not just as words in a paragraph but the graphic image. This beautiful boy and the flagrante behavior of this priest going on for years.
The way Arthur II worded it, that the priest gave his son opioids so the sodomy would not be difficult to perpetrate, then the boy as an adult ends up with one whale of an opioid addiction. And dies young, the day the Pennsylvania legislature decides to create a law that favors the Church over its crime victims.
Right in the middle of that, I sort of became undone as a human and slipped into the computer screen, found myself in the middle of the paragraph living it. The horror, the defeat Arthur III must have felt that night, leaving for the NA meeting and going instead to get stoned and overdose and die. That decision you make when you decide to pick up a drug after being clean for a while, that helpless giving in to the craving and need.
This is what I always wanted to do, right? Be a writer, isolated, doing the quasi-mad thing you do to get totally inside the moments of the incidents you are writing, even if they are sick and horrible moments, you have to get inside them to be able to write them.
To someone looking at it from outside, I probably shuddered. When I finished and posted it, I know I said out loud, “Okay this is one where you do reach for the bottle of Jack at the end.” I pulled out Mr. Daniels from where he gathers dust between files and manila envelopes. Poured out a shot, sipped it, sipped it over a half hour and then threw out the rest, but still-
That story was a Jack Daniels story.
This is the image of myself I think I had when I was a kid, or maybe a teenager, whenever it was that I knew someday I was going to be in a room somewhere alone writing something, going a little bit crazy, but writing something I had to write.
I think as a teenager, the image of the writer included a bottle of whisky in the desk drawer. The image I have of myself inside is always that undercover reporter from central casting, sports coat and a pair of jeans, hat pulled over one eye, stepping into the shadows to strike a match and have a smoke. Bottle of Jack Daniels ever handy in a drawer.
After writing the Baselice story last week I lied down and cried a long time. I didn't have a hard time writing it because of the words, it was just finding the right way to put it all together.
Then it just came together. I wrote it, posted it, promoted it, then laid down and cried for a while.
Another day in the life of City of Angels, whatever this is.
.
When I finished writing the feature at City of Angels 8 about the Baselice family tragedy at the hands of Franciscans and the Philadelphia Archdiocese, it was classic Dashiell Hammett. I have this bottle of Jack Daniels in my desk, not because I nip at it all the time, but to keep it out of the reach of my daughter, so it doesn't disappear.
Writing the story of Arthur Baselice II and III, it wasn’t that it was difficult to put the words together, or even the visceral human emotion anyone feels, even a Catholic bishop, at the thought of a boy dying in his twenties without ever really having a chance at a life in the first place, because he was drugged and sodomized starting at age nine for years as part of his altar boy duties.
It wasn’t even the sob-gulp-shock that ran over me when I first saw the picture of Arthur III in court with his mother, so alive and young and vibrant and handsome.
Just somewhere in the middle of all that, the totality of what just this one priest did, one out of at least six thousand, it got to me, not just as words in a paragraph but the graphic image. This beautiful boy and the flagrante behavior of this priest going on for years.
The way Arthur II worded it, that the priest gave his son opioids so the sodomy would not be difficult to perpetrate, then the boy as an adult ends up with one whale of an opioid addiction. And dies young, the day the Pennsylvania legislature decides to create a law that favors the Church over its crime victims.
Right in the middle of that, I sort of became undone as a human and slipped into the computer screen, found myself in the middle of the paragraph living it. The horror, the defeat Arthur III must have felt that night, leaving for the NA meeting and going instead to get stoned and overdose and die. That decision you make when you decide to pick up a drug after being clean for a while, that helpless giving in to the craving and need.
This is what I always wanted to do, right? Be a writer, isolated, doing the quasi-mad thing you do to get totally inside the moments of the incidents you are writing, even if they are sick and horrible moments, you have to get inside them to be able to write them.
To someone looking at it from outside, I probably shuddered. When I finished and posted it, I know I said out loud, “Okay this is one where you do reach for the bottle of Jack at the end.” I pulled out Mr. Daniels from where he gathers dust between files and manila envelopes. Poured out a shot, sipped it, sipped it over a half hour and then threw out the rest, but still-
That story was a Jack Daniels story.
This is the image of myself I think I had when I was a kid, or maybe a teenager, whenever it was that I knew someday I was going to be in a room somewhere alone writing something, going a little bit crazy, but writing something I had to write.
I think as a teenager, the image of the writer included a bottle of whisky in the desk drawer. The image I have of myself inside is always that undercover reporter from central casting, sports coat and a pair of jeans, hat pulled over one eye, stepping into the shadows to strike a match and have a smoke. Bottle of Jack Daniels ever handy in a drawer.
After writing the Baselice story last week I lied down and cried a long time. I didn't have a hard time writing it because of the words, it was just finding the right way to put it all together.
Then it just came together. I wrote it, posted it, promoted it, then laid down and cried for a while.
Another day in the life of City of Angels, whatever this is.
.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Watching the film 'Taken' brings up the time I got kidnapped in Paris and they almost sold me to the Arabs. But I escaped thanks to a genuine miracle
.
I watched "Taken" and got sick for a week, then dug up this story from City of Angels 1:
It was 1966 and in California if someone had long hair and jeans you automatically identified them as a fellow traveler in the counter culture, a fellow hippie, a stranger who was not a stranger. I was 17 and thought things would be the same in Paris, France, so I may even have been the one who struck up a conversation with the two guys in the Left Bank bookstore. I did ask them if they knew where to get some LSD, as I had promised my sister I'd bring some acid back for her to try, when I left her apartment in Geneva, Switzerland.
The two guys said they knew where to get lalalalala, don’t remember the name of it, a drug they said was not LSD but like LSD, so I said, great let’s go.
Went off with them willingly and enthusiastically. Like the two girls in "Taken."
They explained to me as best my high school French understood that their house was out in the suburbs of Paris. I thought it was funny that Paris even had suburbs. We went to my hotel to get my stuff, then rode the train out to their house, this big empty house in a town a long way out on the train line.
1966 "suburban" Paris, a small quiet town, all the houses had huge fences, private.
We walked about a block from the train to this two-story brick and stone house surrounded by a 10 foot fence, and a yard with trees. You entered through a gate.
I was a 17 year old girl hooked up and ready to party.
No virgin, a 17 year old Southern California natural blond tanned girl with an early anorexic body and Polish curves -- probably some kind of fantasy come true for these French guys, but I was really unaware of being sexy at that time. I was just natural in a sundress and sandals and little else sitting in this kitchen outside Paris drinking wine and eating something home cooked with these two French guys and then taking this drug thinking we would just party like the hippies in L.A.
***
"Hey, this drug isn't at all like LSD," is one of the last things I said before I just fell asleep. I woke up locked in a bedroom upstairs, groggy, and then for days they would come in and have sex with me, usually while I just laid there. Whether I wanted to or not, and they kept feeding me the drug.
Somewhere in the middle of the first night it segued from consensual sex to forced... I hate to have to admit that.
How this story ties in with the pedophile priest stories here at City of Angels is the lack of boundaries I had, at seventeen, going off with two strange guys in Paris France in the first place, my body already this thing that just gave in to sex, wherever or whatever.
Also, the way I escaped from these two guys is a direct tie to the experience, as it was a miracle.
A genuine miracle.
**************
A few days in, strangely, my door wasn’t locked and I heard men talking downstairs, so I crept to the top of, then tiptoed down a few steps to listen. In the living room the two guys who were drugging me were in an animated conversation with two men who looked and sounded Arabic. I crept down lower and peaked at them.
It was hard to understand the Parisian French but I understood enough to know they were describing me, how it felt to touch my skin, the Skin! They kept repeating it, “le peau le teint.”
And they talked about money.
I shivered there on the stairs realizing, “They’re selling me to the Arabs.”
And I freaked.
Got to get outta here.
I listened longer, understood a little more, enough to know the deal was done and I was going to end up someplace like a harem in Arabia in a few hours. (This was 1966.)
Then all the guys left, without even checking on me, which was weird. Looking back now, maybe they’d been up in the bedroom earlier while I was drugged and knocked out, and didn't realize they hadn’t locked the door when they left, and then they didn't want to make the Arab guys wait ...
So the French guys left without checking on me and I knew I had no more than a few minutes to get out of that house.
I had this big white suitcase with all the clothes a 17-year-old girl carries with them. I lugged that Samsonite down the stairs. In every room on the ground floor the windows were nailed shut. I ran to the kitchen and checked and all the doors of course the doors were all all locked, they had me locked in.
The windows nailed shut, all the doors locked except one, the door that led to the basement.
So I dragged the huge white suitcase (this was pre-plastic, it was HEAVY) behind me down the narrow basement staircase in that old French country now suburban house.
In the basement there were laundry tubs, huge vat-like sinks, and above one tub was one small window at ground level.
These laundry basins were huge, like they could hold sheets or curtains to wash by hand a century ago. I saw I could climb up the ceramic and then crawl through that one window. That tiny window. I climbed up and barely pulled myself through, then went to pull out the suitcase and get us to freedom.
But the suitcase was too big.
Remember I was a 17 year old girl from L.A. and I wasn’t going to leave behind all my clothes. So I pulled and pulled and pulled and the suitcase was just plain larger than the window. This was a stone mortar brick building, nothing was going to give but I kept pulling and pulling trying to get the suitcase through.
Then there was a BLLLLLLNNNNNNGGGG sound.
It came with the wind through the trees. There are even angelic voices in the sound as I remember it today.
Whatever, there was a BLLLLNNNNGGG and the suitcase came through the window. The solid 1960s pre-plastic quality Samsonite bulging suitcase came through the century old too small tiny window, which was surrounded by brick and stone wall surrounded by more brick and stone wall.
I was able to pull the suitcase through and get out of there. The too big suitcase came through the too small window and I got away.
It was a miracle. Looking back on it, that's the only way to explain it.
Then I had to climb a tree and throw the suitcase over the fence then jump down myself. I scrambled in the direction I could hear the train, and got to the station, got out of the block before the two French guys came back with the Arabs.
I got away.
If I hadn't gotten away I probably would have ended up like the teenage girls in the movie "Taken," sold as merchandise to some oil magnate shiek.
***********
The Miracle
Later in life I realized that while I was being "sexualized" by a Catholic priest at age five in 1953, God must have looked down and said, this girl is going to have a lot of trouble in life. So God or whoever that is dispatched a couple of extra angels down to watch over me. And that's how I got out of that house outside Paris where the two French guys were getting ready to sell me to the Arabs.
It's the main reason I say it’s a wonder I made it to age 19.
*****
But watching "Taken" last week made me sick. Good movie, but it made me sick.
Or maybe it was the Carl's Junior burger from the day before.
************
There was a man at the train station that day outside Paris, when I escaped, and I also now think of that man as some kind of an angel in connection to the experience.
I must have looked pretty disheveled, drugged, scared, shaking, but trying to act cool. This older French man sat next to me and he asked if I needed help. He asked something like well how much can you pay for a hotel and started reaching in his pocket. I reached in my suitcase and pulled out this wad of American Express checks I had with me and he was amazed, stopped reaching for his wallet and said, "Well then in that case you should go to the Hilton Hotel, the new Hilton they just built downtown, the Paris Hilton, it's just for Americans, to make them feel at home," and I thought yeah good idea.
I wonder why the two French guys who kidnapped me didn't steal the American Express checks. Maybe they were going to have me sign them later... I don't know, but all my checks were still in the white suitcase.
I took the train to downtown Paris, checked into the brand new Paris Hilton, where everyone was going overboard to do everything American, just like they portrayed on Mad Men Season Two a few months back ...
It felt so good to feel the American-ness of the Paris Hilton Hotel that day. On my way to my room I stopped to get a magazine. All I could find, or all I saw in English, was an issue of Playboy.
I went to my room and luxuriated, and with room service a couple of nights, recovered from the “trauma” as we’d call it today. I was alone at age 17, achy in a hotel room from several days of involuntary sex, shaking as I detoxed, but not really even thinking about the Arab guys. I had developed and practiced PTSD techniques since age five, and was using them now to rush away from the experience and not look at it closely.
As always, going faster than the speed of life, in order to avoid looking at life.
Don't think I ever even thought about the way I almost got sold to the Arabs again until soon after my daughter was born, in 1989 or 1990. Then I started writing it and writing it over and over trying to form it into a literary work. Like this time, yet again.
It was twenty years later when I had a baby that I slowed down enough to realize what had happened to me in Paris in 1966.
I got a trip to Europe for my high school graduation present.
After escaping, I found nurturing and comfort there in the Paris Hilton Hotel in 1966, diving into the pages of Playboy Magazine.
********
Considering I'm just one of thousands of adult victims of pedophile priests, I wonder how many others, as teenagers and in early twenties, ended up in dangerous situations
Even ended up dead
Due to sexual compulsions they would never have had, if they hadn't been aroused as a growing child by a Catholic priest.
It's no leap of faith to say a lot of the victims of the pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church did not make it into adulthood...
.
I watched "Taken" and got sick for a week, then dug up this story from City of Angels 1:
It was 1966 and in California if someone had long hair and jeans you automatically identified them as a fellow traveler in the counter culture, a fellow hippie, a stranger who was not a stranger. I was 17 and thought things would be the same in Paris, France, so I may even have been the one who struck up a conversation with the two guys in the Left Bank bookstore. I did ask them if they knew where to get some LSD, as I had promised my sister I'd bring some acid back for her to try, when I left her apartment in Geneva, Switzerland.
The two guys said they knew where to get lalalalala, don’t remember the name of it, a drug they said was not LSD but like LSD, so I said, great let’s go.
Went off with them willingly and enthusiastically. Like the two girls in "Taken."
They explained to me as best my high school French understood that their house was out in the suburbs of Paris. I thought it was funny that Paris even had suburbs. We went to my hotel to get my stuff, then rode the train out to their house, this big empty house in a town a long way out on the train line.
1966 "suburban" Paris, a small quiet town, all the houses had huge fences, private.
We walked about a block from the train to this two-story brick and stone house surrounded by a 10 foot fence, and a yard with trees. You entered through a gate.
I was a 17 year old girl hooked up and ready to party.
No virgin, a 17 year old Southern California natural blond tanned girl with an early anorexic body and Polish curves -- probably some kind of fantasy come true for these French guys, but I was really unaware of being sexy at that time. I was just natural in a sundress and sandals and little else sitting in this kitchen outside Paris drinking wine and eating something home cooked with these two French guys and then taking this drug thinking we would just party like the hippies in L.A.
***
"Hey, this drug isn't at all like LSD," is one of the last things I said before I just fell asleep. I woke up locked in a bedroom upstairs, groggy, and then for days they would come in and have sex with me, usually while I just laid there. Whether I wanted to or not, and they kept feeding me the drug.
Somewhere in the middle of the first night it segued from consensual sex to forced... I hate to have to admit that.
How this story ties in with the pedophile priest stories here at City of Angels is the lack of boundaries I had, at seventeen, going off with two strange guys in Paris France in the first place, my body already this thing that just gave in to sex, wherever or whatever.
Also, the way I escaped from these two guys is a direct tie to the experience, as it was a miracle.
A genuine miracle.
**************
A few days in, strangely, my door wasn’t locked and I heard men talking downstairs, so I crept to the top of, then tiptoed down a few steps to listen. In the living room the two guys who were drugging me were in an animated conversation with two men who looked and sounded Arabic. I crept down lower and peaked at them.
It was hard to understand the Parisian French but I understood enough to know they were describing me, how it felt to touch my skin, the Skin! They kept repeating it, “le peau le teint.”
And they talked about money.
I shivered there on the stairs realizing, “They’re selling me to the Arabs.”
And I freaked.
Got to get outta here.
I listened longer, understood a little more, enough to know the deal was done and I was going to end up someplace like a harem in Arabia in a few hours. (This was 1966.)
Then all the guys left, without even checking on me, which was weird. Looking back now, maybe they’d been up in the bedroom earlier while I was drugged and knocked out, and didn't realize they hadn’t locked the door when they left, and then they didn't want to make the Arab guys wait ...
So the French guys left without checking on me and I knew I had no more than a few minutes to get out of that house.
I had this big white suitcase with all the clothes a 17-year-old girl carries with them. I lugged that Samsonite down the stairs. In every room on the ground floor the windows were nailed shut. I ran to the kitchen and checked and all the doors of course the doors were all all locked, they had me locked in.
The windows nailed shut, all the doors locked except one, the door that led to the basement.
So I dragged the huge white suitcase (this was pre-plastic, it was HEAVY) behind me down the narrow basement staircase in that old French country now suburban house.
In the basement there were laundry tubs, huge vat-like sinks, and above one tub was one small window at ground level.
These laundry basins were huge, like they could hold sheets or curtains to wash by hand a century ago. I saw I could climb up the ceramic and then crawl through that one window. That tiny window. I climbed up and barely pulled myself through, then went to pull out the suitcase and get us to freedom.
But the suitcase was too big.
Remember I was a 17 year old girl from L.A. and I wasn’t going to leave behind all my clothes. So I pulled and pulled and pulled and the suitcase was just plain larger than the window. This was a stone mortar brick building, nothing was going to give but I kept pulling and pulling trying to get the suitcase through.
Then there was a BLLLLLLNNNNNNGGGG sound.
It came with the wind through the trees. There are even angelic voices in the sound as I remember it today.
Whatever, there was a BLLLLNNNNGGG and the suitcase came through the window. The solid 1960s pre-plastic quality Samsonite bulging suitcase came through the century old too small tiny window, which was surrounded by brick and stone wall surrounded by more brick and stone wall.
I was able to pull the suitcase through and get out of there. The too big suitcase came through the too small window and I got away.
It was a miracle. Looking back on it, that's the only way to explain it.
Then I had to climb a tree and throw the suitcase over the fence then jump down myself. I scrambled in the direction I could hear the train, and got to the station, got out of the block before the two French guys came back with the Arabs.
I got away.
If I hadn't gotten away I probably would have ended up like the teenage girls in the movie "Taken," sold as merchandise to some oil magnate shiek.
***********
The Miracle
Later in life I realized that while I was being "sexualized" by a Catholic priest at age five in 1953, God must have looked down and said, this girl is going to have a lot of trouble in life. So God or whoever that is dispatched a couple of extra angels down to watch over me. And that's how I got out of that house outside Paris where the two French guys were getting ready to sell me to the Arabs.
It's the main reason I say it’s a wonder I made it to age 19.
*****
But watching "Taken" last week made me sick. Good movie, but it made me sick.
Or maybe it was the Carl's Junior burger from the day before.
************
There was a man at the train station that day outside Paris, when I escaped, and I also now think of that man as some kind of an angel in connection to the experience.
I must have looked pretty disheveled, drugged, scared, shaking, but trying to act cool. This older French man sat next to me and he asked if I needed help. He asked something like well how much can you pay for a hotel and started reaching in his pocket. I reached in my suitcase and pulled out this wad of American Express checks I had with me and he was amazed, stopped reaching for his wallet and said, "Well then in that case you should go to the Hilton Hotel, the new Hilton they just built downtown, the Paris Hilton, it's just for Americans, to make them feel at home," and I thought yeah good idea.
I wonder why the two French guys who kidnapped me didn't steal the American Express checks. Maybe they were going to have me sign them later... I don't know, but all my checks were still in the white suitcase.
I took the train to downtown Paris, checked into the brand new Paris Hilton, where everyone was going overboard to do everything American, just like they portrayed on Mad Men Season Two a few months back ...
It felt so good to feel the American-ness of the Paris Hilton Hotel that day. On my way to my room I stopped to get a magazine. All I could find, or all I saw in English, was an issue of Playboy.
I went to my room and luxuriated, and with room service a couple of nights, recovered from the “trauma” as we’d call it today. I was alone at age 17, achy in a hotel room from several days of involuntary sex, shaking as I detoxed, but not really even thinking about the Arab guys. I had developed and practiced PTSD techniques since age five, and was using them now to rush away from the experience and not look at it closely.
As always, going faster than the speed of life, in order to avoid looking at life.
Don't think I ever even thought about the way I almost got sold to the Arabs again until soon after my daughter was born, in 1989 or 1990. Then I started writing it and writing it over and over trying to form it into a literary work. Like this time, yet again.
It was twenty years later when I had a baby that I slowed down enough to realize what had happened to me in Paris in 1966.
I got a trip to Europe for my high school graduation present.
After escaping, I found nurturing and comfort there in the Paris Hilton Hotel in 1966, diving into the pages of Playboy Magazine.
********
Considering I'm just one of thousands of adult victims of pedophile priests, I wonder how many others, as teenagers and in early twenties, ended up in dangerous situations
Even ended up dead
Due to sexual compulsions they would never have had, if they hadn't been aroused as a growing child by a Catholic priest.
It's no leap of faith to say a lot of the victims of the pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church did not make it into adulthood...
.
Repressed Memory Scoffers lose in Shanley Case, Boston
Former Catholic priest’s bid for new trial rejected
Boston Globe, January 16, 2010 - The state’s high court yesterday upheld the sexual assault convictions of former Roman Catholic priest Paul M. Shanley, who claimed he was wrongly accused by a man who fabricated memories of being abused as a child. Shanley was a key figure in the ... *&@+^&^^S!!!X(%@& %*@^!
FABRICATED MEMORIES!!!????
Just wish people would stop to think-
HOW HORRIBLE
the experience must have been
for us as children
to have had to suppress it in the first place.
-ke
Former Catholic priest’s bid for new trial rejected
Boston Globe, January 16, 2010 - The state’s high court yesterday upheld the sexual assault convictions of former Roman Catholic priest Paul M. Shanley, who claimed he was wrongly accused by a man who fabricated memories of being abused as a child. Shanley was a key figure in the ... *&@+^&^^S!!!X(%@& %*@^!
FABRICATED MEMORIES!!!????
Just wish people would stop to think-
HOW HORRIBLE
the experience must have been
for us as children
to have had to suppress it in the first place.
-ke
Sunday, January 17, 2010
My first B--- J-- was on camera
,
(Story In draft stages)
Back then you had to go north of the city or east, into the desert, to get to the really hot dehydrating dry air. You'd step out of a car from L.A. and step into it and really feel the difference. Sniff the wind, brown brush and scrappy trees all around, sandy dirt instead of soil, but since you're still near the Oasis of L.A. there’s greenery.
And then the mansion. In the middle of this desert scruff of North San Fernando Valley in 1969, was a futuristic structure. Apparently no one lived there. It had two pools, we shot most of the shoot inside at the indoor pool, I think we took pills, drank, smoked "pot," as we did on all the shoots.
They would call Pretty Girl International on Sunset Bouleard and say, send over two males and a female, or female with two burly males...
In the lounge that was the PGI waiting area, would be males and females, thrust across couches and tables, waiting for a call to work. We'd be dispatched out of those Crossroads of the World offices throughout the day. You registered with them, then waited, either at home or in their offices, for jobs to come in.
Crossroads of the World on Sunset Boulevard.
Right next door to Blessed Sacrament Church, in fact the architecture reveals the structure was probably once part of the church structure, earlier in the 1900s.
I think I worked out of PGI, with the church right outside the window*, every day for about six months, or almost every day.
And must have looked out the window and seen Blessed Sacrament Church and its tower. In fact, the priests in the church probably looked out their windows at all the people in the PGI offices waiting for pornography work.
Meanwhile Back at the Ranch
The female and male in the party and I got more languorous as the day proceeded, as we performed our fake sex setups on camera, then took breaks to swim in the pool and drink cocktails, and smoke...
Somehow in the midst of it, you're convinced you're doing something luxurious and elegant, if not artistic. That's how a normal person explains doing porn. An adult victim of a pedophile priest alone in Hollywood age 18 in 1969 was responding to a different set of compulsions.
That was me.
The guy who’d driven us out to this ranch home north of L.A. at one point came out to the pool ready to do more work. He told the male and me to go outside so we could shoot something in the sunlight.
Off away from the house, Male and I were on this blanket doing “art” shots and then the driver-director gave me instructions.
“Put it in your mouth.”
“What?! Put it- what? I never heard of that. Did you ever hear of that?”
Male's response was a lot more enthusiastic than mine. "Uh, yeah, people do it."
I'd never even heard of oral sex before, maybe heard the word Blow job but wasn't sure what it meant. You mean it? Really? I have to do that? He said, yeah.
He aggressively said, yeah.
Then directed it. And I did what he said to do...
****
How did I end up doing porn when I was really a talented actor with potential for a real career, back then in 1969, when it happened, why did it happen?
I remember the scene that began it.
I was in a play, a kind of silly play, a musical, at a theater in Burbank, but I got good reviews. Then my sister, the older sister who is the other victim of Father Horne in our family, showed up for one of the performances. Afterwards she came backstage, came up to me and said,
“I don't know why you are working on a career like this, considering what we are.”
Or something like that.
She said something like that.
And I knew she was right. I knew exactly what she meant and she was right.
Next day in a kind of fugue state, I called the theater and cancelled, told them to replace me with my understudy, then called Pretty Girl International on Sunset Boulevard, because I'd seen their ads in Daily Variety, and I started doing the new X-rated modeling.
By the time I got to this photo shoot in what may today be Thousand Oaks or Agoura Hills, I was still in this kind of mesmerized state.
Whatever Patricia was referring to when she said, “considering what we are,” I got it, deep inside I got it, and next day I was performing in porn.
Ruined my career.
.
* As soon as it stops raining, going to head down Sunset Boulevard and get a photo of Crossroads of the World next door to Blessed Sacrament Church, to post here.
* I FOUND A PICTURE: HERE it is and video is coming
I remember, we sat in this upstairs waiting room, and when I went to the building recently to look at it, you can see that from that upstairs waiting room, you are looking out a window right at Blessed Sacrament Church. So I must have been listening to their belfry ring every hour and seen the priests and parishioners.
In this picture you see, the church tower and Crossroads Tower are right next to each other.
But swear to God, I do not remember ever seeing a church there, in all those days I would go to PGI right next door...
The quality of video is awful, still going to go back and get better footage. There is also a statue in the Crossroads that must have once been on the church grounds...
Part of history of mass produced pornography, Pretty Girl International casting agency, was in Crossroads of the World shopping center in 1969. Eerily for me as a pedophile priest rape survivor who became promiscuous and went into porn working through that agency, the Blessed Sacrament Church on Sunset Boulevard sits directly next door, even shares some architecture, with the Crossroads building.
I'm not saying there is a connection between the church and the porn agency, except in my story, as I must have been staring out the window at Blessed Sacrament Church while lining up pornography work in 1969 at Pretty Girl International agency in the building next door.
On Sunset Boulevard.
Strange.
(Took the videos down, they are SO BAD. Going to reshoot them, when it stops raining....)
(Story In draft stages)
Back then you had to go north of the city or east, into the desert, to get to the really hot dehydrating dry air. You'd step out of a car from L.A. and step into it and really feel the difference. Sniff the wind, brown brush and scrappy trees all around, sandy dirt instead of soil, but since you're still near the Oasis of L.A. there’s greenery.
And then the mansion. In the middle of this desert scruff of North San Fernando Valley in 1969, was a futuristic structure. Apparently no one lived there. It had two pools, we shot most of the shoot inside at the indoor pool, I think we took pills, drank, smoked "pot," as we did on all the shoots.
They would call Pretty Girl International on Sunset Bouleard and say, send over two males and a female, or female with two burly males...
In the lounge that was the PGI waiting area, would be males and females, thrust across couches and tables, waiting for a call to work. We'd be dispatched out of those Crossroads of the World offices throughout the day. You registered with them, then waited, either at home or in their offices, for jobs to come in.
Crossroads of the World on Sunset Boulevard.
Right next door to Blessed Sacrament Church, in fact the architecture reveals the structure was probably once part of the church structure, earlier in the 1900s.
I think I worked out of PGI, with the church right outside the window*, every day for about six months, or almost every day.
And must have looked out the window and seen Blessed Sacrament Church and its tower. In fact, the priests in the church probably looked out their windows at all the people in the PGI offices waiting for pornography work.
Meanwhile Back at the Ranch
The female and male in the party and I got more languorous as the day proceeded, as we performed our fake sex setups on camera, then took breaks to swim in the pool and drink cocktails, and smoke...
Somehow in the midst of it, you're convinced you're doing something luxurious and elegant, if not artistic. That's how a normal person explains doing porn. An adult victim of a pedophile priest alone in Hollywood age 18 in 1969 was responding to a different set of compulsions.
That was me.
The guy who’d driven us out to this ranch home north of L.A. at one point came out to the pool ready to do more work. He told the male and me to go outside so we could shoot something in the sunlight.
Off away from the house, Male and I were on this blanket doing “art” shots and then the driver-director gave me instructions.
“Put it in your mouth.”
“What?! Put it- what? I never heard of that. Did you ever hear of that?”
Male's response was a lot more enthusiastic than mine. "Uh, yeah, people do it."
I'd never even heard of oral sex before, maybe heard the word Blow job but wasn't sure what it meant. You mean it? Really? I have to do that? He said, yeah.
He aggressively said, yeah.
Then directed it. And I did what he said to do...
****
How did I end up doing porn when I was really a talented actor with potential for a real career, back then in 1969, when it happened, why did it happen?
I remember the scene that began it.
I was in a play, a kind of silly play, a musical, at a theater in Burbank, but I got good reviews. Then my sister, the older sister who is the other victim of Father Horne in our family, showed up for one of the performances. Afterwards she came backstage, came up to me and said,
“I don't know why you are working on a career like this, considering what we are.”
Or something like that.
She said something like that.
And I knew she was right. I knew exactly what she meant and she was right.
Next day in a kind of fugue state, I called the theater and cancelled, told them to replace me with my understudy, then called Pretty Girl International on Sunset Boulevard, because I'd seen their ads in Daily Variety, and I started doing the new X-rated modeling.
By the time I got to this photo shoot in what may today be Thousand Oaks or Agoura Hills, I was still in this kind of mesmerized state.
Whatever Patricia was referring to when she said, “considering what we are,” I got it, deep inside I got it, and next day I was performing in porn.
Ruined my career.
.
* As soon as it stops raining, going to head down Sunset Boulevard and get a photo of Crossroads of the World next door to Blessed Sacrament Church, to post here.
* I FOUND A PICTURE: HERE it is and video is comingI remember, we sat in this upstairs waiting room, and when I went to the building recently to look at it, you can see that from that upstairs waiting room, you are looking out a window right at Blessed Sacrament Church. So I must have been listening to their belfry ring every hour and seen the priests and parishioners.
In this picture you see, the church tower and Crossroads Tower are right next to each other.
But swear to God, I do not remember ever seeing a church there, in all those days I would go to PGI right next door...
The quality of video is awful, still going to go back and get better footage. There is also a statue in the Crossroads that must have once been on the church grounds...
Part of history of mass produced pornography, Pretty Girl International casting agency, was in Crossroads of the World shopping center in 1969. Eerily for me as a pedophile priest rape survivor who became promiscuous and went into porn working through that agency, the Blessed Sacrament Church on Sunset Boulevard sits directly next door, even shares some architecture, with the Crossroads building.
I'm not saying there is a connection between the church and the porn agency, except in my story, as I must have been staring out the window at Blessed Sacrament Church while lining up pornography work in 1969 at Pretty Girl International agency in the building next door.
On Sunset Boulevard.
Strange.
(Took the videos down, they are SO BAD. Going to reshoot them, when it stops raining....)
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Soylent Green continues to come to life in L.A.
.
(Draft, not final, still in editing stages)
L.A. continues to bring the Soylent Green story to life.
It’s really strange to be reading the book “Make Room, Make Room” while living in a city where it seems to be coming to life. The book was the basis of the movie Soylent Green and describes a New York where it is always hot, people live on the sidewalks, there is a water shortage.
I entered the Carl’s Junior on Sixth Street in a state of somewhat hypnosis, having seen the ad for their new burger now maybe five hundred times in the past two weeks. I'm convinced I want to eat this huge double patty of beef, and when I reach the counter I realize, hey it’s only a little bit more to get the “meal deal,” with fries and a Coke.
Chewing the meal as I read.
The familiar ground meal, not much different from the first McDonald’s burger I ever ate back in the 1960s. Even then that young I marveled at the similarity to beef in the flavor.
Not really beef, just really a lot like beef.
I'm chewing the burger as I read the first reference to Soylent in the book Harry Harrison wrote in the 1960s, a book that seems to predict everything that's happening today, with over population, riots and shortages, and the heat- never ending heat like we have in L.A. in 2010.
The sci fi futuristic movie with those scenes I never forgot.
Chuck Connors as the Cop leaves his hovel of an apartment in the morning and has to step over people sprawled on the doorstep, humans living on the streets, even children. They're unbathed, unfed, thirsty, and the government supplies them with just enough food water and cash to stay alive at that horrible level of existence. Meanwhile all over the city, resources are running out.
When you saw the movie in 1973 the idea of people in the United States living on sidewalks was astounding, astonishing, something you would never see. Now walk down a street in the part of L.A. just east of where I live, and you see people who’ve set up housekeeping in alleys, behind bus benches.
And the heat. The heat that never stops in the movie, is also described in the book, the condition of living with a water shortage that prevents people from bathing, while the temperature never goes below ninety degrees so you are constantly sweating, even at night.
So you always have this layer of dried crust on your skin.
We're not too far from that living condition right now in Los Angeles, just a few years away the way things are going.
I put down the book so I could concentrate on my big treat lunch out. I’d gone to the courthouse a few blocks away for a hearing that was on calendar on the internet but off calendar when I got to the courtroom. I didn't want the entire trip to be a waste, so decided it was time to extend my frame of experience.
Time to go to the Clerk’s office on the third floor to get a copies of documents. The last year or so I’ve been so broke, even the fifty cents a page to get copies of public documents was out of the question.
Honest.
Hopefully those days are over now that I'm working all the time and I can even stop for lunch after the hearings. Apparently I’ve got a reputation for being the fastest transcriptionist in reality TV production, I seem to have almost more work than I can keep up with.
Honest.
I thought for a while that Cardinal Mahony had used PI’s and PR consultants or whatever and found out the company I work for, then found a way to steer mounds of work to that company, just to keep me so busy I couldn't keep on writing City of Angels blog. If so, Mahony didn't take into consideration my many manias, one of which is workaholism and an obsessive need to get a job done no matter what I have to do to do it.
Okay.
I'm in Carl's Junior chewing the ground meal, whatever it is, it has become a familiar part of the American palate. If you let the burger sit and get to room temperature then take a bite, you can taste the difference, the meal, and the beef flavoring added to the meal.
I'm cogitating the chew and listening to the babble of languages around me. Korean, Japanese, several dialects of Spanish, and even a few Americans, some with white trash mangling a conversation with an Ebonics speaker were just to my right, arguing over who spent the night last night with who and how much ketchup do you plan to use.
To my left are two very enthusiastic young men, Korean descent, inhaling burgers and fries with a practiced finesse, they know exactly where to put the ketchup in the little cardboard container, exactly how to fold the wrapping over the sandwich so they can take massive bites without getting paper in their mouth. In a Spanglish version of Korean and English they are barking back and forth to each other, barely have their bottoms in their seats, their level of energy is so high. They shove this greased protein down with salt and fries and run back out in the commission sales world in which these young Koreans thrive.
I wonder if people in Iraq eat mystery burgers, for package deals at five dollars a pop.
In the Carl’s Junior windowed room looking out on a parking lot and Sixth Street, the lot across the street advertises several services necessary in the neighborhood, such as “Bed Bugs? Call ----"
Okay, I'm this little old white lady who is the foreigner in L.A. today. Most little old white ladies moved to Burbank or Long Beach at least a decade ago. But I have this affinity with Sunset Boulevard and the way the hills roll in on each other. I don't want to get too far away from it. I thank god for the stretch of Hollywood Boulevard that runs parallel along just the parts of Sunset that a person doesn't want to walk on today, so you can take that detour, then return to Sunset at Fairfax, where the hills really begin to start rolling.
That West Hollywood section used to be the part of Sunset Boulevard to which I had the most affinity, but today it’s a strange glitch of metropolis.
There’s no freeway or transit going out to Beverly Hills on Sunset Boulevard, it’s like transportation froze in time with the original street that runs from downtown to the ocean. Sunset Boulevard winds and winds through the mansions of Belair, with no easy way to get there, other than to take the slow winding road, Sunset Boulevard.
As a result the West Hollywood area that used to be the Jiving Sunset Strip is now kind of decaying. The buildings have peeled paint, there’s a lot of trash, a lot of window sized “FOR LEASE” signs on the office buildings.
Plus for some reason the folding hills are working against the boulevard. You can’t get a breath of fresh air. The gazillion cars running within those square miles are all burning cheap gas and the exhaust is going nowhere, just sitting there folded into the hills. There’s so much gas in the air when you walk on Sunset Boulevard from Fairfax to La Cienega that you almost can’t even breathe.
Sometimes I don't know where to go. I just come home and go back to playing Space Station, just have food work clothes furniture - everything delivered and communicate with the other humans via electrons.
.
(Draft, not final, still in editing stages)
L.A. continues to bring the Soylent Green story to life.
It’s really strange to be reading the book “Make Room, Make Room” while living in a city where it seems to be coming to life. The book was the basis of the movie Soylent Green and describes a New York where it is always hot, people live on the sidewalks, there is a water shortage.
I entered the Carl’s Junior on Sixth Street in a state of somewhat hypnosis, having seen the ad for their new burger now maybe five hundred times in the past two weeks. I'm convinced I want to eat this huge double patty of beef, and when I reach the counter I realize, hey it’s only a little bit more to get the “meal deal,” with fries and a Coke.
Chewing the meal as I read.
The familiar ground meal, not much different from the first McDonald’s burger I ever ate back in the 1960s. Even then that young I marveled at the similarity to beef in the flavor.
Not really beef, just really a lot like beef.
I'm chewing the burger as I read the first reference to Soylent in the book Harry Harrison wrote in the 1960s, a book that seems to predict everything that's happening today, with over population, riots and shortages, and the heat- never ending heat like we have in L.A. in 2010.
The sci fi futuristic movie with those scenes I never forgot.
Chuck Connors as the Cop leaves his hovel of an apartment in the morning and has to step over people sprawled on the doorstep, humans living on the streets, even children. They're unbathed, unfed, thirsty, and the government supplies them with just enough food water and cash to stay alive at that horrible level of existence. Meanwhile all over the city, resources are running out.
When you saw the movie in 1973 the idea of people in the United States living on sidewalks was astounding, astonishing, something you would never see. Now walk down a street in the part of L.A. just east of where I live, and you see people who’ve set up housekeeping in alleys, behind bus benches.
And the heat. The heat that never stops in the movie, is also described in the book, the condition of living with a water shortage that prevents people from bathing, while the temperature never goes below ninety degrees so you are constantly sweating, even at night.
So you always have this layer of dried crust on your skin.
We're not too far from that living condition right now in Los Angeles, just a few years away the way things are going.
I put down the book so I could concentrate on my big treat lunch out. I’d gone to the courthouse a few blocks away for a hearing that was on calendar on the internet but off calendar when I got to the courtroom. I didn't want the entire trip to be a waste, so decided it was time to extend my frame of experience.
Time to go to the Clerk’s office on the third floor to get a copies of documents. The last year or so I’ve been so broke, even the fifty cents a page to get copies of public documents was out of the question.
Honest.
Hopefully those days are over now that I'm working all the time and I can even stop for lunch after the hearings. Apparently I’ve got a reputation for being the fastest transcriptionist in reality TV production, I seem to have almost more work than I can keep up with.
Honest.
I thought for a while that Cardinal Mahony had used PI’s and PR consultants or whatever and found out the company I work for, then found a way to steer mounds of work to that company, just to keep me so busy I couldn't keep on writing City of Angels blog. If so, Mahony didn't take into consideration my many manias, one of which is workaholism and an obsessive need to get a job done no matter what I have to do to do it.
Okay.
I'm in Carl's Junior chewing the ground meal, whatever it is, it has become a familiar part of the American palate. If you let the burger sit and get to room temperature then take a bite, you can taste the difference, the meal, and the beef flavoring added to the meal.
I'm cogitating the chew and listening to the babble of languages around me. Korean, Japanese, several dialects of Spanish, and even a few Americans, some with white trash mangling a conversation with an Ebonics speaker were just to my right, arguing over who spent the night last night with who and how much ketchup do you plan to use.
To my left are two very enthusiastic young men, Korean descent, inhaling burgers and fries with a practiced finesse, they know exactly where to put the ketchup in the little cardboard container, exactly how to fold the wrapping over the sandwich so they can take massive bites without getting paper in their mouth. In a Spanglish version of Korean and English they are barking back and forth to each other, barely have their bottoms in their seats, their level of energy is so high. They shove this greased protein down with salt and fries and run back out in the commission sales world in which these young Koreans thrive.
I wonder if people in Iraq eat mystery burgers, for package deals at five dollars a pop.
In the Carl’s Junior windowed room looking out on a parking lot and Sixth Street, the lot across the street advertises several services necessary in the neighborhood, such as “Bed Bugs? Call ----"
Okay, I'm this little old white lady who is the foreigner in L.A. today. Most little old white ladies moved to Burbank or Long Beach at least a decade ago. But I have this affinity with Sunset Boulevard and the way the hills roll in on each other. I don't want to get too far away from it. I thank god for the stretch of Hollywood Boulevard that runs parallel along just the parts of Sunset that a person doesn't want to walk on today, so you can take that detour, then return to Sunset at Fairfax, where the hills really begin to start rolling.
That West Hollywood section used to be the part of Sunset Boulevard to which I had the most affinity, but today it’s a strange glitch of metropolis.
There’s no freeway or transit going out to Beverly Hills on Sunset Boulevard, it’s like transportation froze in time with the original street that runs from downtown to the ocean. Sunset Boulevard winds and winds through the mansions of Belair, with no easy way to get there, other than to take the slow winding road, Sunset Boulevard.
As a result the West Hollywood area that used to be the Jiving Sunset Strip is now kind of decaying. The buildings have peeled paint, there’s a lot of trash, a lot of window sized “FOR LEASE” signs on the office buildings.Plus for some reason the folding hills are working against the boulevard. You can’t get a breath of fresh air. The gazillion cars running within those square miles are all burning cheap gas and the exhaust is going nowhere, just sitting there folded into the hills. There’s so much gas in the air when you walk on Sunset Boulevard from Fairfax to La Cienega that you almost can’t even breathe.
Sometimes I don't know where to go. I just come home and go back to playing Space Station, just have food work clothes furniture - everything delivered and communicate with the other humans via electrons.
.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Dear Charlie Sheen
I think you would get this story. Because you were raised in an oppressive Catholic family and then grew up to be a sex addict with other bizarre behavioral symptoms, I think you would understand the need to get the story told of the pedophile priests in the United States, by someone outside the Catholic Church or mainstream media. See I’ve been watching your performance in public, not as a fan, I'm more your dad’s age, but as one of the survivors of pedophile priest rape who’s been paying attention to the issue nationally. Charlie, you show all the signs of being one of us. I'm just waiting for you now to be clean and sober finally for two years in a row and experience the recovered memory that many of us have, of one of those Jesuits your dad hangs out with taking you around behind the altar one day and banging you. It usually takes a period of sobriety first before remembering something like that
I think you would get this story. Because you were raised in an oppressive Catholic family and then grew up to be a sex addict with other bizarre behavioral symptoms, I think you would understand the need to get the story told of the pedophile priests in the United States, by someone outside the Catholic Church or mainstream media. See I’ve been watching your performance in public, not as a fan, I'm more your dad’s age, but as one of the survivors of pedophile priest rape who’s been paying attention to the issue nationally. Charlie, you show all the signs of being one of us. I'm just waiting for you now to be clean and sober finally for two years in a row and experience the recovered memory that many of us have, of one of those Jesuits your dad hangs out with taking you around behind the altar one day and banging you. It usually takes a period of sobriety first before remembering something like that
Friday, January 8, 2010
Sing before breakfast, cry before dinner.
.
(FIRST DRAFT)
My two aunts on the Ebeling side both had soprano speaking voices. Shrieking might be a better word for how they talked. Both of them were more effective than most females in families of the 1940s and '50s because they could send their words out like a sword, shrilly piercing over whatever other conversation was going on.
“If you sing before breakfast you'll cry before dinner, haven’t you ever heard that expression?” I had come down from the tower to the kitchen in the morning and found my mom and my aunt there, and I'd been singing all the way down the winding stairs--
Tower.
Yes, the house outside Bartlett had a tower, and a ballroom. It was this huge rundown mansion my dad bought, fixed up, and then flipped, then we moved again.
The tower had a winding staircase what would be three flights, you’d climb round and round on this staircase and at the top was my playroom. At the top of the tower with -Wow, as I write this I can even see it, sun like the Chicago area sun, always behind a layer of clouds, so the air has a gray glow. Look out the tower window and you can see the garage, the ground, in the back of the house, kitchen stairs where Father Horne stands-
Father Horne at the back door in regular man clothes, not priest clothes...
Side trip.
“Sing before breakfast, Cry before dinner,” my Aunt Ruth lilted an octave above high C. “Haven’t you ever heard that expression before? Haven’t you? Huh? Huh?”
She was trying to get something out of me. Probably “What's wrong with you, why are you acting this way,” because the previous day I’d been really weird…
Now I walked into this morning kitchen, and singing was a way to cover something else up, and I knew my aunt wanted me to bring it out and say the thing, but instead I… internalized. That's a big word, not the word I'd use back then, but the one I use now to describe it. It’s like folding over mud, packing a layer of mud down on something to bury it.
Bury it good.
My mom was standing to the side, straight stiff, and I stood with my mouth gaping open, not saying a word. For now I'd also stopped singing.
“Sing before breakfast cry before dinner, huh? Huh? Huh? What do you think that means, huh?"
She's reaching to me and I'm going away too fast for her to get me. The layers of mud are down now, packed, and I can’t budge. That morning must have been around the beginning of the buried memory. Because that house with the tower and the ballroom and the three-car garage, we moved from it into Bartlett, the town, when I was six-seven, then moved from there to Los Angeles the summer I turned eight.
*************
Sunset Boulevard was one of the first rides we took when we moved to L.A. in 1955.
“This is it, the Sunset Strip,” my dad gestured as we got to the 8000 and 9000 block of the road that starts downtown and goes all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
My dad put his hand back on the steering wheel then pointed again. “There's, Dino’s, the night club, see that’s Dean Martin’s place, Dino’s. Yeah, we're in the middle of it all now.” My dad and mom in the front seat, I'm in the back my nose to the window.
And what I see as we drive along Sunset Strip is a little girl, maybe thirteen, not an adult, a pre-teen aged kid. She’s wearing a long coat. Everyone is wearing coats. It used to get cold in Los Angeles.
Side trip.
She’s a teenage girl, wearing a Midwest style coat and hat, and carrying a suitcase, and she’s SINGING. Singing at the top of her lungs as she walks along the sidewalk, making heads turn, people are looking at her, people are laughing as she walks past them.
She’s walking down Sunset Strip about 13 years old, carrying a suitcase, and singing, singing as she walks, singing at the top of her lungs.
And dressed in a long coat like she’s from small town Illinois.
That was one of the first things I saw when I was eight years old in 1955 and we arrived in L.A. and took a drive down Sunset Boulevard.
*************
Sing before breakfast, cry before dinner. An amazing bit of psychological insight on the part of my aunt, who was born in about 1913 and had yet to hear the word psychiatry in 1953.
Sing before breakfast, cry before dinner.
That sums up my whole bipolar existence. The days I'm singing in the morning, I'm probly going to be wailing in the afternoon.
"Mom, you're bipolar," my daughter says to me.
"I know, isn't it wonderful?" And then I laugh out loud, this long rolling laugh that involves my whole body and usually ends with a rush of endorphins like you wouldn't believe.
A laugh so loud and deep, no one can argue with me.
.
(FIRST DRAFT)
My two aunts on the Ebeling side both had soprano speaking voices. Shrieking might be a better word for how they talked. Both of them were more effective than most females in families of the 1940s and '50s because they could send their words out like a sword, shrilly piercing over whatever other conversation was going on.
“If you sing before breakfast you'll cry before dinner, haven’t you ever heard that expression?” I had come down from the tower to the kitchen in the morning and found my mom and my aunt there, and I'd been singing all the way down the winding stairs--
Tower.
Yes, the house outside Bartlett had a tower, and a ballroom. It was this huge rundown mansion my dad bought, fixed up, and then flipped, then we moved again.
The tower had a winding staircase what would be three flights, you’d climb round and round on this staircase and at the top was my playroom. At the top of the tower with -Wow, as I write this I can even see it, sun like the Chicago area sun, always behind a layer of clouds, so the air has a gray glow. Look out the tower window and you can see the garage, the ground, in the back of the house, kitchen stairs where Father Horne stands-
Father Horne at the back door in regular man clothes, not priest clothes...
Side trip.
“Sing before breakfast, Cry before dinner,” my Aunt Ruth lilted an octave above high C. “Haven’t you ever heard that expression before? Haven’t you? Huh? Huh?”
She was trying to get something out of me. Probably “What's wrong with you, why are you acting this way,” because the previous day I’d been really weird…
Now I walked into this morning kitchen, and singing was a way to cover something else up, and I knew my aunt wanted me to bring it out and say the thing, but instead I… internalized. That's a big word, not the word I'd use back then, but the one I use now to describe it. It’s like folding over mud, packing a layer of mud down on something to bury it.
Bury it good.
My mom was standing to the side, straight stiff, and I stood with my mouth gaping open, not saying a word. For now I'd also stopped singing.
“Sing before breakfast cry before dinner, huh? Huh? Huh? What do you think that means, huh?"
She's reaching to me and I'm going away too fast for her to get me. The layers of mud are down now, packed, and I can’t budge. That morning must have been around the beginning of the buried memory. Because that house with the tower and the ballroom and the three-car garage, we moved from it into Bartlett, the town, when I was six-seven, then moved from there to Los Angeles the summer I turned eight.
*************
Sunset Boulevard was one of the first rides we took when we moved to L.A. in 1955.
“This is it, the Sunset Strip,” my dad gestured as we got to the 8000 and 9000 block of the road that starts downtown and goes all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
My dad put his hand back on the steering wheel then pointed again. “There's, Dino’s, the night club, see that’s Dean Martin’s place, Dino’s. Yeah, we're in the middle of it all now.” My dad and mom in the front seat, I'm in the back my nose to the window.
And what I see as we drive along Sunset Strip is a little girl, maybe thirteen, not an adult, a pre-teen aged kid. She’s wearing a long coat. Everyone is wearing coats. It used to get cold in Los Angeles.
Side trip.
She’s a teenage girl, wearing a Midwest style coat and hat, and carrying a suitcase, and she’s SINGING. Singing at the top of her lungs as she walks along the sidewalk, making heads turn, people are looking at her, people are laughing as she walks past them.
She’s walking down Sunset Strip about 13 years old, carrying a suitcase, and singing, singing as she walks, singing at the top of her lungs.
And dressed in a long coat like she’s from small town Illinois.
That was one of the first things I saw when I was eight years old in 1955 and we arrived in L.A. and took a drive down Sunset Boulevard.
*************
Sing before breakfast, cry before dinner. An amazing bit of psychological insight on the part of my aunt, who was born in about 1913 and had yet to hear the word psychiatry in 1953.
Sing before breakfast, cry before dinner.
That sums up my whole bipolar existence. The days I'm singing in the morning, I'm probly going to be wailing in the afternoon.
"Mom, you're bipolar," my daughter says to me.
"I know, isn't it wonderful?" And then I laugh out loud, this long rolling laugh that involves my whole body and usually ends with a rush of endorphins like you wouldn't believe.
A laugh so loud and deep, no one can argue with me.
.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
You can see why kids raped by priests sometimes end up suicidal as adults
.
I get that way. I don't know what it is, this thing that keeps me from going past that one step and actually doing it.
Ironically, it could be the teachings that suicide is the ultimate mortal sin put into my head by the same Catholic Church that created the situation that made me suicidal in the first place.
Unforgivable.
Even on Earth terms, suicide would be unforgivable to my child. My daughter would go through the rest of her life tormented if I killed myself, and that's probably the main thing that's prevented me from doing it, ironic again, because it was when my daughter turned five that I remembered being raped by a priest at age five, forty years earlier.
I sometimes go to such a low place, it really feels at that time that suicide is the only way out. When it’s over you tell yourself, next time I’ll remember how good you feel when you get to the other side, and stop the mania right there on the spot.
But when you are in the middle of it, you almost can’t stop it-
Episodes.
I call them Episodes.
I had another one the other day. It just starts with me getting stuck on a phrase, and you keep repeating it until it becomes the whole world, all you can think or feel. This is the one I've been getting stuck on lately:
My job is so isolating, it’s bad for a healthy person to be isolated like this, let alone someone who’s already emotionally deranged like me. The isolation on my job is causing my illness worse and it’s the illness that caused me to take this kind of isolating work in the first place.
And There's No Way Out!!!!!
Oh how muddled we can get.
Have to go back to the fantasy. I'm not isolated, I'm working on a space station, connected to Earth via Internet and the Space Shuttle that brings me meals on wheels five days a week.
I mean, Meals on Warp Ion Driven lightspeed transport device.
********
The phrases that would run in my head over and over have gotten much more benevolent, when you think about it. A few years, even months, back, the drone said:
You're useless, you have no value, no one wants you around, you make people disgusted, just hide, stay away, because you are inherently awful and everyone sees it and is repelled by you.
It's horrible saying that to yourself.
Somehow I have stopped, probably because I started City of Angels...
****
I get that way. I don't know what it is, this thing that keeps me from going past that one step and actually doing it.
Ironically, it could be the teachings that suicide is the ultimate mortal sin put into my head by the same Catholic Church that created the situation that made me suicidal in the first place.
Unforgivable.
Even on Earth terms, suicide would be unforgivable to my child. My daughter would go through the rest of her life tormented if I killed myself, and that's probably the main thing that's prevented me from doing it, ironic again, because it was when my daughter turned five that I remembered being raped by a priest at age five, forty years earlier.
I sometimes go to such a low place, it really feels at that time that suicide is the only way out. When it’s over you tell yourself, next time I’ll remember how good you feel when you get to the other side, and stop the mania right there on the spot.
But when you are in the middle of it, you almost can’t stop it-
Episodes.
I call them Episodes.
I had another one the other day. It just starts with me getting stuck on a phrase, and you keep repeating it until it becomes the whole world, all you can think or feel. This is the one I've been getting stuck on lately:
My job is so isolating, it’s bad for a healthy person to be isolated like this, let alone someone who’s already emotionally deranged like me. The isolation on my job is causing my illness worse and it’s the illness that caused me to take this kind of isolating work in the first place.
And There's No Way Out!!!!!
Oh how muddled we can get.
Have to go back to the fantasy. I'm not isolated, I'm working on a space station, connected to Earth via Internet and the Space Shuttle that brings me meals on wheels five days a week.
I mean, Meals on Warp Ion Driven lightspeed transport device.
********
The phrases that would run in my head over and over have gotten much more benevolent, when you think about it. A few years, even months, back, the drone said:
You're useless, you have no value, no one wants you around, you make people disgusted, just hide, stay away, because you are inherently awful and everyone sees it and is repelled by you.
It's horrible saying that to yourself.
Somehow I have stopped, probably because I started City of Angels...
****
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Found these cool photos from 1969, click to enlarge
.
In pursuit of the priest, this confused, compulsive girl came to Hollywood, where she was on her own from age 17. Hollywood is a tough enough town. See what innocence I still had left below.
It didn't take long.
I went from sending these photos to agents and getting legitimate work to showing up at Pretty Girl International Agency on Sunset Boulevard to get work in porn movies and magazines.
Within months I made the transition.
In 1969
A strange year in and of itself.
In pursuit of the priest, this confused, compulsive girl came to Hollywood, where she was on her own from age 17. Hollywood is a tough enough town. See what innocence I still had left below.
It didn't take long.I went from sending these photos to agents and getting legitimate work to showing up at Pretty Girl International Agency on Sunset Boulevard to get work in porn movies and magazines.
Within months I made the transition.
In 1969
A strange year in and of itself.
A girl like me, full of sexual compulsions after being raped by a priest at age five, I just fell into the porn market like it was God's will in my life...
This potentially innocent 20 year old girl in Hollywood, instead, look at what happened... Well I guess I still have to tell that part of the story...
Keep reading here at City of Angels 2.
*************
"I Had Intrusive Thoughts, Nine Times"
INTRUSION
You're fine, you're smiling, you're in the kitchen where you can’t hear the TV and all of a sudden you're in another place.
This time it’s thinking
All those times
I should have been asking for money when I’d pick up men on the streets of West Hollywood. 
They sometimes told me they were looking for a prostitute, and were surprised I wasn’t one, when I got in their car to have sex for free. I’d grin back, saying, no it’s me, your fantasy, Little Annie Fanny with brains.
.
With a Name Like Regina, She Fit Perfectly Into My Compulsive Life
.
(First draft)
Regina, with a name like Regina, no wonder I felt a need to turn myself into her for a while.
I lived a life where I was always in pursuit of the priest, even before I knew what the priest had done to me. If I hadn't had a baby when I was 40 years old I would have never even remembered what Father Horne did to me, because it was only when my daughter was five years old, and me being a mom I’d had to stop using alcohol and drugs, that I empathized with my five year old daughter and remembered what happened to me at age five. This is not an unusual experience. The thousands of clergy sex crime lawsuits in the last twenty years have proved repressed and recovered memories are real. God only knows how many victims there really have been, children raped by Catholic priests in small towns across America. It’s only by shoestrings, angel hair strands, of luck that I lived to be 45 years old to recover a memory like this.
But looking back, I so can see the compulsions and how they played back in my life, almost like clues my own brain was giving me. Like this period I keep wanting to write about now, when I was running Studio Typing Service at 8555 Sunset Boulevard, in the mid-1980s. These were the years I’d come back to L.A. from Houston, after the extremely debilitating experience of being forced off the staff at NASA LBJ Space Center. They got me out before I had completed three years work there, that was in 1981. But I was still living in Clear Lake City, the area of Houston where you find NASA, two years later. It was 1983 by the time I got back to L.A. I stayed with my family first for a few weeks, in San Clemente, and pretended the Ebelings were some kind of institution, but we're not.
So about a month, maybe six weeks, after leaving Houston, I was living at The Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where The Duke’s had their first restaurant, a rock ‘n roll dive, half my neighbors were gay prostitutes, others in the hotel were their customers. From that famed address and with being a PAO at NASA fresh on my resume I started looking for another job.
Three years and several jobs later I was typing out of my home from this apartment building where I live in West Hollywood. And advertising myself as a freelance publicist, then shirking work. In these years I also developed the fine skills of a barfly. Drinking to blackout was a regular experience for me in the 1980s. People were constantly walking up to me and saying, Hi, Kay, and I would have no memory at all of meeting them, but they must know who I am. I would walk around town looking sober when I was really in a blackout most of the time. It’s a skill I inherited from my dad, and the Irish German ancestors, I guess, being a functioning drunk…
Okay, Regina, even with a name like that, I thought she had some special connection. PING that's one of the “clues,” that compulsion I had from day one to find other people who had this same special “connection” to God that I had. I knew it was inside me, I just didn't know how it got there. So I’d look for these clues.
Regina, a little older than I was, had a quality of groundedness. She had taken her skill of typing fast, invested cash and made it a business. To people born after the 1960s that might not seem like much, but before Gloria Steinem started Ms. Magazine and the 1970s phase of feminism, most women had few opportunities to develop job skills, and secretarial work, typing, for a lot of us that was it. You see it in the 1940s movies, in The Apartment, all those women with Bacherlor’s Degrees working as typists and secretaries, that's about all a woman could aspire to until the generation that was born of the feminists grew up, went to college, and became professionals.
In my case, after Ms. Magazine came out and the changes started, I became a 26 year old college freshman and graduated just as I turned 30.
The 1980s were a transitional time, and once I lost the job at NASA, I was out on the street, trying to get a foot in any door I could, and all that was open to me anymore was clerical work. Oh, I did take one professional journalism job in L.A. in the eighties. Editor in Chief of ASD AMD Trade News, which involved going to Las Vegas and Atlantic City to sell ad space, as well as journalism work, and well- I soon was fired. After having sex with the boss’ son in Atlantic City and letting some of the venders there take a picture of me topless.
I had no boundaries. Then wondered why I would get fired over and over again.
Okay. Regina. Her name, her demeanor, plus in the weeks I got to know her, she had just met this woman, a fundamentalist Christian from Japan. One night as I helped Regina close the shop, she described how she had felt so lost, like her life had no meaning, then she spent an evening with Pastor Yaya and this guy Ronald. Regina said they were watching an evangelical preacher on TV and she was sitting on the floor. Pastor Yaya and Ronald egged Regina on, “guided” her, and before long she was on the floor, rolling around on the carpet, speaking tongues. When the experience was over, she knew she was a new person, reborn. Now Ronald had moved in with Regina and she started staying after the shop was closed to run off flyers about Pastor Yaya and their ministry on this Kodak copier that Regina had just gone way into debt to purchase for the business.
I was still adopting other persons’ persona at this time in my life.
Before the recovered memory, a thing I used to do all the time was to totally adopt the persona of another person. I’d meet someone and really like the way they dealt with life, and I’d just… become them. I could just take on their feelings, attitudes, it was more than an impersonation, it was me actually adopting other persons’ personalities. Now as a 60 plus year old woman, I realize what I was doing was my own personal PTSD. One of the ways I avoided ever looking at what happened to me was to become another person, and most of the time of my life between age 5 and age 45 I was adopting persona.
It made me a dynamite actress by the way.
So I had taken to adopting Regina’s persona and I'm sure she noticed it, and she probably thought it was part of this rebirthing experience she was having, that a person who was starting to talk act and dress exactly like her was now willing to take over managing her business. So Regina out of the blue offered me the job of managing Studio Typing because she wanted to go do the Work of the Lord now full time with Pastor Yaya and Ronald.
I never did see the picture from the Atlantic City tradeshow, but I'm pretty sure the sudden change in the way I was being treated at ASD AMD Trade News started directly after we came back from the trade show in Atlantic City. It was another case where they never fired me, they just made conditions on the job so bad for me, I had no choice but to quit, same thing that happened at NASA.
*************
So there I was at the counter of Studio Typing Service at 8555 Sunset Boulevard, now that I was manager, it was me who got to take care of the celebrity clients. However, during the time I was going through scripts with the writer-customers, I was able to let what was left of functioning Kay show through, even if it was only in explaining screenplay format and the reasons for putting the pages together in the way that we did.
Since managing this business meant coming in around 7:30 AM and leaving way after dinner hours, the job played in with the Speedy part of my PTSD:
Workaholism.
By filling every hour with business, I had no time to look back on the pain of NASA or to wonder why it happened, even to wonder what happened.
Instead my mouth would grin back on the right side, making a half mouth grin, the exact expression that Regina always displayed when she went over scripts with customers. I’d combine Regina’s counter skills with my intelligence as a one-time NASA news representative, as I explained to the actors how we could keep their resumes updated every time they get a new job. Or defining the purpose of a hyphen in screenplay format, versus a dash, that's when the NASA PAO personality bubbled up, as I’d give this directive on punctuation as much importance as I’d give an answer to a reporter in the Houston newsroom in earlier years.
Always recombining personalities, never really being myself, as a way to avoid looking at who I was and how I got that way.
Until I had a baby and she turned five years old.
Truth is in the 1980s I never brought up my job at NASA, except when Columbia blew up. The astronaut, Judith Resnick who was among the seven who died on Columbia, I used to adopt her personality all the time in the years I was working at LBJ Space Center.
Adopting Resnick's persona didn't help.
Strangest thing is, I never
NEVER
Stopped to look at what happened at NASA.
Until 1992.
I just drank a lot and got jobs that involved 12-14 hour days. Never started to talk about NASA again until I was going to alcoholics anonymous meetings in Eureka, California, in 1992. In the weeks and days before the recovered memory started to come in, when I’d been clean and sober for two years, just before the recovered memory experience, I started obsessing on NASA. What happened there? Why did I lose that job?
**************
Regina rolled around on the carpet in front of the TV set and handed her business over to me, but even as manager, I could not stop the people from Pastor Yaya's Church from showing up after business hours to run off things on the Kodak super copying machine.
In fact, the Yaya's used up so much of our assets that Studio Typing Service soon folded. Pastor Yaya took Ronald and moved on, Regina went back to typing from home, and I found out about the ASD AMD Editor In Chief job from a guy in a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard.
(First draft)
Regina, with a name like Regina, no wonder I felt a need to turn myself into her for a while.
I lived a life where I was always in pursuit of the priest, even before I knew what the priest had done to me. If I hadn't had a baby when I was 40 years old I would have never even remembered what Father Horne did to me, because it was only when my daughter was five years old, and me being a mom I’d had to stop using alcohol and drugs, that I empathized with my five year old daughter and remembered what happened to me at age five. This is not an unusual experience. The thousands of clergy sex crime lawsuits in the last twenty years have proved repressed and recovered memories are real. God only knows how many victims there really have been, children raped by Catholic priests in small towns across America. It’s only by shoestrings, angel hair strands, of luck that I lived to be 45 years old to recover a memory like this.
But looking back, I so can see the compulsions and how they played back in my life, almost like clues my own brain was giving me. Like this period I keep wanting to write about now, when I was running Studio Typing Service at 8555 Sunset Boulevard, in the mid-1980s. These were the years I’d come back to L.A. from Houston, after the extremely debilitating experience of being forced off the staff at NASA LBJ Space Center. They got me out before I had completed three years work there, that was in 1981. But I was still living in Clear Lake City, the area of Houston where you find NASA, two years later. It was 1983 by the time I got back to L.A. I stayed with my family first for a few weeks, in San Clemente, and pretended the Ebelings were some kind of institution, but we're not.
So about a month, maybe six weeks, after leaving Houston, I was living at The Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where The Duke’s had their first restaurant, a rock ‘n roll dive, half my neighbors were gay prostitutes, others in the hotel were their customers. From that famed address and with being a PAO at NASA fresh on my resume I started looking for another job.
Three years and several jobs later I was typing out of my home from this apartment building where I live in West Hollywood. And advertising myself as a freelance publicist, then shirking work. In these years I also developed the fine skills of a barfly. Drinking to blackout was a regular experience for me in the 1980s. People were constantly walking up to me and saying, Hi, Kay, and I would have no memory at all of meeting them, but they must know who I am. I would walk around town looking sober when I was really in a blackout most of the time. It’s a skill I inherited from my dad, and the Irish German ancestors, I guess, being a functioning drunk…
Okay, Regina, even with a name like that, I thought she had some special connection. PING that's one of the “clues,” that compulsion I had from day one to find other people who had this same special “connection” to God that I had. I knew it was inside me, I just didn't know how it got there. So I’d look for these clues.
Regina, a little older than I was, had a quality of groundedness. She had taken her skill of typing fast, invested cash and made it a business. To people born after the 1960s that might not seem like much, but before Gloria Steinem started Ms. Magazine and the 1970s phase of feminism, most women had few opportunities to develop job skills, and secretarial work, typing, for a lot of us that was it. You see it in the 1940s movies, in The Apartment, all those women with Bacherlor’s Degrees working as typists and secretaries, that's about all a woman could aspire to until the generation that was born of the feminists grew up, went to college, and became professionals.
In my case, after Ms. Magazine came out and the changes started, I became a 26 year old college freshman and graduated just as I turned 30.
The 1980s were a transitional time, and once I lost the job at NASA, I was out on the street, trying to get a foot in any door I could, and all that was open to me anymore was clerical work. Oh, I did take one professional journalism job in L.A. in the eighties. Editor in Chief of ASD AMD Trade News, which involved going to Las Vegas and Atlantic City to sell ad space, as well as journalism work, and well- I soon was fired. After having sex with the boss’ son in Atlantic City and letting some of the venders there take a picture of me topless.
I had no boundaries. Then wondered why I would get fired over and over again.
Okay. Regina. Her name, her demeanor, plus in the weeks I got to know her, she had just met this woman, a fundamentalist Christian from Japan. One night as I helped Regina close the shop, she described how she had felt so lost, like her life had no meaning, then she spent an evening with Pastor Yaya and this guy Ronald. Regina said they were watching an evangelical preacher on TV and she was sitting on the floor. Pastor Yaya and Ronald egged Regina on, “guided” her, and before long she was on the floor, rolling around on the carpet, speaking tongues. When the experience was over, she knew she was a new person, reborn. Now Ronald had moved in with Regina and she started staying after the shop was closed to run off flyers about Pastor Yaya and their ministry on this Kodak copier that Regina had just gone way into debt to purchase for the business.
I was still adopting other persons’ persona at this time in my life.
Before the recovered memory, a thing I used to do all the time was to totally adopt the persona of another person. I’d meet someone and really like the way they dealt with life, and I’d just… become them. I could just take on their feelings, attitudes, it was more than an impersonation, it was me actually adopting other persons’ personalities. Now as a 60 plus year old woman, I realize what I was doing was my own personal PTSD. One of the ways I avoided ever looking at what happened to me was to become another person, and most of the time of my life between age 5 and age 45 I was adopting persona.
It made me a dynamite actress by the way.
So I had taken to adopting Regina’s persona and I'm sure she noticed it, and she probably thought it was part of this rebirthing experience she was having, that a person who was starting to talk act and dress exactly like her was now willing to take over managing her business. So Regina out of the blue offered me the job of managing Studio Typing because she wanted to go do the Work of the Lord now full time with Pastor Yaya and Ronald.
I never did see the picture from the Atlantic City tradeshow, but I'm pretty sure the sudden change in the way I was being treated at ASD AMD Trade News started directly after we came back from the trade show in Atlantic City. It was another case where they never fired me, they just made conditions on the job so bad for me, I had no choice but to quit, same thing that happened at NASA.
*************
So there I was at the counter of Studio Typing Service at 8555 Sunset Boulevard, now that I was manager, it was me who got to take care of the celebrity clients. However, during the time I was going through scripts with the writer-customers, I was able to let what was left of functioning Kay show through, even if it was only in explaining screenplay format and the reasons for putting the pages together in the way that we did.
Since managing this business meant coming in around 7:30 AM and leaving way after dinner hours, the job played in with the Speedy part of my PTSD:
Workaholism.
By filling every hour with business, I had no time to look back on the pain of NASA or to wonder why it happened, even to wonder what happened.
Instead my mouth would grin back on the right side, making a half mouth grin, the exact expression that Regina always displayed when she went over scripts with customers. I’d combine Regina’s counter skills with my intelligence as a one-time NASA news representative, as I explained to the actors how we could keep their resumes updated every time they get a new job. Or defining the purpose of a hyphen in screenplay format, versus a dash, that's when the NASA PAO personality bubbled up, as I’d give this directive on punctuation as much importance as I’d give an answer to a reporter in the Houston newsroom in earlier years.
Always recombining personalities, never really being myself, as a way to avoid looking at who I was and how I got that way.
Until I had a baby and she turned five years old.
Truth is in the 1980s I never brought up my job at NASA, except when Columbia blew up. The astronaut, Judith Resnick who was among the seven who died on Columbia, I used to adopt her personality all the time in the years I was working at LBJ Space Center.
Adopting Resnick's persona didn't help.
Strangest thing is, I never
NEVER
Stopped to look at what happened at NASA.
Until 1992.
I just drank a lot and got jobs that involved 12-14 hour days. Never started to talk about NASA again until I was going to alcoholics anonymous meetings in Eureka, California, in 1992. In the weeks and days before the recovered memory started to come in, when I’d been clean and sober for two years, just before the recovered memory experience, I started obsessing on NASA. What happened there? Why did I lose that job?
**************
Regina rolled around on the carpet in front of the TV set and handed her business over to me, but even as manager, I could not stop the people from Pastor Yaya's Church from showing up after business hours to run off things on the Kodak super copying machine.
In fact, the Yaya's used up so much of our assets that Studio Typing Service soon folded. Pastor Yaya took Ronald and moved on, Regina went back to typing from home, and I found out about the ASD AMD Editor In Chief job from a guy in a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
It’s convoluted, like the way the hills along Sunset Boulevard curve into each other, tumble onto themselves. I'm sure if you were watching Earth from up in the sky at some other speed of time, you could see the churning of rolling hills along Sunset Boulevard, especially as you go west towards the Palisades and the coastline. This is not solid rock permanent land.
I live less than a mile from my first apartment on my own. In my life, I’ve lived in Europe, Cleveland, New York City, Dallas Austin and Houston Texas, and still today I'm only a few blocks from my first apartment after leaving home, which was in 1967 near Sunset Boulevard at Echo Park. Then still magnetized to this street through L.A., in the 1980s, I went through this period of doing this being beautiful thing, age mid-thirties, with careful control, anorexia builimia, and exercise obsession.
If I gained three pounds I'd stay home and torture myself with starvation and exercising until the weight came off.
Those years I’d go to these temp agencies that only fill jobs in show business. I didn't realize then that the reason I was getting great jobs through them was that I looked sexy, I really thought they were sending me all over the industry because of my incredible typing skills, plus those years at NASA on my resume always incited conversation.
One job I got through the Friedman Agency in the 1980s, whose offices were in the brand new highrise office building at 9000 Sunset Boulevard, was in the executive offices at Paramount Studios. There I sat from 8AM to 6PM doing NOTHING, I mean literally, reading magazines, books, taking “breaks” to walk around on the lot and then come back.
Then around six PM the executives would all show up, running hyperactively into the offices, and they'd always ask if I minded staying overtime, and I’d get paid overtime for the next two or three hours for getting them coffee and placing phone calls for them, then come back the next morning and snooze through another day.
Okay fast forward to 2005, Lizzie and I have moved into a homeless shelter, the Lighthouse in an old bar and grill building at 5600 Sunset Boulevard. We'd been living in our car for six months, and even though as soon as I have a home I can set up my equipment and return to work, I have to go along with the homeless shelter rules, and go out and apply for jobs.
Digging through the clothing donations, I find a business suit where the jacket almost buttons across my stomach, so it looks okay as long as I wear it open, right?
Wearing my too tight suit and ill fitting panty hose, walking in heeled shoes with feet that haven’t worn anything but sneakers for at least a decade, there I am in the 9000 Sunset Boulevard offices of the Friedman Agency again, just like the 1980s, only now it's an office building with huge "FOR LEASE" signs and empty floors of unleased space.
It’s the strangest thing. I sit in the lobby of the Friedman Agency for a good hour, hour and a half. They never call me in. I’ve taken their tests showing that I know almost nothing about word software. But I got a hundred percent on the Spelling Test.
Nothing
I'm still the same woman who they used to send to Paramount to work in the executive offices.
They left me in the lobby. Other applicants arrived, took tests, went in to be interviewed, left with a packet of time cards, and I still sat waiting.
I’d ridden the Sunset bus all the way up Sunset from the homeless shelter to the 9000 Sunset Boulevard Building, same building.
It was maybe even more than an hour and a half they left me waiting.
Finally, when they realized I was not going to get the message and leave, the owner of the business called me in to his office. I recognized him, but he looked at me like I was a stranger. See he hadn't aged. Men and women west of La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles don't age. They Botox. Their skin is creamy and smooth, even glowing, their bodies toned, as they go through their forties, fifties, even sixties.
So Mr. Friedman looked the same as he did when I was one of his favorite employees in the 1980s. Now I said to him, don't you remember me? You used to send me to Paramount, lots of production companies…
He interrupted me. “How many years ago was that?”
Hmm, Lizzie was born in 1988 and I wasn’t even pregnant yet when I was working for them. I chimed in with a grin, “Oh fifteen, sixteen years ago.”
He stared into my eyes and said with barely hidden meaning: “Sixteen years ago. It was sixteen years ago.”
When I left I insisted they give me one of those packets of time cards I saw other people getting, and he threw one across the desk at me, and turned his back.
They never called me
********
Wearing that same ill-fitting suit, I answered yet another employment ad, riding the bus from the homeless shelter at Sunset Boulevard and Normandie, all the way to Santa Monica, off Wilshire. There a woman spoke to me at a desk, while looking at a computer monitor. In the middle of my answering a question, she interrupted and said, that's okay- you can leave, or something to that effect.
There had been a hidden camera, and the guy who I would have been working for was watching me on a monitor in another room. He rejected me on sight, so the interview ended.
Show biz, Hollywood, it's a tough town.
.
I live less than a mile from my first apartment on my own. In my life, I’ve lived in Europe, Cleveland, New York City, Dallas Austin and Houston Texas, and still today I'm only a few blocks from my first apartment after leaving home, which was in 1967 near Sunset Boulevard at Echo Park. Then still magnetized to this street through L.A., in the 1980s, I went through this period of doing this being beautiful thing, age mid-thirties, with careful control, anorexia builimia, and exercise obsession.
If I gained three pounds I'd stay home and torture myself with starvation and exercising until the weight came off.
Those years I’d go to these temp agencies that only fill jobs in show business. I didn't realize then that the reason I was getting great jobs through them was that I looked sexy, I really thought they were sending me all over the industry because of my incredible typing skills, plus those years at NASA on my resume always incited conversation.
One job I got through the Friedman Agency in the 1980s, whose offices were in the brand new highrise office building at 9000 Sunset Boulevard, was in the executive offices at Paramount Studios. There I sat from 8AM to 6PM doing NOTHING, I mean literally, reading magazines, books, taking “breaks” to walk around on the lot and then come back.
Then around six PM the executives would all show up, running hyperactively into the offices, and they'd always ask if I minded staying overtime, and I’d get paid overtime for the next two or three hours for getting them coffee and placing phone calls for them, then come back the next morning and snooze through another day.
Okay fast forward to 2005, Lizzie and I have moved into a homeless shelter, the Lighthouse in an old bar and grill building at 5600 Sunset Boulevard. We'd been living in our car for six months, and even though as soon as I have a home I can set up my equipment and return to work, I have to go along with the homeless shelter rules, and go out and apply for jobs.
Digging through the clothing donations, I find a business suit where the jacket almost buttons across my stomach, so it looks okay as long as I wear it open, right?
Wearing my too tight suit and ill fitting panty hose, walking in heeled shoes with feet that haven’t worn anything but sneakers for at least a decade, there I am in the 9000 Sunset Boulevard offices of the Friedman Agency again, just like the 1980s, only now it's an office building with huge "FOR LEASE" signs and empty floors of unleased space.
It’s the strangest thing. I sit in the lobby of the Friedman Agency for a good hour, hour and a half. They never call me in. I’ve taken their tests showing that I know almost nothing about word software. But I got a hundred percent on the Spelling Test.
Nothing
I'm still the same woman who they used to send to Paramount to work in the executive offices.
They left me in the lobby. Other applicants arrived, took tests, went in to be interviewed, left with a packet of time cards, and I still sat waiting.
I’d ridden the Sunset bus all the way up Sunset from the homeless shelter to the 9000 Sunset Boulevard Building, same building.
It was maybe even more than an hour and a half they left me waiting.
Finally, when they realized I was not going to get the message and leave, the owner of the business called me in to his office. I recognized him, but he looked at me like I was a stranger. See he hadn't aged. Men and women west of La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles don't age. They Botox. Their skin is creamy and smooth, even glowing, their bodies toned, as they go through their forties, fifties, even sixties.
So Mr. Friedman looked the same as he did when I was one of his favorite employees in the 1980s. Now I said to him, don't you remember me? You used to send me to Paramount, lots of production companies…
He interrupted me. “How many years ago was that?”
Hmm, Lizzie was born in 1988 and I wasn’t even pregnant yet when I was working for them. I chimed in with a grin, “Oh fifteen, sixteen years ago.”
He stared into my eyes and said with barely hidden meaning: “Sixteen years ago. It was sixteen years ago.”
When I left I insisted they give me one of those packets of time cards I saw other people getting, and he threw one across the desk at me, and turned his back.
They never called me
********
Wearing that same ill-fitting suit, I answered yet another employment ad, riding the bus from the homeless shelter at Sunset Boulevard and Normandie, all the way to Santa Monica, off Wilshire. There a woman spoke to me at a desk, while looking at a computer monitor. In the middle of my answering a question, she interrupted and said, that's okay- you can leave, or something to that effect.
There had been a hidden camera, and the guy who I would have been working for was watching me on a monitor in another room. He rejected me on sight, so the interview ended.
Show biz, Hollywood, it's a tough town.
.
From December 20 Post at City of Angels 5:
The reason I had so much trouble in Oregon last summer is the train went right through Mount Shasta. There in my face in all the train car cinemascope windows was a memory I had so stuffed, so prevented myself from confronting, that I didn't even prepare myself before we went through Mt. Shasta.
Then there it was in my face and I relived it all.
Sunset Boulevard is nowhere near Mt. Shasta. The rape by nine Indians who left me for dead is from a 1969 attempt to run away from L.A. to Northern California. I moved myself onto an Indian Reservation. Without any qualms, I'd get up from my bedroom in the morning and bathe naked in the river, I think I knew the guys were watching the little hippie girl. Then one night they got me...
I lived through it.
To be continued...
I always say, that God saw me getting sexualized by a priest when I was five years old, and He knew I was going to have trouble as a result. I've had these angels with me since that time. It's how I lived through all the chaos, several attempted murders on Me, I lived through. Pretended to be dead when the nine Indians raped me up in Mount Shasta until they left.
Lived through it all...
The reason I had so much trouble in Oregon last summer is the train went right through Mount Shasta. There in my face in all the train car cinemascope windows was a memory I had so stuffed, so prevented myself from confronting, that I didn't even prepare myself before we went through Mt. Shasta.
Then there it was in my face and I relived it all.
Sunset Boulevard is nowhere near Mt. Shasta. The rape by nine Indians who left me for dead is from a 1969 attempt to run away from L.A. to Northern California. I moved myself onto an Indian Reservation. Without any qualms, I'd get up from my bedroom in the morning and bathe naked in the river, I think I knew the guys were watching the little hippie girl. Then one night they got me...
I lived through it.
To be continued...
Sunday, December 20, 2009
I used to run Studio Typing Service at 8555 Sunset Boulevard in the 1980s
.
FIrst Draft
People ask me how I ended up with my weird job, transcribing videotapes for reality TV shows. It’s not a job you get by answering an ad in the paper. There are websites where you used to find my job, but even that has stopped.
I started doing this kind of work in the mid-1980s. At 8555 Sunset Boulevard, which is right at the height of West Hollywood, just past La Cienega towards Beverly Hills, still at the top of the hill. A panoply of people ended up in that location, where we had from 5 to 10 Selectric typewriters
Remember the book and movie Wired! about John Belushi, his last days at Chateau Marmont. He and Robin Williams called in typists from Barbara's Place to sit there with them and transcribe down everything they said. Well, Studio Typing used to compete with Barbara's Place, only we had a storefront on Sunset Boulevard.
Writers would come in with manuscripts, typed pages with handwritten notes all over them, arrows and copy and pasted paragraphs, the real copy and paste, using paste, or well, it was the 1980s, using transparent tape.
One writer lived in a house in the hills right above us, and would saunter in wearing her bathrobe, bringing us new pages, replacement pages. Regina, who owned the store, waited on the celebrity customers. She greeted the screenwriter saying, “You didn't have to dress up.”
I lived straight down the hill, on Holloway. In fact, you could hike up an empty lot, there was a path with trash and condoms all over it, trash in the weeds, one of the few places you’d see trash in L.A. back then… anyway, I’d literally climb the hill on the path through the vacant lot, from where I lived on Holloway to Sunset, and 8555 Sunset Boulevard was right across the street at that particular spot. Today it is a strip mall with-
Hmm, I could ride up there later and take a picture of what it is today.
Funny, because when I was running the little script typing and resume business for Regina, as we’d be there late into the night, me and the sprinkling of typists that were there working that week, we’d talk about what a great story you could write about Studio Typing Service, or maybe a TV sitcom. Most of the people who worked for us were the Hollywood 20-something’s you still find in this town today. Moved here from somewhere else, breaking into the business. We had writers actors musicians, they’d come in and type for us, on call, or we’d send scripts home to them where they had Selectric typewriters in their apartments. In fact that's how I started at Studio Typing. I was trying to get jobs as a freelance publicist, needed cash, so I’d type for Studio Typing, first from my studio apartment on Holloway.
Then I worked in the 8555 Sunset Boulevard storefront one day, and when I saw the array of individuals that came into that place, I begged to let me work “in house” and before long, Regina said, Why don't you just run the business for me for a while.
She went off to join a fundamentalist Christian group run by a Japanese lady and this man that Regina was dating. Their church was run out of the Japanese lady’s living room.
Regina got born again by sitting with these two people in the lady’s living room watching a Television evangelist. Regina told me later, she ended up on the floor shaking and twitching and speaking in tongues. Now she just wanted to work for the Lord, so she let me manage Studio Typing. This was 1986 or 1987.
I was so lost. In 1983 I had flown home from Houston, home, ended up in West Hollywood, as the hills and valleys of L.A. are about all the home I really have. I was so lost in those years, having gone from being a PAO in the NASA Newsroom, writing press releases, training to do mission commentary during Spacelab One.
Come 1985 I'm typing from my studio apartment in West Hollywood barely paying rent, still in this sort of state of shock, like what happened at NASA, what did I do? I still, in the 1980s, as I grew into my middle thirties, did not make the connection between the out of control sexuality and losing jobs. I just knew I kept losing jobs, and was trying to find the problem with my work that was causing it. And of course I could never find it, because back then, no one came right out and said, you can’t have sex with everybody in the place and expect to still get any respect, no matter how brainy you are. No one tried to stop me. I just kept making the same mistake over and over again.
So now I was living in West Hollywood, the only city where a person can be as over-sexed as I was, well besides San Francisco and maybe New York City- I was in West Hollywood before it became a city, so there was even more of an anything goes attitude. It wasn’t even incorporated, it was just county land, with million dollar high rises on it.
That's one of the reasons gays and prostitutes and other freaks could just be themselves in that part of L.A., because the strip along LaCienega to Doheny wasn't incorporated. I'm a libertarian and really believe that's the best way to be, in spite of how bad it can get…
Anyway.
Studio Typing. I rediscovered myself as someone who can look good, as I started to run the front counter, there at 8555 Sunset Boulevard, at the beginning of what was once called Sunset Strip. I bought nice clothes, made a good living, felt almost professional again, even if it was a typing service. I don't think I ever even thought about the difference between that job and being a PAO at NASA, at that time I so lived immersed in the PTSD, my form of PTSD, where I went so fast forward, I never stopped to see what a mess I was making, never stopped to look closely. Because I knew if I stopped too long, I wouldn't be able to stand to look at it.
Maybe that's why I was such a fast typist and one of the few persons capable of making a living as a script typist in Hollywood in the 1980s. It was fun. Everyone was creative in Studio Typing on Sunset Boulevard, and towards the end of a long night, we'd hit the Thai-food liquor store in the same lot, joke and type, laugh over the scripts we were typing.
Writers would bring in rewrites and we had our tequniques for retyping and still keeping things in screenplay format, not losing or adding too many pages. We did it with typewriters. Nowadays you pay five hundred dollars for software and it formats your scripts.
In the 1990s when Lizzie and I tumbled back into L.A. like it or not, I found Regina. Oh. I forgot to say. Her business folded because that fundamentalist Christian group was really a con artist and cohorts. They took her for all her money, including the property she had in the business, the Kodak copier that collated and stapled, it was so state of the art.
Studio Typing Service on Sunset Boulevard fell prey to fundamentalist Christian con artists and I got pregnant and moved to Humboldt County to hide from … something, I didn't know why, I just knew I needed to take the baby and hide.
Anyway, we came back in 1998 and I found Regina's colleagues and the same work was still going on, only now it was transcribing raw video that came in for documentary movies and news programs. So I went back to working from home, in the one city in the world where that kind of work can actually be interesting.
I liked the job because I could continue to hide, just in my apartment, now, not in the Redwood forest.
I was able to be a Stepford Single Mom because of this job, and pulled it off for the next few years.
Around 1999, a new kind of job came in, a pilot for a TV show called Survivor, then another job like it came in, this one from a show calling itself The Amazing Race.
We were flabbergasted, as why would they want us to write down everything these people were saying, but that's what they wanted. These new “reality TV shows” wanted us to transcribe everything that was said on this raw video and insert time codes every 30 seconds.
So that's how I segued from a NASA Public Affairs Officer to a script typist to a reality TV show video transcriber.
I’d collate those screenplays or make copies of actors’ resumes using our super duper machine to staple their headshots on the back.
Never stopping long enough to figure out what happened to me until that baby turned five years old, 1993…
**************
Today most transcription for reality shows is done by college students, working as interns for no pay. But I still get plenty of jobs, from the shows that need higher quality, faster, more accurate intelligent transcribing. They pay for me, so I end up now doing-
The documentaries and news shows ...
So with Meals on Wheels as well, I never have to leave my house.
FIrst Draft
People ask me how I ended up with my weird job, transcribing videotapes for reality TV shows. It’s not a job you get by answering an ad in the paper. There are websites where you used to find my job, but even that has stopped.
I started doing this kind of work in the mid-1980s. At 8555 Sunset Boulevard, which is right at the height of West Hollywood, just past La Cienega towards Beverly Hills, still at the top of the hill. A panoply of people ended up in that location, where we had from 5 to 10 Selectric typewriters
Remember the book and movie Wired! about John Belushi, his last days at Chateau Marmont. He and Robin Williams called in typists from Barbara's Place to sit there with them and transcribe down everything they said. Well, Studio Typing used to compete with Barbara's Place, only we had a storefront on Sunset Boulevard.
Writers would come in with manuscripts, typed pages with handwritten notes all over them, arrows and copy and pasted paragraphs, the real copy and paste, using paste, or well, it was the 1980s, using transparent tape.
One writer lived in a house in the hills right above us, and would saunter in wearing her bathrobe, bringing us new pages, replacement pages. Regina, who owned the store, waited on the celebrity customers. She greeted the screenwriter saying, “You didn't have to dress up.”
I lived straight down the hill, on Holloway. In fact, you could hike up an empty lot, there was a path with trash and condoms all over it, trash in the weeds, one of the few places you’d see trash in L.A. back then… anyway, I’d literally climb the hill on the path through the vacant lot, from where I lived on Holloway to Sunset, and 8555 Sunset Boulevard was right across the street at that particular spot. Today it is a strip mall with-
Hmm, I could ride up there later and take a picture of what it is today.
Funny, because when I was running the little script typing and resume business for Regina, as we’d be there late into the night, me and the sprinkling of typists that were there working that week, we’d talk about what a great story you could write about Studio Typing Service, or maybe a TV sitcom. Most of the people who worked for us were the Hollywood 20-something’s you still find in this town today. Moved here from somewhere else, breaking into the business. We had writers actors musicians, they’d come in and type for us, on call, or we’d send scripts home to them where they had Selectric typewriters in their apartments. In fact that's how I started at Studio Typing. I was trying to get jobs as a freelance publicist, needed cash, so I’d type for Studio Typing, first from my studio apartment on Holloway.
Then I worked in the 8555 Sunset Boulevard storefront one day, and when I saw the array of individuals that came into that place, I begged to let me work “in house” and before long, Regina said, Why don't you just run the business for me for a while.
She went off to join a fundamentalist Christian group run by a Japanese lady and this man that Regina was dating. Their church was run out of the Japanese lady’s living room.
Regina got born again by sitting with these two people in the lady’s living room watching a Television evangelist. Regina told me later, she ended up on the floor shaking and twitching and speaking in tongues. Now she just wanted to work for the Lord, so she let me manage Studio Typing. This was 1986 or 1987.
I was so lost. In 1983 I had flown home from Houston, home, ended up in West Hollywood, as the hills and valleys of L.A. are about all the home I really have. I was so lost in those years, having gone from being a PAO in the NASA Newsroom, writing press releases, training to do mission commentary during Spacelab One.
Come 1985 I'm typing from my studio apartment in West Hollywood barely paying rent, still in this sort of state of shock, like what happened at NASA, what did I do? I still, in the 1980s, as I grew into my middle thirties, did not make the connection between the out of control sexuality and losing jobs. I just knew I kept losing jobs, and was trying to find the problem with my work that was causing it. And of course I could never find it, because back then, no one came right out and said, you can’t have sex with everybody in the place and expect to still get any respect, no matter how brainy you are. No one tried to stop me. I just kept making the same mistake over and over again.
So now I was living in West Hollywood, the only city where a person can be as over-sexed as I was, well besides San Francisco and maybe New York City- I was in West Hollywood before it became a city, so there was even more of an anything goes attitude. It wasn’t even incorporated, it was just county land, with million dollar high rises on it.
That's one of the reasons gays and prostitutes and other freaks could just be themselves in that part of L.A., because the strip along LaCienega to Doheny wasn't incorporated. I'm a libertarian and really believe that's the best way to be, in spite of how bad it can get…
Anyway.
Studio Typing. I rediscovered myself as someone who can look good, as I started to run the front counter, there at 8555 Sunset Boulevard, at the beginning of what was once called Sunset Strip. I bought nice clothes, made a good living, felt almost professional again, even if it was a typing service. I don't think I ever even thought about the difference between that job and being a PAO at NASA, at that time I so lived immersed in the PTSD, my form of PTSD, where I went so fast forward, I never stopped to see what a mess I was making, never stopped to look closely. Because I knew if I stopped too long, I wouldn't be able to stand to look at it.
Maybe that's why I was such a fast typist and one of the few persons capable of making a living as a script typist in Hollywood in the 1980s. It was fun. Everyone was creative in Studio Typing on Sunset Boulevard, and towards the end of a long night, we'd hit the Thai-food liquor store in the same lot, joke and type, laugh over the scripts we were typing.
Writers would bring in rewrites and we had our tequniques for retyping and still keeping things in screenplay format, not losing or adding too many pages. We did it with typewriters. Nowadays you pay five hundred dollars for software and it formats your scripts.
In the 1990s when Lizzie and I tumbled back into L.A. like it or not, I found Regina. Oh. I forgot to say. Her business folded because that fundamentalist Christian group was really a con artist and cohorts. They took her for all her money, including the property she had in the business, the Kodak copier that collated and stapled, it was so state of the art.
Studio Typing Service on Sunset Boulevard fell prey to fundamentalist Christian con artists and I got pregnant and moved to Humboldt County to hide from … something, I didn't know why, I just knew I needed to take the baby and hide.
Anyway, we came back in 1998 and I found Regina's colleagues and the same work was still going on, only now it was transcribing raw video that came in for documentary movies and news programs. So I went back to working from home, in the one city in the world where that kind of work can actually be interesting.
I liked the job because I could continue to hide, just in my apartment, now, not in the Redwood forest.
I was able to be a Stepford Single Mom because of this job, and pulled it off for the next few years.
Around 1999, a new kind of job came in, a pilot for a TV show called Survivor, then another job like it came in, this one from a show calling itself The Amazing Race.
We were flabbergasted, as why would they want us to write down everything these people were saying, but that's what they wanted. These new “reality TV shows” wanted us to transcribe everything that was said on this raw video and insert time codes every 30 seconds.
So that's how I segued from a NASA Public Affairs Officer to a script typist to a reality TV show video transcriber.
I’d collate those screenplays or make copies of actors’ resumes using our super duper machine to staple their headshots on the back.
Never stopping long enough to figure out what happened to me until that baby turned five years old, 1993…
**************
Today most transcription for reality shows is done by college students, working as interns for no pay. But I still get plenty of jobs, from the shows that need higher quality, faster, more accurate intelligent transcribing. They pay for me, so I end up now doing-
The documentaries and news shows ...
So with Meals on Wheels as well, I never have to leave my house.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Once again I'm up too early to call anybody, even people on the East Coast.
.
It’s not as easy as it sounds, making yourself stop thinking about pedophile priests for one month. I still, as a journalist, have to at least go to Abuse Tracker a couple times a day to keep up. I’ve got a file of notes for stories when CofA starts back up in January, and it's already ten pages long.
It’s not just the subject matter, priests raping children, it’s the residual effects.
Without meaning to, without even realizing it happened, I turned into this non stop angry person. No matter what the topic, bring it up with me, I’ll start hollering at you about it. And since it’s 2009 in East Hollywood, it’s not hard to find a topic to holler about anyway.
But I bet even if I was on a terrace overlooking some island paradise, I’d still be irritated. I’ve read in a couple of the lawsuit documents, one of the damages so many pedophile priest victims experience is: “Inability to enjoy life,” or “Inability to feel pleasure.” I guess I'm not the only one with this problem. Wish I’d noticed it sooner, or all those people who have stopped calling me would still be calling me, well maybe not. I don't know if you can easily get rid of a character trait like that, when it seems to be so ingrained.
Why shouldn't I be happy in our crappy little home? It’s like that birds in the trees Scripture: They have all the peckings they need. I think it's in the New Testament.
Hmm, that doesn't fly in L.A. You can’t even say that God provides water for all the plants anymore. You should see the thirsty dying palm trees that were planted decades back along Sunset Boulevard.
***********
Religion would probably be a good business to get into right now, since people get religious when they run out of money. At age 61, I’ve watched it happen now for a few economic cycles, and I know it's true. People find God when they don't have anything else to fall back on. And He does get them through it.
*************
Okay there’s this buzz in the “survivor community” to stop giving money to the Church. I assume this means you will still go to the Church every Sunday and stay for their after service Donuts and Coffee. You will be putting your body heat in their air conditioned building, drinking their wine, eating their Eucharist wafers.
It’s dishonest to go to a Church and not give it money. It’s like … how do I explain this.
My Catholic friends tell me that withholding donations is the best activism about pedophile priests you will get from Catholics, they'll never leave their churches. Some call it brainwashing, I don't think that's the right word for it.
A few years back I was on this anti-depressant medicine, and since I used to be an Advanced Hatha Yoga teacher back in the 1970s, I have this sensitivity, I can feel things going on in my body… it’s hard to explain and I’m getting off topic.
After being on this psychotropic, provided by L.A. County public health, I remember the feeling, and it did indeed control my mood. It was like a steel grip, a vice, was at the top of my brain and then steel-like tentacles reached out from the vice and just held
HELD TIGHT
Parts of my brain were held in place, with a steel-fisted grip.
I got on the pills because Lizzie and I were living at Hope Again’s shelter for homeless women at the time. Nowadays, if you are in a shelter like that, they insist you go get on medication, I mean, I didn't need medication. I was depressed because we’d been living in our car for six months, and well, my dad was murdered in 1997 and the woman also embezzled his money, so I lost my inheritance to a murderer and was living on the street 8 years later. Yeah I was a little depressed.
I bring all this up now because as I observe people stuck-
STUCK
-in that religion so bad that they don't want to give it another dime, but they'll still file in and go into a mesmerized state of prayer there at least once a week, I see that and I think of that vice like grip the Imipramine (don't think that was the drug but it came to mind) had on me.
A Steel Vice-Like Grip
It looks a lot like a zip file, when you download several documents at once into your Word folders, then go to open them, the icon will look like this vice like grip, with steel-looking tentacles wrapped around and protecting the openings to what's inside the documents.
The steel grip of Catholicism is like a zip file in their brains. Turn the icon in your computer sideways, put it on top of your head, that's what it feels like to be on anti-deperessants when you really don't need them, and it’s much the same as the grip the Church has on people who think the best way to protest against child sex abuse in the church is to stop donating to the church.
You're still walking in the church doors, you're still giving them power in numbers by your presence, you're still listening to their mind altering even hypnotizing, often untrue, sermons they preach, and then there’s that mesmerizing group prayer they do, everyone repeating the same words in a droning monotone.
Yeah, maybe Ray and Jim and Bill and Dave are all correct.
It is brainwashing, only it's a year 1300 state of the art form of brainwashing.
IT'S Dishonest to Go to a Church and then not put money in its baskets.
You're eating their Eucharist, breathing their air conditioned air
AND
Asking the bishops to resign, or asking the pope to fire the bishops, doesn't really accomplish much either.
Those out of work bishops will not stand in any welfare office lines, they will still never drive east of La Cienega or the equivalent in whatever city they're in. Worse yet, some Catholic person with a lot of money who doesn't like the poor will instead provide the out of work bishop with a home, a stipend, a couple of servants, a car. On a beach probably in some perfect climate.
The bishops belong in prison.
The church needs to feel the full brunt of people not coming in its doors anymore. It’s an organization so full of dishonesty and filth going back probably more than a thousand years, if that's where you think you're going to find God, my hat is off to you, my friend. Good luck.
********
Love is the answer.
I realized it this morning, when I found yet another pile of dishes that I didn't have anything to do with, but yet, I get to wash them, the joys of living with a post adolescent with arrested development.
See what I mean. Bitch bitch bitch.
I have to work on that.
The love has to come from inside of you. Truth is, I get a certain pleasure out of washing dishes.
It’s almost a meditation.
The act of soaking a dish, carefully removing each dried on piece, rubbing the surface, feeling the surface, in every place to see that it’s totally clean, rinsing it, careful not to waste water as it’s L.A. The whole act, everything you do, is a meditation, can be done in a state of perfection.
So don’t yell about the dirty dishes, embrace them.
************
On that note, I'm off to work on Scream Queens season 2 all weekend this weekend. We will be swamped with work, two shows are dumping all their tapes on us on December 23rd and want them transcribed by the following Monday morning. I will be working 12-hour shifts every day, will maybe spend 2 hours doing Christmas, when Lizzie and I go to I-Hop for dinner.
The one on Sunset Boulevard, where all the musicians used to go, it will be fun.
Point is, we don't really do Christmas. We have a winter tree in the house that we've decorated. Lizzie, being in the low-price retail world, is so busy she has no time to even realize we're supposed to be depressed because we're all alone every Christmas. It’s all she’s ever experienced. She’s never had the joy of a holiday with the family, where the vodka breaks open at 9 AM and everyone is yelling at each other by noon.
When she was a kid, I did Santa as best I could, finally got tired of it and on one Christmas morning as she was going on and on about how much she loved Santa because he did all this for her, I shouted, it was me, dammit there is no Santa. I did it. I bought all these toys. Stop thanking this imaginary person and thank me, I'm the one who earned the money and then spent it on you.
She was stunned, shattered, still berates me about it to this day.
Hey, even a Stepford Single Mom can make mistakes.
She still stayed with me, even age 15 when we lived in our car on the streets of Hollywood for six months, and we never parked more than a few blocks from Sunset Boulevard the whole time. Hmm.
But imagine that, I lived in a car with a 15 year old daughter and we both lived through it. We didn't claw each other to death. Plus neitherh of us dropped into the prostitution life, which is so easily encountered all around us, she stayed with me.
We stayed together through all that.
So we can make it through another holiday season.
.
It’s not as easy as it sounds, making yourself stop thinking about pedophile priests for one month. I still, as a journalist, have to at least go to Abuse Tracker a couple times a day to keep up. I’ve got a file of notes for stories when CofA starts back up in January, and it's already ten pages long.
It’s not just the subject matter, priests raping children, it’s the residual effects.
Without meaning to, without even realizing it happened, I turned into this non stop angry person. No matter what the topic, bring it up with me, I’ll start hollering at you about it. And since it’s 2009 in East Hollywood, it’s not hard to find a topic to holler about anyway.
But I bet even if I was on a terrace overlooking some island paradise, I’d still be irritated. I’ve read in a couple of the lawsuit documents, one of the damages so many pedophile priest victims experience is: “Inability to enjoy life,” or “Inability to feel pleasure.” I guess I'm not the only one with this problem. Wish I’d noticed it sooner, or all those people who have stopped calling me would still be calling me, well maybe not. I don't know if you can easily get rid of a character trait like that, when it seems to be so ingrained.
Why shouldn't I be happy in our crappy little home? It’s like that birds in the trees Scripture: They have all the peckings they need. I think it's in the New Testament.
Why do you worry about things, don't you see the birds have all the seeds they need, the plants the water to grow.
Hmm, that doesn't fly in L.A. You can’t even say that God provides water for all the plants anymore. You should see the thirsty dying palm trees that were planted decades back along Sunset Boulevard.
***********
Religion would probably be a good business to get into right now, since people get religious when they run out of money. At age 61, I’ve watched it happen now for a few economic cycles, and I know it's true. People find God when they don't have anything else to fall back on. And He does get them through it.
*************
Okay there’s this buzz in the “survivor community” to stop giving money to the Church. I assume this means you will still go to the Church every Sunday and stay for their after service Donuts and Coffee. You will be putting your body heat in their air conditioned building, drinking their wine, eating their Eucharist wafers.
It’s dishonest to go to a Church and not give it money. It’s like … how do I explain this.
My Catholic friends tell me that withholding donations is the best activism about pedophile priests you will get from Catholics, they'll never leave their churches. Some call it brainwashing, I don't think that's the right word for it.
A few years back I was on this anti-depressant medicine, and since I used to be an Advanced Hatha Yoga teacher back in the 1970s, I have this sensitivity, I can feel things going on in my body… it’s hard to explain and I’m getting off topic.
After being on this psychotropic, provided by L.A. County public health, I remember the feeling, and it did indeed control my mood. It was like a steel grip, a vice, was at the top of my brain and then steel-like tentacles reached out from the vice and just held
HELD TIGHT
Parts of my brain were held in place, with a steel-fisted grip.
I got on the pills because Lizzie and I were living at Hope Again’s shelter for homeless women at the time. Nowadays, if you are in a shelter like that, they insist you go get on medication, I mean, I didn't need medication. I was depressed because we’d been living in our car for six months, and well, my dad was murdered in 1997 and the woman also embezzled his money, so I lost my inheritance to a murderer and was living on the street 8 years later. Yeah I was a little depressed.
I bring all this up now because as I observe people stuck-
STUCK
-in that religion so bad that they don't want to give it another dime, but they'll still file in and go into a mesmerized state of prayer there at least once a week, I see that and I think of that vice like grip the Imipramine (don't think that was the drug but it came to mind) had on me.
A Steel Vice-Like Grip
It looks a lot like a zip file, when you download several documents at once into your Word folders, then go to open them, the icon will look like this vice like grip, with steel-looking tentacles wrapped around and protecting the openings to what's inside the documents.
The steel grip of Catholicism is like a zip file in their brains. Turn the icon in your computer sideways, put it on top of your head, that's what it feels like to be on anti-deperessants when you really don't need them, and it’s much the same as the grip the Church has on people who think the best way to protest against child sex abuse in the church is to stop donating to the church.
You're still walking in the church doors, you're still giving them power in numbers by your presence, you're still listening to their mind altering even hypnotizing, often untrue, sermons they preach, and then there’s that mesmerizing group prayer they do, everyone repeating the same words in a droning monotone.
Yeah, maybe Ray and Jim and Bill and Dave are all correct.
It is brainwashing, only it's a year 1300 state of the art form of brainwashing.
IT'S Dishonest to Go to a Church and then not put money in its baskets.
You're eating their Eucharist, breathing their air conditioned air
AND
Asking the bishops to resign, or asking the pope to fire the bishops, doesn't really accomplish much either.
Those out of work bishops will not stand in any welfare office lines, they will still never drive east of La Cienega or the equivalent in whatever city they're in. Worse yet, some Catholic person with a lot of money who doesn't like the poor will instead provide the out of work bishop with a home, a stipend, a couple of servants, a car. On a beach probably in some perfect climate.
The bishops belong in prison.
The church needs to feel the full brunt of people not coming in its doors anymore. It’s an organization so full of dishonesty and filth going back probably more than a thousand years, if that's where you think you're going to find God, my hat is off to you, my friend. Good luck.
********
Love is the answer.
I realized it this morning, when I found yet another pile of dishes that I didn't have anything to do with, but yet, I get to wash them, the joys of living with a post adolescent with arrested development.
See what I mean. Bitch bitch bitch.
I have to work on that.
The love has to come from inside of you. Truth is, I get a certain pleasure out of washing dishes.
It’s almost a meditation.
The act of soaking a dish, carefully removing each dried on piece, rubbing the surface, feeling the surface, in every place to see that it’s totally clean, rinsing it, careful not to waste water as it’s L.A. The whole act, everything you do, is a meditation, can be done in a state of perfection.
So don’t yell about the dirty dishes, embrace them.
************
On that note, I'm off to work on Scream Queens season 2 all weekend this weekend. We will be swamped with work, two shows are dumping all their tapes on us on December 23rd and want them transcribed by the following Monday morning. I will be working 12-hour shifts every day, will maybe spend 2 hours doing Christmas, when Lizzie and I go to I-Hop for dinner.
The one on Sunset Boulevard, where all the musicians used to go, it will be fun.
Point is, we don't really do Christmas. We have a winter tree in the house that we've decorated. Lizzie, being in the low-price retail world, is so busy she has no time to even realize we're supposed to be depressed because we're all alone every Christmas. It’s all she’s ever experienced. She’s never had the joy of a holiday with the family, where the vodka breaks open at 9 AM and everyone is yelling at each other by noon.
When she was a kid, I did Santa as best I could, finally got tired of it and on one Christmas morning as she was going on and on about how much she loved Santa because he did all this for her, I shouted, it was me, dammit there is no Santa. I did it. I bought all these toys. Stop thanking this imaginary person and thank me, I'm the one who earned the money and then spent it on you.
She was stunned, shattered, still berates me about it to this day.
Hey, even a Stepford Single Mom can make mistakes.
She still stayed with me, even age 15 when we lived in our car on the streets of Hollywood for six months, and we never parked more than a few blocks from Sunset Boulevard the whole time. Hmm.
But imagine that, I lived in a car with a 15 year old daughter and we both lived through it. We didn't claw each other to death. Plus neitherh of us dropped into the prostitution life, which is so easily encountered all around us, she stayed with me.
We stayed together through all that.
So we can make it through another holiday season.
.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
In the middle of doing my job, I want to write these paragraphs that stream in my head
.
You wouldn't believe the temptation to make this story about sex. Boy, could I exploit the hell out of my life by just getting explicit with the sex scenes. But that's never been what it's been about. I mean, even in the middle of all the promiscuity, I never sold it once, it was never about "tricks" in fact- because the person putting the compulsion in me at age five was a priest, I always thought there was something spiritual about it. Like, we are orgasming our way to God... No. But- damn, so many pedophiles use that word "special" you're "special" when they are preparing their targets... When a priest says it to you...
Anyway, I thought having sex with me was some kind of gateway for a man, and it was my job to get to men in important places, and have sex with them, so they would go through this gateway and continue their important work from this new plateau.
Honest, little pudgy often STD ridden me thought I had that kind of power...
You wouldn't believe the temptation to make this story about sex. Boy, could I exploit the hell out of my life by just getting explicit with the sex scenes. But that's never been what it's been about. I mean, even in the middle of all the promiscuity, I never sold it once, it was never about "tricks" in fact- because the person putting the compulsion in me at age five was a priest, I always thought there was something spiritual about it. Like, we are orgasming our way to God... No. But- damn, so many pedophiles use that word "special" you're "special" when they are preparing their targets... When a priest says it to you...
Anyway, I thought having sex with me was some kind of gateway for a man, and it was my job to get to men in important places, and have sex with them, so they would go through this gateway and continue their important work from this new plateau.
Honest, little pudgy often STD ridden me thought I had that kind of power...
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Cool. NASA is seeking planets like ours in distant space
.
Totally off topic, but cool...
Looking beyond our solar system, astronomers are gearing up to reveal the initial findings from NASA's Kepler mission next month. Kepler is aimed at determining how many stars in a patch of sky have planets circling around them. Within three years, scientists hope to be able to detect Earth-size planets in the "habitable zones" around alien stars
Totally off topic, but cool...
Looking beyond our solar system, astronomers are gearing up to reveal the initial findings from NASA's Kepler mission next month. Kepler is aimed at determining how many stars in a patch of sky have planets circling around them. Within three years, scientists hope to be able to detect Earth-size planets in the "habitable zones" around alien stars
I was already a borderline wretch, then created this situation, this great job I do from home, which creates incredible isolation, which makes me more wretched.
This job where I am showered with work, literally showered, I download it off production company websites, they shower work into my computer.
Then I'm strapped electronically at home here, seventh day in a row today with 10-12 hours of work. This is because come Christmas everything will shut down and I will have no work at all. So it's not like I can plan a vacation with the extra money, I will just be here those two weeks, in Hollywood off Sunset Boulevard, trying not to spend a dime.
That's my holiday...
Okay, I have been this wretch now for way too long.
There has to be something celebratory about this. Yes, for about a week and a half the streets around here are eerily empty during holidays. So many people in L.A. are from somewhere else, the city slows down to a stop over Christmas, it's walk down the middle of the street on Sunset Boulevard on a Thursday afternoon during rush hour, in the middle of the street, there will be NO CARS.
Okay, that's something to be grateful for.
And when so many people in America are unemployed, I'm swamped with jobs.
Reality TV, a thriving industry right now...
Expect to see Omarosa seduced by seven hot black men as she selects her soul mate for The Ultimate Merger. That's the kind of stuff I have to keep my head in ten to twelve hours a day right now.
I'd rather be writing about pedophile priests...
I'm so lucky I can cram three weeks work into one so the network executives can take a trip over Christmas. Today it's a Discovery Health Channel show called Accidental Fortunes that I'm working on, a new show about what happens to people when they get sudden wealth, like finding a treasure in their backyard, or buying a painting for fifty cents at a flea market that turns out to be worth six hundred thousand dollars.
Sigh
This job where I am showered with work, literally showered, I download it off production company websites, they shower work into my computer.
Then I'm strapped electronically at home here, seventh day in a row today with 10-12 hours of work. This is because come Christmas everything will shut down and I will have no work at all. So it's not like I can plan a vacation with the extra money, I will just be here those two weeks, in Hollywood off Sunset Boulevard, trying not to spend a dime.
That's my holiday...
Okay, I have been this wretch now for way too long.
There has to be something celebratory about this. Yes, for about a week and a half the streets around here are eerily empty during holidays. So many people in L.A. are from somewhere else, the city slows down to a stop over Christmas, it's walk down the middle of the street on Sunset Boulevard on a Thursday afternoon during rush hour, in the middle of the street, there will be NO CARS.
Okay, that's something to be grateful for.
And when so many people in America are unemployed, I'm swamped with jobs.
Reality TV, a thriving industry right now...
Expect to see Omarosa seduced by seven hot black men as she selects her soul mate for The Ultimate Merger. That's the kind of stuff I have to keep my head in ten to twelve hours a day right now.
I'd rather be writing about pedophile priests...
I'm so lucky I can cram three weeks work into one so the network executives can take a trip over Christmas. Today it's a Discovery Health Channel show called Accidental Fortunes that I'm working on, a new show about what happens to people when they get sudden wealth, like finding a treasure in their backyard, or buying a painting for fifty cents at a flea market that turns out to be worth six hundred thousand dollars.
Sigh
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