I’ve been digging through photo albums looking for a joyful memory of my Mom that I can look at because I want to remember her happy. Not only will “It will never be okay that our mothers are dead” (Dear Sugar # 67: The Black Arc of it). I never want to forget her.

Samoa Sunset Moms House

One of the albums was from the 70’s called “Baby’s Milestone’s: Birth to Seven Years” and it contained illustrations of squiggly babies and blank lines for writing underneath pictures that were expected to be taped in place. Mom had a fastidious propensity to organize.

She taped, cut and pasted and she even wound a creepy lock of my dishwater blonde hair on a page titled “first haircut.”  She wrote notes in her dedicated, secretarial handwriting. She recorded my weight, measurements and shots that took place at 3, 6, 9, months old and so on until she put the album away about twelve months in and stopped recording.

It was time to hire a babysitter and get back to work. She was a paralegal and an active in at least three women’s organizations. I’ve often wondered if she grew up in a different era and place, if she would’ve preferred to live on a ranch with horses and a butch girlfriend in a cowboy hat and spurs than be strapped down with kids and a career in our dinky California town.

According to my mother’s meticulous records, I was born sneaky.

It’s there, on my six months page: ”She is very sneaky.” In addition to that character trait which followed me well into the dark alleys of adulthood, my first word, at six months,was: “Dada.”  Evidently, I squealed with delight whenever my Dad came into the room.

On the same page, she claimed, I didn’t cry much, even when she most expected me to, like at the Doctor or on trips. I am not much of a crier. By six months old, I was a trooper, prepared for an emotional showdown. I’m uncomfortable with my own and other people’s vulnerability, but that’s beside the point.

Let the record show: sneakiness is in my DNA.

What was I trying to sneak at six months old? My stuffed Miss Piggy? What was out of reach that I wanted so badly I had to attempt to fool my Mom in order to get it? What was she withholding?

I wondered if I refused to say “Mama” because I was angry that she was busy withholding whatever the thing was that I was sneaking. More likely it was because we were so merged that I thought we were one person. I needed her to breathe.

Nonetheless, I was a sneaky little fuck and I said “Dada” much earlier than “Mama.” It would be three long months before I would ever say it. Nine months old was the first time I said it, to be exact.  My Dad was up at 5:30a.m. and off to his office to work every day, all day. I didn’t want him to leave without me. Maybe my rushing-at-him “Dada” was an attempt to get him to stay.

At six months, Mom acknowledged that I disliked being slapped and later at nine months wrote that I “cried very loudly when I was slapped” What child doesn’t cry when slapped? This was fifties throwback discipline, carried into the seventies and parents were vexed: were their children friends to smoke pot with or free labor to discipline with corporal punishment the way their parents had done? I didn’t know my role.

Mom kept my wrinkled report cards from Kindergarten, first and second grades from the private catholic school I attended, shoved in between the pages of the photo album with my gross baby hair spilling out everywhere. The bulk of my education was singing songs about the blood of Christ. The thing was, we weren’t even catholic. We sporadically attended a shabby brown, old, First Baptist Church where I went to bible school and made wobbly structures out of Popsicle sticks and glue.

The report cards made me sad. The reoccurring theme was my low self-worth and my refusal to grasp mathematical concepts. These qualities also soared with me into adulthood like a mosquito. “Needs encouragement,” one nun said. “Needs to gain in self-confidence and learn her math facts.”

When Mom was dying, she asked me to come home and look through photo albums with her, but by the time I got home, she was completely out of it on morphine so it didn’t happen.

In these albums are pictures of a Hawaiian vacation when I’m about twelve: my brusque, grinning grandfather who was a beekeeper, canner and plumber, hammered a coconut in the tropical sun until it split open.  My svelte hunk of a big brother lived in Hawaii at the time and worked as a cook.  Years later, he’d be hooked on drugs and spend most of his adult life in prison or living out of a van with his infant.  He’d been happy while in Hawaii and so we visited him: my aunts, uncles and my pretty, valedictorian, cheerleading cousins.

In a lawn chair, Mom looked tanned and carefree, less than two years after her horrid divorce, happily married to her blue collar Burt Reynolds double. I’m struck by her geography: her shapely face and skin, her straight teeth and regal nose. We look alike: our long arms and slim hands. In the photos, we tan the same deep brown way, our Irish pale skin eclipsed by our Algonquin Indian gold skin. We found the ocean relaxing. She was never sick.

In the photograph, there’s a pig being roasted in the ground and we stood shoulder to shoulder with matching profiles but our insides were completely different. I smiled to conceal what was going on inside me. She smiled when things were going well. She yelled on an intercom when she was angry. We were a family of yellers.

It was difficult to be a separate person, especially after the divorce. It was absolutely necessary for me to side with her, in order to be loved. Any positive experience I had with my Dad, post-divorce was an absolute betrayal. She ran interference when he wanted time with me, and time with me was scarce.  Visits were tense. I couldn’t be myself with my Dad, everything about me was wrong.  Dad’s new wife’s mission to ensure her daughter’s place in the family was secured. They had a lock down on my Dad.

Filled with a lonesome furry, I stole stuff from retail stores and ruined people’s marriages  I made a scene and left messes. I rejected both my parents and ran away.

I wished my Mom’s hatred for my Dad hadn’t mangled her insides and made her ugly, but it did. She had my loyalty, but this type of loyalty felt like bees in my stomach. There were jealous rages and screaming fights well into my thirties. She demanded to know where I was going; exactly what I was doing with my Dad and when I would be coming to her house. It was her way of protecting me. She didn’t want me to hurt, the way that she was hurt.

It was never a competition. I loved her more than anyone. I also loved my Dad.

Here is the photograph. The joyful memory: I am twelve years old and in Hawaii with my Mom and the whole family. My Mom is beautiful and tan and lounges on a chair reading all day with a visor on her head and big black sunglasses.

Her shapely, toned legs are strong. I want to be as smart and pretty as she is. I have a friend with me and when the adults are inside the house drinking, we discuss sneaking out of the house my parents rented on Kauai. My plot is to meet a local blonde surfer guy, that I flirted with earlier that day on the beach and make out with him. I sneak out alone and am surprised to find him, sitting on a rock under stars in bare feet. His blonde hair goes silver in the moonlight.  The night is quiet and warm. I don’t know how old the boy is. I kiss him for a long time but I don’t know what comes next so I get scared and run barefoot back inside the house where my whole family is sleeping.

In the Hawaii pictures I look exactly like my Mom except there’s something else in my smile and I know she’s right: I was born a sneak.

I’m telling our secrets because I don’t need to keep them anymore and you’re gone. Your secrets had to do with your father. You wanted his love more than anything. You wanted his approval in the worst way, but he taught you how to shoot up as a kid and sold you out of a van for dope. You contracted Hep C.  You became a lesbian, photographer and a paralegal. Your skin covered in phrases and words in permanent black ink: “Heartbreaker.” “Another Day in Paradise.” “Hell Bent.” “Heaven Sent,” “Die Pretty.”

Dead Man's Hand Ascending Staircase

You never wore the same shoes twice. They were fancy too and when we went shopping you sweated and rushed around. You had a beautiful body. You hated your body. I hated mine. We had this in common.

My secrets had to do with my father and being rejected, abandoned, replaced, unwanted. Chasing the love of someone who’s not there. Packing my bags and waiting for him to come and when he did (if he did) there were too many obstacles and I was too much trouble. He had a new life and I was an imposter. We couldn’t find a common language and no matter how I packaged myself to him, he found a way to discard me. I went without. Took my hustle elsewhere. When you’re a kid, you adapt to your circumstances. In this way I was classically trained to be a stripper.

Sex work was my secret place to be. It was my fuck you. It was my reckless act of despair. It was my I don’t need you. I could feel desired and paid, walk away unscathed. Pay my bills and be self- supporting and alone. There were clubs where I could be in the dark and weigh my options, sit on my hands and not get high.  I could collect cash and expose the most hidden parts of myself and this made me desirable. Today’s another story. Fifteen years sober and I still hide out in clubs. I’m a seasoned hustler who wants to get out, but I haven’t done everything possible to make that happen, including finish this book. My covers are pulled in another way now.

In lonesome Los Angeles, after work, I’d drive the brown Nova to see a middle aged couple in the valley.  The husband, Fred, smelled like burnt cheese and talked in quiet, calm voice. He wanted me to get his wife off for two hours and I did. I brought toys and made her ejaculate on a pile of beige towels. He was in the background. The wife was a slim, tan blonde in Victoria Secret catalogue teddy’s and she got drunk and kept her eyes closed. There were bathroom breaks and they’d smoke pot. I’d watch the clock in the bathroom because there was no visible clock in the room with the fireplace and the toys.

I called you in case the Nova broke down, so someone knew where I was. This was years ago. I lied to my boyfriend, who I was living with, but you knew my secret. Driving up the canyon to see the couple was like watching myself from the ceiling.

Satine and The Oracle of All Things Blue and Whimsical

I was afraid of being abandoned, and resented Ian for not abandoning me. He was a blues musician at his core and he needed to play guitar. I didn’t want him to see the sordid places I went, worry about me or feel guilty. I wanted to take myself away, because as much as I loved Ian, and I did love Ian,

I knew love wasn’t enough. I need to be inspired, moved and churned. I needed to be challenged and fucked and held.

Little by little, I took myself away until my feelings cooled off. It gets easier to lie, not harder. The guilty, lonesome part of me needed him to be there but wanted him gone, like packing your bags and your ride never comes because you never told them to come in the first place.

You were brain dead when I got to the hospital, and I held your puffy warm hand.  Friends tweezed your eyebrows and painted your toes. Your father found you too late. You had gone to his place, wanting his approval, his love and his trust and he wanted you to get high with him. You’d been clean for a while. “You’re worthless,” he said to you. “Here’s some cash, go get us some dope,” he’d said.  Your girlfriend loved you and shut off your phone. She was full of ghosts and suffering. Her last girlfriend died many years ago.

I had just seen you a couple months ago at my reading at The Traveler’s Bookstore in Hollywood. You started a vegan bakery from home so I bought a couple dozen of your cupcakes and you borrowed my running shoes so you could work out at the gym, and we wore the same size. You were staying in town for the day. You were happy, slender, vibrant and in love. You talked about your girlfriend and mentioned getting pregnant. I wasn’t eating sugar at the time. “You have to try them. I made them,” you’d said. I wish I had now.

Adult Baby Sucking Thumb at Mardi Gras 2011

Years ago, we did sex work together; not in the same room. You gave me some of your clients back when I needed work and couldn’t put up any pictures on the Internet because I was in a serious relationship and was hiding.

It was our time of secrets.  I wanted to protect him from the grimy parts of myself no one could possibly love. I didn’t want to hurt him but I did. I shut him out, closed him off. His long patient silences frustrated me.

The sweaty money was shoved in pockets. I came and went. I put gas in the car. I went to class. I learned that a comma goes inside the quotation marks. I learned that I had trouble staying in a difficult moment in scene on the page. I left too quickly. I read Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel and Milan Kundera. I learned that I needed to vary my sentence structure.

Years ago, when I still lived with Ian, You got me the job at the law firm. You were a paralegal. I was a receptionist. When you relapsed, you turned grey, like a hurricane with tattoo’d cleavage that passed by my desk. You went back and forth from the bathroom to your office.  I walked by and found you sitting at your desk, eyes panicked.

“You’ve been to the bathroom four times in the last hour,” I said. “Not that I’m counting.”

“I know. I think I have a bladder infection,” you said. There were droplets of blood on your chest.

Later than week, you called me and asked if you could come over. Your wife had kicked you out.

“Yeah. Of course,” I said. You arrived frantic, jumping out of your skin. I was chasing a boyfriend around town, picked him up from a bar and spent the night at his house.

By the time I got home in the morning, your sponsor was in my hallway, wrestling a needle out of your hand in the bathroom. You checked into a rehab, it was one of a dozen or more you’d try. You’d hook up in rehab with junkies and druggies and get kicked out for having sex. One was a young guy, twenty years old. You moved him in and went on a run, shooting speedballs.  He OD’d and fell into a coma on your kitchen floor and was left there a long time.  The family sent him across the country to be with them. I don’t know if he ever came out of the coma. According to you, his family forgave you. I never met him, but I saw his wrinkled trench coat on a hook on the back of your door.

On our lunch breaks, before you relapsed at the law firm, we went for walks every day at noon and laughed and complained about our lovers and spooned vanilla frozen yoghurt from Styrofoam cups and I felt happy we there together for a while, filling our mouths with sugar.

Some Foxy Krewe of Guys we Ran into by Lexie Montgomery

I was on a crammed flight to New Orleans with a head cold and twelve bucks in my checking account. T mobile threatened to shut my phone off in twenty-four hours without a two-hundred dollar payment so I went to my happy place: New Orleans to squeeze out the last week of Mardi Gras.

Satine's Leg

The phone lines are clogged like the streets, which are crammed with marching bands and thousands of drunks in funny hats and sparkly beads. Things like getting coffee and laundry detergent are impossible the last week of Mardi Gras. Getting to the quarter and onto bourbon to work at the Bruiser is an ordeal.  Working out at a gym is as much effort as the workout itself. I’ve learned to surrender to the crowd. Fall into its arms, clutch my wallet and be carried to work with a smile on my face.

Dead Man's Hand followed by Lambchop Krewe

Mardi Gras is much more than bead tossing and drunk fuckheads barfing off balconies. The pageantry of Mardi Gras is rumored to have started in the late 1600’s.  Church and local government bodies tried to ban it repeatedly but the parades and floats just got larger and more elaborate. It couldn’t be stopped and it was good for the post Civil War economy.

What began as a bunch of businessmen making a mockery of politics (Krewe de Momus named for the Greek God of mockery) and a plot to entertain governing officials, various Dukes and Duchesses in silly outfits expanded to a party for all ages and classes who all took to the streets with marching bands and costumes by 1743.

African American poor laborers in 1909 gave birth to their own Krewe of Zulu in 1909, a parody of the Krewe of Rex (from the Rex Deus: Latin for “King God”) which was made up of high falutin businessmen who crown an actual Mardi Gras King.

Then came the life of Zulu: an elaborate and prized parade which kicks of Mardi Gras early in the morning on Fat Tuesday. It’s considered very fortunate to catch their fancy throw of painted coconuts instead of beads. Zulu proceeds Skeletons, which involves a krewe parading through the streets, knocking on doors in full skeleton makeup. They bang on the door and beckon citizens to come out, a lively and anxiety producing wake up call. The best way to see skeletons is to wake up at sunrise and ride your bike to the poor neighborhood cultural center in the Treme.

The art of absurdity and mockery are alive and well today. Mardi Gras may have a gloved grip on debutante culture referencing the fashion and mannerisms of the late 1600’s and 1700’s revelry. There are crowns, petticoats and wigs, but in 2011, they’re reworked and twisted: think Marie Antoinette with lights in her wig that also contains a ship or birdcage with stuffed bird inside. There are bustles for days, elaborate parasols with slogans that refer to current politics like “F-U BP,” a group of green military creatures with vacuum cleaners and rotary phones. They’re painted green to waggle a finger at BP’s oil spill fiasco. There were various animal casualties referenced: costumes of injured and dead birds.  A drag queen held a sign that said “Public Masturbation is God’s Handiwork” a flick in the face of the religious activists who hold giant crosses and yell bible quotes from megaphones on Bourbon Street during the festivities. There were also scads of black swans to be had, choreographing their mock ballet.

Hot Friends Sexing it Up Mardis Gras Style

The names of the floats refer to Roman and Greek Gods and Goddesses-also referenced in silly and convoluted ways. Bacchus (Greek for “God of Wine”) becomes “box of wine” which became “grapes” which turned into “fruit of the loom” and became “fruit of the womb.” Puns and other word play have a firm legacy in Mardi Gras.

I’ve heard the bloodline is fixed: Folks who participate in Bacchus, Hermes or Orpheus are born into it and ride for life, as do their offspring.

Speaking of elite, I worked a private party for a bunch of Hermes guys for the second year in a row. Hermes (not the designer): the messenger God and God of persuasion and of commerce, not surprisingly consisted of blue blood attorneys who opted out of having their picture taken with me, a topless stripper, on a balcony for reasons of public and private concerns.

The day of the Hermes party was gray and misty in the quarter. It was held up steep stairs above a margarita shop. There were cold cuts, tits and several hundred dollars to be had. I kept my cell phone on after all.

Ménage des tois numero uno:  I’ve packed my beautiful black and red strap on and several paddles and hoods for my own playtime with a friend and his girlfriend, a burlesque dancer and single Mom with pierced nipples, jet black hair and giant green eyes. The date began at One Eyed Jacks in a smoky room with a horn section and lots of clown makeup and ended in an apartment where we pretzelled for hours. Like all great sex, there were awkward and shy seconds collected like the red glitter on her lips, later embedded into my scalp. Hours spent in the arms of new bodies entangled until I collapsed then slept on the couch for a couple hours only to be jolted awake to Miriachi music.

By the time I write this, I’ll be on Royal Street where I’ve foraged for Wifi, and the rain will pour down causing flash floods and cancelled parades. Then the sun will emerge, like new.  It’s warmer than last year, but still gloomy, muggy and dark. When I landed it was a cloudless 70 degrees. There will be a hurricane warning and postponed parades, but New Orleans is predictably unpredictable and the weather is immaterial. The party goes on.

I will have left my dead friend behind in Los Angeles and the weight of her recent memorial. Grief will be clouded by dancing and laughter. J was my first close friend to OD and die, a great photographer and beautiful woman. I will have thrown a small piece of paper with her name on it into the Mississippi River at the end of St Anne’s parade. It’s hard to say goodbye. It is.