Go West, Young Woman

San Francisco in the 80s

During the rest of the weekend, I obsessively reviewed what I’d worn to work. I took out all my clothes and tried to eliminate anything that was overly feminine or revealing. But my clothes were not the problem. There was nothing to suggest sexual availability. For the second time in my life, I had failed to keep a man from sexually abusing me; a man that I knew, a man that I thought respected me. I hated myself even more than usual. On Saturday afternoon I went to the package store and bought several bottles of wine. I spent that night drinking.

I went to work on Monday morning and he stuck his head in my office as if nothing had happened. “Hey,” he said. “Whaddya think about bloody marys for lunch?”
I looked up from the orders. “I know your home address and I’m going to tell your wife what you did to me.”
He looked surprised. “C’mon,” he said. “Didn’t you enjoy yourself?”
I stood up and put my shaking hands behind me. “You are a terrible person,” I said. “I thought you were my friend and instead you’re a sleazy bastard. Get out! “

I slammed the door and called a friend who lived in Brooklyn whom I had met in acting class. After I told him what happened there was a long silence.
Finally, he spoke. “You’ve been raped,” he said. “That’s a rape, Molly. You need to call the police.”

It was extraordinary how good it felt just to have someone name what had been done to me. I didn’t care about Doug anymore. I just needed someone to see me. I wouldn’t call the police but at least I understood why I hurt so much. After that night, I decided I would get a satisfactory evaluation and then I would quit. My trust in anyone at work was gone. Alison had moved to New York so I was living alone. I had no idea what I should do next. As far as acting was concerned, as long as I worked for the phone company, it wasn’t possible to take it seriously. I fell asleep in my acting classes and found the transition between climbing telephone poles and trying to say lines with any conviction too challenging.

The work had changed me. In New Jersey it was the law that a gas station attendant would pump your gas. You sat in your car, the guy pumped your gas, then you paid him and drove away. But now I was acutely aware of making contact, showing gratitude to someone who washed my windshield, noticed toll takers, people who were working outside in the cold or the heat, people who stood outside in the rain while the rest of the world stayed dry. This awareness made for awkward moments with my wealthy, educated friends. I noticed how often they failed to be nice to waiters, the way they threw money at cab drivers, failed to say “thank you,” and acted unaware of the labor performed.

When I was little I was shopping with my Mom at an A&P one day. Our cashier was very pregnant. They need to get you a stool,” my mother said.
She smiled and shrugged.
“Where’s the manager,” my mother said.
People were behind us with groceries. I was mortified. “Mom,” I said. “She’s okay.”
“She is not okay,” my mother said. She marched over to the mysterious place where the managers hid and told the man behind the curtain to give the pregnant woman a stool. A stool was produced.
“Thank you,” the woman said to my mother. “I didn’t think anyone cared.”
“They don’t,” my mother said. “But I do.”

She had always been like that. Not a Disney mom but a mom who could break the neck of an injured bird rather than watch it suffer. A mom who put up with lesser architects asking her to make coffee for the sake of having a job. A mom who made sure our cleaning lady sat down and ate lunch and that her children were getting help with being admitted to college. My mother believed in justice and equity. Now I understood how hard it must have been for her to enter a man’s world when she was so young and so attractive. I thought about all the times I’d complained about her not showing up at school with baked goods and how rarely I’d shown pride in her accomplishments.

Leaving Las Vegas came out in 1995 when I was over ten years sober, but the film ‘s graphic depiction of unchecked alcoholism was so close to the bone that I felt sick watching it. In the movie, Nicolas Cage plays a screenwriter who decides, after his wife and child leave, to commit suicide by drinking himself to death. It’s horrifying and, I believe, incomprehensible for those who have a healthy relationship with alcohol. But as I sat in the darkened theater watching Elisabeth Shue’s performance as a beaten-down prostitute, I completely understood the character’s decision to annihilate himself.

San Francisco marked my attempt to finally embrace the darkness, to step into the abyss I’d circled for so many years. Up until then I was still following the rules that protected me from becoming “one of those people”: I went to work, I didn’t drink before noon, I exercised, I stayed relatively thin, I didn’t drink the day after a bad night. Alison used to point out the incongruity of my finishing off a bottle of wine while boiling roots, those vegetables I had been raised on, rutabaga, turnip and squash, an odd diet for a drunk. For all the years I had been consuming too much booze, I took dance classes, went running, and constantly read spiritual books. But I was close to the very bottom and San Francisco finished the descent.

After I resigned from the telephone company my boss called me into the office and administered an exit interview. I avoided being overly negative, although I mentioned sexual harassment had made for a hostile work environment. “Look,” he said, “Those other girls aren’t getting harassed because they’re butt-ugly. I know that and you know that but I couldn’t say that.”
“But it’s not fair.”
My boss shrugged. “You get to be pretty and they get to do their job. Isn’t that fair?”
“No,” I said. “It’s not fair at all. What if I was Black?”
He chuckled. “Then we’d have a problem, wouldn’t we?”

My gang insisted on giving me a party at the local dive where they drank. I had always refused to join them there after work on Fridays because it was dangerous to relax around them in case I revealed anything too personal. But now I was a free woman. I got very drunk and danced on the bar with Antonio who was a good enough dancer to make it seem like I could salsa. I was completely indiscreet except I said nothing about Doug. Leaving New Jersey Bell was like getting let out of prison. I had been getting up at five o’clock in the morning for two years, working a ten-hour day and never allowing anyone I worked with to know me. Moving to San Francisco was the result of my Trinity friends’ decision to live there for the summer.

Gabrielle, a girl named Cherry, and Alex, Cherry’s roommate, had signed up with an agency that provided drive-away cars. Basically, they took a car from New York to San Francisco and delivered it to its owner. Considering Gabrielle was legally blind because of a rare eye disease, Cherry didn’t drive at all, and Alex had no license, it seemed like a terrible plan. Still, they made it. Driving over concrete barriers in numerous supermarkets, sinking the car into mud up to its fenders, being wooed by three Mormon brothers who dragged the car out and took the three Irish girls’ home to their mothers, and finally having someone attempt to steal it as they asked directions outside of Oakland, did not keep them from handing the keys over to the owner who took one look and burst into tears.

The girls arrived to stay with me having managed to lose the majority of their traveling money playing three-card monte in Port Authority before they caught the bus to Hoboken. “How could you be so stupid?” I said, looking at their stricken faces. “Those games are fixed. It’s like the Tinker kids begging on Ha’Penny Bridge whose parents are drinking in the pub.”
“We didn’t know,” Gabrielle said. “When Cherry started to lose we just put in more money.”
I tried to persuade them to rename Cherry but they refused. She was, in fact, a born-again virgin who clutched a Bible and quoted scripture. Ten years later she would become an infamous lesbian writer of erotic fiction.

Several weeks after the girls reached the West Coast, Gabrielle called and said they’d found a sublet in Berkeley and I quit my job, bought a yellow Volkswagen Beetle and prepared to drive cross-country. My parents kept quiet. I think they were stunned by my success at New Jersey Bell but also worried that I would continue to work at something that was so far from my real passion. I drove alone staying at a succession of cheap hotels, each one cheaper than the next, until I checked into one just outside of Tucumcari, New Mexico that cost $8.50 and had a child who looked about twelve behind the desk who roller skated me to my room without an adult appearing to ascertain all was well.
“Are you helping out your parents?” I asked her as she handed me the key and prepared to roll away.
“Check-outs at eleven,” she said, executing an impressive twirl and disappearing around the corner.

The sky was vast with stars so shiny and sharp-edged they resembled childhood cutouts. I had never seen such an endless horizon. When I came over the hill after crossing the border into New Mexico I lost my breath and suddenly saw how small I was in my Volkswagen, puttering towards the unknown, nothing containing that sky, no buildings or trees to create a border, all of it open. I felt very alone but strangely unafraid. The trucks on the highway came so close to my room the walls shuddered and the lights flared so it felt for a moment as if my bed lay in the highway. I tried not to question my decision to leave my job and to move so far away. I wanted to love someone besides Catherine and my parents. I felt disconnected and unmoored. My father had recently nicknamed me “The Bolter” after a character that was constantly running away in a Maria Edgeworth novel.

Despite the drinking and the drama, until I moved to San Francisco I still believed in happiness and that most people were good. But California brought a sea change in me. I let go of my own deep sense of self, that wild child my sister saw as perfect, and there was a period of darkness so complete it seemed permanent. During the time I spent in California I lost my way completely. There were mornings that I curled up in a ball and tried to get the courage to tell someone I was in trouble and needed help. But I was afraid to ask in case no one answered. It felt dangerous to tell the truth, more dangerous than the sordid, sad way I was living my life. I had been brought up to doubt authority, to expect disappointment, to absorb criticism, and ignore pain. I had learned the lesson too well.

The years I lived in San Francisco coincided with the first diagnosis of Kaposi sarcoma on April 9, 1981. People were already dying mysteriously in New York, dying after intense illnesses that had no name. My sister’s neighbors, a long-term gay couple, were suddenly ill and then hospitalized and then died within months of one another. In 1978, Supervisor Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. In May of 1979 there were riots all over the city after White was given the lightest possible sentence with the defense that he was a junk food addict who lived on Twinkies. There was an air of desperation in San Francisco during those years. It seemed like everyone drank to excess and snorted cocaine. At three o’clock in the morning the fern bars were filled with people who had professional jobs, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and people who worked for the city. No one, it seemed, had a family or any fear of death. But the jackals were circling just outside the light. People seemed desperate to alter their consciousness but not with anything healthy like meditation.

I was hired as a cocktail waitress at a bar on Fisherman’s Wharf called Alioto’s Hofbraus House. One side was a bar, the other side a German restaurant. The job gave me membership in the restaurant and hotel union that provided a decent hourly wage in addition to tips and medical coverage, which was excellent in California. But it was a dump. The owner was an exiled member of the Alioto family, a son so degenerate his family had given him this place to run as a private club where he could drink and take drugs without getting into trouble. I was educated and protected by the bartenders, one a barrel-chested Irish man who constantly reminded me not to lose my “bank” which was the money I used to provide change to customers, the other an intense, angry Salvadorian who kept his wife and daughter locked up in a house in San Jose while constantly hitting on the women in the bar.

My first boyfriend, a good-looking druggie from Fisherman’s Wharf, dropped acid every day before he went to work. I knew there were children somewhere who ate breakfast and went to school. But the only children I ever saw were the ones brought to Alioto’s by their divorced fathers who should have known better than to bring a kid to a place where adults were losing hope, wasting their lives and killing themselves with booze. I refused to serve some of these dads past a certain point and told them to take their kid bowling or to a movie, anywhere but the dark and smoky room where I worked. Their kids understood things were bad. I saw it in their eyes even the really little ones who tried to cheer up their depressed daddies by drinking soda pop and playing with bar accessories. I wanted to take these kids aside and say, “Listen, it’s not your fault your father is so sad. You didn’t make him like this.”

In the open front window sat Johan, Holocaust survivor, alcoholic, brilliant accordion player dressed in Lederhosen, fueled on Spaten beer, the tourists delight. Johan played Lady of Spain, New York, New York, Somewhere, and other tourist favorites for hours, sitting on a chair in the open window, occasionally putting down the accordion and roaring for a Spaten or for me to kiss him because he loved me. Johan didn’t love me but his son, Johan junior did. Johan junior was seventeen and drank as much if not more than his father. He lived with his mother and father in a house in Tiburon, all three of them constantly drunk, a house paid for by Alioto so Johan was always in debt. I saw the tattoo on his inner arm one night when he passed out next to me at three o’clock in the morning. The Irish bartender nodded and sighed. “His whole family was wiped out,” he said. “All of them were taken but him.”

I partied with the Irish girls and various people we picked up on the streets of Berkeley but then they returned to school and Dublin while I remained, pretending to find an acting studio but really unraveling, drinking every night, taking drugs, and sleeping with men I would never have slept with in the past. The life I was living was shameful and stupid.

I found a large room in Pacific Heights in a beautiful apartment owned by a sex therapist named Orlof. He wore caftans and had strange friends he met at Esalen. I’d get back from work, stoned and exhausted and there would be a bunch of these middle-aged sex therapists in caftans in the living room having some heavy discussion about orgasms or tantric positions. I’d try to avoid them but Orlof would call out and so I’d stick my head inside and they’d ask me questions but I felt like they wanted me to join their orgy. Possibly they were just being kind but I had stopped trusting anyone since working in the bar. The LSD guy crushed pennies on Fisherman’s Wharf for a living and took me to a sex club called the Sutro Bath House after we dropped acid and snorted a gram of cocaine. I detached from my body and witnessed all sorts of behavior that would send me straight to hell. Parts of myself were starting to detach and simply disappear. I no longer believed in love or honor. I no longer believed in anything good. And then I met the drug dealer. I had broken up with the penny crusher after taking acid with him three days in a row. That Saturday night I was scheduled to leave work at midnight but suddenly a tanker that had docked off the wharf discharged its crew of Swedish sailors and the bar was jammed with blonde men speaking with funny accents demanding Dortmunder, which sounded like “dwarf mother,” and calling me “Baby.”

photo by Ragnar Vorel

The penny crusher split, leaving me to cope with hundreds of customers tripping my brains out. He returned at three o’clock in the morning in time for us to drop another hit. That morning, I drove my Volkswagen Beetle into what turned out to be the San Francisco Marathon. I was going so slowly the walkers were passing us but a mounted cop pulled me over, looked at my driver’s license and my company, suggested the penny smasher leave and then handed me back my license.
“I want you to follow me, Mary Ellen Moynahan, and not hit any of these marathon idiots. Then I want you to drive home and put yourself to bed. Get rid of that guy. He’s bad news.” He looked straight into my eyes. “Go back to New Jersey,” he said. “This city isn’t safe for girls like you.”

The drug dealer was an acquaintance of my boss. Not a friend, my boss didn’t have any friends, but in fact, his drug dealer. He had come into the bar before and tipped me $50, or a $100, for each drink I served him. He’d asked me out, I’d refused, he’d asked me questions that I didn’t answer, he’d asked me out to dinner and I’d said “no.”  Sometimes he came in and sat alone at a table reading and watching me work. He had a nice face. He looked like someone who did something like teach or maybe something connected to music, but he didn’t do anything but sell drugs, lots and lots of drugs, cocaine mainly. He had clients with yachts who anchored off the Wharf and ordered up their cruising drugs. He had clients that were movie stars and sports figures and politicians and just plain old rich people.

One Sunday afternoon in late September it was cold and foggy, the bar was empty, but the bartender wouldn’t let me go home. I sat at a table with a mug of tea and studied my lines for a scene from Betrayal. I had finally started taking acting lessons in a studio in the Haight. I was severely homesick and very lonely. Disappearing was hard. You still had to deal with people, people that didn’t know you and didn’t care whether you were okay. I was tired of Orlaf and his weirdness, I was tired of living and afraid of the alternative.

The drug dealer sat down at my table. “What are you reading?” he asked.
“A play,” I said. “Pinter.”
He whistled like he was impressed.
“Do you know Pinter?”
“Sure. English. Harold. Famous for pauses and miserable women.”
I looked up. “Right. Except the women aren’t exactly miserable. They’re complicated.”
“Like you?”
“I’m not complicated,” I said. “I’m just unfriendly.”
“You’re complicated and miserable,” he said. “Give me your hand.”
“Go away,” I said. “Go sit at the bar. He’ll take care of you.”
“I want to take care of you,” the drug dealer said. “Give me your hand.”
I wish I could claim that I didn’t give him my hand but that would be a lie. I gave him my hand and he held it. My hand was cold. His was warm and surprisingly soft.
“Ahem,” the Irish bartender was standing over us looking annoyed. “Let go of my cocktail waitress,” he said. “She has a customer.”
“I’m a customer,” the drug dealer said, handing the bartender a $100 bill without letting go of my hand.

I shook off his hand, picked up a tray, and went over to where a couple sat who were clearly from out of town. They were wearing matching blue windbreakers, which made me think about my parents and their matching coats in Dublin. I missed them.
“I would like a Spanish coffee,” the woman said. “What is that?”
“Kahlúa, coffee, brandy, and whipped cream,” I said.
“Make that two,” the man said. He handed me a dollar. “And that’s for you,” he said.

When I went back to get my book, the drug dealer was gone. There were five $100 bills inside my script with a flattened rose.
“Stay away from him,” the bartender said after he made my coffees.
“Why?” I said, picking up my tray. “He’s a great tipper.”
“Bosses’ orders.”
I made a face.
“He’s dangerous. He carries a gun.”
“Maybe I have a gun,” I said. “Maybe I have a Luger in my backpack.”
The bartender snorted.

I gave the tourists their coffee and they requested a tune. I walked over to Johan and shook him gently.
“They’d like you to play I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” I said.
“Fucking idiots,” Johan said.
“You want a coffee?”
“Yes. With a shot. Molly?”
“Yes?”
“Stay away from him. He’s involved with bad people.”
“Maybe I’m bad people,” I said.
Johan touched my cheek. “No, girl. You are good. I know bad people and I know good ones and you are one of the good ones. You’re a nice girl. Sweet.”
”I’m going to hell,” I said.
Johan shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

There is nothing in the world that attracts me more than being told to stay away. I went home and dreamed about the drug dealer. We were getting married and I was wearing a white, A-line mini dress like Twiggy with great-looking white boots. Everything came from Biba. In fact, I was eleven and we were living off of Abby Road again. I woke up giggling.

The boss was sitting in the bar when I arrived. He was glaring with such intensity it seemed like he was in actual physical pain. “Come here,” he said as I walked in. I sat down across from him and tried to look scared. He was pathetic but he liked scaring people. “Should I fire you?” he asked me.
“Maybe,” I said. “I’m not a very good waitress.”
“No, no.” He waved his arms around. He was very drunk and it was eleven o’clock on a Monday morning.
“Did I do something wrong?”
He nodded. “You were fraternizing with a customer.”
“I was?”
“Yes. A customer who is not to be fraternized with.” He waved his arms around some more. “Do you understand?”

The door swung open and the drug dealer came in. He looked well-rested and cheerful. My boss jumped to his feet. “Hey there,” the drug dealer said. And then he kissed me lightly. Like a husband. “Don’t hurt me,” my boss said to him, cowering against the bar.

The drug dealer took my boss into the back office and I went into the restaurant and started to marry the condiments. I’m sure this is a practice forbidden by the Board of Health but it saves on replacing half-empty jars of things. Basically, you combined ketchups, mustards, and steak sauces so you had a single full bottle. It was a mindless, almost enjoyable duty like breaking the ends off string beans or putting things into alphabetical order. Your mind went blank and you simply existed.

The drug dealer came out of the office alone.
“Did you kill him?” I said.
The drug dealer shook his head. “He snorted five lines and then passed out. He’s all fucked up. Anyway, we can go out now.”
I put down the ketchup and glared at the drug dealer. “Excuse me?”
“He won’t fire you.”
“So what? I’m not like a used car and you just got the title, fuckhead.”
The drug dealer looked puzzled but then he smiled. “Oh,” he said. “I guess I need to woo you.” He pulled a plastic flower out of the table arrangement and held it out. “Will you have dinner with me?”
“No,” I said. “I’m off men.”
“Really,” he said. “For how long?”
“A month. Don’t come here for a month and then ask me out again.”
“A week.”
“Two weeks.”
“Ten days.” He threw the flower at me. “Final offer.”
“Okay.”

I always liked deadlines. If I wanted to lose weight in a vague sort of way I usually gained a little but if I had to fit into a dress or play a role that required skinniness, the weight came off. The world was less chaotic and open-ended with due dates. Of course, anticipation was usually sweeter than the actual event. During the days of the drug dealer’s exile, I started a self-improvement regime. Instead of staying after my shift ended to drink free booze I went straight home and read or wrote. I started to run again and realized how gorgeous San Francisco was and how lucky I had been to find my apartment in Pacific Heights even if my roommate was creepy. I wish I could have done these things without the impending date but it still made me feel better.

Ten days later he showed up at eight o’clock, ready to take me out to dinner. Johan junior was filling in for his father who had a cold. Johan junior did not want me to date the drug dealer. He seemed to think I was an innocent from the sticks of New Jersey and did not know what I was getting into. “You shouldn’t hang out with him,” he said. “The guys a serious criminal.”

Serious criminals are good at covering their tracks. The drug dealer kept his business away from me during the early weeks when we dated. We had dinner, we saw movies, and we spent the night in fancy hotels because he lived someplace other then San Francisco. I didn’t realize he had either threatened or bribed most of the people around me not to reveal his secrets. The drug dealer had many secrets. Some of these secrets were small and harmless and others were things I should have known so I did not become close to him. I became close to him. He was smart and he read books and newspapers and liked music and movies. He seemed healthy which is probably a gauge at how tenuous my grasp on reality was. He did not work. He had no known address, he sold drugs and he had tons of cash always at the ready, thousands and thousands of dollars and yes, he had guns. There was a gun in the glove compartment, which I discovered searching for a pen while he was doing something illegal.

One evening we took a powerboat out to a huge yacht, a beautiful boat that belonged to an Iranian businessman. The drug dealer did not expect to have to make this trip which was why I was included. “Look,” he said, “I don’t trust these people. Just stay close to me.”

But that turned out to be impossible. He disappeared into the back of the boat and a handsome man offered to give me a tour. We went below and he opened the doors, I glimpsed bedrooms with sumptuous bedding, silk swags and all sorts of fancy televisions and stereo systems. As we approached yet another door I felt his hand on the small of my back. He shoved me forward and then into the room. It was pitch black. I fell down backwards on a bed with him on top of me. I screamed until his hand came over my mouth and his mouth sank into my neck. He was very strong, I felt my shirt being ripped off my back and then the door burst open, and the drug dealer was standing there in the light holding his gun like James Bond. “Let her go,” the drug dealer said.
“Fine.” My would-be rapist let go of me and stood up. “I thought she was part of the deal,” he said.
“No,” the drug dealer said. “She’s not.” We went back upstairs and got into the boat. The drug dealer gave me his jacket. “I’m sorry,” he said.
I stayed quiet. During the time I had the strangers’ hands on my body I had gone numb. I couldn’t hear or feel anything. For a moment I’d thought I had a stroke.
“I care about you,” the drug dealer said.
It was Halloween. We were supposed to go to a huge party at a hotel downtown. I could not imagine being around people wearing costumes or around people at all.
“I want to go home,” I said.

And that would have been that except it wasn’t quite. First the drug dealer went to Hawaii and then I realized I was pregnant. I wasn’t going to tell him, but he called just after I had the confirming blood test and I didn’t have time to absorb the information properly. “Don’t get an abortion,” he said.
“I have to,” I said. “I can’t have a baby.”
“I love you,” he said. “I’ll take care of you both.”
“When are you coming back?” I asked.
“Soon,” he said. “Just wait.”

I waited. He called every other day and promised he was coming back by the end of that week. At the end of November, he was still in Hawaii. Except he wasn’t. He was in San Jose with his wife and their six-year-old. I found this out from the Spanish bartender who lived in San Jose. His wife was a friend of the drug dealer’s wife. Their kids went to the same school.

When he called the next day, I told him I was getting an abortion. He said he didn’t love his wife and wanted to get a divorce and marry me. “Who told you?” he asked.
“Nobody,” I said.
“Give me another week,” he said. “I’ll straighten things out.”

I gave him another week and then another. It was mid-December and I was pregnant. I called Kaiser Permanente and scheduled an appointment. When I told him he begged me to let him take me there. It was December 22 and I told my mother I wasn’t coming back for Christmas. I said I would get fired if I took off and that I was spending Christmas with friends.

I stood on the corner of California and Webster, but he did not show up. The cab driver dropped me at the hospital, I lied to the intake person and swore someone would be there to take me home. On the gurney, a nurse held my hand. I cried until I fell asleep and then woke up behind a curtain. It was nearly Christmas so they let me go home alone. I went to the Thai restaurant near my house and ordered soup and a bottle of white wine. A little Thai boy handed me a candy cane and I scared him by hugging him.
“I’m sorry,” I said to his smiling mother.
“No, no,” she said, patting me softly with her small hand. “He should learn that people love him.” And then she saw I was crying and she whispered, “Jesus loves you, too.” But I didn’t think so.

Several weeks after New Year’s Johan put down his accordion, sat next to me and said, “What’s the matter? Why are you so sad?”
“I don’t like winter,” I said.
He put his head down on the counter and closed his eyes. After a while the Irish bartender told me to wake him up. But he was dead. A week after the funeral, Johan junior picked up his father’s accordion and started to play. It was time to go home.

—Molly Moynahan