I was smashing barbie heads together, so I alerted her, and she took me home that day for four years...

She turned her whole body—not just her head— to confront the blind-spot behind her on La Cienega to switch lanes. Her bird head searched. She was a dancer, not by trade but by breathing—and there was no way she could have seen this coming. Honking, cursing, getting sexy and excited about an opening, she had a world, simply, as we all do, which I saw as structural. She was driving through a universe in her own world, that’s a frame, she had a focus. She knew abuse happened out there, but she never thought it could enter her world. Making a right onto my street, the song spilled out her windows.

“And you never met her before?” I asked, in the shade.

“No, never.”

A ball sliced across the court. We had popped out like a couple of moons off the frosted table in the scorching sun. “She never met me didn’t know me at all.”

“No clue,” she hit that clue, “who I was.” She tapped her temple, like my mother was even stupid.  “No clue,” she even had to laugh, the stork that snatched a baby back.

Angelica Leibowitz pulled up to a bright white box, getting down and dirty in her fire engine red Cadillac to music, still. She turned off the stereo at the very last second. Putting on her trusty Beverly Hills Tennis Cap and carrying the verse out of her door in her angel voice, she was the stork coming to snatch a baby back with legs shaped by the Gods coming out of a short tennis skirt. She shut the car door in clean white sneaks. She held, in her hands, more keys than St. Peter because everybody gave her their spare key. Her red sweater had a photograph of her grandkids on it. VOVO was written in ALL-CAPS or “grandma.” She was 46, had her first child when she was nineteen. Her calves sculpted, her superhuman stems approached my white condo with hanging black lanterns in Ladera Heights, also known as “The Black Beverly Hills,” according to Frank Ocean. Or, as I call it: the kingdom of Magic Johnson. This is where “the wicked witch of the west” was lurking, my mother, Dr. J. The layers, of this story.

As I did indeed reopen these years to write a little story about it, which irrevocably changed my life, she said that. She said she’d never met my mother, but her husband’s best friend asked her if she could pick up his tax return on her way home. I interviewed him. One of Dr. J’s lovers I would find out. Her husband filed his taxes with Dr. J. People might send their accountant paperwork, but it was 1989, so that required a visit.

What about the fear though? Angelica didn’t know if her husband might have slept with Dr. J. I remember that. She looked off. I gave her the space at the frosted glass table closest to the game. Player one bounced the ball, prepared for the serve.

Angelita flipped out to squeaking sneakers all over this terracotta patio that my mother threw herself on “every man,” which she delivered to me with demonic brows even, coming over the table, down low, and sometimes she was wide-eyed, at me, “Maria, every man.” We both knew. The sound of the sneaks, the location, it all sounded Grimm.  

“That’s true, right?” I needed support, evidently, in believing my mother was real, too, so I was talking to Angelica because she was the only person I knew who interacted with this woman. “Every man,” she said. Her giant Diet Coke fizzed beside her head as big as her head. She took a refreshing sip. She had never seen anything like it.

“She slept with her clients upstairs!” My father exclaimed to me more than once, when we argued about his responsibility in all this. The idiocy of this man, my father, continues to astound me, as I recently came to wake up to all this. His ridiculous outbursts about her sleeping with all these men upstairs, in his house, with my four-year-old face not that far away.

I couldn’t even begin talking about Dr. J without leading with her practically legendary sexual behavior. In real life, however, that’s a hard debut to voice. It’s already a subject that’s very real but very unreal to people. She was a woman with a sexual dysfunction. So that was some twisted form of a twisted idea, that a man would, and does, but not a woman, even if you know, considering the sheer number of people in the world, it exists. My mother was sexually dysfunctional. I mean, “it functioned” but it was scary, picturing some woman showing up in a mirrored room naked. Like, wow, Dr. J. That’s a bold move. In a tax law office. With tea cup sets. A tea cup set has its charm, but it’s the whole package in this case.

“I don’t think that he could,” Angelica shivered. She needed my support in that moment. Did I know? If her husband slept with my mother… she looked at me. She didn’t ask, with words.

In a strangely adult chair, my stupid sneakers with lava in pockets dangled above the ground. I didn’t think so. She might have made a pass, she would have. She’s going after your man, you see, my mother. I’m sending the alarm up into the sky for the women of the world to know—join me. This bitch, my mother, is going after — with Angelica’s demonic brows lifting — your man. But as far I knew, I had never seen her husband before. But her statement would imply that her husband had been to my house. He described me to her, as a particularly cute baby. I remember that.

I don’t know how to approach that, given everything we’ve heard, but I didn’t believe in lying to someone to make them feel better, either. I thought about Dr. J: the biggest liar on earth. I searched for real roots in her condition, so when I saw reflections in others or myself, I noticed. Was she trying to make herself feel better, once upon a time? Where did this all begin?

Now, as an adult, I don’t know what to say about this chain of people.

Dr. J’s saving the world via the IRS— with a comic degree of intensity and selflessness. The Mother Teresa of the Tax Industry. She’s sleeping with these people, at the same time, in her office of mirrors. Another step—she’s charging 400 dollars an hour today, and Angelica’s husband and his best friend filed their taxes by her… I felt lost there, and she reeks of “gangster vibes,” something illegal, Dr. J. Nothing she’s doing, in the way she’s doing it, feels legal. What was this business? And did the Leibowitzs have money, or did they not have money? As members of the Beverly Hills Tennis Club.

This is step one.

“Can you tell me what happened when you came into my house?”

At the courtside table, she wasn’t so much a stork but a mother hen now as she had different birds in her.

All she had to do was take “ONE STEP,” she said, into my house…as if these stems were indeed sent in by divine forces, and she was a woman who would tell you I speak the truth. Her Star of David glistened on her tan neckline, attached to a gold chain. The sheer fact that she was a Brazilian-Jew… this mother… I couldn’t help but laugh.

“ONE,” she flashed her sassy one finger in my face back at the club, as she overly emphasized the one foot. She even wanted me to look at the step.

“Maria look.”

She tapped the terracotta tile with her Adidas sandal.

It was practically pantomime, her telling of it…

She froze upon entry into my house, not five minutes later. A glass panel next to my door downed her in amber waves of light. It was practically a stage play. Wouldn’t theatre makers be floored if a lightning designer came up with that idea? “Let’s put a panel of glass like amber waves, you know, by the door.” Genius. It was even spiritual. Spelled out. In amber waves of light, she told me many times, “I am from Brazil,” so she, too, was from America, so if there’s a glacial chill, she’s going to feel it—she ran hot. She wasn’t pretending that she didn’t, she knew who she was: Nina from The Forbidden Dance 1990.

And the reference is important. It’s even a sign of the scope of my film knowledge — I know what that movie is. It was a film that was made in the wake of the success of Kaoma’s “Lambada,” as that song did kick up quite a frenzy that year. We watched it many times, even at her house. She unabashed ably fast forwarded the film to the sexy parts, in her king-sized white bed. This was a palace to her, for sure. I laughed at her.

Not just any woman, any mother, came over to my house— she said it many many times along this terracotta deck. “BRA-ZIL,” she broke it up into syllables. This woman seemed to possess a whip, truly, spiritually speaking, that she could unleash at any time. She would laugh at that. I swear I could hear it almost retracting like the cord in old vacuum cleaner and snapping back into place. Brazil was divine, most definitely, that message was extremely clear. She wasn’t the type of woman who was going to respond well to hearing that a man is raping someone, let alone a four-year-old. And—

She was dancing sexy regardless.

She was dancing regardless, just like Nina in The Forbidden Dance. Even if evil real estate developers were about to bulldoze her jungle home, she was dancing sexy regardless. This was Angelica Leibowitz. It didn’t matter if catastrophe stood at her gates, she’s dancing, it was breathing to her.

She even laughed at herself, she felt it, she did. The chill, upon entry, I was smashing barbie heads together. It struck her, in profile, she froze upon entry. She gazed off, towards the court. The temperature of my house was cold.  

I was stationed in front of the TV from Grumpy Old Men, a vintage classic set. It looked as if it just moved to this story, as my father was sixty years my senior, so he had the “old set,” still, in 1989. In a hunter green dress and bow in my curly hair, I was smashing barbie heads together in an angry trance. I was fixed on their eyes cold, dead, and bright blue just like Dr. J’s but I remember how Angelica grained towards the railing speckled white and gold as if I had an outer body experience.

People who heard this story over the years said it sounded like something you’d see on TV as if the TV made the real unbelievable and the unbelievable real, simultaneously, just like sex: it’s real and unreal. It felt staged, as if I could begin a play about it like that, depending on what I was trying to achieve. But this line—existing as a real person that appeared like a TV show to people—was terrible, because flipping through the channels, it would be relatively easy to find another remarkable true story.

“What did you think?” I asked.

A couple of moons off the table, the sun beat down on our moist skin beginning to bead sweat. She practically laughed in her blindingly white chair. She sipped her ginormous Diet Coke packed with fresh citruses. Putting that down, she tilted her head, regarding me down her beak as a Mama grandma bird. She’d never seen anything like it.

“That girl needs a friend!”

By the jacuzzi, this time, we sat in true cool shade by a wall of foliage that caught the sunlight at the end of the day, tips heavenly gold. Heaven also appeared psychological in nature. I think, on the religious end of my childhood, as my father was Catholic, I was intrigued that these concepts seemed to exist, in a real way.

“What did you tell her?”  

Her Adidas sandals fell off the chair and onto the terracotta tiles before I could complete my sentence. She flashed another sassy ONE finger in my face. “ONE DAY.” She even looked at her ONE finger up close. “Maria,” her eyes demonic over her beak. “I did not mean this day.”

Kindly, Angelica told her that she had a daughter about her age, Nicole, and that they could set up a playdate “one day…” it wouldn’t be a problem. I had affected her. “I did not mean that day…” she snapped, the whip came out. Pop, the ball. She fell back into her chair, cursed my mother’s existence in Portuguese. She would live to regret it, but not as much as I would.

“What did she say when…?”

She cut me off and threw her hands in my face. “HERE! TAKE HER!”

Dr. J popped like a Jack in Box. Confetti even flew. And that image would make sense to Angelica. “Like this! She did it like this Maria! Sick bitch.” Dr. J inspired fantastical imagery. That made sense to her.

“What did you think?” I wondered, quickly.

Angelica threw her arms at me, again, in her chair. Popping like a Jack in the box, she expressed. She grimaced, shook it out. She’d never seen anything like that. “Was she joking?” She asked me, sincerely.

You never knew with Dr. J.

Was there a difference between real and joke or true and false? She didn’t appear to possess these distinctions. Her eyes as blue as the sky, they held the whole limitless idea— a whiteout. Just erase it. But in contemplating what “the truth was,” you see, one of my files, it became an increasingly complex idea even just reflecting on a “real personality” before me—is there always a difference?

Social masks can appear fake, and the word you’re not supposed to use in life is “honestly,” when that word means that a mask is coming off, so dishonesty is built into concept. There’s a certain degree of it that’s required to function in society. That’s what we believe. And, even at four, yes, in church, listening to these stories, I wondered if people even knew what it was that they believed in.

Dr. J cracked on a particular line, and it wasn’t untrue. That fascinated me. This is what I mean about how she could reflect the truth. These lines exist, but they didn’t exist in her exactly.

Except, she had a hard veneer: SMILE. She was a flat photo with suggestive shoulders out of sync with the head. She was a societal monster, indeed, it seemed.

Angelita really laughed at how she did it, too, threw me onto her as if I became goddamn Cinderella or something to “Un Bel Di” from Madame Butterfly, as Dr. J was operatic in scale. “Here take her,” she really indulged, when she told me. She even laughed at me. She was trying to hurt me, huh. It didn’t hurt me. She looked like the stepmother from Cinderella. I sort of refused to be “hurt” by some adult making this my problem. I was just studying it, instead, this strange so-called human reaction. That was my response as an eight, nine year old. My innocence didn’t exist, huh. In fact, it put me more at risk. How fascinating. A woman with six children could turn against me. At the same time, a moment can be layered, reality has depth, this was my thought process, as if I had gotten stunned by the sheer structure of existence. There’s a lot happening in just this moment, but this was the moment, but the innocent person will always get the blame.

“So what did you say…?” I asked, “when she popped like a Jack in the Box, and told you here take her?”

“Um,” arms crossed, “okay,” Angelica said, even empathetically, she wasn’t busy. Okay. Okay. “Uh,” she shook her face at me, “do you want me number? Address?” Dr. J was whatever about it.

And then, the movie poster for the film about it: “be careful who you let in,” that’s the tagline, and it’s my four-year-old face looking over my shoulder with some shadowy figure at her front door, you’ll see.

We cracked up, we really did. I have to imagine that someone at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club noticed us. It was hard not to laugh about Dr. J. She could wave at us with her wrist like a flimsy hanky, clap like a monkey with cymbals, with Angelita clutching onto her chair. “Maria! She clapped like this.” So laughter appeared to be a theme.

Did I see a reflection? One of these glimmers. Was she mocked as a girl? She acted as if she wanted to be laughed at. One of these weird girls. She looked like it. She looked like she could have been “the weird girl” at school. I wasn’t sure how that would have gone for her. There’s a truth to cruelty, eh? It’s true. People can be cruel. Kids can be cruel.

Now, the laughter was reflecting back onto me, which was the real reason why I was here—to study how people become who they are. So, first, I thought, could the victim get the blame in sexual abuse? Was it even a joke Dr. J? She comes out of a terrible mentally ill home, because in this case, that’s all I saw, and then, the world would most likely encourage her. HAHA, the joke. I was trying to understand her communication.

Angelita had to assume, arms crossed at the club, that she had made love, recently, you know? Looking up at me, applying tanning oil on her legs. It was the only possible reason behind her unusual exuberance. Angelita only thought along these lines. Hard not to laugh.

“Had to be good,” she concluded, I mean, she was little troubled there, as to what that meant in her case, you know, sort of laughing, but she might have had an unusually good time, something. She shrugged her shoulders, shivered a little, as Dr. J inspired her to do, often, the Grimm’s fairytale. She could have.

She made a series of deductions at the outset based on her frame of reference and her appearance, as we all do. To delineate between Dr. J and Angelita, she couldn’t project her mind to child molesters and breasts in her face at step one, but Dr. J—pop— lives there. “Here!” Structure. My mother’s psychology fascinated me beyond my own connection to her. Where did she come from? Now, the great flaw in my investigation evidently was my age — as I would begin to wake up through it. In short, these signs were manipulated into normal shapes. 

“Probably…what she meant was…”

I encountered it over and over again. It crippled me, even, didn’t help. People have ways of trying to help that do not help. People normalized abnormal behavior because they can’t see it. People make up stories based on their perception of a situation even if there isn’t one thread of reality in it. Dr. J is acting like the buffoon of all of it.

That’s how she acted, a bright shadow, you see, a bright bright shadow. A demon from up above, in fact, some mutation of the complicated if not insane perspective many of us hold, fundamentally, about light and dark, even sex. There’s a basic desire to transcend this earthly existence, in the major religions, even, as if this were dirty, base, and it’s rather tired. She’s not dark, she was a terrible actor, one of the worst, playing a Disney princess, the most selfless, senseless human being. In a red wig. Her eyes, really, they were otherworldly in their desperation, their clear innocence, limitlessness.

On this day, another cloudless, endless sunny day, Angelita pivoted her chair to tan her legs, the top half of her body in shadow, a stark contrast. This was a central psychological idea: light and dark. My mother brought that relationship to my attention very young.

All I knew, when I was four, looking up, coming out of my trance, was I had never seen such legs as hers. “Wow!” I ditched the barbies, stood up. “Your legs!” I was bright with compliments… going to her stems. “Wow…” I said. Angelica handled it like a dream, she laughed at my mother, even, as she was the warmest woman in the world, a truly beloved person, and kicked her stems. “100% Brazilian,” she said as if it just came with the package.

I wondered if everyone had legs like she did there…

I had seen nothing, she assured me, she wasn’t even the one, which I liked about her.

I was in a sex scandal when Kaoma's "Lambada" hit the airwaves in 1989

The year was 1989, the year that Kaoma seized the world with the “Lambada,” a dance so close to sex it was scandalous—outlawed. This song hung over these years like a canopy, though more like it ran through her veins, her blood, her six children, a title soundtrack. It was cinematic, even. That song was released the year that I, personally, at four years old, was wrapped up in a sex scandal. Genius. The song played when you walked into a deli that year. It was the year of the lambada, and the heartache in it burns, twists and turns, and it became my favorite song.

It was a song that began in heartbreak that became the sexiest dance on earth. Angelica flashed her brows at me, sort of innocently, when she told me. “The closest thing to sex you can do with your clothes on,” and we danced it every day. I was four, on the edge of her bed, like a little girl being told a fairytale, and that was touching as, already, at that age, Dr. J’s sexual behavior had disturbed me but so did been the attitudes I was picking up on about sex. I was so confused.

This is a snapshot of my inner monologue at four, to illustrate the point.

My first field of study, at four, was “pure regards.” I was studying “pure regards” in a Sunday hat, in church, every Sunday. Dr. J had “a pure regard.” In other words, she had a “pure” quality to her, in her eyes as wide and blue as the sky. That struck me because she was so impure. I got the picture. I was four, so I understood that I was pure, no? Okay, so now, I didn’t understand. Why was sex “impure,” I got that feeling, even from the Catholic Church, if I am pure? If sex is impure, how did it make me pure? You see? And I found someone else with sexual problems in church because of it. He caught my eye. I got a feeling from him, about him, that matched Dr. J. He felt similar. I watched him, only him. I spent my Sundays contemplating him. “What’s going on there?” I wondered if this happened to him, too, and I learned, in that moment, reflections, that this didn’t just happen to girls. “Oh, I see.” I learned, because of him, that this happened to boys, too. I did not know the details, I did not know what that meant, physically. I was not aware of my body, really.

I didn’t think that maybe he had this problem, that he might have had sexual problems like Dr. J, but rather that he had been a victim of it… himself. I tested his reflexes. I threw my arms, BLAH! Stomped at him in church, threw my limbs around. I stared at him, waited. He didn’t jolt, go “what?” I held my gaze—I just hit your knee, sir, with an instrument, basically. He turned, slowly. He lagged behind. He looked at me with the biggest purest eyes, and then, he laughed. Huh, we locked eyes for a moment. No conversation, no comment. Just a laugh, in the end. Strange. I skipped away. “Pure regard.” Many years later, I heard that he had sexual problems. I was shocked, because why would I take my psychological experiments as a four-year-old, seriously? But I was right. I saw it when I was four. He might have just exposed himself to a couple of kids, but you’re not supposed to do that. Why I was so sensitive to all this, in a real way, I don’t know, but that’s the four-year-old who entered her house where the lambada played daily. Some innocent regard on all this.

From a basic standpoint, when I told this story to someone, as I tried to over the years, and the audience was an obstacle in my case, they got affected, when the story simply possessed the ingredients that tugged on the heartstrings, by nature of the parallels— that song was the heartbeat of these years, my first song and dance, at four years old. But that didn’t bode well for me, personally. I couldn’t help what it was with a bow in my hair…

I tried to tell people even emotionally—don’t you see?—this story was all about the lambada to me. It held so much meaning given why I was there, but it did not register, it did not click, because the subject matter is so unreal to people, and I didn’t make sense, always, for a long long time when I spoke about it because it had not registered, it had not clicked, because of how the story developed and concluded. I couldn’t just talk about sex with people, either, come on. People aren’t necessarily even aware of how the subject of sex basically functions inside one’s head. It’s designed to be a private matter, though friends discuss it, but not like this.

I used to say that “she gave me away to someone else, because she lied about my father being a child molester…” that’s how I used to begin telling someone about it, which doesn’t make sense as a sentence. But with that debut in mind, if you can imagine it as a listener, the talk about the lambada in a formless story would sound confusing. If you’re listening, the theme here is sex.

Turning up the dial of her stereo in her car, she could have been listening to Kaoma’s “Lambada” on the way to my house that day, though it was probably Julio Iglesias, as a playlist was a journey, but it was the lambada regardless of the song. Her chin getting into “Agua Dulce,” aye aye aye aye, the introduction of that song speaks to what’s coming.

Her friend had asked her, as she was going to be in the neighborhood that day, if she might pick up his tax return on her way home. Tipping up the volume once more, windows down, this woman did not drive, she danced — danced through life, through every moment, behind the wheel. It was moving. That’s the real opening of the story: the lambada. Her. She was hot-blooded, not warm-blooded, a proud lover of sex and people being sexy. This was the name of the game to Angelica Leibowitz to a comical degree. She cracked sex jokes to the point that her kids, but really Louise and José with rackets and soccer balls, as this story was the goddamn Sound of Music (about Nazis) snapped at her because she acted too sexy sometimes. Any and every song, as she only listened to love song. This is another layer to this story— these years were scored exclusively to love songs…

“And you know what that means…”

“MOM!”

“Seriously!”

I laughed, I couldn’t help it. Just how each of her kids had their own way of navigating around her heat— literally. There was never a moment this woman wasn’t dancing sexy. She was a song and dance that you didn’t want to miss. No one would. She danced and sang and chased after stupid drivers on the streets of LA to flip them off like a pissed off bird. “Fuck you!” She had a mouth, she knew how to use it — out the window of her car. This was an active, dynamic woman, who birthed sports stars, the real Nina from The Forbidden Dance.

We watched The Forbidden Dance, of course we did. That film was made in the wake of the success of Kaoma’s “Lambada.” One of two films, which speaks to its wild success as a world hit. In her king sized bed, she fast-forwarded it to the sexy parts, unabashedly. I laughed at her. She didn’t give a shit —as she cursed—about anything but sex, practically. I laughed, I did. As a little girl, you see, who knew what sex was, who was at her house because we believed I was being molested, at least, her overtly sexual, not sensual, added another layer to this experience, as I didn’t see anything wrong with sex, that’s what I didn’t understand by what I was picking up on. She didn’t think anything was wrong with it, that was for certain, coming to take her seat beside me on her bed. It was relieving, I didn’t really… have the cognition to want to “do it,” I just didn’t understand why “this” ruined my innocence. Again, it’s the pure-impure conundrum.

If you remember that film, though, it’s dedicated to the rainforest, first of all, a pretty funny final note to it all. A jungle princess from the Brazilian Amazon must travel to the USA to save her kingdom from evil real estate developers. And it didn’t matter, you see. It didn’t matter if catastrophe stood at this woman’s gates— she’s dancing, sexy, regardless. That’s Angelica Leibowitz. She’s dancing sexy regardless of what is happening— even through this, this sex scandal.

It was one of these divine moments, even recalling the spin of the dance, when the life feels cosmic, comic, made of stars. The dominoes fell in a direction that’s even artful. She’s going to take a child home — to her sex-loving home bumping with family lambada parties — where our understanding of what sex is, what it means, will deepen — as we go through a sex scandal involving a four-year old.

She was coming for me, you see… she always said that to me with her finger pointing straight at me, “I’m coming for you…” She turned her whole body—not just her head— to confront the blind-spot behind her on La Cienega to switch lanes. Her bird head searched. She was a dancer, not by trade but by breathing—and there was no way she could have seen this coming. Honking, cursing, getting sexy and excited about an opening, she had a world, simply. She was driving through a universe in her own world, that’s a frame, she had a focus. She knew abuse happened out there, but she never thought it could enter her world. Making a right onto my street, the song blasted out her windows. I chose Agua Dulce, because of the intro, her red Cadillac coming for me.

The degree to which this story sounded “unreal” to the people I tried to speak to about it practically spawned a fairytale to be born. People said that I looked like I stepped out of a fairytale. So did Dr. J. Meaning unreal, ethereal. It sounded a little like a modern fairytale about a subject, especially today, that might benefit from some real depth, about it.

It was a known story.

From my perspective investigating it, she knew it existed, it was even easy to believe. This is what I mean. It was possible. To me, as an eight-year-old with some batshit crazy mother who might have come from abuse, I was flabbergasted since the age of four, and now I was on the brink of nine. A man could rape a four-year-old, so this was more common than I would think, so she confirmed that. This could have happened to Dr. J. I already had to conclude at four, four years old, that my mother might have been raped younger than my age… just given how she acted around me. And, at the same time, as I was operating under the understanding that it was lie, someone could lie about it. But wasn’t it already a lie?

That’s what I’m holding above my mushroom cut, my feet dangling off the chair, as they did not touch the ground. I first received confirmation, from this situation, that it was a true story, simply. And what is “true,” what we believe can happen, can’t happen, what in fact happens—I begin to dance in my chair, it’s inside of me—will propel my investigation forward with the woman who danced through it all. A dance that was born from oppression, this was about liberation.

*

“And you never met her before?” I asked in hushed tones in the shade. Player one bounced the ball, prepared for the serve. Now, my mind switches locations. Now, we popped out like a couple of moons off the frosted table in the scorching sun, courtside, so she could sunbathe. I can hardly get through the first couple of sentences sometimes without the scene cutting to another spot. We discussed this situation for years, and I made sure, ensured I heard what she said, as she said it. The idea that the mind plays tricks on you, that was too much for me, especially since I really went through this, and people would try to ERASE me from step one, onwards. She wasn’t going to change her story, one day, not happening. I don’t know how she could, quite frankly, but she wasn’t going to do that to me. The players exercised footwork across the court in soft focus, in a battle, yes, even a dance, of sorts. Their squeaking sneakers. This became my trauma response, I suppose, what I came to focus on, emotionally: the dance, the skill, the players.

“She never met me didn’t know me at all,” she swiped the air with her hand.

A ball sliced across the court.

“No clue,” she hit that clue, “who I was.”

Luckily, she was so bombastic and memorable.

(to be continued)

The investigation begins at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club

No one ever entered the Beverly Hills Tennis Club through the front gate facing Maple Drive, with spindly Maple trees out of a bright Tim Burton film lining the block. The façade of the club was black and white, classic and clean, with the Beverly Hills Tennis Club written in iconic typeface. It was old school Beverly Hills, which makes me laugh because I was not even nine years old investigating a sex scandal that I was in at this location, and I didn’t really realize that. I don’t know how old I was, exactly.

Everybody pulled into the back alleyway behind the club— that’s where the parking lot was. A security guard was on duty by the gate, so it was more discreet and secure. All this discretion, I thought, at nine years old, why? I had so many questions, cruising up Maple Drive in an ’81 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. In the car, I was listening to “Sacrifice” by Elton John and fighting with my father.  I had just gotten to this world, evidently, and I was amazed, truly, by how everyone claimed to know “how things worked” when I was operating under the understanding that nothing had to work that way, exactly. I came from an “other” scenario, not a story one heard every day, though today, sex scandals are a dime a dozen, but still. It was unexpected.

Just like my father’s car:

I pulled up to the Beverly Hills Tennis Club in an ‘81 Cutlass Supreme, not a Mercedes. It’s not to say that I was poor, because I wasn’t, but I was not from Beverly Hills. That was Dr. J’s vehicle. She was a businesswoman. Hungry for the cash. And that, since I was investigating all this, flipped the most basic expectations. My parents flipped the most basic ideas about who made the money, even, so, I became aware of expectations early on, conceptually. It was one of my files in my drawer. My father was also 60 years my senior. Not to say there aren’t older parents, but the average person wasn’t expecting my father to be that old, wasn’t expecting this story to fall out of my mouth.

Strangely, it was my mother’s money that paid for this sex scandal, which made it “okay” that she had money as if…someone…didn’t work for that money, regardless of when their children came into the play. I was always confused about the attitudes we hold about money. A touchy subject. Fascinating to a nine-year-old. I had no clue what the fuck was going on. But Dr. J wasn’t some rich housewife in Bel-Air putting on some absurd fantasy play in boudoir clothing. Joan Crawford, I don’t know. I didn’t have a relationship with any of it, but people did — people had very set, preconceived notions about what “The Beverly Hills Tennis Club” might have meant. I was aware that people held narratives that might not be true—my mother was Dr. J. Psychology seized me, it really did, as a subject, the truth, especially, as that was a folder in my drawer.

One could have cast a variety of assumptions about me, her, them, the club, though we want to be seen beyond these pre-set ideas. I saw expectations as a structural entity with potentially damaging results. I would run up against them, inside myself, too.

The car door opened of an iconic lowrider. I stepped outside of the Cutlass Supreme. I was wearing Payless shoes most of the time. I didn’t have all my adult teeth yet. I had a short, awkward haircut as I had met a couple of Delilahs already, and so, I was Samson, not Bathsheba. I headed straight for the columns with awkwardly chopped off hair— architecture. Psychology.

I waved to the security guard; I knew the code. He knew me. After opening the gate, I walked down the long, shady corridor. The mainstage tennis court ran alongside me. A player bounced on his feet—fierce. Up close, his body vibrated; it was so full of force. The intensity of his body dulled, however, the further I moved away from the game. This story, I believe, automatically had that effect. It appeared more like a cake walk at a distance, a TV show. But we were in that dynamic and physical of a house on Miracle Mile— the Leibowitz’s were sports stars. My mother, too, existed in a heightened state of play. This was a dramatic group of people, already a step or a few beyond normal personalities, whatever that means, but it was a theatrical group.

Emerging from the corridor into broad daylight, the sun smacked that club. The red terracotta tiles baked red hot. I spent the last four years of my life here; I came all the time with Angelica. A chic collection of floppy umbrellas with battlements for trim populated the restaurant terrace. The frosted glass tables evoked a little chill. There were five hard courts in total. The mainstage ran along the pool, glossy like a page out of a magazine. It was the cleanest shade of crystal blue, like the coolest invitation, against the red tiles. Two courts were on either side of the white shack—the workout room. To my right, the stairs ascended, turned at a sharp angle, and climbed up to the changing rooms— nothing fancy. The dining room on the ground floor, encased in glass, was my favorite room with a plush hunter green interior and crisp white table cloths. The silence in that room was so soothing, felt damp. There were two courts behind the restaurant. A magnolia tree, I can’t remember, or a gardenia stood as a natural statue over the terrace. Waxy leaves. White flowers. I could never penetrate who came here. But it made the concept of a façade apparent; a façade was a real thing, hard to explain. I didn’t assume that only wealthy families came here, I didn’t know, that was my fundamental guiding post. I did not know. I hated assumptions, expectations, talk of how the world worked. I would have to make peace with some of that, but I had no clue. I didn’t even know how to assume, in fact. Sure, there were people with money, but I never had an idea as to what it was supposed to look like. The “we’re all in a meat suit” mentality was mine from day one pretty much. I had no idea what this place was and what we were doing in it. “Who are you?” I asked my father that. “I’m your father…” “What does that mean?”  I never lost touch with my inner four-year-old, in a sense. Like, I just got here. I was blown away.

Angelita lounged in her chair under an umbrella on the other side of the chicest pool. She was hot, red hot —as I liked to make fun of her and her unforgettable love of sex— in a red one-piece, cut-off jeans, and Adidas sandals. “The woman in love,” I called her, for the purposes of my undercover investigation. She was a major Barbara Streisand fan. Now that her husband had passed away, she worked at the club as a lifeguard — she was there, anyway, but once again, her family wasn’t the wealthiest one there. Not to assume, but I believe they were considered to be more of a special family, and I have no idea.

Taking my seat, in my mind, before her, the first revelation I had as an adult who did indeed reopen these years was that I had no idea who the hell these people were. Now, I sit here, literally, meaning I am alive, because I made a necessary switch. I am a mother in this chair, listening to this filth. I did not have a concerned parent, one who cared about what had just happened.

I knew that people could change their stories. I was Dr. J’s daughter, not Suzanne’s. I wanted to ensure that her story was burned into my flesh, the tennis court alongside us, with bodies on it that wanted to win. So I asked her the same questions over and over again. Over and over again. So, when I recall these conversations, these scenes cut internally in my mind to different locations along the terracotta deck, as we spoke about this scandal for four years. That’s when I officially closed it.

Two frosted tables were at either end of the pool: one by the jacuzzi and another closest to the tennis court. Between these two floating islands was a row of sun loungers, blindingly white in the sun. A ping-pong table sat in front of the workout room. That’s the basic set of my investigation, with the tennis court in the background. My mind just cuts, fast, fierce, as if I could hang onto the literal truth, memorize her every move. That was my intention. To study it, her, us, the human organism. Till death do us part, type deal. After all, all she spoke about was love. Love, love. Love was the song on the stereo.

I began with the simplest question.

“Did I really live with you for four years?”

“Four years?”

“Was it, was it really four years?”

And already, since psychology was my interest, I was in a scenario that was so true, I would have the license to invent. I could appear in different locations asking her that question such as: my sneakers appearing under a bathroom stall next to hers. “Four years?”

It’s an interesting feature of the truth, in fact, where I would have the right to push it over a real edge. Now, I don’t know about Dr. J, I don’t know how people negotiate this line, but it exists. I really did ask her this question so many times— now, I might not have appeared as lethal as the players on the court, but I gripped on real tight, too tight, to the racket.

Maybe I had a psychic feeling, I don’t know. I couldn’t really believe it myself.

“Did I really live with you for four years?”

At 11 o’clock at the courtside table, she flashed four fingers in my face. I also remember her being stationed at 1 o’clock at the same table and by the Jacuzzi. Now, am I supposed to factor in the possibility that my mind could play tricks on me, that it would be impossible to remember these details, for those who wouldn’t even consider that when they talk? Even when I reopened this, people responded as if they were there, as if they even knew the whole story— which they didn’t. Everything I did had a point to this degree of precision. I said, my mother reflected very very true things about the world, and it terrified me. I was studying all these lines, I called them, just trying to evaluate what my mother’s condition was.

Angelita stretched four magical and even jazzy fingers in my face, accompanied by a nice smile on her face. Luckily, she was so bombastic and memorable.

“Four.”

Beginning on her pinky, once again, a most hilarious woman, she told me to “pay attention.” She counted the years starting clearly here, tapping her pinky, as if discovering a new world in the process. “One, two, three,” she waved a little finger at me, to end on “four.” She kicked the chair, practically, this “bitch,” (my mother), and rested her Adidas sandals on the edge. Her tight fingers tapped her temple: “sick in the head.”

“Slut, pathetic, disgusting…” I never heard one kind adjective about the whorehouse, my mother, which she was.

“Four?”

Back to her pinky, she began listening “everything she did for me.”

“Clothed you, bathed you, fed you…”

(For 11k a month.)

How easy it was, to twist information, thinking about Dr. J. She AGREED to the deal. They made a deal. But she’s making it seem like she wasn’t paid to do just that, to put the mess of it aside a moment.

People do this—they shape the facts, and, a cop my witness, it can look “glittery” with “jazz hands” indeed. Nothing but routines. Why is she doing that? But people do, they twist the facts. 11k.

She made choices. These were her choices, not mine. She got wrapped up in a total nightmare shitshow, but she acted as if she did all this for peanuts — when 11k a month in value in 1989, in CASH, not taxed, is an attractive sum for someone who was supposedly protecting me from my father until my mother left him…. did her children cost her 11k a month in value, each?

“Can you describe what happened when you came over to my house?” I asked.

I launch an undercover investigation into what just happened to me

The only mirror left after the destruction was on my sliding closet doors, floating in soft focus in the corner of my eye. I stood on a pink carpet and stared out my pink blinds. I launched my undercover investigation in a pink room, which makes me laugh, now, because pink isn’t exactly the color of a mastermind. “I will launch an undercover investigation…” My father picked out the color. I didn’t want pink. But to Nick, girl = pink. It infuriated me, but the man was a Great Depression baby. Blue was reserved for a boy, which is what I wanted, but it was his house, his money, so he decided what to paint the walls. I rolled my eyes at him because I said blue, knowing there was also yellow.

Looking back on it all these years later, you’d think, given what I went through, and I still deal with an old framework that tells me I didn’t go through anything, so I bump up against it, still, so I usually ask it, meaning, Angelica—if your child was in this situation, what would you say? I had to unlearn a lot.

You’d THINK that he would have set up a room for me before I came home, or at least let me pick out my own room, as I didn’t have a room in this house. Instead, he brought me home to mirrors being smashed on the walls, and I ran downstairs afterward and ripped his face off —I tried to, at least.

The way I ordered these pieces, called memories, changed, so sometimes, I still don’t know how to order them because I don’t know how they add up. I ordered them, unconsciously, in the past, with large holes. I do not have the same understanding of it now because I came to understand that the premise was ridiculous to begin with. I was in a sex scandal. I was not “given away to someone else because she lied about him being a child molester,” which is what I used to say, which doesn’t even make any sense as a sentence. I said that to those who approached me, wanting to discuss it. The question: “wait what, when did it become a lie?” That changed my life.  

At the time, I understood it to be a lie. I came out of this situation — clueless. I came home, at the end of all that, to mirrors being smashed off the walls. I had no idea what the hell just happened. I thought I did, but I also knew that I couldn’t know. I was a child, so I knew I was automatically at a disadvantage in a world of adults, which put me at risk, and that felt so true, the deafening silence in my room. Adults weren’t going to tell the truth because they didn’t necessarily.

“Didn’t they, Dr. J?”

I regarded my reflection in the mirror. My mother opened a door onto the world that I could not unsee, and it was psychology, and I was obsessed with it. I wanted to study it, that’s how I responded to the sex scandal I was in, that I didn’t really know I was in, because I saw so many reflections in it. She reflected the truth. That was my working hypothesis.

Dr. J ran into Catholic mass every Sunday, according to an eyewitness I secured, “every Sunday.” She “accosted,” in her words, “the priest with her rapes” right before he was about to process for Mass. In other words, he was about to begin a holy holy performance with eucharist ministers around him, which, came into stunning focus next to Dr. J’s outrageous performance — of running into church to “accost him,” so I don’t know where to begin, firstly. What differentiated a genuine performance from a fake performance? She was “out of the box” thereby illuminating the structure that contains us. It’s not that it isn’t real, it’s a construct. There was a structure, and it fascinated me.

She reflected the truth in a fascinating light because —which performance was more outrageous and offensive considering the Catholic Church’s billion-dollar lawsuit over child abuse building behind the scenes — totally ignored? In her blue blue eyes as clear as the summer day she was born, she was even a buffoon. “Just erase it.” No worries. Every sentence she uttered didn’t have substance, it was flimsy—wee. “My degree is in,” her wrist like a flimsy hanky, flopping around, “in Economics, Arts, History of Tax Law,” depends. And she acted like the MOST sincere person in the WORLD. BUT IN ALL-CAPS. THE MOST SINCERE PERSON. Next to the priest, it looked like performance art, even in how richly dressed they both were. And Dr. J would tell you, despite her shoving affairs in our faces, that she hardly ever even had sex. She was chaste, even, just like the Catholic priest, but to an operatic pitch as if she were mocking the concept.

Was she provoking the system? Was she searching for sympathy? She appeared even starved. A very hungry woman, Dr. J. Could she have hit on the priest in this way? I wouldn’t put it past her, and still, even still, it would be more appropriate than a grown man luring a child, and yet, she’s shocking. Reflections. Fascinating. Even useful. In other words—good, you should be shocked. In which direction was “it,” whatever “it” was, believable?

I didn’t need to be five to know that child abuse was more common than I might think. I had to conclude that my mother had been raped younger than my age, at four. At four, I was already aware of what rape is, that’s the conclusion I made about her. That impaled me with some spear that I could not let go of. That my mother might have been a victim of it, that my mother could lie about it, but the Catholic Church did—lie about it. Her theatrics discredited her because she appeared so fake, but in the Catholic Church’s case, their theatrics of normalcy were fake. She reflected the truth.

I wondered if it was true, evidently, but it was hard not to consider that it might have been true GIVEN HOW SHE BEHAVED. Forget the theatrics. I put that in ALL-CAPS because it was SHEER RESISTANCE just getting here.

I did not know, I kept coming back to that phrase. But I was a kid, so I even said to myself, “maybe it’s my biggest strength, that I do not know,” for I was already over “knowledge.” I was already frustrated with the “I know.” I know, you know, everyone thinks they know. But Dr. J taught me — you might not know, you really might not know what’s going on.

I couldn’t trust adults, necessarily, Dr. J taught me that. It wasn’t even their fault, in a sense, for I saw it as a structural problem, in that, we’re probably going to try and protect ourselves. I was a child, but that was sort of laughable at that point. Haha, my mother hit that note. I was going to have to take these adults in. They might deliver information to me as truth. They might even believe it to be true—ah, reflections. They might even believe their lies to be true, just like Dr. J. People lie, they do, even to cover up what they said. “What I said was…”

I know what you said. I have ears.

I saw Dr. J in everyone and everything. In the mirror, it was the subject of psychology that gripped me. I had so many questions. What was the truth even? Contemplating “the biggest liar on earth,” she reflected so many true things about the world. That fascinated me. What the truth is.

Once, I approached the dinner table, suspicious already. Dr. J made me food. Climbing onto my chair, Dr. J left me a lone burger patty on a plate. No bun. No tomato. Just the patty. I didn’t even need to lean. My nose might have been sensitive, I was four, but I paused, stared at this burger. I turned to her. “There’s alcohol,” I did not stutter, “in DIS.” I knew that word, and I was pissed about it. She didn’t look at me; she gave me a quick flash of her hand in the kitchen. “Only a little for the flavor…” she put a bouquet of parsley into her mouth. You see, even I peer into these memories, like I have to come closer, is that a bouquet of parsley?” She could carry one, pick at its leaves, but garlic cloves were “Mama’s candy” so I wondered if it was related to that.

I looked back at this burger, confused. I had my wits, even if I was four. I knew I was four. This wasn’t “my flavor.” Why would I want alcohol in my food, woman? Insane, Dr. J. Moments like this—I wondered, where did she come from? Was she given alcohol when she was four? She stunned me. Didn’t that sound like a line from Arsenic and Old Lace? “Just a pinch of cyanide.” I didn’t trust this burger. I didn’t eat it. I just got out of my chair and left. That’s where my memory ends.

She lied wildly, normally. She told my aunt, I think the only Christmas she fraternized with my father’s family in a side ponytail, that she dumped all the Christmas presents at LAX airport because she was going to miss her flight, imagining a trail of brilliant paper and bows down the domestic corridor like a fairytale. It’s impossible in reality, but not in the mind, so did she have a particular condition outside the drugs? She really did evoke every fairytale — like, fireworks, she was the GRAND FINALE, reaching for the stars. This woman delivered this speech to my aunt, for real, who was so confused. My mother was unreal— it made you want to steer clear, and that’s the problem when it comes to the mentally ill.

I had to even “put myself away,” because my mother wasn’t appropriate for children, but that’s where I lived. A universe that wasn’t for kids. I wasn’t going to understand everything that I was going to hear either. I had to listen, absorb, and maybe one day, I will reopen this as an adult, or with an adult, and it will begin to make sense. I just wasn’t prepared for the day I did. Angelica was even going to try to hurt me, which really fascinated me. Some situations don’t tend to “bring out the best of the species.”

The question I received, a lot, from people was—did she know what she was doing? Do you think she knew? Does anybody? Reflections. Not everyone receives that benefit of the doubt. And yet, the people who asked that question couldn’t make connections — even Dave Chappelle asked, “how old is fifteen really?” Because “we always get tried as adults.” The justice system rings in the question. And there were “meta-structures,” one of my working phrases, that we might not be aware of, like racial biases, thoug more like injustices, and gender. Now, gender, I would bump up against that one A LOT. A man’s word — is still stronger. I love it when I see male favoritism in a female, too. That one is deeply engrained.

And speaking of, as I was thinking about it, criminality and civilization, and madness and civilization, what was the relationship between them? The question underlying my investigation was “how do we become who we are?” Because how did she become this? And I put intention — I intend, I said it out loud even, and how did I know all this? I don’t know, I cannot answer that question. I repeated it many many times, to study this, remember it. “I intend to.” Now, how will the world factor into the equation? I had different files — so-to-speak—that I was studying, in a drawer labeled by a fourth grader: undercover investigation. “Intention” was one of them. Incest, another. It had to be ugly.

And Dr. J was — reflecting through mirrors — ugly. Very ugly.

The only thing my father knew, truly, the only thing he knew about his wife, which was already telling, was that she was beaten when she was two by her sister to the point that her family sent her away for the first ten years of her life. And why did I just get “sent away” for four years? As if the story held real glimmers, fragments, of her past. That hooked me. I would hear later in trauma circles that the past repeats itself. Did it? Was that a cover-up? Beaten at two. Or just a crazy person? Wasn’t it already crazy? Sexual abuse. I was searching for a real girl back there. Did this really happen to her, once upon a time? Was she a victim of this crime, even in her family, as her behavior signaled—maybe—to become some cruel, hysterical reflection of it? I held the possibility that it was a lie, at the same time—that really made me want to go in for Dr. J— as a child. I was lit on both ends.