She was the whitest woman I have ever seen...

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

And the day broke from the mouth of Madame Butterfly…the hope that the sun will rise again … the amber waves glittered hot white as the sun moved towards the afternoon. To “Un Bel Di…” (not literally) Dr. J descended the stair in Ferragamo. This woman existed on the dimension of opera, however, literally, not a metaphor. She was an aria, classical, but buffoon, but buffoon is classical. After all, she was a prodigy on the piano and organ, a professional musician, once upon a time, according to Neiman Marcus Magazine, and a genius at it. A genius no matter what. Above all, that. Her genius was of a caliber beyond the stars in the sky, where she often rested her sky blue eyes, as she sparkled in haute couture sequins in the back of her limo. “Mama,” in her little girl/showgirl way, only wore Krizia to work, exclusively, a fashionista, as all good villains are because they exist in the dimension of fantasy, I believe—Dr J’s home. Her dusty violet Krizia suit with gold buttons was stunning. She was a chic woman, but she had a real passion, so range: ballgowns, cocktail dresses, doll dresses, and a closet of kimonos down the hall. From what I gathered, her outfits in church could sometimes be out of place. But I associate pianists with a touch of wild flair, why? I don’t know. Maybe one has to exit the mind, become one with, as classical can evoke that. Where someone is tuned into some conduit of electricity and is playing like mad, genius, as classical composers, I feel, almost occupy the same elastic headspace as mathematicians. Will Hunting, in Good Will Hunting, describes doing math like playing the piano. Beethoven, he could just play, and math was the same exercise for him. Dr. J sort of acted like BAD ACTOR trying to play the role of “genius” but uppity, girlie, flat like a glossy magazine but with her pianist hands— cultured, even classy. A pianist in Alice in Wonderland the opera, who will then punch numbers, glide across space in her chair — desperate — lives on the line…to Un Bel Di. It was life and death, for sure. “THE IRS IS COMING…” they were always coming to see Dr. J, specifically.

I’m giving you a little introduction to Dr. J to set the tone for a most unbelievably theatrical woman with a particular look and physicality… who exists in a world that dreams about these “great minds…” as Dr. J breaks glass… she looked about the air, as Russell Crowe did in A Beautiful Mind as in there were triangles in it. She was seeing equations, not empty space, Dr. J. She— was a genius. This was her objective— to BE— in ridiculous gestures — the one to rule them all: the geniuses. To “Un Bel Di.” Like, if you actually played that track over her real person moving through space, they would match, it might be groundbreaking, even, as a performance. This was her emotional state, saving the world via the IRS, accosting the priest with her rapes every Sunday, and wrapping her baby up in a sex scandal — Un Bel Di.

“Protect my baby,” tears falling down her cheeks. “Please, I beg you.”

Angelica might crack up/get angry, as Dr. J pushed a funny bone.

Once, coming back from Neimans in her cherry red Mercedes, she was high from shopping and possibly pills. She cranked up AIDA to the MAX and rolled the windows down. She began some ludicrous buffoon mocking aria over this melody at me, sort of cracking up, silly. “Ahhh…” I couldn’t make it up. I closed my ears, because she didn’t sound good, but Dr. J didn’t care—she was provocative in this way. The joke is, practically nightly, “she’s drinking, driving, and looking for sex downtown…” in the same car. She was a pathetic character, so pathos, that’s where Dr. J lives on the comic spectrum as representing some desperate need for care. There’s a function to pathos, and I didn’t need the pity, neither did she, but she did need care. I might have had a rapier, but I was wrong to put it aside, I refused to take on ANY “oh, poor you,” like, go read a book. Sorry, that’s just who I am. “This was your wish, not mine,” meaning you wanted to know. She acted as if she came from the darkest of childhoods as the brightest thing in it. And over the years, people looked at me as if I were delivering a turn of phrase.

Pathetic: it’s a condition. Not an insult. But because I spoke of it really, and I’d never use that word casually, as a joke, you see, or as an insult, it was too close to real for some people, just like the words crazy and insane. People say things they don’t really mean, I got the picture—wink. Dr. J. They speak unreally—wink again. Dr. J. I saw her in everyone and everything. Because I was being real, it discredited me, even, like this person can go around yapping pathetic because they didn’t really mean it. People could get confused between the two and discredit the real deal, because they can’t handle it. “She was a real pathetic.” Joy was a real psychological case. She didn’t want to be normal, you see, she had no interest in it. She acted like a buffoon—a genius, in her mind. This wasn’t a woman to take it easy on, and I did for the majority of my life, as I didn’t have this point of view for most of my life. What she did was unacceptable. And everyone in my life missed it.

Imagine?

Imagine!

She cried, Angelica — firing her pointer finger at me.

“This bitch told me RAPE,” she desperately tried to COMMUNICATE IT. She wrapped up this woman in a sex scandal. Let’s be real. I’m more on the LEGAL end, you see, not on the “aw she was mentally ill,” sure, she most certaintly was, but there are LINES.

In another reflection moment, would you be concerned about someone’s woundedness, someone who abuses a child? No, are you concerned about their mental health state? NO, but if that’s the case, just get it out of my face and deal with it, you know what I mean? Go handle it. Deal with it. It’s a health care issue. It needs to be treated, and not in a system of punishment. This person is sick. It’s a disease. What she did was not okay, a parent was needed—that concerns my healing from all this.

On her way to the goddamn IRS in limo driven by her lover, supposedly, getting into the limo in front of us—absurd. My mother was completely absurd. Angelica told me to “pay attention” for the very first time in her red Cadillac — it was time for my first love song lesson. She clapped and turned up the stereo… “Me Va Me Va…” as Dr. J’s limo took off — probably she went to sleep with a man, shop, and then make a stop at the IRS…

I start here, because it was the worst, just the worst — telling someone this? Trying to EXPLAIN who Dr. J is? A woman who would wrap her child up in a sex scandal. Like, were they expecting Santa Claus? Are you expecting someone who isn’t unhinged? You know? This was my mother. This is the woman who is going to do this. She was a severe case, and they do indeed exist, in fairytale tones, even, since people were ignorant to the existence of madness, abuse, um, “these people exist…” Sorry to be “the one” for you, but welcome to a world with about eight billion people in it. Next. Mirror mirror…mirrors. And not speaking this way — caused me problems. I’m not going to waste my time rummaging through your disbelief just in trying to EXPLAIN who this woman was.

And so, by nature of how gross and offensive she was, Dr. J, and I say that with the spiritual support of political theorist Hannah Arendt because she’d definitely read this, and I definitely read her if not relied on her to help me through the insanity of this story. She was a woman, dead, who supported me better than anybody alive, especially through the insanity of everything that came along with this story. She saw “the world,” as a real entity, a real structure, and I needed her understanding of it to get how much of a role that idea plays into one’s psychology: what it means to appear in the world. That was hard due to the otherworldly nature of this story. This wasn’t a political battle, but it was a battle on the personal front.

That’s exactly how Arendt would have described it. “Maria can’t exactly appear in the world with a story like that. It didn’t even seem that people could SEE her as real.” Sure, Joy’s not a dictator, but there are some acts, some crimes, some ideas, call it what you want, that should not be treated as if they were made of pixie dust—rage is necessary, spiritual, in saying no, where it must be said. It’s a little Dr. J. “This is not okay—maybe in a few generations, we could revisit the idea of a relationship.” I had to, strangely, avoid very true ways of looking “evolved” or “resolved.” It wasn’t that, “all mothers are crazy,” which someone said, to me, of all people, or “she was wounded,” the path was — what she did was unacceptable. The path was one of a parent — if you touch my kid, you’re dead. There’s a big difference between social justice and —if you touch my kid, you see—a parent will kill you. It’s — a deep relationship, typically, not in my case, but generally parents are going to lose their minds. I was disrespected, at a very young age. If you touch my kid, you see, this is the parent, not the wiseman, per se, I’ll kill you. There is wisdom in it when it’s appropriate, you see, which in my case, it was — if someone wrapped up my baby in some ridiculous sex scandal, I would be furious. No? Yet, no one thought of it.

Except, the Zen Master Sybil: the reason why I was able to make through my dark night, as I went through one when I reopened all this. She was a Zen Master psychologist with the middle name Sybil, so I called her the Zen Master Sybil, evidently. I gave her an official title — she was spiritual in her approach, and rage was most certainly that — spiritual, necessary, red. She said.

She told me to — “pay attention” Angelica, behind the red wheel of her red Cadillac. The perfect day, that was Dr. J. The brightest colors, the day. Her backyard — I remember it — it was the greenest grass I ever saw, the field of dreams we twirled upon though it might be more like belief. The field of. Dr. J sounded and acted as if she came from this realm.

What was her general impression of her? I asked Angelica. What’s the first thing that came to her mind when she saw her? I don’t know about how she was at work, but she was never normal. I tried to explain this to people. She was not a “hi how are you” person. All you know about me is: I was beaten at two to the point of being sent away. That’s Dr. J. I don’t know if she thought she was normal, but she did not seem to care if she gave a normal impression of herself….getting naked in her office to seduce a man and running into church and accosting a priest with her rapes. I can’t follow her logic. Except, need, only need. She appeared primally starved, she appeared desperate though her money produced some flouncy spin through it all.

Angelica Liebowitz stuck her fork into her club salad that came in a glass leaf bowl—chic— she made some modifications to it, I remember. I don’t think I even got lunch, and didn’t my father pay her for these visits? To hang out with her, I had to pay, but I didn’t really get lunch, did I — you see? What I noticed in retrospect—that position took me a real effort to get to, thanks to Angelica, a woman who went on and on about how selfless she was, in taking care of me…for money… regardless of the reasons. Not just a couple hundred bucks, either.

So, how did she appear to you…?

Angelica paused and received that question now at an intimate angle at the end of the afternoon. What did she notice about my mother….firstly? She turned her head and searched across the pool at 3 o’clock. She paused. She really thought about it, her eyes darting around.

“She was…” She blinked and peered over the pool as if there were meaning in it that she, herself, could not totally describe.

“…the whitest woman I have ever seen…”

I had to laugh but on the inside. I didn’t want to put her in the position of needing to apologize, and she would have, which would have been ridiculous. It was the first phrase out of everybody’s mouth. “Never seen someone so white.” That struck a chord regardless of her intention, a file in my drawer. I felt the tremble through the architecture. There was a structure that held the world up, that held up a person, and I could feel it and it fascinated me. Racism, in particular, coming out of a sex scandal, when I was four? You know, some unspeakable, unbelievable, insane situation… that people don’t…see. That affected me. That was systemic. That was clear to me.

“You could not not see how white she was.”

There might be something right in front of you that you might be blind to, which is why, it gets annoying when people ACT innocent about it—another Dr. J reflection. In that, Dr. J is REALLY ACTING like she CAN’T SEE. It’s to a pitch that might make these attitudes or behaviors stick out to someone.

You’d think, no, it’s not possible, that a mother could do that to her child, and yet, people have done much worse than that. They lost the war, even, so the winners collect slaves, and they will be used as those in powers wish them to be used…. it’s very simple, cold, cruel, and not that unbelievable. White people, sorry, Europeans, showed up to the United States of America and passed out blankets infected with smallpox to the Native Americans— disgusting behavior. To the people who were so shocked, read a history book, you know what I mean? Was I supposed to support this? Now I know—no. It’s just, people got SO AFFECTED when they could spread it around.

“She was the whitest woman I have ever seen,” but truly! Really! The eye witness in church said, she “kinda” reminded her of Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmations. It wasn’t a joke, she was sincere. “So she was a white villain who would kill puppies for a fur coat?” As this woman wasn’t white. “Yes.” As if beginning a Grimm’s fairytale, Angelica continued, “she was white, really white, strikingly so.”

“Beautiful,” she said. “Unusual shade.”

With skin whiter than snow, “she glowed,” Angelita wondered, seriously, if she glowed in the dark while making love, as Angelita only thought along these lines. Paired with her extraordinary eyes the exact shade of the sky too clear for comfort, and a red wig, real but fake, Angelita described her as “an attractive woman,” sincerely. Which she was…I saw it as part of her pathoogy, hard to explain. So was Ted Bundy. A beauty…with skin whiter than snow, Angelica said, once upon a time.

“Striking,” she said. “Features.”

“Sexy body…”

“Oh?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Very sexy body.”

“Beautiful breasts,” she said. Uh huh, as I said, I was eight or nine, confused, mostly, but I had gotten that impression. That she had an appealing figure. And, uh, “how many times did she come over in these four years?”

She flashed two fingers for “like twice.”

That’s a snapshot of Dr. J. A naked woman, didn’t matter where she was. Angelica saw her breasts more than once.

She snapped, the blue bottle hit the table, “put on sunscreen.” A fight between us since I was four. The whip came out, she practically sneezed through her six children’s names to get to mine as she always did. “My nose was getting red.” She even encouraged me to like my skin tone, a nice detail. I was the daughter of the whitest woman anyone had ever seen.  

I left with Angelica for one day that became four years

Side by side, we left my condo in a polyester tennis skirt and princess dress made of the finest silk. Her calves were sculpted by the Gods next my hunter green bow with a ribbon.

She squatted—a woman who birthed sports stars—eagerly on the first couple of steps to assist me… as I was four. My little hand reached for hers, she was already strange to me, because she was so attentive.

I don’t know what I did, I don’t remember, but I was about to be wrapped up in a sex scandal with this woman at an age where I might not have been able to totally walk down the steps by myself. That’s the joke. I was four, not fourteen. Maybe I was one of these independent types who rejected her help in sounds while I grabbed onto the railing, unaware of myself.

“Okay, you’re a big girl…” who cannot fully coordinate.

Walking to the black gate in patent leather Mary Jane’s, the chiffon under my skirt scratched. I hated these doll clothes from her beloved Neiman Marcus. I hated the tights, white, red hearts sewn in. I couldn’t reach the handle on the gate nor push it open, but Angelica, quick on her feet, did it for me. She stepped off the ledge, held the gate open (no help from Dr. J), and presented her hand. Down the next step, she continued to observe me, telling me to careful, as I stepped onto the boulevard of bottlebrush trees. I began to feel lost and expansive outside my house, in a world without walls.

“I could have been anyone,” Angelica said, scooching forward in her chair back at the BH tennis club, with demonic eyes over her beak. “Anyone.”

Across the grass wall separating my street from a housing development and down the boulevard disappearing…we know that danger lurks at every turn for a child, and yet, this story was impossible, according to the people I spoke to who did not read, I guess, I don’t know. But the danger is always sex. Always. Terrible, unspeakable, that’s the fear. But it came out of a family home as if the real danger lurked inside, not out there. But these people exist, regardless of where they live and the biological processes they possess that ensure that making a baby is indeed possible regardless of their wits.

Parked directly behind Angelica’s red Cadillac was Dr. J’s red Mercedes convertible, as if they were a pair but warped, psychedelic, mysterious. The edges of the cars multiply and overlap, and the real world appears unreal, where the solid stuff we see, is in fact a delicate balance of the wires in our head. I didn’t know what to do with it. I thought about larger relationships like the laws of attraction, in this case: what exactly brought these players together, if there were bigger forces at work out there… to Un Bel Di, of course. It was emotional.

My mother’s license plate read IRSHELP, truly. This is what I mean about how she acted as if she were a joke. The joke was apparent, couldn’t miss it, but where it began, I did not know. My father later wrote in his divorce file, which I didn’t read until I was in my twenties, that Dr. J was getting pulled over almost nightly “for drinking, driving, and looking for sex downtown” in this car.

Picturing this car swerving, driving unusually slow, just taking out a trash can, “oops,” or just killing someone along the way, even, she was on the hunt for sex, Dr. J, to Un Bel Di, as this was the tenor that vibrated through her behavior on her white mink coat. And the thing is, Dr. J was an opera fan, so she very well could have been listening to opera.

I came to realize all this when I began writing about it. Wait, what? She was engaging in prostitution? Or was she releasing herself into a great big world without rules or consequences searching for sex, generally speaking, in this area…?

“Night after night,” my father said, as some hilarious interjection to Un Bel Di. “We were picking her up at the police station night after night…” for these reasons.

There’s a picture of me in front of her car in a black velvet dress and white tights. The license plate did not escape me. Neither did my father’s explanation of what the IRS was. Making noises of defiance at him, I needed to know what the hell this woman did. Finally, he said something like “we all chip in to ensure society works basically speaking.” And he kept saying it, turning his fingers into a gear, turning. “Everything works, Maria…this is nature,” he stirred his adhesive. Letters were pictures to me, so if you would have brought me a tablet of the alphabet, I would have been able to spell it out with my finger. I-R-S-H-E-L-P. I got the picture, and I was scared. So, I tried to express that as my father wanted to take a photo of ME in front of this car. I brought my fists by my head, I was about to cry, and I pushed my little face through these fists, trying to tell somebody that I didn’t know where I was, and it didn’t look good. “Help.” This woman needed it. Please help. IRSHELP. It was too real. She worked for the fiscal branch of the government to Un Bel Di, picturing her storming the IRS to save the life of a man.

My father emotionally erupted as to how we had to pick her up in the middle of the night for drinking, driving, and looking for sex, but he left me alone with this person, an alcoholic and drug addict for 5-7 weeks at a time. What sense does that make? Not the time to travel. You have problems at home sir. He was so unaware of himself, it was epic. He did not see what he was doing.

I’m just puttering along, confused at her, the car.

Her limousine turned onto my block…driven by her lover Michel—“him too!” Angelita cried. “She told me!” — I nodded, at nine, because I got the feeling when I was four that it was true. Angelica shook her head in disbelief in her chair, in a swimsuit. A player drove that ball through, as the only way is through. I didn’t know if Dr. J had her license revoked, in other words, but she got a limousine around this time, this Mother Teresa. Knowing Dr. J, she could have simply decided that it was time to move up in the world, weeee! Since, that’s how she acted, clapping like a monkey with cymbals and waving her hand like a flimsy hanky.

But I don’t know if these facts align: she was frequently at the police station, and so, she got herself a limo to solve the problem. We can be quick to make connections, which isn’t necessarily an asset in an investigation, that’s for reading comprehension. It’s valid, but she existed outside of sense, and it’s going to be a problem in this case throughout my life—people making connections, drawing conclusions, without the need for any direct evidence, with some hierarchical need to be absolutely correct.

The people I spoke to tried to understand her, as she fascinated most. She was a hook, kept them engaged, which would be problematic for me growing up and responding appropriately to her actions, or even relinquishing my attachment to this story, as I quickly became a TV show that people were watching.

Dr. J inspired many questions, so I was often in a peculiar position whenever I opened my mouth. “I cannot speak to what motivated her actions,” I would say as I follow a legal understanding of what the truth is in this context, which I abided by, I suppose, to make a point that was never clear. “I cannot FACTUALLY say what motivated her actions.” No one got that. But the audience tended to not accept it. They insisted what the meaning was, like there had to be meaning. A reason, specifically.

Is there a reason for child abuse? Are they searching for it? No. I said, many times, “some things do not make sense.”

And I definitely didn’t make sense, not around this story for a long time.

On the clearest day in LA, a hyperreal dream devoid of clouds and rain, her white limo leisurely rolled on by…A line of black windows reflected the sky the color of her eyes. That’s the central relationship in Dr. J with her eyes as wide and blue as that overhanging canopy.

Her eyes were otherworldly, they always were, and there was so much truth in them that I couldn’t help but interpret her as a true villain, which mythically, holds lessons for society. But that’s later, once I reopened this, but the seeds were planted back then. We tend to associate the path of a villain as a fall from grace, but Dr. J seemed to show another way was possible— up up up into the sky the color of her eyes, not down down down, the inevitable fall. Her name was Joy.

This was an ascent —to Un Bel Di — she was not a hero, not an anti-heroine neither, she was a villain— and the emotional tug of war within us, wanting to get rid of the word villain, even, as I met those people. Well, there are villains, but of course, a villain stirs emotion because of the path—the path is typically the point. How they become a villain. The better person is, the better the villain. The descent of Harvey Den is —heartbreaking, because he was so good. People, generally, at least those I spoke to, had that narrative anchored into their being. “But she’s not really a villain.” Yes, yes, she is. She wrapped her child up in a sex scandal. And that would be good to keep in mind, spread around town, not reserve for this lady. Maybe open some prison cells, parcel out some that empathy. She was a woman that most people just did not see, and I am one of them to a certain extent, yet, she couldn’t have been brighter—fabulous, even.

Oh, that one. I called her fabulous, I would have to stomach it, too, but that was part of her facade.

It was Joyce, by the way, and rejoice works, but I simplified it to pinpoint the root, as Joyce is Irish for Joy.

I was amazed as only a child could be. She was unbelievably bright, brilliantly so, in a world without limits. We carved all that in, we’re designed, structurally, to mitigate impulses, to operate on roads that go in logical directions, except, if you look more closely at a history book, all of that can get warped, psychedelic, fearsome. So there’s range in the world, contradictions, hypocrises…which people forgot, when I told them this story, which was structural, I just didn’t want to talk to them as if they were stupid, but she didn’t appear to have a past, so was that the sign of a very dark one in fact?

Inside her limo, Dr. J gave me a piece of advice once in her white mink against black leather. “Don’t tell anybody how smart you really are…”

She suggested against it, Dr. J, telling anybody, how smart I really was, cracking a real smile, unhinged. She pat the air with her hand, waved it away. We had a “jeu” of shushing, patting our lips, I didn’t understand. She was silly. “Mama didn’t tell anyone that Mama was a genius…” smiling, a weird routine. “And you are smart like Mama,” Not in villain tones, no no no. She was spotless, chaste, as bright as day, brighter than day.

Her name was Joy.

Coming to the window box on our condominium with black bars, Joy waved her hand like a flimsy hanky in the sharpest dusty violet Krizia suit with bright gold buttons. In her red wig, she looked like a Disney princess that just was the executive villain in her white tower in some TikTok version of Alice in Wonderland. A hyper unreal real person — her wrist floppy.

“Can you describe how she appeared to you…” I asked Angelica…my feet dangling off the chair.

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)