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 this classical aria, “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.
People I told the story to, they wondered, “did she know what she was doing?” They did not hear the justice system in it, as comedian Dave Chappelle even said it, “this nigger knew what he was doing,” excuse my usage of that word, but that’s what he said about a FIFTEEN year old. They always try us as adults…” and did my father know what he was doing? Another warped moment: the rules don’t necessarily apply to everyone. I learned this early and I was angry because from my perspective everyone was a baby. That’s it. That’s the wisdom of a baby.
But of course, her limousine turned onto my block…driven by her lover Michel—“him too!” Angelita cried. “She told me!” — and 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, even 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 —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. And the better person is, the better the villain is. The descent of Harvey Dent—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 learned about shadow, light and dark, early, and 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… 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…