My bond with Keith and Dean proved to be even stronger than friendship. I became so close to them that they finished raising me. I call them my gay dads, and I mean that. If my biological father gets to call himself my dad, then I sure as hell get to say who my real dads are.
When Brad Armstrong and I broke up, it was Keith who took care of me. I could see it coming, but I didn’t anticipate just how he would do it. Brad was often hard to read and not really affectionate. He would build a little wall of pillows between us on the bed when we slept because my instinct is to cuddle. I also knew that the women he was with had a shelf life of one year. I was pushing it at fourteen months.
One day he mentioned offhand that he was taking Jessica Drake wardrobe shopping for her new movie. I didn’t think much of it, but it put me in the mood to check out clothes that I might want some of my stars to wear. I went to the Westfield Topanga Mall, and just like that day that I saw my high school boyfriend holding hands with that pretty girl at the coffee shop, there were Brad and my buddy Jessica, holding hands as they went up the escalator. I could tell by the way they were acting that this wasn’t new.
I didn’t chase them up the escalator. Ever the director, I wanted the confrontation scene to be just right. I ran to another escalator and went up just so I could do a sneak attack on them.
“Well, well, well,” I said, “this is some interesting wardrobe shopping. How long have you guys been fucking?” Jessica said nothing and couldn’t even look at me. I was as hurt about being betrayed by my friend as by my boyfriend cheating. I wanted to kill her, and Brad had to talk me down. And I left.
In the car, I called my dad Keith. He told me to come over right away. When I got there, I hugged him. “It’s now official,” I said with a sigh. “You’re my favorite person. There’s no competition.”
Keith remained my favorite person, even when I woke up accidentally married to someone I’d dated all of two weeks.
I was still heartbroken by Brad and Jessica when I started dating a director named Pat Myne, who I knew by his real name, Bart Clifford. He was in his late thirties and a really nice guy, and had been married to another performer, Shelbee Myne, before divorcing in 1999. Bart and I had been seeing each other for two weeks when we were both in Las Vegas for an adult entertainment convention in 2003. That night in Vegas, I did something very uncharacteristic: I drank. Which is to say that I tried to drown my sorrow about Brad and Jessica in a vat of tequila. The next morning, I woke with my head pounding and my makeup artist friend Christine standing over me holding a marriage license.
“What the fuck is this?” she screamed.
I didn’t remember, but I have since seen photos of Bart and me at a drive-through chapel. I had pink stripes in my hair, which speaks to my insanity at the time. I found Bart in the hotel, and we had to get used to the idea that we were married.
We never really did get used to that idea. I made a go of it because he had a preteen daughter from a previous relationship, Taylor, who he saw quite a bit of. I grew to love her, but Bart and I were only together a year before we decided it was best to split and that what happened in Vegas really just should have stayed in Vegas.
Christine, my friend who informed me I was married, was always urging me to talk to my mother. She was otherwise a very sensible person, but I knew that idea was nuts. But Christine had a very good and healthy relationship with her mother and her grandmother. They have been close her whole life. She couldn’t get her head around the fact that I wouldn’t talk to my mom. Society also drills into you the importance of family. “But that’s your mother,” we hear. “That’s blood!” No matter how toxic it is, we’re supposed to just drink the poison, and maybe this time they won’t let you down. There is so much pressure to honor blood ties, when really my chosen family is the people who have always done right by me.
But there was no convincing Christine. One day we were in New Orleans for work. I was competing in the Gold G-String Awards at the Penthouse Club, which had taken over the Gold Club space. I was there with my roadie Scotty and my stepdaughter, Taylor, who was about twelve and off school for spring break. I wanted her to see New Orleans, and I had all my days free during the trip. Christine was there when my mom’s number popped up as an incoming call. I recoiled from the phone, but she insisted I pick it up. When I did, my mom told me she had seen an advertisement about me and the show. It’s one of the biggest feature dancer contests of the year, and she wanted to come see me. She had seen my show, showing up when I was in Baton Rouge and New Orleans; she loved the reactions and she told everyone in the bar she was my mother. “Don’t you give my baby a dollar!” she’d scream. “You give her a twenty!” Any disapproval she had of my life paled in comparison to the attention it brought her.
I initially said no to her attending out of instinct, but Christine convinced me I should give her a chance. I called her back to lay some ground rules before she drove the fifty minutes from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. “You can’t stay the night, okay?” I said. “We have two hotel rooms and all my costumes. Me, Christine, and Taylor are sharing a room, and my roadie Scotty has his own room. With all of the makeup, all of the costumes—there’s no room in this La Quinta Inn for you.”
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” she said.
“No, no, you cannot stay,” I said. If I had said, “Don’t wear black,” she would insist she was on her way to a funeral and needed to. She only wanted something when I wouldn’t give it to her. But I was adamant, because I didn’t know how much exposure I wanted my stepdaughter to have to my mother. Or me when I’m around my mother. I needed to be able to say, “Okay, we’re going to bed, you can leave now.”
I was suspicious as soon as I saw she arrived with a bag.
“What’s that for?”
“Oh, you know, just in case.”
I made eye contact with Christine, who smiled. My mom was on her best sweetie-pie behavior. Butter wouldn’t melt.
“Sheila’s so nice,” Christine told me while my mom wandered around the room, clearly scoping out a place to thwart me and stay the night. “What’s the big deal?”
I turned when my roadie Scotty walked into the room. It had never occurred to me to mention to my mom that he was black. “Scotty,” I said, “this is my mom, Sheila.”
“Ooooooooh,” she said. “My baby’s made it. She has her own black man.”
All I heard was a thud as Christine dropped something behind me. I watched the look on Scott’s face change from certain he had misheard to angry to “Who is this woman?”
I was prepping for my show that has this big huge Smokey the Bear as a comic thing. In the show, I light a campfire and he comes out and says, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” And he “pees” on it with a fake penis. Well, TSA had taken my fake penis out of my bag and kept it. I was trying to make one with a ketchup bottle, but we needed something dark to cover it so it wouldn’t be bright red or yellow on stage. None of us had dark socks—except my mom. She gave us one, we cut a hole in it, and it worked. I was super grateful and I gave her a pair of my socks in return.
“You saved the day,” Christine told my mom. I winced internally, knowing this would just feed her ego. But then I wondered why I couldn’t just let my mother have this moment. Maybe Christine was right.