Traci Lords: Underneath It All Read online

  Tracil Lords Underneath It All

  Traci Elizabeth Lords

  Dedication

  For the children of the night

  For J.G.

  Nothing ventured nothing gained.

  Contents

  Dedication

  1. The Ohio Valley

  2. The Curse of the C Cups

  3. Hazy Days

  4. Route 66

  5. Hollywood, California

  6. Two Butch Palms

  7. Junior HIGH

  8. School Daze

  9. Porn Again

  10. Angel Is the Centerfold

  11. I, Traci Lords

  12. No One Rides for Free

  13. House Pets

  14. Hell Is for Children

  15. The Skin Trade

  16. Strippers, Tippers, and Pony Clippers

  17. Crash and Burn

  18. Checkout Time

  19. Paris

  20. King Harbor

  21. A Man Named Meese

  22. Running on Empty

  23. My Hero

  24. Dynamite

  25. A Few Wise Guys

  26. Lucky Star

  27. Top Billing

  28. Not of This Earth

  29. Pencil-Thin Mustaches

  30. Cool Waters

  31. Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

  32. Just a Kiss Away

  33. The Lipstick Trick

  34. Cry Babies

  35. The Wrap Sheet

  36. Home Sweet Home

  37. Dancing in the Dark

  38. Press Junk

  39. Film Misses and the Mrs.

  40. Father Waters

  41. Patio in Tow

  42. Have Your Cake ’N’ Eat It 2

  43. Shed My Skin

  44. The Orange-Haired Fairy

  45. Shades of Blue and Green

  46. Star Sauté

  47. Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines

  48. Sweet Meat

  49. Flesh Wounds

  50. A Spot of Tea

  51. Pretty on the Inside

  52. Control

  53. Broken China

  54. The Onion Effect

  55. Bullet Proof Soul

  56. A New Wave

  57. Jeff

  58. Underneath It All

  59. Turn Up the Volume

  Acknowledgments

  Photographic Insert

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Cynthia Levine. Copyright Divine Entertainment

  1

  The Ohio Valley

  I grew up in a dirty little steel town called Steubenville, in eastern Ohio. It was one of those places where everyone was old, or just plain seemed like it. Even the kids felt the times, and the times were tough.

  The streets were narrow and filled with men in Levi’s with metal lunch boxes coming and going to the mills and the coal mines. It seemed like there was a railroad crossing on every other street, where coils of steel were piled up high along the tracks like giant gleaming snakes resting in the sun. It got real hot in the summertime and the dust from the mills wrapped around the people and held them firmly in their places, and the echo of coughing miners was so common you just didn’t hear it.

  The local bar, Lou Anne’s, was always hopping. It wasn’t odd to see your neighbor howling at the moon, and every now and then some of the miners would wander down for a cold one and tie their horses to the stop sign. Drinking was a hobby in that little town, and as in a lot of small towns, everyone knew everyone else’s business. Women had not quite yet been liberated. Husbands ruled the house, women cleaned it, and any strong female opinion was often rewarded with a fat lip. But no one thought much about that.

  At seventeen years old, all my mother, Patricia, ever wanted was to escape. She was born in Pennsylvania in the late 1940s, and her dad took off to California and left her and her mother alone. They moved around from place to place, and after a while she had a new stepdad and two half brothers and sisters. Never fully welcomed into this second family, she found comfort and a home at her grandmother’s house.

  My mother, Patricia, holds me, 1968.

  The collection of Traci Lords

  My great-grandma Harris was a little redheaded Irish woman who loved sugar-toast and drank tea all day long, no matter how hot it was. She combined a fierce sense of social justice with an almost patrician gentleness that was unusual to find in the government housing project where she lived.

  The projects were cockroach-ridden matchbox-shaped dwellings inhabited by desperately poor black families who barely survived on meager monthly public assistance checks. It was a place where hungry children played in the gutters of potholed streets while munching on sandwiches of Wonder bread and mayonnaise they dubbed “welfare burgers.”

  Just a pebble’s throw away down the hill was the University of Ohio, where professors drove their shiny new cars to garden fund-raisers on the campus lawn. I remember catching glimpses of white tablecloths blowing in the afternoon breeze while ladies in crisp white dresses sipped drinks from tall glasses. Every once in a while a burst of applause from the appreciative anthill of university people would enter our world. My mouth watered at the scent of cooking barbecue meat, and I longed to race down the hill and devour the mountain of food on the huge banquet tables.

  But my mother explained that “people like us” don’t mix with “people like those.” “People like what?” I demanded, meeting the weary look of my mother, who said it was a matter of “social class.” I was five years old at the time and didn’t understand why I wasn’t one of the chosen few who could receive hot meals and pretty dresses. I only knew that some people had food and others didn’t, and I was on the wrong side of the fence. I’d gather crab apples from my great-granny’s yard and hurl them in protest toward the happy people down the hill. Although my targets were never struck, I felt justice had been served.

  Great-grandma Harris lived in the first brick building at the beginning of the housing projects. There must have been fifty other little red houses, winding around like a figure eight, each one containing four units. Grandma was known by her neighbors as “the crazy white witch” because she was something of a mind reader who had a reputation for being very accurate. People didn’t always like what they were told, but their fear kept Grandma safe in a very dodgy neighborhood where racism was a sickening fact of life. Despite it all, my great-grandma was always light, gentle, and seemingly unaffected by her status and the people around her. My mother got a lot of love in that house, and ultimately so did I.

  In 1965 the Vietnam War had cast a spell over the people of Steubenville, inspiring in them a patriotic fervor. My mother was a beautiful redheaded teenager with piercing green eyes and a peaches-and-cream complexion. Though she was smart and ambitious, she found herself stuck, working in a jewelry store in a town that celebrated everything she loathed. She thought the war was immoral and said so to anyone who would listen.

  An independent thinker, she didn’t buy the “be a virgin, go to church, follow the establishment” routine that a lot of her friends were falling into. She liked to dance, listened to the Stones and Bob Dylan, and filled her private notebooks with poems. She played the guitar, made out with boys at the drive-in, and went roller-skating on Saturday nights. She lived her life fully but was always hungry for a bigger bite.

  The war weighed heavily on my mother’s heart because it touched her as it inevitably touched everyone. She watched as her friends’ brothers marched off to a foreign land, and cried like everyone else did when they didn’t come back. She ached to have a voice, to make a difference, and to be seen and valued. But she was dead broke and dep
ressed at her lack of opportunities, and no matter which way she looked at it, her future appeared grim. Though she desperately wanted to go to college, she had only managed to get a GED and a crappy part-time job. Her father, who lived in San Diego and hadn’t seen her since she was a young child, promised her a place to stay if she came out west, but he did nothing to help her realize her dreams.

  My father’s family, the Kuzmas, left the Ukraine in the 1930s and settled in Weirton, West Virginia. I suppose my grandfather wanted the same thing all immigrants do, a better life for himself and his family, so he bought a little house by a creek in Weirton and raised three sons and a daughter there.

  My grandfather John had a thick Russian accent and a fierce work ethic that he drilled into his boys. His wife, Mary, was a stout five-footer who drank Pabst Blue Ribbon out of a big blue bowl and sang Russian songs at the top of her lungs while cooking up batches of pierogi and borscht.

  My father, Louis, was born with double pneumonia and spent the first weeks of his existence in the hospital fighting for his life. He grew into a young man who dreamed of California and loathed the war. Rejected from the draft because of the scar tissue on his lungs left from the pneumonia, he ended up doing time at the steel mill instead. He also started to study biology at Morgantown College in Pennsylvania but found it difficult to work at the mill and get an education at the same time. Overwhelmed and exhausted, he dropped out and went home to live with his parents.

  I’m told it was a gorgeous summer day when Louis Kuzma first spied my mom standing on a corner waiting for the light to change in downtown Steubenville. Patricia was on her way to work and had neither time nor patience for the handsome stranger who was trying to pick her up. But he followed her for several blocks, rambling on about the weather and how it was so nice to see her “again.” He acted like she already belonged to him. She was about a second away from telling him to take a flying leap, but something stopped her. He was a real looker, my dad, with his baby blue Clint Eastwood eyes, honey-dipped skin, and a thick head of sandy blond hair. It wasn’t just his looks that got to her, however. It was the kindred spirits he saw in him.

  When I was a baby.

  The collection of Traci Lords

  They started to spend hours together—walking and talking about the war, their families, and their mutual longing for California. They shared their dreams of a more exciting life together. And they fell in love.

  My parents eventually had a common-law marriage. It was the mid-1960s and the thought of a church wedding seemed ridiculous to Patricia. She always swore she’d pass out if she had to stand up and promise to love someone forever while everyone was staring at her. At eighteen that thought was just too scary for her. Instead, they found a small house about three miles from his parents’ place, walked in the front door, announced themselves as husband and wife, and that was that.

  The following year my older sister, Lorraine, was born.

  I was conceived at the end of the Summer of Love and born in the wee hours of the morning on May 7, 1968. I was huge at nearly nine pounds and entered this world totally silent. People say I had the temperament of a baby Buddha with an uncanny resemblance to Clark Gable thanks to thick jet-black hair that gave my fair-haired father a bit of a shock.

  My baby sisters trailed closely behind. Rachel arrived twenty-three months after me and Grace was hot on her heels, completing the tribe known as the Kuzma Girls.

  My father was horrified that he had four daughters with no sons to protect them, and although he loved the idea of kids, he had little patience for the nasty reality of the diapers, whining, and constant chatter the four of us enveloped him in. After a while he started coming home later and later, often leaving us with his parents with whom we’d temporarily moved in so we could save money while my parents looked for a new house.

  My mother had an odd look on her face the day my dad announced he’d found the perfect home to buy, right up the hill from his parents. There were twenty-two steps from our yard to theirs, and even though we now had our own home, Dad still parked the car in his parents’ driveway and walked up the hill through a big field, down the steps, and onto our porch. My mother said Dad would never really leave his parents and she seemed to be right. But we all loved that house so much that nothing more was ever said about it.

  My happiest childhood memories are of times in our backyard. My mother had an old clothesline that hung out in front. It seemed like it stretched a mile long, and I loved sitting in the sun while she hung clothes. She always twisted her hair into a soft knot on top of her head and wore a white cotton dress I loved. There was nothing but miles of green fields in front of our house, thick woods behind it, and a big winding driveway that was never used. On the outside, things looked wonderful, but inside it was a different story. My mom didn’t have a car or a phone, and after a while she felt like a prisoner in her own palace. Dad was always at work or out at a bar somewhere, and at twenty-four, Mom resented the burden of tending to four little girls by herself.

  The situation was tense and got worse as my mother realized she was now just a housewife, and started to resist her confinement. Dad came home drunk some nights. When he did, he became angry and wild, accusing Mom of having a lover hidden in the house somewhere. The fights were loud and unrelenting, and after a while they escalated to blows. She hated it when he drank, and told him so. Then the screaming began, every night after The Lone Ranger. I started retreating to the nearest closet before the program ended to secure the breathing corner, since I hated being stuck in the back with the spiders. Grandma Kuzma thought my hiding adventures indicated I was a smart girl, told me that what I was doing was called “proper planning.” All my sisters coveted the spot too, and when they beat me to it I’d start to panic, running down the hallway imagining a monster at my heels. After a while it became like a game, with my father as the monster brandishing big teeth and several heads.

  I wondered if he’d really eat us if we were caught, or just chew on us and spit us out as he seemed to do with Mom. She looked like a rag doll when he shook her, and I always prayed she wouldn’t break. It was hard to look in her eyes after the fights. I felt guilty about not being able to help her. I really wanted to make him stop, but he was so big that I was afraid. I started studying westerns on TV, wanting to become brave like Clint Eastwood, but it didn’t work, and I felt like a great big scaredy-cat instead.

  I couldn’t understand what Dad was so angry about. What had we done wrong? Was it because we were girls? My mom always said he wanted a son, and I wondered if things would be different if we were boys. Would that make everything better? What was the difference between boys and girls anyway? Sports? Did he want someone to play baseball with? Oh no! I couldn’t play baseball! I hated tiny hard balls being thrown at me and never mastered the clobbering technique of batting that the boys in the neighborhood had. And I never wore pants. I preferred Lorraine’s hand-me-down baby-doll dresses. Why did he want silly boys anyway? What was wrong with being a girl? Was it really a man’s world like my mom said? And if so, where did that leave us?

  The reality of the ugliness and turmoil at home eventually took its toll on our mother. One morning while we were eating our breakfast of Fruit Loops and peanut butter, she finally snapped. She’d been trying to quiet us down, but we were rowdy and she was totally overwhelmed. She picked up a shoe and hurled it across the room at my sister Lorraine. It hit her square in the forehead and sent us all to the emergency room to have my sister’s forehead sewn back up. I’ve never seen my mother cry so much. Beside herself with guilt at harming her own child, she became determined to make some changes.

  I was seven years old when we left our father. Mom said they were getting a divorce, and I immediately searched the dictionary for the word. I’d heard other children use it, but I wanted to be absolutely sure of its definition. Webster’s dictionary informed me that it meant “to cut off” or “separate,” and while the idea of being separated from our daddy made me sad,
I couldn’t ignore the relief I felt when I imagined how quiet our home would now be.

  During that time, my siblings were my best friends. I belonged to Lorraine because she and I were the older girls, and Rachel hung around with Grace. We believed in democracy, and after Mom told us we were leaving our father, we huddled together in our closet courtroom for an emergency meeting. I informed the community of sisters of my findings in the dictionary and we debated whether we should stay and fight or go. There were, after all, four of us plus Mom against Dad. Lorraine thought we could take him, but I was less certain, secretly fearing those big teeth coming after me.

  My little sisters didn’t really understand what leaving Dad meant. They thought we were going on vacation, and Lorraine and I let them think that. We just didn’t want them to be sad. I cast my vote for Mom and agreed to go along willingly, since she needed us more than he seemed to, and the meeting of the Kuzma Clan was adjourned. Just like in the meetings on TV, order was restored. Satisfied, we filed out of the closet and marched off to an unknown fate.