I’m sitting in Wash Plus, a laundromat in downtown Sebastopol, CA. The fluorescent light above me is buzzing so loudly I wonder how it is legal to sell lights like that. My only memory of this laundromat is coming down from my second time on acid (I only ever did it twice and the first time it didn’t work) in here, when I was fifteen. I don’t remember the light buzzing that loudly then, as my friend, W and I tossed petty verbal I’m-coming-down-off-of-speedy-acid-jabs at each other while we climbed in and out of the dryers and jumped off the folding tables at 5am.
A block away from where I sit is Ives Park, where the high school freaks and the freakier adults that bought us alcohol and hung out with us used to drink 40s and smoke pot in the bushes and skateboard on the paved walkways. As a child, my mom Barbara would take me and my baby sister Sarah to the playground and public pool at Ives. Years later, my friends and I would drunkenly climb the fence in the middle of the night and steal a swim. We stole everything back then.
Barbara used to call my friends and I ‘The Deadbeat Club’ after that B52s song that came out my freshman year of high school. That was the year I moved to Sebastopol from Vermont and finally found my freaks, my place in the social order of childhood. Or I should say, my place of not being constantly harassed for being gay, having gay moms, and being on welfare.
Across the parking lot from this laundromat is the back entrance to Copperfield’s bookstore, another hangout for the hippies, punks and skater kids. There was a cafe in the bookstore and we would get jacked up on caffeine, smoke clove cigarettes and show off our Zippo lighter tricks to each other, snapping them open and shut with flourish like we were the shit.
We probably were.
Just past the back door of Copperfield’s is the back of the Greek diner where I had my first over the table job as a dishwasher at fifteen.
I used to haul dripping garbage bags and buckets of grease I’d scooped from the grease trap under the dish washing sinks through these doors and hurl them into the dumpster to the left of what you can see in this picture. The owners of the diner had wanted to promote me to being a waitress until I started getting more into punk rock and started coming to work with my legs covered in Sharpie doodles from hanging out outside punk shows at Cafe This in Santa Rosa the night before. They encouraged me to try to be more feminine and more specifically, to shave my legs. I wasn’t having it. I quit that job over the phone an hour before I was supposed to show up for work on the busiest day of the week once I’d moved to a Riot Grrrl house in Santa Rosa at sixteen. The Pine Cone diner is now a mediocre comfort food restaurant called the Gypsy Cafe.
The Sebastopol Public library sits behind the laundromat, Copperfield’s and the Gypsy Cafe, and when I was fifteen, a couple of my friends made a home made tattoo gun out of an alarm clock motor, a hollowed out ball point pen and a guitar string. We plugged it into this outlet on the outside of the library and all got straight edge X tattoos on our left hands. I didn’t even know what the symbol meant. One of the older girls I hung out with had recently started doing heroin and thought it would be funny to get a straight edge tattoo. So we all got them, as ya do.
I loved being a wannabe JD in Sebastopol. It was so much cooler than my small town in Vermont and it was so close to San Francisco. I bought a pair of Doc Martens and bleached sections of my hair. I dated the hottest rockabilly boy in my class. I hadn’t yet figured out that I was queer when I’d moved there. I’d partially moved there to get away from my classmates, who did already seem to know that I was gay, and let me know daily by threatening my well being. This is likely why I still carry a blanket distrust of straight, WASPy, rich people. It’s that kind of distrust that comes from a primal wound, that as an adult I can talk myself a few steps further into logic, and remember that I don’t really distrust any entire demographic of people. After all, some of my best friends are straight, white, rich people.
It took living with (at least in appearances) straight, white, middle class people for the first time in my life for me to quickly figure out that I was in fact queer like my moms and their lesbian village that raised me. When I came out to my moms Beth and Linda at age fifteen, they had the same reaction many parents have. ‘That’s great honey, but you’re young and everything feels big and changes quickly at your age. Give it some time.’
I’m thirty-six now, how come everything still feels big and changes quickly?
Two years later when I met my first girlfriend, I was living in Vermont at my mom, Beth’s house for a few months. I was writing my college application essay for Antioch; writing about growing up with gay parents in a small town and the discrimination I’d faced daily at school. My mom Beth proof read it for me and then took me aside and said, ‘you know, we didn’t try to raise you to be one way or another, and when you first came out to us, we thought, you’re young, this may pass, but now, I have to say, we’re all so glad you’re gay.’ Me too! My own identity found such easy roots in the sisterhood and struggles of my mothers’ histories.
I had two other gay friends in Sebastopol, well, three. Two dudes and one of my best female friends, who was my first love. As I wrote earlier in this blog, we were too scared to really do anything about it then, but we’re still friends, recently reconnected during my road trip.
When I came out, my little sister was eight, had a hamper full of tutus and was obsessed with ‘The Little Mermaid.’ She would tell me how excited she was to be in my wedding someday. When I told her it was unlikely that would happen (pre-gay marriage rights taking center stage in gay politics), she was bummed. Twenty-one years later, she’s planning her wedding, and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of it. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna need to sing a love song to them in front of everyone. I’m already practicing. The wedding will be at our family’s house in you guessed it, Sebastopol.
During one of my summer visits in Sebastopol, I reconnected with two friends from high school and took walks. One of my gay dude friends from high school, CF and I met up for an evening walk at Ragle Ranch Park and caught up. He’s all beary now! It was great to see him and catch up.
My friend, CL and I met up in Ives Park for old times’ sake, sat on the grass in the old hang out spot and ate crackers and cheese under the August sun. We walked around the neighborhood and shared a joint, rolled with pot she’d grown. We caught up, talked about our lives, hopes, disappointments, and our connection felt the same as it ever was to me. She is the mother of these ridiculously adorable specimens.
This picture was taken on a second hang out at Armstrong Woods in Guerneville and not during the child-free hang out when we smoked the joint. Just to be clear. When we hugged goodbye in the parking lot of Armstrong, she gave me a slight look of concern and said, ‘take care of yourself, Laura, don’t lose any more weight.’
I was once again struck and humbled by the degree to which people care about me. I kind of couldn’t handle it and even now, months later, after spending months up north and several weeks in Sebastopol and now back in SF, soon to return to Sebastopol and my mom, Barbara’s AMAZING hugs and statements of unconditional love, it’s too emotionally overwhelming. I still really can’t handle or fully trust kindness from anyone right now.
The self loathing story line that at times runs relentlessly through my head, inspiring nightly nightmares, lack of appetite, constant anxiety-you may have your own version of : ‘I am a selfish, unreliable fuck-up, wholly worthless and utterly unlovable. Isn’t thirty-six years long enough? Are my parents all dead yet? No? I guess I’ll keep doing this then.’
I’m probably the only person who’s ever wallowed in feelings like these. This wallowing and subsequent depression/shut down are part of why I pulled my blog back in September and haven’t written again until now. What is it? December? Apparently, it’s still 2012.
However, this story line is constantly interrupted by friends texting me ideas for how to structure writing projects; keeping me on track. It’s interrupted by my mom’s aforementioned HUGS. It’s interrupted by my pal, JT who’s been bumming around with me for several months telling me whenever we part ways for a while, ‘be safe! Or not. Be good, or be bad-I love you either way.’ Thanks, pal. Those are some very nice sounding words.
cautiontothewinds 