Baltimore heroes

IN WHICH THE ESTEEMED DIRECTOR REFLE BARROOMS AND BIZARRE CHARACTERS OF

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^ ^\ I L I1 / An alcoholic one night of the week, I I Iv I |U K a workaholic the other six. Only U I ml 111\» I'm better these days. Now I don't work either day of the weekend unless I have a speaking engagement. And I still drink too much only on Fridays. "Was it fun making your movies?" people always ask. "No!" I respond. "Fun is being home in Baltimore and going out to scary bars."

Bars have always been a big part of living in Baltimore, and the good ones have no irony about them. They're not "faux" anything. They're real and alarming. True, Baltimore is changing, but what I make movies about is still there, lurking on the backstreets. When I was a teenager I hung around outside of bars. My mom used to drive me downtown to Martick's, a bar known (at the time) for its bohemian cus­tomers. "Well," she'd sigh as she dropped me off, knowing I couldn't get in because the owner was aware I wasn't 21, "at least here you might meet some people you could get along with." I sure wasn't having much luck elsewhere. I didn't realize this at the time, but what a bravo chance my mother took by doing that. She knew that Maelcum Soul was the barmaid there and that my best friend, Pat Moran (we met because we had the same boyfriend), sometimes joined her behind the counter. I hung out in the alley, or as we started calling it, the "alley-a-go-go." Pretty soon other lunatic bar

customers would come outside to talk to this skinny underage long-haired kid who wanted to make movies. I was in seventh heaven.

My mom didn't know it, but I had already gotten into a Baltimore bar with a fake ID. Pepper Hill was a semi­legal gay club located next door to the main police station. Who wouldn't wonder about payoffs? There I saw Pencil, my first other-side-of-the-tracks drag freak. He was Baltimore's male Tralala, and I used to see him in the daytime too, when I'd hook school and eat at the awful, aptly named Little Restaurant on Howard Street. Pencil was tall, weighed about 100 pounds and wore black skintight girls' jeans, an angel blouse and his own bleached hair in some kind of makeshift beehive. He would screech and sashay up and down the street, having noil fits and mincing to horri­fied truck drivers, who would shout insults back. I was shocked.

I had heard Pencil lived with his parents in East Baltimore, way out

near tiio streetcar barn. I also used to see Pencil wilii his best friend, Cleopatra, who at six-foot-six hardly "passed." Together they would cause a ruckus when they showed up at municipal band concerts in Mount Vernon Park, which were attended mostly by little old blue-haired ladies. For

some reason Pencil always made an appearance just to hor­rify the crowd. I watched his every move.

Later in life Pencil seemed to vanish from the streets. Once, Pat Moran and I were in my car and saw him. I told Pat to yell "Hoy, Pencil!" and she did, but he just gave us a dirty look. We had heard he hissed to others that he "wasn't Pencil anymore but Miss Streisand." I later tried to locate Pencil but at first had little luck. "I know someone who saw him on the bus once" was about as close as I could get until I found Doris, the beloved and retired longtime bar­maid at Leon's, Baltimore's oldest gay bar. She filled me in: Pencil had graduated to serious drag, become a hair­dresser and gained weight. He drank too much but had good friends right up to when "he had stomach problems," moved with his mother and sister to Startex, South Carolina and died in the late 1990s. Pencil was erased for good, but not from my memory. I never once in my life hail so much as a conversation with Pencil, but he was a great influence on me—defiantly courageous in the face of hatred, rabidly enticing despite his repellent packaging and.vo happy to be living a life totally against the laws of the time.

Of course, before Pencil there was Zorro—Lady Zorro. I have written elsewhere about this lesbian stripper from Baltimore's red-light district the Block whom Divine and I used to go see at the very end of her burlesque career in the 1960s. Zorro was so butch, so scary, so Johnny Cash. No actual stripping for her at that point; she just came out nude and snarled at her fans, "What the fuck are you looking at?" lb this day Zorro is my inspiration. She gives me courage to go onstage with no props for my spoken-word act. Brave. Without makeup. Like Tilda Swinton at the Oscars.

Imagine my sadness when I saw in The Baltimore Sun the 2001 obituaiy for Sheila Alberta Bowater, 63 years of age. Since part of the headline read "Dancer on the Block," I scanned down, and there it was: "Appearing as Lady Zorro...she danced at the Oasis and the Two O'clock Club." I couldn't believe it. Lady Zorro was dead! But then the real shock came. The obituaiy mentioned her daughter, who lived in I igard, Oregon. Zorro had a daughter? I immediately wrote Eileen Murche to express my sympa­thies, and she wrote back, "Dear John, How bizarre that you should contact me regarding my mother Zorro.... My mother spoke of you many times. She loved how outrageous you are."

I was speechless. Zorro knew who I was? She had actually followed my career later in her life? Eileen confided to me that she had gone to Catholic school as a child, and she enclosed great glamour photos of her late mom.

"How could Zorro's daughter possi­bly be like other little Catholic girls?"

Eileen wondered in her letter, adding, "My childhood mem­ories are of strippers, drag queens, drugs, the racetrack, the Block and the many faces that passed through the doorway of [her family's downtown row house on] East 28th Street." In other words, the exact opposite of how I grew up in an

iipper-niiddle-class family on Morris Avenue in Lutherville, Maryland. What could it possibly be like to have Zorro, the lesbian stripper, as your mom?

I hopped on a plane to find out. Eileen lives in a lovely suburban home outside Portland. She was going through a trial separation from her husband of 11 years (whom I met). Her two small children were in school the day I vis­ited. Eileen was down-to-earth, pretty and full of gallows humor. She had quite a story.

Lady Zorro was born out of wedlock on May 23, 1937 in New York City to a mother who wanted to avoid the disgrace of being pregnant in her hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. The child was raised in three different orphanages, environments that were later described as "hellish." The grandparents somehow found out about the baby, took her home and legally adopted little Sheila when she was nine years old. She was a hellion from the beginning, butch once she got to high school, with the added problem of having very large breasts. Sheila briefly tried to be a stewardess, but as Eileen remembers hearing from her mom, "a passenger grabbed her ass, and she threw a drink in his face and told him to fuck himself." So much for the friendly skies. Sheila somehow ended up in Baltimore, working as a stripper with the name of Lady Zorro. The reason for the new moniker, her daughter explains, was she needed a costume with a mask "because she had a crooked nose and they wanted to cover it up." Sheila also got her first girlfriend, fellow stripper Rachel, better known as Ray. Ray designed Lady Zorro's costume, and suddenly a star was born. Z (as she was known to people in the life, right up to the end) brought a real rage to the stage, which added (continued an page 132)

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(continued from page 98) a demented hostile sex appeal. An angry stripper with a great body, the face of a man and a history of physical and sexual abuse. Now there's a lethal combination. Lady Zorro, this alternative Blaze Starr, was my kind of burlesque queen.

Z hung with a tough crowd on the Block. The Oasis Nite Club's owner, Julius Salsbury, and his stripper girlfriend Pam Gail—both Baltimore icons—were her close friends. When Julius's gambling empire got him in trouble in 1970, he fled the country and a 15-year sentence, never to be heard from again. "My mother told me the story," Eileen remembers, "how she drove him dressed in drag because she wore size 11 shoes [which he could get into] and dropped him off at Friendship Airport for a flight to Miami."

The height of Lady Zorro's career was between 1956 and 1962, and by the end she

gave up even pretending to be a sexpot. And then Zorro surprised everybody by doing something way ahead of her time. This les­bian stripper got pregnant and wanted to have the child. In 1966, when Lady Z was 29 years old, she had a baby girl, Eileen, named after Z's new girlfriend, who, despite being straight, stayed with Zorro for 18 years before breaking her heart by running off with a male bookie who "sometimes used their phone." "And your dad?" I pry. "His name was J.C., and he wanted to marry Mom even though she was a lesbian. At one point my mother met his mother with her family in Delaware, and the future mother-in-law was just horrified. I saw my father only eight times. At Christmas and on my birthday he would show up with a gift. But then he went to Florida and I never saw him again."

Eileen's first memories? "The racket of drunk people coming in downstairs after Mom's work, the loudness of their voices, the smell of marijuana, the smell of

alcohol." "When did you begin to realize this wasn't normal?" I ask, remembering sitting at the top of the stairs in our family home, feeling safe, listening to my par­ents and their friends singing show tunes around our piano. "When I went to Catho­lic school and some of the other kids invited me over to their houses and I saw that their moms stayed home and picked them up from school. I had two mommies, Eileen and Zorro." Of course there were benefits of having these two mommies the other kids didn't have, such as "making $ 1,000 a night when I was eight years old. They had poker parties and would take bennies and stay up for days playing cards." Eileen recalls the job title I have heard many times in Balti­more: the "hey girl," who waits on illegal gamblers at clandestine dens. As in "Hey, girl, bring me a beer!" "I served drinks, and they would throw quarters in a big box, then dollars, then later in the night it was $10s and $20s." "But how did you get up to go to school?" I worry, like a good dad. "I didn't," she says, shrugging.

Yet little Eileen was a straight A student. Zorro had her daughter baptized and went through her first communion with her and "wanted to give me everything she never had." "You're nothing without a college education," Z would rant as she taught her daughter to sift marijuana seeds. "I smoked pot and drank at 11," Eileen says, chuck­ling. "Rather than play with Barbie dolls, I had a little joint-rolling machine. I rolled a mean joint. My mother's friends thought it was funny. I started to drive then, too." "What? You drove at 11 years old?" Yep, Zorro had a Lincoln Continental, "and I used to pick her up at the bar because I was worried about her drinking and driv­ing. She was an obnoxious, mean-spirited drunk. She would pick fights with anyone. Men, women—she'd kick their asses!"

Eileen remembers being included on Sun­days, which all the strippers had off, when they would come over and talk about "what sick fucks men were." The girls were always nice to Eileen and gave her money. Instead of bedtime stories she heard about a guy who would pay a hundred bucks to a girl "to walk barefoot around the dirty floor of the bar and then let him lick her toes," or a guy from Hampden "who used to have sex with his mother." "Motherfucker," they'd curse at him, but as the strippers explained to the child, he liked that. "I'd walk by people hav­ing sex in the house," Eileen remembers with little trace of anger. She was abused by a prominent Baltimore businessman who, though he died last year, should still feel guilty in his casket. Starting to feel bad for holding Zorro in high esteem, I realize les­bian mothers have the same right as straight ones to be bad parents.

Then it got worse. Eileen's other mother left and Zorro "had a nervous breakdown and things went downhill after that. Z never had sex again," her daughter remembers. "She never recovered." Little Eileen would call big Eileen and beg, "Please take me with you," but her other mother was ill-equipped to deal with the situation. "I can't," she sadly responded. "You're not my daughter." Big Eileen would call sometimes, Zorro's daugh­ter says, trying to give her the benefit of the

doubt. "Mostly when she was drunk. I saw her only once or twice after that."

Zorro went on welfare and was in and out of mental institutions. When she was released "they had her on chloral hydrate and Elavil, and she just lay on the couch for years." Zorro tried to commit suicide, and little Eileen pulled the gun from her hand. Eileen was raped when some psycho at a bar stole Zorro's wallet, looked at the address on the ID, went to the house and attacked the youngster. Zorro's reaction? "Why didn't you fight back?"

Yet Eileen continued to excel in school. "My friends thought my mom was cool because they could come over and smoke pot at my house and drink. I didn't care what she was; I just didn't want her to be fucked-up all the time." When Zorro was committed for long periods, Eileen tried to keep it a secret. She walked to school every day, and the nuns never suspected their honor student was living completely unsupervised in the ghetto.

But then Eileen got caught. The electric­ity at home was cut off for nonpayment and she overslept and was late for school, so she forged her mother's signature on a note. The nuns spotted the fake and told Eileen her mother needed to call. "She's gone," Eileen blurted out. "But when will she be back?" the nuns asked, startled. "I started crying and told them what happened," Eileen remembers matter-of-factly. "They called Child Protective Services, but the people across the street lied for me and said I could stay with them. I did stay with them sometimes, but I wanted to be by myself." "You never said 'Help me'?" I ask. "Never," Eileen answers proudly.

Eileen never seemed judgmental about her unconventional mom. Lady Z read the newspapers every day, liked classical music and, much to my thrill, loved Johnny Mathis. Z was always incredibly proud of her daughter's academic success. "The roof caved in on our house," Eileen recalls with a grin. "The nuns called the St. Vincent de Paul Society to come fix it. Sister Mary Francis, principal of my school, showed up," and Zorro "only had a small buzz. She knew how important this was for me." Zorro, the good mom, "went to turn on the oven, and a thousand cockroaches started walking up all over the wall." And people wonder where I get my movie ideas? Could there be a better scene than this?

Eileen continued on to the College of Notre Dame, moved out of her mother's house and into the dorms and finally got a boyfriend who "was always there for me— until he slept with my best friend, and that was that." When Eileen graduated from col­lege, Zorro went with a cooler full of beer and some of her friends from the bar. "So she did get drunk," Eileen admits. By then Zorro had had all her teeth pulled, so there was no possibility anyone could imagine she had at one time been a stripper. "Amazingly," Eileen remembers with a laugh, "even though my mother got welfare, she was a Republican."

Zorro started hanging out at the Port­hole, a local gay men's bar. Suddenly Z was a fag hag! "She could draw a crowd," Eileen remembers with a shudder, "her voice was so loud." Eileen would show up

every other weekend and say, "Please don't be fucked-up," but Z would announce, "I'm a fuckup! After you are six years old you are a child of the world." "So I'd drive her to the Rite Aid for cigarettes," says Eileen (Z smoked four packs of Benson & Hedges a day), "and buy her a couple of beers." An enabler? "I never bought her hard alco­hol," she argues with a shrug. "Did you ever try to get your mom to AA?" I ask. "Always tried!" Eileen laughs. "She had a couple DWI convictions and was supposed to go, but she traded pot with someone who would sign in for her at meetings."

Eileen moved to the West Coast. "I flew her out to my wedding here." Eileen had warned her future in-laws, and they had politely said, "All families have issues." You have no fucking idea, she remembers think­ing. "Zorro would ask people, 'You got any good shit to smoke?' and I'm like, 'Mom, these people do not smoke pot. Stop asking every person that walks through the receiv­ing line!' Then I went on my honeymoon," Eileen says with a forbidding pause. Her mom said to the new mother-in-law, "I'd like to have you and your husband over, and your next-door neighbors who were so nice in helping my daughter plan the wedding." So they came, and the hostess with the least-est tried to do her best, but as Eileen later heard the story, Z "had this big jug of red wine she said she needed for spaghetti sauce, but she drank the entire gallon and took a Xanax, forgot, took two more and smoked pot, so by the time people showed up she was completely fucked-up. The guests just ran." "Did Zorro ever apologize?" I wonder. "Never," Eileen answers. "I didn't talk to her for six months after that."

But then Z fell, broke her hip and got a staph infection and pneumonia. Eileen went back to Baltimore and broke in the door. Her mother was almost dead. "Had she called you?" I ask. And then Eileen responds with the only answer from our interview about her mom that shocks me: "She never wanted to be a burden to me."

Eileen moved Zorro, who by then looked like a haggard old man from Baltimore, into her house in Oregon. "People had died of AIDS in my mother's old place; everything was ruined. I sold the house to the crack-dealing neighbor lady who liked Mom." When Zorro moved in with her daughter on the West Coast, it was "just hell. I told my husband, '1 know it's going to be hard. She doesn't like you. You don't like her.'" Zorro was allowed two cases of beer a week, an ounce of pot a month and whatever pills the doctor would give her. But "she would go crazy—the neighbors across the street told me that while I was at work my mother would knock on people's doors and say she had DDTs, meaning the DTs."

"Did Zorro mellow as her last days approached?" I wonder, hoping for a lit­tle good news. When doctors told Zorro she had 12 weeks to live, Eileen recalls, her mother wasn't fazed (she lasted 13). "When it's your time to go, it's your time to go," was Z's response. "I was crying," Eileen remembers, dry-eyed, "and she looked at me and sang 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina.'" "Was Zorro ever nice to you?" I ask tactfully. Eileen pauses and answers without rancor,

"No, she made me dinner. She showed me her love by feeding me."

"Could you ever see the comedy in your situation when Zorro was alive?" I ask. "Not at all!" she answers emphatically. Zorro "tor­mented and abused me, and it wasn't until after she died that I started to appreciate her." But Zorro obviously did something right, I argue. "She raised a daughter who is reasonably happy and well-adjusted, and isn't that the best you can say about any mother?" "I always hoped I could have a relationship with her," Eileen says quietly. "But you did," I plead. "You were always the bright spot in her life." Can living in a real John Waters movie ever bring any kind of joy? "I spoke at my mom's memorial ser­vice and said, 'I spent my whole life trying to not be like her, only to find out, at the age of 35, I am like her. I can walk into a room and within 10 minutes everybody is stand­ing around me.'"

A sad story? Maybe not. Months later Eileen wrote, asking, "Would you please save the tape we did together for me? It would be a great way for my children to learn about their grandmother after they are 21. They ask me about her all the time. I smile and tell them she was a piece of work."

Boy, I need a drink after the Zorro saga! But where to go? All my favorite Baltimore monster bars are gone. Like Hard Times, the aptly named blue-collar or no-collar bar at the corner of 28th Street and Huntingdon Avenue in the Remington neighborhood, which was closed down in 2002 as neighbors "breathed a sigh of relief," according to the press reports. City inspectors had found no running water on the premises while it was still open to the public. So what? I mean, I guess you had to piss in the alley out back, but at least there were cute Baltimoreans inside. Dirty drinking glasses? What's the big deal? Just rinse them out when it rains.

I wish Morgan's was still there. I had a real soft spot for this obviously illegal after-hours club in Hampden, which somehow stayed open for years. I think cops went there themselves when they were off duty. This was the only bar in my life that refused me admittance. And for a long time, too. "But he made a lot of movies," I even heard a friendly mutant stick up for me to the mean, handicapped doorman. "Never heard of them," he sniffed. "Besides, he don't live in the neighborhood." Hampden had yet to be discovered by homesteaders, yuppies and starter families, so my celeb­rity was meaningless there. I could waltz into Studio 54, the Mudd Club or any New York "in" restaurant but not Morgan's. Finally, after months of my showing up and pleading, the owner, who looked like a weirdly handsome Robert Mitchum on a bummer, came down. I guess a couple of locals had vouched I wasn't undercover. "Go ahead up," he snarled with a subtle hint of pride in his establishment. Once I climbed those long steps up to the fully operating bar (with booths, for Christ's sake!), I wasn't one bit disappointed. The local dealers, alcoholics and hillbilly chicks were partying big-time, and some of them looked great. Here, I realized, was the

"upper lower class," a segment of society I had never heard described properly in any sociological studies. Not only were they high on drugs, but the bar was also open and ready to serve beer, at rock-bottom prices! Believe me, not one hipster would dare go in this joint. Even I, a veteran extreme-bar cultist, was frightened there. I avoided eye contact and tried to watch people in the mirrors on the walls so they didn't notice me. I started to take friends from New York there, and they really seemed to like it. Especially some of the stylish women I know who had mostly gay male friends at home. Here they got cruised by real het­erosexual men who definitely weren't closet queens. I still laugh with one of my women friends who went home with a really cute guy she met at Morgan's when she was vis­iting me. When she complimented him on his accidentally cool, wildly patterned thrift-store shirt, he answered sexily, "It's made of rayon. And I'm a rayon fool!"

"Isn't going to these places dangerous?" many of my friends ask me, and they have a point. My notoriety usually protects me in the beginning, but if no one is friendly, especially the bartenders or barmaids, I leave immediately. It's a slow process getting accepted, and pretty often my judg­ment has been solid. Maybe it comes from teaching filmmaking to convicts. I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?

For many years I went to the now-defunct Atlantis, a male strip club next to the Mary­land Penitentiary. I called it the Fudge Palace in my movie Pecker. I always took out-of-town guests there, everybody from Gus Van Sant to many of the New York art dealers (both gay and straight) who were participating in the print fair at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Even my friend Judge Elsbeth Bothe went with me one night after a long day on the bench. When I told her that sometimes you get tea-bagged by the naked dancers if you sit too close, she didn't chicken out; she just wore a hat for protection. God, how I miss that place.

But I like girl strip bars, too, as long as they're bad ones. No thanks to the high-end gentlemen's clubs that want to give you a lap dance while reminding you there is an ATM in the lobby. Boot's was a favorite go-go-girl place. Located on Eastern Avenue between Fells Point and Highlandtown, it may have been the lowliest strip club ever. So nat­urally, for about a year, I hung out there every weekend. The "talent" was definitely unnerving. One we called the Moose. She was a big ox and a lazy stripper. One night, when it was her turn to dance, she was still in the bathroom next to the stage. When she heard her musical cue she kicked open the bathroom door as she sat on the toilet and shook her tits for the audience. Boot's was very David Lynch. One regular, a woman customer with a greasy ponytail, jitterbugged with the valve of the radiator every night for hours and nobody questioned it. The barmaid had a hair-trigger temper, but I liked to get her talking. She used to tell me to bringjohnny Depp in as she thrust top­less photos of her legal-age go-go daughters in my hands for me to give him. I stupidly invited her to my Ghristmas party one year,

and she brought her boyfriend, who entered with a bad attitude and would stop in front of any male guest, glare scarily and snarl, "Are you a faggot?" Many weren't but didn't quite know how to respond. Everybody com­plained to the bouncer, who had to throw the barmaid and her boyfriend out. Boot's closed not long after, and when the Atlan­tis sadly shut its doors (the location became yet another swanky men's club), the gay strip club reopened in the old Boot's space under the name of Spectrum, which imme­diately became known as the Rectum. Due to the hideously nelly go-go boys with awful Baltimore accents that some obviously unsea­soned manager hired, it closed quickly.

I guess I could go to the Bloody Bucket; it's still open. That's not the bar's real name, but locals call it that. It's situated at 1619 Union Avenue, across from the Pepsi plant in the area of Hampden commonly referred to as the Bottom. I wish I owned this place. I'd rename it the Pelt Room, but otherwise I wouldn't change a thing. The crowd that hangs there is not one you'd bring home to Mom (unless she's Zorro). I love Blanche, the bartender, a woman of a certain age who is an R. Crumb comic come to life. A big, big girl with giant thighs who looks so sexy and powerful in her micro cutoff denim skirt. Cellulite is, in this case, a true beauty mark. Having her serve you a drink while you listen to the customers' amazing sto­ries is a great way to start the weekend. "I was in this terrible car accident," a drinking buddy there once told me. "Some China­man [as all blue-collar guys in Baltimore call any type of Asian] ran through a red light and smashed into the car I was riding in. My head went partially through the wind­shield; there was glass everywhere. I was so pissed off I wanted to beat up the China­man. So I got out of our car, went over to him to punch him out, but when I opened his car door I saw his head was part cut off and he was dead. So I stole his wallet." "How much did you get?" I asked, excitedly picturing the movie scene. "Twenty bucks," he said, sighing.

The only guzzling events I've never had the nerve to attend in Baltimore are "blow roasts." Blow roasts are even more excessive than the scariest straight bars, but they are a local one-night tradition, and some­times even the cops organize them. Tickets are secretly and selectively sold weeks in advance to working-class men at their neighborhood bars, and the location (union hall or biker clubhouse) is revealed right before the big night. A blow roast is just like a bull roast: oyster shuckers, pit beef sandwiches, gambling, kegs of beer and medleys of mayonnaise-based dishes. But at a blow roast there are also blow jobs. A "two-tier level of hookers works these events," explains a friend who has attended. "The good-looking ones are the strippers who specialize in acts such as dildo shows, where they penetrate each other for your enjoyment while you eat. One of the girls' specialties was she could shoot a banana from her vagina." Before I can stop him from telling me more details, he adds, "I saw one guy pick it up off the dirty floor

and eat it." But the real horrors are the BJ girls, the "rank ones" who give blow jobs to men who win them in a raffle. "Biker types escort them from table to table," my friend continues, "and sell the raffle tick­ets. When they sell $100 worth they draw a number and the winner goes into this dirty little side room where they've set up parti­tions with blankets or sheets, and you get blown." "But what kinds of girls work blow roasts?" I ask, thinking this job is surely the lowest one in show business. "Pretty ugly ones," he remembers when he is forced to picture their faces. Imagine—just imagine— waking up and knowing your job for the day is working a blow roast! "Suppose a blow-roast girl runs into her father's friends," I wail, "or even her father." "I don't know," my friend begs off. "I only went a couple times." "You went back?" I marvel, trying to imagine the horror of these events. "Did you get blown?" I finally demand. "No!" he shrieks, wishing he had never told me about blow roasts in the first place.

There's only one place left to go: the Club Charles, the hipster hangout I have been frequenting for the past 30 years. It's right across the street from the Charles, the best movie theater in town, and it's still, weirdly, the coolest bar. But it used to be even better. In the 1970s it was called the Wigwam, and it was known as the scariest bar in Baltimore. You couldn't even get buzzed in at the front door unless you were a bum. A real one.

The owner was a Native American woman named Esther Martin, and I lived in awe of her. Born in Oklahoma in 1923, she ran away as a teenager to New York and got a job as a hatcheck girl at the Stork Club. Moving to Baltimore in hopes of studying to be a nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospi­tal, she ended up working in nightclubs until 1951, when she bought a bar and got married to Kent Martin. The Wigwam was the politically incorrect name of their new nightspot, and the tepee-shaped sign advertising grub and firewater immedi­ately attracted a good clientele. By the time I met Esther, in 1980, the neighbor­hood had changed drastically and she was a hardworking divorced mother of four. She ran the joint like an ironfisted Elaine's, though her clients weren't celebrities; they were alcoholics, mental patients and vets. If you received any kind of government check, you were eligible to drink in the Wigwam. If not, get out. Esther would cash the checks, keep all the money and dole it out to her collection of lunatics because, as one of her daughters remembers her mom explaining, "If they had all their money, they'd just drink it up." She kept "tickets," or IOUs, on scraps of paper only Esther knew how to decipher. For some reason Esther let me and Pat Moran inside her secret society. It was like being cast in the banquet scene in Bunuel's Viridiana, when the bums take over the mansion and wreck it (except nobody froze in the tableau of the Last Supper the way they do in the film). No, Esther was watching. And you were allowed to go wild. I saw one homeless guy bite off the nose of another and spit it (concluded on page 138)

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(continued from page 135) on the bar. If you left a cash tip, withered hands would appear from all sides and try to grab it away, but Esther didn't care. She wasn't interested in chump change. She wanted your very soul.

Through the years Esther and I became friends. In 1980, when the Wigwam became the Club Charles, Esther was okay about artsy hillbillies, gay outcasts and cool gearheads taking over from the bums. She still owned the joint, but neighbors and police were giving her such a hard time over her clientele that she was afraid they'd take away her liquor license. It was time to retire from behind the bar and go down to her little cubbyhole in the base­ment, count the money and watch over her kingdom. Long before Esther died from diabetes, in 2003, she instructed her staff and future staff never to charge me for a drink. Somehow, to this day, even new kids who just recently started working behind the bar honor her request.

But the real reason I loved Esther right from the beginning was her mouth. No one in the world cussed more. "That mother-fucking cocksucking son of a bitch" was used as a prefix to almost every name she uttered. When Esther died I went to the funeral home to pay my respects. I had heard that Esther's last words were "Move your coat, asshole," but even though I had gotten to know her four children, Kim, Joy, Dick and Battle, I felt this wasn't the time to set the record straight. So years later I invited her family to my house to talk. They knew I had a great respect for their mom, and like all children of insane mothers they had learned to view their upbringing with a certain bemused detachment.

"Don't put your fucking on the fucking table, asshole!" was her actual last message to her kids, written on a Post-it note, her favorite method of communication. None of the kids are exactly sure what the missing word was, but they agree it could have been coat. "Cocksucker!" they immediately shout in unison when I ask what their mother's favorite cussword was. Sometimes, Kim remembers, Esther would leave notes that read, "Fuck you! Shit! Shit! Shit!" "Mom's father paid her to cuss as a kid," explains Dick. "He was a mean asshole," Kim adds, remembering her mom's words. "He beat her till she pissed herself." Just a mention of Esther's foul language makes each sibling go into hilarious imitations of their moth­er's tirades. "As my dear sainted mother would say," Dick laughs and then mimics Esther's voice, " 'You're as worthless as a cunt full of cold piss.'" "Shit and fall back in it!" Battle hollers out in loving imitation. Kim remembers fondly her mother telling her and her sister, "A cunt hair will pull a 20-mule team!" "Fuck! Shit! Piss! Mother­fucker!" they all start barking, laughing and missing their mother's cussing.

All Esther's children worked at the bar at one time or another, and they get misty-eyed remembering the bum clientele, or "smoke hounds," as their mother used to call her customers. "Esther felt love for

these people," Dick remembers. "She'd visit them in the hospital," Kim adds, and Dick continues, "She'd go to Social Secu­rity, the VA hospital. She'd look for their veteran's papers." "When they died," Bat­tle remembers proudly, "she'd bury them." Esther took photographs of them, too. "All around the house," Kim remembers. "'Oh, there's Mary in her coffin.' Mom always thought she would get a big payoff, and as kids we'd see the suitcases."

Ah yes. The mythical suitcases of the dead bums whose souls Esther owned. Up in the attic, still there in the family house where Joy continues to live. A kind of bum burial ground for Esther's subjects. A car­nival of lost souls that shines in the dark of a forgotten harsh kindness. As Esther's children got older, they had to help their mother go through what was left of the bums' stuff. "You got to help us clean the Captain's apartment," Kim remembers her mother saying. "He had a massive artery blow, and his bed was soaked in blood. Mom had me go down there and dig through all his shit!" Did he have a diamond in his pocket? Esther always wondered. "Well, did you ever get left anything of value?" I ask, knowing Esther had somehow amassed a home for her family and five other prop­erties she rented out. Joy remembers, "Earl—a customer, not a real bum—told Mom, 'I'm leaving you everything.' He lived a month. And then Mayflower trucks pull up—not one, not two, there's a whole block taken up. And they started unloading the most unbelievable antiques. His entire estate was left to Mom."

You didn't want to be on Esther's bad side. Her clientele was "all alcoholics or mentally ill, and Mom was keeper of the asylum," Battle remembers correctly. "She would punch somebody full in the face with her fist," Kim remembers with awe. When one of her bum ladies got hassled by another patron, Esther was there to pro­tect her. Dick recalls, "She coldcocked that son of a bitch." Battle laughs. Dick con­tinues, "And when the fool reached out and kicked at Esther, she went off. She was kicking his guts and saying, 'This is Esther. You don't fuck with Esther!' She worked on the element of surprise," he marvels, remembering his mom's fight­ing methods. "She'd pull out a slapper she carried, a rubber hose with lead in it and taped up. I saw her use it on some guy in Rite Aid once. He wouldn't get out of the way. She walked up and said 'Excuse me,' but he just looked back. She just beat this guy," Dick explains, whacking an imagi­nary slapper in the air. "He just went down on the ground cowering."

I try to picture my very proper mom beating the shit out of somebody as we shopped for back-to-school clothes, but I come up blank. It's hard to imagine a slapper done in tweed. But I would have been excited if my mom had punched out my junior-high math teacher, who signed my yearbook, "To someone who can, but doesn't." Maybe Esther was a real inspira­tion for Serial Mom. I mean, as one of the ad lines for the film read, siik meant well.

Esther worked every single day. Kim says, "She loved being behind that bar." Esther

didn't drink except maybe a beer or creme de menthe. She was old school, her kids tactfully try to explain. She loved Nixon and hated John Kennedy, they remember, acknowledging the irony. She also had a gun, but for good reason. "She had to pay off the cops," Joy recalls. "They'd be in there every day playing pinball. She'd get them beer. 'So-and-so needs a case for a bull roast.' Then they'd come in with a list—'This is for the sergeant.' Old Crow liquor, 400, 500 bottles, and then she said, 'Fuck the sergeant!' and stopped." "I'd rather have a daughter in a whorehouse than a son in the police force," Esther used to rage to anyone who would listen.

In her own way, Esther believed in law and order. When she heard two custom­ers complaining about Judy Garland's live performance in Baltimore—the notorious one where Judy was drunk and staggered around the stage—Esther threw the cou­ple out of the bar. "Here goes Mom," Joy remembers the tirade, " 'You're fucking barred! Get out of my fucking bar! If she didn't do another motherfucking thing but The Wizard of Oz, you cocksuckers!'"

All Esther's children have great affec­tion for her. "My mom was a beautiful woman," Battle says. "She made us very independent," Kim says, laughing good-naturedly. "She was very pro-education," Joy says. And like Eileen, Zorro's daughter, all Esther's kids loved school. "It was away from the madness," as Joy puts it without a hint of sadness. None of them seem overly angry about their alternative upbringing. "It was so much better than the boring childhoods I hear about from my girl­friends. There never was a dull moment," says Joy, the one who all the siblings agree is the most like Esther and who still runs the Club Charles from the same downstairs cubbyhole her mother did. Maybe that's why I interview Joy alone, away from the other family members. She married a cop ("He's an honest one") and has left all of Esther's belongings as they were in the house. "Her nightgown is still hanging in the bathroom," Joy admits.

"You could have asked Esther the day before she died what we did for a living," Kim remembers with a shrug, "and she wouldn't know." "Because you were no longer working in the bar, it wasn't real?" I ask. "Right!" Kim, Battle and Dick agree instantly. "She would say she was so proud of us to other people but never to us," Kim remembers. "She also never wanted to get involved in our personal lives. 'Don't bring that shit in here!' she'd yell if you were moaning about a boyfriend." Before Dick got married, he says, "We went out with Esther, and she started to tell my future wife stories. We were driving cross-coun­try, and an in-law in the car was sick as could be. Mom turned to my fiancee and said, 'Honey, her breath smells like your asshole.' I only knew Robin a couple of weeks then..." he trails off. "Nobody lived a life like we had," Battle says proudly with a warm grin.

I'd buy you another drink, but didn't somebody just yell "Last call"?

YOU COULDN'T EVEN GET BUZZED IN AT THE FRONT DOOR OF THE WIGWAM UNLESS YOU WERE A BUM. A REAL ONE.