Stepping off the train onto the platform at Kansas City's Union Station, my
escape from Butte felt official. Out of state. Out of mind. And soon to be completely out of place.
Commanding my attention with vigorous waving at the arrival gate, three
Saint Mary "Greeters" surrounded me in a lingering group hug bordering on
bondage. Little did I know that as the working-class jaws of one trap
opened, a much more insidious other was about to snap shut.
With my luggage loaded into the official Saint Mary College Vista Cruiser
wagon, I took the offer of a back seat and expected one of the greeters to
join me. Instead, all three packed into the front and scootched closer
together than would be even be comfortable for a couple with a kid. The
middle passenger rested her left arm across the top of the seat and toyed
with a lock of the driver’s hair. Giggling, squeezing, and hair twisting over the thirty mile trip from Kansas City to Leavenworth placed me the awkward backseat role of inadvertent voyeur.
Founded in 1859 as the "Academy for Young Ladies", Saint Mary College (now
University) is also the official Convent Motherhouse of the Sisters of
Charity of Leavenworth. Devoted to both teaching and healthcare, the
Sisters of Charity operated the only full-service hospital in Butte and
dominated all phases of Catholic education there.
Every year, from first grade through high school, all female Catholic school
students spent an indoctrination day with "The Saint Mary Story", an
elaborate marketing campaign of campus slides, graduate gratitude, and the
special blessing of getting "the call" to formally enter the Convent.
Promoting, "the call" to attract a new generation of nuns seemed like the
primary objective. Generous financial incentives and academic leeway
were granted to anyone with the slightest interest in attending. Degrees in
lesbianism weren't mentioned in Saint Mary brochures.
The Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth are, no surprise, located in Leavenworth, Kansas...a mid-sized mid-western town with an
economy centered on incarceration. Everyone in Leavenworth was proud of its seven prisons, especially the famous Federal Pen where Robert Stroud, the Bird Man, began his ornithology research before transferring to Alcatraz.
Saint
Mary students who weren’t interested in dating a guard or an inmate kept
themselves occupied on campus until graduation. Even if born of idle curiosity rather than avowed persuasion, lesbian relationships
were an officially ignored reality at the school.
The Saint Mary driver and her middle companion were indeed
having sex with one another. And adding a political edge to sexual exploration was the first wave of 70's feminism. Lesbian
relationships were labeled a defiant obligation.
______________________________________________________________
Though SMC had only around five hundred students, they were drawn from
a global community including Africa, India, South America and VietNam,
wherever the Catholic church had been able to set up shop. Their
economic circumstances varied with some on scholarships from
impoverished backgrounds but many more from the wealthiest strata of
their countries.
For the wealthy, SMC was a stepping stone into the US marketplace of
financial and matrimonial prospects. There was even a bona fide
Ethiopian princess complete with a crown and scepter. The South
Americans were the most obvious about having money. Shopping trips
to Kansas City occupied much of their time. But it was their sleeping
arrangements that generated the biggest buzz. A few of them
brazenly pushed their twin beds together, spawning the first open
speculation I heard about lesbian activity on campus.
Beyond noting a possible connection between these rumors and the hint
of a menage a trois I saw in the front seat of the Vista Cruiser, this
wasn’t a topic that interested me. I never doubted my own sexual
attraction to men. Throughout high school, my only concern was to avoid
getting pregnant.
Despite being raised in a Catholic family and attending Catholic
schools, sex in general wasn’t much discussed or cast as a moral issue.
In a way, this was in keeping with any uncomfortable issue in Butte.
Better not call it to mind. As an adult, when I asked my mother about
why she never said anything about the mechanics of sex, she told me she
knew I was smart enough to figure it out on my own which was exactly
what happened. By third grade the Encyclopedia Britannica became
my source of reproductive education. Further reinforcing this
practical, unsentimental view of copulation was the fact that there were
no romantic fairytale marriages among the families I knew in Butte. For
women in particular, it could better be called a surrender to obligation
with arranged marriages still being commonplace. For me, sex was simply
an amoral biological act.
As it turned out, many foreign students at Saint Mary had their own
versions of lesbian engagement. Even those not sexually involved with
other women were more genuinely affectionate with one another than we
Americans were despite our 1970’s “sisterhood”. Based upon their
own accounts, same sex exploration was a matter of simple practicality
for many of them. “The Pill” had been available in the US for over ten
years but it was not easy to get even here. These women from the
farthest reaches of the globe were comfortable exploring their bodies
with a member of the same sex just for pleasure and curiosity without
concern for birth control. This practical approach to sex crossed a wide
range of the cultures at SMC from Mexico to the Belgian Congo. Though I
wasn’t a virgin, concerns about pregnancy had constrained my
experimentation with intercourse. Written soon after high school,
this essay was my attempt to summarize the reproductive pitfalls of that
time and place.
The School of Foreign Affairs
The first woman I slept with - and it was much more actual sleeping
than sexual contact - was from Vietnam. It was a year before the US
decided we had lost the (Conflict) War in 1974. Huong’s father was an
engineer and her mother exported textiles. Both were well-educated and
successful. Huong was on her way to becoming a chemical engineer with
plans to expand her mother’s work with fabrics. A Saint Mary student
visa brought her to the US before entering Northwestern University in
Boston.
Huong attended French schools from the age of three and, besides
Vietnamese, was fluent in French and English. In fact, when she
was excited, she spoke English better and faster than anyone I’ve met to
this day. She could commit complex piano pieces to memory after hearing
them only once and, with her advanced command of calculus, she would
have been comfortable teaching the classes we attended. Huong was
confident, funny, and thoroughly unafraid of the world.
The US Army has a Command and General Staff training facility at Fort
Leavenworth, affectionately called the War College'. Officers attend
from around the world but, at that time, VietNam was the best
represented. Of course, all the Vietnamese students at Saint Mary’s knew
these officers and Huong would take me to social events at the War
College. Sometimes there were formal dances at the Officers Club where
prizes were awarded. One of the officers once partnered with me for a
Tango and we took second place. It was after one of these dances that
Huong and I ended up in her room, sitting on the floor facing each
other. At some point she looked at me with mesmerizing intensity and,
without hesitation, gave me a lingering kiss on the lips and we became
“special friends”, a euphemism the nuns themselves used for their own
physical relationships.
We never got fully undressed when we were in bed together, but I
discovered an avenue for sexual exploration without concern for
pregnancy. At the end of the school year she transferred to
Northwestern University in Boston and wanted me to come with her, but
there was no way that would happen. It was not financially feasible for
me and, though we had certainly become close friends, I was not sexually
attracted to women. Returning to Saint Mary’s in the Fall of 1974, I had
no intention of further lesbian experiences, making it all the more
improbable that I would eventually spend twenty-five years in a same-sex
relationship that began there.
Riding the Mary Go Round
I saw Mary Angela Collins for the first time a few months after
arriving at Saint Mary’s. She had the lead role in a drama department
production of Paul Zindel’s play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds. Beatrice, the character she played, is an angry, middle-aged
alcoholic who verbally flays every living thing around her. Mary Angela
was only twenty years old at the time but portrayed the part so well she
won accolades for it at a national College Drama Festival. Down
the road I’d realize, this wasn’t a role she had to pretend to
play. 1972 Film Adaptation with Joanna Woodward
I wrote an article about architecture for the college newspaper (The
Taper) and Mary Angela was my assigned editor but we didn’t meet in
person until nearly a year later. (My mother kept a copy of that article. After she died, I found it
in her papers. A story about Mary Angela in Marigolds happened to
be on the front page.) Soon after returning from the Drama Festival, Mary Angela left
Saint Mary, literally in the dark of the night. At the heart of her
sudden departure was an allogation of sexual misconduct she made against
the play’s director and head of the Drama department. In threads
that unraveled over time, strong elements of vengeance for perceived
slights surfaced as the likely motivation behind the allegation. The
director chose a competitor for the lead in Mid
Mary Angela being the unwitting victim of sexual predators would unfold
as a common theme over the years. In this instance, the alleged
perpetrator was a talented young director/professor. The college was
proud to have him as head of the drama department. He had a smart,
lovely wife and two young children. In the aftermath of the Mary Angela
incident, he lost his job and his family. The last that Mary Angela
reported hearing of him, he was selling carpets in Kansas
City.
By the following academic year, she was back on campus and a mutual
friend, Viki Sparks, decided that Mary Angela and I needed to meet each
other mostly because we were both English majors. With Viki’s urging I
went to hang around the dorm where Mary Angela regularly held court at a
big round oak table. The drinking age in Kansas, at the time, was
eighteen and alcohol was allowed in the dorms. Drenched in Scotch
whiskey, she delighted in being at the center of endless arguments.
Recurring topics focused on current affairs such Cesar Chavez grape
boycotts, Watergate, and women’s rights especially as it involved the
sexual revolution. Amped on White Cross, a common amphetamine that we
regularly got from one of Viki’s “honest to god” Mafia connections in
Kansas City, drunken blather sometimes continued for days. When the
speed wore off, we would all crash in the same dorm room, snuggling
together in a “litter” as Viki called it, on the same bed. Despite the
drinking and awkward physical tension of the “litters”, both of which I
did not find attractive, I was starting to get a hint of what it meant
to have couth. In the working class bars of Butte, this same kind of
senseless drunk-speak was a crude waste of time. But in the halls
of a college dorm, it was elevated to passionate discourse.
During Spring Break, four of us went on a cold camping trip to Grand
Lake in Oklahoma. We spent most of our time huddled in a small dome tent
drinking Scotch and solving the world’s problems. Viki and I smoked
Kansas ditch weed, which is what formed our friendship in the first
place. At some point Viki brought up the idea of having sex with
another woman and asked if we’d ever thought about it. Discussion
quickly turned to sex in a 1975 “the personal is political” feminist
context. Of course, I had already had sexual contact, of a sort, with
Huong, but had no desire to bring that up. The fact that the nights were
quite cold gave us a valid excuse to all sleep a little closer. We
returned from camping as two quasi-couples of which Mary Angela and I
were one, allowing me to simply call her “Mary”.
As a Social Work major, Viki was cultivating a radical
political/lesbian matchmaker persona. She was the only one with a
private “shack up” (Viki’s words) dorm room and it got heavy use soon
after the camping trip. Mary and I had sexual contact there for the
first time. I use the term “sexual contact” because that is all it was
in my mind. An oddity that I didn’t recognize until some time later was
that we didn’t kiss the first time we had sex and seldom did throughout
the years. With Mary, kissing had an uncomfortable tinge of being far
too intimate.
Single-sex Catholic school culture and 1970’s Feminism played major
roles in the whirlwind of lesbian activity on the Saint Mary College
campus. At the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the sexual revolution had
gone mainstream. Behind locked dorm room doors, lots of women were
having sex with each other at Saint Mary including many of the nuns,
some of whom even hinted at it because, of course, it was a common
occurrence in the convent. The “Church” even had a code phrase for
it. “Special Friends”. It wasn’t acceptable for two nuns spent too
much time together, though it wasn’t clear what the consequence was
because it appeared to be the norm. There was even justified speculation
about the Saint Mary College President, Sister Janet McGillan, and the
woman she appointed as Dean of Academic Affairs, Sister Claudette
Miller, who seemed to have little qualification in her resume for the
position other than her inseparable friendship with McGillan. Indeed,
they were together so much that their relationship was viewed as an open
secret. McGillan was also a (secret) cigarette smoker and
Claudette would accompany her on secluded smoking treks through the far
reaches of the campus. Though I am certain there are ex-nuns who left
the convent for heterosexual reasons, all those who I’ve met left as
lesbians who enjoy talking about their sexual exploits behind the veil.
I have no stomach for any of this. The Catholic Church has consistently
condemned homosexuals, even to death, while harboring that activity in
even its most powerful ranks. The Catholic Church is a cesspool of
hypocrisy.
Sensing that the College was radiant with the heat of “Special
Friendships”, the Dean of the appropriately named Office of Student
Affairs, a lay woman (non-nun) named Mary Morgan, invited a lesbian
couple to give a presentation on campus. What became the legendary
“Bobbi and Sandy talk” resulted in closet doors flinging wide open.
Everyone was amazed that it went as planned. Maybe those in charge
thought there’d be no interest, or maybe they didn’t fully understand
the intended topic. In any case, within a week the Dean of Student
Affairs found herself with only her own affairs to manage. She was fired
without explanation.
But the seeds of Lesbian Feminism had a fertile bed at SMC. Roommates
who used to lock themselves away alone for hours, under the pretense of
“studying”, now laid around in open embrace. Theories were traded about
who was with whom behind the walls of the convent. In step with a
growing national trend, sexuality became a political statement rather
than a personal preference. The “Lesbian Path” had then discovered her
true identity. “The Personal is Political” may have been the first
“Politically Correct” slogan and lesbianism was the first test of that
correctness.
Mary had only a few months before she graduated and I expected that
would mark the end of our “thing”. In the wake of the Wes Payne episode,
Mary became engaged - with rings and wedding plans - to a guy named Tim.
He managed a movie theater where he once proclaimed, “I Love You, Mary
Angela Collins”, on the marquee then gave her a photo of it which Mary
had in a frame on her dorm room dresser. The three of us even attended
the annual Saint Mary Ball together. It took place off campus so Tim
drove us there and back in his car. On the return trip to campus, Tim
suddenly pulled off the road and started pounding the steering wheel
while Mary sat stone-faced next to him. I was completely confused by the
burst of drama and didn’t say a word. When we finally returned to the
road, the rest of the trip was taken in silence.
Back at the dorms, Mary asked me to come to her room where she rested
her head on my shoulder in a sloppy drunk crying jag that culminated
with her declaring that she was in love with me. Hmmm. (More about that
later) Tim was actually Mary’s third marriage engagement. She kept the
rings from the other two in a jewelry box. The second engagement, Ron
Gunderson, actually never went away. In fact, he contacted me
through LinkedIn in 2014 just to download his lifetime of frustration
with being her ultimate doormat. He repeated the phrase “being
thrown under the bus” in every conversation we had. Ron will come up
again down the road.
I mark this Tim episode as my first lesson in the subtlety of
instilling emotional obligation. At the time, I was looking forward to
the end of my Mary Angela experience. In addition, I had never used the
word love in connection with my feelings about any sexual partner. In
fact, the marketed fantasy version of “falling in love” is still a
mystery to me. But here is what I learned. The phrase “I love you” does
invoke an expectation of reciprocation. I don’t remember responding
immediately when Mary said it, but I do recall my stomach twisting when
I heard it. In her mind this was the point at which we became a
“romantic couple” and she asked me to come with her, after graduation,
to her family home in Wayzata, Minnesota.
Mary’s college car is worth mentioning as an indication of her place in
family favor. She drove a 1972 Chevy Camaro SS Coupe. In contrast to the
pastoral, flowery feminine campus setting, it stood out like the street
racing trophy it was intended to be. Visitors usually asked, “Who drives
THAT?!” when they first saw it. Mary’s father, Jim, a General Mills exec with dark regrets, bought it for himself as a
mid-life crisis muscle car. It was metallic sky blue overloaded with
chrome and horsepower.
The story about why he gave his dream car to Mary was a nonsense tale
about it being an early graduation gift that she was really paying for
herself. I remember Viki asking Mary if her other five siblings had been
given such gifts and Mary’s dismissive response was that the car really
wasn’t a gift since she was “paying for it”. The actual
circumstance was, yes, Mary was the only one who got a custom trophy car
and, no, she wasn’t paying her parents for it. At least, not with
cash.
_________________________
Mary and I met in the Spring of her senior year. At the time, she was
playing the part of Beatrice in a school production of Paul Zindel’s play,
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds. She won accolades for
her portrayal of a fearful, angry woman who twists the life out of
everything around her. She played the part so well.
We had an intellectual rapport that was often exhilarating and could have
cemented a lasting friendship aside from any lesbian involvement. As later
experience would bear out, neither of us had an inborn appetite for being
gay. There were a few hard core, politically-correct feminists on campus who
swore devotion to the lesbian lifestyle on principal alone, but I had no
desire to pretend to be something I wasn’t even if it meant stirring an
activists’ wrath. I saw Mary’s graduation as the logical conclusion to our
curious fling. Instead, she extended invitations that began to tether me to
her for years to come.
The first was to visit her family home in a wealthy suburb of Minneapolis.
Her father was a General Mills executive, the revered patriarch of a model
American family that had scaled the heights of local celebrity. To someone
like myself, who prayed to be absolved of my working-class stigma, being
accepted into the upper echelons of corporate Americana seemed like an act
of divine intervention. I had been handed an opportunity to learn how to
pass.
Most of Mary’s family also happened to be visiting at the time, including
her youngest brother, Chris. He flew in from California the day that Mary
and I arrived from Kansas City. He was silly-funny and self-effacing. I got
the impression that he knew he could never fit into his family of origin but
he could never give up trying. Our attraction was mutual, immediate and
complicated.
Chris was already a dutiful husband. He had married his wife, Karen, two
years earlier when she told him she was pregnant. Soon after the ceremony
her periods returned. A phantom pregnancy gave birth to an unmentionable
resentment but divorce was not an option. Instead they each consoled
themselves in their chosen addiction, Chris with Scotch and Karen with
candy.
Chris and I had sex for the first time a year later. He told me he loved me,
then followed that with an apology for never being able to leave his wife. I
said that didn’t matter. No other response seemed possible, but I had been
well-schooled in waiting. In a sheltered hollow of my naive heart, I planted
a hope and lived as roommates with his sister Mary while others thought, or
insisted, that she and I were lovers.
A few weeks after I met Mary’s family in Minnesota, she drove to California
and persuaded me to spend the summer there. We rented a small studio in a
1960’s apartment complex near the Highway 101 border of Palo Alto. Chris and
Karen lived ten miles away in Sunnyvale.
A newly minted lesbian feminist friend from college joined us in the studio.
Despite her braless dykedom, Viki renewed her birth control prescription and
started sleeping with Mitch, our twenty-one year old apartment manager who
was a high school friend of Stephen King. After a few weeks, she moved into
his apartment for the rest of the summer.
Mary and I spent most of our time with Chris and Karen, drinking straight
Scotch and playing board games. The few times that Mary and I had sex that
summer, I imagined I was with Chris. This didn’t seem like a problem to me
because, at the end of the summer, I planned to return to Saint Mary’s for
my Senior year and expected that the future of this relationship with Mary
would quickly die away.
Not long after my senior year began, a good-sized community of graduated
Saint Mary lesbians formed in Kansas City about thirty miles from our
College in Leavenworth. Included in this tribe was Viki who had dropped
Mitch, gone off birth control and was again leading an Amazon war party.
They encouraged Mary to return to Kansas. After a few months of pleading
letters and angst-filled phone calls, she did.
Not long after her arrival, coy phone calls and elated love letters resumed.
She needed some distraction to keep her company. We formed some vague
arrangement of roommate/snuggle buddy. I got all wrapped up in the logistics
of hitch-hiking back and forth between Saint Mary and Kansas City every
weekend. I was years away from understanding all the isms that made me so
afraid to say no to Mary.
The General Mills Ghetto
After attending her graduation in Leavenworth, Mary’s parents stayed in
Kansas City for a few days while she and I headed to their home in Wayzata
where a truncated family gathering, with three of the six Collins siblings,
would take place. We were the first to arrive at their two story colonial
mansion on an estate large enough to dwarf the forty full grown pines that
surrounded it. I know there were forty trees because everyone in the family
regularly mentioned them by number. I had never been in a house this large.
There seemed to be bedrooms everywhere but Mary insisted that we sleep in
her parents bed and delighted in the idea of us having sex there. Though I
agreed, it felt unsettling with the off chance of being discovered hanging
in the air.
As it turned out, I had good reason to be wary of ending up with Mary in her
parent’s bed. Many years later in California, Mary’s oldest brother, Jim
(Jr.), told me a story with a strange reverberation to the parent bedroom
situation. Here is that aside.
Jim Jr.’s wife, Barbara, was always politely tense around Mary. Jim’s
explanation for the tension was that after he started a relationship with
Barbara, they visited the Wayzata family home while Mary was still in high
school there. After the visit, Jim Jr. and Barbara returned to California
and a few weeks later Jim got a frantic phone call from mother Dorothy
saying that he and Barbara had caused Mary serious psychological distress
because she had seen them having sex somewhere in the house. Though the
exact location that Mary gave seemed to vary, sometimes it was in the
parent’s bedroom and sometimes it was even described as being the laundry
room, the trauma occurred because of Mary witnessing their sex act. As
an added dramatic bonus, it was out of wedlock to boot. Mary said that she
told her mother, Dorothy, because it was so distressing. Of course, Dorothy
immediately contacted son Jim to verify it which left him so flustered that
he took the first available flight to Wayzata. He claimed, even as he told
me the story, that nothing Mary described had occurred. Nonetheless, he
apologized and the end result of all this dramatic activity was that the
unresolved tension only increased when Mary began introducing me as her
lover. Sex and drama went hand in hand in this corporate all-American
General Mills family. Now, back to my first encounter with the free floating
Collins carnality.
The first of Mary’s siblings to arrive the next day was her second oldest
brother, John, with his wife and toddler son. They lived in San Diego where
John was an exceptionally successful anti-labor lawyer who had just won a
landmark union busting case in San Diego that made him an instant
millionaire. This would be the main topic of discussion throughout the
visit, interrupted only by his wife running their child through baby genius
demonstrations.
A few hours later the youngest Collins son, Chris and his wife Karen, pulled
into the driveway from Sunnyvale, California, where Chris had just been
promoted to assistant manager at a local drug store chain. This could not
compete with John’s Unions busting achievement so it was ignored except as
snide ridicule. Competitive stench fouled the air and grew poisonous with
criticism of the siblings who weren’t there. Without actively intending it
over the years, I came to know more about the Collins family than I did of
my own so an overview is worthwhile here.
The parents, James and Dorothy, did not come from wealthy backgrounds but
they were both intelligent and life had presented them with fortunate
opportunities. James was an only child and there was an unspoken expectation
that he would be the center of all attention. Everyone was on alert, ready
to defer to him in any way necessary. With Dorothy, it was the most obvious
and even painful to witness. She was his social interface, greasing light
conversation and laughter. She could be midway through telling a story that
had everyone enthralled when James would grunt some comment unrelated to
Dorothy’s tale. She would visibly freeze and suddenly he would take the
floor. No segway and no return to her previous station in the spotlight. Not
when James had something to say. Then everyone would be obliged to
acknowledge and attentively comment on whatever happened to come out of his
mouth, however bewildering. An instant absurd play. More often than
not, he’d utter some musing about the English monarchy which he admired and
defended even without contest. Even the air around him was stiff with
control.
Most notable, though, was his relationship with his own mother which I got
to witness during the last years of her life. Even this has an unusual
sexual connection. For some unexplained reason, she became almost completely
blind while giving birth to James. As a result, according to the story that
circulated among her grandchildren, she refused to have sex from that point
forward, leaving her husband so frustrated that he turned to molesting his
granddaughters for consolation. This “grampy molestation” story was an
ongoing sore point throughout the time I was close with this family. With
the grandsons mostly denying it and the granddaughters all confirming it
even years after “grampy’s” death. One thing for certain, though,
James and his mother had a cold and even ruthless relationship. I cannot
recall even seeing them touch let alone embrace. For James it seemed to be
nothing more than a social obligation. He visited from out of state on
occasion, paid expenses to keep her comfortable, and handled necessary legal
transactions. But his needs always came first. When General Mills
transferred him to England at the end of his career, as a kind of
“retirement gift”, he had a perfect excuse to never see her again. He only
returned for her funeral. More details about the grandmother will come up
later. In short, James was the essence of repression.
Mary’s mother, Dorothy (Dooley), was a natural musician, one of those people
who could play the piano by ear without lessons. Though her Irish immigrant
family may have bordered on impoverishment, Dorothy was ambitious and took
education as her way out of being stuck where she was born. I recognized
this as something we had in common. In the 1930’s, she got a
scholarship to attend Saint Mary College, the very one where Mary and I
met. At the time that Dorothy attended, it was actually called Saint
Mary Academy and considered more of a “finishing school” for young women
than a serious academic institution but they did award teaching certificates
so Dorothy became one. Though she would probably designate her marriage to
James after graduation as being her highest achievement, Dorothy’s
unfulfilled ambitions were powerful and emerged in dramatic ways as a
mother. There was universal agreement among the children that Dorothy had
serious mental health issues. One story in particular, about her threatening
to fall onto a kitchen knife while pregnant, came up regularly in sibling
conversations. Meanwhile, in day-to-day life, she epitomized the corporate
housewife persona which was an essential ingredient for the success of an up
and coming young executive like James Cyril Collins. Based upon my
interactions with her and my overall experience with the family, I’d say
that Dorothy was more of a convenient, albeit melodramatic, scapegoat. The
whole family were experts in psychological projection. But James, the
father, was a master of insidious manipulation. Dorothy may have been born
with the seeds of instability, her brother committed suicide, but it was her
husband who gave those seeds the fertile ground in which to flourish while
he looked down from being “above reproach”. There was an active family
culture around loading all blame and blemish on a scapegoat. Among the
siblings, the youngest, Maureen, was it.
Being the youngest and second youngest, Maureen and Mary were close in age
but were distant on a personal level. Like the situation with Barbara, there
was a dramatic explanation for that too. Here is an overview for the
time being. As the two of them grew into teenagers, Mary may have felt
threatened to be overshadowed by her younger sister, in brother Jim’s eyes
as well as the parents. Status was all that mattered.
When Maureen entered a typical teenage rebellion phase, Mary’s track was to
become a Homecoming Queen and Junior Miss Minnesota contestant. With such an
obvious embrace of model behavior, so perfect that she had to report
concerns about Maureen to her parents and was instrumental in getting
Maureen admitted to a mental hospital when she was fifteen. Though some of
Maureen’s interpersonal characteristics may have been genetic, there is a
better than average chance that shock treatments and possibly even a partial
lobotomy may have been the cause of her unsettling disconnection. She had
sky blue eyes and, meeting her was the first time, I looked into them and
felt completely invisible. Maureen was not aware of those around her except
as objects. She talked constantly about herself. This was a
common element of the competition for attention in the whole Collins
family. But for Maureen, this was her only mode of
existence.
Now back to Chris and Karen. I felt attracted to Chris from the moment
I met him. In contrast to his siblings, there was a self-deprecating,
casual authenticity in the way he moved and talked. I won’t call it
love because, as I said, through the years I’ve become convinced that what
we now call romantic love is actually sexual attraction. In any case, Chris
was the only person in the house that I wanted to talk with. And our
attraction was mutual. I wished that I had met him before meeting
Mary.
Chris was a dutiful husband. He married Karen when she told him she
was pregnant but soon after the ceremony, she claimed that her periods had
returned and the pregnancy was shelved as a mystery. Karen was from a large
but successful Catholic family near Wayzata. Their money had come from
being in tool manufacturing at an opportune time but there was a sense that
they had something to prove to their educated corporate
neighbors.
From what I recall of her history at the time we met, Karen’s mother had
given birth to more than a dozen children. In the process she became
morbidly obese and had to be transported in a large wheelchair. Karen seemed
motivated to follow in her path. Her size was proof of her “earth mother”
nurturing ability, as though the only thing she was full of was “good
advice”. While snacking on bowls of margarine as though it was ice cream (no
exaggeration), she would ridicule anyone who did not condone her habit.
Chris had his own coping strategy with heavy cigarette smoking and alcohol
so most of their interactions deteriorated into sniping matches. He poked at
her eating and she at his drinking...which of course was the less acceptable
habit. In fact, thanks to a strange political twist, Karen embraced “Fat is
a Feminist Issue”, as support for her right to eat herself to death. Being
around them felt like being trapped in a tar pit, especially after they
started having kids.
By the time James and Dorothy arrived in Wayzata to join half of their
brood, I had enough of an overview of this family to know that this glimpse
of the upper crust was not what I expected. Like my feelings about the
Catholic church, the hypocrisy I saw playing out in this suburban corporate
setting rose an urge in me to expose it. The thing that probably impressed
me most was the drinking. As I mentioned, I grew up around alcoholism and
had this notion that people with money and education were never touched by
it. Champagne and Bloody Marys at brunch followed by aperitifs in the
afternoon wasn’t really alcohol which was reserved with much vocal
anticipation for the 5pm “Cocktail Hour” which in the Collins household was
a euphemism for straight Scotch. They may not have been in the gutter, but
they could certainly go drop for drop with any of the official alcoholics I
knew growing up in Butte. Another significant behavioral item for me was a
family ritual I witnessed during dinners. There was always some discussion
about who would get the “last” of something. There never seemed to be enough
to feed everyone. This was an executive “General Mills” family. Food
availability was not an issue. Thanks to my mother’s Italian family, I grew
up with laden dinner tables. Never a question of running out. In fact, Mary
herself commented on the over abundance the first time she came with me to
Montana. Competition for attention was built into the Collins way of life
and, over time, I came to recognize these ongoing family food fights as
another way of manifesting who was worthy enough to be fed. After spending
an additional day in Wayzata, I boarded a train to Montana with a new
perspective on privilege and did not expect to see any of these people
again.
We lived in Kansas City for about a year after I graduated from college. As
English majors in search of a paid occupation, we found the right mix of
artistic expression and steady rent money by working for a local technical
theater company called Services to Educational and Community Theaters or
SECT. Mary got more involved in the financial end of the business while I
gravitated to set painting.
Our co-workers were a much more diverse group than would be found in the
general population of Kansas City. Most were the freelance rock and roll
roadies who only concerned themselves with sound, lights and the occasional
fury of a smoke machine. This demographic, the misogynist with long-hair
pulled back in a pony-tail creating a red-neck, was the most prevalent
alternative lifestyle in Kansas City. The owner of the business, Steve
Butler, was a member of this clan. He lived on whiskey, cigarettes and
speed. At forty, he looked to be at least fifty, but it was his aggressive
manic behavior that made a lasting impression. In direct contradiction of
his actual size, he seemed to have a personal mission to be the biggest,
most awful piece of crap anyone could ever be cursed to slip and fall in.
Sometimes this was useful. When a stoned-out client would try to bully his
way out of payment on a huge rental contract, we’d call in the boss. Looking
like a Tazmanian Devil that had just gnawed its way out of a leg hold trap,
Steve would snarl to first work up a good froth then deliver a shower of
foam from a sea of accusations. He targeted all weak spots in the first
volley and would stop at nothing to make a point.
The other predominant employee segment of was the temperamental, artistic
theatre type. Luckily, a little of this type goes a long way, so a few of
them were able to nicely balance the roadie hoards. The two most flaming gay
men were both married to women. Howard had grown up in a small town in
Kansas and had married his high school girl friend right after they
graduated. They had two kids.
When Kansas City Parks and Recreation refused to move an old upright piano
up a set of stairs onto a stage for a Shakespeare in the Parks performance,
Steve first laid into them about how it was in their contract to cover such
tasks. When they politely but finally refused, Steve strapped the piano onto
his back and dragged it up the stairs himself. It was like witnessing one of
those National Enquirer stories where a woman lifts a passenger bus to free
her trapped child.
About six months after we started working at SECT, the Kansas City Ballet
was given a grant to design and construct an entirely new set for their
annual production of the Nutcracker. Proposals for the design and
construction were open for bid nationally. A designer from Texas was chosen
as artistic director and SECT won the construction contract even though
there was not the in-house capability to execute it. Despite Steve’s
reputation for tyrannical behavior, this was one of those gratifying
opportunities that draws hungry talent to the trough.
Some, like Don Ferguson, were old friends of Steve. Don was the Master Set
Painter for the Seattle Opera with primary responsibility for the annual
production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Don had an international reputation for
excellence. He had just been through a divorce and wanted to get paid to get
away.
Construction on the Nutcracker was scheduled to start just as the opera
season ended. Don was packed and ready to go even before he knew what he
would be paid. In addition, a nineteen-year-old set painting prodigy from
New York happened to be in Chicago at the end of a production when she heard
about the Nutcracker project. The first day of production, she pulled up in
front of SECT in a checkered cab and didn’t leave until opening night.
Her name was Pam. She was the only child of two successful New York
psychiatrists. Her earliest memories centered on the magical illusion of the
Broadway stage. She wanted to be a set painter. Her parents gave her every
opportunity to fulfill that dream, and she honored their support by taking
best advantage of everything they offered. At nineteen she had an MFA from
NYU and held full membership in IATSE, the Union of International Alliance
of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and
Allied Crafts. For many people, full membership in IATSE would have been the
crowning achievement of their career. Pam had gotten there before graduating
from high school.
The skill and endurance required on such a project creates a strong bond
between those involved with it. I had only some college-level experience in
the field, but was a quick and motivated learner as Don’s assistant. When
the set went up on opening night, Don presented me with and over-sized baggy
of premium marijuana and I suggested we share it.
=============================================
Reminder: Jim got lot of credit for things he never did....Like he
was a genius, yet he never did anything outstanding in anything.
Also for being a good, "liberal" but had lots of help to get out of the
draft ---- Margolin or Belli? Did some time in the National Gourd.
Then as a lawyer, he worked for the Theilen Marrin which was the law arm
of Bechtel...where his brother-in-law was an engineer. When
he didn't make partner because of his alcoholism, he had a friend woman
lawyer hire him for the EPA. Jim was a highly skilled user.
My fear of being trapped, led to a trap.
