Superstar: A Novel

Book One

I

…..that’s what we’ll call you, Gloria, as in GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO.

Thus spoke A, lion of the art world, King of the underground movie, and undisputed Peter Pan of the misfits; as he ruffled a pencil through his toupee one cloudy day in New York City, the city which was to become known at a later date as the last pit in Dante’s Inferno.

Gloria was then standing in the middle of The Plant, a combination painter’s studio and movie set, owned by A and inhabited by countless denizens of the underground.

Gloria’s former name had been Janet Lee Schumann, with two n’s.

"Always hang on to those two n’s, her father had warned her, one n is Jewish."

She was the first of eleven children born to Alfred E. Schumann, famous German doctor, and Alice O’Shaughnessy, simple Irish maiden, but descended from a mixture of English and Irish nobility.

My greatuncle was knighted by Queen Victoria, for inventing chloroform, and giving the Queen a painless childbirth, grandma O’Shaughnessy was always saying, and my greatgreat-uncle had his printing press smashed in Philadelphia by the British, during the Revolutionary War, for printing seditious literature.

Anyway, Janet Lee’s mother, the simple Irish maiden, was discovered by the German doctor Schumann, and the first issue of the union was Janet Lee. As her sisters were fond of reminding her, cute in the cradle, ugly at the table, and vice versa, Janet Lee WAS cute. She was born with platinum hair, preringleted. This was such a novelty in the hospital that the nurses allowed her beloved aunt and godmother, Marie, to put a pale blue satin ribbon around the top ringlet.

Then, the position in which Janet Lee slept … well, it was just too angelic for words, with her little hands in a praying position, tucked under her chin, and her little body drawn up in an embryonic curl.

A’s first movie of Janet Lee turned out to be such a success that he began laying plans toward making her a superstar. A superstar, albeit of an as yet unknown constellation, for NO ONE took A and his superstars too seriously, that is not until the miraculous birth of GLORIA! who was in her own words..… to make A.

Everyone knows that I invented myself, she was fond of saying. "But not everyone knows that I also invented A."

True, A was known to a certain select group of intellectuals before the advent of Gloria, but it was thanks to Gloria that he became a household word within one short year.

Also, within one short year, Gloria, dazzled by fame, actually FORGOT all about her past life as Janet Lee Schumann. However, thanks to her third acid trip, it all came back to her, one starry night, in a rush of morbid hallucinations.

II

It was a long table, loaded with food and little girls. The room was in a dark wood-paneled hotel, in the middle of a dark woods, on a dark lake. Everything was dark, even when the sun was out. The waiter came in and brought a silver platter with a covered dish and set it down in the middle of the table. Everybody waited for a long time. Finally he took off the cover and a live white rabbit jumped out. That was my second birthday party in the American Adirondacks, at Moose Lake, scene of An American Tragedy, starring Liz Taylor and Shelley Winters..… it was the perfect setting for a murder with all that darkness … the rabbit was quite a relief … of course I’m dramatizing at this point because I couldn’t read at the age of two.

The second scene I remember was a park bench in the Adirondacks, a dark green bench, in the middle of dark green woods with my mother and two dark ladies dressed in black. I was standing behind the bench and they were all talking about how pretty my blond curls were. Of course my mother dressed me in a dark blue wool bathing suit which I was also wearing in my third memory—also in a lake in the Adirondacks. Aunt and godmother Marie was dipping me into the damn black water by holding my arms. It was freezing cold, as usual, and I was petrified of drowning and every time she pulled me up the bathing suit stretched further down my legs until it was practically wrapped around my ankles and I was embarrassed. I don’t know why, at the age of two, but I was always tugging the suit back up around my skinny ribs.

The family vacations got a little bigger in the next few years, with a baby coming every year and the cousins, aunts and uncles all getting into the act..… and my very last memory of this sinister place was of my cousin Ted, whom I had a fantastic crush on because of his back muscles, practically dying of asthma, with my father massaging his beautiful back muscles.… now why did he do that? Was a back massage supposed to cure asthma in those days? All I can envision is the dark room, I was lying in bed, hating to get up even then, watching this glorious scene of my beautiful cousin Ted’s tanned muscles.

Now to get down to more serious memories.

My father’s big red hanging balls. Hanging out on each side of the crotch of his white jockey shorts, those athletic shorts, the kind with a bag where the cock goes in. He had a room that went between my room and his room, the dressing room, and he always kept the door ajar, leading into my room, with the light on when he changed his clothes … and I’d look up, my eyes would be on the level of his balls when I was lying in bed, and they looked so big and ugly and terrible I thought it was the most disgusting sight I ever saw. I never saw his cock, just his balls.

…..Visions of Freud danced in her head as the next series of images descended upon her, her early..…………

III

Toilet Training

Enemas, enemas, grand lavage … we’d lie on our side in the back bathroom which used to be a sunporch and was transformed into a bathroom … a big Roman style bathroom and as we stepped out of the tub there was a raised platform with a radiator underneath and we’d have to lie on our side on this heated raised platform on a towel while mother shoved the enema nozzle up our asses with baby cream on it. (From that day on I’ve never been able to STAND the smell of baby cream.) And we’d have to hold our breath. We’d say that’s enough and she’d say "take a deep breath a deep breath a deep breath take a deep breath OK NOW you can go", and we’d RUN across the bathroom into the toilet to shit.

My father, who was about six feet five inches tall with red hair and freckles, NEVER took a shit without forcing it out with these enormous loud groans. He was always going ughuuuuuu ughuuuuuuuuuu on the toilet, so I was always constipated because I thought that was the way you shit..… the only shits I knew were constipated shits. I didn’t get unconstipated until I was twenty-two. I shat little black hard marbles of shit..… it didn’t even stink …… until I was twenty-two.

Because of my mother’s obsession with enemas I even had hemorrhoids at the age of twelve. I’d sit on the toilet, late for school, because I couldn’t shit, and I’d look down between the seat of the toilet and the porcelain and I’d see these big things hanging out of my ass. I’d go in and say to my mother, I have these horrible red things hanging out of my ass, and she would say Ugh, disgusting, I’m eating my breakfast, don’t tell me about it.

One-a-day yellow vitamins we had to take, every morning with our cereal. Cereal, orange juice, and one-a-day vitamins … when we could no longer stand it, the enema water, we had to hold our breath and count to ten. And then we were allowed to run to the toilet and shit. Count to ten SLOWLY …

……..She pushed her mind even further to try to get to the root of her contempt for authority..………

IV

…. We had a nurse who made us wear the same socks and underwear for two days in a row whenever my mother went away with my father. We hated her because we hated putting dirty socks on the second day.

When I went to school, kindergarten, the patrol boys always chased me down the street and I tripped and fell … every morning this went on. I was afraid to go to school. Finally I went up to the principal’s office. He told me to pick out the boys who pushed me down. He had them all lined up in the hall and they all looked alike to me so I just picked out two or three at random and said they did it, and they were punished. I don’t even know whether they did it or not.

At the age of four I ran away from home with two boys, some water purifying pills, an army surplus thermos bottle, and a knapsack. We got as far as the creek in the neighbors’ backyard where we decided to settle down for the night … filled our thermos jugs, put our water purifying pills in, and were building a tent when the older sister of one of the boys found us, and spanked us with a tree branch all the way home. When I got home mother said Santa Claus is going to put charcoal in your stocking.

They kept me fenced in the backyard after that, with a metal fence with spikes on it. I used to climb over the fence and run away into the woods and then I’d climb back over, and they never knew I was gone. One day, my little sister Janie tried to climb after me and as she was climbing over the fence she caught her chin on the spikes and got a big cut on her chin and fell back in the yard crying. I just left her there and kept running into the woods. Whenever she cried I’d say to her What’s the matter, honey, are you constipated?

We used to go across the street to watch the chickens’ heads being chopped off and to watch them run around the yard with their heads off, spurting blood. The woman next door to the chickens had a rabbit farm and we went there to let the rabbits out of the cages. She was a Russian Refugee. To my mother she was a saint, who had escaped religious persecution from the communists to come to the free country and raise rabbits. In Russia she had been a baroness.

There was a dairy farm down on the other side of the street and I’d go there and milk the cows. That’s where I saw the two little boys licking each other’s pricks when I was four, and they said to my sister and me, have a lick and I grabbed her by the hand and we ran home.

At five, I shared my nap with the same little boy; we shared a towel in kindergarten that we slept on together. When we moved away and they made me go to Catholic school I hated it.

……..and the dawn of religious sentiment in her breast……

V

The first time I saw a nun I ran screaming into my father’s arms but he made me stay in the school. If you were really good in this Catholic kindergarten and even the first grade, you could go into the convent and stir the pudding. You had to stand up on a stool, lean over this enormous big vat of boiling hot chocolate pudding with a big wooden spoon and stir it with the steam pouring into your face and hair. It was a reward for being good.

In first grade Sister Venardo would stand at the front of the first aisle and tell us about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and how the soldiers pulled the cape from Jesus’ back when it was full of scabs from his last beating and they pulled it until all of the scabs pulled off with the cloth and the blood ran down his back and she wouldn’t stop talking until we were all crying and then she’d shut up about it.

Everyone should visit his or her doctor every six months, at least, for a check-up the nuns told her and her class at school………

VI

Early Glimmerings

When Janie and Marylou and I were little girls, Mother took us to the doctor (a medical colleague of my father’s) every few months for a checkup. His name was Dr. Cupola. We hated, just hated, going to him because whenever he examined us the same thing happened. Oh, it was awful. He brought us into his examining room and Mother sat on a hard-backed chair near the window at eye-level to the examining table. The room was dark, like the Adirondacks, and, in fact, was in the same colors. Brown and depression green. I don’t remember one ray of sunlight ever coming in that window.

There was a painting on the wall of a naked little boy taking a piss in a pond. This was a great curiosity piece for us, not only because we had never seen a painting before, but because he was naked and was also taking a piss. The only painting we had in our house was a print of some English hunters dressed in red coats and white pants, sitting around a mahogany table in front of a fireplace with burning logs, with their dogs lying all over the floor. The colors were all dark, but kind of nice because of the firelight. We also had two old prints of some cathedrals in France. They were on the landing of the staircase. They were mahogany colored too.

Then, after we looked at the painting for a while, Dr. Cupola would say, OK, who’s first? Nobody wanted to be first so Mother would say, Janet Lee, you were last the last time, so you be first this time.

I would stand in front of mother while she pulled my dress over my head and then took down my panties. Then I would climb up on the table. Dr. Cupola would do the usual things with the stethoscope and everything and then he would come to the awful part.

He would put his hand on my pussy and slowly spread the lips apart, peering closely into it. Then, he would sort of stroke up and down inside with his finger and look at it some more. She’s OK, he would say and then close the lips. I was always very excited by the whole thing. Even today, when I remember the scene and think about it, my pussy gets all tingly and starts to throb. It was so exciting.

Then Janie would have to do the same thing, and Marylou and I would try to see the inside of her pussy without my mother knowing what was going on. We would crane our necks around Dr. Cupola’s back and pretend not to be looking. Then Marylou would get up on the table.

Dr. Cupola usually made some remark about Marylou’s bellybutton, which stuck out instead of in and formed a real button. She could do incredible things with her stomach that we couldn’t do. When we took baths together to save hot water, Marylou used to stand up in the tub to be rinsed by Mother or the maid and stick out her stomach and actually move it around, from up-high to down-low and from right to left. Much better than a bellydancer.

Well, there was Marylou on the table and Dr. Cupola talking about her bellybutton while he fingered her pussy. When we got out of the office, we told Mother as we told her every time we left Dr. Cupola’s office that we couldn’t stand him and we wanted a new doctor. That same day, when we had been driving downtown to see him, the next-door neighbors were in the car next to us. We noticed them when we were stopped for a red light.

Where are you going? they shouted. They were a family of five kids.

To Dr. Cupola’s, we replied.

OOOOOOOOHH, DIRTY Dr. Cupola! they shrieked.

And my mother said, Hush, children.

God we were embarrassed. Of course we had told our neighbor playmates about him, but only to find out if their doctor did the same thing. And they had never heard of anything like that.

So we were convinced that Dr. Cupola was really dirty.

During the Doctor Cupola period, I was subject to fantasies every night. I couldn’t wait to finish my prayers and get into bed so I could picture the following scene:

I was naked, strapped in an army cot. It was just a few years after the Second World War. The cot was a piece of khaki green canvas supported on two sides by wooden poles. There were khaki green straps going around my shoulders, waist, and knees, tying me in. I was hung up in a standing position in this contraption, on the wall, very near the ceiling. There were a lot of other little girls hanging around me in the same cots, all on the same level and in the same suspended standing position. Then the room would fill up with men wearing grey pin-stripe suits. They all had grey hair and glasses and white shirts and ties. When the room was absolutely full of them, they would all look up at once.

When their eyes hit pussy level I would get a fantastic tingle through my whole body.

Every night I relived this same scene. While I was imagining it, my right index finger stroked my pussy lips, gathering all the accumulated matter in them. It seemed to be a whitish-greenish color. When I got it all together at the top of the pussy, I would put my finger up to my nose and smell it. Too bad I never knew about the clitoris.

It was then that I learned at Holy Virgin School, through Sister Venarda, the danger that lay in impure thoughts. Even though she never explained what impure was, I somehow got the picture. Horrible visions of fire in hell assailed me whenever I tried to resume my thoughts at night after my bedtime prayers. Finally I gave up the whole thing and was bothered by nightly leg aches. Grandpa O’Shaughnessy would come in my room and sit on my legs, just like he did for my mother when she was a little girl. This was supposed to stop the circulation of the blood that gave me the leg aches.

A terrible coughing sickness that all three of us, Janie, Marylou and myself, got at the same time, when father was away, proved to be our deliverance from dirty Doctor Cupola. I was the sickest and used to throw up all over the bed at least five times a day.

We had a nurse living in the house to take care of the twins, Joanne and Joey, who had been born prematurely a few months before. Once I was throwing up so much, the nurse, Mrs. O’Leary, took all the sheets off my bed and I had to stay in bed with only the bare mattress. She was the same nurse who made us wear our socks and underwear two days in a row. Dr. Cupola came to see us and said he didn’t know what was the matter.

Mrs. Schumann, that Dr. Cupola isn’t good, I heard Mrs. O’Leary tell my mother. I had sneaked into my mother’s bed upstairs, since that bed still had sheets on it, and I could hear mother and Mrs. O’Leary talking downstairs.

That’s what I always told you, mommy, I shouted down the stairs.

Mother said Hush children.

Why don’t you get Dr. Silberman, Mrs. Schumann? You know he’s the specialist in town for children’s diseases, insisted Mrs. O’Leary. Father agreed.

So Doctor Silberman made his appearance on the family scene. He was old and white-haired and scholarly looking and he never once touched our pussies.

Whooping cough, he proclaimed.

It was right after that that I developed my first serious nervous disorder. I got really stupid, it seemed to me, obsessions. If I passed a picket fence, for example, and didn’t touch all the stakes then I had to go back and touch the one I missed. If I missed a word of conversation I became obsessed until I knew what the word was. This included articles like the and extended to almost all prepositions and conjunctions that anyone would say. And I wouldn’t be able to get the whole thing out of my mind until I told my mother about it.

One day I was walking past the pricker bushes and grandma Schumann was sitting on the porch. I had a sudden idea that there was something I had to tell my mother. I walked away very slowly trying to resist telling her, and trying to tell her at the same time. It must have been a conjunction or a picket fence. Grandma Schumann said, What’s the matter, you look sick.

Yes, she DOES look sick, mother said.

But I still couldn’t tell them, not even with that encouragement. I thought I would have to go through my whole life, burdened with my stockpile of unheard conjunctions and missed pickets.

Then I began to get different kinds of obsessions. If I took a bath and looked at my pussy in the bath water I thought I had to confess it to my mother or I would never forget it. Even telling it in confession didn’t relieve me. It had to be confessed to mother to be absolved.

In fourth grade Sister St. Margaret told us that reading dirty books was a mortal sin. Two days before she told us, I had found a pamphlet in the house entitled What Your Children Should Know About Sex. Of course I devoured it, though it didn’t tell me anything. But, nevertheless, after Sister St. Margaret’s speech, I felt guilty about having read it. I thought I would have to confess it to mother.

That night, I was lying in bed with my heart beating so fast from fear that mother heard the beat when she came through my room to go to the back bathroom.

She was wearing her black crepe sheath dress. It had a white satin drape that hung from the left shoulder and continued down the length of the dress. Her hair was pulled back from her forehead and caught in a chignon at the back of her neck. Shalimar perfume drifted through the room after she left. She was very beautiful; tall and slender with high cheekbones and flaring nostrils. Her blue eyes were deep-set and sympathetic.

"My God, what’s the matter Janet Lee?" she asked.

So I told her I had just read What Your Children Should Know About Sex.

That’s nothing, she said.

Then I got the idea if mother died all my problems would be solved; there wouldn’t be anybody to confess to, so my obsessions would go away. This started another obsession, the one that I should tell mother that I had the idea that she should die.

I remember what she was doing when I told her about that. She was in the back bathroom cleaning Joey’s diapers. He had diarrhea, and his little balls were the color of the outside of a hard-boiled egg, the kind that is left over after Easter, about two weeks after. Sort of a bluish color and about the same size as hard-boiled egg yokes, cold.

Strangely enough, I don’t remember what she said to me when I told her that I wanted her to die. But I definitely got the impression that she was very hurt. However, she just kept on cleaning the watery yellow shit from Joey’s ass.

…My mother always wondered why I didn’t know any history or geography, said Janet Lee, she blamed it on ‘progressive education.’ She said that when she was in school they taught those things and now all they teach is social studies.…

VII

Childhood

Fourth grade … was like back in the saddle again, back where a friend meets a friend… I always heard that song on the radio while I was ironing the clothes for my mother instead of going to school because I hated school so much … anyway back in the saddle again with Sister St. Margaret who taught fourth grade, all except religion, they had hired a laywoman to teach religion because Sister St. Margaret was so insane she could teach anything but religion …the psychiatrists have TORTURED me she used to tell us … Her specialty was making sacrifices for the poor souls in purgatory.

Everybody was in need of sacrifices from us fourth graders … whenever the school put on a movie for us our class had to go to the chapel instead to pray and offer up the movie for a spiritual bouquet … the spiritual bouquet for whoever was on the list for that week … One day we were lined up on the stairs waiting for Sister to go into the library and get babushkas for us because it was raining and the Mother Superior found us on the stairs and said, What are you children doing on the stairs instead of down In the auditorium watching the movie? I told her it was a spiritual bouquet and she went mad …Sister St. Margaret! she bellowed …You take these children down to the auditorium immediately… so Sister St. Margaret had to give up her hour of sacrifice and we were forced to sit through the movie …Poor Mother Ferdinand, she told us later …She didn’t realize the spiritual bouquet was for her feast day.… Sister St. Margaret would tell us to line up, those on the left side of the classroom would be those who were going to the movie and those on the right would be those who were going to chapel with her.

So we all knew who were the really holy ones among us and who were the ones who couldn’t make sacrifices … the latter group called us the goodie-goodies … Sister St. Margaret told us about the hair shirts of the martyrs and lots of stories about martyrdom and sacrifices in general … also one of her pet things was to get as many vocations as she could …

I wanted to be a nun while under the tutelage of Sister St. Margaret and I used to carry her briefcase home to the convent for her every day … the woman who taught us religion was called Mrs. Politesse, and I called her fat fanny Politesse because her ass was so big it stood out like a shelf behind her and she was forced to stoop over all the time because of this enormous ass … she also limped a little due to the ass problem she had … she walked like a mechanical doll, always wore a high-necked dress with a lace jabot and a cameo pin at the neck … We were all horrible to her because she was preventing Sister St. Margaret from teaching us religion … in conspiracy with Mother Ferdinand and the Psychiatrists… I was always dreaming up ways to make a hair shirt for myself … and Sister St. Margaret always reproached me for daydreaming out the window when in reality I was thinking up ways to make a hair shirt … I don’t remember actually doing it, though … however Sister St. Margaret was my idol, I adored her and I wanted to be just like her.

In FIFTH grade I was on the west side, they had an east side and a west side, the east side faced the rectory, for each class then we graduated to north and south … I had a nun we called lispy, it always sounded like she was saying fuck…fuckit girls letsh get to the necth thapther… fuckit instead of lookit … and then I had big fat Evalina, that slept in her … she … We were having history class with her and she just kept nodding into her book and then she’d wake up and she’d go ah, PITUI! in her drawer … shot it, grossed out … spit in her drawer … one nun went Phew, crack with a ring, and there were red marks on my cheek and a white spot from the ring … she shot me against the railing and I took her habit and I pulled it off and I pulled her hair out … I didn’t mean to take her habit off but it just fell off … I took her hair and I pulled, you know all the little hairs that stick out on the sides … I should have pulled her beaver … now