A View From The Backseat

My mother’s addiction to life and limousines
(part I)

It goes like this: champagne, white nails, long limos, repeat. No one could beat my mother at life; drunk or sober. She was life. She is life.

Sometimes, I think she is a victim of her time. When the 1950’s told her parents that being gay was bad, where else was she going to put her sexuality but deep in the crack of her soul? When the 1980’s came, was sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll going to tell her ‘no’? And when the suits on wall street ran out of cash in 2008, why should anyone have hired her under-educated ass? This is the story of a woman born with every ounce of energy, passion, and love ever condensed into human form. This is what happened to a woman who lived her life in the backseat of a limousine. This is Lana.

Born to a Filipino man and a red-haired model, my mother was the middle child of three girls. She wore glasses from two years of age. At recess, the kids would chant “four eyes, four eyes!” and stab pencil lead into her arms just for fun. When she went to catholic school, boys and girls fell in love with her exotic looks. She was shy and daring all at once. When Lana danced at proms, her glasses came off and the world stopped. The boys got hard-on’s, the girls wrote her letters; letters her mother found and cursed her to hell with. Down my mother swallowed her desires. She had a boyfriend every year of her life. Never did she dare love a woman.

Her sisters were perfect and feminine. “Why couldn’t she be more like them?” yelled her mother; even after they both had children out of wedlock. Her sisters wouldn’t pay a cent to help with rent. Lana worked at a restaurant from eighteen-years-old to save her mother and father from foreclosure. And save them she did.

Lana had dropped out of college after a month. Dyslexia pounded her skull. Her dreams of being a radio broadcaster helped her overcome. Enrolling herself in the Columbia School of Broadcasting, she graduated with honors. She was working her own show in under a month.

Lana had a voice of red velvet and blue velvet and purple velvet rolled into one. When you heard it, all you wanted to do was let its wavelengths enter like butter on your eardrum. Then you remember, she was just saying the weather. But, oh, how her voice could make you believe you were in a mysterious fantasy land.

And that is exactly what happened to one man. During her shift, he broke into the station wanting to see this woman whose voice made him feel some sort of way. He banged on the booth’s glass as she cowered in the corner. He was deranged and in love. The cops came and took him away. She was fired. “This is why we don’t let women do radio.”

She was 22-years-old.

In come rock n’ roll. She sang as the lead in a band for six years. They landed every gig available on Oahu. Run Wild, with her at the helm, was the resident band on the military bases. Again, the men fell. Away from their mainland roots, this local girl with a voice like Freddy Mercury and a body like a playboy bunny was the ultimate place to sow their oats. The GI’s bought her beers and bought her cars; they proposed and they followed her.

She kept away from all of them faithfully in love with her band mate, until, of course, that ended. Then, she kept a black book of men, never fully committed, never fully giving in to their sexual fantasies.

When she was offered to go to L.A., she refused. The more correct reason; her mother refused for her. Soon enough, the music stopped. The corporate world of downtown Honolulu was where she began to reinvent herself.

Her pumps were white, her dresses were tight, and her mind; her mind was like a well-trained man. She moved up to the top of companies; managing, hiring, firing, buying leather sofas and designer staplers for her desks that over looked harbors and oceans. Lana was everything Gordon Gekko wanted to be.

She became an addict. Not to cocaine, or to alcohol, gambling or sex. She became addicted to limousines.

It happened one night when her sister’s husband rented a stretch for the family. They were going to see a concert and to drink out on the town, but, that’s not what got Lana excited. The driver let her in alone. Her family, not yet ready, she slid onto the long leather seats in her tight, short-dress. The driving went back into his position behind the front of the wheel after gingerly closing the car’s butterfly doors. She was alone and in control. She realized, in that moment, that money could buy her silent transportation. No relying on boyfriends to get her to her destination, no sitting in traffic with her own vehicle, no stop to the party just because she was moving.

A partition and black tint separated her from the real world. Why should she ever leave?

She never went anywhere without a limo again. A grand here, a grand there, she was riding a white elephant and looking good while doing it. The cost didn’t matter.

For Lana, greed wasn’t good; the party was.

She let everyone into her stretch. Bottle after bottle and blunt after blunt was passed as Lana instructed the driver to just cruise. She’d open her black book of men and enjoy the company of her boyfriends. If she didn’t like something someone said, she’d kick them out and used the phone installed by the bottle of Perignon to call another name.