Lynnie is the Queerest Thing on This Street

Lover, Fighter, Legend

BERNAL HEIGHTS is a quiet neighborhood these days.

The San Francisco tipping point came, long before the Google bus, when someone bought the Beatle House, a stucco two-story on Precita Street that sported a spectacular roof-to-cellar mural of the Fabs, from Hamburg to "Let It Be."

The new 21st century owners painted it gray.

All the flippers painted their houses gray. A block down from the Beatle house, was once the site of Patty Hearst's SLA hideout, and across from that house is the formerly notorious "Needle Park."

Today the hot topic at Precita Park is whether or not to build a low fence around the children's playground. I still stumble over a beer can in the sandbox now and then, but it's not the same. It hasn't been the same since Lynnie left.

© H.L. Cottrell, “Linda and Lynnie, Manchester Street,” 1981

Gay Day morning, 1981:

I had a packed house, friends visiting from Santa Cruz, sleeping in the living room. I was civic-minded and hospitable. Banana pancakes must be made. Parade participants must have their buttons pinned on clean and tight. Every sentimental tradition of the past decade of Gay Days must be observed.

Most importantly, it was my roommates' anniversary. On Gay Day 1979, they stuck a wad of opium up their butts and fell madly in love. Eventually one of them went to AA, and the other to Al-Anon, but their story must be lovingly repeated.

At 7AM, I snuck into the living room like Santa Claus to see if anyone was awake. Wait 'till they smelled the pancakes.

Something smashed into a million pieces outside. I heard the breaking glass, and a voice just as ragged right after it.

"Drop it, motherfucker, drop it right fucking now!"

I didn't understand at first. I pieced the words together by asking my five sleeping bag guests with their faces pressed against the window.

It was a girl's voice yelling, young but low, and it sounded like she had a mouthful of marbles.

In the middle of the street was Ole’ Neil. Familiar face. Neil was a one-man Agent Orange disaster. He lived in the Park, he was always fucked up, and he tried to get little girls to take down their drawers for him.

No, you didn't sit down with Ole’ Neil and have a talk about the war.

In front of my parked car, Neil was waving a butcher knife and snot was running down his chin. He was half-crying, half-yowling.

Standing not two yards away from him, facing uphill on Manchester’s 40% grade, was a wiry blonde shag number with blood dripping off her clenched fist. I looked up at the house behind her; she had apparently punched out the front door.

This was our across-the-street neighbor!

She was talking to Ole Shithead again, her voice still barking, but steady now, as if breaking the door had calmed her.

"How come I don't understand a word she's saying?" I asked.

"She's from Brooklyn," one of my roommates said.

"What part of Brooklyn is that?" someone asked, and I wanted to know the same.

Neil still held his kitchen knife in his outstretched hand, his voice coming in gasps.

"That's it, man," the blonde said. She walked straight into the snot-green zone that separated the two of them and grabbed Neil's knife out of his hand like candy from a baby.

He let her!

Then she cursed and cuffed him on the head, and by the time I finished saying, "I can't believe my eyes," they had disappeared through the broken door across the street.

Years later, I asked Lynnie, "Did you know it was Gay Day that morning you took Neil's knife away?"

"Shit no, I didn't know gay-nothing 'till I met you dykes across the street," Lynnie said. "I'll never forget that, you saying that word to me."

---

I'd stared at the blue house across the street a million times. The shades were always closed, and it didn't look like the front door was ever going to get more repair than tacked-up plywood.

One day after work I was trudging up the Manchester hill and that mouth-of-marbles drawl floated down over my head like a butterfly.

"Hey, dollface, how ya doin'?"

Dollface?

Lynnie was leaning out the second story window and grinning. I could see her face up close now, the face of a comic book superhero. Lantern jaw, deep-set eyes, button nose, and the rocker shag I'd noticed before. Her sweatshirt had the arms cut out and she had superhero biceps too.

© H.L. Cottrell. The second story window.

I was Lois Lane Dollface.

"Can I come up?" I said.

"Yeah, just a minute.” She disappeared from the window. I waited a lot longer than it could possibly take to walk downstairs and open the door. That boarded-up door stared at me like a dream door you're not sure you want to walk through.

When Lynn finally opened it, she was wearing a happy coat kimono, one of its silk pockets sagging to the side— her .45 was too heavy for the material.

"What's that for?" I asked, nodding to the gun, and then climbing her stairs. "What's your name?"

"Lynn," she said. She was right behind me.

A little girl’s voice bawled down the hallway: “LYN-NIE!"

"That's Leah," she said. "I take care of her while her ma's at work."

Little Leah stuck her head around the corner to check me out. Maybe eight years old, with her hands covered in mommy’s make-up. Lynn said something to her about whining, and Leah walked off.

The gun had to do with the pot, Lynnie told me, waving her arms toward the back yard where, sure enough, there stood a greenhouse and plants six feet high. They were being vandalized, she said, all these fuckers who she'd been so generous to were trying to mess with her, and this was going to put a halt to it— the gun, that is.

Lynn was talking about the same neighbor boys who messed with all the neighbors' cars, flower boxes, and pot plants. She was acquainted with the juvenile delinquents a little better than most. This apartment was obviously the neighborhood crash pad.

In fact, I got the idea that Neil was probably Lynn's only grown-up visitor so far. Lynn looked like a high school kid herself.

She told me she was twenty-five. She took me to a bedroom that faced the street, the window she liked to hang out of. There was a foam mattress on the floor, oils and incense, purple-velvet bound books, and a Stevie Nicks cassette. "This is Linda's room.”

Seeing the traces of the woman in her life cooled me off. I didn't think I could ask her to call me "dollface" again.

Lynn went to get an album cover to roll a joint on, and never stopped speed-rapping about the tribulations of her pot-growing scheme.

Little Leah came in to stare at me some more, and I told her I had a big Christmas sample case of Princess Borghese make-up that she could have. Instant kinship.

Lynnie handed me an enormous doobie and I asked her why she hung out with Neil.

There was no understanding her— I needed subtitles— but her tone was that of an exasperated but forgiving daddy. Neil was like a little girl to her.

She isn’t going to be able to call herself a tomboy for too many more years, I thought.

She passed me an onyx pipe. "What's this?" I said, not recognizing the smell.

"Hash," she said, after a moment.

And the next thing I found out about Lynn was that she was a pathological liar.

The base hit I took went through me like an ice blast. My bowels were going to fall out on the floor. I guess it felt worse than it was, because I ran without tripping all the way to the bathroom. What should have been a chemically euphoric moment scared the shit out of me. I felt like the kid in those drug movies who got in way over his head.

"What the fuck was that?" I finally emerged from the can. Lynn ignored me.

Linda was home. She was a bigger version of Leah, all big brown eyes and fluffy dark hair, some of it graying.

I ran to the window to see if my home was still across the street. I saw Jackie Mackie climbing up the hill with her groceries. Jackie lived two doors up, and she was the first person I met the day I moved onto Manchester Street.

"Hi, I'm Jackie Mackie," she said that day, "and I'm on my way to an SOL meeting."

"What's SOL?" I asked.

"Slightly Older Lesbians," she said, and winked. "You can't come yet."

I decided to try the better angels again. Find common ground again with Miss .45.

"Isn't it incredible how many dykes live on this street?" I said.

"WHAT! What did you say!" Lynn yelled down the flat. "LIN-DAAAAAA!"

Marlon Brando wouldn't have a chance next to these lungs. She dragged Linda to the scene of the crime, like I'd shit on the carpet.

"You're not going to believe what she just said, the word she says to me, I can't believe it." Lynnie couldn't repeat my terrible word.

I felt like checking the calendar. This was the San Francisco 80s and I could walk into any Irish bar in the Mission and say "dyke" without a soul looking up. I’d made a big mistake here, though.

"I'm sorry," I offered. "I assumed you two were together and that you must know the other lesbians"—I enunciated 'lesbians' very neatly— "who live on this street. I didn’t mean anything."

Linda picked up a roach from the bookshelf and lit it, without looking at me. I figured it was bye-bye time. Lynn grabbed my arm as I bent to pick up my sweater. "No, no, I'm going to walk you home," she said, as if I lived across the railroad tracks.

I was about to protest, but this was the first time she touched me.

She held my hand as she walked me to my door and whispered, like I was her special confidante, "I'm sorry about Linda being so cold, you know, we've been fighting and shit. . ."

"What are you talking about?" I said, not whispering. "You ARE a couple? Or what?" I was sputtering. "If you two are together, then what am I apologizing for, calling you a fucking dyke! You're the queerest thing on this street!"

"Well, we don't call it nothin’," she said, hurt. She shook her head. "I never met anybody who called themselves that."

And that was the truth, probably the first time I'd heard it that afternoon. I told her to come over to my house later; I had Princess Borghese waiting, and a few other dykes I'd like to introduce her to.

---

There were a lot of stories about Lynnie.

The biggest whopper was that she was going to die any day. There was an ugly bump sticking out of her scalp. She said it was a brain tumor. Sometimes it swelled up and caused her terrible pain. But she hadn’t died yet. The doctors at Stanford were treating her experimentally, someone said, which afforded her a prescription for pharmaceutical cocaine. Uh-huh.

The quacks told Lynnie several times she was going to die in six months, so what was the point in telling her to cool it with the coke?

All the neighbors had a rumor or two. Like, she’s been on her own since she was fourteen, and that she had endeared herself to this older guy who died and left her a lot of money, and that's why she had all the drugs in the world.

Okay. . .

I couldn't imagine her being any dude’s mistress, so if it was anything sexual, he must have been worshiping the untouchable.

One thing I knew for sure was that her father was a milkman in Brooklyn. A milkman. He came out to see her once with her little brother, and they seemed boring compared to her. Her mom was dead.

My house invited Linda and Lynn to their first dyke party. Then we took them to their first lesbian bar. I guess it’s all my fault. Within weeks Lynnie got in tight with the dyke strippers downtown and got a job as a bouncer at one of the sleaziest needle-chasing clubs on Market Street, The Market Street Cinema.

© Monika Treut, director, a still from “The Virgin Machine.” Susie and Ina Blum, in the foyer of the Market St Cinema theater. Elfi Mikesch, photographer.

If you changed a light bulb there, you'd find someone's works. By then it was 1984, before Raven and Beth and Pam died in one horrible year and everybody else joined Narcotics Anonymous. The good-old, bad-old days.

Lynn the Bouncer at the Cinema could stir up as much trouble as she could prevent. But her disarming quality with Neil, the neighborhood psycho, was evident in all her dealings with the men who came to the Cinema. She brought out the boy in them; they responded not to Mommy, but to Daddy. After she slapped the naughty ones around a little, they wanted to impress her.

She did not approach all women equally. She was only attracted to femmes; they brought out the hero in her.

She had combative social relationships with other butches, the only ones she ever called "dykes." Honey Lee, 20 years older than Lynn, was the only butch she treated with respect. —Let Honey take her picture, as you see above. That’s Lynnie.

I hated her competitiveness with the few other women who resembled her. She would have none of it. Her only way of making friends with another butch was to pick a fight and then make up over bruised heads.

You can see it at the movies. There’s a indie movie, Kamikaze Hearts, that plays at gay film festivals every so often. It was shot on location at the Market Street Cinema, and it has footage of Lynn losing her temper and mixing it up with another "chick," as she would say. She was the only one who could upstage Sharon Mitchell.

The show we produced at the Cinema the night we shot live there, for Kamikaze Hearts.

Lynn's caught on camera in a fist fight with another girl in the theater aisles as the strip show plays on. The adrenalin breaks across her brow in a shine, and you can tell she has to hit something. What a left hook.

A few quick cuts later, we see Lynnie flushed and elated outside the theater doors, and you don't know whether she's been victorious or taken her lumps. She had to have the impact, one way or the other.

The two L’s eventually ran up so many credit card scams in San Francisco that one week they packed up very quickly and moved to Arizona. I heard “heroin,” although that was part of the act long before. Little Leah, Linda's daughter, was getting bounced around to different parts of the family, and that made me sick. They were both blaming each other.

I’d sobered up from my idea that if Lynnie would come out of the closet she would somehow clean up her act. First, she was a Class A addict. Second, she never, never joined the life of the gay middle class.

Lynn wasn’t attracted to any of that. She wanted her piece of land with no one else on it. Her cowboy ideals made her feel "straight." She never called herself "gay," and she never made it with a man.

Lynn wrote me rhyming verses from Arizona and sent photos of the houses she was building, of land she was buying. She said she had split up with Linda and was happy for it.

But she sounded lonely. She finally came out again to San Francisco for more of her experimental brain tests. I guess they paid her way because her case was so unusual. Honestly, I believed everything she said, for a minute or two.

I told Lynnie I was moving into a new apartment that had to be completely repainted, and she swore she could do the whole thing for me in a couple of hours.

Oh no. There was no way to stop Lynn from helping you once she set her mind to it. If she helps you, then she loves you, and you have to accept it.

Lynn was at my flat singing U2 hits and painting for six hours. She covered not only the walls but also the entire floor with paint. My roommate Jill, a butch of a different stripe, came home and they hated each other instantly.

Once the apartment was soaking wet in flat white, Lynn insisted we jam into her jeep and go to pick up her latest girlfriend, who happened to be attending Lowell high school on the other side of town.

"That's new for you, Lynnie," I said. She usually only went for Momma’s.

Apparently this girl said she would take off with Lynn that night to drive back to Arizona. But her mother had to agree first.

"I had an affair with her ma a long time ago," Lynn said.

I hadn't been on a high school campus for a long time. Lynnie had no qualms about going to the attendance office and demanding to know where this girl was. Spanish class, third floor.

When we got to the classroom, though, Lynn was afraid to go inside. A minute later, a hippie girl with strawberry hair down to her waist appeared at the door, her face lit up with excitement. Lynn gave her a thousand details about getting out of town.

“Give her my phone number," I said, "so she and her mom can reach you this afternoon."

"Oh, yeah, good idea," said Lynn, who proceeded to carve my phone number into the high school classroom door.

"Jesus, Lynnie, why don't you just add 'For a good time, call’ while you’re at it!”

Time to go back and check on the paint job. Lynnie asked me in the car if I'd always liked her.

"You know I have," I said, "I just always loved Linda, too. She was devoted to you."

She started on the rag again about Linda's millions of faults, and I felt like the point was slipping away. Maybe I'd have to shock her again, like the first time we met.

"Do you want to, you know, when we get home?"

"Now?” Her face turned red, which was funny because Lynnie, you know, lived in the moment.

"Yeah. There's nothing in my room but the bed, and Jill won't be home for a few hours."

---

The sun poured through west-facing windows, in my empty bedroom. Just a mattress so far. Lynn sprawled on it like a lion cub. She was proud of her body, of how strong she was. Junior welterweight. She could pick me up like a baby. Her eyes caught the light of the sun’s golden hour. That bottle green glass.

"What did you do to your eyebrows?" I asked, tracing her funny little crescents, almost all stubble.

"I shave’em," she said. "You know, I have bushy eyebrows; I don't like the way it looks. I can't be bothered plucking them." It seemed she only liked the hair on her head, because she shaved the fine hair on her arms and legs too, like a swimmer.

On one side of her chest, between her collarbone and her shoulder, was a real ugly scar. "What's this from?" I asked. I didn't even touch it because it looked so sore.

She started one story, then switched to another, and then she put my pillow over her face.

I think the next lie was the truth.

"My gun. . ." she said, "went off. . . well, I held it to my mouth, but I'd been drinking, you know, and I must’ve fucked up."

I gathered her up like a child. I wanted to cuff her, like she had with Neil. But she hadn't had anyone to take that gun away from her.

I rocked her.

"I don't come," she announced. "Well, I did with Linda, but that was different."

"I knew you would say that,” I said. "Just let me play, just for the hell of it."

The sun beating down made her pliant, maybe. She let me. She squirmed and made a face when I slipped my hand between her legs.

"I guess you don't masturbate, either," I said. Her eyes flew up in that same horror mask she made the first time I said "dyke."

I could laugh now. "You and your gun, me and my vibrator!" I grabbed my magic wand, which I’d plugged in as soon as the bed was up. She kept protesting, but she didn't stop me. I think she'd decided, for this one afternoon, that all rules were for breaking.

Her skin was fair, like mine, and broke out pink when she was aroused. I felt like her sister then. "You take this back with you to Arizona," I said, watching her tremble against the buzzing in my hand. I could kiss her and kiss her and she didn't move away from me.

She left that night, inviting me along. No chance. I got a lot more letters from her after that, asking me to come to New Mexico.

When I got pregnant a few months later, Lynnie insisted I come out to Albuquerque. We had a fight, because for the first time I refused her help, and nothing could be more insulting.

She called me up smashed a few months later. I was big as a house and not the least bit compromising.

"Why don't you ever call me?" she yelled. "You're a fucking bitch!"

Then she said "fucking bitch" about a thousand more times, and I hung up. I was having a real baby of my own very soon.

I loved Lynnie. I guess it was cowardly to love her and then hang up on her. I hung up on my own mother when I was pregnant—she called me names, too. Sticks and stones will break my bones and obscenities will hurt me.

Lynn told me so many whoppers. Dollface. She sang like a sweet canary. Her occasional truth was some of the most brutal I ever heard. I hoped I'd have another word with her someday. The kind of word that would make her stand straight up, no eyebrows, yelling, "You! You! How can you say that?"

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