Fred Gorski - Making Rain: A memoir of drag, big hair and covens

Making Rain

Written by Fred Gorski

and edited by Dominic Ambrose

Ferrandina Press

New York

Copyright 2015 Fred Gorski

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13:

978-0-9830568-4-6

This is a memoir of a highly subjective nature. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

cover design by Carlo Benalis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When I was approached by the editor about writing this book, I thought I wanted it to be a legacy of a survivor and a student of life - with life measured on a one to ten, I feel mine is a nine and it aint over yet. My goal is to try to give my tools to others in order to help people understand that life is worth living and that it gets better and better. I have been blessed by the god and the goddess in so many ways, I thank them above all. Like any wonderful parents, thanks is what they thrive on.

So many people in my life have not made it into this book. It is a very brief glimpse into my life and I pray that another one can emerge from me soon. Vinny, you lit a candle when things became so dark, showing us love can be given with honorable intentions. Never will I forget those feelings. M & M were there in so many ways to help comfort me and kick my ass. Friends help even when its painful. Paul, the prodigal son, always a boy at Boysbarn. Joseph, who was a comfort even when saying, I just do not know what to say to help you. It was the best comfort I ever had because it made me understand that there is only comfort in oneself. Sometimes we need to be uncomfortable, sit with it, think on it and get out of it. All of the Pullificos, for being family to me, you will never know the things you gave me. Auntie Mame, for your wisdom, humor and unyielding self-respect, with no shame in making mistakes, only to learn from them (and I have!) Jerry P. for being the one I first stepped into adult life taking care of and then you doing the same for me. We have traveled a long, loving road and I am proud to still hear from you, my friend. Mistress Pain, you had the gift to help bring me out of the dark places into a colorful new life, a rough, tough angel with steel wings. I bow to you, love. Demi, love is the gift you give of yourself. I needed it and you came. We have helped each other through the rough spots with no blame, guilt or shame, better than all the crap out there. Understand my love for you, it is true.

EDITORS INTRODUCTION

In essence, all memoirs are the same. They are the same story told in infinitely different ways. The story of the human experience.

Factual accuracy is not the most important element in a memoir, as facts have an annoying tendency to be miscellaneous, misleading or irrelevant. Whats most important about a memoir is the truthfulness of the experience, the flawlessness of the human logic that propels the life-story forward. You may find a particular story a bit silly, perverse or chaotic but, somehow, it makes perfect sense to you because you can see yourself there in that world. That is a true story, and thats what makes a good memoir.

However, we crave factual accuracy in a memoir, we want to know that these things really happened. Fred Gorski delivers that as well. If the reader can forgive an occasional lapse of chronology, or a dubious motivation here and there, or some third person story that is set behind a dreamy scrim of sentimentality, he or she will find that Fred tells the carnal story of his life unflinchingly and without coyness or ruse.

Of course, characters appear in altered aspect and name, in order to protect their privacy. There are also other inconveniences, such as the fact that Fred was sexually active from a very early age. The story of his teen years necessarily touches upon instances of sex with other underage boys and with older men. That these sexual relationships felt completely normal to him is basic to his experience, and are reported this way in the memoir. Fred is not attempting to generalize about such encounters, especially the age-abusive kind, as to how they would affect others. The story does not condone or promote such behavior in any way. It does not condone or rebuke any behavior at all, it is simply the story of Fred Gorski, AKA Rain Storm.

Thank you to those who have helped and encouraged, John Adrian, Mark McNease and Paul Sanders at Staten Island LGBT. It has been my honor to work with Fred for many months putting this book together. It was a lot of work, but also very rewarding right from the beginning. There was no problem getting the story out: Fred has the gift of storytelling, the ancient skill that have given us epic stories of adventure and historic beginnings. This story just flowed from Fred in a steady stream, like an epic memorized long ago in some classical past. I have enjoyed hearing these adventures immensely and I hope that the reader will feel the same enjoyment as he reads them, as I have transcribed them in writing.

Thus, a few words about that transcription. Although this is the memoir of one person, multiple personalities animate this story and a chorus of voices recite the words. For this reason, the reader will find quotations and reported speech transcribed in a variety of ways, reflecting the various ways that speech is remembered in a narrative. Different punctuation styles represent speech along a spectrum of literalness: speech that is meant to sound faithfully rendered might be in quotation marks, an inner speech that may or may not have had a spoken component, (Im like ... and hes thinking ...) might be in italics. Finally, generalized speech, the exact wording of which is not important, may simply be undifferentiated in the body of the text. Voices come and go in Rains narrative, characters pop up and say things. Thus, quotations are not always faithfully assigned, and the reader may have to take a moment at first reading to tell who is speaking.

Hopefully, this punctuation complexity will convey the exuberance of this life, and will not prove awkward or impede understanding. The same can be said about verb tense continuity, grammatical rules ... these are all ephemeral and multitudinous. So please do not look for consistency of grammar, punctuation, syntax or pronunciation. You wont find them here, ... although you will find a genuine Manhattan-Staten Island lingo, distinct from the more widely-known Brooklyn accent. And in that lingo, you will find an invocation of lives lived without hesitation, a pageant of loved ones great and small and a constant rain of creativity and human wisdom. Thats how you make Rain.

Your amanuensis, Dominic Ambrose

PART 1 - INVOCATION OF LARA

A club named Q opened up in Midland Beach. I knew the place well, it was in the Lincoln Hotel and my father worked there many years earlier as a bartender. In fact, the first bar my parents owned was in Midland Beach two blocks away. So I started takin my Fair Play customers there. I would send them over as soon as their makeovers were done (each makeover took about an hour). Then I would join them myself. This one evening I had sent three clients down there to wait for me. When they were gone, I took off my face cream, took the rollers out of my hair. I did my make-up, my hair, put on my shoes, grabbed my bag and my coat, jumped in the car and drove down to Q to meet them at nine.

And as Im parkin the car, all of a sudden, boom: invocation.