RUTHLESS

When I was about sixteen, I had already had a fake ID for two years.  The first one I made myself with the kind of rub-off press type that architects used to use, and a Carte Orange — a monthly pass for the Paris metro, that had my photo on it.   I laid out all of the pertinent information — like date of birth —  in French.  It worked, and my club life in San Francisco began.  By the time I was 15, my parents had given up trying to impose any control on me whatsoever;  I had a 6AM curfew for school nights because I passionately told my probation officer, “I just love dancing!”  This was sort of true — mostly I was just posing around underground fashion clubs or loitering at a gay bar called The Stud.  But he took it like he was an original cast member of “Bye Bye Birdy” and advocated for me in front of my parents, telling them, “Let the girl dance.”  It was a ridiculous moment of teenage triumph for me, and one I definitely didn’t deserve.  So I was out a lot. 

I had a wild girlfriend my age I’ll call Raquel — a tall vivacious girl with big teeth and auburn hair.  Her parents were very wealthy.  The first time I saw her, she was descending one of the twin curved staircases leading to the foyer of her colonial mansion, wearing an unusual pleated grey gown that was elasticated at the knees, a small maribou boa around her neck, and 4-inch pumps.   It was quite the entrance — her style was always ‘conservative Trophy Wife.’ (At that point, my father used to chastise me for dressing “like a divorcee.”) Rocky had a reputation in her private high school as being mercurial and cruel — everyone called her Rocky Ruthless.  I was wild enough to hang out with her, since she was out in the city at night as much as I was — and so began our terrorizing of the adult world. 

Rocky had secrets.  Nobody really knew where her family’s money came from, but I read years later that her father — an extremely fat man with a red Ferrari — owned and operated all of the Happy Ending “massage parlors” around the city.  At 16, Rocky had been covertly screwing her father’s attorney, “Marty,” a man in his forties, for quite a while.  

Rocky had a singular way of getting what she wanted, which was a lot of slavering male attention from older men.  We used to pull stunts to this end.  One we particularly enjoyed was dragging windsurfers into the back of her family speedboat.  We’d wear wetsuits  (I was forever stealing her younger sister’s clothes) and when we were anchored next to Sam’s of Tiburon, a local bar and restaurant with a dock in front of it,  we’d dump buckets of water over ourselves and the windsurfers, then walk into the bar in our wet wetsuits and stiletto pumps, and proceed to not buy any drinks for ourselves for the rest of the afternoon.  Nobody ever guessed we were still in high school — if they did, they didn’t care.  We never picked anyone up, just got back in the boat.  Rocky just liked to chum the waters. 

Her family had a limousine that we used to steal to go clubbing  — a giant, filthy, navy blue stretch Cadillac covered with bumper stickers that exhorted other drivers to spay and neuter their pets.  My friend Angus would occasionally drive us around in it, wearing a leather daddy chauffeur’s hat. 

Rocky always had her eye on the prize, and the prize was power.  Once we went out with her father’s attorney, Marty, and some other politically adjacent figure, and we met Judge Newsom (father of Gavin) at a restaurant.  As a prank, the attorney and his friend hid, and had me sashay past the Judge and drop a handkerchief in front of him before they went in.  They all laughed as the older man looked bewildered at my stunt.  We all joined the Judge at his table and ate a dish they all had nicknamed “Chicken Rocky” after my friend (which suggested, to me, that this was not an unusual scene, for Rocky.)   This fraternizing with high school girls by the middle-aged legal elite in San Francisco strikes me as rather scandalous by today’s standards.  But there was no social media then — anything could happen in a little Italian restaurant on Lombard street.  There weren’t even cameras on phones.  You could do shit back then that today would be social suicide, and get away with it. No more.  

(As it happens:  I realized only a couple of years ago that I had been molested by Marty, when I was 16.  He took me to see a play in the interest of “nurturing my interest in theater.”  It was standing room only, and at the time, I couldn’t really figure out what exactly he was doing behind me. It hit me decades later: he frotted me to completion, that greasy pedo swine! 

I wasn’t exactly traumatized, but it’s creepy now in a way I never fully understood before — sort of like certain Southwestern-style suede blazers, or the Mousketeers. )

 Then another time, because when I was a teenager, I was crazy, I pulled a kitchen knife on two kindly Persian men who were making Rocky and I dinner in their lovely apartment.  I can’t remember why I did it, but for a moment I was either afraid of them for no good reason or I just wanted to act out something monstrous and cause a scene… because the crazy was upon me.

Being an active social climber, Rocky soon understandably began to see me as a liability, and our friendship foundered. 

In my early twenties, I was working as a cocktail waitress in a nightclub when Rocky pulled up in a new, metallic peach-colored Porsche and met two extremely rich young men from our area inside.  I said hi to her, but she snubbed me outright.  I was a bit sad about it.  I’d always liked her. 

Years went by.  While her sister went on to front a Goth band for a while, Rocky was never active on social media.  Like: invisible. She did have a profile on Twitter someone must have set up for her once, but it had never been used.  I tried sending a note to it, but it never got a response. 

A couple of years ago I mentioned Rocky to my friend Kimberly Brooks, the painter, who grew up near Rocky.   “Oh my GOD.  You don’t know what happened to Rocky?” Kimberly asked.  I shook my head and shrugged.  “Oh my God, I can’t believe I get to be the person who tells you this.  OK.” Kimberly pulled up an article on her phone.

It turns out that Rocky went on to be, at one point, the single richest self-made woman in the United States.   She, with the help of a team of tech engineers and friendly laws made in Florida, were the first people to crack into the money of online poker.  She soon established herself as the queen of that particular underworld.  She made so many billions of dollars, Kimberly told me, that she now lived full time on a massive mega-yacht parked out in international waters, as some kind of tax protection.  

It reeks of criminal underworld, but I am still awfully proud of Rocky for that. 

After I realized I was molested by Marty,  I called my lawyer.  Marty had been a prominent legal figure in the city.  My idea was to track him down, confront him….maybe get paid off to go away and not embarrass his family. My attorney sent me back an obituary for him from the SF Chronicle, describing him in the headline as a “Lawyer and Yachtsman.” 

Marty had died a long time ago, at the tender age of 54.  

I always wondered if Rocky’s dad eventually got him.  

Salut, Rocky Ruthless, in whatever international waters you’re basking in, rolling in too much money to quantify.  You were a wild girl, canny and ravishing. And now you are a Pharoah. 

It’s really something.  

Please remember, in the future, to tip your waitress.  

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Artwork: “St. Kimberly,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2020