THE CHOP HOUSE

An Overdue Elegy for Rob “Chop” Vance

Rob Chop was a jolly, indefatigable, blond gay man in his thirties, who embodied an all-night Dionysian spirit.  Congenitally, it was said he was raised in a a good family to be a proper patriarch, but he spent the lion’s share of his life in San Francisco night clubs, dressed in tight black vinyl.  He had an oversize personality to go with his oversize lifestyle  — he often hung around his gracious Castro neighborhood Victorian apartment in over-the-knee platform boots, pink lycra aerobics leggings, a cut-off heavy metal t-shirt and a leather daddy cap.   I only found out years after his death that he had at one point been a major coke dealer.  I never knew where his money came from, but I assumed he was something of a trust fund baby. Regardless, to be with Rob Chop was to be with someone whose heart understood the ups and downs and complexities of having an extended family full of extreme counterculture super-personalities.  

Rob’s apartment wasn’t an apartment so much as a bustling social hub that people were constantly crashing in and out of.  Living in his apartment with him was his common-law wife H., the tall, bleach-blond former lead singer of a punk rock band called VS., “Anna,” his 5 year old daughter with H., and another roommate — a svelte, cackling gaptoothed girl in a 50’s cocktail dress we’ll call Audrey (a girl who eventually became my roommate, partner in crime and best friend for 30 years.  She ghosted me around 6 years ago, much to my regret.) Downstairs, our longtime friend Gina was living with Funkadelic’s George Clinton. 

Rob Chop’s longtime boyfriend, the somewhat famous-in-drag-circles SteveLady, was a spectacularly willowy, winsome, beautiful creature, all angles and inclines and cheekbones who looked like a tall, whippet-thin Italian movie starlet — like Cappuccine, only dressed in polyester David Cassidy looks from the 1970’s, when not in exquisite drag — Dior New Look drag — stick thin silhouette, hipbones out, large hat, popped collars, wasp waist.  SteveLady was strikingly beautiful, elegant, and incredibly funny. 

It was a house where the drag knob was turned up to 11 every single day — and they were farmers.  Every day, everyone but Rob would go to work picking micro-greens for Chez Panisse and other top-end restaurants in a muddy back yard in Berkeley, wearing vintage Pucci pantsuits and full makeup.  Audrey wore hair pieces, jodhpurs, riding boots.  It was all very Fellini.  

I used to go to the Chop House (as we called it) on virtually every major holiday.  H., Anna’s mother, would make enormous feasts with no dietary considerations whatsoever —piles of pies and turkeys and biscuits, and we would all drink goblets of red wine until our teeth were purple, then we’d turn on obscure disco music and dance on the coffee tables and laugh. It was some of the best fun I ever had. 

H., for being punk rock to her very soul, was the person I learned everything about hostessing from. 

One Halloween all the members of the Chop House wore mousey-brown, Streisand-style afro wigs, dark pantyhose, beige mini-dresses from the thrift store, and fake machine guns  — they were a team of blaxploitation stars like Coffy Brown.  They assumed a Charlie’s Angels-like tableau pose in public. 

Rob began acting strangely, and it was discovered he had a brain tumor.   Cancer ate him rather quickly.  Another member of the crew, Barbara L, a bald Chinese model, took to caring for him in his final days.  At around 5AM one morning she ran through the house in a billowing kimono, knocking on the doors, whispering, “He’s gone, he’s gone.”

At Rob’s funeral, it surprised everyone that he had wanted an open casket, since it was so out of character, but he looked fantastic, if dead, in a Gaultier suit with leather trim, a leopardskin pillbox hat and giant bone-colored platform boots.   We kept hanging around the coffin at first, because he looked so different without his spirit animating his face — his expression was so flattened and serene, he could have been anyone, almost, like a blank slate — like if he had had a different soul, he might have looked, with the same features, like an entirely different man.   His daughter, Anna, who was around 8 at the time, kept lifting up his fingers to feel them thud back to his chest, where his hands were crossed. She was curious in a completely absorbed way about the rigor mortis in her father’s hands, as if they were never a part of him at all. 

The priest before the audience of surly nightclub personalities was a real fire-and-brimstone type, who assured us that everyone who has not been forgiven their sins will be going to hell, and that homosexuality was a sin. 

“We’re PROUD of our sins here,” roared a performer named Dead Marilyn from the pews, at least partially drunk. “YEAH,” a handful of other boa-wearing queers responded. 

Nobody had prepared to say anything, so I got up for a moment and tried to say something appropriate.  I was winging it, so it wasn’t terribly profound.  I urged everyone to remember Rob’s “awesome party spirit.” 

SteveLady died a few years later after Rob, leaving a small legend in his wake.  He was widely adored. 

Rob’s daughter, Anna, turned out not to be his daughter, but the daughter of a neighbor. The truth came out years after Rob’s death.  It is not clear if Rob ever knew, or cared that he was not Anna’s biological father.  He loved and provided for her as long as he lived.

 Rob’s daughter Anna turned out great, despite the fact that her mother, H., has battled an enduring drug affliction.  Anybody who thinks that drag queens can’t raise children should meet Anna.  From what I hear, she is quite normal and level-headed, has a good job and children.  I consider that to be Rob’s legacy.  He may have been a party animal, but there was always something wholly decent in him: he really knew how to enjoy life, and how to spread it around.  It’s a wholly undervalued talent in our society:  Rob Chop was truly fun, which requires a certain generosity of spirit; a certain amount of free time, and free will used freely.  Fun is worthy. 

Artwork: “Foxy Brown,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2020