Grandma was a 70’s Porn Star

I love stories you can’t make up. People either wouldn’t believe you or would question your motives for citing such an outlandish story. But alas it is true. One of my ‘jobs’ that my bachelors in Political Science and my Masters have proffered me as a Black man with a felonious weed sales conviction is I do general labor cleaning out houses after an investor that I work for purchases the property. I was just able to vote in 2010 when my 10 years of being ‘on paper’, my fines and my 60-90 days in the County/Regional Detention Facility aka ‘Black Man Summer Camp’ were all satisfied.

As the 75 year old white District Superintendent of the the Methodist Church asked me in a hearing on my certification for ordained ministry with a straight face relative to my current job, “gee Gneisenau you are so underemployed.” He said it as a compliment nevertheless he conveniently cited it as a reason ‘not to employ me’. Not employing somebody because you view it as a negative and a mark on their character that they are underemployed as compared to what their apparent achievements, education and display of gifts and graces would presume is an odd construction.

There are some things I love about my job. Notwithstanding the fact that the properties are sold in personal and financial distress it is fascinating. Quite often the more the distress the better for we ‘ghetto archaeologists’. Oftentimes those people try until the very end (often illegally) when the Sheriff comes and the contents of the home are placed on the street. So the house flippers/investors I work for try to catch it distressed but just before speculators and public investors get involved. The occupants oftentimes leave many of their possessions the way you read of biblical times where people had to flee their homes with little more than what they could carry and the clothes they had on their backs. The moratorium lifting on evictions places people in those kinds of situations today. In recent memory not only hurricane Katrina but the Rohingya in Thailand/Myanmar, the South Sudanese and for that matter the Native Americans right here in this very Southeastern region of the United States during the ‘Trail of Tears’.

When I enter into a home in such a state I immediately begin to pray for the former occupants; that they transitioned well or as best as possible and that I mean them no ill will by anything I see or find. I don’t steal identities and don’t mock the things people have accumulated over the course of their lifetimes. I don’t judge them. If something happens to me and my ‘chillun’ or little cousins find my weed stash ‘cleaning up’, I’d be turning beet red with embarrassment in the darkness of the grave. But no need to worry; critique and judging are different, humor and mockery are different….the way love and like are different. And love covers a multitude of sins.

I’m like a ghetto/working class archeologist working in contemporary post-modern contemporary America disposing of people’s trash which has become by default of quite often mismanagement, everything they formerly owned of value or not they lost. They were so naïve about processes that they lost it so fast they couldn’t protect any of it except what they could carry and drive away at one time. As I mostly trash but also sift through I am looking for artifacts and yes treasures. I look for good books, musical instruments, DVDs, money. I look through things with stories to tell amusing myself in the drudgery of the work by coming up with amusing stories or explanations why they have this or that item. For instance you can tell a lot about a person by the kind(s) of music they collected. And so we shall begin our ‘ghetto archeology’ story there.

The first thing I noticed about grandma was the extensive gospel music collection she had. Gospel music was everywhere, on the mantle piece, in every room there might be something related to Jesus whether it was books or music. She had tapes from Black preachers, white preachers, old preachers and young ones. She had books the same from many different authors of all races and stripes conservative and liberal. I was thinking wow grandma was heavy off into religion; that’s awesome. But a lot of people do a lot of things for a lot of different reasons.

I noticed grandma had three generations worth of choir robes. You could tell the era from the choir robe and its color. Black, navy blue, burgundy or gold and the collar or sash that went with it of some other color. She kept her son’s karate uniform and white belt from when she paid the money for his karate classes. Her wedding dress was in the closet and because another similar dress was in there I think she may have been married twice. She had boxes and boxes of mail order and phone order make up. Apparently she couldn’t make them stop because it was the same set over and over again; I’m sure conveniently charged to her credit card. Clearly someone was taking advantage of her whether it was some multi-level marketing (pyramid) scheme or something else. Presumably she would have called to have it cancelled because she had boxes and boxes of it stacked to the ceiling in the closet. When she called in Guthy Renker they probably just kept gassing her and explaining once you accept the sample you accept the contract. Then again maybe she got Alzheimer’s and bought $1200 worth of makeup off the television 800 number at 2:43:23 am on the Tuesday after Labor Day 2009.

That wasn’t the only ‘novel’ health and beauty products and machinery I saw. She had a 1990’s style air brush make-up applicator (in the box unused). She had a machine with a wrap on it that looked like a blood pressure checking machine that goes around your am but her device’s ‘thing’ went around your waist and was bigger. According to the boxing and instructions it was to relive back pain of some sort. It looked like they sold it in the early 80’s on late night television right before network television went off the air. In those days there wasn’t 24 hours anything and nobody gave a damn. That’s probably why the birth rate is higher in less advanced societies. There wasn’t so much else to do for entertainment (as it were).

I found makeup for days; eye pigments, eye shadow, every foundation known to a woman that came of age in the early 1960s. I should have saved the obituaries. I have a morbid curiosity about them sometimes. As I cleaned out her room and personal belongings I am nearly certain it looked the same way it looked since 2017 when she died. No one cleaned, no one apparently did anything including paying the taxes, maintenance and other costs associated with home ownership.

She had all kinds of pills. There were brain pills, general health pills of an over the counter sort. There were the kinds of pills advertised on television and over the phone. Grandma had a duffle bag so filled with prescription pills that it could not be zipped up. It was so heavy I had to heave to lift it. What I found startling was that rats apparently love certain types of pills. They’d chew through the plastic to get to the pills. Somewhere running around Southwest Atlanta there are some healthy ass rats because I know this family, group or tribe of rats must have gnawed their way through 5 big boxes of pills with 20-25 pills in the plastic containers the boxes held. If you ever wake up in the middle of the night and see a rat looking back at you inquisitively I think you may have run up on one of those rats. It sounds amusing but I am told that we humans leave around so much alcohol and drugs as to virtually contaminate many habitats with it. I am also told that the human urine and waste stream that goes through the sewers is so filled with trace residues of all the dope we take from legal and illegal drugs that it some kind of of psychoactive coattail on the bacteria and animals lucky or unlucky enough to come in contact with it. I can tell you for a fact that water bugs and many other critters love beer and you can tell perfectly easily when they are drunk.

Grand ma had coke bottles from 1973. They’re probably worth something because it was in celebration of something or another. But by then I was amazed by what I found in the bottom of her closet in 3 brown paper grocery bags. I found grandma’s 1973-1979 porn stash. She had books on sex, sex manuals, sex pamphlets, sex dolls and polaroid’s of herself with a man in sexual postures and positions. She had an 8 mm camera and playback machine and sex novelty items of varying sorts. And of course there was the magic moment when I looked at the polaroid’s of her face butt naked in sexual positions in the late 60’s and early 70’s and then looked at the contemporary and intermediate picture of her on the wall and other places and I knew it was the very same woman.

A virtual treasure trove of exotic literature assaulted my senses. Immediately my spine tingled as I wondered what in God’s name was on those 8 mm video tapes. Clearly they were sexual in nature. Briefly, all too briefly I thought about the possible literary value of the assortment of sex manuals and erotic literature from the 60’s and 70’s. Not only that, every man can stand to improve his skills in the bedroom. As a matter of fact I should have “collected it” but I was amazed and like a dummy I called in the investor and showed him. He was then so fascinated by it he wanted to show it off as one of the finds in one of his houses. He didn’t clean up but felt himself obliged to the spoils. It’s not that ‘investors’ feel it beneath them to do this kind of work, unless they do, but I find most people are prevented by their sense of hygiene and what they want to put their hands on (or not). Plus, if you have access to tens of thousands of dollars at nearly any given moment, paying somebody else to touch something is the least you can do. I don’t know what he’s doing to do with grandma’s porn stash and former life. I know I’m proud of grandma.

You see, her porn tapes and alternate lifestyle were all from the 60’s and the mid 70’s. Something happened after that to grandma religiously that made a change in grandma and apparently she either never looked back or only glanced back in the rearview mirror, reading the books and studying the tapes and films of hers from the 60’a the way one checks out where one has been, preferring to look in the big front glass ahead of you. I’m not sure to what extent grandma ever shared her testimony at church but I think many young ladies could and should hear it. Sometimes we get the feeling that we are trapped in our sexual lifestyle and there is this idea that once intertwined in certain behaviors there is little or no way of escape. While I’m highly suspicious of ‘conversion therapy’ as it is practiced by evangelists, evangelicals, conservative theologians and ultra-conservative bootleg preachers of all sorts (you’d think the Catholics would have used it on their clerics), grandma’s new life proves that for some people Jesus works.

Grandma’s choir robes and religious materials start out in the late 70’s early 80’s. Grandma was still singing when the choir ordered new robes in the 1990’s. She was still singing when they got their choir anniversary robes in the early 2000’s and maybe she stopped at some point after that because I didn’t find a newer choir robe than that. That represents a significant commitment to the ministry, the church and the choir. It is also a testament to the fact that she maintained her weight well because ever bit of clothes I came across from the 60’s onward was nearly the same exact size and quite often of similar style to the clothes I found in the 2000’s. Perhaps I should have known grandma was freaky when I noticed she had all that leather; leather pants, leather skirts, etc. Let me alert the reader that leather mildews something horribly when not aired out properly. It is not the kind of thing where if you wrap it in dry cleaner bags it will last and even if it did, the idea that in 2030 they are going to be wearing leather pants I find not only objectionable but scary.

A collection of cigarette lighters and ashtrays alerted me to the fact that while the Lord might have removed the taste for porn and swinging from her lips (life), he apparently did not remove her taste for cigarettes and perhaps marijuana because though I noticed many ash trays I never saw any cigarette buts or packs of cigarettes though her children might have gotten all of those. I find it hard to believe however, that they would leave their and their mother’s social security cards and other sensitive materials in favor of removing all of the cigarettes. However that is not completely outside the realm of possibility. The oxygen machines betray the fact that at some point the cigarettes and/or weed caught up with her and she may have had emphysema like my father did when virtually a lifetime of smoking caught up with him.

As I said earlier she had a large athletic duffle bag filled to the rim with prescription drugs and weighing over 40 pounds. I can’t imagine three doctors or a whole team of doctors prescribing one old lady that many different medications. That is in addition to the over the counter and mail order medications she was taking. Yet that she did all that shows her commitment to life and to finishing her Christian journey in good form. I wrote this piece to document her life. She made a choice in the early 80’s and it resonated so powerfully across the rest of her life that a ‘ghetto archeologist’ like myself could come along and feel the power of her Christian transformation. Her porn stash and tapes were from the 70’s. Had she wanted to continue that lifestyle we all know it only got easier as she got older. Technology and public acceptance have made porn ubiquitous in our culture. Porn hub is one of the most visited sites on the planet. Furthermore the spirit of porn has infiltrated the arts to such a degree that in 60 years entertainment culture has gone from the innuendo of ‘wake up little Suzie’ or Lucille Ball and Ricki sleeping in separate twin beds in their bedroom scenes to the kinds of things we see on Game of Thrones. But grandma stopped, maybe on a dime, maybe not but for all intents and purposes she stopped and we have to believe that the reasons she did so (a Christian lifestyle), satisfied her more than her former lifestyle satisfied her. She opted for religious and religious activities, throwing herself into it the way she clearly invested in and threw herself into her porn star lifestyle. Let all of our stories end where hers did, in the Lord her God. I leave you with one last story to show that grandma wasn’t naïve about her religion or her family.

As I was tossing things out I saw an unopened birthday card style envelope. The seal on it had never been broken and items like that in my business of ‘ghetto archaeology’ one always checks to see if it contained any money. I opened it and though there was no money I saw scribbled in a masculine hand clearly not used to writing much (if at all) a note that said “happy birthday mom from your #1 son in law!” Alzheimer’s or not Grandma wasn’t fool enough by then to even think her son in law put some money in the card even though he, his wife and their child was living with grandma rent free. The corners of the seal weren’t even broken like she accidentally went to open it or went to peek in it. Furthermore it was clear exactly how grandma felt about her son in law. Common courtesy would have her at least open it and read the card but apparently she felt dignifying him with a common courtesy wasn’t even worth it. I wondered if she did it in front of everybody like a birthday party where he gave her the card and she just threw it to the side dismissively. I could even imagine her daughter, his wife saying “don’t lose the card mama, that’s from Joe your #1 son in law,” and grandma replying ‘whatever’.

That is why I don’t believe some bootleg preacher got hold to her and brainwashed her into abandoning her former porn star life. I don’t believe some fancy or cult like church got hold to her and took all her money exchanging her money for the power to pull her out of her former lifestyle. But I can tell you I’ve seen God deliver people off drugs, heal relationships, etc. and I have my own testimony that you will probably read about in more ways than one on this blog. Don’t worry, it is not as exotic as grandma’s but I had to make some lifestyle changes too. Lifestyles that end you up in jail may be glamorous and fun but better with the Lord.