The first time I met Rumi Missabu was at an anarchist book shop called The Long Haul, in South Berkeley. She was showing recently restored footage from the hayday of San Francisco Acid Drag, to a rag-tag bunch of art students, barefoot poets and one-time West Coast It Girls, who were packed in between stacks of yellowed CND pamphlets, sitting on the floor passing party cups around. It couldn’t have been all that late, in fact the book store was only open from 6-9pm, so I know it must’ve been early still, yet it felt as though I were arriving to the afters at dawn, and in a way I was.
The screening, like many of the events Rumi hosted, curated, produced and performed at this side of the year 2000, was an extended celebration of the surprisingly successful documentary, “The Cockettes”. It was a piece of an afterparty that went off for some twenty years. When the film premiered in 2002 it was a definite hit and the response was international; Galliano said that it inspired one of his Dior couture collections, Devendra Barnhart began dressing up like The Cockettes onstage, McGrath and Meisel shot a whole supplement for Vogue Italia called “The Couturettes.” As the collective’s archivist, Rumi had featured prominently in the documentary, and as an original Cockette, from ‘69 to ‘72, she leveraged the attention garnered into a significant second act.
Rumi had spent the intervening thirty something years off-grid, living on ramen, chicken franks and weed, working as a house cleaner, without any form of id besides a library card, which had expired in 1974. She had turned on, tuned in and dropped out for real. The film’s release ushered in a whole new era for her, a small scale miracle, a more modest version of what Almodovar’s movies did for Joan Baez, and Rumi got to go to travel the world on the back of the flick to London, New York, Oslo. When I met her she had been rightly reinstated as one of the figureheads of Northern California’s wild and wacky underworld.
That night in the bookstore, the first of our acquaintance, I felt as I imagined the film scholar who discovered Louise Brooks living as a recluse in a New York City apartment block must’ve. Dazzled. Like all true stars, there was something ancestral to Rumi, something prehistoric, she was like a great 175 year-old tortoise at London Zoo or Gloria Swanson appearing on Parkinson in 1978. She had an eternal quality to her, she was truly more than ancient, like a stone fertility idol worn featureless by time but worshipped still, like a ghost inherited from pagan folklore, and continually repurposed in urban legend. In fact she looked a little like a spirit from a Japanese woodblock print, she was so thin and so pale, with a nimbus of dark synthetic hair floating around her shoulders. This singular physicality was enhanced by a wardrobe of beaded gowns, fun-fur stoles and bellbottoms, the gargantuan false eyelashes and hot pink blush giving her a distinctly groovy kind of glamour, not unlike a villain from the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. I was star struck, even as she battled with the cable of the cheap and useless microphone. Even as she cackled like a witch at her own jokes, of the Who’s on First? variety, showing off her remaining teeth, greyed like tombstones, still I couldn’t quite believe that I was meeting her, legend as she was to me. I started going along to whatever she was organising, I interviewed her for a ‘zine I was editing, we became pals, she was deeply magnanimous.
Time skewered in all sorts of peculiar ways around Rumi which is why her get-togethers were always dotted with both teenage strays and senior citizens in drag, and why they never ran to time, and why Rumi herself appeared simultaneously to be both Puck and relic. She saw Jim Morrison in 1974, a full 3 years after his death, he picked her up hitchhiking she said, and I didn't have any cause to doubt it. People were drawn to her you see, she was her own cult leader, charismatic and ever so slightly tyrannical.
There was always an entourage flapping about her; innocent little things who had run away from their conservative parents in the heartlands, delusional queens who believed she would be the one to finally give them their big break, one or two steel-cut remainders from the Haight-Ashbury days, and a few wealthy patrons who bailed her out and put up the cash to print full colour posters. Celebrity was always waiting in the wings too, Gus Van Sant wanted to sit in on the show, Sufjan Stevens was a big fan, the phantoms of Truman Capote and Rex Reed whistled about overhead, summoned by the not infrequent invocations of their fangirling thirty years earlier. For the last decade and a half of her life Rumi had a boyfriend forty years her junior, a Russian dancer who seemed absolutely delighted with her. Nobody thought this to be unusual because in Rumi’s world it really was still 1972 and punk, AIDS, Big Tech gentrification, none of it ever happened. She was an emissary from the Summer of Love and still traded on its values.
We met in the mid-noughties, a particular high-point of ugliness and stupidity in the Anglo-American alliance. In the backwash of the Blair-Bush war in Iraq I desperately sought out a functioning counter-culture, but all I ever seemed to find were people who told me that Paris Hilton was literally so smart. To say that I felt frustrated would be an understatement, I wanted to dismantle it all completely - I recognised that’s what Rumi had been doing since the ‘60s. Ultimately, the Cockettes were satirists, they made fun of everything, Nixon, Marxism, Jagger, the Kennedys, celebrity, gender, cinema, counter-culture itself. And they did it all with such commitment and so very little ability, they raised amateurism to an art form.
I think that’s what really appealed to me about Rumi, her resolute anti-perfectionism, in the face of so much frictionless corporate dross, her embrace of everyone’s talents, real or imaginary. If you wanted to do something, you should get up and do it, that was the whole of the law for Rumi. “If you can walk you can dance,” she said, you didn’t need any formal training to create. She brought to mind the likes of Isadora Duncan and Grandma Moses, artists who just sort of made it up and worked off of vibes. I had always felt excluded from culture making, barred by my own shyness from studying drama and, blinkered by class pessimism, unable to see myself at art school, and so this approach thrilled me.
The radical free access Rumi offered to making work of whatever kind was an absolute blessing, she also split the proceeds from the door quite fairly, and let me practise my rollerskating in her living room. She booked the performance art collective I was a part of for her salons, and gave me some of my very first opportunities to present solo text work, over at the Centre for Sex and Culture. She treated me with more respect than I felt I had really earned, she afforded me an esteem which set me on the road to self-belief. It’s fair to say that along with Penny Arcade and Lara Clifton, Rumi was one of the cornerstones of my early career.
When eventually I did interview for an MA in Scenography at Central St Martins, images from performances I had presented at Rumi’s salons made up no small part of my portfolio. That’s an irony I think she appreciated, she was Diaghilev in her own mind, I think she thought it perfectly natural that her proteges would go out and attend to remaking culture. I suppose she ran those salons as little sleeper cells, training us up and sending us out into the world. I’m glad to say I was able to repay her in some small way, by organising events for her in New York and London, once she finally got herself a passport.
Myself I left America sometime ago, under a cloud so to speak. But we kept in touch with some frequency, she was one of the few people I would log in to Facebook specifically to say hello to. Her emails came in bursts on one side of an illness or an escapade, such as when she escaped the hospice where she had become convinced the staff had it in for her. Then she would write madcap recollections which veered from in tone from an episode of Scooby-Doo to the memoirs of Bette Davis. She was recovering in “an undisclosed location in the East Bay hills”, she said, “Contrary to rumors and speculation, I did not get kicked off facebook nor am I dying or dead.” She told me that the ‘zine I had interviewed her for was now in the New York Public Library as part of her papers, she made her way into At Certain Points We Touch, she sent me odds and ends in the post, including a colouring book of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, and a signed DVD of my all time favourite flick, “Elevator Girls in Bondage.” I had hoped against hope that I would see her again one more time on this side of the curtain, but it wasn’t to be. I’m very sad about this, knowing her was foundational.
In the two weeks since her death I’ve been writing and thinking about our friendship, trying to get the measure of it, to understand it now she’s gone. This period of reflection coincided with a trip to see my family, and the traditional rooting around in the attic (long time readers might remember this piece from a few years ago in which I sifted through the remains of all my Madonna memorabilia). This time around I unearthed a small leather suitcase full of photographs, including an envelope from Rumi with pictures of herself on an European tour circa 2008. There were also a few images of the two of us in New York, onstage at Glasslands and Monkey Town, they have given me some comfort. Rumi had a real charisma in front of the camera, arch and childlike at once, deeply mischievous, she always looked as though she were just dying to tell you some archival bit of gossip about her nights on the tiles with Tina Turner.
The last time I saw Rumi she was staying with “a trusted intern” somewhere in Manhattan. My mother was also in town and so I stopped in only briefly to say hi to her before meeting my mum in Times Square. In retrospect I see what a strange sort of crossroads that afternoon was. We smoked a joint and Rumi showed me photos of herself with Ida Ekblad and Nils Bech in Norway, it was only when I struggled to get up off the floor that I realised I’d perhaps bitten off more than I could chew. “I feel weird,” I said, and Rumi giggled, “Oh yeah, there’s PCP in the joint. Angel dust.” Thus I staggered off to meet my mother, lightly hallucinating, assuring her that if I was slurring a little it was only because I’d had one too many Bloody Marys at breakfast. “Only you,” she said, “Only you would turn up drunk at 11 am to the bloody Macy’s Thanksgiving Sale.” She melted gently into the floor of the department store, but she was a good sport about it.
Believing that I was smashed on breakfast bevvies my mother performed a lively little jig through the homeware section, to Frosty The Snowman, for my amusement, picking up a pair of big fluffy pillows and using them in place of pom-poms. “Thumpety, thump, thump, thumpety, thump, thump,” she warbled, “Look at Frosty go,” giving it her very best Thoroughly Modern Millie choreo from behind the cushions. In my state of disassociation I couldn’t tell if I was afraid or delighted, I was vaguely embarrassed but it was also strangely liberating, really then not far from a Cockettes midnight revue at all. It’s too bad she was only in town for ten days or else I’m sure Rumi would’ve had her playing Madge the Magnificent in a revival of Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma. Lives not lived, eh?
I wish I were reading this out to a congregation of one-thousand people in Dolores Park, with everyone dressed in their thrift store skirt suit finery, Justin Vivian Bond singing The Golden Age of Hustlers as the sun sets. I wish Rumi could’ve retired very wealthy, or at least have achieved a level of infamy which would have allowed her to be wheeled out semi-regularly on late night chat shows to dish. I wish more people knew the extent to which she influenced numberless writers and artists, I want her to be remembered. Yet I’m naturally reluctant to see her enter the pantheon. I don’t think she’d want the Marsha P. Johnson treatment, to be the one who threw the first brick at Stonewall. I think it would be amusing but ultimately antithetical to her very essence to see Rumi on a $900 Balenciaga t-shirt worn by a Kardashian to pick up a Climate Conscious Girl Dinner at Erehwon.
How do we commemorate the life of someone so dedicated to Rumi’s sort of cultural vandalism? A mural in The Mission, a plaque on a bench in Golden Gate Park, an eponymous cocktail at Aunt Charlie’s? No. No, it’s all too static, too tragic, but maybe a deli sandwich? Chicken franks, sauerkraut and shaving foam sounds good. Ham and eggs and popping candy, because she was after all a resolutely silly person. I don’t know, I’m at a loss. Really, the most fitting tribute would be to keep that spirit of anarchic irreverence alive, against the mediocrity and mendacity which have come to define our cultural moment, to recognise the power it has to dismantle, and to rebuild. Oh, and that we all remember to support our local anarchist book stores, of course. Who knows where a visit might lead you?
As always thanks for tuning in =} I’m sorry I didn’t do all the funny voices on the audio, I didn’t have it in me tbqh. Maybe next time! Do feel free to msg me with yr thoughts & feelings and if you don’t yet have a copy you can buy my novel At Certain Points We Touch here =}
thank you for this! <3