Tallulah Bankheist of Whore Church

JD: What exactly is Whore Church if someone wanted to know?

TB: It's kind of like a Vaudeville program. You'll have dancing, singing, spoken word, performance art and all presented in little more than ten minute acts so nobody gets bored, with breaks in-between. You have some audience participation, play some games, maybe some music. I usually put on a band or two at the end. I don't generally have a lot of bands playing. The money goes to everything from Father Reverend Simms/Tenderloin Outreach and to Streets Survival Project. One of my favorite Whore Churches, and the only one I did in this format was this gothic serious Whore Church on All Souls Day. It was Danielle's idea matter-of-fact, and we blended our ideas together. Did I mention we start it out with Bingo? We do have Holy Communion -- which is donated by pot clubs -- and includes rot gut liquor. We don't have clean and sober communion -- sorry. [laughs]. Yeah it's communion. This one gothic Whore Church was to be a memorial for all the prostitutes and people who have died of AIDs. Prostitutes who have been killed; people who have died in the sex industry. Performers lit a candle before they started and dedicated their performance to the friend that died. I really loved that show.

JD: How do you locate spaces, getting PA's set up and rent money?

TB: Usually I get the place donated to me and I come up with a bar guarantee. Also I have a good reputation already. If it's a fund-raiser they're usually all my friends.

JD: And people know that you're not going to pour beer all over the sound mixer.

TB: Yeah. One time I did a Whore Church in a hotel bar: the Embassy Lounge on Turk. We had the Martha Stewart Whore Church Living there two years ago with the Frugal Dom, Carole Queen and others…

JD: Where was the Gothic Whore Church?

TB: It was at the Komotion. That's where I did my first Whore Church. I've had other ones at different places. We burned a lot of incense. It was very serious. I didn't really know where to put the money into and then I picked up the newspaper and found out about this girl who had been attacked by this serial killer and she went through great pains to survive the attack.

JD: I remember that. Didn't he dump her in the Bay and she swam ashore or something like that?

TB: Yeah.

JD: He brained her with a claw hammer.

TB: Well he hit her with a hammer several times in the back of her head. Her head looked like a hard-boiled egg that had been dropped on the floor. She had stitches all over back there -- a bad head injury. She looked good when I saw her. She didn't fall into any of the categories to get any of the help that's offered out there. Battered women's shelters wouldn't take her in because this wasn't a domestic violence case -- you call up those places and you find out God! These people are really bitchy and mean and fucked up. You think about it what kind of person would be drawn to help a battered women but maybe a batterer themselves. Some kind of sick fuck! This girl who had been attacked, she wasn't HIV positive, she wasn't a minority group member, she wasn't gay, she wasn't a drug addict. She had a lot of stuff going on for her. Smart girl, very smart girl. She just got into a fucked up relationship with a pimp. I don't want to get too personal but I know a lot about her. She testified against the serial killer and he got put away for life. It took a lot of balls to do that. She had faked being dead. He hit her in the head so she decided to… she fell and just stayed there -- pretend dead. He backed up his car within an inch of her head and then picked her up and put her in a body bag, a human sized body bag, and threw her in his trunk. She bit holes in the bag so she could breath. He then went through a car wash and threw her clothes in a dumpster there and then took her out to the pier and dumped her. She swam to shore and went over a chain linked fence with barbed wire on top of it and flagged down a motorist. She was naked, wearing only her socks and that takes -- I was like Woah! The girl really wants to live! It gave me the chills. She was pissed.

JD: That's understandable. She was picked up in the Mission by this guy?

TB: Yeah in the Mission.

JD: There are a lot of hookers that move through the Mission and there also seems to be a fluctuating frequency of that kind of predation on prostitutes in the Mission.

TB: Yes there is. There's one that's out there every Christmas that kills people and has never been caught.

JD: Every Christmas?

TB: Yeah, every Christmas.

JD: You don't read about that or hear about that.

TB: No you don't and it's not often that they really give a rat's ass about what happens to a hooker or a crack head. Things are starting to change. Terrence Hallinan [SF District Attorney] has put forward this measure where if a hooker testifies against a violent client she's not going to get arrested. There's a lot more things now that protect whores but there's still a lot of mistreatment. There's still cops that take blow-jobs [in lieu of making an arrest]. There's some cops that actually pay for blow-jobs too. Then there's some that have an agenda of fucking with them. Then there're some that are really nice and go out of their way to help. They'll tell a street-walker to get off a corner because the neighbors are calling the police. You hear a variety of different stories. If you're out there long enough… I've known people that know who to talk to and who to avoid.

JD: You don't have to answer this if you don't want to but were you ever a street-walker? You work or have worked in the sex industry right?

TB: Right. I've done escort work. When I was really hard up for cash I did go out once in a while. I was very careful. I made pains to dress like and look like I wasn't doing anything. I walked around and never stayed in one spot. I really hated doing that. Most of the time I made my money through people getting their drugs through me but when that didn't come there were a few times I went out there.

JD: A couple of years ago there was a really bad situation in the Mission where pimps were coming in from Concord and Oakland and pimping out their girlfriends or girls they had acquired. Some of these pimps would charge down hookers out in the street. They were trying to corral all the independents it seemed like.

TB: There's a theory that if you look at a pimp, if you give him eye contact that means he's got power over you. If you look him in the eye that means you wanna play with him.

JD: That's what I've been told. "Out of the pocket" isn't that the phrase?

TB: I don't know. He'll run his game on you man.

JD: More about Whore Church, it's Vaudeville, could you describe it more?

TB: It's a Vaudeville performance kind of thing and we mix up people that are in the sex industry with other people and nobody knows who the true whore is. All artists are whores anyway.

JD: Do your performers include the Cantankerous Lollies and people like that?

TB: Yeah. I haven't had them in my show yet but I used to have Betty Bubbles but Betty Bubbles fell into a meat grinder and she's dead. No wait… She was gang raped in Arizona. No I forget.

JD: What are you doing now as far as Whore Church goes?

TB: Right now I've just been having street girls… I did one benefit recently for Sluts Unite -- the sex worker film festival and that went really well. I just had all street prostitutes performing and it was great. One performer wasn't a street-walker, she was an escort and she just volunteered. God it was amazing. There's a lot of talent out there and some really great people. Lot's of great spoken word and musicians.

JD: How long have you lived in San Francisco?

TB: I've lived here for about ten years now.

JD: You were telling me about how you were a member of an occult lodge in Sacramento that had a copy of Jimmy Page's lost sound track for Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising [classic underground occult film from the sixties].

TB: Yeah I was a member of the Boleskein Temple in Sacramento though I was initiated at the Thelema Lodge in Berkeley. Some JERK -- well I didn't like him but I had to take his side on this because -- they call it the OHO: Outer Head of the Order, the people that are at the top of the meat pile or whatever -- food chain -- [laughs] were dicking him around. So I had to take his side. His name was Zardoz or Christopher Dietler and he bootlegged a copy. He did a damn good job of it I must say. I must give him that but I hate him [laughs]. He bootlegged the sound track to Lucifer Rising. This is the original sound track which was done by Jimmy Page. Dietler and Kenneth Anger had a handshake deal that the later could use it any way he wanted to. So he had it pressed onto teal blue vinyl and had all these rare photos of Jimmy Page and Aleister Crowley and stuff. Really nice. Really nice cover. I sold mine because I really don't give a fuck -- I'm not a Jimmy Page fan. If I hear it again I'm going to scream.

JD: So it was the actual Jimmy Page sound track and not the music that ended up being used in the film?

TB: No, no. It was the original by Jimmy Page. I guess they had a big falling out and they never used the music in the film. Well the Caliph has some mystic… the acting Caliph -- I can't say he was the acting Caliph because he had to be tenth degree -- I feel so funny talking to a tape recorder -- he was the owner of Mystic Fire Video.

JD: Oh wow. I've seen their Paul Bowles interview video.

TB: Oh yeah. Well he was jealous or they had some kind of conflict of interest. Eventually they had it in their newsletter -- The Magickal Link -- that it was a bootleg. He wasn't making any money off of it -- it was just going back into the Temple and into one of Jimmy Page's favorite charities: The Spinal Bifida Foundation -- that was it. But he got pissed or something and said that if he put out the album he'd get kicked out of the OTO! Then Zardoz's argument was "I'm doing my will. 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' and I'm doing my Will so I can't get kicked out." So they had some stupid kangaroo court and my friend ended up getting kicked out. Now he's happy because they let him back in. If I was him I would just have said "fuck you" because you really don't need them. They're a lot of good people in there but for the most part the OTO was taken over by a lot of speed freak bikers. But it's not like that anymore. I don't know what it's like anymore. I haven't been to a mass or anything for a few years -- yes there's good people in there but there's also a lot of flaky people. I tend to agree with Crowley: don't get to know each other too well because you'll start hating each other. It was because of Zardoz I made this vow never to fuck anybody in the OTO [JD and TB laugh]. I was the first woman in seven years to be initiated -- and the youngest at 19. A typical come-on line was "Hey little girl do you want to learn the Ninth Degree secret?" which wasn't very much of a secret: sex magick -- and I couldn't see anything very magick about them or having sex with them. It seemed pretty stupid. Simple and stupid! They were a bunch of hippies with hair on their face and I couldn't stand that. I don't have anything to prove to anybody and I wasn't going to then. Also at the time I was having my little thing with drugs and ceremonial magick and drugs just don't go together very well.

JD: They didn't always work out very well for Crowley.

TB: No they didn't. At least I beat heroin, he didn't.

JD: He lived to a fairly old age considering.

TB: Yeah, yeah. I just like the fact his jokes are taken too seriously. You read stuff and people are "aiii!" and he's just being silly. He's messing with people because the people that latched onto him were hopelessly "yes" people; they kissed his ass and he wanted to get rid of them.

JD: He was a snake-oil salesman but he had some pretty original insights into religion and belief.

TB: He went to a lot of places a lot of other people weren't willing to go to and the one good thing about him was he used his flaws to work for him. That's something a lot of people ought to do instead of wallowing in their shit. Just use it! Make lemonade. I know some people with some fantastic art and talent that use some of their foibles to their advantage. Even what some people would consider character flaws they use to their advantage.

JD: That's what John Lydon said he did when he created the persona of Johnny Rotten.

TB: No that was Malcolm McLaren.

JD: Depends on who you were talking to.

TB: Yeah.

JD: So you lived in Sacaramento? Is that where you're from?

TB: [sadly] Yeah unfortunately.

JD: I love that look you made. Is that where you grew up?

TB: Yeah, unfortunately.

JD: Were you a morbid goth girl in Sacramento?

TB: No I didn't fit into any category. None. I was just a freak. I couldn't be categorized as New Wave or Punk Rock or anything. I was this weird, nerdy girl with braces that dressed kind of butch but wore makeup that looked a little bit punk or a little bit new wave but you couldn't really figure it out because she wore a granny dress. I just did my own thing. Most of my friends, we kind of just created our own style. Gothic mixed with industrial and new wave: Liquid Sky and Throbbing Gristle. You know that movie Liquid Sky?

JD: Yeah flying saucer on the roof of the apartment that eats people's orgasms and the people with them.

TB: Yeah.

JD: The host woman that the flying saucer is channeling through never has orgasms because she's always high.

TB: Yeah. We'd mix that in. I worked in a costume shop for years and I'd get really creative. I did like funky, weird makeup and stuff and -- I'd probably laugh if I saw pictures from back then. Oh I have a picture of me with eighties hair I just found. Where is it -- a little teeny picture. Oh my God this is horrible! This is like the Cure. This is like when I was twelve or thirteen.

JD: You look older than twelve or thirteen.

TB: I've been through a lot.

JD: Were your parents hippies or something?

TB: No, not at all. My mother sang show tunes and stuff and I sat with her at the piano and we sang together and stuff. My dad was a cigar smoking, baggy chino kind of guy with a v-neck white Haines undershirt. He worked at the rail road and rode motorcycles. Not like big Hogs, he wasn't like a biker -- he wore a helmet. He used to put Harley pipes on his Jap bike so he would get that broom pop pop sound. I remember we would be going down the freeway and he'd salute to some bikers and they'd hear the sound and they'd look over and see it was a Yamaha and they'd flip him off [laughs]. That was Sacramento. I grew up near the train yards. That was neat.

JD: Did you ever train hop?

TB: Oh yeah. I would jump inside the train cars that were filled with detergent and you could get on top of them and jump inside.

JD: The grainers?

TB: Yeah pretty much.

JD: So you would jump into the detergent?

TB: Yeah but you could get sucked into them.

JD: I'd be too chicken-shit to do that.

TB: Aww. We did all kinds of stupid things. I lived right by Proctor and Gamble and they had this flood gate -- God knows what was going in and out of it -- and they had this slime slide at the end of this ditch or gulch they had, we used to go down and slide on the slime. Crazy stuff: playing with the train tracks.

JD: I train hopped once from Oakland to Portland. That was a lot of fun.

TB: I never did it too far. Our backyard was right next to the field where the train tracks were.

JD: Sacramento or Roseville?

TB: Sacramento. I was in South Sacramento: Power Inn and Corregidor. Power Inn and Fruitridge. The back of our house was towards Power Inn.

JD: Okay.

TB: There's several different hitching places besides Roseville.

JD: All of them hot as shit.

TB: Yeah.

JD: Sacramento's not as suffocatingly hot as the southern half of the Valley because you've got the two rivers.

TB: I love the river. The things I love about Sacramento are the trains, the rivers and the old Victorians and the trees.

JD: When you were older were you living downtown?

TB: Yeah over by Old Sacramento but I wasn't living that deep inside of it. Around R. Street where the rail road tracks are. You won't find me living too far from the rail road tracks. I find them very calming. Hearing the trains… When I was coming up we just got drunk and got stoned and did acid by the rail road tracks -- and they have a lot of nice grave yards there too.

JD: Pioneer graves? Like really old?

TB: Not really. There's a lot of Gypsy graves there and they leave bottles of wine and stuff like that. They leave little trinkets and stuff, alcohol and other things. We'd drink the alcohol and pour a little on the tombstone as a thank you because they'd just take it back to the undertaker's later anyway.

JD: So most of your formative years were spent there?

TB: Yeah unfortunately. When I was little I used to come to the city once or twice a year because I had a problem with my leg and I was sponsored to go to Shriner's Hospital for Crippled Children -- I couldn't walk for a long time. I fell in love with this city. I lived with my aunt and my uncle for a long time when my family was having problems. My cousin was an artist. She was already in college -- a really good artist. She lives in Berkeley now. She does a lot of Dadaesque type stuff.

JD: Painting?

TB: Sculpture and painting. She does it very well. She's one of the Fine Arts types you know. I don't know if she wants to be associated with me or not so I'm not going to say her name.

JD: Anything you don't want me to print…

TB: Actually put it in there -- Susan Danis, an Americanized French name: French; German and Scot.

JD: You said that networking is something you do a lot, get people jobs and stuff. How did you get to know everybody?

TB: As I said I never fit in just one category -- I'm all over the place. I know all kinds of people in all walks of life and all kinds of scenes: the escort scene, the street scene. I know politicians, people in daycare. I know Satanists, I know Christians that are cool; OTO people. I spend time with old people and kids. I just know all kinds of people for different reasons: DJ's, performers, all kinds of health care workers. Just all over the place all the time.

JD: Can you talk about your involvement in pirate radio?

TB: Yeah our station just got raided by the FCC. I don't know exactly what's going on with that -- how we are reacting to this -- but it doesn't seem as if we are taking it too seriously because we are all doing rescheduling. I now have a 2-hour slot. I'm not sure if it's eight to ten: I have to call them soon and find out when I'm on tonight and I have a guest arriving there: Jackie O'Nasty from Apocalypstick. The themes change from show to show. Sometimes it's kooky French pop or sometimes you'll be listening to industrial. Sometimes it will be a mix of everything and everything kind of blends together really well. I'll have a theme like espionage or music from suspense films or just different moods, different music, different eras all mixed together.

JD: How did you meet Danielle?

TB: Danielle? I met her at the Market Street Cinema. We worked there. I was impressed with her because -- first of all I thought she was this great character. You know how a lot of gothic people, at least in Sacramento, take themselves very seriously? Danielle's very campy and very outgoing. I read some of her book when I was very turned off to poetry and such (I had heard so much bad stuff). With her book I was like "This is good. This is really good!" I'm not just saying that because I know her. This is good without even knowing her I would say that this is really good. The other thing is a lot of the women who work in the sex industry are really cold, especially at the Cinema. She was one of the people that you would least expect but there was a girl who was having a nervous breakdown one time -- she was in the basement dressing room and Danielle was down there comforting her. Everybody else didn't even want to look at her because they were "Oh oh, it's me next" or "I need to make money," or they thought that this person was just trying to get attention. Danielle sat with this person and took time out with them and I was really impressed with that.

JD: Wow. You wouldn't think that Danielle would do that if you didn't know her that well.

TB: Right. I didn't know her that well and I thought that this was the kind of person that I'd like to know. She didn't really know me either. I projected a totally different image when I was there. We both quit the Cinema and started doing escort. I told her I was doing it. I don't know how much she was doing but I would expect more than she let on, but she wanted to know how far I was into it. We did some dates together. We had a lot of fun and did some screwy things, a lot of misadventures.

JD: Any non-business related misadventures? Any weird situations that you ran into like surreal street weirdness?

TB: Well I OD'ed at her house once waiting for a client. I was drinking a bunch of Scotch and had just a smidgen of dope. She was "Don't do any more of this because you're not used to doing the kind of dope I do." I was: fuck you! And did some more and fell on the floor. She dragged me down to the lobby, we were both -- Danielle's threatened to write about this -- really embarrassing -- we were dressed up like Catholic school girls which is really out of character, at least for myself. Danielle -- I don't know what kind of background she came from as far as religion goes: her in her little glasses and fangs.

JD: Did you have a religious background?

TB: Nope. Well my mother was a Gospel singer, she was a professional Gospel singer.

JD: What denomination?

TB: Presbyterian. They are more artistic than some. She kind of tried everything. She teetered between Presbyterian and Catholic. She liked ritual -- she was really a pagan at heart I think. She was a really accomplished Gospel singer. She was in the Symphony Chorus for a number of years. [Gets photo album] Here's my mom getting her ring. Corny.

JD: Looks like First Communion. How old was she?

TB: She was thirty -- no she wasn't thirty. Let's see. She was born in 1936… Oh this is a painting of my grandfather. Here's a painting of my grandmother. My cousin Susan painted that.

JD: Was your grandfather in the rail road too?

TB: My grandfather? No, not my grandfather it was my dad in the rail road.

JD: So it wasn't a dynastic thing?

TB: No. My grandfathers on both sides were gigolos.

JD: Really?

TB: Yeah [laughs].

JD: So that's a dynastic thing?

TB: Yeah. My grandfather on my father's side was so hot looking he'd look like a million bucks in a burlap sack.

JD: So he serviced women or men?

TB: Wealthy women. He was a traveling salesman and he had strung along a lot of women. He was pretty much paid for. My grandmother divorced him and took the farm. He was a randy guy. I never got to meet him. I think he died of emphysema but my father never talked about stuff. I know that he was a sharp dresser and that he was very handsome. He looked like a young John Cleese. Actually John Cleese now looks like my father but my father's dead. He looks like a healthier version [laughs].

Basically now I'm building a performance troupe. I haven't done much about my plans yet because I think other people talk too much about what they're going to do.

JD: Jinx it?

TB: Yeah.

JD: Let's talk about what you have done. You're in performance?

TB: Um hmm.

JD: What kind of performances do you do? What are you interested in?

TB: My keyboards. My band. We're kind of just piecing it together but it's very exciting. I used to play music by ear when I was younger and I just put it on hold for a very long time because I felt it would turn me into my mother who turned schizophrenic later but then I realized that she went crazy because she didn't do her art.

JD: What would you describe your music as?

TB: Well I did a noise band but what we're trying to do is more melodic. We're trying to create our own sound just by going by what we like and what we're doing. It's kind of an intuitive approach. I've only had ten lessons. I'm starting to make up my own tunes. We work really well together intuitively. I've been leaning on the keyboards heavily.

JD: Sort of a My Bloody Valentine approach, combining melody with noise?

TB: We're not noise. The other band I was in was noise. I kind of ruined my voice screaming. I didn't have any voice for two weeks. Here let me show you some of our music. Our guitar player is really amazing. He was in Napalm Beach but he's been living on the streets for years. He's teaching friends of mine guitar. He's teaching me keyboard. They gave him a bus ticket to Portland to record when he was living on the streets. This is one of his songs: "Kill the Homeless" this other one's about his wife, a prostitute -- she performed in my band for this benefit.

[Tallulah takes a client's call with "Kill the Homeless" playing in the background on her computer]

JD: How did you organize Whore Church? What are the things you have to do to get it going?

TB: First it usually comes with a theme. I'll get some brilliant idea for a theme. Then I'll find some people that bounce well off of each other and then I'll find an excuse to have a fund raiser. Recently I found a friend who is getting a sex change operation. I'd like to do a fund raiser for her. Then there's this other idea I had. I would have living dead notices: obituaries before the fact. Some person who has dropped out of sight -- have a funeral for them. Black balloons and stuff like that. Pictures from their childhood, mourners wearing black lace. The "deceased" would jump out of their casket. Everyone wants to attend their own funeral! Somebody told me that this idea was in poor taste and I was like so what. It's not like everything I've done has been in good taste. We've had Martha Stewart Whore Church Living, Militia Whore Church -- everything that we've done has been kind of not politically correct.

JD: Good.

TB: I don't like this hippy whore thing, or granola whore thing where "Oh everything is so rosy" and is so preachy. It's like what Danielle was saying: people trying to elevate the business through tantric sex. Well that's okay but let's have…

JD: Blood?

TB: Well you know what? Everybody has a bad day once in a while. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to say every guy's penis is beautiful. Some girls won't ever say anything derogatory. Some days people just get on your nerves.

[end of tape]