I Am Not Myself These Days (3 page)

So why am I excited to see this guy?

 

I am, of course, completely bombed by the time I get to the Boiler Room. But being the smart gal that I am, I did a couple of bumps of coke before leaving Tunnel to appear more alert. So now I'm very alertly drunk. For instance, it's painfully clear to me that I've finished two more vodkas with no sign of this guy and I'm going to be forced to buy myself a third. The Boiler Room is a kind of after-hours hangout for the sorts of people who work in big dance clubs. So most of the other patrons have grown deaf to the constant drink requests and shrill mating calls of the North American Drag Queen.

“Hello again.”

It's him. As soon as I see him, I suddenly remember the whole evening before and breakfast this morning. His name is Jack. I remember pulling into the circular drive of a contemporary high-rise apartment building on the Upper East Side and watching him hit the button marked PH. I remember walking into his apartment and thinking it was the apartment on the old
Bob Newhart Show
. Low and long and modern, with a sunken living room. The skyline of Midtown New York looked like a stage backdrop outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. I remember standing on the small balcony, with a cool summer wind drying my sweaty outfit, and looking east toward the Queensborough Bridge, which seemed close enough to reach out and touch, and much smaller than it does from the ground.

I remember him sitting on the edge of his tub watching me take off my makeup with a tube of his body lotion and some toilet paper. He watched me pull off my three pairs of eyelashes. He brought me a pitcher of lukewarm water to put my fish in. When I took off my wig, he reached over and smoothed out my flattened, messy hair with his fingers. He drew me a bath, no fussy bubbles or oils, and listened to me talk about the song I performed that night, and the audience, and my advertising job. And when I stood up in the tub, and there was no more talk, and no more Aqua, he wrapped me in a soft white towel. And I was drunk, and tired, and tired of myself, and he looked right in my eyes and said, “Hello again.”

By the time he brought me the deli breakfast in bed the next morning I was performing again. Wearing an invisible wig and makeup, I was flip and dismissive and rude. Even if he never saw the clothes he lent me ever again, he was no doubt glad to see me leave his apartment.

But now, for whatever reason, he was back.

“Hey, you,” I say. I try to act normal. Unfortunately I can do multiple different impressions of normal, and I can't figure out the appropriate one for the moment. I'm dangerously close to simply having to
“be myself.”

“How was Tunnel?” he asks.

“Fun. You know…noisy, sweaty, sceney, and sparkly.”

“I haven't been in years. How was your show?” he asks.

“Good. I did a female James Bond thing. Everyone seemed to like it.” I didn't tell him that halfway through the number, when I grabbed a girl out of the crowd and held her “hostage” with my toy laser gun, I was so drunk that I fell backward, pulling the mortified girl down on top of me.

“You wouldn't tell me your real name last night,” he said.

“A girl's only weapon is her secrets,” I say.

“Spoken like a guy with his dick tucked behind him.”

“It's Josh,” I say.

“Nice Jewish name.”

“Actually, Episcopalian.”

“I'm Catholic. Guess we'll never be married then. Shame.”

He turns to the bartender and orders for us both. One Absolut cranberry, and one club soda with lime. Great. He doesn't drink. Which means one of two things: either he has never drunk, or he drank all the time and has been cut off by his “higher power.” Both options are equally frightening to me, and an instant turnoff. I need to get my drag stuff back tonight, maybe have a little sex, steal a prescription pad or two, and get him the hell out of my life.

If I've learned anything, it's that sober people are just that.

“Here you go,” Jack says, handing me the club soda while keeping the Absolut cranberry for himself.

I take a sip and hold the soda water up in front of my eyes, scrutinizing it.

“It's clear, like vodka…and has bubbles, like champagne,” I ponder facetiously out loud. Holding up the lime I go on, “And this piece of fruit indicates that it's some sort of cocktail, yet…” I pause dramatically to take a sip before continuing, “it doesn't make my problems disappear and allow me to escape into a false world of cleverness and beauty.”

“It will, however, allow you to sober up a little to better appreciate the enormous breadth of my personality,” Jack says.

“Any drink that makes things look enormous is the perfect drink for me,” I say, shifting my weight back on my heels.

“You don't need another drink. I'm sure you've been drinking all night,” Jack says. He, of course, is right. My typical drinking schedule is one vodka rocks when I get home from work to help me nap. Two to three more while I put on my makeup and costume. And anywhere from ten to fifteen at the club. I'm not stupid. I know I drink far more than I should. Than anyone should. But part of the pattern stems from the fact that the corsets I wear bring my waist down from thirty inches to twenty-three inches. After about fifteen minutes in one, the pain becomes so unbearable that my internal organs actually begin to throb. Somehow, the booze seems to shut down my entire digestive tract and mask the pain. Coupled with the back pain and swelling feet caused by my seven-inch heels, I find that there's a level of drunkeness that I must maintain in order to finish a gig.

Jack has one more drink, and I have another soda (in addition to sipping out of someone else's abandoned rum and Coke while Jack uses the restroom) before we decide to head home. There's no question of whether and where we'll spend the night together, having already dispensed with that awkwardness the night before.

We're in a cab heading to his apartment when Jack reaches over and cups his hand over mine. It's a simple gesture, but one that catches me off guard. I keep looking out the window as we head north on FDR. Past the United Nations, the neon Pepsi sign in Queens, and Roosevelt Island. The East River sparkles under the bridges. But all I'm thinking about is his hand on mine. By this point on a ride home I'm used to a hand on a thigh or, by the more aggressive, a hand slipped up into my crotch, but not a hand on my hand.

“I don't usually go home with guys while I'm in drag,” I say, breaking that silence that has held since we left the bar. I'm lying again of course. I almost never go home alone. But his hand on mine makes me want to acknowledge this trip as somehow different. If I say it out loud, maybe it's true.

“Me neither,” Jack says. “But I'm not taking you home because you're in drag. I'm taking you home because I want you there.”

And I believe him. I remember enough about the previous night to know that I was more comfortable at his place than I was in my own messy overstuffed studio apartment, with my horribly selfish, angry, and unemployed roommate. I know that I felt cleaner, and more content, than I'd felt in several years in his calm space in the sky. I remember the soft warm towel he wrapped around me when I stood naked in front of him in the tub.

I'm still swimming in this spa fantasy as we waltz through the lobby of his building. I often don't realize what a strange site I am to ordinary people until I notice their incredulous stares. I'm sure the doormen of his luxury Upper East Side high-rise building had never seen a seven-foot-tall drag queen with light-up fish tits clicking her high heels across their inlaid marble floors. I like Jack even more for not caring. He even calls out “hola” to one of the older doormen, who chokes out a hoarse “hola sénor” in response without ever taking his eyes off me.

While he looks for his key outside his apartment door, I sink deeper into my new fantasy life with Jack. I would wait an appropriate amount of time after I moved in before hanging up my wigs and advertising career.

As a successful doctor's boyfriend, I fully expect that I will have new duties to fulfill.

Charity would become my new hobby. Perhaps something at the United Nations, lending an international flair to my philanthropy. I picture trips to five-star hotels in third world countries after convincing Dr. Jack (I really must catch his last name) to quit his practice and join Doctors Without Borders for a year. There I'd become fast friends with caring celebrity activists like Susan Sarandon and Bette Midler and Jane Fonda, who would come over to our penthouse for fundraising brunches.

I'm coming up with the perfect brunch menu in my head when Jack opens the door and I see a middle-aged balding man lying naked and curled up on his side on the floor of Jack's foyer.

“You stupid fat pig!” Jack yells at him while giving him a sharp kick in his flabby gut. “I told you to stay in the goddamned living room, you flabby piece of shit!”

The man is hogtied. His wrists are lashed to his ankles behind his back with black leather laces. Jack grabs his wrists with one hand and his ankles with the other and drags him over to the side of the foyer so I can step in.

“I'm sorry, Aidan! I'm really sorry! I'm just a stupid fat pussy boy with a tiny, tiny dick!” the man screams as he's dragged across to the side. His sweaty clammy skin squeaks as it slides over the shiny wood floor like a new sneaker on a gym floor.

Who the hell is Aidan?

“That's right, cocksucker, now shut the fuck up,” Jack says.

“I'm so bad,” whimpers the man over and over.

“Quit being such a pussy!” Jack screams, “and say hello to Aqua.”

“Hello,” the fat man says, looking up at me.

“Don't fucking look at her you fucking piece of shit! She's too gorgeous to even notice you with your tiny useless cock!” Jack interrupts.

“Cheers,” I say to the man, a little unsure if it's kosher to be friendly, or whether Jack will start yelling at me next.

“If you're a good little pussy boy, Miss Aqua will come back and let you lick her boot,” Jack continues.

Jack grabs my arm and guides me toward the living room. The fat man whimpers quietly as we walk away.

“I'm sorry,” Jack says, “he wasn't supposed to leave his corner.” I briefly ponder what makes him think that I would be any less shocked to discover a naked hog-tied man in the living room rather than the foyer.

“
Now
can I get a drink out of you?” I ask.

Jack laughs and heads into the kitchen. I sit on the white couch and take my wig off. I can see the hog-tied man's ankles around the corner. Jack comes back with the most needed glass of vodka I've ever seen in my life.

“Umm,” I start, not sure how to begin. “Who is he?”

“I call him ‘Houdini.' He's a successful CEO of some huge company in London, with a wife and kids and girlfriend on the side. He comes to me one weekend a month.”

“He's a patient?” I ask.

“A client. I get a lot like him. They don't even want the sex. Just want to be treated like the crappy useless weak person they feel they are inside.”

“What kind of doctor are you?”

“Huh?”

“I thought you were a doctor.”

“No. Who said that?” he asks.

“Never mind,” I say. The drink in my hand is miraculously nearly gone. I suck at the ice. “You're a hooker.”

“That's one term,” Jack says. “But I don't have a lot of sex with my clients. Mostly I just beat them up.”

“I'm not into that,” I quickly reply, mentally plotting an escape route that doesn't involve stepping over Houdini.

“I'm not either. But it pays the bills,” he says.

“More of them than wigs do, apparently,” I say, looking around the immaculate penthouse. Every piece of furniture is some variant of white or light gray but is surrounded by colorful statues and masks and artwork from different regions around the globe. I see a lot of Mexican folk art, some less colorful African sculptures, some pre-Columbian masks, and some Oriental pieces scattered throughout.

“He really stays here all weekend?” I ask.

“If it's a holiday he stays three days. Sometimes four.”

“What do you do with him all that time?”

“That's the best part,” Jack says, smiling. “Nothing. He shows up on a Friday afternoon, I tie him up, and he spends the rest of the weekend struggling.”

“How much does he pay you?”

“Two thousand dollars a day. But I usually give him a thousand back. It's good business.”

“Can you get me another little sip?” I say, holding the empty glass up.

While he's in the kitchen, I walk over and peer around the corner at Houdini. He looks up at me with frightened little eyes. I wonder how old his kids are. What would they say if they saw him right now? Is this something that he asked his wife to do to him once and she refused? Does he really need to cross the Atlantic to get this kind of service? He notices me staring at him.

“Can I lick your boot?” he asks meekly.

“Um, sure.” I kick my leg out toward him. At first he kisses it, with gentle little pecks. He's kind of sweet. I could see him being a good father, actually. I bet he kisses his kids goodnight like this.

After about fifteen seconds of pecking, he sticks his tongue out and licks the black vinyl with short little strokes. Soon he starts grunting and squirming to get in a better position to really go at my boot with his tongue. He's licking and rubbing his cheek against the now sopping boot like a cat rubbing against a table leg. He's really going to town. Then suddenly he bites down on my toe.

“Ow! You little fucker!” I kick him in his neck. He smiles up at me like a kid who got caught doing something bad and doesn't care.

“Do it again,” he says.

“Screw you,” I say, and start to walk away. He begins straining at the restraints, rolling from side to side to try to follow me. I kick him in his arm.