I Am Not Myself These Days (4 page)

“More!” he yells.

“Christ, you're one fucked-up dude,” I say, backing off quickly. Jack walks in from the kitchen.

“You leave her the fuck alone, pencil dick, or I'll call your wife,” Jack says. Houdini stops struggling for a moment. He definitely respects Jack. Somehow I'm impressed by this.

“What do you feed him?” I ask when we're back on the white modernist sofa. I'm beginning to picture Houdini as an overweight, exotic, hairless pet cat.

“Nothing. I just put out lines of coke on the floor and a bowl of water. He doesn't get hungry. Sometimes before he goes back to the airport I'll give him a PowerBar or something.”

I'm pretty much speechless by this point. I see a lot of things in the drag world. Guys who take black market hormones to grow small breasts. Trannies coming back from their operations paid for by their “patrons” and showing off their swollen new vaginas to a roomful of clubgoers. But this is strange even by my standards. I'm intrigued that there's a level of perversity even beyond my realm of expertise. Where have I been? I feel so uncool. Show me more of this party I've been missing.

I had spent so much of my time growing up being afraid of being either too cool or too uncool. Fear eventually took over and became my default emotion. If I tried to be cool, I was afraid of disappointing my teachers and parents. If I stuck with the nerd kids, I had a nagging fear that I was missing out on something. I learned to become exactly what whomever I was with at the time expected me to be. Mostly I was afraid that if I didn't become what they wanted, then they would realize what I really was. A fey little faggoty kid hiding out in a small Wisconsin town. It was an exhausting dance.

When I finally came out, the first thing I wanted to get rid of was fear. You got a problem with queers? Tough, get a load of me in this dress. You think sex is bad? Watch me tackle four guys at once. Just say no? Just say blow.

The problem with trying to be fearless is that there's always someone there to challenge your title. Like Jack. Here's a guy whom people fly across the ocean for and pay obscene amounts of money to just get screwed and have the shit beaten out of them. By comparison, I suddenly feel like the kid who plays bassoon in the junior high band all over again. Only now the cool guy likes me. I'm going to have to find a way to impress him.

“Don't you want to get out of your outfit?” Jack asks.

“Can't I just go kick him once more?”

W
hite.

White = Jack.

This was my first impression of him. And it's sticking in some fold of my brain.

The slant of morning light has slid up my sleeping body, and now pries my eyes open to the blinding flare of his bedroom.

I've woken up in enough beds that are not my own to not be unnerved by unfamiliar surroundings. I usually take a moment to say a little grateful prayer that I'm actually in a bed and not on someone's floor, or a couch in a club, or, as has happened once before, in an elevator.

Jack's bedroom is as white as the rest of his apartment. Off to my left is a long bank of floor-to-ceiling windows interrupted exactly in the center by a glass door that leads out onto a narrow balcony. The view from the master bedroom is the same southern city view as the living room, except now, by daylight, the spectacular array of buildings that make up his backyard seem smaller, slightly farther away than they do during the night. The bed itself is white. White sheets, heavy white comforter—even the platform that the mattress rests on is a hard white slab made up of some sort of white marble blocks. On the wall across from the foot of the bed is a white television sitting on a square-edged white pedestal like the kind one would find sculptures displayed upon in a gallery.

The only color in the room hangs on the wall above the head of the bed. A five-foot chain of palm-sized skeletons cut out of shiny tin and linked hand to hand like a chain of paper men. Each skeleton is painted in a different multicolored pattern, and several are ornamented further with cutout tin top hats, or bow ties, or twisted colorful pipe-cleaner boas, or brightly dyed feathers arranged and glued together like an evening gown. Mexican Day of the Dead ornaments. The chorus line of grinning garish skeletons sags across the top of the bed, slightly fluttering in an undetectable breeze coming from the open balcony door. When the sunlight hits one directly, a ray of iridescent color streaks across the room and disappears as quickly and silently as the breeze that caused it.

I'm wearing a pair of thin cotton pajama bottoms lent to me by Jack last night. He keeps a two-foot-tall stack of them in a drawer in the bedroom closet, all clean and fresh pressed and smelling like fabric softener. He wears a clean pair every night, he explained to me. Likes the newness. When I swing my legs over the edge of the bed, they still look perfectly pressed. I must not have turned at all in my sleep.

Impossible as it seems, the living room appears brighter then the bedroom and I squint my eyes as I pull open the door.

“Hello again,” Jack says, sitting cross-legged in the middle of a fan of Sunday
New York Times
sections scattered around him on the parquet floor. It's only Saturday, but with home delivery, you get many of the fluffy Sunday sections—Real Estate, Arts and Leisure, the
Times Magazine
—a day early. Easier on the delivery guys, I suppose.

“We alone?” I ask, padding across the parquet. The vertical indentations from last night's corset still run faintly up my torso.

“Yup. Houdini had a legitimate business meeting this weekend, so he went to a hotel this morning,” Jack replies. “He may be back Sunday afternoon…do you want breakfast?”

“I should probably go.”

Jack's eyes widen almost imperceptibly, then return to normal.

“I made coffee already and ordered food before you got up. I just need to go microwave it for a sec.” He's not pleading for me to stay and hang out. He's simply telling me I will. He stands up and walks toward the kitchen. “I forget what you took in your coffee yesterday,” he says, rounding the corner into the dining room.

“Just a little milk,” I yell after him.

In a few minutes he comes back with the deli breakfast spread and arranges the different plates in a circle on the floor.

“Sit,” he says, calling me back over from the window where I was studying the skyline, “right here.” He sits back down in the middle of the circle of food and
New York Times
sections and pats the floor next to him with his palm.

We spend the next hour or so eating and reading silently. When he finishes a section, he passes it over to me, and vice versa. I'm completely comfortable. It feels as easy as watching Saturday morning cartoons after a sleepover at your best friend's house.

“Listen to this,” I say, breaking the silence. I point down at an article in front of me and continue. “Rioting and looting has broken out across the capital region of Sudan this morning after a grumpy overnight guest ran out of coffee and his host didn't notice.” I push my empty coffee mug across the floor to him with my foot. He pretends not to notice.

“Interesting,” he replies. “There's a story here about an old guy in Queens who collected every magazine and piece of mail he'd received in the last forty-five years until one of the piles fell on top of him and trapped him for five days.”

He looks up at me, expectantly.

“Was he okay?” I finally reply, resigned to setting up whatever punchline was coming next.

“He was fine. First thing he did after being freed was pull himself right up and pour his own goddamn cup of coffee.”

“You're a cock.”

“…And got a cup for his rescuer too,” Jack continues, now pushing both my and his mug back over to me. “The rescuer reportedly likes skim milk. And a little sugar.”

I roll my eyes, grab both mugs and stand up. As I turn to go to the kitchen, he leans over, reaching out to grab one of my ankles. I stop and he pulls me back toward him, causing me to hop backward on one foot, balancing the two mugs. When I'm near enough, he raises the sole of my foot to his mouth and softly kisses the very center of the arch. His lips are warm against my bare skin, and it tickles just enough to send goosebumps up my calves.

“Thank you,” he says.

By the time we head out to a matinee later that afternoon I'm feeling uncharacteristically relaxed. This is so easy.
He
is so easy. I've never met anyone who just does whatever he wants to do without a thousand other little voices in his head lecturing that he's going “a bit too far,” or will “pay for this in the long run,” or should “just stop a minute and think twice about things.” Jack doesn't seem to ever think twice. He simply has no strategy. No agenda.

It makes me wonder, what's the point of thinking twice anyway? The only possible outcome of double thinking is that you invariably end up negating whatever it was motivating you in the first place. Forcing yourself to think twice about something is just admitting that somehow you are instinctively stupid, and that repetition is the only thing that will save you from yourself.

After knowing Jack for merely forty-eight hours, I've learned that he will willingly think for me too. He'll decide when I should drink. Decide what I should wear to bed. Decide what I want for breakfast. And it's pretty relaxing, never having to think once—let alone twice—about something. The only other time I get to feel as free as this is somewhere around my twelfth vodka. It'll be interesting to see if Jack gives me a headache the next day.

I
'm working the door at Jaguar, a small club two doors down from the Hells Angels headquarters on East Third Street. It's a slow night, and my drag codoorperson, L'il Debbie, is getting restless. L'il Debbie is close to three hundred pounds and famous for her raunchy numbers.

One of her most notorious appearances occurred just last month when she was scheduled to open a show at a club called Don Hill's. She didn't look so well when she showed up, but that was nothing terribly unusual for any of us queens.

Due to a scheduling problem with another drag queen, the hostess of the show moved L'il Debbie's song to the finale rather than the opening number. L'il Debbie sat backstage for an hour and a half, growing more and more sickly by the minute. She refused to sit down and spent the entire show pacing back and forth, sweating far more than a three-hundred-pound man in makeup and leather bustier would even under normal circumstances.

When her number finally came, she rallied. It was a high-energy punk rock version of “The Candyman.” She skipped back and forth across the stage with a black leather parasol in one hand and an oversize lollipop in the other.

“WHO CAN TAKE A SUNRISE?! SPRINKLE IT WITH DEW?!” she shrieked at the audience with such force that several people actually looked as if they were trying to come up with an answer for her.

“COVER IT IN CHOCOLATE AND A MIRACLE OR TWO?!…THE CANDYMAN CAN!!”

She started twirling now in that way ice skaters do, where her body was in constant rotation, but her head would stop at each revolution to stare at the startled audience. She held the parasol out to her side as she spun, threatening to decapitate the entire front row.

“WHO CAN TAKE A RAINBOW?!!…”

The lollipop was flung out over the crowd, beaning a Long Island Italian gay boy toward the back of the room.

“THE CANDYMAN MAKES…EVERYTHING HE BAKES…SATISFYING AND DELICIOUS!!”

It was incredible that Debbie hadn't thrown up yet. She'd been spinning at an increasing speed for nearly a full minute. The end of the song was approaching.

“THE CANDYMAN CAN!!!…THE CANDYMAN CAN!!!…THE CANDYMAN CAN!!!”

At this final line Debbie stopped spinning. What happened next will go down in drag queen history. Debbie stopped with her back to the audience, lifted up her chain-link miniskirt, and bent over, revealing what looked like a big red plastic umbrella handle coming out of her ass.

None of us could make out what it was at first. It looked familiar. All of us had seen one before. Somewhere. And then, just as the crowd collectively remembered what it was, Debbie reached behind her and started pulling and twisting at it.

It was one of those giant hollow plastic candy canes they used to sell at Christmastime in the checkout lines in Woolworths. They were about two feet long and filled with M&M's. The front row panicked as they realized exactly what that red handle Debbie was tugging at was attached to: two full feet of M&M delivery chute shoved up her ass.

The M&M's came showering out of Debbie's ass with amazing speed, bouncing off the stage platform and ricocheting into the crowd. She started swaying her hips from side to side in order to strafe the entire breadth of the audience. It was pandemonium. People screaming, then gagging after a stray M&M bounced directly from Debbie's ass into their mouth. And because she'd been delayed an hour the final few inches of M&M's had melted together and fell in a big brown clump onto the center of the stage floor.

Debbie calmly turned around to face the audience with a huge grin. She took a deep bow—extracting the tube in the process—and placed the red handle back onto it. Then she spun it around her finger and flung it out into the candy-coated shell-shocked audience.

This is a drag queen that demands your respect.

But tonight Li'l Debbie is more sedate. Neither of us has to perform. Just stand outside and let the “right” people in. Which is pretty much anyone who promises to send a drink out to us after they get inside.

“He's gotta be pretty hung to make that much money,” Debbie says.

“I don't know. I haven't seen it.”

“You've been dating a hooker for three weeks and you haven't slept together? What's that about? Short on cash?”

“He just doesn't want to yet. Wants us to get to know each other better first.” Even as I say it I realize I sound like the naïve girl on an
Afterschool Special
.

“He's a pricey whore, and you're a cheap slut. End of story. Start fucking already,” she says glibly, fishing a stray wig hair off her thigh.

Truth is, it does feel a little strange. At this moment he's on a call at a midtown hotel wearing nothing but a leather harness while beating up some naked guy he's never met. But when he stops by afterward to pick me up, we'll go to his place and sleep in pajama bottoms and modestly close the bathroom door when we pee.

“Well, like my mother always told me,” Debbie says, “it's not the size that matters, it's how much it costs an hour.”

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” I say.

“Did I say Ma made any sense, bitch?”

It's two thirty in the morning and the street is dead empty. It's one of those summer nights in New York when the bricks and pavement have soaked up so many days of relentless sun and haze that the city doesn't have a chance to cool down even in the middle of the night. If I stand next to the wall of the club I can feel the heat radiating off the building. I spray antiperspirant on my face underneath my foundation in the summer, but on nights like tonight it doesn't help. There's no such thing as a “natural look” drag queen. I'm sweaty and smeared and bored and not anywhere near drunk enough.

Three Hells Angels turn the corner onto the street from Second Avenue and roar past the front of the club on the way to their own club. The noise as they pass is incredible. I wonder how anyone can stand to live on this street.

“Hey Papa!” Li'l Debbie yells at them, waving them over. They do a U-turn in the middle of the street and come back to us. I can't help but think this might not be such a great idea.

“Hey girls,” the lead motorcyclist yells back. “Club busy tonight?”

He's smiling. As are his two friends. Over the years I've learned that there are two classes of people who get a big kick out of people who are different from themselves. The very rich, and those who are freaks in their own right.

“Totally dead,” Debbie yells over the roaring bikes. “Have you come to save us?”

“Get us some beer and we might do some thinking on it.”

“No problem, Papa, the fridge is full,” she yells back.

Debbie ducks inside and the three Angels break out their cigarettes. She comes back with bottles for them and double vodkas for us. We prop the door open so we can hear the music and start our own little block party, just the five of us. Two of them are from Queens, and one is down from New Hampshire. They show us their tattoos and pictures of their girlfriends. I show them my fish and share the secrets of “tucking” with them. Several beers and vodkas later and we're having a much better time than anyone inside the club.

Suddenly Johnny, the leader, stands up on his bike and brings his weight back down on the starter. The explosion of sound echoes down the street. He pats the seat behind him.

“Hop on, Blondie,” he yells at me.

His friend starts his bike and gestures to Debbie. Neither one of us hesitate anywhere near as long as we should. I swing a seven-inch heel over the seat and settle down behind Johnny. Debbie, with considerably more effort, maneuvers her three hundred pounds onto the bike behind. With my arms around his leather waist, Johnny takes off toward Third Avenue.

The avenue is much busier, especially as we reach St. Mark's Place. I love the East Village. It should be the mandatory first home of everyone who moves to New York. We pass groups of runaway teens, half of them kicked out of their homes because they were too much trouble for their families. The other half ran away from their middle-class suburban homes intent on
becoming
too much trouble for their families. I spot Quentin Crisp in a lavender suit with matching hat and scarf trying to cross Lafayette.

Johnny is going faster now, trying to catch every green light. People stop and stare at our little group as we fly by. I'd like to think I fit in as a biker chick girlfriend. L'il Debbie, however, in her super plus–size Catholic School–girl outfit probably draws considerably more attention. I have to hold one hand on top of my head to keep my wigs from flying off, and it occurs to me that I'm not wearing a helmet.

For a second, the advanced class sixth grade hall monitor in me starts to panic. This is something I could get in big trouble for. This sort of behavior is sure to disappoint someone. My parents, my old teachers. I picture Mrs. Zariff, my fifth grade teacher, suddenly waking up with a start in her floral print bed knowing that somewhere, one of her teacher's pets is flagrantly “crossing the line.” I picture my sixth grade Good Citizen Citation spontaneously bursting into flames in my old desk drawer at my parents' house. I picture my obituary in the
Oconomowoc Enterprise,
informing everyone that the brain responsible for their former debate team hero was splattered (but held loosely together by a blond wig) across Astor Place in New York City. I see teachers, priests, my parents' friends all whispering among themselves that they knew, they always knew, that I was too perfect not to have some fatal flaw. That they knew it was an act all along.

I let my eyes go blurry, finally giving in to the vodka. The streetlights and neon store signs register as streaks on my comprehension. This recklessness is just the kind of behavior expected from someone who suddenly surprises his parents with an uncharacteristic string of “unsatisfactory” marks on his third grade report card…the same year that he was bursting into tears inexplicably in the middle of the night. And nobody realized it was because his best friend, Greg Bransen, was moving two towns away. Nobody recognized that he had a crush on Greg, which he couldn't understand because there were no other boys who loved each other like he loved Greg in the whole wide world.

Being mutilated in a motorcycle crash is precisely the fate that good people would expect to befall a boy who moves to New York City and wears women's clothes and is developing a drinking problem and is falling in love with a guy who gets paid to have sex with other guys.

“Shut the fuck up,” I tell the hall monitor in my head.
“Shut the fuck up.”
What good has being good done me thus far? What have I gained other than a propensity toward panic attacks and a brief addiction to Xanax?

I'm falling in love with a hooker and it feels better than every Regional Concert Band Championship medal stuck in the back of the top drawer of the desk in my childhood bedroom. I'm falling in love with a hooker who willingly, happily, makes my life easier, and seems only to expect whatever I'm already giving him. Nothing more. Doesn't need me to bring home straight As. Or blue ribbons. Or respectable career choices.

Go faster,” I yell into Johnny's ear.