Read I Am Not Myself These Days Online
Authors: Josh Kilmer-Purcell
I Am Not Myself These Days (6 page)
“I've seen you worse.”
“I need to go out at lunch and buy new makeup,” I say.
“Get some that's flattering for a change,” Laura says.
“Maybe you can give me some tipsâ¦what's that brand you wearâ¦Bonne Belle?” I tease.
“Tip Number 1: Buy makeup that doesn't smear off onto someone else's fist,” she says.
“Let's just get back to acupuncture.”
“Okay, prick.”
Laura and I have been working together since I started at the agency, and the closest we've come to saying something nice to each other is when we compliment each other's lunch order. Still, she's my closest friend outside of the club scene. She came to see one of my shows once and left in the middle. She doesn't like my alter ego. “You're an even bigger dick when you're trying to hide your real one,” she said.
“Was Jack with you?” she asks.
“When?”
“When you took your makeup off with the sidewalk, loser,” she says.
“No. He was out of town. I think he got back late last night,” I say.
“Damn. I was hoping it was his fault.”
Laura hasn't sparked to my newâ¦soon to be exâ¦relationship. She met him once a couple of weeks ago when he met me for dinner after work one night. Laura can handle me coming to work drunk, my procrastination, and my insults, but she thinks dating a male escort will be the straw that breaks my brave front.
“Jack's been good for me and you know it.” I was hoping she'd refute this and give me reasons to feel better about our impending breakup.
“I know you've been happier lately,” she says. “But then again, I see happy people wearing cardboard coats and muttering to themselves on the street most every day.”
“I'll probably see him tonight,” I lie.
“Late tonight,” she scolds. “We can't leave until we have one idea that doesn't make me puke.”
“Let's shoot in LA this time. What's a commercial we can only shoot in LA?”
That's how we come up with our ideas. Destination first, script second. Unfortunately, no one has yet bought our “Open on a beach in Maui” stock script.
We spend most of the rest of the day thinking, interrupted only by my frequent visits to the coffee area to regale my colleagues with the tale behind my injuries. By the end of the day, my mugging involves three youths, ski masks, a knife, and a mysterious handsome passerby who saved my life before disappearing into the black night.
Laura and I finish up around nine thirty, having two solid ideas, and one lame one involving the Eiffel Tower that, of course, could only be filmed in Paris. She has to leave to go to do whatever she goes to do at night, and I stay behind to catch up on e-mails. My phone had been ringing all day; I figured it most likely was Jack since I could see that it was an outside line. I avoided answering, telling Laura that I didn't want to interrupt our train of thought. (A train that on most days found any excuse to make multiple station stops en route.)
I linger until nearly midnight, and the office is completely empty. It's the second week of a heat wave, and I can't bear the thought of going back to my apartment. I hadn't turned the air conditioning on yet, knowing that I couldn't afford the resulting electric bill. At least I had the foresight to cancel my show tonight when I realized the swelling wasn't going down at all.
On my way out, I stop in the men's room to check out my cheek and eye. The self-inflicted cut has started to resolve itself in a perforated scab pattern. My eye grosses me out. It's full of blood and itches painfully. The other bruises and scrapes seem like they easily could be covered with foundation in time for my Wednesday-night gig.
The frigid air of the lobby shatters as I push through the revolving door out onto Hudson Street. The oppressive humidity nearly pushes me back inside. It's like a velvet curtain of heat. Immediately I begin to sweat profusely, and the wound on my cheek starts stinging.
I turn to head down King Street. It's about a thirty-minute walk home. I could take the bus, but I save the fares for heavy rain and mornings when I'm too hungover to walk.
“Hey!”
a voice behind me says.
I'd told the mugging story so often today, I've nearly started to believe it myself, and begin panicking. I don't turn around. It's probably one of the mentally disabled homeless people who hang out outside the social agency next to my office building.
“Josh.”
I turn around. It's Jack.
“Hey,” I say. Don't engage him. Don't lead him on.
“Laura said you were still inside,” he says.
We stare at each other. Laura left nearly three hours ago. And he must have been waiting for me for a couple of hours before that. He's on his rollerblades and isn't sweating at all despite the stifling heat. I try not to notice how good he looks. He's a beautiful boy. Sandy blond hair with auburn glints in the right sunlight. Or moonlight. Deep blue eyes. He's half Irish and half Northern Italian. A combination as beautiful as it is dangerous. His skin has the olive complexion of the Mediterranean region, but with the smoothness of Irish cream. I'm very in love with his lips, which are full and bee-stung and always look freshly glossed. Jack chose his work name, Aidan, when a client told him he looked exactly like a young brooding Aidan Quinn. He wears a V-neck Fruit of the Loom T-shirt almost every day, and sometimes I find myself staring at the horizontal line where the tight fabric that clings to his solid chest gives way to the soft drape that falls over his perfectly concave stomach. I like to reach underneath and rub the soft hair on his chest as I fall asleep.
Used to
like to, I remind myself.
But I'm not looking at any of that tonight. I can't afford to. It's not good for me, and I'm certainly not good for him. He's a perfectly together person with a long successful prostitution career ahead of him. I'm a wreck of a drag queen with a day job that doesn't cover my rent and a rapidly developing alcohol problem. If only he didn't have those perfect lips. And he would stop looking at me like I'm a pathetic stray street dog with his honey eyes.
We stare at each other silently, until I look at my feet.
“Come with me,” he says, taking my hand.
He turns me around and we head west down Houston, taking a right on Hudson Street. He rollerblades slowly next to me. Wordlessly.
A few blocks north on Hudson, he stops at a heavy wrought-iron gate. The Church of St. Luke's in the Field. It's one of the oldest Episcopalian churches in the city and its buildings are surrounded by beautiful gardens. The largest garden is a carefully overgrown square prayer garden with ancient overhanging trees and carefully tended roses and lilies. It's a cloistered area so thick and lush that it's easy to imagine you've come across a clearing in the woods and not just wandered fifty feet away from a busy West Village street. The gate has a padlock on it.
Jack pulls on it and it magically springs open.
“If you're about to tell me you're actually the Catholic saint of padlocks, I'm going to need to sit down,” I say.
He explains to me how he had come by the park before closing time and pushed the padlock together just enough so that it looked closed. When the groundskeeper came around, he assumed someone had already locked it.
We shut the gate behind us and wind through the walkways to the prayer garden. Jack sits on a stone bench and motions for me to join him.
This is when I could run away. This is when I could turn around and bolt back into the busy West Village traffic, head to a bar, get free drinks from one of my drag compatriots, pick up a cute guy, and wake up the next morning on someone else's floor with someone else's underwear wrapped around my wrists. This is where Jack and I could part ways for good, and neither of us probably would even remember the other's name by the end of the year.
I stand there. I tilt my head back and look up into the sky. I wish I could see just one star. Just one. Just one little star that would remind me of being a little kid in Wisconsin, lying with my head sticking out the door of the tent I had set up in the field behind the house. Lying there waiting for just one more shooting star, which would come at much more frequent intervals than one would imagine. In a tent that smelled of crushed field strawberries from past summers. When I thought that being twenty was being old, and that being old was no fun. And when there were billions of stars, not like tonight, when there isn't a single goddamned one, just that thick smelly orange haze that threatens to come crashing down through the overhead branches and smother me alive. I just want to see one star I saw then. A star that saw me then. So that I know there
was
a then, and not just this confusing, soul-wrenching, bruising, drunken, face-kicking
now
.
I start to cry. The tears sting the broken blood vessels in my bruised eye. Jesus Christ, I can't even cry without hurting myself.
“I'm down here,” Jack says, patting the bench next to him.
I sit down next to him on the bench, less because I want to, and more because my legs are so weary I'm afraid I'll fall over any minute.
“I was mugged,” I say, “I'm sorry.”
“You were not mugged. Nobody gets mugged anymore in Manhattan. You brought someone home that beat the shit out of you,” he says.
“I'm sorry. I'm so so sorry.” I'm crying harder. It stings like a motherfucker, which makes me tear up even more.
“You are a world-class fuck-up,” he says, smiling. “A class-A diamond-studded fuck-up.” He gets up and starts roller-blading around the path that encircles the tree directly in front of us.
“If you weren't such an incredible overachiever in the fuck-up department,” he says as he makes his first revolution, “I'd never have stood outside your office for six hours waiting for your fucked-up ass to come out the door. You fuck up where others fear to tread. You deserve an honorary Lifetime Achievement Fuck-up Oscar. And if you think you can deprive me of the joy of watching you fuck up for the rest of your life, there's one thing you need to know. I've been waiting for someone to fuck up with for a long time, and you're it, compadre.”
“I don't speak Spanish,” I say, lamely. I've stopped crying, but my bad eye keeps tearing.
“Further proof of your fucked-uppedness.” He takes yet another loop around the tree. “And tomorrow you'll start packing up your things so that this weekend you can move in with me.”
“Okay.” I have nothing left inside me to argue with.
“Time for me to go, fucker-upper.”
On this last trip around the tree he strips the petals of a rose blossom. He showers them over me with one hand and pulls me up with the other.
“I name this variety Summer Fuck-up. Genus: Josh; Species: Kilmer-Purcell.” He skates off down the path toward the gate and turns around before reaching the sidewalk.
“See ya tomorrow, pal!” he yells back toward me, smiling, waving. Then he turns around, rolls out onto Hudson Street and disappears into the labyrinth of the West Village.
I stay on the bench, crying. For him. For me. For us. However we found each other, I know that we will never lose each other. I failed his test, and he's moved me up a grade anyway. This is not new to me. I've always gotten by on extra-credit projects. When people test me, I fail on purposeâto test
them
. We both passed, each in our own fucked-up way.
Crying always makes me have to pee, for some strange reason. I go to the corner of the Church of St. Luke's in the Field Prayer Garden and unzip myself.
It seems like the fucked-up thing to do.
T
he Tempest has passed. So to speak.
It's a Saturday afternoon and Jack and I stop by my old apartment to see if Tempest has finally vacated. I gave him a week to get out after I'd moved in with Jack, and so far he's taken three. But today, other than a broken Absolut bottle in the tub and a leaking lava lamp on the kitchen floor, everything seems to have been cleared out.
I've been in New York for only six months now, and have moved from an East Village studio to an Upper East Side penthouse. I'd be lying if I didn't admit I still had a little gnawing feeling about rushing things. Then again, New York doesn't leave a lot of time for pondering forks in the road. People who have paused to gather their wits often find themselves suddenly waking up in a cookie-cutter beige apartment in Hoboken. Or, worse yet, back in whatever backwater they came from. I will not ever leave New York. I don't know how long it takes to become a true New Yorker, but I assume that if I die hereâeither soonish or years from nowâthat that would qualify me.
Three weeks ago when I finally got all my boxes moved into Jack's, he quickly got sick of me constantly asking if “I could put something in this closet” or if he “wouldn't mind if I used half a shelf in the medicine chest.” The third day after I arrived he went out on a call, telling me that by the time he returned the next morning I should have all my things put away wherever I thought they should go. “It's no longer my apartment,” he clarified, “it's ours.”
Of course I can't imagine anywhere I belong less. Against the stark white walls my cheap furniture and tchotchkes look like a yard sale inside the Guggenheim. But those first few days he patiently walked around the apartment picking things up and pretending to admire them. “This is a beautiful piece,” he'd say about my wicker laundry hamper from Pier One. “These must be really valuable,” he'd comment while admiring my collection of 1970s cereal boxes.
When he's away on calls, I feel a little more at home. Less like a hillbilly relative who's overstayed his welcome. Curiously, the only time I truly feel like I belong there is when I'm dressed as Aqua. Sometimes when I get home from one of my shows and Jack isn't there, I pour myself a double vodka in his heavy crystal rocks glasses. Still in my wig and makeup, I put on his thick white bathrobe and stroll around the apartment, looking out over the sparkling skyline pretending I am anyone from a scorned Ivana Trump to a menopausal Leona Helmsley yelling obscenities at my imaginary domestics. I make a mental note to look for heeled slippers with marabou trim on my next trip to the Chelsea Flea Market.
But by far the most amazing development in my new life is having an entire bathroom and walk-in closet just for Aqua. No more storing intricately sequined costumes in plastic grocery bags under the futon. No more ziplock bags of makeup melting in a basket next to the radiator. I have a proper dressing room and vanity. I've even bought a larger aquarium for my goldfish, and it sits on the counter in between my double sinks. I've gone from a trailer park beauty queen to Linda Evans overnight. If there ever was such a thing as a smart drag queen career move, I've just made one.
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“Just leave it in there; they're going to keep my security deposit for back rent anyway,” I yell at Jack, who's trying to gather the glass bits of Absolut bottle in my old bathtub. “Let's just get back to the apartment. People will be showing up in a couple of hours and I need to shower and change.”
Jack's throwing me a birthday party tonight. The caterers have been at the apartment most of the afternoon cooking and setting up while we're emptying out my old home. He decided that a party would be a good way for me to meet all his friends and him to meet mine all at once. It's an interesting guest list. Most of Jack's friends are other escorts, but he still has several friends from his college school days at Columbia. He quit Columbia halfway through, and many of his friends are grad students or young professionals. I invited several people from the advertising agency as well as assorted drag queens and club kids.
Two of Jack's best friends are Ryan and Grey. They've been boyfriends for five years, and Jack has known Grey since they were in Cub Scouts together in California. When Grey first moved to New York, Jack set him up in the escort business, helping him to craft his first ad in the back of
HX Magazine,
and introducing him to the few escort agencies in New York that deal in male hookers. Grey met Ryan on call when a client had requested several boys to party with him. Ryan was one of the other escorts. He used to play the viola in a string quartet. He had terrible claustrophobia, though. His group was booked on a cruise ship and he had to quit because he couldn't even handle being on the largest ship in the fleet. Arriving in New York, he originally had dreams of becoming a classical musician. But the hooking paid much more.
The two work mainly as a team, billing themselves out as two college athletes trying to put themselves through school. Depending on the client, they either don basketball, football, or baseball jerseys before heading out on a call. One of the things I've learned about “the business” is that it doesn't really matter that Ryan and Grey are nearly thirty years old and so thin that either one would more likely be mistaken for a baseball bat than a player. Clients usually are so socially retarded and obsessed with their personal fantasies that an Asian shemale escort could answer a call wearing a backward baseball cap, rap a few bars while having sex, and leave having convinced the john that he was just fucked by a twelve-inch Rastafarian cock.
Even though Jack had told me so much about Ryan and Grey, tonight would be the first time I'd be meeting them. According to Jack, I've met them several times before as Aqua. They know which nights are mine at which clubs. They can recite lines from my shows. Apparently we've had long conversations and even shared a cab between clubs one night. I remember none of this. Even looking at pictures of them I don't recognize their faces. I'm hoping to God I haven't slept with either of them and they're simply being polite by not mentioning it to Jack.
Most of the club kids and drag queens that I've invited tonight will be meeting me out of drag for the first time. It's strange having spent night after night with these people for several months now and not having any idea what they truly look like. I wonder how many will show up in costume simply because they want to keep their “birth” persona private. Many drag queens I know even have a fictional drag history that they've concocted over the years. One claims she was abandoned at birth and raised by a secret coven of televangelists' wives. I considered being Aqua for the party, but Jack talked me out of it.
Throw in all the escorts who use fake names and it will be a party full of people who've known one another for months meeting for the first time, people who have never met meeting only half of a personality, and people who will be recognized from their escort ad as “12-inch Hot Rod” but will be introduced as Larry Feldstein. It's like a masquerade party in reverse.
Nearly every penis in the apartment tonight will at one time or another either have been tucked away or falsely advertised.
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“You are the hottest guy I've ever been with,” Jack says, hugging me from behind as I'm toweling off after showering for the party. He pins my arms to my side and swings me around so we're seeing each other in the bathroom mirror.
“First of all,” I say, “we haven't actually
been
together yet. And second, most of the guys you find yourself
“being with”
are pot-bellied middle-aged trolls whose most attractive feature is their wallet. This is not a high bar I've managed to clear.”
The party is scheduled to begin in about twenty minutes, and the caterers are taking one last smoke break on the bedroom balcony. Jack showered an hour ago and has been pacing around the apartment moving furniture around. Naked. This is yet another thing I find fascinatingly appealing about Jack. Whether it's a half dozen caterers, or the cleaning woman, or the deli delivery boy, Jack seems to feel that whomever he invites into his home deserves a free peek at the wares that pay for it. He sleeps demurely in pajama bottoms with me, but he'll greet the dry-cleaning delivery boy as if prepared to use his cock to hook the hangers on while he counts out cash for the bill.
“I mean it,” Jack says, “you're the most beguiling person I know.”
“That's a big word for a whore,” I say.
Jack reaches around and twists my nipple.
“Ow! You realize I'm not a paying client.”
He twists the other one.
“Cut it out, rent-a-cock!” I yell.
I tease Jack constantly about being an escort. Probably because secretly I find it incredibly sexy. The few people at the ad agency that I've told about his career can't believe I don't mind him having sex with other people. It's marginally more comprehensible to them when I explain that it's mostly just S&M stuff without any real sex, but I don't explain to them that I really wouldn't care if he
was
banging every single one of his clients. It's hot. I simply like the fact that I have sex with a man for free that other people pay thousands of dollars for. Actually, I'd like it even more if we actually
were
having sex, but I fully expect the big moment to be arriving soon. What better time than my birthday?
“Why do you think I'm so hot?” I ask, looking at us in the mirror.
“Feeling a little needy tonight?” he asks.
“It's my birthday. Bring on the platitudes.”
“I like you,” he says, “because you're terrified.”
“Can't you start out with something normalâ¦like my piercing green eyes or something?”
“I'm not kidding,” he continues, “I like the fact that you're terrified.”
“What gives you that impression?”
Jack holds my arms tighter to my sides and bends us over the counter until our faces are inches away from the mirror.
“When I wake up every morning, I rub your arms and your chest and your stomach,” Jack says, looking directly into the reflection of my eyes. “You are so relaxed, and soft, and you always smell like soap. I rub your cheek and you turn your head into my fingers. And then when you wake up, there's a moment of sheer terror in your body. Every bit of softness leaves your muscles, and you greet the day like it was the apocalypse.”
“So far I don't sound the slightest bit endearing,” I say, knowing in my heart that every word he's saying is true.
“You grow more electric all day. You're so stiff by the time you come home I can barely hug you.”
“And then I break out the booze,” I add.
“Yep. And Aqua. But instead of relaxing, you continue this self-inflicted pursuit of terror, until you finally manage to douse it with vodka and pass out. And then you're soft again.”
“So far you've illustrated why we both need therapy more than why we're in love.”
“I love you because you push yourself over the same cliff day after day after day and I can't believe nobody sees it but me. I love you because I've never seen anything more fascinating, and I need it to be mine. You're a shiny object.” Jack pauses. “Why do you love me?”
“Have I said I do?” I ask.
“You did a second ago.”
“Shit.” I pause. I don't know why. I should know why. But I have no idea.
“Because you touch me when I'm sleeping,” I say finally. “Because you know me soft.”
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The party is a bigger success than either of us imagined. Jack and I are sitting in the corner wondering if our uppity neighbors will be pissed by how large the party has grown. “Mr. Beefeater,” one of Jack's regular clients, is fighting his way through the crowd to bring me a fresh vodka on a small silver tray. This qualifies as minor miracle considering the man is at least eighty years old and not terribly steady on his feet. Jack gave him his nickname based on his outfitâan authentic English Yeoman of the Guard uniform, exactly like the guy on the gin bottle.
He's been hiring Jack for several years, and his typical session begins days before his arrival when Jack gets a script in the mail outlining a scenario involving some transgression committed by a novice yeoman (Mr. Beefeater), and his subsequent punishment by the Clerk of the Cheque (Jack). By the time the old man shows up at our apartment a couple of days later with his dry-cleaning bag and hatbox, Jack has all his lines memorized. The scene can take hours to play out, with much improvised pleading and shouting. It usually involves Jack commanding the errant guard to disrobe, slowly, piece by piece.
“Off with your morion!”
Jack yells during these scenesâat full volume, and with a fake English accent.
“You don't deserve the honor of that tasset! Hand over your bandolier, yeoman!”
It's a slow motion car wreck of a peepshow, a ritualistic disrobing with increasing square inches of eighty-year-old-man flesh appearing from behind belts and medals and corsets. A drag show slowly rewinding. Jack, as the officer, remains naked throughout except for a leather harness and black boots. From what little I remember from a rushed tour of the Tower of London in high school, I doubt Jack's attire is historically accurate. But for three hundred dollars an hour, there's no limit to the revisionism Jack indulges him in. Other than the limit on the old guy's credit card.
Given Mr. Beefeater's penchant to please, Jack invited him to come to the party tonight to be my personal servant. In full uniform and on the clock, of course. Even after living such a short time with Jack, I already consider it normal that someone is paying out hundreds of dollars an hour to serve me drinks.
Jack gets up to reward Mr. Beefeater by taking him aside and yelling at him in front of a large group of partygoers for serving my drink without a lime. The old man beams at his unanticipated punishment. Jack's generous that way.