I Am Not Myself These Days (8 page)

Any questions I had melt away as soon as I open the door. Jack's standing in the kitchen—naked, of course—with the cordless phone in one hand and the deli menu in the other. He's smiling his broad goofy smile at me, and I blow him a kiss while I struggle with my heels. I hear voices from the dining room.

“Aqua!” shout Ryan and Grey simultaneously, sticking their heads around the corner.

“Hey, guys! Awfully early for you to be up for school,” I reply.

I realize they're all coming down from their party. There's a sense of playful relaxation in the apartment. I imagine it's what a firehouse must feel like when all the guys come back from a four-alarm blaze.

“Make that
four
western omelets, hash browns, and wheat toast. And another large OJ,” Jack says into the phone, winking at me.

I need to be in the office in less than five hours and I've had less than four hours sleep in the last forty-eight hours since my birthday party. I should simply crash in bed. But the three of them are in such a fun mood, the sky is just turning a blazing pink over the East River, Jack just ordered me breakfast, and suddenly I get my fifth wind.

“Come here, you,” Jack says, coming up behind me while I'm struggling to undo my corset, and wrapping his arms around me.

I turn to kiss him.

“What happened to you, lizard lips?” I ask, noticing that his lips are more chapped than ever.

“They're just dry—the guy's apartment was over air-conditioned. Hey, I'm sorry I didn't call.”

“No biggie,” I lie.

“This guy was such a freak…” Jack starts.

“Seriously,” Ryan interrupts, “I've never met a more paranoid guy. He smoked more crack than a welfare mother, and he locked the three of us in the bathroom
twice
because he thought we were undercover agents from the DEA.”

“You guys go to just the
best
parties,” I mock.

“And where were
you
, Miss Five A.M. Shadow?” Grey asks.

“Snatch Game at Barracuda.”

“Shit, I missed it, I wanted to see you,” Jack complains.

“I think I'm booked again next week.”

By the time the food arrives, I've peeled off my outfit and put the goldfish back into their tank. I'm still in full makeup though, because I don't feel like showering until I eat.

Jack brings the foil deli breakfast trays into the dining room. The sun is streaming in, turning the white walls a glowing pink. Grey gets up to open the window. It's the first day of September, and a dry cool breeze fills the room. The air feels clean—like someone Windexed away the summer urine and trash smells. Like we
are
getting ready to head out to our first day of school.

We all laugh and eat as they tell me stories about their pathetic client and I tell them about the show. As the sun brightens we talk less about our night and more about other things. Jack says the sky reminds him of the Baja Peninsula, and how he used to disappear for weeks in the summer when he was in high school. Hitchhiking with his backpack down through California into the Baja Peninsula. And how his parents would simply think he'd gone to stay at a friend's house. Jack would take busses from village to village and stay with any local family that would take him in. Some nights he would just sleep by the road in the middle of the desert.

And then one day he'd just come home again and find his parents just where he'd left them, drinking old-fashioneds by the pool with their neighbors.

“Call in sick,” Jack says to me.

“I can't. We have a pitch next week.”

“That's next week. Come on. I want to take you to Coney Island. I haven't been all summer. We'll all go.” Jack's growing more and more enthused.

“I've never been to Coney Island,” I say.

“You're kidding,” says Grey incredulously.

“I've only been in New York for seven months.”

“Come on. Call in,” Jack pleads, “I'll leave my beeper at home.”

This is a serious concession. In the three months we've been together, Jack hasn't once been more than two feet from his beeper. He told me the reason he's so successful is that he's so reliable. And he is. He returns every page he gets, whether or not he's just come home from a two-day party and has only had an hour of sleep, or if we're in the middle of our entrée at our favorite French bistro. “Clients need two things—stability and unpredictability. And I know exactly when they need which,” Jack's said to me before.

“Come on, go shower. Let's go,” Jack says.

Before the water gets warm I have Laura on the phone figuring out how she can cover for me.

 

I wake up completely disoriented but also with a sense of total calm. As I come to, I feel the warm sand under my heels and the cool terry cloth under my back. I'm staring at the underside of a rainbow-hued umbrella, through which I can see faint shadows of seagulls circling overhead. I have never woken up this calm. I know I quickly will realize where I am and what I'm doing here, but for now I try to sink down deeper into this smooth haze of not knowing, not caring, not worrying.

I feel a tingling on my stomach and lift my head to find Jack drizzling a thin stream of sand through his fist.

“Wanna go to Nathan's?” he asks.

“Where are Ryan and Grey?”

“They went on some rides. C'mon, I'm starving.”

Jack gets two foot-longs with onions and chili, and I just get one, with mustard and sauerkraut.

“This is going to give me major gas,” I say.

“We'll have a farting contest on the way home, assuring us of our own private subway car,” Jack replies, wiping chili off his chin. “You do realize you still have mascara in the corner of your eyes, right?”

“Give me a break. You gave me half an hour to get out of Aqua.”

“
Hey
…” Jack says.

“Hey wha?” I reply, chewing a huge chunk of bun with strings of sauerkraut hanging down my lip.

“
Hey
…You're pretty.”

“Leftover mascara smudges and all?”

“Yep.”

“Well,
you're
pretty…
weird,
” I say, dismissing him. “Let's go to the freak show and see if we can get you an honest job.”

The hot dog has done a pretty good job of placating my hangover, which has now lessened to a dull pressure in the back of my head and a slight fatigue that is somehow reassuring. I realize that I have no idea what it feels like to be sober without being hungover, so the relative lack of hangover symptoms actually makes me feel healthy. Just as the early fall weather has brushed the summer heaviness out of the air, my mind has a sense of clarity sharpened by the slight tinge of toxins in my blood.

The Coney Island Freak Show is not much of either—freakish or showy. Jack and I listen to the barker outside, promising amazing feats and stomach-churning unnatural oddities like we've never seen before.

We take our bleacher seats just as the show's beginning. Gone are the days of bearded ladies, dog-faced boys, Siamese twins, and entire tiny villages populated by midgets. I suppose there's not much heart for exploiting physical deformities anymore. Which is a shame really, since now we're stuck watching a lame parade consisting of an overly tattooed “lizard man,” an old guy who pounds nails into his nostril, and a contortionist most notable for her amazing ability to inspire ennui.

“We should sell tickets to our living room,” Jack leans over and whispers to me at one point. He's right. Any random weekday evening chez Jack and Aqua is more exotic than this.

“The Human Cork! Witness a man able to hold a one-liter champagne enema in his rectum!” I whisper back.

“The Chinese Grandfather Clock! Be amazed as a sixty-three-year-old Asian man suspends a swinging five-pound paperweight from his scrotum!” Jack whispers.

We spend the rest of the uninspiring show giving Jack's clients side-show names. “The Human Butt-Sniffer!” “The Insatiable Clothespin Boy!” “The Death-Defying Duke of Debilitating Dildoes!” And of course, our old favorite, simply, “High-Flying Houdini.”

The sheer amount of oddness I've come to take for granted in the last seven months since I've moved to New York begins to dawn on me. As a kid, I would have to cover my eyes while watching
That's Incredible
. When John Davidson introduced a man who walked on coals, I would have to pick my feet up off the floor and tuck them safely under me. My brother could make me vomit on cue simply by turning his eyelids inside out. Do I have a growing callus over my threshold of abnormality? Or have I simply redefined normal? Maybe normal is whatever feels good where nobody gets hurt.

As we exit the freak show, Jack stops me by a Plexiglas display.

“Look, it's Aqua in fifty years.”

The placard at the base of the display reads:
THE FIJI MERMAID
—1914. Inside, a mummified infant head is clumsily sewn onto a petrified carcass of what looks to be a salmon.

“Did this ever really fool people?” I ask, staring at the leathery corpse.

“Does Aqua?” he replies.

On the way home, the four of us are pleasantly sunburned and breezily carefree. When no one on our subway car is looking, I lick Jack's neck. His brown skin tastes warm, like the sun and the ocean. Like a freshly baked sugar cone. He smiles and snakes his hand under the bag of Russian trinkets we bought in Brighton Beach and rests it on my thigh. Jack and Grey are telling Ryan and me stories about their high school misdeeds. I never did anything remotely delinquent until well into college, so my only contribution to the conversation is laughter and admiration. In mid-sentence, Jack initiates the previously mentioned farting contest. Thankfully our subway car is nearly empty, since all-out warfare between the four of us quickly follows. The sauerkraut and chili definitely have given Jack and me an edge in the competition, but Ryan comes from behind with a surprising staccato series of stylish, almost melodic entries. Grey's contributions are less frequent, but noteworthy in their length and bass tones. None of us is willing to concede the championship title as we head, hysterically laughing, into the tunnel under the East River. For the first time I hear Jack actually giggling, uncontrollably, and I realize that I just had the best day of my life.

E
ven though we had prepared for weeks, the morning of my mother's arrival in New York registers an eight on my personal anxiety Richter scale. Like a death-row inmate, I could deal with impending doom in the abstract. But getting strapped down to the chair while knowing the executioner was on a plane speeding toward me
this very instant
is nearly enough to make me call out for a priest.

“Calm down, it's going to be cool,” Jack says to me as I sit rigidly staring out over the skyline wondering about the chances of a freak airport-closing snowstorm erupting out of a clear mid-September sky. “We've got it all covered.”

Ever since my mother called three weeks ago to invite herself for a long weekend, we had been concocting our game plan. Both my mother and my stepfather, who raised me and who I call “Dad,” are extremely accepting of me being gay, and have been genuinely fond of my prior boyfriends. The drag thing threw them a little, but since there's little chance of their Wisconsin church friends wandering into a New York nightclub and recognizing me through three wigs and a quarter inch of foundation, they've pretty much just adopted a “don't ask, and for God's sake don't tell us about it” philosophy. I'd already cleared my schedule of all drag gigs for the weekend.

I doubted, though, that I could explain my way around a drug-dealing male escort boyfriend without seriously jeopardizing any future inheritance. Likewise, asking Jack to not wear his pager during the busy club-opening season would be overstepping the bounds of his hospitality, given that I was living rent-free in a penthouse paid for with every beep of said pager. And anyway, he had already graciously agreed not to take any in-house calls while my mother was here. Only out-calls.

It was time to get creative. We outlined several different employment scenarios that would require him to wear a beeper, and narrowed the list down to four.

My mother is arriving around eleven. Rather than panicking around the apartment all morning, I decide to head to work and hope for some sort of distracting ad emergency. Jack was going to meet some friend from Columbia for lunch. I left instructions with the doorman to let her in the apartment to drop off her bags, and then to put her in a taxi to the agency. Jack thought it was rude not to greet my mother immediately upon her arrival, but I explained that it was like a little welcoming present to her—I was giving her the gift of time alone in the apartment to snoop around a little. Of course we'd packed up Jack's business toys and my Aqua-phernalia and hid them safely in storage in the basement.

I spend most of the morning staring at my phone waiting for the little screen to light up with the word “receptionist.”

“What's your mom's name?” Laura asks, coming in and sitting down next to my desk.

“Jackie.”

“Hmmm. Jackie. Jack. How perversely oedipal.”

“Yes,” I reply sarcastically, “I'm dating an S&M male escort because he reminds me of my mother. They have an eerily similar spanking technique….
Hey,
let's go to the Ear for a quick one before she gets here.”

“It's eleven-fucking-thirty,” Laura says.

“It's purely medicinal. Borderline emergency.”

“Okay. I could raise a glass or two to your imminent misery.”

The Ear is the local bar down the block from the agency. It's one of the oldest drinking establishments in New York, and it got its current name because the neon curves on the letter “B” in “Bar” burned out years ago, leaving only “Ear” glowing. At any time of the day odds are that someone from the agency is going to be in there. There's an unspoken rule that if you spot a colleague there, neither the spotted nor the spottee can discuss or even acknowledge it later at work. It's a more literal—and more satisfying—version of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I order a beer (because it's still morning), and Laura gets a red wine (because it's nearly lunch).

“Please, please, please come to lunch with me and my mother,” I plead.

“You're so much more pathetic when you're needy,” she replies.

“I'll cover for you next Friday. I'll say you're at an edit.”

“Last time you covered for me you gave out three different stories,” Laura says.

“The first two didn't seem convincing enough.”

“If you make up a story, you have to stick with it or people realize it was all a lie.”

“Maybe in Honest Land,” I say. “In my world every truth is judged solely on its entertainment value.”

“In your world there is no truth.”

“So true. So true. Just beauty.”

We spend the next two hours alternating between making fun of people at work and making bets on who's gay. By the time I realize what time it is I've had three beers on an empty stomach. Things aren't looking so dire. Except that my mother was due to arrive at the office about forty-five minutes ago. Shit.

Laura and I traipse off the elevator into our office lobby. My mother is on one of the purple sofas pretending to be interested in an old copy of
Ad Age
.

“Hey, Mom!”

“Hi! Where've you been? The receptionist didn't know where you were.”

“So sorry. So, so sorry,” I say, instantly regretting the number of esses I was trying to get out with my slightly drunken gay tongue. “Laura and I had a last-minute meeting uptown…couldn't get out of it.”

“Is this Laura?” my mother asks excitedly. “I've heard so much about you.”

“Hi, Jackie! Josh has been talking about you all morning!”

Laura easily pulls out a cheery midwestern persona. She was raised in Ohio.

The dread I had about Mom's visit is instantly erased the moment she hugs me a second time. She's a woman who lives pretty much only for her two sons' happiness, and it's readily apparent in her eyes every time she sees us after a long absence. It's a purity of purpose most people would be envious of. Instead of dread, I now feel guilt. Pulling one over on your mom loses its thrill sometime soon after high school. Luckily, I'm just drunk enough to get over it.

“Laura's going to have lunch with us!” I say spontaneously.

Laura shoots me a glare, but quickly recovers her midwestern charm.

“Yes, of course!” Laura replies a bit too cheerily. “Josh said he was treating us both!”

By the time we get to the restaurant Mom and Laura have completely bonded. As someone who tries to flee from any vestiges of my midwestern upbringing, I find it fascinating that Laura can sincerely alternate between New York single cynical bitch and midwestern guilelessness. Unlike me, she doesn't see it as an either/or proposition. As we take our seats at the table, she and Mom are chatting away about Laura's idea of opening a restaurant in New York City that serves only casseroles.

“So, Laura,” Mom says, perusing the day's specials, “you've met Jack.”

Laura does the closest thing to a spit-take that I've seen in real life.

“Sure.” Pause. “Sure I have.”

“I can't wait to meet him. I find what he does simply fascinating,” Mom says, ruminating over the fish of the day.

This time Laura does choke on her wine. I suddenly realize I forgot to clue Laura in on the new travel agent profession we'd given Jack.

“Have you ever used his services?” Mom continues.

Laura stares at me bug-eyed. There's absolutely no way for her to answer this question.

“Umm. No. His prices are a little too rich for my blood,” Laura finally replies, capping it off with a forced chuckle.

“Well, it is a beautiful apartment. He must be a busy, busy boy, running around town all day and night.”

I live for moments like this. It pains me to have to interrupt.

“He'll be home this afternoon, Ma. He's so excited to meet you.”

The rest of the lunch goes smoothly. My mother slowly relaxes into vacation mode. She begins chatting about the two years she lived in New York City back in the early sixties. Mom grew up in upstate New York in a small wealthy town with stuffy parents. Her father owned a cement company, which was the largest employer in town, and my father's father was the mayor. Given their positions in the village, my parents had little choice but to become high school sweethearts.

After school was finished, my mother had an inkling that maybe my father wasn't her perfect mate, but the smothering pressure to get married from both sets of my grandparents was overwhelming. In what was probably the bravest moment of my mother's life, she picked up and moved one hundred and eighty miles away to a small apartment on the Upper East Side. In retaliation, her father cut off any financial help. For two years she roomed with a nurse and an alcoholic gay poet. She became a hostess at the GE pavilion at the World's Fair.

She used to sit reading on a bench outside Beth Israel Hospital, hoping a doctor on his way home would notice her and ask her out for a drink. She wound up dating a French television producer who left her when she wouldn't give up on her dream of having children. Eventually, though, like millions of single women who have passed through New York in the last two centuries, she was defeated by the city itself, knowing that it would never offer up the marriage and family she really wanted. My future father drove into the city, packed her things in his car, and drove her home to get married, without ever proposing.

Nine years later she was divorced with two children. And shortly after, she was remarried and crammed into a puce Ford Maverick moving her kids, her new husband, a Labrador, a cat, and a hatchback stuffed with pots and pans and snowsuits to the hinterlands of Wisconsin.

Whenever I can convince my mother to talk about her short years in New York City, it's like looking through a microscope at our shared DNA. She had to get out and test her limits before returning home and building the life that she always knew she'd have.

We both were born looking for a way out of where we'd been stuck on this planet. Even if it was just a temporary reprieve. We were escape artists from day one.

And sometimes, down is the only way out.

 

“She's cool. I like your mother,” Jack says to me in bed on the final night of Mom's visit. “She reminds me of you.”

“Take that back,” I say.

“She does. She says exactly the same things you say.”

“She told you you have a beautiful cock?” I tease.

“Well, only once. You're much more effusive.”

It had been a good weekend. A few years ago my mother and I instigated a three-day rule. We can't spend any more time together than that at one time or we descend into the level of bickering that only those who have shared one body can achieve.

Jack and Mom seemed to click. He took the three of us out to dinner each night and gave us little New York historical trivia tours on the cab rides home. Mom's a bit of a history nut, so this went over big. When I was a kid, she worked at Old World Wisconsin, one of those outdoor museums with working farms and blacksmith shops. She had to wear period costumes, and when my brother and I would spend the day with her in the summers, we would have to dress up as nineteenth-century prairie kids as well. I would work in the toolshed and lecture all the tourists on the proper method of hewing shingles on the
Schnitzlebanch
. In a way, it was my first taste of drag.