It's All Relative (8 page)

“I'll show you my cooch for them gator beads!” she screamed.

In less than five minutes, I'd moved from breasts to vagina.

“Don't you wanna see my cooch?”

She might as well have asked if I wanted to kick a puppy or punch an old woman in the face.

“Not particularly.”

For some odd reason my response, and not her initial question, infuriated her boyfriend, who was sporting the rather frightening fashion combo of a mullet (“Business in the front, party in the back, man!”), a sequined mask over his eyes, a bushy mustache that looked like a dirty floor mat, and a T-shirt that read:
SAVE THE BEAVER!
, which featured a photo of Jerry Mathers with a shotgun positioned against his head.

I found this combination highly unsettling, like seeing Michael Keaton as Batman. And then he asked: “Why don't you wanna see her coochie?”

I mean, how does one even respond to a question like that?

So I yanked out my best Colin Powell impression and said, calmly, “Because it's special. It belongs to you.”

“That'll be the day!” he roared. “She likes your fuckin' beads. Why don'cha wanna barter?”

I looked around in desperation. My friends were nowhere to be found. Useless as they may have been, they at least would have been able to step in and pee on somebody.

There was no option: I wanted to live. So I unkinked my pricey gator beads from the nest around my head and presented them to her.

“Here,” I said, walking away, defeated. “Enjoy.”

There was a hand on my shoulder.

“Oh, no, you don't,” the boyfriend said. “Fair's fair. You get to see her cooch.”

An honest, admirable sort of chap, I thought
.

He grabbed me close and put his arms around my shoulders and those of his girlfriend, making kind of a one-man shield, and, as she slowly unzipped her jeans, my life flashed before me. Inch by inch, zip by zip, I saw, in descending order:

A pink scar …

a faded rose tattoo …

a nest of black-brown hair …

something pink and swollen that looked like it had teeth …

and some sort of wound/cut/cyst
.

“You wanna touch it?” she asked.

“No. Fair's fair. We haven't bartered for that.”

I looked over and saw that her boyfriend was hard and rubbing himself vigorously, like he was trying to release a genie from his bottle. He was holding me now rather tenderly, not at all in a threatening way anymore.

My life flashed before me again, and I pictured myself being dragged into a back alley and forced to videotape a Mardi Gras threesome—being pounded by Jerry Mathers while sixteen pounds of beads slammed against my chest—after which I would contract hepatitis, if I were only so lucky.

I panicked and started running, my beads bouncing into my teeth, fighting through the crowds, until I could no longer hear the couple's hacking and heavy breathing.

I was winded, still scared, still needing to pee but desperately in need of a drink—one of those giant ten-dollar hurricanes that come served in a vase—so I headed what I thought was north, to a bar where my friends said they would be if we got split up during the day.

But as I zigged and zagged through the crowd, I became disoriented.

Geography has never been one of my strongest skill sets—along with filing and organ transplant. In fact, I thought north was up until I went to college.

As a result, I found myself off the main thoroughfare and directly in front of the infamous Drag Race, the annual gay Mardi Gras competition where drag queens race each other down the street wearing high heels.

Considering I had been in the closet longer than my dad's letterman jacket, I typically would have been too scared or ashamed
to stop and watch such a spectacle. But there was a large crowd, I needed a drink, and I'd had my fill of breeders.

“Nice ass,” a mustached man in crotchless leather stirrup pants said to me as I tried to get in line for the bar, which wrapped all the way around the block. “Need a beer? You'll never make it inside.”

I looked at the man and then at the can that he held in front of me. The beer hadn't been opened and didn't show any signs of tampering. “Thanks,” I said. “Nice pants.”

“I'm up for Mr. Leather this year,” he said.

He smiled proudly, like I was supposed to know the prestige this bestowed.

“Good for you!” I said. “I was once up for Snow Ball King!”

And then a very cute guy—that dreamy college-jock fantasy guy, the kind who always looks as if he just got finished playing baseball—stopped in front of me and asked what it would take to get a strand of my purple beads.

I stammered.

“Wanna play ring toss for it?” he asked, smiling seductively.

I immediately got harder than rebar.

He stood by me as the drag racers began to line up, and I stood breathless—heart racing, adjusting myself like a rapper with Tourette's—next to a hot guy who wanted to play ring toss. With me.

I slammed the leather man's beer—buzz fully restored—and watched a group of drag queens in dangerously high stilettos sprint down the streets. Some were crashing and burning, ripping their stockings, bloodying their knees; others were an amazing mix of speed and dexterity, like Miss America meets Marion Jones.

When it was over, I looked over at what was surely to become my new boyfriend, the love of my life, the man who would teach me to toss a football, hold me, and have that trail of hair running down his navel that drives me insane.

He put his hand in the center of my back. I got dizzy.

“Wade?”

He knew my name?

I turned. Standing before me was a fellow coworker and his wife.

“So, what's going on?”

I fumbled for words. I was standing outside a gay bar, with a boner, between a man who had his arm around me and a man wearing crotchless pants, watching drag queens race in high heels. You might as well have set me on fire and screamed, “Flamer!”

“What a freak show, right?” my coworker laughed. “We had to see this, too. Can you believe this goes on in our town?”

His wife rolled her eyes.

“Hey, we're headed over to Bobby's. Wanna join us?”

I analyzed my options.

My coworker was wearing an XXL college sweatshirt with a cotton turtleneck underneath that made him look like he was wearing a neck brace. And Dockers. His wife was wearing mom jeans, a hoodie, and white sneakers.

Mr. Ring Toss was wearing a skintight baseball jersey that showed every muscle in his torso and jeans so tight I could see the head of his penis. Without squinting. And I had astigmatism.

“You ready?” my coworker asked.

It was one of those defining moments in life, the ones that come completely out of the blue: a test to see if you're comfortable with yourself, if you are willing and ready to embrace the next chapter.

I wasn't.

I turned, without saying a word, and left with a man whom I not only didn't like but who obviously despised gays.

“What a freak show!” he laughed again. “I mean, you just have to see it once in your life. It's like a car wreck. It's so disgusting.”

We walked past throngs of straight people—flashing tits, vomiting, having sex in the street and in the open windows of their row
houses—all of whom were termed by my coworker and his wife as “hilarious,” “wild,” “fun.”

And this Mardi Gras? Well, according to them, it was “a great time.”

I found my friends at Bobby's and they handed me a hurricane, and then another, until I got so wasted that my friends told me the next day I screamed, “Ring toss!” all night until I passed out in a stranger's apartment, until total blackness seemed a better option than living another day in the dark.

Matt LeBlanc (Joey):

… Heads or tails? Heads is ducks because ducks have heads, and tails is clowns because …

Matthew Perry (Chandler):

… What kind of scary-ass clowns went to your birthday parties?

–
FRIENDS

T
he most bizarre rural birthday party I ever attended took place at a decaying farm that, from what I could tell, didn't have anything to farm except, perhaps, dandelions and rocks. The party centered around rides on one low-slung, dirty, rather mean Shetland pony that I firmly believe to this day was two men in a horse suit; a fat clown who forgot to bring his red nose and ended up eating two whole Shotgun Sam's pizzas all by himself; and, topping it all off, a mime whom I walked in on taking a doodie in an upstairs bathroom.

The most disturbing part of this day (and there were many) was the fact that the Shetland pony talked and the mime did not.

The Shetland pony screamed, “Goddammit, kid!” when I kicked it hard with my dingo boots while riding it around a makeshift corral; however, the pooping mime never uttered a word of embarrassment to me, like “Sorry” or “Whoops” or anything. Instead he just looked at me, in whiteface, his bodysuit—yellowed and dusty from sauntering around the dirty farm—down around his ankles. He simply started performing, attempting to free himself from an invisible box that it seemed had trapped him on the toilet.

As you can imagine, I went screaming down the stairs that birthday, telling the moms in attendance that I had just witnessed a pooping
mime. But when I turned around after pleading my case, the mime was already standing behind me, his face all squinched up into a goofy expression, his left palm raised into the air like he was confused, his right hand making a “he's crazy” swirl around his temple. The moms laughed and walked away, but when I turned to face the mime again, he was wagging his finger at me. It was terrifying. And that kick-started my fear of mimes—and clowns—culminating in a tearful exit from the big top the next year when the circus came to town.

To this day, any horror movie with clowns or circus people or white face paint still gives me nightmares, sends me running from the theater.

In fact, I had been to see a therapist about this fear, which had once again reared its ugly white head when I was forced to interview a clown for a feature story I was writing on unusual careers for an alumni magazine.

I hadn't been able to sleep for weeks in dread of meeting the clown face-to-face.

I told the therapist all of this, every last detail, down to the pooping mime, while she scribbled nonstop and nodded her head and sipped some sort of tea that I firmly believe had gin as a main ingredient. Then she looked at me and said, quite calmly, “I believe that you are a coulrophobiac.”

“Am I going to die?” I asked. “Or be disfigured in any way?”

“No,” she said. “That means you are a person with an abnormal or exaggerated fear of clowns.”

“Oh,” I said.

Tell me something I don't know, I thought.

“But your questions about death and disfigurement bring up a host of other issues,” she said. “Does six
P.M
. next Wednesday work for you?”

I ended up feigning illness with the clown, and interviewed him over the phone.

I did not have to face my fear until years later, when I was set up
on a blind date with a man from Sarasota whom I was told worked in PR for Ringling. This was just a couple of weeks before my birthday, at a time when I had just come out and was officially dating for the first time in my life.

“You two have a lot in common,” I was told at the time by a friend, when I still worked in public relations. “PR career, writing, entertaining, movies. It's a slam dunk.”

“Isn't Ringling a circus?” I asked. “Don't they have clowns and mimes?”

“He works in PR, for God's sake, Wade,” my friend said. “Consider this my birthday present to you. Lord knows you need to get lucky. I'll set it all up.”

I walked into our designated meeting spot, a cute little bistro with great food, and there, waiting to greet me, was a mime.

“You must be Wade,” the mime said.

I wanted to run, I really did, but my legs wouldn't work.

It's like the time I met David Sedaris and wanted to give him a copy of my book and make him hysterical with laughter, and the only thing that came out of my mouth was, “You … funny.”

“I came right from work and didn't have a chance to change. I'm so sorry,” he said. “Oh, and happy early birthday, I'm told.”

We were seated by a waitress who seemed unfazed by the fact that a man in white face paint and a white bodysuit had just gulped down a glass of water and left a half circle of grease paint around the rim.

I, on the other, was about to stroke.

In fact, I had yet to say a word and was still staring at my mime openmouthed.

“A mime is just a person in makeup,” I heard my therapist say in my head. She had told me during our sessions to recite this over and over whenever I felt overwhelmed by my fear. “He is an actor.”