I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (2 page)

“But you can dote too much. And trade will take control if they can. That’s why Miss Titania … once … I shouldn’t tell you this, I suppose. You Stonewall boys don’t understand the patterns of love discipline. What do you live for, you cowboys? What stirs you? Does the sight of a trade’s crack, all trembling and open to assault … does it stir you? Do you want me to stop?”

“Go on.”

“Well, once Miss Titania determined that a certain trade would have to be disciplined. A beautiful galoot, big and dark, the cruel kind. Like your father or some such.
Tales of the Woodshed?
Big, breezy galoots, so lazy and mean. This one was called Carl, and he was swindling the johns. He’d go with them but wouldn’t let them do anything. Then he’d flex his huge muscles and say they’d better give him a tip, and he’d empty their wallets. He even pulled this on the queens! I mean, in Miss Titania’s court, you
never
smooth a queen! Well. So Miss Titania and the Duchess of Diva made a date at Miss Titania’s place with this trade, Carl. Funny name for trade. They’re usually Blue or Tex or so what. Miss Titania and the Duchess, they knock Carl out with a mickey … do they still call them mickeys?”

“Oddly enough, that’s exactly the word a friend of mine used recently when some guy got into his apartment and—”

“Who’s being interviewed, anyway?” she cried, all chin and cheekbones.

“Carry on.”

“It was a
rhetorical
question. So Miss Titania and the Duchess strip Carl and tie him to the bed on his stomach, and they call the court over to watch, because you have to humiliate trade to reform them. And I thoroughly approve of this, because they can become almost sweet after they’ve had their asses whipped. The Duchess of Diva—whose sense of tact, I must tell you, runs way to the left of disreputable—wanted to tie Carl down face up, so she could whip his chest and cock and even his face. She would have, too. But Miss Titania knows what’s right. Except as she was getting ready to whip that boy’s ass, Miss Titania begins to realize what a beautiful thing it is to tenderize a man like that. Sweeten him up. Make him so sweet. It’s a dreamy thing. Meanwhile, Carl is coming to and the Duchess is telling him off but good about how he’d better not try his tricks in
her
court, which is very funny because he’s so groggy he doesn’t know what
planet
he’s on. And Miss Titania is just gazing upon him. How his shoulder skin ripples as he’s struggling against the rope and how his ass quivers as she lays the whip so gently upon it. And then Carl is bellowing like a bull, how he’ll kill us all. But Miss Titania knows that a beautiful stud was born to be whipped, and to see him stretched out nude and helpless is the most beautiful thing in the world. And his ass is so lovely as she parts it to inhale the stink of him…”

I would rehearse dialogue in my window, but how does one look saying this? Because truth is not beauty. Is
not.

“… and she knows that he must be whipped, and how good that would be, and of course the Duchess is shrieking, ‘Let’s rip him up!’ all over the room. She has
no
sense of timing. But Miss Titania spreads Carl’s legs wider and wider as she strokes his thighs. She must calm him down, it’s true. And then he’s quiet. He knows he must be sweetened, and that is the secret that queens and trade share. You couldn’t hear a sound in the place as Miss Titania soothed Carl’s hole with her tongue and slowly worked it open, and Carl’s groaning like a wild beast who doesn’t care what anyone knows about him. I truly believe that that is the most beautiful sound in the world. Don’t you?”

“No.”

She looks at me now, quite frankly. “To be sure. And what do you call the most beautiful sound?”

“La Mer?”

The drag queen looks away as if she would never look back again. “Who’s she?”

“It’s music.”

“Miss Titania rimmed and rimmed,” the drag queen insisted. “It was the most spectacular rim job since Scheherazade. Even the Duchess of Diva held her peace as she looked on, and there wasn’t a soul in that room who wouldn’t have given a year of life to be in Miss Titania’s place. Carl’s head was swaying on his neck like a broken toy, and he kept saying, ‘No. No. No. No.’ I wonder why he said that. He was crying. A big, dashing, empty fuck-monster like that, crying. Can you imagine? And when it was done and Carl had been rimmed inside and out, the Duchess of Diva untied him and all the court looked upon him. He had not been whipped, yet he was sweetened. As if he had been cleaned out in his
mind.
He would give no trouble from now on, because everyone had watched. They saw him, do you see? But Miss Titania saw nothing. She was swaying in mid-air as if in a trance. I believe she was in a state of grace, truly. And Carl went into the bathroom and he wouldn’t come out.”

“Just like that southern queen who offended Miss—”

She flared up like a lighter. “How dare you? It’s not the same at all!”

“Well, in outline—”

“
Trade is not like queens!
Now, do you understand? And they
never
will be!”

“Which would you rather be, if you could choose and start all over?”

She is quiet. “I lived for beauty. That was my choice.”

I take notes.

“You don’t think that is sufficient, you Stonewall cowboy. Do you? I suppose you live for music. How grand.”

“Music is a form of beauty, isn’t it?”

“No. Beauty is not music. Beauty is a pretty picture. I told you that. Oh, no—no, I’ll give you something for your piece. Yes. Someone asked Miss Titania once, ‘What is beauty?’ You know what she said? And I quote: ‘Beauty is the death of the drag queen.’
There!
”

She sighed as I wrote. Eleven years ago there was no place to print such tales as this. “Just take it down,” Paul had said, and he added, “You’ll see.”

She lit another cigarette. “It’s true. We had to die so you cowboys could live. Not that we wanted to. No one asked us, regardless. But people who believe every horrible insult are of no use to anyone now. That is not part of survival. No. This society believes in trade. Even if all the trade is imitation. Cops and johns, that’s all that’s left. That’s all that’s real. The need and the threat. Where’s beauty now, penscratcher?”

I looked up from my notebook. I looked at her and she looked back. She smiled.

“You think we have no feelings,” she said. “Is that it?”

I waited.

“Feelings, dressed like this? Feelings? In a place called the Heat Rack? The Demitasse? Feelings, that I am thrilled by the simple sight of a tie? I don’t have feelings, right? Yes?
Yes?
” She screamed in that dreary room; I hear it yet.
“Say yes!”

And I said, “Yes.” Because that is the impression they infix.

She calmed down quite suddenly. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, thank you.” She nodded. “How right you are. We don’t have feelings. We learn to live without them.”

That sounded like the end of the last stanza. I rose to go.

“Where will your piece be printed,” she asked, “and when? I must order copies for all the gang.”

“You still see them, then?”

“Alas.” She raised her hand, palm to me. “Not for a terribly long time. But wouldn’t it be dramatic to track them down for the occasion?”

“Do you think you could find Miss Titania?”

“No one will ever find Miss Titania. She was the first to die, you see. Now, tell me—
The New York Times? McCall’s?
Would they want a picture, dare I hope?”

“Let’s wing it,” I said, while visualizing the editors of the
Times
coming upon that line about the Zulu’s dingus. And
McCall’s!

*   *   *

“What did you think?” Paul asked me on the phone a bit later.

“I think Miss Titania is the one I should have interviewed. There the story lies.”

“You jerk,” he said. “That
is
Miss Titania.”

That
was
Miss Titania, my window tells me, eleven years later; it took that long for me to believe my ears. My eyes I trust by the moment, but who is that masked man? Who tells me these terrible tales? I wish I could choose between beauty and love; I wish life were so trim; I, too, like a pretty picture. But I think the meaning matters more. Staring straight into my window to the disgust of my neighbor, I am bewildered, saddened, offended, and amazed. God make me as honest a storyteller as the drag queen was.

The Straight; or, Field Expedients

When my windows are not reflecting the local countenance, they give out on a great hole from which an office tower has been rising, somewhat feyly (I think) referred to on the hoarding as “Third Avenue at Fifty-third Street.”

So be it. But in the early 1970s, it was all brownstones—especially one, a great box of stories that I would gaze upon from my desk. There was the ancient couple, top left, who never washed their windows. There were the Spanish-speaking queens, middle right, with the yapping chihuahua and the live-in Puerto Rican who watered the hanging garden on the fire escape in the nude. There were the bohemians next to them—he played cello and she painted—and my friend Alex just above. Next to him was a plain straight couple; the woman was seldom seen, the man always around.

As I wrote, typed, and fretted at the dictionary, I would spot this man in his window, looking, sitting, guzzling beer, waiting. He had very long hair, which he sometimes wore in a ponytail, heavy arms and thighs, and (apparently) no clothing but boxer shorts. Gay, he would have gymmed himself inside of a year into a gleaming demon. But straights often like themselves as they are; it’s an arcane grade of hot I’ve never understood.

My friend Alex would regale me with tales of this couple. One season, the woman was cute and the man a nerd. Next season, she was standoffish and he vaguely sweet. They fought, they cooed, they bought a stereo, she made perfect strudel, he got a job.…

“Why tell me these stories?” I finally asked. “All straight stories are the same. What’s in it for us?”

Even when they broke up, the tale lacked interest. But my best friend Dennis Savage was thrilled. “Nowadays,” he said, “when a straight couple busts up, the man always turns gay. Or the woman. You never know with straights.”

“This woman isn’t gay,” said Alex. “Karen. She left him because he wasn’t smart enough for her.”

“He was smart enough to keep the apartment.”

“She went to California.
That’s
smart.”

“Anyway, I’ve seen this guy but plenty,” I told Dennis Savage. “Nothing.”

“How can you tell this far off?” Alex countered. “Besides, you’ve never met him. He happens to be—” Noting that we were watching him like trolls observing a Billy Goat Gruff crossing our bridge, he stopped. “He’s a nice man. Joe Dolan.”

Dennis Savage went into a barfing pantomime as I held my nose.

“That,” I said, “is the straightest name I ever heard.”

“What’s a gay name?” asked Alex.

“Dorinda Spreddem,” I offered. “Nosy Porker.”

“Maytag de Washer,” Dennis Savage suggested. “Rosemary de Tramp.”

“Humungous Layman.”

“Will you stop?” Alex pleaded. “Will you, please?”

“Don’t get serious about him,” Dennis Savage advised. “Those crushes on the straight next door are destructive. Because straight is straight and they never cross that line, no matter how drunk they get, no matter how mad they get at women, no matter—”

“We’ve already had sex,” Alex said. “All the way, everything. Several times.”

The room was so quiet we could hear the appliances depreciating. Alex got up and looked out the window at his building for a long while. “He’s there now, watching a baseball game or somesuch. And when it’s over he’ll knock on my door. He says I’m good to talk to.”

“So he is gay after all,” said Dennis Savage.

“He lived with Karen for two years. They were lovers.”

“An act.”

“I was there! I saw them together! You can fool your parents and your co-workers, but not your gay neighbor. It’s no act.”

“You’re saying that this man came on to you several times and he’s not gay?”

“I’m saying that everything about him is straight. Including the way he comes on.”

Dennis Savage sighed. “Now I’m fascinated. Tell.”

“I certainly will not!”

“Oh, let me guess. He came over one night and asked if you know how to give a backrub.”

“No, it wasn’t—”

“He was in red velvet, a stole, and a cloche hat, and you said—”

“How can you make fun of something so
intime
and dear, and so terribly secret?”

“Will you hark at him?” Dennis Savage exclaimed to me.
“Intime!”

“All right!” Alex paced, stopped, and paced again. “All right, I’ll tell. Just don’t jeer any more. Don’t mock things you don’t understand.”

“Listen, Alex,” said Dennis Savage, “I was setting Stonewall style when you were running around in a propeller beanie, so don’t tell me what I understand or don’t.” He turned to me. “Do I know gay or don’t I?”

“I’ll say,” I agreed. “You’ve gone down on everything but the Lusitania.”

“Look!” cried Alex. “Do you want the story or not?”

It was a familiar one: boy loses girl, boy turns to local ear for sympathy, and a friendship is born. “He’d visit every night, or I’d go to his place. Dropping in, you know? We just talked. For hours, sometimes. He’d be going on about ‘ladies’ all the time. This lady in Dallas, this lady in Chicago, do I have a lady, how do I address a lady. And I just wanted him to scoop me up…” He gazed out my window. “Not once did he look at me ambiguously. He never laid a hand on me. I could have been his uncle.

“Then one night, while we were watching some football or basketball game on television, he started to tell me how ladies never really liked him. How they’d put up with him when they were between true loves.
Put up with him
—that was how he said it. Even Karen, after all that time … even she thought he was a goon. A goon, he said. Because he didn’t … he wasn’t … smooth enough or something. Well, one woman’s goon is another … man’s … if you see what I mean. And he was telling me about the different ways of turning ladies on. Some men have a tattoo in a fancy place. You know? And they show it. Or some have subtle speeches worked out. And one friend of his, he said, used to show his ladies photographs of himself kissing another man. And he … asked me what I thought of that. I was thinking that if all the women he liked thought he was a goon, maybe he should … maybe take some photographs himself. Because he isn’t handsome, I know, but he’s … strong. He’s nice to me.” Alex cleared his throat. “He only wants to be liked, you know? He’ll do anything to be liked. And I saw that. And I … well…”