Mississippi Sissy (36 page)

“I'm sorry. I didn't m-mean to . . . ,” I started to apologize, my stutter still surfacing whenever I became unsure of myself.

“Don't say you're sorry. That just makes it worse,” he said.

“M-makes what worse?” I asked.

Frank Dowsing stood before me now in all his naked glory. Dusty Springfield was singing the last song on her new album. “That's all I am to you?” he asked. “I'm the buck who makes you feel better about yourself?” His flared nostrils flared even more. “Fuck you, man. Fuck you.”

“Okay,” I quietly said, not taking my eyes from his. “Okay. Fuck me. Do it. Try.”

Neither of us said anything for a few long moments as we attempted to decipher what had happened suddenly between us. He
couldn't help it—he finally had to smile at me, if only slightly. I smiled back. He then reached out and touched my face. I turned his hand over and kissed his palm, as different a palm as humanly possible from the palm that Dr. Gallman had used against me. I lay on my stomach and spread my legs. He poured the Vaseline Intensive Care into that palm and worked it into me. I arched my back toward his finger opening me up. He mounted me. I tried not to cry out at the pain he was causing me, the pain I accepted as the penance I had come seeking. With each of his thrusts into me, I kept repeating silently to myself, “Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er,” trying to approximate the dignity, threadbare, though still not thwarted, with which Matty May had ended up grunting out the name when she was picking that cotton for Uncle Benny. Poi-ti-er. Poi-ti-er. Poi-ti-er. I repeated the name with her same determined rhythm, her same grim obedience, trying to turn all that pain behind me into something sublime. It had just begun to work—was this pleasure I was feeling? was this trust?—when Frank Dowsing shot his second load of the night, this time deep into my receptive body. “Stay inside me,” I heard myself say.
“Stay,”
I said aloud.
“Stay. Stay.”

The following day, I called Frank Hains from the pay phone in my dorm floor's hallway. I had promised to call him the minute I got back to my dorm so I could give him, like Pee Wee or Dizzy, the play-by-play of my date. I made sure to whisper into the receiver whenever a door opened on the hall but was so giddy with my accomplishments that I even blurted out that I had been fucked for the first time. “Dear boy, this calls for a celebration,” came Frank's voice through the telephone. “I am simply dying to meet the young man. I've heard his name spoken from time to time by the guys on the sports desk at the
Daily News.
Frank Dowling.”

“Dowsing,” I corrected him.

“Oh dear. Mustn't make that mistake when I meet him. I tell you what, why don't the two of you drop by tonight?” he asked. “I'm having
some of the girls over for dinner, but you and Mr.
Dowsing
could come for dessert or a drink or two. Say around nine thirty or ten?”

“Which girls?” I asked, knowing he meant some of the New Stage gang.

“Oh, it's just Eudora and Charlotte and Jane and Karen,” Frank said. “It'll be a hoot. They'll get a kick out of meeting him. It'll liven up the evening. I'll tell them to be on their best behavior. Or would you prefer they be on their worst?”

I thought about the invitation for a moment. I already knew how sensitive Frank Dowsing was. Would he feel as if he were being put on display? Hell, he had played football in the SEC. He was on display every Saturday, in front of thousands of appreciative white people. Five more wouldn't hurt him. “I'll have to call him,” I told Frank. “He already asked me to go to a movie next week. Do you think I'll scare him off if I call him so soon?” Frank Hains always liked for me to ask him questions of that nature. “Aaah, appealing to my sagacity,” he said once. I hadn't known what the word meant and he handed me a dictionary from his kitchen's glass-covered bookshelves and told me to look it up. He worked on his column “On Stage” there at the big round kitchen table under the lamp that hung over it, so the kitchen bookshelves were stuffed with reference books as well as cookbooks. An S-word, I remember thinking, when he handed me that dictionary and, in that moment, I missed my mother terribly. I wish I could say that Frank Hains was a father figure to me, but it was my mother's absence I was aware of when I was in his presence. There was a steely diffidence to him that reminded me of her, although he was much more cultivated than she. She aspired to be cultivated, but was always just that: an aspirant. He was also, I dare say, a tad more maternal. But more than anything else, it was the way he made me feel when I was with him, which, up until that point, I had felt only when I was with her.
Seen,
is the first word that comes to mind. Gently guided. Unjudged. Joe Rex had been more like a buddy
to me. But Frank—who, like Joe Rex, never made a pass at me—was the older man who helped me begin to heal from the experience of Dr. Gallman, who had
seen
me, of course, but for his own nefarious purposes. Frank Hains was my first true mentor for he did not have any ulterior motive except, maybe, in nurturing me, to expand his already generous spirit. We simply loved being in each other's company. When we were up late one night, telling each other the secrets of our lives—him curled up in the kimono-like robe he loved to wear in his reading chair, me lying on the low-slung sofa as if I were at a therapist session, an Erik Satie album turned down so faintly on the stereo one could barely tell that a piano was being played—I told him about Dr. Gallman's molestation of me and Frank flushed red with indignation. I'd never seen him so angry before. Frank didn't get angry, not like that. Well, when Nixon's face came on the television he could get pretty worked up (this at the height of the Watergate scandals) but that anger—Frank was devoutly liberal—was cultural in its animosity. Hearing my Dr. Gallman story, he could barely contain his contempt for the man. Frank himself had always had an appreciation for young boys, but, according to him, he had never crossed the line into pedophiliac scandal. He had even received a National Pop Warner Award for his work with youth back in the late fifties. “Why is it that the ungodly always reach for the God mask?” he asked, tightening the sash around his kimono. “When will the world stop being fooled by such men?” Standing in the hallway of my dorm, I waited on the other end of the phone for his advice about the skittish football player I was bringing into our midst, “our sphere,” as he called it. There was certainly no anger in his voice when his reply came over the line. He sounded as excited as I was feeling at this new prospect in my life, and, by extension, in his. “Call him,” he said. “Call him the minute you hang up with me. He should know you're interested. You've been reading Cosmo too much. I'll tell the girls you're coming. See you later. Signing off.”

Frank Dowsing agreed to meet me in my dorm room that night and walk down the hill from Millsaps to Frank Hains's house across from the Jewish cemetery. “Bleak House?” he asked when I described the place to him over the phone and told him what we all called it because of its outward appearance. “The Dickens, you say.” We laughed at his joke before hanging up and I spent the rest of the day unable to study, thinking about seeing him again. I closed my English Lit anthology and instead played Jackson Browne and Dan Fogelberg albums—I didn't have any Diana Ross or Dusty Springfield in my collection—while I fantasized about the night I had spent with him. When he arrived, he told me he had to “give an account for his behavior the night before.” I was a little confused but told him to proceed. He prided himself on his manners, he informed me in a stilted, rather comical way, and I was beginning to think I was in an adaptation of Jane Austen over at Jackson State's theater department, since pride mixed with my stumbling attempt at alleviating any vestiges of my own prejudice the night before had resulted in an attraction that neither of us could deny. “Please accept my heartfelt apologies for my rudeness last evening,” he said, and slightly bowed before me. I looked puzzled. I started to say something but he put his finger to my lips. He continued in his overly solicitous manner. “I ejaculated twice last night,” he said. “You did not ejaculate once. That was not very gentlemanly of me.” His Darcy-like demeanor cracked; a raffish grin appeared on his face. He cleared his throat, carefully, and regained his composure. “Rather selfish of me, in fact,” he said, the rest of his roguish seriousness settling once more upon his brow. “Quite self-centered on my part. Uncharitable. I think we should rectify the situation before we head down to Bleak House.” I started getting hard thinking he was going to fuck me again. Instead—with the flourish of an early nineteenth-century Englishman pulling a silk handkerchief from the brocaded pocket of his breeches—he pulled my penis from my jeans. He knelt in front of me. He placed my penis inside his
mouth until the situation of which he spoke was rectified. He swallowed every bit of the result of such a rectification. He stood and put my penis back inside my pants for me and took out a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. Ever the gentleman, he offered me a piece first before unwrapping one for himself. “Ready?” he asked, next offering me his arm. “Now, who are these bitches I'm about to meet?”

“Well, there's Frank Hains.” I said, still a bit dizzy from what had just happened yet having the presence of mind to let go of his arm when we walked into the hallway and made our way out onto the campus.

“No. I know about him. Every Negro homosexual in Jackson knows who he is. His taste is legendary, especially down around Farish,” he said, naming a downtown street where Jackson's blacks lived and owned businesses. “And, of course, I know Eudora Welty. I'm a little nervous about meeting her,” he said, as Miss Welty was at the height of her renown back then, having just won the Pulitzer Prize for
The Optimist's Daughter
and the National Book Award a couple of years earlier for
Losing Battles
. “I met Margaret Walker Alexander at a dinner party recently,” he said, mentioning the Jackson State professor who wrote
Jubilee,
the African-American answer to
Gone with the Wind.
“She was formidable. Probably more formidable than Eudora Welty
in her person.
But I'm still quite nervous. Thanks for inviting me, though.”

“You're welcome. Jane Petty'll be there. She's a rich divorcee. An amazing actress. She played Edna Earle in
The Ponder Heart
at New Stage and she and Frank were supposed to have been a great George and Martha in the very first production New Stage ever did,
Who's Afraid ofVirginiaWoolf?
She's really pretty. Kinda like Hope Lange.”

“Who?”

“Did you ever watch
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir?
” I asked him, hating the question the minute it came out of my mouth. It didn't sound like something you asked an all-American football player.

“No. I missed that one,” he said, chuckling. He stopped to open the passenger side of his Torino and reached into the glove compartment to get his Afro pick so that he could even out his hair where my hands had pressed it to his head after he decided his Mr. Darcy imitation had done its work and he went for my dick.

“She's a blonde, Jane,” I said, watching him primp in his car's side mirror. “Then there's Karen Gilfoy. She's not a blonde. She's tall and lanky and a lawyer. Got a great voice. She performs at New Stage when there's a musical or a Gershwin or Cole Porter revue or something. She looks like she'd have a good hook shot,” I said, trying to make up for the Hope Lange remark. “Who else? Oh, yeah. Charlotte Capers. She's kinda the ring leader. She runs the archives at the Old Capitol or something like that. She's the big dog. Not Miss Welty. She's had an ‘Episcopal pageboy,' as Frank calls it, ever since her father was the rector at St. Andrew's back in the nineteen-twenties. He also told me once she's like Eve Arden as Prince Valiant, whatever that means. You missed a spot right there,” I said, thankful for an excuse to stop my babbling. I took the pick from him and gently touched his Afro with it just above his left ear.

When we arrived at Bleak House the door, as usual, was unlocked and gales of women's laughter were wafting through the entrance hall. The soundtrack to Lerner and Loewe's
Gigi
was playing on the turntable. I took Frank's hand and led him into the kitchen where all the merriment was taking place. “You've arrived!” Frank Hains said when he saw us coming toward them. “Ladies! Ladies!” he said, clapping his hands for attention. “Best behavior!” he instructed them. They continued to giggle. There was an empty bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken sitting in the middle of the table. Frank had made a big dish of his special macaroni and four cheeses. The remains of the salad they had eaten lay limp at the bottom of a big wooden bowl. A bottle of Dennery's salad dressing—Dennery's was the name of a favored restaurant in town—was next to the two bottles of bourbon
they'd obviously been enjoying. Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold were singing, “Yes, I Remember It Well,” from the stereo's speakers. “Let me turn this down,” said Frank Hains. “We were just making up names for each other based on the stars in
Gigi.
Ladies, you all know Kevin. This is a new friend of his, Frank
Dowsing.”

“Go, Bulldogs!” shouted Karen Gilfoy, evoking the mascot name for the Mississippi State football team. “I'm ‘Leslie She-Does-Carry-On,' ” she said, slightly slurring the name they had come up with for her based on Leslie Caron, Gigi's star.

“I'm ‘He-Manly Gingold,' ” said Miss Capers. “And that's ‘Maurice She-Valley,' ” she said, pointing to Miss Welty, who grimaced at the name.

“That wasn't my idea,” Miss Welty apologized. “I liked ‘Lerner and Loewe Though I Walk through the Maurice Chevalier of Death.'“