Naked in the Promised Land (21 page)

Then we moved because Albert had a fight with Mrs. Ostroff, the landlady. She told him what a slob he was when he refused to wrap the garbage in a sack before throwing it in the communal can. He shook his fist and yelled at her, "Go to hell!"

"I'm getting an eviction notice," she yelled back.

He found us a little court bungalow on Fountain Avenue, just a few blocks from Hollywood Boulevard. "It's more cheap too," he told my mother. "May an onion grow out of her nose."

I kept going to Geller's because I had nowhere else to go that summer, and if I stayed home my mother drove me crazy. Everything I did was an unsettling mystery to her.

"Some lady with a funny voice is on the telephone for you." She stood at my door looking aggravated one evening soon after the Mel Kaufman fiasco. "Choo Choo Sand."

"I don't know anybody by that name. What kind of funny voice?"

"I dunno. With an accent. Who do you know with an accent?"

Some stupid prankster from high school? I didn't need this now. I
marched into the living room and grabbed the receiver. "Hello, who's this?"

"Who?" my agitated mother echoed, standing right behind me.

"The Queen of the Night." The melodramatic falsetto sounded familiar. "So is your name up in lights yet or was Miss Mary right?" it dropped two octaves to say. "Let's bury the knitting needle, Glenda. I want to see you."

Eddy. I hadn't heard from him in a year, not since he'd been insulting about Irene and laughed at me about Geller's. Why had he come back into my life?

Eddy came to pick me up with a young man he introduced as "Zack, my boyfriend," and when we parked on Western Avenue he told me we were going to a new place they'd just heard about, the Hearts and Spades. "It's a place where the guys like other guys," he said with a laugh. I'd heard words like
fairy
and
queer
because people used them at Geller's. I knew Eddy was like that, though I'd never before put a name to it, and now I also understood from the way he kept his hand on Zack's muscled thigh as he drove that they were lovers. For a brief second it felt strange to think about, but soon it made me feel sort of comfortable, though I couldn't have said how or why. Maybe it was because I knew Eddy's hand on Zack's thigh was about sex, yet it didn't trigger in me those disturbing images that sometimes crept through my brain like bogeymen stealing through my window—the Silent Film Star in that mirrored bedroom, Mel in his parked car.

The Hearts and Spades was dark and dank, and the alcohol fumes reeked even before we pushed open the heavy door. It was on Sunset Boulevard, but far east of Vine, in a neighborhood that had never been glamorous despite its proximity to the real thing. Eddy said to call him Herman Hermine because that's who his phony identification said he was, and he slipped me a tattered birth certificate that said
Arlene Knopfelmacher, born 1934.
I was to show it to the cocktail waitress if she asked my age because you couldn't drink in California until you were twenty-one. As I sipped at the Brandy Alexander that Eddy ordered for me I felt like an outlaw—and it was fun, like my double-agent act, the kid in high school and the grownup at Geller's.

Eddy's boyfriend was fun too. He looked like a tough, with a full beard, high-laced work boots, tight Levi's, and a battleship tattoo, yet he articulated his words precisely and his eyes were soft brown. He was in costume, I saw right away, and of course I understood the idea of costume very well. I liked him, and I also liked the people around us in the Hearts and Spades. They were mostly men, but I wasn't a rabbit among coyotes here. When we'd only been inside a few minutes, one of them came up to our table and said to me, "Can I tell you that you've got beautiful eyes?" But I knew he wasn't flirting. "Yoo hoo, Charlie," he soon called, waving to his friend who walked through the door.

Zack was quickly a happy drunk, and though I'd had only one Brandy Alexander, he and Eddy and I sat slouched with our arms around one another, giggling immoderately at the tales he told about his year on a navy ship. "Zack, the Belle of the Pacific," Eddy called his boyfriend, and we all toasted the navy. I was having a fine time. I couldn't even remember when I'd had such a fine time before. "Say, I know a bar where the gay girls go," Zack confided after another patriotic toast.

"She's straight, dodo." I saw Eddy nudge him in the ribs. "Ain't you?" He winked at me.

Gay girls.
I'd seen them once at Venice Beach, where I'd gone with the Geller's gang. Simone and Stan had wanted to get lunch at a little Mexican restaurant up the boardwalk. "That's a gay bar," Stan had said as we passed a place with a big printed sign on the roof:
LUCKY'S
. "You know, they're
queers,
" he'd added when we looked at him uncomprehendingly. A tan man in bermuda shorts had stood at the door of the place and called to a black poodle, "Come to poppa."

"Oh, Deb, she has to go potty," a pretty young woman had said, and then I'd looked again and saw that "poppa" was a woman too.
Queers.
I'd grabbed Stan's arm as we walked by.

Eddy drove through neighborhoods that got worse and worse: newspaper-littered sidewalks, boarded-up store windows, burnt-out abandoned automobiles. As we slowed down at the corner of 8th and Vermont, an elderly woman, wearing a red hat perched on her head in drunken lop-sidedness, lurched across the street, barely missing us. Eddy parked in
front of a place with a green lettered sign:
THE OPEN DOOR.
"Miss Thang, are you ready?" he asked as though presenting something fabulous, then led me in with an arm light around my waist, as though we were two girlfriends. Zack stumbled behind.

"I think we're the only guys here, loosely speaking," Zack slurred after a quick glance around, "except for him." He gestured with his head at a bespectacled man standing at the long bar who tugged nervously at his starched white collar, and Eddy whispered something in my ear.

"What?" I shouted above the din of the jukebox and voices.

"Fish queen," he shouted back.

"What?" I shouted again, still unable to make sense of the words, but Eddy had turned to the bartender to order three beers.

I looked around. What was Zack talking about? There seemed to be plenty of men—or at least boys—in the dim, smoky room. Most were dressed a little like the pachucos—duck pants with button-down long-sleeve shirts open at the raised collar, a patch of white T-shirt showing beneath, hair slicked back in a pomaded duck's ass.

Then I grabbed for Zack as I had for Stan at Venice Beach.

"Whoa ... What's happening?" Zack laughed. "You okay?"

I'd been staring at the one my eye had selected as the handsomest of the boys, with dark curls that fell over his ivory forehead and gold cat's eyes with black lashes, and he winked when he caught me staring. His stance was a pose—one crisp pant leg forward, the palm of his right hand cupped over a cigarette that he brought to his lips from time to time, the fingers of his left hand holding a beer bottle by its neck—a tough guy pose calculated to look like James Dean, I thought, or Elvis Presley. Presley's "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You" blared on the jukebox. And then the boy transmogrified into a girl, which was when I grabbed Zack's arm. But now I let go.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I answered Zack. Suddenly I was more than fine. They were all girls, I saw now. A lot of the more feminine ones were decked out in capri pants and high heels, the uniform Simone had taught me to wear that signified sexy. I wasn't out of place here. Some of them stood with the boy-looking ones at the crowded bar, their arms around each other. Some couples sat together at tables and held hands.
One pair stared into each other's eyes as though no one else were around. The girl—the feminine one—had a face full of makeup and a hairdo of elaborate auburn curls and swirls, and the other one lifted a hand and let it rest gently on her friend's cheek. They kissed, right there in the crowded bar, and I watched. I liked it. I loved it.

"You're looking odd, Miss Chicklet. Shall we depart?" Eddy pulled at my collar.

"I'm never leaving! This is where I want to be," I laughed, and tears sprang to my eyes and rolled down my cheeks. Was it the turmoil I'd been through in the past months that made me so emotional, standing there on the packed floor of the Open Door? I don't know. But I felt as I had when I'd first glimpsed Irene hanging the picture of the tutued dancers and she'd turned her violet eyes on me. Though there was no one that night at the Open Door who overwhelmed me as she had, I was transported. It was as if I was looking through a brilliant prism that reflected all the parts of my life with absolute clarity and brought them together, wondrously, into one intelligible whole.

"Copy cat. Just because I told you I was gay, you want to be too." Eddy's words were teasing, but I could tell he wasn't happy with me. "You don't even know what it's all about," he said later, when he drove me home.

"Well, I'm gonna find out," I answered.

"He's just trying to protect you," Zack said from the back seat, where he lay stretched out. "It's a hard ... hard life," he hiccupped.

All day long I'd replayed the images of the night before in my head. The cat's eyes of the ivory-skinned girl in boy's clothes who winked at me, the one who touched her friend's cheek, Elvis Presley's voice on the jukebox, "
Hold me close, hold me tight
"—that was the song they played over and over. "This is where I want to be," I'd told Eddy. Now I could think of nothing else, not even my resolve that I wouldn't upset my worried mother anymore. "Important rehearsal," I shouted to her as I was halfway out the door at eight o'clock the next evening.

The Open Door. I even loved its name. I swung open the door, and all eyes seemed to turn to me, but only for an instant, and then I was pulled into Presley and the beer fumes and the din.

"Hello again." The bespectacled man in the white starched shirt, the one Eddy had called a fish queen, grinned at me as though I were a friend.

"Hi." I moved away quickly and positioned myself on a stool at the opposite end. I hadn't come to the Open Door to meet a man.

"What'll you have?" the bartender asked when he noticed me, and I remembered what Eddy had ordered the night before. "Bottle of East-side beer," I told him. Suddenly it all felt dangerous—that strange man, those odd women. What if I got caught and they put me in jail or reform school for being in a bar? But I'd already ordered a beer. I'd go as soon as I finished it.

I sat for a long time, sipping, as alone as if I'd been in my bedroom. The gold-eyed one was there again, but she was with a beautiful light-skinned Negro girl. They sat at a table and snuggled into each other and never even glanced at me. But I had to stay. I wanted a lover, and I didn't know where else to find one. My lover could never be a man. Men had made themselves so unlovable in my life. I lit each new cigarette from the stub of the last one, puffing away. I sat until my seat hurt. I'd never have the courage to start talking to someone. Now I watched two people at the jukebox who were too busy to notice me. The dark-haired girl deposited a quarter and was punching numbers with an angry finger. She wore dangly rhinestone earrings, and her shiny satin blouse was pulled down over her shoulders and cut to expose high, creamy breasts. A beauty mark beside her chin looked as though it had been placed there with an eyebrow pencil, and it moved as she twitched her lips in a mutter. Then a tear furrowed down her cheek and dropped to stain the blouse.

"Don't you get up and walk away from me," snarled the woman who stood behind her. I could hear it through the din. This one was blond. In her left ear was a single small, hooped earring, and she wore a corduroy men's jacket that was too big for her. She talked out of one side of her mouth, like a gangster, though she had a patrician face—high cheekbones, a narrow nose, a cleft in her pronounced chin. Outside the movies, I'd never seen anyone swagger and squint the way she did. Was she serious or was she acting James Cagney?

"It's over, Jan. I'm not putting up with your shit anymore," the one
in high heels said with a sniff. She flung her patent leather purse over her shoulder in a wide and angry arc and wobbled out the door.

"Fucking slut," Jan hissed after her. "Don't you know it?" she asked in a loud voice, and I realized with a start that she was talking to me. She'd caught me looking. "That broad's a first-class bitch!" Then she was beside me, and I could smell the alcohol on her breath. "Hey, you're a cute little femme, you know that? What's your name?" Jan lifted her lips in a drunken bad-boy smile. I'd never seen such white, even teeth.

"Gigi," I said.

"Gigi. I like that. I'm Jan, the hottest butch in town. Ask anyone." She guffawed at her own braggadocio. "Ask Terri, that fucking slut."

I stared into my glass of beer. Should I get up and leave?

"Got a light?" Jan breathed at my neck. I handed her my matchbook. "I can get it off your cigarette," she said, "just like you've been doing. I've been watching you." She winked and lifted my fingers toward the cigarette clenched between her teeth. She bent her head and inhaled, and a whiff of the clean, lemony scent of her shampoo surprised me. "Don't pay attention to my bad talk," she said, exhaling a cloud. "I'm not usually like this, but Terri just pissed me off—whoops, sorry—provoked an extremely irritated response in me," Jan pronounced carefully and flashed her perfect bad-boy smile at me again. "May I sit?" She bowed like a young gentleman at a debutante ball, then straddled the barstool next to mine, pert and jolly. "I promise to behave. Lemme buy you a real drink." She whistled toward the bartender. "Scotch straight up for the lady—me too."

I kept meaning to leave, but as soon as I'd finished the first scotch, she ordered another round. She put her hand on the small of my back and let it rest there. I jumped as though she'd stabbed me with a needle when I felt her fingers on me, but I didn't try to shake them off. She'd hitchhiked with Terri from New Orleans to L.A., she said. They'd been together on and off for six months, but now they had broken up for good. Before Terri, she'd been Stormy's lover. Had I ever heard of Stormy? Stormy was the hottest stripper in New Orleans, owned her own club on Bourbon Street; everyone knew Stormy. There wasn't a butch within a hundred miles of New Orleans who wasn't dying to get into Stormy's pants, but she was very, very selective.