I Am Not Myself These Days

  Listening to Jack call into this place from our apartment led me to believe the headquarters of his escort agency must be at least as impressive as our gleaming penthouse. But now confronted with the dim reality, I realize that operating an illegal high cash flow business probably calls for a certain level of deceptive discreetness.

  When I reach the fourth floor, I hear the muffled laughing and low music from behind the door at the far end of the corridor. I reach for the knob, and I’m surprised to find it turns easily and opens into a bright fluorescent-lit space decorated in a fashion not too different from a doctor’s waiting room. I would have thought I needed a secret knock or further password or something.

  Instead, the dozen or so people in the room, mostly women, turn to look at me, a moment of confusion passing their faces as they try to comprehend why a seven-foot-tall drag queen has joined their little party.

  “Aqua!” Jack calls out from a sagging couch in the corner covered in a brown corduroy bedspread.

  As soon as he calls out his recognition, the rest of the room relaxes and a few let out small chuckles of greetings.

  The women all look similar, in an Eastern European way—blond, thin, and leggy. Not quite pretty enough to be models, but more attractive than the average woman on the street. They’re all dressed in a tacky style of evening wear, tight short black dresses made of cheap material and Payless heels. Most are smoking.

  Jack rises to greet me, and Ryan and Grey wave from their spot next to the couch. In the corner, nestled between two tall gray filing cabinets, sits an older woman at a desk covered in magazines, Diet Pepsi cans, and ashtrays. The room reeks of too many varieties of cheap perfumes and sweat.

  Jack hangs my cape on a hook by the door and ushers me over to the desk.

  “Elaine, this is Aqua. My boyfriend,” Jack says with his arm around the small of my back.

  The folding card table next to the desk is covered with a paper tablecloth printed with pictures of balloons and confetti and the word “Congratulations” with three exclamation points. In the middle of the table, among plastic plates and forks and knives sits a half-eaten grocery store sheet cake. The section that remains uneaten reads “Hap…Retirem…Elai” in swirly red frosting.

  “Hi, Sweetie,” Elaine says in a cigarette-graveled voice, reaching out a hand. She looks to be about seventy, with hair the pallid shade of blond that only years of covering gray can achieve. “Aidan’s told us all about you, but you’re even prettier in person.”

  “Happy retirement, Elaine,” I say, “what a great party.”

  “I keep waiting for my gold watch, but I guess I’ll have to make do with this,” Elaine says, holding up a gold Zippo lighter and matching cigarette case still nestled in its gift box. She’s joking, but obviously tickled and proud of the gift. “Everybody chipped in,” she adds.

  A few of the other girls have come and circled around me, bending over to examine the fish in my tits.

  “Are they real?” one blonde asks, tapping on the plastic.

  “Are these?” I reply, smiling, grabbing her left breast.

  “If you’ve got enough cash, they can be made out of anything you want,” Elaine answers for the blonde. Everyone laughs.

  I settle down on the couch next to Jack and two other women. Ryan, Grey, another male escort I haven’t met, and another blond hooker with a bad nose job sits across from us. Elaine busies herself with trying to find a livelier station on the radio sitting on her desk.

  “This is Tiffany, and Shelia,” Jack says, gesturing to the girls on the couch, “and that’s Roger and Tonya,” he adds, pointing at the two others across the beat-up coffee table covered with old Glamour and Elle magazines.

  “Hi,” I say, “Hey, Ryan. Grey. What’s up?”

  “Slow night,” Ryan says.

  “Deadly,” adds Roger.

  Jack’s told me that he doesn’t like to hang out here, preferring to stay connected by beeper. Too desperate, he says, and now I see why. According to him, the only hookers who sit here waiting for calls are those who need cash from Elaine right away or those who have boyfriends or husbands who don’t know what they do and would be suspicious of pagers. Besides, most of Jack’s clients are his own private customers; he only gets two or three calls a month from the agency. The agency lets him call in to use their credit card machine when he has a customer who can’t pay in cash. For a cut, of course.

  “How long have you worked here?” I call over to Elaine.

  “You know how they say this is the world’s oldest profession?” she says. “Well, who do you think sent Eve to Adam?” She barks out a gruff chuckle at her obviously often-rehearsed joke.

  Jack brings me a slice of cake, too sweet and bland. Dry. The edge that was exposed is especially stiff and stale.

  “Can I get some booze?” I whisper to Jack.

  “There isn’t any. She doesn’t like the girls to drink,” he whispers back. “Just follow Tonya when she heads to the bathroom; she’s got some in her bag.”

  The group of us around the sofa exchange small talk, Elaine chiming in with her jokes in between answering the phones and paging other hookers. Occasionally Elaine motions for one of the girls in the room to join her at her desk. She scribbles an address on a sheet of paper and goes through the terms that she’d just settled over the phone before sending the girl on her way. Often the girls make a stop in the restroom to apply a little more makeup on top of their already tricked-out faces before they depart.

  “How long do drag queens have to work before they retire?” Ryan asks me kiddingly.

  “We don’t retire, we spontaneously combust on top of a speaker one night, showering the crowd with clouds of glitter,” I reply.

  What will all of us be doing fifteen years from now? No one in the room, except Elaine, looks like they could possibly be older than thirty.

  “I’m going to night school,” Tonya says, “for landscape architecture.”

  I’ve learned that Roger and Tonya are a couple. Both are from small towns in Pennsylvania, and met here at the agency. Roger came in thinking he was going to take wealthy older matrons to dinners and benefits, only to be told laughingly that there is no such thing as the “gigolos” he’d seen on TV and the movies growing up. The very few calls that come in from women are nowhere frequent enough to make any sort of a living, and mostly the women just chicken out before the escort arrives anyway. Every male hooker, straight or gay, has to earn his money from men and the occasional couple.

  Tonya knew exactly what she was getting into, being introduced to Elaine and the agency from an old roommate who’d since moved to Palm Springs to work with Heidi Fleiss and do a little porn. Tonya spoke of the roommate with a certain reverence, as if the girl had made it big. Tonya had an air of resignation about her, as did the rest of the girls. They did not live a life of limos and champagne as pictured in the Yellow Page ads the agency ran.

  I look around the brightly lit room. I hadn’t had that much to drink tonight, and the fluorescent lights sober me up more than a hundred coffees and cold showers could.

  “How long do we have to stay?” I whisper to Jack, just as a heavyset bearded man walks through the door. He looks about fifty and stops just inside to light a cigarette off one of the escort’s lit cigarettes. He is wearing a cheap acrylic golf shirt and ill-fitting brown slacks. He mutters greetings in Russian or Polish to a couple of the escorts as he makes his way over to Elaine. He ignores Jack, Ryan, Grey, and Roger, only acknowledging the women. He stops when he gets to me and looks me up and down.

  “What’s this?” he asks in a thick accent, to no one in particular.

  “Hey. I’m Aqua,” I reply.

  “You working?”

  “Just visiting,” I say. “For Elaine’s party.”

  He doesn’t answer, and instead picks up some papers sitting on the desk and rifles through them.

  “Have you ever thought about working?” Tonya asks. “Stand up a second.”

&nbs
p; I do, half hoping that Jack will follow suit and we could leave.

  “Turn around,” Roger says. “You’ve got a great ass. I’m sure you could pull in some cash from trannie chasers.”

  I sit down again.

  “You’d have to lose the fish,” Tonya adds. “Guys like it real. I know a girl who works at a shemale agency. You could give her a call.”

  Before I can answer she’s scribbling a number down on a corner of a magazine page.

  “This is Rog’s and my home number; give us a call tomorrow and we’ll hook you up.”

  She hands me the ripped scrap, and Jack takes it and stashes it in his pocket.

  “We should all get together and have brunch sometime,” Jack says, changing the subject.

  “Ladies and tramps,” Elaine yells out, standing up as she hangs up the phone with an exaggerated flourish. “I’ve dealt with my last prick. Literally.”

  Everyone laughs and she stands and takes a pink cardigan sweater off the back of the desk chair and folds it into a small ball. She slips it into a brown paper shopping bag with handles that’s packed full with personal effects from the desk. The stern man replaces her in the desk chair, and all the escorts stand up to form a receiving line of hugs and kisses as she makes her way out of the agency.

  “And who says whores won’t kiss?” Elaine jokes, reaching the door. Jack and I follow her out the door, and Jack takes the heavy bag from her as we head single file, with her in the lead, down the stairs. In the dimly lit stairway she seems as if she’s shrunk five inches as she stiffly and awkwardly takes one step at a time down the four flights. I watch the back of her head as she hobbles down, trying to see through her skull to the thoughts she must be thinking as she leaves four decades of organizing paid sexual encounters behind her for good.

  Out on the street she turns to walk east with us down Fifty-fifth Street. She takes Jack’s arm. Suddenly she’s the same as any of the hundreds of old ladies walking around New York’s sidewalks on warm autumn nights when the weight of accumulated years makes it impossible to sleep. I fall behind the two of them.

  “Thanks for stopping by tonight,” she tells Jack.

  “It was a great party, Elaine,” he says. “I’ll miss talking with you.”

  “Oh, I’ll page you every once in a while in between Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. Gonna have to get used to falling asleep when everybody else does.”

  “You going to take a vacation or anything?” Jack asks.

  “I don’t know, maybe visit my sister in Palm Springs. I might move there one day,” Elaine answers.

  “I grew up in Southern California,” Jack says.

  “I can tell. You’re an open person. Like talking to the desert.” She turns to me. “Watch this one,” she says, nodding toward Jack. “He seems simple, but you just never know.”

  I laugh, not knowing how to respond. Luckily she spots a free cab heading up Third Avenue and her attention turns to reaching the curb before it speeds by.

  Jack hands her the bag.

  “Keep in touch,” he says, helping her into the back seat.

  “Happy spanking!” She smiles back as she closes the door and leans forward to give the cabbie directions.

  The water nearly overflows the tub as Jack climbs in behind me. I lean back onto his chest and he wrings out the washcloth of warm water over my head. I close my eyes as the water runs down my face, relaxing away the forced smiles and clownish faces I’d had to pose all evening. My cheeks sting from the nightly scrubbing away of thick foundation. He rewets the washcloth and drapes it over my chest.

  I take a sip from the vodka he’s set on the side of the tub for me.

  “Let’s retire,” I say.

  “Okay.”

  “Where should we go?” I ask.

  “We’ll find a little hacienda on the ocean in Baja.”

  “I want to grow lemons,” I say.

  “And we’ll get a goat.”

  “And we’ll open a little bar in a nearby village where Aqua can sing standards and make people cry for lovers that they can never have,” I say.

  “She’ll ride a burro back and forth from home every night, and all the village children will follow her with flowers.”

  “And she’ll toss them Chiclets and Lifesavers.”

  “I’ll make you profiteroles and serve them to you on the beach every night,” Jack says.

  Jack pours shampoo in my hair and starts rubbing my head. It smells like lavender.

  “I’ll build us a raft. We’ll lie on it watching stars and memorizing constellations,” I say. “And I’ll learn Spanish and sing you to sleep.”

  He starts singing softly to me and rinses my hair with clear water squeezed out of the washcloth. I’m dozing off when he lifts me up and wraps me in a thick white towel and guides me to bed.

  I just begin to fall asleep when I feel Jack, curled behind me under the cool sheets, tracing out letters with his fingertip on my bare back.

  “I love you more than heaven,” he writes softly, letter by letter.

  13

  Jack and I watch Blue’s Clues every morning. Or at least every morning that we’re both at home.

  We both have a little crush on Steve, the host. We lie in bed, me usually still a little drunk from the night before, and Jack winding down from his multiple nighttime calls. Something about Steve makes everything about the world seem manageable. His simple soothing sentences make sense to me during that short wistful window between inebriation and hangover. For Jack, they lull him further and further away from a surreal night of deviant sex and violence. Even when Jack has an overnight client in the apartment, we find time to retreat to the bedroom and lie on the bed silently watching Steve, speaking only when it’s time to solve the day’s puzzle.

  “What time’s your flight?” Jack asks me when the closing theme song strikes up.

  I roll over on my stomach, drape my arm across his chest, and mutter into my pillow.

  “Five o’clock.”

  “Do you have to go into the office today?”

  “Just for a little while. I need to show a rough edit to a client,” I say. “Will you be home around two before I go?”

  “Probably, unless I get a call.”

  Still on my stomach, I pivot around until my legs are over the side of the bed and slide limply off onto the floor, where I lay flat on my back looking at the ceiling.

  “I don’t want to go,” I say. “I’m too tired. Don’t make me go.”

  Jack leans his head over the edge of the bed and looks down at me.

  “Shut up, dickwad,” Jack says. “You know you want to go. It’s a free vacation.”

  “Vacation? You try hauling five wigs and six outfits halfway around the world. And how the fuck am I going to buy goldfish in Tokyo?”

  “They’re called koi,” Jack adds helpfully.

  “Great, I’ll wander around the city in black Spandex and heels, waving cash and pointing at my tits while yelling out ‘koi? koi?’”

  With his head directly above mine, Jack proceeds to pretend that he’s going to let a gob of his spit drop down on my forehead.

  “That drips on me and your teeth will be the next thing falling out of your mouth,” I say.

  Just as it looks like it’s going to fall, he sucks it back up into his mouth.

  “Pussyboy,” Jack taunts, smiling.

  “You five-dollah-whore, I ten-dollah–dlag queen,” I say with a bad Hollywood Japanese accent.

  “Get your flat ass off the floor and start packing, round eyes,” Jack says, getting up, prodding me softly with his bare foot.

  “Pletty geisha boy take hot shower now,” I say, continuing with the lame accent. “You want soap me? Ten dollah you touch bottom place.”

  “Two dollah, final offer,” Jack says, pulling me up toward the bathroom.

  “Ow. You likee smackee smackee? Five dollah you spank me.”

  I get into the shower and Jack brushes his teeth. When he’s done, he turns a
round and puckers his mouth up against the glass shower door. I kiss him from the other side.

  Last month I performed at Wigstock, the world’s largest, and arguably most important, outdoor drag queen festival. Tabloid television crews from all over the world descended on the west side pier where it was held and filmed segments for their shows back home. One Japanese crew was particularly fascinated by me and my costume. I posed for endless shots and stilted interviews. I later realized their interest lay mainly in my tits, the goldfish being a symbol of good fortune to them.

  Shortly after, I got a call to entertain a group of Japanese businessmen at a karaoke bar in a basement in midtown. It was a birthday party for one of the executives at the Japanese television network I’d appeared on. Though of course I remember little of the evening, I apparently was a huge success. The next day I got a call asking if I wanted to go on a short ten-day tour of Tokyo.

  Everyone at the ad agency was tremendously obliging, even though I’d already used up all my vacation and sick days. Once again, my appeal as an agency mascot trumped my value as an actual contributing employee. One of the partners even gave me a substantial pocketful of spare yen that he’d collected over years of Japanese business trips.

  My itinerary is a bit unclear to me, having been relayed in a phone call that came in the middle of one night last week. From what I can tell, it involves a couple of clubs, a television appearance, and, I think, a wedding reception.

  By the time I return from the office before heading to the airport, I’m more nervous than I thought I would be. This is my typical pattern. Rush headlong into adventure and then dig in my heels right before going off the cliff. I would give anything to be one of those people who just do without thinking. Like Jack. I have too many years of being the good boy behind me not to be aware of potential pitfalls ahead. Thankfully I have my good friend, vodka, to help me, sometimes literally, stumble off the edge of the cliff. I’m slowly donating my liver to the pursuit of finding my balls.