Jack’s not in the apartment when I get home from the agency. On the dining room table he’s left a note with an intricate illustration of my plane trip drawn in the margins. A tiny jet swoops past the Chrysler Building, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower, before skipping across the bottom of the page over the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal and winding up back at the top circling Mt. Fuji. Little goldfish jump through the clouds, and the blank spaces in between the famous landmarks are dotted with cactuses. In tiny little capital letters he writes:
HEY GEISHA GUY, GOT A PARTY CALL. PROBABLY A BIG ONE—DAYS. I’LL BE ON YOUR PLANE, AT YOUR HOTEL, AND IN YOUR DREAMS. SEE ME IN EVERYTHING, AND HEAR ME ON YOUR SHOULDER. TELL AQUA TO COVER HER TITS BEFORE SHE EATS SUSHI.
GO IN THE BEDROOM CLOSET IN THE FILING CABINET, BOTTOM DRAWER. UNDER THE MAGAZINES, THERE’S A METAL BOX TAKE WHATEVER CASH YOU NEED. I MISS YOU TO PIECES, JACK.
Jack knows I’m in a perpetual state of poverty. Having to do three or four shows a week means constantly updating and creating new costumes. I’ve been told I’ll be getting a pretty big sum for this trip, but I don’t know if I’ll get it when I arrive or after I’ve finished. I’m nowhere near as adept at negotiating payments as Jack is, and sometimes I’m so drunk at the end of my shows that I forget to pick up my cash altogether.
I give Jack a good portion of my agency check as a token rent payment. He didn’t want to take any, but I told him I didn’t want to feel totally kept. Ho-dependency, Laura calls it. He spends far more on me than the little I give him, and we both pretend not to notice.
The gray-green metal box is exactly where he indicated, and it is much heavier than I expected. When I was little I had a box just like it where I kept my rock collection. Random pieces of quartz and mica that I’d picked up on the side of the gravel road that we lived on. Shiny things. Glittery things. I’d wash them regularly under the garden hose to make them glisten even more. Make them more precious.
Jack’s box was even heavier than my rocks. I lift the lid.
“Holy fucking Jesus damn Christ!” I think to myself. Maybe I even say it out loud. Who could tell? If a tree falls in the middle of the woods next to a huge goddamn pile of cash does anybody hear the fucking tree? Inside, packet after packet of hundred dollar bills bundled in their bank wraps are stacked neatly on their sides, filling the entire box. I counted how many bills were in one wrapped bundle and multiplied it by the number of packets. Normally I can’t even add the hours on my time sheet correctly, but when staring down at this wad of cash I suddenly turn into the Rain Man of tallying up.
There’s $357,000 and change. I didn’t know this much cash existed in the world. Well, I knew, but I just never thought I’d see it in one place. What the hell does he have all this money for?
Then I put it together. Jack can’t have a bank account. He doesn’t really even exist on paper other than his birth certificate and college diplomas. He’d told me that he hadn’t filed taxes in years, ’cause he has no legal income to report. If he gets the flu, he goes to the emergency room, gives a fake name, and leaves right after they give him a prescription. He makes cash payments to the previous owner of the condo, a guy who also was involved in the escort business and had to leave town and start over in Palm Springs. Jack doesn’t even have a checking account and has to get money orders every month to pay Con Edison.
It’s too much cash for me to comprehend. How many asses were beaten with leather straps to make all this? I find myself unable to take a single hundred dollar bill. It’s simply overwhelming. The idea of money for sex now has a physical size and shape and smell and it lives in our closet. I don’t feel any real repugnancy to it, just a newer greater awareness. Like finally seeing a bruise on the skin after feeling a little bit sore for a day. I close the lid. I put it back under the stack of old issues of GQ and close the drawer. I shut the closet door and get my bags and lock the front door and hit the elevator button and hail a cab and go to Japan.
I wish I’d never seen it, and I’m not sure why.
14
Here’s what I don’t like about Japan: there are thousands of social rules that you don’t know about but are made to feel like you’re breaking continuously. And at the same time, everyone is too polite to tell you.
I’m a freak here. In or out of drag. I’m being put up in a private members-only hotel where only one person claims to speak English, but notes are continuously slipped under my door telling me to be ready in an hour. No matter how many times I tell people that it takes at least three hours to get made up, one hour after receiving such a note a teenage boy name Toshi shows up at my door smiling and telling me, “Now we go.”
Whoever brought me here, to their credit, had a check waiting for me in my room upon arrival. Unfortunately, not having a bank account in Japan has left me unable to cash it. Thus, I’m trapped in my room ordering fishy breakfasts and watching Japanese TV until the times arrive that “Now we go.”
The first three attempts at sending someone to buy goldfish for my breasts resulted twice in koi the size of my forearm, and once with some sort of fillet fresh from the store. After many crudely drawn pictures and charade attempts, I’ve now got four healthy small goldfish swimming around in the sink in my bathroom. The idea of successfully communicating my need for a fish tank is beyond my wildest jet-lagged dreams. I resign myself to brushing my teeth in the tub.
After finally figuring out the phone, I try to call Jack. No answer. I leave a message. One of those pathetic messages that go on and on with a half dozen aborted wrap-ups because I can’t bear to break the tenuous connection with home.
“Now we go,” Toshi says at the door.
“You go hell,” I reply, smiling. Toshi smiles back and waves me into the hallway.
Vodka’s not so easy to come by here. I manage to physically intimidate or possibly just confuse Toshi enough to procure me five bottles from the bar at the wedding reception I emcee. And by “emcee” I mean talk onstage to myself while two hundred Japanese people have no idea what I’m saying. Luckily, the drag queen crotch grab is indeed a universal joke.
The television appearance seems to go better, but really, how would I know? From what I can gather, it’s some sort of talk variety show with an androgynous host who shrieks something that sounds like “icky bicky koon hiiiiiiii,” which makes everyone in the studio audience respond with a hearty “Hi Hooooo!” and dissolve into raucous laughter. After what I think is an enthusiastic introduction, someone pushes me out onstage, which I assume means I am to start my number.
I’m wearing my leopard print cat suit, with studded collar and wrist bands. I have a cat-o’-nine-tails, which I occasionally threaten the front row of the studio audience with. While I’m lip-synching to a song called “Twiggy Twiggy” by the Japanese group Pizzicato Five, a video montage of New York City rolls on the screen behind me. The scenes of the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge are intercut with random scenes of Japanese people eating ice cream cones. I don’t know why. I suspect neither does anyone else, but, hey, icky bicky koon hiiiiiiii!
The rest of the trip is just nightclub after nightclub. At one small club, referred to by Toshi as a hostess bar, I notice a man behind the bar arguing with my trusty chaperone. The room is only about the size of my old studio apartment and is located on the thirtieth floor of a swanky high-rise. The showy light displays on the signs of the Ginza district shine below us. From this height it looks exactly like Times Square. It’s strictly a club for drag queens and their admirers, and I’m joined by a dozen or so other Japanese drag queens and transsexuals whose attention to gender-bending detail eclipses mine by several degrees. They’re so small-boned and frail I can’t begin to even imagine them as men. They’re simply beautiful, moving around the room with the small graceful movements that are the hardest part about mastering gender transformation.
Toshi comes out from behind the bar and approaches me, smiling as usual. He points to the drink in my hand.
“Sure, I’d l
ove another,” I say, holding up my glass.
“No. Too many bar buy,” he says, smiling.
Great. Getting cut off in any language sounds dismally similar.
“No. Man buy you,” Toshi continues.
Laura had joked about me getting sucked into the international sex slave trade before I left, but given how I had won over the hearts and soul of Japan on television days earlier, I thought I was in the clear. I’m about to scream out “icky bicky koon hiiiiiiii!” to create a diversion and run when an older Japanese businessman comes over and sits next to me.
“My name is Mr. Hatsumoto. I am happy to see you here,” he says politely, bowing his head.
“Aqua,” I say, bowing back. At least my potential new master is polite.
“What is trying to be said,” Mr. Hatsumoto continues, “is that in this bar, you are to compel gentlemen to purchase drinks. They are one hundred dollars each.”
Christ. For a hundred dollars back in New York he could get a drink and a hand job. With plenty of change.
“You gotta have quite a thirst to buy yourself a hundred dollar drink,” I say as coyly as I can.
“Or a lot of hundred dollars,” Mr. Hatsumoto winks back.
Three hundred dollars and half a buzz later, Mr. Hatsumoto turns out to be a pretty swell guy. Not my type at all, but he doesn’t seem to be hitting on me anyway. I find out he supports three of the girls in the room, paying their rents and giving them spending money. The girls swing by occasionally to check on him like he was their grandfather, and he buys them a drink and requests songs from them.
“Do you have a gentleman?” he asks me later in the night.
“Yes, I do,” I say.
“Does he watch you?”
“Yes. Very well.”
“He is a fortunate gentleman,” he says.
“That’s what I tell him,” I say.
“I could not live without my girls.”
“Sounds like they wouldn’t do very well without you either,” I reply.
“We survive together. We give pieces to each other. I give more. I have more. But they have more valuable,” Mr. Hatsumoto says.
“I’ll take your word for it, Grasshopper,” I say, not sure if it’s the booze or the conversation that’s causing me to drift.
“Now, I will take you back to your hotel,” Mr. Hatsumoto says, rising from his seat.
I’m having a fantastic time at the club. It’s homey. All the girls and men know each other, have been together as a group for years. From what little I understand of the girls trying to speak English to me, most of the men here are married but have their “girlfriends” at the club. Some wives know, some don’t. Some of the men are horny pigs, and others just fond admirers. Like I’ve learned from my nights in New York, and my life with Jack, once you’ve crawled into what’s commonly thought of as the sordid underbelly of life, you realize it’s all just different versions of normal.
I wonder what Jack’s doing. It’s nearly four in the afternoon in New York. I haven’t reached him on the phone once since getting here. He left me one message at the hotel early in my stay, “All well. Miss you lots. Aqua too.” But I haven’t heard from him since.
More than anything I wish he were here with me. “A relationship is an accumulation of shared history,” he’d said to me once. And here I was making history without him. It’s lonely. And I can’t wait to go home. Parts of me are showing through my Aqua, and I’m having a hard time keeping them separate.
“You have given me what you have to give. Thank you. Please let me take you back,” Mr. Hatsumoto says again.
“Okeydokey. Now we go, Cricket,” I say to Toshi, collecting our things and following Mr. Hatsumoto out the door.
I have seen what I needed to see, and am ready to go home. To Jack.
15
The apartment is a shithole.
Every window is wide open and the frigid October wind is howling through, pushing everything that isn’t heavy enough into swirling piles in the corners. A Celia Cruz CD, Jack’s favorite, is blaring on the stereo.
“Jack?” I yell out. No answer.
I put my bags down in the foyer and walk into the living room. His backpack is lying on the floor, flayed open with bottles of lube and dildos and leather toys spilling out like guts.
“Jack? I’m home.”
No one’s in our bedroom. The faucet is on in the master bath and I walk in and turn it off. There are scorch marks on the countertop and bottles of lotion and Vaseline scattered on the floor. The floors in all the rooms are covered with muddy footprints. The candle on our nightstand has burned down completely and spilled a puddle of wax onto the unmade bed.
Back in the living room there’s a stack of foil deli takeout containers in the corner filled with barely eaten egg burritos. The futon is folded out flat and dragged into the middle of the room. It’s covered in stains. Sheets have been dragged out of the bedroom and lie wadded up in piles next to it. Every towel we own is scattered around the floor.
On the plane on the way home, I didn’t have a drink. Not one. A twelve-hour flight. It was the longest I’d gone without alcohol in as long as I can remember. I am tired of always being drunk or being sick. Of not eating. I am tired of throwing up when I do eat. And I missed Jack. Entirely. I thought of his note. See me in everything, and hear me on your shoulder. The entire time I was in Japan I did see him everywhere. “Does he watch you?” Mr. Hatsumoto asked me. “Yes. Very well,” I said back. And it was true. When Mr. Hatsumoto told me to leave the club, I did. Because Jack was watching. Mr. Hatsumoto was standing in for Jack. Pack it in, Aqua. Time to go. Aqua fading out, me showing through. A class-A, diamond-studded fuck-up. I can’t tell when it starts to happen; someone needs to show me. Make me notice. Pull the plug when everyone else wants me to keep drowning. When everyone else wants me to show them how to have a good time. Wants to push me under and dance on my head. The geeky first chair junior high bassoon player peers out from behind the false eyelashes, pleading for someone, anyone, to pull the fucking plug. Pull the goddamn fucking plug. This is Jack’s job.
Where the hell is Jack?
A message on the machine:
“Aidan, it’s Dolores.” Dolores is the new dispatch operator at the escort agency in midtown who replaced Elaine. “Where are you? I have a party in a room at the Regis. They need party favors and two guys. Open ended. Call when you get this; your pager’s not working.”
Where the hell is Jack?
Where the hell is Jack?
Where the hell is Jack?
I don’t know what to do.
Where the hell is Jack?
I stand motionless in the foyer staring at the door. I’ve never felt more sober and more drunk at the same time. But I’m not drunk. I’m just confused. I haven’t talked to Jack in ten days, my home is a disaster zone, and I’m confused.
I turn around in circles, trying to spot something that makes sense.
Jack’s pager is on the kitchen counter. Seeing the pager not attached to Jack is like seeing someone’s lung sitting on the counter with them nowhere in sight.
As I step into the kitchen, shards of glass crackle under my shoes. Broken crack pipes. I pick up the phone.
Hey, it’s Ryan and Grey, we’re not home, leave a message at the beep.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know what to do.
Where the hell is Jack?
I don’t know what to do.
Please. Please. Come in the door. Come in the door and pull the plug.
I go to the freezer and pull out the bottle of Absolut. This is all I know how to do when I don’t know what to do next. The bottle freezes to my hand as I walk back through the windy living room.
I take a long swallow from the bottle and set it on the floor. My stomach grinds in opposition.
Little by little, through the night, I pick up pieces of my home and put them back where they belong.
By the time Blue’s Clues co
mes on, the apartment is back to how I left it.
Please come in the door.
Please come in the door.
BOOK III
16
Why didn’t you call me? I told you to come over,” Laura says over my shoulder as I finish an ad layout on my computer.
“I thought for sure he’d be back. He’s never been gone this long without calling.”
I’ve been home from Japan for two days. Still no Jack. His pager goes off incessantly through the night. I can’t drink enough or pass out hard enough not to hear it. Yesterday at the office I called it myself a half dozen times, hoping maybe he’d come home and reclaimed it.
“Do you want me to sleep at your place tonight?” Laura asks.
“You’re a cheeky filly, aren’t you? You know I don’t like women.”
“Not half as much as they don’t like you,” Laura says. “Is the money still there?”
“I didn’t check.”
“Do you have the numbers of any of his regulars?”
“No.”
Laura stands behind me, watching me work over my shoulder. I’ve worked on the same layout for a day and a half. Try the logo in this corner. In that one. Maybe a little bigger. Try orange. Part of my indecision is just nerves, and the other part is because I’ve kept a steady buzz going since the night I got home.
“Have you been drinking scotch?” Laura asks, wrinkling up her nose.
“I ran out of vodka.”
“You stink.”
Even I can smell it on my skin. I’ve avoided any meetings unless they’re in a large enough room that I can sit far away from anyone.
“You should at least take some of his money and get yourself some more vodka,” Laura says.
“You should write self-improvement books for the successful drunk,” I reply.
I’m supposed to work at Barracuda tonight. The prospect churns my stomach. Nearly as much as the prospect of going home and waiting in the apartment for another night. I try not to think about it. I’ll just keep shuffling the logo around this page like it’s an oracle that, once I find the right combination, will give up an answer about what I should do next.