It’ll be easier to get a cab on Eleventh Avenue. They line up there waiting for the club to empty. A small group of UPS men watch me gather my bag and straighten myself to my full height. The street is plowed and easier to walk on than the sidewalk.
I don’t have a plan yet, but when I do, I know it will be elegant. Yes. A very elegant plan.
I wave to the UPS men, and they wave back.
Good morning, boys.
Epilogue
Hugs and Fishes.
Aqua never saw Jack again.
Back in the East Village, she moved in and out of friends’ apartments, going out less and less. Fewer people remembered her each time, and that was okay with her. Well not okay, but inevitable, and that passes for okay.
Toward the end, when she grew tired of going out because it was the same “out” over and over again, she would sit and pluck the stray gray hairs cropping up in her wigs.
Mostly, she just drank and watched a lot of TV. But when Blue’s Clues got a new host, she turned that off as well.
On some late nights, in the deep haze of her vodka, she would dial Jack’s pager repeatedly, just to see if anyone would call back. Eventually Jack’s ad disappeared from the back of the local gay magazines, and his pager was disconnected. Still, she would dial the number occasionally anyway, along with Ryan’s and Grey’s and even Trey’s. They all had vanished into the city’s maze of boxes. Sink or swim. Sink or swim. There is no round-the-clock lifeguard in New York City.
The fish lived, and the fish died. And new fish took their place—though without the constant practice of regular appearances, the newcomers tended to be lackadaisical, even sloppy, with their performances.
She missed Houdini. She missed Mr. Beefeater. She missed stupidity and insanity and danger and fun. She missed the raw truths that bubble up when survival is gambled and mocked.
Four years later, she lived in three boxes marked “Aqua stuff” in a storage facility five blocks from the penthouse she’d once called home for seven months. When she turned thirty, a frozen pipe burst somewhere over the storage unit and dissolved her boxes and wigs and makeup and costumes into an indistinguishable mess. An iridescent glob that smelled faintly of smoke and sweat and cheap perfume. But she wasn’t all that upset by the loss, because she knew when she turned thirty that she was never going to become a movie star, and if you are never going to become a movie star, then you may as well just be who you are. With little or no makeup and jewelry.
And so, around four fifteen one Saturday morning, around the time she used to be coming off a shift—she left.
She left because she was left behind—in rotting cardboard boxes and foggy disappearing memories. She left because she wasn’t really needed anymore. What was needed was sleep, and a career, and sobriety, and a boyfriend whose vision of the future didn’t include someone dead. And all these things showed up eventually, but not for her. She did all the prep work, then got shuffled aside. And a drag queen can survive a lot, but she cannot survive obscurity.
So she abandoned the baubles and shiny things. She pushed aside the wigs and the metallic thongs. She stepped over the piles of her sparkly history and walked completely naked down to the East River, past twenty-four-hour delis and an undercover vice squad officer who once asked her to blow him in his brown sedan. She walked past small huddles of clubgoers stumbling home from places she’d worked at before they were named whatever they were named today.
Expecting her to hail them, cabs slowed as they passed her. She ignored them. Just as she ignored the other drag queens emerging from the dark doorways trying to joke with her, their lipstick smeared and creasing in the corners of their mouths, and their foundation caking and powdering around their eyes.
She ignored the city as well, as it reluctantly shrugged off another night. The lights in the buildings began to slowly blink off as the sun rose, like sequins popping off an evening gown. She ignored the undressing city as it, over time, had come to ignore her. She just stared at her feet as she walked, refusing to look up at a skyline she’d once looked down on from her white penthouse in the sky.
She climbed up and sat on the metal railing overlooking the freezing, roiling East River, and she wished to God she had a double vodka before she pushed off and slipped into the inky currents below. Gliding underneath, pulled down under the surface, her limbs danced in the bass rush of the icy river.
And the reflection of the amber lights from the bridges sparkled on the rippling water around her body like thick curling schools of shimmering goldfish as she passed underneath on her way out to sea.
There was no funeral for Aqua. In lieu of flowers, she respectfully requests that you buy a round for the bar.
And if you didn’t know Aqua, that’s a shame, because everyone who knew her loved her. And everyone who loved her got their fair share back.
And she just wants everyone to remember—please remember—that once there was a darkly sparkling, glittering, shimmering, lovely dangerous time in this city when Aqua loved Jack.
And Jack loved Aqua.
And I loved Jack.
And Jack loved me.
And boys will be boys.
And boys will be girls.
And sometimes the show can’t go on.
Acknowledgments
Incalculable thanks to my parents, David and Jackie, for whom I’ve been, at times, an endurance sport. Without their values I would be nothing more than a very pretty corpse. I apologize for the fearful times; you did not deserve them and will never relive them. Equal gratitude for Rick, my polar opposite yet Siamese twin. For James—WWJD?—and Maya—WDMT? For Arthur and Bob, who came first. For Andy, Milkman Joe Daley, and Clive…thank you for looking where one would least expect, and finding something I wasn’t sure anyone would want to see. For my editor, Maureen, who’s revered by moguls and movie stars, and hardly needed to add an ex–drag queen to her court, but did. And Stephanie too. And Team Kismet at Harper Perennial. Thank you.
For James and Terrance, Leah, Jeannie, Marty and Jen, Bill and Gilles, the Goddess Raven, Meredith, Jo W., Matty-Patty, Randy, Greg Kadel, John Nathan, Edith, Laura, the “Lady” Bunny, and Jill…whatever has become of my life, it’s all your fault.
And for every twelve-year-old boy who wore his mother’s eye-shadow. To school.
About the Author
After “retiring” from drag in 2000, JOSH KILMER-PURCELL refocused on his advertising career, winning numerous awards, and is now a partner in a midsize creative advertising agency in lower Manhattan. He lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with his partner of five years.
www.iamnotmyselfthesedays.com
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
PRAISE FOR
I Am Not Myself These Days
Recipient of Elle’s Readers’ Prize February 2006
“I laughed. I cried. I laughed again. I Am Not Myself These Days is tawdry and brilliantly witty.”
—Simon Doonan
“I Am Not Myself These Days is a glittering, bittersweet vision of an outsider who turned himself into the life and soul of the party. Kilmer-Purcell’s cast is part freak show, part soap opera, but his prose is graced with such insight and wit that the laughter is revelatory, and the tears—and there are tears to be shed along this extraordinary journey—are shed for people in whom everybody will find something of themselves. In a word, wonderful.”
—Clive Barker
“[Kilmer-Purcell’s] trenchant memoir captures the madcap rush of the once-closeted arriviste’s first brush with city life, a fall from innocence that still haunts him…. He retells the saga…with levelheaded grace.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A delicate narrative that spares not an ounce of pain but never once aims for contrition. Effortlessly entertaining yet still heartfelt; the romance of life as an escape artist.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Plenty of dishy anecdotes and mome
nts of tragi-camp delight.”
—Washington Post
“It’s one hell of a spellbinding read. Engrossing.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“The exact, unpitying detail with which Kilmer-Purcell depicts his downward spiral makes it impossible to look away….”
—Publishers Weekly
“A very entertaining read…as tart and funny as a Noel Coward play, for Kilmer-Purcell is especially good at dialogue, and, as in Coward’s best plays, under the comedy lies the sad truth that even at our best, we are all weak, fallible fools. Again and again in this rich, adventure-filled book, Kilmer-Purcell illustrates the truth of Blake’s proverb, ‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’”
—Booklist
“The book goes deeper, ultimately telling what is a painfully dysfunctional love story…that many readers will likely be able to relate to.”
—Out magazine
“Decadent and delirious, weird and wonderful.”
—The New York Blade
“Filled with witty dialogue, confusing awakenings, and extraordinary situations…. Readers will find this tale of good boy turned bad drag queen darkly hilarious and entertaining.”
—Library Journal
“The book is at once a sensational memoir and…a universal love story.”
—Adweek
Credits
Cover design by Mary Schuck
Cover photograph © John Chellman/Animals Animals
Cover photograph © Steve Lawrence/PictureQuest
Copyright
I AM NOT MYSELF THESE DAYS. Copyright © 2006 by Josh Kilmer-Purcell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2008 ISBN: 9780061860843
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Josh Kilmer-Purcell, I Am Not Myself These Days
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