I Am Not Myself These Days

  I’m still swimming in this spa fantasy as we waltz through the lobby of his building. I often don’t realize what a strange site I am to ordinary people until I notice their incredulous stares. I’m sure the doormen of his luxury Upper East Side high-rise building had never seen a seven-foot-tall drag queen with light-up fish tits clicking her high heels across their inlaid marble floors. I like Jack even more for not caring. He even calls out “hola” to one of the older doormen, who chokes out a hoarse “hola sénor” in response without ever taking his eyes off me.

  While he looks for his key outside his apartment door, I sink deeper into my new fantasy life with Jack. I would wait an appropriate amount of time after I moved in before hanging up my wigs and advertising career.

  As a successful doctor’s boyfriend, I fully expect that I will have new duties to fulfill.

  Charity would become my new hobby. Perhaps something at the United Nations, lending an international flair to my philanthropy. I picture trips to five-star hotels in third world countries after convincing Dr. Jack (I really must catch his last name) to quit his practice and join Doctors Without Borders for a year. There I’d become fast friends with caring celebrity activists like Susan Sarandon and Bette Midler and Jane Fonda, who would come over to our penthouse for fundraising brunches.

  I’m coming up with the perfect brunch menu in my head when Jack opens the door and I see a middle-aged balding man lying naked and curled up on his side on the floor of Jack’s foyer.

  “You stupid fat pig!” Jack yells at him while giving him a sharp kick in his flabby gut. “I told you to stay in the goddamned living room, you flabby piece of shit!”

  The man is hogtied. His wrists are lashed to his ankles behind his back with black leather laces. Jack grabs his wrists with one hand and his ankles with the other and drags him over to the side of the foyer so I can step in.

  “I’m sorry, Aidan! I’m really sorry! I’m just a stupid fat pussy boy with a tiny, tiny dick!” the man screams as he’s dragged across to the side. His sweaty clammy skin squeaks as it slides over the shiny wood floor like a new sneaker on a gym floor.

  Who the hell is Aidan?

  “That’s right, cocksucker, now shut the fuck up,” Jack says.

  “I’m so bad,” whimpers the man over and over.

  “Quit being such a pussy!” Jack screams, “and say hello to Aqua.”

  “Hello,” the fat man says, looking up at me.

  “Don’t fucking look at her you fucking piece of shit! She’s too gorgeous to even notice you with your tiny useless cock!” Jack interrupts.

  “Cheers,” I say to the man, a little unsure if it’s kosher to be friendly, or whether Jack will start yelling at me next.

  “If you’re a good little pussy boy, Miss Aqua will come back and let you lick her boot,” Jack continues.

  Jack grabs my arm and guides me toward the living room. The fat man whimpers quietly as we walk away.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack says, “he wasn’t supposed to leave his corner.” I briefly ponder what makes him think that I would be any less shocked to discover a naked hog-tied man in the living room rather than the foyer.

  “Now can I get a drink out of you?” I ask.

  Jack laughs and heads into the kitchen. I sit on the white couch and take my wig off. I can see the hog-tied man’s ankles around the corner. Jack comes back with the most needed glass of vodka I’ve ever seen in my life.

  “Umm,” I start, not sure how to begin. “Who is he?”

  “I call him ‘Houdini.’ He’s a successful CEO of some huge company in London, with a wife and kids and girlfriend on the side. He comes to me one weekend a month.”

  “He’s a patient?” I ask.

  “A client. I get a lot like him. They don’t even want the sex. Just want to be treated like the crappy useless weak person they feel they are inside.”

  “What kind of doctor are you?”

  “Huh?”

  “I thought you were a doctor.”

  “No. Who said that?” he asks.

  “Never mind,” I say. The drink in my hand is miraculously nearly gone. I suck at the ice. “You’re a hooker.”

  “That’s one term,” Jack says. “But I don’t have a lot of sex with my clients. Mostly I just beat them up.”

  “I’m not into that,” I quickly reply, mentally plotting an escape route that doesn’t involve stepping over Houdini.

  “I’m not either. But it pays the bills,” he says.

  “More of them than wigs do, apparently,” I say, looking around the immaculate penthouse. Every piece of furniture is some variant of white or light gray but is surrounded by colorful statues and masks and artwork from different regions around the globe. I see a lot of Mexican folk art, some less colorful African sculptures, some pre-Columbian masks, and some Oriental pieces scattered throughout.

  “He really stays here all weekend?” I ask.

  “If it’s a holiday he stays three days. Sometimes four.”

  “What do you do with him all that time?”

  “That’s the best part,” Jack says, smiling. “Nothing. He shows up on a Friday afternoon, I tie him up, and he spends the rest of the weekend struggling.”

  “How much does he pay you?”

  “Two thousand dollars a day. But I usually give him a thousand back. It’s good business.”

  “Can you get me another little sip?” I say, holding the empty glass up.

  While he’s in the kitchen, I walk over and peer around the corner at Houdini. He looks up at me with frightened little eyes. I wonder how old his kids are. What would they say if they saw him right now? Is this something that he asked his wife to do to him once and she refused? Does he really need to cross the Atlantic to get this kind of service? He notices me staring at him.

  “Can I lick your boot?” he asks meekly.

  “Um, sure.” I kick my leg out toward him. At first he kisses it, with gentle little pecks. He’s kind of sweet. I could see him being a good father, actually. I bet he kisses his kids goodnight like this.

  After about fifteen seconds of pecking, he sticks his tongue out and licks the black vinyl with short little strokes. Soon he starts grunting and squirming to get in a better position to really go at my boot with his tongue. He’s licking and rubbing his cheek against the now sopping boot like a cat rubbing against a table leg. He’s really going to town. Then suddenly he bites down on my toe.

  “Ow! You little fucker!” I kick him in his neck. He smiles up at me like a kid who got caught doing something bad and doesn’t care.

  “Do it again,” he says.

  “Screw you,” I say, and start to walk away. He begins straining at the restraints, rolling from side to side to try to follow me. I kick him in his arm.

  “More!” he yells.

  “Christ, you’re one fucked-up dude,” I say, backing off quickly. Jack walks in from the kitchen.

  “You leave her the fuck alone, pencil dick, or I’ll call your wife,” Jack says. Houdini stops struggling for a moment. He definitely respects Jack. Somehow I’m impressed by this.

  “What do you feed him?” I ask when we’re back on the white modernist sofa. I’m beginning to picture Houdini as an overweight, exotic, hairless pet cat.

  “Nothing. I just put out lines of coke on the floor and a bowl of water. He doesn’t get hungry. Sometimes before he goes back to the airport I’ll give him a PowerBar or something.”

  I’m pretty much speechless by this point. I see a lot of things in the drag world. Guys who take black market hormones to grow small breasts. Trannies coming back from their operations paid for by their “patrons” and showing off their swollen new vaginas to a roomful of clubgoers. But this is strange even by my standards. I’m intrigued that there’s a level of perversity even beyond my realm of expertise. Where have I been? I feel so uncool. Show me more of this party I’ve been missing.

  I had spent so much of my time growing up being afraid of being either too cool or too
uncool. Fear eventually took over and became my default emotion. If I tried to be cool, I was afraid of disappointing my teachers and parents. If I stuck with the nerd kids, I had a nagging fear that I was missing out on something. I learned to become exactly what whomever I was with at the time expected me to be. Mostly I was afraid that if I didn’t become what they wanted, then they would realize what I really was. A fey little faggoty kid hiding out in a small Wisconsin town. It was an exhausting dance.

  When I finally came out, the first thing I wanted to get rid of was fear. You got a problem with queers? Tough, get a load of me in this dress. You think sex is bad? Watch me tackle four guys at once. Just say no? Just say blow.

  The problem with trying to be fearless is that there’s always someone there to challenge your title. Like Jack. Here’s a guy whom people fly across the ocean for and pay obscene amounts of money to just get screwed and have the shit beaten out of them. By comparison, I suddenly feel like the kid who plays bassoon in the junior high band all over again. Only now the cool guy likes me. I’m going to have to find a way to impress him.

  “Don’t you want to get out of your outfit?” Jack asks.

  “Can’t I just go kick him once more?”

  3

  White.

  White = Jack.

  This was my first impression of him. And it’s sticking in some fold of my brain.

  The slant of morning light has slid up my sleeping body, and now pries my eyes open to the blinding flare of his bedroom.

  I’ve woken up in enough beds that are not my own to not be unnerved by unfamiliar surroundings. I usually take a moment to say a little grateful prayer that I’m actually in a bed and not on someone’s floor, or a couch in a club, or, as has happened once before, in an elevator.

  Jack’s bedroom is as white as the rest of his apartment. Off to my left is a long bank of floor-to-ceiling windows interrupted exactly in the center by a glass door that leads out onto a narrow balcony. The view from the master bedroom is the same southern city view as the living room, except now, by daylight, the spectacular array of buildings that make up his backyard seem smaller, slightly farther away than they do during the night. The bed itself is white. White sheets, heavy white comforter—even the platform that the mattress rests on is a hard white slab made up of some sort of white marble blocks. On the wall across from the foot of the bed is a white television sitting on a square-edged white pedestal like the kind one would find sculptures displayed upon in a gallery.

  The only color in the room hangs on the wall above the head of the bed. A five-foot chain of palm-sized skeletons cut out of shiny tin and linked hand to hand like a chain of paper men. Each skeleton is painted in a different multicolored pattern, and several are ornamented further with cutout tin top hats, or bow ties, or twisted colorful pipe-cleaner boas, or brightly dyed feathers arranged and glued together like an evening gown. Mexican Day of the Dead ornaments. The chorus line of grinning garish skeletons sags across the top of the bed, slightly fluttering in an undetectable breeze coming from the open balcony door. When the sunlight hits one directly, a ray of iridescent color streaks across the room and disappears as quickly and silently as the breeze that caused it.

  I’m wearing a pair of thin cotton pajama bottoms lent to me by Jack last night. He keeps a two-foot-tall stack of them in a drawer in the bedroom closet, all clean and fresh pressed and smelling like fabric softener. He wears a clean pair every night, he explained to me. Likes the newness. When I swing my legs over the edge of the bed, they still look perfectly pressed. I must not have turned at all in my sleep.

  Impossible as it seems, the living room appears brighter then the bedroom and I squint my eyes as I pull open the door.

  “Hello again,” Jack says, sitting cross-legged in the middle of a fan of Sunday New York Times sections scattered around him on the parquet floor. It’s only Saturday, but with home delivery, you get many of the fluffy Sunday sections—Real Estate, Arts and Leisure, the Times Magazine—a day early. Easier on the delivery guys, I suppose.

  “We alone?” I ask, padding across the parquet. The vertical indentations from last night’s corset still run faintly up my torso.

  “Yup. Houdini had a legitimate business meeting this weekend, so he went to a hotel this morning,” Jack replies. “He may be back Sunday afternoon…do you want breakfast?”

  “I should probably go.”

  Jack’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly, then return to normal.

  “I made coffee already and ordered food before you got up. I just need to go microwave it for a sec.” He’s not pleading for me to stay and hang out. He’s simply telling me I will. He stands up and walks toward the kitchen. “I forget what you took in your coffee yesterday,” he says, rounding the corner into the dining room.

  “Just a little milk,” I yell after him.

  In a few minutes he comes back with the deli breakfast spread and arranges the different plates in a circle on the floor.

  “Sit,” he says, calling me back over from the window where I was studying the skyline, “right here.” He sits back down in the middle of the circle of food and New York Times sections and pats the floor next to him with his palm.

  We spend the next hour or so eating and reading silently. When he finishes a section, he passes it over to me, and vice versa. I’m completely comfortable. It feels as easy as watching Saturday morning cartoons after a sleepover at your best friend’s house.

  “Listen to this,” I say, breaking the silence. I point down at an article in front of me and continue. “Rioting and looting has broken out across the capital region of Sudan this morning after a grumpy overnight guest ran out of coffee and his host didn’t notice.” I push my empty coffee mug across the floor to him with my foot. He pretends not to notice.

  “Interesting,” he replies. “There’s a story here about an old guy in Queens who collected every magazine and piece of mail he’d received in the last forty-five years until one of the piles fell on top of him and trapped him for five days.”

  He looks up at me, expectantly.

  “Was he okay?” I finally reply, resigned to setting up whatever punchline was coming next.

  “He was fine. First thing he did after being freed was pull himself right up and pour his own goddamn cup of coffee.”

  “You’re a cock.”

  “…And got a cup for his rescuer too,” Jack continues, now pushing both my and his mug back over to me. “The rescuer reportedly likes skim milk. And a little sugar.”

  I roll my eyes, grab both mugs and stand up. As I turn to go to the kitchen, he leans over, reaching out to grab one of my ankles. I stop and he pulls me back toward him, causing me to hop backward on one foot, balancing the two mugs. When I’m near enough, he raises the sole of my foot to his mouth and softly kisses the very center of the arch. His lips are warm against my bare skin, and it tickles just enough to send goosebumps up my calves.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  By the time we head out to a matinee later that afternoon I’m feeling uncharacteristically relaxed. This is so easy. He is so easy. I’ve never met anyone who just does whatever he wants to do without a thousand other little voices in his head lecturing that he’s going “a bit too far,” or will “pay for this in the long run,” or should “just stop a minute and think twice about things.” Jack doesn’t seem to ever think twice. He simply has no strategy. No agenda.

  It makes me wonder, what’s the point of thinking twice anyway? The only possible outcome of double thinking is that you invariably end up negating whatever it was motivating you in the first place. Forcing yourself to think twice about something is just admitting that somehow you are instinctively stupid, and that repetition is the only thing that will save you from yourself.

  After knowing Jack for merely forty-eight hours, I’ve learned that he will willingly think for me too. He’ll decide when I should drink. Decide what I should wear to bed. Decide what I want for breakfast. And it’s pretty relaxing,
never having to think once—let alone twice—about something. The only other time I get to feel as free as this is somewhere around my twelfth vodka. It’ll be interesting to see if Jack gives me a headache the next day.

  4

  I’m working the door at Jaguar, a small club two doors down from the Hells Angels headquarters on East Third Street. It’s a slow night, and my drag codoorperson, L’il Debbie, is getting restless. L’il Debbie is close to three hundred pounds and famous for her raunchy numbers.

  One of her most notorious appearances occurred just last month when she was scheduled to open a show at a club called Don Hill’s. She didn’t look so well when she showed up, but that was nothing terribly unusual for any of us queens.

  Due to a scheduling problem with another drag queen, the hostess of the show moved L’il Debbie’s song to the finale rather than the opening number. L’il Debbie sat backstage for an hour and a half, growing more and more sickly by the minute. She refused to sit down and spent the entire show pacing back and forth, sweating far more than a three-hundred-pound man in makeup and leather bustier would even under normal circumstances.

  When her number finally came, she rallied. It was a high-energy punk rock version of “The Candyman.” She skipped back and forth across the stage with a black leather parasol in one hand and an oversize lollipop in the other.

  “WHO CAN TAKE A SUNRISE?! SPRINKLE IT WITH DEW?!” she shrieked at the audience with such force that several people actually looked as if they were trying to come up with an answer for her.

  “COVER IT IN CHOCOLATE AND A MIRACLE OR TWO?!…THE CANDYMAN CAN!!”

  She started twirling now in that way ice skaters do, where her body was in constant rotation, but her head would stop at each revolution to stare at the startled audience. She held the parasol out to her side as she spun, threatening to decapitate the entire front row.

  “WHO CAN TAKE A RAINBOW?!!…”

  The lollipop was flung out over the crowd, beaning a Long Island Italian gay boy toward the back of the room.