Jack hasn’t called from this party.
Two hours later I’m at approximately the level of drunk I was aiming for. Okay, so I may have gone a bit beyond. Okay, so I may have a slight problem standing. That’s why God made walls.
The crowd has thinned out, but the shy guy from the contest is still here. I can’t believe Jack hasn’t fucking called me. We fuck for the first time, and then I haven’t seen him in two days. Ass.
The shy guy keeps glancing at me, then turning away when I meet his eyes. It’s cute, but a waste of my time. I wave him over.
“You have fun tonight?” I ask.
“Yeah. I don’t normally do things like that.”
“Who does? Where are you from?”
“I live in Jersey; I came in with my friend.”
“You look like the sort of guy who likes to buy drinks for other people.”
“What do you want?”
“Vodka. Rocks.”
He goes off to get my drink. Jack better be there when I get home. I don’t care how tired he is, I’m going to wake him up and give him shit. I didn’t move in with him to be his roommate. We’re supposed to be boyfriends. Real boyfriends. Boyfriends should know where the other one is every hour of every day. Boyfriends should call when their clients make them smoke crack overnight. It’s common courtesy.
“Here you go.” The shy guy hands me my drink. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Aqua.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Aquadisiac.” He gives me a blank stare. This one is going to be too easy. “Are you staying with your friend tonight?”
“We’ll probably head back to Jersey,” he says.
“I hope you’re not driving,” I say.
“I’ll sober up in a while.”
“The bar closes in fifteen minutes,” I say.
“We’ll walk to a diner. Wanna come?” he asks.
“I’m probably just going home,” I say. Should I head in for the kill? Logically, it’s a bit premature. But I’m gonna have to go with my gut. This guy’s pretty simple. “If you want, you could take a cab home with me.”
“I don’t know. I’m with my friend,” he says warily.
“Is your friend as cute as you are?” I ask playfully.
The shy guy laughs.
“Come on,” I say, “let’s go. It’ll be fun.”
The shy guy laughs again.
“I don’t usually go home with people,” he says.
“You don’t usually take your clothes off in front of an audience either,” I reply, “but you got the hang of that pretty quickly.”
He pauses and looks down at his drink. He’s drunker than I thought he was.
“Why the fuck not,” he says finally. “Let me go tell my friend, then we’ll go.”
Sometimes I wonder why I’m so predatory. I’m a monster. A Drunk. Fucking. Monster. Now I have a boyfriend who gives me everything I want, who leaves me little notes around the house, who just threw a three-thousand-dollar birthday party for me, and I’m still a monster. Jack leaves me alone for a day and a half and I’m already prowling.
How can I bring this guy home if Jack might be there? Why am I so ready to fuck this up? So Jack is out having sex with other guys and doing drugs. I knew this about him. I can’t punish him for that. He tells me everything he does like any guy would after coming home from work. “Hi, honey. Busy day at the whorehouse today. Had to beat up three men and pretend to smoke a little crack. What’s for din-din?” When we’re together, we’re just like any couple. We read the Times on Sunday, we go to brunch with friends, we talk about politics and movies. He writes me cute little notes with drawings of cactuses on them for Christ’s sake.
I’m not going to be a drag queen forever. And he’s not going to be a whore forever. We’ve talked about it a little. We want to look back on this time and laugh, and tell funny old stories about our crazy days. One day we’ll be real people, with stereotypical careers, clichéd midlife crises, and eventually a retirement condo in Florida.
Before the shy guy comes back, I manage to grab my purse and leave. I’m not going to mess this up.
It’s nearly four thirty in the morning when the cab pulls into the circle in front of our building. The night doorman, Pedro, sweeps me through the door with a swing of his arm.
“Buenos noches, senorita,” he says.
“Buenos días, Pedro,” I reply.
I’m not quite sure if Pedro has any idea that Aqua and Josh are the same person. But, bless his heart, he’s never treated Aqua any differently than the Upper East Side matrons who glide through the lobby with their shopping bags.
I’m amazingly sober by the time I reach the forty-second floor. Sober enough to be a little frightened of what’s behind our front door. I’m not sure if I want Jack to have come home and everything to be okay, or if I want him to still be missing so that I can have a reason to be angry and self-righteous.
Any questions I had melt away as soon as I open the door. Jack’s standing in the kitchen—naked, of course—with the cordless phone in one hand and the deli menu in the other. He’s smiling his broad goofy smile at me, and I blow him a kiss while I struggle with my heels. I hear voices from the dining room.
“Aqua!” shout Ryan and Grey simultaneously, sticking their heads around the corner.
“Hey, guys! Awfully early for you to be up for school,” I reply.
I realize they’re all coming down from their party. There’s a sense of playful relaxation in the apartment. I imagine it’s what a firehouse must feel like when all the guys come back from a four-alarm blaze.
“Make that four western omelets, hash browns, and wheat toast. And another large OJ,” Jack says into the phone, winking at me.
I need to be in the office in less than five hours and I’ve had less than four hours sleep in the last forty-eight hours since my birthday party. I should simply crash in bed. But the three of them are in such a fun mood, the sky is just turning a blazing pink over the East River, Jack just ordered me breakfast, and suddenly I get my fifth wind.
“Come here, you,” Jack says, coming up behind me while I’m struggling to undo my corset, and wrapping his arms around me.
I turn to kiss him.
“What happened to you, lizard lips?” I ask, noticing that his lips are more chapped than ever.
“They’re just dry—the guy’s apartment was over air-conditioned. Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t call.”
“No biggie,” I lie.
“This guy was such a freak…” Jack starts.
“Seriously,” Ryan interrupts, “I’ve never met a more paranoid guy. He smoked more crack than a welfare mother, and he locked the three of us in the bathroom twice because he thought we were undercover agents from the DEA.”
“You guys go to just the best parties,” I mock.
“And where were you, Miss Five A.M. Shadow?” Grey asks.
“Snatch Game at Barracuda.”
“Shit, I missed it, I wanted to see you,” Jack complains.
“I think I’m booked again next week.”
By the time the food arrives, I’ve peeled off my outfit and put the goldfish back into their tank. I’m still in full makeup though, because I don’t feel like showering until I eat.
Jack brings the foil deli breakfast trays into the dining room. The sun is streaming in, turning the white walls a glowing pink. Grey gets up to open the window. It’s the first day of September, and a dry cool breeze fills the room. The air feels clean—like someone Windexed away the summer urine and trash smells. Like we are getting ready to head out to our first day of school.
We all laugh and eat as they tell me stories about their pathetic client and I tell them about the show. As the sun brightens we talk less about our night and more about other things. Jack says the sky reminds him of the Baja Peninsula, and how he used to disappear for weeks in the summer when he was in high school. Hitchhiking with his backpack down through California into the
Baja Peninsula. And how his parents would simply think he’d gone to stay at a friend’s house. Jack would take busses from village to village and stay with any local family that would take him in. Some nights he would just sleep by the road in the middle of the desert.
And then one day he’d just come home again and find his parents just where he’d left them, drinking old-fashioneds by the pool with their neighbors.
“Call in sick,” Jack says to me.
“I can’t. We have a pitch next week.”
“That’s next week. Come on. I want to take you to Coney Island. I haven’t been all summer. We’ll all go.” Jack’s growing more and more enthused.
“I’ve never been to Coney Island,” I say.
“You’re kidding,” says Grey incredulously.
“I’ve only been in New York for seven months.”
“Come on. Call in,” Jack pleads, “I’ll leave my beeper at home.”
This is a serious concession. In the three months we’ve been together, Jack hasn’t once been more than two feet from his beeper. He told me the reason he’s so successful is that he’s so reliable. And he is. He returns every page he gets, whether or not he’s just come home from a two-day party and has only had an hour of sleep, or if we’re in the middle of our entrée at our favorite French bistro. “Clients need two things—stability and unpredictability. And I know exactly when they need which,” Jack’s said to me before.
“Come on, go shower. Let’s go,” Jack says.
Before the water gets warm I have Laura on the phone figuring out how she can cover for me.
I wake up completely disoriented but also with a sense of total calm. As I come to, I feel the warm sand under my heels and the cool terry cloth under my back. I’m staring at the underside of a rainbow-hued umbrella, through which I can see faint shadows of seagulls circling overhead. I have never woken up this calm. I know I quickly will realize where I am and what I’m doing here, but for now I try to sink down deeper into this smooth haze of not knowing, not caring, not worrying.
I feel a tingling on my stomach and lift my head to find Jack drizzling a thin stream of sand through his fist.
“Wanna go to Nathan’s?” he asks.
“Where are Ryan and Grey?”
“They went on some rides. C’mon, I’m starving.”
Jack gets two foot-longs with onions and chili, and I just get one, with mustard and sauerkraut.
“This is going to give me major gas,” I say.
“We’ll have a farting contest on the way home, assuring us of our own private subway car,” Jack replies, wiping chili off his chin. “You do realize you still have mascara in the corner of your eyes, right?”
“Give me a break. You gave me half an hour to get out of Aqua.”
“Hey…” Jack says.
“Hey wha?” I reply, chewing a huge chunk of bun with strings of sauerkraut hanging down my lip.
“Hey…You’re pretty.”
“Leftover mascara smudges and all?”
“Yep.”
“Well, you’re pretty…weird,” I say, dismissing him. “Let’s go to the freak show and see if we can get you an honest job.”
The hot dog has done a pretty good job of placating my hangover, which has now lessened to a dull pressure in the back of my head and a slight fatigue that is somehow reassuring. I realize that I have no idea what it feels like to be sober without being hungover, so the relative lack of hangover symptoms actually makes me feel healthy. Just as the early fall weather has brushed the summer heaviness out of the air, my mind has a sense of clarity sharpened by the slight tinge of toxins in my blood.
The Coney Island Freak Show is not much of either—freakish or showy. Jack and I listen to the barker outside, promising amazing feats and stomach-churning unnatural oddities like we’ve never seen before.
We take our bleacher seats just as the show’s beginning. Gone are the days of bearded ladies, dog-faced boys, Siamese twins, and entire tiny villages populated by midgets. I suppose there’s not much heart for exploiting physical deformities anymore. Which is a shame really, since now we’re stuck watching a lame parade consisting of an overly tattooed “lizard man,” an old guy who pounds nails into his nostril, and a contortionist most notable for her amazing ability to inspire ennui.
“We should sell tickets to our living room,” Jack leans over and whispers to me at one point. He’s right. Any random weekday evening chez Jack and Aqua is more exotic than this.
“The Human Cork! Witness a man able to hold a one-liter champagne enema in his rectum!” I whisper back.
“The Chinese Grandfather Clock! Be amazed as a sixty-three-year-old Asian man suspends a swinging five-pound paperweight from his scrotum!” Jack whispers.
We spend the rest of the uninspiring show giving Jack’s clients side-show names. “The Human Butt-Sniffer!” “The Insatiable Clothespin Boy!” “The Death-Defying Duke of Debilitating Dildoes!” And of course, our old favorite, simply, “High-Flying Houdini.”
The sheer amount of oddness I’ve come to take for granted in the last seven months since I’ve moved to New York begins to dawn on me. As a kid, I would have to cover my eyes while watching That’s Incredible. When John Davidson introduced a man who walked on coals, I would have to pick my feet up off the floor and tuck them safely under me. My brother could make me vomit on cue simply by turning his eyelids inside out. Do I have a growing callus over my threshold of abnormality? Or have I simply redefined normal? Maybe normal is whatever feels good where nobody gets hurt.
As we exit the freak show, Jack stops me by a Plexiglas display.
“Look, it’s Aqua in fifty years.”
The placard at the base of the display reads: THE FIJI MERMAID—1914. Inside, a mummified infant head is clumsily sewn onto a petrified carcass of what looks to be a salmon.
“Did this ever really fool people?” I ask, staring at the leathery corpse.
“Does Aqua?” he replies.
On the way home, the four of us are pleasantly sunburned and breezily carefree. When no one on our subway car is looking, I lick Jack’s neck. His brown skin tastes warm, like the sun and the ocean. Like a freshly baked sugar cone. He smiles and snakes his hand under the bag of Russian trinkets we bought in Brighton Beach and rests it on my thigh. Jack and Grey are telling Ryan and me stories about their high school misdeeds. I never did anything remotely delinquent until well into college, so my only contribution to the conversation is laughter and admiration. In mid-sentence, Jack initiates the previously mentioned farting contest. Thankfully our subway car is nearly empty, since all-out warfare between the four of us quickly follows. The sauerkraut and chili definitely have given Jack and me an edge in the competition, but Ryan comes from behind with a surprising staccato series of stylish, almost melodic entries. Grey’s contributions are less frequent, but noteworthy in their length and bass tones. None of us is willing to concede the championship title as we head, hysterically laughing, into the tunnel under the East River. For the first time I hear Jack actually giggling, uncontrollably, and I realize that I just had the best day of my life.
9
Even though we had prepared for weeks, the morning of my mother’s arrival in New York registers an eight on my personal anxiety Richter scale. Like a death-row inmate, I could deal with impending doom in the abstract. But getting strapped down to the chair while knowing the executioner was on a plane speeding toward me this very instant is nearly enough to make me call out for a priest.
“Calm down, it’s going to be cool,” Jack says to me as I sit rigidly staring out over the skyline wondering about the chances of a freak airport-closing snowstorm erupting out of a clear mid-September sky. “We’ve got it all covered.”
Ever since my mother called three weeks ago to invite herself for a long weekend, we had been concocting our game plan. Both my mother and my stepfather, who raised me and who I call “Dad,” are extremely accepting of me being gay, and have been genuinely fond of my pri
or boyfriends. The drag thing threw them a little, but since there’s little chance of their Wisconsin church friends wandering into a New York nightclub and recognizing me through three wigs and a quarter inch of foundation, they’ve pretty much just adopted a “don’t ask, and for God’s sake don’t tell us about it” philosophy. I’d already cleared my schedule of all drag gigs for the weekend.
I doubted, though, that I could explain my way around a drug-dealing male escort boyfriend without seriously jeopardizing any future inheritance. Likewise, asking Jack to not wear his pager during the busy club-opening season would be overstepping the bounds of his hospitality, given that I was living rent-free in a penthouse paid for with every beep of said pager. And anyway, he had already graciously agreed not to take any in-house calls while my mother was here. Only out-calls.
It was time to get creative. We outlined several different employment scenarios that would require him to wear a beeper, and narrowed the list down to four.
1. Drug Dealer. This may not seem like an obvious mom-pleaser, but it is sufficiently close enough to the truth to explain why Jack mainly gets calls between nine p.m. and six a.m. And compared to “my son-in-law is a whore,” “my son-in-law is a drug dealer” sounds almost dignified. Still, we decide that we could come up with better, but would keep this lie in the running in case my mother ever demanded the truth.
2. Doctor. An obvious choice for a man and his beeper. More specifically: proctologist. It seemed to be the one area of anatomy that Jack could most insightfully fake knowledge of. For a few days Jack and I practiced mock Q & A sessions whenever he came home from a call. I’d ask him what the proctological emergency was, and invariably he’d concoct some scenario that would reduce us both to fits of giggling. Plausibility was strained.