“Please tell me you’re not going to do that,” I said, and Pseudo-Gere smiled. A great smile. A sexy smile. The smile of a man who knows exactly what he’s doing.
And then, alas, he bent down and applied his lips to my toes. Very thoroughly. Another woman on the train looked over to me, and twirled her finger beside her ear, rolling her eyes. Crazy. I shrugged. Oh well. It was gross, and yes, he was maybe somewhat imbalanced, but he wasn’t hurting me. My standards for what I would and would not allow had shifted considerably in the yes months.
“Thanks,” said Pseudo-Gere. “I needed that.”
“You’re welcome,” I replied. “But you should wash your mouth out with Listerine. You don’t want to know where these toes have been today.” Toe kissing was not, in my opinion, something people ought to do in a place where negligent dog owners lived.
“That’s the point,” he said, gave me a (literally) shit-eating grin, and got off the train.
“Eww,” said the woman. “Why are the messed-up ones always so cute?”
“Why are the cute ones always so messed up?” I replied, thinking of Baler.
“Because this is New York in June,” she said. “And I don’t like it. How about you?”
“I do like a Gershwin tune, though,” I said, pleased to meet someone witty.
“Life is never as good as Gershwin,” she said, assuredly. “The Gershwins didn’t even write that song. George and Ira would never have written about liking New York in the summer. They were smarter than that.” She went back to reading her copy of Variety.
Such was the peril of the flippant reference. You were pretty much guaranteed to be talking to someone who knew a hell of a lot more than you, or at least felt that they did.
IT WAS TRUE THAT NEW YORK in the summer was not the best place. The city smelled like four hundred bulls doing heavy exercise. The humidity made the air as thick as Play-Doh. Everywhere you looked, there were women wringing sweat from their sundresses. Vic debarked for her sister’s house in New Orleans, where it was even hotter than in New York City. She didn’t care. She liked the Southern manners the men displayed there, and she had a point. On my way to work one morning, I was groped not once, not twice, but three times. One grope on the rush-hour G from Greenpoint, one on the R under the East River, and the last on the 6 uptown. I’d elbowed the G groper, and given the R groper a growl and feral hiss that made him think I might be crazy. By the time I met the 6 groper, I’d reached my limit. When I turned around and saw that his Armani trousers were unzipped, and his penis entirely out of his pants, I screamed, somewhat hysterically, “Look! There it is! He wants you to see it!”
He inexplicably put his hands in the air. There were several black-clad old ladies on my train, and for a moment, we transited to Sicily. They all started pointing and cursing him. One bashed him with her enormous valise. The guy fled at the next stop. It was enormously satisfying, if somewhat surreal. Of course, it only made me more pissed off at all the men on the train who’d failed to defend me. They looked at me like I was a hooker turned rabid feminist. I had a recurrent fantasy of a Riot Grrrls-style project, in which cameras would be distributed to all female subway passengers. Then, when being groped against her will, a woman could turn around and snap an image of the offender. The photos would be blown up to poster size, and posted in the trains. This was the kind of master plan that always ended up dominating my thoughts when the weather was too warm.
THAT NIGHT, IN AN EFFORT to cool my blood before I killed someone, I purchased a twenty-nine-dollar piece-of-shit used air conditioner from the nearby junk store, Your Purveyor of Discontent. I’d gotten our seventies-era spontaneously defrosting refrigerator there the year before. The store did not offer delivery, and so I’d used a case of Pabst as a bribe to get three career alcoholics to help me carry it down the street and up the stairs. I hadn’t really understood mortality until I found myself holding up the bottom end of the refrigerator, in collaboration with a skinny white guy named MoFo, whose fingers felt like noodles, and who kept murmuring, “Where…what? Beer? Fuck! Yo! Heavy!” I hadn’t learned my lesson. Your Purveyor of Discontent was cheap. Frenzied with hope, I tied my new AC to a skateboard I’d bought at the Salvation Army and dragged it home to await Zak’s assistance.
Zak, however, had gone to his girlfriend’s apartment, and did not seem to be coming home. I lay in my bed, steaming like a dumpling. At 4:00 a.m., I brilliantly decided that I was fully capable of installing the AC by myself. Alas, I misjudged the weight of the unit versus the axis of the windowsill. The back neighbors, engaged in partying in their backyard, were very startled to watch the air conditioner tumble out my second-story window, nearly followed by me. The top two-thirds of my body hung out the window for a full two minutes, before I managed to right myself. I’d bitched about all the people in the neighborhood who stood naked in their windows, and now I was one of them, topless for all to see. Fortunately, the neighbors were too drunk to give a damn.
“Come down, girl! We’re roasting the rooster!” one of them yelled.
“Die, you crowing motherfucker!” screamed someone else.
Both the rooster and the AC died. Chicken bones and AC parts were scattered across several lots. In the days that followed, I periodically looked down at my air conditioner’s skeleton and whimpered. I started sleeping beneath wet towels, rising occasionally to wedge ice cubes into my cleavage, thinking I’d reached my lowest point, but then things got even worse.
NINE GUESTS FROM ALL over the country converged simultaneously on our apartment. I was forced to surrender my hut to them. This meant that Zak and I had to sleep entwined on his single mattress. Despite the months of repressed sexual tension, there was nothing sexy about this. It was too hot to be titillated. It was too hot to exist. Everyone hated everyone else, and we were resolving the situation by drinking too much. Our living room was occupied by my sister, Molly, her friend Brynn, my friend Moon and her friend Kitty, Zak’s friend Joe, and his girlfriend Maisie. Vic’s room was occupied by my friend Leah, who was renting it for the summer, and her friends Jess and Nina. My friend Jack was sleeping on a pile of blankets in the kitchen, having come in from Idaho prior to his attendance at an acting workshop. He was a neurotic guy already, and New York City was making it worse. His first day in the city coincided with the Gay Pride Parade, and his first excursion was onto Sixth Avenue, into the heart of about five thousand topless lesbians wearing Band-Aids on their nipples. Everything was swathed in rainbow.
“Is this how New York is every day?” he asked, fearful.
Jack spent the rest of the night listening to Joni Mitchell and Fugazi, rocking sadly, and keeping an eye out for the creepy, and apparently jobless, new neighbor who’d moved in directly opposite our kitchen windows.
The neighbor liked to stand in his own kitchen window, dressed only in an undershirt, raising and lowering his penis via a peculiar system of cords he’d hooked to his wall. Jack never saw Pulley Guy, because whenever a male walked into the room, Pulley Guy dematerialized. As soon as a woman entered the kitchen alone, Pulley Guy would reappear, hoisting his thing like an overachieving kid assigned to flagpole duty. We’d never seen our onanist’s face, because he pulled his blinds down to cover his head, but the rest of his body strongly resembled that of a rubber chicken. None of us could fathom what satisfaction he was deriving from the pulley.
This was the second summer that I’d lived in a building opposite an exhibitionist. The one before this had, at least, been insanely handsome: six foot something and the color of a piece of carved mahogany. Living across from him was like living within spitting distance of the David. Had I not known that he thought it was okay to get busy on his fire escape, both alone and with a variety of female companions, I might’ve gotten a crush on him. He’d been ridiculously well endowed, and watching his nightly show had been like a free trip to Amsterdam. Come 8:00 p.m., you’d find most of my building sitting on our own fire escapes, drinks in hand, some of us with binocul
ars. There’d been a betting pool in the building next to ours, involving just how long he could keep it up. The answer? Forever. Eventually, we’d all just get bored and go to bed. Nobody’d gotten laid that summer. Our Exhibitionist was too intimidating. Sometimes I’d see him at the grocery store. I’d know he was there, because of the mass exodus of neighborhood men, all ducking their heads in shame. The Exhibitionist would always grin and wink, place his Goya mango juice on the conveyor belt, and say, “Hey. How’s your life?”
“Not as good as yours,” I’d say, and we’d laugh, but I had no intention of following up on that particular flirtation. I’d seen the dude naked from twenty paces, and that had been close enough for me. Sleeping with him would have been like sleeping with a baguette. Besides, it was summer. Who wanted to get close to anything? It was too damned hot. All I wanted was to find a nice ice floe and drift away.
I WAS SITTING, DRAINED and bedraggled, at my kitchen table, trying to ignore the fact that Pulley Guy was frantically flipping his penis just ten feet away, when Taylor called to invite me to go dancing. The idea of going to a club and pressing my boiled body up against a bunch of other boiled bodies suddenly seemed brilliant, even though it was what I’d been complaining about the entire day.
“You have to wear a costume,” he said. “We’re going to this club called Mother. I’m going to read you the dress code. Got something to write with?”
“Come on. I’ll remember.”
“That’s what you think. ‘Cyberslut, gothic, classic fetish, dark fetish, vampire, trekkie, anime, sexy robot, imaginative head-to-toe-black, genderhacking, gothic erotica, Russ Meyer hot mama, dominatrix debutante, or access denied! No blue denim, no athletic wear, no white sneakers, no exceptions!’ You have to dress up. Got it?”
“Could you repeat that?” I said meekly, having decided I needed a pencil after all. It wasn’t like dressing up was a problem. I spent half my life in various weird costumes, particularly given that my budget ran to Early Salvation Army. But sexy robot? What exactly did that mean? C3PO dressed in crotchless panties and a push-up bra?
I made a dubious attempt at breast cones before determining that wearing a costume made of tinfoil and Scotch tape was not just flirting with disaster, but sleeping with disaster on the first date. The next several hours were spent staring morosely at my pile of clothing. Taylor, of course, would be wearing rubber.
I gave up and put on a black miniskirt and high-heeled boots, and tied a transparent chiffon scarf around my chest. I moved the hand mirror around for forty-five minutes, neurotic and unable to get a full view. I was pretty sure I’d get past the bouncer (I’d be the bouncer), but what if no one else had visible breasts? Rudy Giuliani, our mayor, had recently expressed the opinion that dancing led to drug use, and so rabid police had been patrolling the nightclubs. What if I got arrested? Not to mention the fact that going topless in public was something I’d never done before. Bottomless, alas, yes. The previous summer, I’d inadvertently exposed my ass to rush-hour Grand Central Station, having somehow tucked the hem of my skirt into my G-string, and then, clueless, walked the length of the terminal, wondering why I was getting so many catcalls.
Finally, I went downstairs to consult Pierre’s roommate, Annie, who was a dancer, and as such, always had ideas for how to keep from being obscene while in costume.
Pierre opened the door. I immediately crossed my arms over my chest.
“What?” said Pierre. He had a mixing bowl in his hand and was whisking furiously.
“Is Annie home?”
“Rehearsal. Taste this.” He stuck a finger in his bowl, and offered it to me. I opened my mouth and let him put his finger in it. It would have been almost sexy, had whatever was in the bowl not involved a psychotic quantity of habañero peppers.
“It’s too hot?” asked Pierre. I had stopped caring about exposed breasts and was bent over with my head in his kitchen sink, my mouth open under the faucet.
“Kind of spicy,” I croaked.
“So, you were coming to show me your tits?” He had his usual confident smirk, but one of his hands was fiddling with his earring.
“No, but now you’ve seen them. So? Can I go out like this?”
“Are you choking?”
“I don’t really need my trachea. What do you think?”
“Milk,” he said, and handed me a glass of it. He was right, although it was disturbing to have him appraising my breasts while handing me dairy products. He looked me up and down for a moment, and then went back to whisking.
“I think…nice rack,” said Pierre, his back to me.
I watched his shoulders for a moment. If he whisked any faster, he’d achieve liftoff.
“Thank you,” I said. For some reason, I was blushing. Why, I couldn’t tell. It was Pierre, for God’s sake. I fled, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.
I WORE A SWEATSHIRT on the subway and carefully avoided eye contact as I made my way to the meatpacking district, which was, at that time, still very much about meat. I had to pick my way over cobblestones divided by runnels of blood, until I got to the end of Fourteenth Street and a crowd of what looked like circus refugees. Taylor and his girlfriend, Janet, were among them. He was wearing a pair of leather hot pants, Day-Glo-striped knee socks, and nothing else. Nothing else, that is, but flaming red paint. She was wearing a fishnet body stocking with a sequined halter dress, and a red wig that matched Taylor’s paint.
“You didn’t get dressed up,” Taylor said, eyeing me with distinct annoyance.
I took off my sweatshirt. His eyes widened.
“What? You don’t think they’ll let me in?” He’d made me nervous.
Taylor grinned and slapped me on the back.
“That works,” he said.
And it did. The breasts were like a secret password. The bouncer took one look, raised his eyebrows, and waved me through. Even in this crowd full of people ranging from guys in black leather harnesses to a trio of women dressed as geek-sirens (fishnets, thigh-high boots, Scotch-taped horn-rim glasses, tiny white shirts with pocket protectors), it seemed I’d gone off the deep end. Luckily for me, the deep end was where everyone wanted to swim. I got more compliments in ten minutes than I’d gotten in my entire life.
“Can I just say that your tits are completely subversive?” one man in leather chaps and sideburns told me.
“Because they’re real!” his companion chimed in, from behind the unzipped mouth of his/her full-body black latex suit. “Nothing’s real anymore!”
“Come dance with us,” said Taylor, dragging me away from a transvestite who wanted to compare bra sizes.
The dance floor was a sauna of grinding, twisting, gorgeous people. Sweat hung in a mist over the room. Taylor, doing his own peculiar brand of the robot, shook us into the fray. Dancing with Taylor was never really dancing with him. You danced in the vicinity of Taylor, being careful to avoid his high-stepping knees. He always danced with his eyes shut, but he was also very kind in that he opened them every five minutes or so, to verify the safety of his female companions.
Marilyn Manson’s song “The Beautiful People,” a paean to freakiness, was inspiring everyone in the room to shout along. I wasn’t that familiar with his music and I didn’t know the words, but I shouted anyway. Someone danced up behind me and grabbed me around the waist. Long, silver fake fingernails on slender, pale hands. A wrist corsage. Pink roses and baby’s breath. I had to turn around to see what the hell I was dancing with.
And it was shocking. At least, shocking for a girl from Idaho. Long, stick-straight black hair. Bicolored eyes, one ice blue, one dark. Skin pale as Wite-Out. A 1950s pink tulle strapless prom dress. Dark red lipstick. Six feet tall, rail thin, and definitely male.
“Hi,” I said, taking a step back. “What’s your name? I’m Maria. I’ve never been here before. Have you? It’s kind of dark, don’t you think? I like the music! I hate house music! But this isn’t really house, is it? More, what would you say? Goth?” I had an
unfortunate tendency to talk too much when I felt awkward. Also, when I felt comfortable. In fact, I talked too much all the time.
He said nothing. He just smiled. Vampire fangs. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but since I didn’t recall ever meeting anyone so weird before, I decided that maybe it was just that he reminded me of the villainous stepmother, Maleficent, from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. The Prom Queen extended his hand to me and curtsied an invitation to dance. Well. Okay. Year of Yes. I gave him a bow, and then I danced with the man. Why the hell not? I was getting to twirl with the belle of the ball. I wasn’t just lost in a fantasy. I speedily discovered that everyone else in the room wanted to dance with this guy, too. Taylor opened his eyes and squinted at me from behind the Prom Queen’s shoulder. He mouthed “Are you okay?”
I nodded and shrugged. Taylor shut his eyes again. “The Beautiful People” continued to play. The entire room raised its fists in the air and rapturously tossed their heads.
I liked the song. I’d heard it before, but apparently never in the right context. The silver fingernails were groping my breasts. I let them. I’d put them on display, after all. I was trying to be liberated. Besides, when else was I going to be groped by a guy in a cotillion gown? It hadn’t been on my list of life goals, admittedly, but it was the kind of thing that you didn’t know you’d kind of like until you kind of did.
A neon redhead in black tulle came up beside us just then and shoved me. She’d been dancing next to us for a while, staring adoringly at the Prom Queen and jealously at me. In fact, there were several people who seemed to want to cut in. We were in the middle of the floor, and we were being circled by a bunch of dance club werewolves. I tried to ignore them, but it wasn’t exactly easy, particularly as the woman had, by then, come up behind me, and was dancing with her arms reaching around my waist to grab my partner. For a while, the three of us danced uncomfortably in a mass of knees, tits, and netting.