Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  “So are you a pony, or what?” he asked, zooming his red MG out of the crowded parking lot, turning sharply right on two wheels, careening down a small street as though we were escaping from a crime scene.

  “A pony?” I laughed. What the hell was he talking about? “Not unless I’ve just grown two more legs.”

  “Let’s see,” he said, squeezing my kneecap. “Nope, feels like a maydeleh’s leg to me.” He didn’t remove his fingers. What was I supposed to do? If he was really a powerful agent, as E. J. had said, I wanted him to like me. How else would I get an agent? But I couldn’t let him keep his hand on my knee. I lifted it, a damp, heavy paw, and fixed a smile on my face. “Now, now,” I said in what I hoped was a charming shiksa lilt, “we’ve only just met.”

  At Googie’s, a Sunset Strip diner, Mel Kaufman asked the hostess for a table right in the middle of the room. He kept swiveling his head around and waving to people who waved or nodded back—men who wore big diamond rings on their pinkies, women who were slim and tall with flawless complexions and long, mascaraed lashes. “You see that girl. Sexy, huh? It’s Mara Corday. I got her signed to The Quiet Gun.” “Recognize that guy from Mister Roberts? William Henry, one of my boys.” My head swiveled along with Mel Kaufman’s. “How’d you like to read at Paramount Studio, next week?” he asked me between giant bites of tuna sandwich.

  I put my own ham and cheese down on my plate and tried to swallow the wad that was in my mouth. So I had impressed him somehow. Though he hadn’t even heard my monologues yet, he’d seen something in me that made him think I could audition at Paramount Studio. Was it really, finally, after a lifetime of hoping and dreaming, going to happen? “I’d like that very much,” I told him, surprising myself by how suave my voice sounded although I was ready to soft-shoe on the ceiling.

  I learned on the drive back to Mel’s office (as wild as the drive to Googie’s) that it was for Tom Saulus he’d arranged the audition. “I got you another reader,” he said, introducing me to a powerfully built young man with an even profile and big white teeth who was lounging in Mel’s chair now, black-sneakered feet folded on the metal desk, reading the green sports section of the Herald.

  “How ya doin’?” Tom looked over the top of his paper and acknowledged me with a slight wave of a hammy hand.

  “If the studio people like the scene, Tom’ll get a screen test,” Mel explained, handing me some pages from Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, a play I already knew because I’d read it in the back row of my algebra class.

  “By when do I have to have it memorized?” I asked them, ready to stay up all night if necessary.

  Tom let his agent do the talking. He’d gone back to perusing the baseball scores.

  “You just read it. You don’t have to memorize,” Mel answered, as though I’d asked a stupid question.

  I was Florence in the three-minute scene we rehearsed the next day. I had five lines: “I know you’re not, I know.” “I know.” “I got a lump in my throat, honey.” “The park was nice.” “Sid, I’ll go with you.” The rest of the speeches belonged to Tom, who kept his gaze in the middle distance as I fed him the lines. His acting was wooden and he used his hands like a robot, yet he was getting an audition at Paramount. Why? I was a Bernhardt compared to him, but Mel intended this to be Tom’s audition, not mine. The dumb injustice of it!

  Waiting at the bus stop in front of Mel’s office, I decided that as soon as I got home I’d call and say he’d have to get someone else to feed Tom lines. But before I reached Stanley Avenue I changed my mind—after all, what did I have to lose? I’d have an opportunity to step on the same gravel where Gloria Swanson and Barbara Stanwyck and Shirley Booth had placed their glorious feet … and who knows what might happen?

  “Who knows,” Mel said as he drove me to the studio the next week, “you might catch their eye. Doesn’t matter if you only have a few lines, they might like what they see. Stranger things have happened.” I remembered the Lana Turner legend of my childhood. I would give it my all.

  “Did they say anything?” I dared to ask Mel as we whizzed away from the Paramount lot. I held on to the seat with my fingernails. He was going to kill somebody one of these days.

  “They’ll call. Tom did a great job,” he said. “So, what did you think of the inside of Paramount Studio?” This time his hand landed in my lap and his fingers darted between my legs. The paw stuck like a boulder when I grabbed it. “Hey, hey, you want me to have an accident?” he laughed, speeding up the car and pulling abruptly onto a side street. He stopped the MG in front of a house with closed shutters and turned the motor off.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. Before I could make sense of what was happening, he’d unzipped his pants and pulled out his member. I snapped my head away, but I’d already seen it—a gargantuan dark rod. “Please take me back,” I said, struggling to hold my voice steady. There was no movement in the unfamiliar street—no cars, no one in sight anywhere on the tree-shaded sidewalks or in the front yards bordered by picket fences.

  “Don’t worry, just give me your hand,” he rasped. I fought to keep my hand away, balling it into a fist, yanking it from his grip while he fought to force me to touch the thing, to hold it. A serpentine monster. A deadly gun. In all my struggles—with Chuck, with Jake Mann, with Falix Lieber—I’d never seen one.

  I rescued my fist, kept it balled like a street fighter’s. “Dammit, take me back!”

  “Hey, hey, how far you think you’ll get in Hollywood?” He looked at me with a sincere expression, as if he was offering a bit of reasonable advice, but his round cheeks were splotched red. “Okay, just sit there,” he said when I glared.

  I edged my body close to the door. I could open it and get out and run. I wasn’t trapped in the car. But then I’d have to admit it was all over, all my Hollywood dreams. And I didn’t even know where to run. I had twenty cents in my pocket, and that wouldn’t even get me a bus ride home from this distant neighborhood whose name I didn’t even know. I turned my head away. I could hear his hand moving quickly up and down the ugly pole. I forced my eyes to keep staring straight ahead, but I still saw the movement peripherally. I turned back to him, ready to beg him to stop, careful to look only at his face, but I could still see all of him, see him grab a starched white handkerchief from his breast pocket, cover the hand that moved, close his eyes. I was glued there, my own eyes lidless. He shuddered and let out a big breath.

  “Okay, let’s go,” he said seconds later with good cheer, tossing the wadded handkerchief over his seat, fumbling with the fly of his pants; the tires screeched as he tore out onto the street. When he pulled up in front of his office building he glanced over at me, and his lips spread in a friendly, gap-toothed grin. “I guess you don’t know the game, huh?” he said.

  “Go to hell, you bastard!” I snarled after I jumped free of the car. “I hope it falls off!”

  I almost bumped into an elderly, blue-haired lady carrying an I. Magnin hatbox. She’d heard what I said and gave me a sidelong, horrified look as she scurried on.

  ***

  I’m twenty-six maybe. Not sixteen. (Is it me or is it the pitiful, dark-haired creature that I’ve seen twice wandering around Hollywood Boulevard, looking as though she’d been hit in the head?) I’m wearing red circles of rouge on my cheeks and black circles of mascara around my eyes. My nylon stockings have huge tears that go from my shoes all the way up to my knees and beyond; the garters rolled on them three days earlier don’t keep them from sagging. My stained skirt is practically as high as my pupik, as my aunt used to say, my bellybutton. I cross the street and a truck swerves and honks, but I’m oblivious. I’ve walked up and down and around for hours, for days. I’m for sale, and nobody will buy. The furious driver circles the truck back and zooms toward me, but my mother appears and without a second’s pause throws herself under its wheels.

  8. THE OPEN DOOR

  THE GOLDEN APPLE would never be mine. I’d never get by the fearsome guardians at the gate beca
use I’d never be a girl who could charm them like Doris Day, or make them silly with desire like Marilyn Monroe. How could I have believed that Lilly from Fanny’s furnished room could win the golden apple? Girls like me were used for something else in Hollywood. And now I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life.

  Then we moved because Albert had a fight with Mrs. Ostroff, the landlady. She told him what a slob he was when he refused to wrap the garbage in a sack before throwing it in the communal can. He shook his fist and yelled at her, “Go to hell!”

  “I’m getting an eviction notice,” she yelled back.

  He found us a little court bungalow on Fountain Avenue, just a few blocks from Hollywood Boulevard. “It’s more cheap too,” he told my mother. “May an onion grow out of her nose.”

  I kept going to Geller’s because I had nowhere else to go that summer, and if I stayed home my mother drove me crazy. Everything I did was an unsettling mystery to her.

  “Some lady with a funny voice is on the telephone for you.” She stood at my door looking aggravated one evening soon after the Mel Kaufman fiasco. “Choo Choo Sand.”

  “I don’t know anybody by that name. What kind of funny voice?”

  “I dunno. With an accent. Who do you know with an accent?”

  Some stupid prankster from high school? I didn’t need this now. I marched into the living room and grabbed the receiver. “Hello, who’s this?”

  “Who?” my agitated mother echoed, standing right behind me.

  “The Queen of the Night.” The melodramatic falsetto sounded familiar. “So is your name up in lights yet or was Miss Mary right?” it dropped two octaves to say. “Let’s bury the knitting needle, Glenda. I want to see you.”

  Eddy. I hadn’t heard from him in a year, not since he’d been insulting about Irene and laughed at me about Geller’s. Why had he come back into my life?

  Eddy came to pick me up with a young man he introduced as “Zack, my boyfriend,” and when we parked on Western Avenue he told me we were going to a new place they’d just heard about, the Hearts and Spades. “It’s a place where the guys like other guys,” he said with a laugh. I’d heard words like fairy and queer because people used them at Geller’s. I knew Eddy was like that, though I’d never before put a name to it, and now I also understood from the way he kept his hand on Zack’s muscled thigh as he drove that they were lovers. For a brief second it felt strange to think about, but soon it made me feel sort of comfortable, though I couldn’t have said how or why. Maybe it was because I knew Eddy’s hand on Zack’s thigh was about sex, yet it didn’t trigger in me those disturbing images that sometimes crept through my brain like bogeymen stealing through my window—the Silent Film Star in that mirrored bedroom, Mel in his parked car.

  The Hearts and Spades was dark and dank, and the alcohol fumes reeked even before we pushed open the heavy door. It was on Sunset Boulevard, but far east of Vine, in a neighborhood that had never been glamorous despite its proximity to the real thing. Eddy said to call him Herman Hermine because that’s who his phony identification said he was, and he slipped me a tattered birth certificate that said Arlene Knopfelmacher, born 1934. I was to show it to the cocktail waitress if she asked my age because you couldn’t drink in California until you were twenty-one. As I sipped at the Brandy Alexander that Eddy ordered for me I felt like an outlaw—and it was fun, like my double-agent act, the kid in high school and the grownup at Geller’s.

  Eddy’s boyfriend was fun too. He looked like a tough, with a full beard, high-laced work boots, tight Levi’s, and a battleship tattoo, yet he articulated his words precisely and his eyes were soft brown. He was in costume, I saw right away, and of course I understood the idea of costume very well. I liked him, and I also liked the people around us in the Hearts and Spades. They were mostly men, but I wasn’t a rabbit among coyotes here. When we’d only been inside a few minutes, one of them came up to our table and said to me, “Can I tell you that you’ve got beautiful eyes?” But I knew he wasn’t flirting. “Yoo hoo, Charlie,” he soon called, waving to his friend who walked through the door.

  Zack was quickly a happy drunk, and though I’d had only one Brandy Alexander, he and Eddy and I sat slouched with our arms around one another, giggling immoderately at the tales he told about his year on a navy ship. “Zack, the Belle of the Pacific,” Eddy called his boyfriend, and we all toasted the navy. I was having a fine time. I couldn’t even remember when I’d had such a fine time before. “Say, I know a bar where the gay girls go,” Zack confided after another patriotic toast.

  “She’s straight, dodo.” I saw Eddy nudge him in the ribs. “Ain’t you?” He winked at me.

  Gay girls. I’d seen them once at Venice Beach, where I’d gone with the Geller’s gang. Simone and Stan had wanted to get lunch at a little Mexican restaurant up the boardwalk. “That’s a gay bar,” Stan had said as we passed a place with a big printed sign on the roof: LUCKY’S. “You know, they’re queers,” he’d added when we looked at him uncomprehendingly. A tan man in bermuda shorts had stood at the door of the place and called to a black poodle, “Come to poppa.”

  “Oh, Deb, she has to go potty,” a pretty young woman had said, and then I’d looked again and saw that “poppa” was a woman too. Queers. I’d grabbed Stan’s arm as we walked by.

  Eddy drove through neighborhoods that got worse and worse: newspaper-littered sidewalks, boarded-up store windows, burnt-out abandoned automobiles. As we slowed down at the corner of 8th and Vermont, an elderly woman, wearing a red hat perched on her head in drunken lopsidedness, lurched across the street, barely missing us. Eddy parked in front of a place with a green lettered sign: THE OPEN DOOR. “Miss Thang, are you ready?” he asked as though presenting something fabulous, then led me in with an arm light around my waist, as though we were two girlfriends. Zack stumbled behind.

  “I think we’re the only guys here, loosely speaking,” Zack slurred after a quick glance around, “except for him.” He gestured with his head at a bespectacled man standing at the long bar who tugged nervously at his starched white collar, and Eddy whispered something in my ear.

  “What?” I shouted above the din of the jukebox and voices.

  “Fish queen,” he shouted back.

  “What?” I shouted again, still unable to make sense of the words, but Eddy had turned to the bartender to order three beers.

  I looked around. What was Zack talking about? There seemed to be plenty of men—or at least boys—in the dim, smoky room. Most were dressed a little like the pachucos—duck pants with button-down long-sleeve shirts open at the raised collar, a patch of white T-shirt showing beneath, hair slicked back in a pomaded duck’s ass.

  Then I grabbed for Zack as I had for Stan at Venice Beach.

  “Whoa … What’s happening?” Zack laughed. “You okay?”

  I’d been staring at the one my eye had selected as the handsomest of the boys, with dark curls that fell over his ivory forehead and gold cat’s eyes with black lashes, and he winked when he caught me staring. His stance was a pose—one crisp pant leg forward, the palm of his right hand cupped over a cigarette that he brought to his lips from time to time, the fingers of his left hand holding a beer bottle by its neck—a tough guy pose calculated to look like James Dean, I thought, or Elvis Presley. Presley’s “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” blared on the jukebox. And then the boy transmogrified into a girl, which was when I grabbed Zack’s arm. But now I let go.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I answered Zack. Suddenly I was more than fine. They were all girls, I saw now. A lot of the more feminine ones were decked out in capri pants and high heels, the uniform Simone had taught me to wear that signified sexy. I wasn’t out of place here. Some of them stood with the boy-looking ones at the crowded bar, their arms around each other. Some couples sat together at tables and held hands. One pair stared into each other’s eyes as though no one else were around. The girl—the feminine one—had a face full of makeup and a hairdo of elaborate auburn curls an
d swirls, and the other one lifted a hand and let it rest gently on her friend’s cheek. They kissed, right there in the crowded bar, and I watched. I liked it. I loved it.

  “You’re looking odd, Miss Chicklet. Shall we depart?” Eddy pulled at my collar.

  “I’m never leaving! This is where I want to be,” I laughed, and tears sprang to my eyes and rolled down my cheeks. Was it the turmoil I’d been through in the past months that made me so emotional, standing there on the packed floor of the Open Door? I don’t know. But I felt as I had when I’d first glimpsed Irene hanging the picture of the tutued dancers and she’d turned her violet eyes on me. Though there was no one that night at the Open Door who overwhelmed me as she had, I was transported. It was as if I was looking through a brilliant prism that reflected all the parts of my life with absolute clarity and brought them together, wondrously, into one intelligible whole.

  “Copy cat. Just because I told you I was gay, you want to be too.” Eddy’s words were teasing, but I could tell he wasn’t happy with me. “You don’t even know what it’s all about,” he said later, when he drove me home.

  “Well, I’m gonna find out,” I answered.

  “He’s just trying to protect you,” Zack said from the back seat, where he lay stretched out. “It’s a hard … hard life,” he hiccupped.

  All day long I’d replayed the images of the night before in my head. The cat’s eyes of the ivory-skinned girl in boy’s clothes who winked at me, the one who touched her friend’s cheek, Elvis Presley’s voice on the jukebox, “Hold me close, hold me tight”—that was the song they played over and over. “This is where I want to be,” I’d told Eddy. Now I could think of nothing else, not even my resolve that I wouldn’t upset my worried mother anymore. “Important rehearsal,” I shouted to her as I was halfway out the door at eight o’clock the next evening.

  The Open Door. I even loved its name. I swung open the door, and all eyes seemed to turn to me, but only for an instant, and then I was pulled into Presley and the beer fumes and the din.