Mama Jean got her mink and locked arms with Dad and me, and we exited to embrace the exhilarating city outside: sharp cold, honking horns, clanging Salvation Army bells, nasal voices. Joey and her escorts were ten paces ahead of us.
Joey was flipping her artfully messy pixie cut to and fro between the two men as she cooed and cackled. One man goosed Joey at the waist. She squealed.
You can have Disneyland. Who needs that when there’s New York? I thought.
I looked down the canyon of West Fifty-seventh Street and glanced up at the chorus line of towering buildings. Just as my gaze came back to earth, Joey screeched to a stop on the sidewalk. She tore open her mink, tossed her head back in a laugh, and threw her right leg over her head in the highest kick I’d ever seen.
The three of us stopped in our tourist tracks as strangers whirled past us. Mama Jean and Dad turned to me and said in unison, “That’s Joey Heatherton!”
Joey closed her coat and kept walking, her ecstatic laughter leading the way.
I learned later that Joey had once been a movie star, had once been a TV star, had once been a Las Vegas headliner. Had once been. By that time she was better known for dancing provocatively in Serta mattress commercials in a hot-pink, bell-bottom, halter-top pantsuit. Four years after her high kick on West Fifty-seventh Street, headlines blazed, “Arrested for Drugs and Assault, Perennial Starlet Joey Heatherton Finally Crashes to Earth.”
But the essence of what I knew about Joey Heatherton on that brisk December day, on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York City, was that I wanted to feel like her at that moment. And I never wanted to crash back to earth.
SEVEN
Lost in Acapulco
Somewhere in Kansas There’s a photo of me. I’ve never seen it, but the details of that snapshot are almost as clear to me as every other detail of the day it was taken. I’m standing in the surf of a beach in Acapulco and flashing a virginal smile, my braces sparkling in the brazen Mexican sun like sequins on a Bob Mackie dress. Besides that smile, I’m wearing a pair of cornflower-blue, nylon, Ocean Pacific, short-short swimming trunks with three stripes in red, pink, and orange forming a V at the Velcro fly. Not a teaspoon of fat is on my fifteen-year-old frame, and my hair shines like a new penny. The ocean is behind me and I’m facing the Acapulco Princess resort, but I’m not looking at the Princess. I’m standing with my hands on my hips and inviting the photographer to stare back at me. Hard.
It was day two or three of a family vacation with Mama Jean, Dad, and my brother Jeffrey in 1983, the summer before my sophomore year. I was almost as excited to be there as I had been on that New York trip. Acapulco was loaded with the promise of glamour and excitement. I remember Mama Jean and Dad’s stories about spending a week at a cliffside villa. And Jackie O spent her first honeymoon in Acapulco. Come to think of it, Mama Jean spent her first honeymoon in Acapulco. If I believed Mama Jean’s talk about good girls not putting out before the gold band, I suppose she became a woman in Acapulco.
Ah, Acapulco. It had been a dream destination since I was five.
We didn’t start out at the Acapulco Princess. We were booked downtown at the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza. None of us were happy there, especially Mama Jean.
“Well, this looked a hell of a lot nicer in the brochure. And the place is full of Mexicans.”
“Well, Jean, we are in Mexico,” Dad said. “The Mexicans here aren’t like the ones we have at home.”
That night Mama Jean and Dad surprised us with a fancy dinner at the Acapulco Princess, which was twenty miles from downtown. Mama Jean primed me to be dazzled. “If you want to talk about swanky, you’re talking about the Princess. I’m telling you, y’all won’t want to leave.”
We arrived at dusk, the palm-shaded road still dappled with sun. As we made the mile-long approach up the drive, I peered out the taxi window, eager for my first glimpse of the famed resort. I felt like Joan Fontaine as the innocent young bride in Rebecca as her jaded husband, Maxim de Winter, drives her through the forested path on her first approach to his legendary estate, Manderley: full of desire and anticipation but not knowing quite what to expect. The trees and tropical vegetation parted to reveal three ersatz Aztec temples of luxury. I gaped in wonder as we crossed the marble-and-stone, open-air lobby, which soared to the peak of the building with vine-covered balconies stair-stepped along the way.
“See. I told y’all y’all would like it,” Mama Jean said.
We had a steak dinner and were serenaded by a mariachi band and had our photo taken with the band as we raised our salted margaritas. (I got to have a tropical drink or two when we were on vacation.) “You can have one margarita with dinner. One,” Mama Jean said. After dinner Jeffrey and I explored a fraction of the 480-acre property. The resort sat on a private beach, and we saw two of the five pools, including a saltwater “lagoon” with a grotto accessed by swimming under a waterfall. Jeffrey dubbed it the Get ’Em Grotto because we saw a couple heavily panting and pawing each other at the entrance.
Mama Jean was right. We didn’t want to leave, and thanks to her, we weren’t going to. “Earl, I’ve got us two rooms here starting tomorrow.”
“Are we going to be stuck paying for the rooms we’ve got?”
“I don’t care. This is where I want to be. Besides, I’m paying for it.”
I was with Mama Jean.
By two o’clock the next afternoon, Jeffrey and I were in room 1010, a white terrazzo-tiled affair with a balcony facing the beach. Mama Jean and Dad were in the same kind of room down the hall. By two-thirty Jeffrey and I were sunning by the lagoon with the Get ’Em Grotto, Mama Jean was shopping for silver, and Dad was reading the paper and having a glass of wine in the lobby bar.
This was Jeffrey’s first family vacation since he’d announced to Mama Jean four years prior that, like her dear friend Henny, he was gay. Even though Jeffrey and Ronny were full-blood brothers and only seventeen months apart, Jeffrey and I were closest. Thin as the wing of a plane and tall as a skyscraper, he had sharp features inherited from his father and almost-black hair inherited from Mama Jean. We didn’t look alike, but when we were younger, Mama Jean liked to dress us in matching outfits. Beige-and-red-plaid bell-bottoms with beige velour tops are the twin outfits that stick in my mind.
Jeffrey was my third parent, mentor, and best friend, and was forever inspiring me to fantasy and make-believe. After he told a six-year-old me about Ann-Margret’s face-crushing fall on a Las Vegas stage, I reenacted the fall dressed in a blanket as my strapless gown. I fell off the bed I used for the stage and rushed myself to the bathroom for plastic surgery. Ronny, on the other hand, was a loner redneck who liked to race dirt bikes and go to Neil Diamond concerts. Mama Jean described him as marching to a different drummer. Maybe Ronny seemed to march to a different drummer because he wasn’t gay.
Jeffrey’s announcement was a double feature. Not only was he gay, but he was leaving the nest to move to Houston. And he was leaving with his boyfriend. I was eleven or twelve. I remember Mama Jean sitting in a burnt-orange wingback chair and crying. She explained to me that Jeffrey was gay and it was breaking her heart. When she asked, “Do you know what gay means?” I had a flashback to Mrs. Chambers asking me if I knew what a sissy was. “Yes.” I didn’t say anything else. I just listened with a poker face to mask my fear. Then she stopped talking. Her sobs were the only sounds in the room. I wanted to leave but was frozen in place on the floor at her feet. After she stopped crying and wiped the mascara running from her eyes like spilled ink, she looked down at me with a stare that could freeze lava and asked, “Do you have feelings like that? Because if you do, tell me now. I’ll take you to see a psychiatrist.”
I wanted to say, If you have to ask…, but instead I answered with a clipped, high-pitched “Nope” and scurried to my room, where the original-Broadway-cast album of Mame was still playing. I’d known the answer to that question for a long time, ever since she’d asked me the first $64,000 question: if I had passed semen.
I had.
I was already interactively reading the issues of Penthouse Forum that Jeffrey had left behind. They had bi and gay stories, so I knew what to do, knew what went on out there. I remember watching a report on television about what was then described as a gay cancer. Shots of shirtless men dancing at a disco were overlaid with a voice talking about how the promiscuous lifestyle of gay men might be spreading the new disease.
“Makes me sick,” Mama Jean said in disgust. I thought to myself, Don’t stop the fun before I get there!
By the time I hit that deck chair at the Get ’Em Grotto, I was ready. I hadn’t confided in Jeffrey that I looked up to him in more ways than he imagined, and if he was bothered that Mama Jean hadn’t extended an invitation to his boyfriend to join us, he didn’t say. Instead we ordered a couple of piña coladas and simply basked in the sunshine of our Acapulco Princess good fortune. Jeffrey fell asleep on the deck chair. The piña colada that I quickly downed left me restless and ready for adventure. “Jeffrey, are you asleep?” He was. I left him there and meandered down the stone path that led to the other pools.
The first one was all water wings, inflatable sea horses, and shrieks of “Marco!” “Polo!” The kiddie pool. Ew. I kept moving. I found the adult pool. The scene there was a party, the pool an aquatic lounge.
I sat on the edge of the cement pond to soak in the scene. I wasn’t afraid of the water anymore, just wisely cautious. The pool was enormous and curved in and out and ended—or began—with a swim-up bar under a thatched roof near a waterfall. The entire pool was shallow, since it was meant for lounging and libations. Every submerged stool at the bar was occupied by men and women holding a rainbow of umbrella-studded tropical drinks: yellow piña coladas, pink strawberry daiquiris, lime margaritas, blue curaçao Hawaiians. A woman in a macramé bikini and floppy hat was making out with a man wearing a gold chain. They both had savage tans. Spilling out from the bar into the chlorinated lake were pairs of men and women holding their drinks high above the water as their heads floated on the surface, besotted hippos. Shrieks of laughter rippled from one end of the pool to the other and back again. It wasn’t that different from the kiddie pool, just another set of games.
Like a cat whose eyes go from lazy indifference to wide-eyed alert as it spots the only two birds in a forest of trees, my eyes zoomed in on the only two men in Speedo bikinis. They were frolicking in the middle of the pool. The one in the lime-green bikini was coquettishly posing for the one in the navy-blue bikini with red and white racing stripes on the side. Limey was tall and lanky like me, with curly brown hair and a light spray of freckles across his face and arms. Racing Stripes, the older one, was stocky, solid muscle, and almost short. A towhead, he had Windex-blue eyes just like my first-grade boyfriend, Eric. In a ricochet of penetrating glances, I caught Limey’s eye, and he caught mine and tossed it to Racing Stripes, who threw the ball back in my court. Tennis, anyone?
I cocked my head to the side and smiled, with my arms in straight lines behind me, the silhouette pose of a sexy woman on a Mack truck’s mud flaps. I wouldn’t be surprised if I licked my lips. Limey posed for another shot, gazing over his left shoulder at the camera. Just as Racing Stripes cried, “Say cheese!,” Limey pulled down the back of his bikini to expose a bare cheek like the little girl in those Coppertone sunscreen ads. When the camera clicked, he winked and shot his smile straight through me. If a bolt of lightning had struck that pool, I wouldn’t have noticed. I was already electrified.
They got out of the pool and walked over to me. I pumped my legs in the water like Lolita and looked up as their near-naked bodies dripped on me. Racing Stripes took the lead and squatted on his haunches, offering his hand with a Pepsodent smile.
“Hi, I’m Vernon. This is Kelly.” I shook Vernon’s hand and Limey/Kelly squatted down to offer his hand.
“I’m Jamie. Nice to meet y’all.”
“Want to take a walk?” Vernon asked, his head tilted in the direction of the beach.
“Why not?” I said, thinking, I can’t believe this is really happening.
They told me that they lived in Kansas and were at the Princess for a company sales conference. “His job,” Kelly clarified, indicating Vernon. How old are they? Kelly was probably Jeffrey’s age, twenty to twenty-three. Vernon? I don’t know. But they were hot. And they were men. That was all I needed to know.
“I’m here on vacation,” I said, omitting with my family.
Making more small talk, we sauntered from the adult pool to the beach.
“Hey, why don’t you stand in the ocean and I’ll take your picture?” Vernon said.
“Okay” was my nonchalant reply, as in Sure. I do this all the time. I’m used to it. I walked out to the ocean and turned my back on the waves. “Here?”
“Just a little further back,” Vernon said. “Yeah. That’s it.”
I struck my pose in the broiling sun, wishing I were in a wet bikini instead of my Ocean Pacific trunks—wishing I had a bikini. Someday.
Then I let the pose go as we waited for a parade of souvenir vendors to walk past.
They passed.
“Okay?” Vernon asked.
“Okay.” I struck the pose again and flashed my thousand-watt smile of sparkling braces.
“Say cheese!” Kelly shouted.
“Cheese!” I shouted back.
“Jamie!” Dad yelled.
My smile melted as I turned my gaze from Limey and Racing Stripes to see Dad standing ten feet away from them with popped eyes and raised eyebrows. The adrenaline in my body was still pumping, but it sank from palpitations in my heart to a lump in my stomach. I robotically walked out of the ocean toward Dad, ignoring my new friends from Kansas. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them drift away.
Dad held my gaze as I walked toward him. I couldn’t read his furrowed brow as either a look of shock or worry. Probably both.
“Hi, Dad,” I said as I reached him.
“What were you doing?”
“Just walking on the beach.”
“Who were those guys?”
“I don’t know. Just some guys. They asked if they could take my picture.”
He stared at me, his face frozen in his brows-raised, eyes-popped look, but he didn’t inquire further. “Well, you need to be more careful. Come on.” He walked ahead of me and away from where Limey and Racing Stripes had been standing. I followed and we walked along the beach side by side for thirty minutes in silence. I didn’t know what to say. I guess he didn’t either.
* * *
At sunset that evening I found myself draining a frozen margarita back at the deck of the adult pool. Mama Jean was holding out her left wrist to model the collection of silver bangles she had bought that afternoon. Dad, Jeffrey, and I oohed and aahed on cue.
“I could shoot myself for not getting the necklace that goes with these. I’m just sick about it.”
“Well, honey, you’ve already got plenty of silver,” Dad said.
“But not like this. I’m going to have to go back to that store downtown before we leave.”
“How about another margarita, Mom?” Jeffrey asked.
“Yeah. We’ll get it,” I said, taking the opportunity to sneak in one more.
“I don’t know. Y’all might have to carry me upstairs if I have another,” she said with her eyes crossed and her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth.
“Oh, have a second one, honey,” Dad said with a head point toward the bar as he tilted his empty glass at Jeffrey and me. Jeffrey and I scurried off before she could change her mind.
We stood leaning on the circular bar as Jeffrey, to my right, ordered a round of drinks. Out of the corner of my left eye I saw a lightly freckled arm resting on the bar. Limey. I caught his eyes and smiled at him and glanced toward Jeffrey to halt him from speaking.
I turned away from Limey and said to Jeffrey, “Make sure mine is salted.”
“Right.” Jeffrey then called the bartender over to clarify the order.
Limey pushed a drink receipt toward me. I saw that he had scribbled “Room 910” on the back of it. He whispered in my ear, “Here’s our room number. Call us. We’ll be in our room for the next hour.” His hot breath in my ear nearly melted me. I leaned harder on the bar as my left leg shot up behind me, bent at the knee. I turned to Jeffrey just as Limey was pulling away from my ear.
“Thanks!” I said to Jeffrey overenthusiastically. We gathered our drinks and joined Mama Jean and Dad poolside.
Midway through our drinks, I asked Jeffrey for our room key with the excuse that I needed to go to the bathroom. I took the key from Jeffrey and fought the urge to run to the elevator as I caressed the piece of paper with “910” scrawled on it. Jeffrey and I were in 1010, so they were directly below us. I saw this as a good omen. I rang them from 1010.
Vernon answered, “Hello.” His voice went up in anticipation on the lo.
He said that he and Kelly were going to a big company dinner that night and then out to the bars downtown. The bars!
“Oh, I wish I could go,” I said, twirling the phone cord, “but I have dinner plans.”
“Maybe you could come to our room later? We should be back from the bars by midnight.” Each time he said “the bars” I tingled. “Want to stop by then?”
“Sure. Sounds good,” I said with bravado, wondering if I could make it happen.
* * *
“You’re not hungry?” Mama Jean asked as I pushed my enchilada verde around my plate.
“Too many chips and guacamole by the pool.” I was too excited to eat. I hadn’t been this excited since the day before my first drama tournament in junior high.
“Uh, y’all don’t look now”—Mama Jean leaned her head forward—“but look at the next table.”
We all started to turn.
“I said don’t look. But I want y’all to see this couple at the next table. Okay, look now. But quick.”
We looked. A man was staring intently into his woman’s eyes as he fed her a piece of lobster claw. When she reached the end of the lobster meat, she began fellating his finger and moaning.
Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir Page 6