Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  Not fans, vultures! Normalyn remembered Miss Bertha’s judgment. Waiting to pay them back because they had been adored. There were those who continued to love them always, but not here. Normalyn closed her eyes to purify the living voice:

  They’ve been so long

  on lonely street

  They never will go back. . . .

  Dressed in clashing tatters, a woman followed him on stage. She staggered about with a bottle of whiskey. Over the derision, Janis Joplin’s voice lilted over hurt and joy. . . . A man in black vinyl pants followed, his hands at his groin hinting with coy naughtiness that he might expose himself.

  “I’ll light your fire, baby!” screamed a hoarse woman.

  Normalyn would have left long ago, disgusted by the ugly spectacle of invited cruelty. She would have been certain the woman depicted in the poster would be another parody, except that she had been billed as “Marilyn’s daughter,” not as Marilyn Monroe.

  Rusty Hills subdued the laughter. “And now, for the first time, the Legend of Legends. Marilyn Mon—” His voice a whisper, he paused to retain the magic of the name: “Marilyn Monroe’s daughter!”

  As he disappeared, a backdrop of light created a white dawn. Whistles shot out in anticipation of ridicule. No one moved into the horizon of light. The restive audience waited. Silence pushed at gathered laughter. The stage remained empty until the audience had quieted.

  Then a silhouette of curves appeared against the artificial dawn. The woman assumed the pose in the poster, one white-gloved hand on her thigh, the other held up, out, a glamorous victor without challenge.

  The audience surrendered silence. Only then did the woman on stage move. A leg parted a slit in the dress, arousing sequins. The purred words commanded:

  That old black magic that I know so well . . .

  This voice was not taped. It was the performer’s. The voice, the movements suggested Marilyn Monroe’s, without mocking. Gleaming red lips shaped the movie star’s sexual breaths, but in between were moments of a bluesy bitter-sweetness that was the performer’s, only hers. Her movements released an added energy, a rhythm of sensuality as the woman stalked the stage with perfect legs.

  Lovin’ that old black magic called—

  Head tossed back, the woman tasted the delicious word, kissed it, finally sighed it:

  —that old black magic called . . . love. . . .

  She moved up three steps of a platform. There she stood in the same pose as that in which she had appeared within the white dawn.

  Bewildered, the audience waited to be released into laughter.

  The woman on stage did not move. Demanding—

  —demanding applause! Normalyn knew. There was scattered clapping. Normalyn joined it.

  The reluctant applause held, only held—this audience had not come to cheer.

  The woman did not move.

  Garish lights pounced on the stage.

  There were loud whispers, giggles, laughter!

  Still the woman did not move.

  “She’s black!” Pam explained deliriously to Belinda why people in front were laughing.

  Trapped in crashing lights, the woman on stage refused to move.

  The announcer leaned toward the audience to share a secret—and to release the gathering, still tentative laughter: “And!— ladies and gentlemen!—our performer wasn’t always a woman. . . . A stitch here, a snip there.” His hand touched his chest, dropped to his groin.

  Pam announced triumphantly, “She’s a black transsexual—that’s what he means!”

  The black woman on stage did not surrender her lavish sexual pose even when the crudest jeering of the evening erupted in the Hollywood Four Star Theater.

  Three

  Normalyn pushed through men and women again tracking each other now that the Night of Legends was over.

  The performer’s courage, her resistance to the demanded humiliation, had moved Normalyn, stirred memories of times when at school she had been trapped in laughter, had forced herself to control the hurt—and had hurt even more, secretly.

  She made her way to the stage exit. She faced the same hefty man who had confronted the muscular waiter earlier. “You can’t come in here, it’s the dressing area.” His arms were a map of tattoos; gray hairs pushed over the top of his shirt. “If you wanna apply for waitress, you gotta see Mr. Stephen Holden on Tuesdays; tonight he’s out there scouting for mud wrestlers—”

  Behind him, some of the waitresses in sheer tights milled; a few of the shirtless waiters lingered along a corridor reeking of sweat and perfume. Normalyn shouted into the hall, “Norma-Lyn!” Strange, yelling out her own name . . .

  She saw a door open nearby. Dressed now, the muscular man walked toward her. He and the tattooed man exchanged threatening looks.

  “What the hell do you want with her?” the muscular man asked Normalyn. He looked to be in his early thirties, then immediately older, then again younger. A deep tan emphasized tiny scratchy wrinkles on his rugged, handsome face. Combed casually to conceal the fact, his light brown hair was beginning to thin. His grayish eyes looked sad.

  “I just want to tell her she was beautiful,” Normalyn answered. The reason she had come to the nightclub—to ask the performer who she was, why she called herself “Norma-Lyn, Marilyn’s daughter”—had been forgotten.

  Brushing the burly man aside, the muscular man led her to a door on which a large crude star was drawn with red lipstick. The man opened the door into an improvised dressing room.

  Still in the white gown—unzipped at the back—the black woman sat before a mirror surrounded by lights strung on a cord in imitation of those in a fancier dressing room. Her gloves and shoes were discarded on the floor. There was a white simulated fur piece draped over the edge of the mirror. The woman’s hair was tightly bunched against her head. On a stand was the platinum blonde wig she had worn.

  Seeing Normalyn’s reflection in the mirror, the woman spun about. She was beautiful, her heavy-lashed eyes yellow-specked, her features finely sculpted, her skin like chocolate cream. “Who the fuck are you?” she demanded.

  Anger shoved away Normalyn’s sympathy. “And who the hell are you?” She shot back the question she had first come here to ask.

  “Hear that, Kirk?” the black woman asked the muscular man. “Girl busts into my dressing room and asks who the hell I am!” She reached out to touch the man’s massive arm, to separate him from anger. Yet she did so almost cautiously, as if the touch might hurt the powerful body—and the man’s body had tensed for a second. Then he hugged the woman’s bare shoulders in reassurance, and she leaned back against him eagerly.

  “She wants to tell you something,” Kirk said to the black woman—and nodded to Normalyn.

  Annoyed at being prodded, Normalyn hurried her words: “Your performance was beautiful.”

  The black woman lowered her head. She said quietly, “Thank you.” Then the head reared up. “That fuckin’ Mr. Holden tricked me!” She slammed the table; makeup trembled. “He knew I was gonna do it straight. How the fuck did he know I’m a—?” She couldn’t finish. “Hate that word. It’s like I’m still in transit, and I am not!” She fluctuated from a “shanty” tone to one that was precise, correct. She shook out her hair, black, curly, lustrous. She was even more beautiful now. She touched the platinum wig. “Wouldn’t make fun of her, I love that gorgeous Marilyn.” She stood up.

  She was shorter than she had appeared earlier, just slightly taller than Normalyn. She looked so young without her stage makeup, close to Normalyn’s own age, but she radiated experience; and so Normalyn calculated she had to be twenty-four.

  Normalyn tried to soften any hint of judgment. “Why did you call yourself Norma-Lyn, her daughter?”

  “You mean I couldn’t be—because I’m black, girl?”

  Normalyn felt both enraged and intimidated at being called “girl.” But she knew the black women was hurting—a lot—and the man wasn’t helping her that much, just sitting there
on a canvas chair, silently, as if helpless despite his powerful presence. But then he, too, had been bruised in that arena outside. “No, I just wondered why you weren’t just Marilyn.”

  “Mr. Stephen Holden insisted.” She raised her voice to assure being heard outside the door. “Stevey Holden and his bullies— that Franky Rich and that Rusty Hills! Grown men with boy names!” she shouted. She spread quieter anger: “That fuckin’ reporter on that tabloid’s been running those stories about a daughter. It was supposed to be a gimmick only till I came on.”

  A reporter . . . writing about a daughter. Normalyn retained unexpected information.

  The woman shook the dress loose at her back, preparing to slip out of it. “What you starin’ at?”

  “I didn’t know I was.” But Normalyn realized she had been. She had heard of transsexuals, but she had thought they would look like men in women’s clothes. This woman was magnificent.

  “Go ahead, look. See?” The black woman cupped her breasts. “Round. Mine!” She ran her hands down smooth hips. “Real! All that’s gotta be there is, and all that shouldn’t ain’t!”

  Normalyn was confused. The woman had begun by challenging her, but at the end she seemed to be addressing Kirk.

  “You’re beautiful, hon, beautiful,” he said.

  The woman closed her eyes, as if to hear the words again.

  The muscular man was crying! No, he was just holding his hands to his nose, sniffing something, Normalyn saw.

  The black woman let the dress slide down. Almost naked, the brown body was like velvet. Normalyn looked away in embarrassment from the unself-conscious extravagant near-nudity.

  The woman looked at her mirrored image. “How did that fuckin’ Holden know!”

  Normalyn shook her head. She could not imagine that this woman had ever been other than a beautiful female.

  “Duke told him,” Kirk said. “I saw him out there.”

  “I’ll kill the motherfucker!” The black woman reached for anything on the table—a glass with a fresh rose. She flung it on the floor. She bent to retrieve the flower from the broken glass. “You gave it to me, baby. Sweetest present, opening-night present.” She looked up at Kirk.

  “Because I love you,” he said. The voice was wearied, sad. In the canvas chair, the enormous body looked surrendered.

  She kissed the rose and brushed Kirk’s lips with it. “I’m sorry you took that ugly job,” she told him, as if she hurt more for him than for what had been done to her.

  “Made a few bucks.” He half-smiled.

  Normalyn looked away. She felt awkward, extraneous. Yet walking out now would call attention to that, make her feel even more so. She tried to think of something to say . . . couldn’t . . . coughed.

  The black woman slipped into a creamy apricot dress. She seemed to see Normalyn clearly for the first time. “How old are you, hon?”

  “I’m twenty-one,” Normalyn lied. She inhaled. “My name is Normalyn.”

  The woman tossed shoes, gloves into her bag. She searched for a lost stocking. Suddenly she looked up at Normalyn. “What?”

  “That’s my name,” Normalyn said. “Normalyn Morgan—and I’m from Gibson—in Texas. I just got here—I slept in Long Beach last night.” She kept adding words because she felt on trial before this woman who knew so much about life.

  “That your name, huh?” The woman’s anger waited or gathered.

  “Yes.”

  “We got the same name, huh?” The words were steely.

  “Yours has a hyphen,” Normalyn said.

  The black woman threw her head back and laughed. “Mine has a fuckin’ hyphen!”

  Kirk smiled, aware only of a light moment.

  “Let me tell you something!” the woman addressed Normalyn. “That ain’t my real name. Just part of Mr. Stevey Holden’s gimmick!” she yelled at the door. The voice became lofty: “I, myself, have never favored a rhyming name.”

  “It does not rhyme. I should know. I write poems!” Instantly, Normalyn wanted to disintegrate.

  “Girl writes poems with goddamn hyphens!”

  “Don’t call me girl, you!—whatever your name is!” Normalyn would not hold her anger any longer. “And let me tell you something now: Just because you are a Negro—”

  “A Negro!”

  “—or colored”— Normalyn held on.

  “Colored,!”

  “—or black or whatever the hell you call yourself’—Normalyn did not relinquish—“that does not make you high and mighty. I may be white, but I have feelings, too.”

  The black woman’s mouth stayed open.

  This time Kirk laughed aloud.

  “Got your own way of lookin’ at things, huh?” The black woman seemed to approve. She smiled. “Never quite seen it that way.” Then she said abruptly, “You’re really green, aren’t you?” There was real surprise in the words.

  “I am not!” Normalyn presented the only evidence she could think of to prove her sophistication: “I’m staying at the Ambassador Hotel. Alone!”

  “Did you hear—!”

  Kirk shook his head quickly, stopping the woman’s new tirade.

  Siding with her. Normalyn welcomed the unexpected.

  “Stayin’ at the ’bassador Hotel, huh?” The black woman cocked her head. She smiled sweetly at Normalyn. “Normalyn. That is a real pretty name you got, especially without the hyphen.” She laughed a honeyed laughter.

  Normalyn laughed with her, marveling that her laughter sounded natural.

  “Well, I’ll just have to go back to being plain old Troja—”

  “Always loved the name, sweetheart,” Kirk approved.

  “Troja!” Normalyn reacted to the exotic name.

  “Don’t know mythology, huh?” Without looking into the mirror, Troja painted her lips with one oval motion of her lipstick. “Her face launched a thousand ships.”

  “You must mean Helen of Troy,” Normalyn was glad to correct. But this beautiful woman looked more like the Cleopatra she had once conjured up.

  “Yeah—her!” Troja snapped. “Without no fuckin’ hyphen!”

  Normalyn was confused by the renewed assault, which had been automatic after conciliatory moments. She walked to the door. Her hand on the knob, she said, “Troja, one moment you’re talking about how mean people were to you, and the next you’re passing your anger on to me, and I came here only to tell you—” Damned if she’d repeat the compliment now. She opened the door.

  “I’m sure Troja’s sorry,” Kirk said quickly, touching Troja’s arm, coaxing an apology.

  “I am sorry. Really.” Troja’s words were caring. “You did just come to do me a kindness, and I’ve been turnin’ on you.”

  Life was wondrous! She had made two new—and very difficult—friends of her own. She had conquered through candor and protest. Normalyn added this to the top of her victories since leaving Gibson. “I accept your apology.” She did not want to give in too quickly, but risk determined otherwise.

  “Oh, big heart,” Troja started again. She stopped herself. “You’re named after Marilyn, aren’t you, hon?”

  Normalyn said, “I think so.”

  “And you’re pretty. Got such pretty hair, pretty eyes.”

  Normalyn still felt embarrassed by the word “pretty.” “Thank you,” she barely whispered.

  Troja removed Normalyn’s hand gently from the doorknob. Then she aimed her words into the corridor: “I have some business to tend to with Mr. Stephen Holden before I go on again. I ain’t ridiculing Marilyn or myself!”

  Kirk stopped her at the door. “I’ll get him for you, sweetheart. Let him come to you.” He left the door open.

  Troja pointed to the lipstick star on it. “Kirk drew it for me,” she told Normalyn. “Those bitches were so cruel to him out there. Did you hear them? Called him . . . old. He can’t face that.”

  “But he’s a man—” Normalyn could not imagine men fearing growing older.

  For the first time, Troja looked rea
lly exhausted. “It’s worse for men who do care—because they ain’t supposed to care.” She said to herself, “Some wounded keep walking straight, others stop; Kirk’s deciding.” She stopped quickly, hearing Kirk. She ran her hands down her stockings. When Kirk walked in and she looked up, her face had shed its weariness, or disguised it.

  Kirk was rubbing his fists. “He fired us both, Troja. But I got our money.”

  Troja tossed tear-drop glass earrings into her large bag. With her fingers she combed the platinum wig on its stand. Then she arranged both carefully in the bag. “Back to Duke,” she said. She told Normalyn, “He’s my manager.” She couldn’t laugh.

  “You don’t have to go back to that fucking pimp,” Kirk said.

  Troja seemed to wait for him to add more words.

  There was harsh pounding on the door. “Mr. Stephen Holden says if you ain’t out of here, he calls the cops.”

  “You open that door, Franky, and two more fists are waiting for you and Mr. Holden, motherfucker,” Troja promised. Pulling the white fur piece from the mirror and wrapping it about her shoulders, she thrust her head back. “Y’all ready for our exit?”

  Kirk took the bag from her.

  The tattooed man stood there with Stephen Holden, a sleazy man holding an iced towel to his puffed nose. The towel had a tint of red. Alerted, some of the youngmen and youngwomen who worked in the club gathered.

  With her hand, the black woman rubbed away the lipstick star on the door. She linked one arm through Kirk’s—and the other one through Normalyn’s.

  Startled, Normalyn quickly welcomed this new closeness. In this moment of giant crisis, she was with them! Life! she thought. Real life. My life. And she held Troja’s arm closer to hers.

  “Goodbye,” called a waitress. “Bye,” said a shirtless waiter. Others echoed farewells, answered by Troja. “Good luck, Normalyn!” a pretty youngman called.

  They were including her! Normalyn was profoundly moved. Kirk must have told them her name, the support she had brought them. She nodded—shyly—in acceptance. This moment of surging life required more. She stopped before the youngmen and women. “I really appreciate—” she started.