“Now she stands up, as if embarrassed—stands and straightens her skirt, pats it down, and in patting it down seems to reawaken the thoughts she has so recently shaken off. There are habits—bad habits some stiffs call them—that are far more fucking fun, far more exciting than sucking your fucking thumb. Sandra looks out at the audience again, bites her lip again, smiles as if letting the friggin’ voyeurs in on her secret thoughts. She lifts the hem of her dress—just a few inches—then drops it with a furtive look in the direction of the audience. Suddenly, though, she seems vulnerable. It’s delicious. Can she trust those schmucks out there? Might they perhaps tell on her to Auntie Em? Or Miss Gulch? She paces the stage, as if she can’t make up her mind whether to let her desires overwhelm her inhibitions. It’s a dilemma. The audience is rooting for inhibitions to bite the dust. Sandra’s eyes plead with the geeks out there in the dark. With any other stripper this would provoke a chorus of ‘Take it off,’ but with Sandra no one would dare. She has them in the palm of her hand, and the men long to feel her fingers close around their dicks.
“She plays with them for a little longer, then she turns her back on the audience, and abruptly—with no fuss, no teasing—pulls up her skirts and tugs down those white cotton panties, allowing a fleeting glimpse of ass. The audience is shocked. Yo—wait a minute—is that all there is? Sandra-née-Sandford stands there for a long beat, back still turned, panties around her ankles. She steps out of them and turns to face the voyeurs out front who are rigid with excitement. She kicks the panties out into the darkness and they land on the bald head of some aluminum siding salesman from Peoria. He almost fucking croaks on the spot. Slowly she lifts her skirt. When the hem is approaching the Mason-Dixon Line there’s a roll of drums and a blackout that leaves the worshiping acolytes paralyzed with disappointment. Is that really all? But no—the act is not quite over. As the jilted swains sigh with disappointment, the lights come up again. Sandra is standing there, naked, her back to the auditorium, giving the suckers a full second or two to enjoy her gorgeous ass. And now she has on the ruby slippers . . .
“The lights are doused again to wild applause, and God-fearing American males find they’ve soiled their jockey shorts.”
He turned to Sandy.
“Did I get that right, darling?”
He seemed to have talked himself into a state of ecstasy.
Sandy said nothing, averting her eyes. The biker turned back to face me.
“I’ve a feeling,” he said in a half-whisper, “we’re not in Kansas anymore—don’t you, Novalis?”
He cocked his head, as if I should be enjoying his humor.
“You have to understand,” he said, “that Sandra invented this exquisite routine when she was still a boy. When she removed her scanties at Elle et Lui, or the Carrousel, or the Schmuzekatze Lounge in Berlin, it begged one all-important question—was something hiding under there? Was this gorgeous creature hung? That was the turn-on. Yari told me about her—begged me not to miss her act when I went to Paris. I was enthralled. I saw her ten times in a week and began to make inquiries. I discovered that she lived as a woman, longed to be one. I made up my mind to make her an offer. Someone had once provided me with the means to change my life, and I decided to do the same for her. Of course, the person who sponsored me didn’t extend his generosity purely out of the kindness of his heart—he was rewarding me for services rendered, and one in particular that helped secure the honor of his family. When I arranged, through a third party, for Sandra to undergo surgery, I too expected something in return.”
He returned his attention to Sandy.
“I still do,” he said. “The moment I had dreamed of has been snatched from me, but I still expect something in return.”
The word “something” snapped out of his mouth like a cross between a shout and a snarl. The icy poise dissolved in an instant and the crazed look returned to his eyes, which now were fixed on Sandy’s face with an intensity that recalled that day in Little Italy when he appeared to see nothing but her.
I had listened to his monologue, but at the same time my mind was working overtime, breaking down the elements of his story. He said he had seen her perform many times, in Europe and at Aladdin’s Alibi. Given his graphic description of her act, that rang true—yet how could a creature with such a disfigured face be a frequent member of Sandy’s audience without her being aware of him? I had heard that some clubs provided private viewing rooms for privileged patrons who liked to party with a couple of hookers while keeping one eye on the show, but I couldn’t quite buy into that explanation. And why had a man who could afford to sponsor Sandy for costly sex-reassignment surgery—and presumably who had supported her at considerable expense through the long months involved—never turned to a plastic surgeon to fix his own scarred features? There was something off about that, but I had no time to pursue the line of thought because his behavior toward Sandy was becoming increasingly threatening.
“I hope you realize,” he said to her, “that I own you. Every inch of your body, every hair, every fingernail, every sweat gland. Your breasts, your cunt—everything—but far more than that, because there is not a cell in your body that has not been transformed by treatments I paid for. By hormones and whatever black magic potions were administered by the good doctor in Morocco and those spooky endocrinologists.”
As he said this, the biker placed his hands on Sandy’s breasts. She looked helplessly in my direction. The biker ripped the bodice of the bridal gown open. I was on my feet by now, stumbling toward him. He had put away his knife, but he reached for something else in his leathers—it was a small semiautomatic pistol. He turned it in my direction and fired a single shot that hit the tarmac inches in front of me, showering me with dirt. It stopped me in my tracks. Now the biker, laughing maniacally, used his free hand to rip the bridal gown from Sandy’s shoulders. She screamed. He slapped her across the face, then grasped her throat. Taking advantage of his distraction, I jumped on his back. This made it difficult for him to threaten me with the gun, and I managed to get both arms around his neck—since my hands were still cuffed together, I had him in a stranglehold. As I jerked the cuffs back into his throat he fired two shots into the ground, trying to hit my feet or to at least scare me off. Then he tossed the gun aside so that he had two hands available to throttle Sandy. He was entirely obsessed with choking the life from her, seemingly unaware of me even as I continued to claw at his throat.
“Bitch! Cunt! Bitch!” he screamed.
Sandy’s face was turning purple and her eyes were threatening to pop out of her head.
“Scratch his fucking eyes out!” I yelled.
For a moment Sandy didn’t seem to understand what I was telling her to do, but then she responded, tearing at the biker’s face with her nails, ripping at his eyes and at the terrible scars. Suddenly he went limp and slumped to the ground, slipping from between my arms. I saw that his face had been completely transformed. Sandy had not succeeded in scratching his eyes out, but she had scraped away what seemed to be some kind of prosthetic makeup—the kind of stuff they use in the movies—thin sheets of sculpted, rubbery material that had given the man his grotesque appearance. The artificial scars were gone, and now I could see who he was.
“Brady Kavanagh . . .”
I recognized him from his photograph in the pages of Vamp—Brady Kavanagh, the presumed backer of the magazine where Yari’s revealing picture of Sandy had appeared. Brady Kavanagh the Invisible Mogul, Wall Street takeover tyrant, and the producer and director of trashy 42nd Street movies—films more notable for their effects makeup than for their psychological insights. Brady Kavanagh who had risen from the streets to become one of the richest men in America.
“I’m not Brady Kavanagh,” he said, almost apologetic.
It was as if, in having his identity revealed, he had forfeited his power. He just kneeled there on the wet tarmac, a beaten man. Suddenly the
whole thing became obvious. Kavanagh owned a movie studio—had access to the world’s best makeup artists. He could have been stalking Sandy in a dozen different disguises. The biker leathers prompted me to ask myself whether he had also been that Tom-of-Finland character with the facial hair and the Doberman we’d had the run-in with outside my apartment. And there could have been any number of others.
“I know him,” said Sandy. “I mean, I recognize him. He would sit right up close to the stage, always at a table by himself . . .”
“I’m not Brady Kavanagh,” said the man at my feet. “You’re lying.”
And then a realization came to me. Here was a man famous for his ruthlessness, who had grown up in a neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan known for its Irish gangs, yet he had found his way to business school at a top Ivy League university.
“The person who did you that big favor,” I said, “that was Joey Garofolo’s father, right? You were one of the Clinton Kids from Hell’s Kitchen who did dirty work for the Family. It was you who sliced open the face of that snitch, but Joey got the credit—that’s what earned him his nickname and a truckload of respect. That’s what you’ve got on Joey—he wouldn’t dare cross you. By rights that nickname should belong to you—Brady ‘the Shiv’ Kavanagh. Got a nice ring to it. It would look good in the Wall Street Journal. And Joey’s dad paid you off by putting you through school. He probably figured that that MBA would buy him a lot of future favors too—you’d be a big help when it came to laundering money and shit like that. I’m sure he didn’t expect you to become the big Gorgonzola you became, but you kept faith with him and with Joey, and Joey was able to help you out. Yari was around too, to take the kinky pictures, and Debereaux was willing to get involved because he’s the kind of politico who’ll take money wherever he can find it. It took Sandy to thwart your perverted plan.”
Suddenly his eyes lit up again.
“Who are you calling a pervert?” he said. “You’re the one who fucked her.” He said it with a leer. “You fucked her, and she betrayed me. You had no right to fuck her, and she had no right to betray me. She’s just a cheap whore!”
I should have kept my cool, but I lashed out at him with my knee, aiming for his balls. He parried the blow, then rolled away toward the pistol he had tossed aside earlier and that, in the confusion, I had forgotten about.
I yelled at Sandy to run. She hesitated. I yelled at her again.
“Go get help!”
By then Kavanagh had reached the gun and was about to grab it. I managed to kick it away, but only a couple of feet because Kavanagh had caught hold of my ankle. This brought me down on top of him. Sandy was running by now. I wrestled with Kavanagh, but had lost sight of where the gun was. Suddenly I heard it discharge and looked up to see Sandy fall. I felt a sudden surge of rage, and I swear I would have torn Kavanagh limb from limb, but the gun discharged once more and a goulash of blood and bone and brains exploded from the back of his head. As he slumped to the tarmac, I saw that the barrel of the gun was in his mouth.
“I can’t move,” Sandy told me.
“Where did it hit?”
“My back. My lower back. I can’t feel anything. Am I going to die?”
“No, no . . . You’ll be okay.”
She managed a smile.
“Yeah, sure . . .”
She was silent for a while, then said, “I wonder if it was all worth it?”
“If what was worth it?”
“All the treatments, all the surgery . . .”
“You’ll be fine . . . I promise . . .”
“Yeah? Maybe. Do you have any idea what is involved in becoming a woman? The scary procedures, the mood swings from the hormones, the fear of the unknown . . .”
“I can only imagine. Don’t talk. Don’t try to move—I’ll find help.”
“Do you remember how we made love? How I flinched when you touched my throat?”
I told her I did.
“I don’t know why, but that was the scariest procedure for me—shaving down the Adam’s Apple they call it—but the surgeon did a wonderful job, didn’t he?”
I told her that she had the most beautiful throat I’d ever seen. She thanked me and closed her eyes as sirens sounded in the distance.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sandy was in rehab for months. I visited her as often as she’d let me, until she was released into a sort of halfway house for paraplegics. She’d been there only a couple of weeks when she disappeared. She left me a letter saying that she thanked me for everything and asking me not to search for her. I wouldn’t have known where to start, but by then I understood that our future was in the past. There were other letters, forwarded by an attorney with offices in the Metropolitan Life Building, a woman who represented a number of gender-reassigned and transgender clients. So Sandy was still the Girl from Nowhere. The nearest she came to letting me know where she lived is that it was somewhere between the Appalachians and the Continental Divide.
The last letter I received contained a snapshot of Sandy in her wheelchair in front of a handsome old clapboard house with a white-picket fence. There was a man standing alongside her—a pleasant-looking dude with thinning blond hair—and two kids, a boy and a girl. The letter told me the man’s name was Darryl—just plain Darryl—and that he was a widower. Sandy wrote that they were getting married, adding that she was sure I’d understand why she couldn’t invite me to the wedding.
Her letter reminded me that I still had the tux Charlie had tailored for the other wedding—the one that never happened. It was scuffed with dirt from the Shea Stadium parking lot, stained with Sandy’s blood, and one knee was badly torn. I’d kept it hanging in my closet for years. I tried it on and found it was a bit snug, but I could still squeeze into it, so I wore it to The Blue Mill for dinner. The waiters treated me with wariness, especially when I ordered two lamb chop dinners and a vodka sour as well as my usual Scotch and soda, and, after dinner, two cognacs. I thought of going uptown to see if the Hauptman was still there, or the Bunny Hutch, but instead I decided to hang around at The Blue Mill and drink some more cognac.
The next day, through my hangover, I saw that the Mets had a day game. I folded the tux and wrapped it in brown paper, then took a Number 7 train out to Shea. I bought a ticket for a box at loge level, right above third base, and deposited the parcel under the seat. It seemed like the right thing to do.
The Mets were trailing the Cubbies that year, but it was a pretty good game. A kid called Dwight Gooden pitched seven scoreless innings and Darryl Strawberry hit a monster home run to right center, giving the Incredibles a two-run lead. They blew it in the ninth.
I went home almost happy.
About the Author
Photo © 2012 Jonathan Mills
Christopher Finch was born and raised on the island of Guernsey in the British Channel Islands. He lived in London and Paris before moving to New York City in the late 1960s, the setting of Good Girl, Bad Girl. After working as a freelance writer and artist in New York for more than two decades, he moved to Los Angeles, where he continues to write and make art. Christopher has mounted one-man shows in both New York and Los Angeles, and his work has been included in museum exhibitions. He has occasionally written for television; his Judy Garland biography, Rainbow, was made into a movie for television. He is married to Linda Rosenkrantz, who is an author and the cofounder of the website nameberry.com. They have a daughter named Chloe.
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