In those early days, Laura said that JT, who was HIV positive, had Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer commonly occurring in AIDS patients, which would have been a natural trajectory for a boy who had been tricking on the street as long as he had. Over the phone she would tell people that JT didn’t want to go out because he was ashamed of the lesions on his face and body. At this time, she similarly never left the house. She said in an interview when it was all over, “If they can have sympathy for this boy with sores all over his body, then they can have sympathy for me.” While the illness functioned to deter certain gay men from wanting to fuck JT, it didn’t deter people from wanting to meet him. Of course, when JT would mumble that he couldn’t go out because he was ashamed of his lesions, everyone told him, get out there, don’t be afraid, you need to live your life. Some people offered to put makeup on him or to be his bodyguard.
Dennis sent JT a picture of his friend, who had died in the ’70s as a boy, to put on the back cover of his first book as an author photo. This boy and I, eerily enough, have similar features: a round face and a ski jump nose.
By the time Laura asked me to play JT, his Kaposi’s sarcoma had cleared up. Though JT still stayed in the house most of the time and wore disguises when he went out in public, AIDS was no longer part of his story. Laura had dropped it. The boy would live after all—and no one ever questioned it.
In January of 1997, Laura got pregnant. Geoff was trying to get a new band together. Laura took odd writing jobs here and there, and continued to do phone sex for extra money. Their wedding took place in front of a couple hundred people at the Unitarian Church in Noe Valley, when I was away at boarding school. Under the hupa held by four sisters, Geoff and Laura sang a duet of “Our Love is Here to Stay.”
Laura gave birth to a boy. She had gained a lot of weight during the pregnancy, and gained even more while she nursed. It was rumored that she weighed over three hundred pounds. She stopped coming to Judy’s gatherings. I remember once when Geoff went to the bathroom, a friend confided to us in a ravaged whisper, “How could Laura do that to Geoff?” Geoff made excuses for her as he bounced Thor on his knee. He took Thor everywhere, even as a baby. Hennessey and I would meet them in front of their house to take walks up the hills or go down to the beach. Laura never came out, but sent her love.
I heard from Geoff that Laura had written and published two books, but didn’t quite understand the phenomenon until I read them. I devoured Sarah and The Heart in a day. The whole premise of writing as someone else seemed mysterious and complicated. I thought the writing was beautiful and true, no matter who had written it. Geoff’s mother and sisters wanted Laura to publish the writing under her own name. Laura ignored their worries. She had her reasons.
Every senior at my boarding school planned to go to college. At graduation the administration announced who was going where on a thick cream sheet of embossed paper that they handed out to all of the parents. Because I had gone on an exchange program to Thailand my junior year, I was sliding through with the bare minimum of credits and mediocre grades. I’d planned to go to UC Santa Barbara—it was the only school I had gotten into—so that was what I put on the list. But after graduating from high school, I had second thoughts. I was ambivalent about college and very eager to live alone in the city and stay close to my family. My father had recently been in a very serious bike accident and had broken his neck. With occupational therapy, he managed to regain most of his movement. He walked, dressed himself, and drove, but his impaired motor control was comparable to a toddler’s, and it was difficult for him to work. I didn’t really know what direction I wanted to take in my studies. During the summer after high school, I took Chinese and guitar lessons at the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) and looked for a job, deciding in my head not to go to college.
A few blocks from my mother’s house is Basil, a stylish Thai restaurant. Young Thais with tattoos and piercings, who study architecture or design at the Academy of Art, moved from table to table, wielding trays of curry and somtum. At eighteen, I found them intimidating, but I was convinced that this would be the perfect respite from home and school. I picked out which waiters were good-looking, and hoped that they had taken note of me as well. For three consecutive weeks, I dropped off my resume. The owner, Todd, finally called me in. He hired me as a bus girl Mondays through Fridays for the lunch shifts.
The older Laotian women in the kitchen befriended me first. I had lived in Khon Khaen, in the northeast of Thailand, so I spoke their dialect, and whenever I blundered an order and the waiters berated me, it was the kitchen women who defended me. When the pace lulled, they would tell each other’s fortunes with Sanskrit cards, or they would take turns sitting on rice bags and invite me to elbow their shoulders, telling me, “It hits a nerve, a very good nerve.” They would make delicacies—grilled duck heads, blood sausage, steamed morning glory stalks, green papaya salad with pickled black crabs, and fermented fish sauce with chilis. Eating in their company at the restaurant provided positive food experiences for me. But still, sometimes I secretly binged, telling myself that food shouldn’t be wasted, but knowing deep down that it came from feeling incompetent and alone. After work the staff would all have a drink together and play cards. I would join them, momentarily forgetting that I had no idea what I was going to do with my life.
That summer I met a Japanese boy named Hilo at the cafeteria of CCSF. Everyone thought he was a girl, and to be honest that was what originally attracted me to him. He wore baggy clothes and had spiky cinnamon hair. He had a soft voice and long limbs, and his torso was like putty, as hairless and supple as a twelve-year-old’s. He said his hormones were off. Every time he went to the men’s bathroom a man would proclaim, “This is a man’s bathroom.” I told him he should embrace his ability to float between the sexes. He said all of his friends thought I was a lesbian.
We lasted only a few months as lovers. Around the end of our relationship he became jealous of my relationship with Geoff, who had begun to entreat me to come over to his house and sing songs together. I was excited to do it, but it took me months to work up the nerve. I started taking voice lessons at City, and tutoring with an opera singer.
The first time I came over to sing was on a weekend; I arrived an hour and a half late. As I rang the doorbell to Geoff and Laura’s apartment, Geoff rustled the tie-dyed curtain at the base of the glass front door to check my feet, a habit he’d learned from Laura. I took off my shoes and piled them on the stairwell. There were towers of magazines and books, pallets of new promotional energy drinks and healthful snacks piled all the way up one half of the staircase. Laura called from the TV room/phone sex writing office, “Hi Savanni. I’ll be out pretty soon.”
“Okay,” I boomed in a false baritone down the railroad hallway, where, I would come to know, it was always twilight.
Geoff and I headed into the kitchen, passing Thor’s latest finger-painted masterpieces, which had been taped up on the dingy walls. I let my finger trail along the embossed decorative metal, and Geoff warned, “I wouldn’t touch that—it’s got lead. We tested it.”
The kitchen was the only room in this long Victorian house that got any direct sunlight, and I squinted from the glare reflecting off the stainless-steel sink. Ice plants in cutoff milk cartons lined the windowsill. I grabbed a mug from the dish rack and turned on the faucet, flipping the switch for the Multi-Pure.
“You know not to run hot water through the filter, right?” Geoff asked.
“I don’t think I was.”
“No, that’s cool. I was just making sure.”
“Where’s Trev?” I asked.
“He’s got a play date until after dinner. The family takes them to the park. They’re French, so he comes back saying, ‘We played le football. And then we had croissants.’ It’s pretty awesome.”
Geoff and I went into his office. They lived in a three-bedroom converted into two offices. He had band posters all over the walls and a few portraits of the band from their Dad
dy Don’t Go days showing their floating heads with clunky phones on their ears, the spiraling cords disappearing into a black background. Laura looked straight into the camera with her knuckles covering the receiver, and Geoff’s mouth was open as if in mid-song.
Laura came out of her office and sat on the black leather couch, the only new piece of furniture in that house. They had given me a practice tape, which I played at Sharon’s in the living room. Sharon had gotten very excited when I would put it on, reminding me over and over that as a child I had said I wanted to be Madonna. As I tried belting out, “When it rains, Oooo” in front of Laura, she adjusted her little brown crocheted hat, standing up to join in. She was passionate about the music and couldn’t hold back. She had a great voice, a voice like water. She could do interpretations and impressions of anyone. She could be Swedish, Japanese, Korean, or from the American deep South. Within seconds, she could do a perfect imitation. Her singing voice was strong with a twinge of an English accent. She coached me on the pronunciation of words and how to deliver a lyric. She was enthusiastic and whooped a lot. As I was learning to sing, I got the feeling she was relieved to have this role filled.
Later, when Geoff went to the bathroom, she told me that at our first family dinner she’d spotted my overdeveloped jaw muscles and guessed my eating habits. I felt the shame well up in my throat. I thought no one knew, except maybe another student hearing me throw up in a bathroom at school. My issues with food came from anger and intolerance with myself, and I had no interest in sharing that with anyone else. I was shocked. I mumbled to her that I didn’t know what she was talking about. I had never before spoken to anyone about it. Later this would become an important thread in our friendship. She was the first person who I could speak to about my closet binging, denial, and fasting. Late at night, we would call each other after we’d binged. We would pinpoint what emotion we ate out of. I would swear that I would go to Overeaters Anonymous. It took years to finally drag myself into one of those meetings. When I had to admit to a room of people that I was an overeater, my words turned to sand. It just didn’t feel right to speak of it. I guess I wasn’t ready. In Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous at least they could talk about the horror days over coffee, cookies, and cigarettes. At Overeaters Anonymous meetings we could barely have tea. I would think, why couldn’t I have a drug problem like the rest of my peers? Then at least I would be skinny.
It had started my freshman year at boarding school. I gained twenty pounds. A lot of the girls did. Overeating was the only encouraged vice. Instead of debaucherous drug and beer parties like we were all aching to have, the administration let us have soda and pizza parties. If a prospective student came to look at the school, they brought out brownies, strawberries, and grapes to make it look as if we were treated well. I can remember visiting and cringing at how pimply and claustrophobic everyone seemed. On the weekends we watched serial television and ate Chinese take-out. There was a poster on my first girlfriend’s wall of a Calvin Klein One ad with androgynous youths posed with their shirts knotted up to reveal carved hips. My girlfriend was naturally like a rod herself. I developed these complexes that our relationship was not working out because I didn’t look like one of these CK One ads. Her ex-girlfriend had been the blade of our school, a senior who always wore a baseball cap and played lacrosse, and was known for coming on to younger girls in the student body. I was too nice, and I was fat, I thought. She broke up with me shortly after we had gotten together.
When I came home for the first time, my mother was horrified. Though she has always been a forward-thinking person, I can remember upon my return her uttering 1950s-type sentiments like, “a woman’s figure is everything.” When she said the word “fat” she spit it out with the fervor of a comrade giving a People’s Party speech against imperialist dogs. That summer my sister and I jogged together, and I would come home and immediately look in the mirror, hoping that I had magically lost twenty pounds. I can remember the disappointment, followed by the desire to eat pizza. Sharon monitored my regiment. If I put butter on my toast she would say, “I don’t know if you need that.” Hennessey had come back from boarding school heavier as well, and then lost it upon my mother’s nagging. Somehow I couldn’t talk to Hennessey about what I was feeling. Instead of changing as a result of the negative attention, I just internalized the feelings.
One sunny morning halfway though the summer, I discovered after eating a sandwich that I could stick my finger down my throat and push the button that I had been searching for. I knew it was not a good habit, and I regarded my newfound tool with caution. I tapered off the amount of food I ate, and began to fast except for coffee. I spent as many nights as possible away from home with girls from junior high so Hennessey and Sharon would not notice that I was not eating. These girls all regarded me as a bit of an embarrassment because I was not going to the public high school, I was fat, and I had “turned” gay. On top of all that, I was completely weird about food.
Around the time I started singing for Thistle, Laura lost a huge amount of weight in a short period of time. Afterwards her skin bowed in folds as if one had laid it over her bones to make a fort. It moved like liquid. She had a trick she showed me once we were closer. After a shower, she would drop her towel. Her skin, having never been exposed to the sun, shone like the waxen moon. She pulled in her slender wings and began to oscillate her hips. The skin made a faint flapping. She then picked up speed, throwing her head back, until it echoed off itself, like the sound of a heron beating the water with its wings before takeoff. A survival call. In time, she would adapt to her new body. She stopped wearing the same rayon-printed house dress and Birkenstocks. She would improve upon her appearance in whatever ways she could. “Witchy poo” and “Fat Albert” were gone forever.
Before we started practicing together as a band, Laura had the PR wheels churning. She had a gift, almost a second sight, for understanding what people wanted to hear in the media world. It seemed to be one of her true callings. She never missed the opportunity of promoting herself and her work. Hearing her pitch a story over the phone was like watching the man at the fair spin blue threads of cotton candy until he’d made a dizzy of fluorescent sugar webs.
In the voice of JT, Laura got me into Interview magazine to plug the band. JT was on the list of the year 2000’s most-up-and-coming hottest people, and in the magazine JT suggested that I, Savannah, should be included on the list, too, as an up-and-coming fashion designer. This was far fetched. I had made my friends a few duct-tape pieces, and myself a backpack out of a paper bag covered in duct tape. Laura relayed to me what she had told them at Interview: I was a duct-tape entrepreneur, and when I went out one night, a mob of Japanese ingenues saw me on the dance floor with my duct-tape bag and danced around me, placing special orders on the spot. My brand had taken off, accelerating into a duct-tape kingdom. I was, according to Laura, like the Louis Vuitton of chrome masking tape. So why hadn’t they ever heard of me? “That was something they had to ask themselves,” she said, out of breath. This sounded like a crock of shit, and I couldn’t believe that any one would take it seriously.
When Interview called, I had my answers written out. They asked what my fantasy was, and I dutifully answered, “I make duct-tape bags and wallets, but my fantasy is to spray a can of beer on Hansen with me and my brother’s band, Thistle.” Granted, it was a roundabout way of promoting the band, but it was effective. I went exactly by Laura’s script. When a number of people, including my sister and mother, asked what the hell I’d meant by it, I just shrugged. It was the first of many words Laura would put in my mouth. It would have been exhilarating to see my nineteen-year-old face in a magazine, except that I didn’t want to show it to anyone. I was embarrassed by the lies.
Interview required a photo booth series of pictures, which seemed easy enough. However, back in San Francisco, Laura had a couple of problems—JT did not exist, and every photo booth in town seemed to have fallen into disrepair since the advent
of Japanese sticker machines. Not easily discouraged, Laura called the photo booth company and found one of San Francisco’s last remaining booths at a bar in the Mission. All she needed next was somebody to be JT.
Geoff, Laura, and I drove around the bottom of Polk Street looking for young boys. As Laura rolled down her window and stuck her head out, she told Geoff to slow down. She craned her neck to check out a couple of guys standing in front of a Vietnamese noodle shop.
“Honey, there’s a car behind me—I can’t just brake.”
He kept driving.
She pulled her head back in the car and said, “How can I see anyone if you won’t slow down?”
“Honey, please, if you knew how to drive you would understand why I can’t.”
“Okay, okay, we gotta get these pictures to FedEx by seven, so just keep going toward the Mission.”
When we got out of the car on Valencia Street, Laura spied a young lesbian couple walking down the street. One of them was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and looked boyish, with a sandy mop of hair sticking out of her baseball cap.
Laura approached them.
“Hey,” she said jovially.
The mop-haired one looked at her suspiciously.
“I really like your face, and I was wondering if you could do us a favor. See, I need a photo strip for this contest, it’s an art contest, and I’m really shy, so I can’t do it myself. Do you think you could go in there with us and take some pictures?”
“I don’t think so,” Mop-hair replied, looking at her girlfriend. They started walking faster.
“Wait a minute. Wait—I’ll pay you fifty bucks. I don’t have much money, but I can give you fifty. Come on. It’ll take you five minutes. It’s nothin’. Fifty bucks for five minutes—that’s like doctor’s wages. It would mean so much to me, and it really won’t be any trouble.You can even keep your baseball cap on.”
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