They seemed to think that we wanted to kidnap them and turn them into sex slaves. Laura kept talking—she didn’t leave them a breath of space to say anything. She reached into her pocket and offered some after-dinner peppermints, a handful of which she’d lifted from a bowl at the last restaurant we’d eaten at. She continued, “You just have to wear glasses—you can keep your hat on—I’ve got them right here, see?” She fumbled in her bag and pulled out bug-eyed shades.
The couple looked at one another. Mop-hair said, “Let me make sure that I know what you mean: just one photo strip for fifty bucks?”
“Yeah. Right on. Right on. Fifty bucks. It’s like you found it on the street. Take your girl out for sushi. Or keep it.” Laura said excitedly.
We went from the bright afternoon into the bar. It was like entering the mouth of someone who never had dental care; it reeked of old liquor, olive juice, and vapors of something rotting. The dinosaur photo booth was in the back parlor. “JT” went first. She stayed still through each picture. Laura told her to keep her chin down.
The photos popped out of the little chute. They were blurry with streaks of white through the middle. Laura became irate, and strode over to the bar. Geoff’s neck seemed to grow shorter, like a turtle shrinking into its shell.
She yelled at the bartender, “Hey, there’s something wrong with that photo booth!”
The bartender looked up from the glasses he was rinsing. “Yeah, I know,” he said, “It’s low on solution.”
Laura fumed, “Well, I want a refund. This is outrageous. These pictures are very important, and this, this machine should be maintained. There’s an ordinance about that, you know—having faulty machines in public premises. I need a refund. This is not okay.”
The bartender looked at her like she was insane. “Well, I don’t give refunds for the photo booth out of my till. You can write a letter to the management if you want.”
While Laura’s back was turned, Geoff paid Mop-hair fifty bucks. She and her girlfriend took off. Laura was still trying to get her $4.50 back while I posed for my pictures as the singer of the band/duct-tape designer. As I waited for the photo strip to develop, Geoff pulled the velvet drape to the side. The machine boiled and spat out my strip. “How’d yours come out?” he asked. They had the same ghost streak across the front. Finally, Geoff grabbed Laura from behind and escorted her out of the bar. “It’s not right,” she fumed as we rushed to FedEx, just making our deadline to send the pictures out.
Shortly after, Laura started complaining that I wasn’t taking my singing seriously, that she knew I didn’t have my heart in the band. She resentfully accused me of running off to do Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art, when I could have been rehearsing.
I couldn’t deny what was true. After just one class, watching all of these Amazonian woman doing tricks and take downs, I had fallen in love with Capoeira. I shirked school, making sure that I didn’t sign up for night classes, and I rearranged my work schedule. I began to stay away from Laura and Geoff, and refused plans with family and dates with friends to take Capoeira classes. Before I went to school in the morning, I packed my uniform and avidly wrote down the traditional Capoeira songs to memorize on the bus ride. I even did my laundry more often to clean my sweaty whites. My dedication showed me something I hadn’t known about myself: I was able to commit wholeheartedly to something I truly wanted to do. I had agreed to be the singer in Geoff and Laura’s band because I didn’t know what else to do with my time. Once I agreed I’d felt obliged to them, but not enough to give them my full attention. I’d let them down. But Geoff told me in his inimitable, sweet way that it was okay. “It’s a tremendous commitment. We’re bummed, but don’t worry. We understand.” I felt relieved. I didn’t want to be a singer in a pop band.
A few weeks later, Laura called me up and said, “I need you to do me a favor.”“What?” I asked.
“I need you to be him.”
A part of me had been hoping that it would come to this.
“Who?” I asked innocently.
“JT, just once. Okay?”
CHERRY VANILLA
WE TURNED THE FIRST JT TRICK in the old loft on Natoma Street, one of the South-of-Market alleys named after the city’s Gold Rush era whores, or so I’d heard. My parents had rented the second-story since 1968. It had 2,000 square feet of unhampered space, originally used as a record factory. The only private areas were one small front room, which had once been an office, a bathroom, and a darkroom installed by my mother. In the big room, sunlight poured through three adjacent skylights onto the pine floors, which were spotted with vinyl tar. At the front of the space stood a pair of freight doors that opened onto the street. An ancient lift waited solemnly beside them, like an old donkey ready to bear its burden down to the sidewalk one story below. I rarely closed these doors, unless it was raining—the place was so drafty that it hardly made a difference. At the far end of the big room, my parents had installed a kitchen, and for the sake of easy plumbing, a shower, too. My mother had painted it with airplane paint, red on top and blue on the bottom; it looked like a puppet theater.
I took over the loft from my father a few years after his accident. He’d tried to continue his life as he always had, but realized that it would be too hard to stay there. The loft was slowly falling apart, and he could no longer repair it himself. It was difficult to get groceries home, and he felt vulnerable walking home at night. So I moved in and sublet the space to three friends. This was at the height of the dot.com frenzy, and rents in San Francisco had gone sky high; we were all grateful for a place to live.
Natoma was crammed with memories from my parents’ lives. In the unfinished redwood rafters, my father had abandoned a kayak, an old scuba tank, and hundreds of round metal canisters of old film reels. The forgotten darkroom had been used for storage for years, and one of my roommates and I cleaned out the dozens of tattered boxes filled with archaic camera equipment and ancient chemicals. I was puzzled when I found a squished toad at the bottom of a stack. It was the size of my foot, and I couldn’t imagine that my father had let it live in the darkroom. A little digusted, I tossed it. When I told my mother about it, she exclaimed, “You threw it away? That was the only Valentine’s gift I ever gave to your father. I hung it from thread in a blue frame and called it Sky Piddling. Did you find the frame?”
For my first JT appearance I needed a good excuse to get rid of my three roommates for an entire afternoon, so I told them that I had answered a personal ad on the Internet: an old man would pay me to bring him to our loft, blindfold him, and let him clean our house. I’d never done things like this, and I could have just said it was a regular date, but a friend once told me a story like this, and I was amused by the idea of a man wearing black socks with yellow woven tips and sock-gators, panting as he scrubbed my sun-bleached floors. It was typical of me to make things as complicated as possible. This part of the lie meant that I had to quickly wash the floors before Laura and company arrived. They were filthy. A fine black silt sifted down through the rafters as I scrubbed them. When I finished, I hurried to the commode and grabbed a mirror my father had hung there on a nail. It was a little rectangle with a cross on it, used for signaling planes in an emergency. I propped it against the floor. I had bought the thickest Ace bandage I could find. It was self-adhesive, scratchy, and a little mentholated. Squeezing my breasts together, I pulled the elastic taut, slowly and painstakingly like a caterpillar spinning his cocoon. I turned to look at my profile. Only a slight mogul remained, and the right clothes could easily mask it. I looked thinner, except for the folds of skin spilling defiantly on to my back and in my armpits. My chest began to burn, but I ignored it and rushed to get dressed. I felt exhilarated. I had figured out how to have no breasts and how to make myself smaller.
I rummaged through my roommate Chuckie’s clothes, throwing his neatly folded garments onto the stubby industrial carpet. I looked in his mirror at my profile covering the bandage with my arm. When I did that I
looked similar in size to the figure on the cover of Sarah, a picture Gus Van Sant had taken of a boy holding a loose red rose. Minus my backside, I was the size of a skinny boy. The rag-picker in me thought that Chuckie’s stuff was a little too slick for JT. What I needed was my moth-eaten reindeer sweater that I’d left on the bus months before. I settled for cargo pants and a black long-sleeved T-shirt. When the buzzer rang, I scrambled for my wig and my raccoon-penis-bone necklace, JT’s trademark talisman.
Only Laura and the photographer came over. The interview had already been conducted with Laura over the phone. I don’t remember what magazine he worked for. He was stocky, but had a boyish demeanor, with slicked back sandy hair and broad shoulders. On first glance, he was the type of white guy that I always judged harshly, unless he seemed gay. Somehow in my mind that would make him seem all right. Laura wore a dowdy straw sun hat with a fake flower tucked into its velvet ribbon over a red wig. A few days before, Laura had taken me to a wig shop down on 26th and Mission. As we tried on different looks, the owner smoothed his greasy tendrils over his shiny head and glared at us from behind his fake wood desk. I picked out a vulgar-looking blue wig. Laura chose Miss Scarlet for herself. In the same way that Laura loved putting on different voices and speaking as different characters over the phone, she loved wearing wigs. She could pick who she wanted to be at any given moment by switching her hair length, texture, and color, though she always wore the same makeup: powder rouge, rust-colored eye-shadow, and light pink pencil.
I nodded to the two of them from behind my mother’s reflector bike goggles and blurted out abruptly, “Hi,” trying to imitate the low hesitant boy’s voice she’d used with me on the phone.
When I opened the door for Laura and the magazine photographer, Laura glanced at me a little searchingly. She said in a British accent, “JT, this is Chris. So, is this place ready for the photo shoot?”
I nodded shyly, trying to croak out a “Yeah.” Turning, I ran up the soiled steps, and they followed slowly.
Laura said, “He gets very nervous. You’re lucky he didn’t puke on you.”
“It’s an honor to meet you after all this time, JT,” Chris called from behind me.
Laura held him back and said in a confidential tone, “Just to let you know, he doesn’t like to be touched.”
I led them into the big room. I felt a strange sensation of seeing the place for the first time, as if muttering and moving erratically under a wig had given me a new set of eyes. It dawned on me that the place looked like a ward for sick furniture. My mother had long ago stopped visiting because it distressed her to see the place clogged up with junk. Her reaction probably inspired me to bring more junk into the loft. I cleared my throat, managing to say, “Um.”
They both sat down. Chris on the green paisley, overstuffed mumps chair; Laura on a scraped-up corduroy. Laura smiled at me—like she was my mother and I was a shy child who needed prompting. She said, “JT, Chris has brought you something.”
My torso prickled from the mentholated bandage. I wondered if he could see my back-meat bunching out of the bind. I was struck by the attention JT commanded, although I hadn’t spoken a word to this man. I thought about my own life, how so much of the time I tried to fill the silence with smart comments so that people did not assume I was just “some girl.” Or else, totally ignore me.
Chris stood and reached out, “Here, JT, I know you like chocolate.”
Laura fenced in her cockney, “Chris, ya’ didn’ bring none fer me? I’m lettin’ ya off easy this time. Stand up.”
She stood up beside him. He looked confused. She pulled him in toward her and crudely rubbed genitalia with him. I was fascinated, remembering how she’d played the dominatrix on the Cybergasm track.
“Alright. Yer alright. Thas’ my test. I’m JT’s ‘andler, and if I don’t get the right feeling around you then I know he can’t work with you. No chocolate fer me? That’s alright because I am the Fagan I am. He filches for me.”
We all giggled a little awkwardly.
“You wanna check the place out? See if you got the right shot?” she continued.
“Sure,” he said, looking around, “Funky old place, huh?”
“Yeah, s’my sisters. JT thought it suited.”
As soon as he went around the bamboo screen that separated my bedroom from the flow of the main space, she whispered in her Brooklynese, “Talk a little more.” She gestured with her spindly, pale fingers to my forehead. “Fix your wig.”
I’d unconsciously scratched the bangs up to let my scalp air out. The nail-gloss hair made me feel hemmed in, like I was sleeping between the back of a couch and a wall with my socks on and the heater blasting. I pulled the wig down grudgingly, thinking, this is so stupid.
Chris went to the edge of the room scanning the perimeter with a trained eye. He decided to shoot me next to the freight doors. One of the glass panes was held together with duct tape. Chris set down a skateboard decorated with a raunchy picture of a horned woman. He flicked his hand, indicating that I should hop on. I patted down my wig and stepped gingerly. The irony of me pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl was rich. The gesture was mine, but exaggerated and prissy. Losing my balance as the board rolled, I said, “I, um, I don’t know about this, man.”
Chris said, “Oh,” and dropped his loaded weapon.
Laura squealed from the sidelines, “The mute speaks.”
“Well,” Chris continued, “can you stand right next to it? Lean it against you?”
I pulled it out from under me and gave it a try: me and the board, a candid portrait of a gutter snipe. Click, click, click—as his shutter beat out a rhythm, I felt more and more awkward. What was this saying? That JT was a skate-boarder? I interrupted his shooting again, “I’m sorry, man. I don’t know what it is. I feel kinda stupid. I’m sorry.”
“Okay. I’ll take the board out, and we’ll do it like that. I thought it would be a good prop, but that’s okay. Alright. Get loose,” he said, dropping it behind him. It landed on its side, and the top wheels spun loudly as if they had gravel in their axles.
Laura stood in back of him, indicating with her own chin that she wanted me to lower mine. She considered it my most recognizable feature. Lower the chin. Lower, the, chin. Lower.
“Get loose!” Chris repeated, clicking away. I stared down at my sneakers.
“You got small feet, JT.”
Did boys ever have feet this small? And where was my Adam’s apple? I wondered why I was worrying. Laura was only paying me what I would have made in one shift at the Thai restaurant. Plus, she’d offered to get me a bikini and chin and upper lip wax. It was quintessential Laura to hone in on one’s soft spots. The truth was I did want that wax. Once when I was twelve, I’d enticed a popular blond boy over to my house with my mother’s Camel unfiltered cigarettes. We languidly lay in my bed together, enjoying the summer heat and trying to blow smoke rings. He was curious about my bra straps. Our date was going well. And then all of the sudden, he sneered, “You’re the bearded lady. You’ve got a chin like a lumberjack!” I had vaguely noticed a few hairs sprouting from my chin but not until he said this did it go on my fast-growing list of things I needed to change about myself. I kicked him out of my bed and vowed to get some tweezers and never to speak to him again. Only recently have I decided that I like the hair on my body.
I reminded myself that I wasn’t just doing this for the wax; I was doing this because Laura and Geoff had asked me to help them. And when had I ever had the opportunity to do anything like this? It wasn’t that big of a favor, dressing up as a boy—I dressed like a boy all the time. Though it seemingly had no bearing on my life one way or the other, I suddenly felt compelled to try to impersonate JT’s character as accurately as possible.
I said, “Uh. I was stunted.”
Laura added, “He’s actually part dwarf.”
Chris laughed, taking a few more pictures without putting his eyes to the viewfinder.
“I’m lik
e a big monster compared to you,” he leered. (Laura often intimated that JT had given head to reporters because he couldn’t distinguish between the attention for his writing and the more familiar sexual attention he used to get from tricking.)
Chris snapped a few more pictures and said, “Alright. I have another idea, and tell me what you think. I brought . . .” He stopped clicking and changed his film adeptly with one hand, the camera propped on his knee. “I brought some lipstick. I was thinking maybe you could put it on while I shoot you.”
Laura whooped, “That’s hot. That’ll be great. Fucking great.”
Chris asked, “Is that alright?”
I took my hands out of my pockets. I knew what he wanted: a flippant, gay boy bending erotically towards the mirror. In my real life, I applied drugstore lipstick with my pointer finger. I said, hesitantly, “Okay, I can do that, I guess.”
“Yeah? So let’s go in front of the mirror.”
We filed through the labyrinth of blinds and sheets back to the main space. Passing my room, Laura said off-handedly, “My sister’s room. She’s in London right now.”
I touched my throat as if to quiet the smooth part where a bump should have been. Why did she say that? She was pulling me out of JT.
Chris asked, “Where do you live, JT?”
I thought, he’s checking up on our facts. He doesn’t believe us.
Laura answered for me, “We live in the Mission.”
I frowned at her. Why hadn’t she better prepared me? Wasn’t it obvious when she answered for me?
“Hey,” Chris said suddenly, “Can we shoot it in your bathroom?”
I cringed.
“Oh uh, hold on,” I said, thinking, make voice lower. I bolted ahead of them and picked up the mirror I’d been using earlier to adjust my bandage and returned it to its nail hook. No evidence. Then I surreptitiously snapped my bandage, the motion similar to pulling out a wedgie. My breasts were numb.
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