by John Waters
“See over there?” asks Gumdrop, pointing to a curtain in the back. “Yeah,” I say, noticing a few truckers sneaking behind it every once in a while. “Take a look, John. You’ll be okay. I’m gonna let you explore a little on your own. There’s a bunch of you cocksuckers back there,” he explains in the nicest, most unjudgmental voice imaginable. I laugh out loud at his clueless homophobic words that belie his gay-friendly attitude. He just doesn’t know. I’m not offended; actually, it’s kind of sweet. I realize Gumdrop would like a little more quality time with Fumbelina, so I decide to be brave. “Okay,” I reply, still sounding a little worried. “I got your back,” he says assuredly. I look around at all the tough guys ear-banging each other in amphetamine delirium, laughing at nothing and celebrating the very act of not thinking, and feel safe here in this paradise of trucker sexuality. Who needs intellectuals when you’re having fun?
I head toward the mysterious curtain, hesitate, pull it back, and go inside the hidden annex. It’s little but, oh, brother, I’m in fag heaven, as Gumdrop might innocently say. Queer-bait go-go boys are everywhere, and the truckers in this audience are just as wild and hopped-up on speed and hooch as their straight brothers out front. Every time a new dancer is announced they shout “Whip it out!” or “Get it! Get it!” just like characters in my old films might. “Basket” seems to be a real favorite. He’s got a huge, tattooed cock that he stirs drinks with when he kneels down on the bar. And then there’s Chicken Little, who’s just my type, a baby-faced ruffian who, much to my initial astonishment, “cold-shakes” Viagra onstage and then shoots up just as Gerard Malanga did with heroin in 1966 as the Velvet Underground played in Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Some of the truckers are jerking off in the friendliest way possible. Chicken Little’s dick gets harder on the Viagra, and he circulates the room slapping customers in the face with it as they roll up bills tightly and insert them up his ass. Wow! This is my kind of club! But since I’ve already had two peculiar sexual encounters today, I decline Chicken Little’s face-slapping (whap! whap! whap!) “helicoptering” offer when he gets to me.
I’m startled to feel Gumdrop’s arm around my shoulder. “Shoot your shot?” he asks, unembarrassed and possibly totally unaware that this was the name of one of Divine’s early techno record hits. “No, but that’s okay,” I respond in our newfound kinship of roadside honesty. “I did,” says Gumdrop with a twinkle in his eyes before adding with a knowing laugh, “Come on, my diet pill is wearing off.” “Hey, that’s a line from Hairspray,” I respond; “I thought you didn’t like that movie?” “Well,” he chuckles, leading me to the exit, “I liked that line.”
We head back toward his truck and I ask if there are rooms we could rent so we can get a good night’s sleep. “Nah,” he says, “you don’t want to get in any bed in this place. Besides, I’m gonna take another upper.” “But I’ve got to get some shut-eye,” I beg, “I have to catch a new ride tomorrow.” “I told you I’d watch over you, John,” he says with unaffected kindness as he pops two more pep pills and swallows them down dry-mouthed. “You get your forty winks”—he motions to the cab of his truck as he climbs up—“I’ll just watch.” “Watch what?” I ask, confused, but flattered at his nocturnal offer. “I’ll just watch you sleep all night and make sure nobody harms you,” he says tenderly. “Will you let me do that, John?” “Yes,” I answer, completely touched by his unsexual kindness, “I certainly will.”
GOOD RIDE NUMBER ELEVEN
SPACE CADET
When I awake after one of the most peaceful night’s sleeps in my life, Gumdrop is in the exact same position, sitting in the chair, watching over me in bed. He looks a little tired but still wired, and he could use a shave. Otherwise, he’s still my nocturnal protector. I get up quickly and gather my few things. I know Gumdrop’s got a shitload of Jujyfruits to deliver and he has to head south. No way I’ll risk hitchhiking on I-70 through Utah where there’s not even a rest area for hundreds of miles. It’s time for us to part.
He gives me a lift to a local porn wholesale-outlet warehouse and drops me off, assuring me this is a “destination location” that many interstate truckers visit. I know I’ll never see Gumdrop again, but we do have our Jujyfruits memories and that’s all I can ask for, traveling these lonely highways. You only get a real fairy godfather for a few hours in life, I’m afraid.
He’s off and I’m all by myself, the way everybody really is no matter where you are. There’s not a car in sight on the road, so I just stand there feeling the power of being alone and hopeful. I see a desert-rat-type guy in his late forties coming out of the porno outlet empty-handed. Who would come all this way to an X-rated warehouse and not find a thing? This big guy, who looks part cowboy, part mental case, gets in a broken-down early-eighties AMC Eagle and peels out toward me. Will my amazing luck continue? Of course it does. He stops and I get in.
Up close, he looks like a real space cadet. I introduce myself and, no internal debate here, my rider has no idea of who I am. I tell him where I’m going. “Headed that way,” he mutters, “right to the middle of nowhere.” I’m not sure if seeing him come out of a porn outlet is a thing I should quiz him about, but I do. “You like adult movies?” I ask with as much nonchalance as I can muster. “Never look at that shit,” he says without rancor; “I just sell my old tapes when I need the money.” “Your tapes?” I ask with newfound interest. “Yeah … I used to do that shit for a few years … way back … before I had my encounter.” “Uh … what kind of films?” I gently pry. “Gay porn,” he answers unembarrassedly. “I ain’t queer but I could get my dick hard no matter who was sucking it.” He chuckles with nostalgia. “What was your porn name?” I ask, trying to look into his ravaged face to remember a possible stud from yesteryear smut. “John,” he says shyly, and then it hits me like a ton of bricks. “Johnny Davenport?!” I shriek. “Shhhh,” he scolds, suddenly paranoid, “they’ll hear you.” “Who will hear us?” I ask, confused, as I look out to the empty landscape surrounding us. “Them people,” he answers vaguely before correcting himself; “well, not ‘people’ exactly, but just … them.”
“God, you were my favorite porn star,” I gush with shocked enthusiasm, remembering the weird sexiness this muscular Eddie Haskell look-alike stud muffin with the curly hair and the humongous cock brought to the screen. “That was all bullshit,” he mumbles, dismissing my praise without an ounce of vanity. “I especially loved you in Powertool,” I continue, not being able to control myself, “when you did that great jailhouse face-fuck scene as Jeff Stryker watched, jerking off from another cell.” “Yes, Jeff was all right,” Johnny admits with only a slight tinge of nostalgia for the bad ol’ days. “I know Jeff Stryker!” I tell him. “I saw his show, Jeff Stryker Does Hard Time, in New York. He was so amazing. Especially after the final curtain. As the ticket buyers left the theater, Jeff stood at the exit door wearing an open bathrobe showing his fully erect penis, and each theatergoer could pose for a photograph with Jeff and his dick.” Johnny doesn’t look impressed. “I have his contact information—want it?” I excitedly offer, imagining the prospect of these two retired sex machines hooking up again. “No!” he spits out with sudden anger. “I don’t care about those fuckers and I told you to keep your voice down. There’s things you don’t know—they’re listening,” he whispers with an insane urgency.
But I’m too worked up to stop. “Johnny Davenport,” I say again, pinching myself that I’m actually in the car with him. “You were so good in The Young and the Hung, Part Two! I loved you in Full Grown Full Blown, too!” “You think I know what those pieces of shit were called?” he asks with contempt. “I just needed cash.” “But you won the 1987 X-Rated Critics Award for Newcomer of the Year,” I argue, trying to give him a little self-worth and letting him know he still has fans out there and they’ve been searching for him for years. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he grumbles, “I’ve heard all those lies, that I’m a mountain man living in Albuquerque with a wife and kids …
it’s all hogwash. Now shut up about that crap!”
Suddenly I’m silent. I look at my watch but it’s stopped. Johnny gets a strange look in his eyes and a tiny grin appears on his weather-beaten lips. This guy has been in the sun too much in his later life. He’s still strangely handsome, but scaly, almost like a butch Gila monster who’s obviously got a screw loose. “They heard you,” he announces with clarity, then slowly pulls the car over to the side of the road. It is eerily quiet but suddenly the radio comes on all by itself. “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll,” by the all-time coolest rockabilly singer, Billy Lee Riley, blares out, but Johnny barely reacts and certainly doesn’t see the humor in this novelty song. Oddly, he begins singing along with the “little green men, they were real hep-cats” lyrics with complete seriousness. My eardrums start popping as if I were on an airplane and I feel the car begin to vibrate even though we’re not moving. “Ever fuck a spaceman?” Johnny asked with a sudden horny gaze. It’s the last thing I remember.
Suddenly we’re on board a spaceship that is so cheesily decorated it could be a set from that Zsa Zsa Gabor movie Queen of Outer Space. There are aliens, too. Stupid-looking ones. Nude. Green, of course, sporting soft bodies, Margaret Keane eyes but weirder—almost like the “cunt eyes” Crackers rants about in Pink Flamingos—a line that I still can’t believe I actually wrote. They’ve got no hair (although a few seem to be wearing bad wigs) and have fingernails that curl around like claws. They’ve got big dicks, too. But no balls. I’m afraid to look and see if they have assholes. There doesn’t seem to be a female in sight.
Johnny suddenly seems relaxed. At home. Even when they all whip out from some fifties sci-fi microwave-type appliance what appear to be liver dinners and start eating with disgusting table manners. “Okay,” Johnny warns me, “they’re getting ready.” “Ready for what?” I ask with sudden nervousness. “For sex,” Johnny announces with full acceptance. “What do you mean, ‘sex’?!” I shout with growing apprehension. “Look, I’m no bottom in real life,” Johnny explains, “but with these little fellas…” He lowers his pants and turns his butt to the space creatures. “It’s magic,” he says to me in an almost spiritual way. A horny little alien heads toward me and starts making weird little froglike croaks. Good God, I think, I’m too old to get fucked! “Is this safe?” I yell to Johnny in a panic. “Do they use rubbers?” But it’s too late. Johnny is being slowly penetrated by one of these ghastly creatures, but he shows no pain. In fact, his face reflects a delighted contentment I’ve rarely seen in a man his age.
I feel a clawlike tentacle unbuttoning my belt from behind, and a wave of body odor like I’ve never smelled before overwhelms my senses. I refuse to look into the face of space rape, so I close my eyes. The rubbery appendage turns me around and begins to unzip my zipper. What the hell, I think; you’ve never been fucked by an extraterrestrial, go for it. But can you “top from the bottom” with a little green man? “Please, no fingering,” I beg, remembering the Fu Manchu–type nails I saw earlier on these creatures. My limits are respected. But then something … some rodlike growth with a fiery magnetic field and a friendly elasticity rubs up on me. I pass out.
I awake in Johnny Davenport’s car. I remember little. Good God, what time is it? I wonder, seeing the sun coming up and looking at my watch in confusion. “It’s the next day?!” I scream in horror, trying to recall the vanished hours. I feel confused, scared, but Johnny seems calm, content. “Don’t worry,” he advises with experience, “you’ll feel it soon.” “Feel what soon?” I shout in panic as vague memories of some kind of sexual rear entry stir in my mind. “I’m not pregnant, am I?” I cry out in paranoia, unsure of the scientific realities of post–alien sodomy. “No,” Johnny answers with patience, understanding my bewilderment, “but doesn’t your asshole feel different?” “Different?” I consider, not really allowing my anus to have mood swings. “Well … no,” I answer, embarrassed. “But wait,” I admit as I feel a little tingling out back in my most private area. “You have a magic asshole now, John. So do I,” he announces gently, like some sort of holy man. Before I can scoff I feel a pleasant turbulence in the air beneath my balls. “The magic only lasts for four hours or so, but listen…” Johnny farts eerily and poetically, and it’s the exact opposite of a fart joke. A masculine aroma of courage and spice fills the air. I think of that porn movie with my favorite title of all, My Ass Is Haunted, and wonder if the director also was back-door probed by a spaceman. “Use the anal magic wisely,” Johnny explains like some sort of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. “‘Wisely’?” I repeat, not sure how to interpret this specialized advice. “Watch,” says Johnny as he lifts his leg and points one of his still round and sexy ass cheeks toward my forehead. Suddenly I feel hair grow. I grab the rearview mirror and look in amazement at my receding hairline filling in with follicles. “It works,” Johnny boasts as he spins around in his seat and gets in a semicrawl position with his concealed magic anus aimed at the top of my head. My gray hair turns chestnut brown. “See?” he boasts as I notice a subtle vibration in the rear of his pants. “Go ahead, try yours,” he gently suggests, so I give in and concentrate. Slowly but steadily my asshole propels me out of my seat with a supernatural power that allows me to hover in the air inside the car. “Oh God,” I whisper to Johnny in a trembling but awed voice, “what can I try it out on?” “There!” my new guru says as he points to unidentifiable roadkill outside the car. The handle of the door pops open without my touching it, and I space-glide out of the car and through the air with a miraculous grace and land right next to the carcass of the unfortunate animal. I hear majestic music that I soon realize is coming from my asshole and quickly learn I can control the volume through breathing. “You got it!” encourages Johnny as he rises in the air of the front seat propelled by his own magic asshole, which joins in with my symphony of unearthly anal notes so that our assholes build to a melodious crescendo. The roadkill’s eyes pop open and the bloodied animal shouts, “Anarchy rules!” just as the fox did in the funniest scene in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Johnny smiles at me as the resurrected critter runs back into the desert. I get back in the car, and without discussing it he pulls off and we give our assholes a rest from their bewitched duties. I meditate on my newfound anal inner peace as Johnny drives away, staring straight ahead on the highway, knowing that he is only a “bottom” when alien-abducted, still a real “top” in human life. He lets me out at Exit 62 on 80 West, Lakeside, Utah, where he lives. I don’t worry I won’t be able to get a ride here in the middle of nowhere. I’ve got a magic asshole and a new head of hair. For three more hours, at least.
GOOD RIDE NUMBER TWELVE
A STAR
Such bliss. Such power. Such anal reinvention. And lo and behold, I see a limo approaching on the lonely highway. A beat-up one, but still … a real limo. I don’t even wonder if it will pull over. My magic asshole is already twitching in excitement. Not only does the vehicle stop, inside is Connie Francis. You heard me, Connie Francis.
I can’t believe my eyes. I recognize her immediately, sitting in the backseat, wearing more makeup than Divine ever did, but without the joy. Spackle. Thick Pan-Cake makeup that seems to be put on with a trowel. She’s had work, too. Permanently “surprised.” With those telltale puppet lines all plastic surgery victims have extending from the corner of the pulled mouth out across their cheeks. She looks sedated, almost as if you waved your hands across her eyes, she wouldn’t blink. She’s “even.” Ever so even.
I have been obsessed by Connie Francis’s late career for years and know she still occasionally performs, even doing four-and-a-half-hour “greatest hits” concerts. God, if you can imagine the beauty and the horror of these shows, you will understand why I continue to be her devoted fan. Except for her chauffeur, who I soon realize is not a real driver but her manager, she’s alone. A legend so oblivious to real life she may not realize the music business has completely changed since she first became a star. A famous singer who’s sold more
records than the Beatles but has had to compete with her own horrific personal life: A onetime accordion-playing child star with demon-father issues. A love affair with Bobby Darin she never got over. Four failed marriages. Being raped at a Howard Johnson’s by a still unknown and uncaught assailant. Commitment to seventeen hospitals for mental illness. Who’s sorry now? I am, goddammit, for all the hell Connie Francis has had to endure.
But she doesn’t seem fazed today. No, she speaks in a monotone but answers all my questions with the most minimalist responses possible. “Yes,” she is Connie Francis. Silence. She’s going to Reno for a one-night concert at the Nugget, which is “really fifteen minutes outside of Reno in Sparks, Nevada,” as her manager corrects her. “No,” she’s “not hot,” she blankly answers after I ask, noticing the fur coat she is wearing with the pelts hanging off the hem. “Wow! Very Hills Have Eyes,” I joke, hoping humor might lighten Connie up a bit. “Is that a musical?” she asks without showing the slightest real interest.