“What’s wrong with you, Rita?” she said. “Sexually, you’re great. Emotionally, you suck.”
“Emotionally?” I shrieked, outraged. “You’re the one who doesn’t connect. I’ve never had such a cold fuck in my life. Miss Icy.”
“Listen honey,” she said. “Why don’t we try to really get to know each other?”
“Like a relationship?” I croaked.
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but I at least think we should go out on a date.”
“A date?”
“Tonight we’ll have hot sex and then later on in the week we’ll go to a museum.”
“Okay,” I said. “Wednesday? ”
“I can’t,” she said. “I have to go see my son in Union City.”
“You have a son in Union City?” I asked. “What is this? Is omission your middle name?”
“Mission?”
“No, omission. You know how fearful people make love—the ommissionary position.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know and can’t imagine. Just ask.”
“Okay,” I said. “I will. That’s enough punishment. Can we go home now?”
“My way?”
“Only your way? ”
“Only.”
“Well,” I said. “Right this second my desire for you is larger than everything I know to be true about science and daily life. But if the only way you’re going to fuck me is with an unnecessary glove on your hand, then I guess there is nothing I can do about it even though I think it is ridiculous.”
“First we go have a drink.”
Chapter Forty-eight
She engaged me in a brisk walk around Chelsea and the more I got dragged along the more I felt out of my element. Like there are two neighborhoods in her neighborhood. One is Spanish and the other is gay. She belongs to both. Going out with her meant sitting in expensive restaurants eating delicious, incredibly overpriced things while she talked to the waiter in Spanish and to the owner in flirtatious arrogance.
“I once came here with a bunch of dykes,” she said. “The owner didn’t like that. We sat here all through drinks and dinner loudly comparing our cleavages.”
After that I didn’t know what she was talking about. Something having to do with computers, about how they work.
“What is software? ” I asked.
She stared blankly.
Okay, so we have nothing in common.
Everything she ordered was incredible. Sautéed mushrooms in garlic and cilantro, crab and avocado salad, gingered oysters. She could talk forever and forever. Ten generations of Spanish aristocracy and two of Cuban aristocracy chatting on the veranda and two of Miami ghettoed bitterness. Some Panama, one Arab, one Jew, and a heavy dose of Union City, New Jersey. Astrology, occult, Spanish words I do not know. I never felt so plain and limited. What a relief. She would be and do everything.
But touching on the street did not feel safe.
“Men bother me every day of my life,” I said.
“They don’t touch me,” she said. “I’m like a brick wall.”
We ducked into the Rawhide, a greasy men’s bar, just on a whim and it turned out to be one of those dens of kind oppression. We could touch and the old queens were drunk and nice. I leaned against the wood like some big dyke and held her by the waist, her arms around my neck. Finally, I liked it.
“I like to be touched,” she said. “But not right away. I need to warm up.”
By the time we got home it was one happy time. Threw her over my shoulder and down on the bed. She and her music, candles, red wine, fucking bullshit latex gloves, tube of lube, all accoutrement—completely commodified.
“Let’s use spit,” I said, refusing all purchasable items.
“No. I have my idea. Seduce me.”
“What does seduce me mean?”
“Go slow,” she said. “It’s too good to go fast.”
Everything I said was what I really felt. Everything I did was what I really wanted. I was never disconnected. I was never in service. It was a two-way street from beginning to end. Fuck a girl in the ass and she’s really yours. Her body on your arm like a Popsicle treat.
There was no love between us. None at all and there never would be. There was no understanding. Nothing to talk about. I come from no mobility. She comes from fallen grandeur. She whipped out another round of those silly gloves. We were kissing and I started thinking.
“Aren’t you afraid of saliva too?” I said, her tongue in my mouth.
“Your timing stinks,” she said. “Your timing is really bad.”
“I don’t know you at all,” I said. “I only know a few things. You’re smart and angry and sexy and sad. You’re opinionated.”
“Opinionated? Me? I know when to keep my opinions to myself.”
Later, when my thoughts turned to that night, I had one memory. I am holding her in the morning. All separation between our bodies has been worn down through the night. Everything is quiet now. My hands are on her back and shoulders. Her eyes are cold. She had a faint smile on her lips. I separated her legs and looked at her labia in the sunlight, honking cars and sirens passing outside the window. I eat her, she turns to wax. See, we can make love in the morning, quietly. No pot, no night, no soundtrack from the CD player.
“That’s how you tell racial origins,” she says later as I fingered her once again. “The darkness at the ends of my genitals.”
“Really?” I said, looking at mine. Just pink. It sounded like another theory. Like computers and the stars.
“Really.”
And then the memory of David’s dad standing in the sunlight came into my head out of nowhere and I realized that I missed my father desperately.
Chapter Forty-nine
The fact is that in real life, not just on TV, most teenagers get some kind of family cheerleading when they go out on their first date.
Most of my friends who were straight remember a wistful enthusiasm unless they were Catholic girls with fearful memories. But then there could be the parading of a new dress before father’s tempered approval and a collective anticipation as the first doorbell rang.
“What’s he like? ” mothers and sisters and neighbors would gossip on grocery checkout lines and in the Laundromat about potential boyfriends and cute boys next door.
Even later, after fifteen, when dates were all about drinking and drugs and hand-jobs with skeevy longhairs with bad skin and no future. Even then my friends’ beaus would be invited into the living room, shake hands and be forewarned. Encouraging or obstructive, there was a recognition of the importance of these events. Daughters and sons were permitted a kind of preening and exhibition as they measured their desirability in the mirror before Mom and Dad.
For me there was no ritual. There was only secrecy. An institutionalized hiding and deception from the earliest age. My dates were unnoticed. My hopes had to be obscured. As I wondered silently what she would want me to wear, how she would like my hair, what gift would please her, what story, what act. What does she like about me? All the while I had to carry on my life without the slightest hint of its existence.
At dinner Dad would tease Howie about a sparkly brunette named Linda while I ate, silently, tragically, hoping not to be noticed. Eating in a state of rage. The Haases and the Weemses would pass in the hallway with approving comments about nice young couples and decent hardworking girls, young men. I worked hard. I was decent.
But all the time Claudia and I carefully withheld meaning and expression until the sack containing my heart constricted, habitually. I can say honestly that I have never recovered. I am absolutely furious and filled with grief to have had these pleasures taken from me when I was so, so young.
It is just like that scene in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion where a young woman leaves her heart back in her married lover’s chamber. This event—my love for Claudia Haas and her love for me—is a moment of my personal history in which I have left behind the romantic flights of fancy of a young girl w
ith an open heart. That girl never existed. She was replaced instead by a security guard, a croupier, a study hall monitor, an economist, a soldier, a snake.
My father came home unexpectedly in the middle of the day and found us embracing on his queen-sized bed. Claudia wisely fled. What followed was a murderously humiliating scenario in which my dignity as a human being was erased, permanently, from the family lexicon.
My solitude at this moment. My deep diminishment obscured two facts that would only come to light fifteen years later. First that I did not do anything wrong, even though I was deeply punished. Second, that my father should have been overjoyed that someone loved me and that I loved them. Why should such basic observations—ones available to most straight people without a second thought—elude me until adulthood and then their devastation continue unmitigated?
After walking around the neighborhood, that first afternoon, I took the Seven train into the city and walked around all night. It was 1975. Few homeless people, no crackheads. A young girl could ride the trains and walk the streets with only internal horrors. Looking back now, twenty years later, I see how impossible my flight/ exile would be today. I see how much harder, angrier, how much more abused those sixteen-year-old dykes are—roaming around without familial love, late at night. And I also see how much more there is for them now than there was for me. And how little there is for both of us.
Chapter Fifty
It was the desire to avoid devastation that always kept me from calling my dad. Fathers are America’s greatest disappointment. Very few of them seem to have done their job. But the ones who came through are so loved. They are adored. The ones who took the time to listen, to ask you questions about yourself, to be happy for you. To actively care.
I have always felt that my father, Eddie, could do that for me anytime he wished. And, frankly, I never understood why he didn’t want to because basically I am a terrific person in many ways. I am someone that a father could love.
As my life has progressed, I have changed. I have learned things and come to understand new things. So it would seem natural that my father would do the same. That’s why his abandonment of me has always been a big surprise. Every couple of years, I tried a new approach to see if he could get it. To see if he could get why I am worth loving.
The thing is that now the guy is getting old. Really old. I’m used to death and I think about it casually, so I have no trouble knowing that my father will die. My problem is that as long as he is still alive, he has the chance, every second, to change the way he views me. So every time he refuses, I’m devastated. Because I don’t want my father to die with me knowing that he had that chance every day and never took it. How will I be able to live with that for the rest of my life? At least while he’s alive I can hope that he will, someday, try.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I ever got a chance to know him. I have a sneaking suspicion that it wouldn’t take very long to find out what he was really like. Probably just three or four visits. But it’s the not being sure that keeps me crazy. The vague possibility that he might be able to come through fills me, daily, with rage.
I picked up the phone, feeling sick to my stomach, ugly, hateful, repulsive, disgusting. I waited, knowing that I am bad.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Dad?”
“Hello?”
“Hi, Dad. It’s Rita.”
“Oh, Rita.”
I could hear the disappointment in his voice immediately. It devastated me. He was sorry he had picked up the phone.
“How are you, Dad? ”
“Everything’s fine, everything’s fine. Your brother Howie is here with his wife. They’re staying here. Howie is washing the dishes right now. Oh, there he goes, turning off the faucet. Hey Howie, it’s your sister. He’s coming over to the phone. Okay, here’s Howie.”
“Hi, Rita.”
“Hey, Howie, what are you doing?”
“We’re just in town for a few days visiting Dad.”
“Are you having fun?”
“Yeah,” he said, totally blank. “We took him to Shea last night. The Mets suck.”
“Well, have a good visit, Howie.”
“Yeah, see ya.”
“Bye.”
I always keep trying and I always get destroyed. I get destroyed by that father-son bond. What did Howie do to deserve it? When you compare us objectively, he’s no better than me. In fact, I have a hell of a more interesting life. So, I know a lot more about living than Howie, who was always in.
What is it with these brothers and sisters of homosexuals? They love that special treatment. They love to take advantage of it. Would it ever occur to Howie to refuse to go to Shea until my dad invited me too? No way. He loves those special rights, those special privileges. You know parental booty is a limited thing. Why split it with your queer sibling if you don’t have to. Why give up the one thing that makes a regular shmuck like Howie into something special—his normalcy?
That’s why we’ll never get rid of homophobia in this country. The brothers and sisters of homosexuals have too much at stake.
Phone calls like that set off a whole chain of reactions usually resulting in what I think of as “pain days.” Days when I walk around and every time I see families or people with their parents or see any children or hear anyone say the words “my father” or “my mother” I feel transported to Planet Pain. My molecules go there. It is unbearable. Do you know how many kids there are on television? How many families? It’s a knife to the throat.
Chapter Fifty-one
That first night, age sixteen, I started at Broadway and Forty-second Street at about nine p.m. and walked up the avenue on the east side of the street until I reached 125th. Then I crossed over and walked back down on the west side until I came to Wall Street, about seven miles later. Then I crossed the avenue and did it again. This first night of refusal—the world’s refusal of me—was also the inauguration of the one factor I attribute most prominently to my survival—the institution of systems. I created mental systems to carry me through the punishment of the innocent. I had one pack of Salems, I had twelve hours until morning. That’s twenty cigarettes into twelve hours. That’s five cigarettes every three hours. That’s one cigarette an hour plus two treats. But how to pass the time between? I had to look in the windows of stores until I saw clocks and that search for measured time occupied my mind.
That morning I showed up at high school for the first time in months—washed up in the bathrooms, washing my hair with soap. All day long people stared at me because it was so sticky and wrong. And I slept in the back of the classroom and ate off other people’s abandoned lunch trays. A few nights I slept over in school—successfully avoiding the security guards and teachers—stretching out, fully clothed, on those gray industrial carpets. I stared at the fake paneled ceilings and the overflowing wastebaskets filled with leftover lunch. I ate other people’s leftover lunch. I developed systems for hunger.
I walked up Broadway starting on the east side and stopped at every restaurant window along the way to read the menus and put together my ideal meal. Appetizer, soup, entrée, and salad. Or just pizza with topping and different time-consuming ways to imagine it. That made the trip last ten times as long and gave me more filler for the hole in my heart. I left my feelings behind. There was Orange Julius.
I went to Nathan’s on Fifty-seventh Street and filled plates piled high with free sauerkraut, having one serving with mustard and one without, washed down with abandoned old Cokes and old orange drink. I left my feelings there. A dirty teenage girl sitting alone in the corner of Nathan’s nonchalantly sipping on someone else’s drink. A shameful person. A disgrace.
I kept going to work in the city and cashing paychecks, washing my hair in Woolworth’s shampoo, brushing my teeth in school, walking around on Saturday nights, Sunday nights. The trick in those days was to find a comfortable stoop on a quiet street, maybe on the West Side of Manhattan. There was no competition back then for a quie
t spot to sleep.
And I learned through my systems how to achieve self-hypnosis by staring at car headlights and keeping my mind blank. Sooner or later you forgot you were alive and could zone out that way for up to forty-five minutes. Then, at around five a.m. it was safe to fall asleep because no one would be coming by. There were not ninety thousand homeless people then, going through every garbage can.
Finally, after a while I snuck back into the building to Claudia’s house. I stared up at my father’s window from across the street and knew he was there but offered nothing. He did not reach out even though I was the child and he the adult. When I got to Claudia’s her mother was waiting, all loving kindness. She knew nothing in particular and would never suspect such a repulsive reality. So I concocted some sham story about a family argument, assuring her it would all be over soon and so, from this—my first confrontation between my homosexuality and the world—I lied from the beginning. I know to this day that I was treated better that way. I know that lying was the only thing I could do.
Chapter Fifty-two
Mrs. Haas was cooking a hot meal. I was starving. I wanted it so badly. She chatted away, stirring and stirring and, absurdly, I rattled on about my new life—about all the little details that never happened and the silly conversations that never took place—all the time Claudia looking on with horror because that was the moment that she decided that she did not want to know either. She did not want to know what was happening to me.
I lied continuously, entertaining them, working my way towards that meal, perfecting my systems for keeping people interested enough to feed me. To casually force them to feed me. And just as Mrs. Haas was setting the cracked plates out on the tiny kitchen table, the telephone rang and it was my father, keeping me from my meat.
As he spoke I saw her expression shift to one—not of shock—but registering rather that everything had simply changed. For the second time that week I was humiliated, because I knew that my father had exposed my true and horrendous self to the one person who was offering me a meal.
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