I saw Pan shake his head but couldn’t make out his words. Wendi wanted us to be a family, not a feral pack. Like any good Mommy, she wanted to tame and housebreak all of us, even Pan. But we were wild and vicious, and that’s what always made us real.
“What do you really want me for?” Wendi finally whispered, crumpling into the corner of the futon, as far away as she could get from Pan. This was not what she had run away for. There was a coldness in her voice that was new.
Pan pulled himself to his fullest height, straightened his binder and T-shirt, and looked directly into her eyes. “I want to be the most devoted boi, Mommy!”
11
Tootles’ Story
I rejoined the bois but didn’t breathe a word of anything that I had seen or heard. That would have been even more dishonourable. Besides, I didn’t want to know any of it.
Pan had brought a Mommy to take care of us, but mostly to tell us stories. It was her stories that Pan had first fallen for, and every night, after we climbed into our hammocks, she told us stories that were dark and yet beautiful. Wendi could string words together into feelings in our fucked, damaged boi bodies and make them into bodies we wanted to think about, be in. Instead of being embarrassed, us bois began to hope her next story would be about us, and not a poem about femme solidarity among the Mermaids, or worse, about one of the other bois. Never before had there been such competition or jealousy between us. Before Wendi, we’d been a unit of Pan’s sworn bois. Mommy was slowly pulling us apart, calling us out in turn, and writing about each of her bois as though we were individuals. She articulated John Michael’s wit, Curly’s humour, or the way she felt when I wrapped my hands around her waist. Wendi had stopped going to the open mic since she came to Neverland, but she performed for us in the kitchen. Pan, of course, still liked to listen to her stories—though like the rest of us bois, he liked them best when they were about him. He tolerated stories about his bois, laughed as she read tales about the Mermaids, and punched walls when, on rare occasions, she shared anecdotes about parents and grownups, about life before Pan. She hadn’t forgotten where she came from, and Pan couldn’t seem to make her.
I don’t know what got into Wendi. Perhaps she was punishing Pan for not being the kind of boi she wanted, but one evening, she announced that she would be telling us a story. All us bois kneeled around her, rowdy and boasting to each other that surely the story would be about us. But Mommy’s story was about Mr and Mrs Darling and their house. It was about her school, the GSA, and the college she was to have attended. She talked of a world so foreign it might as well have been outer space to us bois, except to John Michael. Once, I punched the pretentious little snot when she said she knew the Darlings. I don’t know why I hit her, but I just didn’t like her knowing more about Wendi than I did. And I didn’t want her to have had another life before Neverland. I was no one before Pan.
Wendi loves a happy ending, and she’ll do anything to get one. All her stories, no matter how gritty, must end happily. On this night, Wendi was telling us about her life before she ran way with Pan, before I shot her, before Pan tied the apron around her waist, before she was my Mommy. I understood why Pan locked himself in the bathroom and punched the walls. He hated stories like this—stories without us, stories about the kind of grrrl Wendi had been and the kind of woman that she was supposed to grow into.
Mommy was breaking the rules. Had she been anyone else, I would have punished her myself for such an infraction. She wanted us to feel sorry for the Darlings, for these grownups. She was asking us to think of how they must have felt the night that she and John Michael went out the window with Pan, the night that she came to us. I crossed my arms across my chest. Washington had flown down and was perched on my hand, but I refused to laugh at his antics and scowled as Mommy continued her story.
“Think of how afraid they must have been when in the morning they found our beds empty. They tried so hard to be parents to us, and look at how we repaid them.” If Pan hadn’t been punching holes in the bathroom wall, he would have interrupted Wendi by reminding her that the Darlings couldn’t have been devoted parents, as she and John Michael had never shown up on the missing persons/runaway flyers that the police hand out on the stroll.
All the bois looked at each other, exchanging worried glances. We had all run away, all fallen out of our prams, and chosen to live without parents. Some of us had been forced to run from social services, dodging case managers and parole officers. Others were never followed. We survived however we needed to. We’d been everywhere and nowhere, and loved, fucked, and fought with equal ferocity. How dare anyone, even our Mommy, dredge all this up? There are things best left underneath the sediment in which we anchor ourselves. I saw tears in the eyes of Curly and the Twins, and that made me want to take Wendi over my knee, no matter how disrespectful that would have been. I hated her for starting this story, for suggesting an alternative, something that could possibly be different. I hated Pan most for not being here to stop her.
“Don’t stories have to have happy endings? The story of the Darlings seems so sad!” one of the Twins finally said. I almost punched him to keep myself from crying, but then I saw the warmest smile cross Wendi’s face. This was not a game to her, but as real as Neverland all around us.
“Stories are more complicated than that. Some pieces are happy, and sometimes, in order for a happy ending to come, someone else’s life gets destroyed or changed. Sometimes it’s too early to tell. Mrs Darling told me once that she would keep a window open for me, always …” Wendi trailed off and seemed momentarily lost in her own thoughts.
Lost bois didn’t have mothers with open windows. We’d fallen from our prams because anything was better than where we were. Even Pan never really knew where I’d come from before he found me in that diner. I’d never spoken to Pan or anyone about what happened to me before I fell from my pram.
I left when I was young—too young. We all do. I left when it was bad, but it could have gotten worse, and it would have. I left before anyone remembered that I would someday grow up. I went looking for my people. I knew what I was back then, or at least some of it. I used every dime I’d saved from babysitting and bought a bus ticket to NYC. You don’t need ID to get on those buses; you can just step on and disappear down a highway. There’s no way to track you. I’d heard there were gay people in New York. I figured someone would take me in, help me out.
When I got to the city, I saw swarms of people in the Port Authority, an angry hornet’s nest of grownups too busy with jobs and money, staring at newspapers and buzzing pagers. I felt dizzy, knowing this was not the life for me. I’d heard there were gays in the Village, so I spanged a little in the station until I had enough coins to buy a subway token downtown. Back then, I looked clean enough that gullible grownups believed my story about being on a school trip and having lost my wallet and trying to get back home.
The train was like a monster filled with grownups. I tried to blend in, but didn’t need to worry because no one paid attention to anyone but themselves. People in the Village were worse. They were gay but still grownups. They didn’t want me. I tried to ask a guy at a pizza shop if I could wash dishes in exchange for a slice. It seemed like a reasonable offer, and I wasn’t entirely expecting him to say yes (after all, I was used to being disappointed by grownups), but I didn’t expect him to chase me out of his shop with a broom, yelling that I was a filthy punk dyke and he didn’t want me around.
I didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t at all how I had pictured New York on that long bus ride or in the years I’d spent planning my escape. I wanted to give up, to go “home,” but there was nowhere go back to. I sat across from the bar where the gay riots happened, thinking maybe it would give me luck, but I dozed off. When I jerked awake, the couple of bills that had been at the top of my cup were missing. There were more coins and a business card. I almost threw it out, but the rainbow on the back caught my eye. The card was for a gay community centre. For the first time
since I stepped off that bus, I was filled with hope.
I slipped in the front door of the community centre and washed myself up in the bathroom, hoping to look better before talking to anyone. The volunteer receptionists were perky queens. I smiled big; I wanted them to like me. They directed me to the back, where they said I could fill out a membership form for the youth program.
I was so green then, it didn’t even occur to me to lie. I wrote my real age, answered all the bullshit questions about where I had come from. Had I ever been in a hospital? Did I want to kill myself? Did I use drugs? They asked useful stuff too, like my PGP and how I identified. I handed the clipboard of completed forms back to the lady behind the youth program desk and sat flipping through gay magazines, grinning and thinking to myself how lucky I was to finally be with my people. I started getting nervous when the receptionist looked through my intake and scowled. She picked up the phone and spoke in a whisper, occasionally looking over at me.
Another lady came and took me into a room. No one listened to me—they didn’t want to hear how much safer I was now that I was on my own. They just wanted to cover their own asses. They said it was their responsibility as the grownups. I hated them. They left me in a little office with some pity food, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that tasted as bad as the food I’d gotten in the hospital when, last time, I’d tried a different way to run.
No one stopped me when I opened the door and walked out. The social worker who was trying to turn me in must have been in some back office. No one else noticed or cared as I walked down the stone steps of the gay centre, past the billowing rainbow flag. These were not my people after all. This was not my home.
That night, I met a grrrl. She was working on a street I wandered down. I couldn’t believe that such a beautiful grrrl would talk to a boi like me. Maybe New York isn’t so bad after all, I remember thinking to myself. She told me how to get to The Pier. Told me to wait for her. I don’t know why I listened; back then I wasn’t much for taking orders from anyone. I guess I was lonely and hadn’t really talked to anyone in a long time, and she was beautiful. I waited on a bench until she came. She told me her name was Paris. Paris and I talked on the bench until morning, while all around us kids vogued, dipping and spinning, with only the stars watching on. When the sun started to shine over the Hudson River, I brushed a braid out of her face and leaned in for a kiss. She stopped me.
“Be careful, boi. Don’t you remember what I just told you? I’m as toxic as that water.” Her eyes lifted off me and onto the churning brown water in which soda cans, dirty diapers, and candy wrappers floated. I gently turned Paris’s chin back to me and looked long and hard into her brown eyes. I wanted to tell her everything—about the hospitals and their cold-handed doctors, about the drugs that weren’t working anymore to help me forget everything that came before. I wanted to say, “I know what I’m doing; we’ll be careful. I’ll take care of you always.” But instead I kissed her more softly than I’d ever kissed a grrrl. I was so young.
We kissed for a long time, moving from bench to bushes. I laid my coat out to give her somewhere soft, and she pulled some condoms from her purse. We were careful, but I was mostly worried about finding a way to make her feel as beautiful as she looked to me. I promised her so much: that we would get an apartment, that I would buy her dresses and dinners out, and that one day I would take her to Paris the city, her namesake. She’d chosen it because it was beautiful and fancy and romantic. I promised that I would kiss her under the Eiffel Tower.
A month later, she was gone. One night, she didn’t come back from work. I waited on our bench until morning, then searched everywhere from Christopher to West 4th and all the way to Union Square. The other grrrls said she’d gone with a man in a big sedan. We never found her.
I was lost. I tried more drugs, harder drugs, but nothing helped. I wanted to break the face of every shop owner, every faggot sitting at a café, every dyke barista that wouldn’t give me the bathroom key to go piss. I think that’s when I decided that I would dedicate everything I had to kids like her, kids like us, because it was clear that all these yuppie gays didn’t get it. But in that moment, I couldn’t do anything that wasn’t destructive. I was too hurt, too broken. I had to get out.
I hopped a freight with some kids I found in Tompkins Square Park. I didn’t like them a whole lot, but they’d been on the trains before. You have to be careful with trains, and with het punks. They thought I was a real boy and were always fucked-up enough not to notice anything different. Before we left town, I stole a book about Joan of Arc from a library in the West Village. I thought that was funny, but thankfully none of the kids I was travelling with got the joke.
The trains were scary and dangerous, and if you aren’t careful moving around, you can fall and get caught and dragged. The guards are allowed to shoot to kill if they see you “trespassing.” The punks I was with kept talking about how it didn’t used to be that way, but I thought they were full of shit, because they weren’t much older than me but were acting like they had been around forever. I had to always act tough. It was lonely, because the het punks were trashed the whole time, and I was trying to cut back. Somewhere outside of Gainesville, I gave myself a shitty stick-and-poke of the Eiffel Tower. We landed in New Orleans, having rejected Georgia, Florida, and some other states along the way. I fell in love right away with the look of the city and all that wrought iron—hard lace, I called it. The only grrrls I like are hard, so I decided that maybe that city could be my lover for a while. She was real good to me, until, of course, she wasn’t, and I left town. I didn’t know where I was going, but it didn’t take long for Pan to find me in the diner, and, well, you know the rest.
Maybe Pan felt it wouldn’t be fair for him to critique Wendi’s stories, but it was when she told those stories of life before him that he most regretted having tied her apron strings and wished he’d not just handed his bois to her. It’s not that he had lost us, but now we belonged to both of them; a power struggle between them was inevitable. Pan made his displeasure known, but he was a boi of his word; he couldn’t stop what was already in motion. I certainly couldn’t have pictured what was to come; I don’t think even Pan could have imagined it.
Wendi spoke again of how kind the Darlings had been to her, how different they were than those in the other homes where she had been placed. Now John Michael was scarcely paying attention and listened without recognition, as though, like us, she was hearing a bedtime story. Wendi had been a good grrrl, a role model, and she’d led John Michael here … for what? Love? That wasn’t panning out as she’d planned. Wendi sat on the futon in the very same spot where I’d seen Pan break her heart. She used the corner of an apron to wipe her eyes.
“I know she keeps the window open for me, I know she does. I know I wasn’t just a cheque to cash; she really loved me,” Wendi whispered, more to herself than to any of us. I was confused and angry that she was speaking so much about mothers, but sad to see her eyes fill with tears. Despite the makeup and new clothes, despite knowing her as my Mommy, Wendi was the little grrrl whom Pan had rescued, the little grrrl I’d almost destroyed when, in all her innocence, she crawled through the broken glass into Neverland.
It was almost as though Wendi couldn’t handle the sadness of mothers and homes lost in addition to her disappointment about Pan. Her powder was cracking and her lipstick smeared from where she’d wiped snot with her balled fists. Wendi trembled but pulled herself up and straightened her dress, took a lipstick tube from her bra and applied more red to her lips, followed quickly by a flask. There was an edge to Wendi’s voice, raw from tears and whiskey.
Pan, who had joined us as Wendi’s tears began to fall, started to mock her. “You think mothers are sweet and loving?” Pan jeered. “You think they should be cherished and trusted? Believe me, you’re wrong. Just wait—you’ll see.”
Pan had never spoken about his own past before he’d fallen from his pram. None of us had any idea how old he was or wh
ere he had come from. He still kept those secrets guarded, but did let slip that one time, when he returned to the place where he had fallen from his pram, he found that his mother had closed the window on him. The window was not only closed but locked. She had disowned him, forgotten him, and moved on. Thick bars had been installed and, Pan added quickly, there was another child sleeping in the bed that had once been his.
Curly started to cry. I think he still hung onto a dream about the inherent goodness of mothers and having a Mommy was wonderful for him—and triggering. I felt sorry for him, not angry. I remembered the promises I’d made to protect not just us lost bois but all the runaways, the throwaways. I remembered what it was like to feel completely alone on the streets of New York—and even more alone when I first realized that I had to run, when I first knew that mothers couldn’t be trusted. As I saw his eyes get wet, I reached over and grabbed his hand. Pan’s eyes met mine as I whispered:
“Curly, we’re fine without mothers, we’re lost bois. We’ve built our own family, chosen one another, given oaths in blood to each other. We belong to each other now. Those bad people we were born to can’t hurt us now.”
That wasn’t just a story I told him to stop his tears; I really believed it. I still believe it. Pan smiled at me. It was the first time in a long time I felt really connected to him. It was almost like the old days—he and I against everyone. I remembered how simple it had felt when it was just us, before I became Wendi’s boi too and back when Hook didn’t take as much of Pan away from us. Lost in my memories, I didn’t notice Wendi’s crumpled face and the way my words were the final wave to knock her down, swirling in the fast current.
Lost Boi Page 11