Role Models

by John Waters

  On the way out, a young tough-looking white kid who has his own ridiculous look—full-tilt ghetto baggy—follows me out and offers, “Hey! My dad used to know you from up BJ’s.” BJ’s, a long-ago-torn-down legendary scary white bar up the street, was used as the location for the final scene in my movie Pecker. “Who is your dad?” I ask, remembering fondly the night when a friend and I went into the men’s room to take a leak and came face-to-face with two junkies freebasing. “Beat it, Curley,” one barked at my friend, and we turned in our tracks and fled. “He’s dead now,” the kid responded sadly, “but he told me he used to watch your back up at BJ’s and I just want to tell you I’ll watch your back from now on whenever you come in here.” Now, that’s what I call accepted. And safe. I was touched. Who knows, maybe next time I’ll wear my gold lamé Comme des Garçons tennis shoes.

  Wearing fashion in New York is a whole different story. “Dressed in his thrift shop finest,” the press has written many times when I go to openings wearing Rei Kawakubo’s newest reinvention of “bum wear.” But here, I can model my “I, a Notebook” jacket, the one made out of material exactly like the black-and-white cover of every schoolkid’s composition book, and no one will bat an eye. Sometimes strangers ask, “Is that Comme des Garçons?” I can slip into my hideous gold-and-copper fake-snakeskin-patterned Beatle boots that Mary Boone bought from Comme des Garçons and gave to me for my sixtieth birthday, and a few will recognize that they didn’t come from the sale bin at the Flagg Brothers shoe store. Even if I go out to my favorite New York restaurant, Prune, and wear my snappy little fall jacket that zips up crookedly and hangs on me in an unflattering way, no one will sneer. New Yorkers understand that sometimes everybody needs to dress crookedly.

  Only in Manhattan do I dare wear a fragrance. And that’s Odeur 53, Rei Kawakubo’s scent that to me smells exactly like Off! insect repellant. The best thing about Odeur 53 is that the smell doesn’t last very long. “Rei doesn’t really like perfume for men,” a salesperson needlessly tried to explain. I love the idea of a perfume that disappears—you don’t need to convince me! Designed to “confront the nose”—the press release’s copy for this “anti-perfume” was art in itself—“a memory of smell…entering the world of abstraction by way of a feeling…the future, the space, the air.” With astonishing seriousness Rei listed the inorganic ingredients: “the freshness of oxygen, wash drying in the wind, nail polish, burnt rubber and the mineral intensity of carbon.” That’s exactly what I want to smell like! How did she know?!

  You have to be careful about fashion at the beach. And Rei Kawakubo refuses to acknowledge the seasons, often showing air-suffocating polyester or wool for summer or skimpy little jackets with mesh seams cut in that make the hawklike winds of New York City even more shocking to your skinny body. In Provincetown, I try to blend in. I’m always on my bicycle, so I can’t wear any of Rei’s suave little orange suede loafers that might slip on the pedals or her black “fashion stunt wear” pants with the strings hanging off that could get caught in the spokes. And since I love minorities and Provincetown is a gay fishing village, I hang out in the two straight bars. My first stop is always downstairs at the Bradford, which is a little-known large bar beneath a popular Commercial Street drag karaoke tourist hangout. The grouchy stock boys who work in the local supermarket and refuse to make eye contact with you in the aisles, the handymen around town who don’t show up for their jobs renovating all the expensive new condo conversions, and the hetero townies who grew up in a gay town and have a certain wariness about the homo majority without being homophobic make up the customers. There’s a pool table and a DJ who plays all rap music. It reminds me of that Jodie Foster movie The Accused, where her character gets raped on a pinball machine by a gang of New Bedford–type morons. I usually wear my brown CDG sports coat that Rei Kawakubo hastily spray-painted black right before putting it out on the rack. You can tell because, if you turn up the collar, you can see she forgot or, better yet, chose not to spray underneath. It’s a really ugly jacket but it makes me feel…well…of the people. So many of the customers here could just go home and spray-paint their daywear uniforms and presto—they’d be right in fashion, but I wisely decide to keep that information to myself.

  If that place is dead I go across the street to the Old Colony, which used to be a fisherman bar but now is a nice place for budding alcoholics. It looks like the set of a whaling movie, and there is some vomiting at the height of the season. Since people knock into you a lot, I like to wear a blue coat that, if you look really closely, you realize, no, it doesn’t need to be cleaned; those coffee stains are part of the fabric. This way if a drunken fisherman spills a drink on you, you’ve turned him into a fashion designer and he’s none the wiser.

  My real passion is hitchhiking and I do it a lot in Provincetown. I have a sign that reads LONGNOOK BEACH on one side and PROVINCETOWN on the other. Very Depression-era, just like today. But it works. Cars pick me up immediately; it’s like hailing a cab. I try to look very hobo-like, yet not scary. If it’s chilly I’ll even wear a sports jacket—Rei’s very conservative green number that looks completely normal except for one hideous, large clownlike button on the front. But when the temperature soars I go for her lightweight pajama-type jacket, so preppy yet so Titicut Follies–mental institution. Rei has never done a men’s bathing suit as far as I know and I tremble to think what she could come up with—drawstrings that hang to the knees? Shorts with faux beet-red suntan lines? A reason to live.

  I have a place in San Francisco, too. My filth empire keeps expanding and I’m so happy to once again spend time in the first city where my films caught on outside of Baltimore, way before New York. I live in a great apartment on Nob Hill, just five blocks from where I used to pull over and sleep in my car in 1970. I don’t feel that different. I still dress like I’m homeless. The weather is so perfect for fashion here—always a slight chill, so I’m free to wear year-round the jacket from Comme des Garçons I wear most. It’s a beautifully cut traditional three-button black sports coat, but Rei must have had a fashion vision the day she was finished, because she angrily tore off the entire collar. It’s now ragged, and dirt gets caught in the tears, but “la mode destroy” never looked so beautiful. Of all my CDG jackets, this is the one the dry cleaners hate the most. “No! No! No! Don’t repair it!” I always have to yell when they look at the jacket with a dumbfounded expression. To make matters worse, I like to pair it alongside her all-white dress shirt buttoned up to the top (I copied David Lynch, who invented this look) with one half of the front collar in black, which always gives a cockeyed optical illusion when worn with a black tie.

  I’m obsessed with taking public transportation in San Francisco so I can feel like a real local. I read about someone in L.A. who rides the buses just to pick up people. A “transfer queen”? I wouldn’t be very good at this because when I get on a bus, people in the Bay Area start laughing. Not meanly. And I don’t think at what I’m wearing—a lightweight four-button black sports coat with the fabric around the shoulders dyed gray in a dripping motif paired with a CDG white shirt that has a random mismatched piece of green material sewn awkwardly on the front for no apparent reason. No, it’s just because they don’t expect to see me. “What are you doing on a bus?!” they ask, as if they expect me to have my own personal filthmobile and driver. What can I say? I’m just a model-about-town and the bus routes are my runway.

  The Comme des Garçons boutique on West 22nd Street in New York is my favorite of all Rei’s stores. When you walk in, it feels architecturally like you just entered the Tilt-A-Whirl. Tomoko is my favorite salesperson…no, excuse me, fashion warrior. Even though she, I think, has a good sense of humor, she is quite serious about her customers. Once she called me at ten p.m. in Provincetown, and since it was kind of late for a “school night” (weekday nights before the next day’s writing hours in the morning), I didn’t pick up, but heard her voice on the answering machine. “We got them in!” she breathlessly anno
unced. Stumbling from my bed where I had been reading, I picked up the phone, worried she was in some kind of trouble. “Got what in?” I asked, mystified. “The new line!” she responded without the slightest suggestion of a joke. “Is this some sort of fashion emergency?” I asked half in jest. “Well…yes,” she declared like a proud drug dealer. “I thought you’d want to know we got everything through customs.” She was calling from the airport?! God, how great! “Of course I want to know, Tomoko! Thank you for calling, and I’ll be in to see the new stuff the first day I get to New York.” “Good night,” she said, and hung up. Fashion bulletins! I slept easier that night knowing Tomoko was looking out for me in the fashion trenches.

  I’ve only been to the Tokyo flagship store twice: the old one in Aoyama once and later the new one in Minamiaoya, Minato-Ku, that opened in 1998. The very best thing about shopping here is the woman who seems to be the manager, although that title hardly seems appropriate. She is, quite simply, the ultimate Comme des Garçons woman and has worked there for years. Her name is Ms. Keiko Mimoto and she is of undetermined age, wears such fierce CDG outfits that I’m not even sure they are for sale, and looks exactly like a witch. A stunning, stylish witch like the one in Snow White with the crooked teeth. Imperious, yet flawed in a brand-new way, she is hardly who you’d expect to greet you as you enter a high-end fashion boutique. I am actually scared of her chicness. No one would ever laugh at her “look,” no matter how Kawakubo’d-out she may appear. She is not a fashion casualty; she is fashion authority itself. You almost expect her to offer you a poison apple. I’d eat it. I bow down to her fashion divinity.

  Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market store in London is one of her newest experiments: an actual Comme des Garçons department store that also sells other designers whom Rei deigns to anoint. You have to see it to believe it. Six floors, thirteen thousand square feet of fashion lunacy. Or, as Rei puts it, “an ongoing atmosphere of strong and beautiful chaos.” In other words, “DARE TO SHOP HERE!!” You walk in past off-putting freakish taxidermy displays, and if you decide to try something on, there are porta-potties instead of dressing rooms, and if you purchase your item, you pay in Mortville-style checkout huts that bring back images of Tent City, U.S.A. It truly is the deconstruction of the department store you may remember from your youth. There are beautiful velvet drapes, but they are torn and tattered and have holes in them that bring to mind a hungry moth attack. To further alienate the traditional shopper, rap music or obscure speed-metal fills the air instead of Muzak. There is a bookstore stocked with obscure vintage art books. And yes, there is a lunchroom, but here it is called an “organic café.” It is so sparse that any kind of appetite is mocked. Lunch specials? Parsnips, the day I was there. Yummy! I’ll have two orders, please. On the basement level is an actual CD shop, and I was amazed to see that I had not heard of one of the musicians for sale. In the back is my favorite section. You have to bend down to kind of semicrawl through an opening leading to an entire section of “elf wear”: tiny, shrunken, amazing little outfits that are designed to be too small for the skinniest, most severe Japanese male fashion radicals.

  I’ve never been to Rei Kawakubo’s Guerrilla Stores, but I want to open one in Baltimore similar to the kind she began showcasing in 2005 in remote, ungentrified areas in cities of Europe. Like Dogme 95 movies, Comme des Garçons has a strict series of guidelines for their shops that are explained in Guerrillazine— Extracts of a Corporate Nightmare, a combination shopping guide–instruction manual whose cover is riddled with bullet holes. One can picture Rei Kawakubo nailing her “guerrilla rules” to the door of the Gap or Banana Republic like a fashion-obsessed Martin Luther.

  “Rule Number One—The Guerrilla Store will last no more than one year in any given location.” Heresy for Baltimore, a town where the word “trendy” seems almost preposterous. Ideal, however, for the ten shoppers here who might actually like to be CDG customers.

  “Rule Number Two—The concept for the interior design will be largely equal to the existing space.” Perfect! And I know just the spot for the one I’m going to manage in Baltimore. Armistead Gardens, a neighborhood originally built as public housing for the influx of people coming to work in factories during World War II. It has been called a “white ghetto” of “row-ranchers,” surprising in their “now outdated modernity.” There is an amazing graveyard nearby where the star of my early movie Eat Your Makeup, Maelcum Soul, is buried. No one ever shops in Armistead Gardens.

  “Rule Number Three—The location will be chosen according to the atmosphere, historic connection, geographical situation away from established commercial areas or some other interesting feature.” Well, I remember seeing the perfect house. A tiny little home surrounded by vinyl siding, concrete block exteriors, and Formstone motifs. Where, driving by, spying on a location for a movie script I was writing, I saw an amazing Russ Meyer–type woman walk out her front door with her little baby nestled in her giant silicone bosoms, which couldn’t be hidden even under a winter coat. She looked so bold, so exaggerated, that I kept making up fictitious biographies of her in my mind. There she goes—an obvious exotic dancer who happens to be a single mother in Armistead Gardens. Trying to make ends meet, just like everybody else, on her way to work, first dropping off her kid at day care before showing up to lap dance her way to the mortgage payment. Her apartment is the perfect place for a hidden Comme des Garçons–John Waters boutique.

  “Rule Number Four—The merchandise will be a mix of all seasons, new and old clothing and accessories…” I can just picture the shop now! You walk through her front door under a ladder for bad luck and see the most radical Comme des Garçons women’s lines displayed on plastic-covered furniture stamped “March of Dimes,” the sweaters with purposely stitched holes or the pants with a bonus leg that my buddy Dennis Dermody once described as “fashion formerly owned by onetime Siamese twins.” The few misfires, the CDG lines I didn’t like, would definitely be carried here, too. The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers tongue–patterned men’s wear and anything with a cartoon character in its design, especially Oswald the Rabbit. I’d put them all in the bizarre female urinal in the bathroom, the one we’d borrow from the ladies’ room of the nearby Bengies Drive-In Theatre. This actual working toilet, made and then abandoned in the 1940s, was for women to urinate in standing up. Don’t believe me? Go look for yourself. Just enter the ladies’ room at the drive-in (the same one we shot the final scene of Cecil B. Demented in) and there it is, on the right-hand wall, lonely, just begging to be used.

  Inside the living room would be the main shopping area of our little Guerrilla Store. We’d have shelves that collapsed if you touched the “Hiroshima chic” classics, but a helpful salesperson from the Man Alive program, high on methadone, would wait on you and assist in picking up stuff. In the tiny kitchen our stripper muse would have left out some old pit beef to nibble on, and if it was humid outside there would be some rusty ice shavers and a few bottles of the most obscure syrupy flavorings, like Egg Custard, and you could cool off by making yourself a snowball. But don’t get too comfortable. As soon as you even try to sit down, short high school dropouts from the neighborhood, hiding beneath the cushions of the furniture, will push up and “reject” you just like the couch did in Pink Flamingos after Divine had licked it. And payment? Well, we do accept food stamps.

  “Rule Number Five—The partners will take responsibility for the lease and Comme des Garçons will support the store with the merchandise on a sale or return basis.” “Sale?” Yes, they have sales at Comme des Garçons, but what about the stuff that doesn’t sell even then? I had always heard of the great Comme des Garçons fire, but I’m not sure it’s not just a fashion myth. Supposedly, on the final day, after the final sale, in a secret location, the remaining stock, the stuff absolutely no one in the world wanted even reduced in price by 80 percent, is burned in a giant bonfire so as to not end up in some common outlet shop. Even if this tale isn’t true, couldn’t we have the fire
for the first time for real at my Baltimore shop? Think of the amazing photograph! Couldn’t Rei light the first match herself? Think of the polyester-and-rayon-polluted smoke drifting over the Armistead Gardens neighborhood and the magic spell it could possibly cast on the unsuspecting neighbors. The ecstasy of rejection, the raptures of unavailability, and the open-sesame of Rei’s vision could turn this beautiful downscale section of Baltimore into an international fashion mecca.

  Rei, I have a wish list for you. I know you’re busy. I realize you don’t take “notes” (the new n-word for all film directors), but I just have some ideas for future outfits that I would happily pay you too much money for. I hate weddings; I’ve never had fun at one in my life. I know you’ve designed a black wedding dress with a white veil, and it was so cutting-edge Modern Bride. But how about something for me to wear to a wedding to take my mind off the romance pressure I feel pulsating around me? Something secret, because I’m not a rude person and you never want your outfit to upstage the bride’s or groom’s. How about an elegant black wool Vincent Price–type suit: on the outside so seemingly conservative and beautifully tailored, but inside lined with the fur of the mice who were living and nesting under the hood of my car in my garage, nibbling away at the engine’s wiring harness and causing about a thousand dollars’ worth of damage? Wearing fur coats always makes one look like an old person, but poisoned or trapped mouse-fur lining seems politically correct to me, especially when the same little fuckers had friends who were setting up house inside the exterior air-conditioning compressor of my Baltimore home and chewing on the wiring. If we hadn’t discovered these little Ben and Willard movie-type wannabes and had turned on the cooling system the first hot day, these unwelcome squatters would have been ground up by the motor fan blades and their death fumes would have been piped into my home in all their decomposed glory. So what better purpose could their deaths have than to be recycled as fashion? Even their little heads could be designed as buttons for the inside pockets!