The Man Who Would Be Queen

by Hoshang Merchant

  Landini’s ‘Lament of Tristan’ reminded me of strains my mother sang. No one played Chopin like Guiomar Novaes or sang like Moffo or became the mad Lucia like Callas. I slept days and stayed awake nights to music. I couldn’t sleep after seeing A Clockwork Orange. Fell asleep with the first light to awake in the afternoon to Josephine Jacobson reading on the radio: ‘All need is dry/Rain is a metaphor.’

  I admired my teacher. He was a poet and the first to commend my writing. Once, when I fell out of favour with him, I dreamed I walked to a bridge, stripped, stood on the parapet, decided not to leap into the river, stepped down, dressed, walked home. ‘Only smile at me, sweet friend.’

  Father sent sister over from India. ‘She’s sleeping with the chauffeur,’ he claimed. She befriended an American, became pregnant; elder sister forced her to abort. Youngest sister was forced back to father, who had remarried secretly.

  Elder sister herself had been four years with David. He wouldn’t work, wouldn’t go on Welfare; father had stopped all payments, so sister was forced to wash windows to support herself and David.

  Carmela offered help: co-convicts’ sympathy for each other. I sent sister $400.

  A troop of the town’s transsexuals arrived: ‘It’s your turn.’ I discarded drag, dressed straight. They had taken me to drag shows they put on in Kokomo and at ‘The Door’, a dragclub in Indianapolis where Tania Tyrel, a Black, was billed as ‘the first live sex-transplant in Indiana’. The operation was expensive. The cost was usually paid by boyfriends, who were later dumped; or club managers, from whom the girls ‘defected’ to escape virtual bondage.

  The ‘splice and push’ operation created a vagina. Hormone therapy, silicone treatment, electrolysis and psychotherapy were supposed to create a brand new woman out of ‘the soul trapped within the body of a man’. Ten years of experience showed the new person no happier then when he first started out and the project was abandoned. A phoney way of creating phoney men and women as cure for a sickness that doesn’t exist.

  Mark, at five, started dressing hair. His father was alcoholic; his mother remarried. His grandmother never forgave his mother. Mark spent time with his grandmother, who buried husband and sons and taught Mark the Bible. A brother, also gay, sought a gay marriage in Amsterdam. Mark lived in fear of society but he stood by the transsexual Michael as he stood by me. Having worked all his life, unprovided for by those who should have cared for him, Mark finally abandoned his lucrative profession and tried living off a ‘lover’.

  Chanced on The Diary of Anaïs Nin: ‘Make stories out of your pain.’ Anaïs Nin and I started a correspondence: ‘Those who accuse me of narcissism do not know the meaning of the term. The contrary is proved by the letters of thanks I get from women I have helped.’

  Danielle reads Anaïs Nin to me over the phone: ‘Angels live not in the sky but at the bottom of the sea.’ Danielle had the ‘Golden girl Disease’, anorexia nervosa. Her husband, Daniel, wrote on the Clown. She was a food-faddist, a compulsive smoker, an impossible neurotic and a generous hostess, and had an instinctive and deep appreciation of poetry. Her father died of malaria in Indochina; her mother never remarried. Danielle died at twenty-nine of cancer. ‘Something broke within me, I cannot pray anymore,’ her mother wrote to me. Danielle’s husband turned to religion. One Easter Daniel sent me the elegy I’d written on his wife’s death the previous Good Friday. Maybe all art is such a recall, a call beyond the grave.

  Tennessee Williams arrived an hour late for a banquet, supported by two aging ephebes. He staged a highly derivative, two-character play revolving around a brother and a sister called Out Cry. He spent the evening conversing with a blond freshman (‘I’m not a fag’) who thought he was Tom from The Glass Menagerie. He was too drunk to talk.

  Williams’s autobiography catalogues the decay of an aging queen. It is a sad spectacle.

  An angel exudes unblinking strength, but as death approaches the strength departs and blinking becomes incessant. Here are the five greater signs: the onceimmaculate robes are soiled, the flowers in the flowery crown fade and fall, sweat pours from the armpits, a fetid stench envelopes the body, the angel is no longer happy in its proper place.

  —A Buddhist text

  Cruising: The stalls were partitioned from head to calf-level by polished stone panels. Contact was made by passing notes between stalls. Young flesh was prized and fought over. Boys knelt for each other. Faces were never seen. In the moment of orgasm one faced the bare wall. This was pain, joy, sorrow, absolution. People did it for years: main floor, ground floor, basement, fourth floor.

  Sgt Flood of the vice squad lured people, asked for secrets of the gay world, prosecuted and sentenced gays for other offences like shoplifting or drug taking. He solicited me once but I eluded his net. Closet queers left messages on toilet walls. They suffered more from loneliness than exploitation.

  The other alternative was keeping a lover.

  The cynic as lover: Ken hated literature, society, himself and love. He looked beautiful; I desired him. I loved to watch him swim and shower. But he hated the woman in himself, hence the woman in me. He lived by projection, destroying in others his own hated selves over and over. He was ashamed of his origins: his parents were of the honest, hard-working middle class whose work ethic did not square with his cynicism, laziness and false success-values. He hated life-sustaining illusions and destroyed the illusions others created. But he himself lived in a fantasy of furs, expensive clothes, perfumes, make-up, even plastic surgery. His idea of woman was Elizabeth Taylor. He would not sleep with me. I tried not to be jealous: ‘What you give others is not taken from us’, but he smuggled boys into my rooms; I went to work to support him, he went cruising. Sgt Flood had him jailed for shoplifting. I tried for his release.

  Ken appropriated my Indian costumes, gave my poems to his other lovers. He stole credit cards from his ex-boyfriend. I let Ken stay for seven months. I was seeking salvation, the soul’s salvation. I felt guilt for once having turned on friends who supported me. I needed punishment for this just as I had paid off my guilt at assaulting mother by the subsequent assaults on me. Maybe I was re-enacting sister’s relationship with David, mother’s with father. I saw my young self in Ken and wished to protect him. But he was a cynic because there was no core to his being. I believed in literature, so he made his life into a fairy tale. I believed in Freud then; so he manufactured imaginary hurts and neuroses to explain away his cruelty. He was lost. He betrayed me to his parents: his father condemned me, though his mother appreciated the insight and understanding I offered her. She was a brave woman, from a family of coal miners, who read the books I sent her and was willing to undergo psychotherapy. My role as suffering Madonna had found a fit antagonist in Ken.

  The poems speak of a beautiful illusion. Arturo Vivante quoted Dante to me: ‘He who having loved love itself, loving pardons.’

  Bridgeport came with its seabird calls, its Puerto Rican population, its Shakespeare Festival, and a New York actor, Daniel. He had his New York life: children’s theatre in Central park, transcendental meditation in the sauna, theatre parties, roles for sexual favours, offers of payment for his body, trips in hydroplanes that he bypassed. Private meeting became a public act. We saw Julie Christie and Lillian Gish in Uncle Vanya: ‘We shall live together dear uncle and work. Work.’ Sonia’s last scene. A young Chicago actress, Susan, was also in love with Daniel but he didn’t respond. She admired Gish and we went backstage; the older actress had a purity of features others lacked. Julie Christie, in her small chemise, topknot and small presence, was different from what she was when she played Helena in trailing skirts and bouffant wig.

  We set my twenty-sixth birthday, 5 November, for a meeting. Susan talked all morning: She couldn’t act after an abortion; guilt at abandoning the mother-role for a career. The day before, I had read my poems publicly for the first time. We partied late. Susan knew she was my first woman, was very tolerant and kept a sense of humour. I clowned around as a
dragon slayer. I delayed the final moment as long as was possible. Susan herself was an artist of the delayed moment of pleasure. She took three hours to undress: the hose, skirt, shirt, panties. I wept after love making. We bathed together. While she slept I celebrated her in a poem: woman, actress, girl, goddess, a temple, a fissure in the earth, America: my Newfoundland. Worship changed to distance, which changed to hatred and finally indifference. When I last called Susan on the phone she was living with a Jewish actor and had had another abortion.

  Victoria, daughter of a Greek city councilman, asked me to her room to dance wearing her brassieres, earrings and a fez. She would not touch me but allowed me to bring her off manually. Friends who saw us together told me she acted as if she were in love with me but I was unaware of this. At a party she showered all her guests with cologne. Her Greek father recalled her to Greece.

  Frances, another father’s daughter, was beautiful. She tired of macho men and hence wished for friendship with me. She accepted my worship and poems but refused love. Her boyfriend followed her from Arizona and Frances was happily married. The boys were saved their agonies. But when she wished for friendship with me after marriage Virgil counselled caution.

  A student’s mother complained to the dean of women, (an ex-Navy officer) when I taught Tropic of Cancer. My students were summarily taken away from me. My colleagues protested. The chairman of the literature department gave me a hearing. I offered that scientists who failed were lauded but any failed experiment in literature or pedagogy was castigated. I further stated very plainly that I could not teach anything that I had not found to be true in my own life. ‘Nothing worked for me. I had to invent everything.’ My students were given back to me.

  A professor’s wife spoke to me of infidelity to her husband. Hadn’t I seen her visit the writer, my neighbour? No, I hadn’t. Her husband tried to suppress my discussion of love in the literature department. They had two grown sons. She was committed to a marriage that had yielded no sensual pleasure for twenty years. I counselled divorce. She had admired me for my courage in living openly in a small town. Her friends sent her for a physiological check-up (the old culprit—menopause) and to a psychologist. No one thought of offering the same suggestion to the husband. He was a liberal. But he bullied his wife into staying married to him. I encouraged her to read her poems publicly. The writer published a story about their love. Mushrooming gossip noted the end of an affair rather than beginnings. She wrote me a poem:

  Quick brown hands

  Begin to explicate the abstruse text

  Our world is cornered

  We must turn it over

  Make it yield

  To our two curving palms

  And cry and cry each dusk

  Coax the east to rise to us

  And shape a rounded light

  If night should come again

  Gentle now we shall sway

  Like seaweeds or the heads of swans

  A few years later her husband died of a brain tumour and she brokeoff her friendship with me. Along with Virgil’s girlfriend, I consider her symbolic of the American woman in transition.

  Virgil’s girlfriend brought music to my life. Hers she filled with work. She rechristened herself Merry-less and lived alone. One Easter she left groceries on my doorstep: ‘Now you and Anaïs have a love feast.’

  My sister had now parted from David, who had become a successful banker. She lived with Paul but wouldn’t marry him. It was as if Ariadne was confused between Theseus and Dionysius and the Minotaur, her true husband. But she recognised her thread. She came out of the labyrinth. I was glad for her. Although she had to undergo an illness first. (I was not by her in her illness.)

  Sister encouraged me to go to Switzerland to see a lover I had picked out of the ‘Personals’ in the New York Review of Books. For some time I had feverishly responded to gay ads in The Advocate. Several masturbators on long-distance lines responded. I also had been offered a subservient wife-role by a Los Angeles accountant, Hindu philosophy at Blue Island (Chicago), a pornographic love-existence in Waukegan, and a Pacific haven by a Berkeley professor: ‘As I write whales pass by my window.’ I chose the Swiss, a petty diplomat who described me as ‘a mandrake’ on seeing me, claimed to be involved in the sale of the century (of military hardware) and evicted me from his hotel room exactly after one day.

  III

  The Sea of Fertility

  Travel: Middle East, 1976–1979

  I was offered a teaching position in a West Bank College, in Israel. My life in America was over. I had tired of living in literature. I left without taking the degree, the book on Nin unstarted. Virgil spoke:

  I too have fired and have been fired upon. I have lived with bums. I still have family pictures from the wallet of the Japanese I killed in battle.

  Think of others.

  I left for Jerusalem.

  I was travelling in no-man’s-land. The Dead Sea. The Sea of Fertility.

  Rootless and homeless men are whisked by the Boeing 747 from place to place in luxury.

  Permits and visas are written in Hebrew so the Arab won’t read them. Every applicant is suspect. First the door phone, then the desk behind bulletproof glass. The Consul is out of sight. Once, a chance contact on the Consul’s own direct telephone line. If you circumvent him, the border guards will be on duty. They carry guns but their superiors too are veiled from view. Sometimes they let loose huge friendly dogs who sniff everything from postage-stamp glue to looseleaf tea. They could extradite one for fantasy.

  No. Someone said no. ‘You’re $30 short. You cannot enter Jerusalem.’ My wandering had begun.

  A man fed me water in the desert.

  Jerash, the dead city. The theatre of blood-red stone. Once they had much water here.

  Venus is said to have come out of the sea at Cyprus. Penelope, who lost a plantation in Zaire and a home in Kyrenia, ran a hotel in Nicosia. Her husband planned dream houses.

  The Phaeneromeni Mother giving suck; iconed.

  Provincetown: The artists rejected me. Between husband, friend and children, Kathleen Spivack, the poet, was kind to me: ‘I can enter your world.’ Arturo could not help.

  Ann, a painter and school friend was now living with Jim, an older artist of some repute. Ann had lost her father and tired of young men. Jim was famous for his silk screens of the full moon. A rare eclipse of the moon occurred just then and they travelled to the Dunes to see it. Ann was rediscovering Monet and she asked me to sit for a portrait. She had brought along Maggie the cat with her from Indiana so Jim indulgently built her a louvered window decorated with full moons, of course, so that she could let herself out of the studio whenever she wished.

  My life became the history of rooms I inhabited: the completed home I was ready to leave because it was completed, the hotel room in Nicosia where I entertained Greek soldiers, the unheated wood-panelled room by the sea where I dreamed of reggae musicians being flogged, a friend’s house which was more like a boat with its glass windows on the vast water and its birdcages, my Arab dream-room hung with carpets, the rooms in Hotel Albatross, Athens with its bellboys, a converted box room near Heathrow where I had nightmares of burning planes.

  In London I read European poets in translation. I saw Blake’s prints, Brancusi’s sculpture; the lifeblood of English poets preserved at the British Museum. This was no mummery. At the Portrait Gallery the young Virginia Woolf: ‘What can I say of the Parthenon? That my ghost came to greet me. A young girl of twenty-three with her life before her’; the hero T.E. Lawrence, thin and shrivelled; Richard II, puzzled and confused, the vital and tuberculotic D.H. Lawrence. I saw the films of Kenneth Anger with Anaïs Nin and friends. Since the controversial sound track was withheld the film gave a feeling of a slow silent movie. ‘Who was it I heard drowning in my sleep?’

  I preferred Anaïs Nin’s Louveciennes to Versailles. I dreamed Anaïs took me by the hand and we gently flew over the grass. Another time she appeared, cape and all, sitting on a
n American picnic bench conjugating the verb ‘to make’. A rain veiled her from me.

  At the Notre Dame I felt my alienation from God, the first time in years I had entered a church.

  The young pietà at St. Peter’s reminded me of sister’s sorrowing face.

  Paris: The queens at the Orangerie. The Aerogare: aging businessmen stripping for aging boys, the Algerian with long eyelashes stroking himself to coming, the little ouvrier whose side pocket’s slit lead straight to his cock, the tongue bath given me by a soft man with halitosis, the gigolo disappearing into ‘Ladies’ with a younger boy. ‘Tu n’orgases pas?’

  Privates that resembled Bogart’s! Pierre taking me home to a display of a young ephebe with buttocks up front, telling me about haunting railway stations near the barracks on holidays when young soldiers went home; I dreaming I was a miniscule point falling and falling in dark space.

  Jeanine was married to a comic-strip illustrator. His teacher loved Jeanine; who devotedly tended the teacher’s dying wife. Her husband took to one of Jeanine’s Portuguese girlfriends at her behest. When Jeanine returned to her husband he had begun to love his new love deeply, and though the girl left, their marriage had changed. Jeanine bought a stereo and studied tap dancing.

  Heidelberg had a facade for a castle. It was unreal: Reality is real. Reality is unreal. Reality is both real and unreal.

  Rene fell in love with me. He had a lover in Brussels: ‘Always divide your love in two as protection against hurt.’ I, for my part, fell, in love with Rene’s friend Jurgen, who did not like me.

  I spoke no German and went dancing nightly at the Whisky- A-Go-Go. Danced with the lesbian Traute to Samba Pa Tí.

  In young Germany it is kosher to dance alone. I picked up a German phrase from a movie: ‘Haben-Sie ein Einhorn gesehen?’ I sat through three and a half hours of Pasolini’s philosophy of sex, Salo in German, and loved Kaspar Hauser, the story of a lost boy whose mother did not own up to him.