Nine Lives

by Dan Baum

  “He’s got stones,” Frank muttered to Edgar. “I forget where you found him.”

  “He walked in, looking for a job,” Edgar said, weighing a liver on a dangling scale. “Told me right up front he had a record. I told him, ‘Join the club.’ Thing is, he’s a little odd.”

  “Odd?”

  The new man pulled out the bladder and laid it on the stainless steel counter. Frank and Edgar watched as he weighed the organs, took samples for chemical testing, tossed the organs into a big plastic bag, and eased the bag into the chest cavity. When he was done sewing up the chest, he removed his surgical gloves and walked over to Frank and Edgar.

  “Dr. Minyard, this is James Brown,” said Edgar.

  “You’re good,” Frank said. James seemed to be in his forties, his beard twisted into a snappy little inch-long braid beneath his chin.

  “I worked by Glapion for years,” he said. “Dead don’t bother me a bit. It’s the one place the spirits don’t get to me.”

  Edgar nudged Frank with his elbow.

  “Well, we’re glad to have you,” Frank said.

  Half the people working for him were jailbirds, and the other half are jazz musicians, Frank thought. And the new guy, he talks to spirits.

  THE TWIN GASLIGHTS twinkled merrily in front of Frank’s house on Barracks Street. He parked the Porsche in the courtyard and started for the slave-quarters apartment in back. A shadow stepped out from behind a sapling growing in a planter. Frank jumped.

  “It’s just me, Joe Maumus.”

  “Joe! What are you doing here at this hour?”

  Joe had a big hound on a leash. He turned and said over his shoulder, “Come here, son. It’s okay.” Joe junior stepped forward, his eyes wide and sad.

  “She threw me out,” Joe said. His dark hair was longer than his usual cop crew cut, he had a stubble beard, and his big meaty cheeks were pale. After getting caught in the Fairmont Hotel sting, Joe had fought his dismissal from the police force for two years, all the way to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal, claiming entrapment. He’d won, and had been reinstated with back pay. But the Fourth Circuit couldn’t reverse his romp in the sheets with the police informant, and his marriage had been rocky ever since.

  “I’m sorry,” Frank said.

  Joe looked at his feet. “I’d have gone to Earl Hauck’s, but he’s got the girls this week. Could I bunk with you for a couple nights?”

  Nobody knew better than Frank Minyard how hard it was when a marriage dissolved. Joe had his faults, but nobody was more loyal to Frank. In many ways, Joe Maumus was a younger version of Frank Minyard, and having risked his career defending Joe before the Civil Service Commission, Frank felt a kind of paternal responsibility for him. If for nothing else, Joe would always be a hero to Frank for his amazing work the night of the Pan Am crash. One of the front apartments of Frank’s Barracks Street town house had just come vacant, and he offered it to Joe. It would be nice having Joe under his own roof.

  JOHN GUIDOS

  KENNER

  1989

  John pulled in to the hotel parking lot and switched off the engine, but didn’t open the door. He sat staring through the windshield at Veterans Highway, the speeding red smears of taillights. Two words ricocheted around the inside of his skull: rock bottom.

  The stores were gone. Kathy was gone. His secret life was gone; Kathy had outed him to his parents in an evening of yelling and crying that made his stomach freeze to recall. He sat alone in his Mustang, a thirty-nine-year-old manager of a Domino’s Pizza outlet, a pervert without a penny to his name. Rock bottom.

  On the seat next to him sat a Dorignac’s grocery bag, a wisp of auburn hair rising above the rim. He pushed the wig down, folded the top over, and cradled it in his lap. He’d never worn his wig, makeup, and clothes out in public, and he wasn’t sure he could go through with it. But the ad had kept showing up in Penthouse Variations, month after month: “Like to dress? Write the Sorority.” Finally, he’d typed out a one-line letter saying, “Yes, I like to dress.” Two weeks later, a manila envelope had arrived from someone named Lee. “You are not alone.” John had shaken out two photographs, one of a nice-looking older man with gray hair and a warm smile, wearing a houndstooth jacket and an open-necked dress shirt, another of an aging showgirl with wild black hair and dramatic makeup, wearing a high-necked red satin gown stretched over a provocative bust. They were both, of course, Lee. New Orleans was full of men who enjoyed dressing as women, Lee wrote. Their reasons were as varied as the men. From time to time they’d meet to share grooming tips and swap clothing, but mostly to be themselves for a few hours. John would be most welcome to join the sorority, Lee wrote. An event was coming up.

  This night. This place. John sat in the darkened Mustang, watching people park and walk inside the hotel. Were they the men? Some of them had women with them; they couldn’t be going to the sorority, could they?

  If he opened the door of the Mustang and walked inside, would people find out? Would he lose his job, become unemployable? Did he want to begin a life as a public freak? On the other hand, how much longer could he carry his secret around inside him? How much longer could he get by on solitary sex in the locked office of a pizza outlet after hours? When could he share sex in a way that made sense to him? What would it look like? Twenty years into adulthood, he still didn’t know what he was. Lee had seemed so calm in the letter, so sure of himself, no tortured wondering. This is the way I am, he seemed to say, and it isn’t a problem. I am not alone, and neither are you.

  A car door slammed and a man with a suit bag over his shoulder walked toward the entrance. What was in the bag? A blue blazer for tomorrow’s business or a silver lamé gown and a pair of stilettos? The man looked like any other—middle-aged, chunky. He wore no pain in his face, no tension, no shame. If he was on his way into the sorority, John wanted a little of what he had.

  He opened the door of the Mustang on the whooshing of Veterans Highway. Shouts and laughter burst from the front of the hotel, people greeting each other. Was that them? Or a couple of sales reps rendezvousing for tomorrow’s presentation? He locked the Mustang, walked toward the entryway, and entered the bright lobby. The young woman behind the counter watched him cross to the elevator. Did she know what was going on up there in suite 300? Did she know that’s where he was going? He stepped into the elevator with a short, plump man carrying a gym bag. “Three please,” the man said pleasantly. John touched the three button and kept his eyes on the changing numbers. The man said nothing. When the doors opened, both turned in the same direction, but the man stopped at room 318. “Have a good night,” the man said.

  John stood in front of the door to suite 300, clutching his Dorignac’s bag, listening to the muffled sounds of conversation, laughter, music, glasses tinkling. He looked hard at the spot on the white painted door, at the spot where he would knock if he could summon the strength to lift a hand. He forced himself to breathe.

  The door popped open. A garish woman stood before him. No. The blockiness of the jawline and the sandpaper skin under pancake makeup made it clear it was a man. “Whoops!” she shouted. She grabbed his arm and pulled him inside. “Come in, honey, come in. Don’t just stand there.”

  The suite was full of women, or people who looked like women, waving drinks, touching each other’s hair, pivoting for inspection. “I’m just running down the hall for some ice,” the woman who’d opened the door said. John must have looked terrified, because the woman’s face softened and she said, “Oh, no. I guess I won’t.” She gazed into John’s eyes with tender concern and took him by the arm. “This is your first time, isn’t it?” she whispered.

  John nodded.

  “Okay,” she said, positioning herself squarely in front of him, taking his upper arms in her hands, gazing into his eyes from her own heavily mascaraed orbs. “Breathe. You’re among friends. Nod if you can hear me.”

  John nodded and, in spite of himself, smiled.

  The woman smiled. “Oka
y. What’s your name?” She had a high, thin voice.

  “John.”

  “Got another?”

  “Another?”

  “Another name. You know, a girl’s name.”

  “No.”

  “I’m Beth,” she said. She let her face relax under the paint and eyelashes into a mask unmistakably male. A deep, froggy voice came out. “And Bob.” The muscles of her face swept upward into a wide smile, and she tittered gaily. “Just freaking you out!” she said in her high girl’s voice. “Those your clothes there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.” She swiveled, lifted her chin, and, to John’s infinite horror, shouted above the din. “Hey, everybody! Quiet a minute! I want you all to meet John. He’s a little nervous because this is his first time.”

  The women surged toward him, arms outstretched. It was a funhouse tableau: big, heavily painted creatures with glittering eyelashes and bright red mouths. A figure he recognized loomed up, the black hair, the red satin gown: Lee leaned in close. “I’m glad you made it,” she said, her voice high and breathy.

  Hands with flaming nails tugged at John’s shirt. Someone took the bag from his hand and rummaged through it as they led him toward the bedroom. “Hey, hon,” said a woman next to him. “I’m the real thing. That’s my husband over there.” She gestured toward a short fat man done up in a yellow sundress and blond wig. “Want to get dressed on your own?”

  John nodded.

  “All right, ladies. Back off. Our new friend here would like a moment. Let him dress and then you can start in.” She herded everybody out of the room, winked, and closed the door.

  John looked at himself in the mirror above the dresser, the same old John, short hair, broad face, big in the shoulders and chest. A football player. A laborer. Not a sexual sophisticate. He took off his shirt, found his makeup in the bottom of the bag, and went to work on his face the way he always did: base, eyeliner, lashes, lips, rouge. He’d shaved close but still had to put the base on thick to cover a ghost of stubble. He’d brought the short wig, a fine copper helmet with a widow’s peak that suited the shape of his face. He finished undressing, put on bra, panties, and stockings, and topped them with a metallic blue dress and matching shoes. He straightened and looked in the mirror, and his insides unknotted a little. This was who he really was. His shoulders came up, his back arched. He felt weightless, the terror gone. He could fill his lungs with air for the first time all evening. He ran his hands down his front, smoothing his clothes, smoothing his body, ready to share the woman in him for the first time. He blew himself a kiss, blinked twice, and pulled open the door.

  They were incredibly kind. They handed him around, professing to love the dress, the shoes, the wig. Some of the men looked a fright, making no effort to move, speak, or behave like women. They clumped around the room with their shoulders rounded, speaking in gruff voices. Okay, I get it, John thought; they like the makeup and clothes. Others, though, were transformed by their getup, and a few were knockouts. They not only had the clothes, hair, and makeup; they had the figures and the moves. Someone put a glass of white wine in John’s hand. Lee appeared beside him. He was good. The red gown flattered his olive complexion.

  “So what’s with them?” John asked, gesturing toward a group of real women who were standing in a corner, laughing and talking.

  “Wives,” Lee said, in his breathy voice.

  “They put up with it?”

  “They like it,” Lee said, and John felt the world tilt under his feet.

  “For some of us, it’s all about the clothes and makeup,” Lee said. “We’re men—straight men, not gay—but we get off on the clothes. For some of us, though, this is the real thing. The act we play all day is fake.”

  “Are some of these guys fagg—gay?”

  Lee frowned, thinking hard. “Not the way you mean, I don’t think,” he said. “Gays sometimes crash this sorority, thinking it will be fun, but most of the guys don’t have any patience for that. You’ll find some of the biggest gay haters right here in this room.”

  “So they like doing women? They just like the clothes?”

  “Some of them.” Lee looked at John with new interest. “What about you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s your scene?”

  “My scene?”

  “You like the clothes. Is that all?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you, as you say, ‘do’ women?”

  “I was married.”

  “Was.”

  “When she found out about this”—John gestured at his dress—“she split.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a while ago.”

  “And since? Which is it? Men or women?”

  John laughed. “Neither. Me alone, to tell you the truth.”

  Lee brightened. “The safest sex there is!” He leaned in close and asked softly, “And when it’s just you, who’s there in your mind? A man or a woman?”

  John blushed. “Ah, let’s wait until we know each other a little better.”

  Lee raised his hands in mock surrender. “I withdraw the question,” he said, with an elegant dip of the shoulder. “Now”—he frowned at John’s wig and eyes—“there are some people here you should meet. You could use a little coaching.”

  He took John by the arm and introduced him to a real woman, one of the wives—the naked swell of her breasts, above the plunging neckline, gave her away—and a man-woman so perfectly done up that only her Adam’s apple and slightly lumpy falsies gave her away. They fell on him like bridesmaids, pushing him into a chair before a big lit mirror and going to work on his face. They showed him how to apply the pancake with upward strokes, to better fill in the trace of beard. They dialed back the intensity of his eyeliner and suggested a gauzy scarf to complement the dress and hide the Adam’s apple. Little by little, his reflection in the mirror became more naturally feminine. They worked with his size instead of against it, changing his look from that of a husky guy trying to look like a flouncy sexpot to that of a big thirty-nine-year-old woman. They were taking him more seriously as a woman than he’d ever taken himself. He’d been forcing himself into a cartoon caricature. They were applying a woman’s finesse.

  They twittered above him, trying this and that. “I’m up to a 34B now,” said the real woman, “but I think I can get myself to a C.”

  “Just by increasing the dosage?” the man-woman said.

  “Can’t hurt to try.”

  “I gotta hand it to you,” the man-woman said, “you’ve got balls.”

  “Not for long, honey.” A high girlish laugh skittered out of the real woman. John twisted in his seat and stared. The breasts were real, no mistake; but above them, unmistakably, was an Adam’s apple.

  “You’re not a woman?” John asked.

  “Oh, I’m a woman, honey. I just wasn’t born in a woman’s body.”

  John’s mouth dropped open. “What do you mean?”

  She looked at him curiously. “What I said. I’m a woman living in a man’s body.”

  John’s head tingled, as though she’d rung a brass bell next to his ear. A woman in a man’s body! “So, you’re … you’re not, uh, gay?”

  “Well, let’s see.” She pantomimed thinking, index finger on lower lip. “I like men. In fact, I like men a lot.” She giggled and swatted playfully at him. “But then, so do most women.”

  “But you’re a man,” John said. “I mean, you were born a man.”

  “I was born with a man’s body. I was born with a man’s parts. But I’m fixing that.” She laughed and took his hand, pressed it against her right breast. It yielded like a freshly baked cake. “These, for example, are the real thing.”

  “How?” John stammered.

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “You’ve just got to see the good doctor.”

  BELINDA JENKINS

  EGANIA STREET

  1989

  Lionus Jenkins turned out to be a good husb
and. He let go of all his basketball-star swagger and turned away from the Southern University scholarship with so little regret that Belinda had to wonder if he’d ever really wanted to leave the Lower Nine in the first place. With the help of his parents, he bought a house on Delery Street and got himself a job on the waterfront. When he was laid off, he went to work at Shoney’s. He brought home his pay every week and didn’t spend all his evenings out with the fellas. When the baby was born, Belinda named her Lionesha, to honor him.

  Lionus’s willingness to work long and dispiriting hours let Belinda nibble at her dreams of getting an education. She took a course in word processing at Audubon College. She earned a degree in medical transcription at Sidney Collier Vo-Tech, which got her a good-paying job in a doctor’s office. Many evenings, she and Lionus would walk over to Aunt Polly’s. It was easier than cooking, and Aunt Polly needed bucking up. Her daughter, Belinda’s cousin Faye—who had first turned Belinda on to reading—was slipping away into drugs. Faye’s sons, Ditty and Skeeter, were increasingly dependent on Aunt Polly, and Skeeter was a handful; he didn’t make eye contact or talk. For Aunt Polly to have her high-achieving niece Belinda at her table, along with her hardworking husband, did her good.

  Belinda had never loved the Lower Ninth Ward, and lately she liked it less. Faye didn’t have to go far to get her dope; lots of young men hung on the corners of St. Claude Avenue, in front of the old Jewish stores long boarded up, watching over this shoulder and that. Sometimes late at night, Belinda heard gunshots. She kept dreaming of that white-picket-fence life.

  The doctor for whom she worked didn’t have half the sense she did, so finally, in 1987, she began taking classes at a real college—Southern University at New Orleans, where she’d been accepted three years before. She sat in classes with young people who thought of themselves as future professionals, who would work because it meant something to them, not just because it paid the bills. She loved the heft of a textbook in her lap; she could practically feel knowledge course through her, from her eyes on the page, down through her arm, and into the fingers that took careful notes on clean lined paper. Math. History. Accounting. It seemed to Belinda that her brain was changing color, from a dry and starved gray to a flushed pink, full and juicy, for the first time.