“Are you hiring?” he said, to say something. The diner was pretty empty, lulling between breakfast and lunch.
“No,” said the waiter with a harsh little laugh. “I doubt it. You need a job?”
“Yeah,” said Paul. “I just came here from Provincetown. My girlfriend dumped me. I don’t know.”
The waiter arched his eyebrow again.
“They’re always hiring at Different Light,” he said. “But don’t mention your girlfriend.”
“Ex,” said miserable Paul. He put his headphones on but didn’t press play. If he was Polly right now he’d probably cry. Polly was kind of a crier, something Diane had teased him about. Paul didn’t cry. What else did Paul do or not do? He’d have to remember or find out. He could do anything now; he was Teen Runaway Paul. Was it cheating to stay in the hostel? Maybe he should sleep on the streets, hustle like a real teen runaway. Maybe he should make himself way younger, get taken in by Social Services and adopted by a wealthy but liberal older gay couple, start life over. He could ace high school now, get a scholarship to NYU for film…
The waiter leaned his spindly elbows on the counter in front of Paul.
“She really broke your heart, huh? Did you wrong?” The waiter had gay voice but punk tone, a rockabilly mixture Paul couldn’t help but appreciate. Paul pointed to his headphones and shrugged. He pulled his sweatshirt hood over his head.
“You’re a mess, kid,” said the waiter. “I’ve been there. My shift’s over in fifteen minutes, if you want to hang out.”
Paul sat still for a minute, just breathed. Hang out could mean anything. He didn’t want to have sex with this guy, he didn’t think. He’d just let the waiter believe he was a straight boy, a rube, get taken care of.
“Okay,” he said, piling his thirteen dollars on the check (he was now at $106) and taking off his headphones again.
A half hour later, Paul sat back stiffly on a plastic-covered chenille couch in a bay window three streets over and two floors up, and let the waiter throat his cock, watching his hollow cheeks fill and empty. The waiter’s sandpaper chin chafed him. He couldn’t force himself to harden up, wouldn’t, out of loyalty, but he could force himself to ejaculate, just to be done. To Paul’s surprise, the waiter swallowed. Paul had only been away for a half a year, but he was pretty sure you still weren’t supposed to swallow. He felt a small pinch of commingled disgust and fear in his abdomen.
“Rain’s stopped,” said the waiter, wiping the bristly corner of his lips. “Come on, I’ll take you to the bookstore. I guess you’re gay enough for them now.”
“I don’t know,” said Paul, unsticking his thighs from the plastic and pulling up his jeans. “I don’t have much bookstore experience.”
“What can you do?” said the waiter, whose name was Oscar, Paul now knew.
“I can paint houses,” said Paul. “Or bartend.”
Oscar smiled. Pityingly, Paul thought. Chickens don’t bartend in the big city. Paul was a rube. He thought back on the bartenders at the gay bars in New York; he’d have to make himself bigger, butcher, maybe even hairier—all harder work than the other direction.
“Well, come out with me tonight and I’ll introduce you around,” Oscar said. “Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
“I have to be back by 11 or they lock me out of the hostel,” said Paul, squirming on the couch and rubbing his eyes with his fists. He knew how he sounded, knew he could get whatever he wanted with this lost boy routine.
Somehow he had let Diane turn him from shark to seal—shiny, fat, sunning himself on a rock—but that was over now. He was back.
* * *
×
The bouncer waved Oscar, and by extension Paul, through the door of the dingy punk club on 16th Street that was hosting a drag performance of Chinatown. The drag queens kept breaking into Stevie Nicks songs, badly and with no apparent relation to the story. Everything on the minimal set (a folding chair, a table, a potted palm) had been covered in tinfoil, perhaps to indicate a relationship between LA and outer space. Weak, Paul thought.
He watched the Tuesday night crowd mill about, that ancient variety of bike messengers, waiters, students, drug dealers—people who got by outside the work week, the same from city to city. Oscar handed Paul a beer and he drank it down. He handed Paul another beer, and Paul drank that down too.
“I could do that way better,” Paul said.
“What?” said Oscar, straining over the Stevie Nicks.
Paul shook his head. What was the point?
Many beers later, Paul walked with Oscar and his boyfriend Weldon back to their house, where he allowed himself to be fondled into a desultory three-way. He fell asleep midway through and when he awoke, he smelled something burning, which turned out to be fresh-roasted coffee. His underpants, already rank, were missing, an embarrassment but not an obstacle. He pulled on his pants and shirt and wandered through the silver and purple halls of the ramshackle apartment until he found the kitchen.
Weldon stood in a royal-blue silk kimono, huffing swears at a coffee maker. Paul posed awkwardly in the doorway until Weldon saw him.
“Oscar said you weren’t impressed last night,” he said, handing Paul an empty teacup and saucer.
Paul examined the cup’s floral pattern, thinking back over the night. What was meant to have been impressive? How had he disappointed them?
“The drag show?” Weldon prompted.
“Oh!” Paul said. He wasn’t going to take that back. “Well, yeah. No offense.”
“No offense, of course. You could do better, I’m sure.”
This was it, thought Paul. Of course, so obvious! He could do drag for money! Drag queens probably made a ton of money in San Francisco, where people knew how to tip.
“Yeah, maybe,” Paul said.
“Cheeky,” said Weldon, in the manner of someone who’d spent a semester in London or had once had an English boyfriend. “My closet’s the first door on the right. Let’s see what you got.”
Weldon’s closet proved to be a small room crammed with freestanding racks of dresses, boxes of shoes and wigs, a makeup table with lights, a three-way full-length, and a cobwebbed disco ball swaying overhead. Paul had rarely done drag and had never performed. He was ashamed, abashed—and yet determined, like a young Dusty or Diana—in the face of Weldon’s professionalism. He avoided anything he might wear for real (for instance, a spangly Barbarella unitard). He scrutinized the exhaustively vulgar collection of satin dresses, gold spandex cat suits, indeterminate feathery garments. He tried on the smallest dress he could find—Weldon must be what, six foot? a giant—and made his body fit inside the red sequins. He struggled into high-heeled shoes and a blonde wig. All Weldon’s wigs were blonde! Internalized racism, Paul thought, but then he liked how he himself looked blonde, the unlikeliness a little punk. He looked pretty good. He looked like a really good drag queen, but better because his face wasn’t matte.
He clattered, careful in the heels, back to the kitchen and posed again in the doorway, turning his volume up from shy to ingénue.
“Shit,” said Weldon. “You weren’t kidding.”
“Do I look okay?” Paul made his voice just high enough to be believably coming from a male body. He didn’t want to give away his trade secrets.
“You look like a pro,” Weldon said, setting down two teacups of coffee on the yellow lacquered kitchen tabletop. “Are you?”
“Amateur,” said Paul. “So I can stay eligible for the Olympics.”
“Huh,” said Weldon. “You’re a little weird, aren’t you.”
“Seriously, mister, can I have a job?” said Paul, turning on his kitten voice. Maybe Weldon would discover him, like Lana Turner. Paul disliked asking directly for assistance but he could see the edges of a plan and needed someone to show him how to fill it in.
“I guess you could do
a contest,” Weldon mused, without conviction. He peered at Paul’s skin, stroking Paul’s cheek with his thumb. “Your pores…Sometimes there’s something at the Endup, maybe this weekend. The pot’s usually pretty big. Can you sing?”
“Not really,” said Paul.
“Dance?”
Paul shook his head.
“Hmm,” Weldon said. “So mostly what you do is look good.”
“I guess,” Paul said, and felt himself unintentionally blushing. “I could lip-sync, maybe?”
He attempted to lean seductively against the doorjamb and stumbled a bit in his heels.
“Yeah,” Weldon said. “Hey, be careful, okay? That’s a really expensive dress.”
Paul knew when he had been dismissed. He returned the dress to the dressing room, and put back on his own smoke-stenched jeans and semen-crusted tee shirt. He ducked his head into the kitchen as he slid back into his corduroy jacket.
“Tell Oscar I said goodbye,” he said.
“Okay,” Weldon said, slathering marmalade on an English muffin.
Paul trudged down the stairs and out onto 14th Street. He didn’t know which way to go now. He’d imagined he would impress Weldon, who would immediately offer him a lucrative job as a female impersonator. Wasn’t that Paul’s big talent? And didn’t people make money off their talents? What had he done wrong? Oscar had been perhaps a tad too attentive to Paul during what Paul remembered of the evening’s activities.
Paul had to have a job. But maybe not drag. He walked and listed his other known talents: pouring beer without too much head, shoplifting, washing dishes, organizing items, knowing what was going to be fashionable a little bit early, thrifting, clever commentary, introducing people to other people, cutting pictures out of magazines with X-acto knives, knowing when people were open to having sex, having sex, being gay.
Tony Pinto had worked out a whole theory of gayness and promiscuity based on his memory of high-school science: male creatures had a biological imperative to spread their seed and so could not actually be monogamous. Monogamy was unhealthy, possibly even unsafe, Tony had said. Paul wrestled internally with the implications of this logic, but adopted the position anyway, to be closer to Tony Pinto. Interestingly, Diane had shared Tony’s conclusions about monogamy: for her it was just another way the patriarchy controlled women’s bodies. They’d never been officially monogamous, just provisionally (and actually, for the most part) while living in the same room. Diane. Paul suspected Diane wanted monogamy but couldn’t admit this breach in her politics. But what about him? He’d liked it too. He’d liked the dinner parties and the stocked pond and the surprising coziness of occasionally not having sex. He liked somebody telling him what to do.
He experienced a heavy, almost intestinal, crush of despair, and stopped in the park across from a big anonymous stone fortress: high school or jail, he wasn’t sure which.
He huddled into himself on a bench, face in his crossed arms. What if Diane knew about his activities last night, yesterday afternoon? How he’d been a boy, gotten sucked off as a boy, cum as a boy, walked through the heart of gay San Francisco as the simultaneous subject and object of the male gaze—nothing she could share; he was unrecognizable as her lover. Paul couldn’t understand desire that could be turned off, a circuit breaker routed through particular body forms. He’d imagined Diane as a boy, and loved her. Unfair! he thought-cried. Fuck her, he thought, proud of himself and a little hungry. He surged with excitement, freedom. He’d go back to the hostel to regroup, and he’d make a sweep of the Castro on his way, scouting for cute people. He was free!
The Castro turned out to be many long blocks out of his way, but Paul felt a call to the duty of surveying his new field; according to any system of logic advocated by anyone counseling the recently dumped, he should be “getting out there” as a form of “taking care of himself.” He recalled advising this very course of action to Jane after Stacy had left her for that exotic dancer from Coralville. (Jane! He really should call her.) He decided to trust his pre-Diane self, the self who knew, the uncontaminated truest Paul.
He walked right past the gay bookstore Oscar had mentioned, then reconsidered and turned back. Paul considered real bookstores (as opposed to sex bookstores) the best places for afternoon cruising, the more serious cruising, date cruising. At night you were all set; you found yourself at a bar or party, drank drinks, met a person, and decamped with that person to a second location. Instant date. No need to arrange or plan, and complete flexibility in the likely case you found a more amenable situation at the last minute. Daytime cruising, when not at a tea dance or beer bust, required more finesse and more certainty. First off, both parties had more time to second-guess between the securing of the phone number and the calling of the phone number. Secondly, you saw the person in the harshest light and without any softening lens such as beer, wine, or whiskey. In Paul’s ranking of all possible daytime cruising locations, gay non-sex-shop bookstores ranked at the top: congregants within were most likely to be both out and literate, qualities Paul valued. He thought fondly of the hours he’d spent at Oscar Wilde or the Different Light back in New York or even the HQ76 section of the university library’s stacks, though, to his endless disappointment, he’d only ever found library success in men’s rooms.
Paul believed in reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, staking out likely targets rather than canvassing broadly. He strongly preferred to have sex with or talk to people who liked being queer. He was less excited about people still shaking off the poisons of their homophobic families or small towns, or anybody raised religious who was currently ambivalent rather than angry about that religion: they might be (likely were) dirty and wild in bed but Paul found the shame, self-loathing, obsessive post-coital showering deeply unhot. He was not curious about other people’s families or spiritual beliefs. He was not excited by normal AT&T gays. He did not himself care to assimilate into the power structures of heteropatriarchal white Christian America, was bored and horrified by those who did.
Bookstore cruising was also perfect for his current state: a little slower than bar cruising and thus good for someone with a broken part, like a splint. Paul loitered outside the door, pretending to study the posters announcing various benefits and open mics and documentaries of interest to the Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual community. He filled his lungs with the hunter’s sweet air of expectation, and pushed inside.
The bookstore—just as Oscar had promised—had a hand-lettered Help Wanted sign taped to the cash register. Paul filed this information away as he browsed his way through Gay Erotica, Lesbian Mysteries, Gay History, Lesbian Romances, Bisexual Studies, and Postcards. He picked through the zines, wondering why they’d never ordered copies of Polydoris Perversity. Maybe he could finally do another issue, sell it here. Without Diane to disapprove, he could return to his publishing empire. He was the only customer in the store and neither of the clerks appealed. Paul ambled through the aisles, reading here and there from books he could not afford but strongly wished to own.
He calculated. He still had $324 in his Iowa City bank account and the $106 cash in his pocket, nerve-wrackingly—just enough to stay at the hostel ($154 total) and eat out for two weeks ($20 per day on food = $280) while waiting for a deus ex machina. Or maybe enough for first month’s rent somewhere. He’d wait another week, he decided. Maybe something would happen, the universe would provide a sign. He slouched by the periodical wall, waiting for hot people to come in. He flipped through the most current Sister!/My Comrade. The drag queens pictured within were all so beautiful and clever, like a more evolved species. He just wasn’t one of them, he allowed himself to know with some regret. His thoughts turned once more to financial matters. What could he do? He was too lazy and willful for prostitution. Without local connections or his old buoyancy he’d never find work as a bartender or vintage shop clerk. His best option was the bookstore. He reexamined the bookstore
staff. Tattoos: check; hair dyed in Play-Doh colors: check; playfully unclear genders: check; overalls with glitter tube tops: check double check. He could work with these people. He knew he’d get the job if he tried for it, in the same way he knew when someone was about to agree to sex.
He walked up to the counter and procured an application from a languid clerk in a Power Breakfast tee shirt, then repaired to a corner to fill in the blanks. Using a coffee-table book of Mapplethorpe photos as his desk, Paul considered his experience. He’d spent quite a bit of time at the campus bookstore at Iowa where Jane had worked. Paul visited her and stole books with her approval, even worked there for a week during rush one semester. So that was bookstore experience. He marked Jane’s name down as his manager. He was as good as hired, he thought.
“Come back when you have a phone number,” the clerk told him, glancing down at the paper before tucking it under the cash drawer and clicking the register shut.
“Oh,” Paul said. “Okay. Yeah, I’ll come back.”
Maybe in San Francisco they called references. He’d have to warn Jane. That was going to be complicated.
A wiry fag with mutton chops and a backwards baseball cap walked in, but now Paul occupied the liminal space between worker and customer: he was a supplicant, a possible object of surveillance—too weak a position from which to make any play. He left the bookstore and began to walk in what he hoped was the direction of the hostel.
The sky darkened and the streets smelled lightly of garbage and cotton candy. Night was coming—how had that happened? The whole day gone. He stopped at a lonely fluorescent taqueria and ate the cheapest rice-and-beans burrito, forcing himself to read an abandoned business section of the Chronicle.
He struggled through an article about the North American Free Trade Agreement, which managed not to call to mind thoughts of Diane.
Back at the hostel, another $11 down, and a rugby-shirted gang of French backpackers had colonized the main bunk room, making weak bilingual fart jokes and mock-punching each other. Weren’t Americans supposed to backpack through France? Paul thought. And anyway, weren’t French boys supposed to be like Giovanni, waiting gaily for you in their rented room and actually Italian? Quel dommage.
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl Page 19