No, sir. My identification’s in my billfold.
All right. Oh, I see. Frank, your name is. A he-she. Well, you had me almost fooled, but you wouldn’t have made it to the polygraph. Double D, Frank! You over there, what’s your name?
Reggie Peters.
You have identification?
In my wallet.
Take it out. Slowly. Anything but a wallet comes out, you’re dead. That’s fine. We’ll run a check. Now whose car is this?
His.
Sir, what’s your name?
Daniel Bailey.
Danny boy, I want your ID right now, and don’t fuckin’ puke on it. Good job. Now, Mr. Peters, is that he-she your special pal?
No, sir.
I saw him winking at you. True love, dude.
No, sir.
Did Frank suck you off today?
No, sir.
What about Danny boy over there?
He can’t talk no more, officer. He’s practically passed out.
Convenient for you, isn’t it?
What do you mean?
Don’t try to smartass me, you sonofabitch. Now, I know you don’t want your little it bitch to go to jail.
No, sir.
So what’s up? Where’s the shit at?
What?
Where’s the dope?
We don’t have none of that.
You’re about as convincing as she is.
They searched Danny’s car three times. Then the blondhaired officer said: You’re not convincing at all, but me and my partner are about to get off, so tonight’s your lucky night. Frank, you get your faggoty ass in the squad car.
But, officer, I was only driving for ten minutes!
Without a license. Get in the back and don’t move. Now, Mr. Peters, your buddy Danny boy’s not going to drive this car, because he’s intoxicated. I’ll overlook the false statement he made about his surname, which is a criminal offense; what do you say about that?
Nothing, sir.
Good boy. And do we let him drive?
No, sir.
What about you?
I won’t lie to you, officer. My license—
Correct. Suspended. Driving under the influence.
Yes, sir.
You know what that means?
No, sir.
The he-she goes to jail, and you two compadres start walking. It’ll be good for you. Here’s your identification, Mr. Peters. And here you go, Danny boy. You! Up and at ’em! Car’s staying here. Now you boys listen: Every time I see you, I’m going to jack you up, and next time I see you, you’re going to jail. Go on now. Move.
The blondhaired officer sat in the driver’s seat of the squad car whistling. When Reggie Peters had disappeared around the block and Danny Rivas knelt down to vomit again, the officer turned around, winked through the wire mesh and said: You’ll love it in jail, Frank. Plenty of guys who don’t care which hole they stick it in.
Licking her lips, her face tear-streaked, the transwoman readjusted her bra. Then she tucked her pink tank top back into her shorts.
While his partner called in her identification card, the blondhaired officer and the transwoman came to an arrangement. Right away he got fat and lost most of his hair. Then he became the retired policeman. That was eight years ago.
8
It was when he reminisced about his greatest arrests that the retired policeman reentered a most perfect equilibrium with himself. There is an element of dreariness in hearing someone repeat a story. Either he tells it as he did before, in which case he bores us, or else he alters the details, which is worse. But the transwoman (I would never dare to guess how many times she’d watched The Wizard of Oz) was that rarest of people, an unfailingly appreciative audience. You see, she could never remember any joke well enough to tell it. If someone began to relate what happened to the whore with the glass eye, Judy recollected right away that she loved this story, just loved it, although the punchline (I’ll keep an eye out for you any time!) hovered just out of reach; she could hardly wait to hear the whole thing through again, in order to laugh and laugh! So it went with her master’s stories. She listened with shining eyes, feeling so lucky to be in on the doings of authority; and because her receptivity allured him out of his brooding soliloquies, which accordingly became performances, he even found his penis beginning to stir. Usually they were lying side by side in his sagging queen-sized bed. At this juncture she would slip out from under the sheet and kneel on the floor. As he continued, she would continue her pretense of listening—sparing an instant, I admit, in order to fret about her part time position of considerable importance in the restaurant industry (her gaunt old boss, Mr. Salazar, craning forward lizardlike over the cash register, while through the narrow corridor to the kitchen she could perceive the silvery flashing and clapping of a cleaver), because Mr. S. had yet again expressed dissatisfaction with her efficiency and cleanliness—and all the while she awaited the rise of the retired policeman’s erection beneath the sheet, which she would then peel back, upraising herself just far enough to worship his crotch.
9
In the Y Bar it was show night again, with the orchestra crackling at high volume and low fidelity, ten seconds into the one and only act of Samantha, who (she said on principle and we said by disposition) never learned anything new; by now I must have seen her routine fifty times. She resembled an ancient Queen Elizabeth I, draped in stinking folds of royal red velvet, who just happened to be lip-synching to Barbra Streisand and pointing up at heaven while she flipped her hips, strutting slowly up and down the narrow aisle with her hand out for dollar bills. Al gave her two, Judy gave her three and I gave her one. The Europeans gave ones and fives. Then came the applause and whistles, with loyal Judy making the most noise while the Germans clapped ironically and filmed it. A man got grabby, Samantha slapped away his hand and then Francine poured me my usual. Lacking a sitting place, I paid and stood waiting for the lesbian beneath the smiling cartoon blonde on the placard that said CASH ONLY.
Next starred an almost naked gartered creature of immense doughy breasts and buttocks, who came on waving her long green polyester mane, which hung all the way down to the crack of her ass; Francine informed me that her name was Sunshine and that she came from Wyoming. I wish I could have looked half that good. Shantelle made a face but the Germans simply couldn’t get enough Sunshine—who parked her earnings in her cleavage, slipped a banknote to Francine and walked out; I never saw her again.
Just as a pigeon stares expressionlessly (at least to us) out of the side of its bobbing head, so the transwoman, now nodding and fatly tottering in her too-tight high heels, laid her hairy hand on my arm and said: Richard, why don’t you ever participate? You’d look sexy in a dress. I mean it. You really would.
Since she was ordinarily so shy, I gazed into her eyes and like a good detective verified the hugeness of her pupils. No wonder she was happy.
Guess what? said Judy.
You’re pregnant, I proposed.
No, I got a raise! I got a motherfuckin’ raise!—the truth having to do with the event which she had in truth expected while anxiously wiping each crooked napkin dispenser in hopes of making its stainless steel gleam all the way into Mr. Salazar’s approval . . .—but unless she rubbed really really hard, the fingerprints remained even if the crumbs came off; and when she addressed that latter problem, the overcrammed napkins, already gripped in place by only three corners, began to leap out, so that Mr. S., turning his head to frown on her, bit his lip, preparing to scold as soon as the line should thin out. Another napkin dispenser without any failure! Judy began to relax. Here came Mr. S., kinder and sadder than usual: Judy, you’re too slow. I’m letting you go now. You’re a nice gal; I’m sure you’ll find something else—
I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Judy sobbed. Oh, Mr. S., I’m so worthless . . . !
Mr. S.’s nephew reached past her to clear away a dirty plate of rice and salad. Mr. S. said: Well, I’m sorry, too. Why don’t you go home and rest? I’m paying you for a full six hours, and he opened the register.
But Judy, sickened at the idea of taking advantage, ran away howling.
Mr. S. stared after her. To the others he said: If she comes back, lock the door. That gal’s a nut job.
That’s not a gal, said the nephew; that’s an it.
We’re all God’s creatures, said Mr. S. Now get ahold of Ilona because we need someone for the afternoon rush. If you can’t reach her, try those two new applications from Tuesday. What a life.
I had my own news for Judy, but knowing how terribly easy it was to shoot her down, I decided to wait until the end of her act.
Shantelle was on and ready, wriggling her enchanting bottom, raising one leg and flicking off the blackness of her bra; now she was playing with her black, black G-string. Judy would have done anything, I mean anything, to look two percent as hot as this star, who now belted out the obscene Marianne Faithfull number “Why D’Ya Do It?” while we laughed and clapped; one Austrian girl even gave her ten dollars. For an encore, hanging upside down from the catty pole, which she gripped with her ankles, twisting as slowly as the fan, she rubbed her breasts round and round in time with the music, flickering her tongue like a snake. We all assumed that she would win tonight’s “Most Popular.”
Now came poor Judy’s turn. I who rarely failed because I kept doing nothing would have saved her if I could, so Francine topped me off and I raised my glass to good intentions. When I looked again, Judy was wriggling her pinkish-red buttocks while her hair whirled around her throat, so that Al and some man I didn’t know leaned forward, staring into her prosthetic snatch, and the retired policeman smiled vaguely like a loving father. When Judy Garland starting singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” our Judy lip-synched along until the recorded track skipped, then went silent; Francine spread her hands with comic ruefulness, but Judy kept right on slinging us double servings of her big ass and belting out the words in her best hoarse falsetto.
We all clapped, Francine the hardest. Shantelle wanted another turn, which was granted by German acclamation. When Judy came out of the bathroom, dabbing her sweaty face with wads of toilet paper, I said: J. D.’s at the Cinnabar.
Oh! Is he okay?
I think he’s unwell.
How bad is he?
Well, he didn’t come out of the men’s room. He told me to go away.
Withdrawing from that immense handbag her so-called sensible pumps, she dropped them on the floor, leaned on my shoulder, switched those for her heels, which she swept up into the handbag, swigged at my drink and informed me: You’re a darling.
Thanks, I said.
Then she left. For some reason my double rum and sodapop stopped satisfying me, maybe because my teeth were getting rotten, so I set the glass on the bar, waved to Francine, who didn’t see me because it was time to program the jukebox for Xenia’s act, gave Shantelle a dollar and went home. If any of my gentlemen readers have ever been fellated (for instance by Shantelle) through a condom, they will appreciate what it was like to live out my story thus far: not unpleasant, with arousal slowly increasing, and the possibility of a climax brightening one’s situation, which all the same remains sad and inhuman; because any excitement swells in perfect proportion with miserably insulated isolation.—At least I was free from fixed ideas.
That night the lesbian continued absent. We all craved more, unsuspecting that our best and deepest intimacies with her might merely resemble owning a gemstone and holding it in one’s hand until it grew warm, then wanting to be closer to it, perfectly close, and necessarily failing. No, to us it seemed simple.
II
The Stream of Pleasure
And first, upon thee lovely shall she smile,
And friendly on thee cast her wandering eyes,
Embrace thee in her arms, and for a while
Put thee and keep thee in a fool’s paradise . . .
SIR THOMAS MORE, ca. 1505
Authorities and investigators are not in complete agreement upon the point when desire rises to its highest point. This undoubtedly varies in different women, according to age, climate and general environment.
MARGARET SANGER, 1926
1
When Judy Garland’s ghostwriter visited her at the Doctor’s Hospital in 1959 and discovered that her great, hypnotic brown eyes had dwindled into dark spots sunken into the fat and bloat of her face, true love required the absolutely unvarnished transmittal of this condition to us, the adoring public, because we lived for our sadistic satisfactions; and after that gruesome overdose (rigor mortis on the toilet seat, a fittingly disgraceful end to her whom we had jilted for Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren), certain ever-loving fans wandered around humming: Ding-dong, the Wicked Witch is dead!—Resisting cynicism, I strove to disbelieve that once the lesbian washed up we would act as nastily as other human beings.
My specialty had always been anticipating final acts. As soon as I first saw Neva, I began wondering how long she would last. Her act was immediately imperiled by her hope of managing us without needing to explain—a planless strategy which actually succeeded for more than a month, thanks in part to our awe of her, not to mention ordinary human incuriosity about the means and causes through which our pleasures got fulfilled; as long as we felt loved, what mattered why or how? (Anyhow, explanations would also have brought Neva down. To tell one of us anything would commence an unraveling without end.)
So we were already whirligigging down the stream of pleasure—and, keeping in expert practice, I kept watching out for trouble: dreading it, because all change was for the worse; hoping for it, because it would be exciting; and doing absolutely nothing.
In my own vision of the lesbian I who then barely knew her focused most on her mouth. I imagined kissing it for hours. When I thought of her lips slowly opening and her tongue gliding into my mouth (this movie looped over and over inside me), my penis always stiffened. It was just as her predecessor Letitia used to say: we all “objectified” each woman in this or that way. What it was about Neva’s mouth I could not have expressed, and when Shantelle discoursed about her buttocks, or Victoria murmured of rolling her over and slowly exploring her back, they became my sisters in obsession.
2
How far her allurements actually extended (or, if you like, what “powers” she had) would make for postmortem gossip whose entertainment quotient approximated that of such questions as who really killed President Kennedy and whether Hillary Clinton had ever emulated us; that is, partaken of lesbian love; in any case, Neva’s effects and works have been exaggerated. For instance, the retired policeman successfully exploded the legend of Mr. Hamid Iqbal of Larkin Street, who, unable to avoid learning that his wife was a longtime massage parlor prostitute who had married him solely for citizenship, divorced her in outrage but without violence, upon which she filed a restraining order, which led him to reciprocate, impelling her to file a police report the prize of whose inventions was that he had made physical threats against her, which (ours being a just world) led to his arrest, followed by forty days in jail—but for some reason the court dismissed her complaint, so what could the poor ex-spouse do but accuse him of violating the restraining order, in her apartment building, at night, with a nonexistent gun?—This measure proved so magical that Hamid got re-arrested and even re-jailed, if this time for merely thirty-six hours because his loyal brother Hassan wired money all the way from Pakistan to bail him out, and soon that complaint fell likewise into defeat. Fortunately for justice, by then an undercover police officer was getting superb blow jobs from the ex-wife, and therefore marched badged and uniformed into Hamid Iqbal’s liquor store to arrest him for the third glorious time! Now Hassan flew to the United States to bail him out in person, and the charges fell a
way as usual, after which Hamid, concluding that enough was enough, decided against Hassan’s urgent advice to murder his ex-wife. Not long past four-o’-clock on that summer morning when he pocketed a knife and set off for his lurking-place across the street from her massage parlor, which would close before five, he happened to look up and—here comes the allegation which the retired policeman so triumphantly disproved—met the gaze of the lesbian, who stood at a third-storey window of the Reddy Hotel, with an unknown woman’s arm around her, and instantly, so he is said to have sworn, Hamid Iqbal felt so loved by our Neva that he walked away from murder. From what I learned at the Cinnabar over several shots of Old Crow, this much-wronged individual, so he swore by God to the ever-trusting retired policeman, never fostered murder in his heart anyhow; nor had the ex-wife’s client, member of the force athough he proudly was, been the hero who accomplished Hamid’s third and final arrest; besides, the retired policeman assures me that on the night in question Neva was at my place, and he surely knows me better than I do. The ex-wife, who was as pretty and flexible as our Shantelle, married a drywall contractor from San Bruno; meanwhile it came out that while consoling, counseling and lending money to his brother, Hassan Iqbal had also coached a cousin to lie about a six-month sojourn in Pakistan, which is why both Iqbals and their cousin (whose visit had to do with a dying father and whose lie derived from a misapprehension about losing his place in the dreary electronic queue for American citizenship) currently await separate federal trials on terrorism charges.
3
The Y Bar’s fame had recently swelled among European tourists, who took selfies there, posing with those overweight American drag queens and T-girls whom they loved to mock but secretly considered more “authentic” than the familiar transvestites of Stuttgart, Lyon and Stockholm; in short, our sleek inheritors began to patronize the place, laughing at how inexpensive were those watery drinks. They ignored our most convincing trannies, the rare mermaidish Filipinas rich in bangs and long hair who favored sequin body suits. Eschewing the laughing, kissing G-girls (who, naked pink and then naked blue in the lights, not to mention obviously high on goofballs—which was why they made the mistake of auditioning here instead of at the Pink Apple—kept whirling round the pole, gaping their mouth in silent laughter while gaping their legs, so triumphantly offering themselves), the Europeans consumed the sadnesses of our homegrown T-girls.
The Lucky Star Page 13