by Melvin Dixon
Steam on your skin could feel like a new set of clothes. You didn’t worry about seeing too much, but you started to hear differently. You could hear the water gurgling each time your feet or other people’s feet moved. You could hear the quiet too. The end of the hot water? No more showers? You could hear the steam settle on tile. Then one by one the shower heads turned off. Like on signal. End of shower period. There’d be a bell soon. Some BRRRIIINNNGGGGG sound to send us back to the block. It’d be coming soon to make us dress and haul ass back to cinder-block rooms. Any moment. I still had time before the bell. Like we was naughty children and had to be told to go to our rooms. Shit. Then laughter. Voices of grown men, not children. Steam now and silence settling like a cat’s paws on tile. My shower head was still on. A single jet of warm water. If it wasn’t the end of the hour, then what was it? My hair was still wet, the lather dripping onto tiles, my feet feeling slippery and loose. A hand? Was that a hand on my back? Suddenly no water from above. Someone had turned off my shower.
“Hey man, I ain’t through showering yet.”
“Well, you through now.” It was a black voice.
“Yeah, he’s through.” A white voice.
“We couldn’t wait no longer.” A sneering voice. Someone about to laugh. “Huh, fellahs?”
“No, I ain’t through,” I said. But I couldn’t really see anyone. I could see hair though, and some eyes. Then, as more steam settled, I saw mouths, beards, hands reaching through the air like they was lost. Bodies getting close to me. Closer. Voices like knives cutting through the steam.
“I ain’t had my nut today.”
“Ain’t had mine in a long time.”
“I’m gonna get me a nut. Don’t you want a nut?”
Bodies too close. Steam cooling with weight on my shoulders. Hair dripping. My toes tried to grip the tile. Another hand in my face. I slapped it back. Again. I pushed out and away. Tried to move through the bodies, the smell of men, open mouths, open legs, cocks hard as clubs at my sides.
“You gonna be nice and let us get a nut?”
“What you talking about? Let me get by.”
“He wants to get by, fellahs. Make room. Act nice, now.”
“Yeah. We gotta act nice.”
Suddenly a hand on my arm. I brushed it away again. Another. Another. Arms and legs holding tight. So tight I couldn’t move.
“You better relax, sonny.”
“Let me go.”
“It’ll be better for you if you relax. Act nice and you won’t get hurt.”
“Let me go. Let me go.”
“He ain’t acting nice, fellahs.”
“Don’t let him scream.”
“Huh—” But I couldn’t finish. A hand slapped against my mouth and held there. The whole palm tight. Calves next to my calves, hairy chest on my back. Stick of flesh at my waist, then hips, and moving down, down, down. Pushing in. Pushing in some more. The pain. Pain. Pain breaking me and entering. Someone threw my back forward, my hips up and out. Then I was down on tile and pushing away and slipping on the wet floor and trying to yell but couldn’t make a sound. Everything in me was open. I heard my own voice somewhere saying, “Help me. Help me.”
I remembered darkness. The darkness taking over the gray steam. I thought of pearls, gray pearls and blankets. Then red as something started wetting me all over and seeping from me like from a torn place inside. It was red, all right. Red October leaves. Copper-brown November leaves. Hands from everywhere falling, falling onto me, into me. Rushing, pushing inside. Into me. I was open everywhere. The last voice was a tongue in my ear, “You got to relax, baby. My bid for breaking and entering ain’t for nothing. I just want to get a nut.”
“Hold him till I get mine.”
“And mine.”
“And mine.”
I thought about the girl in the abandoned hallway and the twenty dollars we gave her. I had been in Cuddles’ denim then. Riding her on the feet of roaches, too. Getting in. Getting off. The smell of pussy and Cuddles’ denim armpit. The man on top was grinning at me, his teeth black and yellow in the cooling steam. Arms twisted mine. Opened my thighs wider and wider. The hand on my mouth eased off. I could breathe. I could look at what he was doing. I told him his name was Cuddles.
“My name is Jack, man.”
“Tell me your name is Cuddles, man.”
“Nobody here but me. And my name is Jack. Jack.”
“Tell me it’s Cuddles. Cuddles.”
“Shit, man, you crazy or something?”
The air turned colder than before. I couldn’t move from the tile floor. Steam like icicles settled on me everywhere. Cold needles. I found my voice again. “Does it feel good to you, Cuddles? Is it good to you, man?”
“Look at this shit. You bleeding, boy. You bleeding like hell.”
I woke up in the prison hospital. My legs were tight and spread apart in metal clamps like I was some bitch about to have a baby. I must have been a bitch. They got their pussy, didn’t they? Faggot pussy. They didn’t care: Pussy is pussy, a nut’s a nut. They would find any way to crack it. I tried to move. One foot, then another. Fine. But not the whole leg. Pain sliced through me like a knife tearing up from my thighs and ass and something warm and smelly oozed out of me like I was having a period or something. But the blood smelled like shit and I couldn’t move to see how bad it was. My ass was swimming in it. My stomach queasy. There was blood on me like those red hands in October, those red leaves with a voice. I couldn’t gather them in now or hold in anything. I was open from the inside, couldn’t cover myself no more. I tried to hold things in again. I couldn’t. Shit and blood again. Red September lips, red October leaves. Hands with knives of November like old copper. You know why they called him Metro? He was under, like I was. And I told him, if he could even hear me from somewhere else, “You think you got me now, huh? Metro, you think I’m the pussy now?” Shit. Christ Jesus! I never had a chance.
Ruella
WHAT WAS RUELLA PULLING ME INTO but more commitment? The prison was gruesome. It was too real. Phillip had a weight on him that showed through his eyes. And he probably saw too well what I was and what I was carrying. In prison he had to know how men could need each other.
The ride back to the city was long. First a crowded bus leaving Rikers and then a subway to midtown. I told Ruella I had to be alone. Just for a while. I’d go back to West 4th Street and face the bare white walls. No dance posters. No calendars. Maybe this time I wouldn’t hear Metro’s voice or the soft gurgles of our lovemaking there. But the memory that seizes you and wrings all the sweat from your nightmare is never the one you expect. All the guilt in your life creeps back as if you never fully explained the stolen cookie or the loose change taken from your father’s desk top, and there’s no one to blame but yourself.
I remembered traveling south with my mother on a train. Her mother had died and she was taking Charlie and me to the funeral. We traveled at night and changed trains in the middle of somewhere in the South where the darkness and the heat and steam from the tracks colored the trip like a nightmare. The next day in the bright sunshine of Irmo, South Carolina, it was even hotter. My brother and I waited in an open car while relatives filed inside a gray-wood country church. I could hear the preacher praying, then someone shouting. Everyone inside seemed to be crying. I heard my mother cry. I knew it was her voice although I couldn’t see her. Her crying then had the same scratchy sounds as the ones she made when arguing with my father left her in one corner of the bed, nursing her eyes and swollen cheeks. The sound of tears always takes me back to Irmo and back to Connecticut where I was born. The years exchanged themselves within the same pain, from listening as my grandmother was eulogized to hearing my mother’s muffled caution beneath distraught whimpers. Over the years those sounds returned to me as if my mother and I once shared a language no one else could use. Not even Metro, when I told him about my first trip South.
I tried saying things with her clothes. Touching, then wearing
them. The feel of nylon on my skin was electric. I’d go into the bathroom when everyone had left the house and search through the hamper for any discarded dress, bra, stockings, or scarves. I wondered how girls grew to fill them with the softest flesh. I tried old socks and underwear. Then I danced.
The full-length mirror was my audience. In small, graceful steps, sometimes even curtsying as if before a gentleman partner, I’d dip and whirl the dress as fast and as far as I could, with the wide hems flapping against the sink, tub, toilet. And when I felt most fully the woman or young girl I had become so magically, I’d dab just a little rouge on my lips and cheeks to accent the natural redness under my skin. And I’d dance again and again until sweat streaked my brown face like an African mask, and I’d stutter in short whimpers of pleasure in a voice not even my own.
When I heard the car approach the driveway I’d quickly undress and flush the toilet to make believable sounds. While my mother unloaded the shopping, I’d return the clothes to the hamper and douse my face with water and cold cream. But another time, I learned later, someone was blocking the driveway and my mother had to park on the street. When she entered the house she must have heard the whirling dress and my whimpering song, my feet shuffling in the limited space of tile. She knocked furiously, her voice freezing my motion. “Jesse? Jesse, you come out of there. And make sure you put them clothes back right. I’m tired of finding my things all wrinkled and torn up. Come on, now. I got my washing to do.”
My legs went stiff, my arms trembled, but the dress kept whirling in its centrifugal force of cotton and silk. I found my breath again and disrobed quickly. Without a word I slipped out the back door and ran for the playground. The neighborhood kids looked at me funny and backed away. I had the whole set of swings to myself. When I accidentally brushed at my face, some of the rouge came off on my arm. I’d forgotten to wash! The sudden distance of my friends became too clear. I looked away from them, trying to imagine how high the swings could take me.
That Halloween I dressed as a pirate, and my friend from junior high, Michael, who preferred to be called Micki, dressed as a girl in full calico skirt and loud orange lipstick. Charlie and I met him at the corner store once we had visited the houses on our side of Fairview Avenue. He joined us for the other houses but everywhere we went people recognized Micki, not us. My pirate’s bandana and eye patch and Char-Re’s Dracula cape went unnoticed.
“That can’t be Micki, chile,” someone said.
“Ooooh, look how fine Micki is.”
“He shore look good. Don’t he look good?”
“Watch him strut his stuff. Go on, chile.”
But they always gave us more candy than the simply dressed kids who came later. At one house where Micki modeled his calico and stuffed bosom we each got a Hershey bar—the five-cent size—and an apple.
At the end of Fairview we met Charlie’s friend Al, but when Al spotted Micki he said under his breath that Micki was such a fox that he had to talk with him. The four of us settled in a nearby parking lot to examine our bags of treats. Al came up to Charlie and me. “You watch me handle this,” he said. “Just you watch me.” I took off the black eye patch and saw Al and Micki sitting on a log. Nothing happened. I went back to my apple and chocolate. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw a hand move, and I looked straight at Micki who was caressing Al’s thigh. I looked at Charlie. I said nothing. And Charlie, who was also looking in that direction, said nothing. Al got closer to Micki and put his hand on Micki’s covered knee. Then his hand seemed to disappear. Micki kept caressing Al’s leg as if nothing had happened. Al looked about nervously. We said nothing.
Then Al got up from Micki’s side and went behind a nearby truck. Micki straightened his skirt and followed. Charlie and I remained seated. I listened and tried to make the Hershey bar last longer by eating each square at a time. I couldn’t stop listening.
“Just let me wet it,” Micki was saying.
“Naw, baby. I want it like this.”
“But darling, I’d rather have it like this.”
“You scared it’s gonna hurt? It ain’t gonna hurt.”
Charlie shifted in his seat and moved away from the log and the dim shadow of the truck. I remained seated. I was glued to their sounds and the racing of my nerves. The candy in my belly churned uncertainly. The chocolate became volatile.
“Don’t you like it this way?” It was Micki’s voice again, strained, less sure of itself, and thick with saliva.
“Just relax. It ain’t gonna hurt.”
“But … but …”
“Look here, punk. You wanna be a bitch, you better act like a bitch. Now pull them panties down.”
Just then Charlie called me away. He called me again. Some invisible, strong arm held me to the log, listening and imagining Al’s hands on me. Charlie called me again and I came away from the groaning shadow of the truck. But Charlie didn’t know then, and neither did I, that I would spend half my life wondering what was happening behind that truck and wanting whatever it was to happen to me.
I found out sooner than I expected.
The next summer I wore shorts and sandals bravely. I found a place in the park where I could read. Once a car circled the area near the bench. I caught the driver looking at me from behind the wheel. I stared right at him. He sped off. Minutes later he returned. I stopped reading. He asked if I’d like to take a ride somewhere to get a cold drink. I said yes. We talked. He brought me to a furnished room. We talked some more.
“How do you want it?” he said.
I said nothing.
“You want it big? Big like this?”
The word squeezed out of me. “Yes.”
“Where do you want it?”
“All over, I guess. Will it hurt?”
“It’ll feel good. Lie back. Relax.”
Cautiously. First my chest, then hips, thighs, I climbed up on him, then under him.
He looked at me. “You don’t really want it, do you?”
“Yes, I do. I want it.”
“Where do you want it?”
“I want it in, all the way in.”
“You don’t want it bad enough.”
“Please.”
“Taste it.”
“Huh?”
“You got to want it bad enough to taste. Crack your jaw, baby. And when I’m ready you can crack your ass.”
I didn’t even know his name.
In another room at another time, with someone I thought I knew, I learned a different dance. He threw a yellow silk scarf at me. I tied it about my head, then tied it around my waist. He smiled. “I want to see how much of a woman you can be,” he said, almost laughing. I looked hard at him. He wasn’t smiling.
I tried to laugh. “You got to be kidding.”
His face went blank, his words like nails. “I want to see how much of a woman you can be.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Dance with it,” he said, pointing to the scarf.
“Dance?”
“Dance till I tell you to stop.”
He held himself in at the thighs. I took the square of yellow silk and circled the air with it, wrapped it around my waist and threw it back into the air as I turned and whirled and the scarf dipped and whirled like the sun in a storm. My arms flailed before it, around it, my legs bending and pointing straight. I whirled and turned and whirled again.
“Faster,” he said, his face contorting away from me. I could see him strain.
“Look at me,” I called to him. “Look, look, I’m dancing. Dancing.”
His hands went deeper into his thighs. He pulled at himself and his face showed every line of concentration. The eyes flashed open and shut, open and shut, the hands still digging and pulling in his pants. “Dance,” he said again, almost to himself “Dance, you bitch. You black son-of-a-bitch.”
I spun and landed in a heap on the floor. But my head kept spinning away from me, away from my shivering legs. I drew my knees together and held myself
in tight. I remained on the floor until he left the room without even looking back.
I telephoned home, long-distance. My mother’s voice was as gray as her hair now. I asked if she had really wanted a girl. She said no, she hadn’t wanted a girl.
“Then why did you give me your name?”
“Jesse’s in the Bible. It’s a man’s name. My name isn’t your name. Don’t blame your troubles on me.”
“But our names are the same.”
“I’m Jessica. You’re Jesse. You’re a man. Act like one.”
Before I said good-bye, I asked her to wish me luck for the audition. After a pause, she wished me luck. I eased the phone back to the receiver. I did my exercises alone.
The next morning, I called Ruella as promised and we met for lunch. We then went to her place to plan our audition piece. We took the Broadway #1 local uptown. The train was late. Usually you could count on the local coining every five minutes or so on a good day. The express trains sometimes took longer. I wanted to get going quickly, so I moved to the express side of the tracks at 14th Street. When nothing came, I turned back to the local side. Ruella followed my every move. I planned to go back to her place for a few minutes, gather the few clothes I had left there, the leotards and tights, and return home for good. The closeness between us was grating. I needed her more than was good for either of us. I didn’t say anything, just smiled at her, and she smiled back. A small crowd had gathered by the tracks. Soon the train screeched in, caroom-boom-clack, caroom. An express, finally. Only one of the two doors opened. We piled inside and found seats near an air vent or a heater, you never could tell which.
As soon as the train left the station, the lights inside the car started to flicker. The car ahead of us went dark, then our car and the car behind us. After a moment the lights came back on in the same sequence. Mini-blackouts in a speeding hulk. A well-dressed man got on at Penn Station, 34th Street, and as soon as the car doors shut he opened his briefcase and pulled out a Bible. He started to preach, brandishing the book like a weapon. No one paid him any mind, and he left our car for the next, following the succession of blackouts all through the train as if the Word itself were guiding our travel. Ruella and I burst out laughing. I was sure the man was headed to a midtown insurance office somewhere forty stories high, and he was getting ready for his imminent ascent to heaven.
