Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  “Hello again.” The bespectacled man in the white starched shirt, the one Eddy had called a fish queen, grinned at me as though I were a friend.

  “Hi.” I moved away quickly and positioned myself on a stool at the opposite end. I hadn’t come to the Open Door to meet a man.

  “What’ll you have?” the bartender asked when he noticed me, and I remembered what Eddy had ordered the night before. “Bottle of East-side beer,” I told him. Suddenly it all felt dangerous—that strange man, those odd women. What if I got caught and they put me in jail or reform school for being in a bar? But I’d already ordered a beer. I’d go as soon as I finished it.

  I sat for a long time, sipping, as alone as if I’d been in my bedroom. The gold-eyed one was there again, but she was with a beautiful light-skinned Negro girl. They sat at a table and snuggled into each other and never even glanced at me. But I had to stay. I wanted a lover, and I didn’t know where else to find one. My lover could never be a man. Men had made themselves so unlovable in my life. I lit each new cigarette from the stub of the last one, puffing away. I sat until my seat hurt. I’d never have the courage to start talking to someone. Now I watched two people at the jukebox who were too busy to notice me. The dark-haired girl deposited a quarter and was punching numbers with an angry finger. She wore dangly rhinestone earrings, and her shiny satin blouse was pulled down over her shoulders and cut to expose high, creamy breasts. A beauty mark beside her chin looked as though it had been placed there with an eyebrow pencil, and it moved as she twitched her lips in a mutter. Then a tear furrowed down her cheek and dropped to stain the blouse.

  “Don’t you get up and walk away from me,” snarled the woman who stood behind her. I could hear it through the din. This one was blond. In her left ear was a single small, hooped earring, and she wore a corduroy men’s jacket that was too big for her. She talked out of one side of her mouth, like a gangster, though she had a patrician face—high cheekbones, a narrow nose, a cleft in her pronounced chin. Outside the movies, I’d never seen anyone swagger and squint the way she did. Was she serious or was she acting James Cagney?

  “It’s over, Jan. I’m not putting up with your shit anymore,” the one in high heels said with a sniff. She flung her patent leather purse over her shoulder in a wide and angry arc and wobbled out the door.

  “Fucking slut,” Jan hissed after her. “Don’t you know it?” she asked in a loud voice, and I realized with a start that she was talking to me. She’d caught me looking. “That broad’s a first-class bitch!” Then she was beside me, and I could smell the alcohol on her breath. “Hey, you’re a cute little femme, you know that? What’s your name?” Jan lifted her lips in a drunken bad-boy smile. I’d never seen such white, even teeth.

  “Gigi,” I said.

  “Gigi. I like that. I’m Jan, the hottest butch in town. Ask anyone.” She guffawed at her own braggadocio. “Ask Terri, that fucking slut.”

  I stared into my glass of beer. Should I get up and leave?

  “Got a light?” Jan breathed at my neck. I handed her my matchbook. “I can get it off your cigarette,” she said, “just like you’ve been doing. I’ve been watching you.” She winked and lifted my fingers toward the cigarette clenched between her teeth. She bent her head and inhaled, and a whiff of the clean, lemony scent of her shampoo surprised me. “Don’t pay attention to my bad talk,” she said, exhaling a cloud. “I’m not usually like this, but Terri just pissed me off—whoops, sorry—provoked an extremely irritated response in me,” Jan pronounced carefully and flashed her perfect bad-boy smile at me again. “May I sit?” She bowed like a young gentleman at a debutante ball, then straddled the barstool next to mine, pert and jolly. “I promise to behave. Lemme buy you a real drink.” She whistled toward the bartender. “Scotch straight up for the lady—me too.”

  I kept meaning to leave, but as soon as I’d finished the first scotch, she ordered another round. She put her hand on the small of my back and let it rest there. I jumped as though she’d stabbed me with a needle when I felt her fingers on me, but I didn’t try to shake them off. She’d hitchhiked with Terri from New Orleans to L.A., she said. They’d been together on and off for six months, but now they had broken up for good. Before Terri, she’d been Stormy’s lover. Had I ever heard of Stormy? Stormy was the hottest stripper in New Orleans, owned her own club on Bourbon Street; everyone knew Stormy. There wasn’t a butch within a hundred miles of New Orleans who wasn’t dying to get into Stormy’s pants, but she was very, very selective.

  I found myself leaning into Jan’s touch. Now she moved her hand to my thigh, and I remembered Mel Kaufman with a start, but this was different because she was a woman. I let her keep her hand there, and suddenly I was aware that it was hard to catch my breath.

  “Why don’t you come to my place?” Jan stared me down at midnight, her nostrils flaring, a look on her face that I couldn’t quite read, a look like anger or a dare. “C’mon,” she urged again, and I could see the golden flecks in her eyes.

  “I’ve got to make a phone call,” I said, and wobbled to the telephone booth in back, near the toilets. “This rehearsal will go on for another couple of hours,” I told my mother when she answered the phone in a voice heavy with sleep. “Simone said I could stay at her place tonight.” I was careful to enunciate clearly, like a sober person.

  Jan lived on the third floor of a hotel that was a couple of blocks from the Open Door. TRANSIENTS WELCOME, the sign on the plate glass window said. $2.00 NIGHTLY $12.00 WEEKLY. HOT WATER TUBS SHOWERS.

  She unlocked the door of her room and ushered me in with a mock bow. Then she shoved the door shut with a foot and pushed me to the wall, knocking the breath out of me, her hands tugging at the zipper of my capris, her mouth on my lips. My Jell-O legs wanted to sink to the floor, but the pressure of her body held me up. “Wait,” I begged. “Wait a minute!”

  She laughed a low and dirty laugh and whispered something that sounded like “I’m gonna make you cry Daddy.” A button popped from my blouse under the pull of her rough fingers, and her teeth bit through my bra to my nipple. The pain shocked me for a second, and my reflex was to push at her, to hit her. But the pain gave way to desire, and I rode with it, opened to it, to whatever she wanted to do.

  “Get on the bed,” she ordered me, and she ripped away at the rest of my clothes, parted my legs, flicked and sank her tongue. I held on to a high cliff by my fingernails until I thought my fingers would break, until she tumbled me into space.

  I drifted to sleep with the lemony scent of her hair in my nostrils, my own moans still in my ears, her fingers cupped hard around my breast. I hadn’t slept beside anyone since I was a kid in my mother’s bed, and here I was, held by a woman who talked liked James Cagney. It was scary, funky. I liked it.

  During the night I’d keep waking up, excited and restless in the strange room. In the dark, I kept remembering the couple that was leaving the apartment next door when we arrived—a woman in a big blond wig and a huge man in a black leather jacket and leather pants who held her firmly at the waist. Jan was as still as a stone now, her back to me, and I pressed my cheek as hard as I dared against her firm flesh. I could still feel where she’d been on me and in me, and I kept thinking of the frightening, wild tumble that had been nothing like the sweet pulsings I used to feel in the dark when I thought of Irene. Then I’d fall asleep again for a little while.

  “Hey, where’d you get a body like this?” Jan growled in a gravel voice the next morning. She’d awakened me by running her fingers over my thighs, my belly, my waist, and I watched her handsome face, then glanced at her strong skillful hand that was gentle now on my breast. I hadn’t noticed the night before the two angry wounds on the back of her hand. Each was the size of a dime and looked as though the skin had been gouged with a dull knife.

  The raw skin made my already queasy stomach lift. But I loved her hand and felt pity for it now. “How did you get hurt?” I asked.

  “You really want to know?” She
laughed. “This john said he’d give me five bucks if I could hold a lit cigarette to the back of my hand until he counted to three. I got two booboos there ‘cause I ended up with ten bucks.”

  “No, come on, really.” I didn’t know who John was, but I was sure she was teasing or making light of an accident. “What really happened?” I wanted her to trust me enough to let me comfort her.

  “That’s what really happened, baby.” She flashed me her perfect smile. “It was an easy ten bucks.”

  I called my mother from a Vermont Avenue phone booth on Sunday morning, when the streets were empty of anyone except addicts looking for their next fix and drunks for whom the night was still not over. “Well, we’ve got to rehearse a lot because it’s such a long play,” I said. A hungry cat brushed up against my legs and meowed. “It’s Shakespeare, King Lear,” I added. She’d heard of that one, the parent with the bad daughters—it was even a Yiddish movie.

  “When are you coming home?” she cried.

  I had to ignore the aggravation in her voice because there was no way I was going to leave Jan just then. “I’ve got to stay at Simone’s for a few days. We start rehearsals early and go till late at night, and she lives just a few blocks from Geller’s. You wouldn’t want me to take the bus late at night, would you?”

  “What are you going to do when school starts? You have to enroll in a new high school in September.”

  “I’ll worry about that in September.”

  “You come home right now,” she yelled. “You hear me?”

  “I’ve got to go, Mom. Simone’s waiting. Look, I’ll call you tomorrow. There’s nothing to worry about.” I hung up without waiting for more. Jan was still in bed, and I just wanted to scamper back to her like a rabbit to a warren. I wanted to get out of my clothes again in that dark, secret room and curl into her arms.

  Jan doesn’t work. Here is our day: We stay in bed until the morning has passed, though I usually wake up by ten o’clock and snuggle closer to her, listening to her breathing and to the hotel sounds while she sleeps. Sometimes I hear the lady with the big blond wig screaming next door when her boyfriend beats her; sometimes I hear other voices coming from that room and the squeak of bedsprings. “She’s a whore. Don’t you know anything?” Jan says when I ask about the sounds.

  Then about one o’clock Jan opens one eye and says, “Where’s my coffee? You know I’m no good without coffee in the morning,” and I get up and spoon instant Yuban into a glass and heat some water on the hot plate. Jan drinks propped up on two pillows, then puts the empty glass on the cigarette-burned avocado carpet, pulls me back into bed, makes love to me.

  Now it’s after three o’clock. “I’m hungry,“she says, and either we dress and get a hamburger at a stand down the street, or I dress and she gives me a couple of dollars and sends me for ribs and sweet potato pie to a Negro takeout place a few blocks away. We eat sitting on the bed, listening to rhythm-and-blues and static on the Negro station that comes over a radio that’s missing its tuning knob and can only be turned on and off. Later we pile the dirty paper plates and napkins and rib bones on top of the collection that’s been accumulating on the floor since before I came into her life.

  Then she gets up to take a bath, and I lie there still feeling all the things, old and new, she’d done to me on her bed that day. “Go get cleaned up,” she tells me when she’s finished in the bathroom, and I run the hot and cold water into the rusty tub while the pipes bang and hiss.

  It’s only about six now, too early to hit the bars, so we saunter down the street and go sit in Harry’s Coffee Shoppe. A lot of people know Jan, and she says hi to all of them. “They’re as crooked as corkscrews,” she sometimes says, gloating about her cronies. Their talk goes something like this:

  “Hey, where’s Penny hangin’ out these days?”

  “Oh, man, they busted her ass.”

  “Oh, man, when’s her case come up?”

  “Don’ know and don’ give a fuck.”

  “Hey, you seen Barry around?”

  “The fucker’s dead, man. OD’d.”

  “Man, fuck that lyin’ fucker, anyway.”

  How did Lilly come to be here? I sometimes wonder. Though I’m not really a part of it, I tell myself. It’s like looking through a window, watching a drama unfold in the house next door, and I can’t look away. “He’s a hustler” or “she’s a junky,” Jan tells me after each one leaves. “He’s an old fish queen,” she says about a skinny bald man in a black suit and black tie.

  “What’s that?” I ask, remembering that Eddy had used those words too.

  “It means he doesn’t like to fuck. All he does is eat pussy,” she says. “Doesn’t mind paying for it too. He’s a john. Good money.” She flashes me her dazzling smile. “Terri did it more than once.”

  We never say anything of consequence to one another. There are so many things I can’t tell her, like that I’m ten years younger than she is and not twenty-two, as I’d said I was; and there are probably a lot of things she doesn’t tell me. But once, after we sit in Harry’s for almost four hours and she chats with a long procession of pimps and prostitutes and addicts and johns, she says, “I don’t know why I do this, I have a good education.” I don’t think to ask her what she means.

  At Harry’s we have something more to eat, another hamburger maybe or a bowl of soup. Now it’s about nine or ten o’clock, so we saunter toward the Open Door or the If Club, across the street. Jan studies the streets to make sure they’re safe. “The vice always travels in these unmarked cars,” she instructs me, “but they’re really dumb ‘cause they never use anything but blue or maroon Fords, so you always know when they’re around.” One night we’re a half block from the bars and we see a black wagon parked in front of the If Club. “Shit.” She pulls at my arm and we reverse direction, walking quickly, almost running, for at least a few blocks. “It’s a fucking raid,” Jan says as she pants, holding her side. “Didn’t you see the paddy wagon, the Black Mariah? Those asshole owners probably forgot the payoff this week.” My heart shakes. If I’m caught in a raid, my mother and aunt will die and Jan will find out I’m a minor.

  Most of the time we start at the Open Door, drink until I know I’ll vomit if I have one more sniff of scotch, then I hold on to her arm because it’s not easy to walk and we cross the street to the If Club, where Jan has another glass or two. When she looks at the femmes I worry, because I don’t want to lose her now. “Mmm mmm mmm, watch the ass on that one,“she tells me. “Great tits!” She points to another. I know she’s only trying to get a rise out of me when she laughs her naughty-boy laugh.

  Now it’s two o’clock and the bars close, so we walk the mean streets back to the hotel. It helps to grab on to her waist beneath her corduroy jacket as we walk because I still have a hard time making my legs move. We climb the stairs, she slides the bolt into the lock on the door of her room, and knocks the breath out of me with a bruising kiss. She flips me onto her bed or the floor and makes love to me until I’m aching and the morning light seeps through the torn window shade, and then we sleep.

  “Hey, baby, you better go get some other clothes,” Jan said the next Sunday when I was getting ready to go to Mattie’s Ribs for our lunch. “Your stockings have big rips up the back, and your blouse is a rag.”

  I’d safety-pinned the place where she’d torn the button off that first night, more than a week ago. Now I looked at myself in the mirror on the squeaking closet door, and a disheveled mess of a girl looked back at me. I’d have to go home and get some things, but I didn’t want to leave Jan, even for a few hours. “Come with me,” I wanted to say, but wouldn’t my mother be horrified at her? Wouldn’t she ask, “Is that a man or a lady?” And Jan would be even more horrified by my mother, with her Yiddish accent, and Albert, with the holes in his head.

  “I’ll wait for you at Harry’s,” Jan said over her shoulder, and was out the door.

  I could see that the lights were burning in the house as though they�
�d been on all night. It was Albert who greeted me: “Lee-lee, where have you been? You didn’t call your mother for three days.” His gray eyebrows twitched and his eyes blinked like an insane cat’s. “She’s going crazy and taking me with her!” He grabbed at my shoulders as though he wanted to shake me, and I jumped back, astonished. He’d never before put a hand on me. “She didn’t even go to bed last night,” he hollered.

  My mother heard him and ran to the door. “Louse! You gave me a heart attack,” she howled, and swung at my face with her open hand, but the blow landed on my neck. “I called the police. They’re looking all over for you.”

  The police! “Shut up,” I bellowed at them both. “Don’t you try to hit me, goddammit. Call them back right now and tell them I’m okay.” I pushed her toward the phone. If the police came and asked questions, what would I tell them?

  “What kind of girl disappears for a week?” Albert pulled me away from my mother.

  “None of your damn business. You’re not my father.” I couldn’t let them tell me how to live my life. “You don’t know shit!”

  “You lousy tramp!” He bared his rotting teeth, and I could smell his stale cigarette breath as he grabbed my shoulders now and shook me. I smacked his chest and broke free. “Go to hell!” I screamed.

  “She’s home, she’s okay,” I heard my mother sobbing to the police or Rae as I ran to my room and slammed the door. They weren’t going to keep me from going back to Jan.

  Though I lived with them for almost two more years, Albert and I didn’t speak to each other again until I got married.

  Jan broke our routine a couple of days later because she’d run out of money and said she knew this john of Terri’s who sometimes hung out at the clubs in the late afternoon. “He’ll let us borrow a few dollars if we can find him. Hank’s his name, always wears a starched white shirt and these glasses with black frames.” The fish queen I’d seen on my first visits to the Open Door.