Naked in the Promised Land

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by Lillian Faderman


  How could I not have preferred Maury’s messages of hope and righteousness and free will?

  10. KICKED OUT

  DENNY WORE DAZZLING SHIRTS that were sunflower yellow, parrot green, candy apple red. He was puckish and too pretty for a boy, and anyone who thought about it would have known that his eyebrows couldn’t have been arched so high and perfect without the aid of tweezers. In speech tournaments he did Biff from Death of a Salesman in an exaggeratedly melodramatic voice that was pitched in an upper octave and made his interpretation unintentionally comical, but that didn’t seem to matter much to him. Mario was the real reason he’d joined the Speech Club.

  When he called one evening to ask if I thought Mario looked greater in his black T-shirt or his white one, I said, “I’m gay too.”

  “I knew it, I knew it in my bones!” he shrieked and cackled; he became my best friend at Hollywood High School. I had too much to hide from the other kids.

  It was Denny who introduced me to the secret life that played itself out on Hollywood Boulevard, just a couple of blocks from our school. Most passersby never seemed to notice the young men who trekked up and down the boulevard from Highland to Vine in little knots, shouting merriments or imprecations to other little knots of young men. “She” or “Mary” or some such feminine signifier was how they usually referred to one another, and they talked in high voices about cruising and camping and queens and sailor’s rosaries (“the buttons on a sailor’s pants that queens pray over,” as Destiny, the most fabulous queen of all and my buddy for about three months, defined it for me). A casual stroller might see a beautiful, elaborately made-up woman and think “a Hollywood starlet,” but Denny introduced me to many of them, drag queens who walked the boulevard to hustle or to see how well they could pass. It was Denny also who clued me in to the gay cruising scene on the boulevard; and he took me to the Marlin Inn, a coffeehouse where underage gay boys without fake I.D.‘s for the bars could hang out. Our favorite after-school stop was Coffee Dan’s, a regular meeting place for the Hollywood gay crowd, where the straight patrons seldom noticed that the people in the next booth—billing and cooing or camping it up, sometimes wearing gobs of eye shadow and rouge—were all male.

  Being an honorary member of the secret world of gay boys made me long for the freedoms they claimed for themselves. I’d never heard of lesbians cruising one another on the street, but I yearned to know what it would feel like to pass a strange woman on the boulevard, exchange a significant glance that would be invisible to the droves around us, and follow her (as gay boys followed one another), our blood tingling, around a corner. But if lesbians ever walked down those streets, I didn’t recognize them, and I lived in celibacy through much of my junior year because I knew I had to stay out of the bars. Mostly I was okay since I had plans: I’d finish high school in a couple of years and go to a college I’d seen only a few blocks away from the Open Door, Los Angeles Junior College, and when classes were over every day I’d stop by for a beer and meet women there and have all the lovers I wanted. I’d know how not to get myself in trouble with a brutal woman like Jan. For the present, it was something at least to walk down the boulevard with the queens or hang out with them in the coffee shops.

  Once in a while I “dated” gay men I met at the Marlin or Coffee Dan’s. Wendell looked like a beefy young businessman and worked for the Southern California Gas Company. He asked me to front for him at a Christmas party. “You have to bring a wife or girlfriend to those things, so it would be a big favor to me,” he said. “Tell them you’re twenty, okay? And if they ask, say we’ve been going out for about a year.”

  I was happy to do it. “I’ve got a date,” I told my aunt when Mr. Bergman drove her over to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows. “He’s twenty-three, has a very good job with the gas company.” I waxed ecstatic. Maybe it would put a halt to her nagging for a while.

  “Jewish?” she asked.

  At the end of each semester I took my report cards to Maury because they were trophies too: I’d ended the eleventh grade with mostly A’s. He blinked owl eyes behind his thick glasses as he scrutinized the grades. “Mazel tov, bubeleh!” he shouted and pumped my hand as though I’d brought him nachas, gave him pleasure as if I were his own kid. “Colleges forgive a lousy freshman year if you can make grades like this. It shows you’ve matured. A collitch lady you’ll be, und a lady bachelor und a lady master und a lady phudd. So, where will you apply?

  “Los Angeles City College?” He scowled at me when I told him my plans. “Ridiculous! That’s a junior college—two years only. With grades like this and those first-place speech trophies you can write your own ticket—UCLA, Berkeley, Columbia University. Don’tcha know there’s a difference between those places and someplace like Los Angeles Junior College? There’s a whole big world out there. How’d you like to be living in the heart of New York? That’s where Columbia is. Don’tcha know that in New York they got more theaters, concerts, museums, lectures—more of everything worth doing and seeing than anyplace on the planet?” I didn’t know. I only knew that was where I came from, and those memories weren’t too terrific. But Maury’s words propelled me to dream of New York as a fabulous possibility. Columbia University. Or I could stay in California and go to Berkeley. Or UCLA.

  The first time I saw Nicky I thought she was a straight boy. I’d gone to the Marlin Inn to meet Denny, and she was sitting at a table with him and some other queens. Her gray wool man’s shirt hung loose outside her jeans, and her auburn hair was buzzed and shorter by far than anyone’s at the Marlin. You had to really look in order to notice the breasts under the shirt—not because they were so small but because the whole effect was so successfully male that your eyes could trick you into ignoring the soft swell beneath the shirtfront.

  She was the first lesbian I’d met in Hollywood. “Won’t you join us,” she said with great formality and jumped to her feet. She relieved me of my books and almost bowed as she pulled out a chair. At first I wondered if she was making fun of me, but no, she was serious. She was Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.

  “Thank you, that’s kind of you,” I said. I knew how to be Ingrid Bergman too, so I let her settle me into the chair. Denny giggled. I threw him a look.

  The second I took a cigarette out of my pack, there was a worn, gold-plated lighter waving in front of my nose, and when the waiter brought the coffee I’d ordered, Nicky insisted on paying, then got up to get me some apple pie and then a second cup of coffee. When I said I had to go, she asked if she could walk me home. “Sure,” I said, because I missed the gay girls at the Open Door.

  She talked and talked as we sauntered down Hollywood Boulevard, as though she’d had no one to talk to in a long time. I saw now that she was a great galumpf of a girl with puppy feet and puppy eyes that belied her efforts to pass as a sophisticated man. She’d come to L.A. with a magazine crew, she said, a boss and six young people. Her job was to go door-to-door with a basset hound look and a heart-wrenching tale, like “My mother and father died in a fire last month, and now I have nobody in the world except for a maiden aunt in Topeka, Kansas, and I’m trying to make enough money by selling magazines so I can take a bus back there and live with her. Won’t you please help me?” “They’re good magazines—and a lot cheaper than on the newsstands. People enjoy them once they get them,” Nicky explained earnestly.

  “You don’t have to go in right away, do you?” she asked when we turned the corner onto Fountain Avenue. She was a character; I’d never met anyone like her. So I plopped down with her on the apartment house lawn next door to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows and listened for another half-hour as she poured out her life story, plucking nervously at blades of grass and dandelions. In six months she’d already been to Chicago, Des Moines, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Reno, and San Francisco. She pronounced the name of each city with pleasure, a world traveler who’d seen wonders. “And I’ve made a lot of money. I’m good at it,” she said in a boy’s clear voice. “The crew boss
keeps the money on the books for you, and they pay all your hotel bills and stuff. Then, when you’re ready to leave, you get your wad.” Waaad, she pronounced it, making the word sound as though it meant chest of gold doubloons. Though she was a year or two older than I, I felt like a jaded woman in comparison. The whoppers she’d told in the service of the Ladies’ Home Journal hadn’t yet made her eyes look hard and savvy, and there was an ingenuous air about her. She’d been a carhop before she joined the magazine crew, a telephone operator before that. “But what I really do is write,” she said.

  Sometimes, when I got rave comments from an English teacher on an essay, I thought that I might like to become a writer. It seemed as exciting as being an actress—more exciting, really, because it took intellect. (“You put some squiggles on a paper, and miraculously your mind goes out to the minds of thousands of strangers. You’ll never even see them, but you’ve taught them, you’ve touched them,” Maury had said. “The greatest profession in the world,” he called it.)

  “I’ve got around fifty pages done,” Nicky said now, and I listened, awed. “The book’s actually about me, but I call her Blackie, a butch from St. Louis, eighteen years old, travels around the country, trying to make it on her own. I’m naming it ‘Walk With the Wind.’” When Blackie is twelve, she wins a national short story contest for Catholic school girls, first prize, and the story, “Big Red,” about a Call of the Wild kind of dog, is printed in a magazine that goes to all the Catholic schools. The nuns at her school say she’ll be the next Graham Greene. But when she’s sixteen her mother makes her go to work for the St. Louis telephone company, even though the principal nun pleads with the mother, says she’ll get Blackie (Nicole, she’s called then) scholarships to college. Nicole’s mother is adamant; she went to school only until she was sixteen, and what was good enough for her should be good enough for her daughter. So Blackie begins a life of plugging wires into the phone company’s main switchboard. “I’m a homosexual,” she tells her mother when she’s seventeen, because she’s fallen in love with a girl at the phone company. That’s when her mother kicks her out, won’t even let her take clothes with her, just says, “I don’t have a freak for a daughter.”

  “Did that really happen?” I asked, incredulous that there were mothers who would do that to their children.

  Nicky cracked her knuckles, loud, first on her left hand and then on her right, before she answered, “That’s just the way it happened. That was last year. I’ve been walking with the wind ever since.”

  “But … doesn’t she yell at you to come home when you phone her?” I remembered my own telephone booth calls to my hysterical mother.

  “I only phoned once, when I got fired from the carhop job for stealing ‘cause the pay was so lousy and I had no money and no place to go. I said, ‘Mom, it’s me, it’s Nicole. I wanna come home, Mom.’ ‘I don’t know any Nicole,’ she says and hangs up. Bitch, huh?” Nicky grinned, but I saw her lower lip quiver.

  “Can’t I come in for a few minutes?” she asked, clutching my schoolbooks to her chest when I said I really had to get home now.

  She was nothing like Jan, and I’d never met anyone who wanted to be a writer before. “You better tuck your shirt in and put on some lipstick,” I said, handing her a tube of Red Hot Peppermint that I fished from my purse.

  She looked horrified for a flash, but she took the lipstick. “I don’t have a mirror,” she said. “Tell me if I’m doing it right.”

  My mother was playing gin rummy in the kitchen with Albert and didn’t even notice her. “I got a friend from school,” I shouted in my mother’s direction, and Nicky and I slipped into my room. “Okay,” I heard my mother say. Albert said nothing. I closed the door and pulled from my cache of books a bunch with garish covers that I’d found on the twenty-five-cent paperback rack at the drugstore—Women’s Barracks, Queer Affair, We Walk Alone, Odd Girl Out. “Take them,” I told Nicky. “They’re about lesbians, but your story is a zillion times more interesting. I know you’ll get it published.” My ambition for her was growing like a beanstalk.

  My mother did catch a glimpse of her a little while later, as she was leaving, but she didn’t seem to notice that Nicky looked like a boy. There’d been no butches in the shtetl, or in the movies she’d seen, or in the shops where she’d worked. “She’s so tall for a girl. I never saw such a tall girl” was all my mother said.

  Nicky came again on Saturday and then on Sunday, and when the workweek started she came the minute she was free in the late afternoons. Maury told me I needed to fill out college applications and write my essay on why any college should be happy to get me. I’d already decided to apply to all the good colleges in Los Angeles—UCLA, USC, Pepperdine, Occidental—because I wouldn’t be too far from my mother at any of them. Nicky stayed with me in my room as I strained over my work. Sometimes she wrote a bit of “Walk With the Wind” or she read one of my drama books or novels, her big frame stretched out on the floor near me as I sat at my little desk. “Can I read you this?” she’d ask from time to time. I didn’t mind the interruptions because usually she read passages I liked too, and I thought her comments were so smart, better than mine. “You’re the one who should be applying to colleges,” I told her. It was cozy—her company, our shared tastes—and I found myself dreaming a little, about how she’d become a famous writer and I’d become … I didn’t know what yet, something else good.

  When she kissed me the first time, there in my room, it was a shy, kid’s kiss, with soft, closed lips. “Don’t you know how to kiss?” I teased, and I showed her, like an older woman. Somehow, though, the pieces didn’t fit; it didn’t seem at all … sexy. Still, I went out to the living room to tell my mother: “Nicole is staying over. She’s helping me study for a test.”

  I turn the lock and put out the light after I hear my mother or Albert close the door to their room and two pairs of shoes drop on the floor. I take off all my clothes and throw them in a pile. I can see Nicky’s shadow, her back to me, as she gets out of her shoes, socks, shirt, pants, and nothing more. She climbs into bed before I do, covers herself, and then she reaches out for me. I slip under the blanket and she caresses me everywhere. Id longed for a lover, and now I’ve got one who is so sweet and bright and ardent. But something crucial is missing. Whatever it is lets my mind keep wandering to other things—the sound of my footsteps on the marble staircase that leads to Maury’s office, the dark circles around my mother’s eyes. And suddenly I know: It’s not Nicky’s fault that I’m not stirred deeply. Together we are two left shoes. What I really want is an older woman. An older woman. Even the phrase excites me.

  Yet I didn’t want her to leave. I really liked the way the gay boys on Hollywood Boulevard coupled us—we were Lil-and-Nicky. Sometimes on weekend evenings I’d put on my harlequin capris again and the high heels that she loved, and we’d strut down the boulevard, her arm a shawl round my shoulders. “It’s okay,” she assured me the first time. “Everyone thinks I’m a guy.” I decided she was probably right, and I relaxed into the masquerading fun of it, the charm of fooling the tourists who thought we were like them. “You make a stunning couple, darlings,” Destiny gushed. I liked even more the way she sat with me while I did my schoolwork, and how we talked about her finishing “Walk With the Wind” and selling it for a lot of money. We were discovering books together like The Prophet and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence. She said the book she loved best was Walter Benton’s love poem sequence This Is My Beloved, because the beloved’s name was Lillian. She recited the Benton poem “Your Eyes” to me again and again in a rich, melodious voice, her intonations subtle and canny.

  In about a month the magazine crew had milked all the neighborhoods in L.A., and Nicky’s boss told them they were shoving on to San Diego. She ran to my house as soon as she found out. “Tell me to stay.” She held my hand, peering into my eyes and pleading, like a Victorian suitor proposing.

  “Yes, stay,” I said. I’d be lonely again if she left.<
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  I went with her to collect her clothes and money at the hotel where the magazine crew had lived, the Hotel Royal Astor, a building as grimy as the one I’d lived in with Jan. The glass front door had a crack running its length, as though someone had taken a crowbar to it, and the lobby was decorated by a single overstuffed chair that leaked straw guts. I followed Nicky up familiar-looking unlit stairs and down a smelly corridor.

  The crew boss had a thin black mustache and a cocky tilt to his chin. He wore red suspenders and his hair was slicked, like a 1930s gangster. Without so much as a glance at Nicky, he kept putting things into a suitcase and muttered that she had fifty dollars coming.

  Even from where I stood at the door I could see the deep flush that spread over her face and neck. “But what about all my money on the books?” she cried.

  “Yeah, that’s fifty dollars,” he snapped, still not looking at her, pulling a ledger book out of a big box and throwing it on the unmade bed. “Look, here.” He pointed with a blunt finger on the page, and Nicky leaned down, craning to see. “Right here—hotel rent, food, clothes, spending money.” He flipped the pages wildly. She kept shaking her head at the figures. “A doctor in October when you had the flu—look at how much that cost us.” He stabbed his finger like a shiv on another page.

  “But I’ve been working since July. I’m the one who sold more than anybody!” Nicky wailed. I stood with my back pressed up against the door, suddenly scared for her.

  “Damn it, it’s all there!” His voice rose, and he slammed the ledger shut and glared at her. “You made $1,265 since July, and the company spent $1,215 for your upkeep. Can’t you read?”

 

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