Deflated that the suit still didn’t fit, she lay diagonally across her king-size bed, cast in shadow from the setting sun, and stared into space with her thumb in her mouth. I lay in sympathetic silence with her at the foot of the bed, absorbing her emotions, which filled the room like fog.
She sucked her thumb in moments of distressed contemplation. When she pushed Dad too far in a fight, throwing the money she was making in his face, and he was fortified with white wine, he’d swipe below the pantsuit blazer with “And quit sucking your thumb like a baby! That’s pathetic!”
That was like stabbing a lion’s paw. Her tears flowed and she’d flee the scene with “Shut up, Earl! You are so mean and hateful! Hateful!”
I often witnessed these fights because they rarely happened behind closed doors. They could explode without warning, anywhere, anytime. I hated to bring friends over for fear that Mama Jean and Dad would embarrass me with one of their fights. The explosions usually happened during our nightly family dinners at the kitchen table.
After one of those meltdowns, and after Mama Jean had fled the scene, I stood awash in my own tears, scraping the half-eaten food off my dinner plate into the kitchen sink. Dad rubbed my back as I said through hyperventilated sobs, “Why don’t y’all get a divorce? I wish y’all would just get divorced!”
“We’ll work it out, Jamie-poo,” Dad said. “We always do.” They separated not long after that.
Mama Jean pulled her thumb out of her mouth now and unbuttoned the pantsuit blazer. She broke the silence. “What do you think of that town house we saw?” She had taken me on house-hunting tours since the separation.
“I like it a lot!” I said overenthusiastically, trying to lift the gloom. I knew my role. It was to always be her happy little prince, always in a good mood. My sad or angry feelings were quickly negated with “Now, what does a little boy like you have to be sad about? Don’t you know how much I love you?” Yes, but can’t I be loved and be sad too? There was no room for anyone else’s feelings. Mama Jean’s emotions took up the whole house, like her clothes.
“I don’t know. Maybe. If your father and I don’t get back together…”
Maybe they weren’t going to work it out this time. He was living at the Red Carpet Inn on I-10.
I liked the idea of divorce. I didn’t look at it as Mama Jean and Dad not being married. I saw it as glamorous, something that all the trendy adults were doing. And it meant we might get to move into a two-story town house.
Mama Jean sat up in the nearly dark room and turned on her bedside lamp. “Well, we don’t have to decide today.”
I didn’t know what I wanted that decision to be. I looked at her hair, now spotlighted, and pointed to it. “I see one.”
She leaned her fixed hair in my direction. “Where? Come get it!”
I walked across the bed on my knees and came up behind her. She leaned her hair toward the light so that I could find the gray hair.
“Pull it! But pull it from the root.”
I did. “I see another one.”
“God damn it! They come as fast as you pull them!”
I went to work on her head like a baboon picking lice out of another baboon’s hair and pulled out four more. I balled them and handed them to her.
She looked down at them in her hand. “Those sons of bitches!”
She stood up and looked in the mirror and lightly picked her hairdo back into place with her fingers. As she did this, she spoke to my reflection, which was watching her.
“I don’t know if your father and I ever should have gotten married.” She removed the blazer and tossed it with a look of disgust onto the velvet love seat across from her bed. She looked back at my reflection. “But if we hadn’t, then I wouldn’t have you.” I smiled up at her and she enveloped me in a hug. She looked away from my reflection in the mirror and down at my actual face. “And I couldn’t live without you.”
SIX
The Neon Lights Are Bright on Broadway
“You can have a champagne cocktail like me. But just one,” Mama Jean said. The old-school, liveried waiter stood hovering over our table at the Russian Tea Room in New York City.
Dad, on the other side of the table from Mama Jean and me, looked at the waiter and ordered. “Uh, two champagne cocktails for them”—I was holding my breath that the waiter wouldn’t give us any trouble since I was only fourteen—“and a vodka martini for me.”
Mama Jean glared at Dad and shook her head. “Earl.”
“All right, honey.” The waiter waited. “Uh, two champagne cocktails for them. I’ll have a glass of chardonnay.”
The waiter left. I exhaled.
At the thought of that champagne cocktail, I beamed as I had been beaming that entire week in early December of 1982. I was wearing a navy-blue, Shetland Polo sweater with black plaid wool trousers and Weejuns penny loafers, elated that I was finally in a climate cold enough to warrant such an outfit. I had finally made it to New York City and to “BROADWAY.” We saw a show every night (Cats, Woman of the Year starring Raquel Welch, Dreamgirls, Little Shop of Horrors). Our family may have been Catholic, but we worshipped theater.
“Now aren’t you glad you came with us?” Mama Jean asked rhetorically. I had had the choice of going with the Monsignor Kelly High School drama club on the New York Easter-break trip or with Mama Jean and Dad in December. As I’d weighed my options, Mama Jean had said, “All right, but you’re not going to be eating at Tavern on the Green and the Russian Tea Room with the drama club.” I knew Tavern on the Green from the TV commercials where they secretly replaced their regularly served coffee with Folgers. I chose the December trip.
Mama Jean considered herself a New York insider since she had even lived in the city for a month two years earlier when she was in training to become a stockbroker. As a Realtor, she had sold a house to the new regional manager of a national stock brokerage firm. She impressed him and he talked her into leaving real estate “to make real money” as a stockbroker. She was one of two women stockbrokers in what was still a Southern good-ole-boys club. In the first year she made it clear that she was playing for keeps. When she overheard two brokers bragging about poaching clients from another broker, she poked her head in the door and said with a smile, “Hey, fellows. I heard what y’all just said. Listen to me. If y’all ever do that to me, I’ll cut your balls off.” By the second year those good ole boys watched in fear and respect as Mama Jean clawed out a chunk of the pie with her manicured, jungle-red nails and ate their lunch.
When Mama Jean was in New York for her training, Dad visited for a week. It must have been like a second honeymoon after they had gotten back together. They did what they liked to do best—after dancing—and saw a show every night and ate out at places like the ‘21’ Club, where they had a lunch that cost the staggering sum of one hundred dollars. I knew that ‘21’ was Joan Crawford’s favorite restaurant from the A-earning book report I gave on Mommie Dearest in the sixth grade. I remember looking at the cover, which promised, “The #1 New York Times Bestseller, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture!,” and thinking, When?! When?! The tell-all book by her ungrateful adopted daughter should have made me hate Joan, but instead I became a lifelong fan and wanted to see every movie she ever made. I also couldn’t wait to someday dine at ‘21’ like Joan and Mama Jean and Dad.
All the Beaumont Country Club weddings I attended with them were dress rehearsals for this Russian Tea Room moment. I lived for those wedding receptions, when I could teeter on the edge of a gold vinyl banquet chair, dressed in my Sunday best, legs crossed, right hand curled around the stem of a champagne saucer, feeling like one of the adults. I was allowed a sip or two of champagne at weddings, as long as it was done under Mama Jean’s watchful eye. The additional sips of champagne were done under her nose. Once a waitress called Mama Jean down when she saw her giving me a taste of her drink. “But he’s my child!” she answered with a don’t-tell-me-it’s-not-okay-if-I-say-it’s-okay look of indignation. I liked t
he taste of champagne and the instant pedigree of sophistication it gave me.
I had already had my first drunk a couple of months before this trip, when I felt my life opening up. I’d found the drama club, and in that club, my two new best friends, Nicole and Hunter. Not since Eric from Mrs. Chambers’s class had I found friends that fit me so well. Nicole, two grades ahead, was in speech and debate and always spoke her mind. “James Earl, don’t let me ever wear this dress again. It makes me look fat.”
Nicole wasn’t fat. She was tall and big-boned, with a round, smiling face and penetrating brown eyes. She always took charge, the kind of woman I understood. She made things happen, got us out of the house, much to Mama Jean’s consternation.
“Mom, Nicole wants me to go to a movie tonight.”
“You went out with her last weekend. That girl’s pushy. Don’t you want to stay home with me and watch Dallas and Falcon Crest?”
No. I want to go out with Nicole. “Well, I really want to see Tootsie. It’s supposed to be a great movie.”
Mama Jean never said, “Go out and have fun.” She always begrudgingly gave a yes with a layer of guilt: “All right for you, but you’ll be sorry when I’m gone.”
Hunter was a budding actor like me. We twirled the phone cords nightly, talking about how we were going to take over the drama club, ripping our classmates to shreds, and ending our calls with “Well, let me let you go.” Hunter and I competed for Nicole’s laughter with dueling impressions of our teachers and classmates. Hunter always won with his signature, showstopping impression of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford doing the “No wire hangers!” bit from Mommie Dearest.
My first drunk was with Hunter and Nicole. We drank like girls. Frangelico. Amaretto. Crème de menthe. And we got what we wanted: we got drunk. We found a dusty bottle of Frangelico liqueur at my house when Mama Jean and Dad were out one evening. Once the syrupy hazelnut lava had burned its way into us, we found ourselves lying on my bed, me in the middle between them, our heads at the foot, staring at the whirling ceiling fan. We laughed hysterically at the idea that the friar-shaped amber Frangelico bottle looked as if he could be the alcoholic brother of Mrs. Butterworth, the grandma-shaped pancake-syrup bottle. We thought everything we said was hilarious. I wasn’t smashed, but perfectly buzzed, as if everything were underwater and I was floating weightlessly through it all. It was a perfect storm of joy. I had finally found friends who understood me. I was moving toward whom I wanted to be. I almost felt like an adult. The current that pooled it all together was booze.
As I surveyed the scene in the Russian Tea Room, I knew I had chosen the right way to see New York.
“Do you remember that scene in Tootsie where Dustin Hoffman meets his agent for lunch?” Mama Jean asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, that was shot here.” She flicked her diamond-braceleted wrist toward the red banquettes along the hunter-green wall. “Didn’t I tell you this is a see-and-be-seen place?”
She was right. The trip from the entrance to our table in the back had been a celebrity minefield. At the front corner booth was the actress Ruth Gordon of Harold and Maude fame and her playwright husband, Garson Kanin. Two tables down was the comedienne Madeline Kahn, star of the Mel Brooks comedies Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, and Blazing Saddles. At a table in the middle of the room sat a man with a bush of Crayola-yellow blond hair and a handlebar mustache. As we walked past, Mama Jean asked Dad in a stage whisper, “Look. It’s that confetti-throwing fruit on all those game shows. What’s his name?”
“It’s Rip Taylor, honey,” Dad answered, but I could have. Rip Taylor I knew. He was also on a Saturday-morning kids’ TV show, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. He had two trophies at his table: the lynx-fur jacket he was wearing and a comely, much younger black man. Even though Mr. Taylor wasn’t ejaculating confetti, the flamboyant gestures of his fur-clad arms left fairy dust on the table.
With a nod of her head in his direction, Mama Jean said, “I want a lynx for my next fur. But full-length.” She and I both wanted some of what Mr. Taylor had.
Where is that champagne cocktail? I needed it to keep my head from spinning.
It arrived with bubbles rushing for air from the sugar cube at the base of the tall flute, the champagne discolored to a rosy amber from the Angostura bitters.
Dad made a toast. “To Jamie-poo’s first trip to New York. Maybe you’ll be on that stage someday.”
“I would love that.”
“Yes, but that’s a hard life,” Mama Jean said before clinking her glass with Dad’s and mine. I savored the first gulp of the drink, a mixture of dry bubbles sweetened by the sugar cube and given a zesty punch by the bitters. When it hit my nearly empty stomach, it made an instant impact. Heaven.
“God, I love a champagne cocktail,” Mama Jean said.
“Too sweet for me,” Dad said, sipping his dry chardonnay.
“Too bad we’re not able to see Henny while we’re here.” Mama Jean was referring to her childhood friend who used to put on shows in the backyard with her. “When I lived up here during my training and Daddy visited, Henny showed us his apartment down in Greenwich Village.”
“Well, it was two apartments,” Dad said with raised eyebrows.
“He had combined two apartments, connected with a funny little crawl space. He took us through the crawl space, where he said his ‘friend’ had the other side.” Friend was said in scare quotes. “We didn’t get to meet his ‘friend,’ but I think they were more than friends. Like really, really good friends.”
“Is his friend an actor too?” I asked.
“A dancer,” Mama Jean said. “I guess they’re happy, but I can’t help but think that being … gay … is still a sad, lonely life for most people.” I don’t know what she based that on. Maybe the directors she brought in from New York to produce the annual Luv Forum Follies fund-raiser she started for the Junior Forum ladies club when she was president. She said they all drank, and one time she and Betty Jane Bundy had to drive one of the directors to the emergency room at one in the morning. When the nurse told Mama Jean he’d be fine once they removed the Coke bottle lodged up his ass, she said, “That son of a bitch!” Not in reaction to the Coke bottle but the one A.M. call, I presume. When I asked Betty Jane if this story was true, she replied, “Yes.” Then she cleared her throat. “But it wasn’t a Coke. It was Dr Pepper.”
I looked away from Mama Jean across the room at Mr. Taylor and took two deep gulps of my drink. Just a week prior to this moment I had sat in the bathtub crying silently into the royal-blue washrag—the same one that Mama Jean pressed against my eyes when she still washed my hair—because I was gay. Not that I wanted to be straight. I was completely on board for the love of another man or men. Bring ’em on! But what would it do to her? I was always more invested in her feelings than my own. Everything I did in life carried the baggage of WWMJT?—What would Mama Jean think?
“Acting’s a hard life too,” she continued. “One in one hundred make it. And you wouldn’t like struggling. You have expensive tastes.”
“Well, to judge by this room, acting isn’t a bad profession,” I said.
“Yes, but you can’t judge by this trip. I’ve only shown you the glamorous side of New York, not the seedy stuff.”
I didn’t mention the sights I’d seen in Times Square: a bronzed Adonis, three stories high, wearing nothing but Calvin Klein briefs (I hadn’t been as excited about a billboard since Mama Jean’s MILLION-DOLLAR PRODUCER one on Calder); and the marquis of the Gaiety, a series of light boxes of hunky men in various stages of undress, all of them winking, smirking, leering (its promise of “an all-male, all-nude gay revue” thrilled me as much as the Broadway shows we saw every night).
By the time the check came, I was feeling warm and doughy from the second champagne cocktail I’d snuck in while Mama Jean was in the ladies’ room. New York was another universe compared to Beaumont, and the windowless Russian Tea Room was another planet within that universe
with its flying saucers of cocktail-filled silver trays orbiting stars made of chattering celebrities. I wanted to stay there and keep drinking forever.
Mama Jean looked away from the check and over her frosted-gold reading glasses at me. “Somebody had an extra champagne cocktail.” Then she glared at Dad.
“Oh, honey, it’s vacation.”
She sighed as she slid her credit card across the table to Dad. He slipped it into the leather case of the check and gave it to the waiter.
On our way out, we were bunched up in the bottleneck of the vestibule, waiting in the coat-check line. I heard Dad’s unmistakable stage whisper—“Jean, look who’s in front of us”—and whipped my head around.
She looked. I looked faster. In front of us, waiting for her coat, was a fine-featured, statuesque blonde with a pixie cut fluttering over her heavily mascaraed, false eyelashes. She wore a tight-fitting, one-piece, black pantsuit and was talking and laughing with two men who matched her in height and good looks. Mama Jean made a silent, openmouthed Oh! of recognition that I could not share.
“Who is it? Who is it?” I whispered in desperation.
“Shh!” Mama Jean said.
I bugged my eyes loudly to ask the question again.
“It’s Joey Heatherton,” Dad whispered.
“Who’s Joey Heatherton?”
“You don’t know who Joey Heatherton is?!” they both hissed at me. They were always genuinely shocked when I didn’t recognize a celeb. Like the time I asked them who the Muppet of a woman was talking to Johnny Carson. “You don’t know who Carol Channing is?!” I was seven.
I looked at the lady in question again, as if another glance would unlock the mystery of who this obvious somebody was. It didn’t. One of the men helped Miss Heatherton slip into her full-length mink. The false eyelashes seemed to weigh down her glazed eyes. She cooed and licked her lips as they expanded into an elastic smile. She locked arms with the men and walked onto West Fifty-seventh Street.
Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir Page 5
