Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir

by Jamie Brickhouse

  We all turned back to each other with our eyes bugged.

  “My God! Can you believe that?” Dad said.

  “I told y’all.”

  “I’ll bet they’re the couple from the Get ’Em Grotto,” Jeffrey said.

  I looked at my watch. Ten o’clock. It’s my turn in two hours.

  * * *

  “Jeffrey? Jeffrey?” I whispered. He didn’t respond. In the blackout dark of 1010 I listened intently for the telltale signs of his deep sleep and heard the steady metronome of his breathing from the next bed. “Jeffrey, are you asleep?”

  I pulled on a pair of white shorts that I had placed under the bed earlier with the room key already in the pocket, left on the extra-small T-shirt that fell just above my belly button, and slipped into my Top-Siders. I used the pinstripes of the outside hall light framing the door as guide and goal to tiptoe my way through the dark room. Once I was in the hall I actually skipped down the corridor. I took the stairs, rather than the elevator, to the ninth floor, below. Scurrying down the back stairs seemed to add intrigue to the adventure.

  Nine-ten. My heart was running a race as I knocked on the door. Limey cracked open the door and smiled hello. I could tell he wasn’t wearing anything. That was damn thrilling, but I would have preferred that he greeted me in his lime-green Speedo.

  “Come on in.” He let me in and I saw that he had a towel loosely draped around his waist.

  I walked down the small entrance hall past the bathroom, where Racing Stripes stood at the sink brushing his teeth, wearing only his white, bikini Calvin Kleins, like the briefs the bronzed Adonis wore on the Times Square billboard. He looked at me in the mirror and garbled, “Hello.”

  I sat on the corner of their bed until Limey came in dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, followed by Racing Stripes, still in his Calvin Kleins. We talked for a little bit about their company dinner. They’d had fun at the gay bars downtown and were leaving on an early flight the next morning. They lived together in Kansas and had been a couple for three years. Limey was seated next to me. Close. Our legs touching. Racing Stripes was sitting on the other bed across from us doing most of the talking. Limey was twenty-three. Racing Stripes was thirty-two. “I’m eighteen,” I lied.

  “Do you like Acapulco?” Limey asked.

  I turned to his face, our noses almost touching. “Yes. Very much.” I felt as if I were talking in slow motion, aware of my lips as every syllable left them. Then Limey gave me my first kiss. He tasted of bourbon. I already had a taste for bourbon. Ingested this way, it was as exhilarating as that first sip of whiskey when I was five. It tasted like it did then. It tasted like being an adult. To this day I’m a sucker for whiskey breath.

  In the fog of that kiss Racing Stripes materialized. We tumbled into a blur of tongues and mouths and stiff dicks and oohs and aahs. I was in the middle, and I loved every second of it. My first time and I was spoiled. Will I ever be satisfied with just one? The sex was like a Harlequin romance: everything but penetration. Sure as hell beats pressing.

  * * *

  I don’t remember dressing, just the image of them peeking at me from behind the door, Limey’s head on top of Racing Stripes’ until I disappeared up the stairs. I almost floated up those stairs, I was so giddy. I am a woman now.

  I slipped my hands into my pockets and tensed my shoulders with delight. In my right pocket was the room key, and something else that wasn’t there before. Paper. I stopped walking and pulled out a wad of peso notes, worth about fifty dollars. As I stared at the money, I thought, They think I’m a whore. I’m no whore. I walked back to their room. The door was shut. I piously slid the money under the door.

  Back in my hotel room, I lay in my bed, playing back the video of the entire day, alternately flattered and insulted. Finally, at six A.M., I slipped out of the room again to see if I could catch them before they left. To get the money back? For another round? Their door was ajar. I pushed it open. The room was empty. The closet bare. The soiled bed unmade. They were gone. And so was the money.

  I always imagine them back in Kansas boasting to their friends about the copper-headed Lolita they picked up at a pool in Acapulco and nearly lost on the beach, but who couldn’t be bought—or at least wouldn’t take a tip. And every time they tell that story, I imagine them pointing to a baby grand piano lousy with a collection of silver-framed photos. In the center is a picture of a metal-mouthed kid brazenly smiling in the Mexican sun as he stands in the surf of an Acapulco beach—forever virginal, forever fifteen.

  EIGHT

  Bottoms Up

  “How are we feeling this morning?” Mama Jean asked as she pushed open my bedroom door, her way of knocking.

  My mouth feels like a desert highway at noon, my head like an overblown balloon, and I just might upchuck into my underwear drawer. Right. Now. What I actually said with a forced smile that hurt my face was “Fine.”

  I had been to the Monsignor Kelly High School spring dance the night before with my de facto girlfriend, Maggie, and was experiencing my first colossal hangover, the maraschino cherry to top off my junior year. This educational year had left me street-smart, but not exactly streetwise.

  “How was the dance? Did you and Maggie have a good time?”

  Maggie and I had been going out for a few months. She was edgy and weird, in the drama club like me, and drank. My kinda gal. She went by Margaret until she met me. I called her Maggie, as in Maggie the Cat from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She should have called me Brick, as in Maggie the Cat’s alcoholic husband who wouldn’t put out. I wasn’t actively looking for a girlfriend as a beard, and Maggie wasn’t a beard. More like a goatee, since I don’t think I was fooling anyone but maybe her, Mama Jean and Dad, and a couple of nuns. She’d receive the most tasteful corsages, orchids usually, and always wrist, not breast, so her dresses, like her virginity, would remain unscathed.

  “Oh, lots of fun,” I said, not looking at Mama Jean as I tried to remember just how much fun I’d had. But only three hazy snapshots remained from the school dance:

  Repeatedly scooping a Dixie paper cup into an Igloo cooler filled with red punch at someone’s parentless house. “Hey, what is this anyway? It’s good!” I asked the crowd around the cooler. “Everclear! One hundred and ninety-proof! Illegal in most states!” answered some blond jock with bloodshot eyes.

  Bouncing like Tigger from Winnie-the-Pooh to the B-52’s ode to a beach bacchanal, “Rock Lobster.” The lyric “Boys in bikinis!” conjured Acapulco and made my loins tingle.

  Throwing up blood—blood? No, it was the punch—all over the white porcelain urinal of the school bathroom.

  Then black.

  How did I get home? I saw my clothes piled neatly on the chair next to my desk. Schwoo. At least I didn’t get caught. How did Maggie get home?

  * * *

  My drinking prior to that school dance had certainly caused lapses in judgment, but never giant lapses. Booze had always been the ticket to fun, and I sought it whenever possible. For my weekend outings, I’d skim from the house liquor cabinet. On nights when Mama Jean and Dad were out, I’d play amateur bartender with Dad’s cocktail-recipe book from the fifties, Bottoms Up. The sexy cover featured a busty, blond floozy wearing nothing but opera gloves, black high heels, and a lopsided smile. She was loosely draped over a saucer champagne glass like a pair of stockings, three sheets and several panties to the wind, her image repeating like wallpaper. I discovered recipes for cocktails that I had only seen in old movies: sidecars, sloe gin fizzes, pink ladies, Manhattans. Bottoms Up unlocked the key to the drinks I wanted, the Holy Grail being the martini.

  Martinis were forbidden in our house. The mere suggestion of a martini launched Mama Jean into retelling “The Legend of the Dinner Roll Martinis.” “Earl can’t have martinis anymore. That time we were in Colorado and he had I don’t know how many, and the next thing I knew, I looked across the table and he was like this”—she made her drunk face (lopsided head, eyes crossed, tongue hanging out)—
“and he started throwing dinner rolls across the table. After that, I said, ‘Uh-uh! No more martinis.’”

  Dad always rolled his eyes and sighed. “Honey, that was one time.”

  “Well, one time too many,” she said, getting in the last word.

  I was a toddler when that happened, but the oft-told legend left me thirsty for martinis my whole life. I couldn’t imagine what was so lethal about them, or complicated. Whenever they popped up in old movies, there was debate about “shaken or stirred,” “don’t bruise the gin,” “just a whisper of vermouth.” Like most things that adults do that seem so complicated when you’re a kid, the martini was surprisingly easy, but I had to improvise. With no cocktail shaker in the house, I used the Pyrex measuring cup. We had no proper martini glasses, so I poured the magic potion into one of my grandmother Mamou’s gold-rimmed crystal champagne saucers. The recipe called for three ounces of gin and one ounce of vermouth. My first taste: Ew. I’d never had gin. I thought it tasted like a Christmas tree, and the vermouth part of it was just shy of gasoline. But I was determined not only to finish that drink, but to acquire a taste for martinis. I am going to get sophisticated if it kills me.

  Those first martinis were extremely wet. Not just in terms of the liberal amount of vermouth I was naively using, but where I drank them. I sipped them nude in the swimming pool that Mama Jean put in when I was a freshman. I did know how to swim by the time the pool was installed, but it had taken a while. After the terrifying summer with the Wicked Witch of the Wet, I spent the next two summers back on the steps of the pool. When I was nine, we joined the country club. At the bar that overlooked the pool, I used to sit eating maraschino cherries and talking to Clarence the bartender. I was finally coaxed down from my barstool into another go at swimming lessons when I saw the instructor: a tall, tan, blond college student with a Mike Brady perm. He was kind and gentle and patient. He never helped me pee, although I’m not sure I would have minded. He even got me to jump off the high dive. That took several seconds—minutes?—of standing on the edge of the board, staring down at the water, and chanting to myself, “Do it. Just do it. Just. Jump,” before I would close my eyes, scream, and jump.

  Mama Jean and Dad had a rich social life, so I had plenty of nights to myself to hone my nude bartending skills. I’d set Mamou’s champagne saucer on the edge of the pool, take a deep gulp, and float on my back to the sounds of the rediscovered Burt Bacharach songs of my early childhood—“Make It Easy on Yourself,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Walk on By.” “The Look of Love” was my favorite song to float by. Sometimes I’d drift under the white stone lion, Mama Jean’s zodiac avatar that stood watch at the deep end of the pool. I’d let Leo drench me with the steady stream of chlorinated saliva spewing from his mouth. I was breaking two of Mama Jean’s rules: no martinis and no glass by the pool.

  As fun as those solo, nude drinking nights were, I still craved drinking while dressed up. The Neches River Festival provided the ideal venue. It was the society event every spring. High school senior girls were presented as princesses in a weeklong round of festivities that culminated in the coronation of the NRF queen at the Julie Rogers Theatre downtown. The winning princess was always beautiful and almost always from an important family. The queen would reign that night at the ball and the following day in a parade downtown on the arm of the king, a middle-aged to simply aged, rich man. Like most Southern extravaganzas, it was a beauty pageant with money attached.

  Senior boys usually escorted the princesses, while juniors were requested to pull up the slack for the duchesses, the out-of-town gals. As a junior, I was happy to be an escort and thrilled to don the requisite white jacket and captain’s hat.

  I was paired with a duchess from Port Arthur. Port Arthur was a depressed refinery town twenty miles from Beaumont. Apparently, the Duchess of Port Arthur was already royalty—refinery royalty—since her daddy was an executive at one of the plants. Clearly, she’d been treated like a princess her whole life and wasn’t happy about her reduced status as duchess. She had a lemon-yellow bob of curling-iron ringlets and wasn’t much bigger than Shirley Temple. At the coronation—princesses all wore virginal white, duchesses wore anything but white—she was outfitted in a bubble dress of chewing-gum-pink taffeta. The skirt puffed out from the waist to a bubble of pleats and then curled under at the knees, giving her squat figure the look of a giant taffeta beach ball.

  She had taken an instant dislike to me from the moment we met at the coronation rehearsal. She wore a sickly smile that looked as if she had just smelled the flatulent fumes of her refineried Port Arthur backyard and barely said hello. Perhaps her ultrasensitive nose sniffed me out for what I was.

  After the coronation, I couldn’t turn the key fast enough in the ignition of my teal-green Pontiac Sunbird, which Mama Jean had given me earlier that year, so I could drive the Duchess of Port Arthur to the ball and dump her into the arms of her doting parents.

  “Do you have any Excedrin?” the Duchess of Port Arthur whined, her head turned away from me.

  “What?” I said as I pulled out of the parking lot.

  “I have to have some Excedrin. I have a sick headache.” A sick headache? Who gets sick headaches except bitter old women? Bitter young women, I guess. I wasn’t packing Excedrin, so we drove all over town looking for it. It was late, almost eleven P.M. Most places were closed. I found some Anacin at a 7-Eleven.

  I held it up in the store window for her approval while she sat waiting in the car. She screwed up her soured face to weakly yell, “It has to be Excedrin. I only take Excedrin.”

  I slammed the Anacin on the counter and left. Two stores later I found Excedrin.

  “Here you go.” Pills for the Pill, I wanted to say. Then with mock enthusiasm: “It’s extra-strength! Didn’t want to take any chances!” I opened it and gave it to her with a McDonald’s Coke I had wisely picked up during our search. The Duchess of Port Arthur took her medicine.

  I reached under my seat and pulled out the bottle of Jack Daniel’s I had stashed for the ball and had been sneaking swigs off of during the coronation. “Do you mind?” I held up the bottle. I didn’t wait for her to answer. “This is my Excedrin.” I smiled at her as I poured liberally into my Coke. “Extra-strength.”

  After the ball I raced downtown to the Copa, the gay bar, which wasn’t far from where the coronation had taken place. As I walked toward the bar, still wearing my Neches River white jacket and captain’s hat, I noticed a tall, lanky man, maybe twenty-three, with longish, dark Duran Duran hair. He stood under the streetlight on the corner and winked at me. Inside was a glow-in-the-dark, ersatz New York City skyline. I was the belle of the ball—the real Neches River queen—as I danced on the cheap parquet floor with a new partner for each song: Wham!’s “Careless Whisper,” Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill,” and Madonna’s “Crazy for You,” the first song Maggie and I danced to.

  I made out a few times at the bar. Between sloppy kisses flavored with Jack and Coke, I glanced in the mirror behind the bar and caught glimpses of what others saw: captain’s hat askew, bow tie dangling around the neck, lopsided smile—a drunken sailor in need of an escort. But I didn’t find the escort just right for me.

  On my way out of the bar I passed the Duran Duran man, who was still under the streetlight. He smiled and winked at me again as he puffed on a cigarette.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hi there.” He flicked his ash.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing much. I’m staying not far from here.”

  “Really?” I asked with a lopsided smile.

  “Yeah. Wanna go there?”

  I was thrilled by this cinematic tableau: a sexy stranger, nonchalantly smoking on a desolate downtown sidewalk corner lit only by a streetlight. A surge of electric tingles radiated to the ends of my fingers and toes as I jumped at his proposal.

  I zigzagged to my Sunbird and offered him the passenger seat, which was still cold from the Duchess of Por
t Arthur.

  We got in the car and held each other’s gaze.

  “So why didn’t you come inside and say hello to me?” I asked.

  “Well, I was working.”

  “Working?”

  “You know what I am, don’t you?”

  “Um, a fag like me?”

  “Well, yeah. But I was selling, you know. Out there on the street.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I’m an ‘escort.’ But I’m off duty now.”

  Now I was really turned on. “I’m an escort too.” I took off my hat and tossed it onto the backseat. “Also off duty.”

  I put the car in gear and closed one eye to focus on the dotted line of the road since I was seeing double. I carefully drove just under the speed limit of thirty miles per hour, aware that I was drunk. I was convinced that I drove better drunk because I was extra-cautious. I believed that when I drove drunk, I didn’t do anything stupid or take any risks.

  He lived—or was staying—in a garage apartment behind a dilapidated Victorian. We climbed the outside staircase to enter a room filled with ball gowns draped over every surface, lit only by a dim-watted floor lamp. Rising from the gowns and perched on an ottoman was a wisp of a man with long, blond, permed hair and traces of lipstick and mascara on his face. He was hunched under the lamp, painstakingly sewing silver sequins onto a ball gown that he held in his arms and across his lap like the dead Jesus resting on Mary, a drag pietà.

  “Don’t mind us,” my escort said.

  The man looked up and over his reading glasses, his needle and thread suspended in midair. “Oh, Mary, don’t y’all mind me.” He had the soprano twang of a piney woods mawmaw. “She’s gonna be up for hours. I don’t know how she’s gonna git all these gowns done by the ball next Sunday.” He—she?—made a sweeping gesture around the room. My gloom-adjusted eyes could see that the gowns rivaled any I had seen at the coronation in embroidery, bugle beads, and sequins. More Cher than beauty queen. I could also see that they were about ten sizes up from Cher.