Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir

by Jamie Brickhouse

  “The ball?” I mouthed to my escort.

  “The big Miss Gay Southeast Texas drag ball next Sunday.”

  “Oh, Mary,” the seamstress said, his eyes fixed on me. “You gotta cuuum!” He gave my outfit a once-over. “Trust me, honey. It will blow out of those muddy, snake-infested Neches River waters inny-thing you saw toniiight.”

  I couldn’t reply. I was paralyzed by a combination of fascination and horror that made me want to turn around and leave. Obviously, the Seamstress did drag. Drag made me nervous. He was one of those “high-flying fruits” Mama Jean talked about. Like the ones that worked at her current beauty parlor, Fame.

  Shit. What if the Seamstress works at Fame?

  “We’re going to slip into the bedroom,” my escort said.

  “Slip away, Marys! Slip away!” the Seamstress said, wafting the needle and thread in her right hand before she returned to the intricacy of her sequins. “Y’all have fun. Lord knows, somebody should.”

  We pushed to the floor the backless, strapless, non-bubble gowns that were lying on the bed and took the Seamstress’s sage advice.

  * * *

  A few weeks later mysterious blood was on my post-BM toilet paper. Weird. A week later blood was in the toilet. This can’t be good. A blind man’s search with my hand discovered mysterious little bumps down there, like fleshy moles. Surely they’ll go away. They didn’t. A self-examination with one of Mama Jean’s makeup mirrors revealed little, white hamster pellets. Oh my God. What are they?

  For I don’t know how long, I would reexamine myself and see that they were growing. The alien hamster pellets were forming little bouquets. I’d sit on the toilet, my head in my hands, a diseased version of Rodin’s Thinker. I can’t sit on this much longer. I told no one. Who am I going to tell?

  I remembered the free clinic in the black part of town. It took a few merry-go-rounds the block before I got up the nerve to go in. As the only white boy (the only boy) in the waiting room, I was, as Dad liked to say, “nervous as a whore in church.”

  “Oh, honey!” the fat nurse, a white version of Mammy, explained as she examined my exposed butt. “You’ve got cauliflower growing out of your ass! We can’t handle this here, hon. You’ve got to see Dr. Faudi.”

  My sphincter tightened at the mention of Dr. Faudi’s name since I went to school with his son. “Isn’t there anyone else?”

  “No, hon. He’s the only proctologist in Beaumont.”

  I made an appointment, but I didn’t get past Dr. Faudi’s gatekeeper: a pageboy-blond nurse with red lips that bled into the Kabuki-white powder spread on her face. After I told her my problem, she stared at me as if I had cooties. Well, I guess I did, but shouldn’t she be used to this in her line of work? With disdain and the same fart-smelling expression of the Duchess of Port Arthur, the Nurse of the Bleeding Lips told me that the doctor couldn’t see me without insurance or my parents’ consent. Didn’t she know how hard it was for me to be there? Her judgmental glare seared my entire body with shame and I hated her for it.

  I told Dad that I thought something was wrong, that I was having pain going to the bathroom. No need to get Mama Jean involved. Dad took me to his physician. When I exposed myself to the avuncular doctor, a Captain Kangaroo type, he said, “Oh. Oh. Uh, well, son, it appears that you have anal warts. And they’re awfully … florid.”

  I couldn’t resist. “Kind of like a cauliflower bouquet?”

  “Well, yes. That’s a good description. Now, son, I can’t take care of this. You’re going to have to see a proctologist. And the only proctologist in town is—”

  “—Dr. Faudi,” I said in unison with him, but under my breath.

  Dr. Kangaroo didn’t tell Dad that I had anal warts, just that I had to see Dr. Faudi. Dad, to my relief, didn’t ask any questions, but he did have to bring Mama Jean in on it. He made the appointment and I returned with both Dad and Mama Jean to Dr. Faudi’s office, where the Nurse of the Bleeding Lips sat waiting. This time she greeted me with a powder-cracking smile. I mirrored her fake grin as I walked past her to Dr. Faudi’s examination room.

  Dr. Faudi confirmed what I already knew. Yes, I had anal warts. Yes, they were a cauliflower bouquet. Yes, he was the only proctologist in town. Had I had anal sex with a man? Yes. Did my parents know I was gay? No. Did we have to tell them I had warts? Yes, because they had to be removed surgically, in the hospital.

  He agreed to keep the cause of the cauliflower bouquet a secret. The warts he had to let out of the bag. He called Mama Jean and Dad into his office and explained that I had anal warts, a virus. Dad was silent with his eyebrows raised. Mama Jean listened intently to Dr. Faudi, but looked at me out of the corner of her eye. I avoided her glare.

  “But how did he get them?” Mama Jean asked. Someone was always to blame in her book, and she needed to know whom.

  “There are any number of ways one can contract this,” Dr. Faudi said, his shoulders in a but-who-knows-how shrug.

  “Like what?” Mama Jean asked.

  “Oh, say in the locker room, from sharing a dirty gym towel.”

  “A gym towel?! But he hasn’t taken PE in almost two years!”

  Mama Jean was confused. Her eyes scanned the room from me, as red-faced as a pimiento, to Dad, with his eyebrows raised, to Dr. Faudi, whose shoulders were still shrugged. Thankfully, she didn’t pursue it any further. On our way out, we all stepped over the imaginary gym towel left behind on the floor.

  After the surgery Mama Jean bought me Always minipads to help with the post-surgery “flow.” As she handed me the box, she said, “I thought I was done with this stuff after my hysterectomy.”

  * * *

  The spring dance with Maggie was a few weeks after the surgery. By that time I had recovered and was ready to go out and celebrate, but it wasn’t the dance that was memorable, since I remember almost nothing of it. What I can’t forget was the doomsday promise of that seventies song “(There’s Got to be a) Morning After.” As Mama Jean stood peering over my shoulder, eager to hear all about it, I stared into my underwear drawer with nothing but those three snapshots of memory from the night before.

  “You got home awfully early last night,” she said in a singsong voice.

  “I didn’t think it was that early. Did I wake you?”

  “Wake me? Darling, I believe I woke you.” Her head was cocked to the side as her tongue pushed out her right cheek. I didn’t know what to say, so I took the Fifth. “You don’t remember our little conversation?” she asked with a wide smile and blinking eyes.

  LBD (lower bowel distress) hit. I couldn’t tell if it was caused by my hangover or the trap I was falling into. “We spoke?”

  Her smile widened as she pushed aside my clothes and sat in the chair next to my desk, an antique from Mamou’s house. Hanging over it were the Playbills of all the Broadway shows from the New York trip, which Dad had framed for me. Mama Jean clapped her hands as she hit the chair. “Oh, let me tell you all about it! It’s a real good story.”

  Busted. And Mama Jean loved to bust.

  “Your father and I got home at eleven from Yum Yum and Dan’s party, and there was your car. I looked at Earl. ‘What’s Jamie doing home this early?’ We opened the back door and there was your shirt. Oh! And then a sock in the den. Then a whole trail of your clothes, like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs, leading to your bed.”

  “Really?” I said incredulously, which was sincere.

  “Yes, really. I whispered, ‘Jamie? Jamie?’ Then I tapped you on the shoulder. ‘Jamie?’ You shot up in bed and said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Have you been drinking?’ ‘Huh?’ you asked. I said, ‘Jamie, have you been drinking?’ Well, at the top of your lungs you screamed, ‘I’m DRUUUNK!’” She raised her eyebrows and laughed. I was about to join her, but she shut off her laugh midstream like a water faucet and fixed me with that lava-freezing stare of hers. “And you don’t remember any of that?”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  She told me tha
t she called Maggie, who told her that she had driven my car home.

  I explained about the Everclear punch. That I hadn’t known what was in it, which wasn’t a complete lie. That I’d had the good sense at the dance to know I was drunk and needed to leave before I embarrassed myself. The “good sense” part was a lie. I skipped over the upchuck in the school bathroom. That I’d known better than to drive, so I’d asked Maggie to drive me home. I omitted that I didn’t remember leaving the dance or the drive home or the disrobing from kitchen door to bed.

  “I’m going to let you off easy this time and not punish you,” Mama Jean said. Then with a finger point: “But you and I are headed for a falling-out if this happens again. I hope you’ve learned your lesson. Listen to me: You better watch the drinking. It’s in your blood. On your father’s side. He, and Pawpaw before him, liked it way too much.”

  I stood there flush with shame, feeling as if I were five and had just been caught pressing. I nodded yes in silence for a few seconds to let her know that I had absorbed what she’d said and that I agreed. “Yes, I think I’ve learned my lesson.”

  “Good. You’ve got too much going for you to let that get in your way. With your grades and talent, you can do anything. You can be a writer.” She was proud that I was editor of The Spectator, the school newspaper, and that I’d had a story published in the Beaumont Enterprise, “Christmas Is in the Closet.” No comment on the title. “Or a diplomat!” A diplomat? “So don’t let the drinking get in the way. It’s not worth it.”

  I wanted to say, Jesus. Relax. It was just one night. Instead I nodded in agreement.

  She got up and looked down at the pile of last night’s clothes. Before she left, she pointed to a lone sock. “I think its mate is in the den.”

  I had learned my lesson that year. No more duchesses. No more whores. And no more Everclear.

  NINE

  Destiny

  “Where in the hell have you been?! I can never reach you.” Mama Jean’s voice was long-distance, but, as always, her words were loud and clear. “Where in the hell have you been?” had long since replaced “Where have you been, Lord Randall, my son?” from my childhood days.

  “Well, I was in class, then at rehearsal … busy,” I said, two hundred miles, and a world away, from her. I looked down at the gold-and-onyx ring on my finger. She had given it to me four months earlier for graduating seventh in my high school class with the words “No mother could love a son more than I do.”

  It was the fall semester of my freshman year in college. I had landed at Trinity University, an exclusive ivory tower of a liberal-arts school five hours from Beaumont, in San Antonio. U.S. News & World Report annually dubbed it “the Ivy League of the Southwest.” Wisteria League was more like it. What U.S. News & World Report didn’t tell its readers was that Trinity was rumored to be thirty percent gay. And I was happy to raise the percentage.

  I’d enrolled in a playwriting class. Mama Jean and Dad had proverbial front-row seats. They were eager to see my work, so I mailed them a dot-matrix printout of my first assignment, a five-minute opening scene for a comedy about a straight girl and her gay best boyfriend, who might actually be in love with her. I based it on my friendship with Nicole.

  “We read your scene and just loved it,” she said, speaking for herself and Dad. “We’re so proud of you!”

  “I’m glad y’all like it.”

  “I don’t know how you do it. I couldn’t write my way out of a paper sack. You sure don’t get that from me. That’s all your father.”

  “Maybe I can write ’em and star in ’em.” I was still harboring dreams of being an actor, but I wasn’t going to dare major in theater.

  “No, you need to be a writer. That’s what you should be doing! I’m telling you, your ticket is the writing. And remember what I’ve always said: you control your destiny.”

  I never believed her all the times she said that because I believed that she controlled my destiny.

  “I can’t wait to read how the rest of the play turns out.” After a pause she continued with an uncharacteristic hesitancy in her voice. “You don’t have tendencies like that? Do you?”

  Tendencies? I am a full-blown sodomite. I hadn’t planned on telling her then, but she asked. Actually, she had already asked—that time in junior high—but this time I pulled a Mama Jean and spoke the truth of my mind and my heart. “Yes. I do.”

  She shouted away from the phone, but her voice still pierced my eardrums. “Earl! Earl! Pick up the phone! Now! Jamie’s on the line. He has something to tell us. Earrr-rul! Where in the hell are you?!”

  She cried and told me she should have seen it coming. I thought she had seen it coming when I was five and danced along with the opening credits of I Dream of Jeannie—hands over head in a prayer gesture, hips swaying left to right, feet pointing in opposite directions—or when she dressed me up as Marco Polo for my fifth-grade history class, down to her pantyhose for tights, and I never wanted to take off the outfit.

  Dad remembers this phone call differently. He says that he was already on the phone and he was the one who asked, “Are you writing about yourself? Do you have tendencies like that?” I think I remember Mama Jean asking the question because she was always the one to speak any truth that was as clear as the lipstick on her mouth.

  But Dad might be right because he could see, while she was still in the dark. When it came to any flaw in me (and homosexuality was most definitely a flaw in her mind), she was blind and fiercely protective.

  A few weeks after the call, I went home for a visit and Dad took me out to our first father–gay son lunch. “Your mother seems to be surprised, but I think I realized a while ago.” Neither of us brought up that long walk in silence on the beach in Acapulco after Limey and Racing Stripes took my photo. Nor did we mention the case of the cauliflower bouquet and the dirty gym towel in Dr. Faudi’s office.

  “You know that we love you no matter what you are and we want you to be happy.” Sip of chardonnay. He looked back at me with his eyes popped and brows raised, that look of his that said more than he could speak. “Just be careful.”

  “I will.”

  “And don’t march in any of those parades.”

  * * *

  During that first semester of college, I popped the cork of liberation to imbibe in love, lust, and libations. I dove fearlessly into the deep end of the buoyant water of boys, booze, and late nights free of Mama Jean’s morning-after inquisitions. Within six months—no, it was six weeks, but college years are like dog years—I had lived so many lives, opened so many windows, run so many ways: from Doctor Faustus, to Byzantine Madonnas, to Ecstasy pills, to meeting and shedding two sets of new friends, to my first boyfriend.

  After I dropped the H-bomb on the phone, I told Mama Jean with the bravado and naïveté of first love that I had found a boyfriend: age-appropriate, fellow-freshman-classmate, myopic, intellectual Michael Parker. He was about five-ten with a smattering of freckles on his pale complexion. His baby-soft hair was returning to its natural light-brown shade as vestiges of a platinum-blond dye job faded. Somewhere along the way he became Mr. Parker for his Edwardian demeanor and acerbic tongue. He’d rest his chin on his hand and gaze wide-eyed from behind his glasses—or “spectacles” as he preferred to call them—ready to critique and dissect whatever you were telling him, which he never took at face value.

  We met over Fuzzy Navels (peach schnapps and orange juice—barf!—but it got the job done) at somebody’s dorm-room boy party. I wowed him with my impressions of Carol Channing and Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford. He wowed me with his erudite conversation, which he delivered in vocabulary-rich, complete sentences, as if he’d scripted his dialogue before going out.

  “The way in which you re-create Miss Channing’s persona is astounding.” And: “My God, you as Faye as Joan is incredible, but have you seen Miss Crawford’s Oscar-winning performance in Mildred Pierce?”

  “Not yet,” I said, ashamed.

  “We
ll, you should. It’s sublime.”

  “Have you seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s, my favorite movie—and book—of all time?”

  “Of course,” he said without hesitation. I later discovered he hadn’t.

  After the Fuzzy Navels wowed us both, I drove him to a back alley in my Pontiac Sunbird, where we consummated our love in the backseat. I almost ruined the spontaneity with my “Not on the seat” cries of concern about staining the upholstery.

  Mr. Parker wasn’t a theater queen—he knew Latin, history, and spoke Spanish fluently—but he was an old-movie queen at a young age, like me. Our first real date was cult-movie night on campus. The feature was what I now know is a camp classic, Lady in a Cage. It starred Olivia de Havilland in her scream-queen phase as a heaving-bosomed widow trapped in a house elevator while her live-in homosexual son is away for the weekend and thugs invade her gewgawed home. I told him that my mother had a figurine of an eighteenth-century lady just like Miss de Havilland’s. A few scenes later one of the thugs shattered the figurine. We grabbed each other and Nellie-screamed in horror, our relationship cemented with that movie.

  I jumped the gun in telling Mama Jean about Mr. Parker. We only lasted six weeks. Mr. Parker threw me over for Colton. Colton had three traits that obsessed Mr. Parker: he was pint-size, blond, and an ambigubod (as in undeclared sexuality, which made him an instant turn-on to Mr. Parker).

  Mr. Parker and I agreed to be friends, and two weeks later I was getting ready for a party Mr. Parker and his roommate, Ed, were throwing. No reason to miss a party. My party outfit was all-black. I had cast off the preppy clothes that Mama Jean had bought me (for evening wear, anyway) and was trying to blend in with the “clad-in-blackers,” as we dubbed the cool club kids with their two-toned hair and cassette tapes of the Smiths and the Cure and New Order. I wore a black turtleneck, black Girbaud jeans, and black Weejuns penny loafers (one last vestige of preppy). I crowned the outfit with a black beret from a thrift store. I thought it was a brilliant stroke of fifties beatnik chic.