Scream

by Tama Janowitz

  My mom always responded, hoping her being listed might lead to something, even though we didn’t have the money to buy the actual product. This time, we decided she should—and did—write on her bio that she was the mother of two sons. We were trying to prove that maybe things hadn’t changed that much since the Brontë sisters wrote under pseudonyms, men’s names. Currer Bell got published. George Eliot got published. George Sand.

  The phone rang. “Hi, could I speak to Tom?”

  “Tom, it’s for you,” my mother said.

  I picked up the phone. “This is The Paris Review. We are calling you to tell you we have accepted your story.”

  “What? Really?”

  “Tom?”

  “Yes. Well . . . actually.”

  “I thought you were the author?”

  “I am.”

  “Oh . . .”

  The editor sounded disappointed not to have discovered a young male writer, but Tom finally had his first work accepted! By The Paris Review, no less.

  Months went by, but my excerpt did not appear in the magazine. A year went by. And I was broke and they were going to pay me $150. I contacted the editors there. “I hope you will soon publish my piece; it would mean so much to me to have the book from which this excerpt was taken include this fantastic credit.” (I had finally found a publisher but still hadn’t gotten paid the small advance.)

  “In that case we can’t publish your piece,” George Plimpton said. “We don’t publish pieces that have been published elsewhere.”

  “Please!” I said. “It’s been a couple of years, can’t you squeeze it into the magazine before the book comes out?”

  My mom called him, begging him and saying how upset I was. It was that prestigious to get into The Paris Review. At the last minute they did publish that excerpt. And after I begged for another year or so I did get my $150. But, apparently as punishment for begging, I never did get invited to one of Plimpton’s literary soirees. And when he asked me to read at a fundraiser anniversary, although all the other speakers (all men) got to read from their own work that had been published in The Paris Review, I was made to read a poem by someone else—a bad poem.

  A few months before American Dad was published, the editor and the publicist asked me who I would like to have “blurb” my book. So I gave them a list of every author I admired or who might help by writing something about a first novel by a young author.

  After a few weeks went by they asked me if I had gotten any of the blurbs.

  “But . . . you expected me to get the blurbs? You asked me for a list of who I wanted—I don’t know where these people live or anything.”

  “Oh. Well, I’ll find you the addresses,” said the publicist. “I’m too busy, though. You write to them and, um, you can sign my name and give my number, then they’ll write back to me if they are interested and I will send them the galleys.”

  I was very discouraged at the thought of having to write to these people, nor did I know what to say, but I sent out a couple dozen letters. Then I took it a step further. Since the publicist was too busy, I would assist by sending out letters to reviewers at newspapers and magazines, again with her name and address.

  A short time later, the phone rang.

  It was my agent. “You are going to prison,” she said. “You signed the publicist’s name to a bunch of letters! You have committed forgery. She is very upset. It will be all I can do to prevent her from pressing charges.”

  “Huh?” I was petrified. “But . . . but she told me to write to authors I admired and sign her name!”

  “Not to reviewers, though.”

  I was twenty-three and extremely frightened. Since that time I have lived under fear of having to do jail time. I am not kidding. I still think I am going to go to jail at some point, though it won’t be Tom but Tama.

  Right before publication of American Dad, the editor at Putnam’s chickened out and insisted I publish under my real name. And so I was stripped of my manhood.

  American Dad was published in 1981. But because a cookbook author who was assigned to review it in the New York Times Book Review decided to trash it and crush the twenty-three-year-old first-time author, it only sold fifteen hundred copies. Publishers did not want to publish my next novel, nor the next, nor the next. I started writing short stories. It didn’t take as long to write them or to get them rejected. My mom was encouraging and supportive as always. She never said, “Go back to school and become a lawyer.” She never said, “Go get married.” She drove me to the post office so I could mail my stories to small literary magazines. Some days I mailed five stories to different places. Each had to be weighed while my mom waited in the car.

  Every day she drove me to the smallest post office. Then the postal clerk said, “You are mailing too many things! You can only mail one envelope a day!”

  “What?” I said.

  When I got home I called the central post office. “Is it true you can only mail one manila envelope per day?”

  “No, of course not,” they said. But it still didn’t do any good. The clerk in the small post office had his own rules.

  Mailing one story a day slowed me down almost as much as writing a whole book and waiting to get it rejected. But I kept at it. And finally, The New Yorker published “The Slaves in New York,” and everything changed for me.

  I moved to New York and found a meat locker measuring ten by thirteen feet that had been converted to an apartment. But I was able to get my second book, Slaves of New York, published in 1986. I appeared on the cover of New York magazine in an evening dress standing next to meat in a meat locker next to my apartment in the Meatpacking District.

  At the time the area was a working neighborhood. It was full of transgendered and gay prostitutes working the streets at night before the deliveries of meat were made at six in the morning. The city was so different then. I would not have guessed that this area—with its hard-core gay sex clubs, the Anvil and the Mineshaft, where men darted down these holes from which bellowed the stench of amyl nitrate and sex, and even after the streets were cleaned there were still bits of skin and gristle and fat from the meat being carved up during the day—would turn into an area with fine hotels where corporations gave parties and events and there were photography studios and expensive shops.

  TEN YEARS AFTER THIS INITIAL bout of success, a man named Kurt telephoned me. “I’m calling to say that I know you are really a man. And if you don’t confess, I am going to tell everyone.”

  “None of your business,” I said.

  “You better tell me the truth!”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Then I am going to call your dad and I am going to make him tell me the truth.”

  I called my father right away. “Dad, Dad! There’s an angry man and he is going to call you and make you tell him whether I am male or female.”

  “Huh?”

  “Dad! Please don’t tell him! It’s not his business what genitals I was born with. It’s no different than forcing someone to wear the Yellow Star of Judea on their sleeves. Unless he, she, or it wants to be public, I don’t see what business it is of anyone else’s.”*

  So when the person called to interrogate my father, Dad was loyal and didn’t reveal the truth. But the man pursued. He grew angry with Dad, who would not discuss what genitalia I had at birth.

  So the man put out a kind of newsletter with his proof. His proof that I had been born a man was, 1. I had published excerpts of my first book under the name Tom A. Janowitz, and 2. In some kind of directory of American authors my mom had put down that she had two sons.

  The man sent this newsletter “outing” me to all kinds of media. I got a call from People magazine asking if I would write an article. I said I would, but it would be about this bizarre person haranguing me, not about my genitals.

  People said, no, they only wanted a factual article about my gender. I was against “outing” people regarding their sexual or gender orientation.

&nbs
p; This was the nineties, and I thought, Yes, the world would be a better place if people were honest and open—but they should not be forced into the open. If you were some sixty-year-old who either had to live all your life in secrecy or be shamed publicly and lose your job and be disowned by your parents, I leave it up to him—or her—if they want to be public about it. The only thing I ever thought was wrong was sexual relations with children or animals.

  Do I want to see a man’s penis in the bathroom? Not unless it is tucked under a skirt and he can sit nicely on the toilet with the door closed.

  * Recently a group of students from Hampshire College, near my father’s house, came on a field trip to view his swamp and artworks. As every student walked in the door, each told Dad their name and announced whether they were He, She, or It, and their sexual orientation. Dad was eighty-six. Both my dad and I agreed: Who cares? But I say this now to show you how times have changed from when my grandmother Lillian would come to visit and hide any visible boxes of tampons in the bathroom in shame and horror.

  once i was brave

  I wrote the first story in Slaves of New York, “Modern Saint #271,” in 1979. Nobody then used the word penis except perhaps for doctors. The word had amazing shock value. It is so hard to believe that now. It was not until many years later that the president’s penis was mentioned repeatedly in the media.

  I wrote that story at Hollins College in Virginia while I was getting my master’s. George Garrett came down to give a reading; he had published a story of mine in Intro 8, “The Liar’s Craft,” and he was editing an issue of Ploughshares and looking for submissions. I gave him “Modern Saint #271” and he sent it back right quick, with the suggestion I not publish it. He did not want the story and then nobody wanted the story, until I told some kids in New York City who were publishing a photocopied magazine, New York/Berlin, in the early eighties that they should publish it because I could credit their magazine in my book when it came out. So they agreed. It wasn’t that they wanted my story, but they agreed to publish it.

  By then I was starting to publish in The New Yorker and I was asked to be part of a group reading at Symphony Space. I decided I would read “Modern Saint #271” and another story, “Sun Poisoning.” I was next to last, the least coveted position, and I was anxious through the entire event.

  You can’t explain to people, when you are writing about the past, how taboo things were then when the later generations would not have any issue or thought about that taboo. Did Robinson Crusoe take a crap? Did Anna Karenina get her period? What happened to the guy in The Sun Also Rises that he couldn’t get it up? I mean, nowadays you would expect to read if the whole thing was gone, leaving a hole that could be turned into a vagina. But the original readers of those books dare not ask, and now it is too late to demand answers from the writers.

  Where are the bathrooms and toilets of yesteryear? Charles Dickens, Stephen Crane, Dostoyevsky: Where are the outhouses? Did your character never need the chamber pot? And all those women—no matter how cold it was—only wore dresses. Was there not one woman, ever, who put on a pair of pants?

  Times changed. Still, I cannot reiterate just how shocking that word penis was. So finally I stood up and I started: “After I became a prostitute I had to deal with penises of every imaginable shape and size.”

  I mean, that would kind of be the main thing, wouldn’t it, if you were a prostitute? That’s what you would be dealing with.

  Out in the audience there was a sharp intake of air, which was not dissimilar to the way I felt at that moment, like all the oxygen was sucked out of my lungs—and then they began to laugh. First nervous, embarrassed titters, and then guffaws. It was unbelievable, I had that tired audience who had listened to the previous three readers with their nice dozy droning work and suddenly I got up and it was like throwing a bucket of water on everybody. Ice-cold water. They woke up, they were alive, my story was alive.

  But times are so different now; you couldn’t find a single word to do what I did in that story. Just because everybody says fuck and shit all the time doesn’t give these words any power; it strips the power. The same as you could use the word like. As in, “Like, why don’t you, like, shut the fuck up?”

  I have heard whole conversations on the streets:

  “No shit! Are you shittin’ me? I mean, like what the fucking fuck?”

  “Shit, yeah! That fucking little shit, he couldn’t fucking believe that shit.”

  On the one hand it is just people mumbling and on the other what is coming out of their mouths is feces. And for years after I wrote that story that had the word penis in the first sentence, I could not be introduced to any man without his leering lasciviously and discussing it.

  I would say, “What I was trying to do was to objectify male body parts the way men have always done about women.” But the men who leered never listened. They wanted to think of me as some nymphomaniac, I guess, obsessed with guys’ dicks.

  After this story, well, immediately another woman published a collection with the word penis in the first line; one woman decided to write about women’s vaginas, and a kid made a movie where there was a girl writer who wrote about graphic sex and penises for shock value or to get attention. The president had a penis all of a sudden. The New Yorker published stories with the words fuck and shit and books were published with the word fuck in the title and so on and so forth.

  on lou reed

  I knew Lou from a boyfriend who had danced with a whip with the Velvet Underground when they performed, although that was years prior to when I was with him. Now Ronnie was not really friends with Lou; he knew him through the Program.

  At that time, in the early eighties, everybody met everybody through the Program. That was a phase when it was so totally hip and social in New York City.

  Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, these meetings—the right ones—were just as much of a scene as a nightclub. In New York City there were meetings every single hour of the day, in every single neighborhood. People knew which ones their friends attended and that’s where they would be, then get a cup of coffee afterward or go for a drink or get some drugs. It was a big social support network. Drag queens, rock stars, artists—people had “sponsors” who they could call day or night to get backup assurance or other things.

  Most people in the program still drank. They still did drugs. But when they went to AA meetings they could say that they were sober: for a day, or whatever length of time. Then the people bonded. “Oh my gosh! Congratulations! You’ve been sober for seven hours!”

  I am sure there are still just as many meetings going on in New York today, but I don’t think there will ever be another time in history when you’ll find so many funky, funny, brilliant, and quirky people all in the same room like that. Because New York City just isn’t the same. There are no cheap apartments, like there are no more misfits; back then, if you were homosexual you came from your small town to find acceptance, and if you were an artist, you could afford it, whatever. So Lou and Ronnie were not really friends, even though Ronnie thought they were, but Lou just tolerated him. Nevertheless, around 1983 I met Lou’s wife, Sylvia, while she was writing her thesis and hit it off with her.

  I went to their apartment. They lived on the Upper West Side in a new building, one of those fancier buildings, but still a small apartment. I think it had two small bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a living room, and was done up in brown—brown fixtures, brown wall-to-wall, and brown sofas. It wasn’t how I was used to living and it wasn’t like the funky places of most people I knew, who were in fifth-floor walk-ups decorated with the things you could still find on the street back then: old alligator hides on the wall like Cookie Mueller had, or those art deco pieces that were discarded from people who had died. The only thing to me that made the inhabitants seem reasonable was their collection of dachshunds. Approximately three of them, I think, had broken their backs and hobbled around. The other two, Sylvia complained, urinated on her in bed out of jealo
usy.

  It was nice to have Sylvia as a friend, except she would take me to her closet and show me all her new high-heeled shoes, and I am telling you, when you are so poor, it is a hard thing to have someone your age show you their fancy clothing and nice shoes and a rock-star husband playing early electronic games with a red joystick in the other room.

  Still, although they had that type of a setup, Lou was not rich. How could he be? The Velvet Underground was really not popular; I mean, it was not mainstream music. If you went out with Lou, say, to a movie, you could be sitting next to him and someone would tap him on the shoulder and go, “Wow, you’re Lou Reed!” but that was about as much as he was recognized. And even at that I was surprised: How could someone know—sitting behind him!—that he was Lou Reed?

  Lou’s country house was about an hour and a half outside the city, in Blairstown, New Jersey, and it had been an old Boy Scout camp, something like that. We went there one day. There was a big fence and you drove down the long lane past a pond. The house was massive, stone, built in the beginning of the 1900s or maybe later, with a huge great room and then these quirky little sleeping rooms off the main area, which had a pool table and a big chandelier made out of antlers. The entire house was dark, and the only place that got light was this bedroom Lou had put on in the back, a more modern glass addition.

  We all just sat outside and chatted. Lou was easy to talk to, and he told me about getting electroshock treatment and what that was like, and how his mother had basically forced this on him. He said to me, “After that, a part of me died.” And you could see that some part of him really wasn’t there.

  And he knew I had published one book, American Dad, and he talked about his friend Liz Swados, who had just published a book. I think they had been at university together. I was jealous of her, even though Elizabeth Swados appeared to me at that time to write bad musical plays and to be a bad writer. How much of your life can you go on being jealous? I guess you never stop. Or some people never stop. And when you hear someone talking about someone else who does the same thing you do but is more successful at it than you are, you want to squelch that other person.