by Margaret Cho
I realized that I could not stop drinking. I realized that I really was going to die.
That room service waiter called me a couple of weeks later. I had trouble placing him at first. In truth, there had been so many room service waiters, so many people that I had shared this sort of debauchery with, it was hard to remember and put names and faces to all of them. I had always been fortunate, throughout my reckless drinking career, to land in the company of polite and considerate gay men. They were my guardian angels, taking care of me and being happy to do so. They make me believe in God, and they make me think that God is gay.
In my selfishness and my tendency to black out all the time, I never bothered to thank any of them or try to contact them again, and time and distance has now made that task totally impossible. He was such a nice guy, though, and I think about whether he is still there in Monroe, Louisiana, if he is with the same boyfriend that he loved so, a kind of forbidden love in the South, much like the outlaw romances of Wharton’s New York, and I wonder what the gay/lesbian theater is putting on this season. If I could suggest something, it would be a drag queen rendition of Annie called Trannie. “The sun will come out, tomorrow . . . bitch.” That would really piss those kids off.
Things felt better at home, which they always tended to, at least right when I got back.
One day, I inexplicably and rather impulsively drove down to the animal shelter. I love dogs. I wanted one so badly as a kid that I composed a written proposal to my father on the virtues of Man’s Best Friend, a contract outlining my duties as sole caretaker of aforementioned “Friend.” The document contained many extras, such as promises to get good grades from then on, a clean bedroom, a newfound interest in prayer, and a television boycott.
My father was so impressed that he let me have a dog. We adopted an unruly shepherd mix from the SPCA, and he died of mange before he was a year old. My mother loved him even more than we did. She cried on the bed so long and hard when the vet came and took him away to be put down. She screamed out his name—“Lucky! Lucky! I am so sorry Lucky!” I thought it was really unfortunate that he was named that. I will always remember his sweet, stinky-dog smell, and my eyes teared up to smell it again at the animal shelter.
The West Valley Animal Control Center is a scene that can only be described as “Doggie Death Row.” The dog’s faces are so long and sad, big eyes staring out at you from behind the bars, knowing their fate, knowing that your taking notice of them is unlikely. The older dogs seem hopeless and depressed, the young ones, wild and unaware, fighting over themselves to get to you.
There was one cage that looked empty, then I walked past it and thought I saw something move. I stood in front of the bars, and a tiny dot appeared out of the shadows. The dot moved toward me. It was a little puppy, not much more than three pounds. He didn’t look like a dog at all, with his short snout and tiny legs. He looked more like a bear cub.
We stared at each other with wonder. He bit the bars of the cage, presumably teething, but I interpreted it as him trying to get closer to me. He was beautiful and magical, the way baby animals always are, but had a large wound on the top of his head. It bled between his ears.
The volunteer took him out of the cage. She said he’d had an infestation, but that he was a good dog. I held him. He was so soft and small he scared me. His eyes were brown and limitless. He looked at me with such love, it was hard to put him back. The card on the cage said he was not available until 7 A.M. the next morning. I asked if he had any brothers or sisters. “No. He’s all alone.” Just like me, I thought.
That night, I went to the Buddha Lounge, a gay Asian dance club, and listened to Erasure all night, as my friends cruised rice queens on the dance floor. I drank Cosmopolitans, and visualized myself dancing with my little bear, lost in a cosmic waltz until the end of time.
The next morning, I got up late and hungover (of course). Panicked, I headed straight for the shelter. The little bear wasn’t in his cage. I went down the long row of unwanted and abandoned dogs, some barking, angry that I wasn’t stopping, some sad and crying, some silent, with their back to the bars, resigned to their fate. The dogs, once they come in, have only four to seven days to be claimed or adopted. If nobody comes to rescue them, they are put to sleep. They are not dumb animals. The most heartbreaking thing about it is that dogs know. They know where they are. They know they are going to die.
At the end of the hall, there was a large cage filled with squirming puppies. My little bear was sitting quietly in the corner with his eyes closed. His head seemed worse. The wound had opened and was bleeding again. All the other dogs stopped attacking him to come say hello to me as I stood in front of the cage. My heart leapt, and I asked for my bear to be taken out.
I held him in my arms, and he tried to wriggle free. We went into the office to get acquainted. He was tiny, I don’t think he was more than six weeks old. He was black, and his tiny paws were tan, like he had boots on. He marched all over the desk and tried to grab a French fry from one of the volunteers.
The volunteer petted him. “Look at those intelligent eyes.” He had such a thoughtful expression. There was so much pain there, too. “You’ve seen so many terrible things,” I said. “You’re so little and already the world has not been good to you.” I wanted to cry and cry when I looked into those intelligent eyes because I distinctly saw myself. I knew if I could love this dog, I could learn to love myself.
Just then, there was a big commotion in the shelter office. An old, sorry-looking poodle had been dropped off by an old, sorry-looking woman. As soon as the woman left, the poodle started to wail—an indescribable, horribly painful sound. The volunteer said, “That dog is being left here. The owner is having her put down. She knows what is happening. She knows her owner is having her killed. What a shame. Nobody is gonna want that dog. It is a crying shame. People have no respect for life.”
The poodle continued keening, and peed all over the floor. The volunteer asked me to take my little bear outside so that he wouldn’t be upset by the highly distressing scene. I stood out in the cool shadows of the concrete building and held my tiny one in my arms. He looked up at me with reverence and wonder, quiet, not moving, just letting himself be held. I looked into his big, puppy-dog eyes and said, “I vow, from this moment on, to give you a beautiful home. I am going to take care of you and love you forever. You are going to be my child, and I will be your mother. Because I have respect for life. Your hardship is over. You went through all that so we could be together. I will never forget that.” He fell asleep right then. I fell in love right then.
I put him in a box and drove home. He seemed frightened at first, trying to get out of the box, whining pitifully. I had to stop every few seconds to keep him from getting out.
At home, I immediately put him in the sink and washed all the blood and fleas out of his fur. Wet, he was the size of a hamster. He hated the water, but I washed him until it ran clean. I dried him off with a kitchen towel and set him down on the floor.
Tentatively, looking back at me constantly as if to ask permission, he stepped onto the great expanse of gray carpet. He explored all the little corners of the room, gaining confidence with each step. I think he understood what was happening, started to feel secure right from the beginning, like he could feel my love, knew it was real, and ran with it.
He plopped between my two massive platform shoes and fell asleep.
I took him to the vet because he was sleeping so much. At first, I thought it was cute, and knew that puppies tended to need lots of rest, but this dog seemed narcoleptic. The kind vet took one look at the dog and said, “How much did you pay for this dog? Can you take him back?”
“Why?”
“Because this dog is going to die.”
Great, I thought. We’ll just die together.
I named the dog Ralph, after Ralph Fiennes, because he is my favorite leading man. The English Patient had just come out, and I was playing nursemaid Juliette Binoche to my poor inju
red doggy, Ralph. I was measuring out drugs every hour and resting my head on his chest while listening to his stories about the big, mean world, the sad he saw, the bad he saw—the madness and the kibble. I also liked the idea of saying his name every day, over and over, with the odd pronunciation—“Rafe.” Ralph slept in my lap, and I drank bottle after bottle of Absolut and slept with him. He wouldn’t eat or drink. I had to take him to the vet so they could inject him with fluids. The staff at the animal hospital just looked at me sadly every time we came around.
This gave me the excuse to stay home around the clock. The stand-up gigs I was getting were few and far between. I’d spent too many nights onstage in a blackout. It was starting to affect my reputation. The Monroe show was also such a crushing blow to my ego, I felt like I’d somehow lost my ability to do stand-up. I thought about retirement, nursed my dying dog, entertained Glenn every once and again, and tucked into my own waning existence.
18
MARCEL
Through a rather boring chain of events, I met Marcel. He was living to die. I was years long dead.
Marcel loved me from afar for years, once proposing marriage when he barely knew me. “What a great way to get acquainted. It might work! Marry me first, then we can sort out the details . . .”
I found it extremely charming. He didn’t pay a lick of attention to Ralph. When Marcel would come over, Ralph would try to stay awake as long as he could, maybe because he knew that I wouldn’t be crying into his fur. Instead, I cried into Marcel’s fur. It’s sad, but I never loved Marcel. He was funny and nice, but I wanted a distraction from Glenn, who had become so inaccessible. I wanted to punish Glenn by being with someone else, by attempting to be self-sufficient. Glenn had made me so angry by staying with his girlfriend and still loving me out of turn. It was not fair, and I returned the unfairness, not to the sender but to Marcel.
I wasn’t attracted to Marcel, but that had never really been an issue with me in the past. Most of the time, I felt so ugly that whenever I received any male attention, I felt obliged to return it, even if I didn’t feel anything. I had this ridiculous notion that since I wasn’t really worthy of love, should some accidentally come my way, I should not pass it up. What a terrible way to live your life, and that is how I was for most of my teens and twenties. Even now, if someone I don’t particularly fancy decides he wants to get to know me, I will take the time to call him or talk or even go out on a friendly date—and I will still feel guilty if I don’t sleep with him! At least I’m better than I used to be. (“Maybe if I give him a blow job he will shut up . . .”)
What does it take for us to start to value ourselves? I believe it begins with talking about it, sharing the pain, shedding light on it, so like shadows, it fades away in the brightness.
Marcel was in love. He kept telling me, “You just know .” He told everyone he knew that he knew. It was suffocating, but I think I was looking for a faster way to die; the one I had chosen was taking way too long. Also, I got into all the plans Marcel wanted to make. It gave me a direction, because I’d been so disillusioned by my career. His way sounded so appealing: marry Marcel, move to New York, have a baby, and order leather armchairs for Pottery Barn for the rest of my life. Have my kids say, Did you know Mom used to be a comedian before she met Dad? Isn’t that weird? Yeah, she got pretty good actually, but she gave it all up so she could have us . . . They could bring press clippings from Entertainment Weekly for show-and-tell.
So what if I didn’t love Marcel? So what if I used the interesting things he would do in bed as cannon fodder for my estranged lover Glenn. It seemed like a good idea, and I believed that it was, even as I kicked Marcel awake on bleary, hungover, pre-dawn mornings so he could go do community service.
Marcel had been court-ordered to do twenty-four days of community service with the Hollywood Beautification Team for getting drunk and falling asleep in someone else’s Mercedes. My groom, Goldilocks.
He was a terrible alcoholic, just like me, and it is also just like me to judge him. I really shouldn’t. What a crime it is to pretend you are in love, and the pain it causes visits upon you tenfold. It was all for selfish reasons. I wanted a convenient way out of the mess I had made of my life. I wanted a new career—even though I loved the old one, I was just too fucked up to do it anymore. I wanted revenge on Glenn. I wanted someone to understand. I just wanted. I couldn’t possibly give.
Fantasy and denial were my favorite pastimes, and combine that with drinking, self-obsession, and outright stupidity, it is quite easy to ruin your life. I was unhappy, and wanted a way out of it. Marcel was there, willing, in love. It was convenient.
Poor Marcel. His only crime was loving me. He talked incessantly of his ex-girlfriends, and I became jealous, not because they had been with him, but because they were not with him anymore. He was desperate for me to meet his parents. I had to. There was no avoiding it. Being as close to him as they were, I can’t understand why they were so nice to me. Couldn’t they see in the way that I looked at him that I didn’t love him? How could they not see that their son drove me crazy? Where did I learn to be such a liar? Maybe it was Marcel’s need to be doing something, to be planning something, to have this bright, shining future and someone to hang it on. He talked constantly of love, how we were in love, how one just knows , how I was the One, how he knew I was the One. He spent so much time talking about this love that we were in, I have yet to know when it was happening. All I know is that we drank. Night after night, entire bottles of Patrón and Absolut, countless glasses of Merlot, vodka martinis and bourbon straight up—there was no end. Then, horrific, bloodshot mornings, where I would fight off throwing up while he talked about our love and college friends of his that had died.
Ah, love. We all hang so many hopes and dreams and expectations on it, like ornaments on the Christmas tree of dysfunction, with the shining star of inadequacy right on top.
In the midst of this disaster, we cleaned up a little, packed up and went back East. There were the snapshots taken of me and Marcel at his parents’ house in Florida. I am red and flushed from the heat and the booze. The pictures are stiff and he and I look fat and uncomfortable in them. That day I had gone with the family to the “whites only” country club his parents belonged to. Even though they themselves were not racist and were silently horrified by the club’s policy, it did not bother them enough to boycott it. They gave much money and time to this place, this anachronism, this relic of the antebellum South with apologies and tight smiles to me.
I Wanted to go there out of sheer curiosity and a punk rock hope of actually getting kicked out. Marcel wanted me to go but then fretted and fretted over what I was going to wear, making me change out of my T-shirt and shorts into a Lauren button-down oxford and J. Crew khakis which were dirty but acceptable to him anyway.
I could tell he was quietly nervous but didn’t know what to say or do. I didn’t want to play golf with him and his father and his father’s oncologist friend, so I stayed by the pool and swam laps in the hot rain. They didn’t kick me out, but there was something wrong. It was subtle, but loud as guns.
The mothers pulled their kids away from me, as if they feared I would steal them and teach them how to stir-fry their vegetables. I kept swimming in the pool to avoid them, staying underwater where my race was not as clearly defined. Then I thought even doing that would arouse comment (They can hold their breath for a long time, on account of they gotta go pearl divin’! See what I mean?).
I emerged starving and hoping that I could order a club sandwich from the cheery-cheeked staff that serviced the families around the pool area. They all avoided my gaze, bestowing sleazy, self-conscious smiles on every other person around the pool, everyone except me.
I was not imagining this. I could feel it.
There was an hour to go until Marcel would be back. I sat up stiffly in the pool chairs, miserably waiting, staring at the servers, daring them to look my way. They were even more efficient than usual, as if to
taunt me with their efficiency, handing out menus, taking orders, lifting up huge round trays filled with steak fries and little hotel bottles of Diet Coke, asking all the whites if “everything was okay.”
I was indignant and ashamed. I kept thinking, I am almost white. I am just as good as white. I am off white.
I plotted a million revolutions and forms of revenge in my head. I thought of blasting the servers when I was on Letterman, in my couture dress and with my new movie project. I saw them cringe as they watched from their lumpy futons in their studio apartments with broken air conditioning in the middle of South Florida, ruefully recognizing me, confronting their own racism in the night, and the juxtaposition of my glorious media life and their damply innocuous, anonymous one. I saw me asking point blank for a menu, being refused, tossing the big, tan one, the girl with the heavy eyebrows who looked at me the least, into the Olympic-size pool, black satin bow tie and all. I was so wrapped up in my fantasies that I almost didn’t notice Marcel standing right in front of me. “Hey are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m starving. Let’s go.”
I should have just asked for a menu. I should have just acted like I belonged there. I should have just broken up with Marcel right on the spot. I didn’t do any of those things. I just kept my mouth shut, tried not to drink too much, held my breath until I got home.
When we had been there for several days already, I checked my messages at home. My video store had called informing me that I had not returned some tapes: “Beaver Fever is late. Please return it as soon as possible.”
Before we left, we rented some porno videos to keep me from passing out when we did it. Since we had different flights, because I was coming from work in another city, I asked Marcel to return the tapes. He failed to do so, so now my video store thought that I was unable to return tapes on time because I couldn’t stop masturbating.
I got off the phone and Marcel and his father were standing right there. I started to tell Marcel what happened, not saying what the video was, of course, and he got angry and said, “You can’t expect me to follow through on that shit. Don’t you know me by now? You cannot rely on me.”
