While she was in there, I went for a walk outside and I was all nervous and distraught and somehow I slipped on some grass. It was muddy and my pants had this long brown streak down the side of my leg and I was mortified. It looked like I had shit, and then when the mud quickly dried, it looked like blood. I couldn’t go back inside the clinic. I waited at the glass doors and then I saw Claudia. I went to get her and she was all high on Valium, and to the girls in the waiting room, in this loud, drunk voice, she shouted, “DON’T BE SCARED. YOU DON’T FEEL ANYTHING.” I pulled her outside, and then she told me with this goofy smile on her face that the doctor had given her the age of the fetus, and that the dead baby was too old to have been mine.
But then when the Valium wore off, she wouldn’t tell me again what the doctor had said. And whenever I brought it up, she’d refuse to talk about it. So I stopped asking her, and I’ll simply never know if I made a baby with her. It’s easier to think that I didn’t.
And she’s married now. Has two beautiful children. I met them once. And she and I exchange E-mails every few months.
Girls in My Tub
IN MY SMALL EAST VILLAGE APARTMENT, the bathtub is in the kitchen. I can’t shower in my tub, but attached to the faucet is a hose with a showerhead, and I use this to rinse off while I sit there. While bathing, I often think of Henry Roth’s beautiful Lower East Side novel, Call It Sleep. There’s a description of the protagonist’s sexy, Oedipal mother washing herself in a tub such as mine, in a kitchen such as mine, at the turn of the century. I scrub my hairy chest and I think of her sponging her beautiful breasts.
Last Sunday morning, I was in the tub and I was working on my head with my scalp invigorator. The rubber hose was lying coiled at the bottom of the tub like a snake; water was jetting out of the showerhead, warming my ankles. Then I nudged the snake and at that precise moment something happened to the building’s coldwater supply—it was cut off—and the nudging moved the showerhead so that it was aimed not at my ankles, but at my testicles. My tiny balls were then scalded and I screamed and threw the scalp invigorator into the air.
I quickly shut off the water and stared down at myself. Was I going to have to call 911 for singed testicles? I had heard many stories over the years of children burned in their bathtubs, and then I thought of Henry James and the myth that his testicles had been burned, or punctured on a fence, and this had caused his legendary asexuality—was this to be my fate? But I inspected myself and I didn’t seem to be seriously injured, though I was definitely red.
The whole thing was ridiculous—to have one’s testicles burned while massaging one’s head with a rubber scalp invigorator was a private moment of profound humiliation. I often find such defeats to be more painful than the ones that occur in public—they seem to really tell me who I am, much more than an embarrassing moment in front of others, like slipping on wet stairs.
After this difficult bath, the day unfolded in a slightly insane fashion. I went strolling for a little exercise and I came across my favorite homeless girl. She has sea-green eyes and she’s wonderfully beautiful. She’s fair and blond and in the summer she would wear a filthy, low-cut gray T-shirt and a black push-up bra. She’d sit under the scaffolding by Cooper Union, waiting for alms, and I would look down at her beautiful dirt-smudged breasts and empty my pockets of all my change. Over time, I spoke to her. She’s nineteen, from California, was kicked out of her house at sixteen, and lives with her boyfriend and her dog in the park by the East River. At one time it looked like she and her boyfriend were going to Philadelphia to live with his parents, but that fell through in September.
So I gave her a dollar last Sunday; she was in her usual spot. She was wearing a bulky blue winter coat—there was an early November chill—and I said, to make small talk, “Any chance you’ll get to Philadelphia after all? It’s getting cold.”
“No, his parents don’t want us.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re trying to get jobs, but we don’t know how to pay taxes. I don’t want to be arrested by the government.”
“You don’t have to worry about taxes,” I said, and I looked down at her blond hair; she always parts it in the middle like a Swiss maiden. Her scalp was dirty and red—irritated, probably from lice. As always, I wanted to invite her to come take a bath in my kitchen. She’s so dirty, but so beautiful, and after the bath I’d buy her new clothes. And I always think how I’ll reassure her that I won’t touch her while she bathes, but maybe I’d ask if I could watch. Then I imagine myself at my kitchen table, looking, and she’s in the tub glowing, emerging rose-colored—divine. Maybe she would let me take the washcloth, and I reach out to touch . . .
But there my reverie always ends. I worry that I’ll be arrested, that she’d come to my apartment and accuse me of rape. So I said good-bye to her last Sunday and left her with her strange, naive worries about taxes.
I went back to my apartment and spent the day reading. Then that night I was feeling restless and empty and odd, and whenever I’m this way, I like to go to Edelweiss, my transsexual bar. I find it calming to be around the girls. I love to watch them, be around them. It’s like theater. The bar is on Thirty-ninth Street now; the old grand Edelweiss on Eleventh Avenue was closed down because of prostitution, so it switched locations, trying to stay one step ahead of the police.
My friend Lulu was there, looking sexy and sleek in a black cocktail dress that was only a shade darker than her skin. The bar was smoky and I bought Lulu a drink, and we observed the girls around us. There was a pretty good crowd for a Sunday night, about thirty queens and an equal number of men. My eye was drawn to a stunning blond girl dancing by herself near the stage at the end of the room; she looked eerily like my homeless girl. She was wearing a short white dress and there was absolutely nothing about her that indicated the presence of the Y chromosome. Her breasts jiggled naturally, her legs were lean, her rear shapely, her arms thin. Her face was composed of delicate, attractive features.
“Is that a real girl?” I asked Lulu.
“No, but she’s had the surgery,” she said. “She had a rich Mafia boyfriend who paid for everything.”
We watched her dance and she was spinning around slowly, lost in her own world. “Looks like she’s on drugs,” I said.
“She’s on a lot of stuff,” said Lulu. “She’s crazy. If you go up to her, she’ll show you her pussy. I’ve seen her do it to a number of guys.”
I went and sat at a table near where she was dancing. She didn’t look exactly like the homeless girl, but they could have been sisters. I wondered if I could ask her to come home with me and watch her take a bath. She noticed how I was staring and she sat down with me.
“Buy me a drink,” she said. Her eyes were all glazed and drugged. She wanted a rum and Coke. I came back from the bar with her drink. She took several large sips. I gazed at her beautiful face, her full lips. She said, “You know, my brother started raping me when I was nine.”
She said this aggressively, trying to shock me, perhaps for staring at her rudely. I didn’t say anything—I was shocked—and then in a softer tone, as if we had been in the middle of a conversation, she continued, “He did it for years. Every night he came into my room. Then he stopped.”
“Why did he stop?” I asked.
“He got a girlfriend, and then he married her.”
“How old were you when he stopped?”
“Sixteen.”
“Did you try to fight him when he first started?”
“Yeah, but he was big.”
“When did you start liking it?” I asked, playing the psychologist, but also thinking how I might have reacted.
She looked at me; her eyes seemed to focus a little. We had been playing a game where she was telling me all these shocking truths, but then I said something real. She answered me, “When I was twelve. I’d lie there and wait for him.”
“You must have been sad when he got married.”
“I didn’t go to
the wedding. I didn’t want to see that bitch. Now I’m prettier than her. Much prettier. I don’t know why he stays with her. But he won’t even talk to me on the phone. Won’t see me. No one in my family will. He should fucking divorce her and marry me.”
“You are very pretty,” I said, as some meager consolation, and I thought sadly how she had turned herself into a woman to win back her brother.
She finished her rum and Coke, and then she said with pride, “I have a pussy. I’m not like the other girls in here.” She made a motion with her hand, dismissing the whole bar.
I didn’t want to tell her I had been tipped off that she was different, so I just nodded. Then she stood up and lifted her dress, just as Lulu said she would. She had no panties on and she said, “Look.” It was dark in the bar, but I could make it out a little. There was the neat triangle of hair, and then there was an opening, an empty space, like in a child’s mouth along the gums when a tooth has fallen out. Then she lowered her dress and laughed. She went across the room and started dancing in front of the mirrored wall. She stared at herself.
I stood up and walked to the bar. I said good-bye to Lulu and she asked, “Did she show it to you?” I said yes and I left Edelweiss and went home. I took my second bath of the day. I smelled of cigarette smoke and wanted to get it off me. I was very careful not to burn myself.
Beautiful Again
WHEN I WAS TWENTY YEARS OLD I was beautiful. I didn’t know it then, but I was. I have these incredible pictures from that time and I look at them. I was perfect. The pictures are perfect—my youth presented to me like an intact fossil.
How did I come to have these pictures? I was a freshman at Princeton and my best friend kept telling me I should model. I guess he sort of admired me and loved me, in the way that boys sometimes love one another when they are in school together. To him I was heroic-looking. I was very blond and muscular, and he was dark and thin.
So he was always after me to model, and then in the fall of our sophomore year, he did something about it. A photographer was taking pictures of some models, using the Princeton campus as a handsome backdrop, and my friend brazenly approached this photographer and told the man about me and gave him my phone number.
The next day, the man called me. We met for coffee. Right away he told me I could be a model, that I could make lots of money doing it. But he was a strange little fellow. Mid-forties, about five-foot-five, an ugly dark wig on his head, large brown eyes, and a neat mustache. He looked mildly depraved, but he also had charm. Like many photographers, he stared at you in a way that made you feel attractive, gorgeous even. So he appealed to my vanity. “You must have lots of girlfriends,” he said. He also said he’d take my pictures for two hundred dollars, and with these photos I could go to a modeling agency in New York and present myself.
I took him up on it, even though in my gut I believed myself to be ugly. I’d always had a very big nose that my face didn’t really catch up to until my senior year in high school, and even then I thought it was much too big. So for years I had tried very hard never to be seen from the side—if someone tapped me on the shoulder, I would whip around completely, only showing my profile for an instant. A head-on view, I thought, hid the startling dimensions of my nose, a nose that I was always studying at home in the bathroom mirror, while also using a hand-held mirror so that I could fully diagnose my proboscis from all angles. I would try to convince myself that maybe my nose wasn’t so big and ugly, but I never could. Some people suffer from body-image distortion. I had nose-image distortion.
And my father didn’t help with my insecurities. When I was growing up, he had three nicknames for me: Oedipus, Dick Tracy, and Ugly. “Hey, ugly, how are you doing?” was the way he would usually greet me when he came home from work. And when I would express my concern about my nose and being ugly, he’d tease me and tell me not to worry because I looked like someone famous—bent-nosed Dick Tracy. My father’s logic was inverted. He thought that by calling me Dick Tracy and ugly, he was letting me know that he thought I was beautiful, but when I was a child, I didn’t understand his hidden meanings.
So when I was nineteen, hoping to prove that I was perhaps good-looking and not ugly, I went with this odd, wigged photographer to Asbury Park, New Jersey, and had my picture taken. I didn’t smile once because I thought smiling made my nose expand, and the photographer took lots of pictures of me, mostly beefcake shots of me shirtless in a pair of jeans, sitting on a jetty.
But after this little adventure in Asbury Park, he disappeared with my two hundred dollars and the undeveloped film. I left phone messages for a few months but eventually gave up. My vanity— actually, profound insecurity—had been taken advantage of. But then in the late spring of that sophomore year, 1984, the pictures arrived in the mail with no explanation as to their delay. I never saw that strange photographer again, but he was a good lensman. I thought for sure that there would be proof of my ugliness inside that envelope he sent me, but when I opened it, to find out what my two hundred dollars had wrought, I was shocked to see how handsome I appeared. Why didn’t my nose seem bigger?
So my best friend, who had started this whole mad scheme, urged me to take the pictures to modeling agencies in New York. With school ending for the year, I followed my friend’s instructions and looked in the New York yellow pages under “Modeling.” And, remarkably, the first little agency I went to out of the phone book took me on, and things happened quickly. A famous photographer, Bruce Weber, chose me for a series that he was doing on athletes, and I qualified as an athlete—I was one of the captains of the Princeton fencing team. So one morning I left New York in a van with several other male models; we were headed for Bruce Weber’s home in the country. One of the men, an ex–football player and ex–construction worker, looked at us all in the van and said, noticing for the first time, “Hey, we’re all blond!” It wasn’t an astute observation, but it was accurate.
Our day in the country, to my English major’s eyes, was like something out of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. Amidst these thick pine trees, in this secluded wood, we blond boys were in and out of the pool, swimming, pumping up our muscles, and waiting to have our pictures taken in the late-afternoon light. Bruce, our host, was shy and sweet and gracious. I remember him quietly asking me who my favorite writers were, and I was so nervous in his famous presence that I could hardly speak. I think I said Fitzgerald, which is such a boring and overused answer, no matter how great The Great Gatsby is.
He took my picture while I sat in a beautiful wooden swing with a towel around my waist. My bathing suit, hidden by the towel, was pulled down, revealing the flank of my ass, giving the illusion that I was naked. There were several assistants around and Bruce rapidly took many pictures and I noticed that his thumb was oddly misshapen from years of advancing film so furiously.
Then Bruce asked me if I would remove my bathing suit. He was gentle in his request and assured me that I didn’t have to. I thought about it for a second and then said I couldn’t do it. He didn’t ask me why, he was understanding. And my refusal wasn’t because of prurience or worry that somehow I would jeopardize my fledgling “career,” it was simply because I was concerned that my penis would look small. My neuroses had a certain equilibrium—my nose was too big, my penis too small.
Bruce Weber, though, did cure me of my nose condition. He said that he loved my nose. And the effect was almost immediate— if one of the world’s most famous photographers loves your nose, it can’t be that bad. Which makes me realize now that I should have taken off my bathing suit—I could have been cured of my penis condition.
So my whole modeling career, which began more or less with this Bruce Weber shoot, lasted all of six weeks. During this time, I was photographed by another fashion legend, a man named Horst, and he took my picture for a Fernando Sanchez lingerie ad. When I was presented to Horst, who must have been in his late seventies, his assistant told me to take off my shirt. I did and I stood before this legendary Vogue
picture-taker, and the assistant said, “Look, he’s like a statue. . . . And he speaks French!” Horst didn’t say anything, merely smiled. And I was too young to feel humiliated.
For the picture, I was positioned, while wearing only silk red boxer shorts, beneath three very beautiful lingerie-clad women, and the ad appeared several months later in bus stops all over New York City.
I made some nice money from that ad and had one other paid job: modeling a football uniform for a sports-equipment magazine. Ironically enough, the photo shoot was at the Princeton football stadium. I masqueraded as a quarterback at my very own school and got to pretend that I was a Fitzgerald-like hero defeating Yale.
During these six weeks of modeling, whenever I was about to be shown my pictures, like with that first batch of photos, I always thought the jig would finally be up and my inherent ugliness revealed. But each time, these professional wizards with their cameras did something to me, got me at just the right angle, and yet I still didn’t believe that I was good-looking. I thought somehow I was pulling some kind of con, maybe because I never smiled. And you can see in my eyes in the pictures a certain fear—a fear that this would be the shot that exposed me for what I was.
So I took the money I made from the lingerie ad and the football ad and went to Europe, taking a year off from Princeton. I was supposed to go to Milan, Italy, and model, but I never showed up. I told myself that it wasn’t fitting for someone who wanted to be a writer to model, but really it was because I was scared. I had started drinking a lot and thought I wouldn’t be able to fool the camera anymore, since I was so hungover all the time. Also, I had developed a new neurosis—I was convinced that I was starting to lose my hair. My nose-image distortion had simply moved north. I wasn’t prematurely balding, I was prematurely worried about balding. So I didn’t go to Milan. I traveled for three months and then lived in Paris for a while.
What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer Page 7
