Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (10 page)

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 Port 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 piet
à
.

“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.

“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
Playbill
s 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 that 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.”