I Came Out for This? (5 page)

We took the train back to Dupont Circle and I walked with her to her apartment, but then she said she was tired and she hoped I didn't mind this time if she didn't invite me in. The tentacles of pain started reaching for me. But
then she kissed me goodbye on the mouth and the garlic on her breath caressed me like the first soft gust of spring. She said jauntily, “I'm glad you're here, Knadel!” Then she grinned and turned and sauntered into her building. I walked home and got undressed and got into bed and I realized I was horny as hell. I snatched up my vibrator and tried to summon up my prison warden fantasy, but then Terri burst in and before I could stop her she was fucking me with her “lady luck” dildo, whispering obscenities in my ear. I have resolved to keep her out of my fantasies until I can have her again in reality, but last night there was nothing I could do— she just swaggered into my S&M scene and took over, bumping aside my beloved prison warden.

But today I'm a little depressed because Terri didn't invite me in last night. I keep thinking it's because I held my chopsticks upside-down. It's so ridiculous, but I keep thinking about it, and then I think that Terri is right to not want such a silly ass who obsesses about chopsticks, and then I go right back to thinking about it. Do most people have such ridiculous thoughts when they're almost fifty years old? I know people do have ridiculous thoughts when they're in love. But I'm wondering if I'm being even more ridiculous and obsessive than most people who are in love. Isn't this what children do when they're about thirteen? I didn't. When I was thirteen, I was a tough little customer. “But I was so much older then . . . I'm younger than that now.” Dylan said that.

I feel a bit sheepish to admit this, but it turns out that my rooming house does have characteristics of a deviant flophouse. Even though physically it's clean and well-kept, the residents are all wacko. Of course, I have become friends with all of them. Like Willi says, I have no boundaries.

I've started to wonder if even I am too normal for this place. Today I was lying on my bed reading when Johnny, a DC native with an outdated “fade” hairstyle and pant legs the size of laundry sacks burst into my room to complain about his boyfriend, Guillermo, a sweet, pockmarked Bolivian kid. He said Guillermo had gotten mixed up with a bunch of neighborhood thugs, and not only was he fucking them but he was running around with them on thieving expeditions, ripping off stores and then returning the items using homemade receipts. A minute later Guillermo burst in, yelling, “Joanna, don't listen to him! Everything he says is a lie!” And then he yelled at Johnny, “Why are you telling Joanna about the receipts and making me look bad? Anyway, who was with us yesterday when we bought the chicken wings with money we got from taking back the
porcelain pig?” I couldn't get a word in edgewise because they kept screaming at each other and eventually they left, continuing their fight all the way down the hall.

People seem to have sticky fingers around here, I guess because they're all poor. If you put a sandwich in the fridge, it's gone an hour later. A few days ago I found these two druggie-looking queens, who live in a room in the basement, rooting through the mail. I wondered who the hell would send them mail, but I just took my mail and went back upstairs, and then I left my room to go to work and I ran into Jerome, a strapping, coal-black sex worker whom I've become friendly with. He asked me if I wanted to share a pizza, and I said I had to go to work, and at that moment the seedy queens, Ginger and Calliope, came marching up the stairs with a Pizza Hut box, followed by Donald, a rotund tenant who works in a men's clothing store. Donald was screaming, “I know you stole my credit card from the mail to order that damn pizza. And y'all didn't even have the decency to offer me any!” I just pushed past them and went downstairs.

When I came home from work, I paid Jerome a visit and found him cooing at someone over the phone, in a buttery, Barry White voice, that he's going to “split their tender peaches” and “curl their toes.” He smiled at me when I walked in and made his date and got off the phone. I said, “Did you all order pizza with Donald's credit card that Ginger and Calliope stole from the mail?” Jerome waved my question away and said, “Don't worry about that faggot. He owed me some money anyway. Trust me.” Jerome is always saying, “Trust me.” Then he said, “I gave him back his damn credit card.”

This place is teaming with nut cases. There are a couple of respectable working men here, like Donald, and Tomas, a courteous Brazilian attaché who stays in his room all the time, but it seems I have gotten more involved with the crazies. My most normal friend here is Russell, the house manager, who comes over every day, acting like a cross between a maid and a resident advisor, vacuuming and cluttering around in the kitchen and gossiping with all the tenants, many of whom he knows, shall we say, intimately.

Leave it to me to become a den mother to a houseful of delinquents while every other middle-aged lesbo in this town is living in some house or apartment by herself or with a girlfriend or nice tame roommate. I haven't invited Terri over here yet, but I can't put it off forever. God knows what she'll think of my little haven. Maybe I can make everyone stay in their rooms when she comes. I'm just kidding. If she doesn't like my new buddies, tough beans. It's not as though she's never done drugs or fucked her brains out or lived in a funky house. I'm sure she would say, “I've never stolen or smoked crack or prostituted myself,” in her snooty voice that I can't stand. But then again, how can she not approve of an affordable rooming house for gay people?

She probably would approve of such a place. Unless
I'm
in it. If
I'm
in it, she'll find some derogatory thing to say about it. I have to admit, though, there's plenty of grist for her mill.

Today I woke up still not knowing what to do on the big Millennium New Year's Eve, which is in two days. Yesterday Russell invited me to go with him and some friends to the Mall for the spectacular ceremony and fireworks display, and I said I would let him know. Even though this will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I love being part of historic public celebrations, I still hadn't talked to Terri about her plans, and I knew she wouldn't want to go to the Mall with Russell and his crazy friends. I hadn't heard from her in a few days and I was afraid to call her and learn that she had already made plans that did not include me.

Instead of calling Terri, I decided to go see her. I got dressed and went trucking over there, but when I got to her building I realized that I was about to kill any possibility of going to the Mall. Either Terri would invite me to spend New Year's Eve with her and I would have to sit around all evening listening to her moan about how lonely she is, or even worse, she would tell me that she already had New Year's Eve plans with some other woman and then I would be too depressed to go to the
Mall with Russell and his friends. So I just stood there frozen in front of Terri's building, and then it occurred to me that she could look out the window and see me, so I started walking around the block. I walked all the way around the block, feeling like some imbecile, and when I got back around to Terri's street I saw her up ahead, walking toward her building in her purple fleece jacket, carrying two shopping bags. She went into her building, and I said, “This is ridiculous,” so I walked up toward her building, determined to ring her buzzer, and then my house mates Johnny and Guillermo appeared from around the corner. They yelled “Joanna!” as though they hadn't seen me in five years and they scurried up and started telling me about some drag queen getting thrown out of the Green Parrot and the police coming and I wasn't hearing a word of it. I just kept looking over at Terri's building, and then all of a sudden she walked out the door. She saw us and she called, “Knadel!” and instead of excusing myself and going up to her I just yelled lamely, “Hey, where ya going?” and she said she had to go to get her watch repaired and walked off toward Connecticut, leaving me there with Guillermo and Johnny and their silly story about the drag queen who was kicked out of the Green Parrot. After a few minutes, they went off to visit a friend and I walked home feeling very disconsolate about my aborted mission.

I am so indecisive lately. It's because I'm feeling insecure. Not only is the woman I love always just out of my reach, but I'm in this strange city where I don't know anyone, living in a house full of derelicts who fuck strange men they find on the street and steal other people's food
from the refrigerator and mince through the house with little pieces of Kleenex in their hair. I'm living a bizarre life, like some character in a Jim Jarmusch movie. At least I'm not one of those Y2K goofballs who are all over the TV news, crowding into supermarkets to stock up on water and canned goods in case everyone's computer goes kaplooey at midnight. I feel normal compared to them. Honestly, do they really think the banks and elevators and Wall Street and the supermarkets and the water and gas companies didn't hire enough geeks to prevent the civilized world from coming to an end?

Something just occurred to me. I'll bet Terri's shopping bags today were chock-full of canned food, water, and batteries! In fact, she was probably leading the frenzied pack down the aisles at the Safeway. She's always concerned about her safety and security. She told me that when we were kids during the Cold War and had to crouch under our desks for those inane security drills that I always thought were like a big game, she took it seriously and folded her arms over her head exactly like they told her to do. I'd better not call her any more today, or she'll start telling me how many cans of soup she bought, and how many cans of each
kind
of soup she bought, and I won't be able to resist making fun of her.

I'll wait until tomorrow to call her. If she had made any big plans for New Year's Eve, she probably would have called and told me.

I am lying on my bed in my tiny little room, watching the Millennium festivities on TV. Eleven glowing Ferris wheels are lined up along the Champs Elysées. It's amazing. I don't want to watch the festivities on the Mall because it will make me sad that I'm not there, so I'm watching ceremonies from other parts of the world.

I won't let myself think about Terri having dinner at a chic downtown place called Jaleo's with the publicity manager at the Bouncing Bear Theater, where she works during the evening. I'm sure that if I had called her early enough she would have made plans with me instead of some dumb woman she hardly even knows. But still it was a big bummer to hear that she's spending New Year's Eve with someone else. I asked her if the publicity manager is gay, and she said the woman
doesn't know yet
. What the hell is that supposed to mean?

I was so bummed out after I talked to Terri that I couldn't get it together to call Russell about the Mall excursion, and by the time I did call him, at 3 p.m. today, he had already left. His lover answered the phone and gave me a hard time: “
Child
, didn't he say to call him
by two? You
know
he was going early to get a good spot.” Oh, well, my bad. Did you ever hear that expression? “My bad.” I think it's one of the most annoying expressions of all time. I'm using it to punish myself for having to sit in this little tiny room all by myself on one of the most momentous occasions of our era.

I hope Terri doesn't get the idea to help the publicity manager figure out if she's gay. But I don't think she will. She didn't use the word “date”; she just said she'd made plans with this woman from the theater. I think if she were planning to conclude the evening with a special “nightcap” she would have used the word “date.”

I suppose it was rude of me to call her at the last minute and ask what she was doing. Oh! There are Roman candles shooting up over Sydney Harbour! It's really so beautiful. Even though I'm kind of lonely, I'm glad that I'm here and not in that drippy little Cleveland. And I have a bottle of pink champagne that I bought so I can toast myself at midnight. I hope I can figure out how to get the damned thing open. I hope the cork doesn't go ricocheting off the wall and hit me on the head. That's probably what will happen.

Terri is good at opening champagne. She's very compe-tent with things having to do with the physical world. Like programming digital devices and shit like that. Oh,
STOP IT
! My bad. Oh, look. Wild dragons dancing on the Great Wall of China. That is so awesome. I wish I were there.

January 2000

The first day of the new Millennium started out nice. I woke up with the sun streaming in through my windows, wondering why I didn't feel like shit, and then I remembered that I couldn't get the champagne bottle open last night. I lay in bed, trying to decide what to do and then the phone rang and it was Terri, asking me if I would volunteer with her at the R Street mission, where they were having a holiday lunch for the homeless guys. My first thought was, “Harrumph. You take the publicity agent to Jaleo's and you want me to shlep with you to a mission.” But I agreed to meet her. I always used to volunteer, before I turned into a self-obsessed lovesick blob. Even when I was a teenaged delinquent I volunteered at the Jewish Orthodox Home for the Aged and Head Start. (If you're Jewish, you can't be a pure juvenile delinquent. You always have to do something to water it down, like win a poetry contest or become a volunteer or help some teacher start a club for troubled students.)

I walked over to the mission at 14
^th
and R, and some guys were outside, eating from paper plates. One of them called to me, “Come on in and have some lunch!
They got everything in there— ham, sweet potatoes, the works!” He made it sound as though I was about to enter Chez Paul. Terri, who is never even one minute late, was already in there, serving food behind a long table. They did have a nice spread, with baked ham and sweet potatoes and coleslaw and apple pie and layer cake. I stood next to Terri and started serving the food to a long line of men. We were joking around with them and the other volunteers, and I was having a pretty good time. But then I couldn't resist asking her how her New Year's Eve was and she said, “Wonderful!” I couldn't concentrate on putting food on plates and dealing with that at the same time, or else I would have demanded to know what was so wonderful about spending New Year's Eve with some sexually confused woman. But my generally free-floating anxiety hardened into a little red ball inside of me and I did my best to ignore it and kept slapping food on people's plates. And then I looked up and saw Jerome, Guillermo, and Johnny sitting at a table in the back, stuffing their faces full of food. They obviously had arrived and gotten served before I showed up.