Swish
Authors: Joel Derfner
Broadway Books
New York
C
ONTENTS
for Mike
I
NTRODUCTION
A few years ago I wrote a book called
Gay Haiku.
Writing a book had never been a particular goal of mine, except for two weeks during the eighth grade, after I read Truman Capote’s
Other Voices, Other Rooms;
my resulting desire to be an author lasted until I finished
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
at which point I realized it would be much more interesting to be a prostitute. But in 2003, as part of a fund-raiser for a theater company some friends of mine and I were starting, I wrote 49 haiku about all the bad dates I’d been going on and all the bad sex I’d been having since my boyfriend and I broke up. The haiku turned out well, so I wrote 20 more and sent the collection to an agent as a manuscript called
69 Gay Haiku.
She liked it and sent it to a publisher; he also liked it, but he said 69 haiku wasn’t enough and 110 seemed like a more appropriate number. I was upset, not because the prospect of writing more haiku was so horrible, but because
69 Gay Haiku
was the only decent title I had ever come up with for anything and I was loath to discard it. I suggested the title
69 Gay Haiku Plus 41 More
but the reception with which this idea met was singularly unenthusiastic.
When the book appeared on shelves, however, I stopped being upset about the title because all of a sudden I got to tell people things like, “Sorry, Monday’s no good for me, I’m having lunch with my publicist.” (The only thing I’ve ever said more glamorous than this was, “Yes, I can meet you at your apartment for casual sex tomorrow morning, unless I have to go to Prague.”) The fact that my publicist and I spent the entire lunch in question gushing about how vigorously we wanted to rip Chris Meloni’s clothing off didn’t matter in the least; what was important was that I could use her in a sentence. This was by far the best thing about becoming a published author.
The worst thing about becoming a published author was that, inexplicably, it did not make all my problems go away. Walking into Barnes & Noble and seeing my name on a book jacket was exciting, of course, but when I left the store the thought filling my head was not
Gee, now my life is perfect
but
Why didn’t the cute cashier fall in love with me as I purchased my own book? Am I fat? Or could he just see that I’m a bad person?
I spent a long time considering the possibilities. Perhaps the book had failed to make all my problems go away because it was too small? Too cute? Was it too pink? To do what it was supposed to do, did a book need more than seventeen syllables a page?
Finally I decided that the only solution was to write another, better book. For a while I toyed with the idea of a collection of light verse, amusing myself to no end producing nonpareils like:
Ozzily Tozzily
Wicked Witch Elphaba
Spied on Miss Gale, feeling
Down in the dumps.
“Hmph,” she remarked, somewhat
Unfetishistically—
“Long way to go for some
Lousy red pumps.”
However, I realized before long that if my aim was to produce a more dazzling book with wider appeal,
Gay Double Dactyls
was unlikely to do the trick. So I invited my editor for
Gay Haiku
to lunch (by which I mean I invited him to
buy me
lunch) and said, “I have to write another book for you to make all my problems go away, what do you want?”
“Well,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to hide his consternation at my having ordered a meal composed entirely of partially hydrogenated fat, “there’s that thing from your bio in
Gay Haiku
about trying to become the gayest person ever. I guess you could write a book about that.” I agreed immediately, because our waiter had returned with the appetizers, and I am rendered so powerless in the face of mozzarella sticks that I would have said okay if my editor had suggested I write a book about scaling Mount Kilimanjaro in a bustle.
So when I got home, full of contentment and fried breaded cheese, I set about my task. Before the publication of
Gay Haiku,
panicked because my bio for the book jacket was late, I had scribbled down a paragraph that included the sentence “In an attempt to become the gayest person ever, he took up knitting and got a job as a step aerobics instructor.” As far as the new book was concerned, those two achievements meant little in isolation, of course, but they were not my only credentials: I also wrote musical theater and cheered on the gay cheerleading squad and had had a lot of gay sex. Though I had a long way to go to reach the status of, say, J. Edgar Hoover, I felt nevertheless that I was starting from a position of strength.
My first task was to decide where to begin. Figuring
what the hell, sex sells,
I started writing about casual sex. This would be an easy topic, I knew, as I had a wealth of experience upon which to draw. I had to make up some names and a detail or three to fill the ever-widening gaps in my aging memory, but on the whole things were going swimmingly until I looked down at my computer screen and saw that I had started to write about Johnny Depp.
Please do not get the wrong (though breathtaking) idea. I have never had sex with Johnny Depp, at least not outside of REM sleep. But I had begun to explore an idea that wouldn’t make sense unless I related a story about my childhood reaction to a television character played by that gentleman, and this story required me in turn to relate certain other stories about my childhood, and before I knew it I was writing something completely different from what I had set out to write, something that involved discussions of New Age bookstores and Miss Manners and the Ancien Régime.
Obviously, this would never do, so I decided to scrap the whole thing and start over. But as I reached for the delete key it occurred to me that, in fact, juxtaposing the anecdote about the Scottish guy’s dirty talk with a disquisition on Marie Antoinette’s executioners made me understand each of those two things in a slightly different, more interesting way than writing about either one of them alone. They felt connected under the surface.
“This is more complicated than I expected it to be,” I complained to my boyfriend on the phone.
“What’s wrong with that?” he asked.
“What’s wrong with that is I started writing a sidesplittingly funny discussion of sex and I ended up discovering things about my own character,
that’s
what’s wrong with that,” I snapped. Then I hung up and went on to the next chapter, which was about knitting, except that before long I realized that it was also about my mother.
This kept happening over and over again. I would start writing about some stereotypically gay pursuit in which I was involved and learn along the way that my interest in it came not just from my being gay but also from some deeper need it met. I undertook new gay projects in furtherance of my quest—I went to gay summer camp, I became a go-go boy, I married Liza Minnelli—but even these turned out to sound unexpected echoes with other, seemingly irrelevant, parts of my life.
This introduction used to end with a cute bit about how the subtitle of this book was a lie, because I wasn’t actually on a quest to become the gayest person ever, because first of all who would do that with R———S———still in the public eye, but I was told I couldn’t use R———S———’s real name, which took all the humor out of it. Then my editor pointed out that in any case to introduce the book this way was a facile piece of chicanery that sidestepped the truth. I thanked him for the critique and pointed out that he was fat and that no one loved him.
But upon reflection I think that my editor was right. It’s not that my quest to become the gayest person ever was a lie; it’s that writing about my quest to become the gayest person ever led me to realize that I was actually on a quest to become myself.
I told this to my boyfriend, who is a psychiatrist, and he said, “Well, that makes sense. You definitely have some narcissistic traits.”
“Don’t touch me,” I said.
There is no question but that my quest to become the gayest person ever has failed. I take one look at the plays of Oscar Wilde or the dialogues of Plato or the headlines about the Republican-Politician-Arrested-for-Solicitation-in-the-Men’s-Room of the Week and I want to hang my head in shame. But what I’m hoping is that, like Columbus landing on San Salvador, I’ve reached a new world: a land of vistas to explore, horizons to pursue, indigenous peoples to subjugate. And now that all my problems are going to go away, I’m all set to start doing those things, just as soon as I’m done having lunch with my publicist, because in last night’s episode of
Law & Order: SVU
Chris Meloni took his shirt off and so she and I have a lot to discuss.
P.S.: If I’ve dated you or slept with you and any of the anecdotes in this book seem to be about you, they’re not. They’re about somebody else. You were divine.
P.P.S.: I know I said the same thing in the introduction to my last book, but this time I mean it.
O
N
K
NITTING
T
he two Englishmen were staring at the half-finished glove in my hands, aghast. “What is
that
?” the short one asked.
“I know it’s a mess,” I rushed to apologize. I was lying. It was not a mess; it was perfect. But I had just arrived from the airport and I didn’t want to offend them, as they were my hosts while I was in town for a small theater’s production of a musical to which I had composed the score. The couple continued to stare in reproving silence at the work in my lap. “I’ve never done a glove before,” I continued desperately, “and the fingers are trickier than I expected, and they—”
“No!” the tall one interrupted, his voice quick with dismay. “It’s not that. It’s that you’re
knitting.
Men don’t knit, young people don’t knit. Knitting is…something your
grandmother
does!”
My mother’s mother was a raging alcoholic who had been married seven or nine times (depending on whether you counted the annulment and the common-law bigamy), including once to a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee and once to a French royalist arms smuggler, so I felt I could safely assert that knitting was not a pastime she had ever enjoyed. “Besides,” I said defensively, “knitting is very fashionable in New York these days.”
“Well, this isn’t New York,” the short one retorted, but something in my face must have inspired pity.
“All right,” said the tall one grudgingly. “Just as long as nobody sees you doing it in public.”
But it was already too late, as the tube ride from the airport had been a long one. To mollify them, I put the knitting away, and then we had sex. It was more than satisfactory, as far as that sort of thing goes, but I still didn’t trust them. What kind of people would disapprove of the manufacture of a pair of beautiful cable-stitch gloves, no matter by whose hand?
My friend Cynthia tried to teach me to knit in college. She was a good instructress, but no matter how relentlessly supportive she was I always ended up feeling as if Tomás de Torquemada had taken an especial interest in my hands. It became clear to me very soon that I would never create a garment. I was destined to buy my clothes forever from The Gap. In fact, I thought as I massaged my cramped, searing palms, I would never create anything; I would only be a barnacle on the seedy consumerist underbelly of humanity, sucking up resources and contributing nothing but the occasional second-rate witticism.
But years later, after my boyfriend Tom broke up with me, I thought,
Why not try again?
In the last two years, twenty-nine weeks, and four days not that I was counting or anything, I had mastered utterly the legerdemain required for the illusion that I was in a healthy relationship. What difficulty could winding pieces of string around each other pose my nimble fingers now?
So I signed up for a course at a yarn store called Gotta Knit. There were six students in the class: five women between the ages of forty-five and fifty-five and me. On the first night the teacher, a young woman named Mindy, put six balls of acrylic yarn on the table and told each of us to pick one. Five of the balls were pink and one was purple; I wanted the purple ball of yarn more than I ever wanted anything in my life, including the time I was at a charity auction and lost a bidding war for an autographed photo of Ralph Macchio and snuck in during dinner and stole it and left cash on the table to match the winning bid. But in Gotta Knit I held back out of politeness and somebody else swooped in and pounced on the purple ball, leaving me with one of the dumb pink ones just like everybody else. My immediate impulse was to push my rival out the window, but I did not want to go to prison—the uniform would almost certainly not be in my colors—so instead I seethed with rage and imagined clawing her eyes out or sending her anthrax in the mail.
Mindy explained the basics and before long we were all knitting miniature sweaters furiously. Or at least
I
was knitting furiously; I have no idea what emotional state suffused the others, but I wanted to win. I wanted to crush the yarn; I wanted to beat it into submission.
Soon enough, however, my hands began to feel that familiar, excruciating tightness and I knew I would be unable to continue if I didn’t find a way to relieve it. When I asked Mindy for help, she bent over, performed a piece of prestidigitation I couldn’t follow at all, and lo and behold! the yarn was wrapped around my fingers in a different direction.
“Your hands should stop hurting now,” she said, “and your stitches will also be a lot looser.” The agony spiking through my palms subsided almost right away, and the piece became much easier to work with, weaving effortlessly around itself.
Mindy asked us why we were taking the class. I opened my mouth to speak, but “My boyfriend just broke up with me and I need something to do with my hands other than Google him obsessively” seemed too revealing, so instead I muttered something about always having wanted to learn but never having had the opportunity.
“My mother taught me how, forty years ago, but I forgot,” said one of the other class members.
“My mother wouldn’t teach me,” replied another. “She said there were more useful things for a girl to learn.”
“You, too? Mine said she was going to teach me but she never got around to it.”
“My mother didn’t knit at all, and I was so jealous of Sally Pierce next door, because her mother taught her how. So I finally decided to do something about it.”
We all turned to the last woman, the bitch who had stolen my purple yarn, to see what she would tell us about her mother. “My boyfriend just broke up with me,” she said, “and I need something to do with my hands other than Google him obsessively.” I dropped my next five stitches and it took Mindy twenty minutes to show me how to pick them up again.
My mother did not knit. She did not quilt, or crochet, or needlepoint; crafts of all kinds were anathema to her. I took a different attitude, at least in my formative years. At some point in my childhood I came home from school with a birthday present I’d made for her, a mobile from which I had hung stuffed misshapen felt hearts in every color of the rainbow. I would have stitched her a sampler that said
YOUR SON WILL GROW UP TO KNOW ALL THE WORDS TO “IT’S RAINING MEN
,” but I had yet to discover disco, so the stuffed hearts were the best I could do. If she was unsettled by the gift she didn’t show it; it dangled brightly in an upstairs window for months.
However, though she disdained handiwork, my mother was nevertheless a whiz, when circumstances required, with the more consistent sewing machine. At the age of eight I was cast as Helios, the sun, in my school’s musical retelling of the myth of Persephone. I got home from practice one day to find my mother smoking, her brow wrinkled in concern as she read the sheet of paper upon which were written the school’s costume instructions. She did not show me the instructions but they doubtless called for bedsheets and flip-flops. “I don’t know exactly what they mean by this,” she said, which meant “These people are morons and should be put down like dogs; I’d shoot them myself but I have more important things to do with my time.” Then she threw the instructions away, went to her Singer, and actually made me a costume
out of gold lamé.
It was in this costume, complete with laurels of gold tinsel—what was she
thinking
?—that I sang to Demeter, played by our music teacher, about her daughter’s dark and chthonic fate. After the curtain call my mother hugged me and my little brother (who had played Hades’ gardener) and told us how proud she was and took us out for ice cream. In between spoonfuls of Rocky Road I asked her the question that had stumped me at school during recess earlier in the day. “Would you rather,” I said, “go blind or deaf?”
After a few moments’ thought she said, “It would be really hard not to be able to see anything, but I’d rather go blind, because if I went deaf I would never be able to hear my children’s voices again.”
Would that I had understood the gift I was being given.
At the end of the first class at Gotta Knit, we had all made good progress on our miniature sweaters. I went home and by the next afternoon I had finished all the pieces, including the front with the difficult low-cut neck. The following morning I waited outside the store for two hours until it opened and then I bought needles and yarn to knit my friend Rob a scarf in a reverse rib pattern with a deliciously soft blue-green alpaca.
The class lasted for another three weeks. There are essentially only two stitches in knitting, however—knit and purl, each of which is more or less the reverse of the other—and so the remaining sessions were devoted to the myriad ways in which these two stitches can be manipulated. I learned increasing, decreasing, ribbing, and cabling. I also learned to say things like “a deliciously soft blue-green alpaca.” I began to shop for yarn as if I were at a wine tasting. “This yarn has supercilious undertones, masked by a patina of enthusiasm,” I would say to the woman behind the counter. “This yarn is $10.95 a ball,” she would reply.
Rob’s scarf reached its full six-foot length in a matter of days, and I was hooked. I started knitting everywhere. I knitted on the subway. I knitted at my job. I knitted during the sermon in church.
It is not, of course, Jewish custom to attend church, but I needed the money. In New York, as in many other large metropolitan areas, church choirs tend to be made up not of parishioners but of professional singers, irrespective of faith, so as to ensure the high quality of the music. I’ve worked at a number of New York churches; at the time I learned to knit I was singing at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Times Square, known around town as Smoky Mary’s because of all the incense. I was thrilled to get a job there, not just because Smoky Mary’s has no acoustic peer in the Western Hemisphere, but also because the congregation has historically been composed almost exclusively of men who know the difference between beige and taupe. This is the church at which Tallulah Bankhead is reputed to have caught the attention of the thurifer as he walked down the aisle swinging the censer and said, “Darling, I love your dress, but your purse is on fire.”
The most exciting thing about singing at St. Mary’s, however, was that the choir sat above and behind the congregation, which meant that nobody could see us. And so, when we weren’t singing, we were doing the crossword, flirting shamelessly with one another—at least the tenors and basses were—and, now, knitting. Whoever invented the phrase “preaching to the choir” clearly had no idea what goes on when the antiphon is over and the music folders come down. The choristers at Smoky Mary’s were abetted in our delinquency by the sound system, which consisted essentially of tin cans connected by dental floss, so that we could never hear anything the priests down below were saying. It’s certainly possible that the sermons preached at St. Mary’s would have uplifted my spirit and saved my soul had I been able to hear them, but after five minutes of intense, strained focus at my first Sunday-morning service there, I decided that blissful ignorance was preferable to an inner ear injury, and (since I had not yet learned to knit) opened
Mansfield Park.
