I Am Not Myself These Days (12 page)

“I love you more than heaven,” he writes softly, letter by letter.

J
ack and I watch
Blue's Clues
every morning. Or at least every morning that we're both at home.

We both have a little crush on Steve, the host. We lie in bed, me usually still a little drunk from the night before, and Jack winding down from his multiple nighttime calls. Something about Steve makes everything about the world seem manageable. His simple soothing sentences make sense to me during that short wistful window between inebriation and hangover. For Jack, they lull him further and further away from a surreal night of deviant sex and violence. Even when Jack has an overnight client in the apartment, we find time to retreat to the bedroom and lie on the bed silently watching Steve, speaking only when it's time to solve the day's puzzle.

“What time's your flight?” Jack asks me when the closing theme song strikes up.

I roll over on my stomach, drape my arm across his chest, and mutter into my pillow.

“Five o'clock.”

“Do you have to go into the office today?”

“Just for a little while. I need to show a rough edit to a client,” I say. “Will you be home around two before I go?”

“Probably, unless I get a call.”

Still on my stomach, I pivot around until my legs are over the side of the bed and slide limply off onto the floor, where I lay flat on my back looking at the ceiling.

“I don't want to go,” I say. “I'm too tired. Don't make me go.”

Jack leans his head over the edge of the bed and looks down at me.

“Shut up, dickwad,” Jack says. “You know you want to go. It's a free vacation.”

“Vacation? You try hauling five wigs and six outfits halfway around the world. And how the fuck am I going to buy goldfish in Tokyo?”

“They're called
koi,
” Jack adds helpfully.

“Great, I'll wander around the city in black Spandex and heels, waving cash and pointing at my tits while yelling out
‘koi? koi?'
”

With his head directly above mine, Jack proceeds to pretend that he's going to let a gob of his spit drop down on my forehead.

“That drips on me and your teeth will be the next thing falling out of your mouth,” I say.

Just as it looks like it's going to fall, he sucks it back up into his mouth.

“Pussyboy,” Jack taunts, smiling.

“You five-dollah-whore, I ten-dollah–dlag queen,” I say with a bad Hollywood Japanese accent.

“Get your flat ass off the floor and start packing, round eyes,” Jack says, getting up, prodding me softly with his bare foot.

“Pletty geisha boy take hot shower now,” I say, continuing with the lame accent. “You want soap me? Ten dollah you touch bottom place.”

“Two dollah, final offer,” Jack says, pulling me up toward the bathroom.

“Ow. You likee smackee smackee? Five dollah you spank me.”

I get into the shower and Jack brushes his teeth. When he's done, he turns around and puckers his mouth up against the glass shower door. I kiss him from the other side.

Last month I performed at Wigstock, the world's largest, and arguably most important, outdoor drag queen festival. Tabloid television crews from all over the world descended on the west side pier where it was held and filmed segments for their shows back home. One Japanese crew was particularly fascinated by me and my costume. I posed for endless shots and stilted interviews. I later realized their interest lay mainly in my tits, the goldfish being a symbol of good fortune to them.

Shortly after, I got a call to entertain a group of Japanese businessmen at a karaoke bar in a basement in midtown. It was a birthday party for one of the executives at the Japanese television network I'd appeared on. Though of course I remember little of the evening, I apparently was a huge success. The next day I got a call asking if I wanted to go on a short ten-day tour of Tokyo.

Everyone at the ad agency was tremendously obliging, even though I'd already used up all my vacation and sick days. Once again, my appeal as an agency mascot trumped my value as an actual contributing employee. One of the partners even gave me a substantial pocketful of spare yen that he'd collected over years of Japanese business trips.

My itinerary is a bit unclear to me, having been relayed in a phone call that came in the middle of one night last week. From what I can tell, it involves a couple of clubs, a television appearance, and, I think, a wedding reception.

By the time I return from the office before heading to the airport, I'm more nervous than I thought I would be. This is my typical pattern. Rush headlong into adventure and then dig in my heels right before going off the cliff. I would give anything to be one of those people who just do without thinking. Like Jack. I have too many years of being the good boy behind me not to be aware of potential pitfalls ahead. Thankfully I have my good friend, vodka, to help me, sometimes literally, stumble off the edge of the cliff. I'm slowly donating my liver to the pursuit of finding my balls.

Jack's not in the apartment when I get home from the agency. On the dining room table he's left a note with an intricate illustration of my plane trip drawn in the margins. A tiny jet swoops past the Chrysler Building, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower, before skipping across the bottom of the page over the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal and winding up back at the top circling Mt. Fuji. Little goldfish jump through the clouds, and the blank spaces in between the famous landmarks are dotted with cactuses. In tiny little capital letters he writes:

Jack knows I'm in a perpetual state of poverty. Having to do three or four shows a week means constantly updating and creating new costumes. I've been told I'll be getting a pretty big sum for this trip, but I don't know if I'll get it when I arrive or after I've finished. I'm nowhere near as adept at negotiating payments as Jack is, and sometimes I'm so drunk at the end of my shows that I forget to pick up my cash altogether.

I give Jack a good portion of my agency check as a token rent payment. He didn't want to take any, but I told him I didn't want to feel totally kept.
Ho-dependency,
Laura calls it. He spends far more on me than the little I give him, and we both pretend not to notice.

The gray-green metal box is exactly where he indicated, and it is much heavier than I expected. When I was little I had a box just like it where I kept my rock collection. Random pieces of quartz and mica that I'd picked up on the side of the gravel road that we lived on. Shiny things. Glittery things. I'd wash them regularly under the garden hose to make them glisten even more. Make them more precious.

Jack's box was even heavier than my rocks. I lift the lid.

“Holy fucking Jesus damn Christ!”
I think to myself. Maybe I even say it out loud. Who could tell? If a tree falls in the middle of the woods next to a huge goddamn pile of cash does anybody hear the fucking tree? Inside, packet after packet of hundred dollar bills bundled in their bank wraps are stacked neatly on their sides, filling the entire box. I counted how many bills were in one wrapped bundle and multiplied it by the number of packets. Normally I can't even add the hours on my time sheet correctly, but when staring down at this wad of cash I suddenly turn into the Rain Man of tallying up.

There's $357,000 and change
. I didn't know this much cash existed in the world. Well, I knew, but I just never thought I'd see it in one place. What the hell does he have all this money for?

Then I put it together. Jack can't have a bank account. He doesn't really even exist on paper other than his birth certificate and college diplomas. He'd told me that he hadn't filed taxes in years, 'cause he has no legal income to report. If he gets the flu, he goes to the emergency room, gives a fake name, and leaves right after they give him a prescription. He makes cash payments to the previous owner of the condo, a guy who also was involved in the escort business and had to leave town and start over in Palm Springs. Jack doesn't even have a checking account and has to get money orders every month to pay Con Edison.

It's too much cash for me to comprehend. How many asses were beaten with leather straps to make all this? I find myself unable to take a single hundred dollar bill. It's simply overwhelming. The idea of money for sex now has a physical size and shape and smell and it lives in our closet. I don't feel any real repugnancy to it, just a newer greater awareness. Like finally seeing a bruise on the skin after feeling a little bit sore for a day. I close the lid. I put it back under the stack of old issues of
GQ
and close the drawer. I shut the closet door and get my bags and lock the front door and hit the elevator button and hail a cab and go to Japan.

I wish I'd never seen it, and I'm not sure why.

H
ere's what I don't like about Japan: there are thousands of social rules that you don't know about but are made to feel like you're breaking continuously. And at the same time, everyone is too polite to tell you.

I'm a freak here. In or out of drag. I'm being put up in a private members-only hotel where only one person claims to speak English, but notes are continuously slipped under my door telling me to be ready in an hour. No matter how many times I tell people that it takes at least three hours to get made up, one hour after receiving such a note a teenage boy name Toshi shows up at my door smiling and telling me, “Now we go.”

Whoever brought me here, to their credit, had a check waiting for me in my room upon arrival. Unfortunately, not having a bank account in Japan has left me unable to cash it. Thus, I'm trapped in my room ordering fishy breakfasts and watching Japanese TV until the times arrive that “Now we go.”

The first three attempts at sending someone to buy goldfish for my breasts resulted twice in koi the size of my forearm, and once with some sort of fillet fresh from the store. After many crudely drawn pictures and charade attempts, I've now got four healthy small goldfish swimming around in the sink in my bathroom. The idea of successfully communicating my need for a fish tank is beyond my wildest jet-lagged dreams. I resign myself to brushing my teeth in the tub.

After finally figuring out the phone, I try to call Jack. No answer. I leave a message. One of those pathetic messages that go on and on with a half dozen aborted wrap-ups because I can't bear to break the tenuous connection with home.

“Now we go,” Toshi says at the door.

“You go hell,” I reply, smiling. Toshi smiles back and waves me into the hallway.

 

Vodka's not so easy to come by here. I manage to physically intimidate or possibly just confuse Toshi enough to procure me five bottles from the bar at the wedding reception I emcee. And by “emcee” I mean talk onstage to myself while two hundred Japanese people have no idea what I'm saying. Luckily, the drag queen crotch grab is indeed a universal joke.

The television appearance seems to go better, but really, how would I know? From what I can gather, it's some sort of talk variety show with an androgynous host who shrieks something that sounds like
“icky bicky koon hiiiiiiii,”
which makes everyone in the studio audience respond with a hearty
“Hi Hooooo!”
and dissolve into raucous laughter. After what I think is an enthusiastic introduction, someone pushes me out onstage, which I assume means I am to start my number.

I'm wearing my leopard print cat suit, with studded collar and wrist bands. I have a cat-o'-nine-tails, which I occasionally threaten the front row of the studio audience with. While I'm lip-synching to a song called “Twiggy Twiggy” by the Japanese group Pizzicato Five, a video montage of New York City rolls on the screen behind me. The scenes of the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge are intercut with random scenes of Japanese people eating ice cream cones. I don't know why. I suspect neither does anyone else, but, hey,
icky bicky koon hiiiiiiii!

The rest of the trip is just nightclub after nightclub. At one small club, referred to by Toshi as a hostess bar, I notice a man behind the bar arguing with my trusty chaperone. The room is only about the size of my old studio apartment and is located on the thirtieth floor of a swanky high-rise. The showy light displays on the signs of the Ginza district shine below us. From this height it looks exactly like Times Square. It's strictly a club for drag queens and their admirers, and I'm joined by a dozen or so other Japanese drag queens and transsexuals whose attention to gender-bending detail eclipses mine by several degrees. They're so small-boned and frail I can't begin to even imagine them as men. They're simply beautiful, moving around the room with the small graceful movements that are the hardest part about mastering gender transformation.

Toshi comes out from behind the bar and approaches me, smiling as usual. He points to the drink in my hand.

“Sure, I'd love another,” I say, holding up my glass.

“No. Too many bar buy,” he says, smiling.

Great. Getting cut off in any language sounds dismally similar.

“No. Man buy you,” Toshi continues.

Laura had joked about me getting sucked into the international sex slave trade before I left, but given how I had won over the hearts and soul of Japan on television days earlier, I thought I was in the clear. I'm about to scream out
“icky bicky koon hiiiiiiii!”
to create a diversion and run when an older Japanese businessman comes over and sits next to me.

“My name is Mr. Hatsumoto. I am happy to see you here,” he says politely, bowing his head.

“Aqua,” I say, bowing back. At least my potential new master is polite.

“What is trying to be said,” Mr. Hatsumoto continues, “is that in this bar, you are to compel gentlemen to purchase drinks. They are one hundred dollars each.”

Christ. For a hundred dollars back in New York he could get a drink and a hand job. With plenty of change.

“You gotta have quite a thirst to buy yourself a hundred dollar drink,” I say as coyly as I can.

“Or a lot of hundred dollars,” Mr. Hatsumoto winks back.

Three hundred dollars and half a buzz later, Mr. Hatsumoto turns out to be a pretty swell guy. Not my type at all, but he doesn't seem to be hitting on me anyway. I find out he supports three of the girls in the room, paying their rents and giving them spending money. The girls swing by occasionally to check on him like he was their grandfather, and he buys them a drink and requests songs from them.

“Do you have a gentleman?” he asks me later in the night.

“Yes, I do,” I say.

“Does he watch you?”

“Yes. Very well.”

“He is a fortunate gentleman,” he says.

“That's what I tell him,” I say.

“I could not live without my girls.”

“Sounds like they wouldn't do very well without you either,” I reply.

“We survive together. We give pieces to each other. I give more. I have more. But they have more valuable,” Mr. Hatsumoto says.

“I'll take your word for it, Grasshopper,” I say, not sure if it's the booze or the conversation that's causing me to drift.

“Now, I will take you back to your hotel,” Mr. Hatsumoto says, rising from his seat.

I'm having a fantastic time at the club. It's homey. All the girls and men know each other, have been together as a group for years. From what little I understand of the girls trying to speak English to me, most of the men here are married but have their “girlfriends” at the club. Some wives know, some don't. Some of the men are horny pigs, and others just fond admirers. Like I've learned from my nights in New York, and my life with Jack, once you've crawled into what's commonly thought of as the sordid underbelly of life, you realize it's all just different versions of normal.

I wonder what Jack's doing. It's nearly four in the afternoon in New York. I haven't reached him on the phone once since getting here. He left me one message at the hotel early in my stay, “All well. Miss you lots. Aqua too.” But I haven't heard from him since.

More than anything I wish he were here with me. “A relationship is an accumulation of shared history,” he'd said to me once. And here I was making history without him. It's lonely. And I can't wait to go home. Parts of me are showing through my Aqua, and I'm having a hard time keeping them separate.

“You have given me what you have to give. Thank you. Please let me take you back,” Mr. Hatsumoto says again.

“Okeydokey. Now we go, Cricket,” I say to Toshi, collecting our things and following Mr. Hatsumoto out the door.

I have seen what I needed to see, and am ready to go home. To Jack.