Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut (6 page)

And being locked into a dorm room at ten forced me to make friendships that remain some of the closest in my life; you bond on a whole different level (or despise on a whole new one, too, in some cases) when you’re trapped with each other. And so for that I’m glad. Two great friends made it all worth it. And to this day, when I sic myself
on
a buffet, sumo-style, one blissful word pops up, wired in pink neon in the storefront of my mind: “FEED!”

6

I have a weird relationship with tampons. You know how most girls have euphemisms for periods? You know, like, “on the rag,” “Aunt Flo is in town,” “checking into the Red Roof Inn,” “the Communists are invading the summer house,” etc.? Well, I actually have that with ’pons. I call them vampire tea bags. Or cunt plugs. Just kidding, I never called them that. I’m so grossed out by them, and yet, really, what am I gonna do, lie in my hut for a week a month like a pygmy? As a virgin at thirteen when I first got my crimson tide, it didn’t even cross my mind to ride the cotton pony. I’d simply use a pad. Which, might I add, as a 1974 baby, did
not
include a belt. When I cracked
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
and I read about their pads with belts, I was like,
What the fuck are they talking about?!
When my own Cracky Chan enlisted in the red army during intermission at
Forbidden Broadway,
my mom smiled and kvelled and misted, then took my hand and brought me to a twenty-four-hour drugstore, and those weren’t as omni back in the eighties. We bought my adhesive pads and that was that. Womanhood was so close I could smell it. Literally. Ew, that was gross, sorry. Anyway, at first, everyone used pads. I barely even knew what a tampon was!

Actually, that’s not true.

My mom had a stash of Tampax in a basket thing to the right of her toilet, which seemed quite mysterious when I was a little kid of, say, seven or eight. On the other side was a magazine rack with
Vogue
and
People
. Weird combo, I know, but she insists today that
People
was a comped subscription from my dad’s work. I remember one cover was Ann Jillian with her platinum bangs/bowl cut and she’d had breast cancer and said something like “I hope I’m not any less a woman for my husband” or something like that and I was so young I didn’t even know what that meant. Also unclear? What those paper-wrapped cigar things were in the teal box.

Years later, of course, Bill Clinton actually did insert a cigar into a vag, but my kid self wondered what the hell they were and for some reason I don’t recall ever asking. But little by little my mom’s tampons would disappear. She was always buying and opening new boxes.

Then one day, my mom was cleaning my brother’s room and reached under his bed. I heard a scream. I came running from my room to find my mom lying on his green carpet, peering under his bed, jaw on the floor. “
Willieeeeeee!
” she yelled.

I got down on my hands and knees and was shocked to find
hundreds
of tampons piled under the box spring. My four-year-old brother came scampering down the hallway in his Velcro sneakers.

“Yeah?” he asked in the doorway, finding us on the floor.

“Willie, what is this?” she asked him, revealing his compromised stash and her handful of cardboard plungers with strings coming out.

“Oh.” He shrugged. “That’s my dynamite.”

It was the definition of “LOL.” It totally did look like TNT, shipped direct from Acme Products, sold by one Wile E. Coyote for my mother’s ’ginee. Nice one, Will.

So tamps were sealed into family lore, and it was soon revealed what they were for and I was horrified. When my own flag of Japan waved in the teenage breeze, I was a pad gal through ’n’ through. And then peer pressure hit me. Not for brewskis or BJs, but for cooter corks. Little by little all my friends started pooning up. Every Shark Week, I tried, but it killed. I was closed for bidniss down there, nailed shut, sealed up.

“But don’t you hate messy pads?” both commercials and my friends asked.

“Uh, yeah . . .”

“So just try it!”

I did. Again and again and again. And I felt like I was being raped by Raggedy Andy’s cotton cock. I would stab my seemingly sewn-shut vag with the applicator till I’d give up, thinking it hurt so much, and it was a slender regular; what the eff would I one day do when a big ol’ ween tried to enter? Maybe mine was like those tunnels that didn’t have height clearance for certain-sized vehicles. Like the SUV of penii couldn’t even get into there.

But then one day I had an incident. I was wearing a skirt and was walking home at the brisk pace most New Yorkers whizz by with. And before I could even do a damn thing about it, my bloody maxi pad somehow became unglued from my panties and fell through my panty leg hole
sunny-side up
onto Madison Avenue. Right there in front of Fred Leighton on Madison and Sixty-sixth Street. Diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and rubies sparkled in the glittering window and my own ruby mess lay on the sidewalk. So I did what any mortified, ashamed girl would do.
RUN, FORREST, RUN!

Shortly thereafter, I got to boarding school, and a senior, aghast that I actually walked around with a white pillow in my Calvins, took me by the wrist and led me to the bathroom. “I’m going to talk you through this, through the stall door,” she announced.

“I’m ready,” I said, exhaling, bracing myself.

“Okay,” she said, “now, the way you were describing the discomfort, I feel like you were trying to shoot it up—”

“Uh, well, yeah . . . isn’t that how it goes?”

“No!” she exclaimed. “No, no. The hole doesn’t go up, it’s diagonal. Don’t aim parallel to your belly button, aim toward your butt crack.”

“Huh?”

“Angle it toward your ass.”

I tilted the cotton rocket.

And then,
blast off
!

Eureka!

Halle-fucking-lujah.

The gun was loaded.

7

After three years of ribbon-belt ’splosion, I was all excited for my new chapter at multiculti college. When I said I was going to Yale, countless morons immediately reminded me that they “heard New Haven is really dangerous,” and that “one out of four, maybe more” members of the student body was homosexual. Which wasn’t enough for me! That’s because I have always truly felt that I am a gay man.

It’s not like “Oh, all my friends are gay guys.” Well, yes, that too, but I also weirdly think I am a queen. As in, I know every Tim Rice lyric ever penned. I’ve never missed a Tonys. I don’t know who Patti LuPone is from that oh-blah-dee oh-blah-da Down syndrome TV show; I worship her from the Great White Way. Nary a car ride isn’t blaring Andrew Lloyd Webber. When I was seven, my mother and I went to the box office for
Evita
tickets. My little head peeked up to the ticket window, requesting a pair of matinee seats, orchestra.

“Um, ma’am, I’m not sure this is appropriate for her,” the cashier said, gesturing to me.

“Oh, she’s already seen it four times,” my mother replied, sliding the credit card through the hole.

I can perform a one-woman version of most Broadway shows. But it’s not just ’cause of an affinity for original cast recordings that I’m a poof. I’m drawn to gay men. I love their style. Okay, maybe not the bear scene at Rawhide on lower Eighth
avec
full chauffeur hat and leather vest over flesh. But in general: they are gorgeous! And tasteful. And interesting. We like the same things.

Dick, for one. Just kidding. Slash not. I love me a diva. Before I bore fruit, I clubbed at the Cock and dance-halled my way into some serious street cred, and even had a glam rock–themed birthday party with my best friend Trip called Studio Filthy Whore. It was maje. The invitation read “No Glitter, No Entry.” And BTW, if I were a real pink-triangle card-carrying fag, I wouldn’t be just some mere hipster with a Strokes haircut and John Varvatos ’splosion. No. I’d be Johnny Weir times ten, faaaabulous and
en fuego,
a foot off the ground like a homo hovercraft, floating higher than a combination triple axel double salchow. I’d sweat sparkles and diarrhea sequins. My drag name would be Helvetica Bold. (Alas, years after I decided this, I heard that was taken. Damn.) I’ve read countless books about coming out and am a member of Lambda. My interest in the early days of AIDS, when it was called GRIDS (gay-related immune deficiency syndrome), bordered on obsession, especially the fact that it was ignored for so long. (No doubt if it’d been little white babies getting Kaposi’s sarcoma there would have been a five-alarm deafening insta-war on the virus.) And before the national debate began I was fixated on the injustice of gays’ inability to marry.

But for all of my righteous rainbow flaggage there was one glaring hole (no pun intended): oddly, I never had one lesbo pal. Not by choice or anything; I just didn’t know any. So when I got to college and saw a group called Yalesbians, and subsequently an even more hard-core group, a Jewish faction of extreme religious box-chowers called OrthoDykes, I was surprised at my bizarrely unexplainable semihomophobia. It wasn’t a phobia per se—I wasn’t freaked or anything—it was more that I just . . . didn’t identify. Lady Gaga?
Bien sûr!
Indigo Girls? No,
gracias
. From the mullets to the shoe-boots, I couldn’t aesthetically absorb the culture the way I did with my boys, even though I wanted to. And I’m
such
a girl’s girl! And truly, it’s not that I’m freaked about carpet munchage (which, okay, maybe I am, I’ll admit), it’s more the look and feel. When I go to my favorite bar in New York, Marie’s Crisis, on Grove Street, I feel more at home among the singing gay guys than I would in a bar full of ladies at Henrietta Hudson or Rubyfruit (which is code for clit, I think). One night, I was early for a dinner on the Lower East Side. I spied Meow Mix, the lez bar, and decided I was intrigued and would get a drink there. I just wanted to spy the scene. Was it going to be the PowerLez clique like on
Sex and the City
? Lipstick wearers with stilettos? I was curious.

Apparently, so was Michael Imperioli, best
known as “Christophuh” on
The Sopranos
. He walked in and sat on the stool next to me, looking me over, assuming that I was a muff diver. We made small talk about the weather and the music, chatting in the end for about a half an hour. The funny thing is I never could have struck up a conversation anywhere else, because he prolly would have assumed I was some stalkerazzi fame-fucker who would try to bang the eyebrows off him and Glenn Close some rabbits on his stove. But no, I was a nice downtown hip lesbian; how unthreatening! When I left he said it was so nice talking to me and rubbed my arm good-bye as I sauntered out, presumably for my dinner with k.d. lang.

My eldest child, who has gay godparents, blithely checks out the wedding announcements in the
New York Times
and asks me to read stories of how the pairs met. She has no idea that in (many) parts of the country—not to mention the world—the marriages are not legal. She sees two people in love. I’m not some kind of beaming psychomom whose sense of accomplishment is tied up in her chitlins, but I must confess I’m so proud my kids are color-blind and little unknowing rainbow-flag wavers. Moms are aghast when I say I’ll be fine if my son, Fletch, lives on Christopher Street and skips to work, but it’s the truth. Then I’ll always have a pal around the corner when I want a midnight croon session at Marie’s Crisis. Anyone who goes there, even people who are dragged in rolling their eyes, can’t help but feel a jolt of camaraderie and New York spirit gathered around the packed piano with perma, 365-days-a-year Christmas lights. Between the tiny twinkling bulbs and the improvised four-part harmonies, I feel more alive than I feel in any other place in the city. “I could have daaaaaanced all night” rings out as people cram under the wooden beams, singing and swaying. I feel merry and warm and part of a club. I feel gay. I know the art clique leader that Charlotte befriended on
Sex and the City
said, “If you don’t eat pussy, you’re not a dyke,” but I still feel that connection. More to the guys, but still. Maybe it’s an outsider thing. Maybe I just dig the same stuff. Maybe I see the world in the same way. Through a kaleidoscope, where the poppies are redder, Emerald City is greener, and Judy Garland’s voice is more magical than Oz.