Naked in the Promised Land (25 page)

I found myself soaring in seven-league boots down Sunset Boulevard because I was suddenly higher than Jan's scotches had ever made me, though my mind was absolutely clear too, as though I'd ripped off
layers of gauze. I could do something good, even if I couldn't be an actress. I remembered that I'd once wanted to be a lawyer, and Fanny had said that poor girls couldn't be lawyers. I'd ask Mr. Colwell—Maury—what he thought about it. He knew this country as my mother and Rae and Fanny never could.

Algebra II, History, English, Latin—my classes went from eight o'clock to twelve. I couldn't imagine now how I'd managed to mess up so badly at Fairfax. You just had to pay attention and turn in whatever the teacher said to turn in, and your homework came back marked with
A
's, or at least
B
's. It was easy.

Though I was done for the day before lunch and was free to leave, by the third week I didn't want to. The Speech Club met at noon. "
We are looking for new faces—debaters, oral interpreters, extemporaneous speakers
" the flier had read. "
Help Hollywood High bring home the bacon from the Pepperdine regionals!
" Oral interpretation—that meant dramatic reading. I no longer had actress dreams, but I missed the craft I'd studied for so long. In one of the books Maury had given me,
USA
by John Dos Passos, I found "Body of an American," a piece about war horrors—what I'd felt in blood and bone since infancy.

I loved the familiar sweet calm and sharp focus I felt when I walked up to the front of the classroom at the Speech Club's second meeting. Lil disappeared into Dos Passos's angry ironist. I held the book in my hands, but I knew the lines by heart, and I modulated my trained voice to the nuance of every phrase. I loved the hush in the room and the look on the faces of the kids and on the face of Mr. Bell, the speech coach, too. "Wow!" I heard a boy whisper when I finished. Like Irene's "wow" all those years ago.

For a while they become my gang. I never before had a bunch of friends my own age, and I like the novel feeling—finally I'm something like a teenager. There is Ken, the boy who said "Wow!"—he's the son of a famous leftist lawyer and lives in a big house in the Hollywood Hills. That's where I learn that while money can buy a home like Simone's, to create one like Ken's you need culture and taste too. Ken lends me hardcover books with intact dust jackets—Dalton Trumbo
and Upton Sinclair and Howard Fast—that he takes down from the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the rumpus room of his family's house. We sit on furniture that is shiny oak and rich brown suede, and he holds my hand and gazes at my face while he tells me with great passion about socialism and about the evils of McCarthy and how his father had defended blacklisted screenwriters and directors, and the brave and clever things they'd said in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. There is Alice, who pirouettes through the school halls on fairy toes, who wants to learn to play the dulcimer so people will call her the Damsel with the Dulcimer, who declares everything to be "curiouser and curiouser" because she knows she looks like Alice in Wonderland, with her wide periwinkle eyes. There is Mario, who reads aloud to us from the paperback of Baudelaire's
Flowers of Evil
that he carries in his back pocket, his full, red lips in an expressive pout, the bicep of his smooth, raised arm rippling as the book moves to the rhythm of the words. Ken is the heartthrob of all the cerebral girls in the Speech Club, but Mario is dubbed the sexiest boy in school by almost all the other girls and by Denny also, who calls me late at night to talk about the hidden content in any crumb—any word or gesture—that Mario deigns to pass in his direction.

I lugged the giant trophy to the YMCA in a big paper sack, feeling foolish, but I needed to hear Maury tell me that I'd done something fine. I'd shown it to my mother first: Grand Prize in Oral Interpretation—Southern California Forensic League Regionals. "Kids from fifty high schools," I'd said. She put down the Morton's Kosher Salt that she'd been sprinkling on slabs of red brisket, wiped her hands on her apron, and lifted the gilt and wood Winged Victory gingerly. She moved her lips, trying valiantly to read and understand all the words on the base, and her smile was radiant. The way it was when she used to watch me performing with Irene's troupe. But what did she know?

"Extracurricular activities. Colleges love that stuff." Maury gratified me with the words, his owl eyes fluttering under his glasses. "Keep rackin' 'em up."

If he thought it worthwhile, it must be. I was itchy in anticipation of the next tournament—mostly because I wanted to win again and have another trophy to carry up the marble staircase of the Y and present for
his approval. "Sixteen going on ten," I chastised myself, but I put myself to sleep many nights with the vision of how I'd walk through his door with another Winged Victory in my hands, and he'd say, "Ya dun good, kid! Keep it up."

"Let's see what you got in that bag," he never failed to say. Wise owl, he knew my need.

"I took a first at Occidental" or "I won the State in oral interp," I'd tell him, ashamed really by how much I relished his praise. "They're sending me to the nationals in Lexington, Kentucky!" I ran to tell him, the telling more delicious almost than the happening.

He talked and talked, for two hours or three every single week, sometimes twice a week. He was as generous with his pronouncements as he was with his time, and I accepted them both like a lost wayfarer, grateful for the beacon, the road map, the searchlight, that illuminated the way. He pointed me to plush swaths of open fields and made me intuit horizons far beyond the eye.

He lectured me: "There's no such thing really as class in America, not like in the old country. There, where you're born, you stay. Here, you can go up, you can go down. Nothing's etched in concrete, no Book of Peerage. Your parents can leave you a million, you shoot it up in heroin or some such crap in a year, and then you're nothing. Or you can be born nothing and you make yourself into something—a doctor, a lawyer, a college professor. You need brains and hard work, and it's yours. You know who Horatio Alger was? Rags to riches. It happens."

He educated me: "Do you know the greatest horror, the greatest threat to civilization? Not poverty, not ignorance. Injustice. That's what denies your basic humanity the most. That's the first thing a civilized society needs to spend its energies on—fighting injustice. Everything else falls into place when that's taken care of."

He answered my worries: "Yeah, so you're right, there aren't a lot of women doing big things. But so what? There's nothing they can't do, it's just more of a struggle for them to get to do it. Look, there have been women politicians, women scientists, women inventors, women lawyers. It's not against the law. We're not in the nineteenth century here. You just have to want it."

To this day his pronouncements, right or wrong, are etched on my psyche as much as shtetl wisdoms were etched on my aunt's. "If you're destined to drown"—she used to repeat the narrow fatalism she'd absorbed with Prael potatoes and cauliflowers—"you'll drown in a spoonful of water." She loved that one. Her other favorite was: "If something isn't the way you like it, you've got to like it the way it is."

How could I not have preferred Maury's messages of hope and righteousness and free will?

D
ENNY WORE DAZZLING SHIRTS
that were sunflower yellow, parrot green, candy apple red. He was puckish and too pretty for a boy, and anyone who thought about it would have known that his eyebrows couldn't have been arched so high and perfect without the aid of tweezers. In speech tournaments he did Biff from
Death of a Salesman
in an exaggeratedly melodramatic voice that was pitched in an upper octave and made his interpretation unintentionally comical, but that didn't seem to matter much to him. Mario was the real reason he'd joined the Speech Club.

When he called one evening to ask if I thought Mario looked greater in his black T-shirt or his white one, I said, "I'm gay too."

"I knew it, I knew it in my bones!" he shrieked and cackled; he became my best friend at Hollywood High School. I had too much to hide from the other kids.

It was Denny who introduced me to the secret life that played itself out on Hollywood Boulevard, just a couple of blocks from our school. Most passersby never seemed to notice the young men who trekked up and down the boulevard from Highland to Vine in little knots, shouting merriments or imprecations to other little knots of young men. "She" or "Mary" or some such feminine signifier was how they usually referred to one another, and they talked in high voices about cruising and camping and queens and sailor's rosaries ("the buttons on a sailor's pants that queens pray over," as Destiny, the most fabulous queen of all and my
buddy for about three months, defined it for me). A casual stroller might see a beautiful, elaborately made-up woman and think "a Hollywood starlet," but Denny introduced me to many of them, drag queens who walked the boulevard to hustle or to see how well they could pass. It was Denny also who clued me in to the gay cruising scene on the boulevard; and he took me to the Marlin Inn, a coffeehouse where underage gay boys without fake I.D.'s for the bars could hang out. Our favorite after-school stop was Coffee Dan's, a regular meeting place for the Hollywood gay crowd, where the straight patrons seldom noticed that the people in the next booth—billing and cooing or camping it up, sometimes wearing gobs of eye shadow and rouge—were all male.

Being an honorary member of the secret world of gay boys made me long for the freedoms they claimed for themselves. I'd never heard of lesbians cruising one another on the street, but I yearned to know what it would feel like to pass a strange woman on the boulevard, exchange a significant glance that would be invisible to the droves around us, and follow her (as gay boys followed one another), our blood tingling, around a corner. But if lesbians ever walked down those streets, I didn't recognize them, and I lived in celibacy through much of my junior year because I knew I had to stay out of the bars. Mostly I was okay since I had plans: I'd finish high school in a couple of years and go to a college I'd seen only a few blocks away from the Open Door, Los Angeles Junior College, and when classes were over every day I'd stop by for a beer and meet women there and have all the lovers I wanted. I'd know how not to get myself in trouble with a brutal woman like Jan. For the present, it was something at least to walk down the boulevard with the queens or hang out with them in the coffee shops.

Once in a while I "dated" gay men I met at the Marlin or Coffee Dan's. Wendell looked like a beefy young businessman and worked for the Southern California Gas Company. He asked me to front for him at a Christmas party. "You have to bring a wife or girlfriend to those things, so it would be a big favor to me," he said. "Tell them you're twenty, okay? And if they ask, say we've been going out for about a year."

I was happy to do it. "I've got a date," I told my aunt when Mr. Bergman drove her over to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows.
"He's twenty-three, has a very good job with the gas company." I waxed ecstatic. Maybe it would put a halt to her nagging for a while.

"Jewish?" she asked.

At the end of each semester I took my report cards to Maury because they were trophies too: I'd ended the eleventh grade with mostly
A
's. He blinked owl eyes behind his thick glasses as he scrutinized the grades. "
Mazel tov, bubeleh!
" he shouted and pumped my hand as though I'd brought him
nachas,
gave him pleasure as if I were his own kid. "Colleges forgive a lousy freshman year if you can make grades like this. It shows you've matured. A collitch lady you'll be, und a lady bachelor und a lady master und a lady phudd. So, where will you apply?

"Los Angeles City College?" He scowled at me when I told him my plans. "Ridiculous! That's a junior college—two years only. With grades like this and those first-place speech trophies you can write your own ticket—UCLA, Berkeley, Columbia University. Don'tcha know there's a difference between those places and someplace like Los Angeles Junior College? There's a whole big world out there. How'd you like to be living in the heart of New York? That's where Columbia is. Don'tcha know that in New York they got more theaters, concerts, museums, lectures—more of everything worth doing and seeing than anyplace on the planet?" I didn't know. I only knew that was where I came from, and those memories weren't too terrific. But Maury's words propelled me to dream of New York as a fabulous possibility. Columbia University. Or I could stay in California and go to Berkeley. Or UCLA.

The first time I saw Nicky I thought she was a straight boy. I'd gone to the Marlin Inn to meet Denny, and she was sitting at a table with him and some other queens. Her gray wool man's shirt hung loose outside her jeans, and her auburn hair was buzzed and shorter by far than anyone's at the Marlin. You had to really look in order to notice the breasts under the shirt—not because they were so small but because the whole effect was so successfully male that your eyes could trick you into ignoring the soft swell beneath the shirtfront.

She was the first lesbian I'd met in Hollywood. "Won't you join us," she said with great formality and jumped to her feet. She relieved me of
my books and almost bowed as she pulled out a chair. At first I wondered if she was making fun of me, but no, she was serious. She was Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca.

"Thank you, that's kind of you," I said. I knew how to be Ingrid Bergman too, so I let her settle me into the chair. Denny giggled. I threw him a look.

The second I took a cigarette out of my pack, there was a worn, gold-plated lighter waving in front of my nose, and when the waiter brought the coffee I'd ordered, Nicky insisted on paying, then got up to get me some apple pie and then a second cup of coffee. When I said I had to go, she asked if she could walk me home. "Sure," I said, because I missed the gay girls at the Open Door.

She talked and talked as we sauntered down Hollywood Boulevard, as though she'd had no one to talk to in a long time. I saw now that she was a great galumpf of a girl with puppy feet and puppy eyes that belied her efforts to pass as a sophisticated man. She'd come to L.A. with a magazine crew, she said, a boss and six young people. Her job was to go door-to-door with a basset hound look and a heart-wrenching tale, like "My mother and father died in a fire last month, and now I have nobody in the world except for a maiden aunt in Topeka, Kansas, and I'm trying to make enough money by selling magazines so I can take a bus back there and live with her. Won't you please help me?" "They're good magazines—and a lot cheaper than on the newsstands. People enjoy them once they get them," Nicky explained earnestly.