Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (11 page)

I stood there flush with shame, feeling as if I were five and had just been caught pressing. I nodded yes in silence for a few seconds to let her know that I had absorbed what she’d said and that I agreed. “Yes, I think I’ve learned my lesson.”

“Good. You’ve got too much going for you to let that get in your way. With your grades and talent, you can do
anything
. You can be a writer.” She was proud that I was editor of
The Spectator,
the school newspaper, and that I’d had a story published in the
Beaumont Enterprise,
“Christmas Is in the Closet.”
No comment on the title.
“Or a diplomat!”
A diplomat?
“So
don’t
let the drinking get in the way. It’s not worth it.”

I wanted to say,
Jesus. Relax. It was just
one
night.
Instead I nodded in agreement.

She got up and looked down at the pile of last night’s clothes. Before she left, she pointed to a lone sock. “I think its mate is in the den.”

I had learned my lesson that year. No more duchesses. No more whores. And no more Everclear.

NINE

Destiny

“Where in the
hell
have you been?! I can
never
reach you.” Mama Jean’s voice was long-distance, but, as always, her words were loud and clear. “Where in the hell have you been?” had long since replaced “Where have you been, Lord Randall, my son?” from my childhood days.

“Well, I was in class, then at rehearsal … busy,” I said, two hundred miles, and a world away, from her. I looked down at the gold-and-onyx ring on my finger. She had given it to me four months earlier for graduating seventh in my high school class with the words “No mother could love a son more than I do.”

It was the fall semester of my freshman year in college. I had landed at Trinity University, an exclusive ivory tower of a liberal-arts school five hours from Beaumont, in San Antonio.
U.S. News & World Report
annually dubbed it “the Ivy League of the Southwest.” Wisteria League was more like it. What
U.S. News & World Report
didn’t tell its readers was that Trinity was rumored to be thirty percent gay. And I was happy to raise the percentage.

I’d enrolled in a playwriting class. Mama Jean and Dad had proverbial front-row seats. They were eager to see my work, so I mailed them a dot-matrix printout of my first assignment, a five-minute opening scene for a comedy about a straight girl and her gay best boyfriend, who might actually be in love with her. I based it on my friendship with Nicole.

“We read your scene and just
loved
it,” she said, speaking for herself and Dad. “We’re so proud of you!”

“I’m glad y’all like it.”

“I don’t know how you do it. I couldn’t write my way out of a paper sack. You sure don’t get that from me. That’s
all
your father.”

“Maybe I can write ’em
and
star in ’em.” I was still harboring dreams of being an actor, but I wasn’t going to dare major in theater.

“No, you need to be a writer.
That’s
what you should be doing! I’m telling you, your ticket is the writing. And remember what I’ve always said:
you
control your destiny.”

I never believed her all the times she said that because I believed that
she
controlled my destiny.

“I can’t wait to read how the rest of the play turns out.” After a pause she continued with an uncharacteristic hesitancy in her voice. “You don’t have tendencies like that? Do you?”

Tendencies? I am a full-blown sodomite.
I hadn’t planned on telling her then, but she asked. Actually, she had already asked—that time in junior high—but this time I pulled a Mama Jean and spoke the truth of my mind and my heart. “Yes. I do.”

She shouted away from the phone, but her voice still pierced my eardrums. “Earl!
Earl!
Pick up the phone!
Now!
Jamie’s on the line. He has something to tell us.
Earrr-rul!
Where in the
hell
are you?!”

She cried and told me she should have seen it coming. I thought she had seen it coming when I was five and danced along with the opening credits of
I Dream of Jeannie
—hands over head in a prayer gesture, hips swaying left to right, feet pointing in opposite directions—or when she dressed me up as Marco Polo for my fifth-grade history class, down to her pantyhose for tights, and I never wanted to take off the outfit.

Dad remembers this phone call differently. He says that he was already on the phone and he was the one who asked, “Are you writing about yourself? Do you have tendencies like that?” I think I remember Mama Jean asking the question because she was always the one to speak any truth that was as clear as the lipstick on her mouth.

But Dad might be right because he could see, while she was still in the dark. When it came to any flaw in me (and homosexuality was most definitely a flaw in her mind), she was blind and fiercely protective.

A few weeks after the call, I went home for a visit and Dad took me out to our first father–gay son lunch. “Your mother seems to be surprised, but I think I realized a while ago.” Neither of us brought up that long walk in silence on the beach in Acapulco after Limey and Racing Stripes took my photo. Nor did we mention the case of the cauliflower bouquet and the dirty gym towel in Dr. Faudi’s office.

“You know that we love you no matter what you are and we want you to be happy.” Sip of chardonnay. He looked back at me with his eyes popped and brows raised, that look of his that said more than he could speak. “Just be careful.”

“I will.”

“And don’t march in any of those parades.”

*   *   *

During that first semester of college, I popped the cork of liberation to imbibe in love, lust, and libations. I dove fearlessly into the deep end of the buoyant water of boys, booze, and late nights free of Mama Jean’s morning-after inquisitions. Within six months—no, it was six weeks, but college years are like dog years—I had lived so many lives, opened so many windows, run so many ways: from
Doctor Faustus,
to Byzantine Madonnas, to Ecstasy pills, to meeting and shedding two sets of new friends, to my first boyfriend.

After I dropped the H-bomb on the phone, I told Mama Jean with the bravado and na
ï
vet
é
of first love that I had found a boyfriend: age-appropriate, fellow-freshman-classmate, myopic, intellectual Michael Parker. He was about five-ten with a smattering of freckles on his pale complexion. His baby-soft hair was returning to its natural light-brown shade as vestiges of a platinum-blond dye job faded. Somewhere along the way he became Mr. Parker for his Edwardian demeanor and acerbic tongue. He’d rest his chin on his hand and gaze wide-eyed from behind his glasses—or “spectacles” as he preferred to call them—ready to critique and dissect whatever you were telling him, which he never took at face value.

We met over Fuzzy Navels (peach schnapps and orange juice—
barf!
—but it got the job done) at somebody’s dorm-room boy party. I wowed him with my impressions of Carol Channing and Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford. He wowed me with his erudite conversation, which he delivered in vocabulary-rich, complete sentences, as if he’d scripted his dialogue before going out.

“The way in which you re-create Miss Channing’s persona is
astounding
.” And: “My God, you as Faye as Joan is incredible, but have you seen Miss Crawford’s Oscar-winning performance in
Mildred Pierce
?”

“Not yet,” I said, ashamed.

“Well, you should. It’s sublime.”

“Have you seen
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
my favorite movie—and book—of all time?”

“Of course,” he said without hesitation. I later discovered he hadn’t.

After the Fuzzy Navels wowed us both, I drove him to a back alley in my Pontiac Sunbird, where we consummated our love in the backseat. I almost ruined the spontaneity with my “Not on the seat” cries of concern about staining the upholstery.

Mr. Parker wasn’t a theater queen—he knew Latin, history, and spoke Spanish fluently—but he was an old-movie queen at a young age, like me. Our first real date was cult-movie night on campus. The feature was what I now know is a camp classic,
Lady in a Cage.
It starred Olivia de Havilland in her scream-queen phase as a heaving-bosomed widow trapped in a house elevator while her live-in homosexual son is away for the weekend and thugs invade her gewgawed home. I told him that my mother had a figurine of an eighteenth-century lady just like Miss de Havilland’s. A few scenes later one of the thugs shattered the figurine. We grabbed each other and Nellie-screamed in horror, our relationship cemented with that movie.

I jumped the gun in telling Mama Jean about Mr. Parker. We only lasted six weeks. Mr. Parker threw me over for Colton. Colton had three traits that obsessed Mr. Parker: he was pint-size, blond, and an ambigubod (as in undeclared sexuality, which made him an instant turn-on to Mr. Parker).

Mr. Parker and I agreed to be friends, and two weeks later I was getting ready for a party Mr. Parker and his roommate, Ed, were throwing. No reason to miss a party. My party outfit was all-black. I had cast off the preppy clothes that Mama Jean had bought me (for evening wear, anyway) and was trying to blend in with the “clad-in-blackers,” as we dubbed the cool club kids with their two-toned hair and cassette tapes of the Smiths and the Cure and New Order. I wore a black turtleneck, black Girbaud jeans, and black Weejuns penny loafers (one last vestige of preppy). I crowned the outfit with a black beret from a thrift store. I thought it was a brilliant stroke of fifties beatnik chic.

I arrived late because I had to strike the set of a show I had been working crew on, and I bitterly resented it. The party was raging when I arrived. The bread box of a dorm room was packed with moussed and gel-spiked heads bobbing to the Smiths (rumored to be real, live homosexuals) plaintively singing “How Soon Is Now,” about being human and needing to be loved like everyone else. Over the Smiths’ forlorn wail, I announced my presence with a bray of “Oh my God! You’re all drunker than I’ll
ever
be!”

Uproarious laughter. Immediate attention on me.

“Oh my God! We thought you’d
never
get here,” Mr. Parker said.

“Me either.”

“You need a drink!”

“Yeah, I need a drink.”

Someone handed me a paper Dixie cup filled with store-bought ice, cheap rum, and orange juice. I downed it in two gulps and thrust the empty cup into the air like the Statue of Liberty’s torch. “I need another.” More laughter.

“I love your outfit,” someone said.

“Thanks. Very Audrey Hepburn in
Funny Face,
don’t you think?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Think beatnik.”

“Can I try on your beret?” someone slurred.

Before I could answer, the beret was lifted from my head. As I took giant gulps to catch up to the party’s buzz, my beret bopped around the room like a beach ball to the Pet Shop Boys singing “West End Girls.” The last place I saw it land was on Mr. Parker’s head as he danced with a blas
é
Colton.

I was thrilled that my beret had become the hottest party favor since a fat joint. But I wanted it back. My outfit was incomplete and I was certain I had hat head. In between gulping drinks and gyrating to Mr. Parker’s favorite band, New Order, I would swing my arm in the air as if it were a dance move, but really to fluff up my hair.

By the time the Bangles were singing “Walk Like an Egyptian,” my dance steps were more Frankenstein monster than pharaoh deity. I ran my hand through my still-flat hair.
Where’s my beret? I
want
my beret.
As soon as I thought it, I said it. Something I only did when I was drunk.

“Where’s my beret?!”

“I don’t have it.”

“I think it’s over there.”

“No one’s seen your silly beret.”

“Where’s my beret?” I was like a dog
without
his bone. “I
want
my beret!”

I surveyed the room, which was now a quarter full with the diehards bopping to Bananarama’s “Venus.” No one had my beret. I searched the room with the singular focus of King Kong lumbering through New York City on a quest for Fay Wray, pulling up pillows and bedspreads and tossing them down when I didn’t find what I wanted.

I laser-beamed my inquisition at Mr. Parker. “Where’s my beret?”

“Jamie, darling. I haven’t seen your beret.”

I scowled. “
You
took it.”

“Honestly, Jamie, I don’t have your beret.”

Straight out went my right arm like an unhinged gate. It swung fast and loose until the palm end of it crashed into Mr. Parker’s right cheek, making a soundstage effect of a slap, only it was real.

Stunned silence except for Bananarama still chanting about Venus,
“Yeah, baby, she’s got it!”

I never saw that beret again.

I woke up the next morning feeling as if
I
had been slapped in the face. Not just because my hangover was award-winning, but because I couldn’t fathom that I had actually hit someone.
I am a lover, not a fighter.
I liked to joke that when straight men get drunk, they fight, but when gay men get drunk, they fuck.
How did I cross that line?

*   *   *

After that first year of ecstatic freedom I was back in Beaumont, where summer had covered the town like a wet towel after a scalding shower. Being back under Mama Jean’s roof felt as oppressive as the humidity. The ground was lousy with Mama Jean land mines. Not long after she informed me that there were only two kinds of sex—oral and anal—and cryptically declared, “You don’t know what love is,” another Mama Jean explosion erupted.

“Don’t you ever,
ever,
refer to yourself that way! That makes me sick!” Mama Jean’s rage was pointed—with the help of her mascara wand—at the parody of
The Spectator,
our high school newspaper. I was making it for my friend Nicole because that’s the kind of silly stuff we did to amuse each other to break up the boredom of a summer in Beaumont. “You should have more self-respect than that.”