Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (12 page)

I stood silent, half-dressed for my summer job at the White House (not
that
White House, but Beaumont’s fledgling answer to Neiman Marcus), and stared down at the mock
Spectator
. I had foolishly left it exposed on my desk, sitting below the framed
Playbill
s.

What had ignited her rage was the headline I’d written over my graduation photo: “Fashion Fag & Drama Queen Jamie Brickhouse Saves the White House.” She couldn’t handle the
fag
part.
Would she prefer I use her word,
fruit
?

“And I’m not paying for you to go to that fancy school so you can be an actor. You can try that
after
you graduate!” Poof! She was gone. Her fuse burned down the hallway from my bedroom to her bathroom.

I pushed the parody
Spectator
into the trash and continued to get ready for work.

When I was in high school, she had bought me a trunkful of new clothes, each outfit carefully coordinated by her. A day later I said something that hurt her feelings—I don’t remember what—and she retaliated by grabbing all of the clothes and storming off with them to her room. We made up and she gave back the clothes. But the message was clear: anything I did that she didn’t like meant I didn’t love her. And I’d sooner go naked than leave the house without her love and validation.

That summer I made a decision. I wouldn’t major in theater. I’d major in something vaguely creative but more practical, communication, with a focus on journalism, and I’d audition for plays on the side. The booze and the sex I was in control of. They were all mine and she couldn’t stop me from chasing them. Her idealized image of me—though already fractured—I would keep separate.

Booze. Sex. Her love. Unwittingly, I’d created a kind of golden triangle that left me standing in the middle of a highway. The only problem with standing on that yellow, broken line is that the traffic passing you by in both directions will eventually kill you.

Part II

Mr. Golightly (1990–2006)

Promise me one thing: don’t take me home until I’m drunk—very drunk indeed.

—Holly Golightly, from
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
by Truman Capote

After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.

—Oscar Wilde

TEN

Swingin’, Baby, Swingin’!

I was standing at the antique art deco bar Mama Jean had reluctantly bought me after I moved to New York. In my left hand was a lit cigarette and a martini. In my right hand, a cocktail shaker. I was about to refill the martini glass of a party guest, a friend of a friend.

“How’s the party going?” she asked.

“Swingin’, baby,
swingin’!
” I laughed and refilled her martini glass.

She took a sip of her martini. “Mmm. You make a mean martini.”

“Thanks. We’re hanging a sign over the door like McDonald’s:
BILLIONS
OVER
-SERVED
.”

She cackled at that. “Remind me again. You’re from
where
?”

“Beaumont, Texas. It’s a small town in southeast Texas, near Houston. But my whole life I knew I was destined for New York. The summer I graduated college I took the Radcliffe Publishing Course, a postgraduate course in book and magazine publishing. I mean, I came here to get into publishing, but I really came here because I
had
to be in New York.”

“New York must have been culture shock after Texas.”

“No. The first eighteen years of my life was culture shock.
This
I understand.”

I smiled as I surveyed the crush of people in the Upper West Side Manhattan apartment that I shared with my boyfriend of a year, Michael Hayes, or Michahaze, as he was known, because of the rapid-fire way he pronounced his first and last names when he cranked up his East Tennessee dialect. We lived in the kind of apartment I’d always seen myself in—brownstone walk-up, wood floors, exposed-brick walls—and threw the kinds of parties for which I was born. The apartment was a reverse clown car as a parade of people poured into the narrow room to the competing sounds of Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart” and the blasting door buzzer. “Could somebody just
lean
on the buzzer?” I shouted across the sea of bobbing, laughing, swilling, talk-yelling heads. At the far corner of the room two wasp-waisted boys and the Rasta Ecstasy dealer disappeared into the sliver of a bedroom Michahaze and I shared.
I wonder when my X will kick in?

I met Michahaze in 1990, six weeks after moving to New York to break into publishing. Whenever people asked us how we met, we told them in Central Park. It was September 23, the first day of fall. I was walking my roommate’s dog. Michahaze was jogging. We went out a week later. “That’s so romantic,” girls would gush.

It’s actually impolite to ask gay men where they met because the answer is rarely polite. It’s almost never at a party or through friends. It’s more likely cruising on the street, at the bathhouse, on the phone lines (in those days), or, at best, at a bar. Michahaze and I did meet in Central Park, but in the Ramble, the Brothers Grimm wooded area of winding paths famous for watchers of birds and seekers of snakes—the one-eyed kind.

It was twilight. I wasn’t having any luck until a blond wearing a gold shirt, jeans, and a suede backpack materialized under the newly lit streetlight. The blond smiled. I smiled. He motioned me up the hill with his head. I followed.

The sex had a tenderness that I hadn’t felt in situations like that, and he possessed a sweetness that I’d never experienced with anyone before. When it was over, rather than immediately separating and walking away with an awkward “Thanks, man” or “See you around,” we hugged each other. Intensely. For a long time. Neither of us wanted to let go. When we finally did, we stared into each other’s eyes in the semidark of the new night. We walked hand in hand out of the park. Under the streetlight he looked at my hair: “Oh, you’re a redhead. Like me.”

I looked at him. “You’re not a redhead. You’re blond.”
I’m not picking out china patterns yet, but if this is going anywhere, there can only be one redhead in this relationship.

“Strawberry blond,” he conceded. With his close-cropped and side-parted hair, he was a boyish thirty-two to my twenty-two. He was as adorable as the dentist from
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
. Then I saw his eyes. They were unlike any I’d ever seen before—a blue-green but with a halo of gold around the pupils. We went out a week later on a real date. I brought him a bouquet of purple irises, the Tennessee state flower, and he took me to dinner at Yippee Yi Yo, a Texas country-cooking joint. He told me that he’d been looking for me. Just months before we met, he was in Scotland and paid a visit to a legendary tree where people leave a garment and make a wish. “My wish was to meet the love of my life,” he told me. “I tied a tube sock to a branch and made my wish.”
To think that I can be had for the sacrifice of a tube sock. A jockstrap would be more romantic.

I had been looking too. The only real boyfriend I’d had before Michahaze was Mr. Parker, but that was only for six weeks when I was a freshman in college. Since then I had had a cavalcade of men, but no boyfriends. Some people were serial monogamists. I was a serial fornicator.
Some people call that a slut.

The guys I actually dated tended to have big personalities like mine, but turned out to be no-count flakes from Carlos Fitzpatrick de Novarro on. Michahaze was unlike anyone I’d ever gone out with before. While I was usually “on”—telling jokes, doing impressions, talking about old movies and the theater—he was reserved and soft-spoken, talking about politics and ways to improve life in the city. He was an architect, which impressed me. I had wanted to be one before I discovered the theater (and realized all the math involved in becoming an architect).

But Michahaze was an eager audience member, always ready for a good time. Early in our courtship we were two sheets to the wind one Sunday morning, conjoined with the sashes of our robes, Bloody Marys in hand and dancing. I shouted, “At last! I’ve found someone who likes to drink as much as me!”

Best of all, he called when he said he’d call. He showed up where he said he’d show up, usually meticulously dressed in a plaid blazer, bow tie, and silk pocket square. After nine months I moved in with him to the Upper West Side apartment on West Eighty-second Street.

Michahaze had his first audience with Mama Jean at the Royalton Hotel not long after we had moved in together. The Royalton was where he had taken me for drinks on one of our early dates. It was the chicest hotel at the time, with its Alice-gets-drunk-in-Wonderland-fantasy lobby. Mama Jean and Dad were perched on a chartreuse velvet sofa under horn-shaped sconces, she sipping a champagne cocktail, he drinking a glass of chardonnay.

Mama Jean never quite bought the Central Park story, at least the way I told it. “Now, let me get this straight,” she said. “You were walking a dog, and Michael just stopped running, turned around, and said, ‘I believe I’ll have some of that’?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“I don’t quite get how that works, but okay.” Even with the sugarcoated facts, she managed to extract the essence of our meeting. I presented Michahaze in his ocher-and-maroon-plaid blazer and bow tie. Dad rose to greet us in his navy-blue blazer and red paisley tie. Mama Jean remained seated in her black linen dress and held out her hand for Michahaze to shake. He shook it, and as he did, I caught her glancing at me wearing one of Michahaze’s bow ties and plaid jackets. She didn’t recognize the outfit, hadn’t bought it. The tie around my neck was almost as tight as my sphincter hovering above that velvet sofa.

“I’ll have a Manhattan,” I told the clad-in-black cocktail waitress.

“A Manhattan?” Mama Jean cocked her head. “Isn’t that a little strong? I thought you liked champagne cocktails.” She glanced at hers.

“Too sweet.”

She rolled her eyes and sighed.

I sat there in silence as Michahaze told Mama Jean about his rising career as an architect, but mostly as she and he discussed my budding career in publishing. I was working in the publicity department of a major trade publishing house. They talked about me in the third person, as if I weren’t there.

“Well, this is a good start, but he really needs to be writing. That’s what he should be doing. He gets that from Earl.”

Dad smiled. I nodded. Michael agreed. The moment wasn’t unlike the parent-teacher conferences I was allowed to sit in on when Mama Jean and the teacher discussed my talents and how best to direct them.

Mama Jean also tooted her horn about how far she’d come with gay acceptance. “I can’t tell you that I was happy when Jamie told me he was gay, but when I hear about parents turning their backs on their own children because of that, it makes me sick. Earl and I were visiting our friends Yum Yum and Dan. Dan started going on about the fags this and the fags that.” She gritted her teeth and lowered her voice, as she must have with Dan. “I told him, ‘You better watch it, Dan. I’m the mother of two gays.’ He didn’t
dare
say another word after that.”
I’ll bet he didn’t.

After my two Manhattans and Michael’s Southern charm, sprinkled with just the right amount of praise—for her outfit and for producing such a marvelous son—had worked their magic, I relaxed. I excused myself to the bathroom.

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and adjusted Michahaze’s bow tie.
This is going well
.
I love him and I think she likes him.

I pranced down the royal-blue-carpeted runway of the hotel lobby back to our table. My prance ground to a halt and the smile on my face went slack when I saw the cloud that had formed over our table. Mama Jean was dabbing tears from her eyes. She was talking to Michahaze, and Dad was looking away from them and scratching the back of his neck. When he saw me, Dad gave me his raised-eyebrows look and took a sip of his chardonnay.

“I hope y’all are careful.”

“Of course, Jean.”

Dad interjected. “Now, honey, don’t get all worked up.”

“Well, I can’t help it, Earl. I
am
worked up!” She turned her back on him, shot a quick glance at me, and fixed Michahaze with a steely glare.

“What happened?” I asked, looking at everyone.

Mama Jean ignored me. “Because if anything ever happened to Jamie, they’d have to lock me up and throw away the key.” Her face was in close-up, an impenetrable wall of moistened makeup and don’t-fuck-with-me stare.

“Mother.” (I always called her Mom, but this moment required Mother.) “Don’t worry, we’re safe.”

“Okay, but promise me.
Promise.
”

“I promise.” With one raise of the eyebrow I gave Michael the “Now you know what I mean about Mama Jean” look. I glanced at my watch. “Well, we better go if we’re going to make our dinner reservation.”

Mama Jean handed Dad her credit card, and he took care of the tab. As we left the lobby, she pulled me aside. “Well, I’m impressed.” When Mama Jean said this about someone, she meant not only that she liked the person but that she respected him. “Michael is
really
fine.” She meant
fine
as in “high quality.” “You can see that he’s so meticulous and conscientious about everything he does—I haven’t seen you wear that jacket before—and he knows how to behave.” Pause. “It’s better that you’re gay. I could never share you with another woman.”

ELEVEN

A Frog in Cha-Cha Heels

I was two sips into my martini the first time I saw supersize drag queen Divine in a baby-doll nightie throw a monumental fit on Christmas morning. I was at the Works, a gay bar around the corner from our West Eighty-second Street apartment. The bartender had turned down the music so the entire bar could watch the TV screen as Divine, playing Dawn Davenport in John Waters’s cult classic
Female Trouble,
tears open her present expecting the cha-cha heels she has her cholesterol-encrusted heart set on. Her face is as excited as, well, a child’s on Christmas morning, as her father and slip of a mother look on. When she pulls out a pair of low-heeled, sensible shoes, her face falls and she explodes in anger. “What are
these
? These aren’t cha-cha heels! I
told
you the kind I wanted!” She throws a tantrum to rival that of a drugged-out rock star in a hotel room, stomps on those
wrong
kind of shoes, and buries her whimpering mother under the toppled Christmas tree. “I hate Christmas!” Divine shouts, and flees the room, a blubber of sobs.