Mississippi Sissy (31 page)

________________

I spotted my father crawling in the bushes behind the Simpson Lady's house next door when my mother had taken Kim and Karole for an overnight visit to Forest. There had been yet another spat between my parents. It was only a few days after my father's baseball accident sliding into second and my mother had wanted him to quit the team. He refused. She took Kim and Karole and fled to my grandparents' house, leaving me behind, knowing how my sissy presence irritated him. Usually I would have hated being abandoned by her and left in his strict clutches, but I had become fascinated by the sight of that white plastic whiplash collar attached to his neck. Also, since he had been taking the painkillers that came with the collar he had been much nicer to me. I liked him better when he took those pills—my first exposure to dolls, I see now—because he liked me better, too. My girlishness amused him when he was high on those pills instead of, as
it usually did, leaving him fearful, angry, utterly sad. He even let me pretend we were having a tea party at the kitchen table that night, getting down some of my mother's good china to use as props. I watched his temples pulse as he chewed the imaginary cake I served him, though he had begun to fidget with his silverware. “You go on serving yourself this make-believe Betty Crocker shit,” he suddenly said. “Daddy's got something he's gotta do. You stay here,” he said and fled outside. I put a chair next to the backdoor after he carefully closed it and climbed up to pull the curtain back a bit and peek out at what he was up to. I caught a glimpse of the whiplash collar's white plastic glinting in the the moonlight as it moved along down low, there next door in the Simpson Lady's bushes. I put the chair back, took one more sip of the tea I pretended was in my cup, and snuck outside. I tiptoed over to watch him crawling in the dark on his hands and knees in the flower bed in the back of the Simpson Lady's house. I silently watched as he reached her bathroom window. He started to stand, careful not to make any noise himself, and I shocked him by pulling on his pants leg where I, following his example, had crawled up behind him. For a moment he did not know what to do, but decided he should make a game out of it all. “Want to see, Kevinator?” he whispered, putting his fingers to his lips to make sure I continued to make no noise. He lifted me on his shoulders and I wrapped my legs around that cool white plastic that encased his neck, so soothing in the humid nighttime heat. I peeked in the window. I saw the Simpson Lady's son sitting on the toilet. I saw him wipe his ass. His naked mother was taking a bath in the sudsy water before him, her breasts as white as the collar around my father's neck. She asked her son if he wanted to sing in the church choir. I shifted on my father's neck trying to get a better angle at what I was seeing and he let out a loud groan of pain. The Simpson Lady heard us at the window and screamed for her husband. My father dropped me to the ground. He hissed, “Run like hell for home!” a bit of advice that's
kept me running ever since. He let me scamper in front of him at first but scooped me up when I wasn't escaping fast enough. Coco barked wildly at us as we ran past her pen. In a matter of seconds we were sitting back down at the kitchen table, both of us out of breath. I started right up again, pretending I was serving my father tea. He reached out and fiercely grabbed me. I thought I was about to be hit. Instead he held me closely to his chest. “Don't breathe a word of this to another soul,” he said. “We're on the same team now, you and me, Kevinator. This is our secret. Don't you never tell nobody. This is between you and me. We're teammates, you and me,
teammates.”
His heart was beating wildly where my ear was pressed next to his chest, as wildly as my own heart was beating as Dr. Gallman gripped me tightly one last time before he let me go.

I opened my eyes.

Dr. Gallman's palm lingered over my sperm. I stared again at his opened Bible. He sighed against my neck—relieved, ashamed, unsure how exactly to deal with me now—like my father sighed against it, all those years before when he held me at the kitchen table and we finished drinking our imaginary tea. Was he, my father, the Peeping Tom, or was I? Dr. Gallman took his hand away. Proverbs, upside down, remained unreadable.

________________

Nothing was said as Dr. Gallman and I readied ourselves for breakfast that morning. He finished showering and got dressed in front of me. After perfectly knotting his necktie without even looking in the mirror, he said, “I'm going to go down to buy a newspaper and get us a table at that restaurant off the lobby. Want me to order you eggs or pancakes?”

I shrugged.

The mention of food made me feel even sicker. “Let's say pancakes,”
he decided. When he shut the door I ran to the bathroom. I knelt at the toilet. I tried to vomit but could not. The maid entered. She wet a washcloth and put it to my head. “You okay?” she asked, yet another gentle black woman coming to my rescue. “What was a'goin' on in here this mo'nin'?”

I shrugged.

When I arrived at the restaurant downstairs it was filled with African Americans of a different sort dressed in their hippest showbiz finery even though it wasn't yet noon. The neon colors of their big-collared shirts shone under the restaurant's lights. “I asked the waitress about all these people,” Dr. Gallman said when he saw me looking around at our fellow diners. “Some famous Negro singer was down the street last night performing at the Mississippi Coliseum. This is his retinue. If I had known about it we could have gotten tickets. Would you have liked that?”

I shrugged yet again. I could not look Dr. Gallman in the face. I looked down at the floor instead and saw a pair of platform shoes coming my way. I gazed up past the tight red bell-bottom pants and saw that it was James Brown walking by to sit at the table next to us. Dr. Gallman did not recognize him. He spoke instead about some headline in the morning's
Clarion-Ledger
that concerned Spiro Agnew. He then asked me if we could see each other again the next time he came to Mississippi.

“Sure,” I softly said.

I watched James Brown eat his scrambled eggs.

I lied. I do remember more than just watching the World Series in Mrs. Thompson's class when I was in fifth grade. I wish I didn't. But I do. I tried to ignore it, but it is a memory that inserts itself into my life at the oddest of moments just as it inserts itself here into this, the heightened narrative of my life. It is the secret I have always kept paired with the one I shared with my father. They are the tandem essentials of all residual secrets. I apologize to my father. I vowed to him never to reveal what happened at that bathroom window. It is a vow I had always kept until now. But breaking that one has freed me to go ahead and break another. What was it my little tomboy neighbor said to me in that dugout when we were naked and nobody then yet knew what we had done? “We just kids. We just do stuff. It's
tellin'
that
makes it bad,” she said. I've heard her wrongheaded voice inside my own head my whole life. No more. I've told. I'm telling. I'll tell.

During that fifth-grade year, my fascination with Arlene Francis gave way to a more refined crush on Audrey Whatshername, as I always liked to refer to Audrey Hepburn in deference to the memory of my father regaling his cracker-ass cronies about his love of “little-titted” women. My own little-titted mama loved Whatshername as well. One of my favorite things in all the world was to accompany my mother to the movies over in Jackson and she likewise loved to take me along, even paying for an extra ticket during the reserved-seat engagement of
Cleopatra
at the Paramount. However, it was at the Lamar where I had noticed posters announcing an upcoming Audrey Whatshername movie when my mother and Miz Kirby had gone there to see a Gig Young picture. My mother agreed to bring me back with her to see Audrey when I begged her to, nonstop, at the snack bar, so fascinated was I by the images of such a creature in the stills and poster from the upcoming film. The big black sunglasses Whatshername wore in a few of the stills added to the confused yearning I felt for her, because my father wore similar big black sunglasses himself when he was coaching or playing any outdoor sport. My mother agreed to bring me back to see Audrey Whatshername just to shut me up. “Yes, for godsake, we'll come back to see
Breakfast at Tiffany's,”
she had said. “Stop tugging at me so.”

My adoration of Audrey grew later on, when I saw her in
My Fair Lady.
That performance confirmed my crush on her and banished Arlene Francis for good from my fevered daydreams. I saw the film soon after my parents' successive deaths, and her transformation in it made me believe I could transform myself, too, once I escaped Mississippi—the very lusciousness of the film helping alleviate the bare-bones mourning from which I suffered back then. I began to watch for Whatshername's chic image—and her chic image alone—in
every movie magazine Aunt Gladys bought for me when I went to visit her in Van Winkle.

By the time
Wait Until Dark
made its way to the Town Theater in Forest, I was besotted. I knew the movie was going to be a scary experience because all the kids in school were talking about the poster that Old Lady Jacobs, the harridan who owned and ran the Town Theater, had put up for a whole month before the film's arrival. On it, Warner Bros, had printed a warning: “During the last eight minutes of this picture the theater will be darkened to the legal limit to heighten the terror of the breathtaking climax, which takes place in total darkness on the screen. In those sections where smoking is permitted those patrons are respectfully requested not to jar the effect by lighting up during this sequence. And, of course, no one will be seated at this time.”

Mom told me she wasn't sure that the movie was appropriate for me, as I had enough nightmares on my own, but I convinced her to let me go if I could come up with the money myself, knowing, of course, I could. I went into my closet and opened
Pale Horse, Pale Rider.
The year before I had taken the four quarters I earned picking cotton up at Uncle Benny's farm and Scotch-taped them into the inside cover of the book. I had honored Matty's wishes and saved them for a special Saturday matinee. There was not going to be a more special one than this.

It was a warm early-December day as matinee time approached, so I was allowed—if I wore the heavy sweater Mom laid out for me on my bed—to ride my Western Auto Western Flyer bike the few miles it took to get to the theater, which sat across from the county jail up in town. I had just enough money (Pop slipped me an extra quarter) to buy a ticket, a box of Milk Duds, and a small mixed drink, which was all the varieties of soda in the fountain—Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper, and 7-Up—pressed into one cup full of crushed ice.
Old Lady Jacobs had hung a couple of new posters of coming attractions in the lobby. One was for
Thoroughly Modern Millie
starring Julie Andrews. The other was for
Hillbillys in a Haunted House
starring Ferlin Husky, Joi Lansing, and Lon Chaney Jr., the follow-up of one of the biggest hits the Town had screened the year before,
Las Vegas Hillbillies,
in which Ferlin had costarred with Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren, two women too big-titted, I concluded while downing an earlier box of Milk Duds, for my dead daddy's taste.

I had misjudged the time it would take to ride my bike into town. When I walked inside the theater with my Milk Duds and mixed drink the place was already packed. Having always had a phobia about sitting in any seat in a movie theater that is not on an aisle, I tried to find one in the section where all the school kids sat, over to the left side, but I was unable to. Mad at myself for getting to the matinee late, I circled back through the lobby. I went to the other side of the theater. I found an aisle seat in the middle section where the adults always sat. Pouting, I plopped down and waited for Whatshername's image to flicker to life up in front of me.

A man hurried into the darkened theater and sat down beside me right before the movie started. He quickly began to frighten me more than anything up there onscreen. The story concerned a doll—yet another one in my life—that Audrey accidentally had in her possession and the villain who wanted it back because it contained a stash of heroin. The plot was convoluted and circumstantial, but I was mesmerized by Audrey's beauty and “mosquito-bite” breasts, as my father liked to describe them. I also have to admit I was equally mesmerized by the outline—there is no other way to put this—of her pussy so visible in her tight beige pants. It disconcerted me that I noticed that. She's the only woman to this day who ever made me glad to notice such a thing. By the time Audrey Whatshername's character had figured out what was going on up on the screen, I had figured out that the man sitting next to me wanted to touch my cock. I had
been hard for most of the movie, especially every time Whatshername's outlined pussy came into view. It had taken the man next to me over an hour but he had finally gotten up the nerve to drop his hand into my lap. I had removed my heavy sweater soon after I sat down and it now covered his determination as he undid my pants and maneuvered his hand inside.

I had had to pee for most of the movie, but was afraid I'd miss something if I went to the bathroom. I had also been waiting for my erection to subside, so I could pee more easily. But there was no holding it in any longer, especially with what was going on beneath my sweater. I pushed the man's hand away and buttoned my pants. I headed for the bathroom. It was the moment in the movie when Audrey discovered that her phone wire had been cut and she couldn't call the police. Her face was pressed against the railing of the stairs that led down to her basement apartment on St. Luke's Place, a block in Greenwich Village that I often went out of my way to meander along when I first moved to New York City, remembering each and every time I found myself on the bend of that lovely block the day in the Town Theater when I had first been touched by a stranger.