Mississippi Sissy (34 page)

From that sweet-sixteen moment on, all I could think about was getting to college and away from Forest. By going to summer school twice, I was able to skip my senior year and head straight to Millsaps in Jackson to major in Theater. I had also applied to NYU and the University of Missouri, thinking I might want to study journalism, as I had had such a great time writing stories and conducting interviews for the high school newspaper I had helped found. I had successfully convinced the rest of the staff to christen the paper
After Eight;
it was my secret tribute to
After Dark,
the magazine I had begun to read around that same time at Frank Hains's urging, for it was also around this time I had been cast in the New Stage production of
The Medium
and Frank entered my life. Ivan Rider, New Stage's artistic director, had almost given up on finding a boy with the right exotic quality to play the role until I walked into that A
Midsummer Night's Dream
cast party to which Joe Rex had taken me at Bleak House. When I told Ivan and Frank I had just won the Best Actor award at the state's high school drama festival at the University of Southern Mississippi, the deal was cinched. It took a lot of coaxing by me and Joe Rex and Frank and Ivan to get my grandparents to agree to let me drive the family Plymouth (that old wrecked Dodge was, well, a little dodgy) the eighty-mile round trip every day for a whole month of rehearsals and performances at the highly regarded theater, which staged its productions in an old church, the audience sitting in pews newly utilized, churches and pews an inescapable aspect of my young life even as I was beginning to escape them. I'll always be grateful to Mom and Pop for letting me be a part of that production. They recognized how much I needed to take my first tentative steps away from them, from
Old Highway 35 where we lived, from a Mississippi country life that could not keep me captive much longer. “This is something good I can ponder on later in life,” I told Mom, citing her “Alice Blue Gown” days as part of my argument. She convinced Pop that all the gas I would burn up that month would be money well spent. I adored the attention the production brought me. My picture as the mute gypsy boy was all over the Jackson papers. And young men—many more beautiful than I—waited around after the show each night to tell me how good I was in the part. But most of all I loved hanging out afterwards with the New Stage crowd, for whom Miss Welty gladly served as a kind of den mother.

Those were halycon days of literate discussions and witty banter and sucking dick, sometimes all three at the same time, especially if I went to bed, as was my wont, with Carl Davis, that dashing bisexual advertising executive who looked like Robert Redford and acted in many of New Stage's productions. He was as debonair to me in his late-thirties demeanor as he was slightly tortured by how I was making him feel. “Rather foolish,” he told me once, as we lay naked in each other's arms after one of my performances. “But rather grateful, too. I'm not sure which is more troubling. Are you trouble?” I shrugged. I turned toward him and, like Dr. Gallman had done to me, took as much of his shoulder as I could inside my mouth and felt my teeth shudder against him. “Make me cum,” I whispered single-mindedly. “Make me cum again, Carl. Make me cum.”

I also started to sneak into the gay bar in Jackson back when I was sixteen, going on seventeen, or going on whatever age you wanted me to be. One had to be eighteen to get into a club, but I got around that by slicing the raised numbers off my new driver's license and rearranging them so my rejiggered birth date would make me old enough. I glued the rearranged numbers back on and slipped the license back into its plastic sleeve in my wallet. It looked a little haphazard but did the trick. The old couple whose son owned the gay bar located up a
flight of rickety stairs in a dilapidated building located on a deserted side street in downtown Jackson—Mae's Cabaret was its name—would look at me kind of funny but go ahead and let me in. They always worked the door for their son, and during my fourth or fifth visit there they asked me if I had ever lived in Pelahatchie. Shocked by the question, I just stood staring at them. “It's okay, honey,” said the little round, big-haired woman. “I recognize your name on this driver's license. And who can forget that pretty face. We're Mr. and Mrs. Myers. ‘Member us? Jack, that's my son who owns this place—he's Mae—used to be the manager when he was in high school for the basketball team for your daddy when we lived over yonder. Ever'body called him ‘Tip' back then. Small world, ain't it? Lord, what would Coach Sessums say if he knew you was spendin' time at Mae's.”

Her husband, wearing thick-lensed glasses and his usual pair of overalls, looked me up and down. “I knew you'd end up in a place like this when I saw you doin' them cheers with them Pelahatchie Chiefs cheerleaders when you wasn't but knee-high to a June bug,” the man said. “Jack wanted to be a cheerleader hisself but we made him settle on bein' the manager for Coach Ses. Boy cheerleaders ain't looked at with much respect ‘round these parts, I told him, if ya' catch my drift. I ain't got nothin' agin boys like y'all—shoot, I give him the money to open up this queer bar once we was out of Pelahatchie—but you got t'member where you livin'.” He looked at me some more. “You can't be no eighteen neither by my figurin', but go on ahead inside. Once dick-suckin' gets a'holt'ya, ain't nothin' gonna keep you away from it. Safer in here than a truck stop out on 1-20.” His wife hit him on his shoulder but laughed at his irreverence. “Coach Ses'd never forgive me if I didn't keep a eye out fer'ya,” he said. “You behave in here. We gotta a drag show tonight goin' on. Wait till you see that colored boy from Corinth we got doin' Gladys Knight's ‘Midnight Train to Georgia.'“

“Carthage,” his wife corrected him. “The Lady Naomi's from Carthage.”

“Wherever,” he said. “Naomi's my favorite. ‘At boy'll knock your socks off when he throws that suitcase down from the stage and it opens up and all his extra-large lingerie comes a'fallin' out along with some of them rubber dicks. That's when he starts makin' his tips. Here,” the man said, handing me back the dollar out of the cash box I had just given him. Mae's Cabaret didn't have a cash register at the door. “After he throws that suitcase down on the dance floor and falls on his knees right behind it—Jack give him some old kneepads to wear under his gown that he must've stole from Coach Ses and one of them Chiefs he coached, ‘cause that colored boy, he ain't little neither, not by a long shot, falls right on his knees from way up on the stage down to the dance floor, that's a right fer piece, crowd goes wild, you'll see—you go on over and stuff this here dollar I'm givin' back to you into the Lady Naomi's fake tits. That's the way it's done. Go on now. Have fun. Line's formin' behind'ya.”

I took the dollar. I sat in a corner and sipped at the Coke I got at the bar. The place didn't have a liquor license, but sold something called setups from the bar for the older people who brought their own liquor in brown paper bags. I was often offered liquor by old drunks trying to pick me up but I always had my eye out for boys closer to my age. There weren't that many to be found at Mae's. But every now and then one would wander in and we'd pair off in the parking lot. That night I looked for Jack, that pudgy, pimply-faced basketball team manager who'd been so mean to me back in my father's locker room. I'd been waiting my whole life to hit him back like he'd hit me, on the top of his head, almost ruining that first visit my father had allowed me down there underneath the gym. I saw a door open that led backstage and, though he was backlit by the narrow hallway's bare bulb, I could tell it was Jack. Even pudgier—he looked more like his
mama now—he still had that same walk, a determined waddle that gave him, oddly, an air of authority, whether it was needed to run a high school basketball team or Jackson's only gay bar. He waddled right by me. I almost put a foot out to trip him. But as I drank Coke after Coke that night and watched him greet his regular customers and handle the varied egos of the drag queens about to perform and keep his eyes on the bartenders hovering at the cash register behind his bar, I gained a new respect for him, and even a newfound fondness. He was no longer pimply faced, but he still had those same doe eyes I remembered, that seemed so full of a contemptuous recognition whenever my father made him tend to me. Back in that Pelahatchie gym he often looked like a deer caught in headlights, but now, here at Mae's where he felt at home, he looked more relaxed, less wide-eyed, a heavy-lidded jadedness lending him a Bambi-after-a-few-beers leer. He kept checking on his mother and father at the door and making sure they were comfortable, steadily supplying them with soda and snacks, a bag of pork rinds for his daddy, his mama munching on any Lay's product he put in front of her. Sometimes he'd stand off by himself and contemplatively watch the disco ball turning in the light above the dance floor as it glittered and speckled the faces of Mae's denizens so thankful to have a place we could be ourselves for a few hours, an inner sanctum more precious to us than any locker room, cigarette smoke taking the place of steam as it rose around us in a haze-enhanced world, the only world back in the early 1970s that would have us. He said “darlin' ” a lot, something he had not said when sitting on my daddy's bench with those basketball players, and wore a muumuu and purposefully bad makeup later when he lip-synched to Vestal Goodman singing “I've Found a Better Way” off a Happy Goodman Family gospel album. I tipped him the dollar his daddy had given me instead of tipping the Lady Naomi, that fat colored boy from Corinth or Carthage—it didn't really matter where he came from. We had all come from the same place, somewhere that
didn't want us. When I stepped into the spotlight to stuff the dollar into Jack's pudgy palm he held my hand a long moment and stared into my eyes. A look of shock—a recognition no longer contemptuous—registered beneath his wig and badly applied eye shadow. The crowd whooped with delight, thinking he was flirting with a beautiful teenage boy who had happened into the place, but we both knew we were looking into the eyes of our earlier selves. He hesitated before hitting me on top of my head for old times' sake, this time both of us acknowledging the flirtatious sting the gesture was meant to leave behind. Later, in the corner of Mae's parking lot, I jerked off somebody in the backseat of his mama's old Studebaker, and as I stared at the discarded candy wrappers on the floor as he shot his load in my hand, I thought of that gallant ballplayer on my father's high school team who defended me against Jack Myers back when he had pimples and dared to perform in his mama's muumuu only in private.

Mae's Cabaret became my refuge throughout the two years I went to Millsaps—even though I had a girlfriend I met while in line at the registrar's office my first day on campus during freshman orientation. She was in front of me wearing a halter top and I couldn't take my eyes off of the lovely array of freckles across her shoulders and back. When she turned to say hello, I instantly fell for her. I don't know why. It still confuses me. But I can truthfully say she is one of the few people for whom I felt real love. The sex was good, too, and we weathered the requisite pregnancy scare. But my truer self was homosexual and I kept returning, behind her back, to Mae's and to men. I also joined a fraternity at college, Pi Kappa Alpha, and had sex with two of my fraternity brothers. The sex with a younger one was more of a lark after a drunken night of stealing plants from old ladies' porches around Miss Welty's house on Pinehurst. The sex with an older one, however, was more meaningful to me. It took my whole freshman year to seduce him but I would not give up. He reminded me of Bobby Thompson, who still filled my thoughts. Young gay boys
fall first for boys we want to
be
more than boys we want to
fuck.
Both Bobby and my Pike brother fit the bill, not only with their smooth-bodied blond-haired beauty compared to my increasingly hairy-chested brunet looks, but with their lives of privilege compared to my hardscrabble one. They were both preppy, both effortlessly popular. The first time I slept with my older Pike brother was, I kid you not, after we went to see Woody Allen's adaptation of
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)
together at the Paramount Theatre when it finally came to Jackson. And we kept sleeping together sporadically for the rest of my time in college—whether it was in our respective dorm rooms or at Frank's when I'd stay at his house while he was away in New York seeing shows for his arts column in the
Daily News.
I even once showed him Frank's collection of pornography in that secret trunk, knowing it would make Frank crazy if he knew I was doing it, but also knowing—I had checked it out many times myself when Frank wasn't around—that there was enough pussy in there to get my Pike brother horny. He wasn't as queer as I was, just queer enough to make love to me, or, more precisely, to allow me to make love to him. For me, at that time in my life, it was enough.

Indeed, it was more than enough, for when it stopped I was devastated. Gossip had started to percolate around campus about the two of us. My girlfriend and I had broken up, and people were beginning to notice that my Pike brother and I were spending way too much time together. By that time, I had decided not to hide the fact I frequented Mae's Cabaret, which was, I guess, a rather brave stance for any eighteen-year-old to take back in the early seventies. The only regret I had about my openness was that it was putting so much distance now between my Pike brother and me. One night at Mae's, while Shirley & Co.'s “Shame Shame Shame” was blaring from the sound system, I was drowning my sorrow at losing both a girlfriend and what passed for a boyfriend in my life with a series of a liquored-up
Cokes (Jack let me borrow one of his bottles of Bacardi) when I heard a voice ask, interrupting one of Shirley's shouted “shames,” if the seat next to me was taken. I looked up. At first all I could see was a giant Afro encircling the guy's head in the light reflecting off the disco ball behind him, a massive halo of frizzy hair like that overly serious actor on
The Mod Squad
whose Afro was so big it was like a fourth lead character. The guy's voice, unlike so many surrounding me in Mae's, was not effeminate at all. His overabundance of cologne, however, was bordering on the feminine, such a perfumy presence at odds with the physique so obvious beneath his tight polyester shirt and even tighter low-slung jeans. “Do you mind?” he asked, pulling out the chair. “I've been watching you. You look so sad. It seems you could use some company. My name is Frank, by the way. Frank Dowsing.”