Swish (16 page)

Near the end of the show, the heroine, Lorelei, comes to believe that the Nazis have destroyed all the sketches she made of her friends and family. But in the last scene, after the war is over, she finds the drawings secreted away throughout the camp, hidden by other inmates between bricks, behind shingles, under floorboards. During a recent rehearsal for a production outside of Seattle, as I watched Lorelei learn that through her creation something of her loved ones still lived, what I was thinking about was
Moon Landscape.
In 2002, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon asked the Jerusalem Holocaust memorial for an artifact to take into space; they gave him a drawing by Petr Ginz, who at fourteen had been an inmate of Terezin. Ramon had
Moon Landscape
with him on the space shuttle
Columbia
when it blew up over Texas on February 1, 2003, what would have been Ginz’s seventy-fifth birthday.

A few days after the
Columbia
disaster I read that the only living things to survive the rain of aluminum and flesh and mystery into which the shuttle had exploded were some worms. They were
C. elegans,
apparently the first multicellular organism whose genome scientists mapped completely, which was why they had been taken into space in a container that later fell to earth intact—researchers wanted to find out how reproduction over multiple generations in space affected the species.

It turns out, I learned, that
C. elegans
is hermaphroditic; it reproduces itself. Maybe, I thought, this means it’s whole in a way no
Homo sapiens,
gay or straight, can ever be, because it can just keep going and going past the end of time with no help from anybody or anything, while if we can’t love one another and annoy one another and have sweaty awkward sex with one another we die for good.

Petr Ginz was murdered in Auschwitz two years after he drew
Moon Landscape,
so he never got any closer to the moon he drew than the
Columbia
astronauts did. Still, I hope that on that February day in 2003 his picture was ripped into seven billion pieces, one for every person on this planet, and flung just like in
Steppenwolf
so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering that the light of his
bara,
spreading its radiance, might touch us all with its enchantment. I believe that the planet visible in this drawing has never known mounds of gold fillings from Jewish teeth, or the castration of singing children, or Matthew Shepard tied to a fence, or the Janjaweed rape of black women in the Sudan, or husbands and lovers and children leaping from the windows of the World Trade Center. And so if Petr Ginz, who saw around him in Terezin an endlessly renewed mass of people sent daily to the slaughter, still imagined a planet without cruelty—and I hope fervently that he did—then he committed the boldest act of
bara
since God breathed life into Adam in Genesis 2:7.

We will end up food for
C. elegans
no matter what. But our souls are immortal, and I think reaching for that immortality when it can never be achieved is the greatest gesture of creation in the world. When Petr Ginz and all the other artists in Terezin, who had nothing—no food, no supplies, no dignity—used that nothing to create hope, they made themselves immortal, while the world exploded, by reaching for one another and for us.

A few months ago I was in Chicago, visiting old friends (theirs was the first lesbian wedding I ever attended), and one day one of them said, “Hey, listen. A singer friend of mine had a really bad case of gastric reflux, and she went to a specialist who did some new kind of treatment that completely cured her. Do you want me to get you his contact information?”

I said, “No, thanks. I’m happier doing what I’m doing now. I don’t want to go back there.”

I was lying.

The loss of
asah
haunts me. If there is nothing like the joy of writing a piece of music and hearing it come out of an actor’s throat for the first time, there is also no getting around the fact that it’s somebody else’s throat the music is coming out of, somebody else who is Poe’s earthly harp. I compose with my mind, and feel pride and satisfaction; I sang with my body, and felt ecstasy. Music doesn’t exist without a performer—notes on a page are not music, any more than a recipe is dinner—and so when you are composing you are powerless to give your creation a soul. The act of creating is separated from the act of bringing to life. But when you’re singing, you’re not only molding something from what already exists;
you are what is being molded.
You are creator and created at the same time, thrumming with the breath of life, reaching out to everybody on earth and feeling everybody on earth reach back. For
bara
you need faith that one day someone will read or look at or hear what you have made and be changed. But when you engage in
asah,
that day is
today.
You don’t need faith, because your audience changes in front of your eyes, and, in changing, changes you too.

The choir in Terezin petitioned the commander of the camp to delay a transport to Auschwitz so that the singers destined for the gas chambers could perform the Verdi
Requiem
before they died. They knew what awaited them, and they knew the world didn’t care, so they couldn’t have been motivated by pragmatism. Of course they can’t tell us what drove them but I choose to believe that, after their request was approved, as they stood and sang “Lord, grant them eternal rest,” understanding that the words were as far from rhetorical as they would ever be, they were transmuted by the spray of their moment’s happiness into gold so pure no crematorium could ever destroy it.

When my lesbians went to the movies a few hours after our conversation about their singer friend, I didn’t join them, even though I had heard Hugh Jackman spent a lot of time onscreen with his shirt off. Instead, I sat at their piano and worked on a trio I was writing for
Terezin.
I’d already written the basic shape of the song, so I started playing with the different voices, bringing this one in here, taking that one a sixth higher there, joining all three in unison for a line before splitting them into dissonance with a resolution so unexpected it made me laugh with glee when I discovered it. Eventually I reached a natural stopping point in my work, but I didn’t get up from the piano.

It was certainly possible, I thought, that I could go to my friend’s friend’s specialist and he might wave his magic tongue depressor and give me back what I had lost. But it was also possible that he might wave the tongue depressor and
nothing would happen,
at which point I would be unable to bear breathing any longer.

Because the glee I feel when I surprise myself composing is real, but I feel it only because I have lulled to sleep the memory of what infinity feels like; and I am afraid of what might happen if I woke that memory up. I love my life because a part of me has learned how to give up hope, and that, I suspect, is a dangerous lesson to unlearn.

As I sat at my friends’ piano my fingers eventually assumed a position they had not held for years, and then I opened my mouth: “Gentle airs, melodious strains,” I sang, picturing the dust motes shimmering in a Boston chapel. But when I got to the next part, when I was supposed to sing “call for raptures out of woe,” neither my hands nor my throat could remember what to do.

O
N
G
O
-G
O
D
ANCING

“H
ow’s the book going?” my friend Jim asked over Indian food.

“Bleah,” I said in between forkfuls of beef samosa. “Mostly it’s fine, but I’m worried. I feel like there’s some aspect of gay life I haven’t tapped into. And if the book isn’t perfect then everyone who reads it will hate me. Maybe I’m not gay enough.”

Jim couldn’t respond right away, as he had gotten something caught in his throat that seemed to require a great deal of coughing to dislodge, but when he had regained his composure he told me he had faith I’d come up with something. Then he started talking about the sketchy party he had been to on New Year’s Eve. “It was in a restaurant,” he said, “and there were a bunch of naked go-go boys dancing with hard-ons, and people were sucking each other off in dark corners. Then there was a competition to find America’s Next Top Bottom.” During the fit of uncontrollable laughter into which this sent me, Jim joked that I should become a go-go boy and write about that, but I didn’t pay attention, because all I could think about was racing home and Googling “America’s Next Top Bottom.” When I finally did so I found, among other things, a blog kept by a go-go boy who had attended the party, though he had not competed to be America’s Next Top Bottom. His account of the event was delicious, and in general his experiences as a go-go boy sounded, if not entirely wholesome, at least exciting. (“Though Jack was talking with someone and getting blown by someone else, he absentmindedly stroked my cock until it was rock-hard. I ran the back of my hand over his backside, which was incredibly smooth.”)

And then Jim’s words came back to me and I started thinking: What if he was right? What if I should become a go-go boy? What if an exploration of gay nightlife was truly what my book needed to be whole? What if it was what
I
needed to be whole?

But I was being ridiculous. Go-go dancers were muscled, sexy, carefree, and young. I was no longer overweight but I couldn’t imagine that the musculature required for dancing in underwear was anywhere close to within my reach. Furthermore, I felt as sexy as Kermit the Frog, I was as carefree as Job, and at thirty-three I was already cheating death in gay years.

And yet.

The more of Go-Go Boy’s blog I read, the more compelling I found the idea, especially after I realized that he was just a working stiff who’d started dancing for fun a few months before the party Jim had attended.
What if I could actually do this?
I wondered.

It was difficult to picture myself writhing on a bar. For my first thirty years I had held the life of the body beneath contempt. In kindergarten I had been so absorbed in the puzzle map of Africa I was taking back to the map drawer that I didn’t realize Samara Zinn had tripped me until I was flat on my face, former French and English protectorates mingling indiscriminately about me on the floor. My first-grade T-ball team put me deep in the outfield because I was too busy picking flowers to pay any attention to the ball. A photo of me at twenty-eight shows a sphere standing in a theater lobby, my porcine fingers barely able to close around the playbill. I had stayed away from the world of gay clubs because my only strengths were my intellectual ones, which were imperceptible in the dark no matter how many cosmopolitans men around me had consumed. Though I was now aware for the first time that I possessed physical mass, it was not an aspect of myself with which I felt at all comfortable. And I was considering a career as a sex object?

I sought out a former professor of mine, not unacquainted with the seedier side of gay life, and asked him what he thought. “Lift up your shirt,” he said, and I did. “Yeah, you could do it.”

“But aren’t go-go boys all like nineteen years old?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“But aren’t they all big muscle jocks?”

“A lot of them are,” he said, “but some of them are small and lean like you.” He named half a dozen bars at which somebody with my body type might find a warm welcome and sent me on my way.

The one remaining problem was that I did not know how to become a go-go boy. If there was a graduate school I was unaware of it. The Learning Annex did not offer classes. But then I figured,
It’s a job, right? I know how to apply for jobs.
So I e-mailed Go-Go Boy, praising his blog, and asked him for the contact information of the people who hired dancers at the clubs where he worked.

His puzzled response read, “Um, usually I just get gigs by showing up and asking the party promoters if they’ll let me audition for them then and there. I guess you could get in touch with some of them and tell them you want to try out. Here are numbers and e-mails for a few of the guys who throw parties on different nights at different clubs.”

The first part of this explanation was of course inconceivable; I could no more show up at a club and ask to audition than I could translate the complete works of Betty Friedan into Linear A. I had crossed the threshold of a gay bar fewer than a dozen times. The night my friend Stephen wanted to take me to my first New York club I agreed to go only if he didn’t make me check my copy of
The Count of Monte Cristo
with my jacket. The most adventurous of my bar visits came a few days after Tom and I broke up, when I took a cab to Hell’s Kitchen, walked into a bar alone for the first time, ordered a Diet Coke, slurped it up through the tiny bar straw without making eye contact with anybody, and fled.

However, I write cover letters (and make query phone calls) like nobody’s business. I hit a snag when no matter how hard I tried I could not find the specifications for a properly formatted go-go-boy résumé. Then I realized that I had no relevant experience to list on such a résumé anyway so the only thing I could do was make first contact and improvise from there. Between e-mail and the telephone I shot off half a dozen requests for auditions.

And got no reply.

Then one guy, named either Benjamin or Antoine—it wasn’t clear which—called me back and said yes, he was looking for go-go dancers, I should send him some photos. I had my boyfriend Mike take some pictures of me in the shower and e-mailed them immediately to Benjamantoine.

And got no reply.

This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. People I had never met heard my voice or saw my picture or read my impeccable typing and hated me. The fact that my book was obviously doomed to fail was the least of my worries; my ego was at stake. Despite a life spent avoiding bars, I had begun to tie my self-image to the idea of being their cynosure. I spent week after week in therapy talking about my inability to get a job as a go-go boy. “All I want is to become a piece of meat,” I complained to my therapist. “Why is that so difficult?” He suggested that party promoters were unlikely to be as responsible about communication as most people I was used to dealing with. I suggested that he was missing the point; he suggested that we talk about my mother.

I thought about Go-Go Boy obsessively. Eventually, after continuing our electronic conversation for a while, we met for dinner, and I didn’t see what was so great about him. He was an inch or two taller than me, with short brown hair and a cute nose. Nothing especially out of the ordinary. Yet according to his blog he was dancing all the time and making heaps of money. I pictured him spending every night in the throes of sybaritic ecstasy and then going home confident in the knowledge that he had the power to make a bar full of men want him. Ordinarily I would have been able to say, well, he may be a better go-go boy than me, but I went to Harvard. I couldn’t do that in this case, though, because
he did too.
He was pleasant and kind and went out of his way to be helpful to me, and I prayed for the earth to open up and swallow him whole.

And then finally—
yes!
—somebody e-mailed me back. His name was Daniel, and he was the very man who had thrown the New Year’s Eve party with which my friend Jim had set this all in motion. “Come by Splash some Wednesday and audition for me,” he wrote, so a few nights later I went to bed early, woke up to my alarm at midnight, and took the subway down to New York’s best-known gay club. I showed the doorman my driver’s license and, keeping my fingers crossed, pulled the door open.

I stepped into a room where sex suffused the very air. Everywhere I looked, I saw men chatting at the bar, men adjusting their coiffures in the ubiquitous mirrors, men dancing with an abandon reached either by sheer will or by very good drugs, thrusting their hips in time to the wild
thump-thump-thump
of the music. The shirtless bartenders, smiling flirtatiously, handed drinks to patrons who then turned back to one another and recommenced devouring one another’s lips with the fierceness of leopards. And on a platform in the middle were two go-go boys, haughty, aloof, unapproachable. One was tall and blond, muscles bulging in places muscles shouldn’t be allowed to exist; the other was shorter, black, compact and tight. They danced together as if they were the only two people in the world. I hungered to fulfill my newly discovered destiny, to leave behind the troubles of the common folk and join the aristocracy of the gay demimonde, in whose company I would be transformed into an animal of such raging heat that men would have to avert their eyes in my presence or be burned to ash. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw a composer who’d won three awards I’d applied for, and I had to hide behind a column so he wouldn’t see me.

In order to audition for Daniel I first had to find him, but I had no idea what he looked like. I approached the shorter go-go boy on the platform and, since it seemed rude to ask for information without offering anything in return, stuck a dollar in his underwear. “DO YOU KNOW WHERE DANIEL IS?” I screamed in his ear over the deafening music.

“SDFDZXUYVILJSJIUHVLE!” he screamed back.

“HUNH?” I screamed, and he screamed again; if my life had depended on it I could not have identified a single morpheme. I thanked him and trudged off to repeat this conversation with increasingly intimidating go-go boys and patrons alike for forty-five minutes, both on the ground floor and on the lower level, until at last somebody took pity on me, led me through the crowd, and introduced me to Daniel. The man I had been searching for was tall, with a long face and dark brown hair; he said it was nice to meet me and told me to get up on the bar near the entrance and start dancing, so I did.

I was instantly filled with terror that I would get it wrong and that people would laugh at me. What the fuck did I know? I should get down immediately and go home and eat ice cream while Googlestalking old boyfriends. Scratch that; eat ice cream and M&M’s while Googlestalking old boyfriends.

Clear your mind,
I told myself firmly.
Focus on details to remember when you write about this.
I did so, and I was instantly filled with terror that I would focus on the wrong details and that when I sat down at the computer all I would remember would be the bar’s gaudy decorative scheme, so I went back to being filled with terror that I would get it wrong and thinking about ice cream and M&M’s and Googlestalking old boyfriends.

But eventually I began to relax. The great thing about go-go dancing, it turns out, is that you don’t actually have to dance. In fact, you barely have to move at all. My boyfriend, Mike, who is a great dancer, had attempted to teach me some impressive moves before my audition, but he went too fast and made me cry, so I stuck with the basics: stepping languidly from foot to foot, gyrating at the hip, and sometimes running one hand or the other over my pectoral muscles. Every couple of minutes I moved a foot and a half to my left and stepped and gyrated and ran there. The terror subsided—how could it not, when men were looking up and smiling at my nearly naked body?—but neither did I feel transported to the higher state of being I had expected to reach. Possibly this had something to do with the fact that I kept having to apologize to people for kicking their drinks over.

After I’d traversed six feet of the narrow bar, a well-dressed guy grinned at me, pulled out his wallet, removed a dollar bill from it, folded it in half as I bent my knees to get within arm’s length, and tentatively put it behind the band of the skimpy underwear I had bought expressly for this audition. I stood up, gave him a smile that I hoped hit the halfway mark between sweet and salacious, and moved on. His physical properties were different from those that usually attract me to a man. But still something in me thrilled at having stepped into a land where the laws governing the sunlit world held no sway. If I had been at a movie theater and somebody had come up to me and shoved his hand into my underpants, I would have been disconcerted (though not necessarily upset, depending on how cute he was). But in this bar, whose denizens breathed not oxygen but alcohol and sweat and desire, such a gesture was no less decorous than a handshake.

An hour later, when the official go-go boys started to leave, I had five dollar bills in my underwear. I wanted desperately to ask Daniel whether this was a good sum of money to have earned or a bad sum of money to have earned, but I suspected the latter and I feared he would scorn me, so I just nodded to him on my way down to the clothes check. As I bent to put my pants back on, I realized that when I’d banged my knee against the column on the bar I’d actually gashed it open, and blood was oozing down my leg (this had happened only minutes earlier so unfortunately it did not explain the bad tips). When I got home I showed Mike the wound, which he immediately started calling my go-go boo-boo.

I couldn’t sleep, so afire with excitement was I. During a rapid flurry of suggestive e-mails with Daniel it became clear that my audition had gone well and that I was on my way to go-go-boy superstardom. Then at one point he asked, “How would you feel about dancing naked?” and I e-mailed back that I would have to ask my boyfriend and Daniel didn’t write back, which worried me. I asked Mike the next day and he said he was fine with my dancing naked, so I e-mailed Daniel again and told him so, adding, for good measure, “I haven’t been this excited since Madonna’s performance of ‘Vogue’ at the MTV Awards in 1990!!!!!!” Daniel maintained e-silence. Finally, after weeks of torment, I decided that he was not interested in hiring me unless I was available for fooling around. This made a welcome change for my therapist, since now instead of talking about how I was failing to become a go-go boy I could talk about how it was my own goddamn fault I was failing to become a go-go boy and how by admitting that I had a boyfriend I had ruined my life. I hated Go-Go Boy more viciously than ever, even as I searched and searched his blog for the key to his sortilege. Finally, in a moment of inspiration, I e-mailed Daniel again and told him that Mike and I had broken up, which was a lie, and within a day he had written back and asked whether I could work a party that weekend.