Paulette, the pre-transsexual, was beautiful and slender, with perfect breasts. Paulette’s act flourished until the removal of her G-string revealed a shriveled penis and scrotum. The boos drowned the bald man’s announcement that Paulette would be leaving for Tangier the following month and would return in December as a real girl.
Miranda was last. The band went steamy and grinding. She came out in long white satin. My dove. My eyes hurt for her, a scorch along the nerve string to the brain. The men in front of me stood up, leaning forward, slapping each other’s shoulders and sending out the high-pitched long-toned soooooo—eeeeee’s of pig callers. I stepped on my own hands getting up onto the table so I could see. Her long arms were lifted, her hair snapped with light. A young blonde in silver at a table just ahead of me glowered at the backs of the men who were with her as they leaned toward the stage. Miranda with the Binewski cheekbones, the Mongol eyes. Wide-mouthed Miranda, the dancer on long legs. The chill wash of joy hit me: my daughter. She was good. Not great, but good. What’s bred in the bones, when you have bones, comes through. And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice.
Electra and Iphigenia were high-powered performers, they wrung your heart, cramped your brain, brought silence on thousands for half an hour at a time. And the crowds that watched Arturo were funneled out of themselves, pumped into the reservoir of his will. Though I am her mother, I knew that Miranda’s little act, her clever little strip with its dignity and timing, was paltry compared to the skill and power I had watched in my other loved ones. But it was strange and different to me, watching these people watching her. Because they thought she was pretty, because they thought it would be good to grab her ass and pump jizz into her. Their bodies lifted up, clean and simple to her in the clear, unconscious awareness of each of their cells’ sensing that she would grunt out strong young.
She was down to her G-string with the fluffy lace plume on her rump, she had her thumbs hooked in it, looking over her shoulder at the crowd, she was waving her ass in a slow semaphore of invitation. The frowning blonde at the table had her chin in her hand. The men were hooting and grunting and watching with smiles. I held my breath, blinked, and she pulled the plume down, unsnapped the G-string and whipped it off with a flourish, waving her ass still, her head tipped up and an unmistakable giggle bubbling out of her as she revealed the thin, curling tail that jutted out from the end of her spine and bounced just above her round buttocks.
• • •
The second time—the last time—I simply followed Miranda to work. I walked out the door at Kearney Street fifteen seconds behind her and tagged her easily enough through a heavy rain. She never looked out from under her umbrella until she stamped her boots at the back door of the Glass House. I went in the front entrance and left my umbrella in a glass stand. I moved carefully toward one wall and slid along until I was fairly near the curtained stage at the end of the room.
There was a commotion in front of the stage. A big tuxedoed man with a glistening bald head was giving orders in a harsh whisper. I wasn’t tall enough to see who he was speaking to.
Suddenly he jumped onto the stage. There was a crash from the drummer. A cone of light appeared around the bald man. There were whistles in the crowd, laughter, sporadic handclapping.
“Gentlemen and jokers! Lively ladies!” The bald man stuck his long-corded microphone between his legs and wiggled its silver knob. The crowd chuckled. “The Glass House proudly presents its Tuesday-night feature! On Stage Topless Auditions! Any member of the audience is welcome to step up to the stage at this time and try out for a topless position here at the Glass House—with the Glass House orchestra! Under authentic conditions! A ten-dollar prize to each and every contestant! Ladies and gentlemen, step up and test your talent! … And here they come folks! …” A scramble of flesh hit the stage. The crowd cheered, hissed, whistled, laughed. Five bodies, bare from the waist up, snarled around the bald man and then tapered out in a line facing the audience. I began to sweat. A fat woman with her blouse hanging from the waist of her skirt stood nearest to me, blinking at the audience. Her breasts had fallen, thick and long, mixing with the rolls of fat that hung puffily over her belly. Her arms had the same texture and shape as her breasts and belly. She crossed her arms over her chest in an instant of shyness and then let them drop, forgetting.
Two middle-aged men wore matching red plastic jeans with broad leather belts strapping their adjacent legs together. Their thin white arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders and matching ostrich plumes curled up out of their thinning hair. Their raddled faces wrinkled unnervingly beneath an expert Oriental makeup, and their bone-riding nipples were enlarged and glowing with red gel.
A fat man in a glitter jockstrap had little eyes flicking in his pillow-creased face, as his booze buddies belched his name in unison from the front tables.
And the startled young girl was blushing beneath her awkward Pan-Cake, her lips drawn lush, her scared eyes outlined in black, her tiny breasts thrust out on her long, prominent ribs. She wore her lewdest panties and a pair of pirate boots, but she wasn’t drunk like the rest. She must have thought she was actually auditioning for a job here.
A bear baiting. The band is brassy spunk. The bald master of ceremonies spanks his hands at the edge of the stage and hollers into the mike as the line pumps and jiggles. I lean my chin on the stage itself, watching the wave of flesh reveal a surprise of blurred nipple every third beat as the fat woman throws her shoulders forward to toss her tits out of their usual resting place beside her sagging navel.
The young girl tries to look professional in the confusion of wobbling red thighs and waving ostrich and the fat man’s patch of chest hair. Confusion is burning her. She knows she has been taken, and has wandered into the wrong and maybe the worst place.
The noise is suffocating and I have to squint to see in the strange light. Then cold air hits my scalp and a hand is thumping my hump in an investigative way. “You forgot one!” is the shriek. My wig is dangling high above my head in a wavering hand. My dark glasses are snatched away and the light sears in at me.
The bald man is staring into my eyes as big hands lift me, my own mouth opening though silent and the music beats into my face and the pinching, bruising fingers trap my jerking arms and legs and breath. There is a shout—many-voiced—and the bald man is coming toward me with a smile and the flabby woman is grabbing at my coat and yanking at the buttons and shrieking, “Little pink eyes!” and the red pants hop toward me, their crotches bobbling at my eye level, the thick buckles that hold them threatening to kneel in my face. My coat is being pulled away, my big blouse, which is cut with deep darts for my hump and hangs flat to my knees in front, tears in an explosion of buttons that ricochet around the stage without sound because there is no room in this big sound for the little sounds of buttons hitting.
They have come to my chest harness now, thick strips of elastic stretched above the hump and below it to hold a solid band across my ragged dugs and their grey nipples. The bald man is talking to me in a confidential way without his microphone and I feel the movement of his lips and the hot wet of his breath in my ear but I cannot hear him as the harness slides off, scraping my hump, raking my ears, blinding me for a second. I kick as they lift me in the air to pull off my elastic-waisted skirt and wave me upward to the yellow spotlight and bring me down with my shoes hitting the stage and my white underskirt riding up over my crouching knees.
I am standing alone in the light and the big bodies have fallen back from me. The college girl, dumbfounded, is still pumping away with her mouth open, her knees and arms still following an old order to dance, as her mind is pummeled by what I am, and what they have done to me, and wondering if I am in on it. The crowd is standing up and beating the tables. The laughter is fierce and the band is loud, but barely loud enough, as I lift my thin arms and waggle my huge hands and bob to the light, and my knees begin to shift in what my body calls dance, waving my hump
at the crowd, the light warming my scalp and burning into my unprotected eyes. My big shoes thump at the ends of my little legs, and I am proud with my arrow tits flapping toward my knees, and the fat lady standing on my coat is staring, with spittle across her cheek, and the fat man with his electric G-string pumping at his invisible crotch and laughing, and the shouts coming up, “Christ! It’s real!” The twisting of my hump feels good against the warm air and the sweat of my bald head runs down into my bald eyes and stings with brightness and the spirit of the waggling hump moves over the stage and catches red pants, hairy bellies, and all, while I stamp on my buttonless blouse, slide on the tangled elastic harness, and open my near-blind eyes wide so they can see that there is true pink there—the raw albino eye in the lashless sockets—and it is good. How proud I am, dancing in the air full of eyes rubbing at me uncovered, unable to look away because of what I am. Those poor hoptoads behind me are silent. I’ve conquered them. They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
There wasn’t any graceful way to end it. The band stopped, the bald man shouted, “Let’s give ’em a hand, folks.” There was a surge of catcalls. We all scrambled around for our clothes, clutching them to our chests as we hurried down. Of course there was no dressing room. The restroom was on the other side of the club, so we huddled down in front of the stage tugging awkwardly into clothes. I slid my blouse on inside-out, as I discovered later, put on my coat and wig and glasses immediately, and stuffed the chest harness into a pocket.
The bald man was doling out five-dollar bills like stale cookies. He handed two to me. The shame had already started icing up my valves, and those five-dollar bills were the clinchers. It had been a long time since I had blushed, not since Arturo, maybe. But the hot blood scorched me then.
“What’s your name? Can we get you to come down regularly for audition nights? That’s a lot of potential you’ve got. We could work up a nice set using you. We’d up the ante a bit, make it twenty bucks for a turn. We do two auditions a night between the regular acts. You could pick up an easy forty.” He was being perfectly pleasant about it. My wig wasn’t fitting and I couldn’t make out why. I kept pulling at it until I noticed that it was on backward. I turned it around and made for the door. Sidling through the crowd, I crammed my brain with static to prevent myself from hearing what they were saying. Run hide quick, I thought, scuttling down the street.
I paced and thumped up and down my room all night. I couldn’t lie down at all for fear of Arturo and Papa and my own terrible pride.
3
NOTES FOR NOW
Meltdown, Diving into Teacups from the Thirteenth Floor, and Other Stimulating Experiences
Miranda is talking on the phone as I come in from work. She lolls against the wall, one long bare leg jutting out through her green kimono. She has a towel turbaned over her fresh-washed hair and she hangs up the receiver as I close the door behind me.
“Hi. Got time to come up for tea?”
“No. Thank you.”
Miranda is a student at the Art Institute. Her aim is to illustrate medical texts. She wants me to pose for her drawings. I never accept her offers of tea. I proceed toward the stairs while scrabbling to hang on to my books and papers. She purses her mouth elaborately.
With a grip on the banister and one foot on the first step I can’t keep from pausing, from looking at her. She drops her lids halfway and eyes me in a deliberately speculative fashion. A small glitch in my gizzard warns me that Arturo used his eyes this way. His eyes were, like hers, long, slanted almond shapes, though of course Arty didn’t have the lashes and brows that Miranda does.
Smiling weakly—does she know or is this just her usual badgering revenge when I refuse her invitations?—I climb the stairs with her eyes following me.
• • •
Olympia Binewski, aka Hopalong McGurk, the Radio Story Lady, is hunched over a book in the glass-walled recording booth at Radio KBNK, Portland. The molasses voice that has earned her living for decades pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles. She is deep in a dramatic rendition of that speculative classic “Pit Might.”
In the story the mind-souls of three theoretical physicists find themselves reincarnated (after dying hideously during their search for Schrödingers demon cat) in the bodies of itch mites inhabiting the pubic hair of a particularly obtuse Los Angeles policeman.
McGurk’s eyes twitch up from the book regularly to check the engineer on the other side of the soundproof glass. He watches meters and the clock. He signals two minutes left and McGurk storms into the climax. The theme music comes up and McGurk signs off, “Until tomorrow …” Falling back from the microphone, McGurk stretches to ease the ache in her neck and looks through the glass.
Miranda is smiling in the engineer’s booth. McGurk drops the book onto the floor instead of into her briefcase. The engineer is propped on the control panel sporting a paralytic grin, his eyes clamped on Miranda’s thorax.
Miranda waves and Hoppy McG. nods, forgetting to put any expression on her face.
I, Hoppy-Olympia, the invisible mom, sit frozen, watching as the engineer talks to Miranda. His hands in the air make typing motions and jerk a thumb in my direction. Miranda nods. The engineer turns to me, walking two fingers in the air. They slip away through the door.
The engineer gives Miranda a tour of the station while I type up the royalty credit for that day’s program. My skull oozes sweat. A vacancy behind my eyes makes me nauseated. What is wrong? Why is she here? Why would she suddenly appear at the workplace of a neighbor who barely acknowledges her “Good mornings” in the hall? Could that senile slut of a nun have broken her word after all these years and told the girl the truth?
I’m in the front office buttoning my coat when they come back. I’ve just remembered reasons she might be in this radio station that have nothing to do with me. She is visiting a friend, applying for a job, or taping an interview as guest stripper on the Night Train Hour. It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.
“I’m taking you to lunch,” she chirps at me, as though we did this all the time. I slide into the elevator and lean against the back wall. She follows me, saying, “Thank you so much,” as the doors snuff out the engineer’s anxious grin.
Miranda turns her brights full on me. “I hope you’ll excuse my showing up here. I knew where to find you because I listen to your program. I recognized your voice when I first heard you talking to Looney Lil in the hall. I knocked on your door this morning but you’d already gone. I need to talk to you.”
The phrase ricochets in my skull. “Need to talk.” All these years of silence. I have intended, and do intend, to dog Miranda until my dying day, but I never meant to talk to her. My heart tries to climb out through my ears. She pinks up—flustered at what must be a mild glare behind my blue lenses.
The elevator gapes in front of us and I dart through the slow legs of the lobby loiterers and into the faster legs of the midday sidewalk. I feel her behind me, threading the crowd after me, shortening her stride to accommodate me, coming up beside me at the corner.
Sucking air noisily, I lean forward to discourage conversation. She is wearing dark green, her heels bouncing impatiently beside me. There is no pleasure in having her so close. What does she want?
“How about the grill at the Via Veneto? They do a lunch buffet. Miss McGurk?”
I can’t look at her. I try to civilize my voice. “I don’t eat lunch.”
The light changes, trapping us on an island in the wide street. The cars swarm around us in a sea of stink. She’s caught me on this concrete knob and her harpoon is suddenly revealed, her eyes, her words ripping out of her. “Look, forget that you don’t know me. There are two things. First, you’ve got to model for me.” Her sweet-simp guise is gone. She is green fire above Binewski cheekbo
nes. She means to convince me. The heat of her intention has my throat melting. I want to hold her face in my hands and push her strange hair back from her Binewski forehead. The faces behind the windshields save me. A Binewski never disintegrates in front of the ticket holders.
She is burning away at me, talking fast, her eyes demanding. The anatomy competition is coming up. She has already won two years in a row. The judges will be reluctant to give it to her again. She needs something special, something hot.… Art school. She is talking art school and she is talking to me. These two facts amaze me.
“The first year I went to LoPrinzi’s gym and did a series on a body builder. Technical, illustrative, and predictable. Last year I went to the medical school and did a flayed, emaciated cadaver. Classic and totally predictable. I’ve got to show more than a technician’s skills this time. I’ve got to rock them. I’ve got to yank their hearts out.”
Her urgency has my stomach cringing, trying to crawl down my leg. Is this an accident? Is it coincidence that she comes to me? All this time of silent watching, my secret care. My anonymous arm holding the invisible umbrella. Could she know? Is this her way of opening me? Slipping in like the knife that unlocks the oyster? Or does some pulse in her bones, some twist in her genetic coil, lean her toward me in a blind craving? The light changes.
“Look, there’s a bus bench. Come sit a minute.” She sails past revving machines in the intersection, collapses onto the bench and waves me up beside her as she yanks a sheaf of papers from her bag.
“Reduced copies. You don’t get the full effect but you can see that I’m serious.”
The top sheet shows a hip socket, lushly washed, the hard lines impatient and powerful. The second sheet is exposed abdominal muscle, fiercely striated. Then come loving portraits of callused arthritic hands and bunion-twisted feet, a flayed jaw, a joyous nude of the blobby news vendor from the corner. He is hunched on a stool, pudgy hands propped on knees like sagging pumpkins, his acorn head thrown back in surprise on what passes for a neck. I don’t understand the drawings, or why they move me. I want to cry, loud and wet with the pain of love. The drawings are as mysterious to me as the school report cards that the Reverend Mother mailed dutifully every few months. No Binewski ever made pictures. I never had a report card. But I saved Miranda’s, stacked and wrapped with a rubber band in the biggest of the old trunks.