Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
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I did myself, but I hardly think it was because they thought he was really a woman.
Of course it is sort of like murder, isn’t it? You hear about the ones that don’t work, but if it did work, you”d never know, would you? Years ago, there was a dancer named Brandy, petite and very pretty, who appeared regularly at the Queen Mary, a drag club in the San Fernando Valley. I saw Brandy a number of times on and off stage—occasionally in brightly lighted coffee shops after the shows, where the truth is often sadly obvious; but I never could be sure about Brandy until I saw her being interviewed on television and learned that she was indeed a he who did live undetected in drag. He was the only one that I ever personally met, however, who was that convincing.
Now I suppose some of you are thinking, don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. I confess, I am very nearly a virgin when it comes to drag. I say very nearly, because I did indeed dress up one time, and that is the only other experience I have had with someone off the performing stage who was able utterly to fool the public—at least, some of the public. At least for a brief while.
I didn’t call it or think of what I did as “drag.” To be honest I doubt if I had even heard that term at the time, when I was fourteen or perhaps fifteen. It was Halloween and I was just “dressing up.” We had no money for Halloween costumes, but with so many sisters there was no shortage of dresses.
I bought a little black half mask and a blonde wig at the local Woolworth’s for twenty-nine cents, or perhaps it was fifty-nine. I ask you, how convincing could it have been? My sisters helped me with a bra, stuffed but not over done. Everything in good taste. A bit of makeup, some nail polish, a drop or two of Oh Dick Alone, and I was ready to set out in my smart pumps (I never have understood how real drag queens, or real women for that matter, can walk in high heels!)
My brother-in-law’s brother had a new convertible, black and plenty snazzy, and he gave me a lift to the local armory, where the town’s Halloween festivities were taking place. I started up the stairs—and ran into a covey of the school macho contingent.
I was not really popular with these guys to begin with, certainly not with Morris, as I shall name him here, who was the biggest, the loudest, the most fearsome of the bunch. Morris was the school bully. It was his role in life, it seemed, to make everyone else’s life miserable, and he dedicated himself to his task. I was his favorite target, and the way in which I earned that privilege was a strange one.
I was twelve or perhaps not quite that when Morris moved to our community and started in school, in my grade though he was perhaps a year older than I. A significant year older, as it turned out.
From the start Morris was friendly with me. Downright chummy in fact. I might have suspected something but I did not. You may titter if you like but I was still quite innocent. We lived not far from one another, as country boys calculate things and I was flattered when he invited me to his home one afternoon for his birthday party.
I was not even suspicious to discover that I was the only guest, though I suppose by then I should have been. His mother served us cake and ice cream and when he suggested we go for a hike in the nearby woods I skipped along merrily at his side. Picture Little Red Riding Hood traipsing into the woods with the Wolf, though in fact in this instance it was the Wolf who had the basket (I didn’t say absolutely innocent, mind you).
We soon found ourselves in the privacy of a secluded glade, a scene quite out of one of those romantic paintings from the eighteenth century. Now, I know some of you who know me will find this difficult to imagine, but when he proposed that we “do it,” I did not at first understand what “it” was. When he pulled a woodie out of his jeans, however, and started to massage it, I did finally begin to get the picture.
A picture which so startled me that I could only decline mutely. I don’t think I had yet discovered “it” as a private matter. It had certainly never occurred to me as a joint project. I was accustomed to spending time in the woods—I was a country boy, as I have explained. However, this was a far cry from Cowboys and Indians, or at any rate a variation on that theme that I had never before encountered.
My disinclination was the end of our growing friendship. I left and was not invited back. It never occurred to me afterward to tell anyone else about his propositioning me. It was not the sort of thing I supposed one brought up in polite conversation. I think, though, that he was afraid I might, and that when he was so nasty to me day in and day out over the next several years, it was a form of “self-protection,” or distancing himself from me in case I had told anyone and they might be inclined to believe me.
When I celebrated finishing high school, I was celebrating as much as anything the fact that I would henceforth be free of Morris and his antics.
A few years later I was home for a visit and an old friend called to say there was someone who would love to see me. When I arrived at his apartment that evening, who should be there but Morris. I was astonished to think that he had asked to see me and even more astonished by his friendly, his downright warm manner.
Right up until he followed me into the bathroom. By this time of course I was all grown up. I now knew, as I had not before, what “jism” meant, and I was quick to get the point when he yanked down his trousers in an effort once again to convince me to play.
And I must admit his argument was persuasive. The Wolf’s basket had been filled with goodies after all, as it turned out. Alas, the level of conversation hadn’t improved much; “take a look at this, why dontcha?” I swear it, if I had shown him two detailed photographs and asked him to identify them, he almost certainly would have been unable to say which one was the hole in the ground.
Of course it wasn’t this time, nor had it ever been, intellectual excitement that Morris was offering to share with me. I should perhaps add too that with the passing of a few years and the loss of some baby fat, Morris had grown into a rather good looking man, in a sort of King Kong way. Well, those brutes can be exciting, can’t they?
But wait, hadn’t we played this scene already? Moreover there was a principle involved. This man had made my life miserable for years and I was not about at this late date to reward his misbehavior with, well, rewards. I excused myself, I bade my host good evening, and departed.
I never saw Morris again and in a sense our entire relationship was book-ended by those two propositions, so entirely different from everything in between. His life was not a pretty one. He was later wounded in a robbery attempt and he died young in a bizarre drug incident.
Was it my refusal to play that sent him down the tragic path he followed? He had seemed a nice enough young man up until that fateful day in the forest. Could my love have saved him from himself? Might one kiss—well, I don’t really think it was kisses he was after on either of those occasions but all right then, might one blow job have made the difference?
Hmmm. Probably not. In any event, he was very much alive on this Halloween evening and obviously as smitten by my girlish charms as he had been before by my boyish charms—was there some bodily chemical I secreted? If only I had been able to discover it and use it at will. I can think of scores of times with others when I would have liked to be so irresistible.
This, however, was not one of them. Morris was not alone either. There were three or perhaps four others in his group, including Mister Touchdown, our dazzlingly handsome football hero.
Now, though he was never the sort of bully that Morris was, Mister Touchdown clearly had never had any use for me. This is not to say that he was entirely innocent of experimentation—I knew from conversations I had overheard in the locker room between him and some of his friends that he had at least once gone to visit a retired politico who lived in our town and was fond of paying the local boys for their time. (Morris was known to visit him as well, which I guess you could say qualified him as a “Pro-Magnon” creature.) I once heard Mister Touchdown boasting that he was bigger—“when I’m hard”—than a classmate who was famed for his endowment; which certainly indicated to me that he had seen our classmate hard and I could only wonder when and how.
But these were paying politicians and the recognized class standard for size and I was not in either party. I truly doubt that Mister