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[The following is an excerpt from a piece I read at The Kitchen a few years back, part of a memoir I'm writing, still very much a work in progress.]
It must have been the scream that woke me. Opening my eyes, I stared straight up. A woman was leaning over the railing of a balcony several flights above, watering her plants. She pointed at me, then covered her mouth with her hand. Her eyes widened as she leaned further over the railing. Was she going to jump? I waved at her. The woman suddenly stopped. She turned away in disgust and was gone.
I sat up. My head felt as if someone had hit me with a croquet mallet. I was completely naked. That poor lady, I thought, as I searched frantically for a towel or something else to throw on. She must have thought I was dead, that I’d jumped off the roof and landed down on the terrace, my arms and legs akimbo in a kind of human swastika.
I was staying at the apartment of a woman named Thorndike. On Sutton Place. I barely remembered coming home that morning. But as I passed through the French doors and entered the living room, I noticed the riding boots I’d been wearing the night before, crumpled on the floor, tossed there casually as if I’d flung a pair of gloves on a table. There too were the jodhpurs I’d had so much trouble getting out of, and the riding helmet, hard and round and brown like a coconut. And then it all came back to me. The disguise. The wig. The makeup. The endless preparations with Thorndike and Denise. The doormen’s bemused expressions when I had waltzed through the lobby on our way out. “You’re the most beautiful girl in New York,” Denise had said. “Bette Davis in Dark Victory.” Thorndike had insisted on the riding get-up. Most of it was hers. And thanks to the fact that I weighed a mere 132 pounds back then, and boasted a 30-inch waist, I was able to slip into them without difficulty. What was it they used to call me in college? Mahatma Gandhi? My friend Geoffrey had seen me once draped in a sheet and nicknamed me that. It stuck.
Memories ricocheted in my mind’s eye, as I stumbled into the kitchen to make some coffee. Actually I was looking through the cupboards for something stronger. My tongue felt like a soiled bath mat. My eyes burned. My legs felt disembodied, held to my frame with puppet strings. I had bruises on my arms and legs. My hands shook as I opened the liquor cabinet and searched in vain for some vodka. I couldn’t get anything else down this early in the morning. But all there was was an unopened bottle of Campari. I guess I’d finished everything else off when I came back that morning. I was hesitant about opening a new bottle, especially as I was a guest of Thorndike’s, but I had no choice. The bitter nectar soothed my throat. There were sore areas along my esophagus, like someone had taken a cigarette and burned holes along the length of it. But I ignored the pain and drank some more.
Next duty – cigarettes. Thorndike was a classy girl. She kept cigarettes in silver cups on side tables in the living room. I glanced at the clock. 7:15 am. I’d only been asleep for three hours, I reckoned. And yet, I felt totally awake, bracingly alive, if you discounted the constant throbbing in my temple and the sensation that my eye balls were being poached in boiling water. My contacts! In those days, I still wore hard lenses, but always forgot to take them out. The tiny discs felt as if they’d been welded onto my corneas. It would take a crowbar to get them off. An eye doctor had warned me once that I might get ulcers on my corneas if I didn’t take more care. I stopped going to see him. In the bathroom, I cupped some tap water in my hands and splashed at my sockets. Grabbing one of Thorndike’s oversized towels, I draped my bony frame and headed for the shower.
At times like these I called myself Muriel. I liked the sound of it. The mellifluous lilt. Muriel. Mu-ri-el. It was my mother’s name, of course, but I never connected the two. At least not intentionally or consciously. I know that must seem impossible. But I was capable of many impossible things in those days. I just liked the name. I always had, even as a baby in the crib when I would lip-synch to Edie Adams’ commercials for Muriel cigars on TV. Or so my father always told me. He said I had a love of music from the day I was born. That was just like Dad. To make nothing of the fact that his son was impersonating Edie Adams.
As I showered, the events began to shift and organize themselves in my brain, as if a maid had come to clean up the mess after a disastrous party. I’d been at Rounds, the hustler bar on 53rd Street, now closed. Denise had been very sympathetic when I’d told her how the night before the evening in question, I’d been thrown out of the bar for stealing money from the clientele. A nightly ritual, it was surprisingly easy to do. Most of the heavy drinkers who sat at the bar would leave their booze money in a pile, and when they weren’t looking I would reach over, grab a twenty dollar bill and slide it gingerly into my coat pocket. One time I’d been even bolder. I took the wallet right out of a guy’s back pocket when he wasn’t looking. I pulled out all the bills, stuffed them in my pocket and then carefully replaced the wallet. A few minutes later, having struck up a conversation with the fellow, I was delighted when he offered to buy me a drink. He was mortified when he opened his wallet to pay the tab and found that he was broke. I lent him twenty bucks. He never stopped thanking me.
The night I got in trouble I’d been wearing a sheepskin coat with lots of inside pockets. I must have stolen over eighty-dollars when I felt a hand on my shoulder. The manager, a tall black man who looked like he might have played football in high school, said gently: “I think it’s time you go home.”
“But I’ve only had one drink,” I lied.
“Give me the money now or we’ll lift you upside down and empty your pockets right here in front of everyone,” he said, a bit more emphatically. I gave him the money and was escorted out the door. The bruiser told me never to come back. Hence the costume the next night. It sounds preposterous, I know. But whenever I dressed as Muriel no one recognized me. Maybe it was because of my slight frame. I remembered the time in college when I’d bought a corset at the Salvation Army. I didn’t realize until I got home that it was meant for a teenage girl, or perhaps a dwarf. Why either would want to or need to wear a corset is beyond me. A friend helped me put it on. I sucked in my breath, accentuating my rib cage as he pulled from behind and snapped the two sides together. Shades of Scarlett O’Hara.
I became a different person when I dressed up. It wasn’t like being a transvestite since I had no desire to shock or send up feminine stereotypes. And I’m not fooling myself in thinking that no one could tell I was a man in women’s clothes. That goes without saying. But they did not know it was me inside the outfit. What thrilled me in dressing up was that I ceased to be myself. A curious sensation of complete control would come over me. I suppose most people when they put on the trappings of the opposite sex feel a perverse thrill, a cheap frisson that comes from doing something against nature, subversive, carefree. Think of Mardi Gras or Halloween. But when I dressed up as Muriel it was different. I wasn’t putting on a costume. I was taking one off. It was like exposing a new skin, one that fit perfectly. When I was Muriel everything felt spectacularly right. I was powerful. Beautiful. Irresistible. I could say anything without fear of recrimination. I was a lady of quality, above reproach. But most of all I was happy, and not in any tortured gay sense. I felt a serenity that an infant feels when he’s clutched to his mother’s bosom, being nursed.
As Muriel, I was able to spend the entire night at Rounds. But then I had plenty of my own money to spend since Thorndike had kindly lent me a hundred dollars before leaving. Drinks were on me. I was always generous when I drank. I don’t remember getting back to Sutton Place.
Blackouts were nothing new. I’d been having them all the time. The first one was back in college in New Haven, at the local gay bar, Partners, when I’d met some punk weirdo with a safety pin in his ear, and gone home with him. I woke up the next morning in one of those fallen Painted Ladies, a ramshackle Victorian miles outside of town. Whomever I’d been with was gone. The only sign of civilization was a lipstick lesbian named Cato in the bathroom applying eye shadow. A chic symbol of 70s decadence, she was rather notorious at Yale. For a second, I thought I’d arrived. She wouldn’t get out of the loo long enough for me to puke. So I did it in the kitchen sink. Then I grabbed my things and left. Somehow, the night before, I’d lost my shoes and had to board a bus in my socks. It was the dead of winter outside.
My most memorable blackout, if that isn’t an oxymoron, was the time in North Carolina with my college a capella singing group. We’d just done a concert at a conservative girls’ school. Celebrating afterward at the local bar, I was feeling mighty high. I wasn’t dressed in drag, although one of the girls had lent me her eye pencil and I’d use it to bring out my blue eyes. I was wearing a Brooks Brothers blazer and a tiny madras bow tie that I’d bought at the Hadassah Thrift Shop. While playing one of the video games, I discovered that the door to the change safe was broken and I could reach in and take out as many quarters as I could fit into my hand. I must have pulled out fifty dollars worth of silver and started buying everyone in the place drinks.
The bartender thought it was funny the first couple of times I paid him with coins, but then he got pissed off. Luckily, he wasn’t bright enough to figure out where they were coming from. Pretty soon everyone in the bar was laughing and surrounding me in a circle as I bought them rounds. I had developed a routine by this period in my drinking career of ordering a pitcher of beer and getting an audience together to watch me drink the whole thing in one gulp without stopping. If I succeeded, they’d have to buy me another. You had to be careful when doing this stunt that you didn’t gag and spew out beer all over the spectators. But I was awfully good at it. That night, I did it maybe three times in a row to tremendous applause. A huddle of football players approached me and goaded me on. We started wrestling for the hell of it. Rather than depressing me, alcohol made me feel invincible, incredibly strong. I had a way of cornering a jock when I got real tanked, pulling his head back by the hair or the nape of his neck, and forcing him to kiss me. The amazing thing is that he usually enjoyed it, but his buddies would go ballistic and try to beat the shit out of me. Remind me to tell you, sometime, the story of the professional hockey team in New Haven. But that night in North Carolina, I went too far and started petting some big ape down among the folds in his very tight Guess jeans. Word got out and the next thing I knew I was being chased by a drunken linebacker crying out for my blood.
I managed to get back in one piece to my motel room with the other singing group members. That’s when the break happened. It had been happening more frequently by that point. Inside my head, the snap of a pea pod. A warning sign of trouble to come, it always came too late. I was trying to take out my contacts and put them in the small plastic case I always carried. But the more I searched my eye, the more I could feel the contact inside. The lens wouldn’t come out. I started screaming at my friends to help me – that I had a shard of glass in my eye and that I couldn’t see. People were pissed off because they were trying to sleep and here I was three sheets to the wind hollering that I was going blind, stumbling about like Oedipus with tears of shame oozing down his cheeks. A buddy came over and tried to calm me down, but I slapped him very hard across the face and ran out the door. Behind the motel were woods. I ran into them. My face was scraped by brambles as I tore past. But I didn’t care. I felt nothing. I was terrified that one of the boys would grab me. I paused to catch my breath and turned around to see if they were closing in on me. The moon was out, bathing the trees in a pale blue light, not unlike what in cinema is called “day for night.”
Everything was preternaturally vivid, my vision crisp, overly defined, the air stingingly fresh and fragrant. I could differentiate the pine needles piled on the forest floor, the bark on the tree trunks. My shoes crackled. I could hear my heart beating. Down the hill, I saw a group of men with lanterns and hunting dogs climbing the slope. Some of them were beating the underbrush with sticks. They were closing in on me. I realize now that I was hallucinating. It was a sort of waking dream – a fugue state. But then I no longer knew what I was running from. I just needed to escape, my life depended on it. The fear was overwhelming but extremely exhilarating. All of my senses were sharpened, like those of an attendant animal of prey.
I ran even faster up a steep hill, crossed a stream, wading across rocks, vaulting over fallen trees. I finally came to the crest of a knoll where I had a view of the surrounding countryside. About a half mile down the other side was a highway, a ribbon of lights strung like a pearl necklace against the black backdrop. I ran down to it. Once there, the headlights of an oncoming car sped towards me like two eyes staring angrily. It raced past ignoring my pleas to stop. I flagged down the next vehicle, an eighteen wheeler. Once inside, the trucker asked me where I was going.
“To Palm Beach,” I said. I had suddenly remembered an old lady I’d met once who lived at the Breakers. She had said I could come visit her anytime I wanted.
“Palm Beach is eight hundred miles from here, kid. Are you crazy?”
I told him just to drive me as far as the next major city and then I would catch a train. I must have passed out momentarily. But when I woke up, the driver smiled and asked how I was feeling. I felt the same. I noticed his strong, masculine features, his days old beard, his thick muscled arms and calloused hands. His faded jeans stretched over his thighs like damask. I put my hand on his knee. I don’t remember what happened next. Did he swing at me? I don’t know. All I do remember is that he pulled over and told me to get out. He was very frightened. I exited the cab and descended to the asphalt. The driver in the truck floored it and was gone.
Dawn was breaking over the horizon, a thin gray line. I ran out into the center of the highway and tried to stop the next car that came by. I didn’t notice the red lights on top until it was too late.
“Where you going?” the taller of the two state troopers asked me. Considering how early it was, they were awfully polite. And very striking in their uniforms.
“Palm Beach,” I answered. They glanced at each other. The tall one put his hand on my shoulder and said if I would just tell them where I lived they would take me home.
“New York,” I said.
“Then where are you staying?”
“I don’t know.” I had no idea. “If we could just drive around a bit, I think I can show you.” And they did, but obviously we were miles, if not hours, away from wherever it was that I had been before. We drove into some town and looked at all the houses, making small talk all the while. But after an hour of this charade, the police finally decided to take me in. I was booked for “disorderly intoxication,” fingerprinted and placed in a jail cell with a very large and very ugly man who was stinking drunk. There was only one bed to lie on, a mattress on a bench, and he barked at me that it was his. I didn’t argue. I slept on the floor. I can still recall the rank odor of the urine-stained concrete. By then, my Brooks Brothers blazer was soaked in mud and covered with burrs. My madras bowtie had fallen off somewhere in the woods. I couldn’t sleep worrying about the man on the bench, the way he kept looking at me, with one eye open. I was only 19.
A few hours later, I pleaded guilty before the judge, paid a small fine with a check, and still couldn’t remember the name of the town where I’d been staying. There were about six other drunks in the tank, including one who joked that he was on vacation from skid row. I treated them all to breakfast at the Howard Johnson’s across the street. After my fifth cup of coffee, I regained enough sense to call the singing group’s business manager’s parents in North Carolina (I’d stayed with them once a year before) and asked them to call their son so he’d come and fetch me. He showed up an hour later, took me back to the motel. My eyes still hurt and when I looked inside my contact case, I found that I had taken the lenses out. I don’t know where I got the idea that I’d had a piece of glass in my eye. My friend let me sleep in his bed; he was pretty hung over himself. I started crying, sobbing, blubbering like a baby. As I dreamed, I fixated on the image of the man in jail, his open eye glaring at me.
It took me back to when I was seven years old. My father was out shopping, probably at Sears which he visited with near religious devotion every weekend. The housekeeper was out visiting relatives, fellow fugitives without green cards, hiding out in Flushing. Saturday was her day off. My brother was up in his room in the attic. I slipped into my father’s room and went to the large old-fashioned bureau by the window. I opened the bottom drawer, where he kept his important papers. I think I was looking for adoption papers. I’m not sure. I find it hard to believe now that at that young age I would even know what “adoption” meant. But that is how I remember it. I was troubled by the mystery of my birth. If my mother was sick and in the hospital, and had always been, how then was I born? I theorized that I must have been adopted. It made more sense than the idea that Mom had given birth to me. I didn’t end up finding any official looking papers, but I did stumble across a small dark blue leather box that was frayed at the edges. I flipped it open and nearly dropped it.
Inside were several eyes made of glass, fitted into pockets. One or two had slipped from their moorings and rolled around like marbles against a dark blue velvet background. I picked one up and held it in my fingers. Hollow on one side, it was as smooth and gleaming as mother of pearl on the other. The corneas were hazel blue, the irises dark brown. Replacing the eye, I put the box back where I found it and never mentioned it to anyone.
Later, I’m not sure exactly when, I was told that my mother had lost an eye when she was fourteen at the Elmhurst Academy in Providence, Rhode Island. It was one of the Sacred Heart Convent schools. Deserted by her father when she was just an infant, my mother suffered the loss of her mother to TB when she was only ten. A veritable orphan, she’d been sent to the convent by her legal guardian, a lawyer named Elmer Gertz, in Chicago. One day in chemistry class, she participated in an experiment. But it ended in disaster. The beaker she’d been holding in her hand exploded when someone put a bunsen burner under it. Glass flew into her eyes, damaging both. Blood oozed down her cheeks, but she still had the presence of mind, I was told, to curtsey to the Mother Superior before she was whisked off in an ambulance to the local hospital. For nine months, she was totally blind. A famous eye surgeon left his death bed to operate on her. He was able to save the sight in her right eye, but the other had to come out. Muriel was fitted with a new eye made of glass. It must have been a devastating blow to a young girl, a dancer, on the brink of becoming a woman.
Years later, after she’d married my father and produced four children, ending with me, Mom suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide several times. She was sent to a mental hospital. As a child, I would visit her every weekend. Sometimes we were able to take her out for the day and bring her home. On those trips, I can remember sitting between her and my father in the front seat of the car as we drove back to the hospital. I’d gaze up at her, but it was as if she were staring straight ahead, unaware of my presence. I would talk to her, and she would answer me, but her face was an unresponsive mask. She only came to life when she would turn towards me and see me with her good eye, the one not made of glass.
The hospital fascinated and frightened me. It was like a castle in a horror movie, tall and gloomy with iron bars on the windows to keep the inmates from getting out. The brick walls were the color of dried blood. Sometimes I’d walk my mother up to the hospital door and I could see faces peering out at us from behind the iron bars, lost souls whose loneliness was as visible as the lines on their strange, pale, contorted faces. I went because I thought it would help my father and I went because I felt sorry for my mother. Even though the place would give me nightmares, I told myself to swallow my fear and act as if there were nothing out of the ordinary. My mother would show me off to her floor-mates and doctors and nurses. But other times she’d be lost in a world all her own. She wouldn’t respond when I hugged her. Her hair would be dirty and uncombed. The skin on her legs was so dry it would flake off like flour. She’d shoot frightened glances to her right and left, fearful that someone was writing down everything she said. She would wring her hands incessantly, roughly, as if trying to remove a stain that had seeped into the bone. Actually, her hands were dark yellow from tobacco. She was a chain smoker who hid her cigarettes in the palm of her hand as she inhaled.
Sometimes when we’d get in the car, my mother would start crying. She’d hold her head in both hands and sob. But there were never any tears. I would try and comfort her by putting my hand in her hand and or on her shoulder. But my father would tell me to sit back and be quiet and not to disturb her when she was in one of her states. Her sadness was like an insurmountable wall that I wanted to scale. The silence hurt the most. Especially on the way home, after having dropped Mom back at the hospital. My father would stare straight ahead at the traffic, lost in deep thought. I didn’t dare break the spell. I’d stare out the window and watch the families in the other cars.
Around this time, I remember watching Jane Eyre on television with my father — the film version with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. When Joan discovers that Orson’s wife is a madwoman locked in a secret room, a chill passed over me. I looked at Dad, wondering if he noticed the similarity. He didn’t say a word. A moment later, he left the room. It was the first of many experiences in which the truth of my life was more tangible in fiction than in my day-to-day existence.
It was a few years later when I was playing Scrabble with my mother at home on a Saturday afternoon that I first noticed the scars. She’d been given a pass for the weekend. As she reached for some tiles, the sleeve on her dress pulled back, exposing her forearm. A dozen or perhaps two dozen thin white lines had been etched along the flesh of her arm, from the wrist up to the elbow. “What are those from?” I asked, touching the skin, so rough it felt like it had been shed, like snakeskin.
“Those are scars,” she said, in a monotone. “From where I hurt myself.”
“With what?” I asked. It didn’t occur to me then to ask why.
“With a razor blade.” She showed me her other arm which was nearly identical, with thin stripes of raised flesh above the skin. “I did something very stupid many years ago and for that I am being punished. That is why I am in the hospital. Away from you.”
There didn’t seem any point in asking why she had felt the need to cut herself. But I remember thinking, that I had to make sure she never did it again. I wasn’t aware yet of the thick jagged scar on her neck that looked like someone had carved a backwards question mark under her left ear.
The first time I dressed up as Muriel, I must have been nine years old. I was rummaging around the attic. My brother had taken over half of the space. Our housekeeper lived in the other half, which included a bathroom. There were two eaves on either side of my brother’s room that extended far under the roof. Even as a nine year old, I had to bend over to get inside them. Stashed at the back of one of them was a large trunk, untouched since our grandmother had died shortly after we’d moved in. I opened it and found a pile of old ladies’ purses – the kind with alligator heads and scales. A rotting fox stole still had its head and tail and tiny little paws. Best of all, there were dozens of old shoes, black clunky designs with high heels and funny metal holes for lacing the strings. I also found a baby carriage stashed up there (I realize now it must have been my own). After donning one of my sisters muu-muus that my father had brought back from a trip to Hawaii, I put on the fox stole, threw an oversize pocketbook over my shoulder, adjusted the straps on my roomy high heels and put an old teddy bear in the pram. I pushed it out the garage door onto our gravel driveway and paraded up and down the road to the delight of the housewives on the block.
Nature abhors a vacuum but so does a little boy who is lonely for his mother. On weekends, when the maid had her days off, I’d step in to fill her shoes too, making breakfast early in the morning for my father and bringing it to his room. I would put on an apron, the kind my Dad used for barbecuing, with bad cocktail jokes from Esquire magazine printed on it, and get his glass of orange juice ready, toast the thin slices of Arnold’s Brick Oven Bread that he preferred. Sometimes if I felt industrious, I’d pick some daffodils out of the neighbor’s yard (we didn’t have a garden) and stick them in an empty Flintstones jelly jar. I was always the first one up in the house when the housekeeper wasn’t there. Sometimes on Sundays, I would get up at six am and watch the David and Goliath puppet show on TV. Then I would pull out the miniature typewriter my father had given me for my birthday and write stories which I would read to him as he enjoyed his breakfast. Knowing that Dad had been stationed in India during the Second World War, I would regale him with tales of the adventures of Marco Polo in the court of Kubla Khan.
As a child, long before I went to school, I started to read. I learned early on that it was an easy way to get my father’s attention since he loved to read himself and rarely left his chair by the fireplace when he had a book or newspaper on his lap. I developed a passion for books on Greek and Roman mythology, and went to a lot of trouble once to chalk up an entire blackboard my father had bought me with elaborate lists of the names of the Greek gods next to their Roman and Norse counterparts. I had one dog-eared book that told me how the ancient gods had all died when Christianity gained a foothold in Europe.
Even though I was a devout Catholic, who kept the creche up all year round, I prayed for the day these ancient deities would return. Unlike the Christian saints we studied in Church School, these gods were handsome and athletic, with gleaming muscles and fine aristocratic features. They were lustful creatures too who seemed far more human than the angels and saints whose names we memorized in catechism. Best of all, the Greek gods were almost always half-naked. I fantasized about joining them in their races and battles and chariot rides across the sky. I was particularly drawn to the legend of Perseus, the strapping hero who slew Medusa. On the cover of one of my mythology books, the one by Edith Hamilton, was an illustration of Perseus holding Medusa’s head in one hand, blood dripping from her sliced neck, his thick sword held stiffly at crotch level.
But my interest in his tale was more than merely physical. I was fascinated by the three Gorgon sisters who would sit in a circle and pass the one eye they shared among them. The image of the old crones passing their eye haunted me. I would think of my mother in her room at the hospital, her face frozen in moonlight. Turning off her bed light, she’d reach up and remove her glass eye and place it in a velvet box. It was a ritual she did every night, or so I imagined. She was Medusa, the Gorgon queen, whose very look could kill. And I was Perseus, the hero who wasn’t afraid to look her in the eye. 
