Billy Wilder’s film SOME LIKE IT HOT was a funny movie and I didn't think much about men dressing up as woman, until my next-door neighbor asked me in his basement, “Who you think is prettier? Jack Lemmon or Tony Curtis?"
“Neither.” Chuckie Manzi was posing the question in 1964 and men in dresses weren’t supposed to be pretty to twelve year-old boys on the South Shore of Boston. "I want Marilyn."
“Marilyn's dead and you wouldn't want to make love to a dead women, so if you were on a deserted island and there were only you, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon and they were wearing dresses, who would be your wife?”
My best friend had confessed to me that he sometimes wore his youngest sister’s bra and panties. He looked nothing like Addy Manzi, but more like Tony Curtis.
“I would kill myself before marrying either of them.” The Church considered men dressing as woman an abomination, however the priests wore long black cassocks. They called them robes. We knew better and kept our distance.
Chuckie and I remained friends throughout the 1960s. Our knowledge of drag queens expanded with the Kinks’ hit song LOLA with Ray Davies singing, “She walked like a woman and talked like a man.”
“You ever see a man walked like a woman and talk like a man?” Chuckie's interests in the bizarre was more advanced than mine.
“Once at the Greyhound Bus Station.” I had been buying Levis at Walker’s Jeans on Boylston Street. “But he was obviously a man. Even had stubble like a man. And you could tell the high heels hurt his feet.”
“I tried walking in my sister’s shoes. They were murder.” Chuckie had persevered with his closet cross-dressing at home.
“I only have trouble with new sneakers.” They burned blisters on my heels.
“Oh.” Chuckie sensed that this was as far as we could go.
After high school we grew apart.
I attended a Catholic university on the outskirts of Boston. I drove taxi to pay for my apartment near campus. My last fares for the night were out of the Combat Zone; mostly go-go dancers, drunks, and a few drag queens. They were all good tipper and several of the queens exiting from The Other Side were more attractive than the strippers. Most of their fares were to hotels with straight men. Neither asked too many questions on the way to their destinations. I couldn't help singing Lou Reed’s WALK ON THE WILD SIDE after I dropped them off for a night of wicked sex in a cheap hotel.
“Candy came out from the Island, in the backroom she was everyone’s darling.”
I didn’t know what a back room.
My move to New York in 1976 taught me the meaning.
I became a punk and sexual frontiers were blurred in a city where people changed their names to suit their desires. I went to gay bars to pick up fag hags. My gay friends told these girls that I was queer. The fag hags wanted to convert me to being straight. I played hard to get, but they thought they had the cure.
One night I was at the Anvil, waiting for my friends to finish their excursion to the back room. No girls were allowed in the bar, so I was surprised when an attractive brunette sat next to me. She looked like a top fashion model in her pink tube top and hot pants, except she was skinnier than any covergirl.
A long lacquered nail touched my shoulder.
”Can you buy me a drink?”
The faux falsetto betrayed why the bouncer permitted her into the Anvil. She was not a woman, only the closest thing to a female in this bar and I ignored her request.
“Do I have to beg you?” She twirled a strand of long brown hair around her finger with a mockery of feminine guile. I almost laughed and she caught my smile.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, just thinking back to an old song.” I wouldn’t be able to get the Kinks' LOLA out of my head for days.
“Something you want to dance to. I’m a good dancer.” She wiggled her shoulders like a go-go girl. This move sold the mirage and I signaled the bartender to give my barmate a drink.
“My name’s Dove. How you like to go in the back room with me? You can do anything you want.”
“No thanks.” I knew what happened in back rooms.
“Why you think I’m unattractive?” Her lips pouted with disappointment. “I know you’re straight. That’s why I sat here.”
“I thought it was to hustle me for a drink.”
“Fresh.” She slapped my hand. “I have my own money.”
She showed me a thick roll of twenties and Dove explained how a US senator was her sugar daddy.
"Which one?"
"If I told you, he'd have to kill you."
Her story about going to the inaugural ball for Jimmy Carter was funny.
“No one thought I was a man. At least none of the men seemed to care. especially the Republicans. They like girls like me."
After an hour my friends were still buried in the Anvil’s snake pit and I settled my bill to leave.
"Where you going?"
"Home." It was a an SRO on 11th Street and 5th.
“So I guess this means you’re going home alone?”
“Sorry.”I almost kissed Dove good-night, but shook her hands instead.
“Don’t’ be sorry, one night you and I will get it together."
"Never," I answered, although Dove was prettier than most of the women in New York at that time and twice as feminine.
I’m patient. I can wait for never.” She waved good-bye and stood up to twitch a hip as a calling card for a date in neverland.
Dove was not only patient. She was persistent, despite my continual refusals to push our relationship any further than friends. I refused her at the Mudd Club, Studio 54, CBGBs, Hurrahs, Xenon, the Kiev, Dave’s Luncheonette, but she kept asking and I kept saying no.
One evening in 1980 I was at a black tie Paloma Picasso party at Danceteria on 37th Street. I was bored after the first hour and went to get my leather jacket from the coat check. A young man stumbled into me and I turned around quickly since he had stepped on my foot. The thin gay boy’s clumsiness was not from too many drinks. A brutish six-footer was shaking him by the lapels. The stitching of his tuxedo was giving way and I slashed my arm down on his aggressor’s wrists, which broke his grasp and the gay boy ran away.
“Why you do that?” The thug demanded with red eyes. He was on something. My guess was speed.
“Because I didn’t feel like being bumped into, while you beat up on a fag.” My brother was gay. My friends were fags. I didn’t like bullies.
“And what are you going to do about it?” His hands clenched into fists.
Boys from Boston didn’t back down from fights and I launched a right to his mouth. The punch seemed to stagger him, then he spit a tooth in my chest. I knew that I had a fight on my hands and not a good one. I threw lefts and rights faster than his counters, but he outweighed me and I backed up to the wall.
Luckily the security broke us up. They knew me and threw him out. Two ballerinas thought that I was hero for standing up against this gaybasher. I felt like one too and accompanied them into the street, where I waved down a taxi. My hand never reached the air, because something hard struck the base of the skull.
I fell into the gutter and pulled my arms over my head. A second punch later my ego was floated past my superego into a green emerald pulsating with lightning every second. This was not a good sign. Finally someone asked with a Jersey accent, “Have you had enough?”
"Yes." I had had enough after the first sucker punch.
The thug stood up with a chain was wrapped around his fist and strode away the victor.
I rose to my feet to survey the damage.
"Are you all right?" asked a young handsome photographer on the scene.
"I think so." My teeth were intact and my nose was unbroken.
"He would have killed you if I hadn't have pulled him off." The photographer was clearly horrified by the damage.
"I owe you one." I looked at my face in a car mirror. Blood was dripping from a dozen cuts and my skull was swollen with blossoming bruises.
For the next week I resembled a welcher on a bet to John Gotti’s gang and I plotted my revenge licking my wounds.
New York was a big city, but the night life in 1979 was a small scene. Maybe 3000 people. I would run into the thug again and carried a long stiletto for my payback.
It wasn’t long in coming.
A transvestite trapeze bar opened in Times Square called GG Barnums. Dove was part-owner backed by her secret senator. One night we were sitting at the bar. She had heard about my beating and thought I was a hero.
“Hero’s don’t get the snort beat out of them.”
“Well, you’re a hero to me and I’d love to show you how much.” The cut of her Chanel dress cut showed off Dove's Mia Farrow figure.
“Thanks, but I’m not really in a romantic mood.”
“I could change that in a second.” Her hand caressed my thigh and showed me a Pond's Cream jar packed with cocaine. It shown Bolivian pink in the bar lights. "You, me, and an ounce of blow. How can you say no."
"Not tonight." I rose off the stool.
“What wrong?”
“That guy who beat me up just walked into the bar.” I grabbed the knife in my pocket.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Dove pushed me back down and lit a cigarette. “I’ll take are of this.”
"This is something I have to do for myself."
"Trust me, it's better this way."
Dove stole through the crowded bar like a serpent seeking its prey. She puffed hard on the cigarette. The ember burned a bright red. Dove tapped the thug on the shoulder. He turned around and she stuck the cigarette in his eye. He dropped to his knees on the floor.
Dove returned to me and asked, “Will you go home with me now?”
“I don’t think I can refuse.” She was in too vicious a mood to refuse.
Nothing really happened between us. The cocaine was too strong. We kissed a little and that was it. She said that my problem was our little secret. She was good at keeping that secret.
GG Barnums lasted a half-year. The trapeze transvestite shows had a short life. Dove started dressed like a Palm Beach divorcee with nova blonde hair. She said that she was moving south.
"The Senator divorced his wife and isn't running for office next term." I wished her luck. "Thanks, but I was born lucky."
I think about Dove everytime I hear WALK ON THE WILD SIDE. Dove was everyone’s darling in the right mood and beat out Tony Curtis as choice #1 on a deserted island, but I couldn’t have foreseen that in 1964. Not even in my wet dreams.
To hear WALKL ON THE WILD SIDE please go to this URl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnPG2fX5oUM
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