December 21, 1978 - East Village - Journal

GG Barnums was good fun last evening, especially dancing between a glamorous queen and ballerina; Shannon and Dove. Shannon stuck poppers under my nose and Dove too, whispering 'fuck me, fuck her' in all seriousness dancing to Chic's FREAK. Grant and John joined us in the dance orgy. It had been a long time since I enjoyed myself in a disco. GG Barnums offers another higher plane of perversion; shem/him/she. Dancing underneath the trans trapeze artists in sequined bikinis swing through th air. Grant felt a little out of place, because none of the men were interested in gay sex, but wanted stick pussy. Same as me.

I wasn't fucked enough to escape my hang-ups, but submitted to the touch and caress of the cluster pseudo-fuck. Shannon gives me a line. We went into the toilet, but there were too many people to do anything without 5heir involvement.

I first became acquainted with queens through Hubert Selby Jr.'s LAST EXIT FOR BROOKLYN. One of the tragic heroines, Georgette, sadly tastes someone else's ass on her boyfriend's cock. They liked getting fuck hard in the novel. I jerked off to it more than a couple of times and back at the bar I allowed Shannon to fondle my cock sheathed by my jeans.

"I want you to jam your cock down my throat. I want your cock in my ass. Get me a beer."

I hadn't gotten an erection and left soon after. Rain outside. I walked through post-midnight Times Square. Alone. No sluts, no whores, no queers, only wet perverts hoping for the impossible. I take the R train south to the East Village.

WALK LIKE A WOMAN by Peter Nolan Smith

Billy Wilder's SOME LIKE IT HOT was a funny movie about two musicians hiding from the Mob in an all-women band and I didn't think much about men dressing as women, until my next-door neighbor asked in his basement, "Who you think is prettier? Jack Lemmon or Tony Curtis?"

"Neither."

The year was 1964 and men in dresses weren't supposed to be pretty to twelve year-old boys on the South Shore of Boston.

"Yeah, but if you had to make a choice, who would it be?" Chuckie Manzi was my best friend, but his question had weirder me out.

"I pick Marilyn." She was the logical choice.

"Marilyn's dead and you wouldn't want to make love to a dead women, so if you were on a deserted island with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, who would be your wife?"

"I would kill myself before marrying either of them."

The Catholic Church condemned men dressing as woman an abomination, however the priests wore long black cassocks, which they looked like dresses to me and I kept my distance from priests as would any twelve year-old atheist.

"You know they have a word for men who want to be women? Drag queens and not drag like drag racing."

"I know." I had heard that term in school and the words were not spoken in a nice way.

"Some of them are supposed to be pretty."

"Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are not pretty."

"You're no fun." Chuckie gave up on getting an answer.

A year later I entered his bedroom and was shocked to see a teenage girl in lingerie and high heels. For a second I thought it was Chuckie's sister Addy. I was in love with my ex-babysitter, but then Chuckie pushed back the wig, "I just wanted to feel what dressing like a girl was like. It feels real good. You want to try?"

"No."

I left his house.

We remained friends throughout the 1960s and when Ray Davies sang on Kinks’ hit song LOLA, "She walked like a woman and talked like a man." Chuckie asked, "You ever see a man walked like a woman and talk like a man?"

"Once at the Greyhound Bus Station. I had bought Levi jeans at Walker's Jeans on Boylston Street and was walking to South Station."

"Through the Combat Zone?"

Strip bars, gay clubs, porno parlors, and prostitution in Boston's adult entertainment district

"Yeah, I was looking for something at Jack"s Joke Shop and outside the Hillbilly Ranch and a man in a dress was fighting a sailor, who hadn't paid her."

"Who won?"

"The drag queen. They're tough, because they have to be tough. You still wear Addy's lingerie?"

"No, I outgrew that."

"You could always try on your mother’s undies."

"Fuck off." Chuckie dropped this subject forever.

After high school we grew apart.

I attended a Catholic university on the outskirts of Boston and drove taxi to pay for an apartment near the campus. My last fares of the night were from in the Combat Zone; mostly go-go dancers, drunks, and a few drag queens from the Other Side. The trannies were good tippers and several were more attractive than the strippers from the Two O'Clock Lounge.

Most of the drag queens brought straight men to cheap hotels. Neither passenger spoke much en route and after dropping them off for a night of wicked sex I couldn't help, but sing Lou Reed's WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, "In the back room she was everyone's darling."

In 1971 I didn't know what a back room was, but a move to New York in 1976 opened my eyes, because sexual frontiers were blurred in a city where people answered their desires with a constant yes.

I frequented gay bars with queer friends from the ballet. My queer friends told the fag hags that I had doubts about being a homo. These models, air hostesses, and strippers thought they had could cure me and they were right, because I was mostly straight.

One night at the Anvil I was waiting for my friends to end their voyage to Sodom in the back room.

No girls were allowed in the bar, so I was surprised by an attractive slender brunette sitting next to me.

She could have graced a fashion runway in her pink tube top and hot pants.

A long lacquered nail touched my shoulder.

"Buy me a drink?"

The faux falsetto betrayed why the bouncer permitted her into the Anvil and I ignored her request.

"Are you going to make me beg?" She twirled a strand of long brown hair around her finger. It was a good act and I laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"Nothing, just thinking of an old song."

"Let me guess," she sighed with a roll of her eyes. "LOLA."

"Yes." I was a poor liar after a few drinks.

"Too bad it wasn't a song you want to dance to like Diana Ross' LOVE HANGOVER."

"Why?" The ex-Supreme singer had scored a big hit with that song in the gay discos.

"Because I'm a good dancer." She wiggled her shoulders like a Times Square go-go girl

"I bet you are." I signaled the bartender for two drinks.

"My name's Dove. How you like to go in the back room with me? You can do anything you want."

"No thanks."

"Do you think I'm unattractive?" Her lips pouted with hurt disappointment.

"You're every man's dream, if I were that type of man."

"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 flashed a thick roll of twenties.

"I'm kept by a very important person."

"Who's your VIP?"

"A US senator from Dixie."

"Which one?"

"If I told you, he'd have to kill you, but I accompanied him to Jimmy Carter's inaugural ball. Every man at the White House was stumbling over their feet to worship my high heels, especially those wicked Republicans. They really have a thing for girls like me."

"I bet they do."

After that comment the two of us conversed about politics, love, and sex.

I ordered more drinks.

My friends were lost in the Anvil's snake pit.

An hour later I waved for the bill.

"Where you going?"

"Home. I live in a SRO room on 11th Street and 5th."

"And you're leaving alone?"

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry, one night you and I will get it together."

"Never," I answered too fast to be telling the truth.

"I've heard 'never' too many times to know that 'never' doesn't exist forever."

She stood up to twitch a hip as a calling card for that future date in Never-Neverland.

Dove was not only patient.

She was persistent.

I refused her at the Mudd Club, Studio 54, CBGBs, Hurrahs, Xenon, the Kiev, and Dave's Luncheonette.

"One night you and me."

"Never."

Dove smiled and caressed my thigh.

"See you soon."

"Maybe. Maybe not."

Dove disappeared for most of the fall.

On Halloween in 1980 I attended a black tie Paloma Picasso party honoring the NY Ballet at Danceteria on 37th Street. The illegal nightclub was packed with Upper East Side slummers and after an hour of champagne I went to retrieve my leather jacket from the coat check.

While waiting in line a young ballet boy stumbled into me. His clumsiness was not from too many drinks. A brutish six-footer shook the dancer by his tuxedo lapels. The stitching of the ballet boy's evening suit gave way and I slashed my arm down on his aggressor's wrists, breaking his grasp and the gay boy fled into the crowd.

"Why you do that?" the thug demanded with eyes blurred red with Dexies.

"Because I didn't feel like being bumped into, while you beat up on a fag."

"And what are you going to do about it?" His hands clenched into fists.

Boys from South Shore of Boston didn't back down from challenges and I lashed a right to his mouth. The punch staggered him. He spit a tooth in my chest. I threw lefts and rights faster than his counters, but my heavier opponent weathered the blows without any sign of damage and backed me up to the wall.

I was in trouble, until two bouncers stopped the brawl.

They knew me and threw the Jersey boy out of the club.

Two ballerinas praised my standing up against this gay basher and I exited Danceteria with them in tow. On the street I waved down a taxi, but my hand never reached the air, because something struck the base of my skull.

Hard.

I fell into the gutter and pulled my arms over my head.

A second blow booted my ego past my superego into a green emerald id pulsating with lightning.

This was not a good sign. Finally someone asked with a Jersey accent, "You have you had enough?"

"Yes."

I sat up with great difficulty.

"No you haven't." The thug cracked my skull with a chain wrapped around his fist and strode away the victor.

I rose to my feet shaken to the bone.

"Are you all right?" asked a young handsome photographer on the scene.

I had seen him around. His name was Marcus Leatherdale.

"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." Marcus was clearly horrified by the damage to my face.

"I owe you one." I glanced in a car mirror. Blood drooled from a dozen cuts and my skull was swollen with blossoming bruises.

I took a taxi home and stayed in bed for a few days.

Every second of my convalescence I plotted my revenge, for while New York was a big city, the nightlife in 1979 was a small scene consisting of maybe 3000 people and two weeks later a transvestite trapeze bar opened in Times Square. Dove's lover was part owner and she invited me for a drink at the bar.

"I heard about you're saving that gay boy at Danceteria." She signaled the bartender for drinks.

"You're my hero."

She was smoking a Virginia Slim.

"Heroes don't get the shit beaten out of them." My facial bones were returning to their original positions.

"Well, you're a hero to me and I'd love to show you how much." The black Chanel dress revealed the best features of her Mia Farrow figure.

"Thanks, but I'm not really in a romantic mood."

"I could change that in a second."

She opened a Pond's Cream jar packed with cocaine shining with Bolivian pink.

"You, me, and an ounce of blow. How can you say no?"

"Not tonight." I rose off the stool.

"What wrong?" She was an expert judge of the mood of men.

"That guy who beat me up just walked into the bar." I grabbed a knife from behind the bar.

The handle was as cold as the blood in my veins.

"No." Dove pushed me back down and puffed on her cigarette. "Girls like me learn early how to take care of ourselves and our friends. I'll take care of this. Believe me, it'll better this way."

She read the murder in my eyes.

"This better be good."

"Silly man, this will be bad."

Dove stole through the crowd, sucking on her cigarette, until the ember burned a lava red. Dove winked at me and tapped the thug on the shoulder.

When he turned around, she stuck the cigarette in his eye.

Screaming he dropped to his knees.

Dove returned to the bar and asked, "Will you go home with me now?"

"How I can refuse?"

At my room we snorted blow, then necked and petted and groped without intercourse. The cocaine eunuched my cock.

In the morning Dove left my apartment, whispering that that my erection dysfunction was our little secret.

"Thanks."

"No, thank you, super-hero." Dove was a starlet of discretion.

Her bar lasted a half-year. Dove sold out her interest to the owners of Danceteria.

Over the next months Dove began to dressed like a Park Avenue divorcee with nova blonde hair and one day she told me that she was moving south.

"To Palm Beach."

"Big money country."

She shrugged a shoulder cloaked by Dior.

"The Senator isn't running for office and he wants to make me an honest woman."

"An operation?"

"Perish the thought."

"Good luck." Being beautiful was a powerful card to play with the rich.

"Thanks, but I was born lucky." She smiled knowing the odds weren't in her favor, but they never are for girls like her.

And now every time I hear WALK ON THE WILD SIDE I think about Dove, because she was everyone's darling in the right mood and beat out Tony Curtis as my # 1 choice on a deserted island, although I couldn't have foreseen that option in 1964.

Not even in my wettest dreams about a man who walks like a woman.

WALK LIKE A WOMAN by Peter Nolan Smith

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