Authors: Cleary Wolters
The guy laughed and said, “It’s a madhouse here today.” He took my passport and Customs card. “Where are you coming from?” I knew this by heart. Every question he might come up with I had the answer ready to fire back.
“Paris.”
“Purpose of your trip?” He asked this while making notes on the blue Customs card.
“Business,” I answered as glibly as I could. He looked up, gave me a quick once-over.
“Anything to declare?” His attention was back on my Customs card. This is where I was supposed to list the valuable items I was bringing into the country. Of course, I had not noted the heroin, stuffed in the lining of the jackets I had packed in my garment bag.
“Welcome back. Hand this to the agent on your way out.” He slammed a stamp down on the Customs card, made some big squiggly mark on it, and handed it back to me, tucked inside my passport.
I walked toward the exit of the big entry hall, one blue door still flipping closed from the last entrant, and there was now one more agent between me and the end of this fucking trip. I pulled the card out of my passport and handed it to him. He was perched on a tall stool and looked more bored than anything else. He had a stack of cards already amassed in his hand. He reached out, took mine, scanned the front and the back, nodded toward the door, and said nothing.
I walked through the door and into the busy baggage claim area. I didn’t have to wait for any luggage; I just had to wait for Henry and Bradley on the curb outside. I made my way to the door, skipping an opportunity to trade my hundred francs for dollars. I would keep this as a souvenir. I got outside and it was bitter cold, but I felt fantastic. I pulled a cigarette out of my purse and lit it, then moved toward the area where people were getting into taxis.
I saw Bradley come out the doors. He spotted me and walked
over, reaching out with two fingers, a give-me-your-cigarette gesture. I handed my lit cigarette over and he took a long drag. “Holy shit!” Smoke and his breath in the cold air came out in two big plumes.
“That was so fucking easy!” I said this to Bradley, under my breath.
“Speak for yourself. Try holding your poop for six hours.” He handed me back the cigarette and made a groaning noise. He looked terribly uncomfortable. I was just about to suggest he go on ahead to the hotel when Henry came out the door and headed to the last cab in the line of taxis. We hustled to catch up and practically dove into the backseat of the taxi. Henry was in the front seat, telling the taxi driver he was sorry, but we could not wait in line. He had diarrhea. The driver objected strongly, telling us to get out, then Henry held out two hundred-dollar bills and said please. Henry turned and smiled at us, like a proud father, as soon as the taxi left the curb.
Northampton, Massachusetts
March 1993
N
ORTHAMPTON IS A COLLEGE TOWN
, a picturesque little village nestled in the Berkshire Mountains of New England in Massachusetts. Think of Norman Rockwell’s
Saturday Evening Post
cover images decades ago: simpler times, when kids sat at old soda fountains talking to white-smocked, rosy-cheeked old men—a perfect little town, with clapboard homes and white picket fences. That’s Northampton. Just add a lot of lesbians to Rockwell’s painting.
I was the only passenger left on the bus when we pulled into the Northampton station at nightfall. The big snowstorm my driver had been racing to beat was already heavy in the air, muffling the quiet night. I surveyed the empty parking lot, recalling the distance to my hotel. I used to live right near the bus station, but back then I’d had my motorcycle to go into town. I hadn’t been walking then, and I hadn’t been dressed up with bags to lug. Fortunately, I had packed light—just the one bag and my purse. The Tumi bag had tough little rollers, so I decided to make the walk to the hotel. It’s not that I had an alternative. There were no taxis around and the pay phone to call one was inside the closed bus station.
I took a deep breath of the cold, clean air and my mind filled with images of hot chocolate, glowing fireplaces, and familiar faces. It was odd not having an actual home to return to, especially with the storm coming. Storms made me want to curl up in bed and cuddle with my kitties or a lover if there was one handy. But I didn’t have my cats, Edith and Dum Dum, with me, my love life was in shambles, and I didn’t even have a bed yet.
The remnants of a previous storm still littered the sidewalks. Salt and piles of compacted and refrozen slush might make it a difficult walk. There was a shortcut up a steep hill to Main Street. I chose the longer but safer route and avoided wiping out. My Italian leather boots had heels, but they were just a couple of inches high. I wouldn’t wipe out on this route, not if I was careful. I loved the way the boots felt—slippery, soft, and pliant inside and out. They weren’t particularly warm, but they were cute, and the clack and the crunch they made on the sidewalk sounded expensive to me.
I pulled out the thin leather gloves I had picked up at a boutique in Paris and slid them on. My coat was designed for show. Long, black, and lightweight, it was not intended for snow. I was warm though; I had a surplus of adrenaline and layers. Each layer was thin and slippery—silk, linen, and a wool and silk blend—my coat, a jacket under that, and blouse. I had shopped for two days in Chicago, assembling the outfit, getting my hair and nails done again like I was going to some big formal occasion. It wasn’t formal, but it was definitely an occasion. I had made it. Now I just needed to make it to a bathroom before I ruined my fabulous outfit.
There were so many people I wanted to see. But I wanted everything to be perfect when I saw my friends. Just the same, I was impatient. I wanted to run into somebody on my way to the hotel right then, maybe just an acquaintance, just to see if they recognized me. Nobody knew I was coming. I looked totally different, and I had never been able to afford to dress as nicely as I was dressed at the moment. No, my friends would expect a short, dumpy tomboy in tattered jeans and motorcycle boots, if they were expecting me. But they weren’t.
I walked by the steamy windows of Spoleto, a restaurant I had worked at before deciding to leave Northampton and move to Chicago two months before. The restaurant was packed, but it was impossible to tell who was in there. I couldn’t see who was working. All I could make out through the sweating glass were the general shapes and number of people crowded in, trying to get seated. It was hard to believe it had been only two months since I had left. It had been snowing then too.
The Hotel Northampton felt like the deserted hotel in
The Shining
or any one of Vincent Price’s haunted mansions. When I walked into the big empty lobby, there was no one around to greet me, and the only sound came from the wind outside. I supposed they were operating with a skeleton staff, probably because of the expected snowstorm but more likely because nobody visits Northampton at that time of year.
I took the elevator to my floor after checking in. When the elevator door opened, I peeked out, looking in both directions, listening for signs of other guests, before stepping out. It was silent, except for the closing elevator doors behind me. I walked down the carpeted hallway to my room, picking up my pace as I neared my room number. When I closed the door behind me, I felt the hairs rising on the back of my neck. I was totally spooked. I made two quick hops to the bathroom, as if by hopping I was safe from whatever had spooked me. I did my business, and then I turned on every light in the room.
Washing my hands, I was shocked by my reflection. I had seen myself every day through some fast changes, but I was still surprised to see myself in a mirror. My rebellious curls hadn’t changed, but my brown hair had gotten lighter, turned golden from all the sun. My face was thin—I had a chin and neck now—and I wore makeup. My black-rimmed glasses were a new look for me too. They looked a little like the glasses my father had worn or that Clark Kent wore when he wasn’t being Superman. The glasses made me look intelligent and nerdy. They had taken me some time to appreciate; they were a much bolder look than my old tortoiseshell specs I’d been wearing since high school, but Henry had loved them. The
mascara and tan made my eyes look bluer and the whites whiter. The lipstick still looked weird to me.
I suddenly had the urge to remove my makeup. I had been back in Northampton for thirty minutes, and the new me was already starting to crumble. The makeup felt wrong, like a mask or something of my mother’s I shouldn’t be wearing. I knew that was crazy—some bizarre ass-backward insecurity I had about myself. Most women wear makeup because of their insecurities. I was uncomfortable being pretty, or trying to be. Cute I had no trouble with, but pretty made me squirm. I was a tomboy at heart.
When I was in seventh grade, my father was called into a parent-teacher conference with my school counselor at Anderson Middle School. I had taken to wearing my father’s shirts to school. Dad was an office man and a very sharp dresser. I liked his starchy white oxford-cloth shirts and thought they looked cute on me. I had gotten the idea from a Doris Day movie in which she was running around in a similar shirt with no pants on, tan, with her golden hair a mess. I’d thought she looked fantastic. Doris was probably an early crush, the first tingles in my gaydar going off, but that concept wasn’t yet part of my consciousness. In any case, I had finally seen something famously worn that I liked, so I felt like a movie star wearing Dad’s too-big shirts. If that happened today, my flare for creative expression in my attire would have made me a fashionista, not a deviant in need of reprogramming, but it was 1975.
The counselor attributed my innocent fashion faux pas to something insidious. He wanted my parents to deal with the troubling crisis he saw brewing or remove me from among the perfectly preppy young darlings dressed in Ralph Lauren, Izod, and J. Crew. In his defense, I think he was suffocating in his own gay closet. It wasn’t just the shirts that would fix me, and he had to have known that; his swish and lisp hadn’t been corrected by his plaid flannel. Perhaps he thought that if he caught it early enough, he could save me from his fate. I don’t know, but I was a tomboy. The men’s shirts just gave him the circumstance to do what he felt was needed: talk to my father.
The counselor believed it would be in my best interest to start wearing clothes little girls should be wearing and wanted to enlist my father’s help in making that happen. Dad disagreed, and in my best interest, enrolled me in a Catholic girls’ school. Uniforms made the issue moot. I suspect this swift resolution actually came from my mother. The men’s shirt incident just gave her license to do something she had wanted to do since I’d entered first grade.
This was her opportunity to get me into a better place, where I could meet the right boys and make the right friends. Mom hadn’t gone to public school. She was a spoiled Southern belle and former mistress of the Birmingham Civic Ballet Company. She’d been raised in a very religious Irish Catholic family in George Wallace’s backyard: Birmingham, Alabama. Mom had some very distinctly Southern and snobby notions about how to raise a little girl in the world, and she felt her little girl needed the kind of grooming nuns and priests could provide.
Mom had also been noisily suffering from a troubling void any good Catholic woman of the seventies experienced when they didn’t attend Mass every Sunday or make sure their children did. Her daughter’s expensive enrollment in a Catholic school alleviated that guilt a little. Church had been taken from Mother’s Sundays by my father’s refusal to go. Dad didn’t try to bar her from going to church on her own, but she would not go without him. If she didn’t go, then my sister, Hester; my brother, Gene; and I didn’t have to go to church either, or Sunday school.
Dad had been raised a poor farm boy in Kansas, and he had his own rich history with the Catholic Church. Unlike Mom’s spoiled upbringing in an otherwise empty nest, he had five younger brothers and sisters with whom he had endured an impoverished existence. He loved his brothers and sisters madly and wouldn’t have traded any one of them for anything, but he didn’t want to create the same-size litter his parents had been obliged to create. He also wanted to have sex more than a few times in his life.
Ironically, the Catholic Church had paid for his education in the seminary where he had nearly become a priest. His passion for
Christ hadn’t matched his passion for sex, and with his thirst for knowledge sated, he had been unable to blindly accept the man-made rules of his church as he had done all his life. He’d chosen a more practical vocation and married Mom in 1960.
In 1975, Dad had stumbled into a final intellectual conflict with the men who ruled the church and had decided that the Catholic Church, as an institution, was insane. It had no place in his life. We stopped going to church when I was in third grade. In any case, the Catholic school choice and the uniform that came with it worked for both my parents in different ways, so I went to Saint Ursula Villa for my eighth grade.
For middle school students, eighth grade is like their senior year—a strange time to be uprooted. I hated the uniform, hated the school, and hated all the pretentious brats I didn’t know. Money and affluence make no difference; eighth-graders anywhere are fierce little monsters. They thrive in packs, and I didn’t have a pack. Fortunately, it was only eight months before summer arrived and grade school was over. High school turned everyone into new students, not just me. I was advanced to Saint Ursula Academy, an all-girls high school—the perfect place for a young blossoming lesbian, you would think. But no, I left there my senior year. I had to go back to public school, at Anderson High School. I think this lifelong problem with who I was is what accounted for my alarm every time I looked in a mirror and saw who they had always wanted me to be.
Having forgotten about being spooked, I dimmed the lights and looked around my hotel room. All that was missing was a crackling fire, in a fireplace of course. The phone sat in its cradle on the desk, patiently waiting for me to summon it into action. I picked up the receiver, listened for a dial tone, and pressed nine plus the first three numbers for any phone in Northampton. I knew Phillip’s number and Joan’s by heart but didn’t know which to call. I had been waiting so long, dreaming of the moment when I could talk to my best friend or ex-lover again. I set the receiver back into its cradle and rested my head in my palms. I could hear the fast
thump, thump, pa-dump
of my heart. The wind picked up outside
and shook my window. I heard light taps on the glass pane.
Damn it!
I didn’t want to get stuck in the hotel all by myself, and now the storm had started. I called Phillip. He was my dependable cure for loneliness and a much better impulse than my misguided desire to call Joan.
“Hey. Are you hungry? I’m starved.” My cheery invitation was greeted with silence.
“Cleary?” Phillip sounded completely indifferent, not at all surprised by the unexpected reemergence of his vanished, possibly presumed dead friend. He always sounded that way though. “Are you in town?” His voice got just a tiny bit higher at the end of his question. It wasn’t enough input for me to determine whether the pitch change meant
I’m going to kill you
or
Yippee, you’re all right!
I couldn’t be sure how angry Phillip might be at me for ditching him, leaving him almost penniless in Chicago, and not communicating with him as to my whereabouts or well-being. I had told him I would be gone for only a week.
“Yes, it’s me. I’m here. Bolognese?” As soon as I said it, my stomach growled. This was the dish I ordered every time I ate at Spoleto, the restaurant where I had worked with Phillip until we had both taken off for Chicago in January.
“I’m broke.” Phillip had a hint of irritation in his tone now.
“Come on. I’m buying. It’s my apology.” I giggled. I’m not one for giggling; it just happened, like a drunken hiccup. I hoped Phillip’s forgiveness could be bought for a lot less than a dinner at Spoleto, but it’s what I wanted.
“What time?” he asked.
“Now’s good.” Phillip hung up as soon as I said it. He had horrible phone etiquette and wasn’t much more polite face-to-face.
Phillip was my eye-candy sidekick. He had been handsome in the black-and-whites we used to wear at Spoleto. He came across as a mildly snobby Italian, though he was neither snobby nor Italian. The snobbism was an unintentional indifference. The Italian look relied on context; outside of Spoleto he was a generic-brand American. He had dark brown hair and brown eyes, and he was pale, always
pale. He carried himself lightly, but he was not effeminate—sort of like a skinny rock star but without the long hair. He actually looked a little like Henry, but looks were all they had in common. Phillip was the straight version, he was an artist, and instead of being the temple of self-control, he drank too much, chain smoked, and did recreational drugs like it was the eighties.