Authors: Rona Jaffe
“Could
I
do it?” he asked Flash, almost in tears at the thought of how wonderful it would be to have an image at last.
“Sure. You’d look great. I’ll put you in drag myself.”
So Flash did. He got Vincent a blond wig, showed him how to paint, told him what cosmetics to buy, how to care for his skin, and even took him to buy a dress. One night he and Flash went to a gay bar in drag and Vincent was the star of the evening. All the men thought he was a girl. He was so happy he burst into tears.
He let his hair grow a little and Flash styled it like Twiggy’s. He began to paint all the time, copying everything he saw on the models in
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
. He needed a name for drag, so he named himself Jewel because he thought it sounded classy. Vincent was not hip and he did not like to poke fun at himself. To him, drag was serious business. He felt much more at home as a girl than as a boy, and he knew he looked better. He knew he was a strikingly pretty girl. On the other hand, he was still quite aware—much more so than the other queens he met in the bars were about themselves—that he was a boy. He did not, for instance, ever carry a handbag; that was ridiculous. He kept his carfare in his underpants. He did not bother to wear a padded bra, knowing that flat-chested girls were perfectly acceptable, and because a padded bra made him feel uncomfortable. He never wore lipstick, only a little Vaseline. Although he always wore boys’ clothes except when he was in drag on weekend nights or for parties, he gaffed, tucking his cock back so it did not show, and often when he was in the street wearing no more paint than a little mascara, people would say within his hearing: “Is it a boy or a girl? It’s a girl, of course, silly.” He was a natural beauty wonder.
Often straight men came up to him in bars and asked him to dance, thinking he was a girl. He always told them that he was a boy, not believing in the fantasy enough to deceive himself, but they always wanted to dance with him anyway. Sometimes college boys invited him to their college dances, in drag, and passed him off as their date. Vincent liked that very much. He knew he was the prettiest girl in the room, and he looked
real
.
Vincent met a lot of queens in the bars, and he spent many weekend evenings dishing with the girls, dancing, flirting, until the sun came up, but he always went home alone. For one thing, drag queens like him did not appeal to many fruits, and for another, Vincent still had his girl’s mentality—he believed in love, or at least someone he could have a relationship with. If someone approached him who was just a number he did not even bother to talk at all. He knew the difference between a number and a real date, and he never deceived himself about that either.
At first when his parents found him going around wearing make-up they were shocked and saddened. He never put his dress on at home at first, carrying it in a bag and putting it on at the home of one or another of the queens he had become friendly with, but after a while when he realized his parents weren’t going to throw him out of the house for painting, he became bolder and pranced right out of the house in front of their noses in high drag. After a while he really believed they were beginning to accept him as their daughter, although of course they refused to call him Jewel and he never even asked them to. He thought of himself as “Jewel … she” when he was in drag, and as “Vincent … he” when he was out of drag. Out of drag, for Vincent, meant not in a dress.
When he wasn’t painted he spent hours with complexion creams and moisturizers on his face, taking better care of his skin than almost any girl. Luckily, he was never troubled with adolescent acne. He graduated from high school with excellent grades, but then he just stayed around the house all day, watching television, napping, or just thinking. Sometimes he played records. He never read a book or a newspaper, which was not surprising because there were no books in the house. The only magazines he read were fashion magazines, and sometimes drag-queen magazines, if anyone he knew had her picture in it. He refused to get a job. What kind of a job could he get? He refused to look for work as a boy, and he was too shy to look for work passing as a girl. Sometimes a boy who liked him would buy him some article of feminine clothing, so he managed to keep his wardrobe up, and Flash had given him the wig. His parents gave him small amounts of money. But the main reason Vincent stayed in the house all day was that the life he had chosen to follow was essentially the life of the night people. All the queens lived on pills, slept all day, and cruised the bars all night. There were private gay clubs for after the bars closed. Often they went into Manhattan, where there were bigger, better private clubs.
Although Vincent attended every drag ball, he never entered a beauty contest for female impersonators, giving as the excuse that he was too poor to buy the proper gown and wig. He knew that you had to look really spectacular to win, and although his friends assured him he would mop any contest he entered, he knew you had to know a lot to be a winning contestant.
He was often depressed. His depression took the form of inertia. He could sit for hours, curled up on the couch with his cheek resting on his knees, and think about nothing at all. The hours would go by, then somehow the days. He took little naps, like an animal. He hardly ever ate. Sometimes he cleaned the house for his mother, or cooked dinner. He liked to be helpful. He would joke to the other queens that he was going to find a rich man and get married, because he would be a wonderful wife, but sometimes he wondered what was going to happen to him. It didn’t really matter right now, though, he was only eighteen. He had a long time to think seriously about his life.
Then, one night in Manhattan, at a drag ball, he met Fred. At first he thought Fred was either a drag queen, because she was so chic and beautiful, or a dike, because she really looked
real
. If she was a queen he liked her, if she was a dike she terrified him. He hated dikes. Fred had come to the ball with a hairdresser named Nelson, an up-tight East Side queen who wouldn’t be caught dead cruising a gay bar because he was famous, and would go to a drag ball only if he brought along a girl and pretended he thought it was all a camp. Nelson, Vincent knew, was probably a tireless cruiser of the streets, not to mention the bath houses when he got desperate. Vincent couldn’t stand phonies: he didn’t like Nelson and Nelson obviously hated him because he was doing what Nelson really wanted but didn’t have the courage to do. Nelson looked as though he thought if he touched Vincent by accident he would be contaminated.
But Fred seemed to adore Vincent, fussing over him, calling him Jewel, saying over and over how beautiful “she” was, how “she” looked just like a girl, how she could fix “her” up to look even more real. She told him he should model. Fred turned out to be perfectly straight, and eventually by the end of the evening Nelson decided Vincent was not going to contaminate him after all and let Fred persuade him to restyle Vincent’s hair and help him with his new make-up.
After that it was just like a dream. They went to Fred’s apartment where she made coffee and they spent four hours experimenting with make-up and wigs, while Fred kept up this chatter about turning Vincent into the greatest model who ever was because he had “a new face in the modeling world.” Fred let Vincent try on many of her dresses and even gave him two which she said didn’t really suit her. After all that experimentation Nelson decided the Twiggy hairstyle really suited Vincent the best, although Vincent’s dream was to have a mane of hair like Fred’s. “You have to be a sweet little girl,” Fred told him. She taught him the difference between painting for drag and making up subtly.
Vincent couldn’t wait to try out his new look back home in Irvington. He went into the bars the next night, and socked them beauty
back!
The queens died of envy. Everyone buzzed around him telling him how beautiful he looked. He knew then that it was an improvement.
After a year in the bars Vincent had lost all touch with the straight world, and he had never gone out alone with a girl, so straight people frightened him. Fred took him to stores to buy clothes, lending him the money; encouraged him, took him into restaurants with her for lunch just as if he were another girl, and gradually Vincent grew to love her dearly, although in a purely platonic way. He certainly wasn’t a dike! Nelson didn’t want to have anything to do with him socially, but Fred even invited him to several straight parties, in drag of course, and everyone there thought he was a girl. He was absolutely unreadable. (Later when she took him to the photographer and he saw the photos, he was sure of it. He looked as much a girl as Fred did, and Fred was certainly quite a woman.)
“Now you have to change your name,” Fred told him.
“What’s wrong with Jewel?”
“It sounds like a drag queen, that’s all. You should get an ordinary girl’s name.”
He kept protesting, because all his friends knew him as Jewel, and he had come to think of himself as Jewel when he was in drag, but then one day a date took him to see
Bonnie and Clyde
and Vincent knew instantly the name he wanted to have.
“I’m Bonnie Parker now,” he told Fred.
“You can’t be Bonnie Parker. No one will believe it.”
“Why not? Bonnie is a nice name, and I can’t be Bonnie Abruzzi—it sounds ridiculous. I like Bonnie Parker. If I can’t be Bonnie Parker I’m going to stay Jewel.”
“Oh, hell,” Fred said. “What am I going to do with you?”
But Fred finally resigned herself to Bonnie Parker, and the queens in the bars thought it was inspired. A lot of them had movie stars’ names and the names of real girl models they admired, but none of them had called herself after a character in a movie. It really was a good idea, they all agreed. When the queens in the bars agreed on something Vincent became unshakable, for they were his jury. If they didn’t like something, if they thought something wasn’t
real
, then he wouldn’t do it. Not that he had any illusions about them, for many of them were crazy. In the past year, several of his friends had committed suicide or o.d.’d on drugs, and he knew his was a neurotic world, peopled with freaks and dreamers. But who else could he trust? Straight people, to him, were like men from Mars. Until he’d found the queens in the bars to be friends with, he hadn’t had anybody he could communicate with. Neurotic was better than nothing. He was sure he was pretty neurotic, too, just being a freak the way he was, trying to look like a girl.
Although many people naturally asked him about it, Vincent had never for one moment considered the sex change. He was a boy and he was proud of what he had. He liked fruits, and fruits didn’t want to go to bed with girls. The few sex changes he knew who still hung around the gay bars got none, poor sad freaks. They were more
men
after they’d had it lopped off than they were before. He knew surgery couldn’t make any man a real woman. A sex change was just a mutilated man who’d thrown away the only thing a fruit saw in her in the first place. He liked straight men the best, of course, as what fruit didn’t, but he liked the kind of straight men who liked him because he was a beautiful boy who looked like a girl. In Vincent’s mind, any man who told him he was straight until he’d met beautiful Jewel, or Bonnie Parker, really
was
straight. Fred told him that in the places he met these “straight” men a straight man shouldn’t be there in the first place. But he knew she was just being bitchy. Fred couldn’t begin to understand. Why, Vincent had even met a beautiful straight boy in the delicatessen!
Finally, after much coaching and encouragement, Vincent was ready to meet the famous personal manager-publicist, Sam Leo Libra. Fred told him that Libra was “this horny fossil who’s been chasing me, and very influential.” According to Fred, Libra would do anything for her, and if he chose to do anything for Vincent (whom she was now calling Bonnie, quite naturally), the sky would be the limit. Fred was such a wonderful person. Vincent really cared for her. He just couldn’t believe that a real girl would do all these nice things for him and spend all that time with him, and help his career without for one moment being jealous. But Fred was so secure in her position as a model, so convinced that the addition of Vincent to the scene would never cut in on her own success, that she was all altruism. She must have told him that a million times, but he still could not believe it. The world he lived in was so competitive that it was hard to believe there existed anyone as secure as Fred said she was. He trusted her, though. He knew she never lied to him and he knew she really liked him.
“I think I’ll get the sex change so I can dike it up with you,” he told Fred, kidding.
“Well, if you ever go straight you can marry me,” Fred kidded back.
“I really would marry you if I was a man,” he told her seriously.
She kissed him. They kissed now, quite naturally, on the mouth, like sisters. He was as at ease with her as he was with any of the queens.
Fred planned their assault on Mr. Libra as carefully as if it was D Day. First she took Vincent to her lover, who was “one of the very best photographers in the world,” she assured him, and her lover, the photographer, took hours of photographs, lovingly lighted, until he had two dozen perfectly unreadable ones. Vincent was very photogenic, and Fred taught him how to stand and what expressions to make with his face. It was not too difficult to photograph Vincent looking real, the photographer assured him, if you didn’t use too harsh a light. The photographer agreed with Fred that Vincent was a natural as a fashion model.
Then Fred took Vincent and his photographs to the woman who ran her agency, and told the woman that it was a big secret but Bonnie was going to become Sam Leo Libra’s twelfth client, to replace Douglas Henry, that movie star who’d died. The woman had a fit, the news gave her such a rush. She said she certainly could find room for Bonnie, such a sweet girl, in her roster, and a little publicity was always a nice thing. Vincent was afraid she would call up Mr. Libra right there to check, but she did no such thing. Apparently straight people were as gullible as queens.