Authors: Rona Jaffe
But one day Gerry noticed. She had just finished hugging Vincent and she drew back. “Bonnie … you’ve grown!”
“No I haven’t.”
“You certainly have. You’re a head taller than I am.”
“I always was.”
“The top of my head used to fit just under your chin. Now you’re way up there like Alice in Wonderland. Have you measured yourself lately?”
“No.”
“Then how come you let down all your pants? And your wrists are hanging out of your sleeves. Bonnie, for God’s sake, you can tell
me
. Are you
growing
?”
Vincent burst into tears and ran and locked himself in the bathroom.
When Gerry finally persuaded him to come out he confessed all of it to her, even the shaving. “And I’m so scared I’m going to turn into a big man,” he sobbed.
“Well, not overnight you’re not,” Gerry said. As always, she was calm, already thinking of a solution. “Maybe you should start smoking and drinking lots of coffee, or is that just an old wives’ tale? I don’t know, they used to threaten me that I wouldn’t grow if I smoked and drank coffee … no, maybe that’s when you’re only ten years old. How tall are your parents?”
“Shorter than me.”
“Oh dear, the new young generation is so damn
healthy
. I’ll get some wax for your moustache and we’ll rip it right out by the roots.” Vincent winced. “Never mind, it’ll be worth it. You’ll take a week off and tell them you have the flu, and you’ll sit in the apartment and grow your moustache for me. We’ll do it right before your screen test. And we have to get you some new clothes. Thank God you don’t have hair on your chest. Some men never get that. The shoulders, though, are going to be a problem. You’re growing a nice little pair of those.”
“What’s nice about them?”
“I’ll get one of those beauty books and see how a girl with big shoulders and skinny legs should dress. They always tell you how to minimize your flaws. I think maybe you should start wearing little falsies, Bonnie. Then you’ll just look like a big,
zaftig
girl. Try one of my bras with two make-up sponges in the cups. I think that’ll be more natural.”
When Mad Daddy came to pick Gerry up she had Vincent in the bra with the sponges and a poor-boy sweater and skirt. They’d told Mad Daddy about Vincent, finally, and he never really could get used to it; he always looked as if he were going to burst out laughing. Vincent would have hated him for it, but Mad Daddy was so sexy and likable that he really couldn’t get mad—it was like getting mad at a seven-year-old kid … a kid Vincent would really have loved to ball; too bad he was straight.
“You look very sexy,” Mad Daddy remarked pleasantly. How could anyone say that and sound so uninterested?
“Do you notice anything different?” Gerry asked.
Mad Daddy shrugged. “He’s growing a bust?”
“He’s growing, period,” Gerry said. “Can you tell?”
“Elaine did that after I married her,” Mad Daddy said. “She grew and grew. I had to get her a whole new wardrobe.”
“See?” Gerry said. “Girls grow too.”
“How old was she then?” Vincent asked.
“Sixteen.”
“Well, I’m nearly twenty. Ain’t that a
mess?
”
“Isn’t,” Gerry corrected automatically. “
Isn’t
that a mess.”
“You look kind of like Elaine from the back,” Mad Daddy told him.
“That’s not all bad,” Vincent said.
“That’s a good idea,” Gerry said, thinking. “You should let your hair grow. Then people would notice your hair and face more. Twiggy is out anyway. Elaine has big shoulders, but with all that hair spilling around them, nobody notices.”
“By the time my shoulders finish growing my hair will cover them, right?”
“Right.”
“If they ever finish growing,” Vincent said morosely.
“Can’t we go eat now?” Mad Daddy asked.
When Gerry and Daddy left, Vincent experimented with his collection of blond falls. He wondered how long it took to make a movie. Wouldn’t it be a mess if he made one movie and became a big star and then nobody ever hired him again because he’d turned into a wrestler? Gerry’s bra was too tight around the back and it hurt. He took it off. He’d go out tomorrow and buy a Jezzie—that’d push up what he had. He pushed his breast skin up with his fingers. They did look like tits, they
did
. He was scared to take hormones, even though a lot of the queens he used to hang around with took them. He didn’t want to be a freak. Those things the queens got weren’t tits, they were just membranes. Tumors, cancers. He didn’t want two tumors growing out of him.
He washed his tear-stained face and painted carefully, putting on six pairs of upper eyelashes and a pair of lowers. He painted in a beauty spot beside his mouth and one of them on the opposite cheek. He pinned on two of the falls and two little side curls. Then he put on the bra again, even though it hurt, and put in the two make-up sponges. It certainly looked real. He put on his favorite pants suit and noticed with pleasure how much better it looked with a little shape up top. Oh, Bonnie, you are flawless! You are a flawless beauty!
He had no place to go, so he’d go to a gay bar and wreck them. He hadn’t been to one for a couple of weeks, and he didn’t want to be forgotten. Everyone would rush over to him when he came in, as they always did, and make a big fuss over him because now he was their star. He’d never looked better, no matter what anyone said. He pouted at himself in the mirror and blew his image a kiss. Oh, what a flawless beauty! Look at that nose, look at those huge violet eyes! He ran his hands down his body and over the cups of the bra. Didn’t those sponges feel
real!
Just like a girl’s tits—not that he’d ever felt any except Gerry’s on the sly. He tossed his head and the hair of the falls swayed and rippled over his shoulders. God, he was beautiful! It turned him on, seeing himself so lovely in the mirror, even though he knew it had taken him two hours to achieve this masterpiece. He was really getting hot. Look at those sensual lips! His cock began to hurt where he’d gaffed, and he realized he was getting a hard on. Now he’d have to pull it before he went out.
Vincent jerked off in front of the mirror, staring passionately at Bonnie’s exquisite face. Another man never made him as hot as just looking at himself and knowing he was lovely. The only other thing that really made him hot was being the center of attention and knowing everyone thought he was beautiful and wanted him. He was so lucky he had been born beautiful! Just before he came, he kissed Bonnie’s voluptuous mouth in the mirror.
Then he washed and dried himself neatly and tucked the love-hate object back out of trouble. He’d never go have it cut off like some of those crazy queens did. Just yesterday he’d heard on the grapevine that one of the queens who was saving up for the sex change had committed suicide. That came as no surprise. Whatever happened, even if he (God forbid) turned into a big man, he was fond of what he had. It was his identity, his toy, his solace. See, what if he’d had it cut off last year, when he was just entering his heyday as Bonnie, and then he started growing these shoulders and that moustache. He’d really be in trouble then!
If I have to be a man
, Vincent thought,
I’ll be a real man
. But taking a last look at Bonnie Parker in the mirror before he went out of the apartment, the possibility that he might turn into an unmistakable man seemed very far away indeed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
On a Fine, late September morning, Barrie Grover was dozing through her boring history class when her friend Michelle passed her a note. It was a newspaper clipping, actually, a gossip column about celebrities, and it said that TV star Mad Daddy and his wife Elaine were acting silly and going splitsville. It was the first the girls had heard that he even had a wife. Michelle had circled the item in red pencil and written in the margin: “Maybe you’re
next
?????”
Barrie Grover nearly went into shock. It was all she could do to contain herself until the class was over. Then she pushed her way through the kids into the hall and grabbed Michelle.
“My God! He’s getting divorced!”
“I wonder what she’s like,” Michelle said.
“I wonder if he’s got somebody else,” Barrie said.
“You’d better hurry up and meet him now,” Michelle said.
“What about you?”
“I don’t want to marry him, for heaven’s sake. He’s old enough to be my father.”
“You never used to mind that.”
“Oh, I was just a kid then.”
“Imagine being Mrs. Mad Daddy,” Barrie mused, transported.
“Will you invite us over to your house?”
“Sure I will. You and that
kid
you’re going to be married to.” They both giggled at the fantasy of Barrie married to Mad Daddy and playing hostess to the former Mad Daddy Fan Club of Kew Gardens. The bell rang for their next class and Barrie decided to cut it. She put her books into her locker and sneaked out of the building. It was a clear, beautiful day, the air crystal clear, the sun shining, but not too hot. The leaves on the trees were just beginning to fade at the edges. She walked a block to the Pancake House, where the kids usually hung out, and went in. It was almost empty, being the middle of a class, and too early for lunch. She sat in a booth at the back, put a quarter into the miniature jukebox beside the table, and selected two happy songs. The waitress was setting tables and ignored her, as usual. She didn’t mind because she was too excited to eat anything anyway, and she wanted to think about this new extraordinary development.
Mad Daddy had a wife, and he was getting a divorce! It made him seem more like a real person now. She was just dying to know what his wife looked like, how old she was, was she funny too. Or maybe she was a good laugher. Barrie drifted into a fantasy of actually meeting him, of telling him who she was, and of him saying of course he knew, because he had read and appreciated all her notes and letters. Then he would really look at her, as if noticing her for the first time, and he would ask her if she would like to go for a cup of coffee. They would sit there and talk and talk. They would gaze into each other’s eyes. They would realize that they really understood each other like no one had understood either of them before. He would fall in love with her because she was loyal, sensitive and true. They would get married. They would never be separated again. She would sit there at each and every one of his shows, right in the front row. Everyone would know that he was dedicating the show to her.
She had to stop living in fantasies and figure how to make them come true. The first thing would be to get a ticket to be in the audience at his show, and get a seat in the first row, and try to make him notice her. No, that wouldn’t work. The kids always mobbed him, and they had all those nasty guards that kept you away from him. The only way to meet him would be to find him after a show, when the guards weren’t around and get to speak to him. She knew that if she could only speak to him and tell him who she was that they could be friends.
During her next class she would write him a letter. She started composing it in her head. She would tell him more of her secret thoughts, how she had been maturing and changing, what she had discovered about life, and he would think she was astonishingly bright and perceptive for a kid who had just turned fifteen. Maybe she would send him her picture. Then when he saw her he would recognize her without her having to tell him.
She looked at the clock above the counter and realized she was too late for the next class, too. Where did the time go? The Pancake House started filling up with kids, the ones who had spending money and couldn’t stand to eat the school lunches.
“Is anybody sitting here?”
They were all strangers, and they wanted her booth. She nodded shyly and slipped out of the booth, letting the noisy couples crowd in. All those older kids going steady, holding hands over their hamburgers, saying dumb things, proud of themselves because they had someone to be in love with and that gave them status. She hated them. She was above it all. She was going to meet Mad Daddy, a man who was old enough to get married, not just fool around being engaged to be engaged, and she would never have to be a lonely, ignored outcast again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Mad Daddy, registered under his real name of Moishe Fellin, had moved into the Plaza Hotel, in a suite down the hall from the office-residence of Sam Leo Libra. He loved the Plaza; it was big and elegant and old-fashioned, and there were no kids running around the lobby to jump out from behind the potted palms at him. He had thought his apartment was elegant, but this was really
it
. What a long way from the Lower East Side! Sometimes he could hardly believe it. And the best thing of all, the thing he could believe least of all, was that he was in love with the most wonderful girl in the world, and Elaine the ogre was finally going out of his life forever.
He supposed it was a rotten thing to do to their kid, but he had always felt himself totally inadequate as a father, and Elaine would probably marry someone much better at it than he had been. He just couldn’t think of himself as a father, an authority figure. When he was with his daughter he felt like another kid. He made her giggle, and they played together, but he couldn’t stand to discipline her, and he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to teach her anything. He wondered if Gerry would want to have kids. He didn’t want to have any more. He had kids he hadn’t seen in years, and he was sure their mothers had told them he was the dirtiest of rats. No, he and Gerry wouldn’t have any kids. They would just be together and love each other for the rest of their lives. The world was a bad and dangerous place, and kids grew up to be killed in wars. He had no special desire to perpetuate his name and his image. His show was his name and his image. It was all the creativity he needed.
The lawyer said he and Gerry couldn’t live together until all the financial terms of the divorce had been arranged, but they were together nearly all the time anyway. They simply kept separate residences. He saw her a dozen times a day when she ran down the hall to visit him on the sly, and after the show was taped he would go to the office to pick her up. He pretended he had come in to talk to Libra, because he was just down the hall, and he didn’t want Lizzie to catch on and tell Elaine. Lizzie was hardly ever there anyway. So then he’d give Gerry the high sign and she’d grin at him and then if Libra was there and Lizzie was not, Libra would give them a drink and have one with them and look very pleased about the whole thing, as if he was their matchmaker. And then Libra would send them on their way with his blessing and they’d have the whole wonderful evening together.