Burt Starr, Burt Starr, Burt Starr, MaryLiz sang a little song as she dashed through the apartment, swooping up her make-up bag, pulling a pair of pumps from her backpack. The other girls shook their heads. Everyone was jealous. I was a little jealous, even though I knew, in my heart, that it was best he chose MaryLiz. I couldn’t play Burt Starr the way she could, some crucial part of me was not tied down secure enough. A gate inside my heart would come loose and I would feel bad. I would ruin it all, I would waste the bounty that was Burt Starr. Not Mary Liz. MaryLiz was cold. She kept the phone numbers of her out calls and rang the numbers later to have little chats with their women. Your husband calls prostitutes. Uh-huh, he really does. Yes I was just fucking him in your bed on Thursday night, you have a maroon comforter with speckled red sheets, and a stack of
Cosmos
by your toilet. She gave herpes blow jobs whenever she had an outbreak, peeling down the condom to rub the crusty sore in
the corner of her lips raw on the man’s cockskin. She would take Burt Starr for all he was worth, and hopefully I could come along for the ride.
I heard that he bought this one girl who worked for Marissa down on Comm Avenue a whole house, out in Newton. Not an apartment, a house! And he put her through school, Rita said, exhaling mentholated smoke into the apartment. I stood by the window, watching for Burt Starr coming up the street. Many men passed. Burt Starr looked like everyone.
Angelina? Angelica? I can’t remember her name but she still drives the car he bought her. She said he’s a very sweet man, Irene nodded, lighting her own Marlboro Lights 100 off Rita’s smoldering stub. A very sweet man, she repeated, dreamily. I snorted. It made me crazy that any hooker would think any john could be called a very sweet man. Irene shot me a look, half glare, half hurt. That’s what I heard, she insisted. Just a really nice man.
You’re deluded, I said. The cigarettes were starting to look good. It had been so long since I smoked one.
You’re a lesbian, Irene countered. We were finished. My perspectives on our trade were routinely dismissed because I was fucking (or whatever) MaryLiz. Because I was gay. A gay lady. The rest of them, the straight women, were playing out some ancient agreement between men and women. It was a power play, a passion play, it was timeless and complicated
and exposed raw truths about each gender’s base natures. I had somehow snuck my lesbo self into this scene, was a trespasser making quick cash, what did I know. They all had, or had had, husbands and boyfriends, sons. A constant of men in their lives. I was twenty-one, estranged from my family, had one male friend, a fag. Spent my time getting drunk at bars with lesbian communist organizers. I was not living in what you might call the real world.
In came Burt Starr, lingering in the hallway. He would not enter the common room, which we had straightened up for his visit, the takeout menus and general debris shoved into empty furniture cabinets. The ashtrays dumped and a can of fruity spray misted over the stink of it. Windows opened to air the place out, bringing in the traffic sounds of Boston. The television had been snapped off, and Tanya had even draped a shawl over it. A scented candle burned and a dusty, dented radio was set to classical music. All the girls sat demurely, sweetly. Rita conjured a look of seductive helplessness on her full-featured, Italian face. Burt, she husked. I mean, Mr. Starr. I’m the one who spoke to you on the phone. I gave Rita a look, lip curled. All of them hoping to swipe Burt out from under MaryLiz. All of them sitting with stockinged legs crossed, posture conscious, makeup touched up. Even Karen, who forbid call stealing in her house, beamed a gentle, needy beam in his direction. I slumped by the
window in a thrift-store dress, my short short hair disheveled on my head. MaryLiz needed her wig back, had walked over and simply tore it from my scalp. I had my glasses on and could clearly see Burt Starr, who was in his fifties, maybe sixties. Gray hair and a nice suit, glasses and shiny shoes. Hello, Rita. The others introduced themselves. Goodnight, Irene, he sang, and Irene collapsed in shrill giggles.
And you? Burt asked.
Mary Elizabeth, I said. Someone gasped. That wasn’t my name at all.
I don’t want you taking dates with him outside the house, Karen said sternly.
Look! MaryLiz shook the heavy binder with its sheaf of schedule at the madam’s chubby cheeks. Three weeks he’s already scheduled with me.
See? Karen scowled suspiciously. It’s not that I’m not happy for you . . .
Uh-huh, MaryLiz cut in, her mouth thin.
I am! Karen insisted. I just don’t want you breaking the house rules. House rules apply for everyone, even Burt Starr.
That was the week there was a scandal at home. MaryLiz and her roommate, our roommate, had a wine party. They bought a bunch of bottles of wine and invited over friends, mostly men, all straight. The men were intrigued and delighted with MaryLiz’s new lesbianism. Most of them
had fucked her. They teased, flirted, passed her joints they’d rolled nimbly, their eyes stuck on her cleavage. I lingered in the back, wished for cigarettes. Wished MaryLiz wasn’t such a hypocrite about vices. Pot was great to smoke, but cigarettes were poison. She’d caught me smoking one in the backyard once, pointed and laughed. Whoa you look really cool smoking your cigarette. I bet you feel really cool, do you feel real cool? What are you, thirteen? MaryLiz had a thing about alcohol, too, about beer, vodka, gin—the stuff I liked. Somehow, wine was different. Especially if you knew each bottle’s origin myth, especially if you’d really laid some cash down on it, blowing much of Burt Starr’s outrageous first tip. Especially if you got it at a Brookline wine shop, as opposed to a liquor store in Jamaica Plain.
After the party, MaryLiz looked in the wooden box where we kept our cash and discovered five hundred dollars missing. She screeched and hollered. She rolled wine into a thin glass, poured it purple down her throat, slammed the delicate thing down on the table. She declared one friend, Tony, the thief. Tony had gone into the room where the box was.
Everyone Did, I reminded her.
No, it was Tony.
The roommate was crestfallen. Tony was her good friend. Now she would have to hate him.
Maybe You Just Spent It, And Forgot? I asked hesitantly.
Fuck off, MaryLiz spat. Her cleavage was speckled with burgundy freckles, spilled wine.
Tony was tall and gangly, Italian, his hair a thick dark wave on his head. As far as MaryLiz’s crew of straight dudes went, he wasn’t so bad. Better than her ex-boyfriend, the painter, whose hair was too long and who looked right through me. Better than her other ex-boyfriend with the grown-out Mohawk and the going-nowhere punk band. Better than the upwardly mobile city planner who talked down to everyone but spoke to MaryLiz in a hushed and confidential voice. Tony wasn’t so bad. He was the only one who hadn’t fucked MaryLiz, who didn’t hold it over me on some invisible thread. Now he was a thief and cut off. The next day MaryLiz returned with big shopping bags from Jordan Marsh, new boots, a new dress.
Wow, I said, uncomfortable.
What? she snapped. Do you know how much money I’m getting off Burt Starr?
No, I said. She hadn’t told me.
Exactly. She brought the dress from the shopping bag, shook it out.
The roommate confronted Tony, who denied everything. Who was hurt and insulted and confused.
“Maybe there was a mistake? The roommate suggested hopefully.
“If I see him near this house I will call the fucking police on him, MaryLiz threatened. He didn’t just steal from me, he stole from Darlene, too.
They both looked at me, expecting some emotion. The missing $500 had come from our communal fund, money we socked away for our shared, lesbian future. When we would move to someplace natural and grow food, have a baby, open an art gallery.
i
woke up anxious. My guts were my alarm clock. I sat on the toilet, groggy, heaving my self out from inside myself. The sink streamed loud water to drown out my miserable sounds. Something was wrong, something was wrong. The anxiety was an energy, an electrical current swirling in my belly and tickling up and down my limbs. Every morning it was the same.
I walked back into the bedroom I shared with MaryLiz, our futon on the dusty floor. Nothing on the walls, not much in the way of furniture. Who was MaryLiz? You couldn’t form a guess by a glance at her room. You would think the person hadn’t fully moved in yet, that there were boxes stuffed with personality waiting to be unpacked. I crawled into bed, stirring her. What? Her eyes cracked open.
Everything’s Okay? I asked. We’re Okay? Everything’s Okay?
Everything’s fine. She rolled over, slinging an arm around me. Her voice was husky and affected, a comforting lilt and breathy tone infusing her words. Everything is totally okay. Okay?
You Love Me? The electrical tingle became a fresh hot wave, molten and thick, shame.
Of course I love you. I love you so much. Go back to sleep, okay? Stoned or half-asleep, MaryLiz could muster comfort. During the day it was different.
Burt Starr was really starting to happen. He was talking the talk, the talk he was famous for in whorehouses throughout Boston. He wanted to save Veronica. She was too good, too pure and classy, to do this work. He had feelings, real feelings, for her. Did she have them, too? He thought maybe she felt the same. He could feel it, she thought he was different from the other men. They had a connection. He had a lot of money, he could help her. He would love to help her.
MaryLiz responded in kind. She didn’t like this work, wanted to get out. She had dreams, she just needed love, and support. Financial support. She had feelings for Burt, too. Burt was classy, he was kind, generous, he wasn’t like the other men. She told him what he wanted to hear: The other men, they’re animals. Savage. Base. They tore at her precious body, they cared not for her. Burt Starr was not like these other men. He wasn’t a john, he wasn’t a trick. Never
mind that he hadn’t had a relationship with a woman who wasn’t a prostitute in his entire life. That he went through this cycle with hundreds and hundreds of girls, his finances and his capacity to be taken in by whores unfathomably deep. Yes, Veronica said. Yes, I feel the connection, too. Yes. Yes yes yes, yes to everything. She would love to be helped by him.
MaryLiz had a decision to make. Stick it out and bag the full potential of riches Burt Starr would offer. Or, play Burt Starr fast and hard and split town.
Split Town? I was alarmed.
I’m sick of Boston. Let’s go, she said. I’ll go first and you follow. You meet me.
Meet You Where?
Colorado. New Mexico. Arizona. I’ll let you know. Don’t force me to have a plan just because you can’t deal with freedom.
I was stung. I could deal with freedom. I loved freedom. In fact, freedom was my favorite thing. I was so free when I had met MaryLiz—I was defending abortion clinics and getting drunk and playing Casanova with strangers in gay disco bathrooms. I was so devoted to freedom that I had become a hooker. It is, after all, just another word for nothing left to lose. Was that true? That was propaganda. What was freedom? The pulse of horrible energy that vibrated
my body awake each morning? The push and clench that wrung me out, emptied me of everything.
Despite the eventual promise of a car, MaryLiz decided to play Burt hard and fast. He would place a deposit on a gorgeous, Back Bay apartment. The kind of Newbury Street brownstone where a contemporary kept lady would reside, perpetually reclining, decadently idle, in a suspended state of awaiting her sugar daddy. The place was expensive. The deposit was first, last, and security. It was a bundle. She would meet Burt at a café in Back Bay and they would do it together, like a pair of giddy newlyweds. I wondered how many times he had done this with other girls, how the girls had acted. Was MaryLiz fundamentally different than any of them? Was she more sincere, more believable? Was there anything beside Burt’s own mental illness that encouraged him to believe that this time would be different?
The night before the deposit date, MaryLiz and I drank cocktails at Club Cafe. A snobby, upscale gay boy video bar. Club A-Gay, my fag friend called it. Before hooking up with MaryLiz, I would never have come to such a place. Or, rather, I would come to it for the express purpose of being obnoxious, getting kicked out. We would be underage, carrying fake IDs. We would smoke in the nonsmoking section and mock the clean gay boys in their designer clothes, we would tell them to fuck off when they stared at us too long. We
would dance where there was no dancing and park it where boys were trying to get their groove going to the generic house music, standing stock-still and bored, smoking. Now I sat at a little table with MaryLiz, a plate of appetizers in the center of the brushed steel, wine for her and gin and tonic for me. I’d rather be at Jacques, the dive trans bar a few blocks away, playing Guns and Roses pinball and drinking bottles of Red Stripe while mean trans women insulted the audience in between lip-synchs of Mariah Carey. But MaryLiz hated the trans women. She thought they were misogynist and unnatural. I had persuaded her to come once, and one lady, a hefty redhead, sneered at us and called us
fish.
I’d lost. It was Club Cafe from now on.
MaryLiz’s beeper beeped. It was Burt Starr. It had been Burt Starr beeping her all night long. And she had to respond, every time. It was the Eve Of. The night before the Big Day. He was feeling insecure. It had suddenly occurred to him that MaryLiz might be playing him. That MaryLiz maybe did not love him after all. I have to, MaryLiz shrugged, flashing me the screen of her beeper with its string of now-familiar digits.
We were on a date. MaryLiz would be leaving soon, very soon, for the Southwest, some indeterminate, dusty location. She would take the entirety of the money we’d saved together, in addition to whatever she got off Burt Starr. She would use
it to secure a house for us, a quaint adobe with a wide porch strewn with dried chilis. At the end of the month, I would move into the whorehouse. It was temporary. We repeated these words, MaryLiz and me, Karen and me. Temporary. Just until MaryLiz found our desert dream house, and then I would be gone. I would join MaryLiz and the savings we kept in the wooden box.