I Came Out for This? Read online

  Oh please, Joanna. Stop your blithering and call her.

  Well, now I feel kind of jerky. I essentially lied to her. I told her I’ve decided to move to DC because I’m in a rut and I need to be in a more cosmopolitan city and that Washington, DC is my second-favorite city after New York, all of which is true. But then I said that I’ve worked through my feelings for her and I’ve decided I can handle living in proximity to her and we can be friends. And while I was saying that, I felt like about a million miles away from my own treacherous mouth. And then I went back into myself and said truthfully that I hoped she wasn’t upset by this news and then she lied and said, “Not at all! It will be nice to have more ‘family’ here.” So there we were, babbling on top of the real issues the way we always do because I don’t face the facts and she tries to process everything mentally and ignore the turmoil inside of her. But I’m sure she’s plenty discombobulated and is probably conveying my news in urgent tones to Tiny or Linda as we speak, and you can bet your bippy she’ll have a nice juicy session with her therapist on Friday.

  So here I am, hightailing off to the country’s most bloodthirsty city to win the heart of a woman who has tossed me away like a supermarket mailer. My friend Tommy and I laugh hysterically at this image we’ve concocted of me suffering some final, devastating rejection by her and running naked and shrieking down Connecticut Avenue and ending up in a nuthouse or some cult for melt-down people. Like my mother would say in Yiddish, “Nitoh ver tsu lachn!”— “There’s nobody to laugh.” Loosely translated, it means, It’s not even funny.

  It really isn’t funny. I’m so scared. But you know what? Underneath my terror is the conviction that I’m doing the right thing. I suppose it’s because I feel as though I’m doing something normal, for a change. Not that it’s considered totally sane to run off to some city in pursuit of someone who has rejected you, but at least it’s being crazy in a normal way, instead of being crazy in a crazy way like I’ve done all my life, setting trash fires and riding a moped around Harlem at night and writing short stories about people with pet flies and eating mayonnaise from the jar and acting like an overall general weirdo that everyone thinks is so cute but is really just sick. This is the kind of crazy thing that lots of people do. And now I’m doing it too.

  So after all is said and done, that’s why I’ve decided to move to DC. Because it makes me feel like part of humanity.

  There. I figured it all out.

  December 1999

  I love myself! I’ve never done anything like this before, the kind of thing that if someone else did it I would think it was so cool. Five hours ago, I jumped into my 15-year-old hoopty and tore out of Cleveland, leaving my whole draggy life back there. Tommy grumpily helped me pack the car with a bunch of clothes and my computer, and I hugged him goodbye and took off like a thief in the night. Nobody else even knows I’m gone except for my parents because you can’t just not tell my mother something. So here I am in an EconoLodge in Breezewood, PA, a constellation of motels and eateries near the Maryland border, and I have the same current of excitement running through me as I had when I was 21 and moved to New York. It’s partly because it was the same time of year as now; it was cold and the air was heavy and had that peppery, metallic smell.

  I haven’t just run off like some teenager, by the way. I have found a job and a place to stay in DC. The job is the best part. I’m going to be a field interviewer for a government health study. I’m taking a step down from writing for a living and I don’t care because I never liked writing for other people and only did it because I’m a Jewish girl from a middle-class community, and in spite of my rebel image I always thought I should be some sort of “professional.” I have no desire to do “communications” in Washington DC and deal with stuffy DC bureaucrats that wear navy suits and use phrases like “intellectual capital” and exude arrogance to hide their rage about being nobodies in big fat Washington. This field interviewing job will allow me to be more like the free-wheeling journalist I actually am, bopping around the city, getting people to talk to me.

  I am a little nervous about the place that I found to stay in, a rooming house that ran an ad in the DC gay newspaper, which I responded to and was told by the manager that I could have my own, small room with a shared bath for just $250 per month. I almost fell over when I heard the price and asked him to please hold the room for me. But when I hung up and told Tommy about it, he said that for $250 per month my “find” was obviously some queer flophouse, implying that it was one of those Bowery-type places with cracked cement floors and metal beds with sagging mattresses and men spitting up hockers in the halls and blowing one another in the “shared bathrooms.” I think Tommy is just trying to freak me out because he’s pissed off that I’m going to Washington and abandoning him, but what if I show up at this place tomorrow and it is like that? I would die before calling Terri to rescue me, especially since she agrees with Tommy that I shouldn’t go there. I suppose I’ll have to go out to Rock-ville and stay with Willi’s cousin Marj, which is so far out of the city it would be like staying somewhere in Iowa.

  Well, that’s not going to happen anyway. It’s probably some charming, weather-beaten mansion with a big front porch and original woodwork and vintage carpeting. Right now, I’m not going to let anybody’s Gloomy Gus predictions fuck up my rhythm. I feel the future roaring through me like a locomotive! I love motels. This EconoLodge is adorable, with its faux early-American decor. I know I could have left earlier and driven straight through, but I like doing things at night and also I wanted to savor this move, turn it into a mini-road trip. So now I’m Jack Kerouac for a night. Go, man, go! (Actually, Kerouac annoyed me. He thought he was so hip, but really he was a flag-waving conservative who couldn’t roll with the sixties and ended up as a flabby, drunken recluse in his mother’s house while the rest of the world was out raising hell.) But tonight I will savor the myth of On the road without dwelling on grim postscripts.

  I’m very nervous about seeing Terri, but right now it’s a good nervous, like salt on your tongue— the high-quality kosher salt with coarser grains that my mom uses in her vegetable soup. I like this kind of nervous— the stimulating kind. It’s the other kind of nervous that I hate, the kind that’s more like inhaling sulfur, the kind that nauseates me and slows me down. In general, I don’t mind being nervous, because it’s my natural state. It’s when I’m not nervous that I start to worry.

  Ha, ha. That was funny, right? I am my own most appreciative audience. I’d better go to sleep. It’s 2 a.m. I don’t function well on no sleep. But I’m over-excited. I’ll probably be awake until four. What if I’m late getting there tomorrow and that guy gives away my room? Well, I suppose I shouldn’t care, if it’s one of those places with saggy mattresses and cement floors and semen stains. But I don’t think it will be like that. I think it will be perfectly nice.

  I am in heaven. Imagine Washington, DC being heaven. But I’m lying on a single bed in a tiny room with two large, sun-streaming windows letting in what feels like a semi-tropical breeze. That’s right. It’s 70° in Washington, DC in the middle of December. When the manager of this place showed me this room with these big old windows, I almost swooned with relief. I can live anywhere with big bright windows. I would rather live in a closet with big bright windows than in a dark mansion. I wouldn’t want to live in a mansion anyway. But this is fantastic, lying on this single bed that reminds me of lying in my little bed at home when I was sick and I could hear the shouts of the kids coming home from school through the open windows, just like now, except back in those days they weren’t cursing.

  The rooming house itself is perfectly habitable. It’s clean, quiet, and shows no evidence of debauchery. Actually it’s not a “house” at all, but rather a small, red-brick building. It used to be a halfway house for women prisoners, but a couple years ago the city closed the place and sold the building to a skinny, nervous gay guy who turned it into a residence for queers. The building is very plain, but i
t’s on a block full of renovated row houses painted in lovely southern colors like peach, avocado, and sky blue, and it’s just a block from U Street, which is the hot new strip in DC. When I looked at the map, I realized that this neighborhood is right next to Dupont Circle, where Terri lives, and it’s an easy walk. When I saw how close I was to her, it kind of freaked me out.

  My room is on the second floor in the back of the house, where I have plenty of privacy. It’s tiny and cozy, with blue walls and brown carpeting, a single bed with a blue-green comforter, a white dresser and matching night stand, and two big windows, one facing east and the other facing south. There’s even a little TV on the dresser, with cable. The bathroom is right outside my door, and although I have to share it with two other people, I have not yet seen them. The only two residents I’ve met so far are a sweet white swishy kid about eighteen and a big guy with a marbled face from one of those pigment deficiencies. They were in the dumpy little living room downstairs watching a huge TV when Russell, the manager, was showing me around the house yesterday.

  I did have one experience that reminded me of how irritating DC can be. Yesterday after I unloaded my stuff, Russell, an engaging, mischievous queer with mocha skin and wild, brillo pad hair, took me under his wing. He had me ride with him to pick out Christmas trees for him and his “Aunt” Ethel, who lives across the street from him, and after we got the trees and dumped them in his back yard he asked me if I wanted to go to a holiday party given by the Shaw–U Street neighborhood association. The party was in a fine old U Street bar, and we walked over there and met Russell’s brother Mikey and Aunt Ethel, a sweet black lady in her seventies. As soon as we sat down at a back table, I noticed that almost all the other people in the room were white. I thought this was weird since Shaw–U Street, although gentrifying, is still an overwhelmingly black neighborhood, and in fact was once known as DC’s “black Broadway” because of all the famous entertainers who performed in clubs here. We got our buffet food, and while we ate I watched all these whiteys in their crisp outfits sporting their little name tags marching around with their plates full of broccoli, and finally I leaned over and asked Miss Ethel, “Who are these people?” and she replied, “Well, I don’t really know any of them.” I was very taken aback, thinking that in Cleveland, which is a very grassroots town with a big working class, a respectable lady like Miss Ethel (who has lived in this neighborhood her whole life) would be a leader in her community organization; they would have gone out and recruited her. But DC has only privileged white people (like me, but I don’t count because I’m a starving writer) and they’re all so oblivious. After we ate our buffet meal, they set up a microphone and started making speeches about “How far we’ve come and how far we have to go” while the black people just huddled around the fringes. At one point, a very big woman in tan pants and a yellow blazer walked over and stood with her ass almost in Miss Ethel’s face while she talked to a lady at the next table, and Miss Ethel just moved her chair a little, didn’t even make a face or any kind of wisecrack. I assumed that Miss Ethel was just one of those black southern aristocrats who is above laughing at white people, but Russell and Mikey weren’t laughing, either. DC is such a goody-two-shoes town, and I guess I’ll have to get used to it, but I can’t stand seeing straight white people riding roughshod over everyone else in the most cavalier way, making the other people feel like little nothings and hate themselves. It happened to me and it practically ruined me. Although I have to admit that there were some gay white boys at that event and they were acting even worse than the straight white people.

  I hate to say it, but Terri fits right into hoity-toity DC. She’s such a good, example-setting lesbian, with her career as a “diversity trainer” and her reputation in the gay community as a political advocate and her involvement in lesbo “leadership activities” that are the equivalent of Hadassah for Jewish ladies. I, on the other hand, am a bad lesbian who listens to macho music, including rap and makes fun of lesbos who sing sorrowful songs at coffee houses and says sarcastic things about women who are afraid to come out. So how can we possibly get along?

  The answer is that Terri is only a goody-goody on the surface. Her real self is very spicy. I can tell you this: If some woman stuck her ass in her face, that wench wouldn’t just sit there and take it. She would tap the woman on the shoulder and when the woman turned around she would say with a little smile, “If I wanted your ass in my face I would have asked for it.”

  I really need to let her know I’m here. I wonder if she’ll be happy that I’m living practically next door to her. I’m kind of nervous to call her. I feel as though I need to get a little more settled. Maybe I’ll give her a ring tomorrow, or at least on Monday. If I wait too long, she’ll be pissed.

  Well, I finally saw my little peppercorn. Just as I predicted, she was irritated that I waited three days to call her. It’s not that she couldn’t wait to see me, God forbid that should be the case; it’s just that she likes to know everything, and my traipsing around DC for three days without her knowledge violated her notion of what’s right and proper. But when she said, “Come over now!” I was as ecstatic as if she had just asked me to marry her.

  But then, walking to her new condo in Dupont Circle, I passed her old place, a glowering building on 15th Street, where I was always trying to kiss her ass and nothing I did was ever right and I got stuck on the elevator and she accused me of deliberately making us miss our play and once, I walked outside after I’d been crying and a toddler in his mom’s arms pointed at me and said, “Grandma!” and I walked to my car feeling like an old lady and found a ticket on it, and when all that came back to me that same mood enveloped me and I started to wonder why I even moved here to be tortured by this ridiculous relationship.

  And then I got to her building on Q Street off of 19th and looked up at her second-floor window, and my panic had a chemical reaction and suddenly I was surging with lust. Terri buzzed me up and opened the door wearing her jeans and checkered shirt, with her kinky salt-and-pepper hair cut short and a fresh tan from a recent trip to the Caribbean. She didn’t smile or light up when she saw me— ironically, she always accuses me of not looking happy to see her, and once even said I looked as though I had gallstones which, it turns out, I actually do— but she hugged me long and hard and emotionally, and I cried. Her mother’s death still hangs in the air between us, intensifying everything.

  Terri’s place is what decorators might call “well appointed”— the living room, more of a parlor, contains a loveseat, an old china cabinet, a rag rug, and plants decorating a large window, the bedroom is spacious and modern, the kitchen and bathroom are spotless, and the whole place has the same lemony-fresh scent that was in her 15th Street apartment, which frankly made me a little sick from the association.

  She had prepared a plate of hors d’oeuvres for us and we went into the bedroom to eat them and share a bottle of wine. The first thing she told me is that she got rid of that Sonya person with the apothecary store. She said the woman got too clingy. Everyone is always too clingy for her. In the past year, she’s gotten rid of about six women who supposedly were too clingy. She even thought I was too clingy, which was a lie because I am not at all clingy. Actually the word she used was “cloying.” When she told me I was “cloying,” I almost killed her. Really. She’s lucky to still be alive after saying that to me. But I’m sure all the other ones really were too clingy.

  Lying in bed next to the wench, I felt like someone whose estranged family has let her into the foyer but hasn’t decided whether to allow her back into the house. I so wanted to start ripping her clothes off. Sometimes her clothes irritate me because they’re on her. It’s not as though they’re so fashionable or anything. I wanted to tear off those shabby old moccasins and throw them across the room and tear off her shirt and stamp on it and pull her pants off and hurl them out the window and then start ravaging her, to bite her lips and nip at her neck and inhale her skin and shove her breasts in my mouth and then
make my way south to the jungle and have myself a wild feast. Terri has such an organic taste, like wild berries— in contrast with the couple of other women I’ve been with, one of whom sprayed something down there, which made her taste like orange potpourri that you buy at the dollar store.

  But I couldn’t attack her because she’s doing this “friend” thing. I just had to lie there like a big sister and listen to her recite every detail of her day: she discovered a spot on her mother’s rug and she took her car in for an oil change and she talked to Ruby, her mom’s former housekeeper, on the phone. She likes to report everything that happens to her and I hang onto every word, even though in general I have little patience for minutiae and if someone else reported every detail of their life I would be secretly furious at having to listen to them. (I even stopped being friends with my friend Shelly when she moved into her condo and started obsessing about her countertops and silverware drawer, and then she got a brain tumor and died and I still feel guilty whenever I think about how I abandoned her.)

  While I was there, the phone rang and it was the head of some nominating committee asking Terri to give a speech on behalf of her Congressional candidate. Terri said the candidate was a secret dyke and all the dykes are rooting for her and Terri had lunch with her and confronted her about being a secret dyke and the woman refused to come out to her. Terri said she will refuse to give the speech. She said she found the woman “off-putting.” Terri can be arbitrary, which isn’t always pleasant, but I like her unwavering stand on political issues. She’s actually somewhat famous in DC as a gay advocate and has been quoted in newspapers and even had an article written about her.