CHAPTER EIGHT

When Vincent Abruzzi was a little boy he liked to play with dolls, but since his parents did not want him to play with dolls he called them his “puppets.” “I’m going upstairs to play with my puppets now,” he would say, and his mother would smile and go on with her work around the house. Then he would go into his room and for hours he would design and sew little dresses for his dolls, creating a fantasy life about them. They were always girl dolls.

Vincent was a shy and beautiful child, very well behaved, and since his parents were already middle-aged—he had been a menopause baby, born long after his parents had resigned themselves to being childless—they were glad that he was so good and did not trouble themselves to find out what he was thinking. He liked to play with girls, because they played games he liked. The girls loved him, because he was so gentle, and adults who noticed how much time he spent with girls laughed and said that he was already quite a ladies’ man. Because he was always so sweet and so pretty, none of the boys taunted him for being a sissy until he was in high school, and even then it was only a few who were already insecure about their own masculinity. For the rest he was a sort of mascot. Because he had a heart murmur he didn’t have to go to gym, but he hung around anyway to watch and attended all the school baseball, basketball, and football games, always with a gang of friends. People liked him.

Vincent lived in Irvington, New Jersey, in a run-down neighborhood that might even be called a slum. His parents had one of the nicest houses on the block, if it could be called nice, and he was never conscious of being impoverished. He never had anything much of his own, so he simply did not have any conception of ownership about anything. If something took his fancy he would usually manage to get it, and if a friend liked something of his, he would give it to the friend. His mentality was a curious cross between a slum mentality and that of a resident of the Garden of Eden.

By the time Vincent was in high school all the boys who were going to be homosexuals knew who they were and were already well versed in homosexual practices, but Vincent did not yet know what he was. He was sure he was straight, even though girls terrified him. The girls who had been his playmates were now his dates, but all the kids went out in groups, and the only time he started to shake with fear was during the car ride home when all the other couples were necking. He knew everyone was looking at him, wondering if he was going to kiss his girl. When he took her to her door he knew they were watching from the car, and he would start to plead a headache long before the car had reached his girl’s house. At her door he would give her a quick handshake, say: “Well, it was nice seeing you,” and think: Her make-up looks the worst.

Three of the boys on the block he’d grown up with liked him, and after all of them had deposited their girls home the three of them would each phone Vincent, to ask him how he was and if he wanted to go out for a late cup of coffee. He often did, but he did not have sex with them. He’d already had the customary sexual experimentation with them when they were all thirteen or fourteen, but he didn’t see anything queer in that. At this age, though, it seemed different.

He thought he was just slower to develop socially than the other boys. Some of the boys had lovers, but at the time Vincent thought they were only good friends. There were a few flagrantly nitty fags at school, who minced through the halls trying to attract attention, and some of the boys beat them up periodically. But Vincent was so timid and likable that some of the boys used to form a flying wedge around him in the school halls when the fag-beaters were around, and say: “Don’t worry, Vincent, we won’t let them beat you up for being queer.” Vincent would think: Me, queer? He knew he was effeminate, and supposed that was why everyone thought he was gay. When the fag-beaters yelled after him in a taunting way: “Oh, Vincent, you great big A-BRUTE-zi!” that hurt. He cried easily. But he had never confided in anyone, so when he was lonely or confused or hurt, which was often, he went somewhere where he could be alone and cried for a while.

As he grew older he became more of a recluse, preferring to stay home and play canasta with his mother to hanging around with the kids. He never went to school dances, although he prided himself on being a good dancer, and whenever he was invited to a party he spent the evening dancing with girls, embarrassed and confused, because some of the boys kept staring at him. At one party, a boy he didn’t know stared at him so much it began to annoy him. But after the boy left, Vincent found himself missing him. He could not figure out why he missed that boy so much. But he always asked his friends when the boy would be around again. His friends nodded knowingly, and Vincent couldn’t figure out what they knew that he didn’t.

His parents, who were religious Catholics, saw nothing strange in Vincent’s mental and physical purity; to them he was a good boy. They thought perhaps he might become a priest. To be a priest was the farthest thing from his mind.

He was very blond, and although he grew to normal size and had quite a large penis, from what he observed of other boys’ organs in the school locker room, he never had to shave. There was a pale blond peach-fuzz on his jaws, much like what you would see on a girl’s face, but that was all. He naturally assumed that was because he was so fair-haired. He always wore his hair cut short and combed back neatly, and he wore jeans every day except Sunday, when he wore his one good suit. He knew he was a rather pretty boy, but he did not consider himself handsome, and he wondered if anyone would ever find him attractive enough to fall in love with. He never let himself wonder whether that someone was to be a boy or a girl.

There was one boy in gym class whom Vincent particularly admired. That boy was a star athlete, well built, tall, and blond; an older, more masculine version of Vincent himself. His name was Buzz. And then one day, after basketball practice, Buzz asked Vincent out for coffee. Vincent was seventeen, Buzz was eighteen.

Vincent fell in love like a girl. He and Buzz took long walks holding hands, went to the beach that summer, and talked and talked. It was very romantic. From Buzz, Vincent learned all about how to have sex with a boy, and he liked it very much. It never occurred to him to be unfaithful to Buzz, or to cruise faggots in the streets, or even to date anyone else. It was bad enough that they were two boys, Vincent thought, but at least they were in love. Buzz told him he looked like a girl, but treated him like a boy. After all, Vincent was a boy, and he knew what he was himself better than anyone else seemed to.

Then Buzz went away to college. Vincent mourned his lost romance, the feeling of belonging, the affection. He began to date other boys, but for him it was always a romantic relationship, never just a number. He acquired quite a few fraternity pins and wedding rings.

At seventeen he still wasn’t shaving, and he was quite sure that he was pretty because so many people had told him so. One of his closest friends was a boy named Flash, who was a hairdresser who spent his time making shellacked confections of hairdos for the married women in the neighborhood who had their hair done on Friday and didn’t even put a comb to it until the following Friday, when they had it washed and set again. Flash despised his clientele, and longed to create really fashionable hairdos because he knew what was what—except that those horrors didn’t want to be chic. So Flash exercised his talent for creating chic women on himself, painting his face and wearing a wig and a dress, as a weekend drag queen. It was the first Vincent had heard of drag, being quite out of everything, but Flash took him to his first drag ball and Vincent was fascinated. He thought they were going to a masquerade; then they got there and he thought it was an ordinary dance … then Flash told him all those beautiful girls were really men.

“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.

Then Fred called Mr. Libra and made an appointment. She coached Vincent carefully.

“He can be very rude, but don’t let him scare you. I don’t think he’ll catch on to your voice, because I’ve heard women who talk lower than you do, but just to be on the safe side don’t say much until he’s had a chance to look at you for a while, then he’ll believe his eyes, not his ears.”

Vincent could have told her that; he’d been keeping quiet for over a year now.

“If you get a chance to be a little sassy,” Fred went on, “don’t be afraid, sock it to him. He respects that. Besides, you’re very funny, and nobody ever gets mad at you.”

“You think I’m funny?” Vincent asked suspiciously.

“I mean humorous, darling. You have this great sense of humor. And you’re very sweet and everybody adores you. I’m going to clear out as soon as I can and leave you alone with him. He’ll make a lunge at you.”

“Oh my God!”

“Now, when he does, you escape … I’m sure you’re good at that by now. But flirt and let him think you’re not rejecting him altogether. When he gets up a good head of steam, giggle, so he thinks you’ve just been kidding about trying to evade his clutches. Then let him kiss you.”

“What do I have to kiss him for?” Vincent said. “You said he was this terrible old fossil.”

“You don’t go to bed with him, silly. You just let him kiss you, and fight him off when he tries to do anything else. If I know Mr. Libra, he’ll have his hand up your skirt before you can say one-two-three, unless you break his arm, and you’re not strong enough.”

“But if he gets …”

“Exactly. If he doesn’t have a heart attack he’ll realize that what we’ve pulled on him is probably the greatest publicity gimmick ever thought of by anyone but Sam Leo Libra. It’s a happening. He loves crazy things. Bonnie, darling, if you were just another model, he wouldn’t bother, but the bastard would like nothing better than foisting off a boy on the public and making them all fall in love with him as a girl. He’s not going to tell anyone you’re a boy. He’s too smart for that. You’d never get work as a boy; the fashion magazines are too up-tight about that. I’ve heard for years that there were boys modeling as girls, but nobody’s ever been able to find out who they were. It may be just a rumor. But Libra would just love to be the man who pulled it off. It would be his private joke, and he’d love it.”

“He sounds sick,” Vincent said.

Fred smiled cheerfully. “Aren’t we all?”

So, carefully coached, Vincent had met Mr. Libra, and everything went as planned, including Libra’s lover’s leap. He really did think Libra was going to have a coronary occlusion when he grabbed at Bonnie’s enormous clit, and he was afraid Libra would throw him out the window or choke him or something. But Libra, after a minute of stunned silence, had thrown back his head and roared with laughter until tears streamed out of his eyes.

“Fan-tastic!” Libra said. “Fan-tastic!”

Then he made Vincent sit there while he, Libra himself, typed out a paper that said Vincent was never to appear anywhere out of drag, that he was never to tell anyone he was a boy, that all his dates were to be supervised and chaperoned by Libra or his assistant, Geraldine Thompson, that he was not to have sex with anyone for a period of one year, and that during that year he was to be Sam Leo Libra’s client under exclusive contract and was never to grant an interview or speak to a columnist, except for exchanging pleasantries unless it was first cleared with Libra and either Libra himself or Geraldine Thompson was present.

Vincent knew perfectly well that he couldn’t go without sex for a whole year; that was unnatural. But he wasn’t going to tell Libra that. He would sneak out somehow. As for the rest of the contract, he was thrilled, even about giving Libra thirty per cent of everything he made.

“I know I’m going to have to watch you every minute,” Libra said to him. “I know you fruits. You’ll be down on your knees in an alley the minute I close my eyes to sneeze. But don’t think I won’t keep tabs on you. First of all, who do you live with?”

“My parents,” Vincent said.

“Where do they live?”

“Irvington, New Jersey.”

“Well, from now on, you live in New York, with Gerry Thompson. You can sleep on her couch.”

Who was this Gerry Thompson? Some hostile woman? He was afraid of her already. He didn’t want to live with a stranger. Maybe he could live with Fred. She had a lover, but they might find room for him in the corner or something. He wouldn’t even mind sleeping on the floor.

“I could live with Fred,” he said. “I know her.”

“You’ll like Gerry too. Fred’s too busy to take care of you. Fred doesn’t work for me. Gerry has to watch you if I tell her to.”

“I’m going to be a prisoner,” he mumbled.

“Damn right you are. One infraction, one slip, and out. I won’t have to throw you out, Miss Bonnie Parker; the public will throw you out. The public will stone you out. Today’s headlines wrap tomorrow’s garbage. Remember that.”

Vincent shivered. He could see it now: his face wrapped around a mound of decaying lettuce and eggshells. How horrible! But he was afraid of that Gerry, too. He didn’t know any straight girls except Fred. What could he say to her? Maybe she wasn’t straight … maybe she was a dike. That would be worse. If there were as many dikes as fags, she was bound to be a dike, because the world was so full of fags.

“I’ll miss my mother,” he said.

“You’ll see her as often as you want. But I want you to live in New York where I can watch you. Besides, you have to be close to your work. I don’t want you getting tired on the subway.”

“It’s a bus,” Vincent said.

“So, the bus, then. Who goes to New Jersey? Here’s the contract for your signature, and sign this paper. I’ll attach it to the contract. Bonnie, you realize how important this is. This is not a joke. I may laugh at it here, but I know as well as you do it is not a joke. It’s your life. Without me and this chance I’m giving you, you’re finished. Do you want to be rough trade on Forty-second Street? You’d last just about three minutes. Or do you want to stay in those bars—just another painted freak? Or is your idea of dreams of glory to be in the chorus line at the 82 Club? Believe me, Bonnie, there is a real world outside. The real world is not your friends in the gay bars you live in. The real world is Hollywood.” He paused significantly to let it sink in. “Do you remember when I asked you if you wanted to go to California?”

Vincent nodded.

“Well, I was kidding then, but I’m not kidding now. I can make you the top model in New York, Bonnie, and that means the top model in America. From there I can get you a motion-picture contract. You’ll be rich beyond your wildest dreams. You’ll be famous, loved. You’ll have a life. You won’t be anonymous, you won’t be forgotten. You’ll be able to choose your friends. You’ll travel all over the world. The real world, Bonnie.” He held out the contract and the sheet of paper.

Vincent took them gingerly in his hands and scanned them quickly. It was hard to make out the words because his eyes were full of tears of gratitude and happiness. “Which name do you want me to sign?” he asked. “Bonnie Parker or Vincent Abruzzi?”

“Oh my God!” Libra said, beginning to laugh again. “I don’t believe it!”

“What?” Vincent asked, hurt.

“Vincent Abruzzi! Oh, oh, oh, oh … Vincent Abruzzi! You sound like a truck driver. Sign both names, just to make it completely legal. Uh-oh, I just thought of something. Have you been to your draft board yet?”

“They rejected me,” Vincent said. “I have a heart murmur.”

“Then from now on,” Libra said, “there is no Vincent Abruzzi any more. Vincent Abruzzi is dead.”

That’s what you think, Vincent thought. But Bonnie Parker nodded amenably and signed the papers.