THE DOOR, HUNG with an antique glass-beaded French funeral wreath, was open. Hopefully, I entered and looked over at Miss Sandra Hanover and was chilled to the bone.
Miss Sandra Hanover, ex-Miss Rosie Lamont, ex-Mrs. Roger Wilson, nee Alvin Brown, needed a shave. The thick dark stubble was visible under two layers of female hormone powder. But she had plucked her eyebrows; they v’d up toward Chinese-style bangs like two frozen little black snakes. A Crown Princess, working toward a diva’s cold perfection, she did not acknowledge my entrance. She looked silly as hell, sitting on a warped English down sofa, wearing a man’s white shirt, green polka-dot tie, and blue serge trousers. Her eyes were closed and her Texas-cowboy sadist’s boots morse-coded a lament. At home Miss Sandra Hanover normally wore a simple white hostess gown which she’d found in a thrift shop. So freakish, I thought, mustering up a smile.
Coming up, I’d decided not to comment on The Wig, realizing rhetoric would not be effective. The Wig would speak for itself, a prophet’s message.
I went over to the warped sofa and said, “What’s wrong?”
Miss Sandra Hanover clasped her two-inch fake-gold-finger-nailed hands. Then she opened her bovine eyes, but made no reply.
“Did you upset those faggots last night?” I coaxed.
Miss Sandra Hanover blew her nose with a workman’s handkerchief. Her face was bright. Then it caved. A chalice of tears.
“Oh, Les. It was simply awful. Remember Miss Susan Hayward in I Wanna Live?” Her voice was so heavy with suffering that I immediately thought of Jell-O.
“Yeah. But why the waterworks?”
The Crown Princess masked a doubting stare. She bolted over to the gun cabinet and got a perfumed Lily cigarette.
Imitating a high-fashion model’s coltish stride, Miss Sandra Hanover paraded around the nine-by-seven pied-à-terre, striking grand bitchy Bette Davis poses.
Sucking in her breath, she suddenly stopped and began speaking as if she had rehearsed her monologue diligently:
“Well, I went to this drag party on Central Park West last night. Mr. Fishback couldn’t chauffeur me in the Caddie. A night-rider funeral. So, your mother taxied down. Ever so grand. I looked like Miss Scarlett O’Hara. Miss Vivien Leigh was simply wonderful, wasn’t she? You should have seen how lovely I looked, Les. Peach-colored satin. I let my silver foxes drag the floor like Miss Rita Hayworth in Gilda. I’m maiding for this call girl on Sutton Place South. The sweetest little thing from Arkansas. She let me wear her diamond earrings like those Miss Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She had this John glaze the foxes. The sweetest little furrier. I didn’t even have to do him. I just told him that he really loved his mother. Like he wanted to sleep with her when he was four years old.”
“Still up to your old tricks.” I laughed.
“Now, Lester Jefferson,” Miss Sandra Hanover said coyly. “Everybody’s got something working for them. I bet you’ve got something working for you.”
Smiling and silent, I went and sat down in a modern Danish chair which looked like a miniature ski lift.
Miss Sandra Hanover cleared her throat. “Remember Miss Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard? Coming down that spacious staircase, mad with her own greatness, beauty? And all those common reporters thinking she was touched in the head? She knew deep down in her own heart that she was a star of the first multitude! Well, love, that was me last night.”
Greedily relishing her victory, Miss Sandra Hanover clucked her tongue, leaned back and struck a Vogue pose. Vigorous, in the American style, she wetted liver lips, exhaled, and continued: “Oh, did those faggots want to claw my eyes out! I acted like visiting royalty. Remember Miss Bette Davis in Elizabeth and Essex? I sat on that cockroach-infested sofa like it was a throne and didn’t even dance! I just gave’m my great Miss Lena Horne smile . . .”
Drunk with dreams of glory, Miss Sandra Hanover’s voice became a coquette’s confidential whisper: “Later, things got out of hand. The lights were turned down low. Sex and pot time. Miss Sammie knocked over the buffet table, which was nothing but cold cuts anyway, and those half-assed juvenile delinquents started fighting. I pressed for the door.
“Three Alice Blue Gowns came running up the stoop. Naturally, they thought I was a woman. I flirted like Miss Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa. Then this smart son-of-a-bitch starts feeling me up. You see, I was a nervous wreck dressing for the party. I couldn’t find my falsies. I looked high and low for those girls! I had to stick a pair of socks in my bosom. And this smartass cop has a flashlight and pulls out my brand-new Argyle socks. Oh! I was fit to be tied. In high drag going to the can at two in the morning. Suffering like Miss Greta Garbo in Camille, and before you knew it: daylight . . .”
“And the doll was ready for breakfast in bed,” I joked, craning my neck for a glimpse in the oval-shaped mirror above Miss Hanover’s crew cut.
She cleared her throat again and slumped back on the sofa. “Breakfast? I couldn’t eat a bit. Slop! I felt like Miss Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number. But I did this lovely guard and he brought me two aspirins and a cup of tea.”
Miss Hanover fell silent. I couldn’t resist another glance at myself in the mirror, dreaming an honest young man’s dream: to succeed where my father had failed. Six foot five, two hundred and seventy pounds, the exact color of an off-color Irishman, my father had learned to read and write extremely well at the age of thirty-six. He died while printing the letter Z for me. I was ten, and could offer my mother little comfort. I remember she sprayed the bread black. I remember the winter of my father’s death as a period of black diamonds, for my mother and I had to hunt for coal that had fallen from trains along the railroad tracks. Like convicts hiding in an abandoned farmhouse, we sat huddled in our ramshackle one room. My mother read to me by candlelight. I vowed that I would learn to write and read, to become human in the name of my father. The Wig wasn’t just for kicks. It was rooted in something deeper, in the sorrow of the winter when I was ten years old.
Remembering this now, I bit my lower lip and turned to Miss Hanover. “It’s a good day, doll.”
But Miss Sandra Hanover only saw the blood of suffering. “Les, they sent me to a headshrinker. Everyone knows I’m a clever woman. I am not about to go to no nut ward! I lied to this closet queen. I said I was from down South and they’d told me it was all right to go in drag in ‘Nue Yawk cit-tee.’ The closet queen nodded her bald head and said, ‘That’s interesting.’ ‘Yes,’ I smiled back like a nice little water boy. ‘Don’t feel bad. This is quite common among Negro homosexuals who come North.’ ‘Let’s get this straight,’ I said. ‘I am not a homosexual. I am a real Negro woman.’ ‘You don’t understand,’ Miss Headshrinker had the nerve to tell me. ‘My name is Miss Sandra Hanover. Do you wanna see my ID card? You know. Blue is for boys and pink for girls.’ Did Miss One turn red in the face! She excused herself and came back with two more closet queens. These bitches told me that I was a common Southern case. Ain’t that a bitch? I was born and raised in Brooklyn. Now I got to take treatments twice a week because they think I is queer and come from the South. Why, everybody knows I’m a white woman from Georgia.”
Miss Hanover leaned forward on the warped sofa and gestured like Mother Earth. Puckered liver lips. Her dark, aquiline nose quivered.
“Oh! I feel so bad. Remember how Miss Joan Crawford suffered so in Mildred Pierce? I could just die . . .”
A sharp intake of breath. A flurry of batting false eyelashes. A guttural sob, and Miss Sandra Hanover tumbled dramatically to the floor, very unladylike.
Dead she wasn’t. No one like that ever dies. I got up, found a bottle of Chanel No. 5 and bathed Miss Hanover’s forehead and temples with the perfume.
Counting to ten, I stared at Miss Hanover’s carefully brushed crew cut. I missed her glamorous false wig. It was true; everyone had something working for them.
Presently, the great actress regained consciousness.
Sighing erotically, she looked up at me. “I must have fainted. Isn’t that strange? And you look strange too, love juice.”
Swallowing hard, I backed toward the door. “I’d better be going,” I said.
“Now, Les,” Miss Hanover chided.
“I’ll see you later, doll.”
The Crown Princess rose quickly. “Come here, honey,” she pleaded. “I ain’t gonna bite you. My, my. Those beautiful curls. Naked, you’d look like a Greek statue.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled and bolted out the door and down to my second-floor sanctum. Pleasure, I reflected, was not necessarily progress, and I had a campaign to map out. I had to get my nerves together.