‘You have to learn to read a man and know when he’s just lookin’ for fun and when what he really needs is for you to hold him so he can cry his eyes out like a babe,’ he told me as we drank strawberry Yoo-Hoos and sat on custom satin-covered beanbag chairs. ‘You have to learn how to listen. There is medicine in that penis bone to help you learn how to love like a real professional.’
I take daily lessons from various boys of Glad’s, who affectionately refer to each other as baculum, which Glad tells me means ‘little rod’ in Latin.
I practice rolling a condom on a man with my teeth without him knowing. I practice how to take every bit and grain of a man in my mouth. I already knew that one. I’d have contests with Sarah. We’d lie on our backs side by side on some motel bed, with our heads hanging, tilted back over the edge of the bed, till our mouths, esophagus, and throats would all line up. Then we’d put in a carrot as deep as we could without gagging. We’d mark the carrot with our top teeth and after we’d see who was the better head giver. Sarah always won.
‘You win ’cause you’re older and bigger,’ I told her once and she slapped my face so hard I saw stars.
‘Don’t you ever call me old and big,’ she said and ran out crying.
I acquire tricks, like spraying Binaca on your right hand, so if a date is not on top of his hygiene, you can breathe in the scent of fresh mint from your hand and think of the snowy Alps instead of inhaling his ammonia scent and being reminded of a dirty Porta-potty.
I learn how to trick with men who want to dress in lacy frilly things.
‘That’s the most difficult one,’ Pie tells me. Pie was born a woodscolt—a bastard, and half white on top of that. To his Chinese mother from a traditional Chinese family that ran the only traditional Chinese restaurant in the upper reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, it was a disaster. They tried to keep him hidden by making him tip long beans and slice bitter melon all day and night. All Pie wanted to do was be a Japanese geisha, and as soon as he was old enough he hitchhiked all over, ending up in San Francisco. He came back home when his Great-Aunt Wet Yah was dying. His Great-Aunt Wet Yah was the only one who let him wear her silky undergarments and read to him from a forbidden book on the great geishas she had happened to possess. Wet Yah died and now Pie was working for Glad, saving up to move back to San Francisco and open his own geisha training school for men.
‘You have to listen very carefully when you are with a man that wants to dress.’ Pie uses his hands while he talks, gracefully waving them back and forth as if he were icing a cake in the air. ‘He might only want to show you how nice he looks in his pink panties and discuss how much he enjoys the feel of the smooth material against his privates. Or he might want to be a lesbian and make love to you as a woman making love to another woman.’ Pie moves his body in a flowing S, making the silk of his kimono ripple so sinuously as to suggest two women making love. ‘Or the gentleman might wish to be called a little sissy pantywaist, teased and otherwise humiliated.’ Pie shakes his hips and mimics a femmie boy. ‘You can often make extra by making the gentleman pay to bring in other bacula to laugh at him.’ I nod and scribble notes in a notebook Glad has given me.
‘The gentlemen often do not tell you what kind of cross-dressers they are. You have to listen and take their clues.’ Pie sits down on a beanbag and looks at me studiously, the slight slant of his eyes accentuated by broad strokes of black liquid liner. ‘It is your job to figure out: do they want to pretend you are a woman completely, do they want you to be sweet and gentle, do they want you to be forceful and fill their hungry mouth, do they want abuse or gentle guidance? The faster you can figure this out, the more famous you will become.’
And Pie is famous. Cross-dressers come from as far away as Antigua to see him. But I don’t need to be told which boys are the best. All I have to do is look at the raccoon bones around their necks. The better the whore, the bigger his bone. I heard it said that the bigger bones aren’t real, that Glad just melts waxed dental tape onto a small bone until it is bigger. I look at Pie’s and it looks authentic. Big and genuine.
‘You’re ready for your first date,’ Glad says to me two months after I’ve started my training. I haven’t lived at the motel room in a month. I stay at the caravans. Sarah took off with a rich crooked cargo inspector, and I check the room every day to see if she is back. The plastic attaché case is gone, but her bubbles are still there in the bathroom so I know she’ll come back eventually. I plan to have my own bubbles on the shelf next to hers by the time she gets back.
‘You think you’re ready? You feel okay?’ Glad asks as he helps me get dressed in a muted pink leather miniskirt I couldn’t wait to show Sarah when she came home.
‘Ready as snippers at bull-ball cuttin’ time,’ I say, borrowing Sarah’s line. I put finishing touches on my makeup the way Sarah taught me. Glad makes me go light on the makeup, though. I want to take an iron and straighten out my hair so it flows like floss, but Glad won’t hear of it.
‘You really oughten not to be wearing any makeup. The natural look will make ya more lettuce than a face palette. Men pay for freckles and curls,’ Glad says and wipes up my face with his hankie.
‘Glad, you are a sight worse than a mother dressing her daughter for prom night,’ Sundae laughs.
Sundae is a Texas honey-blonde with a bone bigger than Pie’s. Sundae’s specialty is cheerleaders. ‘You’d be surprised by how many football players want a cheerleader with cock,’ she says adjusting the miniature pompoms in her hair.
Glad picked out a truck driver everyone knew.
‘He’s a nice man that only wants to diddle you,’ Sundae says.
‘Remember to watch the clock on the dash,’ Pie says and gracefully kisses the air next to either side of my cheeks. ‘Good luck.’
Glad just wrings his hands and makes me feel nervous.
I walk, in the flat white Mary Janes Glad made me wear instead of the spike heels I wanted, out of the caravans with everyone seeing me off, past The Doves, and into the lower-lit fluorescent night-time of the overnight truck lot. The Nice Man’s truck is right where Glad said it would be, five rows in and seven across. It is a plain truck, nothing special. No custom anything. The door is a dark blue and I can see my face mirrored on it. I squint my eyes so I can pretend I am seeing Sarah’s reflection. I am supposed to tell the Nice Man my name is Cherry Vanilla, but after I knock and he says, ‘Who is there?’ the name ‘Sarah’ just comes out of my mouth.
At first I’m scared of the Nice Man. He reminds me of a New Orleans voodoo priest, his eyes rimmed with a thick black tattoo. Then I realize, after I sit on his lap a little and he talks to me in his near indecipherable Appalachian twang, that he is just a laid-off coal miner. And it’s true what they say; the dust settles in every crease of skin like a new layer of pigment.
‘Started in the mines when I was ten,’ he says and places his charcoal-lined hands gently on my waist.
He is from Mingo County, West Virginia. Everyone in West Virginia, no matter how bad off they are, gives thanks at least they don’t live in Mingo County.
‘I used to lie in the bed with my brother at night while my mama listened to
The Christ Cure Radio Show
and my daddy sucked on a piece of coal to help his graveyard cough,’ he tells me while bouncing me tenderly on his knee. I thought about asking him if he heard my grandfather’s sermons too, as his show came on not too long after
The Christ Cure Radio Show
and was very popular in Mingo County, but I remember what Glad told me about not getting personal about my life.
‘It ruins the fantasy of who they want you to be,’ Glad had said.
‘I do love Jesus,’ the Nice Man says and begins to run his hands up under my pink skirt and to my peach panties. ‘And you are such a sweet thing.’ I hope he will say the name I told him. I want to hear her name while his hands begin to diddle me. I close my eyes and let him rock me and caress me.
‘Sarah,’ he finally whispers into my ear.
‘I’m here,’ I whisper back, ‘not going nowhere.’ I let my eyes roll back into my head in pleasure.
Sarah comes back a month after I’ve started working. The green-bean truck-driver man had stopped by to see her while she was gone. Other lizards were more than happy to be helpful and let him know Sarah’s whereabouts. He was so mad that she was carrying on in some other state, with a cargo inspector at that, that he got rid of our room and put everything she’d left out on the brown lawn. Someone rang up Glad and I came and gathered up all the things and took them back to the caravan. Except her bubble bath. I left that sitting there on the rotting grass.
Mother Shapiro paid for Sarah to get our room back at the Hurley motel, but mostly Sarah stays with Mother in her caravan. They’re always together. Sarah even starts acting like she cares about the lizards’ moons too.
Mother Shapiro knows all the girls’ monthly cycles by heart. At any given time, if Mother is sitting in The Doves, some lizard will holler out to her across the floor asking if they were ripe. Some want to know so they can force a driver they are fond of to settle down with them and a baby on the way. Some want to make sure they weren’t gonna catch, so they can earn extra money risking sex without a rubber. Some just want to know so they can set aside enough money to get their feminine hygiene products ready. Mother Shapiro is pretty good at figuring out why a lizard wants to know. Folks say she has a second sight that way. Being a big believer in condoms she usually yells back across The Doves to the girl, ‘Honey, you’re as ripe to seed and as ready to take as a breeding sow!’
The only problem is most girls know that when Mother Shapiro overreacts like that she’s just being protective and the coast is probably all in the clear.
Now Sarah acts like she knows the dates too, and discusses bleeding with Mother. I think about going up to Mother and telling her how many millions of times I’ve heard Sarah scream how she hates the ‘plague.’
Mother Shapiro would invite me over to their booth to share a caramelized kiwi and walnut tart tatin when she sees me hovering nearby. Mother Shapiro asks me about how my dates are going and Sarah rolls her eyes away from me when I answer. Despite myself I try to interest Sarah in some good gossip from the
World News
newspaper.
‘Said in the paper today that Elvis was really a hermaphrodite.’
‘Read it already,’ Sarah says and rolls her eyes again.
‘Now, now…’ Mother says. ‘You two should really try to get along. You’re family, aren’t you?’
I realize by the way Sarah’s eyes dilate that even Mother doesn’t know
exactly
how we’re related.
I slide out from the booth and before I walk away, I say with a small smile in a voice loud enough so those with good ears could hear, ‘She’s my mother.’
I hope Mother Shapiro will send for me, invite me to her trailer to snuggle under the goose-down blankets from Hungary with the two of them. Instead no one sees either one of them for weeks.
The candles in Mother’s trailer blaze at night and Mother’s broad outline can be seen lumbering past the drawn shades. It is said Sarah was taken with severe shock upon discovering she was my mother, and in public at that. All she could do was lie in bed and moan, while Mother Shapiro tended to her and tried to ply her with food.
Bolly tells me, ‘She’s got a freezer in there the size of a mare farm trough. I’ve been filling it for her with specials, in case a famine should hit.’
From outside their trailer I can smell reheated Appalachian foie gras with apple crisp in ver jus with grilled tender mango, and microwaved cider-cured spit-roasted pork loin with grilled figs and sweet Vidalia onion purée. Paxton is the only one who’s set foot in there in two weeks, and that was very briefly. He brought them over a Tupperware of osetra caviar dressing, which Mother had used her second sight to know Bolly had prepared.
‘That place is lit in hundreds of beeswax candles,’ Paxton said gravely. ‘Your mother,’ and I distinctly heard a tone of hostility directed at me as he said those words, ‘Is at death’s doorknob.’
When I enter The Doves I notice an audible dip in the volume, which especially alarms me after reading that stuffed quail eggs braised in fresh huckleberries with English pea ravioli and miso-butter-poached chard is the day’s special. Even a loud smash-up in the lot right outside The Doves wouldn’t cause any notice to be taken when the menu was what it is today.
‘Accusing someone of being your mother is a very serious thing,’ Glad says to me sternly when I run back to the caravans in tears.
‘Are they gonna play Davy Crockett for me?’ I ask and put my head on Glad’s lap.
‘Oh no.’ His hands slide through my curls. ‘It just gonna take everyone a little time to get over it, that’s all.’
I devote myself to proving I am not the inconsiderate scoundrel everyone thinks I am. I dedicate myself to being the best lot lizard ever, so one day I can walk in to The Doves with the grandest-ever raccoon penis bone and make the place hush in awe and respect.
‘On account of you being a greenhorn and two curves and a cuss fight away from entering your teenhood, it’s best,’ Glad says when I ask him why he’s sending me out on only one or two dates a night.
All my john does is ohh and aww me, diddle me some, lick me like a lolly, and have me admire or laugh at the fuchsia French-cut underwear he has on under his worn-out jeans. I never get a chance to develop a second sight like Pie or Mother Shapiro. Glad always knows who they are and what they want down to a play-by-play. They never pay me either. That is all prearranged, down to my tip.
‘I want to set the cab to rockin’ and rollin’ when I get in there, like a
real
lizard’s trick would,’ I complain to Glad. ‘I want to stuff dollars into my shoes.’
‘I’m not gonna let no one play with you,’ he says and won’t say any more on it.