The Cool Part of His Pillow

Chapter 1: Blue Roses-2

If you didn’t know where the gay birthday party is, the rainbow arc of balloons flanking the entrance of Gyrate makes it very clear. They were not my idea. Nor is the 45 And Barely Alive banner strung over the second floor Skybar. It has the promised bar, but as for sky, one small oval window faces a vacant lot of trash and snakes. (And that window, it’s cracked.)

Friends drift in. I go into inventory mode. Ranking people like dry goods seems catty, but it’s pretty accurate. Most of our life rack clangs with caveat emptor—damaged but sellable. Andy is my Display Only haute couture, custom-designed, fit on me and altered as wear and gravity has dictated.

Dee is the exception. She would discontinue herself before ever being marked down. She was the Realtor representing the seller’s interest when we bought our house. Despite being Ann Coulter’s doppelganger, our rapport was immediate. After the sale closed, we delightedly called our immediate friendship Gift With Purchase. She is every gay man’s idyll: the slave style confidante in the little microbeaded black dress. Dee appears effortlessly beautiful but works as hard at it as any listing. She’s one of the state’s highest producers, but she’s been less successful in marriage—now, three husbands.

Stan, over there by the food, is our Sell-By. He’s closer to seventy than sixty, a few years short of my mother’s age. He sought a divorce and came out late in life after retirement from teaching English literature in public high school. Seeing him play catch up is painful; he has what everyone assumes is a perm and his popped collar isn’t so much hip as it is Elizabethan. His sons never speak to him, a cause of great pain, yet whenever we meet his newest underemployed twenty-four-year-old boyfriend, we do the math and shiver. It’s never quite May/December; it’s usually closer to Bassinet/Dawn Of Man. The arrangements never last much longer than a typical rinse cycle. They’re just a collective Protégé, invariably regifted. Tonight’s Protégé is all b***h-flip and clunky eyewear.

“Try this ceviche,” I hear Stan urge Protégé.

“f**k ceviche. I want a chili dog.”

Kerrick, he’s our Irregular with the ill-placed seam. His event company is called Planned With Kerr. He is all high concept and low execution and generally makes everyone uneasy. Local gay leaders were outraged at a charitable event when he crafted chocolate butt plugs for dessert. He’s pouting tonight. The only thing I let him supply for my birthday were two servers who, for no good reason, came dressed as Pee-wee Herman and Bettie Page.

Faith is tall and manages the human resources of a CPA firm with which I do business; Suzi is squat, runs a preschool center, and isn’t much larger than her charges. There’s not much more to say except that they clearly came from Women’s Separates.

Suzi implores, “So lay the Termination of The Week on us, Faith. Who got the Das Boot at ten ‘til five and why?”

We often tell Faith she should alter her department’s name to Humorless Resources, since they’re well-known for overreacting and canning employees for arcane reasons.

Faith stiffens. “We did rightfully dismiss a financial analyst overheard telling a sexually divisive joke.”

“What was the joke?” Tracy asks.

Tracy has hair the color of red velvet cake. She and her husband Matt have nine indoor cats, plus another three feral. She greets with a “meow,” not “hello,” and will excuse herself to the ladies’ room by explaining she has to “visit the litter pan.” She oversaw the installation of voice-recognition telephone equipment at Andy’s bank headquarters. It malfunctioned from day one and was eventually replaced; she wasn’t. This makes Tracy a Consolation Gift. Matt is easygoing to the point of lethargy. I think of him as a*****e Label: nice enough yet absent the finishing touches, bought for others but never yourself.

Faith crosses her arms. “What did the leper say to the prostitute?” The group waits. “Keep the tip.”

“Divisive? Who felt singled out?” Andy laughs. “Do you employ the diseased whose genitals are falling off?”

As I pass, I wonder aloud, “People still tell leper jokes?”

Since they’ve been coupled, Greg and Greg have been commonly referred to as Gregsquared. They are Buy One, Get One Free. Like us, they have two dogs saddled with gay names: Abercrombie and Fitch. Unlike us, they dress alike: pink button-downs, khakis.

Emily, heavy with child, chugs San Pellegrino. She’s been relocated to our Maternity Department. She stands with Miss Sondra. I pat Emily’s stomach. “Boy or girl, Em?”

“No clue,” she says.

Miss Sondra drolly notes, “That’s okay. Me neither.”

Sandor Cornajo has been Miss Sondra Cornajo since we’ve known her. She is from Mix ‘n’ Match. Her anatomical goals remain unclear. We don’t know if she’s seen a real gender vendor, but she’s had a tracheal shave to soften her Adam’s apple and hormones diminished her p***s to “not an angry but a sheepish inch,” she told us one night. “It’s sorta like a piece of rotini pasta, without the spring-like appearance.”

I compliment Miss Sondra’s shawl. It is her dining-room table runner: “If I didn’t have such man hands, I was going to wear my new napkin rings for bracelets.”

Who else at my party is in a textile?

Sarah Tanner pinches a centerpiece like it might say, “Ouch.” To her husband Rick, who’s plucking a frankfurter from rollers, she says admiringly, “Wow. It’s not silk.” They are The New Arrivals.

When my gaudy birthday cake appears, ablaze, I close my eyes and pucker.

Vic casts his eyes heavenward. “Blow out your candles, Laura.”

Sarah’s eager to learn the lingo. “Laura? Is that what you go by on nights like this, Barry?”

Someone summarizes The Glass Menagerie for Sarah, or at least I think they are, because I hear “Laura Wingfield”—the mentally fragile sister character from the play—being mentioned not “Laura Petrie” or “Laura Ingalls Wilder.”

Our best friend Potsy disbelievingly echoes, “…on nights like this.”

Thank God everyone ignored Andy’s edict and tithed me. I flip around a playbill from the original flop—not the 2012 flop revival—Carrie: The Musical and announce, “Carrie. There’s never been a musical like her.”

Neil’s justifiably proud. “See where the star signed it? Betty Buckle.”

I laugh so hard I snort. “Buckley. With a Y!”

I walk among those theater queens who bid on glossy programs from shows cut short by awful reviews. We neurotically change passwords for the encoded websites where we barter a backer’s demo CD for a bootleg of rare Ed Sullivan Toast of the Town kinescopes. We’re all united in the so-far fruitless pursuit of the Holy Grail: a complete video of the original 1971 Follies. From the Boston tryout. At the Colonial Theatre. It’s our secret handshake.

I wave a white cloth. “Look, Andy!”

“Surrendering to forty-five?” he gloats, to laughter.

“It’s a hand towel Hugh Jackman wiped his sweat off with when he did The Boy from Oz!”

This is immediately passed around for obscene sniffing.

By the time our guests adjourn to the lower dance floor, I can barely make out my friends. Blanche du Bois designed the illumination here: ten thousand square feet, one night light.

I find an Employees Only door and walk through it. I pace the tar periphery, past rooftop mechanicals. A starless cityscape surrounds me. A plane is passing over the dome of our state’s capital building. Beyond blinks the spire of the tallest building, which houses the corporate staff of Andy’s bank.

“How you durrin’?”

Potsy has trailed me to the rooftop. We’ve known Potsy, born Louis Van Bourgondien, almost the entire time Andy and I have been together. At Andy’s first job, as an assistant bank branch manager, Potsy was the teller who made tsk-tsk sounds when a customer came in to settle bounced checks. He was verbally warned and sent to sensitivity training. Then, children only got the foul flavor Dum-Dums at his window because Potsy had taken the rest of the suckers. A note was placed in his personnel file. My favorite episode was when a carload of pranksters farted into a drive-through canister. Potsy opened it, gagged, tore out of the bank, caught the teenage boys at the exit, and caused about one thousand dollars in hood damage with his fists. He became the first employee Andy had to fire. How his unemployment claim turned into a friendship is murky, but the next thing we knew, Potsy was in our new hot tub, announcing he’d just peed. This makes him hard to classify, but he’s a little like the extra acquisition the cashier accidentally tossed in your bag at check-out. It’s not to your liking but you keep it anyway.

We look down at the velvet rope and a doorman who thinks he’s Vin Diesel. The deflating balloons arc has sprung partially loose, thumping the nightclub facade and, occasionally, Vin.

“That’s me. I’m a sagging balloon.” I point my finger at the fresh-faced boiz that Vin grants entry, then to whom he ignores: older gay men in ironed short-sleeves, too-white sneakers.

“We all line up for inevitable invisibility,” Potsy agrees.

It’s already started. One buzz-reducing moment was at a Provincetown Tea Dance four summers ago. I was playing a wood block someone had handed me and Andy impulsively leapt onto a cube. Someone near had catcalled, “Go, Gramps, go!”

A man with Sun-In hair—blond the goal, popsicle orange the result—is blocked by Vin.

“From pursued to pursuer.” I tip some of my drink into Potsy’s martini glass. “Here. No desire to be a morose old homo in his cups.”

“Too late. Lose that long face, Judy. You own your own f*****g mall.”

I remind him that I am Laura tonight. “And it’s not a mall. You can’t buy a soft pretzel.”

“But you can buy the imported mustard to put on it. You’re a Williams-Sonoma in utero. A home here, and one in Key West.” He rubs his shorn head. “You still sport major hair, you son of a bitch.” He lights a cigarette. “Plus a handsome husband since forever. That kind of monogamy pisses off the right-wingers and lets down your own whoring people.”

I point to lightning outlining the clouds. “Even the sky has varicose veins in my honor.”

“They said rain tonight, later,” Potsy says.

“God’s tears, to sanctify my forty-fifth year.”

“The pearl-clutching move up here, boiz?” It’s Dee, carrying her shoes and someone’s hair. “Miss Sondra lost her clip-on bangs, and I can’t find her.” It’s like a wide paintbrush minus a handle. “There’s a Hispanic neuter loose, covering her high forehead with a birthday napkin.”

Potsy slaps his arms, neck. “Damn fruit-fly repellent didn’t work again!”

“My fruit loop detector must be stronger,” Dee hotly offers. “You don’t treat LezbyAnn this way.”

Potsy flicks ash toward her. “LezbyAnn isn’t needy and bleedy.”

“Seriously. I’m curious. What did I ever do to you?”

“I can’t stomach women who act cool with gay men but secretly resent they can’t change us.”

“I couldn’t even get a husband to stop washing his hair with a bar of Irish Spring, so I have no illusions that I can coax a d**k out of your mouth, ass, or armpit.” She gets in his face for this last part. “I’m not looking to convert anyone. Especially you.”

“Maybe not,” he admits, “but it’s always like this. You’re always at everybody.”

Their Best Friend competition has always been intense, yet flattering. Potsy calls her The Thresher when he’s not calling her The p***s Flytrap. Dee has a brisk stride. Her arms chug, like opposing handshakes suddenly taken away. “Do you generate actual energy, like wind farms?” Potsy challenged her one night.

“Enough to blow away the likes of you,” she coolly assessed. “Does it physically hurt, being so dumb?”

At the roof’s edge, Potsy tilts the martini glass. A drop plinks the dome of Vin, who looks up. Potsy steps back just enough.

Dee wraps her arms around me. “Sweetheart, Andy’s doing a cement-mixer-with-white-man-overbite.” She demonstrates. “Stan is helplessly watching Pee-wee put the move on Protégé, who’s trying to talk Andy into taking his blouse off.”

“He hasn’t worked out since Memorial Day!” I cry.

Potsy places his glass on his ribcage. “It’s a low-nip intervention!” He flicks off what’s left of his cig. Balloons pop and a startled Vin screams in falsetto.

We all clomp down into Gyrate. It is so time to go. I dance with—and try to dress—Mr. Potatochippendale, but Andy deftly pops his arm out of the sleeve I just got on him.

At least I stop him from whipping Miss Sondra, who’s shaking her padded ass, with his belt.