So it’s the path to the greatest discovery.
It’s because we’re so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and two legs everybody has. We’re so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we’re trained to want.
“My first idea was to have one arm and one leg amputated, the left ones, or the right ones”—she looks at me and shrugs—“but no surgeon would agree to help me.”
She says, “I considered AIDS, for the experience, but then everybody had AIDS and it looked so mainstream and trendy.” She says, “That’s what the Rhea sisters told my birth family, I’m pretty sure. Those bitches can be so possessive.”
Brandy pulls a pair of white gloves out of her handbag, the kind of gloves with a white pearl button on the inside of each wrist. She works each hand into a glove and does the button. White is not a good color choice. In white, her hands look transplanted from a giant cartoon mouse.
“Then I thought, a sex change,” she says, “a sexual reassignment surgery. The Rheas,” she says, “they think they’re using me, but really I’m using them for their money, for their thinking they were in control of me and this was all their idea.”
Brandy lifts her foot to look at the broken heel, and she sighs. Then she reaches down to take off the other shoe.
“None of this was the Rhea sisters’ pushing. It wasn’t. It was just the biggest mistake I could make. The biggest challenge I could give myself.”
Brandy snaps the heel off her one good shoe, leaving her feet in two ugly flats.
She says, “You have to jump into disaster with both feet.”
She throws the broken heels into the bathroom trash.
“I’m not straight, and I’m not gay,” she says. “I’m not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don’t want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, someplace to be that’s not on the map. A real adventure.”
A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined. Unknowable. Indefinable. Those were all the words Brandy used to describe me in my veils. Not just a story that goes and then, and then, and then, and then until you die.
“When I met you,” she says, “I envied you. I coveted your face. I thought that face of yours will take more guts than any sex change operation. It will give you bigger discoveries. It will make you stronger than I could ever be.”
I start down the stairs. Brandy in her new flats, me in my total confusion, we get to the foyer, and through the drawing room doors you can hear Mr. Parker’s long, deep voice belching over and over, “That’s right. Just do that.”
Brandy and me, we stand outside the doors a moment. We pick the lint and toilet paper off each other, and I fluff up the flat back of Brandy’s hair. Brandy pulls her pantyhose up her legs a little and tugs down the front of her jacket.
The postcard and the book tucked inside her jacket, the dick tucked in her pantyhose, you can’t tell either one’s there.
We throw open the drawing room double doors and there’s Mr. Parker and Ellis. Mr. Parker’s pants are around his knees, his bare hairy ass is stuck up in the air. The rest of his bareness is stuck in Ellis’s face. Ellis Island, formerly Independent Special Contract Vice Operative Manus Kelley.
“Oh, yes. Just do that. That’s so good.”
Ellis’s getting an A in job performance, his hands are cupped around Parker’s football scholarship power-clean bare buns, pulling everything he can swallow into his square-jawed Nazi-poster-boy face. Ellis grunting and gagging, making his comeback from forced retirement.
Chapter 18
e all know the scene in the classic movie, the David Lynch masterpiece, but Daisy’s version was better. How Daisy St. Patience remembered the movie, it wasn’t even sepia-toned. The setting was still an auditorium filled with row upon row of tiered seats, standing-room-only crowded, that full house of straightlaced, Victorian nobility. Ladies in bustles. Men in tall silk hats. Everyone hushed with anticipation. They were all staring intently at a screen of cloth stretched over a lightweight frame, the type of screen used to separate beds in old hospital wards. But when that screen slid aside to reveal an almost naked figure …Daisy’s interpretation was better.
To start with, there was music. An unseen hand pressed an offstage button, and a thumping bass beat shook that staid auditorium. The house lights dimmed. From loudspeakers, a voice shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Pathological Society of London brings you the sexy …the sin-sational …the searing-hot, one-and-only …the Elephant Man!”
In Lady Daisy’s revision Joseph Merrick made his entrance in a burst of blue smoke bomb, wearing a skintight California highway patrolman’s buff-color uniform. A brown stripe running down the outside of each thigh. Twenty-one, twenty-two years old. He’d wear a giant-sized pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses in perfect proportion to his huge Elephant Man head. His every seam was cleverly held together with Velcro; he’d wear nothing you couldn’t get off with a firm yank. He’d wear a banana hammock engineered for maximum flop. And boots. Sexy black leather boots.
One nipple was pierced, pinned through with a polished policeman’s badge on his otherwise bare torso.
No, when Joseph Merrick was presented to the Pathological Society of London in 1884 he didn’t need to dance—but he did. That was the fantasy of Daisy St. Patience. No working the brass pole, not for him, but Daisy imagined him wearing a black Chippendales bow tie. This Elephant Man augmented his tan with baby oil. Who’s to say what really went down? History tells us the Elephant Man didn’t sport sexy Speedo tan lines—those sexy runway lines that point the shortcut to some sexy Elephant Man groin, groin, groin. Rumor has it he didn’t shave his legs or wax his chest, not even while he was touring the European Continent. Again, history records that he was twenty-one, twenty-two years old. Who’s to say Joseph Merrick didn’t get his elephant ears pierced for some hot saddle plugs? A gold ring glinting in his sexy navel. Odds are excellent that he got his lopsided Elephant Man chest inked with a couple of tribal tats. In Daisy’s version, Joe Merrick wore the effects of his Proteus syndrome and neuro-fibromatosis like a hot-pink thong, bumping and grinding his G-stringed self to invade the personal space of those esteemed scientist voyeurs. No passive object for critical gaze, he rotated his deformed hips. Shimmying and finger-snapping. Flexing his washboard elephant abs. No cowering victim, he flexed his fibroid-distorted self and returned their aghast stares with his sexy Elephant Man smile. He grinned his bulbous Elephant Man face like he’d been growing his big forehead lump since he was a three-year-old kid in Leicestershire, pumping up his skull and practicing moves in front of a mirror for today’s command performance. His skeleton might’ve been tortured, but his capped teeth looked perfect, blazing white in the spotlight. Delivering it home, hot, to those whale-boned mamas. Bringing them the ol’ razzle-dazzle with his Elephant Man jazz hands, he did his smooth moonwalk. Working his mutilations with the arrogance of a Playgirl centerfold, Merrick executed perfect backflips. He did handstands and shook his junk in everyone’s cookie-cutter Victorian face. So close they could feel the heat coming off his Elephant Man thighs, he was just boom, boom, boom to the scorching mix of Donna Summer and Lady Gaga. Strutting the sexy curvature of his twisted spine, he pumped his bony cockeyed pelvis. Unmistakable. Sans apology. His every knotted muscle said: Here, this is what it is to be alive. His thrusting crotch said: Come and get it!