Impossibly
Glamorous
Charles Ayres
Copyright 2011 by I.G. Impossibly Glamorous
All rights reserved.
Afterword by DJ Kamasami Kong
Photographs by DJ Kamasami Kong, Anatole Papafilippou and Charles Ayres
Interview with May Pang copyright Radio Nippon
All other celebrity radio interviews copyright Tokyo FM
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Certain names, locations and details have been changed to protect the anonymity of the people mentioned in my book. The public personalities and famous people are all real. Romanized versions of Japanese words are written without the macron to denote the long vowel sound for ease in reading.
ISBN: 978-0-615-49765-5
In loving memory of
César Garcia
(1976-2006)
“Even if you are having a shitty day, as long as you have your make-up and hair done, you’ll feel fabulous.”
The Contents
Chapter 2—Stuck on the Way Out
Chapter 4—Channeling Weirdonesia
Chapter 8—The Blue Envelope, the Skinny Envelope and the Fat Envelope
Chapter 9—Start Spreading the News
Chapter 11—President Nero’s Legacy
Chapter 16—The Tale of the Grumpy Samaritan
Chapter 17—Roller Coaster 2008
Chapter 18—Things are OK with O-Tani
Chapter 20—The Day It All Changed
Chapter 1
“Girl, what are you doing?”
“I’m Nair-ing my ass and listening to the Cure. Where are we going tonight, Charles?”
“Look César, I don’t think I can sneak out three nights in a row. And that lesbian bouncer at the Edge, she doesn’t think I’m twenty-seven like it says on my ID.” I looked every inch of seventeen at the time.
“Silence, motherfucker!”
I tried to imagine just what position César was in while he cradled his phone on his neck and smeared hair removal cream on his butt cheeks. “Drag queens L’Oreal and Melinda Ryder are MCing the show, and I wouldn’t miss them for anything. Pick me up at eight.”
To sneak into the Edge we had to arrive before ten, when the power lesbian doorwoman, Larissa, showed up. If Larissa was there, underage kiddies were out of business. She would make you cry by cutting up your fake ID right in your face and threaten to toss you out on your bare behind if you ever came back, i.e., she did her job. If we came before ten and hid in the bathrooms until the bar filled up, us underage gays could dance to Crystal Waters and the Real McCoy to our heart’s content.
César Garcia was the brother I never had and my first close gay friend. Or gay-adjacent, I should say, as César often made out with girls too—even though he squealed higher and pranced girlier than any homo I ever met. Homosexual, bisexual or polysexual, it was because César was so obviously not straight that he had endured much more homophobia than I had. Legend has it he got tossed out of Catholic school for slapping a nun. I went to bourgeoisie Shawnee Mission EAST, and he attended the rougher Shawnee Mission WEST. People slammed him into lockers and called him “César Gay-cia” or “César Cock-munch.” I personally was impressed with the redneck that came up with “César Toss-My-Salad.”
High school was perilous and got in the way of partying, so César got his GED and began his long line of not-a-career jobs that he would get fired from for coming in high or not coming in at all.
César Garcia could turn any mundane day of the week into a fiesta. Though he had an unavoidable presence at our favorite hangout, Club Pirahna, I got to know César when I hung out with a clique of Gothic lesbians—we usually all ended up at the same parties. Whenever I wanted a night of adventure, I would cruise my jalopy ten minutes down 75th Street to his place, and we could take off on a scandalous escapade. César could dance like a superstar, do make-up like nobody’s business and make you laugh out loud any day of the week. He was a handful for his employers. César was as much fun as he was because he was completely unemployable—for parts of his life at least. Whether he got caught shoplifting black jelly bracelets from his gig at Spencer’s Gifts or pillaging the Aveda at high end salons, he was an absolute nightmare for any boss—but he was more fun than anyone in town.
The boy knew how to party. He practically had a Master’s Degree in Mind Altering Substances: marijuana, mushrooms, Vicodin, Percoset. César loved to experiment with different substances, and unfortunately, us his friends, were enablers. Every day, picking him up was almost like picking up a new friend. I could get “mellow César who wants cookie dough and curry shrimp egg rolls” or “speedy César in platform shoes and grinding his teeth” or even “raver César with a pocketful of ecstasy.” Fast César, crying César, fun César, bitchy César. There were a whole lot of Césars to be met.
With my social life revolving around César and Club Piranha, I was not exactly on my way to becoming valedictorian. As a teenage gay, I had been predictably involved with drama in school, but who had time for Our Town and South Pacific when I had parties to go to?
The drama chair in high school grew more and more displeased with me. He nearly tossed me out of drama club (gasp!), when I got caught smoking during rehearsal one day.
“I can smell the cigarettes on you. And I think I smell pot on you, too,” he said. I had not indulged in pot that day; maybe the smell was all the Sandalwood fragrance the drama chair had been bathing in?
Ironically, this led me to being banned from the gayest production at our school ever: Cabaret. With no drama class or productions, this left me with extra time to get into trouble with César.
I lived for visiting the Garcia family, too. César’s family had a great affinity for Mediterranean cuisine and general appreciation for gastronomy, so their household did not subsist on microwave pizzas and Fruit Roll-Ups like my family did. Nary a Manwich to be found in Casa Garcia. Booze flowed freely, myriad Mexican cousins visited and music and dancing were on the agenda. Seriously, César had so many cousins there seemed to be a quiceañera every week. If you could chop up “FUN” and mold it like Play-Doh into a human form it would be César and his family. He was a local celebrity and walking pandemonium.
If my life had an MPAA rating, César knocked it from PG-13 up to NC-17. One day I met him after he had a threesome with the Gothic lesbians. “All true Goths are bisexual,” César asserted, as if this were some well-known fact written on the Statue of Liberty. “I just can’t get enough, I need both peen and poon.”
César made out with Gothic non-lesbians. César made out with the Gothic lesbians. César made out with me. He was something of a Gothic, Latino Don Juan—a fusion of Edward Scissorhands and Antonio Banderas.
The only resistance he received was from the straight men. When not making out with his gay and lesbian friends, César was always infatuated with straight-ish men that never quite reciprocated. We were always driving to Red Lobster to leave love notes on Dustin Davenport's car. This man had greasy long hair and the enticing aroma of hush puppies. Not only was he one of those men that never quite trimmed his nails (a personal pet peeve of mine), large sweat stains always circled his pits and his goatee never was quite shaved into a cohesive shape. Of course César thought this moron was practically the second coming of George Clooney, and he spent hours upon hours analyzing Dustin’s every utterance and wardrobe choice for traces of homosexuality while writing Dustin love poems. César and I would have deep conversations about Dustin over the phone.
“Dustin once wore pink bell bottoms to that party we all went to.”
“But César, that was a costume party.” I would try to play it down.
“But his nails were totally long and painted black. He is a Goth bisexual just like me.”
“OK César, number one, you are only bisexual when you are drunk and there are no men around. Number two, I think Dustin’s nails are just long and dirty from working the swing shift at Red Lobster. Bringing out the seafood lover in you is grueling work, and he doesn’t have time to scrub behind his nails and do his cuticles.”
Gay, straight or bestiality inclined, César and Dustin simply were not destined to be Andromeda and Perseus. It is unfortunate that the book He’s Just Not That into You was not out at this time, as it would have saved thousands of Hispanic tears and much gasoline consumed in vain errands to the Red Lobster on Shawnee Mission Parkway.
Having a friend who shoplifted well could be a blessing in disguise. César would always leave stores with new things he had stolen that you wouldn't know about until you got in the car. César was a lovable thief, the Jack Sparrow of Johnson County. He stole loads of makeup, bottles of vodka even a Halloween pumpkin once. He would just yell “DRIVE! Let’s get the fuck outta Dodge!” as he pulled random articles from his pockets. He lovingly shared with me and his other friends boatloads of product from luxury salons, fierce cosmetics and a grand bottle of Thierry Mugler perfume from the counter at Saks 5th Avenue. After years of enormous heists right under the eyes of store workers throughout the KC Metro Area, César finally got busted at Camelot Music for stealing a clearance bin tape of Billy Idol’s Vital Idol.
I graduated high school a semester early, and the last Friday I was there César came to Shawnee Mission East with me as my guest in the dead of winter. We lied and said he went to school at Our Sister of the Worthless Miracle in LA. My first class was a Biology test, and we were rather sedate, being 8AM and all. We both wore our PVC pants; he wore his blue velvet jacket matching my green velvet jacket. We applied Gothic makeup in the parking lot, shaking in Kansas City’s subzero temperatures in January 1995. We looked like the faggot leprechauns of doom.
I had been dying to terrorize the preppy Shawnee Mission kids for years, and with César and I in full Gothic regalia, the whole school went ballistic. People were yelling and screaming at us. I only had one last semester of gym senior year, and this was the same class that the jocks had terrorized me in throughout the year.
“If I were you I’d just kill myself,” jocks in the class taunted us. "What's your phone number? Maybe you can suck my dick!"
César had some choice words for these football players and yelled out, "I have a phone number! It's 1-900-FUCKOFF!" and we escaped further harassment by going to the counselor’s office. During lunch we drove to César’s, smoked some ganja then went to the International Center where I studied Japanese. Being high made studying the Kanji characters so much fun! Shogun and Sayuri took a ride on Jefferson Airplane. Those hep cats from Osaka were groovy, baby, groovy.
One night a fabulous full-moon shone brightly overhead. We were stoked because every full moon hippies would hold a drum circle in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. César and I wanted to go party but we were flat broke out of cash.
I called César on my black cordless from Best Buy.
“César we need to come up with some money.”
“My father is giving me money to start a Gothic dance club. It is going to be called La Ment. Get it Lament?”
“Yeah, I got it César, that’s a moronic name. Anyway I thought you said last week that it was going to be Dracula’s Last Stop? What gives?”
“Well, either way it is going to be the shit. Everyone is talking about it.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it’s the next Limelight, Peter Gatien. Look César, I am dying for a little buzz before we hit the hippie drum circle. Do you have any weed?”
“Girl, you know where we need to go.”
“But I don’t have any money. I spent my last cash buying you chalupas and Oreos after the 2-for-1 beer bust. Now look, I didn’t want to do take this route, but there is just one solution we may have.”
My saxophone that I played in junior high mostly lay around collecting dust. My older sister’s friends destroyed my poor saxophone when she threw a pot party at home while my parents were out of town. The bastards kicked my alto sax down a flight of stairs and the sax would no longer blow. It could, though, be pawned for just enough cash to buy us a dime bag and some vodka.
The full moon glowed over the city, and César and I went down to buy pot from this notorious dealer named Handyman. The dealer had only his white briefs on, and when he turned around there was a big brown stain on the back. I looked up at the farm tools and bludgeoning instruments used as décor on his wall then turned to César, grabbed our Maui Wowie and said, “Let’s get the fuck outta Dodge!”
Anybriefs, we got our herbs and went join the hippies in their full moon drum circle in a dodgy part of downtown Kansas City. Dreadlocked white girls danced around a bonfire wearing the flammable-looking, purple flowy skirts that were in vogue with the spiritual chicks. Though none of the hippie girls caught fire that night, everyone was, in fact, quite well-lit.
César and I sat on a bench overlooking the deco-era brick buildings and knocked each other over and laughed about the small town gay gossip. “This can’t be all you want César, don’t you want to get out of here?”
“What for? I have everything I need in KC. Great family, great friends.”
“Oh you just like being a big rainbow fish in a small dreary pond. Not for me, César, I gotta get out of here.”
“Bitch please, where the hell do you think you’ll go?”
“Europe, New York, Japan, South America? Who knows?”
“You know what I want Charles? I just want to be loved.”
“You are loved. You have more friends than anyone I know.”
“No. Like a real boyfriend.”
“Well, you need to clean things up a little bit. Slow your lifestyle down. Do less drugs. Be more proactive in getting a career going.”
“I’ll think about it after we finish this joint.”
“Come on César, don’t go chasing waterfalls, please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.”
“Will you shut the fuck up and smoke this?”
Some hippies were coming and we didn’t want to share our blunts with them so we went inside a sketchy bus parked nearby. The last time this bus had been driven, the Partridge Family was still popular and girls were wearing flowers in their hair to San Francisco. It was filled with old furniture covered in white fabric. It smelled like mold and garbage, so of course César and I did the logical thing to do in a bus full of refuse and started making out.
We both pulled back and laughed. “What are we doing?” A lot of gay friendships are based around the fact that there isn’t a lot of chemistry and the window for becoming boyfriends had passed. César and I were no different. Only the light of the full moon, a couple blunts of Maui Wowie and the stench of a hippie bus made us crazy for a moment.
After the hippie circle, we went to Arabian Nights, a dreadful run-down gay bar that César loved. It was absolutely horrid and had been around since the 1960s or thereabouts. You rang a doorbell to get in and had two choices of drink, a vodka straight or vodka cranberry. The regulars were out: the decrepit, the scary and the plain insane. One man got up on a table, shoved a bottle of beer up his own rear end and DRAINED the bottle of beer. Aside from the bottle performer, the only ones out were some trannies with moth-eaten Miss Havisham dresses, and a couple of leather daddies that kept leering at me and saying, “Hey, sweetheart.”
“César, this place is disgusting. Is there somewhere else we can possibly go?”
After the Arabian Nights, we went to our Goth friend Arwen Angel’s house, where we usually ended up. She got out of her bed, lit up a Camel Gold and brought us some chips and salsa—the way to a Garcia’s heart. After we finished smoking all the chronic, César put our friend’s vacuum cleaner on his cock.
“César! What are you doing? If you fuck up my vacuum cleaner I’ll kill you.”
César immediately sucked up all of Arwen’s salsa with the Hoover and fucked up her vacuum cleaner.
In the next morning’s haze, I called César. “Girl, are you OK?”
“Whew! What a night!”
“Are you possibly a little itchy?”
“Yeah, actually a lot of my skin is red”
“The same thing happened to me! What is going on?”
We paused for a second then both screamed in unison, “That hippie bus!”
Our night of debauchery had landed us both with full body rashes from the dust and flotsam that were inside that dilapidated hippie bus. A small price to pay to the party gods.
* * * * *
No one could burn bridges faster than César —he would napalm those bridges, but we always forgave him. It was simply too much fun to hang out with him to hold a grudge.
Not only did he atomize friendships and leave employers wanting to throttle him, he also got banned from half the gay clubs in town. The Cabaret, a gay club, banned César after one late night out. César and some friends went to a late-night eatery, Chubby's, with the owner and door people. César decided that was apropos timing to announce he was in fact eighteen and illegally entering their club. As César had been a fixture at all the gay clubs for some time, no one questioned his age anymore. After the Cabaret banned him and Arabian Nights shut down, that left us one last resort I didn’t want to turn to: the Dixie Belle.
We could always sneak into the Dixie Belle, a leather daddy and cowboy bar. César and I would run through that place and go laugh at the circle jerks going on in the basement. One day I saw a physics teacher I knew up to something strange downstairs.
“Oh my! Charles Ayres? What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to see me here,” he flustered as he zipped up his black jeans and flounced off. I knew he had a certain twinkle in his eye that day he explained Gibbs free energy. Having barely missed a peek at my teacher’s Bunsen burner, César and I ran back upstairs and looked for more daddies to buy us some Michelob Light.
I missed the action another night at the Dixie Belle when César and some friends locked themselves in the private VIP bathroom. César decided he was Sid Vicious and karate kicked the porcelain sink off the wall. And so, César got banned from Kansas City’s most foul gay bar. It should have earned him some medallion or Purple Heart or something.
Of course it was hilarious when his stealing and bitchiness was directed at someone else, but he would direct it at his friends. Sooner or later, most of his friends had a falling out with him, at least temporarily.
“Um, girl I think this is my Elastica CD,” I said one day when I came over for sangria and salsa.
“No I totally lifted this from Camelot Music at Ward Parkway.”
“Um, César, I don’t think so. This is the limited edition CD I searched around for. Not only that, aren’t those my Madonna tapes?”
A line had been crossed. Mess with a gay’s Madonna, and you are bound to have trouble. “I don’t think this is funny César.”
“Why do you have to be such a shady bitch? They are just some tapes, get over it.”
He did this to all his friends, but the fact of the matter was you just had to get over it, because when it comes down to it, no one was as much fun to party with as Mr. Walking Pandemonium.
César and I as friends had many ins and outs over the years. Sure, it seemed fine—even funny—when he decided to start the morning by buying a 24 pack of beer at 10AM or mix three different types of pills with his Caipirinha.
“I don’t think you should be mixing alcohol with those pills, César.”
He would ignore me. “They work faster!”
Indeed both César and I became victims to a common disease in the gay community. Gays commonly congregate in bars and clubs, and it is easy to reach a point that your desire to socialize with other gays conflates with hard core substance abuse. We all had fun with him during the party, but we should have pushed him to a healthier lifestyle day to day. Hell, someone should have pushed me to live a healthier lifestyle, because these youthful misadventures eventually took their toll on both of us.
At the same time, I wouldn’t trade my time with him for anything. From my music to my fashion to my humor: César influenced all of it. I moved away from Kansas City and heard less and less from César, but he always had a special place in my heart.
Chapter 2
My first photographs were not exactly glamour potential. I got stuck coming out as a baby—literally, stuck in my mommy’s hoo-hoo. On September 21st, 1977 at 1:11AM, my big head turned the wrong direction. The doctors actually went for the clamps and forcibly yanked me out. I arrived in the world already crying. The doctors had no need to spank the baby boy, Charles Joshua Ayres.
The staff at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City that day photographed a bruised, mutant-looking baby. My parents kept the newborn pictures hidden from me throughout the years. “Let’s keep the bruised, mutant-looking baby picture under wraps. Not good for the ol’ self-esteem,” must have been their discussion.
My parents called me my middle name, Josh, reflecting the ‘70s vogue for J names like Justin, Jerome, Jennifer and Jonathon. Here is a note to parents thinking of naming their children something then calling them by their middle name: don’t do it! I wasted hours of my life explaining that even though Charles is my first name, my parents called me Josh. People assume that your first name must be embarrassing to you, so they of course use your actual first name to mock you. Teachers never know who you are. I was cursed with this Josh business until I gave up and just started going by Charles.
I would find out later that said the wrong way, Josh can sound like “Girl” (joshi) or “Female Prisoner” (joshu) in Japanese. Only those who take me to a romantic dinner at the Olive Garden and buy me a dozen roses are allowed to call me “Girl” and “Female Prisoner.” But we’ll get to Japan in good time.
I was the second child born to Richard and Wilhelmina Ayres, and the younger brother of Victoria Ayres. Richard, Wilhelmina, Victoria and Charles. You would have thought we played polo and ate scones with Prince Harry before jaunting off to Charing Cross. Instead we were a broke family residing in America’s “City of Fountains:” Kansas City.
Our devoutly Christian single grandmother raised my mother in St. Louis. Though I am loathe to call her a Bible thumper, she definitely tapped at the Bible or swatted the Bible—whichever is considered one step down from a thumper. Grandma’s entire social world revolved around church, which made our mother about as wild as Mother Theresa during Easter Mass.
My father had eccentric, dreamer qualities that could inspire yet be problematic. Richard Ayres grew up in an unhappy, broken household. His party animal parents left the kids at home while they painted the town. Grandma Betty, as we knew, could pack booze away like Homer Simpson. She stood 5’2” with a pink beehive and had a liver like an oil refinery. Legend has it that Betty, in her wild days, could down a keg of moonshine, burp a baby and knit Christmas stockings in less than five minutes.
Betty kicked alcoholism after a dream of my uncle pleading with her to stop. After Betty put down the sauce, she turned her attention to colorful plumage. She had a rotating selection of pink, purple or orange hair that later inspired my own follicle misadventures.
Betty repented in her later years, found Jesus and became an aspiring novelist. God came to her in a dream and proclaimed he would give her money to build a theater for which she would write religious plays. As of publication, the Almighty has yet to open a cosmic cash machine for Grandma Betty. Should she win the lottery, I will be sitting in the first pew of St. Jude’s Theatre of the Pentecostal Delusion enjoying every minute of her Scripture based plays.
Raised in a party-hard atmosphere, it is no wonder that by the time the ‘60s rolled around, Richard Ayres knew he was born to be wild. He spent his own hippie years tooling around on his motorcycle and hitchhiking across the country. The only picture of him from this era shows him with a buffalo skull on his head and a goofy grin—like the peyote must have been bad at the fireside “Kumbaya.”
After a stint in the Green Berets, Richard went to graduate school for plant physiology and horticulture where he met Wilhelmina, a doe-eyed and conservative girl. Obviously the motorcycles and buffalo skulls did a number on her. He propositioned her after a psychology class with the oh-so-romantic line, “Would you like to be the weekend wench?”
Was it the Jung they had just read or the incense in the air? Possibly Jupiter had aligned with Mars? She surprised my father and his cohorts by saying, “Yes.” The weekend wench would become his wench for life.
Only a few years later, they would be married in a park. They walked down the aisle to “How the West Was Won.” I’m unsure if Grandma Betty owned a shotgun, but they promptly welcomed their first child, Victoria, into the world somewhat less than nine months after the wedding in the park. I joined the household in 1977. By the time the ‘80s rolled around, Richard Ayres had brainstormed ways to support his growing brood—and change the world.
No one could fault my father for lack of ambition. “In six months we’ll be living in Mission Hills,” (Kansas City’s answer to Beverly Hills) he’d claim. “By next year we’ll have a corporate jet.” Pretty big statements from a man who drove an antediluvian Toyota Corolla hatchback to a “business” that seemed to change focus every six months.
My father’s early business ventures focused on renewable energy, which sounds good and dandy now, but people didn’t want to hear about this in the early ‘80s. People liked IZOD shirts, jelly shoes, Spuds Mackenzie and Max Headroom. Renewable energy to protect our planet? Not so much. This was the pre-Al Gore, pre-Wangari Maathai, pre-polar-ice-caps melting, irresponsible ‘80s. And it was fun! So you say, “The polar bears will all starve and the entire nation Tuvalu will sink under the water?” As long as Boy George is singing, it will be a hit! The low-down: people didn’t give a horse’s dingleberry about the environment and ‘80s eco-based ventures dried up like the Greenland ice shelf.
Our family finances, which had never been great, veered from rocky to abysmal as my father constantly hatched new plans to make oil from waste wood, make a biomass plant in Canada, or create “clean energy” from a contraption known as a “Gas-a-Fire” (or “gasifier” for people in the business). A “Gas-a-Fire” takes a carbonaceous material such as coal, gasoline or biomass and transforms it magically to extract energy. The “Gas-a-Fire” of the early eighties probably made better flatulence than energy, and my parents needed to leave our spacious Missouri residence to move to the Kansas suburbs.
For those of you who slept in geography class, the Kansas City area straddles the border of both Kansas and Missouri. Just as a crash course in the social dynamics of KC: during the Civil War, wild and lawless Missouri people (a Confederate state) went and slaughtered people in Kansas (a Union state) in a dispute. Tension between the two states has never subsided completely. Today, the rivalry is mostly friendly but lives on: Missourians think Kansas is salty and stale, while Kansans think Missouri is catty-corner to Babylon.
To this day, my father insists we moved because the schools in Kansas were superior. Indeed, Victoria’s school on the Missouri side of Kansas City failed to notice she had dyslexia. My mother more dryly notes that taxes and finances were not well because the Gas-a-Fire failed to take the world by storm; the Show-Me State became the Show-Me Outta Here State.
We moved to a suburb on the Kansas side with the drab name of Prairie Village. Anyone reading “Kansas” and “Prairie Village” might think we ran around barefoot in overalls, cooked grits for Dorothy and went on dates with our cousins. We sang “Old Susannah” at the hoedown while Granny made snake-oil tonic and got dressed up to go to Wal-Mart—just before we hunted some opossums for supper. If only it were that interesting! Apparently there was a “prairie” and a “village” at some point, but those were bulldozed in the name of suburbia to create the town. The income strata of our area encompassed the range of “Upper Middle Class” down to “Shops the JCPenney Sale Rack,” and I called our somewhat sketchy Prairie Village fiefdom home until university.
I was blithely unaware of our Gas-a-Fire-finances and had my very first puppy love at age five: Dixie, a pretty blonde girl of Scandinavian ilk. We went to the same Pre-kindergarten where Dixie was the reigning Queen Bee, a Regina George for the Playskool and Candyland set. Woe to the kids who would try to withhold My Little Ponies from her. She would stomp on your Sundance while tearing the head off of Megan if you didn’t hand over your Rainbow Dash by nap time. But I knew it was better to be on Dixie’s side, hating life, than to not be in the Preschool Plastics at all.
Dixie had these fruit-scented dolls I coveted called Strawberry Shortcake.
I could have cared less about GI Joe or Cobra Commander—I wanted some fruity fragranced Strawberry Shortcake dolls. They smelled pretty! I think the toymakers laced Strawberry Shortcake with angel dust. It made me wild and crazy, so I kept in mind for future’s sake: Thou shalt not do PCP, it will drive you CRAZY! I could sniff that red haired temptress and her apron for hours and hours. Raspberry Tart and Custard popped Quaaludes while the Peculiar Purple Pie Man cooked up a meth lab in the Berry Bake Shoppe. These toys were the forerunners in a decade when American children became addicted to materialism, and like catnip to a calico, I got high sniffing those dolls for hours.
My foundation for being on radio and TV started around this time. I had been a fairly quiet child until a switch turned on inside of me. A deluge of words poured out. I became garrulous and would talk to every mailman, grocery sack boy and Dixie, of course, for hours. I would tell my address, birthday and parents’ social security numbers to anyone within listening distance. One of my earliest memories involves lecturing a Safeway checkout clerk on paramecium and amoebas after a special on single-cell organisms on PBS had mystified me. My mother sent me to time-out every time the postman came lest I start telling him about the amoebas or ask if he had a penis.
I married Dixie by the swing set in her backyard (or we played married). With first love comes first heartbreak. Her father’s career took off, and one day she got taken away to a magical, far off place where the grass is really greener: California. I cried myself to sleep underneath a bed. I suppose this choice makes sense, as most would choose California over Prairie Village. Should you meet Dixie gallivanting about La Jolla or Sacramento, please inform her that if she has since gotten married that she has committed bigamy with a homosexual. I would like my alimony payments in one lump sum so I can pay my AmEx bill, or I may have to snatch a boatload of panties to sell to Japanese businessmen!
With my father busy finding new ecological ways to make eco-conscious diesel fuel out of goat cheese or pineapple clusters and my mother working for the U.S. government, the TV became my babysitter during these early childhood years. In addition to the reruns and game shows, a new form of media had just hit the scene in the early ‘80s—MTV. I really, really loved when we had MTV as it meant we had cable, my father was getting paid, and, BONUS, I might even be able to see “Fraggle Rock” on HBO.
Of course, music video classics by the Cars or Flock of Seagulls entertained me, but nothing even compared to Duran Duran. They simply oozed New Romantic polish and sensuality. We all had a copy of Thriller from back when Michael was cute and before his skin encountered vitiligo. Lots and lots of vitiligo. I would dance the entire choreography from “Beat It” on repeat in our living room and wonder why the video’s denouement knife fight was so completely ineffectual.
Childhood musical taste was another harbinger of things to come. Aside from MJ, I remember the first pop song I really, really liked. You guessed it: “Lucky Star” by Madonna. It seemed to match the dolls my sister had, Rainbow Brite. Then Madonna came out with “Material Girl,” the video that featured Madonna acting like Marilyn Monroe in a sea of cute ‘80s white guys. To this day I still shout, “Don’t throw that away!” at the TV when Madonna’s bearded suitor tosses a present in the garbage while Madonna chats on the phone: “He thinks he can impress me by giving me expensive gifts.” Madonna struts her way through a sea of white, white, white dancers and one Asian guy. Since Prairie Village was not exactly a cultural melting pot, nor even a cultural cheese fondue, I had never met an actual Asian. But I believed the Asian dancer’s pain when Madonna snatched a diamond ring off his finger. I saw that Asian guy and thought, “I like THAT!”
Chapter 3
The Material ‘80s
“We’re Belinder Braves and in so many ways
We’re not bad, we’re not good, we’re the best”
So started the Belinder Elementary School Song, set to the tune of “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” How I longed to sing that corny song! For all the raving my father did about Kansas public schools, you would think it was practically Dartmouth, Oxford and the Police Academy all rolled up into one L-Shaped brick building in Prairie Village (or PV), Kansas. It seemed a worthwhile institution for a public elementary school. The Belinder teachers helped Victoria beat dyslexia, and she was on her way to reading like a normal elementary school student. Curious George and Shel Silverstein would thwart her no more.
Several hundred students attended this “Harvard of the Great Plains” and the socioeconomic dynamics of this suburban microcosm were fascinating. Us PV kids shared classroom seats with the Mission Hills kids. Mission Hills is where the Kansas City sports legends, Hallmark company heirs and trust fund millionaires keep their Old Money palatial residences. The income disparity was large, with the Mission Hills kids flying to Aspen or Bora Bora for Spring Break while we PV kids rode minivans to such underwhelming destinations as Lincoln, Nebraska or Sioux City, Iowa. For PV kids, it was, “Branson, Missouri here we come!” while the Mission Hills kids dined on beluga caviar and jet skied at St. Barth’s Nikki Beach.
Belinder Elementary had very few racial minority students, but there were quite a few Jewish children. Come Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, a notable number of seats were left empty. Yes, I know after New York and Miami, one does not think of Kansas as part of the great Jewish Diaspora, but I am quite grateful to the Schwartzes, Goldmans and Greensteins that I grew up around. When I did make it to New York, I had some clue as to what matzo ball, meshuga and mensch referred to.
My mother dragged me by the collar of my IZOD shirt as I moaned and hollered to my new classroom the first day of Kindergarten. I was about to spend the first day of my Elementary education in utter bitterness. How dare they make me go to Kindergarten with these goofy-looking, snot-nosed babies? Not only that, there were about twenty girls to the mere six boys in the class. No other boys to play tag with? Only six lonely boys to discuss the latest exploits of “Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats” with? I felt more like I was being shipped off to Leavenworth or Alcatraz.
Then a seraph in a blue, black and red sweater descended upon us.
“My name is Mrs. Hartsock. A long time ago a little boy came to me and said in order to remember my name he put his hand on his ‘heart’ and looked down at his ‘sock.’ That way he could remember Mrs. Hartsock!”
Her voice was soothing like the gossamer wings of an angel, as gentle and as pure as anyone you ever met. The cynic in me now fails to believe someone that pure exists. I would like to imagine now that Mrs. Hartsock lived some crazy double life. She taught “Stop, Drop and Roll” by day, then drank bourbon and attended mafia shoot-outs by night. She had the kids reach for their Crayolas when the sun was up while whipping executives under the name “Pandora Sixx” under the twilight.
I was a naïve child and had no concept of sex nor sexuality. I thought a man married a woman, and automatically she became pregnant. Pee Pee and Va Jay Jay no touchy touchy. In my adult life Pee Pee and Va Jay Jay almost never touched either. Since my birthday was always the first of the school year, I invited all six boys and no girls to my party.
I should have invited some girls. Each boy gave me a Hot Wheels car, and I remember being exceedingly disappointed by this. I really would have preferred Strawberry Shortcake and her strawberry-crack-scented hair.
I do remember having a quasi-sexual fantasy of wishing I could “wrestle” the other boys in my Kindergarten, shirtless like Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage. Except my fantasy included wrestling on the beach on a desert island. It was a highly erotic version of Lord of the Flies, minus the death and mayhem.
In addition to being naïve I also was temperamental, and I think it had much to do with my anxiety about my family’s financial status among all these wealthy Mission Hills kids. Our parents did their best, but my $5 JCPenny Sale Rack Couture had nothing on their Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans and Reebok high-top sneakers that cost more than my parents' monthly mortgage payments. Maybe I needed to learn that “Money isn’t everything.” Or maybe I was just a pain in the ass.
I believe now the situation caused me to have anxiety that affected my diet. To this day I detest pasta, no matter how delicious or gourmet, as eating spaghetti always meant our parents didn’t have much money. Several days of Ragú meant squabbling parents and awkward silences.
Around age seven, I suddenly stopped wanting any food except breakfast cereal. My parents constantly badgered me saying, “You don’t know what you’re missing.” I came to hate dinnertime, and there were often standoffs when I couldn’t leave the table until I tried some Manwich or brisket. Eventually I would sneak off when my parents got distracted by “Hill Street Blues” and get my cereal. This lasted a couple years, but the fact that I survived until today speaks volumes about the nutritional intake one can receive from years of 2% low fat milk and Frosted Shredded Wheat.
By first grade, I would trot along merrily with a new He-Man lunchbox having fantasies about Man-at-Arms and enjoying a day of book learnin’ with the seductively witchlike Mrs. Paseo. I remember being spellbound by her curled brunette tresses swaying as she wrote sentences on the chalkboard for us to re-write and learn. When Mrs. Paseo dressed as a sexy witch for Halloween, she looked the part.
To add to my already growing laundry list of issues, at this age I was robbed of my innocence. My sister Victoria, normally quite kind and responsible, committed an act so vile and reprehensible they should make a special government site where people can keep track of such a violator in case he or she might be living in your neighborhood. Her crime: robbing me of Santa Claus.
Victoria joyously reduced me to tears by telling me there was no Santa Claus. “You’re so stupid, there’s no Santa!”
“There is too! Things just work different on the North Pole with flying reindeer and all that jazz.”
“How could he possibly get to the house of every single child in the world? It would take a week, or at least nine days to do all that.”
“Obviously Santa has the ability to defy the laws of physics and time. Mrs. Claus and Blitzen can tell you all about it.”
“Yeah, well when I asked Mom, she confirmed to me that he doesn’t exist. There is no Santa Claus!”
“Mom told you?”
I hated the other children whose innocent minds had yet to be polluted with the fact that their letters to Santa Claus, sent from the Prairie Village Post Office, were letters in vain, postal benefactions to a false idol.
“I’m going to ask Santa Claus for a dolly and a Cabbage Patch Kid. I wrote a letter all by myself,” my classmate Clementine said to me before the Christmas of first grade.
“What kind of imbecile are you? Don’t you know there’s no fucking–”
Mrs. Paseo pulled me aside, and her claw-like nails dug into my arm. “Do NOT tell the other children about Santa Claus.” She was livid. “It will be our little secret.”
In first grade, we began to become aware of the opposite sex more than we were in babyland Kindergarten. Mrs. Paseo held an emergency class lecture one day.
“I am very disappointed in you guys.” She paused for dramatic effect, “VERRRY disappointed.” Oh no, what had we done? I had never seen the Siren-esque Mrs. Paseo this incensed. “Another teacher told me that some boys and girls have been KISSING at recess behind the wall of the school.”
What? Kissing? Not me Mrs. Paseo I swear!
“I thought to myself, ‘Not my boys and girls,’ but then I saw who you were,” she said. I promise it wasn’t me! Who could these first-grade Lotharios be? “VERRRRY disappointed.” I swore to myself then and there I would never disappoint Mrs. Paseo with such depraved behavior as girl kissing.
Our Cherokee Drive manor situated a brief twelve minutes from Belinder, and walking home always cooled me off. I remember having a kiddy crush on the boy with the same route home as me, a fair-haired boy named Zack Lamar. Too bad I never got to wrestle him shirtless on a desert island.
On one of these walks home I first learned what the word “dick” meant. All small children have these moments—the instant they learn what is actually meant by a bad word. All these older kids had been saying “dick,” and just as Zack and I were about to trek home, I asked an older kid in a very loud voice, “What’s a dick!?” He just pointed at his crotch and laughed at my shocked expression.
Zack introduced me to the word “gay.” I wonder now how evident my budding gayness was to these other children, as their parents would often not let them play with me or spend the night at their houses.
“Do you know what gay is?” Zack asked me out of the blue as we picked up acorns on the walk home (seven being an age that picking up acorns can be an event unto itself). “Do you love girls?” I really didn’t understand why, but in first grade girls had cooties and I didn’t want any rumors of “girl liking” to float around the school. I wasn’t one of those youthful Casanovas, kissing girls and disappointing Mrs. Paseo!
“Well, I love my mother,” I answered. I couldn’t understand what he was trying to get at. I am guessing an older sibling brought up at the dinner table that I must be “gay,” and he grappled with the idea while sussing out the sissyness. Zack moved to the other side of Prairie Village not long after that, and I smothered my heartache with Oreos and Fruit Roll-Ups.
“Damn you Zack! Why can’t I quit you?” I didn’t say that on his departure, but I might as well have said it. I could no longer walk home with Zack, but I dreamed of playing He-Man with him for many years to come.
Second grade came around and the marketing machine that lured capitalistic ‘80s children went into full gear. Cabbage Patch Kids, Care Bears, He-Man, Transformers, Popples and GI Joes made children greedier and greedier. “Masters of the Universe” (He-Man) was my favorite cartoon, and after the school day ended, I rushed back home to view the latest exploits of Prince Adam in Eternia. The furor this cartoon caused among parents of the ‘80s as a 30 minute toy commercial seems quaint compared to the capitalist extravaganzas behind cartoons today. The show succeeded because of the novel toy line, and the USA was at the height of the Conan/Red Sonja zeitgeist. I blame “Masters of the Universe” more than Calvin Klein for an entire generation of gay men that would sell their mother rather than give up their gym memberships. Whatever homo sculpted these children’s toys did an excellent job of giving He-Man the glutes, deltoids and hamstrings that are only attainable through enough steroid use to kill a sperm whale. Of course, I wanted dozens of He-Man toys. Muscle men of every size. Muscle men of every color. Muscle men of every ethnicity and persuasion. In short, I wanted hundreds of muscle men in my bedroom to undress and play with at will.
My sisters (I had a younger sister at this point) taunted me saying, “Those are just dolls. Dolls for BOYS!”
“They ARE NOT DOLLS!” I screeched back in my high-pitched, pre-ball-drop voice.
“The Masters of the Universe” action figures (NOT DOLLS) certainly had a homoerotic appeal. Usually they wore only a loincloth, S&M plastic armor and bulging muscles. I hoped to find the Power of Grayskull in my Underoos one day.
I desperately tried to avoid the juvenile emasculation that “doll liking” implied; however, I loved He-Man’s sister series, “She-Ra Princess of Power,” but I kept my addiction a secret. She-Ra came on during school hours so I prayed to get colds so I could watch it. “Our heavenly Father, please send me a case of typhus or maybe just trichinosis so that I may watch She-Ra in peace.” Thankfully, the Heavenly Father did not give me these diseases, but the occasional strep throat was like Thanksgiving, Pentecost and Christmas all in one.
While in Kindergarten I longed to wrestle my male friends on a desert island. My next childhood fantasy involved undressing my He-Man figures (you could take off their armor leaving just a loin cloth!), who would then “wrestle” each other. Tri-Clops would straddle Man-at-Arms, Mekanek practically fisted Beast Man, while Prince Adam and Glizzlor 69ed in the Evil Horde’s dungeon.
In the series there were several glamorous looking female characters, but it was verboten for boys to receive the female action figures. I secretly wanted to play with Teela and Evil-Lyn as well, but my younger sister had all the female toys. Teela was totally diva in those gold heels, and she could even walk across tight ropes wearing heels in the cartoon. Teela made the acrobats of Cirque du Soleil look like a bunch of two-toed sloths.
You know those He-Man animators worked on the cheap. They obviously used the animation cells repeatedly with identical scenes occurring in each episode. The animators merely changed the backgrounds which fooled us ‘80s kids for the most part. He-Man threw the same boulder in every episode and dodged Skeletor with the same somersault.
Back when I was a Belinder Brave, I could have cared less about the fiscal realities of animating a homoerotic cartoon to sell toys for Mattel—as long as my NOT A DOLL He-Man action figure could lovingly spoon Skeletor in the back seat of the Attack Trak when no one was looking.
One day, I got pulled aside by my teacher and sent for a battery of strange tests. I always finished my class work early and spent the remainder of the day drawing at my desk, so it seemed apparent I was different from the other children. Sitting alone with an unknown counselor in Belinder’s art room, I put together certain puzzles and did dimensions tests. Rorschach inkblots came out, and they informed me I would be among the first students to spend one day a week with another teacher, Mrs. Wandless. I loved Mrs. Wandless, and her name made me think that she had once been a purveyor of wands that had been, unfortunately, confiscated by the police.
I found out I would be studying under the Wandless Wonder for something called “Enhanced Learning,” E.L. for short. This gifted program allowed me and a few other students a whole day to work on a project entirely of our liking. Mrs. Wandless stands today as my patron saint, the Saint Perpetua of Prairie Village. She was always kind, liked my eccentricity and nurtured us kids that were sticking out in the regular classroom. I don’t know if I was truly “gifted” or just strange enough to be taken out of the normal classroom situation, but I began self-studying Japanese in this creativity-enhanced atmosphere.
The naming of the program did us smart kids no favors as the E.L. standing for “Enhanced Learning” soon became short for “Enhanced Losers.” The other Enhanced Losers and I also spent a couple months learning about the Greeks and got to have a Greek Day. We presented on the city-state of our choice. I, of course, was on the Sparta team, and our nemesis on Team Athens always yelled, “Fucking Sparts!”
Those wimpy Athenians had nothing on me. After several weeks of wrapping sheets around ourselves and pretending to be from the ancient city-states of Greece, I came away with such profound knowledge. Did you know, for example, “cretin” differed from “Cretan” and that “Gigantes” referred not to well-hung Corinthians but a delicious dish of baked beans and Mediterranean herbs? Still today, I enjoy a good bout of Greek role-playing with my boyfriends: Patroclus and Achilles go toga shopping, Agamemnon and Ajax the Lesser snuggle close inside the Trojan Horse. The possibilities for Greek-inspired play are truly boundless.
Around this age, everybody wanted to become The Karate Kid, and I did a short stint taking Tae Kwon Do. The Korean owners operated a training center in a scary area on the Missouri side, and it was filled with Missouri kids who seemed undomesticated and mean. I only lasted a few months, mostly because the dojo owner’s sadist son always made us do push-ups on our knuckles. Also, “Thundercats” came on at the same time as Tae Kwon Do so I wimped out and quit that business. Push-ups on your knuckles or the exploits of Cheetara and Snarf? The Eye of Thundera guided me to leave the feral Missouri-side children to their knuckle push-ups.
As much as it is featured in this book, possibly a brief explanation of my love for my unfairly maligned hometown, Kansas City, is in order. Certainly I think it is a marvelous place, and I appreciate the fact I grew up there. People who leave Kansas City for more cosmopolitan destinations must grapple for years with their hometown’s unwarranted bad image. Sometimes, though, I wish the city as a whole would step up its game. If Kansas City were a contestant on “America’s Next Top Model,” Tyra would advise it to, “Find your light.”
Kansas City resembles the C-List actress of American cities, a Tara Reid who longs for the status of a Julia Roberts. As lovable as she is, the actress never makes the short list for plum Oscar roles, just like Kansas City is never a big contender for hosting the World Cup or Olympics.
People in major cities wince when I tell them where I am from and almost immediately make some reference to The Wizard of Oz. Get the fucking jokes about Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz out now—Charles must be a real “Friend of Dorothy.” We sure ain’t in Kansas anymore! Are my friends a cowardly lion and a walking sack full of hay?
Sometimes the Wizard of Oz references come out at really rude moments. When I interviewed for jobs post-university in New York, one ill-tempered interviewer from Mikimoto Pearls mocked me during a job interview.
“You’re from Kansas? JUST LIKE DOROTHY!”
“Does this mean I will not be an admin assistant for your company Mikimoto, which I might add purveys the finest of quality, cultured pearl jewelry?”
Despite the extraordinary number of fine pearl necklaces I have received from men over the years, alas, admin assistant at Mikimoto turned out not to be my calling. I blame Dorothy and her little dog, too.
People who have a complex about their hometown know that meeting people in big cities requires you to become a “Geography Warlock.” Most people immediately think of wheat fields, Dorothy and Bible thumpers when you mention the “K” word: Kansas. They believe it to be a portion of the country that time, science and civilization have abandoned.
When you escape Kansas, you have to cast an illusion that you are attached to somewhere with better PR. If someone asks, “Where are you from?” I will immediately answer, “I grew up in Kansas, then I moved to New York City,” which is not a lie, and people are usually so disinterested in Kansas they forget about it within minutes. The next time they meet you they immediately say, “Oh you’re that guy from New York!”
When I get the feeling someone will give me problems about being from Kansas, I simply lie and say I am from Denver, since it is urban enough not to be laughable. You rarely meet people from Denver, so your chance of being caught in this sort of geographic tomfoolery is close to zero.
Kansas City lacks a monumental attraction that people might picture immediately or pop culture references aside from The Wizard of Oz. No image that solidifies Kansas City’s status as a major urban area. To cheer for the major sports teams, the Chiefs and Royals, might be synonymous with “to waste one’s energy” or “to labor in vain,” an existential Task of Sisyphus for the sporting world. That doesn’t stop Kansas City from having lofty aspirations. The major monument, Liberty Memorial, a giant tower erected to commemorate World War I, gets derided as resembling a “giant cock and balls,” and has long been the hangout for gay teenage hustlers, bush queens and transsexual prostitutes. Tourist pamphlets, advertising the casinos and zoo, proclaim KC as the “City of Fountains,” and that it has “more boulevards than Paris, more fountains that Rome.” Frankly, the nickname seems more laughable than effective. I can tell you for a fact no one in Paris, could they find Kansas City on a map, ever sat down stewing, “Putain de merde! Kansas City a plus des boulevards que Paris! Vee must make more boulevards, so vee can beat KC.”