Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Your Dreams
Posts: 346
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Holidays At The Green Monkey With Angel-Pie and Jim
Strange little short story I wrote awhile ago, I think it's rather good.
Holidays at the Green Monkey with Angel Pie and Jim
Hazel
Glorious, I look through the clouded swirl of finger prints on the window glass to the tacky tinsel and lights of the Christmas village and it’s glorious. It’s probably the closest to eggnog and gingerbread around the familial tree I‘ll get. I can’t remember the last time I went home for Christmas. I have a tacky little pink tinsel tree in my apartment and for Christmas I usually just sit around chain smoking depressed because idiots are happy and the star I bought for two bucks at someone’s garage sale isn’t straight. Funny that I have a date today, funny that I bothered to look halfway decent for it, carefully styled short slicked 20‘s boy/girl hair, my good leather jacket and white wife beater that hangs straight thanks to the help of the ace bandage company and good genes on my mother’s side, and the jeans that do nice things for the curve of my ass that en femme would get smacked. Hell I’m even wearing a little mascara and eyeliner.
No one seems to think it odd, usually, I just thank god I’m 5’9, 5’10 in shoes. I check my watch, a cheap Casio that I bought because I’m late for everything, and realize that I’ll be early enough to have a drink without whoever she is if I go now. I don’t know why I let Lulu sucker me into the, maybe it’s because I really want Lulu, but Lulu has Donna, and Donna’s been my best friend since I dropped out of college and so there’s nothing I can do about it. The bar is called the Green Monkey and it’s in Tribeca. I wonder vaguely who goes to Tribeca anymore unless they like need an over priced fix. The sidewalks are gray and the snow is gray, and most of the people are gray, but that’s the way of things isn’t it. Things start out white and good, and then they touch the world and it sticks to them like tar and it grinds in and grind in and grinds in until it gets from they’re coat, to their skin to they’re heart and soul and then they become gray like everything else and they just stop caring. I wonder if my freshly bound chest and smoky eye makeup look gray, I wonder if my black leather jacket and exposed undershirt look gray. Why is there still so much girl stamped into my behavior even though I know what I am? I can’t fix carburetors, like my stereotype can, but I know how to put on lipstick and make my face look slimmer with rouge, a trick I’ll never use since I’m gaunt from forgetting meals, and being a freelance writer. I kick up snow with my docs and feel chilled to the bone. I wonder what the girl is like, I bet I’ll hate her.
The Green Monkey, isn’t trendy, but the bar tender has a skull in a fez tattooed on his skinny arm and excellent hair. I wish mine would do that. I like it here, the mirror’s are cloudy and the corners are cobwebbed and the jukebox plays The Libertines, and Cibo Mato. There are about three other people in the bar, one of them’s a girl drinking alone at the end of the bar. She’s skinny and high cheekboned and wearing about three sets of false eyelashes. She’s wearing as much makeup as my drag queen friends do going on stage, and she looks good in her slinky little black cocktail dress. Her hair is blonde and worn like a 30’s starlet Marcel waved and cute, her lips are drawn in dark red as a cupid’s bow over her fuller, kissable, desirable, real mouth, she’s why women get collagen. She turns from her whisky, and looks me up and down.
“You know, you can’t pass worth a damn, honey. Lulu said you could, but girls are always too polite to say or just wrong or something.”
“What?” I say glancing around the bar to see if anyone knows what she’s talking about. They do, and they’re nodding.
“I’m June, Lulu’s friend,” she says. I look at her, she has nice legs. “but really s’ok, because you’re just so pretty, come and have a drinkie?”
“Isn’t it traditional for the boy to pay?”
“Isn’t he?” she says giving me a peek at the breast forms she wears under her party dress.
“You pass,” I say in surprise, and suddenly I can imagine sleeping with her/him the clothes would come off and suddenly the positions would be totally switched. I would be femme, giving, and ready to please and she would be male. She’d be male and taller than me and wanting me like I want her now. I can tell when I look closely that she was a beautiful boy, is a beautiful boy, I hate PC. I really don’t mind when people I’ve known for years call me she it seems silly to make them learn a whole new pronoun, and a whole new word, they’re just words anyway, it doesn’t matter.
“Cigarette?” I ask her, as the bartender lays our drinks down in front of us.
“How cliché, but yes,” says June.
“What was your name before…” I ask looking at the beautiful boy girl sitting next to me, as I hand her the pack. Light one of my Gauloises for her, light one for myself.
“James,” he says, looking me straight in the eyes, scaring me. I could never do that. “You never told me either of your names,”
“Oh, sorry, you’ll laugh. I’m Angel-Pie Whittaker.”
“Angel-Pie?” she says smiling, showing white teeth that make him-her look like a fox looking for a hen in the dim light of the bar.
“I didn’t bother to change it when I came out, it’s kinda gender neutral don’t you think,” I say.
“How did you come by it?”
“My parents are from the south, and on the crazy side, it’s actually a family name, my great great-grandmother was also Angel-Pie,” I say, sipping my drink. She grins.
“You know, you really are too cute, though you can’t pass worth a damn,” she says.
“You really make a cute girl,” I say.
“You’d make a really cute girl,” he says. I thank her, and I feel the blush of pleasure that I normally crush when someone says something like that, but with June it’s ok. S/he knows what I am, likes what I am, likes me for my bound chest, and men‘s jeans.
“You’d make a cute boy,” I say, take a long drag on my cigarette. Our flirting is blatant, but I don’t care, but I can tell s/he’s been drinking and subtlety will be lost on her.
“Oh, I was,” he says, grinning, and I can see James for just a moment, and that’s the tragedy for both of us, we’ll never be able to get rid of those years we didn’t say something, and they’ve built a wall and for him they’re James and for me they’re nameless and too present. Maybe I’m just neither, maybe I’m no boy at heart but a
girl-boy, god I would love to pick my gender when I got up in the morning, or just be nothing, everything… sort of like David Bowie.
I really haven’t gotten any in too long, and whatever June is s/he’s cute. It’s getting late and the blue evening light outside has faded going from turning all the gray in the world a sad depressive butterfly blue to turning it black and streetlight Halloween orange. We’ve had too many drinks by now, and I feel dizzy. June smiles at me.
“Someone can’t hold their liquor,” says June, and offers to take me back to her-his apartment.
Coming home with June I get a look into the life s/he’s built. The kitchen where the light flips on to nothing but what s/he moved in to. The living room where the vintage sofa with velvet upholstery and swans for arms. There are magazines scattered across the floor, mostly the New-Yorker, and fashion magazines like Nylon and Vogue. It’s nice and not too neat which is a plus if you ask me, I really have never been able to deal with anal people, unless they’re fairies, sorry terrible pun there, you didn’t deserve that.
S/he, undresses and becomes he-he. The wig is off, and his own chin length dark brown hair can be seen, the makeup’s off, and his jaw is a young man’s jaw, and with out padding he is skinny and nubile and beautiful, flat cheasted and leggy, androgynous and coltish. He looks at me, and his eyes are a girl’s, but then again, they‘re not. I don’t know how but I can tell a smile curves her lips and she looks at me.
“You too,” she says, and somehow I do, and then the cat’s out of the bag and the binder’s off, the stuffed sock is thrown across the room, and I’m out in the open just another dyke again or something I’m a girl-guy, about to fuck a guy-girl. I suppose it makes us both bi. He looks at me, and even without silicon and makeup, he’d make a beautiful girl.
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Gilding The Lillie Is My Idea Of Shangri-La
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