Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

“There’s something I want to talk to you about.” She tries to make it casual.

The bite of fear—“She knows!”—grabs my chest and then relaxes. No. I’ve been sitting here bald and naked for an hour. Too late for that.

She stops chewing her thumb and asks, “Have you ever been to the Glass House?” At my nod she drops the pen, picks up her tame tool, the pencil, and begins work on a fresh sheet of paper.

“Then you know,” eyes on paper, “that the dancers, all of us, aren’t there for our dancing skills or even our looks, but …” rubbing her thumb vigorously across the page, “because we each have something odd. We call them our specialties.

“What the Glass House calls ‘Exotic Features’ are all in the back room. You know. Separate cover charges for private shows and private parties. Blondes with Dobermans. Group acts. They stage requests, too, for fancy prices. There are one-way mirrors in the peeper booths and special insurance policies for domination or S&M. That’s where the girls make money. The club too.”

Her mouth screws up tight as she squints at her sketch.

“Well, there’s a regular customer. Not frequent but regular. Once a month or so she comes in for one of the specialty shows. Maybe twice a year she’ll foot the bill for a request. At first I thought she was a standard S&M dyke. Now I think it’s not pain that she’s interested in. She’s interested in changing people.”

Something in Miranda’s tone catches me. A swirl of familiar fear starts in my gut. She feels it too. I see a bewilderment strange to her face.

“The lady’s rich. She pays. She likes transvestites if they want to become transsexuals. If they want to go all the way, she’ll pay for all treatments and the surgery. That’s how Paulette could finally afford it. He could have gone on strapping his balls up tight for the rest of his life if it wasn’t for her. The Glass House keeps hiring transvestites and she keeps shipping them off to get real. But she watches. That’s part of the deal. She goes along and watches the operation. And it isn’t just sex changes. She actually prefers other things.”

A cold thought sinks quietly through me. Again? Miranda draws and talks, looking at my elbows, forehead, knees, tits, anywhere but my eyes.

The long-haired blonde, Denise, who unfurled her pubic hair and danced on her head hair, had furnished one of the recent command performances. They stretched her out on a chrome table in one of the back rooms, and gave her local anesthetics while they burned all her hair off. They set the fire and then ducked back into the glassed-in booths to escape the smell as the girl shrieked in fear if not pain, and the master of ceremonies, in a gas mask and flameproof suit, stood by with the fire extinguisher.

“The dame paid Denise’s hospital bills and went to visit her all the time. I went to see Denise the day before she got out. She looks bad. The roots were destroyed and the hair will never grow back. There are a lot of scars on her face. She’s not allowed to have any plastic surgery. That was in the contract she signed. You wouldn’t believe it but Denise is happy. She says Miss Lick, that’s the lady’s name, paid her so much she’ll never have to work again. Denise says there have been others from the Glass House. One redhead with enormous tits who had them amputated and went to college and is a doctor now!”

My daughter is staring at me. Her eyes are looking anxiously at my eyes. The point is coming. I feel it speeding toward me as she searches my face for a reaction. Any reaction.

“The reason I’m droning on with this silly stuff is that Miss Lick came back to the dressing room after the show last Friday night and asked to talk to me. She’s gruff and gross and when she isn’t being extremely dignified she’s being what she calls a ‘straight shooter.’ That means the first thing she said to me was, ‘Look, I’m not going to make a pass at you, so relax.’ Maybe it’s nuts but I liked her. She took me out for a fantastic dinner, though she didn’t eat. She drank the whole time. She pumped me for my life story and, being the shy, reserved type, I spilled the works. The poor orphan brought up in the convent school. The mysterious trust fund covering my art-school tuition and the permanent rent on this place. I had a glass of champagne and colored the whole yarn a glorious purple. She was fascinated. And what it comes down to is, she isn’t after my ass, she’s after my tail.”

“Ah,” I say. My mouth stayed open.

Miranda leans forward, eager. “Yes. This is the tale of the tail that I threatened you with, and I figure you will understand what I’m talking about.”

The sketch pad lies unmolested across her knee. One long leg hooked over the chair arm, she looks at me. Her hands are still. Her face is just young now, all the cleverness washed away.

“I was ashamed of it. You know, as a kid. The nuns would tell me it was a cross to bear and a punishment for my mother’s sins. I want to just tell you the truth, not purple it up this time. The nuns were good to me. I loved them. In a funny way the fact that the religion never quite took in me has to do with the tail. It’s hard to explain. Maybe I don’t even understand it yet. My one prayer was that I’d wake up and my tail would be gone. My backside would be smooth like the others.”

My mouth twists wryly. “You hated it?”

“Sure.”

I sit, coolly naked, examining her racehorse legs and the jut of her calf out of incredibly thin ankles and remembering my first sight of her head, emerging blood-smeared and dark from between my legs. Her small rumpled face jerked to the side with a profile like a turtle.

And later, with Lil beside me, stretching out the tiny folded arms and legs by gently pulling on her hands and feet, and finding nothing. Nothing but that little pigtail coiled over her buttocks. And Lil’s voice, not broken or shrill in those days, saying, “Well, remember Chick. He didn’t look like much either. Go ahead and love her. We’ll see.”

Months later she was crawling and learning to stand up, and was getting too big to sleep in the cupboard beneath the sink with me. Her father, whose wide mouth and almond eyes are Miranda’s now, looked at her one day when she had tripped and fallen and split her lip on the floor of the trailer and was crying and bleeding, and he said, “Get rid of her.” And I cried and begged and yanked down her diapers to remind him of that tail, pink and charming, and he sneered and said, “Get rid of her or I’ll give her to Mumpo for supper, stuffed and roasted!”

Now, twenty years later, in this huge room, with Lil downstairs watching a TV screen through a magnifying glass, her mind steeped in the amnesiac vapor of her own decay, and Arty’s wonderful face gone to worms despite me, I sit here looking at the full, ripe flesh of this almost normal young female and for a single satisfying instant see her on a platter with a well-basted skin crackling to the touch.

“You say you hate your tail.”

“I did. Then I heard about the Glass House, where they weren’t interested if you were just pretty and could dance but wanted something spectacular. It was a joke to audition. Or an experiment. A different approach to my tail. But since I’ve been working there I don’t feel the same way about my tail. Now I think, in a way, it’s kind of marvelous.” Her eyes are questions. Is it sane to like my tail? she is asking.

I am too old for this roller coaster. This much anger and this much pleasure should not be crowded into two short hours. My liver, or whatever it is that’s trying to crowd its way into my left leg, can’t take it.

“This must bore you. It must seem pretty silly.”

“No, I’m just resting my eyes. What does she look like, Miss Lick?”