Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

Which was where, obviously enough, I was now working. Five nights a week, six hours a day, for the next four months—and, fortunately, never again—I made my living by exhibiting the peculiar way I am formed. The Clinic had prepared me for it, benumbing my sense of shame, and besides, I was desperate for money. Sixty-Niners also had a perfect venue for me. I worked with two other girls, so called: Carmen and Zora.

Presto was an exploiter, a porn dog, a sex pig, but I could have done worse. Without him I might never have found myself. After he had picked me up in the park, bruised and battered, Presto took me back to his apartment. His Namibian girlfriend, Wilhelmina, dressed my wounds. At some point I passed out again and they undressed me to put me in bed. It was then that Presto realized the extent of his windfall.

I drifted in and out of consciousness, catching bits of what they said to each other.

“I knew it. I knew it when I saw him at the steak house.”

“You didn’t know a thing, Bob. You thought he was a sex-change.”

“I knew he was a gold mine.”

And later, Wilhelmina: “How old is he?”

“Eighteen.”

“He doesn’t look eighteen.”

“He says he is.”

“And you want to believe him, don’t you, Bob? You want him to work in the club.”

“He called me . So I made him an offer.”

And later still: “Why don’t you call his parents, Bob?”

“The kid ran away from home. He doesn’t want to call his parents.”

Octopussy’s Garden predated me. Presto had come up with the idea six months earlier. Carmen and Zora had been working there from the beginning, as Ellie and Melanie respectively. But Presto was always on the lookout for ever-freakier performers and knew I’d give him an edge over his competitors on the Strip. There was nothing like me around.

The tank itself was not that large. Not much bigger than an above-ground swimming pool in someone’s backyard. Fifteen feet in length, maybe ten feet wide. We climbed down a ladder into the warm water. From the booths, you looked directly into the tank; it was impossible to see above the surface. So we could keep our heads out of the water, if we wanted, and talk to one another while we worked. As long as we submerged ourselves from the waist down the customers were content. “They don’t come here to see your pretty face,” was how Presto put it to me. All this made it much easier. I don’t think I could have performed in a regular peep show, face-to-face with the voyeurs. Their gaze would have sucked my soul out of me. But in the tank when I was underwater my eyes were closed. I undulated in the deep-sea silence. When I pressed myself against a porthole’s glass, I lifted my face up out of the water and so was unaware of the eyes studying my mollusk. How did I say it before? The surface of the sea is a mirror, reflecting divergent evolutionary paths. Up above, the creatures of air; down below, those of water. One planet, containing two worlds. The customers were the sea creatures; Zora, Carmen, and I remained essentially creatures of air. In her mermaid costume, Zora lay on the wet strip of outdoor carpeting, waiting to go on after me. Sometimes she held a joint to my lips so that I could smoke while I grabbed the rim of the pool. After my ten minutes were elapsed I clambered up onto the carpet and dried off. Over the sound system Bob Presto was saying, “Let’s hear it for Hermaphroditus, ladies and gentlemen! Only here at Octopussy’s Garden, where gender is always on a bender! I’m telling you, folks, we put the glam rock in the rock lobsters, we put the AC/DC in the mahi mahi . . .”

Beached on her side, Zora with blue eyes and golden hair asked me, “Am I zipped?”

I checked.

“This tank is making me all congested. I’m always congested.”

“You want something from the bar?”

“Get me a Negroni, Cal. Thanks.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s time for our next attraction here at Octopussy’s Garden. Yes, I see now that the boys from Steinhardt Aquarium are just bringing her in. Put those tokens in the boxes, ladies and gentlemen, this is something you won’t want to miss. May I have a drum roll, please? On second thought, make that a sushi roll. ”

Zora’s music started. Her overture.

“Ladies and gentlemen, since time immemorial mariners have told stories of seeing incredible creatures, half woman, half fish, swimming in the seas. We here at Sixty-Niners did not give credence to such stories. But a tuna fisherman of our acquaintance brought us an amazing catch the other day. And now we know those stories are true. Ladies and gentlemen,” crooned Bob Presto, “does . . . anyone . . . smell . . . fish ?”

At that cue, Zora in her rubber suit with the flashing green sequin scales would tumble into the tank. The suit came up to her waist and left her chest and shoulders bare. Into the aquatic light Zora streamed, opening her eyes underwater as I did not, smiling at the men and women in the booths, her long blond hair flowing behind her like seaweed, tiny air bubbles beading her breasts like pearls, as she kicked her glittering emerald fish tail. She performed no lewdness. Zora’s beauty was so great that everyone was content merely to look at her, the white skin, the beautiful breasts, the taut belly with its winking navel, the magnificent curve of her swaying backside where flesh merged with scales. She swam with her arms at her sides, voluptuously fluctuating. Her face was serene, her eyes a light Caribbean blue. Downstairs a constant disco beat throbbed, but up here in Octopussy’s Garden the music was ethereal, a kind of melodious bubbling itself.

Viewed from a certain angle, there was a kind of artistry to it. Sixty-Niners was a smut pavilion, but up in the Garden the atmosphere was exotic rather than raunchy. It was the sexual equivalent of Trader Vic’s. Viewers got to see strange things, uncommon bodies, but much of the appeal was the transport involved. Looking through their portholes, the customers were watching real bodies do the things bodies sometimes did in dreams. There were male customers, married heterosexual men, who sometimes dreamed of making love to women who possessed penises, not male penises, but thin, tapering feminized stalks, like the stamens of flowers, clitorises that had elongated tremendously from abundant desire. There were gay customers who dreamed of boys who were almost female, smooth-skinned, hairless. There were lesbian customers who dreamed of women with penises, not male penises but womanly erections, possessing a sensitivity and aliveness no dildo ever had. There is no way to tell what percentage of the population dreams such dreams of sexual transmogrification. But they came to our underwater garden every night and filled the booths to watch us.

After Melanie the Mermaid came Ellie and Her Electrifying Eel. This eel was not at first apparent. What splashed down through the aquamarine depths appeared to be a slender Hawaiian girl, clad in a bikini of water lilies. As she swam, her top came off and she remained a girl. But when she stood on her head, in graceful water ballet, pulling her bikini bottom to her knees—ah, then it was the eel’s moment to shock. For there it was on the slender girl’s body, there it was where it should not have been, a thin brown ill-tempered-looking eel, an endangered species, and as Ellie rubbed against the glass the eel grew longer and longer; it stared at the customers with its cyclopean eye; and they looked back at her breasts, her slim waist, they looked back and forth from Ellie to eel, from eel to Ellie, and were electrified by the wedding of opposites.

Carmen was a pre-op, male-to-female transsexual. She was from the Bronx. Small, delicately boned, she was fastidious about eyeliner and lipstick. She was always dieting. She stayed away from beer, fearing a belly. I thought she overdid the femme routine. There was entirely too much hip swaying and hair flipping in Carmen’s airspace. She had a pretty naiad’s face, a girl on the surface with a boy holding his breath just beneath. Sometimes the hormones she took made her skin break out. Her doctor (the much-in-demand Dr. Mel of San Bruno) had to constantly adjust her dosage. The only features that gave Carmen away were her voice, which remained husky despite the estrogen and progestin, and her hands. But the men never noticed that. And they wanted Carmen to be impure. That was the whole turn-on, really.