A Word of Our Own: Ch 12 Performance Studies
The adventure continues in New York where sometimes I get naked. Sometimes I run and hide.
A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017, the book, not my life).
Thank you for reading!
12. Performance Studies
For eighteen hours I stared out the Greyhound window at the disappearing mountains and tobacco barns, the rolling hills that the mist covered and in the spring bloomed with dogwood, the fading middle-class suburban lawns and their caged women pacing past the matching dining room sets, the cupboards stashed with Del Monte green beans, and Green Giant peas, and Starfish tuna, Campbell’s soup.
Soon there was nothing left but motion. I dissolved in it. Was startled at dusk, when my own face reappeared in the shining glass.
I’d been living on a farm in Augusta, Kentucky when I got the news that NYU had given me a scholarship and an assistantship, and made one last visit to the woman I just couldn’t quit, dragging Angie along, before I climbed on the bus. My mother had recently lost her typist job at the bank. “He said I was too long in the tooth. Or that’s what he meant.” She was wearing a skirt. Her legs were blue with the varicose veins of three pregnancies. She was distraught at finding herself jobless and old, so old. About the same age I am now, mid-fifties, unemployed and unemployable, a resume full of that unspeakable word lesbian, that shameful word gay. For her, getting fired was worse than her divorce. She’d loved that job. Dressing up to go to work, the prestige of having a place in a bank. Besides, she had taxes to pay. A roof that needed replacing. The alimony long gone.
She made us Duncan Hines brownies from a mix. Served us instant coffee in cups I was careful to hold by the handle like a girl, so she wouldn’t flip out like the last time when she screamed, “You’re holding the cup like a MAAAAAAAAN!”
I felt pity for her. Felt protective. Encouraged her to sue because I’d learned all about age and sex discrimination at college, and here it was in the flesh. She said she’d think about it, but lawyers were so expensive, and you couldn’t trust them. Her divorce guy had cheated her even if he was a member of our church. “You know he’d get me on the phone and we’d spend twenty minutes talking about you girls and he’d charge me for it!?” He was incompetent, too, not cottoning on to the fact that my father lied about my mother’s age, and all the paperwork had her younger, making her seem more employable than she was. My father also hid as much money as he could, so even though she put him through college, all she got was the house and a pittance of the dough she’d scraped to save while he was off playing golf and drinking. “But I’ll think about it, sure. Write me,” she said finally, insisting on a bony hug. Even gave one to my nice “friend” Angie.
In New York, there were two mattresses on the floor with only a sheet hung up between them. “You can have the one in back. It’s more private,” he said. My clothes stayed in my suitcase. A crate became a desk for my typewriter for the few weeks I was there. We were speaking Spanish. Jorge was Angie’s ex-girlfriend’s brother-in-law from Colombia. He lived in the distant neighborhood of Corona, Queens and I was going to crash on the floor of a room he had in an apartment with a couple other Colombians. We all shared a bathroom down the hall, and the kitchen smelled of dirty crisco.
I tried to fit in, speaking the Spanish that I’d learned in school, even if they thought my Castilian lisp was hilarious. I ate boiled rice and the green plantains that his elderly female roommate showed me how to fry. And when she needed to go to the bank I went along and played granddaughter in case she didn’t get a Spanish-speaking clerk. She’d been in the country twenty-five years and had never learned English. “Too busy working,” she said.
Jorge taught me to play cowbells, and when he asked about me and Angie I was patient, “Which of you was the man?”
“Neither,” I said, “That’s the whole point of being a lesbian.”
He told me how back in Colombia he’d worked as a reporter, but left after too many of his friends got killed for writing inconvenient stories. Now, he was a janitor not far from Shea stadium where he’d sneak in sometimes to watch baseball games. I told him that Performance Studies was an interdisciplinary program examining all kinds of things through the lens of performance from theater and performance art to ritual and the way we present ourselves when we move through the world.
Once he persuaded me to go to a Latino club with him. I agreed, even if he told me to dress up, thinking it was going to be an ordinary bar like the Cincinnati one I hung out in, with happy hour specials and a juke box. Instead, there were all these elegant men in suits, elegant women in slinky dresses holding cocktail glasses. I felt shabby and foreign and really dykey like something you’d find under a rock. I stood there and my legs froze. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t pretend I belonged any more than I could at that girl bar in Cincy. So I flipped out, to his chagrin, and wanted to flee. He was pissed. He’d paid the cover charge after all. “The subway’s over there. I’m going back in.”
Queens was the weekend, the nights. Almost every day I hopped onto the subway and took it into the heart of Manhattan, the commuters getting whiter and whiter, and English becoming the lingua franca again, to the NYU building at 777 Broadway in the Village and my gig as an assistant at the Women & Performance Journal, the occasional seminar. The large introductory class was in a cushy auditorium where the scholarly people sat in the front, and I hid in the back with the other artist types, including a Bengali guy who was a playwright and actor, a Filipina with South Asian roots who was a theater person, too, and a performance artist from New Mexico who was Native American and Hispanic.
Then there was me, this grungy outsider girl from Kentucky who did performance, too, wrote poetry, stared in wonder at the East Coast people from good schools and academic families. Born with Foucault and Derrida on their lips. And Butler, too. Right when she was starting to get big for her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. A lot of the recommended readings were xeroxed and sitting in an office in pale manila folders that you could checkout. I’d get the files, stare at the language, get trapped by words which I understood individually, but not together. Like post-feminism. Which I couldn’t wrap my mind around.
I’d sit there, just staring at the text in my fancy university in New York City where money flowed like water, though always upstream, and wonder how feminism could go post-al, declare a kind of victory when my mother in Kentucky was getting fired for being an old and ugly female at fifty-five, while her aging male boss just got more distinguished. While everywhere women as a class were still far more poor and powerless than men, and even though I didn’t “perform” femininity, wear a skirt or make-up, or heels, still got shoved up against walls and had to carry a boxcutter. And guys threw bottles at me because I was a wrong woman and called me dyke. Real bottles that shattered against real pavement that was not some theoretical, theatrical backdrop. Abortion clinics were bombed or burnt down. Women were killed every day, or beaten on the regular by their husbands or boyfriends—like that women I met in high school when I volunteered at the hospital who went from nurse to patient overnight with a black eye and busted ribs and damaged kidneys.
Stepping into the NYU lobby, none of that existed. Wasn’t real. Just the words were. The ideas. Like the promise by that nurse’s violent boyfriend that he would change. He didn’t mean to beat the shit out of her. Said he’s sorry. “I love you, babe. Forgive me.”
Still, I understood the attraction of post-modernism, the power of magical thinking. I was a poet after all, an ex-wannabe missionary. There was an almost mystical beauty to how it translated everything into language, signs, words. You could “read” the ritual movements in a church, as well as the meaning of my skin, my sex, my voice, my clothes. But because all that was in the eyes of the beholder you could then declare that meaning arbitrary, strip it away like flesh, like a metaphor with the acid of relativism. And why not? If all the world is literature, everything a performance, of course meaning is irrelevant and contextual. We are finally free, free at last, from the tyranny of the material world.
The only problem was that it wasn’t true. Not for me anyway. I kept bumping up against my real life experience like you smack into a coffee table in the dark. And I couldn’t stop either asking the basic question I’d learned in my college ethics courses. When they insisted one interpretation was as good as another, I’d learned to ask, Good for whom? Or for what? Like a motive for a crime, who benefits? And while, post-modernists were busy authoritatively declaring the end of authority, of truth, unraveling words, absolving themselves of reality, there I was on the subway train dragging my white female body into and between communities and worlds and consequences which seemed real enough, to us anyway, those who wore history wore lives like the shabby daypack that I’d bought when I worked with Kay in Yellowstone and the wolves howled outside our door.
I’d only been at NYU a couple of weeks when I lost my shit because a professor said she would help us with the forms of our dissertations, and didn’t care what was in them. That meaning was meaningless. And the top of my head flew off. Because, seriously, what privilege. No, the clouds of words we expelled talking about “performance” were not more important than the thing itself. The world exists beyond language everybody at NYU was so good at.
It was why I did that performance.
I’ve written about it before. I feel like I’ve written about everything before. How in a fishbowl of a room just down the hall from my office, I took off my ordinary clothes of jeans and shirt and shaved myself from the tip of my toes to the top of my head. Pubes and eyebrows included fell to the razor’s hum. I pulled on underwear, pantyhose, a slip, skirt, bra of course, and blouse, then smeared myself with make-up. Art-Official Ritual, I called it. And for my trouble got called into the office of the chair who asked, as they always do, if I needed a shrink. There were some at the university. Did I really belong there?
It also got me kicked out of my apartment—the old lady ratting me out to the landlord as a child of the devil, but as a dyke, too. There was no way I was Jorge’s girlfriend as he’d told them.
I think sometimes of that former me, the girl of Art-Official Ritual. Who was so brave. And naive. So good at channeling her unconscious without quite grasping the implications in real life. The Kelly of 1989 thought she was making a point about how academics were trying to strip away what was natural and meaningful in language, and dress it up for the sake of the profs. It was about words and social class and communication. I was just using my body as a metaphor as artists do. Didn’t realize that my body was also the point. That I’d created an image of what the world was doing to me as a female, as a dyke. Upping the ante. You don’t like the hair on my legs? I’ll shave my whole body. You want me to wear a skirt and make-up? Fine. I’ll give you an image of femininity that will haunt your dreams.
I try to remember what that performance was like. I never even wore tight jeans to reveal my ass my thighs and there I was taking my clothes off in front of god and everybody. And naked, clambering up on a table in the conference room with windows all around and putting that razor in motion which at some point started making this choking sound and naked, horribly naked, I had to stop and clean it. And I was panicked inside. Because you can’t rehearse for something like this, and the only thing worse than being naked was falling flat metaphorically speaking on my naked face. And sure, maybe the whole thing was a cry, but not for help. A cry against the fog of language which hid everything I knew to be true, but would still end up infecting me. As vulnerable as I was. Raw with longing to belong.
A few times I hung out with this gay guy, Martin, who told me about the dissertation he was doing on the Cockettes, a group he’d been in in San Francisco. He showed me a picture and I couldn’t believe that the modest, cheerful gay guy in jeans and a tee shirt was also one of those monstrously glamorous creature, not exactly a drag queen, or female impersonator, but something which seemed far more subversive, at least then. Because the truth always is, and instead of replacing the trappings of masculinity with that of stereotyped femininity, he and the Cockettes, like their pal Divine directly layered it on, right on top of their obvious maleness, the sparkly make-up and boofy wigs and clothes that were so pointedly artificial that even my sister wouldn’t have worn them in her big hair, blue eye shadow days.
“Cool,” I said. Not sure of what to make of any of it, that photo, the Cockettes, how he treated me like a peer. I felt like a sham by comparison. I mean I’d seen Pink Flamingos with my friends in college, and practically puked when Divine actually picked up that dog shit and put it in her mouth. Who did I think I was?
Once, when I was over at Sunita’s house on Long Island with Sudipto and Cynthia, smearing yoghurt and spices onto chicken, I did a kind of encore performance. They draped me in the delicate, feminine gauze of a sari, put a bindi on my forehead. When I looked in the mirror I was as strange as Divine, a cockette, any drag queen. The red smudge looked raw as a wound against my skin. The fabric too dainty over the tee shirt which I’d refused to take off. And we laughed until the tears spilled from our eyes. “She looks like one of those white ladies in the Hari Krishnas downtown,” someone said. “Don’t they know they’re ridiculous?” Yes we laughed at them, and the white girl in the sari, the dyke dressed up like any matronly breeder. We absolutely guffawed as we do when we mean to crack a joke, but some truth slips out instead.
Stay tuned for…
Ch 13…
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K