The musical, Rock 'N' Roll, was a Grease retread with a far flatter plot. Any idiot can jitterbug. We in the chorus were shown dancesteps simple enough that stagetime was left wide open for the emoting and blocking of the leads' scenes. Backstage, we had any number of ways to pass our downtime. We'd corner the sevvies and threaten them inexplicably. We'd see who dared to say "penis" the loudest, and then we'd laugh over it. That was the year of Nirvana's Nevermind, and often someone cast as one of the jocks would pop the CD into the theatre classroom's boombox and we'd mosh impromptu among the desks. The girls in the cast weren't into this. They'd lure the boys outside on nicer days to practice jitterbugging acrobatics, which landed me and a girl named Caton a solo dance during the show's title number. What we did was this: Caton, arms around my neck, would jump up and I, arms around her waist, would swing her along my right hip, and then back out and in along my left hip, and then back out and in right at my waist, around which Caton would wrap her legs for me to swing us both around in a circle. Was it racy? Memory doesn't serve here on whether she let go of my neck at this point to lean backward; despite the pride I felt in doing this to/with a girl, I remember her doing most of the work.
One slow afternoon I found a curly blond wig and put it on my head. Ratty, knotted, it fell just past the shoulders. I stood there and smoothed the hair down and became, for a time, someone else. My castmates there in the classroom stood around me and watched me do this to see what would happen next. And here I saw an opportunity.
"Hello," I said in a voice that made a husky rustle in my throat. I knew, somehow, to let my body mince as it walked toward one of the jocks, who in his real life was more skater-punk but looked large enough to play a member of the high school football team. "What's your name, big boy?" I said.
"C.J.," he said, laughing. Playing along. "What's yours?"
I felt slutty, dumb, and funny. Of course I named her Daisy.
*
Herndon Intermediate School was a building old enough to have been the town's high school back when my grandfather would have gone. The auditorium's seats were lacquered plywood, murder on older backs. The pale-blue walls and ceiling made a hard sharp box of the room. Everything always echoed, and the high thin windows that ran along the hall's north wall cast a weak pall in the room that made us all look sickly. Better to be on stage. Better still to be backstage, where the teachers couldn't see a group of us corner 7th-grader Tang with vague wide-eyed threats about the safety of his person. Where they didn't catch that background chorus member don an old wig and make everyone in his vicinity immediately uncomfortable. Daisy was more of a lark than a laugh, more caricature than character. One bit I had with her was to pose as though I had ladies' hips I could run my hands up and down. I'd bend toward someone close. "Happy Birth-day!" I'd sing, channeling Marilyn. "Misssthter Presssthident."
Was this funny? Here's the thing about Daisy: nobody laughed with her. Her antics—the breathy vocals, the Monroe bit, the little fluffing of her hair she'd flirtily throw the way of the jocks—were more shameful than charming. What laffs I got were the laffs of teenage boys made uncomfortable and perhaps just sad by the spectacle before them. Here were boys who already were the boys they were going to grow up to be. They weren't seeds of future selves, they were those selves fully formed. I didn't know it at the time, but in this key sense I was not a part of them. I was some other kind of boy. I was this thing to humor. And here's the other thing about Daisy: this was enough. Being laughed at was getting me laughs. Disregard is still one form of regard.
The play ran for three nights. After Saturday we struck the set and this is where my memories of Daisy end. I never again put on wigs and pretended at being a woman, except for later that year, when I went as a kind of benign parody of my sister for Halloween, stuffing her bra with my own balled sweatsocks. This was 1992, all of it. My drag year.
*
Here, word for word, is how I in the final days of eighth grade signed the yearbook of Chris, who played yet another of the guys on the football team:
Christopher,B.J.'s a mutual friend. And it seems important here to note I was in no way attracted to 12-year-old Jeff. If I had attractions to other boys at age 14 it was for the thuggish, athletic ones I got a chance to see undress in gym class (hello, Jarrett! hello, Tommy and Colin!), or for our gym teacher himself (I salute your shorts, Mr. Stames!). What was going on here was not a safe place to flirt just-kiddingly with the sorts of people I wanted desperately to gain the attentions of. By way of evidence for this claim, behold a line from our friend Kevin's entry in the same yearbook:
Luckily, between B.J. and "Rock + Roll" we united.
Yay,
Dave
P.S. I'm in love w/ your sexy brother. Hello, Jeff [commalessness sic] my sex-slave forever! I want you to lick me all over + let me wear your sexy glasses! Joy.
P.S.S. [sic] Purple W's rule the solar system.
P.S.S.S. [sic] Hopefully over the summer you become less morbid + learn to love life for the blissful escapade that it is.
P.P.P.P.S. DAISY LOVES YOU! [underlined thrice]
I want your hard cock throbbing in my hot mouth.In certain contexts there is nothing funny about this. It is not a funny thing for a 44-year-old, for instance, to say to a 14-year-old. It's also not a funny thing for a 44-year-old to say to another 44-year-old. But it is a very, very funny thing for one 14-year-old to say to another, and where this comedy lies is in the line's performativity. Hard cocks and hot mouths, even the notion of throbbing, these were nothing but ideas to us at 14. They were abstract concepts we didn't know anything about except that when uttered or written they became funny.
I think what I'm trying to say is that there was a lot of acting going on in Herndon, Virginia, over that long spring term of 1992. That I was an eventual queer acting every day the part of a nascent straight boy—a performance for which I, too, was for years a willingly fooled audience member—is the role that concerns me the least here. It's the mawkish A-plot in every stock coming-out story. What's more interesting to me is the acting that happened on stage. It was, naturally, terrible. To watch an old VHS recording of Rock 'N' Roll is to see kids sport about a tempera'd set in makeup stagemoms must have sprayed on with a hose. Kids endlessly failing to project, their reed-thin voices rarely reaching back to the back of the hall. What everyone seemed ready to project, though, was a future. We were middle-school kids given a stage to act the parts of high-school kids. Danceful high-school kids in love. Movies and television had been explaining all along what it was like, but now here was a script that felt written just for us. We were made with the play to receive a kind of education.
As far as educations go, it was a lousy one. Within a year after Rock 'N' Roll, I’d walk down the halls of my high school with my new girlfriend and have an actual jock, from our actual football team, laugh with his buddies and say, “Is that your boyfriend or your girlfriend?” I'd begun growing my hair out in the style of the alt-rockers I favored at the time, and Beth had bobbed hair that fell like a silent water feature, one strand hanging lower than the rest that was dyed with dye she bought at a basement-level store in Georgetown. Beth and I just kept walking out to her car. In not knowing which of us that boy was addressing I got the best education around on how I'd need to act for the next four years to keep my dumb self under the radar.
Daisy herself wasn't so much an act as she was an act of an act. Of several acts. Everything I did with her was meant as wry reference, derivative of any number of sources beloved in 1992 to a 14-year-old. The Mister President bit was taken straight from the first Wayne's World movie which had premiered that winter. The wig's rattiness and the voice it inspired, the sense of terror I tried in others to instill, was all Jerry Sizzler from the second season of The Kids in the Hall. Daisy was the same kind of mechanism for cheaply earned laffs as the guy who's good at quoting Simpsons episodes at appropriate moments of the conversation.
Except I think I was the only one in on the joke. It was clear to me that boys my age made inappropriate references to sex and sex parts in order to make each other laugh. I was smart enough at 14 to pick up on this and enact such inappropriateness. But it's also clear I went too far. I wore a wig for god's sake. If there were a dress handy I'd probably have slipped that on as well. And then for the next five years I got called faggot by classmates who all seemed to know something about me that it would take a whole decade to find out for myself. To come out (not just to your parents, but even to yourself) in the middle of your twenties is like finally allowing yourself to look in a mirror and see the reflection staring back. And it's hard not to look into those eyes of that new person without seeing the lost years behind you both. What happened? It's hard not to ask yourself what happened.
Daisy is the way a terrifying side of me began to unfurl. I've hated her for years.
*
Regarding Daisy, my Daisy, there are two things that are true. One: I donned that wig happily and readily at age 14. Two: As an adult, I'd rather slice a vein than put a wig on and become someone else.
