Firebird by Doty Mark

Author:Doty, Mark [Doty, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POETRY
ISBN: 9780061860829
Goodreads: 10437532
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 1999-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

We’re GO-ing cross the RI-ver

for to get to the other side,

We’re GO-ing cross the RI-ver

Milk and honey on the other side.

Now I’m in my full stride, my smile wide and glittering in the spot, my fingers spread wide in the air minstrel-style, then flying up to lift my top hat in rhythm. I am amphetamine bright and glittering on the inside, too, possessed by my song. I am entirely a Judy, right down to the prescriptions, in tight black stockings, the tuxedo jacket slicing across her thighs just below the waist, eyes huge with the force pouring out of her gaze now into the music. I begin to wave the long red scarf in the air, making it also dance to my song and the throb of my accompaniment. I toss my cane away and hold the scarf high over my head with both hands. I hold it behind my back and my behind, pull it back and forth in a kind of shimmy.

Knock at my bedroom door, loud, uncompromising, not to be ignored. The music in my head diminishes and twists away, the real bongos sputter and cease, lights up, movie’s done. It’s my mother at the door.

What would you say if you found your ten-year-old son performing a drag show?

My mother says, Son.

I haven’t learned to recognize it yet, the look on her face, the crinkled skin around the eyes, the mouth somehow fallen, but I recognize it now, in memory: she’s drunk.

She says, Werner, you get on home now.

She says, What are you doing?

I say, Werner and I are putting on a show, explaining about Tom Thumb’s Wedding, and how there will be many musical numbers, how we’re going to sell tickets, and even as I’m saying it I know I wasn’t really planning to do these things. Only a game. No, more than that: what I liked was the daydream of the performance, how I could feel utterly free, dreamed and improvised Judy, because Werner wasn’t about to judge anything.

She says, “You can’t do that for the neighbors.”

Now I’m wilting; whatever flamed up in me in my singing is wavering and chilly now. I know, all the way through, that she isn’t going to love me the same way now. Am I standing there with the filmy piece of red chiffon limp in my hand? Am I wearing her lipstick? I feel blank; I have no explanations.

She says, with a hiss, with shame and with exasperation, Son, you’re a boy.

And now a performance begins again, this time not a movie but a play, no set for this one but darkness, one little island of light in which a boy and his mother stand, in absolute silence, as if there were a vacuum around them, and the play has begun just as their dialogue is over. Nothing else to say. It’s a stopping place. How can they move? They’re held there in the mother’s disappointment, her fear for what her son will become. His dissolute future spreads out in front of her like an oil slick: shameful, worthless, sick.

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