NEWSLETTER

Don’t ask how I know this, but there’s people with Milroy disease, where their lymph nodes in their legs never develop and they end up with feet the size of suitcases on legs like tree trunks. Or cyclopia, where you’re born with no nose and both eyes in the same socket.

Mister Elegant, his nipples looked too small and pale pink so to make them swell, big and red, he learned to paint them with something called Lip Plumper. Comes in a bottle with a little brush, like nail polish, and when you paint it on your nipples and lips and the head of your dick, they all swell up, huge.

Mister Elegant outlined his washboard abdominal muscles by drawing between them with mascara, then blending with a wad of tissue so his belly wouldn’t look like tic-tac-toe.

If he popped out one blue contact lens and looked at himself in the steamy mirror of a motel bathroom, yeah, he could still pass as 24. But between Billings and Great Falls and Ashland and Bellingham, between the Fireman’s giving everyone crab lice and the Army Soldier’s snoring, Mister Elegant was feeling wore out.

By Salt Lake City, his pickled balls were dragging.

Mister Elegant strutted out with his armful of red roses. Still in his breakaway tux, he gave out the roses, then started into the buttons on his pleated shirt. The only thing that makes Salt Lake City any different from Carson City or Reno or Sacramento is after the tux broke away, after Mister Elegant was counting into his second song, smiling and keeping his pubic hair out of people’s drinks, watching the dollar bills come out of purses and pocket books, the virgins writing their phone numbers on old bank-machine receipts, between his dropping to full splits and bouncing back in a perfect kip-up, one deep breath before his handspring and a full midair flip, two minutes and 36 seconds into the N-Trance cover of “Staying Alive”—(4:02)—the faces and drinks and dollar bills started to blur. Mister Elegant thumbed up the elastic loop around each hip, high and tight for his handspring, crouched down, jumped—and that’s all I remember.

In case you didn’t notice, the music’s stopped and here I am still shaking my dick in your face.

Like after all this time I didn’t learn any better.

What a retard.

Early as I can remember, I used to have Simple Stare Syndrome, a form of temporal-lobe epilepsy. My mom or dad would be talking to me, and I’d freeze. My vision would blur and all my muscles would stop. I’d still hear my mom talking, telling me to pay attention, maybe snapping her fingers in my face, but I couldn’t talk or move. Breathing is all I could do for a half minute, which seems like forever.

They took me in for MRIs and EKGs. I couldn’t ride my bicycle except on deserted streets. I climbed trees and my vision would start to blur. I’d wake up on the ground, my friends asking if I was OK. One school play, the baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, six shepherds, three camels, an angel, and two other kings waited what felt like a year while I stood frozen with a gift of frankincense, Mrs. Rogers leaning out from the wings, whispering, “Bless me, for I bring you this humble offering… I bring this!”

But after ten years of Clonazepam, I pretty much had that licked.

Trouble was my prescription ran out in Carson City. Being tired makes it worse. Drinking and cigarette smoke, fatigue, loud noise, all risk factors.

In Salt Lake City, I’d pitched what’s called a tonic-clonic seizure, what people used to call a grand mal seizure. I woke up in the back of a screaming ambulance, just in time to see a med tech stuff a thick stack of piss-soaked singles into his wallet, saying, “Mister Elegant…” and shaking his head. A blanket wrapped with belts held me flat, and I could smell shit. I asked the med tech, What happened? And he stuffed his wallet in his back pocket, saying, “Buddy, you don’t want to know…”

By the time the hospital released me, Troupe 11 was already in Provo with a new Mister Elegant shipped out to meet them at the venue. The Motel 6 where we’d stayed the night before, they were holding my suitcase.

A social worker came and sat next to my hospital bed, saying how the human mind is nothing if not a constant cycle of electrical activity. She said a seizure is like a burst of static, a storm inside your head.

I said, Tell me something I don’t know, lady.

And she told me about phocomelia, a condition where you’re born with your hands emerging from your shoulders. No arms. The old-time term for this birth defect was in fact “seal arms.” It’s linked with the sedative Thalidomide, but it’s existed long before that.

She told me about sirenomelia, where you’re born with your legs fused together, to make what looks like a fish tail. Hence the name: Sirenomelia, and possibly the original idea of mermaids.

This social worker, she told me her name was Clovis, and she herself had been a dancer, an exotic dancer, trying to hide the fact she suffered from narcolepsy. She used to have long blond hair and blue eyes, long smooth legs and no tan lines. Next to my bed, her hair was curly and brown. Her eyes were brown, and the thighs of her white pantsuit looked too tight for her to cross her legs at the knee.

While dancing, she kept her condition under control with Provigil except she ran out and started skipping doses, breaking pills in half, your standard false economies. One night headlining in a biker bar in Rufus, New Mexico, Clovis made her big entrance, hit the brass pole high up and spinning from centrifugal force, her blond hair swinging, her tanned body spiraling toward the stage below.

Saying this, her brown eyes mist over.

Clovis can’t recall ever sliding to the bottom of that pole. She woke up backstage and pregnant by some 32 customers. Some twice.

I ask her, What song?

And misty-eyed, Clovis says, “Portishead doing ‘Sour Times’.”

Ah, I agree. The sweet dark vocals of Beth Gibbons. Four minutes and 11 seconds.

“Four minutes and eight seconds,” Clovis says. One eyebrow arched at me, she says, “Always check your deck time. Never trust liner notes.”

I ask, What was her stage name?

And Clovis looked at her wristwatch, saying, “That was a long time ago.” She says, “I’m almost 30.”

Me too, I say.

And looking at some hospital form on her clipboard, Clovis says, “I kind of figured this age they put here was a lie.”

Before she could stand up and walk away, I asked Clovis to tell me what happened. What really went on.

The baby was born, she said, nine months after she woke up, a textbook delivery. A boy. It didn’t look like anybody and immediately drove off in a limousine to live a gated lifestyle in the Malibu Colony with two gay millionaire movie-studio executives.

“Talk about popping out a brainless, heartless stranger,” Clovis says.

She’d already told me about epigastric parasites.

And I said, No. I asked her, What happened to me?

And for a long minute of balls-out silence, Clovis just blinked her eyes at me. Finally, in the voice of a health-care professional, she said, “There’s a videotape of the… event.”


CONTINUED:
MISTER ELEGANT | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next>

< PREV

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

NEXT >

POST A COMMENT [SIGN IN] Hi, in case you haven't heard, you can now sign up to become a "member" of Viceland.com, which entitles you to all sorts of amazing benefits like pictures and a nickname. Click here to make your own profile. You can still comment if you don't, but you gotta do it all 'nonymously.

Name:
Comment: