It is eleven thirty-seven on the evening of my final night of classes. I’m drunk. Not just the five-beers-in kind of drunk, oh no, I am Aunt-Cathy-at-a-Christmas-Party drunk. It’s the kind of drunk where all of the hard edges in the world blur and puff, like the world is made of honeybees, minus the stingers of course. “You’re gonna do it, right, Dan?” She asks me point-blank. Like this is nothing. The world stiffens, stingers emerge from the fluffy haze; they’ve been there all along, the wily deviants. I notice the corners of her mouth, delicate and pink, are anticipating my agreement; they flex their muscles, expecting to smile; it’s all for naught. “Nah, I don’t want to turn anybody to stone,” I say as nonchalantly as possible; I’ve been relying on self-deprecating humor a lot more recently. She doesn’t notice. I do. I should probably fix that. Yikes.
“Jiggle-jiggle, fatty,” she chortles, her milk carton clutched between her chalk-stained, eight-year-old hands; hands that will no doubt cause her grief years later when Korean women make fun of her cuticles. Her name is Claire. I too am eight-years-old. She takes a swig of milk and lets out a contented sigh. Had I possessed the sass and vocabulary at the time, the thoughts running through my eight-year-old mind would have been: is it really that refreshing, you heifer? But I’m eight and significantly less observant or sassy, so I continue jumping rope. After all, these are my girlfriends, right? These are the cool girls, the girls who wear those belts made of wispy fabric that serve no purpose, the ones who wear snap bracelets, whose dads own that shopping center down the street, whose pretty blonde hair makes the perfect mustache when we need to laugh. No, I may not be especially observant, but what I do notice is the truth in her words. Jiggle-jiggle, fatty. Jiggle-jiggle indeed.
For the first time in my life, I’ve come to the realization that I’m not just heavier than the other kids; I’m the heaviest. We set to double-dutch: our ritual, our prayer-circle, the Gospel of Miss Mary Mack flying up to the heavens with every too-simple rhyme. Today is the day. Today is the day I double-dutch with these cool girls and earn my rightful place in the pantheon of well-liked, popular, rich, blonde girls. I’m going to be that girl, god dammit. I zero in on the center between the girls spinning the ropes, and I hop for all I’m worth. The trickiest part of double-dutch is getting inside, as anyone well-versed in the sacred art will tell you. I hop; I land. I’ve made it! “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in—jiggle-jiggle, see him wiggle. Look at the fatty go,” they chant. I haven’t heard this one before. “How many times can the fatty jump before we let him go…” One. Two. Three. And so it goes.
I’ve always had issues with my body. Perhaps it was because my dad was a body builder, always aching and pushing for that extra pound somewhere else on his hulking frame. Maybe it was my mom, striving to cram her natural size-eight-Hispanic-mother’s frame into a size-three-childless-executive’s pencil skirt. Perhaps body issues, like false machismo pride and subtle misogyny, are just another unspoken, ever-present part of my cultural DNA.
“Uhm…Dan?” She looks concerned. Where was I? Right, the naked mile. What am I doing here? Right, not the naked mile. I’m drunk, after all, and it’s about to rain. I don’t want to slip and fall and get pneumonia. Yeah, that’s what’s keeping me from doing this. “Me and a bunch of other people got some body paint, come and have a drink, paint some things on people’s bodies, and we’ll see how you feel.” I try to protest, “me-thinks I’m too…something-something hither-thither—” but she’s not buying it. She sees right through my comic fortress of insecurities. Maybe it’s because I’m drunk. I’ll never be like Stanislavski in that regard, he was always more convincing when he was piss-drunk and misquoting Shakespeare. I frolic in the archives of my subconscious for a time; sensing my haze’s return, she grabs my hand and ushers me inside.
“Dan, stop joking;” he pleads, “just come out for one night. I promise you’ll love it.” The truth is, I would love to go to this gay club with Jon. He’s six feet tall, red-headed, built like one of those farmhands you see on the cover of terrible romance novels with titles like ‘A Hayride to Remember’ or ‘Pastured Desires’. He hates when I make myself the butt of my own jokes. “All I’m saying is that the lights are dark and the music is loud, nobody even pays that much attention to other people,” he tries, he really does, but I’m not budging. “We can recreate that in my room with a flashlight, an oscillating fan, and some noise-canceling headphones.” He pauses, tries not to laugh at the mental image I’ve planted in the fields of his mind’s eye. “I’ll stay the night with you after…” he comes in close and walks his fingers up my chest, his hand a lonely hitchhiker in the mountain range of my lumpy body, “…and we can cuddle…” no cars come to offer his hand a quicker passage through yonder hills; it continues on its merry way. He smiles. He’s got me. Pastured desires indeed. I glower at him, “Fine,” I say, “but what the hell am I gonna wear?” His azure eyes sparkle with, what was that, mischief? Was that mischief? Crap, it was mischief. He runs to his car and returns with the smallest, tightest-looking button-down shirt and daisy-duke-jean-shorts combo I’ve ever seen; I try to protest, but then he smiles at me with that deliciously crooked farmhand's grin. Well played.
We arrive at the club and he immediately starts dancing. I explore the space, find the dressing rooms for the drag queens, spot a few butch lesbians smoking in the corner talking about power tools (I wish that were a joke). Everybody here is beautiful. They are skinny and smiling and smoking and drinking and happy and muscular and gorgeous and probably models for some homo magazine. There is no place here for a queer of the land-whale variety like myself. He finds me; he’s already glistening with sweat. He smiles and laughs that baritone laugh of his; a laugh that makes redwood roots quake and butch lesbians blush, much to the chagrin of everybody involved. His shirt has disappeared, unsurprisingly, and he ripples with every step he takes towards me. “Don’t give me that bull about you not dancing,” he starts, he raises one of those gorgeous eyebrows, the left one, specifically, my favorite. Is this the part where I tell him that it’s not that I can’t dance, it’s that I don’t want to be seen? Is this the part where I tell him that I am so uncomfortable and he can keep his god damn cowboy hat and his perfect smile for the evening if we could just get out of here? No, it’s not. This is the part where he pulls out a bandana, folds it at the corners, and ties it around the lower part of my face. “There,” he says, “Now you have a mask.”
We enter the dance floor; I feel my hips begin to sway. He grabs my waist; I’ve always hated grinding, but it feels oddly appropriate now, probably because for the first time, it’s happening to me. We are in the center of the room, a black bandana, my romance-novel-cover farmhand, and me. With that simple little thing around my face, I am transformed. No longer am I Dan the Queer Land-Whale, no; I am Dan Lovato (like Demi, but pretty and talented), Dancing Fiend Extraordinaire embarking on a hayride to remember as I jump, twirl, split, twerk, bend and snap to the rhythm. “Wooo, gurl, must be jelly ‘cuz jam don’t shake,” a drag queen shouts as she tosses bills and people cheer. “They’re cheering for you,” I say into Jon’s ear. “No,” he licks my neck and tightens his grip on my waist, “they’re not.”
We’re inside; I’m searching for beer as she gets the body paint ready. I can’t do this. I won’t do this. She takes her top off. “Alright,” she says handing me a rainbow assortment of paints, “I want Loki to be a rose and Thor to be a smiling sun with sunglasses on.” Loki and Thor are the names she’s given her breasts, don’t ask me what part of herself she calls Odin. With my stomach treated with a fresh coat of drank and the Norse gods reveling in their new identities, I’m starting to feel good. “What do you want?” she inquires. I—I’m actually thinking about it. What do I want? If I get something, then I have to run; it’s just good manners. Am I really doing this? Apparently I am. I hold back a smile as she covers my body in thyrsus symbols. How appropriate, I think to myself, that I would be covered in the very symbol of what I’m about to experience. After all, I’m already drunk, and I’m about to frolic naked; let the bacchanal begin, right? Right. Well, almost. I run upstairs to my room and go to my super-secret top drawer, the drawer holding various artifacts from fraternity initiation, my passport, and most importantly, a frayed and sweat-stained black bandana. I remove the remainder of my clothing, and I don my mask.
Thunder erupts overhead as Thor, Loki, Odin, and Dionysus carouse in the quad. There are easily two hundred people laughing, screaming, running, reveling. I am among them. I have completed my first year of college; I deserve a good frolic. This is my bacchanal, the very one I set out to experience at the beginning of senior year sitting in AP English class. This, this moment in a sea of bodies and laughter and alcohol and memories and revelry, I realize, is where my journey has led. The journey my body and I undertook all those years ago on that double-dutch court. Somewhere in the fray, the bandana falls off. The thought of looking for it never even crosses my mind. And why should it? After all, at the end of the night, nobody has turned to stone.
