A Coarse in Education
A couple of times, in these pages, I’ve mentioned writing about a despicable character named Kendry Ignatious “Natty” Vero. He’s been fun to write about, so I keep coming back to him. I’ve already included details about his move, from NYC to Philadelphia, and his new career in a club for female impersonators. Unbelievable: A Modern Novella (the Extended Edition) recounts the education he received along the way. The story, below, is part of that Vero canon.
Don’t get me wrong; Unbelievable readers are unlikely to discover parallels to Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, or The Education of Henry Adams, or—heaven help us—anything written by Dewey, Montessori, or Piaget (i.e., the boring and irrelevant stuff we had to read in college if we ever planned to become teachers).
No, the edification that Vero acquires is more of the “street smarts” variety—’though it wouldn’t surprise me if he referred to it, in one of his drag performances, as “graduating from the school of hard knockers.”
He is just tasteless enough to do it, too.
Urban Nickname
Those who have been unlucky enough to have suffered an hour in the presence of Kendry Ignatius Vero are likely to suspect that he has never had friends. They would be even more surprised to find out that he ever had girlfriends.
And yet he has.
That astounding fact might require some explanation.
When he was in college— in upstate New York—there was a girl he liked to call “Xanthippe.” I don’t know if she ever knew why he called her that—but, if she had, she wouldn’t have liked it. You see, Xanthippe was the wife of Socrates—and Vero liked to think of himself as a latter-day Socrates (he has always had a high opinion of his intellectual powers). He also enjoyed plying the unfortunate woman with questions. For the ancient Greek, the Socratic Method was a tool used to show students what they already knew (but didn’t know that they knew). For Vero, it was the tool he used to impress others with his own spectacular erudition.
The original Xanthippe was famous for being a terrible shrew who made Socrates’ life a living Hades. Vero has, on occasion, quipped that Socrates probably preferred hemlock to the “matrimonial bliss” of Xanthippe’s nightly harangues. If the original Socrates, then, was as annoying as Vero is, now, her bitter scolding nature must have been seen as justifiable.
Vero liked to describe his relationship with his Xanthippe as “Platonic”—and prided himself on the fact that it was less physical than philosophical. No one knows how she felt about that state of affairs—although the brevity of their union is telling.
There had been one other woman in his life—later, when he was working in advertising—but their relations could hardly be described as romantic either. They used each other as stepping stones to career advancement. It was hardly a suitable subject for a Romantic Comedy (even if the girl did get the boy, in the end).
Fortunately, for her, it was a different boy. Definitely not Vero.
So... why tell you all this? Simply to explain that—with so little practical knowledge of the females of his own species (whatever species that might be)—Vero was unsuited, seriously unprepared, to perform as a female impersonator. He possessed a total lack of usable experience of anything that makes a woman a woman.
Consequently, the first few times he was onstage as Natalia Verità, the act did not go over well. She had incorporated a lot of old jokes into her routine—jokes that belittled women, especially blond women—and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working. Eventually, her employer took her aside and explained that female impersonators (and their audiences) actually like women enough to want to become women, or at least fantasize about becoming women—even if only temporarily. Vero’s misogynistic routine was flying in the face of the very thing that brought people to a place like Chix with Dix.
Amazingly, she wasn’t fired on the spot.
When she’s onstage, the light makes it difficult for Natalia to see her audience, but she can hear it. If she only hears the clinking of glasses and cutlery, she knows they’re not paying attention to the act. When they laugh, she’s got them; when they don’t—or worse, they grumble—she doesn’t. In response, Vero reworks the routine each night and gradually begins to get more positive responses from the audience.
One night, during the performance, Natalia hears confused sounds in the darkness beyond the spotlight. Shading her heavily mascaraed eyelids from the glare, she can just make out a dark figure moving between the patrons’ tables. She hears chairs scraping the floor as customers try to make room for the hulking man who works his way toward the stage.
When he’s only a few feet away, Natalia can see that he’s squinting intently at her. She can’t tell if his threatening expression is anger or just a reaction to the unfamiliar brightness of the limelighted stage. He keeps inching forward, and Natalia braces herself for whatever is about to happen. The man creeps up, his face—contorted in an intimidating leer—close to her face, then leans in, close against her right ear.
And kisses it.
As a great collective sigh of amused relief washes over the patrons sitting in the dark, Natty/Natalia experiences a complex series of tangled emotions, onstage.
First, deliverance from the chance of being attacked—before a crowd of strangers—by another stranger, for god-only-knows what reason.
Then, embarrassment at being kissed, in public, by anyone, let alone a man.
Then, a sense of accomplishment because his portrayal of a woman had been so convincing that it overpowered what she imagined to be the other man’s natural shyness (or reluctance to embarrass himself in public).
Then, exhilarated by the awareness of the power of her own beauty, she has to resist the urge to belt out “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story.
Then, finally, wondering if it wasn’t that at all; that the strange kissing man might just be gay—and had mistakenly assumed that Natty was too. “After all,” Vero mused, “Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love, and maybe he was just acting on it.”
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