Despicable
Everyone likes kind, good-natured, positive people. It’s effortless and painless. However, unfeeling, self-centered, opinionated, and down-right nasty folks are much more interesting.
At least to write about.
Last year, I wrote a little book (Unbelievable: A Modern Novella) that featured such a character: Kendry Ignatius “Natty” Vero. He’s full of himself, convinced that he knows more—and about more things—than anyone else and is always ready to share his wisdom with the world. That the rest of the world is a less-than-enthusistic audience for his pomposity never really occurs to him.
What particularly intrigues me about Natty is the fact that none of his much-vaunted knowledge is based on anything substantial. Mostly he just makes things up—or builds vast intellectual structures out of idle conjecture, rumors, popular fallacies, and does so without any semblance of foundation (such as actual study).
He does all of this with such self-confidence that—for a while, at least—people are generally taken in by it. He coasts effortlessly from success to success on nothing more than others’ mistaken opinions of him.
Natty Vero was a despicable character, but an absolute joy to write about.
Since the Vero book came out (and was made available to paid subscribers to this substack page), I’ve missed hanging out with him. Consequently, I’ve decided to explore him further. Rather than writing a sequel novella, or expanding the original book—perhaps to novel-length—I’ve begun writing a set of Vero-centered short stories. That allows me to examine more of his peculiarities, as well as the different kinds of reactions he might provoke in his victims. You might say that such writing lets me be as self-indulgent as my (anti)hero.
Sobeit.
For now, I’ll just serve up one of the new stories:
Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty
Ignatius Kendry Vero—“Natty”—had been digging through the classifieds and paused to look out the window. The view was all too familiar: just the backs of several Manhattan apartment buildings, but they looked especially gray and dismal that morning. No doubt, that had been his reason for moving to Philadelphia.
Well—that—and the fact that he’d had no luck at all in finding a job in New York.
Philadelphia, on the other hand, is sunny—and, by comparison, seems much more welcoming. At first. After a week or three of pounding the pavement, with little or no progress, he is beginning to lose hope. Just when his prospects seemed bleakest, he spots a sign bearing the magic words, “Now Hiring; Inquire Within.”
The building’s exterior is so non-descript that Vero has to search for any identifying marks. Eventually, he finds a mailbox with a single name on it: “Chix with Dix,” and a small sticker that boasts “A Club for the Daring and Discerning.” Curious, he opens the door and peeks inside. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and the place is mostly dark—and devoid of customers. He spots a heavy-set woman sitting alone at the end of the bar, a long ash dangling from the end of her cigarette holder. She appears to be counting credit card slips and making notes in a ledger.
“Good,” thinks Vero, “she must be the manager.”
“Excuse me ma’am... I’m here to inquire about the help wanted sign, outside.”
She looks up from her work as Vero approaches. When she tilts her head and peers over her rhinestone-studded glasses, he can see her heavily-darkened eyebrows rise in curiosity. The room isn’t very bright, but Vero can make out a bit of five-o’clock shadow.
“Yes, dear...come on over and sit yourself down!”
Her voice is deeper than Vero expects, and its nicotine rasp suggests that she might—at one time—have been a torch singer. When he gets closer, Vero can see that the five-o’clock shadow goes down almost to her cleavage.
“Das ist ein mann!” thinks Vero, congratulating himself for remembering the scene in Siegfried when the hero discovers that the “knight” encircled in flames is the Valkyrie, Brünhilda—even though the situation, in Chix with Dix, is reversed.
“And what is it that you do, dearie?”
“That depends,” he answers, “what is it that you need?”
“What I need is the love of a good man... but I don’t suppose that’s what you have to offer. Or do you?” she asks, suggestively raising one eyebrow.
“I’m here for the job... and I don’t suppose that’s what you’re talking about either.”
“Well, if you haven’t guessed by now, my club specializes in cross-dressing acts. Can you do something along those lines?”
“I never tried it... but, if it was good enough for Benjamin Franklin, it’s good enough for me.”
“What on earth are you talking about? Philadelphia is absolutely Franklin-mad, he’s everywhere... but no one ever told me about his feminine side.”
“You know his first nom de plume... Mrs. Silence Dogood? He used to dress in his mother’s clothes when he wrote the articles he signed ‘Dogood.’ It helped him stay in character. Or so he claimed.”
“Do tell!”
“And, when he was ambassador to France, he developed a real fondness for French couture. He brought back trunks full of silky outfits that he wore—late at night—in the house behind his printshop.”
“Oh my goodness... my do-goodness, I should say!”
“‘Goodness,’ as the sainted Mae West once said, ‘had nothing to do with it!’”
“Delicious!”
“Back then, everyone knew about Ben’s alter-ego. Some just played it as laissez-faire—or perhaps—cherchez la femme, but others didn’t see it that way.”
“So few do, do they?”
“True. John Adams, that stick-in-the-mud Bostonian prig, caught Ben one night—in flagrante delicto or, at least, delicately flagrant in pearl-pink watered taffeta—and was disgusted by the sight.”
“If Adams were around, today, his sort would not be welcome in my club.”
“I doubt that he would want to be associated with it. You know, there was a whispering campaign against Franklin, that I always suspected was started by Adams...”
“A nasty little man...”
“...that referred to ‘The Libertine Belle.’”
A loud snort of laughter shoots out of the club manager. “You know, that would make a fantastic stage name for the right Philadelphia performer. Are you interested...?”
Vero had never considered a career as outré as this, but the idea begins to consume him. He had always been able to convince others of just about anything—why not that he was a woman-in-disguise? In that instant, a strawberry-blonde temptress—Natalia Verità—wafts, like Botticelli’s Venus-on-the-half-shell, across the imagination of one Natty Vero.
—
The next morning, Natty and the future Natalia go shopping. Their first stop is VIP Fashion, a store—in the Philadelphia Mills Mall—that sells prom dresses (gaudy, faux-fancy, and a tad over-the-top is the look they need). He tells the saleswoman that he is shopping for his niece. “What size does she wear?” He says he isn’t sure, but she’s built almost exactly like him—though a bit curvier.
“So, about a size fourteen?”
“Sounds about right,” he answers. The clerk steers him to a rack of puffy gowns in vaguely silk-like fabrics in a range of pastel colors. He spots an off-the-shoulder number in lime-green satin that makes his eyes hurt.
It is perfect.
After buying it, he realizes that he is going to need foundation garments (not that he knows that term for feminine undergarments). Fortunately, there’s a Victoria’s Secret in the same mall. Inside its unfamiliar terrain, he stumbles around looking as clueless as every other male shopper. The saleswomen are quite accustomed to masculine befuddlement.
“How may we help you, Honey?” one asks—a common question, but an especially apt one in such cases.
“I’d like to buy... a bra... for my wife...” he stammers.
“We’ll be happy to help with that. What size does she wear?”
Natty is prepared this time—or so he thinks. “She wears a size fourteen.”
“Ummmmm... that doesn’t help. Bra sizes are different from dress sizes.”
“That makes no sense... why is that?”
“Well, the dress size gives us an idea of her chest size, but not the size of the cups.”
That stumps Natty for a moment. He struggles to keep images of his imaginary wife and his alter-ego-to-be—Natalia—separate in his head. Then he recalls hearing other men speak about their fondness for large breasts. If he is going to make a convincing bombshell of a drag queen, he’ll need to play to his audience’s expectations.
“Double-D,” he answers with firm, if undeserved, confidence.
“With straps or without?”
“Does it matter?”
“Full-figured women sometimes require more support... but, if she’ll be wearing something that shows her shoulders, she wouldn’t want the straps to show.”
“I see... thank you.” The dress he’d just bought would properly be worn with a strapless bra... but, since he’ll be playing up the fact that he’s a man in women’s clothing, he thinks visible straps might be funnier. “Straps, definitely.”
“What colors does she like?”
“She has several in white and flesh-tones... but I think she’d like something more dramatic. Do you have any in red... or black?”
“Of course, dear.” She steers him to another counter and shows him several different models. He chooses a lacy one in black, pays for it, and has it gift-wrapped—for effect—even though he’s the only one who will open the box.
Next, Natty heads to Cheltenhair, in Germantown. The shop has a reputation for having the best—which is to say, the most outlandishly ostentatious—selection of wigs in Philly. When he first opens the door, the assault on his eyes nearly overwhelms him, but he quickly realizes that he has come to the right place.
Skipping over a hundred-or-so short wigs on the lower shelves—that range in hue from all the natural shades to blinding bubblegum pink, iridescent purple, acidic chartreuse, and deep midnight indigo (and a few that included multiple colors, simultaneously and with a total disregard for anything Mother Nature ever attempted, with the possible exception of certain tropical birds)—he refocuses his eyes on the top shelf.
That’s where the BIG hair hangs. Natty doesn’t know much about drag life yet, but he’s pretty certain that big hair is essential. Outrageously big hair.
Just what he needs.
He quickly settles on a long-flowing wavy wig in a color that flamed like a trash fire. It will clash beautifully with that lime-green gown. He doesn’t try it on in the store—telling the salesman that it was “for his wife who was going through chemo, and was too embarrassed to be seen, bald, in public.” The salesman—who has sold many a ludicrous lock of ersatz hair to all sorts of people—does not believe a word of it, but makes sympathetic noises anyway.
Next, Natty visits his local drug store, hoping to find suitable make-up. The selection is awful (it never occurred to him that most women want to look like they’re not wearing make-up). He complains to the store’s manager—which requires him to admit the real reason he’s shopping for make-up. “That’s cool,” the young man replies, “but ya’ never gonna’ find what you lookin’ for in places like this.”
Somewhat mollified, he asks the manager where he should go. “What you be needin’ is theatrical make-up—ya’ know, what actors wear on stage, or the stuff that circus clowns use. Head on down to M. Cramer, on North Twelfth Street—they’ll take good care of you.”
Natty had always prided himself on already knowing all kinds of obscure facts, but—this morning—he thinks, “You know, I’m getting a real education down here in Philadelphia.”
Paid subscribers to these substack pages get access to complete editions of two of my novellas. Noirvella is a modern story of revenge, told in the style of film noir. Unbelievable is a kind of rom-com that forms around a pompous guy who is conceited, misinformed, and undeservedly successful. Both books are sold by Amazon, but paid subscribers get them for free!
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