Jane Jones is Fabulous
My Name is Zack
When I first saw Jane Jones, I said to myself, this is the coolest person I’ve ever met. Everything about her defined cool. And she showed up at exactly the right moment, because I needed help. I mean, I used to be a nerd. Even more of one than I am now. This wasn’t even when I was going through my raver phase and wearing big baggy pants and this huge orange terrycloth shirt that I wore for like, eight months straight. At this point, pre-Jane Jones, I was a major, full-on, clueless and shoeless walking fashion nightmare type cultural wasteland dweller from Cleveland, Ohio named Zack.
Well, five years later, I’m still Zack, and me and Jane are both still Virgos with Leo risings, but a lot of other stuff's happened. We’ve gone through thirteen boyfriends and girlfriends between us, gotten jobs together in more restaurants than I can count, left Athens, Georgia behind us forever, and moved to New York City to follow our dreams and reach for the stars. And being around Jane, some days when I wake up, I almost feel like some of her being fabulous has rubbed off on me too.
I also moved up here with my boyfriend Danny. Jane came first, and found the three of us this amazing top floor apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s right above some street sign warehouse, and nobody else lives in the building but us. Right up the stairs from our apartment is the roof, and when somebody’s using the bathroom you can climb up there and pee off the edge, only it’s a little scary, because there’s a big drop, and the part you have to stand on is real skinny and narrow, and it’s windy sometimes. But if you look over your shoulder while you’re peeing, back towards Manhattan, you can see the Empire State Building! I get dizzy sometimes when that happens, caught up in the moment, looking at all the lights and hearing the sounds of the city at night, and that’s when I move back from the edge a little.
Right down the street from our building there’s a little bodega on the corner where I can buy dime bags from the girl who works the counter! I used to get them from the guy we paid to walk our dog, well, it’s actually Jane’s dog, his name is Chou Chou, and he’s a very nice little dog, even though he only has one eye. I think he had glaucoma, and that’s why he lost his eye. Sometimes I blow smoke his way when I think he needs some extra therapy. Jane says he's the reincarnation of another dog she used to have, who looked exactly like Chou Chou, only he was a she named Mushpuppy.
We used to give the guy bus fare to go get the dime bags for us, plus paying him to walk the dog. Then about six months after we met him, he told me from now on, we could go the corner store ourselves and buy the bags. He must have felt guilty. But the other day, the girl who works there said she couldn’t sell them at the store anymore, because people had been talking. It wasn’t me! I would never say anything to anybody about where I get my pot, because I really enjoy smoking it. Danny thinks I smoke a lot of pot. Well, at least I’m not ashamed to admit it. But then again, what’s a lot of pot, really? I only smoke five or six times a day. Some people I know hit the bong like, twelve times. And that’s just on weekdays.
Actually, lately I haven't even been smoking all that much, because one of my really good friends that I've met in New York is HIV positive, and he takes these great synthetic THC pills to increase his appetite. I'm telling you, if you've never tried these THC pills, you're missing out. You get so high, it's like getting more high than you've ever been high before. I'm not kidding.
I met Jane working at a restuarant in Athens called Sparky's. I'd never worked in a restaurant before, and it was her job to train me. Girl trained me, alright. Jane Jones was fierce. Hoop earrings, silver hair, and outfits that could only have been dreamed up by a fashion time traveler. Twenties flapper chic mixed with swinging sixties style and seventies disco sexy. She had her own thing going, and didn't care what anybody else thought of her.
Before she was through, I was on my way. I knew which thrift shops to haunt to find the best polyester clothes Athens had to offer, how to wrap a beehive hairdo, and most importantly, I knew I was enrolling in cosmetology school. That's where I learned the science of hair. You know there's a science behind it, right? Where do you think hairdos come from, styling gel? Guess again. It's all about chemistry!
Think about the PH scale. Like, at the swimming pool. It runs from acid to alkaline. My friend Derek says that's how sexuality works, too, everybody's either totally gay, totally straight, or somewhere in between. But if that's true, then people can potentially change their spots, just by having volatile elements added to their mix, and getting their PH levels all fucked up! Which is something I try to do on a regular basis, especially when I meet cute straight guys who look like they need a little spurt of acid in their alkaline.
But anyway. So in its natural state, everyone's hair has a normal PH level. There's also two basic types of hair, straight and curly. I know, it's ironic. Both types are like hollow tree trunks, with beams supporting them on the inside. But the beams in straight hair run perpendicular to the tree trunks, and in curly hairs, they run diagonally. So when you change the hair's PH level, by adding certain chemicals, you temporarily change the way these beams run, and can turn curly hairs into straight, or vice versa, which is lots more fun!
So that's the science of hairstyles. What's even crazier is that hair has short term memory. Like, when you get your hair wet, and it dries? It will remember what PH level it changed to when it got wet, and keep its new shape. Hair is truly amazing.
I think I first started styling hair when I was eleven or twelve. I used to do my sister's hair, and after that, for her circle of friends. Then I was the boy on the playground who would braid all the little girls' hair. They loved me. In high school, I started cutting hair, because I wanted to make people look good. But then I put my scissors down for several years. I almost forgot how to cut heads! It wasn't until Jane Jones came along that I realized hair was a big part of my destiny.
You'd think being a part time hairdresser and trading blow jobs with guys all through high school I would have realized I was gay. Well, guess again. I don't know why I didn't realize it. I never thought about it. I dated girls, I kissed girls, but I never slept with any of them. I never slept with any boys, either. I didn't even know what anal sex was. I thought blowjobs were sex. I thought anal sex was a myth, some weird rumor about gay men that couldn't possibly be true. When I was fooling around with boys, it just felt normal. It felt good.
I've already told you where I'm from. But I didn't grow up in the city of Cleveland, the town where I lived was the sticks. Suburban Ohio boondocks, at least twenty minutes from downtown. The only gay bars were in the heart of the city. That's how I finally realized I was gay. I went to one called Pulse. I went with my friends at first, to go out dancing. And when I saw all the boys, men with other men, men holding hands, and dancing, and just being together, it all clicked. I had found my way.
Thanks to Pulse, I met my first boyfriend, came out to my parents, and single handedly put another Cleveland gay bar out of business forever. Good thing we went dancing that night!
The first time I went to the bar without my friends must have been six months later. I'd gotten into a fight with my parents, and decided to go out by myself. It was very exciting. And when I got there, the line to get in stretched twenty deep. So I walked up to the front, then the bouncer asked me what I was doing, and I said, "I've come to see you!" He smiled, said, "Okay," and let me right in. Later on, some foul mouthed queen came up to me in the bathroom and bitched me out royally for cutting past her in line, but I didn't care.
Then I saw two guys in a corner, well-dressed, good looking, but older. They seemed interesting, so I went up to them and asked some stupid question. They nearly tripped over themselves trying to buy me a drink. And one of them says to the other, "You know, you need him to work for you. I saw him get in outside. He could work the door." So then the other one tells me he's opening a huge new gay bar soon. I was like, "Yeah, right. Prove it." Then he told me where it was, and I laughed, right in their faces. Where I lived was bad enough, but this town was like, two counties over, and it was even more hillbilly country. But he swore up and down he was opening a bar there.
"The opening's on Friday. We're having an employee meeting tomorrow, so come on by, and we'll give you a job."
Well, I couldn't believe it, but the next day, I was driving two miles through overgrown woods down this dirt road, two counties over from where I lived. The address he gave me was on the shores of this fucking lake. It used to be a hunting resort. He said the club was going to be called "The Beach." There wasn't even a sign. I came over the crest of this hill, and saw twenty cars parked around this cluster of old, decrepit, faux log cabin buildings that looked like they should have been torn down twenty years ago.
When I walked through the door, it was 3:15. The meeting was supposed to start at 3 pm, but I was late, because I had been stuck behind a cop car driving there for most of the way. All heads in the place turned to stare at me. I had just turned nineteen, and I looked fierce. There were at least thirty men in there, all of them gay, but I didn't realize it at the time. The two guys from the night before were sitting on bar stools at the front of the room, and the one guy looked at the other guy, and I could tell they were thinking, oh shit, this kid actually showed up!
So then they started saying something right away about how they had filled all the doormen positions! I couldn't believe it. I walked up to the front of the room and I said, really loud, "You don't even remember my name, do you."
They didn't know what to do. They just stood there, staring. Then I laid into them. "Just what do you two think you're trying to pull? What kind of businessmen are you, if you can't even follow through like professionals after you offer someone a job? Is this how you expect to run your business into the ground?"
Right in front of everybody! Finally, the main guy cut me off and said, "Alright, alright, I guess you got the doorman job!" And from then on, three nights a week, I ran the door.
I used to have to sneak out of my house to go to work. I would tell my Mom I was going over to a friend's house, or out to see a movie, or wherever. She never caught on. And I was making good money. I was also working serving drinks. I was a shooter boy. I would walk around and sell shots. People would always buy me shots, so I would end up drunk by the end of the night. It was a blast.
There must have been a lot more fags hiding around my neck of the woods than I thought, because within four months, that place was packed every night it was open. I mean, it was getting to be the winter, and there were still people partying outside, right by the lake, in the freezing fucking cold, because the bodies were jammed up like sardines on the inside and you could hardly breathe. They had a big sign on top of the place in the shape of a body builder wearing a tight yellow bathing suit. Driving down that long dirt driveway, you'd see cars parked halfway out to the main road.
I was always running errands and doing stuff for Timmy, he was the guy who actually owned the place. His lover Steve was the other guy with him when we all first met at Pulse. That's how I met my first boyfriend. One day, Timmy gave me his keys, two hundred dollars, and told me to go pick someone up at the airport.
"He's from Athens, Georgia. We want him to be the club's new manager. But he doesn't really want the job, because he doesn't want to move here. Show him Ohio boys know how to have a good time."
Timmy didn't really mean that I was supposed to fuck him, or whatever, which I wouldn't have done anyway, unless I wanted to. I had already decided this guy was going to be my boyfriend, as soon as I heard them talking about him coming up here from Georgia. So I went to the airport, picked him up, and he was so cute! I was in heaven. He was thirty-five. His name was William Wilkie. It wasn't his fault he had a funny name.
We were together for nearly six months. But again, I only traded blowjobs with him. He never wanted anything else. Maybe because he was so tired from running the club. But he did a really good job. All kinds of craziness would have gone down nightly if William hadn't been keeping things together at that place.
On the night before Christmas that year, I came out to my sister. We went out driving around, shopping for last minute stuff, and in the parking lot at the Holly Hills mall, I got all silent, just looked at her, and told her I was gay. She smiled, and said, "I know." Then we both burst out laughing. I told her all about working at the club, and William being my boyfriend, and everything. It felt so good to tell somebody close to me, especially since I thought I could never tell my parents.
But the next morning, she did something really fucked up. As we were unwrapping presents, with aunts, and uncles, and my grandparents, and Mom and Dad, and everybody right there, all of a sudden she turned to me and said, "So Zack, are you going to tell Mom you have a boyfriend?" And everyone fell silent, mouths open. I don't even remember what I said. I think I stormed out of the room.
Christmas was always a strange time with my family. My Dad also had a son from another marriage, my half-brother Michael, who was twelve years older than me. I didn't even meet him until I was eight, and it was over Christmas. Michael was also very tall, and he had darker skin than me because his mother was Italian. I remember staring at him from the next room where I was playing with the other kids, he looked so big, and beautiful, and all my grown-up relatives were gathered around him, it was like he was the center of attention. I only saw Michael a few more times before he died, and we never really had a chance to become close. He died of complications from HIV when he was twenty-eight. At Christmas the next year, one of my uncles said he had died because he kept letting faggots fuck him in the ass.
Right after New Year's, less than a week later, the club got busted. And it was all my fault. See, I was only nineteen, so I used to let all the cute young kids in, even if I knew their ID's weren't really legit. So one night, the first week in January, I was working the door, and I let this group of four boys in. They might not have been twenty-one, but they were looking good.
Later that night, I was going around serving drinks, and I saw them again. Of course, they asked me for some drinks, so I went to the bar to serve them. The bartender asked me if they were of age, and I laughed, and said, "Sure!" Then I brought them back their shots, and as soon as my back was turned, these two guys got up from a couch and went over to the kids, demanding to see their ID's. They were undercover cops! The club was completely fucked.
So it was totally my fault. I let the kids in, then I served them the drinks. It was a huge scandal. The neighbors all around that lake were already pissed as hell knowing there was a gay bar in their little redneckville. When this bust went down, it hit the local papers big time. And of course, my name was in there. I was a major player in this stupid drama! The whole reason I'd thought it was okay for me to work at the club was because it was two counties away from my hometown, so I thought no one would ever know. Now I was screwed, too.
The night the local paper got published with the story in it, I came home to find my parents all furious. They told me I had to swear to them I wasn't gay, or if I was, to renounce it forever, or else they didn't want me in their lives any more. I knew that's how they'd react when they found out. I just told them I was leaving. Then I went to my room, put all my stuff in boxes, and said I'd be back for my things later. Three months later, I came back and picked everything up. I haven't talked to my parents since.
All this happened pre-Jane Jones. So I guess I already had a little fierce to work with. But Jane nurtured it, and magnified it, and helped my inner diva reach full blossom! She showed me raging, soaring heights of fabulous I'd never, ever in a thousand years dreamed were possible! I love Jane Jones. Have I mentioned that yet?
To Be Continued...see the second half of our story by adding Jane Jones to your friends list