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fiction
Kitty and Vergil*
by J.
Neil C. Garcia
For Yason, with apologies to Paul
Kitty's in bed with Vergil to help him
shave off his pubes. His head thrust forward and cocked
at an awkward angle to the left, Vergil holds a compact
mirror out in front of him, while Kitty deftly maneuvers
the brand-new, self-lubricating, twin-bladed disposable
razor round Vergil's limp and aubergine-brown thing,
all the way down the gully that splits his smooth bubble
ass in half, careful to get every last black and wiry
strand.
Shhh, keep still or I'll Bobbitize you,
she says while Vergil, half-lying and half-sitting against
the satin-cushioned headboard, wiggles his hips and
moans, obviously keen on playing nelly and getting Kitty's
goat. In the glare of the naked bulb of one of Vergil's
mom's priceless porcelain lamps, Kitty blinks the sweat
off her eyes. This isn't as easy as it looks, or as
Vergil taunts it is, his lips puckering in and out.
With her forefinger and thumb she tries to stretch the
underside of Vergil's stubby and shriveled member as
taut and flat as possible, for only this way can she
hope to catch all the fine curling hairs that seem to
grow in greater abundance in that region than anywhere
else on the dark and pleasantly supple shaft. As Vergil's
favored hag, girl Friday and video-documentarist, Kitty's
lent more than a helping hand to almost two dozen of
his performances over the past three-and-a-quarter years
they've worked together professionally, and in that
same period they've grown to be the best of friends.
Or at least she already considers him
her closest friend and staunchest ally, who enjoys the
most confidence she's ever given anyone. This can be
proven by the fact that Vergil's the only person in
her adult life she's felt feminine and grown up enough
to show her crap to. It's a service Vergil gladly offers
her, since from the time she quit getting her colon
cleansed with coffee enema—a form of personal
ablution her pranic-healing, chakra-opening,
mantra-mumbling and dearly departed tita
had introduced her to, way back in college—she's
been extremely persnickety about and fixated on her
bowels, and how healthy or peaked they look. Looks
fine to me, Vergil announced in between spoonfuls of
his favorite strawberry Haagen Das ice cream, the first
time she ushered him into her candle-lit and incense-perfumed
toilet.
Kitty considers experiences such as this
nothing if not profoundly significant, and she’s
always believed one should have as many of them as one
possibly can, which is why she quickly dumped her dweeb
of a boyfriend in order to work full-time for Vergil,
with whom she readily concluded she could “encounter”
life in a freer and thus inevitably fuller sense. Dressed
in her aunt’s red-and-gold sari and with an amethyst
bindi glued securely on the center of her forehead,
she first met Vergil during one of his more celebrated
performances, somewhere along the breakwater behind
the CCP. Vergil was butt-naked but for the roll of Glad-Wrap
he’d stolen from his mom’s pantry and generously
swathed himself from head to calf with, and with breathing
holes over his nose and mouth and wearing his neon-pink
rubber shoes, he joined the schools of joggers in their
sunset laps by the bay.
My goddess... Lakshmi... how... simply...
divine, he stopped dead in his nimble tracks and greeted
her, his palms joined at his lips and rising heavenward
in prayerful salutation. Kitty found herself utterly
beguiled and unable to respond. She decides she chose
and chooses to be with Vergil because, among other things,
his being gay means he’ll never really be interested
in her only for her body and the sex it can, forcibly
or otherwise, give. In fact, only someone like Vergil
will value her for her mind, her soul, the fullness
of her talents and abilities. Certainly, this is how
she’s always wished herself to be valued.
Which is not to say they haven’t
indulged in bodily pleasures together. As Kitty lovingly
proceeds to depilate the rest of Vergil’s manhood,
she thinks of how delightful and curious it looks, after
all, and wouldn’t mind putting it between her
legs or even inside her mouth, as she almost believes
she must’ve done, the first time they got impossibly
drunk/doped after Vergil’s drag number in the
old Blue Café proved to be one blonde and besequinned
flop. It was so bad that after Vergil had ceremoniously
taken his bow, not one of the Café’s snooty
and fabulous queens clapped or even raised an eyebrow
in acknowledgment or perhaps bitchy response. But for
Kitty’s hearty applause, Vergil’s debut
into Manila’s bewigged and stilettoed world of
transvestic glam was met with dismal and dismaying
indifference.
She'd told him he couldn't do drag for
shit, but working his butt off lip-synching Marilyn's
"Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" in front of the
bathroom mirror for weeks before that ill-fated performance—he
simply wouldn't hear of it. They came home to Vergil's
flat exhausted and soused on rhum cokes and tequila
courtesy of lanky Frank of the Verve Room, and before
they could even finish off their last batch of Sagada-certified
weed using the water-pipe Kitty'd given him last Christmas,
they ended up on the floor, jerking and excitedly banging
each other like two hot pieces of flint. They've never
spoken of that incident, of course. In her heart of
hearts Kitty fervently believes friends are the most
precious treasures one can possibly acquire in this
life, and they should've all the freedom to perform
every kindness for each other, even as friends shouldn't
always feel compelled to talk about it at all. Sometimes,
though, she wonders what Vergil thinks of that night's
short and silly episode, which ended with her—if
she remembers it right—regurgitating a cupful
of vomit on Vergil's downy and—she now realizes—rather
cute paunch.
This time her kindness is urgently needed
to help prepare the oddly shaped popsicles Vergil intends
to surround himself with when he freezes himself on
the evening of his performance, which will be held in
the middle of the hippest street in Malate on Friday,
the busiest night of the week. It's a nice little piece
he's decided to call, simply if not unsubtly, "Love."
The plan is to take plastic molds of Vergil's naked
and baby-bald crotch, molds that they will use to make
the lemon-flavored, amber-colored frozen delights Vergil—dressed
in his mother's off-white bridal gown—will be
sucking on and offering passers-by, while calmly ensconced
inside a chest freezer. Kitty's supposed not only to
capture all of this on video, but make sure Madonna's
"Frozen" plays audibly enough in the background and
without a hitch all throughout. They both know some
of Vergil's beautifully vain and stupid ex-es—stiff-lipped
yuppies by day, hip-grinding sluts by night—will
be in attendance, and this seems to Kitty to be part
and parcel of Vergil's plan.
You've got it really bad this time, Kitty
remarks with a smirk as she hands Vergil the razor.
After inspecting his mid-section, and appearing very
pleased with the results of their latest collaboration,
Vergil stands on the bed and stretches out his arms,
by turns pouting and purring, Oh but dahling, you should
see how much they love me! This, of course, is not entirely
untrue, Kitty thinks to herself as she tackles him with
a fuzzy, electric-blue bear, one of Vergil's softer
toys. Vergil's arguably the best and most ingenious
performance artist around, but Kitty knows that not
too many people know about Vergil's trade secret: how
all the energy and imagination he brings to bear on
each and every production he mounts are actually the
dying effusions of a sad and operatically broken heart.
The truth is, almost all his most memorable
outings were done in the wake of his having been dumped.
For instance, his stint as a human buffet table in Old
World Art Gallery was a dirge for the plump and uncut
engineering student Pocholo. His mock-lecture-cum-prayer-rally
in the Vargas Museum of UP was an exorcism of the sadist
and balding banker Jaime. And last year’s much-talked-about
video installation in a café in Baguio was his way
of getting back at Carlos, the promiscuous theater-actor-turned-movie-starlet
who unwittingly provided Vergil hours of hard-core
footage as a scandalously noisy bottom, which Vergil
vengefully unveiled for everyone in the city of pines
to gawk or cross themselves at in disbelief.
Inyaki, the androgynous globe-trotting
fop with a famous Spanish surname, is the latest in
Vergil's growing list of bastard ex-es, but this one's
a cut above the rest if only because he didn't even
have the decency to serve Vergil notice of how it was
over—of how it had been over for more than a month—and
Vergil had to catch him slam-dancing with a burly, blue-eyed
Australian in the back-room of Mister Piggy's on the
night of the Queer Pride March. I told you his aura
was far from clean, Kitty reminded Vergil on the phone.
But not even the generous servings of her home-grown
good counsel and wise-woman consoling could stop him
from overdosing on a cocktail of pain-killers, antihistamines
and protein muscle-builders later that evening. Rushing
from her mother's new lover's house in Dasma to be by
Vergil's tearful and puffy-faced side in the hospital,
Kitty already knew that unlike his father—who
succeeded in ending his life by guzzling a bottle of
scotch after popping a dozen hypertension pills when
Vergil was in elementary school—her queer and
chronically love-lorn friend was merely being theatrical,
as always.
Tell me dahling, what do you think? Vergil
emerges from behind the closet door in a satin-and-lace,
sumptuously pearl-beaded and rhinestone-studded wedding
gown. Kitty squints and walks over to fix the veil
that doesn’t quite look right. After a few tugs
and fluffs, she moves away to take a second gander.
Yup, that’s so much better, she lies at the foot
of the bed to her cross-dressed friend who’s not
nearly as attractive in the role of a blushing bride
as she imagines he must be as a dashing groom. Vergil
rushes to the bathroom and squeals, Gorgeous, simply
gorgeous!, and skedaddles back to give her a quick smack
on the lips. I can’t wait to see the look on their
faces, but knowing how dumb they are I’m sure
they’ll never get the point. Vergil picks up the
hand-held mirror and proceeds to make faces on it. I
don’t know why, dahling, but I seem to be attracted
to men whose IQs are no higher than the measurements
of their dicks. Must be karma, he answers himself in
between sticking out his tongue and pointing his cherry-lipsticked
mouth.
At this point Kitty thinks of asking
what she knows must be a very obvious question. It's
a question she's never felt confident to ask in the
past, specially since Vergil once told her about how
irritating it is, when people ask what any of his performances
mean, As though—his voice aquiver with queenly
righteousness—artists need to justify their art
with anything other than the art itself! And just what
is the point of this one, sweetie? She finds she simply
has to ask it this time, despite Vergil, despite herself
and her fear of overstepping her bounds. Promptly Vergil
drops the mirror on the bed, yanks back his shoulders
and sticks out his chest, faces her akimbo, smacks
his lips and, looking straight into her eyes, declares
flatly and in all certainty: Simple, my pearl. We cannot
love what can change. Whom we love we freeze.
Vergil's fallen asleep in his mother's
gown. After fixing up the room a little—stacking
the tapes on the shelves, returning the toiletries to
the medicine cabinet, and untangling video cables scattered
about the floor—Kitty decides it's time to go
home. It's almost four, but that's okay since no one
waits up for her anymore. She can't help but smile when
she sees Vergil's dark face in the middle of all that
white tulle, as though it's a kind of gift, like a
piece of fragile, tektite-glazed ceramic—a squat,
angel-faced vase?—still cradled in the abundant,
whorled softness of its packaging. She takes out the
clumsy still-camera from her duffel bag. It's strange—she
discovers—she's not had to use it for sometime
now. She steps closer to the bed, thinks of what might
be a good angle, and stoops to give Vergil a wee, three-second
kiss on the plush, delicately parted lips. She steps
back to her old position, regains her bearings, trains
the camera's eye on the scene, and clicks. A flash,
and the sound of tiny cogs and wheels turning. Vergil
stirs a little, but quickly falls back to the unknowing
solidity of his sleep.
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