Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis Read Online Free Page B

there was a lot of food. And in one bag he noticed a lot of delicatessan coldcuts and cheese, about pound each of ham, turkey, swiss cheese, and baloney. The Aunt told Jackie to put away the things that belonged in the refrigerator and went down to the basement to start the laundry. Jackie told me while she was down there he opened up all of the packages. He wrote his name in very huge letters on the kitchen floor using the sliced coldcuts. He took the pound of ham and made a very large “J,” the pound of turkey became the “A” and so on all the way through to the “IE” on the end. Of course his Aunt walked in the room and just went crazy. Jackie said she immediately telephoned his father and stepmother and said, “you have to come and get Jackie right away, we just can’t tolerate this!”
    Rev. Tim Holder
    I’m Jackie Curtis’s brother. Jackie used to talk about having family in Buladine, Tennessee. He was a member of the Buladine Citizen’s Club, which he joined one summer he spent there with us. Dad could not live in the big city so the family moved to Tennessee. Jackie’s mother could not live in Tennessee, which meant that they could not be together. So they divorced and Jackie went with his mother to live in New York.
    I remember being in study hall in the library of my high school one day and
was reading Newsweek magazine because I was interested in politics. I turned the
page and there was a theater review with the headline “Ridiculous” which turned out
to be a not very favorable review of Jackie Curtis’s new play Heaven Grand in
Amber Orbit . But as they say, any kind of news can be good news because here
was a review of his play in a national magazine.
    Gretchen Berg
    Jackie really wanted to break out and be on his own after high school, but he became frightened a lot. Life was very scary to him. Jackie tried living with friends many times during his life, but he always went back to Slugger Ann’s. He never really had his own home. You need a place of your very own. You need a place where you can go and just shut the door and the whole world is outside. He didn’t really have that. He didn’t really have a father or mother in his life. He managed to bury that, but it came up later in his twenties and thirties in alcohol and drug abuse.
    He once confided to me that he was still a virgin at 18 and that he was scared to have sex with anybody. He said that when he was told ‘the facts’ as he called them, he said to the other kids without thinking, ‘My mother and father never did that!’ and he was subjected to much merciless ragging. He almost never mentioned his family (I didn’t even know he had a brother) and the only time he mentioned his mother was once when he spoke of leaving high school: “I knew my mother wouldn’t have served another plate of food to me, so I got that high school diploma!”
    Jackie once said to me, “Girls really have it good because they can dress in skirts or they can dress like a boy.” He would often make statements that were really questions. It was really as if he was asking me is this right? Should I think these things? Is it right to feel this way? Jackie didn’t have anyone to show him what a man is in this society. He didn’t know if he should be straight, bisexual or homosexual – it was all very confusing to him as an adolescent, and it wasn’t something I could help him with.
    Lily Tomlin
    I relate to Jackie because of my own background in Detroit. I lived in a working class neighborhood that was very mixed racially and ethnically. I grew up living in a very old apartment house that was filled with all kinds of people. And I can imagine what it was like for Jackie hanging out at Slugger Ann’s when he was young. My dad was also a big drinker and a gambler and I went to all the bars and the bookie joints with him. And I was just kind of in love with everybody, and all the different classes and education levels and politics and all I ever