Once upon a time in Harvard Square there was a short-lived venue called the Market Theatre. The space truly altered the face of performance art in Boston by taking on avant-garde projects and obscure playwrights, and turning them loose on mainstream audiences. It was awesome.
In the fall (I think) of 2001, my friend Tom Cole, the director of the Market, asked me to take part in a reading by the author J.T. LeRoy — a person so troubled and fragile that he couldn’t perform readings to promote his books by himself. Instead, he would farm out the task to notable fans in cities all over the world, luring the likes of Courtney Love, Shirley Manson, David Eggers, and Gus Van Sant (who also signed up to turn J.T.’s life into a film). Tom explained the whole thing to me: LeRoy had grown up a truck-stop nomad. His meth-addicted mother dragged him around trolling for tricks and drugs, sometimes dressing J.T. as a girl if that could be used to some advantage to support them for a few days. Eventually, by the time he was a ’tween, J.T. had become an addict and a prostitute himself.
Occasionally, they would find shelter with his mother “Sarah’s” fundamentalist Christian family, whose cruel patriarch inflicted as much damage as anyone else by forcing them to do things like scrub their genitals with bleach to make themselves pure for Jesus. I couldn’t believe this fucking story!
“Really? This guy wants me to read for him?” I asked with the sort of incredulous pride that I normally reserved for times like when my roommate told me that my ass looked good in a certain pair of jeans. J.T. requested me, Juliana (that would be Hatfield), and Jake Burns from Stiff Little Fingers (the seminal 1970s punk band from Belfast).
“Wow,” was all I could think to say, and off I went to read The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, LeRoy’s second book and the one we would be reading from.
“Momma. I say it softly like a magic word you use only when severely outnumbered.” This is the book’s opening salvo before the baby LeRoy is snatched from the warmth and safety of his foster home, and whisked into the clutches of his teenage mother and a quickly ruined life. Devastating. The sentence is about as subtle as a drunken head-butt, but, hey, I’m easy like that. From page one I was a weeping convert. I devoured the book and chose this passage as the one I would recite at the Market in a few weeks.
A few days later I sank deep into a fan-girl reverie after receiving a message from J.T. LeRoy on my home answering machine. I could kick myself now for not saving it, but that’s what I get for being an unsentimental jerk. Anyhow, he called to thank me for agreeing to take part in the promotional reading of his book. I thought it was a lovely gesture, but right away my bullshit detector went off. Something strange was afoot. He could barely put sentences together and his voice was absolutely absurd: a childish whisper with this cartoonishly deep Southern accent. I called him back and thus began a correspondence that lasted for a few weeks.
He told me about his life in San Francisco, occasionally revealing intensely personal things while being oddly evasive about far more mundane details. For instance, I knew that he lived with another man and a woman and their child in a sort of platonic three-way couple, that he mostly lived life as a female and had more than passing interest in changing his sex organs. But he could not answer simple questions like “Is your mom alive?” We communicated by phone and e-mail. Sometimes he spoke like a retarded third-grader. Other times he seemed extremely bright and expressed lucid thoughts about the publishing business and his many famous admirers. He sent me a few presents, the strangest of which was a raccoon penis-bone necklace. That, apparently, was his signature gift.
Now, I’m not suggesting I didn’t believe him. I loved the idea of him so much that it didn’t occur to me that the whole thing was a fabrication. I’m also Irish Catholic, so lying on this scale would just never be a conclusion I would arrive at.
