I Walked With A Cockette And Lived To Tell About It

Yes it’s true; I did walk with a Cockette. In fact I lived above a former Cockette in my old loft on 27th street many moons ago in the early 80’s. I had met Jake one nice spring day when I went out on my back fire escape, and noticed a good looking young man sitting on a chair on the adjacent roof getting a haircut from a neighbor of mine who was the estranged daughter of a well known documentary filmmaker. Jake noticed me standing there, and said hi and asked me if I knew of any lofts that were available for rent. As luck would have it, the loft on the floor below mine had just became vacant, and later that day Jake got in touch with the landlord and soon moved in. Jake had long given up his bubbles bangles and beads for a more conservative look and was no longer a Cockette, a cocksucker yes, but no longer a Cockette. I had no idea Jake was a former Cockette until one of his roommates told me. “You know Ira Joel besides Jake being a cocksucker he used to be a Cockette” and showed me a photo album of Jake in his many drag costumes. All of this came back to me the other week as I finally watched the documentary on the Cockettes and of course there was Jake in all his tattered glory. I was never much into them, and I didn’t even go to see them when they came to New York and delivered their disastrous performance for the difficult to please New York audiences. The documentary showed them getting quickly back on the bus to San Francisco after the New York debacle, but Jake loved New York City and soon left the fold and settled in the city. I found the Cockettes to be a little too strange even for me. I mean with those beards and gowns they kinda frighten me and they were so unprofessional and tacky. I was much more into the Theatre of The Ridiculous founded by the late great Charles Ludlum, and I never missed one of his fantastic plays. My relationship with Jake started out ok, but after a while we were not getting along at all. He had a taste for tacky forgotten show music from the 20’s and 30’s and would blast these awful songs and singers at all hours of the day and night which would rattle my nerves. He also had a terrible temper and would get into awful screaming fights with his roommates. Jake would scream foul language at them, and my roommate and me would laugh and howl at some of the things Jake would scream at the poor souls at the top of his lungs that would filter up through the porous floors and walls up to our loft. A drag queen forever. After leaving the life of drag Jake had decided to become a furniture dealer and he had a knack and a talent for this often finding great pieces of Art Deco pieces in the garbage dumps and dumpsters around the city and in the surrounding areas. Occasionally Jake would gift me with a little this or that and I still have some of the things he gave me. It wasn’t that Jake was a bad person, he was just impervious to other people’s life styles and assumed that everyone stayed up all night blasting their televisions and listening to horrible Rudy Vallee and Ruth Etting records. I had told him several times that his TV viewing at 2 and 3 in the morning was keeping my roommate and me awake and could he please keep it down. He would just look at me like I had told him the moon was made of blue cheese and the next night the loud sounds of late night TV would stomp up through his loft to mine. I started to dislike the guy, and after one nasty phone call to him early one morning, when I told him that he would never sleep again if he didn’t stop his loud playing of music and the TV at all hours of the night. We pretty much stopped speaking after that. Then I noticed that he was getting thinner and I knew Jake was sick. He never told me that he had AIDS but he didn’t have to. By that time I had already lost some friends. He started to lose his hair and developed shingles all over his face. “I’m going to go back home to Indiana for awhile Ira Joel and I’m subletting my place to a nice young man whose a performance artist.” “Great I thought, now I’m really in for it.” However the opposite was true for the performance artist turned out to be a gentle sweet and considerate young man who I really liked a lot. When Jake came back about a year later he had his mother Bathsheba with him. His mother moved in to his loft and as Jake got sicker and sicker it was her who took care of him. I tried to be as kind and helpful to them as I could, helping Bathsheba carry the groceries, getting cabs for them in the pouring rain when they had doctor appointments, things like that. I still didn’t like him though, and he was constantly yelling at me for no reason at all and even told me to go and drop dead. “Jake I think you will be doing that before me” I said. I know it wasn’t nice but I was sick of his nastiness. Soon after Jake did just that and his mother sold off all his Art Deco furniture and pottery and went back to Indiana.