A life in-between

The lovely waif who presents herself to a guest on Carrie Fisher’s couch turns out to be a man.

“Ahm J.T.,” says author J.T. LeRoy, whose life has been pretty much defined by his girlish good looks. Although tonight he wears a short manly haircut and genderless shirt and pants, LeRoy’s fragile physique and exquisitely sculpted face project the essence of prettiness. This trick of fate, he learned as a child, was not to be ignored.

Throughout his critically acclaimed writing (two novellas and one book of short stories), LeRoy refers to the succession of strange men -- mostly truckers seeking sex -- who paid to pat his curls, cuddle him and tell him what a pretty little girl he was. Some knew he was really a boy and didn’t care. Others punished him when they discovered the truth.

LeRoy, now 24 and a rising star in the literary world, lives in San Francisco and is Fisher’s houseguest for the night. In town to promote his new book, “Harold’s End,” he plops down on the couch, stares straight ahead and pouts. “You have a pen and a notebook,” he says in his high-pitched, West Virginia twang.

“Yes, because I’m here to interview you,” replies the visitor.

“Well, that’s not fair. I thought we were just gonna hang out.”

It is a childish attempt to control, and it works. The reporter puts the tools of her trade away. Seven hours later, few words have been exchanged between interviewer and interviewee. A vegetarian meal prepared by Fisher’s cook has been consumed and the reporter has driven LeRoy to a Bel-Air party where he steals the L’Oreal lipsticks meant as gifts for the guests. He plans to give them to homeless kids on the street, he later reveals by phone.

No interview was conducted, proof of LeRoy’s manipulative prowess as well as his ability, on some nonverbal level, to connect.

LeRoy says he has difficulty meeting people face to face and finds it nearly impossible to meet the press. He hears voices in his head, he says, that tell him what the interviewer really thinks about him, as opposed to whatever niceties are being superficially exchanged. Even with the medications he is on, the voices are “always there,” he says.

His life in the stories

His new book, like his other work, is short, tragic and autobiographical. The tale of a homeless boy living on the streets and the deviant adult male who lures him with heroin, hot food and a pet snail.

Or perhaps it is the boy who lures the man. LeRoy’s work, called “brilliant, gifted and profound” by Vanity Fair, explores the complexities of human need without passing judgment on the needy or resorting to cliche.

“In my world as a child, I figured out if you traded your body, you could get some of what you need. Sometimes it was taken from me, but a lot of times I did the taking. Of course, a child isn’t supposed to be able to seduce an adult, but it happens,” he says in one of many phone chats that follow. LeRoy says he was sexualized at 5 or 6 when his prostitute mother’s clients began including him.

The sympathy with which he portrays children under siege and the jolting subject matter of his work has led some critics to call him a new Salinger for the underclass. One of his earlier books, “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” has just been made into a film by Asia Argento. It was given its premiere in Cannes and awaits a distribution deal. His book “Sarah,” about his relationship with his mother, has been optioned for a film. LeRoy also wrote “the inspiration” for the Gus Van Sant film “Elephant,” which won the Palm d’Or at Cannes.

His next book, which expands on his life with his mother, will be published by Viking next year, and he says he has been asked to write everything from film scripts to a “Blue’s Clues” children’s book.

He also writes lyrics for a band called Thistle.

Like anyone on the cusp of possible fame and fortune, he knows it is in his interest to get his work publicized. But in addition to the voices, he believes he has now exposed so much of his painful life in his books that people who’ve read his work may look at him as some kind of freak. He often wears a blond wig and sunglasses when he goes out, a kind of Michael Jackson get-up he uses as a protective barrier. If they don’t know what the real J.T. looks like, he says, they can’t identify him when he goes out as himself, and that is a comfort.

He claims he doesn’t go out very much, but from all appearances he orchestrates a rich and exotic social life almost entirely by e-mail and phone. It is in-person attention of any sort that he finds difficult to tolerate, as if he is being scorched by an invisible flame.

“In my life, attention was always a real negative. It was dangerous,” he says.

In the brief moments of his childhood when his religious zealot grandfather focused on him, it was to beat him bloody in an attempt to make him into a God-fearing “normal” boy. Whenever his mother’s clients noticed him, it was usually a prelude to sexual abuse, a quick hop from his mother’s bed into his. He was a very pretty boy who looked and dressed like a girl.

It was a kind of bond he shared with his mother, who gave birth to LeRoy when she was just 14 and who then became a “lot lizard” -- a prostitute who plied her trade at truck stops across the country and who led her child into the same life.

“We’d go to a town and we’d both notice that guys were more aggressive when they knew I was her son. They were much more relaxed and treated us better when I pretended to be her little sister.”

So without ever actually discussing it, the mother and child fell into the habit of having LeRoy pretend to be female, which was easy because of his physical appeal and what he describes as “beautiful long blond curls, which made me look very pretty.” From there it was a natural progression for LeRoy to become a special kind of lot lizard himself.

He still has “a fluidity of gender,” he says. “I don’t identify as one or the other. I go back and forth with it. It’s confusing to me. I use the male pronoun, but sometimes I just wake up and put on lipstick and a dress.”

LeRoy adored his mother. In his stories, that adoration is displayed in the child protagonist’s endless attempts to do his mother’s mindless, drug-addicted bidding, to protect her from herself and from the men at whom she threw herself -- and him. In his endless attempts to win her approval, he patterns himself after her, believing that this is the way adults are supposed to behave.

In real life, whenever his mother abandoned him to live on the streets, social workers found him to be “unplaceable” in shelters or foster homes, he says. His behavior was inappropriately sexual, and he had no idea of that, he says. Caseworkers never bothered to teach him what “polite society” is all about. He was like a child raised by wolves.

LeRoy’s abject affection rarely penetrated his mother’s haze; she continually abandoned him -- usually without notice. “It was terrifying. Sometimes she’d just say, ‘I’m going to the bathroom.’ And she’d disappear. Or she’d tell me to go into a store and get something, and she’d drive away. Or she’d drop me at a mall and never come to get me, and be gone for weeks.”

Each time, LeRoy was either left in the hands of pimps or was homeless on the street. Each time, he’d yearn for her, search for her and wait. When he was 14, she disappeared for good. (He now claims she’s dead but will not discuss the matter further.)

On the streets of San Francisco, he met an outreach worker who introduced him to a psychologist who specialized in child crisis intervention. “I was looking for someone to tell me it was OK to commit suicide,” LeRoy says. Instead, the doctor told him to write. At first, the writing was just to release his emotions, to retain continuity between their therapy sessions. Soon, the doctor showed the writing to a neighbor in the publishing field, and J.T.’s (for Jeremiah Terminator) career was begun.

Darkness and discomfort

His short, shocking tales are infused with tenderness, forgiveness, hope -- with compassion rather than rage. The prose is spare and lyric, lifting his work above the level of traditional memoir into the category of what some are calling great literature. He calls it fiction but admits it is also fact. LeRoy says he knows his work so far is not necessarily destined for huge commercial success. People may not want to wrestle with the darkness and discomfort of it, he says.

And some have said they don’t believe the people he writes about are relevant to the world in which they live. His characters are not urban and sophisticated, but often rural, antisocial and poor. They are, however, by no means dumb or irrelevant, he says. And he is living proof. The urban smarties who mistakenly think they understand America may be in for a shock.

Whipping, for example, is nothing enlightened urbanites would do. But LeRoy says it’s still prevalent all over rural, religion-dominated areas. “There’s even a popular country song about the right to beat your child, to make him a man. You go to any small God-fearing town and they’re all like that; they talk about it in sermons at church.”

And as for mothers, he says it’s time for a new archetype in the cinema and in our culture. “In America, motherhood is still sacred. We have this idea of what a mother has to be. And God help you if you mess with that.” But a whole segment of his generation grew up with imperfection, with moms who were punks and addicts, like his.

“Just as Julianne Moore in films often played the ‘50s mom, there’s a new model which I write about and which Asia Argento played in the film. A lot of us reserve the right to have mothers that were cruel and abusive but who we still love very much, and who, in their own way, loved us.”

A celebrity coterie

LeRoy, a clever conversationalist on the phone and reportedly a great gossip, has attracted a number of celebrity women to his growing cult of fans: Winona Ryder, Tatum O’Neal, Diane Keaton and singers Pink, Courtney Love, Debbie Harry, Shirley Manson (who wrote a song about him), Suzanne Vega are some who’ve made contact. A few have become his confidants, in a manner eerily reminiscent of Truman Capote’s ardent claque of followers, who were ultimately betrayed by him.

So far, LeRoy has kept whatever star secrets he’s been gifted with. Ryder once told a magazine that she was “in love with him,” though “not in a romantic way. He’s one of those guys you can lay in bed with and watch a movie with ... and feel safe doing that. He is so true, such a poet.”

In the same article, Liv Tyler admitted, “I tell him things I probably don’t tell anybody else.”

In 2003, a kind of love-fest called “J.T. LeRoy and Friends” was held at New York’s packed Public Theatre. Ryder acted as emcee, O’Neal, Manson and Rosario Dawson were among those who read from his work.

In November, at L.A.’s Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, an event to promote “Harold’s End” turned into a “crazy, over-packed happening,” says the shop’s Christine Louise Berry. “It was standing room only inside, with the overflow way out onto the street. It was a total scene with very adoring, very hipster young fans” mixed with older types. “I also had a patio full of celebrities who’d volunteered to read from his book. People have really taken him under their wings.”

This may not be all good, say some observers, who worry that LeRoy may lose his focus as a serious writer in favor of frivolous pursuits with famous friends. Some wonder where his literature can go from here under any circumstances: Will he be able to expand his repertoire beyond tales of his troubled youth to become the important voice in literature that some fans claim he already is?

It’s too soon for anyone to know -- including LeRoy himself.

All he does know is that the buzz his work has created hasn’t made him rich nor famous yet.

He lives in what he describes as “a roach- and silverfish-infested converted squat” in San Francisco’s Mission District with two friends and their 7-year-old son.

He has no car, few material possessions, worries all the time about a possible fire because the place is littered with his papers. His work space is what was supposed to be the family’s living room. “They are sort of like parents to me,” he says. They are also his “minders” to an extent, helping keep him off drugs and alcohol, and on the writing path.

What he elects to write in the future is sort of up for grabs. He may concentrate on film scripts for a while, he says. They’re more lucrative than books, and he’d really like to make some money.

“I would buy us a house. That is my dream. I want my own room with wall-to-wall file cabinets and bookshelves. No TV in it! I fantasize about this constantly.”