A Perverse Peter Pan, a look at Scott Heim's novel Mysterious Skin

Perverse: Directed away from what is right or good
Peter Pan:a storybook boy who could fly and never wanted to grow up.

“His eyebrows met ominously in his forehead’s middle. Up close, I could smell him. The odor swelled, like something hot. If I weren’t so eager to touch him again, I would have shrunk from it. . . . ‘But you’re a tough queer, right?’”
-Wendy Peterson to Neil McCormick, Mysterious Skin

“Edie was looking for an alternative. Andy Warhol was a kind of alternative convention. . . .Edie felt a strong sexual relationship to our father. But was impossible. The same thing was true with Warhol. It was impossible. He was androgynous, as Edie herself was. [Warhol was] A kind of perverse Peter Pan.” Saucie Sedgwick on Edie, her underground movie star sister.

If the most important man in your life was a queer, would you dye your hair silver gray just to match his? Would people call you the Girl of the Year in 1965 just because you were his superstar, Edith, turned Edie, Sedgwick? When you went on the something bigger and better, would you turn around and announce to the world on film, “I’m a little nervous about saying anything about “The Artist” because it kind of sticks him right between the eyes, but he [Andy Warhol] deserves it.”
Or would you be uncomplicated in your love for a queer man like Wendy Peterson from Hutchinson, Kansas, circa 1983,is?
Wendy, one of the few female characters in Scott Heim’s novel, Mysterious Skin is a sixth grade blond girl who gets a crush on the person who will have more influence on her than any mere straight man in her life, the main character and teenage hustler Neil McCormick. Wendy gets a mean crush on Neil the year she’s twelve, and her friendship with Neil will continue throughout her teenage and early adult years.
They’re just a couple of crazy kids hanging with each other to placate the boredom of living in the middle of no-where. The fact that he’s gay doesn’t deter Wendy at all from her love of him, because even as a gay man,Neil is like the love of her life. At night she has dreams that they are Bonnie and Clyde together, blowing away “boring innocents” with their machine guns, with their arms wrapped around one another. Yet, it’s a platonic kind of love, because in these dreams, Wendy can never see herself actually kissing Neil, as in romantic passion. They hang together at school, and they hang together for dear life. They are both reckless outsiders like Bonnie and Clyde, both hated by the other kids who reject their mindset and style. They hate Neil for being a queer, and the girls think Wendy is strange herself by openly declaring herself his friend by walking home from school with him every afternoon.
But Wendy doesn’t care. She hangs tough about all the other stupid kids in school. Wendy vows to herself, “If I could make Neil my friend, I figured I wouldn’t need anyone else.” Eventually, Wendy and Neil become the closer than if they were even lovers. Wendy just understands something about the perverse Peter Pan in Neil that even he doesn’t understand about himself. It’s almost as if she were his perverse Wendy who can sometimes visit never-never land together.

[Edie] she, too, hated Andy at that point: she had been eighty-sixed.
When she was with the fairies, she was on speed, and she was Edie, she was “on”. When she was with Bobby Neuwirth, who was a hetero, she was on downs and Edie on downs was not pretty.
Well, when she arrived at the apartment, the cameras started rolling. I had my own personal vendetta against Warhol, and so did she. And I was playing Warhol So I played him the way he behaved to people under him. She played herself according to how she felt about him then. The things she said to me were horrible. I don’t even remember even what I said. I was awful. I have nightmares about what I did in that movie . . . saying things about Andy that were true, how he disposed of people. Paul Morrissey, who was behind the camera, was white with rage. I went through the paintings . . . how Andy doesn’t actually do the paintings himself. Stupid things like: “Gerard, get me an egg. Do you want to know how I paint my pictures, you people out there?” I’d crack the egg in a glass and then I’d say to Gerard: “Cook it! That’s how I paint my pictures.”
[Rene gives Edie some flowers] . . . She cried out, “I hate them! I don’t want to be beautiful!” . . . we were both hating each other because of the roles we were playing.” Rene Ricard, on how they all hated Andy. [Stein, p.286-287]

But Wendy Peterson knows no such evil complications with her buddy Neil in Mysterious Skin.
Yet when I look at Edie Sedgwick and Wendy Peterson, I can see something of the attachment to their respective “perverse Peter Pans” that’s almost the same thing. Wendy is just a little girl from Kansas who can’t stand being in the most boring place on earth until she meets her destiny in the form of her gay boyfriend, Neil McCormick. And Edie Sedgwick was a bored Sixties socialite who stumbled on Andy Warhol one night at a cocktail party soon after her arrival to New York City at the age of 22.
Like Wendy, Edie sees herself in Andy. Wendy clearly identifies with Neil, even when she sees him do horrible shit like suck-off a retarded boy – right in front of her – one night. Edie watches Andy operate at the Factory, the way he’d manipulate his “superstars” as they were called, and Edie went right along with everything. All the drugs, all the gay sex out in the open. Well, anyhow, my point is, both Wendy and Edie could be called “fag-hags”.
A term I use in reference to women who fall in love with homosexual men, and follow them around as if they were their wives. This is a relative term. The other one would be “fruit-fly”, which is supposedly just a woman who merely hangs out with her gay male friend, in bars, usually. It is not a marriage. It is not a career. But Edie and Wendy, they make careers out of their love for their faggot friends. They are, fag-hags for real.

Wendy and Neil just have each other, unlike Edie’s situation at the Factory, where she had to share Andy with everyone else. And, as she replaced Andy’s former superstar, Baby Jane Holzer, Edie herself was replaced when she started to slip into too many drug stupor.
Wendy and Neil know no such problems, at least the way it’s portrayed in the novel. They are limited in their resources, so they must stay together, and fight the unknown forces of middle school in Hutchinson, Kansas.
From the get-go, Wendy and Neil are of a like mind. Wendy’s love and admiration for Neil is so great, she, in short order:
 Alienates her best friend Zelda when Zelda asks what the fuck is wrong with Wendy, “How in the world can you think a queer is cute? I mean, you can tell he’s a freak. You can just tell.” Is the advice Wendy is pro-offered about Neil McCormick. Zelda is unceremoniously dumped after this remark. Wendy knows in a heart beat she’s too cool for her.
 Stops taking the bus to and from school to be able to walk with Neil. “By Halloween I stopped riding the bus home and began walking with Neil.” Wendy blandly looks on as Neil’s mother drinks gin out of a bottle in front of her.
 Witnesses Neil trying his sex games out on a retarded boy. “Now, some dire section of my brain longed to find out what twisted things Neil could do to this nimrod, this Stephan Zepherelli.” Thinks Wendy, getting something of the perverse thrill Edie must have gotten when she did her first movie with Andy, and she was the only girl among several gay men in a movie about a young boy being tortured. Edie sits and smokes a cigarette, and flicks ashes on the boy as he screams.
What exactly Wendy gets out of her relationship with Neil isn’t clear. She doesn’t get laid by him, that’s for sure. And it was the very same with Edie, what did she get out of her relationship with Andy? It is not the typical heterosexual, let’s get married and have kids routine. Okay?
Edie and Andy made movies, Neil and Wendy invite trouble. But they do it together, like any other happy couple.

By the time Neil and Wendy are 15 years old, it doesn’t surprise Wendy one bit that Neil is showing signs of degeneration. Especially since she witnessed him going down on a retarded boy a few years back. Neil has told Wendy all his private stories about being with Coach, and older man who used to make-love to Neil when he was a little boy. In Neil’s mind, it has been a great thing, a great love experience. But deep-down, Wendy knows there’s something wrong with Neil, and his love relationship with Coach is somehow to blame. Neil is now perversely attracted to older men, and wants to sell his body to get both his cheap thrills again, and earn an income, so I could get more drugs for Wendy and me.”
Neil, a little later, will go to New York City and begin his tenure as a full time street prostitute. Wendy is the friend he shacks up with. They both have managed to escape Kansas, and get away to AIDS ridden Manhattan.
But meanwhile, they are still growing up in Kansas, and Neil gets his first real job as a hustler.
Then he takes the bike he stole over to Wendy’s to celebrate their first hoist. Never mind that Neil let his first john almost mutilate his genitals.
“It’s freezing,” she yells when they’re on their bikes, “and you’re conning me into following you to your new whorehouse.”
But it’s no con, Wendy is ready, willing and able to follow Neil to the ends of the earth.
Neil and Wendy stop and wait for a train. Neil puts the candy wax lips over his mouth, and Wendy leans over to kiss them.
They go to the park and Neil writes his advertisement on the in magenta crayon. Then he says, “I have something to show you.”
And here Wendy witnesses teeth marks on Neil’s prick when he takes his pants down to show what this john did to him.
“Your dick is not a candy-cane!” she lectures him. (Because Wendy enjoys this privilege), “Pull up your pants, exhibitionist!”

It is in the very last chapter of part one of the novel that Heim shows the reader how close Wendy and Neil are. More than high school sweethearts, more than a married couple. They are almost like soul mates who share the same secret language.
Written from Neil’s Point of View, we can see just how much Wendy means to him, as his friend who he’s willing to share his deepest secrets with.
As the snow begins to fall, Neil thinks, “it’s as if I’d punched a button marked MIRACLES.”
Neil takes Wendy’s hand.
“I wish they were showing a movie right now,” Wendy whispers, a film about our lives, everything that’s happened so far. And we would be the only ones standing here, you and me.”

They unhook a phone form a pole they’re standing by. Is Wendy playing a joke on him, Neil wonders?
“I hear something,” she tells him, listening, “it’s the voice of God.”
But Neil has a need to trust his in soul-mate, the girl who does everything for him, even gets God on the phone for Neil, just so he can believe in something for one single moment in his life, something that isn’t a joke told by his best friend.
Neil takes the phone out of her hand, brushes the snow out of her face, and says,
“I hear him.”

The question is, when you’re in love with a perverse Peter Pan, like Wendy is with Neil, and Edie was with Andy for a while, can this relationship last? Can the Wendy and Edie have had a real live love relationship with these men who have a hard time growing up?
What about when you identify so strangely with them, your perverse Peter Pans, that you dye your hair silver, star in his movies, become the most envied of all couples in New York City in the mid-Sixties?
Then what happens?

So Edie became the Factory’s superstar. Edie and Andy! You should have seen them. But you did see them! Both were wearing the same sort of thing – boat-neck, striped T-shirts. Andy wore black corduroy jeans, banana-shaped high-heeled boots –terrible boots. I hated them. He never could stand up in them. He never had a good wig in those days, the poor thing. Edie was pasted up to look just like him – but looking so good! The T-shirt. The black stockings. Long earrings. Just the most devastating, ravishing beauty. –Rene Ricard, [Stein, p.182]

Works cited: Mysterious Skin, by Scott Heim
Edie, An American Biography, ed. Jean Stein