“La la la,” she sang to the kid and then grabbed him and held him. She tucked her face into his belly and cried into it. Her mother sighed and stretched her back.
“If you want a vacation, go back to your sponsor and tell him to take you to Hawaii,” I yelled.
“His wife found out so he doesn’t talk to me anymore,” she said, hugging the baby.
I stared for a second while she squeezed her brother. “I told you there can’t be any men and not any anything,” I said very loud.
“I have no men and no anything,” she said. “I have nothing but my family and Miss USA and you, Tito.”
When she looked at me from under her hair, her eyes were angry and strong like a panther’s.
We didn’t give up. And she got the walk pretty okay finally, and just in time, about three months later.
The reason why I’m telling you all this is because I can see that you’re a long shot and not likely to make it. And Montana has not placed since the 1950s. But I’m also explaining the world to you to see how you take it and if you have anything to say. Then we can go from there.
So then my other contestant dropped out, the mostly white, blond, tall one with the STEM degree from Brown and the disabled advocating. She said she quit because she had morals or something.
“I cannot have anything to do with this pageant as long as that man owns it,” she said.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
The blond lady had by this time paid me thirty thousand dollars. Laila and I had trained her exquisite on the four faces and verve. Also, her answers to the test questions were now brilliant, not only because she was smart as a professor but because we had taught her not to look like a slapped rabbit from the deep thinking when the question was presented to her.
The problem from her perspective was that in June, that guy, the pageant’s owner, this maniac, he had said that shit about Mexicans being rapists and he wants a wall. And now he wants to be president. And Univision was dropping the show and who knew with NBC.
“Why aren’t you boycotting it, Tito?” the blonde said. “He’s bad on race, and he’s going to be bad on transgender.”
“Baby,” I said. “Come on. What I haven’t been through already.”
“That’s not exactly the answer that I’d hoped for,” she said.
“It’s not what?”
“I have to confess, I’m just very disappointed in you,” she said. “I expected more from a person with your . . . difficult experiences.”
“Yes, okay,” I said, and now of course I was getting angry, but I am a professional and know how to not show it. “I respect your decision, and I wish you the very, very best.”
“We should protest,” she started gabbling. “We have the platform.”
“It has been such an incredible honor working with you, and I hope you have a great day,” I said, as I muscled her out the door.
Then I got on the phone and I called my girl.
“Do you know about what Trump said on TV?” I asked her.
“Oh, yeah, I know,” she said. “It’s all over the news. He wants his whites to kill us or something.”
“My other one dropped out because of the morals,” I said. “Do you want to too?”
“Huh?” she asked.
“Do you want to drop out because he’s co-owner of Miss USA?”
“Oh—Jajajajaja!” she laughed, so loud, and dropped the phone. I could hear her mother yelling and the kids crying. She picked the phone back up. “Jajajajajaja!”
“So no?”
“Do you know what I’ve been through?” she said. “This is nothing.”
“That’s what I said,” I said.
“People like us don’t quit, Tito,” she said. “You been busting my ass, and now I have the questions down. I have the verve down. I have my faces down. I got the dancing and sincerity down. I got my third-person silent talk down. All I have to work on is my pivot.” She starts yelling about how nobody will ever stop her from this and that and she’s going to rule Miss USA and then the world.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning at four thirty.”
In the end, NBC pulled out and so did Univision. Zuleyka Rivera, who you know was Universe 2006 from PR, dropped out as judge. J Balvin was going to sing his super hit “6 a.m.” as the major performance, but he bounced because he’s from Colombia. Roselyn Sánchez and Cristián de la Fuente were going to be the hosts, but they quit too. To replace my blond-lady contestant from the Ivy League, Miss USA wound up getting her state’s runner up, a very skinny Asian American twenty-four-year-old lawyer. The blonde herself wound up making a long speech about human rights that got on Vox and Canal 5.
“I don’t care,” my girl said. “That’s my crown.”
The show was in Baton Rouge, and we brought the whole team—Dennis, Sarah, Laila. And the family came out too, the mother and the boys. We all stayed at the Hilton, which is four stars. I splashed out for three rooms because we were there for two weeks and I wanted my girl to feel good. In Baton Rouge, she had to learn the choreography for the prelims and then the moves for the final pageant. And the director drags the girls around the host city so that the film crew can shoot them in groups with activities and also do the solos for the montages where the contestants talk about their passions. The contestants have to have a change of sportswear for every day’s event. They have different evenings for the dinners and unique bikinis and one-pieces for all the water sports they schedule. It was a fortune. I kept the receipts for when my girl became a brand ambassador for Cover Girl or MAC and paid my ass back. The girls did a swamp tour where they rode around in a big boat. They also visited an alligator farm, where they touched the alligators and screamed, and a pet sanctuary with the dying dogs. They met the governor. They went dancing and tried to dance attractively at night clubs so that the hair doesn’t get messed up and no obvious hairline or tit sweating, which is difficult. Mucho, mucho lemon water and cayenne and enemas. I had to keep my girl hydrated.
But the Trump thing was a shitstorm. That Mexican rape business and the president stuff was on the news every day. We didn’t know if they were going to cancel or what. In almost every meeting, the director and the sponsors and the head of Visit the Bayou said, “This is about supporting the girls, not about politics.” And “we are here to lift the self-esteem of women, and we are going to hold our heads high and concentrate on women power and girls loving themselves.” And apparently the whole time in the dressing rooms the women are jumpy because Trump likes to come in when they’re naked. But he was too busy with building the wall because he didn’t make much of a showing that year.
At one of the nightclubs, during the second week, a news reporter from KNXX5 came up to a group of about thirteen girls and stuck a mic into their faces. All the contestants start punching each other to talk. My girl wasn’t the tallest. There was a big fucking redhead with crazy white teeth and a white ash-blonde with robot-blue eyes. Both of them started elbowing forward. I’d put my girl in a white shantung Carolina Herrera off-the-shoulder bow-embellished mini loaner and gold-strap four-inch heels. I’d straightened her hair for the night and added two pieces in the front. I also did a very light dusting of tawny rose on the cheeks and a cat for the eye. She looked incredible, just miraculous.
“Ladies,” the reporter said—she was a white woman with long brown hair and wearing a hot-pink dress and sneakers. “What do you all think about the co-owner of the pageant running for president when he has such harsh things to say about the Mexican people and also Black Lives Matter?”
My girl nudged the big ones under the armpits so that they fell away. She gave the camera a light series-two smile with no teeth and just enough smolder. We had eliminated every piece of the Spanish accent in her elocution, and so at least she didn’t have to worry about that. “I think that America is the land of free speech,” she said, in the voice I’d trained her on, like Claudette Colbert
with just a touch of southern friendliness. “And the First Amendment, thank the good Lord, lets every man say his own opinion.”
“Well, beauty and brains, there you have it, Louisiana!” the reporter said.
When we got back to the Hilton, her mom and brothers were watching Game of Thrones on TV. My girl didn’t take off the Carolina Herrera, which is four thousand retail, and she didn’t wipe off the makeup or remove the expensive hairpieces. Instead, she went straight to the bed and lay down crumply. She put her arms around her little brother and cried into his belly from I thought exhaustion and being so hungry. The mom curled around her too and said “shhh,” and then the other brother started crying and piled on top. I sat on the bed and petted my girl’s hair. I never showed this, because she was much too young for me, but whenever I got near her, my heart would smash up into pieces. I only touched her very light, patting, like an uncle.
“It’s okay, baby,” I said.
“It’ll all be okay if I win, Tito,” she said.
“You’ll win,” I said.
She nodded into her little brother’s belly. “I’ll win.”
I felt glad that the blonde with the human rights problem had quit. My girl worked hard and now was the best of them all. Everyone could see it. From her walk to her verve and her focus. She practiced the pivot, over and over. She did the silent third-person self-coaching. Rehearsing in her mind, all the time, and she never lost that beautiful hunger and anxiety. That’s why I think the other girls all looked at her sideways. Even when they’re screaming at the alligators and petting the dead dogs and running around the swamp or scratching each other to be on TV, they could all tell that she would destroy them.
Already, I made plans for her. I decided that she and I would have everything. After USA, Universe. After Universe, cosmetics and hygiene contracts. Maybe a children’s cancer charity and starring in an E! original series or doing guest-hosting on RuPaul’s Drag Race. From there, a movie. A fashion line. A makeup line. Housewares.
Except, her problem did come up again at the preliminaries.
As you better know, there are basically two competitions for USA. First, you do the whole thing at the prelims, where they do the first set of cuts. And then you do it all over again, like ten days later, at the televised final show. The prelims were July 8, at the Baton Rouge Raising Cane’s River Center.
Well, three days previous, my girl kept getting these phone calls, and they made her secretly upset. Her phone would ring. She ran out of the room to take it. She came back with a huge smile, but her panther eyes would look scared, in a naked and unpowerful way. I knew it was bad.
“What, what?”
“It’s nothing,” she said.
Her Mom looked at her and shook her head, then went to take care of the boys.
“YOU ARE GOING TO TELL ME RIGHT NOW,” I said. I shouted about how I’d spent this much on Carolina Herrera and that much on Zac Posen and this on Jimmy Choo and that on Registration. I yelled about how I was the number-three pageant coach in the nation. I begged her, if there was a problem, I had to know because I could not let anything go wrong now.
“My ex-boyfriend’s wife is giving me problems,” she finally said.
“I told you, no men,” I said.
“There’s no men,” she said, her eyes glimmering and starving. “There’s nobody but you, Tito.”
Her eyes hurt me. I know that I should not be telling you this, but I fell in love with her at that moment. It was bad for business, but what could I do? Eventually, I just let my stomach get ulcers. I spray-lightened her and I plucked her hairs. I gave her manicures. I fed her lemon water and I ran her through the mantras. I gave the family money to go away and eat at restaurants while we did breathing. Every free moment, we went over the intro dance steps and the stance and the pivot and the half turn and the full turn.
But apparently that didn’t work, because she tripped.
It happened during swimsuit. The judges were Darius Baptist, Jennifer Palpallatoc, Lori Lung. I didn’t know all of them. I knew Darius. I have my own personal rules, so I didn’t try to seduce them with little presents like some other people I know. But even if I had, you can’t gift bag your way out of a runway fall. It’s very terrible. It’s not death, though, not necessarily. Crystle Stewart fell at ’08 Universe and Rachel Smith did too, in ’07. Crystle Stewart wound up placing in the top ten and afterward worked with Tyler Perry. And Rachel Smith placed in the top five and then got on Good Morning America and Nightline. But that’s not the way to bet. The way to bet is, if you fall, you’re dead.
When they called her state, my girl came out in a gray and white bikini with white rosettes at the hip bones and nude four-inch platforms. I’d put a full hairpiece on her, which had long, long waves. She stood at the top of the three-stair rise just amazing, her left leg fully extended. She held the pose like Betty Grable. She looked out at the judges with her eyes like hypnosis. It was everything. It was my God. Down she came the stairs, perfect. Down she walked to the center of the stage, perfect. Even the saddlebags you couldn’t see. Breasts up and down and stomach shining, with just a little muscle, not too much. Hair moving this way, that way. Smile, not too white teeth. Not stiff. Fluid and the face moving, holding my number-two smile for a beat beat beat, and after that the closed smile, the wide smile, the flirt. She did a full turn and then fell on her ass.
Along with the mother, the brothers, Dennis, Laila, and Sarah, I sat on the far-left-hand side of the lower floor. The mother starts tearing her hair and biting her hands. The brothers are both asleep; they don’t know. My team all cover their mouths and begin sobbing. I did not yell out or act dramatic. I am a professional. But I die inside. I die. I sat there staring straight at her with a supportive and positive smile on my face just in case she sees me through the lights. I wanted it so that she would know I was there for her and that I love her even though she can’t walk any better than a one-legged flamingo.
But she didn’t need me, the beauty. The thing that saved her was how she laughed. I knew she didn’t want to laugh because she probably wants to drown herself right now. But she dropped straight down on the ass bones and didn’t show any pain, no anger. She threw her head back and laughed so everything becomes funny, joyful, light. It made everybody like her, maybe better than if she did it flawless.
So then she did become like Crystle Stewart and Rachel Smith, because she placed. She made the top fifteen.
We prepared her for the questions, hard. Since Trump was screaming about us Mexicans and Univision and NBC got pissed, we knew there would be nothing about immigration. But maybe something about police brutality or college rape or economic inequality. Laila is our person for these things because she has a master’s in sociology from CUNY and a PhD from Georgetown. Yes, impressive. But more impressive was my girl. She got everything right away. It was all of her reading. She wanted to go to law school and become a big bastard who tells everybody else what to do. And she had the smarts for it too.
“The police need the freedom to do their work if we are going to have safe streets,” my girl said, smiling.
And: “We must protect women against sexual assault, because it is our responsibility that our women and girls live without fear. But at the same time we must not overreact. The men who are accused must be given due process.”
And: “America is the greatest nation in the world, and if you work hard, I truly do believe that you can achieve anything here.”
Two nights before the pageant, I did ask her. She was so convincing. I don’t usually care, but, you know, I loved her. I was obsessed with her, in a way.
“Baby, do you really buy all that crap?” I touched her very light and fatherly on the hand. “You’re not letting all of this garbage get into your mind, right?”
She looked at me and laughed, but softer, not like she laughed when she fell on her butt.
“Come on, Tito. What am I going to say, ‘All these rich fuckers should go to jail?’ Am I goi
ng to tell them, ‘Mr. Trump, sir, vete a la mierda?’”
“Yeah, but just between you and me,” I said. For a second, I thought I would tell her the story about my sister, but then I knew she wouldn’t be interested.
“Between you and me, I think we’re going to win, Tito,” she said, jumping up and running around the room like a crazy thing.
The day comes for the final competition, and I’m sick, and she’s sick too. All that calmness from before is just gone. What if she falls again? What if she sounds stupid during the question? It’s easy to fail, so easy. That’s why everybody does it.
Here we go, back at the River Center, in downtown Baton Rouge. Now the judges are serious and know the business. Kimberly Pressler, Miss USA ’99. Leila Lopes, Universe ’11. Rima Fakih, USA ’10. And on and on. None of them dropped out even with the Trump crap because they owed. But they knew what to look for. I relaxed my rules a little and tried to gift bag them, but they had so many body guards I couldn’t get through even to the assistants. The director got Family Game Night show MC Todd Newton and Miss Wisconsin ’09 Alex Wehrley to host after the others bowed out.
The bathing suits were solid red, white, and blue. My girl got assigned white. I’d made it for her, custom. Tiny, tiny sequins over two layers of white cotton. Tiny briefs, with side ties, so the straight men and lesbians and bisexuals and pansexuals in the audience can think about pulling them and undoing them, which leads to more clapping and higher points.
My girl comes out, walks down the three steps, and floats to the center of the stage. She does the full turn like a ballerina. Smiling with that god smile, eyes on the judges all the time. It was just the end. It was just gorgeous. She was one of the greats. Like an old-school Aphrodite, on the level with Vanessa Williams and Janelle Commissiong and Norma Beatriz Nolan.
Like in the prelims, I’m sitting next to the mother, the brothers, Dennis, Sarah, and Laila on the left-hand side of the floor. We’re all of us rolling around in our seats and screaming. Everybody was shouting at her. I saw men and women get on their feet clapping. The mother of course is crying again, and so am I. The brothers are yelling because everybody else is. Sarah’s getting everything on social media, and Dennis and Laila are filming it with the Nikon. I’m so happy I’m like dead.
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