Harrie Debby served the drinks and told a joke that had everyone else in stitches, but I felt like there was an invisible wall getting thicker and thicker all the time between me and them, blocking out more and more of the sound until they were as faint as a radio playing to itself in a downstairs room.
Nani had a radio that was always on, an old one, black and silver colored metal with a long antenna that was so fun to extend and retract over and over again.
And the dial on it was fascinating, the way the little white line moved up and down a series of numbers when you turned the knob.
That radio sat in the kitchen all day playing the classics, old school calypso, chutney and Hindi songs.
It had always been there in the background when I stood in the door of her doll room and looked at the dolls. I wasn’t allowed inside without Nani. None of us were. But I looked.
And I had to look a little secretly, because boys didn’t care about dolls.
I could just remember standing there and tapping my foot and humming under my breath along to some old song like Mi Wife Took Mi Baigan Masala Away and looking at the pretty, perfect faces. Looking at the Victorian doll, that was my favorite
When we were in the restaurant and everyone was paying, Anthony noticed me looking at him and gave me back an insolent stare. I was taking my credit card from the pile on the white saucer and his hand brushed against mine as he took his from underneath it, and put it back in his woman’s clutch bag. He stood up, following the other two, and adjusted the long waist tie on the jumpsuit. It fit well. It didn’t have the look of a woman’s garment hanging awkwardly off a man’s square frame. The silk draped and clung in a way that was only complimentary.
I stood up, the last of the party to do so, and the other two started moving toward the door. He had turned slightly away and I noticed that the fit was just as good in the back. At that point he looked over his shoulder at me and I dropped my gaze and went around the table, hurrying to catch up.
And now, Anthony was flirting with Clarion Call, and it was right in the field of my vision and if I didn’t want to see it, I would have to stare at the menu. Anthony was trying to stick his fingers in the various shreds and tears of the pink top. I assumed for purposes of tickling.
I dropped my gaze and took a long sip of the cold drink in my hand. It was a champagne cocktail with edible gold flakes floating in it, and there was a sting in the tail that spoke clearly of some strong liquor I couldn’t put my finger on.
Harrie Debby and Lucky Penny on the bon-bon and La Tata and Clarion Call on the poof.
I poured some more of the cocktail down my throat.
Anyone who knew me knew that I found the femme+femme dynamic nauseating. Wasn’t the whole point of being a gay man that you wanted to be with men?
Anyway, I was a bottom, so how would that work? It would be like two batteries of the same polarity trying to make a spark. You couldn’t exactly get off by having someone else rub their ass against yours. I shuddered and let that train of thought plunge swiftly into a deep ravine.
And Damaris knew me better than almost anyone.
So how come she was so wrong about me?
Harley offered to top up my glass and I let him, and he clinked his glass with mine.
Drinking gold-flake cocktails with Harrie Debby in the VIP area of House of Cosmosis. It sounded like the dream ending to the night.
But as I drank greedily and the cold bubbles prickled the interior of my mouth and throat, it felt more like a nightmare.
I just wanted to wake up and find that everything had gone back to the way it was before.
Please let me wake up.
Please.
When’s Day
“Marcy,” I said, putting my hands flat on the desk. “I’m begging you.”
She swished her long, straight brown ponytail with the chunky blonde highlights and sucked on her lower lip. She had more than a little bit of a trout pout, but I loved her for it. I wouldn’t wish that trout pout away for all the money in the world.
“You want me,” she said. “To give your drag queens prime studio space, for free, for two weeks?”
I frowned and nodded. “Yeah.”
“Why would I do that? What do ya think my head is filled with, pencil shavings?”
“I know,” I said. “That it is filled with your excellent brains which are smart and savvy.”
“Don’t give me that sweet talk,” she picked up her coffee cup and took a sip.
“Marcy,” I said, crossing my legs and sitting up straighter. “One, you can give us the small back studio, the one that had the flooding problem.”
She pursed her trouts at me. “What flooding?”
“Hmm,” I tapped my chin. “Let me see… wasn’t there a sewage leak?” That wasn’t fixed in a timely manner? I didn’t say.
I didn’t ask if the studio hadn’t ended up ankle-deep in raw sewage because of some cost-cutting measures authorized by management. And I didn’t ask if that room still reeked so badly that they hadn’t been able to hire it out to the public.
I didn’t want her getting all defensive or anything.
She put the coffee cup down a little too hard and crossed her arms. “What’s it to you?”
I tapped my nails on the table. “So it’s sitting there unused. Let my girls and me in. None of us have any sense of smell any more. That’s what happens when you drink too much semen. The sperm get up into your olfactory bulb, try to fertilize it and over time it stops working.” I shrugged and spread my hands. “It’s a tragedy, and yet, will be such a benefit to us in this particular situation.”
She burst out laughing, a hoarse and raucous sound, and pounded the flat of her hand on the desk. “You can take care of the smell by opening the windows. But the flooring was damaged during the flood.”
“How damaged?” I said instantly.
She squinted at me. “Unusuable. The roll-out had to be trashed and all that’s in there is the original sub-floor. Studios A and B have fully sprung floors,” she added quickly.
“We’re not doing jumps or tumbling. This is basic stuff, Marcy.”
“The studio takes no responsibility,” she said, putting her hands up.
“Okay,” I clapped my hands. “That’s fine. We’ll be careful.”
“Hold on,” she said. “That wasn’t a yes. I still don’t know what you’re offering me.”
“Well, you just might like to know,” I said. “That we are rehearsing a brand new show which will feature the wonderful and much-loved Harrie Debby. It’s going to be big, and we’ll make sure Persimmon is featured heavily as a sponsor.”
“Harrie Debby?” Marcy sat up straighter in her chair. “The drag queen?”
“The one and only,” I smiled pleasantly.
“No, this doesn’t add up,” Marcy frowned, waving her hand with her fingers in a position that I knew she used to hold her cigarettes in. “Harrie Debby doesn’t go around asking for charity.”
I had to take a deep, slow breath in such a way that she wouldn’t notice. I didn’t count humiliation as a frequent activity, and here I was putting myself through it willingly.
“Harrie Debby is doing this for us in a charitable, um, manner,” I said. I couldn’t think of an elegant way to phrase it.
“What, are you having financial problems?” Marcy’s eyebrows didn’t register surprise, but her eyes did.
I raised my eyebrows and laced my fingers together over my knee. “Well, Marce,” I said. “You could say that. You could certainly say that.”
It wasn’t a lie.
You could say that.
It wouldn’t necessarily be true if you said it.
But you could say it.
The financial problem was that DT wouldn’t pay for a damn studio.
“Alright,” Marcy cut a line through the air with her hand. “I don’t care about the details. I know what you can do for me. You can take a class.”
I smiled uncertainly. “Take a c
lass…?”
“I mean teach. Take like teach. I want you to take one of my classes. You get your studio, I get a fucken break. Okay?”
“When?” I was so surprised, I just blurted it out.
“Eh,” she waved her two fingers in the air, and again I could see she was missing the cigarette she used to gesticulate with. “After your show. Okay?”
I paused. Once winter set in, it would be the start of the busy season at work. Sometimes it got so busy, I had to cut down my performances at Ellegrandé. I wasn’t sure how I was going to fit teaching one of her classes, which was probably a commitment of at least four hours a week, on top of all that.
“Sure,” I said, smiling brightly. “This is such a big honor. I don’t know if I deserve such a big honor.”
That was, actually, true.
What she had just said was the last thing I expected to hear, probably ever.
“You’re good, kid,” she said. “This is what you should be doing, not that drag business or whatever else it is that you do.”
“Audit and compliance,” I said, genuinely smiling now.
“No fucken idea.” She opened a drawer to her left and took out a single key which she passed to me across the desk. “Now get out of here and go dance your butt off in that shit studio.”
I got up and gave her a salute. She wasn’t a hugger.
“Keep the heat off. I will send someone in there in a gas mask to make sure those heaters are not on and so help you if they are. I’m not paying utilities on a room that’s not earning. Just makes the smell worse anyway. Hot shit.” She laughed.
“The nights aren’t too cold yet,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll be fine. Our first rehearsal is scheduled for tonight at seven,” I said, putting the key in my pocket. “Thanks, Marcy. I’ll poke my head in before I leave, if that’s okay.”
“Fine,” she said. “It’s yours. Two weeks.”
When I woke up this morning, I had woken up feeling like I was still in the same nightmare I had gone to bed in.
I lay there in the dark with my heart racing for some unknown reason, convinced that my head was being eaten alive by a mega-colony of hornets.
Before I knew what was happening, I was face-down in the toilet, violently disgorging the seeming gallons of cocktails, the edible gold leaf and the hot meatball sandwich I had stuffed into my face before I collapsed into bed.
I crawled to sink and stuck my head under the faucet, brushed my teeth and lain back down in bed. The sight of the clock telling me I had less than forty minutes before I had to get up was almost enough to make my stomach heave again.
I closed my eyes and prayed for the torture to end. But I had things to do that couldn’t wait, so a scalding hot shower and a handful of pills and a very weak coffee later, here I was taking care of business.
As I left Marcy’s office, I was still so hungover, my head felt like it was going to fall off and I kept sweating bullets.
I had got us a rehearsal space for tonight, even if I had to make up a tiny little white lie to get it, and promise something that I had no idea how I was going to fulfill.
Yes, sir, Machyl Mostroso Lyons was checking things off the list. On my way out of the building ten minutes later, I had to stop in a bathroom and throw up. But still. The list.
The sun was shining brightly and it was crisp and cool, just before ten am. I decided to walk to work from Persimmon. It would take about forty minutes going fast, and it would give me a chance to clear my head and work off some of the hangover. I had missed a day at the office yesterday and there was only so much time I could make up at night.
I just hoped I didn’t need to puke again on the way there. And that the pills I had taken would start working on this headache which felt like my head was covered in acid working it way through my brain.
Come to think of it, I hoped I hadn’t thrown up the pills. I had no idea. But I had taken the maximum dose. So if they had been absorbed, I couldn’t risk taking any more.
I took a deep breath and sucked in the New York city air. I could smell asphalt, hot pretzels from a stand down the street. Half a block away, a manhole cover was steaming gently in the morning sun.
In my mind, they gave off the musty, dank, underground scent of the subway system, reminding us all what was under our feet. I knew it wasn’t true, and that it wasn’t the subways venting, but the municipal steam system. But I could still almost smell it.
I passed the pretzel stand without stopping. I wasn’t ready for solid food yet.
I knew why I had drunk so much last night. I had been pissed off. And when I was pissed off, it was easy for the night to get out of control.
Angel?
He might as well have stuck me with a bayonet like he was a soldier in a long-ago war. And I was lying crumpled up, watching his boots walk away through the long grass, bleeding into the mud.
Damaris?
It was like she had beckoned me toward her, smiling and holding out her arms for a hug, and when I stepped toward her, the ground turned out to be the too-thin ice of a frozen lake, and I plunged in and in my final moments as I drowned under the thick ice, I was given the knowledge that she had planned this.
Duane Tyrone?
We were like a Venn diagram. Some things overlapped. But only some. He wasn’t on my side. I didn’t expect him to be. But he didn’t appreciate what I did and how much I did. He didn’t listen to me. It was like I didn’t count when the chips were down, when it counted most.
The House of Ellegrandé I had known for so long was gone, literally obliterated overnight. And in the ashes and burnt timbers left over, Anthony Alcantara was frolicking in a pair of baby blue lederhosen and thinking it was such fun.
In the cold light of day, I regretted what I had said to Anthony in the restaurant.
So much for faking friends, I had gone and openly declared that I was at war with him. That had been akin to, if not shooting myself in the foot, at least dropping a pretty big knife into it from a height. In other words, it was a really stupid thing to do, an unwise move, not tactical.
I had officially put him on his guard, explicitly told him that he needed to be watching out for me. Now it was going to be impossible to get him to do anything.
No, I had definitely let my temper get in the way of tactics on that one.
But I had a plan to fix it. It had come to me while I was lying in my hangover bed early this morning.
I grinned to myself thorough the nausea and took another deep breath of the fresh morning air.
I had a plan, alright.
“DT said what?” Anthony looked at me skeptically.
“He wants to put you forward as the first candidate,” I said.
We were in the small back corridor outside the studio I had finangled from Marcy this morning. It was poorly lit and there was a distinct dankness and slight moldiness in the air, like it was lacking a good ventilation system.
“What’s that?” Anthony put his hands on his hips.
He had come dressed up in obviously expensive athleisure gear, mesh-filled leggings and a side-tied crop top made of material punctured with tiny holes. Well, he had better be ready to get all of that nice and sweated up.
I held back the cutting remark I could have inserted here on his obvious ignorance of the Vivesse audition process.
“If you’re making an institutional application,” I explained. “You have to mark which of the two candidates is the preferred candidate.”
“Which one you think is better?” Anthony interjected bluntly.
I swallowed my growing irritation. “That’s a very crude way of putting it.”
“So which one were you?” Anthony asked.
I froze. Did I just hear him right?
“Last year,” Anthony said. “And the year before that, and before that, yadda yadda yadda.”
If I wasn’t mistaken—and I wasn’t—that was a read.
A read from little Anthony Alcantara, directed squarely at yours truly.<
br />
Well, well, well.
Wonders never ceased.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean?” I rubbed my hands together, trying to diffuse some of the tension sparking through my body.
He smirked at me. “Damaris was the preferred one, wasn’t she?” He looked at his nails and ran the tips along the ball of his thumb, then looked back up at me, his smirk widening into a grin.
If this had been any other situation.
Any.
Other.
Situation.
You would get whiplash trying to follow how fast I responded. Oh, sister, it would be a speed-reading competition. And Anthony Alcantara, the well-known dyslexic, would be left lying on the floor of the library, gasping his dying breath. And on my way out, I would put my heel down on his reading glasses and crush them into powder.
Behold, La Tata, the illiterate drag queen.
“She called me this morning,” Anthony grinned and looked me right in the eye. “Sounds like she told you.”
I almost took a step backward to get some distance between me and him, but then I told my feet to stand their ground.
I told him I think you have feelings for him, Damaris had said.
Anthony looked back at me, and then he outright laughed. “So funny,” he said, giggling.
He was trying to embarrass me. That was all. I almost collapsed in relief. He knew how humiliating it was to have Damaris say that to him about me, and he was trying to rub it in.
Of course that was why she had said it.
It hit me like a force from above, like the time the wig shelf collapsed and about twenty of them on mannequins came down on my head.
She had made it up to tell to Anthony to embarrass me.
Ever since last night, I had been racking my brains trying to figure out why she would say something like that, and if she believed it, and how she had come up with this crazy idea in the first place.
But now I got it. She was trying to, shall we say, give me a dose of my own medicine. Like I had lied to Marcus that Anthony liked him, she was lying to Anthony that I liked him.
Fishy Queen (Drag Queen Beauty Pageant Book 2) Page 11