Drag Queen Beauty Pageant

by Malachite Splinters

The other girls could mostly swap costumes as needed, but I swam in their outfits, so Brooklyn had to make everything specially for me.

  I carried the dress carefully back to my station and stepped into it, pulling the arms on carefully. Machyl came over in his thong and took hold of the material at the base of my spine, jerking the zipper up forcefully.

  “Careful!” I yelped. “You’ll rip it.”

  “What he said,” Machyl muttered, fastening the tiny hooks at the zipper closure at my neck, and then flouncing away.

  I sat down and pulled a pair of heels from underneath the counter. Unlike the other girls, I could fit into women’s shoe sizes. It was a good excuse to go shopping. I had bought these to complete this outfit. Pale yellow suede with gold hardware accents, a four inch heel on top of a two inch platform. I slipped my feet into them and stood up.

  “Machyl,” I said, wishing I didn't need to ask for his help. “Could you get my wig for me?” I pointed at the pale red one, flowing straight to just below shoulder length, slightly curled at the tip, crowned with two cute victory rolls.

  Machyl huffed and rolled his eyes. “I keep telling you not to wear that one, Tata,” he said, stomping over and reaching up on his toes to catch it. As he handed it to me, he said, “Your skin is not light enough to pull that one off.”

  It was, though, and it looked even better with the colored contact lenses I wore. I placed the wig carefully over the pinned-up locks of my weave and went to look at myself in the full length mirror.

  “Another night of La Tata,” Machyl muttered, blending his eyeshadow.

  The door which led to the upstairs apartment opened and Ellegrandé strode in, several pieces of A4 fluttering in her fingers. She leaned over and started tacking them up on the mirrors.

  “Running order for tomorrow,” she said, as Marcus and Brooklyn came back in through the other door, which led to the green room and the wings. She turned to them. “Shanghai Calendar Girls, you are on tomorrow. Giltie, you know the score. Damaris will be doing her signature.” Her eyes fell on me heavily. “Tata,” she said, “Mingle duty.”

  I crossed my arms and looked away, trying to hide my embarrassment. She didn’t need to single me out like that. I knew I was on mingle duty. I couldn’t do anything else.

  I turned back to the mirror as everyone else started getting busy and Machyl put some loud music on. I looked at my slender hourglass silhouette, the feminine pose of my body in the towering heels.

  I remembered what Damaris had said to me, the first time she brought me in here.

  “We’re a family here,” she had said. “This could be your chosen family. The family you weren’t born with, but the family you choose for yourself, because they accept you as you are. They accept you for who you really are.”

  She had smiled at me, and I had smiled at her, and I had felt, at that moment, that God had brought me here. I felt that St Sebastian was protecting me. I felt that everything I had ever dreamed, everything I had ever wanted, was now within reach.

  I looked into my own eyes in the mirror. I had just turned twenty the month before, and I couldn’t help the feeling that things hadn't turned out the way I had imagined the first time I walked into this dressing room at the age of eighteen.

  Storage Closet

  Diet Coke fizzed my tongue and prickled the roof of my mouth as I walked through the door from the green room and into the dressing room.

  It was quiet and empty and I closed the door behind me as softly as I could. I crossed the room to my station, sat down, put the cold can down and shook the condensation off my fingers and wiped them on a make up stained towel crumpled on the counter.

  I hadn’t cleaned up last night and there was make up all over, mixed in with spent cotton balls in my flesh tone and red and pink and black and bright, bright blue. A fuchsia lipstick, uncapped, had rolled into a spilled pile of setting powder.

  I picked up the lipstick and shook the powder off it, then set it down absent-mindedly and took another cold drink of Coke. The flat sweetness of the aspartame coated my tongue and left an artificial aftertaste when I swallowed, like nail polish.

  I paused, looked at myself in the mirror, licked my lips and swallowed again. I could feel my stomach, light and on the verge of fluttering.

  It was early, and there was no-one else here, exactly as I had hoped. I pressed one hand to my sternum, trying to calm my beating heart.

  When I woke up this morning, I had had a brilliant idea. I would be the first one to see her when she came down to get ready.

  Knowing I was going to see her soon brought back to me how much I had missed her. Her absence had become physical, like a missing tooth. I used to look forward to coming to the House of Ellegrandé every day, knowing she would be there.

  The weeks and months of her illness, with nothing but the constant teasing from Machyl and the reminders of how much of a failure I was as a drag artist, had taken their toll. No wonder I had felt depressed yesterday.

  But today was a chance to turn over a new leaf. Damaris was back, and I was sure that now, we would become better friends than ever before.

  The silence was broken by a muffled sound which made me sit up straight in electric shock.

  A bitten-off woman’s moan which seemed to plunge straight into the core of me and take root deep in my body.

  I felt every hair rise on my arms and neck and I swallowed, hard.

  That’s Damaris.

  I would know her voice anywhere. And then it happened again, louder, starting round and ending high and needy.

  “Oh—”

  Damaris was here. Damaris was here with someone. Damaris was here with a man.

  I winced as a stab of arousal quickened in my groin. Heat flushed my face and humiliation poured through me. I bit down, hard, on my lower lip. Frozen, tensed, I couldn’t think, or move.

  Bathing in shame, I could feel my chest heaving as moment by moment, I waited for the sounds that would surely follow. I wanted to leave, but my butt seemed to be glued to the chair.

  I was horrified by myself, and by the situation, caught on a knife edge, stuck between moments and unable to go forward or back.

  “Fuck you. You heard?” It was a male voice, deep, coarse and rising in anger every second. “Fortune cookie limp dick Limey faggot—”

  Plain terror melted my dick like a stick of hot glue. The guy she was with sounded big. And he was angry. Fuck.

  I ducked practically under the make up counter as the door of the closet blew open, rebounded against the wall next to it so hard it surely left a mark and slammed shut again.

  “I’m sorry, Damaris—” I recognized Marcus’ British accent coming faintly from the depths of the closet.

  What? How many people were in there?

  And then Damaris emerged from the closet, seized the door handle and slammed it shut with all her might.

  She saw me, our eyes met and she froze, breathing heavily, her chest heaving.

  I stared back at her, my mind racing. If we ran, we might be able to make it to the apartment upstairs, and that had a front door that locked. Then we could call the police.

  I would have shouted for Duane Tyrone, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea. DT was big, but he would be no match for a fit, strong young man.

  There were three of us, maybe we could overpower him—

  “Anthony,” she blurted, and I could see her eyes darting this way and that, around me, finally to the door behind me, which led to the back stairs up to the apartment. “How long have you been here?”

  “I—I just got here,” I lied, swallowing nervously.

  She half-glanced to one side, as if she were trying to stop herself from glancing back over her shoulder. I saw her mouth working, her jaw grinding. She didn’t say anything more, she just bolted out the door. I heard her footsteps running up the wooden staircase to the apartment above.

  And then Marcus walked out of the storage closet, looking sheepish and rubbing the back of his ne
ck.

  Marcus? I was so confused, I was speechless. Where was the big guy she was with?

  Anthony, a voice said in the back of my mind. There was no big guy. That was Damaris yelling.

  “Anthony,” Marcus said. “What are you doing here?” His eyes were alarmed and his face was bright red.

  A mixture of confusion and shame swirled inside me. Marcus and Damaris had been hooking up in the storage closet, and I had walked in on it. My heart twisted, quick and merciless.

  Suddenly I was back in the past again, on the night, several days after I met her, when Damaris first brought me backstage and I had seen this dressing room for the first time.

  “Listen, sweetie,” she said, putting her arm around me. “I’m a need you to keep something to yourself. Okay? You can never—ever—tell anyone here what you saw the other night. It’s a house rule that there’s no fraternization. Do you get me?”

  She had just put make up on me, which I had never worn before. And she had placed a wig on my head, and I had looked in the mirror and seen a different person staring back at me. Someone beautiful. Maybe even sexy.

  “Sue Ellen is stupid,” I said quickly. “I would never have said anything. I never will say anything. I promise.”

  She smiled and reached her arms around me in a hug. And I had kept my promise all this time. No matter what else happened, I had kept my promise to Damaris.

  Since that night in the alley, I had never seen Damaris and Marcus so much as touch each other. They didn’t even help each other get dressed.

  But I had always suspected that they were continuing to see each other. And now I knew that I had been right.

  “I—I’m here—” I said to Marcus, running my hand through my hair, trying to find some composure, “for the show.”

  “Jesus Christ, Anthony, it’s three in the afternoon,” Marcus said distractedly, picking up his leather backpack from the counter and slinging it over his shoulder. He started walking quickly toward the door. “Call’s not until seven,” he muttered. “Bye,” he said, and disappeared through the door which led to the side exit. I heard it slam shut. He was gone.

  Damaris.

  She had gone back upstairs. Performers didn’t normally go up there and I had only been there a handful of times. But—I had to go and see if she was okay.

  The apartment above had its own street door and was connected to the dressing room by a narrow hallway. I pushed through the door which gave into this hallway and walked along it until I got to the staircase and started climbing, the hollow thudding of my footsteps echoing that of my heart.

  When I got to the top, I stood on the landing with its creaky floorboards, long crack down one wall, paint drips around the doorframe where the painter had done a sloppy job, and I knocked softly on the front door.

  “Damaris?” I said, my voice sounding timid in the silence.

  “It’s open,” I heard her voice, thankfully back to normal, and I went inside.

  The main room was empty. It was old-fashioned, unrenovated, with an open-plan living room and a small kitchen.

  On the wall above the TV was a big framed Drag Queen Beauty Pageant theatrical release poster, signed by the director. Next to it, the framed photograph of Ellegrandé and ColorQueen, taken on the red carpet at the New York premiere.

  There was another copy of this photograph hanging in the dressing room downstairs, and it never failed to amaze me how young, slim and good-looking Ellegrandé was in this photo.

  I could see the door to DT’s bedroom half-open, and no movement inside.

  A little worm of nervousness squiggled in my stomach as I walked through to where the door of Damaris’ bedroom stood open and peeked inside.

  She was sitting on her bed, with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. My heart quailed at the sight of her like that.

  “Are you okay?” Was she crying? What should I do? I didn’t dare enter, so I lingered on the threshold, like a vampire waiting to be invited in.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  She looked good. She looked really good, even better than before, if that was possible.

  “Come inside,” she said.

  I stepped inside the doorframe, but didn’t dare to get any closer. “What happened?” I blurted out.

  She stood up, walked away from me and went to the window and looked out. “It’s nothing,” she said shortly. “Just forget about it.”

  I frowned. “Are you sure?” I said. It sounded like they had had a fight.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” I said doubtfully. She didn’t say anything else, so I just hovered around the door, feeling increasingly nervous and out of place.

  She turned around, dragged her heels back to the bed, and slumped down on it.

  “You know how hard I had to work for this voice?” She said. “Not so ladylike now, am I, shiiit,” she muttered and pushed her bangs out of her face, and sniffed. “It makes me feel ratchet, goddamnit…”

  She started to cry softly with one hand over one eye, pushed up into her bangs.

  My heart, which was pounding at a million miles a second, started to hurt, a deep ache, like the one you get when your throat closes up when you’re about to cry.

  I should have left the dressing room immediately when I heard that first sound from her mouth coming out of that storage closet.

  But I didn’t leave. I stayed and I listened, like a perv. Like a disgusting old man in a park, in a wrinkled mac, watching and waiting for people to flash, getting off on the fact that they don’t know he’s there until the crucial moment. That’s what I was like.

  I wasn’t worthy of being near her, but I couldn’t stand to watch her like that any more, so I went over to the bed and sat down on it gingerly.

  “Damaris?” I wished I could comfort her. I wished I could hug her to me and take her pain away.

  “Could you hand me one of those tissues, please?” She gestured at the nightstand.

  I quickly grabbed several and handed them to her.

  She sat up, sighing, and dabbed at her face. “I thought I had gained control of my temper,” she said. “I hate when I lose it. Especially when I lose it and yell in my old fucking voice.” She sniffed. “I give myself mad dysphoria with that shit. So how stupid is that? I did it to myself.” She shook her head, folding up the tissue and laying it on the comforter.

  I loved the way Damaris spoke, her smooth accent with that lilt, the slightly husky quality of it, a little breathy. I had never thought about Damaris’ voice before. I had just accepted it as part of her. I hadn’t realized how much effort it took for her to change it.

  “What’s up with you, anyway?” She said, the edges of her mouth curling up as if she was making an effort to smile. “We haven’t seen each other in so long.”

  She raised her eyes and looked at me for real for the first time. My heart clenched painfully.

  “I’m good,” I said, my voice strained.

  “What’s new? Are you dating anyone?” She leaned back on the bed, looking slightly more relaxed now.

  “I, um, no,” my mind was racing wildly, looking for excuses I could invent.

  “Anthony,” she said, smiling incredulously. “You’re still single?”

  I nodded, squirming with embarrassment.

  “Are you just not into relationships?” She asked, peering at me. “Are you more into the hookups?”

  I felt so uncomfortable I wanted to vacate my body and my mind was still whirring furiously looking for a lie, but at the same time I felt a deep, wounding stab that she would even ask.

  She thinks I’m not into relationships? She thinks I’m hooking up and not telling anyone?

  Quiet outrage and worse than that, a sudden and terrible loss of faith in our friendship.

  She was so wrong about me. So wrong— “Anthony,” she rolled over onto her side facing me. This line of questioning seemed to have stopped her crying, mostly, so maybe I should be grateful for that
. “Why aren't you answering?”

  I looked at her, lying half-raised on one elbow. She was wearing a tight apricot crop top over black and white track pants. The apricot set off her skin tone beautifully.

  I could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra and I tried really, really hard not to look at her boobs. I tried not to look at the line of her waist and hips. Her long hair fell softly over her shoulder and pooled on the comforter.

  My face was hot. Underneath all her towering confidence she had a vulnerability which drew me like a siren call. Her femininity intoxicated me, I wanted to drink it down like sweet nectar.

  I felt like a stain spreading on the comforter, like a clump clinging to the carpet that someone was going to have to scrape off and then steam clean to get it all out.

  “I just,” I cast my eyes to the Cheshire Cat lamp, the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, anywhere but her. “Just haven’t met anyone yet.”

  “Haven’t met anyone,” she laughed, and rolled onto her back. “You spend half your life in a gay bar, Anthony, for Chrissake.”

  “Well,” I protested, bunching a handful of the comforter in one hand, as if it could anchor me, stop me from being swept away by the torrent of discomfort flowing around me. “I can’t force people to like me back.”

  She laughed humorlessly. “You must be pretty fucking picky.”

  “Yeah,” I said stubbornly. “I’m picky.” I felt a flash of defensiveness. “So sue me.”

  “Are you even—” she rolled back toward me, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Anthony, have you even had sex yet?”

  A stab of panic. I crossed my arms across my chest, tightly, and stared at the vintage 80s poster of Color Queen tacked up on the wardrobe door.

  “No offense,” she said, “but I’m starting to think that, okay? Anthony?”

  I blinked, hard, several times, willing myself to come up with something. Anything. But my mind was a blank. As blank as a white field first thing in the morning after a long night of snowfall.

  “Is there anyone you like at the moment?” She asked. She just wasn’t giving up.

  She was going to keep going like this, forever, until I just faded away into the ether out of sheer humiliation.