“Miss Carriage,” he extended his hand like a favor. “Some poor twinks think me gruesome, like I mean dead fetuses and weeping women. Get this straight: I do not mock women. No ma’am. I respect women. It’s men I mock. Men in robes. Men in suits. Men in every costume they drag out of the closet.”
His hand still graced the air. It seemed I should kiss it but he suddenly withdrew the offer. His nose flared and a yellow ring blazed around his gray eyes.
“The problem is these apolitical homos. They have no sense of justice, much less a miscarriage. Where’s the justice when you get arrested for what you put in your mouth, honey? I ask you: is it not your own damn mouth?”
He answered himself with a “YES” that hissed in the air and stretched into two syllables.
“And where’s the justice when you get bashed for what you put on your own face?”
Even though Miss Carriage was not made up, his eyebrows were plucked into commas and his lashes lengthened into quote marks. His hands were groomed too, with clear polish, so that every gesture shimmered in the black light. The tip of one finger drew an imaginary line up and down the bar.
“In Lafayette, these Cajun queens slip a De or a La into their name and think they’re French aristocracy and thus not subject to sodomy laws, conduct codes, hateful bashers, or even—Goddess forbid—AIDS. The dizzy fools are heir to nothing, certainly not Stonewall, but they lord it over the joint with eyebrows supercilious and elbows akimbo. Moi, I’m not looking to rule nobody but myself.”
He tossed back another gold shot.
“Teach, yes, but rule, no. And testify, always. I made that poster, and I will make these queens remember their history even if I have to shout it every night from the bottom of the urinal.”
After hearing I was a junior at the high school where he graduated and where the latest angel disappeared, Miss Carriage announced that his Lady Cub Scout Class was officially in session. By the end of the night, he had warned me away from anyone in a uniform—whether cop or cleric—and had schooled me into a new vocabulary. Basket, bear, bottom, butch. Trick, trade, troll, twink. Each word had its own operating instructions. Breeder=Straight. Trade=Straight to Bed.
“Never turn trade for cash. Money cheapens everything, honey.”
He narrowed his eyes and flared his nostrils.
“Get drugs instead. The only currency you can slam, smoke, sniff, snort, or shoot straight up your starfish.”
Miss Carriage was older, nearly thirty, and the price for his tits had gotten bigger while his purse got smaller. At this point, he said he was just stuffing dreams down a crawfish hole, but as long as he was dreaming he might as well have the look of an angel—or a female private dick.
“Truth be told, I’m already a girl with a gun. And I see crime up and down this bar. Don’t you?”
Miss Carriage never asked how I got into the bar (fake ID) or how many times I’d been (twice). He asked few questions he couldn’t answer himself.
When my eyes finally turned back to the stage, a drag queen in a nun’s habit held a paddle over a priest’s rear end while four cowboys spurred imaginary horses and kicked their heels in unison singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
“One of these days,” Miss Carriage exclaimed, “I will work that stage over!”
“You don’t perform?” I asked.
“Honey, every utterance is a performance. But if you mean lipsync for dear life before a dead mic to a set of musty show tunes, then the answer is a round NO. I’ve got better uses for this set of choppers.”
A week later, we stood in a circle-shaped bar hidden under a huge cantilever bridge in the Louisiana state capitol. To get there, we had to drive over not one bridge but two, the first an endless ribbon of concrete running through murky swamp and the second a sky-high arch spanning the muddy Mississippi. A trip out of town, Miss Carriage had predicted, would shake up our spirits.
In the bar, a hulking drag queen named Miss Teary de la Place pushed around an empty shopping cart while singing old girl group songs and pantomiming “fellatio” on a long black rubber tube. Up and down, her plump lips traced the length of the tube, her wild tongue shot out lyrics, and her wide hips swung in alarm. Overhead, the only art on the walls hung in a massive frame: a golden-maned lion entering a brawny man who lay prone on the grass. The man’s haunches were raised, lips open, mustache wet. His eyes turned toward the ground, but the lion offered the painter a tender look and not one man who saw it didn’t sigh. The Lion’s Den, the place was called.
“Now every den mother must feed her pride,” Miss Teary landed the punch line, after belting out a tough-knuckled song called “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game.”
Miss Carriage rolled her eyes, muttered “suffering fools,” and darted for the bar.
The men, and they were all men with ribbed tanks and roper boots, knew the words to all the songs. They waved colored hankies in the air and passed around a bottle of poppers with a screw-top missing. Everyone put a nostril to it; some put two. Round and round the bottle went, and with each huff, I slipped out of myself and the spirits slipped inside. The scent of solvent rose out of the bottle in a vapor that burned away memory. Where you were, the calendar year, the state capitol, the church of your parents, right from wrong, the location of your feet, your own first name, all went like a match in a quick flame.
More memory on fire: the painted face of the angel in the poster. That beauty spot. The brush of rouge.
In a flash, the vapor vanished every thought and magnified every sensation. The furry prickle under your finger nails, the shimmering floaters orbiting your eyes, the loud odor of underwear nearby, all beat with the throttle of the rising floor and the surging heat of the air in your chest. The vapor lifted men off the floor and spun them on their heels, lifted the bar and spun it like a careening carousel. Sounds popped, blood rushed, and for the expanse of a twelve-inch house remix, amyl nitrite lifted every queen out of mourning and made every man into a mindless beast.
With another huff, my chest started to spasm again, and my eyes went black. When they opened, Miss Carriage was nowhere near. I was in a back room of the bar, with the synthesizers muffled and the lights out. My lashes grew heavy and long like feathers and my hands went limp at my sides. My fingers disappeared altogether. My feet kept folding under, while my lungs swelled until I thought they might burst. A few times, I raised my voice but no words fell out, just a gasping sound. My uproar attracted a lion, not the one in the frame but Leon, the long-haired barrel-chested bar owner, who dangled an ornate strand of Mardi Gras beads before me, the old kind made of milky glass.
“Let me have a taste,” Leon purred into my ear. When I shook my head “no,” he dropped his belt and wrapped the beads around my neck.
“My bar,” he said, biting my ear.
“My rules,” he said, biting my nipple.
Then he shoved a hankie in my mouth and shoved my face to the floor. Behind me, he dropped his belt, and the sound of a zipper ripped the air. His legs doubled under mine; his hands raced over me. The whole time, he groaned as if someone had him in a headlock. He made choking sounds as if someone had a pair of hands at his throat. He mumbled a smear of French words and chewed at my hair while his whole body trembled and shook. Before he finished, he hacked off a lock with a pocket knife then bared his teeth.
“A perfect little fairy bird,” he said.
He squeezed his hand like a gun and put the barrel in my mouth. “And, mon ’ti cher, I do love a blackbird gumbo.”
Then he threw down the beads. “Fair trade,” he said.
Maybe I was only seventeen, but Miss Carriage had taught me the price of trade, and I knew he had yet to pay.
The next night, back in Lafayette, I snuck into a bar tucked behind a cinder block wall in the back of a nearly abandoned shopping mall. A vinyl store called Raccoon Records had the only open doors by day, a
nd by night the Goth-boy clerk spun dark wave tunes at the bar, the kind no drag queen sang. The electronic beat got the men thrusting their legs in and out on the floor. All around, there were mirrors but the fog kept blocking out the faces so that each dancer was just a pair of legs in the dance or a pair of arms in the air. In and out, they strutted and preened like cranes along the gulf daring each other to take flight first. Fantasy II in Exile, the sign over the bar said.
“What happened to Fantasy I?” I asked the Goth-boy DJ before he went down on a longneck and threw the bottle back with nothing but his teeth. A black cross dangled from his ear as if moved by a tremor in the air.
“It got found,” a tall guy in spiky hair and white face powder said. There was a silver lightning bolt near his eye and rhinestones where his brows should be. He parted his blue lips. “And any fantasy found is a fantasy killed.”
Then he marked the air with a snap and turned back into the fog.
Later that night in his garage apartment, Treats teared up over the lost angel. He was a cousin, distant, but a cousin. Just a boy. Once, he’d taken the stage at Fantasy II draped in nothing but a French flag singing a song by a petite woman known as the Little Sparrow. The queens sneered at his snarky rendition of “La Vie en Rose” and at the safety pin in his ear, but Treats applauded with abandon and dubbed his little cousin a punk diva. He also nursed his cousin through his first STD, a round of syphilis.
“War wounds,” Treats called it then, “think of it as Purple Hearts, Toot. You’re practically a hero.”
Afterward, Treats had meant to stitch up a pink camouflage dress but never got around to it. He swore he had swatches somewhere and towered before the open chest in his studio, pulling out combat boots, tartan kilts, graphic tees, black boas, books on the Beats, and a poster for a show by a factory of artists in New York.
“Nothing,” Treats turned to me. “Not a single swatch. Nothing left, sweetie.”
The thought seemed to weigh his face down. His hands pulled at the skin and the white powder rubbed off in streaks, making his look redden. His green eyes flared but not at me. He stared over my head and went silent before opening a hinged kit of trays filled with brushes, wands, tubes, and scissors, all ordered in alert rows. They looked like weapons for doll-sized vigilantes. Yet with the powder gone, there was no vengeance in Treats’ face. He was younger than Miss Carriage by a decade but already seemed more bowed. Out of the bar, his spiky hair and studded gear became more costume than uniform. With a battery of sponges, his skin darkened into Sabine brown, the burnished color of Cajuns who lived deep back in the bayous. His eyes dimmed too as he flourished a hand, like a magician, over his face.
“It’s not drag,” he said, “but war paint. Life, that’s the real drag.”
Then he tossed a boa my way and shimmied out of his chair before popping a pill into his mouth.
“And that’s why the gods gave us speed,” he said.
The thought put a light back in his eyes, as he swore that one hadn’t lived until one had been to a party on the Mississippi and that’s exactly where he’d take me next week. “The Cockfish,” he declared, “will make you a man. Or a girl. Your choice, really.”
Legend had it, Treats supplied the amber bottles, the white lines, the black beauties, and hormone injections from across the border to half the queens in the state capitol. So I figured Miss Carriage would ride shotgun for another trip over the two bridges to Baton Rouge. The Cockfish was a floating party—“a moveable feast!” as Miss Carriage put it—staged on a former naval ship. When we crossed the plank, I spotted Treats on board, already scouting for business.
“What a lark!” he trilled in the air with an exaggerated smile, as if to convince himself. “What a rush!”
His eyes shut for a long moment before opening again with a piercing look. When he caught sight of Miss Carriage, he genuflected then rose into the towering figure of a royal purveyor, though one with blue lips and a lightning bolt at his eye. He put a hand to his heart and boasted of selling only sunny drugs, “the kind that push your face to the sky, sweetie. Who wants to fall into a crack?”
As he made his pitch, his eyes flitted about in search of a customer in need.
Miss Carriage squeezed my hand. Tonight, she was in need but “lacked funds,” as she put it. And she was most definitely she, in a white wedding gown with a biker belt cinched at her wasp waist and a blonde crown of a wig. She was fighting off a mood, and I didn’t need to ask why. The cops hadn’t even opened a case on the angel boy yet. No one knew who did it. No suspect in sight. And the motive? They chalked it up to panic defense, especially since the body was found a few hundred yards from a cruise bar.
“Panic,” Miss Carriage said, “is an offense not a defense. I ask you: how does a dead boy get accused of his own murder?”
Her shoulders shook, and I squeezed her hand back.
“Now,” she said, pursing her lips, “time to hunt for a patron. Some flush gent to fund my party favors and put a twirl in this girl.”
Then she gave Treats a knowing look and studied his duffel bag. In the background, the lyrics to a song about a sex dwarf spun round and round. Treats closed his eyes then plunged a hand into the bag.
“Listen,” he said in a near whisper, “we can’t dwell in the dark forever.”
His back straightened out of its bow.
“And Lord knows, the best drugs can shake everything into the light.”
He placed a white pill in Miss Carriage’s palm.
“Ecstasy. The name says it all.”
The look on Miss Carriage’s face brightened for once, her lips spreading into a wide grin. She almost never showed her teeth, everyone knew. Though she told anyone with ears about the bashing that left her with dentures, she’d learned to smile through tight lips and to talk with more tongue than teeth. Even in Baton Rouge, other queens knew her story, knew how she breathed fire in a bar raid once and led the march to a parish prison to demand the release of an inmate with AIDS. Miss Carriage rarely let go, rarely stopped fighting, so her grin lit up Treats’ face too. He grinned right back, his teeth flashing in the strobe lights. And when Miss Carriage offered an I.O.U. Treats refused it with a finger snap.
“Legends twirl for free,” he said.
Mostly, Treats operated on a bartering model, with all forms of payment accepted, including finger snaps and party invites, and no line of credit—or favor—denied.
Not the case with The Lion’s Den owner, who sold crystal and crank to the rest of the queens in Baton Rouge, the ones who twitched to industrial beats. For that, they rushed to his side and clung to his sleeve.
“Leon has a horde of fans,” Treats allowed, “a whole legion.”
Yet he whispered doubts about the bar owner and his shady business practices. No one knew where he got his money, for one. And instead of credit, Leon took score. He also took twinks and turned them into trade, Treats warned, looking at Miss Carriage but aiming the warning my way. I pretended not to hear, so Miss Carriage carved an exclamation mark in the air before my eyes.
“Lions and tigers and bears, they’re all here and all ready to pounce, so hold onto your basket,” she stared me down.
After chaperoning me into an R-rated movie the night before, a movie featuring a dance called the Time Warp and people shouting lines at the screen, Miss Carriage declared me her ward, especially at a party where not everyone “ate from the same mushroom and drank from the same tea.”
Yet it didn’t take long until Miss Carriage left me for the bar. She knocked back two gold shots in a row then set her eyes to “cruise control.” In the middle of the old battleship, a burly guy in a black funeral gown thrashed about to the sound of a drum machine with a stuffed dove wired to his wrist. Behind him, a sign said No Disco! but with a K added in pink lipstick.
“Clever,” Miss Carriage said in a rare moment of approval b
efore joining the dance. “After all, I like a good double-entendre.”
The sleeves of her gown were capped in white feathers. She raised them to testify to the beat and turned her eyes skyward while I went in search of collecting my pay from a long-haired beast.
Down in the bowels, I passed the nun and priest from the “Bohemian Rhapsody” number, only now the nun had grown a beard and the priest had grown breasts. The priest asked me to open my mouth, then he placed a tab on my tongue. When I asked what, he told me to embrace the mystery. I pushed aside Miss Carriage’s warning about clerics and swallowed.
An hour later, the angel boy appeared before my eyes in several places at once: in the parking lot with a shoe missing, a sleeve torn, and an elaborate strand of beads around his neck; in the back of somebody’s car with his face shoved to the fogged-over window and a set of claw marks overhead; in the middle of the dance floor frozen while everyone else did the Time Warp. My head flared into a full bonfire now, with memories false and true rising in spires all around. My eyes watered, my throat tightened, and my ribs throbbed me into a spasm. In the fever of my vision, every time a light flashed, the world began anew. The boy’s face flashed too, with the beauty spot opening like a small flower on his cheek. I wanted to cry out his name but kept stammering my lips.
Then, when the flashing stopped and the light went steady, I saw it: a set of dentures on the floor in the hall outside the boiler room. They were dim yellow but perfectly formed, like they were made for a singer to open before a microphone. Only there were no sounds coming from the hall or the boiler room, just a rumbling overhead. In a near stupor, I started knocking on every cabin door, busting up more than one coupling, driven with burning nostrils and a flame quickening in my head. I bolted back up to the deck and pushed my way through the crowd looking for a trail of white feathers. Yet there was no sign of Miss Carriage anywhere, not a single plume.
Until I heard an odd but familiar sound coming from the galley. A kind of choking and an ugly smear of French words. When I threw open the door, Leon had Miss Carriage on her back and a billystick in his hand. He’d come dressed as a cop, complete with a shiny badge. Miss Carriage was handcuffed, and her wig was knocked off. A bruise shone on her neck, and a line of blood trailed from her ear. She stared at me with fixed eyes, and I stared back with a shaking head. In the haze of the moment, the Lion ran past me toward the door. Without her teeth, Miss Carriage kept her lips tight. My own tongue stuttered and failed to get out a word. Yet a sharp sound ripped right from my throat, like a war cry.
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