As he poured the drink, I sat at the small table he’d just wiped. Paul told me that none of the regulars at the bar had come down with it. “I would know,” he said, coming over to the table. “We’re a close group.”
“You would know,” I said. “The guys are gone so fast. But you can have it and not even know it for years. Then they’re just gone. The trick is preventing them from getting it and spreading it by accident. I have a doctor I know who is willing to give AIDS tests—no grief or questions asked. I feel like nobody knows the most basic stuff.”
“Which is?”
“You have to use condoms.”
His eyebrows arched even higher. “Do you know many people like us?”
“Presbyterians?” I joked.
“Gay folks.”
“Well, I do now. And I have a cousin in Hawaii. He’s the one that turned me blond. And I had a friend growing up. I mean, he never told anyone, but Helen Keller could tell . . .”
Paul laughed.
“I’m sorry, was that rude?”
“I like rude,” he said. “So, you’re not a fag hag.”
“A what?”
“A woman who just likes to hang around gay people.”
“Are you calling me a hag?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, laughing.
“Good, cause I may be a lot of things, but a hag is not one of them.”
“I really thought you were coming in here to Bible thump,” he said, pointing at my planner. “You look like a church lady.”
“I’m a Methodist,” I said. “So that makes me proud. But that’s not what I’m here about.” I opened the book to show him. “See? I’m taking notes on what’s happening. I’m serious about this.”
“Why?
“What do you mean, why?”
“Why are you serious about this?”
I took a long sip of my drink. I hadn’t stopped to ask myself that, and I wanted to give the answer the courtesy of real thought. “I just don’t think it’s right,” I finally said. “I don’t think it’s right. You said I looked like a church lady. Well, I am, but I’m a real one. Jesus is tough. He calls you to do the right thing, and that’s always the hard thing.”
“Okay, but when you come back, don’t mention Jesus.”
“Oh, don’t worry . . .”
“He’s like an ex-boyfriend for a lot of people here.”
“I get that,” I said. “So, I can come back?”
“Come back Saturday night,” he said. “We have a drag show twice a month. Brings in everyone and all the tourists.”
When I left, my eyes had become so adjusted to the dark that now the world outside seemed too bright and too harsh.
I came back to Our House for the Saturday drag show, telling Mitch I was busy. I didn’t want to worry about a plus-one when I felt like I was enough of an outsider as it was. I was surprised by how many cars were in the parking lot in back. I walked in, and it was burning up hot in there, like a steam room with no ventilation. They were playing Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money,” so loud I felt like I was in a music video. The blond surrounded by a roomful of men.
I spoke too soon. A woman who was shooting pool hopped over the corner of the pool table like she couldn’t get to me fast enough to say hi.
“Ruth!” she said.
“Suzann,” I said, smiling. She ran the flower shop and was also the local motorcycle cop. I’d known her since the sixth grade.
“I haven’t seen you here before,” she said.
“First time,” I said, looking at the men dancing, kissing, laughing. It was the essence of fun.
Suzann was looking into my eyes. She was real cute, so I bet this worked on girls. “Honey, let me tell you, I’m just visiting,” I said. “Men aren’t that bad yet, but I promise you’ll be the first to know.”
She laughed. I looked right at her. “But I am really happy to see you.” I made a show of looking around hopefully and crossing my fingers. “I have a feeling I’ll meet a man tonight!” I joked.
We laughed. “Nice to see you, Ruth,” she said, eyeing me up and down before she went back to playing pool. Other than that, it was like I was invisible. I was so used to men looking at me that it was weird. I’m not bragging—you and I know a straight man will size up any woman with or without a pulse.
I saw a drag queen at the bar and made my way over to get a drink. She was so tall, red hair for days falling all around her big shoulders.
“Can I put vodka in your soda and lime this time?” she asked.
“Paul?”
“Miss Cherry Fontaine,” Paul said.
“You look amazing,” I said.
“Thank you, Ruth. The show starts at ten,” he said, pointing at a pair of double doors as he poured generously. It was top-shelf vodka he’d tucked away, the only bottle they had. “It’s more of a suggested start time. The queens won’t start until there are enough customers in the showroom to tip them, and people won’t pay to go in until they know the queens are starting.”
“That old story.”
“Yes,” he laughed, going off to tend to another customer. “That old story.”
I turned and saw an empty seat and grabbed it. The two guys at the table looked at me for a moment, then turned back to each other with a “get her” face. I’d worn a little black dress and made my hair big enough to let the drag queens know I put effort in but not so much that I was competing. I looked at everyone, people in jeans and tees, definitely a beer crowd, and a lot of them didn’t even have a drink in their hands. It was like the social halls my daddy and his veteran buddies would go to. It wasn’t about getting drunk. It was about being together.
Just as I was beginning to worry I was overdressed, a man swanned in wearing a full-length mink coat. He walked toward me but didn’t register my presence. In one fell swoop he threw his mink off onto the arm of a chair behind me. And then he laid a wallop of a kiss on a man, seeming intent on sticking his whole face down this other’s guy throat.
I instinctively looked away, not because it was two men but because I knew him. It was my childhood classmate Greg. Growing up, other kids had teased him mercilessly and called him Liberace because he played piano. He was really so talented, but people couldn’t see past his flamboyance.
Greg saw me only once he came up for air. Then he grabbed his fur and ran out. Couldn’t run fast enough.
I tried to disappear. It was like, Hi, everybody! Come meet me! I felt so bad. I had known him since the fourth grade. I’d never said a bad word to him, but he felt like he had to run from me.
Thank God Paul rang a bell and yelled that the show was starting. People started walking to the double doors, and Paul was there to take the entrance fee. I reached into my purse.
“You’re good,” he said.
“I’m a little naughty,” I said. “But thank you. I really appreciate the welcome.”
I walked into the showroom, which looked like a legion hall rec room. It had the same low, tiled ceiling as the bar, but they’d hung red draping in the back to create a sense of a stage. The audience sat jam-packed at about forty metal foldaway tables, arranged with folding chairs that looked like they were pulled from the trash. Every once in a while, a face would peek out from a side door to see how the room was filling. It got to about 150 people, and the room got tighter and tighter. Standing room only, and people were still outside trying to get in. Finally, Paul took the stage to start introducing the performers one by one.
The first up was Miss Misty McCall, in a beautiful beaded gown that just looked expensive. She lip-synched “Take Me Home,” looking more like Cher than Cher as she moved around the stage. Gradually, people would approach the stage and offer a dollar, which she would take in her hands during the instrumental portions of the song.
Next was Consuela, swinging
her natural long blond hair as she did Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up.” She was as thin as Twiggy, and I kept thinking the word willowy. When people performed in our church, you sometimes smiled at them like you were the only thing keeping them from falling apart in the spotlight. There was none of that here. This was someone commanding the stage, with small movements designed for maximum impact.
Mother Superior was announced, and I expected a nun, but she was even better. A six-foot-five, three-hundred-pound person in a big dress with tassels and jeweled strings. She danced to Dolly Parton’s “Why’d You Come in Here Looking Like That,” at double the speed of the music. She was manic but light on her feet, twirling so that all her bangles and beads flew like some gorgeous taffeta car wash. There was a large support beam running across the ceiling, and Mother was taller even than the beam, so she had to duck her head as she moved to collect dollars. She spun and spun until I was dizzy, then she was hitting the floor and popping up like she was break-dancing. The crowd ate it up, screaming for more. She just scowled at us as she stalked around grabbing the money.
Miss Brown Sugar came out, leaning elegantly on her cane as she moved to center stage. She wore a brown sequined dress that hugged her wide hips, holding the mic with a shiny white glove, like a jazz singer from the sixties. I sat up as she began.
“Summertime, and the living is easy,” she mouthed, seeming so languid about it that she made it seem true that nothing could harm any of us. She was so regal, briefly serenading people as they handed up offerings of dollars. The performers came and went, each trying to outdo the other with an even more glamorous gown. It was like Dynasty, but that was absurd because we were in Arkansas, which meant these people didn’t have the means to have a fabulous life. But there they were in fabulous gowns. It wasn’t clownish, it was elegance, a celebration of feminine beauty. They were goddesses. The idea that I could breeze by someone like this in Hot Springs, walking around in their boy drag, and not know it? I was in love with the whole scene.
And then the emcee introduced Miss Marilyn Morrell.
I swear everyone leaned forward before she even hit the stage. And when she did, people cheered.
Billy, aka Marilyn, made a classic drag queen entrance into my life. Just breathtaking. Fine-boned and broad-shouldered, wearing a shoulder-length, curly black wig that looked like God gave it to her. Marilyn sang Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” in a beautiful long white dress that absorbed all the light in the room and shot it back at you. There were lesbians in the front row, and they sat up, giving her their full attention, holding their hands up to be ready to clap the loudest. You couldn’t not look at her. I looked over and saw Paul staring in adoration. This was a star.
Midway through the song, I reached into my purse for a dollar and approached her. Marilyn turned to me and smiled, reaching out a hand like a queen accepting a tribute.
“Thank you, darling.”
“You are so welcome,” I said.
I turned and walked over to Paul, who was standing by the stage to watch. “Who is that?” I said. “She’s amazing.”
“She’s my boyfriend,” he said in a soft voice, touched with awe. “That’s Billy.”
Chapter Fifteen
On Sunday night Allison had trouble settling down. It was hot, which didn’t help, but I knew it was because second grade was about to start and she was anxious. We both were. I was in her room, and she was all brushed and in her pajamas. The phone wasn’t ringing, and there were no emergency visits to be had.
She looked at me with a conspiratorial smile. “You wanna go out on a midnight run?”
I smiled back. “Let’s go.”
We did these nighttime drives periodically, especially when it was hot. It fit my restless heart too. We drove out to the lake and then up North and West Mountains. It always worked for us. Allison wouldn’t get sleepy in the car, but she knew that by the time we went home, it was time for bed. I’ve done my part, now you’ve got to do your part.
The lake was gorgeous, an expanse of black glass jeweled by lights across the way. The windows down, we breathed in great big gulps of air, summer leaving us soon. The roads up and down the mountains wind and wind; it’s one-way now, but it used to be two-way or “however you want to get up or down.”
We always stopped at the top of West Mountain to take in the view. In the sixties and seventies, this was Makeout Mountain. Everybody came up here with the excuse that they wanted to see “the duck.” It was an outline of a duck shaped by the lights of Hot Springs, but you had to look for it. Kids would tell their parents, “We went up to see the duck.”
“That’s nice, dear.” A lot of pregnancies started up here.
Hot Springs had grown out so much that the duck had disappeared, but Allison still tried to find it. We got out and sat on the front of the car, our feet perched on the fender. This was our spot, and sometimes we’d get doughnuts before school and watch the sun come up here. I reminded myself to try to do more of that this year—if there was time.
She pointed out Tim and Jim’s building and figured out which was their light on the eleventh floor. “They are so funny,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“I hope they can be okay for a long time.”
I paused, not sure what to say. “Me too,” I said. What was permanent to my little girl? Her father gone, dependent on the friendship of kids whose parents hadn’t yet forbidden them to even play near her. Meeting these men, only to bury them. Sooner, later, but always the same end. At seven, her prayer was for time.
I held her with my right arm, my hand tucked under her leg to pull her toward me. With my other hand, I traced out the duck from memory. “It’s still there,” I told her. “You just have to look for it.”
That weekend I invited Mitch to come with me to the drag show, telling him to dress up to show respect for the performers. Mitch wore one of his white Hong Kong shirts with the initials embroidered on the cuffs, open at the collar, gray slacks, and a black belt with a heavy gold buckle. I wore a red cocktail dress, which he complimented, so it must have looked good, because Mitch wasn’t one for compliments. It’s not that he was a jerk, it just didn’t occur to him to point things out. The irony was that he was vain, which is partly why he enjoyed the show so much. He loved the attention he got from the guys at the bar, and when the performers made him a part of the show, serenading him at certain moments in songs, he seemed as mesmerized as I was. I guess a poor kid from Cutter dressed up in a hundred-dollar shirt felt a certain kinship with a drag queen.
Mitch and I were on the dance floor after the show, still enraptured from the performance. Between songs, I congratulated him on being so good and respectful about giving dollars to the performers. He laughed. “Well I give ’em to the strippers,” he joked, “so why not your friends?”
I rolled my eyes but laughed. I put my arm around his neck, and I spotted Billy over Mitch’s shoulder. His makeup washed off, he remained beautiful, with short hair, coal black. You’d now describe his cheekbones as chiseled, the flat angles of his chin as strong. He looked so young, probably just out of his teens.
I waved a hand at him as he walked by and simply said, “I loved the show.”
He stopped. “You did?” he asked. His voice was deeper than I expected, with no country accent at all. There was a shyness to it that I also hadn’t expected.
“Oh yes,” I said, wanting to say so much more. “I loved your dress.”
He let out a wonderful laugh, a hearty one that seemed like it would never be at anyone’s expense. “I love yours,” he said.
“Where are you from?” I asked. I could not place his voice at all.
“Dardanelle.”
“Dardanelle,” I nearly shouted, unable to hide my shock.
He smiled, giving me a conspiratorial look before more fans came over to hug him. Dardanelle was an hour and a half north through t
he pines along Highway 7, right on the banks of the Arkansas River. A whole town just left on the shore, waiting for the barges of the 1800s to come back, bringing gin and cotton and news of the world out there. It was one of those places with all the cars putting out blue smoke because it’s that poor of a town. The Great Depression never really left Arkansas, but I imagine when it came to shake down Dardanelle, there wasn’t much to take.
We were drawn to each other, but for a long time it was just a mutual fascination. Me in my Junior League haircut, and him, the movie star from Dardanelle. I didn’t see much of him at first, even though a couple of nights a week I would leave Allison with Bonnie for an hour or two so I could go to Our House when it opened at five. I sat at the bar, near Paul, drinking my club soda and chatting here and there with him. I didn’t bother him while he was setting up. We were two cats getting to know each other, and this was his territory.
In Hot Springs, you learned who someone was by figuring out who their people were. That wasn’t the case at Our House. Almost all the regulars had left their hometowns to create their own lives here in Hot Springs. Even Paul, who’d moved to Hot Springs as a sophomore in high school, seemed to have lived those fifteen years in a different world. If they’d had any skin in the straight world of Hot Springs, they couldn’t just go to a gay bar. The family’s reputation would be on the line too. But the men and women who went to Our House had already left all that behind.
Just by being a wallflower, I slowly began to break in to the community. I knew gay men from my AIDS work, but that was the language of T cells and symptoms. This was different. There was the interchanging of “he” and “she,” depending on mood, and the passion for drag queens. People talked about pageants and of queens being robbed of crowns and trophies with such conviction that I worried real fights would break out. They dropped names like Miss Lena London and Miss Candace Kincaid and fought over who should have been last year’s Miss Gay Arkansas if the score sheets were correct. “Those Little Rock queens . . .” someone would say, and people would shake their heads.
All the Young Men Page 16