“I’m sorry, what?”
Royal Travesty looked at the audience, looked at Clara, then at me. A wider smile. “It’s all in good fun, hun.”
“Sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying. I don’t speak Asshole.” The audience gasped. They choked. Royal Travesty stepped forward, her bottom lip heavy, trying desperately to craft a comeback. She was either going to spit at me or kick me offstage. I was the younger, less experienced queen after all. Despite having crossed a line, I happily stood on the other side of it, delighting in the mess I had made of her emotions. I had never felt this sense of authority before, fuelled by the laughter in the audience. So drunk was I on this unfamiliar power trip that the width of my grin felt like it was going to break my face in half. Clara quickly intercepted Royal Travesty, and she signalled to the bar staff to begin my music, which was a mash-up of songs from the musical Fame.
Wearing a 1980s leotard and tights, I began lip-synching to a recording of Debbie Allen’s infamous lecture about “working your little tights off” to become a dancer. Laughter. I moved about the audience waving a teacher’s cane in their faces and preaching that it didn’t matter how big their dreams were; fame costs, and here was where they had to start paying. The cheap sound system suddenly blared my badly edited audio track of the signature “Fame” disco downbeat. The crowd went wild. Buoyed by their reaction, I pranced about onstage doing faux jazz choreography while lip-synching to Irene Cara’s lyrics. By mid-song, everyone was clapping in rhythm to the music. I pushed the audience into hysterics by miming the electric guitar solos using my own leg. Peals of laughter. I struck my final pose and enjoyed yet another standing ovation. As I walked off the stage I looked straight at Royal Travesty and gave her my most aristocratic wave.
Upstairs, Clara and Royal Travesty finished their set of performances. I sat in the office/dressing room waiting for them. Down the stairs they stomped, both of them out of breath.
“Where is that fucking bitch!? Who the hell does he think he is, shaming me in front of everyone?”
Clara pleaded with Royal Travesty. “Come on. Kay is new. Maybe he took it too personally. He just needs some fineeeeeeesse.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck if he took it personally. This is a drag show, not art therapy.”
The door of the office/dressing room slammed opened. Both Clara and Royal Travesty were drenched in sweat. Their made-up faces had melted onto the surface of their necks. At that moment, Clara was Long Faced Henry. Royal Travesty was Old Man Arthur. Only, both of them happened to be wearing dresses with wigs askew. The magic spell was over.
With the same rage she had displayed onstage, Royal Travesty glared at me, then glared at the steaming-hot large pepperoni pizza sitting on the desk. Three clean paper plates and three cold cans of cola sat next to the box. The rage shifted to confusion.
“I’m sorry to have hurt your feelings, Royal,” I said while delivering the deepest of bows. “Pizza is on me.” It was worth sneaking through the back door of Epic to Pizza Pizza in my full costume to see the look on her face. She warily grabbed a piece of pizza and took a bite, as if the flavour of the slice would confirm whether it was a gesture of humility or yet another insult. I exited the room and changed back into my street clothes just outside the office. While stepping out of my tights, I watched through the crack in the door as they devoured the pizza like pigs at a trough. I felt a thrilling combination of amusement and satisfaction at hearing nothing save for their breathy bites through the crust and the occasional belch. Sure, it wasn’t a family of four, but feeding two angry queens felt just as triumphant.
Years later, during yet another dinner at the Bridge Restaurant, Nadine gestured to the waiter. “Is this asshole going to give us our check or what?!” She kissed her teeth in frustration. She piled the cutlery onto the plate, now stained with maple syrup and icing sugar, so she could reach over and cradle my hands. “Are you doing okay?”
“Yes.” I actually was. My newest place was a second-floor walk-up in the gay village. It was a small apartment just above the Pizza Pizza at Church and Wellesley. I shared it with two other queens named Fanny and Nolan. I explained to Nadine that I had first met Fanny during the 20-Minute Drag Workout, where a dozen of the city’s most renowned drag queens guided spectators in high-heeled eighties aerobics during Pride. I was just a baby queen back then, so I watched on the sidelines in full costume and awe. It was all fun and games until someone in the crowd threw an egg at Fanny and called her a tranny ho. The front of her leotard was covered in yolk.
“No!” Nadine covered her mouth in disbelief.
“Yes. I had to think quick. She was about to cry. It was so humiliating. I stepped forward, removed my own dress and gave it to her. I happened to be wearing this Donna Summer wrap-dress, so it was easy to take off, it was easy for her to put it on over the mess, and she still blended in with the rest of the queens. Even though I was out there in my skivvies, the crowd cheered for us. Next thing I know, I’m over at her place while she’s cleaning herself off, she’s letting me search through her wardrobe for something else to wear, and she tells me she’s looking for a roommate.”
“Okay, how easy was that?” Nadine said with an absent smile while still looking for a waiter to give us our check.
“Well, finding our third roommate wasn’t as easy, let me tell you. We had a whole whack of jokers messaging us on Facebook saying they had seen our ad. Because of how desperate everyone is nowadays, lots of them didn’t have jobs. Some smelled funny. Some of them, you wanted to disinfect the house after they came by for their interview.”
“Nasty.” Nadine waved at another waiter. He looked right at her and walked on by. She sighed.
“It was. Then I met Nolan. He was doing drag at Throb Nightclub, performing his famous Miss Saigon number with a tiny helicopter. I watched him work the room. Girl, he would earn his tips by hitting audience members with his red fans and demanding they cough up some crisp bills. I knew he would never be short on rent.”
“But are they treating you okay? No more stolen money? Or fighting?”
I explained to Nadine that there was always body hair on the floor of the washroom, at least three ruined razors in the wastebasket every Friday, but there weren’t any bedbugs. I gave her the impression that living in the heart of Toronto’s gay village was a dream. I told Nadine about the topless gender-Queer youth who wore the Pride flag like a cape and ran down the street screaming, “Check out my top surgery scars, motherfuckers!” and I told her about watching the Wednesday-night American Sign Language class through the windows of the 519 community centre. I did not tell her that Epic had been vandalized yet again, that I had watched Henry sweep up the destruction one dust bin at a time, his dejected reflection shining off endless pieces of shattered bar mirror, or about Clara McCleavage’s dwindling audiences. I did not tell her how we all avoided darkened alleyways at night, the rumours of our disappearances. I did not tell Nadine about the woman walking down the street, going from stranger to stranger showing them a photo, asking if they had seen her Trans sister who had gone missing the week before. Instead I told her it all felt like magic to me, living where I felt safe, despite being down the road from where I was assaulted by my mother’s church folk. I could see from Nadine’s face that her life was not so magical, either. I had to shift the conversation and unlock the mystery of her far-away looks.
“How’s your mom doing?”
Nadine raised her eyebrows, and the edges of her lips twitched away a deeper emotion than she was allowing me to see. “She’s okay. Her new boyfriend couldn’t handle the breast cancer thing, so he’s history. Probably for the best.”
“And your dad?”
“The usual. Travelling constantly. Might see him having breakfast when he’s in town. But he spends his time ignoring me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. I’m fine by myself in that house. Once I pay off my student loans, I’ll be ready to move somewhere else. M
aybe closer to my Kay.”
In a rushed flurry towards another table, a waiter finally placed the black check folder in front of Nadine.
“Uh, thanks! Finally.” Nadine rolled her eyes. The waiter rushed off before she had a chance to pass her credit card to him. “Jesus Christ. I swear this city is getting shittier by the minute.”
I shrugged. I was finally feeling more like myself in ways I had never thought possible. “For reals? You don’t think so?” Nadine looked around her conspiratorially. “Like, I noticed things shifting around here. Like, people are getting more and more brazen with their actions.”
“What do you mean? Who is getting brazen?”
Nadine looked around again. “White people.”
“Not all white people . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really don’t want to hear it.”
“You’re half white.”
“Yes. I know. I see my white dad when he comes home. I know my dad is white. It’s not like he’s not part of the problem. He’s become more brazen too. After everything that happened during the flood, you can’t tell me things didn’t get fucked up and they didn’t show their true colours.”
Of course I could agree with her. I just didn’t want to say it out loud.
“White people are happy to go on their social media and share quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. on MLK Day. But as soon as they have their back up against a wall, as soon as they’re about to lose something, or in the case of the floods, when things get scarce, they’re quick to mark their territory.”
I looked around us, worried people would hear.
“You’re getting paranoid.”
“Like, look at this place. At first I thought it was just bad service or something. But man, we’ve been coming here for years. They’re serving everyone else. I think it’s us. We might find spit in our food one day.”
“Come on, Nadine! We just ate.”
At long last, the waiter made his way to our table with a wireless credit card terminal to process Nadine’s payment. “Your card was declined,” he said, his face cold and unmoving.
Nadine’s face twisted. “That’s impossible.”
“It was declined.”
Nadine and I accompanied the waiter to the point-of-sale desk and tried her debit card instead.
“Declined,” the waiter said, righteously handing back her card.
Nadine snatched it out of his hands. “I heard you. Do you need to say it so loud so you can embarrass me, you punk?” I touched her arm, worried about the possibility of an altercation. “No, Kay. This is ridiculous!” I quickly reached into my pocket and sifted through a wad of bills from last night’s show. I paid the waiter, and he did not say “thank you.”
Under yet another downpour, we shared an umbrella and walked to a nearby bank to check Nadine’s debit card. Two ATMs sat in the foyer of a bank, with accordion doors dividing its locked main section after hours. Nadine slid her debit card into one of the machines, only to hear a crunching sound deep within. She slammed it.
“What the hell?!”
“It’s okay, Nadine. I’m sure it’s just a glitch.” I slid my own bank card into the other machine next to her to confirm that the malfunction was unique to that particular ATM. It ate my card too.
“Shit! No!” I screamed into the slot like I could call the plastic card back to us. I banged the surface of the machine and shook my head.
Two ultra-femme gay white boys came into the bank foyer and took off their raincoat hoods. One of them drunkenly pulled his bank card from his back pocket.
“Oh fuck. I don’t know if I’m sober enough to remember my PIN. Goddamn it.”
“Oliver, come on. Lucas just texted saying they’re already at Throb. Hurry the hell up!”
Nadine and I stood quietly and watched Oliver slide his card into the ATM and retrieve five crisp green twenty-dollar bills. They replaced their hoods, then the two danced and swayed themselves out of the bank foyer. At a distance from us, we could hear them singing a song by Lizzo, but we remained silent.
I looked at Nadine as we began to make our way along Church Street. She seemed to be foggy, as if in a trance. I followed her. We walked speechlessly into a corner store a block away. We entered and made our way to the refrigerated section. Nadine reached for a bottle of water and froze. I followed her gaze to the quarter-dome safety mirror in the upper corner of the store. A Black woman was arguing with the cashier.
“Try my card again. I know I have cash in my account!”
“You’re holding up the line, man. Move along!”
“I’m not a man!”
“Could have fooled me.”
Nadine stood there, immovable, her arm still outstretched, her hand still grasping the bottle, marked by the heat of her touch.
“Hey! You with the Afro puff!” the cashier shouted towards Nadine. “Close the fridge. I’m not paying to cool the entire store.”
Nadine shook her head awake and we left, empty-handed.
I returned to work the next day, prepared to ask Henry to issue me my payment in cash. I found Henry at the bar, clearing bottles of booze to make way for a large espresso machine. He looked at the instruction handbook and at the machine quizzically.
“Good morning.” I had a sad feeling in my stomach. Nadine was right. Things were changing.
“Good morning, Keith.” I hated the sound of that name. Why did he use it? Henry adjusted the spectacles on his long nose. He was wearing a surprisingly butch ensemble that day, full of sombre neutrals. He could have been mistaken for a suburban dad with his golf T-shirt and khakis. He leaned on the bar close to me, but not so close as to be intimate.
“Keith, we’ve made some changes around here.” I looked around. The stage risers had been dismantled and several more tables stood in its place. The LED had been cut from its wire. Henry’s vowels were clipped short in neat suburban dialect. “I’m afraid you can no longer work here. Epic is now a café.”
“I can still wash dishes at a café.”
“I will have to ask you to leave.”
“What?! But—”
“Leave. I do not know you.”
Nadine texted, urgently asking me to meet her at the same bank where we had lost our cards two nights before. A queue of people overflowed past the exterior doors. All of them Others. When I approached her, she didn’t even hug me or greet me “hello.”
“You are not going to believe this, Kay. I went back to this branch wanting to get a replacement debit card. There’s this huge lineup. I’m waiting for forever. I finally get to the front of the line, and the teller checks my ID and hands me this several-page document to sign. I had to put my name down, my Social Insurance Number, date of birth, names of my parents. It was detailed. I laughed and was like, ‘Lady, am I applying for a passport here?’ and she says, ‘You’ll need to fill this out to confirm you’ve received your Verification Card.’”
“What’s that?”
Nadine reached inside her leather wallet and pulled out a plastic card. The letters of her name were punched into the surface of the card in official blocks. Underneath was a number. “And then she tells me that instead of using a debit card, I can use this to deposit or withdraw funds from my account. I’m all confused because . . . I don’t know . . . is this a form of identification, or is this a way for me to pay for things? And she says, ‘It’s both. It’s a streamlining of our system to make things easier for you.’ I’m feeling all uneasy but accept it for what it is. She smiles and asks me, ‘Is there anything else I can do for you today?’ and I ask for a hundred dollars from my account. She hands me the money and a receipt of the transaction.”
Nadine’s head looked left and right, suspiciously, then at me. “Kay, I had half the funds I originally had. I watch that account like a hawk! I know something’s fucking us up, Kay. I know something’s happening. Look at everyone in the queue. I’m not imagining things.”
I looked at the lineup, this obvious cross-section of citizens
. Deep in my belly, I knew, too, that something was happening, but residing beside that big something was a muscular reaction, a contraction in the fibres of my being telling me that this was impossible. Surely this was a dream. Surely we were imagining things. The use of these Verification Cards was just coincidence between people who happened to sit at the crossroads of race, gender and identity. These things didn’t happen here in Canada. These things happened elsewhere. These things didn’t happen without folks stepping in and stopping them from happening. The pages of history told us to never forget, to never forget the atrocities of the past, yet here we were in a city that was actively forgetting. That is why I kept my reactions, the waves of shock, from Nadine’s pleading eyes. My body was so stilled by this disbelief that we were unsafe, that I could not even bring myself to put a loving hand on her shoulder. She searched my face, from my eyes to my tight jaw, until she gave up and we began walking the streets again, silently witnessing the city falling apart.
6
I awaken with a sharp inhale of air, Nadine’s name still on my lips. The once-familiar sight of her crown of curls has disappeared, and I see Bahadur asleep on the bed next to mine, frowning through a dream. I creak softly upwards from the mattress and make my way to the window of our room.
My Evan. If you are still in hiding, if you are in a place where real things exist beyond a window, or an underpass, or a set of dark stairs, let me tell you about how beautiful this morning is.
Through the cloudy glass, I can see a heavy fog sitting like risen cream above the wilted crops of long ago. A black bird flies above and below the fog in a lonely game of peekaboo. I wrap my blanket around my body and find myself turning the knob on the cottage door carefully. I actually turn a doorknob, open a door and move my body outside of a room, Evan. I am free, at this moment, to move my body from one place to another. And it feels good. I want to touch the fog myself. I head outside and the black bird flies out of sight. All insects stop their singing in fear of me, and I try to creep quietly among the reeds in the hopes that the insect songs will continue despite my presence. I fail. I can never be quiet enough for them to forgive me. Even the dew on the grass slips into the secret of the deep green as I pass.
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