DEDICATION
For my family
EPIGRAPHS
In sorrow, seek happiness.
—Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
i need to know their names
those women i would have walked with
jauntily the way men go in groups
swinging their arms, and the ones
those sweating women whom i would have joined
after a hard game to chew the fat
what would we have called each other laughing
joking into our beer? where are my gangs,
my teams, my mislaid sisters?
all the women who could have known me,
where in the world are their names?
—Lucille Clifton, “the lost women”
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
Author’s Note
Part One: Motherhood/Sisterhood Motherhood
Sisterhood
Part Two: The House One
Two
Three
Four
Part Three: The Sky View
Coda: Going
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Though some of the characters who appear in this novel are based on historical figures, and many of the places described—such as the Christopher Street Piers, Sally’s, The Saint, Paradise Garage—were important places during the decades covered, it is important to note that this narrative is fiction. The portraits of the characters who appear in this story, along with the events and journeys covered, should not be taken as a historical record. I believe that the role of the novelist is to search for poetic and narrative truth, and it is my sincere hope that this novel is a representation of such an effort.
PART ONE
MOTHERHOOD/SISTERHOOD
(1976–1984)
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
MOTHERHOOD
(1976–1981)
ANGEL
1980
Girrrl—
Before there was Dorian and before there was Hector, there was 1980—the year that things began to change. Diana Ross was pumping on the radio, Angel was sixteen years young and already she felt she was being turned upside down, inside out, boy oh boy, everything was turning around-around. If the seventies were the decade of disco, then the eighties would be what?—the beginning of a new era?—the decade of the sequin? It was the time that Angel the he became Angel the she—even if it was only something felt within the deepest layers of her soul, she knew that it was there, underneath the skin and the bone, as thin as a sheet of silver foil.
It’s not that she felt trapped in her boy body. She felt as libre as a paloma on a humid summer night, flying up and around the project buildings of Da Boogie Down. How good it felt to say she!—because she didn’t need to be a woman as much as she needed to have the air of a woman. So when her mother and brother, Miguel, were out of the house to run the weekly errands, Angel would take off her jeans and shave her legs. She stood there naked in front of Mami’s vanity. She tucked her stuff back—up and away with a piece of duct tape—and closed her legs so that they crossed like an X.
Her skin was so smooth, her body so lean. But then there was her face. She knew she wasn’t nobody’s conception of cute, pero maybe when she got older she could cover it up with makeup. She could put on fake lashes, tweeze her brows, and put liner on her lips to make them look more plump. Years later, she’d think back on those nights and wonder what in Christ she was thinking being all tacky-tacky like that. Pero in the moment, it all felt right and she—for the first time that day—felt beautiful.
She took out the crumpled picture of Bette Davis that she hid inside her science textbook. She loved Bette Davis because she loved her sass. On summer nights, she sneaked down to the midnight showings of Bette’s flicks in the Village and Chelsea multiplexes. She loved the drama of it all. She had picked up smoking because Bette Davis made it look so classy. Then eventually she found herself hooked to the damn things.
Miguel, who was only two years younger than Angel, had a stash of Newports hidden under his bed, so she took one and watched in the silver reflejo of the mirror as the smoke curled out of her lips. She walked to the bathtub and finished smoking while lounging in the water.
Once the cig was done, she dipped the end of it into the water, got out, and dried herself down. She always feared that Mami and Miguel would arrive home earlier than expected. (Ay, Dios mío, the Pathmark was closed down, Mami would say, but I forgot my wallet on top of the counter, and what the fuck are you wearing?) What would Angel say then? Caught red-handed, smooth-legged, in her mother’s silk kimono that was so long, it looked like she was a tree made of flowing silk.
She imagined it would go something like this: Mami would cry and smack her with the broom, scream the Apostles’ Creed, and threaten to call the santera lady to cleanse Angel with chicken blood and soothing tree oils, or some mierda like that. Miguel would watch, too stoned para decir nothing. And as this fantasy-nightmare played in Angel’s mind, she practiced the lines from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane in the mirror:
—You wouldn’t be doing these awful things to me if I weren’t still in this body.
—But you are, Angel! [mouthing to the mirror, pointing a finger at her reflection as the bath water got swallowed by the drain] You are in that body!
* * *
She met Jaime one day when she was gliding around St. Mark’s looking for an outfit that would pop. Jaime worked behind the sales counter even though he looked so bored at it—the kind of guy who seemed to have stumbled into fashion because he was beautiful. But it was his boredom that looked mad cute, like it was some kind of accessory that he was working. He had a fitted light-denim jacket and black pants that were so tight, Angel got a peek at his bulge.
Pero Jaime didn’t give her no time of day. He just sold her the glitter nail polish she wanted with that same blank look of boredom. As she walked toward the door, she could feel his presence walking right behind her. She thought of what she could do: side-glance at a pair of black leather pants to ask the price (she was too flaca to make them pass), or drop the nail polish on the floor (and risk breaking the damn bottle?!), or just turn around and say, The weather today is crazy, ain’t it (but girl, her stomach was in knots, and besides, the weather was perfectly natural), so she didn’t do or say nada. And it was for the best, because homeboy was just looking to take a drag on his cigs, not nothing more, not nothing less.
He became Angel’s recurring daydream. In these fantasies, Jaime and Angel were never in the same spot. In one, they’re on a dance floor and nobody stands between them. Blondie is on blast. Even though she can’t hear the music, she can feel it and knows that it is so. In another, they’re at the Botanical Garden next to some flowers she never knew the names of. In yet another, they’re on the subway platform at Grand Central watching a tourist scream at a rat. And the same thing happens in each one: that is to say, nothing. Nothing happens: they make uninterrupted eye contact, the kind of eye contact that feels like it is penetrating warmth into her body, but Angel can’t think of anything to say. They stare and stare and Angel knows she gotta say something to fill the silence, and because she’s daydreaming, it’s almost like she can feel the words dangling from the tips of her fingers, but they can never travel to the tip of her tongue and come out of her mouth.
Nothing changed in her fantasies, nothing
ever changed, day after day, night after night, except what she was wearing. Sometimes a tight silver-lamé onesie, or leather chaps (that one gave her cold sweats when she woke!), or another time it was just a simple little black dress or pair of jeans. She’d want to tell him that he was cute, that her body longed for his, but nothing would come out of her mouth, and then she would force herself to wake.
A month later, she decided that she had to go back to the store to throwdown. And by throwdown, she didn’t mean nothing violent or wack. By throwdown, she meant, ask for his number. When she arrived, however, he wasn’t at the counter. In his place, there was a chica as pale as costume pearls. She was wearing black lipstick, black pants, black eyeliner. Angel watched as she leaned against the counter and glanced back at Angel, probably to calculate if Angel was worth helping. The girl gave Angel a once-over, then went back to her nails.
“Pardon me,” Angel said. “Can I ask you something?”
The girl didn’t look up from the ferociousness of her nail filing. Angel asked again.
“I heard you,” the girl said. “I heard you the first time.”
Angel did not appreciate the tone or the attitude. “Well,” Angel said. “Can I ask you then?”
The girl gave her a long set of eyes. “I suppose,” the girl said, planting the nail file down on the counter as if she were in pain.
Angel explained that she was there the month before to buy, well, it didn’t matter what she bought, but she was helped by this dude. She didn’t mention the bored face or the cigarettes or the dreams she had of making awkward, uninterrupted eye contact while wearing nothing but silver lamé. Instead, she described the way his chin pointed just so, the way his eyebrows were groomed, and how his hair went just a tad over his ears, like some cover model for Christopher Street magazine that Angel had once seen with the caption: INTERVIEW WITH THE BUTCHEST MAN ALIVE.
“Oh, you mean Jaime?” the girl said. She rolled her eyes and Angel wanted to pry those eyelids open with her fingernails. “Of course you would be looking for Jaime. I should’ve known. Every little queen south of Fourteenth is looking for Jaime.”
“Well I got news for you,” Angel said, the sass in her voice unintended until it actually came out. “Do I look like one of those Fourteenth Street hippies? Girl, I am from Da Boogie Down Bronx. Just look at this style.”
It was true that Angel shouldn’t have given off any other aura than that of the Bronx, and maybe if that girl wasn’t rolling her eyes up to the back of her head every time Angel spoke, she would’ve seen Angel’s cute white T-shirt and Yankees cap. Angel’s style that day was giving vibrations of the little flaco Boricua boy that Angel’s body inhabited. Only in those dark moments at night, when she was alone at home, would she allow herself to indulge in her feminine beauty.
The girl blew a giant gum bubble. A pink ball against black makeup. Angel watched as the bubble grew bigger and bigger and hit the tip of her nose. Then it popped. As she reeled the deflated gum back into her mouth, Angel saw the black lipstick smudged on the gum.
“Ugh,” the girl said, like it was a statement. “The Bronx.”
“Yeah,” Angel said. “What of it?”
“What a shithole.”
* * *
As it turned out, Jaime was on his lunch break. Angel should have figured that out, and even though the girl clearly wanted Angel out of her nose hairs, Angel stayed and pretended to finger through the racks of clothes that were too punk rock for her to ever pull off. When Jaime returned with a McDonald’s soda cup in his hand, the girl raised her eyes, popped her gum, and said, “Jaime, baby, you got another visitor.”
The girl punched out and left without any goodbye. They were alone in the store and Angel was fishing for something to say. She settled on asking him what he got at Mickey D’s.
“That’s the question you’re gonna ask me?” Jaime said. He was smirking at her from where he stood at the back of the store, near the dressing room that was really nothing more than a side alcove with a red curtain as a door. “I remember you,” he said.
Angel was too nerviosa to ask something else, or dish out her usual dose of sass that she usually flung when someone was short with her. “Yeah,” she said. “I just wanted to know.”
Then, just like in her dreams, they stood at opposite ends of the store, alone, giving each other long eye contact in total silence. At least in the comfort of her fantasyland, she could startle herself awake, but she knew that now, since this was a real-life moment, she couldn’t do none of that. His eyes scanned her up and down and she felt naked under the heat of his attention. “Come over here,” he said. “There’s something I want you to do.”
Her heart raced as she walked over to the dressing room. Once they were inside together, Jaime pulled the curtain shut. Angel wanted to ask what would happen if a customer came in, but she knew better than to say anything. They both faced the mirror, which was an eight-foot ordeal leaned against the wall in all its hand-smudged glory. She loved that Jaime and the girl hadn’t even bothered to clean the glass that day, as if there was no point to cleaning a surface that would be smudged again.
Jaime sat down on the stool and told her to undress. When she was finally naked, nipples tight with excitement, Jaime said he’d be right back and swooshed around the curtain. He returned with a tight silver dress, size who-knows-how-small, but it fit Angel’s figure like plastic wrap over a plate of chuletas: tight but giving. She slipped it on and when she finally stared at herself in the mirror, then at Jaime staring at her through the mirror, she raised her arms to the side like she was about to launch into flight. Head back, mouth open, she closed her eyes and laughed. Free, she thought, totally free.
It was the kind of freedom you felt when someone was looking at you and finally saw what others couldn’t see because it had been bottled away for so long. Angel had walked into that store in boy clothes, and there was Jaime, who had seen her and knew. How Jaime had known that Angel was the type of maricón to wear a dress, Angel didn’t know.
When she turned around to face him, she saw his eyes devouring her. She felt it—like she had an invisible hook attached to her body and she was going to reel him in, until he was closer, closer, closer.
“Turn around,” he told her, grabbing her shoulders in order to swivel her body back around. “I wanna do something to you, you slut.”
She faced the mirror as he bent her body down enough so that he could pull the bottom of the dress above her hips. He bit her right nalga, then he slapped her ass. She wasn’t expecting it, as if it were a sheet of glass about to smash into a concrete slab. The next morning, she would look at the bite mark in the mirror and think about how it looked like an itty-bitty bear trap had closed in on her, but then, when the bell at the front of the store jingled, Jaime stopped slapping her ass. He told her not to make a sound, and then he left her there all alone.
* * *
The next weekend, Jaime told her to wear the silver dress and meet him at The Saint, where he worked as a bouncer. It was a side gig, he told her, so he could treat himself to some booze and blow every now and then. She was faithful to Jaime’s request: she wore the silver. Once she stepped outside, she was dressed like a woman for the first time outside the confines of her bedroom.
She took a jar of Vaseline, smeared it all over her face, and dabbed the rest on the bits of skin that were still exposed once she had the dress on. Then she doused herself in a bottle of glitter like she was shining brighter than a quinceañera dress. The goal was for her to embody silver in all its element—head to toe, didn’t matter if it was radiating off her skin or the fabric—she was silver.
“Girl, what is this, what is going on?” Jaime said when Angel arrived. His fingers buzzed around her, snapping here and there. She loved the way his triceps bulged whenever his arms moved. He was the kind of man who looked so lean in his clothes, even his muscles came as a surprise.
Behind her, a group of five denim-clad muscle-gods stood with crossed a
rms until they flashed their membership cards and Jaime waved them in.
“What?” Angel said. “You don’t like?”
“Oh, honey, I love me some glitter,” Jaime said. “But you took it way over the line.”
“What line!” She snapped her fingers once, then got closer to his face so she could whisper, “You know I don’t give no care about some line.”
“Ay, mi Angel,” he said. “Whatchoo think this is—Baby’s First Ballet Recital? You ever heard that saying, ‘Too much of a good thing’?”
“No,” she said, trying to make sure she didn’t cry in front of him. She knew that Jaime was right. She looked like a glitter factory exploded and she was caught in the center of it all. “But if it’s a good thing,” she wanted to know, “how can you ever have too much of it?”
“Honey,” Jaime said. “Look, it don’t matter. Next time, use enough glitter to accentuate, not distract.” He placed his hand on Angel’s culo and guided her through the door. “Come see me later,” he said and winked.
The Saint was off the hook. Shirtless chulos in leather pants, feather headdresses, crystal-encrusted nipple tassels, a man dressed like an Egyptian pharaoh pushed up against the side wall getting a blow job from not one but two boys dressed like Cleopatra. (There were normal guys too, in jeans and tight tees, but it was the locas that caught Angel’s eye.) A man in a neon-yellow thong walked over to Angel and grabbed her ass, smiled at her, and gave her a plastic cup filled with bubbling white wine and a strawberry slice that floated to the top. “On the house,” the chulo said before giving her an air-kiss. “The next one ain’t free though.”
The theme, Angel noticed from the posters that were taped to the golden theater doors was HISTORY, emphasis on the HIS. A shame that Jaime had not informed her of the theme (think of the possibilities!), although she thought she could always throw down the claim that glitter was timeless, and therefore, fit the essence of the theme.
The House of Impossible Beauties Page 1