The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

  He ignored her and she was ready to rage out at him. His dick was still there, blocking words, being a nuisance. She knew what she had to do—clearly what Myra herself, that bad bitch, would do in that moment too—but she had to wait in order to time it right. She stared down at the guy’s dick. She stared at the thick vein in the middle and watched as the man was becoming harder, like it was a balloon slowly being inflated. This was some fucked-up bullshit and she couldn’t even wrap her mind around it. She knew that New Yorkers could get down with some kinky shit—how could she not, she had met enough of them down at the piers—but she had never thought someone would have the balls to do this to her in the middle of the damn public.

  When the train slid into the next station and stopped, right before the doors opened, she placed her open palms on each side of the hardcover book, and then she slammed it shut, squeezing his dick inside the book as hard as she could.

  He didn’t scream but she could tell from the wince on his face that he was pained.

  “I asked you nicely,” she yelled. “If you don’t bruise, I hope you at least got a paper cut so bad, it’ll sting for a week.”

  He put it back in his pants and zipped up. “You fucking tranny bitch,” he said, running off before the doors slid back closed.

  “Oh dear,” the old lady next to her said. She put a hand on Venus’s thigh. “Are you alright?”

  The man to her left put down his newspaper and looked at Venus and nodded his head, but for what? To acknowledge her presence? Venus had no idea, and what good would that do anyway?

  The rest of the people in the car kept on staring at whatever they were focused on. Like nothing had happened. It made Venus even wonder if what she had just experienced was real, or if she had just imagined it all up. Surely her coke was good, but it wasn’t good enough to make her hallucinate an entire situation like that.

  “Yes,” Venus said to the lady. “I’m fine, thank you for asking.”

  But what she really wanted to do was stand up and rage against each and every person on the train who knew what was happening and chose to not say or do nothing. She didn’t do that though. She just sat there and opened her book back up where she left off: Myra was talking about postponing something, but Venus had already forgotten what needed to be postponed. She felt tired now, all of a sudden, wondering if she could make it through a single goddamn day without having a dick thrown into her face.

  She needed another line. The train kept zooming through the tunnel and she looked out the window at the shadows against the tunnel walls. She needed to get off that train and find a bathroom. She reached into her pocket to feel the small baggy of coke and she closed her eyes to daydream of how light her mind would feel when she took her next sniff.

  * * *

  She spent the afternoon on a bench at the piers reading Vidal. She spent the evening at the Gray’s Papaya, eating sauerkraut with her fingers out of those little plastic cuppies because there was no way she could stomach a hot dog after all the coke she had blown through. Then, once night hit, she went to a bar in the West Village and listened to a group of older queens attempt to work their way through some sad show tunes. Songs about hopes and dreams and futures that seemed bleak, at best. After an especially depressing rendition of “One Hand, One Heart” from West Side Story, the man singing fell to his knees only halfway through and had to be carried off stage by two lesbians who cooed, It’s alright, it’s alright. And when they were outside smoking a cigarette, whispers began: the gossip was that the man’s partner had been checked into St. Vincent’s, which was a shock to everyone because he had looked fine just the week before on Fire Island.

  That was Venus’s cue to leave. She could watch or hear no more of that. In the bathroom, she reached into her pocket to see how much coke she had left. Nothing, just residue, and the crash was creeping up on her something hard. The pressure in her temples felt like metal nails were digging in slowly, making their way to her eyeballs. She reached into her backpack and glided her hand along the bottom to see if she had any loose bills or spare change. Her fingers hit some coins, but when she added it all up, she had about three dollars’ worth of quarters, which definitely wasn’t enough to get a belly-button-size bump of coke. She wasn’t even sure it’d be enough to get her a bump’s worth of baking soda, if she had to be real about it.

  She walked up to Times Square to see if she could pop into one of the peep shows with the side booths. To take a nap. A couple of quarters could buy her—maybe an hour’s worth in the little booths?

  It took her forty minutes to walk from the Village to Times Square. The whole time she walked, she had this fantasy that Myra Breckinridge would come to life, offer her a silver platter full of rails and tight tubes of C-notes to use as nose straws. It would be fabulousness.

  She saw the first peep show sign right around the corner from Sally’s, where some of the ball children did their drag shows for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. Dorian had always talked about her own forays at Sally’s, dancing with her titties out for the closeted husbands who’d take the LIRR or NJ Transit back to their boring-ass ticky-tacky homes where they pursued their lives as breeders. All Dorian’s words, not hers.

  She walked inside the tiny booth, sat down on the stool, took off her heels, and inserted her twenty-five cents. When the curtain rose, a young girl was in silk lingerie, pushing her big breasts together behind the plexiglass. Now, if Venus had any interest in actually viewing the show, she would’ve asked for a boy dancer, but she wasn’t delusional—she knew there was no such thing as a boy dancer in one of these kinds of peep shows. No demand for such. And Venus was tired, so she didn’t want to watch shit. So, while the girl played with herself, Venus gave herself a little foot massage because her arches were killing her after all those hours trekking in heels.

  She didn’t know how quickly it had taken her to fall asleep, but when she heard the tap-tap-tapping against the plexiglass, she startled awake. The girl was on the other side, looking pissed as hell. Venus knew that the girl couldn’t see her because the viewing room where she was sitting was dark. They were designed so that the performers couldn’t see the viewers. The girl’s face was all WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING, IT’S TIME FOR MORE QUARTERS.

  Venus picked up the phone that was in the booth so she could talk to the girl. The phone was such an old, gross, sticky thing that Venus didn’t even want to bring it completely to her ear.

  “You’re such a doll, honey,” Venus said, yawning. “Just looking at your chest is making me jealous.”

  “Excuse me?” the girl said.

  “Oh yes, right, maybe I should clarify,” Venus said. “I’m not your average customer. I’m a flaming homosexual, honey. Just my presence alone could flame this building down.” She was being witty and it tickled her, but she was getting off message. She was broke and tired and gay. She needed to communicate that. “Well the thing is,” she continued, “I had a few quarters on me and I was just trying to take a nap.”

  The girl looked like she wanted to cry. And Venus could only imagine: being young and performing at a place like that, and then your clientele just wants to nap while you shove two wet fingers up your pussy? Horrid. Probably better to be stuck between a rock and a hard-hard place.

  The girl flicked the light switch and Venus’s booth lit up with fluorescent lighting. Venus hated fluorescent lighting. The road to hell, she always thought, wasn’t paved with good intentions. It was paved with fluorescent lights. “Dear,” Venus screamed, covering her eyes. “It’s too much.”

  “You can’t take a nap here,” the girl screamed into the telephone. “Get a room for that. Don’t you see I’m trying to work?”

  “And you are working,” Venus said. She could certainly empathize. She knew how it was, when things were rough and she needed to get some cash. But what could a girl do? She was out of money and energy. She had no more coke.

  The rush of nausea hit her. She swallowed two or three times quickly to keep from vom
iting. “Please, honey,” Venus said, her voice so soft that it almost embarrassed her. Just the thought of seeming weak in front of a stranger made her self-conscious. “Please, I’ve had a day, I’m sure you can relate. Can I please just sleep here for a hot second?”

  By now, her eyes were adjusting to the lighting and she could look up at the girl, who was kneeling on the ground of the plexiglass-encased room. There was a red velvet curtain all around, and the girl looked right back at Venus. “You really don’t,” the girl said, “have anything more to give?”

  The girl’s fingernails were bright blue acrylic press-ons that were too wide for her thin hands and small nail beds. “No,” Venus said. “Maybe, hold on.” She wondered if the girl was too new at this to get the proper size press-ons, or if she had just made a mistake and selected the wrong size.

  Venus reached into her backpack and took out the empty coke baggie. It looked like a Ziploc bag made for a Barbie doll. She slid it in the small tray where dollar bills were supposed to go for making special requests of the performers.

  The girl took the baggie with two fingers and ripped it open by the sides. She put it on her tongue and she sucked on it for a hot moment, then spit it out so it hit the glass and slid down. “Haven’t had any of that since I first came to the city,” the girl said, “if you can believe it.”

  The curtain on the other side of the cube swung open and Venus could see the outlines of a man in the other booth. The girl moved over to the other side and smushed her tits together as a signal that the next show would begin.

  Venus saw a cockroach near her feet, but she was too tired to flinch or scream. She grabbed her heels and tried to swat at it. It scurried away and Venus looked up one last time at the girl, wondering if the shadowed man in that other box could see Venus with the bright white lights on. And if he could, she wondered what it was, exactly, that he could see.

  * * *

  She smoked cigarette after cigarette wondering where to go. She couldn’t go back home that night, not in her current state of affairs. Angel would positively kill her if she saw her like that, especially if her nose started to act up with a nosebleed. Being in that house made her realize how much she missed Charles. She found it painful to watch Daniel and Juanito be so cariñosos with each other. Whenever she looked at Angel, she saw a mirror of her own pain too. Like Charles was not even on the same level as Hector was, but she still felt the absence of him. She wanted to stay away from all that. She wanted more blow.

  There was no way she’d be able to score some coke in the Bronx. She’d have much better luck doing that in Manhattan because the farther uptown she went, the more rocky the powder became. And she didn’t want crack.

  Then there was the issue of the piers. No, she didn’t want to go back down there. She didn’t feel like getting into cars, or sitting alone near a boom box watching other people have their fun. She didn’t have the energy or the absolute patience to be around groups of people. That left her with two options, she thought, as she waited at the crosswalk. She looked to see if there were any cars or trucks zooming by so that she could step out into the street and jaywalk.

  She could go to one of the rundown hotels or movie theatres in the area, the ones that catered to the Port Authority crowd—the pimps, the girls in poom-poom shorts, the visitors arriving by bus, looking to score.

  Some hotels had rules and some did not. Not written rules though. Not like the hotels in the beach towns she would visit with Angel back in their heyday when they were barely twenty-one, sipping margaritas with too much salt, staring at the Jersey boys, figuring out how to get a ride from Long Branch to Sandy Hook’s nudie beach. Those beachside motels had rules about shirts and shoes, which was always meant to say, you had to wear them or get out. Wear sandals by the pool, or get out. Wear a shirt and shorts at the pizza joint, or get out. Everybody was caught up in a list of rules. The hotels in New York were the same.

  She always had a love-hate fascination with these hotels, ever since she had first come to the city, fresh from Port Authority, and trekked up to Central Park. Gosh, it was disorienting to think of how many years had passed. She wondered what she would say to her younger self, if it were possible to send a message in a bottle back through time. What would she say that night, right before he took her to the Plaza and fucked her on that bed? Would she even say anything at all, even if she could?

  It was so useless to think about, she almost hated herself for trying. She waited at the crosswalk still. It was unbelievable how quickly time swept by in the grand scheme of things, yet how long it could take for a fucking crosswalk signal to change. How was it that it could only take a handful of months, or just a teeny-tiny sliver of years, for certain aspects of herself to become unrecognizable? Now, as she prepared to cross that street, among the neon signs shining for the peep shows and the pimps and the prosties in knee-highs, she just wanted another line of coke and she didn’t care what she had to do to get it.

  Another ciggie went into her mouth, but her book of matches was all out of lights. This would not do, not at all. She needed this smoke. She needed a fuck too. She needed a bag of coke, a wink of sleep, some morsel of happiness would be nice too. A man to say he loved her and it didn’t matter how old she got, he would always be there by her side. How much was that to ask for?

  “’Scuse me,” she said to the next man who passed her by. He kept walking and she said, “I said, Excuse me. I just need a light.”

  He turned around and flicked a book of matches at her. But it fell short and the book landed on the sidewalk. She had to crouch down to pick it up. He kept walking and she wanted to give him the finger for being so rude, but he had given her what she wanted, hadn’t he? She kept the finger to herself and lit her cigarette.

  “’Scuse me, darling,” she said to the next woman who passed by. She looked outrageous in her orange jacket. It was a confusing splash of orange puffs and strings. Probably one of the FIT students, she thought. “I’m just wondering,” Venus said, “if you could tell me what day we’re on?”

  “What?” the woman said.

  “What’s the day today?” Venus said, and then before the woman could respond, she blurted out, “Honey, you’re giving me Sesame Street realness in that jacket.”

  “What,” the woman said, “the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a compliment,” Venus said, “trust me. You know where I can score some coke?”

  The woman eyed Venus hard. Her eyes were purposefully smeared with bright blue eye shadow. Très edgy, Venus wanted to say, but she kept it to herself.

  “I’m not some cop,” Venus said. “Just a flaming queen in need of some lines.”

  The woman looked torn, like she didn’t know if she wanted to keep walking the street or if she wanted to give Venus the hookup.

  “At least tell me what day of the week it is, darling,” Venus said. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “Thursday morning,” the woman said, “and I am way too fucking drunk for this right now. Who are you?” When she put her hands inside her pocket, Venus thought she looked like a life-size orange lint ball that somehow sprouted a head and legs. Venus was enthralled by her and wanted to know where she was going. This woman was so chic, there was no way she didn’t know where to score some coke.

  The woman pulled her hands out of her jacket and looked left and right. She reached out her hands to offer Venus a little bump off her pinky nail.

  “Fabulous, radiant, yes,” Venus said. “You’re such a doll.” She pinched her nose so the lining of her nostril could eat it all up for breakfast. “And it’s Thursday,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air. “And we’ve got the whole weekend ahead of us, right, honey?”

  With that, the woman turned her back to Venus and threw up all over her damn self. It didn’t matter though, because Venus was feeling good, feeling fly, feeling all of her feelings. A little vomit here or there wouldn’t stop her from enjoying her high.

  JUANITO

/>   He and Daniel were in charge of decorating the tree while Angel made her bomb-ass chicken noodle. He was looking forward to that soup more than anything else that day.

  They didn’t have any stringy lights, so they decided to dress the tree with whatever party streamers and tinsel that Angel had in a cardboard box in the closet. “Ay, Dios mío,” he said, pulling out a long cord of silver tinsel from the box. “If I could, I would make a sweater out of this shit.”

  Daniel laughed. “That’d be one helluva itchy sweater.”

  Juanito clicked his teeth. “Pues,” he said, “I guess you wouldn’t get one then, now would you? Not with that kind of mentality.” He lifted his shoulder and play-huffed in Daniel’s direction.

  Daniel rolled his eyes. “Qué drama,” he said.

  The tree that Angel had been kind enough to select for them, but which she absolutely refused to help them carry down the block and up the stairs, was three feet tall. It made the tree in Rockefeller Center look ginormous, but Juanito still thought it was cute. Like they had their own baby tree right there in the sala. Daniel held the end of the party streamer between his teeth while he tried to squeeze into the corner of the room. He was trying to get the streamer around the tree. He couldn’t reach all the way, so he had to go around.

  Angel was in the cocina, stirring the pot. She asked if Venus had called. The soup, she shouted out, was almost ready for the taking.

  “Nah,” Daniel said. “Haven’t heard a thing from her in hours.”

  “Days,” Juanito added.

  “Ay, what am I going to do with that one?” Angel said. “Supongo que I’ll leave an extra bowl out for her, pero damn, Miss Free Spirit over there must be feeling the Christmas cheer.”

  “She’s probably waiting in line at Macy’s,” Juanito said. “Waiting to sit on Santa’s lap.”

  “You’re certainly feeling feisty today,” Daniel said.

  Juanito blew him an air-kiss and grabbed one of the tinsel ropes and wrapped it around Daniel’s neck so he could pull him in for a kiss. Then he pranced over to the cocina and wrapped another tinsel rope around Angel’s neck and said, “Come on, mami, ven acá.”