by Jeffery Self
My curiosity was getting the better of me, so later that night I Googled more about the pageant. The information online made it clear that while it was a “beauty pageant,” it wasn’t meant in the traditional Miss America sense. The whole idea of beauty not being what we look like but who we are was definitely a comforting thing to remember.
There was no swimsuit competition, thank God. But there was an opening number where each contestant would be introduced, a talent portion, an interview portion, and then the essay performance.
I had no talent. Sure, I enjoyed singing, alone in my room, but that didn’t make it a talent. Nowadays you had to sing while ice-skating through a ring of burning cars or be famous for zero reason on Vine in order to be called talented.
And then there was the whole competition taking place in New York thing. I was in Florida, which meant it wasn’t exactly a bus ride across town. I had a hundred and ten dollars saved up in a sock in my dresser, but that was all I had to my name. That wouldn’t even get me a one-way plane ticket. Asking my parents was out of the question, especially because they believed that anything you needed in life could be found at Walmart, and if Walmart didn’t have it, then you could probably live without it.
Who was this John Denton of the John Denton Memorial Foundation, anyway? According to the information online, he had been a big playwright in New York during the seventies and eighties. He was some kind of cult icon who had no family and had chosen to leave his entire estate to this foundation in hopes of, as he put it, “helping to empower and strengthen the minds and confidence of queer youth in the way it took me an entire life to do for myself.”
I wondered what it was that had finally strengthened the confidence of this John Denton character, what finally made him feel comfortable in his own skin, and if it was even possible for me to find that in myself at all.
The competition was scheduled for the first week of April, which was our school’s spring break. A trip to New York for spring break would be like a dream come true. But as with all of my dreams, I inevitably had to wake up and smell the coffee—or, in my case, the gasoline.
There was absolutely no way it could happen.
My phone rang—it was Seth. Like he had spies in my mind to tip him off that I was thinking about his idea.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Hi. Are you still mad at me?”
“I was never mad at you.”
He chuckled his dumb little chuckle that only he could make cute.
“I know. I’m just calling to say hey.”
“I was just on the website for the scholarship, actually. Did you know John Denton was some obscure playwright who left his money to this foundation to help gay kids?”
“I see someone’s been doing his research.”
“Isn’t it crazy to think about how when somebody like John Denton was a kid, the very word gay was considered so taboo he couldn’t have even said it?” I asked. I had never lived in a world where gay wasn’t at the very least the description of a wacky next-door neighbor on a TV show. Sure, it wasn’t always easy to be gay in Clearwater, Florida, but it wasn’t anything like someone like John Denton would have experienced. Gay people were everywhere now and some of them were getting married and having kids, to a degree that John Denton probably wouldn’t have been able to wrap his head around. Sure, I was insecure about almost everything, but at least I had the freedom to be proud of being a gay person, even if I wasn’t wild about the person part.
“Yeah,” Seth said. “Crazy, huh? And to think after his struggles he still left this amazing legacy for someone like you and you don’t even want to try to take it.”
“Seth,” I said, flat and edgy, the way I always did when I was over a particular subject.
“I just want you to let go of what you felt before. We all have to do that once in a while; we all just have to move on from something that made us feel bad about ourselves sometimes. You can’t hold on to it.”
“Oh yeah. When was the last time you had to let go of something that made you feel bad?”
Seth was uncharacteristically quiet on the other end, as if I’d upset him.
“You still there?”
He brushed off the whole conversation with a laugh and said he had to run, but before he hung up he told me he loved me no matter what and would always be there to believe in me. I wondered why, even in modern times, even with all that had changed since somebody like John Denton was around, even with a gorgeous boy telling me he loved me … I still couldn’t face an opportunity that, sure, scared me, but also excited me in a way I was just too scared to admit to myself or anyone else. I wondered what John Denton would say.
Later that night, I ate dinner in front of the TV, which was tuned in to the Home Shopping Network because Mom was in control of the remote. A woman was selling sixty-dollar snow boots people could pay for in five installments. With a sleeping Li’l Biscuit in her lap, Mom was on the phone, reading her credit card number to the operator on the other end of the line. Dad came in, tired as always, dirty as always, and with a beer in his hand as always.
“Four-five-five-four … seven-nine-two …” Mom squinted at her Visa.
“What’s she doing?” Dad asked, plopping into the ratty old recliner only he was allowed to sit in.
“Ordering boots, I think.” I bit down on the frozen burrito Mom had “cooked” for dinner, the center still ice-cold.
“What the— Debby! Hang up that phone right now!”
Mom waved her hand at him and moved on to the expiration date.
Dad continued to huff and puff but Mom just talked over him. Finally he grabbed the phone and hung it up before she could get to the security code.
“Hey! Those snow boots are on sale!”
“What the hell do you need snow boots for?” Dad tossed the phone onto the couch beside me. “We live in Florida!”
Mom groaned as she lit a cigarette and took a deep, long drag, which was followed by a deep, long cough.
“We need to save some money. JT is graduating this year and we gotta think about the future,” Dad said, taking off his shoe. The odor of his foot filled the room—an odor that could have peeled paint off of a car.
I perked up. It was the first time Dad had ever used JT and future in the same sentence. I was actually surprised he remembered it was my senior year.
“Right, son? It’s about time we start thinking about your education.”
I couldn’t believe it. Dad had never talked about my education, except the one time he got mad at me for reading too often.
“I picked this up for you today.” Dad slapped a brochure onto the coffee table, a cloud of dust billowing in its wake. I looked down.
Clearwater Technical School Auto Repair Department.
“I figure you ought to start taking classes this summer, get a jump start on the training, and maybe we can open a little shop for ya in that old garage behind the gas station. Buddy of mine says the mechanical industry is really booming.”
I had thought, for a moment, that my father was approaching an understanding of what I wanted.
Now, not so much.
I was sure that auto repair classes at the technical college would have been awesome for some other teenager, someone whose passion lay under the hood. I knew those guys existed. My dad had been one of them. But this wasn’t exactly what I imagined for my own education. I hated cars almost as much as I hated living in Clearwater.
“Dad, I don’t think I’m—”
He cut me off. “I know what you’re gonna say, but you can learn. Apparently it ain’t that hard. You know Pooter down at the Reichen Auto Body Shop? He’s dumb as a brick. But give that guy a screwed-up engine, and he’ll have it fixed quicker than you could drive to Pizza Hut and back.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My father was comparing my future to that of a man named Pooter.
“I’m not going to auto repair school. I’m just not. Save your money. Let Mom buy those snow boo
ts. I want to go to college.”
Dad’s face flushed, the way it always did when he got mad or ate red meat.
“I think he’s right,” Mom said, reaching for the phone. “I should order those boots.”
Dad grabbed the phone away from her.
“Look, there’s nothing wrong with technical college or auto repair or whatever,” I told him, “but that’s just not what I want, okay? I want to do something different. I want to live in different places. I want to see the world and be somebody.” I was on the verge of tears, but I fought them back.
“You ungrateful little son of a—”
Dad stopped himself, lit a cigarette from the box on the coffee table, inhaled, then exhaled like he was meditating. “All right. Have it your way. Your mother and I are trying to give you a future. You don’t want it? Fine. Be ungrateful. Be a little prick.”
He couldn’t process the otherwise I was searching for. I wanted to shake him, tell him that I loved him but that I wanted more than his life, and if he truly loved me, he would understand. I wasn’t asking for a handout, just support. I wanted them to hear me, actually hear me. That would have meant the world.
I cleared my throat and stood up from the couch. The woman on the TV was still going totally nuts over those boots. Which were hideous.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am. I don’t know why or how, but I want something other than this. I don’t want to live in this town. I don’t want to work in an auto shop or at a gas station. And I’m not saying those are bad things. They’re just not for me. And I know it’s hard for you to understand that. But I wish, for my sake, you could at least try to. Because one day, not that long from now, I’m going to be gone. Maybe even far away. And I’d like to believe that, even if my parents don’t understand me, they can at least be happy for me.”
Mom and Dad were silent for a while. The clouds of their cigarette smoke formed a weird fog around them, thick as the fog in their minds. I stood there for what felt like forever, hoping in my heart for an I love you or even just an okay.
Instead, Dad tossed the phone to Mom.
“Order the damn boots.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table. “Move out of the way, JT, you’re blocking the TV.”
I didn’t say another word. I just went to my room and slammed the door. I looked down at my computer and it was still opened to John Denton’s bio. His face, with generations of hard work for kids like me, staring at me. I thought of Seth, beautiful Seth, and how much he believed in me. In that moment, I knew that no idea was too crazy. I had nothing to lose. Whatever it would take, I was getting out of Clearwater. As soon as possible. Once and for all. Give me a wig, I was going to win it—the scholarship, the title, everything. I was going to be THE Miss Drag Teen, and not just for Seth, not just for Heather or John Denton, but for me.
“I MIGHT REGRET THIS, BUT I want to do it.”
I stood, trembling ever so slightly, on Seth’s doorstep. His perfectly angular face immediately lit up like a Christmas tree.
“I’ve got to do something. I can’t get stuck here. I can’t work at a gas station for the rest of my life. Maybe they’ll laugh and boo all over again, maybe I’ll fall on my face and disgrace the entire legacy of John Denton, but I’m not in the position to turn down any opportunity. I just have to do it.”
Seth grabbed my hands and pulled me into the foyer of his house. Seth’s house was the kind of house that was always cozy and clean, with the walls covered by smiling family vacation photos from fancy exotic places like Charleston, South Carolina.
“This is wonderful. This is one of those moments where your life is on the verge of immense change, JT!”
Seth was being a bit overdramatic, but overdramatic or not, it felt really nice to see somebody excited for me. He bounced across the living room to his phone just as his mom walked in.
“We need to call Heather and tell her too,” he said to me.
“Tell Heather what?” Seth’s mom asked with her warm smile. Seth’s mom was the kind of mom that you see on old sitcoms: pretty, sweet, slightly naive, and with a heart the size of Texas for her only son.
“About spring break.”
“Oh! Are you boys going down to Daytona with the kids from school?” Seth’s mom seemed genuinely excited for us to be planning something fun.
“We sure are!”
“Huh?” I wondered aloud. Seth squeezed my hand, shutting me up.
“Can we borrow your car?” he asked.
Seth’s mom didn’t even stop to think about it; she just maintained the same sweet mom smile she always had. This was either because she was genuinely a good-hearted person or because she had more Botox pumped in her face than the entire audience at the Golden Globes. Seth’s dad was a local plastic surgeon and Seth’s mom was his eerie masterpiece.
“Of course!” she chirped. “You guys hungry? I’m making guacamole!”
She went back to the kitchen, humming some kind of old jazz song under her breath. It was hard not to envy Seth’s family. Their nice house, his always-perky mom, his wealthy dad who actually believed in college being something that wasn’t just for, as my dad always called them, “snooty glasses-wearing types.”
“What are you talking about?!” I whispered to Seth once his mom was out of earshot.
“My parents have been hounding me about going to spring break in Daytona with the rest of the school. They’re all about the ‘full high school experience.’ Which, if you grow up in Florida, is supposed to mean beer bashes and wet T-shirt contests in Daytona. They told me they’d even pay for it. That’ll cover our gas up to New York.”
Seth picked up his phone and texted Heather the news, with the newly added detail of having a car, while I tried to process the fact that this was actually going to happen. I was going to New York for a competition that could possibly win me a full college scholarship. It all sounded too good to be true, and deep in my heart I knew it probably was.
Seth finished his text with a flourish of emojis, and spun around to kiss me.
“Now. We have got a lot of work to do!”
While Seth’s parents were always encouraging Seth to have a good time, my parents were the complete opposite. Spring break was only a week away, and if I didn’t turn in my application to do the pageant within the next twenty-four hours, I could kiss the whole opportunity good-bye.
I sat in my room, staring at the application form on the pageant website, listening to the ongoing drone of some detective TV show my parents were watching in the living room. Sometimes I wondered if the only reason people loved watching all those shows about horrible crimes is because it made them feel like slightly less terrible people.
I was scared to come right out and ask my parents for permission to go on the trip, even though the trip I was going to tell them about wasn’t even the real trip itself. Daytona Beach was something my parents could understand. Daytona Beach was the kind of place people like my parents consider paradise. I was sure they’d gone there for their spring break. All I had to do was get them to say okay to that and then I’d have the entire week to myself to do the pageant, to breathe, to go nowhere near their dumpy gas station. But how could I even begin to ask them? Their inability to ever actually understand me made any conversation with them nearly impossible. It was as if they always knew exactly what I didn’t want to hear, which meant that in the moments of attempting to stand up for myself, I felt so small. One no from them and I cowered down into the little-kid version of myself that had been so scared of ever crossing them.
The more time I spent thinking about the pageant, the more excited I allowed myself to get. Imagining myself in a great wig was about as exciting a thought as my mind could muster.
When I was little, before I saw To Wong Foo, I didn’t know what a drag queen was, or what the term drag even meant … but I had this wig. It was slightly shorter than shoulder length, a brown, wavy wig my nana had worn during chemo. Nana had fought lung cancer for as long
as I could remember, but she was stubborn as you could get, so she lived with it for way longer than they expected. Nana lived about twenty minutes away from us, and every couple weekends or so my parents would let me stay over with her for a few nights. She lived alone—my grandpa had died when I was a baby—and she liked having the company. Especially if the company was me.
I was her favorite, and she didn’t mind telling anybody that, even her own son. She’d let me stay up way past my bedtime watching old movies, with fabulous songs, glamorous dresses, epic scenery. As we watched together she’d regale me with stories about the first time she’d seen each movie, and how she’d only paid a nickel to see it. Nana claimed so many things only cost a nickel in my day that I wondered how anyone had ever made any money at all.
She always let me sleep in her bed because my bedroom was in the back of the house, overlooking her big, dark, spooky backyard. An owl lived there, hooting and glaring with its glowing eyes every night, for as long as I could remember. It was terrifying the way it ominously glowed in the darkness. She always told me, though, that it was a good thing that the owl was watching over the two of us. Eventually I believed her. Nana had that kind of power about her; she made you believe in magic.
As the cancer got worse and the chemo more frequent, she always wore a turban to cover up her hair loss. It made her look like a really old genie. She also had a wig she’d purchased when she first started the chemo, but she didn’t like wearing it because it was too itchy and, as she said, “I’ve got cancer, I’m not in a school play, for God’s sake!”
I became obsessed with this wig. She kept it in a cabinet right by the vanity in her room, on one of those Styrofoam heads—this one with a face hand-drawn by yours truly. Every time I’d go over to her house she’d let me take the wig out, brush it, and wear it. I loved the feeling of this gorgeous hair on my head. I loved looking at myself in the mirror as I was wearing it. I loved the feeling of looking like someone else.