Drag Teen

by Jeffery Self

  every day a new try,

  a chance to find yourself,

  find the reason why.

  People care about me,

  which I sometimes forget.

  People care about me,

  and that’s as lucky as you get.

  The melody was catchy, soft, sweet, and a little corny—the kind of music that gets not just into your head but in your veins and blood. As I looked around the room at Seth and Heather, listening so intently, I realized that the song was right. People did care about me. Even after I’d argued with both of them hours earlier, they still cared.

  People care about me,

  which I sometimes forget.

  People care about me,

  which is as lucky as you get.

  We all sang along, and just as we reached the final chorus, I was so lost in the song, singing full out, that I didn’t notice everyone else had stopped singing until it was over. Tina turned around on the piano bench and looked at me with a big smile.

  “Can’t sing, my ass,” she said, handing me the sheet music.

  I hadn’t found my talent. It had been given to me, by people who cared.

  “WITH A VOICE LIKE YOURS, I’ll kill you if I ever catch you smoking a cigarette. You hear me, boy?” Tina commanded as she rocked in a rocking chair on her front porch, smoking her third consecutive cigarette. Heather had gone to bed and Seth had insisted on cleaning up the dishes from dinner, which Tina hadn’t put up much of a fight about. “You worry a lot, don’t you?”

  “Huh? How can you tell?” I laughed; she’d thrown me off guard.

  “I can see it in your eyes: worry worry worry. I ain’t wrong, am I?”

  I shrugged. She wasn’t.

  “I knew how to sing from the time I could talk. As a point of fact, my mama said I could sing before I could talk. She said I’d sit up in my crib all night long just singing up a storm, and they felt bad making me stop because I sounded so good.” She took a long swig from a bottle of beer. “But you want to know what? It wasn’t until I was twenty-nine years old that I sang in public.”

  “Come on! That can’t be true.”

  As she shook her head, the porch light created little beams in the cigarette smoke circling her head, like heavenly rays.

  “Sure was. I’d sing in a studio at the piano, back when I was just writing songs. I’d play a song for Loretta or Tammy or, worse yet, Dolly damn Parton.”

  “What’s the problem with Dolly Parton?”

  Tina rolled her overly made-up eyes. “She stole my act.”

  “Huh?”

  “I was white trash with big boobs and bad wigs long before Dolly was—she just perfected it.” She pointed her long finger in my face. “Look it up.”

  “Is that why it took you so long to sing?”

  She threw her hands in the air. “Lord, no! Dolly was the last thing that kept me from performing. I was absolutely dying to show her who was boss!” She paused, waiting for me to reply. “Me, by the way.”

  I nodded.

  “I was terrified of singing. Everybody’d say, Tina, you ought to be the gal singing this one, and I’d get all flustered and change the subject. ’Cuz the truth was I wanted to, but I was scared.”

  “But you knew you could sing.”

  “Sure, I knew I could, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t afraid of doing it. There’s a big difference between being able to do something and actually doing something.” She finished her beer in another long swig, put it down, and grabbed my hand. “You’ve got something, JT. I saw it by that piano tonight. I watched you find it; now all you have to do is not forget it’s in you.”

  She patted my knee and we sat there in silence for a while, just the sound of crickets chirping across the big field in front of us.

  “Can I tell you something?” I said, breaking the silence.

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Earlier, when I was singing at the piano, when I didn’t realize I was singing all by myself? It was the most ‘in the moment’ I’ve ever felt.”

  She smiled a big Cheshire cat sort of grin. “That’s called passion, sugar. And it feels good, huh?”

  “You know how people talk about being in the moment? Well, I thought that maybe I was the exception. That nothing could put me in the moment, but tonight I felt it. I felt like I was really, truly there. Does that sound silly?”

  “I think it’s the least silly thing you’ve said all night.”

  In a lot of ways, Tina reminded me of my nana. They didn’t look anything alike and their lives couldn’t have been more different, but they’d grown up in similar eras and conditions, and somehow became the best versions of themselves they could be. Like Nana, Tina didn’t grow up with much, but unlike Nana, she ended up with a lot. At the end of the day, however, they both valued loving themselves and those around them above anything else. And when Tina squeezed my hand, her hand was soft and wrinkled, old, like Nana’s.

  I pulled the page out of my pocket and glanced down at the word talent.

  “What’s that you got there?”

  “It’s the list, for the pageant. Glamour, talent, heart, and soul.”

  She took the napkin and examined it, squinting her old eyes to make out Seth’s handwriting.

  “Seems you’ve already got one crossed out. Glamour, huh? How’d you find that? Seeing me?” She chuckled a deep laugh that turned into a cough.

  “This drag queen in South Carolina,” I explained. “She gave me a makeup lesson and made me look amazing. Like, I genuinely felt beautiful. Look.”

  I pulled out my phone and opened up the photo I’d taken with Bambi. I handed it over to Tina. She smiled at it.

  “How about that.”

  “I know. I don’t even look like myself.”

  She shook her head. “Naw. I think you’re showing yourself completely. See that smile, JT? That’s what’s inside of you, and it’s just waiting for you to reach in there and touch it. Well, symbolically, that is.”

  I looked back at the photo. She was right—my smile was different. It was the happiest I’d ever seen myself in a photo. There was no fear, no tension, no nerves. Just joy.

  “Your parents cool?” she asked, after a moment.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They cool? Like with the gay stuff, the drag stuff, all of that stuff people get bent out of shape about for no reason.”

  The word cool sounded so silly coming out of her mouth.

  “Yeah, they’re fine with it,” I told her. Then, because that didn’t feel like the most honest picture, I added, “They don’t really think about me much. When I told them I was gay, they reacted the same as when I’ve ever told them anything.”

  “Which is?”

  “A non-reaction, basically. They have their lives, their routines, their business, each other. They don’t really need me. They never have.”

  Tina pushed her cigarette stump out into an old ashtray in the shape of Elvis sitting beside her, and immediately lit a new one.

  “Everybody needs their kids, JT.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t have a response to that because I wasn’t sure if that was actually true.

  “They do,” Tina insisted. “Even your parents. They might not get you, but they need you. What do they do?”

  “They run my grandpa’s old gas station down in Clearwater. It’s right outside Tampa. Barnett’s Oil and General Store.”

  “I see. And what do they think about the pageant?”

  I explained that they didn’t know, and about how we hadn’t told them about coming to New York and had actually lied about going to spring break in Daytona instead.

  “They didn’t want more details?”

  “Nope.”

  Tina processed this for a moment.

  “Well, I’ll tell you this. My own mama hated the idea of me going into music. Said I’d end up homeless and that she wasn’t going to put another roof over my head once I came crawling back. She never really got over that mentality
either—she was always so dismissive of my success when it eventually came. She swore it was fleeting, and insisted I had better save up because the day it all went away was coming, and coming soon. She never even came to see me perform.”

  “No. Come on!”

  She shook her head, sucking on her (as she described it) cancer stick.

  “Nope. Never came to see me. She had so many chances, but she always had some excuse or another. Too far to travel, she had quilt guild that night, she was sick, afraid of flying. It was always something.”

  “Didn’t that hurt your feelings?”

  She let out a loud “Ha!” that echoed off the pine trees into the night air.

  “Of course it did! It just about killed me! But when she died, do you want to know what I found? Not one but seven scrapbooks full of every magazine or newspaper clipping that had ever mentioned my name.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  She let out a sigh and rocked back and forth in her chair for a while. “Disappointed, for both of us. She was too scared to celebrate me, and I was too scared to ask her to. And in the end, we never got a chance to undo that for either of us.” She took another drag from the cigarette. “Life, ya know?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She pointed her long finger at me. “Let them in, even if they don’t seem to want in. Ask ’em. Trust me. Someday you’ll be glad you did.”

  We stayed sitting on the porch for a while, looking out at the big open sky. I knew it was high time that I decided to be nicer to myself, to allow the people who loved me to celebrate me. Just then, a big owl landed on the branch of the enormous old oak tree in the yard. It sat there, hooting, just like the one used to do at Nana’s house. The universe’s message was quite simple: Follow Nana, and Tina, and Bambi’s leads and maybe, just maybe, I’d find my otherwise.

  Bud drove into town, got a replacement tire, and had it changed before any of us had gotten up. We tried to pay him back but he refused; Tina said he was probably just happy to have something to do.

  After cooking us a very large breakfast, Tina sent us on our way, but not without insisting we take a bag of costumes and wigs for the competition. I put them into my suitcase with the wigs and clothes we’d already packed. Those other queens might be going to the pageant with years of experience, but I had something none of them would have: a wig that had belonged to Tina Travis. Plus a green paisley pantsuit that zipped up the back and hugged my hips so perfectly that you’d have thought I’d been to a gym before. And a trash bag full of more outfits.

  Before we said our good-byes, Tina pulled me aside. She held my chin in both hands and scratched a patch of stubble I’d missed the last time I’d shaved.

  “Hm. Better get somebody to teach you how to shave better before you get to New York, sugar.” She lowered her voice, turning me away from the others. “I want you to have something.”

  “No,” I protested, “I can’t take anything else from you. You’ve already given me all those costumes and wigs.”

  Tina waved off my words. “Don’t get excited, it’s nothing as important as wigs or costumes. It’s just this.”

  She slipped something into the palm of my hand—a wad of cash.

  “Tina! That’s a lot of money!”

  She yanked me away from the group and whispered into my ear, “Shush! Bud thinks I’m some kind of mess when it comes to money. This will be our secret.”

  I looked through the wad of cash in my hand. At first glimpse, I counted four one-hundred-dollar bills and at least a dozen or so twenties.

  “Yeah, but this is a way more than a lot, Tina.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t mess with me, JT. Put that in your pocket and get yourselves a nice hotel room when you get to New York. That place eats money for breakfast. Treat yourselves; feel glamorous. After all, that’s the whole point of living, right?”

  I hugged her, her big red wig scratching my cheek. She smelled just the right amount of superstar and old lady to warm my heart.

  “And how can I find out if you win?”

  “Are you on Facebook?”

  She arched her eyebrows, giving me an expression that said What do you think?

  “All right. Well, text me.” I took her phone and programmed my number into it. “Thank you, Tina Travis. For everything.”

  She kissed me on the cheek. I could feel the outline of her lipstick creating a track mark where her lips had been.

  “Go win the damn thing,” she said with the same big grin I’d seen on that old record of my mom’s.

  We returned to the group and said our good-byes. Then Seth, Heather, and I hit the road. We were back on the same highway where the whole tire debacle had begun the night before. Before we got back onto the interstate, I pulled the car over and cut off the engine.

  “Don’t tell me you have to pee already?” Heather asked.

  “No. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” I looked at both of them. “I know I’ve been a bit of a handful these past few days.”

  “A bit?” Heather arched an eyebrow.

  “Hey now, don’t push me.”

  She laughed.

  “But really, I’m sorry. I think I’ve been letting my nerves about this pageant bring out my every little dormant and not-so-dormant insecurity, and instead of trying to overcome them, I’ve just been feeding them with the self-hatred they need to keep controlling me.”

  “Wow. Okay, Oprah.” Heather was taken aback. She added, “And that wasn’t me calling you fat. Just ridiculously Zen and well spoken.”

  We all laughed and I cranked the car back up.

  “Hey.” Seth pinched my leg. “Thanks for saying that. I’m sorry too.”

  I smiled as I pulled the car back onto the interstate, and with my new wigs and costumes in the trunk and my two best friends at my side, we were off.

  Seth was singing along to the radio as we passed a sign welcoming us into the state of Maryland. Suddenly he stopped singing and became quiet for a while.

  “Has anyone called home since we left?” he asked, seemingly lost in some other thought.

  None of us had. Heather had texted her mom sometime the day before, but otherwise we were completely cut off from the lives we knew. It was a neat feeling, with no one but the three of us knowing where we were. Arguably dangerous, but still a neat feeling. However, we decided we probably ought to call and at least pretend to update them.

  The three of us paced back and forth around the car, each fabricating our own story about how spring break was going. Seth’s dad was asking all sorts of details, telling him to have a blast. The good thing about having parents like mine is that you can lie to them at any time and they won’t question you for a second, not because they think you’re trustworthy but because they just don’t care.

  “Hello?!” My mom answered the phone in her usual sound of panic. For as long as I could remember, my mom had always answered the phone as if the house had just caught on fire.

  “Hi. It’s JT.”

  Li’l Biscuit yapped loudly over the sound of QVC in the background.

  “Oh, hey. You still in Daytona? Don’t tell me you got arrested or something!”

  This was my mom’s way of saying “How are you?”

  “Nope. Not arrested. Daytona’s fun. Just great. Really cool,” I lied.

  “Okay, so do you want something? Suzanne Somers is selling her three-way poncho right now and she’s about to tell us the third thing it can do.”

  It was no surprise to hear my mom’s lack of interest, but it was still a disappointment. Seth’s and Heather’s families had both gone on and on about how much they missed them, and the most my mom could say was that she needed to get back to some old TV actress selling a poncho that could be worn three different ways. (That said, I wanted to know more about this poncho myself.) I told Mom good-bye, she hung up without saying “I love you,” and I rejoined the others by the snack machine.

  “How’d it go?” Seth asked, pulling a bag of Lay�
�s out of the machine.

  “Fine.”

  “Did they quiz you like mine did?”

  I gave Seth my what the hell do you think? look and he smiled.

  “Well, consider yourself lucky that you didn’t have to come up with a fake story about going to an all-you-can-eat fried shrimp buffet!” Heather shouted from the picnic table she was sitting on.

  “Why would you make that up?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It was the first thing that popped in my head when they asked what I’d been up to. Speaking of which, is anyone else craving shrimp?”

  Seth looked up from his phone. “Actually, since we’re making pretty decent time, how would you guys feel about a detour?”

  “To where?”

  Seth was already mapping out directions. He seemed more tense than usual.

  “It’s a ways out of the way, but Ocean City, Maryland. Where we used to live before my dad moved us to Florida. I haven’t been back in, what? I guess four years or something. Wow.” Seth stopped and took in the passage of time. I could see how much he really wanted to go; it was sweet to see him trying not to sound too eager in case Heather and I protested.

  “Why not?” I elbowed Seth in the hip. “It’s important to live in the moment, you know?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I should warn you—the moment we’re about to live in definitely belongs to the past.”

  And away we went.

  IT WAS CLOUDY BY THE time we got to Ocean City. The town was located on the water but was nothing like a Florida town. It was a cold, quiet little place with small houses built around a large boardwalk that followed along the water’s edge. We parked on the street and made our way over to the water and wandered down past the kind of places with T-shirts that read I’M WITH STUPID and an arrow pointing directly up. The whole place smelled more like a giant funnel cake than an ocean.

  I knew this was where Seth had grown up—but I didn’t know much more than that. The past was something he didn’t talk about much—sometimes when there was a story from when he was a kid, but very little from his recent history. I didn’t think about it much—my own sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade years weren’t particularly compelling material either. I just assumed that Golden Boy Seth had been golden somewhere else, and then had left this place to come into my life.