The skidded scruffy streaks blackened the hollow suck of her painted cheek like savagery on her tawny brown face. Dirt or makeup; dirt as makeup. Deeply desperate dirt. Work. Love. Art. She looked into the mirror and put the mascara wand onto the tabletop.
“My name is Christopher Evans Watley, and I am going to show you that nothing in the world is impossible but a dream, and until that dream is made into a reality, you’ve got to keep pushing through its haze, keep grabbing towards its gleam, keep shufflin’ across its path until you can grab it by the throat and merge it into your being and the being of others around you, and that’s what I want to say to you, to all of you and everyone. Never stop striving, never—always keep your mind centered to your heart and your hope on a chain in a locket.” She laughed, an insecure sort of laugh nudging sanity. She tried again.
“My name is Christopher Evans—the true-blue sassy queen of Rag Town—Watley.” She stopped. No. Refreshed the hair with a head flip. Looked dead into the mirror.
“I’m Sista Sassy Bee.” Now she really laughed, bent over her waistline, hand on her lanky hip, chest concave like a vogue. No, she thought softly. Her eyes moved to her lap then turned to Marty.
“Are you videotaping this?”
“Yeah. Don’t you want me ta?”
“I do, yes, but I don’t want to be conscious of it. I just want to…I dunno.”
“Try again then.”
“OK, all right. OK.” Her face rendered its piercing look; her eyes squinted. She sucked on her straw, sloshed around the ice, and put down the plastic cup. Stopped. Turned back to him.
“Did you get that weed?”
“I did. Aren’t we gonna…?”
“Yes. All right. Ready?” She shook the hair back again.
“My name is Sista Blue and I’m here with a message from God.” She stopped, too rent by the drama to continue.
“That’s a bit much, Jules. You sure you wanna do the God thing?”
“No. But that’s how I feel, Marty.” She pulled the wig off. “Listen, I don’t know if I’m up to this right now.”
“But you looked so good just now with all that pretty fierceness, like a savage goddess or somethin’.” He laughed.
“A savage what?” She laughed, but this laugh was one to check the room for tone. She cut a glare toward Marty. “I ain’t no plaything, muthafucka.”
“You know what I mean, Jules.” Marty laughed uncomfortably.
“I know. I know.” She looked back into the mirror, “I look like an Amazonian rain god after…after a bender at Badlands.”
“Afta fifty drinks, five lines of coke an’ a spliff!”
She paused, finger in the air. “Uh-uh. I never do coke, Marty. That’s… that’s you, Miss Thing, OK?” They laughed.
“How can ya call me Miss Thing with this rug on my chest, babe? Huh? Look at dis stuff on here?” He lifted his sweatshirt, curly hair covered his entire torso like a beast’s. “That’s man, baby, all man.”
“Yeah, but your ass is pussy.”
“Ooooo, ouch, mama.”
“Spare me, sissy. Put that Diana Ross album on.”
“Not Blondie?”
“No, girl. I like her but not now.”
“It’s nineteen eighty four, fa Chrissakes! Diana Ross is like Mama Motown at this point.”
“Marty, just put it on please. I’m gonna get to rolling this joint. Where are my papers?”
“Fuck if I know, Jules.” Marty shrugged, put the camera down, and walked to the record player, took out an album, centered it over the turntable, and snapped it into place, gently pulling the arm to the record’s edge. The static scratch announced the coming music. Ornette Coleman’s “Free” came running out of the speakers like a rabbit being chased by a fox. Jules passed the joint and Marty took a deep, red-hot drag.
“This ain’t Miss Ross.”
“It’s betta than any kind of pop music, babe.”
“Just because it’s Coleman, I’ll allow it.” She stretched fully. “Fuck, I love this opening riff.” She bent forward to refit her wig and flipped it back into place.
Marty inspected the seam of the joint. “You always roll the best bones, Jules. Perfect burn.” He held it in, then slowly, ritualistically, blew out the bluish smoke. “Damn, that was a big hit,” he said, squinting like a happy Buddha at the indulgence.
The high crept up on them and the sound of things muffled like darkness, made the jazz into a simmering hiss, though the sun seemed to blare through the boxy windows which ran the length of Marty’s dirt-stained, tight studio. They languished in the brain tease of the high, hearing but not listening to the mumbled word or phrase they could feel but not hear themselves saying. Jules was splayed out, hair fanned on the soiled, tan carpet. Her wispy frock fell from her legs as they moved up and down—pointing her toes into the air—wiggling her body against the soft textile of the carpet.
Marty sat against the wall under the windowsill, contemplating his legs and how they connected to his feet, over which were the worn-out high-top sneakers he’d owned since he moved to New York. His father bought them to show his concern over his art-talking son’s expedition to the hungry city. He figured his son wouldn’t be barefoot for at least a year.
Marty switched the record from Coleman to Antonio Vivaldi’s “Winter” and as the strut and pluck of the violins began to build, Jules twitched her shoulders front to back and slowly raised herself from the floor. At the icy weave of the first movement, Jules’s radiant face, beat down for the gods, turned to the sunshine (which beat upon the sitting paint) and mocked a transcendent regard for the world and all that rested within it. For the rest of the opening theme, she danced and twirled and laughed. Marty sat, video recorder heavy on his shoulder, delighted by the freeness of her response to new life.
Her eye caught the time on the wall. “Wait! Stop! Turn that off!”
Marty rushed to remove the arm from the player. “Whaaaaa-ta? What’s the matter, babe?! We have such a good groove goin’ on here.”
“I’ve got my fucking gig in twenty fucking minutes. Babe.”
She threw off her ballroom wig and pulled on the punk one, rushing around the room looking for the final pieces of the evening’s outfit: the red boa, the leather biker jacket, bangles, one longer earring, one stud. She smoothed the shaved hair on one side, sprayed sticky mist into the purple mohawk shooting up the other. She streaked more mascara down through the center of her cheeks, cutting her cheekbone as if in stone. Marty followed, camcorder on his shoulder, tracing every last step of Jules’s stiletto sashay over the cracks of hundred-year-old brick streets, messy with rain pools and oil-slicked rivulets swirling down the stone gutters toward the chuckle of the sewer. She was used to all this wet growing up on grungy Portland streets, but Marty jumped around it like a conscientious rat.
They trekked over from The Jane Hotel in the Meatpacking District to Avenue A on the Lower East in thirty-five minutes, fifteen minutes late, but the club was still locked. The rain subsided and simply misted the atmosphere. Young people with striped or stripped hair, shaved heads, tight jeans, and rings in their noses began to group around the entrance, some smoking, some leering through eyes blackened by heavy liner. They stared at Jules out of jealous admiration, for she stood out in a way they didn’t but tried so deliberately to. Her drag-punk-grunge fusion outdid their straight punk. They huddled like minions yet to accept their curiosity and intermittently stared and looked away when she, sensing their interest, looked over, smiled, and said loudly, like a happy elementary school teacher to her pupils, “Hello!”
“Hey, Jules!” some emboldened blond yelled out.
“Uh-huh. What? What’s up?” She was always cautious with punks.
“Who’s emcee tonight?”
“Well, I’m not entirely sure. My friend Marty and I got here late.” Marty kept filming; Jules looked into the camera, smiled, laughed. “We got caught up at his place listening to some really great music.”
“What kind?” the little crowd yelled back.
“Oh, you know, some Ornette Coleman, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Monk. The greats. You know?”
The crowd mumbled and grumbled.
“Do you know them?”
“Beethoven, yeah,” yelled one back.
“Circle Jerks! Dead Kennedys! Sex Pistooools!” They called out all their music.
“Circle Jerks, yeah, I like that, that’s cool,” Jules conceded, but looked distracted, looking around her, then at the row of bangles clacking down her arm. She towered over everyone not only because she was tall and wearing four-inch heels.
“I wonder where Fred is.”
“He’s late or doin’ lines in the slut box.” Marty talked through the camcorder like a stranger.
“I dunno.” She adjusted the bangles like a watch. Marty just filmed.
Down the street came a little horde of men, some dressed as women, some in jeans and a T-shirt, one in jeans with no T-shirt, exposing his perfectly lean, sculpted young body to the streets of Manhattan and anyone who might be interested in an easy-money quickie. His name was Louis from down south—Louisiana, someone had said. Jules thought he was beautiful but didn’t connect with him like she wanted when she was a man; now that he was Jules, no one dared approach too closely. It was only sex anyway.
In the center of this ever more loudly tramping group was a large, white queen, tall and round—a big man dressed as a delicate woman in a white, lacy nightie with white knee-high leather boots and high, bouffant, cascading golden hair, two stacked wigs which looked like a plastic slide from a certain angle and a certain distance.
“Lady Honey!” Jules yelled out. She sort of hopped in the air like a schoolgirl.
“I am the Lady Honey and my sap is still as sweet,” this new queen announced, opening her arms to no one in particular. “Ask Louis, he just had a taste.”
They all laughed, Louis blushed, but Jules asked, “Before or after you tucked your cock between your cheeks,” just as Lady Honey bent forward for a congenial kiss, careful to balance the oversized hive of smoothly stacked, golden-hued hair. She gagged at the question but kissed Jules magnanimously nonetheless.
“Before, girl. My honeypot is never suckled when I’m wearing a dress, silly.” Her nasal, whiny voice offset the vulgarity of her humor. This was a common greeting; gay trash talk sexualized their wit. It was the one domain that linguistics hadn’t touched, and it was all theirs, molesting language with sexuality. Lady Honey had a key to the club and let everyone in.
Sure enough, Fred came out of the back room snorting his last lines up his nose, but not one of them noticed.
“Ladies, ladies, and fine and hunky gentlemen. Yum.” He sauntered out, arms and palms open like a dowager greeting her younger devotees.
“Who else is back there?” Jules asked as she headed through the velvet curtain separating the dance room from the bar.
“Last night I had this dream,” Louis began as some stared at him uncomprehendingly, “and we were all there—I think it was CBGB’s—high off our asses.” He smiled his big, pretty-boy, red-lipped smile, put his hand to his jaw. “And Debbie Harry was there.” His arms tilled the air in front of him. “Everyone was just talking, ignoring her.”
“Debbie who?” A trio laughed.
“I haven’t been to CBGB’s since five years ago! Who goes there anymore?”
“Who’s got that lighter? The blue one with the tiger stripes; that one’s mine, you bitches.”
“I saw it last in your hand, cunt.”
Some were bringing large amplifiers and speakers out from another room, setting up the venue.
“Anyway, it was a good dream.” Louis looked over at the one person still listening who stood mute, just staring at him.
“Would all of you just shut the fuck up and come help me do a sound check?” Lady Honey commanded them from the stage. They quieted down and listened while she talked to the sound guy through the microphone in her hand, half into it, half into the air like a pop star who never wants the people around her to entirely stop paying attention. They stayed quiet but grew impatient and began huddling in little groups, lighting cigarettes, talking softly, then more loudly as Lady Honey turned her full attention to the sound engineer. Once she was ready, she shot back to the crowd.
“All right, listen up, all you raving homosexuals.” The fright from the loud amp jolted them out of conversation, eyes toward her. “You cock-sucking queers!” And then in her more demure, sort of girlie Southern voice, “Tes-ting, - one, two. Tes-ting.” She giggled.
Patrons strolled in, some skinny, some muscular, some marked up; some wan, gaunt, listless; some edgy, jumpy. The kaleidoscopic fan of homosexuals, husky-voiced drag queens, club kids, and punks of the era filtered in through the heavy curtain entry of the Pyramid Club. Every stupid act, every pathetic lip sync snuck through those doors for a brief jolt of cabaret fame, drugs for every desire, and sex almost anywhere you looked for it. A little bit of danger, a little bit of titillation, and a lot of desire. More than these, there was boredom, a kind which always bookmarks the experience and anticipation of excitement when infrequently gratified. This was the suburban lilt which edged the room. It was the longing to be gratified matched to the search, the hunt, the prowl which passed the time. This was why cocaine was so favored by the partygoers. One shot up the nostrils and all expectations of life, all fantasies were struck to life as from a spark off a golden anvil. And then dullness, resentment, boredom, the hunt. A half-naked, seductive young man might pass to your right; a big-bosomed female might go to the left. All gorgeous and young and searching. And all playing with excitement for the boredom which chased their every grasp at fun.
Lady Honey flounced around the room like the centerfold of a Showcase Showdown on The Price Is Right, nostrils glistening white. The catcalls of the crowd wound about her occasional beratement of a drunken punk, pawing too closely to her honeyed magnificence—perhaps a bisexual who, in his drunken romp, mistook or misremembered her bosom and bottom curves for a woman’s.
Then, there was a shushing sound like steam. The foggy puffs from the cloud machines hissed and the musty vapor streamed downstage and into the irritable crowd which had hushed. Lady Honey quieted her voice to above a whisper. The curtain had fallen; only the slightest beams of light escaped from around its edges, a light which seemed to grow soft and strong according the rhythm of a person’s heart. The rest was dark. A human hum began to reverberate around the room. The crowd grew thicker, denser; a few made inebriated comments, a couple of hoots, some hollers, but otherwise they were quiet.
“Ladies and gentlemen, fags, fairies, queens, and dykes of all ages, gender-fuckers and butch trade alike,” Lady Honey announced, “please welcome to the stage…Sista…Bee…Juuuuuulessssss.” At this, the curtain rose, the throbbing glow pulsed brighter with an increasing line of sound, like a single electric note bringing up the heat of the room. The beat began. The light centered and intensified at the proscenium into which walked a large, sweep of shadowy forms, dark fabric of a cloak wizarding and twirling in the light and fog. The beat pumped harder and harder and the forms became clearer and clearer—the image of Sista Bee resolved as her hood flung back and revealed the powder-beaten, polished face of the queen of the night. She began her song, a punk-infused disco, both screamed and sung into the shimmering microphone as she stripped away the folds of dark cloak to reveal, slashing the dark, a reflective pop of colors, one at a time, bursting through the heavy darkness of the outer layer and exploding like music into the reverent eyes of the assembly eager for the radiance. Sweat flew out from bodies jumping, hands raised to the cosmic mush of light rays, color, smoke, a nebula of star-making mist. Faceless young men, barely of age, writhed and whirled in naked corners, moving their sexual hands across smooth, muscular, sweaty ridges to the rounded joy of the musical coda.
As the thud from the beat reduced, the light began to fade back out. Jules slowly crouched in center stage. The colors were replaced by the pieces of dark cloak, one section at a time, and the music reverted to a hum out of which came the sad, deliberate progress of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” slowly, quietly resolving the bursting extravagance of her very first planned and paid show.
The curtain fell. The crowd booed.
Jules smiled as she crouched under the heap of the night’s moody fabric. She stood and remerged as herself, was escorted off the stage, and fell with a plop onto a plushy couch in a heap of exhaustion and fame.
Lady Honey thought Jules had failed, flopped, so she pumped the disco beat back into the audience and started asking the crowd if they were having fun, who was excited to see the Big Dick Contest, and so forth. But the crowd remained disengaged, reimagining the spectacle they had just seen, murmuring among themselves how weird, how delightful, how awed they had been by the sight and sound. Some chanted her name, then others, then all chanted, demanding her return to the stage.
But within minutes of finishing the short-lived set, her heels clicked the brick pavement as she, Marty, and a small, motley entourage left the venue from the back entrance, prancing down the ally and into the empty, early morning streets of the Lower East Village. She cackled to herself at the length of time it took to get to this point, this paltry, run-down extravagance, this impoverished set, which lay the first seed in the grove of future selves to culminate in a continuous blooming, withering, and dying, ever expanding toward that glimmering hope around which lights grew brighter, people clearer, and selfhood fainter: a reality to be dreamed of. And as drawn out and feeble, as turned inward and desperate as this tiny mass appeared (except for Jules, who marched triumphantly), the future lay in each of their steps; the cultural dream would proceed from every humbled, daring click of her gritty heels, the tramp of their boots. Some would be dead in a short few years: drugs, AIDS, suicide. Some would return to normal lives deeper in the boroughs, the outskirts. Only this one would rise to meet the inconsolable synthesis of dream with reality—the truth and the lie—but, as in everything, she would take its disappointments, more its achievements, in stride.
They piled into a rusted, pockmarked van, adjusting their drag, their boas, their ragged tuxedos, their clown suits as they climbed onto the seats, heading for the next venue—instead a place to relax, a place to remain friends in a shared but uncertain and fantastical scheme.