Dear Lola, I drove four blocks to brand x and parked, I realized later, too far away. Next to me, in a beat up compact with Guatemalan plates a pair of guys grinned out at me as I took off nervously across the parking lot. Brand x was jumping. Unfortunately the place was also low- ceilinged, overcrowded, dark and filled with an air of desperate celebration that seems endemic to gay bars in the post-AIDS era. |
Curiously, the favored femme role was fifties beehive bombshell. Mean leather-jacketed molls with big tornadoes of lacquered, cotton candy hair roamed in impenetrable cliques, moving from one corner of the room to the other like draggy Siamese quintuplets. In the dark corners, in sour solitude, sat the paunchy middle-aged TVs in their wash and wear Jabba the Hut drag. No attempt at copping an attitude here, just a Halloween night out in a favorite frock with dashed high hopes and a gin and tonic for solace.
Of those in my age group, a very small category, I was the most fetching but in this crowded cavern it was moot beauty indeed. Carl had migrated to brand x as well and we exchanged smiles as I waited in line for a drink that never arrived. A small Spanish guy in his twenties passed by and threw an arm around my waist like a lasso but I kept walking and he let me slip away. Twice more we encountered each other before he finally asked me my name. "Charlotte. What's yours?" I said after a long pause during which I plotted my polite exit. He said something and I excused myself to go to the bathroom. It was disturbing because his eyes had gone dead with drink, leaving only his stony libido to light the way. I was afraid an impolitic rejection might result in something unpleasant in the parking lot but he watched me walk away, not in the direction of the bathroom and seemed to understand he wasn't my type. The encounter did serve to focus my attention on what I was doing there. And what had I been doing out on the previous Saturday? I wasn't in drag that night but had gone out to find what I had hoped would be the big Halloween bash. Alas, the BIG celebration had happened the night before a bartender told me but there was a drag show coming up at midnight. I hung around like a ghostly professor and watched a troupe of young drag queens lipsynch disco songs. It was mildly diverting. And here I was on Halloween night performing the very same role: The Invisible Professor in Drag. The sort of role you might expect Fred MacMurray to play. I couldn't pass as a girl but I could certainly give Fred a run for his money. Though, as far as I know, he was never given to wearing chokers. The chances for conversation were slimmer here than in the first bar. Finding a person to begin opening remarks to was near impossible given the hostile armored drag divisions, the bullet- riddled music, the chasm of age and the inviolable isolation of the solitary queens. My costume afforded me no instant insider status. I was just another oddity in a wig without a support group to give me safe harbor. I left. As I hurried across the parking lot I watched a cop driving by turn his head to look at me, a bewigged night creature, momentarily vulnerable out in the open air while it hustled from cavern to car. When I reached my car the Guatemalans were still there. They grinned and I grinned. And then the driver rolled his window down and asked me if I had any jumper cables. So the night ended with a jumpstart. The good samaritan in drag, high haired Hannah, fastening the big clips to pos+ and neg- while the rescued Guatemalans grinned and the streetlights of Pocatello illuminated the parking lot and blotted out the stars. Charlotte |