Kitty Litter.
Sofonda Peters.
And the vivacious Vivienne VaVane.
AKA the Rhea sisters, three drag guys who worship the quality queen deluxe but would kill each other for more closet space. The Brandy queen told me that much.
It should be Brandy I talk to, but I call my folks. What’s gone on is I lock my killer fiancé in the coat closet, and when I go to put him inside there’s more of my beautiful clothes but all stretched out three sizes. Those clothes were every penny I ever made. After all that, I have to call somebody.
For so many reasons, no way can I just go back to bed. So I call, and my call goes out across mountains and deserts to where my father answers, and in my best ventriloquist voice, avoiding the consonants you really need a jaw to say, I tell him, “Gflerb sorlfd qortk, erd sairk. Srd. Erd, korts derk sairk? Kirdo!”
Anymore, the telephone is just not my friend.
And my father says, “Please don’t hang up. Let me get my wife.”
Away from the receiver, he says, “Leslie, wake up, we’re being hate-crimed finally.”
And in the background is my mother’s voice saying, “Don’t even talk to them. Tell them we loved and treasured our dead homosexual child.”
It’s the middle of the night here. They must be in bed.
“Lot. Ordilj,” I say. “Serta ish ka alt. Serta ish ka alt!”
“Here,” my father says as his voice drifts away. “Leslie, you give them what for.”
The gold saxophone receiver feels heavy and stagy, a prop, as if this call needs any more drama. From back in the coat closet, Seth yells, “Please. Don’t be calling the police until you’ve talked to Evie.”
Then from the telephone, “Hello?” And it’s my mother.
“The world is big enough we can all love each other.” she says, “There’s room in God’s heart for all His children. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered. Just because it’s anal intercourse doesn’t mean it’s not love.”
She says, “I hear a lot of hurt from you. I want to help you deal with these issues.”
And Seth yells, “I wasn’t going to kill you. I was here to confront Evie because of what she did to you. I was only trying to protect myself.”
On the telephone, a two-hour drive from here, there’s a toilet flush, then my father’s voice, “You still talking to those lunatics?”
And my mother, “It’s so exciting! I think one of them says he’s going to kill us.”
And Seth yells, “It had to be Evie who shot you.”
Then in the telephone is my father’s voice, roaring so loud that I have to hold the receiver away from my ear, he says, “You, you’re the one who should be dead.” He says, “You killed my son, you goddamned perverts.”
And Seth yells, “What I had with Evie was just sex.”
I might as well not even be in the room, or just hand the phone to Seth.
Seth says, “Please don’t think for one minute that I could just stab you in your sleep.”
And in the phone, my father shouts, “You just try it, mister. I’ve got a gun here and I’ll keep it loaded and next to me day and night.” He says, “We’re through letting you torture us.” He says, “We’re proud to be the parents of a dead gay son.”
And Seth yells, “Please, just put the phone down.”
And I go, “Aht! Oahk!”
But my father hangs up.
My inventory of people who can save me is down to just me. Not my best friend. Or my old boyfriend. Not the doctors or the nuns. Maybe the police, but not yet. It isn’t time to wrap this whole mess into a neat legal package and get on with my less-than life. Hideous and invisible forever and picking up pieces.
Things are still all messy and up in the air, but I’m not ready to settle them. My comfort zone was getting bigger by the minute. My threshold for drama was bumping out. It was time to keep pushing the envelope. It felt like I could do anything, and I was only getting started.
My rifle was loaded, and I had my first hostage.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jump way back to the last time I ever went home to see my parents. It was my last birthday before the accident. What with Shane still being dead, I wasn’t expecting presents. I’m not expecting a cake. This last time, I go home just to see them, my folks. This is when I still have a mouth so I’m not so stymied by the idea of blowing out candles.
The house, the brown living room sofa and reclining chairs, everything is the same except my father’s put big Xs of duct tape across the inside of all the windows. Mom’s car isn’t in the driveway where they usually park it. The car’s locked in the garage. There’s a big deadbolt I don’t remember being on the front door. On the front gate is a big “Beware of Dog” sign and a smaller sign for a home security system.
When I first get home, Mom waves me inside fast and says, “Stay back from the windows, Bump. Hate crimes are up sixty-seven percent this year over last year.”
She says, “After it gets dark at night, try and not let your shadow fall across the blinds so it can be seen from outside.”
She cooks dinner by flashlight. When I open the oven or the fridge, she panics fast, body blocking me to one side and closing whatever I open.
“It’s the bright light inside,” she says. “Anti-gay violence is up over one hundred percent in the last five years.”
My father comes home and parks his car a half block away. His keys rattle against the outside of the new deadbolt while Mom stands frozen in the kitchen doorway, holding me back. The keys stop, and my father knocks, three fast knocks, then two slow ones.
“That’s his knock,” Mom says, “but look through the peephole, anyway.”
My father comes in, looking back over his shoulder to the dark street, watching. A car passes, and he says, “Romeo Tango Foxtrot six seven four. Quick, write it down.”
My mother writes this on the pad by the phone. “Make?” she says. “Model?”
“Mercury, blue,” my father says. “Sable.”
Mom says, “It’s on the record.”
I say maybe they’re overreacting some.
And my father says, “Don’t marginalize our oppression.”
Jump to what a big mistake this was, coming home. Jump to how Shane should see this, how weird our folks are being. My father turns off the lamp I turned on in the living room. The drapes on the picture window are shut and pinned together in the middle. They know all the furniture in the dark, but me, I stumble against every chair and end table. I knock a candy dish to the floor, smash, and my mother screams and drops to the kitchen linoleum.
My father comes up from where he’s crouched behind the sofa and says, “You’ll have to cut your mother some slack. We’re expecting to get hate-crimed any day soon.”
From the kitchen, Mom yells, “Was it a rock? Is anything on fire?”
And my father yells, “Don’t press the panic button, Leslie. The next false alarm, and we have to start paying for them.”
Now I know why they put a headlight on some kinds of vacuum cleaners. First, I’m picking up broken glass in the pitch dark. Then I’m asking my father for bandages. I just stand in one place, keeping my cut hand raised above my heart, and wait. My father comes out of the dark with alcohol and bandages.
“This is a war we’re fighting,” he says, “all of us in pee-flag.”
P.F.L.A.G. Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. I know. I know. I know. Thank you, Shane.
I say, “You shouldn’t even be in PFLAG. Your gay son is dead, so he doesn’t count anymore.” This sounds pretty hurtful, but I’m bleeding here. I say, “Sorry.”
The bandages are tight and the alcohol stings in the dark, and my father says, “The Wilsons put a PFLAG sign in their yard. Two nights later, someone drove right through their lawn, ruined everything.”
My folks don’t have any PFLAG signs.
“We took ours down,” my father says. “Your mother has a PFLAG bumper sticker, so we keep her car in the
garage. Us taking pride in your brother has put us right on the front lines.”
Out of the dark, my mother says, “Don’t forget the Bradfords. They got a burning bag of dog feces on their front porch. It could’ve burned their whole house down with them sleeping in bed, all because they hung a rainbow PFLAG wind sock in their backyard.” Mom says, “Not even their front yard, in their backyard.”
“Hate,” my father says, “is all around us, Bump. Do you know that?”
My mom says, “Come on, troops. It’s chow time.”
Dinner is some casserole from the PFLAG cookbook. It’s good, but God only knows what it looks like. Twice, I knock over my glass in the dark. I sprinkle salt in my lap. Any time I say a word, my folks shush me. My mom says, “Did you hear something? Did that come from outside?”
In a whisper, I ask if they remember what tomorrow is. Just to see if they remember, what with all the tension. It’s not as if I’m expecting a cake with candles and a present.
“Tomorrow,” my dad says. “Of course, we know. That’s why we’re nervous as cats.”
“We wanted to talk to you about tomorrow,” my mom says. “We know how upset you are about your brother still, and we think it would be good for you if you’d march with our group in the parade.”
Jump to another weird sick disappointment just coming over the horizon.
Jump to me getting swept up in their big compensation, their big penance for all those years ago, my father yelling, “We don’t know what kind of filthy diseases you’re bringing into this house, mister, but you can just find another place to sleep, tonight.”
They called this tough love.
This is the same dinner table where Mom told Shane, “Doctor Peterson’s office called today.” To me she said, “You can go to your room and read, young lady.”
I could’ve gone to the moon and still heard all the yelling.
Shane and my folks were in the dining room, me, I was behind my bedroom door. My clothes, most of my school clothes were outside on the clothesline. Inside, my father said, “It’s not strep throat you’ve got, mister, and we’d like to know where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to.”
“Drugs,” my mom said, “we could deal with.”
Shane never said a word. His face still shiny and creased with scars.
“Teenage pregnancy,” my mom said, “we could deal with.”
Not one word.
“Doctor Peterson,” she said. “He said there’s just about only one way you could get the disease the way you have it, but I told him, no, not our child, not you, Shane.”
My father said, “We called Coach Ludlow, and he said you dropped basketball two months ago.”
“You’ll need to go down to the county health department, tomorrow,” my mom said.
“Tonight,” my father said. “We want you out of here.”
Our father.
These same people being so good and kind and caring and involved, these same people finding identity and personal fulfillment in the fight on the front lines for equality and personal dignity and equal rights for their dead son, these are the same people I hear yelling through my bedroom door.
“We don’t know what kind of filthy diseases you’re bringing into this house, mister, but you can just find another place to sleep tonight.”
I remember I wanted to go out and get my clothes, iron then, fold them, and put them away.
Give me any sense of control.
Flash.
I remember how the front door just opened and shut, it didn’t slam. With the light on in my room, all I could see was myself reflected in my bedroom window. When I turned out the light, there was Shane, standing just outside the window, looking in at me, his face all monster movie hacked and distorted, dark and hard from the hairspray blow-up.
Give me terror.
Flash.
He didn’t ever smoke that I knew about, but he lit a match and put it to a cigarette in his mouth. He knocked on the window.
He said, “Hey, let me in.”
Give me denial.
He said, “Hey, it’s cold.”
Give me ignorance.
I turned on the bedroom light so I could only see myself in the window. Then I shut the curtains. I never saw Shane again.
Tonight, with the lights off, with the curtains shut and the front door locked, with Shane gone except for the ghost of him, I ask, “What parade?”
My mom says, “It’s the Gay Pride Parade.”
My dad says, “We’re marching with PFLAG.”
And they’d like me to march with them. They’d like me to sit here in the dark and pretend it’s the outside world we’re hiding from. It’s some hateful stranger that’s going to come get us in the night. It’s some alien fatal sex disease. They’d like to think it’s some bigoted homophobe they’re terrified of. It’s not any of it their fault. They’d like me to think I have something to make up for.
I did not throw away that can of hairspray. All I did was turn out the bedroom lights. Then there were the fire engines coming in the distance. There was orange flashing across the outside of my curtains, and when I got out of bed to look, there were my school clothes on fire. Hanging dry on the clothesline and layered with air. Dresses and jumpers and pants and blouses, all of them blazing and coming apart in the breeze. In a few seconds, everything I loved, gone.
Flash.
Jump ahead a few years to me being grown up and moving out. Give me a new start.
Jump to one night, somebody calling from a pay phone to ask my folks, were they the parents of Shane McFarland? My parents saying, maybe. The caller won’t say where, but he says Shane is dead.
A voice behind the caller saying, tell them the rest.
Another voice behind the caller saying, tell them Miss Shane hated their hateful guts and her last words were: this isn’t over yet, not by a long shot. Then somebody laughing.
Jump to us alone here in the dark with a casserole.
My father says, “So, honey, will you march with your mother and me?”
My mom says, “It would mean so much for gay rights.”
Give me courage.
Flash.
Give me tolerance.
Flash.
Give me wisdom.
Flash.
Jump to the truth. And I say:
“No.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jump to the moment around one o’clock in the morning in Evie’s big silent house when Manus stops screaming and I can finally think.
Evie is in Cancún, probably waiting for the police to call her and say: Your house-sitter, the monster without a jaw, well, she’s shot your secret boyfriend to death when he broke in with a butcher knife is our best guess.
You know that Evie’s wide awake right now. In some Mexican hotel room, Evie’s trying to figure out if there’s a three-hour or a four-hour time difference between her big house where I’m stabbed to death, dead, and Cancún, where Evie’s supposed to be on a catalogue shoot. It’s not like Evie is entered in the biggest brain category. Nobody shoots a catalogue in Cancún in the peak season, especially not with big-boned cowgirls like Evie Cottrell.
But me being dead, that opens up a whole world of possibility.
I’m an invisible nobody sitting on a white damask sofa facing another white sofa across a coffee table that looks like a big block of malachite from Geology 101.
Evie slept with my fiancé, so now I can do anything to her.
In the movie, where somebody is invisible all the sudden—you know, a nuclear radiation fluke or a mad scientist recipe—and you think, what would I do if I was invisible…? Like go into the guy’s locker room at Gold’s gym or, better yet, the Oakland Raiders’ locker room. Stuff like that. Scope things out. Go to Tiffany’s and shoplift diamond tiaras and stuff.
Just by his being so dumb, Manus could’ve stabbed me, tonight, thinking I was Evie, thinking Evie shot me, while I was asleep in the dark in her bed.
My d
ad, he’d go to my funeral and talk to everybody about how I was always about to go back to college and finish my personal fitness training degree and then no doubt go on to medical school. Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Daddy, I couldn’t get past the fetal pig in Biology 101. Now I’m the cadaver.
Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.
Evie would be right next to my Mom, next to the open casket. Evie would stagger up leaning on Manus. You know, Evie would’ve found something totally grotesque for the undertaker to dress me in. So Evie throws an arm around my mom, and Manus can’t get away from the open casket fast enough, and I’m laying there in this blue velveteen casket like the interior of a Lincoln Town Car. Of course, thank you, Evie, I’m wearing this concubine evening wear Chinese yellow silk kimono slit up the side to my waist with black fishnet stockings and red Chinese dragons embroidered across the pelvic region and my breasts.
And red high heels. And no jawbone.
Of course, Evie says to my mom: “She always loved this dress. This kimono was her favorite.” Sensitive Evie would say, “Guess this makes you oh for two.”
I could kill Evie.
I would pay snakes to bite her.
Evie would be wearing this little black cocktail number with an asymmetrical hemline satin skirt and a strapless bodice by Rei Kawakubo. The shoulders and sleeves would be sheer black chiffon. Evie, you know she has jewelry, big emeralds for her too green eyes and a change of accessories in her black clutch bag so she can wear this dress later, dancing.
I hate Evie.
Me, I’m rotting with my blood pumped out in this slutty Suzie Wong Tokyo Rose concubine drag dress where it didn’t fit so they had to pin all the extra together behind my back.
I look like shit, dead.
I look like dead shit.
I would stab Evie right now over the telephone.
No, really, I’d tell Mrs. Cottrell as we placed Evie’s urn in a family vault somewhere in Godawful, Texas. Really, Evie wanted to be cremated.
Me, at Evie’s funeral, I’d be wearing this tourniquet-tight black leather mini dress by Gianni Versace with yards and yards of black silk gloves bunched up on my arms. I’d sit next to Manus in the back of the mortuary’s big black Caddy, and I’d have on this wagon wheel of a black Christian Lacroix hat with a black veil you could take off later and go to a swell auction preview or estate sale or something and then, lunch.