City of Night (52 page)
Now, during Mardi Gras, when the barcrowds flow from one place to another—a mob thirsty for the momentary liquid gayety of the carnival—from the blue-shifting, pink lights of the burlesque halls to the offbeat, side-street bars—there will be, too, in overwhelming abundance, the curious and the largely unaware, both men and women.
For this one day, those two worlds will collide—the night-world and the touristworld—on the twisting, grinding, clamoring stage of Carnival, New Orleans.
Even in the melee of queenfaces, painted eyes, bodies in drag—even then, she stood out from all the others at The Rocking Times: a queen perched on a stool like a startled white owl: a man with bleached, burned-out hair and a painted face dominated to the point of absolute impossibility by the largest, widest, darkest eyes I have ever seen, painted into two enormous tadpoles, slanting to the very edges of her temples. The frizzled quality of the bleached curled hair and the devouring wideness of the eyes gave her the appearance of a demented Cassandra whose futile, unattended knowledge makes her burn, inside, with a fire that consumes only herself, while others refuse to heed the prophecy shining from her face.
She wore a lace dress, a ruffle about her shoulders: a misty lavender which nevertheless drained—as any other color would have done—her flour-white face, the skin covered with some kind of cement-like powder. As if aware of the precariousness of the improvised harsh makeup, which may crack suddenly, she holds her face stiffly. Two round smears of rouge burn on her cheeks as if she had been slapped over and over, cheeks painted red like the bright rounded smears on a clown.
She wore bracelets—cheapglass-beaded. Rings. Sequins sprinkled in her hair. Tiny glittering dots pasted over her blue eyelids. A long, long necklace which wound about her neck at least five times dangled in a pendant where her clumsily stuffed false breasts rounden rather than protrude. Occasionally, she pulled tightly on the strand of the neckbeads—as if to choke herself. Her dress, short, reaches her knees, the legs crossed so that the purple spikeheeled shoes, coming to a long point like those of a witch, protrude on either side of the stool: one foot swinging back and forth impatiently, recklessly, constantly, like a pendulum.
And this man—this queen—holds a foot-long frailly thin silver-beaded cigarette holder—glossy ebony—the beads buried in it teasingly like tiny, winking, alive eyes. She held the cigarette holder tightly—curiously tightly—from a clenched, angry, potentially menacing fist—and she blew the smoke out constantly, her head turning in abrupt snakehead movements, as if expecting to be assaulted from the rear and trying to obviate the surprise attack by diligent alertness.
A queen.
A flamboyant, flagrant, flashy queen. A queen in absurdly grotesque, clumsy drag.
But there was something else.
There is something else that accosts you immediately about this flaming, reckless, gaudy queen contemptuously puffing out smoke as if it were something burning fiercely from Within that will force you to acknowledge her blazing anger:
When she slides off the stool momentarily—and nervously, uncertainly, often—to straighten the lavender folds of the lace dress, you will see that she is enormous, this queen: over six feet tall. And if youre a man and you stand near her—near that painted man, that demented-eyed queen like a startled white owl—you will surely be envious of his/her shoulders: which are immensely, improbably wide.
And youll notice, beyond the lace drag, the idealized body of a powerful man. Her arms, beneath the delicate lace ruffles which dance up and down in curves, are bulgingly muscled, deeply vein-rooted. Her legs, supported precariously on the wobbly high-heeled witchshoes when she stands, reveal themselves strong and firm, molded solidly, massively, as if by years of physical labor or exercise which necessitates sustained straining.
Yet this body and this voice (the husky voice too: as she turns, camping, to speak to me, the Cassandra owleyes becoming momentarily demure, the look of a man patently unsuccessfully mimicking a flirt woman), which should belong to that idealization of a man, are vitiated by the lavender drag-clothes. The gestures that were meant to match that man’s body have wilted.... Occasionally, as if by an impulse not quite drowned, not quite smothered by the perfumed femininity, she straightened up very much like a man. Then, as if realizing what shes done, her body relaxes, melts, curves effeminately, as if to compensate guiltily for the sudden flash of masculinity.
An incredible gigantic white owl, I thought—as I leaned against the bar near her to allow the mashing tides of people to pass in their fervid display of restlessness (as I lean against the bar, too, in order to avoid facing Sylvia, whom I can see sitting at the other end, closely surveying the constantly changing panorama of her bar). And through pill-clouded thoughts, I imagine this queen next to me as though she had descended from the sky through the ceiling, perching owl-like on that stool—defiantly, to bring her unheard prophecy to doomed ears.
Through the open door, near which she sat, facing it, the man-and-woman crowds, howling outside in the compulsive happiness which may be Terror, are visible like writhing worms gnawing at each other. And the blond-owl queen in lace drag turns toward the door, slowly as if to perform a ritual:
With the cigarette holder clenched between her second and fourth fingers—the third finger, erect, supporting the holder—she aimed an unequivocal fuck-you symbol at the world Outside—and she rasps loudly:
“Hey, world!”
Then the curious curse of contempt was followed by unintelligible grumbling. And now loudly: “Why doesnt somebody close the fuckin doors? You wanna contaminate the Pure air in Here?” as, at each tossed-out word, she “purifies” the air with puffs of gray smoke, to create a smokescreen that will shelter her within the wombgrayness of this bar. She scowled meanly at the door. Open, it threatens her world.
“Chi-Chi!
Chi-Chi honey!” Miss Ange (Scarlett O’Hara) gushed at her, over somebody’s shoulder, unable to advance any closer through the deadlocking crowd, “you look simply Fabulous, honey! No, no, you dont look Fabulous—you look
Real!
... And who made your gorgeous gown?—Im green with envy,” she says, unsuccessfully hiding her astonishment at the clumsy dress draping the huge body.
“I made it myself,” the blond-owl queen, drag-named Chi-Chi, snorted.
“When did you get back into town?” Miss Ange asked, wresting her arm free from between two people pulling her along. “I thought youd decided Not To Come Back. How was Boston, baby?”
“Lousy,” Chi-Chi answered. “I kept getting busted. Father-fucking cops! wont leave me! alone!” she called loudly as if addressing a proclamation at every hostile person in this bar.
Farther and farther away, surrendering now to being carried along by the shifting crowd, Miss Ange shouts: “But youre making it All Right?”
“Yeah—yeah, still living off the lean of the land,” said Chi-Chi sourly.
“See you later, sweetie!” Miss Ange called, all but swallowed by the other bodies as she adjusts her beribboned straw hat; raising her skirt over her head to make her dizzying way through the crowd. “Y’all stop crushing muh skirt!” she pleads plaintively.
Mostly sporting New-Year’s-type hats, the tourists—intrigued, revealing auspicious Interest—eye the queens; and Chi-Chi eyes them back coldly, challenging them.
As I lean against the bar—for protection from the crushing mobs—leaning there next to Chi-Chi until the strategic time when I can move away—another queen, tossed out of the main current of the struggling bodies, spots Chi-Chi incredulously; but toning down the incredulity, she welcomed her to the queen sorority of the French Quarter.
“Im—whew!—Echoes and Encores,” she says to the blond owl. “I never—whew!—seen you in the Quarter, but then—whew!—I just got here myself—and, well, I think We Girls—whew!—have got to stick together—or—whew!—we are Lost!... Oh, damn this maddening crowd anyway. Why dont they go home!” she shouted.
She squeezed in next to me, smiling at me—Bewitchingly, she thinks—and lets her hand drop casually so that it floated tenuously over my groin. “Dont I know you from the 1-2-3 in L.A., doll?” she asked me. The floating hand finally cupped my crotch. I said maybe. “Well, it’s closed now, you know—so is Ji-Ji’s—the heat is on in downtown L.A. something fierce.” She emphasized the ferocity of heat-heavy Los Angeles with an intimate press of her searching hand.... She turns to the owlqueen Chi-Chi: “What is your name, sweetie?” she asks her.
The owlqueen answered: “Chi-Chi.... And where did you get such a crazy handle like Echoes and Encores?”
Holding herself as if a hundred cameras are focusing on her nonexistent beauty to record this revelatory moment, Echoes and Encores answers:
“Well!...
My Life Has Been Just That: a long, long series of echoes and encores.... Oh, Chi-Chi, honey,” she said dramatically as her hand more openly and with assurance now explores my thighs since I havent knocked it off, “I just
got
to tell you about a positively shattering experience I had just a while ago.” Suddenly she develops a thick, inconsistent Southern accent: “Ahm still shakin from it.” She held out her free hand—gloved (shes an elegant lady)—to prove it. “Ah saw this cute butch numbuh—and Ah wouldda swore hes a hustluh—and Ah thought: Well, your mothuh’s gonna go aftuh that one!... Well, honey, that butch numbuh turns out to be a les-bay-an—the butchest dam diesel dike y’evuh haid yuh gay eyes on!” Now she grinds her squirming butt against my pelvis and goes on: “I wanna tell you, Miss Chi-Chi: that dike was so dam butch if Ah wahnt such a lady muhself, why, I wouldda turned
straight
for huh.... Why, they are gettin butchuh and butchuh each yeah—those dam buildikes. And Ah don mine tellin you Ah personally think it is ob-see-an: girls dressed like men!”
“Dikes gotta live too,” Chi-Chi growled hostilely at Echoes and Encores.
“But, oh, me-oh-my!” shrieks Echoes and Encores, reaching out delightedly to touch Chi-Chi’s massively muscled arm. “Nevuh you mine about
girls!...
Ah just wanna ask
you
, Chi-Chi: Where did
you
get those Shoulders? And those Muscles—I swan! Rippling—thats what they are!... Honey, you just take off that dress and that paint and I’ll marry you!”
“Cut the low camp, bitch!” Chi-Chi barked furiously at Echoes and Encores, shoving the queen’s hand roughly away from her shoulder. “Im as much of a Lady as you are—and dont you forget it... Now swish your goddam nelly ass away and leave us alone!” To me, as if to reassure me that she
is
a queen: “Stick around till this mob clears, babe; I’ll party you like you never been partied before.”
At the top of her voice—in order to be heard over the paroxysmal roar of the crowd—and safely away from Chi-Chi, who, because of her enormous size, would have had to struggle for minutes through the crowd to reach her—a startled Echoes and Encores confided to another queen: “That big queen over there—I swear, she must be a Mr America in drag!”
“I saw her!” said the other, hollering too. “She might be the vice squad—you never know what those bastards will pull.”
“Do you know?” hollers Echoes and Encores, forgetting about Chi-Chi “Those tourists over there thought I was A Real Woman!”
“Thats nothing, honey,” said the other. “I was sitting in a car the other day with a daddy whod left his ole tired wife at the Roosevelt Hotel to be With Me—and we were necking up a storm—and a vice cop saw us and he says—guess what he says to your sister—he says: ‘A Pretty Young Lady like yourself ought to be at home this late in the evening, Miss!’”
Seizing advantage of a break in the mob, I wrested myself from the bar. At the door, I saw Chi-Chi aim the fuck-you cigarette holder once more at the crowds outside, and I heard her roar loudly:
“Hey, world!”
2
Outside in the chilly air, I felt suddenly whirlingly dizzy. Two hands of darkness threaten to enfold me. But I tell myself Im still completely sober—still not even nearly high enough. The moment of panic is followed by renewed dazzlement.
I toss myself into the thickening crowds.
Bodies are passed out in Jackson Square as if on a battlefield before the mop-up, empty hurricane glasses like mock tombs beside them. Occasionally one of the bodies will rouse itself to blow a horn or shout into the night, which is calm and still—a sky like dark ice—and the world so turbulent.
A flurry of tourists like a band of wide-eyed children in the midst of this flowing river of drowning faces passes gleefully blowing horns, and I think: We’re trying to swim in a river made for drowning. And I feel harrowingly sober.
At Les Petits, equally crushed: A queen in wilting drag, in withering eye makeup, was singing raucously: “Howre you gonna keep them down on the fawm—after theyve seen a New Wor-lee-eens queen?”... The same jangling, jangled crowds. Angel Face—wide livermouthed—is singing a blue jazzsong.
With great difficulty, advancing two steps, being pushed back one—feeling the ubiquitous hands on my legs—I worked my way to the back of the bar, where a glass was suddenly thrust into my hand by someone I know from the dozens of score-faces here. Liberatingly, outside, I stood in the courtyard, and I gulped the drink in a hurried swallow.
The crowd was not so thick in this courtyard. Male-and-female couples, male-and-male partners cling in loveshadows against the wall.
In the center of the courtyard three queens were posing for a man in a small party of tourists. The camera bulb flashed harshly expelling the gray darkness momentarily. The queens, feeling acknowledged as Women, struck impossible languid poses. One bends down, raises her skirt to reveal her man’s knee, invitingly. Miss Ange, in Scarlett-O’Hara plantation tones, says to the man taking the pictures: “Now me! Take
My
picture!”... Muttering “bitch,” the other queens glared at Miss Ange as she poses in her billowing ballgown—as if she has just returned, Triumphantly, to Tara. The flashbulb clicked on the smug at-last womanface of Miss Ange.