Backstab (3 page)

“ ‘Why?' said Charlie.

“ ‘Guys can't get pregnant,' said the cop.

“ ‘What's that got to do with Betty?' said Charlie.

“ ‘She's. A. He,' said the cop, punctuating each word with a mean smile.

“Charlie's face turned the color of pork fat.

“ ‘A guy?' Charlie croaked, and drank his draft in one gulp.

“ ‘Betty's a bouncing boy, just about ready to get his final operation,' said the cop, enjoying every word. ‘That's why he never gives anything but blow jobs, he-man. You've been getting sucked off by a she-man.' ”

“Hee, hee, I loved that part,” Rita said.

“Charlie's smile did sort of curl up and slide off his face like a dead worm. He put some money on the bar and left. A lot of guys went home early that night. The men who stayed were the ones who'd never been with Betty in her white Cadillac, and they looked relieved. They claimed they could tell when they saw her Adam's apple. But they couldn't. Betty was darn good.”

“Here's the part I want you to pay attention
to,” Rita said, still prompting her pupil to learn this lesson. “What happened the next night?”

“The next night, when Betty's Cadillac showed up on the back lot, Charlie and some of the guys were waiting for her. Or him. They beat up Betty so bad, Terry finally came out and made them stop. Betty's blouse was ripped and she had bruises on her face and arms, but she'd managed to do some damage with her long fingernails and spike heels. Terry wanted to call an ambulance, but Betty didn't want any trouble. She drove herself to the emergency room, bleeding all over the white interior. I heard Betty didn't work her specialty for some time. She had to have her jaw wired. The cops asked if she wanted to press charges, but she said she fell in the parking lot.

“She certainly fell from grace at the Word. Betty never showed up at the bar again.”

“See what I'm saying? Those guys at the Last Word almost killed poor Betty when they found out what she was,” Rita said.

“Yeah, if Terry hadn't come to her rescue with that lead pipe he keeps under the cash register she would have been a goner,” I said.

“I think that's what happened to the poor thing they found on Bedler Street,” Rita said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because of what happened when those guys at work found out about Betty.”

“It doesn't mean that's what happened to this person.”

“It's worth looking into,” Rita said.

“It's just another dead hooker,” I said.

“I'm trying to give you a good story tip, but you're not listening,” Rita snapped. “I better go. Thelma is at the back door.” Thelma was her next-door neighbor, eighty-eight years old. I knew she wasn't really there, or I would have heard her yelling and rattling the door knob. Rita was irritated with me. She was also right. This was the second time I'd ignored a woman's good advice. I would regret it.

I finished my column by deadline, but I missed the story.

“B
eing a columnist is like marrying a nymphomaniac. As soon as you finish, you have to start all over again.”

A reader told me Ellen Goodman said that. Maybe she did, but Ellen always looked too prissy in that column photo to know much about nymphos. Besides, it sounded awfully politically incorrect. There's no such thing, medically speaking. A nympho is what scared men call an unsatisfied woman.

Still, I know what she means. A four-days-a-week column is insatiable. The thrill of servicing it is almost as good as sex. As soon as I finished one column, I needed another. And another. And another and another and another, until I was panting and exhausted. No wonder they say you put a newspaper to bed.

I love it. I'd hate to have a
real
job. Talking to a palm reader in a bar beats digging ditches and working in factories, and I have relatives who do
both. When I finished my Crystal Ball column five minutes before deadline, I was a happy woman. Today's work was done. I could look forward to tomorrow's with satisfaction. Because I had another fantastic subject, a hot and juicy one. I grabbed my briefcase and a fresh legal pad and headed out to the Louie the Ninth Motor Inn, near the airport.

St. Louis is named for Louis IX, the saintly French warrior-king. If a saint who led two crusades to the Holy Land had to do any time in Purgatory after he died, I figure he spent it at the motel named after him, the Louie the Ninth. The decor was punishment enough. The Louie started out as a basic airport motel. It had a big high-ceilinged lobby fronting for a hollow two-story square of rooms. But the motel went slightly wacky when the present owners gave it a medieval theme.

Now aluminum suits of armor stood in the lobby next to the standard motel overstuffed sofas and silk ficus trees. The Sheetrock walls were painted like gray castle stones. The high ceilings were hung with colorful banners, which made the place look more like a gas station tire sale than a medieval court. But most of the activities in King Louis's namesake motel were far from saintly. The Louie was the site of swap meets for bored married couples, swinging singles conventions, and gatherings of S and M aficionados, who loved the Dungeon cocktail lounge.

The motel also hosted the conventions other motels wouldn't touch: scary-weird sci-fi gatherings,
comics conventions, and cat shows. Many hotels won't take cat shows because nervous cats shed huge amounts of hair. The Louie's ballrooms had a light layer of cat fluff in the corners. The people who used the Louie never complained. They were happy to find any place that would host their events. I think the Louie's semimedieval staff uniforms contributed to the louche atmosphere. They certainly made me think about sex. The women employees were dressed like Lady Macbeth in long, trailing gowns that emphasized their breasts. The men wore tabards and hose. I have a theory that most men have great legs. The Louie proved I was right.

I tried not to stare at the bellperson with the muscular legs set off by dark green tights. Instead, I went straight to a pale, ponytailed blonde behind the information desk. A Gothic plastic name tag announced that my informant was Tiffany. Tiffany wore her cheap blue gown with the dignity of a Plantagenet princess. Princess Tiffany was talking on the phone to a friend. She looked at me disdainfully, and rightly so. If I was at the Louie, I was probably up to no good.

“I'm looking for the Miss American Gender Bender Pageant,” I said, confirming her suspicions.

The pale princess pointed around the corner, not deigning to speak to me. The noise guided me the rest of the way—shrieks, squeals, and shrill girlish laughter. Standing in front of the Crusader Ballroom were some of the tallest
women with the biggest hair I'd ever seen. The sequins on their dresses were as blinding as searchlights. They wore more mascara than a Barbie doll. In fact, they looked rather like giant Barbie dolls, with exaggerated busts, major makeup, dangly earrings, and drop-dead gowns.

I've always had my suspicions about Barbie. I knew for sure
these
weren't real women. They were fabulous female impersonators hailing from Maine to Mississippi, here for the annual Miss American Gender Bender Pageant. They dragged U-Haul trailers filled with sets for their talent numbers. They packed eleven-thousand-dollar Bob Mackie gowns. They brought hair stylists from Elizabeth Arden and a queen's ransom in rhinestones.

A successful female impersonator always travels with an entourage, and these brought their wardrobe advisers, set designers, and lovers. The men who accompanied them were decidedly gay. They wore a lot of black, leather, and chains. One of them was my friend Ralph the Rehabber. Ralph had traded in his daytime wear of paint-spattered, plaster-covered jeans for something a lot more interesting. He was going to be my guide for the evening.

Ralph was tall and lean. With his Vandyke beard and longish blond hair, he reminded me of those museum portraits of English aristocrats. Tonight he wore a silk pirate shirt, a studded black leather vest, and tight black leather pants with silver chains going places I probably shouldn't look. The orange-and-yellow Proventil
inhaler sticking out of his vest pocket spoiled the devil-may-care effect slightly. But Ralph had had a near-fatal asthma attack last December, and since then he didn't go anywhere without his inhaler. He even kept one in a pouch on his ladder when he worked on houses.

My readers knew Ralph the Rehabber as a regular source on how City Hall worked—or didn't. St. Louis is one of the rehab capitals of the country. We have some gorgeous old brick homes in the city, and they go cheap. You can buy what would be a million-dollar mansion in any city on the coast for less than one hundred thousand dollars here. A lot of people fled St. Louis for the new, boring burbs. They saw those areas as crime-free. People like me feared we'd die of boredom if we lived in the suburbs. We stayed in the older parts of town, rehabbed the handsome houses, and lived in luxury on the urban edge.

It takes skill and nerve to finish a rehab project, get the required bank loans and permits, and outwit the city inspectors, and Ralph had all these skills. I think my favorite Ralph story was about when he was fixing six bungalow breeze-ways in a postwar subdivision on the edge of St. Louis. The city code required a fire door between the kitchen and the breezeway, which spoiled any chance of enjoying the breeze. Ralph rigged up a fire door that could be hung just before the city inspector arrived, then removed. It traveled from neighbor to neighbor, painted six different colors.

I knew Ralph the Rehabber was gay, and had lost his heart to a three-hundred-pound drag queen named Bambi. Bambi was a southern belle trapped in the body of a sumo wrestler. Imagine a simpering sumo wrestler, and you had Bambi. She had doelike brown eyes, a charming giggle, long red hair, and thick, rubbery lips. She shaved her face and her legs. She loved green satin and wore the biggest pair of dyed-to-match green heels I'd ever seen—and I'm six feet tall in my panty hose and wear a size 11 shoe.

Ralph designed all of Bambi's prizewinning outfits, including a green satin wedding dress with a twelve-foot train that made her look like Scarlett O'Hara on steroids. I thought Bambi loved Ralph's work, but not Ralph, and was only using him while she made out with a hunky bodybuilder whose sole talent was flexing his pecs. But I never said anything to Ralph. You can't tell a person the truth about the one they love.

The pageant had been going on for four days. Like most beauty pageants, this one had contestant interviews, rehearsals, bathing suit competitions, and judging for poise, posture, and presentation. Tonight was the climax, with the two most important competitions: talent and evening gown.

The whole event was a flashback to 1957. Female impersonators put on the things many women have cast off—tortured and teased hair,
ballistic breasts, hurting high heels. The natural look is not big in this crowd.

Ralph was my guide into this world. Unlike some gays, he never played “shock the straights.” Talking with Ralph was like watching a National Geographic special. He narrated the most astonishing facts in a professional, didactic manner. “I got us both passes for the whole show, including backstage,” Ralph said. I wondered how many strings, or chains, he had to pull for that. The straight press usually wasn't allowed in these pageants, for good reason. We tended to cover them like freak shows, and displayed all the sensitivity of high school jocks.

“What about the
Gazette
photographer?” I asked.

“He's allowed in, too,” Ralph said. “But we'll have to stay with him.” I knew that would be fine with Jimbo. He was about twenty-five and looked like Beaver Cleaver, right down to the freckles. He'd react to this assignment the same way as the Beav. He'd give a gulp and a golly. Then he'd grab his cameras and do his usual good job. While we waited for Jimbo, Ralph began his lecture:

“The subject of female impersonators is very controversial in the gay world,” Ralph said, and I almost expected him to pull out a pointer and a blackboard. “Some gays feel that men date drag queens because they aren't fully out of the closet and haven't completely accepted their gayness. In other words, we're going out with men who
look like women, rather than accepting who and what we are, and loving men who look like men.

“My own theory is that female impersonators let us show our creativity and our need to walk on the wild side. We go for the outrageous.”

Ralph certainly did. Dating the Jolly Green Giantess was as outrageous as you can get.

“You won't hear it from the Chamber of Commerce, but St. Louis is a center for female impersonators. It's estimated we have some two hundred fifty in the area.” And now, thanks to the King Louie, we had a whole lot more.

Impersonators may look cheap, but they aren't. “It costs thousands of dollars to get up on that stage,” Ralph lectured. “The twelve finalists spent a total of a hundred thousand dollars for their dresses. Some losers wind up with colossal debts. Many bet the rent and the utility money and don't even place.”

“Then why are they doing this?”

“Often it's a way out of the ghetto or the trailer park,” said Ralph. “Many of them are poor boys who have pretty faces and not much else. If they win, or even place, they get a ticket to the gay club circuit. They can make two hundred fifty dollars a night at a cabaret and three hundred to five hundred dollars in tips. It's more money than those boys have ever seen in their life.”

“Do they put it away for their old age in securities and real estate, like smart call girls?”

“Most of them don't have an old age,” said Ralph.

He pulled out his Miss American Gender Bender Pageant program and showed me the back pages. They were loaded with tributes to drag queens who'd died of AIDS. In their photos, the dead queens shimmered and simpered, and looked pitifully young. Their epitaphs were short and sad. “Beautiful Bettina, 1993 AGBP Runner-Up. 1975–1995. We love you.”

I flipped through the fat five-dollar program and found a happier section. It proved a beauty queen is a beauty queen, regardless of sex. These gushed just like female contestants and wrote girlish congratulations to their competition in the program. Last year's title holder, a glamorous brunette named Sweet Cherry Whine, wrote this: “To the contestants—remember to be the best that you can be. While only one of you will wear the Gender Bender crown, you are all unique!” I couldn't agree more.

That's when Jimbo showed up, looking weirdly normal in jeans and a baseball jacket. He was wide-eyed with disbelief.

“We can get you backstage, Jimbo, but you have to stick with me,” I said.

“I wouldn't think of wandering off,” he said, clutching his cameras like a lifeline.

Ralph led us through the stage doors, where the medieval theme made way for makeshift modern. The backstage dressing area was a long room with scuffed unpainted plasterboard walls and rolling racks of costumes. Wigs perched on stands like small animals. The drag queens put on makeup at long folding tables or poured
themselves into their dresses in front of portable mirrors.