Tats Too (33 page)

Their applause is what slams me back down to earth in the middle of the kitchen. I take an awkward bow, trying to cover my embarrassment.

“Wonderful!” Vivian laughs. “Dueling Elvi!”

“Kind of like the dueling banjos in
Deliverance,
” Lulu adds. “Except without the banjos.”

Rachel laughs and slaps me so hard on the back it almost sends me to my knees. I grab the counter for support and wheeze, “Well, I don’t guess I’ll be giving up my day job anytime soon.”

Vivian kisses me sweetly on my nose, saying, “Honey, you don’t have a job.”

“I have an idea!” Lulu exclaims, sounding just like the million times Vivian has said the exact same thing. And just like all those other times I’ve heard those same four words, a chill creeps down my spine. She continues, “We don’t have much time. Pride Parade is this afternoon, and we need some female help. I’ll call all the girls. I bet I can have them all here in just a couple of hours.”

***

Lulu was wrong. She got all the girls here in less than an hour and she only made one phone call. All she said was, “Tina, get all the girls together. We’re having a coming-out party. My
place. ASAP.”

There must be a drag queen phone tree that reaches across the city of Las Vegas because the condo is packed to the gills with a passel of drag queens. Not passel. A gaggle? That doesn’t seem right. What do you call a pack of drag queens? Pride? A coterie? Cotillion?

“A Flame,” Tina Turner says. “Drag queens travel in Flames.”

Whoopsy daisy. I didn’t realize I was thinking out loud. I smile sheepishly at Tina, who’s sitting very, very close to me on the sofa and dwarfs me in size, weight and sheer presence.

Tina giggles and lays a big, black paw on my thigh. I hope her overly-manicured hand fondling my leg is just her way of being friendly. I’ve never told anyone about my dreams of the real Tina. I have this recurring Mad Max, end-of-the-world, meteor-hits-America-and-destroys-all-life except me, Tina Turner and cockroaches dream. And Tina does all kinds of beastly, naughty things to me. I always wake up scared and in a cold sweat. And horny as hell.

My Tina dreams are even better than my Queen Latifah dreams.

Yeah, I got a thing for sexy black women. When I’m around them I emit pheromones that smell stronger than Henry the Eighth. Tina must’ve sniffed them out.

I scooch closer to the end of the sofa and pretend to be entertained by all the drag queens milling around the living room. So far I see one Barbra, one Judy, one Bette, one Ann-Margret, two Chers and three Lizas. There’s also a blonde that I don’t know if she’s Madonna or Britney. And another one that’s either Sonny Bono or Janis Joplin, I can’t tell. And the one with the weird eyebrows is either Joan Crawford or Faye Dunaway.

“If I were a man, I’d want to be a woman, too,” I say out loud on purpose.

Tina laughs and scoots closer to me until our thighs are touching. That makes me so nervous, I keep rambling, “But if I were a woman, which I am, but pretend I’m not for the sake of this conversation, if I were a woman, I’d want to have a penis. I’d like to put out campfires with it. That’s the second thing I’d do with it. Does aiming one of those take a lot of practice? And why do men pee for such a long time? They must have bladders the size of a basketball. I’d think it would take at least three firemen to hold a piss stream that hard.”

Tina laughs again, then says, “You smell scrum-dilly-ishous.” I look at her leg touching mine and wonder how the hell can she get muscled-up quads like that. Is it from wearing six-inch heels all the time? Maybe I should start doing squats and thrusts with heels on.

“Yeah…” I stutter and keep on rambling, “with all this leather on, I smell like the inside of a new car. I love that smell, don’t you?”

“Mmmmhmmmm,” she hums. “Leather is the new polyester. You don’t have to iron it and it wipes clean with a damp cloth.”

Where’s Lulu? Or Rachel? I need some help here. Tina is obviously not going to let me go easy, and she has me so squished into the side of the couch, it’s going to take the Jaws of Life to get me out.

Vivian stands up on a coffee table, oh wait… my bad. That’s Lulu. She’s wearing Vivian’s jeans, white T-shirt and white tennis shoes. She even has Viv’s trademark red purse slung over one shoulder. Her makeup is toned down several notches and she looks more like Vivian than Vivian does.

Where is Vivian? I haven’t seen her in about half an hour.

I grab the nearest evening gown and use it as a rope to haul myself out of the sofa cushions.

Lulu sticks two fingers in her mouth and whistles loud enough to call the cows home. Everybody snaps to and gives her their full attention. She smiles benevolently and says loudly, “Sisters, thank you for being here.”

I nudge, poke, prod and squeeze my way through the Flame and head for the kitchen.

No Vivian.

“As you all know by now, you have assembled to help me and my little sister.” Lulu’s voice booms from the living room.

I go back on the scout. I check every room in the house, but can’t find her anywhere. Maybe she’s in the guest bathroom. I see a slice of light under the door and knock.

No answer.

“Vivian,” I ask and knock lightly again.

“Just a sec,” she says from behind the closed door.

Is she crying? That sounded like her crying voice.

I turn the door handle, but it’s thumb locked. I knock again.

No answer.

“Vivian, what’s going on? Let me in.”

No answer is all the answer I need. I hold my shoulder high, take a couple of steps back and ram the door as hard as I can.

It flies open, banging against the tile wall behind it.

Vivian sits in the empty tub, her legs curled up to her chest, head on her knees and sobbing.

I don’t know what to do, so I sit on the edge of the tub and rub my hand over her head.

And that’s when I see it. Lying on the seat of the toilet. It’s one of those pee stick things that tells you if you’re pregnant. I pick it up and take a look. There’s a blue minus sign in the little window.

“Viv?” I whisper to her.

She looks up at me. Her cheeks are red and splotchy from crying and her body shakes all over.

“Honey?” I ask, holding up the pee stick.

“Good news,” she says, snorting the snot back up her nose. “I’m not pregnant after all.”

I don’t think she feels good about this news at all. In fact, it looks like she feels pretty damn bad about the good news.

And maybe I do, too. There was a little part of me that was hoping…

Vivian rests her forehead back on her knees and blubbers, “It was just a hysterical pregnancy. I just made the whole thing up. My whole body just bloated up because I’m fucking crazy in the head and wanted to have your baby, and you should have me committed or something.”

I slide into the tub with her and pull her into my arms. She lays her head against my chest and sobs. I trace my fingertips lightly up and down her back because that’s what my grandma used to do to make me feel better.

I stare at some space beyond the white tile wall for a long time before I realize that I’m crying, too.

“You didn’t really sleep with anybody else, huh?” I ask.

“I already told you that.”

“I know. But even if you did, I’d already decided that I can’t live without you anyway.”

“Well, now you don’t have to worry. There’s no baby,” she says, smearing her snot on my leather.

“Do you want a baby that bad?”

She shakes her head. “Hell, no. It would wreck my body. My tits would get saggy and my ass would get huge and I’d have all kinds of scars. This is a relief,” she sputters, “a huge, fucking relief.”

I pull her closer to me and hug her even tighter. “Because we could, you know. We could have another.”

“We could?”

“I’d like that. I’d like that a lot. And I don’t care if you get scars or your tits get saggy.”

“I love you so much, Lee. You know, you’re the first person I’ve ever had sex with when I was sober.”

I didn’t know that. Damn.

She continues, “And I want to have your baby.”

I lift her chin so she’s looking in my eyes and I tell her the truth, “Then it’s settled. We can figure out the logistics later. But we’ll need to do it quick so Georgia and her little sister or brother won’t be that far apart in age.”

Vivian throws her arms around my neck and hugs me tight. “You’re my favorite.”

“Your favorite what?”

“My favorite everything, silly.”

“Well, I’m actually being kind of selfish about the baby thing,” I say. “I’ve never had sex with a pregnant woman, and I’ve never had sex with a fat woman. Two birds, one stone, you know.”

She laughs and kisses me on the chin.

Lulu walks in the bathroom, takes in the scene and claps her hands for attention. “I don’t know why you’re choosing this moment in time to sit in my tub and cry, but you better get over it. We’re wasting daylight.” She points at Vivian and says, “Your hair is a fucking mess and your complexion looks like shit. And as for the rest of your body…” She yells over her shoulder, “Rachel! See if one of the girls has an extra girdle!”

Vivian laughs. “Remember how you told me to bitch-slap you when you sound like Mother?”

***

Lulu and Vivian have drag queen mentalities. Nothing is ever quite perfect enough and everything could stand to be bigger. Hair, makeup, clothes, tits (I’m actually okay about the bigger tits part). I’m not so scared of the Mafia anymore. I think drag queens are scarier. And, I’d have a better chance of surviving a Mafia attack.

It only took about ten minutes for Rachel to turn me into Elvis. The hardest part was hiding my dreads under the wig, but Lulu fixed that by putting some pantyhose over my head before sticking the wig on. One of my dreads keeps sticking out the back like a pig’s tail, but Rachel just said not to turn my back on the audience. She once did an entire show with the seat of her pants split and nobody ever knew.

I squeezed into a tight baby blue jumpsuit with a flipped-up collar and more rhinestones than Glen Campbell and I don’t look half bad. The open neckline plunges all the way down to my wide belt and I was worried about showing my boobage, but Rachel just duct-taped my boobies further to the sides and that seemed to work. Duct tape is my friend until I have to rip it off my nipples.

Vivian, on the other hand, has all the right parts in all the right places. Lulu duct-taped Viv’s tits together until they squished up out of her neckline and made a nice little shelf. If I still smoked, I’d set my ashtray on them.

Her hair is bumped up so high she single-handedly raised the sea level of Las Vegas (now she’s taller than me), and her body is rockin’ that dress so hard that even Lulu has declared her flawless. And in drag queen-speak that’s as good as you get.

“Just remember that you’re not a man, you’re not a drag queen. You are a woman with attitude,” Lulu lectures.

Vivian replies, “I’ve always been that. It’s in our genetic code.”

Rachel and I steal a glance at each other and snicker our assent.

“More!” Lulu gestures wildly, almost tipping over the Mt. Everest of hair on Vivian’s head. “More attitude than normal. Less is not more. Whoever said that was stupid. More is more and less is less and less is not more.”

“Got it,” Vivian says, molding her hair back in place like it’s a clay pot on spinning pottery wheel.

“I once knew a Cherokee guy named Les Moore,” I throw in just for the hell of it.

“And you, shut your cakehole,” Lulu says. “In your case, less is more.” She points at Vivian, saying, “More.” She points at me and says, “Less.”

Lulu puts both palms under Vivian’s tits and pushes them higher, then pulls the dress down lower, then squishes the tits in toward each other—it’s like she’s kneading dough. “Cleavage is like chocolate. There’s no such thing as too much and it makes you feel good. It’s also the highest form of advertising there is,” she explains while shaping Vivian’s loaves. “But…” she emphasizes, “if you show sidetit, undertit or nipple, you’re nothing but a cheap whore.”