Stella Steele

I don’t know when my inclination to dress in drag was born but I remember always feeling ashamed of it.  I remember getting home from school as a young boy and putting my mother’s lingerie gowns on, and as simply as the silk night garments slipped over my hairless shoulders, I was empowered.  As simply as my soft feet slid into my mother’s heels, I felt like I could walk anywhere.  Like I could walk up to the terrorists at school and tell them to fuck off, walk up to my parents and tell them to stop using me as leverage, or click and clack my way onto the platform of a train, with a mink stole wrapped tight around my young neck and let it take me somewhere with lights and tall things.
            I would stand in front of my mother’s mirror and admire the way my body looked in them, put on her lipstick and blow kisses to myself, I would have imaginary conversations with important people and I would laugh like a movie star, placing my fingers on my chest and throwing my head back with half closed eyes while my brother, waited in the living room watching cartoons, for our mother to get home.   Sometimes my mother would get home early and I could hear the garage door opening, and on when that happened, I furiously scrubbed the makeup off my face and put her gowns in her dresser, making sure the laces and folds were exactly how I found them as to avoid suspicion.  She would walk in the door and I would be out of breath and full of fear that I had forgotten the cap to her eye liner or that there might still be some blush on my cheeks and that fear lasted for days.  I must have been 9 or 10 years old.
            I don’t think my mother ever knew, I still haven’t told her, and if she does know then she’s never said anything.  My mother knows a lot of things that she doesn’t bring up, our family has many closets and in them are delicately laced boxes containing delicately wrapped secerets.  Although she did take the news, when I was 20, that I would be moving to Florida to pursue my dreams of being a stand up drag queen comic pretty well.  My drag name was to be Stella Steele, after my mother’s madden name. “Well if that’s what you wanna do honey…” she said changing the subject.  I suspect she was relieved when I never made it to Florida.
            It wasn’t until I fell in love and moved in with Evan and his apartment above a haunted antique shop in Oswego Illinois, that I recognized my proclivity for drag queens, when I became enchanted by his roommate Daisy .   Daisy Star stood six foot six before stilettos and was formally Frank Murphy.  I guess Daisy was more of a transsexual, a permanent drag queen who injected hormones into her ass daily to achieve a more feminine shape.   She does tranny porn in LA now but at the time she was stripping at a nearby bar called Manuvers and I would watch her rehearse in the living room often.  I studied her mannerisms, the elegance of her fingers, the dexterity of which masterfully applied makeup between snorts of cocaine and shots of dry gin.  Even the way she shoveled cocaine in her nose, off of the glass table in our living room was a sight for sore eyes.   She garnished her drug abuse with a raised manicured pinky; a beautification of the closeness to rock bottom.  Daisy represented what I loved about drag and that was in her ability to evoke glamor and poise in filth and in nothingness.
            Daisy once indulged in a radical cocaine bender and for four days and four nights she did not sleep.  She instead, put on her roller skates and rehearsed her soon to be preformed stripping routine to the song “I’ve Got A Brand New Pair Of Roller Skates,” by Melani Safka.  She put the CD containing this song into our DVD player and hit repeat, and I swear to God she did not take off those roller skates, or stop listening to that song for four days.  She just rolled around the living room, all seven feet of her, singing “You’ve got a brand new key…” taking breaks only to inhale more powder.   I eventually came home on the fourth day to her slumped over the couch, wearing her roller skates and the song still blasting through the speakers of our old TV.  She was supposed to perform that night, but I didn’t wake her and she slept through her curtain call.
            She seemed to only sleep when her body gave up and once took a nap in the bath tub, only to wake up underwater to the scratches of a heroin cat on her bloated face.   In spite of her obvious vices, I had my own (one of which was my addiction to Niquil martinis), I still loved her because she possessed a power I had fantasized about possessing since I was young and played with my mother’s clothing and cosmetics.  It is the power of confident femininity, which I think is the closest thing to a super power human beings can hope to have; even closer is when a man masters it. 
            Daisy first flaunted this power for me in the bread aisle of a grocery store, where we were attempting to buy a week’s worth of groceries for twenty bucks.  She was wearing a pin up dress, the patterns of which were checkered red and white like a picnic table cloth and her hair was in braided pig tails.  Her dress was low cut and exposed her full back tattoos, the swallows on her chest, the flames crawling up her thighs and arms.  Her lip stick was as thick as her confidence and as she stood posing, selecting her bread of choice I heard a woman talking to her daughter a few feet from where Daisy  and I stood, “What the hell is that?” she said in a loud whisper. 
            Later, in the potato chip aisle I asked her, “does that bother you?”  She took her sun glasses which were on her head and placed them in front of her eyes, “does what bother me?” she asked.  I looked at her until she couldn’t avoid what I was asking and she responded, “Oh that?  No.  It happens all the time, and to tell you the truth I like it, I’m more beautiful than any woman in this town and even if I’m not I feel like I am, so she can suck my tits.”  With the elegance of Ms. Golightly herself, extended her pinkies and put her sun glasses back on her head.   She read aloud, the ingredients in the bag of chips she was holding, “Potatoes, canola oil, sea salt.”
            Ever since that day in the potato chip aisle of Jewel-Osco I have idolized transsexuals and drag queens, and Daisy is still one of my biggest hero’s.  She taught me many things in the year we lived together.  She taught me to alternate nostrils when snorting cocaine so you get less nose bleeds.  She taught me how to do a champagne enema.  She taught me the power of femininity.
           
 And that is the closest thing to a super power I can ever hope to have.      
           

Short #2

           I once tried to love a botanist named Jesse.  He lived in a trailer in Wichita Kansas with a fat video game nerd who was also a queen. Our long distance romance was upheld by the telephone, the wires of which transmitted our deepest secrets of regret, failure and hope.  He said to me once over the phone that all he wanted to do, more than anything in the world, was to smash a bunch of glass, “I just think it would calm me down,” he said. 
            I only met Jesse in person twice, and I must admit I had high hopes for us, if only for the fact that he loved plants, and I was aware of my own heart’s frailty which at the time was as easily torn as the petal of a rose in the hands of a clumsy child. 
            I met him the first time in the West Bottoms of Kansas City, where we went to haunted houses in old factories and clung to one another both because we were scared shitless and because we both needed so much to hold on to someone’s arm.  Sometimes I get like that.  I need to hold onto a man, physically, because if I don’t, I feel like I might float away or fall down.   What I found out though, through years of leaving gay bars with handsome strangers, is that I’m not alone.  On several occasions I got to these strangers houses or them to mine, I told them I didn’t want to have sex, I just wanted to hold them in the nude. On those occasions those men let out a sigh of release comparable to the air pushed through someone’s lungs when they are told that they do not have cancer, or that their mother will be okay. And I held a lot of beautiful lonely men that way, and they held me.  I also slept with a lot of beautiful lonely, angry men that way.
            The second and the last time I met Jesse was in Topeka Kansas.  I drove him and I to a creek on a road that enveloped the world in its vast grey flatness.  The creek was tucked between trees and an old semi truck loading dock, it glittered with boulders and pebbles.  I opened my trunk and motioned for Jesse to look, “I have a gift for you.” I said.  I had filled my trunk with plates, vases and coffee mugs from every thrift store in Kansas City.

            We smashed every single piece of glass.
            He was right, it did calm him down.

Short #1

Miles made terrible coffee and would attempt to disguise this fact by adding a pile of cinnamon to the equal parts of canned coffee haphazardly slopped into the paper filters of his abused coffee maker.  I hated it, it tasted like those burnt things that stick to bread pans, but I have always possessed an affinity towards men who make coffee for me and rarely refused his black charred liquid garbage. 
            On mornings when he was especially tired and his roommates were awake, he would triple brew his coffee, which consisted of brewing a pot of coffee and then pouring the coffee batch into the water chamber of the coffee maker and brewing it a third time.  The result was a muddy water whose body resembled the crema of freshly pulled espresso.  “Tripple BREW!” he would scream while running through the frosted apartment handing us all cups of crap.  “It’s snowing and there is triple brew!”   Miles was always quick to wake up.  I tried to teach him how to lay in bed for hours before actually getting up, telling stories that shaped us and making love to the sounds of his Chicago flat thawing and cracking and bowing in the winters morning sun; but 15 minutes of being next to me while conscious seemed to drive him into a state of wide eyed panic.  So we usually just fucked and got dressed while the triple brew turned our blood thick.
            Miles was fun to have sex with because he was so young.  I was not that much older than him, I was 23 and he was 20 when we met, which meant he had three years less of fucking experience than I did, three years less of heart break than I did; and I fell in love with his malleability.  I fucked him like a porn star, because he was too young to know how to make love.  I don’t think young gay people know how to make love anymore, and I think it’s almost entirely due to the porn industry.  From the age of 18 to about 22 I received more money shots than French kisses, had my backdoor opened more times than I had car doors opened for me, cracked open more legs than I did hearts and had foreplay lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes.  I didn’t learn until age 23 how to make love and I didn’t learn until age 24, how to make love with a stranger.
            But then I actually fell in love with Miles and naturally, dropped a Hiroshima bomb of insecurities onto that very fragile relationship.  I sometimes look around me, when I’m sitting by the water and the Pacific winds chill my bones, and I can still see the rubble.