CHAPTER 2

SAYING IT IS DIFFERENT

Okay, it couldn’t actually be Diana Ross. I knew that because she’s like a grandmother or something now, and this was a very young Diana Ross, wearing a shiny, long, tight, flapper-fringed gold gown like something out of The Supremes’ high-glamour period. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, think Rihanna without the piercings and tattoos. Or Beyonce in Dreamgirls, because I’m pretty sure she was really supposed to be playing Diana Ross, but for legal reasons they called her Deena Jones. Even Buck figured that one out. Lawyers.

“Um, so you’re supposed to be Diana Ross, right?” I said with a lack of certainty.

“Well, darlin’, who the hell else ever looked this fabulous?” she said, waving one glove-covered arm over herself like she was a part of a “Showcase Showdown” on The Price Is Right.

Now that I was paying more attention, I realized that “she” had a rather deep voice. But I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions and say something wrong, because some women just have deep voices, just like some men have high ones, and both sets must get really tired of the wrong, “Yes, ma’am,” or “No, sir,” from telemarketers and the like. And she was really, really beautiful, with smooth brown skin dusted over with some sort of shimmering makeup.

After a longer pause than was natural, I finally blurted out a confused, “Where did you come from?”

“You mean like Harlem, or what the hell am I doing on your street?”

“Um, the second one, I guess? But without the ‘hell.’ You’re perfectly welcome on any street, including this one. I’ve just never seen you before. Or anyone like you.”

“Mm, ain’t you a flatterer.” She held out a gloved hand for me to shake, which I did. “Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Ms. Coco Chanel Jones. And don’t you forget it.”

“I don’t think forgetting is an option.”

“More flattery. I like that. Anywhoo, you asked how I came to be here. Well, it’s a sad tale, but you look like you’re trafficking in sad these days, so let’s just say that cab driver did not take kindly when I realized I left my purse at home. So he dumped this fine piece of African goddess down the street there, and then carted off your fancy-dressed friends. You don’t happen to have a spare Metrocard, do you?”

“Oh!” I said, feeling badly that I’d flagged down the cab that had just dumped her. (Him? Her? I still wasn’t sure.) Then, wanting to make her (him?) feel better, I said, “They’re not my friends. They’re my … family.”

“MM-hm, I heard that,” Coco said, pursing her lips. “Let me guess. You’re all sad because they’re going somewhere that you want to go. Am I right?”

I nodded reluctantly.

“Where?”

“It’s stupid,” I said.

“Don’t try Coco,” Coco said, wagging a gloved finger with a huge sparkling costume diamond ring on it at me. “You’re cute, but I get bored easily.”

It’s always a nice surprise being described as cute, but since I still couldn’t figure out which sex was calling me this, I shifted uncomfortably on the cement step. “Really, don’t worry yourself. It sounds like you have enough troubles on your plate.” But before she’d even had chance to say anything else, I found myself continuing with more than I’d meant to say. “It’d just be nice to feel included for once.”

Coco tapped the toe of one of her gold five-inch stilettos on the sidewalk a few times before crossing her arms over her chest, saying, “Don’t make me get blood on my new shoes kicking in your head because you won’t just say where it is you want to go. Do I really look like someone who has a tolerance for the repressed and soft-spoken?”

The look of good-humored intolerance somehow got me to actually blurt out to this complete stranger what it was I wanted. “The Autumnal Ball! Okay? There, are you happy? They went to the Autumnal Ball at The Plaza, and I wanted to go, too.”

And then Coco let out the most unexpectedly cruel cackle I’d ever heard, and I immediately regretted sharing such a personal pain.

But it turned out her laugh had not been cruel. That was just the way I heard it at first, because she followed the laugh with a huge smile, saying, “Child, fortune just gave you a big, wet, tongue kiss!”

“Huh?” I said. For many reasons.

She began to struggle up the steps in her tight dress and five-inch heels, putting a hand on one of my shoulders for balance. “Baby, we’ve got to get you cleaned up and pretty. I’m going to be your fairy godmother, ya hear?” she practically shouted in my face. “And when Coco says fairy, honey, she means fairy! Hey, now!”

I struggled to stand while trying not to make her lose her balance, all while attempting to figure out what the heck was going on.

“I’m confused,” I said.

Now standing one step below me, but with those five-inch heels, Coco was pretty much eye-to-eye with me. She put her hands on my shoulders, looked deep into my eyes, and said the most unbelievable words that I never thought I’d hear. “Child, I am taking you to The Autumnal Ball.”

“The … but … but … I don’t have a ticket.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But how—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But I don’t have a thousand dollars for—”

“I said, don’t worry about it.”

“But how can I not worry about it? Worrying is what I do! About everything!”

With an unexpectedly calm smile, Coco put I finger to my lips. “And that’s why you need a fairy godmother. For the rest of the night you’re not allowed to worry about anything. You have one, and only one, responsibility. To have a dream come true and have the sweetass time of your sweetass life. Do you understand me?”

I didn’t really feel like I had much of a choice other than to nod in agreement. Besides, homework could always wait until tomorrow.

Coco ooh’d and ah’d as we walked up to the third floor where my room was. I’d started out apologizing for the deteriorated state of the house, just like I always heard Iris doing on the rare occasion she had to let someone inside. But after Coco interrupted me to say that she lived with her single mother and four siblings in a two-bedroom walkup in Harlem, I decided to keep my mouth shut.

That didn’t mean she was very impressed with my bedroom. It was admittedly minimalist, but that was at least partially my fault. When my dad and I had first moved in, I’d asked to be put on the floor above the others, because I didn’t want to displace anyone, or give them any extra reasons to resent my entering their lives. It also gave me the chance to remove myself a bit from a situation I wasn’t entirely ready to embrace. And since the third floor had been where servants were housed back in the day, the decor was definitely utilitarian. But I had a bed (old, but surprisingly firm), a chipped antique dresser that must have been a piece of pride in its heyday, and a simple desk and chair. Luckily the desk was pretty large, because I generally had lots of books stacked on it, and the chair was comfortable, which was all I really needed to focus on my schoolwork.

The best part of the room was that I had my own little balcony. Since it was at the back of the house, it looked out onto the small garden alcove of one of our neighbors, the NYC version of a backyard. When the weather was nice, I often spent many hours there reading, enjoying the fresh air and the slightly muffled sounds of the city. Kimberly’s much larger room was beneath mine, and her much longer balcony stretched out below me. There had once been a time when I’d first moved in that I thought she and I might somehow bond over this shared experience, her escaping to read on her balcony, me escaping to read on mine, and our eyes would meet and we’d realize that we weren’t so alone after all. But that never happened. Kimberly wasn’t much of a reader.

To be fair, since it had just been my dad and me up until then, I’m not sure I really knew how to be part of another type of family. I’d never had a mother I knew, and I’d never had siblings, so my expectations were based on what I’d seen in movies and on TV. Iris and her children were definitely not like that.

“You’re kidding me, right?” Coco said as she looked through the clothes hanging in my closet. “That little cuntella was wearing this year’s Vera Wang, and their cheap asses can’t even buy you a suit?”

“How do you know what designer she was wearing?” I asked.

Coco raised a worldly eyebrow at me. “I’m your first drag queen, ain’t I?”

“Oh. So you are a he.”

Coco’s other eyebrow raised to meet its partner. “We prefer ‘she’ when we have put this much time and money into our appearance, thank you very much.”

“I can do that,” I said.

I guess I looked a little spooked, because she shook her head with a soft chuckle and said, “Shit, next you’re going to tell me you don’t even know you’re gay.”

And then I guess I looked more than a little spooked, because for the first time I saw a glimpse of whomever Coco was when she wasn’t in drag. Everything about her went sort of soft and quiet. “Oh, precious, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be until you’re ready. When am I ever going to learn to keep my big mouth shut?” She looked down at the floor, biting her lower lip.

So here it was, the moment I’d been dreading. And hoping for. When someone would say those words, “you’re gay,” and I wouldn’t feel the knee-jerk need to deny it.

Because the fact is that … well … I am gay. The idea of it had taken a few years to solidify in my mind, and in the last year or so I would even experiment with saying the words out loud—always when I was in the house alone—just to see if anything cataclysmic would happen in the world, mine or at large. “I’m gay. I am gay. I like guys.” Little one syllable words that changed everything. But no lightning, no thunder, no turning into ash and dissolving into the ground. Nothing really, except for the feeling that somehow I’d done something wrong.

I don’t know if you’re gay or straight, or even if you are gay, if you’ve ever felt this way, but for me, I always felt like the words, “I’m gay,” needed to be followed by, “I’m sorry.” Dad, I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you by being something other than the man you thought you’d been raising all of these years. Straight girl with a crush on me, I’m sorry if you were having visions of a long romance and eventual marriage to the only guy you’ve ever known who would also rather watch episode after episode of Gilmore Girls reruns than football or a Transformers marathon. Straight person, I’m sorry if the differences in our sexual and emotional wiring make you uncomfortable. Because that’s something that seems to get forgotten in all of this talk of sexual “preferences.” Being homosexual isn’t just about sex. It’s about who we have emotional romantic connections with, whose arms we actually feel at peace in, who completes the—dare I say it—fairy tale of what romantic and domestic bliss is for that individual.

And then, after all of that hypothetical apologizing, I’d get kind of annoyed. You know what, yes, I’m sorry I’m gay and if that creates issues for you, but I’m having to deal with it, and so must you. Because it’s not changing, it’s not going away, it’s always been there, whether we’re talking about my history or the history of the world, so we’re all just going to have to deal with it. Case closed.

So many words like that had run through my mind for years, but saying them aloud, to an actual person, was very, very scary.

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I’m … I am … it’s just that knowing it and saying it are … different. You know?”

When I looked up into Coco’s eyes, I saw them beginning to tear up, and evidently that was not okay with her because she shoved me towards the bed as she reached into one of her arm-length gloves and pulled out a cell phone. “You just sit there while I make a few phone calls. We’ve got to get you a suit jacket, and I ain’t walking through a field of cow shit with someone in Payless shoes. Those cheap motherfuckers. She gets Vera Wang and you’re wearing Payless freaking shoes!”

After I gave up trying to argue that there was nothing wrong with nondesigner shoes and clothes, Coco sent me to go take a shower.

Since Coco didn’t have her purse, I paid for us to take the 6 Train. One of the great things about living in New York City is that you can get on a subway on the relatively conservative Upper East Side with an uber-glamorous drag queen, and other than a few happily scandalized tourists, no one bats an eye. One elderly Russian lady asked how Coco managed to walk in such high heels, but her husband said, “If your legs had ever looked like that, you would have found a way.” For a second I thought she was going to hit him, but then she just blew out her cheeks and said he was probably right.

When a seat opened up, a rather handsome Dominican man motioned to it with a, “Ladies first,” and Coco flirted with him so hard I finally understood what it meant for people to eye-fuck. Luckily he got off at the next stop, or I’m not sure she would have said a word to me.

“Whew,” Coco said, after her eyes had followed him down the platform as far as she could. “I was afraid he was going to give me a hard-on while I’m tucked.”

“What’s tucked?” I asked.

Coco looked at me with slight exasperation before saying, “Child, did they have you locked up in that attic? Because no kid that grows up in New York City is that damn innocent. What do you think tucked means?”

My eyes briefly went to the crotch of her dress.

“That’s right, baby. Men do not appreciate what a beautiful woman goes through.”

I figured this wasn’t the time to ask why, exactly, she felt the need to put in all of that effort to look like the sex other than the one she had been born. Being gay had certainly never made me want to dress or look like a woman. But to each his or her own, right?

Instead, I said, “So you still haven’t told me how we’re supposed to get into this high security event.”

“I told you not to worry about that. What I want to know is why everyone else in your family gets to go, but you don’t.” She bent over to pointedly look down at my inexpensive shoes, as a way of pointing out that she was following my request to drop that topic.

I explained all about Iris being my stepmom, and dad’s death, and so on and so forth, but when I finished, Coco just said, “Okay, so money is tight. I certainly understand that, trust. But why spend the money for them to go? Let alone the money that Vera Wang gown set y’all back. Lordy!”

“Okay, well, first, Iris had to sell one of her last pieces of serious jewelry to pay for that dress, and don’t think she doesn’t remind Kimberly of it every time she can, even though Kimberly kept saying she could get something cheaper. But Iris said ‘there was no way she was having those other bitches at the ball talk trash about her daughter because she didn’t have as good a dress as anyone else there.’”

“I’m starting to respect this Iris,” Coco said with an emphatic nod.

“So, anyway, Iris has it in her head that since Kimberly is so beautiful—”

“I was far away when they got in the cab. Is she really that pretty?”

“She’s gorgeous,” I said. “I’m not saying that makes her a good person or anything, but she is sort of stunning. On the outside, at least.”

“Go on,” Coco said tapping me on the forearm.

“Anyway, now that Kimberly is starting NYU, and J.J. Kennerly is a sophomore at Columbia …”

I stopped because a faraway look had come over Coco’s face, and I could tell she wasn’t listening anymore. “What’s wrong?”

Coco snapped back to attention. “Oh, nothing, you said the name J.J. Kennerly. That man is so beautiful, I just had to take a moment and picture him. Although, probably not a good idea while I’m tucked, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I think I’ve figured it out, thanks.”

“So, what, Iris thinks if J.J. Kennerly sees Kimberly all dressed up in some Vera Wang maybe she can get a date or something?”

“Oh, no. Iris wants them to get married.”

“Married? Is she cray-cray?”

“Well, Fontaine is a pretty big name in the Social Registry and that sort of thing, so it’s not that crazy of an idea, and Iris will do just about anything to get back to her former glory.”

“Ooh, it’s all so Jane Austen, isn’t it?”

“You read Jane Austen, too?” I asked. It would be nice to know that we had something in common besides being gay.

“No,” Coco said. “But I’ve seen a couple of the movies.”

Then she grabbed my arm and jumped up. “This is our stop.” A gang-banger type stupidly tried to step in front of her to get to the door first, so quick as a whip she stomped the heel of her stiletto into the toe of his shoe. “Oops. So sorry. Pardon me.” She smiled at him in a way that was both polite and a threat, and he let us both pass. I have to say if I ever get caught in a fight between a group of gang-bangers and a group of drag queens, I might want to be on the side of the drag queens.

Especially once I saw the first of Coco’s friends. Special Kaye Ballard was a six-and-a-half-foot tall, red-wigged Amazon, dressed to compliment Coco—one of the backup Supremes to Coco’s Diana Ross. As we emerged from the subway, she was standing at the top of the stairs holding a suit jacket and a pair of men’s black shoes.

“You’re the best,” Coco said as they air kissed. “Mama loves you.”

“We’d better hurry,” Special Kaye said. “Aphra Behn is getting antsy.”

“That bitch always goes Norma Desmond before a performance,” Coco said, taking the jacket from Special Kaye and helping me into it. I felt slightly uncomfortable about the way this new drag queen was looking me up and down, but when she said, “Mm-mm-mm, what a cutie,” I couldn’t really pretend I hadn’t heard it, so even though I blushed, I said, “Thank you.”

Special Kaye started fanning herself. “You know that blush would go perfectly with my red hair.”

“Hands off, you wretched old queen,” Coco said. “This little innocent has already had enough shocks for one evening.”

“But the night is so young.”

“And so is he.” Coco stopped adjusting the jacket on me and looked Special Kaye dead in the eyes. “I’m serious.”

Special Kaye held up her hands, with a shoe in each. “Okay, okay, I get it. No chicken for dinner.”

“Good. And make sure Aphra Behn knows it, too.”

Special Kaye turned to me and said, “You won’t have to worry about her. She prefers buzzards, all wrinkled and stringy.”

I was a little confused, but before I could give it too much thought, Coco was kneeling down and telling me to lift my foot. Within seconds the shoes I’d worn had been carelessly tossed aside, and I was standing in a fancy pair of black leather shoes that looked and felt very expensive. There was just one problem.

“Um, these are way too big,” I said.

Coco and Special Kaye both looked at me like I’d just farted in front of the Queen of England. Then they looked at each other, as if to confirm that their ears had not deceived them, and finally back to me.

“Baby,” Coco said, “those are Ferragamo. If you don’t think your feet are big enough to fill what you have so graciously been given, then I will gladly stop a cab driver and ask him to drive over said feet until they swell up enough, understand?”

“Um … they’re perfect?” I said.

“That’s better. Now let me see you walk in them.”

I took a step, and the shoe immediately slipped off.

“Taxi!” Coco said.

“Wait!” I said. “Wait, just give me a chance to figure it out.” Thus began an awkward couple of minutes while two impatient drag queens crossed their arms over their busts and watched me learn out how to walk in shoes that were way too large for my feet. Finally I thought I had the hang of it, but when I turned around to proudly walk back in their direction, somehow I kicked off one of the shoes, and it barely missed hitting Coco.

Slow as dial-up, she bent down to retrieve the shoe, then held it out to me. “If I can make walking in five-inch heels look easy, the least you can do is keep these damn things on your feet.”

“We should go,” I said. “I’m ready. Really. Besides, you still haven’t told me how we’re supposed to get into this thing, so why should I worry about—”

“Little one,” Special Kaye said, throwing her arms above her head in a show-stopping gesture, “we’re the entertainment!”

Confused, I turned to Coco. “Wait, what? You mean you’re invited to this thing?”

“Invited?” Coco said. “Honey, we get paid to be here.” She and Special Kaye cackled as they high-fived. “Let’s go.”

We started on our way, but then I remembered, “My shoes!”

Coco rolled her eyes, and then told me to wait right where I was. She walked back to where my old shoes had been abandoned, picked them up, and headed towards us. But then, as she passed a trash bin, she tossed them in, wiping her hands dramatically as she looked me directly in the eye.

I had a couple blocks to practice walking in the new shoes, and I thought I was getting the hang of it, even if I was dragging behind a little bit. By the time we rounded the corner to The Plaza’s service entrance, I was feeling pretty proud of myself since I hadn’t thrown a shoe in over a block.

Waiting with a hand on her hip and a perturbed look on her face was a much shorter and chubbier version of Special Kaye, also with a matching red wig. “Finally!” Aphra Behn said. “You’re later than my first period!”