Drag Teen (10 page)

SEEING THE SIGN THAT READ
NEW YORK CITY—50 MILES
gave me legitimate goose bumps. We’d been driving all day and into the night, and here we were. New York City was the most special place on earth and I didn’t mind saying that, even as someone who had, up until that moment, never been there. It was where, if you had even the tiniest inkling to visit, you’d never be whole until you did. I didn’t think New York City created interesting people—but I believed it told them it was okay to be interesting. Then, inevitably, paid them for it.

“Fifty miles,” I said out loud, without realizing it. “Wow.”

“I cannot believe this is really happening!” Heather screamed from the backseat. Seth was beaming; he’d been the image of contentment ever since we left Ocean City. As we approached, we put on the New York playlist Heather had created for this special occasion, containing every song about New York you could think of: that Alicia Keys song, the Liza one, the Sinatra one, even the Taylor Swift one.

None of us had been to New York before except for Seth, and even then he’d been two and didn’t remember it. It felt like every story I’d ever heard of people entering New York City for the first time compared it to
The Wizard of Oz
—and at first I was like,
Okay, we get it, you’re gay, have you seen any other movie?
But when I actually got there, I thought,
Gee, someone walking into the Emerald City
is
the closest thing to the magic of arriving in New York City as you’ll ever find, so the comparison is necessary.
If I was frustrated at Seth for slipping back into his New Shiny Self, not talking about what had happened in Maryland, it subsided as the immaculate towering skyline got closer and closer.

Before I knew it, we were in the Holland Tunnel, underwater, on our way into the city itself. To enter New York City, you literally have to go above or under water, leaving the rest of the country as you know it, to enter that special kingdom. At that point all I wanted was to be there, to be out of the car and in the streets like a real New Yorker. As we exited the tunnel, I rolled down my window. I wanted to smell the New York air.

“Ahhhh! We’re here!” I cried out. “We’re here! Let’s take in the beauty of it all!”

Heather winced. “It smells like dog pee.”

She was right. In unison, we all rolled our windows back up.

We were greeted with insane traffic, bumper to bumper, honking, people screaming in languages I’d never even heard before. Everyone seemed so pissed off—it was everything I’d ever dreamed of. Glowing billboards for Broadway shows and fancy clothing stores shone high above our car as we inched our way into this tiny island I’d always dreamed of stepping foot on.

I had made it. I had actually made it.

It wasn’t until we were on our way down Eighth Avenue, past taxis and hordes of people coming out of Broadway shows, that Seth asked where we were headed.

“I mean, I know there are lots of hotels … but do we have one? I didn’t think about that. I just sorta assumed we’d show up and stay somewhere.”

I shushed him, turning down Judy Garland as she sang “
I like New York in June, how about you?
”

“You name it, we can stay there!” I announced with immense excitement.

“Huh?” Heather asked.

“Tina gave me some money—
a lot
of money—and she told me to put us up somewhere really nice.” I pulled out the wad of cash from Tina and showed it to them. Both Heather’s and Seth’s eyes widened so much they looked like they might fall out.

“Holy crap,” Heather whispered, almost religiously. “We’re
totally
ordering room service.”

Heather and Seth did a quick search, Googling
fancy New York hotels
. There were plenty of them, but none of the fanciest ones had available rooms for the night.

“Look up where Jennifer Aniston stays,” I said.

“Why?” Heather asked, looking up at me in a beam of blue light from her phone.

“I don’t know. I just think she has nice taste.”

Heather couldn’t argue—you could accuse Jennifer Aniston of a lot of things, but bad taste wasn’t one of them.

Seth was already on it. “Apparently, somewhere called the Gramercy Hotel? Jesus! These rooms are six hundred bucks a night! How much money does Jennifer Aniston
have
?!”

“A lot!” I turned onto Thirty-Fourth Street just because I’d heard of it. “Fine, try someone a little
less
classy.”

“Jessica Simpson?” Heather offered from the backseat.

“Perfect!”

Jessica Simpson’s go-to hotel was booked, and by the time half an hour had passed, we’d checked the favorite New York hotels of Jennifer Hudson, Emma Stone, Kerry Washington, and, in one moment of desperation, Ariana Grande. Finally, we settled on a place where Seth’s web results insisted Justin Bieber had gotten into a fight with Orlando Bloom. We figured that was fancy enough for us.

The farther downtown we got, the more confusing New York became. The streets, once simply named Thirty-First, Thirty-Second, Thirty-Third, etc., suddenly turned into names like Crosby, Houston, Mulberry. We finally found the hotel, and as we pulled up to the front, a fancy-looking man in a uniform came out, asking us if we were guests of the hotel and offering to park our car. I’d never seen anything like this in my life, just driving up to a door and handing your keys over to someone in a vest that’s supposed to indicate they work there. Heather, trying really hard to seem unfazed by the whole situation, claimed the man was called a
valet
—which we later learned you don’t pronounce the
t
in.

This was a whole new world.

Inside the hotel, it was dark and moody—a little too dark, to be honest. I didn’t know how more people weren’t bumping into things. I wondered what the whole point of making a room look nice was, if you were going to make it so dark you could barely see it. Everyone in the lobby, whether at the front desk or at the bar to the side, looked like an extra from a present-day version of
Sex and the City
. With its subtle hints of burning woods and the fancy soap I was inevitably going to steal from the hotel room, the place even
smelled
cool. There was a DJ elaborately set up in the corner who didn’t even appear to be DJ-ing. Next to him was a really stunning supermodel reading a book inside a glass tank as if she were a really pretty fish.

Heather claimed she needed to pee, but I knew she probably just wanted to see how fancy the bathrooms were. Seth and I went to the desk to check in.

“Good evening. Name on the reservation?” the lady at the desk asked, peering over some skinny black glasses. She didn’t smile—in fact, she seemed to be putting great effort into her avoidance of doing so.

“Hi. We just called a few minutes ago. We’re—”

“The ones with the
Florida
area code?” She said the word
Florida
the way one would refer to a drowned water moccasin that’s gotten stuck in a pool skimmer. At that moment, I didn’t blame her. That’s what the state seemed like to me, from far away.

“That’s right,” I said. “We just need the one room, two double beds, please.”

My politeness seemed to annoy her. “ID, please,” she said curtly.

I handed over my ID. She leaned over her iPad typing, her long jet-black bangs covering her eyes as she did so.

“How will you be paying for this?”

“Cash.”

She looked up, her bangs falling perfectly back into place.

“We’ll need a card on file.”

I looked at Seth. None of us had a credit card.

“Well.” Seth cleared his throat, attempting to cover his panic. “Can we give you a cash deposit instead?”

“No,” she replied with zero emotion whatsoever. We were quiet for a moment while we tried to come up with what to say next.

“Is there any other option besides a card that we—”

“No.” She cut us off, this time with seemingly
even less
emotion, which I hadn’t thought was possible. “No hotel in New York is going to check you in without a credit card on file, Mr….” She looked down at my ID, frowned condescendingly, then handed it back to me. “You should know that all New York hotels require an adult signature for people under eighteen.”

Heather skipped up to the desk, delighted. “The bathroom has free mouthwash! Smell my breath!”

She opened her mouth really wide against my face, appalling the front desk lady. I stepped away.

“We’ll be right back. We just need to discuss a, uh, matter, briefly.”

Heather and Seth followed me over to a table by the bar. We sat down.

“Sorry! Should I not have made you smell my breath?” Heather asked, guiltily looking back over at the front desk.

“No. I mean, yes, that was disgusting, but that’s not the problem,” I said, fiddling with the wad of cash in my hand. “They require a credit card on file to check in, and hotels won’t check you in if you’re under eighteen. Why didn’t we think of this ahead of time?” I was spiraling, the way I tended to do, allowing one thing to bring down everything else around it, the fatal addition to the house of cards my emotions lived in.

“Calm down, JT. It’s going to be okay.” Seth rubbed the top of my hand. “We will figure this out. Let’s be rational. What hotel will let three underage teenagers with a wad of cash stay without asking questions?”

“We could go get a fake ID, open up a credit card in its name, and come back?” Heather offered.

I shot her a level glance. “A. That’s called fraud. And B. How is that going to help us tonight?”

“Okay, okay. Wait. I’ve got it.” Seth was looking down at his phone. “We’ll call the pageant organizers and ask for help. They’ll have to understand, right?”

“Great idea, Seth! Who’s listed as in charge?”

“Someone named … Lady Rooster.”

Heather rolled her eyes. “She sounds responsible.”

“There’s a phone number too.” Seth was already dialing. “It’s ringing! You talk to her—you’re the contestant.”

He handed me the phone. It rang for a long time without going to voice mail. Just as I was going to hang up, someone answered. All I could hear was really loud background noise, as if the person was inside some kind of mob.

“HELLO?” the voice shouted over the noise. “WHO IS THIS?”

I tried to talk loud enough for the person to hear me but not so loud that I caused a scene in the hotel.

“Is this Lady Rooster?” I asked.

“YEAH,” she bellowed.

“Hi. I’m JT Barnett. I’m in the pageant, the John Denton Foundation one, and we just got to New York but we don’t have anywhere to stay because—”

The background noise was only getting louder, but Lady Rooster had enough lung strength to interrupt me. “I’M WORKING AND IT JUST GOT BATSHIT BUSY. CAN YOU CALL ME BACK OR JUST COME DOWN HERE?”

“WHERE’S HERE?” I shouted. Some of the lobby patrons looked at me like I’d let loose an epic verbal fart.

“XXXL! WHERE THE HELL ELSE DO YOU THINK I’D BE?”

She hung up before I could ask anything else.

“Well?” Seth asked, hopeful.

“Sounds like we’re going somewhere called XXXL.”

Our adventure, it seemed, had gotten just that large.

WE WEREN’T CRAZY ABOUT DRIVING again in Manhattan, so we left the car where it was and took a mind-blowingly expensive cab over to the mysterious-sounding XXXL, which turned out to be a not-so-mysterious enormous gay club. And when I say enormous gay club, I mean
really
enormous, like the Epcot of gay bars. Even from outside I knew this was going to be a lot for me to handle; if the tiny dive in South Carolina had sent me into a dramatic tailspin of insecurity, I imagined this place would ignite a hurricane. A line was wrapped around the building, full of ridiculously attractive gay men.

“This line will take hours, you guys,” Seth said, surveying just how far down the block the parade of gays went. “Let’s try going to the front and asking for Lady Rooster.”

“We can’t break in line!” I panicked. “These people will kill us. Besides, that guy at the door is checking IDs. They’re not going to let any of us in there.”

“Call Lady Rooster back and tell her we’re outside.”

Heather was laughing. “Is anyone else aware of how ridiculous it is that we keep having to say the name Lady Rooster in a serious way?” She shook her head in awe. “Gay people are great.”

I tried calling Lady Rooster again but didn’t get an answer. I sent a text—
Hey. This is JT who called earlier. We’re outside the club—
but she didn’t reply. We waited for half an hour as the line got shorter and shorter. Most of the guys checked out Seth on their way in, and I tried not to notice, deciding I had enough to worry about for one night. Finally, a side door was kicked open with a sharp orange heel; then a ball of orange and red feathers poked out. After a second I realized there was a face in the middle of it. From the costume alone, there was no question that this was Lady Rooster.

“You!” She pointed at me. “You the one blowing up my phone?”

I sheepishly walked over to her.

“Yeah, I’m JT Barnett. I’m in the pageant and we just got to town and we don’t have anywhere to stay and—”

“Ugh. I’m on in five minutes. Lady Rooster doesn’t normally let girls back here, but just stand where nobody can see you,” she spat, giving Heather a less than welcoming look. “Get your asses in here.”

She darted back inside, moving slightly like an actual rooster. I wasn’t sure whether it was intentional or the product of the enormous cocktail she clutched in her talonlike fingers. We followed her into a grungy hallway, the graffitied walls literally pulsating from the loud music in the club. At the end of the hall was a large room crammed full of decorations for every possible holiday, and a tower of beer kegs.

I heard an announcer revving up the crowd, introducing the host of the evening’s party, the one and only Lady Rooster. The crowd was going wild.

“You three wait here—and if you steal anything, Lady Rooster will know it.” She touched up her lipstick in a cracked mirror taped to the wall. “And STAY OFF MY STAGE!”

With something that sounded eerily like an authentic rooster call, she was out the door and onto the stage, the audience going even wilder.

All three of us looked at one another and mouthed, “WTF?”

From the crack in the door, we watched Lady Rooster greeting the audience.

“Hello, New York! Who’s ready to play a little chicken?!” She spoke with one of those vaguely British accents that is sometimes there and sometimes not. “This one goes out to all of Lady Rooster’s fans! Are there any Chickadees in the house?” From the response, one could tell there were. “All right, then. Let’s do this.”

An old but familiar disco song played and the crowd cheered as Lady Rooster did an amazing job lip-synching the whole thing. She danced all over the place, pulled hot guys out of the audience, downed people’s drinks, and, in a grand finale, shot a cannon full of orange and red feathers all over the crowd. As the feathers rained down on the hundreds of screaming fans, she made a dramatic exit offstage, directly back toward us.

I was amazed. Not just by what she pulled off, or the confidence that powered her considerable strut. But the way she had the audience eating out of her hand, like they were indeed little chicks and she was a goddess—that, I knew, was what I wanted to do. Not her way, but my way … whatever that way might be.

“You see that?” She blotted the sweat from her forehead with a towel. “That one number just got Lady Rooster a thousand bucks and unlimited cocktails all night. Who are you three again?”

She plopped down into a recliner. I stepped forward, as if I were meeting a foreign dignitary.

“I’m in town for the pageant, and you were listed as the contact, and we don’t have anywhere to stay because we’re underage and don’t have a credit card.”

“Dammit. Why the hell is Daryl listing me as the contact on his dumb charity fund-raiser?” she mumbled to herself as she pulled off her shoes and rubbed her feet. “Lady Rooster is the HOST of the damn thing, not the CONTACT, and she’s not even wild about that. It’s the
one
charity gig she does all year, unlike the rest of the queens in this town. They’ll throw on their wig and go out there for just about any cause you can think of. But me? Bitch, I’m a career girl and don’t you forget it!”

“I’m sorry if we”—
do not say ruffled your feathers, do not say ruffled your feathers
—“have inconvenienced you,” I said.

“Listen, JP.”

“It’s JT.”

“Whatever. JT and super twink and whoever this sidekick chick is—Daryl is my boyfriend. Ugh, husband now, actually. The prick made me marry him last summer. I told him I needed time, but he thought fifteen years had been enough; oh well. Lady Rooster got a trip to Belize out of it and some new Fiestaware. Anyway, the pageant is his thing. He runs that foundation, the John Denton thing. You should talk to him. Not me.”

Lady Rooster agreed to call Daryl, and when she reached him, she explained, in her crass manner, what was going on. She asked him to come downstairs. Apparently they lived around the corner.

“Two of them are your type,” she told him. “The other has boobs.”

“Why is she being so mean to me?” Heather whispered to us.

“Rooster!” A tough-looking—but kinda hot in an older, scary way—bouncer popped in. “Go give them an encore.”

Lady Rooster cocked her head to the side. “What the hell do you think I am? Some kind of show pony? You slip me three hundred bucks cash and I’ll give ’em one more, but that’s it. Lady Rooster’s feet are
killing
her.” She casually looked over at me. “I hosted a drag brunch this morning. Apparently that’s a thing now.”

The bouncer agreed and handed her some cash as his eyes fell on Heather. It was clear he liked what he saw—and it was also clear he was at least ten years older than any of us. It was even more clear that Heather liked what
she
saw and was ignoring the fact that he was ten years older than any of us. They smiled at each other.

“I’m Roger,” he said, ignoring the rest of us.

“Heather.”

There was a knock on the door to the alley.

“That’s Daryl. Open it, super twink,” Lady Rooster commanded Seth.

“I’ve never seen you here before, have I?” Roger inched his muscular body toward Heather. Heather blushed as she shook her head, which only seemed to turn Roger on even more. Seth opened the door to the alley and a man I assumed was Daryl walked in. Immediately Roger stiffened away from Heather.

Daryl was a friendly teddy bear of a guy in his forties. He had a sweet smile, gray beard, and soft eyes—the complete opposite of his betrothed.

“I hear we got some homeless drag teens in here?” he said.

The announcer in the club was introducing Lady Rooster and her encore. “DAMMIT!” she screamed. “SOMEBODY could have given me a warning!” She shoved her heels back on and stomped back onto the stage. I thought she’d be huffing and puffing at the audience, but the moment before she hit the stage, all the rocky parts turned into diamonds.
There’s something to be learned here
, I thought as I watched her start her number, flawless. She left all the crap going on in her life off the stage where it belonged. All that mattered up there was owning the room, and she certainly did that. I would have followed her from start to finish, but I sensed Daryl next to me, waiting to introduce himself. When I turned to him, I saw he’d noticed me noticing Lady Rooster in awe … and this got a smile from him, one that could only come from somebody who’d been with Lady Rooster through thick and thin.

“I’m Daryl Hart,” he said.

“Hi, I’m JT. We just drove up from Florida—”

“JT Barnett?”

I was a little taken aback that he, or anyone in New York City for that matter, would know my last name.

“Um. Yes?”

He gave me a big bear hug. “Welcome to New York! And who are your friends?”

I introduced Seth, and he greeted him with a hug just as friendly and warm as the one he’d given me. Heather was distracted, giggling over the conversation she was having with Roger as he programmed his number into her phone.

“And who’s this?” Daryl asked, making his way over to Heather.

“Oh. Hi. I’m Heather!” she said, noticing Daryl for the first time. Daryl raised a thick eyebrow at Roger, then directed his attention back Heather’s way.

“Nice to meet you, Heather. And how old are you?”

“Seventeen, why?”

Daryl nodded as he gave Roger a look that basically said,
Get the hell away from her
. Roger, rolling his eyes, told us good night and went back into the club. Heather’s face sank into disappointment. She shot me a look of anger, to which I mouthed a silent but exasperated “What?”

“I love this, JT,” Daryl said, patting me on the back. “I really do. We usually just get kids from the area or somewhere a little ways north. I think you’re our first from Florida in all six years.”

I thanked him for the warm welcome and explained what was going on, how we hadn’t booked the hotel and didn’t have a credit card and were underage. He listened with interest.

“And we have cash, a lot of cash actually, so we’d be happy to pay for somewhere. Like, even if we could crash on your couch, we’d be willing to give you money or something.” I tried to hide the desperation but it wasn’t very easy. Finally, he smiled knowingly and pulled out his phone.

“Excuse me one second.”

He stepped into the alley for his conversation. As Seth and Heather and I eagerly awaited his answer, I checked the stage and saw Lady Rooster was lip-synching masterfully to a medley of anthems that attractive young divas had produced for their gay fans—“Raise Your Fireworks ’Cause You Were Born This Way, Skyscraper.”

“Ugh. Why did he scare Roger off?” Heather moaned, slumping against a wrinkled poster advertising something called an underwear party, which seemed pretty self-explanatory.

“Oh, you’re on a first-name basis with the bouncer now?” I asked, only slightly more sarcastically than I had intended. Heather shot daggers into me. “That’s not creepy to you? Come on. He’s like thirty, Heather.”

From the stage I heard Lady Rooster ask the crowd if they felt like yet another encore. Clearly, she was enjoying her act a bit more than she let on.

I was dying to see what she’d come up with next. But I was interrupted by Daryl coming back in.

“JT, come here,” he said, motioning me over. “Two things. First of all, your friend has no business with Roger. Understand?”

I glanced over my shoulder at Heather, who was grinning as she typed a text on her phone.

“And secondly, it’s not much, but some of the drag teens are staying in an apartment over in the East Village. Great kid named Pip—it’s his aunt’s place. He said the three of you could crash in the living room. I know it’s not ideal, but—”

I was so relieved I almost jumped to my feet and threw my arms around him.

Then I remembered:
decorum
. I was a contestant here, even if the judging hadn’t formally begun.

But still, I couldn’t quite erase the excitement from my voice when I said, “We’ll take it!”

Daryl took us over to the East Village apartment where the other queens were letting us crash. The neighborhood was grungier than the area we’d previously been in, which Daryl said was called Chelsea and was apparently, as he put it, “super gay and interesting, once upon a time, before all the rich people came in and ruined it.” Daryl was very passionate about his city, even shaking a fist at a brand-new Whole Foods as our taxi drove by it. The entire cab ride over to the apartment, he pointed out numerous places he claimed were once “the real New York.” He stopped to mourn an independent video store that had been turned into a frozen yogurt place, claiming that the video store had once been “the heart of all queer punk.” He’d lived in the city since he was seventeen, a transplant from Iowa, and from the day he’d arrived he had never lived anywhere else. It was a strange feeling to arrive somewhere so exciting and have someone immediately tell you how much better it used to be. To me, the streets and buildings and people we were passing were the most exciting things I’d ever seen. Even the frozen yogurt place.