It's All Relative (5 page)

Gary batted a whopping 80 percent.

“How did you do that?” I wanted to know.

“I told you: I got the gift. I mean, how do you know Best Animated Short Film? You just do.”

“I have to know some of your tricks, though,” I pressed. “Tell me.”

Gary got off the couch, a piece of half-eaten pizza crammed in his mouth, and snapped the curtains shut in our TV room. He then picked up the phone, listened for a dial tone, and, seemingly content, placed it back down.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“People would kill for these,” he whispered. “They're not your standard Vaseline-on-the-teeth-to-keep-your-lips-from-sticking, or masking-tape-on-the-ass-to-keep-your-suit-from-riding-up secrets, but deeper ones—Harry Potter secrets. I developed these after years of sneaking into my bedroom to watch the pageant and dreaming of being on that stage, the talent competition in full gear, a fire baton blazing over my head.”

“Tell me,” I said to Gary, mesmerized, as though he were going to light candles and spill goat's blood all over our wood floors.

And so, in a whisper, he did:

1. Look for “Crown-Ready Hair”: The hair must be stacked, especially toward the back, and look worthy of holding a diamond-encrusted tiara.

2. The evening gown must be “sexy but ladylike,” “unique but not tacky.” “If she looks like a lady in the streets but a freak in the sheets, she's a lock,” Gary said.

3. Blondes are always favorites, but they can't be “whore blondes.” “If their hair looks all Pam Anderson, they're screwed.”

4. Barbie bodies. “Big breasts, no waist, curvy hips in the swim-suit competition. They have to look like Barbie,” Gary told me. “America only likes to see big girls at Curves and anorexics in the movies.”

5. Always pay close attention to Miss California, Miss Texas,
Miss Florida, and Miss New York. “They're robots. They've been trained to win since they were five. And they know how to go in for the kill, like the Terminator. Just watch them smile. It will curdle your blood. They always make the top ten.”

6. Look for a sleeper, the cornpone gal from the Midwest or the Southern belle. “One of each usually makes the top ten,” Gary said, “and each will have a cute drawl and a strong faith in ‘Lord Jesus, my Savior!' ”

7. And, most important, Gary told me, very seriously, “Winning contestants always sport an opaque heel.” According to Gary, some pageants have begun to allow contestants to choose either a colored, strappy heel and colored hose, or the more traditional opaque heel and hose. “Tradition, always!” Gary yelled. “It's a test. And, worst of all, colored shoes and patterned hose cut off contestants' legs on TV, and can make even the leggiest of girls look like they have stumps. Only women in opaque hose and heels will make the top ten.”

“What about the final question?” I had to ask, when he had revealed his secrets.

“Doesn't matter,” Gary said. “As long as they don't vomit on themselves, or curse, the prettiest ones are fine. Their whole year is scripted anyway, so what's it matter?”

And then Gary nailed the winner of Miss America, picking a Southern girl with a heavy accent, breasts the size of a semi, hair that needed its own zip code, a love of God, and a burning desire to help dying children, or, as she more aptly put it, “dy'un chill'uns.”

As I downed a Mich Ultra and ate Funyuns that I had fashioned into a bracelet around my wrist, I realized: We could make tons of money off the God-given talents that we had squandered for years.

So we became gay grifters.

We started small, innocently, so we could perfect our games, unsuspectingly. We attended close friends' Oscar and Miss America
parties. Each and every time we would win, walking out with enough cash to make a monthly car payment and enough candy to keep us twitching the entire winter.

After a few years, however, our friends turned angry and suspicious and began disqualifying us from winning, saying the wealth needed to be spread to others, namely the straight and undeserving, those who firmly believed that
Patch Adams
was overlooked for Best Picture.

It was then I decided to up the ante.

I decided to go all
Ocean's Eleven
.

Our first foray into the big-time gambling circuit was a mammoth Oscar party held in a Ritz-esque ballroom filled with massive projection screens and catty, pretentious gays who dressed in tuxes and acted as though their invite to the
Vanity Fair
after party had been temporarily misplaced.

Tickets to the party cost a fortune and benefited some local charity that I knew had already spent its quarterly take on vodka and Brie.

But for me the highlight of the party, the reason I ponied up, was the Oscar-ballot competition.

Gary and I walked into the ballroom that night wearing our sleekest suits and silk ties, our fingers dripping in gold and silver, diamonds and lapis. Gary had slicked his hair back à la Gordon Gekko. I was carrying a money clip. Which held roughly seven dollars.

I looked around the room.

There were hundreds of competitors.

This was high stakes.

This was George Clooney and Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts type money.

But I could take them all.

“What's wrong with you?” Gary asked as we searched for a table. “You're … dripping.”

I was sweating.

I never sweated.

My mouth was dry, my face and body wet.

I felt as if I'd been struck by a rattlesnake.

“You're freaking out,” Gary said.

“Get me a ballot, please,” I gasped.

I hunkered down over it, and—channeling the gifts I had been granted at birth—checked off my winners with more ambivalence than confidence, using the lucky Napoleon Dynamite pen Gary had given me.

“Vote for Pedro!” the pen told me.

“Vote with your gut!” my gut told me.

I mean, I had seen every film, some twice. I had taken notes. I had prepped harder for this than for my ACT.

When I was finished, I wrote my pseudonym—as we were asked to do, for fun—at the top of my ballot and turned it over to a man who'd obviously had more face work than an antique pocket watch.

I grabbed a cosmo, took a seat, and watched the night unfold.

It was a grueling four hours. Our ballot tallies were, thankfully, updated at each commercial break, and the entrants' names and scores were projected on a big screen in every corner of the ballroom.

After a few rounds, the hanging chad began to fall away, leaving me—MissFayeDunaway—alone at the top, along with only one other competitor: Liza with a Z (but of course), a rather bothersome mosquito, who remained annoyingly close as the evening progressed.

In fact, we leapfrogged each other the rest of the night—me nailing Best Foreign Language Film, Liza snagging Best Sound Mixing. And then we were tied, and stayed tied until the final award of the night: Best Picture.

I was confident.

I knew
Brokeback Mountain
would win.

It had momentum. It had great press. Ang Lee had just won Best Director. The Oscars were the gayest event of all time. It was time for the gays to break through big-time, brokeback style.

“
And the winner is
 … Crash!”

“What? Are you kidding me?” I screamed, standing up, frightening the elderly gay couple sitting next to us who looked like the Smothers Brothers. “Nothing with Sandra Bullock in it can win an Oscar!”

And then I heard a series of loud whoops and a lot of screaming.

I turned toward the projection screen.

Liza with a Z had picked
Crash
.

Liza with a Z had picked
Crash?

I locked in my personal GPS on Liza, toweled off with a cocktail napkin, and headed across the room with a mission.

“Where are you going?” Gary asked. “You lost. It's okay. Please don't freak. I can win it all back in Miss Teen USA!”

“No one beats me!” I yelled. “And what kind of lunatic picks
Crash
over
Brokeback
?”

I headed toward the celebration, where I found a man in pleated Dockers and a wrinkled Ducks Unlimited sweater drinking Budweiser and high-fiving a group of unattractive men.

“Liza with a Z?” I asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“MissFayeDunaway.”

I stared.

He stared.

Neither of us blinked.

It was a standoff at the Gay O.K. Corral.

“Just one question,” I said. “How could you pick
Crash
?”

“
Brokeback
was just too … you know … gay, dude.”

I recoiled.

And then I looked him over, closely, once again.

Dockers.

Ducks Unlimited.

Wrinkles.

Unattractive male friends.

Budweiser.

Dude.

“Oh, my God! You're … 
straight
!”

“
Sssshhhhh!
Shut up!” he said. “You think it's easy being straight and loving the Academy Awards? I can't help that I got the gift, too.”

I could've blackmailed him right then and there.

I could've started screaming and pointing, “Breeder!”

And there's a good chance he would've endured the same outcome as Sebastian in
Suddenly, Last Summer
.

And yet, even though I had been beaten at my own game, I admired the prowess and intellect of my straight nemesis. I knew what it was like to be driven by a gift granted at birth.

Mostly, however, I knew I had still come out on top.

Not only because I could talk openly about my night, without fear of retribution, but also because I knew—as a PR pro—exactly what was coming next.

Just then a photographer appeared, yelled “Smile!” and snapped Liza with a Z's picture, the flash capturing the shock, horror, and bewilderment of this straight man realizing his photo would appear all over town with a caption screaming:
LIZA WITH A Z WINS GAY OSCAR CONTEST!

O
ne of the new ministers at our little town church had a wicked penchant on Ash Wednesday of making his more infrequent parishioners resemble Al Jolson.

Unfortunately, my family was among those who attended church only on the “important holidays,” like Ash Wednesday, Christmas, and Easter, the holidays when, as my dad liked to point out, “God was paying particular attention and truly taking count.”

Which is why instead of tracing dainty little crosses on our foreheads, as was done on the foreheads of the church deacons and Bible-study leaders, our minister made our family look as if we had just been pulled free from a collapsed coal mine.

I wanted to believe, like any person of faith, that our minister had giant hands, or a touch of Tourette's, or simply—like an untrained singer—bad technique, but I realized, the older I got, that he simply had a vicious streak.

I remember one particular Ash Wednesday when I was in junior high and my mother returned to the pew looking as though she had just crossed Oklahoma in a covered wagon.

“Are you going to work like that?” I had asked her, the contrast of her white nurse's uniform and ashen face making her look like a photo negative.

“I can't wash it off!” she said. “That'd be blasphemous.”

What was blasphemous, however—after years of watching our minister work—was his evil ash-decorating techniques. For the
truly devout
, he would always keep his left hand clean, using it to hold their holy faces steady while his right index and middle fingers swept shallowly through the ashes and then softly but deftly formed a cross on their God-fearing foreheads. He would smile proudly as they left the altar.

But with heathens like the Rouses, the minister used both hands freely, as though he were in a schoolyard fight and his mission was to blind his enemies with as much dirt as he could possibly toss.

And I swear that the man of the cloth would always smirk as my family walked back down the aisle.

What was an even bigger and dirtier slap in our faces, though, was the fact that the minister always had a perfectly formed cross on his very own forehead, almost as if he had stood for hours in front of his little mirror in the rectory next door and etched it with a well-sharpened eyebrow pencil before outlining it in mascara.

This ongoing Ash Wednesday debacle was particularly difficult for me during my overweight youth because I always went to school resembling the spawn of Fat Albert and Tootie from
The Facts of Life
.

Moreover, this seemed to create a chasm between my mom and dad.

Whereas my mom loved to attend church—she enjoyed the pomp and circumstance of dressing up, dressing her boys up, having breakfast out, the ritual and order of worship—my father never generated much interest in the notion until later in life. It was my understanding that he felt church was more for those who needed forgiveness, much like a shower was for those who were dirty. If you were somewhat clean—physically and spiritually—you were good to go.

My father also frequently had to work on Saturdays, thus leaving only Sunday mornings open to enjoy a big breakfast, work in
the yard, and complete projects around the house before watching pro football. Church was another commitment—another meeting, if you will—to which he just didn't want to commit.

My dad grew up going to church every Sunday, if not more. His father was a deacon in a local church and a much beloved member of a nearby small-town community. My grandfather loved to go to church, put on his suit, and talk with the townsfolk. It was an extension of his job, and one he relished. While my father loved and respected his dad greatly, I think—as most of us do as adults—he simply enjoyed a bit of distance, to walk outside of the shadow his father had created.

My father was also an engineer with, though it was never formally diagnosed, what I would term today as ADD. He used to become distracted and irritable in church, like a petulant child.