Serenading Stanley (2 page)

But Stanley had other ideas.

In this final two years of Stanley’s education, his living and schooling expenses could be covered with the money his father left him when he died during Stanley’s senior year of high school. His father had cut the apron strings from Stanley’s mother several years before his death, for which Stanley did not blame the man at all.

Still, it was now time for Stanley to cut his own apron strings. He didn’t have to cater to his mother’s checkbook any longer, and that meant Stanley was free! Sort of.

He would always be grateful for his mother’s financial help getting him through school, but still, if Stanley didn’t get out of her clutches right this very minute he’d be building his own mound and burrowing under it like some dying Cahokian just to get the hell away from her.

So here he was. The Belladonna Arms.

He took a deep breath and headed for the front steps. The mechanics of applying for a place to live were mind-numbingly terrifying to Stanley because he also suffered from such a horrendous infusion of shyness he could barely function in everyday life. He often thought that might be why he had set his sights at a fairly young age (second grade) on a career that dealt mainly with people who were already dead. Dead people are hardly judgmental at all.

Pursuing a career with dead people was probably the most sensible thing Stanley had ever done. And after burying himself in the study of archaeology for the past four years, Stanley knew he’d made the right decision. He loved it. Every bone, stone, and tomb of it. Even the serene
silence
of dead people pleased him. It pleased him no end, really, especially after spending twenty-two years with his mother, who was never silent for a minute.

But back to now.

Stanley climbed the steps in rhythm to the eerie caterwauling of that screaming Latino queen who was still singing along to Selena like a squeaky brake drum somewhere in the bowels of the Belladonna Arms. It was a funny thing, but compared to Stanley’s mother’s annoying voice, the queen really didn’t sound so bad. Stanley got a pretty good chuckle out of
that
thought. Maybe he owed his mother more than he really knew. Hell, compared to her,
everything
seemed better than it actually was. Two weeks with Stanley’s mother could make the Valentine’s Day Massacre seem like a skeet shoot. The sinking of the Titanic a mere act of baptism for fifteen hundred people. A flesh-gobbling case of leprosy little more than diaper rash.

Yes, Stanley owed his mother a
lot.
The simple act of being far away from the woman made the world look all rosy and promising, and who can ask for a better testimonial than that?

As he climbed the stairs, Stanley somehow managed to trip on the last step going up. He knew he would, and by God he did. Sometimes he was psychic that way. He landed hard on his knees and hands and was back on his feet a nanosecond later, hoping no one had seen him fall. This was a common occurrence with Stanley. He was clumsy. He was actually pretty used to it by now. If you do something twenty times a day, it ceases to be a catastrophic event after a while.

He merely rubbed his stinging knees with his stinging hands and went on, the fall forgotten in moments.

Stanley opened the Belladonna Arms’s front door and stepped inside.

It didn’t take Stanley long to realize the Belladonna Arms was just as depressing on the inside as it was on the outside. The lobby boasted two rows of rusty mailboxes embedded in the wall to the left with a wastebasket underneath packed to overflowing with fliers nobody wanted. One overstuffed chair, which had seen better days, was parked in the corner with a splayed-open copy of
The Advocate
resting atop it. Even
The Advocate
had seen better days. Dog-eared and wrinkled and stained with coffee rings, it looked as if it had been the main source of entertainment for all lobby-goers for the past five years at least. In the other corner stood a fake
Ficus benjamina
that went all the way to the ceiling. The plastic tree had plastic tinsel and plastic Christmas ornaments dangling all over it, as if blithely ignoring the fact it was now the tail end of August. The tinsel gave a glittery shudder when the opening of the front door created suction in the room, as if a fresh little breath of air had suddenly cooled the premises. Nothing could be further from the truth. The lobby was hot enough to roast a goose.

And speaking of roasting a goose, Stanley thought he could detect the aroma of one now wafting down from somewhere overhead. Or maybe it was fish sticks. He couldn’t be sure.

Through a passageway dead ahead, Stanley saw a flight of stairs heading up. That was it. No elevator. Just a flight of stairs. And Stanley knew with a flash of insight if he
did
manage to acquire an apartment here, it would without a doubt be located all the way up at the top of those stairs on the sixth fucking floor.

A tiny bell hanging over the door announced Stanley’s entrance.

A moment later, with a swish of sound like the rustle of a shitload of Japanese fans and silk kimonos, a swirling mass of orange taffeta came swooping into the lobby through a side door like a phoenix exploding from the wings into voluptuous flame. It took Stanley exactly four seconds to realize it wasn’t a flaming phoenix at all, but a flaming drag queen. And a fairly old one at that.

It took him another two seconds to realize he liked the old queen. Some people you just do. At very first glance. People are always going on and on about
love
at first sight, but Stanley figured there was a lot of
like
at first sight going on too. People just didn’t talk about it much because it was less grand, he supposed. Less…
operatic.

The old queen was fluffing her bodice like a florist arranging a spray of daffodils. Looming above the orange taffeta bodice was the bulging, hairy chest and shoulders of a truck driver who had consumed far too many truck-stop specials in his day. The man was huge. Tall, broad, and rotund. The hands doing the bodice fluffing were as big as boulders and were swathed with hair on every knuckle, like an ape’s. The nails on those hands were painted a very lovely chartreuse.

The flaming phoenix needed a shave badly, not only on his chest and shoulders (and probably his back) if he was going to wear low-cut taffeta, but on his face too. Especially with that red wig. The red lipstick did absolutely nothing to camouflage the beard. Besides, it sort of clashed with the chartreuse nails.

Stanley had to smile. This poor thing was the ugliest drag queen
ever
.

“I hope you brought the right curling iron this time, Ramon. I want
ringlets! Ringlets!
”

Then the queen looked up and saw Stanley standing in the doorway.

“You’re not Ramon,” he said.

And Stanley stammered, “Sorry,” as the smile fell off his face.

“Well, whoever you are,” the queen said, regaining her composure. “As long as you’re there, can you tell me if this gown makes me look fat?” She proceeded to do a rather dainty pirouette that freshened the flames considerably as the orange skirt billowed out, exposing two filthy tennis shoes and two hairy expanses of chubby shin.

“You need to wax,” Stanley said, avoiding the “fat” question at all costs.

The queen stopped in midturn and let the folds of her skirt sway to stillness around her, rather like the quieting of a great bell. She eyed Stanley with one eyebrow hoisted so far up on her forehead it was lost in the bangs of the wig.

“Good Lord, son,
I
know that! I’m asking about the
gown
!”

“The gown is stunning,” Stanley stammered, and the queen’s fat face lit up like her stubble had caught fire.

She simpered very sweetly for a hairy three-hundred-pound man in a ball gown. “Oh, thank you, darling. But do you really think so? I don’t want to look cheap, you know. Or simply thrown together.”

Stanley swallowed hard. The last thing the man looked was simply thrown together. In fact, the construction job looked like it might have taken years. And it had still run afoul of perfection at every stage.

The only thing Stanley could think to do was beat a hasty conversational retreat into neutral territory. “I wonder if you might tell me where I can find the manager. I’d like to see the unit that’s up for rent. If I’m cute enough, that is.”

“Cute enough? What the—? Oh, is that stupid sign still out there? I told ChiChi to take it
down.
That fruit cup never took a direct order in his life. It’s his apartment the vacancy is next to, and he’s trying to assure he gets a hot neighbor. But good Lord, son, you don’t have to worry about being cute enough. You’ve got youth on your side. Hell, that’s half the battle right there.”

The queen whapped herself in the head hard enough to kill a cat. “Oh, well, for goodness sake. Here I am blathering on about my stupid gown and that stupid ChiChi and his stupid sign and you’re here to rent one of the units. I’m such a silly twit! Come on then, son. Let’s look at it together, shall we?”

She demurely faced away from Stanley and peered back over her shoulder. She even went so far as to bat her eyelashes. “Unzip me, will you, dear? I can’t climb all those stairs in this dress or I’ll drench it in sweat. It’s rather warm today, don’t you think?”

Stanley stepped up to the plate and pulled the back zipper down as far as it would go, all the while avoiding the fur on the man’s back like the plague. When he caught a glimpse of the guy’s hairy butt crack, he figured he’d gone far enough. He felt himself blush and quickly turned away, acting like he was studying the molding on the ceiling, which, in actuality, seemed about ready to fall off the wall. “Uh, what floor is the unit on, then?” Stanley asked, all too certain he already knew the answer. And the man immediately proved him right.

“Penthouse,” the drag queen gaily replied. “And a lovely unit it is too. And what a view!”

He stepped out of the flamboyant orange gown and Stanley almost fainted with relief to find he was wearing trousers underneath, albeit with the legs rolled up. The man’s protruding stomach was as hairy as his back and his breasts were far larger than Stanley’s mother’s, or any other woman in Stanley’s unfortunate family, which is how Stanley always thought of his family as being. Unfortunate.

“Let me just grab a shirt,” the man blushed, holding his hands over his tits like Mamie Van Doren being coy, and he ducked back through the doorway from which he’d come. A second later he reappeared tugging a dingy white T-shirt over his head.

When he had the shirt the way he wanted it, and it took some tugging to get it to hang correctly over that bulging stomach, the old queen stuck out his hand and said, “Hello, young man. It’s a pleasure to meet you, and thanks for the sartorial assistance. When I’m dressed like this, my name is Arthur. In high drag, you can call me Angie. Angie O’Gram.” At Stanley’s quizzical expression, the man patted his paunch and spit up a fatalistic giggle. “What can I say? Two heart attacks. One more and my drag name will be Nita Mortician. Anyway, I’m the head cheese around these parts.” And he giggled again.

Stanley grinned as Arthur’s ham-like fists swallowed his outstretched hand like the Blob devouring the mechanic’s head in that old horror movie with Steve McQueen. Only Arthur’s handshake was a lot gentler than the Blob ever dreamed of being. That Blob was a mean motherfucker.

“I’m Stanley,” Stanley said. “Penthouse, huh?” He really did like this guy. The prospect of running up and down six flights of stairs several times a day he wasn’t so sure about.

Arthur gave Stanley’s fingers a friendly pat, then excitedly clapped his hands in front of his nose, obviously concerned with losing the sale before he ever cornered it. “Now just wait until you see the apartment! It’s to die for. Truly it is. So cute and compact and sunny and windowy. I just put up new butter-yellow curtains in the unit too. And a bedspread to match. They’re sooooo cute!”

Stanley had to laugh at the hairy giant flapping his hands like obese butterflies. “So it’s furnished, then.”

Arthur laughed right back. “Oh, yes, honey. Furnished with everything you need, except for maybe someone to cuddle on those lonely nights when—oh, but never mind about that. I’m sure you know more about cuddling than I do. I myself didn’t come out until late in life. Two years ago, in fact. I’m trying to make up for lost time.”

“So I see,” Stanley said. After all, the man was still wearing lipstick.

“Onward and upward!” Arthur announced. “Let’s show you that apartment, shall we?”

And before Stanley could even nod, Arthur had taken him by the elbow and dragged him toward the stairs. “You don’t mind a little exercise, do you? A young handsome buck like yourself? It’ll keep you in shape, you know. Yes indeedy, it will.”

Then Arthur cast a nervous glance up the long flight of stairs, sucked in a large gulp of air like a man about to dive off the high board, and began lumbering skyward, Stanley in tow. Half a flight up, Arthur was puffing and blowing and sweating like a steam engine. His dingy T-shirt was already stuck to his fuzzy torso like a soggy stamp on a moldy envelope.

“I’m glad I took my gown off,” he muttered to himself. “Perspiration simply
ruins
taffeta.”

Perhaps to take his mind off the stairs, Arthur said, “You know I don’t dress in drag that often, but the big Belladonna Ball is coming up, and I want to do it right this year. I’ve been dieting for almost a year now, and I’ve already lost two pounds. Two pounds! I’m so thrilled about that. Ramon—he’s one of the tenants, a beauty student, don’t you know—he said he’d wax me before the ball. Just like you said! See? I’m really on top of things this year.”

He stopped on the landing and looked around, squinting through the sweat soaking his face. “Are we there yet? Christ, I think I’m having a stroke.”

Stanley pointed to a sign on the wall that read “2.” “Uh, I think this is the first landing. Four more to go.”

“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph on pogo sticks. Okay. Let’s not stop now or I’ll never get going again. I’ll have to take an apartment on the second floor myself and start life all over again.”