One
When Lola asks me to help him with his tits, I know it’s going to be one of those nights.
“Come on, Sammy,” he says, fluttering his long, fake lashes and puckering his red-lipsticked mouth. “I need the girls to look fabulous. I’m doing the Dolly Parton number.”
The Dolly Parton number is “9 to 5,” a song popular more than twenty years before I was even born. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a fun song, and I like it. But Lola is, well, not exactly the age Dolly Parton was when she took it to number one on the charts.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says, jabbing the air with a finger tipped by a long acrylic nail painted bright pink. “But Dolly and I are the exact same age, and if she can still do the song in her shows, so can I.”
I don’t argue with him. There’s no point. He owns the bar, so he can do whatever he wants to. Besides, getting onstage is the only thing that makes him happy. Well, that and the mai tais he drinks one after the other starting at around three in the afternoon. He’s sipping one now as he plops into the chair in front of the dressing room mirror and waits for me to put the fake breasts on him.
Most of the other queens create the illusion of cleavage using makeup, but Lola insists on these giant silicone boobs that he’s had forever. He tells everyone that his fairy godmother gave them to him for his sixteenth birthday, and they look it. They’re pretty beat-up, but he covers them with powder and pancake makeup and says he can get another couple of years out of them.
“How’s Starletta?” he asks me as I fasten the strap around his neck.
“She’s fine,” I tell him. I know where this is going, and I’d like to avoid it. But Lola is determined.
“You know I took her out a couple of times back when we were kids,” he says. “Nothing big. A church picnic. Maybe to the county fair. But if things had worked out differently, I could have been your grandfather.”
“Great-grandfather,” I correct him. “Hank is my grandmother. Starletta is my great-grandmother.”
Lola laughs. “That’s right,” he says. “Sometimes I forget. Starletta had Hank young. What was she, sixteen?”
“Almost seventeen,” I say. “Do you want the diamonds or the sapphires tonight?” I hold up both necklaces, hoping this will distract him from the conversation.
“Diamonds,” he says. “I’m wearing the white jumpsuit, and the sapphires would be too much. Say, you’re going to be seventeen yourself soon, right?”
“In August,” I answer.
Lola shakes his head. “I don’t know why I let you hang around here,” he says. “Cops find out and I’d lose my license.”
“That’s why I stay back here,” I remind him. “Besides, you know nobody cares about this place.”
This is true. You’d think that in this part of the world, aka small-town central New York, aka the geographic center of nowhere, we wouldn’t even have something like a gay bar. After all, the entire population of the town could take one of those Carnival cruises at the same time and still not fill up the ship. But since the nearest big-city bar is over an hour away, the Shangri-La attracts guys from all the other small towns around. It’s not particularly busy on weeknights, but on the weekends it gets crowded.
You’d think people around here would be freaked out by a gay bar. And maybe they were at first. But now nobody thinks twice about it. Or if they do, they don’t tell anybody that they think about it. That’s one of the rules. Another rule is that if you see somebody at the Shangri-La one night and then the next day you run into him shopping at the Price Chopper with his wife and kids, you especially don’t say anything. And that happens more than you might think.
Even so, I don’t tell anybody that I come here. Especially not my family. Not that they’d care about the gay thing. We’ve already been through that, two years ago, and now it’s just the way things are. But there are other things I’m not ready for them to know about just yet.
“Seventeen,” Lola says, looking at me in the mirror. “That’s a big year.”
It is. Especially in my family. Because of the curse. But that’s something else I don’t want to talk about. Not that Lola would. Despite what he said about my great-grandmother, I don’t think he knows about it. But my family talks about it all the time. Especially now that my birthday is getting closer.
“We should have a party for you,” Lola says. “Get Paloma to make you one of her tres leches cakes. That would be fun.”
It would be fun. If there’s one thing drag queens know how to do well, it’s throw a party. And the queens at the Shangri-La are my best friends. My second family. Not that there’s anything wrong with my actual family. I love them too. But sometimes being a Weyward is a challenge, and when I’m at the Shangri-La I can be someone else. Even if I haven’t quite decided who that someone is yet. But I’m working on it.
The door to the dressing room opens and Farrah bursts in, all drama and attitude. He tosses a handful of damp dollar bills on the table and pulls his wig off.
“Cheap mothercrackers,” he says.
Lola looks at me in the mirror and we both try not to laugh. Farrah’s temper is legendary, and we don’t want to make him any madder than he already is.
“Did you do the Beyoncé number?” Lola asks. “Or the Tina Turner?”
“Beyoncé,” Farrah mutters. “‘Crazy in Love.’ I danced so hard my feet just about fell off.”
“Just like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes,” Lola says, sighing happily. “So tragic.”
“That another one of your movies?” Farrah asks. “You know I don’t watch that old shit.”
Lola gasps. “Watch your language!” he scolds. “The Red Shoes is one of the most heartbreaking stories ever told.”
“They’re all heartbreaking,” says Farrah, looking at me and rolling his eyes.
“Yes, well, the best stories are,” Lola says. “Because life is heartbreaking.”
“We can agree on that,” Farrah says. “So why would I want to watch movies that are sad too? That’s just stupid.”
Lola asks me to get him his Dolly Parton wig.
“Do you know why I named this place Shangri-La?” he asks as he pulls a wig cap over his head.
“Yes,” Farrah and I say in unison, hoping this will stop him. It doesn’t.
“When I was eleven years old, I saw Lost Horizon on the television at my grandmother’s house,” Lola begins. Because he loves this story, and because he’s had so many mai tais, there’s no distracting him.
I tune him out, concentrating on teasing the Dolly Parton wig to life. I’ve heard the story so many times, I can recite it by heart. Besides, Lola made me watch the movie. It’s actually pretty good. It’s about these people whose plane crashes in the Himalayan mountains. They’re rescued by a group of men who take them to a valley called Shangri-La, where it’s always summer and everyone is really beautiful and happy. Only something seems kind of weird about the whole thing, and when some of the people try to leave and go back to their old lives, they find out what it is: As long as you stay in Shangri-La, you stay young and healthy. But once you leave, the spell wears off and you die.