Authors: David Crabb
A
uthor Jacqui Rivait is credited with the quote “If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.” Dorothy Parker would later famously say, “If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by me.” Sylvia, had she written, would have said, “If you don't have anything nice to say, I'll say something worse. And if it's about me, I will read your hair for filth!”
Reading
was one of the many gay terms I learned from Sylvia. She'd shown us a documentary called
Paris Is Burning
, about drag queens in the New York City ball scene. Greg and I became obsessed with the movie and added a liberal dose of terms like
shade, work
, and
Miss Thang
to our daily vocabulary.
Hearing Sylvia's “language” evolve on the spot was quite an experience. When we'd introduced her to Raven at a party, they'd had a disagreement over the true meaning of a Yaz lyric.
Things got heated, as they usually did between Sylvia and anyone else with a vagina, and Sylvia called her a cunt. As Raven stormed from the room, Sylvia continued to scream.
“You're a cunt. Goodbye, cunty! Whatever, Kunta Kinte! Keeping walkin' back to your slave shack! [
Tongue clicking and lip-popping
]”
Sylvia had drawn a phonetic comparison between
cunt
and Kunta Kinte, a character from the PBS slave saga
Roots
, which led to a series of racist jokes and, finally, vague insults in some made-up African dialect. Not only was it incredibly offensive, but it also made no sense. There weren't many people whiter than Raven or Sylvia, in ethnicity
or
actual skin color. Additionally, Sylvia didn't have a racially-biased bone in her body. It wasn't so much that she singled out any one type of person for her disparaging remarks as it was that everyone in her path was fair game. And once you crossed Sylvia, every aspect of your person was up for
reading,
regardless of whether or not it was politically correct.
One night on the FX patio, after digging through her purse for five minutes, Sylvia found that she was, as usual, out of cigarettes and cash. She nudged Raven, batted her eyes, and in a baby voice asked, “Girl, can Mama bum a smoke?”
“Seriously?” Raven replied. “I've already given you so many.”
“But massa!” Sylvia feigned fear and dropped to her knees on the cement. “Peeees! Me just want one smoke, massa!”
“You are awful,” Raven laughed, rolling her eyes as she handed Sylvia a cigarette. They smiled together for a moment before Sylvia murmured under her breath, “There's a sucker born every minute,” then proceeded to click and pop her way into the club.
Raven's smile turned into a sneer. “I can't stand that bitch,” she hissed. “Why do you guys hang out with her?”
Greg and I shrugged in silence, but we both knew the answer. Sylvia could be insensitive, but her insensitivity was strangely inspired and wonderfully absurd. And for some reason, she liked Greg and me. Simply by not harassing us, she made us feel like special members of a very exclusive club.
Sylvia was also a professional fag hag, a title she'd chosen for herself that was as offensive as the ones she applied to other people. At eighteen, Sylvia was not only an adult who could get into clubs, but she was also pretty much the queen of every gay bar in town. And soon she was going to get us into one of them.
Walking up to the entrance of the Bonham Exchange, downtown San Antonio's premier gay club, I felt butterflies in my stomach. Sylvia walked ahead of us, her voluminous breasts bouncing under countless layers of gauzy ebony fabric.
“Thank God we're out of that fuckin' teen bar. I was about to catch a bad case of puberty up in that joint.” She looked over her shoulder and saw us, several feet behind her. “Why the fuck are y'all in the back of the goddamn bus, Rosa Parks? Let's put some fucking hustle in it!”
“Sylvia, we're nervous,” Greg said. “What if they don't believe the IDs you got?”
“IDs? What the fuck is this ID business?”
“Well, isn't that how you're getting us in?” I said.
“David, listen to me.” She turned to us and placed her hands on our shoulders. “You are babies who are about to be men. I am going to make this possible, okay?”
We nodded and smiled as Sylvia sweetly patted our faces.
Suddenly and with painful intensity she pinched our cheeks and dragged us around the side of the club. “One! Do NOT question Mama! Two! Just FOLLOW Mama! Three! Do whatever Mama tells you to do!”
“Ouch! That fucking hurt,” Greg whined as she released us in the alley behind the Bonham.
“Why are we here?” I demanded, rubbing my burning cheek.
Sylvia raised her small clutch and lightly smacked my head with each word of her command. “Do! Not! Question! Mama!”
The light over us flickered as she caught her breath and fixed her hair, which had been dyed an almost iridescent violet. Greg, trying to calm her, said, “Sylvia, your hair is such a nice purple color.”
“Bitch! It's called EGGPLANT!” she screamed. Taking a deep yoga breath, she straightened her teardrop-shaped brooch. “Now, just stay here by this fence and you will be in this club in five minutes.
Capisce
?”
We nodded in silence, muttering a quiet “Thank you” as she clicked away.
An hour later, we were still waiting by the tall wooden fence. The alley was somehow darker, and distant sirens had been sounding closer and closer.
“It's getting late, huh?” Greg was pacing up and down the alley.
“What if this is a prank?” I asked.
“I know she's a little bit crazy, but why would she do that? I mean . . .” He stopped as we heard a slight scratching.
“A rat!” Greg winced and fell against the chain-link fence on the other side of the alley.
“Pssst. Bitches!” a voice whispered. “Are you there?”
“Sylvia?” Greg asked.
“No. It's Anne Frank, fagotron!”
As I snickered, Greg backhanded me in the chest and replied, “What do you want us to do?”
Suddenly the two-by-fours of the fence busted out with brute force. A small four-inch heel kicked the planks from side to side as they swung back and forth, still nailed to the top of the fence. Sylvia's tiny face peeked out from between them and flashed us a bloodred Joker grin.
“Heeeeere's Johnny!”
We crawled through the narrow space in the fence and snuck through the patio. Inside the club, Sylvia kept reminding us to keep our cool. “Close your mouths, whores. You trying to catch flies?”
But it was amazing. The Bonham Exchange wasn't any old dance club. It was a palatial converted synagogue, complete with a three-story vaulted ceiling over the dance floor and four full bars. Muscular men in tiny thongs gyrated on boxes to thump-heavy music. The Bonham's speakers and laser lights made FX seem like a school dance.
“Look, David. Everyone's drinking out of
real
glasses!” Greg exclaimed.
“Isn't it fancy, ladies?” grinned Sylvia. “Welcome to the Bottom Sexchange! Now let's go.”
“Wait! Why are we leaving?” Greg begged as Sylvia pulled us away from a hairless Mexican guy who was thrusting his banana thong in our faces.
“It's last call, Gregorian Chant! Come on, Crabapple!”
I looked at my watch and saw that it was already 2 a.m. I hadn't realized how long we'd been waiting in that alley.
“Don't worry, girls! Night's not over yet. We're going to an after-party!”
Thirty minutes later we pulled into the Elmira Inn, a shady downtown hotel. Even if you never went downtown, you knew about the Elmira from its appearances on the ten o'clock news. It was where prostitutes got busted and drug deals went wrong. Greg and I were genuinely thrilled to be there.
“Oh, wow! This is the place where those drag queens started that fire!” Greg chirped as he parked the car. “I've always wanted to see it!”
“Well, you're about to, Mary,” said Sylvia in a half-welcome/half-warning. She dug through her clutch and pulled out a small glass vial. “Here. Sniff a little of this before we go in.”
“What is it?” I asked as she took off the lid and inhaled the stuff.
“Oh, don't be such a stick-in-the-mud, Minerva!” she replied, her eyes rolling back in her head as she slumped into her seat.
“Yeah, Minerva,” chided Greg as he took a snort, clearly confused about who “Minerva” was. “Oh, wow,” he said, leaning back. “My head is so warm . . .”
I took the vial from Greg and snorted, my head filling with a thick, hot jelly that slipped down my neck all the way to my tailbone. “Oh, fuck. It feels amazing.” I could only imagine what high-end, designer drug I'd just taken. “Sylvia, what is this?”
Her eyes rolled down from her skull like venetian blinds. “It's VCR head cleaner.”
“What? You mean I just inhaledâ”
“Let's go, cunts!” And, like that, she was on her feet and up the stairs. On the second floor, we walked into a smoke-filled
lair of thudding club music and pungent male musk. My brain was buzzing with a pulsing crackle, like the staccato hum of an old television right after you turn it off. Dizzy, I grabbed Sylvia's arm. “I feel . . . spinny.”
“I know, bitch. It's called the wah-wahs. Isn't it fabulous?”
I tried to focus my eyes through the smoke in the dimly lit room. The door to the next suite was open, as was the one after that, and the one after that. Dozens of people, mostly men, filled the space as far down as the eye could see, like an endless mirror reflecting itself, forever and into eternity. I realized that Greg was gone and suddenly became aware of the immediate space around me. I looked down to see two men rolling around on the carpet in their underwear.
Are they fighting? Or . . . Oh wait . . . They're not fighting
.
To my right, a girl with fluttering eyelids was grinding her shoulder blades into an air-conditioning unit.
It's not that hot in here. Does she feel sick? Oh wait . . . She feels just fine
.
I felt a smack on my arm and turned to find Greg beside me with a plastic cup.
“Hey, I made you a rum and Coke, but there's no Coke. So it's just rum and ice.”
I downed the glass and noticed that Greg was now only wearing a tight white tank top.
“What happened to your Psychedelic Furs shirt?”
“I felt overdressed,” he said as a skinny boy in red underwear stumbled past us.
“Where's Sylvia?”
“How should I know?” Greg could barely focus on me. “Oh my God, that guy is totally checking us out.”
I tried to aim my vision on one point in the spinning room, but everyone seemed to have a twin. “Which one? The little blond guy on the bed?”
“No. That forty-year-old in the red tank top drinking Zima. You should go talk to him.”
“No, Greg. I feel weird. I don't want to.”
“Of course you don't want to. I have to do everything.” Greg handed me his drink and coiffed his hair. “How do I look? How's the light? My skin?” Greg angled his face in several directions. “Am I shiny? What about here? Am I shiny like this? Okay. Give me back my drink.”
Greg confidently strode up to the man and introduced himself. “Hey, I'm Greg.”
“Hey, I'm Paul,” he replied, slipping his thumbs into the front of his low-slung jeans. “How old are you, Greg?”
“How old do you think I am?” Greg flipped his bangs and gave Paul a smoldering stare. Paul leaned forward and whispered something in Greg's ear. Greg laughed coyly and slipped his thin red straw between his lips seductively. “You're funny.”
How the hell does he do that?
I thought, followed immediately by,
I need to find a bathroom now
.
I stumbled through the connected suites, trying to find an unlocked bathroom, as strange men looked at me with an intensity I hadn't experienced before.
Are they angry?
I thought.
Why do they all want to fight me?
As a mustached man in a bandanna palmed my bottom, I realized that these men didn't want to fight at all.
I wanted to be like Greg, to turn to this man confidently and simply say, “Hello.” But I couldn't even hold his stare. It shouldn't have been so hard for me to look into the eyes of another man, if only to say, “Hi. I'm David.”
“David!” I spun around to see Sylvia sitting at a small table with a few men. “Crabapple! Come to Mama!”
A half hour later I was even more obliterated, curled up beneath the table against Sylvia's leg. I started to nod off as she entertained a gaggle of adoring gay fans, one of whom offered her a small bag of cocaine.
“Come on, stick-in-the-mud,” she whispered to me. “A hit of this will keep you up.”
“No, Sylvia. My head feels like a brick. I don't feel well.”
“Suit yourself, pussy. More for Mama.” I heard her snort a giant line as an old, haggard woman entered the room. She shuffled toward us in flip-flops, wearing a dirty denim skirt that revealed bruised knees. Her short auburn hair was arranged atop her head in an unnecessary banana clip. Her entrance stirred the masses, and as she sat, a hush fell over the room.
“If y'all don't know me, my name is Leona,” she announced with a gravelly rasp. “And when Leona gets to the party, that's when the party starts!” Leona erupted into a fit of coughing and removed a small glass pipe from her bag. “Who wants to hit it first?”
“Excuse me, ma'am. He does!” Sylvia grabbed the pipe and passed it down to me. “Here, Minerva.”
“No, Sylvia. My head . . .”
“Oh, come on! It's just weed.”
“But I feel so sick and . . .”
“Come on, Crabby. Don't make Mama get high alone.”
Sylvia looked at me with the big, wet eyes of a pleading child. Leona stared at me sleepily, a thousand wrinkles at either edge of her permanently down-turned mouth. As the song on the stereo faded to silence, the eyes of every man in the room were on me.
All their stares felt like a dare, compounded by Sylvia's insistence. I unfurled from my tiny fetal ball in an attempt to rise to the occasion. I would not be shamed by all these strangers with eyes I could barely look into, all these men to whom I could not simply say, “Hello. I'm David.”