The Adventures of Isabel, page 8
“I have key here. Come, come! You want that big fuck to see us, figure out something wrong, hurt Denis?”
Given that argument, with which I had to agree, I turned, got back into our rôle-play, and we oozed out through the crowd. I hated the moment when I turned at the door and saw the big queen move around Denis, cutting him off from my view, looming over him.
He was a big fuck.
49. Into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell, rode the six hundred
Outside the bar, a group of suburban teenaged boys were gathered, shouting and screaming. All of them had short haircuts. With them were a few older guys, one of whom, a tall guy with a pony-tail, wore a T-shirt on which the words Soul Patrol encircled a medallion with a cross on it. The kids wore high-school team jackets and baseball caps on forwards and backwards. Some of them had sticks and bats. One had a tire iron.
Just as we came out the door, they began shouting about “fucking faggots” and “cornholers” and “fucking perverts” and “dykes” (whassa matter, you stupid little gits, don’t dykes fuck? since you’re so uneducated you only know one adjective?) and closed on the crowd of men and women leaving the club — and on us.
My silver hair and dress were like the Olympic flame, attracting cheers and jeers and an amazing amount of the action from the gay-bashers. Pushing Hep behind me, I waded out into the crowd, hoping she and Jian at least could get away. Being taken for a drag queen had developed a down side.
My way was blocked by two older men, who seemed less noisy, more intent. One was the tall guy, and the other also wore the Soul Patrol colours, stretched across a Michelin-Man™ set of bulges under a beige windbreaker.
“Pervert!” the chubby, hard-looking man whose face was six inches from mine was shouting, but for some reason he seemed insincere about it, though the fist which thudded into my belly was sincere enough.
“Grab her,” the taller, thinner one said. “Come on, let’s go!” but someone in the mob had other ideas. I saw the movement coming at my head only out of the corner of my eye, turned and raised my arms in defence, fell off the damn high heels, and began to fall in slo-mo as the stick struck my head.
“Grab her?” Italics mine, fleetingly. Then blackness . . .
50. Lost, up in no-man’s land . . .
Which is why we didn’t guard Denis — but also why I didn’t get kidnapped, why I woke up in hospital, and why Roger was there when I woke, waiting to talk with me.
She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up,
51. Does it hurt when I do this?
Once they were satisfied that I wouldn’t fall into a coma from the concussion, the doctor said, I would be allowed to go home. So Roger figured that since I had to be kept awake for the first few hours after my injury anyway, he might as well take my statement. He listened to my whispered descriptions of the two older guys without surprise.
He had a scrape on his cheek too — from one of the gay-bashers who resisted arrest, he said. I didn’t have the energy to ask him why he’d been so near by. He went away with his notebook to talk with the others, and eventually came back to tell me, while the nurse was checking my pupils yet again, what the night’s score was.
Denis was missing and so was the big drag queen, I had a concussion and black bruising on my belly (alliterative perhaps, but not a pretty sight, and not too pleasant to be feeling either), Jian had twelve stitches on her arm — she’d waded into the fray when she saw the stick hit my skull — and Hep had a sprained wrist and little finger from fending off a punch in a proactive manner, and a cracked toe bone from kicking a skinhead on the shin, manner ditto.
However, Hep had been right behind me, so in addition to fingering (so to speak) the gay-basher with the religious T-shirt, she had also been able to identify the man who punched me and his buddy who tried to grab me as the two who had been talking threateningly to Maddy the last time Hep saw her. As if any of us had any doubts by that time.
Did that mean we were further ahead, further behind, or just hurting more? All of the above, I suppose. I was too exhausted and aching to care, and they wouldn’t give me strong painkillers because of the concussion. Hep and Jian had already left the hospital, together I assumed, though Roger didn’t say and I was too tired to ask. By morning, when they let me go home in a taxi, I was staggering with pain and fatigue (and the need to walk on feet which last night had spent eight hours standing in Maddy’s five-inch heels).
I fell into bed, Bun came and sat on my concussion, we had words and compromised on him leaning on my face instead, and I passed out for twelve hours.
52. Set the controls for the heart of the sun
When I got up and staggered out to the kitchen the next evening, the voice mail indicator on the phone base was blinking furiously. Ouch, strobe, too bright. Seven messages, which I turned down in volume to a whisper. Three were from the lawyer’s office to whom Thelma had given my number, two were from Thelma, one was a hang-up, and the last one was from Denis.
Now picture this. Last time I had seen Denis, he’d been sashaying up to the meanest looking Queen of the Night that I’d seen in my life, someone who gave me existential terror with one glance, and who was suspected of murder.
Since then I’d almost been kidnapped by two men who likely were also murderers, my friends and I had been attacked by a brawling mob of gay-bashers, and I had sustained a concussion. I had almost decided last night, as the nurses kept me awake, that Denis was already dead like Maddy, and that I’d be going back to the morgue. That’s the state in which I heard Denis start to speak — and this is what he said:
“Hi, girlfriend, how are ya? Listen, honey, I’ve found out something about our big queen, which I must say puts a spin on things, and you don’t have to worry about her for a while, I fixed that. I’m off to work now, as soon as I have a quick shower. I have to work the whole weekend — I traded some shifts to get my garden done — so don’t worry if I don’t call. You didn’t answer! Hope you guys got home all right. We went out the back way. Oh, everything turned out fine, by the way. I talked to Roger, that big cop you told me about? How come in all these years of police liaison — and I don’t mean liaisons, unfortunately — I never met this one? Oooh, what a hunk. Did you do him? I bet you did. Is he pan? I almost broke my ban and invited him home, but I had a better idea! Ta ta for now!” The time on the message was 6:45 a.m. — I’d still been at the hospital.
Discovering in this manner that Denis was not dead — in fact, had apparently had a completely uneventful time while we’d been assaulted — made me feel like I could kill him myself, or so I said to Bun and the empty air of the kitchen. Then I began to cry with relief. Crying hurt. I stopped.
I called him and got voice mail. “You bugger. Pun unintended. Dammit, I thought you were dead! Where the hell did you meet Rog? Call me.”
I called Roger, but he wasn’t at home. The office said he was on duty but out of the office. He wasn’t answering when called. My head was into a country of agony beyond sensibility. I fed Bun, groaning as I bent over and the pain peaked, then started to rummage around for something non-threatening for me to eat. The refrigerator light burned out the back of my retinas like a tiny sun, leaving a dazzling afterimage when I squeezed my eyes shut. Ow. Carefully closing the fridge before I opened my eyes, I realised that I had been operating this far in a twilight lit only by streetlight glare and the clock on the microwave oven.
That’s about right, I thought, and looking in the freezer, which has no light, found something to thaw out. The annoying little buzzer which accompanies programming the microwave was headsplitting. Microwaves have lights too — there should be a law. I was in technohell, and some eighteen-year-old suburban bigot was to blame.
I put the meat back in the freezer and instead put frozen mini-waffles into the toaster, a nice old-fashioned device with no son et lumière. I could find the maple syrup in the fridge with my eyes shut, and did.
It had already obsessed me for the hours I spent in the hospital cubicle that I hadn’t even seen which one of the little psychos — it’s a technical term we helping professionals use — got me, so I wouldn’t be able to testify. I’d been concentrating on the guys in front of me — if concentrating is what you call reacting to a sucker punch.
“Grab her.” But everyone else in the crowd of bashers thought I was one of the drag queens. Pervert, yes, fucking homo, yes, but every one of the kids had said “Get him!” or “Kill him!” The two in front of me had had no doubt I was a woman.
I had to interpret their pronoun that way, because I couldn’t believe the other option, that they were politically aware of the gender-critiquing diorama played out in the choice of high-camp female tropes to create a topos of female construct confounding actual genetic sex and backgrounded against issues of orientation politics, and had chosen to use the semantic signifier to indicate recognition of the radical linguosocial statement inherent in the transvestism of queer/drag.
No. They just didn’t seem that complex; they seemed like old-fashioned thugs, not at all postmodern. Given that, I had to assume they knew just exactly who I was, despite the silver wig, the Body Shop tanning lotion, and the Diana Ross dress.
Thinking hurt. I decided to stop. But I didn’t want to lose the memory of this, as I had when I first talked with Roger. After taking one of the painkillers the hospital had given me to take after a certain number of hours which had definitely passed, I left another message on his voice mail, and lay down on the couch, my throbbing head propped up with pillows, to eat the frozen mini-waffles.
Bun tried to sit on my stomach bruises to lick my empty plate. I managed not to scream, knowing that the noise would hurt, nor did I throw him across the room. Instead, I used his own weaknesses as strengths, put the plate on the floor, and of course he chose it over me. This is a cat I’m talking about here. He has his limitations.
53. Better living through chemistry
As do we all. The painkiller finally took effect, and I drifted off into an uneasy state of wakefulness-without-consciousness, where the pain stood ten feet to the side and made comments about the state of my health, fitness, and sanity, and my brain simply gave up and went away.
It was rather peaceful, actually, once I realised that pain was only a kind of sensory Muzak and began to ignore it.
54. “I’m a soul man . . .”
Soul Patrol? It woke me up.
Groaning, I reached for the phone and, wincing at the dial tone and sharp little beeps of numbers as I dialed — how come we still say that? — Thelma’s number. As it rang, I dry-swallowed the next scheduled painkiller.
For that matter, how come I know her number by heart?
“Thelma? . . . Yes, I got your messages, but that’s not why . . . Thelma, hang on a second . . . Thelma, please be quiet, you’re hurting me. Thank you. Thelma, I need your help.”
Silence from the other end of the line. I was pretty surprised too. I need your help: the four words I never thought I’d hear go from my lips to her ears.
Finally she said in a small voice, “Are you all right?”
From her, four others of equal shock-value. Gracious. We were acting like family.
“No. Yes. Sort of. I got beat up. Can you come over?”
Goodness, it was four-word surprise time. As we discussed a time, the call waiting beeped. On the other line was Roger.
“Great, Roger! Can you come over? Soon?”
I went back to the haze for a while. Shocked awake again by another thought, I called Hep. Yes, Jian was with her, as I’d thought; and yes, they’d come over; and yes, she knew Denis’s new work number; and yes, she’d see if he could take a break.
“And please don’t call me back,” I said. “If the phone rings, I think I’ll die.” I turned the ringer down, just in case, told them to use the key Jian had, and lay back in the twilight.
It wasn’t until long afterward that I wondered how I managed to convince Thelma to come over to my house at almost midnight — and then realised she hadn’t even protested. I must have sounded worse than I knew. That, or it was truly a night of miracles between us.
55. “It’s me, it’s me, O lord, standing in the need of prayer”
Have I mentioned that Thelma is a Christian? She has me on her prayer chain. People I don’t know pray for me to have lives like theirs instead of like mine. Usually it irritates me, being prayed about without my consent, but tonight I thought I might ask her to mention my headache to them. I felt that I wouldn’t mind some healing energy going into the universe on my behalf, if I got to pick what was meant to be healed.
When Thelma arrived, before Jian and Hep so I was forced to creep to the door to let her in, another miracle occurred. She neither fussed nor prayed. She capably and quietly found a towel, wrapped it around a bag of ice cubes, and arranged it on my head so it almost felt soft. Then she made similar ice packs for my bruises. She tucked a blanket around my shoulders with strong, minimal motions, and made me lie down on the couch with a pillow under my back and another under my knees. Intensely grateful, I mentioned the possibility of switching the focus of the prayer group, and a little smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. Not an “I knew she’d come around” smile, but a wry little “from each according to her ability” recognition smile.
We had done the best we could do for one night. The others arrived as I was getting used to a limited amount of light from the hall fixture (indirect, also Thel’s idea).
The Soul Patrol T-shirts were the issue, of course. Those things aren’t sold in stores. They’re given out to people who volunteer for community service in evangelical and fundamentalist church circles. Thelma had been very proud when she got hers; she had showed it to me last spring at her Easter Forced Family Event.
Now, Christians may hassle prostitutes about turning to Jesus instead of turning tricks, but “holier than thou” is usually their watchword, emphasis on the “holier” part. I needed to know how a guy who hassles homosexuals and prostitutes gets Soul Patrol endorsement — well, okay, how a guy who hassles them criminally rather than as a hate crime.
To find out, I needed a local guide. I’d have to convince Thelma to take me there. She knew the lingo. I began to tell her what I’d been up to.
She was surprisingly resilient about it. She only tsked about a dozen times and only said, “Disgusting!” twice (and once was about Denis’s sixties outfit). It helped that Hep had her pictures of Maddy. The kid’s pitiful looks even got to Thelma.
56. “Then I got thrown out of chu’ch fo’ talkin’ ’bout ditty-wah-dittie too much . . .”
“We can pray for her,” she said.
“With all due respect, Thelma,” I said, “she’s dead.”
“She may suffer in Purgatory. Maybe our prayers can help shorten her time in the Lake of Fire.”
“We had something more like catching her killers in mind,” Roger said.
“You said we,” I said. “Thanks, Roger.”
“I was talking about we the police,” he said.
“So what are you doing here, then?”
“I’m in a terrible conflict of interest position,” he said.
“Think of it as civilian liaison work, looking for relevant information,” said Hep. “Which it is. We are civilians, aren’t we?” and she glared at us all as if she expected us to develop undercover cop credentials on the spot.
Thelma was charmed. Did I mention she watches a lot of TV? Not all of it is the gospel channel, I guess.
Then she came through in style — Thelma’s inimitable style. “You could never go there,” she said. “Even if you could see straight, which you can’t, or walk straight, which you can’t, you could never look straight. I have to go for you.”
“Thel, you’re a doll,” Denis started to say.
“It may be dangerous.” Roger, of course.
“Besides, do you think I want everyone at church to know my cousin is a homo? That’s worse than anything some hoodlum could do to me.”
We all looked at her, struck silent.
“And I won’t go unless you promise me something,” she said, turning to me a little faster than my eyes could track, which made for a fetching if vertiginous “traces” effect, like a bad acid-trip sequence in an early-seventies movie.
“What?” My momentary glow of liking had worn off with the homo remark.
“You have to go see the lawyers. I’m sick of them calling and calling, as if I could make you do anything you didn’t want to.”
“Except now you think you can.”
“I never had anything you wanted before,” she said with devastating truth and simplicity.
“Oh, Thelma . . .” I said, feeling hit while down.
“Just promise,” she said. “You don’t have to like it.”
“I promise,” I said.
“This week,” she said relentlessly.
My head was throbbing. She gently took the ice-pack-filled towel and refolded the package so that it felt cold against the lump. “This week,” I mumbled, “as soon as I can walk again.”
If I were to say they were all there when I went back to sleep, that wouldn’t be saying much, since immediately after I saw her nod with satisfaction, I passed out again before I finished the agenda of the midnight meeting I’d called.
Or should I say, “and then, I knew no more . . .”? Especially since that was the net effect?
57. Stop me if you’ve heard this one
When I regained consciousness . . . okay, you’ve heard that one too. Never mind. The next three days weren’t pretty. I couldn’t keep solid food down at first, and discovering that by experience hurt more than I believed possible. As soon as I awoke, I realised that Denis hadn’t told us what he had discovered about the big queen, but as I had already passed out in the middle of one arbitrarily-summoned team meeting, as Hep and Jian reminded me, I shouldn’t call another one until I was sure it wouldn’t happen again.
