Victor, Victoria, Victory!

Easter Sunday, but no Easter dinner for us – just a slothful day of recovery from last night’s festivities. Yesterday we finally got a nice, mostly sunny day (back to rain again today) so I mowed Cousin’s lawn using his Craftsman sit-down mower – really the first time I’ve driven ANYTHING, not counting video game cars, so that’s a big step for me, and once I got used to it, it was fun...don’t think I’ll use a push mower again if I can help it. Wouldn’t it be weird if I ended up learning to drive and LIKING IT after all these years of avoiding anything to do with the steering wheel of a car? Around 4pm Cousin’s friend John (the one who helps Cousin make doll genitals out of sculpting clay) came over to get ready for the Victor/Victoria party with us.

Each time I do drag (apparently that term comes from Shakespeare?) I take it a step further. This time I fully shaved all facial hair, Cousin did my makeup, and gave me fishnets and a sweet purple sequin minidress that fit me like a DREAM and big blonde princess hair and a pair of old black pumps that subsequently BROKE. I put on fake eyelashes (with eyelash glue) and long, pretty fingernails (with super-glue) and made fake breasts out of rolled-up socks and attached a pair of clip-on earrings, since I’ve never had pierced ears (just eyebrow, nose and lip – and I am now completely over facial piercings). My drag name for the evening was Taffeta, Taffy for short; Cousin was Nicole (Nikki) and John was Camille. Cammy, Nikki and Taffy out on the town. And when we got to the party, my goodness, what an entrance we made! EVERYONE wanted photos with us, and at one point there were so many cameras flashing on us that it was like paparazzi on the red carpet. K., the host and birthday boy, lives in a beautiful house up in the hills with a panoramic view of the town below – even at night it was beautiful, I can only imagine in daylight. I had a little trouble with the long nails. When we first arrived and hit the food tables I said “Oh good, deviled eggs!” and snatched one up but sliced right through it with the nails and it fell to the floor in two pieces. A nice little woman, noticing my predicament, started making little snacks and handing them to me so I could eat (so sweet of her). We spent most of our time on the open-air deck, so Nikki and Cammy could smoke, so that became the drag queen smoking deck, and people kept coming out to get photos with us, girls especially just seem to love drag queens. One kept telling me that I looked SO MUCH like her 14-year-old niece. We handed out flyers for our Auntie Mame party in May. (I hope we gave one to the cute boy in the DIY bluejean getup – the one from Switzerland. He was a hottie.)

Then as we were leaving, first one of my shoes and then the other completely lost their soles, and I was stumbling along with the soles flapping on the ground, trashy as hell and most inconvenient. We drove to Gian Don's, the one club on Maui that has occasional gay nights (there is NO full time gay bar on the island, one reason I may actually be ready to leave by October), where a very nice man at an Easter crafts table in the bar (the DJs boyfriend) used his hot glue gun and glued my shoes back together! I danced a little – started the dance floor, in fact! – but Cousin didn’t want to stay long at the club, so then we headed over to his friend DJ’s house, and DJ was asleep and naked, but didn’t seem to mind that we woke him up, but we didn’t stay there long, either, so finally we headed home, and were followed for a long ways by a police officer, which was really unnerving (three inebriated drag queens going over the speed limit – oh, that would’ve made an officer’s night – Cousin joked that if they put us in jail we’d have to ask to be put in with the women). Luckily we got off scott-free. But I had a bitch of a time taking my super-glued nails off this morning. Couldn’t get the thumbs off, in fact – ended up just trimming them down with a nailclipper. Tomorrow morning, back to business: gonna get up early and go in to Kahului to continue the job hunt, and get a new canvas for another Ben Whishaw portrait I’m going to do (using a photo from Interview magazine) that’s going to be the best yet. Oh yes. It’ll make him fall in love with me for sure.


xo

glam aka tony

Lahaina

April Fool’s Day. And I feel foolish for going to Lahaina in JEANS and sneakers and a polo shirt. I was thinking of job hunting, not of the climate I now live in, especially on the (south)west side of the island where Lahaina is, which is the dryer, more desert climate. (I wouldn’t use the word “desert” myself, though...it’s dryer and less lush than Haiku and Hana, to be sure, but it’s still pretty green, not like sand dunes or anything.) It was hot and sunny, of course, and EVERYONE else was in shorts and a T-shirt. I saw lots of tattooes and lots of Crocs (I bought a pair! finally! and they are comfortable! I remember when I briefly dated that cute little James kid years ago in Portland, the one who took those awesome photos of me back in the Melcliff around the time I started Dreck, he was the first person I knew who wore Crocs, and they were so cute on his little elfin feet, so I’m happy to finally have a pair of my own), and lots of shirtless boys with skin the color of tan leather. K. drove me there, she is very friendly and said I can ride with her whenever in the future if it coincides with her work schedule – she sells or buys pearls retrieved from oysters in some store on Front Street there, I think. She told me to watch for whales’ tails in the sea as we drove by – the prime whale season is mostly over (February and March), but it’s still possible to see them. Most of the way to Lahaina (it took us only an hour in her car) looked like one long stretch of public beach, but K. warned me that some areas are not safe for swimming, not due to sharks but rather to coral reefs, which you can scrape yourself on badly. I read in her Hawaii guidebook that all hula dancers were originally male, just like actors in the time of Shakespeare.

K. dropped me off in Lahaina and I turned in my application at Foodland (the Lahaina location is expanding) then spent the afternoon exploring Front Street, which is a wonderful concentration of art galleries (LOTS of them – I saw paintings done by Sir Anthony Hopkins – didn’t know he was an artist as well as an actor), discount stores, T-shirt shops, surf shops, restaurants, cafes, ice cream and shaved ice shops, and little marketplaces with kiosks like at Saturday Market in Portland, but with totally different weather. I brought my pair of jean shorts missing the top button to Ruth Ann at the Needlework Shop (by the Banyan Tree, a huge tree with 12 trunks that was planted in 1873 and is the largest and oldest tree on the Islands) and she said she could fix it and I inquired “It won’t cost too much then?” and she sort of scoffed and said, “A dollar.” It’s weird how some things (groceries!) are more expensive here than in Portland, while other things, for example liquor, are strangely about the same price, and then still other things – like the bus fare, which is a flat dollar whether you’re going one stop or all the way to Kahului, or getting a button fixed on your shorts – are CHEAPER. It’s a spectrum of relativities.

I’ll go back to Lahaina Friday or early next week to pick up my shorts and turn in some applications – especially one to the Cool Cat Cafe, a 50s-style restaurant with a full bar and (reputedly) the best burgers on Maui – although K. told me, “I don’t think it’s going to work for you to work in Lahaina,” and I know what she means – it will take an hour and a half to two hours each way on the Maui bus to make that commute. So I’m going to focus on trying to get something in Paia, which is a much shorter ride – in fact I could probably walk there if I was feeling up to the challenge. I tried to get a library card but I need a bank statement first showing my Maui address. I bought a pair of sunglasses, a ring from one of the kiosks, and the Crocs, which I can’t wait to try out on the beach. Got a waffle cone with two scoops at the Maui Swiss Cafe, which is very cute and very pink (it has Fred Flintstone out front driving a pink cart with a pink laminated menu).

On the bus back to Haiku two incredibly stoned hippie guys got on and sat right behind me and had an inane hippie conversation with phrases like “respect each other, man, it’s all we got” and “we’re all clowns and life is a circus!” They got off at the same stop I did, and I could tell they would’ve been happy to strike up a conversation, which I wanted to avoid at all costs, so I started walking really fast, to lose them. I walked home in the dark, and cars came along now and then and lit the way in front of my feet (no flashlight), and it was a little lonely and scary, but I didn’t feel lonely or scared, in fact the warm breezy summerish night put me in a mood of poetry, and I composed most of a poem as I walked home, which I’ll post here tomorrow after I add to/revise it a little.

Futile as poetry is, I can’t help but write some now and then.

Aloha, Maui!

Here I am on the islands! Oh, Maui, how I love thy semi-tropical climate, and persistent rainbows, and continuous breeze! It was certainly worth the white-knuckled terror of the flight. But I’m just being a big ol’ drama queen now. As a matter of fact I’m in danger of becoming one of those people who doesn’t bat a lash about getting on an airplane. It’s only the takeoff and descent that suck, the entire middle part is fine, and even soothing, especially since I had earplugs in this time. Coming down on Maui was the only turbulent part – it’s windy here! Anthony met me by the baggage claim conveyor and wreathed me in a green tea leaf lai that he made along with a tuberose one, creamy white colored and fragrant of vanilla and honey. It made me want to quote aloud lines from Shakespeare. (I’m finishing “Wuthering Heights” finally and I think it’s influencing my writing style.)

Cousin Anthony (who I will henceforth refer to simply as “Cousin”) took me to his and J’s “project house” this morning (photo above) to get new smoke alarms installed for the people coming over to look at, and hopefully buy the house. It’s been on the market almost 2 years now, and the asking price is down to $1.8 million from well above $2 million. It has a steep paved driveway and exquisite decoration and a pool and three floors, the top two both with wide spacious patios sporting breathtaking panorama views of the town and lush foliage below, and beyond them the glowing azure ocean stretching to the horizon.

Afterwards Cousin took us to the only restaurant in town serving breakfast at 10:30 a.m. where he said he’d had such a bad experience last time that under TIP on the check he wrote “Find a new job,” but he gave it another chance for my sake, and he had florentine eggs benedict (florentine basically means “spinach”) and I had a stack of golden buttermilk pancakes with fresh strawberries, and everything was fine, the server was attentive, in fact almost overly servile, I thought, but Cousin is imperious and impatient in demanding compliance from people, whether it’s restaurant servers, the agent who has failed to sell their house so far, or the people in front of him on the road who purposely block him from driving as fast as he’d like in his giant F350 white pickup truck. (So big that he took up two parking spaces when we went to the restaurant.) We stopped and chatted with a couple exuberant older Hawaiian ladies who run an art gallery and are planning a Victor/Victoria themed party for a mutual friend.

Then we went to Secret Beach, which was clothing-optional, and Cousin lounged naked in the HOT sun (it's between 60 and 90 all the time here), while I body surfed and got too much sun (my head is turning bright lobster red – I put “Green Ice” aloe gel on it). He pointed to one house and said “That’s David Bowie and Iman’s house,” then pointed to another on the hill above us and said “That’s Sharon Stone’s house.” Bowie’s house has its own little point or spit of land jutting out onto the water, landscaped all the way up so people can’t climb into their yard and it’s semi-private while being also directly in view of a public beach – with naked people. Sharon Stone’s house looks like cheesecake – same color and consistency. Cousin thinks the water here is cold and was only in it for a few minutes, but I spent a solid hour or two body-surfing the waves, and the water is heaven to me - exactly what I dreamed of and longed for the whole time I kept trying to swim in those glacial 40-degree lakes in Glacier Park last summer. Cousin finally called me ashore after J warned him on the phone not to let me stay in the water too long or my scalp might burn. On the walk back from the beach to the parking lot I felt like a sensitive, pale water creature burning myself on hot coals. The soles of my feet felt soft as the underbelly of a reptile, scalded by hot rocks as I walked along barefoot.

Back at Hohani Place, Cousin had a nap while I organized and put away everything in my room, then took a dip in the pool. He has corned beef simmering in a pot on the stove for tomorrow night’s dinnner. They have a friendly, skinny, tan, blonde Russian girl roommate named K. who goes to a community college nearby, studying to be an IT person. She warned me not to go anywhere without suntan lotion, a rule I failed to observe today, but I didn’t know we’d be hitting the beach when we left. I did my regular exercise regimen this morning, then also did a 15-minute run on the exercise bike with the Resistance set to 7. It’s easy to sweat here with the high humidity. Cousin started to play “Brideshead Revisited” but I said “Let’s save that for another night” because I just can’t watch that movie without a commitment to fully experience it, such is the bond I’ve formed with it. I just read Benji is going to make a movie about the Beatniks next with Jesse Eisenberg from Adventureland. He’s going to play Lucien Carr, a less-well-known figure from the Beats’ early days who nonetheless played an integral role in bringing them together. So I have that and Bright Star to look forward to. Well, I’ve got to go try on some diaphanous gowns Cousin laid on my bed in preparation for our upcoming parties. Looks like I’ll be doing drag before San Francisco after all!

Cousin told me the first night that he and J both walk around the house naked from time to time. K. does, too, occasionally. That's how it goes here! Being the shy thing I am, I’ll probably keep my underwear on at least.