Testy Does Vegas

Testy Lesbiana cruised down the Strip in stately fashion, negligently steering her pop-top Caddy with one hand and ogling tourists as they outpaced her on the sidewalk. The Caddy, dubbed the Drag Racer but hardly living up to its name in this 2 am traffic, took up twice the space of any of the tiny rolling boxes around her.

If she’d been sitting up on its back deck and waving instead of slumping in the front seat and steering, she could have been a county fair teen queen in a parade down Main Street U.S.A.

If she’d been in drag, that is, and teenaged, and within striking distance of anything like the heartland.

She should have thrown a wig on, she lamented, before she left work to begin this eternal slog down Las Vegas Boulevard. The Strip’s traffic had gotten slower and slower each year, especially as more new hotels went up and more new tourists came to gawk.

Of course, tourists paid Testy’s salary, and gawking was practically her religion, both as object and participant. But this traffic was a pain. And she hadn’t even thought to make the most of it by gussying up, throwing on a little rouge and mascara, piling up the hair and wearing some sequins home. She revved the Racer and rolled five more feet forward and sighed. She really must be losing her touch.

Testy Lesbiana was as old as dirt, she claimed, but a whole lot more glamorous. When she’d rolled into town lo these many years ago (more years ago than any lady would admit to, but not so many that she was a positive relic quite yet) she’d known no one and had no prospects at all. But she did have a saddle bag full of lashes and bugle beads, an indefatigable sense of the fabulous, and enough chutzpah to take on every Mob boss in town. And those gifts turned out to be just what Vegas needed.

She’d pitched what she had, which was herself, and the city was buying. She’d become an actual local celebrity for some years, the creator and star of her own drag revue, Wonder?Boys!, which against all odds became a Vegas fixture. Wonder?Boys! first appeared in a dusty 100 seat cabaret at Cactus Jack’s Downtown Casino. In that version, Testy and two other queens sang and danced along to records of Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. The costumes were cheap but showy, and the audiences walked out happy.

After a couple years, Jack got run out of the state by the IRS and the place was annexed by the Gold Stake next door, which had no interest in, as Testy put it, “supporting the arts.” So the show moved to the Strip, where the Royale Hotel & Casino’s decrepit old theatre had been sitting empty for a decade, and where the owner, a crusty old scam artist named Billy B, was more than happy to try any scheme that drew a customer as long as it didn’t cost him a nickel. Wonder?Boys! fit the bill on both counts, so Testy hired a few more ladies and played the Royale for a generation, convulsing the gamblers’ girlfriends and enlightening more than a few redneck wranglers into the wonders of a very particular flavor of fantasy.

The gimmick of Wonder?Boys! was all there in the title. Testy and four other drag queens, as well as one real woman, lip-synched to current hits, changing the lineup from Judy to Barbra to Cher to Madonna as the years went on. The audience was invited to test themselves, see if they could spot the real girl. Given the sensory tumult of false eyelashes and glittery gowns and more fake hair than any single production had used since King Kong nuzzled up to Faye Wray, the odds were against them. And at the end of the show, when all the ladies tore off their wigs and lashes, the jig was up, and the audience members got to point and gasp and argue as they all claimed to have known, from the first moment, who had the estrogen up there.

They were always lying, of course. The girl Testy most often employed, Cheryl, was a two-hundred-fifty pound blonde who played Totie Fields and Mama Cass and was never picked by anyone as the show’s sole legitimate owner of a vagina. Testy Lesbiana, herself, was more often accused of being physiologically feminine, especially at the bar by drunken patrons who’d just embarrassed themselves by getting hot over the wrong gender. Her strategy at those moments was always the same: she’d buy the schmo a beer, wave grandly at her own richly bejeweled nether regions and say, in her gruff baritone, “Nothin’ going on down there, boys!” It was her signature quip, and the fact that it wasn’t funny didn’t matter as long as the patrons were drunk enough, and it was said with enough style. Style, obviously, was Testy's stock-in-trade. She would take a florid bow and then make her exit, disappearing out of the bar in a cloud of applause and cheap perfume.

So Wonder?Boys! kept Testy comfortably in wigs and sequins for more years than she would have dared hope when she started it. And it established for her a small but definitive place among Las Vegas’ entertainment pantheon. She was the Doyenne of Drag, the Queen of the Crossdressers, and the gatekeeper who stood between any number of wannabe boys in dresses and a paying career that just might justify their fetish to their parents. It was a good life.

But all good things must end, and mediocre things, too, although sometimes they last longer. Testy Lesbiana came in one night to learn that Billy B had sold the Royale, lock, stock, and cabaret, and it was scheduled for demolition exactly one month later. Wonder?Boys! was homeless again.

And drag queens, Testy was told in meeting after meeting as she shopped the show around town, had seen their day, and it was over. The Royale was destined to make room for the Strip’s very first themed mega-resort, marking a new era in Vegas’ history. The city was going legit, it was going to appeal to families, and a bunch of aging, paunchy men in bugle beads was not what those customers wanted.

“So that’s it, then,” she told her cast one night. “In two more weeks, we play our last show, and then the wrecking ball hits. I’m sorry it’s all happening so quickly. I’d love to go out with some sort of bang, but at this point I think we’ll be lucky just to get all our lipsticks packed.”

“I don’t know how you can be so casual,” Cheryl accused her. “This show is important to some of us.”

“Hey, it’s important to me, too,” Testy retorted. “What else do you think I’m going to do now? I’ll probably end up sewing rhinestones in some sweatshop somewhere, for god’s sake. But no one wants our tired old asses, honey.”

Cheryl sniffed. “Well, I’m not giving up.”

“Fine,” Testy told her. “I heard a rumor that some freaky French circus is coming to play the Oasis next summer. If you can figure out how to work yourself into that, let me know.” Testy knew Cheryl had bills to pay and no particular talents, but she’d done what she could. Cheryl stomped off, and Testy watched her, sighed, and then went to get her mascara back from Big John, who played Grace Jones and Diana Ross and was an inveterate stealer of other ladies’ makeup.

Two weeks later on the night the show closed, Testy Lesbiana stayed up all night packing her favorite beaded gowns and make-up for the last time. And as the sun was rising over the Royale parking lot, she loaded them into the Drag Racer, saluted smartly, and drove directly to the Grand Hotel's employee entrance. She marched into their HR office and filled out thirty-seven pages of paperwork to apply for a job as dresser at Extravaganza! That was a production, she figured, that could use a little talent with a needle, not to mention some style. Of course they snapped her up immediately.

And thus, my children, we end up where we started, at what I guess will have to be the beginning of our story. Now we’re to the point where the really exciting stuff starts to happen. The complications, the entanglements, and of course, the Entry of the Bad Guy. All the stuff a story depends on.

Ready?

NEXT UP: THE DROWNED & THE FURY (Friday 7/17)