Without A Good Excuse to Wear a Dress

The moon raced through the night, but Testy Lesbiana raced faster.

Rachel was posing quite a problem. Ten minutes after she’d crept off tonight, Testy had thrown down her mending, reached under her work table, and pulled out her own private treasure chest. It had begun life as a cheap toolbox, a plain, black rectangle with a simple chrome hasp. It might have cost ten dollars. Now it was dented, banged up, scratched, and as near and dear to Testy’s heart as her car or her favorite stiletto heels. It held her make up, her eyelashes, her curlers and crimpers and, folded up and kept clean in a plastic baggie, her emergency breasts.

She’d plunked the box down on her work table, peered at herself in the mirror, and set to work. Sometimes, a girl needed to break free. To get dolled up and outrageous, and go spin a little chaos in the desert. She had just the dress for it hidden away, kept here at work for just such an occasion. She had shoes, and the box, and her massive, flip-top mobile behemoth out in the parking lot just waiting to roar down some empty roads. Testy’s car was officially christened the Queen of the Road. And the time had come, she’d decided, for a royal invasion.

Now, she sailed on a wave of bass and Bassey, cruised with the crooning of Horne, and steered with her fingertips. The scorpions hung by, silent; the lizards held their breaths to hear. And Testy Lesbiana wondered to herself, What the hell am I doing?

She’d known that her time in Vegas was ending. She’d known it for a long time. But like homeowners who refuse to see the nibble marks on their cereal boxes in the pantry, she’d ignored the warnings till they came right out and beaned her, till she ran rammed her own head against their dead-end wall with its big, screaming letter left their by some lunatic therapist: GO!

Testy knew about exits. She’d pulled up stakes more times in her life than she cared to count anymore. This was just one more carefully staged Fade Into the Sunset. The only problem this time, the only roadblock on that trail heading into the great big, blobby, orange egg yolk of a sun hitting the horizon, overflowing its bounds and leaving a sticky, lecithin mess all over the pristine kitchen counter of the sky, was Rachel.

That would teach her to get close to someone, she thought.

“Oh hell!” she said aloud, and swung her car onto the shoulder and stopped.

Testy had never dealt with stowaways. When she’d picked up and gone, she’d gone, with nary a backward look or memento to weigh her down. But here she was, large as life and feeling twice as antsy, and this plucky, sweet, on-the-edge-of-overage little gamine looked after her with eyes big and pitiful enough to belong to a kitten doing advertisements for humane society donations.

Vegas winked at her through her rear-view mirror, glaring as beadily as an acid-tripping crows.

“Oh, fuck you,” she glared back.

She hauled herself out of the driver’s seat and stroked her sequins down once or twice. Then she pulled her heels out of the gravel and stepped onto the blacktop, humming Stormy Weather tunelessly. Her dangling handbag swung in time.

What does a drag queen carry in her bag? The basics, like the Queen of England has in hers. Lipstick, powder, and a condom. The Queen perhaps trades in the condom for an extra pair of gloves, or maybe cab fare in case she gets separated from her party (imagine the Queen hailing a cab and saying “To the Palace!” as she settles in the back seat. Would she know how to do it? Does she understand the very mechanics of hailing and directing a cab? Does she know what a cab is? Maybe there are classes, Queen Classes, to help her should she lose her way.) But a drag queen comes prepared, so to speak, and has ways and means of getting by without any money. So Testy Lesbiana swung her handbag loosely (but always in rhythm) as she made her way across the narrow highway, and then through the gravel on its other side, and so into the desert itself.

Even the greatest drag queen has to pee, sometimes. Some girls might have barely stepped outside their cars to pull their skirts up, but Testy Lesbiana was from an era that recognized a lady when it saw one, and peeing on the road was simply tacky. She walked a good distance into the desert, looking back to see that the piles of sagebrush around her provided at least minimal screening from the road.

She stopped. “Welcome to the dollhouse,” she muttered, and proceeded. The little bush in front of her seemed excited to be feeling moisture, at first, though it retracted a little a second later, uncertain what this liquid was that sparkled like moonlight but then pooled and sank into the sand like a mirage, bitter as an empty promise of water to a lost hiker without a canteen.

Testy raised her perfectly penciled eyebrows at the bush. “You’re welcome,” she told it. She rearranged her clothes, bottom layers to top, working her way outwards. Peeing en costume, as it were, was not an easy business.

When she was finished, she took a moment to survey the spot she’d chosen. Like all the Mojave, it was sand and sage, in its endless variation.

“Just like me,” she told it. “A little drift of sand, a little tumbleweed passing by—”

She broke off, suddenly inspired. Could she, she wondered, find a good, dead sagebrush, the classic tumbleweed, and fashion it into a fab wig? Spraypaint it silver, perhaps, and throw some glitter on, then drape herself in something sandy and gossamer, a gold mesh, maybe, and call herself the Queen of the Desert? She might put together a whole new act, resurrect Wonder?Boys! in some new guise, start all over right here—

She sighed. She shook her head, just to make it official. “No, you big, huge, desperate queen,” she lectured. “Time to get out. Pack up the kid and drive away. Don’t you fall back and get stuck, and don’t you let her, either.”

Another sigh, and an echo from the sandy, still air.

“That’s right,” Testy Lesbiana told it.

She turned and started back to her car.

And then something happened.

Not much happens, ordinarily, in the middle of the Mojave. There is a good reason that the words deserted and desertion come from desert, and also a good reason why the Mojave outside of Vegas is commonly referred to with words like wasteland, wilderness, and goddamn-it’s-empty-out-here. There is, in other words, a whole lotta nuthin’ out in the Mojave, and a whole lotta nothin’ doin’.

So, when you, a solitary traveler, stop to pee at some unseemly hour after midnight, all alone on a two-land state road forty minutes from Vegas, in the middle of the unmoving sea of sand and sagebrush, under the silvered sky before the jagged backdrop mountains, why, then you will also be quite surprised to hear a voice behind you.

Particularly if that voice is louder than the loudest loudspeakers in the Extravaganza! Theater, if it booms and shakes the sagebrush, if it shatters the still of the desert (no longer deserted) night as abruptly and effectively as Jehovah’s own well-known cameo in another desert, with flaming flora.

“LISTEN TO ME, TESTY LESBIANA,” came the voice.

“SHIT!” Testy Lesbiana screamed.

NEXT POST: THE END OF THE BEGINNING OF THE END (Friday 9/18)