Queens of the Road

“I remember one day when Plato came over to my place for makeup tips. They still teach you kids about Plato, right?” Testy glanced over at Rachel, miles away on the passenger side of her infamous Detroit convertible yacht-on-wheels. “The philosopher?” Testy prompted. “Well–” she corrected herself, “drag queen-slash-philosopher.”

Kansas was, Testy Lesbiana had warned Rachel beforehand, “A whole lotta nothin’. And they spread it out real flat and open for you so you can see just exactly how little there is to it.”
Testy and Rachel had left Vegas driving North and West, threading the state of Nevada from its point to its triangular heart to join Interstate 80 in Reno. Delusions of the frontier spirit still persisted there, and wagon wheels and cowboy hats abounded. From Reno, they’d sailed East through the countless doughy mountain ranges of the Silver State, natural spiritual home of anti-technology survivalists and rotting trailer homes. They’d hit Utah without pausing, watching the Great Salt Lake slink by their windows as flat and white as a batch of spackle. And then they’d hit the joy of the trip, the jumbled, tumbled western approach to the Rockies, where Testy had insisted on taking every out-of-the-way detour and scenic route she could find, and Rachel had spent the time dizzy with height and confusion and sensory overload.

“Shouldn’t we be hurrying?” she asked.

“Nah. Why bother? We’ve got all the time in the world, babe, and all the world to spend time in. Come on–there’s another scenic overlook!”

But once they passed Denver, the drama quotient of their drive fell as flat as a bad souffle. The Rocky Mountains might be a stage set. They have only one side. Having heroically crested their heights, Testy and Rachel suddenly found themselves rolling down one great, tilted plain, no crags or peaks or even bumps in sight. Shortly, the cornfields began, which indicated, Testy said, that Colorado had surrendered utterly, and let itself be watered down into the boringness of Kansas with no fight whatsoever.

“Disappointing, but what can you say?” she shrugged. “You can’t even tell we’re going downhill. You might never find out at all if this road didn’t eventually fall off into the Mississippi when it gets to St. Louis.” She shrugged again. “And don’t get excited about that, babe,” she continued. “The Mississippi is the biggest, slowest, muddiest river there ever was since the Nile used to flood each year. I remember telling Pharoah–”

So far, Rachel had heard stories about Testy’s misadventures in Rome with Nero (“Terrible musician– I burned the place down just to keep him from the sheet music!”), posing for the Statue of Liberty (“What real woman would know what to do with all that draping?”), shopping with Napoleon (“Great guy, but a bigger clothes horse than I was, and let me tell you, France has always been the Holy Land for drag divas!”), and generally hanging out with Betsy Ross (“That flag? It was supposed to be a gown—I would have been the best-dressed bitch of the whole Eighteenth Century if that silly dame hadn’t suddenly felt all patriotic—what a waste”), and the dinosaurs. Rachel felt pretty confident that that one, at least, wasn’t wholly reliable. They’d been on the road three days.

“So Plato said to me,” the former dresser went on, “‘Testy’, he said, ‘I know this is the dawn of civilization and therefore pretty damn primitive, as far as glamour goes. We can’t even get a decent sparkle eyeshadow in this century! But tell me how you do it, how do you, La Lesbiana, find ways to make a toga look so fabulous?’ That’s what he asked me.”

“Plato?” Rachel clarified.

“Don’t doubt me,” her friend told her. “So, I said to him–” And off she rambled. Between and among the stories had been various thrills and chills, at least for Rachel. Testy seemed monumentally unbothered, no matter what happened. They’d blown a tire in the middle of the night between Elko and Salt Lake, which was the single most desolate stretch of highway Rachel had ever imagined. “Don’t worry, doll, someone will come along,” Testy assured her, and, indeed, someone did. A cute young guy pulled up in a tow truck within fifteen minutes, his headlights appearing out of nowhere over the last rise they’d passed. He’d jumped from his cab with his tools already in his hands, proceeded to jack up the Drag Racer, trade tires, comment heartily on how great these old vehicles were, how they’d run through anything, how if Testy ever decided to sell the car to look him up, and how if they needed any water, snacks, or coffee to see them through the desert, he could give directions to the best truck stop. Rachel thanked him profusely and Testy did so graciously, and he bobbed his head and disappeared into his truck.

“That was lucky!” Rachel exclaimed as they settled back into the car and headed off again.

“Yeah. I’d have hated to get my fingers all greasy doing that, myself,” Testy agreed.

“You mean we could have? I thought we were helpless!” Rachel was shocked. “Why did we wait around? What if he hadn’t come?”

Testy grinned at her, her teeth glowing in the darkness as if plugged in for the purpose. “Angels always show up when you need ‘em, hon. At least they do when I need ‘em! Now, where were we?” And she started in on the tale of how she’d been a geisha several hundred years ago, when the first white men sailed into Tokyo Harbor.

Any day now, Rachel thought, they’d get to the time that Testy and her good friend, Neil Armstrong, strolled along the moon together. Till then, she’d just let the words wash over her, and settle back into the monstrous car’s upholstery and half doze her way across America, as hundreds of miles turned to thousands and the desert turned to fields and cities. And Testy kept on talking.

“Linda must be in class right now,” she mused one afternoon, leaning her head back and watching the rows of corn rush by as if they had an A-list premiere to get to.

“Yes,” she heard Testy agree without any inflection whatsoever. “Don’t start missing it, babe. Don’t do that.”

“Oh, I’m not,” Rachel promised. She blinked rapidly. “I was just... thinking,” she finished.

“Thinking never got anybody anywhere, as my old friend Albert Einstein told me. Great guy– but no sense of style.”

Testy reached over and patted Rachel’s hand while she still stared out at the world's most redundant National Geographic special outside her window. She refused to even acknowledge the enormous lump that had somehow emerged in her throat without warning.

NEXT POST: IT’S GOOD TO BE GOD (Friday 10/9)