The Bottle Ghosts (13 page)

Since I was closest, I hurried over.

“Teddy, let me give you a hand.”

He looked at me for a moment before a look of recognition swept across his face and he burst into a huge, ear-to-ear grin, at the same time swinging the garment bag off his shoulder and into my arm. He took a bill out of his wallet and handed it to the utterly bored-looking driver.

“Keep smilin', honey,” T/T said.

The driver didn't bat an eye, got back into the cab, closed the door, and drove off.

T/T turned to me, still beaming. “Why if it isn't my very favorite Dick in the whole world! You came to see me! I'm touched, darlin', truly touched.” He looked toward the rest of my group standing by the car, and his eyes grew even wider in a classic silent movie look of mock surprise. “And can that be…is that…my number one fan Chris?” He thrust out both arms in a “come to mama” gesture as Chris came over, grinning broadly, and was swallowed up in a huge bear hug.

“Why, darlin's, I couldn't be happier to see anybody! And you're…” he looked from me to Chris, then over at Max and Jonathan, who were hesitantly coming over to join us. I gather he thought Chris and I were back together, though he couldn't be absolutely sure, but decided that since he'd started a sentence he should finish it. “…you've brought Dick's brother and…your nephew?”

Chris and I exchanged grins as Max and Jonathan joined us.

“Teddy, this is Max, Chris's other half, and this is Jonathan, mine.”

As he shook hands with Max, T/T leaned forward, brows knitted, and stage whispered, “Are you
sure
you're not Dick's brother?”

Max grinned. “I'm pretty sure Mom would have told me.”

“Well, I'd double check that birth certificate if I were you,” T/T said, releasing Max's hand and turning his attention to Jonathan.

“Honey, you shouldn't be here tonight!”

Jonathan looked a bit confused as he took T/T's hand and looked quickly at me. I just gave a gentle “don't worry about it” shake of my head. I knew T/T was just pausing for effect.

“Why, chile',” he said finally, “with you in the audience, ain't nobody goin' to be lookin' at
me
.”

Jonathan blushed furiously, but his grin got even broader.

T/T looked at his watch, gave another raised-eyebrow look of surprise and said: “Lordy, look at the time! My plane was late, and that taxi took forever to pick me up from the hotel, and I'm runnin' late. I'll just be able to make it!”

He reached for the garment bag, but I said: “I can bring this in for you, if they'll let me through the door.”

“Well of course they will, darlin'!” T/T said, moving quickly to retrieve his makeup case and hatboxes. “You're with a
star!
”

I told the others to start heading for the main entrance, and I'd be right there.

T/T walked to the door, set down his makeup case and gave two battering-ram “Bam”s on the metal with the side of his fist. After a moment, the door opened and a bouncer-type head emerged. He gave T/T a quick once over and said: “Tondelaya O'Tool?”

T/T rolled his eyes skyward.

“No, honey, I'm Amelia Earhart, and I think I'm lost. Can I use your phone?”

With a wide grin, the guy swung the door open to let T/T enter. I followed. We stopped just inside the door and T/T said “Dick, you give the bag to this handsome hunk o' man and get on back to your friends. We're only doin' the one show tonight, but if you'd like to wait around a little bit after while I change, I can come join you for a drink and we can catch up on old times.”

“That'd be great, Teddy. Thanks. Bob Allen's with us, too, and…”

“Bob?” T/T's face grew serious. “How's he doin'? Is he…”

“He's fine. He has a new partner now, Mario, who's a great guy. You'll get a chance to meet him, and I know Bob would really like to see you.”

T/T reached out and tapped me on the arm. “Well, we'll just do that, then.”

*

As I was approaching the crowd at the front entrance, which included a nice mix of lesbians and gay men, and with Chris, Max, and Jonathan just a short way ahead of me, I saw Bob and Mario approaching from the other direction. We exchanged greetings as we inched forward toward the door, paid our cover charge, and entered.

Like Glitter, the city's largest bar/dance bar/show bar, which had converted the second story of a huge old factory warehouse, Steamroller Junction made no effort to conceal its origins. As a matter of fact, the first thing we saw upon entering—mainly because it would be pretty hard to miss—was an actual, full-sized steamroller, circa 1930, painted bright pink, surrounded on three sides by a full bar behind which there must have been four bartenders. The steamroller was on an inclined ramp, heading uphill—probably to call attention to it, just in case anybody might otherwise indeed have missed it. Behind the steamroller and forming the fourth side of the bar was a wall that spanned the entire room and reached to the arched roof. On either side of the bar were a set of four theater-sized double doors leading into the dance area. Exposed steel girders in the bar section, which was a lot more brightly lit than most bars, were painted iridescent purple, orange, and red.

From the inner room throbbed the omnipresent bass line of the music—the kind my deaf friends love to dance to because they can, quite literally, feel the beat. We made our way to the bar, ordered our drinks, and then moved into the main room. Two smaller bars could be seen, one on each side of the room, in one far corner of which was a gigantic end-loader painted bright white, its huge bucket raised, and in the bucket, somehow, they'd fitted the DJ booth. The rest of the room was totally black, except for the girders, which were, like the end-loader, bright white. A little impractical, I thought, given the crowds and the smoking, but pretty impressive. In the other far corner, across from the end-loader, was a fair-sized stage, complete with curtain. Whether it was going to be a permanent feature of the place or had just been put up for the grand opening, I couldn't tell.

Without saying anything, I could tell that Bob, Chris, and I were all doing the same thing: checking the location of the emergency exits. I'm sure Bob and Chris were as relieved as I to see that there were at least two double-door, clearly marked emergency exits on each side of the room, flanked by sets of emergency lights. Obviously, the lesson of the horrendous Dog Collar fire some time before had been well learned.

Max grabbed Chris and moved out onto the dance floor. Jonathan wanted to get out there and dance, too, but I have two left feet and begged off. Jonathan looked disappointed until Mario said: “Come on, Jonathan, let's show these old farts how it's done.” Handing me his Coke, a grinning Jonathan followed Mario out to disappear into the crowd on the floor.

The music was—surprise?—far too loud for regular conversation to be an option, so Bob and I just stood there, guarding everyone's drinks. Thank God for the wall ledge or we'd never have managed. I could tell from the way Bob was glancing around, subtly but definitely, that the huge crowd made him nervous. He caught me looking at him and dropped his eyes quickly to the floor and gave a small shrug.

“I know,” I said, and I did. If I'd been in the Dog Collar that night, as he had, and if I had lost what he had lost….

When the others hadn't come back fifteen minutes later, Bob leaned over and said, loudly enough for me to hear: “You think we should call out a search party?”

That proved to be unnecessary, for at that moment the music faded and the spotlight on the DJ swung over to the curtains, and everybody stopped dancing and started moving toward the stage. The rest of our little group came over to grab their drinks and we all headed to the far corner of the room, where the curtains were moving about, indicating some sort of activity behind them. I noticed that Bob almost unconsciously reached out and grabbed Mario's hand as if to say, “I'm not going to lose another one.”

*

The show was emceed by an androgynous little number in close-cropped hair, black leather pants and a black sleeveless tee shirt with a tattooed bicep. If it was a guy, he was hot as hell. My crotch, which still had a mind of its own, was greatly disappointed to realize it was a woman. Oh, well.

The first act was a lesbian rock group, “Sappho's Baby” which was surprisingly good, especially the keyboard player, who had spiked hair about the same color as the steamroller in the front room, but who was one of the best keyboardists I'd ever heard.

They really got the crowd going, and they were followed by a very cute, all-American boy type stand-up comedian I'd actually seen on one of those comedy club shows on TV. The crowd loved him, partly, I think, because he represented something we were only just now beginning to see: our own people not only right out front, but able to make it openly in a hetero-dominated profession.

He was followed by a couple of well-known drag queens I'd seen in local clubs over the years, both above average as lip-synch drag queens go, but to be honest, I've very seldom gone out of my way to seek out drag shows.

Sappho's Baby came back to do another short set, and when we sensed T/T would probably be next, Chris insisted we work our way up as close to the stage as we could possibly get. He led the way in jostling us through the crowd. Jonathan had hooked his hand through the back of my belt so we wouldn't get separated, and I noticed that Bob still had Mario firmly by the hand.

Since leaving the city, T/T had been a headliner for New Orleans' largest drag show and then, from what I'd heard through the grapevine, had gone on the club circuit around the country. He'd worked just about every drag club in the city before he left, and had developed an avid following. So when the MC said: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, dykes and dicks, let's give a big welcome to the one and only Tondelaya O'Tool!” the crowd went wild.

Chris let out a piercing whistle, which was fairly well drowned out by the enthusiastic ovation. Rather than stepping out from behind the curtain, T/T made his way from a door to the left of the stage along the floor in front of it to the other side. I imagined people farther back probably couldn't see too well, but it was classic T/T—Pearl Bailey at her best, greeting her fans. When he reached the other side of the stage, he climbed a set of steps I'd not noticed, and, in total control of the room sauntered to the center of the stage, reached behind the curtain for a microphone, and went immediately into “You Gotta See Momma Every Night,” followed by “Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home.”

No question about it, T/T was a great entertainer. He used his own voice, and he played the audience like a violin. Then, spotting our group, he blew us a big kiss and went into one of his lesser-known truly down-and-dirty shoulder-shaking numbers he used to make a point of singing directly to Chris and me: “The Butcher's Son” (
“I'm not the butcher, I'm the butcher's son/ but I'll give you meat until the butcher comes!”
) He did it again, which as usual both pleased and embarrassed the shit out of me. Jonathan just looked at me with an expression that made it clear he had no idea of what was going on.

When his set was over, the crowd wouldn't let him go until he did his trademark “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” for which he let out all the stops and practically raised the roof off the place. Even the lesbians loved it.

When T/T finally left the stage—through the curtains, this time—and the MC was able to make herself heard, she announced the sentimental favorite and “star” of the show, Daisy Chane, a home-town boy who'd became a legend on the nation's drag queen circuit in the days when just being a drag queen took a hell of a lot of guts. If the stand-up comedian represented the community today and where it was headed, Daisy Chane represented the kind of in-your-face courage it took to get us where we are.

He'd retired several years before to a farm outside of the city with his partner of over forty years, but had been persuaded to come out of retirement for the opening. Chris and I had bought one of his albums when we were together. I think I must still have it somewhere.

But though Daisy had to be pushing seventy-five, he still had it: he was more Bette Davis than Bette herself, and could out-Marlene Marlene Dietrich. He got a wild, five minute ovation at the end of his act, which was not only richly deserved but a sincere tribute to his career. I'd have said it was a standing ovation, but since nobody was sitting down anyway….

The performers were called back out for their curtain calls, Sappho's Baby did a third brief set, the curtains closed, and the spotlight swung back to the end-loader, where the DJ cranked up both his turntables and the volume, and the place transformed immediately from show bar to dance bar.

I managed to convey, via shouts and signals, that T/T wanted to join us for a drink, and we moved closer to the door through which he had emerged at the start of his number. I figured that would be the most logical place for him to come out, and there was no way he would otherwise have been able to find us in that crowd.

Jonathan, Chris, Max, and Mario went back out onto the dance floor. They stayed fairly close to the edge of the crowd this time, and I was able to watch Jonathan dance. He was fantastic! I could never move like that in a million years. He danced like he didn't have a bone in his body. Every move just flowed effortlessly and he was so incredibly sexy I could hardly stand it.