“And just a touch of makeup—”
“No.”
The cab dropped us off in front of a nondescript former warehouse on West Street, marked only with a huge neon B and a line of people waiting to get in. We were at Benedick’s, it was finally Halloween, and David had just spent the past three hours repeatedly assuring me that I was a dead ringer for Demi Moore, if she were five foot-eleven without heels.
“I hate you,” I muttered as he paid the driver. “And you don’t look a thing like Bruce Willis.”
“I most certainly do,” he replied, although except for the receding hairline, he most certainly didn’t.
“Okay. You do look like Bruce Willis. After he’s gained about forty pounds, aged fifteen years, and totally fagged out.”
“You’re just upset because you’ve discovered the joys of drag so late in life.” He took my elbow and guided me toward the entrance. “And remember, try to keep your voice at a higher level. You sound like a man.”
“I am a man.”
He smiled. “In your dreams.”
At the entrance, David presented the beefy bouncer with the passes. He looked us over carefully.
“You know this is a queer club, right?” he asked, looking directly at me.
“Speak to the man,” David commanded.
I came up with a voice out of my normal register, a hybrid of Southern belle and Lauren Bacall. “Why do you think this place is so queer?”
The bouncer still stared at me, unsure. So David, still playing Henry Higgins, said, “Now, speak in Andrew’s voice.”
I gave him an uncomprehending look and stuck with my Belle Bacall voice. “Who’s Andrew?”
“Sorry,” said the bouncer, moving to block the door. “I don’t know where you got the passes, but this place is open tonight for gay men only.”
Gay men only. I recognized that as one of Barry Blackburn’s themes, the periodic and controversial “Boys Need A Safe Place” parties that I’d always managed to avoid in the past. I mentally added misogyny to the list of Barry Blackburn’s sins.
“Oh, for Chrissake…” muttered David, less concerned with the political correctness of the situation. “Okay, Andrew, you’ve shown the world you can pass as a woman. Now would you knock it off? I’d like to get inside.”
No longer entertained, the bouncer moved us off to the side to admit a leather version of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. When the door closed again, he said, “Please move it somewhere else, folks.”
“I’m a man,” I confessed to him in my normal voice, but he still blocked the door.
“Andrew,” said David, growing more annoyed than the bouncer, “since this man doesn’t believe your voice anymore, show him your dick.”
I hoisted up my skirt, pushed aside my garter, pulled my panties slightly to the side, and exposed one testicle.
“You’re pretty convincing,” admitted the bouncer, somewhat embarrassed, as he ushered us in the door.
“Thanks…I think.”
“Told you so,” whispered David.
“Shut up,” I growled.
Inside, Benedick’s was lavish, gaudy, and an exaggeration of everything good and bad about gay nightclubs. The voice of Grace Jones—who was rumored to be making an appearance later that night, gay icons being the only apparent exception to Barry Blackburn’s no-girls-allowed rule—throbbed over the speakers as hundreds of New York City’s brightest, wittiest, cutest, and studliest men gyrated on the huge dance floor. Hundreds of other men crowded the bar and ringed the dance floor, drinks in hand, watching the dancers do what they wouldn’t or couldn’t do and hoping someone would try to pick them up.
And everyone was in some semblance of a costume: soldiers, sailors, police officers, firefighters, cowboys, Indian chiefs, Roman emperors, Greek gods, hard hats, a lot of masks, and an awful lot of awful drag. It was a theme park for fetishes; every fantasy was represented, although not always by fantasy men.
David went off to “buy a girl a drink,” and his space next to me was immediately filled.
“You’re the best-looking woman in the place,” said an older, balding faux police officer. “Mind if I frisk you?”
“Sorry, no thanks,” I replied in my Belle Bacall voice. Just because I’d let David talk me into this costume didn’t mean I was going to help trolls fulfill their fantasies. “I’m here with someone.”
“I’ve got handcuffs.” He patted the cuffs dangling from his belt, then leaned closer to me and added, almost inaudibly, “And I’ve got a hose I can beat you with.”
Oh, please. I’d been here less than ten minutes and already wanted to go home and take a shower.
Still Belle Bacall, I sweetly said, “Thanks, but…”
He smiled and nodded downward. I glanced down to see the tip of his penis poking out from his fly, then looked him sternly in the eye.
“Fuck off or I’ll rip it out by the roots and shove it up your ass,” I said, this time as Andrew Westlake. Shaken, he stuffed it back in his fly and moved away.
“Wasn’t that Paul Musso?” asked David, who was suddenly there with my drink.
“Who?”
“The cop.”
“I don’t know who the fuck it was,” I replied, in a surly mood. “But I wish he’d go back to the Port Authority Bus Terminal where he belongs.”
David nodded his head. “Yes, that would be Paul Musso.”
We made a circuit of the club. David ran into a number of his A-list acquaintances and pointed out several young men on the dance floor whom he allegedly had slept with, all conveniently too far away from us to be engaged in conversation.
I, of course, knew no one, although a towering black drag queen did approach to tell me, “You look fabulous, darling. You’re a natural.”
“That’s me,” said Belle Bacall. “I’m all woman.”
“You sort of look like Demi Moore,” said the drag queen as she departed.
David smiled smugly.
After an hour I had to go to the bathroom. I excused myself to “powder my nose” and left David chatting with the president of a major record label, who was dressed as a pimp.
I walked in the direction of what I presumed to be the men’s room, but once I passed through a set of doors and into near darkness, I realized I’d made a mistake. When I heard the doors latch behind me and I was trapped in total darkness, I realized I’d made a big mistake.
“Great,” I muttered, out of character, as I fruitlessly tried to open the locked doors.
So there I was—my first time in drag, let alone heels—standing on the wrong side of the door in an unlit, locked corridor of a converted warehouse now hosting what would hopefully become the hottest gay dance club in the world, lost and really having to take a leak.
What was a poor girl to do?
After my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw faint light at a far end of the corridor. I took a few steps, bumped into a cardboard box hidden in the dark, lost my balance in the heels, and fell over.
“I hate David Carlyle,” I growled through gritted teeth as I picked myself up off the floor. I slipped off the high heels and carried them with me, walking carefully as I navigated toward the light.
When I reached the end of the corridor, I saw that