Gigantic.20

Ask the Universe

Most drag queens I knew did not get out of bed until the afternoon. These were no exception.

Of the couches I’d surfed since coming back to New York, this was the most welcoming. It had snowed overnight, a proper blizzard. I tried to stay quiet so as not to wake anyone as I got up to stare out the window at the triangle formed by Little West 12th Street, Ninth Ave., and Gansevoort.

The meat packing district was still the meat packing district then. You’d step over gutters of blood that smelled like death on the cobblestone streets. But today everything was blanketed in white. Not a soul was out there.

Finally, everyone started to wake up. RuPaul shared the place with Lahoma and Larry, who were equally friendly. We all had coffee.

Lahoma, as if the mid-winter snowstorm had finally convinced her, got out one of those home insulation kits and began blowdrying giant sheets of plastic wrap over the drafty windows.

There was an upright piano which I was encouraged to play. I took my time noodling since there was nowhere to go.

“You play beautifully,” Lahoma said.

“Eh, I’d rather play the guitar,” I said.

“But why?”

How do you explain to a guy who wears women’s clothes that the piano is just not feeling butch enough for you lately?

“I don’t know,” I said, left it at that.

There’d be no clubbing tonight, the city was socked in. But as night began to fall, Ru just couldn’t stay inside anymore, so the two of us hit the streets.

She always said: “You’re born naked, the minute you put on clothes, you’re in drag, baby!”

There was girl drag, there was boy drag. This said, her wardrobe had absolutely zero boy drag. So she’d pulled a trench coat over long underwear and topped the ensemble with an aviator hat, the kind with flopping ear flaps.

It was freezing out, the westside streets had barely been plowed. Snow got into my shoes as we tromped through snowbanks on our way uptown.

We stopped at a bodega to get two forty ouncers, then on to Times Square. This was before Disneyfication, but the snow had effectively cleaned the place up, at least for tonight.

Ru wanted to see Little Mermaid, which wasn’t really my thing, but I wasn’t going to argue. There was no one else in the movie theater. We still sat toward the back with our oversized bottles, watching a cartoon crab singing about the benefits of underwater life.

Usually when we went out, Ru was done up fabulously. When you combined the heels and hair with natural height, she was a foot taller than me. I didn’t exactly dress to impress. I looked like a dirtbag or an undercover cop. Visually, we must have been an odd combination.

We talked about everything. One time Ru said to me prophetically:

“I think the reason most people don’t get what they want is because they don’t ask the Universe.”

I’ve tried to follow this advice, particularly after it became apparent how stunningly well it worked for her.

Over a period of a year or two, I’d wind up with Ru in vip rooms, backstage in theaters, and in the apartments of various downtown celebs previously out of my orbit.

Somehow the empty theater in Times Square that snowy night remains the most memorable.

The two of us in the back row, needing to pee from too much beer, watching an animated film about the impossible divide between the everyday world above the waves, and the fabulous one under the sea.

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