Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues (Cape Island Mystery)

by Randall Peffer

  For some reason she pictures her favorite sweet. She sees sticky, red, coils of it.

  “You are like licorice, la.”

  Tuki gives Nikki another little kiss on the cheek.

  “You are sweet.”

  “What you doing?”

  She is not exactly sure what Nikki is asking, but her voice blurts out. “Whitney. I am feeling her, so I guess I got to go with the mood, la.”

  “I mean, what’s with you and the cold shower, padruga?”

  “Some Asian craziness, I guess … to wake up the blood.”

  Tuki is glad her wrists have healed. She does not want Nikki to notice the scars. Does not want to talk about the filthy men, the spilled blood, the shadowy women at Bridgewater … or the cute lawyer who already wants to quit her case and go fishing. She does not want to wonder whether any of the people in this room killed Alby, set the fire, framed her. She just wants to get back in front of an audience.

  “Wake up the blood? You lie.”

  Tuki shoots Nikki a look that begs. Can we drop this?

  “Ah, the mysteries of the Dragon Lady,” Nikki sighs. “You sooo compli—”

  “Excuse me, but will you two fag hags stop with the Thelma and Louise routine, and help me dry the floor before every bloody costume we own turns up with water stains around the hem from Miss Tuki’s little harlot bath!”

  Silver is shouting over her shoulder through the open bathroom door as she drains—guy style—about a pint of what used to be vodka and seltzer into the toilet.

  “Please, just once put the seat back down for rest of us,” says Nikki.

  “Yeeesss, dear.”

  Tuki can feel the smirk on Silver’s face even before she turns around and walks across the dressing room, zipping her fly with one hand and offering Nikki a drag on the joint with the other. Nikki frowns, but takes the joint without looking at Silver. She smokes it dry as she stares out at Cape Cod Bay through the open door to the little deck. When she turns around, she is smiling again.

  “Whitney will be nice,” she says. “Don’t you think, Silver?”

  “Absolutely, darling, we can close with Whitney tonight. Let’s see if the famous Miss Tuki can still wail … after her little vacation in the Big House. How’s the billing go, sweetie: ‘Down, dirty, blue, and funky until the sister’s voice just shreds the audience’s hearts?’ Did I get that right? Or was that just some jive a writer cooked up after you gave him a hummer?”

  Tuki stares daggers at Silver. Says nothing.

  The dressing room remains totally quiet for ten minutes. Nikki takes her shower. Silver rolls on platinum lipstick at the makeup table, Tuki files and paints her nails like she is making claws.

  After Nikki is out of the shower in a robe, Silver kicks back her folding chair with a screech and crosses the room to Nikki and Tuki. She doesn’t stop walking until she is so close you can smell the scent of Absolut Lemon on her breath.

  Nikki steps back as if to get out of the line of fire.

  Tuki takes a rat-tail comb in her hand and holds it like an ice pick.

  “All right, girls. Let’s make up. Give mama a big kiss. We’ve got a show to do.” She puckers up her lips like she is some kind of pet bird. Nikki rolls her eyes, then leans forward and gives Silver the kiss she demands. Now it is Tuki’s turn.

  She hesitates, wonders what Silver knows about how Alby spent his last moments, then she smiles a bitter grin, stretches to those platinum lips, plants the smooch.

  “On with the show!”

  Silver sighs. “Friends again.” She pulls her hair out of its ponytail. It falls down to her shoulder blades like strands of white gold. Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe—with all the peroxide in the world—never had it so good.

  Silver is the real thing. At thirty-two she is the reigning queen of the Follies. In guy clothes, like jeans and a crew-neck sweater, and with her hair pulled back in a ponytail cinched at the neck, Silver looks like David Bowie on the best day of his life. Thin face, high cheekbones, piercing blue eyes, six feet one, rugged, and macho, even, if you see Silver wearing cowboy boots and riding a black Harley. That is how you mostly see Silver by day. For her—or him—drag is theater; theater is illusion; illusion is pure power.

  Put Silver in a white corset with six hundred dollars’ worth of glue-on silicone tits stuffed into her D cups, a red mini, a pair of black tights, and her trademark silver pumps, and she will stop traffic when she takes on Commercial Street. Back in New York, Silver has been known to bring four lanes on Broadway to a halt. There is not a girl in the world with better legs. The total vamp—beyond Garbo or Madonna, both of whom she does onstage. But Silver is at her best when she is her own girl, lip-synching to show tunes from Rent, Cabaret, and Chicago. Her “All that Jazz,” done in a silver bodysuit, which she peels out of onstage, gives new meaning to the word babe.

  The girl is famous. She’s played Honolulu, Vegas, San Francisco, Amsterdam. She had her own sitcom on NYC cable for two years, gigs in more than a half dozen music videos, a cosmetic ad, and—maybe—a part in an upcoming feature film. Silver Superstar, world-class runway filly. But she does not sing. She needs the other girls to put some heart and soul and rhythm into the show. Such the queen.

  Michael would probably love her, thinks Tuki. Silver looks like she could kill her best friend for a new pair of stilettos. But then again, what would Silver know about friends?

  NINE

  Nobody, nothing, dares to come between Tuki and Ingrid. They are best friends. They ride the tuk-tuks together. Sit beside each other in school. Do homework in the park, sitting on their favorite bench like a couple of pigeons. Sing and dance at home with each other. Sometimes they put on their mothers’ costumes when they are not around. Make up their own routines to songs like Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary.”

  They watch American movies together. Love and musicals are Tuki’s thing. Ingrid goes for space flicks. They are all over films like Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, Star Wars. Sometimes they pretend that they are the African American sisters Celie and Nettie in The Color Purple. Other times Tuki pretends she is the jazz singer Shug Avery in the same movie, or Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues.

  Ingrid says she is Princess Leia from Star Wars. Out on the streets of Bangkok, she starts carrying a silvery umbrella found in a corner of Brandy and Delta’s club; Ingrid says it is her light saber. It will kick butt.

  That’s good because they need something to help protect themselves. The Patpong has turned totally crazy. It overflows with porn tours from Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and a lot of Western tourists, too, from Germany, Holland, Australia. Sex—lala—is big business. More and more young girls from the country, some no older than Ingrid and Tuki, start hustling on the corners. Pimps pack gangs of teenage girls four or five to a room in apartments. Even the girls in the live sex shows and the straight-out whorehouses, massage parlors, are hardly more than kids.

  Ingrid’s mother has quit dancing to be a bartender because these kids are becoming exotic dancers, too. Bangkok is selling its children, and it turns the world on. Heroin addiction and AIDS spread like fire. Skinny little girls and boys lie dead in the alleys. There are no more jokes in the Patpong.

  Their mothers tell them no way can they go out alone after dark. The problem is not the farangs, the foreigners, it is the junkies who rip you off to get a fix or pimps who kidnap girls, get them hooked on pung chao, make them turn tricks.

  But Tuki and Ingrid do not worry much about what is happening in the streets. Not even a chance. They still live in their own little world of songs, dances, and movies. And they have also started reading books like mad, romance novels they find in the dumpsters at places like the Oriental Hotel.

  Their favorite thing to do on a weekend is to go down to the water taxi stops on the river to get away from the Patpong. They talk and watch the boys dive off the piers. They compare their sleek golden backs and legs. They hold their breath when the boys boost themselves out of the water wit
h muscles bulging like steel cables in those arms. Sometimes the boys shout things to them in Thai, and they wave back, but they are quiet as kwaang, deer.

  One day Tuki and Ingrid are doing their kwaang thing, watching a group of older boys at a water taxi stop farther up the river from where they usually go. They are comparing these boys to the guys back at their regular stop and to the boys in their movies and books. These guys are way ahead in the buns department. The girls hardly notice that it is getting dark, that the boats on the river have begun to turn on their lights. Before today, they have always left the piers before the boys stopped their swimming, but this evening the boys are drying themselves with towels and walking down the pier toward them … the girls are blinded by their golden bodies.

  Before they can stand up, five or six of the boys are circling around them asking in Thai why the sexy little farang and her luk sod friend do not go swimming to cool off in this heat. Are they afraid of the river?

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” says Ingrid in a screw-you-for-asking voice.

  Tuki just smiles and looks at the wet sheen in the boys’ hair.

  “Then show us. Take a swim,” says one of the boys. The others cheer.

  “Fuck off,” says Ingrid. Then she gives Tuki this big-eyed look that says she knows of all the things she could have said in English, the F-word was absolutely, one hundred percent the wrong one.

  Here we go, la. Battle stations.

  “Foak you,” says the leader in English that sounds like he has learned in a fancy British school. “You stupid, little, Patpong slut!”

  The boys begin laughing and pushing toward the girls. They are backing toward the river. And Tuki is wondering if she is going to meet with any rats or snakes when she jumps in.

  But while Ingrid is looking for a safe place to jump in the river, Tuki suddenly grabs Ingrid’s light saber with both hands and swings it like a golf club. It clips the leader in his chaang with a loud thwack.

  He doubles over and falls to the ground screaming in Thai.

  “Run!”

  Her legs wheel into action. She does not know whether it is Ingrid’s voice or her own that coaxes, “Warp speed, Mr. Spock!”

  The boys are chasing them, but they stop when they enter the Patpong. Maybe the boys are the ones who are afraid here.

  Ingrid is laughing, and so is Tuki … when they finally pause to catch their breath outside her mothers’ bar.

  “Who do you love, Cheesecake?”

  This is a favorite line from one of their trashy novels.

  Ingrid throws her arm around Tuki’s waist and gives her a kiss on the cheek. She says, “Friends forever.”

  TEN

  Attorney Decastro is in investigator mode, cataloguing everything for his case. He’s trying to orient himself to this brave new world.

  As soon as he sees the inside of the Painted Lady, it reminds him of a speakeasy in a movie about Mafia kings during Prohibition. The ballroom is two stories high, at least eighty feet long, complete with glass chandeliers and a rotating disco ball. Ten golden columns hold up the ceiling, which has actual frescoes of ancient Greeks in their birthday suits.

  There is a balcony around the second floor of the ballroom. The light and sound kids hang out up there in their shorts and T-shirts, working the spots and the soundboard.

  Downstairs the wallpaper is red brocade, like the cover on a Valentine’s Day box of chocolates. For the show, the waitresses—club kids in drag—pull black velvet curtains over the windows and the three sets of French doors that lead to a cafe deck facing the beach. So when the house lights are all down low and blue and the table lights are giving off a salmon glow, the place looks ripe for mystery and romance.

  To top off the whole scene, there is a wide, semi-circular staircase sweeping down from the dressing room on the second floor. A landing branches off to the little stage and runway. This is how all the girls make their entrances, down these stairs. Queens of the night. Suspects. Anyone who works here might have lit the fire, might have killed Big Al Costelano.

  Working the long marble bar is the manager Richie, who’s in a backwards Red Sox ball cap and “Ring Pirate” muscle shirt. His partner Duke is a Mr. Clean type who is into no shirts, leather vests, Fu Manchu facial hair, and nipple rings.

  The big digital clock over the bar reads 7:43. Upstairs in the dressing room the queens are going over their cues with the light and sound kids. Downstairs the crowd is already clustered at their tables. The dragon waitresses are flirting with the clientele and pushing tray-loads of drinks to the upbeat tempo of “Material Girl” while Madonna’s music video flickers on a screen at the back of the stage. It’s an eighties, retro kind of summer.

  He can handle this. After three rum and cokes on an empty stomach, he is starting to think screw the D. A., screw the judge, screw the case. He is ready for his first drag show.

  Tuki was wrong about his response to Silver. He watches her come and go with her Broadway show tunes routine without so much as a single stirring below the belt or a pitter-pat of the heart. He is just wondering how this queen hides her stuff in that silver, skin-tight jumpsuit. How did Tuki hide it in that spandex dress? He is thinking that maybe they use duct tape or something to pull their hardware back between their legs when suddenly Silver starts into a lip-synch of “Memory” from Cats. He almost gets up and walks out. He hates this karaoke-like stuff.

  But then Nikki makes her entrance as Janis Joplin, Southern Comfort bottle and all, which he can see she is slugging on for real. She rips the club open with “Me and Bobby McGee” and then goes buck wild in her closer, the long version of “Piece of My Heart.”

  Maybe this is karaoke, he thinks, but Jesus … are you sure she’s really a guy?

  The house lights go dim for thirty seconds while a waitress rakes the money off the stage. Then a blue spotlight picks up a figure in a red, filmy evening dress standing at the top of the steps. A diamond choker glitters at her throat. Slowly, her head starts to rise. She looks just like Whitney Houston. Her hands fall from prayer, her fingers begin a slow rhythmic snap, her hips pick up the beat, the mike rises to her lips, and she is singing “Exhale.” Not lip-synching, really singing. “Everyone falls … in love sometime …”

  “Holy shit!” thinks her attorney.

  The background guitars and strings cut in. Her voice is a woman lost in a memory of love on a hot slow night in the delta. The Mississippi … the Mekong … or the Chao Prya, Bangkok.

  Down the stairs she comes, three steps on the beat. She pauses. Her body does a slow burn to the pain of the lyrics. Then she takes three more steps in a kind of lazy shimmy, her voice gaining strength with each step like an approaching freight train. The audience is whistling and cheering, so loud that the sound and light kids have to amp up the volume on the speakers.

  She strolls the runway with classic voguing—chin high, three strides, turn, smile, pose. Again. When she hits the chorus, she starts with the “Shoop, shoop, shoop, shoo be doop, shoop, shoop” then holds the mike out low at arm’s length, a signal for the audience to pick up the refrain. As they do, she scans the crowd. People wave creased bills Whitney’s way. Mostly singles, but fives, tens, twenties, too. She folds them into her free hand before she slips the green into her cleavage.

  When the music stops and the applause rings, she sees Michael sitting alone at a table on the right side of the runway. She makes eye contact and gives him a little smile.

  Richie shoots her two thumbs up from the bar, and a waitress comes up onto the stage with a huge champagne goblet that has a big red strawberry at the bottom of the glass. This is part of the act. It is Perrier, and it gives Tuki a chance to catch her breath and unload her tips into the basket on the waitress’s tray. She takes a slow sip, holds the glass out in front of her, eyes it. Then she begins—a cappella—Whitney’s torch of torches from the final scene of The Bodyguard.

  “Bittersweet memories,

  That is all I’m taking with me,
>
  So goodbye, please, don’t cry,

  We both know I’m not what you need,

  And I … will always love you …”

  The sound system weeps with violins. Now she is dragging her sorry self back home across the room toward the staircase. Singing.

  Sitting there tasting the last of his rum, he sees that she is unpacking her heart, her soul, for the crowd, for him if he will just pay attention. Closing her eyes, she sings so that she will not cry as she remembers.

  A girl in a secondhand red dress boards a water taxi at a big house on the klong in Thonburi, near the sheds where they keep the royal barges. She can still smell a man’s lemon bath and fresh sweat on her hands and in her hair. The shadow of a man is standing there, watching her, in his white linen suit. Motionless. Overcome. The taxi breaks free of the dock in the current, and a raft of water hyacinths fills the void of brown water. She heads out on the swollen river downstream, toward the Patpong. She watches until she can no longer even see the bowed roof of the house she leaves behind.

  And she sings again, “I will always love you …”

  She does not even notice the money being shoved into her left hand.

  At last, she slips out of her red pumps and starts up the stairs. They are the stairs at the Oriental Hotel dock near the Patpong, and they are the stairs from the stage back to her dressing room. She feels as heavy as the river. The music and the sound of her own voice cut her like a snare of piano wire. Her skin freezes in the blue beam of the spotlight. At the top of the stairs, she stops and holds the last note of the song until she is completely out of breath.

  Twice she pauses and looks back around the room. Through her blurry eyes she thinks she sees a smooth Asian face with his eyes riveting on her. She is wrong. It is only a lawyer, a man who would rather go fishing than find out who really killed her lover. But he is also a man who seems unexpectedly struck with waves of emotion.

  ELEVEN