When they are covered in dirt and finished with their otter play, they walk home to the Patpong. Tuki takes Ingrid to the club where she lives to dry off and get fresh clothes. Brandy and Delta are not home. Tuki gets a towel for Ingrid and herself, some clean underwear, a couple of extra school dresses. They are both laughing about being dirt balls and singing, “One, Two, Three” by the Jackson Five as they peel out of their soccer shorts, T-shirts, and panties.
Then they are standing there naked in front of each other. And Tuki is the only one still laughing.
Ingrid is staring at her body like she has just seen someone vaporize.
EIGHT
When she turns around, Nikki is still there. Her hands pull the towel more firmly over Tuki’s shoulders, across her chest. Then she gives her friend a kiss on the cheek and smiles.
Nikki is four inches shorter, so Tuki dips her knees to return her kiss. Backstage, it is a rule: someone kisses you, you kiss them back. She can taste the salt and sunscreen on Nikki’s skin. She has been swimming. The little sister is such the athlete.
Among the three queens in the show, Nikki is the least girlie. Right now—because she is wearing baggy shorts, cross-trainers, and a blue sleeveless tank—she looks like a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy out of the L. L. Bean catalogue, especially with that two-inch-long pageboy cut that she parts on the left. A little choirboy. No chest at all. And she is young, maybe twenty-four. When Tuki first saw her, she thought Nikki was one of the light and sound kids.
But the crowds gather to see Nikki made up in a tangle of dishwater blonde hair and a skimpy cocktail dress … bringing Janis Joplin back from the dead. So much energy and pain fuse in that tight little body. It looks ready to explode onstage when “Janis” screams out when the soundtrack wails, “TAKE IT! Take another little piece of my heart now, baby!”
People can’t believe her eyes. She has these naturally thin, long brows that arch high and sharp over the outside corners of her enormous hazel eyes. A thousand grains of broken glass sparkle in them. And she always has this sort of cockeyed look that says, “Mischief.”
This is exactly what Tuki is seeing right now as Nikki pats the towel along the sides of her head again, and says, “I miss you, girlfriend!”
For months, Ingrid traveled back and forth to school with the other kids. And every time that Tuki tried to talk to her, she got quiet and made up an excuse to go away. Tuki thought that if she told her what she knew about old souls she would maybe understand a little.
But Ingrid never gave Tuki the chance. Sometimes at tai chi she would trip Ingrid and make it look like an accident, but Ingrid still would not look at her face. Tuki stopped trying.
One day when Tuki is at home singing along to Delta’s new Diana Ross tape, there is a knock at the door. When she opens it, she sees Ingrid, who shoves a bunch of yellow flowers into her friend’s hands.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Then both of them cry like little crocodiles.
Later, they hike down to the water taxi dock by the Oriental Hotel and talk.
Ingrid asks Tuki if Brandy and Delta make her dress up like a girl. When Tuki tells her, “No, I AM a girl,” Ingrid sighs. “Then you were just born different, la?”
“Yes.”
She wants to tell Ingrid all about old souls, but she is crying again. She knows that Ingrid is feeling sorry for her, confused.
“Yuu thi nai chaang,” she snorts, puffs out her belly, gives a goofy smile, and waves her arms in front of her face like a trunk. “Have you seen my elephant?”
Suddenly, Ingrid stops crying and busts a laugh.
“You are crazy as a malaeng saap. Cockroach.” Those words feel like a hug.
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 hun
dred 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 with 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.
Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues Page 4
