Death Wore a Smart Little Outfit

by Orland Outland

  “Eleanor!” Doan shouted, jumping out of the car. KC and the police officer were right behind him.

  Eleanor knew it didn’t matter which train you got on when you were going downtown from here; they all went straight down Market Street and dead-ended at the Embarcadero station. The train was just pulling into the station when she saw Charles.

  She hid on the other side of the escalator and hoped she could get on the train before he saw her. In vain. She felt a breeze, even though the train had come to a stop. The way forest dwellers can tell on the wind what animal approaches, so the city dweller can tell from that underground breeze that another train is coming into the station from the opposite direction.

  She dashed into the downtown-bound train, waiting to hear the bell ring that would announce the doors were closing. Charles made it through the doors into the next car up. She looked at the sign that was now flashing to announce the destination of the train coming from downtown. Two car train, one J car, one N car. She had a brainstorm just as the bell started ringing. She was out the doors of the car just as they closed.

  Charles forced his bulk between the doors of his car, causing them to reopen, and went after her. She ran for her life, probably faster than she’d ever run before, and prayed to God that she wouldn’t trip.

  She made it into the N car. Charles made it into the J car. The doors shut. And she laughed.

  Charles cursed, first silently, then loudly. Why the hell was this train moving so slow? He guessed it couldn’t be doing more than ten miles an hour. Relax, he told himself. Just think of her in the next car, as scared as a mouse is when you hold it in your hand. She knows what’s coming.

  The train lurched as it changed tracks and began to come up out of the ground. It stopped when it reached the street. There was a shudder and a rumble. Charles looked out the window. The car ahead had detached, and his was turning down Church Street! Eleanor had taken a window seat so as to smile and wave prettily at Charles as the subway car, now streetcar, rolled away. “I hate you!” he shouted. “I hate you! And I’ll get you yet!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Eleanor’s rescue effected, Doan lost interest in the case almost immediately. “After all,” he reasoned to Eleanor, “Charles still has some money squirreled away, so he’s probably left the country, anyway. Besides, it really wouldn’t do us any good to catch him, since he’d just hire good lawyers and get off.”

  They were sitting in her living room, having tea served by a more than usually solicitous Frannie.

  “Doan!” Eleanor chided him, clinking her fine china cup into its saucer. “That’s awfully cynical.”

  He eyed her levelly. “I have three words for you, dearie: Claus Von Bulow.”

  “Mmm. Well, at least Flaharity and Alholm are behind bars now.” She paused to take a very unladylike swallow. “Listen, I’ve had this fabulous idea. I want to throw a party next Saturday night; not too many people…”

  “Saturday? Darling, if you’re going to have a party next Saturday, it’s going to have to be huge, or nobody will come at all.”

  “Why ever not?”

  Why ever not, indeed! any gay San Franciscan would sniff. A little background: the gay season in San Francisco is not mandated like that of other resort villages around the heterosexual calendar, which opens the festivities on Memorial Day and closes them on Labor Day. San Francisco’s season opens on the last Sunday in June, with the Gay Pride Parade, and ends four months later, after the Folsom, Castro, and Dore Alley street fairs, on the coming Saturday night on which Eleanor had planned her party: October 31, aka Halloween, the highest of homo holy days, the gay Saturnalia, four blocks of Babylon, two hundred fifty thousand homosexuals, all in costume and most in drag.

  Each year the event, which closes off most of the Castro District’s streets, is besieged with a multitude of heterosexual gawkers who come in from the far provinces across the bay to see the queers at play, and occasionally beat them up, too. And each year, many grumble that the whole thing should just be moved to Folsom Street one year, and not tell them, so that they all come to the Castro only to see each other, resplendently authentic in their yahoo costumes. But it never happens; after all, homosexuals are tolerated so well in San Francisco because they are one of the tourist attractions. The heterosexual citizens could no more risk alienating them than they would dare to blow up Alcatraz. So we, in turn, continue to do our bit for the tourist industry, holding hands in public, dressing up on Halloween, and all the other shocking appurtenances of gay life, and the festival proceeds apace.

  Those who truly cannot stand the frenzy of the actual Halloween night plunk down their hard-earned money for a ticket to the Muscle Sisters Ball, an affair generally held in the Castro the weekend before H Day. The rest of us put up with the madness in the hope that our one-night illusion, above all others, will be the one remembered for years to come.

  For Doan, this meant one night a year on which it could be said, without his being able to deny it, that he did drag. Of course, being Doan, he didn’t just do drag. He’d done that his first year in the city, when he’d gone out in full regal splendor as Marie Antoinette, only to discover, to his horror, six other doomed queens in the same outfit, all of whom completed his mortification by shouting, “Off with his head!” at their first sight of him. Doan had made his first – and last – bumpkin’s mistake, which can generally be summarized as doing the first clever thing that comes to mind without stopping to wonder if anyone else has been equally clever in the past. (This particular year, the bumpkin’s mistake would be to think you and your best friend were the only homosexuals in town who’d thought to dress as Patsy and Edina.)

  As his savvy and social circle increased, so did the scale of Doan’s Halloween enterprises. The previous year, he’d staged a Medici Family Reunion (at eight o’clock, repeated at ten, twelve, and two) in the middle of Market Street, which ended with all participants theatrically splayed across the pavement in dramatically dead poses. His plans for this year’s effort was a closely guarded secret, even from Binky.

  “I know it’s going to be something imperial,” she sighed airily. “Last year you almost got poisoned for real because you wouldn’t let anyone else be Catherine di Medici.”

  Doan did not, for once, rise to the bait. The secret was too delicious to be extracted by mere taunts. “Of course it will be something imperial,” he sniffed, “but that certainly leaves the field wide open. I could be Catherine the Great, riding a pillow to ecstasy, or Elizabeth II - who wouldn’t pay me to see the contents of my purse? Or Lady Jane Grey, Queen for a Day…”

  “Never mind,” she sighed. “I suppose I’ll just have to be surprised,” she spoke the last word scornfully.

  “And what about you, dear? Who will manifest through you?”

  “Well, if you’re not telling, I’m not either. Suffice it to say I tend to go for a much more minimalist look than you do.”

  “Mmm. Listen, I need to borrow your drapes.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I need to borrow your drapes. You can have them back Sunday.”

  “Oh right, I’m going to loan my gauzy linen drapes to you in perfect shape and you’re going to return them in the form of skimpy little dresses. I don’t think so.”

  “They will be returned intact. I guarantee it.”

  She loaned him the drapes. What are friends for? She offered to meet him at a neutral place the morning of the big day for champagne and pastry, so that neither of them would have to resist the urge to paw through the other’s closet looking for clues. But Doan pooh-poohed this, telling her to come to his place. This was not because he trusted her - he did not - but because his little thing required a much larger staging area than merely his apartment.

  “Well, if we can’t talk about tonight,” she said, “we might as well talk about men.”

  “The men! I forgot all about them. What are you doing with yours tonight?”

  “Luke’s back to work already
, and he’s working the Castro tonight, on the beat. They need all the help they can get. Which is fine by me, because that gives me someone to hang out with and talk to until you deign to make your majestic entrance. It is safe to assume that your new love is shaving his moustache, even as we speak, for his role in tonight’s comedy?”

  Doan’s new love, in fact, was KC. Never mind that he had much more in common with Stan, or that the artist would as lief try to change Doan as he would try to make the world turn backward (which could not be said of KC). Nature has its own imperatives, even with those who might be considered among nature’s closed circuits. If someone saves your life, why, you almost can’t help it when your affections are transferred to that (otherwise highly inappropriate) person. And needless to say, opposites usually attract because the sex is great.

  “He is not shaving, no. I will tell you that he is a participant. Really, Binky, you keep steering the conversation back to tonight!”

  “All right, all right, I’ll shut up.” She disgruntledly shoveled a mini lemon tart into her mouth and washed it down with Veuve Clicquot. “Just tell me where and when to meet you tonight.”

  Doan smiled. “You won’t be able to miss me.”

  Let it be said politely, first: Unless one is extremely gregarious, being crammed into a four block area, even if that area consists of generously spaced boulevards, with two hundred and fifty thousand strangers, is not a picnic. “Trick or treat!” a man in a raincoat and a John Bobbitt mask shouted at Binky, opening said coat to reveal a sign hung over his privates that said, “Please give generously.” While under other circumstances, she might have been forced to smile tightly and politely, her character tonight enabled her to focus all her laser like disgust at the man, who promptly shriveled up and died.

  That done, she shifted her basket from one forearm to the other and made her way through the crowd. She’d made a late start, knowing that Doan would wait until at least midnight to show up to ensure maximum bang for his buck, and having been warned beforehand by Luke that he would more likely have his hands full with puking louts than he’d have free time to schmooze with her.

  The streets held the usual collection of generic drag queens, most of them men who would shave their facial hair and don a dress this day and no other, including some sad souls in full boobs and tits extravaganza who wouldn’t even part with their beards for the night; more than one of that beloved infidel of all oppressed peoples, Bart Simpson; and the legendary guy with the head, a man who wore his self-sculpted gigantic papier maché head of Madonna at all the gay season’s grander street events.

  It took her longer than usual to find Luke. While her six-four beau would have been literally head and shoulders above most crowds, the sheer height and scale of the artificial hairdos on display tonight conspired to conceal him from her view. When she did find him, he was trapped between a contingent of Radical Faeries on one side and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence on the other. What had begun as a good-natured and completely unserious argument between the pagans and the nuns had somehow devolved into a shouting and shoving match, provoked by an inopportune faerie high heel pinning down the hem of a sister’s habit. Binky waited a safe distance away as Luke played music to soothe the savage beasts (it didn’t hurt the cause of peace that the peacemaker was so easy on the eyes, either).

  “Your Nobel Prize is in the mail,” she said.

  Luke turned around to see her and lit up. “Hey!” Then a puzzled look crossed his face. “Who are you supposed to be?”

  It was not a costume that your average straight man could figure out. Binky had cut her hair into a short do, had it dyed blond with intentionally distinct dark roots. Her clothes were expensive but nondescript: a pair of slacks and a white sweater. On her arm was a basket loaded with potpourri, little cookies artfully tied up in muslin bags, a few gardening implements, and a handful of charge cards.

  “It’s a secret,” she said. “If you really want to know who I’m supposed to be, help me find Doan. He’ll know right away; he’ll tell you.”

  “All right. But I have to let the other guys know I’m temporarily deserting my post.”

  Binky waited impatiently for Luke’s return, jostled constantly as she was by the press of the crowd. Then, just for a moment, she saw a face she recognized – a face so thoroughly plastered over the front pages of the local newspapers that even one as ignorant as she of current events could not have missed it: the face of Charles Ambermere. She blinked, and he was gone.

  Was it really him? she wondered. She wouldn’t put it past some queen to dress up as the city’s latest celebrity murderer, but then again, she had never actually seen Ambermere herself, face to face. She thought it would be a good time for Luke to return - just in case.

  But her efforts to locate him in the crowd were ended by a blast of four trumpets blown by scantily clad youths mimicking imperial pages. All movement came to a standstill as the crowd turned to see what was coming off of Sanchez and onto Market. Preadolescent drummers followed the trumpeters, then hunky legionnaires carrying the eagles of their legions. Then came the princesses - among the few authentic females on the whole street - scattering rose petals.

  And then, around the corner, came the coup de grace: a splendid palanquin hoisted and carried by six shirtless beefcakes, most of whom were famous local porn stars and one of whom, Binky noted, was KC.

  And of course, who should be the one carried on said palanquin, Binky’s own gauze curtains pulled back to reveal him: Doan, his hair done in curly Roman ringlets, his eyes thick with dark makeup, his plain white toga neatly accessorized with a sash of the imperial purple, a laurel wreath on his head.

  “I am your empress,” Doan shouted in a tone of voice that brooked no dissent. “Bow down before me!” Many actually did; others simply fell down trying to get out of the imperially rude majesty’s way.

  “Doan!” Binky shouted, pushing her way through the cheering crowd, all of whom loved a spectacle. “Doan!”

  “She may approach us!” Doan commanded the legionaries, who promptly shoveled multiple innocent bystanders out of the way to allow Binky through.

  “Do you love it?” he whispered conspiratorially. “Have I outdone myself?”

  “Doan, I just saw Charles Ambermere.”

  “Of course you did. I just saw Charles Manson! Who are you supposed to be, anyway?”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean the real Ambermere! Or at least I think it was. ...”

  “Don’t be silly. What would he be doing here?”

  “Coming to get revenge on you, I imagine.”

  Doan opened a fan with a snap - the fan was admittedly an anachronistic touch, but an effectively royal one, nonetheless - and snorted. “There are too many homosexuals here for Charles Ambermere to stand it. Besides, this is way too public a place for revenge.” Noting that Binky was not appeased, he tried another tack. “Look. I’m doing a repeat performance of this entrance at Eleanor’s party; I’ve got a chartered bus waiting to take me and all my supporting cast to her house. We won’t loiter here long, all right? Just long enough for everybody to take pictures. Okay?” he said hurriedly, seeing the photographer from the San Francisco Times approaching.

  Doan made a motion, and his palanquin was lifted above the heads of the throng. “My people!” he shouted, showering the populace with gold coins (actually a combination of gold foil wrapped chocolates and Gold Coin condoms). Binky, accepting that stardom trumped safety every time, sighed and made her way to Doan’s caravan of buses.

  Eleanor’s house blazed with light; every room was packed with people. Art Mill mingled with the skill gained from God knew how many decades of mingling; Anthony Chamberlain held Eleanor captive with explications on modern art; former inmate (and now artist du jour) Stan Parks was there with several aged men competing to be his benefactor. He and Doan had parted amicably, both recognizing a fling for what it was; moreover, Stan was a believer neither in holding a grudge nor in letting the grass grow un
der his feet. This was his moment in the media sun, and he was damned if he would let it pass by.

  Luke escorted Captain Fisher, having been pulled off Castro duty to do this honor. Binky left Cecelia B. DeMille and her cast of thousands around the corner and quickly took refuge from the autumn chill in Eleanor’s house. She spied Luke by a huge floral arrangement, grinning wickedly.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “I just thought I’d stand here and see if I waited long enough, if you’d get your head stuck in here, and I could do the honors of pulling you out.”

  “Ha ha. Where’s your costume?”

  “I’m dressed as a policeman. Every gay man’s fantasy, right? What better outfit for Halloween in San Francisco? You could introduce me around as your pet cop.”

  “I don’t think I know many of these people. They’re all friends of Eleanor and Doan.”

  “Well, then, introduce yourself. You call yourself a socialite?”

  “I never called myself a socialite,” Binky replied frostily. “Are you going to be gallant and get me a drink, or just stand here making fun of me?”

  “Your wish is my command.”

  “My command is champagne.”

  Luke bowed low and deep and went in search of Binky’s refreshment. Meanwhile, Binky decided to explore one of San Francisco’s most eminent piles. Not being a big fan of large crowds, and having not only pushed her way through the throngs in the Castro, and also having been sat on in Doan’s overcrowded bus by several giggling page boys, Binky was not thrilled about once more pushing her way through still throngier throngs in Eleanor’s house. Her original intent of exploration was soon subsumed by her desire for a room of her own, if only for a few recuperative moments.

  She soon found that her only option for such rest was to find a bathroom, but there were lines for those. Salvation came in the form of Eleanor, who recognized her as Doan’s friend and pulled her out of line.