Las Biuty Queens Read online

  But how can Jennifer be resting in peace? It’s been twenty years and they still haven’t found the person responsible for her death. It’s a cold case. I didn’t know her, but things stay with you for a reason. Some things are destined to encircle you in a spiral of energy that transcends time and space.

  A few months ago, I was sitting in my friend La Manuel’s living room. After we smoked some weed, as always, she told me she had something to tell me. We’d spent the afternoon talking about the difference between the transsexuals of the past and transsexuals today. Surgery was so expensive back then that locas expressed themselves more through their personalities. Today it’s so much easier to get surgery. In New York they’ll even pay for your breast implants and facial feminization. Years ago, you had to take client after client for years to save enough money for your surgeries. Transsexuals today are pretty and that’s it. Transsexuals back then weren’t just beautiful, but they had strong personalities, too. They knew how to mark their territory. We got to thinking about all the locas we once knew who were no longer with us. All of a sudden, La Manuel stood up and went to look for something in her room. She came back with a big white envelope. She took out a photo the size of the envelope. It was of a trans girl posing nude, covering her breasts with her hands and gazing into the camera as though looking you straight in the eye.

  “You won’t believe it,” said La Manuel, “but she was my girlfriend for a few months. She was murdered in a hotel back in ’97. Her name was Jennifer.”

  Without saying a word, I took the photo into my hands and thought of all my dead friends. Of Amanda, the African American trans woman with a face so many would have killed for, who was stabbed to death in the middle of Port Authority. Her murderer got out in less than seven years. I thought of the blond Colombian loca who looked like a Barbie who was murdered in Australia. She traveled the globe making her money.

  With the photo of Jennifer still in my hands, I remembered the street full of red carnations that night. Flowers that here, in English, are called carnations. Just like carne, f lesh.

  Silently, I went down to the corner store. I bought a white candle and a bouquet of carnations. I set them down beside the photograph. We said a prayer for Jennifer and asked that she rest in peace.

  Adriana la Chimba, or The Gorgeous Adriana de Pereira

  I HAVEN’T MADE MUCH money tonight. It’s time to pay rent and my wallet is beyond hungry.

  “That’s what you get for spending all night chatting with the locas instead of working,” Melanie reproaches me.

  “I’m just enjoying myself.”

  “Oh, so the locas are gonna pay your rent?”

  “Quit nagging me. Come out with me to look for tricks.”

  We leave the bar and start walking along 34th Street toward 8th Avenue. On our way, we find a mattress in the middle of the sidewalk. On 9th Avenue, to be exact, right across from where María—who’s better known as the godmother of all the maricas in Hell’s Kitchen—works.

  “Come on,” says Melanie. “Climb on.”

  “No way, are you insane? What do you want me to get on this filthy mattress for?”

  “Don’t say that. In Colombia, when a whore finds an abandoned mattress while she’s working, she has to get onto it and jump around. It brings you money.”

  You can’t make this stuff up.

  “Well, help me, then. I can’t get up with these heels on.”

  Melanie reaches out and gives me her hand, just like she has so many times before, just as she always does.

  “Okay, hold on tight.”

  “Loca, be careful or I’ll fall.”

  “It’s your heels, loquita, your heels. I’m telling you, hold on tight! Now let’s jump.”

  “Seriously? You’re out of your mind, you know that?”

  “I told you it won’t work if we don’t do it.”

  We hold on tight to each other and start to hop around.

  “That’s good, just a few more little jumps,” she says, laughing uncontrollably.

  “I’m so dizzy, loca. No más, please.”

  Back on the pavement, we balance atop our clear heels and decide to continue along our route.

  “Ay, loqui. I hope that mattress didn’t have bedbugs.”

  “Don’t be a downer. You have to think positive or it won’t work.”

  “I’m serious!” I retort like a kid talking back to his teacher.

  “We’re almost there. Let’s go to my room and do a bump and then we can go back out and make ourselves a fortune.”

  “Ay, sí. Now you’re talking. And all the men will be leaving for work soon. Maybe I’ll find myself a nice construction worker.”

  “But make sure you charge him this time. You always forget to charge when you go to work horny.”

  “Ay, loca, please. That was just one time,” I say, defending myself.

  “Once? A few times, you mean.”

  We climb up the stairs in our building on 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, laughing the whole way. We live on the third f loor. She in one room and I in another. The building has separate units and every f loor shares a bathroom. Each of us pays a thousand dollars a month. A lot of money. But, then again, we’re nocturnal butterf lies at the end of the twentieth century, and in the heart of Times Square, no less. I don’t go into my room. Instead, we go straight to Melanie’s.

  “Mmm, that’s more like it. I’m glad I left the AC on,” she says as we walk in.

  “Thank god, honey, ’cause this humidity is a bitch.”

  “What do you expect? It’s summer. The winters here are so long, we have to take advantage.”

  We collapse onto the sofa. Melanie takes off her heels. I don’t, because I still haven’t made any money and I should go back out to make some cash.

  “What’re you looking at?” she says playfully. “Ah, let me guess. Something tells me you want to do a bump?”

  “But of course,” I tell her decisively and with a glimmer in my eye. “Don’t you see I need the energy to go back out and hustle? I have to make enough for rent.”

  She holds out a key with coke on its point. She takes it out of a little bag she keeps inside her wig. Out from between her scalp and her blond wig, to be precise. Melanie is almost always platinum blond, but today she’s more like honey blond. Blond but not too much. According to our Argentinian friend and neighbor, Francesca, who’s so obsessed with Susana Giménez she seems like her clone, Melanie’s been blond as long as she’s known her.

  “Hey, give me a little more. That was only enough for one nostril. You want me to be lopsided?”

  “You’re shameless,” she laughs, taking another bump out of the bag with the point of her key and raising it to my nose so I can snort it.

  “How lovely!” I exclaim, leaning back on the sofa.

  “Careful, honey, you’ll never go back out if you get too comfortable.”

  “Give me fifteen and then back to work, I swear.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she says, taking two ice-cold beers out of the fridge.

  The one she hands me almost freezes the palm of my hand. Before we toast, Melanie pours some beer onto the f loor and says, “We have to give a little to the spirits so they bring us money.”

  Obedient, I do the same. Ever since I dedicated myself to the life of a nocturnal urban geisha, I’ve become superstitious. If you’re supposed to turn your back to the police station every time you walk past so you don’t get locked up, I do it. If you have to spin around three times while whistling every time a black cat crosses your path, I do it. If the famous Puerto Rican astrologist Walter Mercado says putting four red roses at your door will bring you good luck, I do it. Once, while I was walking to the neighborhood f lower shop after hearing in his horoscope what would bring us good weekend vibes, Melanie warned me we’d end up broke if we kept buying everything Walter Mercado told us to. We must have been spending something like two hundred bucks a month on incense, colorful ribbons, candles, and f l
owers, all under the expectation that it would bring us good luck. And, well, I guess it’s all about faith, right?

  “Cheers, babe.”

  “Cheers.”

  We sit in silence. Each one of us in our own little world. Bumps of coke can give you that side effect, I might say. That high, others would say. Such a high, in fact, that I don’t even notice when Melanie stands up and, turning her back to me, looks out the window at the street and says, “Who could have imagined that this loquita would end up here. From Pereira, Colombia, all the way to New York, United States.”

  Sometime before this night, something in me had learned how to be silent. My instincts know when to let someone else speak.

  “My teachers were happy for me when they found out I was coming to the US. They told me I was really smart. That I could even become a doctor if I wanted to.”

  She pauses and turns around. She looks at me and says, “I guess you could say I do have a certain familiarity with the human body.”

  “Done!” I say, and we laugh. “It sounds like you had a reputation at your school for being a good student.”

  “Obviously I was a good student. I loved math.”

  “I, on the other hand, was awful with numbers. I did okay anyway, but because I studied hard, not because I liked it or because it was easy for me.”

  “Hand me another beer, would you, Monalisa?”

  I stand up right away and take two beers out of the little fridge across from me.

  “Here you go, muñeca.”

  “Thanks. And here.”

  She turns around with the beer in her hand and passes me a whole bag of coke. “This is for you. So you don’t have to keep asking me for bumps. Now it’s your turn to share with me.”

  I snatch it from her hands like a desperate addict. I throw myself onto the bed and offer her a bump on the point of my key. As Melanie and I always do. Then I take one myself. I stand up from the bed and lie down on the little sofa.

  “Thanks again,” Melanie says, propping herself up on her elbow and taking a long sip of beer.

  “No problem,” I reply, as though I were the one doing her a favor. That’s one of Melanie’s virtues, part of what makes her so humble and so loveable. She goes out of her way to do favors for other people and always ends up making it seem like they’re the ones doing her a favor.

  “I graduated secondary school first in my class. That was the first and only time I ever saw my father drunk. He was so proud of his son. He threw me a huge party the day I graduated.”

  Our silence is interrupted only by the sound of our noses sniff ling.

  Melanie continues.

  “Honestly, I didn’t like it here that much at first. But that’s the way it goes, I guess. It’s a loca’s job to send money home to her family, right?”

  “You must have a bunch in savings back home,” I say, trying to bring some optimism to our conversation.

  “Savings? Yeah right. I’ve sent money home for them to save for me before, and some emergency always pops up. Your dad is sick, there’s a loan to pay off, the utilities, blah, blah. I mean, I’m not complaining or anything. I’m still Adriana la Chimba, or simply,” we say in unison between laughs, “the gorgeous Adriana de Pereira!”

  It’s not the first time I’ve been reminded of the name she used in her native Colombia. She’s said it so many times that I and every loca in the bar know it by heart.

  “Come on, Monalisa, give me another bump.”

  “Hey, I have to save something for myself,” I tell her, only half in jest.

  “Absolutely no shame.”

  I stand up. I go toward her. We each take another bump. I lie back down on the couch. For a moment, we’re both quiet.

  “After I turned thirteen, the money situation in my house got worse. At first I didn’t pay much attention to it. But around the time I turned fifteen, I started walking the streets. I had to start hustling.”

  “So young?”

  “That’s right. I was just a piroba, as we say in Colombia.”

  A silence followed, interrupted only by the rays of light that suddenly f looded the room. A new day had begun. New York was waking up.

  “What time is it?” I ask, emerging from my trance.

  “Six, babe.”

  I sit there, pensive.

  “Mmm, you don’t even have to say it. Too wiped to go back out.”

  “Afraid so. Too many people. And it’s too light outside, don’t you think?”

  “You’re right,” Melanie says. Looking me in the eye, she adds, “Hey, do you want me to lend you twenty bucks just to get you through the day? You can pay me back tonight when you work. But listen, you actually have to pay me back, I know you always play dumb.”

  “Ay, loquita, thank you. You really are too much.” I realize that my friend looks exhausted. “Muñeca, remember to take off your makeup before you go to bed. You’ll get wrinkles if you sleep with it on.”

  “No way, I’ll never do that. I want to look pretty in my dreams, don’t I?”

  We laugh. I stand up to go to my room. I open Melanie’s door.

  “You’re forgetting your twenty bucks,” she reminds me, holding out a bill and giving me her hand, just as she has so many times before. Just like she always does.

  Emergency Room

  IT WAS AN INTENSE TIME, one of boorishness and insolence, to say it plainly. I lived alone in an apartment right in West Harlem. 139th Street between 7th and 6th Avenues. Between Lenox Avenue and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, to be exact. My online ads were a huge success. Manhattan is Manhattan. There’s always money here.

  My living room window looked out onto my building’s entrance. I could see whoever was coming to visit me perfectly.

  Are you at the corner? Okay. Stay with me on the phone. Keep walking on your left side. Do you see an entrance on your left? Okay. Come up the stairs and make a right … And then, as soon as they turned to the right, I could see them. I never told a single one that he couldn’t come up. The fact that I could see them before they saw me gave me a certain sense of security and confidence. Keep staying on the phone and come up to the third floor.

  The door to my apartment opened directly to the stairs. I’d leave it open a crack before they made it to the third f loor. Come in and get comfortable.

  And that’s how it went for a while. My friends all told me how lucky I had gotten with the apartment.

  But, oh well. Nothing’s perfect. Let’s just say that when night comes, not even our shadows can keep us company. The johns leave. It’s two or three in the morning. You’re not sleepy. An inexplicable power keeps you charged up. And all of a sudden texts start rolling in from guys who want to come over. They’re not clients. They’re frituras—yes, for free—and, if you want to know the truth, each one of them is more handsome than the next. That’s how people like Drew appear. He’s Blatino. Half Puerto Rican, half African American. He didn’t come alone. He brought with him the thing that would almost end up being my ruin: Tina Turner. I’d already had experiences with her. Sporadically. This boy is a hustler, I thought. He would travel to Philadelphia to make his fortune. When he came back to New York, he’d forget about his work and only wanted to party. To get high on Tina—crystal meth—in the company of a transsexual, travesti or “cross-dresser.” And, of course, he wanted to play kinky. That’s where I came in.

  It wasn’t that Drew was any different from my other frituras. He just started showing up regularly. For two months, he appeared every Saturday between four and six in the morning. What we’d do when we were high is irrelevant. What really matters is that it was with him that I started getting high on crystal meth.

  Every rule has its exception, and it just so happens that he appeared once on a Thursday in the middle of the night. I was getting ready for bed when I got the text.

  What’s up. U up?

  My heart started thumping. Not because I had a thing for him. I owed my anxiety to what was quickly beginning to seem like an a
ddiction. Or maybe it was both. Honestly, the boy was straight out of a magazine. Or straight out of a porno, you could say, thanks to those ten inches that made him all that money in Philadelphia and that, in my experience, were entirely versatile.

  Wow. Son las tres de la madrugada. I am very tired.

  Come on. We’ll have fun. We always do.

  Estoy sin chavos.

  Give u some money. No worries. I can give u fifty bucks.

  What can I say?

  I gave my subconscious a big slap in the face so it would leave me alone. And then I responded.

  Come over. Ya.

  I will be there in twenty minutes.

  Hurry up …

  He showed up like he always did. With that neighborhood bad-boy, pretty-boy look, with his backpack still on, like an urban gypsy. I don’t remember how long he stayed. When you’re high, time tends to get away from you. All of a sudden, he got up and stood next to the bed. He looked at me like he wanted more. More than what? Well, more than everything. I told him to leave. I didn’t walk him to the door. He let himself out.

  My mind felt stronger than my body. I was spent. It didn’t matter how high I was, I fell asleep. I woke up and went straight to the fridge. I ate whatever I could find. I didn’t even bother heating it up. I devoured a slice of pepperoni pizza, half a can of Coke, a doughnut. I drank milk straight from the carton, thinking it might help bring me down from my high. I lay down belly-up on the sofa. I don’t know how long I stayed in that position.