Diary Of A Blues Goddess. Erica Orloff

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      “You know…you were the one girl I’ve wondered about…. Have you stayed in New Orleans this whole time?”

      “Can’t get beignets anywhere else.”

      “I never left either. Even went to law school here. New Orleans is my town. Must be destiny that we ran into each other finally.”

      Yeah. Destiny. Or another cosmic mind-fuck.

      “And then what?” Maggie asked.

      Dominique held up her hand. “Wait…was the kiss on the lips or the cheek? There are more important things to discuss first.”

      “Cheek,” I said firmly. “Ladies, he was there with a date. A gorgeous date, I might add. She looked like a Swedish supermodel. And she was perched on these four-inch stilettos and walked around in them like she was in sneakers. Effortlessly.”

      “Don’t you hate women like that?” Maggie asked as she stuck my head under the faucet and started washing my hair.

      “Hold on, girls.” Dominique sashayed over to the counter and hopped up on it, sitting there, legs crossed and fluffing her hair. “I walk effortlessly in stilettos—you can’t judge a woman for that.”

      “Yes, we can,” Maggie said.

      I have never seen Maggie in a pair of heels. She always wears black boots, even in the dead of summer. If she dresses up, it is only to wear her black boots with a black skirt, topped with a black jacket. She saves all her color for her hair.

      Maggie lathered me up with her secret shampoo. I talked loudly over the water, my voice kind of echoing in the sink. “So his date was hovering in the background, a few feet away, trying to look disinterested but giving me the evil eye. And he asked if he could take me to dinner on Friday. For old time’s sake. To catch up.”

      “Once a male whore, always a male whore,” Dominique called out over the sound of the faucet.

      “I don’t know. I didn’t get the feeling she was his girlfriend. But I barely know him. I don’t even know if we could figure out enough things to talk about over dinner.”

      “Oh please,” Dominique clucked. “I thought he would bend you right over a desk and take you from behind the way you two talked in homeroom. I remember wishing someone would talk to me that way.” She sighed. “If things go right, you won’t be doing very much talking at all.”

      Maggie finished rinsing and piled my hair into a towel, which she did up into a turban.

      “Shut up, Dominique! I don’t usually have sex on the first date.”

      “You don’t usually date, period,” she countered. “You’re always busy with the band. You should take up sleeping with one of them—not Gary. One of the other ones. Not Jack—Maggie has dibs. That leaves Mike or Tony. And Tony has a British accent, so I vote for him.”

      “Irish.”

      “Irish what?”

      “It’s an Irish accent.”

      “Fine. I mean, if you’re going to spend every weekend with those guys, you might as well.”

      Maggie sat me down in a chair and started trying to pull a comb through my hair, which is akin to pulling a comb through Brillo. My hair falls to the middle of my back, though with the curl in it, when it’s dry, it’s usually just past my shoulders.

      “Ouch! What are you doing?” My eyes teared up from the tugging.

      “Sorry,” she muttered. “Listen, you have to go out with him. Come on. I’d go out with Jack in a heartbeat.”

      “And I’d go out with George Clooney if he asked,” Dominique said. “Well, if he begged.”

      Dominique takes her Clooney obsession very seriously. And she firmly believes if he just for a moment put aside his rampant heterosexuality, he would, indeed, go for a six-foot-two-inch drag queen with platinum hair and a collection of vintage transvestite go-go boots.

      “Look, dating is hard enough without being with a guy so good-looking that all the women in the room want to sleep with him.”

      “Is that what this is all about? Personally, I want to date a man everyone wants to fuck because I’m so deliciously fuckable myself,” Dominique said, pushing her fake tits together and admiring them. “You know, Georgia Ray Miller, you have had some ridiculous theories before. And this from the woman who takes advice from a ghost.”

      “Fine. Don’t come screaming into my room in the middle of the night when you hear her footsteps in the hallway and her slamming doors.”

      “Uh-huh, girlfriend.” She hopped from the counter and wiggled her hips. “Let’s put aside the ghost for a minute, and consider Casanova Jones. First of all, I don’t know what it’s going to take for you to realize how beautiful you are. I have to work for my beauty! You think all this waxing and dyeing and primping and plucking is easy? Hmm? Georgia Ray, I remember Casanova, and he was one of the fuckable gods of high school. But you—” she came over and stood directly in front of me “—you are an equally fuckable goddess. A beautiful, sexy, voluptuous goddess. I have breast envy. I mean, yours are perfect.” She reached out and squeezed one of my breasts. I didn’t even blink. She’s had breast envy since I got my first padded bra in seventh grade, and feeling me like an overripe cantaloupe was just typically Dominique.

      “Well, you’ve slept with your quota of men since high school, so I’d say it’s time to consummate things with this Casanova guy,” Maggie said. “Most of us would do anything to be with that one guy we crave.”

      Maggie is fearless enough to wear lopsided hair and not care about it. She gets her tattoos without getting drunk first, and she doesn’t even flinch. She will speak her mind to anyone—from a drunken Mardi Gras reveler, to a snobbish customer, to her very formidable father. She was the first person I knew to pierce her belly button. And the only person I knew who pierced her nose—and her tongue. She eventually took out the stud in her tongue, but a tiny diamond in her nose remains. Maggie never cares what anyone thinks about her. Not when her hair is pink, not when her tattoos are displayed in all their glory when she’s wearing a tank top.

      Dominique is also fearless—though not about spiders or scary movies or any one of a dozen things she’s ordinarily terrified by. Still, she was a he—Damon—in high school. After we graduated, Damon told his father, a retired captain in the army, that he was gay. When his dad promptly threw him out of the house, he came to live with Nan and me, heartbroken, with a black eye, but grateful our door was open. Three years later, he was Dominique, and the beautiful voice he had raised to the rafters in his gospel choir was now used to belt out show tunes and disco hits onstage. His father has refused to see him all these years, yet Dominique will not change who she is, not even for her family. She volunteers at an AIDS crisis center, and instead of beads, she hurls silver-foiled packages of condoms at Mardi Gras. She’s vocal and in-your-face sometimes. And she tells everyone she’s not gay—but queer. And proud of it.

      Maggie finished combing my hair, and the three of us went out on the side porch so we could sweep up my hair cuttings when we were done.

      I continued, “But you should have seen this girl he was with. She had cheekbones СКАЧАТЬ