In a dress with a black tulip’s
sheen
la fabulosa Lola enters, late,
mounts the stairs
to the plywood platform, and begs whoever
runs
the wobbling spot to turn the lights down
to something flattering. When
they halo her
with a petal-toned gel, she sets
to haranguing,
shifting in and out of two languages like gowns
or genders to please have a little respect
for the girls, flashing the one
entrancing
and unavoidable gap in the center of
her upper teeth.
And when the cellophane drop goes black,
a new spot coronas her in a wig
fit for the end of a
century,
and she tosses back her hair—risky
gesture—
and raises her arms like a widow in a blood
tragedy,
all will and black lace, and lipsyncs
"You and Me
against the World." She’s
a man
you wouldn’t look twice at in street
clothes,
two hundred pounds of hard living, the gap in her
smile
sadly narrative—but she’s a
monument,
in the mysterious permission of
the dress.
This is Esta Noche, a Latin drag bar
in the Mission,
its black door a gap in the face
of a battered wall. All over the neighborhood
storefront windows show all
night
shrined hats and gloves, wedding
dresses,
First Communion’s frothing lace:
gowns of perfection and commencement,
fixed promises glowing. In the
dress
the color of the spaces between
streetlamps
Lola stands unassailable, the dress
in which she is in the largest sense
fabulous: a lesson, a criticism
and colossus
of gender, all fire and irony. Her
spine’s
perfectly erect, only her fluid hands moving
and her head turned slightly to one side.
She hosts the pageant,
Wednesdays and Saturdays,
and men come in from
the streets, the trains,
and the repair shops, lean together to
rank
the artifice of the awkward or lovely
Lola welcomes onto the stage:
Victoria, Elena,
Francie, lamé pumps and
stockings and always
the rippling night pulled down over broad
shoulders
and flounced around the hips, liquid,
the black silk of esta noche
proving that perfection and beauty are so alien
they almost never
touch. Tonight, she says,
put it on. The
costume is license
and calling. She says you could
wear the whole damn
black sky and all its
spangles. It’s the only night
we have to stand on. Put it
on,
it’s the only thing we have to wear.
