Shane and Carmen: The Novelization Ch. 25

Shane and Carmen: The Novelization

Chapter 25

Better a Whore Than a Lesbian

"Oh, wow!" Alice exclaimed as she walked into Wax. She was carrying a tray of cupcakes she'd made -- cupcakes iced in the form of round, full breasts with large nipples. They were intended for the bake sale, a minor part of the festivities being set up at Waxfor Max's "top" surgery fundraiser. Jenny had appointed herself chief organizer, and Wax was swarmed by two dozen workers busy turning the place into something that looked like a demented prom night. In fact, they billed it as "Trans Prom," and colorful flyers for it were posted all over West Hollywood. There were people up on tall step ladders running crepe paper streamers around the ceiling and hanging down from the rafters. There were bunches of balloons, and the place had the appearance of the William McKinley High School gym in a Very Special Tranny Episode of Glee.

"Hey, guys!" Alice called out.

"Hellll-ooo" Jenny said, happily running up to greet Alice. She had a big ball of tulle and organza in her arms. "Oh, good, these are so fabulous," she said, looking over the nipple-top cupcakes. "Is Dana going to be okay with these?"

"Yeah. I mean, you know, she's having a hard time, but I think she's coming tonight."

"Good, good, good. Hey, Max!" Jenny called, walking over to a large piece of plywood that Max and Shane were working on. The plywood had been painted as a simple cartoon beach scene with a stylize palm tree in the middle of it. Max was up on a ladder attaching a streamer to the top of it while Shane held a big roll of sticky tape she doled out in pieces to Max when he needed them.

"Look at these," Jenny said, indicating Alice's mammary cupcakes.

"Cool, Alice," Max said.

"Is there a fridge?" Alice asked, "'cause I don't want them to melt."

"There's one right in the back," Shane said, pointing to the rear of the building.

Shane walked across the room to the booth Carmen was setting up. It featured a big sign on the backdrop that said "Get some kissin' here!" next to a large purple heart. Carmen was climbing up a stepladder with a huge pair of mauve-colored lips she had to attach to the other side of the sign. Shane put her hand up on Carmen's ass, mainly to steady her on the ladder. It startled Carmen. "Erp," she said.

"Hey," Shane said, holding Carmen's hips so she didn't fall. "Need some help?" Shane could have held one of Carmen's butt cheeks for hours on end, she loved them that much. Days. Weeks. Years, maybe.

"No, it's okay, I got it," Carmen said, but Shane reached out to hold up the giant lips. "Shane, I got it," Carmen said.

"But, baby I just—"

"Shane! I got it!" Carmen pushed the lips against the sign, and it stuck in place.

"What is your problem?" Shane asked, angry and frustrated. "You've been like this for days. What's your problem?"

Carmen got down from the stepladder. "I'm fine," she said.

"Oh, really?" Carmen knew Shane wasn't buying it.

"Okay. Fine. You want to know what it is? How would you feel, if you were making love to me, and then all of a sudden I just check out in the middle of it. Gone. Not there."

"Check out?"

"Yeah, you're there, you're lying next to me and stuff, but I try and touch you, I try and kiss you, I try and do all these things to make you feel good, and you're completely gone."

"No," Shane protested.

"Yes!" Carmen said firmly.

"I'm, I'm, I'm there," Shane protested, the noise level in her head rising, all the confused feelings and ideas bursting from wherever they lived and milling around in the plaza of her conscious mind, getting in the way of coherent thought. The worst part of it was that the complaint was true.

"Okay, when was the last time you came?" Carmen asked.

Shane had nothing. "Eh, duh, mmm." She waved her hand and shook her head no. "That has nothing to do with it."

"Really?" Carmen asked quietly, almost gently. "I think that somewhere, deep down, you realized that all of a sudden you're in this nice, little committed relationship, now, and it pisses you off, and now you're punishing me."

And before Shane knew it Carmen walked away to the other side of the room, as though the conversation had never taken place.

"Hey, Jenny?" Carmen said. "I have to tell you, this place, it looks amazing!"

Jenny was sitting in one of the waiting room chairs near Shane's hairdressing alcove. Behind her was an eight-foot-tall collage poster that said "Transform the Tranny." It featured a life-size but crude drawing of a bare-chested, manly Max, surrounded by detachable parts: a pair of pants, a vest, a white dress shirt, brassieres, a sleeveless tank top, a penis with a set of testicles, sunglasses, several caps, and so on. There was a pouch pasted over Max's crotch, and sticking out of the pouch was the head of a cardboard dick. The effect was that of a giant doll with interchangeable paper doll accessories. Cocks notwithstanding.

"I've been telling you, lady, you did a phenomenal job," Carmen said, sitting down next to Jenny as Alice came over to join them. "If my prom were this cool, I absolutely would have gone."

"Why didn't you go to your prom?" Jenny asked.

Carmen laughed. "All right. So there's this girl, see, her name was Lucia Torres" -- she made a gesture and a salacious grin indicating that she and Lucia had been lovers, which was true -- "and that night we snuck off, and, like, we went to this porn festival—"

Jenny gasped and Alice asked, "For real?"

"—so we go to this porn festival, and afterward she taught me how to sixty-nine!"

"That's, like, the coolest prom night," Alice said. "I'm so jealous!"

"Why?" Jenny asked.

"I mean, I went to mine, but it sucked," Alice frowned as Shane came over.

"Did you go to your prom?" Jenny asked Shane as she slouched down next to her and pulled her knees up.

"She didn't finish high school," Alice told Jenny quietly.

"You didn't finish high school?" Jenny asked. Shane sighed. She shook her head no.

"'S'awright," Jenny said, patting Shane's knee and rocking her leg fondly.

"The G.E.D.," Alice said. Shane nodded.

"Did you go? To prom?" Alice asked Max, who'd just come over.

"I did," Max said rather proudly. "I went with Buck Thornton."

"Buck Thornton?" Carmen and Jenny asked simultaneously, disbelieving.

"Yeah, he was captain of the football team," Max explained, holding out his arms as though that was the greatest thing in the world. Which, in some times and places and contexts, it probably was. "Yeah. And a total closet case," he added.

Then Max noticed the paper doll tranny display. "Jenny," he said, growing angry, "you can't do this." He stepped up to the collage and gestured at the dick in the pouch covering the doll crotch.

"But ... why?" Jenny asked, mystified.

Max yanked the dick out of the pouch. "It's totally disrespectful," he said, throwing the dick down into a box on the floor. He walked away mad.

"It's inside the pants," Jenny tried to explain to the retreating figure and the other girls, who just looked at Max. They didn't get it, either. Trannies. Go figure.

***

"Abuela," Carmen said, addressing her grandmother in Spanish and asking her a question that Shane didn't understand.

Carmen's abuela replied something brief, and possibly dismissive.

Carmen wanted to swing by her mother's house on the way home after they'd finished decorating Wax. Shane certainly didn't mind dropping in to say hello; she welcomed every chance to bask in the glow of the Morales clan. They weren't going to have dinner there but were just hanging out before it was time to dress for Max's big trannie fundraiser. Carmen knew they could never say that to Mercedes, but they could very well tell her ninety-five percent of the truth: They were going to a fundraiser that evening for a benefit for a friend of theirs who was having a major medical procedure. If Mercedes pressed, Carmen was even willing to tell her their friend was having a double mastectomy, which was completely true. All she had to do was be careful about the pronouns "he" and "she" and that the mastectomies had nothing to do with breast cancer.

Shane, Carmen and her grandmother were sitting on the back steps of Carmen's mother's house. Shane was helping Abuela shuck ears of corn in preparation for dinner. Carmen had retrieved a large cardboard banker's box full of old record albums, and sat sorting through them. Grinning with pleasure, she held one up for her grandmother to see: It was the Lo esencial Beny Moré y su banda gigante album, "The Essential Beny Moré and His Big Band," put out in the mid 1950s at the height of the Cuban singer/bandleader's huge popularity in the Hispanic world. Some people said Moré was the greatest Cuban singer there ever was.

"I was just teasing her that, if she had ever met Beny Moré then she absolutely would have married him," Carmen translated for Shane.

"Who is he?" Shane asked, interested.

The simple truth was that Shane loved Carmen's family. She loved Carmen's childhood home, the actual house itself. She loved the culture. She loved being surrounded by something in her own life she had never before experienced: A warm, loving household. She wanted to know about everything that went on in the Morales villa, everything that was said, what everything meant. Shane was absorbing Latino culture as she never had before she met Carmen. And she was absorbing familial love.

"Oh my God, Chane!" exclaimed Carmen's mother, Mercedes, coming out of the house onto the back porch with a bowl and spatula in her hands. "Who was Beny Moré? Only the best musician in the world!" She took her bowl and spatula back into the kitchen.

She was a heavyset, exuberant woman with a large body and an even larger heart, and if Shane loved Carmen's mom, Carmen's mom adored Shane. In a way, their affection mirrored that of Shane and Carmen themselves: Love at first sight. This particular love merely happened to be maternal, not sexual, that's all. Maybe it was just something in the de la Pica or Morales genes. Shane was no more able to resist the one family member than the other.

Mercedes pronounced Shane's name as "chain," and what was strange was the fact that mispronouncing her name would have bugged the shit out of Shane coming from the mouth of anyone else on Planet Earth but Mercedes. From Mercedes' lips "Chane" was music laced with affection. It was Mother Love Incarnate. Mercedes could have called her "Chithead" instead and Shane would have eaten it up with a cuchara.

"Beny Moré," Carmen said, lowering her voice only a little, "he's the guy that you liked for me to play, every time, when, you know, back in the day when I used to go down on you."

Shane froze in shock. "Carmen!" She knew Abuela spoke no English, but even so ... had Carmen lost her mind again? To say such a thing with her own mother only a few feet away? They stared at each other.

Carmen turned away with a shrug and went back to sorting through the box of records. "Mom!" she called out, and asked her mother in Spanish if they had any more of Abuela's cigars.

Shane knew Abuela loved her cigars, and that they were kept in a cigar box on top of the refrigerator. And she understood enough Spanish to jump up and say, "Oh, wait, no, I'll get it."

She went inside the door to the house to the refrigerator, reached on top, took out a big cigar, and brought it back to Abuela, who pulled Shane down to her to give her a big embrace, for Abuela loved Shane almost as much as Mercedes did. And for someone who had held five hundred or six hundred or maybe a thousand women in her arms before she turned thirty, hugging large, overweight motherly and grandmotherly types was a totally new experience for Shane. She had hugged women she was fucking, and she had hugged her friends platonically from time to time. She had been hugged by people before, during and after Harvey's funeral. But the last time Shane had a mother's hug had been the day she was ten years old and her own mother had turned her over to Child Protective Services. After nearly two decades of maternal starvation, Shane treasured the embraces of Abuela and Mercedes in a way incomprehensible to other people.

Abuela almost crushed Shane in her arms, and then happened to see the back of Shane's neck and the new tattoo of the bird.

"Oooh, bonita tattoo!" she said to Shane.

"Ah," Shane said. "Yeah! What do you think?" She bent over and pulled her hair aside so Abuela could see the back of her neck better. At that moment Mercedes came back out onto the porch. She saw Shane bending over showing the tattoo to Abuela. She saw Carmen's neck, too, for Carmen had worn her hair up that day. Matching bird tattoos. Bingo.

Carmen suddenly realized what was happening and snapped her head around to look at her mother, just as Mercedes turned away. Carmen knew her mother had seen the matching tats.

"Chane?" Mercedes asked, "could you help me?" She went into the house, and Shane, oblivious, said "Sure," and went in after her.

"Tomorrow night you and Carmen are coming to dinner?" Mercedes asked Shane.

"Uh, yeah, I guess we can, sure," Shane said.

"Oh, you have to come," Mercedes said. "There's someone I want you to meet."

"Okay!" Shane said.

On the porch, Carmen listened to her mother's conversation with Shane. Carmen had lived a couple of chapters of When Bad Things Happen to Good Lesbians, and knew no good would come of this. Her heart filled with dread.

***

That evening Tina was dancing with Max at the Tranny fundraiser at Wax, which seemed to be a great success. The place was packed with lesbians, gays and trannies of all kinds. There were at least half a dozen trannies who already had top surgery themselves, and they walked around bare-chested, showing their hairy chests and especially the scars across their rib cages, showing where their tits had been removed. It was a macho thing, like a German dueling scar had been before World War I. No dueling scar, no manhood. No titty scar, no trannyhood.

Max glanced around the room and saw that Jenny was dancing with one of the bare-chested trannies, a good-looking blond guy with a haircut so short it hardly qualified as hair at all. It was a buzzcut a Marine Corps recruiter would admire (the trannie under it, not so much). A good many of the non-butch lesbians in the room had gone the other way in their clothing choices: The theme was high ultra mock femme, Cinderella gowns with lots of petticoats, elbow-length gloves, tiaras and high-top hair-dos, the works. Alice wore a bare-shouldered ball gown so low cut her endowments were almost falling out; she accessorized them with a lovely strand of oversize faux pearls the size of gumballs that drooped to her waist. Dana went Jackie Kennedy, in a pink suit with elbow-length lace gloves. She wore a lovely red-haired Jackie-style wig, and actually looked smashing, considering her chemo. For her part Helena Peabody had gone the other way, wearing a very mannish men's business suit, a white dress shirt, and a black necktie tied but with the knot so loose it rested down on her sternum. It was cute, and Helena was one of those rare women, like Carmen, who were still so innately feminine that no amount of men's clothing made them look like guys. And like Shane, Helena looked even cuter and more attractive in men's clothes, not less. There just wasn't an ounce of butch in either of them. Some dykes are like that.

Jenny went Wizard of Oz Good Witch, and wore a pale emerald green ball gown with large, puffy shoulders; the color complemented her long dark hair color, but contradicted the hair style: The just-washed, towel-dried couldn't-care-less-if-I-brushed-it look. She wore a large, twinkly tiara on top that had cost a buck ninety-eight in K-Mart, and a pair of large, round, owl-like nerdy glasses. The total effect was kind of in-your-face ragamuffin cute, and Jenny could carry it off where others might not.

Max's problem with Jenny wasn't her outfit, it was that she seemed to be enjoying herself, slow-dancing with the buzzcut trannie, and the more Max thought about it the less he liked it. They weren't even dancing in the clinch, just swaying a foot apart like a pair of fourth-graders, her hands resting on top of his shoulders. Never mind that Max was dancing with Tina the same way; that didn't count. Max stewed, and finally he could take it no more.

"Excuse me," he said to Tina, and walked across the floor to Jenny and Scarchest.

"Hi," he said as they stopped dancing.

"Hi," Jenny said. "You want me to draw another raffle--"

"Do you mind?" Max said to the guy, who took the hint, raised his hands in the "no foul, no harm" gesture, and backed away.

"I'm sorry," Jenny said to Scarchest as he left.

"What are you doing?" Max asked with some attitude.

"Dancing," Jenny said, wondering WTF now?

"Are you trying to embarrass me?"

"No!" Jenny said.

"You're my girlfriend!" Max said, roughly grabbing her wrist and pulling her arm. "This is my party! You shouldn't be dancing with some other dude!"

Jenny ripped her arm away from Max's grasp. "I'll dance with whoever the fuck I want to dance with," she hissed. "I wasn't sucking his fucking cock, was I, Max?" This was in reference to the fact that a few days earlier she'd caught Max giving Billie Blaikey a blowjob in the back room of The Planet. She turned and walked away. Just as Max was about to follow after her, Shane stepped in front of him, blocking his way.

"Hey," Shane said firmly. "Don't hurt her. Or I'll fucking cut your tits off, do you understand?"

"I'm not gonna touch her!" Max said, angrily brushing past Shane. He walked over to the corner where Jenny sat by herself. He found a chair, reversed it, sat down next to her. His mood had changed.

"Jenny, look, I'm sorry," he said. "I really am. It's just that when I saw you with that guy, you know, I just got ... you know ... I couldn't stand it."

Jenny thought about it for a moment. "When I realized I might be gay," she said, "I ... I didn't rule out men. But if I'm gonna be with a guy, I'm not gonna be with some aggressive, macho male pig who has different standards of behavior for himself than he does for me." She looked down at her hands.

Max seemed to think about it. "You're right," he finally said. He leaned in toward her. "You're totally right. I messed up. I'm going to try to be a better man."

Jenny looked at him, looked away. She took off her oversize nerdy owl glasses.

Max had run out of words. He didn't know what would work. Awkwardly he leaned forward, put his head on Jenny's shoulder, slide down so his cheek rested on her collarbone.

Nothing.

He put his arms around her waist, hugged her closer.

Nothing.

***

Carmen and Shane stood in a long line waiting to get their photographs taken. One of the fundraiser events was a photo backdrop where a professional photographer took photos of the guests dressed in their costume party outfits. One of the backdrops was the beach scene with the palm trees that Shane and Carmen had painted and put up.

Shane wore one of her signature look man's tux outfits that featured white piping on the lapels, a white, fancy, riverboat gambler's dress-front shirt with black piping down the frills, and a black cravat. Carmen had gone funky. She wore a black, sleeveless dress with a square-cut top, a triple strand of plastic pearls that had a flapper flavor, a large white cross on a black leather strand, and wore her hair up on top tied off with a big white bow. She deliberately wore a lot of face makeup, highlighted by a very dark red lipstick. She wore elbow-length gloves made of fine pink lace.

As they stood waiting patiently, Shane started to giggle to herself about something Carmen's mother had told her that afternoon.