“That wasn’t my fault!” I shouted up at him. “Everyone knows you can’t just ride a bike into an open car door, what the fuck—”
“And then Paul took him to the hospital, got him drugged up, took him home, and never let him leave,” Helena finished with a flourish. “It’s the gay love story of the ages. Boy meets boy, boy hits boy with his car, boy and boy get married.”
I grabbed the mic in Helena’s hand and brought it to my mouth. “I’d just like to say that none of this is true.” I frowned. “Okay, wait. I suppose most of it is true. Dammit.”
Helena jerked the mic away from me and covered it with her hand to muffle the sound. “You know better than to touch a queen’s mic,” she hissed at me. “Try that again and I’ll chop off your hand, you understand me?”
“Bitches be trippin’,” I said.
She turned back to the crowd. “We’re here to rejoice in the love of Paul Auster and Vince Taylor who, by this time next week, will have followed in the footsteps of many a heterosexual who deemed it their right, but who also forced the homos to get the Supreme Court to make the decision that we were equally able to be just as miserable as the straight people. Paul and Vince are to be married and we are here to celebrate the fuck out of them.”
And maybe I forgot to pose for a few moments because I was too busy trying to keep myself from getting choked up. Once the crowd’s cheers had died down again, Helena got a wicked smile on her face that I didn’t like. It wasn’t her come-hither smile. It wasn’t her I’m-better-than-you smile.
No, this smile was
devious.
It was calculating.
It was evil.
It was her I did something bad and I don’t give a fuck smile.
Which, nine times out of ten, meant that something was about to happen that I wouldn’t like.
(The tenth time being, of course, something I did like, which was when we’d found out that Chris Evans had been in Phoenix filming a movie six years ago and we’d accidentally broken into the set to see if we could find his trailer as Sandy was convinced that Mr. Evans was on the down low and only needed to see Sandy spread out like a “love buffet of love” before he would ravish him with his disco stick. Suffice it to say, we were chased by security guards even before we’d started to scale the chain link fence. I’d never run as fast or as long in my life (at least three minutes of full-on jogging). We managed to escape, only to find out later that Mr. Evans was in another state right at that moment, but by then, Sandy had decided his celebrity crush was Gerard Butler (“He makes such terrible movies, and all I want to do is fix him!”) and so Mr. Evans was forgotten. It was one of those precious moments that I realized that no one would ever get me like Sandy would.)
But this time, here, in front of our friends and family (and furries), while I was hopped up on sexy juice, I knew Helena Handbasket was up to something I wasn’t going to like. This wasn’t breaking and entering to stalk a celebrity.
“As you can see, Paul’s feeling good,” she said.
And because I was drunk on Jager, I shouted, “I like the way I work it, no diggity, but you can’t bag it up.”
“Exactly,” Helena said. “And what is one thing a bachelor party always needs?”
The laser lights began to drop lower.
Helena whispered, “Entertainment of the… male variety.”
The crowd screamed their approval.
I stared at her in horror. “You know we said no strippers!”
She ignored me. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls… Paul’s parents and grandmother—which, honestly, I might not have thought this one through as much as I should have.”
“We should probably cover our eyes,” Mom said to Dad, who immediately buried his face in his hands.
“You better not be talking to me!” Nana said, eyes narrowing. “I didn’t survive the sixties and make it to being elderly only to be told that I can’t watch someone decades younger than me shaking their groove thang. Do you know what happened in the sixties? Hippies. Hippies happened in the sixties. I don’t think anyone took a shower that whole decade.”
I took a step toward Helena, getting ready to put an end to this charade. I didn’t want strippers, even if I was in the mindset that I could absolutely outdance any of them right at this moment.
But she saw me coming.
And then her plan was revealed.
“Darren! Bring out the sacrifice!”
Darren Mayne burst through the curtains behind the stage where the drag queens normally came from. He was dragging Vince behind him, who wore a blindfold that was similar to the one I’d had, and a large set of what looked to be noise-canceling headphones. A bar back followed them, carrying a chair.