There are 1811 miles between Independence, Missouri and Oregon City, Oregon: the famous Oregon Trail. We did it backwards. And we did it out of focus—Portland to St. Louis—our route slightly blurred, like a movie you’ve been watching too long before realizing it’s the projectionist’s fault and not the filmmaker’s; the storyline seems permanently marred by the fact that the characters never quite looked clear. That’s Audrey and me. She was like a drug I didn’t always enjoy, to which I’d nevertheless grown addicted. A recurring theme in my life, but more on that later.

Even the drag queens seemed to see that I was making some sort of mistake. The day we left, they fluttered around me like winged creatures, whispering warnings in my ear. My boss, Chocolate Jones—a black post-op transsexual who passed so believably as a biological woman that she once held down a day job in the children’s section of a department store—took me by the wrist and pulled me close. “You have to be careful of that child, Pure One,” Chocolate said. “She’s got itches she don’t know how to scratch yet.” Chocolate called me Pure One because, for the two years I’d tended at her bar, I was celibate. The other bartenders, the cocktail waiters in cut-off jeans and designer tanktops, the performers who looked stunning in drag and the ones who looked desperate: all of them spent nights tricking for sex and change, while I wore long-sleeved thermals and construction worker pants and avoided human contact like a boy who was allergic to his own skin. Chocolate held onto my wrist. The U-Haul was only a few feet away from us, daylight exposing its small dents, the scratches on the airbrushed mural of “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Chocolate knew how unpleasant it was for me to feel her hand around my arm; she thought she was doing me a favor by pulling me physically into her world.
Several yards away Audrey stood surrounded by a small crowd of female performers, women with slick pompadours, dark ties and huge dildos stuffed down their trousers. At night all cats are gray, sure, but in the sun you can see not only their colors, but the startled expressions of their faces as they slink away in a sort of instinctive panic. Audrey was more girlish than her drag-king buddies; there was a gracefulness in the way she put her hip forward while she stood, a coquettishness conveyed by the bend in her wrist when she let one of them light her cigarette, a stylishness to her clothes, despite the fact that they were covered in paint. I watched Audrey try to laugh mannishly. The girls loved her, swooned over her jokes and her paintings. “Why do you have to leave?” they must’ve been asking her. “I’m going to graduate school,” Audrey would have said, not sure whether to punch someone’s arm or kiss a cheek. She’d just finished her joint BA/BFA with Reed College and the Pacific Northwest College of Art, a five-year program which Audrey, the little genius, managed to complete in only six years. Audrey had become a friend out of default soon after I moved back to Portland: she was a regular at LaBar, and she went to college with my housemates. Her studio was near the cabaret, and she used to come in after midnight, splattered from the thick self-portraits she painted on glass panes and mirrors bought at second-hand stores. She never went home with any of the women—not as far as I knew—always pretended to be otherwise engaged.     

Ontario Review #58