Memorial Hospital.
The truth is I was addicted to being beautiful, and that’s not something you just walk away from. Being addicted to all that attention, I had to quit cold turkey. I could shave my head, but hair grows back. Even bald, I might still look too good. Bald, I might get even more attention. There was the option of getting fat or drinking out of control to ruin my looks, but I wanted to be ugly, and I wanted my health. Wrinkles and aging looked too far off. There had to be some way to get ugly in a flash. I had to deal with my looks in a fast, permanent way or I’d always be tempted to go back.
You know how you look at ugly hunchback girls, and they are so lucky. Nobody drags them out at night so they can’t finish their doctoral thesis papers. They don’t get yelled at by fashion photographers if they get infected ingrown bikini hairs. You look at burn victims and think how much time they save not looking in mirrors to check their skin for sun damage.
I wanted the everyday reassurance of being mutilated. The way a crippled deformed birth-defected disfigured girl can drive her car with the windows open and not care how the wind makes her hair look, that’s the kind of freedom I was after.
I was tired of staying a lower life-form just because of my looks. Trading on them. Cheating. Never getting anything real accomplished, but getting the attention and recognition anyway. Trapped in a beauty ghetto is how I felt. Stereotyped. Robbed of my motivation.
In this way, Shane, we are very much brother and sister. This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.
I slowed down for the exit and pulled over onto the shoulder, what they call the breakdown lane. I remember thinking, How apropos. I remember thinking, This is going to be so exciting. My makeover. Here was my life about to start all over again. I could be a great brain surgeon this time around. Or I could be an artist. Nobody would care how I’d look. People would just see my art, what I made instead of just how I looked, and people would love me.
What I thought last was, at last I’ll be growing again, mutating, adapting, evolving. I’ll be physically challenged.
I couldn’t wait. I got the gun from the glove compartment. I wore a glove against powder burns, and held the gun at arm’s length out my broken window. It wasn’t even like aiming, with the gun only about two feet away. I might’ve killed myself that way, but by now that idea didn’t seem very tragic.
This makeover would make piercings and tattoos and brandings look so lame, all those little fashion revolts so safe that they themselves only become fashionable. Those little paper tiger attempts to reject looking good that only end up reinforcing it.
The shot, it was like getting hit hard is what I remember. The bullet. It took a minute before I could focus my eyes, but there was my blood and snot, my drool and teeth all over the passenger seat. I had to open the car door and get the gun from where I’d dropped it outside the window. Being in shock helped. The gun and the glove are in a storm drain in the hospital parking lot where I dropped them, in case you want proof.
Then the intravenous morphine, the tiny operating-room manicure scissors cut my dress off, the little patch panties, the police photos. Birds ate my face. Nobody ever suspected the truth.
The truth is I panicked a little after that. I let everybody think the wrong things. The future is not a good place to start lying and cheating all over again. None of this is anybody’s fault except mine. I ran because just getting my jaw rebuilt was too much temptation to revert, to play that game, the looking good game. Now my whole new future is still out there waiting for me.
The truth is, being ugly isn’t the thrill you’d think, but it can be an opportunity for something better than I ever imagined.
The truth is I’m sorry.
Chapter 23
ump to Brandy and me, we can’t find Ellis anywhere. Evie and all the Texas Cottrells can’t find their groom, either, everybody laughing that nervous laughter. What bridesmaid has run off with him, everybody wants to know. Ha, ha.
I tug Brandy toward the door, but she shushes me. Ellis and the groom both missing …a hundred Texans drinking hard …that ridiculous bride in her big drag wedding dress …this is just too much fun for Brandy to walk out now.
Jump to Evie riding her big parade float out of the butler’s pantry, her hands all fisted up, her veil and hair flying straight out behind her. Evie’s shouting about how she done found her butt-sucking fag-assed new husband face- downed enjoying butt sex with everybody’s old boyfriend in the butler’s pantry.
Oh, Ellis.
I remember all his porno magazines, and all the details of anal, oral, rimming, fisting, felching. You could put yourself in the hospital trying to self-suck.
Oh, this is dazzling.
Of course, Evie’s answer to everything is to heft her hoop skirt and run upstairs after a rifle except by now most of her bedroom is a Chanel No. 5 perfumed wall of flames Evie has to ride her parade float right into. Everybody cell-phones 911 for help. Nobody’s bothered enough to go into the butler’s pantry and check out the action. Folks don’t want to know what might be going on in there.
Go figure, but Texans seem to be a lot more comfortable around disastrous house fires than they are around anal sex.
I remember my folks. Scat and water sports. Sado and masochism.
Waiting for Evie to burn to death, everybody gets a fresh drink and goes to stand in the foyer at the foot of the stairs. You hear loud spanking from the butler’s pantry. The painful kind where you spit on your hand first.
Brandy, the socially inappropriate thing she is, Brandy starts laughing. “This is going to be messy good fun,” Brandy tells me out the side of her Plumbago mouth. “I put a handful of Bilax bowel evacuant in Ellis’s last drink.”
Oh, Ellis.
With all that’s going on, Brandy could’ve gotten away if she hadn’t started laughing.
You see, since right then, Evie steps out of that wall of flame at the top of the stairs. A rifle in her hands, her wedding dress burned down to the steel hoops, the silk flowers in her hair burned down to their wire skeletons, all her blond hair burned off, Evie does her slow step-pause-step down the stairs with a rifle pointed right at Brandy Alexander.
With everybody looking up the stairs at Evie wearing nothing but wire and ashes, sweat and soot smeared all over her luscious hourglass transgender bod, we all watch Evelyn Cottrell in her big incorporated moment, and Evie screams, “You!”
She screams at Brandy Alexander down the barrel of the rifle, “You did it to me again. Another fire!”
Step-pause-step.
“I thought we were best friends,” she says. “Sure, yes, I slept with your boyfriend, but
Step-pause-step.
“It’s just not enough for you to be the best and most beautiful,” Evie says. “Most people, if they looked as good as you, they’d tread water for the rest of their lives.”
Step-pause-step.
“But no,” Evie says, “here you have to destroy everyone else.”
The second-floor fire inches down the foyer wallpaper, and wedding guests are scrambling for their wraps and bags, all of them headed outdoors with the wedding gifts, the silver and the crystal.
