The Queen & the Homo Jock King (7 page)

“And now, ladies and gentleman, Jack It is proud to present the fiercest bitch in the Wild West, her majesty, the
Queen
, Helena Handbasket!”

The curtains parted.

The crowd roared.

The nerves melted away as the familiar beats of a Britney remix poured from the speakers. The bass reverberated down the walls and through the floor, vibrating up into my skin.

I knew this routine like the back of my hand. Some people see a performance by a drag queen and think it’s nothing but a man dressed as a woman, lip-synching along with a random and forgettable pop trash. And maybe those people were right, at least partially.

Because I
was
dressed as a woman. I
was
lip-synching pop trash.

But I was doing so much more than that.

For everything a person
did
see, for every deliberate step I took, each slink and slide of skin, there were hours upon hours spent choreographing and learning in front of a mirror, listening to the same songs over and over again. It started off with an idea of what each number was meant to convey, the music and choreography following after.

Tonight, I was fucking Britney, bitch.

The crowd screamed for me when I dropped into the splits. I bounced once, twice, three times, ignoring the twinge in the back of my right thigh, the thin sheen of sweat I could feel above my lip. I bounced up again, and swung the leg facing front back up under me, resting back on the balls of my feet, my hands splayed out at my sides. The beat changed and I rocked forward, hands to the ground, crawling down the center of the dance floor, the crowd gathered on either side of me. The floor was sticky and I had to keep from grimacing, locking that cocky fuck-you smirk on my face. I was going to chew Mike out later. It was his fucking bar, but I brought in the money. He needed to keep it clean.

The music changed again and I stood, dropping out of the routine. Men and woman on either side of me held out money, ones and fives, and I grinned at them as I took the bills into my hand. I wasn’t paid for what I did, not by the bar. I donated my time and energy, putting together the show for free. I spent my own money on the costumes, the wigs, and the makeup. I scavenged the thrift stores, looking for vintage this and sequined that.

It was hard work.

I did it because I loved it and wouldn’t have it any other way.

But it was also expensive.

Which is why I had no qualms taking the money from their hands.

Paul had asked me once if I felt like a hooker and these were my johns.

I told him it was more like being a drug dealer and giving them a high.

Then I kicked him in the shins and told him if he
ever
called me a hooker again, I’d fist him so fast, his asshole would be stretched for a week.

He probably shouldn’t have asked me that while I was Helena.

So I kissed and schmoozed and thanked the boys and girls as I took their money. I moved through the dance floor, past the people sitting in chairs on either side of the room to the back where it was standing room only. I sang along with Britney, who was now telling everyone that there were only two types of people in the world. People in the crowd grabbed my arms and hands and I let them, kissing their cheeks and whispering sweetly in their ears.

There were still a few hands outstretched along the rear of the room, and I thought I saw a twenty-dollar bill. I tried not to lunge at it like a fat kid on cake, as I was a queen and thus needed to move with dignity and grace. (In all reality, I focused on the twenty-dollar bill, and if I
was
a fat kid, then the cake was mine, I swear to god.) The twenty was gripped in a big, tanned hand, the fingernails immaculately groomed. The hand was attached to a thick arm, the lights above flashing and showing the light hair that dusted the skin.

I liked big hands.

Because they usually had thick fingers.

What can I say, I wasn’t a picky person.

Most of the time.

“Come to mommy,” I whispered to that hand as I moved down the line.

I should have known it was going to be a trap. But twenty dollars to a drag queen was like a large crack rock to a tweaker and I was going to have it. It was
mine
. And if the owner of said twenty was anything good, then maybe Helena would be finding herself some cock tonight.

But that’s the problem with drag queens and twenty-dollar bills and potential hot cocks. The power of Andrew Jackson blinded us to anything else and the allure of dick made our mouths water. I needed a new hot glue gun. And I had almost saved up for these knee-high boots that had flames up and down the sides. I had
needs
and that twenty would go toward the needs. I also wanted to get plowed like I was a field during planting season.

I hadn’t noticed that I’d wandered into dangerous territory.

I had already been through the bears and the twinks. I had passed through the leather daddies and their boys, the lesbians with killer pixie cuts and the Doc Martens that Paul was sure one day would give him a penis kicking. There was the obligatory bachelorette party that had screamed drunkenly when I’d given the bride-to-be a lap dance. The models stood posing, nary a hair out of place. I’d even gone through the Muscle Marys and their steroidal dreams.

I had passed them all.

Into the heart of darkness.

The point of no return.

The Homo Jocks.

Like high school, gay bars have cliques. The groups stick together. Sometimes there was intermingling, but more often than not, the gays stayed where they were allotted. Sometimes things changed when people moved groups. A twink cannot remain a twink for the rest of their lives, no matter how much they wish it so. Aging twinks were sad twinks and had to find a new group to assimilate into. A twink could become a bear, but a bear could never become a twink. It was all very confusing, the homosexual lifestyle. Only those that were gifted could ever hope to understand or be a part of it.

But I was blinded by greed. I wanted that twenty-dollar bill.

I should have noticed when I moved from the lesbians to the homo jocks, but to be fair, there was a hard time distinguishing between the last bull dyke and the first homo jock. Both had good-sized chests and short hair. The only reason I noticed the difference was when the first homo jock had a distinct lack of lesbianic features, such as plaid and a braided belt. I saw a stretched tank top with the words
LANDO’S GYM
across the front and knew I was fucked.

You know you have a homo jock when several things occur.

First, there will be muscles on display. They won’t be bad as the Muscle Marys (no one is as bad as the Muscle Marys), because they aren’t juicing themselves up. Chances are they will have exposed biceps and use phrases like
I just had the best kale smoothie
and
Look how vascular I am today, isn’t it grand?

Second, they will most likely be wearing tight clothing that accentuates said muscles. A homo jock tends to be proud that they go to the gym sixty-eight times a week, and therefore wants the fruits of their labor to be on display. If they haven’t forgotten leg day, most likely the homo jock will be wearing pants just as tight so one can gaze upon the glory that is their thigh muscles.

Third, homo jocks tend to be of a cocky sort. In fact, it could be said that one could not
be
a homo jock without having an inflated sense of self. Typically, a homo jock will look good and he’ll
know
he looks good. Yes, it was certainly possible to have a humble homo jock, but they tend to be a rarity in the homosexual hierarchy. Homo jocks often get most everything they want, be it people or possessions, and have no scruples in crushing others to get to them. They also have a hard time understanding words like
no
and
you’re not my type
and
fuck off, Darren, you fucking sack of shit
.

Fourth, a homo jock doesn’t necessarily need to be a jock to become a homo jock. More often than not, a homo jock will participate in activities such as basketball or Ultimate Frisbee or homoerotic wrestling that leads to confused feelings and boners. However, if one just goes to the gym and wears tight clothing and acts like a cocky jerk, then one can still be a homo jock. Organized sports are not indicative of a homo jock, but more often than not, the jock will be there, rubbing up against other sweating homo jocks and thinking about how nice they smell and—

Nope. Nope, nope, nope.

Fifth, as past experiences dictate, a homo jock asshole will most likely eat twinks for breakfast and stand in the shadows of your drag show and watch you
every fucking time for no goddamn reason whatsoever
with his other homo jock friends, and sometimes, you wonder why he’s even there when he obviously hates your guts, which is
fine
, by the way, because you hate
his
guts too and are not afraid to admit it.

Well. This is all very hypothetical, mind you.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I left the Land of Lesbians and entered homo jock territory.

There were three of the underlings tonight, and I was sure their names were something ridiculous like Biff or Chet or Xerxes. They grinned at me with perfect teeth and perfect dimples as if they knew some great secret that I wasn’t privy to. I wanted to smack the smug looks right off their faces, but there were hundreds of witnesses around me. Maybe later I could jump them in a dark alley and scratch their eyes out.

And because that’s the way my life went, the twenty-dollar bill was in the hand that was attached to the muscular arm belonging to none other than the Homo Jock King himself.

My most mortal of enemies.

Darren Mayne.

Britney was shrieking about how she did it again, that she played with your heart, and I was caught completely by surprise.

He was unfairly pretty, almost like he was manufactured specifically to cause as much emotional devastation as humanly possible. He wouldn’t look out of place walking off the set of SeanCody or Corbin Fisher, posting videos with ridiculous titles like
Darren’s Triple Load with Micah
. He’d recently gotten a haircut (and I
despised
the fact that I could tell that), his short, blond hair looking messy, but entirely on purpose. He had blue eyes and a strong jaw and a wicked fucking grin on his face, the barest hint of teeth underneath, flashing as the black light lit upon them.

He was big, too, because of course he was, even more so than Vince, though you could see they were cut from the same cloth. Big arms and big legs and
everything
was big, though I sometimes wished he was making up for the fact that he had a small dick, but life didn’t work that way. Not that I knew anything about the size of his dick. Nor did I care to know anything about it. I didn’t even think about it. It was a nonissue for me.

Ahem.

He was walking perfection and was the type of person that
knew
it. Drag queens aren’t humble people. It goes against the very nature of being a drag queen. However, it was usually all an act, and when I
wasn’t
Helena, when I was nothing but plain old Sanford Stewart, I wasn’t cocky or self-sure and only carried the barest residuals of arrogance that was the Helena bleed-through.

Darren never turned it off. I didn’t think he even knew
how
to turn it off. He always had that knowing smirk on his face, that little smile that said he knew he was hot shit, that everyone knew he was hot shit, and there really wasn’t any point in trying to deny it. He was twenty-eight years old, and it was obvious that every single one of those years had been handed to him on a silver platter, because whatever Darren Mayne wanted, Darren Mayne got.

In other words, physically, he was hot like burning.

Mentally, however, left a lot to be desired.

Not that I ever thought about such things, mind you. I didn’t have time for the Darren Maynes of the world, no matter what other people thought.

Which brought me back to the present, given that Vince, Kori,
and
Paul were standing on the other side of the homo jocks like the traitorous bastards they were.

I thought about bypassing them all completely, but that twenty-dollar bill felt good in my hands, and hey, a girl’s gotta eat. A girl also gotta get flaming knee boots.

But it was
Darren Mayne
.

I’d taken his money before, sure. But it’d been fives and tens. For some reason, this felt more like charity than it’d ever felt before. Like he was
better
than me.

No. I didn’t need it
that
bad.

I started to move on because
fuck him
.

His eyes caught mine, and I struggled to do
anything
but stare at him like he was something special, but it was almost as if I didn’t really have a choice.

His grin faltered slightly.

My eyes narrowed.

His mouth moved.

I couldn’t hear a single word he said above the music.

He leaned forward.

I smiled at the people behind him, people completely unaware that if I had a switchblade, I’d try and stab Darren right in the stomach. Maybe. Probably. I’d at least think about it in a very threatening and angry manner.

I glanced over to Paul, who was grinning at me. I mentally said good-bye to my best friend because there would be nothing left of him but bone and gristle before the night was over.

Darren’s cheek scraped against mine. I could feel his breath on my neck. He pressed the cash into my hand and I tightened my fingers around his.

When he spoke, his words crawled along my skin and I fought the shiver that wanted to crawl through me.

“Take the money.” His voice was low and honey-sweet. “You’ve done it before.”

“Go fuck yourself, sunshine.” My voice was sharp and brittle. The smile never left my face. I was a performer, after all. None of them would see me crack.