Love & Other Curses

  Dedication

  For Tara

  who said yes

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Books by Michael Thomas Ford

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  When Lola asks me to help him with his tits, I know it’s going to be one of those nights.

  “Come on, Sammy,” he says, fluttering his long, fake lashes and puckering his red-lipsticked mouth. “I need the girls to look fabulous. I’m doing the Dolly Parton number.”

  The Dolly Parton number is “9 to 5,” a song popular more than twenty years before I was even born. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a fun song, and I like it. But Lola is, well, not exactly the age Dolly Parton was when she took it to number one on the charts.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he says, jabbing the air with a finger tipped by a long acrylic nail painted bright pink. “But Dolly and I are the exact same age, and if she can still do the song in her shows, so can I.”

  I don’t argue with him. There’s no point. He owns the bar, so he can do whatever he wants to. Besides, getting onstage is the only thing that makes him happy. Well, that and the mai tais he drinks one after the other starting at around three in the afternoon. He’s sipping one now as he plops into the chair in front of the dressing room mirror and waits for me to put the fake breasts on him.

  Most of the other queens create the illusion of cleavage using makeup, but Lola insists on these giant silicone boobs that he’s had forever. He tells everyone that his fairy godmother gave them to him for his sixteenth birthday, and they look it. They’re pretty beat-up, but he covers them with powder and pancake makeup and says he can get another couple of years out of them.

  “How’s Starletta?” he asks me as I fasten the strap around his neck.

  “She’s fine,” I tell him. I know where this is going, and I’d like to avoid it. But Lola is determined.

  “You know I took her out a couple of times back when we were kids,” he says. “Nothing big. A church picnic. Maybe to the county fair. But if things had worked out differently, I could have been your grandfather.”

  “Great-grandfather,” I correct him. “Hank is my grandmother. Starletta is my great-grandmother.”

  Lola laughs. “That’s right,” he says. “Sometimes I forget. Starletta had Hank young. What was she, sixteen?”

  “Almost seventeen,” I say. “Do you want the diamonds or the sapphires tonight?” I hold up both necklaces, hoping this will distract him from the conversation.

  “Diamonds,” he says. “I’m wearing the white jumpsuit, and the sapphires would be too much. Say, you’re going to be seventeen yourself soon, right?”

  “In August,” I answer.

  Lola shakes his head. “I don’t know why I let you hang around here,” he says. “Cops find out and I’d lose my license.”

  “That’s why I stay back here,” I remind him. “Besides, you know nobody cares about this place.”

  This is true. You’d think that in this part of the world, aka small-town central New York, aka the geographic center of nowhere, we wouldn’t even have something like a gay bar. After all, the entire population of the town could take one of those Carnival cruises at the same time and still not fill up the ship. But since the nearest big-city bar is over an hour away, the Shangri-La attracts guys from all the other small towns around. It’s not particularly busy on weeknights, but on the weekends it gets crowded.

  You’d think people around here would be freaked out by a gay bar. And maybe they were at first. But now nobody thinks twice about it. Or if they do, they don’t tell anybody that they think about it. That’s one of the rules. Another rule is that if you see somebody at the Shangri-La one night and then the next day you run into him shopping at the Price Chopper with his wife and kids, you especially don’t say anything. And that happens more than you might think.

  Even so, I don’t tell anybody that I come here. Especially not my family. Not that they’d care about the gay thing. We’ve already been through that, two years ago, and now it’s just the way things are. But there are other things I’m not ready for them to know about just yet.

  “Seventeen,” Lola says, looking at me in the mirror. “That’s a big year.”

  It is. Especially in my family. Because of the curse. But that’s something else I don’t want to talk about. Not that Lola would. Despite what he said about my great-grandmother, I don’t think he knows about it. But my family talks about it all the time. Especially now that my birthday is getting closer.

  “We should have a party for you,” Lola says. “Get Paloma to make you one of her tres leches cakes. That would be fun.”

  It would be fun. If there’s one thing drag queens know how to do well, it’s throw a party. And the queens at the Shangri-La are my best friends. My second family. Not that there’s anything wrong with my actual family. I love them too. But sometimes being a Weyward is a challenge, and when I’m at the Shangri-La I can be someone else. Even if I haven’t quite decided who that someone is yet. But I’m working on it.

  The door to the dressing room opens and Farrah bursts in, all drama and attitude. He tosses a handful of damp dollar bills on the table and pulls his wig off.

  “Cheap mothercrackers,” he says.

  Lola looks at me in the mirror and we both try not to laugh. Farrah’s temper is legendary, and we don’t want to make him any madder than he already is.

  “Did you do the Beyoncé number?” Lola asks. “Or the Tina Turner?”

  “Beyoncé,” Farrah mutters. “‘Crazy in Love.’ I danced so hard my feet just about fell off.”

  “Just like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes,” Lola says, sighing happily. “So tragic.”

  “That another one of your movies?” Farrah asks. “You know I don’t watch that old shit.”

  Lola gasps. “Watch your language!” he scolds. “The Red Shoes is one of the most heartbreaking stories ever told.”

  “They’re all heartbreaking,” says Farrah, looking at me and rolling his eyes.

  “Yes, well, the best stories are,” Lola says. “Because life is heartbreaking.”

  “We can agree on that,” Farrah says. “So why would I want to watch movies that are sad too? That’s just stupid.”

  Lola asks me to get him his Dolly Parton wig.

  “Do you know why I named this place Shangri-La?” he asks as he pulls a wig cap over his head.

  “Yes,” Farrah and I say in unison, hoping this will stop him. It doesn’t.

  “When I was eleven years old, I saw Lost Horizon on the television at my grandmother’s house,” Lola begins. Because he loves this story, and because he’s had so many mai tais, there’s no distractin
g him.

  I tune him out, concentrating on teasing the Dolly Parton wig to life. I’ve heard the story so many times, I can recite it by heart. Besides, Lola made me watch the movie. It’s actually pretty good. It’s about these people whose plane crashes in the Himalayan mountains. They’re rescued by a group of men who take them to a valley called Shangri-La, where it’s always summer and everyone is really beautiful and happy. Only something seems kind of weird about the whole thing, and when some of the people try to leave and go back to their old lives, they find out what it is: As long as you stay in Shangri-La, you stay young and healthy. But once you leave, the spell wears off and you die.

  “So I decided that when I grew up I would build my own Shangri-La,” Lola says as I put the wig on his head and pull it down. “Where people could be happy and beautiful.”

  “As long as they never leave,” I say.

  “You’re too young to be so bitter,” Lola tells me, teasing the wig.

  “I’m not bitter,” I say. “That’s just how it worked. Everyone was happy as long as they stayed in Shangri-La. But when they left, they weren’t.”

  “Poor Maria,” Lola says. “That scene where they turn her body over and see that she’s become a dried-up old thing is so sad.”

  “Speaking of dried-up old things, you’d better hurry,” Farrah remarks. “They just started playing Paloma’s Madonna number, which means you’ve got about five minutes until you’re on.”

  “Jumpsuit,” Lola barks, and I run off to the wardrobe closet.

  The next few minutes are crazy as we stuff Lola into his costume, make sure his wig is straight, and do touch-ups to his makeup. I’m just strapping the rhinestone-covered sandals to his feet when Paloma sticks his head in and says, “Time to work, gurl.”

  Lola leaves, following Paloma down the hallway to the main room and the tiny stage. I can hear people hooting and calling out Lola’s name. The energy from the bar pulses down the hallway, and I wish I could go out there. Then Farrah shuts the door and all I hear is the muted thump of the song as Lola starts to do his number.

  “You’re right about Shangri-La,” Farrah says as I sit down in the chair in front of the mirror and pick up a makeup brush.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re only happy as long as you never leave,” he says. “And you know what that makes it—a trap. Just like this place.”

  I turn and look at him. “You don’t like it here?”

  He waves a hand at me. “I like it just fine,” he says. “I’m just saying, the only way to keep the illusion alive is to never let it wear off. And that’s a lot of work.”

  I look at the color I’ve added to my cheeks. My skin is already pretty pale, and the pink blush makes me look almost doll-like. I switch to eye shadow and apply some blue to the crease of my eyelid, the way Paloma has been teaching me to.

  “You look like one of those anime girls,” Farrah teases. He comes over to the mirror, takes the brush from me, and puts some more shadow on my eye. “Now blend it with your fingertip,” he says, doing part of it for me and then watching as I repeat what he did on the other eye. “That’s good. You decide on a name yet?”

  I shake my head. My drag name is an ongoing topic of conversation at the Shangri-La. Everybody has an opinion. But I don’t know who I am yet. Besides, it will be another year before I can even legally perform here. By then I might be an entirely different person.

  Farrah finds a wig and brings it over to me. It’s red, the color of a campfire after the flames have burned down and only glowing embers remain. When Farrah puts it on me, the long curls fall around my shoulders. I stare at the glass and wonder who this girl is looking back at me.

  Then I notice the time. It’s 11:35. “Shit,” I say, snatching up a washcloth and some cold cream. “I’m going to be late.”

  I told my dad I would be home by midnight. Even though it’s summer, and I don’t have to be at school in the morning, he doesn’t want me running around all night. Besides, I’m supposed to help out at the Eezy-Freezy tomorrow.

  I get the makeup off in record time, give Farrah a kiss on the cheek, and start to leave. Then I remember the wig. I pull it off and toss it to Farrah, who catches it in one hand like it’s a fly ball.

  “I’ll see you on Saturday night,” I say, and go out the back door to the parking lot.

  Thankfully, my old truck starts up with no problem. It’s a 1965 Ford F100 stepside pickup, cherry red, that belonged to my great-grandfather, whose name was also Sam. He bought it when he was eighteen. It cost $1,900 new, which he earned washing bottles at the Adirondack Ale brewery for $1.25 an hour. I figured out he had to work 1,520 hours for this truck. Plus, he was married to Starletta and they had my grandma, Hank, to take care of, so really he worked a lot more hours than that.

  He didn’t get to enjoy the truck for long. He died when he was nineteen. Blew up on the Fourth of July when a sparkler he was holding burned his fingers. He dropped it, and it landed in a case of Roman candles he was supposed to be taking over to the firehouse for the annual fireworks display. Starletta was sad, of course, but she’d kind of expected it because of the curse and all.

  I’m told I look like my great-grandfather. There’s only one picture of him, taken the day he bought the Ford. He’s sitting in the cab, leaning out the window and grinning like a fool. Like me, he’s skinny and has light brown hair. And even though he’s smiling, his eyes look sad. I think it’s because part of him knew he wouldn’t be that happy ever again, but Starletta says his eyes were always like that. She says I have those same eyes, although I’m not really sad. I just think about things a lot.

  The truck is still in great shape, because someone in every generation learns how to keep it running. It’s kind of a tradition. As soon as I was old enough, my dad started teaching me how to change the oil. Then he showed me how the engine worked, and how to replace the spark plugs and belts, before we moved on to the harder stuff like the brakes and the engine. I’m pretty sure I’m the only guy in my school who can replace a faulty kickdown switch and also create the perfect smoky eye.

  I drive with the windows open, and the warm air blows through the cab of the truck. It smells like grass and tar from the recently repaved road. Reaching into the glove box, I take out a packet of cigarettes. Camels. The same brand Great-Grandfather Sam smoked. I remove one and light it with the dashboard lighter. I take a drag and let the smoke fill my lungs, then blow it out.

  I don’t really smoke. Only once in a while when I’m driving late at night like this. Then I imagine that the swirling smoke exhaled from my mouth forms a ghostly shape and that the other Sam—the one I never met but whose name and eyes I have—is sitting in the cab with me, his arm on the edge of the door as we travel down the road.

  I finish the cigarette right before I get home. Sam’s ghost swirls away in the wind, and when I pull the truck up in front of the house, I’m alone again. I walk to the back door, which leads directly into the kitchen. Inside, my grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother are seated around the table. Each one has a tall glass of strawberry Nehi in front of her, and they’re playing cards.

  “It’s too hot to live,” says Hank.

  “There’s peach pie on the counter,” Starletta informs me.

  “Gin!” crows Clodine, throwing down her cards. Millard Fillmore, her ancient brown Chihuahua, is sitting in her lap. He opens one eye, sees that no one is offering him anything to eat, and goes back to sleep.

  “Where’s Dad?” I ask, considering the pie.

  “In the trailer,” Hank answers. “You lucked out.”

  “I’m not that late,” I say, taking a plate from the cupboard and spooning a piece of pie on it. “It’s just past midnight.”

  I’d ask them what they’re doing up, but I already know the answer. They almost never sleep, not for more than a couple of hours a night anyway. They’ll probably be in this same spot when I get up in the morning, only they’ll have swapped t
he sodas for cups of coffee, and the pie for donuts covered in powdered sugar.

  I pick up the pie, kiss each of them on the cheek, and go upstairs. My room is on the third floor, which is actually the attic, and which I have to myself. My father mostly lives in an old Airstream trailer parked behind the house. He comes inside to eat, but he says sleeping in a house with too many people makes him dream their dreams, so he prefers to be in the trailer.

  I go inside, shut the door, and set the pie on top of the stack of books on my bedside table. I get undressed and sit on the edge of the bed, eating the pie. It’s super sweet, and I wonder if I’ll regret having so much sugar before I try to sleep, but it’s so good that I actually think about going downstairs for another piece.

  Instead, I lie on my bed. On the floor beside it is a telephone, the old-fashioned kind with an actual dial. I pick it up and place it on my stomach, then turn off the light so that the room is dark except for the little bit of moonlight that comes in through the window.

  I run my fingers over the dial until one of the holes feels right, then I turn it. I do this nine more times, press the receiver to my ear, and wait. When the ringing starts, I hold my breath. After four rings, a man’s voice says, “Hello?”

  “Tell me a story,” I say.

  “Who is this?”

  “Tell me a story.”

  There’s a pause, then the man says, “Asshole,” and the line goes dead.

  I put the receiver back in the cradle and set the phone on the floor. I’m disappointed, but not surprised. Most people don’t respond. I guess they don’t have stories to tell.

  Two

  “How many toads in Millard Fillmore’s water dish today?” Starletta asks.

  I open the kitchen door and glance at the bowl sitting in the grass beside the steps.

  “Five,” I report.

  Starletta looks at Clodine, who is pulling the chocolate sprinkles off of a cruller. “What’s five mean, Ma?” she asks.

  Clodine shrugs. “Hank is better at prognostication,” she says, pinching the sprinkles between her thumb and forefinger and dropping them into her coffee mug. “I always forget what the numbers signify.”