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It had been a surprisingly quick trip north, Destiny reminisced so many years later. But it wasn'’t Mariano, as the Cuban guards had hoped, but the brother-in-law who gave him a lesson in catechism, going out of his way to explain Sain't Dimas, for whom the yacht had been named.

“He was the good thief,” he said, “died on a cross just like Jesus, on the same day, with him. Patron sain't of criminals. Bet you didn'’t know criminals had a patron sain't, huh? Well, Sain't Dimas repented at the last minute, surrendered, and so Jesus said he’d take him to Paradise. It’s what we Catholics call baptism by desire.”

Sitting in her kitchen now, Destiny remembered the helter skelter arrival in Key West and the resettlement unexpectedly negotiated for him by the gruff Mariano. In a matter of weeks, Dago Fors found himself sponsored through a church in Chicago’s trendy Lake View neighborhood, living in a spare room belonging to an elderly white gay man who practically licked his lips at the sight of him.

Mariano was assigned to a small but thriving parish in a South Side Mexican barrio. As soon as he left, the elderly white man immediately took Dago by the hand around the apartment, explaining exactly how he expected each room to be cleaned and with what products. He lingered lovingly over an antique bureau and demonstrated the gentle rubbing action to be employed with the special cloth and lemon oil. He also seemed to think that Dago’s penis should be grateful enough to stand on command and insert accordingly.

“He thinks he hit the lottery!” Dago complained to Mariano that night, whispering into the kitchen phone now that the elderly man was asleep. “Somebody to clean his toilet and fuck him too. This isn’t my idea of freedom!”

Mariano showed up the next day, accepting a cup of coffee from the elderly man, who nodded enthusiastically as he explained that these were difficult days of transition. The old man was aghast as Mariano delivered his sermon, with Dago prim and still across from the two of them at the kitchen table. The elderly man, his hand shaking, assured them both that his largesse had been lost in translation. On his way out, Mariano gave Dago a stern, annoyed look.

That night the elderly man made himself a scrumptious beef brisket, heaping mounds of creamy mashed potatoes doused in butter beside it. It was not by any stretch a gourmet meal, though it was a particularly hearty one. Dago watched him devour it, his mouth flooding, his own plate empty. When Dago reached for a roll, the elderly man slapped his hand, surprisingly hard, and suggested that if he wanted a roll, if he wanted anything at all, Dago could clean the mess in the kitchen, bloody cutting boards and green stems, peelings and greasy foil scattered all over the counters. Later, in the privacy of the spare room, a determined Dago took a shoelace from a boot he’d found in the hall closet and tied the tightest, most arduous knot he could in its very center. He did this over and over, until it was hard as a pebble.

“Sain't Dimas,” he whispered in the dark, remembering the prayer that Mariano’s dissident brother-in-law had taught him on the yacht, “I will not undo this knot from around your balls until you return to me my way, my path, my fate.”

The reporter—her name was Zoe Pino, an understandable reduction, Destiny would find out later, from Zozima Castro Pino—already knew most of his arrival story. She’d drawn its outline in an email that made the jaunt across the waters seem considerably more adventurous, yet abbreviated it into one solid paragraph. Destiny knew that what Zoe wanted now was the story of how Dago Fors had transformed himself from a little nobody Cuban wetback to something of an international drag legend. But she didn'’t just want a recitation of facts, of this-happened-then-this-happened. She already knew about all the pageants Destiny had won, she could list all her titles and claims to fame. She had Destiny’s lines memorized from her cameo appearances in The Garden at Midnight, a film based on a murder mystery that ended up getting much greater box office than anyone could have suspected. Destiny had turned that into a flurry of talk show appearances, in English and Spanish, and even set up a website that sold DVDs of her performances, a beauty booklet she’d penned, and assorted Destiny accessories, like T-shirts and lunch boxes.

Zoe had immersed herself so completely in the minutiae of something so incredibly niched that she’d said, as casually as if she were asking a waiter for a tall drink of water, “Destiny, I think you’re even bigger than David de Alba,” who was really the greatest of them all and who, like Destiny, was a Cuban who had gotten his professional start in Chicago. Of course, David had never been to La Caverna; David, who could pass as Judy Garland’s reflection, would have never in his life set foot in La Caverna.

Dago Fors had always been very, very good at one thing: being a drag queen. He wasn'’t a cross-dresser, he wasn'’t a female impersonator; he wasn'’t confused. He was a marvelously talented performer, an impressive six feet tall, with style and imagination and just enough restrain't to give off an air of enduring elegance. No bookkeeping or waiting tables for him, this was all he knew how to do, all that he’d ever done.

In Havana he’d gotten to practice his skills due to uncommon good luck. Sure, there were tons of underground drag shows, something pieced together at somebody’s apartment until an intolerant neighbor turned them in. But his real showcase had been a lunchtime show, performed completely under the auspices of the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. It was conveniently chaired by a friend’s aunt, whose husband was a high-ranking military officer blackmailed to okay the whole thing. It turned out that Dago’s friend’s aunt had found out her husband was having an affair with the wife of an even higher-ranking officer and was now using the info to get him to do pretty much whatever she wanted, including lending his official imprimatur to the lunchtime drag extravaganza. As a result, for two years Dago had been free to be himself—or whomever he wanted to be—for ninety minutes every Monday to Friday.

The show took place at a worker’s cafeteria across the street from the Presidential Palace, right in the middle of the city, accessible to anyone who had the time and inclination to come. There was no stage per se, just a space opened up by pushing the long lunchroom tables together. This discouraged complicated choreography but really put the premium on presence. Moreover, without stage lights, and with the light of day pouring in unfiltered, the queens really had to be extraordinary to make magic in so naked a place. For Dago, it was a grueling but exuberant apprenticeship. Nothing would ever be as hard again. Nothing would ever require so much of his psyche and heart.

In Havana back then, all the girls loved to do Celia Cruz, the exiled queen of salsa. It was not that Celia was particularly beautiful, because she wasn'’t at all, but her music was saucy and her costumes, even then, interplanetary. Lots of queens also liked Garland, of course, and Barbra Streisand and Marilyn Monroe. But the girls of color tended to go for Celeste Mendoza, who wore towering African wraps on her head and rivaled Celia for sheer rhythmic audacity, or Juana Bacallao, who had a nice ghetto thing going and was a lot of fun.

For Dago there really was only one choice: Moraima Secada, also known as La Mora. A gorgeous mulatta, a little richer in color than Dago, she’d begun as a member of a famous quartet but went off on her own to record a style known in Cuba as filin, a kind of over-the-top ballad in which both lyric and melody worked from simple melancholia to unfettered tragedy in about three and a half minutes.

Her style was sui generis: She sang with a stern face, as if she were incandescent with rage. She would tilt her head up, press her lips together, and raise her arm, fist clenched. But as she brought up her trembling limb, her fingers would slowly open, almost against her will, as if all fortune could take flight. La Mora was so intense that after her husband was killed in the terrorist bombing of a Cuban airline on its way back from Panama, she still kept her nightclub engagement that night in Havana, the only crack in her otherwise militant façade a suppressed sob, like a hiccup.