English was still hunting around in this battlefield for an empty seat. He found one, but somebody claimed it was taken. While people applauded the Spanish dancing singer, English located a chair near the bar, carried it overhead, trying to look as if he belonged here, and put it down where some people squeezed over this way and that to make room for him. He sat partly at their table and partly behind a supporting pole for the ceiling. He had to look on one side or the other of it to see anything. His subjects were only a couple of tables away.
The mistress of ceremonies was the one he liked the best. He’d already grasped that they wouldn’t be seeing any genuine females in this entertainment, but just the same she was a real woman, whatever her official gender. She was making a long thing out of introducing the next act, who was going to be Miss Shirley. “And I mean,” she said, “this is a fine, fine imitation. This girl has really, really worked on this act.” The MC wore her platinum hair in a matronly bun, but she was made up after the fashion of a chorus girl. Silver-sequined eye shadow fanned all the way up to her sketched-on eyebrows. Shivering golden earrings dangled. Her breasts were real. English had heard they did that with silicone injections. Her long midnight-blue and shiny dress clung to her paunch, but was kind. “Miss … Shirley!” she said at last, and bowed off. She was poised and full of grace, and he was rooting for her.
Miss Shirley was only a guy in a blond Brillo-style wig who dragged a teddy bear into the lights and lip-synced “The Good Ship Lollipop,” the scratchy original Shirley Temple version. But it was funny, and it made a big hit.
It was an amateur night. One by one they paraded themselves onto the stage and stalled there, brazen and embarrassed. The MC hung out onstage with a tall drink in her hand and said how badly these girls needed to be here, in a town where they could promenade along the streets in dresses, and get up on this stage and hide nothing about themselves. They were all in some kind of club, from places up and down the East Coast, and they were usually under tension, dressing up only in secret, and they needed this respite from the world. Some of them had wives in the audience. They were all living in a dorm-style situation in a couple of the hotels here in Provincetown. “They need you to see them,” she said. English noticed there were plenty of cross-dressers in the audience, too.
The air turned thick and hot, the applause grew a beard of loud voices and got all out of proportion to the quality of the miserable acts, which were almost all lip-synced. When the record got stuck or skipped, the performer would get wild-eyed, wondering how to cope, but the audience just cheered each one through these difficult moments. English’s brunette got up, snagging her fur jacket along with one hand, and was immediately lost outside the aura of the stagelights. He wanted to stay; he was having a nice time. But it turned out she was only visiting the bar behind them to get a drink. As for English, he drank nothing, because he considered himself on duty, until suddenly there was an apparition of a white-coated waiter before him, at which point he crossed the borders of sense, he couldn’t have said why, and waded out into the Scotch-and-water.
Next was a person whom English thought of as a cowboy, because by his flung-knee position, as he seated himself on a stool with his guitar, the man reminded English of nothing so much as a wrangler straddling a chair backward in the bunkhouse after a tough ride. His makeup had been washed away by sweat, and his coiffure was only a mess of hair drawn back into a ponytail by the use of a green rubber band. He was decidedly and happily masculine, but he happened to be wearing a Pop Art dress, with lightning bolts and whirling stars all over it, and black high heels, severe and schoolmarmish street shoes. This man played his guitar and sang, without benefit of a professional’s recording, a song he’d written himself about how his older sister had started dressing him up when he was a little boy. “And the prison of manhood stepped aside for me,” he sang, “and I could do all the things that only little girls could do. I could be loving. I could be soft. I could surrender and be weak.” It was a sad song. Everybody was very moved. He was a great favorite.
For English’s money, the atmosphere was better than in an actual show. The worst acts were the best, and the good ones were a relief. Just to reward each one for the feat of getting finished without expiring, the audience shouted and pounded on their small, circular tables, everyone crammed knock-kneed around these toadstools at an alcoholic tea party presided over by a steadily more and more inebriated duchess. English himself drank until he felt the floor shift. Everything was happening faster than it usually did — a cigarette seemed to last ten seconds — but the MC was taking a longer and longer time between acts now, seizing this chance to fill everybody in on most of her past accomplishments and giving them the benefit of her thinking on quite a range of issues, including the veiled meaning of their lives. “I had a man,” she remembered. “I had a man.” She raised her hands to put a stray lock of hair back into her bun with perfect movements, holding her elbows forward as only a woman would. “I had a man,” she sang with shyness. “But my man got drafted, and do you know, girls, he refused to tell them he was a fag?” Right, English thought, right for you, whatever I mean by that. He was feeling a great affection for all these people. Cut off by the sea from the steel mills and insurance companies who would never know them like this, they obviously felt a wholesome bond among themselves, the closeness of doomed cruisers on a sinking ship—“Do you know what I mean?” he asked one of the people he was sharing a table with, but he didn’t know at which station of his thoughts his mouth had got on. “Do you get it?” He’d lost count of his Scotch-and-waters.
The last act was going to be something special—“like I was, my dears, my dears — if you could have seen me!” the MC told them all. She wasn’t choked up with grief; she observed with humor the train of years as it left her behind. She conjured up for them her youthful self and presented this ghost as she might have presented a daughter whose loveliness even she was astonished by. “I was the seventeenth-highest-paid female impersonator in the world … Europe — of course the girls in Europe might have given me a little competition. But don’t you know, it might have been the other way, too — I might have given them a little competition, don’t you know? But I stayed in my own country.” She looked at the audience steadily, and English remembered, from his own experience in a high-school production, that she probably couldn’t see a single face. “Because I wanted to be Miss America.”
And in the same generous spirit, tainted only a little by matronly jealousy, she presented the young person whose future, she assured the audience, was assured.
This last performer was beautiful and smoldering and sexy, in a lacy black corset and garter belt, high heels, net stockings. First she did a number that was fast and was supposed to be funny, but nobody laughed, everyone only applauded endlessly. She was a gifted dancer. For her second act and the evening’s last number, she mimed a version of “My Funny Valentine.” English was a little mixed up about his feelings as he watched her, because he felt weak in the arms with yearning. He caught sight of the subject Marla Baker, who was kissing one of her friends while around them the crowd applauded a parade of the night’s performers, and he wished them well.