Proud Mentee
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| Barbara Ess - Untitled (Barbie Doll), 1991 |
[...] Angie Xtravaganza was a loving mother, if a little peevish about expressing her softer emotions and remorseless in her enforcement of the rules. As the children clamored around her–as Þfty-plus grown men called her Ma and vied for her attention–she sometimes lifted her face to the ceiling and hollered, "I should have had abortions." But she never lashed out at the kids with any real seriousness, and the kids knew never to let her get too angry. They teased her and, if teasing didn’t work, they simply obeyed.
Says Frank Xtravaganza, thirty-one, another of Angie’s children, "Angie would always scream your name across a room. Her voice was so shrill, it’d cut right through you, and we’d go, ‘Ma, those hormones didn’t help your voice any.’ She’d be sitting on the sofa, and she’d laugh and go, ‘Shut up, you damn butch queen, and get me a cup of coffee before I get up from here and beat your ass.’"
She was joking. But still, somebody always got her the coffee.
Angie’s AIDS was diagnosed in 1991, when she was 25. Within a year she was going regularly to St. Claire’s Hospital to have the ßuid drained from her lungs, and she felt so depleted she moved out of her own apartment to live with Frank on East 94th Street. Angie and Frank used to break the night together back when she was still Angel Segarra. During the six months she lived with him she grew emaciated. She was covered with Karposi’s sarcoma lesions. But she still wore her trademark dangle earrings. She put on makeup every day, and got a wig when her hair started falling out from chemotherapy. Throughout her illness she remained stern, bossy, affectionate, and reluctant about showing too much emotion.
Frank recalls, "Angie hated to be patronized, even when she was sick. She’d say to people, ‘You’re just being nice to me because I’m dying.’ I saw her whimper maybe twice, and it lasted, like, three minutes. I’d cry and go through changes and she’d say, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do this to me.’"
A mother, to Angie’s mind, was regal. She didn’t get weepy with her children, or they with her. She loved them. She ruled them. She took care of them. End of story.
"The last time she went out," Frank says, "it was St. Valentine’s Day. I’d had a date, but he stood me up, and I was bummed about it. Angie, she was really sick by then, but she said, ‘Miss Thing, we’re going out.’ She put on makeup and her wig. She wore jeans and a top that showed her belly button, which was about the only place by then that didn’t have k.s. lesions. She teased up her wig, sprayed it, and we went to the Sound Factory Bar."
A drag mother will not only buck you up when you’re feeling rejected. Unlike most other mothers, a drag mother will spray her wig and take you out herself.
Around that time, Hector Xtravaganza was going home from work when he heard a couple of queens from a rival house talking about Angie. He was waiting at the light on Sixth Avenue. He’d been thinking about Angie–those days he thought of little else and suddenly he heard her name.
"Oh, Angie, she’s a bitch. I wish she’d hurry up and die."
It was a couple of kids with dyed orange ßattops, being hateful as only kids can be; waving their cigarettes like Gloria Swanson, throwing some shade on a Tuesday night.
Hector ßipped. He grabbed one of the kids by his clear plastic jacket, threw him down and kicked him, hard enough to send a bright thread of blood unfurling onto the pavement. The other one screamed and started to run, but Hector caught his shoulder, spun him around and pummeled him in the chest and face until the kid crumpled and knelt quietly in the street, bleeding onto the Versace silk shirt he’d been planning to wear to the upcoming ball.
Hector started seeing a psychologist, who ordered him to stay away from Angie during her last days. Watching Angie die was too much for him, the shrink maintained. After all Hector’s years of scrapping around, this was the thing he might not survive.
Some of the other children visited her faithfully. Some were too frightened by the prospect of seeing her sick. Up to the end she advised her kids about what to wear to balls, and she was willing to do it by telephone with the ones who couldn’t bring themselves to see her in the ßesh. She claimed she didn’t mind.
"She was a mother right up to the end," Frank says, and he’s probably right. Like a lot of mothers, she was comforted by some of her children and abandoned by others. Like a lot of mothers, she seemed to have carved an identity out of a devotion so unstinting it borders on the inhuman.
During her last weeks Angie liked to say, à la Piaf, "I have no regrets." She usually added, "No drag queen has carried herself the way I have. I’m not a beauty but I’ve got class."
She died alone, at night, in the hospital.
I had an appointment for a second interview with Dorian the week following our Þrst conversation, but she had to cancel again, pleading ill health. We agreed to get together when she was feeling up to it. That was the last time I spoke to her. I left messages on her answering machine, which she never returned. I knew, from some of the children, that she was in and out of St. Luke’s Hospital.
She faded quickly over the summer. Her mind frayed and started to untangle. She grew sulky and silent; she wanted few visitors. Having been generous and expansive, a vast presence, all her life, in death she curled herself up like a Þst. To the children’s chagrin she offered no deathbed wisdom. She grew angry and incoherent. She didn’t part the fog grandly, in a gown of white feathers. She died at home, with Leo the sweet-tempered man-child and his brother, whom she’d taken in after his own parents kicked him out.
In Paris Is Burning, she delivers the Þlm’s coda as she applies makeup to a face that looks as much like the pocked, ravaged surface of a planet as it does like ßesh.
"I always had hopes of being a big star," she says. "But as you get older, you aim a little lower. Everybody wants to make an impression, some mark upon the world. Then you think, you’ve made a mark on the world if you just get through it, and a few people remember your name. Then you’ve left a mark. You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better just to enjoy it. Pay your dues, and just enjoy it. If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you."
After Angie died her ashes were sent back to the South Bronx, with the name Angel Segarra on the plaque. It seems that our pasts have a way of reeling us back in, no matter what we do or how far we travel. Still, our created selves, however short their shelf lives, can leave legacies behind. They are small legacies, but they’re legacies nonetheless, and ones that we could never have offered if we’d just stayed home.
Hector, for instance, has survived Angie’s death. He’s got a job with a fur company in Soho, an apartment of his own in Brooklyn. He keeps what he calls a "death album," Þlled with memorabilia of everyone he loves who’s died.
He himself is planing on living. He’s covered a lot of ground since the old days, when he slept in the streets and poked around in dumpsters for food. He says he’ll never try suicide again.
His life is far from easy. Hardly anyone’s is. But he seems, in some fundamental way, to have been healed.
"Angie was a bitch and everything," he says. "But she was the only one that could tell me, ‘Shut the fuck up,’ and I would. She believed in me when I didn’t believe in me. We all felt that way. She believed in us."
"She was my gay mother, my friend. She put so much shit in my head, just the slap of love. And it woke me up."
After I Þnished writing this, several months after Dorian’s death, a few of her former children were going through her sewing room looking for Halloween costumes when they found a trunk that contained a mummiÞed human body. It was wrapped in strips of leatherette and covered with baking soda. It proved to be the corpse of a black man in his thirties, who had died of gunshot wounds and who had been dead more than twenty years (which meant the body had been moved out of and into several different apartments). Pinned to the body was a note that said, "This poor soul broke into my apartment and I was forced to shoot him."
Nothing more is known, although the discovery did get Dorian’s picture on the cover of New York Magazine, under the words, "The Drag Queen Had a Mummy in Her Closet."
Ah, Dorian. One last dramatic gesture, from beyond the grave.
end of The Slap of Love - Michael Cunningham
in Open City. 6. 1996
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