by Maye McPhail
Stormé
I
am dancing. I am dancing and I am made of sweat and colored lights and the pulse of an unfamiliar beat, darkness chased away by alcohol and a familiar stranger’s fingers curled around mine. I have danced through this city of neon and smoke for two days now, never having felt quite this far away from the Louisiana of my childhood and the darkened theaters of my youth. I am running. I am back in New Orleans and the air is damp and thick, a gang of white kids at my tail – or are they black kids this time, it doesn’t even matter. The child of a wealthy white man and his dark-skinned maid; in New Orleans, I am always running. The hand I am holding tugs me towards the bar. Sit down, Stormé. Have another drink with me, Stormé. She’s an aerialist, she says, have I ever seen a trapeze? I am nineteen and standing in front of a tall man with at top hat and a goatee. He pulls the hat from his head and wipes the oil off his forehead, shaking his palm as beads of sweat fall onto the grass. Excuse me, I say again, I was wondering if you have any work I can do. His eyes burn into me, burn into my men’s dress shirt and chopped-off hair, burn into my soul and the sickness within, the dark afflictions I cannot disguise any more than my neither-here-nor-there skin tone. The ringmaster laughs. Honey, have you tried contacting a drag revue? I tell the aerialist I think I’ve had enough for the night and push my way to the front of the club, not caring if she follows. But she does, slipping her hand into mine again as we break out into the New York City air. Noise leaks out of the other bars along Christopher Street, laughter and fragmented music and 1:30 a.m. drunken laughter. The cacophony seeps into my mind, filling my thoughts with an incessant buzzing as the aerialist leads me past trembling bar after dilapidated storefront. The idiocy of it all! People like me laughing in Greenwich Village, drinking in Greenwich Village, running away to Greenwich Village
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