Chapter 1

Acknowledgements

The rickety lean-to club under the train tracks was drenched in the glittering raindrop refractions of blue spotlight off blue sequins. The lyrics of “September in the Rain,” swinging with a nostalgia only Dinah Washington could imbue, nudged some to reach for the little umbrellas they imagined adorned their cocktails. No one was disappointed, though, at the lack of fruity drinks or paper garnishes; it wasn’t actual rain, after all. Cheap beer and plenty of it had made The Crossing famous, and the sticky tables-for-one overflowed with empties-for-three. When you drink to forget, pineapple juice just gets in the way.

Midnight Eaton, Santa Fe’s premier plus-sized Latina Dinah Washington impersonator, sashayed through her lip-sync of the bluesy, boozy lament to Once Upon a Time, filling the room with bouncing blue lightning every time she gave the mountains of her moneymaker a shake. It wasn’t a drag bar per se, but a gang of dudes in dresses with a boom box was a lot cheaper than hiring a band, and The Crossing’s “live entertainment” packed ‘em in on a Friday night in a way that ESPN on the bar’s one lopsided-hanging television never had.

There wasn’t much of a “scene”—when Danny Hanrahan was looking for action, he did better as decoration on a patio around the Plaza, his painstakingly pedicured size sixteens casually propped on the railing the better to snag a passing size queen. No, the boozers came to The Crossing to booze, and the hardcore cadre of men chasing men who look like women didn’t come looking for a paragon of The Mouth-Breathing WASP Dude like Danny. But if he was looking for a place to grab a beer or two after a long day of litigating—or after an unexpectedly short night of Wham, Bam, Gotta Get Back to the Ma’am with a tourist—The Crossing hit the spot. The beer was cheap, the vibe was chill, and if he needed a break from “Blurred Lines” blaring over the dance floor every twenty minutes, the music was reliably eclectic. Midnight Eaton dug deep into the Dinah Washington songbook and kept it swingin’. Phyllis Crackin had a seemingly endless supply of parodies, mash-ups, and incongruous covers, the unearthing of which Danny imagined must have kept her on YouTube for days at a time. Rose Marian Thyme actually played her own guitar over the vocal tracks to folk faves like Phoebe Snow and the Indigo Girls. She kept her makeup to a minimum, in keeping with the hippie tradition, and looked like nothing so much as a dude in a wig, but had garnered a small, staunch fan base that cheered her strumming from the edges of their seats.

Shortly, Midnight sashayed off the stage with a fist full of singles to half-hearted applause. It was September and it had been raining all day. Danny threw out a supportive “woot” as a nod to the clever song choice and stretched his absurdly long legs into the darkness of the corner of the bar he’d staked out for himself. Ernie, The Crossing’s cocktail waiter who gave every indication that he’d been shuffling across this same floor when the first conquistadors had arrived at the end of the Santa Fe Trail, had set another two dollar beer in front of him, and he was in no little danger of falling asleep when the emcee—taking a short breather from his duties as cook, bar back, and bouncer, all five-foot-three of him—bade the audience put their hands together for “Miss. Raima Reason!”

In much the same way as the blue refractions from Midnight Eaton’s Goliath-sized gown had drenched the bar in the same rain and blues as Dinah had drenched her rendition of Midnight’s song of choice, so too did the whirling, glittering, tinkling waves of red, orange, and yellow immediately brighten the mood of the entire bar as the lithe and lovely Raima Reason spun onto the dance floor in a sunshiny shower of silk. Even the professional despondent drunks shifted their attention momentarily from the bottoms of their bottles to the swirling dervish whose high energy would not be ignored.

Like everyone else with a popcorn popper and a subscription to Netflix, Danny had seen maybe three Indian movies in his day, two of those in soundless snippets while out to lunch with his secretary Monica at Bombay Buffet. But he knew enough to recognize the high trill of a Hindi songstress, and the fast, flashy hands and shimmying shoulders from a Bollywood blockbuster. Her pajama-looking pantsuit was aflame with glitter, and she commanded yards and yards of brilliant silk scarves like a circus animal trainer—they swirled around her, swooped over the bar, skimmed between tables like a flock of trained phoenix, every head in the bar riveted to the trail of their tails. Ink black hair fell to her waist in ringlets, her eyes evoked an anime princess, and her lips hit the hills and valleys of every lush, foreign syllable.

Part of the reason Danny straightened in his seat was out of respect for the way this girl played the game. She jumped and danced and spun to music that no one knew, at once snagging the audience’s ear and unraveling any expectations around her need to know the words. She was barefoot, Danny noticed, jingling delicate anklet bells with every step, in keeping with her lush costume while freeing herself from what Danny imagined must be the torture of teetering around in heels. As a performer, she had legitimate skill, but it was the appreciation of her willingness to work a gimmick that got Danny up out of his seat. He’d never tipped one of The Crossing’s queens before, but Raima Reason worked hard for the money, and Danny, himself a tireless and detail-oriented legal foot soldier, firmly believed professionalism merited reward. He waited his turn in a retinue of admirers, then held out a five-dollar bill in a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. Raima gave him a sparkling wink of thanks mid-twirl without breaking stride, then when she spun off the stage, Danny bailed.

She was pretty hot, he supposed. You know, if you were into that sort of thing. That is to say, underneath her wig and her sparkly makeup, it looked like “she” was probably a trim and athletic little dude, which was decidedly Danny’s style. But he wasn’t going to hang around like a groupie up some alley at the stage door with his autograph book. He liked them trim and athletic, sure, but “dude” was pretty much the operative word where Danny’s tastes were concerned. The Crossing was fun for a beer or two, and he could definitely appreciate drag both as a playful art form and as a cultural cornerstone, but Danny was above all a guy’s guy. So what if she was hot as a boy? It’s not like he was going to fall in love with a drag queen. 1: Danny

He wasn’t any kind of “certifiable” giant, you understand. It’s not like he was being stalked by paparazzi from the Guinness Book of World Records. But unless your name was Jack and you grew up with a beanstalk in your back yard, Danny Hanrahan was probably the biggest guy you’d ever seen. Standing flat on his bare feet he brushed six-foot-ten, and everything about him was outsized. His youngest brother Matt, at six-foot-three the family shrimp, had run to fat pretty early in the game, but if his dad, his uncles, and his towering eighty-three year-old grandfather were any predictors, Danny probably wouldn’t. The little pooch of overindulgence he hadpopped was undetectable in all but the most intimate circumstances, then adding only an irresistible shade of vulnerability to an already must-have body. If you imagined viewing a scene from A Day in Danny’s Life the way you might view a photograph in a magazine, he looked like nothing so much as a generically pleasant athletic twink from Central Casting who’d been excised from the photo, dressed in an expensive suit, zoomed to about 125%, and then reinserted. He punched in right around two-eighty, but it fit him like 165 pounds of muscle. His thick-measuring waist was proportionately slender, his snowshoe-sized feet in balance and unremarkable in the aggregate.