Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter
Twenty-One
Nothing conveys the sincerity of an apology like meeting the person you’ve wronged at a porno theater. At least, that was what Danny was banking on.
After some finagling, he’d convinced his mom that Astoria’s show was a) school sanctioned and b) mandatory.
To be fair, Astoria had crafted her latest performance art piece, Hysterical Blondeness, as her thesis project for the Fine Arts Winter Showcase, but instead of the lobby at LaGuardia, Astoria had booked the Bijou Cinema, one of Nina’s dad’s porn palaces in the East Village.
Seeing it as his last chance to fix things before Christmas break, Danny headed into the City that Saturday afternoon, rehearsing his apologies.
He boarded the R train at South Ferry, took a seat on one of the gray graffitied benches, and tugged on his Sony Walkman headphones, the Rent tape cued up for Act Two.
He drowned out the clattering sounds of the subway with the voices of his audio friends—Mimi, Roger, Maureen, and Angel, who never needed explanations or begrudged him for fast-forwarding through the sad parts.
As Mark and Joanne schemed about breaking into the padlocked apartment, something caught Danny’s eye.
In just a few months, Danny had mastered the art of wearing blinders on the subway.
You had to. You’d go crazy taking stock of every subway preacher, mariachi band, or public urinator.
But today he let his blinders slip just enough to know that someone needed his help.
“I said, hey,” the man barked. “You not hear me? You deaf or something?”
Danny looked down the subway car at a man with a mustache and a faded Yankees cap.
He was hunched over, his arms leaning on his thighs like he was about to hike a football, staring menacingly at the woman across from him with the orange hair.
Danny sat up, tugging down his earphones and pressing the gray Pause button.
Something about the woman caught Danny’s attention.
It wasn’t just her Crayola-orange curls—those were common enough in Lower Manhattan.
It was the way her expression hid behind her prescription aviators, guarded and distant.
It was Valerie Toxin, Astoria’s A-number-one talent crush.
Danny was certain. He almost didn’t recognize her without her usual zebra leggings or googly-eyed coat.
She looked practically normal in a puffer jacket and corduroys, clutching a Gristedes bag and pretending to ignore the asshole sitting across from her.
“I like your hair,” the mustache man said.
Valerie, clearly wearing a pair of blinders of her own, said nothing, looking down at her shopping bag.
“I said, I like your hair, lady,” Mustache said a little louder.
“Thank you,” Valerie whispered to her groceries, perhaps hoping this would be enough for him to move on.
“What’d you say?” Mustache barked. “I can’t hear you.”
Valerie said nothing, just kept staring at her groceries, her face counting down the milliseconds until she could get away from this man.
“You know,” Mustache said in a gravelly voice, “your hair would be a lot prettier if you didn’t put all that stuff in it.”
Valerie kept staring at her groceries.
“A pretty girl like you doesn’t need to do all that.”
The mustache man stood up, grabbing the metal pole between them, steadying himself against the lurching floor.
“I don’t get why girls always try to do that shit.”
Danny glanced around the train. The other passengers were absorbed in their books, staring out the window, or fixated on the grimy floor—anything to avoid having to be accountable for yet another helpless woman and yet another drunk guy.
“Men hate that shit,” Mustache said, pointing a finger at Valerie’s head and letting a tobacco-stained grin spread across his face. “I bet you shave your pussy, too, am I right?”
The man let out a phlegmy laugh that ricocheted through the train car like a rusty hinge.
Valerie craned her neck toward the subway doors.
When the hell is the next station stop? Like a vengeful god, the train slowed down before grinding to a stop, mid-tunnel.
This finally caught the attention of the other passengers, who looked up just as the conductor’s voice crackled through the speaker.
“We are delayed because of train traffic. We will be moving shortly.”
Valerie’s cool, composed expression tightened.
“Am I right?” the man said, holding on to the pole and stretching out his arm so his face was only inches from Valerie’s. “You love to shave that pussy, don’t you?”
Danny looked around. The other riders had gone back to doing whatever it was that they were doing.
Seriously? Is no one going to say anything?
“Why don’t you show me, pretty lady,” Mustache stage-whispered into her ear.
“Hey!” Danny shouted, surprised by the sound of his own voice. “Leave her alone!”
Mustache and Valerie both turned toward the voice, cueing Danny’s heart to pump double time as Mustache’s face twisted in rage.
“The fuck you say?”
Danny looked over to Valerie, whose eyes seemed to be wavering between fearful and thankful.
“I said, leave her alone,” Danny said in a voice somewhat shaky and a little higher-pitched than intended. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“The hell you know what she wants?” Mustache shouted back, spittle forming in the corners of his mouth.
“Come on, man,” Danny said, trying a more conciliatory tone. “We all just wanna get off this train. Just cool it.”
“Just cool it,” the man parroted back in a mocking voice. “How ’bout you suck my dick?”
Danny looked around the train. This time everyone was paying attention—the guy with the book now held open on his lap, the old woman no longer looking out the window, and the man no longer staring at the floor. Everyone was watching, but no one was daring to join in.
“Just back off, asshole,” Danny said firmly.
“Why don’t you make me, faggot.”
There was that word. That word that had been written in Sharpie on his locker and hollered from car windows as he waited at the bus stop, that word that his dad had called his mother’s brother and anyone sissified enough to wear sunscreen, that word that had been shouted by cops and men with bats, the last thing you heard before they swung.
And on that subway car, on a cold December Saturday, somewhere between City Hall and Canal Street, Danny decided that he was never going to let anyone call him that word ever again.
“The fuck did you say?” Danny said, stretching out his long Victorio legs and straightening his back taller than the MetLife Tower.
He stood up from the bench and rolled back his shoulders, ten times broader than his father’s, and puffed out his chest like two S44 bus tires, the subway floor shaking with each crunching step.
“How ’bout you shut your ashtray mouth and leave her alone before I beat the shit out of you?
” Danny said, summoning the strength of every St. Pete’s linebacker, superhero comic, and drag queen he’d ever seen take the stage on a Friday night, his Staten Island accent more unrestrained than he’d dared even in Pippin.
“Hey, relax,” the puny mustache man stuttered, now cowering in the shadow of Danny Victorio. “I was just jokin’ around.”
The man’s prayers were answered, because right at that moment, the subway motors hummed back to life and the train crept into the station, and when the doors opened, the mustached man scrambled out onto the platform, bolting up the stairs as though he felt lucky to have escaped with his life.
“Thank you,” the woman with the orange hair said to Danny, now back to his five-foot-nine-size self, thin, with headphones hanging from his neck and a collection of musical theater tapes tucked into his bag.
“Of course,” Danny said in a soft voice. “Asshole.”
“It’s okay,” Valerie said with a sigh, releasing her death grip on the rumpled brown grocery bag. “Just the price of living in New York, right?”
“Nah,” Danny said, shaking his head. “People don’t get to act like that and get away with it.”
“Right,” Valerie said, peering up at Danny through her aviators. “Well, in any case, thank you. Wish I could repay you.”
A smile began to tug at the corners of Danny’s mouth, an idea beginning to take shape.
“There might be one thing.”
“You sure this is okay?” Danny asked Valerie as they arrived at the theater on East Fourth, a handwritten poster taped to the otherwise unmarked black door.
“It’s the least I can do,” Valerie said, smiling. “Besides, it’s good for me to scope out the competition.”
The stairway to the basement was steep and smelled of burnt coffee and bleach.
At the bottom, they entered a lobby painted traffic-cone orange.
Retro movie posters decorated the walls with names like Scared Stiff, Powertool, and Top of the Class.
Above a plexiglass window, a sign read “Bijou Film Forum” in art deco letters: “Hours 8 p.m. to 4 a.m.—Preview Booths Feat. the Hottest in Male Hollywood.” Beneath it, a handwritten sign announced “MAIN STAGE! Astoria Ditmars: Hysterical Blondeness.” The lobby was empty except for an unplugged solitaire arcade game, a mounted TV flickering a channel of static, and an elderly man sitting behind the window who wordlessly waved them through a set of turnstiles.
Valerie and Danny entered the theater, pretending like this was just business as usual, and perhaps for Valerie, it was.