"And," Gon Rhea says with her mouth full of chewed-up Chinese, "and every time she came home from the hospital with her forehead broken and realigned or her Adam's apple shaved down to a ladylike nothing, who do you think took care of her for those two years?"
Jump to nay folks asleep in their bed across mountains and deserts away from here. Jump to them and their telephone and years ago some crazy man, some screeching awful pervert, calling them and screaming that their son was dead. Their son they didn't want, Shane, he was dead of AIDS and this man wouldn't say where or when and then he laughed and hung up.
Jump back to inside Suite 15-G and Die Rhea waving an old picture of me in my face and saying, "This is how she wanted to look, and tens of thousands of Katty Kathy dollars later, this is how she looks."
Gon Rhea says, "Hell. Brandy looks better than that."
"We're the ones who love Brandy Alexander," says Pie Rhea.
"But you're the one Brandy loves because you need her," says Die Rhea.
Gon Rhea says, "The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person." She says, "Brandy will leave us if she thinks you need her, but we need her, too.”
The one I love is locked in the trunk of a car outside with a stomach full of Valiums, and I wonder if he still has to pee. My brother I hate is come back from the dead. Shane's being dead was just too good to be true.
First the exploding hairspray can didn't kill him.
Then our family couldn't just forget him.
Now even the deadly AIDS virus has failed me.
My brother is nothing but one bitter fucking disappointment after another.
You can hear a door opening and shutting somewheres, then another door, then another door opens and Brandy's there saying, "Daisy, honey," and steps into the smoke and cha
cha music wearing this amazing sort of Bill Blass First Lady type of traveling suit made out of solid kelly green trimmed with white piping and green high heels and a really smart green purse. On her head is an eco-incorrect tasty sort of spray of rainforest green parrot feathers made into a hat, and Brandy says, "Daisy, honey, don't point a gun at the people who I love."
In each of Brandy's big ring-beaded hands is a sassy off- white American Tourister luggage. "Give us a hand, somebody. These are just the royal hormones." She says, "My clothes I need are in the other room."
To Sofonda, Brandy says, "Miss Pie Rhea, I have just got to get."
To Kitty, Brandy says, "Miss Die Rhea, I've done everything we can do for now. We've done the scalp advance-merit, the brow lift, the brow bone shave. We've done the trachea shave, the nose contouring, the jawline contouring, the forehead realignment ..."
Like it's any wonder I didn't recognize my old mutilated brother.
To Vivienne, Brandy says, "Miss Gon Rhea, I've got months left on my Real Life Training and I'm not spending them holed up here in this hotel."
Jump to us driving away with the Fiat Spider just piled with luggage. Imagine desperate refugees from Beverly Hills with seventeen pieces of matched luggage migrating cross- country to start a new life in the Okie Midwest. Everything very elegant and tasteful, one of those epic Joad family vacations, only backwards. Leaving a trail of cast-off accessories, shoes and gloves and chokers and hats to lighten their load so's they can cross the Rocky Mountains, that would be us.
This is after the police showed up, no doubt after the hotel manager called and said a mutilated psycho with a gun was menacing everybody up on the fifteenth floor. This is after the Rhea sisters ran all Brandy's luggage down the fire stairs. This is after Brandy says she has to go, she needs to think about things, you know, before her big surgery. You know. The transformation.
This is after I keep looking at Brandy and wondering,
Shane?
"It's just such a big commitment," Brandy says, "being a girl, you know. Forever."
Taking the hormones. For the rest of her life. The pills, the patches, the injections, for the rest of her life. And what if there was someone, just one person who would love her, who could make her life happy, just the way she was, without the hormones and make-up and the clothes and shoes and surgery? She has to at least look around the world a little. Brandy explains all this, and the Rhea sisters start to cry and wave and pile the American Touristers into the car.
And the whole scene would be just heartbreaking, and I would be boo-hooing too, if I didn't know Brandy was my dead brother and the person he wants to love him is me, his hateful sister, already plotting to kill him. Yes. Plotting me, plotting to kill Brandy Alexander. Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight.
Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.
Flash.
Just give me my first opportunity.
Flash.
Brandy behind the wheel, she turns to me, her eyes all spidery with tears and mascara, and says, "Do you know what the Benjamin Standard Guidelines are?"
Brandy starts the car and puts it in gear. She drops the parking brake and cranes her neck to see for traffic. She says, "I have to live one whole year on hormones in my new gender role before my vaginoplasty. They call it Real Life Training."
Brandy pulls out into the street and we're almost escaped. Police SWAT teams in chic basic black accessorized with tear gas and semiautomatic weapons are charging in past the doorman holding the door in his gold braid. The Rheas run after us, waving and throwing kisses and doing pretty much ugly bridesmaid behavior until they stumble, panting, in the street, their high heels shot to hell.
There's a moon in the sky. Office buildings are canyoned along either side of the street. There's still Manus in the trunk, and we're already putting gross distance between me and my getting caught.
Brandy puts her big hand open on my leg and squeezes.
Arson, kidnapping, I think I'm up to murder. Maybe all this will get me just a glimmer of attention, not the good, glorious kind, but still the national media kind.
Monster Girl Slays Secret Brother Gal Pal
"I've got eight months left to my R.L.T. year," Brandy says. "Think you can keep me busy for the next eight months?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Half my life I spend hiding in the bathrooms of the rich.
Jump back to Seattle, to the time Brandy and Seth and I are on the road hunting drugs. Jump to the day after the night we went to the Space Needle, where right now Brandy is laid out flat on a master bathroom floor. First I helped her off with her suit jacket and unbuttoned the back of her blouse, and now I'm sitting on a toilet overdosing Valiums as steady as Chinese water torture into her Plumbago mouth. The thing about Valiums, the Brandy girl says, is they don't kill the pain but at least you're not pissed off about being hurt.
"Hit me," Brandy says and makes a fish lips.
The thing about Brandy is she's got such a tolerance for drugs it takes forever to kill her. That, and she's so big, most of her being muscle, it would take bottles and bottles of anything.
I drop a Valium. A little baby-blue Valium, another powder blue Valium, Tiffany's light blue, like a gift from Tiffany's, the Valium falls end over end into Brandy's interior.
This suit I help Brandy out of, it's a Pierre Cardin Space Age style of just bold white, the straight tube skirt being fresh and sterile to just above her knees, the jacket being timeless and clinical in its simple cut and three-quarter sleeves. Her blouse underneath is sleeveless. Her shoes are box-toe white vinyl boots. It's an outfit you'd accessorize with a Geiger counter instead of a purse.