Daniel spun around, the tail of his dress making a bubble around his ankles. “I look good, don’t I?”
He was strutting across the living room to get another look at himself in the mirror when Marcell, completely confused by the entire scene, furrowed his little brow in wonder. “Mommy! Mommy!” he said, tapping my leg. “Why is Daniel dressed like a girl?”
“It’s Halloween, baby,” I said quickly, exchanging a knowing glance with Daniel. “He’s wearing a costume. Go on in the room.”
Hours later, Daniel was up on that stage, dancing and twirling as if his entire life counted on it. A few days after that, Daniel and I piled into my little raggedy Nissan Sentra and hightailed it over to a tattoo parlor, where the two of us would get our first ink. This was much more nerve-racking for us than any drag show spotlight; fulfilling the former wish brought joy, the latter was guaranteed to bring immense pain. Both of us were scared.
“Is this going to hurt?” I asked, settling into my tattoo artist’s chair as he sat next to me, poised with the tattoo gun over the section of the small of my back where he’d just drawn a small dove with an olive branch in his mouth. It was the perfect canvas—a place hidden from public view unless I wore a bikini or my shirt accidentally rode up to reveal it. That’s how I like my tattoos; each one is a piece of art with messages that are deeply meaningful, hidden in places that are just for me. I’ve gotten three others over the years, and am plotting a few more; namely, one featuring the names of both my father and son, and another that says, simply, “God is.” I’m an old pro now, but in the moments before I was to get the first, the whir of the gun made me and Marcell, whom I’d brought along because I didn’t have a babysitter, jump. I looked nervously over at Daniel, who was across the room in another artist’s chair, about to get the yin and yang symbol tattooed on his chest, and wondered if he was as scared as I was.
The tattoo artist, no doubt having felt the tremble of many bodies beneath his tattoo gun, looked at Marcell before he answered my question about the pain. “Is that your son?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“This tattoo isn’t going to hurt you,” he said, noting that the pain was much less intense than childbirth. “But it’s going to hurt him,” he said, nodding in Daniel’s direction.
When that needle hit my back, I was like, “Is this it?” The tattoo artist was right: compared with labor pains and pushing a human out of my loins, getting inked was a walk in the park. Daniel, on the other hand, was shrinking under his artist’s needle, crying like a little bitch.
God, I miss him. Only a month or so after our big LA adventure, in January 2007, my cousin passed away. I miss the camaraderie I had with him; he was my heart, and life just isn’t the same without him in it. But I am so grateful that we did get to spend that time together as adults, doing what brought him pure, unadulterated joy, completely trusting that I would guard his heart and ride with him, without judgment. This is what true friendship is made of. This is love.
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My girls Tracie, Guinea, Pam, Ptosha, and Jennifer know all my business, though they aren’t in the business, with the exception of Ptosha. They know my love and trust for them runs deep, and that feeling is certainly mutual. Our time together looks a lot like that Apple Music commercial in which I am featured alongside Mary J. Blige and Kerry Washington: lots of laughter and commiseration, good food and wine, great conversation, and, of course, music and dancing. We’ll lie out on the beach from sunup to can’t see on some of those days, and totally live the sloth life in the spa, getting ourselves rubbed and scrubbed into pure peacefulness.
I kicked off this tradition fairly early in my career. On one such occasion, my girls talked me into taking a weeklong jaunt to Cancún, despite my reservations. Know this: to a Californian, trips to Mexico happen so frequently that vacationing there can feel like you’ve packed up all your stuff just to go hang out in the suburbs of your own city. But my friends insisted and I needed the break, so Cancún it was. “All right,” I said reluctantly. “But don’t get out there and drink the water.”
The trip turned into one long disaster, rife with all kinds of destruction along the way, beginning with one of my girlfriends absentmindedly leaving her fanny pack at the security gate. We were already outside the airport, walking toward the plane, when she realized she’d left it; we all hustled back to the security gate only to find the entirety of her fanny pack dumped out on a small table, and a bunch of security guards rifling through her stuff. The money: gone. And someone was about to stuff her credit cards in his pocket as we walked up.