Diary Of A Blues Goddess

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

chapter

1

I live in a house with a dead prostitute.

More precisely, I live in a house with her spirit. At least that’s what my grandmother, Nan, thinks.

New Orleans is filled with spirits. We’re so used to them, we don’t give them a thought. Mist-filled cemeteries are tourist attractions, and houses on St. Charles have ghosts. Halloween is more important than Christmas—at least to the drag queens. Voodoo priestesses still practice their art, and superstition is interwoven through our lives as much as the bayou and crawfish.

Our house in New Orleans used to be a brothel and has been in my family since 1890. My grandmother ran the brothel briefly, until Sadie Jones was murdered over sixty years ago. A customer with an obsession for the redheaded whore with the alabaster skin and green eyes stabbed her in an upstairs bedroom. He’d been wordless, with the vacant-eyed look of a man possessed, and my grandmother has never forgiven herself for not turning him away. Another customer, a senator with a handlebar mustache, who enjoyed the brothel every Friday night, shot the murderer dead with a pistol and a single bullet as the man ran outside. My grandmother cradled Sadie’s head in her lap as the young woman took her last breath. After that, Nan closed the brothel, married my grandfather, who’d been her most faithful customer, and set about becoming one of the more colorful characters in New Orleans, a city known for colorful characters.

When I was eighteen, I came to live with my grandmother in this house with twenty bedrooms. I soon found out that the spirit of Sadie had opinions on the opposite sex. According to Nan, if she felt you were making a big mistake with a man, she would slam the door of the bedroom in which she’d been murdered. If she approved, the house was at peace.

Considering my track record over the last ten years, there’s been a whole lot of door-slamming in New Orleans.

chapter

2

“O h my God, why’d she have to die!” Dominique wailed like a Greek woman throwing herself on the casket of a loved one. “Why? Tell me why?”

“Here’s a tissue,” I said, calmly passing her one as we sat up against huge pillows, side by side on her bed. We were watching Steel Magnolias for the third time in two days, huddled beneath Dominique’s pink Laura Ashley quilt, with a bowl of popcorn swimming in a tidal pool of melted butter and a pitcher of Sex on the Beach on the nightstand—Dominique likes any drink with sex or genitals in the name.

“I don’t understand how you can just sit there, stone-faced like that, Georgia Ray Miller. It’s unnatural,” she sniffled at me.

“Dominique, you know Shelby dies in the end. You’ve known this since the first time we watched this video together in high school, and through every single solitary fucking time we’ve watched it since then. I just can’t cry anymore. I cried myself out five years ago.”

“But the cemetery scene…” She hiccuped, and with that, she started blowing her nose.

Drag queens are rarely subtle. Give Dominique a feather boa, platform shoes and a new platinum-colored wig, and watch her strut her stuff. But believe me, a drag queen with a nightclub act—and Dominique has a sellout one—doesn’t begin to hold a candle to the sight of a drag queen with a broken heart.

Dominique was actually our only lonely heart at the moment. Good thing, since she was practically a full-time job. One of the benefits of having a house with twenty bedrooms is providing refuge for the lost and lonely. Nan rarely turns anyone away. She has two rules: no weapons and no drugs. Beyond that, if someone’s a friend of mine, he or she is welcome to stay as long as necessary. Rent is minimal. And everyone contributes to meals and kitchen cleanup. We’ve had as many as six lonely hearts at one time following Mardi Gras two years ago when it seemed as if nearly everyone I knew, including myself, walked in on his or her lover in the arms of someone else. That’s Mardi Gras. Getting blind drunk, flashing your tits in the street and fucking up your life.

Dominique sighed, flinging her head against her pillow like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. I stared at her cocoa-skin and her long jet-black lashes curled slightly and framing eyes such a dark brown you couldn’t see the pupils in the irises, just coal black. She was beautiful, her cheekbones so high they seemed to carve out cavernous hollows beneath them, like a runway model’s, her chin a dainty point with a tiny dimple in its center. She was stunning, even without her usual Velvet Mac lipstick and eyes made up like two wings of a butterfly. “I’m swearing off closeted men, Georgia. I am.” She looked at me. “And closeted white men are the worst.”

“No, married men are the worst. What am I saying? They’re all bad, Dominique. It’s men. Straight, gay… Of course, I don’t include you in that category, Dominique. You’re a woman even if…parts of you aren’t.”

“Thanks…I think.” She clutched her tissue, then dabbed her eyes. “Is my mascara running?”

“Running? Honey, you cried it off a half hour ago during the kidney transplant scene. Look, two days in bed is enough, Dominique. Come on…you’ve left Terrence before.”

“But this time there’s no going back, Georgia.”

“Don’t say that.”

She lifted her head from the pillow and shook it vigorously. “I am saying it.”

“But this moping, this…” I waved my hand at the television. “Endless watching of Julia Roberts on her deathbed…isn’t helping, Dominique. You’ve got to get back out there. You don’t see me moping around in my nightie, do you?”

She stared at me. I was wearing a Victoria’s Secret black peignoir set. “As a matter of fact, I do see you in a nightie.”

“This is sympathy nightgown wear. For movie watching. I meant that as a figure of speech. I mean, you don’t see me moaning and groaning over my love life. In a nightgown or otherwise.”

“Uh-huh.” She rolled her eyes at me. “Georgie, you are the original magnet for bad men. Might as well hang a sign on the front door. Married men and mama’s boys apply here.”

“Yes, but that was the old me. Now I have a system.”

She snorted. “System? You call what you have a system?”

She was referring to Sadie’s ghost.