The sequins made her seventy year old something body look forty something.
I am talking about Cher.
Yes, the Gypsies, Thieves and Tramps, Cher.
Just walking through the casino like nothing. Displaced with a glass of something cool with a cherry swimming inside it.
Her hair, still an impossible black. Vampire maroon blush across impossibly high cheekbones constructing an architecture like a Klimt painting.
Absolutely no one is looking her way. She is pushing her tongue up against the back of her teeth.
A restless mass of worshippers are gathered just a few feet away with their phones lifted above their heads making an offering to their goddess.
And at the center of it all is another Cher.
A drag queen in a sheer illusion of a gown, nothing but shimmering silver dripping. The wig is enormous, cascading, theatrical, and everything you would imagine it to be. Voice, a lower register. Eyeliner drawn more like Elizabath Taylor in Cleopatra than Sonny’s Cher. Bombastically she is calling out to the crowd: I got you, babe, as her false eyelashes snapped in a wink.
A table covered in red linen. A Sharpie. Stacks of glossy photographs. The line coils.
Someone squeals, “Oh my God, you look exactly like her.”
Someone else whispers, “This is better than the real thing.”
The drag queen signs the glossies with a flourish. There is a large gap in between her front teeth.
“Oh girl, if you only knew how fucking hot it is underneath all this synthetic hair. I think the devil himself may be coming for me, or maybe I am just in menopause. It must be a hot flash!” The drag queen breathes in and tugs at her equally synthetic breasts. She lets out a husky giggle.
A security guard walks straight past the real Cher never looking at her. A woman brushes against her shoulder and murmurs “sorry” without looking up. Perfume and liquor molecules stir throughout the room like awkward men at a mixer. Cher takes a step forward but just then the crowd surges and starts closing around the table where the drag queen is seated.
“Umm hmmm,” Cher clears her throat as she rattles the ice around in her glass watching the scene. Even her “Umm hmmm” was a perfect pitch.
A sudden explosive applause breaks out. The drag queen flips her hair back and makes a raunchy joke about her breasts being bigger than the real Cher’s.
As Cher looks down at her B cup sized breasts, her heel gets caught in a snag on the old casino carpet. Wham. Face plant. Prostrate before the drag queen.
Someone shouts, “We love you, Cher!” The drag queen presses a hand to her chest in mock astonishment.
“I love you more,” she says, in a voice rich and buttery this time.
A hundred phones flash like fireflies on a summer night.
The real Cher looks like a sequined mannequin crumpled onto the floor that someone forgot to undress. Her long black hair spills forward covering her face. One long, still rather toned, leg is folded under her. Her ass is sticking straight up in the air. The cherry has rolled out of the glass and onto the floor.
A woman steps backward, nearly onto her hand, laughing, adjusting herself for a selfie. The corner of her shoe grazes Cher’s sleeve. She moves and squishes the cherry instead.
The drag queen is posing now with her arms stretched out wide.
“Am I Cher or Jesus? Who do you say I am?”
“We don’t care who you are!”
“Turn this way!”
“Do the hair flip!”
“Say it again—say I got you, babe!”
She does. They scream.
Cher pushes herself up and leans herself on one arm. Half-sitting her gaze moves across their faces, noticing their round eyes and their curved mouths. How open and hungry they all look.
Paula Hayes is a would-be-poet in Memphis where the ghost of Elvis still roams around at the Arcade. Whatever that feeling of existential aloneness is in the fiction of Raymond Carver and the paintings of Edward Hopper and the fascination with eccentrics found in Flannery O'Connor, that is the feeling she keeps trying to capture, but it is too damn elusive to be held down too long in words.
