I don’t take enough pictures. I never have.
Now, I’m not a terribly sentimental kind of guy. I’m not really materialistic either, in the sense that I don’t need things like ticket stubs or pressed boutonnieres or scrapbooks full of photographs to make me feel complete or to document my half-lived life. I’m generally fine with my memories, thank you very much. In fact, most of the time I find photos to be a let-down: in my head, I’ve got a clear picture of past events, warm and gooey and happy, but then I pull out a photo and it’s somehow different, it doesn’t look right. What can I do? Argue? Photos don’t lie, and that’s their shortcoming.
Still, I wish I had a few pictures of my friend Jay.
Jay moved to New Orleans not long after I did. He was the ex-boyfriend of my then-boyfriend, Martin. Out of the blue one day he called us and said he was tired of Tampa and wanted a change of scenery. We offered him our sofa for as long as he wanted to stay–and what a stay he had….
Jay flourished here. As a drag artiste working in the genderfuck style, Jay–or Goddess, as he was better known–was celebrated for his quirky performances and his faux-messy, Kiki-esque antics. He was a beautiful dancer, too, classically trained in ballet, with an arabesque to make Nijinsky weep. He may not have always remembered the words to the songs he was lip-synching, but you couldn’t help but watch.
In person, Jay wasn’t too different–funny, giddy, always cutting up. The messiness offstage, however, was all too real. Smoking and drinking ’till dawn seven nights a week isn’t terribly healthy for anyone, let alone folks with compromised immune systems.
Anyway, Jay left New Orleans a few years back, and to be honest, I hadn’t thought of him much until this morning, when I received phone calls from two different sources verifying that he had passed away. And as I listened to the frustratingly vague details of his death, something in me snapped. Suddenly I was very sad and very angry that I never took a single picture of him on the stage at Lucky Cheng’s as he churned out his own rendition of Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” for the upteenth time. That I never snapped a pic of him perched on his barstool upstairs at the Pub, downing shots with the bartender, Roberto. That I have not one photo of him at all.
All I can do is sit here at my desk and listen to Sinead O’Connor’s “Red Football” and imagine Jay spinning deliriously atop the stage at MRB like a whirling dervish on too much meth, the thin, shiny heels of his PVC stilettos creeping closer and closer to the edge of the platform until it looks like certain doom, when suddenly he hurls himself into the air and lands with his back pressed against the upstage, mirrored wall in a gesture as grand and as final as Isadora Duncan tossing that tragically long scarf over her delicate shoulder as she stepped into her Bugatti for the very last time.
We’ll miss you, Jay. Wherever you are, I hope you’re turning it out.
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