Chapter 21: Puta Shoes
In which I stumble into beauty pageants...omg, I hope you laugh at the absurdity of it.
In the beginning it’s not really an act of my will. When you stop working out for hours each day you’re less hungry and you lose weight. If you’re conscious of what you're eating in this timeframe, it’s like the cutting professional weightlifters do--less calories, less muscle built, less…you. I watch in wonder as the mirror shows a moon-shaped face gradually deflating. Jeans that have collected dust in my closet fit again and sliding them on is like a homecoming.
When I’m finally released for light physical activity, I start swimming laps (It’s an ugly dance across the pool, but so what). Then I make it a goal to skip breakfast, swim, go to school, and break my fast at lunchtime. Sometimes when I ascend the concrete staircases between classes I feel dizzy, so much so that I have to hold onto the railing. But it’s so worth it because I weigh myself every day and the numbers keep going down. If they don’t, I rationalize that it’s water weight or the mass of my clothes, but I also go on the offensive and eat a little less until the number rights itself.
Here’s what I eat every day, with little variation:
Breakfast: nothing
Mid-morning: Diet Dr. Pepper
Lunch: a whole wheat sandwich with ham, mustard, and fat-free cheese; Baked Lays; carrots
After school: carrots and cottage cheese
Dinner: cottage cheese, turkey lunchmeat, and carrots
Yes, if you’ve picked up on carrots as a theme, you are correct. I’ll eat so many carrots in this season of life that the skin on my hands takes on a Cheeto-orange tint, something my anatomy teacher points out and explains while she watches me dissect a cat.
On Sundays after church--which I’m mostly attending alone now because Karl has tightened his grip on Mom’s activities--I meet Grandma and Grandpa at Luby’s Cafeteria, the most popular restaurant in town for the blue-hair contingent. Thoroughly hungry and satisfied with the day’s attempt at godliness, I slide my tray down the metal rails and pick up a salmon patty, stewed spinach, and as a treat, macaroni and cheese. On one such Sunday, I tell Granny that I like the feeling of being hungry. A child of the Depression, her eyebrow raises and she quips, You haven’t been truly hungry then. But she praises my increasingly svelte figure, saying I look just like my mom did at my age. She asks if I have a boyfriend with a twinkle in her eye and I shake my head, thinking of Peter.
I’m painfully aware of him in every church service and every youth group event. I don’t flirt with him because that isn’t part of ‘holy girl’ etiquette, plus he seems caught up in the I Kissed Dating Goodbye phenomenon sweeping across evangelicalism. He tells me that he wants to “court” his lady-to-be. I nod and search for the meaning of this old school word, but all I come up with are mental images of the scales of justice, or going to the Food Court at the mall. I have a deep, uneasy feeling that I can’t make myself attractive to him through the usual feminine devices, which just drives my attraction harder and deeper.
I pine after being desired, but desire itself feels like a grenade in my hands. So I sublimate it into dieting. With every meal missed, every AP study session logged, every makeout session avoided, I’ll create a me that looks like my mother but doesn’t behave like her.
***
I was the chauffeur for a beauty errand and became a pageant girl. Let me explain.
Martha’s mom doesn’t know how to drive and she needs her eyebrows waxed. I have wheels and a license, so Martha recruits me to drive them downtown to a place where a magical maestro sculpts bush brows into works of art. That place is the business office/fantastical fortress of pageant barons Richard Guy and Rex Holt, known the world over by their professional name (and polymer of identities): GuyRex. Covered in The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and People magazine, they’re famous for coaching six women to the Miss USA crown in the 1980s, five of them in a row. And, I guess, the maestro’s waxed brows are part of GuyRex “girls’” beauty regimen.
How Martha’s mom learns about the brow guy is beyond me, but here I find myself, entering a gigantic house through copper doors cast at Emerald City scale. Inside is a darkly lit menagerie with stained glass windows, mongoose and cobra taxidermy, and signed headshots of beauty queens on every wall. I’m led into a smaller, brighter space lined with hanger racks full of ball gowns and cocktail dresses. Little vieja seamstresses hum about with needles held between their lips, alongside two obviously gay men, gorgeous naked women, and of course the Brow King. A seamstress guides me to a squishy couch in the corner and I sit, trying to keep my head down until one of the men, Guy, glides over to the couch and sits next to me.
Are you trying out for the Miss El Paso Pageant this year? he asks.
I’m speechless.
You should try out, he says. He takes a drag of his cigarette, exhales, then inhales the secondhand smoke through his nose while he looks me over. Stand up, he says commandingly.
I stand, all of a sudden painfully aware that my casual clothes are out of place here.
Guy grabs my hand and pulls me away from the couch to a full-length mirror. Take off that stupid t-shirt and pants, he says.
My mouth gapes open, but all around me queens undress, their breasts like pairs of flesh eyes peekabooing as they get fitted for gowns. So I obey.
He blunts out his cigarette in the ashtray and looks at my face. I hold his eye for a second and observe the first face I’ve ever seen with obvious plastic surgery. He takes me by the hips and tilts them forward so my back is more arched than my original posture. He puts the back of two fingers on my abdomen and gently pushes so that I’ll suck in. Then he pokes at the cup of my breast, seeing if anything bounces, how it bounces.
He walks away, then says over his shoulder, Yes, get an application--you have very nice legs. It’s hard work, though, he warns. You’re ours for ten months and we put you through the paces to get ready for the competition. He lights another cig. Your friend over there, she should try out, too, comes the edict as he chassés away.
And that’s how a python goes about trapping its prey.
***
Pretty soon I’m the girl being fitted for ball gown dresses, my hair now bleached as white as Kristi’s is naturally, my skin baked brown from the tanning bed. Guy tells me to put my fine locks in Velcro rollers every night so I do, and I always wear a full face of makeup. Before I catch a ride to school with Jake each morning, I stare at my torso in the oval swivel mirror and marvel at how lean it’s becoming.
Damn, guerita, you’re flaca, says a football player in my World History class, and I wonder how I ever lived with my former, cumbersome body.
Of course, Barbara is delighted. This makes so much sense in her world, fitting like a puzzle piece with all her cherished memories of Mom as Little Miss Cotton. The parallels make me very uneasy, but I read the story of Esther, strip it of all its historical context, and note how her beauty was a tool for God’s people. So I find a way to wedge this beauty pageant within the Christian identity I’m constructing.
Guy knows the Bible, too, and in his many, many speeches to the Miss El Paso contestants, he takes Jesus’s words and twists them like a taffeta bow on one of our couture dresses. He’s always identifying with Jesus as a misunderstood man bent on doing things His way regardless of the outcome. And because Guy knows I attend church regularly, he looks to me for confirmation. Rex, usually quiet and on the periphery, rolls his eyes when I glance at him for advice as if to say, Just ignore him, kid.
Our “training” is actually a way that GuyRex monetizes our beauty, though the actual exchange of cash is never spoken of in front of us. They book as many public appearances as they can for the dozen or so contestants, each event with some advertising angle. At a Kiwanis luncheon we’ll walk the runway in a local boutique’s clothes or show up for the grand opening of a new auto dealership. Behind closed doors, perhaps in a janitorial closet or a makeshift dressing room, we press into our merry widowers and basques, tucking flesh here and amplifying it there, fasting from oxygen so we can collapse our navels further and further towards our spines. Some girls are not allowed to attend an event if Guy believes they’ve gained weight. I, proudly, am never one of them. But my left foot often goes numb after wearing three-inch heels late into the evening and I know my doctor would not approve of this part of my “recovery” program.
One evening, GuyRex holds a sexy legs contest for a small gathering of “executives” and a few Juarez tabloids. The day before the contest, my brother appears in my bedroom door and makes his obeisance for all the times he pinned me down to drool on me as a kid. He begs to attend with a few friends (Why did I not leverage this further?). Because Jake is rather attractive himself, Guy’s all too willing to let him and his college buddies come. So, as if the GuyRex cosmos is not surreal enough, Jake and his friends sit in the barons’ sunken party room dressed in polos and baseball caps, enjoying mixed drinks and tolerating Guy’s flirtations while we ladies suit up in our Daisy Dukes.
As we hurriedly dress in a separate room along with ten other girls just as stupid as we are, Martha says, I hate these puta shoes.
What? Puta? I ask.
Yes, puta shoes. That’s what Guy calls them. Puta, like ‘slut’ in Spanish. These are our slut shoes, she says.
This does not fit into my ‘Esther saving the Israelites schema’ at all, nor does the brown paper grocery bag we each place over our heads for the contest. But I’m in too deep to immediately repent of debasing myself. So I stand there looking through the eye slits in my paper bag, angling my legs just so for my brother, the press, and men who are possibly linked to the cartel, and I tell myself I’ll go through with the big show, the Miss El Paso pageant on New Year’s Eve, and then quit strutting around like a puta for these pimps. In the meantime, I justify, I can try and talk to the other girls about Jesus and invite them to church with me.
***
The main event is held at the Marriott near the airport, and Guy and Rex book a block of rooms for the contestants. The night before the event, I sit in bed reading Psalm 23, nervous as hell but committed to staying away from the hotel bar where the other girls are flocking.
I shut my pink Bible and stand up to rehearse my “commercial” once again. The commercial is one of the four pillars of the show: introduction, swimsuit, evening gown, and commercial. It’s GuyRex’s amalgamation of a talent show and an advertising spot. Back at the beginning of our season, each girl was knighted with a sponsor whose name appears on their white satin sash. Sponsors are local businesses that make an investment that pays for our clothing and the winner’s purse. Miss El Paso 1998’s bevy of marketers includes but is not limited to an Italian restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a shipping company, a real estate brokerage, and, in my case, a commercial painting company. I am Miss Mike A. Garcia Painting, and as the bearer of such a proud name, I’m tasked with creating a one-minute spot that displays my personality, creativity, and the reasons why you want Garcia to paint that accent wall.
I’m bankrupt of all musical gifts and will never be mistaken as a thespian. So, several months before the event, I tapped our high school drama teacher for some support. He suggested I do a dramatic monologue about being a competitor to Garcia, one that has to moonlight in beauty pageants to make ends meet because Garcia is so good. Lacking a better idea, I ran with it. I threw together some words and Mom spritzed up a pair of painting overalls with glitter and a Bedazzler. A black beret completed the look.
So here I am in the hotel room, rehearsing this little spiel, wondering if I’ll lose points for wearing such loose-fitting clothing during my performance.
I put my hair in rollers, turn out the lights even though Martha is still at the bar, and barely sleep at all.
The next morning we start teasing our hair and painting our faces at 10 am in preparation for one-on-one interviews with the judges. I have diarrhea which, I reason, is better than constipation and might help me look thinner in my swimsuit. The hours fly by the way they do when you’re completely dreading something in the near future, as if Time itself is warped by humanity’s fall from grace.
At the end of the afternoon my mother calls me to wish me luck and tells me how excited she is to be at the event tonight. In a rare moment of vulnerability, I tear up on the phone. I don’t think I can do this, I confess.
Just look at me as you perform, she says. Hold my eyes, and imagine everyone else is not there.
I feel the sweet intention behind her words, but connecting to her in this moment of all moments would equal following in her footsteps. I tell her I have to go, that they’re calling us for one last rehearsal and I’ll see her tonight.
***
From behind the curtain, the audience seems content. We can hear the clinking of hundreds of forks, and the constant conversation sounds like bees buzzing above a flower bush in full blossom. In preparation for the swimsuit contest, we place Elmer’s Glue and plastic diadems in our belly buttons, pressing them until they dry clear and sparkle. Then it’s on with our corsets and black velvet catsuits to launch the evening.
Right before we’re formally introduced, as the emcee babbles, I grab the girls in a huddle and ask if I can pray. I’m bowled over by their interest (I guess there are no atheists backstage in a beauty pageant) and I pray wooden but well-meaning words that amount to a Jesusy lucky rabbit’s foot for most of them.
Both in real-time and in my memory of it years later, the actual pageant is a blur. What I recall the most is the walking, the strutting around in swimsuits with gold lamé capes, the gliding in a black floor-length cocktail dress with a middle slit all the way up the front, the way my toes went completely numb in those puta shoes, my toes a pulp of flesh and nerve crammed into a mold created to objectify me, to stretch me out in all the right places, to tilt me at erection-producing angles. I smile with Vasolined teeth through it all, a robotic seductress casting my eyes across everyone in the crowd except my mom.
I manage to do my little monologue for the painting company without completely bungling it, and I feel so damn relieved that the night is ending soon. The possibility that I might win never enters my mind because Guy’s told me that at 17, I’m too young. He says I’m like Jesus before his baptism--my time hasn’t come yet.
So when Ms. Mike A Garcia is included in the finalists’ round, a wave of panic crashes against my sternum. I look over at my family’s table--all my parents and grandparents’ faces beaming--and feel the tears surfacing in my face. My mom holds my eyes then, and it’s as if I’m leaning all of my weight onto her through my gaze. When the emcee asks each of us finalists our New Year’s Resolution I wait my turn and then take the microphone from him, returning my eyes to hers. What comes out of my mouth is a nightmare and a miracle at the same time, a resolution and a scripture verse from Matthew 20 all mingled together and uttered involuntarily, “I want to have a servant’s heart, to be like Jesus who ‘came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’” And I pass the microphone back to the emcee who is momentarily paralyzed by this ill-placed Tim Tebow moment.
I’m told later that Barbara leaned over to my mom at this moment and said, She just lost it. And she’s right. Jesus mixed in with the putas in his day, and it still doesn’t go over well in 1998. So I walk away in 5th place with $500 winnings, money I’ll tithe to my church’s missions fund. And the puta shoes--I kept them for prom.