It was Thursday night at Iggy’s apartment in Chicago, which usually meant he and his friends would cop, but he’d just gotten out of rehab, so he was just lying on the couch. Gyda was next to him with her boyfriend Cheetah, and the three were watching the Bill Grundy Show. Iggy didn’t like TV, it bored him, but he turned it on for guests and waited for them to leave so he could read.
“Where’d you get your dress?” Iggy asked Gyda. Her’s was green with a cummerbund, and Iggy liked to dress in drag for a laugh, so Gyda let him wear it. Gyda put on one of Iggy’s old Halloween costumes.
“Let’s go,” Gyda kept saying. “We’ll call Anya and everything.” Iggy ignored her, then he told her he wouldn’t over and over again.
“You won’t have to get out of the car, just don’t make me go alone,” she said. Iggy gave in, and he and Gyda left Cheetah sleeping on the couch.
They drove for an hour in the dark before the car started to smoke. They were just past the “Welcome to Ottawa, Illinois!” sign, and Gyda had insisted that they drive that far, because you could get the real stuff out there, from guys with guns in an old Victorian house.
Gyda and Iggy got out of the car and leaned against it.
“We should get some help,” Gyda said, but they didn’t move. Finally, Iggy decided to be the man and walk to the nearest gas station to call a tow truck.
He walked for maybe twenty minutes and finally saw a Chevron. The town was small and there weren’t too many people out, since it was eleven o’clock, but Iggy imagined heaps of people in the candy aisle staring at him, and an old lady saying, “Well, I never!” He pictured himself saying back, “Well, now you have!” to her, and the old lady scoffing in that stereotypical British old woman way.
No one was in there, just the cashier, who smiled and had tattooed-on eyebrows and lip liner, and shaved arms.
Iggy made the call on the phone at the register, which the cashier let him use because she thought it was too cold for him to be outside, using the pay phones.
The tow truck was sent, and Iggy decided to get some Ripple wine for the walk back, which he got in the gas station for a special half-off and from the cashier’s secret stash.
Iggy was walking back, pretty drunk, when the police slowed down next to him, then arrested him—not for the dress, but for the wine. Iggy didn’t understand why, maybe because he was so drunk, but he thought he wasn’t being disorderly, and even if he was, there was no one around to see.
The cops laughed at the dress as they drove him to jail, and when they were inside, they asked if he wanted a special cell, away from the men in the cells who were shocked and wanting to beat up the “drag queen”. The cops put Iggy in a cell with a man who had bangs down to his waist and false eyelashes.
“It’s so good to be with someone who understands me,” he told Iggy, who sat on the toilet and didn’t move from his throne until Gyda came for Iggy. He hadn’t called her, so he didn’t know how she knew he was in jail, but she came and paid bail.
“Idiot. You can’t go around a hick town in a dress. This isn’t New York,” Gyda said. She and Iggy walked for a while around the dead town and Gyda kept having to help Iggy stand. He was still drunk, and finally he passed out in a gutter. Gyda decided to go back to Chicago alone and come back when her car was fixed.
The next morning, Iggy awoke and sat up. People on the sidewalk were passing by, some ignoring him and some staring but not helping him. Iggy didn’t know which was worse. So he just sat for a while, confused and needing to get back to Chicago. He started walking, and once he was out of the city, which was almost as deserted as the city limits, he sat on the road and waited for someone to stop and pick him up.
Eventually, around noon, a full junk car stopped and the rednecks inside let Iggy in.
“Why you wearin’ that dress?” one man asked him. Iggy told him that he had nothing else to wear, and that he stole the dress from Wal-Mart, to make himself seem tougher with these men. They were the violent type. The driver kept talking about how he had some wire and his ex-girlfriend’s hoop earrings and he wanted to garrote somebody. Iggy hated him already. The driver would go slow up hills and then speed down them.
When they were almost halfway to Chicago, the driver stopped at a bank and everyone robbed it, and all of them, even Iggy, got arrested for armed robbery. This time, no one came for Iggy, so he spent three months in jail and when he was released, he was back in the green dress and got in a cab.
“Why are you wearin’ a dress, son?” the driver asked Iggy, who shrugged. “I won’t judge you. Your life is your own business.” Iggy looked out the window. “When I was your age, the boys never wore dresses. In my day, it was illegal to be gay.” Iggy ignored the driver. “One day, I found a stuffed bass on my lawn and found out it was the local queer who done put it there. We beat on the fag with a baseball bat ‘til he were pink all over. Then everyone started calling him and his boyfriend ‘Squatting Dog’ and ‘Numbnuts’ because we left a dog with diarrhea chained to his porch when he was on a date.”
Iggy had enough and jumped out at only 15 mph. The driver stopped and tried to make Iggy get back in or pay the fare, but Iggy kept walking until the driver gave up. Then, Iggy sat on the grass and looked at his toe. It was broken and hurt even to move his leg, so Iggy crawled and limped his way to Chicago by midnight, and when he got there, he used an olive tree branch as a cane to walk to his apartment.
When Iggy used the expired gift card under his “LEAVE!” mat in front of the door to get into his apartment, he found Gyda and Cheetah inside. Apparently, they’d been living there because their clothes were all over his bedroom, and the towels were wet on the floor.
“Wow, you’re alive!” Gyda said. They hugged Iggy, mostly because they didn’t want Iggy to be mad they’d been living there.
“Where’ve you been?” Cheetah asked. “We’ve been waiting here for months for you to show up.”
“Ask Gyda,” Iggy said, and he turned off the TV and sat down on the couch with a book. As he pretended to read, he listened to Gyda say, “The last time I saw him, he was in Ottawa.”
“Ottawa, Canada? Doing what?” Cheetah said.
“No, our Ottawa. Gyda left me in the gutter.”
“You were in the gutter again?”
“So?” Iggy said. “Gyda just left me, and I got picked up by Hell’s Angels.”
“You’re kidding,” Cheetah said. Gyda didn’t know what to do with herself.
“And I got arrested for armed robbery.”
“Why’d Gyda leave you there?”
“Oh, come on, you always pass out in the road, and it gets exhausting,” Gyda said. “It’s no big deal. You’re here now, and I wanna go cop.”
Cheetah kicked Gyda out of Iggy’s apartment, and then Iggy told her not to listen to him. Gyda was relieved, but then Iggy told her to leave himself.
“It’s my place, man,” Iggy told Cheetah, and he stretched out and read “The Best of Roald Dahl” for the fifth time.
