Ginger, my best friend, had a penchant for the dangerous and the mundane. She was a walking contradiction. She loved her family and she hated her family. She craved performing and snorting cocaine, and yet if a Saturday night came around when neither of us had to work, she preferred to stay home and cook and watch old movies. Anything with Vivian Leigh. She adored Vivian Leigh.
“If I were deaf,” she used to tell me, “…I could still understand every single word she said.”
Ginger bought the house with her partner at the time, and the two of them made a decent living in downtown Wisconsin. Ginger transformed herself into Tina Turner, Eartha Kitt, and at times, Boy George. We met at Club Victoria in Chicago when I was 22 years old. She was the first true best friend I ever had.
If I needed money, I asked Ging. If I needed a place to stay, I asked Ging. When I was out on the street for a year of my life wandering aimlessly, Ging was the one that grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and drove me to her house. The house at the end of the path. That year, the year she took me in, Ging planted an entire row of yellow and pink roses along her driveway.
“Roses never really die.” She said to me.
“They don’t?”
“Nothing that fabulous ever really dies, Chauncey. Not ever.”
She called me Chauncey. I never really knew why.
Ginger was beautiful. Everyone said so. Men wanted her. Women wanted her. And she had most of them, most all the time. I never asked what kind of relationship she and Earl had, but there was never any lying going on. She didn’t believe in that. I remember stealing a pair of fake boobs from one of the other girls in our show, and lying to Ginger about it. Eventually, as the evening wore on, and the poor girl whose blue bag I ravaged had done her third number in crumpled up toilet paper, and two old socks, I put the foam pads back where I found them.
“Good girl, Chauncey. Good for you.” She said.
We never talked about it again. But I did lie to her again. I did do that. When she contracted the AIDS virus, and the lesions slaughtered her skin, she would ask:
“Am I still beautiful?”
And I would say:
“Yeah. You really kind of are, Ging’.”
But that wasn’t the lie. Because she was beautiful. She was rail thin, pale, throwing up blood, shitting herself, and losing her mind, but there was something amazing about her still. Something stronger than both of us was testing her resolve, and for some odd reason, she seemed to be okay with it. She moaned, she sobbed, and she once got so angry that she threw her coffee table out the back door, but for the most part, as she was dying….and she was dying slowly and horribly….she never really gave up. I never heard her say “this is the end. Shoot me now.” I don’t know what she was sticking around for when it got near the end, except to go out there, even in the middle of the winter, and look down that street. I once caught her, in a sheer Lana Turner night gown, with her chestnut hair stuffed in a too-small knit hat, standing in the middle of the snow filled pathway, peering off in the murky distance and smiling.
I got my coat on, put on some boots, and wrapped a scarf around my face. The wind was picking up and it was January in the Midwest. This is self explanatory.
“You okay?” I asked shivering.
“When I die, will you remember me?” she asked without looking at me.
“Yep. I will. I’ll make sure everyone remembers you.”
“I don’t give a shit about everyone. I want *you* to remember me.” She said defiantly.
I held her hand and said I would remember her. Yes. I would always, always remember her.
Ginger died in her sleep and took the longest last breath I’d ever seen 13 years ago yesterday.
I remember before I moved into the apartment with Chrisanne when we both still lived in Chicago, that I took one last drive up to the house she shared with Earl. It was painted a different color, and it was spring. The trees were still stretching over the street, and there was more pavement than I remembered. The pathway that lead to the door was now covered in colored stone, and someone put shutters on the two windows the lead to the large open living room. And there, just beside the gold, green, and blue stones were the long row of red and pink roses. There was a small nip the air, as I got out of the car, and stood across the street. I stood there looking at the roses knowing I’d never go back to that house again. And there they were. Years and years later, still blooming, as colorful as the day they were planted and I realized Ging was right; nothing that fabulous ever really dies.
Nothing.
And No One.