The Stars of Saint-Léonard
by Anthony Portulese
Nothing exhilarates me more than the friction of hairy legs in high-heeled boots. The other girls give me pointers for how to heal the chafing on my shins: powders, lotions, thicker nylons. But I ignore their advice with reckless delight. May my toenails splinter and crack. Let my blisters burst and bleed.
At night, I lather my work-wounds with an ointment of olive oil, mashed garlic and coarse salt: Mamma’s ancient remedy for whenever I’d limp home from another beating behind the bleachers. I’d tell her I fell off my bike, and she’d scoff and call me a scemo, a klutz. I’d never divulge to her the names they’d call me, and she wouldn’t ever disclose the rumours about me she’d overhear from the other mothers. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” remains a ubiquitous bartering currency in Montreal’s East End.
“Can you help me cover this up?” a princeling pleads, pointing to his black eye. He’s caked his face in pasty foundation, but the purple-yellow contusion pierces through under the weak lamplight backstage. His unwrinkled face can’t be much older than twenty, the same age I was when I first started to entertain the Village. Not that I’m that much older, but age accelerates in gay years. We’re all considered geriatrics by thirty.
I lick my thumb and rub off his makeup. "Own it," I tell him. Some of the hairs on his black wig cling to his fake lashes. “Don’t hide the violence. Let your cuts and bruises sing.”
I slide the black leather over my thighs, the pain pulsing a sharp shiver down my spine. The more it hurts to dance for my queens, the more I’m reminded of why I forsook my community for this palace in the first place. The dull, gnawing jabs at school, at church, at the park, that I absorbed and digested for the entirety of my youth. They all wanted to kill me from the outside in and thought knuckles and knees would speed up the process.
Only Francesco would spare me such assaults. He didn’t try to stop any of them, but at least he didn’t contribute.
“My boyfriend’s got it way worse than me,” continues the princeling. “These drunk assholes outside the club chased us down the other night. We thought it’d be better here than Thunder Bay.”
“Shhhh,” I respond, smearing blue glitter on my eyelids. “I don’t need to hear your story.”
“Wow. Screw you, bitch. At least I can do a split without shattering my hip.”
I can hear all the queers roaring beyond the front curtain, a den of lionesses, hungry for meat and spectacle. I pull my Azzurri jersey crop-top over my chest and wipe a trickle of blush off the crest—the Italian flag topped with four gold stars, one for each FIFA World Cup that Italy has taken home. A slip of royal blue worn every Saturday night as I take to the stage; I used to think the concept was edgy and controversial. In truth, the catalyst behind its creation was simple Italian spite. The strongest of motivations. The oldest of traditions.
“Drag saved me, you know,” asserts the princeling. “And now RuPaul’s new show is taking off. We’ll be the next wave of stars, you’ll see.”
A house remix of Mina’s “Ancora, ancora, ancora” blasts from the speakers, and the floor quakes with howls and cheers. It’s time. The other dancers assume their poses and positions behind the velvet curtain. The sores on my legs scream hateful slurs that I ignore with practiced ease. I hug my fellow performer and clasp his face. I don’t know his real name, but I kiss him with loving ferocity. His hostility melts, limber in my embrace.
“Every queen’s got a sob story, bello,” I whisper. “What makes you think yours or mine are so special?”
***
Midnight nears in early July. The Maghrebi men have finally left for the shisha cafes on Bélanger Street East. Moths and mosquitoes flurry by the thousands under the white stadium lights that illuminate the soccer field at Garibaldi Park.
“You’re crazy,” snickers Francesco, hanging from the top bar of the goalkeeper’s net. His abs tighten and flex with each condescending puff of air. “You’ve been hanging around too many potheads at your university.”
“Oh, c’mon,” I dart back, kicking the ball at his topless torso with the force of a cannon. He catches it in the palm of his hand without the slightest flinch. Like me, Francesco is nineteen, and still I’m struck by the unshaking solidness of his newly minted adult self. He could break a tidal wave with his body and never quaver; a boulder along my stormy shore that will never crumble. “Gigi Garibaldi! It’s perfect for me.”
“Why Gigi?”
“The first and last pieces of my name – Gianluigi.”
“But you take this park’s name,” says Francesco. “Our sacred space.”
“It’s just a stage-name, Frankie. It’s clever.”
“It’s sacrilege, Luì,” he admonishes. “To be one of those cross-dressing fags in front of actual people—that’s one thing. But now you wanna name your insult after our most important Italian, even? You’re asking to get your fucking ass kicked.”
“By who?” I reply, annoyed.
He stares me down and tilts his head.
His concerns are not outlandish. But I never much appreciate his realism during my flights of whimsy. I thought this drag-name to be a stroke of genius when it had first tumbled into my brain. I couldn’t wait to tell him, to have the chance to say her name aloud. To birth her out of my mouth and onto the patchy grass. To honour the park that had hosted the hallmarks of my childhood, whose sands and soils I had fed with blood from busted lips or a broken nose. Where tournaments and championship triumphs cloaked my theatricality with an acceptable veneer of showmanship. And where Francesco and I would sometimes retreat after dark, nestled under the trees, away from prying duplex windows, wishing we could fly and fry with the bugs above us.
“Yeah okay,” I scoff. “If someone from Saint-Léo catches me at a Village drag bar, they got as much to lose as me.”
“I’m only trying to protect you. What if you get caught?”
“Don’t worry, Frankie. If you come to a show, your girlfriend would never believe you were there.”
“Angie’s not my girlfriend.”
“Does she know that?”
The heat and humidity make my tank-top cling to my back. I pull it off and pitch it onto Francesco’s head. He doesn’t toss it aside, but lets it droop over his face and presses it into his nose, inhaling deeply. Nobody’s around, so he’s safe to indulge his impulse. I know he likes how I smell, especially after a game, be it on the field or on his basement couch. I yank the shirt away and hover my open mouth an inch from his chin. I look up at him without tilting my head upward. His breath smells of fennel and tobacco. Sweet musk wafts off the hair on his chest.
“You any good?” he asks suddenly, feigning nonchalance. “At the dancing, I mean.”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Maybe I can be your backup,” he offers jokingly. “Do one of those dead falls, even.”
“I told you. They’re called death-drops.”
“Whatever, Luì.”
I turn away from him and amble a few paces past the penalty area. Grunting to the notes of Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” behind me rotates my focus back to the goalie’s net. Francesco is pulling the neck-hole of his t-shirt around the top of his head to mimic long hair. His back is arched, ass protruding out from his hips. He shimmies towards me on his tippy toes with so little coordination that I can’t help but laugh.
“What?” he says, pleased with his display. “No good?”
“Fucking terrible,” I giggle.
Francesco charges, and suddenly I’m hovering off the field, bouncing on his shoulder. He trips as he attempts to twirl us about, and we tumble into the dirt. I can’t resist and pounce on him with a lingering kiss. In that moment, I just want to be locked away with him, our sweaty skin melding together, far away from any measure of time and space, as anonymous and alive as the insects overhead.
“Come over tomorrow, Luì. To watch the World Cup Final.”
“You know I can’t,” I say. “Your dad and uncles will be there. Your brother, too.”
“Yeah, and?”
“You know I fuckin’ can’t stand your brother. I didn’t even know what a faggot was till he first called me one when we were kids.”
“Danny will behave. And if he makes any comment, I’ll shut him up, I swear.”
He knows the risks, he knows what’s at stake if anyone even suspects there’s something between us. And yet he wants to have me sit in his family room with the patriarchs present, to graze my outer thigh with his fingertips in the concealed recesses of the couch cushions. It’s a show of intimate defiance.
“Will Angie be there?” I ask.
“Oh, definitely not.”
I lunge forward to kiss him again but this time, he holds back. I pull away and follow his gaze across the field to where four Algerian boys are staring.
Francesco curses under his breath in a dull panic. They jump the chain-link fence and holler obscenities in our direction, marching towards us in an inebriated fury. He rolls over and stands up, tall and alert. I had gotten complacent in my brief bliss, and in retribution, Saint-Léonard deploys its street soldiers against us. Once, I might’ve run. Not anymore. I’m too damn tired.
I sigh and rise to my feet. "At lease it's no one we know." I crack my knuckles and anchor my soccer cleats into the earth, protecting our turf. Street fights are the dance of my youth; I know the choreography all too well.
In this neighbourhood, it’s better to be cut by strangers than to be caught by friends.
***
Just one more bow until I can remove my wig. Sweat drips down and melts my mascara, the glue on my fake lashes stinging beneath my eyelids.
“Et finalement, mes mignonnes,” calls Chief Queen on the mic. “Can we give it up – another round of applause for our favourite Italian soccer starlet, Gigi Garibaldi!”
The audience howls. Fingernails claw at my ankles. A few new faces are scattered across the packed crowd, their physiognomies flushed in shadow from the stage lights. Facial features are irrelevant; their blackened silhouettes are enough to tell me this is their first time at a cabaret. Their hunched shoulders and shrunken necks tell on them, trying to disappear into the crowd.
That’s when I spot her, and for an infinitesimal moment, I falter in my strut. She’s surrounded by a retinue of shouting, sloshed bachelorettes. A cheap white veil and plastic tiara tilt off the top of her head, and a golden sash reading “Bride To Be” wraps across her halter top.
Angie.
I haven’t seen her in years, but bleached blonde hair and an orange spray tan can’t conceal her iconic discerning squint. She clocks me through all the makeup and her eyes bulge out, mouth agape. The light from the disco ball hits the engagement ring on her finger and burns through me like a lethal laser. Of course she would see me through Gigi’s armour. I flee the stage.
So she and Francesco are still going strong. Or maybe he’s just letting her drag him down the aisle since he gave up and disembarked from our little rocket ship out of Saint-Léo. Now I wonder if he’s still stuck there, doing the same things, safe in the mold he jumped into without hesitation, carved by those who purport to know him better than me.
I really shouldn’t care anymore. Francesco was the last thing keeping me in Saint-Léo. Once he ran to Angie, I couldn’t flee fast enough. Now it’s been so long since that night in Garibaldi Park, the frenzy of that FIFA World Cup.
But no. The sight of her in my adopted sanctuary is too much. Never, ever, did I think I’d have to confront the truth head-on like this. Least of all in here. But there it is: the love we shared wasn’t enough for Francesco to choose me over his family’s expectations.
Or was it? I have to know. Leaving Angie to wonder whether she could trust her drunken eyes, I throw my black boots in my bag and sneak out through the back alley.
I hop in a musty car-share and begin my journey, slithering up Saint-Laurent Boulevard before cruising down the Metropolitan Expressway. The quaint rowhouses and boutiques transform into high-rises and parking lots, and the air in my lungs hardens like wet cement.
Soaring over a bridge named for a particularly conservative pope, I roll down the window to let in the cool night air. Revving motors and ambulance sirens welcome me back to Saint-Léonard.
It’s my first return to the hometown in years. My heart pounds out over the dashboard.
***
A chorus of cheers erupts from the rows of duplexes. Francesco’s father and uncle lock elbows with me as we all swarm the streets. Within minutes of Grosso scoring the winning goal in shootouts, Jean-Talon Street between Viau and Lacordaire transforms into a complete bacchanalia. The tender bruises on my face from last night’s brawl at Garibaldi Park go numb in the euphoria.
From across the island, Montreal’s Italians descend in droves and congregate into a carnival. Cars and buses paralyze the streets, their horns blaring as Azzurri fans sing into megaphones. Teenagers sneak onto the roof of the Intermarché Lagoria and drape the grocer’s façade with Italian flags. Grandfathers pour and pound shots of grappa on the sidewalks. Parents dance with their children over the sewer grates. Green, white, and red smoke blasts into the sky. Francesco cackles as we surf through a sea of masculine affection. I’ve never before been kissed by so many men.
“Angie keeps calling me,” he screams over the pandemonium. “She wants to meet up and celebrate.”
“See her tomorrow,” I shout into his ear, relishing the opportunity to have my lips so close to him and not raise any suspicion. I want nothing more than to embrace him right here, to defy anyone’s assumption that someone like me can’t share in this celebration. Francesco’s shy smile reflects my joy and desire. I know he won’t drop the masquerade here in Saint-Léonard. But just maybe, we can take our festivity elsewhere.
“Let’s go dancing,” I say. “Just you and me.”
“Dancing? Where?”
“Just trust me.”
Before long, we catapult through the Gay Village. I pull Francesco into the cabaret where I hope I’ll introduce Gigi to the globe someday. It’s early afternoon, but inside the bar is as dark as night. Tina Charles’ voice serenades the queers and queens with “I Love to Love” as we make our way onto the dancefloor. I stop and thrust myself into his arms, below a giant disco ball that rotates on its axis in the centre of the room. Others gawp at the sight of our bruised faces, scuffed running shoes and Italian soccer jerseys, painfully out of place amongst the constellation of mesh tops and skinny jeans.
“I don’t know about this,” says Francesco, staring back at the exit.
I wrap my arms around his neck and press our foreheads together. “Forget yourself,” I tell him. “You’re not you. You’re not dancing with me. I’m Gigi, and you’re my backup, remember? Dance with Gigi.”
The adrenaline from Italy’s victory still surges through us. Strangers’ sweat mixes with our own. Glitter falls on our faces like space dust. The walls are black and invisible. White light flickers off the facets of the mirror disco ball. It fragments and spirals into a cosmos of crystals. Like objects in a vacuum, I hope we spin in its orbit forever.
I arch my heels off the floor and press my palms on his scruffy cheeks. Francesco’s hands slide down my back, and his breath becomes mine. His lashes twinkle with sweat like budding diamonds and catch his tears before they spill. He smiles and kisses me, sparks aflame between the cuts on our lips.
“I love you,” he whispers.
The words combust like rocket-fuel in my ears.
***
Along the eastern stretch of Jarry Street, the terrace of the local caffè is crammed with its usual cast of characters. Under the sun-visor mirror, I touch up my self-portrait with some fresh lipstick and Azzurri blue eyeshadow. Clouds of smoke swirl around the patrons, decked out in their gold chains, flashy tracksuits and Juicy Couture sweatpants.
I kick off my sneakers and slip on my thigh-high black leather boots. Without a pause for second thoughts, I thrust the car door open and twist towards the front entrance. Their bombastic chatter, a bordello of English and Italian, falls somewhere between speaking and shouting. But as I reach the counter, the din is extinguished abruptly. I smile at the barista, forcing him to meet my gaze.
“An espresso,” I order with a tender tone. “Lungo. And the name’s Gigi Garibaldi. I’ll be outside, carissimo.”
I extend a few toonies to the bartender in my cupped hand, but he doesn’t budge. Perhaps he’s frightened that he’ll cut his fingers on my lacquered nails, so I plunk the change on the counter and waltz outside. The subtle rasp of my heels on the paving stones is soon offset by tongue clicks, sharp whispers, and exasperated puffs of disdain.
“The fuck is he wearing?” I hear one man spit out. “Did he cut up an Azzurri jersey?” “Disgraziato,” hisses another woman into her glass of sangria. “So disgusting.”
Francesco spots me with panic in his eyes. At his corner table slumps a group that includes my former nemeses, bullies who acquainted me with the ways of this world.
I take the table opposite, lean back in my chair and cross my legs. The black leather of my boots squeaks together, and I fondle the four golden stars sewn into my top. The moths above hum with angst.
“Gigi, uh…” calls the waiter, clearing his throat. “Gigi Garibaldi.”
He stumbles over and places the espresso cup in front of me without making eye contact, then beats a hasty retreat back indoors. I take the slowest and smoothest of sips, watching Francesco as I savour the brew. Everyone around him tries to carry on with their revelry, but they can’t seem to escape the hook my appearance has latched into them.
On stage or in a stadium, we all wear costumes and play our parts. These East End boys perform every day for their families, their bar buddies and their churches. Now I do just the same at night, but for strangers, under neon lights and disco stars. Though I think my show takes far less work. All my spins and splits are probably less exhausting. But Francesco’s solo act is breathtaking; his commitment to the role absolutely devastating.
I pull out a cigarette from my underwear and saunter over to his table. His eyes swell larger with every step I take. Finally, I lean over the table in front of him, as if to flaunt my imaginary cleavage under his nose. His entire entourage freezes, and I wedge my stilettos deep into the grout.
“You got a light, bro?” I ask, slow and sultry.
Francesco looks around, as if for permission. Lowering his head, he pulls out his father’s accendino from his pocket and raises the flame to my lips. And then he does something I don’t expect.
Peering through the makeup and the leather and the fishnets, Francesco searches for the Luì he knew back on the soccer field. But try as he might, he can’t see the real me. He doesn’t see the Luì with whom he once spun under the disco ball. I want him to say something, anything. In the end, he says nothing, and that says everything.
“Seriously?” spews his brother, offended and braver than the rest. “Who are you, parading yourself around like that—like some clown? You got some nerve, there.”
The group squirms in their seats. I can only smile as the other boys grumble, sucking on their cigars.
“Please, Danny,” I retort, blowing smoke in his face. “Your suit at little Bruno’s communion last year was brighter and tighter than your wife’s own dress.”
His confusion at my knowing his name is quickly replaced with terror once he connects the dots. I chuckle and chug the rest of my espresso.
Strutting back to the car, I can hear them all growl. Only Francesco’s voice doesn’t join in their scowls. I twist the key, ignite the engine, and raise my sparkly blue eyelids blinking in the rear view. His tiny planet shrinks as I drive away.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Anthony Portulese (he/him) is a queer Italo-Montréaler. He was raised and lived most of his life in the borough of Saint-Léonard. He studied civil and common law at McGill University, and currently works as a legal editor. He just completed the manuscript for his first novel, a story about love, family, culture war politics, and what it means to be Québécois in today’s Quebec.
Instagram: @tjportz