Work in Progress - John Inman.pdf

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For John B., who puts up with me on a daily basis and, amazingly, keeps on smiling.
Chapter 1
H
I
. M
Y
name is Harlie Rose.
Let me tell you about the time I fell in love. I mean, really fell in love. Oddly enough,
it all started with me standing in a rainstorm with a broken heart. Yeah, see, you’re
confused already. But I didn’t say I wanted to tell you about the first time I fell in love. I
said I wanted to tell you about the time I really really
really
fell in love. There’s a
difference, you know. There’s a big difference.
But anyway, back to the rainstorm. And jeez, what a rainstorm it was!
You never really expect to see a monsoon in San Diego. You never really expect to
see palm fronds scattered to hell and back and torrents of rainwater sluicing down the
gutters. Not in this town. You also don’t expect to see people in cutoffs and sandals (San
Diegans never know how to dress) leaning against a wintry wind with their dripping hair
sticking straight out behind them like the fins on a ’69 Cadillac, while they try to slog their
soggy asses down the sidewalk without being picked up by said wind and tossed over the
border into Tijuana.
And you never really expect to see a fat old drag queen clutching his periwinkle blue
dressing gown around him as he hauls the trash out to the curb, or see him daintily
sidestepping all the puddles so as not to ruin his size twelve marabou-feathered house
slippers with the four-inch heels that might have been swiped from Carole Lombard’s
dressing room on the Fox back lot about a hundred years ago (if Carole Lombard had
worn size twelves) and which now looked like a couple of drenched chickens, what with
all the sopping wet feathers. And how the hell can a three-hundred-pound man walk in
those damn things anyway?
You also never expect to see a drag queen, young, old, or in-between, wearing a
transparent plastic rain bonnet on his head (the kind that ties under the chin) to ward off
the deluge, especially when he doesn’t have any hair on his head. Not one single hair. And
besides, those plastic rain bonnets just aren’t chic enough for a respectable drag queen.
Are they?
This was the kind of stuff rattling around in my mind while I stood at the curb in the
frigging downpour and watched the old drag queen, who was actually kind of charming in
a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not sort of way, as he trundled the barrel of trash out to the curb to
park it next to six other barrels like it.
Shivering in the wet and cold, I continued to watch as the gigantic man in the
periwinkle blue dressing gown and the plastic rain bonnet disappeared back inside the
rundown apartment building from whence he came, clattering up the stone steps on those
ridiculous heels and panting like a steam engine while he did it. And since the old queen
didn’t return, I figured that was the end of the show.
Hearing a clanking noise, I craned my head back and squinted through the slanting
rain to the top of the six-story apartment building the old queen had disappeared into.
What I saw was a rusty neon sign perched on top of the structure, still lit in orange at this
late hour in the morning, banging and rattling and leaning rather precariously in the biting
wind gusting off the San Diego Bay.
The neon sign read Belladonna Arms. One of the l’s was flickering like maybe it was
about to give up the ghost. And while I stared at the sign, the whole thing suddenly
flickered out. Apparently the old queen had flipped a switch somewhere inside, hoping to
save a few bucks on the light bill, maybe.
I tugged my coat collar snug to cut off the tiny rivulet of rainwater dribbling down
my back. I wasn’t wearing a hat or carrying an umbrella, which further proved San
Diegans are never prepared for anything but sunshine, so my hair was as sopping wet as
the old queen’s marabou feathers.
I looked back at my battered Buick station wagon parked at the curb behind me to
make sure it hadn’t been swept away in the tsunami of trash-laden gutter water splashing
and gurgling down the hill I was standing on—the only hill in downtown San Diego, in
fact. The car was safe and sound, of course. It was also clean and shiny for the first time in
living memory, thanks to the downpour which had started yesterday and hadn’t let up
since.
For the last four months, I had been all over the place in the old Buick. Deserts,
prairies, purple mountain majesties. Thirty-two states in all. No kidding. I was like a
regular nomad. And aside from the occasional flat tire, the ugly gas-guzzling beast had
never failed me once. And it was still not failing me. There it sat at this very moment,
packed to the roof with everything I owned, which in the grand scheme of things wasn’t
much, I supposed. But still it was all mine. Computer, clothes, books. And reams of notes
taken on my pilgrimage, from which I had just returned this very minute to reclaim San
Diego as my home.
Yep. It was time to finally settle down and pull those notes together. And time to
somehow squeeze The Great American Novel out of them. I was home now to do exactly
that, or I would be home as soon as I found a home to settle in.
That’s why I was standing in the rain in front of the Belladonna Arms. The old sign
had caught my attention while I was tooling aimlessly down Broadway looking for a place
to light. Broadway, by the by, is San Diego’s main thoroughfare. It bisects the city from
east to west, and at the moment I could see it a bit down the hill from where I stood.
But back to the sign. When I first spotted it, I had immediately liked the cheesy
orange lettering on the rattletrap neon contraption. I even liked the way it stood slightly
askew atop the boxy, less than elegant 1940s-era apartment building the old drag queen
had ducked into. The whole misaligned package of tattered neon and weathered
construction, perched one upon the other on this out-of-place hill on the southernmost tip

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