Chapter Text
Normally, Louis likes to vet the new girls himself. It’s a point of pride for him — that not a single queen who lipsyncs or death drops or vogues her way across the Azalea stage does so without Louis having approved her first. But really, what they do during their four-minute audition slot is only half of what he’s looking at — he’s also trying to get a sense of who might bring trouble to his door. Minor sins, such as leaving dirty tights thrown over the mirror or doing coke in the bathroom, Louis can forgive; major sins, like selling coke in the customer bathroom, he will not. Perhaps the bigger, glitzier clubs on the nicer end of Bourbon Street can afford a scandal, can plaster over a fuckup with some money and still come out on top. Louis knows he has no such luxury, and so the queens are subject to the same rigorous scrutiny as the bouncers and the bar staff and the liquor suppliers. He will give Tom Anderson and his cronies no excuse.
And so in the short time the Azalea has been up and running, he’s never missed an audition – until now. Paul started hearing the birds again last week, and this was the only day the psychiatrist could fit them in, and they’d already had the open call up on their socials for three weeks. The result? While Bricktop and Lily sit in the daytime gloom of the Azalea with their phones set up to record each new hopeful for future assessment, Louis is in the parking lot of the doctor’s office uptown trying to convince Paul to go in.
“I don’t want to go to the doctor at all,” Paul grouses, leaning his forehead against the window.
Louis flexes his fingers on the wheel. He can feel his patience tensing like a catgut violin string. Their appointment is in ten minutes; he does not have time to rehash this old argument between them. But Paul doesn’t deserve his frustration. “You like Dr Torres,” he says. Paul does, as much as he likes any doctor; admittedly, it’s mostly due to the little gold crucifix permanently peeking out from the collar of her crisp white shirt and the portrait of her in bridal white beaming on the steps of St Louis she keeps on her desk.
“I don’t need to see her.” Louis had a brief flashback to Paul as a child, sitting stone-faced in front of a plate of mashed potato for the third meal in a row. He’s always been this way when he has an idea between his teeth.
But Louis is just as stubborn, and has come prepared. “Remember what Father Matthias told you?” Paul scowls. “That we have a responsibility to take care of God’s creatures, and that includes ourselves?”
Paul stares silently through the windshield. It’s grey and overcast, even for the end of January. Louis can see the storm clouds gathering in the distance, hopes they’ll be finished here before the rain really hits.
“C’mon, Paul,” he says, voice gentler this time. “We gotta get a move on.”
“I don’t want to go away again,” Paul says, and his voice is so quiet, like he thinks saying it might make it so.
Louis swallows. There’s a dizzying seizing of his stomach, like when he’s drunk too much rye whisky without eating and then stands up too quickly. “Hey,” he says. “Hey, listen. I will never let that happen to you. You hear me?” Paul shrugs, staring down at his hands. His nails are cut too short, Louis notices absently. “I promise. When have I ever lied to you?”
“When you told me you didn’t eat the last of the lemon cake.”
Louis snorts. “Okay, yeah. But I did confess that, like you told me to.” He reaches over and nudges Paul gently. “See? You have to go to the doctor and keep yourself healthy, otherwise who else is going to keep me honest?”
“You shouldn’t need me to keep you honest,” Paul says. “You should do that yourself.”
“I know,” Louis says, wishing that such a thing was possible. “But I got a ways to go, yet, so you have to stick around and make sure I get there. And that means —”
“Going to the doctor,” Paul drones.
“Exactly,” Louis says. “You ready to go in?”
“I guess.” Paul sounds like a sulky child, and drags his feet like one as they walk towards the building. Last time Mama had brought him alone, she hadn’t pressed him; simply turned the car around and drove him home without a word of argument, and he’d been on the wrong medication for another week and a half until Louis came to Sunday dinner.
After checking in at the front desk, they’re shown to the waiting area where Paul looks suspiciously around at the other patients and eschews the free magazines in favour of pulling out his Bible app. It gives you a verse a day: conveniently bypassing the ones about donkey sperm and stonings and Sodom, Louis assumes. He takes advantage of Paul’s momentary distraction to check the group chat.
How’s it going?
Bricks messages back a row of skulls, and then a row of vomiting emojis. Great, just great.
That bad?
It’s not great, Lily responds, but i’m sure we’ll find someone amazing!
Louis doesn’t share her optimism. It’s already a struggle luring acts away from the larger, more well-established clubs, where they’re guaranteed bigger audiences and thus bigger tips, into what he knows many in the bar scene see as a fly-by-night joint that’s probably not here to stay. And since Ms Desiree upped and moved to Miami to live in newly-wed bliss with her 95 year old paramour, they’ve got a slot that desperately needs to be filled; if they postpone any longer, Louis is liable to be on his knees begging Bricks to come out of retirement for one last show. And his pride can only take so much of a beating.
Sure you will, he types out, and hastily tucks his phone in his pocket as the door behind him softly snicks open.
“Paul, Louis,” Dr Torres says, “please come in.”
The appointment is terse. Instead of increasing the dosage of the medication Paul is currently on, Dr Torres wants to switch him to a new one — or rather, an old one.
“He’s been on that before,” Louis says, keeping his voice as level and as pleasant as he can. “He didn’t respond well to it.” By now, the names of antipsychotics are familiar incantations to him, a magic spell that this time, might just work.
“No,” Dr Torres says, equally level and pleasant, “but that was several years ago, and I think we can all agree Paul is in a better place than he was at that time.”
Louis’s stomach will never fail to flip at that particular wording (“in a better place”, he remember the preacher telling Mama while she wept and wept as Paul and Grace listening in from their perch on the stairs and Louis sat stiff at his new place on the head of the table) or, indeed, at a reference to that particular time for Paul. “Exactly,” he says, nicely, nicely, sweet enough his teeth ache and he might be listened to. “It seems a shame to disrupt him, when he’s doing so well.”
Dr Torres hmms and ahhs her way through their reluctant stalemate. In another circumstance Louis would have felt for her — he imagines they’re both so unwilling to concede ground because they’ve had a similar fight to gain any at all, but fuck it. She’s got a degree and the medical profession on her side; all Louis has by his is Paul, who shrugs apathetically and refuses to give his opinion. Eventually, though, they leave with a script for an increase of 50 milligrams and a request to come back in a fortnight to “see how it’s going.” Louis has to tuck the paper into his pocket before he grips it hard enough to tear as they leave.
Paul always wants to go to church after a doctor’s appointment, as if to cancel out the blasphemy of seeking to silence the voices of God, and so Louis drives there without even asking. Halfway up the churchyard path, when the doors are in sight, he turns to Paul. “I’m gonna make a call.” Best not to mention the bar explicitly, lest it set him off. “You go on in, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Paul frowns. “Will you?” he asks, sceptically. It’s a fair question. Louis dodges Mass more often than he attends, these days, but then Saturday nights are so late at the Azalea and most weeks Louis finds himself sleeping through Sundays.
“Promise,” he says. Paul scrunches his face a bit, as though he still doesn’t quite believe him, but the draw of the altar clearly outweighs his desire to argue with Louis. He presses his hand over his chest, to where Louis knows his rosary beads sit permanently in breast pocket, and, satisfied by their weight, heads on into the church alone.
Louis steps off the path, keeping the doorway in his sight just in case (what, he refuses to think even to himself), and in the shade of the churchyard rings Bricks.
“Hey.” He pats the front of his slacks, then the pockets of his jacket, until he finds the comforting rectangular solidity of his cigarette carton. “How’d it go?”
Bricks snorts derisively. “Choosing one of those girls is like choosing which bucket of shit to drown yourself in.”
Louis huffs half of a distressed laugh through his nose and knocks out a cigarette, looking around quickly for any stray worshippers before bringing it to his lips. “That bad?”
“Fucking abysmal,” Bricks says. “It was,” she protests, though Louis hasn’t said a word, and he can imagine Lily shaking her head in disagreement.
“Is that Louis?” he can hear her demand, voice echoing slightly in the empty space of the club. “Put him on speaker.”
“Hey, Lily.” The lighter rasps and splutters; it’s almost out of fluid, he keeps forgetting to refill it. He leans in quickly to catch the flame before it dies entirely.
“Hey,” she says. “Look, most of them weren’t fabulous, sure —”
“That’s a fucking understatement,” Bricks scoffs.
“But, I liked the last girl!” Lily continues, cheery and undeterred.
“Yeah, cause she had a six pack and flirted with you the whole time,” Bricktop sounds less than enthusiastic.
“She was hot,” Lily says, unabashed. “And she could dance, at least.”
“How many turned up?” Louis interrupts, keen to stem their push-pull tide of bickering before it really has a chance to get started.
He can picture Bricks grimacing as she leans forward, ashing her cigarillo into a shot glass. “Seven.”
Shit. The last time they’d been auditioning for a new performer, they’d had fifteen, and even then it had felt like slim pickings. They’d been coasting off Lily’s connections then, wheedling DMs sent out to every queen in Nola that she’d shared a stage with at one point or another to see whether they’d be willing to take a chance on a new bar. It looks like the well may have finally run dry. He inhales what feels like half his cigarette in one go. “Okay,” he says, “seven, okay. You record them?”
“Yeah,” Bricks says, “but I wouldn’t waste your time watching them. That’s a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back. We got two washed-up divas who can’t get a slot anywhere else in the city, three amateurs with two left feet who don’t know how to lipsync and one who’s got a list of allegations longer than the Mississippi.”
“And one cutie with a six pack who asked for my number on the way out, who for some reason Bricks doesn't want to hire,” Lily chimes in.
“She had crazy eyes,” Bricktop says. “And she was French. French-French.” Louis hasn’t heard her sound so disgusted since they’d first opened and the pizza place opposite had kindly shared their rodent problem. They’d been greeted by scurrying feet and snaking tails every time they opened the door to the basement, and it had taken several weeks of regular pest control visits before they stopped finding the corpses. It had been hard not to see the whole putrefying affair as a bad omen.
“People love the accent.” Lily isn’t letting this one go. “Louis, she can really move, and she said she was looking for bar work too. You said you needed some more staff.”
“We ain’t even hire her for one job yet, and you want to give her two?” Bricktop demands.
“She said she could do tricks as well,” Lily says.
“What kinda tricks?” Louis asks suspiciously. He doesn’t care what they do in France — he’s not running that kind of joint. Not worth it, even if he could negotiate a cut.
“Not like tricking,” Lily begins, but Louis isn’t listening anymore, because Paul is sticking his head out of the church. He stubs his cigarette out on an iron railing, feels a flicker of guilt as he drops the butt into the tall grass.
“Give the French girl a trial Thursday night,” he says. “If she’s terrible, we can boot her after that. I gotta go.” He hangs up before Bricks can argue and trots up the path before Paul can catch sight of him. There’s no scripture that strictly forbids smoking on church property, but Paul does not approve. “Hey,” he says, “You done already?”
“There are five people in line for the confessional,” Paul says, disgruntled. Father Matthias has previously joked that Paul should have a Fast Pass, which Paul didn’t find quite as funny as him. “Can we come back?”
“Sure,” Louis says, relieved that he won’t be required to lurk in the shadows of the back pews while Paul does the entire Stations of the Cross. (That was a day to remember.) “Want to run to the pharmacy first?” Asking is a risky move – just because Paul has received the script, doesn't mean he'll be amenable to following it.
Paul pulls a face, and then his expression shifts into something canny. "Only if you come into the church with me after."
People often forget, Louis thinks, that Paul is a de Pointe du Lac too, and knows how to wield a bribe as well as the rest of them. Everything comes at a cost. This one, though, Louis is happy to pay. "Deal," he says, jangling his car keys in his pocket, and pretends not to notice Paul's satisfied little nod. Louis hasn't felt at home in the house of God for a very long time – but if it gets Paul to take his medication and see the therapist without complaint, he is willing to spend any amount of time on his knees in the confessional.
On Thursday night, dispute with city ordinance keeps him on the phone for longer than he expected and so the show is already in full swing by the time Louis arrives at the Azalea. He nods at a few regulars and winds his way through the crowd (reasonable, but not nearly thick enough to put him completely at ease) towards the bar. Bricks, uncharacteristically, is there perched on a stool and sipping at a sazerac.
“Don’t normally watch the show,” he says to her, as greeting.
“Wanted to see Frenchie’s grand debut.” Bricks gestures at her drink and holds up two fingers to the bartender.
Louis swears. “Fuck. I completely forgot. She been on already?”
Bricks shakes her head, lips pursed. “You’re just in time.”
“I meant to look her up,” Louis says, “get her socials off you, watch the audition, but —”
Bricks casts him a sideways look and something softens on her face. “You got a lot on your plate.” She takes the drinks Damek places down and slides one across the bar. Louis is proud of this bar: its dark woodgrain a little gnarled with age but buffed brilliantly with wax, the brass rails polished to a high shine each week. The antiques dealer had cut him a good price when he’d found out Louis intended to put it into a club. “Where she belongs,” he had said, fingertips resting on the soft wood with an intimate, delicate fondness. “She once served up drinks in the prettiest little whorehouse in New Orleans, if you can believe it.”
“I believe you,” Louis had said, smiling. It hadn’t mattered whether he had or not — if everything in the salvage yards that the owners claimed came from the old cathouses had possessed such provenance, the entire city would have been a brothel at one point or another. But who cares about legend when the price is right? He had shaken his hand on the cost, and if it came with a story attached Louis was not one to argue.
Now, he lifts his sazerac off the bar and holds it up to Bricks. “Thanks,” he says, for more than the drink.
“Shut up,” Bricks says, but clinks their glasses all the same.
On stage, Honey Honey picks up her discarded feather boa and blows a final kiss to the applauding fans. “Same damn routine as she’s done the past four Thursdays,” Bricks mutters, before Louis can ask. “Gave her a warning last week to pull a new act together. Bet she turns on the waterworks again, you wait and see.”
Louis grimaces. He never likes getting rid of a girl, no matter how lazy she gets. “Decent crowd tonight,” he says instead.
“Spending, too,” Bricks says amiably, and they both turn their attention back to the stage as as Lily emerges from the wings in a slinky tangerine evening gown that glitters with a universe of scattered rhinestones.
“That was our Honey Honey, sweeter than anything you’d buy in the grocery store,” Lily says, clapping soft and quick — more of a tap against the opposite palm than anything, quiet enough that the mic doesn’t even pick it up. Louis takes the first fortifying sip of his drink as she reels through a few jokes and crowd-warmers. “And there’s another treat up next tonight — we’ve got some fresh blood!” Lily leads the room in a chorus of oooohs. “All the way from la belle France!” Aaaahs ring around the room. “So lets give a warm New Orleans welcome to Lestat, and her husband, Pierre!”
“Lestat?” Louis mutters at Bricks, who shrugs, dutifully clapping as Lily exits stage left. He doesn’t think it’s a French word, but maybe it’s some kind of dirty new slang that hasn’t made its way off the continent yet. He doesn’t have time to puzzle over it, though, because instead of the beat of a starting track there’s a prolonged second of silence, and then a loud thud as an enormous roll of clear PVC tarp is launched out from stage right, unfurling to cover the floor of the stage like a crime scene version of a red carpet.
“What the fuck?” Bricks says it before he can, low beneath her breath. Scattered giggles, sounding more confused than mocking, bubble up around the club as a large pole on wheels careens out after it. The vinyl slows it to a halt midway, where it sways gently. It reminds Louis of some strange coat rack, or the kind of frame a skeleton might hang from in an anatomy class; it does, in fact, have a hook, and he’s about to turn to Bricks and ask exactly who approved this act when the first poppy jangle of the music starts and someone — Lestat, presumably — bounces onto stage.
Louis's first thought is legs, and his second thought is admonishment at himself. Though to be fair, they're hard to miss. Lestat looks like she's walked straight off a cover shoot for a retro magazine, clothed in a 1960’s style trapeze dress with a big, Mary Quant-style flower print: it would be kind of kitschy and cute, if it didn’t end high enough on the thigh that she’s definitely flashing the front row. Louis doesn’t like to speculate on the state of his girls’ tucks, but he hopes Lestat has got hers perfected. She’s finished off the look with a voluminous blonde Bardot wig; seven-inch platform Pleasers in a glossy Mary Jane style that make her legs look impossibly long; a somewhat incongruous pair of frilly white ankle socks like the kind that Grace used to wear to church as a child; and a blow-up doll that she drags behind her by the hand. Pierre, Louis assumes.
“Children behave, that’s what they say when we’re together.” Okay, good, she can lipsync — sometimes with the ESL girls it’s fifty-fifty. Content that, despite Bricks’s disdain, the performance is probably not going to be a total disaster that puts the Azalea out of business for once and for all, Louis settles back against the bar to watch the show.
The doll and the new girl are in love, apparently; she clutches it it tightly to her and peppers its shiny plastic face with lipstick kisses. Louis is generally ambivalent about the use of props, and a blow-up doll is a particularly crude choice; there’s a strange coiling in his stomach as Lestat twirls and dips and gazes adoringly upon her rubber lover.
He shakes himself. If he’s jealous of a blow-up doll, he really needs to redownload Grindr. He forces himself to refocus to a more clinical level of observation, like switching lenses at the optician. Lily was right — Lestat can move, a twisting little bop that effortlessly encompasses the whole stage even with the heft of the inflatable. Although now, there seems to be trouble in paradise; Lestat is batting Pierre’s hands away, face in an exaggerated scowl. Hard to tell beneath the dramatic contour and the Twiggy-esque lashes whether he agrees with Lily’s assessment of her good looks; absently, he notes that the shape of the dress obscures any hint of a potential six pack. The dress is sleeveless, though, and her biceps are all sculpted muscle as she reaches up and hooks the back of Pierre’s jacket onto the weird coat-stand.
“Look at the way, we gotta hide what we’re doing, cause what would they say, if they ever knew?” Lestat is backing away: one hand comes to rest dramatically against her forehead like some fainting maiden, the other held out as if to fend Pierre off. The doll looks disturbingly like a body as it dangles there. She reaches the side of the stage and leans over to grab something from the wings, hands momentarily out of view. “And then you put your arms around me and we tumble to the ground and then you say —”
Louis's interest is caught. He leans forward to try and see what she's retrieving.
“I think we’re alone now!” Lestat does a wide one-two-twirl and prances back to the middle of the stage, only this time she’s carrying —
“Is that a fucking chainsaw?” Louis hisses to Bricks.
“Sure as hell looks like it,” she breathes. “Holy shit.”
Louis does not know enough about DIY to be able to tell whether Lestat taken off the chain and it’s too late to intervene now, not without causing a chaotic stampede. Besides, no one else seems that concerned, especially as Lestat has returned to bounding around Pierre’s limp body, which is swinging gently on what Louis is now pretty sure is an anatomy frame. She lunges at it and then fakes out, a comedic routine that elicits laughter from the crowd — and even Louis can feel his mouth twitch upwards as she repeats it, spinning around with a look of outrage when she misses, as though Pierre has somehow deliberately evaded her grip. She lets the chainsaw hang loose and wraps an arm around the doll’s waist, pulling it close and grinding up against it — a happy end to a heated lover’s quarrel, Louis thinks, and allows the smile to come.
It abruptly vanishes as Lestat pulls back and, without any warning, drives the chainsaw directly through the chest of the blowup doll. Which is apparently not filled with air at all, but with —
“Oh, she is cleaning that up herself,” Bricks says, watching as the fake blood — God, Louis hopes it’s fake blood — cascades down onto the stage. Well. That explains the PVC.
“I think we’re alone now, there doesn’t seem to be anyone around.” The new girl is smearing the blood all over herself in a catastrophic orgy of delight, like something out a particularly blue B-movie. She yanks Pierre off the hook, tackling him to the floor once more, and the whole bar screams as she climbs on top and starts to ride him. Louis’s gaze snags on the fluid gyration of her hips like a jacket on a barbed wire fence; she arches her back, bloodied hands tugging at her own hair, as she writhes and bucks, drags her wrist across her mouth to leave a wet red slash like a warning. And it must be his imagination, but Louis could swear that in the gloom her eyes find his as she brings herself to a faux-orgasm as the song crescendoes.
Tiffany’s voice fades as the bright jangle and thudding drums of the track dies away, replaced by wild applause. Louis watches as Lestat hops to her feet, wobbling just a little as she stands. There’s fake blood splattered across her face; fake blood dyeing the ends of her teased blonde wig a sticky maroon; fake blood turning the sunny floral pattern of her dress into a horror show, a landscape of utter carnage. Her frilly white socks are drenched in it. A curtsey, then a bow; she lifts Pierre’s empty plastic hand and makes him wave to the crowd.
“Told you she was crazy,” Bricks says, with the smug finality of someone who’s been proved irrevocably right.
Lestat is grinning huge and wide, pupils pinpricks under the stage light — and somehow Louis is grinning too, looking at her in her bizarre, unmoderated joy. He takes in the snowstorm of bills people are continuing to throw, the whooping and hollering that fills the bar. The people at the back are on their feet, craning their necks to get a look. Almost everyone has their phone out and pointed towards the stage.
Well, he thinks. Maybe a little crazy is what this place needs.