Honey, I Got Hit on by a Drag Queen

"Babe, listen--"

"I am tired of listening to your pathetic excuses, Michael!"

Michael Streight stared at his wife Alexia in bewilderment. The hazel eyes he looked into every night with love and adoration were now staring back at him with crazed incredulity, the bottom eyelid of her right eye twitching sporadically like it did when the kids were home.

"They aren't excuses, Lex," he said slowly, choosing his next words carefully. "I had a perfectly legitimate reason for being late tonight."

"Yeah?" Alexia said. Her arms crossed over her chest and her head flopped to the side, expectant. "What about the other night? Last Tuesday? Was that excuse not 'perfectly legitimate?'"

Michael bit his lip profusely. He had walked right into the trap he hadn't known she had even set. As was life.

"I didn't want to, you know, tell you but..."

Maybe in the awkward silence, Michael thought to himself, she will give up and forgive me.

"Go on."

"I was out drinking with the guys."

"Uh huh."

"Honest!" Michael said, his arms flung wide. "And that's what we were doing today too, it's just that, you know, something happened."

Alexia chuckled into the back of her hand. Her teeth were bared like she was prepared to take a massive bite out of her wrist. "Oh, I know what happened, sweetie."

A warm rush of relief flooded Michael's chest, relaxing the tense muscles of his back and shoulders. "Oh good. So she told you."

"She??" Alexia shrieked. "I knew it! You are having an affair!"

"Good grief, woman, no!" Michael yelled back. "You really think I could pull another woman? Let alone another smooshalicious momma like you? No sir, I am not Neil Patrick Harris."

"NPH is gay, honey."

"That's exactly my point!"

"Uh-"

"Lex, please," Michael said desperately. "Let me explain. There's no reason why this should affect our marriage in any way. I would never have an affair without you."

Alexia raised an eyebrow but said nothing. She simply circled her wrist around and urged her husband to continue.

Michael took a deep breath. "Well--"

***

It all started with four burdened bladders. You may be wondering what burden they were carrying. Simply put, it was an assload of urine.

One of those bladders, as you might expect, was mine. The other three belonged to my buddies Asher, Teo, and Hudson. My friend Benji was there too but, for medical reasons, he doesn't count as one of our four bladders.

We were looking for a bathroom. Particularly someplace that was well-stocked in liquor, but we would have settled for anywhere that sold root beer floats, too. Much to my surprise, we found a bar that was still open at ten in the evening on Memorial Day.

The five of us stumbled in and immediately headed for the back wall where the restrooms where. Thinking back on it, I should have immediately seen the red flags, but I was already buzzed out of my mind just from breathing in the bar's atmosphere and didn't think much of it.

There was no door to the men's room.

In fact, there wasn't even a men's room at all. It was a single space equipped with about five or six stalls, and on the wall opposite the toilets was a massive mirror at least five times my personal wingspan. Below the mirror were the sinks, and above those was a long shelf holding dozens of tiny bottles and what appeared to be urinal cakes. Teo took a bite out of one of the cakes, though, so I guess it was just really disgusting-looking candy.

Aside from the mirror, there were posters of beautiful women all over the walls.

***

"Oh my God, it's worse than I thought," Alexia interrupted.

Michael, his hands raised above him theatrically as though he were telling the most dramatic story of all time, glared at his wife. "How do you figure?" he said. "I haven't even gotten to the good part yet."

"Oh really," she said snarkily. "Well guess what. You're never going to get to the 'good part.' Because I'm not going to be married to a man who goes to strip clubs!"

Michael stared at Alexia in astonishment. "You think I went to a strip club?"

Now it was her turn to be surprised. Her eyebrows knit together in confusion, her dark eyes turned downward away from her husband in embarrassment. "Well...you strongly hinted at it."

"Well I didn't. You'd know that if you let me finish my story."

"Sorry."

"Yeah. Anyways--"

***

Asher, of course, was the first one to notice the pretty ladies on the walls.

"You guys seeing what I'm seeing?" he said. He went up to one of the posters, a picture of a tall black woman, and stroked her long, blonde, two-dimensional hair.

Trust me, I know. I really need to get the guy a girlfriend.

"Dude," Hudson said from the other side of the room, "Could you not be weird for like two seconds? Leave the girl alone."

"She's not even real, man, gimme a break."

"At least you realize that," I mumbled under my breath.

Asher didn't seem to hear me. He looked the poster girl straight in the eyes, puckered his crusty chapstick-less lips, and kissed her cheek. "Until we meet again," he said sadly.

At that point I didn't want to be associated with Asher at all, so I hid in a stall and did my business. The other guys followed my lead, except for Benji, who entertained himself with the glass bottles by the mirror.

"This one smells like peaches!" he called out to us.

As you know, I'm severely allergic to peaches, so I tuned out Benji's booming voice for a minute and focused on taking a piss.

The stall I was in was honestly pretty nice for a bar bathroom. There were no death threats etched into the phenolic of the walls, no phone numbers or supposedly inspirational quotes graffitied on the door. There wasn't even any angsty music playing through the speakers. Instead they were playing some vaguely familiar pop music, and since there was no door, you could also hear a group of girls singing karaoke nearby.

Musical theatre karaoke. Another red flag I should have noticed.

I bopped my head to the music and zipped my pants up. I reached my hand to push the flush handle down, and that, my friend, is when I realized what was so terribly wrong.

I could see a pair of bright red heels peeking out from beneath the stall to the right of me.

"Teo," I whispered to the left stall.

"What is it, Chief?" Teo said loudly.

"Shut the hell up," I breathed ferociously. I pressed myself against the wall, my fingers reaching over my stall and into his. "We need to get out of here."

"What are you griping about over there, Mikey?" Asher said from his stall. "You constipated again? 'Cus I really don't want to wait half an hour to get drunk."

My friends are idiots, I thought to myself. They're absolute buffoons.

"No, Asher," I said a little louder. By now I was sure the wearer of the high heels could hear me, and I did not want to offend her in the slightest. I chuckled nervously. "It's just, uh," I said in as high-pitched and feminine of a voice as I could muster, "We really need to get going, sweeties."

That really got them going.

"Freaking 'sweeties?' What the hell are you on?"

"Dude we got here to get drunk and I'm not missing out on my nightly self-loathing!"

"Did you kick yourself in the nuts again bro? Here, unlock your stall so I can help."

At that point I gave up trying to be indiscreet. I threw my fist over the toilet handle, flushed my precious bodily fluids down the drain, and slammed my stall door open. I was faced by the rest of the boys, who were either splashing sink water at each other or taking turns nibbling at the urinal cake candy. They all stopped their shenanigans and looked at me with a variety of emotional expressions. I thought Teo was about to burst into tears.

"Guys," I said, "This is a freaking women's bathroom."

The corners of Benji's mouth twisted into a frown. "Not like any women's bathroom I've ever seen."

"Have you ever seen one before?" I said.

"No."

"Exactly!" I retorted. "Women keep their bathroom lives a secret from us dudes. They never wanted us to realize how cool it is in here!"

Teo nodded, chewing thoughtfully on a crumb of urinal cake. "It does smell pretty nice."

"And it's really clean," Hudson agreed.

"But they must all be lesbians," Asher said, "Because I mean. Look at these ladies!" He gestured to the posters all around us, his eyes wide with awe.

That's when she stepped out of her stall. The women who had been peeing peacefully next to me looked out at the boys and I with an amused expression on her face. Her hair was dark and curly, her skin the color of sliced almonds, and her makeup done to absolute perfection. Purple lips smirked a crooked grin at us. "Not all of us are lesbians, dear," she said. Her voice was deep and masculine, like a truck driver at Denny's at two in the morning after a swig of dark roast.

Asher almost passed out.

"Oh, I'm sorry," the lady said, making her way towards the sink. Benji and Hudson moved out of her way, their mouths agape in astonishment. She pumped a puff of soap into her palms and scrubbed away, tossing her hair out of her face. "I take it you boys didn't know you walked into a gay bar, did you?"

Seeing as the rest of the guys were too shocked to speak, I swallowed the lump in my throat and nodded. "Gay bar," I said uselessly.

The lady chuckled and rinsed the suds from her fingers.

"So you're into girls?" I said nervously. "Heheh. Me too."

"No, hun. I'm a drag queen." The lady placed her hands delicately under the air dryer and waited patiently for the droplets of water to evaporate from her skin. When she was finished, she turned back to me with a flirty smile on her lips. "Too bad you're 'into girls.'"

***

"I'm gonna kill her!" Alexia shrieked. She leaped for the door, but Michael wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her close despite the flurry of teeth and claws.

"No no no you won't," he said. "She was actually really nice."

Alexia blew a string of hair from her forehead heatedly. "A little too nice if you ask me."

"Trust me, sweetie, she didn't do anything. She was just, you know. Complimenting me."

"I'll compliment her face with my fist."

"I sure you would," Michael said sweetly. He released his wife from his arms and considered this. "Apparently her stage name is Elect Ricity. She does comedy about appliances and politics."

"Very classy."

"Yes," Michael said. "I've never met a drag queen before, but she was really neat."

Alexia nodded. "So...you were late because you were hanging out in the bathroom with a drag queen for three hours?"

"Well, we didn't stay in the bathroom. We got some drinks, did some karaoke. I had no idea I knew all the words to Rent but here we are," Michael laughed. He looked to his wife, examined the relief he saw in her eyes. He swallowed.

"Also I uh. Think I'm a little gay, sweetie."