Neal Pollack

Immediately, the guards started swearing, shouting and waving frantically, the dissident brother-in-law began to scream at the taciturn priest, and in the confusion Dago Fors gritted his teeth and threw himself, or was pushed by one of the guards (it was hard to say), into the froth, his fingers urgently gripping one of the yacht’s dangling ropes. At that, the brother-in-law whooped with joy and began to reel him in, Mariano now gunning the yacht’s engines as it roared its way out of Cuban waters.

It had been a surprisingly quick trip north, Destiny reminisced so many years later. But it wasn'’t Mariano, as the Cuban guards had hoped, but the brother-in-law who gave him a lesson in catechism, going out of his way to explain Sain't Dimas, for whom the yacht had been named.

“He was the good thief,” he said, “died on a cross just like Jesus, on the same day, with him. Patron sain't of criminals. Bet you didn'’t know criminals had a patron sain't, huh? Well, Sain't Dimas repented at the last minute, surrendered, and so Jesus said he’d take him to Paradise. It’s what we Catholics call baptism by desire.”

Sitting in her kitchen now, Destiny remembered the helter skelter arrival in Key West and the resettlement unexpectedly negotiated for him by the gruff Mariano. In a matter of weeks, Dago Fors found himself sponsored through a church in Chicago’s trendy Lake View neighborhood, living in a spare room belonging to an elderly white gay man who practically licked his lips at the sight of him.

Mariano was assigned to a small but thriving parish in a South Side Mexican barrio. As soon as he left, the elderly white man immediately took Dago by the hand around the apartment, explaining exactly how he expected each room to be cleaned and with what products. He lingered lovingly over an antique bureau and demonstrated the gentle rubbing action to be employed with the special cloth and lemon oil. He also seemed to think that Dago’s penis should be grateful enough to stand on command and insert accordingly.

“He thinks he hit the lottery!” Dago complained to Mariano that night, whispering into the kitchen phone now that the elderly man was asleep. “Somebody to clean his toilet and fuck him too. This isn’t my idea of freedom!”

Mariano showed up the next day, accepting a cup of coffee from the elderly man, who nodded enthusiastically as he explained that these were difficult days of transition. The old man was aghast as Mariano delivered his sermon, with Dago prim and still across from the two of them at the kitchen table. The elderly man, his hand shaking, assured them both that his largesse had been lost in translation. On his way out, Mariano gave Dago a stern, annoyed look.

That night the elderly man made himself a scrumptious beef brisket, heaping mounds of creamy mashed potatoes doused in butter beside it. It was not by any stretch a gourmet meal, though it was a particularly hearty one. Dago watched him devour it, his mouth flooding, his own plate empty. When Dago reached for a roll, the elderly man slapped his hand, surprisingly hard, and suggested that if he wanted a roll, if he wanted anything at all, Dago could clean the mess in the kitchen, bloody cutting boards and green stems, peelings and greasy foil scattered all over the counters. Later, in the privacy of the spare room, a determined Dago took a shoelace from a boot he’d found in the hall closet and tied the tightest, most arduous knot he could in its very center. He did this over and over, until it was hard as a pebble.

“Sain't Dimas,” he whispered in the dark, remembering the prayer that Mariano’s dissident brother-in-law had taught him on the yacht, “I will not undo this knot from around your balls until you return to me my way, my path, my fate.”

The reporter—her name was Zoe Pino, an understandable reduction, Destiny would find out later, from Zozima Castro Pino—already knew most of his arrival story. She’d drawn its outline in an email that made the jaunt across the waters seem considerably more adventurous, yet abbreviated it into one solid paragraph. Destiny knew that what Zoe wanted now was the story of how Dago Fors had transformed himself from a little nobody Cuban wetback to something of an international drag legend. But she didn'’t just want a recitation of facts, of this-happened-then-this-happened. She already knew about all the pageants Destiny had won, she could list all her titles and claims to fame. She had Destiny’s lines memorized from her cameo appearances in The Garden at Midnight, a film based on a murder mystery that ended up getting much greater box office than anyone could have suspected. Destiny had turned that into a flurry of talk show appearances, in English and Spanish, and even set up a website that sold DVDs of her performances, a beauty booklet she’d penned, and assorted Destiny accessories, like T-shirts and lunch boxes.