Tahiti Trot

Round The World In Drag The First - Part Whatever - I've reached Tahiti - sometimes moody, as I told Jo in this E-mail,- Sister Jo, Jo, I know you want to know what Paradise is like, but wait. Before we got here I thought we should have spent ages here, - a week, even with an extra day thrown in for crossing the Date-line wasn’t half enough. But that’s travel for you - why we couldn’t just stay on at these places if we’re having a good time, I didn’t know. That was then. So, what is Paradise like? You should know that it’s French. That’s not necessarily a problem, and the French boys with their flat-tops and tight T-shirts are a good thing, in the clubs and bars and up and down the waterfront, but they will, all of them, insist on speaking French, and they’re funny buggers, aren’t they, the French? – half the time they’re so cool they look like they’re falling asleep to their own pulse-rate and the other half they look so stressed and world-worn you think they’ll collapse. And they chat away on a payphone like there was nobody else in the universe. (Maybe I just don’t like being ignored). So, Tahiti’s French, and expensive, and strange. Jo, what do you think of when we talk about the Pacific? This is Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, and you’ve got cruise liners tied up at the dock across the road, people drive round in pick-ups having little parties in the back or just sitting there while they get driven round in the hot sun, there are flowers everywhere, you get one for behind your ear when you get on the plane, and a little band is playing when you arrive, and the place is full of bars. But this is strange, strange, strange. Alright, take our first night. One thing we’re here for the Scorpio Bar, with its scene and the rae rae, who are the local trannie girls, quite a special atmosphere, the book says. So we arrive, get settled in and head out to look for it. We have the map, we’re looking for the Vaima Centre, it must be somewhere in the centre of the bustling night-life. But what bustling night-life? Excuse me? A few pretty quiet bars along the waterfront, we pass them, the shopping centre has a big neon sign you can see from a few blocks away and when we get there, nothing. It’s all closed up. Where the Scorpio should be is a closed up cinema, being picketed by local people over something in French, and what looks like a closed club. It’s all very moody, empty, and there’s nowhere to eat, and we’re starving, and it’s not even ten o’clock. Well, we never find the Scorpio, though we’ve been told since that it’s changed its name and everybody goes elsewhere, but across the road by the liners is this area where they park the food-vans – they call them roulottes, and you can get all kinds of food, and we ended up eating crepes – very nice too – sat up at one of the vans on stools in the hot night amongst all the tourists and locals. So far so what? We’re staying at this place called the Royal Papeete Hotel which is an old waterfront place. It’s seen better days – I don’t trust the lift at all – but it’s clean, the rooms have big mirrors, you get a view of the harbour from your window, and – holy mother, thank you! – it’s bug-free. And actually, Jo, if you’re going to stay anywhere stay somewhere Royal, whatever it’s like, - it’s the least a queen owes herself. It’ll probably be fine, and this is. That was June 1st. And we had it all again, June 1st I mean, date-line, etc, when we woke up. But I should say that when we started the first June 1st, in Auckland, if you’re still with me, I wasn’t expecting a drug-bust – police, customs officers, the works, all but knocking down the door of the hotel room. Now, Roger may have been expecting it, since the clever sod, I now gather, had sent some draw to himself in the post from Sydney before we left. I wondered why he kept asking the hotel lady if there was any post. Anyway there they were and there we were – “Who’s this?” says one of the customs men. “I’m a drag-queen,“ I said, “What you might call a transvestite.” And it was five hours to our flight to Tahiti. I’m not going to go on about this, Jo, so you’ll have to be satisfied with knowing – as if you couldn’t have guessed – that we got away, and Roger got away with it, and a “warning”, maybe, just maybe, because it dawned on the lawmen that a major drug-smuggler and dealer doesn’t usually mail drugs to themselves, especially a piece of resin the size of a thumb-nail between two,postcards of the Blue Mountains, and that they had better things to do with their time. So here we are, and I have to say that Roger’s peculiarities have already got us into more trouble. Papeete, - no sign of the Scorpio, the Internet’s all cranky (I’ve had real trouble finding somewhere to send this, so count yourself lucky, girl!), and the traffic up and down the Boulevard Pomare is terrible. June 1st the Second, time for tea. Let’s give ourselves a cheap treat – McDonalds. Air-conditioning, outside seats, all right by the Rue Generale de Gaulle. So there we are, and we’re just smoking an après-burger cigarette when this red-headed Tahitian bomb-shell appears out of nowhere. It’s a boy, late-teens, early 20’s, hair died red, surfy gear, Polynesian mainly (but with an American mother he later tells us), and he takes to Roger – “Tintin! Tin-tin!” (that’s the bizarre haircut he’s been cultivating since Bali – tufty at the front), and then he susses that R. is gay, and starts planting kisses on him, “You are my husband!” And he announces that he is the grandson of the Presidente and his name is Matty Floss. What a wind-up! This is one wild card, Jo, I can tell you. Before half an hour is up we’ve been taken across the road to a bar, I’ve been introduced to Lolly, who is a stoned trannie floozy who offers Roger sex, and we’re part of the alternative crowd in Papeete, party invitations to things on the beach up the coast flying around, all that. All very nice, but…. a bit shady, really. And when we get up to go to the hotel to get changed things get heavy with this guy coming up from the other side of the bar table and saying that he’s heard Roger say (we’re doing our best with the French, remember) that he’d got a consignment of crack with him. Aaaaargh! He’s saying then that he’s a cop and what if he were to take us down to his office and strip-search us? And then Roger, bless him, comes out with this, - “Listen, I got up yesterday morning to a drugs raid from the Auckland police, - if I had anything like that they would have known about it before you!” and it – plus the fact that Matty was calming him down, the guy who wasn’t a cop – seemed to do the trick for now. Off we trotted. A bit edgy. And that wasn’t the end of our adventures in this peaceful paradise. The tourist office had given us this brochure which said this, - I quote – “For the adventurous, there exists an unusual cabaret where the entertainment is staged by local “rae-rae” (transvestites). Quite special!” When we asked we were told that it was in the Piano Bar, just down from the Royal Papeete as it happens, so that was where I, at least, was going to spend the night. Roger was determined to stay in the Hotel and write up his diary but before he retired we spent a while walking along the waterfront. And there we ran into Daniel. I’m not going to over-do this low-life, moody bit, Jo, so you can have more detail if and when I get back in one piece, but Daniel was a smiling, friendly guy, an electrician from down the coast, with a smoking pipe and a nice way of singing the songs we could hear coming from the waterfront which was sweet, but, of course, all the conversation was in French, and mine is awful - Roger had to do most of it, and got increasingly frantic as time went on, about what I’m not sure, I think he was just feeling the pressure of the last few days.. All I know is Daniel persuaded us we hadn’t got enough money for a night out and went with us to the Change to get more and asked to see the notes we’d got, and it was all just a bit – What the fuck’s going on? – and eventually Roger got off back to the hotel with most of the loot and the passports, and Daniel disappeared. Though he did turn up in the Piano Bar for a while, still asking to see the notes. So where is the peaceful Pacific? I felt like shouting after them all. So there I was, just by the Piano Bar. Time for a show? I went in anyway. It’s expensive to get in – 1500 Polynesian francs -, but us girls get in free. Miss out on the free drink though. Through a curtain on a side street, and a long narrow bar which opens out into a dance-floor and another round the corner with little side-seats and tables. The girls are there, of course, mainly TS’s I’d say, with the Polynesian oval face and generally fabulous looking, in western fashions, tight studded jeans and hanky-tops, some of them a bit plainer, but all having fun with each other, dancing and talking. Dark-haired beauties, some of them a bit drag-glam-slut – heels, chokers and long black hair, - but it all fits with the place. They’re all slim and tall – I’ve sometimes felt like the shortest queen on the planet on this trip, especially since we got to Australia. The punters are a real mix of French tourists, a lot of them the French boys I like the look of, and local gays, and the odd lechey-looking ex-pats. Some of the girls are a bit older and either bigger, and seem to be running the working scene, or big and fat, with long robes and circles of flowers round their heads, like many of the women on the streets, and just in there for what they can get. Everyone including me comes in for a lot of appreciation and the main girl in charge kept coming up to ask me if I was having a good time. The music is old-fashioned disco – no mixing – and I get a screwdriver off the big friendly trannie behind the bar and sit at the side for a while. I went two nights in a row so I’ll tell you about the spectacle on the first night first. It was due to start at 1 but it wasn’t till 1.30 that the bouncers cleared the dance-floor and we got the usual fanfare dance music. Because the whole space is round two corners the girls have to walk round all the time. First up were two girls, one wearing black, the other beige with a big cloak and they synch to “If You Could Read My Mind”, taking turns to cover the two areas. Then two dancers, one girl in black, and a white girl in a green bikini with a silver belt, hold-up fishnets and heels. She’s got a jacket on but that goes soon enough while the music chugs on, then the belt to reveal a white fringed G-string, and then she’s into full go-go dancer mode, pulling this tall showy French boy onto the floor, kneeling to him, miming the works, taking his T-shirt off, pulling his jeans down. Since he’s been strutting his stuff all night on the dance-floor he doesn’t seem too worried by all this, and anyway she lets him off before long. Then this big-faced girl in a dark shimmery number, Melodie, comes out and gives us her “New York, New York!” pulling the same boy to her with a green feather boa. When she casts it off the bouncer rushes to collect it (these girls are queens, you know!) – and a cute albino boy by the changing room door drapes it round himself. I have to say that I found little things like that almost more interesting than the show, which is obviously for the benefit of rich, mainly straight, men. It’s all very casual – people wander across the dance floor and when the girl performing is round the corner they talk and walk and joke. If there’s a finale it’s PlusDance who does more dance. She’s black too, not just Polynesian dark, with as little sequins on her as will hang together safely, and basically she does the whole strip, tits and muff, and she walks around a lot in the full-on with the lights down. People have started to lose interest, and it all just ends with some announcement in French, probably about the following night’s show. The dance music starts up, and I go to the toilet. All the girls are there, pushing the boys out of the boys’ cubicles and sending them to the stalls. When we’re all done we emerge from the door, mix and dance. As I say I went back the next night, the Saturday. Now all the events of the day before had begun to settle in – the drugs, mad Matty and his mates, Daniel, and the fact that I passed a guy on the pavement beaten up on my way back to the hotel, - and I began to feel a bit spooked by this Pacific paradise we’d fallen into. Do I do it? Or chicken out and stay in like Roger? No, Jo, for the sake of people like you who need to know about these things, I thought I’d do it, but be careful. So I put on the rainbow dress, and the long blonde, and made up very carefully. And went out of the hotel. I tell you, girl, that little trot in my stillies along the waterfront felt like the Walk For Life! But I got there, in free again and I paid £6 in local money for a Bacardi and Coke (!) before finding a seat in the back. The girls recognized me and I got a lot of admiration. I’m the only blonde in the place, by the way, which is important for later. I get to talking to the main girl who tells me. – I think, my French is almost non-existent – that the girls go to London for their operations. Most of them are the same as the night before and they’re working the place hard. You get moved out of the back cubicles to let them entertain customers, mainly gimpy older French men, and the girls don’t look too interested as the expensive drinks get piled upon the table. A bouncer stands by them with a flower behind his ear. So I wander about and a girl by the door says. “Tu es belle”, and we dance together a bit. The point is, Jo, that when you’re not working – and nobody is interested in an English blonde, they’ve come for the Polynesian beauties, - you get used to the idea, - hard though it comes to me, - of being a bit ordinary and invisible, so her saying that was really nice. Meanwhile the place filled up with stupid Frenchmen who, you would think, had never seen a trannie before. The show starts, late as usual, and straight off PlusDance does a strip. “Melodie” turns out to be Milou after all and does “New York, New York!” again this time in a big white cape. I’m standing by the changing room door, basically the DJ box, and everything that comes off the girls gets thrown at me and picked up by the cute boy. Then Marou does another strip - and that’s it. Well, it gets the punters in, doesn’t it? So it’s all over bar a night’s dancing and whoring, and I get befriended by Teimanu, nice girl who tells me my hair is “belle”. That’s the clue, Jo, - we’re standing, then dancing, by the DJ box which has a window in it shaped like a piano, and while we’re boogying to the techno sounds from the box, behind that window is the DJ, a big Polynesian mamma-trannie with flowers round her head, and after a while she comes out and looks at me, then she pulls at my hair, then she moves away and talks to this other girl about me. Teimanu says, “Elles sont jaloux” which, thanks to Roger later on, I find out means They’re Jealous, and they are, and all because of the long blonde. Who would have thought when I bought the trusty hair all those years ago it would get me into bad favour in the Pacific. When your face, well head, doesn’t fit and all that… Anyway I’ve about got as much out of the Piano Bar as I’m going to and I’m set to go. But first I go to the DJ box where the mamma is stood and I hold out my card to her – “Mandy Romero” – and my E-mail address – and she seems to be telling me to kneel to her. She’s not that tall, in fact a bit shorter than me, but I’m fucked if I’m going to kneel so she gets the card, I smile sweetly and I go. Mandy woz here! O.K? Oh, and I found out that they were having a Miss Piano Bar contest the weekend after we leave. Our timing is atrocious, as usual, but I’m sure I’d never have stood a chance. No casualties on the trot back to the hotel, and I’m in bed before long. But I’ve about had it up to here with Papeete, - not what I expected. The girls lovely of course and it’s all an education, but I’m due some rest and recuperation after all the action of the last few days. Where is my Paradise island? If we find it, Jo, you will be the first to know. If it has E-mail, of course. Love Mandy