Look at Brian Yarish.
Six-foot-five in his stockings, but he’s not wearing stockings tonight, he’s wearing five, maybe six inches of platform heel that would break my ankle in three places just looking at them. He’s working his way down Franconia like he owns the concrete, like he invented concrete, and you know what? Maybe he did. That kind of confidence isn’t bought or borrowed. It’s forged in the fire of not giving a single, solitary fuck.
He calls himself Grandma. Not ironically. Not as a joke. Just Grandma, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like it’s been his name since birth and everything else was just a placeholder. And somehow, it fits. Grandma’s got that energy, that take-no-prisoners wisdom mixed with the recklessness of someone who’s already lived three lifetimes and is working on a fourth.
This is before one of the Franconia Performance Salons, that beautiful chaos where art meets sweat meets whatever the hell you want to call what happens when creative people stop pretending to be normal. The calm before the storm. The deep breath before the dive. We’re still in that sacred space where it’s just beer, cheap, cold, perfect, and the night stretching out ahead like a promise or a threat, depending on your perspective.
And that wig. Jesus. That wig has seen things. That wig has stories that would make a sailor blush and a priest reach for the good scotch. It’s been on every head in the neighborhood at one point or another, passed around like a sacrament, like a sacred relic. It’s got more miles on it than a ’73 Cadillac, and Grandma wears it like a crown.
The party hasn’t started yet, but Grandma? Grandma’s always been the party.
My grandmother had a love which found in me so totally its complement, its goal, its constant lodestar, that the genius of great men, all the genius that might ever have existed from the beginning of the world, would have been less precious to my grandmother than a single one of my defects.
The Guermantes Way