Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov

Ice queen and the hairy king: Kim White and Richard Havenick, the new king and queen of the San Pedro Polar Bears, greet their subjects at the San Pedro Christmas parade. The new royals will be formally crowned on New Year’s Day, then lead their fellow Polar Bears on a midday swim from Cabrillo Beach.


’Tis the season of bell ringers outside every market and mall. But the collector outside the Vons in Hollywood has no bell, and instead of a red hat wears skintight hip-huggers, snakeskin boots and several ounces of lip liner. Then you hear her plea: “Can you help the transgender community in crisis?”


Huh?


An elderly gentleman automatically hands her a buck on his way out of the store. She gives him a flier, which he nods at absently as he walks toward his car. Then he stops, looks back at the woman, back at the flier, and just stands there with the leaflet from El Shaddai Resurrection flapping in the wind.


“I do have a lot of men wonder if I’m transgendered,” says Pamela Petty (who says she’s not), as she collects for the ministry she and her husband started 11 years ago. “I guess they want to know if they should be interested.” She laughs. “It’s all for God’s glory.”


Unlike the nearby Salvation Army collector, whose feet appear embedded in the concrete, Petty uses her lean, midriff-bare body to politely invade people’s space. The reactions she elicits are both wary and fascinated; what, exactly, is this woman with severely penciled eyebrows, tinted sunglasses and Cher (circa 1970) hair asking for?


“We work with transgender prostitutes, runaways and drug addicts,” Petty says, to a woman with a baby strapped to her chest. “We provide emergency clothing and food, and we’re trying to open a crisis center and disciple home here in Hollywood.”


“I live in the area,” says the woman, digging into her purse, “so it sounds like a pretty damn good request to me.”


“Can you give a dollar to help transgender prostitutes?” Petty asks two African-American teens, laden down with cases of soda.


The boys look at each other, and then, one after another, put down their cases, and hand Petty a dollar. An elderly Russian couple say together, “God bless you,” as they offer their money. A middle-aged man teases Petty about the patchouli oil she’s wearing (“Takes one to know one,” she jokes back) and hands her a five. People who don’t have any cash on them actually apologize; so many, in fact, are stopping to throw money Petty’s way, they’re causing a jam-up, which chagrins the Salvation Army guy, who’s told by a Vons manager to move to a lesser-used entryway.


The consistency of the donations seems a little bizarre. Shouldn’t Petty, after all, get the occasional negative reaction, perhaps someone saying, “Well, you know, these folks you’re helping have sort of made lifestyle choices I disagree with”?


“I think people who have a problem with this would basically have a problem if I were collecting for the Girl Scouts,” she says. “Though I do sometimes wonder if people think I’m telling a joke. I mean, what could be weirder, pedophiles with dyslexia? Sometimes one of my hookers will come stand with me, so people know we’re legit.”


“What’s El Shaddai mean?” asks a man who grinds to a halt not one but two overflowing shopping carts.


“It’s a Hebrew word that loosely translates to God,” says Petty. “Years after we chose the name, we found out it also means ‘big-breasted one,’ which seems pretty appropriate for a transgender ministry.”


The man hands her three dollars.


As the morning wears on, I congratulate Petty on her large haul.


“Oh, it’s not me, it’s God,” she says, rolling singles into stacks of 10. “Then again, I do have a lot of people tell me they’re happy to give me money just because I don’t have those damn bells.”


—Nancy Rommelmann



Blessing: A Christmas Carol


’Twas a week before Christmas, and at the corner of Highland and Franklin avenues, just north of the new Hollywood and Highland mall, a young guy on crutches encountered a middle-aged man in a camouflage cap (call him the Vet) walking his dog. With little preamble, they began yelling at each other. The young guy (call him Tim) jabbed a crutch at the Vet, who seized it and repeatedly beat the differently abled wayfarer about the sides and shoulders with it, at one point knocking him sprawling into the gutter alongside traffic. The dog looked on, wagging its tail.

[


As the Vet walked away, still carrying one of the confiscated crutches, Tim limped along behind, and they continued exchanging salutations. The words were hard to make out, but the conversation sounded sort of like this:


Tim: “God bless us every one!”


Vet: “God bless America!”


—Greg Burk



Loyalty: The Guest Driver


My girlfriend is about to strip for strangers. Again. Rowdy yelps spill out of the plain stucco house in Tarzana that murmurs with the dull thud of bass. I lean back in the driver’s seat of my car, watch Natasha get ready. She applies bright red lipstick to her clever mouth; her hair crowns her face in red ringlets. I look at my watch — we’re too early. Natasha stretches her arms along the dashboard, plucks cat hair from her outfit. She’s wearing a stretchy black shift with a Chinese dragon scrolling from her breasts to her left hip. Underneath this is a silver metallic G-string. Underneath that, her pear-rounded hips, the knotwork tattoo at the base of her spine. She looks me in the eye and sighs with exaggerated force, grinning.


“Don’t worry,” she says. “Parties are easy. Lots of cash.”


She carefully drops the lipstick tube in a side compartment of her huge athletic bag, and I see the collection of toys: whipped cream in a can, a metallic vibrator, a huge double-headed dildo in case another girl has been invited. You can never overprepare, Natasha assures me. She gets out, adjusts her outfit, looks at the nondescript stucco house. “Here’s what you say: ‘I’m the driver. We collect half at the door and half after, plus extras.’ Tell them you’ll be just outside.”


This is my first week as her driver. The guy from the agency, Manny — huge, with “Death” and “Mother” tattooed on opposing forearms — is away in New Orleans. Natasha doesn’t trust the other drivers.


In her 6-inch heels, she’s two inches â taller than me. We climb past a dozen cars and knock on the door. No one answers, and my stomach churns — maybe they’ve all passed out. Natasha tries the handle, turns, opens the front door to a blast of music and smoke. Fourteen men line the room cradling their beers at the neck, eyeing us. Pointing at me, one of them moans, “Ai, mi hijo!” His friend chokes with laughter. Natasha, forcing a sly smile, asks for the host. A short young man with a shaved head comes out from the kitchen, his hand in his pocket, his pupils enormous. “S’my house. S’is party,” he says, pointing to the other end of the room, where a man wearing a bra and wig is talking heatedly to his friends.


“I’m the driver,” I say.


“What?” he yells.


“I’m the driver! Half at the door!”


He considers me for a moment. He looks at Natasha, who squints her eyes and pouts, then laughs, hands on hips. The host pulls out a wad of 20s and gives me a hundred.


“There you go, kid,” he sneers.


“I’ll be right outside,” I say. Natasha touches my shoulder, then lays down her boom box and trots off to the bathroom. I push past two men coming into the living room, bumping into one of them in a way that I think is hard, but the man apologizes and keeps walking. No one looks at me, and I have nowhere to go but out. I close the front door, and within a minute I hear cheering. “Oooooh. Oh! Yeah, baby, me!”


I sit on the porch, stand up, sit back down again. One hour, and then I can knock. More cheers. I’m such a good boyfriend, I think, very understanding. They see her, they touch her, they watch her, they want her — but hey, she comes home to me. Isn’t loyalty sexy? When she began stripping, that thought was reasonable and even consoling. It was my mantra. Here’s another one: I’m young, and she’s putting herself through school. Or: What right do I have to tell her what to do? How can I insist she keep working at burger joints and fund-raiser telethons? Thanks to college, my friends are going to be in debt for a decade. Natasha can pay for it all in one year of stripping, but here we are in year two. No matter how often she comes home exhausted and smoky-stale, cavalier and hating men, she’ll be doing this for a long time. The money’s too easy, Natasha said today while we lay in bed. You strip till they won’t have you.


Another cheer goes up, and then a chant: “Go! Go! Go!” I think of the gig earlier in the week, the house of the widower in Eagle Rock, no porch light, blue TV light coming from the front room. He had Natasha dress up in his wife’s pearls and masturbated while she played with the vibrator. I know because I stood watching in the window, appalled at my excitement. The widower danced around the room with her in the center of it. She was moaning and he’d become a windup toy, begging Natasha, “Please, please let me fuck you.” She told me later she came for real.

[


I feel the car keys in my pocket and the hundred bucks. I think about how it took hundreds of men loving her wide hips, not just me, to make Natasha believe she was beautiful. I imagine myself driving away alone, now. I stay seated and my hands twitch.


More yelling and whistling. Then more. Then “Oh, honey!” and I know that was her yelling, know she’s come for them spectacularly. An hour is up. I knock. The host comes out grinning, looking back inside as the cheering continues. “Natasha says hang on, she’ll just be another 10 minutes.” And he closes the door again.


—Ryan Sloan

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