Felony Jones

Magic Wanda

     She still claimed she was in her mid-forties, even though she was in her early sixties. Felony knew better. She also claimed she dated, or just had sex with some of Hollywood's biggest names. Felony believed that was possible, although exactly how big the names were, was open to interpretation. Wanda-Wanda made a lot of claims, you just had to know her well enough to separate truth from fiction. With Wanda, there was truth, there was nuance, and then there was outright bullshit. Felony knew her pretty well. Well enough to know a good percentage of what she said was just cheeky, counterfactual storytelling. She considered Wanda a friend of sorts, but a friend in the sense that she had known her for the better part of a decade and that it meant staying keenly aware of the fact that Wanda could be a very sweet and charming person, but a very unpredictable person.

Wanda grew up in Downey California as Marvin Birdlove—the bright, gregarious only child of two loving parents from an upper middle-class neighborhood. She ended up (with an incredible amount of twists and turns between her easy childhood and complicated adult life) as Wanda-Wanda Vivian Birdlove, of West Hollywood. It was on one of those twists or turns when Felony first came in contact with Wanda-Wanda, the name she preferred to be called by people who weren't close friends. Frankie, (the name Felony was still using at the time) and her patrol partner Hank, whom she described as a rabid menace on his best day, were working the beat when Wanda's "gentleman friend" was roughing her up in an alcove just off the strip. Hank had no interest in helping Wanda and wanted to move on, but Frankie stepped in and stopped the assault. That wouldn't be the first time Frankie came to Wanda's rescue. She even went as far as paying Wanda's bail on two occasions. The last time Frankie came to Wanda's defense was in a courtroom when she was accused of stabbing a man in the gut with a corkscrew in a seedy bar on the Sunset strip. Frankie came to court as a character witness. Wanda told the judge point blank, "I don't like being man-handled, but it was all the bleeding on my silk dress that really pushed me over the edge." The judge replied by pointing out, "but you're the one who made him bleed in the first place." To which she replied, "Then he shouldn't have man-handled me!" Wanda's logic was something else. In the end, Wanda ended up getting off on a technicality. She mostly learned her lesson and mostly cleaned up her act, focusing her attention on fashion full time. That's when she seriously began designing her own clothing. Felony always considered her designs to be more like costumes, but never mocked her outwardly. She made a habit of staying on Wanda's good side just in case there was ever a corkscrew nearby. Being in her good graces came in handy, Wanda knew a lot of people and Felony used that to her advantage on many occasions.

Wanda lived her life as a woman, but never had reassignment surgery. Wanda said she couldn't afford it—which fell under the counterfactual, bullshit claim. Felony had always been amused by the fact that Wanda had one of the most extensive wardrobes in Los Angeles, possibly competing with any Hollywood studio, worth tens of thousands of dollars, while at the same time maintaining the nonsensical story that she couldn't afford sex-reassignment surgery. Wanda had a large storage unit filled with rack after rack of clothing. Once, she practically forced Felony to drive to Sherman Oaks with her because she had watched a story on the news that her storage facility had been broken into and Wanda was in a panic, almost paralyzed with fear at the thought of her individual unit being compromised. It hadn't been touched. Felony stood in awe when Wanda opened the large rolling door exposing her treasure of costumes.

Wanda spent most of her day sleeping, then getting up around four in the afternoon to watch talk shows. After that, she would spend the next several hours primping and plucking and sipping herbal tea while wearing her favorite kimono until it was time to festoon herself with some sort of ridiculous costume. One day she could be dressed as the Statue of Liberty, one day a Chinese Empress. After the festooning period, she spent the rest of her night sketching, designing and sewing clothes that could in theory, Felony reluctantly conceded, be worn by women in a normal everyday situation. At best though, Felony thought of the designs as, drag queen chic. On the rare occasion Wanda actually went out of the house, she would go to one club in particular and hold court. She had mostly stopped going to her old haunts around town for various reasons and decided the best place for her now, in her waning years, was to spend her time in a gay club as a wise dowager dispensing advice, rather than being a dried-up lounge lizard picking up strange men from strange, middle America area codes. In a gay club she was safer and showered with attention, and she loved attention. She would get someone to set up a velvet rope and stand guard while the local gay boys and drag queens waited in line to kiss her giant (fake) diamond ring while she sat alone in the long, curved bench seat, holding out her gloved hand in a way that oozed disinterested boredom. They would ask her all sorts of questions like, what did she think of their outfit? What did she think of their performance? What was her advice when it came to love? Not all of her advice was great. Once, she convinced a friend (who she serviced on a regular basis) to talk to a guy, who had a connection to another guy, who worked at the local gay newspaper, in to giving her a shot writing an advice column. Someone in the chain of command mistakenly gave the okay. The first, (and last letter) she responded to was from, "Woeful in West Hollywood." It was from an extremely shy young man (self-described) who found it too embarrassing to go into an adult toy store, (or have a friend go for him) to purchase a dildo. He explained that he couldn't send away for one either because he couldn't be sure that when the package arrived in the mail that his mother wouldn't open it. The upside was that he had the perfect hiding spot for the dildo once he actually got his hands on it. Wanda wrote back to him—