When I was in college the student pride center put on a drag show, and the campus paper asked me to interview one of the performers (queens, rather). I found him, after the performance, in the marching band’s storage closet, which was functioning as a dressing room. He had already taken off the last wig he had worn onstage and was placing his acrylic nails in an empty tin case that used to house clarinet reeds.

He had none of the flamboyance I expected. He was soft spoken, reticent, and disinclined to make eye contact. Rather than look at me, his eyes moved to the rack of instruments behind my head. The room was dim, and I could only see their shapes, brass and wooden tubes hanging from hooks and piled on shelves. It could just as easily have been in a tool shed, or a dungeon.

“Hello,” I offered, and he nodded and gave me a weak smile. I told him my name and why I was there. I was wondering if I could ask him a few questions. “You can, yes,” he replied as he peeled off the final nail. I opened my notebook, and squinted at the list of pro forma questions I had written the night before. I asked him how he had become interested in drag.

“Well,” he said. He hesitated, and I thought maybe he was searching his mind for some prepared speech. I wondered if even drag queens had elevator pitches. He removed a nail from the tin and pressed it between his fingertips, so that when he separated his fingers the sticky side still clung to the flesh of his thumb.

“When I was in my teens I suffered from sleep paralysis. It started when I was fifteen or sixteen, I guess. I would wake up, or I would think that I had woken up, and I wouldn’t be able to move. I could see my room—I could see it clearly, the ceiling, the four corners of my bed, my arms on top of the comforter, but I couldn’t move my head, just my eyes. As I lay there, this black thing would crawl across my floor and jump onto my nightstand. It would sit on top of my alarm clock—I could even read the time on the clock—and it would speak to me. I couldn’t hear it, not really, because I was actually asleep, and words aren’t the same in dreams. Language just doesn’t work the way it does when you’re awake. So I never knew what it was trying to say.”

I wasn’t sure if I should interrupt. I was listening, but I also knew that I couldn’t use any of what he was saying. I imagined my editor, a long ago tenured professor of journalism, and I imagined his incredulous red ink notations crawling up the margins of my notes, cursive hooks grabbing at each other, like desperate crabs trying to scale the walls of a supermarket tank. I didn’t say anything.

“I guess this happens a lot to teenagers. Sleep paralysis, I mean. Maybe it’s a hormonal thing, or the stress of growing up, or, I don’t know. But I didn’t know that. I didn’t know what sleep paralysis was. I had never heard of it. So, eventually, I went to my mother. She was a Catholic. I don’t mean that just as a descriptive label, like me saying she was a brunette or a homemaker. She was Catholic. It was her identity, beginning and end. She didn’t hesitate. She told me that it was the devil, or a devil, I don’t remember. And she told me when he came again I should recite the rosary. The only problem was, of course, that when I was in that state I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even think in words, let alone say them. Mary couldn’t intercede, because I couldn’t say her name. Eventually I realized that it didn’t happen if I slept during during the day. I guess ‘night’ is a fundamental part of a ‘nightmare.’ So as soon as I could, I started staying out after dark, as late as I could, as long as I could. I needed to stay distracted to stay awake, so the drag clubs were perfect. The music helped, too.  And I guess everything else followed naturally from there.”

I looked at the still empty page. I wanted to move on to my next question, to get something I could use. But I was curious. “What did the devil look like?”

“He looked like a cat,” he said. “And he didn’t.”