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competition in full gear, a fire baton blazing over my head.”
    â€œTell me,” I said to Gary, mesmerized, as though he were going to light candles and spill goat’s blood all over our wood floors.
    And so, in a whisper, he did:
    1. Look for “Crown-Ready Hair”: The hair must be stacked, especially toward the back, and look worthy of holding a diamond-encrusted tiara.
    2. The evening gown must be “sexy but ladylike,” “unique but not tacky.” “If she looks like a lady in the streets but a freak in the sheets, she’s a lock,” Gary said.
    3. Blondes are always favorites, but they can’t be “whore blondes.” “If their hair looks all Pam Anderson, they’re screwed.”
    4. Barbie bodies. “Big breasts, no waist, curvy hips in the swim-suit competition. They have to look like Barbie,” Gary told me. “America only likes to see big girls at Curves and anorexics in the movies.”
    5. Always pay close attention to Miss California, Miss Texas,Miss Florida, and Miss New York. “They’re robots. They’ve been trained to win since they were five. And they know how to go in for the kill, like the Terminator. Just watch them smile. It will curdle your blood. They always make the top ten.”
    6. Look for a sleeper, the cornpone gal from the Midwest or the Southern belle. “One of each usually makes the top ten,” Gary said, “and each will have a cute drawl and a strong faith in ‘Lord Jesus, my Savior!’ ”
    7. And, most important, Gary told me, very seriously, “Winning contestants always sport an opaque heel.” According to Gary, some pageants have begun to allow contestants to choose either a colored, strappy heel and colored hose, or the more traditional opaque heel and hose. “Tradition, always!” Gary yelled. “It’s a test. And, worst of all, colored shoes and patterned hose cut off contestants’ legs on TV, and can make even the leggiest of girls look like they have stumps. Only women in opaque hose and heels will make the top ten.”
    â€œWhat about the final question?” I had to ask, when he had revealed his secrets.
    â€œDoesn’t matter,” Gary said. “As long as they don’t vomit on themselves, or curse, the prettiest ones are fine. Their whole year is scripted anyway, so what’s it matter?”
    And then Gary nailed the winner of Miss America, picking a Southern girl with a heavy accent, breasts the size of a semi, hair that needed its own zip code, a love of God, and a burning desire to help dying children, or, as she more aptly put it, “dy’un chill’uns.”
    As I downed a Mich Ultra and ate Funyuns that I had fashioned into a bracelet around my wrist, I realized: We could make tons of money off the God-given talents that we had squandered for years.
    So we became gay grifters.
    We started small, innocently, so we could perfect our games, unsuspectingly. We attended close friends’ Oscar and Miss Americaparties. Each and every time we would win, walking out with enough cash to make a monthly car payment and enough candy to keep us twitching the entire winter.
    After a few years, however, our friends turned angry and suspicious and began disqualifying us from winning, saying the wealth needed to be spread to others, namely the straight and undeserving, those who firmly believed that
Patch Adams
was overlooked for Best Picture.
    It was then I decided to up the ante.
    I decided to go all
Ocean’s Eleven
.
    Our first foray into the big-time gambling circuit was a mammoth Oscar party held in a Ritz-esque ballroom filled with massive projection screens and catty, pretentious gays who dressed in tuxes and acted as though their invite to the
Vanity Fair
after party had been temporarily misplaced.
    Tickets to the party cost a fortune and benefited some local charity that I knew had already spent its quarterly take on