For just eight dollars more per day than a Chevrolet Impala, the Enterprise at the Austin, Texas airport rents me a 2008 Chrysler 300 in “Inferno Red Crystal Pearl.” My Enterprise representative, who wears a white cowboy hat, black vest, and a six-pointed star badge with “SHERIFF” embossed across it, points at the plastic jack-o’-lantern and invites me to take as much candy as I’d like. I snag a Tootsie Pop and an eight-ounce bottle of Ozarka water.

The stereo activates with the ignition, playing Southern Crunk at smooth jazz volume. I’m in my costume, I realize, one I will assume throughout the next week. It’s an aspirational one, that of the high-dollar horse breeder, someone who can easily afford buying horses, breeding them, showing them, and selling them to sheiks and wives of rock stars (I’m talking to you, Shirley Watts!).

I’ve revamped the image some, wearing jeans and a tank top, Gucci sunglasses. My hair is as blond as it was when I was fifteen, and you can see a stylist swathed in tattoos cut it. My body isn’t what it was (how could it be?), but compared to most people outside of Los Angeles, I’m popping it with the muscle definition of my arms, certainly younger than the 42-year-olds these people typically see. I wear a Coke bottle top stud and a Star of David stud in my left ear. I don’t hide that I’m queer.

And I rock a 300. The only thing missing is the Tanqueray and the bud, but I don’t drink much, been to jail once, and don’t want to take my chances in Texas, know what I’m saying?