The diamond stroke
by Maria Golia
[ fiction - october 05 ]
I
I don’t let my feelings intrude in my dramatic work. It’d give a false view of the world. I aim at an extremely classical, cold, highly intellectual style of performance. I’m not writing for the scum who want to have the cockles of their hearts warmed.
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theater
I am a traveler and a thief. I travel through scenarios, stealing ideas, moments and the occasional jewel. The most recent and therefore fondest of my larcenies was the idea for the Backstage Club heist, that to be precise, first occurred to Paris, a pimp in whose company I found myself one balmy Texas night about a month before the rodeo. Paris was in the process of lighting an infinitesimally thin marijuana cigarette, having just dispatched a pinch of brown powder, called ‘boy’ from the side of his palm. He drove his Cadillac with divine detachment. A low-slung, purple felt fedora might have interfered with a lesser being’s line of vision but not Paris’s. He could navigate the east end of town from his own grave, which in fact, it was.
Right now, Paris is worried about Dolores who is not waiting in her usual place. Cruising the battered shack-lined streets of Fort Wright, we pass a couple of wraiths that shout out his name hoping for a lift. Paris glides by indifferent.
- Don’t want no broke niggas in my car. Always askin’ somethin’ for nothin’, always broke as the ten commandments. You know, what, sista?
- I will if you tell me.
Paris emits a fig-like chuckle and passes the joint.
- That Dolores? She my bread and butter. But I’d give ten a her for one a you, you hear me, woman?
- I hate to disappoint you, Paris, but I’m on a mission for Christ. (This fabrication is designed to put Paris on the defensive.)
- Hell.
- He did it for us.
- Whatch you talkin’ 'bout, woman?
- When’s the last time you went to church?
- Aw, shit...
- When?
- Look. My brother, LaPaz? He the one love them church meetings. He just got him a job in a big-assed redneck restaurant, you know what I mean? LaPaz, he’s no good on the street. Only time he find work is when that crazy-assed rodeo comes to town and they be flippin’ those steaks and fryin’ those frog legs up in the Backstage Club like it was Friday night before Judgment Day.
- Isn’t that in Cowtown?
- Right on top of the muthafuckin’ rodeo rink, that’s where, and only the big ole fat cowboys get to watch the show up there. LaPaz? He told me they good and dirty rich, they got some scrawny women and some fat-ass ones too. They all wearin’ so much ice they can hardly lift their hands. They got them gold toothpicks, and gold belt buckles and spurs on the muthafuckin’ pointy-assed boots. They rich. Yes, Lord. And they fat.
Paris shakes his head and leans into a turn with a predatory sideways slouch, scanning the ghostly slick sidewalks. After several tokes on the exceptionally potent Thai-stick joint, I am virtually telepathic. I look at sloe-eyed Paris and drop anchor in his thick-skulled thoughts. The image of a shop-window’s-worth of chunky gold and sparkle flickers there. I sit still and quiet, waiting for the next opening, passive as a sleeping sphincter. Paris is still shaking his head and stroking his chin.
- Yes, lord. They rich and they fat.
- You think they need more help in that kitchen, Paris?
- What? You crazy, woman?
- Think about it.
- Uh-oh. I’ll be goddamned. You one peculiar white bitch. You be thinkin’ 'bout them dia-
- Look, isn’t that Dolores down there?
- Damn her whore hide. I give ten a her for one a you.
We pull up in front of an after-hours speakeasy where Dolores is engaged in a catfight with two other women. Paris spins out of the car and with one fluid stride and a long-armed sweep, extracts Dolores from the altercation by the nape of her neck, shakes her, and throws her in the back seat, screeching:
- What page you on, bitch?
While Dolores yammers a response, I take a small packet of herb, the original object of the evening’s encounter, from Paris’s large, flat, dismissive palm and exit the caddy.
- Peace, says Paris.
- Say hello to LaPaz.
Paris touches his hat. And there it was: a moment, an idea and incipient jewel, all in a single, gliding, street-lit puff of smoke. You had to see it.
A way of seeing became apparent to me in the Fort Wright theater where I attended acting classes, an acoustically perfect space with black velvet curtains and a black latex floor. Involved in a particularly tricky exercise designed to raise the organism’s energy level from the automatic (blundering locomotion) to the sensitive (a minimum requirement for achieving ensemble) to the conscious (whereby every stratum of musculature is lived in and aware); poised on one elbow, half a knee and an index finger; infused with attention, I noticed droplets of sweat fall to the ground and turn to onyx on the matte black floor. The texture of the moment was so vivid I knew it would enter that archive of moments of which there are never enough, unless one becomes a connoisseur. So I agreed to play the part of a Polish mercenary in Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu and discovered I was made for the role and any other.
King Ubu is about a malicious opportunist who only distinguishes himself from those around him by his particularly murderous greed. His reward is consummate power; actually, he fights for it but underhandedly and without a trace of imagination. The playwright Alfred Jarry conceived the play as a schoolboy with a schoolmate, modeling the lead character on a teacher they despised. When it debuted in Paris in 1896, an infuriated audience halted the show that began with the word, merdre.
Things went a little differently around a century later in Texas where shit is a widely accepted fact of life. In fact, the laughter of recognition rang throughout the theater. Nor did we manage to elicit the same furor of critique from the local press as did Jarry’s original. After all, this play is about the success that awaits the ruthlessly treacherous, not exactly headline news in the Lone Star State. Indeed, if our sardonic choice of play could be excused, the fact that it unwittingly coincided with the town’s annual Gun Show was unforgivable since it cost us half our audience. The joke was on us. The only thing that beats a gun show for entertainment in this part of the world is a rodeo, as I soon found out, and the only thing that beats a rodeo is, well, we shall discover that in due time.
Meanwhile I had a taste of theater. I wore a beard and a mustache. Night after night I was attacked by a ferocious polar bear that I relentlessly slaughtered with a wooden sword. I made friends with the actor who played the bear, a blue-eyed melancholic Berliner named Ernst that I call Angst, one of the few things that make him smile. By tacit agreement we never asked each other what brought us here but I’d watched Ernst perform more demanding roles than the bear and so inquired what he thought about acting:
- Acting is a dying art or if you like, the art of dying. Each night on stage the actor dies.
- So why do you do it?
- Because when I’m on stage no one can fuck with me. Because people don’t know what they’re like and I think that I can show them.
II
And no political or moral revolution will be possible so long as man continues to be magnetically held down - even in his most elementary and simple organic and nervous reactions - by the sordid influence of all the questionable centers of the Initiates, who, sitting tight in the warmth of the electric blankets of their duality schism laugh at revolutions as well as wars, certain that the anatomic order on which the existence as well as the duration of actual society is based will no longer know how to be changed.
Antonin Artaud, Theater and Science
Our theater is a semi-liberated space rented from the local powers who own the better part of Fort Wright. The Codd Brothers are oilmen, which mean they like to dig holes. They dug a big one out of the deteriorated town center and replaced it with neat rows of family restaurants, shopping malls and hotels where black and chicano workers slave for subhuman wages while sleepily sabotaging the operations however they can. In the middle of it all, is a shiny black tower from whence the billionaire Codds rule the world. One of them awoke one bland sunny morning and decided that what his town was missing was Culture. He went straight out and hired someone to buy a representative portion of every sort of art that civilization had produced to date and then got a Japanese architect to build a proper container. The Codd Art Museum has the dual virtue of burying the tracks of various funds, taxable or otherwise, and keeping the Board’s wives busy.
The theater was a postscript; someone from New York said they simply must have one and there was no room in the museum, bursting with the plunder of five continents. Someone from San Francisco suggested a troupe of itinerant actors to get the place going. The Codds agreed. The consultant had a laugh with himself because the Codds didn’t bother asking and so never knew that the troupe was a bunch of ex-hippies from Haight Ashbury. But what the hell did they expect for the lousy budget they gave him, Sondheim?
The three brothers own politicos on both sides of the fence, just to be on the safe side, which is the only place they’d ever dream of being. They own a private security force that trawls downtown in golf carts wearing guns and carrying electronic cards that give them access to every last door - except one. Our techie hotwired the theater to give us ample warning if someone tries to crash rehearsals that may seem odd to the hostile observer. Mostly they left us alone having bigger fish to fry, since Fort Wright is the heart of an ever-thriving arms industry, aside from the oil one, and the Codds have a finger on that trigger too. They live in houses set on custom-contoured hills surrounded by artificial lakes filled with water wrenched from a parched and querulous earth. Sometimes for relaxation the men get together and shoot quail.
Aside from that, the colored folk cluster on the fringes of town while the majority of the native sons and daughters thrive on meat, bigotry and anachronism. A popular supermarket chain is called The Beef People. A main thoroughfare is named White Settlement Road. The city’s vaunted historic core is referred to as Cowtown and quaintly arranged in the style of a Western film set. There are saloons with swinging doors and shops with facades of weathered plank. Painted wooden representations of beer mugs, boots, hats, saddlery and steaks hang above shop doors to unequivocally advertise their commodities, the local synonym for art.
These Texans have a preternatural fondness for all things bovine, epecially in Cowtown where commercial establishments display the portraits of prizewinning bulls with the same fondness that compels other folks to frame their ancestors. Steak joints are darkened, hushed and perfumed with mesquite smoke. Women clad in crisp white aprons distribute hunks of charred flesh, beside which sits a single foil-wrapped potato, the Texan yang and yin; between them a wood-handled knife lies as sharp as a dare. There’s a vast abandoned slaughterhouse in Cowtown, a cavernous building of ramp-connected stories with lofty arched naves where untold millions of cows were once unceremoniously bludgeoned. Now that the dirty work’s been moved to the suburbs, the grounds are overgrown with tall pointy grasses and thistled weeds. This is Fort Wright’s Imperial Forum, a noble ruin, but the nearby Rodeo is the town’s coliseum, alive and kicking and never more so than during the Great Stockyards Show.
A parade inaugurates the two-week long rodeo and animal fair and it’s pure spectacle involving man, woman and beast, a distinction that at times is hard to draw. There are cowboys and cowgirls in stiff jeans and brass buckled belts, sheriffs with thick mustachios (that I secretly envied) bandana bandits and honky-tonk women with bosoms tumbling, everyone topped with immense and unyielding ten-gallon hats. The local corporations sponsor vehicles for their lackeys to ride, dozens of horse drawn carriages, stagecoaches and covered wagons. The parade cuts through downtown, so cattle swarms up Main Street, herded by cowboys on highbred quarter horses that can turn on a dime. There are horny bulls, fetching heifers, fatted calves and chubby sheep and they all leave piles of steaming manure in their wake. There are marching bands and children rapt with wonderment tottering close by the hoary hooves.
One of the floats features an upright player piano and a group of buxom blondes in tight bodices, flounced skirts and chicken feather boas. No mistaking the Judge Sisters, Fancy, Tina and Jude, disaffected graduates of the Academy of Southern Belle. They came to our Ubu performance and hung around after the show to ask if they could join up. We just love the theater, they said (pronouncing it the-ate-er, accent on the ‘ate’) displaying charming overbites. The gals were friendly but our director, a saturnine poetess from Berkeley, was nonplussed. I went to hear them sing at the Hot Iron Inn and the sisters had talent. They performed Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1922 hit 'Black Snake Moan' and brought the house down, way down, to its very knees. Hats were thrown, balls adjusted and tobacco spat in a glorious moment of eye-rolling distraction. I met the Judges’ mother that night, a blousy, chain-smoking bundle of tough love. She has what may well be a lethal flu and is hoarse, wheezy and wise.
- You sure must be proud Miz Judge, I tell her.
- Ah ay-yam. Ah told 'em ‘be yourself, don’t be afraid to take chances and just enjoy it’.
When the girls finished their act (a ballad encore of ‘That Man In My Arms Means Nothin’ To Me, I Was Tellin’ Him All About You’) they came and sat, dressed in different pastel shades of satin cowboy shirts with bursting snaps, hot pants under strapped on chaps, and low slung sequined holsters.
- You gals must sure be proud of your mamma, I remarked.
- I know that’s right, Sugarcube, said Fancy. She taught us everything we know.
The girls let me in on the secret that the Judge Sisters is a stage name and the family is actually from Tennessee and ‘just passin’ through’. What’s more, they were none too fond of Texans.
- They don’t know diddly ‘bout lovin’, said Tina (the youngest who had an affair with a rancher who turned out to be married and had to activate a pump installed in his urethra to achieve erection).
- They don’t think much of women, that’s a fact, said Fancy (mother of two love children currently living with an aunt in Nashville and financed by a portion of the collective sister enterprise since their daddy ran out). It’s always ‘lil’ lady’ this and ‘pretty momma’ that. Why can’t those fools call us by our Christian names, I’d like to know. Lordy.
- Well, they’re probably just scared, you know how men are I offered (knowing that the more sense they had the more frightened they were).
- Do we ever, sister, do we ever. Can’t live with ‘em -
- Can’t live without ‘em, they all chimed in with the eldest, twice-divorced Jude who broke into a hearty head-shaking laugh.
- Tell you what, says Jude, how about we go on over and find us some fresh blood at the Backstage Club. One of them good ole boys wants us to sing up there for the last night of the rodeo. Let’s go have a look around.
The Backstage Club is small by Texan standards, designed to provide elite patrons with a birds-eye view of the rodeo. A glass wall overlooks the dimmed arena where a small tractor makes the rounds smoothing the red-dirt ground. People are so drunk they can barely stand and the rodeo hasn’t even begun. And there are the women, just as Paris’s brother said, glittering like a starry chaparral sky.
- Damn, says Fancy. I haven’t seen so much ice since we played that folk fest in Anchorage.
- Hell, look at the sparkler in that cowboy’s bolero, says Tina.
- Talk about carbon-based life forms, says I.
- Atomic number six, I remember that from chemistry class. Diamond’s made of it. Lucky six, Fancy reminds us.
That cinched it. She and her nomad sisters seemed integral to my rapidly evolving plans. I told them the idea and how it would be just like a theater performance with a little audience participation.
- Think you can do that? I asked.
- We sure could use the moola, says Tina. Mama’s gettin’ too old to be livin’ out a motels.
- How can we be good when everything’s so expensive, Fancy pouted.
- If you can’t run with the big dogs then stay on the porch, said Jude who decides all the sisters’ gigs.
- Feel the fear and do it any way, said Fancy.
- Well, it’s a small world, especially around here. But I won’t mind leavin’ it behind, added practical Tina. And we all drank to that.
Th ersatz cowboys at the Backstage Club smoked, hummed and hollered, their blocky, armored torsos mounted on denim legs terminating in reptilian boots. They had cow skin belts with metal shields jammed between their guts and groins and stiff empty headpieces with sharp-edged brims that hide their eyes. They grimaced with emphatic jaw mashing, cheeks bloated with juicy tobacco chew that periodically issued in viscous brown projectiles smack dab into strategically placed spittoons. I watched a man lift a hedge of white mustache with an index finger to clear the way for a frothy beer. And there it was, another stolen moment, a collector’s item best indexed under the title ‘this too, exists’. And this is where I live.
III
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond
Is immortal diamond
Gerard Manley Hopkins
I have a body, a hundred trillion cells each made of millions of atoms, and carbon is the quintessential glue that holds them all together, the sixth most abundant element in the cosmos. It’s formed in the cores of red giant stars in a nuclear recipe so just right that if it differed by a pinch of a percent we wouldn’t be here wracking our brains to figure out why we are. If you care to see the versatility of lucky six, look in the mirror or out of a window. Everything organic owes its existence to carbon and its peculiar ability to make atomic connections. Diamond is pure carbon and the Greek name for it, adamos, means ‘I tame’ or ‘I subdue’. We’re only eighteen-percent diamond-stuff but the elemental affinity with something incorrupt, invulnerable and ripe with possibilities is there. But who’s doing the taming and subduing around here, is what I’d like to know.
It seems my Texan neighbors aren’t that interested in matters such as origins, astonishment and escape from the mortal coil, whereas they could at least show a little atomic appreciation. After all, what is petroleum but the compressed goo of planktonic organisms that once shimmered in a vanished Paleozoic sea? It’s hydrocarbon, that’s what. Nor could their guns, cars and planes be shot, driven and flown without carbon, that combined with iron makes steel. And where would our wardrobes be without carbon-reliant synthetics like rayon and polyester, the Frankensteins of the fashion industry? Not to mention rubber and plastic. From condoms to alarm clocks, we are not only carbon-based but carbon-enslaved.
Beneath a large, smudged moon Fort Wright’s black community gathers in the Convention Center for what would have been Martin Luther King’s 63rd birthday if he hadn’t gotten shot at thirty-nine. A simple chicken dinner will be served by the Black Chamber of Commerce in a cut-rate cement-floored rental room usually reserved for storage. It’s a big family-style turnout, soft lights and tables decorated with oak leaves and confetti left over from New Year’s Eve, everyone smiling wide, dressed in Sunday clothes and shaking perfumed hands, singles eyeing each other boldly and laughing when they get caught.
A contest for the best essay entitled ‘My Future’ awards two kids five hundred dollar scholarships towards the cut-rate college of their choice. The winners read excerpts. First, the girl, owl-eyed with glasses and poker-straightened hair:
- I’m not interested in two hundred dollar handbags, especially endangered species of Texas fresh water crocodile. My psyche is more important than that, and it tells me I’m to serve the community and my lord Jesus Christ and my way of doing it will be to become a famous pschye-ologist. Or else a veterinarian.
The boy is more prosaic:
- I’m just glad to be sixteen and never set foot in a jailhouse except with my daddy, I mean Little Tommy Tucker, the best bail bondsman this side of the Trinity River. When daddy says there’s more black men in jail than university, you best believe it. I don’t run with gangs and I say no to drugs because I’m an Individual.
We applaud and rise for the black national anthem, led by Selenza and Hobert White, choirmasters of the Baptist Church of the Transfiguration. I can never remember the words except for the end ‘...til victory... is won’ - but it’s a poignant hymn that summons thickness to the throat and moisture to the eyes if you’re not careful. Then the choir dedicates a song to King that ruefully credits him with having given his life and having consequently no more to give. I sit with my dentist, Josephine, her husband Lamar, my ophthalmologist, and their hairdresser Carl who says he’s running a ten dollar ‘recession buster’ down at the shop, two shampoos and a golden conk (kink-remover and blond highlights). A multi-media presentation with real dancers and filmed images flashes scenes across the stage of Alabama marches, crack houses, Paula Adbul and Dankali tribesmen. Selenza sings Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Goin’ On’ and everyone’s humming along, swaying shoulders or snapping fingers soft and reverent as I slip away.
Meanwhile, in the parallel universe conveniently located in the main wing of the Convention Center, the Gun Show is still going strong. The big hall is lit up like an operating room. Miles of aisles of folding tables are covered with guns and ammo and some mean looking hunting knives with notches up the side and spikes at the ends. There are displays of Nazi memorabilia and relics from the Civil War. The gun selection is ponderous, running the gamut from vintage muskets and bayonets to automatic weapons, ‘Something for everybody, l’il lady, you don’t you just try that magnum on for size while you’re at it, you’re a big strong gal ain’t cha?’
The creatures manning these tables are all Odins, Thors and Valkyries, bristling, burly and russet - bearded in plaid hunting shirts. I stop at one table and toy with a switchblade then move to another and flip through a Mercenary Magazine. I try not to drop it and stare when a group of turbaned and cloaked Afghani warriors sweep by pointing to a fully mounted Stinger and pattering excitedly in what I take to be Pashtun. The guy selling the magazines tips his Stetson and says proudly that a local congressman had the Afghanis flown in to be sewn up in the local hospital before heading back to the Soviet fray and why not fit a little shopping in while they were at it? Good for business. Damn right. Patriotic, too.
I pick up a pair of fake pearl-handled six-shooters and a box of blanks. Time to head for the theater where Ernst is waiting to help me memorize text for a TV gig. On the way out, who do I run into but Paris.
- I didn’t see you at the Martin Luther dinner, I told him.
- Shit, whatch you talkin’ ‘bout woman, I done bought me a fancy-assed portable cattle prod at the gun show. That shit comes in handy on the street. Battery operated.
- You mean you don’t carry a gun Paris?
- Hell no, sister. I’m a lover not a fighter. Let me tell you a little somethin’ bout us niggers. When it comes to women, they just wanna’ feel their nigger strong, I say strong. You just got to give it to her as hard as you can and she can understand that, you hear? She get behind it. Now, as a matter a fact I like me some oral sex, you know what I’m sayin’? Truth is, we niggers, we just romantic muthafuckas but don’t tell that to no black woman. I swear to god I give ten a them for one a you, you hear me woman?
I tell him I do.
- Hell. Where you goin’ girl, you can ride with me. You ain’t goin’ to no church this time a night.
On the way to the theater Paris detours so we have time to smoke a joint, the acrid smell mingling with the thick twang of cherry car-freshener. He drives us through the Bottom, a slum at the edge of town where the river runs high and no one else will live but the blacks who have to settle for the flood-ground. I tell him about my visit to the Backstage Club. He’s impressed, and says anything he and La Paz can do to help is fine so long as the price is right they have some fun and don’t get their hands any dirtier than usual. I ask if he has any more brothers and sisters.
- Hell yeah, there’s Dakar, he’s the youngest and twin girls, Havana and Luanda.
- They’re all cities. Most people get named for saints.
-Shee-it. My daddy name Havana after his favorite cee-gar. Dakar? That’s some fancy-ass men’s perfume. Paris, yeah, my granddaddy comes from Paris Texas and Luanda, well now that’s just a right pretty name.
Paris drops me off and I walk the last few blocks to the theater. The streets are deserted except for the Codd security guards who remind me that I live in a prison block, regularly patrolled by a flaccid gun-toting army employed by the wardens, my landlords. One hundred and twenty bourgeois mercenaries hold the key to my sleeping quarters in the theater loft. If I happen to forget my entry card all I have to do is request access via a video monitored intercom hooked up to a twenty-four hour surveillance center. The greatest wealth in America cannot buy imagination. Get a good job with an insurance package and prepare for old age; that’s the routine. I jog the last two hundred yards to the theater and notice the cops telling each other on their walkie-talkies to keep an eye on me. I move only half as fast as I can, knowing I could outrun them all in my sleep.
After an all-night session with Ernst I’m ready to make a pilgrimage to the nearby city of Dallas to participate in a science fiction video version of Poe’s Lygeia, about a woman who defies death. I play the lead and have a few good lines:
Thinking is the crest of deep physical turbulence rushing from a point of original unity at the beginning of the universe. It is a product of the same motility and physical processes that created galaxies. When one thinks clearly about thinking, one is present at the first instant of time. The inevitability of death is statistical. Statistics are mental patterns of expectation. There is no observable connection between expectation and fact. Man does not yield to death utterly, except by the failure of his will.
Driving back to Fort Wright, I notice derelict housing projects and their names: Aladin, Casa Villa, Biarritz, all hopeless wrecks bearing their titles with regal irony. The Dallas skyline rises like a reef from an exhumed seabed, a monolithic tribute to no one, its mirrored facades reflecting a setting sun. The filming of Lygeia adds the penultimate link in a chain I will soon relinquish. My ghost will haunt the airwaves long after I’m gone.
IV
We must first of all put an end to the subjugation of the theater to the text, and rediscover the notion of a language halfway between gesture and thought.
Antonin Artaud, The Theater of Cruelty, First Manifesto
Even to the casual observer, small movements of the face, hands and body reveal truths: the sympathetic listener suppressing a yawn, the doctor eyeing his watch, the priest comforting a beggar then checking his pockets, the lover kissing with open eyes, the manic foot, slack mouth, clenched jaw, narrowed eye, tight lip, furrowed brow, bleeding nails - movement is the language of betrayal. The smaller the movement the more subtle the thought it betrays. If you could observe the smallest of all movements down to the capillary, the molecular, the atomic, it follows that consciousness itself would be revealed. Or betrayed, however you want to look at it. Like movement in the skin of a snake: diffuse, pervasive, un-pinpointable, e pure si muove, and yet it moves.
The purpose of ordinary acts is to absorb, overwhelm and therefore conceal these small movements. A handshake, shoulder slap, hug, leg-cross, head-toss, stride, sob, spin - all subsume and devour the revelatory truths of the actions’ origins. That is why the idea of an actor, placed under the microscope of the stage, is so fascinating and so unpopular. Because everything he does is scrutinized and usually comes up short, because only he can know what he knows and when he doesn’t, it shows. And why watch another inept actor when I’m starring in the show of a lifetime and the only time I’ll know it is when the curtain falls? Bad theater is very depressing. On the other hand, everyone has seen some act of grace, a dancer’s leap, the trapeze arc and grasp, the tilted head and crooked elbow of a woman smoothing her hair, a flower-like hand extended, a grief-weary head tentatively raised. An act can be a mood, a point of entry, benediction.
But what act is required, what could embody so many strivings and provide escape velocity from this entropic snake-biting-tail orbit? The best I could come up with on short notice was a pataphysical diamond heist, a singular bit of mischief with a multifarious objective performed by a sanguine ensemble invested with white-hot sensitivity. Create and run. Guerilla theater, you might say, just a little something to get us out of the slump.
On the appointed day I awoke to find Angst’s platinum bulk hunched like a tortured Rodin at the foot of the two costume trunks upon which I slept.
- It exploded, he intoned darkly, it exploded it exploded it exploded it-
I sit up, shaking off a dream.
- Don’t tell me, not the bloody rodeo arena, what explo-
- The space shuttle. The Challenger, Angst snarls mockingly. He’s taking the event very personally, both the loss and the ineptitude of the responsible agencies.
- Oouf. That’s rotten. What about the astronauts?
- Star dust, Angst hisses, baring his teeth which are sharp, brown-edged and separated.
- And the shuttle?
- Pulverized (smashing his fist on my still warm pillow).
- Ernst, how sad. Wasn’t there a schoolteacher on board?
- Silly hen, he roars. Why didn’t she stay home and teach her brats to multiply?
- They’ll figure it out for themselves when the time comes. Come on, snap out of it. We have things to do. The show must go on.
- Space shuttle, space shuttle! How will I ever get to Mars if they can’t even keep a glorified airplane in orbit.
- Take it easy Angst, we’ll get you there one of these days, don’t you worry your pretty little head. Now run along and do your errands.
As Ernst slinks off muttering, the possibilities of this latest bit of news begin to dawn. The scripting of an act, insofar as it is possible, incorporates every accessible contextual nuance and so is flexible, but as full of form and substance as a sound wave. The best plots cannot anticipate themselves except in the act, unfolding. Ideal outcomes are astonishing. And they lived astonishingly ever after.
Driving south on the highway, the sky is pewter with a greenish cast. Lula is waiting for me in front of the Do Or Diner, a truck stop off the interstate at the exit for Possum Kingdom. She’s a Judge Sisters discovery, a refugee from the Tennessee Church of God With Signs Following, the folks who gave us snake handling (Mark 16:17-18: And these signs shall follow them that believe...). Other methods of observing their faith include applying fire to the skin and ingesting poison.
She gets in the car, kisses me on the lips in obeisance to scripture (Corinthians 13:12-13 ‘Greet one another with the Holy Kiss’) and says:
- Sorry. Bad habit.
Lula’s got hair like dirty water down to her hips (Signs Following women aren’t allowed to cut it) is carrying two big baskets and looks like the Little Match Girl. Closer examination reveals the lithe muscularity of a gymnast, wincing skepticism, two diamondback rattlers in one basket and assorted pit vipers in the other. Lula’s a talker which is fine with me. I just want to get one thing out of the way.
- Those snakes. Are they still, uh, I mean do they have their -
- I’m no fool. My daddy got bit when he was preachin’. Said he felt like he got popped with a baseball bat. That was right before he died. Last words were ‘he really pumped it in me.’ Mamma said daddy got pumped full a Jesus. Mamma’s not too bright. Jesus says, ‘be perfect like your Father’ but I’ll be damned if he was talkin’ ‘bout mine. I defanged these varmints myself, except maybe one or two just to keep things inner-restin’.
- Perfect. Which of the-
- You know about snakes, real ones? Them diamondbacks for example, they smell with their tongue, both ‘a them itty-bitty pink forks is a nose. They got little heat-radar doodads in their face, help’s ‘em find food. They like their critters small and furry.
- That’s a relief.
- Lookie here. (Lula produces a baby Texas Horned Lizard from a cloth handbag.) This here’s called a horny toad. Found it by the roadside. It can shoot a stream ‘a blood from its eyes a good four feet. Nobody knows why.
- Inner-restin’
- You makin’ fun a’ me?
- Wouldn’t dream of it.
- Awe-right then.
Lula disappears in a stream of hair and sleeps. I have several more stops and a costume change before the Rodeo begins. All the while I’m running the coming night’s choreography through my mind forwards and backwards. Backwards is harder because it begins with an end that no one can predict. This, I think to myself, is living. You start in the middle and work it both ways.
V
In the Theater of Cruelty the spectator is in the middle and the spectacle surrounds him... we have no intention of boring the audience to death with transcendent cosmic preoccupations.
Antonin Artaud, Theater of Cruelty First Manifesto
The Rodeo arena is packed to the rafters with a grimly boisterous crowd of the kind once seen at public executions. They hush and rise for the National Anthem amidst great brow-furrowing and leg shuffling to remove the vascular pressure on sub-virile testes and labia strangled in the garrote of blue Wranglers. Like them, I place my hand on my heart and sing words without meaning, in my case, sweetly with a hint of admonishment. Oh say, can you see? The benches rumble as we reposition our shanks and the show begins with a procession of nubile blonds who prance their lively tail-swishing mounts around the red-dirt rink to the tune of Deep in the Heart of Texas. A booming disembodied tenor slices through the music:
- Howdy Ladies and Gents! (‘howdy’, many shout gamely to no one in particular.) They call us a vanishin’ breed (whistling and booing), I guess they’re talkin’ ‘bout us cowboys and cowgirls and buckaroos. Now I ask y’all: are we vanishin’? (a chorus of shouts, mostly ‘hell no’). I can’t hear y’all!! Ah said, are we or are we not vanishin’? (The crowd roars dissent). That’s more like it. Now, we got us a tight little outfit this year and I’ll be tarred and feathered if y’all don’t go home happy as fleas in a bedroll. As a matter a fact, if this ain’t the best damn rodeo you ever did see, they can bury me with my face down so y’all can kiss my ass! (Surge of roaring, whistling and boot stomping.)
Things stay jolly during the calf scramble. The chutes open releasing a wave of bewildered veal that scatters like heat molecules, bouncing off each other and the wooden breakers enclosing the space, howling shrilly all the while. Close at their hooves is a herd of rope-brandishing boys whose mission is to wrestle the thrashing calves to the ground and tie their appendages together lickety-split. The calves are disoriented, the boys awkward, and everyone suffers before the animals are lying with their legs in a knot, stunned and lowing, all of which elicits much thigh-slapping laughter from the public.
Next up are the bareback bronco riders, pinballs catapulting out of the chute, one by one. After that come the saddle bronc riders, one of which gets his face smashed in by an otherwise beautiful strawberry roan named Gypsy Dog. The most anticipated event is the bull riding, two hundred pounds of homo sapiens sitting atop of a ton of enraged beef for eight seconds, if the riders can manage. A Cretan remnant, alive and well in Texas. A bull-rider is hurled from a snorting beast’s back and everyone stands to watch him land. He comes crashing to the ground not far from where I sit and his broken femur makes a queasy extra angle in tourniquet-tight jeans. He’s cleared away, sawdust sprinkled like holy water on the stain he left on the ground. Clowns and barrel-jumping cowgirls roll in to replace him. Just a taste of blood to liven the dance.
VI
Our profoundly unsettled time forces artists to take special measures to penetrate to the truth. Our society will not admit of its own accord what makes it move. It can even be said to exist purely through the secrecy with which it surrounds itself.
Bertolt Brecht, on Galileo
As stagehand for the Judge Sisters I have no problem entering the service door of the Backstage Club to the kitchen where LaPaz and his crew are stoking a steak-filled grill and dipping the tangled slime of webbed-footed frog legs into a thick creamy batter. Chicano busboys with bulging upper arms carry trays piled with heavy plates, some greasy with yellow chunks of steak fat, others steaming clean.
- Looks like you gentlemen are cooking, I tell LaPaz.
- That’s right missy and I used that funny spice a’ yours too and plenty of it (LaPaz refers to a specially formulated herbal intoxicant provided at no extra charge to our audience.)
- I hope you were generous LaPaz
- You go on out there and have a look-see. I put it in the batter, in the ‘taters and even in the salt n’ peppa shakers. I never seen so many gigglin’ wigglin’ cowboys in all my born days. It ain’t natural.
Indeed, outside the swinging kitchen doors the mood is jubilant. The Judge Sisters belt out ‘King of the Road’ in three-part harmony, Tina on bass, Jude on guitar, Fancy on piano and a drum box on 120volts. The girls’ pink flesh bursts from silver gauze halters and see-though bellbottoms over purple lace thongs. White-kid boots and holsters packing pearl-handled pistols hug their hula hips. Plexiglas Stetsons perch atop blond beehives dripping thick golden ringlets. Everyone knows the words to ‘King of the Road’ and couples crowd the dance-floor in unlikely gender configurations. A reeling rancher grabs a busboy for a two-step. The women glow like branding irons and the men are beside themselves with well-being, kicking their heels and spinning their partners. As the set ends Fancy says:
- We got planned a real special round-up for the last night of the Rodeo, so y’all stay with us, hear? The applause disintegrates as people form chatty clusters, arms entwined and heads bent as close as their hats will allow, some of them tumbling off sweaty, creased brows in jolts of laughter.
Horse sense tells us not to delay the second set, just long enough for folks to replenish their drinks and the girls to make a costume change. The lights dim and the bouncing sisters take the stage in a few shreds of faux-buckskin, a handful of beads and knee-length braids a la Pocahontas.
- Put the saddle on the stove ‘cause we’re ridin’ the range tonight, Fancy hollers, allowing one high-nippled breast to make a cameo appearance. The crowd gasps and sputters as the girls launch into ‘She Was Bad She Was Good, She Did All That She Could’, a catchy number that brings everyone to their feet. Jude slows it down after that with a breathy rendition of Patsy Cline’s ‘Crazy’ and the couples on the dance floor press real close.
- Hold that thought, Jude whispers hoarsely into the mike, and then she ushers in Lula, dressed in snake and hair. The girls quietly dissolve into the makeshift wings beside the stage.
Lula does an excruciatingly slow backbend until her hands grasp her ankles and her head emerges from between her legs, the rattlers hissing by her ears. Everyone stands stock still when the stage lights begin to swirl magenta, blue, red and green and Lula dances with the snakes to the sound of a lone flute. She passes them over her torso and loops them around slender hips while performing a series of slow high kicks that melt into splits as she slides to the floor and miraculously rises, over and over. The snakes glide through her hair and all you can hear in the room now is breathing. An electronic drum-roll builds the tension as Lula goes into a headstand, then a handstand, until finally she is poised straight as an arrow on her index fingers. As the drum roll builds she opens her legs flat out either side. Drum roll stops. Lula speaks in a penetrating nasal whinny:
- That’s ‘T’ for Texas, she calls out before flipping upright as the men toss their hats and the women hoot, hop and claw the men.
- Ladies and Gents, let’s hear it for Lula!
Fancy attacks the piano, playing Cajun blues with a recorded brass section. The combined effect of the herbal concoction, liquor and sex energy, peaks. The room is engulfed in euphoria, people abandon themselves to the music in an unstructured dance.
That’s the cue for Angst and I, disguised as a bearded sheriff and his deputy, both with exaggerated barrel bellies and big shiny stars pinned on leather vests. We wear platform boots that along with our hats make us more than seven feet tall and we stalk on stage like swaying stickmen.
- What’s goin’ on ‘round here, the Sheriff roars.
- Seems like we got ourselves some injuns and a snake handler, Sheriff. (We stalk stiffly around the stage amidst whistles and catcalls.)
- Well now, I be doggone if I see me any injuns and snake handlers.
- But they was right here just a minute ago, Sheriff.
- Deputy?
- Yessir, Mr Sherif sir.
- You a damn fool. I don’t’ see me a single injun varmint but if I did, you know what I’d do?
- Yessir!
- I’d shoot ‘em up real good, that’s what! The sheriff removes his six-shooters from the holster, juggles them for a turn or two, fires a few blanks then sends them spinning back to the holster which he pats with satisfaction as the crowd oohs and aahs.
Now the Judge sisters reappear in black capes over teddies and garters with black velvet eye-masks and low Fedoras. They engage the sheriff Angst and I in a swordfight. High jumps over curved lances and a back flip or two. Before they can reach for their guns the Zorros puncture the lawmen’s balloon bellies and we roll off stage slinking to the wings as the crowd loudly applauds our defeat.
- Let’s have some music, the Sheriff be damned!
- Damn the Sheriff! Let’s have music! The girls toss off their capes and hats, now donned exclusively in lingerie and black masks, looking like a slumber party’s-worth of cuddly dominatrices. Some folks step on stage to play and sing with the sisters, an old favorite called ‘Don’t Fence Me In’.
In a moment Ernst and I glide back as bandana-ed bandits in taut black leather, all of our movements curved, light and incisive as cougars. Strobe lights and player-piano create a silent movie effect.
- Y’all do as we say and no body gets hurt, says Bandit One.
The sisters gesticulate like heroines by the railroad track about to be villain-ravished.
- Don’t hurt us, Mr. Bandits. I and the girls were just amusin’ these fine people here, weren’t we, fine people?
The fine people respond protectively while the bandits circle the huddled girls. A center-stage spotlight creates looming villainous shadows that flash in the strobe.
- Amusin’? Well, now ain’t that nice. Like we said, y’all do as we say. Now then, let’s start with you, Bandit Number One says to a chubby man on stage with a tambourine he hasn’t stopped shaking.
- Why don’t you just hand over that pinkie ring right here, Mr Tambourine Man, it’s for a real good cause, says Bandit Number Two extending his hat.
The sisters look at the moist gent pleadingly. Jude takes the tambourine so as to free his hands. He shrugs, removes the ring and tosses it into the hat and the girls clap and wriggle with joy.
- That’s real nice, now how about y’all showin’ some appreciation? Bandit Number One addresses the public. The response is considerable. More men hop on stage to kiss the Judge Sisters who manage to extract as many marriage proposals as cash rolls and jeweled boleros while we bandits make the rounds with our hats.
-Just drop those little trinklets right into the hat, pretty mama, you too pops (they struggle with swollen fingers, laughing giddily) it’ll come right off, see that? Wasn’t that easy? Don’t you just feel that much lighter?
I’m watching my hat fill with winking diamonds set in shapeless lumps of gold slipping from fine-boned, chafed hands, hands with red ceramic tips, pudgy hands and thick hairy ones. The Judge Sisters are singing their hearts out:
- ‘Hey good looking! What you got cookin’? How’s about cookin’ some of that up with me’ ...and everyone is smiling except for the one gentleman I’m holding the hat to right now, who is new in the crowd and wearing the uniform of the Texas State Police. The only thing sparkling on him is a pair of cufflinks attached to his belt.
- Whose adventure do you think you are anyway, he asks and it occurs to me that this is what it means to be caught in the act. I watch his flat blue eyes dull and lose dimension before my heart flails and thought fails and there it’s time to stop.
Fear is to terror as understanding is to intuition. Understanding requires a degree of formulation, whereas intuition is direct knowing, organic truth. Likewise, fear is a looming anxiety, a cold burn, whereas terror is white-hot and faster than light. So I am not afraid, I’m terrified. But standing and facing the terror, I intuit that this man is playing a role, same as I, and is weaker, since he’s stuck in his. He’s convinced of himself but I know better and will have to show him. There follows a test of nightmarish strength as I hold the cop in my gaze, lower my bandana and smile the smile of a wrathful deity right up against his reptilian stare. He blinks, lidless, faltering. I bestow him a Holy Kiss before flying to the stage to make an announcement:
- Ladies and Gents, on behalf of the Relief Fund for the Fallen Space Shuttle Astronauts we sure do appreciate your generosity!
- Yes we do, say the Judge Sisters in chorus, not losing a beat.
- The Families of the Fallen Space Shuttle Astronauts will surely appreciate all you did you for them tonight.
Fancy’s back at the piano with the first hymnal chords of ‘Amazing Grace’.
- Yes, Lord, the space cowboys need all our love and support in their time of need, adds Jude linking arms with Tina and the tambourine man.
- Not to mention the schoolteacher who went up there so she could teach her children right, says Tina.
- That’s brave, real brave, Bandit One holds his jewel-laden hat in both hands, head lowered in tribute and we all sing the last refrain of ‘Amazing Grace’:
- I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.
- Let’s give those heroes a hand right now, says Fancy, and while the crowd cheers and the befuddled Texas cop makes his way to the stage, we exit swiftly to the surge of a two-hundred-voice recorded choir singing ‘I Saw The Light’, leaving the diamondback rattlers in the elevator and a tangle of snakes on the service stairs.
Paris was waiting in the parking lot behind the wheel of a Wonder Bread delivery van. Momma Judge sat at a card table in the back, all set to free those sparklers from their gold traps like a squirrel cracking nuts the way she did back in her daddy’s pawn shop. By the time we hit the Dallas airport we’d split the loot (including a small package with a large rock addressed to NASA) and were ready to call it a night.
Epilogue
In the theater there is a kind of strange sun, a light of abnormal intensity by which it seems that the difficult and even the impossible suddenly become our normal element.
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double
The tale of the Backstage Club heist was never told, partly because no one could agree on what happened. An unseasonable tornado whipped through Fort Wright at dawn the following day and added to the general confusion. Conventional wisdom says that twisters never come downtown, preferring flat open spaces. This one ripped right through Main Street and uprooted a fire hydrant that tore a hole the size of a house in the in the Codd’s big black tower. When things settled down, the cop who crashed the performance collected eyewitness accounts from everyone he could, trying to prove that folks were robbed. And some people did wake up thinking they’d been had, but they reasoned through the mist that it was a helluva party and if they were fool enough to part with their belongings then it was either their own damn fault or else for a damn good cause. The cop’s efforts were further thwarted by the fact that a relief fund for the shuttle astronauts’ families actually existed, although he never learned that it was founded by an unknown donor who contributed a single flawless six-carat diamond.
The members of our merry band all walked away with a jeweled moment or two. As for myself, well, it’s a dangerous universe, that’s the diamond truth. I have plenty of time to think about it having reached my destination, a place called the White Desert. There’s no past or future here, only the whittled down grain of now. Surrounded by sand, I learn the danger of memories turning to rock, fixing the future like epitaphs. Better leave things fluid, unrehearsed, I say, pausing now and then to drop a diamond in the sand.
