I've seen the guy
before in functionally similar functions. He stands at six foot
eight, walks about with a gait shaped like an 'S', and has a narrow
torso that still, somehow, manages to give him shoulders that could
be described as broad.
And he's wearing a
purple evening dress, with sparkly matching gloves covering hands
twisting about themselves in a puppet show of modesty. And it works
on him. for him. Dead gods.
He notices me –
not sure if because he remembers who I am or just thinks the guy
dressed in all white save for a ruddy brown fedora six decades beyond
common fashionability just stepped up to the third floor hallway of
the building, adjacent to the ball room set up for one such grand
ball. The twenty plus other people drifting around the de facto foyer
might as well have been absent for how well I blend in. For how well
I intended to blend in.
I walk past him,
tilt the brim with all the suave I'm attempting to cultivate and say,
nice and flatteringly low, “looking lovely this evening.” He
responds with an effeminate “thank you,” palms to his cheeks and
twist of his body. I give him a thumbs up and walk past phantoms
departing as I step inside the great omni-purpose chamber.
The room is lit as
if the sun was cast through impure amber, dimmed and turned
orange-yellow through a dozens of lamps held aloft. A red material
that could be carpet lines the walls, away from which and forming a
rectangular core are regiments of chairs sitting at attention,
prepared to seat. Other guests, of all shapes and sizes and colors,
dressed anywhere from casual to formal-for-the-other-sex, start to
congeal into groups near the chairs and by tables set up in the back.
Tables that, upon
closer inspection, hold aloft: chicken strips that are more breading
than fowl; great brownie sheets speckled with white sugary powder
that were divided into squares and further divided into triangles and
my plate has ten of them and I am sitting down in the back row and my
brownies have vanished, never to be seen again. As brownies.
The people outside
had clearly multiplied by means of mitosis, as an order of magnitude
more nonpaying patrons step into the sultry amber chamber of wonders
and find their crimson seats. There is a din of conversation, all
filed away in my mental space as things that do not concern me. I sit
back, wait for the lights to dim, and spin the skull-decorated outer
band of my two alloy ring.
The front we all
face like eventual fate has a line of glittered red weights, each
tethering metallic heart balloons. In the left corner of the ballroom
are the big black mesh boxes of captive thunder, and on the platform
situated amidst the cells stands the control panel of an acoustic
organizer: The DJ's domain was present, apparent, and the man himself
was attendant.
To the right was a,
theme apropos, dark red free standing screen veiling untold,
unfathomed mysteries.
The memory of the
person who really stepped up to the stage is eclipsed by this:
heralded, as if her arcane true name was spoken from the center of a
ritual circle decked in phallic and yonic insignia, she walks out
from the tall-stood veil, gusto-heeled to the center of the stage,
drawn by the heavy bass fanfare.
Her name in this
realm of the stage is Bunny Boom Boom, an onomatopoeia of impact on
both mind and eye: stout, round, with eyes like scorch marks and
wearing the smoke billowing from a tire fire, condensed into a
wrap-around something. Her hair is blonde and bulbous and up.
She grabs the
microphone, shakes her head back, opens painted red lips and speaks
in so high pitched a voice that, between it and the electronic
distortion accrued over the microphone and stereo system, becomes all
but unintelligible. It's a squawking, a squeaking: defective language
that conveys only the tone and energy swelling her.
Everyone else seems
to understand her just fine. She twists her hand, beckons hither and
squeals a command that elicits three people, each carrying a chair,
to the stage.
When the thrumming,
leaden bass laden music rolls through the stage, madame Boom Boom
gives each of the chair bringers and now sitters a lap-dance. I have
to stand up from my seat to see over the crowd and confirm this.
I now realize in
totality what I am witnessing: students, with their tuition
supplemented by either federally-funded student loans, grants, or
public scholarships, being given a clothes-on lap-dance by a bloated
transvestite. Federally-funded student loans and grants and
scholarships payed for in no small part by the self professed Born
Again to Christ, who had infused their cult with American
nationalism, and who persist in the tenet of faith concerning the
evil and inhumanity of all who are not married to one member of the
opposite sex and only employing sexual relation for the purpose of
creating one more writhing screaming pink wriggly human larvae.
My idle mental probe
into scenario persists and deepens as a Pappy Chulo – a senorita
hombre banger in black and beard and bling and whose song and dance
picked up where Bunny Boom Boom's ended – kisses and straddles the
legs of the unfair non-maidens, all under a synthesized chorus that
could only arise out of the Mexico-United States border culture and
the nonobservance of law and decency.
I wonder who among
those ladies are indeed fair maidens. I wonder if the girl who had
her cheek pressed upon by lips orbited by xeno-hormonal stubble had
sat through dinner-table sermons and casual proclamations of
damnation. I ponder if, out of all the born ladies here, it was the
girl that had her leg decorated with F-T-M ganger that had her
tuition paid for by a reverend or preacher of one of the uncountable
free-market temples that outnumber fast-food restaurants.
Is the price of many
ones salvations funding this brazen demonstration of sin most high,
yet harmless?
Chulo's show slows
then goes, and Bunny Boom Boom returns once more to talk without
being heard. At least, not be heard by me. And not seen either – I
had just realized that there was roughly ten rows of bodies standing
between me and the stage, and not a decent seat accessible amidst
them.
I very well can't
abide by this most mundane of outrages. I get up, crouch low, and
walk down the isle to the front of said isle. There I sit down, kick
my feet out, and enjoy a front-row view.
And not a single
soul beside or behind cares. Their attention is firmly pulled towards
Bunny Boom Boom
wraps up her pattern-setting bout of audience interaction, now
wrapped in a pink leotard and a teal sash around the waist. Replacing
her presence are a skirted trio with parasols and monochromatic
dress. They march to evenly spaced stops in front of the crowd and
wait for digital-turned-analog notes and rhythm.
It starts slow. The
music reverberates and builds in volume as their patterned umbrellas
start to revolve and rotate about them. Left to right: one green, one
red, one yellow; and all are synchronized. The central red fabric
panel breaks harmony and goes up and down when the others go side to
side, and maneuvers horizontally when the others go vertical. Every
few beats kick the angles of motion to new degrees.
The dancers
themselves orbit erratically, guided by some huckster's invisible
hand. It's forgone where the balls are – this is now a game of
tricky motion for its own sake, set to the rhythm poured into the
floor.
The pattern-breaker
with the red parasol and checkerboard tights walks right up to me and
I now know precisely how a quantum physicist feels: my very act of
observation now modifies the behavior of the so observed subject. She
sweeps fabric blossom in front of me, pulls it back up and gyrates
into where it once was. I give a salute with my ringed index finger,
copper skulls winking light.
This skit remains
classified as a thing amongst all, and thus ends. Madame Boom Boom
solidifies the pattern: she walks about the stage, screeches at
audience members in what I am assuming is dialog, then surrenders the
floor to the next performer on the list. I think I made something out
about pets that time. I definitely hear “are we ready for this?”
as she abandons his feminine vocal facade if only for that single
line.
The next dancer
chases the lyrics, chanting with chorus to 'turn me loose'. The black
dress permits her right leg to obey the command ahead of the
performance itself. Her movements carry a sort of alloy ecstasy and
solidified confidence that rumbles through the floor and bounces off
the walls. She walks right up to me. I feel my skin burn, eyes sting
in that as of yet unnamed brilliance as I notice the song change:
“Dontcha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” Despite the
palpable levels of queer in the room, it's played straight. There is
neither snicker nor heckle. Just a damp idea rising from the crevices
of my mind, not yet rising to conscious thought.
She walks back
behind the veil, and the song trails along until Bunny Boom Boom
picks it up with his man voice. “Dontcha wish your girlfriend was
hung like me? Fat like me?” That requires, of course, that I have a
girlfriend.
Ever.
Sexual and
relational frustration aside, this intermission is shorter than the
rest, and almost directly segues into the next song and dance.
By the star-forged
obsidian crypts of Dead Gods, Bruce Willis has stepped onto the stage
in yellow tights and with hair colored and shaped like a candle's
flame. The song is “Like thunder, lightning,” or something, and
the crash and boom strikes in tune with that Die Hard protagonist's
hells on the floor. Force is pressed into and quakes out of each
step, each rolling impact of drum and cymbal, recorded and
synthesized. Actual simulated thunder hits every surface, and
vibration presses into the marrow and that lurking concept splashes
up into my frontal, conscious lobe.
I see what this is.
I see all the
revulsion and protest cracked and broken on the floor. Every step
breaks more pieces into finer and finer bits of repulsive dust.
Expectation lies on the floor and rusts, and every motion skips over
those ferric chains.
I see dignity
emerging from indecency. I see pride stabbing prejudice in the back.
I see Bunny Boom
Boom in her black bisected by teal gown staring at me, under dim
amber lights with crowds on all but one side and red carpet walls
beyond them. I hear her ask me, in her voice, under her scrutiny,
“You goin' on a safari motherfucker?”
“Damn straight,”
I say.
