Luda, page 3
The Vallhambra, driver, I remember instructing the by now half-Cubist cabbie. I’m auditioning for Aladdin, the panto. Widow Twankey.
His expression relaxed in the niqab eye-slit of the rearview. Now the inexplicable moment made sense. But he still rolled down the window, eyes watering. Tabu, yahoo.
The ecstasy was cresting in a calm blue-and-white Hokusai breaker, all Mount Fuji azure Zen as I tipped my charioteer with a generosity born of intoxication and clambered out, all legs and leather, strutting through the gawping throng, submerged in profound aquarium light down my old pal Gargoyle Street, basking in the silky pedestrian airflow.
Oh look! There’s me!
The Vallhambra’s endlessly revolving doors cycled a familiar face into view, this face leaving the spacious lobby as I came in. As it did, a shuffle of random features superimposed themselves over my reflection in a briefly disturbing kinetic overlap. My delighted brain assembled the jigsaw jumble of ghost-pig eyes, juicy nose, and raw-kidney lips into the image of a “formerly” alcoholic host of a weekly quiz show based on some old board game.
For the life of me I couldn’t recall a name. Still, that punctured party-balloon complexion deserved a witchy wink and a grin if nothing else. As our paths crossed briefly, I’d swear the ghost of a distillery followed close on his heels. Then he was gone; Tam O’Shanter pursued to his waiting limo by unquiet ninety-proof spirits and tender minders.
He looked smug, at first, all self-satisfied, certain he’d scored the gig; his Twankey, honed over years of rote performance, was the gold standard traditionalist’s take. If the production was trawling for the precise qualities this metastasizing human tumor had to offer, I was fucked up the far end of the spectrum, UV to his infra dig. He seemed to know he was the bookie’s favorite; as far as anyone was concerned, he was the most famous, the funniest: the most special. Department of Foregone Conclusions. The deal was dealt.
Until he saw me swing in.
He scanned me up and down with a personal radar and I could almost feel the burn marks on my butt cheeks where those laser-guided brown-hot peepers finally anchored themselves. I was way too high to grasp the threat he represented. I knew I had my work cut out, but I trusted my next half hour to that hopeless look in his eyes. The one that said he’d recognized me straightaway, Nemesis to his Hubris.
All I had to do was live up to the myth.
I swung my skinny protruding hips, proudly extended the shelf of my ersatz tits, and certain I’d never see the quizmaster again—
—I certainly didn’t expect to see his coffin lowered into a six-feet-deep, three-minute-long slot on the evening news two months later—
—I toppled into the audition on six-inch platform heels, made regal and ridiculous in a towering Louis Quatorze bleached-blond wig. A shaggy petrol-blue and fluoro-pink leopard-print coat. Vinyl miniskirt. Gasping for breath after a drag on Twankey’s vaper, I tripped into my routine.
Aladdin! Where is that boy of mine? There are sheets to be washed and I don’t want to get ANY MORE behind—a backward glance. MY BEHIND’S BIG ENOUGH AS IT IS!
I didn’t stop for the laugh. I was on the express train of thought, riding First Class, aware that the blast radius of Tabu had reached my audience, bringing on the first symptoms of hay fever and shock.
They would never forget this audition.
I’m very nervous—I say. But everyone tells me it’ll be all right on the night…I just hope I can remember my lines.
A half beat for the rhythm.
It’s all too easy to get my tongue twisted around a REALLY LONG HARD ONE.
I’d crafted the makeup to look like Twankey had hit the menopause at high speed, careered out of control across the midlife junction, and failed to slow down. I’d made the best of my sagging skin, the droopy jowls, the interlabial drapes, and the eye hammocks.
Mine was a Twankey who binged on celebrity gossip. A Twankey martyring herself to Botox injections and lip fillers, as if to hold back the inevitable depredations of a washerwoman’s life on the bustling narrow alleys of her make-believe Peking.
Rubber tits, augmented ass, monstrously sexual, eternally unsatisfied, driven to live or die trying; I was the Bride of Frankenstein with a Gorgon eye for the cable guy. Strutting and puffing, I found myself out of rehearsed material, improvising a Restoration Twankey, sneering down her nose and flipping her thumb in the direction of a saucy next-door neighbor’s condo.
When fortnightly to the rigs doth fly her man,
That Mrs. Egg Fu Not so Yung next door is wont to call the builders in—
To have enwhitewash’d both her porches, front and back!
Where best they’re pleased to park the van’s a guess I dare not make.
But day and night she doth extravagant deliv’ries take!
There’s no real suspense, so I won’t do the whole twenty minutes I eventually gave them. I got the part. Of course I did. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. There would be no story. No mystery.
No crime.
* * *
—
Float told me later, they were swithering between me and the quizmaster, but I think it’s important to make it clear that, contrary to some people’s opinion, I didn’t only get the part because my one rival was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s before his unlikely and suspicious death. A dementia brought on by the steady replacement of all the liquid in his body with a transfusion of alcohol, let’s face it—not by some doll I stuck pins in!
Believe that and magic’s real. And then, where are you?
Anything can happen.
* * *
—
The inaugural production of The Phantom, as I’ve explained, opened here in the Vallhambra Theatre on Gargoyle Street in Gasglow, declared that year the nation’s Culture Capital—the gesture was ironic; our meta-burlesque would open in the home of some of the most fondly remembered and spectacular productions of the Golden Age, like Cinderella or Mother Goose, when they’d have enchanted carpets zipping overhead on wires and fleets of haunted pirate ships sinking onstage.
And it worked in our favor; the first reviews came in as a storm of love letters from unknown admirers.
“…it’s scary, it’s fun, it’s a treat for kids and their parents on seven different levels.”
THE DAILY MONITOR:
“The jokes are superb, topical and near-the-knuckle with a potentially offensive edge that sails over the heads of the young audience to keep their parents in stitches while the disturbing backstory plays out…”
THE EVENING BANNER:
“The cast is superb but special mention goes to drag comedienne Luci LaBang as Widow Twankey, and Gwen Skillicorn as pitch-perfect straight man Aladdin…”
THE GASGLOW MESSENGER:
“Sublime, frighteningly self-aware nonsense…”
Float’s gamble paid off with a hit show. Next, we lit up London’s West End. Then came the off-Broadway offer. We were sold out every night. The Tony Award seemed an unlikely prospect, but it still sits there today in Float’s office gathering particulate matter between a photograph of his estranged wife, his strange children, and his honorary doctorate from Gasglow University. God knows, I’ve waited long enough for mine! There were parties and limousines. Even both halves of Buttercup the pantomime cow got laid, in what must have looked like Damien Hirst directing an orgy on Sesame Street.
And I became her.
I lived Luci’s life, with beautiful people, shallow unreal people just like Luci. And through it all, I rekindled a love affair with myself. I felt reunited with my long-lost twin in a fabulous, mercurial ménage à moi that mended the holes in my soul.
That’s the thing about holes, though: Fill one, another one opens. Whac-A-Mole!
Now here we all are, back to where the show began, back in Gasglow for a victory-lap season that opens tonight, would you believe?
That’s why I’m here, in front of the mirror, applying my slap for what might be the last time.
You’ll know better than me how it all turned out, though I have my suspicions.
There’s one more thing about pantomime before I take it for granted you’re up to speed and can pick up the rest as we race along to the point of this monologue…
The key to a successful pantomime lies in audience participation. No other live dramatic narrative format relies on such close, immediate interaction with its audience. You might find a bit of that with one of those radical performance collectives who haul paying customers onstage to embarrass them with dangling rubber cocks and blood bags but that’s a more aggressive, invasive kind of interaction, to my mind.
The trick in panto is for performers to establish an intimate, confessional relationship with the audience while at the same time wrapping them into the performance as a kind of omniscient chorus. There’s a dialogue between stage and stalls. We use a call-and-response style to build rapport, breaking down the barriers between the action onstage and whatever they’re up to in the back rows.
He’s behind you!—they’d shout, early-warning guardian angels when the villains were creeping around in the shadows up to no good. He’s behind you!
It’s the job of the Dame to get the crowd warmed up; when Widow Twankey glides onstage in full sail, the first thing she’ll do is turn to the howling mob, with less than a minute to engage their sympathy.
I’d get going, explaining how I sometimes forgot my name for all kinds of reasons, and how I’d need their help to remind me periodically. Then I’d have them shout out WIDOW TWANKEY!
What’s that? I can’t hear a thing.
WIDOW TWANKEY!
I’d shake my head. I must be going deaf. Me, at the age of twenty-five! Who did you say I was again?
WIDOW TWANKEY!
Three is the magic number. The tentative murmuring swelling to a Colosseum roar.
WIDOW TWANKEY!!!
A summoning that ran down every vein and nerve and wire and neuron as pure platinum lightning.
Well, you seem to have figured it out, even though it’s written RIGHT HERE on the sign for my Chinese laundry! Next time I forget, you’d be doing me a big favor to remind me if I ask you…
Every time I came onstage, I’d play the same gag—It must be my Alzheimer’s. What’s my name again? Wobbling on three-story spikes. Laundry basket under one arm, the other hand cupped to my ear. That was the cue for every kid in the audience to yell Widow Twankey! in a jet-plane takeoff of synchronized voices.
In the end I’d pay off the gag with a reveal; every time I’d talked the audience into yelling my name, they’d been advertising my bespoke Chinese launderette. Thanks to their hard PR work, business was finally booming!
I’ve got a few layers of foundation down now and I’m about to erase my eyebrows with wax and glue.
I say layers, they’re more like geological strata. Dig down through this, and you wouldn’t be surprised to unearth a few old strollers, dinosaur bones, and the remains of once fertile river valleys.
Five years makes a major difference. “You look young for your age,” they’ll all tell you, but I’m older than I’ve ever been before, younger than I’ll ever be again, and it shows.
Thinking like that brings the ugly old pressure drop inside. The bleak bath-bomb of depression, dissolving into gray fallout flakes of regret and fizzing existential terror. There comes the sure and certain knowledge that it won’t get better, so cover it over, paint it out, three coats deep.
In times like these, drag is camouflage. Concealed for a little while longer from the fangs of time, the troubling face in the mirror evaporates into a jungle foliage of cosmetics and colors, becomes invisible as the patterns drawn on its skin—arched brows, glittering lids, the glossy plastic sheen of outlined cherry lips—replace what lies beneath the surface with a hard, new veneer. The enamel visor lowered into place for my hopeless battle with the clock.
I can see her the way a medium might catch a glimpse of the first faint fog where ectoplasmic tendrils spill and coil together, spinning a death-mask of vapor and fag-ash above an urn. No one else could detect what I can. Not yet. The image might as well be transparent, a distillation so dilute, she’s hardly there at all. A trace element. A homeopathic dose of Luci.
I can taste her. Bitter lemon and chocolate.
Then, from that faint, profound impression, I bring her in through the brushstrokes, the tints and glosses, the moondust sparkles.
I can do it now without all the abraca-jumbo I resorted to in the old days. All it takes is her signal, the transmission. The fizzing static from the Big Bang condensed in a receiver. She’s the Cosmic Background Radiation and I’m the radio telescope cupped like a listening ear.
I know you’re listening carefully too. I have that of which every performer must surely dream, a captive audience.
You’re listening because the law requires your attention. You’re obliged to put up with my horrible jokes. You’re required to deal with my florid descriptions and long-winded digressions. You’re duty-bound to play along and join in when I ask you to.
Audience participation. That’s how it works.
You’re listening because this, what I’m about to tell you, is evidence.
They’ll be on their way now—kids tugging mums and dads like reluctant parent-shaped balloons, student couples delighting in the clever irony we have on offer, professional theatergoers alerted to the trendy legitimizing of a proletarian artform by Sunday supplement reviews, lovers of novelty and extravaganza. They’ll come in all shapes and shoe sizes, all ages and Pantone shades. For four hours, including the interval, they’ll park their worries and their differences at home.
The world in here, our little kingdom in a bottle, all dreamy gold in the luminous fumes of the dry-ice cannon, promised life with the boring bits trimmed out to fit the story’s formulaic requirements.
Framed in its cabinet, TV before its time, ours was a world where each day came fully choreographed and scored, and no one forgot their lines. Here, conversations were comedy routines. Good people were rewarded, and the bad ones faced punishment according to their natures.
At the pantomime, every story ended with a kiss and a promise and a twinkle in someone’s eye.
Even our meta-story, the tragic musical tale of the Phantom, had an unexpected conclusion. A nod to the power of pretend to change the world, ambiguous enough to appeal to everyone and send them home swapping theories.
Out there in the narrow Tic-Tac-Toe grid-streets of Gasglow under cloud lid and Storm Ingmar’s sullen Scandi seethe, the arctic rain came sleeting off the broad bare back of a Siberian wind.
In here, boilers and generators and the power of make-believe, the potency of the Glamour, brought to life the dust and heat of evil Abanazar’s desert citadel.
The hurly-burly of a market in Peking. The vibrant, lively backstreets where Widow Twankey ran her Chinese laundry. The multicolored majesty of the Cave of Jewels.
Where would you rather be on a freezer-cabinet-cold night in November?
The doors open two hours from now. They’ll be climbing into cabs, packing the kids into people carriers. Slipping in a last round or two after work, or lectures.
They’ll come to laugh out loud and hold their breath and most of all they’ll come to join in. They’ll cheer the heroes and boo the villains.
They’ll roar—Widow Twankey! And—HE’S BEHIND YOU! Oh no, he’s not! And—Oh yes, he is!
They’ll come to take a step across the subtle line dividing real life from show business, where the glamorous funny people onstage are talking directly to them, eliciting their advice and support. They’ll be hypnotized into a fantastic waking dream, swept along in the rapids of the action. Wrapped up in a world of such artificial grandeur, such feigned luxury, it becomes more real than any real world.
They will enter, with me, into the eternal Glamour.
And when the curtain falls, they’ll scatter from the theater into Gasglow’s unrelenting rainscape, trailing pixie dust.
Some will hail taxis. Some will disperse, drawn by the warm bellows-breaths huffed through stalled traffic on Gargoyle Street every time a punter opens the door of the Karachi Kebabatorium.
In Gasglow, the night comes smoked and seasoned with fragrant frying oils, its irresistible animal aromas released by the measured rotation of a sizzling barrel of compressed halal lamb. Seduced to the dark side by the promise of hot, salty junk food best savored outdoors when the weather’s foul; that’s how it played out night after night.
I had one or two surprises planned.
I know some dames who claim they can do their slap in fifteen minutes flat. I say, you’re not even trying. I prefer to approach my transformation into Twankey as a work of art, taking my sweet time.
It takes at least nine minutes nineteen seconds for the best choirs in the world to sing Spem in Alium, but I’ll have it on a loop until I’m done. After the last shimmering chord, I usually finish off with a bracing blast of “Pretty Vacant” until the pristine Buddhist condition of shunyata is achieved.
That’s when I know it’s time to go on.
The music is a vital part of the ritual. The one you’re helping me with.
Did I mention this was a ritual?
Did I make it clear we would stop at nothing?
Never mind. Once I’ve explained about the Glamour, you’ll understand what I mean by that.
You’ll see what happens when witches go to war.
Nearby, from the dressing room along the corridor, I’m sure I can hear her music starting up in competition. I taught her how to do that. Our Principal Boy. Our Aladdin who let the genie out of the lamp.
