by Michele Lee
My play, Love, is about two young Americans, Erik and Lyle Menendez, who killed their parents in 1989 and went on trial in the early nineties. It was one of the first court cases shown on CourtTV and was broadcast into homes in America and internationally. The Menendez brothers became celebrity criminals. They weren’t initially suspects, however; they said that at the time of the murder they were at the cinema watching Batman. The police believed the alibi and tried to find the real killer, someone who must have had a grudge against the rich family. Meanwhile Erik and Lyle were spending their new inheritance on Rolexes and purchasing fast-food chains for Lyle to manage. Erik, the weaker link, eventually confessed to his psychiatrist. The brothers went on trial and their defence lawyer argued that undocumented childhood sexual abuse was their motive for murder. Sympathy is sparse for the rich and young. They got life.
In my play, I invent an eerie day that happens the moment before Erik’s confession. It’s Erik’s story I tell. In a dreamy scene, Erik, the gawkier younger brother, shoots at a flutter of tennis T-shirts inside the restaurant that Lyle has recently acquired. It’s after hours and an alarm goes off.
‘I don’t think you should introduce the guns until the third scene,’ my dramaturge says.
‘Okay.’
‘Can you see why? It undercuts.’
‘You think this scene shouldn’t get too explosive?’
‘Yes, exactly. Let it build. And I’m not sure about how you’ve physicalised the violence, either. I’m not sure. Something about it, it isn’t working, I don’t know what. It might be too obvious, and it’s too hard to stage.’
I wonder what Cormac McCarthy would do.
The pizza restaurant would expand into a dusty plain. Apaches loom in the horizon, straddling horses with clumps of dried human scalps flapping at their flanks. Lyle appears at the crest of the group, bare-chested and glistening, face painted with warrior’s stripes. Or perhaps we see the paint resembles the makeup of … the Joker. Erik peers out from under the brim of his hat. His dirtied tennis uniform tightens, moulds into rubber, and a cape drops from his shoulder blades. He’s Batman.
‘Jackie Winchester’.
This is what he’d call himself if he were a cowboy. Not the kind of cowboy crossing the desert on a poetic slaughter-fest but the cheesy kind sitting bowlegged in a twangy saloon.
Jackie Fucking Winchester.
When I first started writing my play in July, he exuberantly copied and pasted the address California State Prison, 24863 W Jayne Ave, Coalinga, CA 93210, United States of America into our Googletalk conversation so we could send off my script to the real Erik Menendez. Jackie Winchester’s enthusiasm was so potent, it was as if, regardless of he and I living in separate countries, somehow we would both stuff the envelope with the script and both lick the flap of it shut.
The more I think about Jackie Fucking Winchester’s impractical excitements, the more pissed off I get. All the reasons why I might have muvved him – his endearing impracticalities, his hungry excitements – are now the same reasons that he sucks.
Husband rings me, in reply to my cranky texts. ‘I thought it’d be easier just to talk,’ he says.
So I do. I talk about Jackie Fucking Winchester. I say that the more I think about him, the more pissed off I get. Because, you see, when I meet up to have sex on a Friday lunchtime on Level Twelve of an office block, it’s clear that with Mr Mercedes I’m just having sex. So when it ends, as it will, I won’t feel short-changed. With Jackie Winchester, we did not have sex in office blocks. We spent two months pre-Auckland chatting and quipping and intellectually wanking each other nearly every night. In said conversations, he went out of his way to define our relationship as more than sexual, and when I finally accepted this he freaked out and friend-zoned me. Jackie Fucking Winchester is worse than an unreliable Cub who forgot to text me last weekend or an absent Backpacker who, in his senior web-related user experience designer job, rarely writes. Jackie Winchester is a pretender, Jackie Winchester is a phoney who wears plastic spurs and he can’t even ride a horse. At his prompting we’d first spoken on the phone so he could hear my voice, my typed words embodied. He had told me in a transcontinental text message, him drunk and bravely honest, that I was the coolest girl he had ever met. Not just a cool girl but the coolest one, the usurper of all other cool girls in the whole wide world.
Husband pauses. ‘So he wasn’t allowed to give you compliments?’
‘What?’ I say.
‘I know you. You twist everything so that you’re not in the wrong.’
‘Oh, that’s not true.’
‘You did the exact same thing happened with me after we broke up.’
‘That was different. Even then I knew I was being unreasonable.’
‘He wasn’t doing anything wrong by asking those things of you. That’s normal, Michele. Most normal people want to do and say those things when they’re starting to get to know someone. They don’t want to hear about the other person’s sex life even if they know that it’s happening. Do I have to remind you that you’re not like other girls?’
Husband would like to be more detached, like I tried to be, but often when he starts to see a girl, like Pole Dancer Naturopath Chick, he becomes smitten and wants that girl to know it. It’s not insincere. In fact, he genuinely likes Pole Dancer Naturopath Chick. He likes her more than Tuesday.
‘You should tell Tuesday that you don’t want to see her anymore,’ I say. ‘Because there’s someone else in your life.’
‘Yes.’
‘She’ll be hurt.’
‘I know.’
‘Better now than later.’
I’m going to Craigieburn, this warm Sunday, on the Broadmeadows line. There are a few Indians in the carriage but the Asian kind, not the cowboy kind. They live far north, by the endless Hume Highway.
I’m visiting Hmong people, most of whom live in this area of Melbourne. After one generation, Hmong people have worked hard and now own palatial brick mansions in which to raise their crowds of children.
Punch picks me up from the station. She gets out of the car and hugs me hello. There are beads of sweat on her nose, little droplets that warn us that spring will be here tomorrow. She’s been waiting in her car, unsure if I’d find her given the construction happening by the station. She leads me to the passenger side and apologises for the door handle not working properly. She gets in on the driver’s side and starts the car.
Punch is an indeterminable age, somewhere past forty. She’s a former dancer and she moves with the grace that trained dancers move with, as if they’re always gliding through water.
I’ve met Punch once before, at Mario’s in Fitzroy. She’d just come from a catered forum at Arts Victoria and had eaten there; she placed a serene hand on her stomach as if rubbing an oracle or an unborn baby, and ordered herbal tea only. She explained the Hmong embroidery project to me – that during Tet Festival next February she would set up a shopfront on Johnston Street and she would pay several Hmong women to sit inside it and embroider shirts. The Hmong women would then give these bespoke shirts to non-Hmong customers who would have entered the shopfront, naturally curious about what this posse of Asian women were doing. Punch asked if I might want to be involved in some sort of artistic and language-interpretation role.
I felt flattered and useful. I said I’d love to be involved.
I was aware, however, that Tet Festival isn’t a Hmong event, and that Punch hadn’t talked to me or any other Hmong women before she got funding, so she didn’t have any actual Hmong women enlisted to be embroidering sitters showcased in a Johnston Street shopfront. She had read about Hmong embroidery and textiles, and she’d researched Hmong tapestries and the storytelling within them. She knew more than me and she was far more enchanted than I had ever been by the cushion covers and wall hangings and bookmarks and accordion skirts my mum and many others cherished. Punch had been committed to recruiting Hmong women to her project. Funding secured, she’d gone on t
o have a conversation with a Hmong woman in the community gardens at the bottom of the Fitzroy commission flats, but the woman couldn’t speak English very well − she must have been one of the last Hmong people still living in government housing, the final welfare recipient. Punch was also put in contact with me.
We drive away from the station and loop around the Hume and drive back into Craigieburn.
‘I’ve got shirts from a local op shop,’ Punch tells me. She’s ironed them too and laid them neatly into boxes, on top of one another, like layers in a gateau. She lived in Europe, in France, I think, before coming back to Australia. ‘Should I bring them inside?’
‘Oh no, no, I don’t think you need to,’ I say with confidence.
We go to the house in Craigieburn, where the sister of the gardener lives. The gardener is there too. Punch explains the project with the help of an English-speaking Hmong girl, a daughter who lives in the house and studies at La Trobe.
The daughter says in Hmong: ‘The woman says because you have skills, you’re good with cross-stitching, with decorating fabrics, she’d like to do work with you. You would do your embroidering but on the shirts.’
‘Which shirts?’
‘I’m not sure. I guess, like shirts men and women wear to work.’
There is a pause in the conversation and Punch adds, ‘Please tell them they’ll be paid, of course, for their time.’
‘She says she’ll pay you.’
‘Us?’
‘Yes.’
Punch watches. ‘And please tell them there is money for four people. It’s up to them if they want to work with others, share the workload.’
‘She says it’s up to you. You can do this work by yourselves, just you two. Or you can ask someone else, have four people doing this.’
‘Huh?’
‘Ask someone else.’
‘To help?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who? Most people have jobs!’
‘Well, don’t get angry at me! I’m just saying what she’s saying.’
‘Too ugly. It’s too ugly.’ The older Hmong women chuckle, mutter to each other in Hmong, shake their heads. ‘These shirts she’s talking about will be too ugly when embroidered.’
The young girl turns to Punch, who has kept her eyes on the exchange and kept a smile on her face, optimistic about what the Hmong women’s loud gestures mean.
‘Excuse me,’ the young girl says.
‘Yes?’ Punch is nodding.
‘Well, my mum and my aunt are saying they think the shirts will look too ugly.’
‘Pardon?’
‘The shirts. They’re not sure if what you’re saying will work.’
So Punch has to go out to the car after all and bring in the actual shirts for studying. The Hmong women touch the lapels, buttons, seams, collars. The women have now brought out samples of decorated and cross-stitched shapes of fabric, and they press embellished squares and triangles onto the shirts, trying to imagine how it will all come together.
I don’t say much. I don’t have much to add. The project is fairly new to me so I can’t explain why there is also a choreographer in it or why she will improvise a short dance every now and then when a shirt is exchanged in this temporary shopfront on Johnston Street.
Besides, my Hmong sucks.
And I feel odd being here via a white woman. The more obvious route for getting me here should have been through Mum, given everyone in this house is in the Hmong Vang clan, the same clan Mum was in before she married Dad.
Mum’s immediate family are mostly dead. Of twelve children, nine died. Laos: the land of a million elephants but not so many hospitals. One sister lives in the ghettoes of Paris, the other sister remains in Laos outside of the party town Vang Vieng, well known among young travellers for tubing and riverside bars.
I have shown interest in the Hmong. I wrote a play. Quite a few people came to the reading. I entered that script into a playwriting competition and though it didn’t win, the theatre company invited me to write a short play, which I wrote about two murderers.
I leave the house with Punch. A success. The Hmong women, the crucial project ingredient, have agreed to be involved. In the car, I ask Punch to keep me informed while I’m away in Laos.
My phone beeps as I walk home from the tram stop. Jackie Fucking Winchester.
So. Bullet is bit. I emailed my PhD supervisors. YIKES. Told em that I’m going to live in Melbourne. So there.
He’d been anxious about telling his supervisors about his plans to live in Melbourne because he knew – and figured they’d know too – that it’d make more sense if he moved back to Sydney, like he’d done in the first year of his PhD. It’s a Sydney-based university that awarded him a scholarship, and who’d allowed him to buy a flashy video camera for filming his field work. It was this same camera that Jackie Winchester had planned to use in making short films with me. Not because he moonlighted as a filmmaker. But because making short films was exciting, and excitement is his thing. Genres of films were suggested; he urged me to bring costumes to dress up in. I didn’t and we never did make films. And that other idea of us going for a leisurely skiing day-trip to the snow in Turoa was a fantasy – Turoa is five hours from Auckland.
I text him back, something affirming and friendly but not overladen with expectation or intimacy. I think that’s what he wants to hear from me.
Jackie Winchester.
He said we were ‘kidults’: young adults who haven’t yet grown up and who suck at thinking about other people, about what our supervisors might want, what our universities might want, what our Hmong community and families need. We don’t have the usual accoutrements that educated and financially advantaged young adults have: long-term partners, established careers, multi-mega-pixel hobby video cameras that we bought with our proper wage and not slyly through a scholarship. It’s not that kidults refuse to relent, we just haven’t got there and so we still enjoy a good rort because we still feel that we’re outside the systems we rort.
Jackie Winchester got his first tattoo recently. It’s a pirate tattoo wrapped around his bicep. He likes pirates, by the way, hence the pirate eye-patch for me; a bit of him bestowed on me in a quirky kidult gift. He’d like to get a whole sleeve tattooed on his arm but with the pirate image morphing into a terrorising dinosaur that’s eating cars all the way down his forearm. He still has the Star Wars pillowcase from when he was a child: it’s on the pillow that’s on his bed in the apartment his dad bought him. He’s spent a lot of money on his T-shirt collection but he hasn’t paid off his $70 000 university debt and in kidult fashion he doesn’t plan to. After he finishes his PhD, he’s not going to get a job as an ethnomethodologist. He might get a pinball machine.
He’s online right now. I’ve come home, my laptop’s open and he’s frustrated that the transition back into friendship with me isn’t as simple as him just stating it and willing it to be. He types at me.
– Why does it even matter?
– What do you mean ‘Why does it even matter’?
– Your reaction is baffling me.
– I’ve told you I’m not a robot.
– Which I acknowledge.
– It’s the RSVP thing to start with.
– What?
– You said you’re still on RSVP, emailing seven separate Melbourne girls.
– It’s just emails.
– Not sex, you mean?
– Exactly. Emails. Of which there are only two people that I find vaguely entertaining.
– I get the implication. Emails vs sex. You do emails, I take emails further. Sex is worse. And so why does it matter for me, right?
– Why?
– Because I wanted to make you the only option. I don’t want to be fucking other people. I would have been happy to stop.
I log off and I go around the corner to Husband’s onebedroom place. Because it’s late and it’s Sunday night, he says he’s not that hungry and he won’t make the beef salad he offer
ed to make. We have cheese and bacon on toasted seeded bread.
‘I might send my Menendez brothers play to Erik Menendez, in jail.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘I have the address.’
‘So?’
‘And I think he might find it interesting.’
‘If he can make sense of it. Two guys selling tickets to Batman? He won’t understand what you’re trying to say about his life.’
‘No, no, it’s different now. Now it’s basically more like true crime, based on his life. But set in Australia. It’s a bit abstract. But not too abstract.’
‘Didn’t you call the brothers called Hermanoz and Hermanoz?’
‘I’ve called them Erik and Lyle again.’
Husband laughs. ‘You always change your mind, don’t you?’
I finish up my meal and I go back around the corner, back home.
Michele Fucking Lee.
Fake Hmong gun. Fake Hmong spurs. Fake Hmong horse.
And Asialink is actually giving me money to go to Laos in three weeks?
Last year when I went to Laos for a holiday, to see the country that had raised Mum and Dad and then ejected them, the country that had killed most of Mum’s family, and killed many more Hmong, I did stay with Hmong people, with some of my family. My Dad’s half-brother, Uncle Lai, picked me up from Wattay International Airport. He lived in America and had done so since he was a teenager. But a longing for the homeland, as brutal as it may have been at times, had drawn him back, and he was staying in Vientiane for an extended time. I hadn’t seen him since my wintry trip to Minnesota many years ago. I was twenty then. Now, nearly eight years later, he might not have recognised me. I might have blended into the arrivals crowd, dismissed as some other traveller from a rich Asian country.
He found me easily. The airport was small and the disembarking passengers didn’t amount to the swarms one had to sift through nervously at Heathrow or LAX when searching for a newly arrived guest. I didn’t recognise Uncle Lai – Wattay International Airport mightn’t have been swarming but most people were Asian and I’ve never been very good at picking out Hmong from other South-East Asians. But after he approached me, greeted me and dutifully relieved me of my backpack, I could see his face clearly. It did, in fact, conjure my other uncles. Minnesota was coming back to me: that snow, the mob in parkas at the Minneapolis airport greeting me. The many relatives with shared features, and me struggling to remember who was who.