Sleep Walking Now and Then

by Richard Bowes

  The Studio included a large performance space with sixty chairs set up. At the Halloween midnight show all seats had been taken and many more patrons stood or sat on the floor. Halloween had been a triumph. But it’s in the weeks between holidays that hit shows are revealed and flops begin to die.

  Jeremy Knight had that in mind as he pirouetted on the stage. He estimated thirty people in the seats. And this included The Killer, always the first to arrive. Remo was also Jeremy Knight’s understudy. He sat down front with his legs stuck out so far his booted feet rested on the stage. A little knowledge of history and one would be reminded of Jacky Mac’s fatal tastes.

  The under-capacity crowd bothered Knight. But he told himself that any audience of any size was fated to be his. And the people at these performances who sat on antique wooden folding chairs were willing extras.

  They were drawn to the Studio by the sounds and the lights flashing through the open double doors. Or they were told not to miss this by friends who had seen Knight/Jacky perform this monologue, one-man play, stand-up routine, whatever you wanted to call it. Jacky Mac’s writing was out of copyright and Cass had lifted big chunks of it for a play within a play called A Death Made for Speculation.

  Jacky leaned over the front of the stage, hummed a few bars of music, and said in a husky voice, “I’d thought of coming out in an evening gown and doing a Dietrich medley. But I’ve seen the way women look at me when I do drag. It’s the look Negroes get when a white person sings the blues. So I’m here to fulfill a secret dream. I’m playing a guy.”

  Rosalin had taken liberties with the decor but 1970 was a hard moment to exaggerate. Jacky’s loft had been described and shown in articles, books, and documentary footage. Like Warhol’s factory, it was iconic. On the walls and above mantelpieces were mirrors, which at certain angles turned into windows looking into other rooms. In those rooms doll automata played cards, a mechanical rogue and his partner cavorted, and one or both might look your way, indicate you were next.

  “When I was young,” Jacky Mac said, “I tried to make myself look beautiful. Later I tried to make myself look young. Now I’m satisfied with making myself look different.”

  In the lawless 1960s, the Angouleme Hotel was almost as famous as the Chelsea across town. When it was sold as co-op apartments and lofts Jacky bought most of the third floor of the building with the proceeds of his clothing line and his performance art. Jacky Mac was not, of course, his real name, which was boring and provincial Donald Sprang.

  For Jeremy Knight the task was making something as ordinary as homosexuality feel as mysterious, hysterical, and dangerous as Jacky had found his life to be. A brief film clip existed of Jacky Mac working out some of this material in the Studio, performing for an audience of friends in just this manner.

  Jeremy caught the odd, fluid near-dance of Jacky Mac, which he’d learned from old videos. On the walls Hendrix, Joplin, and Day-Glo acrylic nude boys and girls melted into a landscape of red and blue trees. A light show played intermittently on the ceiling. Deep yellow blobs turned into crisp light green snakes, which drowned in orange, quivering jelly. The color spectrum dazed the eye.

  Knight/Jacky leaned forward to show a once-angelic face now touched with lines and makeup and asked, “Why do men over thirty with long hair always look like their mothers?”

  On cue, The Killer down front swallowed a few pills, stood up, pulled a bottle from his back pocket, spat out, “Faggot” at Jacky and walked toward the door while taking a long slug. In the old-fashioned manner, Jacky Mac liked his partners rough. It would be the death of him.

  The audience watched the long, slow exit. Wrist limp, Jacky Mac gestured after him. “We have the perfect relationship. I pretend he doesn’t exist and he pretends that he does.”

  It wasn’t just the costume; Jeremy Knight had absorbed every bit of the lost manner and voice of someone society hated for what he was. Ninety years later it was hard to convey. For a few years in his teens Jeremy had been Jenna Knight, making the change because boys in school got neglected and there was an advantage to being a boy with the mind of a girl.

  Each day Knight felt closer to Jacky’s alienation. Saw it intertwine with his own fear of falling off a very small pedestal and back into the vast, penniless crowd in the Big Arena.

  The Killer stopped at the door and yelled, “IT’S YOUR TURN NOW, BITCH” at somebody no one could see.

  Jacky glanced his way, turned back to the seats and found everyone staring wide-eyed. “Dear me, are the snakes growing out of my head again? That Medusa look was so popular once upon a time!” He peered at the crowd and remarked half to himself, “Judging by your faces, I’ve turned you all to stone. Forgive me. My mother always said…”

  But few were listening. All eyes were on a figure in silks floating past the stage humming “Beautiful Dreamer” under her breath, while the audience whispered her name.

  Cass had invented a liaison in this hotel between a self-destructive artist and the ghost of a legendary suspected murderess. The character Jacky was haunted by Evangeline decades after she had died of an overdose.

  Once he caught sight of her he seemed to forget the audience completely and followed her out of the room. When audience members came after them, they found a locked door.

  But the room into which the two had gone was Jacky’s legendary mirrored bedroom. The ceiling, an entire wall, even the floor in places reflected the room and its outsize bed. One wall was a two-way mirror. Jacky was always aware of this, as were some of his bedmates.

  The Sleep Walking audience flocked around the glass, saw silhouettes dance in semi-darkness as Jacky tried to trap Evangeline or she ensnared him. One shadow seemed to pass through another. One or the other always had a back to the audience and both whispered so none outside could hear.

  “How’s the gate tonight?” she asked.

  “Seventy percent for this show, about the same for the midnight show,” he said.

  “Shit,” she said. “It’s going to fold.”

  “Needs a third act,” he said. “I have my eye out for especially unstable repeat patrons.”

  “A third victim,” she said. “Rosalin’s got one but Sonya scares me.”

  He shook his head. “She’s harmless.”

  “A suicide might do,” Keri said.

  “I volunteer my understudy, Remo.”

  “Silly, understudies don’t want to die; they want to kill the leads.”

  Through the glass the two heard, “Where are you, faggot? Fucking the ghost girl?” The Killer had returned.

  Jeremy Knight took a deep breath and walked out of the bedroom. “Let’s talk, one faggot to another. I’m the terrible secret: the herpes sore on the ten-inch cock, the skunk at the tea dance, the troll without the decency to hide under the bridge. I’m the one who’s here to call you sister, to tell you…”

  In Sleep Walking The Killer emptied the pistol into him just as had happened in real life. Audience members screamed. Keri always stayed for this and always had to stop herself from crying. Then she’d slip out for her big scene with Nance.

  Only after his death was Jacky Mac described as “The Kit Marlowe of this bedraggled city.” The press didn’t get into the details of his life. The murderer was never identified, never caught.

  Business did pick up for Christmas/New Year. But January brought bad weather and bad box office. On the last performance that month Rosalin stood several steps above Sonya, looking down at her as she said “This show needed something that would get the Big Arena talking about us and not the thousand other entertainments available. That never happened. We’re posting closing notices next week. All my work wasted. I hope you enjoyed your brief time on stage.”

  Sonya’s eyes glistened. Rosalin recognized tears. They had talked about suicide. But heights bothered the stupid girl, guns were a mystery. Rosalin had thought to bring a knife.

  FINALE

  The show’s final scene was actors playing detectives, questioning th
e audience members as they filed out of the Studio after Jacky Mac’s death.

  And down the hall, Edwin Lowery and Evangeline Nance went at each other in hoarse ghost whispers. “Oh finally, my daughter, you will have no more to do with that sodomite!” Anger is never hard for actors to achieve in a failing production.

  Keri was scared and irritated. Sonya, like a rat deserting a sinking ship, hadn’t shown up that evening to get her through the dwindling crowd. She screeched, “So unlike the midnight visits to my room when I was still a child! Let us talk about pederasty and hypocrisy!”

  Playgoers, still a bit ensnared by the drama they’d just witnessed, kept pointing them out to the actors/police who would look but be unable to see the ghosts.

  “And that reminds me, dear Father…” Evangeline started to say, when there was a long, piercing and—Keri realized—quite heartfelt scream.

  “That sounds very authentic!” said Jacoby Cass in his own voice and with a look of hope in his eyes.

  Actor/cops and audience members stared down the hall. The Killer was running toward them with tears in his eyes and the prop gun still in his hand, babbling. “… in the elevator … opened the door … blood…”

  Jeremy Knight/Jacky Mac arose from the floor of the Studio to discover what the commotion outside was about and was stunned when Remo/The Killer threw himself sobbing into his arms.

  City police found Sonya holding open the faded gold door of the elevator. She’d knocked Rosalin down and stabbed her multiple times. The surveillance tape showed it all. She’d even looked up and waved.

  When they hustled her out of the hotel and into a police car, Sonya yelled to the crowd, “She wanted me to die, wanted somebody else to die. But her work was over and the play must go on!”

  A reporter asked Cass, “City officials think the production can open again in another few days. Do you believe it’s safe for theatergoers?”

  Jacoby Cass had heard from Inspector Chen that the authorities regarded this as a murder that could have taken place anywhere. The elevator, though, would need to be thoroughly inspected and his supervisors would accompany him.

  Cass anticipated a flurry of green handshakes but knew Sleep Walking Now and Then was booked solid for at least the next six months. He told the reporter, “Yes. Notice that at no time was the life of any patron threatened!”

  “Is the place haunted,” Keri Mayne was constantly asked.

  Leaving the building the night of the murder, she had felt Rosalin’s presence in the lobby and wondered if her death was her greatest piece of theatrical design. Until then Keri hadn’t thought much about spirits. “Yes,” she always said. “And I’m dedicating each of my future performances to the ghosts.”

  Seeing Jeremy Knight and Remo arrive at a party as a couple, a social blogger asked, “Does this feel like your on-stage relationship?”

  Remo shook his head. Jeremy stopped smiling for a moment and said, “Yes.”

  As a foreign correspondent put it, “The Big Arena was made for moments like this.”

  Copyright © 2014 by Richard Bowes

  Art copyright © 2014 by Richie Pope