by Jan Richman
I did get caught a few times, like the time I felt an iron grip on my bicep as I began to pedal breezily away from the Payless parking lot, my patch pocket bulging with Brach’s chocolate peanuts. My body was launched off the bike completely, swung through the air in a wide arc, until I was kneeling in front of my father’s topsiders on the black pavement, my whole upper arm clenched in his muscular fist. My bike lay a few yards ahead, next to my dad’s parked Fiat Spyder. I had never thought to take precautions against running into my father outside the house. This was my world, from the Payless strip-mall to the Girls Club all the way down to the hot dog stand at Moonlight Cove. What was he doing crossing the invisible border into my ten-speed territory? With his free hand, he fished the oversized box of candy out of my pants and hurled it into the nearby trash bin, bullseye. Then, with a snort of disgust, he dropped me on the pavement the way you would drop a name at a cocktail party, casually, trying not to call too much attention to yourself.
But the times I got away with it right under the Condor’s nose gave me the feeling I learned to crave. If my dad truly knew everything about me, if his intimations that I didn’t exist outside of his field of vision were correct, then what was a twenty-dollar double Allman Brothers album doing in my record collection? If I was fatuous and irrational, untenable and unsophisticated, a dreamer not a doer, then how come I had accumulated more flavors of Bonne Bell Lip Smackers than any other girl in my junior high? If being loved meant being meticulously apprehended, then I wanted to be an incomprehensible loner. I had a secret life. Most importantly, this was a life kept secret from my ruler; like a prisoner who successfully hides a tell-all diary in a loose brick of his cell wall, I had harbored a whole private world in a tiny unseen cavity—not in my heart or my brain or my vagina or my mouth, but in a microscopic bubble that floated somewhere in my chest. Every time I swiped something, that bubble swelled and thickened, its skin becoming human skin, its name becoming some lyrical, more interesting version of my name, like Janine spelled out in Russian.
Fits & Starts
Barbara Eden is the emcee. She’s not wearing the harem pants and braided wiglet, of course, but a certain Jeannie proclivity bleeds through. Even in her smart taupe pant-suit and rimless unisex Gaultier eyeglasses, she exudes “I did not mean to cause trouble, Master” energy. She has the same round, mascara-fringed eyes, the same mellifluous if slightly frigid phraseology, the same easy orbit of facial expressions from cloudless smile to cute pout. She stands in a spotlight center-stage with the posture of a ballet teacher, hands folded, eyes roaming left to right. Finally she clears her throat and speaks.
“Some of you here tonight may remember what it felt like to spin in circles until you were dizzy with freedom, to slap your thigh when you laughed, or to stand up and shout at a ball game.” Her tone is dulcet and reverential, delivered with thespian precision. Clearly she has made the choice to provide a hint of a cry in her voice. She waits a beat to make sure we grasp the gravity of her news. “But most of us can only imagine what it would feel like to lose control. Ask yourselves, do the words ‘impulsive’ and ‘spontaneous’ really have meaning anymore?” Her brow furrows above her entreating eyes.
A hum moves through the packed crowd like an “om” at a spiritual retreat. It is perfectly on cue and hushed, without a hint of irony—a practiced meditation on the concept of spontaneity. I crane my neck to look back from my fifth-row seat, trying to get a general sense of what the audience looks like, but the enormous theater is a shadowy cavern. It could be empty of people, for all I know, except for the now-subsiding om-purr and the occasional slight rustle—raw silk against gabardine? the tortoise-shell latch on a Kate Spade handbag?—that whispers through the rows. I straighten the front seams of my black slacks, and look up to see the spotlight zoom away from Jeannie and across the stage, search along the curtain near the wings, and land on a girl in a blood-red dress.
The girl looks to be about nine or ten, with the sway-backed posture of prepubescence. Her dress is skin-tight, pulled across her flat chest and protruding belly, and drips onto the floor in puddles of shining cerise. Her eyelids have been painted with a thick sweep of eyeliner all the way out to her temples, and she’s barefoot. She takes a moment to fully grasp that she can now be seen by an entire auditorium full of people, a moment during which she strokes the edge of the curtain lovingly and nods her head of short-cropped curls vigorously a few times. When the vampy first notes of an Astor Piazzolla tango swell up into the speakers, she grimaces straight out at the audience, an excruciating smile-frown that bares all her teeth, a rictus reminiscent of a cobra in a cage. She tiptoes across the stage. By turns forgetting her staunch smile and then flashing it even more garishly, her face slides through a loop of private/public veneers at an astonishing rate. She holds one arm aloft and circles around the stage, horse-stepping in what appears to be a solo highland fling. Her face is wracked with such intense, disparate emotions that she appears to be both in pain and deep in pleasure. Her progress is brilliant, graceful even; one movement flows into the next without the self-conscious sophistry of adult forethought. I am not sure what’s going on here, but it’s clear to me that no one taught this girl to move like this. No one told her to tiptoe and prance and tweet the floor with her heels. Certainly the flood of sentiments flying across her face are not the result of some Young People’s Drama Workshop—the exposed hurts and remembered losses and overworked smiles stab into me like hooks as they flash.
The black silhouettes of heads in the rows ahead of me are perfectly still, some tilted studiously, some sprouting straight up from their long black necks, with no movement at all. I have the urge to reach out and touch one, to see if it is made of construction paper: perhaps the bouffant in the seat directly in front of me that looks like a child’s drawing of a dark cloud. The stillness is rigid, a breath inhaled and held, the long contraction of clenched stomach muscles in a body just about to orgasm. My hand creeps up to my hair, and I realize that I, too, am sporting a fancy updo, sculpted with pins and ribbons. I turn to look at the man in the seat next to me. He is bulging, his whole being trapped in suspended animation.
My shoe slides over something slick, a playbill lying on the floor beneath my seat. I notice that the picture on the front looks terribly familiar. As I lean down to pick it up, I can see that it is, in fact, a photo of my father. His face is in extreme close-up, his mouth cranked open, mid-yell, and his eyes stare defiantly straight out at the camera. His teeth look yellower than usual, but the facial expression is one I’ve seen thousands of times: it’s his “Don’t Fucking Look at Me” look. The show’s title, in yellow letters over his head, is FITS & STARTS: A TOURETTIC JOURNEY INTO THE IMPETUOUS NATURE OF REALITY. I flip breathlessly through the program and see blurry headshots of people in motion, with captions like lola can’t keep her hands to herself and walk this way? I stop when I get to a photo of the girl onstage, in the same unlikely Gloria Swanson makeup, but wearing overalls and a Hello Kitty T-shirt, above the line: it takes one to tango.
I don’t want to call too much attention to myself, but I am having trouble breathing. I have to get out of here. Why did I choose a seat in the middle of a row? The old springs creak loudly as I shift my weight forward onto my thighs. I grasp the slim wooden armrests and hoist myself up, instinctively tucking my head in like a turtle, my shoulders rounded in deference to the sad musical score onstage. I can feel my father’s presence even with my head down; he invades the air like the stink of fresh-mown onion grass. The center aisle is six seats away, and I duck into a crouch that leans far to the right. No one moves. I glance down the row, and all the eyes in all the heads are fastened to the stage in a kind of hypnotic state, bobbing slightly on their stems, a slow-motion dashboard-dog display of assent. Still crouching, I take a tiny step that nudges my seatmate from his reverie. He glances at me briefly, then swings his legs to the right as though he’s riding side-saddle, and continues to absorb the compelling specta
cle onstage.
“Uh!”
I hear an amplified, lascivious grunt. The familiar passion it infuses into the heated air of the auditorium makes me lift my head. There he is, stage right, my dad, decked out in a beige turtleneck and plaid sansabelt slacks (Robert Goulet circa 1976). He is sputtering and wincing and lashing out in jabs, a blindfolded boxer in an empty ring.
“Fucking shithole!” I look around at all the faces mesmerized by his every tic, the hundreds of eyes widening and lips pressed together into prurient smiles as he punches his testicles over and over again. The sexual threat without the sexual act, the dangerous mood without the violence: this is stock footage from my past, my family, my childhood home. I feel trespassed on. Rows of tastefully dressed strangers gape at my creator, their soft hands white-knuckling the armrests, and it makes me want to crack some heads. Why don’t they peer at their own filthy home movies? I slam my way out of the row, flipping hems, bruising knees, upsetting pocketbooks. I no longer care about causing a scene. But these people, whoever they are, seem to love scenes. They can’t get enough of being quietly appalled.
When I get to the aisle, I feel a large hand grab my calf. I try to yank away, but the grasp is indomitable, sending a painful trill up my leg. I fall into the aisle, my arms outstretched, and squirm around to look at my attacker. He is a bald, hamlike man of indeterminate age. He looks like he has never sprouted a hair anywhere on his body. His dark blue suit is pressed and immaculate, the jacket sleeve perfectly tailored to rest in the center of his fleshy wrist, cutting his watch in two. His massive hand has no trouble enveloping my entire ankle.
“Where are you going?” he asks in a paper-ripping whisper. The smirk on his face tells me that he knows exactly where I’m headed. I lash out with my other foot, aiming for his groin but striking him somewhere near the hip—leaving a small oval ghost-print on his pants—and he releases his grip for an instant, long enough for me to unloose myself. I inadvertently glance at his digital watch when he opens his hand; it’s the kind that lights up a bright turquoise blue.
I know I am dreaming when the numbers on the man’s watch say 25:02. Even on a digital LED pilot watch, there is no 25:02. On any other night, I might have given him the benefit of the doubt, assumed that his numbers got spun out of whack somehow, but when I see 25:02 I remember taking three of Buffy’s bumblebee pills just before bed, the ones she promised would induce lucid dreaming. 25:02 means I am submerged inside my own unconscious. 25:02 means the pills worked, Buffy was right, and I am the mistress of my insentient destiny.
Immediately, I have the urge to wake up. When you open your eyes and see that you’ve sunk to the bottom of the lake, the impulse is to rise. But I won’t let myself; I know what I have to do. I thought when this moment came, I would will myself to fly like a bird or breathe underwater, but instead I dart straight down the aisle toward the stage. There is a small black door on the left side of the proscenium, and I belly-crawl toward it along the carpeted moat like a soldier approaching an enemy bunker. The door opens soundlessly when I twist the knob, and I cram my body through a short tunnel that deposits me in a busy backstage wing.
People dress and rehearse, wave their arms and whisper to themselves, or just stand around waiting, hopping from foot to foot, doing deep knee bends and toe-touches. Someone hits a punching bag in the corner. A huge wig that looks like a leftover from The Flying Dutchman is hefted onto a woman’s head by two stagehands perched on a balustrade. No one seems to notice me, and I quickly sidle up against the wall where a few bulky set pieces lean. An antique spotlight is hunched like an old troll against the wallpapered expanse of wall, and I tuck myself next to it in hopes of fading into the equipment. At about my shoulder level, I notice a series of nicks where the wallpaper has been peeled away in a varied pattern like a mountain range or an EKG. I lean in closer to examine the area, wondering if this is some kind of vintage height chart where dwarfish vaudeville performers of yore measured themselves while waiting to go onstage.
“That’s me you’re lookin’ at!” The hoarse voice behind the spotlight makes me literally jump, both feet clearing the floor. “Johnny the Ring,” he says, and emerges from somewhere in the massive, bulky curtain. He holds out his small, bejeweled hand. “On account of my rings,” he adds. Like Sammy Davis Jr., he’s got fat, gold rings on each finger.
“Oh,” I say, “I was just looking at ...” I trail off dumbly.
“Ssssh!” he shushes me, and nods his head toward the stage. He moves the curtain aside an inch: a middle-age woman in a black ballgown is attempting to wrap a gift, without success. Every time she picks up the scissors, she makes confetti.
“What’s your name, Lady?” he asks, and his breath buzzes right up against my ear like a mosquito while he thrusts his hand into mine with the force of a small tractor. Like everyone else backstage, Johnny the Ring is animated and enthusiastic, all hopped up and ready to break into some athletic routine—break dancing? vine-swinging? high-speed masturbation?
“Jan,” I manage to gasp. That the gift-wrapper is onstage must mean that my dad has finished his performance. Or will they loop through all the entertainers again? I glance around but can’t locate him. Maybe he exited off the other side of the stage.
“What’s your dodge?” asks Johnny, still squeezing my palm like it’s an orange he’s juicing.
“My dodge?”
“You know, your skill, your chops.” He looks me up and down, studies my breasts when he gets to them, and his upper lip folds back like a fingered page. He obviously doubts my credentials. “I don’t notice anything exordinary about you, Miss.” He bows, “if you don’t mind my saying so.”
He drops my hand, races over to the wall and starts punching it lightly with his knuckles, tapping his big rings back and forth fast. I am on the other side of the tracks now, with the freaks behind the curtain. I had better start spazzing out soon or somebody is bound to be become suspicious.
As Johnny the Ring adds to his abstract wall-art piece, I try out a brief shiver. It’s been a while since I’ve imitated my dad’s outbursts, but those childhood hours spent perfecting his stabs and tremors, his un-der-his-breath linguistic mutations—“Pussy-slurper!” “Bunghole schvitzer!”—have paid off: the moves are surprisingly easy to recapture.
But now I am on the spot. What’s my dodge? I know I can’t copy my father’s moves explicitly—that would be too obvious, even for this crowd—but the important thing is not the specific gestures anyway, it’s the attitude with which the gestures are executed. I have been handed a legacy, I realize now, an intuitive ability to align myself with the twitchers of the world. When Johnny turns back toward me, I steel my face into a frond, a flat plane from which the thorns of my features protrude. I hold his eyes in mine, not letting go even when my chest tightens and I begin to quake violently. I let my hips collapse and my torso drops like a waterfall, my arms swing spastically, and my fingers sweep the floor for dust and crumbs. I clear my throat seven times.
“You’re on!” says an officious-looking woman carrying a clipboard, nodding her chin, I’m pretty sure, at me. It’s hard to tell because she continues to nod furiously, up and down and up and down and up and down until I lose track of her intention. I’m just finishing my second or third full-body shudder and her face is there, bobbing like a kid diving for apples at a Halloween carnival. Dizzy and disoriented, I take a step back in the direction of the shadows.
“Me?” I ask timidly, standing on my tiptoes to steal a glance at her clipboard.
She jerks away and rasps sternly into her headset mike, “I know. I’m aware of that! Thank you.” I glance at Johnny the Ring for assistance. Maybe I’ve convinced him there is something extraordinary about me after all, maybe he’ll come to my rescue. But his attention has already strayed to a larger-chested female a few yards away who jumps high into the air and kicks her own ass.
“Yes, you!” the woman with the clipboard hisses,
“Now!”
Her pageboy haircut is razor sharp—how does she maintain the style with a tic like hers? Does she have a lover who trims her bangs while she sleeps?—and she does not look like she’s going to take no for an answer. She grips my elbow and leads me firmly to the parting in the stage curtain.
I hear Jeannie’s voice again, calm and consoling. “Now, I want everyone here to have my personal assurance that no humans were harmed during the making of this pageant!”
A wave of laughter rumbles through the house and then stops exactly on the same beat. I realize that Barbara Eden’s vocal cadence sounds just like the tinkling of a bell. I wonder if she’s had to practice to get it to sound like that.
The hand at my elbow has migrated to the small of my back and pushes me forward, nails biting into my butt flesh. I hear myself being introduced as “The Human Hummingbird!” and then I am thrust out onto the fiercely lit stage. I feel my pupils contract at light speed as I peer out at the unseeable audience. I am terrified.
But this is my dream! I remind myself that these people in the audience are my own creations. If I made them out of scraps of my brain tissue, surely I can hypnotize them into thinking that I am a talented and alluring performer. Plus, if I want to find my dad, I’d better get on and offstage as quickly as possible without stirring up too much suspicion. A few chords boom from enormous monitors at the front of the stage, and I recognize the libidinous syllables of Prince’s voice as he races through the first line of “Purple Rain”: “I never wanted to be! your part-time lover ...”
I know what to do. I turn my back to the audience and the hot lights invade the loose mesh fabric of my blouse; tiny squares are branded onto my skin. I start to shake. I shake my hips fast and loose, vibrating in place. I poke my beak into a bright red feeder, so fast I approach stillness. My vulva is immovable, solid gold like one of Johnny’s rings, my undisputed center of gravity. I lean my head back and shake it too, just as though I have a long mane of strip-club hair. If there were a ten-foot pole up onstage, I have no doubt that I would mount it and ride like the wind. Eyes closed, body quivering furiously, lips puckered like the stuck halves of a yo-yo, I languish in the heat of stage lights that spit imaginary sparks to nip at my shoulder blades. I listen to the terrible sorcery that is “Purple Rain.” Prince cries like a cat and repeats himself like a sex offender, scratches on the locked screen door, pleads to be let out into the deluge. My tremble is so subtle now that I have stopped moving entirely. The spotlight spits me out and I am offstage again in a flash, almost tripping over a pair of identical twins in knickers and Tam O’ Shanters as I rush toward the stage door.