by Joshua Cohen
O Siegeles! Bugsy’s burg, Lansky’s kinda town, I’m leaving you to-ni-ight…its name, hymn, how it might be derived from the German word Siegel, implying as some scholars hold the King’s Seal of approval, that infamously rhinestoned monarch whose memory lords it over these strange, illicit festivities: thank you, thank you very much…or else, other sages have said, how it might be a benign corruption from the Sephard, its Siega, though the word’s shyly feminine, with the meaning of Harvest, out southernly in this desert due west where nothing grew in the olden heat let alone in this freeze, you get used to it. Here in this garish desert Egypt, Mitzraim’s what the locals know it as, gone Goshen—give yourself another season.
Verily in the course of the buffetline that we call the land of our forefathers they came upon a famine. And so we generations stay enslaved even now, which exile’s to be redeemed with appropriate voucher. The Al-Cohol Hotel & Q’asino…try your luck, try your, try, three wishniaks pitted, rotsweet, it looks like we got a winner, close your eyes, stick out your tongue, here comes a manna of dimes. Tonight and tomorrow, it’s independence from independence we’re observing for the final, last call and closing time and all, though only a handful of the stubborn still wave in the manner of Old Glory. Onearmed bandits: the veteran homeless crutched at the crossroads, as stiffnecked as poles barren, BAR BAR BAR the stripes reeling, slowing, fading…oldtimey jingoes sleeping the day away standing upright, with their thumbs still out, their lids at halfmast, with their hands out, too, begging alms with false palms by the oases motelfront—and that’s it so far out to Mesquite, on the road north toward the border, its barricade, the purdured purdah of the holdouts, Mormondom.
Not to worry, though, there’ll be fireworks enough by tomorrow, the Fourth that isn’t the fourth, the false fourth, the day of the Israelien–Shade wedding, newly autoordained Rabbi Travis Travisky of the drivethru shul to preside: the halls of this Q’asino Hotel coagulating into veins mined for congrats; guests shaking hands, handing around envelopes enclosing checks and tables’ chips, addressed with advice in bright blood: senselessness, don’t spend yourself all in one place. Ben brought low in a seat that both rises and swivels around, costumed already, rouged, perfumed, and powdered: the faygele doing Makeup’s—secretly the partner of the one doing Wardrobe, don’t doubt—gone maybe a little too hard on the coverup, and now the tall, lashthin, lonely stoop goes tweezering again at His eyebrows.
Are you excited for tomorrow? he asks…and what can He say with his knee in His crotch.
O I do love weddings, he goes on, who doesn’t: she’ll walk around you seven times, and then shtum, He doesn’t want to think about it, thinking: where’s my coffee, I take it black but by now you should know that, what about my water, my invincible pills…anyway, why all this makeup if I’m married to the veil—which matches the white jumpsuit, too tight and tawdryjeweled?
Tomorrow, He’s to be married into the family of the President of the country that loves Him, which God blesses with each bountiful lapse of His will: the woman a girl He’s never even met, soon to be converted from daughter to wife. Her name, wait, give me a moment…Lillian Israelien, it has a ring to it, nu, and hope Gelt’s got the ring, sixstitched to his pillow. Then, the chuppah that’s been made in the image of a bedsheet upon which a son will be spilled—the weather holding its sky, which is a canopy greater, a next night’s clouding of the sleepless new moon, tomorrow’s redeye to Newark. Tonight, however, Ben’s been forbidden from mothers and sisters, urged to save up His strength, avoid such risky indulgence: though there’ve been allegations, ahem, situations, hymn, little embarrassments, random indignities…a measure of Schaden done, but nothing the glad hand of Publicity won’t wipe from the face of the earth.
And though there’s no rehearsal tisch, there’s still a rehearsal, which is always the same—whether religion or revue, and no matter the variety, the show must always go on.
Onstage in the main showroom, the Tut-ankh-a-men Ampitheather its name is, the paraplegic, extapdancer who’s also the second asst. director he’s not quite kickstepping, knocking, screaming out the kinks still left in the openers. Mada sits in the emptiness middlerowed, taking quick blacksmeared notes on a legalpad and shouting, too, as the small balding wheelchairbound mensch rolls himself into the sets in a dissatisfied fit, exhorting emphysemic through the hole in his throat, its metallic electrolarynx, the performers assembled: lefthand, and he means it in his emphatic tinny wheeze, the fingers must flutter, you with me, righthand now, right, and soon enough they’re arguing…Mada disagreeing with him through his own hands cupped to bell yell, you’re getting it wrong, then him demanding of Mada—tell me, who’s the professional, he’s asking voicelessly though, without apparatus, unable to manipulate sound as with his hands he’s frantically wheeling toward the lip of the stage, who’s the goddamned professional, rearing himself up almost vertically, this spooked tilt, as Mada throws back, who’s paying the professional…he’s leaning in a smoked hoarse, throatily impotent rage to fall back and out of his chair, which spits out from under him to fly up and into the frontrow, then snaring on a seat just spinning its wheels, him thrown to squirm worm atop the floorboards stageright. Houselights dim, with the spotlight on him; the operator’s been finally woken. He struggles to sit up against a tree prop, redfaced, and tearing, on elbows across the stage foundering before making an attempt with swipes of his fist to lisp pitifully through the gasp of his puncture.
What do you want from me, he asks, what are you asking of us, he pauses for the strain of next speech—that we scrap an entire moon of work, he’s wriggling his insensitive spine against the sloppily paintcaked wooden tree wheeled, which falls over its waxwork fruit: that we should just stop trying, he tries again to sit up, and trust success to what, bribery, coercion, providence, God or His headlining angels? then slumps, to be proppedup by the twelve principal Benettes, who fan him with their wings.
Am I on yet? is Ben’s voice from above—heightened amid the wisps of the walks and there even patiently, too, just hanging around: from the ceiling, stretching the rubberized cords wrapped around waist and stropped to a strut overhead, dangling Him limply over the pit and its floodlights, and sagging, halo drooping, toes weighted nearly to stagefloor—without drama, not enough tension, not much to spectacle at when it comes to suspension.
Save your voice! the crumpled choreographer gasps, a direction taken up slowly in whispers, vouches, and oaths staged by all in unionized unison: Ben. Benja. Benjamin, the stagehands intoning His name in this newly popular propitiatory formula; not as much hoping to save their star from falling than a ritual of pep, invoked in a style baldly copped from the profuse, profaning neon, flashing outside passersby, their yarmulked kith chauffeuring laden, bluefrozen kine. Along the Strip, marquees advertise attractions both former and upcoming in small print (all your past favorites: comic & corpseimpersonator Reggie Feldsein his name is, whom you might remember from his only appearance on Late Night with, forget it; next week: Eleven Intepretations of the Ten Plagues in Lasers & Lights—“Two Thumbs, Guess Where?” says the Siegeles Sun), but the large print’s always for Him: B-E-N it flashes, ten tall, BEN, and then BEN…B-E-N, BEN, B—a pause—N—and a member of the maintenance staff ’s chosen by lots, tephramancy: by the interpretation of ashes, the reflection of helium, argon, krypton, or xenon in puddles of gutter manure—cast out into the wilderness to screw in a new bulb.
An hour later, it’s opening, what with the toetap and the slapclap, and the booing, we want the show, we want the show—how there’s no time for reflection, Ben, you’re on and we’re off, a blinding flash out there, a whole cast of what can go wrong always will, acting up under the batting of brights: a heavy velour tugged up by a cord braided and fringed, sandbagged hoisted the flag, the desert’s skypennant, backed only by a dustily footlit diaphanous veil; this musty, fouled curtain rising on a risqué oneliner, then lowering itself back down only to be risen again as another: the entire spiel here a setup (p
lus admission fees, the prices of food, drinks, and unmemorabilia), and all this funnily staged business with the curtains in their second coming and third only to be followed by blah, merely a punchline we didn’t think funny the first time, and you didn’t either…such tuggy yuks as delivered by a mensch they’d taken on take your pick—scrapedup from under a rock Upstate or so, from which bungalowcolony or kuchaleyn his first wife dead always said—think it up for yourself ’s what it means (that and his older birthdate, which he’s had falsified with a stolen certificate, and which are his daughters and which are his second and third wives, each of whom’s said to own land in Joysey where they’d graze their trick Arabian horses): an oldhand expert at Katz skills, he’s short, fat, and borschtbelted, a former tummler and the purplehearted, white-livered veteran of a million hundredshekel Kutsher’s gigs, at least according to his official bio supplemented with headshot ten years and twenty pounds out of date—the immediate past president of Congregation Beth Supporting Actor, too, this snubby stub of a forgotten, unrecognized, underrecognized, genius in a weathered suit and a pair of dark, plastic, feltfooted slippers he thinks passes for dress shoes, how his bunions have corns, his tongue’s lost its gift is its gift in the telling, how he tells the same lame old jokes while holding in one hand a microphone and in the other an assortment of props, nightly, depending: whether a ringmaster’s whip or a conductor’s baton, often an unstrung violin he didn’t play if he could or a feather, which is artificial of plastic itself, pink and illegally sharp; then—according to the program that costs only a shekel or two extra if you care to follow along with us at home—there’ll be a juggler on stilts, to be followed up by a stilted who juggles, stay tuned; upstaged by a mime, the juggler’s brother-inlaw who he’s just doing a favor for he’ll regret (is he climbing a rope, or milking a cow, I’m not sure, ask him yourself, he’ll flip you a finger in answer); four and five respectively illfed, parasiteriddled albino lions and tigers turning lazy, tired, halftushed loops through flaming hoops, schnorring on their other sides, stageright, for scraps of meat rebarbatively raw—though only once all have passed safe and sounding in growl through such hazards are the hazards, then, magically transformed, alchemized, from having been hoops into triangles superimposed as to form a familiar star still afire.
An interlude, featuring the Tehranfinanced, Beirutbased rapper Def Führer engaged for juvenile appeal, the edifying fun of the kinder: We’re all infidels now / How / Shut the futz up…followed up by a set from a set of Siamese Twin girlpianists, the necessarily packaged two of them the only ones on this tour not in any way faking it, having been imported from Siam itself if it still exists: they play for our pleasure two different nusachs at twinned grand pianos, though thankfully they don’t sing (aren’t allowed to)—have you heard their accents? asks the dramaturge he’s billed as but he’s really a producer, and a dealer in woolwear, hats, gloves, mittens, and scarves; this seguing into a reprise of the opening theme, initially heard scored softly for winds with flute solo amid that sitting and settling rustle (aux. percussion), now though in an arrangement that can only be described as discoliturgical, even the critics agree it’s way over the top, performed past forte and prestissississimo, keying a change to chorus accompanied by triple winds and brass with bells up from the pit’s hellacious darkness, courtesy of the mephistic Maestro and his orchestra, besamimaddled spice addicts all, doing their improvisatorily riffing best to keep those deaf, dumb, startlishly molting feathered and sequined things onstage in the vaguest semblance of together: they couldn’t take a cue if it took them, audiences have said, and it won’t—Management will…these the openers that’ve been contracted tonight like a bad virus that stills the showstopper, keeps the stars in bed and without their shiny understudies for company, makes a boy have to step in to play a girl in drag what with the blond wig and the fainting; the last cast for the last date Ben’ll do in Siegeles, baby, and ever, wherever, the end of one engagement, that is, before the eternalizing commitment that marks the end of another, tomorrow, remember, whose wedding of Him to her and the day with posterity, too, is to be private, then its own reprise the day after that for the masses, the media, with their honeymoon scheduled to rise back in the east to close the tour at the Temple—which event’s to be the culmination of Ben’s public wander: the end to this six nights a week, with two hits per at 1900 and 2200 with only Fridays off, then two shows after Shabbos, the risen black chuppah curtain of night with its three tinsel stars, and then—showtime; He’s been scheduled like this for a moon.
And the tour entire from its opening night to this one time only it’s said, Very special engagement upon the eve of the fourth of the olden July the first of another month, also—the night of the newest moon of the month known as Tammuz, named for the God of Babylon, who’d been the lover of Ishtar and the bane of our prophet Ezekiel—has, admit it, proved nothing less than a disaster of proportions most Scriptural, whatsoever were its intentions: to begin with, the animals had been rented sick, the dye wouldn’t take, or poisoned—six sheep done dark, mortally leaded, and one heifer dripping in a puddle of its own red; the mocked up horn of the unicorn kept falling off when it wasn’t stolen and sold by the crew; then and as if that’s not enough in Indiana the unions went striking left and leftist forever, following this Marxist stuntmensch and his pyrotechnic associate who specialized in making smoke without fire turned political for the emancipation of the Hoosier proletariat; at Des Moines, Iowa, the Emezin Persky, he of “His Equally Emezin Magic Trunk (which he would always say might also refer to a more intimate organ, then wink)” refused to tour further without yet another plump plumer, a busty clovenhoofer and aspiring puppeteer he’d met then impregnated one night while on line for the motel’s ice machines and maybe she’s twelve on a good day; members of the audience throughout the Rockies, “The Very Difficult And Often Uneven” region down to the even ostensibly intelligent, aware, and worldlier denizens of Denver proper, proved reluctant to volunteer to sit in the schmuck’s trunk, take a lay, a load off—then poof out again Affiliated, afraid maybe of getting sawed in Solomonhalf, perhaps of disappearing forever; though the press would hold that their resistance was, instead, an issue of respect, finding the trick with the trunk not merely sacrilegious but unrepentant, also, of the unforgivably boring, that old outcast estate of outdated, superannuated shticky, which is to be punished by yawn, a tip of the old hat lacking a rabbit to pull for. According to our sages whose bylines buy love and whose praise is often greater purchase than money, Terrible, Unwatchable, Unlistenable, Unthinkable, too, nostalgically nonsensical—who would have thought, what with the mind that’s gone into it all: the script’s desertstale, the lighting and f/x despite the budget come off as amateur to be generous, production values pitched so low you could trip over them, a snare, a stumblingblock. A rimshot, a cymbal, a crash. And then Ben, what’s His deal, His dinging thing, what’s with it. A mensch walks into a talent agent, ouch, a mensch walks into a talent agency, ouch, next time he should use the door. No, seriously folks, a mensch walks into the office of a talent agent and sits down and says, nu, listen up, I have this fantabulous new act: it’s jokes like this, acrobatics, juggling, magic, how I’m doing all of them just by living. Here and now, that’s the act, I’m it, that’s the joke, me…whaddya think, this talking to Himself, Ben upstaging the stab of backstaging patter. Existence, now that’s entertainment. You’ll go far in this town, so far that you’ll leave town, and then you’re in the desert and futzed.
He flies high and lone up there, only to be lowered down onto a throne set atop a pillar footstooled amid property plastic fronds and hunks of foamquarried marble, from that vantage to offer His answers to questions that’d been earlier offered to select audience members, memorized by them preshow (questions asked to themselves in their minds throughout the performance, just as He’s been practicing answers, silently rememorizing what’s anyway always fed to His mouth by a device spooned into His ear) only to be offered back up to Him
as if so much sacrifice, too turned and false to be accepted by even the cheap seats and their miserly gods. What did the yadda say to the blah, Ben? Knock knock, who’s there, Jaffa orange you happy I didn’t say Eden’s apple? That, and how many chickens does it take to cross what. Are sons responsible for the sins of their fathers, another goes, and its answer is yes, or no, contingent, of course, on the humors of any sins in the question, on which fathers and sons. How many crickets can outsound a heckle. Though often the answers and questions are reversed for effect, as if He’s telling the joke of a fortune: don’t bother, the audience would say all as one, or half the house that and the other, I’ll just sit in the dark, and then how He’d have to ask, humiliatingly, and with a smile that turns His glossy teeth to mirrors of the audience’s yawning and sleep, how many mothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb; and then, how the houselights would abruptly die or be killed in a fizzle, and how there’d be murmuring, too, bleats and more booing less and less sheepish—the Maestro would pad. A hook might become crooked from the wings. This is how a shepherd loses His flock.