Halfway Home

by Paul Monette

  Dumpsters big enough for eighteen-wheelers dominate the open space; and yet, improbably, from the center of the square rise four royal palms, freakish as giraffes. The palms are never pruned or watered, and more than one truck has smashed against them backing up. But they stand six stories tall and aloof, a smidgen of oasis.

  Gray pulls the pickup in by the loading dock. There are maybe fifteen or twenty cars parked higgledy-piggledy, not a bad crowd for Sunday potluck. Half of these, of course, are probably the performers' cars—the exhausted ones with shredding vinyl roofs. I move to get out. Gray touches my arm, and not just with one finger. "Break a leg," he says quietly. "Or at least one heart."

  "I'm not promising anything," I retort, as if it's still up in the air, but we both know nothing will stop me now.

  There's a proper front entrance, with a spiffy canvas awning and a sputtering neon sign, courtesy of a donor. But we head in by the loading dock itself, a concrete bay faced with railroad ties and big old tires. The aluminum sliding door is open a couple of feet, and we slip in. There's still a strong smell of ink about the place, as if nothing is truly forgotten. It's dark, and we make our way toward the white stage lights.

  Music is playing off a tape—awful music, post-punk, tone-deaf. Gray and I approach on cat's feet to stage right, just beside the bleachers. The performer, a woman in three shades of black, is doing the obligatory mime, a cross between T'ai Chi and a sort of mute primal scream. The straggly audience is, as I expected, about twenty strong, most in black themselves. Performance is always a bit of a funeral.

  Across the way, stage left, I spot Mona standing against a post, looking as if she wants to start a gulag for bad artists. Something catches her eye, and she turns and sees me. Total shock, then a grin of dawning light. She jerks her head toward the office. Gray and I slip around behind the bleachers, where there are still cartons of cheap ball-point pens stacked in dusty corners. We won't run out of pens for several hundred years.

  I walk in with Gray, and Mona flashes a helpless look of gratitude at him, as if this is somehow his doing. I am already scooting around the desk, covered with reams of grant applications, past the chaotic filing cabinets, drawers yawning open and choked with rotting props. I open the accordion closet door and feel a surge of excitement. My costume hangs just where I left it.

  "They're even worse than usual tonight, if you can believe it," Mona says, and as if we needed further proof, the woman onstage spews out a torrent of invective, none of it intelligible but clearly about as amusing as a root canal.

  I lift out my caftan, a coarse dun-brown wool. "I may only do five minutes," I warn them, shinnying out of my sweat shirt.

  We don't exactly have a dressing room. Slipping off my jeans I feel no shame or strangeness about my spots. Gray and Mona are watching me, not even pretending to small-talk. They of course have romanticized this moment to such a pitch, they probably think the exercise will cure me. I'm much more nuts-and-bolts. I clamber into the caftan all for its own sake, the smell and the scratchy feel. My shoulder-curl wig lies on the closet shelf like a dead squirrel. When I shake it, the dust of old hairspray clouds the air, but the Dynel is in fact a miracle, no tangling and supple as ever. I draw it over my scalp and check it out in the mirror.

  "He is risen," Mona says.

  Then I grab my sandals and sit in the swivel desk chair to strap them on, the kind with the long laces that crisscross up the calf. "He wants you to come meet his Aunt Foo," I tell Mona.

  She blinks in confusion at Gray. "She's alive?"

  "Of course, dear," I retort breezily, as if I didn't ask the same thing. "There's always somebody in a WASP family who never dies. How else will anyone know where all the skeletons are buried? Where's my crown of thorns?"

  Mona stoops to the nearest filing cabinet, tugging open a sprung and rusty drawer. It looks like it's full of electrical cable, but she lifts out from the back something wrapped in tissue paper. Carefully she peels the tissue away, revealing the crown undamaged. This is a true slice of Grand Guignol, with darkly twisted branches and thorns like fangs. Mona found it at a garage sale in Reseda. As she props it lightly on my head, she says, "But you haven't told me a thing about your brother. What happened?"

  I peer in the mirror, cocking my crown at a rakish angle, more like a forties Adrian hat. "Oh, the usual. I fucked him. He cried a little."

  She swats my shoulder as I stand up. I'm incorrigible. Gray says, "You want to go next?"

  "Sooner the better. I might collapse at any moment."

  The three of us head out into the darkened theater, each of them squeezing an arm on either side. I feel like Diana Ross being led to the stage at Caesar's Palace. As we come up behind the bleachers, we can see through the seats that the sullen performer is reaching the end of her piece. The music has fallen from its cacophonous heights, sounding now like fingernails on a blackboard. Sorrowfully, inevitably, the woman in the spotlight begins to shuck her black clothes. So raw and authentic. I am meanwhile preoccupied ducking in under the bleachers and lifting out my cross without making noise. It's in two pieces, a couple of four by fours. Gray is right behind me, so I pass them back to him. Then I grab my carpenter's toolbox.

  Gray is already fitting the crossbar onto the stakepole. Though he has never helped me put it together before, he's got that handyman's intuition for how things work. He slots the crossbar into place and secures the toggle bolts. It stands almost eight feet tall. Mona waits by the low end of the bleachers, ready to dart onstage as soon as Lady Macbeth goes off.

  We watch for the flash of her dreary nakedness, but the black shift comes off, and it turns out she has saved us a final stunning metaphor. Not naked at all, but wearing a black lace G-string and matching pasties, the tawdriest peepshow gear. The woman herself weighs in at one-forty, so she looks like a fullback in drag. She stands in her final tableau, defeated and yet triumphant, for this is a postfeminist reading. The music cuts out. The twenty gulls in the audience applaud.

  Clearly I don't have the right attitude anymore about my fellow supplicants in the temple of High Art. Mona applauds with the others, smiling enthusiastically as the woman retrieves her fallen garments. She doesn't bow but gives a dimpled smile as she totters off behind an armload of clothes. Then Mona strides on, before the clapping has sputtered out.

  "We announced in our February flyer that we'd be premiering a piece tonight, but it's not ready." Mona shrugs, no excuses. There is no groan of disappointment from the audience, which sits there dully, expecting nothing. "Instead we have a special guest," says Mona. Her onstage patter has always been very straight-on—the dyke Ed McMahon. "The performance artist who put AGORA on the map. A man who's actually been called the Devil—by a reviewer. It's just like they always say: nothing sacred, nothing gained. Ladies and gentlemen, my bossman, Tom Shaheen.Miss Jesus to you."

  Gray is holding the cross. I turn around, and he lays it over my shoulder so I'm gripping the crossbar, very King of Kings. The loxes applaud rather spiritedly as I trudge around the corner of the bleachers and into the light. Mona has scooted off the other way, so as not to block my entrance. I lug my burden center stage, and by now you can hear a pin drop. I turn my head and rake them with a desolate look, as if they are indeed a crowd of onlookers on the Via Dolorosa.

  I breathe deep and speak. "Welcome to the Second Coming." Beat. "The first time I had a wet dream."

  They don't exactly laugh, but there's a small expulsion of breath from several quarters. I turn and drag the cross upstage, where I slip it off my shoulder and prop it against a black-painted platform, toolbox beside it. My music begins, starting with monks chanting. As a sort of warmup I strike a set of poses, limp-wristed and mincing, flouncing my golden hair, shivering with sissiness. All right, it's self-indulgent, but it gets across the persona with swift economy: this boy is a queen.

  "I thought as long as I was coming back to Hollywood, I might as well come back as Jeffrey Hunter." Once more they don't laugh, a little lo
uder. This group is too young to have seen K ofK.

  I move to my toolbox and pull out a hammer and spikes. Then I climb onto the cross. I turn over and position myself so I'm lying on it, then hook my feet through the leather thong on the stakepole. The crossbar also has leather loops at either end for my wrists, and I slip the left one through, my right hand free with the hammer. I am more or less in the crucifixion mode, but with one significant modification. In the past I have stripped off my caftan and done the cross part in a loincloth, my shoulders and back greasepainted with whip marks. But I'm not ready to parade my lesions in front of this motley crowd. Even my sort of exhibitionism has its limits.

  I reach over and stick one of the spikes between the fingers of my lashed hand. Then I start hammering. Of course they can see quite clearly that the spike isn't actually going into flesh, but the effect is near enough. Nobody comes to this moment in my act, Jew or Muslim, without an overload of images of the Passion. So basically they're riveted by the nuts and bolts. But as I hammer and the spike sinks into the wood, I start to moan with pleasure. Here I can get pretty tacky as I raise the stakes, and only the bravest laugh now, and no one tonight.

  I loll my tongue and grunt obscenely—"Yeah, do it!"—as I strike each hammer blow. My music changes to the Kings College choir, trilling the "Hallelujah Chorus." I rub the hammer against my crotch, groaning and panting shamelessly as I flex my spiked hand. It's at this very moment, in fact, that I have been attacked—once, a God-fearing lady from the Coalition of Family Values who stormed onstage and wrested the hammer from my grasp. But this group sits in polite shock while I go over the top, thrashing in ecstasy. Then I go limp. I turn and gaze raptly at my nailed hand, wincing now as I mimic that postcoital ache where you realize you went a little too far. Then I look at them.

  "I bet you never realized I liked it."

  Silence. I'm acutely aware, from the corners of my eyes, of Gray and Mona standing on either side of the bleachers. My bodyguards. I release my hand from the crossbar loop, unhook my feet, and climb off. I pat my crown into place and brush at the wrinkles on the front of my caftan. Then, as if to show there's no blood, or maybe to bless them, I raise my palms to the crowd. It's about half and half, men and women, and nobody over thirty.

  "The thing is, I can't figure how everyone got it so wrong. Think about it: I found twelve single men in Palestine who were still living with their mothers. I mean, give me a break."

  It's amazing how it comes back after eighteen months. Not that there has ever been a script. But a certain flow of attitude, the cheap one-liners popping up, has shaped itself in the course of time. I'm not remembering but reinventing, and the material feels live, like a snake in my hands.

  "I think James the brother of John was straight, and Peter was kind of bi, but I always thought that was mostly wishful thinking. Otherwise—honey, this was always meant to be a gay thing. And celibacy? Please."

  I sniff with disdain and give them a haughty left profile. Gray is hugging himself with delight. I love how much he loves this stuff, and tonight I'm doing it more for him than anyone. After all, he's been my patron all winter, and I'm his colony of one. I look back at the audience and point behind me to the cross.

  "Not that everyone was into this kind of thing. I admit it, I was much more on the edge than the rest of them. But hey, my father's house has many mansions. And besides, I was like the CEO, with all the pressures and all the tsuris. Now you know how those guys at the top need to be sex-pig slaves on Saturday nights. The straight ones like their hookers to do the dominatrix thing, with cattle prods. Really, when you come to think of it, isn't crucifixion just another turn of the screw?"

  "I don't have to listen to this shit!"

  Ah. About halfway up the bleachers a lanky man is standing. The woman beside him is pulling his arm, telling him to shush. But he's in his own spotlight now, and there's only one way to go.

  "I'm a Christian," he seethes at me. "And you're a sick fuck."

  "Thank you for sharing," I purr in reply, as he clumps down the steps, the woman huddling behind him in his wake. "Blessed are the Rock 'n' Rollers, for they shall see Elvis."

  But he won't be drawn in any further. He storms across the skirt of the stage, past a flinching Mona, and heads out through the main entrance. His girl makes sure the door doesn't slam behind them. Everyone else has watched them go as if it was all part of the act, which of course it was.

  "Just like my brother Aaron, flies right off the handle. Of course it's been very hard on Aaron, bunking all those years with the Son of God. See, Aaron was non-Immaculate. We were always a little out of sync, because he'd be playing baseball and I'd be doing miracles. But you know what's weirder than that? He had a lot more trouble with me being gay than being God. He was the butchest kid in Nazareth, but something about it really threatened him."

  This is all new, and I don't know where it's going. I never did a brother riff before. What's curious is, I'm not really thinking of Brian, not consciously. I'm actually in character. I've crossed that invisible line, and the man I call Aaron is right there in my mind. He's swarthy with lush brown hair and a beard, dressed in a caftan just like mine, the gleam of a Palestinian terrorist in his eye. Gorgeous. A real warrior.

  "And he's a much better carpenter too, so he's the one took over the shop. Which was fine with me because, honey, I can hardly hold a screwdriver straight." I sigh and examine my nails, pouty as a princess. "He still lives in Nazareth, building condos. Married, coupla kids. And when people ask if he has any brothers and sisters, he says he was an only child." I shrug. I can tell the natives are restless, as if they know I'm off the track, and besides, I'm not even shocking them anymore. "I don't blame him really. He didn't want his name linked with the founder of a homo church. Too bad he can't have a Second Coming, because it would blow him away to see how it's taken off. Success he can get behind."

  My tape comes softly up again, the Mormon Choir singing "Amazing Grace." By this point I am supposed to be into the Last Supper, strutting around and rubbing my privates—flashing them on a good night—and taunting them with "This is my body—eat!" Somehow I have lost the momentum, or else I'm just too weak tonight to pull out all the stops. I turn and shuffle back to the platform, picking up my toolkit and hoisting the cross to my shoulder again.

  I start moving across the stage, dragging the cross after me. I've let the energy drop, which bothers me in purely theatrical terms. I usually go off with a bang, telling them about my Jesus game show, my intro into cable. I stop and give them a melancholy smile. They've really been pretty attentive, and I can feel they'd like another little spin, doesn't have to be a bang. So I reach down in, not sure what I'm going to come up with.

  "You know what's funny? When I first got it on with Judas, he reminded me of Aaron. I don't know, something about that furry Jewish chest—chunky shoulders—little bit of a gut. Plus that love Buick of his, with a nice big mushroom head. It's like I was getting fucked by my own brother. You know?"

  Nope, they don't know about this part at all, not a clue. I can feel them hunkering down in their seats again. They're expecting another simulated orgasm, me sitting on Aaron's pole. But that's my last surprise, to turn it all upside down, just like the G-string and pasties. Tonight I want to leave on a grace note, mellow as Tony Bennett.

  "You always fall for the ones who remind you of the one you never got. I fell for Judas hard. I would've done anything for him. His little sister got thrown by a camel, and I raised her from the dead, but we kept that very quiet. I stole his dirty underwear. I watched him sleep all night. I knew they paid him money, and still I couldn't keep my hands off him. I think that's why he betrayed me, frankly, because I was one of those girls who love too much. It was really messy."

  I knock my head a few times against the cross, to show what a flake I am. "So now that I've got a second chance, my first commandment is: God shouldn't date. Only anonymous sex in dark alleys." I nod and give them a wink. "See you there. I'
ll be the one with the Shroud of Turin on my face. Peace and love."

  And I trudge off stage right, dragging the sins of the world behind me. They clap, all right, and there's even a whistle, but not much more than they gave to Lady Geek before me. Still, Mona is beaming as I come off, practically jumping up and down with excitement. She throws her arms about my neck and kisses my cheek with the lesion. "Welcome home, darlin'," she murmurs in my ear, and now the little audience raises the volume, applauding more vigorously. If nothing else, they approve the schlock reunion of Mona and me. I'm swept up in it too, I admit it. Mona disengages, and I turn to the crowd and throw a fist in the air like Rocky. They're almost cheering, for all the wrong reasons, but what the hell.

  Then I duck around the bleachers, and Mona goes back on to announce the next one. Immediately I set to work to dismantle the cross, undoing the toggle bolts. There's something deeply satisfying about storing your props just where they came from, ready for the next performance. As I work the crossbar loose, suddenly Gray is beside me, holding the stakepole. We don't speak yet because we're locked in the mechanics of the chore. He holds the two pieces as I crawl in under, then passes them to me one by one. Then the toolbox.

  Huddled beneath the bleachers I feel a rush of mawkish tenderness for my chosen profession, the bits of wood and hardware that turn a bare stage into ancient Judea. I peer out through the gap between the rows, right between somebody's legs, and see the next thing start. A young man in a dark suit is actually standing there with a dog, a bastard mix with an amiable air who sits nonplussed while the guy barks at him. This is not somehow a promising gestalt.