Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker

by Kathleen Hale

  Joe grabbed another knife and skinned the sow so that her hide dangled inside out around her face. Then he snapped the skull from the spine and dropped the whole thing into a large brown paper bag. Blood seeped through.

  “It’s a head bag,” Joe explained. “We’ll write your name on it, and that way they’ll know to call you.”

  “But when I get it in the mail, how will I know if it’s the right head?”

  “Who cares?” he said.

  Joe was right. Feral hogs are a bunch of monsters. They’re all the same, and they all deserve to die.

  Cricket

  Miss Georgia wept as if her entire family had died. She hugged her bouquet of thorny roses and was swallowed up in a group hug by her enemies. While they worked the crown into her slightly exhausted-looking curls, like some kind of crack sniper I focused my binoculars on the contestants who didn’t even make it past the preliminaries. After a year spent preparing for the oldest beauty pageant in the nation, they had lost before the competition even began. They’d spent tonight sitting on the sidelines, smiling for hours just in case the cameras spotted them, wearing white gowns, looking like sacrificial lambs. Now they seemed euphoric, almost orgasmic, over Miss Georgia’s win—but in a poised way. The woman sitting next to me shouted to her friend, “Miss Alaska is a dog!” I caught her eye but said nothing to defend my fellow woman.

  I arrived at Miss America a very different person—a principled person, the sort who would have defended Miss Alaska, who was only nineteen. But watching women parade around a stage in their bathing suits, and toss batons, and clog, which I’d never heard of prior to this event, had changed me.

  And now, here’s what I thought: forty of the contestants were dogs, five were so-so, seven were hot, and I fell somewhere toward the bottom of the pack. When I came to Atlantic City, I considered myself self-confident, pretty, and young. Now, I saw my body as an assemblage of component parts, a patchwork of wrinkling imperfections in need of ironing and toning and implants and paralytic injections—anything to freeze time. I’d become so detached from my own body—from bodies in general—that on my bus ride back to New York City after the pageant, I would look out my window to see firefighters spraying a charred minivan—their boots slipping on what at first appeared to be mushy bits of orange pumpkin meat, but turned out to be the flayed remains of human flesh—and feel, basically, nothing.

  But for now, I turned my attention to the stage. Ombre purple and coral-pink panels dappled with digital stars. Curtains shimmering electric blue. A cartoon mermaid’s natural environment. On stage left stood a gigantic golden statue, like the one at the Oscars. Only it looked like this one had breasts. I couldn’t really tell. My seat was pretty bad. The ladies next to me kept going on about Miss Alaska and how “that yellow bikini she wore on night one made her look like an albino dog—haha!” On the big screen, I caught a glimpse of Miss Alaska, smiling brightly like she’d won and hugging all the other losers, their heads tipped back in jubilee, teeth bared.

  Primates smile to submit; if a beta meets an alpha in the wild, he shows his teeth to indicate his inferior rank. It’s called a fear grin. Sociologists say human women smile more than men because their lower social status motivates deference. They smile to indicate attentiveness to the needs, goals, and accomplishments of those who are more powerful.

  If I’d learned anything in Atlantic City, it’s that girls were expected to lose like winners and win like losers.

  Miss Georgia fingered her crown, continuing to sob.

  Like her, my dissolution into madness started with roses.

  * * *

  A week earlier, I’d taken the Academy Bus from Manhattan to the Trump Taj Mahal. The ride had cost $40, a full $15 more than the regular Greyhound. But I’d decided to “go fancy,” in the hopes that eavesdropping on what’s casually known as the “casino bus” would give me a sense of “the scene” in Atlantic City.

  “The devil is in the details,” I wrote to my editor, requesting the extra money. “And details pay dividends .”

  Unfortunately, I had chosen to travel on Labor Day, so the bus was completely empty except for me and four other people, two of whom were speaking Yiddish, and two of whom were annoying mumblers. Over the course of the two-and-a-quarter-hour trip, all I could make out from the English speakers was “I think that girl is listening to us.” I wrote it down.

  As we pulled into the casino’s unexceptional carport (white overhang, concrete pillars, a booth just inside the door that looked like the check-in desk at an airport), I was excited to learn from our driver that the pointlessly expensive bus tickets came with thirty credits’ worth of Trump Dollars.

  “Luck be a lady tonight!” I said.

  When the bus driver didn’t seem to “catch my drift,” I hummed the first few bars of that big solo from Guys and Dolls and danced off to the beat of my own drum. I was a confident lady!

  After that, I was on my own in Atlantic City.

  To cash in my voucher, I first had to navigate a sea of blackjack tables, free drinks, and blinking slot machines. Dick Clark Productions, which puts on Miss America as well as the Academy of Country Music Awards and So You Think You Can Dance, had denied me a press pass. (An inside source said it was because the people in charge found my writing “inappropriate,” which is totally fair.) But I was hoping to get the exclusive scoop from burned-out employees using my untested charm.

  The lady behind the desk watched as I scanned her breasts for a name tag. In my mind, I was a sly, charismatic investigative reporter, off to prove that Miss America was what I had decided it was: an empowering feminist exploration of the beauty myth, in which contestants adjusted their appearances and personalities to game a sexist system.

  “Hi … Chantelle,” I crooned.

  But she didn’t like that. So I asked in a businesslike voice whether she’d been experiencing an influx of people for the Miss America pageant. Had it been overwhelming, I wondered, to deal with a larger-than-usual crowd?

  When Chantelle didn’t answer, I asked again, thinking maybe she hadn’t heard me.

  “I heard you,” she said, handing me my official Trump Card. “No one cares about Miss America. There’s no one here for that. They’re here to gamble. Welcome to Atlantic City.”

  Undeterred, I carried my swipe card full of Trump Dollars past an old man crying alone at the craps table, and sat down at a slot machine called “Vibrant Rose” (or rather, “Vibrant ”). I had gone to college and everything, but I couldn’t figure out how any of this worked, so I asked the guy next to me for help, raising my voice a little to be heard over the dinging of slots. But he kept his eyes on his machine, gripping its handle as if clinging to life.

  “Hello?” I shouted, poking helplessly at my console, until suddenly a woman reversed toward me in one of those wheelchairs with a bicycle basket and handlebars and offered to help.

  “Thank you!” I said.

  But then she stood up from her wheelchair, and I screamed, not knowing whether to fall on my knees in the face of what appeared to be a miracle (she can walk!) or shake myself awake. (The negative reaction to that 2000 Super Bowl commercial featuring an ambulatory Christopher Reeve is a testament to how shocking this can be.)

  The woman looked confused, so I explained I had thought she was paralyzed, which is when I learned that her little vehicle was not a wheelchair at all but a “scooter.”

  “You rent them from any of the casinos for twenty-five dollars,” she said. “It’s easier than walking or standing.”

  Without taking a single step, she slid onto the chair next to mine and walked me through the embarrassingly easy process of cashing in my Trump Dollars. I noticed that her card was different from mine and attached to a lanyard on her belt. I couldn’t tell whether the lanyard was an actual electrical cord, or a way to keep the card handy and avoid losing it, or simply a fashion statement, but regardless, it seemed to allow her to sit back and play without even having to press the green SPIN
button on the machine.

  Looking around, I saw that many of the gamblers wore such lanyards, connecting them to their slots as if by IV.

  I pressed SPIN, and within seconds my balance had dwindled from $30 to $9. I struggled to mirror my neighbors’ vacant calm.

  But then, out of nowhere, Vibrant started ringing and wouldn’t stop.

  “What’s happening?” I screamed, shaking the scooter woman’s shoulder. But part of me already knew: I was winning—I had won! I tried to get the scooter woman to dance with me, but she stormed away to her scooter and scooted off (jealousy tears women apart). Images of blue and red diamonds and gold coins exploded across my screen to the tune of our national anthem.

  After cashing out the $220 in winnings, an insane thought entered my mind: “With this fortune, I will never have to work again.”

  I texted my husband, explaining how casinos are actually just like ATMs, except it’s not your money. His response—something about “this is how it starts, I love you, don’t give in to the allure of Lady Luck, blah blah blah”—did not sink in.

  I proceeded to go full “money crazy.” I purchased an enormous pretzel for $6. I bought a hat made out of balloons. I paid an elderly conductor to physically push me all the way to my hotel in a carriage, because you can do that in Atlantic City. While the old man panted and moaned, I counted my remaining cash, thinking, “No wonder people want to be Miss America!”

  Whoever won the pageant would receive $50,0004*—enough for 8,333 pretzels!

  If you had told me then what the rest of that week held in store—feral cats, possible tetanus, a dead body in a bathroom stall—I might have seen reason.

  I might have taken my winnings and gone home.

  * * *

  The Claridge Hotel, known as, “Home of Miss America,” had a fancy restaurant called the Twenties, which was in fact decorated in the style of the eighties, with brown geo-print carpeting and black chairs.

  On the morning of the first round of preliminaries,* I sat there for hours, hoping to catch sight of one of the contestants. (I’d heard a rumor they all slept on the fourteenth floor.) Instead I saw lots and lots of “Teen Misses.” One told me she had come to “get tips from watching” her idols.

  Mostly, I talked to my waitress, Lee.

  “To tell the truth, they’re getting to be pretty freaky,” she said of the actual Miss America contestants whom she’d waited on so far. “I’m like, you’re Miss America, you’re supposed to be nice. But they don’t even leave tips. And they smile, smile,

  smile, and, yeah, they’re pretty. But you know how sometimes that sort of looks whack? Like a mask?” She shuddered. “The eyes are wild.”

  I recalled my wedding day and how badly my face hurt at the end of the night. “It probably hurts to smile all day.”

  “Yeah,” Lee said, “but that’s the contest, right?”

  She shook her head, like, What a shame.

  I nodded in agreement.

  “It shouldn’t be,” I said. “But if that’s the game, and they play it, then they’re exploiting for their own gain the same patriarchal framework that seeks to subjugate them.”

  “What?”

  I ordered a Diet Coke.

  While Lee was gone, I thought of the many serious feminist texts I’d lugged with me to America’s Playground, a.k.a. Atlantic City, a.k.a. the birthplace of Miss America. I’d brought theoretical ruminations on pageantry in general, and historical accounts of Miss America, and was thinking about memoirs written by the winners themselves—including How to Win a Beauty Contest, by Miss America 1949, Jacque Mercer. Mercer’s book includes chapters like “What to Do When You Win” and “How to Accept Applause” and “How to Smile When You Don’t Want To.”

  She writes:

  There is nothing more exciting to an audience member than to see a pretty girl smiling through her tears and saying something like, ‘Oh, Mamma! I won! I won!’ Of course, no beauty queen would go so far as to do the overhead clasp of a prize fighter in acknowledgment, but if people are nice enough to applaud, then you should be gracious and charming enough to bow and smile in return.

  Mercer urges her readers to embrace “a few simple tricks that will help you smile more easily on all occasions”—tricks like:

  “If you are walking down the street, make a game of smiling at lampposts or at every mailbox you see.”

  I was practicing smiling through the window at the parking lot when Lee returned with my drink.

  “Another thing I forgot to say? They barely eat.” She wiggled her head back and forth. “It’s always ‘egg whites, egg whites, egg whites.’”

  I cracked my Diet Coke can and laughed, interpreting her impression of the girls as the performance of a more body-confident woman, one befuddled by dieting.

  But Lee wasn’t laughing.

  “I wish I could be skinny,” she whispered.

  “You’re perfect,” I lied.

  * * *

  Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall boasted 10,500 seats, but during the first night of preliminaries, only around seven people sat in each section. The auditorium was almost empty. The competition began with a third of the contestants parading onstage to the empowering sound of Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” chosen for the pageant by Nick Jonas, that year’s official “music curator.” After that, they disappeared, returning in bikinis for “Lifestyle and Fitness,”* which counted for 15 percent of their preliminary score.

  Dena Blizzard, a Miss America loser turned comic (her one-woman show, One Funny Mother: I’m Not Crazy!!, premiered off-Broadway in April 2015), introduced the Lifestyle and Fitness competition in accordance with the organization’s stance: “First, it’s a demonstration of athleticism and strength,” she said, “an indicator of how hard the women work, a testament to health, a motivating counterexample, the first step toward a war on obesity.”

  Blizzard lifted her fist in solidarity and said:

  “It’s not about being a size two.”

  But then out marched the contestants, all of whom definitely looked like size 2s—except maybe for Miss Kentucky, whom the audience members in my midst jeered at, making fun of her face and her hopes and her dreams (she was eighteen and wanted to be president of the United States).

  “Eighteen?” a middle-aged woman next to me hissed. “She looks forty-two!”

  “President? More like First Lady,” another said.

  “More like fat ass.”

  They laughed.

  I showed my teeth.

  Behind us, a husky daughter stood up in front of her husky mom, swinging her hips in a pantomime of Miss Kentucky’s walk and puffing out her cheeks, giggling, parroting the older women’s mean insinuations about Miss Kentucky’s weight.

  “It’s not about that,” her mother admonished. “It’s how she do.”

  Eveningwear came next and counted for 20 percent, then talent—a portion of the night that could easily be retitled “Who Is Most Like a Jane Austen Character?” Almost every contestant played a little instrument, or did an impressive short dance, or sang a nice song. Talent counted for 35 percent. (I learned that at some point, a private ten-minute interview had taken place and counted for 25 percent. But the organization didn’t show us that part. Apparently the producers considered it too boring to witness girls in conversation.) Each contestant was granted sixty seconds to discuss her “platform,” defined by the Miss America website as “an issue about which she cares deeply and that is of relevance to our country.” This section of the evening was brief, incoherent (by virtue of the stopwatch), and ultimately very low stakes, counting for only 5 percent of each person’s overall score.

  As they announced that night’s winners (during the preliminaries, participants won small trophies for looking good in swimsuits), I glanced behind me at the woman and her daughter to see how they’d take the news. Miss Kentucky had sashayed across the stage with the easy confidence of a future president. According to the mother’s logic—“It’s h
ow she do”—she should have won the prize. But the judges didn’t agree. Blizzard called South Carolina’s name—the victor of that night’s preliminaries—and all the size 2 losers hugged each other, evidently thrilled that another size 2 had beaten them. The mother handed her daughter earbuds and an iPad as a consolation prize.

  “Show me that pretty smile,” she said.

  * * *

  The bikini march was always controversial. But since its inception it had also been the lifeblood of the pageant.

  In Miss America’s early years, the bangable-body requirement was much more explicit and, in certain cases, defined with scientific specificity. When Norman Rockwell judged Miss America in 1923, contestants were awarded up to 15 points for the “construction of their heads.” Until 1935, judges unfurled measuring tapes to determine whether contestants possessed the ideal bust-waist-hip ratios. That same year, the Miss America Organization recruited Lenora Slaughter, formerly of the St. Petersburg, Florida, Chamber of Commerce, to become the head of the pageant. She instituted reforms designed to make the pageant more respectable, which meant forgoing the official cataloging of body proportions and changing the name of the “bathing suit” category to “swimwear,” because she thought “bathing” conjured the idea of sex. She also banned women who were not “of good health and the white race” from competing, a fact that goes uncharted in the organization’s renderings of her. Slaughter ran the pageant for more than thirty years and is basically responsible for creating what we think of today as Miss America. (Her whites-only rule was abolished in 1950.)

  Based on all the mean things I heard people whisper when the girls were in their bathing suits, audience members seemed to blame contestants for the bikini portion of the contest, often implying that the girls did it for attention. This is silly when one considers that the Miss America hopefuls—physically perfect, young, and gorgeous—could simply cross the boardwalk to the beach and receive much more legible (i.e., lecherous) attention. It’s hard to see anybody’s jaw drop with the spotlights in your eyes.