| America's Got Talent! |
[Jul. 26th, 2006|02:23 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  cynical | ] |
Mark was out of town—gone to California to shoot another appearance on America’s Got Talent. Last time he had kicked a flaming bowling ball with stake knives in it and caught it with his face. But before he did it he put a deadly scorpion in his underwear. His explanation for why it doesn’t sting him is that it is used to him. The next appearance would feature a baby doll and a running lawn mower.
Having had some success previously seducing a clown by mailing him a pair of dirty pantyhose, I figured that sending something to Mark to keep me on his mind was in my best interest. The obvious choice was pin up photos of myself posing with juggling props—there by combining two of his favorite things (and by that I mean pin-ups, not myself).
It was one of the hottest days so far this summer. I hadn’t showered in several days. My hair was greasy, my pits and crotch stinky, my room filthy and littered with costume accoutrements and a thick layer of dust. But somehow I managed to cover my sofa and wall with enough random black fabric that I could just barely squeeze into a frame that revealed nothing of the surroundings. I set the camera, ran across the room wearing nothing but high heels and a necklace, struck a foxy pose with a juggling club or two, and then hopped did it all over again—many, many times. Despite the fact that in 3 out of 4 shots I had rumpled the drapery enough to reveal some element of couch or wall and that my hair was plastered down in oily strings, they turned out extremely well. I sent them off the next morning via email, accompanied by a cute note relating my progress in bowling and at Mario Kart. That was my first mistake—well, my second because my first was the night before. Actually, the third because I made two mistakes that night.
Richard was downstairs drinking a bottle of wine. I descended the staircase in a white chenille robe--heels, makeup, and rhinestones still on. I told him I was upstairs taking pictures or myself, but I didn’t tell him why. I wasn’t ready to reveal that I was taking a deliberate step to further things with Mark. This was because I suffered from the delusion that seeing me with another man might be making Richard unhappy or jealous. Thinking about him with another woman made me unhappy and jealous—particularly thinking about him with his girlfriend, in afar away exotic place—where I wanted her to stay while Richard’s heart slowly broke, and then healed again in a strong bond to mine. But instead she was coming to claim him in two weeks time. He anticipated her arrival with unblemished excitement as the fulfillment of his unshakeable love for her.
Through conversational tactics that would have been transparent to one less oblivious than he, I determined that he had felt no inclinations whatsoever or in any way towards any other girls. However, I felt that there must be some sort of loophole through which I fell—that he had considered loving me, and decided against me only because he wasn’t convinced of my affection for him. And now that I was starting to see someone else he felt the deep regret of not acting, but was too stoic to interfere at this point.
I lounged about stupidly, draping myself and my white chenille over couches and chairs, and hunted him throughout remaining evening. However, it was only when he declared his intentions to go to bed that I was able to get out the words “Richard I want talk to you about something in the next couple of weeks—we can either do it now, or some other time.” He chose now, but after I sat there blankly staring and saying “Well…” for five solid minutes he changed his mind to “some other time, then.” And although I was stupid enough to have spent the preceding hours in a relentless monologue on the topic of how aged freakish gentleman were my only admirers, and that every person who had ever dated me dumped me, and that men my own age find me terrifyingly repulsive, I was at least smart enough to know that I would never bring it up again if I let this chance go by.
He lay down in bed and turned the lights out. I told him I was going to go use the bathroom, and that when I came out I was going to have a one sided conversation with him. I took off my make-up, which left a dark halo around my eyes and a pink one on my chin, and then sat down on the foot of his bed.
“Are you awake?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Well……………..the only reason that I’m not really into you is because you are in love with someone else. But, if you ever decide that you aren’t into someone else and that you are into me, I would be really into you.” He said nothing. “Are you awake?” I asked.
“Yes”
“Awake enough that I can know you heard that and should let it go?”
“Yes.” Sometime during that conversation panicked humiliation spread over me. I wondered if I had said enough. I hadn’t said that I have the best conversations with him of everyone I know, or that hanging out with him is always fun no matter what we do, that he is pretty and handsome both, that the happiest I have been recently was when he was sleeping in my bed every night, that I was certain that we could love each other and get along so well that I would fill him with just as much bliss as Molly. What he didn’t say was that he would never in a million years consider dating me, that he could never love me, and that everything about me pales in comparison to her--he didn’t have to say it.
I went upstairs and broke out crying. I felt so pitiful and miserable that I decided to call Mark--surely after a month of dating I could claim the privilege of calling him late. However, calling him late and crying over another man was a privilege I would never earn, so I attempted to mask the fact that I was crying like my eyes were going to pop out of my head—but my voice was tragically clogged by thick snot and tears. The only thing I remember of the conversation was that Mark said he was having a drink and had just taken some sleeping pills. And that I sounded like I could use some sleep, too.
I slept eventually, and woke up with eyes that looked like onions. I pretended to Richard that everything was normal, and his tremendous relief that I wasn’t putting on a freak show expressed itself in an increased enthusiasm for our friendship.
I hadn't heard from Mark for several days--nothing about the pin-ups. And nothing about the fact that he had apparently gotten x-ed by two judges during the filming of his routine. I about this because, in a weak moment, he had spilled the secret pre-aired info with Brian. The fact that Brian had talked to him was a bad sign--almost as bad as no response to naked pictures--it meant that he was in full phone and email communication, and I that I would have to now stop assuming he just hadn't recent access to such commodities during his travels. So, I developed a theory that he had somehow mispoken when he had given me his email address, and so I had actually sent the photos to some other Mark, who was not particularly amused by them either.
For some reason I tapped into an uncharacteristic emotional stoutheartedness--and continued to believe there was some pretty good (or at least forgiveable) explanation for his lack of response. Not that you would think that from talking to me--I made a point of referring to myself as having been dumped by a crazy carny as much as possible. One particular conversation on this topic took place over a beer at Rainbo with my friend The Warlock. We had met up to exchange a gorilla suit of which he was the keeper--actually, he is the keeper of three (plus some extra hands, feet, and heads) and I needed one for an upcoming "Gorilla crashes the Burlesque show" extravaganza.
No one in Chicago notices anything. I walked back from Adam's car wearing the full Gorilla suit, and after being ignored by barflies for three blocks I was unusually receptive to the first attention that I got. It came from a tall, lean cowboy who sat against a tree--he asked who I was, and he kept calling me a monkey. Soon he and I and two of his friends were on our way to my house. I wondered if Richard would be at all impressed (although certainly not jealous or regretful) that I kept late night company with a tall, lean cowboy. A young, tall, lean cowboy who looked almost exactly like Gram Parsons ( and spoke with what was most likely a fake country accent. His speech made him strangely more appealing to me because something about it reminded me of the person who had disappointed me in love the very most. He was an animator, and a drunk with a reputation. He nailed his testicular sac to a chair with the back of a rusty hatchet at a party at my house shortly after he dumped me. I encouraged it.).
But Richard never woke up. Even though Nugget barked fiercely at me (in the gorilla suit) for nearly twenty minutes, right next to his bed, he never woke up. The only witness to the gorilla and her date was Garth, who seemed to think he was dreaming. And perhaps some neighbors who are perhaps light sleepers were witness to some loud singing of "Sin City" in a surprisingly accurate Gram-Parsons-Emmylou-Harris style duet.
Suddenly it began to pour down rain in thunderous buckets. The cold rain was a relief in the vicious heat, and the surreality of the the world's sudden transformation added a drama that made the moment nearly perfect. What perhaps pushed it over the edge into perfect was the idea that we had met when I was wearing a gorilla suit.
I’m not exactly sure when things started to go wrong, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with the fact that I allowed him to come inside, dry off, and gave him a change of clothes. It all seemed innocent at the time—I’m definitely not capable of refusing someone, particularly cute cowboys, shelter from the rain. To try to diffuse things a bit I gave him a t-shirt from “The Great Big International Drag King Extravaganza” and a pair of “boi’s” underwear with a lesbian mermaid on the thigh.
And I don’t remember exactly when he said it for the first time—“I’m sorry I have a gut!”—but I am pretty sure that it coincided with his confrontation of his more scantily clad self in my bedroom mirror. And I’m sure I would have forgotten the comment entirely, or thought it was a joke if he had not from that moment on repeated the comment with a fearsome relentlessness, embellishing on it with “I’m sorry I’m so fat!”, and then adding into the mix “I’m sorry I have such a small penis”. Things got worse when he started referring to it as his pee-pee—“Why is it that it’s okay for me to fawn over you, but you won’t even look at my pee-pee?” I couldn’t give him an answer—I couldn’t really articulate why the thought of looking at his pee-pee made my skin crawl. He wanted me to tell him if it was small or not. I didn’t want to look at it, I didn’t want to touch it, but some degree of interaction with it during some half-hearted making out had revealed to me that it was medium. Just a medium, regular looking pee-pee on a really tall guy. I told him he had long legs. He said, “Everything about me is long—or do you disagree?” Getting crabby, I said “What, you want me to tell you if you have a big dick or not? It’s medium.” Humbly he declared that he had never before gotten a straight answer from a girl--that usually they just laugh nervously and say “It’s big enough!” I tried to explain to him that part of their nervousness might be the result of his badgering them for their opinion on the organ.
I’m pretty sure that in his mind things weren’t going as badly as they were in mine. He declared me extremely sexy, and told me “I want to make you my woman!” He said I was everything he wanted—I was sexy and had long hair. But he also wanted to be assured that I would let him look at other girls. And he said that from now on he wanted me to tell him what to do.
And in a vain effort to rouse me to some sort of sexual livelihood he declared his intention to ‘lick me all over”, and started with my feet. “Do you have a foot thing? Aren’t you to young for that?” And when he made his way up to kissing my stomach I could feel that he gut was in fact soft, that my toes poked into fleshiness in a disturbing way. I felt as if they were being sucked into a churning pool of lumpy flesh. It made me miss Mark.
I told him I had had enough and that I wanted to go to sleep. He threw what could only be described as a sissy bitch fit, saying that he wanted to stay awake and kiss me all night—that he thought that would be romantic, but apparently I didn’t think so! And that he wanted to keep kissing me, and I wanted to go to sleep, and so wasn’t that boring for him? And when it was my turn to kiss him, I wasn’t kissing him as much as he kissed me when it was his turn. And then I think he started to make a connection between me wanting to go to sleep and his being fat and having a gut, so he tried that argument for a while. “It’s probably because I have a gut. I’m sure you hate the fact that I’m so fat.” But sadly, I just wanted to go to sleep. I wanted him to stop groping me, and maybe, just maybe, I wanted him to leave.
Finally he told me he was going home to beat off before he had a brain aneurysm. He got out of bed, and before writhing into wet jeans, he paused before the mirror to observe his gut more closely and declared that he did indeed need to lose some weight. He wrote his full name and phone number in huge letters on an old psychologist’s bill that I handed him and left, cursing the fact that drenched cowboy boots awaited him downstairs.
And then I had time to really think about things—how I felt bowled over, and disgusted, and regretful, and lonely. How my own bed now seemed soiled from laying in it with him. How much I longed for something familiar—and how much I would have preferred to have been kissing Mark. If he had been there he would have passed out without pouting, bothered me only with a “Sorry I’m so drunk”, and then let me rest my hand on his belly, which would feel like skin vacuum-packed directly over muscle. And we would have slept in each other’s arms all night.
Mark finally called me the next day--the next evening, right after the “live results show”. I knew his appearance the night before hadn’t gone well—I had watched the short clip of him on the web when I voted for him—but I didn’t turn the sound on. I didn’t want to hear if people were booing or the judges’ unnecessarily harsh comments. It was odd to see him in this way—I had been having a little bit of difficulty calling up a sensory memory of him, and somehow this didn’t help. I made sure that my mom and step-dad and sister all voted for him, too.
I was excited to hear from him, excited to try to make him feel good, even though he told me he had just gotten voted off the show. “Well, I’m glad you’re not moving to Las Vegas—that makes me happy!” He didn’t bite. He told me he might have another shot at some offshoot of the show.
Then he told me the “bad news”: that he had gotten back together with his girlfriend. He thought he was over her and ready to move on, but realized that he wasn’t. And that I am a really cool girl and that he loves coming over to the Milk Factory, and so he really hopes that we can be friends, and that I am a really cool girl and I deserve someone who really loves me with their whole heart, and he is not the type of guy who can date more than one person, but he really wants me to call him sometime so that we can be friends, that he had gotten the pictures, and thanks, they were really great. And then he wrapped up with that he felt really really terrible, really bad, just awful about everything.
Interspersed somewhere amongst those statements were my own: that I was very disappointed, that I had had no idea that he had a girlfriend and would never have acted the way I had had I known that, and that I didn’t think I wanted to be his friend, because I was sad about the whole thing. And good luck with everything. I didn’t mention the Game Cube he left at my house, which I’m certain that the retrieval of was his primary motivation for befriending me.
Apparently he had wasted no time in getting kicked off the show, and then going straight up to his hotel room, calling me, and dumping me. I wasted no time bursting into baffled tears. And then banished him from my mind as quickly as possible.
Epilogue: The Great Ghoul Rush of 2006 (and why I’m awesome).
I may have seen Warlock for the last time last night. He is going to California, just like Serwich, and considering that I have never visited anyone in my life and he swears he’s never coming back here, there is a fairly good chance that we will never see each other again.
Three years ago was the first night of shooting The Spook Show, and also the first time I met Warlock. We met through Serwich--they had arrange to video tape me performing my shadow puppet reenactments of famous celebrity deaths at Serwich’s loft—I showed up, set up and realized only too late that Warlock was there and very busy puking from the stomach flu. It took me two years to shake the fear that he was about to puke at any moment, but only one year to stop thinking of him merely as “that puking guy, the Warlock”. And the fact that I am over the incident enough to have kissed him last night is kind of a surprise.
Last night I was a part of the final shooting of The Spook Show. Warlock, in full Warlock costume of white greasepaint, deep dark circles around his eyes, black lips, and black locks curling onto his cheeks, plus a witch’s hat and a velvet cape. He stood in front of a faux-stone proscenium decorated with giant cloaked skeletons wielding scythes and spoke the line “And now I leave you with a token of my infernal gratitude…but remember! While you sleep, I destroy the world!” Then The Monster Mash started and I entered the frame wearing only a green sequined G-string and holding two giant ostrich feather fans. I ran through all of my best fan dance moves—fluttering in front, fluttering in back, one in front, one in back, spinning and fluttering, showing my butt as if I were a peacock, pretending I had wings, etc, as The Monster Mash played on, again and again. And then I slowly opened the fans for a final shot as the fog machine blasted a steady stream on my sweaty breasts. It so hot that I was truly sweating horribly--even totally unclothed and constantly fanning myself with apocalyptically oversized fans.
It seemed like a good idea to go back to Rainbo—and surprisingly, we got more of an immediate response there than I had the previous week in a gorilla suit. Warlock in his cape and pointed hat, and me in a purple velvet bustier with black swirls over the breasts—“Oh my go! You look great!!!!” cried Liz Armstrong, fawning over us with an enthusiasm that I assumed would be missing from her recounting of the episode if it appeared in the paper.
I hadn’t called that damn cowboy—hadn’t even considered it after the idea that I wasn’t obligated to slipped into my mind. But there he was, sitting in a round booth surrounded by equally hip looking boys. He smiled and waved, and I smiled and waved, and then turned my back. We had a brief, ineffective conversation when he passed by me on one of his many trips to the bathroom.
Warlock and I crowded into the photo booth and fed it wrinkly dollars. Our white faces bleached and our dark features darkened, our short strips of horrified and sinister expressions fascinated us endlessly. I giggled and declared them amazing, the best photos booth pictures ever taken.
I left without saying goodbye to a certain someone, and that’s why in the end, I’m awesome. I’m a gorilla-witch-fan-dancer-girl, far too cool for a tall, lean, hipster cowboy.
 |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
mechaniquemary's journal