Luda, p.2
Luda, page 2
As the cast numbers diminish, it falls to the remaining players to assume the roles vacated by their unfortunate colleagues.
Until eventually only one actor remains playing all the roles.
According to Dominick Float, our gifted, dangerously overweight director, the descent of culture that informs The Phantom’s subtext is implied right there in the title’s biblical plummet from the high-flown operatics of the bourgeoisie to the proletarian troughs of panto sing-along. This structure finds itself reiterated in the tragic story of our histrionic lead, who, if I can lower the tone for the moment, effortlessly puts the “tit” into “titular character.”
Now, I can already hear voices raised in protest all the way across the People’s Republic, from Andong to Gorno-Badakhshan, from Xing’an to Hainan—what’s the story with a non-Chinese actor playing a Chinese character?
When faced with panto’s melting boundaries and blurred identities, race is no more stable than gender, as you’ll discover. Men transform into women, girls blossom into boys, and the poor get the chance to roll in vulgar wealth as class itself deliquesces to tasty bone stock in the bacchanalian broth.
This is where it gets complicated: Aladdin is from the Middle East—the story originated as one of the Thousand and One Nights tales that helped spare Scheherazade’s swanlike neck from the butcher’s blade, but here’s the thing: the pantomime Aladdin? It’s not set in Scheherazade’s Arabia; it takes place in China. On the stage, Aladdin is a Chinese boy, son of the washerwoman Widow Twankey.
DNA was spliced from mythic and modern-day China with a rogue sequence from the Middle East to create a single imaginary sprawl of hybrid cultures that fused a Bedouin Sahara with the paddy fields of the Cultural Revolution and its rubbish heaps of broken spectacles.
The pantomime’s anachronistic collision of places and times suggested a dreamlike half world where familiar stories played out in endlessly retied knots through a confused congestion of half-real cities and times, embedded in nested narratives handed down through generations.
Widow Twankey’s a textbook example of the confusion; when she was born to the boards in 1788, Twankey was Ching Mustapha, an unlikely cross-pollination of cultural signifiers that suggests an exotic variant of cocaine and reminds us how surprisingly widespread was the Chinese Muslim population of London in those days.
Now I’d like you to picture the most offensive stereotype of a sex-starved gossip—and you’ll have me down to a T.
You’ll also have Widow Twankey, who’s all about flashy gutter comedy. Outrageous peacock costumes, fake tits and upholstered ass, winks and asides to the audience, double entendres. You know the kind of thing:
She’s eagerly looking forward to a big hand on her entrance. Mug to the back row. You can see she’s got big things ahead of her. Out-thrust chest. 44DDs by the looks of them.
Twankey is outrageous, vulgar, and grotesque. And that’s just her earrings. It gets worse the more you pay attention. Don’t come looking for subtlety or nuance, and you won’t be disappointed.
The Widow is a flouncing, indomitable monster. A brash and trashy caricature even the goggle-eyed toddlers and the special-needs adults they wrangle to the matinees can recognize and identify. But she’s no more Chinese than the people of Tibet.
Which brings me back to my point that casting a bona fide Chinese actor might be a way to double or triple the offense. Really, it’s up to our hypothetical Chinese individual to draw his or her own conclusions before getting snarled up in what can be a heartrending, demoralizing audition process.
As far as I know, the role’s open to anyone, regardless of ethnic origin or political creed, so why not have a Chinese man take a swing at Widow Twankey? I know I’d pay to watch that.
Anyway, enough chat about 19 percent of our planet’s entire human population. Let’s steer this back to me.
Although you might never have guessed from my present radiant demeanor, I’d found myself in a desperate tailspin after turning forty and breaking up with Luci. For a while I even considered suicide, until finally I went through with it, only to discover I’d guzzled an overdose of placebos.
You know how they work; I’d already convinced myself my organs were shutting down one by one, so that’s exactly what I experienced. In excruciating detail. The placebo effect they call it. And while it was happening, I had quite a big sort of revelation.
I realized I’d been split in two. I’d been separated out, curds-and-whey-style, then subtracted from myself. In some black and backward act of alchemy, Mercurius, the androgynous spirit of wholeness, had suffered a near-fatal sundering somewhere down the line. One half abandoned, stumbling and flabby, with his neuroses hanging out like guts, the other banished to the Twilight Zone, leaving only traces and spoor: the cobby husks of her dresses, her empty coats and vacant shoes; drained bugs dangling on their hangers in a spider’s web of wire.
Matter and spirit, formerly mingled as one in ecstatic harmony, felt like awkward strangers now, reduced at best to strained small talk over a dispiriting brunch. My spark-haired Ariel was gone, exorcised. Only doughy Caliban remained, weighed down with his mud and mortality, cultivating a life belt of lard that kept me afloat in the featureless ocean of Nowhere.
Without Luci, I’d become a hollow man, a creepy piñata packed with nothing you’d want. Six years had passed since I’d put her away, since that separation. That primordial error.
I prayed. I prayed to triple-faced Mercurius to release me from the downward Coriolis suction. I prayed like a motherfucker for deliverance. I prayed so hard that three days later, the phone rang as if to shut me up. Even then, I had “Two Ladies” from Cabaret as my ringtone. I still remember it.
The caller was a forty-three-year-old neurotic genius named Dominick Float, then weighing about as much as one of his thumbs does now, and he wanted me to audition for his new musical. The production company had bigger names topping their want lists, he explained; screen stars, established comics, he said, but he’d seen me chewing up the boards with my Ugly Sisters in Prague, he remembered me from the Troupe shows on Channel 6 and felt I could bring an edge to his “vision” for this thing called The Phantom of the Pantomime.
I’ll admit I was flattered, but at that point the confidence I once imagined I’d have forever had evaporated like a fertile green Saharan oasis in the haze between the endless dunes. I couldn’t recall the taste or shape or texture of confidence, to tell the truth, so I told Float I hadn’t considered anything in the performance vein for a long time. I didn’t say it in so many words, but I left him in no doubt: I considered myself more than a little bit past the lipstick, lace, and lingerie stage.
Float, unwilling to surrender even a single pixel of his personal “vision,” wouldn’t take no for an answer, and insisted I audition. Where Twankey was concerned there could be no “past it.”
Sir Ian McKellen had smashed the role at the Old Vic when he was sixty-five, a newly minted pensioner qualifying for a bus pass. I was an ingénue by comparison, Float assured me. I did like the sound of that. Flattery was music.
What else could I do? I prayed like the penitent Mother Superior of the Order of Ravens to Mercurius, who had, in infinite mercy and cruelty, tossed this raw and shiny bone for me to gnaw upon. I surrendered myself to the grace of my patroness and the Odyssean tides of the Glamour. The choice was clear: accrue more misery until I sagged beneath the damp cold accumulation of years and regrets or—
Or summon up the bright snake-eyed demoness I’d banished on my drunken stagger into middle age. While I became the stomach-turning portrait in the attic, she’d stayed young, flash-frozen, immaculate, waiting for her time to come around again. Waiting for me to summon her back into my evacuated life, trusting that the fire of her incendiary aura would shine so much brighter than the putrid phosphorescent glow of my personal decay.
Drag had been with me almost my whole life up till I separated from myself aged thirty-eight.
From the days when I was waist-high to that monstrous store mannequin, the one I’ll tell you about later, I’ve been attracted to the power of fashion, deception, illusion, trickery. The fake, the synthetic, the scary boundary where Artifice becomes the Uncanny.
Possibly, Doctor Freud, if my mother hadn’t been overprotective, if circumstances and lack of closet space hadn’t compelled her to leave a tempting chest of drawers in my bedroom with her stockings and bras inside, I’d never have made the choices I did, it’s true. Mum’s drawers had it all. And she was a very stylish good-looking woman, my mother, so I didn’t get my start dressing in twinsets like some of these old-school CDs you used to see in cheaply printed contact rags; the ones who looked like ghosts showing up bored at séances, or mediums possessed by their own elderly relatives.
I didn’t identify with any of that and I never felt trapped in the wrong body. I was more than satisfied with the slender-limbed form I’d grown to inhabit. I didn’t need boobs or a womb to complete me, only flamboyant clothes and cosmetics. All I wanted was to look fabulous, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, like the photographs of those eternal fashion models I grew up admiring.
For me it was always about the drag.
What am I? Where do I fit on the scale, or the spectrum? How would I know? I’m sure I don’t have time to be a narcissist—I’m too busy checking my makeup in the mirror.
My head was, still is, a half-built haunted arcade of shifting selves and liquid identities, voice impressions, disguises and shadows, reflections and lightning among the rafters.
Either there’s nobody there at all, or dozens of us share the one skull, passed like the ball in a very strenuous game of Rugby Union. I was chosen to join the unseen throng on the day I saw the door in the Horus-inked eyes of the mannequin.
In truth, at the secret heart of me dwells something attenuated and alien, a long-limbed genderless flame if I had to be precise. Existing so close to the boundary with Nothing at all, it could pass for anything. Shakespearean, an alien, a Puck perhaps, its general gas-jet attitude easily summed up in the trickster’s famous quote: “…what fools these mortals be!”
Just an old-time nonconformist!
I’d been branded on that steamy August afternoon all those years ago by the cosmetic runes of the Glamour, its hieroglyphic alphabets sketched in Egyptian kohl, Nefertiti’s death mask illuminated with bold lip pencil outlines. I was drawn through the shimmering cut-price veil, the glittering bead curtain, the tinsel portal that opened onto sorcery and to Luci.
In the beginning, I had no separate stage name for what I became when I was dressed and made up; as I said, there was no inner division. It was only later, when we started up the Troupe, that I christened myself at the font of Mercurius:
I became Luci LaBang, a nom de plume dripping with steaming pearls of meaning.
But latterly, I’d given up Luci. I’d made my tearful farewells. Her dresses haunted the closet, unworn, sulking spooks. Being honest, I was scared to call her back, certain she’d never allow my face, that pocked and dimpled canvas retrieved from a carpet-bombed museum, to distort her beauty. I was frightened of what I might find when I dug her up, smelling of mothballs and accusation.
But I knew there was no backing down; Widow Twankey, avatar of the Three-Times-Perfected, had delivered the perfect excuse. I was being presented with the opportunity to surrender to something stronger, faster, more real than anything I’d been for so long. I would light my old lamp and dust off my wand, my rusty dagger, my cup, and my books. My Louboutins and Agents Provocateurs.
I would summon the Glamour one last time and let it burn me to chemical incandescence in its blue occult flame.
A couple of pills started me down the Yellow Brick Road. Vodka tonic, double. What’s the worst that can happen? I thought. I’ll shit myself and choke on my own vomit in the back of a taxi or onstage. At least I’ll die with dignity.
I always start with the music—my personal theme tune is Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium, which is Latin for “Hope in Any Other,” as if you didn’t know. I can’t tell you how upset I was when they used this music for a shoddy sex scene in a terrible film based off an even worse book. It almost but not quite ruined it for me. Nothing can spoil the impact of forty voices rising, up and up, all sparks and chimes and the bright glory of God.
I raised my vivid lipstick aloft, my crimson wand, and called her name, Luci Luci Luci—three times and there were ripple flickers on the still pool of the mirror, and there beneath the surface, the afterimage of a remembered face arose—the Lady of the Lake preserved in the green tank of her frozen millpond, waiting for the looking glass to thaw…
I drained a tall flute of pink champagne—which is exactly what I’m doing right now—if you’ll excuse me…
Think of it as the sacrament. The Cup of the Blood of the Moon. The cannibal Grail of the werewoman. Call it what you like, if it gets you in the mood for transformation.
Mercurius, brother-sister, dark and light, up and down, Hermes Aphrodite. Bride and groom wedded as one.
So unfolded the celestial ascending spirals of Spem in Alium hand in hand to Heaven with increasingly pleasurable pharmaceutical rushes, that came on as fresh and childhood-scented Easter breezes blowing away those last leftover autumn leaves of crispy fear, shame, and doubt.
I was invincible. I was morning incarnate rising over the jagged peaks of Kanchenjunga. Where tumbling unfinished thoughts and cycling jingles had ruled the inner airwaves, where private critics formerly jostled to judge every move and condemn every word, there was only air-blue silence and what you might describe as limitless magnificent transparency.
The muscles of my face relaxed, becoming slack and pliable to the touch. I pushed and pulled, and carefully reset each learned configuration of zygomatic arch and risorius, levator labii superioris, masseter. Tweaking and palping, I sculpted a new expression into place. A new mask.
The ritual progressed—these were white hours with no time—I couldn’t remember how her fabulous smile wound up on my face, but I supposed I must have put it there. Her Babalon scarlet rising in satanic counterpoint against the heavenly silver choiring of King’s College, Cambridge.
Angels and the devil in a tango, complementary partners arranged as tessellated black-and-white tiles in one of those ever-so-clever M. C. Escher drawings.
There I was, with all this joined-up thinking going on, absentmindedly scooping homemade lentils-in-stockings tits into my bra before I realized the music had come to an end.
In that hush profound there was only the Sangreal glow of the face in the mirror.
Fairest of them all.
Her familiar, forgiving smile making its way through the wrinkles and slap, a beloved song surfacing out of static on the radio.
Hey you.
The wig goes on last, an exclamation mark to complete and emphasize the statement. That’s when I find the tuning—and become the receiver for a force of nature I call Mercurius.
I know it sounds a bit weird, but I’ll explain later, and you’ll see that it’s bigger than just weird.
The hair was new, and smelled of plastic, packing, and processing—sacred in its box-fresh connection to eternity.
I set it in place, her crown and diadem. The Empress Twankey.
Destroya!
I looked a bit like Luci’s mother might look if she’d had one.
As it turned out, Mum looked quite hot in the full-length; a MILF Widow vamping like Cruella de Vil and Elizabeth Báthory sharing a double exposure.
Luci LaBang shaking her ass in the noonday blaze of an indoor sun, in a por favor where forty-four was just a bingo number. Magnum Force! Forty-four. And she looks—I grinned at the time—not six months past her second bitter divorce. The blood in my veins ran with alternating current, so it felt like the resurrection by thunderbolts of the Bride of Frankenstein.
Like bacon, Luci LaBang was back, sizzling on the world’s hob.
The Luci LaBang Twankey would reinvent pantomime tradition. How could I settle for anything less?
Except—except—my heels, as I recall, had become twin Rubik’s Cubes of fidgety strap and nano-buckle. Imagine two unfeasible and maddeningly intricate puzzle machines at the end of your legs, and those were my Azzedine Alaïas. I persevered, huffing and squealing with the frustration of a monkey made to do a jigsaw puzzle by scientists with electric prods, until I worked them into place and was back in stilettos where I belonged after those years flat-out in the desert.
My immense and shaggy neon faux-leopard coat swung like a bell across bare, oiled shoulders, perfume moving ahead of me as a bow wave. Pausing to let the mirror snap an unsaved selfie, I raised my faceted tumbler with a leer and a Venus flytrap wink.
Was I seriously planning on going out like this? After all these years? At my age? Forty-four.
Open the door. I tipped back the vodka tonic and a great and special quiet brought its sudden blunt calm upon the world, answering all my silly questions with an articulate silence.
Just the right side of wasted, as I hope my description conveys, I found myself descending the staircase to Cinderfella’s waiting pumpkin carriage, Duchamp afterimages stitching together as a shaggy leopard-striped bridal train at my back, head tilted all imperious, Her Majesty the Queen of the Madhouse in a drag production of Marat/Sade.
The cabdriver gawped in the tiny cameo brooch of his mirror. The brute’s semi-disorganized features twitched like gloves and I could tell I’d violated his safe space in more ways than one.
My perfume, Twankey’s perfume, was Tabu, with its overwhelming allergenic waves of suffocating patchouli, its blindingly acidic citrus squalls—less delicate fragrance, more full-scale climactic upheaval.
You like my perfume? It’s Tabu—I managed to say without laughing.
I knew what he was thinking: Tabu, as in incest, cannibalism, and bestiality.
