Thrill-Bent (16 page)

“I don’t so much mean
people
themselves as much as the weird plan involved in our conception,” I start. I know it is ill-advised to try describing my despondent state of mind in philosophical terms to a man who is clearly part bunny, but I can’t help it. “I mean, why are we constantly compelled toward stimulation? What kind of callow dadaist creator would make a species that is capable of almost anything—solving puzzles, building shelter, falling in love, creating language and music and art—anything except just sitting in a room with our own thoughts and feelings and memories? Is there anything we can’t do, except nothing? We can never do nothing. Because when we’re still, that’s when we start to remember that we have these awful ... burns. And the wounds start to ooze and chafe and look really grotesque, and we go, ‘Oh yeah, we have to hold something against these, some butter or vinegar or ice-water or salve, something to change the nature of the pain.’”

The sounds of screams and canned music and endless arguments come down around us like hot rain and dissolve into incomprehensible static.

Furry looks at me seriously. “The only good thing for men is to be diverted from thinking of what they are,” he says slowly, as though he is carefully reciting from dim memory a phrase that has been drifting through his head since high school philosophy class. “Pascal,” he says. “Someone dropped a copy of the Penguin Portable
Pensées
under the loopscrew. I keep it next to my bed.”

I smile. “Awesome.”

“You saw, didn’t you?” he asks, nodding back toward the door of the hut.

Is he referring to the sight of him in his bunny suit? “Um, yeah,” I say, not sure, as I hear it coming out of my mouth, whether I should be lying.

“I figured,” he says. “That man was my furrier, Freddy. He’s making me a new suit for the convention, and this morning was my first fitting. I thought I could finish before you got off the Tumbler, but there was a complication with the whiskers.”

“What convention?” I ask. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“Totally off the record?” he says, and looks me in the eye.

“Totally off the record. Shit, between Mormon-town and your collection, I have more than enough to write about already.”

“Well, it’s called AnthroCon, and it’s a convention for furry fans. People who are interested in . uh, anthropomorphism.” He looks at me. “It’s not all rabbits,” he says, anticipating my question. “That happens to be my thing. I met Bob, Ken, and Mike a few years ago online, playing a game called Furtopia. They lived in Salt Lake, so we naturally, you know, gravitated.”

“So does everyone dress up at AnthroCon?”

“No, no, lots of people are there just to network. There are artists and writers, people who spend a lot of time online, and then there are ... the suits.”

“Do you wear the suit the whole time? Do you have to take the head off to eat?”

“Absolutely not! It’s considered very gauche to be seen without your suit head. I go back to my room in the hotel occasionally to eat or drink something, but I make sure I’m alone before I break character.”

“I have to tell you, Furry, I thought you looked very much at home in your costume. I mean, you seemed so comfortable. It really suits you.” He looks at me, and we both break out laughing at my unintentional pun. Even his laugh is rabbit-like, high-pitched and vibratory, his nose scrunched up and trembling.

I kiss Furry good-bye, right on the mouth this time. His lips are moist and they actually taste pink, like he’s been sucking on one of those little Valentine conversation hearts.
Ask Me. Say When. Yes Dear. Be Mine.
Maybe he’s not on anything, I decide, stronger than the euphoric sentences of Pascal’s Pensées and a bunch of carrots.

I rise from the stair and reach into my pocket for the rental car keys. After I have walked halfway to the exit gate, I remember to look back to see if I’ve left a giant sweat stain on the step where I was sitting. I can make out an elegant gray blob, but I can’t tell from here whether it’s really my buttprint or just Furry’s quivering hoop of shadow.

I
stole something pretty much every day from the time I was four until I reached my early thirties. In conscious memory my kleptomanic tendencies began one day in nursery school when I swiped the tiny pinwheel blade that sat in the bottom of Cindy Carlton’s mother’s blender. On that day, after recess, we were scheduled to make peanut butter, a high-profile endeavor that had garnered enough hype to warrant several guest-star moms. When my mother showed up without a blender, Cindy Carlton’s mom had to “jet home”—an expression I understood to mean that it was no big deal
at all
and that absolutely no one should feel in any way guilty or shamed by the extemporaneous nature of her jaunt—to pick up her Waring stainless, even though my mother’s name was officially written in neat cursive next to “Bring Blender” on the classroom chore list. She had forgotten to bring ours, or never intended to bring it, or floated in a world so far back behind her eyes that blenders and lists and cursive were like storybook apparitions that required no material equivalents. Who knew what went on in her quiet cortex? She mumbled apologies, then sat demurely on a giant tub of Legos and crossed her legs, holding her purse in her lap, smiling sadly at a water stain on the opposite wall.

I was raiding the crafts table a few minutes later when I spotted the Carlton Waring, tucked away in a baby blue Monkey Ward’s bag. Its shiny axis and complicated razor-petaled open mouth made something inside my young head spin like a propeller. It was like I had stepped into the swirl of a tornado, knowing full well I was going to get bruised and battered but unable to resist the intense peace-fulness in the center of the whorl. That was the day I fell in love with furtive opportunism. I glanced around quickly to make sure I wasn’t being watched, unscrewed the little rocket-shaped button that held the blade in place at the bottom of the blender, slicing my fingertip in the process, and stashed the spiny claw in the pocket of my Pendleton jacket. When it came time to make the peanut butter, I kept my finger in my mouth and said nothing as mayhem ensued. It was a mystery that went unsolved (until a month later when my father found the blade in my sandbox with an aluminum pie tin and a rusted flour sifter), and we spent the rest of the morning sitting cross-legged on our carpet-sample squares eating handfuls of salted peanuts and slices of Wonder bread spread thick with margarine.

The flair for theft never became an involuntary habit—not like blowing hard on the surface of my morning coffee to stir it without dirtying a spoon, or singing the name-game song under my breath whenever I see someone wearing a name tag. In fact, after a while I had to remind myself to steal something each day, even if it was just a flower from the park, a pen from the bank, a french fry from an unbussed table at a restaurant. It didn’t matter what I took, but it had to be one thing, every day. And each time, I had the same intoxicating thought: Everything is
not
in its place!

It was hard to stop. I’d get the urge and I just wouldn’t feel right until it was satisfied. Until I’d palmed that lipstick or that peppermint pattie, my fingers would itch. I’d walk around with my hands fluttering as though I were playing air-keyboard. I couldn’t relax until I’d stolen my daily swag. At that moment, I would hear a click in my head that corroborated my world view:
This is all an elaborate illusion; this panorama is begging to be fucked with.
But until I heard that click, I was vulnerable to all sorts of demons. I felt terribly exposed to what other people thought of me. Did they see how powerless I was, how utterly average? Until I found my own little folksy ritual, I crept through life feeling like an extra on a soundstage. Theft was the superpower that enabled me to slough off my colorless persona, the potency that made me custom-built. Security cameras were my kryptonite. Once I finally stopped altogether, a few years ago, I vowed never to steal again. But I miss it sometimes—the exhilaration of the click, Eve’s jaw-drop when she saw Eden’s exit sign.

At first, my mother’s oblivion was the catalyst for my thieving; the opportunities were just too easy to pass up. She could be looking directly at my hand in her purse, and she’d emit one of her abstract, other-worldly sighs. Her eyes were light blue lakes that faded mysteriously into sky. And there was daily satisfaction in proving myself right: my mother really was a ghost who roamed the earth, unseeing, unfeeling, untouchable. Maybe she had just gotten so used to ignoring my father’s outbursts that now any erratic behavior struck her as unremarkable.

Ironically, though my mother’s preoccupation taught me the joys of stealing, it was the challenge of deceiving my father that kept me from passing through the typical juvenile shoplifting “phase” that so many kids experience, and instead made me vow to keep practicing and training until I could confidently fool the master. Not that the Condor stole things, per se, but he had eyes everywhere on his head. He clearly understood there was danger at every turn and no end of Machiavellian urges to be disabled. Unlike my mom’s, his looks contained worlds of knowledge about my plans and schemes, intricate detailed blueprints of my unwholesome intentions. Even during one of his tic storms, he would keep his eyes on me until the fit subsided, as though he knew that I was the kind of opportunist likely to strike while he was otherwise occupied. It was almost impossible to get anything past my dad, but I managed to come up with a couple of workable methods to smuggle my shoplifted treasures into the house: I’d hide the offending item in the clothes dryer in the garage when I came in from my “bike ride” until I had scoped out my parents’ positions in the house. Or, I’d sneak in the back gate onto the patio, and throw the thing onto a pile of dirty clothes in my bedroom through a window I’d previously left open. If for any reason the window had been shut in my absence, I’d dig a fast hole in the dirt at the far edge of the garden just over the lip of the canyon, and bury my prey temporarily, marking the grave with a piece of rose quartz or a broken sand dollar.

I did get caught a few times, like the time I felt an iron grip on my bicep as I began to pedal breezily away from the Payless parking lot, my patch pocket bulging with Brach’s chocolate peanuts. My body was launched off the bike completely, swung through the air in a wide arc, until I was kneeling in front of my father’s topsiders on the black pavement, my whole upper arm clenched in his muscular fist. My bike lay a few yards ahead, next to my dad’s parked Fiat Spyder. I had never thought to take precautions against running into my father
outside
the house. This was my world, from the Payless strip-mall to the Girls Club all the way down to the hot dog stand at Moonlight Cove. What was he doing crossing the invisible border into my ten-speed territory? With his free hand, he fished the oversized box of candy out of my pants and hurled it into the nearby trash bin, bullseye. Then, with a snort of disgust, he dropped me on the pavement the way you would drop a name at a cocktail party, casually, trying not to call too much attention to yourself.

But the times I got away with it right under the Condor’s nose gave me the feeling I learned to crave. If my dad truly knew everything about me, if his intimations that I didn’t exist outside of his field of vision were correct, then what was a twenty-dollar double Allman Brothers album doing in my record collection? If I was fatuous and irrational, untenable and unsophisticated, a dreamer not a doer, then how come I had accumulated more flavors of Bonne Bell Lip Smackers than any other girl in my junior high? If being loved meant being meticulously apprehended, then I wanted to be an incomprehensible loner. I had a secret life. Most importantly, this was a life kept secret from my ruler; like a prisoner who successfully hides a tell-all diary in a loose brick of his cell wall, I had harbored a whole private world in a tiny unseen cavity—not in my heart or my brain or my vagina or my mouth, but in a microscopic bubble that floated somewhere in my chest. Every time I swiped something, that bubble swelled and thickened, its skin becoming human skin, its name becoming some lyrical, more interesting version of my name, like
Janine
spelled out in Russian.

B
arbara Eden is the emcee. She’s not wearing the harem pants and braided wiglet, of course, but a certain Jeannie proclivity bleeds through. Even in her smart taupe pant-suit and rimless unisex Gaultier eyeglasses, she exudes “I did not mean to cause trouble, Master” energy. She has the same round, mascara-fringed eyes, the same mellifluous if slightly frigid phraseology, the same easy orbit of facial expressions from cloudless smile to cute pout. She stands in a spotlight center-stage with the posture of a ballet teacher, hands folded, eyes roaming left to right. Finally she clears her throat and speaks.

“Some of you here tonight may remember what it felt like to spin in circles until you were dizzy with freedom, to slap your thigh when you laughed, or to stand up and shout at a ball game.” Her tone is dulcet and reverential, delivered with thespian precision. Clearly she has made the choice to provide a hint of a cry in her voice. She waits a beat to make sure we grasp the gravity of her news. “But most of us can only imagine what it would feel like to lose control. Ask yourselves, do the words ‘impulsive’ and ‘spontaneous’ really have meaning anymore?” Her brow furrows above her entreating eyes.

A hum moves through the packed crowd like an “om” at a spiritual retreat. It is perfectly on cue and hushed, without a hint of irony—a practiced meditation on the concept of spontaneity. I crane my neck to look back from my fifth-row seat, trying to get a general sense of what the audience looks like, but the enormous theater is a shadowy cavern. It could be empty of people, for all I know, except for the now-subsiding om-purr and the occasional slight rustle—raw silk against gabardine? the tortoise-shell latch on a Kate Spade handbag?—that whispers through the rows. I straighten the front seams of my black slacks, and look up to see the spotlight zoom away from Jeannie and across the stage, search along the curtain near the wings, and land on a girl in a blood-red dress.

The girl looks to be about nine or ten, with the sway-backed posture of prepubescence. Her dress is skin-tight, pulled across her flat chest and protruding belly, and drips onto the floor in puddles of shining cerise. Her eyelids have been painted with a thick sweep of eyeliner all the way out to her temples, and she’s barefoot. She takes a moment to fully grasp that she can now be seen by an entire auditorium full of people, a moment during which she strokes the edge of the curtain lovingly and nods her head of short-cropped curls vigorously a few times. When the vampy first notes of an Astor Piazzolla tango swell up into the speakers, she grimaces straight out at the audience, an excruciating smile-frown that bares all her teeth, a rictus reminiscent of a cobra in a cage. She tiptoes across the stage. By turns forgetting her staunch smile and then flashing it even more garishly, her face slides through a loop of private/public veneers at an astonishing rate. She holds one arm aloft and circles around the stage, horse-stepping in what appears to be a solo highland fling. Her face is wracked with such intense, disparate emotions that she appears to be both in pain and deep in pleasure. Her progress is brilliant, graceful even; one movement flows into the next without the self-conscious sophistry of adult forethought. I am not sure what’s going on here, but it’s clear to me that no one taught this girl to move like this. No one told her to tiptoe and prance and tweet the floor with her heels. Certainly the flood of sentiments flying across her face are not the result of some Young People’s Drama Workshop—the exposed hurts and remembered losses and overworked smiles stab into me like hooks as they flash.

The black silhouettes of heads in the rows ahead of me are perfectly still, some tilted studiously, some sprouting straight up from their long black necks, with no movement at all. I have the urge to reach out and touch one, to see if it is made of construction paper: perhaps the bouffant in the seat directly in front of me that looks like a child’s drawing of a dark cloud. The stillness is rigid, a breath inhaled and held, the long contraction of clenched stomach muscles in a body just about to orgasm. My hand creeps up to my hair, and I realize that I, too, am sporting a fancy updo, sculpted with pins and ribbons. I turn to look at the man in the seat next to me. He is bulging, his whole being trapped in suspended animation.

My shoe slides over something slick, a playbill lying on the floor beneath my seat. I notice that the picture on the front looks terribly familiar. As I lean down to pick it up, I can see that it is, in fact, a photo of my father. His face is in extreme close-up, his mouth cranked open, mid-yell, and his eyes stare defiantly straight out at the camera. His teeth look yellower than usual, but the facial expression is one I’ve seen thousands of times: it’s his “Don’t Fucking Look at Me” look. The show’s title, in yellow letters over his head, is
FITS & STARTS: A TOURETTIC JOURNEY INTO THE IMPETUOUS NATURE OF REALITY.
I flip breathlessly through the program and see blurry headshots of people in motion, with captions like
lola can’t keep her hands to herself
and
walk this way
? I stop when I get to a photo of the girl onstage, in the same unlikely Gloria Swanson makeup, but wearing overalls and a Hello Kitty T-shirt, above the line:
it takes one to tango
.

I don’t want to call too much attention to myself, but I am having trouble breathing. I have to get out of here. Why did I choose a seat in the middle of a row? The old springs creak loudly as I shift my weight forward onto my thighs. I grasp the slim wooden armrests and hoist myself up, instinctively tucking my head in like a turtle, my shoulders rounded in deference to the sad musical score onstage. I can feel my father’s presence even with my head down; he invades the air like the stink of fresh-mown onion grass. The center aisle is six seats away, and I duck into a crouch that leans far to the right. No one moves. I glance down the row, and all the eyes in all the heads are fastened to the stage in a kind of hypnotic state, bobbing slightly on their stems, a slow-motion dashboard-dog display of assent. Still crouching, I take a tiny step that nudges my seatmate from his reverie. He glances at me briefly, then swings his legs to the right as though he’s riding side-saddle, and continues to absorb the compelling spectacle onstage.

“Uh!”

I hear an amplified, lascivious grunt. The familiar passion it infuses into the heated air of the auditorium makes me lift my head. There he is, stage right, my dad, decked out in a beige turtleneck and plaid sansabelt slacks (Robert Goulet circa 1976). He is sputtering and wincing and lashing out in jabs, a blindfolded boxer in an empty ring.

“Fucking shithole!” I look around at all the faces mesmerized by his every tic, the hundreds of eyes widening and lips pressed together into prurient smiles as he punches his testicles over and over again. The sexual threat without the sexual act, the dangerous mood without the violence: this is stock footage from my past, my family, my childhood home. I feel trespassed on. Rows of tastefully dressed strangers gape at my creator, their soft hands white-knuckling the armrests, and it makes me want to crack some heads. Why don’t they peer at their own filthy home movies? I slam my way out of the row, flipping hems, bruising knees, upsetting pocketbooks. I no longer care about causing a scene. But these people, whoever they are, seem to love scenes. They can’t get enough of being quietly appalled.

When I get to the aisle, I feel a large hand grab my calf. I try to yank away, but the grasp is indomitable, sending a painful trill up my leg. I fall into the aisle, my arms outstretched, and squirm around to look at my attacker. He is a bald, hamlike man of indeterminate age. He looks like he has never sprouted a hair anywhere on his body. His dark blue suit is pressed and immaculate, the jacket sleeve perfectly tailored to rest in the center of his fleshy wrist, cutting his watch in two. His massive hand has no trouble enveloping my entire ankle.

“Where are you going?” he asks in a paper-ripping whisper. The smirk on his face tells me that he knows exactly where I’m headed. I lash out with my other foot, aiming for his groin but striking him somewhere near the hip—leaving a small oval ghost-print on his pants—and he releases his grip for an instant, long enough for me to unloose myself. I inadvertently glance at his digital watch when he opens his hand; it’s the kind that lights up a bright turquoise blue.

I know I am dreaming when the numbers on the man’s watch say 25:02. Even on a digital LED pilot watch, there is no 25:02. On any other night, I might have given him the benefit of the doubt, assumed that his numbers got spun out of whack somehow, but when I see 25:02 I remember taking three of Buffy’s bumblebee pills just before bed, the ones she promised would induce lucid dreaming. 25:02 means I am submerged inside my own unconscious. 25:02 means the pills worked, Buffy was right, and I am the mistress of my insentient destiny.

Immediately, I have the urge to wake up. When you open your eyes and see that you’ve sunk to the bottom of the lake, the impulse is to rise. But I won’t let myself; I know what I have to do. I thought when this moment came, I would will myself to fly like a bird or breathe underwater, but instead I dart straight down the aisle toward the stage. There is a small black door on the left side of the proscenium, and I belly-crawl toward it along the carpeted moat like a soldier approaching an enemy bunker. The door opens soundlessly when I twist the knob, and I cram my body through a short tunnel that deposits me in a busy backstage wing.

People dress and rehearse, wave their arms and whisper to themselves, or just stand around waiting, hopping from foot to foot, doing deep knee bends and toe-touches. Someone hits a punching bag in the corner. A huge wig that looks like a leftover from
The Flying Dutchman
is hefted onto a woman’s head by two stagehands perched on a balustrade. No one seems to notice me, and I quickly sidle up against the wall where a few bulky set pieces lean. An antique spotlight is hunched like an old troll against the wallpapered expanse of wall, and I tuck myself next to it in hopes of fading into the equipment. At about my shoulder level, I notice a series of nicks where the wallpaper has been peeled away in a varied pattern like a mountain range or an EKG. I lean in closer to examine the area, wondering if this is some kind of vintage height chart where dwarfish vaudeville performers of yore measured themselves while waiting to go onstage.

“That’s me you’re lookin’ at!” The hoarse voice behind the spotlight makes me literally jump, both feet clearing the floor. “Johnny the Ring,” he says, and emerges from somewhere in the massive, bulky curtain. He holds out his small, bejeweled hand. “On account of my rings,” he adds. Like Sammy Davis Jr., he’s got fat, gold rings on each finger.

“Oh,” I say, “I was just looking at ...” I trail off dumbly.

“Ssssh!” he shushes me, and nods his head toward the stage. He moves the curtain aside an inch: a middle-age woman in a black ballgown is attempting to wrap a gift, without success. Every time she picks up the scissors, she makes confetti.

“What’s your name, Lady?” he asks, and his breath buzzes right up against my ear like a mosquito while he thrusts his hand into mine with the force of a small tractor. Like everyone else backstage, Johnny the Ring is animated and enthusiastic, all hopped up and ready to break into some athletic routine—break dancing? vine-swinging? high-speed masturbation?

“Jan,” I manage to gasp. That the gift-wrapper is onstage must mean that my dad has finished his performance. Or will they loop through all the entertainers again? I glance around but can’t locate him. Maybe he exited off the other side of the stage.

“What’s your dodge?” asks Johnny, still squeezing my palm like it’s an orange he’s juicing.

“My dodge?”

“You know, your skill, your chops.” He looks me up and down, studies my breasts when he gets to them, and his upper lip folds back like a fingered page. He obviously doubts my credentials. “I don’t notice anything exordinary about you, Miss.” He bows, “if you don’t mind my saying so.”

He drops my hand, races over to the wall and starts punching it lightly with his knuckles, tapping his big rings back and forth fast. I am on the other side of the tracks now, with the freaks behind the curtain. I had better start spazzing out soon or somebody is bound to be become suspicious.

As Johnny the Ring adds to his abstract wall-art piece, I try out a brief shiver. It’s been a while since I’ve imitated my dad’s outbursts, but those childhood hours spent perfecting his stabs and tremors, his un-der-his-breath linguistic mutations—“Pussy-slurper!” “Bunghole schvitzer!”—have paid off: the moves are surprisingly easy to recapture.

But now I am on the spot. What’s my dodge? I know I can’t copy my father’s moves explicitly—that would be too obvious, even for this crowd—but the important thing is not the specific gestures anyway, it’s the attitude with which the gestures are executed. I have been handed a legacy, I realize now, an intuitive ability to align myself with the twitchers of the world. When Johnny turns back toward me, I steel my face into a frond, a flat plane from which the thorns of my features protrude. I hold his eyes in mine, not letting go even when my chest tightens and I begin to quake violently. I let my hips collapse and my torso drops like a waterfall, my arms swing spastically, and my fingers sweep the floor for dust and crumbs. I clear my throat seven times.

“You’re on!” says an officious-looking woman carrying a clipboard, nodding her chin, I’m pretty sure, at me. It’s hard to tell because she continues to nod furiously, up and down and up and down and up and down until I lose track of her intention. I’m just finishing my second or third full-body shudder and her face is there, bobbing like a kid diving for apples at a Halloween carnival. Dizzy and disoriented, I take a step back in the direction of the shadows.

“Me?” I ask timidly, standing on my tiptoes to steal a glance at her clipboard.

She jerks away and rasps sternly into her headset mike, “I
know.
I’m
aware
of that!
Thank
you.” I glance at Johnny the Ring for assistance. Maybe I’ve convinced him there is something extraordinary about me after all, maybe he’ll come to my rescue. But his attention has already strayed to a larger-chested female a few yards away who jumps high into the air and kicks her own ass.