=28=

“So just imagine this,” says the catwalk-thin cutie, trembling all over from head-to-toe, her blue lips blood-flecked, blood-glittered, blood-dusted, and her large painted eyes coquettishly a-flutter: “My lover informs me that she's planned a surprise dinner party--a surprise to me, anyway, a sort of debutante's death-ball, is how she puts it, my coming-out’ party. She says this with an ominous, secret little smirk that only strikes me as ominous and secret in retrospect, when the secret is no longer any secret, plenty ominous, and way too late to escape.

“In the meantime, I mindlessly fret and flit about debating what to wear; in the end, of course, it's not important, because the plan doesn't require me to wear much, but I don't know that yet--it's all part of the fun, their fun, to keep me blissfully ignorant, in a state of perpetual pre-orgasmic suspense. I've managed only to don a sexy little half-bra and ruffled panties when the injection kicks in, the curtain goes up, the show begins; half-blinded, I struggle to slip into a pair of thigh-high stockings, clumsily getting the seams straight, costing myself valuable seconds. It's when I bend forward to buckle the strappy stiletto sandal to my ankle that the inky black fingers of whatever illegal cocktail of drugs that's been surreptitiously introduced into my bloodstream slides over my brain like a mutant octopus, smudging up and squishing out the last of my consciousness. Thereupon I tumble forward in slow-motion to the polished hardwood floor like a soft little pillow at my mistress's booted feet.

“For half the party--my own party, mind you!--I'm just not with it; drugged dopey, I stare through glazed eyes at a lot of people I don't know, or half-know, or, worst of all, know all too well, these emissaries from the past and present intermixed, like in a dream set in a place I don't recognize and have never been before, but familiar all the same, an archetypal banquet hall, maybe, the kind they use for weddings or mitzvahs, bar or bat, and I'm still in my underwear and I'm seemingly hovering just above the crowd (Why just look at them down there, having such a good time at my expense!).

“God, I'm so loopy, and it's a good thing, too, since I'm starting to understand that, as unreal as it all seems, as surreal as it looks to my own eyes which are only inches away from my open palm, my head having flopped lazily to the side at the prompting of a dull, faraway pain, like the flicker of distant lightning or the faint drums of a still far-off marching band, I see the impossible: the fact that I'm nailed to a wooden cross erected in the middle of this milling gathering, crucified here like nothing so much as an incidental conversation piece!

“Well, maybe not so incidental…

“But, then, certainly not so important either; this isn't my party, after all, as it turns out, but hers, my pre-op transsexual mistress in her ultra-glam gold lame evening gown, an ex-male bodybuilder turned glamour-puss film star, or something of the sort, well, you know what I mean, not exactly a film star, per se, but...wait…

“Ssshhh…listen...they are mingling, chatting, sipping cocktails and noshing on catered hors d oeuvres and hozzie-whatzies, every so often throwing a glance my way, curious, bored, chuckling at my precarious plight—‘whose is that freakthing anyway?’ To which comes the ubiquitous response ‘Cyn's little girlfriend.’ The retort to which invariably is some variation of ‘Oh...(laughing)...Jesus...I didn't recognize...well, I'll be damned they've finally gone and done it then...well, good for Cyn; she deserves it...by the way, have you seen the first rushes yet? Dynamite stuff for low-budget porn…’

“And so it goes, the small-talk people make, even at funerals, the chitchat they generate clustered around sickbeds, and deathbeds, the pointless albeit essential buzz they doubtless made on the walk to and from the crematoriums, the firing-squads, the death marches, et al....

“Tears have meanwhile dried in my thickly-applied make-up, so thickly-applied, in fact, that it's like a mask of sludge, so thick, to be precise, it's like my face is under an inch of mud; why, I wonder? Why--this heavy-handed, intentionally inexpert job? It's theatrical make-up, that's why, corpse make-up, that's what I suddenly realize, puddinged on the way they prepare the dead, or the slow dancing actress portraying an archetype of death on stage, her face emotionless, unblemished, vacant--serene, by which I mean to say, soulless, un-transcendent in every sense...does that make sense? Yes, there is no other conclusion to draw. I've made up my mind. I have been made-up like this because in everyone's mind I am, in fact, already dead.

“I whimper. My bowels, as the Bible has so often and so eloquently put it, have turned to water.

“An older man, sipping a Cosmopolitan, perhaps (I'm no Mr. Boston!) puffing a cigar, appraises me meditatively, almost appreciatively, but nonetheless with blank unseeing eyes, preoccupied, as if he were thinking of something else entirely (which, quite naturally, he is), which would mean he wasn't appraising me at all, now wouldn't it? Note to self: For crissakes you're not the goddamned center of the universe, you fucking egomaniac, you! He was merely looking, absently, in my general direction because I am absent.  Occasionally someone (is it Cyn?) quiets my groans by thrusting a sponge between my teeth; it's soaked, I think, with a lemon-flavored tranquilizer laced with diuretics and laxatives; the older man gets bored, resurfaces from his private meditation, gets tapped on the shoulder, knocks the ash off his cigar and extinguishes it, off-handedly, against the inside of my left thigh, and so it goes.

“My ribcage, exposed below my pink polka-dot halter (yes, I'm now wearing a polka-dot pink halter and pink short-shorts, don't ask me how this is possible) is slashed (for effect, non-lethally, Cyn assures me; she looks so radiant!) and my taut tummy is stretched (and similarly slashed with what look to be some sort of Mayan hieroglyphics) between my prominent hipbones, navel pierced, of course, with a dangling rhinestone trinket of vaguely religious significance, ironically postmodern, of course.

“A party game has started up, seemingly spontaneously, as these things so often do, with the abrupt and incongruous appearance of an aluminum baseball bat—‘Break the Pansy's Legs’ this unfortunate game seems to be called. Is that, ultimately, what this is really all about? Someone has tacked a sheet of paper above my head with the words "Impotent Fag" scrawled across in pink block letters, and so, now that all's prepared, let the game begin!

“I guess you could say that the general idea of the contest resembles (more than anything else I can think of at the moment) a sort of cross between pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and beating a piñata. Someone takes up the bat, they blindfold him or her, turn them rapidly around two or three times, and face them in the general direction of my crucified body. Then they give him or her a shove forward and the hilarity ensues!

“Staggering towards me, bat-on-shoulder to the accompaniment of encouraging cheers, hoots and laughter, to spirited and shouted instructions (left, right, no left, left, left, now right, that's it, a little bit forward, not so much, almost, almost, right, yes...stop right there... Stop!...now…SWING! SWING!). Each participant eventually arrives in the approximate vicinity of my cross, at the foot of it, I mean, and, with all their might, takes an awkward, off-balance hack, the idea being to break the bones in my legs so that, no longer able to support my weight, unable to relieve the pressure on my nailed wrists and feet, my diaphragm will collapse, my lungs fill with fluid, eventually cease to function altogether and, in exhaustion and agony, lapsing into shock, I'll suffocate and expire, which is generally the way the crucified of all centuries eventually met their deaths.

“And nothing more than this is the goal of the game, this is how the winner is determined. Who'll be the one to succeed in breaking my legbones so that I croak. That person is the lucky champion! Can you imagine? What kind of people are these, anyway? What kind of world is this that they inhabit? How did I end up among them?

“And that’s not even the worst part, the most humiliating part. Shall I tell you the worst part?”

“No, please don’t. I’ve heard enough…”