Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

“I remember hearing—”

“Hearing’s nothing. This place was a goddamn war zone. Now it belongs to the artists, and all the trash has supposedly moved over to Bangkok Park.”

“Supposedly?”

“These wise guys with the earrings in the nose, in the cheek. Enormous pain in the ass, my friend. You’ll never know.”

“But they help you pay the rent.”

“Bingo. We play out this little lie. I pretend that they’re like my black sheep, my kids that went to Europe and came back all wrong, okay? They pretend like I’m the stone age mommy, all out of it, but a good heart and genuinely lovable. It’s all shit. We’re both … what’s the word? It was in Sunday’s puzzle. Like a heartworm … something inside of you—”

“Parasite,” Ike says.

Bella slaps the bar. “There you go. Parasite. Eight letters. Fits perfect. They get a cheap place to do their plays, read their books. I take what I can off of them. I never ask where they get the money. They manage.”

“You both get what you need.”

“Well, that’s about the best you’re going to do.”

“Amen. How about a shooter to go with the beer?”

“How about the four bucks for the performance?”

Ike pulls all the money he has out of his pocket, finds a twenty, and lays it on the bar.

Bella doles out a shot of the house bourbon and says,“Show should begin anytime now. Hope those aren’t your good clothes.”

Ike looks down at his legs hugging the legs of the barstool and then back up at Bella.

“The special effects. You could get soaked if they start to cut up. I was nuts with the bastards at dress rehearsal, but then I realized the floor’s cleaner than it’s been in years.”

Ike picks up the shooter and asks, “Where’s the rest of the audience?”

“Looks like it’s just you and me tonight, darling. But you’ll love it. Well worth the price. It’s a classic. Or so they tell me. I don’t remember ever seeing it and I was crazy for the movies when I was young. Raul, he’s the leader, the head guy, he says, ‘It’s restructured, Bella, reinvented.’ Reinvented. Like it was a machine. Jesus. These kids could talk the ear off a goddamn dead dog. So much horseshit.”

Ike fires the shooter, and a bell, like an old school recess bell, starts to ring from some back room.

“That’s it,” Bella says, and starts to shuffle out from behind the bar. She moves to the front door and locks it, then yanks the heavy, dark green pull shades down to the windowsills.

Ike rotates on the stool to follow her.

“What’s all that for?” he asks.

“Part of our agreement,” she says. “Once the bell rings, that’s it. No one else gets in. They say you got to be here from the start.”

She gets back behind the bar and her head starts to nod and she says, “Oh, and I’m supposed to pass this,” and she pulls out an old black felt top hat from under the bar and slides it down to Ike. There’s an index card secured in the hatband that reads: “Fund for the Preservation of Dangerous Art.”

He throws a dollar in, slides the hat back to Bella, and asks, “What’s so dangerous?”

She ignores him and sinks down into a small, rickety, wooden rocker wedged in behind the bar. The yellowish lights from the room’s chandelier begin to flash on and off. Garbled noise starts to sound from the same direction as the recess bell. It’s a few seconds before Ike can determine that the noise is supposed to be wind and thunder. It sounds like it’s being played off his mini-Panasonic. Then, sounding slightly closer, he hears two male voices yelling over the storm.

1ST VOICE: Son of a bitch, we’re going down!

2ND VOICE: Bogus shit, dude, death city!

1ST VOICE: Where’s the big Kahuna?

2ND VOICE: In a crouch, man. Behind you. And it’s the waves that’s the big Kahuna in a storm like this.

1ST VOICE: Bad shit, man, we’ll never surf again.

KAHUNA: I heard that, you little weasel. We pull through, I hope you get herpes.

The owners of the three voices start to appear from the double doorway at the back of the room. They’re three young men, maybe around twenty years old. They’re all dressed in those longish California swim trunks, “baggies” Ike guesses they’re called, all hot pinks and lime greens and Day-Glo tangerine. Though he can’t see too well from this distance, they seem to have perfect golden tans and Nautilus-pumped bodies straight out of a muscle-magazine ad. And all three are posed, arms out at their sides, shoulders hunched forward slightly, bodies crouched a bit, knees bent, one leg pivoted forward, the other set at a ninety-degree angle. They’re standing on surfboards. They’re pretending to surf.

The wind and thunder noise suddenly gets much louder and the chandelier increases its flashing.

KAHUNA: Hold on, buds, it’s the big one!

Stagehands dressed in black spandex burst through the door carrying red metal buckets with the word FIRE printed on them. They douse the surfers with water, then one lone stagehand bolts from the pack, runs straight toward Ike, and heaves his pail. It’s a perfect hit. The water is freezing and Ike jumps up off his stool and screams, “Jesus.”

He wipes his eyes clear to see Bella waving him to be quiet. She throws him a bar rag and indicates that he should sit back down. And he does, mopping his head with the musty-smelling towel.

The action in the depths of the bar continues as the trio of imperiled surfers are replaced by two new beachpeople. One, an older surfer, middle-aged even, his lean body given over to flab and slicked-back blond hair gone grey and white. A hefty beer gut hangs down low over his baggies. He’s got those plastic sandals on his feet, the ones that hook between your big and next-to-big toe.

With the old surfer is a young blonde, sixteen, seventeen years old, high school age. She’s dressed in an unbelievably skimpy pink bikini and she tosses her mane of hair around like it was a tangle of whips. Something about the scene is familiar to Ike and it starts to nag him before the actors even open their mouths.

GIRL: God, Daddy, can’t you do something about the rain?

HER FATHER: Miranda, baby, chill out.

When he hears the girl’s name, the whole thing becomes clear. He’s about to witness some reinvented Shakespeare. It’s The Tempest. He read it in high school. He saw most of it on PBS a few years back. The big storm. The fairy. The ugly witch’s son. The dispossessed duke. The bored young daughter. It’s The Tempest done as a Frankie Avalon — Annette Funicello beach party movie. Gidget Goes to Stratford-upon-Avon. Ike knows they think this is wildly original. He wonders if they’ve ever heard of Natalie Wood. He’s sitting in front of a surfer version of The Tempest. And the door to the place is locked.

He gives a soft knock on the bartop and Bella’s eyes open. He holds up another twenty and points to the bottle of bourbon on the bottom shelf. Bella rolls her eyes, then nods her head, and Ike hoists himself halfway over the bar and grabs the bottle. He pours himself another shooter and settles back down on the stool to watch.

The play is jumpy, more like a series of old-fashioned blackout skits than a continuous story. The dialogue is all slang, white-leisure-class-teentalk and surfer colloquialisms, monosyllabic, perpetually sarcastic, tinged with a weird falsetto drawl. And by the first act it’s almost unbearable. Each time Miranda gasps “Daddy!” in the exasperated, breathless, eye-bulging whine, Ike belts back a drink. He’s starting to feel plastered by the end of the second scene.

And because of this he starts to think that maybe he’s missing something, that possibly, as the play progresses, the actors get more chancy, start to go beyond simply translating Shakespeare’s English into West Coast beachyak. The pace of the production starts to seem unraveled to him. The action starts to somehow seem more serious and less farcical. And all of these changes seem to be revolving around the entrance of the actor playing Caliban.