Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

Miranda was last. The band went steamy and grinding. She came out in long white satin. My dove. My eyes hurt for her, a scorch along the nerve string to the brain. The men in front of me stood up, leaning forward, slapping each other’s shoulders and sending out the high-pitched long-toned soooooo — eeeeee’s of pig callers. I stepped on my own hands getting up onto the table so I could see. Her long arms were lifted, her hair snapped with light. A young blonde in silver at a table just ahead of me glowered at the backs of the men who were with her as they leaned toward the stage. Miranda with the Binewski cheekbones, the Mongol eyes. Wide-mouthed Miranda, the dancer on long legs. The chill wash of joy hit me: my daughter. She was good. Not great, but good. What’s bred in the bones, when you have bones, comes through. And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice.

Electra and Iphigenia were high-powered performers, they wrung your heart, cramped your brain, brought silence on thousands for half an hour at a time. And the crowds that watched Arturo were funneled out of themselves, pumped into the reservoir of his will. Though I am her mother, I knew that Miranda’s little act, her clever little strip with its dignity and timing, was paltry compared to the skill and power I had watched in my other loved ones. But it was strange and different to me, watching these people watching her. Because they thought she was pretty, because they thought it would be good to grab her ass and pump jizz into her. Their bodies lifted up, clean and simple to her in the clear, unconscious awareness of each of their cells’ sensing that she would grunt out strong young.

She was down to her G-string with the fluffy lace plume on her rump, she had her thumbs hooked in it, looking over her shoulder at the crowd, she was waving her ass in a slow semaphore of invitation. The frowning blonde at the table had her chin in her hand. The men were hooting and grunting and watching with smiles. I held my breath, blinked, and she pulled the plume down, unsnapped the G-string and whipped it off with a flourish, waving her ass still, her head tipped up and an unmistakable giggle bubbling out of her as she revealed the thin, curling tail that jutted out from the end of her spine and bounced just above her round buttocks.

• • •

The second time — the last time — I simply followed Miranda to work. I walked out the door at Kearney Street fifteen seconds behind her and tagged her easily enough through a heavy rain. She never looked out from under her umbrella until she stamped her boots at the back door of the Glass House. I went in the front entrance and left my umbrella in a glass stand. I moved carefully toward one wall and slid along until I was fairly near the curtained stage at the end of the room.

There was a commotion in front of the stage. A big tuxedoed man with a glistening bald head was giving orders in a harsh whisper. I wasn’t tall enough to see who he was speaking to.

Suddenly he jumped onto the stage. There was a crash from the drummer. A cone of light appeared around the bald man. There were whistles in the crowd, laughter, sporadic handclapping.

“Gentlemen and jokers! Lively ladies!” The bald man stuck his long-corded microphone between his legs and wiggled its silver knob. The crowd chuckled. “The Glass House proudly presents its Tuesday-night feature! On Stage Topless Auditions! Any member of the audience is welcome to step up to the stage at this time and try out for a topless position here at the Glass House — with the Glass House orchestra! Under authentic conditions! A ten-dollar prize to each and every contestant! Ladies and gentlemen, step up and test your talent! … And here they come folks! …” A scramble of flesh hit the stage. The crowd cheered, hissed, whistled, laughed. Five bodies, bare from the waist up, snarled around the bald man and then tapered out in a line facing the audience. I began to sweat. A fat woman with her blouse hanging from the waist of her skirt stood nearest to me, blinking at the audience. Her breasts had fallen, thick and long, mixing with the rolls of fat that hung puffily over her belly. Her arms had the same texture and shape as her breasts and belly. She crossed her arms over her chest in an instant of shyness and then let them drop, forgetting.

Two middle-aged men wore matching red plastic jeans with broad leather belts strapping their adjacent legs together. Their thin white arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders and matching ostrich plumes curled up out of their thinning hair. Their raddled faces wrinkled unnervingly beneath an expert Oriental makeup, and their bone-riding nipples were enlarged and glowing with red gel.

A fat man in a glitter jockstrap had little eyes flicking in his pillow-creased face, as his booze buddies belched his name in unison from the front tables.

And the startled young girl was blushing beneath her awkward Pan-Cake, her lips drawn lush, her scared eyes outlined in black, her tiny breasts thrust out on her long, prominent ribs. She wore her lewdest panties and a pair of pirate boots, but she wasn’t drunk like the rest. She must have thought she was actually auditioning for a job here.

A bear baiting. The band is brassy spunk. The bald master of ceremonies spanks his hands at the edge of the stage and hollers into the mike as the line pumps and jiggles. I lean my chin on the stage itself, watching the wave of flesh reveal a surprise of blurred nipple every third beat as the fat woman throws her shoulders forward to toss her tits out of their usual resting place beside her sagging navel.

The young girl tries to look professional in the confusion of wobbling red thighs and waving ostrich and the fat man’s patch of chest hair. Confusion is burning her. She knows she has been taken, and has wandered into the wrong and maybe the worst place.

The noise is suffocating and I have to squint to see in the strange light. Then cold air hits my scalp and a hand is thumping my hump in an investigative way. “You forgot one!” is the shriek. My wig is dangling high above my head in a wavering hand. My dark glasses are snatched away and the light sears in at me.

The bald man is staring into my eyes as big hands lift me, my own mouth opening though silent and the music beats into my face and the pinching, bruising fingers trap my jerking arms and legs and breath. There is a shout — many-voiced — and the bald man is coming toward me with a smile and the flabby woman is grabbing at my coat and yanking at the buttons and shrieking, “Little pink eyes!” and the red pants hop toward me, their crotches bobbling at my eye level, the thick buckles that hold them threatening to kneel in my face. My coat is being pulled away, my big blouse, which is cut with deep darts for my hump and hangs flat to my knees in front, tears in an explosion of buttons that ricochet around the stage without sound because there is no room in this big sound for the little sounds of buttons hitting.

They have come to my chest harness now, thick strips of elastic stretched above the hump and below it to hold a solid band across my ragged dugs and their grey nipples. The bald man is talking to me in a confidential way without his microphone and I feel the movement of his lips and the hot wet of his breath in my ear but I cannot hear him as the harness slides off, scraping my hump, raking my ears, blinding me for a second. I kick as they lift me in the air to pull off my elastic-waisted skirt and wave me upward to the yellow spotlight and bring me down with my shoes hitting the stage and my white underskirt riding up over my crouching knees.

I am standing alone in the light and the big bodies have fallen back from me. The college girl, dumbfounded, is still pumping away with her mouth open, her knees and arms still following an old order to dance, as her mind is pummeled by what I am, and what they have done to me, and wondering if I am in on it. The crowd is standing up and beating the tables. The laughter is fierce and the band is loud, but barely loud enough, as I lift my thin arms and waggle my huge hands and bob to the light, and my knees begin to shift in what my body calls dance, waving my hump at the crowd, the light warming my scalp and burning into my unprotected eyes. My big shoes thump at the ends of my little legs, and I am proud with my arrow tits flapping toward my knees, and the fat lady standing on my coat is staring, with spittle across her cheek, and the fat man with his electric G-string pumping at his invisible crotch and laughing, and the shouts coming up, “Christ! It’s real!” The twisting of my hump feels good against the warm air and the sweat of my bald head runs down into my bald eyes and stings with brightness and the spirit of the waggling hump moves over the stage and catches red pants, hairy bellies, and all, while I stamp on my buttonless blouse, slide on the tangled elastic harness, and open my near-blind eyes wide so they can see that there is true pink there — the raw albino eye in the lashless sockets — and it is good. How proud I am, dancing in the air full of eyes rubbing at me uncovered, unable to look away because of what I am. Those poor hoptoads behind me are silent. I’ve conquered them. They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.