John Hawkes - Travesty

Chez Lulu. That's the place. I remember it well. And how fortunate for me that it is you rather than Lulu who is my companion for tonight's undertaking, since Lulu may have been an agreeable and even seductive giant of a young man but was hardly fit for the mental and emotional rigors of the private apocalypse. He was an excellent host in the establishment that bore his name, but I cannot imagine anyone more frustrating in a discussion such as this one and occurring under these the most difficult of conditions. Actually our charming, dark-haired young brute of a man could not possibly have been your substitute, never fear. And yet both Honorine and Chantal were fond of him. At any rate it was in Chez Lulu that Chantal gained her emotional though not legal majority in a spectacle that you especially would have enjoyed. Chantal could not have been more than fifteen years of age at the time.

Well, anyone with a penchant for the ocean and for summers promising a certain harmless decadence will recognize Chez Lulu from merely its name. You too must have discovered it in a dozen seaside resorts: the harbor barely large enough for a handful of sailboats and a yacht or two, the summer evening rich with the scent of both the rose and the crab, the couples strolling or arousing each other beneath the aromatic trees, and there, fronted by a few feet of powdered sand, there the bar-restaurant which for its disreputable music and growing adolescents and strings of brightly colored lights is indispensable to any such dark and idyllic cove noted for quietude, natural beauty, safe swimming. With Chez Lulu the glorious nighttime summer shore would have offered no champagne vying with spilled beer, no irruption of girlish laughter, no hint of first (or possibly last) romance. Perhaps you are already beginning to smile. I need say no more. The point is that until we concluded that we preferred to spend our summers in an Alpine resort instead of beside the sea in the second and smaller dwelling owned by Honorine's mother, Chantal and Honorine and I were among the most favored patrons of Chez Lulu. There, I can tell you, we ate mussels roasted on olive twigs and laughed with appreciation at Lulu himself, who as owner and master of ceremonies was large, handsome, amusing, and the possessor of an unlimited store of sexually aggressive ways. You know his type: one of those tall, strapping young men who would have made an excellent athlete had it not been for his relentlessly dissolute nature.

Well, by now you will have the scene in mind: a warm late night at Chez Lulu, Honorine and I seated together at a small wicker table at the edge of the sand; the young accordian player and of course Lulu already making spectacles of themselves on a low, crude, wooden stage facing away from the sea and toward the animated crowd of Lulu's favorite patrons old and young; the protective matting of bamboo strips rustling above our heads; the colored lights strung like a bright fringe about the perimeter of the place; the tide going out beyond us in the sultry darkness; Lulu well-launched into the predictable early stages of his exhibitionism …. Yes, everything was conducive to what Lulu had promised us would be a night of surprising and superlative entertainment.

Preliminary to this entertainment, a secret event he had been anticipating for us the entire week, Lulu was in the midst of telling one of his rare, evocative stories which always caused Honorine to smile and settle herself more comfortably into her own special attitude of languor and expectation. The story, as we began to discover, concerned a man who had been sent out by his mistress one rainy afternoon to sell a spray of mimosa on one of the town's busiest thoroughfares. The mistress was a beast of domesticity, the rain was heavy, the street was crowded (mainly with children), the man had a face of amazing scars and was so small and stolid that he was not much better than an impressive dwarf. But most important of all, this maltreated and ridiculous figure was the possessor of a left arm nipped off and drawn to a point at the elbow by one of those familiar accidents of birth that are so prevalent in a nation that still lies under the wing of medievalism.

On he talked, our Lulu, now contributing illustrative gestures to his story, which was punctuated occasionally by a few disrespectful notes of the accordian. Well, the stubborn and resentful lover, such as he was, attempted to sell his enormous branch of mimosa in the rain. He held the mimosa first in his right hand and then in a furious grip in the armpit of his offended partial arm, then in an agony of self-consciousness he shifted the mimosa from armpit to angry hand and back again. The children laughed (as did we of Lulu's audience), the hatless man was wet to the skin, a small but elegant automobile drove past with an enormous heap of gleaming, yellow mimosa covering its entire roof. Well, this story had no ending, of course, but afforded the perspiring Lulu a good many artful strokes along with an increasing number of sour notes to the accordianist. And though Lulu wiped his face and laughed and apologized for being unable to reach the moral of his story, no matter how fast and sonorously he talked, still each and every member of his audience smiled in immediate and pleasurable recognition of that moral, which says in effect that we are a nation of persons not only unashamed of the handicapped but capable, as a matter of fact, of making fun of them.

But now came the moment of the rare entertainment that we were all so primed to receive. The laughter faded, Lulu wiped his partially visible bare chest as well as his face with his handkerchief, the accordianist bestowed upon us a great, gleaming sweep of fanfare music, Lulu made a brief but enticing announcement about the spectacle we were now to see. Then he turned and drew aside an ordinary bed sheet which, throughout the story of the unglorious lover, had concealed the rear portion of the small makeshift stage which, I may now assure you, is all that remains of the long- since abandoned Chez Lulu.

But that night, and at that moment, already we saw no signs of impending physical decay. To the contrary, because there before us on that little stage stood three young girls who were delightfully natural, only moderately shy, and appealingly dressed in the most casual of clothing-in undershirts designed for boys, that is, and in tight denim pants. The families of those young girls were in the audience, each member of the audience knew each one of those most reputable young girls by sight. Need I mention the clapping that followed the removal of the sheet? Need I say that the smallest and most attractive of the girls was our own Chantal?

So she was, and barefooted, like the other two, and like them attired to affect simplicity and to erase undesirable differences between the three. As a matter of fact, Honorine and I were pleasantly and simultaneously aware that these three young, innocent girls were already more provocative, more indiscreetly revealed, than most professional seminude girls in a chorus line. You can imagine the activity which this combination (the adolescent amateurs, the public performance) sent rippling through the audience at Chez Lulu that night. What, we wondered, had he trained our girls to do? And what were we to make of the three large, orange carrots suspended small end downward approximately a meter apart by lengths of ordinary white twine tied to a slender beam affixed overhead? What "act" could Lulu possibly have in mind?

Well, we had not long to wait. Lulu clapped his hands, the accordianist set aside his great gaudy instrument, we of the audience craned or crowded forward, some of us going so far as to leave our tables and sit informally in the cool sand at the foot of the stage. And then, while the two men bustled about, whispering to the girls and positioning them in an exact giggling line across the impromptu stage, so that each one stood directly behind the particular dangling carrot which had previously been designated as her own, suddenly and as if by prearranged signal, all three girls knelt as one with their faces raised, their knees apart, and their hands behind their upright backs. The tips of the immense carrots hung barely within reach of the three sets of pretty lips which, we noticed, had been freshly painted with a glistening red cosmetic for this debut on the stage. There were whistles, random volleys of clapping, more jockeying for better and closer locations from which to see. But what now, Honorine and I asked each other with smiles and raised eyebrows, what now- blindfolds?