Although I sometimes longed to be done with this life, I never considered suicide. Because of books, especially those written by the wonderful Mr. Dickens, I believed this was a made world with profound meaning. I kept faith that each of us has a purpose and that if we fulfill it, we will rise from even the lowest position as surely as a night mist rises from a lake in the morning sun. After my two sets on the Blue Mood stage, however, after Friday became Saturday, as I was lying abed in my room, I spent time contemplating how one might kill oneself in a painless fashion.
Six years were to pass before Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald would write,In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.When I read those words in 1936, I was conveyed by a vivid memory to that motel room in San Diego.
Long before Blue Mood, I had readThe Great Gatsby. The novel was too acerbic for my taste, but I identified with Gatsby. He might have been a shady character, even a bootlegger, but I sympathized with his yearning to be accepted in a higher social strata than the one into which he was born, to be thought respectable.
In the real dark night of the soul, where I found myself at three o’clock on that San Diego night, I thought of the ill-fated Jay Gatsby. His problem was that he tried to lift himself with the wrong hoist, by accumulating wealth and mimicking the attitudes and fashions of those who presumed to be his betters. He did not believe this was a made world with profound meaning or that he had a purpose greater than his own needs and desires if only he could find it. Had he believed as much, he would have understood that the only chance we have of being lifted ourselves is by lifting others.
Although I was a biological oddity, a freak, I had been waiting all my life for the opportunity to lift others and thereby rise with them. That dismal California night, I could not know that my purpose was soon to be placed before me and that the challenge of fulfilling it would be the work of a lifetime.
Two
In Blue Mood, two crescent-shaped tiers of tables stepped down to a small dance floor that fronted the stage. A white cloth dressed every table. Each place setting featured a blue charger, flatware in an Art Deco motif, and short-stemmed glasses that would be filled with ice water as soon as the diners settled in their chairs. The lighting was romantic but not dim.
The menu featured everything from pasta Bolognese to lobster, and the food was priced below cost. Those who ate a filling meal tended to have a greater capacity for liquor than those who came only to drink, and this establishment was in business to mint money from alcohol. A single shot of rye sold for a dollar. Prohibition had made booze more profitable than drugs. The wines here were not the sixty-day bottled-in-the-basementvin ordinaireserved in less elevated joints, but fine vintages. If that was what you wanted, you’d better bring a fat wallet.
No less so than in the Roaring Twenties, the clientele arrived well attired, men in suits and ties, women in high heels and the smartest dresses. Soon Blue Mood was busy with conversation and laughter. From Lucky Strikes and Pall Malls, ribbons of smoke unraveled into a general haze.
The collapse of the stock market, dubbed “Black Tuesday,” was one year in the past, unemployment was soaring, banks were beginning to fail, and the Great Depression was underway. Yet in the United States of America as in all countries throughout history, regardless of the form of government, some prospered while many suffered in times of economic disaster. Blue Mood catered to those who had suffered very little or not at all.
As in all of these more elegant venues, the night was divided into two seatings, the first from five o’clock to nine, the second from nine until two in the morning.
Two seatings meant two performances.
An elevated island to the left of the stage accommodated the nine-piece band. A lone pianist provided dinner music for the first hour, followed by an hour of easy-listening dance music by the full band. The floor show usually lasted an hour and a quarter, including two fifteen-minute opening acts.
Captain and I were always the second act, though “act” was too grand a word for the tommyrot and vulgarity that he was peddling. If I’d been nothing more bizarre than a three-eyed girl, we would never have been booked anywhere. Conversely, if I had not been attractive from the neck up, if my head had been as shocking as the rest of me, many in the audience might have left in disgust or fled in horror, or at least parted ways with the dinner they had recently eaten. It was that dichotomy, the contradiction between face and body, that made me a creature of fascination, a bargain-basement star in the bootlegging bottom of the culture.
A stagehand wheeled me into the spotlight in what appeared to be the upright coffin of a mummified pharaoh, which had been shipped from our prior engagement in Los Angeles. The closed box was carved and painted with an ornate Egyptian motif, although what Egypt had to do with me or Captain or anything else in the act was never explained.Captain thought it would intrigue the audience, establish a sense of the exotic and mysterious even before I appeared.
To the audience, he spoke of mermaids and centaurs and Gorgons, although I wasn’t like any of those half-human half-animal and fully mythological beings. He recounted how adventurous missionaries happened upon me in a Brazilian jungle, though I had never been in Brazil and had never met a missionary. Thirty-two years earlier, Mr. H. G. Wells had publishedThe War of the Worlds, and throughout the first two decades of the new century, his work inspired numerous stories of alien encounters both on Earth and on distant planets. Captain wished to play to the public interest in science fiction by teasing the audience with the possibility that I was not a child of this world.
When on cue I opened the lid of the Egyptian casket and stepped onto the stage, the audience responded with a collective gasp. Some issued cries of distress. Others stood up from their chairs, not in alarm but to get a better view of what had come before them. I was perplexed about why a supper club audience always reacted with more excitement and apprehension than the marks showed when they reached my stall in the Museum of the Strange. Perhaps it was because the carnie pitchman prepped the rubes to expect a dash of horror with the wonder and because a carnival was a venue where grotesqueries were more expected than in a speakeasy catering to the upper crust.
If some patrons thought that I, though apparently almost naked, must be cleverly costumed, their misapprehension was soon dispelled. For one thing, a nightclub accommodating two hundred is an intimate space, much more so than the average movie theater. Furthermore, willing members of the audience were brought onto the stage to have a closer look, to touch me.
My job was first to condone their goggling and their questing hands. You might expect that those who came forward at Captain’s invitation would be the most boorish in the audience, and you wouldbe right. They were mostly men, but when women stroked and prodded me, they were usually less respectful of the sanctity of my person than were their male companions. Captain insisted I smile at them as they touched me, but I would not be that gracious.
However, I did forgive them for their cold indifference to my feelings, for their rudeness and crude remarks. They had visited Blue Mood to become inebriated, and by the time the floor show began, they’d achieved that condition. Indeed, they were descending to an even lower level of cognitive impairment. When sober, they might have been better people. Even saints on their long journey toward canonization often stray from a righteous path.
When the touching and poking ended and everyone had returned to their seats, Captain and I followed a script he had written and we’d memorized. Our dialogue was stilted and stupid, but it didn’t seem to matter. It was the kind of hokum that the marks—whether poor or rich, educated or not—always believe because theywantto believe it, because it spices their lives with mystery and wonder that they haven’t known since Sunday became just another day of the week. In telling my fabricated story, I was required to be coy while seeming to let slip intriguing details that suggested I might be concealing a terrible or at least shocking truth about my origin.
The performers who preceded us were often magicians, though sometimes it was a juggler, perhaps a pair of acrobats who could astonish with their tumbling and balancing feats, or a performing dog and his master. They never gave me any grief. However, in the interest of encouraging repeat business, management wanted to send customers home in a pleasantly besotted condition with a memory of laughter, so the main act in a five-star speakeasy was always a comedian. Funnymen could be trouble. Of those who watched me from the wings rather than waiting in a dressing room for a call, some saw me as rich material. Theyrushed onstage before we could leave, before the master of ceremonies announced them.
Like many of his kind, the stand-up comedian at Blue Mood that year, Buddy Beamer, specialized in vulgar, smutty jokes for which the audience had prepared by dumbing down on whoopee water. With a well-rounded body like that of Oliver Hardy and Charlie Chaplin’s mustache, wearing a windowpane-plaid suit straight out of vaudeville and a hat that was too small for his head, Buddy looked as much like a cartoon as like a comedian. The first night that he appeared ahead of his intro and fanfare, he crossed the stage while daubing at his eyes with a handkerchief, as though my appearance evoked in him such pity that he could not repress his tears. He went to one knee beside my chair and posed a few questions that any genuinely compassionate person might have asked, although his manner was so unctuous and his voice so fulsome that it was apparent he regarded me as a figure of fun. The faux compassion soon evolved into impudence and mockery. No matter how I responded to him—solemnly or with a wisecrack or with stony silence—he had a comeback that was crude but also amusing. Although he was a heartless creep, he was quick witted; I’ll give him that much. At first the audience reacted with subdued, nervous laughter. Perhaps they thought this was part of our act and well rehearsed, because they soon threw off whatever misgivings they might have had, rewarding the funnyman with hearty laughter and occasional applause. When he asked why I was wearing briefs but was otherwise naked, I knew we were descending to depths that comedians in other clubs had not dared to plumb. Buddy wanted me to take off my pants so that, as he said, “we can see what all the boys on Mars are talking about.” All my life, humiliation after humiliation had been piled on me, but it was only at that moment in Blue Mood that I felt as if I might break under the weight of it all.
Whenever a comedian intruded on the end of our act and kept me onstage for an extra five minutes, Captain Farnam welcomed it. With rare exception, the response of the audience was enthusiastic, and happy customers ensured a happy club manager. What was I, after all, but a performing dog, and what more should a dog expect than to be provided with food and a dry, warm place to sleep?
That evening, between the first show and the second, I schemed to make Buddy Beamer appear to be a fool and a bully. I assumed he would intrude again, repeating those questions and punch lines that drew the biggest laughs in the prior show. I crafted counterpunches wittier than anything that he had said earlier. For the first time, I looked forward to being exhibited to a crowd of hooch hounds.
Nothing went as I anticipated. The comic had a quicker wit than he’d revealed in our first encounter. As I hoped, my practiced lines drew laughs at his expense, though his ripostes were funnier. To my chagrin, the audience assumed that our exchanges were as scripted as the conversation between Captain and me, that for a few minutes the funnyman and I were a comedy team.
I didn’t know how I could endure eight more shows at Blue Mood, with Buddy Beamer watching from the wings like a vampire who fed not on blood but on the emotional and mental resources of his victims.
Whatever I once had been, whatever I became in the years after that ordeal in 1930, whatever I might yet become as I write this, I have never been nor ever will be a prophet. The future doesn’t bloom before me in a crystal ball, and I cannot interpret the language of the lines in my palms or yours. I dare to hope I know my ultimate destiny when this body withers and I rise from it, but the years before me on this world are a mystery that I can marvel at—but never solve—as clock hands carry me forward day by day.
On the afternoon of September 6, 1930, ensconced in a stained armchair in a seedy motel room, I tried to leave my time and placeand worries by immersing myself in the nineteenth-century England of Thackeray’sVanity Fair. Whenever I read, I see the novel’s scenes vividly in my mind, in full color and three dimensions. However, on this occasion, and to my dismay, Buddy Beamer repeatedly appeared in the drama, as anachronistic as a caveman. He posed as a member of the Crawley family, now as one of their servants, and yet again as a visiting friend, always with a sinister smile, togged out in a windowpane suit and a too-small hat.
I finally had to putVanity Fairaside and steel myself for the evening’s first floor show at Blue Mood.
