Performance Blank

I'm a gangly girl. Other girls have thin and elegant bodies from hard workouts and disciplined diets. My metabolism simply burns off chocolate cakes, pizza, and beers like it's nothing. That physical identity is a symbol for my whole life. Things simply fall into my whole lap, and I stagger through life without grace.

Mary is my best friend. We met as seatmates on a plane doing shots of single serving, comped for three hours on the tarmac tequila shots with tomato juice, the only vaguely fruity mixer. Those are called Bloody Marias, and Mary gushed out her first period-bleeding-through-clothes-story without any grace to me. She had been on the public bus to school when she noticed the strangely wet sensation in her groin and the growing stain, which she had at first attributed to sitting down on a dirty seat. When she went into all the gory details of the physics and her emotions to me - a mere ten-minute-long acquaintance, I knew that she was cut off the same clothes as me.

After the third Bloody Maria, we were doing impressions of the various stewardesses' noses. The tall, blond Swedish-looking one held her nose high like an aristocrat. Mary pressed her cheeks together like a mouse and paraded her nose around to pretend to be the aristocrat one. I picked the hard-working Japanese one. Her nose had a short nose bone, which made her nostrils appear as two prominent black holes to the viewer in front. We were genuinely concerned in a way that only drunk girls can be about the rain landing inside of her nose. I put my index and middle finger into my nostrils to lift up my nose and snort around like a pig. Our physiques may have drawn eyes at first, but our behavior drew headshakes.

My roommates had a similar experience. In NYC, $50 more or less in rent can make a serious difference. It might mean access to a whole shelf of your own in the fridge or a window that shows more than the wall of the opposite house at a five-foot distance. So I picked a housing situation with five guy roommates. They must have been overjoyed to get a girl into the boy stink dorm, which caused them to undercharge me $200 a month. However, after the first evening, all their interest in the ever-instant hope of guys to get laid had evaporated.

I do want a guy to romance me, but I have no grace at times. The other day at the Union Square subway stop, I pushed a middle-aged guy into the subway door so that the door would close on him, try to crush him, and allow my friend enough time to run down the stairs. He looked angry at me. Those subway doors are pretty harsh, which is why I didn't block them with my own body. Yet, he saw that I was a woman and didn't see it fit to leash out at a woman in public. I think it's a self-reinforcing cycle. Because I don't expect to get romanced and cherished, I don't even try, and because I don't try, guys kind of back away from me once they see my graces.

So Mary is my best friend. We have coffee or dinner almost every day together. We tell each other everything. Like Mary told me when she gave her stepbrother a hand job under the table. He didn't get to cum or anything, but she fondled and pumped him for a good two minutes at the family reunion last year. An act of delayed rebellion of an adult against the oppression of family is how she described her motivation. Sitting there in her mid-twenties, she had the emotions of stifling, life-draining family norm restraint distress her immensely. Breaking family taboo felt so freeing, especially as she listened to the unyielding and unbending tone in her father's voice at the head of the table. "I'll teach you!" she had whispered silently to herself while she pumped on her stepbrother's dick. Dessert came with mom walking around the table, and she had to quickly pack away his cock.

Naturally, when Mary signed up for a stand-up comedy class, she wanted me to join her. I was reluctant at first. That whole thing of being on stage and the center of attention wasn't my thing. I simply wanted to get on with my life, and there were many things that I did that I knew should hide in the shadows. I feel a little bit like a rat, one of those mammals that I see scurrying in the streets in between the garbage bags that leak the black and brown juice on the pavement. They always seem very busy on getting some gain like a slice of pizza, and each time a person steps in their presence, they know that they have to run. I've been through all the drawers of my roommates. And when my clean clothes stack is empty, I think of nothing to take some of their clothes. They are, of course, larger than me. But Gabe has t-shirts with big prints of pop stars like Mariah Carey and Kurt Cobain. I can wear those like a dress with a belt from Doron's collection - beautiful metal, rock, and otherwise studded showpieces of belts. I wear the belt loose so that it hangs on one hip and drapes down below the other hip.

Stand-up comedy wasn't my thing. I got a lot of anxiety being in front of people. I might sound very relaxed as I'm telling you my story, but in front of people, I get tense, I get shaky, and I lose all my words. The instructor told us to let go of trying to be funny. If we simply relaxed and told personal stories, we'd randomly stumble on good material because life is funny. What is laughter? Laughter is a psychological process to release tension. Life is fully of tension and awkwardness. The more we'd let the pure authentic us flow out, the funnier we would get. And the more we focused on being funny, the more we would become tense and artificial. That was the sweet lullaby that he was singing us, but I didn't get any laughter.

As everyone in class got more flamboyant, dramatic, and edgy, they learned how to tingle the nerves of other students in beer-through-the-nose-puking laughter and knee-to-the-groin-shock laughter. All of their success made me more tense. I seriously dreaded going to class. I'd get terrible dreams the night before. The last couple classes, I stopped trying. I simply endured because Mary wouldn't let me quit.

The final performance was the worst. Everyone in the class would perform on the actual stage in the school in front of a live audience. They all had tested and refined punch lines into sequences. They were all so happy to realize their dream. We had a group huddle circle before where we all had to put our hands in the middle. Our instructor gave us a speech. Peering through the stage curtain, I could see those blinding lights. Every sign that hyped them with energy made the muscles in my body tense. My brain shut down in terror.

When it was my turn, I slipped between the curtain onto the stage. I slipped in a way where I still hoped that I could be like one of those street rats where I could slip away quickly enough before anyone noticed me more than a fleeing shadow. But the stage lights overhead blinded me with white. The applause was expected, a little louder like in class, but there were cheers. Cheers were coming from all directions. The uplifting energy of the cheers shocked me. I raised my hand to shield the stage lights. The audience faces were all looking straight at me. "Oh my gosh, fifty people are fully staring at me!"

"Hi, my name is Dextra...." I read from my cue card.

That was the last thing I could remember. I was standing on the stage. I stared at the last of my cue cards. I must have gone through the whole deck. The audience was roaring and applauding like my show was at the end. I couldn't remember what happened. I had started with my name and then blanked out. I tried to get my bearings. It felt like I was standing on stage in silence for an eternity with the audience falling into the rhythm of shouting "encore." The only face that wasn't in complete rapture was Mary's in the front row. She was pale like a ghost. Her mouth and eyes were wide open. Her expression was of utter dismay that said, "I can't believe that you did this." She seemed very upset with me.

I staggered backwards, searching for the gap in the curtain. Behind the stage was the welcoming darkness, our instructor smiled at me big. He handed me a blonde beer, "Your really gonna need this." Craig, the best student in class, bowed in front of me and incarnated, "I am not worthy. I couldn't keep track of how many fists and high-five hands were reached my way as I tried to struggle away from all the attention. I had no clue what I had done on stage. My memory was completely blank except for the first and last moments.

In the corridor to the restrooms, I found a little solitude. The hallway was so narrow that two people couldn't pass without both rotating sideways. Steel pipes ran across the ceiling. The wall was ripped and beaten. The feeling was of a leftover place from an old era of NYC when everything was squeezed for space to a miniature tightness that was below code in the rest of the world. Drunks and late-night rowdies had banged and degraded the place. The bathroom was so cramped that one had to straddle the toilet. The lock was ripped out because someone had kicked in the door, the splinters still pointing. Someone else had put a chain through a hole in the wall and door to keep the toilet closed for privacy.

In that roughness was a guy with a dad bod and full beard standing. If he was waiting or hanging out was unclear. He wore a metal band t-shirt but seemed more like the guy who got stuck at home on the couch like a go-nowhere kind of guy. That explains why he was at a student theatre when NYC, the world capital, offered the best of the best in cultural affairs. It explains why he was hanging out alone in a hallway instead of with his friends in the theatre. He was playing with a pair of purple panties in his hands.

Yes, those were panties that he was fondling, rolling around, and savoring. The purple looked very familiar. The lace rim had a distinct look. "They look just like my panties," I told him as I pressed my way past him to break the spell of his inappropriate behavior. His whole belly and fatty chest heaved laughing, like I had done a really good one. His eyes sparkled with joy. He was way too animated by a corny joke and left an odd air like he suggested that they were my panties. I slipped into the toilet.

When I pulled down my jeans, I was naked underneath. My panties were gone. With the sensation of a hole in my belly, I wondered if the panties in his hands were actually mine. The likeness was too uncanny for them not to be. My panties had disappeared. The next rational conclusion was that in order to get my panties off, I must have taken my jeans off on stage. The surreal suggestion of me bottomless on stage was outlandish, but it would explain all the praise that I had gotten.

I peed, wiped, and flushed. When I walked out, the dad bod guy was still there. He was cradling my purple lace panties in both his hands like a beggar receives a gift. His nose dabbed into the panties to sniff. He smiled warmly at me with bliss on his smiling cheeks. He was so at ease with sniffing my panties in front of me that it implied that I had given him the panties very willingly and approvingly to do such things. What had I done on stage?

Mary would have to tell me what happened. I went up a flight of stairs, down a hallway, down another flight of stairs, and through three doors to make it through the maze of a prewar NYC building to the audience side. I found Mary at the front row table with her purse in hand. She was all ready to go but waiting. When she saw me, she came towards me. She hit my face with her flat hand. The sound and sharpness were intense. I felt like a cupboard of plates, cups, and bowls was raining down on me, so shocked was I! "Fuck you!" she screamed at me and ran off.

The sensation of not knowing what I had done was strange. Of course, I felt like the very fabric of reality was tearing. Yet, at the same time, a soothing guilty pleasure was inside my heart, way deep down. I knew that I shouldn't allow anybody to be aware of it. I knew that I had to play the surprised and stunned damsel, but I had a sheepish hunger to find out what I had done. There was absolution to having done things without remembering. It was like I could have done the craziest things and could get away with it. My heart was burning with the wish for me to have done something very crazy and then to be able to disavow responsibility for it. It's like youthful indiscretion doesn't count. So maybe, my stage blank act out didn't count either. I kind of wanted someone to tell me what I had done, but I also didn't want people to tell me because I was sure what I imagined was way worse than what had happened.

Our instructor Dan found me. He told me to see the school director right away in her office. So I made my way through the tumult of the audience gathering their things, slowly shoveling out, and getting stuck in a giant traffic jam to climb out of the basement. As I was shoveling one step at a time forward with the crowd. The guy next to me told me how he totally agreed that my left boob was larger than my right boob. He spoke with such a tone of familiarity like we had a profound and cozy one-on-one about the asymmetry of my boobs. I assumed that I must have really opened up on stage and had a deep bonding moment with the audience. It's strange because the audience members feel like they are having a one-on-one conversation when it gets really personable, but the performer doesn't even know the person.

At the end of the audience seating was a ladder. The ladder led up to the director's office, which used to be the light projectionist booth when the place had been an acting theatre. However, stand-up has very simple lighting needs, which is why the little space was converted into the director's office. I climbed up there. Rung by rung, I rose across the throngs of people wanting to get out of the stifling room with the smell of stale beer. Like you know if someone is looking at the back of your head while you wait at a red light, that feeling overcame me strongly. A silence was spreading behind me. Then a chant rose, "Give me one fan! All I need is one fan!" They sang it to the tune of the Nas song "One mic" where the singer bragged that all he needed was one mic to show the world who he was. I felt like they were chanting the theme song to my stage performance.

I waved at them and quickly disappeared through the door into the director's office. The ceiling was so low that my hair touched it. A foldout chair between the door and the filing cabinet was all the space that I had to sit down in the little booth. The director was an old woman whose skin had wrinkled from too many performances overseen to number. She had been living and breathing shows her whole life to where it embodied her and had drained all youth from her. She definitely was way too old to still perform, but she knew the business inside out.

"Sit down, hon," she told me while pulling from her vape inside her palm. "Don't worry. On the scale of things I've seen, your stunt was nothing. In the seventies, we had no limits."

"To be honest, I don't know what happened. Could someone fill me in?" I tried to explain politely.

"Shove the pretense up your arse!" she replied without dwelling on it, merely swatting my question away like a pesky fly. "I've good news and bad news for you. The bad news is that you are expelled from school. You've broken too many rules to be put on probation. The good news is that the audience loved you. I want to offer you a slot at our 11 pm program where we don't have to worry about kids being in the audience. I'll pay you $5 per ticket sold. We have fifty seats. If you manage to draw enough of a crowd, we can sell another twenty standing tickets."

I was unprepared for both consequences. I froze up. She had no patience.

"Your stalling ain't gonna get you one cent more. It's $5. Take it or leave it. Tell me yes and I put your name down right now or I'll write down Andrew. It's your choice. I want it to be you. You're a star in the making!" she barked quickly.

This was one of those NYC moments were it counts to be fast. They say a NYC minute is the equivalent of an entire hour elsewhere.

"Yes," I said plainly.

"Congratulations! Now get the fuck out!" she ordered me.

I climbed down the ladder. I shuffled out with the stragglers in the crowd. I got slaps on the back and "you go, girl"s called to my face. The jubilant atmosphere and warm acknowledgment was addictive. Everywhere I went, people felt the urge to celebrate, and they seemed to be elated and proud to be able to express their cheering. My heart whispered to me all the way out to the dark city streets and home on the subway ride: "I like this. I want more. I crave more. Give me this again! Oh, to feel that warm soup of outpouring again!"

Coming home was a real downer. An envelope with my name on it was on the kitchen table. It said, "Rent is due: $859.57." Three of the boys were playing computer games on the TV in the living room. Doron shouted at me, "stop stealing my jeans and claim they make the best boyfriend jeans!" and slammed the door shut. The place smelled like boy farts, dirty clothing, and dried cum from wanking sessions. My contribution was clogging the shower drain with my long hair. My room was so small that the queen-sized bed was touched by walls on three sides. The front of the room was the only floor space, where I had spread out my shoes. Landing in my real life was painful after the high. I couldn't stand staying home longer than I needed to finish sleeping.

The next evening, Mary and I met up for drinks. She seemed to have settled down.

"Sorry, Dextra. I acted like an ass yesterday instead of a supportive friend. Of course, as a performer, you are going to draw on your family and friends. I should know that. It's simply par for the course of being friends with an amazing comedian. In a way, I'm honored to be in your show. And you didn't reveal that it was me. You were so badass! We should celebrate with shots!" said Mary with a conciliatory tone.

"Mary, I have no clue what I did. I blanked out! Will you tell me?" I asked her.

"Girl, you went so far out, I can't even take the words in my mouth to describe what you did!" she replied.

I tried to prod her to tell me, but she genuinely seemed scared to even broach the subjects. All of that only increased the allure of what I done to myself. We always are extra curious to find out things about us, but this was a-whole-nother level. All the little hints like "What the audience saw!", "That girl in the audience was so shocked, she fell off her chair!", and "I completely lost track of where your clothes went at times, but you always seemed to find who had them.", they only made my feverish mind draw more wild fantasies about what I had done.

When I prepared my jokes, I had a hard time. How could I entertain the audience as the first act of the after-dark 11 pm show when I had only a single class behind me? I am shy in a way and not shy. I am not shy when it's about stealing pizza from my roommates or getting some advantage. I am not shy when it is about being rude and inconsiderate at times. But I'm very shy when it is about talking about myself or drawing attention to me. Coming out of my shell (more specifically, my alter ego that came out of the shell) was something that I looked forward to with rabid anticipation.

When Saturday night came, I was behind the stage with only three other comedians. As the least-known performer, I naturally had to go first to warm up the crowd. I had put on a cute skirt, high heels, and a blouse that showed my midriff. The other performers had less visible anxiety than the students. Their faces were calm. Yet the had a lot more intensity. The focus with which they shoveled the cue cards and practiced dramatic motions was with iron focus. Being backstage where the magic was prepared was intoxicating.