Clown Girl - Monica Drake [99]
I’d work with what I had: if religion is the opiate of the masses, religious balloon tricks would be the speedball, the crack cocaine, the glue-sniffing toxic fumes. It was time to call on the greatest of the great masters.
How hard could it be to tie a balloon version of Leonardo da Vinci’s prize painting, The Last Supper? Everybody loves The Last Supper. I pulled a balloon from my pocket and gave it a warm-up snap. Mad Addie leaned against the back wall and watched from a distance.
If I did this right, who knew? Maybe I’d be the next place of pilgrimage. The faithful would come from miles to see God and da Vinci work through my balloon-blowing lungs. I’d make it a salon act, for starters, small-scale and personal.
Traditionally, there’s been no delicacy to balloon art. That’s where I’d revolutionize things. Chiaroscuro, sfumato: I’d find a way to translate da Vinci’s painterly tricks into rubber and air.
Maybe I’d pioneer a line of designer balloon colors in da Vinci’s palette. Why stop there? I could have a van Gogh line, a Gauguin line, Toulouse-Lautrec and Tintoretto.
I blew the balloon halfway up and left space inside to create the right balance between air and emptiness. What could be more delicate than a composition made of air and a lack of air? Instead of leaning on the big twists—neck, elbow, waist—I’d find the small articulations, the pinkie fingers, the back of the hand, the turn of an ankle. The Last Supper is all about gestures.
I sipped my beer, and made the first tiny twist in one end of a yellow balloon.
Da Vinci’s Last Supper is a tangle of bodies; I worked from memory. There were six disciples on either side, bodies clustered in a knot of infighting, power struggles, and deceit. The clustering part would be easy. Only Jesus, in the middle, stood on his own. After Jesus, I’d tie a sheep and put the sheep on the table.
Maybe da Vinci didn’t serve lamb in his painting of the Last Supper, but there was room for interpretation. Jesus himself was the lamb led to the slaughter.
I tied a balloon-sheep Jesus.
Judas had to be handled carefully. I used a green balloon for envy. Art critics would understand. I was so careful with the air; I found the right balance and left room in the balloon to work. I made a tiny twist. That would be Judas’s hand, laid on the shoulder of his neighbor.
I tried to remember the lean in his back, the turn of his head. I hunched over my work, and made a hundred tiny twists. The final piece would be a sculpture in the round, without what they call frontality—it had to work from all sides.
Where were Judas’s hips, his thighs, his cock? I invented the areas that would be covered by the table. Tiny, tiny twists. I’d need more than one balloon. I had the scale wrong. What I made looked like a cluster of grapes. I took out some of the twists and started again. The balloon grew tight, the twists tricky. I wanted his foot to be perfect, full of everything Judas stood for.
And the balloon burst loud as a dropped rack of pint glasses in the morning tavern, zipped out of my hand, and whistled through the room. One old man belched. Mad Addie pushed her way off the wall like a lazy swimmer. She cut through the haze of the tavern air.
She eyeballed me, opened a drawer in the back of the bar, and took out a big black marker. She reached a skinny arm and wrote along the bottom of a cardboard sign taped to the wall: No Balloon Tricks. No Clowns.
Then she turned to me and tapped the words.
“Oh, shit,” an old man said. His bleary eyes opened wide. “They’re on to me.”
I said, “No clowns? But that’s your whole clientele.” The other old man at the bar gave a slow, drunken stare. I said, “I see where this is going—and if fun is outlawed, only outlaws will have fun.” I had to restrain myself from hitting the mechanical wolf whistle call in my pocket.
“I’m having a damn good time,” Mad Addie croaked,