The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [10]
“Anyway,” the reporter says, opening her notebook, “I’m Judy.” She taps her long, French-manicured nails on the table. “I was hoping you could just give me some background. How the show got started. How you all met. Then I’d like to interview each of you individually if that’s all right.”
Nods all around.
I sip my black coffee.
Tony’s the first one to pipe up, offering Judy the press release version of our history. It’s not too far from the truth, his story, but most of us have a little something to hide. There’s Barbaro and his nonexistent green card, Lupe on the run from her husband. Magdelena doesn’t want anyone to know she’s over thirty. And then there’s me—the secret of my trick.
Tony and I were sitting on the big Mexican rug in the living room of our old student house, a grand Victorian rental that creaked and leaked through the winter. This was years ago, and about a month after I’d dropped out of college. He offered me a joint. I hardly ever smoked, but I accepted with a shrug. Why not? The inhale tasted like torment. I remembered why I avoided the stuff—reminded me of all the philosophy students with their heads in the clouds, tripping on “God is Dead” and the dehumanization of humanity and the sad truth that no matter how much you smoked, things weren’t okay.
I’d turned to Socrates, Nietzsche, and Confucius because I could accept neither the nihilism of science nor the dogma of religion, but the philosophy department turned out to be just another tangled mess of words.
“Language is meaningless!” my favorite professor cried out in lecture hall the morning before he shot himself in the head. “There is no shared context.” Tears rolled down his sun-wrinkled face.
Imagine dying for lack of a shared context. Almost as absurd as committing murder for lack of a shared vision of God. Still, I wished I’d understood how desperate he felt that morning. Instead, I wrote his words in my red spiral notebook. Language is meaningless. There is no shared context. As if we were going to be quizzed on that.
I tried to focus on Tony now, his coffee black skin, angular features, the stubble on his chin, hair cut so short you couldn’t tell it was curly, the words he strung together into a rambling monologue. The two of us had dated briefly when Tony first moved in to the student house, but our kisses always felt awkward. The sex was sweet but passionless. When he finally said, “I’m attracted to you, Frankka, but I don’t think it’s romantic,” I had to agree. Now he spoke of lucid dreams and low-impact living. He’d recently quit his job, didn’t want to look for another. He’d taken a vow not to cause suffering. Seems simple enough: So That I May Not Cause Suffering. And at first it had been something like simple. His goal was to contain his habitual mean streak, the little comments that passed for humor but were intended to belittle: Nice shirt. Ha, ha. You can’t really like that band. Ha, ha. You’re not that fat. Ha, ha. I guess you haven’t read Ginsburg. Simple, but pretty soon just containing his mean streak hardly seemed enough. He learned to hold his tongue when he wanted to use words to wound, but as soon as he’d gotten a handle on that, other ways in which he caused suffering presented themselves. He had to stop eating meat, of course. Couldn’t even kill a spider. He had to close his bank accounts. His savings were being invested in unjust enterprises all over the world. He stopped buying clothes made in sweatshops. He’d never realized how hard it was to find a T-shirt that hadn’t been dyed or sewn in Thailand or Honduras. He couldn’t keep his job at the flower stand—workers in Ecuador were being poisoned to harvest those gorgeous, scentless roses. He had to convert his little diesel hatchback to run on grease because he saw the blood of innocents flowing from every gas pump. So That I May Not Cause Suffering. Within a month, Tony had become just another organic-cotton-wearing unemployed vegetarian street musician who couldn’t pay the rent on his six-foot-by-six-foot