The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [12]
I did and I didn’t. I’d never been that into Greek mythology, but it made me happy to see Tony so fired up. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to perform my trick publicly, either, but I agreed to give it a try. What else is a dropout from the philosophy department with a knack for bleeding going to do?
And by nightfall, the idea had started to grow on me. There was something absurd and alluring about it—we’d sell everything we had for next to nothing at a huge yard sale, give up the comfort of our own Rock Soft futons, ignore all the voices that say You Can’t Do That, and trust that the world would somehow support us.
Right away, Tony thought of his friend Magdelena, trapeze artist and all-around diva. They’d met at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, had been an item for a few months, were both in California now, unemployed. Tony said, “You’ve got star talent, Frankka, but every road show needs at least one member with an ego that stretches to the heavens.”
Magdelena showed up on a Thursday, wearing fishnet stockings and a peacock feather in her hair, looked me up and down just to make sure she was the more beautiful. The three of us rehearsed in that living room for hours and days, our other roommates and their lovers drifting in and out like stray cats.
The problem, it turned out, wasn’t that I had any difficulty performing in front of friends or strangers, but that I had to be legitimately hungry to get the blood moving. After a meal—even after a snack—no blood would flow. We experimented with degrees of starvation. If I ate a light breakfast just before 9:00 in the morning, I could achieve the stigmata by about 6:00 P.M. No breakfast at all, and I’d be good to go by 4:00 in the afternoon. If we were going to take this show on the road, careful attention would have to be paid to my diet and nutrition.
Mercifully, Magdelena had been anorexic for most of her teen years and knew the precise caloric margin between livable hunger and the kind of famine that can land a girl in the hospital. “It’s all in the nutrient-rich vegetables,” she assured me, and within a few days she’d concocted a sweet beet-apple juice that looked like communion wine and revived me easily. After rehearsals, she fed me plates of lentils and mustard greens.
By February, we weren’t quite ready to go, but rent was due and we had no money, so we sold everything and packed up the rest, hung a St. Christopher medal from the rearview mirror of Tony’s little red grease-mobile, and headed off to perform on sidewalks and in a few cafés from Santa Cruz to San Diego, wowing the street kids and horrifying well-heeled tourists along the way.
At a pizza parlor in Mesa, Arizona, we found Madre Pia—just Pia at the time—a washed-up transvestite with big dreams. She’d planned to save her counter tips and move to San Francisco to launch a comedy levitation drag show. It wasn’t a chance meeting. A hippie chick in Orange County had seen our little show. “You have to meet my friend Pia,” she insisted. Then her beeper went off. “Oh, my God, it’s synchronicity! I bet that’s Pia now!” But it was the girl’s mother. “Anyway. Pia. She’s huge, but she can actually levitate. Swear to God. She used to perform in this Latin drag show in Santa Fe, but she isn’t Latin and plus some serious I-don’t-know-what shit went down between the performers, and anyway, the thing completely fell apart and she just got superdepressed. She hasn’t been performing for—I don’t know—a year? Anyway. She’s doing nothing. Living nowhere. God, you’d love her.”
The hippie girl’s pitch didn’t seem all that promising, but on our way out of Phoenix, Tony called and booked a