I am an orangutan who has been taken out of the wild as a baby and raised in captivity. Now that I'm here, equipped with language, culture, technology, I've got to find some kind of meaning through existence, a discrete thread to hold onto while I walk through the dark. I can't seem to stop hitting myself over the head with my smallness. And everything keeps moving, moving, shifting always, so by the time I have pinned something down it changes. I am plagued by a desire to pin it down and it keeps rushing past, like telephone poles along a highway. I'm overeducated and undertouched. I'm an artist who wants to be a scientist. I am unhappy.
On Saturday night we go to a drag show called "Electile Dysfunction". It's characterized by Republican irony and audience participation. It stirs up my dormant desire to be behind the scenes. There is one audience member in particular who becomes a running part of the act, Therese. She has a Louise Brooks haircut and plenty of cleavage. After the show I overhear her in the bathroom telling some woman about her John Fluevog shoes. They're a pair of pumps whose heel has a slender middle and a wide platform, like a woman's body. She looks older here than in the dark-blue-hued theatre, and less beautiful. I wonder if I'll end up like her, a fag hag in fashionable shoes and a lifetime of diachronic cultural knowledge.
Something about her feels like a movie extra, indulging in libations instead of coming out on the other side of an experience.
On the bus ride from some place to some place else, an old woman with flabby knees picks up a coin on her way out and drops it in the payment box. It takes her three times as long as it would take me. She's probably an extra too.
Before the show we wander around Chinatown like the tourists we are, touching wooden trinkets, snapping photos of street musicians, purchasing cheapsakes. Well, not me. I don't have anyone who would care one way or the other. I spend ten minutes opening and closing heavily laquered paper parasols. Nathan leaves a plastic Rubik's cube under his chair at a restaurant and Sara carries it all the way to the theatre without him noticing. We have a good laugh at his expense.
It turns out she's obsessive compulsive, everything she does has to be symmetrical -- scratching her head, stepping on a rock. Or occur in pairs -- eating M&M's, reading book chapters. When she was a kid, she used to read until she reached an even chapter and then stop, until one day she realized that meant she was reading an odd number of chapters; now she stops at the odd chapter. What a protagonist.
