The Infernal Beauty of Vaudeville #1

Brendan Kiley

They lined up, impatiently chewing tongues and distending cheeks, wishing and trying to pop out their eyes (like the polished balls the blind seven-foot drummer kept in his sockets) to drift through the line of fellow spectators-to-be, past the wooden ticket window, into the canvas tent theater. That tent was Carnegie Hall and a gothic cathedral, a concentration camp and a truck-stop bar. It was an opera of cruelty the prisoners invited their gawking, mocking captors to attend - and charged them a fee to jeer and cower at the beauty of the kicked. (It is always the kicked who are more beautiful - their scars dance a pantomime of bizarre history, their warts dull light and soak up rainwater as a text of innovation and a small riot against measurable time.)

The spectators-to-be never knew where their prisoners came from, and that was best. Kristen (the gangly, dancing leader made of wire hangers with hair prickly and dry as straw) was the only one of the bunch who would call this muted countryside his home - but he didn't. Home is less a place one comes from than a place to which one returns. And belongs.

Hope, the small, old paper-bag woman who sang through her hooked nose tanned around the nostrils from exhaling pipe smoke for years and years, came all the way from Kansas, but the rest had trudged from Spain, Morocco, France, Russia. Blind, one-legged jugglers and toothless old animal trainers huddled behind the tent each day, not speaking to each other and taking long drinks from label-less bottles and stuffing their cheeks with bread, cheese, and apples before shuffling mechanically to the wings when their cues neared, fixing expressions before they rolled on stage.

Some couldn't even do that - some winced from backstage and were more childish, alien, and arousing for their refusal, or inability, to attempt reconciliation with their captors.