Cabaret

“So… are we gonna go see Hannah and Kayla at that cabaret thing?”

“Yeah — what time is it now?”

“Ten after nine.”

“Let’s go.”

The venue was only a few blocks away, and they strolled over to 17th and headed past Mission towards Van Ness.

“How much is it again?”

“Ten bucks.”

“Jesus. Let’s see if we can find somebody to let us in.”

After a moment: “So what did you think of the film?”

“I liked it; it was good.”

“I kind of thought… you know how the Fool said everyone has a purpose? Well, maybe Gelsomina’s purpose was, she made Zampanò feel human.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Twice she made him feel human: the time he left her in the cold with the blankets, and when he found out she’d died and he cried at the end.”

“Hmmmph. So what was his purpose?”

“I don’t know,” Milo laughed. “He didn’t have one.”

They had reached the theater hosting the cabaret. It was a crisp, pleasant night by now, with that feeling of expansiveness peculiar to San Francisco, in which the breeze dies down and the illuminated street transforms into a vast, welcoming stage. And what is Milo’s purpose, thought Horner, and what is my purpose, our purpose in each other’s lives? They were still trying to figure that out. Horner loved and admired Milo as a star kid brother, with a great, proprietary sort of love, and there was a desperate energy that made things awkward at times. It wasn’t there when they were in a group. In a group, they were charming, devilish cohorts, but alone together it was like flypaper rubbing between them. Sometimes Horner found himself shy as a lover on a first date. They were looking for an apartment together. Or rather, Horner was looking, and Milo was going along with it, because he didn’t have a place of his own and would soon have to vacate his temporary digs house-sitting for an artist named Nao, who was currently on a fellowship in New York. Would Horner ever really know him, or was he just trying to get him in captivity—to study him, feed off his energy, bring him down to life size, everyday life size, with a job and bills to pay?

“Here it is.”

“Yup.”

“So, it’s ten bucks, eh?”

“Yeah.”

They stood out front and watched the casually beautiful figures coming and going through the glass doors, smoking cigarettes and chatting among themselves.

“There’s gotta be a way to get inside.”

They strolled to the next set of doors, which was the performers’ entrance, and peered down the long hallway that led to dressing rooms, trying to glimpse anyone they knew flitting about inside.

“I know that one,” said Horner, spotting a petite blonde who’d participated in one or two of Hannah’s rehearsals some months back. She flashed past them on the stairs and vanished. No good—no way she’d remember Horner from such a distant encounter.

Horner had an idea. He led them around to the side of the building, remembering how he’d stood there looking up at the window and mooning over a dancer named Olive one night last December when she’d had a late rehearsal with Hannah and the others. Olive had flashed through Horner’s life in a brief, hot fling before flitting back to her native New Zealand.

There they all were, the dancers, in the big practice room up on the second floor. Milo and Horner could see them walking downstairs to the dressing room, singly and in pairs, as clearly as if they were watching them on a movie screen — but also as impossibly distant. And it was no use, because the dressing room window had been papered over.

Eventually, however, they managed to catch Alan, stepping out for a smoke; he discreetly hustled them inside.

They each bought a beer from the concession stand and rushed in to see the fire-eater. She was a short-haired brunette in face paint and broad hilarious clown pants held up by suspenders, and when Milo and Horner stepped into the dim hush by the risers, she carried a torch in each hand. Stepping quietly closer, they could smell the alcohol in which the nubs of the torches had been drenched. Just as the Great Zampanò had only really had one trick he ever performed in circus sideshows, so she did the same trick over and over again: She twirled the torches around, and then she thrust her head way back, opening her mouth wide, and lowered one of the torches to her lips, swallowing the flaming ball. Then she’d lift it out, and a bright flame bloomed from her mouth about a foot in the air before expiring with a rippling sound.

The crowd went oooh-ahhhh, cheering and whistling.

Then in a very stylized way, like a matador holding a sword up to his nose to sight along the edge for the final thrust, she turned her body sideways and blew the torches out one at a time. Sometimes, as she repeated the whole routine with slight variations, she’d make a show out of not being able to blow out the torches, like a child straining to blow out her birthday candles, and she’d glance poutingly at the audience as if begging their help. As one body they all sucked in a deep breath and pretended to blow with her, and the flames were at last extinguished.

She was sex personified. Despite the greasepaint and the clown pants — perhaps because of them — this was the essential message she put across. Or so it seemed to Horner. He thought of the actor who’d portrayed Gelsomina in La Strada and her performance, like something out of commedia dell’arte, loaded with pathos in ways that few of the dancers and artists he’d met in the City were willing or able to approach. Of course she’d been a mature actor, directed by a master. Still, much of what Horner encountered—at readings, galleries, performances—seemed cut from similar cloth.

They walked out to the lobby to finish their beers, accompanied by Alan. He leaned close to Milo for an eager hug; Horner received no such greeting, as for whatever reason, things between them had grown cold over the course of rehearsals for the Alice Project. He stuck his hand out and it hovered there for a moment before Alan shook it, exclaiming, “Hey, you’re all spiffed up!” as if to deflect from this awkward exchange.

Alan began talking about this and that; things had been rough lately, he hadn’t been making enough money and it was getting difficult over at Alex’s place; he had to get out of that situation right away.

“Is it really that bad?” Horner said, channeling his annoyance from Alan’s hesitant greeting into this interjection, as Alan had left him hanging off to the side while speaking mostly to Milo. “I mean, what happened with Alex? I had no idea all this was going on.”

“Oh, I really don’t wanna start talking about people like that and bringing everything into it when they’re not even here,” he said in swift rebuke.

Horner had to admit to himself he was right and bit his tongue. Two nights later, however, he’d overhear Alan laying out the whole story for Nana, one of the dancers, seeming to relish this exposure of wounds and secrets. In brief, Hannah had been dating Alex, Alan’s roommate; one night, they invited Alan into their bedroom for a threesome. The upshot was that Hannah had broken up with Alex and began dating Alan instead.

Alan resumed his conversation with Milo, mentioning a place he’d heard about that might be opening up. Horner made a point of interrupting again to indicate his interest in this plan, thus completing the cycle of awkwardness between them. By then it was time to head back inside for the main event: Kayla’s cabaret.

First, the emcees emerged, dressed like harlequins in pencil moustaches and tasseled jester caps, spouting hammy jokes in phony French accents. Then there was a staged mishap involving the crew bringing out the props, and Kayla came stomping out to yell at them in a mock Brooklyn accent. “Fuckin’ moovit! We gawta put on a show heah!” At last, the dancers were introduced by their stage names for the evening: “Champagne, Mindy, Chantilly,” and so on.

They came prancing out in teddies and silk negligees, stockings and wigs, feather boas. They started out swinging their legs to barrel-house music like the Rockettes of old, and here was Kayla, Hannah, Ashley, and another dancer Horner didn’t know, later introduced to him by the impressive name of Thelonia. She was tall, dark, and long-legged, with short black hair plastered tight to her head, and full breasts that gleamed under the spotlights, scooped up in the sharp cut of her bustier.

Horner had always felt that Hannah had a wonderfully athletic body. But moving around in a platinum blonde wig and the rest of the old-timey costume, her taut muscles struck him as incongruous, almost robotic. It was Kayla for whom both costume and mood fit perfectly, making her really shine. She wore a red teddy with a short-short bottom, from which her ass cheeks curved and rippled over her thick, muscular thighs. No wig covered her short red hair, which flashed under the lights, making her seem like the only one who was genuine and true.

The old-timey music stopped, replaced by hip-hop, then heavy metal, and so on, proceeding swiftly through several different genres. The dancers quit doing the cutesy cabaret-style moves and instead threw themselves onto the floor and into each other’s arms, performing modern but choreographed “contact” dancing. At a certain point, a woman dressed in a smart black suit, a bowler perched on her head and a cane in her hand, stepped on stage and pranced very slowly before them. Speaking in a cockney accent, she brought to mind Alex from A Clockwork Orange as she harangued the dancers, click-click-clicking her heels and cane on the floor. Listening to her, they pantomimed impatience; they posed and sighed, they got into arguments with an imaginary presence off stage, named Jerry; they stormed off in protest, returned sans wigs, smoking cigarettes and complaining; they broke into dancing again.

Kayla would later explain to Horner that her piece had something to do with how much dancing had changed, yet how it had stayed the same, since the old days of cabarets with a cigar-chomping boss pulling strings behind the curtains. It was fun to look at, but to Horner’s eye it had gone on much too long for such a slim thesis.

As the evening wound down, Milo sat on the floor by the wall near the risers, and the fire-eater came and sat beside him. Horner watched them out of the corner of his eye. In the general hilarity, someone dropped a ball and it rolled towards the fire-eater, who stopped it deftly with one foot and raised her eyebrows at Milo, Eve posing with an apple. It seemed the whole world was rolling itself in her direction. Milo leaned ever closer to her as they sat side by side; but as the lights flicked on, she was swallowed up by her friends, as Milo and Horner were swallowed up by theirs, and pulled away, into the night.

NEXT  >> 

Back to top