Perfect Skin (31 page)

I want to take him aside now and I want to say to
him, How the fuck has it become a problem that I wear ties to work when you do too and Justin's wearing a goddamn beanie in a room that's rapidly approaching body temperature?

There's a pop from the microphone at the small stage down at the far end, a yowl of feedback as the host starts to talk.

Welcome,
he says, like a grand old showman, or perhaps a parody of one.
Welcome everyone, back to this seething hotbed of the new, to the latest in our series of experimental performance poetry, Words Let Loose, where some of Brisbane's and Australia's finest let loose their newest and boldest on the second Friday of every month. And tonight, like every night, we've got a special treat in store. One of last season's success stories is back. Back with something very new. Back with the fruits of his labours on an Arts Queensland grant.
So
tonight, here it is, his grant acquittal reading. Please make welcome Oscar Wong and his
. . .
‘Millennium Suite'.

There's muted applause – not exactly what the razzamatazz intro was calling for – then silence.

Then a thump from the stock room out the back, an empty cardboard box falling over. From Oscar this would usually be part of the performance, but I think tonight it's incidental. He surges from the stock room in a glittering, gold-embroidered gown, looking like a marginally oversized Christmas tree decoration. He strikes a pose and fires something down each sleeve and into his hands. Fans, bright yellow fans, and he snaps them open, then shut again, then places his head between them, turning them into a pair of thin jaws. He hisses. Four times, once to each point of the compass, rotating
with a slow and practised elegance. It's as if someone has lifted the lid of a rather creepy music box.

I should have known it'd be like this. I'm not sure if it's worse than I remember from last time (hair extensions, box, dead flowers), or if there just seemed to be less at stake then. George and me standing up the back in our work clothes going, Oh my god, where did this come from? Now George has gone the Big O with the wardrobe, and I've brought a girl. I can't believe I brought Ash to this. I can't have thought it through at all.

The poetry begins. Words let loose, but fighting to get out sometimes, piling on top of each other, rushing out, staccato and spitting. The audience leans back, out of range wherever possible.

Yes children

The forest is large and all of it

Forest

There is no playground there

No swings, roundabout, monkey bars

No unfettered pleasure in any

Of its brightnesses

There are paths that are not paths

Not paths that are paths

Paths to nowhere and

To rectangular corners and

To reckoning

There is the appearance of

Creatures and

Food

Bright in small orbits

Harvestable

But look

While you gorge yourself

On golden globes of possibility

Even while the leaves are still

The wind gone

Danger sets to tap

Any shoulder

Oscar twitches among dialects and demeanours, hisses and scowls, sweeps low with his fans. And his gown slips open, giving us a good look at his Mickey Mouse boxer shorts. (Is that part of the show?)
Up
his Mickey Mouse boxer shorts, actually, and for a fraction of a second there's a little too much performance happening tonight.

Sweat runs down his face, and that's when I realise there's make-up involved, a hint of gold about his cheeks. He rattles on, dangerous and amorphous and confrontational, and the crowd stands silent, in fear of what might happen next, or simply in fear of the next dose of spit or view up the shorts.

Death that stalks

On jelly legs is

No less death

Even in bright hues

Death comes in

The colour of your children's clothes

With a sad smile

And from any portal

And all is gone

On the third chance

All untoward and

Unavoidable

Play while you can

Embrace the moment and

Play

Some days there is no

Smoking gun

Only life and

Death

He digresses into bewildering similes and then machine noises, chops with the closed fans, swings his arms like pistons, flaps the fans open like wings, comes right back rhyming like a bandit when you least expect it.

There are pauses for bowing. They might be the ends of individual pieces, but no-one knows. Except George, who starts the applause each time with a few whacks of his solid hands, and the audience, relieved to get a clear signal of some kind, bursts out clapping too.

There's been a lot of rehearsal at our place this week,
George says.
I know the score. I hope you're keeping track of what it's about.

It's about something?

There's not a scrap of poetry in you, is there?

I concentrate hard, and in the slower, quiet parts I can make out the words, but that doesn't seem to help.

Go checking

Take all your hands and mouths and

Get to work

This bird will brook you

No fair clutch of eggs

Should you delay

Their pleasure's simple

In your cup-shaped hand

But hurry

Collect them as a child might

This season

This quick season

Just before breakfast

And they will give you

Life

And then he speeds up and I'm sure he says
Pac Man
at one point, and cheese (or possibly lozenge). Anyway, it's very powerful, whatever it's about. I can talk about the power later. And the costume, I suppose, if that's the right word. This must be how deaf grandparents feel at primary school musicals.

The end is climactic. Much spit, much sweat, much shouting. And he freezes with the fans snapped open in front of his face, their two bright semi-circles forming a circle and hiding him.

Wow, I hear myself saying inadvertently, as the clapping begins.

And someone near me says,
Yeah,
in the same hushed,
slightly overwhelmed tone of voice.

Some of the crowd rush Oscar, most of them rush the door. By the time we get to the front he's having a very serious discussion with someone about
going
CD
ROM on this one.

Like it, Oscar,
George says, when it's our turn.
Very non-traditional. Very
. . . He shakes his head, as though there can't be words.

Political?
Oscar suggests.

Very political.

And very powerful, I say. Very powerful.

Good, very good,
he says, and nods. He wipes his sweaty brow and a streak of gold comes off on the back of his hand.
So, a success then.

Oh, absolutely.

Then let's eat. It really takes it out of you up here.

He starts to move for the door, still in costume.

Oz, the gear,
George says.
You haven't changed.

Porge, I'm on a roll. Don't stop me now.

It's a different world beyond that door, Oz Man,
George says, and shepherds him back to the stock room, where he's left his non-performance clothes.

I don't think I got all that,
Ash tells me while he's changing.
Everything Oscar was doing in his
. . .
show. What was it about exactly?

It was poetry. There's no ‘about' in poetry.

Sometimes there's an ‘about'. Plenty of times. Sylvia Plath. And he seemed like such a quiet person the other night.

Yes, but maybe lurking deep in all of us there's some scary performance piece waiting to be poetry slammed out.

Oscar re-emerges, taking the last of the make-up off
with a baby wipe and looking much more like his normal self (and far less likely to spit). On the short walk to the restaurant, though, I notice that his gestures are still a little more flamboyant than usual, everything's scaled up twenty per cent, as if he hasn't slowed down completely from his performance high. And sometimes – by accident, I hope – he slips into rhyming couplets.

I wonder,
he says, as we wait for our entrees,
if I could take it somewhere. Take it on the festival circuit, maybe. Particularly now, or in the next nine months, since that's when it will be at its most meaningful, obviously.
Do
you think?

Well, yeah,
George says.
You see a broad range of stuff at festivals.

Of course, it's still evolving. Tonight was just the start. Already there are things I'd do differently, one or two.
He taps the ends of his chopsticks on the table, jogs his knee up and down.
I'm still reaching out with some of it. Still trying to get in touch with the other side of me.

Is that why you've got the traditional costume?
Ash asks him.

Traditional costume? No. I just saw this in an op shop one day, and there's
so
much gold. It's pretty special. George thinks it might be from
The Mikado.

And what's your other side, exactly?

Other side,
he says, like the far side of a canyon bouncing it back to me but making it no plainer.
The other side. The other. The side that is the other.

George interrupts.
This is a big thing of Oscar's. He thinks you should be able to hear that he's got inverted commas around ‘other'.

Oh, other,
Ash says.
That other. The side of you that represents the other, the outsider side.

Yes, but when you do it the inverted commas are quite audible.

And how does the costume represent the other?

Well,
Oscar begins,
that's a very good question, Ashley, since the choice, I know, is somewhat atypical. For a start, it doesn't represent every regular day of my life. I mean, look at Jon. Imagine him just the way he is now, but with a tie.

I can do that.

Well, that's where I am most of the time. That, but just a bit more stylish.
No
offence.

Since when did I take offence?

You're always taking offence. But, anyway, I can't explore the other from there. There needs to be more
. . .
let out. It's got to be bold. It's got to be unafraid to be honest. I have to liberate myself to allow the words to surge out of me, with the writing and with the performance. That's what any creative process is about, the surge. And maybe a small amount of glamour. I think that's me. Deep down, I mean. There should be glamour there. It should be just a bit
. . .

Shimmery?
George suggests.

Oscar goes
Mmmm,
and gives a small, satisfied nod. Shimmery is, I suspect, a nuance he'd like to call his own.
And from there, you see, the poetry begins. I can be bold. Unafraid. I can create my ‘Millennium Suite', again and again.

And the section about the ‘golden globe of possibility',
Ash says.
Is that to do with getting in touch with the other, or is it something specific?

Oh, both of those things. Very definitely, both. But it's also about good and evil. And I know that's a little reductionist, but I quite like the starkness of that contrast sometimes. Don't you? The innocence that's behind it, behind that uncomplicated view of the world. It's quite special. And very millennium, I think. That's what I'd call it. Millennium.

And what exactly is the ‘golden globe of possibility'?

At a non-metaphorical level? It's pretty much about Pac Man.
There's a pause, as this takes us all neatly by surprise.
You don't know Pac Man, Ash?

It's the . . .

I know Pac Man,
she says.

Okay, it's like this. This is where your thesis comes in, I think,
he says, but he could just be doing it to scare her.
I believe when any new technology comes along, we first try to interpret it in terms of the fundamental struggle, the struggle between good and evil.
So
the early video games, before they got all fancy, that's what they were all about. Two classic examples
–
Space Invaders and Pac Man.
So
most of my poetry is about them. But particularly Pac Man. Cause there you have the innocence. You see?

Um, not totally.

I was worried about that. The clarity of it in performance in particular, since the imagery has a certain density to it. I thought perhaps I should wear a glove, a single white glove on my left hand, and hold it this way.
He cocks his hand into a very poetic shape.
But even then it's in the eyes, you see. And in what the other hand is doing. It's that dichotomy of knob hand and button hand. Gloved hand and naked hand. Let me show you.
Here's another one. I didn't do this tonight. It's a little unfinished.
He pulls a sheet of paper out of his folded
Mikado
costume, arranges his napkin on his raised left hand like an imaginary friend, shouts out a few bizarre lines, ending with,
Redolent, fabulous, yes mother, yes mother earth, your children are gone and all by these small hands.
Like someone who's re-mastered a recording of the poetry of seventies legend Rod McKuen, with intent to do harm.