There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 (33 page)

But Melissabeth’s talent was no rumor, and the voice that pierced the evening air was no tape. She hit every note with precision and astounding clarity and in such speedy succession it seemed inhuman.

The audience was amazingly quiet, as if speaking or producing any noise during the performance was akin to engaging in a round of farting, as if any sound emanated could never come close to being as worthy as what had just punctured the air around them. To speak or make a noise would soil the trail of a perfectly achieved note, and even as Melissabeth clearly and dramatically charged to the close of the aria, Maye herself couldn’t predict the scale of the reaction. Indeed, when the orchestra’s last note was sounded, several seconds passed as people in the audience weren’t sure how to respond, their efforts at gratitude falling so short with mere applause that it seemed a paltry way to show thanks for such a lovely gift. The audience simply clapped politely, as if the aria demanded accolades containing the same refinement as the performance itself.

If Melissabeth was shocked that the audience didn’t figuratively set off fireworks at the conclusion of her segment, she didn’t show it. She smiled politely, kindly even, took a slight bow, and then glided backstage with her orchestra trailing behind her.

When Miss Teeny Royalty Universe stepped onto that stage, she had some pretty big lungs to fill. Backstage, her mother had quickly stripped off her pink, puffy, layered show dress right in the main hallway and slipped her into a tiny gray mechanic’s jumpsuit with two name patches on it; one for Kaytlynne and the other, naturally, for Brytanni.

To complete the look, the Miss Teeny Royalty Mommy yanked her daughter’s perfectly coiffed, curled, and poofed hair right off her head and threw the set of golden ringlets onto a nearby chair like a dirty pair of underwear. Maye gasped for a moment, thinking she could never win against a child with cancer, until she saw the hairnet snapped to the skull of the little girl, and that, too, landed on the bed of Barbie hair on the chair. Maye sighed with relief as the Miss Teeny Royalty Mommy combed out the child’s unfortunate and genetically dictated locks, which were straight as a toothpick and the color of a rotting banana. The mother pulled a jar of Vaseline out of her purse and combed it through the child’s bob, thus completing her look as the oil-change guy at Lube ’N Go.

“Are you ready?” the Miss Teeny Royalty Mommy said, holding the kid’s chin up with her finger as she spat onto her other hand and wiped a red lip-gloss smudge off the child’s cheek with it.

“Yes,” Kaytlynne Brytanni said, nodding.

“Then
smile
,” the mother hissed between gritted teeth. “I want you to think of how good this will look on your beauty résumé. Queen of all of Spaulding! Now
smile
!”

“I have to pee-pee,” the little girl, who could not have been older than eight, complained.

“Did you drink something today?” the mother asked, her eyes widened. “Who told you you could drink something today? You’re not allowed to drink on event days! Who gave it to you? Was it her? Was it her?”

Miss Teeny Royalty Mommy began pointing at the other contestants.

“Was it the pervert man with the puppet? Who was it? WHO WAS IT, THEN? Who gave you water?
Who’s trying to throw this show
?”

“I was just thirsty,” the little girl cried. “I just have to pee!”

“No you don’t. There’s no time to undo that jumpsuit! Right now it’s time to sparkle. It’s time to shine. You’re going to go out there and be the beauty that my genes made!” the mean mommy said. “You’d better hold it! And let this be a lesson to you why you’re not allowed to drink on event days!”

“Lord Karl is not a pervert,” Little George said, lifting his stringed arm up, pointing at his partner. “He’s a dreamer.”

“…Kaytlynne Brytanni!” the announcer called from the stage.

The mean mommy took Miss Teeny Royalty’s jaw in her claws. “You’d better hold it!” she hissed and then pushed the little girl toward the stage as the lights went down.

Maye and Mickey scrambled through the backstage hall to the other side of the stage, where the wing wasn’t nearly as crowded—since the sound booth took up most of it—and she had a perfect view.

Miss Teeny Royalty’s choice for the talent segment became all too clear when from the darkness of the stage John Travolta’s voice boomed the opening lines of “Greased Lightnin’.”

Oh, I get it, Maye thought to herself; the jumpsuit oil-monkey outfit made perfect sense now.

Suddenly, the stage lit up and there was Kaytlynne, performing her excessively rehearsed rendition of the song as she pranced, danced, cartwheeled, and lip-synched to it. She had the routine down pat; there was no doubt that she had performed it numerous times—in fact, it seemed to come to her almost naturally. There she was, moving her mouth perfectly to the words, almost so perfectly you could nearly believe they were hers until at the end of the first verse, it was highly unlikely, ultimately impossible, that an eight-year-old lassie wearing lipstick and false eyelashes would blurt, “You know that ain’t no shit, we’ll be getting lots of tit, Greased Lightnin’!”

Kaytlynne spun twice, did a couple of kicks, then bent her knees, outstretched her right arm and dittoed the choreography of Danny Zuko, pointing, shooting her arm up and out, and no one seemed to notice that anything was even remotely out of place, that it was completely preposterous for a second-grade girl who had moments earlier been wearing a pink party dress and a baby Dolly Parton wig to throw out in a male’s baritone voice, “You are supreme…the Chixel cream…for Greased Lightnin’!”

At least that’s what Maye’s ears, which were at the moment still in eighth grade, heard, understood, and comprehended, until her mid-thirties brain finally realized that there was no such thing, and never had been any such thing, as Chixel cream. “Holy shit,” she whispered to herself in astonishment as she gasped and watched Miss Teeny Royalty Universe run around the stage while mouths were dropping in the audience. The song still held all the magic for the little girl, who delivered all of her drama faces, pretended to comb her hair like a greaser, shook her fanny, somersaulted, and snapped her fingers.

And then Kaytlynne, a little girl who collected My Little Ponies and loved anything with a fairy on it, a little girl who several months earlier had gotten her TV privileges revoked for a week for saying
turd
, took a defiant stance on the stage with her feet firmly planted, pointed directly at the audience, and declared, in the way-past-puberty male voice of Vinnie Barbarino: “You know that I ain’t bragging she’s a real—”

Hmm, Maye thought to herself. I thought “pushy wagon” was odd, but take out the
h
and add an
s
, and you’ve got yourself some real misogynistic filth for a musical. You’d never hear that in
H.M.S. Pinafore
!

As Miss Teeny Royalty took off skipping around the stage and waving her hands in Greased Lightnin’ jubilation, heads began to shake in the audience, people covered their mouths in shock, and several people made their way through the crowd to leave. Maye saw one woman in the front row mouth the words “That better be a midget.”

The tiny dancer was oblivious and did the monkey, then the swim. In the moments that Kaytlynne was getting ready for her big hand-jive segment of the routine, Maye heard a shrill banshee scream backstage and a ruckus that sounded as if a gorilla had just escaped its pen.

“What the hell are you doing?” the mean mommy roared, charging at Merlin, the sound coordinator. “You played the wrong version! I told you the singles version, not the movie version! Do you hear me? You have to stop it! You have to stop it NOW!”

Merlin was so stunned by the sudden commotion that he couldn’t say a word and backed up with his hands raised like either he was about to be taken hostage or a hungry bear had invaded his campsite.

“I said NOW!” Miss Teeny Royalty Mommy roared, and she meant it. She pushed her way into the sound booth, which was basically nothing more than a boom box and a lot of wires, and stopped the music herself before her daughter had an opportunity to tell the audience about Chixel cream again.

With the music stopped, the mean mommy stomped onstage, which was honestly really where she wanted to be, and pulled Kaytlynne Brytanni off by the arm as some members of the audience shook their heads in disgust. The mother dragged Her Teeny Highness backstage, where she chastised her for not realizing she was dancing to the Jenna Jameson version of the song, and at the same time her mean-mommy shoes were being splashed with droplets.

She glanced toward the ceiling to see where the leak was coming from, then as she looked back down at her wet shoes, she could only growl one thing: “Who gave her water?”

“Look on the bright side,” Maye said to the little girl, who looked tired and, frankly, quite relieved. “I bet the hot dog guy will vote for you.”

Shaking her jingly-jangly staff, Pinky Tuscadero took her position in the center of the stage and slammed the stick into the floor, almost as if she was trying to stake it. She stared out into the audience in a full, determined glare some people would take as a challenge.

She stabbed the staff into the stage again, the chimes of the bells fading quickly into silence. Her shabby scarecrow clothes rippled slightly in a breeze that swept over the stage. Her straw cowboy hat bore dry, deteriorated patches that exposed her head, and the blond-streaked shoulder-length hair underneath looked stringy and perfect for the part. Maye noticed she wasn’t wearing shoes, but then again, she hadn’t met many scarecrows that did. This one was fortunate even to have feet.

Maye glanced over at Merlin, who didn’t appear to be getting any music ready, even though she was certain that any moment now,
any moment
, a dirty little somebody onstage was going to break into a bumbling shuffle and begin crooning the opening lines to “If I Only Had a Brain.”

But Pinky Tuscadero did not. Instead, she took a deep breath, opened her mouth, and screamed, “It’s going to rain on you! It’s going to rain on everybody!”

Immediately, every face in the crowd looked up toward the clear, bright sky. There wasn’t a rain cloud in sight.

“I am Pinky Tuscadero,” she continued. “I am Arthur Fonzarelli’s girlfriend.”

And then she shook her stick.

“Do you know how to get to Sesame Street? Ask Mr. Hooper, but not Big Bird. Big Bird drops acid. Does anybody have a burrito I could eat?”

Oh goody, a shitty spoken-word artist, Maye whined to herself. I hate spoken-word people. It’s all fun and games until a poet shows up and sucks the life out of everything in six seconds flat.

It seemed like the audience collectively shifted its weight from its right foot to its left.

“I’m tired of the cops hassling me!” the scarecrow informed the crowd. “I’m sick of people sticking their nosy noses into my life, taking away my kids because I won’t take my medication! My butt itches!”

More stick shaking.

“I don’t need pills, I don’t want your poison! I want Section Eight housing! Give me Section Eight housing, and I want a butler! So what if I have a record!”

And then, from the edge of the stage, Maye saw something approaching Pinky Tuscadero. It was white, thin, and the portion that was closest to the contestant had a curved end, while Merlin held the other end steadily. He marched out onto the stage focused and in control, wrapped the white hook around the scarecrow’s waist, and pulled her right off the stage as Rick Titball filmed the whole thing from his attack perch.

“Scratch my butt! Scratch my butt!” Pinky screamed as she was dragged away.

“Bring back the little girl with the potty mouth!” an audience member called.

“How did she get in here?” Merlin demanded from the wiry pageant coordinator as he handed Pinky Tuscadero over to the security guard backstage as Rick the Dick Titball captured it all with his camera.

After a brief investigation, it was uncovered that Pinky Tuscaredo wasn’t a contestant at all; she had never filled out an application, and she certainly hadn’t paid her thirty-five dollars. She was just your average, run-of-the–mill street person of dubious mental cognizance who wandered backstage after following the scent of the lighting guy, who had just returned from Hopkins with a meatball sub.

The audience was already getting a little testy when Lord Karl and Little George took the stage. When Lord Karl announced that Little George was a mime as well as a puppet, it didn’t diffuse the situation any, since everyone knows that there’s only one thing less welcome on a stage than a mime, and that’s a clown, because everyone knows that clowns eat people.

But when Lord Karl announced that Little George was a mime, even Maye had to admit that her curiosity was piqued.

Little George’s first feat was to walk against the wind, but since it was relatively impossible to position the puppet at a forty-five-degree angle due to a well-known phenomenon called gravity, the puppet simply looked like he was marching in place.

This was all despite the desperate whisperings of Lord Karl as Maye heard him urging the papier-mâché-and-string doll quietly to “Try harder! Feel the wind! You aren’t feeling the wind!”

Next, Lord Karl and Little George tackled the “glass wall” routine with slightly more success, but that merely entailed Lord Karl running across the stage with the puppet and then suddenly stopping.

“That was good, George, that was good,” Maye could hear Lord Karl compliment the puppet. “I could tell you really felt that one.”

Little George then, and quite affectionately, looked up at Lord Karl and then softly patted him on the leg.

When the team attempted to embark on “pulling the rope,” the portion of the act truly built on faith, since Little George had no thumbs, the puppet merely moved its arms alternately up and down slightly at its midsection. To give Little George credit, it did look like he was pulling on something, but perversely, it did not appear to anyone that it was a rope but something much, much more private.