The musicians were tuning up; we had to scoot back to our seats. Mona and Marcelle were already seated, buried in a deep conversation. Suddenly there was a full blare from the orchestra pit, like a snarl of prussic acid over a tight tarpaulin. The red-haired fellow at the piano was all limp and boneless, his fingers falling like stalactites on the keyboard. People were still streaming back from the lavatories. The music got more and more frenetic, with the brass and the percussion instruments getting the upper hand. Here and there a switch of lights blinked, as if there were a string of electrified owls opening and closing their eyes. In front of us a young lad was holding a lighted match to the back of a post-card, expecting to discover the whore of Babylon—or the Siamese twins rolling in a double-jointed orgasm.
As the curtain went up the Egyptian beauties from the purlieus of Rivington Street began to unlimber: they flung themselves about like flounders just released from the hook. A scrawny contortionist did the pin-wheel, then folded up like a jack-knife and, after a few flips and flops, tried to kiss her own ass. The music grew soupy, alternating from one rhythm to another and getting nowhere. Just when everything seemed on the verge of collapse the floundering chorines did a fade-out, the contortionist picked herself up and limped away like a leper, and out limped away like a leper, and out came a pair of incongruous buffoons pretending to be full-blown lechers. The back curtain drops and there they are standing in the middle of a street in the city of Irkutsk. One of them wants a woman so bad his tongue is hanging out. The other one is a connoisseur of horse flesh. He has a little apparatus, a sort of Open Sesame, which he will sell to his friend for 964 dollars and 32 cents. They compromise on a dollar and a half. Fine. A woman comes walking down the street. She’s from Avenue A. He talks French to her, the fellow who bought the apparatus. She answers in Volapuk. All he has to do is turn on the juice and she flings her arms around him. This goes on in ninety-two variations, just as it did last week and the week before—as far back as the days Bob Fitzimmons, in fact. The curtain drops and a bright young man with a microphone steps out of the wings and croons a romantic ditty about the aeroplane delivering a letter to his sweatheart in Caledonia.
Now the flounders are out again, this time disguised as Navajos. They reel about the electric camp-fire. The music switches from «Pony Boy» to the «Kashmiri Song» and then to «Rain in the Face». A Latvian girl with a feather in her hair stands like Hiawatha, looking towards the land of the setting sun. She has to stand on tip-toe until Bing Crosby Junior finishes fourteen quatrains of Amerindian folklore written by a cow-puncher from Hester Street. Then a pistol shot is fired, the chorines whoop it up, the American flag is unfurled, the contortionist somersaults through the block-house, Hiawatha does a fandango, and the orchestra becomes apoplectic. When the lights go out the white-haired mother from the lavatory is standing by the electric chair waiting to see her son burn. This heart-rending scene is accompanied by a falsetto rendition of «Silver Threads Among the Gold». The victim of justice is one of the clowns who will be out in a moment with a piss-pot in his hand. He will have to measure the leading lady for a bathing suit. She will bend over obligingly and spread her ass so that he can get the measurements absolutely correct. When that’s over she will be the nurse in the lunatic asylum, armed with a syringe full of water which she will squirt down his pants. Then there will be two leading ladies attired in negligee. They sit in a cosy furnished flat waiting for their boy friends to call. The boys call and in a few moments they start taking their pants off. Then the husband returns and the boys hop around in B. V. D’s, like crippled sparrows.
Everything is calculated to the minute. By the time 10:23 strikes Cleo is ready to do her second and final number. She will have just about eight and a half minutes to spare, according to the terms of the contract. Then she will have to stand in the wings for another twelve minutes and take her place with the rest of the cast for the finale. Those twelve minutes burn her up. They are precious minutes which are completely wasted. She can’t even get into her street clothes; she must show herself in all her glory and give just one little squirm or two as the curtain falls. It burns her up.
Ten twenty-two and a half! An ominous decrescendo, a muffled two-four flam from the drums. All the lights are doused except those over the Exits. The spot-light focuses on the wings where at 10:23 to the dot first a hand, then an arm, then a breast will appear. The head follows after the body, as the aura follows the saint. The head is wrapped in excelsior with cabbage leaves masking the eyes; it moves like a sea urchin struggling with eels. A wireless operator is hidden in the carmined mouth of the navel: he is a ventriloquist who uses the deaf-mute code.
Before the great spastic movements begin with a drum-like roll of the torso, Cleo circles about the stage with the hypnotic ease and lassitude of a cobra. The supple, milk-white legs are screened behind a veil of beads girdled at the waist; the pink nipples are draped with transparent gauze. She is boneless, milky, drugged: a medusa with a straw wig undulating in a lake of glass beads.
As she discards the tinkling robe the pom-pom becomes the tom-tom and the tom-tom the pom-pom.
And now we are in the heart of darkest Africa, where the Ubangi flows. Two snakes are locked in mortal combat. The big one, which is a constrictor, is slowly swallowing the smaller one—tail first. The smaller one is about twelve feet long—and poisonous. He fights up until the last breath; his fangs are still spitting, even as the jaws of the big snake close about his head. A siesta in the shade now follows in order to give the digestive processes full sway. A strange, silent combat produced not by hatred but by hunger. Africa is the continent of plenty in which hunger reigns supreme. The hyena and the vulture are the referees. A land of chilly silences split by furious snarls and agonizing screams. Everything is eaten warm and uncooked. Life so abundant whets the appetite of death. No hatred, only hunger. Hunger in the midst of plenty. Death conies quickly. The moment one is hors de combat the process of devoration sets in. Tiny fishes, mad with hunger, can devour a giant and leave him a skeleton in a few minutes. Blood is sucked up like water. Hair and skin are instantly appropriated. Claws and tusks makes weapons or wampum. No waste. Everything is eaten alive amidst blood-curdling snarls and screams. Death strikes like lightning through forest and river. The big fellows are no more immune than the little ones. All is prey.
In the midst of this ceaseless tussle the remnants of the human kingdom stage their dances. Hunger is the solar body of Africa, the dance is the lunar body. The dance is the expression of a secondary hunger: sex. Hunger and sex are like two snakes locked in mortal combat. There is no beginning nor end. One swallows the other in order to reproduce a third: the machine become flesh. A machine which functions of itself and to no purpose, unless it be to produce more and more and thus create less and less. The wise ones, the renunciators, seem to be the gorillas. They live a life apart: they inhabit the trees. They are the most ferocious of all—more terrible even than the rhino or the lioness. They utter piercing, deafening screams. They defy approach.
Everywhere throughout the continent the dance goes on. It is the ever-repeated story of dominion over the dark forces of nature. Spirit working through instinct. Africa dancing is Africa trying to lift itself above the confusion of mere reproduction.
In Africa the dance is impersonal, sacred and obscene. When the phallus becomes erect and is handled like a banana it is not a «personal hard-on» we see but a tribal erection. It is a religious hard-on, directed not towards a woman but towards every female member of the tribe. Group souls staging a group fuck. Man lifting himself out of the animal world through a ritual of his own invention. By his mimicry he demonstrates that he has made himself superior to the mere act of intercourse.
The hoochie koochie dancer of the big city dances alone—a fact of staggering significance. The law forbids response, forbids participation. Nothing is left of the primitive rite but the «suggestive» movements of the body. What they suggest varies with the individual observer. For the majority, probably nothing more than an extraordinary fuck in the dark. A dream fuck, more exactly.
But what law is it that keeps the spectator rigid in his seat, as though shackled and manacled? The silent law of
