Free Halfway Home by Paul Monette

Guignol, with darkly twisted branches and thorns like fangs. Mona found it at a garage sale in Reseda. As she props it lightly on my head, she says, "But you haven't told me a thing about your brother. What happened?"
    I peer in the mirror, cocking my crown at a rakish angle, more like a forties Adrian hat. "Oh, the usual. I fucked him. He cried a little."
    She swats my shoulder as I stand up. I'm incorrigible. Gray says, "You want to go next?"
    "Sooner the better. I might collapse at any moment."
    The three of us head out into the darkened theater, each of them squeezing an arm on either side. I feel like Diana Ross being led to the stage at Caesar's Palace. As we come up behind the bleachers, we can see through the seats that the sullen performer is reaching the end of her piece. The music has fallen from its cacophonous heights, sounding now like fingernails on a blackboard. Sorrowfully, inevitably, the woman in the spotlight begins to shuck her black clothes. So raw and authentic. I am meanwhile preoccupied ducking in under the bleachers and lifting out my cross without making noise. It's in two pieces, a couple of four by fours. Gray is right behind me, so I pass them back to him. Then I grab my carpenter's toolbox.
    Gray is already fitting the crossbar onto the stakepole. Though he has never helped me put it together before, he's got that handyman's intuition for how things work. He slots the crossbar into place and secures the toggle bolts. It stands almost eight feet tall. Mona waits by the low end of the bleachers, ready to dart onstage as soon as Lady Macbeth goes off.
    We watch for the flash of her dreary nakedness, but the black shift comes off, and it turns out she has saved us a final stunning metaphor. Not naked at all, but wearing a black lace G-string and matching pasties, the tawdriest peepshow gear. The woman herself weighs in at one-forty, so she looks like a fullback in drag. She stands in her final tableau, defeated and yet triumphant, for this is a postfeminist reading. The music cuts out. The twenty gulls in the audience applaud.
    Clearly I don't have the right attitude anymore about my fellow supplicants in the temple of High Art. Mona applauds with the others, smiling enthusiastically as the woman retrieves her fallen garments. She doesn't bow but gives a dimpled smile as she totters off behind an armload of clothes. Then Mona strides on, before the clapping has sputtered out.
    "We announced in our February flyer that we'd be premiering a piece tonight, but it's not ready." Mona shrugs, no excuses. There is no groan of disappointment from the audience, which sits there dully, expecting nothing. "Instead we have a special guest," says Mona. Her onstage patter has always been very straight-on—the dyke Ed McMahon. "The performance artist who put AGORA on the map. A man who's actually been called the Devil—by a reviewer. It's just like they always say: nothing sacred, nothing gained. Ladies and gentlemen, my bossman, Tom Shaheen. Miss Jesus to you."
    Gray is holding the cross. I turn around, and he lays it over my shoulder so I'm gripping the crossbar, very King of Kings. The loxes applaud rather spiritedly as I trudge around the corner of the bleachers and into the light. Mona has scooted off the other way, so as not to block my entrance. I lug my burden center stage, and by now you can hear a pin drop. I turn my head and rake them with a desolate look, as if they are indeed a crowd of onlookers on the Via Dolorosa.
    I breathe deep and speak. "Welcome to the Second Coming." Beat. "The first time I had a wet dream."
    They don't exactly laugh, but there's a small expulsion of breath from several quarters. I turn and drag the cross upstage, where I slip it off my shoulder and prop it against a black-painted platform, toolbox beside it. My music begins, starting with monks chanting. As a sort of warmup I strike a set of poses, limp-wristed and mincing, flouncing my golden hair, shivering with sissiness.