“And one, two, three! Action! What are your thoughts about getting ready to compete for the Sewer Pipe Queen title?” a familiar voice buzzed into Maye’s ear like a big, bothersome, bloodthirsty bug.
Titball.
“And next we have Kaytlynne Brytanni Syznowski, also known as the reigning regional Miss Teeny Royalty Universe!” the emcee announced.
“Dick Titball is a liar,” Maye said into the camera despite the retinal damage incurred in her eyes by its light. “Dick Titball makes up stories.”
“Our next hopeful contestant is…Pinky Tuscadero? Is that right? Yes? Pinky Tuscadero, ladies and gentlemen!”
“One comment, come on!” the reporter insisted, still walking next to Maye as her turn to be introduced approached.
“The next contestant for the Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant is Frankette, it says here. Is that a last name? No, no? That’s the whole thing? Okay, then, welcome, Frankette!”
“Leave me alone, Titball,” Maye warned, taking another step forward. “I’ve already been your victim once.”
“And next, the marionette team of Lord Karl and Little George!”
“One comment!” the reporter insisted. “Can’t you give me one thought?”
“I think Dick Titball has a fleshy, fat ass that flops around in his pants when he runs and everyone on TV can see it,” she said just as her name was called and she walked out into the glare as the sun, although still burning brightly, was beginning to slide into the horizon.
Maye smiled brightly and waved to the audience as Mickey walked beside her perfectly and they took their spot on the far side of the stage.
“And here they are, people of Spaulding!” the emcee announced. “One of these contestants will be your new Sewer Pipe Queen!”
All six and a half contestants stood there, beaming on cue, waving to the audience, hoping that when the sun rose the next day, the townspeople of Spaulding would have become their loyal subjects.
“Now that we’ve met the contestants, let’s meet our panel of celebrity judges!” the emcee called, making a wide, sweeping motion with his arm to the opposite side of the stage.
“You know her as Sequoia,” he said with a grin. “But you can also call her Mayor! Ladies and gentlemen, Mayor Sequoia Montoya!”
The audience whooped it up as the mayor stepped onstage, her waist-long jet-black hair clipped neatly into a ponytail by a silver-and-turquoise barrette. The fringe on her leather vest swung vigorously like the fringe on a flapper’s dress as she walked over to the judge’s table, smiling broadly, then took a seat.
“Please welcome our next judge with a warm round of applause, Spaulding’s own State Champion Hot Dog Eater, Kenny Hicks!”
Chowing down like the incarcerated at feeding time, overall-wearing Kenny Hicks sauntered onstage with his trademark food in his hand, his choppers voraciously feeding off it as chunks of bun and wiener tumbled from his mouth. On the seesaw of judgment, this tipped heavily in the favor of obscenity.
“Now may I introduce one of Spaulding’s Old Queens, Her Royal Highness Sewer Pipe Queen Louise Taylor!”
It was the friend of Maye’s Realtor, Patty, whom she had met the fateful night of the I Have My Period but She’s Eating Meat Incident with Bonnie and Vegging Out Bob. It had been Louise who had encouraged her to enter the pageant to begin with.
Maye smiled as they made eye contact, and Louise winked at her kindly, putting Maye at ease. Somewhat.
“And our last but far from least celebrity judge, may I introduce Balthazar Leopold, Spaulding’s Letter Carrier of the Year!”
With a flash, the silver fox jumped onstage, ran to the judge’s table, and without hesitation leaped over it and took his seat. Maye hardly recognized him without numerous packages strapped to his torso like ammunition à la Pancho Villa.
Mickey, however, smelled him immediately, and although he had been sitting patiently next to Maye as she fed him his favorite liver treats as a bribe to stay put, the dog’s eyes abruptly widened when the mailman, the very mailman who had sent him to doggie reform school, began his gallop across the stage.
Maye lightly tugged on the leash to get Mickey’s attention, and he stayed. As she and Mickey left the stage with the rest of the contestants, Maye looked over at the judges’ table, where Balthazar Leopold was not merely staring at the two of them, he was glaring.
Melissabeth herself was ready to put on a show.
Not only did she arrive in a tailored, perfectly fitting evening gown worthy of Gwyneth Paltrow at the Oscars, she brought friends with her. Four of them to be exact, all musicians in tuxedos and black dresses, with their own seating as well, all arranged behind her.
Melissabeth had not brought a CD; the singer had brought her own orchestra.
The girl who had rejected Maye as a weekend friend politely and elegantly stepped out onstage and clasped her hands in front of her; after the orchestra played a few notes, she opened her mouth, and heaven came out. On hearing the first notes of the Queen of the Night aria, Maye thought, well, opera shmopera, she’s trained to sing that way; I bet there are a couple of opera tricks you need to learn and anybody with an untrained ear wouldn’t know the difference between a novice and a pro. Kind of like ice skating. You see someone at the rink do a jump or a forward spin really fast and you are blown away, you think, Wow, that is talent! And then you watch the Winter Olympics and realize the goddess of the skating rink is really a hack in leg warmers and what’s probably just a swimsuit.
And then, in the next moment, Melissabeth ditched her forward spins and went straight into opera’s version of the Death Drop, the portion of the aria known for its extreme difficulty, and the generator of its fame.
Each peck of a note that rocketed from her lungs was like a perfectly tuned bullet that exploded as it hit the air, filling the entire town square with her booming, crystalline voice and eventually landing—whether Mozart intended it or not—where it was to do the most damage: in the center of Maye’s self-confidence. When Melissabeth hit the F6 note, a note that always makes people gasp when they hear Mariah Carey reach it in “Emotions,” even Maye, with her bread-crumb knowledge of opera, knew was a pretty accomplished feat. She prayed from where she stood backstage that the singer was pulling a Milli Vanilli and that the tape would slur, then snap, leaving the flying monkey with a gaping, mute mouth.
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 p
erfectly 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 o
nstage 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.