Spiral Into Madness

“Today what we’re basically going to be doing is the three of us are going to be dressing up as some of Batman’s villains. After that, we’re going to go out to dinner and get shit-faced drunk.”

19 year old Kenton is a fellow American, living in Qingdao where he and his Chinese girlfriend run an English training school. This is the first and only time we have met. I am impressed that someone this young has been able to make it so quickly in China. He’s clearly one of those guys with his finger on the pulse of changing opportunities, and he knows that the world’s economy is leaning more and more towards the red country. He’s from New York, and he likes to party. I can see it in his gigantic nose, sniffing out fun and games – the same kind of fun and games I might have liked 10 years ago. I don’t know Kenton. I’m just here by chance. And I don’t plan to get “shit-faced” drunk. But things don’t always go according to plan in China, do they?

One month before the Spiral

It’s getting late, and I decide to leave Mudan Park and head home. I put my nunchucks into my bag and choose to walk back to my place rather than take the bus. As I walk towards the gate of the park, a Chinese girl asks me where the nearest metro station is. She’s a little heavy-set and wearing glasses. I’m not sure if she’s pregnant, or if it’s the clothes she is wearing that makes her look pregnant. Answering her in Chinese, it’s only after looking at my face that she realizes she is talking with a foreigner. We talk for a little bit, just casual chit-chat. She compliments my Chinese from time to time. Her English name is Lena, and she tells me that she is doing some sort of internship or work/study program at Beijing Film Institute. I’m still not quite clear on what her employment status is, or if she is a student. I let her know that, should she need any foreigners for an advertisement, a movie, or whatever, she can give me a call anytime. She looks at my face, taking in all the shadows and lines, giving me the “once over.” “Not bad,” she says, as if I pass the test. “You’re quite handsome. Your face is okay. Body, not bad. Not too tall, not too short.”

We exchange numbers and I walk her to the metro, not giving the meeting anymore thought. It’s just one of those countless encounters that is bound to happen at some point or other. Maybe she calls one day, maybe she doesn’t. Who knows?

The Call

“if u r available today, we have the make up contest and need a model at 12:30, we will treat u good dinner and free drink!” These are the exact words that I read when I see the text message Lena sends me in the morning. It’s a Sunday morning, and I don’t have any particular schedule for today. I have just made tentative plans with my Swiss friend, Simon, to go to a restaurant specializing in serving male animals’ sexual organs for dinner. I read about it on a website while looking for interesting places to eat in Beijing. I decide that the ox’s penis can wait for another day. Being asked to participate as a model for a “make-up” contest at Beijing Film Academy may just be a once in a lifetime opportunity for me. I decide to respond to the call, and dial Lena’s number. “Lena, I’m in.”

Albino

Kenton and his girlfriend are only entering this contest to have some fun. Cosmetology and making up people’s faces are only a hobby. We stand outside in the cold November air waiting for the third member of our villains’ cadre to arrive. We’ll be wearing the Halloween costumes that Kenton and some his friends wore this year. Kenton will be sporting Jim Carrey’s “Riddler” outfit. Myself and the 3rd party will choose between “Two-Face” and “The Joker” outfits.

Some minutes later, a short young Mexican with numerous facial piercings arrives and introduces himself as “Albino” (pronounced “al-been-oh”). He has a gentle, lisp of a voice, some color in his hair, and a dancer’s body. I never went to sleep the night before, opting instead to dance, dance, dance at some club, somewhere in Beijing. He’s 20 years old. I’m an old man today. He has no idea what the plan is for the day’s events, and I’m not sure if I can give him a good explanation. For the rest of the day’s activity, in fact, he’ll continue to be in the middle of some sort of daze, as if everything that happens is just some part of a dream sequence. But this is how life happens when you are in China if you are a foreigner. Sometimes you have to go with the flow and get on the damn bus, even if you know that the only thing holding the bus together is an old strip of duct tape. Albino and I decide to flip a coin to decide who will be Two-Face and who will be The Joker. I get to be Heath Ledger. He gets to be Tommy Lee Jones.

Out of the Toilet, Amidst the Trees

Kenton takes the two of us into the men’s bathroom where we begin to change into our wardrobe for the evening’s events. The bathroom is filled with young men taking off their clothes and putting on costumes for the contest. I feel as if it’s Halloween all over again. Kenton strips naked to don his green skin-tight Riddler body suit. I put on Heath Ledger’s suave Joker coat. Albino wears Tommy Lee Jones’ Two-Face outfit. Not a Batman in sight.

As soon as we enter the auditorium where the contestants are applying their make-up and putting on their costumes, I realize that we are way out of our league. The room is filled with absolutely gorgeous Chinese women. Each of them is wearing an extremely elaborate outfit. All of their faces are in the process of being covered in some kind of make-up to match with their costume. The women are tall, like trees. The Joker, The Riddler, and Two-Face, all lost in the middle of a forest of beauties.

The men who are participating in the contest all seem to have the same theme: they’re all wounded soldiers, or they have blood coming out of their bodies in some place or another. While the make-up artists concentrate on bringing out the women’s toothpick figures and model-like features, the men have nothing to go for them except their blood and guts. I feel as if I’ve arrived in the middle of some strange porn movie in which an army of gargantuan gorgeous alien women has invaded the Earth, laying waste to the entire male population.

“Faster, faster….come on, no talking, we’ve got to get this thing going,” the MC yells at all the participants. Apparently there are other competitions to follow after ours. We have 60 minutes to get our faces made-up. We go with quantity over quality. While most of the participants are single entries, we have entered as a trio. Just like the foreigner to make a stir.

I’m the first one to get his face painted. I sit down in the chair and Kenton’s girlfriend slaps the face paint on thick like a farmer slapping a hog, tendering up his rump before the gallows. My lips are smeared red, eyes circled Panda-black, with a white background. Zip, zap, zoom, done in a flash. Sitting across from me on the stage is a girl who looks like the female version of Two-Face. Her right side is made to look like an angel, even her eyelashes have feathers. Her left side looks like a skeleton. She sends me wink and smile. I do the same. It’s my character doing the talking now; Jeffrey has left the building. Kenton’s make-up is easy enough. Two black circles around the eyes, and after that he just covers up his head with a green hat and orange wig. Albino’s make up takes some time. Because he is Two-Face, half of his face needs to be disfigured. How to create this effect within the remaining 20 minutes? I look at the fallen soldiers around me. The other contestants’ make-up and gore really impresses me. Some of the wounds seriously look like bullet holes or open sores. One guy appears to have had his torso slashed by a wolverine. Another one looks like a burned version of the terminator. I turn around and see that Kenton’s girlfriend is gluing mass amounts of cotton to the left half of Albino’s face. After she does this, she simply paints the cotton over with dark purple make-up. This color matches the color of Albino’s jacket. We finish making ourselves up within the allotted 60 minutes. All of us look horrible, but we’re ready for the Batman, regardless. The villain always loses anyway, so why not have some fun with it?

The Contest

Each contestant in the contest receives a number that he or she is to wear at all times. At first this creates a problem for us because we are three people as one contestant. Kenton has the brilliant idea to cut up our number into three pieces. We are contestant “163.” Kenton wears “1,” I wear “6,” and Albino wears “3.” We stay in this order for the evening. Ahead of us is the forest of beautiful trees doing their best model’s strut. None of them are smiling, of course. As soon as a model hits the stage with her huge dress and three foot tall wig or headdress, her expression goes icy cold, and she stares at the judges with a look that could kill. Just as we are about to head up to the stage, Kenton’s girlfriend grabs him. “Sing something while you’re up there, they’ll love it,” she says. Kenton looks at her, dumbstruck. There are two more people in front of us before it’s our big moment. “Uh, I don’t think there’s time. They just want us to walk,” Kenton says. Another model walks across the stage–one more person to go. “What’s going on?” asks Albino. His number “3” has fallen off of his jacket and he searches for it on the floor. It’s our moment.

We don’t end up doing any song. I’m ready to sing the national anthem or something—anything for a laugh. That’s my character, right? As we prance across the stage, Kenton (now totally in Jim Carrey mode) hunches over as if he is a cripple. I goose him from time to time and blow kisses at the audience. Two-Face flips his coin, walking heel to toe, heel to toe. I knew Albino would show up when it counted the most. The audience doesn’t quite know what to make of us. We’re basically three people who have put on pajamas to parade with the professionals. We stop in the middle of the stage to ham it up and strike a pose. Flashes of light erupt from the crowd as they snap a blur of pictures. It’s probably the first and last time in my life I’ll get to be a model.

Aftermath

I’m not certain who won the contest that evening, but I know for sure it wasn’t us. I try to locate the female Two-Face again after the finale, but she’s nowhere to be seen. Maybe our paths will cross another day–probably not. We head back to the toilet and scrub our faces down, erasing all evidence of this charade. Did it really happen? How and why do I get myself involved in these situations? Is there a target on my back that invites me to make a fool of myself whenever I have the chance to? Here I am, a grown man in China, prancing around in a make-up contest as The Joker when I should be sitting down to a dinner of ox penis. I think about the choices I make. Should I think about them more? In the evening I do go out with Albino, Kenton, his girlfriend, and Lena. We do stuff ourselves and drink ourselves silly, and I do make a fool of myself, as if Kenton preordained it all from the beginning. He and his girlfriend quarrel the quarrel of young, drunk lovers. She cries the cry of a jealous girlfriend. He scowls the scowl of a young boy trying to appear much older than his 19 years, blowing smoke into the air from his lit cigarette, so cool. Albino makes an early escape, feigning fatigue. I don’t remember exactly what we all talk about, and the five of us will probably never gather together as a group again. After arriving home, I vomit in my toilet, flushing my childhood memories down the drain.  Two years old, three year old–life’s early memories exit my mouth along with the Korean barbecue.  It’s not an evening that I’m proud of, but it’s just one of those nights that happens to everyone once or twice – a night to learn from, and a night to forget about.

Before the fiasco spirals into the madness of the evening supper, I stand there in the men’s toilet next to the other contestants and make a mental note to mark this experience down as another one of China’s wild goose chases. It’s just one of those memories that I’ll add into my life’s rich pageant, telling my children about, and their children’s children – or I could cast it off as a day to toss into the gutter. The whole day is really quite silly…one big farce, one big JOKE. I won’t be defined by farces, so why do I let myself get pulled into one? Maybe it’s the lure of adventure, the temptation of having fun without a plan with a group of strangers who are younger than I am. Sometimes we all need these kinds of getaways; they provide chances to break away from the mundane, the everyday, the routine, reality. Sometimes these getaways turn out to be fruitful, other times we end up with only cold water on our face and stinging mascara in our eyes. I turn to Albino and give him a pat on the shoulder, still thinking about how I came to be in this toilet, in a room full of men vigorously scrubbing the make-up off of our faces with frigid, soapy water. “Funny how we get ourselves into these things, huh, Albino?” Albino pauses, possibly, contemplating the same questions and justification for hedonism that I’m now pondering. His response tells all. “I think the glue stuck my eye lids together. What do we do now?” What do we do now, indeed, Albino? What do we do now, indeed.

•