SAMPLE CHAPTER FROM ASSASSINATING SHAKESPEARE

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 Chapter 6
   A Bard Is Born

‘Shakespeare?’ the burly, surly, half-breed manager of the Sunshine Club asked. ‘We sell women and beer here, not British culture.’
            ‘I’m American,’ I added, as if it made any difference. ‘Please?’
            ‘Well, I guess I could give you the ten o’clock spot during the band break and before the Masai maiden strip show,’ he said at last. ‘But no politics, OK?’
            A gig, at last! Indeed, I couldn’t think of a better venue than the Sunshine: the lights were dim, the customers drunk and anonymity reigned supreme.
            I arrived early, at eight, just to get the feel of the place. Already, the Sunshine was filling up with ‘professional’ ladies, and every eye in the bar turned to coolly appraise me. Nimbly leaping over a beefy thigh I claimed a place at the bar, where I continued to cram lines as a succession of whores came over to grope me: ‘Darling I love you too much!’
            ‘Darling, I told you I am too busy!’
            Hours passed with no call, and I was about to give up and go when the band stopped playing and I noticed the manager whispering something in the lead singer’s ear. The latter nodded, reached for the microphone and then announced: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen …’ A decibel or two dropped as the sailors and whores paused for a moment to gawk at the stage. The man said nothing more, and walked off the platform. It was my cue. Who was this apparition? A guy with dirty feet in open sandals, wearing black stretch slacks cinched with a red bolt of some cheap material, into which were stuffed a wooden dagger and an assortment of brightly colored cloths. Another large bolt of material served as a sort of cape to flourish, while a sheet of white muslin tucked under a black beret soaked up sweat and served as a curtain when flipped in front of the face.
            ‘Sirs and honored Madams, for your pleasure this eventide, Bits from the Bard!’ said I, pulling the muslin cloth over my face while whistling a would-be Renaissance tune. My couplets were heavily distorted through the PA:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand … anD … aND … AND
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this … isS … iSS … SSS
My lips, two blushing pilgrims stand … anD … aND …AND
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss … isS … iSS … ISS

At first, the swell of noise coming from the back of the room seemed to be encouragement. They like it, I thought, continuing in a falsetto voice for Juliet:

Good pilgrim, you do wrong to much … ucH … uCH … UCH
For mannerly devotion shows in this … isS … iSS … ISS

Suddenly, my amplified voice went dead. In the void that followed, a wave of bile rolled towards the stage. In place of the expected praise, came jeers. ‘Bring back the band!’ shouted a sailor.
‘Fuck ‘er, Romeo!’ came another critique.
            It was going downhill fast. But I had to persevere, convince them, carry on and finish at least the one scene, amplification or no. I started shouting – but to no avail. The heckling grew until I could scarcely hear myself. Still I carried on, projecting, shouting, screaming Shakespeare to my audience of b-girls and their sailor suitors. FOR! SAINTS! HAVE! HANDS! THAT! PILGRIMS’! HANDS! MUST! TOUCH!
            Then, with a clump and bang, the PA system came back on, magnifying my voice twenty-fold in mid-sentence. But before I could get another caesura in edgewise, a hand reached in front of my face to remove the microphone.

Testing, testing, one, two, three, testing …

It was the band, and I wasn’t halfway through my piece, much less my entire prepared act. Then, with a rude shove from behind, I was propelled from the stage to land in a heap on the dance floor. Howls erupted as I picked myself up, dazed, bruised and confused.
            ‘Hey!’ I cried, trying to claw my way back to the stage. ‘I’m not done yet!’
            The band, however, was playing, and couples were moving out on to the floor. My grand debut was over – and I was utterly crushed. The sensible thing to do would have been to get as far away from the Sunshine Club as possible. But my pipe-puppet Romeo had fallen from my grip. With the obsession of the insane, I determined that I would find it, and began looking under tables, between people’s legs – asking everyone to help me search for the missing pawn.
            ‘Give it back!’ I accused a fat whore with wild, trellis hair. ‘Romeo, Romeo wherefore art thou, Romeo?’ she cackled. ‘Hahaha!’
            It was bad and getting worse, my ignominy only feeding my indignation until finally, blissfully, the manager called on his bouncers to drag me out of the club and deposit me on the street. The howls of laughter were only silenced when the door slammed shut behind me – or almost. A group of taxi drivers calmly observed my humiliation.
            I stumbled away, weeping. I had been reduced to public groveling in front of bawds and whores, and I had been utterly rejected, utterly. I had bottomed out, crashed. There was nowhere to go but up.

The first place to try and dive, however, was down as deep as I could go. Junkies might beg to differ, but I maintain that there has never been better pseudo-solace from the self-perceived evils of this wild and wicked world than the comfort of the bottle, and I that is what I sought that night, big time. I was into my sixth level of incoherence when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
            ‘I thought I was the only crazy one around here,’ a slightly accented voice whispered.
            I whirled – or lurched – around and stared at a familiar-looking woman with henna-red hair. It was the nympho half of the pair I believed had stolen my money so long ago (actually only a couple of weeks), come back to haunt me again. ‘You!’ I snarled. ‘You are responsible for all this!’
            ‘Be calm, be calm,’ she cooed. ‘I saw you at the Sunshine Club tonight.’
            The reminder of my shame hit hard.
            ‘Just leave me alone!’ I wailed. ‘What do you want from me?!’
            ‘You are actually quite good,’ she said, speaking with what I gathered was an Austrian lilt. ‘But you just chose the wrong venue. Sailors’ bars are designed for sailors. They go there to get laid, not for Shakespeare.’
            ‘Oh,’ I said, confirming or admitting a profound truth.
            ‘Tell me, where do people go to listen to Shakespeare?’ she asked.
            ‘They go to the theater,’ I replied.
            ‘If people who want to listen to Shakespeare go to the theater, why don’t you?’
            I wanted more details. I offered her a drink – but as soon as she had drawn a small map detailing the location of the Mombasa Theater and Arts Club, a horn honked outside the bar.
            ‘Sorry,’ she said, brushing her lips against my cheek while nodding subtly towards an idling Mercedes Benz. ‘Gotta go.’
            ‘What’s your name?’ I managed to ask before she made the door.
            ‘Elizabeth,’ she said, and then was gone.

After hiding out in a flophouse hotel, afraid to show my face in Mombasa during the long, cruel light of the next day, I  emerged late in the evening and strolled over to the Mombasa Arts and Theater Club to introduce myself to the manager. ‘I say, Shakespeare wallah, what!’ he replied with a grin.
            ‘Shakespeare whata?’
            ‘You know, the chaps who busked around West Africa with such success, although I believe they were financed by the British Council or some such. Who finances you?’
            ‘I was actually sort of thinking of passing the hat.’
            The manager bought me a double scotch and told me to hang around until after the evening movie had finished (Burton-Taylor’s Shrew). Finally the doors to the clubroom opened and out spilled a crowd of just plain regular folks: Englishmen with their wives, Indians dressed in safari suits with their families, middle-class Africans chatting softly at the bar and even the oddball American Peace Corps volunteer.
            ‘Well, Bard, the floor is yours,’ said the manager, snapping me out of my shock at the wonderfully mundane. Then he raised his voice above the general din of clinking beer glasses and the cough and cackle of club conversation.
            ‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’ he said. ‘Tonight we have a special guest, who claims he is a wandering actor, a peripatetic player of Shakespeare! Let me introduce to you, tonight only, the one and only … Bard in the Bush!’
            Heads turned, and a murmur passed through the crowd. I lifted two puppets and screwed my courage to the sticking place, like Macbeth knifing Duncan. Actually, the curtain rose on the Desdemona snuff scene from Othello.

Put out the light, and then put out the light.
If I quench thee, though flaming minister, I can again thy former light restore
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume …

The deed done and Desdemona dead, I finished the scene with a flourish, took a deep bow … and was met by silence. Disaster had struck again, I was sure. But then, from the bar, came the first murmurs of praise circulating around the room. It spread like a blissful contagion and as I emerged from my bow and threw back the facecloth, everyone was applauding and smiling.
            ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I said, unsure of what to do next.
            ‘I say, a little Romeo and Juliet?’ asked someone.
            Why not, I thought.
            ‘My next scene is a piece from that well-known play of the two star-crossed lovers. But what is not well known is that their first meeting is actually cast as a secret sonnet  …’
            I chipped in the Porter’s monologue from Macbeth which I somehow remembered from the off-off-off Broadway production years earlier, finishing my limited repertoire with a badly hashed version of Launce from The Two Gentlemen of Verona; for an encore, I reprised Desdemona’s death scene. My audience did not seem to care. The manager came back from passing around my beret, which was filled with cash notes and coins to the tune of some 250 shillings, a sum representing about 100 bucks, if memory serves. Others plied me with drinks and suggested new scenes. The night’s revelry went on, and I emerged from the club utterly smashed, my head spinning with new ideas and my pockets brimming with honest loot.
            Back to the flophouse that night? No way. I hailed a cab and went straight to the train station, where I got me a ticket to the Big Town aboard the Lunatic Express. It was still cattle class, and I ended up sleeping on a piece of floor somewhere behind a stove, but what the heck; I was going to Nairobi, bringing my show on the road. Finding li’l Livingston Eddy could wait for a while – I had a new career.