The Pink Duck of Permission

Watching "F is for Fake" took me back (I often have this time distortion experience when I think of tricksters, which seems oddly appropriate) to the year I went to school in Hawaii, which year has now become obscured in my less-than-perfect memory, but seems to be '87-'88, or maybe '88-'89. The beginning of the film features a woman named Oja who struts her stuff for what appears to be a variety of eager, lusty males. Rather, we are watching her headless torso, butt and legs for several ponderous minutes while men (supposedly) look on with hungry eyes. This reminded me of the following experience.

I was shopping with friends in Waikiki when we saw a vision of beauty about a block away. This vision was tall and lanky, walked with a sultry gait, had long blonde hair and was wearing nothing but a bright pink bikini and spike-heeled slides. The hair waved back and forth jauntily across the vision's backside. The imacculately shaved legs moved together tightly in a suggestive manner. The hands stood out from the hips, delicately, as this vision of loveliness moved. Abruptly, the vision turned at the corner to cross the street and -- as one -- my friends and I came to a complete halt. The vision had a beard... not a woman beard, but a full-out hippy style, ZZ top beard. Yes, the vision was a man. Upon asking around, we discovered the vision's name was Waikiki Bob, and he was a well-known fixture of the street scene there.

This is a true story. (As true as they get...)

Anyway, I kept expecting Oja to be other than female.

Freddie the Fake

“My own position, in any event, is not that the artists I write about are tricksters but that there are moments when the practice of art and this myth coincide" (14).

Trickster Makes This World - Lewis Hyde

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, No escape from reality
Open your eyes, Look up to the skies and see,
I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go, Little high, little low
Any way the wind blows doesn't really matter to me, to me.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" - Queen

"I went to bed with the disconcerting knowledge that almost everything I had assumed about my life was incorrect, that I had been baptised in blood and raised on secrets and misconstructions which had, obviously made me who I was" (133).

My Life as a Fake - Peter Carey

Reading Hyde and the backstory of poor Boofy in Carey has led me, via strange and circuitous thought processes, to Queen front man, Freddie Mercury. This stems from more than the fact that they are both British (a fact which Freddie came by through India) and the hidden-or-maybe-not-so-hidden hypersexual notoriety both men shared. Like Lord Wode-Douglass, Freddie "did not discriminate" (127). Lover Mary Austin was his lifetime partner, but Freddie's passions flamed brightly elsewhere. Both knew the burden of "living a lie." But this is just one aspect of the tragedy of the trickster within, the one that tries to outwit itself, and destroys itself in the process.

In my trickster class we talked about first lies, and the lies we keep to ourselves, the transgressions that haunt us and bedevil us through life, and hoaxes. Queen's hard rock image could be said to be one of the great hoaxes of modern music, putting on an aural show of the testosterone rich, head-banging variety while embracing the nail-painting, sequin-wearing, gender-bending visual nuances of glam rock. The group intentionally poked fun at the ultra-masculine suppositions of the corporate rock enterprise. There was something of the jester in Freddie especially, his ability to make a mockery of himself while embracing his musical and theatrical genius. Perhaps Slater was more like Freddie in this regard, as "the thing about dear old Johnno [was] he always did exactly as he damn well like[d]," going where he pleased, basking in the spotlight, the fun-loving face of the trickster (10). Freddie even performed on stage with the Royal Ballet, not just singing, but dancing, and not a soul would nay-say him. In fact, they gave him a standing ovation. The lyrics to such songs as "Stone Cold Crazy" and "I'm Going Slightly Mad" also reflect the reality-bending aspect of Freddie's inner trickster.


But for all his bravado, Freddie could not admit publicly to having AIDS until literally the day before he died, perhaps a reflection of the lyrics to "The Show Must Go On", perhaps just a last lie as significant as a first lie. What must we do to make the unendurable endurable?

Jim Bridger: Mountain Men and Tricksters

When I think of the research I did on Wyoming history, the most trickster-like character that comes to mind is Jim Bridger. I don't think that most people would categorize Bridger as a con-man as such, but there were elements of his life and dealings which hearkened to that ethic. Mountain men in general could be considered a tricksterly lot. They walked the boundaries between white men and Native Americans, mediated between civilization and wilderness. Their annual meeting, the Rendezvous, was something of a Bacchanal, characterized by drunken brawls and trying to out-sell each other and the traders who came for their goods. One of the attributes which set Bridger apart from the others was his special gift for telling tall tales. They all told them, but he was the master, and was renowned for his stories from the elite of Euro-American society (he even told one of his classics to President Grant, I believe) to the Indian war chiefs themselves (there is a story of how he kept a tribal council enrapt for an hour with a story told all in sign language). His most notorious story was one in which he either died or got scalped at the end, depending on the audience. He was so notorious for his hyperbole that when he told Easterners about the wonders of Yellowstone, no one would believe him at first.

Bridger, like the African trickster Legba, was a master linguist. He was employed as a scout by many people (the U.P. Railroad, the Army, the Mormons) because of this gift. There have been suspicions that his interpretations weren't always accurate. After all, Bridger was also a businessman, and he had his own agendas. He also was known to be quite virile, to put it politely, and was considered handsome. As such, he had several wives, consecutively, maybe (officially), one of whom was Chief Washakie's daughter, called Mary, with whom he spent his final years (she probably had another name, but it has since been lost, as far as I know). Like most tricksters, Bridger could not stay in one place. He was always on the move, exploring usually. He acquired the nickname "Old Gabe" because it was said he knew the face of the earth as well as the Angel Gabriel himself. (wings)

I could go on and on, but just as a final interesting note, Bridger went around for years with an arrow imbedded in his shoulder from an Indian skirmish with some Gros Ventres near the Tetons. He had it removed finally in an open air surgery during a rendezvous as entertainment, with no anesthesia. Aside from the ick factor, I'm not exactly sure how this relates to being a trickster, but I'm working on it.