The Spotlight and the Stain

Where to put your feelings.

Everything is made of everything.
— Leonardo da Vinci

Ossage orange underbark, cactus flower, Gifted Japanese inkstick dust

When I was eighteen I ended up in a hospital for a month with a hematoma in my stomach that turned me into an artist.

I was in my second year of a degree in Classics when I was offered a job working the lights backstage at a local theatre. I was just following a set of cues, but I loved the feeling of supporting the mood on stage with tiny moves of the buttons and dials and faders. I loved the way I could make the light mix. I loved looking down to see a pool of light softly expand and open up a space on the scuffed black floor for the actor hidden in the shadows to walk into. I loved being the nerd behind the scenes alone in the quiet secret booth. A couple months later, I’d decided to drop out of university. I had a job lined up in Montreal X-raying Raisin Bran (a whole other story), and I planned to save up to move to Greece to get some first-hand experience with the land that made Sappho and Lucretius. But then, just before I left for Montreal, I got a call from the theatre asking if I wanted to try out for part in an experimental theatre project based on Andy Warhol’s factory. To this day I am not sure why I said yes.

Stains of Rudy Blue Prussian Blood ink from the studio of Yuri Shimojo , an ink made by the Toronto Ink Company and featured in The Colour Of Ink

I was a quiet kid. Without friends at school, I mostly hid in a stall of the boy’s bathroom or at the very edge of the schoolyard hoping that I would not be noticed. When I was noticed, I was given names by my tormenters which I could not correct. “Dazed Out Wimp” was one of the ones that stuck. In band class Mr. Ben the teacher made me cry because I did not buy a reed for my clarinet and so he made an example of me by making me stand up at the front of class and explain why I had no reed and could only cry. I did not talk much and I was weird. I figured there was something wrong with me and so I practiced invisibility .

I say all this not to make you feel sorry for me but to explain the degree to which people have always terrified me, and to hammer home how hard it was for me to get up on that stage under the lights and do an ad lib performance for the director, and that if I succeeded, it would be even more terrifying. I got the part of Billy Name. The play was mostly physical and I had one great line: “My name is Name.” I worked with an incredible cast of characters. We covered every inch of the theatre with tinfoil and silver paint and I wore the same black jeans every day and cut the hair of the guy who played Andy and the director hired a whole band to play the Velvet Underground and we sort of co-designed the play through a series of theatrical exercises. I was half in love with everyone in the cast. Part-way through rehearsals, I started brief affair with the woman who played Valerie Solanas who had previously been involved with the guy who played Gerard Malanga.

Solanas is of course famous for shooting Andy Warhol not to mention a prescient burn it all down feminist. Malanga was famous for being one of the few straight guys in a mostly queer utopia. The Malanga character was played by Greg Bryk, who at that time was most famous as the linebacker of our winning university football team, and now best known for his breakout role in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence along with countless roles as drug dealers, soldiers, and sci-fi thugs.

All this to say Greg Bryk suits his name. The play had a lot of movement, and at one point his character and mine get into a fight (I think it involved a bullwhip). He is supposed to a fake punch to my stomach, but on opening night, the fake punch landed a bit too real and it knocked the wind out of me. I was so full of adrenaline at the time that I barely noticed. The opening night was a huge success and the whole cast broke into the bar downstairs from the theatre and celebrated late into the night and I was excited to be invited back to Valerie Solanas’s apartment when everyone else drifted home. But something wasn’t right. I felt sick and figuring I had just had too much to drink I threw up in her bathroom. It was all blood.

Marta Abbott