A/N: It's been a real long time since I've posted anything on this site so I hope you guys like this. I don't own RENT or this poem! Please review.
Angel Dumott Schunard, 21, Street Musician/Artist
When I decided I wanted to interview the Peeps for the Favorite Poem Project I organized the names alphabetically so as not to show favoritism. It's ironic then that the first person drawn was the first fanfic character I ever met. I wait patiently on the couch for Angel to enter the living room. I had told everyone that we'd conduct these interviews wherever they felt comfortable. Angel, in her usual flexibility and indecisiveness, said, "Wherever."
So I lie sprawled across the red leather couch idly pushing buttons on my tape recorder for a few minutes before a melodious voice trills:
"Today for you, tomorrow for me!"
I sit up grinning as she strikes a dramatic pose in the doorway, tall and curvaceous as a perfume bottle. Always dressed to the nines, today she sports a billowy white chemise above a very long pleated skirt colored differing shades of red. She has selected one color perfectly with which to paint her soft, wide lips, and contrast against the softer blush and eye shadow powdered across cinnamon skin. Her earrings dangle, her shoes glisten with rhinestone flare and she's clipped her ebony bob back behind her ears with a red glittered barrette. She swings her plastic pickle tub over her shoulder as she marches to where I sit. Even though I gave her a drum set of her own, plus ever other percussion instrument imaginable, she won't let that beat up thing go. She puts it bottom up on the floor and plops down next to me on the sofa, wrapping me in a tight one armed hug and kicking her legs excitedly.
"You okay, honey?"
This is her way of saying hello. I offer up the traditional reply.
"I'm afraid so. Better now that you're here."
"Aw, mi chica bonita," she beams. "God, I feel like we haven't talked in ages."
We had talked just that morning, but I know she's right. The truth is Angel and I haven't had a one on one character conference in months. The story I wrote around her at fourteen had done so well on the web I thought she'd be the only character I ever needed. But somehow it didn't work out that way. I had started another fic under the pressure of the first and abandoned it quickly. New characters came and my real life moved forward. I'll never get rid of the guilt I feel about Angel, but she, for her part, never complains. All she says is, "Whatever happens happens, honey. If we find time we'll do it. If we don't we won't." That's just how Angel is. Easy, confident, happy.
"Shall we begin?" she asks now. I nod excitedly and set my recorder on the coffee table. She slides to the floor, takes two drumsticks out of the tub and rights it. She's got something planned. I press record.
"Okay so how does this work, I read then you ask me questions? Or do we talk first?"
"Read it first," I decide. "Then you're answers will be clearer."
"All right then. This poem is called 'Life Doesn't Frighten Me' by Ms. Maya Angelou."
I smile. I had known she'd pick something by Angelou. For a moment there's a silence as she situates herself, curling her body around the drum as if it were a lover. I lean forward on the couch, licking my lips, an addict hungry for poetry. She smiles at me, then takes the sticks tightly in her limber, scarlet-fingered hands and closes her eyes. She begins a slow, simple rhythm on the plastic surface, like something out of the old black spirituals I half remember from elementary school music class. Bum-bum bah! Bum-bum bah! Then, after a bar, she recites. Slow, steady, to the rhythm she's created.
"Shadows
on the wall I go boo
Noises down the hall
Life doesn't frighten me at
all
Bad dogs barking loud
Big ghosts in a cloud
Life doesn't
frighten me at all,
Make them shoo
I make
fun
Way they run
I won't cry
So they fly
I just
smile
They go wild
Life doesn't frighten me at all."
She winks at me, still keeping her hands on beat. I giggle and she grins, then pauses before going on.
"Tough guys in a fight
All
alone at night
Life doesn't frighten me at all.
Panthers in the
park
Strangers in the dark
No, they don't frighten me at all."
Slowly, gradually, she softens the volume of her beat. When she speaks again her voice is a whisper. She opens her eyes and I gasp as I see tears.
"That
new classroom where
Boys all pull my hair
(Kissy little
girls
With their hair in curls)"
The beat stops. Angel reaches up, places her hands inside the dark bob, and removes it. The true hair underneath is cropped short, as dark as the wig, and I am forced to remember something that every day comes as a surprise. Under the rouge and glittering jewels, Angel is not a girl. My friend holds the wig above her head like some royal crown and whispers:
"They don't frighten me at all."As quickly as it happened, it's over. She replaces her wig, redoes the barrette, picks up the sticks and plays that simple rhythm. Bum-bum, bah! Bum-bum, bah! It's louder and faster than before.
"Don't
show me frogs and snakes I've got a magic
charm Life doesn't frighten me at all
And listen for my scream,
If I'm
afraid at all
It's only in my dreams.
That I keep up my sleeve,
I can walk the ocean floor
And
never have to breathe.
Not
at all
Not at all.
Life doesn't frighten me at all"
She finishes with a spectacular drum role and I leap up off the couch clapping. She laughs and comes back to the couch to hug me.
"Good God Angel, you're gonna make me cry here!" I burst out. "Jeez."
She laughs again.
"All right so let's lighten the mood a little, shall we?"
"Please. So ah, when did this poem find you?"
"Well it was published in nineteen…seventy eight I think so I was three years old. My mother was a huge, huge Angelou addict and was constantly reading her works aloud to me. But the first time I ever really paid attention to it was when I was around thirteen when I met my chica Mimi."
I smile. Mimi Marquez, another RENTer, is a Latin dancer and Angel's self proclaimed "soul sister." She's signed on to the project too.
"You may not know this," Angel says. "But her mother cleaned house for my mother. That's how we met."
"Really? Wow, I didn't know that."
Prior to his coming out, Angel had lived in Westport as part of a wealthy family, something this wild bohemian is now embarrassed to admit. I don't know much about Mimi's past; only that it's not a rosy picture.
"Anyway, while Mrs. Marquez worked, Mimi would jump rope on the street outside. Lord, lord, that girl was addicted to the rope. Anyway it turned out she'd heard the poem at school and thought it would make a good rhyme. I came home from school one day and heard her singing it just like that. But she forgot a line and stepped on her line. Well stubborn little Mimi, you know how she is. She wouldn't get jumping again until she could remember it. So I went over and fed it to her. Ever since that minute, that second, we've been like this."
She crosses her fingers. I laugh.
"Do you remember which line?" I ask jokingly and she bats her hand and snorts.
"Oh that's easy. It was the line about "panthers in the park." I remember because she lived right near a park growing up and told me she'd never seen a panther in it."
She laughs at the memory and so do I. I imagine the two of them; the now voluptuous Mimi a scrawny eleven year old under a veil of brown curls and Angel a gentle eyed, spaghetti limbed boy as they stood outside his house among the maple trees and old fashioned lampposts. So much has changed.
As if reading my thoughts, Angel suddenly sighs wistfully. She looks away from me towards something on the ceiling, eyes glazing over as she tumbles through memory.
"Then as we got older things changed on us," she murmurs. "I left town and lost little Mimi. Then…well you know what happened, nothing very good. But I kept this poem written on my heart all that time. No matter how hard times got, and were they ever hard, I remembered Ms. Maya's words, the way I had when those boys in the classroom hurt me the way they hurt her. Her own poem became that magic charm she'd been talking about. All I had to do was say it. Life doesn't frighten me. It really works. More years passed and soon there wasn't as much hardship. Mimi and I found each other again and our friendship was as strong as ever. In a city of eight million people, imagine!" She chuckles softly. "Life is funny sometimes."
I just nod. She sighs again and turns her head, looking down to the floor. Suddenly her face looks a little more tired, creased with lines that weren't there before.
"I guess whatever Mimi and I took from the poem still binds us. We're older now but not necessarily braver or wiser. We've both got our ghosts and our panthers and shadows on the wall. And we know it's never gonna be over. But we won't let life frighten us."
As she speaks these words she looks down sadly and strokes the red satin ribbon pinned to the corner of her blouse. Mimi has one too. They never take them off. I feel an ache at the back of my throat as I ask the question:
"Why do you love this poem, Ang?"
She looks back at my eyes with that same smile. Not sad really, but resigned, determined.
"Because when I think of it I remember where my heart is. I can't be a ray of golden sunshine without a little help now and again ya know!"
She tosses her hair and bats her eyes and with my giggles the spell over the room is broken. Then suddenly we hear a sharp beeping go off. Angel looks down at her waist and pusses the button on the little black box at her waist.
That's the beeper the doctors gave Angel when she was just eighteen with the first of many amber bottles.
"Ooh," she squeaks. "Time to improve my quality of life. Sorry, sweetie, I gotta break for a minute."
"Oh, no, no that's okay. I think we can stop." I punch a button on my recorder. Angel's nose wrinkles as she smiles.
"Okay. Thanks, Livvy. This was fun, what a great idea. If you need anything else don't you hesitate to ask!"
She bops me on the nose with her index finger, then picks up the drum slings it over her shoulder. Before she leaves the room I can't resist the urge to call:
"Te amo, Angel!"
She looks back over her shoulder, the ends of her jet black hair brushing past one smooth, glowing cheek.
"Te amo tambien," she replies, winking and sashays out the door.
☼☼☼