CHAPTER 2: MAKE-UP
Putting the make-up on, for him, is less of a process and more of a ritual. It is like prayer to a monk. Required (to him and him alone, for some bizarre, unexplainable reason) and strangely fulfilling.
He stands at the mirror, swaying to the music of Beethoven. The speakers jut out of the abandoned delicatessen walls and fill the place with the vicious, booming blare of the 9nth Symphony. He hears it remarkably well, even while in the bathroom at the sink. He is a man not necessarily of planning, but organization. Not necessarily of routine, but of rite. A list-maker, if you will. And when it's time for the putting on of the make-up, it's always Beethoven's 9nth.
And here the 9nth resounds with a clamorous authority. If the delicatessen weren't in a relatively bad part of Gotham, a ghetto in the Narrows only half full and occupied by crack-addicts and drug dealers, somebody might complain about the noise. But no. The music bothers not a soul. It is part of his universe, and it is building, a heavenly ascent, to it's climax—which, for him, will be like an orgasm when he hears it. And he stands at the mirror with his eyes shut, smearing old white stage make-up over his cheeks, his lips, his eye sockets, his scars, and bliss comes to him. It fills his body with an electric vigor, and his mind comes alive with such horrific, beautiful images. A woman fat enough to be mistaken for a walrus struggling to breath as her own body slowly suffocates her, a man as road kill in the gutter of an intercity street, two brothers as soldiers stabbing at each other with bayonets, a little boy dying of AIDS in a world that is dark and monstrous and bittersweet. This is his sick, deranged enlightenment. This high is better than that which any drug, invented or discovered, could ever produce. He wipes the white paint across his forehead and quivers as he feels it coat his skin. Lovely. Simply heaven.
Every now and again he sneaks a peek at the bicycle card lying on the porcelain basin of the sink. He still to this day has no idea how the little thing came to inspire his newfound guise. In that deck of fifty it was the joker card that found him best. He's had other personas, of course. That which he calls The Joker is only his current identity. At the moment, this one seems to satisfy him, but he remembers dressing up in his younger years even, as The Red Hood. How he would sneak out at night and drape that lovely red ski-mask over his boyish face and go shop-crashing and convenience store robbing. Sometimes he wouldn't do it for the money. Sometimes he would do it just for the sheer thrill of smashing a brick through a window and burning the store up from the inside, money and all. Sometimes he would do it just to see the fear in the eyes of the clerk at the counter as he pointed his pistol at their face. And he remembers how he would come away afterward and feel so alive. It would ware off eventually, it always did, but in those few moments just after it had taken place, after he had wrecked a part of the sanity of the planet, he would be flying higher than a rocket ship to Mars.
He would use this, does use this, as his drug because he despises narcotics. His opinion is, only the truly pathetic use narcotics. He is particularly spiteful of the rich suburban kids who use narcotics because they are bored with their video games and several hundred channels of cable TV. He feels they, the bored, are not investing their time accurately. He feels that they could be causing so much more damage, and not just to themselves. With the poor it is different, yes, but not too different. He recognizes that at least the poor have a somewhat plausible excuse for drowning their sorrows or pumping their veins full of the poison that makes them see God and all his holy angels playing divine music on harps and trumpets. The poor are down and out, and so what's wrong with using a little bit to escape? Everybody needs a little escapism every once and a while. Sometimes, albeit rarely, he takes cats with collars, the ones he finds wandering around outside, and puts them in the microwave in the kitchen until the popping noises send him over the edge and off the planet. Escapism, plain and simple. But he dislikes those poor people who do drugs constantly. He does not like the idea of hiding from the harshness of the world. He believes the concept of chaos should be accepted. Embraced, even, with open arms and cleared heads.
And as for alcohol . . . Alcohol he hates with a fiery passion that equals his lust for the violently macabre. The reason he so deeply hates alcohol is his father.
He stops dead in the middle of applying his lipstick (bright red like blood), eyes parting just a crack so that he can view himself in the mirror.
Part of the reason he wore the ski mask, wears the make up now, donned all the other costumes and masks and the like, is because he looks like his father.
Unable to stand this fact, and unwilling to break another mirror (the other three in the bathroom are badly smashed and shattered), he squeezes his eyes shut tightly and takes in a deep, calming breath. He focuses on the music. On the violent images. On their beauty, determined to forget how uncannily similar his own features are to his old man's.
The ski mask was his first attempt, and the make-up his most recent. But the scars that line his cheeks, they were his most desperate. They were his first broken mirror, also. Sitting alone in that padded little cell, swimming in an un-done strait-jacket, seething as he slipped the blade of glass into his cheek and feeling that moment of exciting tension just before he yanked backward, carving a 'happy little grin' onto his somber, ailing face. And oh, how the blood came then. And he tries to recreate it now in the bathroom of the delicatessen, mashing the lipstick point over the scars, imagining himself carving his face up all over again, picturing the liquid red trickling across his mouth and remembering the warmth running down his chin and the beautiful release it brought and the taste in his mouth the taste the taste of blooooood.
Outside, the music is raging.
Sooner or later he will find his father in his face again, and the make-up and scars will be unable to effect his not seeing it, and he will find something new. But for now, for now he is all bliss and joy and beautiful violent energy. He comes crashing out of the bathroom, make-up still wet on his ears and nose, to the thunderous conclusion of the 9nth. And he's singing, screaming, laughing to it as it ends. And the other men sitting in the cob-web ridden dining section look up from their card games and stare at him from behind their own masks and give their leader their undivided attention, an audience for which he will gladly perform.
He dances away as the music fades, off through the kitchen and toward the back rooms, where the meat-locker is. He's headed to check up on Martha Aiken, to 'speak with her'—as is the first step on the crumpled piece of notebook paper in his left pocket, the one with THE MASTER PLAN written in big bold magic marker at the top.