I Jump for You
by Martha Hipley
Born in the middle of three children, the only boy between two sisters who were both too pretty and polite to be believed, I was the class clown before I even went to school. My first memory is of sitting on my mama’s lap and letting out a clear church bell ring of a fart that made my daddy laugh and my mama hold me up at arm’s length to check if I had shit myself. I remember how beautiful his laugh was, the way it burst out of his gut as though all the pain of working a job he hated just to pay for his three children’s room and board was finally worth it to hear that one, wet fart. That was the first germ of a disease, the disease of wanting everybody I met to laugh like they loved me as much as my father did in that moment, of wanting every damn person who crossed my path to feel like every dark day, every bad decision had at least led them to one moment of joy.
I began my entertainment career in the traditional way by getting poor marks in school but getting it together every year just in time to pass to the next grade. I ruled the lunch room with my real and simulated farts, and I invented so many new ways to pratfall in each and every gym class that even Curly Howard would catch himself impressed. I scraped by without a thought of a future farther than the next recess until one particularly thoughtful and patient teacher, the kind who would ask kids if they were ok when they didn’t do the homework instead of flunking them, well, he recommended that I try out for the school play. I played the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, and Nicely Nicely in Guys and Dolls, and the literal ass in the Christmas pageant before it all fell apart. Of course I stole the show when I bucked the Cabbage Patch Baby Jesus off my back and pretended to shit on the manger floor, and of course the principal gave my mama an earful and booked me in detention for a month. I wanted to try and get out of it, but that teacher, the one good one, he told me that if I was gonna be an entertainer, I needed to pick my battles, and the Christmas pageant at a third-rate Catholic prep school wasn’t a battle worth winning. He bought me my own leather-bound copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare to read during that longest of months, and then he wrote me a recommendation for the theater program at U Berkham.
Now for being where it was, which is to say, not even within a day’s driving distance from New York City or Los Angeles, the theater department at U Berkham was full of the exact kind of freaks who should be running a theater department. What I mean is, the theater is meant to be a refuge, like a church, if a church was actually like what Jesus said and welcomed all the prostitutes and homosexuals and fat kids who have figured out that if they make fun of themselves first they can make everybody love them. You can tell by now that I was in that latter category, and, boy howdy, did I thrive in an environment where my final exams became less about writing an essay about what did or didn’t happen at Antietam and more about “inhabiting the moment” and “being one with the text.” It was a beautiful dream, those four years, a dream that still haunts me.
On the extracurricular side of things, I also found myself in a golden era of technological capital-s Stupidity. I came of age at that exact meeting point between the first wave of cheap-as-shit digital cameras and the death of public decency thanks to the Internet. I worked just enough hours washing dishes as I needed to buy a beautiful little Sony handycam and a couple of SIM cards. From that moment on, any waking hour that I wasn’t running lines in the theater or scrubbing grits in the kitchen of the Double M Diner, I was working on my audition tape for SNL. I could just feel Buster Keaton rolling in his grave with jealousy over all those endless hours of bullshit I shot and clipped together. For every inch of film that would have been a battle with the accountants of MGM, I could shoot a virtual mile of me falling on my own ass. And it was in one of these many miles that a clip of one particular ass-fall landed me in the top ten most popular videos on a new website called YouTube. Good Morning America even flew me to New York City just so that Al Roker could ask me how it felt to be famous for the sound of my butt cheeks clapping on national television. I told him it felt like Art.
You would think that with virality handed to me on a silver platter, I would have just coasted into a blissful oblivion of product endorsements. You have to remember, though, that my brain wasn’t even done being formed yet and neither was the Internet. Besides, if I had learned nothing else from the U Berkham theater department, I had at least learned that I was an artist. I turned down every damn agent and representative, every offer to hustle myself to Los Angeles, everything beyond that first round trip to New York in favor of graduating on time with a decent GPA and cashing out every penny that I had saved into euros. I enrolled myself in the premiere clowning program of Paris, France and said goodbye to everything I had ever known, even my own native tongue. Adieu, mon amour, indeed!
*
SCENE 1
A bridge across the Seine. A young mime gestures at passing tourists. An upturned beret rests on the ground in front of him. It is empty.
MIME
(silence)
A young woman approaches.
YOUNG WOMAN
(in French)
What a funny creature. I have never seen such a mime. He is round where he should be thin, brash where he should be elegant.
MIME
(silence)
YOUNG WOMAN
And this face, what a strange face. He needs no makeup. Anyone can see from a distance what a sad soul he is, just from the way he radiates out into the world.
MIME
(silence)
YOUNG WOMAN
I must know this man. Tell me, what is your name?
She embraces the mime.
MIME
(in French)
Me neither.
He farts. The woman laughs.
*
If I told you that Celine was the best thing to happen to me, that would be a lie, albeit a lie that would preserve our narrative tension in this tale a bit longer. Instead, I will say that she was, while not the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my whole life, certainly the most beautiful woman who had ever shown any sort of interest in me, my art, my dreams. She, too, was an artiste, a sculptor who made sets and props and costumes for a local theater company, and she could see something in me that I wanted to see but couldn’t quite—that it was worth it to carry on. She also tolerated, infinitely, my bad, broken French in a way that most Parisians wouldn’t and shouldn’t. I admired her with a deep, pathetic obsession. The nights I spent at her side, I wrapped around her like kudzu on a Jersey wall. The nights I spent alone, I tossed and turned in my little garret apartment, wishing myself forward in time to our next set date or, if that was unachievable, a quicker death.
Together, we blossomed, or at least, I blossomed, and as I didn’t have any tangible point of reference to her life before me and was full of all the masculine vanity of youth, I assumed her successes in those days were as much due to my influence as mine were due to hers. Her theater company offered to let me open their performances, first as an emcee, then as a real, complete act. The gaps in my French thickened my skin and forced an understanding of the most pure physicality of comedy and the truest depths of the human experience. Some things are universal, among them death, taxes, and flatulence. I felt an almost erotic thrill each night as I told my last joke and the red curtains parted to reveal the lush beauty of Celine’s latest mise en scène.
I will say of the French that certain stereotypes, assumptions, and expectations that we Americans hold thanks to film and television are quite true, among them a certain rapidity of romance that outstrips even the most jarring shotgun weddings of my own Appalachian youth. Within a year we shared that garret, our meager incomes, our futures. We had even grown to resemble each other the way old folks resemble their dogs—Celine’s belly stretched with child to match my own cornfed flab. There was a beautiful peace in it, in the waiting and growing, the making and talking, the long nights spent reading aloud to each other. We worked through the whole works of Shakespeare—Celine read all the girl parts, and I read all the boys. We saved the sonnets for last, taking turns between even and odd. We had made it to the one hundred and thirtieth when Beatrice arrived.
*
SCENE 2
A hospital. Night. Doctors and nurses bustle. A spotlight on a single, simple bed. A woman holds
a bundle to her breast. A man stands at her side.
WOMAN
Have you ever seen such a beautiful being?
MAN
Never.
WOMAN
Have you ever seen such a clever being?
MAN
Never.
WOMAN
Seeing her now, have you ever truly felt love before?
MAN
Never.
WOMAN
And what will you do about it?
MAN
Nothing.
*
And now you know the real best thing.
If you are young, I would say to you, “And the worst thing in life is greed.” If you are as old and lame as I am, I say, “How we all have suffered together!” Oh, if we had lived forever in that garret, making our little shows, tending to and loving Beatrice, reading sonnets until we fell asleep. But I was weak and stupid, and fate came a-knocking. Oh, why did I want anything more than I had?
After my early and prescient success (New York, Al Roker, et al.), I had shunned the new digital era with fervor. Art, as far as I was concerned, should be a thing of time and space and presence, which were all flattened out into nothing on the black mirror of the smartphone. While I found it tedious when the French seemed to hate useful things like punctuality and gas station sandwiches, I felt a deep kinship with their early hatred of those nasty little screens. I would visit my family once a year and wonder at how my parents and sisters and all their myriad friends and lovers would seem increasingly lost to these devices and their poisons.
Not only did I live in France, where the border between life and work is still better-preserved than in most places, I lived in the theater amongst drunks and hoboes, people who could barely wine and dine themselves, let alone own anything more than the cheapest flip phone. It was nearly a decade after the first lineup for an iPhone made the cover of the tabloids that any of my peers held anything like it in their hands, and that particular peer, a beautiful but stupid dancer called Jean-Pierre, might as well have been a monkey slapping a bone against the ground. The perception of The Arts as the avant garde is a strange one. While all the actors I knew fought tooth and nail over any opportunity to recreate Othello, Uncle Vanya or Blanche DuBois for the umpteeth time, our philistine friends in the outside world were killing each other to have the latest release of this phone or that. Eventually, our own reluctance and sheer financial exclusion from this brave new world meant nothing—every evening, as soon as the lights were dimmed, the audience would flash like fireflies, taking pictures of nothing for no one.
*
SCENE 3
A man stands in the middle of a stage with a microphone in hand. A spotlight shines bright upon
his sweaty body.
MAN
(in French)
Who is it for? Who is looking at this shit? Will you go back to your hotel or your shitty little apartment and jerk off while you watch it?
AUDIENCE
(silence)
MAN
Will a beautiful woman see your video and call you up and say, “Yes, I would like to fuck you, finally?”
AUDIENCE
(silence)
MAN
Will your father call you up and say, “Yes, son, I am finally proud of you, now that you have shared a video of the show you saw last night?”
AUDIENCE
(silence)
MAN
Take a picture, it’ll last longer. More like, if I kill myself in front of you, it’ll be worth more.
The audience is still silent but flashes with the lights of a thousand cameras.
MAN
(in English)
Just go the fuck home.
A man in the crowd stands and points at the stage.
MAN IN THE CROWD
That man seems important!
*
Young lovers can live on air and hope for almost forever, and a baby can live at her mother’s breast for a time, but eventually, a family needs and wants more than the weekly payments provided by a small but sustainable theater company. Beatrice was more beautiful and clever every day, and every day I felt worse that she slept in a little crib in a tiny apartment up six flights of stairs. Time, to an artist, is a construct of philosophy, and money is a construct of politics. Until rent is due, and due it was.
My second spate of virality came at a fragile moment in our domestic life. The invitations to talk shows and news programs paid more than a year in the theater, and I began to fantasize about things like private school tuition and flat screen TVs. I wanted Beatrice to have more than I did, and how could I give her that unless I, too, had more? It was easy to play the curmudgeon on TV and easier than I expected to transition into cameos and then supporting roles in various acclaimed and despised feature films. And if people are laughing, ain’t that what matters? A fart is a fart is a fart.
I became a face, then a name, and then a lead in various publicized and bloated productions for a popular but controversial streaming platform. You haven’t seen my later work by choice, but you have seen it I’m sure, if only in that space between waking and sleep, when you have slumped over on your couch, drooling, haunted by the endless autoplay of slop. By which I mean, none of it is good.
Beatrice, my love, my everything, had everything and nothing. She studied at the best schools. She wore the best clothes. She traveled the world. She never saw her father. A marital love may not last, may be supplanted with industry parties and press junkets and high resolution pornography, but a father’s love yields an infinite capacity for regret and shame.
*
SCENE 4
A yacht is docked in Cannes. A banner with the logo of a popular but controversial streaming platform flaps in the wind. A young woman runs along the marina and shoves past the line of celebrities boarding the boat. They are dressed in black tie. She is dressed for running errands. On the deck of the boat, she runs to a man. He wears basketball shorts and a Memphis Grizzlies hoodie.
MAN
(silence)
YOUNG WOMAN
Are you shocked to see me?
MAN
(silence)
YOUNG WOMAN
Is this what you wanted? All I wanted was your love.
MAN
(silence)
YOUNG WOMAN
And now I want nothing. This is it, my catharsis.
MAN
(silence)
YOUNG WOMAN
Was it worth it, all this?
She gestures out at the sea, the boat, the crowd of celebrities, the decadence of all of Cannes.
MAN
(silence)
YOUNG WOMAN
(in English)
Your last series was trash!
*
So here I stream before you. Before her, I hope.
All I wanted was to make you smile. All I wanted was to dance and be wanted.
Take me back to those days of poetry and prose, of cheap wine and too many stairs. I want to smash out the glass on this dark screen, and if I smash through it, will I see her again? Will I see Celine too? I can’t take another year of this, even another day of mugging and smiling and lying in front of lenses so that I might be radiated out to every screen in the world. I remember my memaw always resented that John Lennon said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. Well, none of them even had the Internet.
I would give all the money I have, all the fame, all the clicks and streams to see any of them, even that damned dull Jean-Pierre again, with the honesty of a man who has nothing more than he needs. Oh, just let me push through to the next world, the next lifetime, I am damn tired of this one and all its trappings. Just let me roll into my own grave and rot in peace. Let me be Uncle Vanya. Let me fart and be happy. Let it end.
*
SCENE 5
The Eiffel Tower viewing deck. A press event. A man wanders away from the crowd to face a cardboard standee of a cartoon flea. A sign next to the standee reads: “TRY THE FLEA-IFY FILTER BROUGHT TO YOU BY AMAZON.” The resemblance of the man to the character is obvious. He holds his phone out before him at arm’s length. He looks to the safety fence that arcs overhead.
MAN
Oh, I want to rest!
Martha Hipley is a writer and filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland who lives and works in Mexico City.