Bad Convention

Jayne Mansfield took her life the other day.

It was very sad.
She went the barbiturate route.

Looking down at her body - her hourglass suspended in a dress, her platinum hair draped across a slab, it was hard not to feel completely and utterly fucked.

In her honour we watched a film. Not a Jayne Mansfield film (there weren’t any), we watched the Matrix.

All three hours of it.

For dinner, there was something of a banquet; tomato stew garnished liberally with beef mince, and served with garlic bread. Some of the bigger guys braved one of the smaller cellars, returning with pitchforks (precautionary) and several bottles of red. They said it had been quiet.

We drank into the night, toasting several times to her memory. In a way, it was nice to forget where we were and what we’d become.

To those ends, Sinatra and a man who looked like Adam Ant (but said he was someone else entirely) sullied the mood when they exchanged punches close to midnight, rolling about on top of one another; and only bothering to get up and dust down when one or both had been sick.

And would you believe it was Jeff Goldblum, of all people, who actually took it even further with some joke about child abuse. It was only when he saw the damage done that arguments were abandoned in exchange for tears; Jeff (and he does look a LOT like Jeff) speaking at length, and in graphic detail, about abuse suffered at the hands of a succession of wayward stepfathers and two butchers (unknown to each other but in direct competition in the same town).

It was agreed Jayne's body would be laid out in her favourite dress (the backless sequined number in blue, the one she had gone to sleep in) for the night. Her wig, the quality of which had been difficult to maintain in perpetual lamp light, was glued to her scalp. It had taken on a green-ish hue with time.

In the morning we paid our respects all over again. Goldblum took care to apologise for the events of the previous night. As did Adam Ant (Sinatra stayed in bed). We wrote haikus on gilded paper Little Richard found in a drawer in the main lobby reception, threading them into the slits in her dress with the help of safety pins and a marble brooch sourced from Lost Property; tokens of goodwill and love she could spend in the next life.

Finally, we said our private goodbyes; some taking her hands in theirs, others standing back to drink in the confusing mixture of radiance and sadness.

And then, later when we were gone, I heard several of the technicians carried her body up to the fifth floor where it was shoved into an exposed hole in the wall.

I heard they had to break her arms, feet and neck, and remove half of her face and lower jaw to fit it all in.

They got there in the end, I suppose.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us too afraid to ultimately admit what Jayne admitted, life goes on.

I speak for everyone when I say: this has been a bad convention, almost definitely the worst ever.