THE LAZARILLO OF FINE ARTS.

 

The Lazarillo of Fine Arts
(Memoirs of an Anointed Divo)

A Tragicomic Picaresque Farce in Four Masters and a Mirror

 

By Benjamin Gavarre

THE LAZARILLO OF FINE ARTS. © 2026 by BENJAMIN GAVARRE is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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CHARACTERS AND STAGE DESIGN

• GABRIEL "GABE" SUNDAY (50 years old and 19 years old at once): A single actor who splits himself in two without ever leaving the stage. On one side, he is the Consecrated American Showman—draped in a monumental black silk dressing gown encrusted with twenty-four-karat gold sequins—and on the other, he is a starving country boy from the Mississippi Delta, wearing high-water mustard polyester slacks and shoes resoled with egg-carton cardboard. His survival schizophrenia is marked by razor-sharp shifts in lighting, posture, and vocal register.
• THE FOUR MASTERS: MRS. CHARLOTTE BEAUREGARD OF BUCKHEAD (Gluttony and Pride), CAPTAIN NEPTUNE OF "THE ELECTRIC BAYOU" (Sloth), COLONEL HARLAN CROSSFIRE (Wrath and Greed), and ROCK MONTGOMERY, "THE GOLDEN NARCISSUS" (Lust and Envy).
• YOUR HONOR: A 1970s portable cassette recorder sitting on the illuminated vanity table, to which Gabriel confesses his sins. In the Epilogue, it takes flesh as LAZARUS (a.k.a. NAZARENE), a starving nineteen-year-old government stenographer, general assistant, songwriter, and singer.

The star dressing room at Carnegie Hall in New York City, choked with towering wreaths of giant gladioli. At the back stands a heavy baroque mirror that turns translucent whenever Gabriel’s vengeful hallucinations erupt.

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PROLOGUE: THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF THE RHINESTONES

(Warm amber light over the vanity table. GABRIEL stands with his back turned, contemplating a custom Nudie Cohn-style stage suit of black velvet and gold bullion hanging on a mannequin. The hum of the air conditioner vibrates through the room, underscored by the muffled roar of ten thousand souls chanting his name beyond the walls of Carnegie Hall. Gabriel pours himself two fingers of crystal-clear Kentucky moonshine, studies the heavy bags under his eyes in the mirror framed by thirty glowing bulbs, and presses the "Rec" button on the cassette deck. He speaks with a musical cadence).

GABRIEL:
Well now, look here, Your Honor… or whatever fancy name the publishers slap on the cover when they peddle my memoirs for seventy-five cents at the Greyhound bus station… folks out there in the velvet seats think a man was born hatching out of a mother-of-pearl oyster shell, already blessed with a pressed falsetto, a Pepsodent smile, and his backside lined in imported satin. (He lets out an ironic laugh). No. To make it to this dressing room—where even the water in the toilet bowl smells like French gardenias—this one right here had to serve first as a front-porch doormat, then a honky-tonk spittoon, then a hot brick for other men's cold feet, and, in my spare time, live chum for the sharks.

The Pentecostal preachers back home used to holler that there are seven deadly sins that send you greased and sliding straight into Old Scratch’s boiler room. Pure propaganda to scare folks who eat pinto beans for supper! In this city of wolves in Brooks Brothers suits, the only mortal sin is having sins when you’re dirt poor. If you’re poor and you’ve got Pride, your stiff corpse turns up frozen to a park bench on the Bowery. If you’re poor and you’ve got Wrath, the precinct bulls rearrange your teeth with a hickory nightstick in the holding tank. If you’ve got Gluttony, your belly button fuses right to your backbone from swallowing your own spit staring through the windows at Delmonico’s.

I made it to the top, yes indeed, because the Good Lord built a cathedral pipe organ inside my throat… but mostly because I learned how to sell off my dignity on an installment plan, like a limited-time promotion, while deep down inside I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured myself slitting all their throats with a rusty guitar string.

(He shrugs off the black-and-gold silk robe. Underneath, he wears mustard-yellow polyester trousers riding three inches above his ankle bones and a dingy, buttonless shirt. His dignified posture collapses on the spot: he rounds his shoulders, sucks in his gut, and puts on the hungry, servile, incandescent grin of a stray mutt begging for a soup bone).

GABRIEL:
Because hunger, Your Honor, is a mean, handsy bitch of a schoolmarm… but Lord, don't she teach you how to hit a high C when she’s got her thumbs around your windpipe!

SCENE ONE: MRS. CHARLOTTE BEAUREGARD OF BUCKHEAD

(The light snaps to the surgical white of a millionaire’s Georgian mansion. Enter MRS. CHARLOTTE BEAUREGARD teetering on 70s stiletto heels, wrapped in a silver fox stole complete with the taxidermied head biting her shoulder, a choker of pearls the size of quail eggs, and a perfumed plush Pekingese dog cradled in her arms).

GABRIEL: (To the cassette recorder, cradling a battered acoustic guitar missing its fourth string).
I rolled into Atlanta off the back of a turnip truck with three country-soul ballads scribbled on paper cement sacks and a hole in my left shoe where the winter wind came in and my own shame leaked out. My first master wasn't a mister, she was a matron: Mrs. Charlotte Beauregard of Paces Ferry Road. She hired me off the corner by the hardware depot to entertain the guests at the First Communion party of Frou-Frou, her prized Pekingese who had just flown back from hemorrhoid surgery at the Mayo Clinic. She promised me ten dollars and the right to lick the silver catering trays once the high society went home. I had spent four straight days eating air sandwiches without the bread.

MRS. CHARLOTTE: (With the throttled warble of a society soprano who’s had her tonsils bobbed, spraying a can of Lysol in a cloud around Gabriel).
All right, boy, sing something folksy, and don't you dare holler like a watermelon peddler—high notes make the stitches on Frou-Frou’s sphincter come unknotted! And take two giant steps back from the beluga caviar table; you’re sweating rancid lard and your orphan eyeballs are going to curdle my homemade mayonnaise!

GABRIEL:
But Miss Charlotte, ma'am, pretty lady… I haven't had a solid crumb hit my belly since Tuesday noon. Just look at that smoked salmon finger sandwich the Right Reverend Bishop left half-chewed in the crystal ashtray… couldn't you let me give it one little goodbye kiss before the maid scrapes it into the trash? I’ll sing you my brand-new original number, the one I wrote thinking about the morning my sainted mama pawned me at the feed store for two pounds of roofing nails…

MRS. CHARLOTTE: (Letting loose a laugh like shattered cut glass).
Oh, girls, come listen to this wild swamp possum—he claims he has a mother and composes music! Shut your trap and play For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, you greasy rag! Look here, the puppy just dropped a rind of imported Gruyère cheese right between my Ferragamos. If you eat it off the rug without using your hands and wagging your little tail in three-quarter waltz time, I’ll toss in an extra fifty cents so you can buy yourself a bar of carbolic soap.

GABRIEL: (To the tape recorder, eyes bloodshot).
Without using my hands, Your Honor! Right there under my nostrils sat silver platters of Gulf oysters on the half-shell, pine-nut-stuffed turkeys gleaming like a cherub’s backside, champagne fountains where those withered old biddies stubbed out their ivory-tipped cigarettes… My stomach was growling in E-flat major. Gluttony was yanking my tongue toward the carpet, and Pride was whispering in my ear: "Smash that six-string right across their snouts, Gabe!".

(LIGHT CHANGE: DREAM DELIRIUM I — Blood Red and Electric Violet / Macabre Dixieland Strut).

GABRIEL: (Leaping atop a stool like an avenging Delta prophet, eyes rolled back).
And right then and there, Your Honor, I dropped the guitar and snatched up the electric turkey-carving knife! In one bound I was standing dead-center on the Brussels lace tablecloth, kicking silver gravy boats all over their Christian Dior gowns. I ripped that strand of pearls off Mrs. Charlotte’s turkey neck and rammed them down her gullet one by one with the handle of a soup ladle, screaming: "Swallow your pearls, you wicked witch, let's see if they come out the other end already strung!" Then I grabbed Frou-Frou the Pekingese, tied him onto my scalp like a powdered French wig, seized a roasted turkey drumstick for a microphone, and let rip a falsetto so savage it burst every silicone implant and Baccarat crystal goblet in the Junior League! Oh, what a banquet, boss! Me scooping up caviar with both fists on the Persian rug while Mrs. Charlotte crawled around on all fours barking for an olive pit!

(HARD CUT IN LIGHT. The cold kitchen white returns. Dead silence).

MRS. CHARLOTTE:
Did you freeze up on purpose or were you born simple-minded, boy? I said no hands on the carpet, the help just vacuumed. Hurry it up, Frou-Frou is getting bored!

GABRIEL: (With an immense, luminous, broken grin; he drops to all fours, plucks the cheese rind off the rug with his teeth in a comic somersault, and barks on pitch in G major).
Arf, arf, sweet Miss Charlotte! My, oh my, don't that French cheese taste heavenly with a pinch of stiletto dust! Here comes Jolly Good Fellow with a high-falsetto howl so little Master Frou-Frou’s tender parts heal up nice and pink!

GABRIEL: (Spitting discreetly into his handkerchief as Mrs. Charlotte exits cackling; he turns to the tape recorder).
Do you see how it works, Your Honor? If I’d gotten all proud and high-and-mighty that afternoon, my bones would be rotting in the potter's field with my honor intact and my belly caved in. You can't chew dignity, and it makes piss-poor soup stock! That night on the Greyhound bus, I chewed that lint-covered cheese rind crying pure bile… but out of that dog-bark I let loose on all fours, I pulled the high-pitched vocal yelp of my first international gold record. Twelve years later, when Mrs. Charlotte ended up on the street because her husband ran off to Geneva with the pool boy, she wrote begging for two comp tickets in the nosebleed section to hear me sing… and I mailed her a box of Milk-Bone dog biscuits autographed with a giant middle finger! He who laughs last... eats his revenge cold.

SCENE TWO: CAPTAIN NEPTUNE AND "THE ELECTRIC BAYOU"

GABRIEL: (To the recorder, taking a pull of moonshine).
After Mrs. Charlotte ran me out of Buckhead for leaving the smell of poor white trash on her Oriental rugs, I learned the first law of musical physics, Your Honor: in this great republic, before an impresario wants to hear your high C, he wants to grab your low D. (He lets out a sarcastic laugh). And don't you get scared on me, you asked me for the gospel truth with the drawers pulled down! If a boy wants to sing for the First Lady at Carnegie Hall, first he’s got to learn how to sing for the husbands of the First Ladies when they’re blind drunk on rotgut rum in the basement dives off Bourbon Street.

(GABRIEL pulls a grease-stained calypso shirt with limp ruffles over his high-water polyester pants. The lighting shifts to a flickering brothel pink. Enter CAPTAIN NEPTUNE: yellowed white linen suit, a chewed, slimy cigar stub wedged in the corner of his hideous mouth, a gold tooth the size of a postage stamp, and a wire flyswatter in his fist).

GABRIEL: (Rubbing his face).
My second master was Captain Neptune—owner, lord, and spiritual pimp of a New Orleans cellar club called The Electric Bayou, a basement so damp the cockroaches would stick their tongues out at you when they paddled by. I worked twenty-two-hour shifts down there. From six in the evening till ten at night, I scrubbed the urinals with muriatic acid; from ten till two, I served rum-and-Cokes with ice cubes recycled out of the spittoons; from two till four, I sang swamp-pop ballads dressed like a tropical parakeet; and from four till six in the morning, I mopped out the back booths where the State Senators went to unload their patriotic burdens with the B-girls.

CAPTAIN NEPTUNE: (Licking his cigar stub and cracking the wire flyswatter across Gabriel’s calves).
Wake up, you gutter canary, you’re sleeping on your feet and spooking the paying customers! Look at the bags under your eyes, you look like a hungover raccoon! Sheriff "Bull" Higgins is sitting at Table Four with three vice-squad detectives. He says for you to bring over the bottle of the good French cognac and sing him Crying in the Chapel… perched right square on his lap, on account of the Sheriff is nearsighted and likes to feel the acoustic vibrations directly through his thighbone.

GABRIEL:
But Captain Neptune, I haven't shut my eyes in four days… Yesterday I nodded off for three minutes under the billiard table while Busty Rosita was servicing a meatpacker right on top of the green felt, and all the cigar ash and sweat of original sin rained down on the crown of my head. Let me curl up for thirty minutes on the empty Dixie beer crates! I came here for my art, Captain Neptune, I’m a songwriter…

CAPTAIN NEPTUNE: (Hawking up a phlegmy laugh).
A songwriter?! The only thing you’re gonna compose in here is your fake little smile when the Sheriff stuffs a five-dollar bill down your jockey shorts! Sloth is a mortal sin, you stupid hick! In The Electric Bayou, he who sleeps don't eat, and he who acts too proud turns up floating face-down in the Industrial Canal with a bouquet of water lilies stuck up his tailpipe. Now get over there, shake that skinny frame like a Waring blender, and if the Sheriff pinches one cheek, you turn the other just like Jesus Christ commanded!

GABRIEL: (To the cassette deck, tiptoeing across the stage balancing an imaginary tray).
Oh, Your Honor, what a sweet temptation Sloth is when you’re nineteen years old and your ankles are swollen up like boiled sausages! I used to stare at the winos passed out cold under the urinals, snoring in the piss-soaked sawdust, and I envied them like they were sleeping on clouds in glory. When I reached Table Four, Sheriff Bull Higgins—a three-hundred-pound gorilla who smelled of drugstore cologne, aged armpits, and gun oil—yanked me by my shirt ruffle, slammed me down right onto his gun belt, and shoved his cold, clammy paw up under my shirt, hunting for Lord knows what radio station between my ribs while blowing Lucky Strike smoke into my ear: "Sing it real soft, sugarplum, my trigger finger’s feeling mighty twitchy tonight."

(LIGHT CHANGE: DREAM DELIRIUM II — Hellfire Red and Sulfur Yellow Strobe Lights / Voodoo Burlesque Conga).

GABRIEL: (Vaulting onto a chair in a vengeful trance, eyes blazing like a guerrilla diva).
And right then, Your Honor, I felt the spirit of Mae West mixed with John Brown come roaring down into my bones! I clamped my skinny thighs together like a pair of iron shears and—wham!—crushed Sheriff Higgins’s family jewels with the sheer gristle of my starving hipbones! While that gorilla howled in soprano hunting for his manhood on the sawdust floor, I slid the Colt .45 right out of his holster. "Now you’re gonna hear how your sweet mama sings, you sons of bitches!" I hollered. I put Captain Neptune down on all fours on the dance floor, shoved his own lit cigar up where the sun don't shine, and forced the three vice detectives to dance Swan Lake in their polka-dot boxers while I poured good cognac over their heads and struck a kitchen match! The Electric Bayou went up like a Roman candle! And I strolled right out through the flames, buck naked, glorious, and covered in hundred-dollar bills glued to my privates with tupelo honey, while the hook-and-ladder firemen tossed red carnations and sunflowers at my feet!

(HARD CUT IN LIGHT. The miserable brothel pink returns).

CAPTAIN NEPTUNE:
Put some sugar in those hips for the Sheriff, you starving scarecrow, you look like a dripping nose! Wake up, smile!

GABRIEL: (Shifting uncomfortably with the frozen grin of a tragic clown).
Yes sir, Sheriff! Lord have mercy, what a warm hand you’ve got, feels like a hot flatiron! Here comes the second verse, boss, and if you like I’ll spin all the way around so you can watch the neon bounce off my polyester!

GABRIEL: (Wipes his nose and mouth and leans in close to the recorder).
I didn't burn that dive down that night, Your Honor. And I didn't break a thing on the Sheriff, except the brass zipper on his fly with my shirt button when he tried to collect his tip in the washroom hallway. But just look how Divine Providence works when a boy swallows his gag reflex: to keep that filthy old hog from getting a full handful of meat while I was singing, and at the same time keep from falling asleep standing up, I started doing these little sideways electric hops—sucking in my gut, puffing out my chest, and spinning half-way round with my hands flapping high like I was shooing horseflies. The drunks started hollering: "Look at that skinny bastard go, looks like he’s got a live lizard down his trousers!" They started howling, they started pitching silver quarters onto the floorboards… and twenty years later, Your Honor, decent country-club wives from Seattle to Miami pay front-row prices to watch me do that exact same little dance step, thinking it’s pure Southern joy. Joy my ass, sweetheart! Those are jackrabbit reflexes so a man don't get his backside pinched without a paid ticket!

SCENE THREE: COLONEL HARLAN CROSSFIRE

(Captain Neptune vanishes into the shadows. The light shifts to the bureaucratic amber of an expensive 1970s Music Row office. Enter COLONEL HARLAN CROSSFIRE: crooked platinum-blond toupee, oversized square tinted glasses, loud tartan plaid sports coat, and alligator-skin boots with the animal’s glass eyes still glued to the toes).

GABRIEL: (Stripping off the ruffled calypso shirt; he stands in a ribbed white undershirt, clutching a sheaf of grease-spotted sheet music under his arm).
With the tips I scraped together dodging hands in The Electric Bayou, I saved enough to buy a shirt without ventilation holes and took a bus to Nashville to knock on the big mahogany door: Condor Records on Music Row. That was the kingdom of my third master, Colonel Harlan Crossfire. A man so tightfisted that whenever he cried at a funeral, he caught his own tears with an eyedropper to top off his Cadillac battery. I walked in shaking like a leaf with my twenty best songs—the ones I wrote on brown butcher paper while scrubbing toilets—and he received me with his boots propped up on the desk.

COLONEL CROSSFIRE: (Speaking in the unctuous baritone of a late-night laxative commercial).
Look here, my little backwoods tadpole, your little ditties have a certain charm. They’re trashy, sticky, and weepy, just the way the trailer-park rubes like 'em… But I’m gonna give it to you straight: you’ve got a face carved out of a swamp-cypress stump… and you move like somebody’s tickling your rear end. The American public wants square-jawed blond surfer boys. I’ll give you a hundred bucks flat for the whole batch of twenty songs, you sign right here stating they were written by my nephew Ricky "The Malibu Cyclone," and then you… slip out the back alley out of the sun.

GABRIEL:
But Colonel, a hundred dollars won't even cover the rent on the boiler-room cot I share with four fiddle players and a billy goat! Let me cut just one forty-five single with my own voice! I swear on my mama’s Bible, if you let me sing for you right here, up close, every hair on that toupee of yours will stand straight up at attention!

COLONEL CROSSFIRE: (Lowering his voice, sliding off his tinted shades, and eyeing him with viscous lechery).
Is that a fact, sonny boy? Got yourself a big pair of lungs and a deep throat, do you? Well now… step over here. Turns out the building shoeshine boy didn't show up today and my gators picked up dust on Broadway. Crawl on under my desk, buff these toes to a mirror shine with your own shirtsleeve… and while you’re down there on your knees between my knees, sing me that number that goes "I’ll Love You Till the River Runs Dry." If you convince me you’ve got good… acoustics down there in the dark, I might just bump you up to a hundred and fifty bucks and let you sing backup "shoo-be-doo-wahs" behind my nephew.

GABRIEL: (To the tape recorder, dropping to his knees in front of the Colonel’s leather armchair).
So there I was, Your Honor, wedged into that dark mahogany cave, breathing in mentholated foot powder and old-man mothballs from his trousers. Wrath was burning my ears like hot skillet oil. I stared at those two dead alligators on his feet and thought about every supperless night I spent rhyming "heartache" with "for goodness' sake." And as the Colonel slowly spread his knees apart, sighing like a hog in a mud wallow and reaching down with his heavy Masonic ring to stroke the nape of my neck…

(LIGHT CHANGE: DREAM DELIRIUM III — Psychedelic Purple and Golden Smoke / Distorted Mariachi-Country Brass).

GABRIEL: (Rising from beneath the desk transformed into a satanic high priest of honky-tonk).
I grabbed both of those alligator boots and pinched their tails so hard they came roaring back to life, Your Honor! Those gators unhinged their jaws full of razor teeth and—crunch, crunch!—ripped both of Colonel Crossfire’s legs clean off at the groin! While the old bastard shrieked, spurting black India ink instead of blood, I yanked off his platinum-blond toupee, slapped it onto my upper lip like an imperial mustache, snatched his solid-gold Parker fountain pen, and drove it dead-center into his forehead to sign his death certificate! "Sing shoo-be-doo-wah down in hell now, you old boar hog!" I roared, while his tasty nephew Ricky crawled in on all fours barking and begging for mercy, and I forced him to eat his own boogers laced with Tabasco sauce until he got the hiccups out of his backside!

(PURPLE BLACKOUT. The bureaucratic amber returns).

COLONEL CROSSFIRE: (Snapping his knees shut and straightening his necktie with counterfeit dignity).
Come right on in, Miss Irma, come in! Don't be startled, the boy just dropped a quarter down here between my feet and since he’s half-blind he’s hunting for it with his nose… (He nudges Gabriel hard with the toe of his boot). Take your hundred and twenty dollars, press your inked thumb right here where it says "Perpetual and Irrevocable Assignment Until Judgment Day," and take your sorry figure out of here.

GABRIEL: (Crawling out backward on hands and knees, his forehead smeared with black Kiwi shoe polish and the bills crumpled tight in his fist).
Thank you kindly, Colonel. May the Good Lord preserve your nephew Ricky’s sight and keep your alligators biting for many a year. If you need your boots buffed next month, just whistle; I work cheap and I don't leave stains on the broadloom.

GABRIEL: (To the tape recorder).
I signed, Your Honor. I sold off twenty of my own flesh-and-blood babies for a hundred and twenty dollars and an afternoon under a desk smelling of stale Limburger cheese. If I’d indulged in Wrath or Pride, I would’ve marched out with my manuscripts under my arm to starve to death with my head held high. But since I was clean out of shame, I left him the twenty good songs… and kept the three truly immortal masterpieces stitched inside the lining of my drawers. Five years later, when the Colonel’s label went belly-up and he came begging to buy one of my hits, I charged him compound interest on my own spit.

SCENE FOUR: ROCK MONTGOMERY, "THE GOLDEN NARCISSUS"

GABRIEL: (Fogging the microphone with his breath).
With Colonel Crossfire’s hundred and twenty dollars I didn't buy sensible shoes, Your Honor; I bought a sky-blue sharkskin suit that glowed in the dark like a Vegas neon sign… and took a bus to Hollywood looking for true love. Lord, how dumb a boy is when he’s twenty years old and his hormones are bucking like a billy goat in clover! A man can stomach hunger, he can stomach vice-squad pinches, he can stomach shining alligator boots with his sleeve… but the day a poor boy falls in love with a pretty rich man, that’s the day he hands over his soul, his liver, and his draft card without asking for a receipt.

(GABRIEL strips down to gym shorts and a thermal shirt… holding a small red hand towel as his working tool… The lighting turns to the ostentatious gold of a Beverly Hills penthouse on Mulholland Drive. Enter ROCK MONTGOMERY, "THE GOLDEN NARCISSUS": a mature Western matinee idol, chest waxed and oiled, leopard-print silk robe, silver-spurred Lucchese cowboy boots, and a lacquered pompadour. He kisses his own reflection in a silver hand mirror).

GABRIEL: (Sighing).
My fourth master was Rock Montgomery, who was billed on the Technicolor posters as The Rawhide Stallion of the Rio Grande, and who stood in his bachelor penthouse rubbing virgin sea-turtle cream into his buttocks so gravity wouldn't drag them down to his knees. He hired me as his "confidential secretary, arch-masseur, and resident ghostwriter." And right there I fell headfirst into two twin sins: the Lust of wanting to eat him alive, and the Envy of seeing how God had given that tone-deaf mule the flawless shell He denied me.

THE GOLDEN NARCISSUS: (Examining his profile with a magnifying glass while extending one leg for Gabriel to tug off his cowboy boots).
Pull straight, country boy, don't go wrenching my ankle—tomorrow I’ve got a beefcake layout in my swimming trunks for Photoplay magazine! Hey, my little Stephen Foster… did you finish that ballad I ordered yesterday? I need something real virile, real gut-wrenching, about how I’m dying of heartbreak without losing my five-o'clock shadow. Tonight the Senator’s daughter is coming up for supper with the columnists from the Hollywood Reporter, and I have to croon it right into her ear so her daddy will bankroll my next picture, Six-Guns Against the Atomic Mummies.

GABRIEL: (Hugging Rock’s boot to his chest like a holy relic).
It’s all finished, Rock… I mean, Mr. Montgomery. It’s called With My Soul Torn to Shreds. I wrote it last night, right after you let me warm up the left side of your king-size bed… Remember how you told me my hands were softer than any starlet’s on the Paramount lot, and that someday we’d run off together to Acapulco even if we had to wear dark glasses?

THE GOLDEN NARCISSUS: (Barking out a radio-matinee idol laugh).
Oh, you wild little woodchuck, don't go confusing kidney stones with rhinestones! It’s one thing for a man to get a draft in his lower back at three in the morning and need a hot brick between his thighs, and quite another for the Rawhide Stallion to be seen cruising Acapulco Bay with a swamp sparrow who looks like a novelty ceramic ashtray! You’re my classified national security secret, Gabe! Just like my elastic waist-cincher or my back partial bridgework: indispensable in the dark, but if they show up in the flashbulbs, my box office is dead.

(The penthouse chimes ring out. The Golden Narcissus drops his voice two octaves into a rugged baritone, puffs out his pectorals, and spits on the parquet floor).

THE GOLDEN NARCISSUS:
That’s the press and my fiancée! Move it, duck inside the walk-in cedar closet with the fringed buckskin jackets and your little guitar! When I cough twice and pop the Dom Pérignon, you play and sing from inside the closet with your mouth pressed tight against the keyhole, so the little filly thinks it’s me serenading her like an angel while I nibble on her earlobe. And don't you dare sneeze from the mothballs!

GABRIEL: (Crouching down behind the baroque mirror, speaking into the cassette deck through choked sobs).
Three solid hours I stayed locked inside that dark cedar closet, Your Honor, breathing in camphor and sweaty suede! Through the keyhole slot I watched my Golden Narcissus sprawled across a polar bear rug, feeding peeled green grapes into the mouth of a peroxide blonde. He opened his big trap pretending to lip-sync my verses, and the blonde cooed: "Oh, Rock, you’ve got such deep sensitivity inside you, you’re like a rough-hewn poet!" And every time my voice cracked from pure heartbreak, Rock slammed his boot heel back against the closet door to make me tighten up my falsetto. That’s where I met hell face-to-face, boss! Wanting to be the polar bear rug, wanting to be the grape, wanting to be Rock himself… and being nothing but a voiceless ghost locked up among nine thousand leather jackets of every cut and color.

(LIGHT CHANGE: DREAM DELIRIUM IV — Furious Pink and Poison Green / Screaming Rodeo Fiddles and Brass).

GABRIEL: (Bursting out of the closet in an immaculate white rhinestone cowboy suit with a twenty-foot bridal veil and a pair of giant garden hedge-shears).
But all of a sudden my Mississippi blood boiled right up to the crown of my skull, Your Honor! I kicked those mahogany closet doors off their hinges and stepped out like an avenging archangel on the Fourth of July! "So I’m your partial bridgework and your elastic girdle, am I, you son of a bald-headed bitch?!" I screamed right in front of the newspaper photographers! With one snip of the shears I sliced his leopard robe in half and left the Rawhide Stallion standing in pink Chantilly lace panties with foam-rubber pads stuffed in the rear! While the press boys popped flashbulbs right at his crotch, I hog-tied his ankles with my steel guitar strings, hoisted him upside down from the crystal chandelier like a rodeo piñata, and with his own monogrammed silver hairbrush I plucked his pompadour out hair by hair to the beat of The Orange Blossom Special! "Sing a cappella without me now, you melted wax dummy!" I belted out in a high C above high C, while the Senator’s daughter dropped to her knees to kiss my boots and signed over the deed to Malibu right across Rock’s naked back!

(HARD CUT IN LIGHT. Pale, freezing blue light of five in the morning).

THE GOLDEN NARCISSUS: (Flung open the closet door in disgust, wiping smeared lipstick off his chin).
The reporters are gone, you can crawl out of your cave now, you little bat. You went a quarter-tone flat on the second chorus, you hear me? Here’s twenty bucks for a yellow cab, and if you ever open your trap and claim you write my songs or know where the birthmarks are on my lower back, I’ll tell my golfing buddy the Chief of Police you stole my solid-gold Rolex and you’ll rot ten years in San Quentin. Beat it!

GABRIEL: (Sprawled on the floor in his shorts, shifting instantly from weeping to cold picaresque calculation).
He threw me out onto the curb of Sunset Boulevard at five in the morning, Your Honor, in a blinding rainstorm with a wet twenty-dollar bill in my fist. I wanted to throw myself under a municipal bus… until I thought: "If you jump under that bus, you’re the corpse in the ditch and Rock is the one crying crocodile tears for the newsreels at your funeral." Hell no—I’m gonna sell the candy of my broken heart at ten dollars a pound! I wrote twelve smash hits before noon that day. Rock died fat, bald, and owing three months' rent… and do you know who paid for his bronze casket just to come out in the Sunday papers looking like a magnanimous Christian gentleman? Your humble servant, Your Honor! The best revenge isn't killing your master: it’s buying his cemetery plot and singing for free at his wake.

EPILOGUE: THE FIFTH MASTER IS ME

(Three sharp, urgent knocks rattle the dressing room door. The Stage Manager’s voice barks from the corridor: "Five minutes to curtain, Mr. Sunday! The President and the First Lady just took their box and Carnegie Hall is coming down around our ears!" GABRIEL, encased in his monumental black velvet and gold-bullion suit, hits the "Stop" button on the cassette recorder, ejects the tape, and pivots toward the darkest corner of the room, behind a towering wreath of white calla lilies sent by the Wall Street Bankers' Association).

GABRIEL:
You can come out from behind the funeral lilies now, Your Honor… standing behind those white flowers with that pale face, you look like the corpse at the viewing. Come on out, man, quit chewing on the velvet drapes!

(From behind the floral arrangement shuffles LAZARUS [NAZARENE]: a nineteen-year-old boy, scrawny as a broomstick, his hair slicked down with lemon juice, wearing a gray polyester suit three inches above his ankles, busted shoes with cardboard soles, and a stenographer’s pad from the Department of Education clutched like a shield against his chest).

LAZARUS: (His voice cracking in an adolescent squeak).
Forgive me, Mr. Sunday… I was trying not to make a sound or breathe too deep so I wouldn't use up your oxygen. But listen to me, Mr. Sunday! If the Undersecretary of Culture hears that tape you just recorded, they’ll padlock Carnegie Hall on you and ship me off to sweep Alcatraz with a toothbrush! The Bureau sent me over here so you could dictate an inspirational pamphlet for the public elementary schools titled "From Humble Handyman to Pride of the Republic: How to Succeed Through Chastity, Thrift, and Clean Living"! How am I supposed to put Sheriff Higgins, the Colonel’s gator boots, and Rock Montgomery’s pink lace panties into the free fourth-grade textbooks?!

GABRIEL: (Throwing his head back in a delicious laugh while dabbing a velvet beauty mark beside his lip).
Oh, you poor lamb, just write down that Sheriff Higgins was my Boy Scout troop leader and that I was locked in Rock’s closet praying the rosary for rain in the Deep South! What did you expect, sugar? That I made it to Carnegie Hall eating communion wafers and knitting mittens for the orphans? Take a good hard look at me, "Your Honor"! (He spreads his arms wide like a rhinestone-crusted Christ). Every silk thread on this jacket is a lie I told right on the beat, every thread of gold bullion is a live toad I swallowed without blinking, and these custom boots shining like black glass…

(GABRIEL stops dead in his tracks. His eyes drift to the vanity table, where an untouched silver platter sits heaped with imported French cheeses, green seedless grapes, smoked oysters, and a honey-glazed turkey drumstick sent over by the President. Slowly, his gaze drops to LAZARUS's split, cardboard-soled shoes. A loud, cavernous rumble echoes from the boy’s belly).

GABRIEL: (Dropping his voice to a feline, dangerous, hypnotic purr).
Say, Lazarus… when was the last time you ate supper, boy?

LAZARUS: (Swallowing hard as he stares at the glazed turkey leg as if it were a Marian apparition).
Day before yesterday at noon, Mr. Sunday. I write songs too, Mr. Sunday. I’ve got twenty country-soul ballads right here that I swear would make a tombstone weep. If you’d just let me sing you one chorus right now…

GABRIEL: (Arching one sculpted eyebrow, picking up a rind of Gruyère cheese from the silver tray between two fingers).
Is that a fact? Twenty songs written on brown butcher paper? Well, well, what a small world… You know, walking down the hallway just now, a speck of lint landed right on the toe of my left boot. And I purely hate walking out under the spotlights with dusty toes, on account of the President brought his eagle-eye opera glasses tonight.

(GABRIEL sinks into the armchair in front of the vanity, crosses his legs with the languid, monstrous arrogance of Mrs. Charlotte, Colonel Crossfire, and the Golden Narcissus rolled into one, and extends the tip of his boot toward the boy).

GABRIEL:
Let’s see what you’ve got, songwriter… drop down on your knees right here between my legs. Buff that toe to a mirror shine with the sleeve of your gray coat… and while you wipe off the dust, sing me your saddest ballad real soft. If I like the… acoustics down there on the carpet, I might just buy the whole batch for a hundred bucks so I can put my name on them, and I’ll let you tote the turkey bones home wrapped in a paper napkin. What do you say, little canary? Have you got pride, or have you got hunger?

(LAZARUS stares at Gabriel’s boot, then at the platter of food, squeezes his eyes shut to swallow two scalding tears of rage, and sinks to his knees on the carpet).

(THE MIRROR OF MONSTERS — Bile Green and Blood Red / Funeral Carnival Music).

(The baroque mirror above the vanity turns translucent from behind. Pressed tight against the glass appear the grotesque, leering faces of MRS. CHARLOTTE, CAPTAIN NEPTUNE, COLONEL CROSSFIRE, and THE GOLDEN NARCISSUS, all wearing identical black-and-gold sequined robes, applauding in slow motion and laughing with gold-plated teeth).

THE FOUR MASTERS: (In chorus from behind the glass, speaking with Gabriel’s own distorted voice).
Bravo, little Gabe, bravo! You finally made it to the mountaintop! You’ve got your penthouses on Fifth Avenue and your Beverly Hills estates, and your very own starving stray licking your boots clean! Step on his fingers, Gabe! Toss the cheese rind on the rug! He who don't stomp don't shine! You’re the Fifth Master now, sweetheart—you’re the spitting image of us!

(GABRIEL stares into the glass in sheer horror. He looks down at the boy kneeling between his boots, hunched over in the exact posture he wore thirty years ago).

GABRIEL: (Letting out a roar that snuffs out the ghosts in the mirror on the spot).
No, I am not the same… Get up off that floor, boy! Why are you humiliating yourself?

(GABRIEL grabs LAZARUS by both ears and hauls him bodily to his feet until they stand side by side facing the mirror).

GABRIEL:
Look at yourself in that glass! And listen to me like I'm handing down the new commandments. If you ever get down on your knees again in front of an old queen in rhinestones for a turkey bone, I’ll bust my guitar over your skull myself! (He snatches the sheaf of papers from Lazarus). Hand over that sheet music! I'll read it, but I make no promises. And if your spelling makes my eyes bleed, I'll make you eat every page. You tell the Undersecretary to go to hell and that I denied the interview… (He grabs the freshly recorded cassette tape and shoves it deep into the boy’s breast pocket). And take this tape! Hide it where the feds won't find it. You play this tape all by yourself at three in the morning every time you’re tempted to sell a song for a hundred bucks or warm the bed of some imbecile trying to take advantage of you.

(GABRIEL sweeps up the entire silver platter—cheeses, smoked oysters, grapes, and glazed turkey—and shoves it into LAZARUS's arms).

GABRIEL:
Here, eat everything you can hold from this tray. And take this cash, buy yourself some shoes that don't cry when you walk, and don't spend it all in one place. You wait for my call, and I'll tell you if your music is worth a damn or if you should go flip burgers at McDonald's… But if you make it… If you ever get a dressing room like this one, Lazarus… promise me that when you look in the mirror, you won't see the disfigured visions of a miserable past. Now get the hell out the Artists' Door before I change my mind and charge you for my advice!

STAGE MANAGER’S VOICE: (Throwing wide the double doors at the back of the dressing room).
Places, Mr. Sunday! All of America is waiting!

(Through the open doorway pours a blinding, monumental shaft of white stage light and the glorious roar of sixty strings and twelve brass horns launching into a heartbreaking overture. GABRIEL stands alone for a split second before the mirror. He adjusts his gold-bullion lapels, puts on his most radiant smile, turns off the vanity lights so he no longer has to see the disfigured faces of his old ghosts, and strides into the blinding glare with a solid-gold microphone in his fist).

GABRIEL: (Belting at the top of his lungs into the luminous abyss as the curtain slowly falls).

They say I have no shame at all,
Because I peddle my illusion—
A nickel buys a broken sigh,
A dime will buy you absolution!

If they only knew, my darling,
What this ballad had to cost:
Seven deadly sins of hunger
For the paradise I lost!

Good evening, Carnegie Hall! Stand up, Mississippi, and nobody leaves here with dry eyes—tonight the drinks are on me!

(Deafening explosion of applause, a torrential rain of red and white carnations falling from the balconies onto the stage, and FINAL BLACKOUT).

 

 

 

THE LAZARILLO OF FINE ARTS. © 2026 by BENJAMIN GAVARRE is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0