CARNIVAL

{A Dispatch From the Dinner Club}

Matt Suddain

(First published 2008)

My memories are gauzy, insubstantial, and adulterated by dangerously high levels of pre-pubescent nerve-toxins, but this is how I remember pageants: the lights come up on a stage in what can only be a multipurpose conference venue in heaven. There are angels present: whisps of starlight drifting among mortals; dauntless ambassadors for virtue, beauty, and the pursuit of global peace; celestial bodies wobbling on the brink of universal greatness. The angels clash in an arena of combat. They bring outfits. Bob Barker is there, his hair carved from virgin teak by a kindly German woodsmith. The angels compete in a series of trials: swimsuits, gowns, answering simple questions. One by one the lesser float away into the ether and are forgotten. 80 become 5, 5 become 2, huddled together under burning lights, until a single angel staggers forward, a slender hand firing up to correct the crown that has just been roughly stapled to her head, her long legs wobbling like the limbs of a newborn foal as she faces her adoring crowd and dissolves into a livid, snotty teargasm.

That’s my recollection. We used to watch the pageants as a family. I remember finding it amazing that an angel would cap months of glacial poise by breaking into the distorted sobs of a freshly jilted teenager. Sobbing is the most profoundly unattractive thing a person can do (beyond vomiting, or attempting to make eye contact while giving oral pleasure.) But I digress. Last year, a magazine called to ask if I would travel to the Miss Universe Pageant, in Vietnam, observe proceedings, and write a “scintillating” commentary. It was my first international assignment and I was very excited. My girlfriend, much less so. I carefully explained to Sarah how her how her doubts were stupid. I am not attracted, on any level, to beauty queens, I explained. I find them unnerving. In the second place, even if I was attracted to, say, Miss Turks and Caicos it would be unlikely that her minder would grant me the face time needed to consummate my desires. Three: even if I managed to get “alone time” with Miss Turks and Caicos (Angelica Lightbourne,) I would still face one terminal obstacle: she would need to find me attractive. Floored by this argument, Sarah relented. She would stay in Tokyo, reflect on how our lives precisely mirrored those of Giovanni Ribisi and Scarlett Johansen in the movie Lost in Translation, and wait for, as she put it, her “Bill Murray platonic love experience.”

That’s how I found myself blitzing along the coast towards Nha Trang in a taxi driven by an angry drunk whose dash-ornament was a miniature bottle of Hennessy on a gold plastic rostrum, and whose drink holder nursed an oily glass with a pink straw resting in an inch of brown liquid. We skimmed the burning coast with windows down, my notes on the contestants struggling like a startled dove in my hands. Miss Slovenia plays the transverse flute, the synthesizer, and the upright piano. Miss Ireland has a problem with sleepwalking and often tries to climb into bed with people. Miss Albania has provided her bio in CAPS. Try to imagine her shouting her answers above the rush of wind, the clamour of horns and engines. “What is your career ambition?” “MANAGING MY OWN BUSINESS THAT HAS TO BE SOMEHOW RELATED WITH MODELLING.”  

Nha Trang is a resort town offering undiscerning visitors the finest in ethno-generic holiday experiences. My hotel was the best available on a modest editorial budget. I arrived to find a porter prying open the doors of the elevator with an iron bar. A Vietnamese family emerged, blinking and sweating. The mother took a few moments to shout at the porter before she grabbed her children roughly by the arms and pulled them back inside the grimy cabinet. My room was on the 9^th floor. I had a breathtaking view of the bay: the deadly highway, the sweeping, white blade of sand, the ocean fizzing in the sun, and Vin Pearl Resort, where luminaries such as Jerry Springer and Mel B were hiding. A note in my room explained the house rules: guests shall not bring guns, knives, explosives, dangerous chemicals, outside guests, or “prosities” into their room. It was an altogether brilliant day.

The next morning, at the magnificent Diamond Bay Resort & Conference Centre, the media centre swarmed with Latin camera-squads, and photographers Hoovering endless swimsuit photos into battered laptops, and guards who eyed me with deep suspicion no matter how many times, or how maniacally, I smiled at them, or how often I held up my credentials. Every time I walked in, a great number of people would wheel around to see if I was someone, then turn away and hiss,

The contest rules seemed in order: contestants should be between the age of 18 and 27, single, and not pregnant. She must have nothing in her background that could bring the contest into disrepute, but physical augmentation is not one of these things. Last year’s winner, Rio Mori, has, by her own admission, had her lips remodelled. Pageant favourite, Daya Mendoza, Venezuela, has the makings of an around-the-world balloon attempt on her chest. But physical beauty is hardly enough; you have to have talent, ambition. Miss Australia wants to become a psychologist, Miss Montenegro, a para-psychologist, and Miss Paraguay, interestingly, a forensic psychologist. Miss Curacao aims to become a human resources manager in a medium sized company. Miss Jamaica hopes one day to take over her father’s business: Swift Cash Money Transfer. Adversity is a recurring theme. Miss Kazakhstan was in a terrible accident: “I thought that my body and face would be ugly as I was all scratched and had abrasions.” Miss Costa Rica once fell into a manhole …

… Miss Hungary may also have received some kind of blow to the head: “I still do not know who entered me in this pageant.” Miss Angola, Lesley Pereira, meanwhile, was in a plane crash while trying to escape the civil war that savaged her country for 27 years and took the lives of over half a million people. We all have our burdens.

A little about me: I am Caucasian, of average height, with a build and style best described as “Bassist-chic.” I have an irregular nose—the result of a childhood BMX crash while showing off for a girl—which gives me, at worst, the beaten aspect of a flyweight boxer, and, at best, an Owen Wilsonesque charm. Now imagine me kicking back with several of the more … congenial contestants. Miss Croatia is slapping me lightly on the arm and saying, “you’re so funny, I could just eat you up, like Paški baškotin!” (aromatic rusk from the Island of Pag.) Imagine contestants walking by in their various national bikinis. Imagine, because that’s as close as I’d managed to get to the world’s most intoxicating women. The angels were being held in an impenetrable bubble of exclusion, and even now I was being promised just a hurried few minutes of conversation from across a velvet rope. The next morning was the big media session. A fragged intern explained the rules to me. The girls would be brought into a velvet-rope enclosure. The media would be on the outside, shouting, shoving furry microphones in each other’s eyes and armpits. Those were the rules. The angels arrived in a convoy of eight-seater golf carts and were ushered into their velvet cordon like a selection of endangered mammals. Miss Estonia roamed towards me. She is unfeasibly tall, has a razor sharp bob framing glacial eyes. She’s a Bond villain, essentially. She owns a hairless sphinx cat.

“You’re very tall!” That was my first question.

“Yes. I’m a metre 80. That is 5’11.” Mr. Bond.

Next was Japan. Hiroko Mima is a cool beauty, but playful too—like a panther with a piece of string. When Miss Mima learned I was from New Zealand, she performed a spontaneous Haka. The Haka, for those who don’t know, is a war dance performed by the indigenous Maori of my country of birth. Mima’s adaptation was loose limbed, jaunty, performed with a wide smile, and it contained few of the Haka's actual words, and yet never before has the dance so effortlessly achieved its fundamental purpose: to bring about a heightened state of arousal.

"You know the Haka is a war dance. Are you going to hit me?"

"Noooooooo," said Miss Japan, and gently hit me.

Miss USA, Crystle Stewart, was compelling and utterly charming. “Noo Zeeeeeeelaaaaaand” she said, stretching out the word like a sexy piece of gum. “I’d love to go there. You’ll have to take me around sometime. “Yes,” I said, “I’d like that. I’m from New Zealand.” Then she spontaneously hugged me, and the sun chose that moment to break through a bank of clouds in distance, and it was good to be alive. 

They had run out of time so they agreed to let me talk to Miss Australia on the way to her rehearsal. We cruised the sunny plaza in a golf-cart, winding among the palm trees that swayed beneath the artificial waterfall. It was like a tunnel-of-love ride at a provincial theme park from my youth, except that I was with a girl instead of alone or with my Mum. “What is beautiful is questionable,” said the Australian student of psychology with the nine-inch death-lashes as she relaxed one arm across her seat and let her eyes float towards the crest of the waterfall where a cliff-top family of ceramic deer were peacefully grazing. “Studies show that a more attractive person is someone you’ve seen more often. They can show people photos and the more a certain person is shown, the more attractive they become. I mean, it’s in the eye of the beholder, as they say.”

I nodded thoughtfully, even though she was wrong, totally wrong. The ability to fuzz the borders of beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You can do it by squinting your eyes, or your brain, but either way you’re squinting. The ability to use wealth and influence to conquer beauty, and redefine it, is within the means of some beholders, and thus do we have the pageant. But beauty, as a core principle, remains as concrete and immutable as anything we know. Where the definitions of good and evil, right and wrong, liberal and conservative, communist and capitalist, even, can be debated into the hours, beauty is hardwired into our brains. It is an international, non-denominational, non-debatable agent of wonder from which words retreat. “Beauty,” said Albert Camus, “is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” “Beauty is the evidence of why we are here,” said Adrian Canfield, and “Beauty will save the world,” said Fyodor Dostoevsky, and “Through light and joy is the world opened up, revealed for what it is: ineffable beauty, unending creation,” said Henry Miller.

“Angelina Jolie,” said Donald Trump, owner of the Miss Universe pageant, “is … not beauty, by any stretch of the imagination. I really understand beauty. And I will tell you, she’s not. I do own Miss Universe. I do own Miss USA. I mean I own a lot of different things. I do understand beauty, and she’s not.”

Now you might find it hilarious to hear the concept of beauty so critically defined by a man sporting the black ocular pits of an aging rhino, the limp jowls of a University Don, and a haircut that looks like a multi-million-dollar apartment development for sparrows. You might, in a rash and unguarded moment, imagine Donald himself crossing the stage at the Diamond Bay Conference Centre, to the hoots and calls of well-dressed Vietnamese men, a matt of hair spreading like desert grass across his undulating torso, an ill-fitting swimsuit straining to flatter his sub-prime millionaire junk, the scant lycra hemmed at one edge, perhaps, by a stray frill of pinkish scrote, and the whole affair watched from above by a set of gray, pendulous man-tits. I would not be so uncharitable. Donald is not a beautiful man, I think we can all agree on that, but need one be a painter to appreciate art? And need one himself be an attractive person to dispense wisdom on the subject of beauty? Need one even be present at his own pageant to defend his views on beauty? Donald attends this contest as a spectre, appearing on video links to wish the ladies luck on their mission, like a latter-day Bosley.

That evening I ate alone. The lone male traveller is a dismal figure. People suspect him, probably, of being a sex-tourist, a fugitive, or a sociopath. People give him the wide orbit and tight smiles usually reserved for fallen sporting heroes, or burn victims. He desperately wants to move around the tables, just to say, “Hey, thought I’d let you know, I’m not a loser, I’m here for work.” But he doesn’t.

Then I wandered down to the beach as the sun was setting. There are no rules here, you can do what you like: play volleyball, leer at girls, be the recipient of leer, or leer mutually. You can swim between the flags, or you can realise that there are no lifeguards, and that the flags probably indicate the zone of the beach where human faeces is most often found. You can spoon quietly with your loved-one or holiday “prositie,” or you can pass above the whole scene, strapped beneath a quivering shoot and tethered to the back of a swiftly moving boat as it weaves between the bobbing heads of the bathers. It’s really your choice. Rio Mori gazed from billboards spaced along the shore. Youtube will testify that there was no teargasm when Japan’s queen won in 2007. She displayed the startled look we reserve for surprise parties, or for nearly being run down on pedestrian crossings. Then she gathered herself, walked gracefully to the front of the stage, and blessed the assembled with the one-armed sweeping gesture a wealthy dowager might employ as she says, “And this … is the drawing room.” Youtube also has footage of Nha Trang as it was during the war: grainy 8mm footage of cargo-planes unloading at the airbase, of recon trainees firing into the jungle, of an officer with a chained monkey on his shoulder, of troops abseiling from towers, of trainees carrying a heavy green bag from the from the sea onto Nha Trang beach while another holds an I.V. bottle.

That night was the swimsuit show and to reach it I had I had to get through the Vietnamese army. The pageant Green-Zone was guarded by six roadblocks staffed by men with automatic weapons. My young driver found it as strange and hilarious as I did. “The Americans are back!” he said and laughed. He’s the only Vietnamese person I met on my travels who brought up the subject of the war without prompting. It turns out he was born in 1973, just in time to see the US Army leave. When the armies of the north flooded down, the southern troops and civilians fled to Nha Trang, which they knew to be a safe-zone. It wasn’t. “What do you think of all this?” I asked. He paused while he made a radical lane change. “I think it is another invasion,” he said, with difficulty. “Instead of guns, bikinis.” We laughed. As we approached the venue we dove into a sea of evening regalia. The Vietnamese in their thousands were arriving, they flowed into the bright doors of the venue. Each blockade towards the convention centre got progressively more militarized and belligerent, until the last, where soldiers mobbed our vehicle and a soldier slammed his hand down hard on the roof to move us on. (I was exiting the vehicle at the time.)

Inside, the crowd was restless, irritable, mad with swimsuit fever. The girls appeared in dresses made entirely from glitter and floated across the stage like sunbeams. The audience barely hid their impatience. When the angels finally returned in bikinis the crowd went nuts. As each angel crossed the stage the audience was tossed an intriguing fact. Miss Canada was once bitten by a monkey while on a trip to Nicaragua. Miss Germany learned English by watching the films of Will Smith. Curacao is not, as I thought, a blue liqueur flavoured with the dried peels of the laraha citrus fruit: she is a woman. It was a hypnotic onslaught of flesh and trivia, but I can now tell you that Miss Mexico, Elisa Najera, is, at this exact moment, the greatest wearer of the bikini in the Universe. Miss Mexico once took a “power journey” in the Teotihuacan pyramids during which she spoke to the dead.

After, the highway was filled with well-dressed souls wandering the mile or more to the perimeter where the taxis waited. The lucky crushed into vans and buses, or trundled off, four, five-to-a-bike, into the darkness. I wandered down the lonely highway, turning once when a motorcycle veered towards me, twice to see the Diamond Bay Conference centre glowing brilliant white and pulsing like a fallen spaceship, its searchlights scanning the stars. Soon it was gone and I could hear music, faintly from the trees beyond the road, while all around me, the ghostly shapes of tuxedo-shirts and evening dresses floated. Back at my hotel I got stuck in the lift with two old men and one tried to feel my muscles. Locked in my room I poured a healthy drink and wondered if I’d seen a single thing that night that I’d call beautiful. Unable to think of anything, I amused myself by watching poorly subtitled Van Damme movies, and reading Wikipedia’s entry for “Beauty Pageant.”

“A beauty contest, or beauty pageant, is a competition based mainly, though not always entirely, on the physical beauty of its contestants, and often incorporating personality, talent demonstration, and question responses as judged criteria.”

Would it surprise you to know that it was P. T. Barnum who staged the first modern American beauty pageant? He had previously held dog, baby, and bird beauty contests, but young women, apparently, were a step too far, and the contest was abandoned. It took a woman to add a level of respectability to the pageant. Her name was Lenora Slaughter, and she went on to rule the pageant scene for more than 30 years. In 1945, America crowned its first Jewish Miss America when New York's Bess Myerson won the title, even after being told that unless she changed her name to something "less Jewish," she would never win. Today, there is a pageant to suit everybody. There’s Mrs. Universe, Mrs. World, Manhunt International, International Man, International Mr. Gay, El Modelo Mexico, and Miss Earth. Last year Saudi Arabia held its first "beautiful goat" pageant. Lottie Pylant, 95, was crowned queen at the 2008 Missouri Health Care Association Ms. Nursing Home Pageant. Ms. Pylant believes that although life is unpredictable, it can be "Cherries Jubilee" if you remove the pits. Iraqi-born Huda Falah, 18, won Denmark's first Miss Headscarf competition in 2008, but many Danes did not appreciate the event. In August, 2008, the BBC website ran the headline: Priest to Hold Nun Beauty Pageant. On the 26^th it ran the headline: Priest Cancels Nun Beauty Contest. In April, 2008, Ten women met in Angola to present their beauty, brains, and their landmine injuries, in a quest to win a golden prosthetic limb, and the title of Miss Landmine 2008. 

Finally it was the day of the big show. I say “Finally,” not because of some grand sense of anticipation, but because I was eagre to leave this freak-zone and go home. The town had gone nuts. Also, that morning I’d called Sarah. Her attempts to find her Bill Murray had been a failure, although while eating alone in a fast food restaurant a Japanese man had tried to pick her up with the line, “Excuse me, but can you tell me the English word for ‘Hijack’?”

Outside the venue I watched the crowds milling in their black tuxedos and cocktail dresses, smoking, chatting, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was morning, and the tropical sun was beating down. The show had been timed to coincide with the American primetime. Some people carried flags. I saw Israel, Ecuador (I could tell the flag was Ecuador’s because it had “Ecuador!” written on it.) The surprisingly versatile Vietnamese army were there in numbers, patrolling, running checkpoints, filling seats in the auditorium. I saw one soldier operating a news camera. According to the bookmakers, there could be only one winner: Venezuela’s Dayana Mendoza. Mendoza’s most surprising personal detail is that she was once abducted in what her country calls an “express kidnapping.” In such a kidnapping, the victim is driven to a cash machine to withdraw money. In an interview with Thanh Nien, a Vietnamese newspaper edited by one of this year’s judges, she said, “I was once kidnapped when I was around 10 years old. But I was calm enough to bring out the better side of my kidnapper and take advantage of a moment alone to call the police.” Recently she’s been saying that it happened about 18 months ago. Whatever the truth, she’s the hot favourite. The last Venezuelan to make an impact on the contest was Ana Karina Añez, whose thong exploded during the 2004 event.

I watched from the media centre. The Columbian news team cheered like drunks whenever their girl was mentioned. Miss USA fell down, the second consecutive American entrant to do so. The finals featured four Latin American contestants—uncannily reflecting the wishes of the bulk of the global TV audience—and Miss Russia. Rio Mori appeared with the children of Vietnam (not all of them.) She wore a surprising tuxedo outfit. 80 became 2, and Miss Venezuela and Miss Columbia were left huddled together under burning lights, their respective countries’ deep mistrust dissolved through the bonds of pageantry. As her name was spoken, Mendoza displayed a look of almost credible shock: hands steepled over mouth and nose, trembling fingers running under both eyes, mascara oozing.

And that was that. I wandered out to find a beautiful morning, the sun gleaming on the ornamental animals above the artificial waterfall. The contestants drifted out, blinking like deer, each pulling a small travel-case. Somehow, between the show’s beginning and end, the bubble had vanished. There weren’t even any golf carts to whisk them back to their resort. They had to walk. The angels signed autographs. Miss New Zealand appeared and hugged her family, Miss Serbia collapsed on one knee, like a Transformer robot, so she could be photographed with a small child. As the big guns emerged, the crowds and entourages grew. Miss Vietnam was lost in a murder of black suits.

I entered the media centre to hear Rio Mori defending her outfit. “It’s a sexy tuxedo!” Then, Miss Venezuela, all aglow. How does it feel to be Miss Universe? “To be honest, I haven’t processed it yet.” The kidnapping? “The kidnapping happened a year and a half ago. It’s not nice to relive the experience and I don’t want to talk about it.” “But according to your bio you were in America a year and a half ago—pursuing your modelling career,” I wanted to yell. Research. “What do you say about the fact that all the betting agencies have predicted for months that you’d win the contest?” someone asked. “Next question,” said her minder angrily, and she and Mendoza’s bodyguard spent the rest of the conference scowling at the journalist who’d dared to ask the obvious.

Free booze flowed at the coronation ball. People queued before the poolside buffets and the fading sun fell upon a ten-foot, seven-tiered, artificial party cake. Down on the beach, locals picnicked, and roast pigs spun lazily in the haze. I had a date for the night: William, a gentleman journalist from Ghana. William introduced me to his country’s Queen, who also happened to be Miss New Zealand’s roommate. The angels were starving. “They haven’t fed us and so we have to queue for food, but that’s impossible because everyone wants a photo.” Here was the master stroke: without their bubble, and without so much as a cracker to eat in the VIP area, the girls had to head to the buffets, stand like regular people, and interact with a salivating mob. It was carnage. Some of the fans were drunk, some were getting aggressive, an angel had already been “grabbed” Miss Ghana told me as she lightly raised her left hand to form a shallow cup. “Do you think the organisers did it on purpose?” I asked William. “Probably,” he laughed. “They’re big girls. They can look after themselves.”

Was he right? Was I just being sexist? I was angry by the time I got back to my room in the early hours. You should see the drunken letter I wrote and never sent.

“To the owners and executives of the Miss Universe Pageant.

Congratulations on your historic pageant in the beautiful nation of Vietnam. It is, at times—especially from the inside—an ugly spectacle, but too little respect, I think, gets paid to ugliness, and to the opportunities it creates for beauty to flourish. Without darkness, beauty’s light would not be seen. I just made that up, I think. Whatever the case, where fools see the two as opposites, enemies even, the wise know that ugliness and beauty are entangled. They are grand associates who conspire to produce the hidden ambiguities that startle us into a sickening awareness of our nature. This alchemy has produced some of strange and terrifying monuments: the Circus Maximus, bull fighting, pornographic movies, reality television, cheerleaders, topless bars, and the modern pageant, of which yours is just one. Without this wonderful alchemy, the Western hemisphere would lose something vital. And you’d be astonished who “gets” this. “... The extent of my power is as great as the power of the money I possess. ... What I am and what I can do is therefore not determined by my individuality in the slightest. I am ugly, but I can buy myself the most beautiful of women. Hence I am not ugly, since the effect of ugliness, its discouraging power, is annulled by money[1].” Karl Marx. He gets you. Power can make anyone beautiful: the nerd, the jock, the spoiled princess, the basket case, the criminal. And this is, I think, is what’s most interesting about beauty: not its passive mutability, but its willingness. Ugliness can’t make something beautiful, but it can make a whore of beauty.

Sincerely yours

The Dinner Club.” 

In my defence, I had been drinking. And what do I know anyway? While the girls fly back to Saigon in comfort I’m heading there on a train that moves at 30kph and is staffed by a thousand tiny cockroaches. They roam along your armrest, across your knees. That morning I’d found the Vietnamese channel Khan TV playing a preview of the final show. “Miss Vietnam is tipped to do well because of her good features, stylish walk, and professional gestures … Miss USA is also a possible candidate because of her warm smile and brown complexion.” The finals were yesterday, but it’s more than you could expect from a channel whose news theme is, and I couldn’t make this up, the title music to Star Wars. The man in the seat next to me, Raul, is not handling the roaches. “But you’re from New York.” “I know.” He tells me that during the celebrations last night, one of the girls had had her face cut and had been taken to hospital. He’s unsure whether she’d cut her face, or had her face cut, but he thinks the latter. “There’s a big difference,” I say. “I know.” He doesn’t say any more, and I feel the edge of something so awful that I just want to cry.

At the after-party at the Sailing Club I’d watched the queens dance, flirt, drink cocktails at the bar beneath the stars, and at last forget that they were supposed to be celestial. Rules are furry things, I remember thinking, as I stood at the bar with Miss Trinidad and Tobago, who likes documentaries and wants to become an artist. I can’t read my own notes. I possibly thought, “Rules are funny things.” But on reflection, rules are, especially where pageants are concerned, much more furry than funny. William and I strolled to the shore and took two empty sun-loungers. We watched people swimming out into the darkness. We watched the formally untouchable Glamazons, some still in sashes, dancing on the sand beside a bonfire, celestial bodies wobbling on the shore. It was a grand party, the rules were forgotten, the official Miss Universe creed was cast aside and left to float out to sea on the tide.

“We, the young women of the universe, believe people everywhere are seeking peace, tolerance and mutual understanding. We pledge to spread this message in every way we can, wherever we go.”

“Oh, Matthew, Matthew, Matthew,” said William, laughing. “Yeah,” I said, “I know.” William might be the only beautiful thing I saw at this event; aside, maybe, from the young waitress at a café I had eaten at last night—alone, obviously. When I’d wandered by earlier she’d skipped out to hand me an envelope. Her photo had been carefully pasted into the card, and her message, in neat handwriting, began: “I saw you eating alone and I can sympathise …” and ended with an invitation to visit her village. At 2am William gave me a big hug and left, I wandered back along the beach to my hotel.

END.