BEATING THE DEAD HORSE
Every opportunity to witness the talking horse is met with uproarious public support. In the stadium a layer of bodies jostles over staircases and rows of seats like ant trails. The sell-out crowd usually doesn’t fill its seats until deep into the first act—it’s a long haul event, a slow burn to start. Horse speech. And all along he’s down there, stock still, stood behind a condenser mic complete with horse-sized pop filter. A splitscreen on the Jumbotron shows 3/4, tail, flank, and bird’s-eye shots. The horse has always been kind of a wet blanket despite his appearance: always a gorgeously dappled skewbald Vanner with ghostly furred hooves, crimped blonde mane, and robust muscular build. Harlequin cover material, Fabio made horse. So he even speaks with the accent (not Fabio’s), irreproducible in text by someone who has never spent any length of time in Ireland, much less Travelling. Music latent in the voice, but there’s no groove to the horse’s lectures that moves anyone but himself. And it is always a he. Calling himself a warhorse, pleading for a metallurgist in the audience to turn the carbon of his flesh into carbon steel, steel his nerves like he’d steal a car, spoil a horse, spare the cowboy. Audiences are fond of calling the horse schizo, for which they can be forgiven, popular abuse of the term notwithstanding, given that the horse’s word salad, slant rhyming, and rapid transmutation of one subject to the next altogether read as the genuine article.
Shortly after intermission the horse gets lucid and mean, making a series of escalatingly vivid threats toward specific audience members, plastered on the splitscreen, singled out by name: what he’ll do to you if you don’t help him get what he wants. Audiences would be more open to this part of the performance if it was clear what exactly the horse wanted, which wasn’t actually armament, companionship, or escape. Some shouted suggestions from low expensive seats, almost always inviting on themselves descriptions of heinous gnawing or trampling violence, the reason they paid the earshot premium at all. Below even them were the lottery seats down by the sidelines where spectators bided their time until the audience turned, and when you finally couldn’t hear the PA over the crowd they mobbed him. The rumble dissolved all at once into cheering as the sideliners kicked and scratched and allegedly – hard to confirm through the scrum despite all the camera coverage – bit the horse to death. Every time they finish there is nothing left of the horse but an exceptionally well-fertilized patch of turf. Up in the stands they drain their cups and light cigarettes while those on the field hit the showers.
No one quite knows why this is the pattern each performance has settled into. The horse’s debut is at this point resigned to a series of disputed oral histories. There are those who swear the horse started it: beyond the threats, they say near the end of his very first appearance he lunged at some Q&A participant and the rest of the sideliners acted in unified self-defense. To others that sounds out of character for the horse, who these days doesn’t even flinch when you pelt him with bottles. Supposedly, this whole horse-turning-against-us / us-turning-against-horse dynamic was such a hit it was written into the show for good. No one knows where the horse comes from or how he is duplicated with such high fidelity. We don’t know where the ticket money goes. Cloning the horse, we suppose. Teaching the cloned horses to talk, of course. What we know for sure is that way back when, it would be two or three years between horses coming back to town, and now we go through one every other week. In those first and third weeks you can feel it everywhere. People slam doors, drive angry, walk their dogs barking and sloping and squabbling the whole time, kick up dust at the homeless. At first pure spectacle, then group therapy was meant to be the draw. These days it’s something crueler.