By the pond, under the lights : open
The wig was hot. Heavy. Cheap plastic netting that rubbed along his real hairline and made him ache to shove his fingers under there and scratch, scrape, claw with painted fingernails until the agony was soothed. The weight of blonde hair piled sky-high atop his head made his neck stiff. His feet hurt. (How did anyone ever walk in these things? The gold glitter boots were probably filled with his blood by now.)
In short, he was in no mood for a party. Of course the party seemed to regard this fact with indifference, and continued to whirl about him in a sparkle of lights all the colors of a confectionary. Salt in his wounds as he sought to lick them, stumbling away from the press of spinning bodies and coming to kneel at the edge of the pond. Wet grass and mud squelched through the diamond pattern of his fetching fishnet tights. Fitting.
Fit for a loser. Scorned. Abandoned. Robbed of his music, his life’s work. Oh, what was even the damned point of life’s cruelties? And the worst part, the very worst, was the knowledge that a man had left him in such a sorry state. Hardly even a man, barely a boy, and how humiliating! To see Tommy out there on the CRT television screens, alternative darling to the burning-eyed misfits of the world as he sang Hedwig’s songs like they were his own blood creations.
He didn’t deserve to call himself an artist. Disgusted, disheartened, and with the cheerful hoots and hollers that filtered through the dark, Hedwig reached up and tore the wig from his head.