Crayola Payola

They’d be very well paid, they were told, if they came out

arrayed in Crayola. Five dollars and forty nine cents for a box

of ten markers – about the same price as a single purveyor

of classier ink that you get from the clique at Chartpak. They

were promised a claque of adoring new fans and appearances at

all the trendiest clubs on the planet, expensively framed in a swirl

of acclaim, with the fame of Merle Oberon at her most famous.

Now they’re here in immoderate glare on the wall of a men’s room

in back of a stall in a bar no one goes to who doesn’t get drunk.

So far they’ve achieved the response of a half-conscious stare

here and there. But they’re not in a funk. They know they’re

supposed to bemoan what they’ve done: sold their souls

to Crayola for nada. But Holy Kenyatta, they love being cheap!

They’d rather be shallow than deep. And they’re having great fun

posing elegantly like Faye Dunaway, making a run of it anyway.

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