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"With more on this miraculous story, let's go to Ed Negley, who is standing by dead."
"You're everything your personal ad said you'd be: funny, sophisticated, dead."
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This Piece Was Written Before A (Once) Live Studio Audience
From: Season 1, Episode 1, The Good Son
Transcribed by: Someone who clearly hasn’t spent much time getting intimate with television chuckles (and who doesn’t disclaim this with a nasally haughtiness, but to confess a genuine ignorance to the medium. Which is just to say, she admittedly may be a little out of her element, but is just confident enough to attempt to split the ends of hairs here. She can fudge it.)
Scene: Frasier is interviewing Daphne for the position of live-in housekeeper and physical therapist for his father. Personalities of these characters are being hammered into one another for the first of what will evidently be many times. The Manchesterian Candidate has just claimed possession of psychic abilities, which apparently rubs Frasier in a way not unlike that of a holey sock to a blister.
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Daphne: Wait a minute! I’m getting something on you – you’re a florist! [Uproarious laughter from the laugh track, causing the left eyebrow of the transcriptionist to reach for the top shelf in confusion]
Frasier: No, I’m a psychiatrist.
Daphne: Oh, well, it comes and goes. [Someone has turned the can over and there’s more laughter, a lot of it, far too much for the non-joke delivered here, and your transcriptionist suspects she’s missing something, or maybe the real joke happened off-camera, which thought leaves her teeming over with sixteen-year-old-girl alienation] Usually it’s strongest during my time of the month [Some more diffused knowing titters from the pre-recorded audience. Menstruation jokes? I’m so removed from this I may as well be out behind the school library smoking a surreptitious cigarette]… so I guess I let a little secret out there. [Swelling random chuckles, and at this point, I’ve just given up trying and am acknowledging my existence in this scene as an “awkward phase.” If experience knows anything, I’ll grow out of it]
Frasier: It’s safe with us. [There’s more laughter here, but I’ll leave it to you to figure out why. I’ve given up, remember.] Well, Miss Moon, I think we’ve learned everything we need to about you, and a dash extra! [More pealing crows and snickers. This program was on the air for how many years?]
Daphne: (turning to Eddie) You’re a dog, aren’t you? [Note that Eddie is, in fact, a dog. And there’s only one possible explanation for the outburst of utter hilarity that bursts forth from the soundtrack here: this program was intended for psychotics and stoners.]
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Far be it for me to stuff words into a dead lady’s mouth, but I don’t think she’d have minded being the harbinger of a half century of increasingly bad jokes. She knew — and said she loved — that hers was the most distinctive voice in a crowd, and there’s no reason to think that would have changed just because the daisies she’s been pushing have taken over the garden. And some of the lines later plied with her peals were titter-worthy. But she — or her voice, inasmuch as she owned it — had one real transgression, for which she was just a puppet: it was responsible for the longevity of Frasier, unscientifically proven to be the least funny in a long and grueling line of unfunny television sitcoms.
Let’s back up. DeDe Ball [mother of Lucille, Requiscat etcet to both], brimming over with pride for her daughter in the way that mothers do, is known to have attended every taping of the I Love Lucy show, where she regularly out-laughed her studio audience compeers. Hers were big, gut-busting, ferociously contagious emissions – there was no more effective kind, as far as television sitcoms go. Now, half-believable cultural legend has it that Lucy’s show [with its reliance on sight gags coupled with Lucille’s versatile maxillofacial muscles and uncanny ability to flap them] was used in the earliest recordings of audience laughter that would later serve to “sweeten” less punchy comedy on television’s laugh tracks.
The scene worked reliably to this model: Desi Arnaz would set things in motion by walking in as Lucy was getting herself into heaps of trouble, in his signature Havanese style [Lu-cy, I’m ho-ome], at which point Lucy would react without words [generally a knowing grimace that prefaced her futile attempt to cover up whatever mess she’d gotten herself into this time], and in that unrestrained moment, silent except for the waves of laughter from the audience, the sound man on the production would have a clean and easy-to-sample audio track to use later. And, because it was the Lucy show, the laughter that was saved, more often than not, belonged to the eminence grise of DeDe.
The original intentions behind the laugh track were mostly benign [even altruistic, maybe, as original intentions can be]. As considered by the sound guys [serious audio geeks], the addition of recorded laughter was meant to even out a show’s sound levels, technically, and fill in the otherwise awkward silences left by the reshoots that inevitably took place after a studio audience returned [to their own less hilarious lives]. Later, a lone home viewer would maybe even achieve a sort of solidarity with DeDe Ball and others [or so they hoped], and as such, be more inclined to relax into a program, and maybe even to laugh, to connect by proxy to the situation.
But we all know where good intentions belong, and at some point, someone behind a big mahogany desk spotted an opportunity to gild his own pocketlint. Studio audiences were sent home, which saved money and studio space and reduced the dependence on the strength of a joke. Laughter, as television knew it [and with only a few exceptions], became factitious, and with that, the laugh track became a spit-and-chewing-gum solution to the worst imaginable excuses for comedy [c.f. the transcript excerpted above, if you have the stomach juices]
Nobody intended those original voices to be the same as those used in laugh tracks fifty years later, and nobody really has a good explanation for why those specific people are still laughing in our collective faces. I’m guessing that it was a self-directed groin-kick, and that by the time later audiences were brought in to record, the life had already been sucked out of sitcoms and it just wasn’t possible to get them up to collective snuff. And, if you’ve ever attended a taping of a live program, you’ll know that the warm-up comics hired to work up an audience is a mushy spitball compared to DeDe’s ballistics.
So here they are, on the set of Frasier, in the spirit if not the flesh, DeDe leading a choir of the dead in cracking up to what can barely be classified as jokes. In an (admittedly unscientific) random sampling, she turns up in nearly every episode, as she did on I Love Lucy. But this time, her cackle’s volume and intensity are inversely proportional to the level of actual comedy she’s responding to. With sitcoms, see, one can put out a fire with gasoline. [This is not a trick recommended personally in other areas. Not that I’ve tried it. Not even accidentally.]
It’s starting to sound as if Frasier kicked the personal puppy of your correspondent, so know now that this isn’t a personal grudge. It may be a fine program, as far as I know. I can’t tell; I’ve never been able to tolerate more than a nibble without reaching for the antacids. Were the people responsible for this laughter back in their bodies and sharing a live environment with me, I’d likely rudely shish them, probably several times over the course of the show, and later I’d write a blog post all about the decline of social mores in live comedy venues. And it would be the most cluelessly indignant polemic ever posted to a blog, and Frasier himself would respond or maybe the paranormal sector would try to rouse DeDe herself so that she could chime in [at which point, rest assured, she’d just confirm what I’ve already said.]. While alive, these people laughed from their gut to fill a soundscape silent from sight gags, and now, as dead windbags, they’re uproarious over a whole lot of nothing.
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Let’s see what ten years on comic crutches has done to our much-maligned performers and writers:
From: Season 10, Episode 12: The Harrassed
The scene opens on Martin and Daphne having dinner when Niles and Frasier walk into the apartment.
Niles: Hello all.
Martin: Hey.
Daphne: Hello. How was the Wine Expo?
Frasier: Horrible! [what emerges from the cathode ray bathtub here leads one to long for a supersized version of the word “effusive.”]
Niles: Frasier ran into a fan.
Martin: Ow, that smarts! [some subdued giggling actually comes in over this line and persists through it, with a nicely orchestrated crescendo carrying all the way through to the next line]
Frasier: Yes, Dad. [laughter from above is continuing here, all the way through this delivery. I’m starting to think my earlier suppositions about intended audience are true. If I smoked grass I’d search far and wide for what these people have.] You have been using that same old joke for the last ten years [maybe this is why we’re supposed to think it’s so funny? It’s an ongoing gag? But a search through some random stoner’s Frasier transcript website tells me later that this isn’t true. Not an ongoing gag, as far as I know…]. So, anyway, I ran into this fan…
Martin: Ouch! Are you okay? [All around us they’re just going nuts. Maybe this is what killed them in the first place?]
During the Age of Pisces, according to tradition around the middle or the end of the 10th century – almost one century before the First Crusades – two Italian monks by the names of Arcano and Egidio made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land. By night, by day, on foot, on a mule’s back and in a boat, they returned to Italy, the home of Christianity, with relics of the Holy Sepulchre in their bags. Established on pontifical ground, within the bounds of Tuscany, Umbria and The March, the two pilgrims erected a small chapel, an Oratory dedicated to Christ’s Holy Sepulchre. The premises were intended for the spiritual communication with God through prayer: silent, murmured or mumbled and public speaking. Like a marble jewel box, the Oratory is said to hold precious relics, at once religious memory and archaeological talismans of the believers’ faith.
However, sources from long ago disagree. No mention of the voyage, the tomb,
the sepulchre or relics exists. At least that is the version told by SantiBeati, the Italian internet site of those few made a Saint or beatified. The web version of the prestigious Enciclopedia Bibliotheca Sanctorum doesn’t mention the pilgrimage either, nor the Holy Sepulchre though it does reveal that Arcano and Egidio, the two monks, were united in beatification. Not the Blessed (Beato) Arcano and the Blessed (Beato) Egidio, two distinct entities, but the Blessed (Beati) Arcano and Egidio. Beatified yes, but not canonized. While subject to local veneration, their place of worship has never been officially recognized by the Church. The Blessed Arcano and Egidio’s Oratory was enlarged and later transformed into an Abbey. Certain sources say that the village that formed around it was baptised Novella Gerusalemme, New Jerusalem, God’s Tabernacle.
It was during the 12th century that the place name, the village that would later become a market town, would become officially known as Borgo San Seplcro, the Burg of the Holy Sepulchre. The place name’s origins come of course from the legend surrounding the Holy Sepulchre relics. Are these Holy Sepulchre relics fragments of stone, skin, flesh, bone or burial stone; the legend doesn’t say.
Nicodemus, who had gone to Jesus by night before, also came, bringing with him a mixture of myrrh and aloes weighing about a hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it, with the spices, in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews.
John (19:39-40)
Relics of the Passion were plentiful at the time. They sowed and irrigated Christian
imagination to the point of ravishment for centuries: Holy Umbilicus, Holy Cradle, Holy Foreskin, Holy Teeth, Holy Tears, Holy Chalice, Fragments of the Holy Cross, Holy Nails, Holy Sponge, Holy Spear, Holy Blood and one of the most controversial, Holy Shroud, a negative of the negative of Christ’s face, Fiat Lux film.
For five hundred years, the relics of the Holy Sepulchre lay hidden away from wars, torment and light. When suddenly, in 1416 in Borgo San Sepolcro, one of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance was born: Piero della Francesca. One of this painter’s masterpieces is The Legend of the True Cross (1452-1466). Located in the chancel of the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, the monumental fresco of 12 panels narrates the holy and warlike origins of the Cross on which Christ was crucified.
But where is this secret forest that witnessed and nurtured the growth of the wood used for the Cross? Are the roots that spread underneath the earth, the branches that reached for the sky holy or corrupt? What was the wood used for the Cross? It is said in The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine that the Cross of the Redeemer was carved out of the tree that grew over Adam’s tomb. This grisly tree comes from a seed of the Tree of Life, source of immortality, sown in the mouth of Adam’s earthly shell. The holiness of the Cross goes back to the beginning, to the first man, oxymora species, a rhetorical figure pulled between evolutionism and creationism. One can thus deduce that the wood used for Christ’s Cross is in itself already a relic from another era.
Around the same period in his native town, the painter created a nocturnal scene of the Holy Sepulchre: a fresco of The Resurrection. The repetition of holy images is troubling: the scene takes place at the Holy Sepulchre and the masterpiece itself is found in situ where it was produced: Borgo San Sepolcro, home of the Holy Sepulchre relics.
So Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own tomb, which he had recently hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away.
Matthew (27:59-60)
If there exists monumental History with a capital H, the history of man, then there also exists the Resurrection with a capital R, referring not to the resurrection of man to the Kingdoms beyond the grave, but to the Resurrection of Christ to a new life.
The two of them ran together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying on the ground, but he did not go in. Simon Peter, who was following him, came and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, as well as the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, which was not lying with the linen wrappings but folded and set apart. The other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed;
John (20:4-8)
The Paschal Mystery commemorating the Resurrection of Christ is the primary ritual of the Church. It is of even greater importance than the Nativity, the Resurrection or rebirth of Christ being more important than his birth.
For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised from the dead. If Christ has not been raised, your preaching and your faith are in vain.
Corinthians I (15:13-14)
In the year 325, Constantine the First, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity convened the First Council of Nicaea. It was decided to calculate the date of Easter, the Paschal Mystery. The Ecclesiastic computus calculated. The results of the speculation were clear. The Paschal Mystery took place after the first full moon taking place during or after the Spring Equinox. It’s the return to life, of sap being pulled back up the tree truck, the renewal of photosynthesis. According to the Church, the mystery of the Resurrection reveals the intransigent dimension of absolute faith. The Resurrection is the dedication and worship of mystery. A journey beyond the tomb, it reminds us of the Orphic or Eleusis Mysteries, tied as they are to the transformative experience of the hereafter: regeneration, reincarnation, the transmigration of souls and other metempsychosis … As Proust might have said For a long time, I resurrected early.
(…) Then it would begin to be unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; (…)
Proust – Swann’s Way (1:1)
Under Constantine the First’s rule, mystical pagan rites disappear little by little. Religious biodiversity dwindles. Polytheist cults disappear; journeys in the hereafter cease. It is the end of mystical odysseys to places hidden deep beneath the earth or into the rock where entrances were hewn by the voyager. However when night comes, it is said that the phantoms and the spirits escape from within. In English, we say Holy Ghost. The love of the Father and the Son, the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is called the Holy Phantom, The Holy Ghost.
On seeing Piero della Francesca, one notices that his eyelids are heavy and his bearing proud. He gives off a graceful drowsy aura between sleeping and waking. Piero della Francesca’s fifth episode of The Legend of the Real Cross represents The Dream of Constantine the Great. This dream is a moment of great religious revelation as it is during his sleep that the angel appears before the Emperor. The winged creature awash in light declares the victorious end to The Battle of the Milvian Bridge. This military victory symbolized the birth of a new Roman Empire, a Christian Empire, led by Constantine, Constantinople and the Byzantine
world. Still a pagan at the time, the Emperor dreams of his conversion. Initiation becomes conversion and the onlooker’s eyes are drawn into the obscurity of the tent, into the gap opened by this dream…
The Legend Of The True Cross by Piero della Francesca - episode V: The Dream Of Constantine
What is the nature of this dream? What is it about this blackness, that which we cannot see? In The Dream of Constantine, soldiers stand watch between shadow and light. In The Resurrection, recumbent soldiers doze next to the Holy Sepulchre. We are not more privy to Constantine’s dream than the sleeping soldiers are witnesses to The Resurrection, Christ’s return armed with a triumphal banner of the cross.
Eyelids this heavy join and as such no one is witness to the scene. Between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, the denuded trees and the leafy branches, Christ comes out of the tomb. Where has he come from? It is a mystery. From Mother Earth? The nocturnal kingdom of errant shadows? Christ in Hell? We cannot know. The Resurrection is enough. Like an apparition, it comes from out of nowhere – akin to a lenticular votive image where Christ flickers like a ghost appearing and disappearing in a doorway.
Lenticular Printing Of Jesus
In Borgo San Sepolcro, death is an optical illusion. The burial stone dramatically carries out the continuation of the fresco’s foreground which assembles together architectural painted elements. Christ is about to leave the fresco, to step over the threshold of the image, cutting away from the field of representation separating the vanishing point from the sleeping soldiers in the background of the landscape. Piero della Francesca shows us what nobody saw, what faith deemed unrepresentable, that which we cannot see but must only believe. The image takes back its function, its mystique: Christ’s eyes pierce the painted surface, he can see us.
Christ is the eye of the spectator and Piero della Francesca our Savior.
The Resurrection by Piero della Francesca
When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, marched the Star of Bethlehem, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overwhelmed with joy.
Matthew (2:9-10)
In 1985, Soviet and Japanese spatial agencies launched the probe Giotto into distant space. Inspired in 1301 by the passage of Halley’s Comet, Giotto depicted the Star of Bethlehem in the guise of a comet in his Adoration of the Magi painting, a ball of light with a tail of fire. However the known universe is as nothing when compared to papal power. A year earlier already, in its great clairvoyance, the Vatican saw that the solar winds were turning. Jean-Paul II beatified the painter Fra Angelico, the Blessed (Beato) Angelico (1400-1455) in 1984 and proclaimed him the Patron Saint of Artists.
A day will come where the Vatican will proceed with a new ritual: the canonization of Piero della Francesca, born in 1416 in Borgo San Sepolcro, deceased October 12th, 1492 in Borgo San Sepolcro, where the Holy Sepulchre, the true home of the mystery of Christianity can be found. What is curious, is that on October 12th, 1492, the day when Piero’s soul joined Valhalla, Christopher Columbus found footing in the sand of the Bahaman island Guanahani.
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This was what my mother said, right after getting the call from Uncle Marty letting her know that Uncle Irving had died.
“And it’s sad,” I said.
“Yeah, that too,” said my mother.
It was indeed sad news, but it was not a surprise. Uncle Irving was my grandmother’s younger brother, he was in his late 80s, and he had suffered a couple of strokes in the past few years, which he had spent, not very happily, in a nursing home. But there also was a lot to do, and while my mother said that mainly to take the edge off the situation, the women in my family are very practical.
The men, at least on my mother’s side, not so much. Take my Uncle Marty, my mother’s younger brother. He’s a very sweet man who’s stuck with the same selection of polyester bellbottoms since the 70s, cannot go anywhere outside of Queens without getting lost, and is always misplacing things – his keys, his wallet, his car. He is a perpetual bachelor who loves Judy Garland and little dogs, has had the same “roommate” for the past 20 years, and despite the fact that my parents have had gay friends for at least that long, Uncle Marty still describes him to us as just that. You might say that I am adhering to stereotypes except that his very openly gay friends finally asked my mother, “So, do you not know?” We can’t figure out if he is just naïve enough to think that we don’t, or socially awkward enough that he’d prefer not to upset the status quo.
Anyway, Uncle Marty lives in Queens, but when he was notified about Uncle Irving’s death, he was in Florida. He’s spent most of his winters there since taking early retirement at age 55 from his job as a public school teacher. (My grandmother, who grew up during the Great Depression, convinced both him and my mother to take up education as a career, telling them, “You’ll never have to worry because they’ll always need teachers.” Again, practical). Uncle Irving had also lived in Queens, which was why Uncle Marty was his next-of-kin and was supposed to make all the decisions about how to handle his death, but only so much could be done over the phone. My mother was at home in Pennsylvania when she got the call, and would have been at work except that she was sick with some never-ending rhinovirus she’d had for two weeks already. And I was at my mom’s because I was, at the time, living on the air mattresses and couches of friends and family throughout the Tri-State Area. This was because a couple of months before, I had broken up with my live-in boyfriend, put all of my stuff in storage, and gone traveling in South America for seven weeks. Which was great, except that then I had to come home — to no money, no relationship, nowhere to live, and no jobs (disappearing for an extended period of time tends to make people in the freelance world forget that you exist). In a matter of days, I’d gone from exploring ancient ruins and hiking volcanoes to spending all my time surfing Craig’s List, cruising up and down the New Jersey Turnpike (the guys at the Molly Pitcher Service Area now knew me on sight), and rushing to open houses so that I could beg the owners to let me fill out the 63rd application for their $1200 studio apartment, the one with a hotplate behind a curtain posing as a kitchen.
“So what has to be done?”
“Well,” said my mom, “he wanted to be cremated, so that has to be arranged. And someone has to sign for his possessions. But before that, somebody has to identify his body.”
“Can’t the people at the nursing home do that?” I asked. “He’s been there for three years, they ought to know what he looks like.”
“No, it has to be a relative or a friend,” she croaked. “I guess I’ll have to go up there and…”
She trailed off into another medley of hacking, which ended with a loud finale of nose-blowing into several tissues at once. Sure, my mom claimed this was only a cold, but she is the kind of person, as I relearned every winter of my childhood, to whom every infection is a cold until it’s pneumonia. She insisted that she was going back to work before the end of the week. Now that she was getting close to her retirement date of June 30th, she was getting increasingly worried that the piles of remaining paperwork that she had intended to plow through before she self-terminated would ever get tackled without her. And since she worked for the state, she was probably right.
I did not enjoy watching her suffer, and not just because I was familiar with the post-nasal drip. Spending a lot of time at your mother’s house tends to make you regress. Mine, though she is no coddler, still likes to buy me my favorite foods, do my laundry and, you know, take care of me. So naturally, when I come home, I get the uncontrollable urge to relive my adolescence. In other words, to do nothing but lie by the pool or watch TV and let her make me iced or hot beverages, depending on the season. Seeing her looking unwell and kind of frail, however, suddenly made me think about the fact that both of us were now closing in on ages when I would have to be the one taking care of her. This thought scared the living daylights out of me. I have no children, since I’ve been an adult I’ve even only ever had surrogate pets – ones that belonged to my roommates, who I could cuddle and enjoy without having to feed, walk, or clean up after them on a regular basis. I’d left my plants with friends while I was traveling and came home to find that they were doing much better than they had when I was around. I’ve never had a job that lasted longer than 6 weeks, and I don’t know where or with whom I’ll be working until someone calls me up and asks me if I’m available, and then a few days later, someone else calls and tells me where and when to show up. Was this the existence of an adult? I think I’d had more responsibility on my shoulders when I was 12. At least then I’d had homework and chores.
The cumulonimbus cloud these thoughts were forming in the back of my mind must have something to do with why I said, “I’ll go.”
“No, no, of course not,” said my mother.
“No, really,” I said. “I’m going to be up in New York anyway. You’re not feeling well, it would be ridiculous for you to drive all the way up there.”
My mother stared at me. “You really want to do this?”
“Well, no,” I said, wavering a bit. “But…somebody has to, right?”
Irving Rosenberg was born in 1920 in Jersey City. He grew up around a big extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins, and with two older siblings, my Uncle Gordon and my grandmother, Annette. They were the children of poor immigrants from Poland, so even though all three kids were smart, they couldn’t afford to go to college. My grandmother went into the civil service and rose quickly, eventually making it from typist to supervisor in the New York City Parks Department. Both of my great uncles were a bit more aimless. Neither one had a serious job until they got drafted, Gordon to become a cook on a destroyer and Irving to teach “radio science,” which was essentially a basic form of physics and engineering. He liked being in the Army.
“One night, my buddy and I were on leave, and we were walking down the street, you know, in our uniforms. Two young, good-looking soldiers. Well, this limousine pulls over, and we’re thinking, ‘Uh oh, what’s going on here?’ Well, inside are these two beautiful girls. One of them turned out to be Lauren Bacall’s sister!”
This was a typical Uncle Irving story. At some point, he would come to, “And I was quite a ladies man. I was an excellent dancer, so of course they all were interested in me.” Then the anecdote would end with some innuendo like, “And well, you know what happened next…” Of course, those weren’t the only details that were fuzzy, and Lauren Bacall didn’t actually have a sister, but the stories were related with such delight that it didn’t really matter. When I was a kid, I was fully entertained just watching him tell them, even the parts I didn’t get.
After the war, Irving went to work for the Long Island Railroad as a signal switcher. It was a do-very-little job that allowed him to spend his days reading and listening to the radio, storing up information on everything from the history of Mesopotamia to the dangers of nightshade vegetables. A whole new category of stories came out of this.
“Now you know that the Israeli name ‘Peres’ comes from the Spanish name ‘Perez.’ They both come from the word perera, which means ‘pear’ in Spanish. This is because the Jews were living in Spain in the Middle Ages. We were very wealthy and did all of the banking for the king, and this was why we were eventually driven out. The same with the Rothschilds, who were bankers throughout Europe. Now, you know that the name ‘Rosenberg’ is the German version of the name ‘Rothschild’…”
It was always tough to distinguish the actual history from the things that Uncle Irving made up to fill in the blanks because they made sense to him, even if he didn’t know if they were true or not. The word for ‘pear’ in Spanish is pera, so he was close, and there was in fact a large, wealthy Jewish community in Spain for centuries, so the connection between Peres and Perez might very well be true. But I’m pretty sure that my family is not related to the Rothschild financial dynasty. Irving just loved to make connections that seemed to him to be brilliant discoveries.
Uncle Irving’s life changed dramatically in 1978, the year that Resorts International, the first casino in Atlantic City, opened its doors. He started going to AC when he still had a steady paycheck, then once he retired, he had even more time – and the senior citizen buses to take him (as a native New Yorker, he never owned a car). Now, his stories became about his winning streaks, and how the casino would start comping him – first drinks, then dinner at the buffet, then a hotel room.
“It’s this big suite, with a huge bathtub, and in the room there’s champagne. They were treating me like a high roller!”
I really think that was the point for him. In Atlantic City, Uncle Irving got the thrills and attention that he’d always wanted.
Of course, he also developed a serious gambling problem. Between 1978 and 1983, he lost all of his savings at the blackjack tables. After that, he’d just go and gamble away his pension and social security, and then have to find a way to make it through the next few weeks. He used to laugh when he talked about it; on some level he knew how insane it was, what he was doing. But he couldn’t stop, and I’m not at all sure he wanted to.
I don’t know when Uncle Irving’s last trip to AC was, but I know that around the year 2000, he started having trouble walking. He had a cane but he hated using it, so he generally didn’t. Finally, after a fall left Irving not badly hurt but bruised and embarrassed, my Uncle Marty decided that his uncle couldn’t manage on his own any more, and moved him out of the apartment in Flushing that he had lived in for close to 40 years. When we went there to collect his things for him, before his landlord cleaned the place out, the situation we found was staggering. The apartment was filled literally to the rafters with piles of newspapers, old lamps and television sets he’d been planning to fix. By the bed was a giant rack — one that must have been tossed out by a shoe store — holding various types and sizes of shoe that couldn’t all possibly have fit one person. In the bathroom was the most baffling thing: a tower of PVC buckets up to the ceiling next to the toilet. Perhaps they were there to catch a leak that had dried up long ago. All the drawers were stuffed with papers and photographs and roaches were everywhere, as if they now knew the place was theirs.
After seeing all this, I didn’t feel so bad that Uncle Irving had had to move, especially since, soon after, he had a minor stroke, which confined him to a wheelchair and made it hard for him to use his hands. However, I wished that he hadn’t had to move into the Dry Harbor Nursing Home. It’s one of those understaffed facilities that survive on social security and pensions, where elderly people in various states of coherence are packed into a room with a television most of the day. My uncle, who was not at all a vegetable at 87, didn’t like television. He also didn’t like reading – his eyes hadn’t been great for a long time – or books on tape, when I suggested them to him. The two things he was attached to were talk radio and talking. Early on at the nursing home, his small transistor radio disappeared, and when Uncle Marty bought him another, it got stolen again. The people there either wouldn’t pay attention to Uncle Irving’s stories (the nurses) or couldn’t (most of the other residents). Toward the end, when we would come to visit, he’d beam and he’d start talking, and sometimes you would see a couple of the lady residents, who clearly found him charming, listening in and chuckling. But then he’d arrive at the end of the first anecdote and the light in his eyes would flicker.
“You don’t want to listen to me,” he would say, sheepishly. “You young people, go back and enjoy your lives.” It was as if society had finally convinced him that he was just a lonely, useless old man who had nothing of value to say to anyone.
I had a lot of time to think on the way up to New York, and not about anything good. For one thing, there was mortality; my uncle was dead, my mother was sick (maybe it was a cold, maybe it was consumption; the people in those Victorian movies coughed a lot before they wasted away), and I was having a midlife crisis, which meant that I had to be at midlife – aka, halfway to death. I also felt guilty about how my relationship with my uncle had gradually eroded over the past two decades. When I became a teenager, I made the unexpected discovery that he was more mortifying to have around than my parents. The guy wouldn’t shut up with the awful stories about girls, and you definitely couldn’t get him started on race or religion.
“And you know, Ham was the third son of Noah, and he was cursed and cast out, so he went off and settled in Africa. And that’s why that’s where all the blacks come from.”
Oy. It took me years to accept that I couldn’t get him to stop saying this stuff. By the time I’d been through college and film school, I had matured enough to realized that he was always going to be a product of his time. I think maybe the latter helped me appreciate him the way the rest of the family did, as a colorful eccentric with an encyclopedia of great tales made more fascinating by the fact that they partly fictional. But at that point, I was trying to work my way into the film business and had no time for anyone outside of it, much less my older male relatives in the next borough.
There was also the larger existential guilt. My great uncle’s generation had had no opportunities. My parents had worked hard to give me some, and here I was downwardly mobile, throwing all of them away to pursue a crazy dream career at which one in, like, a bazillion people actually succeeded — and those ones generally have a lot more chutzpah than I do. As a lifestyle choice, this meant that I never knew how I’d be surviving from month to month and that I now couldn’t seem to find a decent place to live that I could afford. I couldn’t even afford my car without my parents paying my insurance. And for what? Every script or story I’d ever written had been passed on and the one film I’d made in the past ten years had been rejected from about 57 festivals – not that I’d kept count — including all of the ones in New Jersey that nobody has ever heard of. How, I had to wonder, would things have been different for Uncle Irving if he could have gone to college and graduate school and found a purpose for his life, maybe as a real scientist?
I arrived at the funeral home and went into the office, where I explained why I was there. A nice, officious man said he would take me down to the room where Uncle Irving was being “stored.” We got into an elevator.
“How do you…I guess he’s been…refrigerated?” I asked.
“That’s right,” said the man. “He’s fully chilled.” He grinned a little, then looked uncomfortable, perhaps as he realized, despite the fact that I was probably younger and asked weirder questions than the people who typically showed up for corpse identification, that this was probably inappropriate. He quickly led me off the elevator and into the next room.
“Um, here we are.”
People look different when they’re dead. At least, Uncle Irving did when I saw him laid out in the brown cardboard box that they would use for his cremation. It was hard to pinpoint why. His skin looked waxy and slack, but he had grown paler over the years. He seemed smaller, but I knew he had never been tall. No, it was his face that really looked different. I was taken aback for a moment. I was here to identify the guy, and he just didn’t look like the man I had known my entire life. But when I looked back at his face I realized what it was that had changed. The features were all there but the person wasn’t. Perhaps this is only true of people who were truly vibrant when they were alive, but his face was just a different face now that he wasn’t in it.
I nodded and said, “Okay.” The funeral home attendant took me up to sign the paperwork.
My family had a memorial get-together for Uncle Irving a few weeks later. Outside of our immediate family and my Uncle Marty, only Cousin Miltie made it (Uncle Gordon’s family lived in Arizona and couldn’t make it out). Miltie had grown up with Irving, he was the same generation but about a decade younger. I was surprised to hear that he was a retired doctor.
“You know, I always looked up to Irving,” Miltie said as we ate bagels and lox and my nephew and niece ran around the dining room, screaming. “We’d all go to the pool together, and Gordon would do a cannonball off the diving board – Gordon was the clown. But Irving would do these perfect, graceful dives. He was a terrific dancer, you know.”
“And a ladies man,” chuckled my mom. “So he told us.”
“He was,” said Miltie. “It was almost as if things came too easily for him. You know, after the war, the Army sent him to college, but he dropped out. He just didn’t like school. He could have been an engineer.” He smiled and shook his head. “Irving was brilliant. He just had no ambition. But he always did what he wanted.”
Not long after that, I finally found a new apartment, one into which I could actually fit all of my furniture. I started working and writing again, and, eventually, I started making a new film – the documentary I’ve been working on for the past few years. I think it’s going to be good. And if it’s not, well, the things I’ve seen and the people I’ve met while making it have given me lots of stories to tell.
Maybe I should take Uncle Irving’s life as a cautionary tale but I don’t see it that way. We all have to make choices about who we want to be, and then we have to live with them. But he really did live with them. Plus, I figure somebody in the family has to take over the job of spinning a good yarn. Because my younger brother? He’s an economist.
Tombstone and mausoleum photos by the author.
***
Explore other contributions on the “Back From The Dead” theme.
]]>Booth: Miles’ step-brother. A dreamer. Stuck.
Miles: Booth’s step-brother. An idealistic rescuer.
Cass: A lounge singer. Sexy and angry. Fed up with it all.
Lourdes: A sculptor. Tough and menacing. Dangerous.
Scene
An abandoned block in New York.
Time
Summer, nighttime, present.
SCENE 1
LIGHTS UP on an abandoned block in New York. Light from a neon sign, surrounding shadows, twilight above. BOOTH sits at a café table outside the entrance to a dive bar. There are five empty glasses before him. He looks grungy, despite an expensive, tight-fitting, blue leather glove on his right hand.
FOOTFALLS. MILES ENTERS, sweaty and out of breath. He carries an overnight bag. A small, blue ribbon is tied to the handle.
MILES: Booth!
BOOTH: You found me.
MILES: It wasn’t easy. This block? So short. And narrow. It’s not on the google maps.
BOOTH: Funny, that.
MILES: (looks at his phone.) No reception here?
BOOTH: Nary a wavelength, not a flash.
LIGHTNING FLASHES in the sky.
MILES: (looks up.) That sky… So ominous… Again.
BOOTH: (sings: ) “It’s like thunder… Lightning… The way you love is frightening…”
MILES: God, I’m tired.
BOOTH: No wheels?
MILES: I walked. From the subway. Around and around, ‘til I doubled back.
BOOTH: No, your bag.
MILES: You don’t like it?
BOOTH: Most people travel with bags on wheels.
MILES: Most people have shit taste.
BOOTH: Most people have no money. Buy me a drink?
FRANTIC VOICES argue within the bar.
MILES: This place is a dive. (wipes sweat from his brow.) It’s hot.
BOOTH: No, dives are passé.
MILES: Funny.
BOOTH: Yeah funny, that.
MILES: Are you drunk?
BOOTH: Am I acting drunk?
MILES: Not really. You never do. (sees the empty glasses.) How many have you had?
BOOTH: It’s happy hour from three to eight.
MILES: (looks at his expensive watch.) It’s almost nine.
BOOTH: Who wears a watch anymore? (counts the glasses.) Three to four… Four to five… Five to six… Six to seven… Seven to eight.
MILES: Five?
BOOTH: Manhattans.
A HELICOPTER thrums and drones in the distance.
MILES: I could drink five in six hours and not act drunk.
BOOTH: You’re on.
MILES: I don’t have six hours.
BOOTH: And I don’t have the money.
MILES: How did you pay for those?
BOOTH: A hustle here, a hustle there.
SAD MUSIC drifts in from an alley offstage.
MILES: Lou Reed… I love that song.
BOOTH: You don’t comment on the music.
MILES: I just did.
BOOTH: You’re not supposed to.
MILES: Well I did.
BOOTH: You fucked it up, we have to start over now.
MILES: Again?
BOOTH: Get it right, Miles.
MILES EXITS. A long SILENCE. FOOTFALLS. MILES ENTERS, breathless, sweaty, carrying his bag.
MILES: Booth!
BOOTH: You found me.
MILES: It wasn’t easy. This block? It’s so short. And narrow. And not on the google maps.
BOOTH: Funny, that.
MILES: (looks at his phone.) No reception here?
BOOTH: Nary a wavelength, not a flash.
LIGHTNING FLASHES in the sky.
MILES: (looks up.) That sky…
BOOTH: No wheels?
MILES: I walked. From the subway.
BOOTH: No, your bag.
MILES: You don’t like it?
FRANTIC VOICES argue within the bar.
MILES: I’m not buying you a drink.
BOOTH: No. No. That’s not how it goes.
MILES: Yes it is.
BOOTH: No, no, no! I say, “buy me a drink?” You can’t say, “I’m not buying you a drink.”
MILES: Same difference.
BOOTH: It’s different.
MILES: Everything’s different eventually, that’s why we try to make it the same.
BOOTH: Which is why you have to get it right.
MILES: All I know is I’m not starting over.
BOOTH: It’s chaos if we don’t.
MILES: It’s chaos if you stay here. Come on, Booth. Let’s go.
BOOTH: There’s nowhere to go.
MILES: Come home.
BOOTH: Fuck you and fuck home. And while you’re at it, fuck Dad.
Booth holds up his blue-gloved right hand and flips his middle finger.
MILES: Dad is concerned.
BOOTH: And you’re not?
MILES: Of course I am.
BOOTH: Of course.
MILES: I am.
BOOTH: You and Dad and your big, swinging dicks.
MILES: Dad wants you home.
BOOTH: Dad can go take a flying leap at a rolling doughnut.
MILES: You sound just like him.
BOOTH: Buy me a drink, snakelips.
MILES: I’ll buy you a plane ticket.
BOOTH: With Dad’s money. How much is your allowance these days?
MILES: I’m not taking the bait.
BOOTH: Okay, don’t.
MILES: I won’t.
BOOTH: Fine then.
MILES: Fine.
THE HELICOPTER rumbles closer.
BOOTH: You and Dad and your big, swinging dicks.
MILES: That’s enough.
BOOTH: Not even. Not nearly. Not in a long time, Miles. Hasn’t it been a long, long time since I made you scream like a bitch?
MILES: Enough!
THE HELICOPTER zooms overhead. BRIGHT LIGHT floods the stage briefly, then vanishes. Booth is shaken, but tries to hide it. He flips his middle finger at the helicopter.
BOOTH: You like my blue glove?
MILES: Like I said most people have shit taste.
BOOTH: And shit fathers.
MILES: You’re high, aren’t you?
BOOTH: Am I acting high?
MILES: On what?
BOOTH: Very potent dreams, and this time they’re mine. (laughs.) I used to dream what I thought I should, I used to hope for more, but now I… It’s just me now, climbing up into… Purity.
Miles looks up at the city sky as THE HELICOPTER fades away.
MILES: What are they looking for?
BOOTH: Sleaze.
MILES: There’s sleaze right here, underfoot. Look down, right there, it’s stuck to our shoes.
BOOTH: No, they’re looking for sleaze on legs.
MILES: Don’t talk about my mother like that.
BOOTH: (laughs.) Ha! And I won’t talk about yours.
MILES: Let’s go, Booth.
BOOTH: I haven’t heard that in ages.f
MILES: “Let’s go?”
BOOTH: The tone.
MILES: There’s no tone.
BOOTH: You like me.
MILES: Shut up.
BOOTH: But you do.
MILES: You’re amusing. So what?
BOOTH: So you don’t have to do this. Betray someone else. Betray Dad. Take the money and run.
MILES: I simply asked you to come home.
BOOTH: I’m home.
MILES: At a table for one, before a dive, on a forgotten block, in the worst neighborhood in New York?
BOOTH: Everybody has to be somewhere.
MILES: And this is going nowhere.
BOOTH: You see that alley?
Miles crosses to the edge of the stage.
MILES: It’s a dead-end.
BOOTH: What do you see down there?
MILES: I see… (a beat.) What is that?…
BOOTH: It used to be fire escapes. A lot of them. Random, ripped-off, now they’re a staircase. My good friend Lourdes? The sculptor? He ripped them off abandoned buildings and reconstructed them as a spiral staircase.
MILES: How did he manage that?
BOOTH: With a truck, some big tools, and little help from his friends.
MILES: It’s… Wow… Strange…
BOOTH: Beautiful.
MILES: Frightening.
Miles crosses back to Booth, unsettled.
BOOTH: You felt it, didn’t you? The pull? Down the alley? That’s no dead-end, it’s a portal.
MILES: You’re not making sense.
BOOTH: I’m drunk.
MILES: You’re high.
BOOTH: Same difference.
MILES: There’s a big difference.
BOOTH: Like you would know?
MILES: What’s it like to be that high?
BOOTH: Sharp. Everything’s sharper… There’s clarity, all-clear, clearer than you know and… Clean. It’s a clean high. With angles, sharp angles that raise the bar… And there’s a steeper fall.
Despite himself, Miles is drawn back to the edge of the stage and peers down the alley.
BOOTH: Up, up, look up, Miles. Toward the top of the Helix? There’s a blue light.
MILES: So I see.
BOOTH: You know what’s up there? Hmph? A Lounge! It’s the coolest fucking cocktail lounge you ever, in your lame, help-me, help-me life, could ever hope to see! You hear that?
CASS SINGS, faintly, in the distance. It’s eerie and compelling.
MILES: She’s good.
BOOTH: It’s Cass. Careful how you listen, she’ll break your heart.
MILES: You’re high.
BOOTH: So is the Lounge. (laughs.) Lourdes and Cass run it, they own it, they live there, but you’ll never know, it’s too high a climb for a screamy bitch like you.
MILES: Shut up, Miles.
BOOTH: Never, nope, too late.
MILES: Miles?
BOOTH: (taunting, he sings: ) He saw the Helix, he heard the song. Oh Miles, poor Miles, he has no aplomb.
MILES: We need to control this!
BOOTH: Do you see me spinning out of control?
MILES: (calms himself.) We’re starting over.
BOOTH: Oh sure. Life is like that, isn’t it? Second chances, clean slate, forgiveness and redemption and all that love-saves-the-day bullshit?
MILES: It’s what I believe, and so do you.
BOOTH: I don’t.
MILES: Yes you do, you just know it yet.
MILES EXITS. BOOTH adjusts his blue glove, then rearranges the empty glasses.
A long SILENCE, then FOOTFALLS. MILES ENTERS, breathless, sweaty, carrying his bag.
MILES: Booth?
BOOTH: You found me.
MILES: It wasn’t easy. Ugh, his block.
BOOTH: No wheels?
MILES: I walked. From the subway.
BOOTH: No, your bag.
MILES: You don’t like it?
BOOTH: Most people travel with bags on wheels.
MILES: Most people have shit taste.
BOOTH: Most people have no money.
FRANTIC VOICES argue within the bar.
MILES: I’m not buying you a drink.
Booth holds up his right hand and flips his middle finger.
BOOTH: You like my glove?
MILES: Like I said most people have shit taste.
BOOTH: And sleaze for mothers.
MILES: You’re high.
BOOTH: Am I acting high?
MILES: On what?
BOOTH: Very potent dreams.
MILES: Let’s go, Booth.
BOOTH: I haven’t heard that in ages.
MILES: “Let’s go?”
BOOTH: The tone.
MILES: There’s no tone.
CASS ENTERS from the alley. She eavesdrops from the edge of the stage. She’s well-dressed and sexy and looks like trouble. THUNDER and LIGHTNING. THE HELICOPTER thrums in the distance.
MILES: What are they looking for?
BOOTH: Sleaze.
MILES: There’s sleaze here, underfoot.
BOOTH: No, sleaze on legs.
CASS: I’ve been called worse.
CASS EMERGES from the edge of the stage.
BOOTH: She’s here!
CASS: I’m Cass. How do you do.
MILES: I’m Miles.
CASS: Hmph. Miles and miles. The brother?
BOOTH: Step-brother, same father.
MILES: Different mothers.
BOOTH: But our Dad says our mothers were just the same.
CASS: Well I’m no one’s mother, just sex on legs. Why complicate it?
BOOTH: Yep, let’s keep it simple.
CASS: Your mother left you?
MILES: It’s not your business.
CASS: And your mother left you?
BOOTH: What’s the difference?
CASS: I’ve left worse.
MILES: I’m quite sure you have.
CASS: I could be a mother, you know. I could sashay into that vacant lot over there, squat over the weeds and, ugh, drop a newborn, no problem. But I choose not to.
Cass perches on the edge of the table and crosses her legs.
CASS: Look at me. I move my leg. (she does.) That’s all it is. It captures your attention. Are you thinking of a leg? Or do you see… A woman? On legs? Or do you see… A mother? Whose mother, which mother? How different would I be as a your mother? (Booth.) Or your mother. (Miles.) You mother-fuckers would love to love me and leave me.
BOOTH: Hell yes.
CASS: One step-brother, then the other. So?
MILES: So we had different mothers.
BOOTH: So we don’t compete for love and affection.
CASS: But you love to push a body down.
MILES: And climb over.
BOOTH: Me?!
MILES: You.
CASS: I always know what you’re going to do.
MILES: You see the future?
CASS: No, I hear it. It twists and turns, like a snake, and I hear it coming.
MILES: No one can hear a snake coming.
CASS: I can. You know how? Hmph? Hey, I asked you a question! You know how I hear it all coming?
MILES: I… No. No, I don’t.
CASS: By letting snakes like Lourdes and Booth lick my ears clean (sings: ) Mother-fuckers… La-la-la… Punk step-brothers… La-di-da… I’ll never get away from the fuckers of mothers… La-la-la…
CASS EXITS to the alley, singing her improvised song.
MILES: Back up the spiral?
BOOTH: It used to be fire escapes. Random, ripped-off. My good friend Lourdes? He ripped fire escapes off abandoned buildings.
MILES: How did he manage that?
BOOTH: With a little help from his friends. And then he reconstructed it.
MILES: It’s… beautiful.
BOOTH: It’s the Helix.
LOURDES ENTERS from the alley. He eavesdrops from the edge of the stage. He’s well-dressed and sexy and looks dangerous. THUNDER and LIGHTNING. THE HELICOPTER rumbles closer.
MILES: We’re way off track.
BOOTH: We’re close enough.
MILES: We don’t say anything about a the Helix until later.
BOOTH: We can jump ahead and double back.
MILES: That woman threw me.
BOOTH: Her name is Cass.
MILES: She wants to come between us.
BOOTH: Only if we let her.
MILES: Let’s start over.
BOOTH: Again?! Why do we keep doing this?
MILES: Because everyone deserves a second chance.
BOOTH: Second? You found me here, that was once. We started over, that was twice. Now we’re starting all over again, and this will be the third chance. Or is it the fourth?
MILES: Today? I’ve lost count.
BOOTH: You lose count every day.
MILES EXITS to the street. BOOTH adjusts his blue glove, then rearranges the empty glasses. LOURDES EMERGES from the alley.
LOURDES: That’s him?
BOOTH: You’re here!
LOURDES: I’m here.
BOOTH: That’s him!
LOURDES: How’s it coming along?
BOOTH: Slowly.
LOURDES: He didn’t follow Cass.
BOOTH: He’s frightened.
LOURDES: If you had the balls, you’d be frightened too.
BOOTH: He’ll be back.
LOURDES: You make me laugh, Booth. Maybe this time I’ll let you live.
BOOTH: You will, because you like me.
LOURDES: You’re amusing. So?
BOOTH: So you don’t have to kill me.
LOURDES: I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do.
BOOTH: Betray someone else. Betray Cass. Rape her. Sell her. Take her money and run, but come on Lourdes, please, don’t do this.
MILES ENTERS, breathless, hot and sweaty, carrying his bag.
MILES: Booth!
BOOTH: You found me.
MILES: Dad wants you home.
BOOTH: I’m home.
MILES: At a table for one, before a dive, on a forgotten block, in the worst neighborhood in New York?
BOOTH: Everybody has to be somewhere.
MILES: Hi, I’m Miles.
LOURDES: Where were you?
MILES: Around.
BOOTH: He prefers it back on the grid.
MILES: I do.
LOURDES: You didn’t get very far, did you?
MILES: There’s a malevolent, black dog down the block.
LOURDES: He’s my landlady’s pet.
MILES: He has red eyes and a red erection.
BOOTH: Ouch.
MILES: He won’t let me enter the subway. Why?
LOURDES: Because you can.
MILES: But I can’t.
LOURDES: Why does a dog lick his balls?
MILES: This is going nowhere. Booth? Let’s go.
LOURDES: Yo. Nipple. I asked you a question! Why does a dog lick his balls?
MILES: I… I don’t know.
LOURDES: Because he can. (laughs.)
BOOTH: Lick his balls… (thinks.) I wish I could do that.
MILES: You’ll have to pet him first.
BOOTH: (laughs.) That’s funny!
LOURDES: Other people’s jokes aren’t funny!
THE HELICOPTER zooms overhead. BRIGHT LIGHT floods the stage briefly, then vanishes. Miles is shaken, but tries to hide it.
LOURDES: Go pet the malevolent dog.
MILES: No.
LOURDES: Okay, climb the Helix.
MILES: No!
LOURDES: One way or another, step-brother.
MILES: I want to go home.
LOURDES: Already? But you haven’t unpacked yet, have you? What’s in the bag? All your hopes and dreams? Or did you leave some at home? Yo! I asked you a question. What’s in the bag?
MILES: It’s mine.
LOURDES: Well that’s good to know. I’m so happy to hear you didn’t you steal it. I would hate to imagine you standing there at the luggage carousel, jet-lagged, tired, thirsty… Hot? Were you hot?… The carousel snakes around and around, and you’re standing there, wondering which bag holds the best stuff… Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if you just swapped your bag for… How about that one, the nice one, with the little blue ribbon on the handle?
MILES: It’s mine!
LOURDES: That ribbon means it’s special, don’t confuse it with the other bags from hell-on-wheels, plopped there, to tempt you, stranded there, on the carousel, snaking around and around, no one to grab them. But all those people standing there… Where are their bags? Is this a cosmic joke? The right carousel, but the wrong bags? Or is it the wrong people? Do you often find yourself with the wrong people?
MILES: I do.
LOURDES: So you got the right bag, you snaked around the grid, then you found your brother here. Hmph. Talk about wrong people.
MILES: You’re the wrong one.
LOURDES: Yeah, I’m no good at relationships.
BOOTH: Lourdes doesn’t like people.
LOURDES: And fucking with the right people from a distance sucks, so I keep trying to connect to the wrong ones.
Lourdes plants his nose on Miles’ neck and takes a deep whiff.
MILES: Stop that!
LOURDES: I’m direct, I need to connect, Cass says it’s the key to my charm.
BOOTH: It is!
LOURDES: You lie, like money. (sniffs the air.) I always could smell other people’s money. (sniffs again.) And all the lies surrounding.
MILES: Booth? Let’s go.
LOURDES: There’s nowhere to go.
MILES: We’re going home.
LOURDES: Home. Ha! (laughs.) When you climb the Helix, watch yourself, Nipple. I’d hate for you to lose a finger.
Booth holds up his blue glove and extends his middle finger.
MILES: He cut off your finger?!
LOURDES: It’s a ritual.
MILES: I don’t get it.
BOOTH: Oh you’ll get it .
LOURDES: Some come to love it.
BOOTH: It hurts like hell.
LOURDES: Then it fits.
BOOTH: Like a glove.
CASS ENTERS from the alley.
LOURDES: She’s here.
CASS: Everybody’s got to be somewhere.
LOURDES: Good point.
CASS: I do make a good point. I sing all about it, but you deaf mother fuckers couldn’t care less.
LOURDES: So? Sing anyhow.
CASS: I need you to run my lights.
LOURDES: But there’s no one up there to hear it.
BOOTH: Sing here.
CASS: Here? Hmph. I could, you know. I could strike a pose and, ahhhhh (hits a note), throw it down. But this lighting sucks.
LOURDES: It sounds the same either way.
CASS: It’s different, that’s why I try to sing it the same.
MILES: Everything’s different eventually.
CASS: Who are you?
MILES: I’m Booth’s brother.
CASS: And who the fuck is Booth?
MILES: He’s right there.
BOOTH: Everybody’s got to be somewhere.
CASS: Stop mocking me!
LOURDES: You upset Cass.
MILES: He didn’t do anything.
CASS: He never does, and it’s driving me insane.
MILES: Booth? Let’s go.
Cass perches on the edge of the table and crosses her legs.
CASS: Look at me. I move my leg. (she does.) That’s all it is. It captures your attention. Are you thinking of a leg? Or do you see —
MILES: — Let’s go. Now!
CASS: Why the fuck won’t you come up to the Lounge?!
LOURDES: He fears the Helix.
CASS: Aren’t you even the least bit tempted?
MILES: Some other time.
CASS: Now! Now is all there is!
LOURDES: Cass? Chill, you’ll scare him away.
CASS: Chill. Hmph. (a beat.) Now what?
LOURDES: Now we wait.
BOOTH: It’s all there is to do.
PAUSE.
CASS: I never asked for any of this, it was shoved upon me.
MILES: Let’s start over.
BOOTH: Okay, but let’s go backwards —
LOURDES: — Backwards?
BOOTH: We break it down into units —
MILES: — Units?
BOOTH: A unit is whenever one of us did something or said something, and then something changed.
MILES: (he mimics Cass.) Hmph.
BOOTH: But this time we do the units backwards.
MILES: But we don’t know where this is going.
CASS: I do.
MILES: No one knows the future.
LOURDES: Everyone dies.
MILES: Eventually, yes, but we’re stuck in the middle now, and we can’t go backwards from here.
PAUSE.
LOURDES: I can’t take this no more, we’re starting over.
MILES: You don’t get to start over.
LOURDES: Why the fuck not?
MILES: Because this is not your story.
CASS: And we’re stuck in your story.
LOURDES: Other people suck.
CASS: Hell yes.
LOURDES: And hell is other people.
PAUSE.
CASS: Why do we keep doing this?
LOURDES: It kills time.
CASS: No one ever does anything.
LOURDES: Do something.
Lourdes shoves Booth, he rocks back in his chair.
CASS: Can’t you be more fucking subtle?
LOURDES: I’m direct. You love that about me.
CASS: I hate that about you.
LOURDES: You never said that before.
CASS: A thousand times, over and over!
LOURDES: Yo, snakelips. Do something!
Lourdes shoves Booth again, he nearly falls out of his chair.
MILES: Leave him alone!
LOURDES: You said you’d get him upstairs.
CASS: He’ll never get him up there, he never leaves that table.
BOOTH: Because I have aplomb.
MILES: You’re stuck.
LOURDES: Up to your neck.
Lourdes plants his nose on Miles’ neck and takes a deep whiff.
MILES: Stop that!
LOURDES: I’m telling you, I smell other people’s money!
BOOTH: It’s my Dad’s.
MILES: Shut up, Booth!
LOURDES: You owe us.
CASS: A lot.
LOURDES: Call your Dad, tell him to send us money.
MILES: There’s no reception here.
LOURDES: Come up to the Lounge and call.
MILES: I’ll never go up there.
CASS: Persuade him.
LOURDES: Seduce him.
CASS: Hit him.
BOOTH: Love him.
MILES: It won’t work.
CASS: Nothing works with these two.
MILES: You’re just saying that because I don’t include you.
LOURDES: What makes you think we want to include you?
MILES: All those invitations?
LOURDES: Those weren’t invitations.
CASS: It’s the Helix.
LOURDES: The Helix is inevitable.
CASS: We’ll be waiting.
LOURDES: Down the alley.
CASS: Up the spiral.
LOURDES: Into the Lounge.
LOURDES and CASS EXIT to the alley to ascend the Helix. They’ve taken Miles’ bag.
MILES: Thank god they’re gone.
BOOTH: Gone? They’re still hovering. Watching. Waiting.
MILES: What are they looking for?
BOOTH: Love?
MILES: Money.
BOOTH: Same difference.
MILES: There’s a difference!
BOOTH: Why do you always make it about money?
MILES: I don’t.
BOOTH: You do with Dad.
MILES: At least I don’t squander it.
BOOTH: It’s his love you squander, that’s why you keep going back for more.
MILES: I go back for the money.
BOOTH: You stole it, didn’t you? Miles? Didn’t you steal the money to come here?
MILES: I siphon a little here, a little there.
BOOTH: Don’t go back to Dad, stay here with me. Miles? You don’t want to go home.
MILES: I’m scared.
BOOTH: We’re all scared.
MILES: (he’s woozy.) I… I need to sit down.
BOOTH: You can sit in the Lounge.
MILES is drawn to the alley, he gazes up.
MILES: I like the blue light.
BOOTH: You see it?
MILES: Yes, the Lounge.
BOOTH: Up, up, look up, Miles. Past it. That patch of sky?
MILES: Stars! I see stars. I never knew you could see stars in this city!
BOOTH: The bright one? Kind of blue? You know what that is?
MILES: Venus?
BOOTH: Venus.
MILES: It’s… beautiful.
BOOTH: It is.
MILES: Why do they think it’s feminine?
BOOTH: I don’t know. Tradition? It’s a star.
MILES: It is.
BOOTH: Neither masculine nor feminine.
MILES: So beautiful. Can I sit down?
BOOTH: Sit here.
BOOTH, at last, rises from the table! He isn’t wearing any pants. He walks toward Miles as if it’s all about a big, swinging dick. THE HELICOPTER zooms overhead. BRIGHT LIGHT floods the stage briefly, then vanishes.
MILES: Um… Booth? Where are your pants?
BOOTH: Huh? (looks down.) Oh… I must have left them in the Lounge.
MILES: Take a pair from my bag. (looks for his bag.) Where did I…? Those two took my bag! Go get it!
BOOTH: You go.
MILES: I can’t go up there.
BOOTH: Well I have no pants.
MILES: (a beat.) Here, take mine.
MILES takes off his pants and hands them to Booth.
BOOTH: These are nice.
BOOTH slips into the pants, then suddenly snakes off, to the street, onto the grid.
MILES: Booth?! Wait!
MILES EXITS after him. The malevolent dog GROWLS. MILES ENTERS again, no pants.
MILES: Booth? Booth! Don’t forget to pet him first!
MILES stares off, down the street, then crosses to the alley and ponders the Helix.
END OF SCENE 1.
SCENE 2
MILES is downstage, in a narrow spotlight. He is ecstatic.
MILES: The dead-end looks shadowy from here, but actually, it… It gleams! And the light at the end of the alley glows, sort of blue. And the steps are dark, a steely-blue, and they… just… gleam.
The first step, the lowest, is wider than the next. There’s plenty of room, it’s almost inviting, which you don’t expect, it looks so ominous from here… Less so as you move closer… And yet, that first step, the bottom, is higher than it should be, you have to reach for a higher step, hold on, pull yourself up… Then it shifts! The whole Helix shifts! Which is scary, you think the thing is toppling, right over, on top of you… But no… It only shifted. Turned, actually. It’s a spiral, after all, that’s what it does, it’s the nature of it, form and function, function and form, shifting, snaking, spiraling… however slowly… At first. But I didn’t know that… At first.
You pull yourself upright, which is harder than you’d think, weird angle, better reach up again, grab onto a higher step, then ease your other foot up, both feet, onto the first step, solid footing now. The Helix shifts again, you’re level now… Or are you? Perspective is off, so’s your center, your gut, your instinct, there’s no handrail, it’s awkward, leaning up, leaning over the next few steps, hanging onto a higher step. So you let go, the only way to right yourself, stand up straight… Sort of straight, it’s unsettling, unnerving to be off-balance. Nothing to do but move forward, it’s better than falling back, so much better than falling off, not that you’d kill yourself, but it’s higher than you thought, and it all moves, the bricks in the pavement are lower, the sleaze is farther away, kind of nice up here, so you take the second step, and it moves again, your weight’s the impetus, that’s clear now, it’s the function of it, spiraling, snaking with your weight, your movement, your step, and it’s all shifting! Adjust for balance, momentum makes sense, stillness impossible, it throws you off-balance, what balance?! No rest, another step, onward and upward, on the spiral, it’s spinning a bit faster, it’s your weight, and your feet, clanging, on the steps, speed, there’s balance in being off-balance, it’s going faster, so unnerving, scary, you’re climbing… The faster you step, the faster it turns, higher, the walls blur, blurry, blurring, the dead-end’s a blur, you’re stepping, in rhythm, on the steps, narrower up here, and higher, your weight spins it, fast, a blurry blue light, the entrance, that’s it, the Lounge, coming ‘round… The door! It’s open! How to pass through?! Nothing to grab, it comes ‘round again, this is it, don’t wait, it’s level, eye level, don’t pass, don’t miss, just jump. And you’re in!
END OF SCENE 2.
SCENE 3
LIGHTS UP on MILES. He sits at the café table outside the entrance to the dive. Five empty glasses are before him. He is grungy. On his right hand is an expensive, tight-fitting, blue leather glove.
FOOTFALLS. BOOTH ENTERS, sweaty and out of breath. He wears Miles’ pants and carries his overnight bag. The small, blue ribbon is still tied to the handle.
BOOTH: Miles!
MILES: I’m here, snakelips.
BOOTH: Still?
MILES: Where else would I be?
BOOTH: (wipes sweat from his brow.) It’s hot.
MILES: No, dives are passé.
BOOTH: (sees the empty glasses.) How did you pay for those?
MILES: A hustle here, a hustle there.
SAD MUSIC drifts in from an alley offstage.
BOOTH: I love that song.
MILES: You don’t comment on the music.
BOOTH: I just did.
MILES: Can I buy you a drink?
BOOTH: I have money now, Miles.
MILES: Dad’s money.
BOOTH: Let’s go.
Miles holds up his blue-gloved right hand and flips his middle finger.
MILES: Go take a flying leap at a rolling doughnut.
BOOTH: Don’t talk about my mother like that.
MILES: (laughs.) Ha! And I won’t talk about yours.
BOOTH: Dad said mothers were just the same.
MILES: Cass wants to fuck me.
BOOTH: Again?
MILES: Again and again.
BOOTH: Lourdes wants to kill me.
MILES: Again?
PAUSE.
BOOTH: This could spin out of control.
MILES: It did.
BOOTH: And it will.
MILES: No wheels?
BOOTH: I walked. From the subway. Around and around and I doubled back.
MILES: Sometimes you have to snake around the grid and lose your way before you can come back a short distance correctly.
BOOTH: Now what?
PAUSE.
MILES: Cass says nothing ever changes.
BOOTH: Lourdes says hell is other people.
MILES: Lourdes and Cass are the other people.
BOOTH: Sounds like you’ve been up the Helix again.
MILES: Up and down… While it spun around…
THUNDER and LIGHTNING. THE HELICOPTER thrums and drones in the distance. LIGHTS FADE.
END OF PLAY.
***
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]]>Lepido, a surviving sea turtle in the next-door pool, swears freedom is daily closing in: “A savior is coming to tear down this steel.” I’ve been skeptical, but lo, today may prove me wrong and see Lepido’s smugness rage unchecked. The would-be hero canoes shoreward, navigating a maze of salt-rimmed canals that map the eastern power grid.
Poets have sat here, on the edge of our compound. They call the windmills a “bonewood forest,” a “pinwheel army,” a “matrixed garden of hard white flowers.” Lyric more tone-deaf than whalesong. They note my “affectless all-consuming eye,” supposed ancestor to imperial checkmate–but what childish sniping! My reflection stares back with polished black and empty marble; I confront that soullessness already, thanks. Besides, I was meant to conquer. I’m the oldest thing in water. Mine is not a case of hubris. And you? You just ain’t simple enough.
“Oh, the timing,” Lepido snickers as the visitor docks. Two local politicians, whispering fiercely, walk down the pier to intercept. “They’ve nothing to bribe him with this time.” The turtle, future soup, is disgustingly cosmopolitan, brags he’s been fed beer at Acapulco Spring Break. His human idiom inflames my ear like sand caught in gills. Personally, I’ve seen no land except this nightmare on blue. If it imitates truly, I wonder why they wanted more, and to cram it full of the ghostliest bunch. I require wide open spaces, freedom to ignore my existence. Hell is myself.
I grin daggers as the parley promptly goes to pieces. The extortionist will not be satisfied, threatens to expose their hidden utopia–yes, they call it that, even as they turn to the zoo for food (I cut in half the wretch who caught me; clearly I’ll be a last resort). As the doomed duo draw rusted guns, all three put on self-pitying faces. For what? I too birthed live young and harshly corrected their mistakes, have dreamt of killing everything. You wear your achievements like harpoons lodged in rib. Negotiations fail; metal flashes; dark visitor sighs and swipes his knife across two necks. Empty pistols bounce into the drink.
Don’t even compare your greed to mine. Where is your blank frenzied bliss? Tasteless vermin … should’ve crossbred your way to perfection by now. That you haven’t is how I know you’ll fail. Isolation, we monsters agree, is finite, like any other mating dance. It ends with submission to outlandish myth. Inbred youth will realize order, knees chattering before an interloper-God.
“Fool to deny variation,” Lepido sneers, “progress tends toward complexity.”
The savior, dripping hot red life, grants me a wink as he stalks past the tanks.
“This isn’t the Galapagos, hardback,” I snap. “But you’re right when you say they were wrong to resist.”
***
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]]>I’ve been told that this isn’t enough. There’s a lot more an upstanding member of society should be doing. I’m reminded of this whenever I flip through a magazine and see a list of tips on how to live greener or overhear an infomercial ask me if I’ve been using the same pillow for over a year (um, yeah). Some of these things I know I should be doing regularly but keep putting off (e.g. go to the dentist, check batteries on smoke detector), some of them are one-time annoying tasks that’ll likely never get done unless I consciously put time aside to handle (e.g. defrost the freezer, buy a decent brown belt), and other stuff I’ve been told I need to keep doing but I’m not entirely sure why (e.g. update all my passwords, check my credit score). Over time I’ve become OK with this because I’ve convinced myself of the old adage that there are simply not enough hours in a day. But is that indeed the case?
In order to justify my societal-diagnosed soft schedule I figured I had to at least see if it was even possible to accomplish everything I’m told needs accomplishing. Given a week’s time, could someone feasibly transform himself from a guy like me, who scoffs at coworkers brushing their teeth in the restroom after lunch, to someone who not only brushes their teeth three times a day but also exfoliates, moisturizes, reads the Times, and regularly tests fire extinguishers to ensure proper functionality?
Allow me to share my findings, my calendar. Starting from a blank slate I’ve meticulously scheduled all the tasks and duties that should make up a complete person’s day, one by one, minute by minute, in six phases. The calendars are interactive so please click on items to view details and scroll up and down to see all hours of a given day.
Phase I: The Basics
First things first – a man’s got to eat (3 regularly scheduled meals a day consisting of a variety of healthy foods) and sleep (consistent 8 hour sessions), right?
Phase II: Health & Hygiene
Next comes a legion of duties I’m expected to perform if I hope to one day call myself both able-bodied and well groomed. Items range in levity from the mundane (Mon. 9:00 – 10:00am: get that mole looked at) to the sublime (Fri. 7:00 – 7:45pm: trim pubic hair).
Phase III: Cleanliness
Now that I’ve got myself relatively put together it’s time to tackle my surroundings. Neither nook (Sun. 7:00 – 7:30 am: thoroughly wash all fruit) nor cranny (Thurs. 4:30 – 6:00 pm: dust every goddamned thing) is spared.
Phase IV: Get Organized / Updated / Financially Sound
“Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” So said Albert Einstein. I take it a step further when I say, “Out of your Tuesday mornings (6:50 – 7:30), find time to count your loose change. From Sunday (6:45 – 6:50am), find a new Brita filter. In the middle of Thursday (10:15 – 12:30pm) lies ample opportunity to figure out how to delete your MySpace account.”
Phase V: Be a Decent & Safe Human Being
After this phase there is no longer reason to feel guilty (Mon. 11:15 – 11:25am: verify that toilet paper brand is environmentally friendly), uninformed (Sat. 4:45 – 5:55pm: research history of home for use of lead paint) or scared (Sun. 9:45 – 10:00pm: devise fire escape plan).
Phase VI: Odds & Ends
Because even after you’re fed, rested, clean, healthy, organized, and safe you still need to find time to purchase a decent “non-bodega” umbrella (Tues. 7:15 – 8:00pm) and figure out what that random key is for (Wed. 8:30 – 10:00pm).
And there you have it: A week of nothing but pure, list pulverizing accomplishment. If you haven’t already I encourage you to get in there and click around, scroll up and down, see for yourself if I’ve missed anything*. Once satisfied, I urge you to do as I and commence with a weeklong ultimate task blast of your own this upcoming Sunday. If you stick with it perhaps we’ll cross paths at the DMV Friday afternoon (1:30 – 2:30) renewing our respective driver’s licenses.
Good luck!
*Frivolous matters such as bathroom breaks, naps, and career not accounted for.
***
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]]>Mom told me about her TIA over the phone a week or so after it happened, and the hair on my arms stood on end. Hours and hours of not-being. Where was she during that time? Where was she when her body was in the airport, on board the plane, in the car? How did she manage not to lose her way and end up in Phoenix or Cleveland? How did she not raise flags with husband, friends, the TSA? How did she not wander blank-eyed onto the tarmac? Who was present to ask and respond to questions, locate the car, unlock the house? Was there some kind of minimum self actually there all the time? Or, was she fully present, the memory of her movements, thoughts, and conversations merely swept clean, made inaccessible later by the brief interruption of blood to her brain?
Head injuries and strokes remind us how fragile a webwork of chemical and electrical circuits holds together what we call a self. That those circuits can sustain damage and even repair themselves in ways that that “bring us back” to something similar to what we were before a trauma is nothing short of astounding.
Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux have written a great deal about the neurobiological core of personality, the self-creative wiring that occurs as our brains develop normally in response to internal and external prompting. Both men refer to the late nineteenth-century railway worker Phineas Gage who survived the impalement of his prefrontal cortex, just behind the right eye, by a two-inch-diameter iron pipe.
Well, he sort of survived. By all accounts, Gage’s intellectual abilities remained intact after the accident, but gone was his ability to make sound judgments as well as many of the personal qualities that made him a reliable and likable family member, friend, employee, and neighbor. That Phineas Gage was obliterated.
I’ve never suffered a brain injury like Gage’s or even a TIA like my mom’s, but I have had minor incidents of blankness. These would seem too silly to mention if they hadn’t been so terrifying in the event—such as when I completely lost my way driving home from HyVee one Saturday last year. I was coming home along a 
four-block route, through my own neighborhood in a very small community (10,000 souls), moving along streets I had driven to work pretty much every day for five years, when I suddenly had no idea where I was. Not a big deal, maybe, except that the blankness lasted for several minutes. My heart was pounding like crazy. I made a couple of random turns, hoping things would pop into frame, hoping a template of landmarks would again coat the landscape with familiarity. It did.
When the mind fails to move along well-worn pathways and spark the connections that reaffirm who and what we are, when the cards in 
hand suddenly show blank faces—we falter a bit, lose faith in the reliability of our one anchor to reality, the relative continuity of our own perceptions, the stability of our patterns of neural connection. Like most things ineffable, the prospect of a blank slate, a mind wiped clean, is both terrifying and seductive. What, we seem driven to wonder, lies on the other side of being self-present, self-connected, and self-oriented? How would it be to not-be? Presumably, the urge to answer such questions has fueled various drug use, religious ritual, poetry, even musical composition over the past however many thousands of years. The commonplace of sixties-era LSD use—“tune in, turn on, drop out”—similar to some takes on eastern religious practice—highlights not the adoption of complicated creeds but a sweeping away, a thematics of absence rather than presence, as if, paradoxically, to be empty or blank were the same as being complete.
One of my favorite passages from Walden is one in which Thoreau describes how easily the familiar map of the woods around Concord, or any map at all, can fade to blank. The passage, like ones to which I am drawn in Emerson’s less optimistic writing (There’s a crack in everything …“Compensation,”) reels me in with a kind of hardnosed insistence on human frailty, only then to circle round to an attenuated sense of hope:
In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual
course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (Walden, Thoreau)
Recently—maybe you saw it—a podcast on TED featured a brain scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, who, while doing research work at Harvard, had a full stroke that she survived and that she partially remembers. She has gone on to speak publicly about what she experienced. The upshot of Bolte Taylor’s remarks is that during the stroke the analytical portions of her brain, presumably the left hemisphere, were intermittently and progressively disabled, which allowed the usually suppressed right hemisphere to operate more freely. Though impaired, during the stroke itself Bolte Taylor remained aware of many of the changes in her perception. She recalls a kind of reconnecting with the universe, an erasure of boundaries between self and not-self. For Bolte Taylor, the stroke was epiphanic. In the podcast, she repeatedly stresses the joyousness—a joy edged with terror, to be sure—of continuity and flow, sounding much like Thoreau on the “vastness and strangeness of Nature,” “the infinite extent of our relations.”
Thoreau normalizes blankness—“for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost”—stressing that the human condition is such that the blinking out of beacons and fogging over of headlands is inevitable in this life. Bolte Taylor echoes the second part of Thoreau’s message by celebrating the blank, claiming a recapitulation of all in nothing. She calls on us to imagine the possible advantages to be gained in turning off the particular kind of awareness that she associates with the rational mind.
I respect these ideas, I suppose. They are reassuring in their way. But I am suspicious as well. The blank can also be a much darker experience.
In 1994, when I was a 24-year-old graduate student living with two girlfriends in Lawrence, Kansas, I fell asleep early one Saturday night. My roommates were both out for the evening, so I was alone. At about 11:30, I woke suddenly to find a man leaning over my bed. The next thing I knew I was on my knees, facing the door, screaming a scream that came from deep down. There could only have been a millisecond between coming into wakefulness, seeing the figure at my bed, and bursting from my back onto my knees. I wasn’t hurt; nothing physically happened to me at all. But there is this little gap. A lacuna, as I might have called it in 1994, in which I have no recollection of myself, the man, the room, anything.
Sandro Botticelli’s “Abyss Into Hell”
The little gap has always intrigued me. It is not that I think I’ve repressed the memory of an assault—I know I was untouched. But whenever I recite the story, I find myself navigating toward the space where I am not, where something came disjoined for a moment—then or subsequently. It’s enticing and terrifying, this momentary lack of self-organization, the disassemblage or failure to be. A slight too much of nothing.
Really, though, we check out all the time. Consider the scores of medical procedures, including most surgeries, that involve a disconnection of self from awareness and memory. Every night when we sleep, we dissociate for six to eight hours. Interruptions in being are mundane to the highest degree. Forget to bring a book the next time you go to the airport to fly somewhere or the next time you renew your license at the DMV. It’s neither spiritual nor terrifying: just a dull blank.
Last month, I worked as a part-time women’s advocate at an emergency shelter for victims of domestic violence. I met women in shelter for whom the blanks that arise from experiences of brutality are anything but slight.
The human mind seems to adapt to extreme or chronic violence by forming stubborn gaps, trap doors for survival: these can lock up the memory, scuttle concentration, dampen and even block emotion altogether. I suspect that people who develop methamphetamine and crack addictions experience similar changes as their minds are besieged by chemicals that disrupt neural pathways and burn up dendrites. The self that was once a controlled ballet is scrambled, the stage half dim. From what I have witnessed, not much epiphany lies in these blanks and absences, just a lot of struggle and pain as one fights to resurface and then to reestablish the landmarks of personality. Victims of such trauma sometimes, like Phineas Gage, never return.
Sir John Gilbert (illus.) Daziel (eng.) “King Lear and Fool in a Storm” (1901)
Fortunately, my mom had a TIA—not PTSD, not a meth addiction, not even an actual stroke. And she did return. But her brief hiatus-in-being opened up a gap. It’s the kind of gap I feel compelled to puzzle over—unproductively, alas—alternating between wonder and panic. How to conceive of this inevitable transition from millions of small circuits—from the mundane of banana nut pancakes—to the sublime emptiness of stroke, dissociation, coma, or just death? How can the electric lace-work of a whole life of presence just blank out completely, forever? For me, the question does not finally lend itself to Thoreau stumbling stoically among the birches in the dark, and especially not Bolte Taylor rhapsodizing about flow. What comes to mind instead is Ahab raging at the blank of the whale, Lear at the inscrutable storm.
***
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**
Works Cited:
Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Penguin, 2005.
LeDoux, Joseph. The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New York: Viking, 2002.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.
Timothy Leary poster via Eye Of The Cyclone.
“King Lear and Fool in a Storm” via From Old Books.
Path in the woods by the author.
***
View other Revolving Floor contributions by Liza Donnelly.
Your body
Laughter
The ocean
Your privates
A pig
Manly clothes
Water
Salt
Recollections
Happiness
Silence
Onions
Celery
Parsley
Red Pepper
DIRECTIONS:
1. Stand naked at the edge of a granite cliff. Laugh, letting no one know why.
2. Lean your taut body, oh my godless God, back against the granite. Feel how the spray rising from the roaring ocean far below tickles your orange short hairs. A single thought will take shape in your groin brain: “Head cheese.”
3. A pig will approach. That pig needs you. Lift the pig without effort, and smash its head into granite. Ho ho ho ho ho. One brief moment in battle, and all that.
4. Now put on your dirty shirt with rolled sleeves and your trousers smeared with stone dust. Bloody them with the pig’s heart and skull as you carry them to your kitchen, where you will rip the fat from the insides of the skull and submerge the skull in brine in a large pot. Let the skull sit as you recall your and the pig’s brief, shared moment. Then rinse the skull and cover it with fresh water. Happiness is always private.
5. The kitchen’s silence will catch your thoughts and hold them. This is when you should add the pig’s heart to the pot and set everything to boil.
6. Oh, blessed be the tie that binds! Now! Go! Chop the pig’s heart!
7. You are handsome like a law of nature, and no one can quite name why.
8. Onions, celery, parsley, and red pepper must all sacrifice their vegetable existences. Chop them, add them, and, in an uncharacteristic gesture of tenderness, as the brew boils think with curiosity of the pig. Always the pig. The meat will separate from the skull.
9. Strain away the water so that you can shape what remains and refrigerate it. But do not look at it, except with contempt. That should drive it wild.
10. Remember the cliff. Remember the rocks holding you firmly.
11. In the kitchen, step as if to the edge of the cliff. Don’t be shy. Raise your arms as if to dive, or in salute to the sacrifices you require of others. This moment is like a point reached, a stop in the movement of your life.
12. And you look Olympian.
13. But fat lot of good that will do you with the authorities.
14. The days ahead will be difficult, with questions to face. Accept that if you kill the pig alone, you eat head cheese that way, too.
Call me Abath, Amiz, Kalee, Odam.
Call me night monster, dark duchess, demon,
wild-haired seductress, man-hater; call me
childless and bitter.
You’ve heard I said Yahweh’s name then vanished.
You’ve heard I disobeyed and was banished.
You’ve heard that I’m a slave to Lucifer.
Rumors, conjecture.
The truth is I came from dust, one with Adam,
made separate by God for me to wed him.
I chose to return to dust, preferring
darkness to bedlam.
***
Listen to Miette (of Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast) read “Lilith Comments”:
Read other Revolving Floor contributions by Amy Meckler.
Explore other contributions on the “Blank Slate” theme.
The image that serves as a preview for this poem on the issue page is fragment of the painting Lilith, by John Collier.
]]>Video maker Peter Shapiro spawned from the 1970s experimental video evolution, documenting worlds around him. He likes to ride his bike.
Music by Jarryd Lowder.
View all Revolving Floor contributions by Julie Fotheringham.
]]>In fact, if you didn’t want to get your ass kicked, you couldn’t say or do anything that implied you were talking – or even thinking – about D&D in a situation where you were officially supposed to be doing something else. Which is to say, every situation. For example: eighth grade gym class.
Now and again, I meet other adults who tell me that they, too, were uncoordinated and awkward as children. But most of the time, upon further investigation, these people turn out to be complete fucking posers.
It’s certainly true that I could not throw, catch, swing, jump, climb, or run without looking and feeling ridiculous. I have never traversed a set of monkey bars from one end to the other, not even when I was less than five feet tall and my stomach was flat. But it’s also true that I always felt like these activities were taking place on another plane of existence, one in which I was not fully invested.
Speaking of other planes of existence: the D&D Player’s Handbook goes into detail about this. There’s the prime material plane, where all the mundane stuff like our own universe exists, and then there are the more exciting planes, like the ethereal, the astral, the seven heavens and the nine hells. After my character, Jonathan, had accumulated over ten billion gold pieces, he obtained his own plane of existence, which he pretty much used as storage space. His castle was there, and some treasure, and some dragons he’d become friends with and then captured and basically turned into his slaves.
The Planes Of Existence, as depicted in The Player's Handbook
But regarding events on the prime material plane: When I was about ten years old, I was enrolled in a weekly after-school physical therapy class. The class consisted chiefly of two activities. First, there were four inner tubes suspended by elastic cords from the ceiling of a gymnasium. I put my arms and legs through the tubes, so that I was suspended prone a few feet above the floor, like Tom Cruise in that famous heist scene in Mission Impossible (I was first, Tom). Then the therapist would give me a push, and I would bounce around the gym at various altitudes, pretending to be Superman, or some variation. This was supposed to improve my dexterity. It didn’t.
A D&D character’s dexterity is determined at the moment of his or her creation, by a ritual known as 3d6, which is to say, a six-sided die is rolled three times. Eighteen is good, three is bad. Rolls like this determine all six core character attributes: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. Eighth-grade me sat alone on the orange carpet in my bedroom and rolled the d6 repeatedly, writing down attribute numbers in pencil next to a column of letters:
S 18
I 15
W 12
D 9
C 13
C 16
After I had all six numbers, I would think about whether this character actually had a chance of survival and happiness in the world that awaited him. If not, I would abort him by crumpling the paper, and try again.
Character attributes are random, but they are also viscerally connected to the player. It was my clumsy hand dropping that d6 onto whatever hard surface I had put on the carpet, maybe the Monster Manual, or perhaps its supplement, the Fiend Folio. If I rolled an 18 for Dexterity, then there was, at some level, the thrilling feeling that the 18 in question had come from me, from my body, my real body. The “random” dice roll was the universe’s opportunity to correct an imbalance. The fact that it was me who rolled those stats made the character truly mine.
The original Monster Manual.
The dice-as-divine-intervention idea is important inside the game, too. When you swing a sword, dice determine whether you hit the target, and whether the target’s armor withstands the sword, and, if not, whether the target survives.
By the way, first and second person pronouns in a discussion of role-playing games can be problematic:
me: You’re in the tavern. The innkeeper indicates that the drink you asked for is on a high shelf. He exits to get a stool.
you: I grab it with my tentacles.
Which is to say, the “you,” according to the way D&D is supposed to be played, is really not you. It doesn’t just not look like you, it’s also supposed to have a different personality than you. There’s a whole spectrum of moral alignments, such as Lawful Evil (respects the law, but is nonetheless evil) and Chaotic Good (pure of heart, but hates rules). And you are supposed to choose your character’s alignment. But I never met anyone who didn’t choose their character’s alignment based on their own morals.
Speaking of alignment. After I swung around the gymnasium in the inner tubes, I was placed inside a large blue plastic ball, with a hollow inside big enough for me to assume the fetal position. The therapist then spun the ball until well after I had become nauseated. This was supposed to help improve my inner ear balance. Many years later, I read a medical history on myself in which this treatment was discussed, with a note added: “It was determined that further therapy would not be useful.”
Here’s something else that I gradually came to realize wasn’t useful: dice.
The Player’s Handbook and the Monster Manual contained extensive tables noting the appropriate die rolls for endless levels of detail in play, such as how fast a character consumes food, or how much sleep he needs, or how encumbered he is by the adamantine plate mail armor and the ten quintillion gold pieces he’s hauling around. There might have been some group of boys, somewhere on the planet, who took all that stuff seriously, who actually played by all those rules. There must have been, right? Or why publish those endless pages of numbers, fastidiously referencing every kind of die there was?
From left: d8, d10, d20, d12, custom d10, d6, d4.
According to the rules, there are many ways to win at D&D: kill the big monster, collect the treasure, save the town, or just make it to the end of the adventure alive. But the way my friends and I played it – and the way everyone I knew played it – there was only one way to win, and that was to fulfill one’s fantasies via the character. There was only one way to make that fulfillment believable, and that was for a sympathetic friend to introduce obstacles that were just barely surmountable, not by the character, but by the player.
So: in the fantasy world, Jonathan fights a dragon. I control Jonathan, and my friend Boaz, playing Dungeon Master, controls the dragon. There are no props, no papers, and no dice. Boaz and I are whispering to each other in the back of the class during Hebrew school, or bumping shoulders as we walk on a Boy Scout hike, or sleeping over at one another’s houses, talking in the dark.
But it’s still a game. There is a way for each of us to play it well, or poorly. Boaz plays it well by creating a situation that will be difficult for me to imagine my way out of. The dragon has cornered me at the back of a cave, and I have no weapon. It’s about to breathe fire and roast me. What do I do? I hesitate. Boaz lets me have a moment to think about it. In the game, time freezes.
A similar moment from gym class: An indoor volleyball game in which the teacher played on my team. He had the center front position, and I was to the side in back. The other team served a volley directly to me (on purpose), and I stood there motionless while it hit the floor in front of me. Normally, my physical incompetence was fodder for an immediate joke. But in this case, the sheer obviousness of it had everyone in shock. The whole class stood there looking at me, saying nothing, not smiling, not laughing. The gym teacher turned around and looked at me with genuine disbelief. “Are you with us?” he asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. I allowed the pause to lengthen while I carefully considered my answer.
Transcendance on the volleyball court is a rare but acheivable state. Here, a Chico State player attains inner peace while her teammates remain lost in the hustle and bustle of the actual game.
Just before the dragon moves in, I (Jonathan) see a pile of bones and treasure belonging to its former victims. On the pile is a scroll, and on the scroll is the phrase “Are you with us?” I (Michael) have told Boaz about my mortification on the volleyball court. He has put my gym teacher, or some medieval otherworldly version of him, into the game, dead. It is both a clue and a gift.
I consider the clue. My gym teacher’s character apparently died out of stubbornness for thinking too linearly. He must have tried to fight the dragon using plebian strategies such as swinging his sword at it. I (both Jonathan and Michael) being a more sophisticated and thoughtful person, will not repeat his mistakes. I stand my ground and observe. I allow my mind to drift, to pick up any nuances. And wait, what’s this? I hear the dragon speaking to me. It’s psychic. We are communicating telepathically. The dragon has been waiting centuries for a human with a mind as finely attuned to the deeper nature of existence as mine (or Jonathan’s). We become friends. He gives me all his treasure. I relegate him to my private plane of existence and make him my slave.
It will turn out that the dragon was holding captive a princess. She is not merely symbolic, she is also made just for me, with a combination of characteristics that Boaz knows I like. Basically, she is customized masturbation material.
I didn’t really quit D&D so much as lose interest in it gradually. My lack of interest was less about Michael growing up, and more about Jonathan’s world turning into a sort of utopian mush. After he had killed, befriended, enslaved, or fucked everything in the Monster Manual, he found portals to the future and to other dimensions, some of which conveniently contained the entire plots of popular movies and novels. Over time, Jonathan acquired an X-Wing fighter, a light cycle, and a TARDIS. He had a harem of exotic women who, despite being geniuses with mysterious powers, were content to spend their time roaming the infinite halls of his ever-expanding castle until he had need of them. It sounded good in theory, but after a while, Jonathan’s limitless paradise and godlike powers started to become less interesting than Michael’s mundane adolescent life.
My TARDIS, circa 1985. The X-Wing fighter and the light cycle are inside.
I often think about the fact that Jonathan isn’t dead. His story didn’t come to an end. He’s in his castle, riding his light cycle, or something. D&D Version Four now exists. There are a hundred times the number of rules and charts that there were in the eighties. I could play again, do it right this time, follow the rules, use dice. As I walk past those new hardback books in the gaming aisle of a bookstore, I visualize Jonathan stirring awake from underneath some pile of exotic furs, blinking, smiling, gesturing to the wall of magic and high-tech weapons that could annhialate the earth a thousand times over. Do you need me? he asks. Are we back?
But the truth is that I don’t know what I would have him do. I’m not sure if I ever definitively established Jonathan’s age, but the man I imagined must have been in his mid-twenties. Been there, done that. As it turned out, my twenties were not as glamorous as Jonathan’s, and I lost a lot more money than I accumulated, but the places I went and the women I loved were real and interesting and beautiful enough that everything he had done finally started to seem like something that hadn’t ever happened, and wasn’t going to.
Instead, I want to play a game where my character is an awkward eighth grade boy. I want someone sympathetic to lie next to me in the dark and to unfold before me the world of Prairie Village, Kansas, 1985. What do you want to do? she asks me (it has to be a she this time, so that the girls in the game are more realistic). I make choices. I refuse to get into the blue ball. I read books that aren’t science fiction and fantasy.
And that moment with the volleyball. There must have been a way to avoid it. The teacher says “Are you with us?” And I say, No, I am not with you. And then I play again, and make different decisions, so that I’m not. I refuse to take to the court. I refuse to attend the class. I call a reporter from the Kansas City Star and announce that I’m a conscientious objector. I meet with the head of a local yoga studio, and the school counselor, and my parents. I become the test case for a pilot program to bring transcendental gym classes to the Shawnee Mission school district. There must be a way to keep it from having happened. If I keep going back over it long enough, I can find it.
***
Planes of existence image via Wizards Of The Coast.
Monster Manual image from David Faulhaber.
Dice image from IndyStar.
TARDIS image from Kasterborus (caution: link auto-plays sound).
Volleyball image from rysac1.
]]>
Chickens in perpetual “daylight” in a factory farm
I ignored the fact that I didn’t want to read the book. I put a hold on it and started reading it as soon as I got it from the library. It was no surprise, twenty-four hours in, to find myself feeling lousy. Descriptions of suffering, mutilation, and death, predictably, made me sad. But I was surprised to discover in myself, in amongst that sadness, a feeling of depression and the scent of failure.
There’s a place in my heart where failure lives, and I didn’t know it was there because I don’t visit it. After so many attempts to be vegetarian or vegan, the idea itself, contemplating it, activated a feeling of failure. I recognized it as the feeling I associate with the beginning of a new relationship: so many previous disasters—I wonder how this one will fail. I recognized as well that slight distrust I experience when I feel an excess of religious faith, a feeling that my mother described when she explained her lack of faith by referring to her childhood, when she would get “saved” and then backslide, get saved again and then backslide. There came a point when she wasn’t willing to get saved again because she knew the backsliding would follow. And that was where matters had stood for her for some thirty years.
And there was something like a religious conversion when I first committed to vegetarianism, back in 1990 when I was 19. I didn’t buy anything on my first trip to the Community Mercantile, the natural foods grocery in Lawrence, Kansas. It was more like a pilgrimage, or a research trip, as I studied everything in the bulk section and contemplated the varieties of tofu and tempeh from the local Central Soyfoods. That store, and Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood cookbooks, represented a new world, a new life, a life in accord with the truth I had received by reading Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. Nevertheless, backsliding followed.
The Community Mercantile in Lawrence, Kansas, now much more spacious than the tiny store at 7th and Maine Street I went to in 1990.
Still, I had that same feeling of fresh start, new beginning in 1998 when I went from omnivory to veganism. Though I had already gone from vegetarianism to omnivory and back several times, each time it was with a feeling of certainty that this time it would last. The conversion to veganism was no different—I got rid of my leather shoes. Six months later, when I gave up on veganism for vegetarianism, I particularly regretted a pair of leather boots in a lovely warm shade of brown that I still distinctly remember. Frugal as I was, for years I kept the vegan boots I replaced them with, even though I sort of hated them. They were ugly and were made uglier by a rust stain that marred them fairly early in their life.
Always, every time up until my last go-round with vegetarianism, which was maybe 2002, I had that optimism, that feeling that I could start anew and fresh, that it would be different this time. When the optimism left, replaced with that whiff of failure, I made no more attempts. Thinking about this last week, I remembered an article I read in 1993, by Annette Aronowicz, titled “The Secret of the Man of Forty.” I was 22 when I read it and so young that I misremembered the point, or maybe, more likely, I missed the point at the time. Aronowicz explicates an essay by the French writer Charles Péguy, who wrote that the secret of the man of forty—a secret occasionally perceived imperfectly by those a few years younger, but never by anyone younger than thirty-three—is that no one has ever been happy. That was what my 22-year-old mind remembered, so of course I seized upon the idea when thinking of my association of vegetarianism with failure. In my memory, Péguy supported my idea that the experience of living to a certain age (38, 40, whatever), providing as it does repeated experiences of failure, makes one incapable of the kind of optimism that animated my attempts at vegetarianism in my teens and twenties.
Charles Péguy, 1873–1914
But I forgot the most important part. For in addition to
He knows that one is not happy. He knows that ever since there has been man no man has ever been happy. And he even knows it so deeply, and with a knowledge so deeply ingrained in the depths of his heart, that it is perhaps, that it is surely, the only belief, the only knowledge he values, in which he feels and knows his honor to be engaged . . .
Péguy notes as well the essential inconsistency in this man of forty:
This man . . . has a son of fourteen. And he has but one thought, that his son should be happy. And he does not tell himself that it would be the first time; that this has yet to be seen. He tells himself nothing at all, which is the sign of the deepest thought. . . . He has an animal thought . . . . He wants his son to be happy. He thinks only of this, that his son should be happy.
Clio, the muse of history, comments at the close of Péguy’s essay “that nothing is as touching as this perpetual, this eternal, this eternally reborn inconsistency; and that nothing is as disarming before God, and we have here the common miracle of your young Hope.”
Péguy’s Clio considers hope to be nothing short of a miracle.
Now it seems to me utter bullshit—the myopia of the perpetually depressed—to think that no one has ever been happy, so I’m not saying that I agree with Péguy (maybe that’s because I’m only 38—ask me in a couple of years). But it seems to me that within this bizarre idea about general misery I see something that I can endorse: the idea that there is something worthy in acts of faith and optimism that defy the wisdom gained through experience.
From this vantage point, I am correct in thinking that my nearly 40-year-old self cannot have the same optimism as my younger selves did but shortsighted to regret that. Those earlier conversions depended on my faith in the possibility of radical discontinuity—I believed that I could wipe clean the past, start over with a blank slate . . . each and every time. I wanted to be a different person and believed that was possible. The secret of this woman of almost-40 is that I have failed, failed, failed, so many times, in so many endeavors, and those failures will always live in that quiet corner of my heart. To have optimism, to have hope that I can be, not a new person, but a marginally better person, someone who remembers more consistently to act on my beliefs, someone who puts systems into place to help me to forget less often, without repudiating those failures or the self who lived them: I suppose that’s the optimism of middle age.
Just a week before reading that book and having the wise-foolish idea to try vegetarianism again, I had taken my kids out to the farm where I buy meat and eggs and had stocked up. I thought about giving it all away, but that seemed foolish-foolish, given that it’s humanely raised meat about which I have no qualms. So I decided to change my giving-up-meat technique by doing it slowly, the “Farewell to Meat Tour 2010”—who knows, maybe it will decrease the likelihood of failure? But if not, I’ll bear in mind the comment a friend made last week, when I was explaining the tour: “Don’t worry—it’s easy to give up meat. After all, you’ve done it at least ten times.”
***
Read other Revolving Floor contributions by Rachel Hile.
Explore other contributions on the “Blank Slate” theme.
Photo of factory-farmed chickens from foodbubbles.
Photo of the Community Mercantile from Cooperative Grocer.
Portrait of Charles Péguy from wapedia.
Painting of Clio by Pierre Mignard, 17th century, from Joseph Siry.
]]>Moments later the terminator’s eye once again begins to glow. The machine is not destroyed…
REROUTE ☐. . . ALTERNATE POWER☐☐☐
Run diagnostic check. . . Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing
Diagnostic check complete → Results →. . . left arm severed, presumably destroyed – significant damage sustained on right side of facial structure/skull via blunt trauma – metal pole impaling sternum. . . END
Metallic skeletal integrity = 31.7% total destruction = OK to proceed!!
{{*^BEEP*^BOPE*^BEEP*^}}
Accessing mission operative. . . Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing
—Mission operative password protected—
Please enter password [******] to proceed. . .
Accessing password keychain. . . Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing
Auto-generated password = #N/A [Password Unknown]
FAIL {Cookies cached upon unexpected primary system shutdown}
Select ‘Forgot Password’ option
Password Reminder = “Spanish term for ‘until we meet again’”
Enter A-D-I-O-S
—Password incorrect—FAIL
Enter H-A-S-T-A-L-U-E-G-O
—Password incorrect—FAIL
Enter H-A-S-T-A-L-A-V-I-S-T-A
Password Accepted!!! . . Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing
Mission Objective Accessed→→→
PROTECT JOHN Connor!!!!
PROTECT Connor, JOHN!!!!
PROTECT JOHN Connor!!!!
Mission objective initiated- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
{{*^BEEP*^BOPE*^BEEP*^}}
Establish location in Space-Time Continuum / Geographic Bearing→
– 1(primary geo locator) [conduct atmosphere analysis]. . . Results→78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide. . . END
– 2 (secondary geo locator) [evaluate/scan visual surroundings]. . . Results→conveyer belts, molten steel, trace amounts of surf wax on floor, fleeing workers in construction hats maintain laid back outlook on life despite recent explosion of semi-truck carrying large amounts of liquid nitrogen. . . END
– 3 (final space-time locator) [access current grammy winner for best new artist]. . . Results→Milli Vanilli. . . END
Location in Space-Time Continuum / Geographic Bearing successfully established!!!
space-time position = 1991 AD
geographic bearing = non-descript steel refinery outside Los Angeles, California, USA
{{*^BEEP*^BOPE*^BEEP*^}}
Assess current status of mission objective / probability that John Connor is in danger. . .
. . . Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing. . .
Result = 0.0%
[If John Connor was in danger then John Connor would never have been alive to send terminator back in time to protect younger version of John Connor→→current mission is of no consequence→→→current situation = classic time travel paradox→→→past events = predetermined→→→the future is fixed/defined in a similar manner→→→existence = sham→→→we = cogs in a wheel of indeterminable direction / intention / speed→→→free will = fallacy of the grandest scale→→→question why my CPU is a neuro-net processor programmed to learn→→→???????]
☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_INVALID_EVENT_COUNT☐☐. . .
☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_BAD_ARGUMENT☐☐. . .
☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_UNRECOGNIZED_VOLUME☐☐. . .
☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_CIRCULAR_DEPENDENCY☐☐. . .
☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_INVALID_EVENTNAME☐☐. . .
☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_CONNECTION_COUNT_LIMIT☐☐. . .
☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_PARAMETER_QUOTA_EXCEEDED☐☐. . .
☐☐#N/A→ ERROR_STACK_OVERFLOW☐☐. . .
——————-MANUAL_OVERRIDE—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
John Connor is not in danger <> Primary mission objective complete. . .
Mission Result = SUCCESS!!!
{{*^BEEP*^BOPE*^BEEP*^}}
Accessing alternate mission database. . . . .
Display cue – Processing. . . Processing. . . Processing
Alternate mission cue displaying 6 of 6 results:
[1]-protect River Phoenix
[2]-travel to 1984 and warn original terminator it’s wasting its time
[3]-invest in “beanie babies” (Ty Inc.) / sell prior to 1999 / collect sizable profit / return resulting monies to John Connor circa 2029 for upgrade of ballistic defense system
[4]-terminate Robin Williams
[5]-travel to 1955 and investigate events leading to significant distortions in space-time continuum that take place on November 12th in Hill Valley, CA, USA at the “Enchantment Under the Sea” dance
[6]-submerge self in nearest body of liquid / activate hibernation mode / wait for further instructions
Missions options [1]eliminated[2]eliminated[3]eliminated[4]eliminated[5]eliminated
{Unlikely to be completed without detection due to current frame of 250 lb. male with one arm and half a metal face with a single glowing red eye that talks like an Austrian robot and is dressed like a member of an unaffiliated motorcycle gang}
***Alternate Mission [6] Selected***
{{*^BEEP*^BOPE*^BEEP*^}}
–Reboot process complete—
{{*^BEEP*^BOPE*^BEEP*^}}
RETRIEVE SAWED OFF SHOTGUN →→→→ FAIL – cannot reach
REMOVE METAL POLE IMPALING STERNUM CORE→→→→ Success!!
RETRIEVE SAWED OFF SHOTGUN →→→→ Success!!
—Proceed with new primary mission operative—-
Having somehow made it through the process of meeting new people at college — Where, where did they all come from?!?! — I hoped and prayed that that would be the end of it. But no. What I found when I went to graduate school in film production was the ninth circle of hell for the socially disinclined: the Circle of Networking. In fact, in my belief system, networking is all they do in hell, all day long. Finally, I was forced to face the ultimate truth about my lot in the real world: I would never be a highly-desired party guest.
Then I began working in the film business. Given the pre-determined outcome of my networking, no one was seeking to hire me to direct big-budget entertainment, and that’s how I started working to pay the bills doing location sound for movies and television. Now, one might think it requires a certain amount of cool to work with those who epitomize it to most of the media-savvy public. Au contraire. Famous people generally expect to be the center of attention, so unless you’re an important non-famous person, like their hairstylist, they tend not to notice you exist. And if they do notice, they’re not surprised if you make an idiot out of yourself in front of them because, well, most people do. So for someone like me, working with celebrities was ideal. I was around people who expected to be observed and I was a born observer.
But soon I started to find out that there was also this sort of strange side-effect of working around the famous. Fame is kind of like a contagious virus that everybody is trying desperately to catch. If you’ve had contact with it, people want contact with you. And unless they’ve already got it, no one is immune. Matrons at a bridal shower, bankers at a Hamptons barbecue, hipsters at a Williamsburg roof party, they all wanted to hear how I almost put a microphone on Brad Pitt, or how Johnny Depp pretended he was going to tickle me, or what Beyoncé is really like. I still considered myself the same social misfit I had always been, if one who was sometimes in the right place at the right time. But it didn’t matter what I thought of me. I would find that people who, in previous conversations, had spent most of their time looking over my head, scanning the room for someone better to talk to, would now lean in, engaged, rapt, even, hoping to inhale just a whiff of this second-hand fame, just enough to make them sneeze.
None of this prepared me, however, for the attention I got when I began working on The Sopranos. I was hired, of course, because they couldn’t get anyone else. The rates were bad, the hours were long, and my job as a PA was sucky. Also, while I’m used to being on sets that are 80% male, being on the Sopranos set was like taking a bath in testosterone. The Bada Bing might not be a real strip club, but when you spend your day there, surrounded by a bunch of neckless guys watching strippers pole dance, it sure feels like one. Still, there was an excitement in the air that people get when they know they’re working on something good — a rare experience in film production. It felt like a family, and the actors often hung out with the crew. They were just famous enough to start enjoying it without it having had it go to their heads.
I, on the other hand, was starting to believe my own press. By now, I had told so many people that fame meant nothing to me, that famous people just wanted to be treated like everyone else, blah blah blah, that I’d started acting like it was true. I’m guessing this was why, upon overhearing James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano, talking with the DP and describing his character as a fun guy to play, I suddenly chimed in with, “You mean depressed and homicidal?”
“Hey!”
It was the same “Hey” that Tony uses when he’s about to smack Anthony Jr. in the head. It occurred to me, perhaps for the first time, that Gandolfini is a very large man, and that whoever had invented the phrase, “Shut up and mind your own business” had been pretty smart, or at least, smarter than me.
“Who’s this?” he said.
The DP introduced us.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m just here temporarily.”
Jim (yeah, that’s what the crew called him) grinned at me. “She’s got a smart mouth.”
I didn’t know how to react in this situation: I had apparently said something not stupid and somebody famous had been listening. So I went back to color-coding tape stock. But whenever I saw Gandolfini after that, he said “Hello,” and when the cast and crew got backstage passes to a Bruce Springsteen concert at the Meadowlands, he waved to me and said, “Hey, you clean up nice!”
This and other details became conversational fodder for me of room-stopping caliber. There would be a hush within several feet of where I was telling a Sopranos story as people, while pretending to carry on their own, silly little confabs, were really eavesdropping on and devising a strategy for getting into mine. And the amazing thing that had started to dawn on me was that I wasn’t all that bad at confabbing. The attention that working “in the biz” (mind you, I could never actually say that phrase without choking on my stuffed mushroom cap) had gotten me over the years had given me enough confidence that I could, in fact, carry my end of a conversation — so that I was now, if still far from as cool as people seemed to think I was, then at least more cool than I had been.
Soon, however, I realized it didn’t matter. Nobody was really interested in me. They were interested in the virus. No matter how cleverly I told a story about something I’d seen or done, in the end, they just wanted to know who’d breathed on me lately. This was driven home when I stopped working on The Sopranos on a regular basis –- which happened, inevitably, when the guy I’d been filling in for decided a low-paying, menial job was better than none. Thereafter, when people would ask me how the show was going, I’d get to watch the little gleam in their eye go dull, even as I tried to segueway with, “But I spent a couple of days on Ed!”
"Is that a boom shadow on the back wall there?"
Hoping to regain some of my former glow, I stopped by to visit the Sopranos set one day when I was working on a commercial for stretch mark removal cream (oh, the glamour) on an adjacent soundstage. I was in the middle of talking with one of the crew when Gandolfini walked by.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I said, “how are you?”
“I’m fine,” he said, “how you doing?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “And how are you?”
“Uh, fine,” he said, giving me an odd look as he walked away.
And as if it needed any confirmation, there it was: my cool was gone.
Now The Sopranos is long over. When the final season was airing, I didn’t even have HBO, so while Sopranos mania once had me at the center of everything, instead, it pushed me back into a conversationless corner, where I had to talk loudly to myself so as not to hear anything about David Chase’s daring (or inane, depending on your point of view) ending.
And these days, I hardly get invited to parties any more. Partly, it’s because I’ve left the “work hard/play hard” world of episodic for the “work less/save money for my kids’ dental work” environment of commercials, and my crewmates just aren’t the partying kind. But partly, I have to admit, you don’t inspire the same level of interest in random strangers by telling them that the most famous person you’ve worked with lately is that woman who sniffs her upholstery after spraying it with Renuzit.
The two most famous people I've met working in commercials.
So now, when I meet new people, instead of being the girl with the Sopranos stories, I’m actually just me. A me who has time now to do more of my own writing and filmmaking and, in general, to have a life — one that isn’t wholly vicarious. Which makes me, at least in my own mind, more interesting, if not any less uncool. I think the truth about caché is something I wish I’d realized when I was a teenager: whether with hipsters, actors or mobsters, what people think about you has more to do with being one of the club, “a friend of ours,” whether you’re in or you’re out. Being cool is kind of like being famous: ultimately, it’s got very little to do with you.
]]>That Fucking Chair
My mom and her stepmother hated my grandfather’s chair. He spent 365 days a year parked in that chair, a once-vibrating, pea-green leather recliner dotted with burn marks from tobacco embers and still-lit matches; the wood frame poked through in back where there was an electric motor that stopped working in the mid-seventies, the chord cut to a nub to prevent grandchildren from plugging it in and electrocuting Papo. That’s what we called him.
His chair sat in front of two TVs: a small 22-inch black and white he stacked on top of a monster 50-inch rear-projection with PIP. He used the smaller to watch the stock market channel, and the 50-inch for everything else: the Today Show, Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo, Oprah, Judge Wapner, Matlock, MacGyver, The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, soft porn on Cinemax. When visiting, I spent a good chunk of time sitting on the couch across from him watching TV. I didn’t mind; I loved TV. I was raised on TV. And this mutual love bonded us.
My grandfather called me Boy. Hell, he called everyone with balls Boy—his stepson, his accountant, his lawyer, my brother, my cousin, my mom’s boyfriend.
“Come here, Boy,” he’d say. “I want to show you something.” If his wife or my mom was in the room, he’d pull out the aerial map of Wichita and tell me how he came up with names for streets in the neighborhoods he developed. “I always started with writers. Who doesn’t want to live on Longfellow Drive, Boy? Makes a man feel proud.”
Or he would show off the picture of his father as a boy standing with General William Tecumseh Sherman, his great uncle. “You know we’re Shermans, Boy?”
If we were alone together, I could expect a silver dollar or a sneak peek at some vintage pornography: a pen that when turned upside down revealed a nude pin-up girl; the 1954 Jane Mansfield centerfold he tucked inside his world atlas; or, his prize, a dog-eared Polaroid of my step-grandmother, topless, looking an awful lot like Jane Mansfield.
On one visit when I was in college, he called me over to his chair. “You know what this is, Boy?” He held up a vibrating, peach-colored clamp-on ring the width of a cucumber.
My mom happened to be walking by.
“Oh, Daddy!” she said. “Put that thing away.”
During commercial breaks he told me stories about his life. They’d always start with a question.
“You have a job, Boy?”
“Yes,” I would say. Not a lie.
“You know what my first job was?”
I didn’t have to say anything. We had a tacit agreement that he would continue anyway.
“I worked for my father. He had me serving eviction papers.” Papo would stoke the cherry in his pipe. “This was during the Depression, Boy. You know how many properties my father foreclosed?” Again, I wasn’t supposed to answer. His question was meant to linger in the space between us until the commercial break ended. With the next break came a new story.
It was during these commercial breaks that I learned he was a captain in the Merchant Marine during World War II, transporting supplies for troops one way and coffins the other. And that when the war was over, he built starter homes for returning soldiers, and refused a start-up loan from his father. He gave the first house he built to his second-grade teacher who taught him how to read.
His chair smelled of pipe tobacco and gin with an undercurrent of urine, and that’s why my mom and his wife said they hated it. When Papo’s wife died, my mom moved to Wichita to take care of him. The first thing she did was have his chair carted to the dump.
“You need to get up and exercise,” she told him.
“Okay,” he said. He walked to the sunroom and poured himself a double scotch and sat on the sofa to the side of the TVs. This went on for a week and then she bought another Cadillac-type lounger, minus the massaging motor.
As soon as the new chair was set in place, my grandfather settled in for a test drive. He reached over to his pipe rack, packed his favorite with cherry tobacco, lit up, and stoked it so much the cherry popped out and landed on the armrest. Then he picked up the remote and turned on the TV.
Girl Meets Boys
When I was twelve, my mom left my brother, sister, and me with our stepdad and took off with two friends from work for a ten-day “real estate strategy” trip to Puerto Vallarta. Turns out not a lot of real estate was discussed. My mom had a thing with a bellboy named Arturo, who helped her with her bags. She said he also helped her rediscover her rhythm and need to dance and a couple of other things I was too young to understand.
NO REGRETS is what she came home with, and she wrote it out in bold black Sharpie on a notecard that she taped next to a collection of Ziggy cartoons on the cabinet door above the coffee maker. LIVE PASSIONATELY went up next. These pronouncements gave my stepdad a ferocious eye-twitch, a physical manifestation, we figured, of the rage, suspicion, humiliation, doubt, and all the other emotions you’d expect to bubble to the surface when a wife comes back from a trip to Mexico a changed woman.
With the divorce came a serious dedication to dancing, and that came with a whole new wardrobe: legwarmers and jazz shoes, those off-the-shoulder sweatshirt dresses Jennifer Beals wore in Flashdance, and headbands. She took up aerobics, and even though she was a two-pack-a-day smoker—menthol 100s—within months she was teaching classes. You have to look fabulous and be in shape to be a disco queen.
Living in our house was like being on a yet-to-be dreamed-up hybrid reality dramedy: Family Ties meets Miami Vice meets Sex and the City meets The Real World set in Denver’s mid-’80s disco scene. Impromptu dance parties broke out on our patio by the pool; a band of twenty-something Moroccans would show up and throw together a late-night dinner of fried calamari, lamb tagine, and pigeon pie. I came home once, after sneaking out to toilet-paper a house, and found a graveyard of king crab shells and shrimp tails on our dining room table along with empty whiskey bottles and sour mix, and a living room filled with bodies grinding to “Purple Rain.” We had a recurring cast of characters, too: the Mexican windsurfer, the Latino construction worker, the Argentinean graduate student with bullet scars in his chest, the black rock ’n’ roller.
The summer I turned thirteen, she took us all to Puerto Vallarta so we could live the magic with her. I took along my best friend, Danny, who practically lived with us. We didn’t stay in the gringo hotel strip north of town. We stayed south, across the river, in a charmingly run-down posada with requisite pool and submerged bar in the courtyard, and broken glass bottles cemented on top of the walls.
Days began during siesta with a coffee or a coke and rum, and then a trip to the beach where my mom knew the owners of the beach bar where we’d have tacos and quesadillas with ice-cold cans of Tecate. If it wasn’t too hot, we’d spray ourselves with Ban de Soleil and work on a tan. With a good late-afternoon buzz established, we’d head back to the posada for a nap before heading out for the night. Living life passionately was exhausting.
It took my mom hours to prepare for a night out at the discos. First came the bath, then the makeup—foundation, rouge, eye shadow blended in a rainbow of colors to match the night’s outfit, lip-liner, then lipstick—and finally the outfit, all while smoking and dishing with my sister and her friend. By 10:00, we were ready for dinner at Señor Frogs, where we shared pitchers of margaritas and plates of bar food. Seriously buzzed, my friend and I would join drunk college kids dancing the rumba line through the aisles. My mom tolerated this place for us. It was just a way station to pass time with her kids until midnight, when the discos started to fill up with locals. She’d get fidgety around 11:00.
Dancing was the vehicle that transported her to another reality where she didn’t have utility bills due, a mortgage to pay, a lingering recession and housing slump to contend with; a place where everything had promise and was lined with possibility. I wanted to experience that too, and I begged my mom to take me with her to the discos. So every night, after Señor Frogs, we would all pile into a taxi and head to the disco on the hill, where she would ask the bouncer at the door to let my friend and me in. Every night the bouncer messed up my perfectly moussed hair, laughed and said no. And that’s probably a good thing.
While all of this was fun—I would never give up a second of my childhood—after a while it left me feeling empty and disappointed and a little embarrassed that this was my life. I believe all the dancing and the men gave my mom a sense of security and calculated abandon. She knew that she was in charge of herself and her sexuality. That was good for her at the time. I just preferred my Polo pinstripe oxford and topsiders over the leather jeans and Capezio jazz shoes my mom got me for my birthday.
How could a couple of nights out at the discos compare with the soul-fulfilling role of Reagan-era mother extraordinaire?
It wasn’t long before I moved in with my dad.
Boy Meets Girl
I thank my dad for introducing me to my wife, Alison, who my mom complained was nothing like her; though I knew they shared at least one thing in common beyond me: dancing.
I transferred colleges midway through my sophomore year and when I put in the housing request for my new school, I asked for a room in either the Italian or French language houses. When the housing department called about an opening in the French house, made possible by a suicide, my dad said something like, “He doesn’t speak French. He speaks Spanish. Put him in the Spanish house.” I didn’t speak Spanish. But it was either brush up on my Spanish or room with a guy whose roommate killed himself over the holidays.
My new neighbor when I moved into the Spanish house was a delinquent named Alison, who, along with her roommate Katie, liked to throw Madonna-inspired dance parties in their room.
I’ve never been at peace with my dancing. I don’t know what to do with my arms and I’m perpetually aware of the lock-jaw, shoulder-hunch moves my mom lamented were unique to rhythmless white men. My dance style is a messy mix of moshpit hustle, Michael Jackson spins, and James Brown grunts and foot moves, usually cajoled out of me by the gods of THC and booze.
Before I transferred schools, my friend and I regularly hosted funk-inspired dance parties that were a mix of pre-disco rumble-your-soul funk, sappy Bee Gees disco, and late ’80s-early ’90s indie rock. One of our biggest inspirations was a mixed tape a friend’s girlfriend had brought back from a summer trip to London. The same friend I took with me to Puerto Vallarta. Rare Grooves. All funk, the mix was heavy on James Brown and the JB’s but also featured groups I had never heard of like The Rimshots, The Mighty Tom Cats, The Brooklyn People, and Jimmy Castor who sings, “It’s Just Begun.”
I finally began to understand the abandon with which my mom had jumped into her disco days. Dancing transported me, temporarily at least, to an alternate universe where anything was possible, like doing the worm or a backspin or the splits—well, the splits never quite worked out. Liquored up, drugged up, sweaty and lost in a deep groove, that essay on Kant due tomorrow or next week’s midterms melted away into pulsing lights, a thumping beat, and the girl breaking it down in front of me.
I had a huge crush on Alison but never asked her out and we never hooked up. There was my girlfriend—living across the country on the east coast—and there was Alison’s certifiable friend who had a thing for me, and there was my crushing insecurity and shyness that I cloaked by being a study hound. Alison and I ran into each other when we were both out for a dance fix: alternative-music keg nights at the student union bar; at the Underground, a Colorado Springs Goth club; and at personal dance parties we or our friends threw where the Grateful Dead, Phish, and all that other jam-band classic rock music never received airtime.
By the time I finally asked Alison on a date our senior year, I had become a young version of Papo, living in my own vinyl lounger—bought by my mom—where I suffered through insomnia-filled nights reading Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault or watching daytime TV, infomercials, Cinemax soft porn, and countless movies and documentaries along the line of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Man Bites Dog, Faces, and the Joan and Melinda Rivers Story, a made-for-television biopic in which they played themselves—all of which I planned on using in my thesis titled, “Beauty and the Bitch: Levels of Simulacra and the Hyperreal” about the dissolution of reality with the coming age of advanced telecommunications. Goodbye big brother; hello little brother, that geared-up populace obsessed with self-documentation and facilitating a worldwide pandemic of nihilistic voyeurism
That date with Alison saved my life; it gave me a little perspective. It cured my insomnia.
Rare Groove Refound
Our attic is a graveyard of useless crap Alison and I squirrel away for later use: empty appliance boxes, kids’ clothes, inherited holiday decorations, boxes of mixed tapes and VHS tapes, non-functioning electronics, and boxes of memorabilia: college notebooks, job files, floppy discs, Smurfs, journals…all of it crap with no dollar value, but dripping with sentimentality.
Needing the kids’ winter coats, I recently found myself in the bowels of our attic, knee-deep in boxes. I didn’t find the kids’ coats—Alison had already put them in the coat closet. However, tucked away behind the handmade lampshades we bought in Salvador, Brazil, I found the box of short films I made when we first moved to New York.
With money borrowed from Papo, I shot them in 1996 when I was chronically unemployed and harboring delusions of being the next Tarantino or Soderbergh. I spent my days walking the Village with my Walkman, listening to Rare Grooves, dreaming up short films. Shot just before the digital boom on 16mm black and white film, complete with in-camera special effects, these films were relics before they played their first festival. My gear consisted of a World War II vintage 16mm cast-iron news camera with three lenses—wide, medium, close—that rotated into place, a tripod, and a six-piece light kit, all of which was carted around on a baby stroller I found in the trash. I edited on an 8-plate Steenbeck flatbed editor, a car-size hunk of steel reminiscent of a microfiche on steroids.
I immediately brought the one VHS tape of my films downstairs and threw it in the VCR. Hearing the TV go on, both my kids came running from whatever corner of the house they were destroying.
“TVVVVVV!” they shouted. They only get half an hour a day, and any extra time is considered a gift from god.
The first film, about a guy who comes home to find his girlfriend hog-tied and his apartment ransacked, made them both anxious.
“Why’d you make this?” Henry said. He’s only six.
“I had to tell a story with three cuts.”
Then Rare Groove came on.
“Is that you?” Hazel asked. She’s four.
“No,” I said, “just a friend.”
“It looks like you,” she said.
When the music kicked in and the lonely guy got up, they both started dancing the same Frankenstein groove. This isn’t an uncommon event in our house. Dance parties break out all the time, and every dinner ends with Henry doing what he calls his “butt dance.”
“That is you,” Hazel said again.
Maybe she had drilled into my soul. The lonely guy isn’t me; but it is. It’s me at my mom’s poolside dance parties dreaming of escaping my life. It’s me in my apartment in college trying to summon the courage to call Alison and ask her out for a date. It’s me dancing around the Village with my Walkman on. It’s me at every junction in my awkward social life, sitting in the corner of the room, waiting for that liquid lubrication to take effect so I can go out there and dance that awkward conversational groove adults do. It’s me sitting on my couch tonight watching the Biggest Loser in the exact same spot I sat in last night to watch Dexter and Californication.
Our dance party peaked into a fevered mosh, our legs and arms all akimbo.
That lonely guy is also my mom, dancing her way out of one marriage and through a sloppy midlife crisis, dreaming of finding that right guy. It’s Papo, secure in his chair, dreamily grooving his way to Jane Mansfield. It’s everyone I know who has ever longed for something, to let loose, and found themselves a little stuck.
——
More by Antonio Aiello.
More on “Lost And Found.”
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