Yeah, me too, I love it that the company has its own gym and we can pop in like this before we go home. We’re lucky. But even with all the hours that I spend working out here, I can’t get this weight off. I’ve still got the same butt and thighs. … No, come on, not “me too,” you look great … Thanks, but I want to lose 20 pounds, to get back to where I was when I was young, and no matter what I do … I know, but still … And all the other women our age around here, they’ve had “some work done,” too, huh? You know, the facelifts, the Botox … Oh, come on, you don’t need it, but I do, even though I’m not sure it would help …
Because with me, it’s different, with what happened to my face. … Well, this side is paralyzed … That’s nice, but come on, everybody notices … Really? You mean that? … That’s great… Of course, I still notice every time I look in the mirror, even after all these years… I thought everybody would, but, hey, great … No, not a disease, I know what you’re thinking of, Bell’s Palsy, where half your face gets paralyzed … That’s not what happened to me … You don’t know? I thought everybody knew! You’ve worked here, what, two years now? … Wow, I thought someone would’ve told you. I guess people don’t talk about it as much anymore.
It was ten years ago. Almost eleven years, now. I had my own software company. My brother was working as an aerospace engineer when I was in high school and he told me to get a college degree in computer science. It was hard. Harder than I thought. That was before a lot of people were doing it. But I did it.
Then I worked at a small company for a year. It was going nowhere, but I met my husband there – you’ve seen him, he comes to pick me up at work sometimes. We got married and started our own company.
I was doing the R&D. We were looking for what they used to call the “killer app” – you know, something like VisiCalc. Software that could change the way people worked, something everybody would need to do their job. We were working on a bunch of things, programs that everybody uses today, computerized troubleshooting and self-repair. We were really close to finishing a self-repair program. That was the goal, a product like that. They’re common today. But not back then.
Meanwhile, we were doing consulting for about a dozen clients. My husband was running that part of the business. He was installing their computer systems. Freight companies, small newspapers and magazines, a lot of companies with a hundred or so employees that needed to get their accounting systems off the ledger books and onto computers. We were growing twenty percent, thirty percent a year. We were making serious money. Things were great.
I had two assistants, two gals, interns from the college where I’d studied. We were working late one night, we were all getting tired, so I told them to go home. We had an office out in the suburbs. They didn’t want to leave me alone. But it was a low-crime area, everybody always said it was the safest city west of the Mississippi – FBI statistics – so I wasn’t worried. I didn’t lock the door when the other girls left.
About ten minutes later, this guy came in. I knew right away. A vibe. They say a chill goes up your spine, but I’d never felt that until then. It’s true. A chill does go up your spine.
“We’re closed,” I said.
“I don’t care if you’re closed,” he said. “I’m here to kill you.”
And he came toward me and I knew if I didn’t get away I’d be dead. So I tried to run around my desk to the sliding glass door to get out on the balcony and jump over the side. Fourth floor. That’s how scared I was. It was worth a chance. But I didn’t make it.
He hit me on the side of the head while I was trying to get to the balcony. Maybe with his fist, maybe he had a club or something. Then he grabbed me by my hair, from behind, and he cut my throat. Here, see? Then he must’ve hit me again, because that’s all I remember.
Then he raped me. Oh gee, you’re turning white. No, no, no, it’s OK, I don’t remember that part. They told me that later. They told me he took off my pants and he raped me. They think he got turned on by doing violent stuff. Or that what he wanted was sex with dead people. …. No, I didn’t even know it happened. I have no memory of it, none at all. And it was so long ago. Don’t cry.
My husband was out of town, he called home, called the office. After two hours, it was getting late, he couldn’t find me, so he called my brother, and my brother went to the office and found me there. The ambulance came. I had lost almost all my blood. As soon as they got me to the hospital, I flatlined. No pulse. No nothing. For four minutes. Gone. They thought I was dead. They were doing chest compressions and they got a pulse again.
I was in a coma for two months. They induced the coma so I could heal. After that, it took me, oh, something like three months to learn to walk again, and six months to learn to talk again. It was slow progress. It was a year or more before I got back to normal again. Well, I never got back to normal completely. Never got back like before. This side of my face is still paralyzed. But after a year, I could do most stuff.
We lost everything. The company, the house. My husband had to take care of me full time. Even with insurance, and insurance was better in those days, there were extra things I needed that weren’t covered. But I got better. Almost all better. That’s the important thing. Right?
No, they never caught him. Everybody asks that. The detectives worked really hard on the case. They had me look at thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of mug shots over the years. They thought that he’d get arrested eventually for beating up some woman somewhere and his mug shot would make its way into the books. But no, I never saw anyone.
The four minutes? That’s funny, nobody asks about that. Everybody asks if they caught the guy; nobody asks about the four minutes. I don’t know; I don’t remember. But here’s what they told me: When they brought me back to life, I started sobbing and crying, and they thought it was because I was in pain, but I guess not, I guess it was something else. Because they told me I said:
“Why did you bring me back? It was good there! It was BEAUTIFUL there!”
… Yeah, that is something to think about, isn’t it? But I swear I don’t remember. I wish I did.
Uh huh, it was great that my husband took care of me. I have a great husband. He always said it didn’t bother him, what happened to me. But we had money then. I wonder if he hired a private detective, found the guy and had him killed. The first few years, I was bitter, so angry that it happened to me, that I lost so much. And my husband was always really Zen about it. A little too Zen, sometimes, if you ask me.
The statute of limitations ran out a long time ago. One of the detectives made a joke about it. He said: “Maybe we can pop the statute by saying he killed you. There’s no statute on murder. And you were dead.” … Yeah, quite a sense of humor. I guess you’d need one, dealing with cases like mine all day. Otherwise you’d go insane, right?
… No, we couldn’t start another company, we fell behind in the technology. We couldn’t put in the hours. And by then we knew that even if we’d finished our self-repair program or made some other killer app, Microsoft would’ve reverse-engineered it, then put it in Windows and driven us out of business. That happened to some people I went to school with who started their own company the same time I did. Ruined them. They called me and told me all about it. … Hah, right, that’s exactly what I said, too. After what I’d been through, I heard that story and I said to myself: Big deal.
You just do the treadmill? And that works, that keeps you trim like that? We’re about the same age, and you look so much younger. So you don’t do the other machines, that chair you bend over in? Have you tried that? That’s supposed to tone up the butt and the abs. I’ve tried. Half an hour, forty-five minutes. Nothing. … Yeah, I know it’d be worse if I didn’t work out. But still, I’d like to see some results. I’d like to get my body back looking it did when I was young. … I know, we all do, everybody does. But I want to really, really badly. I really want to get back to the way I was when I was young. That’s why I work out so much. It’s so important to me. You understand.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Song for John
“A few good times, before it ends,” I say, and we raise our glasses. “So let’s drink to that.”
We’ve been getting together at an Indian restaurant near my house at the beginning of every season; our quarterly dinners, I called them. But these days life has gotten too hectic even for that, so now it’s more like twice a year, summer and winter. A bunch of us from high school – we played in bands together – and some of the girls we knew. “Girls” – women now, with grown children, one an attorney, another a composer, a few others. I still call them “girls,” because they were girls then. And we were boys.
First I call Bob, to see if he’ll be available, because he tours with a classic rock cover band sometimes, and when he’s not touring he’s got gigs playing guitar at country-western bars around town or recording. The rest of us work day jobs; one at a bank office, a few teachers, a salesman, a computer animator, a farm owner and some others. Bob and I pick a night when he’s in town and free, then I e-mail everyone and most show up. About six of us. Sometimes eight or nine. It’s pretty fun.
It started after Barry’s funeral. Barry was a prop master on Hollywood movies. I’d seen him ten years before he died, when I was walking down a street in Venice. A booming voice called my name from the shadows inside a huge trailer. I instantly knew it was him, even before I saw him as he stepped out into the sun. He was a huge guy, maybe six-foot-five and at least 250 pounds, with a helmet of black hair and wire-frame glasses. I’d last seen him when we were 18, he had terrible health problems, but he hadn’t changed in fifteen years.
“Hey, watcha workin’ on?” I asked, stepping in to have a look at his trailer. It was filled with monster masks, fake guns, holsters for them, sports equipment, hats – a rolling house full of odds and ends that someone might need for a movie.
“A Christian Slater bang-bang,” he said. It was called “Kuffs” and it still shows on cable sometimes.
A few years out of high school, Barry shot up heroin with a few of his friends at someone’s apartment one night. They shared the needle. Within weeks, he got a staph infection that landed in his heart and ate up one of the valves. He had to have it replaced with a pig’s valve, and suffered from bad circulation for the rest of his life; toward the end he was traveling to film shoots wheeling the stand for his I.V. bag. He died at 43. He always claimed it had nothing to do with the heroin and the shared needle. None of us believed him.
Mike called to tell me about the funeral, and I called Fred and some of the others. When I told Fred about the funeral, he reminded me that B. wasn’t just a big goofy guy. Barry was deep. Fred remembered seeing Barry in front of high school one morning wearing a black armband. He asked him what it was for.
“Kent State,” Barry said. It was the anniversary of the day the National Guard shot and killed four students protesting the Vietnam War. Four students Barry didn’t know, and who had died years before and many miles away. But he cared. Fred and I cared, too. A lot of people cared. But Barry cared enough to wear a black armband.
Mike and Barry had been friends most of their lives. Mike remembered the first time he saw Barry, washing his hands in the bathroom of their elementary school. Barry was huge even then, twice the size of the other kids, and he was wearing his Cub Scout uniform. They were in second grade.
Later, teenagers, they got arrested at Disneyland while they were on acid. The official charge was “being minors in danger of leading an idle and dissolute life.” I didn’t know that was a crime. In any case, it’s obviously a law that’s selectively enforced. They spent the night in a cell at the Orange County Jail with two other friends, Scott and Jeff. Barry had punched a Disneyland employee in the face when they argued about a magazine the worker thought he was stealing from a shop – he wasn’t, he just didn’t realize he had it in his hand. Mike had to ask passersby to call for an ambulance while he and Jeff were walking through the parking lot to their car, because Jeff was turning blue and said he thought he was going to die. Mike describes their trip this way: Picture an M.C. Escher drawing, animated, backwards and upside down.
Mike and I and a few of our other friends from the old days all went to Barry’s memorial service. I didn’t go to Barry’s parents’ place afterward, though, but most everyone else did. Mike called me later that night.
“I felt so guilty!” he said. “It was Barry’s funeral, and I was having the best time I’ve had in months – maybe years – because I got to see everybody again!”
Fuck that, I said, not angry at Mike, but at life, at myself, for not picking up the phone and inviting my friends to dinner every now and then. “We’re not going to get together just for funerals anymore,” I promised. So I started setting up the quarterly dinners, which are now semi-annual dinners. But at least it’s not just funerals.
We’re all impressed with and grateful for each other’s attendance at the dinners. It’s built up to where most of the people we used to hang out with in the old days come every time.
Most of the people. Not all.
The name that comes up at just about every dinner is John’s. “Why isn’t John here?” someone will ask. “Have you called him?”
John. We all shake our heads and laugh a little. I call him every time. I spoke to him once. Since then, he doesn’t pick up so I just leave a message. On his answering machine, you can hear him play the guitar chords for “Tequila” and whistle the melody. Then he growls: “TEQUILA!” Then you hear the tone. I leave a message, telling him when and where we’ll be meeting for dinner.
But he doesn’t return my calls and he never comes.
---
We were all in high school music history class together. John was a tall guy with braces, shaggy hair and granny glasses. We got to talking about music and he brought his guitar up to my house one day and taught me how to play a song called “Mister Moonshine” on my Vox organ, and he sang and played guitar. We had a pretty good time. Then we drove down to have coffee at a doughnut place where L. worked. She was a blond pianist in our class and he was in love with her. John didn’t know that I was, too, but he realized something was up while we were with her. On the way home, he started yelling at me.
“I’ve finally found a girl I like, one who can talk about music, and I’ve got to compete with you for her! That’s so fucked! My life is so fucked! That figures! My life is so fucked!”
“John, I swear, I’m not getting anywhere with her. She’s not interested in me. I’ve tried in a dozen ways to let her know, to ask her out without it being like a ‘date,’ you know, just a concert together or something where we could meet, but nothing. All clear for you, big guy. She’s all yours if you can get her. Go for it! Don’t worry about me! I’ll be happy for you if it works out!”
That calmed him down. Whew. I was worried there for a few seconds.
Mike had told me John could be intense.
They had stayed up late one night smoking pot and watching TV. A commercial came on, showing a lot of numbers, orange, blue, yellow numbers, floating on a white background.
“Wow,” Mike said. “Numbers.”
“They’re so fucked,” John said. “I hate ’em.”
“They don’t lie.”
“YOU REALLY BELIEVE THAT, DON’T YOU!” John snapped at him.
John didn’t get anywhere with L.
“I don’t really want a girlfriend,” he told me. “I just want the lower half of one. Just the legs. Just to fuck.”
“That’s all you want to do with a girl? Really?”
“No.” He thought for a second. “I’d take her riding on the back of my motorcycle.”
“Do you have a motorcycle, John?”
“No, but if I had a girlfriend like that, I’d get one!”
John and I took a humanities class together that summer. The teacher was pretty hip, for an old guy. Mr. Rifkind. He had us build our own instruments from kits you could order. John and I both did kalimbas – African finger pianos. John’s came out nicely, mine was awful. Two girls who lived on his street were in the class, too. They flirted with me, but I wasn’t interested. So when they’d see John outside his house, they’d shout to him: “How’s your gay friend?”
After a couple of times, he got tired of it, so he shouted back:
“Just because he doesn’t want to fuck your fat ass doesn’t make him gay.”
That took care of that.
Two actors came to our school and performed Ionesco’s “The Lesson” in the auditorium.
“What did you think?” I asked John as we left.
“What did you think?”
“I liked how the dynamics changed as the play went on. The student was submissive at the beginning, then became more and more confident, until she was a threat to the teacher and he had to kill her.”
“Yeah, well,” John said.
“Well what?”
“You know, if you’re going to do an Ionesco play, then you have to do an Ionesco play. It was too timid. It wasn’t crazy.”
I had glossed over the surface; John distilled the essence.
I went up to Don’s house one afternoon a couple of months later. John was on acid. He was sitting in a chair and looking at an art book. I sat on a couch near him and started talking to Don’s girlfriend, Jenny. Suddenly something hit me in the chest.
“Time for Miro!” John shouted. He had thrown the book at me. It was a pretty heavy book.
“John! That hurt!”
“I’m sorry!” he said with a big smile.
I saw him again a few months later when I started college. He was walking down the promenade. He had shaved his head. I called out to him.
“New hairstyle, huh?”
“I don’t want to do art anymore,” he said. “I want to be art. I’m interested in extreme art. Have you seen photorealism?” He pulled a book out of his backpack to show me. It was the first time I’d seen photorealism. “And I want to do art that most people wouldn’t think is art.” He also had a book of photographs by William Wegman, that guy who posed his Weimaraners in odd positions and costumes and took pictures of them. It was the first time I’d seen Wegman’s dogs, too. I thought they were really funny. I don’t think they’re funny anymore, though.
Mike and I put a band together, we covered some jazzy rock songs by Jeff Beck and Steely Dan. Rick asked us to play a party at his house one night when his parents were out of town, but our bass player – Barry’s younger brother, who now plays double-bass for an orchestra in Amsterdam – couldn’t make it, so we asked John to sub. Hundreds of kids flooded Rick’s cul-de-sac as the party got started. We played for about an hour, then the cops came to break up the crowd. John took a legs-spread stance, dropped his bass onto his thigh and thundered away on it as if he were a rock star in an arena. A cop walked over to his amp and unplugged it. John laughed.
John lived next door to Hank, who was a few years older than we were. He was finishing law school. John’s father, a rocket scientist, was having an affair with Hank’s mom, a secretary at the defense contractor where they both worked. John and Hank would follow the unfaithful couple to the parking lot of the missile company and watch them make out like lovestruck teenagers. Both families broke up.
I was naïve. I didn’t know what a divorce could do to people. I thought it would just be traumatic for little kids. But the day Hank went to take the Bar exam, he couldn’t write. He just froze. Then he couldn’t speak. I don’t know what ever became of Hank. That was about the time I left L.A. I was going to ride my bike across Europe for eight months, stopping to work at restaurants or hotels or harvests every now and then, but I found a job in London, stayed there for a year, then traveled some more, then studied in France and got a job there.
I had to come back to L.A. to get my student visa for France. That’s when Mike and Jenny told me what had happened to John after I’d left. He had been sent to Camarillo State Mental Hospital. They let him out after his three-day evaluation, though. Doing fine, they told me at the time.
I had a friend, Tony, who was about 10 years older than I was, I met him when we worked together at a porno theater, he became my mentor in literature, movies and music, he turned me on to Nathanael West and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and a lot of other writers, filmmakers and jazz musicians. He knew most of my crowd because they had worked at the theater before I did. He agreed that John was obviously the smartest of all of us. I guess it made sense, then, that John would be the one to get thrown in the psych ward. Even if it was just for three days. That’s how it goes: I think it’s toughest for the smartest, the ones who can grasp things the rest of us don’t.
I was in Europe for about eight years. Then I moved back and I stayed at Mike’s house for a while. John dropped by. He was on his annual pilgrimage to the old neighborhood, to visit Terry’s parents. Terry was a friend of his from high school, another tall guy, sharp dresser, though, styled hair. Terry disappeared one day. Gone. Picked up hitchhiking and killed? Or did he just run away and assume a new identity? No way to know. Truly bizarre.
John’s mom had bought some apartment complexes by the beach with the money she got after the divorce. John was living in one of the units. He would put on his wet suit and take his boogie board out to the surf every day to ride a few waves. He could do that most days because he worked odd hours as a directory assistance operator. Classic case: He was too smart to do anything besides a mindless drone job. Probably too intense, too.
I hadn’t seen him in eight years.
“So I hear you did some time in Camarillo,” I asked. “Like Charlie Parker, huh?”
I wondered if he would get mad at me; I hoped he didn’t think I was making fun of him. But he was proud of his experience. He explained what happened:
At the time of his parents’ divorce, he was – unsurprisingly – not ready to move out on his own and was severely stressed out about it. He went for counseling at a county mental health center. That’s where the trouble began.
He lit a cigarette in the waiting room. There was no ashtray. He asked the receptionist for one. She ignored him. He pulled a Kleenex from a box that was on the table next to the old magazines, cupped his hand and ashed his cigarette in the tissue.
It caught on fire.
He threw it on the ground and stomped it out. The receptionist saw him and told the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist brought him into his office.
“How long have you been starting fires?” the psychiatrist asked him. “Do you start fires often? Is that how you deal with stress?”
John laughed and tried to explain that it was just a little accident with a Kleenex and his cigarette. But he saw that the psychiatrist had written “PATIENT STARTED FIRE IN WAITING ROOM; THEN PATIENT LAUGHED” on his notes. He realized he was in trouble.
The psychiatrist told him to report for a 72-hour evaluation at Camarillo the next morning or there would be a warrant issued for his arrest.
After he checked in at Camarillo, he walked down the hallway where a 300-pound woman was singing opera.
“May I have this dance?” John asked her. She was delighted. They danced down the hall while she sang.
“I did it,” he told me. “I can honestly say I waltzed down the hall of Camarillo with a 300-pound crazy woman while she sang opera,” he said, smiling widely and nodding. John’s bragging rights.
“What else happened there?”
“Well, there was this really cute girl who came up to me later and said, ‘Hey, see that wall out there on the other side of the field? Meet me there later, right after dark.’ Then she walked away. So I thought: All right! This is great! I danced with the crazy opera-singing fat lady and now I’m even going to get laid!”
“Did you?”
“Right after that a guy came up to me and asked what she said to me. I told him and he said I shouldn’t go. ‘Why not?’ I asked him. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he said.”
“So you didn’t?”
“No. That was pretty scary. Would you have gone?”
“I guess not,” I had to admit.
The doctors there quickly realized he was perfectly sane, or at least not insane enough to commit to the mental hospital, so he got out after his three days.
They closed the hospital. It’s a college campus now. California State University Channel Islands. Or C-Sushi, for short. These days, the mentally ill live on the streets or get taken to jail.
The year after he told me the story of his stay in Camarillo, John stopped at Mike’s house again on his way home from his visit to Terry’s parents. He pulled a washtub bass out of his car trunk, set it up on the driveway and played it for Mike, singing an old hillbilly lament, really loud. Mike loved it.
Years went by. Time passes.
John called Mike, told him he was on antidepressants and was really happy as a result, really feeling good. He played him some Stones licks over the phone and asked for Bob’s number: He wanted to tell Bob that he was proud of him for having made it as a professional musician. He said he’d seen Bob with a guitar case outside a recording studio in North Hollywood. Mike didn’t have Bob’s number so he called me to get it; I didn’t have it either, so I called Fred. Fred gave it to me, and called Bob to tell him that John would be calling and why.
Bob was baffled. He hadn’t been to North Hollywood anytime recently. John must’ve imagined it, he said. Then he realized something:
“I’ve been astral projecting,” Bob told Fred. “Maybe John was astral projecting, too, and he saw me on the other plane!”
As it turned out, John was astral projecting, too. I was surprised to learn I had two friends who were astral projecting. Not too surprised, though.
But John didn’t think he’d seen Bob on the other plane. In fact, he remembered distinctly seeing Bob on this plane, in North Hollywood. When they chatted on the phone, they compared notes and realized the discrepancy was related to time, not space.
“That was years ago,” Bob told Fred, somewhat puzzled, the next time they spoke.
“But John described it as if it had happened the day before,” Mike said to me later.
“A misunderstanding,” I said. “Or maybe they really did meet on the next plane.”
John called Mike every now and then; he’d play some guitar on Mike’s answering machine. Mike would call him back and play some guitar on John’s machine. Musical messages.
More years went by; time kept passing.
My friend Mark’s wife Nikki died of bone cancer that spread through her body. Tony died of a brain tumor. A girl named Karin I used to work with got married, moved to a Caribbean island with her husband, had a baby and then drowned in a current at the beach one day. With Tony gone, Mark had become my closest friend. He took too many sleeping pills with his gin and tonic one night and never woke up. That all happened in less than two years. I call them the hell years.
Then Barry died and the rest of us started getting together for those dinners. Another one of “the girls,” Betsy, came once or twice. She was a friend of John’s sister, Sylvia. Betsy works in the building across the street from where I work and we have lunch together every now and then. So that’s how I found out what was going on with John, and that’s how I got his phone number again.
John’s mother died. John, Sylvia and their brother Pete inherited her property, including the apartment where John lived. Sylvia was having an attorney liquidate the assets so they could divide the money three ways. But that meant selling the complex where he lived, so John wasn’t happy. Betsy told me he threatened Sylvia and he threatened her attorney. Meanwhile, he got in a huge battle with his bosses at work. As a result of an e-mail of his complaints that he sent to the entire corporate directory, he was placed on stress leave.
Sylvia’s attorney arranged the sale of the apartment complex in a way that allowed John to remain as a tenant. Sylvia, John and Pete got a lot of money. Not millions and millions, but an amount that would allow most of us to live comfortably the rest of our lives.
I called John to invite him to one of our dinners. When he called me back, he asked me to help him find a writer to document his battle with Sprint. His plan was to turn his story into a book and call it “Working for Sprint Drove Me Completely INSANE!” He would self-publish it and then advertise it in the New York Times. Hey, he had enough money, he said, so why not? He told me he would pay a good freelancer a generous sum.
“John, write it yourself,” I told him. “I’ll edit it. You can pay me a little to edit it.”
“I’m not a writer,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter. Just get it down on paper. I’ll help you turn it into a book. Just gimme something to start with.”
“Hmmmmm.” He thought for a second. “Yes! GONZO! I will tank up on coffee and JAM! Stream of consciousness! … Like Jack Kerouac! I’ll get a legal pad, drink lots of coffee and stay up all night!”
“Exactly! Meanwhile, come to the dinner next week. We all want to see you. Your name comes up almost every time. We all love you. Someone asks every time: Where’s John?”
I had heard John was something of an agoraphobic. I suspected that’s why he wasn’t coming. He confirmed it.
“I get anxious when I go out, and I just know how I’ll feel while I’m driving out to see you guys. I’ll be worried about what you think of me.”
“John, I promise: Unconditional love. I promise. No need to worry what we think of you.”
“There’s a great taco stand by my place, though. I guarantee the best carne asadas you’ve ever eaten! You should come by anyway. This friend of mine has set up his Swedish bells in my apartment and we’re recording with them!”
Like all those years before, I thought to myself, when I first got to know John, playing “Mr. Moonshine” in my room and then going to the doughnut shop to visit the girl we were both in love with.
I practically begged him to come out my way, because getting us all together in his neighborhood would mean too much of a drive for some people in the group. I guess he just couldn’t. That’s the last time we spoke. I’ve left a couple of messages since then, but I haven’t heard back from him.
John’s brother Pete was a heroin addict. If you know about heroin addicts you will have already guessed what happened as a result of the windfall that followed his mother’s passing. He bought more heroin that he’d been able to buy before, shot up more than he’d ever shot up before and died of an overdose. That happened within weeks of his getting all that money.
I think of the English translation of a Jacques Brel song: “Death waits to allow my friends a few good times before it ends.” But then ….
---
This time we decide to meet at a Japanese restaurant instead of the Indian place. My friends and I all click our cups of hot sake. “To John,” I say. “And the passing time.”
We split the check, say goodnight and I make the short drive home. I get in bed, I close my eyes and float up slowly, slowly, then out the window. It’s the night of the Perseids, and I am heading northeast, toward the shooting stars. I glide over the city lights twinkling below and I see John in the distance, sailing toward me. When he’s close enough for me to hear him, he whistles the melody of “Tequila.” I call back to him: “TEQUILA!” Then we float off in opposite directions. I look over my shoulder and I see him fade into the dark night sky.
We’ve been getting together at an Indian restaurant near my house at the beginning of every season; our quarterly dinners, I called them. But these days life has gotten too hectic even for that, so now it’s more like twice a year, summer and winter. A bunch of us from high school – we played in bands together – and some of the girls we knew. “Girls” – women now, with grown children, one an attorney, another a composer, a few others. I still call them “girls,” because they were girls then. And we were boys.
First I call Bob, to see if he’ll be available, because he tours with a classic rock cover band sometimes, and when he’s not touring he’s got gigs playing guitar at country-western bars around town or recording. The rest of us work day jobs; one at a bank office, a few teachers, a salesman, a computer animator, a farm owner and some others. Bob and I pick a night when he’s in town and free, then I e-mail everyone and most show up. About six of us. Sometimes eight or nine. It’s pretty fun.
It started after Barry’s funeral. Barry was a prop master on Hollywood movies. I’d seen him ten years before he died, when I was walking down a street in Venice. A booming voice called my name from the shadows inside a huge trailer. I instantly knew it was him, even before I saw him as he stepped out into the sun. He was a huge guy, maybe six-foot-five and at least 250 pounds, with a helmet of black hair and wire-frame glasses. I’d last seen him when we were 18, he had terrible health problems, but he hadn’t changed in fifteen years.
“Hey, watcha workin’ on?” I asked, stepping in to have a look at his trailer. It was filled with monster masks, fake guns, holsters for them, sports equipment, hats – a rolling house full of odds and ends that someone might need for a movie.
“A Christian Slater bang-bang,” he said. It was called “Kuffs” and it still shows on cable sometimes.
A few years out of high school, Barry shot up heroin with a few of his friends at someone’s apartment one night. They shared the needle. Within weeks, he got a staph infection that landed in his heart and ate up one of the valves. He had to have it replaced with a pig’s valve, and suffered from bad circulation for the rest of his life; toward the end he was traveling to film shoots wheeling the stand for his I.V. bag. He died at 43. He always claimed it had nothing to do with the heroin and the shared needle. None of us believed him.
Mike called to tell me about the funeral, and I called Fred and some of the others. When I told Fred about the funeral, he reminded me that B. wasn’t just a big goofy guy. Barry was deep. Fred remembered seeing Barry in front of high school one morning wearing a black armband. He asked him what it was for.
“Kent State,” Barry said. It was the anniversary of the day the National Guard shot and killed four students protesting the Vietnam War. Four students Barry didn’t know, and who had died years before and many miles away. But he cared. Fred and I cared, too. A lot of people cared. But Barry cared enough to wear a black armband.
Mike and Barry had been friends most of their lives. Mike remembered the first time he saw Barry, washing his hands in the bathroom of their elementary school. Barry was huge even then, twice the size of the other kids, and he was wearing his Cub Scout uniform. They were in second grade.
Later, teenagers, they got arrested at Disneyland while they were on acid. The official charge was “being minors in danger of leading an idle and dissolute life.” I didn’t know that was a crime. In any case, it’s obviously a law that’s selectively enforced. They spent the night in a cell at the Orange County Jail with two other friends, Scott and Jeff. Barry had punched a Disneyland employee in the face when they argued about a magazine the worker thought he was stealing from a shop – he wasn’t, he just didn’t realize he had it in his hand. Mike had to ask passersby to call for an ambulance while he and Jeff were walking through the parking lot to their car, because Jeff was turning blue and said he thought he was going to die. Mike describes their trip this way: Picture an M.C. Escher drawing, animated, backwards and upside down.
Mike and I and a few of our other friends from the old days all went to Barry’s memorial service. I didn’t go to Barry’s parents’ place afterward, though, but most everyone else did. Mike called me later that night.
“I felt so guilty!” he said. “It was Barry’s funeral, and I was having the best time I’ve had in months – maybe years – because I got to see everybody again!”
Fuck that, I said, not angry at Mike, but at life, at myself, for not picking up the phone and inviting my friends to dinner every now and then. “We’re not going to get together just for funerals anymore,” I promised. So I started setting up the quarterly dinners, which are now semi-annual dinners. But at least it’s not just funerals.
We’re all impressed with and grateful for each other’s attendance at the dinners. It’s built up to where most of the people we used to hang out with in the old days come every time.
Most of the people. Not all.
The name that comes up at just about every dinner is John’s. “Why isn’t John here?” someone will ask. “Have you called him?”
John. We all shake our heads and laugh a little. I call him every time. I spoke to him once. Since then, he doesn’t pick up so I just leave a message. On his answering machine, you can hear him play the guitar chords for “Tequila” and whistle the melody. Then he growls: “TEQUILA!” Then you hear the tone. I leave a message, telling him when and where we’ll be meeting for dinner.
But he doesn’t return my calls and he never comes.
---
We were all in high school music history class together. John was a tall guy with braces, shaggy hair and granny glasses. We got to talking about music and he brought his guitar up to my house one day and taught me how to play a song called “Mister Moonshine” on my Vox organ, and he sang and played guitar. We had a pretty good time. Then we drove down to have coffee at a doughnut place where L. worked. She was a blond pianist in our class and he was in love with her. John didn’t know that I was, too, but he realized something was up while we were with her. On the way home, he started yelling at me.
“I’ve finally found a girl I like, one who can talk about music, and I’ve got to compete with you for her! That’s so fucked! My life is so fucked! That figures! My life is so fucked!”
“John, I swear, I’m not getting anywhere with her. She’s not interested in me. I’ve tried in a dozen ways to let her know, to ask her out without it being like a ‘date,’ you know, just a concert together or something where we could meet, but nothing. All clear for you, big guy. She’s all yours if you can get her. Go for it! Don’t worry about me! I’ll be happy for you if it works out!”
That calmed him down. Whew. I was worried there for a few seconds.
Mike had told me John could be intense.
They had stayed up late one night smoking pot and watching TV. A commercial came on, showing a lot of numbers, orange, blue, yellow numbers, floating on a white background.
“Wow,” Mike said. “Numbers.”
“They’re so fucked,” John said. “I hate ’em.”
“They don’t lie.”
“YOU REALLY BELIEVE THAT, DON’T YOU!” John snapped at him.
John didn’t get anywhere with L.
“I don’t really want a girlfriend,” he told me. “I just want the lower half of one. Just the legs. Just to fuck.”
“That’s all you want to do with a girl? Really?”
“No.” He thought for a second. “I’d take her riding on the back of my motorcycle.”
“Do you have a motorcycle, John?”
“No, but if I had a girlfriend like that, I’d get one!”
John and I took a humanities class together that summer. The teacher was pretty hip, for an old guy. Mr. Rifkind. He had us build our own instruments from kits you could order. John and I both did kalimbas – African finger pianos. John’s came out nicely, mine was awful. Two girls who lived on his street were in the class, too. They flirted with me, but I wasn’t interested. So when they’d see John outside his house, they’d shout to him: “How’s your gay friend?”
After a couple of times, he got tired of it, so he shouted back:
“Just because he doesn’t want to fuck your fat ass doesn’t make him gay.”
That took care of that.
Two actors came to our school and performed Ionesco’s “The Lesson” in the auditorium.
“What did you think?” I asked John as we left.
“What did you think?”
“I liked how the dynamics changed as the play went on. The student was submissive at the beginning, then became more and more confident, until she was a threat to the teacher and he had to kill her.”
“Yeah, well,” John said.
“Well what?”
“You know, if you’re going to do an Ionesco play, then you have to do an Ionesco play. It was too timid. It wasn’t crazy.”
I had glossed over the surface; John distilled the essence.
I went up to Don’s house one afternoon a couple of months later. John was on acid. He was sitting in a chair and looking at an art book. I sat on a couch near him and started talking to Don’s girlfriend, Jenny. Suddenly something hit me in the chest.
“Time for Miro!” John shouted. He had thrown the book at me. It was a pretty heavy book.
“John! That hurt!”
“I’m sorry!” he said with a big smile.
I saw him again a few months later when I started college. He was walking down the promenade. He had shaved his head. I called out to him.
“New hairstyle, huh?”
“I don’t want to do art anymore,” he said. “I want to be art. I’m interested in extreme art. Have you seen photorealism?” He pulled a book out of his backpack to show me. It was the first time I’d seen photorealism. “And I want to do art that most people wouldn’t think is art.” He also had a book of photographs by William Wegman, that guy who posed his Weimaraners in odd positions and costumes and took pictures of them. It was the first time I’d seen Wegman’s dogs, too. I thought they were really funny. I don’t think they’re funny anymore, though.
Mike and I put a band together, we covered some jazzy rock songs by Jeff Beck and Steely Dan. Rick asked us to play a party at his house one night when his parents were out of town, but our bass player – Barry’s younger brother, who now plays double-bass for an orchestra in Amsterdam – couldn’t make it, so we asked John to sub. Hundreds of kids flooded Rick’s cul-de-sac as the party got started. We played for about an hour, then the cops came to break up the crowd. John took a legs-spread stance, dropped his bass onto his thigh and thundered away on it as if he were a rock star in an arena. A cop walked over to his amp and unplugged it. John laughed.
John lived next door to Hank, who was a few years older than we were. He was finishing law school. John’s father, a rocket scientist, was having an affair with Hank’s mom, a secretary at the defense contractor where they both worked. John and Hank would follow the unfaithful couple to the parking lot of the missile company and watch them make out like lovestruck teenagers. Both families broke up.
I was naïve. I didn’t know what a divorce could do to people. I thought it would just be traumatic for little kids. But the day Hank went to take the Bar exam, he couldn’t write. He just froze. Then he couldn’t speak. I don’t know what ever became of Hank. That was about the time I left L.A. I was going to ride my bike across Europe for eight months, stopping to work at restaurants or hotels or harvests every now and then, but I found a job in London, stayed there for a year, then traveled some more, then studied in France and got a job there.
I had to come back to L.A. to get my student visa for France. That’s when Mike and Jenny told me what had happened to John after I’d left. He had been sent to Camarillo State Mental Hospital. They let him out after his three-day evaluation, though. Doing fine, they told me at the time.
I had a friend, Tony, who was about 10 years older than I was, I met him when we worked together at a porno theater, he became my mentor in literature, movies and music, he turned me on to Nathanael West and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and a lot of other writers, filmmakers and jazz musicians. He knew most of my crowd because they had worked at the theater before I did. He agreed that John was obviously the smartest of all of us. I guess it made sense, then, that John would be the one to get thrown in the psych ward. Even if it was just for three days. That’s how it goes: I think it’s toughest for the smartest, the ones who can grasp things the rest of us don’t.
I was in Europe for about eight years. Then I moved back and I stayed at Mike’s house for a while. John dropped by. He was on his annual pilgrimage to the old neighborhood, to visit Terry’s parents. Terry was a friend of his from high school, another tall guy, sharp dresser, though, styled hair. Terry disappeared one day. Gone. Picked up hitchhiking and killed? Or did he just run away and assume a new identity? No way to know. Truly bizarre.
John’s mom had bought some apartment complexes by the beach with the money she got after the divorce. John was living in one of the units. He would put on his wet suit and take his boogie board out to the surf every day to ride a few waves. He could do that most days because he worked odd hours as a directory assistance operator. Classic case: He was too smart to do anything besides a mindless drone job. Probably too intense, too.
I hadn’t seen him in eight years.
“So I hear you did some time in Camarillo,” I asked. “Like Charlie Parker, huh?”
I wondered if he would get mad at me; I hoped he didn’t think I was making fun of him. But he was proud of his experience. He explained what happened:
At the time of his parents’ divorce, he was – unsurprisingly – not ready to move out on his own and was severely stressed out about it. He went for counseling at a county mental health center. That’s where the trouble began.
He lit a cigarette in the waiting room. There was no ashtray. He asked the receptionist for one. She ignored him. He pulled a Kleenex from a box that was on the table next to the old magazines, cupped his hand and ashed his cigarette in the tissue.
It caught on fire.
He threw it on the ground and stomped it out. The receptionist saw him and told the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist brought him into his office.
“How long have you been starting fires?” the psychiatrist asked him. “Do you start fires often? Is that how you deal with stress?”
John laughed and tried to explain that it was just a little accident with a Kleenex and his cigarette. But he saw that the psychiatrist had written “PATIENT STARTED FIRE IN WAITING ROOM; THEN PATIENT LAUGHED” on his notes. He realized he was in trouble.
The psychiatrist told him to report for a 72-hour evaluation at Camarillo the next morning or there would be a warrant issued for his arrest.
After he checked in at Camarillo, he walked down the hallway where a 300-pound woman was singing opera.
“May I have this dance?” John asked her. She was delighted. They danced down the hall while she sang.
“I did it,” he told me. “I can honestly say I waltzed down the hall of Camarillo with a 300-pound crazy woman while she sang opera,” he said, smiling widely and nodding. John’s bragging rights.
“What else happened there?”
“Well, there was this really cute girl who came up to me later and said, ‘Hey, see that wall out there on the other side of the field? Meet me there later, right after dark.’ Then she walked away. So I thought: All right! This is great! I danced with the crazy opera-singing fat lady and now I’m even going to get laid!”
“Did you?”
“Right after that a guy came up to me and asked what she said to me. I told him and he said I shouldn’t go. ‘Why not?’ I asked him. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he said.”
“So you didn’t?”
“No. That was pretty scary. Would you have gone?”
“I guess not,” I had to admit.
The doctors there quickly realized he was perfectly sane, or at least not insane enough to commit to the mental hospital, so he got out after his three days.
They closed the hospital. It’s a college campus now. California State University Channel Islands. Or C-Sushi, for short. These days, the mentally ill live on the streets or get taken to jail.
The year after he told me the story of his stay in Camarillo, John stopped at Mike’s house again on his way home from his visit to Terry’s parents. He pulled a washtub bass out of his car trunk, set it up on the driveway and played it for Mike, singing an old hillbilly lament, really loud. Mike loved it.
Years went by. Time passes.
John called Mike, told him he was on antidepressants and was really happy as a result, really feeling good. He played him some Stones licks over the phone and asked for Bob’s number: He wanted to tell Bob that he was proud of him for having made it as a professional musician. He said he’d seen Bob with a guitar case outside a recording studio in North Hollywood. Mike didn’t have Bob’s number so he called me to get it; I didn’t have it either, so I called Fred. Fred gave it to me, and called Bob to tell him that John would be calling and why.
Bob was baffled. He hadn’t been to North Hollywood anytime recently. John must’ve imagined it, he said. Then he realized something:
“I’ve been astral projecting,” Bob told Fred. “Maybe John was astral projecting, too, and he saw me on the other plane!”
As it turned out, John was astral projecting, too. I was surprised to learn I had two friends who were astral projecting. Not too surprised, though.
But John didn’t think he’d seen Bob on the other plane. In fact, he remembered distinctly seeing Bob on this plane, in North Hollywood. When they chatted on the phone, they compared notes and realized the discrepancy was related to time, not space.
“That was years ago,” Bob told Fred, somewhat puzzled, the next time they spoke.
“But John described it as if it had happened the day before,” Mike said to me later.
“A misunderstanding,” I said. “Or maybe they really did meet on the next plane.”
John called Mike every now and then; he’d play some guitar on Mike’s answering machine. Mike would call him back and play some guitar on John’s machine. Musical messages.
More years went by; time kept passing.
My friend Mark’s wife Nikki died of bone cancer that spread through her body. Tony died of a brain tumor. A girl named Karin I used to work with got married, moved to a Caribbean island with her husband, had a baby and then drowned in a current at the beach one day. With Tony gone, Mark had become my closest friend. He took too many sleeping pills with his gin and tonic one night and never woke up. That all happened in less than two years. I call them the hell years.
Then Barry died and the rest of us started getting together for those dinners. Another one of “the girls,” Betsy, came once or twice. She was a friend of John’s sister, Sylvia. Betsy works in the building across the street from where I work and we have lunch together every now and then. So that’s how I found out what was going on with John, and that’s how I got his phone number again.
John’s mother died. John, Sylvia and their brother Pete inherited her property, including the apartment where John lived. Sylvia was having an attorney liquidate the assets so they could divide the money three ways. But that meant selling the complex where he lived, so John wasn’t happy. Betsy told me he threatened Sylvia and he threatened her attorney. Meanwhile, he got in a huge battle with his bosses at work. As a result of an e-mail of his complaints that he sent to the entire corporate directory, he was placed on stress leave.
Sylvia’s attorney arranged the sale of the apartment complex in a way that allowed John to remain as a tenant. Sylvia, John and Pete got a lot of money. Not millions and millions, but an amount that would allow most of us to live comfortably the rest of our lives.
I called John to invite him to one of our dinners. When he called me back, he asked me to help him find a writer to document his battle with Sprint. His plan was to turn his story into a book and call it “Working for Sprint Drove Me Completely INSANE!” He would self-publish it and then advertise it in the New York Times. Hey, he had enough money, he said, so why not? He told me he would pay a good freelancer a generous sum.
“John, write it yourself,” I told him. “I’ll edit it. You can pay me a little to edit it.”
“I’m not a writer,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter. Just get it down on paper. I’ll help you turn it into a book. Just gimme something to start with.”
“Hmmmmm.” He thought for a second. “Yes! GONZO! I will tank up on coffee and JAM! Stream of consciousness! … Like Jack Kerouac! I’ll get a legal pad, drink lots of coffee and stay up all night!”
“Exactly! Meanwhile, come to the dinner next week. We all want to see you. Your name comes up almost every time. We all love you. Someone asks every time: Where’s John?”
I had heard John was something of an agoraphobic. I suspected that’s why he wasn’t coming. He confirmed it.
“I get anxious when I go out, and I just know how I’ll feel while I’m driving out to see you guys. I’ll be worried about what you think of me.”
“John, I promise: Unconditional love. I promise. No need to worry what we think of you.”
“There’s a great taco stand by my place, though. I guarantee the best carne asadas you’ve ever eaten! You should come by anyway. This friend of mine has set up his Swedish bells in my apartment and we’re recording with them!”
Like all those years before, I thought to myself, when I first got to know John, playing “Mr. Moonshine” in my room and then going to the doughnut shop to visit the girl we were both in love with.
I practically begged him to come out my way, because getting us all together in his neighborhood would mean too much of a drive for some people in the group. I guess he just couldn’t. That’s the last time we spoke. I’ve left a couple of messages since then, but I haven’t heard back from him.
John’s brother Pete was a heroin addict. If you know about heroin addicts you will have already guessed what happened as a result of the windfall that followed his mother’s passing. He bought more heroin that he’d been able to buy before, shot up more than he’d ever shot up before and died of an overdose. That happened within weeks of his getting all that money.
I think of the English translation of a Jacques Brel song: “Death waits to allow my friends a few good times before it ends.” But then ….
---
This time we decide to meet at a Japanese restaurant instead of the Indian place. My friends and I all click our cups of hot sake. “To John,” I say. “And the passing time.”
We split the check, say goodnight and I make the short drive home. I get in bed, I close my eyes and float up slowly, slowly, then out the window. It’s the night of the Perseids, and I am heading northeast, toward the shooting stars. I glide over the city lights twinkling below and I see John in the distance, sailing toward me. When he’s close enough for me to hear him, he whistles the melody of “Tequila.” I call back to him: “TEQUILA!” Then we float off in opposite directions. I look over my shoulder and I see him fade into the dark night sky.
Friday, August 01, 2008
The Starving Artist and the Chimp (Part V)
Libretto for an Opera
Act V
Francais and the Chimp are on stage. The chimp is at a desk and he has a laptop. There is another desk with a computer near him. On a bookcase shelf is a CD player, a fruit bowl with bananas and grapes, a jar of nuts, a bottle of soda, a telephone.
Francais
Later that night
I returned home
What did I find?
A chimp was there
What a strange sight
I was surprised
And like the chimp
In the story
Of the beach house
This one could write
And he had his
Own computer
I asked: “Who are You?”
He said: “Henry”
I said OK.
He pointed to my desk
He pointed to his keyboard
He challenged me to write
Write better than a chimp?
Well, I hope I can
I guess we’ll soon find out
Francais and the chimp hold their hands above their keyboards.
The Chimp:
One two three GO!
They both start typing
Francais
The name of my story is:
Changing Channels on the Multi Verse.
And it goes like this:
My brand new Panchronotic Multi-Versal TV
Was delivered to my home today
Complete with its remote control joystick
Now I will know what I might have been
Now I will see what I could have been
A screen displays nine squares; images in the squares appear and disappear as Francais describes them.
On the first channel I am a man in a lab
I am wearing a white lab coat
I can see that is the path I did not take
I can see that this is the one my parents wanted
And now I can see that ‘me’ on the TV
How many animals did that ‘me’ kill
All in the name of science?
The next channel shows ‘me’
Watching the new TV, wearing my clothes
Not these, different clothes
It’s a different day on that channel
On the next channel, too
I’m watching TV
On the next channel too!
So my first lesson is:
I watch too much TV
On the next channel
Whew – I’m reading a book.
The next channel, too!
And so on and so on
Same book, different clothes
Same book, different days
I type a random number
And on a new channel
I’m back in the lab
The next one, too
The next channel, too
The next one, too
But then: Ah! What’s this?
I’m on the deck of a ship
In a blue wetsuit
With diving gear!
I use the joystick
To pull the view back
And away from the boat
In the water: more divers!
One is climbing back
Onto the ship
I zoom in for a closeup
Of the diver on the ladder
Then I shift the joystick
For a wide view of our ship
I see ‘me’ and the divers
Take off our gear
We rinse it, then rack it
I don’t really want
To watch myself shower
So I bookmark the channel
The next channel shows
New views of me on the ship
The next one, too
The next channel, too
And the next channel, too
But on the next channel
I’m underwater
I watch for a while
And start to wonder
If I’m really having
As much fun as it
Looks like I’m having
The Chimp jumps up and points to his computer.
The Chimp
Look what I have written!
You owe me a banan’!
I’m sure that it is better
Than what you did, man!
Francais takes a banana from the fruit bowl in the bookcase, hands it to the chimp
Francais
OK, let’s have a look
Are you the chimp
Who can write a book
… Wait! What is this?
A screen displays the chimp’s text; each word appears as he reads it.
The Chimp
upsetting oscillAte quine scrawL
ast hornbLende aYe wedge
clOUdburst NosE morphing dEarth
nurture Dummy warble taketh
yank cItation Salsa per diem
buzzsaw orkney raveL wedge
wander scramsax hintered fasten
restOre knee ostrich VEry
Francais
What? That makes no sense
And no I’m not dense
Give me back that banan’
You get only half, man!
Francais takes back the banana splits it half, eats half, gives the other half to the chimp. The chimp takes half the banana, eats it and raises his middle finger.
Wouldn’t you know it?
Give a chimp a keyboard
And he thinks he’s a poet
Francais looks at the text again
But wait, now that I read
The letters that he’s upper cased
But wait, now that I see
What these letters spell
The stories all make sense now
The letters that he’s uppercased
The stories were all saying
The same thing, the same thing
The stories were all the same
The lowercased letters on the screen disappear, leaving the letters:
A L L Y O U N E E D I S L O VE
The orchestra plays the opening line of ‘La Marsellaise’
The Chimp
ALL!
Francais
ALL!
The Chimp
YOU!
Francaise
YOU!
The Chimp
NEED!
Francais
NEED!
The Chimp
IS!
Francais
IS!
/The Chimp
|
|LUHHHHVE!
|
|Francais
|
\ ... LUHHHHVE!
Francais and the Chimp dance
I put on my Beatles CDs
And we sang and danced all night
I broke out the soda and the grapes
And everything was alright
Francais and the Chimp dance around the stage, passing the bottle of soda and a bunch of grapes back and forth. The chimp picks up the telephone and dials a number and chants into the telephone:
The Chimp
Go! To! The! Window!
The Chimp hangs up and they laugh.
Francais and the Chimp:
Go to the window, the kitchen window!
The cast enters stage left, snapping fingers, joining the chant, assembling center stage.
All:
Go to the window, the kitchen window!
(repeat seven times)
Francais:
Are we not all
All
The starving artist
Sheisty
The starving artist
All
And the chimpanzee
IAA
Who fears fulfillment
All:
Both of them slaves to humanity
Talker:
In the light of day
All:
All of them slaves to humanity
Tapas
And are we not all
All
All of us slaves to humanity
The Chimp
The chimpanzee, too
All
The chimpanzee
Ghost
In the dark of the night
All
And the starving artist
IAA
With our physical needs
All
Both of them slaves to humanity
Francais
Our anger, our fear
All
All of us slaves to humanity
Sheisty
And our love
All
In our love, we’re slaves to our humanity
/Men:
|The starving artist
|
|Women
\The starving artist and the chimpanzee
/Men:
|They are both
|
|Women:
\They are both slaves to humanity
/Men
|But we are all
|
|Women
\But we are all slaves to humanity
/Men
|Like the starving artist …
|
|Women
\… Like the starving artist and the chimpanzee …
Men
… And the chimpanzee
FIN
Act V
Francais and the Chimp are on stage. The chimp is at a desk and he has a laptop. There is another desk with a computer near him. On a bookcase shelf is a CD player, a fruit bowl with bananas and grapes, a jar of nuts, a bottle of soda, a telephone.
Francais
Later that night
I returned home
What did I find?
A chimp was there
What a strange sight
I was surprised
And like the chimp
In the story
Of the beach house
This one could write
And he had his
Own computer
I asked: “Who are You?”
He said: “Henry”
I said OK.
He pointed to my desk
He pointed to his keyboard
He challenged me to write
Write better than a chimp?
Well, I hope I can
I guess we’ll soon find out
Francais and the chimp hold their hands above their keyboards.
The Chimp:
One two three GO!
They both start typing
Francais
The name of my story is:
Changing Channels on the Multi Verse.
And it goes like this:
My brand new Panchronotic Multi-Versal TV
Was delivered to my home today
Complete with its remote control joystick
Now I will know what I might have been
Now I will see what I could have been
A screen displays nine squares; images in the squares appear and disappear as Francais describes them.
On the first channel I am a man in a lab
I am wearing a white lab coat
I can see that is the path I did not take
I can see that this is the one my parents wanted
And now I can see that ‘me’ on the TV
How many animals did that ‘me’ kill
All in the name of science?
The next channel shows ‘me’
Watching the new TV, wearing my clothes
Not these, different clothes
It’s a different day on that channel
On the next channel, too
I’m watching TV
On the next channel too!
So my first lesson is:
I watch too much TV
On the next channel
Whew – I’m reading a book.
The next channel, too!
And so on and so on
Same book, different clothes
Same book, different days
I type a random number
And on a new channel
I’m back in the lab
The next one, too
The next channel, too
The next one, too
But then: Ah! What’s this?
I’m on the deck of a ship
In a blue wetsuit
With diving gear!
I use the joystick
To pull the view back
And away from the boat
In the water: more divers!
One is climbing back
Onto the ship
I zoom in for a closeup
Of the diver on the ladder
Then I shift the joystick
For a wide view of our ship
I see ‘me’ and the divers
Take off our gear
We rinse it, then rack it
I don’t really want
To watch myself shower
So I bookmark the channel
The next channel shows
New views of me on the ship
The next one, too
The next channel, too
And the next channel, too
But on the next channel
I’m underwater
I watch for a while
And start to wonder
If I’m really having
As much fun as it
Looks like I’m having
The Chimp jumps up and points to his computer.
The Chimp
Look what I have written!
You owe me a banan’!
I’m sure that it is better
Than what you did, man!
Francais takes a banana from the fruit bowl in the bookcase, hands it to the chimp
Francais
OK, let’s have a look
Are you the chimp
Who can write a book
… Wait! What is this?
A screen displays the chimp’s text; each word appears as he reads it.
The Chimp
upsetting oscillAte quine scrawL
ast hornbLende aYe wedge
clOUdburst NosE morphing dEarth
nurture Dummy warble taketh
yank cItation Salsa per diem
buzzsaw orkney raveL wedge
wander scramsax hintered fasten
restOre knee ostrich VEry
Francais
What? That makes no sense
And no I’m not dense
Give me back that banan’
You get only half, man!
Francais takes back the banana splits it half, eats half, gives the other half to the chimp. The chimp takes half the banana, eats it and raises his middle finger.
Wouldn’t you know it?
Give a chimp a keyboard
And he thinks he’s a poet
Francais looks at the text again
But wait, now that I read
The letters that he’s upper cased
But wait, now that I see
What these letters spell
The stories all make sense now
The letters that he’s uppercased
The stories were all saying
The same thing, the same thing
The stories were all the same
The lowercased letters on the screen disappear, leaving the letters:
A L L Y O U N E E D I S L O VE
The orchestra plays the opening line of ‘La Marsellaise’
The Chimp
ALL!
Francais
ALL!
The Chimp
YOU!
Francaise
YOU!
The Chimp
NEED!
Francais
NEED!
The Chimp
IS!
Francais
IS!
/The Chimp
|
|LUHHHHVE!
|
|Francais
|
\ ... LUHHHHVE!
Francais and the Chimp dance
I put on my Beatles CDs
And we sang and danced all night
I broke out the soda and the grapes
And everything was alright
Francais and the Chimp dance around the stage, passing the bottle of soda and a bunch of grapes back and forth. The chimp picks up the telephone and dials a number and chants into the telephone:
The Chimp
Go! To! The! Window!
The Chimp hangs up and they laugh.
Francais and the Chimp:
Go to the window, the kitchen window!
The cast enters stage left, snapping fingers, joining the chant, assembling center stage.
All:
Go to the window, the kitchen window!
(repeat seven times)
Francais:
Are we not all
All
The starving artist
Sheisty
The starving artist
All
And the chimpanzee
IAA
Who fears fulfillment
All:
Both of them slaves to humanity
Talker:
In the light of day
All:
All of them slaves to humanity
Tapas
And are we not all
All
All of us slaves to humanity
The Chimp
The chimpanzee, too
All
The chimpanzee
Ghost
In the dark of the night
All
And the starving artist
IAA
With our physical needs
All
Both of them slaves to humanity
Francais
Our anger, our fear
All
All of us slaves to humanity
Sheisty
And our love
All
In our love, we’re slaves to our humanity
/Men:
|The starving artist
|
|Women
\The starving artist and the chimpanzee
/Men:
|They are both
|
|Women:
\They are both slaves to humanity
/Men
|But we are all
|
|Women
\But we are all slaves to humanity
/Men
|Like the starving artist …
|
|Women
\… Like the starving artist and the chimpanzee …
Men
… And the chimpanzee
FIN
Sunday, June 29, 2008
The Starving Artist and the Chimp (Part IV)
Libretto for an Opera
Act IV
Sheisty is at a desk in the middle of the stage. The chimp is on a platform to Sheisty’s left. Francais enters stage left.
Francais
I started a new job the very next day
As an editor at a book company
Once my assistant had showed me around
I looked at what some writers sent for me
It’s called the slush pile and I dug right in
One manuscript quickly caught my eye
It was wrinkled and marked with stains of wine
That was very strange; I wondered why
It seemed to be written as if the author
Were held somewhere against his will
An angry rant by a hungry captive
It was typed, I thought, by someone on pills
This is quite crazy I said to myself
It reminded me of the lost notebook
So I went back to the Craigslist forum
To see what was there, to have a quick look
Sheisty was writing about a chimp
Could his tale lead me to identify
The person whose notebook I found in the park?
So I read his text with an inquisitive eye …
Sheisty:
I have rented this house on the beach
It’s cheap, so on booze I don’t have to scrimp
I can write all day, enjoying life
If I can just put up with the owner’s chimp
/If I can just put up with the owner’s chimp
|
|The Chimp
|
\… And I am one hungry, noisy chimp
Yes, I am one hungry, noisy chimp
And I want some food and I want it now
Bring me a sandwich, make it baloney
I’m hungry dude, come here with the chow!
/I’m hungry dude, bring the chow now
|
|Sheisty
|
\… He’s hungry and he wants his chow now
I could get used to this good life
But that chimp makes too much racket
You think he’d be happy when I bring him food
But he makes me a target for his chimp-shit!
/Yes, he makes me a target for his chimp-shit
|
|The Chimp
|
\… Downstairs he is typing away
He spends his day typing away
I’m hungry, I’m hungry, what more can I say?
Sorry, it’s just that I’m built this way
I’m hungry, I’m hungry, all through the day!
/I’m hungry, I’m hungry, all through the day!
|
|Sheisty:
|
\… He’s driving my crazy, that’s all I can say
I took him to the beach to help me pick up chicks
But he made obscene gestures; really sick
Even when I told him I’d make a sandwich thick
When we got back home … what a chimp-prick!
/A sandwich thick … what a chimp-prick!
|
|The Chimp
|
\… I know one thing and I know it well
One thing I know and I know it well
I’m hungry, I’m hungry, bring me a treat
But he just types away all of the day
And whenever he wants to, he can eat!
/Whenever he wants to, he can eat!
|
|Sheisty
|
\… I have a deadline, he jumps around
He jumped so much a vase shook off the shelf
Fell on the keyboard, broke the space bar
This is a disaster, it means I can’t finish
The novel that would pay for a nice new car!
/The book that would pay for a nice new car
|
|The Chimp
|
\… He can have food, but he wants a new car!
When he wants food he can open the fridge
And help himself to some wine or bread!
I can knock this guy out and switch places with him
I’ve got this plan in my little chimp head
Sheisty stomps up the steps to the chimp’s platform
/Yes, I’ve got this plan in my little chimp head
|
|Sheisty
|
\… That’s it, I’ve had it, you broke my space bar
I’ve had it now, you broke my space bar
You’ll have to pay for what you’ve done
We’re gonna box and when I connect
You’ll see stars, it will not be fun
Sheisty and the chimp circle the platform, rolling their fists at each other, ready to fight.
/You’ll see stars it will not be fun
|
|The Chimp
|
\… Lights out for you, I’ll lock you in the room
The chimp punches Sheisty, he falls to the ground. The chimp goes downstairs, takes some grapes and a bottle from the fridge and starts to read Sheisty’s manuscript.
Lights out for you, you’re locked in my room
Where you kept me while you worked on your book
First, a stop at the fridge and then I’ll read
What you’ve been writing – here, let’s have a look
The chimp studies the manuscript, eating and drinking. Then he sits down at the table and starts typing. Stage lights dim, then return. Sheisty awakens, realizes he’s been locked in the room and pounds on the door.
Sheisty
Where is that chimp? Where did he go?
Now I’m locked in here. Where is that ape?
I can’t jump from the window, it’s too far down
I can hear him! He’s eating my grapes!
/I can hear him! He’s eating my grapes!
|
|The Chimp
|
\… I’m eating his grapes and they taste so good
Yes, I’m eating his grapes and they taste so good
With salami, Jack Daniels and I’m thinking
I am down here with the food that I love
He is up there where the shit is stinking
The chimp climbs the stairs to the room and confronts Sheisty.
/He is up here where the shit is stinking
|
|Sheisty
|
\Here he comes now! I’ll teach him a lesson
Here you come now, I’ll teach you a lesson
I’m a human and you’re a chimpanzee
That means I’m smart and you’re a dumb beast
Now for a rematch! We’ll see what we’ll see
Sheisty and the chimp circle each other, preparing for another boxing match.
Sheisty and the Chimp:
Now for a rematch, we’ll see what we’ll see!
Sheisty runs from the room and slams the door behind him.
Sheisty
I’ll never let him leave that room again
He can die in there for all that I care
Now back to work on my novel I go
I had written up to the chapter where …
He pours himself a glass of wine and read from his manuscript.
Wait, there’s another chapter here
I thought I’d stopped at page ninety-nine
And it seems to be written in my own style
Could it be that the chimp wrote this while …
/Could it be that the chimp has written this while …?
|
|The Chimp
|
\… He was blacked out, so I had a go
While he was blacked out, I gave it a go
He thinks he’s smart and he thinks I’m dumb
But truth is hard and illusion is easy
Who does he think he’s descended from?
/Who does he think he’s descended from?
|
|Sheisty
|
\... And look, he even fixed the space bar
He’s even fixed the keyboard’s space bar
I can finish my book, and it will be great!
But hey, what the chimp wrote is pretty good
Better than anything I could create
Writers block has begun to afflict me
I have an idea I think you’ll enjoy
Let’s see if it works! You know what I’ll do?
To finish the book, the chimp I’ll employ
Sheisty returns to the chimp’s room, they fight, Sheisty lets the chimp knocks him out without much of a struggle. The chimp goes downstairs, pours some wine, sits at the computer and types. Sheisty awakens. The chimp brings a sandwich to Sheisty, goes back downstairs and types some more. Then the chimp opens a bottle of whiskey, picks up a cigarette and stares into space. Sheisty listens for the chimp’s typing, but hears nothing. He looks out the window.
I didn’t make noise, I let the beast work in peace!
At first he was typing almost all day
But now I can see him from the window
He’s down at the beach! Time’s passing away
/He’s down at the beach while time’s passing away!
|
|The Chimp
|
\ …I’m down at the beach, wasting more time today
Writers block has afflicted me, too
I’m smoking and drinking or just sitting here
Staring off into the distant horizon
I cannot finish this book, I fear
/I cannot finish this book I fear
|
|Sheisty
|
\… He cannot finish the book, that’s clear
I pound on the walls, I scream in frustration
Smoking and drinking, that’s my style, too!
Staring off into the distant horizon
When the muse takes her leave, that’s what I always do!
The Chimp
Smoking and drinking
Sheisty
That’s my style too
The Chimp
Staring off into
Sheisty
The distant horizon
The Chimp
When the muse takes her leave
Sheisty and the Chimp
What else can you do?
When the muse takes her leave
What else can you do?
Francais
So I picked up the manuscript
I had seen earlier
The one that was crumbled
Unformatted, stained
I turned to the last page
To see if it ended
But it just trailed off
And faded away …
The writer did not sign his name
Nor provide a return address
Who do you think could have written this book?
I can’t be sure, but I do have a guess
I can’t be sure, but I do have a guess.
Sheisty and the Chimp
How about you? Want to venture a guess?
Act IV
Sheisty is at a desk in the middle of the stage. The chimp is on a platform to Sheisty’s left. Francais enters stage left.
Francais
I started a new job the very next day
As an editor at a book company
Once my assistant had showed me around
I looked at what some writers sent for me
It’s called the slush pile and I dug right in
One manuscript quickly caught my eye
It was wrinkled and marked with stains of wine
That was very strange; I wondered why
It seemed to be written as if the author
Were held somewhere against his will
An angry rant by a hungry captive
It was typed, I thought, by someone on pills
This is quite crazy I said to myself
It reminded me of the lost notebook
So I went back to the Craigslist forum
To see what was there, to have a quick look
Sheisty was writing about a chimp
Could his tale lead me to identify
The person whose notebook I found in the park?
So I read his text with an inquisitive eye …
Sheisty:
I have rented this house on the beach
It’s cheap, so on booze I don’t have to scrimp
I can write all day, enjoying life
If I can just put up with the owner’s chimp
/If I can just put up with the owner’s chimp
|
|The Chimp
|
\… And I am one hungry, noisy chimp
Yes, I am one hungry, noisy chimp
And I want some food and I want it now
Bring me a sandwich, make it baloney
I’m hungry dude, come here with the chow!
/I’m hungry dude, bring the chow now
|
|Sheisty
|
\… He’s hungry and he wants his chow now
I could get used to this good life
But that chimp makes too much racket
You think he’d be happy when I bring him food
But he makes me a target for his chimp-shit!
/Yes, he makes me a target for his chimp-shit
|
|The Chimp
|
\… Downstairs he is typing away
He spends his day typing away
I’m hungry, I’m hungry, what more can I say?
Sorry, it’s just that I’m built this way
I’m hungry, I’m hungry, all through the day!
/I’m hungry, I’m hungry, all through the day!
|
|Sheisty:
|
\… He’s driving my crazy, that’s all I can say
I took him to the beach to help me pick up chicks
But he made obscene gestures; really sick
Even when I told him I’d make a sandwich thick
When we got back home … what a chimp-prick!
/A sandwich thick … what a chimp-prick!
|
|The Chimp
|
\… I know one thing and I know it well
One thing I know and I know it well
I’m hungry, I’m hungry, bring me a treat
But he just types away all of the day
And whenever he wants to, he can eat!
/Whenever he wants to, he can eat!
|
|Sheisty
|
\… I have a deadline, he jumps around
He jumped so much a vase shook off the shelf
Fell on the keyboard, broke the space bar
This is a disaster, it means I can’t finish
The novel that would pay for a nice new car!
/The book that would pay for a nice new car
|
|The Chimp
|
\… He can have food, but he wants a new car!
When he wants food he can open the fridge
And help himself to some wine or bread!
I can knock this guy out and switch places with him
I’ve got this plan in my little chimp head
Sheisty stomps up the steps to the chimp’s platform
/Yes, I’ve got this plan in my little chimp head
|
|Sheisty
|
\… That’s it, I’ve had it, you broke my space bar
I’ve had it now, you broke my space bar
You’ll have to pay for what you’ve done
We’re gonna box and when I connect
You’ll see stars, it will not be fun
Sheisty and the chimp circle the platform, rolling their fists at each other, ready to fight.
/You’ll see stars it will not be fun
|
|The Chimp
|
\… Lights out for you, I’ll lock you in the room
The chimp punches Sheisty, he falls to the ground. The chimp goes downstairs, takes some grapes and a bottle from the fridge and starts to read Sheisty’s manuscript.
Lights out for you, you’re locked in my room
Where you kept me while you worked on your book
First, a stop at the fridge and then I’ll read
What you’ve been writing – here, let’s have a look
The chimp studies the manuscript, eating and drinking. Then he sits down at the table and starts typing. Stage lights dim, then return. Sheisty awakens, realizes he’s been locked in the room and pounds on the door.
Sheisty
Where is that chimp? Where did he go?
Now I’m locked in here. Where is that ape?
I can’t jump from the window, it’s too far down
I can hear him! He’s eating my grapes!
/I can hear him! He’s eating my grapes!
|
|The Chimp
|
\… I’m eating his grapes and they taste so good
Yes, I’m eating his grapes and they taste so good
With salami, Jack Daniels and I’m thinking
I am down here with the food that I love
He is up there where the shit is stinking
The chimp climbs the stairs to the room and confronts Sheisty.
/He is up here where the shit is stinking
|
|Sheisty
|
\Here he comes now! I’ll teach him a lesson
Here you come now, I’ll teach you a lesson
I’m a human and you’re a chimpanzee
That means I’m smart and you’re a dumb beast
Now for a rematch! We’ll see what we’ll see
Sheisty and the chimp circle each other, preparing for another boxing match.
Sheisty and the Chimp:
Now for a rematch, we’ll see what we’ll see!
Sheisty runs from the room and slams the door behind him.
Sheisty
I’ll never let him leave that room again
He can die in there for all that I care
Now back to work on my novel I go
I had written up to the chapter where …
He pours himself a glass of wine and read from his manuscript.
Wait, there’s another chapter here
I thought I’d stopped at page ninety-nine
And it seems to be written in my own style
Could it be that the chimp wrote this while …
/Could it be that the chimp has written this while …?
|
|The Chimp
|
\… He was blacked out, so I had a go
While he was blacked out, I gave it a go
He thinks he’s smart and he thinks I’m dumb
But truth is hard and illusion is easy
Who does he think he’s descended from?
/Who does he think he’s descended from?
|
|Sheisty
|
\... And look, he even fixed the space bar
He’s even fixed the keyboard’s space bar
I can finish my book, and it will be great!
But hey, what the chimp wrote is pretty good
Better than anything I could create
Writers block has begun to afflict me
I have an idea I think you’ll enjoy
Let’s see if it works! You know what I’ll do?
To finish the book, the chimp I’ll employ
Sheisty returns to the chimp’s room, they fight, Sheisty lets the chimp knocks him out without much of a struggle. The chimp goes downstairs, pours some wine, sits at the computer and types. Sheisty awakens. The chimp brings a sandwich to Sheisty, goes back downstairs and types some more. Then the chimp opens a bottle of whiskey, picks up a cigarette and stares into space. Sheisty listens for the chimp’s typing, but hears nothing. He looks out the window.
I didn’t make noise, I let the beast work in peace!
At first he was typing almost all day
But now I can see him from the window
He’s down at the beach! Time’s passing away
/He’s down at the beach while time’s passing away!
|
|The Chimp
|
\ …I’m down at the beach, wasting more time today
Writers block has afflicted me, too
I’m smoking and drinking or just sitting here
Staring off into the distant horizon
I cannot finish this book, I fear
/I cannot finish this book I fear
|
|Sheisty
|
\… He cannot finish the book, that’s clear
I pound on the walls, I scream in frustration
Smoking and drinking, that’s my style, too!
Staring off into the distant horizon
When the muse takes her leave, that’s what I always do!
The Chimp
Smoking and drinking
Sheisty
That’s my style too
The Chimp
Staring off into
Sheisty
The distant horizon
The Chimp
When the muse takes her leave
Sheisty and the Chimp
What else can you do?
When the muse takes her leave
What else can you do?
Francais
So I picked up the manuscript
I had seen earlier
The one that was crumbled
Unformatted, stained
I turned to the last page
To see if it ended
But it just trailed off
And faded away …
The writer did not sign his name
Nor provide a return address
Who do you think could have written this book?
I can’t be sure, but I do have a guess
I can’t be sure, but I do have a guess.
Sheisty and the Chimp
How about you? Want to venture a guess?
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Dancing Shoes
Yes, you made it. Didn’t think you would, did you? That’s what most people say. There are so many challenges, so many choices, so many ways to go wrong. Congratulations! You didn’t kill anyone – or at least not too many people. … Ha ha, just a joke. One of my favorites. Ah, I never get tired of that one. Just to see the reactions. That raised eyebrow you gave me. Superb. What a riot. I crack myself up.
Uh huh, this is it. Pretty much as you imagined, huh? No, I’m not “Peter.” You know it’s those other people who believe in “Peter.” Not us. What? Oh, I wouldn’t know. Maybe there is another place like this for them, with “Peter” at the gate. Could be. I haven’t thought about it much. But both stories can’t be true, can they? And where are you standing now? So what does that tell you?
I know, that’s the first criteria. That you believe. Of course you believe. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.
My name? It’s not important. No one remembers my name, anyway. But you’re asking too many questions. You only get to ask one. Take some time to think about it. There must be something you want to ask about this place ¬– or anything else.
What? That’s your question? Well, that’s an interesting one. I don’t hear that one often: Why did He rest on the seventh day? A few of us were talking about that very subject a few months ago – or maybe it was a few decades ago; it’s difficult to keep track of time here. It was down at the Strato-Cumulus Bar over beers, as I remember. … Of course there’s beer here! You know where you are, right? It’s the other place where there’s no beer. Just coffee. Coffee breaks every couple of hours. And then back on your head! Good thing you didn’t kill too many people, huh? Hahaha … ah, I tell you, that one never gets old, never.
Yeah, a lot of people are surprised we serve beer here. I guess everyone thinks we just fly around all day playing harps. I wasn’t a good musician anyway. I never had a good ear. Maybe that’s why I got this job.
So, if you had the ability, the power, how hard could it be to create the universe? Like building a sandcastle, maybe? So why would you need to rest afterward?
And for a whole day? And why not the sixth day? Or the fifth? These are all good questions, and our discussion was quite lively. But most of our discussions get quite lively, as they’re accompanied by many pitchers of beer. Sometimes too many. Wine? Yes, you can have some wine when you like, but you’ll see that most of us prefer beer. It doesn’t dehydrate you as much. Most of the bars carry excellent microbrews. Try Celestial, Infinity or Eternity. Those are my favorites. Infinity has a nice woodsy flavor. Let me know what you think.
So back to your question, how did it go? The heaven and the Earth, then the light, then the dark of night, right? That was the first day. Then the sky on the second day. After that I get mixed up. He gathered the waters on the third day, and the dry land appeared, and then He made the flowers and plants and fruits and trees. Wait, was that the third day or the fourth day? I’m getting tired just trying to remember the order of everything He created.
When we were talking about this over Infinitys that time at the Strato-Cumulus, Michael said that creating it all wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was thinking it all up. After all, if there were never water before, how would you invent water? How would you know that water is what you wanted? How would you know to create a mountain, before mountains existed? How would you know to make a giraffe? And why a giraffe?
But then you wonder if He had spent a lot of time thinking about it before he actually started working, like a writer planning his story. There was an Italian novelist who said it only took him a few days to write one of his best books. But he admitted he’d thought about it a long time before he sat down at the typewriter. I’ll bet that writer was tired after he’d written that book. I’ll bet if he spent six days writing that book, he’d want to take a break on the seventh. But let’s get back to the creation of the universe and everything in it.
Maybe He didn’t think it all out beforehand. Maybe He just got some ideas in his head and then improvised, like a jazz musician. If Charlie Parker were jamming for six days, he’d want to take a breather on the seventh, too. Yeah, I know about the heroin, but let’s assume he had as much as he needed, enough to play for six days in a row without having to go out to score. No, there’s no heroin here. And I said you only get one question.
So where were we? First day, the Earth and the light and the dark, second die the skies. On the third day, water, and plants and trees and fruits. On the fourth day … hmm, you’d think I’d know this by now … oh, yeah, the sun, the moon, the stars, the seasons. Fifth day, the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky. Sixth day, the giraffe and all those other animals, then finally man and woman. Right? Whew.
Now that sounds like a lot of work to me. But – and this is what we talked about with Michael and the other guys and gals that day – let’s say, for argument’s sake, that it was easy. Well, you know how when you’re at work, and you don’t have anything to do, it’s boring and time passes really slowly? And you get home and you’re even more tired than you are after a busy day? Let’s say it’s like that. Either way: He was tired so he rested. No mystery. Right?
But wait, there’s more. Because look at what it says in the book: There was evening and there was morning. We’re just talking about what He did during the day. It makes no mention of what He did at night.
And let me tell you something. You’ll find this out for yourself. You usually think of Him from the texts, always serious and usually angry; commanding this, commanding that, arguing with Moses. Set that aside. Because this is a guy who throws one helluva party – pardon the pun, sorry, couldn’t resist. When He gets in the mood, this place gets rockin.’ The beer flows, there’s music – not just harps, there are a lot of good guitarists and drummers up here, keyboardists and horn players, too – and we dance and sing all night long.
So imagine back then, in the beginning. I’m thinking once He had what he needed to make beer, he opened a keg and celebrated each of his creations. I’m thinking he drank all night. Yes, you usually bless Him for creating the fruit of the vine, but he created the barley of the fields, too, and as I mentioned, beer is the beverage of choice here.
So after a week of creating all day and partying all night, I’m sure he needed a rest. That’s right, I’m speculating. Of course it’s just my opinion. I said you could ask one question. I didn’t say you’d get an answer.
It was nice to meet you, too. Make yourself at home. The nearest bar is the Nimbus. Go that way and turn right when you see Venus. Be sure to try the Infinity beer. I’ll bet you’ll like it. See you at the next party. When? Oh, pretty often. Every week or so, or maybe every year or two, I can’t keep track. But bring your dancing shoes. You’re gonna have a great time. And always remember: Why are you here? Because you didn’t kill too many people, right? Ha ha ha. But seriously: It’s because you believe.
Uh huh, this is it. Pretty much as you imagined, huh? No, I’m not “Peter.” You know it’s those other people who believe in “Peter.” Not us. What? Oh, I wouldn’t know. Maybe there is another place like this for them, with “Peter” at the gate. Could be. I haven’t thought about it much. But both stories can’t be true, can they? And where are you standing now? So what does that tell you?
I know, that’s the first criteria. That you believe. Of course you believe. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.
My name? It’s not important. No one remembers my name, anyway. But you’re asking too many questions. You only get to ask one. Take some time to think about it. There must be something you want to ask about this place ¬– or anything else.
What? That’s your question? Well, that’s an interesting one. I don’t hear that one often: Why did He rest on the seventh day? A few of us were talking about that very subject a few months ago – or maybe it was a few decades ago; it’s difficult to keep track of time here. It was down at the Strato-Cumulus Bar over beers, as I remember. … Of course there’s beer here! You know where you are, right? It’s the other place where there’s no beer. Just coffee. Coffee breaks every couple of hours. And then back on your head! Good thing you didn’t kill too many people, huh? Hahaha … ah, I tell you, that one never gets old, never.
Yeah, a lot of people are surprised we serve beer here. I guess everyone thinks we just fly around all day playing harps. I wasn’t a good musician anyway. I never had a good ear. Maybe that’s why I got this job.
So, if you had the ability, the power, how hard could it be to create the universe? Like building a sandcastle, maybe? So why would you need to rest afterward?
And for a whole day? And why not the sixth day? Or the fifth? These are all good questions, and our discussion was quite lively. But most of our discussions get quite lively, as they’re accompanied by many pitchers of beer. Sometimes too many. Wine? Yes, you can have some wine when you like, but you’ll see that most of us prefer beer. It doesn’t dehydrate you as much. Most of the bars carry excellent microbrews. Try Celestial, Infinity or Eternity. Those are my favorites. Infinity has a nice woodsy flavor. Let me know what you think.
So back to your question, how did it go? The heaven and the Earth, then the light, then the dark of night, right? That was the first day. Then the sky on the second day. After that I get mixed up. He gathered the waters on the third day, and the dry land appeared, and then He made the flowers and plants and fruits and trees. Wait, was that the third day or the fourth day? I’m getting tired just trying to remember the order of everything He created.
When we were talking about this over Infinitys that time at the Strato-Cumulus, Michael said that creating it all wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was thinking it all up. After all, if there were never water before, how would you invent water? How would you know that water is what you wanted? How would you know to create a mountain, before mountains existed? How would you know to make a giraffe? And why a giraffe?
But then you wonder if He had spent a lot of time thinking about it before he actually started working, like a writer planning his story. There was an Italian novelist who said it only took him a few days to write one of his best books. But he admitted he’d thought about it a long time before he sat down at the typewriter. I’ll bet that writer was tired after he’d written that book. I’ll bet if he spent six days writing that book, he’d want to take a break on the seventh. But let’s get back to the creation of the universe and everything in it.
Maybe He didn’t think it all out beforehand. Maybe He just got some ideas in his head and then improvised, like a jazz musician. If Charlie Parker were jamming for six days, he’d want to take a breather on the seventh, too. Yeah, I know about the heroin, but let’s assume he had as much as he needed, enough to play for six days in a row without having to go out to score. No, there’s no heroin here. And I said you only get one question.
So where were we? First day, the Earth and the light and the dark, second die the skies. On the third day, water, and plants and trees and fruits. On the fourth day … hmm, you’d think I’d know this by now … oh, yeah, the sun, the moon, the stars, the seasons. Fifth day, the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky. Sixth day, the giraffe and all those other animals, then finally man and woman. Right? Whew.
Now that sounds like a lot of work to me. But – and this is what we talked about with Michael and the other guys and gals that day – let’s say, for argument’s sake, that it was easy. Well, you know how when you’re at work, and you don’t have anything to do, it’s boring and time passes really slowly? And you get home and you’re even more tired than you are after a busy day? Let’s say it’s like that. Either way: He was tired so he rested. No mystery. Right?
But wait, there’s more. Because look at what it says in the book: There was evening and there was morning. We’re just talking about what He did during the day. It makes no mention of what He did at night.
And let me tell you something. You’ll find this out for yourself. You usually think of Him from the texts, always serious and usually angry; commanding this, commanding that, arguing with Moses. Set that aside. Because this is a guy who throws one helluva party – pardon the pun, sorry, couldn’t resist. When He gets in the mood, this place gets rockin.’ The beer flows, there’s music – not just harps, there are a lot of good guitarists and drummers up here, keyboardists and horn players, too – and we dance and sing all night long.
So imagine back then, in the beginning. I’m thinking once He had what he needed to make beer, he opened a keg and celebrated each of his creations. I’m thinking he drank all night. Yes, you usually bless Him for creating the fruit of the vine, but he created the barley of the fields, too, and as I mentioned, beer is the beverage of choice here.
So after a week of creating all day and partying all night, I’m sure he needed a rest. That’s right, I’m speculating. Of course it’s just my opinion. I said you could ask one question. I didn’t say you’d get an answer.
It was nice to meet you, too. Make yourself at home. The nearest bar is the Nimbus. Go that way and turn right when you see Venus. Be sure to try the Infinity beer. I’ll bet you’ll like it. See you at the next party. When? Oh, pretty often. Every week or so, or maybe every year or two, I can’t keep track. But bring your dancing shoes. You’re gonna have a great time. And always remember: Why are you here? Because you didn’t kill too many people, right? Ha ha ha. But seriously: It’s because you believe.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Starving Artist and the Chimp (Part III)
Libretto for an Opera
ACT III
Francais is at stage left, in a spotlight.
I went to work
It was my last day as editor of the opinion pages
At the local Herald
My plan was
To spend the day cleaning my desk
Throwing out old files
But the receptionist
Paged me to the front desk
A man was there
Bill enters stage left, stands next to Francais.
Hello, my name is Bill
I think you will want to publish my poem
In tomorrow’s paper
Francais:
Nice to meet you Bill,
I’m Francais and I will consider your poem
For the op-ed page
Bill:
Oh Mister Francais
I am sure that you will do more than
Just consider it
Bill exits stage right.
Francais:
I went back to my desk
I didn’t think too much more about Bill
The newsroom was abuzz
Someone had opened
All of the cages at the local zoo
And the animals were out
Gazelles wandering
And snakes slithering around town
Down the streets
Then I remembered
The notebook I found and the story
Of the artist and chimp
The Notebook writer mentioned
The Literary and Writing forum
On Craigslist
So I logged on
To see if I could find a way to track down
The Notebook Writer
And I read
IAA’s version of the Starving Artist
And the chimp
IAA enters stage left.
IAA:
The high had lasted weeks
Bill crept from under stoops to attics
To back yards
He wrote poetry
In the bushes with stolen pen and paper
He lived for art
Women loved him
Some nights one would take him home and feed him
Then he would leave
After all
A starving artist looks just like
A rich kid slumming
One day he woke up
And rummaged through a dumpster
But couldn’t find food
At that moment
He became obsessed with the idea
Of Henry Miller
Bill enters stage right:
Bill:
Henry Miller
Henry Miller, Henry Miller, Henry Miller
I said to myself
All day long
Henry Miller, Henry Miller, Henry Miller
Henry Miller
And into the night
I asked himself why I had become
So obsessed
I took a bus
To St. Anthony’s for a free meal but
They had stopped serving
I said to myself
I’m hungry here just like Henry was hungry
In Paris
The church doors
Were closed and I thought I might never
Eat a meal again
Tall Bum and Short Bum enter stage right.
A puff of smoke
Rose above two men who were
At the side of the church
Tall Bum:
You jonesin’?
Bill:
I don’t need drugs, I’m just very hungry.
Short Bum:
Here’s 10 bucks.
Go get us some food
Three burgers from Carl’s Jr. And some fries.
Tall Bum:
Hey, not so fast
Why don’t you leave your bag here?
But first smoke some weed
The three men smoke together. Bill exits stage right. The two bums take his bag and exit stage left. Bill returns stage right with a Carl’s Jr. bag.
They took my bag!
They stole my bag, my poetry
And now I’m stoned
Bill sits on the floor and starts eating a burger.
IAA:
He ate the food
The three burgers were good but then
The high wore off
He grew aware
Of his bleak situation
His desperation
Bill:
I have become
A street person, a derelict
I said to myself
My plan has gone wrong
I gave my possessions away
I faked my own death
At the beach I watch
The seagulls flying, seeking scraps
I’m a gull too
I live on scraps
Hey, that’s pretty good, should I
Write it down?
IAA:
“Are you a painting?”
It was a voice in his head
Asking him that
Is this art?
Are you a living work of art?
Said the voice in his head
Bill:
I need a muse
I will hide at my aunt’s house
On the way there
I passed the zoo
That would be a good place
To plan my next move
So I went back
Later that night with wire cutters
I stole from a shop
IAA:
He climbed the wall
Got into the zoo, wandered around
Under the stars
Bill walks back and forth across the stage, looking out over the audience as if they were animals in the zoo.
Bill:
I have found
A new kind of poetry tonight at the zoo
It’s animal magic!
The chimp enters stage right, holds up her hands in fists as if she were clinging to the bars of her cage. Bill approaches her. He brings his face to hers. She kisses him.
Bill:
I will free you
And all the rest of the chimps
Other animals, too
Dancers with animal masks enter stage left and perform. Bill takes the chimp’s hand and they exit stage right. The dancers complete their ballet and exit stage right. A table with a fruit bowl on it is placed on the stage. Bill and the Chimp enter stage right and sit at the table. The chimp takes a persimmon and eats it. Bill is writing.
IAA:
The chimp was full
And Bill wrote his poem about the night
He freed all the beasts
Their fate was
The same fate as the artist
The very same fate
They are all
Slaves to humanity, animals and artists
Slaves to humanity
He’d made his statement
And signed his masterpiece
With his real name
And brought it to
Every newspaper with circulation
In the tri-county area
Francais holds up the manuscript.
IAA
Then Bill moved back
To the basement of his old
Victorian flat
He wired it up
Filled it with light bulbs
And brought the chimp
It was warm, it was bright
The chimp came and went as she pleased
Bill wrote and wrote
Bill wrote his poem
He framed an indictment of modern life
He spoke for us all
For the abused
For robots, for artists, for women
Humanity’s slaves
All of us are
Slaves to humanity, slaves to humanity
All of us
As night would fall
The chimp climbed in his arms
To hold him close
Francais
Two and two I can do
So I read the poem Bill gave me
And it’s all true
Bill: (aria)
I, Bill C. Schneiderman, do hereby declare
From this year forth, this date shall bear
The name Animal Freedom Day
Across the mighty nation of U.S.A.
And that is in honor of what I created
By seeing the beasts liberated:
In the name of all robots and slaves
I freed giraffes from their pens, the chimps from their cage
Flamingos, go! Polar bears, dare!
Each zoo animal, no matter where
Shall know what it is to be free
To roam the streets, to climb the trees!
And so from the depth of our inhibited beingness
We shall recognize all of our animal needingness
To burst forth from our cages, real and unreal
To breathe, to see, to touch, to feel
The lesson we take from the zoo liberation
Is that, like beasts, we crave validation.
And what did I learn as I followed my bliss?
There is nothing so sweet as a chimp’s gentle kiss.
So each year we will gather and set the beasts free
And teach the children this example of glee
Bill exits stage left.
Francais:
I decided
I would not publish this poem
For Bill’s own good
So his work,
Like many other great poems
Will remain unread
As I walked home
I sensed a presence as I passed
An alleyway
A pair of eyes
Or was it my imagination
Glowing yellow eyes
Down the alley
Amid trash, rags and cardboard
Glowing reptile eyes
Watching me
Or was it my imagination
Glowing yellow eyes
ACT III
Francais is at stage left, in a spotlight.
I went to work
It was my last day as editor of the opinion pages
At the local Herald
My plan was
To spend the day cleaning my desk
Throwing out old files
But the receptionist
Paged me to the front desk
A man was there
Bill enters stage left, stands next to Francais.
Hello, my name is Bill
I think you will want to publish my poem
In tomorrow’s paper
Francais:
Nice to meet you Bill,
I’m Francais and I will consider your poem
For the op-ed page
Bill:
Oh Mister Francais
I am sure that you will do more than
Just consider it
Bill exits stage right.
Francais:
I went back to my desk
I didn’t think too much more about Bill
The newsroom was abuzz
Someone had opened
All of the cages at the local zoo
And the animals were out
Gazelles wandering
And snakes slithering around town
Down the streets
Then I remembered
The notebook I found and the story
Of the artist and chimp
The Notebook writer mentioned
The Literary and Writing forum
On Craigslist
So I logged on
To see if I could find a way to track down
The Notebook Writer
And I read
IAA’s version of the Starving Artist
And the chimp
IAA enters stage left.
IAA:
The high had lasted weeks
Bill crept from under stoops to attics
To back yards
He wrote poetry
In the bushes with stolen pen and paper
He lived for art
Women loved him
Some nights one would take him home and feed him
Then he would leave
After all
A starving artist looks just like
A rich kid slumming
One day he woke up
And rummaged through a dumpster
But couldn’t find food
At that moment
He became obsessed with the idea
Of Henry Miller
Bill enters stage right:
Bill:
Henry Miller
Henry Miller, Henry Miller, Henry Miller
I said to myself
All day long
Henry Miller, Henry Miller, Henry Miller
Henry Miller
And into the night
I asked himself why I had become
So obsessed
I took a bus
To St. Anthony’s for a free meal but
They had stopped serving
I said to myself
I’m hungry here just like Henry was hungry
In Paris
The church doors
Were closed and I thought I might never
Eat a meal again
Tall Bum and Short Bum enter stage right.
A puff of smoke
Rose above two men who were
At the side of the church
Tall Bum:
You jonesin’?
Bill:
I don’t need drugs, I’m just very hungry.
Short Bum:
Here’s 10 bucks.
Go get us some food
Three burgers from Carl’s Jr. And some fries.
Tall Bum:
Hey, not so fast
Why don’t you leave your bag here?
But first smoke some weed
The three men smoke together. Bill exits stage right. The two bums take his bag and exit stage left. Bill returns stage right with a Carl’s Jr. bag.
They took my bag!
They stole my bag, my poetry
And now I’m stoned
Bill sits on the floor and starts eating a burger.
IAA:
He ate the food
The three burgers were good but then
The high wore off
He grew aware
Of his bleak situation
His desperation
Bill:
I have become
A street person, a derelict
I said to myself
My plan has gone wrong
I gave my possessions away
I faked my own death
At the beach I watch
The seagulls flying, seeking scraps
I’m a gull too
I live on scraps
Hey, that’s pretty good, should I
Write it down?
IAA:
“Are you a painting?”
It was a voice in his head
Asking him that
Is this art?
Are you a living work of art?
Said the voice in his head
Bill:
I need a muse
I will hide at my aunt’s house
On the way there
I passed the zoo
That would be a good place
To plan my next move
So I went back
Later that night with wire cutters
I stole from a shop
IAA:
He climbed the wall
Got into the zoo, wandered around
Under the stars
Bill walks back and forth across the stage, looking out over the audience as if they were animals in the zoo.
Bill:
I have found
A new kind of poetry tonight at the zoo
It’s animal magic!
The chimp enters stage right, holds up her hands in fists as if she were clinging to the bars of her cage. Bill approaches her. He brings his face to hers. She kisses him.
Bill:
I will free you
And all the rest of the chimps
Other animals, too
Dancers with animal masks enter stage left and perform. Bill takes the chimp’s hand and they exit stage right. The dancers complete their ballet and exit stage right. A table with a fruit bowl on it is placed on the stage. Bill and the Chimp enter stage right and sit at the table. The chimp takes a persimmon and eats it. Bill is writing.
IAA:
The chimp was full
And Bill wrote his poem about the night
He freed all the beasts
Their fate was
The same fate as the artist
The very same fate
They are all
Slaves to humanity, animals and artists
Slaves to humanity
He’d made his statement
And signed his masterpiece
With his real name
And brought it to
Every newspaper with circulation
In the tri-county area
Francais holds up the manuscript.
IAA
Then Bill moved back
To the basement of his old
Victorian flat
He wired it up
Filled it with light bulbs
And brought the chimp
It was warm, it was bright
The chimp came and went as she pleased
Bill wrote and wrote
Bill wrote his poem
He framed an indictment of modern life
He spoke for us all
For the abused
For robots, for artists, for women
Humanity’s slaves
All of us are
Slaves to humanity, slaves to humanity
All of us
As night would fall
The chimp climbed in his arms
To hold him close
Francais
Two and two I can do
So I read the poem Bill gave me
And it’s all true
Bill: (aria)
I, Bill C. Schneiderman, do hereby declare
From this year forth, this date shall bear
The name Animal Freedom Day
Across the mighty nation of U.S.A.
And that is in honor of what I created
By seeing the beasts liberated:
In the name of all robots and slaves
I freed giraffes from their pens, the chimps from their cage
Flamingos, go! Polar bears, dare!
Each zoo animal, no matter where
Shall know what it is to be free
To roam the streets, to climb the trees!
And so from the depth of our inhibited beingness
We shall recognize all of our animal needingness
To burst forth from our cages, real and unreal
To breathe, to see, to touch, to feel
The lesson we take from the zoo liberation
Is that, like beasts, we crave validation.
And what did I learn as I followed my bliss?
There is nothing so sweet as a chimp’s gentle kiss.
So each year we will gather and set the beasts free
And teach the children this example of glee
Bill exits stage left.
Francais:
I decided
I would not publish this poem
For Bill’s own good
So his work,
Like many other great poems
Will remain unread
As I walked home
I sensed a presence as I passed
An alleyway
A pair of eyes
Or was it my imagination
Glowing yellow eyes
Down the alley
Amid trash, rags and cardboard
Glowing reptile eyes
Watching me
Or was it my imagination
Glowing yellow eyes
Monday, May 19, 2008
The Starving Artist and the Chimp (Part II)
Libretto for an Opera
ACT II
Francais enters stage left, holding a red notebook, and sings in a spotlight on the left side of the stage.
Francais:
I found a strange text in this red notebook
While walking in the park on Saturday
Walking in the park on a break from work
Does anyone here know who wrote this text?
The notebook writer enters stage right and sings in a spotlight on the right side of the stage.
The Notebook Writer:
I was reading people’s posts on Craigslist
No, not the sex ads,
No, not the sex ads
The literary and writing forum
Found a question that
Caught my attention:
Someone called Talker
Writing a story
Needed an idea
How does an artist
A starving artist
Find himself a chimp?
Working at a zoo
Is that what to do?
He wanted to know
Thought that he could ask
Writers on the site
For a better way
That his artist,
His starving artist could
Find himself a chimp
I had work to do
So I left the site
But I had an idea
What if the artist
Was an activist
Who frees chimps from labs?
I went back later
Ghost of Majestic
Had the same idea
Well not quite the same
Similar enough
Mine was not needed
But I was intrigued
As I thought about
The artist and the chimp
How can the artist
Find the chimp he needs?
Soon I decided:
The starving artist
Is not an activist
That just wouldn’t work
He is a loner
Society’s outcast
Would not join a group
He lives in a loft
He is a painter
No, he’s a sculptor
Who needs a piece of wood
To create the art
He has in his mind
A dancer enters stage right and performs an erotic ballet during the following verses:
A girl in his building
Strips at a nightclub
And she knows a man
A customer of hers
An importer of wood
From Indonesia
She knows where he works
He gave her a case
Of clove cigarettes
Trade for a lap dance
That she gave to him
One night at the club
She loves the artist
Tells him where to go
To get what he needs
To create the art
He has in his head
Can she be his muse?
The dancer completes her ballet, striking several poses as if modeling for a sculpture, then exits stage right.
The artist breaks in
To the businesman’s
Warehouse after dark
He lifts up a tarp
He does not see wood
Instead there's a cage
In the cage a chimp
A screaming, shrieking chimp
And the artist, he screams, too
Chorus:
Waaaaah! Woooooh!
(Sounds of human and chimp screams.)
The Notebook Writer:
He sees a clipboard
Reads the documents
Knows what’s going on
The businessman imports
Chimps from his country
For drug companies
For experiments
To test the treatments
For curing disease
Suddenly …
Activists arrive
Jump on the artist
Think he’s the bad guy
They tie him to a chair
And free all the chimps
Then they take their leave
One chimp stays behind
Unties the artist
Ponders his next move
Looks at the artist
Thinks a moment more
Then says: ‘You need me.’
He’s a talking chimp!
He helps take the wood
For the sculptor’s art
Inside the stolen wood
Smuggled heroin
Soon they’re on the run
The Indonesian man
Wants his heroin
And his talking chimp
I will write that tale!
No, that’s not the kind
Of thing that I write
I write tales of love
Of self-discovery
But I had a good time
Imagining this
Story of the chimp
And starving artist
The Notebook writer exits stage right.
Francais:
That was what was written
In the red notebook
Can anyone find
The author for me?
Maybe the writer
Wants the notebook back?
But now, more than that,
I have a story
A story of my own
That I want to tell
To the writer of
The red notebook I found:
That afternoon I took the bus back home
It’s a long bus ride, it’s a very long ride
I thought about the talking chimp
And if I could I tell the tale
From the chimp’s point of view
That’s what I was thinking
As I fell asleep and dreamed
I fell asleep and dreamed
I was in my house
And the telephone rang
When I picked it up
I heard a voice say:
Chorus enters stage right, swaying, finger-snapping, chanting:
Chorus:
Go to the window, the kitchen window
Go to the window, the kitchen window
/Francais:
|
|So I looked out my window
|My kitchen window
|
|Chorus:
|
\Go to the window, the kitchen window
Francais:
/So I looked out my window
|My kitchen window
|
|Chorus
|
\Go to the window, the kitchen window
/Francais:
|
|And there was a chimp
|Holding a phone and
|Looking straight at me
|
|Chorus:
|
|Go to the window, the kitchen window
\Go to the window, the kitchen window
Chorus exits stage right.
Francais:
I was terrified
Why was I so scared?
Because I was not me
I was there, outside
Looking in at me
I’d become the chimp
I was the chimp with
The phone in my hand
In my hand the phone
I was not dreaming
That I was the chimp
That I was the chimp
The chimp was dreaming
That he was me
That he was me
The chimp was dreaming
I found a notebook
And took the bus home
The chimp was dreaming
I sat at my desk
And started to type
The chimp was dreaming
That I wrote these words
These words you’re reading
Chorus enters stage right.
Chorus:
Go to the window, the kitchen window. (Repeat as Francais continues singing.)
Francais:
My life is just
The dream of a chimp
The dream of a chimp
Is my life just
The dream of a chimp?
The dream of a chimp?
But that can’t be true
I’m a real person
With real feelings, too
It just can’t be true
I’m a real person
At least I feel real
I’m not a chimp’s dream
Do I really know
How could I prove it?
(Chorus stops chanting as Francais concludes.)
How could I prove it?
How could I prove it?
How cold you prove it?
ACT II
Francais enters stage left, holding a red notebook, and sings in a spotlight on the left side of the stage.
Francais:
I found a strange text in this red notebook
While walking in the park on Saturday
Walking in the park on a break from work
Does anyone here know who wrote this text?
The notebook writer enters stage right and sings in a spotlight on the right side of the stage.
The Notebook Writer:
I was reading people’s posts on Craigslist
No, not the sex ads,
No, not the sex ads
The literary and writing forum
Found a question that
Caught my attention:
Someone called Talker
Writing a story
Needed an idea
How does an artist
A starving artist
Find himself a chimp?
Working at a zoo
Is that what to do?
He wanted to know
Thought that he could ask
Writers on the site
For a better way
That his artist,
His starving artist could
Find himself a chimp
I had work to do
So I left the site
But I had an idea
What if the artist
Was an activist
Who frees chimps from labs?
I went back later
Ghost of Majestic
Had the same idea
Well not quite the same
Similar enough
Mine was not needed
But I was intrigued
As I thought about
The artist and the chimp
How can the artist
Find the chimp he needs?
Soon I decided:
The starving artist
Is not an activist
That just wouldn’t work
He is a loner
Society’s outcast
Would not join a group
He lives in a loft
He is a painter
No, he’s a sculptor
Who needs a piece of wood
To create the art
He has in his mind
A dancer enters stage right and performs an erotic ballet during the following verses:
A girl in his building
Strips at a nightclub
And she knows a man
A customer of hers
An importer of wood
From Indonesia
She knows where he works
He gave her a case
Of clove cigarettes
Trade for a lap dance
That she gave to him
One night at the club
She loves the artist
Tells him where to go
To get what he needs
To create the art
He has in his head
Can she be his muse?
The dancer completes her ballet, striking several poses as if modeling for a sculpture, then exits stage right.
The artist breaks in
To the businesman’s
Warehouse after dark
He lifts up a tarp
He does not see wood
Instead there's a cage
In the cage a chimp
A screaming, shrieking chimp
And the artist, he screams, too
Chorus:
Waaaaah! Woooooh!
(Sounds of human and chimp screams.)
The Notebook Writer:
He sees a clipboard
Reads the documents
Knows what’s going on
The businessman imports
Chimps from his country
For drug companies
For experiments
To test the treatments
For curing disease
Suddenly …
Activists arrive
Jump on the artist
Think he’s the bad guy
They tie him to a chair
And free all the chimps
Then they take their leave
One chimp stays behind
Unties the artist
Ponders his next move
Looks at the artist
Thinks a moment more
Then says: ‘You need me.’
He’s a talking chimp!
He helps take the wood
For the sculptor’s art
Inside the stolen wood
Smuggled heroin
Soon they’re on the run
The Indonesian man
Wants his heroin
And his talking chimp
I will write that tale!
No, that’s not the kind
Of thing that I write
I write tales of love
Of self-discovery
But I had a good time
Imagining this
Story of the chimp
And starving artist
The Notebook writer exits stage right.
Francais:
That was what was written
In the red notebook
Can anyone find
The author for me?
Maybe the writer
Wants the notebook back?
But now, more than that,
I have a story
A story of my own
That I want to tell
To the writer of
The red notebook I found:
That afternoon I took the bus back home
It’s a long bus ride, it’s a very long ride
I thought about the talking chimp
And if I could I tell the tale
From the chimp’s point of view
That’s what I was thinking
As I fell asleep and dreamed
I fell asleep and dreamed
I was in my house
And the telephone rang
When I picked it up
I heard a voice say:
Chorus enters stage right, swaying, finger-snapping, chanting:
Chorus:
Go to the window, the kitchen window
Go to the window, the kitchen window
/Francais:
|
|So I looked out my window
|My kitchen window
|
|Chorus:
|
\Go to the window, the kitchen window
Francais:
/So I looked out my window
|My kitchen window
|
|Chorus
|
\Go to the window, the kitchen window
/Francais:
|
|And there was a chimp
|Holding a phone and
|Looking straight at me
|
|Chorus:
|
|Go to the window, the kitchen window
\Go to the window, the kitchen window
Chorus exits stage right.
Francais:
I was terrified
Why was I so scared?
Because I was not me
I was there, outside
Looking in at me
I’d become the chimp
I was the chimp with
The phone in my hand
In my hand the phone
I was not dreaming
That I was the chimp
That I was the chimp
The chimp was dreaming
That he was me
That he was me
The chimp was dreaming
I found a notebook
And took the bus home
The chimp was dreaming
I sat at my desk
And started to type
The chimp was dreaming
That I wrote these words
These words you’re reading
Chorus enters stage right.
Chorus:
Go to the window, the kitchen window. (Repeat as Francais continues singing.)
Francais:
My life is just
The dream of a chimp
The dream of a chimp
Is my life just
The dream of a chimp?
The dream of a chimp?
But that can’t be true
I’m a real person
With real feelings, too
It just can’t be true
I’m a real person
At least I feel real
I’m not a chimp’s dream
Do I really know
How could I prove it?
(Chorus stops chanting as Francais concludes.)
How could I prove it?
How could I prove it?
How cold you prove it?
Friday, April 25, 2008
The Starving Artist and the Chimp (Part I)
Libretto for an Opera
OVERTURE
Chorus:
All of us are like the starving artist
All of us are like the chimpanzee
Both of them are slaves to humanity
All of us are slaves to humanity
ACT I
Talker, IAA, Ghost, Sheisty, Tapas, Francais are on stage. Each singer is at a desk, or in a cubicle, or at a table. Each singer is typing on a computer or a laptop before singing. The spotlight isolates each one as he or she is singing; the others are in darkness.
Talker:
I’ve started to write a story about
A starving artist and a chimpanzee
The artist has the idea that a chimp
Can help him escape from his poverty
How would my artist get the chimp?
Does he apply for a job at a zoo?
I’ve come to the Craigslist writing forum
For some suggestions on what I could do
IAA:
But what will happen when he gets the chimp?
I suggest they starve to death together
The chimp is a slave to humanity
And so is the artist – keep it short, though
Talker:
The chimp will make him rich but not for long
At the end there will be a disaster
IAA:
I think my version is better than yours
If you don’t write it then maybe I will
After all, there’s been more than one story
Written about a lady and her dog
Talker:
Please don’t think I don’t like your suggestion
I’m asking how the artist gets the chimp
I already have my story’s ending
I need some literary Tabasco
IAA:
The reader wants the chimp to go apeshit
Narrative tension requires tragedy
I did not mean to sound so defensive
VainlyJane:
Apeshit! Funny stuff! LMFAO!
Talker:
You’re right about adding the tragedy
A car hits the chimp, a cop could shoot him
We think that the chimp has met his demise
Then the audience gets a big surprise!
Sheisty:
I like IAA’s suggestions a lot
It would be ‘La Boheme’ meets Marx Brothers
Talker:
Comedy all the way, with feelings too
The chimp, a slave to humanity, yes
But this chimp is a slave up to a point
I can’t wait for the chimp revolution!
Tapas:
When I was a girl a chimp bit my friend
When she stuck her finger in Bobo’s cage
The authorities then took him away
Could your artist get his chimp in that way?
Talker:
What would you think of my starving artist
Kidnapping the chimp from a movie set
Where he just got a job as a painter?
Tapas:
I thought my friend was a complete moron.
Ghost:
The artist could be for animal rights
And break into a lab to free the chimps
Talker:
Yes! That is the answer to my question
That is how my artist will get the chimp!
Ghost:
I once had a chimp I taught to throw darts
I pasted the stock pages on a wall
Then bought shares in the companies she hit
And that is how I made my first million
VainlyJane:
Could the starving artist have a dead squirrel
And believe it is a live chimpanzee?
They could perform together for spare change
On a street corner … that would rock so hard!
Talker:
I’m not understanding how a dead squirrel
Could be passed off as a live chimpanzee
Ghost:
It has become cliché to use dead squirrels
To serve any literary purpose
VainlyJane:
Sorry, sorry, what a stupid mistake
I am an idiot! Sorry, sorry!
Ghost:
There is no need for self-flagellation
Just pick yourself up and write something new
MumbleMumble:
Dead squirrel as live chimp, I love the idea
Dead squirrel as live chimp, what a great idea
Sheisty
(Aria)
There was an old man, alone and so sad
In the apartment next door to my dad
When he was still in Pentagon City
The old man died and it wasn’t pretty
He had no family and he had no friends
No one knew that he had come to his end
His body was in a state of decay
The smell was the thing that gave it away
And his cockatoo, emitting loud shrieks
Trying to waken the man from his sleep
So building management opened the door
And found that the man was living no more
Your artist’s neighbor could be found deceased
And his chimp would scream, and his chimp would wail
The starving artist could befriend the beast
And that would be the first part of your tale
He had no family and he had no friends
No one knew that he had come to his end
His body was in a state of decay
The smell was the thing that gave it away
And his chimpanzee, emitting loud shrieks
Trying to waken the man from his sleep
So building management opened the door
And found that the man was living no more
That is how you can begin your story
The starving artist and the chimpanzee
Both of them are slaves to humanity
All of us are slaves to humanity
Both of them are slaves to humanity
All of us are slaves to humanity
In the beginning the starving artist
Is having some trouble paying his rent
He has an argument with his landlord
On other things his money has been spent
The next day the landlord comes to his end
Then the artist adopts the landlord’s chimp
The two of them struggle to survive
The chimp learns to paint to keep them alive
They become two successful performers
First, on street corners, soon they are famous
The chimp then begins to feel he’s been used
He rebels, he won’t paint, it’s outrageous
The chimp will rise up against the artist
There will be chaos, there will be chaos
Both of them are slaves to humanity
All of us are slaves to humanity
MumbleMumble:
I want to argue in favor of Jane
I do not think what she said was insane …
Let us suppose it’s not a dead squirrel
Let’s give the concept another whirl
It’s just a stuffed chimp, the chimp’s just a toy
He believes it’s alive, wait that’s not it:
He makes other people think it’s alive
And he paints with it – A toy chimp “puppet”
So have your artist get his chimp
By stealing it from Toys R Us.
Talker:
But the story is about a chimp who can paint
I don’t want to say your idea is not good
Is there a way a stuffed toy can paint?
If you can tell me how that would work …
MumbleMumble:
It’s just that now I’ve hit upon something
A story about a stuffed chimpanzee
And the artist, who begins to pretend
The mechanized toy chimp can write, you see
The chimp creates “automatic” texts,
Like Yeats and his wife with their Ouija board
The chimp makes a name as a prophet
The artist opens a psychic hotline
Then a cult forms to preach the chimp’s teachings
The artist starts making some real cash … for a while
Talker:
Everyone has been so helpful
I like all these ideas so much
I wish we could get together
We’d skip out on work for one day,
And have a big party instead
I’ve had such a great time with you all
Ah, but I fantasize …
I will let you all know when I’m finished
My book is based upon a true story
Of an artist I saw once, on a street corner
Holding the paintbrush was his chimpanzee
I thought of those paintings by elephants
And how people buy them for thousands of dollars
Will this chimp be famous? I said to myself
But the chimp did not look happy at all
He was slapping the brush against the easel so hard
I thought the painting was going to fall
Also the chimp had an ‘I’m-going-mad’-look
And a really cold stare coming out of his eyes
This was a chimp who needs some time off
This is one angry chimp, I said to myself
And one day he’ll say: enough is enough
There will be chaos, there will be chaos
Paste:
And now I have a news flash: “This Just In:”
A homeless man was helping Mayor Dodson
With baby-sitting for his chimpanzee
And the mayor’s housekeeper was not happy
“A good-for-nothing bum, if you ask me”
Mrs. Stape declared in a smug-toned voice
Mr. Pimpletone had the same view point
“We don’t want him here, if we have a choice”
But Tina TwoBottom was interested
She’s the one starring in “Back That Thing Up”
“Homeless guys are hot, this one I would date
If he’d take a bath, he’d drink from my cup”
The mayor’s opposition went for his throat
They called it a ploy for sympathy votes
Because their man was leading in the polls
They said the artist was just playing a role
Talker:
I have read your news flash inspiration
Not what I’m looking for but thanks the same
TripleDash
The starving artist finds a job
As a caretaker for a chimp
Owned by a mega-rich rock star
The artist runs away with the chimp
With the rock star in hot pursuit
Talker
I like that idea, that’s a great idea!
Chorus:
He likes that idea, that’s a great idea!
That’s a great idea, he likes that idea!
VainlyJane:
The chimp is in an apartment
The artist climbs the fire escape
They become friends through the window
He teaches the chimp to break free
Talker:
I do think that could work:
In a starved state of mind
The unshaven artist
Limps along a sidewalk
Then he smells sweet apples
Gazing upward he sees
An apple pie cooling
In a row-house window
“I think that pie’s for me!”
That’s what he tells himself
When he reaches for it
Whoa! A chimp grabs his wrist
“Woo-ha-ha-woo-ha-ha”
The chimp begins screaming
“Just let me go, I’ll go!
“Let go of me, you boob!”
He begs the chimpanzee
A woman’s voice replies:
Tapas:
“He’s not a boob, you know,
He’s my pet chimpanzee
And you, you’re just a thief
I will call the police!”
Talker:
He implores her not to
“Please don’t do that miss!
Please just let me explain!”
You can see where this goes
The artist gets his chimp
And he falls in love, too
IAA:
Let’s all write stories of artists and chimps
/IAA:
|
|Artists and chimps in all of our stories
|
|Francais:
\We’ll all write stories of artists and chimps
/IAA:
|
|Both of them are slaves to humanity
|
|Francais:
|
|Chimps and artists in all of our stories
|
|Tapas:
\Let’s all write stories of chimps and artists
/IAA:
|
|All of us are slaves to humanity
|
|Francais:
|
|Both of them are slaves to humanity
|
|Tapas:
|
|Artists and chimps in all of our stories
|
|Sheisty:
|
\Let’s all write stories of artists and chimps
/IAA:
|
|All of us are slaves to humanity
|
|All others:
|
\We’ll all write stories, we’ll all write stories
/Tapas:
|
|About the starving artist and the chimp
|
|All others:
|
\We’ll all write stories, we’ll all write stories
IAA:
I had tickets for Terry Gross last night
I couldn’t go so I gave them away
But I heard it was a pretty good show
Sheisty:
I think I’ll post my story on Monday
/IAA:
|
|All of us are slaves to humanity
|
|All others:
|
\We’ll all write stories, we’ll all write stories
OVERTURE
Chorus:
All of us are like the starving artist
All of us are like the chimpanzee
Both of them are slaves to humanity
All of us are slaves to humanity
ACT I
Talker, IAA, Ghost, Sheisty, Tapas, Francais are on stage. Each singer is at a desk, or in a cubicle, or at a table. Each singer is typing on a computer or a laptop before singing. The spotlight isolates each one as he or she is singing; the others are in darkness.
Talker:
I’ve started to write a story about
A starving artist and a chimpanzee
The artist has the idea that a chimp
Can help him escape from his poverty
How would my artist get the chimp?
Does he apply for a job at a zoo?
I’ve come to the Craigslist writing forum
For some suggestions on what I could do
IAA:
But what will happen when he gets the chimp?
I suggest they starve to death together
The chimp is a slave to humanity
And so is the artist – keep it short, though
Talker:
The chimp will make him rich but not for long
At the end there will be a disaster
IAA:
I think my version is better than yours
If you don’t write it then maybe I will
After all, there’s been more than one story
Written about a lady and her dog
Talker:
Please don’t think I don’t like your suggestion
I’m asking how the artist gets the chimp
I already have my story’s ending
I need some literary Tabasco
IAA:
The reader wants the chimp to go apeshit
Narrative tension requires tragedy
I did not mean to sound so defensive
VainlyJane:
Apeshit! Funny stuff! LMFAO!
Talker:
You’re right about adding the tragedy
A car hits the chimp, a cop could shoot him
We think that the chimp has met his demise
Then the audience gets a big surprise!
Sheisty:
I like IAA’s suggestions a lot
It would be ‘La Boheme’ meets Marx Brothers
Talker:
Comedy all the way, with feelings too
The chimp, a slave to humanity, yes
But this chimp is a slave up to a point
I can’t wait for the chimp revolution!
Tapas:
When I was a girl a chimp bit my friend
When she stuck her finger in Bobo’s cage
The authorities then took him away
Could your artist get his chimp in that way?
Talker:
What would you think of my starving artist
Kidnapping the chimp from a movie set
Where he just got a job as a painter?
Tapas:
I thought my friend was a complete moron.
Ghost:
The artist could be for animal rights
And break into a lab to free the chimps
Talker:
Yes! That is the answer to my question
That is how my artist will get the chimp!
Ghost:
I once had a chimp I taught to throw darts
I pasted the stock pages on a wall
Then bought shares in the companies she hit
And that is how I made my first million
VainlyJane:
Could the starving artist have a dead squirrel
And believe it is a live chimpanzee?
They could perform together for spare change
On a street corner … that would rock so hard!
Talker:
I’m not understanding how a dead squirrel
Could be passed off as a live chimpanzee
Ghost:
It has become cliché to use dead squirrels
To serve any literary purpose
VainlyJane:
Sorry, sorry, what a stupid mistake
I am an idiot! Sorry, sorry!
Ghost:
There is no need for self-flagellation
Just pick yourself up and write something new
MumbleMumble:
Dead squirrel as live chimp, I love the idea
Dead squirrel as live chimp, what a great idea
Sheisty
(Aria)
There was an old man, alone and so sad
In the apartment next door to my dad
When he was still in Pentagon City
The old man died and it wasn’t pretty
He had no family and he had no friends
No one knew that he had come to his end
His body was in a state of decay
The smell was the thing that gave it away
And his cockatoo, emitting loud shrieks
Trying to waken the man from his sleep
So building management opened the door
And found that the man was living no more
Your artist’s neighbor could be found deceased
And his chimp would scream, and his chimp would wail
The starving artist could befriend the beast
And that would be the first part of your tale
He had no family and he had no friends
No one knew that he had come to his end
His body was in a state of decay
The smell was the thing that gave it away
And his chimpanzee, emitting loud shrieks
Trying to waken the man from his sleep
So building management opened the door
And found that the man was living no more
That is how you can begin your story
The starving artist and the chimpanzee
Both of them are slaves to humanity
All of us are slaves to humanity
Both of them are slaves to humanity
All of us are slaves to humanity
In the beginning the starving artist
Is having some trouble paying his rent
He has an argument with his landlord
On other things his money has been spent
The next day the landlord comes to his end
Then the artist adopts the landlord’s chimp
The two of them struggle to survive
The chimp learns to paint to keep them alive
They become two successful performers
First, on street corners, soon they are famous
The chimp then begins to feel he’s been used
He rebels, he won’t paint, it’s outrageous
The chimp will rise up against the artist
There will be chaos, there will be chaos
Both of them are slaves to humanity
All of us are slaves to humanity
MumbleMumble:
I want to argue in favor of Jane
I do not think what she said was insane …
Let us suppose it’s not a dead squirrel
Let’s give the concept another whirl
It’s just a stuffed chimp, the chimp’s just a toy
He believes it’s alive, wait that’s not it:
He makes other people think it’s alive
And he paints with it – A toy chimp “puppet”
So have your artist get his chimp
By stealing it from Toys R Us.
Talker:
But the story is about a chimp who can paint
I don’t want to say your idea is not good
Is there a way a stuffed toy can paint?
If you can tell me how that would work …
MumbleMumble:
It’s just that now I’ve hit upon something
A story about a stuffed chimpanzee
And the artist, who begins to pretend
The mechanized toy chimp can write, you see
The chimp creates “automatic” texts,
Like Yeats and his wife with their Ouija board
The chimp makes a name as a prophet
The artist opens a psychic hotline
Then a cult forms to preach the chimp’s teachings
The artist starts making some real cash … for a while
Talker:
Everyone has been so helpful
I like all these ideas so much
I wish we could get together
We’d skip out on work for one day,
And have a big party instead
I’ve had such a great time with you all
Ah, but I fantasize …
I will let you all know when I’m finished
My book is based upon a true story
Of an artist I saw once, on a street corner
Holding the paintbrush was his chimpanzee
I thought of those paintings by elephants
And how people buy them for thousands of dollars
Will this chimp be famous? I said to myself
But the chimp did not look happy at all
He was slapping the brush against the easel so hard
I thought the painting was going to fall
Also the chimp had an ‘I’m-going-mad’-look
And a really cold stare coming out of his eyes
This was a chimp who needs some time off
This is one angry chimp, I said to myself
And one day he’ll say: enough is enough
There will be chaos, there will be chaos
Paste:
And now I have a news flash: “This Just In:”
A homeless man was helping Mayor Dodson
With baby-sitting for his chimpanzee
And the mayor’s housekeeper was not happy
“A good-for-nothing bum, if you ask me”
Mrs. Stape declared in a smug-toned voice
Mr. Pimpletone had the same view point
“We don’t want him here, if we have a choice”
But Tina TwoBottom was interested
She’s the one starring in “Back That Thing Up”
“Homeless guys are hot, this one I would date
If he’d take a bath, he’d drink from my cup”
The mayor’s opposition went for his throat
They called it a ploy for sympathy votes
Because their man was leading in the polls
They said the artist was just playing a role
Talker:
I have read your news flash inspiration
Not what I’m looking for but thanks the same
TripleDash
The starving artist finds a job
As a caretaker for a chimp
Owned by a mega-rich rock star
The artist runs away with the chimp
With the rock star in hot pursuit
Talker
I like that idea, that’s a great idea!
Chorus:
He likes that idea, that’s a great idea!
That’s a great idea, he likes that idea!
VainlyJane:
The chimp is in an apartment
The artist climbs the fire escape
They become friends through the window
He teaches the chimp to break free
Talker:
I do think that could work:
In a starved state of mind
The unshaven artist
Limps along a sidewalk
Then he smells sweet apples
Gazing upward he sees
An apple pie cooling
In a row-house window
“I think that pie’s for me!”
That’s what he tells himself
When he reaches for it
Whoa! A chimp grabs his wrist
“Woo-ha-ha-woo-ha-ha”
The chimp begins screaming
“Just let me go, I’ll go!
“Let go of me, you boob!”
He begs the chimpanzee
A woman’s voice replies:
Tapas:
“He’s not a boob, you know,
He’s my pet chimpanzee
And you, you’re just a thief
I will call the police!”
Talker:
He implores her not to
“Please don’t do that miss!
Please just let me explain!”
You can see where this goes
The artist gets his chimp
And he falls in love, too
IAA:
Let’s all write stories of artists and chimps
/IAA:
|
|Artists and chimps in all of our stories
|
|Francais:
\We’ll all write stories of artists and chimps
/IAA:
|
|Both of them are slaves to humanity
|
|Francais:
|
|Chimps and artists in all of our stories
|
|Tapas:
\Let’s all write stories of chimps and artists
/IAA:
|
|All of us are slaves to humanity
|
|Francais:
|
|Both of them are slaves to humanity
|
|Tapas:
|
|Artists and chimps in all of our stories
|
|Sheisty:
|
\Let’s all write stories of artists and chimps
/IAA:
|
|All of us are slaves to humanity
|
|All others:
|
\We’ll all write stories, we’ll all write stories
/Tapas:
|
|About the starving artist and the chimp
|
|All others:
|
\We’ll all write stories, we’ll all write stories
IAA:
I had tickets for Terry Gross last night
I couldn’t go so I gave them away
But I heard it was a pretty good show
Sheisty:
I think I’ll post my story on Monday
/IAA:
|
|All of us are slaves to humanity
|
|All others:
|
\We’ll all write stories, we’ll all write stories
Monday, January 28, 2008
The Bishop Moves Diagonally
What happened to you, that boy whose sister
Gave him a chess set when he was six
Born in America, during the Holocaust
What a strange game you would play, Bobby Fischer
Your mother was Jewish, her husband Hans, German
He was suspected of Communist sympathies
He could not come here so you never knew him
Your real father was a Hungarian Jew, Paul
When you learned the bishop moves diagonally
You said: “All I want to do, ever, is play chess.”
New York in the fifties, what an amazing place
Boom times and beatniks, a world of possibilities
Mom left you alone with your sister in Brooklyn
And moved to England, across the Atlantic
While you were playing your pawns and rooks
Did you feel that she had abandoned you?
Soon you were named the world’s youngest grand master
The shiniest star in your strange galaxy
To its formulas and strategies you would bring
Your burning talent and something beyond
A Jewish agency arranged my adoption
Just a few miles away from where you were
Spending your days perfecting your play
And learning to see things that others could not
You were losing a game to Robert Byrne
But with a few moves you made a comeback
For a checkmate so stunning that they said
You were like Rembrandt, or Brahms, or Shakespeare
We moved to L.A. and my dad’s friend Maurice
Came from New York and gave me a chess set
And showed me that the bishop moves diagonally
I taught my dad and we’d play together
You lost to the Soviets, your game went badly
Even so, you accused them of cheating
And dropped out of championships for five years
Until the rules were changed to your liking
My dad and mom took me to San Diego
We crossed the border to shop in Tijuana
We bought a cheap steel-stringed guitar
And a big, beautiful wooden chess set
Soviet missiles were aimed at my neighborhood
Targeting Lockheed, Rocketdyne and Hughes
We kept hearing we could die any day
And we believed it because it was true
One morning in ’71 the earthquake hit
Shaking so hard that our pool splashed half empty
For a few seconds I thought the bombs had all fallen
And it was the end of everyone and everything
Later that year my dad bought me tickets
To see Led Zeppelin at the Forum in Inglewood
So I heard the song, “Stairway to Heaven”
The first time the band ever played it in public
The concert opened with “Immigrant Song”
A driving guitar riff and pounding drums
“We come from the land of the ice and snow”
Then “Dazed and Confused” with a violin bow
Soon you would take the role of our champion
Against the Soviets, like David faced Goliath
With no armor, naked, just a slingshot
You had no missiles, but would play Boris Spassky
An arena of rock fans would cheer Jimmy Page
When he played the guitar lines for “Whole Lotta Love”
While all around the world, not thousands but millions
Were rooting for you, Bobby, millions and millions
So you went to the land of the ice and snow
You complained about noise, you were surly, impatient
But your game was so bold, so new and so strong
Even Spassky applauded one of your checkmates
That was about when I stopped seeing my friends
I was tired of them, they didn’t like me much either
I’d stay home Friday nights and set up the pieces
To play two or three quiet games with my dad
Spassky left before the tournament ended
No longer respectful, he phoned in his forfeit
And that’s when you became the world champion
The greatest player in the history of chess
You gave $61,000 to a Pasadena church
Jesus would come back in ’75, they said
But he didn’t so you walked out on them
You should have asked for your money back, Bobby
Three years after your triumph in Iceland
You were living alone in an acquaintance’s basement
They say she was your only friend in the world
A little old lady from Pasadena
One day the cops thought that you were burglar
You were arrested then you claimed they abused you
You wrote a 14-page pamphlet and called it
“I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse”
I didn’t know you were there then, so close
Just a few miles from me down the freeway
I wouldn’t have visited you, though, Bobby
I had lost interest in you and your game
I don’t think my father ever really knew
How much I loved playing chess with him
Those Friday nights when I was fourteen and fifteen
Enjoying his quiet company, his kindness
You refused a challenge from Karpov
So they took away your title of champion
I was in college, working nights at a porn theater
I’d sit in the stairway, reading Mishima and Ibsen
I finished my studies in Paris and got a job there,
Kasparov beat Karpov in a weird tournament
They played the same game over and over!
You were invisible, a penniless hermit
In French, the king is le roi, the queen is la reine
But the bishop is not l’eveque. The bishop is
Le fou – the fool, or literally: crazy
Is that because the bishop moves diagonally?
I flew from France for my father’s funeral
It was my worst day, Dad, and not just because
We would never play chess again
I never thanked you for all you had done for me
I moved back to L.A. to take care of my mom
The Soviet Union was signed into oblivion
With the stroke of a pen that Gorbachev borrowed
From an American who was standing next to him
Slobo was doing his ethnic cleansing
I was visiting Paris and I was told
A Yugoslav friend went to look for his mom there
And to this day I don’t know if he found her.
You didn’t care, Bobby, you played there anyway
You beat Spassky again and won three million dollars
But you lost your country and was stripped of your passport
You placed the blame on a Jewish conspiracy
Then Kasparov faced the Big Blue computer
In a chess match designed to determine
If a computer could outmatch a champion
A machine cannot love and a machine cannot hate
You were drifting from country to country
They say you were in Germany and Hungary
Were you looking for the fathers you never knew,
The communist husband, the Jewish lover?
One winter morning I buried mom next to dad
The porn place I’d worked at turned into a theater
They staged “The Doll’s House” there one weekend
The dream was a world or the world was a dream?
Your mother and sister had died, Bobby Fischer
And you could not come home to tell them goodbye
But you would not sit quietly and play random chess
There was still something more that you needed to say
Arabs crashed planes into twin towers
Across the river from where you grew up
Just down the street from Washington Square
Where you were perfecting your game when you were young
How could you rejoice over the blood,
The severed limbs, people burning and falling?
They were not chess pieces, Bobby Fischer,
Not pawns, not knights. How could you think that?
Your words were brought to us across the Pacific
Manila radio let you describe your approval
As crowds crossed the bridge back to your old Brooklyn
Fleeing the chaos that delighted you so
Later, eight months in a Japanese jail
While the U.S. tried to bring you back to stand trial
But then you were granted refuge in Reykjavik
You went back to the land of the ice and snow
Into the mist you would fade, matching moves
With your wife – she was a chessmaster, too
Could you enjoy the midnight sun with her?
Or did you think it was another Jewish plot?
I went to New York six months after 9/11
And spent a spring morning at Ground Zero
The next day the woman in charge of adoption files
Had just left her office and I still haven’t called her
New York at a new century’s dawn
What an amazing place, a world of the wonderful
“The Graduate” on Broadway, the ballet at Lincoln Center
And the Darger exhibit at the Folk Art Museum
Five years later, Led Zeppelin played Wembley
A million people were bidding for tickets
To hear what I’d heard back in ’71
You were dying in the land of the ice and snow
Bobby Fischer, you could have stopped
And rebuilt all of your ruins
At the end, could you see the missing piece?
The bishop moves diagonally.
Dad, even if you were still alive
You might be too old for chess
Still, I wish we could have kept playing
Those Friday night games forever
Gave him a chess set when he was six
Born in America, during the Holocaust
What a strange game you would play, Bobby Fischer
Your mother was Jewish, her husband Hans, German
He was suspected of Communist sympathies
He could not come here so you never knew him
Your real father was a Hungarian Jew, Paul
When you learned the bishop moves diagonally
You said: “All I want to do, ever, is play chess.”
New York in the fifties, what an amazing place
Boom times and beatniks, a world of possibilities
Mom left you alone with your sister in Brooklyn
And moved to England, across the Atlantic
While you were playing your pawns and rooks
Did you feel that she had abandoned you?
Soon you were named the world’s youngest grand master
The shiniest star in your strange galaxy
To its formulas and strategies you would bring
Your burning talent and something beyond
A Jewish agency arranged my adoption
Just a few miles away from where you were
Spending your days perfecting your play
And learning to see things that others could not
You were losing a game to Robert Byrne
But with a few moves you made a comeback
For a checkmate so stunning that they said
You were like Rembrandt, or Brahms, or Shakespeare
We moved to L.A. and my dad’s friend Maurice
Came from New York and gave me a chess set
And showed me that the bishop moves diagonally
I taught my dad and we’d play together
You lost to the Soviets, your game went badly
Even so, you accused them of cheating
And dropped out of championships for five years
Until the rules were changed to your liking
My dad and mom took me to San Diego
We crossed the border to shop in Tijuana
We bought a cheap steel-stringed guitar
And a big, beautiful wooden chess set
Soviet missiles were aimed at my neighborhood
Targeting Lockheed, Rocketdyne and Hughes
We kept hearing we could die any day
And we believed it because it was true
One morning in ’71 the earthquake hit
Shaking so hard that our pool splashed half empty
For a few seconds I thought the bombs had all fallen
And it was the end of everyone and everything
Later that year my dad bought me tickets
To see Led Zeppelin at the Forum in Inglewood
So I heard the song, “Stairway to Heaven”
The first time the band ever played it in public
The concert opened with “Immigrant Song”
A driving guitar riff and pounding drums
“We come from the land of the ice and snow”
Then “Dazed and Confused” with a violin bow
Soon you would take the role of our champion
Against the Soviets, like David faced Goliath
With no armor, naked, just a slingshot
You had no missiles, but would play Boris Spassky
An arena of rock fans would cheer Jimmy Page
When he played the guitar lines for “Whole Lotta Love”
While all around the world, not thousands but millions
Were rooting for you, Bobby, millions and millions
So you went to the land of the ice and snow
You complained about noise, you were surly, impatient
But your game was so bold, so new and so strong
Even Spassky applauded one of your checkmates
That was about when I stopped seeing my friends
I was tired of them, they didn’t like me much either
I’d stay home Friday nights and set up the pieces
To play two or three quiet games with my dad
Spassky left before the tournament ended
No longer respectful, he phoned in his forfeit
And that’s when you became the world champion
The greatest player in the history of chess
You gave $61,000 to a Pasadena church
Jesus would come back in ’75, they said
But he didn’t so you walked out on them
You should have asked for your money back, Bobby
Three years after your triumph in Iceland
You were living alone in an acquaintance’s basement
They say she was your only friend in the world
A little old lady from Pasadena
One day the cops thought that you were burglar
You were arrested then you claimed they abused you
You wrote a 14-page pamphlet and called it
“I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse”
I didn’t know you were there then, so close
Just a few miles from me down the freeway
I wouldn’t have visited you, though, Bobby
I had lost interest in you and your game
I don’t think my father ever really knew
How much I loved playing chess with him
Those Friday nights when I was fourteen and fifteen
Enjoying his quiet company, his kindness
You refused a challenge from Karpov
So they took away your title of champion
I was in college, working nights at a porn theater
I’d sit in the stairway, reading Mishima and Ibsen
I finished my studies in Paris and got a job there,
Kasparov beat Karpov in a weird tournament
They played the same game over and over!
You were invisible, a penniless hermit
In French, the king is le roi, the queen is la reine
But the bishop is not l’eveque. The bishop is
Le fou – the fool, or literally: crazy
Is that because the bishop moves diagonally?
I flew from France for my father’s funeral
It was my worst day, Dad, and not just because
We would never play chess again
I never thanked you for all you had done for me
I moved back to L.A. to take care of my mom
The Soviet Union was signed into oblivion
With the stroke of a pen that Gorbachev borrowed
From an American who was standing next to him
Slobo was doing his ethnic cleansing
I was visiting Paris and I was told
A Yugoslav friend went to look for his mom there
And to this day I don’t know if he found her.
You didn’t care, Bobby, you played there anyway
You beat Spassky again and won three million dollars
But you lost your country and was stripped of your passport
You placed the blame on a Jewish conspiracy
Then Kasparov faced the Big Blue computer
In a chess match designed to determine
If a computer could outmatch a champion
A machine cannot love and a machine cannot hate
You were drifting from country to country
They say you were in Germany and Hungary
Were you looking for the fathers you never knew,
The communist husband, the Jewish lover?
One winter morning I buried mom next to dad
The porn place I’d worked at turned into a theater
They staged “The Doll’s House” there one weekend
The dream was a world or the world was a dream?
Your mother and sister had died, Bobby Fischer
And you could not come home to tell them goodbye
But you would not sit quietly and play random chess
There was still something more that you needed to say
Arabs crashed planes into twin towers
Across the river from where you grew up
Just down the street from Washington Square
Where you were perfecting your game when you were young
How could you rejoice over the blood,
The severed limbs, people burning and falling?
They were not chess pieces, Bobby Fischer,
Not pawns, not knights. How could you think that?
Your words were brought to us across the Pacific
Manila radio let you describe your approval
As crowds crossed the bridge back to your old Brooklyn
Fleeing the chaos that delighted you so
Later, eight months in a Japanese jail
While the U.S. tried to bring you back to stand trial
But then you were granted refuge in Reykjavik
You went back to the land of the ice and snow
Into the mist you would fade, matching moves
With your wife – she was a chessmaster, too
Could you enjoy the midnight sun with her?
Or did you think it was another Jewish plot?
I went to New York six months after 9/11
And spent a spring morning at Ground Zero
The next day the woman in charge of adoption files
Had just left her office and I still haven’t called her
New York at a new century’s dawn
What an amazing place, a world of the wonderful
“The Graduate” on Broadway, the ballet at Lincoln Center
And the Darger exhibit at the Folk Art Museum
Five years later, Led Zeppelin played Wembley
A million people were bidding for tickets
To hear what I’d heard back in ’71
You were dying in the land of the ice and snow
Bobby Fischer, you could have stopped
And rebuilt all of your ruins
At the end, could you see the missing piece?
The bishop moves diagonally.
Dad, even if you were still alive
You might be too old for chess
Still, I wish we could have kept playing
Those Friday night games forever
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