Unliving doll: outside the box

Unliving dolls

An obsession I return to over and over again is the creepiness of dolls, rivalled only by the creepiness of clowns. Both are meant to bring joy and pleasure to small children (or rather "children of all ages!", as they say at the circus). Come to that, circuses are pretty creepy too, or at least the circuses I saw as a kid:  tawdry is a better word, with sad elephants, bad smells and clowns who had probably seen better days and likely fuelled themselves from a flask.

This is the first video I've found with a complete set of Edison Talking Doll recordings. Or, at least, I fervently pray it is a complete set and I won't find any more. God only knows where they got them, as I would've thought the wax cylinders would have melted down by now. 

The dolls had a most un-cuddly steel  body with holes in it to concentrate the "audio". I think either the crank or the cylinder broke down almost immediately. Did this freak out kids? It might have filled them with wonder. Even some of the stranger dolls from the 1960s were seen as completely charming, like the one who had different facial expressions when you wrenched her arm around (and what was her name, anyway?), or the one who said creepy things like, "I can see in the dark" and "I wish we were twins".

"Doll" has taken on a whole new meaning. When I first heard about "reborns", they were dolls with realistic-looking arms and legs and head, and a cloth body like a conventional vinyl doll. And they were vinyl. Originally, you just took a vinyl doll and mucked around with it until it looked more-or-less real.

Soon the dollmakers upped the ante, placing beating hearts in these things, heaters, voice recordings so they'd cry and coo, and even the capacity to wet and (I think) poop. Jesus, you might as well just have yourself a real kid!

But soon that wasn't enough, either. I began to see dolls molded out of silicone, one-piecers I mean, their limbs jiggling like a rubber frog's. These were so "lifelike" they scared the hell out of me. One of these might run as high as $10,000.00, though I just found this one on eBay:







5h left (Today 5:06PM)
From China
Soft Brown Hair Full Silicone Vinyl Reborn Baby Dolls Lifelike Newborn Baby Doll
$1.99
0 bids


Though it's described here as "full silicone", I have a feeling it's the kind of doll you might find at a dollar store: "Mo-o-o-o-o-m, can I have that doll?" "Oh, okay. It's only worth a couple of bucks."

I have weird feelings about these dolls. I honestly do. After watching a number of "Kaylee's Morning Routine" videos, which made me gasp, I began to wonder what it would be like to own a doll so real-looking that cops broke the glass in hot car windows to rescue them. (Doll owners are not above such pranks and love freaking people out while shopping at Walmart, sometimes casually abandoning them in the ladies' room.) I even. . . no, I didn't, but yes, I DID look at some of them, decided they weren't worth my while and that you needed to pay five grand to get a really good one.

Now I wonder what I was thinking of. Getting a cat seemed to rescue me from such thoughts.  I didn't realize I was at such a low point. At least the cat is real.

If you watch their YouTube videos, the collectors cannot understand why anyone would find their obsession creepy. "Full-body silicone" seems to be the Cadillac of these never-born, never-dead things, quickly replacing those clunky old cloth-bodies that can't even be bathed. This rarefied cult strikes me as stereotyped and largely misunderstood. Wikipedia says reborns are owned almost exclusively by elderly women who at some point suffered the loss of a child, but that's simply not true. Nearly all the videos I've seen are of women in their 20s and 30s, and quite a few of them are teenagers.

I can only assume that they just like having them around to feed, dress, bathe and take on "outings", and collect them obsessively. Elaborate, thrill-packed box-opening ceremonies abound on YouTube, each one packed with as much fun and excitement as a baby shower. These are actually entertaining to watch: though the disaster openings ("ohhhhh noooooo, his head is warped. . .") are even more fun.

I keep thinking of a chant we had in school: "Rubber baby-buggy bumpers". You had to say it ten times fast, or something, though I am not sure why.

POSTSCRIPT (there's always one of those!): I found this weird little entry in Wikipedia, which gets just about everything wrong about reborn dolls:

A reborn doll is a manufactured skin doll that has been transformed to resemble a human infant with as much realism as possible. The process of creating a reborn doll is referred to as reborning and the doll artists are referred to as reborners. Reborn dolls are also known as Bodo dolls or unliving dolls.

I've scoured the internet and found NO reference to "Bodo dolls", though I did find "Bobo dolls". These are the roly-poly clown things that bounce back up when you push them over. For some reason, all sorts of scientific experiments have been done on these that don't interest me at all. "Unliving" isn't easy to find either, except on really creepy sites that have nothing to do with these dolls.

And then there's this:

Social issues and reactions

The overwhelming majority of reborn customers are older women. Many women collect reborns as they would a non-reborn doll, whilst others purchase them to fill a void of a lost child and may treat reborns as living babies. Media features and public receptions have used such adjectives as "creepy" to describe the reborns. This can be explained by the uncanny valley hypothesis. This states that as objects become more lifelike they gain an increasing empathetic response, until a certain point at which the response changes to repulsion. Department stores have refused to stock the dolls because of this reaction, claiming they are too lifelike.

I don't know if I have seen any "older women" on the YouTube videos, if older means 60s or 70s. Many of them are less than half my age. Wikipedia makes no reference at all to the "full-body silicone" doll which is all the rage now. This information is at least ten years out of date. Wiki is mostly put together by guys in their 20s, the ones that live in Mom's basement and really don't get out much, or do much of anything except steal each other's research.

As for department stores not selling them because they are "too lifelike", it's more likely they don't sell them because of the price factor. Really good ones cost hundreds or even many thousands of dollars. Unless they bolted them to the shelves (hmmmmm. . . ), they could stand to lose a lot through shoplifting. Picture it: reborn kidnappers wearing maternity coats sneaking into the toy department and smuggling the little blighters out past the store alarms.

BTW, I'd be interested to see if there is any feuding between "old-school" cloth-bodied reborners and the newer, full-body-silicone crowd. I have never seen a video of a conventional reborn which could be bent and twisted and slung around like this. Nor do they have realistic genitals, a detail which squicks out even some of the most die-hard collectors. That hunk of quivering pink silicone looks EXACTLY like a real baby, folks, and that is exactly what makes it so creepy.

Bodo, anyone?

Damn, I thought I was finished! But I just had a horrible thought. These dolls are molded, right? HOW DO THEY MAKE THE MOLDS? The only method I can think of is to make a plaster cast of a baby. How else could they make it that realistic, down to those last minute bumps of scarlet prickly heat?

Dear God. This is worse than the squawky, distorted, Night of the Living Dead Edison doll recordings! I found some instructions for making a silicone, baby, but I find them kind of hard to believe. Nevertheless, in the interests of science, I will share them with you:

There is one way to do a full mold for a full silicone baby, and I have been researching this, but haven’t done it yet.

You start off by drawing a line through the center of the baby, around its head, fingers, toes.

Then you take some white clay and put it on the bottom of the mold, and pack it into the center lines all around the baby.

You take a flat brush and dampen it and go around the edges making sure the clay is sealed.

Cut off excess on sides to not be wasteful with product.

Take the end of a sharpie with the lid on it, and make holes around the baby, which will be the center holes that hold the mold together. You can even put the round nuts around it if you want to.

Close the mold, and mix the dragon skin, or silicone you are using for the mold, and add flocking for the color you want the mold to be.

Pour the product into the mold covering the baby half that you can see.

Let it cure.

Cut the mold open and remove the clay and any loose silicone that is dangling.

Clean all of the clay off.

Turn the baby over and roll up a clay hole maker to put into the center for the pour hole.

Cover the remainder of the baby.

Let cure.

Remove. It comes apart, but you can pour the baby into the pour hole.

Make sure to Tap tap tap to get all of the air bubbles out, because you don’t want those. It will waste your silicone product. Also turn to cover every nook and cranny.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Bride of Frankenstein in 63 seconds

A white moose in vegetation

Henri 2, Paw de Deux

Helas. . . meow.

"How long were you with the carnival?": Bob Dylan's dream

This snippet from one of the many (MANY) Bob Dylan biographies has always stuck in my mind. It's from Down the Highway by Howard Sounes. He's 20 years old and just getting started in the coffeehouses of Minnesota, when he says something very strange to his current girlfriend, Bonnie Beecher:

"It seemed to Bonnie that Bob's confidence was sometimes out of proportion to his ability, however. 'If the Library of Congress ever comes and asks you for these songs,' Bob told her gravely, 'I want you to sell them for two hundred dollars. I want you to promise this.' Bonnie was flabbergasted. 'I thought, what an outrageous ego! To think that the Library of Congress was going to come and ask Bonnie Beecher for Bobby Dylan's tapes!' But Bob made her promise. 'Yes, I give my word,' she agreed, when she stopped laughing." 

Bob Dylan is Rolling Stone's pick for best songwriter of all time.
Rolling Stone crowns Bob Dylan greatest songwriter of all time; here's who else made the cut

BY BRIAN ANTHONY HERNANDEZAUG 13, 2015

Bob Dylan made you feel his love — and his unforgettable lyrics.

To recognize the folk legend's brilliant contributions to music history, Rolling Stone has placed Dylan at No. 1 on its "100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time" list, a comprehensive ranking spanning many decades.

SEE ALSO: Bob Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone' Interactive Video Mimics TV Surfing

"A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true," Rolling Stone quotes Dylan saying. "They're like strange countries that you have to enter."

Dylan, whose most recent release is 2015's Shadows in the Night, penned such classics as "Like a Rolling Stone," "Blowin' in the Wind," "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," "Forever Young," "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Positively Fourth Street" and "Tangled Up Blue."

Contemporary chart-toppers also earned spots on the list — Taylor Swift (97), Eminem (91), Kanye West (84), Bjork (81), Jay Z (68) — although it's rightfully dominated by artists and writers whose music has stood the test of time over many generations.

Here are the top 25 songwriters on the list; go to Rolling Stone to see the top 100:

25. Randy Newman

24. Elvis Costello

23. Robert Johnson

22. Van Morrison

21. Lou Reed

20. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller

19. Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry

18. Prince

17. Neil Young

16. Leonard Cohen

15. Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland

14. Bruce Springsteen

13. Hank Williams

12. Brian Wilson

11. Bob Marley

10. Stevie Wonder

9. Joni Mitchell

8. Paul Simon

7. Carole King and Gerry Goffin

6. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

5. Smokey Robinson

4. Chuck Berry

3. John Lennon

2. Paul McCartney

1. Bob Dylan

"EPIPHANY!" I make this blue because I had a real snazzeroo of a realization when I was digging up the Bob Dylan quote. The thing is, that quote has been kicking around in my head for quite a while now. It illustrates the absolute Zenlike poise of the Master, the nearly extraterrestrial confidence which sustains a once-in-a-lifetime artist like Dylan through all the rotten tomatoes of existential small-mindedness.

Then comes the Rolling Stone article, in which BD is finally recognized as, not unlike Muhammad Ali, The Greatest, not just of his own time, but for all time. And somehow or other those two realizations twisted together into a perfect pretzel which only required, from me, a little salt.

I never knew much about Bonnie Beecher except that: (a) she was one of many girl friends BD had in Minnesota; (b) she later married Woodstock caterer Wavy Gravy; (c) she might have been the inspiration for Girl from the North Country, though 3 or 4 others also lay claim to the fact; AND (I just found this out) she was on the Twilight Zone! Not only was she on The Twilight Zone, she was on Come Wander With Me, one of the best-known and creepiest episodes, which I remember gave me the heebie-jeebies when I was a kid. It featured a tape recorder playing back a song that had never been recorded, which freaked me right out because I was afraid my old reel-to-reel Webcor might start doing the same thing.

So of course I had to make a gif of Bonnie Beecher! Dylan always got the prettiest girls.

Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART SIX

This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 

Part Six

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel


Aggie

Portman Hotel
October 31, 2003

Last night I dreamed about the Edison doll: and it was freaky, because the doll talked to me all right, but it said things it was never programmed to say, and even answered my questions in a way that made my scalp prickle.

This sort of happened once before, it was when I was eight years old and got a Chatty Cathy doll for my birthday, back in the 1960s. People don’t realize this about me, but I’m nearly 50, not 35 or 40 like they think. I don’t show my age, maybe a benefit of being schizoaffective, who knows. They say people in mental institutions and jails don’t age, they’re protected from reality, or is it just the fact they’re so far outside reality as to escape being marked in the face? Anyway, I kept telling my mother: Mum, the Chatty Cathy doll is talking to me.

Of course it is, Aggie, that’s why they call it a Chatty Cathy doll, it’s supposed to talk to you when you pull the string.

But Mum. I never even pulled it, and it talked.

Aggie, don’t make up stories.

I’m not! I never even went near it, and its eyes were following me all around the room!

Oh, Aggie. What are we going to do with you.

I told myself I had dreamed it. Did I dream it? The two worlds were muddled together sometimes. But whether I was awake or not, I heard it talk. I heard it say, don’t trust the grownups. I heard it say, keep one eye open at night. I heard it say, watch out, little girl. And: keep your head. Keep your head.

A suspicious sort of person, was Chatty Cathy, always on the lookout for danger of every kind.

Next day I found my doll hanging. It was dangling, hair all on end, from my big brother’s bedroom door-knob. He had made a little noose out of string, the kind he used at scouts for tying knots. I gasped and stepped backwards and nearly fell over the cat. 

“Watch out, little girl,” Chatty Cathy said to me in her freaky, squeaky, ripcord-strangulated voice. “Watch out for the people at home.” It was the kind of dream where I was paralyzed, unable to rise or to wake.

So this Edison doll dream was kind of traumatic for me. Brought back things I didn’t want to remember. I turned the crank sticking out of its back, and it recited this odd little poem, let’s see if I can remember how it went:

There are things in the world that we don’t want to see.

There are (people? Souls?) in the world that we don’t want to be.

The strange and the stranger are not what they seem,

And they all (something, something), lost in a dream.

It was almost like a song, a catchy little tune squeaked out by a doll that happened to be 114 years old, a little girl older and freakier-looking than your great-great-grandmother if she somehow managed to stay alive for 114 years.

The song explained a few things. It made a kind of sense to me. It is as if somebody tilted the chessboard, and all the unstable pieces, the ones with no solid foundation, slid down into a kind of crack. Anyway, that was the image that came into my head when the doll was talking to me in that horrible distorted voice. And even though this province now has a strange new ad campaign for the tourist industry with the motto, “This is the best place on earth”, there are those of us down here who might have another opinion.

It’s Halloween, which is probably what has got me so down today; I’m pretty sure of that, because I can’t help but think about Cameron and Suzanne in their costumes, I wonder what they’ll dress up as this year, they’re eight years old now, the same age I was when I got that stupid Chatty Cathy doll, and they’ll want to be something special, not just go as something off the rack from the Safeway store.

And the fact I haven’t seen them in so long makes me want to die sometimes, I’ve been judged unfit to be near them, but I swear, though I admit I don’t really remember it very clearly, that guy coming towards me on the street after dark looked exactly like my Dad. And it was self-defense, there was nobody around to bear witness, Dr. Levy believes me, but I kind of lost track of myself there, until I came to with handcuffs on, and very sore hands which apparently came from trying to throttle this guy to death.

The man’s a real asshole, verbally assaulted me and tried to touch me, but he was determined there were going to be consequences, and even though I didn’t do any time, I’m “watched”, I’m “monitored”, a social worker dogs my footsteps, and I can’t see my kids for the forseeable future, which means I have to assume Jamie is handling things, Jamie who wouldn’t know how to keep order in a home if his life depended on it. And yeah, he loves them and all, I don’t doubt that, and he has a career of sorts, playing the clubs and the street corners, but a jazz musician isn’t necessarily the best father-figure for two impressionable young kids. Jamboy, they call him – Jamboy Jarrett, with his mother-of-pearl saxophone that looks so awesome, like it’s carved out of alabaster or something, almost translucent. We did have some pretty good years, okay, some very good years before I got so sick, or at least it seems like it from where I am now, pretty much on my own. There was some bad stuff here and there, some “issues” as the social worker puts it, God how I hate that word, such a piss-ass term for stuff that’s so horrible. Being crazy is a big issue, apparently, though sometimes I think Jamie’s the crazy one, out there honking his brains out for spare change and a decent meal.

As for my cylinder project, I’m still waiting, the wait has been interminable, weeks and weeks, and Porgy is trying this and trying that, unbending paper clips, rigging up rubber bands, whatever he can think of to get the machine working again. He just got the bright idea of going on the internet to see if he can get some spare parts. Not very likely. The thing hasn’t worked since 1904 or something, no wonder he’s having trouble, being out of commission for a hundred years will do that to you. A century of silence. But think what it’s going to be like, when that baby finally begins to speak.

Szabó

What are Szabó’s thoughts?

What does he think about, a man who is unspeakable, with a crater instead of a face?

Even among the write-offs who prowl the gaudy medieval streets of Zeddyville, he is an extreme, an outcast among outcasts. But he does not sit there and think: I am an extreme. He thinks in Hungarian still, always has, always will, which is why Dr. Zee’s couple of sentences made his insides jump so hard. He’s wired for it, and also wired to create, not sit like this in a heap on the sidewalk like some Victorian curiosity transplanted 100 years into the future, wondering what his fortunes might have been in different times, when he could have charged admission for people to gawk at him.

As it is, they get to look for free, but some of them still drop toonies into his hat (a theatrical prop more than an item of apparel), perhaps moved by pity for the strange heap of humanity draped like some museum statue just waiting to be revealed for display. He sometimes feels tempted to unveil himself, but can’t quite bring himself to do it, not just yet. But one day, one day when the jeers become too much for him, one day when he has had just about enough of small token handouts and the meanness of pity, he’ll do it, he’ll pull the cover off and show the world what really happened to Szabó when he pointed the rifle at his chin and fired.

If you could watch time-lapse photography of the six hours or so Szabó spends on the street at his station, nothing much would happen. Mavis Potter recently discovered how time slows down to a crawl around these parts, how eventlessness becomes the norm.

There would be no shortage of activity, but it would all look the same. People would whir and whip by like hummingbirds in a time warp, whip, zip, whip, zip. Toonies would fall rhythmically from guilty fingers. The stream of human traffic would gradually slow down as the day wore on; some would deliberately choose to walk on the other side of the street, as the sight of Szabó sitting there faceless and stateless is just too disturbing for them to contemplate. Better they shouldn’t have to look.

This time, however, the ending is different.

This time, when the six hours or so is up, when he has enough toonies to cover his room and board for the day, plus food, and a little extra for the cheap alcohol he tips into his feeding solution as a special treat, he doesn’t go across the street to catch the Number 42 to take him back to his tiny little one-room apartment on Hemlock Street. He begins to walk towards the Portman instead. Inwardly he is quaking, his pride saying, no, no, don’t ask for help, you can do this on your own.

But something else in him, something in him that has had about enough, enough of this bad parody of living, is propelling his legs towards the clinic where Dr. Zee tries his best every day to control the runaway damage of the streets.

Come see me sometime, okay? You know where my office is.

If you don’t have a mouth, it’s a little hard for you to make an appointment. So Szabó just shows up, and as fate would have it, Dr. Zee is on the premises and not even terribly busy. Between catastrophes, he likes to say to his longsuffering staff, and almost a little bored.

Szabó suddenly appears in the doorway, startling the hell out of him. How did he get in? There’s a controlled entrance to this place, but maybe the guy at the door was too stunned to say no.

“Szabó Tamás.” He says it warmly, in the Hungarian way, last name first, first name last. It catches him behind the knees. How does he know? He knows. Szabó sways a bit, and Dr. Levy guides him towards a chair.

“I’m glad you came,” he tells him. In Hungarian: Isten hozott. Then realizes that two-way communication is going to be a little bit difficult, unless Szabó writes things down, perhaps.

As he is pondering this, and thinking of ways to overcome the obstacle, he realizes something, sees it in the bent shoulders, the head lowered almost as if in an attitude of prayer, the slight sound from a strangulated throat.

Even with no eyes, no mouth, no face, a man can still weep.

Zoltán Levy

Zoltán Levy feels that sense of privilege, of honour, that always steals over him when someone unburdens, opens themselves to him.

It is something about his face, perhaps; in spite of its battened-down quality, the hardness about the mouth, there is compassion written in the deep puckers in his forehead. The face suggests Elie Wiesel in its classic sadness, a Holocaust face, wrought by forces that crushed the life out of millions. People often feel compelled to share things with him, private things, agonizing things, secrets.

He recognizes this as a gift, but an uneasy one. Like most gifts, perhaps all of them, it has a cost. The weight of the world is on his shoulders, and he has the backaches to prove it. One can almost see the dotted-line borders of an invisible globe perched atop his not-very-powerful frame. Wiry, people call him; wiry and intense. One journalist compared him to a hummingbird, zipping around at a higher frequency than anyone else.

Zoltán Levy gazes upon the weeping figure in his office, and finds himself sinking into a powerful state, a deep state, a profound state: the therapeutic state, the place where he can help. This is his gift, the essence of it: the ability, or perhaps the willingness, to go there, to go where the trouble is, and for all his scattered attention, to make himself so fully present in the moment that he becomes a receptor for pain.

He knows that much has happened in this first session, though very few words have passed between them. There was simply no need, for something far more important has occurred. Szabó showed up. Showing up is the huge portion of life, which is what makes not showing up (also known as abandonment) so completely devastating. It is as if it’s the inverse of life, the opposite of love, if love has an opposite; not hate, for if we hate each other and are screaming and raging, there’s still energy, maybe even hope; but indifference kills, kills by not caring, by not giving a shit.

Dr. Levy sits in the warm aura of a weeping man, and feels gratitude for the moment, perhaps the closest he comes to prayer. He is not a religious man – too much has happened to him, he has seen too much to believe in a higher benevolence. But he is aware of spirit. More aware than ever now that he is older, in his sixties, the protracted ordeal of his youth far behind him.

Did such a man ever love? Could such concentrated intensity, such passion, never touch another human being? He loved once, make no mistake. The love was so intense, so profound, that it made itself manifest in the form of a child. Not a stone baby, not a papyraceous freak dry as the wings of a dead insect, but a warm flesh-and-blood little boy named Anton, the very image of his father, whom Zoltán Levy coldly abandoned as if he were some inanimate object, something to be tossed aside without a thought.

A canyon yawns between his therapeutic tenderness, the tears pricking his warm dark eyes as he watches Szabó weep in his office, and the utter disregard with which he walked out of Annie’s life forever, with not even a backward glance. For the truth is, Zoltán Levy isn’t the saviour of the mean streets so much as a first-class shit.

Annie was left alone. With a son. That bastard; that bastard. For this is the hard truth about Zoltán Levy, the truth he can’t outrun no matter how quickly he zips from blossom to blossom like a supernaturally-charged little flying machine. The damage he did when he turned his back was incalculable, and so casually done! That was the worst of it, the casualness. What happened to his conscience? Did the forces of history twist his head so violently that he lost all sense of what was right, or is that just an excuse, should we let this go by, shouldn’t he be held accountable for his actions, or his lack of actions, his lack of presence, which is in many ways worse than a death?

Annie wonders this; she wonders it all the time. She’s not living five thousand miles away, though she might be for all the connection she feels with the father of her child. No, she lives right here in Vancouver. But Zoltán Levy has found a way to compartmentalize this broken piece, this dead-ended, abortive love that caused him to coldly walk. It sleeps in a locked cellar in his mind, along with other things, including the memory of a potato, a fragment of potato he was saving to give to his mother, she kept saving food for him, he felt so guilty, so guilty, so now he would return the favour and keep this small morsel of food for her, hide it carefully in the rags of his clothing all morning even as he worked moving heavy stones from one part of the camp to another, useless, demeaning work, though it could be worse, some had to dig up Jewish corpses and move them from one part of the camp to another, so he should consider himself lucky, but at one point in a moment of weakness he reached in and fished around just to look at the potato, to make sure it was still there, and in a split-second impulse he nibbled on the fragment, and then nibbled some more, and before he knew what he was doing he had eaten it, he had eaten the potato he was going to give to his mother because the hunger was so overwhelming, and because no matter how much he loved her, his desire to live was stronger than his desire to save her.

Márta Lévai survived because she was just strong enough, and because she had a small son to live for. She survived to bring him over to freedom and a change of name, easier to spell, and not so Hungarian, a fresh start in a new country. She was one of the lucky ones, she made it through, and her son made it through, though terribly skinny, he’d never grow properly, he would always look stunted or starved all his life, but never mind, even her husband was spared, after a long and harrowing separation, and the family came back together again in 1945, it was like a miracle, a miracle of restoration. They never spoke of the war, but put it away and lived forwards, like walking with shattered bones. What were they to do? Cry for the rest of their lives? Not live, not take one step, then another – was that not letting Hitler win?

Hitler did not win, and the little reassembled family, the small sober-faced boy whom they called Tán-tán and his grateful shell-shocked parents, transplanted themselves to this strange new land, and found a way to go on living, day by difficult, irreplaceable day.


Aggie

Portman Hotel
November 11, 2003

So the day finally dawns, the great day when Porgy gets the little beast working again without breaking down after a few seconds of operation. I couldn’t believe how excited we both were – like kids on Christmas morning, like the Darling children when Peter Pan lifts them off the ground and flies them over London, all lit up at night.

We needed to have some kind of ceremony for such a momentous occasion, so we smoked a couple joints and drank some rice wine and got a little giggly beforehand. Normally I wouldn’t go near the stuff, pot I mean, because it can make me really paranoid, and I’ve even hallucinated on it before, white fountains, it was freaky. But this was quality stuff, Porgy must have a good dealer, and though it was strong, the buzz was mellow and pleasurable and calm. We grinned at each other like conspirators, and Porgy said I should choose the first cylinder to listen to.

I did it blindfolded. We thought it would be more fun that way, to pick at random. So Porgy puts the blindfold on me, giggling away, and turns me around three times like I’m going to play pin the tail on the donkey, and I grope towards the big pile of cylinders on the floor, and grab one.

It’s one of the really old ones, Edison brown wax, with no label on it, it could be anything. My head is reeling with excitement and a weird kind of fear. Porgy feels the same way, I can tell.

He loads the cylinder on, gives the machine a mighty crank, and we listen.

A hiss, a crackle, then: ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita.

“Have you ever heard about the Wibbly Wobbly Walk?

Well just in case you’ve not,

I’ll tell you on the spot,

The Wibbly Wobbly Walk is only just another way

Of saying that the boys are out upon a holiday. . . “
I freak.

I abso-fucking-lutely freak. But it’s so funny!

“And they all walk

The Wibbly Wobbly Walk,

All talk

The Wibbly Wobbly talk,

All wear

Wibbly Wobbly ties,

And wink at all the pretty girls

With Wibbly Wobbly Eyes. . .”

I freak.

I abso-fuckin’-lutely freak!

We both fall on the floor, convulsing. The recording I could not stand to listen to as a child is thumbing its nose at me over the span of an entire century.

The guy singing, who knows what his name is, he sounds sort of English, and he starts kind of raving mid-cylinder, chortling away like he’s drunk or something:

“Heh-heh-heh.

You ought to see them.

They can’t do the Grizzly Bear or the Turkey Trot.

Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.

I’ve got a Wibbly Wobbly laugh, haven’t I?

Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”

It’s so totally bizarre, unexpected and delightful, we just hug each other. We can’t wait to hear the next one, but unfortunately, it’s a bit of a downer:

“A Cornfield Medley. By the Hayden Quartet.” (The really early ones are announced, for a very practical reason – there was no way to label them.)

“Some folks say that a nigger won’t steal

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field)

But I caught a couple in my corn field

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field)

One had a shovel and the other had a hoe

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field)

If that ain’t stealin’, I don’t know

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field).”

Porgy and I listen with our mouths open:

“Now dem coons am happy,

Don’t you hear those banjos play. . .

(rang-dinga-dinga-dang

rang-dinga-dinga-dang)

I cannot work until tomorrow,

‘Cause de teardrop flow.

I’ll try to drive away my sorrow,

Plinkin’ on de old ban-jo.”

There’s an embarrassed silence.

“Oh Porgy, I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, it’s not your fault. It was a hundred years ago.”

“But still. Jesus, Porg, the racism. Didn’t people realize? It’s disgusting.”

“Yeah, but it’s all part of the deal, the time-travel. If we’re gonna go back there, we have to deal with conditions as they were.”

We play through the rest of the Edison Blue Amberols, and it seems minstrel music is the most popular form: white guys trying to sound black, no doubt blackening their faces with burnt cork, à la Al Jolson, the Jewish negro: Down on the Old Plantation; Five Minutes with the Minstrels (which we clocked in at 2 minutes, 37 seconds); Darktown Strutter’s Ball; Dese Bones Shall Rise Again. A couple of them are “Hebrew monologues”, Yiddish-flavoured stories that meander along without any real punch line to them. Humour was a lot different then, too.

There’s a category we call the “modern marvel” cylinders: McGinty at the Living Pictures (and movies were a new thing then, almost as awesome and scary as recorded sound); and Aeroplane Dip, kind of a variation on Come, Josephine, in my Flying Machine.

There are some really odd ones in there, too: bird imitations, of all things, a series of elaborate whistles by one C. Corst: “I will name each bird,” he announces grandly at the beginning, no doubt dressed in a top hat and tails, “and then I will faithfully reproduce its song.”

We sit through four and a half minutes of robin, bluejay, yellow-bellied sapsucker, cedar waxwing, meadowlark, thrush, nightingale, and even pileated woodpecker (does he knock on his head?, I wonder.)

For some reason male quartets predominate: the Edison Quartet (Edison had his name all over everything, he was a smart man, made the most of the new technology); the Peerless Quartet. “Oh, that’s because female voices didn’t record very well. The trebles sounded kind of sour.”

“That explains Dame Nellie Melba, then.”

“Yeah, her.”

“I don’t know, Porg, voices sure have changed a lot in a hundred years. They all had that fast quaver, and everyone seemed to sing through their nose.”

We listen to the Edison Quartet chuffing their way through a World War I song (another favorite category): How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree). Then, Pucker Up Your Lips, Miss Lindy (there’s lots of sexual stuff going on in these things, make no mistake), Baby, Baby, from Lady Slavey, The Bird on Nellie’s Hat, and my personal favorite: Tickle Me Timothy, “sung by Billy Williams, Ed-i-sohn Re-cawwds” (and apparently nobody knows how to pronounce the word “record”, the technology being so new):

“Tickle me Timothy, tickle me do,

Oh tickle me, there’s a dear.

The parson nearly makes me cough,

And I feel like pulling his nightshirt off!

I can’t help meself, I’ll do it in half a tick,

And he mightn’t have anything underneath, Timothy,

Tickle me, Timothy, quick!” 

We notice something funny, too – sometimes the music suddenly speeds up right at the end of the song. “That’s because they were running out of cylinder,” Porgy explains.

It was all pretty primitive. In the early days, before 1900, they’d get fifteen machines all cranking at once, each making an original cylinder, because they hadn’t figured out a way to copy them. The performer would have to absolutely bellow, or blow his instrument so hard his brains would start to come out of his ears.

It’s fascinating, a time trip, like a tour through a really excellent museum, only even more vivid and real. I can’t escape the feeling that we’re there, we’re actually experiencing another time. And then we come to it: the very last cylinder of the twenty-four I bought, in a plain brown unmarked canister.

“Oh. This is odd..”

I slide it out into my hand, and get a weird feeling from it. It doesn’t look anything like the other cylinders in the lot. For one thing, it’s pink. A pale, translucent pink, not the gaudy pink of the rare Thomas Lambert celluloid recordings that came out in 1902.

Somehow I know this one is way older than that.

“Wow. I wonder what’s on this one.”

“Let’s try it.”

We load it on.

There is an incredible amount of surface noise. Almost as bad as the lead cylinder with the talking clock. Then, faintly, I think I hear something.

“It’s spoken word.” My heart jumps.

“Think so?”

“It’s a man.”

“What’s he saying?”

“I can’t tell, it’s too garbled. Is it in English?”

“Hard to tell.”

“I wish I could make it out.”

We look at each other, feeling a creepy kind of chill.

There is a faint pencil-mark on the outside of the cylinder case: ’87.

“Good God, is that the date?”

“Somebody must’ve made this one privately. It’s not a commercial cylinder. It isn’t even brown, or yellow paraffin like the really rare, early ones.”

“Wow. Strange.”

“Yeah.” Porgy yawns. He’s a little tired, I can tell. He’s easily overwhelmed, in fact that’s his whole problem, he can’t deal with anything stressful, and we’ve been listening now for what seems like forever. Pot can do that to you, elongating time and stretching it into eternity.

So I give him a hug, and he goes downstairs to bed. But I sit up for another hour, listening to the strange flesh-colored cylinder over and over again. Sometimes I think I can make out bits of it, here and there:

“Would add to our understanding. . . “

Then more garble.

“Unfortunately. . . “

More noise: ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita.

“Then I came to realize that the only thing that mattered was. . .” I swear it’s making sense to me here and there, in little fragments. I try to piece them together.

My hair prickles as the cylinder concludes:

“. . .send this message into the future with (noise, noise, noise, noise) received with understanding. It is only then that (noise, noise, noise, noise, noise).”

It was hard to get to sleep that night. I was haunted by the voice. Who is this guy? What does the message mean?

I have to go back to the flea market right away. I remember seeing dozens of odd old cylinders on sale, really cheap in fact. I’ll have to scrape up the funds somehow. Hell, I’ll sell my jewellery, use the grocery money. I need to crack this more than I need to eat.


Bus People Part One


Bus People Part Two


Bus People Part Three


Bus People Part Four


Bus People Part Five


Bus People Part Six


Bus People Part Seven


Bus People Part Eight


Bus People Part Nine


Bus People Part Ten


Bus People Part Eleven


Bus People Part Twelve

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Gabor Mate: is he the real Zoltan Levy?

NEWS FLASH! Yes, I did hear from Gabor, though I was pretty sure I wouldn't. Mostly it was reassurance that I could use any aspect of his personality I wanted for my character. Might as well post the email:

Hi Margaret,

Thanks for the courtesy of reaching out to me on this.

I do not consider that you require either my permission or agreement to publish your novel. On grounds of general principle I hardly think that “I” am in it. Although I’m sure

your take on me does contain aspects of the real me, it’s still your version and hence coloured by your perceptions and reactions. Some of these I have found accurate

over the years, others less so. I would not be offended by whatever image of this character you present.

I don’t have a new book coming out with anything do with concepts of normal, although I am giving a talk locally soon entitled The Myth of Normal. I have been working on a book

called Toxic Culture, very much on hold at the moment. It may or may not surface.

My work life no longer includes medical practice; I do travel and teach/speak a lot, and lead healing retreats with and without psychedelic modalities.

I wish you all best with your publishing project, and trust you are still a happy and proud grandmother.

Gabor

And now. . . the rest of my post (adjusted accordingly).

http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/gmate.html

If you've had a chance to read the first six parts of my novel Bus People, which I am running as a serial just because I would like to have it see the light of day, you'll note that there is a very central character called Zoltan Levy, a doctor who works on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

Well, guess who he's supposed to be.

This novel was written in a wild whirl back in 2004, in only about four weeks, though I was quite surprised to find a very neat folder of research today dealing with pretty much every aspect of the novel.  I guess I was not so spinny-headed after all. And this was back when the internet was still kind of tottering along. I found material on Hungarian history, papyraceous twins, facial reconstruction (then in its infancy), cylinder recordings, ailments of the digestive tract (one character has a rather icky obsession with colonic irrigation). . . and many other things besides. I also found a detailed, handwritten outline of the story, along with sticky notes for each character and plot development so that I could rearrange them as the story progressed. Still, the centre of the thing was a character who was a fictionalized version of Gabor Mate, already a celebrated author who is now way more famous than he was then. 

My first contact with him was an interview I did for January Magazine a dozen years ago (the link to it is above). Though he's a dynamic individual, he talks very fast and compulsively psychoanalyzes people (including me) on a dime. When you try to interview him, he will unfailingly interview you. Doing the January thing threw me off-balance, but I have to admit I was fascinated. A lot of this turning-around thing, I've come to believe, is a projection of his own "stuff", which he is actually quite candid about. He has written more since When the Body Says No, most notably In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts which deals with addiction on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. For a while, quite a while in fact, we emailed back and forth. I don't know whether to call him a friend exactly, but there was a time when he'd listen to me, or at least not tell me to go away, when I was in an emotional hurricane and no one else wanted me around. Or so I thought back then. He made himself available, and since I wasn't officially either a friend or a patient, he didn't have to do that.

I think he is a different Gabor now, I honestly do, because he is just a lot more famous, world-famous in some ways, giving seminars and talks and workshops all over the world. I don't think I could put him in a novel now, I mean the present-day Gabor, but then, what HASN'T changed since then?

So what has it been like to go back to this novel, and Zoltan Levy, something/someone I wrote in 2004 and haven't even looked at since then?  I could say it has been pretty interesting, and I could say it has gutted me, and both would be true, remembering the harrowing circumstances under which it was written. Like all the rest of my fiction, it has pretty much failed in worldly terms, if "failed" means "didn't sell". I suppose I couldn't help myself however. It was a novel that had to be written.

(I had to pretty much rework this post from the beginning because after I got the email from Gabor, which I honestly didn't think I was going to get, I didn't think I was being terribly fair to him.  But can I leave my unicorns-and-rainbows gif, just as a reminder that he's spreading the sunshine everywhere? No doubt, in his own rather grim and Hungarian way, he does.)