I'm your puppet (short fiction)

 

Human puppet: someone who is easily jerked around by others. Someone who realizes her position in life is always so, so fragile. Someone who gingerly creeps, tippy-toe, tippy-toe, along thin ice at the top of Niagara Falls.

 

She doesn’t know how it got that way, but maybe she does. Right out of the egg? Wrong egg, wrong sperm? Sometimes it seems that way. And it truly does not matter what she had to bear to survive her childhood, to pull herself out of an inferno of post-traumatic stress in her 30s: it has all been reburied, forgotten again, put away. Then there was the alcohol, but we won’t get into that, will we? About how her kids at first felt proud of her for going to AA, for finally getting her act together and not landing in the goddamn hospital with sickening regularity?

 

 

Going to AA wasn’t exactly a picnic, but her kids were there at her cakes, and her daughter even gave her a cake at some point, maybe five years. Who knows what the creep of time brings? A restored life, maybe, spreading out in many directions, being seen almost as normal sometimes, though of course she wasn’t. Only she knew about how the fragments of her life were wired together, held together by main strength and force of will.

 

And then, many years later, when everything exploded and flew to pieces again, it was: sympathy, compassion, love? No: horror, denial, and accusations that she was making the whole thing up. Faking sickness to get attention for some bizarre reason. When the truth was, for most of her life she had been faking health, trying to keep up a mask that looked enough like her that most people were fooled.

 

All right, all people.

 

How is it that you can be married for 40 years and have a spouse who knows absolutely nothing about you? How is it that he can even admit, “look, I learned to tune you out a long time ago for my own survival”? Admitting that what she said was just noise, verbal garbage, narcissism and histrionics in a form that wasn’t even words any more, just a sort of “bluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluh” that didn’t even go in one ear and out the other, because it never went in one ear to begin with.

 

So he has learned to tune me out “for his own survival”, and he has become extremely good at it, to the point that any time I am in pain or distress, a big soundproof sliding door comes down with a heavy clang.  But what about MY survival? Or have I already died in this family? I try too hard, I know I try too hard with the grandchildren and it is beginning to backfire. I see the hard-eyed looks my children give me, the sense of “what the hell is she up to now?”. I realize the things I love and work so hard at are so incomprehensible them that not only do they not take any interest in them, they don’t even know what planet they are from or why anyone would want to bother with them at all.

 

 

So I am lonely. If I say I am lonely within this family that I co-founded so long ago, the response will be outrage that I would ever accuse them of being so heartless. Lonely?? What are you saying, when we allow you to come to our houses and look after our children, when we give you every chance to make individual gifts by hand for their birthdays (secretly sniggering about it behind my back: “waaaaaaaay too much time on her hands!” - I’ve heard them at it, but mustn’t say anything. Mustn’t.)  How can you be “lonely” unless you’re some kind of freak? Go out and make some friends! Do something normal for a change, stop pretending you’re a “writer” and being so pretentious and unrealistic.

 

She remembers the shrink, a thug who looked like Leonid Brezhnev, who said to her in his thick deep thug voice, “Get a job. Get a job at 7-11 maybe and just do writing as hobby.” If she’d had a gun in her hand his wonderful vocational counselling would have been spurting out the other side of his fucking thug head and splattering the psych ward walls with  brain pulp that had turned out to be a complete waste of time.

 

Thinking about dying is something she has become very good at: she started at maybe age thirteen. Though there have been many fallow periods, even years at a time when it never crossed her mind, it was inevitable that SOMETHING would toss her right back to the beginning again and hold her there until she suffocated. She has come to realize that you must not just think of “a way to do it”. You must choose at least two methods concurrently. Take pills, slash wrists (and if you’re really thoughtful and caring, do it in the bathtub so there will be less mess to clean up. Just turn on the tap, you’re done, no towels spoiled). She saw that YouTube video of the guy jumping off a bridge and thought it was magnificent, but he’d have to be full of pills, a lethal amount, first. A dear friend of hers, incarcerated in a psychiatric ward when his psychic agony began to overflow again, smuggled in pills, took them all, then wandered out in the middle of a blistering winter night, passed out beside the railroad tracks like a bum, and was found frozen stiff the next day, a Bobsicle, doublekilled. Man, he was good! He must have practiced for a long time.

 

 

She wondered about THREE ways, but didn’t know how to juggle it all: slish, slash, I was takin’ a bath; jumping-jack flash, it’s a gas-gas-gas; and she couldn’t think of anything cute and self-concealing for the pills. Suicide was hilariously funny. She could not count the number of times she had made therapists smirk, smile or even bark with laughter. They thought she was funny. Badda-boom! She had trained herself that way all her life, learned in her cradle to be amusing, to be the mascot, to keep her father from murdering her in her bed. She had learned to be witty while her older siblings got her drunk at parties and snickered when they found out their married friends (with their wives in the next room) had groped her in the bathroom.

 

But it’s all in fun, isn’t it? Fun, fun. I was lucky to have those social occasions. So they said to me. I should’ve been grateful. And though for years and years she thought she had escaped those poisonous dynamics, she hadn’t. Once again she was a sharecropper in her own home. All she had was some sort of fragile tenancy that could fall through at any moment. “Oh, massa, don’t sell me down the river!” Bark, bark, oh, that’s so funny! Don’t look at me that way! Stop it, stop looking so hostile, it’s just that you’re funny, that’s all. You’re obviously trying to be funny, so why do you get so hostile when I laugh? You’re very entertaining. Besides which, are you really sure any of this really happened? Your Dad sounds like a pretty swell guy. You’ve heard of false memory syndrome, haven’t you?

 

How could anyone want to keep going, to feel any relish for life, when after years and years of struggling to do reasonably well everything blew apart again and hurled you back four decades into helplessness? How could anyone be “entertaining” when their life was unravelling like a sweater, when they were trying frantically to grab on to  a greasy pole, when some hideous beanstalk or poison tree had suddenly thrust up out of nowhere to blow all order and sanity apart?

 

The most important part of the suicide thing, and the place where nearly everyone falls down, is not letting anyone find you. DON’T do a Marilyn Monroe and get on the phone. DON’T call 9-1-1 because 9-1-1 doesn’t rescue useless pieces of shit that want to die anyway. Sylvia Plath set it up so that someone would find her, but oopsy, doopsy, this was a person who wasn’t very punctual, and on that particular day she was tardy enough to cause Sylvia Plath’s death at 30. Or at least, to not prevent it. Everyone dies anyway. Lots of people die catastrophically every day, accidents, poison, murder. Some die in the womb. We all get erased, then the timer is reset to before we even came on the scene. Click! Isn’t this just speeding it up a little?

 

 

But she doesn’t, not on that particular day anyway, because even though she ceased to believe in a benevolent God a long time ago, she has still not completely dispensed with the fear that there is a hell, that she won’t escape herself at all, that she will be pinned, doomed to drink her own poison for all eternity. Or perhaps watch her family howl and scream with rage: “How could she do this to me?”

 

 

Oscar Levant: Rhapsody in . . . green??

Oscar Levant in 12 takes. . .
(or: variations on a theme)

 

 

"Who turned out the lights?"
 

 

 

 

Furioso
 

 

 

Gershwin's  ghost
 

 

 

Merry Christmas!

 

 

 

Aqua velvet
 

 

 

 

Rhapsody in Green
 

 

 

"Somebody had me bronzed"

 

 

You call that a picture?
 

 

 

 

Blackface blues

 

 

 

Incandescent light

 

 

 

 

"Wait a minute, that's only TEN!"

(ok then. . .)

Pina colada

 

Indiglow

 

Oscar Levant plays Khatchaturian

So here is the only clip I could find that would play: the Concerto in F one wouldn't work. This is more of a flashy showpiece, but my my, what he does with it! Women must have thrown their hotel room keys on the stage. This video displays certain unique aspects of his playing: the prizefighter bobbing and weaving; being a hair's-breadth ahead of the beat, which conveys a certain urgency; tiny comic elements like turning around to face the orchestra; producing a "something extra" with some chords (I can't express this, but I can hear it), almost a hidden overtone or bright extra sound that wasn't written down anywhere, a new color in the spectrum, so that the chord opened out and became excruciatingly pleasurable (and this is, after all, Khatchaturian, the composer I rhapsodized about a few posts ago). But it happens so fast and then vanishes, not so much mercury as lightning. I wish I knew who wrote this arrangement of the Sabre Dance, but at the same time I know it could be no one else but Oscar, incorporating his trademark sour/sweet dissonances and complexity. He blows this tired old piece of circus music out of the water.

Oscar Levant: Rhapsody in Black

Since my enthusiasm so often runs ahead of my knowledge, I'm writing this in advance of knowing anything about my subject. Or not much. I have ordered a biography from Amazon called Oscar Levant: A Talent for Genius, one of those 500-page doorstops I love so much, but for this post I'm pretty much winging it.

He was a strange one, and I have strange feelings for him, attraction and repulsion at the same time. Who wouldn't love a man who could play the piano like that? NOBODY could play the piano like that, poetic sensitivity melded with a gangster's rat-a-tat-tat aggressiveness.

Nobody looked like him either, with that sensual, almost Polynesian mouth, the flop of hair that whipped around as he played, the constant manic bobbing and weaving (particularly later in life when he was in the throes of God-knows-what sort of addiction/affliction) reminding me of Michael J. Fox. The grief-stricken, fathoms-deep eyes, the forlorn eyes of an abandoned child, that could quickly flip over into fierceness, to a sense of "yeah, make me", or even blanked-out indifference. 

Oscar Levant was an updated Oscar Wilde without the effeminacy. You knew he wasn't gay by the way he eyed women. Only his personal charm saved it from being a leer. Some glamorous dame would kiss him on the cheek (he played the harmless, charming, eccentric sidekick in all his movies) and he'd lunge at her neck. He got away with lines that would have been censored without that lightning-stroke, oddly monotone delivery: "It's a good thing Marilyn Monroe has gone kosher, because now Arthur Miller can eat her."

 

 

 

Seductive, but somehow - offputting -  as he evolved into a sort of comic hired gun, an outrageous joke-machine that spewed them out on demand. The narrow-eyed, double-breasted gangster demeanour, cigarette constantly dangling from those Filipino lips, deteriorated most awfully over the years as mental illness slowly consumed him. He ended up, no kidding, a real bona fide mental patient, institutionalized, getting shock treatments right during movie shoots so that he had to have himself signed in and out for his scenes (at one point actually playing a mental patient, a part he described as "Pirandelloish").

That's sad. That's sadder, even, than the elderly Dorothy Parker and her poodle called Cliche holed up in her fusty ash-and-bottle-strewn apartment, watching soap operas all day as her friends edged away from her one by one.

 

 

 

 

 

Oscar Levant had friends aplenty, but did they keep him around just because he was so entertaining? Did he sit down and think about all those viper-strike lines, actually write them down, or did they just pop out of him like Athena from the head of Zeus?  He had an extremely loyal wife who became a caretaker in later life, and three pretty, vivacious daughters. He had a lively, varied career that most people would envy, considerable fame and adoration, and at the same time the most awful, soul-destroying depression that finally claimed him and sucked him under. It's hard for me to even think about it.

People sometimes called him a sellout; he did coattail on his close association with George Gershwin, who did Levant a big favour by croaking at age 38. Levant was automatically assumed to be his successor, but who can follow George Gershwin? Not even George Gershwin. Oscar Levant composed, but it doesn't hold together somehow. He's a  sort of Schoenberg on ice, a "look-at-me-I'm-a-composer" performing triple axels at the keyboard. The music is technically good, but it doesn't say anything.

 

His classic, often-misquoted line was, "There is a fine line betwen genius and insanity. I have erased that line." He constantly joked about suicide and his own craziness, causing an uneasiness and even fear that, for some uknown reason, was viewed as hilariously funny. He was, I think, the first shock comedian.

So, that's what I know, and it ain't much because it's less than what's in the Wikipedia entry. I think his doorstop of a biography (which I will consume in installments propped up in bed before sleeping) will be a wild ride, or else it will be boring, as some biographies inexplicably are.

About these pictures. It was a big disappointment to discover there were very few good photos of him, except for the sardonic, Edward G. Robinson-esque pose at the piano which was a publicity shot for his most famous film, An American in Paris. Others were grainy and dusty-looking, almost mildewed, as if no one had bothered to take care of them.  Contrast this with the hundreds of razor-sharp black-and-white shots I easily found of Harold Lloyd, even going back to pre-1920.

 

So I took the ones I could find, many of them extracted from old album covers, and because they are in the public domain, and because Oscar said I could, I tinkered with them. Something leaped out at me, a kind of predatory energy. There were so many dimensions to him. He looked different in every shot (and I've excluded some of the later, really painful ones). In a few of them he looked like a young Alan Arkin. 

Out of those ancient grey lithographs emerged  Shakespearian spectres, that is, if Shakespeare had dealt in slighty off-colour wisecracks. And many of the black-and-whites, particularly very dark concert shots, exploded into colour, which as far as I know is impossible (i.e. it's relatively easy to go from color to black and white, but how is it possible to go the other way?). But in every case, no matter how much I altered the original, he was still Oscar. His essence came through every one of the masks.

 

People were known to say things like, "Oh! That's Oscar Levant. You know, he could have been. . . " But if he had "been", as they say, we'd know nothing about him now. He would've had a stellar career as a concert pianist, then sunk out of sight, with only a few musty-smelling LP covers to remind us of who he was.

Instead we have quite a few "sidekick" movies where he's somehow irresistable in his craziness, and a few YouTube videos that are a little disturbing to watch, as he becomes a sort of tame circus tiger on pointless panel shows. He even does a turn on his own show, and the one surviving kinescope is excruciating: he slurs and bobs around like Ray Charles at the piano while his wife sits close beside him like a watchdog, making sure he doesn't fall over the edge.

And he did fall over the edge. What's on the other side of it? Nothing, or a reunion with his pal Gershwin, or celestial piano keys waiting to be played? Considering the chaos of his life, I think oblivion would have been more than enough.

 

 

CODA: I'm not sure I'll be writing about Levant again. In fact I kind of hope he won't be another Harold: making an Oscar doll would just be too challenging. But I did find out something about his death, so I'd better get to it now. Too bad he wasn't around to enjoy it, for he was morbid enough that I think he would have found the bizarre circumstances amusing.

 

 

 

 

Though everyone seems to think he was a complete wreck at the end, like everyone else with serious mental illness he also had his good days. Days when he could noodle around on the piano, talk to his wife June, take a nap. This is what happened: he went upstairs to lie down for a while (for, at age 65, he was already frail from years of drug abuse), to rest up for an interview he'd be having later in the day with a certain fresh-faced young photojournalist.

 

Her name was Candice Bergen.

 

Late in the afternoon when the doorbell rang, his wife welcomed Candy in, all bubbly and excited about meeting this living legend. June called upstairs:

 

"Oscar! She's here!"

 

No response.

"Going deaf, obviously. Oscar! Come on down now."

 

"Oh, it's OK, Mrs. Levant, if he wants to. . . "

 

"OSCAR." She looked at Candy in puzzlement. "What's he up to? I'll be right back."

 

Mrs. Levant went upstairs and into the bedroom. He was curled on his side in a fetal position, the way he always napped, the corner of a blanket childishly wrapped around his head.

 

"Oscar."

 

The silence was profound.

 

"Oscar." She touched his shoulder, then drew back with a gasp.

 

 

 

 

It must have been hard for Candice Bergen, being assigned a plum interview like that, an interview with pictures,  to have to report back to her editor, "Uh, sorry, but I couldn't do it."

 

"Couldn't do it? Why not?"

 

"He's dead."

 

"Dead?"

 

"Dead."

 

"Oh. Are you - "

 

"Sure? Yes, I'm sure."

 

"Oh."

 

"He's sure, too."

 

Then they both disgraced themselves - and each other - by collapsing into helpless laughter.

 

 

 

 

I'm glad, though. Not glad he's dead - I'm not that mean - but glad that such a turbulent, often agonizing life ended in such sweet surrender. It was like the tide going out: his heart stopped; it was time to go home.

I defy you to count all the stars in this

I usually hate these things, these old cartoons that feature caricatures of stars from Long Ago. I was a little shocked how many of them I knew, cuzzadafact that they ARE from so long ago: this was 1933, remember! Then howcum I recognized Ed Wynn and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and so many others that I associated with the '40s or '50s or even later? Harold Lloyd is in there, too, in a couple of places. One of the earliest Popeye cartoons has Mahatma Gandhi in it, but I don't think he's in this one. Anyway, this is my Friday Surprise.

My Harold Lloyd doll: I got my mojo working

NO! This is NOT my Harold doll, notnotnotnotnot. This is a horrifying clip depicting a Harold Lloyd windup toy from the 1930s, one that actually appears to still work. The Harold we see here has a sad affliction, some sort of seizure disorder that causes explosions of frenetic movement. He doesn't walk so much as flail along. Toys like this are worth plenty, and are uniformly hideous. I've even gone into this subject in past posts, and frankly I'm pretty sick of it.

So we know that Harold toys have existed for a long time. There were even Harold dolls, sort of, which consisted of two flat pieces of oilcloth sewn together with a uniform pattern stamped on them.

But soft! What's this??

 

 

It's a Harold with features, a face, hair, in three dimensions even. And glasses.

 

 

A Harold complete with white straw boater and bowtie. A soft and cuddly Harold, unlike those tin things that scare the hemoglobin out of me.

A Harold with blue eyes and glasses and hair like he had, sort of wavy and slicked-back.

 

 

A Harold who can doff his hat.

 

A sitting Harold.

 

 

 

And, most importantly. . . a Harold with SADDLE SHOES!

 

 





I am not too shy to tell you that I made this doll myself, and with no pattern. He evolved under my hands. I had certain feelings when I began this project. I'd been thinking about dolls and writing about dolls (and if you're following this blog, you'll be tired of the whole subject by now) and their strangeness, creepiness. There's something eerily powerful about a human making an image of a human. It goes back to the Venus of Willendorf or something. It has juju, cachet, mojo, power.

 

I feel like I lost track of my mojo a long time ago now, and I want it back. It's funny that, though I initially got very excited about this project, I then fell off it for a while and didn't particularly want to do it.

I think it was the misery and despair of realizing that no one seems to have the slightest interest in publishing my novel, The Glass Character, a fictionalized treatment of Harold Lloyd's life and loves.  Part of me died when that happened, for I had so many hopes for it and STILL think it's the best thing I've ever written.

It dropped with a clunk. It was like throwing a pebble into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

So I needed Something. I don't believe in voodoo or anything (though obviously some people do), but I wonder if I might be able to beguile a sort of reverse voodoo here, to have some sort of power over somebody's attention or perception or influence or something.

To get someone to notice.

Harold got noticed, believe-you-me. He stood out. Part of it was his fierce ambition, part of it his sleek and slightly vulpine good looks, blue eyes crackling with intelligence and life force.  A hell of a lot of it was a talent that was surprisingly slow to bloom. Even by his own admission, some of it was "luck", whatever that is, which is maybe what made him so incredibly superstitious.

(I just remembered something from several years ago, a very strange story. My granddaughter Caitlin, then only about five, found my DVD set of The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection. She saw the photo of the man with the glasses and his hair standing on end and looked at me strangely, then asked, "Grandma, is that you?"

"Yes," I said. "It's me."

"Can we watch this?"

"Of course. But we'll just play the good part."

So I put on Safety Last, the climbing scene, and all through it she was totally absorbed. Every once in a while she'd say, "Ah!" or "Oh!" when it looked like he might fall. At one point Ryan, only about 3, mosied in, put his hands over his eyes and said, "He's gonna faw! He's gonna faw!" He watched the rest of it through his fingers.

But after the clock-hanging scene was over, the spell seemed to be broken. "That's not really you, is it, Grandma." It wasn't a question.

"No, it isn't. It's a man named Harold Lloyd. I wrote a book about him."

A little while later I could tell she was still thinking. I asked her what she was thinking about. Then she looked at me and said the most remarkable thing.

"You're Harold Lloyd, and Harold Lloyd is you.")

You can't throw your heart over the jump and have your horse get halfway over it and get impaled on it and throw you off so that you land on your head and are paralyzed for life. So much for THAT adage. And it's NOT true that "you can do absolutely anything you want in life, so long as you keep on trying". That's the biggest piece of bullshit I've ever heard, and do you know what? I hear it EVERY DAMN DAY, along with "everything happens for a reason" (childhood cancer? Random shootings? The Holocaust?) and "God never gives us more than we can handle" (so then why are our prisons and mental hospitals always full to overflowing?)

And here I go into a rant again. I need my Harold doll, someone to watch over me. And though I know this sounds incredible, his eyes, the rather rudimentary blue eyes that I embroidered on myself, DO appear to follow me around through those glasses, the glasses that made Harold who he was.

I made him. I made his face, his eyes, his body, his shoes and hat. Without me he'd be bits of yarn in a basket, nothing. He is me; he is mine.

"I'm Spartacus!" "No, I'M Spartacus!"

It's hard to believe that the music I waxed rhapsodic about yesterday is from a ballet called Spartacus. I've never even watched the movie, which is supposed to have homosexual under/over/whatever-tones, with a few deleted scenes from the Roman baths that are probably restored to the DVD.

All I remember is that stupid scene where Kirk Douglas is standing there and some guy yells out, "Hey, Spartacus?" and everyone else takes a step backward. Or something. I see it over and over again on those Top Fifteen Thousand Greatest Motion Picture Moments that I can never resist watching, bad as they always are.

Anyway, let's not be silly here. If you are serious about your music, which I always am, you will want to hear more than the glowing and gorgeous excerpts from this work that I posted yesterday. I so associated this piece with The Onedin Line that I assumed the music was composed to describe a great seagoing vessel, kind of like in Scheherezade where, in the last movement, "the ship goes to pieces on a rock surmounted by a bronze warrior".

But it ain't, ain't that at all, it's Spartacus, that sweaty guy with the big dent in his chin. I will try to put all that aside, because this music is truly remarkable. Not only that: with the help of someone from YouTube, I found the best version, the one that's excerpted in The Onedin Line. Now you can hear the whole nine minutes if you want to, or not. But I recommend it.

 

Aram Khatchaturian (whose last name sounds a bit like a chicken dish) is mainly known for that infernal Sabre Dance which you used to hear on Ed Sullivan during the plate-spinning act. It's circus music, and believe me, he is capable of far more than that. And just look at him, he was an absolute god when he was young, with those olive eyes, bow-shaped lips and serious demeanour.

I also found a picture of an Ashot Khatchaturian, a pianist I think. I had hoped he was a son or grandson or something, as there does seem to be a resemblance. No more can classical artists come on stage in sweaty crumpled white shirts, stringy hair and suspenders. They have to be seductive. This guy is, but they keep saying the other Khatchaturian is his "namesake". Could be that in Armenia, the name is as common as dirt.

Musical orgasm (I promise you!)

I want to just shut up here so you can listen to this, but I am also bursting to tell you: this was a process like everything else. Eons ago I used to watch a British TV show called The Onedin Line, not really watch it but be transfixed by the theme song which seemed to be describing a magnificent ship in full sail. It was only later, much later, that I found out the piece was from a ballet by Khatchaturian called Spartacus. It's a long way from Kirk Douglas and the Sabre Dance, but it had to come from somewhere.


I don't know, a very long time went by, maybe 30 or 40 years (could it be so?), and something happened, the floor got deeper or the ceiling higher, and I feel now in each chord, each cadence of this piece, a rapture that can only be described as erotic.

This is sexual music, the excruciating, almost unbelievable pleasure, the peaks and valleys, the mounting feverish intensity and the lashing, splashing, furious climax. It's hard to describe such fever in words - one can't without sounding ridiculous - but music comes closer. There are other contenders, perhaps: Daphnis et Chloe by Ravel, which I once heard Bramwell Tovey conduct live with the Vancouver Symphony (a highlight not just of my musical life, but of my life period). It's much more sustained and seems to have acts in it like a great erotic play, with moods on moods. This is just a rhapsody, a passionate lover grabbing a lush young woman and pulling her dress down and smothering her body with kisses. It's the point of no return, when you wonder if it is even possible to feel more than this, not just pleasure but extremity, reaching the very edge of what is possible in a human body.

Sort of like. I told you it was hard to describe.