Last Bender

5.3

Sally, Christopher, Lydia and Joseph retired quickly behind the curtain leaving me and a few others from the party in charge of the house. I decided to bow out of things and left the greeting of people to Joseph’s IA‘PS pals. I sat at the table farthest from the stage reading Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld.

I was nervous for Sally. A week before the first performance she still couldn’t remember her lines and act at the same time. Then one night she was reading it in French and discovered that she knew the thing cold. She could spout the French without a problem, although without much inflection either; there was a toneless quality to her recitation. This in and of itself was not really a problem, Christopher reasoned, since Jarry believed his actors should speak in a machine like voice. But of all the cast he was the only one who could even understand the French, so at the last minute she undertook a free translation. Tempers at rehearsal began to run high; Joseph openly suggested that Lydia was more suitable for the part anyway. Lydia could rattle off whole scenes, though she sounded like an angry transvestite junkie slinging her hash on the corner of St. Mark’s and Third.

Our only hope now was that something would come out of her mouth when she walked on stage.

I waved for my mother. She smiled her open, gap toothed smile and waved back from the door. Short of breath, she kissed my cheek and looked around. “This is a fine looking place. Nice chairs.” She pushed one in and out. “Where should I sit?”

Cynthia and Raph were at the door. Raph wore a worn denim jacket with a sheepskin collar, jeans and boots. He looked a little dazed by sudden alienation. He saw me and smiled and nodded his head. He touched Cynthia’s shoulder and she stopped chatting with an extremely tall fellow in a blue jacket and white shirt, the pant cuffs draped over black brogues. Raph pointed his finger in the air and said, “Alex.”

I don’t know what she did it in, whether she twitched her semaphore, or released it olofactorily, but he took it to mean, “Yeah, yeah.” And so Raph came over and said, “Some thing this, huh?”

My mother stood up and touched her hat, a red felt cloche with a pheasant feather in the band, and said, “Aren’t you Sally’s father?”

“Oh yes, and you must be–”

“Allisoun Baines. Alex’s mother. I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Well,” Raph said, looking both bewildered and trapped. He had a soft face, grey hair and a very gentle manner about him. But it belied a stormy core. He had been an artist and jazz musician in the fifties. He made experimental films and worked for a while with Maya Derren. Those years had a mighty thirst and he did everything he could to quench it, though in the end it quenched him.

The cure restored what was gentle in Raph, but he remained a slightly paranoid, aggressive man, in his own peculiar way. Not bumbling, removed perhaps, except under certain circumstances, when he would speak his mind without any editing at all. His voice had just a little scrape to it, a smoker’s rasp (though he had not smoked in years), and a Bronx accent.

In restaurants he had the habit of staring at a menu, scratching his head, and then looking at a waitress and saying, “What do you have that’s good?” If she were Asian he might ask, “What are you, Japanese or Korean?” If they answered Korean, he’d say, “I was over there. I did art for the army.” Then he’d chuckle, but whether it was at the absurdity of working as an artist for the army, or the absurdity of the Korean War, or even modesty, I couldn’t tell.

“Well,” he said again. “As soon as Cynthia,” (which he almost pronounced as Cynthier, just as he almost said liberry), “is done we’ll take a seat. Where are you sitting?”

“Right here,” my mother said, indicating the chair over which her coat was draped, one sleeve pointing to the floor.

He took off his jacket and laid it across a chair at the table to our left, also in the front row. I can’t explain why it is whenever I think of those tables they have umbrellas stuck in them. Raph backed towards the seat and muttered something indistinct, averting his eyes.

“Herb!” my mother called out. “Over here, in front with Alex.”

Herb and Ursule stood behind some men in black and in front of Simon and Tammy, who were looking relaxed, checking out the space. They spoke low to each other, and laughed every couple of sentences.

Herb used to be trim and athletic, a vegetarian (but boy could he motor through the greens), a meditator, but as he grew older he grew tired, fatigued by the immense aggravation of being a backcracker and he decided that a vegetarian diet was making him weak. So the best way to drag him into town was to promise him a meal. He loved Chinatown, Peter Luger’s, schmaltz halls like the Carnegie Deli and destination restaurants, (a lot like my father, and the psychiatrist too), like The Russian Tea Room. The fact that my father had a table at ‘21’ was a source of endless invective on his part. “Does he think he’s god with that table? Every time he calls he mentions it, and I mean, it might be once a year, so what. The food’s no good anyway. And who wants to eat with those people. They give you indigestion. They give you the shits.”

My mother, without looking up from whatever she was doing, might say, “Speak for yourself. They don’t give me the shits.”

“They’re superficial.”

“So you’re looking for more engagement–”

“It’s their posture drives me crazy. You can see them all twisted up. It’s the money and the lies. The lies attack their shoulders like Nixon, slumped down with eyes that dart. And the money gets them in the lumbar region; it weighs down on the sacrum. You know why it’s called that? ‘Cause it sits on top of a sack, and the sack is full of shit and the shit backs up into it and the shit is money. It’s in Freud. It’s in the Chinese medicine, the Ayurvedic, I’m sure if you read Paracelsus you’d find it there.”

He had thick straight eyebrows that hung like black bars on his forehead and horn rimmed glasses that seemed like they were at least twenty years old and to which he attached trimmed-down corn pads when the sides of his nose had started to blister. “What can I say,” he would say, rubbing the beet-red sore between his thumb and index finger, “I’ve got a sweaty nose.”

It was a job he once loved, once considered to be a vocation like poetry, the scansion of the vertabray. However, Herb was a man more put upon than others; for one, his first wife had made him a cornuto by screwing their friend and couple’s bowling partner, Ed something or other, and for a man of his importance, this was an intolerable burthen. The divorce had been a messy affair, obsessive, litigious, vengeful. When it was over he was, “Grateful to still have my underpants,” and like a woman 8 months pregnant, he brought to his condition a desire that it be over-with and in a like amount of time it was. He met my mother at a backyard barbecue. He moved to Brooklyn Heights. Yet he found that happiness in Eros does not a happy life make, nor does a companion, nor a yokemate in the rough, for the affliction continued to subject him to its flail. There was no way out of the punishment for Herb Zschisch, only endurance.

He had dense five o’clock shadow. It started at 2pm and by 5 he needed a shave. It was so predictable he could tell the time of day by dragging his finger across his face.

When he was uncomfortable he spoke barely at all, except to deliver in staccato sentences the dogmatic conclusions of long trains of thought he doesn’t wish to reproduce, primarily because of the effort involved. “Let me try to explain,” he’d say before expelling breath in such a way as to convey the almost unimaginable difficulty he was experiencing. It was like this laser beam of air coming out of him. He did this to everyone except for my mother and his patients. Even his family, especially his family, appeared at times to physically crush him with obligation. And he did love them because they crushed the real thing out of him.

“Hello Alex,” he said. “Where’s the booze?”

“Over there.” I showed him the table with the vodka.

“Two dollars. That’s quite a deal.”

“Get me one too, Herb,” my mother said.

“So, how are the books?” he asked.

“They’re like petty tyrants,” I said.

“The shop owning class!” he declared. “We had a very mediocre meal.”

“Where?”

“A place called The Panda House.”

“No good, huh?”

“Strong on homey atmosphere. I’ll take Shun Lee.” He made short work of the ice, plastic cups and vodka. “How long’s this play last?”

From behind my back I heard Lydia say, “I promise not more than an hour.”

“Thank god,” said Ursule, who till then had played schoolgirl, hiding behind her father. She had dressed downtown for the occasion, in coral mules, black fishnet stockings and a leather miniskirt and jacket. But she still had the LIE wave of ginger colored hair, bulging bloodshot eyes and elasmobranch scope of the room. Nothing to eat.

The chiropractor announced, “I like to say, for an hour I can stand just about anything. But not a crown. That I can’t stand. I got this joke with my dentist. How come he always leaves my office laughing and I always leave his in tears, praying for my life?”

We awaited the punch line and when that didn’t arrive we took our seats.

“Hello,” Simon said.

“Alex,” Tammy said. “Look at this room full of thespians, just my thing.”

“Well hello Tammy Markham,” my mother called out. “Come and say hello.” She stood and they kissed each other’s cheeks. “Oh! Don’t you look good. Still in lighting?”

“Whenever I can get work. I bartend at CBGBs twice a week now.”

“You can just roll out of bed then.”

Tammy looked at her a second and started to laugh and my mother, greatly pleased, patted her hand and sat down again.

“Don’t get up,” Simon said. He bent down to kiss her, “I found her those Capris and talked her into wearing them.”

“He even bought me the sneakers,” Tammy said.

The lights flashed.

“Oh–” It was time to take our seats.

Ursule stood off to the side observing. Herb, my mother, and I crowded around the tiny table and sipped our drinks. The house settled down and the lights went off.

There was a lengthy wait, a buzz, the lights flashed again, we heard cursing. Then the curtain opened onto a stage, which was like a dump full of puppets. They hung down on strings, were skewered and affixed to the walls, heaped up on shelves and about the stage, hanging by the neck, in chains and stretched out on a rack. The playing area was between the easel and the keyboard and extended back into the debris and clutter. It was just big enough for 2 people; any more would have to clear a space in all the junk.

There were misshapen lumps of clay in skirts, and jokers, and fools. Little wooden robots. Many fat, vulgar things dressed in grave clothes. There were targes and pistols and all manner of bric-a-brac: a stuffed crocodile, an electric train chugging on a circular track and a chimp doll on a tricycle with a horn, racing bicycles, a jelly fish in a jar, an aboriginal drawing of a cuttle fish, and a stuffed owl. In the staging they made some effort to observe Jarry’s instructions, expressed in a letter to Lugne-Poe, the director of the Theatre de l’Oeuvre where Ubu Roi premiered. Individuals were to stand in for armies and crowds; the principals were to wear inexpressive masks, the scenes would be announced on a placard, as in the puppet theaters.

Joseph came out in a moth-eaten cutaway coat and tails and a bow tie; his hair, bleached and dyed blond, hovered above his head like an electron cloud. Looking insanely cherubic, he bowed and sat down behind the Yamaha and after some minutes started to play. The sound was distorted but still recognizably an electronic keyboard. He didn’t have an actual synthesizer, just a drum machine which started to percolate like a bar mitzvah one-man band. He played the vaguely carnivalesque music he had composed under a deep spell of Kurt Weill and Kraftwerk, but the macabre, retro dressing barely adhered to a man still in thrall to laconic bubble gum pop and whose main mode of expression was disingenuous ironic pastiche.

 After the brief musical interlude one of the Dada men from Sally and Christopher’s party came out in a shabby doorman suit and white gloves. His shoes were too large. He lifted the cloth off of the easel and returned backstage, leaving us to contemplate the solely lit carte:

ACTE PREMIERE

SCENE PREMIERE

 

It was indeed the moment we had all been waiting for. Kicking through the puppets from backstage, crushing them beneath his feet, flinging those that fell on him away, came Christopher in fat pants. He was so fat his stomach knocked the puppets over. One hand was a large phynance hook made of rough papier-mâché. The other held a physick stick. He wore a silver ski mask. The lights gleamed off of it.

Sally followed, daintily walking on top of all the felled marionettes, taking care of the few who might have fled. Her mask was a piece of cardboard cut in the shape of a crocodile’s head and covered in foil. A hole, outlined with lipstick, served as a mouth and her other features had been penciled-in crudely and then covered in Elmer’s glue and glitter, which became unstuck each time she moved and flickered to the floor. On her chest were two enormous balloons not quite fully inflated. Lou yelled out from the audience, “The bodacity of her Tau Taus!”

Pere Ubu.–Schrritt!

Mere Ubu.–Oh! Voila du joli, Pere Ubu, vous estes un fort grand voyou.

“What’s that mean?” Ursule asked. She squatted down beside me and smelled like bubble gum and perfume and cigarettes. “What’s that, French?”

“Shshs,” I said.

“Don’t say szczs szczs to me. What is that? You didn’t say it was gonna be in French.”

Every one of the 20 people in the audience stared at her.

Pere Ubu. — Watch out I don’t bash yer nut in, Ma Ubu!

“Yeah,” I said softly to Ursule.

“Why don’t you sit down dear and listen, or don’t listen,” my mother whispered.

Mere Ubu. — C’est pas moi, Pere Ubu, c’est un autre qu’il faudrait assassiner.

“What the fuck.”

Pere Ubu. — De par ma chandelle vert, I’m not with you.

He clumped over as if to boink her, but his stomach bumbled into her boobs and she pushed it away. The mask dug into the purple, torpedo-shaped balloons, and the nipples, smeared on in ruby lip-gloss, bulged, bursting periodically. Pere Ubu had a big red bone between his legs that mostly was hidden by his umbrageous belly but which would unroll like an amphibian tongue and stiffen at certain times to general laughter. Ursule did a fair approximation of her father’s laser sigh and decided to stick it out, sitting on the floor staring at her raw cuticles.

By the time the man in the doorman’s uniform lifted the curtain off the carte:

 

ACTE IV

SCENE PREMIERE

The Crypt of the ANCIENT

Roi de Pologne in Warsaw Cathedral

 

Sally, who after a bumpy start had hit a stretch of exuberant Mere Ubuing, albeit in French, was beginning to slump and we were all alarmed, at least any of those of us with a shred of empathy. She was the boss of the French, but no one else could con what it meant, so they kept blowing lines, on stage and off.

It broke Christopher’s concentration so that nothing he did was right; if she clobbered the line in English, you could see him straining to correct her; and if it were in French, he would stop whatever he was doing to translate in his head. It so discombobulated him that the blast of Ubu would suddenly die into the attenuated, nasal drone of Christopher at his most introverted. He touched his bow tie. His lips trembled. Then, once again, he became Ubic, swelled up like a bubo and bellowed as before.

By then the hubbub of battle, as well as a puppet horse and scorched flags made of little bits of paper on toothpicks, had filled the stage. Joseph swirled us in and out of war most fowle with his dink-a-donk dervishes.

He gave us bells,

He gave us cannonade,

He gave us the growls of a beare.

 

Sally ran out of gas in the Lithuanian cave. Her mask was ragged and bent. We sat there watching the confetti snow come down in fistfuls, waiting for her to say: “Enfin, me voila a l’abri,” and hearing only the room. They ran out of snow. It would have been a disaster had not Lydia yelled out from the back of the house, “Shelter at last! I’m alone here, which is fine as far as I’m concerned.” Sally, as Lydia spoke, nodded the mask up and down. The edges of the mouth were soaked with saliva. Most of the glitter had come off the foil and some of the glue hadn’t dried yet so it slid in tears from one eye. The balloons bounced against it when she walked. She was nodding along with the words as if they were a song and then, suddenly, the speech in French burst out of her without inflection; it was a run of memorized sounds few in the audience understood, but it wasn’t silence.

When it was finally over I felt like I had actually lived through something, though I am not entirely sure now why I felt that way, other than the drama of Sally’s performance, which is all I remember of it. I know we applauded and that it was as we were heading towards the door in a large herd, attempting to negotiate a restaurant, that Roy walked in, twitching his nose and checking out the puppets and marionettes still scattered over the stage.

Sally was in street clothes and aside from her sullen, pale face you’d not have suspected she had just trod the boards for a little over an hour, in wooden clogs no less. All Roy elicited from her was a roll of the eyes followed by an averted gaze. My mother was steering the chiropractor and Ursule towards the door.

“We could go to Kiev,” Sally said.

“Ah–” Raph said, dismissing the idea with a wave of his hand.

Sally’s mother shook her head. She had short blond hair, was quite tall and thin, in her late fifties, with a commanding eye and voice. She was dressed in jeans and a white silk blouse and wore open toed sandals through which her red nails showed. “What’s wrong with Kiev?” she asked.

Raph said, “It’s the mushroom gravy, I don’t like it.”

The chiropractor, who was not quite out the door, turned around and yelled, “Whatever you do, don’t go to that Panda House.”

“What?” Roy asked.

Sally turned her head and stared at him and muttered, “Merde. Essenzie schizer. Spaniel at heel. Perfidious lick-twat buggerall.”

Cynthia turned to me. “Where would you like to go, Alex.”

“Someplace we can get a hamburger,” Raph said quietly, looking me in the eye. Now I knew I couldn’t let him down. He tolerated me in his loft and in his daughter with more than resignation, with what I would not hesitate to call equanimity. I restored balance to the family. True, we were all token males in their eyes, inferior copies of a flawed original, and the men behaved as people in such circumstances do, with bowing and scraping and resentment. But now they at least had the advantage of numbers. I could be counted on to caucus with them in a close vote.

“Well, Phebe’s is around the corner, practically,” I said.

“Roy,” my mother said.

“It’s over?” he asked.

“Yes it is over, Roy. Go see them to the car and come out for a bite to eat with us. If they can ever make up they’re minds,” she nodded off in our direction. Roy had lizard eyes, darting as he licked his lips. He stood still and then bolted for the door, arms at his side and elbows sticking out.

Somehow we made it over to Phebe’s, Joseph, Sally, me, my mother, Roy, and Raph and Cynthia. We lost Tammy and Simon on the way. They were going to The Ninth Circle for a drink before heading out to work, Simon somewhere down in Soho, and Tammy at CB’s. We sat in the window overlooking the Bowery. Joseph was at the other end of drunk, where a strange coherence sets in. He had not slept in days, at least not more than a few hours in the afternoon. “I don’t think I can eat anything.” He attempted to light a cigarette but kept missing.

“You really should get some sleep Joseph, you look exhausted,” Cynthia said.

Joseph smiled. “No, I’m fine.” Then he fell face forward onto his empty plate and lifted his head like a beguiling halfwit.

Cynthia rubbed her forehead and repressed a smile. “Well you can joke if you like but I think it’s time to get a little sleep. You all worked so hard, it really showed.”

Sally sank into her feet; I could feel the qi slink out of her ass and into a hole in the floor. We fell to examining the menus.

“I wonder if they have pie,” Raph said, turning the menu back and forth.

Cynthia, reading, said, “It’s on the inside. You have to open it.”

“Usually it’s on the back.”

“It says to ask the waiter,” my mother said cheerfully. “Pie and coffee’s all I want.”

“I was thinking for after the burger,” Raph said, glancing at Cynthia, who seemed to be utterly absorbed in the menu. “What? I didn’t eat.”

“Who said anything?” Cynthia asked. “But it’s after ten. You know you get terrible-”

“Don’t let’s start in on that now,” he said, shaking his head and clearing the space with his hands.

Sally sucked on her teeth and said, in a low grumble, “Hornstrumpet. Cock in your nearoles and one up your arse.”

Roy sniffed and said, “Just coffee for me.” His hands were pink and the nails were pared right down to the flesh. The skin around the nails was bitten up and chapped. He drummed the table with his fingertips and did weird things with his lips, sucking them in and out of his mouth and biting down hard enough to blanch them.

“It’s been a long time Roy, I’m sorry Lydia missed you,” Cynthia said.

“That’s OK. We got plans for later. Whenever we get together it’s always old times with us. Never a fuck–no dull moments I mean.”

“Lydia says you’ve been away a lot on business in Central America.” She put down the menu.

Raph interrupted, “Those years in the Air Force must come in handy down there.”

Roy acted like he hadn’t quite heard the question. “I’m going into business in New York, as an investor. You know, I’m gonna be here all the time. Probably get an apartment. I’m at the Chelsea right now.”

“What sorts of investments?”

“Real Estate probably and maybe restaurants. I’m talking to some people.”

Raph became mildly curious and gave up on the menu. “Some People,” he said. “Oh yes. I’ve heard of them.”

My mother cleared her throat a few times and then studied the menu pretty hard. It was busy and the waitress was long in coming. She was new, didn’t know the pies but guessed they had apple.

“Not that apple with the sour cream and crumble,” Raph said. “That’s all they have these days. I ask you, what could be more American than apple pie and a slice of cheddar? But you try putting the cheddar on, whatever that’s called–”

“Dutch,” the waitress said.

“That’s right, Dutch apple. That’s not the apple you have then?”

When it looked like it would never end Joseph took on the role of interrruptor to say, “I’d like grilled cheese and fries. Black coffee.”

“I thought you weren’t hungry, hornstrumpet,” Sally said, and then, to the waitress, “Earl Grey, with lemon, please.”

Upon receipt of the pie report Raph, Cynthia, my mother and I were able to order; chocolate cream for Raph, pecan for my mother and Dutch apple for Cynthia. I got a pizza burger and a Coke. I had this burning gorge in me and it seemed to want gross measures taken, no half-assed endeavor with pie and such. And when were they going to talk? A painful, prolonged silence prevailed till we couldn’t even hear the background stammer of noise.

Sally caved first and was able to obvert an abandoned and obscure social skill that enabled her to recall our dinner at the Oyster Bar and thus obtund the acute edge of our unseemly silence. “Alyssoun was Mere Ubu, what was it, 30 years ago?”

“Oh, longer than that.” My mother chuckled. “I came to New York hoping to be an actress and found myself performing in one of those Columbia apartments, up on 109th, 110th, in somebody’s living room I think. That was in ‘48 or ‘49. Your father was still in school.”

“She saw the Living Theater do Ubu Roi at The Cherry Lane.”

“Oh yeah,” Raph said. “The Cherry Lane. You didn’t keep it long there!”

“Oh god! Raph–” Cynthia said.

“They got kicked outta there. The way they were living you can’t blame the landlord. What an asshole that guy was, but they were living there. They weren’t the cleanest people!”

“Well you know Judith and Julian lived just two blocks away from us,” Cynthia said. “We went to their parties. Raph and I met at the Poets’ Theater in Cambridge. I knew this remarkable woman, Bunny Lang. She wrote and performed these absurdist Greek dramas I suppose you’d call them and lived with her father in a decayed mansion. Raph came up with some New York poets. There was a lot of back and forth.”

“They were fucking nuts,” Raph said. “Anarchists. We used to go see them when they were up on Broadway there, and 100th street. Men would pretend to bugger each other like dogs. That was always Julian’s problem. He was a faggot who fell desperately in love with a woman.”

“Why do you use that word,” Sally said. “Of all the homophobic–”

“Homa-what? Phobia? Of queers? What’s to be afraid of? All I’m saying is–”

“Weren’t you telling us about Ubu Roi, Alyssoun?” Cynthia asked.

“Oh yes,” my mother said. “That was one of the best shows they ever did. And I met my second husband, the psychiatrist, at a performance of The Connection. We both knew Judith by coincidence. I got arrested with her one time at a demonstration at City Hall Park. In court, the judge, who was this son of a bitch, just kept at her till finally he asked her if she had ever been in a madhouse, and she looked at him and just lit him up with her eyes and she said, ‘No, have you?’ Mmm.” Everyone laughed. “Well that judge right there and then remanded her to Bellevue for psychiatric evaluation. They threw her onto the locked-ward with lifers. That’s right. The snake pit. Hard core psychopaths. In the morning Julian and some friends rounded up a lawyer and a psychiatrist, who agreed to see her. Now the psychiatrist they called in, it turns out he knew Judith, from back in the forties. His first job after the war was at the Hartford Institute for Living, where Judith worked. He remembered her and knew she was sane and had her released. He started going to their shows.”

The waitress brought out the burgers and grilled cheese. “Do you want your pie now or when he gets his?” she asked, pointing at Raph, who was in the midst of taking a giant, greasy bite out of his hamburger.

“I think we’d like it now, dear,” my mother said.

Raph said, “Julian and I did store windows together for a while in Brooklyn. He was a terrible painter, but he was a great stage designer, and he did good windows. People don’t know what they did. They think it’s all that stupid sixties shit, but that’s not what it is. They made things possible. To see one of those performances in the fifties, when everything was so fucking straight, it felt like the end of the world. And it was theater. Just like tonight. It’s happening right in front of your eyes, and then it’s over and it never happens again.”