Last Bender

This is an excerpt from the middle of Endangered Species. I’m going to post the whole thing one of these days but for now it’s going to be excerpts, and an excerpted novel isn’t always all that comprehensible. In this part my characters are putting on a show, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. It’s a sort of Here Comes Everybody situation. The hero’s mother and second step father are there and his girlfriend Sally’s parents show up. The chapter itself (50 or so pages long) has a structure of concentric circles. This is the inner circle from which the others radiate. Thematically it takes the book back to the 1890s, which is a  fitting anagram for a book about the 1980s. When Philip first read it he didn’t know whether to take the performance seriously or not. I was unable to answer the question. When Yeats saw the premiere performance he thought it was the end of civilization, and he also thought it was the aesthetic future. If Ubu Roi is art, what does it mean for artists like Yeats? But Jarry was a mystic, immersed in much of the same symbolism Yeats was. As Yeats himself said, The center cannot hold. I am reminded of old Claudius musing on the frog king. Once he knew the world had gone to hell, he wasn’t going to bother stopping it. He put Nero on the throne. Might as well hasten things along. But Ubu Roi was conceived and executed in the spirit anarchic fun, of Mennippean satire, of the destructive and corrosive explosion of humor pitted against tyranny and maturity. God save the queen, she ain’t no human being, she made you a moron, a potential H bomb. That kind of thing. “When there’s no future how can there be sin? We’re the dead flowers in the dust bin. We’re the poison in the human machine. We’re the future, your future.”

 

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 junkie slinging her quim 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?”

      Sally’s parents, Cynthia and Raphael, whom they called 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 old man shoes. 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 (my mother always has a hat) with a pheasant feather in it, 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 past sometimes alluded to by Sally, Lydia and Joseph. He had been an artist and jazz musician in the fifties, 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 in it, a smokers rasp, though he had not smoked in years, and he spoke in 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 the chair of 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 table 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 Carnegie Deli and destination restaurants, (a lot like my father, and the psychiatrist as well), 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 a nearly unbearable 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 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 Chinatown.” 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.

      “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,” she 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, just big enough for 2 people; any more would have to clear a space in all the junk.

      There were misshaped 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 racing in a circle on a 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 he found in a Salvation Army in Stonington, Conn. (where we had gone on a road trip to visit Tammy Markham’s sister Emma, who was in nursing school), 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 a 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 object on stage.

ACTE PREMIERE

SCENE PREMIERE

      It was indeed the moment we had all been waiting for. Kicking through the puppets from back stage, 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 mache. 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 mostly 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 and staring at her raw cuticles.

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

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 buboe 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, awaiting: “Enfin, me voila a l’abri,” but only hearing the silent audience. 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 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.