“TELL ME.”
I am sitting, unseen, with Mudd and Molloy in what appears to be a hospital chapel. Molloy is in his hospital gown, Mudd in a smart double-breasted suit.
“I suggest we go back and attempt once again to get Here Come a Coupla Fellas made,” says Molloy.
“OK, Chick. I mean, I don’t know. The business has changed.”
“Surely not much in three months.”
“Well, Chick, can I be honest with you?”
“Please.”
“I think you’ve changed. A bit.”
“I don’t believe I have.”
“You’re more like…me now,” says Mudd.
Molloy studies Mudd for a long moment.
“I see,” says Molloy.
“I’m not sure you can play the same character anymore.”
“Well, let’s give it a whirl, shall we?”
“Right now?”
“Why not?”
“Yeah, sure, Chick. The haberdashery scene?”
“Let’s do it.”
The two perform the scene and it falls flat.
“I’m not sure, Chick. It doesn’t feel natural anymore,” says Mudd.
“Perhaps we’re just out of practice.”
“I don’t think that’s it. Maybe if you shave your mustache and gain back the weight?”
“I prefer my look now, Bud. It suits me. You don’t know how difficult it is to be overweight. It’s a health issue and people always laugh at an overweight fellow.”
“I can imagine, Chick. But to be fair, we are hoping to make people laugh.”
“Not that way, Bud. Not that way. That’s cheap laughter and hurtful.”
“OK. I get that. Maybe just shave the mustache?”
“The mustache is dapper.”
“But does dapper work for our act?”
“Perhaps you can shave your mustache, Bud. Gain some weight. And we can switch roles.”
“I don’t want to gain weight, Chick.”
“So you understand how I feel.”
“I do, but that has always been your role in our act. I don’t even think I’d be good as the put-upon buffoon. I’m a straight man. That’s what I do.”
“Let’s give it a try. What do you say? Let’s do the scene again with our roles reversed.”
“Chick…”
“Let’s just try it, Bud. We might surprise ourselves.”
“Yeah, sure. OK.”
They try again and it plays exactly as it did previously, except with the roles reversed.
“You’re not being at all silly, Bud. Be silly.”
“It’s not my personality, Chick.”
“You’re not even trying.”
“OK.”
They start the scene again. Mudd mugs and whines and performs insane double takes throughout. It’s horrifying, nightmarish, obscene, impossible to watch, yet impossible to turn away.
“No, that’s not right, either,” says Molloy.
“I’m a straight man, Chick.”
“I am, too, Bud. I am, too.”
“Maybe it’s time to call it a day, my friend.”
“Comedy is all I know, Bud.”
Molloy begins to cry, but with no change of expression. Mudd watches this disconcerting display.
“We’ll figure this out,” says Bud.
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Maybe…what if we have two straight men? No one has ever done that before.”
“Yeah, sure, Chick.”
“Maybe it’s like a man arguing with himself. Are you familiar with the German Romantics, Bud?”
“Not really. No. I didn’t know you were.”
“I read at night when it’s quiet here.”
“Oh.”
“Doppelgängers. Romantic writer Jean Paul coined the term, but it’s an ancient concept. The double. It might be just the thing to take American comedy to the next level.”
“Sure. Sounds great,” says an unenthusiastic Mudd.
“Great!” says what I suspect is an enthusiastic Molloy, but I cannot tell for certain, for his face remains an almost parkinsonian mask of blankness.
IT’S A BEAUTIFUL Sunday afternoon, and I am speaking to a group of children at the Junior Future Film Historians of America, East Coast Division, picnic in Riverside Park:
“So here I am, in the future—in the year 2019, is it?—looking back at my life. This mysterious nonexistent place called Not Yet now fully realized, and who could have imagined the futuristic marvels we take for granted here? Cable-less telephones. Computer stations in our homes. Delicious, satisfying meals in pill form. All the world’s books in electronic libraries, accessible to everyone with the simple flick of a toggle switch. And even though war and poverty have been eradicated and all other peoples are now recognized to be just as good as white people, I still find myself dissatisfied. In this, which can only be described as the early evening of my life (daylight savings), I find myself struggling for meaning. Certainly it is wonderful to be in a world where everyone is equal and nobody is special, but I come from a different time, a different land, a land of ego and ambition, of endless striving, of envy. These traits have burrowed deep into my being, and now that everyone is celebrated, everyone writes book and paints paintings and sings songs and everybody else reads those books and looks at those paintings and listens to those songs, I find my primitive being wants to stand out. All of this welling to the surface at the very time my creative powers are waning and I am being slowly absorbed back into the earth from which I once sprung. For you see, I am shrinking.”
The children are impressed, I think. But I cannot be certain, for their faces remain almost parkinsonian masks of blankness.
“TELL ME.”
There is something behind the glass doorway. Barely visible. A blur. An insinuation of form. The camera dollies in. The door opens, and we enter the hallway of a brownstone. It’s empty, and we are drenched in foreboding. What was that? Who was that? Was it something we were not meant to see? And yet we are here. The film has taken us here. So we are meant to have seen it, we assume. We glide down the hall toward a closed door. There is menace in the absolute silence. We remember all the horror movies we have seen that have used this very device, invented so long ago by Giovanni Pastrone for his 1914 film Cabiria, albeit to an entirely other effect. There exists a feeling of inevitability, of lack of control, in this push forward. We will see what is in the room, whether we want to or not. The scarred, white wooden door at the end of the hall opens, bidding us to enter. Inside the dank, shuttered room, a drunken sailor is murdering a child. It is a horror film, not so much because of the child murdering (for that is played for laughs), but in that the tattoos on the sailor’s shirtless back are animated, suggesting his ambivalence about the brutally comical act he is committing. Spanning his left trapezius to the lower left deltoid is a dancing homunculus representing unbridled glee. The dance is simple, hopping back and forth, from one foot to the other, coupled with a malevolent grin and ecstatic counterclockwise eye rolling. On the right deltoid is Saint Nicholas, who represents not killing children. The tale of the butcher who slaughtered three children to sell for food comes to mind. Saint Nicholas resurrected them, which was the right thing to do, according to saintly ethics. In the tattoo, Nicholas mouths “tsk, tsk” and shakes his head but is unable to intervene because there is a tattoo of a giant fanged monkey between him and the homunculus. I’m not certain what the monkey represents (cultural indifference? Societal apathy?), but it seems clear that Nicholas is scared of it. The monkey appears smug. What is Ingo saying here? Is he revealing his own perverted desires? Is he advocating child slaughter? I seriously doubt that. Perhaps the child slaughter is wholly symbolic. Who hasn’t wanted to metaphorically violently slaughter the child thon once was? To erase from the face of the Earth the memory of that needy, pathetic abomination. But is that the right thing to do? Saint Nicholas says no. Or maybe more to the point, Saint Nicholas says, I don’t approve and I will resurrect that child if you murder it. I will never let you forget that child, for that child is the needy and pathetic being you once were. If you deny it, you are denying your own history, which, pathetic as it certainly is, must be remembered because those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. And who wants to be a child again?
The murder ends, and the sailor turns and looks into the camera, as if to say, “Heh?” It’s a moment of great cinematic power. We are all culpable, his look tells us. The bloody child stands and bows. Was this all a performance? No, he is the undead now. This is made clear by Ingo having replaced his eyeballs with black marbles. He doesn’t seem unhappy though. He pulls dishes and utensils from the cabinet and sets the table for dinner. The sailor smokes his pipe. The homunculus is dead. No, he’s breathing; he’s just asleep. Life is complicated, Ingo is telling us. There is horrible violence, but then we take a break and have dinner. This is life.
I leave Barassini’s office a wreck. The process of remembering is an exhausting one, which has rendered me physically and emotionally depressed. I reflect on the work I am doing, on the necessity of it, and on the real possibility of failure. I feel my deterioration. I feel it in my knees. I feel it in my bowels and in my penis. I feel it in my shrinking height, my failing memory. There was a time when I could remember everything. It was not necessarily an emetic memory. That’s not the word. The word that means photographic memory. Emetic is about vomiting. Although, in truth, that word was not entirely ill-chosen. I would and could vomit information. Ask me about Godard and I could projectile vomit dates and facts and theories, my own and those of others, about his work. I could tell you his shoe size. But no longer his shirt size. And this worries me. My memory lapses. My weak bladder. My unguaranteed erections. I am not heeding Thomas Dylan’s advice to not go gently into that good night. Dylan Thomas. Gentle. Jesus. I drowse in my chair. There is a dream about love. The kind of love that has never existed for me in life, but has, on several occasions, found its way into my dreams. In this one, this woman is kind and looks at me with resistantless eyes, wide, open-door eyes. Enter me fully, they offer. Don’t leave any of you out. Her eyes are black, her skin smooth and brown and reflective. This is all I have ever wanted. This grasping for respect, for money, for fame in which I spend my days is meaningless, silly, shameful in the presence of this love. She and impoverished obscurity are more than I could ever hope for. I move into her, effortlessly, no fear of rejection, no self-consciousness about my physical repulsiveness. I am loved. Her skin against mine is warm and soft. We tumble in weightless tangles. No elbows or bony hips. No worry about my buried motives for attraction to a black woman. It is fine. It is clean. I wake up brokenhearted. This will never be. This is not possible for me. If it ever were, it is too late now. I stare in despair at my wall of books. I vow to remember her face. I make up a story: Perhaps she exists and the dream is premonitory. It has happened before. Coincidence perhaps. I am not a firm believer in such things. But perhaps. And I vow to look openly today into the eyes of all African American women, see if they look back, see if there is a moment of love. It is unlikely. But I tasted something in that dream, and now I don’t know how to continue without it.
I walk to Barassini’s, attuned once more to African American females. But the fiction of the dream doesn’t overlap with the reality of the waking world. I see five possible candidates for dream lover among a sea of obvious rejects. Not one of them, the candidates or the rejects, acknowledges me. The truth is that I am not lovable, not in reality. Not by African Americans.
I arrive at Barassini’s in a foul mood. He senses it and asks me what’s wrong. I look into his stupid judgmental eyes. Why can’t he look at me as she does? Why can’t anyone in my damn corner of the Universal Brick look at me as she does?
“You’re looking at me crazy,” says Barassini.
“Whatever,” I tell him.
“Yikes. Well, maybe we ought to get to it. I can see you’re in a mood.”
“I am just fine,” I say. “Just fucking peachy. Let’s do this.”
Barassini flicks my neck switch.
I’m in the hall peeking into the parlor as gaunt, mustachioed Molloy reads the 1943 private printing of Guy Wernham’s translation of Maldoror. Patty passes by several times, straightening, cleaning. It’s clear she wants Molloy to notice her, to speak to her. After three passes, she turns in the doorway.
“Would you like some lunch, Chick?”
Molloy looks up.
“Hmm?”
“Lunch?”
He seems to consider this offer for a long moment, then:
“I don’t recognize myself, Patty. That is to say, I remember myself and I remember my reactions to things. But it’s as if I read about me in a book, a book about a stranger whom I revile.”
“What are you saying, Chick?”
“You really want me to repeat that?”
“No. I just don’t understand.”
“For example, I know I liked veal chops. I remember I liked veal chops. But now, I loathe veal chops and everything they represent. Where did my affection for veal chops go? Is it floating free now, like smoke looking for a place to affix?”
“We don’t have to have veal chops, Chick. I could make whatever you like. You want spaghetti?”
“That’s not the point I’m making.”
“Oh. OK. Because I have hamburger. I could make meatballs.”
“I don’t think the same things are funny I once thought were funny. I remember the things I thought were funny. But now they rankle me.”
“What’s rankle mean?”
“Annoy.”
“I see. Well, that’s OK. We can laugh at new things.”
“I know I used to be happy to be around lots of people. I liked parties. I liked flirting. I prefer to be alone these days.”
“Alone?”
“I’m more comfortable with solitude. With my books.”
“How do you mean alone, exactly?”
“An audience still intrigues me, but in a different way. I desire the attention, but not for the same reason.”
“What reason, then?”
“I need witnesses.”
“How about sandwiches?” she says. “We have some cold chicken in the ice box.”
“I’m not really hungry, Patty.”
“OK.”
Patty stands in the doorway for a long moment, while Molloy goes back to his Lautréamont.
“Do you remember you loved me, Chick?”
Molloy looks up.
“I do remember, Patty.”
This scene breaks my heart. I consider the love I shared with my African American girlfriend and, once, long ago, with my wife. Am I like Chick? Did I change? Did they?
Does everyone?