ALL RIGHT, I SEE NOW THERE IS A PLATE I HAVE TO SPIN. THOSE OF YOU who don’t quite grok the metaphor never spent Sunday evenings watching The Ed Sullivan Show. That is how my family spent its Sunday evenings, or so I assert, with a large measure of wilful self-deception. For although I sat cross-legged in front of the television set, my hands cupping my chubby knees, the rest of the family was otherwise occupied. My mother would be on the sofa behind me, reading a novel, drinking a drink. My brother, if he was in the house at all, would be, I don’t know, conducting little experiments; for example, he spent many hours trying to ascertain exactly how malleable his face was. Jay would invert his eyelids, fold his ears, pinch his nostrils, tug at the edges of his mouth. Sometimes he would wrap Scotch tape around his massive head, flattening and deforming all of his features. Although this may sound like the result of bottomless boredom, that wouldn’t account for the absorption my brother found in such activities. Anyway, if he was just bored, why didn’t he watch television like a normal kid? “Hey, Jay!” I would holler, as soon as Mr. Sullivan had completed his introduction. “It’s Topo Gigio, the cute little Italian mouse!”
“Hey, a lion tamer!”
“Hey, a plate spinner!”
Plate spinners were my favourite. The stage sprouted long wooden poles; the performer would enter with a stackful of plates (or else have the plates tossed to him by his assistant, who wore a little leotard that cleaved the backside and revealed many square inches of bare buttock, which went unmentioned, seemingly unnoticed except by me) which the plate-artiste would set, one by one, atop the poles. He’d place a plate, flick the rim a few times, set the thing into motion and centrifugal suspension, and then move on. A good plate twirler might have as many as twenty-five plates and poles, and as he worked on, say, the fifteenth, the first would be slowing and wobbling and threatening to drop and shatter, and the performer would dash back and give it a few quick flicks. Then on to the sixteenth, back to the second (give that first one a little extra torque, just for good measure), back to the seventeenth (for some reason the eighth would need some quick attention!), and soon the man was dashing all around the stage, and plates were spinning and wobbling and, oh!, every so often one would drop and the man would dive and catch it before it hit, an act the audience awarded with great huzzahs. It has only just dawned on me now that I was receiving, not just entertainment, but some skewed notion of how to live my adult life-to-be. Maybe it was the presence of the bare-buttocked assistant. (And of course, I never considered what happened after Ed Sullivan threw up his hands and invoked applause, I never considered that behind the fallen curtain every single fucking plate was shattering to little bitsies.)
At any rate, plate-twirling certainly has an analogue in novel-writing, and I see now that a plate is wobbling, so let me rush back, let me remind you of the scene in the makeup trailer, on the set of Padre, wherein I more or less dared Edward Milligan to read the Bible. Okay, you got that? (Flick, flick.)
Now we can proceed to an evening perhaps three days later. I have crawled into bed beside Ronnie, and, despite the fact that I have just recently spent my seed (you’ll soon appreciate the Biblical tone) with Bellamy, I reach up under my wife’s nightshirt and cup her right breast in my hand. Ronnie stirs, purrs, presses herself back up against me (although she remains an awfully long way from wakefulness) and I am content. I have these small moments of contentment, they are really all I can hope for, because if I were to look around I would see naught but wobbling plates.
The telephone rings, and I leap out of bed, wondering who the hell it could be. My brother, Jay, is my best bet, as he sometimes misplaces time at the bottom of a whiskey glass. So I snap up the phone in the master bedroom, press it tightly against my face and whisper, “Hello?”
“Phil? It’s Ed.”
“Milligan?”
“Yeah, sure. Milligan.”
“You have to be on the set in four hours.”
“Yeah, I know, but I can’t sleep. Listen, listen to this. A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side.”
“Ed? Why are reading me this?”
“The priest passed by on the other side.”
“Yeah. Okay, listen. Take that dope you have, flush it down the toilet. Actually, save a little bit for me to try, it seems to be really top-notch …”
“I’m not doing any dope, Phil. I was just lying in bed here, and I thought I’d look at this Bible. Okay, so then a Levite passes by on the other side. But the Samma-ritten, I mean the Samaritan, um, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. I didn’t know wine was good for that sort of thing, you can really learn a lot from the Bible.”
“I don’t think it really functions very well as a first-aid manual.”
“Look, Phil. Don’t, you know, mock me. Please don’t mock me. Because this story, it’s like … you know, you try to divide the world up into good and bad people. You know? It’s like this choice you’re given, You gonna be good, you gonna be bad? And it’s easier to be bad, right? It’s more fun. But in this story, the good person, the priest, he just passes by on the other side. So like, where does that leave us? There are no good or bad people, there are just people and some can be moved by this, this, compassion. Doesn’t that make you feel better?”
“Why would it make me feel better?”
“Because you think you’re such a bad person.”
“I don’t think I’m a bad person.”
“Bull-fucking-whipdip. You think you’re the lowest of the low, and the only reason you can stand having me around is that I’m a lot worse than you are.”
“Look, Milligan, I was in bed.”
“With your wife, your beautiful wife?”
“Yes, with my wife, my beau—my wife.”
“Do you love her?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then why are you laying the pud to Makeup?”
“Milligan!”
“I’ll tell you why. Because it’s a monstrous thing to do, ergo, you’re a monster.”
My wife, my beautiful wife, is struggling to resurface into the land of wakey-wakey. “Phil? What’s going on?” I think I woke her up when I whispered/bellowed, “Milligan!”
The next day, on-set, Milligan seemed to be his old obnoxious self, and I was convinced that his nocturnal phone call was the result of space-age pharmaceuticals. I found him fighting bitterly, savagely, with Jimmy Yu, Padre’s most frequent director. “You’re whacked!” Milligan was hollering. “Just totally fucking whack-o.”
I couldn’t read all too much into that particular statement, given that it was incontrovertible. Jimmy possesses no grip on sanity, doesn’t even attempt it. One only has to look at him; they say appearances can be deceiving, but in my experience this is not the case, certainly not the case with Yu. Jimmy sports a kind of inverse monk’s tonsure, shaving his head except for the crown, from which blooms a thick plume dyed on a daily basis, although amateurishly, so that it is mottled and variegated. He is the only person I’ve ever encountered whose spectacles are thicker than my own. My lenses make my eyes look distorted and large. Jimmy’s cause his to disappear, and when you look at him head-on, you see nothing but flesh-coloured clouds where the orbs should be. He’s fortunate in that nature saddled him with a huge pair of ears and a prodigious nose, as anything smaller would be unable to deal with the specs.
Jimmy is from Hong Kong originally—specifically, a film studio in Hong Kong, one that specialized in martial arts movies. His father was a director and his mother an actress (indeed, his mother was Nan Yu, famous for her role as White Breast, a fierce warrior who often battled with a breast exposed, I suppose for tactical reasons), and although there was a family apartment nearby none of the Yus ever left the sets. Not young Jimmy, at any rate, who still doesn’t truly believe that there is existence beyond the sound stage. We (by “we” I mean the producers of Padre) supplied him with a hotel room, quite a nice hotel room, but he went there only reluctantly, after being tossed out of the production facilities by Security. (Despite which, he managed to run up an astronomical pay-per-view movie bill.) When he is editing (Jimmy is truly a filmmaker, he does it all himself and trusts no one) he sleeps and eats in the editing suite, although only to the tune of twenty-odd minutes a night and a few handfuls of peanuts.
This may sound like artistic dedication rather than insanity, but trust me, it’s insanity. Jimmy is in the grip of the illusion that he is reinventing cinema, marking his page in movie history, every second of every day. Therefore, the simplest shot (Milligan standing in front of his little parish church, for example) is undertaken with Eisensteinian enthusiasm. Yu will mount huge attacks; he will holler into being a phalanx of klieg lights and booms; he will lead the charge himself with the 35-millimetre camera raised above his head. Again, this may sound admirable but it is fundamentally irritating, and finally maddening, because Jimmy lacks both age-appropriate social skills and much of the English language. Although he’s lived in North America for ten years, he abandoned his acquisition of the tongue after mastering, oh, thirty-five words, not all of which are applicable to the film and television business. (“Buttocks,” for example, which he employs in a variety of ways. When angry at the grips, Jimmy will shriek, “Buttocks!” We don’t know if this is the part of their anatomy he is threatening or if it is just an all-purpose cry of frustration.) The word he shouts most is “Right!” which serves duty both as “correct” and, although it is racially insensitive to mention this, “light.”
So when I heard Jimmy scream, “More right!” and Milligan assert, “You’re whacked,” I just continued walking, because all was as it should be (or just was). But then I heard Ed Milligan say, “You know, these people have feelings.” I stumbled a bit, raced out to the makeup trailer, indulged myself in the very teenage activity of feeling up Bellamy.
At some point in the afternoon I ventured back to the set, where I spied Milligan and Jimmy Yu sitting in a corner, talking quietly, their foreheads almost touching. I grabbed some food from the crafts table and wandered close enough to overhear Milligan say, “Vanity of vanities, Jimbo. All is vanity.”
“Van-nitty,” repeated Yu, as though he was willing to add this new word to his vocabulary.
“Yeah, yeah, because, check this out, what profit hath a man of all his labour under the sun? Because, like, one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. Get it? This is all so, so … ephemeral.”
Jimmy Yu nodded and attempted to repeat the word “ephemeral,” although I am unable to transcribe this utterance.
Well, it could be that after all these pages (there’s at least a couple hundred scattered about my gloomy basement bachelor) I’ve finally learned something about novel-writing, because I am not going to follow this particular narrative thread to its end just yet. (At any rate, I have wobbling plates to attend to.) For now I will only tell you that Milligan continued to read the Bible. He became a born-again Christian. He appeared on Rainie van der Glick’s radio show and proclaimed himself so, which caused the ratings of Padre to plummet. My, my, people are strange. Mind you, he continued to ingest huge quantities of drugs, which, in combination with his own self-hatred and twisted emotional palette, led him to a very strange place.
And he gleefully took me along.
I’m going to spin another plate here, with your kind indulgence, a plate off toward stage left, and tell you that earlier this evening I entered Birds of a Feather and sat down at a little table near the back. Amy presented herself quite a while thereafter, having left me to stew in my own juices (an apt metaphor) for fifteen or twenty minutes. She pointed a finger, as though trying to place me. “The regular?”
“No, uh, half the regular. Just the beer portion, please. Amy.”
“Your bro’ isn’t here tonight, you know.”
“Oh, yeah, I know. He has plans and preparations to make. We’re going on a road trip.”
“Huh.” She didn’t ask where we were going; in fact, she enunciated that single syllable with such manifest lack of interest that I inferred I was never to bring up the subject of my trip, or travel in general, again. So it was quickly on to Plan B. “So … I read Barchester Towers.”
“Really.”
“Really.” Not really. I’d read maybe two hundred pages and scanned the Coles Notes.
“I’ll get your beer.” And then Amy was gone.
This wasn’t going well; indeed, the whole notion was misbegotten, and I’m sure many of you find it off-putting. There’s no getting around the fact that I was a few years older than her—more than a few—hey, let’s face it, I was an old goat, a bleating ungulate. But, um, maybe we as a society should be a little less sanctimonious as regards the workings of the human heart, and those who are condemnatory should book tickets for the Jerry Springer Show, where anyone can hurl stones at the slack-jawed sinners.
Okay, all right, perhaps a little too sensitive there.
Amy returned with my beer. “So…?”
“So?”
“So, what did you think of Barchester Towers?”
“Well, um … the names were weird.”
“Eh?”
“Mr. Quiverful. Omicron Pie. These are like teevee names.”
Amy placed her salver on the tabletop, slipped into the seat across from me. “Teevee names? What’s that all about?”
“Oh, well, in these litigious times, you can’t use real, realistic names on television. I couldn’t call someone, I don’t know, Jack Winston, because Clearances would come back and say that there’s a guy in Akron, Ohio, named Jack Winston, and he’s in the same business or whatever, and he could enjoin production of the show, so you have to change the name. You have to come up with a name that nobody has. Omicron Pie is good.”
“Huh. Interesting.”
Really? Was it? Or was Amy just being polite, in which case, why? Maybe I hadn’t lost too much ground that evening with Rainie.
“Yeah, I remember you saying you worked in television. Padre, right? With the star that—”
“That’s the one.”
“So … what’s your favourite teevee show?”
“My—? Oh, gosh. Don’t you have to—?” I gestured at the bar’s patrons; they didn’t seem to total more than about seven people.
“No, I’m good for a few minutes.”
“Well, then, I’ll answer unequivocally. The Twilight Zone.”
“Yeah! Great show. I’ll tell you what my favourite episode is, ‘A World of His Own.’”
“You’re not old enough to have a favourite Twilight Zone episode.”
“I’m probably not as young as you think I am. And anyway, you can rent all the seasons, you know, at the video store. I like old things. Old movies, old television shows, old novels.”
“So ‘A World of His Own.’”
“About the writer who talks into the tape recorder, right, the Dictaphone, and everything he describes becomes real. And then to destroy whatever it is, he just has to throw the tape into the fire.”
“It’s a good one, all right. His wife catches him with some blonde, and he tells her about the magic Dictaphone. She doesn’t believe him, so he throws the tape about the blonde into the fire and she disappears.”
“Then he takes out this tape that describes his wife, and it ends up in the fire—”
“Uh-huh, but remorse gets the better of him, so he gets on the Dictaphone and starts describing his wife, and then he has second thoughts—”
“And starts describing the blonde again. I like little twists like that.”
“I should point out, though, that the teleplay was by Richard Matheson. It’s not a Rod Serling script.”
“Uh-huh. And that’s important?”
“Well, kind of. I don’t know. What’s your doctoral thesis about?”
“I’m calling it The Power and the Glory; Heterodoxy in the Novels of Anthony Trollope. It’s about the conflict between spiritualism and social status in the clergy.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s what Padre was about, too. Except Padre was a pile of shit.”
“That guy was cute, though.”
“Yeah, he was cute.”
“So, Phil, I should get back to work. It was nice talking to you.”
“Yeah. Listen, I’m going away for a few days, but maybe when I get back, if you have a night off, we could have dinner or something.”
Amy wrote down her number on a napkin, shoved it across the table. “Sounds good. What’s the matter?”
“Huh?”
“You look funny.”
“Well, I’m… I’m just a little bit flabbergasted here.”
“Oh. Good. I’m all for flabbergastation.”
“And I’ve made quite a few dinners, and frozen them, and they’re all labelled, you know, chicken cacciatore or veal scaloppini or whatever.”
“I see. So the children only eat foreign food?”
“Why are you being so snarky?”
“Snarky? Moi?”
“Toi.”
“Well, it’s just that, you know, I feel this whole situation is bad enough without you treating me as though I were totally incompetent.”
“For one thing, I am only trying to be helpful. For another, you brought this situation upon yourself.”
“I brought upon myself the situation of you larking off to Mexico with your young lover?”
“Yes, you did. And lastly, do you realize that’s probably the only time you ever actually told me what was bothering you?”
“It’s the first time you’ve ever gone on a romantic holiday with your young lover. And do you realize that we never went on a romantic holiday?”
“Whose fault is that?”
“You’re saying it’s my fault?”
“You were always working.”
“I was always working because we always needed money.”
“And you resent me for that.”
“I resent your resentment about the fact that I was always working, yeah.”
“You know what? Maybe we should go talk to a ellor.”
“What was that?”
“We could try to work ou f these issues.”
“Something funny’s going on with my phone.”
“Even if we rema arated.”
“There are strange little blasts of silence.”
“Oh. M ou have another call.”
“Really? What do I do?”
“Put me on hold and answ one.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Hit the talk button again.”
“Okay. Hello? Who is this?”
“It’s still me, doofus supremo. Hit the talk button.”
“Hello?”
“Okay. I got a car.”
“Jay?”
“She’s a real beauty. A 1970 Dodge Super Bee. Three-eighty-three magnum, a 727 transmission …”
“What does all that mean?”
“Fucked if I know.”
“Hold on, hold on. Don’t go away. Hello?”
“Yeah, I know. Whoever it is is more important than me. Who is it, anyway? Your girlfriend Rainie?”
“No, um… listen, did you say even if we remain separated?”
“Uh … I may have.”
“But that would imply our separation is not a done deal.”
“I only meant that seeing a counsellor could only be helpful, even in separation. I certainly didn’t imply there was any chance of reconciliation.”
“Yes, you did, Ronnie.”
“That may have been what you inferred.”
“You’re seeking refuge in syntax. That’s a good sign.”
“Phil … I’m in love with Kerwin.”
“Is that so?”
“Okay, okay, okay, maybe I’m not in love with Kerwin, but that doesn’t mean that you and I have any sort of a future, except as co-parents.”
“Right.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Okay, babe, I’ve got my little brother on the other line. Or on the same line, whatever, I didn’t even know my phone could do this. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.”
“Bye.”
“Hello?”
“The big thing is this. At some point during the journey—I’m thinking on the return, near Sudbury—the odometer’s going to click over. Nothing but zeroes. Flat line. A brand new beginning.”
“It’s got a hundred thousand miles on it?”
“Almost three hundred thou. She’s a trooper.”
“Where did you get this thing?”
“Bought it from a musician friend of mine.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred bucks. A steal.”
“We’re doomed.”
“Hey, don’t sweat it.”
“I’m just worried about, you know, I think this may be a crime.”
“Trying to reclaim the spiritual integrity of your existence is all of a sudden a crime?”
“I’m afraid it might technically be kidnapping. I mean, I am the girls’ father, but if their mother hasn’t given her explicit approval, especially now that we’re separated—”
“If you want to bail out, bail. You don’t need a reason. Especially not a stupid one.”
“I’m just saying, maybe it’s not a good idea.”
“Oh, it’s a good idea, Phil. It’s necessary. All of these things—these things that happened to you, these memories—you’ve just been throwing them into a big pit. Covering them over with dirt. That’s how you been dealing with this shit. But the thing is, it’s all been toxic waste, man. You’ve destroyed the table water.”
“Huh?”
“The water table?”
“Right. So all the land is now, you know, poison. No healthy crops can grow.”
“Uh-huh. I think you might want to turn that metaphor loose now, Jay.”
“If nothing else, you should want to actually get a couple of details right for your goddam book. I mean, it’s an autobiographical novel, you’d think you’d want to get some authentic memories into it.”
“I’ve got plenty of authentic memories in there.”
“You thought their names were Tom and Tony.”
“That’s what you said they were!”
“Ted and Terry.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter what their names were.”
“Yeah, it does. It matters. Because, Phil, this thing has fucked us up.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Yeah, I know you wouldn’t say that. Because you’re an emotional imbecile, that’s why you wouldn’t say that. But you have fucked up.”
“Look, I may have made a few poor life decisions…”
“Shut up, Phil. I’m not trying to be hard on you. I fucked up every bit as badly. I’m a two-bit fern-bar pianist who can’t play a major seventh without weeping like an infant. Let’s face it, Phil, we both have a warped world view, and what warped it was two grease-balls named Tom and Tony.”
“All right.”
“All right.”
“But I still think their names were Ted and Terry.”
“I’ll see you Monday morning.”