excerpts from
DeBoom: Who Gives This Woman?
from
The Best American Short Plays 2006–2007
GEOFFREY DeBOOM Used to be I slept six hours and erupted into the day, my mind as febrile at the moment of tremulous waking as it would be in the epicenter of the day’s quakes. Now, I sleep and wake and sleep eight, nine, ten hours and have no desire to get out of bed except for the middle-of-the-night urination—and then only for the sake of my decaying kidneys (27 percent function last test)—the lack of desire to rise and go forth abetted, no doubt, by the fact that I have nothing to look forward to, or to be fair—not that fair is of much interest to me anymore—that I look forward to nothing. I roll off the Posturepedic so as not to precipitate a back spasm that would put me back to bed for a couple of weeks, forced to choose among self-analysis, pop books, bad music, or, worse, movies. So I would rather go to the university than stay home. Thus, mobility, such as it is, has value. I engineer the four-step journey across carpet into the bathroom, favoring the titanium and plastic right knee over the left one with its shards of chipped bone and cartilage roaming the joint like Rice Krispies through molasses. Load my toothbrush with whitening paste and crane myself toward the toilet with stiff arms on the seat, dropping lead-like the last few inches as my arms give out to gravity.
Avoid the mirror. Pee lefty, brush righty. Wait for my indolent bladder to drain. Pee, squeeze, squirt, squeeze, sit, wait, wait, dribble, squeeze, squirt. I stopped frequenting the student bathroom down the hall from my garret in favor of a trek to the faculty lav several corridors over, following a whiz between two undergrads who imagined life would always be thus, their bladders emptying in a tsunami of malted urine. They left me chained to the urinal like Prometheus, long after they’d zipped, washed (one of them), exited (lunch, ball game, sexual encounter?), while I stood and sprinkled and spritzed for a couple of hours, guilty of what wisdom has taught is mankind’s most egregious sin: growing old. I drive off the toilet on a silent “Hut!,” aware that no matter how many last little squeezes I exert on my prostate, before I am upright my penis will emit a last squirt that will saturate a quarter size circle in the crotch of my Jockeys. (Tip: black underwear.) Limp the road of life now with wet pants. On a panel at a civil rights conference last year on the failure of the movie industry to do much about diversity (and in a superficial effort at disclosure—not there as a supporter of affirmative action, political correctness, or the glories of the melting pot; I was there to say the industry was not a moral conglomerate but a financial one that didn’t care about diversity unless it paid in dollars). Wearing cream-colored Zanellas. Knew, following the pre-speech safety whiz; I’d spritz a 25-cent piece right before taking the stage. Wore a Kotex Mini Pad.
Diapers pretty soon. Rinse toothpaste—two cupped palms of water, left above right— always two, going back to age eight and the onset of compulsive behavior: Save the family, give thanks to a benevolent Savior, request not to die young. Shake out the toothbrush, restore it to its place in the receptacle next to Cass’s unused, firm Oral-B. I had figured in twisted Cartesian fashion: She has a toothbrush at my condo; therefore, she’ll come back to me.
Must tackle my image in the mirror (daily query delivered to no one but me: What is my father doing in there?) and resist with the modicum of self-control still available the desire to smash my head through glass, plaster board, and studs to the outdoors. Imagine my father’s and my communal head, connected by a tendon or two, yo-yoing from the second floor.
Next, a moment’s loathing of the once sculpted but now flaccid pecs (pubescent breasts, really), the reedy biceps, their rippling, dry overskin like stretched, faux snake skin, the leavened baguette in the midriff that defies the hundreds of crunches I do daily.
My eyes drop to the ellipse-shaped pouches under my eyes that don’t go away since squirrels started depositing their nuts there a decade back. Not tiredness, according to a woman at a book signing, she with parchment skin stretched like loomed silk over the front of her skull and tacked behind her ears, but, she whispered so that only the first five or so in line behind her could hear, the walnuts are just fat deposits which can be removed in an hour operation in a doctor’s office.
Tropical forests of hair festoon along the helix, tragus, lobe of my ears, sprout like roach antennae from the tip of my nose. Every two weeks, with tweezers, I stand here wearing my reading glasses and pluck the antennae black filament by black filament, each pluck sending through my neural network a little electrical reminder of my putrefaction.
There is the hair on my head that only recently began thinning on top and receding into my temples. Good chance death will beat baldness.
The human body, helpless to resist, humiliates the living thing that was itself. I have contemplated suicide a thousand, ten thousand times. I have stood on three separate Saturday afternoons at Barnes & Noble and perused the periodically updated tome that details for do-it-yourself sorts the best ways to get it done. Tell myself I can’t kill myself because of Cass and Maxine.
• • • •
GEOFFREY DeBOOM My life insurance might not pay off, as if that’s an issue, since my daughter is rich and can take care of her mother, whether she wins a Nobel Prize or not, if she lives another hundred years. But I know, though once unafraid if not brave, I am a coward now and don’t have the guts. A Southern Baptist gone public atheist, I am a closet Catholic. I fear there’s a hell to which I’ll be assigned for eternity with all the other perfidious misanthropes who set themselves up as judges of mass culture. Terror keeps me alive, witness to my deterioration.
Dressed, deodorized, pomaded, I limp to the kitchen, listing to port, the left leg three-eights of an inch shorter than the right since the right knee was replaced with plastic and titanium. At the out-of-fashion tile counter I commence the ceremony of the pills. Seven supplements shipped via UPS once a month from a distributor in Dallas, then the replacement for the pill for arthritis that was destroying my kidneys and the one for high blood pressure followed by the one for the hyperthyroidism that is trying to keep the kidney function I have at its current short-of-dialysis level.
Skip the antidepressant for the eighteenth straight day.
I turn on my computer. Download e-mail. There are nineteen. Several from students with work attached; the New York Times; Truthout, a website I use to keep track of liberal—pardon me, progressive—bullcrap; one from Max (“I need to talk to you, but we have to leave for the airport.”), a couple of ads, three reminders of meetings at the Film School, two of which I’ll duck though I’ve confirmed I’ll attend.
Responding to e-mail has become my substitute for writing reviews, the thing I did for a living several times a week for thirty years, or writing the copy for my TV show, which I did for a decade and a half. I drag it out, to minimize guilt for not working on the column I still write monthly for Esquire, until I can go to school but not be there so long that I’m bored or have to talk to people I don’t want to talk to—which takes in pretty much everyone there. The phone rings at seven forty-two. I have no message, just the “beep.” [. . .]
I wait to board last. Fester past the fortunate eight who fill the spacious elite seats with their smug complacence toward me, hunched like Quasimodo, nudging as if I were in ankle shackles to the back of the plane, where I’ll be crammed in three abreast with insufficient room for my failing body parts.
At my row will be a colossus who runneth over into my narrow tract, affording me the opportunity to make a memorable scene that I can leak to Entertainment Tonight. Flight attendant, didn’t I hear there’s a flab limit per passenger now? Why isn’t this mastodon paying for two seats? I have an aisle seat. There is no one in the middle. I have nothing to bitch about. My feelings are mixed. Nothing is pure, I wrote about East of Eden after a festival of Steinbeck’s books-into-movies in the late ’80s, which I left renewed, with almost boyish confidence in my ideals, what I could do that others before me could not—of course could not, they were not me! I could define filmic art the way Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazan had defined modern literature! “Nothing is pure, but the film version of this novel brings us a confluence of words. With actors, screenwriter, director, cinematographer, editor, composer that overwhelmed me anew by the complexity, the Aristotelian tractability of life made into art about life intractable.” And, yes, I can quote myself by heart if I have written it down.
Celebrity! From the Latin “to celebrate,” as in: We celebrate them for no reason on earth other than our own pathetic lack of substance. “You resent the wealth of the people you review,” Stallone accused me following my review of the unspeakable Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). So withering—and accurate—was my appraisal that it remains a film school staple, trotted out in countless film analysis classesthe world over as “a perfect example,” as one lily white professor at the University of Utah once wrote, “of calling a spade a spade.”
Yes, Sylvester, I resent your wealth, your celebrity, your promiscuity, and your unearned political standing, but none of that has anything to do with the fact that you’re an execrable actor in an excremental movie. I had written:
“The deceit in the conceit of an American avenger with steroid pecks, lathered in olive oil, wearing an undulating pubic wig, revising the abject failure of my nation in Vietnam made me laugh, made me sick. The actor wrote the script himself. For himself. It is a masturbatory exegesis on post-Vietnam American male impotence.” The review was the first time the Daily News had used symbols in its pages to mask someone’s use of a perceived profanity. The closing sentence of my review: “Shame on the egregious makers of this propagandist, populist s***. We lost a war we should have won when we actually fought it.” My editor urged me to change “shit” to “excrement,” a variant on excremental, which I had used above, but I insisted that was too polite a word and that I would accept the “s” followed by three asterisks. I realized at some point—an incremental understanding—that I despised the male of the species and that there was no word for it. There is misanthropy and misogyny for hatred of mankind and of women, but nothing to denote one’s loathing of men, per se. Manthropy lacks the musicality of the other two.
In the early eighties, I was feminized by Cassandra Rosenblum DeBoom and began to write respectfully of women. Streep, MacLaine, Pfeiffer. Even a kind piece after The Witches of Eastwick about Cher Bono, though I couldn’t resist a riff on her competition with Michael Jackson in the torture of the flesh department. I was the first to point out that Nicole Kidman had the talent to be way more than the girlfriend of the modestly talented, big of nose and small of stature Tom Cruise. Cass loved Cruise and thought less of Kidman, accusing me of favoring Kidman because she was
the doppelganger of the six-foot, linear, curly-haired, monster-forehanded Maxine Abigail DeBoom. Directors, producers, studio executives (virtually all men in my formative years) hated me for my perceived bias against their gender (and the gender virtually always at the center of their movies). I gained vigor from their united enmity. My paper and network were threatened over the years with 162 lawsuits for libel (spoken) and slander (written). None ever went to trial. And none was settled out of court with cash. Only twice did people come after me physically. In the first case—Bruce Willis—a gaggle of bodyguards intervened before I squashed his nuts into canned peas. In the second case, I slammed Brian DePalma (whom I had decreed the worst director of the half century, either half), into an upholstered easy chair at a crowded Bar Mitzvah reception and told him I’d rip out his leftover hair, follicle by follicle, if he said one more pompous, self-serving, historically inaccurate word about his place in the canon of moving pictures. This incompetence had just razed Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (a book I admired and had said so, adding in the finale of the piece that Wolfe was the only writer I considered as intelligently acerbic as I, calling down a torrent of offended blather from the proletariat and snarly rebuke from lovers of the vituperative John Simon). A while ago.