Before going any further I should mention Irwin’s reaction to it all. He had let out his first roar of laughter with Yogi’s first “Hey hey hey,” roared again each time a new character so much as appeared onstage, and in no time had everyone around him roaring too. In fact, having never seen the play without him, I have no idea whether the sidesplitting and curtain calls and surprisingly merciful reviews in the Times and Post-Intelligencer the next morning were due to the drama itself or to the deadly infectiousness of Irwin’s laugh.
I can’t remember exactly what came next—and it hardly matters. Mr. Ranger showed up to keep an eye on Yogi; Sergeant Friday and Captain Kangaroo were there; Queen Elizabeth was for some reason helping Wilma Flintstone look for Fred; then Albert Einstein appeared, formed a terrible crush on Wilma, and started following her around, espousing increasingly complicated theories to try to impress her. The subplots had multiplied to the verge of chaos, the serious theatergoers had long since walked out in disgust, and Irwin had pretty well howled himself to exhaustion when the stage suddenly darkened, a spotlight fell on Eddie Haskel, and he turned to the audience and came out with a kind of soliloquy: “What we’re all basically doin’ in these woods is searchin’, right? We’re all lookin’ for somethin’. For the Apeman here, it’s Jane and Little Joe. For the Yog it’s a pickanick basket. For Hoss it’s Pa. For Roy and Dale (heh-heh-heh!), it’s their own private bush. But meanwhile, check out these hats we’re all wearin’.”
For the first time, the characters all took notice of their preposterous headgear. “Can you believe it?” Eddie asked, boinging his revolvers around a little. “Can you believe us all dorkin’ around up here in these little doom-units? What a buncha fuckin’ jerks.”
“Say there, young fella!” Roy Rogers interrupted. “That’s no way to talk. I like my hat!”
“Me too,” said Hoss.
“I think they’re sexy,” cooed Dale Evans.
“Gosh!” said Hoss.
But then a man in the audience started hollering and fussing around—and we saw that he too had a two-gunned hat stuck on his head. A woman up in the balcony stood up and screamed: same problem. Then it was a little boy down front—a kid no more than five, cute as a guinea pig and a born ham actor. “Get it offa me! Please!” he pleaded. “It’s not funny anymore!” And somehow he managed to burst into such pathetic, convincing tears that Irwin’s eyes filled with tears too. Then a couple stood up in the middle of the audience—a man and woman I’d wondered about, since they’d been necking a little, and it was not the sort of drama to inspire that. Anyhow, they started trying to wrestle the. hats off each other’s heads out of love for each other. But their hats were invisible. They were damned good invisible-hat-wrestlers too. (Everett later said they were mimes.) They made the problem so dire and real that before long fifty or sixty people, none of them planted actors now, were wrestling with sinister nothings welded to the air above their skulls. And when the theater-wide struggle was at its height the spotlight hit Eddie Haskel again, and he smirked his famous smirk and said, “Now you get the picture. Now I can say it and maybe not offend you. We’re all a hopeless buncha jerks. These Kremlin/Pentagon party hats are stuck to our heads to stay.”
“Hey hey hey! What a shitty toupé!” quoth Yogi Bear.
“No cussing, Yogi,” carped Mr. Ranger.
“Please! Get it off!” the kid in the front row whimpered.
“I like mine!” Roy Rogers insisted.
“Happy Trails,” said Eddie Haskel.
That was the gist of Act I, and perhaps the emotional climax of the play. But it was not the end of the entertainment. The second act dealt with the incompatibility of antiwar activism and romance, and was, if anything, even sillier than the first. Einstein was a central character. He kept tediously expounding upon things like radiation, megatonnage and so on, trying to talk people into Banning the Hat. But every time he came close to inciting a few characters to protest, the French cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew would come bounding in and start poeticizing about springtime and love and beautiful women—and Queen Elizabeth would form a royal crush on Captain Kangaroo, or Liberace would tear off after the beefcake Tarzan, or Roy Rogers and Dale Evans would continue their search for a private bush, and the antinuke movement would fall to pieces. Even Einstein, under Pepé’s cupidean influence, would eye Wilma Flintstone suggestively, and his theories, against his will, would grow longer and longer He finally “climaxed” by telling her that an American dollar bill was six inches long, that a mile was five thousand two hundred and eighty feet, that ten thousand five hundred and sixty dollar bills laid end to end would cover a mile, that it was ninety-three million miles to the sun, that nine hundred eighty-two billion eighty million dollars laid end to end would therefore create a bridge of dollars from our planet to the sun, that any child realized that the construction of such a bridge would not be wise since the sun’s heat would ignite the money and burn the entire bridge, but that, since the year 1950, the United States Pentagon had burned the equivalent of not one but two such earth-to-sun dollar-bridges; and to what end? Why, to purchase the deadly hats everybody was wearing! Before the audience could begin to contemplate these dire calculations, though, Queen Elizabeth commenced bragging to Captain Kangaroo about how a pound note was considerably longer than a dollar, inspiring Liberace to nudge Wilma Flintstone and lisp, “So is Fred!,” which caused Wilma to retort, “How would you know?,” to which Liberace replied, “That’s exactly what I hope to show Tarzan!,” upon which the dismayed Apeman hollered “Ungawa!” and vanished into the woods. And when Eddie Haskel hollered, “Hey, Lib!” and pointed out a wriggling thicket, the pianist tiptoed over, dove right in—
and landed on top of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.
Hats ran all summer at the Boathouse, was produced in two other instate college towns, and Everett not only became a campus celebrity but was known for a few months in wider circles as “the young guerrilla-theater playwright,” “the head who hatched the hilarious Hats” and so on. In trying to capitalize on such labels, though, his original theory of composition failed him: no matter what chemicals he used to inspire or lash himself, all subsequent attempts at plays were stillborn.
Everett liked to claim at the time that it was the antiwar movement which forced him to sacrifice his budding career as a playwright. But there were less specious reasons for his flash-in-the-pan. Hats, after all, had not been the work of a would-be dramatist who sat down with a sense of literary calling: it had been the one-night outburst of a cornered Kesey fanatic hell-bent on proving to his buddies that the hapless Phil’s typewriter had died for a noble cause. This, even for Everett, was unusually silly subject matter, but the motivating force was typical: at his silliest as at his best, Everett’s oratorical and literary styles have always been contrapositive; he needs an action against which to react, a thesis against which to pose an antithesis, an offense by which to be offended. He has always been a kind of verbal and literary boxer—a compulsive counter-puncher, really. And the confrontations and causes of 1968 had just turned his world into a counterpuncher’s paradise. He did begin to write and fight against the war, militarism, racism and so on, but he sacrificed very little that he valued, least of all a career as a playwright, in order to do so. Activism suited his contrary nature to perfection. The only inconsistency, the only serious discrepancy I saw between Everett’s personality and his new political passion was that he had supposedly begun fighting for the very stuff he had always found hardest to deal with:
peace.
2. The Thing
Did you hear about the baby just born that was both sexes? It had a penis and a brain.
—overheard at the University of Oregon Medical School
All intentions to the contrary, Irwin was unable to remain a virgin past his third year of high school. I mention this in introducing Everett’s sex life because the order in which siblings or close friends attain sexual experience frequently inflicts profound psychological re
percussions upon those who bring up the rear.
Every time Irwin answered an Altar Call at church, it was for the same time-honored reason: he had once again fondled some young maiden overfondly. Perhaps I should explain that the Altar Call, at least by preacherly intention, is a demand for a once-in-a-lifetime act of total repentance and religious rebirth on the part of a “sinner.” So when Elder Babcock would cry out for that last lost soul still skulking out in the pews, when he’d demand that this wretch—he or she knew who they were!—immediately swallow their pride, step forward, and let the Holy Spirit pour like Sani-Flush into their toilet bowl of a heart, it did not please him at all to see no one but the redundantly saved Irwin jump yet again to his feet, stride up to the altar with a big grin on his face, chunk down on his knees, and re-re-reconsecrate his life to Jesus. Another irony was that every time Irwin made this trek, a number of ex-fondled and unfondled girls in the congregation were staring overfondly at his backside, hatching schemes and battle plans which pretty well guaranteed he’d soon be back at the altar again.
All intentions to the contrary, Everett remained a virgin until he went away to college. But he knew a little about Irwin’s escapades—and he did not handle this knowledge well. Irwin tried to be discreet about his amorous exploits, but when he’d come home from dates with his underpants lost and his shirts on inside out or crawl in our window in the wee hours with a maddeningly fuggy hum rising off him, it wasn’t hard to draw conclusions. And our conclusions, vague as they were, drove us to gang up and grill Irwin so long and mercilessly that he could sometimes be forced to speak …
“They have this thing!” I remember him announcing to three brimming vats of testosterone disguised as his brothers one night when he was only fifteen, but fresh back from a tryst (in what they later learned was poison oak) with a lovely, full-breasted, lithe-bodied seventeen-year-old Adventist girl whom Everett had been ineffectually chasing since kindergarten. “This wonderful little funny little thing down there! Kind of a toggle-switch deal! And when you work it for ’em, when you barely even toggle it, man oh man! They just go nuts. I mean, you wouldn’t, they just sort of, they start to, man oh man! and then they kind of, it gets all sort of, I don’t know! until it, oooooh! and they sort of, waaaaaaaah, and you can kinda … aw shoot, you guys! I can’t explain it! All I can say is watch out for that thing!”
Needless to say, we did. Constantly. And everywhere. On the ground, in the sky, in the fine print on sides of cereal boxes, in our lockers at school, in roadside gutters on the way home. The thing was now seared on our brains; it was the star of our semiconscious lives; it was the ineffably cute swimmer who sent the white shark of lust knifing through the sea of our blood, giving us the obvious Attacking Shark Shape in the obvious place during every dull sermon, every school class, every sultry night or lull in the day. But before long it grew painfully obvious to Everett and me—particularly in the vicinity of mirrors—that, lacking Irwin’s godlike body, godlike joie de vivre, godlike luck and other key godlike equipment, possessing in fact no parts like any part of Irwin save the wildly pulsating hormones, we looked very much like a couple of charmlessly horny doofuses from Camas, Washington, and very little like the sorts of Romeos whom beautiful girls jump out and ask to work their things for them.
To deepen our Doofuscosity, the deceptively monkish Peter, when he was sixteen, tried to describe to us (after Everett had refused to let him sleep for four or five hours) what transpired when he and an equally intellectual girlfriend had come to some sort of agreement, met in some intelligently selected trysting place, and indulged in some sort of technically sexual behavior. But it was nearly as hard for me to imagine what sort of antics would produce an account like Peter’s as it was to imagine a genuine “thing.” He told us: “Well, yeah, it was fun, I guess. But the trouble, see, was that we knew we didn’t love each other. So even though we got excited and all, it came down to a matter of, I don’t know, not mauling each other exactly, but just sort of operating each other. Like a couple of cars or something. Yeah, that’s about right. It was like we’d each invented this car, see. But there was no way of seeing how well our two cars ran without her getting into me and me getting into her and each of us test-driving each other. So that’s what we did. We test-drove our cars. And we were our cars. Which was very exciting, and confusing, and made us feel all this gratitude and shame and wonder and embarrassment toward each other. But when it was over, we felt way too much the way you’d feel after test-driving a regular old Ford or Chevy or something. You know. It was like, okay, everything runs great, yeah you’re welcome, thank you too. And that was it. Which just isn’t right. The driving itself was just too wonderful to end up feeling like that. So I won’t do it again. I mean, not in that way. I want a form of wonder that doesn’t turn me into a car. I want a wonder that lasts.”
“Well, I want a wonder with breasts!” Everett roared.
But no such wonder offered itself. Everett had girlfriends in high school, but there was no joint “test-driving.” And even after he arrived among the sixteen thousand coeds at Washington and found himself devastatingly attracted to a new subspecies known as the “hippie chick,” he had to undergo a transformation so complete that it resembled a left-wing parody of a successful right-wing business career before he was able to attract them in return. For starters he established social credit, and the equally crucial social discredit, by becoming one of the first truly longhaired males anybody had ever seen. He then upgraded his living situation by trading his dork-ridden dorm-cubicle in on a room in a romantically deciduous off-campus hippie house. Next he began developing his product (himself) by playing every remotely romantic role he could find time for, becoming a classroom wit, a street-corner flower-seller, an activist in whatever causes were most active, a waiter at the hippest U district coffeehouse, an aspiring poet, a soapbox orator, the chief humorist and honky-baiter for an underground paper. He then insured these investments by going to work for the university’s bona fide bluestock newspaper, but concealed this unsightly hint of career conservatism by becoming its most incendiary columnist with his weekly offering, “Give Chance a Peace.”
At that point Everett finally arrived at his long-sought solution to the puzzle of The Thing. But the name, face or nature of the girl he found it with hardly matter since a whole string of less long-sought solutions soon followed. In fact, after Hats and “Give Chance a Peace” brought him name, fame and a little gold earring that Gay Liberation would one day force him to rue, Everett attained so many short-sought solutions-to-the Thing Puzzle that it lost its mysteriousness altogether and became a requirement, like PE. He no longer wanted a woman. He wanted Woman. He wanted to show the godlike Irwin what it was to be really desirable. He wanted what Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu did not mean at all by “the Ten Thousand Things.”
In other words, he no longer knew what the fuck he wanted. But Irwin and I saw him seldom enough, and he was still charming and funny enough, that we figured he was thriving and pretty much admired him to the skies. The only one of us who felt differently about Everett at this time was Peter. But Pete lived three thousand miles away, and his rare letters—which were mostly to Freddy—talked about religion and metaphysics, not about his big brother.
3. Everett Routs the Ottoman Empire
It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another—but, of course, it is not likely.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Like most of you, I oppose the American military mission in Vietnam. Unlike some of you, I don’t consider that opposition ‘revolutionary.’ Perhaps it’s your country’s unusually bloodless beginnings that give the word ‘revolution’ its mythic ring to students in this country. But having studied many revolutions, and having survived two of them myself, I have become familiar enough with some of their hidden costs to want to share them.”
The speaker was one Dr. Edward Gurtzn
er—an antiquated, cigar-chewing Austrian history professor who’d witnessed the tenth anniversary celebration of the Russian Revolution in Leningrad as a child and the Nazification of his homeland as a student. In a recent letter Everett had called him the best lecturer on campus, and added that his European Intellectual History class took place in a hall full of three hundred students, so that if I wanted to attend I could do so and remain faceless. Everett would make suggestions like this casually, but stuck as I was in a Stone Age called “high school,” I did not receive them casually. University life had become magical to me, and I slipped away to visit Everett every chance I got. To me the University of Washington seemed like the center of an embryonic world that was about to burst forth and revivify, if not replace, the stale old world at large. And in this embryonic world my brother had become some kind of combination firebrand, stand-up comic, knight-errant playboy superstar. I read his crazy columns, heard him quoted in coffeehouses, found him clowning for a different young woman every time I visited, joined him on a march or two, and felt he’d become a hero of our time. He was, of course, full of crap, and always had been. But he was also full of goodness, and I never doubted that the goodness would eventually KO the crap. Anyhow, when his letter mentioned Gurtzner, I called that very night to find out the professor’s schedule, skipped school and hitched to Seattle the very next day, and made my way into a back-row seat maybe ten minutes into a lecture. And though I didn’t know what I’d missed, the little I’d heard had me feeling already that I’d arrived, once again, at the center of things.
The Brothers K Page 39
