Richard Simmons, the TV aerobicizologist, called in. He knew something about the case, he said, and was quite angry with Stern. He tried to get him to apologize, at least to quit it, knock it off. They seemed, Stern and the aerobicizologist, to know each other and called each other by their first names—though it may have been a show-biz thing, the first-name basis like a professional courtesy—even when Simmons was at his angriest and most scolding, even when there was this catch in his throat and you knew that something had genuinely touched him, moved him on behalf of fatties and the glandular everywhere to call in, to have this face-off, celebrity to celebrity, man to man.
And lost control, or lost control as celebrities lose control, a vague, persistent notion like a nagging question that it was part of the show, a vaguer notion that it wasn’t.
Because I don’t know if Simmons was really crying. Just as I don’t know if Stern was really embarrassed.
Though that was the best part of it, wasn’t it, better than the stupid fat jokes, better than Howard Stern’s professionally willful, deliberate bad taste, better than Simmons’s heroics?
But we’re close to the bone here, theatrically, artistically, maybe even humanly in situ. Because it’s that inch of art that makes the difference, art, like baseball, being a game of inches. Because the subject is art, and art, first of all, is a noise, a testing, stretching, then a busting of the decorums and proprieties, child’s play—literally—in some cautious, juridical, Cinderella’s slipper, try-it-for-size sense. The full stop I-dare-yous. Seeing just how far one is prepared to go, I mean.
It’s the nagging question that nagged me then and nags me still.
When I was a kid, maybe seven, maybe eight, Sonny, our downstairs neighbor, Gert’s husband, took me to White City to watch the wrestling. Maybe we went twice, traveling on the cars, Chicago’s matte-red trolleys with their tight, lanyard-weave yellow-straw seats and ridged wood floors, complicated, busy as a bootheel. I had never seen professional wrestling and, of course, it wouldn’t have been then what it is now. There would have been no elaborate capes and costumes or glitzy special effects, no prop hairdos or, in those relatively ethnic-neutral days, bewildering stereotypical styles. What I chiefly recall about the White City fights was that the bad guy, in extremis at the tide’s turning, when the referee finally caught on to his villain’s behavior and scoundrel’s ways and even the good guy, slow to anger, who until this minute, perhaps alerted by the crowd, had not seemed to understand what was happening, never mind that somebody in that ring was kicking the shit out of him, pulling his hair, gouging his eyes, choking the very breath from his body, was starting to suspect that it was an imperfect world, always—I mean always—reverted to type (well, reverted, I mean you can’t very well revert to type, can you, when you’ve been living up to your ears in it all along?) and, craven, showed his coward’s colors like the woven yellow straw on the cars, threw himself on the good guy’s mercy, offered his hand, mimed new beginnings, mimed phooey on my old ways, oathing remorse, change of heart, rebirth itself, on invisible Bibles, body Englishing self-abasement so down at heels and abject it made no difference that the abaser was insincere or the good guy taken in. (Who, human, could afford not to be taken in by such voluntarily complete disgrace, or what would become of mercy or the benefit of the doubt? What, I mean, would happen to possibility, to salvation?)
Was it, I asked, part of the show?
Sonny, inculcating in me that the suspension of disbelief, like Christmas propaganda (Santa, Mrs. Claus, the elves and helpers, even the North Pole like some powdery mise-en-scène), is the necessary beginning of mystery, shrugged.
Or the circus. Where it’s part of the show constantly to raise the question, whatever the intrusion, whether it’s part of the show, where it’s part of the show to invade the fourth wall, to mix worlds, world and art intermingling like elements of un-water, un-oil. The drunk in street clothes in the audience who rushes into the ring before anyone can stop him and climbs up the high wire. The volunteer who may or may not be what she seems. Even the near-fatal misstep, even the last-minute recovery. Even, since it’s part of the show to make what is dangerous seem even more dangerous than it already is, the ringmaster’s plea for absolute silence during this next trick and, when you think you can practically hear a pin drop, the flyer shakes off the signal anyway and looks to the ringmaster to see whether he can or cannot control this crowd, God damn it, and he tries again, the ringmaster, taking a cue from the performer himself (whose life it is anyway) and, stern now, no more Mr. Nice Guy, masterly, a masterful ringmaster, once again requests, no, demands absolute quiet, silencing even the drumroll and shouting backstage to the animal trainers to see if he can get them to get their beasts to hold it down, to quit that rumbling, someone’s trying to do a triple out here.
Because the circus, dealing as much in imminence (the possibility of fuckup) as it does in awe, requires, like shock radio, a sort of verisimilitude, some you-are-here, street-scene quality to the quality of life by the side of the road when the accident happens and blood gets spilled. Because all naïve forms—professional wrestling, circus, radio call-in shows, the pantomime—are dependent upon the engagement of witness. I can’t prove it—prove it? Hey, ain’t I the guy who entered Bob Baker’s Mother’s Day Sweepstakes?—but I’m pretty sure the percentage of people who ever actually call one of those shows, who aren’t just there to listen, is smaller, oh, much smaller, than the percentage of people who act in movies compared to those who pay money to see them. More, I mean, witness the world than have any practical use for it. (Who makes a fist? Who takes a stand? Who learns to fly? To ski, to go sailing? Who gives up a throne for love? Who has a throne? Whose ship comes in? Who has a ship?)
Just to witness. Not even to bear it. Only to be there, this voyeur of the dictions, just one on whom impressions are made, just another privileged, please-stand-by artist, a piece of the public, a part of the great grandstand for whom all the grandstanding gets done, one share of all civilized, tellurian creaturehood. My God, I might well have thought in that hospital, not distracted understand, anything but, the cheap portable recovered whose absence had so exercised and damn near killed me all over again in my first confused hours as a surgically salvaged dead guy (and that had been the first miracle, I thought, remembering my father’s RCA portable, in ’40, ’41, which you turned on by pressing the catch and lifting its lid like some shoebox of sound), the First Amendment is surely our national art form.
Choosing from the formats fanned out on my dial like paint on a palette—country, classical, easy listening, big band, top 40, golden oldies, adult contemporary, all news, all talk, all sports, all Praise God and Die. What a country we are! Tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. But it’s true, this abundance is true. This overkill is true, this surfeit and riot and profligate plenty are true. Right on the money our luxurious redundancy and gorged, de trop profusion. (Now there’s even shock TV. There are nude talk shows on cable. Because nothing’s sacred, not even talk shows, and history is only your get-an-inch, take-a-mile arrangements, progress some leaps-and-bounds smash ’n’ grab, roiling and arbitrary as the tectonics of smoke—you heard it here first, recall—there could in the offing be—shock ballet, shock opera, shock world-team tennis, why not. As already there’s shock news—the Enquirer, the Sun.) All naked, suck-thumb comfortable now, all snug, supine coze and satisfied stand-pat, sit-pretty contentment and pleased ease. Safe in the intensive care, serene in the hospital corners. Because “all talk” is my format, character my poison. Character, I get off on character, character and opinion, and they’re slogging away on The Party Line, going at it hot and heavy, to-ing and fro-ing, having it out. These people astonish me. They have opinions on everything. They take all the papers. They never miss a national news show on TV, a controversial miniseries. They listen to all the call-in shows on all the stations, see all the Donahues
, all the Oprah Winfreys. I think they must be recovering heart patients themselves, the intensively cared for, and suddenly I understand that the world is much smaller than it is, shrunk to the size of a changing neighborhood, a backyard, so small, finally, you probably can’t find it on maps anymore. But persistent in its instincts, some rage to keep talking, never to change the subject or to have it changed, and that what I’m hearing is not so much some continuing national debate as a neighborless gossip, racism only something to do over the coffee klatsch and the reactionary just a way of making friends in a pluralistic society. Maybe it ain’t even the real thing, the true gen mean spirit and 24-karat narrow mind here at all, but merely mindless chatter, making conversation, small talk, only all coal-hauled, censorious bicker and find-fault’s scandalized, scolding tut-tut, its venemous niggling carp and recriminative tongue lash—just loneliness batting the breeze while the laundry hangs drying and the bread bakes.
Sure, I think, that’s probably it. It probably is. Even the best of formats has its reasons. And if it’s something of a letdown to realize that what I’ve been identifying as character is only, well, this scheduled, prearranged rage, fixed as a fight, this nostalgic black hole, this absence populated, seeded with ogres of the political, with stand-ins and straw men and stalking horses, with mere beards for the demonic, with all fond, pining idleness’s inept transference and fuzzy displacements.
Here, three plus years into my post-op, my lazy valetudinary set as a spell of good weather, is what they were saying to each other just the day before yesterday.
It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, a day or so into the Moscow Summit conference—Nuclear Spring. Reagan had thrown his picnic for the dissidents, all ears, Santa Claus and Our Lady, too, to the juggled grievances, promising nothing but touching the bases of agenda, never mind that the Russians had already begun to pull out of Afghanistan, or that just about everybody, even Reagan, could see that the Cold War wasn’t going anywhere, that, like the Vietnam War, like the one in Afghanistan that the Russians were pulling out of, it had bogged down. Could see that history had too much on its plate already—AIDS, the Middle East, the Central Americas, all the world’s flashpoint economies, all its nasty, insoluble nationalisms. Could see it had had it, the world, had had enough. It don’t need any Cold War, it don’t need any arms race. It ain’t—O frabjous day!—gonna study no cold war no more!
Glasnost glasnost glasnost.
I settled back.
Virginia McCarthy has a slightly nasal voice and speaks with this thin, just melodious, whine. When, for example, she gives out one of the station’s telephone numbers, she always sings the “5,” raising it a stave above the numbers beside it—4 5 1—like a note on sheet music. It is almost visible, and it clenches my teeth.
She was telling her caller, who had told her that, say what you will, it’s just bad manners for a president to go into another fellow’s country and keep harping on what’s wrong with it, that she thought much too much was being made of the summit conference anyway. She thanked him for calling. Then she took a call from a man who agreed with the first caller. He was, this caller said, no bleeding-heart liberal. Why, he wondered, would Reagan bother with a bunch of refuseniks? We certainly didn’t want any of them in this country, did we?
Mrs. McCarthy, both of whose wings are right, is rarely confrontational, though she usually speaks her mind. She’s always polite, but you know where she stands. On the issue of Reagan’s behavior in Russia, however, though she defended him, it was pretty clear that she was bothered by the mixed signals. She said she hoped he wouldn’t give away the store. Her callers were starting to come down rather heavily on Gorbachev’s side, and I was beginning to lose interest.
We’ve never met. I’ve no idea what she looks like. The only things I know about her are her public opinions. But something was happening to both of us. Our zeal was going off was what.
Now caller after caller seemed to take issue with her. Not violently, not even very exceptional their tentative exceptions, only, their mood, a little more reasonable than usual, only a little more let’s-wait-and-see, let’s-hold-our-horses. Only a pinch of the benefit-of-the-doubt in the brew like a seasoning, a dash of hopefulness, a splash of sanity. And this woman who speaks her mind suddenly seemed just a little uncertain about where she stood. And I’m thinking for her now, with her.
It’s the entropy, we’re thinking. It’s dragon loss, demon deprival. It’s all monstrosity, we’re thinking, suddenly endangered as a rain forest. And what if it is over, we’re thinking, what if it really is? What will happen to the call-in shows, all our partisan opinion operas, all our patriotic countersong? This is almost embarrassing, we’re thinking.
Because I love talk shows, I love my quick-draw angers and resentments, would defend to the death no one’s right to say anything so much as my own right to hear it said. Who has this voyeur ear, this hold-your-coat heart, who needs, if only because it satisfies a sense of the dramatic which, if not deranged, may be, at bottom, a kind of sin—the sin of casus belli, say, of provocation, the sin of human interest, of fuss blunder, some melodramatic turpitude, agent-provocateur error, the rabble-rouser heinities, gadfly sin, flat-out archetype lust!
And begin to fear, even as I go, even as I lob these soft culpas at my head, that somewhere, in some tiny corner of the scheme of things, there’s this toy hubris of the Grand Antinomies and that I, too, am a part of the show.
THE MUSES ARE HEARD
And Jesus, I’m thinking at the time, this snob of geography, this longitude-latitude fop, it can’t have been but three weeks ago I was living in a villa on Lake Como, taking the gelato, the customized pastas; servants were cutting my meat. And tucking in, too, feasting on the blood-oranges architecture folded into the terraced hillsides organic as agriculture, the lake’s thin gray porridge and lumpy Chinese mists. Well maybe, I’m thinking at the time, in spite of Missouri is my hometown, distance is only a different time zone of the head. Because I recognize nothing here, all jet-lagged out in the van, two or so hours southwest of St. Louis on I-44, deep—I see by the recurring billboards that keep on coming, popping up at us like an infinite loop of highway in some redneck video game—in the walnut-bowl belt, in roadside zoo land, cavern and cave country. Among fireworks stands. Live bait mines. And there’s a sense, God bite my high-hat tongue, of something so un-gun-controlled out there we may have fallen, may my swank wither and drop off, among a race of Minutemen. There’s billboards for the Passion Play, for Silver Dollar City, for rides on the Wet Willies.
This ain’t any America of franchise and one size fits all; this is a time warp. Some live-by-the-tourist, die-by-the-tourist figment of the imaginary bygones and halcyons, of fiddles and corncobs and jugs. We are, I mean, deep, real deep, in a hanger-on economy, in some landscape of the novelties, and I ask Ross Winter, founder and artistic director of the Mid America Dance Company (MADCO), the man who leads our troupe of modern dancers bound for Springfield, Missouri, where we’re performing Friday and Saturday evening, what folks do hereabouts when they’re not minding the bait stores and walnut-bowl factories.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps they groom each other for ticks.” It’s improbably close to what I’ve been thinking myself, for we seem to be traversing tracts of the summer pests and poisons, a vast American steppe of allergens and contact toxins, of wicked itch banes in the woods and high grasses.
The van, something in a fourteen- or fifteen-passenger Ford, has been rented for the four days it will be required. A second vehicle, also rented, containing the company’s props, wardrobe trunk, special equipment (some of which is also rented), and rolls of the vinyl theatrical flooring it has just acquired and that will have to be paid for by matching grants, had set out earlier, is probably already in Springfield, setting up.
The dancers, I think, are used to me by now. (We go back.) We are practically colleagues, these toned, flexible, almost jointless young men and women in their twenties and th
e crippled-up fifty-eight-year-old man who has to negotiate the high step up into the van by means of a high step up onto a milk case, a breathtaking piece of choreography in its own right, let me tell you. They call me by my first name, something that normally squeaks against my blackboard like chalk—I am, by ordinary, when not playing la strada, a teacher—but that, here, in these circumstances, oddly I do not mind at all, and even find flattering, though I must say it’s a little difficult to keep their names straight, wait for others to say them first, only gradually constructing a private mnemonics. Liz is the married one. Her husband, James, is part of the tech crew and has gone out with David in the other van. Raeleen is the one with the close-cropped hair. Ellen is the tall one, so Darla must be the one with the reddish hair and the expressive face you associate with clown-white makeup and one dark apostrophe standing for a tear. The men are a bit easier. Paul is driving, Michael is reading the Stephen King. Jeffrey, unseen in the van’s last row, is apparently sleeping.
No one calls me by my first name now or says much of anything, really. Indeed, they seem a bit torpid for a group normally so casual with gravity. Not like last time when they stretched out on the long ride to Winfield, Kansas, by improvising themselves into various riffs of position, a kind of jazz yoga. Not like last time when they passed the time in the moving vehicle playing board games without a board and counting cows and doing license-plate poker. When they made up ideas for dances. Even me. “You pass out these dinky cardboard glasses,” I said. “You give a pair to everyone in the audience. There’s this green lollipop cellophane over one eye, this red over the other.”
Pieces of Soap Page 9
