Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  It may even be that Milch is right, that California isn’t much different from anyplace else, or that I am beyond Happiness, Serenity, Euphoria, the conventional building blocks of California quietude, quiddity, the vexless verities where nature lies down with life-style; or that California is not so much a place as an invention, a kind of aspiration, really, what imagination does to opportunity in a decent climate to make a benign and goofy nationalism.

  But anyway, I’m on this airplane, a California dreamer thinking about the WELL, thinking about those two-buck-an-hour parking meters, and suddenly I understand why I unloaded all that money on the lady in the airport when she pushed me in the chair to my gate. For the same reason any tourist dumps his spare francs, or dinars, or pesetas, before he boards his plane and goes back home.

  AT THE ACADEMY AWARDS

  At the Academy Awards, the entrance to the Shrine Civic Auditorium is flanked by four giant Oscars quite, or so it seems to me, like sullen, art deco Nazis. Set maybe a hundred feet back from these, two temporary grandstands have been constructed for three thousand or so fans—day-of-the-locust types, extras, all the tribal, representative legions who come to these things, drawn, it could almost be, by the limousines themselves, gleaming cream-colored packages of celebrity.

  Maybe because Galati never returned my calls or that I couldn’t get into Swifty Lazar’s private party at Spago for a few hundred of his friends. Or, first things first, putting, as it were, the horse before the cart, because off my turf (those few or so blocks of Washington University campus and the several more of proximal neighborhood where I’ve lived almost thirty years now like something deposited in the fossil record) I am essentially cloutless, this pushing-sixty geriatric babe, out of my element, in over my head. I wait while Joan assembles the wheelchair stashed in the trunk of the cab before I even try to get out. But that’s the point of these exercises, yes? The upstairs/downstairs, city mouse/country mouse, liaisons—all the slicker/rube relationships. Why, it’s practically science fiction, journalism is, or this kind of journalism anyway, the refractive we-go-there or they-come-here displacements. Reactive chemistry just one more bankable myth, or, no, not one more, almost the only game in town, at the core, I bet, of half the plots in all the pix I’ve come in person all this way from Heartland to Coastland to watch being honored. More, probably. Isn’t The Accidental Tourist about an educated, affectless, upper-middle-class writer who becomes involved with a spunky, blue-collarish, Jean Arthur type who keeps a kennel and trains his dog? And doesn’t Dangerous Liaisons have the experienced mix it up with the innocent? Working Girl transforms a girl from Staten Island into a kind of Cinderella when her scheming, upper-class boss injures herself in a skiing accident. And Rain Man, the ultimate rube/slicker story, is a tale of two brothers, one your sweet, helpless idiot savant, the other your callous, high-flying car salesman. (With the exception of Mississippi Burning, I’d seen all the candidates for Best Picture 1988. Do I have a life or what?)

  All the movies are some variation of The Prince and the Pauper; drama, that is, through collided worlds. But plot is about mixing it up. Not this, then that so much as characters caught out, embarrassed, in a dream. This is fiction’s essence anyway, the thematics of opposites. Cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, are nothing if not versions of the class struggle.

  And all stories are travelogues, finally, or why would I have said what I did about journalism? Us Marco Polos are wide of eye, bumpkins, rubes and rustics, hicks and insulars. We travel by turnip truck (as Joan and I, minding the pennies, made the trip west on a carrier almost, it made so many stops, like a streetcar). Something surreal in the heart, something slapstick in the head, all the binary opposition of rigged polarity.

  So, hardly your customary correspondent. More your plant, more your little old hand-wringer. There, in the clear California sunshine, beyond the California velvet roping off the red California carpet, below the 3,000-plus plebes in the charity-built grandstands, your reporter taking the air in black tie and wheelchair, basking at ground level—get this picture—among the milling celebs, bucking in the bowels for celeb himself, nonchalant, see, his face absent expression, unless indifference, carefully composed as the neutral poker puss of a high-stakes gambler, is the giveaway, my mean, squeezed mien, I mean. I give them nothing, nothing. My gimlet glare, my crabbed judgmentals, the studied, Prussian composure of some old-timey studio head. (I ought to be in pictures!) Projecting both to the cheap seats and to the stars themselves, all those famous, by-bone-structure-fated lives ambling the red carpet, outgoing and chipper in the still photography as brides and grooms. Because it is like a wedding, and they move past the press, straining toward them with tape recorders and microphones, as if along a receiving line.

  Here is Roy Rogers. Here is Dale Evans. Old Roy packs a six-shooter on his spangled pants. Miss Dale is beaming and looking demure in her late seventies as if, despite her stylized cowlady duds, no woman was ever libbed.

  Here is Dorothy Lamour, so much resembling my mother, I feel, my face breaking ranks, like waving.

  Here is Karl Malden, here’s Vincent Price.

  Here are Cyd Charisse and Tony Martin. Here’s Alice Faye. Here are the Bridges, Lloyd, Jeff, and what’s-his-name. Here’s Jimmy Stewart in his pink old age.

  Most of them—this is peculiar—I don’t recognize. (Michelle Pfeiffer, River Phoenix, Melanie Griffith, people whose movies you wait till they come out in video.) It’s just these that the fans in the bleachers, sending some distant early warning of celebrity, alert us to. They actually go “ooh,” they actually go “ah,” making this raw, rough purr of awe.

  And it really is like a wedding, it really is. We’re looking at—what?—a dozen million dollars’ worth of duds here. Some of the younger guys wear postmodern tuxedos. Blair Underwood, a lawyer for the home firm on L.A. Law, has dark sequins hanging down the arms of his tuxedo jacket like a kind of glazed hair. Several fellows wear black running shoes with their tuxedos—formal Reeboks, dress Nikes. I see, no shit, a leather tuxedo. And there’s another man in a tux with a long rabbinical coat over it. And another whose bow tie spills over his shirtfront like a growth.

  Security is trying to hustle the ticket holders—our comps, in the thirty-third or thirty-fourth row, cost $150 each; that’s the incredibly inflated figure that’s printed right on them in what I can only conceive of as Weimar Republic numerals; the ones to the Board of Governors Ball afterward claim to be worth $450 apiece—into the Shrine Auditorium, but I don’t want to go in just yet, and the wheelchair, like some flying carpet for gimps, provides a sort of cover. A woman in a black floor-length skirt and dark, sheerish blouse, her outfit vaguely reminiscent of a circus performer’s, the dog- or bird-trainer’s snagged, stitched fishnet, say, and who carries a walkie-talkie, gives me permission to stay outside awhile longer to watch the movie stars arrive. (There’s Tom Hanks, there’s Olivia Newton-John, there’s Michael Caine.)

  Gradually I feel the features of my great stone face subside, erode in the presence of all this fame, my ego not put down but beside the point. If I could see my reflection now I would probably look windblown, punchy as the Sphinx. Someone in the bleacher seats waves a sign that says JOHN 3:16, but it ain’t really any day of the locust here. The crowd’s much too mellow, befitting the time zone and circumstances. Though perhaps a bit barmy. The things people say! There’s John Cleese. Someone shouts out at him, “Good luck tonight, good luck. Thank you for all the comedy you’ve brought us over the years. Thank you, sir!”

  And still they keep coming, a parade of the physically elect, the incredibly handsome, the fabulously beautiful. It suddenly seems astonishing to me that presences like these could play just human beings. It seems, I don’t know, a sort of reverse hubris. (There’s Jeff Goldblum. There’s Gregory Hines.) They better watch themselves, is what I think. They better cool it, this weird dressing down they do for a living like, oh, grown-ups squeezing into the getups of children. They better look what th
ey’re doing or they could freeze like that.

  There’s Kevin Kline.

  Maybe because I didn’t say anything to Roger Ebert when I spotted him standing with the other reporters. Maybe because I didn’t identify myself and remind him that we were both of us scheduled to speak in two weeks at a memorial service for a mutual friend.

  To say I feel betrayed would be overstating it. But I do feel had. A little. A little I do. It takes a while, maybe through the first half hour of the Awards show, but pretty soon I realize that no one is here who doesn’t have to be. The two hundred or so nominees in the twenty-three categories. The fifty-some-odd presenters—there’s Candice Bergen, there’s Sean Connery, there’s Kim Novak—the hundred singers and dancers—there’s Tina Omeza, there’s Regan Patno, there’s Carla Earle—and all the not-to-be-numbered members serving on the eleven Academy committees. Then, when spouses and friends are thrown in, well, there you are, you’ve accounted for a least a couple of thousand people. I can’t account for the rest of the folks in the hall—people vaguely associated with the industry, I suppose, or society types, perhaps, who come every year but who almost certainly no one from my part of town would recognize. I would think many of us occupy proffered seats, as, in a different season, we might be the guests of corporate season ticket holders at a ball game or concert.

  It’s the same in my business, the same in yours. Most folks have edge, some little piece of the action, first refusal, or the privilege of wholesale, the travel agent’s unlimited mileage, the congressman’s frank or salesman’s discount, this one’s backstage access, that one’s dibs on the float’s leftover roses, the meat that would only spoil otherwise.

  What I mean is, there’s no such thing as the gratuitously high-profiled here. We’re an audience of cliques and special interests. The real players are home, watching on TV, or with Swifty at Spago. Joan and I are tucked a bit to the right and toward the back in a section two or three steps above orchestra level; in the thirty-third or thirty-fourth row, as I say, just under the overhang of the balcony in what is probably a forty-row auditorium.

  Why I’m steamed, to the extent I am, is that I’ve watched these ceremonies on television for years. Always I’d come away not star-struck but filled with some prize-in-every-box sense of a homogenized, evenly distributed fame. Now, in my immediate area, except for a few stars straggling into the hall and walking past our discrete little acreage—there’s Max von Sydow—to take their seats by the 5:30 PM deadline, I recognize only myself and my wife.

  Clearly, the star-spangled demographics are off this evening. Even money they always were. And suddenly I understand something, that all the splash and flourish of all those advertised lives I’d seen on all those Oscar shows had been nothing but camera angles, a sort of trick photography, doctored like Chinese news. And why not? Pros put this stuff together. There are tricks to every trade—maybe there are actual filters that take out bystanders like a kind of sunscreen. Or maybe Fame is only the fine-tuning of some driving, evolutionary will, natural selection doing its flakked and flashy thing. You think Zapruder shot his film by accident? He aimed that camera at that gunned-down president. Like Oswald himself, he was only following his heart, some abiding tropism that turned him toward history, that turns us all toward what seems important. If nothing’s going on, you pass, you fold, you excuse yourself and get a sandwich.

  So if this is the gala, where is everybody? is what I’m saying.

  What can I tell you about an Oscar ceremony you don’t already know? You’ve watched them for years, too. Taking in our pageants like our bonbons, the secret sinfuls—the Miss Universe, the Miss America, the Miss Teenage America, the Miss Mrs. America. The Tonys and Emmys and Grammys. The People’s Choice, the Golden Globes, the Country Musics, the Clios and Peabodys. All those endeavors awards, all these little faits accomplis. Do I have to tell you?

  This is how far we’ve come. This is the ascent of man, awards only the persistence of a presumed justice, the shortest distance between thumbs-up and thumbs-down; lions, Christians, and the development of the jury system. The Academy Desserts. Because it isn’t competition or truth at the core of entertainment; it’s judgment, it’s criticism. It’s having a say. It’s having a say and getting to change it from year to year. Even the World Series starts up again the following year. As if we demanded qualitative distinctions, a world with heroics, champions.

  My first celebrity, the worst thing I ever did, and some observations:

  In 1955, about three or four weeks into basic training, we were doing bayonet drill. This was in a field in the Colorado Rockies. As I recall it now, and it’s very fuzzy, we were either two lines of recruits lined up across from each other or a long, continuous line facing practice dummies, some stuffed, canvas enemy. It could even be that nothing was across from us, that we were only going through the motions, doing what wouldn’t then have been called imaging, thrusting our bayonets, fixed to our M-1s, in some choreography of vacant engagement, the sergeant in charge of our charge calling out half a catechism: “What’s the spirit of the bayonet?” To our lunging, choric response: “To kill!” Shouting “To kill!” but thinking “chicken shit.” Then something happened I’ll never forget. Suddenly there was this officer on horseback, a one- or two-star general. I’m no more equestrian than soldier. I don’t know the gaits. I can’t tell the moment a walk becomes a trot, a trot a canter, a canter a gallop. What this was was none of those anyway. It may not even have been motion so much as some practiced, show-the-flag horse/man ballet, the mixed and ambled military leisurelies of mince and prance and strutting in place. I remember his long gleaming boots; I think he had a sidearm. If he’d broken into iambic pentameter or rallied us with speeches out of Shakespearean history plays, recited the chain of command, King to St. George, St. George to God, or tried to rouse us with the For-God-and-Country’s, I couldn’t have been more surprised. No—stunned! I’d never seen a general before. Mostly sergeants dealt with us, corporals, NCOs whose power came out of the barrel of their mouths, the sheer threatening noises they made. This man, if he even was a man, on that horse, if it even was a horse, was dead solid Power itself. He could have owned the field, the mountains. He could have been the field, the mountains, and if he wasn’t my first celebrity, he was—to use Faulkner’s word—my first avatar. The upshot was that I suddenly understood the spirit of the bayonet clear as crystal.

  And here’s the worst thing I ever did:

  In the spring of 1975, I was a visiting professor at Yale living in a third-floor apartment at Timothy Dwight College. Timothy Dwight has in its endowment the Chubb Fellowships, grants that bring visiting politicians in for three-day visits. The semester I was there, Jimmy Carter, John Lindsay, Maynard Jackson, and Hubert Humphrey were all Chubb Fellows.

  On the morning of the day of the worst thing I ever did I was coming downstairs with my laundry just as Hubert Humphrey was stepping out of the Chubb apartment. His hostess, Shelley Fishkin, saw me and introduced us. Humphrey and I shook hands and went about our business. That evening there were to be three functions in the senator’s honor, a cocktail party at the master’s house for everyone, a dinner to which I wasn’t invited, and, later, a party at the Fishkins to which I was. Two out of three ain’t bad and I hold no grudges. When I showed up at the cocktail party, Humphrey spotted me, broke away from his group, and said, “Saaay, I didn’t know you were that Stanley Elkin!”

  Now, unless the senator was confusing me with the historian Stanley Elkins, I don’t believe he thought I was any kind of Stanley Elkin at all. What probably happened was that after our brief introduction Shelley must have identified the guy with the laundry basket as the visiting writer. In any event, I was being patronized. I knew it and it annoyed me. In the two-hour interval between the dinner I hadn’t been invited to and the party I had, I’d had some drinks and arrived at the party a little late. The Whiffenpoofs were serenading the senator. They finished and left. Immediately, everyone in the room crowded
around Humphrey and started asking him questions, about the upcoming conventions, about foreign affairs, whatever was on the agenda that spring. Really, it was more like a press conference than a party. And that’s when I made my move.

  “Excuse me, Senator,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Could you get me a Coca-Cola?”

  “You want me to get you a Coca-Cola?”

  People were paying more attention than they had even to the Whiffenpoofs, baa baa baa.

  “If you would, please. There’s a whole tub of them behind you. Right there. Over against the wall.”

  I know it sounds dramatic, but Humphrey was watching me closely. Christ, everyone was. “All right,” he said finally, and handed me a can.

  “That’s the way you hand somebody a Coca-Cola?” I reproached him.

  “What,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Well, it’s just that there’s that little tin whoosie on top. I might cut myself. I better not try opening that. No sir,” I told him, and gave the Coke back. Very deftly he did something deliberately to disable it.

  “Gosh,” said Hubert Humphrey, “I can’t do it either,” and put the useless can back in my hand. He’d won, the happy warrior, and by now he probably had all too clear an idea about the kind of Stanley Elkin I really was.

  Or the time we lived in Virginia, maybe a hundred miles from Washington, and every so often we’d go up for a weekend, poke around the museums, do a monument or agency, maybe take in a congressional hearing, then come in at six o’clock and eat the big seafood. The thing of it is, Washington has always depressed me. I have the feeling, as I have in Paris or anywhere glamorous, I’m not only a tourist but a stranger, that big things are happening, important shifts, large goings-on in the social and cultural tectonics, the great, carved intentions of the world, but not to me. For all that the guides insist it’s my White House, I know better. I know it’s worth my ass to sit down in one off-limits chair or touch, unauthorized, one lousy velvet rope. I had a sense, wherever I happened to be in those days, that the good stuff was going on elsewhere. Georgetown was where the action was, the Virginia hunt country, and this knowledge broke my heart.