English Studies Forum

Unreel

Lou Rowan

for David Antin

            We’re always walking and talking.  I met her six weeks ago.  I haven’t been still since.   We meet mornings in the Rockefeller Preserve.  She puts her hair through her Arms Acres cap in a pony that swishes responsively.  She said yes to my proposal: a happy home from which, without envy, Mrs. Rowan watches my bladder fertilizing our kitchen garden.

“There was a time, babe, when I lived on the beach and didn’t know what to do with myself.  A three-mile strand of famous people filling domestic excesses.  Not knowing what to do with myself at home, I would walk to the water through the soft sand, turn right when it hardened and head for the cliffs at Solana.  I walked knowing the sounds of the waves, and the winds were lovely, the water cooling my feet was refreshing—I knew it but I didn’t feel it.”

“I thought you loved Del Mar.”

“Try to understand, love: I'm too old to play on the beach, I'm a visitor to my family, so I kept walking past the spot where I fished with the Portuguese Pepperpot, Ralph Neves, a famous jockey who rode for my father and grandfather.  He was my hero.  I watched for him mornings when my father was at the stables, and hurried out with my green pole and my worms and sandcrabs.  He didn’t want me too close to his line, so I’d settle in  ten yards south of him, cast out, and steal glances at his short-legged muscular body.  Riding falls tightened and stooped his back; I doted on his mesomorphic crouch and deliberate gait.  We didn’t have much to discuss, unless there was some action from the fish.  Once a furry sandy dog rushed up to me as I adjusted my pole to maintain proper tension on the line.  I felt something warm on my right leg.  Ralph cracked up, and I realized the dog had peed on me.”

“I hate dogs, but that really is funny, babe.”

“It was not how I wanted to impress a sports hero.”

“I fished to please my father.  Fishing and swimming were the two things we did.  I loved to swim out to the big breakers with him: we were the only ones in the family able to bodysurf; we’d swim alone out there.  When he’d return from the racetrack, or arrive from the office in LA, I’d beg him to swim with me.  It seemed to take him hours to do whatever he did with my stepmother before he’d be ready.  I’d sit slumped by the picture window, so he’d know I was waiting, contemplating  and pinching the folds of my bare belly.  Fishing with him was less fun: he used a flexible trout rod not an erect casting-pole, fishing the shallows as if they were running streams, jumping about to avoid the waves.  People gathered to watch the action, spoiling it for me.  I wanted a normal Outdoor Life ritual alone with my Dad.  If he had to show off, it should be to me.  He didn’t have tight muscles like Ralph.”

“It’s difficult to get a clear picture of your father.”

“I’ll tell you about him sometime, but: now I’m a young man walking north and leaving the boyhood scenes, and the first significant figure will be a tall two-tone man with the biggest house in the whole row.  He had sparse, slicked-back hair dyed jet black.  He wore black Bermuda shorts and a white or ivory dress shirt and velvet slippers.  A figure of dignified corpulence, a sleek ellipse not a wagging bulge.  His casting-rod was of extraordinary length, before him a steel holder for it driven into the sand by his butler, and behind the white fan of an Adirondack chair beside a matching table for buckets, tackle, tools, and a silver service of coffee and pastries, flanked by the butler in a black livery.

“The butler baited his hooks with floppy gobs of clam; the large man waded with slow dignity into the shallows and cast far out, the heavy pyramidal sinker projecting the load to the big waves.  Then he sat down to coffee and treats, pole-holder at hand like a knight’s pike.

“Four hundred yards north Jimmy Durante fished in a bikini, tucking the butt, if that’s what you call it, of the pole into the top of his taut pants.  I got a good view of Jimmy Durante’s dark gray pubic hair.”

“That’s neat, honey. Did you ever talk to him?”

“I never hit on a good approach.  Anyway, I thought he was boring on: I liked crooners and rhythm ‘n’ blues.  My stepfather watched his shows, not my father, and just beyond loomed the king of California dog food’s pink stucco mansion.  He and the king of California frozen pies were my Dad’s particular pals.  I couldn’t fathom them: neither swam or took off his long trousers.  The dog food guy’s wife was a striking, buxom strawberry blond, but Dizzy Arms, the bandleader with an orange stucco mansion four doors further, stole her, dropping renowned strawberry blond Luci-Ball Arms, who was his age.  Press stories estimated the dog food king’s wealth, and soon he dripped young women at the track.  I never liked Dizzy: he was always cursing the waiters at the Turf Club because they couldn’t mix him a good daiquiri.

“The dog food king chewed cigars, a common habit at the track; he was portly and loud.  He wore four diamond-crusted rings.  He was bald, greasing back the black hair around his temples and neck.  He carried a roll of bills two inches thick.  He wore tight-fitting silk sports-shirts that made him look like a gangster and garish sport coats that reminded me of oil slicks.  He’d sit with his legs apart, the roll bulging alternately inside or outside his thigh.”

“Yuck. He sounds disgusting.”

“I had difficulty finding satisfactory topics to discuss with him, and he was only one of a stream of fat cats from Kentucky, Arizona, Texas, and the Golden State who followed  their horses to our beach house.  I was studying existential theology.  These men, drinks and canapes in thick hands, asked what I would do with myself in life.  They  regretted the question five seconds into my answers.  I was a Paulist, struggling with original sin in myself and others, which led me towards the ministry or journalism.  One who hung in with me sketched duty to make money for my future family, suggesting those callings would harm the household.  The Lurchinison brothers of Texas went farther: standing back dramatically, the younger asked the elder if, now that he knows what he knows, he’d do anything different with his life.  The elder, gulped, chewed, and stepped forward to announce, ‘Nope, I’d do everything how I did it.’”

“Maybe they were right, honey.  Aren’t you glad you didn’t do those things?”

“You’re not letting me make my point, babe.  You know I always have a point.  I was a good-hearted chap, mostly, and I wanted to like these folks and them to like me, but talking to them was like talking to a loud radio.”

“So what’s your point?”

“My point, honey, is that these bumptious beings gave me no emotional or mental sustenance.  It’s hard to understand unless you grew up in Southern California how soul-deadening life was.”

“Maybe you have to’ve been there.  That’s strange to think about.  I wonder if we’d have liked each other then.”

“I don’t know, darling, but as I continued north, I was struggling to maintain the optimism synonymous with Christian love.  I wanted to be a conduit of California’s psychic radiance.  See this is the psychic crux, babe.  I longed to belong there, but I could never quite find the right approach to my peers, my family, or my family’s friends.  So I dug myself a deeper emotional hole by forcing myself to smile and say hello to people walking in the other direction.   This was social suicide for a late teen, dorkhood with a grin.  Feeling like an idiot was my penance, and it gets worse. . .”

“Before it gets worse, could explain to me what you just said?”

“Honey, I’m trying to express how sad it was that nobody in that material culture noticed what a well-meaning young man I was, how hard I was trying, but it only gets worse because now I’ve reached the volleyball section: reams of teenagers my age in an animated frieze of the good life.  Bronzed bodies, laughter, radios, drinks, sunglasses—the incarnation of God’s purpose for beaches—there handsome, pretty, buddies, appreciating each other, dominant, commercial emblems of evolved sunny perfection there, happy, high-fiving, bottom slapping—and I don’t know a soul.

“Could I have been one of those feckless, free types, I’d have done it in a second.  I yearned to be cool, but I didn’t even know what to do with my arms as I walked on the beach: swing them, let them hang, swing them how high, hang them how limp—I never knew.  The volleyball crowd scorned neurosis.  Its shaded Argus eyes found me wanting.”

“Explain the part about the eyes, honey.”

“They were all wearing dark glasses.  I couldn’t tell if they were staring at me alone there, but I felt. . .”

“I doubt they were staring at you, honey.”

“Well, anyway, I walk on, safely reaching an oasis of unassuming natives.  That summer I did have one friend, John Deere, who lived in a development back in the hills of Rancho.  He had red hair, pale eyes, and something of a stutter.  He was an engineering student in a public college.  He spoke with a deliberate flatness befitting an engineer.  He knew worlds beyond the social crucible of the beach, introducing me to a woman who collected recordings by visitors from flying saucers.  She darkened her rec room and loaded a tape.  The sound quality was poor; I do remember Ash-Tar remonstrating in accented English with me and other earthlings to heed his warning for our own good, and John’s friend, re-appearing in a tiara and a purple robe during the orchestral finale.  She had accented the rec room with purple sequined hangings, which matched her ceremonial clothing.  I maintained my well-bred politeness, even though I considered the proceedings beyond the pale.  But she must have read skepticism on my attentive brow.  This is something you should know about me, babe, I can be snotty and, although I’m pretty creative, one of my reflexes is reserve.  This holding back can be arid. . .”

“I’m dying to hear about the space-lady.”

“OK, OK.  She said, ‘You may laugh because you do not realize you are in the very crotch itself!  You don't, do you?  And where is that, you ask, because you do not know why bulldozers have been laying bare these hills and erosion washing them into the sea, do you?

 No, I ‘m sure you do not. Young man the earth is your mother, your great unloved unappreciated mother, and she is readying herself for her vast labor, and you are standing this instant, young man, right on top of her hill of Venus, which puny men have been deludedly denuding unknowlingly preparing her for the heavenly for the heavenly penetration.  She has been shaven cleaned smoothed by ignorant earthlings and their puny machines.  The hills of her hidden flesh are open to the skies, the heavens and stars.  You would not smirk at me, young man, if you knew all this, and now you know it.’

“She was taller than I, and the tiara, piling up her hair, extended her stature.  Her breath smelled like clamshells as she yelled full blast into my face.  I always associate bad breath with lengthy advice, the feeling reforming gut pouring itself into my nostrils.  I didn’t know what might happen if I moved or spoke, so I stood there, posture poor, stifling retches.”

“Did she try to molest you, babe?”

“No, darling, the rape comes farther up the beach.  Her zeal was pure; we left safely with unillustrated newsprint pamphlets, promising to spread the word.  And the denuded valleys between L.A. and San Diego are indeed shot through with little white units.

“After this encounter John introduced me to my first blond.  Her name was Virginia, babe.  She called herself Ginnie and was my first-and-a-quarter love.”

“You’d better explain”

“Sure, when I was a kindergartner up the coast in Corona Del Mar, the year my classmates were rooting for Dewey and calling Truman a Jew-man, there was a pale, skinny blond named Anita.  I was obsessed with her and called her Anita-Banana.  In my pre-pubescent fantasies I brought lots of little girls to bed with me for serious discussion, focusing my instruction on her.  She was one quarter.  Then there was my sister’s friend Margaret, a Catholic girl who broke my heart repeatedly because I was too weird for her, or rather for her mother.  At twelve she dropped spit on me intimately, as I haunted the driveway below their bedroom, to my sister’s giggles, beginning an intermittent obsession.  Count her a half.  Then Ginnie another half.  Since I met you babe, I’ve realized love can be something besides a painful obsession, and the abortive experiences preceding us are nothing.”

“You know I know that.  I’m sure you want to go on.”

“Her name was Virginia Bildung.”

“What kind of a name was that?  Did she rape you?”

“That’s a literary name.  No, we were too religious for rape.  That’s why John introduced us, to connect me with another townie who was religious like me.  I don’t get molested until I reach the cliff on which David Antin lived.”

“Isn’t he the writer you love who just died?”

“That’s Douglas Woolf.  I think David’s alive.  He’s waiting on the cliff above the rape scene to finish this story.”

“I’m glad to hear this story has an ending.  You’re dying to tell me about this blond with my name.”

“I remembered her because she had your name.  I’m mixed up because you won’t keep your hands off me while I’m summon these primal memories.  Let me get to religion.”

“I thought she was a blond on the beach.”

“Yes, religion, heh-heh.  In those days there was a remnant of middle class locals on the beach-front.  Mrs. Bildung was a classic ‘little woman:’ her beauty given to her daughters, her hair lank and gray, her skin faded as she extracted her goodness and injected the girls with it—nurturing them as a dressed and seasoned offering to her husband Mark, and to her peers in the parish and PTA.”

“That’s cute and sad, babe.  Are you getting a little carried away?”

“The daughters loved their sweet Mom, but their devotion to the dad was blatant.   Evenings the living room floor was cleared of sewing, crafts, and games, and Mark danced with his daughters in smooth surging motions.  Jerry Vale, Perry Como, Tommy Leonetti, Tony Bennett: the Italians with voices mellow as seedless concord grapes exhaled the harmonies through which they looped.

“Schmaltz assuaged my loneliness.  I loved this family.  The parents, sensing good intentions in my theological discourses and my father’s wealth, blessed this purposeful crush.   Ginnie and I took long walks, smiling and greeting all passersby, discussing life and Father Stevens, the minister whose sermons and whose advice were like visions of her father set to language.  Sometimes we’d hold hands.  We swam or water-skied in my little boat, the Don’t Panic.”

“The what?”

“Don’t Panic.  I told you I was cool.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Water-skiing killed my crush on Ginnie.  Driving to Missionary Bay, she sat close to me in my can—not because she was like that but because the sun had fried the plastic seat to her right.  She was wearing, for the first time, a bathing suit without a skirt.  Her thighs exuded masses of hair, sharply cropped below her knees.

“This insurmountable vision assailed me the morning after my father’s friends had lectured me on my financial debt to my future family, and Ginnie had taken his side, airily asserting he’d given me a lot to think about.

“So there I am, driving down Highway 101 with a cute blond on my flank, but I’m internalizing those legs, feeling down on myself as my visionary moment of coolness changed from golden to hirsute.”

 “I thought you were sensitive and Christian.”

            “Follow-through on my principles came later.”

            “I’m glad it came at all, babe.”

            “So now David Antin awaits us atop the cliffs at Solana.”

            “I thought we’d finally arrived at the rape.”

“We need him for it.  One day in 1965 he walked into the New Yorker Bookshop where I worked part-time for no money.  He was carrying the ‘Bomb Hanoi’ issue of Some/Thing.”

“The what?”

“That’s the magazine he edited with Jerry Rothenberg.  Andy Warhol did the cover—detachable stamps each saying ‘Bomb Hanoi.’  I liked it because the only graffito I’d ever done said ‘Napalm Babies.’  I sprayed it in red on a wall on Claremont Avenue below the International House.  When David lived on LaSalle Street up there he leaned over the guardrail of the elevated IRT testing suicide.  When I lived there I tried (inspired by William Burroughs) to cut off a finger and send it to the White House.  I bought a hatchet on Amsterdam Avenue.  It was blunt and bounced off my knuckles.”

“Aaah, poor babe.”

“David wore a straw hat.  I don’t know how I knew him, probably from St.Mark’s Church, but I was thrilled to see him, ‘Your’re David Antin!’  He knew things and could do things I couldn’t.  I never envied him the way I did other writers.  He could outtalk me, and in those days I did lots of talking.”

“I can’t imagine.  I’d like to meet him.”

“I think you will.”

“But why is he going to finish this story?”

“He lives in Del Mar.  He runs on that beach.  He cut his finger near it.  He hurt his foot on it.  I’m copying him a bit now.”

“Did he tell you and his wife about hairy girlfriends?”

“No, strange neighbors in the Village.  But in a sense he said that what you and I are doing now may not work anymore.”

“Didn’t he like sex?”

“I’ll bet he did.  I mean the words part, the story.”

“You always tell me that you’re making love to me when you write.”

“I am.  It’s one of the 24 ways I caress you.”

“24?”

“Yes, lifting, nuzzling, chewing, rubbing with fingertips or whole hands, squeezing, scratching, licking.  I lick you on nine places, chew you on eight—so really with the multiplier effect it’s way, way beyond 24.  There’s. . .”

“I get the idea: every time we’re together you go to your study and make little notches and write little numbers in your journal.”

“Wide notches and big numbers.”

“What do my little notches have to do with David Antin.”

“He used my Uncle Bob as a conventional art-collector in his first ‘talking’ book.  He examines all convention more logically than it would care to be seen.  He plays with definitions, with limits. I like to feel that I have no boundaries, but to play without considering them.  I’m content writing a story or poem; David ruminates on the bounds of stories and poems as he does them out loud, creating the court while playing the game.  His work has the freshness of continuous invention—in fact, that’s what it is, as he carries off.

“If I’m going to be molested, I’d like him to be there to reshuffle the pieces of my anxiety.

“You know my ending, honey—it’s you.  And I know the puns David and I made about ‘the fur below’ and yuppie possessions as ‘furbelows’ have to do with how I experienced the phantoms of passion as if they came from Ash-Tar—I can tell them I did not feel them.  My father did.”

“You’ve a weird way of discussing rape, love.”

“A succession of governesses cared for my three half-siblings while my father and stepmother, herself my former governess, went to the races.  The incumbent was the Irish Nualla.  Buxom, chunky, hot pants and bikinis were her work outfits.  My father professed irked shock at the vulgarity of her dress.  She didn’t excited me no more than the grade-B porn magazines of the day; they were too much like bubblegum, the kind with the gushing syrup in the center, “come-gum.”

“But one day she took the walk North with me.  She’d been hanging waiting for friends on her day off, the two of us alone.  She eyed me and said she no longer cared if they came.

“‘Let’s go,’ she said, stepping out of her gilded thongs.

“I don’t know what subjects we found to discuss on the walk north.  She praised the beauty of the cliffs, and some impulse untinged by lust prompted me, ‘Yes, they’re a great trysting-place.’

“We sat upon a ledge in a shallow cavern the surf had hollowed in the cliff.  She took my hand as we approached the ledge.  A friend of my dad’s walked by, and chatted with me, ignoring Nualla.  Something bothered him.  He left reluctantly.  Nualla undid the straps to her latticed tank top.  Her flesh bulged through the lattices like hillocks ripe for planting.  She gave me a big wide sexy come-on smile, and said something like a movie-siren.  Frozen in embarrassment, frozen in fear and confusion, I somehow waited there long enough to get us headed back.  She took my hand again, paralyzing the arm, as if she were disciplining me.

“That night, frustrated that he’d failed to shoot the moon and lost the final game of hearts, my father warned during our good nights that Nualla wanted to seduce me.  He emphasized the pregnancy problem.  He laughed about her get-ups.  Only then did I grasp what had happened at the cliff.  ‘Seduce’ was a giggle-word from film comedy: Audrey Hepburn used it in Sabrina.  I assured him Nualla would be safe.  I joined him, or sought to, in joking about her vulgarity.

“And you know, darling, until right now, I had always understood the man-to-man jokes about Nualla as one of the three moments of understanding and closeness my father and I ever had.”

“I’m sorry, babe.”

            “I believe my father’s in every sentence.”

“I love you, honey.”