The Tank Woman

(Governor Tom's Note: I wrote this piece for a short story workshop during my senior year at Temple University. Reading it now for the first time in over a decade, I'm struck by the occasional whiff of The Catcher in the Rye. Funny, I don't think I'd heard of Catcher at this point. I know I hadn't read it. I didn't read it until three years after I graduated.)

________________

"Excuse me, sir," growled the old man from my right. I turned and looked up at him. His eyes were huge. Actually I should say eye singular. It was enormous, glaring at me from behind a thick lens. The other lens was covered with light brown tape. I felt like ripping it off to see what was wrong but thought better of it. Just by the way he was looking at me I knew he had the strength to tear my arm off even though he was old. His olive-colored skin had lines drawn in it as if some child had taken a pick and set to carving his face. His bald head reflected the gold bulbs that bordered the mirror-columns all around the store. The reflection almost blinded me whenever he tilted his head forward a little, which he did as he dug out his wallet. The gray goatee was losing its look in the middle of the stubble that crowded around it like little bugs. He held up a pair of khakis so the whole length of the pants hung down, and his arm was the clothesline. "I said, can you ring this up?" His voice was so grating. It reminded me of a metal sheet grinding against a rocky surface. Now I wanted to scratch my own throat.

I was in the middle of thinking about which story from my English Lit class I should use for that essay about the writer and his world when this pirate showed up. I snatched the pair of pants off the clothesline and zapped them with my laser gun. I secretly fired a shot at his stomach while he was finding the right bill to pull out of his wallet. He may not have felt that shot now, but when that tumor starts growing in a few years, he’ll feel it. I took his bill, stuffed it in the drawer, and gave him his change. As I was bagging the pants, Stephanie from Cosmetics strode over, her long, tanned legs extending gracefully from the tantalizingly short skirt. I could actually smell her perfume before I saw her, almost making me dizzy with lust. When she reached my counter, she flung her Nordic blonde hair behind her shoulder in such a way that I wanted to get on my knees and worship her like the goddess she was. I fought the urge. "Some guy returned this to my counter," she said, singing her words softly. "He said they didn’t fit him. I don’t know why he didn’t just come to you."

"Oh, uh, th-that’s okay," I stuttered. I wanted to hit myself. "Just put them there." I gestured toward my counter. The pirate almost had to turn completely around so his one eye could get a look at her.

"Whoa!" the pirate shouted. Stephanie didn’t know what that meant. She dropped the turtlenecks on the counter, turned around (her hair flowing behind), and strode away. I caught myself just before I drooled, sucking the spit back in.

"Thanks have a nice night," I mumbled to the pirate as I handed him his bag. After he left, I grabbed the turtlenecks and sniffed them. They still had the "new" smell so it could be the guy never tried them on at all. The first rule of retail was that whenever someone returned something, the reason they gave was a lie. And now it was happening more than ever in the post-Christmas gift-returning rush. I heard Stephanie laughing. Turning around, I saw her at the Cosmetics counter flirting with Roy from Men’s Suits. He was even taller than her, dark groomed hair, and a face that could have been chiseled out of stone. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it was enough to make her laugh. He laughed with her. I turned away to keep my heart from growing too heavy, but when I saw my reflection in the mirror column adjacent to my counter, it just got worse. I scowled at my five feet, four inch frame staring back at me. How was I ever going to get the attention of someone like Stephanie with this body, or lack of one, I should say? I threw the turtlenecks under the counter in disgust, kicking the foot of the counter angrily. Now my big toe throbbed, but I didn’t care.

At the sound of squeaking wheels I looked up and saw a woman even older than that pirate. She was huffing and puffing into my department, tugging along with her a hand truck which held a big gas tank that fed tubes into her nose. I shook my head. What the hell kind of customers was this store bringing in? I looked around and saw she was the only one in my department. She was moving slowly, so I could get back to thinking about my disaster of a day.

I had to write an essay for English Lit, but I didn’t know what to write about. Not that it mattered. I wouldn’t be able to print because last night my laser printer, which I just spent six hundred dollars on last month, suddenly claimed my computer didn’t have enough memory to print. Unbelievable! Sixty-four megs of memory my computer has! And my printer thinks that isn’t enough! It’s certainly enough to play the best games on the market today so I know it’s enough to print. Now I’ve got to take it back to the store for an exchange when I have time which will be never because I never have time during the semester. Never. Ever.

As the tank woman was browsing through the wallets, Juan Carlos from Argentina, who works in the store’s bridal registry, walked by, showing an engaged couple around the store who were looking for things to add to their registry. He hurried them past my department. I knew he could feel my grumpy eyes on him all the way through. Watching him scurry reminded me of my Spanish class. For tomorrow I had to read a short story in Spanish and be prepared to discuss it in Spanish. Forget it. I had too much else to do. I needed to get out of here. I looked at my watch, and it told me nine-twenty. Only ten more minutes to go. I needed to get the tank woman out of my department so I could close my register. I was about to step out from behind my counter when the store manager, Kermit Eck, ran up to me and patted me on my head. The nerve this guy had! If he hadn’t been the store manager, I would have punched him in his gut. One shot could’ve doubled over this red-headed beanstalk. He had to be at least six feet four, but I couldn’t tell how old he was because he looked so weird. Thirty? Thirty five? Fifty?

"How’d everything go here tonight, Randy?" he said in his high-pitched voice, as if he’d been kicked in the nuts years ago and still hadn’t recovered. "Everything go okay?"

"Fine," I said through clenched teeth. I balled up my fists until my knuckles shone white.

The tank woman had picked out the wallet she wanted and was wheeling her air around with her toward my counter. Kermit took off at a dash toward the escalator. I laughed to myself. How could the manager of a department store be afraid of customer service? He was leaping up the escalator steps in twos when the woman finally got to my counter, the squeaking wheels of her hand truck coming to a halt. While she dug around in her purse all I could see was her long hair, once dark, now almost completely taken over by gray. Her long trench coat was dirty, and her dark green and red scarf certainly didn’t belong with it. It was like she reached blindly into a pile of clothes and wore whatever she pulled out. And now she could have passed for a clown.

Then she looked down at me, and my insides fell. Here she was up close, a pair of tubes going into her nostrils, her yellow eyes only half open as if she could have just as well gone to sleep here than anywhere. Her mouth sagged down in the same manner. I got the feeling she wasn’t just sad at this moment, but this was how she always looked. This was what her disease and having to lug around this oxygen tank had done to her. I knew I was never a good judge of age, but I got the feeling she was a lot younger than she looked. The disease had gobbled up her years the same way it was doing to her body. I zapped her wallet and was careful not to point the gun at her. Handing over the money was an obvious struggle. I gently accepted it from her trembling hand. I stuck it in the drawer slowly, as if the money were as fragile as her. When I gave her the change, I avoided looking at her at all costs. It was like her face trapped all the sadness and grief in the world and now she was threatening my mood with it. And, much to my own surprise, was succeeding.

After her trembling hand took the bag with the wallet in it, she put it into her purse before grabbing onto the hand truck. I watched her go, the wheels squeaking in full force, when the store operator announced the store closing over the PA system. "Good evening, shoppers, the time is now nine-thirty, and your Palace is now closed for the day. We appreciate your patronage and invite you to shop tomorrow from ten to nine-thirty. Thank you and good night. The store is now closed." The tank woman was the only one left in the store, and at her pace she wasn’t going to be out any time soon. Who’d let her out by herself? Obviously she was in no such condition to shop by herself. I watched her getting closer to the glass doors. There was no way she could get through those by herself. I hurried out from behind my counter–the air felt much cleaner out here–and rushed over to the double glass doors, opening one for her to let her pass through. She looked up at me and offered a poor excuse for a smile as she walked through. Out in the chilly night air a car was waiting for her. I couldn’t see who was at the driver’s wheel because all the windows were black. Despite the cold she didn’t hurry to the car but continued in her slow, sick way. I closed the glass door and watched her from where it was warm. Someone from the passenger side got out to help her.

In the reflection of the door I could see Lance from Sporting Goods speed by, his blond pony tail bobbing up and down. "Hey Ran how ya doin’?" he said without stopping.

"Fine," I told him. I saw him shaking his head, figuring I was just being my old cynically sarcastic self. But I meant it this time. This old woman, who was getting into the back seat with her oxygen tank, had told me. I looked at my own reflection in the door and didn’t feel the need to scowl anymore. I was doing just fine.

Golden Box

(Governor Tom's Note: I wrote this little ditty in the fall of 1998, my first semester at USC. It was inspired by the studio apartment I was living in at the time.)
________________

I live in a golden box which is quite
Claustrophobic
And sometimes I think it’s
Funny
Because in the summertime it’s
Unforgiving
Because it doesn’t let me breathe and is
Suffocating
Because it’s so
Small.
The sun penetrates the creamy yellow
Curtains to create a light golden hew
Which fills up the
Box
Like a thick pool of warmth which
Starts out nice but then thickens into
Syrup.
In the winter it’s just as bad because of the
Fecal brown heater which sticks to the wall
Like a block leech, sucking out the little life
Left in my piss-yellow
Walls.
There’s no heat to come from that, just
Cold.
It comes from the heater, from the duct in
The heater which snakes through the piss wall
To the outside where, with a warm opening of
Metal arms, invites the cold in where it can
Swim in and
Drown
Me.
Isn’t it obvious what I’m saying?
Stay away from golden
Boxes.
And don’t sleep. You might get
Crushed.

At the Movies with Governor Tom: Australia

Tonight I went to the Aero for a sneak preview of Australia, the new epic by Baz Lurhmann and the first movie he's directed since 2001's Moulin Rouge!. Baz takes his time directing movies. He was thirty when he made his feature debut, Strictly Ballroom, back in 1992. He did Romeo + Juliet four years later, and then Moulin Rouge! after that. I have to admit I haven't seen those first two flicks, and I was sort of blah about Moulin Rouge!. Still, when I saw the trailer for Australia, I was intrigued. Let's just say I'm a sucker for historical epics. Oh, and you've got Nicole Kidman too. She never hurts. And I did see a stage production of La Boheme Baz directed for L.A.'s Center Theater Group back in 2004 or so. That was terrific, although I'm not sure why he had to update the storyline to the fifties, but whatever.

While I enjoyed Australia overall, it wasn't the epic masterpiece I was hoping for. Baz takes an unconventional approach by trying to mesh a whole bunch of genres together. Actually, he doesn't marry them so much as lay them out in a sequence. At first it's sort of like a comedy and a musical, then it becomes more of an adventure, then a romance, and then a drama. I think it sort of worked, but I don't think it's possible to do that and create a masterpiece at the same time. Tugging your audience across the emotional spectrum in two and a half hours isn't very realistic. Still, if you appreciate great photography, then by all means check this out. There were times when I detached from the story and just sat there with my mouth agape while taking in the landscapes.

Here's the story in a nutshell. It's set in the late thirties and early forties, leading up to the Japanese attack on the city of Darwin, which came soon after Pearl Harbor. Nicole Kidman plays a rich English gal named Sarah Ashley. When the story starts, her hubby's just kicked off and left her this huge ranch in northern Australia. No sooner does she get to the ranch than she finds out that there's this rancher nearby named King Carney who's trying to usurp it by slowly but surely poaching her livestock. Playing King Carney, by the way, is the long lost Bryan Brown. Okay maybe he isn't really long lost, but I don't think I've seen him since those F/X movies he did with Brian Dennehy back in the eighties. I really liked those flicks. I think they did two of them. Anyway, he's brilliant as King Carney. He's got the local cops in his pocket, but he's not all bad. He's just complicated.

Nah, the real baddie here is a chap called Fletcher, Neil Fletcher, played by David Wenham. Did you see The Lord of the Rings flicks? Dave played Faramir, brother of Boromir, the one in the second and third flicks who helps Frodo and Sam get closer to that dag nab frickin' volcano. And he also starred as Hugh Jackman's sidekick in that awful horror mishmash Van Helsing back in 2004. Ugh. Like a stake through the ol' ticker just thinking of that travesty. I've got to give props where props are due, though. David Wenham's got range. As Faramir he was this noble, chivalrous type, although it took him a bit to trust Frodo and Sam. In Van Helsing he was this bumbling moron who tripped over his own feet. And now here, as Neil Fletcher, he's this quiet malevolent type. At first it seems he's another version of Faramir. Uh uh. He's Faramir's evil cowboy twin. And I mean evil. Dave really amps up the nastiness as Neil, but he never overdoes it. Dude definitely comes from the school of less is more, and his performance is all the better for it. In addition to Hugh Jackman, Dave's also got a history with Baz. He had a supporting part in Moulin Rouge!.

But wait. Speaking of Hugh Jackman, I haven't gotten to his character yet, the first person Nicole Kidman meets on her arrival in the great outback. Known only as Drover, he's sort of a freelance, uh, drover. Someone who drives cattle and livestock over great distances. He's a freelancer, but he does have a working history with Nicole Kidman's late husband. At first, Nicole and Hugh's characters go together as well as oil and water. He's this rough-hewn sort of guy, a Han Solo of the outback. And Nicole's this prim and proper English gal. Still, the sexual tension's pretty much apparent from the get-go. And it doesn't really take long at all for...well you know.

The main conflict of the story is this. Nicole's ranch is pretty much out of money. Her only hope is a beef contract with the Australian army. If she has any hope of closing the deal, she needs to get all her late hubby's livestock, something like two thousand heads, to the city of Darwin by a certain deadline. And from her ranch to Darwin is quite the trip. She doesn't have a hope of getting it done without Drover. And it's this epic journey that constitutes the beef (pardon the pun) of the movie. On the way, not only do they have to contend with an absolutely unforgivable (if absolutely beautiful) landscape, but they've got Neil Fletcher and his goons on their tail, trying to make life as complicated as possible.

So that's pretty much the setup. And over the course of the film, we're building up to the inevitable attack on Darwin by Japanese forces. In fact, it's the exact same squadron of planes that ambushed Pearl Harbor. Many Americans (like, say, me before this film) don't realize that Pearl Harbor was only a warm-up for those pilots. Apparently they blew up Pearl Harbor, then did a U-turn and headed over to Darwin.

Before I get to Baz's Q&A, let me mention my favorite thing about this film. That would be the Aborigine kid named Nullah. He's part of the Aborigine family who live and work on Nicole's ranch. His mom dies pretty early on courtesy of those corrupt cops, and then Nicole slowly but surely becomes a sort of mother figure to him. Actually she and Hugh Jackman become his surrogate parents. His central conflict is whether or not he should do the walkabout. Not if, but when. Anyway, he's adorable. Very charismatic. And his relationship with his mysterious grandfather King George, who hovers in and out of the film like a guiding spirit, is very intriguing.

Peter Hammond from the L.A. Times moderated the Q&A. The first thing Baz talked about was how this project grew out of his failed Alexander the Great project four years ago. He and Oliver Stone were working on competing projects about Alexander. Oliver finished his in time for Thanksgiving 2004. Did you catch it? It's perfectly fine if you didn't. With Colin Farrell as Alexander and Angelina Jolie as his mom and Val Kilmer as his dad, it just didn't work. Too all over the place. So it's too bad Baz's version fell apart because it's hard to imagine how it could've been any worse. Baz wasn't very specific about why it fell through. He had Steven Spielberg signed on as the producer. Huge sets had been built in Morocco. It was all due to start shooting with a fall 2005 release date, giving audiences a full year to get over the Oliver Stone fiasco. But it just didn't happen. That's obviously how he found the time to direct La Boheme in L.A.

So he went back to his wife in Paris and decided to have a second child. Their first, a daughter, was born in the fall of '03. And their second, a son, was born in Paris during the summer of 2005. His wife, by the way, this gal named Catherine Martin, does the production design for his movies. In fact, she scored an Oscar for Moulin Rouge!.

Anywho, it was while in Paris spending time with his family that he decided to do an epic about his homeland. Part of what inspired him was the fact that most people outside Australia have no idea that the forces that attacked Pearl Harbor also did a number on Australia. Darwin was bombed no less than fifty or sixty times. Also, if he was going to do an epic, he wanted it to have a real-life historical backdrop. And he did do his research. Before he started worrying about what the actual story would be, he holed himself up in his Paris flat and spent a good six months doing nothing but reading book after book after book. One thing he didn't have to do much reading about was droving. Baz comes from a family of drovers on his dad's side. They drove Clydesdales, Baz explained. He'd never done it himself, which is why he and two assistants left Paris for Oz to try it out.

Originally he wasn't going to include an Aborigine subplot, but then he thought about his kids. What are they? French? Australian? The daughter was born in Sydney but now lives in France. His son was born in Paris. Baz and Catherine are Australian. This issue of his children's identities led to him thinking about the Aborigines. Until 1973 the Australian government had this policy about Aborigine kids who, like Nullah in the film, are half Aborigine and half white. What the government would do was kidnap them from their homes right from birth and raise them in an all-white orphanage where they would eventually be told that their parents were dead. To hammer the point home, Baz said if Barack Obama, who's half white and half black, had been born in Australia, the same thing would've happened to him.

It's hard to imagine that happening, isn't it? How strange. Eventually the Australian government did issue a formal apology, but according to Baz, the reason they took so long to get around to it was because they were afraid they'd be sued. Apparently, after they stopped this program in 1973, no one was supposed to talk about it. Everyone was supposed to go about their lives as if it had never happened. So the government thought that if they apologized, they'd be admitting it actually happened, in which case the Aborigines might sue them. Jesus Christ, man. They deserved to be sued, don't ya think? So anyway, the question of who his kids are made Baz think of that, which made him decide to incorporate an Aborigine storyline into his script.

That kid who played Nullah, Brandon Walters, survived umpteen rounds of auditions that originally started with a thousand Aborigine kids from all around Oz. A lot of the auditions took place without Baz. He didn't get involved until the pool had been winnowed down quite a bit. He was too busy droving. Now that guy who plays Nullah's grandad King George, David Gulpilil, used to work in Ozzie movies and TV shows all the time. Back in the seventies and eighties he was the go-to guy if you needed an Aborigine character. He's still working too. He was in Rabbit-Proof Fence, which came out during the holidays of 2002. That's powerful stuff. Check it out if you haven't seen it. It deals directly with the half-caste Aborigine issue I mentioned above. Anyway, David Gulpilil obviously doesn't get out much. When Baz approached him about playing King George, the first thing David asked was how Jimmi Hendrix was doing.

To cover his bases, Baz filmed two endings for this thing: One sad, one happy. In the end he opted for happy. The world's already laden with enough doubt and anxiety. Why should he add to it? Dude just finished mixing this thing eight days ago, and the big premiere's two days from now. Oprah saw a cut of it a while ago before most of it was edited. To fill in the gaps Baz had to use still photographs and rudimentary animation. Anything to get a good quote from Oprah, right? We've seen what her endorsement can do for books. She loved the rough cut of Australia. Now let's hope that love can boost this sucker's sales.

Opera League Seminar: Carmen and The Magic Flute

This morning I paid my dues to opera geekdom by going down to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (the L.A. Opera venue) for a seminar on their next two operas. It's a Saturday, mind you, but these are two of my faves. When I read in their last newsletter about the chance to attend lectures about them, I couldn't pass up the opportunity. What would possess me to get up at dawn on a Saturday to hear scholars blow hot air about operas? The Magic Flute and Carmen, that's what.

Let's start with Carmen, shall we? It was the second lecture, but it's the next one they're putting on. Performances start two weeks from today and continue into the middle of December. Indeed, I've just bought my ticket for the first Saturday in December. And then in January they'll be doing The Magic Flute. I'm not sure why they talked about The Magic Flute first. Now that I think about it, maybe it's because that opera was written first. It came out in September 1791 whereas Carmen debuted almost a hundred years later, in March 1875. Whatever. They're staging Carmen first. So I'll talk about that first.

If you only see one opera before you die, Carmen is a sure bet. No, I'm not just saying that. I wouldn't say the same thing about The Magic Flute. Or any Mozart opera for that matter. Don't get me wrong, Mozart knew opera. His are among the best. You've got The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and, one of my faves, The Marriage of Figaro. But I'm talking one opera here. If you've never seen an opera before, and you could only pick one, Carmen's a definite winner. I'm sorely tempted to recommend The Marriage of Figaro, but since that sucker's four hours, I'd have a hard time recommending it to someone who's never seen an opera and who only has the chance to see one. Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute aren't exactly short stories either. Carmen, however, clocks in under three hours and has what just about every classical music buff and their cousin considers some of the most beautiful music the world's ever heard. I don't care how alien opera is to you, I guarantee you that you'd recognize at least two of the numbers in this piece. You've got that one scene early on when Carmen herself is singing in the street with all those people standing around. And then you've got that one instrumental ditty toward the end, right outside the bullfight arena. The undisputed best opera that's ever come out of France, Carmen is the C in the ABC operas, the three operas widely considered to be the most popular in the repertoire. The A stands for Aida, and the B is La Boheme. In other words, if you can only see one opera in your life, and Carmen isn't it, either of the other two would be just as surefire a bet.

Speaking about Carmen this morning was a chap called Williams, Simon Williams. He's an English chap who teaches drama at UC Santa Barbara. Specifically, he is both a professor and the chair of the Department of Dramatic Art. The theme of his lecture was why Carmen was such a dismal failure. Premiering in Paris on March 3, 1875, Carmen was composed by thirty-six-year-old Georges Bizet. According to Simon, the vitriolic reviews affected poor Georges to such an extent that part of the reason why he died of a heart attack exactly three months to the day after the premier was because he took the reviews so personally. They precipitated a depression, which in turn affected his health. The date of his death was not only the three-month anniversary of his opera's debut, it was his sixth wedding anniversary.

Like movies today, operas were oftentimes adapted from another work. Quite a few of Mozart's operas were adapted from plays, for example. Carmen was adapted from a novella published about thirty years earlier by a Frenchman named Prosper Mérimée. Set in Seville, Spain circa 1830, it's a pretty simple story. You've got this hot factory girl named Carmen, right? And then you've got this army guy named Don Jose. Dude falls head over heels for our gal and flips his life upside down to get her. He's got this other hot gal who wants to marry him, and who keeps him informed about his ailing mother. Well, so much for that. At first Jose says he'll go back to Mom, but once he's under Carmen's spell, forget it. Forget Mom. Forget this hottie who wants to have his kids. He also blows off his superior. And to make his unhinging complete, he goes and joins a group of bandits or something. By the end of the opera, in other words, Jose's pretty much gone a full one-eighty from the prim and proper military man and momma's boy we meet in act one. And I'm not just referring to a total change in his outward comportment, but in his emotional psyche as well. Again, at the start of the piece, Jose's all composed and professional seeming. But by the climax, his very being is riven into pieces by a fiery jealousy and insecurity. It's only then that we realize the Don Jose at the start of the opera was just a flimsy facade. The Don Jose at the end is the real Don Jose, and good for Carmen for getting him in touch with himself, with the base elements of his being which he'd been trying in vain to control.

So why was Carmen such a friggin' flop? Well, pretty much for the reasons intimated above. Remember, it was 1875. Things like women's lib and feminism weren't even a seed in anyone's noodle. This opera was just too racy for the times, and specifically for its venue, the Opera Comique. No, Opera Comique doesn't mean funny operas. It was a brand of operas founded in the early eighteenth century as a French alternative to Italian operas. You have to understand that Italians invented opera. There was a time when the word "Italian" in "Italian opera" was redundant. There was no other kind. But soon enough the rest of Europe started contributing to the art form. Opera Comique is an example of the French contribution. Simon summed up Opera Comique as essentially being opera that included speaking parts instead of just pure singing. Much more than that, before Georges showed up with Carmen, Opera Comique had a tradition of being very chaste. Characters never died. The endings were always happy. Without spoiling anything for you, let's just say that Carmen has things which don't exactly jive with that tradition. I agree with Simon that it's kind of weird that Georges would be so taken aback by the adverse reaction. He knew Opera Comique better than most. How could he think a storyline as racy as Carmen's would go off without a hitch?

Simon said the problem was even more fundamental than that. In his words, Georges was a square peg trying to fit into the round hole of the Paris theater scene. Georges wanted sex in his work. He wanted hips, sensuality, all that sweaty stuff that was antithetical to the audience's sensibilities at the time. Playwright Henrik Ibsen was doing something similar at the same time with his plays. Like Georges, he was writing about sex and other topics that people in polite society didn't want to talk about.

Rehearsals for the premiere of Carmen were accordingly pretty tense. The cast members had no illusions about how their new opera was going to be perceived. Infighting became the norm. The two glaring exceptions were the two leads: Marie Galli-Marié (Carmen) and Paul Lhérie (Don Jose). Simon said they stood by their man Georges Bizet to the very end. When any doubters let their doubts be known, these two wouldn't hear it.

The opera didn't flop right out of the gates, just exactly. On the night of the premiere, act one was a rousing success. Georges was backstage feeling good. But as the second, third, and fourth acts progressed, people steadily walked out. Again, Opera Comique was the Disney of its day. Parents brought their kids to it. Young couples came to celebrate their engagements. An opera like Carmen was the worst kind of opera for this venue. In fact, now that I know what I know about Comique, I'm amazed Georges would allow his piece to be played there. Didn't he have any other choices? Seriously, even if it meant an opera house in another country? At any rate, those who were still in their seats by the time the last curtain fell were dazed and confused.

Poor Georges. The theater tradition of his hometown was antithetical to everything he stood for culturally and socially. He was a positivist. He went for realism at a time when Romanticism was in theatrical vogue. One of the things that rubbed his cast the wrong way was how he made his choristers individuals. He didn't use his chorus in the traditional wedge format whereby the entire body of choristers move around the stage en masse. Georges was the verite storyteller of his day. He did dabble in other kinds of operas, though, such as grand opera. Ivan IV is perhaps the most popular example of that. And he did opera buffa (light or comic opera), such as Don Procopio.

And he sure had his fans. Some Russian composer named Tchaikovsky came to Paris to see Carmen. At first, he remained mum on his opinion, maybe because he figured he'd be drowned out by the critics going to town on it. Many years later, though, he wrote a review that was very positive. Nietzsche was a fan too. It is kind of difficult to imagine this opera getting even mixed reviews, let alone negative ones. To this day Carmen is hands-down the most widely performed French opera on Earth. It's one of the five most popular operas in any language.

Amazing, really. Here people were. It's almost 1900 already. By our standards, people were still relatively prudish. And in France of all places, a country that views us Yanks as being too loyal to our Puritan heritage.

Simon concluded by saying flat out that Georges Bizet's death is the greatest tragedy opera has ever suffered. Mozart was also in his mid thirties when he died, but he'd already churned out a lifetime's worth of stuff. Not so Georges. While it's hard to see what more Mozart could have possibly done, it's not hard at all to imagine what Georges could have accomplished had he lived to brush off Carmen's bad reviews. It boggles the mind, really. Simon's right. What a tragedy.

Like I said, Simon was the second of two speakers, so his remark about Georges's death being the opera world's greatest tragedy was how this morning ended, and what an exclamation point that was. Now let's back up to the first lecture, on Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Delivering this lecture was an American named Mitchell Morris. Mitchell is a musicology professor at UCLA. What stands him apart is that he doesn't just study human singing. Dude does whale songs too. There was some interest in that amongst the crowd this morning. I mean really, how often do you get to hear someone talk about the art of whale singing? Alas, he had to defer that bit of esoterica to another time.

It's just as well. Like any Mozart opera, The Magic Flute provides plenty of fodder to fill up a lecture. Or a whole book. Remember how I said above that if you see only one opera in your life, Carmen, Aida, or La Boheme are a safe bet? Well, if you've got time to squeeze in a second one, The Magic Flute's a sure thing. Premiering in a suburban Vienna theater on September 30, 1791, this was Mozart's final opera. Strangely enough, he died about three months later, just as Georges did three months after Carmen. Actually not even three months. He died December 5. Unlike Georges, though, Mozart's ill health wasn't precipitated by negative reviews. In fact, then as now, Mozart was pretty much critic proof. Nah, Mozart's health was bad already. No one really knows how he died. He did have poor living and working habits, which obviously had to contribute somewhat. But a person dying at thirty-five in the pre-antibiotics age wasn't all that unheard of, sad to say.

Mitchell admitted to having mixed feelings about The Magic Flute, and mainly that's because of its narrative incoherence. Like me, Mitchell doesn't attend opera exclusively for the music, as some people do, not looking at the supertitles and just basking in the sound. That's fine and all, but I want to know what's happening on stage. So does Mitchell, and what's happening on stage with this opera is all over the place.

First of all, you've got a main character who's a prince from Java. Tamino's his name. But when it starts, he's in Egypt. Some of the characters he interacts with are Egyptian priests and so on. And the villain is a woman known only as the Queen of the Night. Well, what's her deal? Where's she from? And how in tarnation did Tamino get "lost" in Egypt? Why did he leave Java in the first place, and what was his intended destination? See what I mean? When it starts, Tamino, a Javanese prince, is lost in Egypt. Ooooooookayyyyyyyy. 'Course, what you need to know going in is that Mozart had always intended it to be a fantasy. The libretto for the opera (a libretto is to an opera what a screenplay is to a movie) was written by his good friend Emanuel Schikaneder, a writer, singer, and actor who played the bird man Papageno in the premiere. So Mozart knew from the get-go that his new opera would start out with a giant snake in scene one, that one of the characters was a man-bird hybrid, and so on. When you've established it's a fantasy, man, all bets are off.

Mitchell went even further with why he wasn't comfortable with The Magic Flute as an opera. It's a more fundamental issue: Technically speaking, The Magic Flute isn't an opera. It's a Singspiel, the German equivalent of a musical at that time. While already hot in Europe in the 18th century, musicals didn't really take off in the U.S. of A. until Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway in the spring of '43.

To help put Mozart's time in context, Mitchell pointed out that the way we experience an opera today is vastly different from how people experienced Singspiels. Today when we see an opera, or a play or musical, we sit silently in a darkened auditorium with our attention one hundred percent on the performance. That's a good one-eighty from how Germans and Austrians took in Singspiels in the beforetimes. Going to a Singspiel wasn't just about the performance, it was a social event where the performance was just one of many things going on. The lights didn't go down, for one. People in the so-called audience would sit around and chat, gossip, have dinner, play cards, throw down some beers. Seriously. No dimmed lights. No reverent hush. Quite the contrary. Mitchell said the closest we come to that today are rock concerts. It wasn't like that everywhere, though. You'd have recent college graduates from Great Britain going on their Grand Tour. The itinerary would invariably include one or more of the German-speaking states and, while there, they'd take in a Singspiel. Not knowing what to expect, they'd be just as dumbfounded by the experience as any of us today would probably be.

So I guess Mitchell's point in going into all that detail is that, at that time, plot wasn't the point. People weren't there to analyze the friggin' thing. They were there to eat, drink, and be merry. So what if the protagonist was a Javanese prince who gets lost in Egypt? Now that I think about it, that's a pretty cool setup. Nah, the point of the Singspiel was simply to put on a good show with good music and lots of spectacle.

Speaking of music, Mitchell pointed out that it's not only the plot that's incoherent. So's the music. The Magic Flute represents the meshing together of myriad musical styles. First off, you've got the strophic music. Yeah, I didn't know what strophic meant either. According to Dictionary.com, a strophic song is a song that has the exact same music in each successive stanza. In other words, it's very simple. Strophic songs are those songs anyone could sing. Funny how they'd pick such a fancy-sounding label for such a simple musical style. Anyway, in The Magic Flute the strophic stuff represents the lowest class of people, epitomized by that bird guy I was talking about, Papageno.

The second style of music you've got here is the sentimental stuff, corresponding with the bourgeoisie. It's our main character, Prince Tamino, who represents the middle class. We're talking achingly slow and gorgeous melodies and arching notes that are chockfull of emotion. To cite an example, Mitchell played us an excerpt of the first song Prince Tamino sings in the opera. Let me set up the scene for you. When the curtain comes up, the lost Prince Tamino is being attacked by this giant twelve-foot snake that flies through the air. It's not quite big enough to be a dragon, but Tamino isn't really worrying about that detail. He conks out from utter dread. Just as the snake's about to gobble him up, these three hotties working for the Queen of the Night show up and kill the snake. After they go away, Papageno shows up and tells the just wakened Tamino that he killed the snake. Yeah, right. Anyone can see that Papageno's a little scardy cat. The three hotties come back and put a padlock on dude's mouth as punishment for lying. Then they turn their batting eyelashes on Tamino and show him a picture of the Queen of the Night's daughter, Pamina. They need him to go rescue her from the evil Egyptian priests. So anyway, it's at that moment when he looks at Pamina's pic that Tamino falls in love with her. He sings a song called "Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön" (This image is enchantingly beautiful).

That's what Mitchell played an excerpt of to give an example of the middle class music. He pointed out--and I'm glad he did or I wouldn't've thought of it--that people at that time, for the most part, didn't get married strictly for love. Oftentimes love had nothing to do with it. It was usually a property arrangement. Read anything by Jane Austen and you'll know exactly what he means. It was only forty years before The Magic Flute, circa 1750, that the Romantic era kicked into high gear in Europe (it didn't really catch on in the States until the early 1800s). This is when you started having poems and plays that were gushing and overflowing with emotions.

It's important to know this when listening to Tamino's song. Looking at Pamina's picture, he's experiencing an emotion he's never felt before: Love. By the time The Magic Flute came out, the idea of love having anything to do with relationships had become a very bourgeois thing. And Mitchell wanted us to know he meant bourgeois in a good way, not in the pejorative sense with which it's often used nowadays. At any rate, marrying for love hadn't quite taken over by 1790. Mozart's a good example of that. The "only" reason he wanted to marry Constanza was because he loved her. His dad Leopold was accordingly furious. Marrying Stanzie would affect no financial gain at all, so why bother? Apparently Leopold begrudged Stanzie this fact. They never got along.

The third type of music Mitchell discussed was the stuff representing the upper class, personified by the Queen of the Night. This style, in itself, is a hybrid of various styles. When we first see her, in the very beginning of the piece, she seems like a sympathetic character. We're supposed to believe she's on Tamino's side. She sings a beautiful aria called "O zittre nicht, mein lieber Sohn" (Oh, tremble not, my beloved son). This song spans the style spectrum, from baroque to opera seria to sentimental, back to seria, and ending on sentimental. Opera seria, by the way, means "serious" music. It's the opposite of opera buffa, which I mentioned above when talking about Georges Bizet. Mitchell played an excerpt of this song to represent the upper class music. In the premiere, by the way, the Queen was played by Mozart's sister-in-law.

The fourth and final musical style came from Mozart's Masonic background. This is the stuff sung by the head priest Sarastro, and the other priests. We're talking a lot of deep-chested stuff, basses and tenors. These songs represent brotherhood. As an example you've got "In diesen heil'gen Hallen" (Within these sacred halls), which Sarastro sings in the third scene of the second act.

After playing four songs to represent the four styles, Mitchell decided to play one more excerpt just for good measure. And his choice, which made me smile, was the second--and only other--aria sung by the Queen of the Night. As with the Sarastro piece I mentioned above, it comes in the third scene of the second act. By the time we get to the second act, we know that it's the Queen, and not Sarastro, who's the villain. This aria may be my most favorite in any opera. It is also, by the way, perhaps the most challenging piece in the operatic repertoire for sopranos. It's called "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen" (Hell's vengeance boileth in mine heart). Seriously, one of the best songs ever in any opera. And one of the hardest. If you see a performance, and the soprano pulls it off without a hitch, then you know you're watching a singer at the pinnacle of her game. Mitchell said this song's a great example of why Mozart could be called a Romantic composer, and that the term "classical" would apply more to Beethoven. At any rate, do yourself a favor and find this piece online somewhere. You'll be glad you did.

At the Movies with Governor Tom: Synecdoche, New York

I should admit off the bat that I have mixed feelings about Synecdoche, New York, which I caught tonight at the ArcLight Hollywood. But I'm going to go ahead and write a post about it because at least I was rewarded afterward with an in-person appearance by Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter extraordinaire behind Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He was Oscar-nominated for Malkovich and Adaptation and finally scored a trophy for Eternal Sunshine. I wasn't too crazy about Human Nature, but I love all the other stuff he wrote. So when I saw he was conducting a Q&A following tonight's screening, I couldn't pass up the opportunity. I'd actually seen him at the ArcLight before. Back in 2004, around the time Eternal Sunshine came out, he did a three-night Q&A at the Arclight for Eternal Sunshine, Malkovich, and Adaptation. The Eternal Sunshine screening sold out before I could get to it, but I did make it to the other two. What I remember taking away was that Charlie didn't want to be there at all. He never got loud or hostile. He's a shy guy, very soft spoken, but irritability is impossible to hide. Tonight, I'm pleased to say, he was much more affable and engaging with the audience. Now if only the movie were better. Oh, and by the way, Charlie also directed it. This was his debut behind the camera.

Let me give the rundown on the story as best I can. I won't give away too much, but I don't think I could if I wanted to. This isn't the easiest flick to wrap your brain around. Now sometimes that can be a good thing. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a puzzle, especially toward the end, but it's undoubtedly a masterpiece. Not so here. Synecdoche, New York becomes too puzzling for its own good. It sort of strains to be a masterpiece....and then folds in on itself like a soggy pretzel. Really, if it weren't for the terrific cast, I don't think I would've enjoyed this at all.

Okay here's the scoop. The always-awesome Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theater director in the New York suburb of Schenectady. When the film starts, he's putting on a production of Death of a Salesman. It goes over well enough that he scores a grant to write a new play for the Great White Way.

While his professional life's going okay, his personal life is a disaster zone. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is a painter who specializes in these still-lifes so tiny that people viewing her exhibitions have to wear these little magnifying glasses. Just as her career takes off, she up and leaves Caden for Berlin, taking their daughter Olive with her. Over the course of the film we see the occasional art magazine cover with Adele on it. Her European career thrives. At one point, twenty years or so later, Caden pays a visit to Berlin to find that Olive is a tattoo-covered stripper who only speaks German. They may as well be strangers, having lived worlds apart for so long. It's actually one of the more affecting parts of the film.

Meanwhile Caden's health slowly deteriorates via one mysterious malady after another. From the very first time we see him, when he's young and still with Adele and Olive, these weird symptoms start manifesting themselves, like lime-green shit or what have you. Seriously, lime-green shit.

Caden uses the grant to put on a full-blown monster-sized production of...well...let's see. It's basically a play involving a cast of literally thousands inside this ginormous warehouse where Caden does his darnedest to build a life-sized replica of Manhattan. He doles out instructions to the cast with little Post-Its. "You just found out your wife's cheating." "You just found out you have cancer. Should you tell your family?" He even casts someone to play himself. And it's not just anyone. It's this guy Sammy (Tom Noonan) who's been stalking Caden for years. During auditions when Caden's trying to find someone to play himself, Sammy comes in and says something like, "If you want to see how you really are, cast me."

The production stretches on for decades and only gets bigger. Time is very fluid in the film, so it's tough to say exactly how much time we're covering here. But Caden's a pretty old fart at the end, so I'd guess he works on this opus for close to half a century. During this time he continues having one complication after the next with the various women in his life. He marries an actress named Claire (Michelle Williams), and they eventually have a daughter. But he also rekindles a fling with his former box office assistant Hazel (Samantha Morton). The weird thing about Hazel is that her house is always on fire. There's only two or three scenes there throughout the picture, one toward the beginning, when Caden's still married to Adele and Hazel has just bought the place. It has these little fires in the wall 'n shit. Pretty weird. And then decades later, when they're in their golden years and are sort of reviving their feelings for each other, Caden goes back to her place. Sure enough, these same little fires are smoldering all over the place.

A few other terrific actresses show up. During his trip to Germany, Caden meets a friend of Adele and Olive's named Maria, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Back in New York, the actress he casts to play Hazel is played by Emily Watson of all people, looking particularly fetching. She actually accompanies Caden to his father's funeral, another one of those affecting scenes that stands out because of its humanity in an otherwise tough-to-relate-to story. Hope Davis plays his shrink. The great Dianne Wiest shows up in the second half of the film as another actress in the production. She and Caden form this touching little bond that keeps him going in an otherwise bleak life.

And he gets older. Time jumps ahead really fast in this film. The only indication you have is how much makeup Philip Seymour is wearing in this scene compared to the last scene. And of course his health sinks into the shitter (pardon the pun). The production gets pretty meta. You have Sammy playing Caden in the production. And then there's a scene where Sammy is casting "actors" to play "himself" in a life-sized production about New York. And then those actors cast actors to put on a production. The freakin' thing becomes an onion.

The title, by the way, is sort of a play on words. It sounds like you're saying Schenectady, New York. But the word synecdoche, as I only found out a few days ago, means a part that is representative of a whole. Ostensibly that would refer to the production Caden puts on. But the film itself, how it jumps through time to afford us glimpses of Caden at various stages of his life, could be a synecdoche not only of Caden's life, but of life in general. I think. That is, if you buy into Charlie Kaufman's mercilessly bleak point of view. Me? I tend to be an optimist, yet one more reason why this flick rubs me the wrong way.

The Q&A was moderated by this chap called Whipp, Glenn Whipp, film critic for the Daily News. The first thing he asked Charlie was how in Christ he came up with this story. That's when Charlie, who looks young at fifty, told us about how Sony Pictures mogul Amy Pascale tried to get him and Spike Jonze to work together on a horror flick. Charlie was game, but Spike was busy directing one music video after the next before signing on to adapt Where the Wild Things Are. Apparently that's been delayed quite a bit due to some pretty terrible test screenings. Anyway, Charlie stuck with Sony and eventually got them to let him direct the proposed horror picture. He never did say what the plot of that horror film was supposed to be, only that it eventually mutated into the Russian doll we got to see tonight. Of course, from a certain point of view, Synecdoche, New York is a horror film. As Charlie said tonight, aging and mortality and living alone and lying sick in a hospital are pretty freakin' scary.

As someone with all that added responsibility, Charlie's schedule during the 45-day shoot was fairly rigorous, but he also said that since he has insomnia anyway, trying to catch enough Zs was never really an issue. He only averages about four hours of interrupted sleep per night, so directing a feature film, by all accounts a brutal and thankless job, would seem to suit him just fine. What made making this film a bit extra hairy was that it had upwards of two hundred scenes, far and above the average. Back during film school I took this one class where they made us pick any film we wanted to do a scene-by-scene breakdown. You know, we'd watch a scene, pause it, and then write a brief description of it, numbering the scenes as we went along. I did the original Star Wars. I'm sorry, I mean Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope. Anyway, it clocked in at something like seventy or eighty scenes. And just about everyone else had a scene count in the sixty to eighty range. Recently I did a similar scene breakdown for both Dave and The American President as part of research into a Presidential comedy of my own, and both of those films were somewhere in the sixties. Synecdoche, New York, meanwhile? Two hundred. That might be yet one more reason why audiences probably won't warm to it. It's not like anyone besides a film geek would think about the number of scenes. Still, like bad editing, audiences might detect it on a subconscious level. Props to Charlie, though, right? Dude was able to film four scenes per day on average. That's extremely fast.

That's why, in response to someone asking if the film was as weird to make as it was to watch, Charlie said it wasn't weird at all. Because of the practical demands of the schedule, the film production was very grounded in reality. He'd show up and put in a good eighteen hours a day, every day, and was very down to earth with his cast. I believe it because he was very down to earth during the Q&A. His normalcy is noteworthy because of how unique his films are. Maybe he channels all of his eccentricity into his art or something so that he himself can stay normal. He did add that while the first ten hours of the day usually went well, during the next eight hours he'd have to go give the producers a what-for now and again for trying to make him change something. Anyway, one touching little tidbit he shared with us was that his dad lived with him during the production. Charlie's fifty, so I can only imagine that his dad's pretty up there in years. Apparently he was in the audience tonight, but Charlie spared him the spotlight so I'm not sure where he was sitting. Anyway, during the production he moved in with his boy and provided moral support. Dad said that even if the production didn't pan out, it wouldn't negate the huge accomplishment of writing it and at least trying to mount it.

The main thing Charlie wanted to get at with this film was the fluidity of time, which is pretty apparent when you watch this thing, and how it leaps ahead years from scene to scene. Charlie says it amazes him how ten years can go by in a blink. You can remember something that happened ten years ago as if it were yesterday, but you have a tough time trying to remember all the stuff that happened in the intervening years. The person you are at age fifty isn't so different from the person you were at twenty.

Both he and Philip Seymour Hoffman had an interesting temporal experience on the film that may reflect how caught up in the story they got. It took Catherine Keener the first two weeks of shooting to do all of her scenes. And then that was a wrap for her. Even though the film only had one more month to shoot, it seemed a lot longer. A couple weeks after Catherine left, during which time they'd filmed over fifty more scenes, it felt to Charlie and Philip that she hadn't been gone for two weeks but two years. Philip told Charlie that it really did feel like entire gobs of his life were whizzing by at light speed. Man, if two weeks seemed so long to them, can you imagine how much of an eternity the entire six-week shoot must have seemed like? By the way, when you watch this thing, it's impossible not to notice the sheer number of clocks and watches. Seriously, in almost every scene there's a clock visible somewhere.

It was inevitable that someone would ask Charlie about Samantha Morton's perpetually burning house. But he wouldn't give it up! Obviously it's a metaphor for something, but for what? He did have an answer but said it was only one person's opinion. At screenings for this thing he's had people come up to him and offer their own opinion of what the burning house means. He's heard so many compelling interpretations that he's given up saying what he thinks. Whatever you the viewer take away from the burning house is no less valid. Seriously, the whole friggin' film could be looked at as a metaphor. I think if you go in prepared not to take what you see literally, you might have an easier go of it. Sort of. So what do I think of the burning house? Well, toward the end, when Samantha Morton's already very elderly, her character dies of smoke inhalation. Mind you, she'd been living in this burning house for decades, and she only just then dies of the smoke. That might help you figure out the meaning, but it hasn't helped me yet.

It's funny. A good share of Charlie's stories have plots that fold in on themselves and become sort of meta. He swears he doesn't set out to do that every time he sits down to kick off a brand new script. Another thing he doesn't think about is how commercial his story is. He just sits at his computer and goes with it. Lucky bastard. Unfortunately, though, while that may have worked when he was collaborating with talented directors, it may not work this time around. Time will tell, of course, but no matter how much he screams from the rooftops that this film is an allegory or a metaphor, it probably won't fair very well.

Speaking of which, one thing that got him all primed to direct was his collaborating with those other directors. I suppose I'm speaking of the films he wrote which were directed by either Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry. On all of those, Spike and Michel were good about involving him in the production. Once again, he's very lucky to have had those opportunities, as most screenwriters are pretty much shut out of the process once the cameras are rolling. That only happened to him once, with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. That was George Clooney's directorial debut. Once he bought that off Charlie, he took it and ran with it and didn't involve Charlie at all. Apparently a lot was made of that at the time, like there was some sort of drama between George and Charlie. When Glenn asked him about that tonight, Charlie swears that got blown out of proportion. And it probably was. It sounds like what happened on Confessions was what happens to most screenwriters once they've sold their baby. Charlie's a big believer in compromise. It's impossible to work on a production with all those egos and creative types and not have your script change in some way, shape, or form. He even went so far as to say it would be bad if the script didn't change at all during the production. Which, of course, is true. I mean shit, if that happened, it would call into question what the director's doing there if they're not exercising at least a little bit of their own creative vision.

And finally someone asked him about the directors who've inspired him. Among the names he threw out were Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, a couple of Englishmen who are among the least commercial directors you'll ever come across. Like Charlie, they've somehow managed to make films that ultimately do make money because of good critical word of mouth. Mike Leigh is one of my favorites too. I've always marveled at how he essentially "writes" his stuff through six or so months of improv with his cast. Charlie said he's also a fan of stuff by Tom Noonan, who played the actor playing Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film. Tom Noonan's primarily an actor but does write and direct his own little microbudget films now and then. In particular Charlie said he's fan of this flick Tom made about ten years ago called Wang Dang. It's about an aging washed-up director who comes to a school to impart some wisdom onto a new generation of storytellers but somehow manages to screw even that up.

Musclemen and Demon Knights

(Governor Tom's Note: This is one of many short pieces I wrote while at SC. Enjoy!)
________________

i

The violence was neat. The way the musclemen and demon knights ran around the pale landscape and fired their cannon-guns at each other in their seemingly insatiable desire for mutual assured destruction was neat.

Lawrence was playing one of his console games in the family room when Mr. Roseman, the next-door neighbor, paid a visit one cloudy and cool Saturday afternoon. He’d been out in his garden watering his little flowerbeds when Lawrence’s dad got home from the grocery store and started talking to him about something Lawrence didn’t understand. He wasn’t really paying attention when they came into the house. After getting drinks, the two came into the family room, their voices drowning out the explosions and gunfire from Lawrence’s game.

"Larry, turn off the game and talk to Mr. Roseman."

Lawrence’s mom came down, dressed in a turquoise dress. She and his dad would be leaving soon.

Lawrence stared at his console, the little cartridge protruding from the top of it. He paid attention to nothing any of them said for the first few minutes of the conversation. That was when his dad addressed him.

"Larry, tell Mr. Roseman about your science project."

Lawrence moved his eyes to Mr. Roseman without turning his head. Mr. Roseman was flashing a wide, ivory smile. "What did you do for your science project, Lare?" The smile didn’t go away. Mr. Roseman was able to speak without hurting his smile.

"He got third place out of all the fifth graders," his mom said.

"Really!"

He couldn’t help but look at the smile.

"Well, what was it, Lare?"

"Tell him about it, sweety."

"It was the planets. All of the planets in our solar system."

"He made a model of the solar system."

"Excellent!"

"A pretty impressive one too. I’ll show it to you sometime, Nat."

Mr. Roseman’s hand stroked the gray-fuzzed tip of his chin. The smile never faded. "I’d like to see it now."

"It’s still at school, right, guy?"

"Yeah."

"Let me know when you bring it home so I can show it to Mr. Roseman, okay?"

"Okay, Dad."

His mom, dad, and Mr. Roseman continued their conversation without Lawrence. While he said things to his mom and dad, Mr. Roseman never looked away and never stopped smiling, as if his face had become stone.

Lawrence noticed his mom recrossing her legs every five minutes. She scratched the side of her thigh, moving the hem up a little. She was wearing clear panty hose.

"We really should get going, Hank."

They all got up and said a few more things. Mr. Roseman left just before his parents left for the opera, but he also stayed sitting in the family room, his smile fixed on Lawrence. His hand played with the gray stubble a little more, then went down to his neck, where a few gray chest hairs played peekaboo.

"Can I see one of your video games?"

ii

"You’re being such a good boy, Larry. You’re always a good boy."

He closed his eyes and pictured the musclemen and demon knights chasing each other around the pale landscape with their cannon-guns.

iii

"Why don’t you sit down, sweety?"

His mom had changed into her T-shirt and sweats and was watching a funny show on TV. His dad was upstairs in his study with the door shut. Walking by, he’d heard a lot of clicking which meant his dad was on the Internet.

"Why?"

"Don’t you want to watch TV?"

"I am."

"Well, don’t you want to sit down?"

The audience’s laughter erupted from the TV. He looked at the screen and saw Mr. Roseman smiling at him. The gray stubble had grown significantly. The whites of his eyes had a pink tint to them.

He lay on his stomach, resting his head on his mom’s thigh. "Can’t I just lie on your lap, Mommy?" He didn’t want to tell her his bottom hurt too much to sit on. She could probably tell he was trying to hide something.

"Of course you can," she laughed, stroking his hair. "But I know in five minutes you’ll fall asleep."

The TV laughed.

He looked away. He wanted to play his pale landscape game, but he was too tired. After looking down at his mom’s knee for a few minutes while her cool fingers stroked his scalp, his eyes became heavy.

The laughter grew louder.

He opened his eyes. The smile was there, and the beard was bigger. While his mom’s hand continued massaging, he could feel the pair of thick, rough hands continue their explorations as well.

"Stop it!"

"I knew you’d fall asleep."

iv

In his bedroom he kept the door cracked open. The hallway fed his room a bar of light which divided it in half. Lying in bed on his stomach, he looked across the room at his chest where his action figures and their vehicles overflowed. Then he looked at his desk, on top of which his monitor stared back at him with an empty screen.

Wind blew through his window. The bar of light thinned. He closed his eyes. The high-pitched howls and the tapping of the branches against the siding calmed him. He could hear his mom yelling at his dad in his dad’s study down the hall. Walking by a few minutes before, he had still been able to hear clicking. His mom had obviously heard enough of it. He tried not to hear her right now and instead tried to focus on the howls and the tapping. It helped him fall asleep.

When he opened his eyes, the bar of light was shining directly on him. Lifting his head, he felt the imprint of the carpet on his cheek. His parents were louder. He stood up and stumbled half asleep to the window. The wind soothed his bare body. As he listened to the howling, he thought he could hear someone behind it, someone talking to him. He strained his ears but couldn’t make sense of it.

But the wind was very comforting. He closed his eyes again.

v

"Sweety, why are you sleeping on the floor?"

"What’s he doing?"

"He slept on the floor."

"Whatchya doin’ down there, guy?"

"Sweety?"

He opened his eyes. Armed with their cannon-guns, two of his musclemen figures were grinning at him with their square-jawed, perfectly white plastic grins. One had an eye patch and a flattop and a tatoo of a swan on his bare mountainous chest. The other was very round, bald with a long brown beard, an inverted dunce cap, his cannon-gun bigger and more advanced looking. They were pointing their cannon-guns at him. "I’m on your side!"

"What is it, sweety?"

"Come on, Lare, get off the floor."

He pushed himself off the floor and turned around to sit. His bottom didn’t hurt as much as the night before. Mr. Roseman was sitting cross-legged on his bed, wearing only a pair of jeans. He had a tatoo of a swan buried under the gray forest. His beard was full, his hair a flattop, and he was shouldering a cannon-gun of his own. Only this one wasn’t metal. It was just flesh and cartilage. He was still smiling, the smile never wavering when he spoke.

"I’m on your side, Larry."

"You want to go to the gardens with Daddy and me?"

"When?"

"As soon as you’re up and ready, guy."

"Come on, sweety. You should get dressed, okay?"

As he stood up, Mr. Roseman got off the bed and approached him, the flesh-gun dangling on his shoulder. "Can I go to the gardens, too?"

"No."

"No what, sweety?"

"Get dressed, guy. We’ll leave in a half-hour."

"What do you want for breakfast?"

"Nothing."

"You’ve got to have something."

He looked back at Flattop and Round. They’d moved since he last saw them. They were now facing the window, and it was as if they’d moved toward it a little.

vi

His parents talked most of the time at the gardens. He didn’t listen to anything they said. Every few minutes he’d look behind him to make sure Flattop and Round were still there, keeping a lookout for any of their enemy demon knights who would most likely be waiting to ambush.

He was the first to spot one, sitting high up in one of the trees. The demon knight had a gray head and chest and was about to launch his flesh-spear. "Fire!" he shouted, pointing up. Flattop and Round fired, but the demon knight got away.

"You want a hot dog?"

vii

He could lie on his back now without any serious discomfort.

"Sweet dreams."

She left the door cracked again. He traced the bar of light with his eyes until he was forced to turn over to finish its path in the opposite corner of the room near the chest. He could make out the figures pointing their cannon-guns at each other.

There was movement by the computer.

He looked over at Mr. Roseman sitting at his desk. His arms were much longer, but in the dark it was difficult to see why.

"Hi, Larry."

He got out of bed and walked over to the opposite corner near the chest. Putting his hands against the wall on the bar of light, he tried to move the light around the room so it would fall on Mr. Roseman. It took a lot of effort. His face grew hot with the strain, but he eventually managed to pull the bar over to the desk, working carefully to make it fall directly across Mr. Roseman’s nose. He wanted to get it just right.

Mr. Roseman wasn’t there anymore.

"I don’t like the light, Larry. Come over to the dark." The voice was behind him. Even though it was filled with anxiety, he could tell Mr. Roseman was still smiling.

"I don’t like the dark. That’s why I like to leave the door open. I need to get the light on you."

"But I don’t like the light. Why do you want the light on me?"

"Maybe you’ll go away."

There was movement on the bed. "I don’t want to go away."

He sat down at his computer and turned it on. The bar of light was dividing him now. The hard drive humming to life drowned out Mr. Roseman’s pleas. "I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!" The screen lit up. He wanted to play solitaire.

The hard drive quieted after booting up.

"Get away from that computer."

"Leave if you don’t like it."

"Where’s your solar system?"

"Leave."

"No."

He clicked a few times to open the game.

"Play a game with me. Try to get the light on me and I’ll leave. Think you can do it?"

He hopped off the chair and grabbed the bar of light. It was easy now. It didn’t take long before he had it over by his bed. The faces of the musclemen on his sheets laughed at him because Mr. Roseman wasn’t there. He was back at the computer. One muscleman in particular, whose face was half-fire, laughed the loudest.

"You’re losing, Larry."

He dragged the bar of light back to the computer.

"You’re still losing."

The cards were dealt. He decided to stay there with the light.

"What’s the matter?"

"I don’t want to play anymore."

"Can I talk to these guys on your bed?"

viii

The throw-up chunks had an orange-red tint to them. The bubbly acid was a thick yellow. He watched the chunks spiral to the bottom, holding one hand to his sore stomach. He threw up two more times, and then he couldn’t see the water anymore.

He flushed.

Spit strings dangled from his lower lip. He tried looking down at them to see how far they stretched. It hurt his eyes too much. He stood up and stared at himself in the mirror. The strings broke and fell to his feet.

For some reason his bottom was sore again.

ix

"Sweety, are you okay?"

"What happened?"

"You fell asleep in the bathroom."

"I threw up."

"What happened?"

"He’s sick."

"Can I stay home?"

"I’ll call the school."

"You should get back into bed, sweety."

His musclemen figures were grouped in front of his chest, each armed with a cannon-gun and ready to charge.

His mom helped him get into bed. He didn’t want to lie on his stomach because it was still sore and felt like it could rebel again at any time. But the pain in his bottom continued to flare, so he tried lying on his side. It wasn’t the most comfortable position since one of his arms was being crushed, but it was easier this way to avoid lying on top of Fireface.

"Why don’t you lie on your back, sweety?"

"I like this better."

"Does your stomach still hurt?"

"Yes."

"You’ve probably got a bug or something. Just take it easy today and hopefully you’ll be better tomorrow. You want Mommy or Daddy to stay home with you?"

"That’s okay. I’ll just sleep a lot."

"All right. But if you need anything, call. Okay? Our work numbers are in the kitchen."

x

He was controlling Fireface during the game so Fireface wouldn’t get mad at him because of a poor performance. He had almost killed all of the demon knights for this particular level when there was a knock on the door.

"Hi, Larry."

Mr. Roseman looked like one of the demon knights: His entire body was covered with black armor. Centipedes and spiders and scorpions made their homes inside the suit, but occasionally one would scurry out of one crack and disappear into another. And now he could see why his arms were so long. Mr. Roseman’s arms had become a pair of flesh-spears. Covered with barbed armor, they would be even more powerful.

"I didn’t see you leave this morning. Are you okay?"

"You’re infested."

"What?"

"I’m sick."

"Oh I’m sorry to hear that, buddy. Are you getting any better?" He stepped in.

"Sort of." A worm slithered through the bars protecting Mr. Roseman’s eyes and fell to the ground.

"What’s wrong? You’re looking at me funny."

"My mom and dad aren’t here right now."

"I just wanted to see if you were okay. We’re friends, right? I worry about you." He shut the door. "What were you doing?"

"Killing your friends."

Mr. Roseman laughed. "My friends?"

"The demon knights. Your friends."

"Is that one of your games? Ohhhh. Does that mean you have to kill me too?" he chuckled.

xi

He could picture the musclemen in his room running across the carpet at full charge. Fireface was the most eager, leading them.

xii

"Oh my God! What happened! Jesus Christ! What happened! What happened! What happened!"

"What did he do?"

"I don’t know! I don’t know what happened!"

"Call the police!"

"Oh Jesus!"

"Call the police, God damn it!"

His stomach had calmed, and the soreness in his bottom had cooled.

xiii

"Would you like some ice cream?"

"Okay."

The nurse left. The white hurt his eyes. Everything was white, the padded walls, the bed, the clothes on the nurses and doctors, the TV, even the bars on the windows. By getting rid of the nurse, that would be one less white object to look at.

It didn’t have to be this bright, though. He could think about the musclemen doing battle with the demon knights. The wall opposite the bed could be the large screen. It was already pale, so he didn’t have to think too hard about the wintry landscape. He just had to imagine the men and their vehicles and cannon-guns, and how they would scour the terrain in relentless pursuit of the demon knights, who would fight back hard with their own cannon-guns and spears.

He was smiling now.

The violence was neat. The way the musclemen and demon knights ran around the pale landscape and fired their cannon-guns at each other in their seemingly insatiable desire of mutual assured destruction was neat.

On a Hillside in Eger

(Governor Tom's Note: This is one of the poems I wrote for a four-week poetry workshop in Prague in May and June of 1999. It was part of the masters of creative writing program at USC, from which I graduated that December. After the third week of classes, a classmate and I took a weekend jaunt to Hungary. We spent Friday and Saturday in Budapest. On Sunday [June 13] we took a two-hour train ride eastward to a small town called Eger. On the west end of town is a small valley called the Valley of the Beautiful Women. Built into the hillsides along both sides of the valley are wine cellars, about two dozen in all. As luck would have it, Sunday is the day when they have free wine tastings. So my classmate and I sampled some of the wares. Feeling awesome in no time, we bought a jug of the juice at one of the cellars before traipsing up the hillside and parking ourselves in the grass to get totally wasted. What I could remember of the occasion inspired me to compose the below ditty, which I included in my final poetry collection for the class the following week.)
________________

I'm sitting on a hillside in Eger,
Listening to the breeze hum softly and sway the stems
Of the towering grass against my stubbled cheeks.

The setting sun turns the clouds
Into pink-lined quilts that I long
To rest on.

The cup of Chardonnay in my hand
Reminds me of apple juice,
One of the addictions of my youth.
When I sip it, I let the liquid linger
On my tongue, blooming its buds with excitement.

I fight my mind's slackness
So I can focus on the chess game.
On the other side of the board,
My friend slouches on her elbow,
Also losing her concentration occasionally
To the chorus of bugs, the buzzing of birds, and the creaking
Of the bent tree against the push of the wind.

Without warning, we laugh.
At first, we don't know why,
But then we realize it was the tickle
Of the amber horizon against the calm sea
Water of our eyes.

Jellwagger - Episode 10: Attack of the Killer Chesticles

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