The Disappointment Artist (15 page)

Speaking of which, here’s Eddie the, er, Native American, in
A Woman
Under the Influence
, who has every bone in his body broken by the immigrant Italian guy. And, in the same movie, George Mortenson, Mabel’s father, declines an offer of dinner with irrational fury: “I’m just
not
a spaghetti man!” Am I wrong to hear in the scene an undertone of Wasp revulsion (Spaghetti/Longhetti), as though what Mortenson really wants to say is
if my blond daughter hadn’t married a Wop maybe she wouldn’t be
so fucking crazy
? What’s more, Seymour Moskowitz, the unworthy suitor of the Waspy Minnie Moore in
Minnie and Moskowitz
, is Jewish. Cassavetes’s shifty racial allegories are everywhere, when we begin to look.

But the deepest binary is, of course, men and women. In both
Husbands
and
Faces
Cassavetes invented his unique language of behavior in part by matching professional male actors with unprofessional females, in order to emphasize the uncertainty and “naturalness” of the women in contrast to the confident, slick, and rehearsed styles of the men. In
Shadows
, in a similar gambit, Anthony Ray was shown pages of dialogue weeks in advance, while Leila Goldoni was only handed them on the morning of the shoot. So: Are women more “natural” than men? Or is it just that imbalances in our society dictate the appearance of that difference? Again, we have to agree that Cassavetes was either making a deep interrogation into his material, or not. But he’s not innocent.

This is the cause, then, of my fascination with the parts Cassavetes played himself: the questions he never fully answered beat like a pulse in the male characters most easily taken for his stand-ins. I’m thinking of the chance that the purloined letter of Cassavetes’s lifework is his own terror of boredom and superficiality, right there at the locus of so much vitality and inspiration, at the center of so much “being around him was like being in a Cassavetes movie” malarkey. I’m not accusing his beloved friends and collaborators of being sycophantic, only suggesting that he was, at the end of the day, both The Director and an enormously charming and manipulative guy, the kind who caused others to feel lucky to have been manipulated.

In other words, the only actor in a Cassavetes film who doesn’t have the privilege of being directed by, disarmed and charmed and embarrassed and transmuted by the direction of John Cassavetes, of being
called on his shit
by John Cassavetes, is John Cassavetes. His character’s goodbye wave at the end of
Love Streams
has been seen as a dying man’s farewell to his audience, but that character’s isolation in the final shot strikes me as more than a little like Humphrey Bogart’s at the end of
In a Lonely Place
(one of the most Cassavetean films in the classical Hollywood cinema): barred in a prison of his own personality, watching a last chance at life walk out the door. Maybe Cassavetes cast himself as a man of ingenious and tragic masks because he felt like he was getting away with something.

I’m thinking of the not-entirely-minor character in my life of the woman who took me to my first Cassavetes movie. I was about to turn thirty, and my first novel was about to be published. I liked to think of myself as having already completed my basic education in film, and, as a writer much influenced by film, as having long since assembled my array of primary influences. (I still like to think of myself that way. I was so much older then, I’m older than that now.) She was only in her early twenties, but she knew to drag me to see
Faces
, at the Red Vic, on Haight Street in San Francisco. She’d already seen it, and was wordless with excitement. I wanted an explanation in advance, having heard that the Cassavetes films were
nothing more than a series of actor’s exercises
, but she refused to offer one.

It knocked me out, of course. I left the movie theater wrestling with what seemed then to me to be an overwhelming insight, though from this vantage it appears to be not much more than the first level of resistance peeling away from what would become my consuming obsession with Cassavetes’s films: that life had been revealed to be so much more like a series of actor’s exercises than I’d ever understood before. This epiphany seemed to me profound enough that I knew I would have to change my life, or at least my art, to account for it.

It was sometime in this period that the same woman broke up with her boyfriend and, in the process, made an obscure gesture in which I became faintly implicated: she took his television and VCR hostage and hid them in my apartment. I remember using them to watch Preston Sturges’s
Unfaithfully Yours
(another Cassavetean film, come to think of it). Presently the woman and her ex-boyfriend reached an accord, on terms unknown to me, and she collected the television and VCR and returned them to him.

I’m thinking of one last story concerning this woman. When, a few months later, my first novel was published, she wanted me to know how excited she was for me. So she told me a story: she’d seen my novel for sale in a bookstore, also on Haight Street, one of the few places that was carrying the book. I asked if she’d read it. No, she explained. In her excitement for me she’d attempted to shoplift it—had gotten it into her purse, and gotten herself halfway out the door—and then been caught, reprimanded, and let go. Now she was ashamed to go back to the bookstore. She left it at that, but she knew—and I knew she knew I knew—it was the most flattering story she could tell me.

The Beards

(a coda)

The Heavenly Music Corporation (1980–82, mom dead)

No Pussyfooting
is an album by the guitar player Robert Fripp and the keyboard player Brian Eno. The album consists of two songs, or compositions: there are no voices on the record, no lyrics. Unlike other recordings by Fripp or Eno, alone or as members of groups,
No Pussyfooting
doesn’t consist of studio overdubs, of layers of sound. Though the music provides a richness, a sense of intricacy, the two cuts appear to be long improvisations between the players, conducted in real time, within simple parameters. Side one consists of achingly long tones, swells of sound that rise and fade. In vocal terms, the instruments groan or wail. They keen. On side two, the tones are frantic with ripples, oscillations. In vocal terms, the instruments ululate. Or orgasm.

Side one is called “The Heavenly Music Corporation.” Side two, “Swastika Girls.”

I bought
No Pussyfooting
in 1979 or 1980, at the record store on the eighth floor of Abraham and Straus, a palatial department store on Fulton Street, a few blocks from where I lived. My friend Jeremy and I had been going there regularly to browse the long sections of Frank Zappa and Kinks records, and to dare ourselves to spend money on some of the mysterious products we couldn’t have investigated otherwise. I was curious about Brian Eno because he was the producer of the newest Talking Heads record. I imagine I selected the two Eno records I bought—
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
and
No Pussyfooting
—on the strength of their jacket art, which was alluringly dark and strange, and which had a resemblance to “gallery” art, as did the jackets of Talking Heads albums.

I also liked Eno’s name. It sounded vaguely alien, bliplike, like those of some of the writers I’d begun to idolize, partly for the distance from the prosaic seemingly encoded in their surnames: Lem, Kafka, Poe, Borges.

When I got those records home,
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
turned out to be a sequence of songs in conventional rock format, three to six minutes long, mostly with guitars and drums underlying creepy, synthesized sound effects and ominous, gnomic lyrics. Perfect, in other words.
No Pussyfooting
was this other thing: a pair of fuzzy electronic suites, which absolutely refused to beguile. I should have filed it in my collection and forgotten it, gravely disappointed, as I’d imagine most of its teenage buyers were. Instead, I decided I loved “The Heavenly Music Corporation,” and hated “Swastika Girls.” The first was, as its name suggested, deeply soothing, the long tones invoking surrender and contemplation. The other was compulsive, boiling, and its name offered a couple of reasons I ought to be intimidated by it.

I had a room to myself, on the top floor of our house. My bed was on a loft, built above a hivelike construction of desktops and storage spaces. Directly below where I placed my pillow was a wooden compartment which neatly held my amplifier and turntable. I had a set of headphones—absurdly heavy, ear-clamping muffs, connected to the stereo by a mushy, coiled, rubber-coated cord, twice as thick as a telephone’s.

Late at night, when I was done reading, and had shut off my light, I’d wear the headphones and listen to the twenty-one minutes of “The Heavenly Music Corporation,” or as much as I could before it lulled me to sleep. I memorized each aching swell of guitar and synth, anticipating the moment when the synthesizer’s repeated plunge toward a certain note suddenly seems to persuade the guitar to follow, so that the second half of the piece becomes a long finishing, an ebbing away.

Some nights, whatever teenage anxiety or fear thrilled my body kept me awake through the whole piece. In that case I’d lean over the edge of my bed, still wearing the headphones, and place the needle at the start of the track again. I’d mastered an art of nudging the monstrous phones off my head as I launched into deeper stages of sleep, so I’d wake to find them crammed into the margin between my mattress and the wall, yet never recalled dislodging them.

“The Heavenly Music Corporation” was a secret friend who flattered my wishes both to vibrate to the universe’s pulse in some post-human sense, through the exclusion of banal seductions of language or melody, and to align with esoteric art, made by freaks from a pop-art future, beyond the ken of my teachers or family. Truthfully, I was using it as a white-noise generator, like the one I recently learned a jittery friend employs to put himself to sleep. But Fripp’s long guitar solo was also a human voicing I grew to know better, probably, than its maker. His on-the-spot thinking, audible as he tested the surf of Eno’s synthesizer, was like a morality only I understood. I covered it in sleep, then bore it out into the day with me, a surrogate brainwave with which to reply to the world.

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, mom out of hospital)

My mother and her boyfriend took me to a midday showing of the Nicholas Roeg film
The Man Who Fell to Earth
at the Quad Cinema on Thirteenth Street in Manhattan.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
is a surrealist science-fiction movie full of gorgeous hallucinatory photography. It stars David Bowie as a gentle and moody alien visitor to our planet, one who, upon encountering man’s inhumanity to aliens, becomes increasingly bitter and self-loathing, until he ends up a decadent and drunken pop star. This was the bowdlerized American release, missing the blatant sex scenes which have since been restored, though David Bowie’s attempt to present his “true self” to his human lover, played by Candy Clark— shedding disguises, he reveals goatlike slit pupils, and a smooth, doll-like bump in place of his genitals—was shocking to me.

As we three stepped back out into the daylight of Manhattan I was deeply in the spell of the film. It was my first experience meeting a brand-new cultural artifact calibrated perfectly to my private symbolic vocabulary, which was already fairly well formed. I’d been reading Ray Bradbury’s
Martian Chronicles
and a handful of other classic sciencefiction stories, and
alien equals alienated
was a rebus I grasped.
Any one
of these people I see walking around me
, I remember thinking, in astonishment, as we made our way back to the subway,
could be like him.
By “like him” I meant, or thought I meant: a secret visitor from another planet. But my wonder at the film was really at the force of my identification with the figure of the misunderstood alien, and I didn’t imagine for a minute that I wasn’t an earthling. So what I really meant was: Any one of these people I see walking around me could be like
me
. Could feel like me, just as I felt like Bowie. That is to say: subjective, sad, and special.

Barry Lyndon (1975, mom undiagnosed)

My father lived in a commune. According to my parents’ arrangement, my brother and sister and I spent two days a week there. The oldest child on the premises, I systematically made friends with the adults, finding points of common interest with each of them. Libby and her family lived in the commune too. Libby was a mother of two children, and she and her husband were drifting apart. Libby and I decided we were the only two people in the world who understood the greatness of Stanley Kubrick’s rejected historical saga
Barry Lyndon
, and so we went to see it a second time, just us. Libby drove us out to Bay Ridge to find the one theater in Brooklyn still showing it, a cavernous old emporium likely soon to be sliced into a three- or four-plex.

Barry Lyndon
is an epic of merciless slowness, an account of human vanity and corruption charted in microscopic degrees. The film is lucid, unhysterical, purged of deference to the suffering of its characters. Instead, the narrative posture is of droll tolerance for human failings.
This is so great
, I remember thinking as I sat and watched it in perfect silence beside Libby. This is so great, this is so great, this is so great, this is so great.
Barry Lyndon
offers an amplitude of emptiness—as much as
2001: A Space Odyssey
, it takes as its ultimate subject, the ocean of space which surrounds each human life, and isolates each from any other. Into this space I fit the fierce certainty of my response:
This is so, so great.

Wish You Were Here (1979 or 1980, mom dead)

The party was in the apartment of a man named Louis, who wore his hair in Rastafarian-style dreadlocks, and whose shelves were full of paperback science fiction of the saga variety—Frank Herbert’s
Dune
books, and Philip José Farmer’s
Riverworld
. In the middle of the living room stood a hookah, surrounded by low cushions. I’d been inhaling marijuana from one of the tubes of the hookah, a surprisingly easy thing to do quite a lot of. And I’d been feeling very much a part of this delightful party, which consisted entirely of adults, men and women in their twenties, all of whom seemed to have accepted me as a given in their circle, despite the fact that I’d never been to Louis’s apartment before, and many of the people there were strangers.

Yet I wasn’t mistaken. This mutual comfort extended from the degree to which I’d been adopted into the company of my grown-up friend Michael, who ran a used bookstore on Atlantic Avenue, a few blocks from my home. It also spoke to Michael’s charismatic influence on his friends, a clan of actors and hippies loosely centered around Michael and a couple of his best friends from Queens, where he’d grown up. I’d wandered into Michael’s shop one day, attracted not only by the used books which had already become my passion but by the oddness of a ramshackle enterprise which surely reminded me of my parents’ milieu. For, improbably, the bookstore on Atlantic was also a puppet theater, and the home office of a small, informal moving company, each in partnership with Michael’s friend Larry.

I made myself an immediate sidekick to Michael and Larry, and insisted on apprenticing myself in all three of the trades they ran from the single storefront. I painted backdrops and collected receipts at the puppet shows (I also rounded up local kids to help make an audience). I joined on small moving jobs, more than once mooring the guide rope on a block and tackle as we shifted a couch through the upstairs window of a Brooklyn apartment. And I immersed myself in Michael’s bookselling knowledge. This was the beginning of the only trade I’ve ever practiced—it was by working in used bookstores that I supported myself for twelve years after dropping out of college. Before long I opened the shop by myself, on those days when Michael didn’t feel like making the trip from his Upper East Side Manhattan apartment. I was apprenticed to Michael as a reader too, aping his interests in John Cowper Powys, Colin Wilson, and Thomas Berger, and I took home my pay from the shop in books, not cash. When we differed—Michael found Borges trite—I was ashamed. When I succeeded in seeding Michael’s interest, as I did in the case of Philip K. Dick, I exulted.

It was in the shop, then, that Michael’s friends got to taking the presence of his fifteen-year-old acolyte for granted. Nevertheless, I must have seemed a bit adrift that night, on my pillow at the hookah, grinning and smiling at the women in the room, trying to follow or perhaps insert myself into nearby conversations. I’d inhaled more pot than I ever had before, more than I realized. So Bob, another of Michael’s friends, made a small intervention.

Bob was a tall, elegant black man, an actor and a jazz musician—a trumpet player and scat singer, to be exact. My first memory of Bob was at Michael’s shop, as he burst in one day to report on his audition for a part in a jazz musical. Bob had come straight from the audition, which, according to his account to Michael and me, he’d bungled. “I went like this—” Bob said, and began to reproduce his inept scat singing for us. “I mean, all I had to do was this—” Now he scatted beautifully. “But instead I was going—” Again, he reproduced the crappy scat singing. “I could have just—” Now it was good again. Michael laughed knowingly. I might have laughed too, but I was spellbound. Bob’s ability to make me hear the difference in formal pressure behind a successful improvisation and a failed one still stands as one of the finest aesthetic lessons I’ve ever grabbed on the go. At the time, the self-reproaching magnetism of his impromptu exhibition made me think it impossible he wouldn’t get the part. How could anyone else have been as wonderful?

This night, at Louis’s party, Bob had seen something in my eyes as I sat at the hookah which made him wish if not to rescue then to divert me. He tapped me on my spaced-out shoulder and made me follow him to Louis’s bedroom. There he sat me on the edge of the bed and placed a pair of heavy headphones on my ears.

“Listen to this,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Just listen.”

Bob pressed a button on a cassette deck. The music that flooded my ears was sensual, ominous, and infinitely protracted, oceanic. The record was Pink Floyd’s
Wish You Were Here
, which begins with the band’s fourteen-minute “Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Part I–V,” a suite I’d later discover was a tribute to their former bandmate, Syd Barrett, lost to drugs and schizophrenia at the end of the sixties. The album is recorded for stereo with such pinpoint hallucinatory clarity that its effect on headphones, in my stoned condition, was to suggest I’d plunged out of a landscape of two aural dimensions into one of three, or five, or twenty. I felt able to place each of the notes in a precise place in the air before my eyes, to watch them flicker and vanish like embers.

He’d given a gift. It was as though Bob had said:
Jonathan, the time for
you to pretend you are an adult among adults is through for the night. You’re
a charming kid and we like you very much, but the strain is showing. So, quit
pretending you understand things you only half understand, and return
yourself to wonderment, to masturbation, to dreaming.
That set of songs, met for the first time on headphones and marijuana, would have reduced anyone to a childlike state. So there was no shame for me in sitting alone there, entranced, no sense of having my precious disguises robbed.