Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 14 Read online

  A: A man in a gorilla costume. Only he wasn't a man.

  Q: This happened today?

  A: On my way in from the airport. That's why I was late. Oh, Christ! Christ!

  Q: You hit somebody with your car?

  A: Shit . . . it was them. The gray men, the little men.

  Q: John?

  A: I . . . I . . .

  Q: I think we're going to have to stop for the day.

  A: They wanted me to make that noise . . . that sound.

  Q: John, we're going to stop for today.

  A: Why do they want me to make that sound?

  Q: John, I want you to take a deep breath.

  A: Get away from me. No, I won't pet your monkey. That's not a monkey.

  Q: I want you to take some deep breaths. It's me, Fred Rogers, you're here at my television house and you're taking a deep breath.

  A: What is that sound? What is it?

  * * * *

  My son never did get to see me visit Mr. Rogers, and after my nervous breakdown in his television house I continued to sink. Strangeness, horrible and undeniable, surrounded me and I just tried to push on through.

  I was a contactee, an abductee, an experiencer. After Pittsburgh I could remember it, remember them, but I didn't know what they wanted. I couldn't answer their questions or understand their sounds.

  I was an abductee, and I knew it, and the abductions just kept coming.

  "You're here,” Foxman, the concert master, said. He was folding up his music stand when I walked into the rehearsal hall, and only paused briefly when he saw me. “You're here, but I'm still leaving."

  "How late am I?” I asked.

  "You are exactly one hour and fifteen minutes late,” the third cellist told me.

  "I'm sorry,” I took my baton from the podium and then turned back towards the orchestra. “How many of you can stay a little longer?"

  About twenty hands rose in response.

  "Okay,” I said. “Let's begin."

  Foxman squinted at me. “You're wearing your jacket backwards."

  "I am?"

  "And your pants."

  "And my pants . . . backwards. Yes,” I said. “Okay, and one . . ."

  * * * *

  I kept working on my Opera, kept adding elements, and kept coming back to the same basic pattern. “Missing Time,” shifted right and left, and it was expanding, but when I looked over my notes they seemed like something written by a fourteen-year-old with autism.

  I was looking for an answer, a satisfactory response, to the challenges and questions that they were constantly thrusting on me. I was looking for some way to understand what was happening, but what I came up with was just more stuttering, more phase shifting, more bees and gorillas.

  I was writing my own libretto as well as the music, writing out the plot as well as the score:

  "There are lights in the sky and lights along the road and lights that spell out SOAP and EXIT. And we might be visited, and we might be for we are. And the EXIT is the SOAP and the visitors are on the moon. Would you like some tea for your coffee or would you like the moon? And there are lights that spell there are lights that SOAP the EXIT, and there are visitors on the moon."

  I had the telephone scene, and the barbecue scene, and the violin solo, and the spaceship would move very slowly across the stage. I had nothing, really, except yet another series of notes following the same basic formula that I would never, could never, escape. And the visitors were on the moon.

  * * * *

  Source Unknown, Time Unknown:

  Q: Who are you?

  A: You're asking me?

  Q: Do you know your other self? We are tired of waiting.

  A: What do you want?

  Q: Who are you?

  A: I am John Zuckerman.

  Q: And without words?

  A: What do you want from me?

  Q: Without words.

  A: What is that noise?

  Q: It's you. You're making the music.

  A: What is that noise?

  Q: We are through waiting. The sound is yours. It's you.

  * * * *

  Ufologists, debunkers, contactees, psychologists, bureaucrats, and faith healers have all come up with explanations for these kinds of experiences. The little gray creatures are benign visitors from the Pleadies system, they are bloodthirsty killers from Mars, they are a cultural delusion, they are angels, they are demons, they are a lie, they are God.

  "I don't care what they are,” Meredith told me. “I want them to leave us alone."

  "Have you seen them?” I ask.

  "Go check on Jacob. Will you just go and make sure Jacob is okay? You start talking like this and . . . go look in on our baby."

  We locked the doors, and then checked them again. We turned on the television, hoping that the actors and announcers selling Time-Life Books and Toyotas and Mutual of Omaha insurance would somehow stabilize the room with banality, and then we turned it off again.

  "There are people who claim that all human religions are based on contact with aliens,” I told Meredith.

  "Do you want to listen to some music? Can I turn on the radio?” Meredith asked.

  The oldies station was playing a song called “Flying Purple People Eaters."

  "Have you seen them?” I asked again.

  "Yes, I've seen them,” Meredith said. “They're gray, ugly."

  "So you understand? You don't think I'm crazy?"

  "I wish you wouldn't bring those books home with you,” Meredith said.

  "You're not answering me."

  "Those UFO books aren't good for Jacob. I had to take away a copy of Communion from him this afternoon,” Meredith said. “He was playing with it and I think it scared him. The cover . . ."

  "Meredith, I need you to help me. Something is happening and I don't know what it is,” I said. I got up to turn off the radio, but instead I spun the dial over to the public access station.

  "They're floating dots of light. They're floating dots of light. They're floating dots of light."

  Some college kid with his own radio program was playing my early music. “Frozen Light,” was on the radio.

  "Jacob was talking to the cover of your book, to the man on the cover. He called him Papa,” Meredith said. “He thought the gray monster on that book was you."

  Nothing anybody says about UFOs makes any sense to me. I don't believe in time travel, I don't believe in faster-than-light travel, I don't believe in out-of-body experiences, and I have my doubts about the collective unconscious. People say that the aliens have been here always. People say that the aliens are us, some other part of ourselves.

  They want something from me. They want me to be more than what I am. I don't know what they want. I don't know who they are.

  "They're floating dots of light. They're-re floating-ting dots-ots,” the words flowed out and mixed.

  The world was phase shifting, and my job was to try and write it all down. I was expected to sing.

  * * * *

  Conversation with Spouse, Sighting of UFO, 1/15/99:

  Q: What are we going to do?

  A: I don't know.

  Q: I can't believe this is happening.

  A: You see it too?

  Q: Are the windows locked?

  A: Let's go check. Let's go look.

  Q: I don't want to look. Are the windows locked or not?

  A: Do you hear that?

  Q: It's beautiful.

  A: Let's go look, let's go look out the window.

  Q: You're on their side aren't you?

  A: Whose side? Oh, my god. It's huge.

  Q: What is it?

  A: It looks like a toy. It's exactly what you'd think a flying saucer would look like. Oh, and there are some people looking out the portholes.

  Q: Come back. Get away from there.

  A: You should see this.

  Q: I'm going to watch a movie. Do you want to watch a movie? I rented The Big Chill.

  A: Hello the
re. Hello.

  Q: John, get away from the window.

  A: Ooohhh . . .

  Q: The light is . . .

  A: Are you all right? Do you need help? Let me help you up.

  Q: Thank you.

  A: I think it was just a fly by. Are you okay?

  Q: I have some questions.

  A: What?

  Q: I have some questions, why do you separate awake from asleep?

  A: Meredith? What's going on?

  Q: Why do you separate awake from asleep?

  A: Meredith? What's wrong with you?

  Q: Meredith is asleep.

  A: I want her to wake up.

  Q: How do you separate?

  A: I want my wife to wake up. Oh shit. What's happening now? Why did you turn out the lights?

  Q: Meredith is asleep. Why are you awake?

  A: Is that a rhetorical question?

  Q: Tell me about music. Please explain about music.

  A: What do you want to know?

  ———

  I'm not the only one who has been led like this. According to the paperbacks and internet chat rooms, most pop music has been influenced by aliens.

  John Lennon wrote a song called “Like a UFO,” and David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust is actually a warning, a way to acclimatize the populace to the alien presence.

  I can't adequately transcribe the Opera here. I'll tell you what I can, but I can't tell you what it's about because it's not really mine.

  What's more, reading the words to it doesn't convey much:

  "When the sky is falling and the sky is falling and when it is we are. And give me an F and give me a F and give me an F. When the sky is falling I have to go to work, each day, by seven o'clock A.M. in the morning. I work in Beaverton. I work when the sky is falling. Hello."

  It's a mess, incomprehensible, but I think I've finally captured that sound, the sound I've been hearing since I was five or six years old.

  The night of the premiere, when the audience opened their programs and read aloud, I heard it. The sound that was not really a sound, but a thought, some idea, came to life on the stage.

  My protagonist, a businessman who lived in Beaverton and secretly communed with UFOs, walked center stage and looked through the fourth wall.

  The audience asked him questions.

  * * * *

  Libretto, “Missing Time,” performed 4/5/99:

  A: There is no wall here. How long has it been this way? There is no wall here and I can see . . . who are you people?

  Q: We have questions.

  A: You have questions? I've been living my life thinking there was a wall where there wasn't one.

  Q: Why do you live in such a world? Why do you pretend there are walls where there aren't any?

  A: Who are you people? What do you want from me?

  Q: We came here to watch you. And now we have questions.

  A: You have questions?

  Q: Will you tell us why we came here to watch you tonight? Will you tell us why we paid good money to come and watch you pretend there are walls where there aren't any?

  A: Do you live where there aren't any walls?

  Q: We have questions.

  A: No. No more questions. Please. Just listen.

  Q: What's that sound?

  A: It's me. It's what one hears, what one says, when you break through. It's nothing.

  Q: What is that sound? Why did we pay good money to come here and listen to you not say anything? Why did we pay good money for the orchestra not to play? What is that sound?

  A: There isn't a wall here. Forget about the aliens, don't think about the way the sky is falling. What's interesting is the way there is no wall.

  Q: Do you hear that?

  A: How long has it been this way?

  Q: We have questions.

  A: Who are you people? How long have you been here? What do you want?

  Q: We have questions.

  A: I'm ready to answer.

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  The Film Column

  William Smith

  Greaser's Palace

  1972, dir: Robert Downey Sr.

  music by Jack Nitzsche (arranger for Phil Spector, and member of Crazy Horse)

  * * * *

  Greaser's Palace is a notable example of the “acid western,” an extinct ‘70s sub-genre that combined the metaphysical ambitions of top-shelf westerns, like Shane and The Searchers, with the excesses of the Spaghetti westerns and the irreverent outlook of the counter-culture.

  Written and directed by Robert Downey, Sr., the film is an absurdist take on the Gospels in which Jesus—in a Zoot suit and spats—parachutes onto the western plains and heads for “Jerusalem” to find the Agent Morris and become an “actor/singer/dancer.” This is one of several goofball epic journeys which criss-cross the film and lead us to its center, Greaser's Palace.

  Seaweedhead Greaser is the High Sheriff of the land. He has a concerned and fatherly air about him but he is armed to the teeth, and gut-shoots his subjects without pattern or reason. In a cheeky reference to Arthurian myth (and a likely parody of Richard Nixon), Greaser suffers from epic constipation and all of his subjects are obsessed with his long-awaited bowel movement. Greaser's Palace is an enormous log castle with an outhouse at the pinnacle. At promising moments, Greaser races to the peak (where he keeps a Mariachi band and his mother caged) and waits for the spirit to move him. But it never does.

  The complete Holy Trinity wanders the landscape of the film. The Father, unmistakable, with his halo of white hair and wizened eyes, watches his creation through windows and from distant mountains. The Holy Ghost, under a sheet with a cowboy hat, invisibly torments Seaweedhead's son Lamey. Driven by holy cigar burns, Lamey is prone to bizarre outbursts. Seaweedhead finds these fits undignified, so he knifes Lamey and throws him in a well. Inconveniently, Jesus keeps resurrecting him.

  When Jesus finally arrives at Greaser's Palace to spread his message, his routine falls completely flat. It's a good act and has all of the energy and schmaltz of a road-tested Vaudeville number, but he just hasn't read the crowd. So he pulls out the stigmata bit (that old groaner) and knocks ‘em dead. The Agent Morris is unimpressed. “My whole life that's the worst act I've seen. How do you do that material with a straight face?"

  Like Salvador Dali, Robert Downey realized that the ultra-vivid contrasts and infinite horizon of the desert create the perfect backdrop for surrealism. By transplanting the Christ story to the old west—and dressing it up in esoteric pop culture references—Downey creates an absurdist collage that parodies American myths and our justifications for the conquest of this country. He also illustrates that the very act of removing a religion from its land of origin to practice it elsewhere, is already a work of absurdist collage.

  The film plays out its own bizarre take on the passion and crucifixion but one of its more subtle revisions is that it reverses the Christian dogmatic of reading the Old Testament through the Gospels and instead it sees the Passion as an extension of the testing of Abraham. The trembling hand of a father holding a knife over his son, waiting for an okay from the whirlwind, was a resonant image for a generation sent off to slaughter in Vietnam. Zoot Jesus vocalizes this anxiety in his last discussion with his Father before being crucified:

  "Father, I can't do it."

  "Why?"

  "I think I found myself . . . and I really don't trust you."

  The fathers in this film demonstrate a fear that the older one gets, the more likely one is to listen to perverse voices from the whirlwind (and who older than the capital-F Father himself?). We do get a bit of intergenerational communication near the end when Lamey and Seaweedhead admit their mutual love and respect over a drink. This is exactly what Seaweedhead needs to free his tortured colon and (in a hilarious reference to Zabriske Point) the log cabin explodes with his ecstatic release. The film's final shot, of the sun disappearing into a mountain, denies this momentary resolution, though, and suggests that i
t's all cyclical and the bowels of the world are impacting again.

  Using non-sequiturs, puzzle structure, and overloaded symbolism, Downey has created a film of religious parody that produces a strong religious effect. In one of my favorite moments, a hobo stands in the desert, displaying a painting of the Last Supper. Zoot Jesus stares at the image and is completely perplexed. It's as if he's gazing into another universe where all of his signifiers have been moved around. This is similar to how the film operates on the viewer. Its elements combine to create the impression of great meaning that probably isn't there. But since absence of meaning is one of the film's main subjects, this is a perfect technique.

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  Two poems by David Blair

  Black Eyes

  The heavy gilt lacquered frames of the grannies and

  grand dames

  of Cadillac and Pontiac and El Dorado

  and the summer highways are my own white

  walled wheels and red detailing

  and baby's butt white leather interiors

  * * * *

  and have kept me from peripheral vision, kept me in little

  black eyes,

  my head in a beehive and a yellow jacket,

  my tomatoes in a brown paper bag,

  three kingly sunflowers

  spitting their teeth in the mud,

  in the sunlight which was black night to me,

  funneled me in black lenses,

  sweet country vision, sweet strangeness,

  * * * *

  where black water fills in every boat launch and black

  slip,

  black stockings, sliding off, and your underwear was

  black

  as you stood there, cupping your breasts. If you were

  black marble

  in a public square, men and women would wade the

  fountains

  to kiss down your inner thigh to instep arch,

  sweet strangeness, sweet country vision.

  * * * *

  The waterfront sent seal calls and caulked groans,

  the rubbery echoing docked boats rubbed out on the

  rubbery piers,

  the sides of docks, it wasn't right,

  the waterfront hotels and the privacy of boats

  where the drinkers of gin wore life vests, wore drowning,

  and out in flowery points of weed there were benches

  and rusted ladders out of the harbor water.