Читать книгу Hollywood to Vienna - Donald Ellis Rothenberg - Страница 24

This is not Berkeley, Wavy Gravy, and the Ashkenazi choir rehearsal in People’s Park. This is not Telegraph Avenue and the freaks and geeks and intelligentsia, business people, poets and hangers-on, street people, a few homeless, and students eating and kibbitzing at the Med. This is not Moe’s bookstore, and CD row where the hodgepodge of color and acting-out low riders, students, and assorted minorities come to have fun, play drums, bask in the sun: alive, smiling and smoking and toking and groping for another beer. How queer the rhyming becomes when the operetta is so near.

This Mickey Mouse Club special, and this Hullabaloo, this Dick Clark with the radio blaring Englishese over German-speaking peoples’ networks, this roguish show of powder puffs rattling in my brain, continues and continues. I recall the “Politics of Meaning” articles in that Jewish intellectual magazine, and the new wave of “isms” and ideologies attempting to co-opt word-speak and straighten out the “people’s united” slogans, the downtrodden and dispossessed, the politicians sleeping with the secretaries, and the chosen people proclaiming that the messianic era has come and gone and we are all still waiting.

Numbed-out, is what I think. Who is really alive, and where are they smoking and drinking and fucking and singing, and dancing in the streets? The youth are wearing new uniforms now, and the police are doing their beat to the beat. Steal This Book, Steal Your Face, we once read and heard. It was Abbie Hoffman’s book, or the Grateful Dead’s album title. The four aces are showing, the trigger-happy ones are buying and selling armaments over the counter.

Alongside the opera singers, the mental masturbators are on parade. What is it I was going to do today, besides lull away this non-working day in a sea of madness? The brain, that’s the fault. Whatever man can conceive, he, or she, can do or make. Let’s bake this planet alive. Let’s educate the little brats into thinking that their autonomous track, the life expectancy, what life owes us, is met crawling over the backs of others on this here Mother Earth.

It’s a stonewaller’s paradise, status quo and all the rest. The actors are role-playing their parts, showing us who we are. The reality and the fantasy: Which is it, man? Get up and make yourself a strong one, a coffee with milk and sugar. Let that caffeine do its thing on the morning after. Let’s see, there’s the opera, on that channel. Oh, blah dee, oh blah da, or something like that. It really is so simple, isn’t it? The maya, the mirage, the transparent self, that mask in the face as the sculptor is recreating stillness-in-motion, the images on the screen, the sounds of the voices and the images played at us incessantly in this information age.

Outside the windows, the leaves blow, moving in a shivering chorus of greens, of lights, darks, and in-between.

This toast is good. I think I’ll have some marmalade with the bread. This is a lot different from back home, with the eggs easy-up and the bacon and toast and hash-browns and orange juice, and the coffee with a croissant on the side, ready-made and spilling over into the intestinal tract. And perhaps a few buttermilk pancakes with butter and syrup on them, if that isn’t enough.

Back home now: Just where is the home away from home, the elegant place to live to escape the tourists, the ecological vacation to view nature as if it were all a zoo to see while you still can.

This sarcasm will never get you anywhere, I say to myself. Besides, I wonder where Anna has gone off to this morning, without even a trace of musty madness on the couch where we so recently snuggled with glee, wrestling and feeling our way to heaven.

I should clean up this kitchen and take another shower, wash off that love and soap-down – and come again, recalling last night’s bliss. It lasts for a while, this aphrodisiac of effortless playing and feeling one’s insides on the outside turned inside out and refreshed, alive again, perking up the old dead cells and the ones up there decaying in the brain. It’s a shot of hope. This life, don’t mope. Oh, I am so clever with my home remedies and my silly jargon of nonchalance.

No luck. Anna’s answering machine spits out some kind of German message, with violin music in the background. There is no chance of checking in with her, waxing tones of lover over the hot line, playing a little nasty chatting game about porno kinds of things. A replay of the body/mind in real time.

I hear myself say, so intimately, “Dear one, I see that you are not here, not near me on the sofa of our dreams from last night’s blast. You are not at home either, but we are both enchanted with each other’s emotional responses being so intact and sacred, or so I presume. My dear, I await your re-entry into my world, and I wish you a nice day, wherever you are. I hope to hear from you soon. Bye for now.”

I hang up the phone, a little disappointed, hoping not to have shown it in my voice, the male bravado getting the upper hand of this man, but also with a smile on my face. like playing the jester and joker, the instigator of things surprising, mysterious, and new.

Where are you now, Chico Marx, now that I need you, to see me through?

Let’s see, where were we? We would meet somewhere on our street. After all, we were neighbors. You and your little schnauzer with the gray short-cut hair. What was his name, I forget? You, past your prime comedic and acting years but still very vital and witty in these, your later years.

You had the gray hair of an elder statesman. You were rather short, not looking tall even to me, just a young boy, and at ease with yourself after accomplishing so much in your life. I still see you and your brothers on the silver screen. It’s on reruns and in theatres and at festivals, and has influenced an age, an entire attitude, the tragedy/comedy, the other half of the whole, like a yin/yang balancing act.

All of our family, the whole Mischpoke, seems to have grown up on humor, laughing, telling a joke or a pun, playing the fool, being funny, being a little cynical, teasing, playing practical jokes, telling a story. What else was there, what with our past history? Just what was your home like and how was your upbringing portrayed in real life, compared to the other life on the stage, the actors milieu, Hollywood, where I was born?

“Well, Jesse-boy,” Chico chimes in. “You always have to look on the bright side of things. Life can throw you a curve ball, throw you for a loop, if you know what I mean. It’s the ability to take sides with the lighter side of life and balance all of life’s dramas and tragedies with wit, with intelligent pranks or the poking of fun at someone or some situation, that helps us get through life. One can always mope around, feel sorry for oneself and be angry and vindictive or hurtful and disappointed, the way things are going.”

“But I believe we have a responsibility to be the best person we can, to just be human. The comedian holds up a mirror to himself, for others to look at. The clown is willing to sacrifice himself and wear a costume, to hide his real face in a mask of fun and levity.”

Chico continued in earnest, “This is great, I love to help people feel good. I love children like yourself, who need to find something to laugh about and enjoy. Just be yourself. Be like you already are, like a child. Life is hard enough. Hey, have you ever heard the one about . . .” continued Chico, or should I say Mr. Marx?

He proceeded to talk on and on, and tell me stories only a few random images of which I still remember. I never remember a story or joke to retell it to someone else anyway.

I knew this was Mr. Marx, because someone had shown me his house, an unassuming small dwelling in the wealthier part of town. What we were doing there, a middle-class family, I didn’t know. Anyway, this man seemed like an angel to me. This famous person who treated me like one of his own. We used to chat just about regular things in life, like how I was feeling about school, the weather — you know, just your typical conversations and child-to-adult stuff.

There was this infectious, genuine smile and aura about him. I wonder why to some people it seemed he was not so tall, but I still had to look up at him. He had this kind of magic, this charisma, this success-in-living. I didn’t know anything about his personal life, nor had I read anything about him. I just had this feeling as if he were a guardian angel, looking only after me. Our meetings were perfectly random and usually involved the same setting on the street next to our house, with Mr. Marx walking his little dog. We met under that palm tree. Now his brother Groucho, that was another man entirely, an altogether different psyche.

I later read about his two-sidedness and meanness, but I would never suspect Chico of having that hidden side. I still remember him today, and laugh when I see the films and how remarkable it was that these Jewish brothers, the Marx Brothers, could bring tears of laughter to everyone’s eyes. They are still current and timeless, worldwide. Relevant and healing. Laughter, humor, is contagious, if we let it in. If we get out of the way, it can come through us. We don’t have to do anything, just be there. The human comedy. It’s a real relief from the serious and tragic sides of life, from the angst, the melodrama, the side of the coin where tragedy and comedy meet. The famous masks of the theater, looking in the mirror at each other.