Читать книгу Performance / Media / Art / Culture - Jacki Apple - Страница 19

Allen’s saga Dugout is about his ancestors born in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, grandparents and parents working the land, fighting the wars, and drowning their disappointments and dreams in drink, and in the silences between them. They are Bible Belt folk who came west after the Civil War, whose children left the farm for the city, embracing the promises of the twentieth century in minor league baseball fields and honkey-tonk jazz clubs. They grew up with racial segregation and didn’t question it, and historically they feared and resented each new wave of foreign immigrants. At the end of the twentieth century some of their great-grandchildren and grandchildren empty their despair through the barrel of a gun. Others vent their anger at Donald Trump rallies.

Dugout unfolds like a film. It starts at the end with a vivid image. An old woman is sitting in a chair in the middle of an empty white room. The curtains blow straight out in the breeze from the windows. There are roses in her lap and on the floor like blood at her feet. Only her fingers move like she is playing the piano. Then it weaves its way backward in time, not in any particular chronology, but more like the way we remember. Words and images, sounds and music, a gesture triggers a time, a place, a face, a series of events. Sometimes it is just a moment of realization, a shadow on the wall.

There are two stories — Terry Allen tells the man’s and Jo Harvey Allen tells the woman’s. They speak in the third person, as observers, witnesses, reporters. Their voices alternate, moving towards each other, not in a straight line, but winding their way in and out, until they cross paths at some intersection, coincidentally or by a twist of fate.

But they are not strangers. The cadences and intonations of speech, their distinctive accents tell us they know these people because they are in their blood and their bones, and in the soil they grew up on. Their lives are part of our history and their reality is its own truth. They sum it up for us this way — He once told a young pitcher “Your life just turns into a bucket full of stories with a little bitty hole in the bottom.” And much later she says “Or a bucket full of holes with a little bitty story in the bottom.”

Inside of the twang and drawl is the sigh of resignation, the blue note of disappointment, and the defiance of faded dreams. The land is in their voices. Dust and blood, sex and drink, and religion. The Texas that was once Mexico is there. So is the black soul of the Mississippi blues, and the thunder and lightning of white preachers, Texas grit and sweat, and the smell of hairspray and tobacco. The glare of the sun on muddy ballfields and the smoky darkness of honky-tonk bars.

It’s 1892 and he’s six years old. His Pa’s voice shouts, “Swim you little son of a bitch. Swim or drown,” as he flies out in a great high arc into the Missouri.

It’s the summer of 1918. Inside the church her Pa is down on his knees praying, head up, mouth wet, eyes bulging with revelation. Outside there is a steam engine covered with flags, crowds, a brass band, and banners. There’s a man with a piano in a wagon, frantically whipping a horse, and the blurred shadow of a figure running from the livery. Inside she is naked, spread eagle, with welts on her thighs and stomach, and bloody knickers. She’s thirteen years old and “drunk as a skunk.” Underneath the photo written in script is “Our boys go to war.”

They don’t question the violence that shapes their lives. They accept it as the way things are. On the surface it is told matter-of-factly. But underneath, in the voices of the tellers is something else, something weighted that falls with a silent thud. Mute indignation? Pride, perhaps? Maybe it is simply sorrow without sentiment hardened by the unspoken empty spaces.

The sweet promise of freedom waiting down the road is tempered by the failed dreams, broken like all the bones in his gnarled old hands. It’s 1903 and he is sitting on the bench in his first dugout, playing for the St. Louis Browns farm team in Enid, Oklahoma. He’s seventeen and it’s the happiest day of his life. He got his first ball glove, a catcher’s mitt. By August he’d seen his first exhibition game. By September he’d played in twenty-five games. “It beat the hell outta farming!”

In 1925 she discovers jazz, is caught in a juke joint and expelled. Jazz is a “terrible wickedness … a white girl playing with Negroes!” Her Papa slashes his hands and cries. She is thrilled. She enrolls in a beauty school in Fort Worth for six weeks, and she’s waitressing and rehearsing her own band.

In the late 40s and early 50s the old ballplayers and old musicians would come round late at night to tell stories. She’d cook and “play piano like a house on fire” and they’d all sing and drink and “talk loud an’ colorful to cover the great deep gaps in their lives … turning memory into story.” When it’s over they hug each other and cry and get in their cars. Until 1955 when most of them are dead.

When the baseball season was over he finds work doing carpentry. One winter he sold hardware. Once he worked in a slaughterhouse but he hated the pigs screaming and quit after three days. He never ate bacon again. He was thirty-two when he finally went to the majors in 1918. He could “throw like fire and catch like a wall,” but he couldn’t hit.

She’s twenty-eight years old and Prohibition is in full swing. She’s at the piano, smoking a cigarette, playing alone in the lounge. Her band is long gone. She’s wearing a red sequin dress and has long black hair. The Denver speakeasy called The Satin Dugout is full of ballplayers. “She doesn’t care for sports but the players are nice, dumb but tip good.”

It’s the summer of 1942. “They meet at the railway station. He’s a lot older but she likes his big open grin. ‘Hi there, sunshine,’ she says. They have supper. They like each other’s hands. She is recently divorced. His first wife is recently dead. And as usual America is at war. They are married six weeks later. He gives her a small ring with tiny diamonds, and one son (Terry Allen). They will live together for fifteen years.”

She can hear him from the kitchen. It’s the final game of the World Series. He is cussing the Yankees, the TV, the plate, the pitcher, and the way it’s all about money, now. The Yankees win. He’s 73 years old and it’s all over.

“She takes his hand. Her fingers move over his big knuckles like she is playing piano. He suddenly feels himself come loose and fly out in a high and familiar arc, and in some infinite and secret place she flies away with him.” His time is up.

And over the piano playing the blues, echo the words that aren’t there — his Pa’s voice shouting, “Swim you little son of a bitch. Swim or drown.” And maybe that sums up who we are as a society. Except for one crucial irony, which is that in truth just swimming isn’t enough.

Dugout is about working-class Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans who awaken in the twilight of their youth halfway across the river, realizing that the mirage on the horizon where the trophies and the bright lights are will never get any closer. It is about people caught in the current and carried downstream with only their memories to keep them afloat.

The America of Dugout is still here in the struggles, dreams, and disappointments of the people portrayed with compassion and honesty in Allen’s stories. But they have now become fodder for the demagogues who are systematically shredding the very fabric of our democracy in the dark hours of Trump’s America. This is not the movie we want to make.