Loitering: New and Collected Essays

by Charles D'Ambrosio

  The audience watched as a group, from behind a cordon. A few examples should suffice to give a flavor of the whole. The set for the Abortion Scene was a hospital room. A girl in blue scrubs was wheeled in on a gurney, her crotch and thighs garishly soaked in blood. She screamed her head off while a doctor and nurse talked across the gurney, consulting so calmly and in such quiet voices they seemed to belong to another story entirely. Whoever wrote the script hadn’t labored much over their dialogue—they showed no concern. You stared right at the girl’s spread legs—I did, anyway—and that was weird. Her positioning sexualized the moment grotesquely—the bath of blood and the girl’s agonal cries and even her death were an obvious but sick and grossly caricatured loss of virginity. More important, though, the girl’s death was an act of revenge, it was retribution for killing an unborn child. It proved a conservative moral point—all the while she was dying the ghouls leaned over the gurney and ridiculed her.

  The Slumber Party Scene involved two girls having a sleepover, listening to Mariah Carey, watching television and talking about what they’d like to be when they grow up. Then a man breaks into the house and abducts one of the girls, taking her to his car for what he calls “fun.” You hear one of the ghouls say: “Don’t you just love the smell of fresh meat?”—which totally threw off the point of view for me. Up to that moment my sympathy had been entirely with the girls, but now the ghoul seemed to be saying that this young woman, hauled off to be raped, had somehow invited the moment, had transgressed, was blameworthy. Suddenly the ghoul was an agent of justice. Why else make this observation about fresh meat? It was creepy. Throughout Hell House it was mostly (sexual) girls who were in jeopardy, owing in part, I suppose, to the stock conventions of horror flicks; the girls’ bodies acted as territory in a disputed moral landscape. In the very next scene, which took place in a roofless structure, semi-outdoors, you see the same girl roped to a joist, her hands tied above her head, while her abductor digs the hole he plans to dump her body in.

  In the Porno Scene, we see this slumpy guy on a couch, watching dirty movies. His girlfriend comes home. She tells him she’s pregnant. Then she tells him the child she’s carrying isn’t his; it’s his best friend’s. Then he violently forces some kind of humiliating sex on her. (We segue from the living room to the bedroom by watching a black-and-white video, quite blurry, that suggests rough stuff.) The acting in these skits, by the way, was a mixed bag, ranging from OK to horrible, but many of the girls, when they had to scream, could really belt it out. It was never the scream of a real person in real pain but rather a homage to horror movies. When the boyfriend leaves, the girl curses, giving the very best, full-out scream of the whole tour, rolls on the floor, blasphemously accusing her Bible and God of abandonment, and eventually kills herself, simulating slashed wrists by popping a plastic ampoule of stage blood, quite convincingly, on her arm.

  All of this was meant to be hideous and repellent, yet each room offered such a long, prurient, gazing look into the life of degradation that the scenarios often seemed like a spastic reaction against a real desire, a fascination. I see two ways to take this observation. One is: somewhere along the line somebody had to imagine the act of sex, and that’s one of the reasons, I think, that so many of the stories ended in murder—it was a way of punishing the imagination and paying for the fundamentalist sin of passing sympathy. The economy of it was creepy in its efficiency, with the condemnation and dispatch following so swiftly on the lapse or frailty or doubt, never considering, for instance, that promiscuity might be about an ambivalent need for love, or the desire, the stray hope, for something other than nothing—possibilities that would engage the imagination, tempting it. And the other is: no one ever actually imagined any of this and Hell House was, instead, a gathering of clichés whose entelechy was fear and this house, far from being haunted, was in fact a safe refuge from the morally confusing universe out beyond the walls of black plastic. The sins were all childishly obvious, and I was aware, just vaguely, of being catechized. Very often I felt the tour wasn’t about conversion but enlistment, and as such, it was a test of loyalty, with anyone who was the slightest bit recreant banished. Loyalty—in its darkest form, which left so much death as its legacy to the twentieth century—rids the divided self of anxiety and guilt, so that murder smiles. The ghouls in Hell House did a lot of gloating as others suffered.

  There was a dispirited familiarity to the rooms, a lack of care about the shabby way things looked. Most of the furniture, I imagine, came from thrift stores, arriving at Hell House pre-saddened by other lives, other misfortunes. Everything lacked an element of choice, the memory of an original moment of hope about how things would be. The interiors were decidedly lower middle-class. The headboard in the porn scene was flimsy, not up to the rigors of a good sodomizing, and the vanity was one of those things that put you in mind of a wedding cake, white and elaborate and frilly, so vestal and princessy you just know heartbreak is in store for any girl still holding on to those misplaced hopes past the age of twelve. Things were sad as gesture, sad as furniture, in a world premised on the idea that appearance is a lie. The percale sheets, the sagging mattress, the framed art on the walls (because art is what a blank wall wants), all of it lacked vitality. The sofa was slouchy and vague as to color and the various easy chairs were worn and soiled and the carpet was the kind that’s already there when you move in, with faint paths turned pale where other people have walked. It was a décor that suggested hope was elsewhere, in another life, and a décor that suggested unseen enemies, the sort of place that feels shameful and mean in a world where the failure to prosper is a sin. Of course, the sets were meant to exist only gesturally, as props, but there was something in the hard literal fact, in their mere presence, that encouraged you to see them in a realistic mode. The dingy and dim rooms made for an atmosphere of sordid involvement—they were meant to indicate a shabby moral state, a despondency—but to me the “sins” did not seem moral so much as economic and aesthetic—a matter of both failed consumption and poor taste. Hopelessness had come to reside in the sofa on the porn set because it would never move again, because time had come for it and stayed, like an intimation of death. You felt nothing would change, that progress was gone and destiny mislaid; what the future held was repetition and sameness. There was a malignancy in this world, but it wasn’t a problem you could blame on the devil. In Hell House it wasn’t sin so much as sadness and despair and heartbreak and misfortune and cluelessness and just every stupid human possibility that was answered with damnation. People pathetically in need of help were shot.

  And so as we wandered from room to room, every narrative ended in death, every story came to the same conclusion, until it felt as if a flawed and fallen world were finally being cleaned up and organized and made perfect. Mistakes were made, and the mistaken were efficiently condemned, leaving behind empty squalid rooms in which it was impossible to imagine a tender unseen moment or a kind word or a shared silence that wasn’t murderous. It’s perhaps needless to say, but the people in these skits lacked a living texture, were crude-minded and ugly in spirit and, in general, dismissively drawn. Hell House resembled the smutty mood of a sixties exploitation film more than religion, a spectacle of types, lewd and overblown, exaggerated to the point of pornography with its parade of stock characters. But Hell House was quite specifically somebody’s vision of others. Whoever created Hell House seemed to despise people, their freedom, the varied possibility of them. Whoever it was could imagine only concluded lives, lives summed up by a single act, in a world where most of us have agreed, not always happily, to live with ambiguity. Every fundamentalism focuses on end times, and Armageddon is, in a sense, a rhetorical trope, an emphatic and overwhelming conclusion, meant to wrap up and make tidy the mistaken wanderings of history. For a fundamentalist the end is one of the forms desire takes, a passion no different from lust or avarice, intense with longing and the need for fulfillment and relief. It’s like they’re horny for apocalypse. They
get off on denouements, which partly explains why Hell House never amounted to much more than a series of murderous conclusions. It focused only on that part of a story where life finds itself fated. Inside every act a judgment was coiled. Real people, with their ragged and uncertain lives, their stumbling desires, their bleak or blessed futures, would only break into the narrative, complicating the story, dragging it on endlessly.

  You would think there’d be enormous anxiety involved in desiring the end since the end doesn’t seem to actually be anything. And perhaps it’s the messed-up management of this anxiety that accounts for Hell House’s failure. Kierkegaard says anxiety “is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite.” He says, “anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” In other words, anxiety has no object; in fact, it tries to become fear because fear has a definite object that can be faced with courage. I think it’s fair to say horror bridges some kind of gap between fear and anxiety, using objects that are present yet unreal, objects that retain a somewhat objectless character. Horror makes visible the source of our anxiety, typically arriving dressed as death. It’s nothingness in a black cloak, coming for all of us, a bequest of our bodies. But Hell House was premised on an antipathy to the suddenly helpless body, a hatred. It gutted the very thing that would make it compelling. Instead of indulging the thrills inherent to horror, it swapped out anxiety for fear and came up with morality as an answer to annihilation. The hated content of Hell House was arrived at via a bunch of rejections, a denial, a suppression of the self, which helped the creator form a superiority over the rest of us who are slogging our way—living and loving, doubting and sorrowing—toward a hole in the dirt. The Pentecostals who created Hell House converted their anxiety over the human body into persecution, and their horror set them dreaming of death.

  Added up, room plus room plus room, Hell House was a holocaust. Everybody died. They died—they were killed off—because they lived the wrong way, made the wrong choices, believed and thought or felt the wrong things. The whole thing kind of sickened me. The last night I stood outside, absurdly thinking of Dante and his imagery, as the kids rehearsed their lines in the early dark before Hell House officially opened. Out on the lawn you heard a disembodied anguished call in the cold: “Where am I? What’s going on?” And the strange music of a young girl warming her voice with: “God hates you. You killed your baby. I hear babies crying.” I stood for a while in a field, listening, then went inside to inspect the Rosco fog machine that would make Heaven the ethereal stuff of visions and the Styrofoam rock where, in half an hour, a sinner would be chained for eternity. The rooms lost nothing for being empty. In the hospital the bloodstained gurney waited for what the script called “The Abortion Girl,” a name as allegorical as Bunyan’s Giant Despair. The sacks of plasma hung from their IV poles, the false charts were clamped into their clipboards, the stethoscope waited for its heart. The Abortion Girl would again scream and hemorrhage and die hideously a dozen or more times later that night, and again her nightmarish pain would be mocked, but for now an accepting silence held the room. In the Garage Scene, the paint cans, the Hefty sacks twisted at the neck, the red car, all of it was stubbornly real in a way the stilted dialogue would not be. In the Slumber Party Scene, soon enough, the raped girl would hang from her rope, the abductor would dig his hole. But the show hadn’t begun yet and there was no morality or condemnation just now. The shovel was there and so was the partially dug grave and the heap of overturned dirt smelled wet and loamy and the rope dangled, empty and waiting, as a light rain fell through the roof. It was beautiful, and a relief, mostly a relief, to feel the rain coming down and know how resistant reality was, how durable, even in a world drained of love.

  1 W. Bush at the time of writing.

  One More Paradise

  In a story about paradise, the complications inevitably follow, so perhaps a simple description first—Biosquat is three or four acres of scrub, a derelict tract of land in East Austin (itself a somewhat neglected section of the city) on which Dave Santos has established at least the rudiments of an eco-village. There’s a cattle gate and a mailbox out front, and a forked tote road leads partway into the property; from there footpaths wind through stands of juniper and oak and mesquite. Plants in this part of the country, baffled by the sun, seek and hide from it all at once, suffering a kind of conflicted heliotropism in which the branches of a dry fissured oak, for instance, grow up and out, turn back, go down, curl and twist, writhing so much that, even still, they seem in motion, snaking like the hair of a Gorgon. The heat in August is oppressive, and the umbrage these stunted trees provide is spotty, more shadow than shade, offering little relief. Underfoot, the blanched soil at Biosquat feels like crushed brick and hardly seems arable. I saw no wildlife other than a few lizards, although I was told rats and raccoons, as well as coral snakes, live in the area. Mosquitoes were plague-plentiful, and Dave Santos suggested, rather alarmingly, that the once-numerous crows were decimated by West Nile virus. In the distance you could hear the constant hum of cars, and while Biosquat’s ambitions are somewhat Edenic, at present it still retains the mood and look of a vacant lot; it has a spurned and forgotten quality, as if the world had, without warning or explanation, fallen in love with someone else.

  Once inside the gate, along the paths, you find the first improvements, the nets and tents and bamboo beds, the solar panels and the cistern and the terraced gardens, a limestone megalith surrounded by rickety scaffolds and a series of unfinished structures, the ceilings of which are fabricated from bike rims and a cladding of placards and signs left behind by old political campaigns. There’s a pale green trailer and a toilet mounted on a tricycle and a trellis of unripe tomatoes hanging, again, from bike rims. There’s welding equipment, there’s rebar and conduit, there’s an anvil on a stump and a primitive garden hoe cleverly forged from a piece of pipe and a chain ring. The visual impact of the place is surreal and collagist, although, sprawling with junk, it also comes quite close in character to the sort of illegal dump site every city has, those wooded hillsides that mysteriously fill with unwanted mattresses and shopping carts and washing machines. Over the couple of hot August days I spent at Biosquat, Santos often spoke of “trash worship,” an idea meant to elevate debris into an aesthetic and invigorate refuse with a rarefied sense of social mission—something more high-minded and messianic than recycling, at any rate—and perhaps that’s what he’s up to, perhaps the bikes and the rebar and the bamboo aren’t haphazard, aren’t just old crap nobody else wants, but are instead the base materials for building the small, resonant civilization he imagines.

  I, for one, was willing to believe. I was willing to believe that, on a warm fall night in the future, estivating frogs would bellow to life in ponds that, as of now, don’t exist. I was willing to believe that human shit is second only to bat guano as a nutrient and fertilizer, and that it’s entirely odorless when mixed with mulch. I was willing to believe that a recipe of soybean oil and chili peppers would eradicate the mosquitoes and make for an edible pesticide. I was willing to believe in things I did not understand, in Hilbert space and eigenforms and combinatorics, and I was willing to believe in houses that would someday look, fantastically, like big puppets. I was more than willing to believe in a world in which, quite beautifully, nothing was outcast or lost or abandoned, not people or things or ideals. I was willing to believe in all the enthusiasms Dave Santos believes in—the radical circus and the mutant bikes and the chicken tractor and the gnat goggles and the flying robots and the car that runs on rain. I was even willing to believe, in principle, that an earthly paradise, lush and complete, could be improvised and sustained with rainwater, PVC pipe, a homemade cistern, and a solar-powered bilge pump. I was willing to believe all of this and more—that human migration and nomadism make sense, that pedaling a bike a mere six weeks a year will keep you in an eternal spring, that Bucky Fuller once bathed a family of four with a single cup of wa
ter—but I was not willing to believe this:

  “Ultimately, I think colonizing the atmosphere is the solution to a lot of ecological problems . . . [Uh-huh.]1 And it’s also more sensible than the space fantasies—the idea that we’re ready to build a bunch of rockets and blast off and live in orbit. [Right.] Engineering-wise, it’s much simpler to colonize the lower atmosphere. [Uh-huh.] And so we have the stratosphere, is where I started theorizing. I lectured at UT Aerospace on the subject . . . We could take carbon out of the atmosphere. We have excess carbon dioxide, we’d liberate oxygen to help us breathe up in the stratosphere, we could mix that oxygen in with our helium and live inside these huge cathedral spaces—we’d be talking a little like Donald Duck—but because of the solar energy coming in we’d have a shirtsleeve, close-to-sea-level-pressure environment, up above the weather [Uh-huh.], and totally reliable electric solar power. [Yeah.] And we could use that electricity for ion propulsion to crack the carbon dioxide, to regenerate the ozone, using the catalytic reactors of these ion propulsion engines, and get carbon credits, from, like, the nations that want to do something good for the environment. We could build this aerial civilization from the carbon we’ve dumped in the atmosphere. [Yeah, yeah.]

  “And then go anywhere we want, like the round-the-world ballooners. By knowing, by being able to visualize the atmosphere, they can steer . . . [Uh-huh.] And they didn’t even have any propulsion except the ability to go up and down. [Right. Right. Right, right.] So we have these sites around the world that are like stratospheric elevators where prevailing winds hit a mountain and create a stratospheric mountain wave, and so those are places you could have gliders that soar up to your stratospheric cities. [Yeah.] Getting down’s easy. [Right.] You could just skydive. [Uh-huh.] Out of the stratosphere. [Yeah, yeah.] It would be the basis of an Olympian civilization, living up in the clouds. I’d like to see socially conscious hippies get there as opposed to some death star. [Yeah, yeah, yeah—so you see Biosquat in relation to everything you’re saying as . . .] As a stepping-stone. [Yeah—it also seems somehow, uh, it seems very fluid.]”