In other words, he had the religious gift (so lacking in rationalistic me). Our journey out of the little world of reason and sense experience and into eternity was Robby’s mature subject. Our alleged mortality he saw as a deceit. He would have understood at once what Blake wrote to George Cumberland in April of 1827: “I have been very near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble and tottering, but not in Spirit & Life not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for ever.” The fallen world was temporary. The true, ever-living world, all around us but unseen, a holy secret, revealed itself through mystical experience. Although a marvelous draftsman, Robby had (again in common with Blake) no interest in landscape or in depicting the human form from nature. I see this now as of a piece with his transcendental preoccupations.
Robby at work in the Château de Vincennes.
Three of his visionary company.
The delicious companion of my childhood had become Robert Anton the grown-up puppeteer. Everything the Romantics taught about the momentousness of childhood, about original untutored prowess as the source of art, was borne out in him. What happened is what always happens: Maturity intensified by orders of magnitude the early promptings and intuitions. The cabinet of curiosities from FAO Schwarz gave way to a visionary company of the puppeteer’s own making. Twenty-two years ago I tried, in a novel called Tales Out of School, to impart something of what this theater was like. Much the most fantastical thing in the book, it’s the only part I didn’t make up:
“On the planks smoke rose from a tiny cauldron. A couple of bowls—the halves of a robin’s egg, really—lay side by side at the foot of a peach tree, two span high, which was coming into flower. Here was a world of smallness made clear by what it excluded. Simpler than the big world, yes; the big world excludes nothing and this makes the big world hard to see. But here in smallness dwelled the promise of a truth.
“There came a scratching noise from under the platform. The proboscis of a horseshoe crab poked up through the planks. He lumbered on stage doing a side-to-side step. Ah, he wasn’t a crab. He was a puppet wearing the carapace of a crab. Now he shed his shell and was a lovely white-faced lady. The proboscis, unwound, became a head of hair which he—no, she—proceeded to comb out with delicate fingers.
“Looking to right and left, she put the peach tree under one arm, climbed into the carapace and sailed away. But here Schmulowicz [the puppeteer] snapped his fingers, summoning her on stage again. He pointed sternly to where the tree had stood. Red in the face, she put it back.
“Schmulowicz now produced a little torch, put it in the lovely lady’s hand and, pointing to the footlight candles, bade her light them, which she did. She held the tiny flame back up to him; he blew it out. Then she put the brand, still smoking, under her arm, climbed into the carapace and sailed away. But Schmulowicz snapped his fingers, summoning her back. He put a finger under her dress; she pushed it away. He glowered at her until she complied—hoisting her skirts, squatting, shuddering. At length, she laid an egg into Schmulowicz’s waiting palm; and, in great weariness, went back to her carapace, lay down and slept.
“There came a harried headless man on stage—his arms turbulent—rushing this way and that in search of what he lacked. After some groping about, he found the egg in Schmulowicz’s hand, fitted it onto his spindle neck and began to bang at it with his fists. Fragments of eggshell fell away, and now a miniature of the head of Schmulowicz himself was discovered. Big Schmulowicz offered little Schmulowicz a hand mirror into which little Schmulowicz gazed, not without admiration, picking the last of the eggshell from off his head. He looked and looked, growing vain. Then big Schmulowicz snatched away the looking glass and broke it.
“Now little Schmulowicz rushed over to the lovely lady, asleep in her shell. Wake up, wake up. He needed for her to admire him, love him, see that he was beautiful. Wake up. She would not. She only turned over. Wake up. Big Schmulowicz intervened, removing little Schmulowicz’s head, putting it in his pocket. And that was that.
“The lovely lady turned over, stretched, yawned, arose; but she was no longer lovely. She was a bird of prey, indigo-plumed and with a hooked beak. Her head jerked nervously, as if a quarry were near. Oh, terrible. Then she flew up, perched herself on the crossbeam above the stage—freed (it seemed) of the puppeteer’s mastery. But the life was draining out of her from the moment she took wing. She had flown, and where she had flown she stayed: humped on the crossbeam, quite, quite still, because dead now.”
They delighted the eye and filled the mind, Robby’s homemade creatures, who would turn to the deity who’d made them with love, fear, bafflement, the whole range of feeling.
Shirley and Charlie must have wondered what they’d wrought in this prodigal son. But along with bewilderment there was love, there was money. The hothouse flower was encouraged to bloom. He had pictures to look at, plays and musicals and movies and operas to go to, books to read, records to listen to: the art of Dürer, Blake, Fuseli, Redon, Grosz; the films of Fellini (especially Juliet of the Spirits and Toby Dammit) and Kubrick (especially 2001); the writings of Paracelsus, Saint John of the Cross, Jakob Boehme, Meher Baba and C. G. Jung; the songs of Brecht and Weill (especially from Mahagonny) and of Cole Porter (especially from Kiss Me, Kate). The American musical theater was Robby’s Great Code. Expectable in someone of our bent. But “Havana Song” or “Begin the Beguine” or “Another Op’nin’, Another Show” interpreted in the light of Paracelsus? That was new. As in childhood, so again in adolescence and beyond: I was his slave, doing my best to wade through Meher Baba, even immersing myself in the mystical puzzles of Jakob Boehme.
Robby’s puppets lie orphaned in a trunk and will never be famous. But fame and the sublime are only accidentally related. This we must believe, or else surrender to a worldliness honoring only success. Robby’s immense gifts were known to but a handful of people and it may be, given his indifference to recognition, that he’d have remained a close-held secret even if allowed to live out a long life. Once in a while, however, I still meet someone who actually saw a performance of his. It happens less and less, of course, and eventually the next-to-last and last of us who saw the thing will die. For now, though, we are a happy few, content to have sat in the long ago before a tiny stage beholding a stupendous wonder of art.
• • •
The long ago: that is to say the sunlit late seventies. Then a cloud settled down on earth to see how many of us it could devour—the part of the story everyone knows. Robby was an early case. He fell ill in the spring of 1983. Watching my adored friend as the darkness enveloped him, I did not imagine how many more I’d see vanish in their turn.
That subtraction of wit, grace, brains and beauty from our midst is unbearable to contemplate. How is it we did not, in compassionate horror, pull the earth up over us? How is it we who were spared have gone on creating, laughing, renewing ourselves with love? Is the appetite for life simply too great, greater than our accumulated griefs? And what, for their part, do the lost travelers under the hill think of us? Do they applaud our resilience? When I get a moment with them in dreams they tend to say that yes, they do.
George Richmond writes to Samuel Palmer, Blake’s disciple: “Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and he burst out into Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.” Justice would have Robby full of years and singing. But Robert Anton died young and alone and humiliated and frightened—and by his own hand, having endured enough—in a Los Angeles hotel room.
They say that coming and going, Palmer would kiss the bell handle of Blake’s lodgings. As a boy Robby had a comparably ardent disciple on the threshold at 3912 Ann Arbor Court. My mother would drop me off on Sunday afternoons. After decently greeting his parents, busy with some football game or golf tournament on television, I would make my way to the heaven of art, Robby’s bedroom. Here was where the real man, the imagination, lived. Here was
where nothing bad could happen. When I dream about him we’re there again. Having greeted Shirley and Charlie, I hurry to Robby’s room. I find him huddled up, the prodigal come home, sick but hanging on. I say, You’re dead. He says, Not for a minute. I say, Lo, these many years. He says, Illusion. I say, The dead are dead. He says, Only out of sight. He asks for news, wants very much to know how everyone’s been getting along. I think I’ll not go in, only give the bell handle a kiss, next time I dream I’m there.
• • •
An old man I loved said: “When we speak of the past, we lie with every breath we take.” Well, no. It’s nostalgia that lies. Memory certainly arranges, seeks for the story. Memory is aesthetic. But everything in this memoir happened. The sea change has been from persons into language, not from truth into lies. Years ago I memorized four electric lines from Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy on the hunch I might need them. In English they go like this—
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth seems beyond undoing.
—and nowadays seem the sum of all wisdom. I am trying to say what it has felt like to be me, this unrepeatable alloy of temperament and circumstance, this particle of history. What I tell is over half a century old but everything is still happening and the past is now. I heap up this monument because my family—Annette, Sol, Tommy, Robby too—have vanished and I cannot allow oblivion to own them altogether.
| CHAPTER FOUR |
PERU
January 1964. I’m helping Mom arrange chairs in the living room around our new color television. A crowd is coming over for a movie and pick-up dinner. Spare ribs, slaw, adult beverages. Rebel Without a Cause is on at eight. It’s our first convivial evening since the assassination. We need this party, need it as the nation needs the Beatles, suddenly conquering our radios. The guests are mostly Tommy’s friends, now of drinking age. Dad has put the hard stuff out of bounds but there’s beer and a lightly spiked punch.
My brother is unbelievably handsome. Mom and Dad seem to fear he could get a girl in the family way just by looking at her. They want him safely married. The two of them, exact contemporaries, had wed at twenty-one, the age their elder boy is now. His campaign for bachelor digs has produced a lot of shouting. A randy young bachelorhood is not on the program. In the little world Mom and Dad come from, a son moves out when he weds, not before. The idea being to confine sex to procreation.
The awkward age is behind Tommy now. He’d left college at one point, declaring that he wanted to labor with his hands. Maybe run a filling station, he said. Dad organized a night job for him, working the injection press at a plastics plant. An exhausted Tommy came home each dawn, scrubbed down with Lava soap and collapsed. Poor boy was back in college before long.
Rebel Without a Cause deals, in what must have seemed hard-hitting fashion, with a threat the young adults in the room are safely past: juvenile delinquency, as the postwar phrase was. Tommy and his friends aspire to banking and brokerage and corporate law, not driving cars over cliffs. The movie must already look quaint to them in 1964, some eight years after its release, but to me it’s high tragedy. I erupt when Sal Mineo gets shot—a bawlarama and the old man does not like it, and says so, and hustles me to my room. I think I cried a lot, more than other boys, and recall no shame that I cried. And watching Nicholas Ray’s teen opera today, I get what was going on. Sal Mineo keeps a glossy portrait of Alan Ladd in his school locker. I’d seen Shane too. And wanted Shane to come back. And dimly knew that Sal and I were from the same bolt of cloth.
That I was not like other boys, those who remember me from back then will attest. A tiptoe walker, a hand-flapper, a ninny under pressure and a shrieker when frightened or angry. A mortification. The diagnostic name later attached to my symptoms was not yet in use. I was just “troubled” and not what my parents had bargained for. They called me the child of their old age. In fact they were thirty-three when I was born, but Mom had lost two babies, both boys, between Tommy and me. Hence the ten-year gap, and I’d have gone the way of those ghostly brothers but for some kind of surgery making it just possible for Mom to carry to term, then be delivered of me by cesarean section.
I once overheard her tell another woman that she knew she was pregnant with me “the next morning”—after intercourse! I figured out in horror—because she felt so ill. And stayed that way till I arrived. “Your mother was in bed for nine solid months. No letup. You can’t imagine how heroic she was,” Dad said over and over (which was how my father said things). “And once you arrived, nothing was too much. While you napped she’d iron your shoelaces.” We ought to have been a big family of neatly stair-stepped sons, but the middle was missing and there was time even for the ironing of a baby’s shoelaces.
All for what would grow into the dark spot on their lives. When I was six they took me to my first psychiatrist, a Dr. Knopf in Dallas with whom I played checkers. Knopf was a waste of time and money. What I was, I remained. My handwriting was not just bad but demented. I could not grasp arithmetic. I spilled food at every meal. At roller-skating parties I posed a clear and present danger. My obsessive concern was to memorize everything; and to make sure that certain objects on the mantel and coffee table were arranged in a way I thought necessary; and to explain, till all tempers were spoiled, why these objects had to be as I arranged them; and to report on what was up in the spice rack; and to name the ingredients of vanilla extract. My fear of firecrackers, of all loud noises, was mortal. I was as scared of a Roman candle or smoke bomb as of a water moccasin. At gatherings of any kind I was baffled by conversation. How did people know what to say? Had they received the script beforehand and memorized it?
I was fully equipped—a boy with asthma, homosexuality and what would later be called Asperger syndrome. I can make no guess about how I struck other children. I believed they were built of pasteboard and glue and only I was real. In the old days this kind of obliviousness was moral disease. Then “Asperger’s” came along, a kinder terminology. Only as I entered my thirties did the eponym make it into popular parlance, even as it was beginning to be phased out diagnostically.
And on an analogous schedule I was phasing the syndrome out of me. In adolescence I would learn the art of eye contact and how to modulate my voice; how to make more friends; how to work successfully (sometimes) with others. In college I studied the attractive and the gifted and built myself a Frankenstein monster from the parts I liked best about them—a persona very nearly the opposite of who I was when alone. I learned the language of social interchange better than all but a handful of its native speakers. I even caused several people to fall in love with me. But from then to now, when someone responds, I know I’ve brought off a confidence trick.
One other Aspie trait was strong and hung on: a literal-mindedness causing me to believe that everyone was telling the truth. In the planetarium scene of Rebel Without a Cause the upturned teenage faces grow solemn when the scientist at the controls says: “Man is an episode of little consequence. We will disappear into the blackness of the space from which we came—destroyed, as we began, in a burst of gas and fire. [Explosive sound effects.] The heavens are still and cold once more. . . . Man, existing alone, seems himself an episode of little consequence.” And I thought he meant pretty soon. And maybe that’s what I was crying about, and with cause. We’d only just escaped the end of the world fifteen months earlier at the hands of Nikita Khrushchev. Now the sun was going to swell up and devour us? Childhood was getting too eventful.
• • •
As our guests for Rebel Without a Cause left that evening, a nice light snow had started to fall. It would come down for the next thirty-six hours and be known as the Great Blizzard of 1964, a record-breaker for Fort Worth at more than twelve inches. About an hour after I fell asleep Daddy shook me awake.
“No school tomorrow. We just heard. Let’s you and me go for a drive in the snow.” I pulled foul-weather gear over my pajamas, got into galoshes, hooked on earmuffs, and we went to the garage. It took us an hour to get thirty yards down the driveway. We lost heart there, abandoned the car and trudged back to the house. Mom was waiting with hot chocolate for me and an ice-cold stare for Dad. I was put into a bath and could hear them arguing. Tommy didn’t come out of his room. I wrote my first poem that night, something about the snowfall being like God giving Earth a kiss and Earth kissing God back. It would be published on page one of the superintendent’s citywide bulletin. Copies survive.
Three weeks later the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. Two weeks after that Cassius Clay (“the Louisville Lip”) beat Sonny Liston (briefly a palatable Negro, at least in that matchup) in seven rounds at the Miami Beach Convention Hall. The American ride was picking up speed again.
Ranier Court after the (so-called) Great Blizzard.
• • •
Mom’s ailments came not single spies but in battalions. A terrifying memory: overhearing her say to a woman friend, “I doubt I’ll make it to forty-five.” Pregnancies and childbirths had weakened her. Spinal stenosis, kidney stones and a host of other excruciating illnesses gave her no respite. Encroaching deafness made her shy with strangers. I never knew my mother healthy. She strove for hardihood, but the impersonation of health kept breaking down.
She was a kindly taskmaster. “Straighten up and fly right” was her severest admonition. “Up and at ’em,” “Buckle down, Winsoki” or “The days are slipping by” were likelier. On direst occasions she’d say we were driving her to Wichita Falls (where the state asylum was). Now that so many of my days have slipped by, I want to sit quietly and wait upon moments of the past as they briefly surface. I can walk around at will in the extinguished house and talk everything over with my dead. Not to indulge the counterfactual, of course. Down with “if onlys.” What’s the point of wishing this had happened or that hadn’t? Down with all wishing. But nowadays the best of my waking hours are as if in a screening room where episode after episode reveals itself, tactile and verbatim. The following is, as I calculate it, a few months after our Rebel Without a Cause evening:
The Hue and Cry at Our House Page 4