by Steve Aylett
The showdown with the bug is an exchange of challenges, Arlen winning over by questioning how a parrot can be changed into a parrot, or a human into a human—the demand cannot be carried out, of course, and the monster is sent back to the cold vast in medieval blasts of fire, hair and finality.
Parrot hit the shelves in 1962. The book’s first line, ‘Spindly crutches descend upon the stairs, an insect bigger than you can handle’, was only the latest from the creator of some of the most idiosyncratic first lines in pulp history, such as:
‘I placed an atomic bomb in your eyebrow.’ (‘The Fenchurch Conspiracy’)
‘How was I supposed to know barbwire was meant to make capture less funny?’ (‘Bill’s Forebodings’)
‘Was it a giant gumdrop or a polished bible?’ (‘Last Beauty’)
‘False treasure is more colorful.’ (The Phosphorus Tarot of Matchbooks)
‘There was a tiny zipper on the pearl.’ (‘Broadway Crematoria’)
‘Doom was prearranged under the clenched heavens.’ (‘The Jarkman’)
‘It’s hard to determine, at the start, what you will be able to bear for a lifetime.’ (The Man Who Gave Birth to His Arse)
‘I’ve never felt more wary than the day I visited Pobo the Clown.’ (‘The Harrowing Squid’)
‘Strange destructive curios were floating over the city.’ (‘Tesseract’)
Lint’s marriage was already in trouble due to his attempt to pass off a sleep-crease as a glamorous knife-scar. His attempts to re-impose it by grabbing naps throughout the day put a strain on communication, and Lint’s explanation of how he came by the scar was unnecessarily lurid, involving a shrieking nun and a meteor prophecy. As Lint continued the momentum of Parrot into the essays which would make up Prepare to Learn, his domestic life was falling apart around him. Madeline was outraged at Lint’s borrowing one of her dresses for the delivery of Parrot, disbelieving his assertion that it was common practice. She later commented about her short time with Lint: ‘It’s tough to sit at the table, listening to someone talk about a facsimile of a river replacing the river every alternate second. Friends dropped by for a beer and left believing their biceps were parasitic aliens. Hell, maybe they were. Maybe they were.’
10
CATTY AND THE MAJOR
False cartoon · everything · Can I see your skull, mister? · the cat and the burnt guy · exegesis · journeyman reavers · the Kecksburg Testicle · hit and run · casting out the self · Herzog breakdown
When NBC cancelled Rocky and Bullwinkle in 1964, they filled the slot temporarily with Achtung Alligator and began casting about for a longterm replacement—they wanted a zany but harmless new cartoon for the after-school slot. Alan Rouch had begun working as an assistant script editor at NBC and mentioned Lint’s name to department head Arnie Waldheim. Waldheim was a fan and asked Lint to come in and discuss ideas.
Madeline was long gone, Rouch was now living in a treehouse closer to the studio and Lint was a lonely but driven man. He was startled by the invitation, as he had recently had a weird dream in which he was watching a strangely-coloured cartoon on TV. A dark figure loomed up behind him and whispered: ‘That isn’t a cartoon.’
‘What is it?’ Lint asked.
‘It’s a false cartoon.’
During the meeting at the studio, Waldheim raved in detail about Turn Me Into a Parrot and Jelly Result, and Lint was ‘charm itself’, according to Rouch. Hired and surprised, Lint set about creating a product that would outreach the embellished vacuum of the average cartoon of the time. Television historians have since described Catty and the Major as ‘a wholesale defect’.
Lint was very specific about how the characters should look. The Major’s head was required to be ‘stained brown like a dead acorn or as though badly burnt’. Catty’s leonine head looks mis-matched with his body in a way which suggests he is wearing a massive rubber mask—when speaking, his mouth barely moves. Catty sometimes starts clicking his fingers and reciting his ‘crazy rhymes for schoolkids’:
CATTY: What the hell is that bulging thing?
MAJOR: Can’t you tell? It’s everything.
The Major’s voice is grating and low, his body apparently fragile, and he in fact seems to be in a constant state of dying. He often falls backwards, ‘clacking’, and lays inert for the remainder of the episode, wrecking any chance of frenetic action and complaining vaguely of an ache in his ‘rubies’. In the notorious third episode ‘Face It, Face It, Friend’, the Major coughs up blood. Impressed, Catty tells the Major ‘You are free!’ The dissolution of illness is a step on the road to death’s release. The Major bursts into bitter-sweet tears, the sky behind him spiralling like a hypnotic device. This shot continues for almost a full minute and has been blamed for provoking epileptic fits. Jamie Price of the Major-centred C&M fansite HereAreMyLastEverOrders.com has theorized that the Major’s condition of ‘arrested death’ is a symbol of nuclear threat in the age of ‘duck and cover’.
In July 1965 the first two episodes were shown to a test audience of kids aged six to fourteen. The children’s test cards point to a mixture of agitation, chastened terror, thoughtfulness and will to violence. One child emerged with the inquiry ‘Will I die now?’ Another approached an executive and asked ‘Can I see your skull, mister?’ God only knows how the show was allowed to proceed—Rouch later claimed that Lint agreed to make changes, but the four broadcast shows surpass any cartoon before or since in obscurely implied horror. In December 1965, households were treated to the strange banter of two creatures who stood mainly in a sort of abandoned gas station, moving in a distorted and freakish way, and flickering against muted colour. Catty and the Major visited the drawling Lord Lazenby, drove a long purple car and tried to dodge the terrifying Spike, a boulder-sized mace-head that ricocheted around in a hellish chaos of hazard, its out-of-control danger summoning a panicky blood-freeze in viewers. ‘I was so scared of that huge spike-ball,’ says fan David Shippers, ‘I locked myself in the bathroom and tried to suffocate myself with the dog.’ Other fans recount childhood nightmares in which they were pursued or otherwise molested by characters from the show. ‘Catty especially gave me alot of grief,’ states Jamie Price. ‘He would press his face really hard against mine and very slowly open his mouth so that I could feel the working of his cartoon jaw. In the dream he was called “Swan” but he was definitely Catty, for sure.’
Some fans point with especial horror to the second episode, ‘Soon Antiques’, in which the Major’s lips begin to droop and fall away like black wax. Investigating the problem, Catty finds the cause in Lord Lazenby’s yard—a replica of the Major’s head built from dead flies. Catty and the Major lift the curse by stuffing a doll with meat and ‘charging it up’ in the spire of a cathedral. Then they set the doll loose upon Lazenby—it causes mayhem in his kitchen until its head is blasted away by a shotgun wielded by Lazenby’s wife. The mutilated replica returns to its creators, chuckling horribly from half a face. Catty and the Major scream in unison, and the episode ends.
The show was at its most unsettling when the characters contemplated the suspect innards of false people, as they did in the fourth and last broadcast episode ‘Mannequin Heart’. Echoing the ‘false cartoon’ of Lint’s dream, this story featured the notion of a ‘false radio’ or block of ‘solid plastic space’ in which nothing can breathe. ‘It’ll never be popular,’ comments Catty prophetically. He and the Major begin the episode in an echoing ruin at night, moving only to pick up and discard an occasional cockroach—their criteria for approval is unclear. Then the Major begins to glide slowly forward as though on invisible wheels, plunging into shadow. Catty later finds him scrutinising the form of an armoured man that is embedded in the factory wall. For the rest of the episode they dig out pieces from the belly of the man and try to identify what they have. A strange, slowed-down trumpet tune begins to play over the scene. The Major is looking avid. ‘It will help me,’ he says. The frantic end titles burst in and it becomes cle
ar that the episode has concluded.
In December 1965 a child was reported as having belted his school principal around the face—the boy claimed that Catty and the Major had ordered him to ‘tenderize’ the man in preparation for their impending visit. At the network, C&M had become known as ‘that show about the cat and the burnt guy’. In January ‘66, Catty and the Major was cancelled—whether due to audience horror or Catty’s resemblance to Lippy the Lion (or both) is unclear.6 But the show has remained a presence through the massive exegesis of its deeper meanings. Those who have specialized in the study of the ‘Catty 4’ (the quartet of broadcast shows) have described an insidiously mounting horror, self-disclosing layers of suggestive meaning which point to ever darker motivations. Some have said the process becomes ‘intolerable’. In Edward A. Clark’s essay ‘Marching Orders: Imposed Authority in the Catty 4’ it is suggested that the main characters are both normal people incarcerated behind cartoon masks that will not be still or silent: ‘A frame-by-frame analysis of the Catty 4 has revealed 482 incidents of some kind of structure, foreign shape or unnecessary graduation of color visible in the open mouth of the Major. About half of these may be attributed to film grain, tenth-generation degradation and other artefacts. The others might be glimpses of the Major’s real face.’ C&M scholar Robin Lowman has gone further, isolating these ‘shapes and fluctuations’ in the dark mouth of the Major and stringing them together in a magnified, grossly abstract sequence. This eight-second flurry of quantum foam, she claims, shows quite clearly a trembling human mouth saying ‘Locked in, help, oh they have maimed me. No more, you’ll take me out, say it.’
There was a sensation in the C&M world in 1996 when Thomas Moorer isolated a single frame in episode 3 in which, in the tradition of cartoons from Betty Boop onward, the two characters appear naked for a single frame—the heads of both characters seem separate from the bodies as though jammed on like upturned buckets. Much of this analysis is summarised in Tatyana Koryagina’s ‘Degraded Image Quality in the Catty 4: Toon Rot and Slipping Masks.’
Many C&M studies concentrate on the relationship between the two protagonists. Den Hastert’s ‘Death as a Friend in Catty and the Major’ describes Catty as a kind of capering Reaper, carrying the ailing Major endlessly into his good night. Hestert (who famously authored ‘Gay Porn Color Schemes in Ernie & Bert’ with its coining of ‘faded stock confusion syndrome’) posits the notion that Catty and the Major are some sort of ‘champions’, though his reasoning is muddled and refers repeatedly to another show called Beany’s Flight, which apparently does not exist. In ‘Sediment of Cartoon in the Real World: the Major Crosses Over’, Jeffrey Brzozowski describes a dream in which he finds ‘toon dust’ in the corners of a room illuminated by a TV on which episode 4 is airing. The episode is slightly different from the one familiar to C&M fanatics, in that the Major actually dies and a tidal wave of grief engulfs the network. The toon ash burns like Hiroshima dust. After Brzozowski’s essay an entire subcult of C&M dream literature sprang up on websites such as FalseCartoon.com and CattyWasntCatty.com.
There is conflict among C&M cultists regarding the relative value of the Catty 4 and the several unproduced teleplays—indeed the four broadcast episodes are viewed very like the four gospels, to the apocrypha of the unbroadcast scripts. The most hard-line of the former are those who adhere to episode 1 (‘Blame’) as the be-all and end-all of C&M exegesis and express mortified disgust at the ‘soft’ end of the discourse (Catty dreamers). ‘Blame’ and its very slow yet apparently un-dodgeable flying fish is an odd episode but the scripts and sketches for the uncompleted shows make the aired adventures look bland indeed. Witness the story entitled ‘Satisfaction Replica’, in which Catty beats the Major like a cur for making a discovery. The Major has found Spike’s home, a ‘reaver hall’ that shunts intersecting razor blades across its space, dicing intruders. The episode also introduces us to the Journeyman Reavers, people who worship the alien Spike. The tale has the airless quality of a delirium nightmare. Another unproduced script (‘Untitled Catty script 3’) shows us Catty holding the Major down and using a tire pump to inflate the side of his neck, then bringing an unidentified contraption to bear on it and drawing out a greenish fluid. This is all that happens in the proposed episode.
Lint himself became aware of the show’s cult status in the late eighties and his only remark about it was ‘I should have aimed higher.’ He never had time for those who traded in tenth-generation pirate editions of the four and was bemused at the existence of ritualized parties at which the shows were projected upon two chosen revellers who must conform to the characters’ movements behind the Technicolour flush. Lint’s memories of 1965 were tainted by the events surrounding the removal of his right testicle—it had swollen to the size of an Irish heart and Lint had visited a specialist in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, for the operation. But he became scared at the last minute, stealing a gun from a child and climbing onto the roof of a fire station. The resultant siege, shooting of Lint with a tranquillizer dart and efficient surgery while cops tipped their hats back to laugh is one of the strangest incidents in Lint’s life. A giant replica of Lint’s ball now sits atop the Kecksburg fire house and many Lint fans make the pilgrimage there each year.
Lint was not surprised in early 1966 when Catty was wrenched off the air, and was already heavily involved in other projects, Prepare to Learn foremost among them. But in 1965-66 he was also distracted by obscure developments in the world of Cameo Herzog. Herzog was still based in New York, he and Lint corresponding only through an exchange of theoretical SF articles in Bloody Fantastic Idea magazine. But many have theorized that a hit-and-run incident in the street outside Lint’s home was the work of Herzog and Dean Rodence, whom Lint swore to seeing all aglee in the passenger seat of the oncoming truck. ‘My arm broke under the wheel,’ wrote Lint of the incident. ‘It didn’t sound like celery, which surprised me. It sounded like the bone-conducted thump of a marrow when you knock it against the counter. And you do.’
Yet it seems Herzog was on the East Coast at this time, as several of his journalistic colleagues have attested to the florid breakdown he suffered in the lobby of the New York Public Library.
Caul Pin, the eccentric old Brit who would become notorious for his failed ‘Earth Sandwich’ project, witnessed Herzog’s convulsions. ‘It wasn’t very practical,’ he says today. ‘He looked like a sort of convulsing ghoul. There was something so fundamentally spooky about the fit. But the finality was like sudden attention for him, I suppose. He was saying things like, “I have clattered a thousand talents on the concrete through my frosty correctness and loved it! I am fattening the palmed coin as we are taught we should! I will not be attacked by some beefy idiot, or skeletons cleansed by God in the silvery world!” Something along those lines anyway. No one’s more conspicuous than a man who’s awoken from a lifetime of imaginary authenticities.’
It seems that the source of Herzog’s grief was his feud with Lint in the pages of Bloody Fantastic Idea. In an interview with the magazine, Lint had spun the notion that since crustaceans were skeletons containing meat and mammals were meat containing skeletons, then since the bones of human beings enclosed organs and marrow, humans were in fact crustaceans. In a subsequent issue Herzog countered that calcium traces in organs and marrow technically constituted a central bone system and that we were mammals after all. Impressed, Lint agreed. Taken by surprise, Herzog was simply unable to accept this turn of events.
A week after the library incident Herzog showed up in a meat market, running amok with some kind of rubber hose until cornered by police. Lint was in town to deliver half of Prepare and Caul Pin collared the sundressed author in the street, apprising him of the situation. Lint soon found himself at the siege scene insisting through a megaphone that Herzog was indeed wrong—within calcium were atomic particulates of carbon molecules and so on. Privately Lint was asking the cops why they didn’t just use a tranquillizer dart on the bastard—‘That�
��s what they did with me.’
Herzog gave himself up, his hose was confiscated and he was led away swearing revenge. There is newsreel footage of his turbulent arrest, Herzog throwing panic at the camera. Glimpses of Lint looking on show him wearing some sort of bouffant daisy-patterned Montgomery Ward number with fitted bodice and full shirred skirt with an attached nylon petticoat. The further Herzog’s career fell behind, the more strident his public claims became. While on parole he wrote several letters to the Boston Globe declaring that Lint was a ‘rogue maniac’ published only through criminal indulgence. ‘Shoot me if I ever write like that.’
When Herzog’s body was found a year later, his forehead containing a 9mm Parabellum slug, Lint was hauled in as the key suspect. But his surprised laughter upon hearing of the incident was so clearly honest, the police felt foolish (and reportedly ‘soiled’) in holding him.
11
“DEBATE THIS, YOU MOTHER”— SMASHING THE READER IN PREPARE TO LEARN
Absorbing all consequence · Vacuum as Policy · hyperlife · too many novelties in his nobility · America Immaculata · pragments · honoured and scorned · Paradox results from artificial boundaries
In 1966 Lint lowered what he called his ‘flesh stylus’ onto the world and started laughing. He knew an author was exempt from mercy and bore this in mind to bluff-call and bring plain all potential and unspoken dangers in his path. ‘Art is one of those sure scapegoats,’ he told me in 1992, ‘absorbing all consequence with only mild surprise. But in a dull vacuum it’s yet human nature to try striking a match.’ Prepare to Learn is a fierce environment of hurtling ideas like blurred paintballs from every direction, demands expounded in a hundred ways and justice expressed through easy mischief. The tradition of different explanations given by each rebel; that was a galling art, almost lost.