Lint

by Steve Aylett

  And he was happy to ‘grip the lavish old planks’ himself. It is apparently true that during a free-form exercise in which Lint was asked to re-experience his emergence from the womb, he sprang up and started firing a gun. And he often came unstuck while winging it onstage, as in his cameo during 27 Workshy Slobs. Boutwell takes up the story: ‘Lint went off into some sort of improv about red murder-blood on an ice floe or something, how that was real, but glory is reduced to altars. He kept trailing off and looking at the audience in silence, like he was expecting some sort of response.’ He finally got one when someone fired a flaming arrow into his right leg.

  ‘Lint’s pants burst into flames and he was shrieking, collapsing back and forth across the stage,’ Bob Prince described later in his autobiography A Publicist at My Grave. ‘Of course most of the audience thought it was part of the show, and were booing.’

  In the hospital, Lint re-examined his philosophy of stagecraft. ‘The modern musical should be more than a mere ceremony subject to diabolical ambience etc,’ wrote Lint. ‘It should be subject to criminal suspicion and possible arrest.’ Thus in The Riding on Luggage Show critics were baffled by the indistinct image of a gaunt creature crouching in blasts of electric light. Was he injecting himself or playing a violin? ‘The harp was dripping with chromosomes, making the performance revolting,’ wrote Roland Harriman of the Albuquerque Tribune. ‘Luggage displays all the symptoms of an angular hell. And when I tried to leave, I found that they had childishly locked the doors.’

  ‘Respect is rarely acrobatic,’ said Ivy Rhyging in a review of A Dog Arrives Altered, a Mistake in Scale, ‘and with all their leaping these bastards show the audience none.’ Diren Grey’s article on the Consolation experience was titled ‘My Lost Hours’.

  Of Blame the Mouth (later retitled Blame the Moth), in which the entire cast dies whimsically early, Debbie Oxenhandler wrote ‘Lint’s contempt shows through like the sun through clouds. There is no middle of the road to Damascus for this bastard.’ Other critics were less generous, as evidenced by Corney Lievense’s description of Moth as a ‘fecal downpour’ and the damning Santa Fe Times headline MOTH PLAYWRIGHT DESCRIBED AS ‘LONER’.

  Blame the Mouth/Moth was a chaotic production in which the hero, LeRoy, is blamed when everyone wakes up wearing monstrous costumes of, according to the aggrieved Police Chief, ‘kerosene-resistant velvet’:

  CHIEF: Don’t worry about LeRoy. For all his posturing, he’s still just a spider.

  LEROY: It’s true you know, I am a spider.

  CAST: Join us, Chief—we need your strength!

  CHIEF: Well, juxtaposition isn’t much of an incentive. But I’ll think about it.

  The play was made quite famous by a headline misprint in Variety reading OBSCENE PLAY ATTRACTS MASSIVE CROW. Lint comforted the cast when audiences were hostile, saying that ‘Thrown stones were once stars.’

  ‘These kids are hot with hurry and hazard,’ he wrote under a pseudonym in the Village Voice. ‘Make way for a fab new generation, grandad.’

  ‘When I see what I’ve done so far I’m too pleased to apologize,’ Lint wrote to Terry Southern, and set about creating his theatrical masterpiece The Converse Bell. At ten hours with one hectic, desperate interval, Bell was daunting and operatic, culminating in the crucifixion of Strobe Bricker (played by Jane Boutwell) on a street sign flashing WALK/DON’T WALK as blood sprayed from the theatre’s sprinkler system, drenching the audience. The troupe left Albuquerque behind, touring Bell and Luggage in LA and then settling at a new fire hazard on New York’s West Forty-Sixth Street. Lint, still largely based in California, was less involved with the Consolation Playhouse from here on in, writing only two more source works for them—A Team Becomes Embers Together, and the knockabout slapstick of I’m Carnal, You’re Mostly Made of Ham. Lint would formally sever contact with the troupe in 1970 (when it became the Consolation Arts Lab), citing artistic differences and his belief in ‘the bitter strength of the densely rooted’. Lost in the quagmire of sixties experimental theatre, his plays were rarely performed after 1970, though in fact they have dated less than most fringe work from the period. In 1988 a new production of The Coffin Was Labelled Benjy the Bear was put on in London’s Garrick Theatre. At that time in theatreland it was considered innovative—no matter what the subject of the play—to dress an entire cast in Nazi uniform, thus implying a heavy subtext in even the lightest fare. In the case of Benjy the Bear it had been originally stated that the characters were Nazis, but through the constant revision involved in Consolation’s interpretative process this detail had been dropped. So by the fashionable re-dressing of the 1988 production Lint’s intended meaning was inadvertently reinstated. ‘Your mischievous remedies have smashed us all!’ shrieks Alger Lattimore as blood streams from his eyes. ‘Mankind will become a rib cage atoll!’

  13

  “MY GOBLIN HELL”

  Death of Agent Baines · three fifths of a mile in three months · vestigial tail · Just One Honest Statement · sorcerer’s apprentice · ‘Or the mosquito gets it’ · Dragons of Aggrazar

  Lint’s contract with Doubleday had an unexpected sting in the tail. It obligated Lint to produce some sort of sword and sorcery adventure, full of inconvenient elves and pompously abstruse wizards in the style of Tolkien, whose Hobbit books were hitting big in the sixties. When he learned of this Lint went to see his literary agent Robert Baines in New York, only to find the office locked and a strange, swarming thrum sounding from within. Baines was in an advanced state of decomposition, his office blasting with blowflies and methane gas, and still he was taking 15 percent of Lint’s earnings—Lint was not to hear of the death during his own lifetime.

  ‘I only had three months to spring it on them,’ Lint would later comment. ‘And I wasn’t in any shape.’ His notes from the time give an indication of his state of mind: ‘I suppose, then, there’s a procedure. Procedure will have its—what’s the score here? have its—duplicate my car—face me and see—so, wizards? Wizards. I give up, what are they? my privates are lashed to a nightmare pig—America’s blame-reflex, burning a hole in its pocket.’ Despair was evident in his choice of associates, Phil Silvers among them.

  Through a mix-up Rolling Stone had offered Lint $500 to cover a Nevada martial arts show and he thought to use the time to break into the book. Apparently Lint drove into the hotel lobby in an explosion of glass and, stepping out, claimed to be ‘a fantastic bunny, with no reservation’. Luckily he did have a reservation, as well as an expense account for the course of the festival. ‘The desert was made of sugar,’ he added with a laugh. Lint had become convinced that he had a vestigial tail in the middle of his face and, stung by his own heartbeats, settled into the hotel room for a brainstorm that lay the ground for his ‘Fantastic Lemon’ experience of ‘73. The spiral catalogue of his crimes roared down upon him like a mechanical shark, its tail a lash of full-spectrum agony—the scaly rainbow of human evils. Dogs dropped through the dimension playing cancerous harps. Satire traffic crossed the room, blasting papers off the mantel and generally mucking up his judgment. The next thing Lint was aware of was a delegation of thugs on his doorstep with a bedlam of accusations. When the hotel management asked him to confirm his name, Lint professed ignorance and tore down a strip of wallpaper to blow his nose. They roared him to the police precinct, where he gave his name as Isaac Asimov and gazed upon the officers with glossy, drugged eyes. He was almost incoherently mellow and the only phone number he could offer them for confirmation was that of the festering Robert Baines. But on returning to the hotel he found the scrawled manuscript of Just One Honest Statement There in the Hat, and Civilization Saved; A Fantasy.

  It seemed to be the story of a sorcerer’s apprentice whose curt and hated master crashes through social custom while holding before him like a warding cross the justification that he is teaching everyone an arcane truth. In fact the so-called wizard is just an appalling old man and the lesson all must learn is to kick him away when he draws
near. Passing through a small village, he remarks ‘I just stamped on the head of a caterpillar, I hope you won’t despise me for it,’ before launching into a five-page mockery of the villagers’ corn-prolonging prayer. In a return to the dimensional glimpses of Jelly Result, we see ‘a moment trailing behind him, revealing his machinations’. ‘Bringing the cauldron isn’t everything,’ he sneers at the apprentice.

  They meet some sort of zombie and only the apprentice seems curious. ‘What is it like, being dead?’

  ‘Adequate for my needs,’ says the dead man, and then the wizard slashes a bucket of water over him for no reason, cackling like a bastard. Throughout the book the apprentice must repeatedly apologize for his master’s dismal antics.

  It is a life of forced limitation. When the apprentice suggests in young wonder that the royal castle must be majestic, the old man is dour and doubtful. ‘Heavy in ironbound marvels. But majestic? No. A few warriors glint on the doorstep, with spitting bumpers for eyeballs.’

  ‘They cry?’

  ‘All the time.’

  At one point they encounter a real shaman and the apprentice asks him his future.

  ‘Among rock I have foreseen dates,’ says the real sorcerer, standing before a slope of ciphered graphite. But before the shaman can make his predictions, the old man shoves him, knocking his head on the cliff and probably killing him.

  ‘No fuss,’ says the old man as he leads the concerned apprentice away. ‘Your dainty biology will disintegrate, don’t you worry. What they will find is a vapor of an abstract boy.’ The codger has stolen the wizard’s grimoire and recites a page, at which a hanged silver creature rears from the floor amid crystal exertions of growth, water circulating in silent innards. Eight feet tall, the dream murders ten local innocents before buggering off again. The old man offers no apology to the townsfolk save to say complacently, ‘The meal of nature never ends.’

  Finally, the reputation of the old man precedes him and those he would bore evade him, crying: ‘Ringing in his throat, a reminiscence is minutes from emerging—let’s get out of here! Avoid fellows like this who are merely vague approximations, yes, search out the real thing, gentlemen!’

  When the two travellers meet a devil-worshipping cannibal, the fraudulent wizard tries to marry the boy off to him. The apprentice protests that there is no priest, merely an aura of pure evil. ‘The devil can perform a marriage,’ chides the old man. ‘It’s like a Captain at sea.’ The boy now heaves a sigh which runs the course of eight pages, a sigh so chambered and elaborate it contains whole fields of golden circuitry and contracting skin, motives purifying in the sun. The killing of the old man escalates into a vivid bacchanalia to which all the book’s characters are invited, the three witches from chapter four cackling ‘Casserole his secrets, sisters!’ as they boil the charlatan. Hands drizzle with blood.

  In a sort of epilogue, the boy, now a sorcerer, opens a stream and points at its inner structure, cages and cages receding into infinity. In one of these cages is the old man. ‘This is not a striped suit—I’m reduced to a skeleton,’ calls the codger. The young sorcerer climbs down, releasing the now sad old man, and they proceed downward to visit hell. Observing a ceremony in ‘the blind sound church’, they voice their suspicion of the priest:

  ‘What’s that hidden in his euphoria?’

  ‘It looks exactly like a religious charlatan’s earnest tension!’

  Attacking everyone, they are happy at last. But the priest halts them, affronted, and orders them to kneel.

  ‘Why would I want to occupy a god reddened with others’ blood?’ the boy asks.

  The priest’s appearance changes to that of a godhead. ‘You were meant to battle this beast.’ The boy is granted a glimpse of a dragon in a coloured reach of tingling space. ‘Why did you waste your life?’

  ‘Because there were absolutely no clear and uncontradicted instructions left for me,’ says the young sorcerer. ‘The system is almost totally unworkable.’ The young man realises that his current happiness derives from his coincidentally attacking someone who truly deserves it, the proverbial needle in the haystack. He scribbles through the god with his sword, slashing it to pieces.

  The thoroughly unpleasant aspect of the old man, the long frustration of the boy’s progress and the bickering dialogue of the two characters all serve to make There in the Hat a far cry from the sort of book where magic ructions are sacred. ‘I suppose I never will be right until I’m ready to leech wisdom from you, eh?’ was not the sort of response required from a sorcerer’s apprentice, in a genre book anyway. The elf-clotted landscape is populated with ‘impractical customs, politicians pointing where they’re not going, guardians unflappably asleep and figments of your imagination’.

  A journal note at the end of the handwritten manuscript says: ‘Spent the morning peeling angels off the ceiling. At eleven I offered to explain why alot of everyday stuff simply didn’t apply to me, thinking no one could fail to be stirred by my oratory. Think again.’ Lint would type up this piss-poor attempt at dragon fantasy two weeks later and mail it to Doubleday, who published it under the title Dragons of Aggrazar in 1970. ‘Some

  jesters pray for reality,’ wrote Lint. ‘That book was as dumb as putting a belt round a bottle.’

  His report on the martial arts conference consisted of a line-drawing of a honeysuckle.

  14

  HOLLYWOOD HACK

  Banish m’Colleagues · The Gloom Is Blinding · Fanny fire · Kiss Me, Mister Patton · mannered and epicene · ghost of corporate future · five curses

  Lint had always thought Hollywood impregnable to talent and in the mid-sixties was still chiding Terry Southern for ‘selling out’ with the success of Dr. Strangelove. But Lint was hard up when publishers such as Doubleday and NEL seemed briefly to develop a taste for his earlier stories. It transpired that Doubleday had begun reprinting his material with such exuberance because they thought he was dead. This increased the shock when he appeared in their offices wearing a dress, the Random-rejected Banish m’Colleagues in hand.

  Robert Sellers, a lowly sub-editor at the time, confirms Lint’s odd belief that an author should unfailingly dress up as ‘some kind of cheerleader’ when submitting a manuscript. ‘He was huge, like an ageing boxer, and barely fit into the skirt. I sort of took pity on him. The chief editor wanted to kill him with a tubular chrome chair, he had it raised over his head. I thought Lint could do something marketable but Colleagues was about these wandering elephants and was maudlin at best.’

  Indeed Banish m’Colleagues frequently lapsed into verse, as in the ‘Send Serum Stop’ chapter:

  an elephant mended

  is a tusker befriended

  an elephant dead

  is as big as a shed

  Sellers encouraged Lint to bring in his next book, and was rewarded a week later with the manuscript of Balloons Hear and Understand, a piece of trash. Sellers suggested he try to option it to a picture company, and put Lint on to a friend at Columbia, who passed him on to Kenneth Turnour, an executive who happened to be a fan. He called Lint to tell him he had burned Balloons for the good of everyone, and Lint rushed around to the studio to strangle the reserved Englishman. ‘He didn’t seem to know how to do it,’ Turnour said years later. ‘Instead of strangling my neck, he sort of grabbed me around the middle of my head, squeezing that. It surprised me, but it was hardly dangerous.’

  Turnour explained the movie business to the stubborn author and Lint seemed to be taking it aboard, but his first venture into pictures was the result of his stealing a camera from the studio. The Gloom is Blinding, an experimental short in which a blurred clown (played by a young Alan Alda) eats a chicken to the sound of Green Onions by Booker T and the MGs, caused Turnour to actually black out. Lint later took the reel with him to pitch meetings as proof that his inaugural leanings were purged. ‘I was convinced,’ stated Turnour, ‘that once his baroque tendencies were vented, he could produce a damned good screenplay.’

 
; Yet Lint’s first real script was Despair and the Human Condition, in which two grizzled idiots sit at a tool-strewn workbench in a dim garage and talk intricate shite for ninety minutes. Behind them stands a pirate made entirely of wood except for one leg of living flesh. The dialogue between the two men proceeds incrementally:

  MAN 1: I will exact vengeance, er, retaliation, is that the word?

  MAN 2: Yes.

  MAN 1: Retaliation. Your blood will …

  MAN 2: Flow?

  MAN 1: Flow, yes. Yes, all over. So, er, what do you reckon?

  MAN 2: About what?

  MAN 1: Retaliation, your injuries and so on.

  MAN 2: Sounds like a plan—simple, direct, with passion and just cause. I’m in.

  MAN 1: In, you bastard?

  And so on. Upon receiving a first draft, the baffled but trusting Turnour insisted that Lint inject a science fiction element. Lint responded by garbing the three figures in space suits, the speaking duo with mirrored visors in place to increase the mystery, but the pirate’s visor up so that all could understand it was a mere wooden buccaneer. ‘As for the live leg,’ Lint wrote to Terry Southern with a dawning pragmatism, ‘the loss is a bitter but unavoidable concession.’ Yet he alluded to the leg in crafty new dialogue for the masked figures: