I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

  He then described—for an hour—one particular, technically challenging zoom-in shot on something he referred to as a “crack o’ wheat,” apparently some ball-like, stationary object he’d placed at the end of a camera track, as if I would naturally know what a “crack o’ wheat” was. I still have no idea. I still don’t care, either.

  The other consuming theme of our interview, to which he returned again and again in case I had overlooked its importance the first time, was the fact that Jack Nance, the film’s lead actor, had had to wear the same bizarre Afro for five years because Lynch’s production money had repeatedly dried up.

  I disliked David Lynch immensely. His stories were humorless and boring. His smarmy air as he stirred his Postum was even creepier than his movie. However, it occurred to me that his tedious wholesomeness, so exaggerated that it seemed perverse in a way quite opposite to his movie, might be a brilliant ruse, like Magritte’s formal dinner jackets.

  “I would never agree to do a Hollywood-type film,” he assured me, “unless I could make all the actors unrecognizably ugly.”

  He followed Eraserhead with The Elephant Man, a treacly tale with a message of tolerance for those who are different, in which Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, and Anthony Hopkins looked exactly the way they did in everything else, the only ugly standout being John Hurt as the eponymous Elephant Man.

  People aren’t expected to be happy, as an ongoing condition, anywhere on earth, not really, except in propaganda, advertising, sitcoms. Life is pessimistic because we die. How could it be otherwise? But when people spill into the abyss, they discover that they aren’t allowed to be extremely unhappy as a chronic thing, either, and become the object of impatience, dread, fear—fear that their hopelessness is contagious, as in the case of the bus driver who ran over the soccer star.

  fourteen

  Melancholia is playing at the Milan cinema on La Rampa. I considered recommending it to P., having thought about this film for months, but she is the debutante type so common in the art world, familiar with proper names and the prices of various objects but completely uninterested in anything more demanding than a thumbnail reproduction and a press release. That’s as true of many high-end dealers as it is of fringe figures like P., who caters receptions in her house, and arranges this and that for visiting artists. They all have the mentality of pork butchers who keep both thumbs on the scale. It’s doubtful she would ever go to a movie house on La Rampa, anyway. Alcoholics and psychiatrists, I read somewhere, both avoid going to the movies.

  Something was off with the projection, or the print, or both, it looked as if the movie I saw in New York had been run through a bath of Clorox, but it was still very powerful. I felt curious to see how a Cuban audience would react. People leaving the theater looked stunned. That might have been the Clorox effect. But they all dispersed quickly. I had no chance to eavesdrop on their conversations. When I first saw Melancholia, I was crawling out of my own living death, and the film pulled me right back into it. At the same time, the fact that someone had pictured this state of depressive alienation was, on some level, soothing. It confirmed something true about the melancholiac’s view of the world, his/her indifference to its empty rituals and false emotions. Certainly by the time Justine tells Claire that “life on Earth is evil,” the film has proven it in spades. “What kind of God,” my father used to ask, “would have invented the food chain?”

  I wondered if Lars von Trier experienced any benefit from the large number of people concerned about him, and decided probably not. When you go behind the moon, no one can follow you there to bring you back, and the quality of darkness is so overwhelming it can’t be described. The words that could describe it, like most words, have been rendered meaningless by the hyperbole of vernacular speech. When everything is awesome and amazing, anything really out of the ordinary is practically inexpressible.

  I also wondered if he deliberately piled on the operatic melancholia of Tristan and Isolde and Caspar David Friedrich in hopes that pushing it all beyond the pale would humor him back into a tolerable frame of mind. One is desperate for something to laugh about, even if it’s the end of all existence in the universe. It is usual for people in depression to try anything, anything at all, to make it go away. But people in depression are also, usually, incapable of taking the smallest steps. Justine can’t lift her foot to get into the bathtub. Meat loaf, the one thing she might be counted on to enjoy eating, tastes like ashes in her mouth, and she can’t swallow it.

  After Ferd reappeared, my sporadic contacts with Carol increased. Over the years she had called me from time to time, in a rush of maniacal inspiration to involve me in projects that had occurred to her on a jumbo dose of lithium, projects that became, sometimes for a few days, but usually for a few hours at most, all-consuming obsessions. Carol caught me in moments of drastic susceptibility, when my daily situation felt utterly shitty and hopeless, at the onset of clinical depression (mine). Although I knew her to be a seriously destructive person, who drew people into her narrative for the express purpose of turning on them and making them miserable, and used her biopolar disorder as an obnoxious weapon, she had a strangely powerful, arachnid glamour that made me feel closer to her than I did to many people I liked a lot better.

  Her visits to LA were jarring, difficult longueurs. She had listened to the tapes I improvised driving to work—the cab driver, the terrorist, the studio hairdresser—and she sketched out a video project in which I would incarnate the characters. She sounded scarily but seductively enthusiastic, suggesting we commence as quickly as possible.

  By the weekend, (her) depression had become so crippling that even lifting the phone to say she wasn’t coming was an act too fraught with sensations of failure and guilt for her to go through with it. A few days later, her excitement became boundless again, a new date was set, but as it approached, her mind shifted again to the dark side, an abyss in which a simple phone call asking if her plans had changed was perceived as an act of savage aggression on my part.

  The element of attrition involved in sustained interaction with Carol suggested the wisdom of keeping her at tongs’ length. She actually came to the Bryson, finally, several times, lugging her Film Studies Sony Portapak, but each time was overwhelmed by ambivalence about whether it was the “right time” to shoot anything, considering the horrible mood she was in after driving all the way to LA from Goleta. When I suggested we might forget the whole thing for a while, that the world wouldn’t crumble if the comedy gold of a few amphetamine ravings went untaped for posterity, Carol shrieked that I had “dragged” her into making these videotapes, forced her to make the crucifying drive to Los Angeles, and was now adding to her martyrdom by calling it all off. She was insane, as I’ve already mentioned.

  All the same, the idea of a reunion of the three of us naturally suggested itself and then became an inevitability. I can only suppose we were all ridiculously driven to force our lives into a legible story line. Getting together would fill a worrisome blank space between 1969 and 1976. Carol and Ferd hated each other, but neither could admit it—that was too unsophisticated. During their Evanston period, Ferd had dutifully finished his MA at Northwestern, and Carol, I think, earned a PhD at the University of Chicago. They’d lived together in some dingy basement flat, in a hell of seething animosity. Arthur Ginsberg included scenes of their Evanston inferno as an epilogue to The Adventures of Carol and Ferd: they were grim, like Warhol’s Kitchen, and the crapulous quality of half-inch black-and-white videotape made the two combatants appear submerged in an ocean of colorless cooking oil. Yet having divorced and lost track of each other, now that they knew each other’s location, they were determined to prove they were adults, and had outgrown the murderous loathing they still felt for each other.

  We went to a Directors Guild screening of Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar. Afterward we went to my apartment for drinks. In the Bryson elevator, as he pulled the metal gate shut, Ferd sighed, with an oracular exhaustion
I can still hear after thirty-five years: “There aren’t going to be any more highs.”

  In that remarkable moment, a switch was thrown in my brain. I suddenly knew that I had expected, for years, the bleak atmosphere of the 1970s to blow away one sunny day like fog, and the good good times of the 1960s to roll back in. The sour, disillusioned era of Patty Hearst and Watergate and Baader-Meinhof, I realized, was not an interruption of the revolution—however I’d pictured that, if I’d pictured it at all—but an ugly portent of inevitable things to come, the first gasp of the final strangulation of human dreams. Reality would always be harsh reality, and the world would forever divide into winners and losers, and if you were wired the way we were, you would unavoidably end up a loser. Deluded as Ferd often was, I recognized that he’d said something true.

  Some further outings ensued, but the novelty quickly wore off. An entrenched habit of instant contradiction, of sniping, sulfurous innuendoes suggestive of Tracy and Hepburn with Dexedrine hangovers, or two chittering rattlesnakes in a lethal mating dance, made their company unbearable. I felt implicated in their bilious outpourings, even responsible for their ugly feelings. The Carol and Ferd show dragged me to early evening cocktail lounges, some dinners at the then-only Japanese restaurant outside Japan Town, on Hoover. I felt like glue sticking them together when they should have inhabited different solar systems.

  One night they descended in tandem on the Westland Twins, supposedly to watch a remake of The Woman in the Window, but really to watch me drudging behind the concession counter. I felt as if my own insignificance in their rejuvenated drama was their only point of friendly agreement, and that they’d come to the theater to deflect their mutual contempt by spilling it on me.

  “Don’t believe a word that person tells you,” I told Mary after they’d gone into the auditorium.

  “I thought she was an old friend of yours.”

  “Not by choice, I assure you.”

  But it is a choice, of course, a bad one that plays itself out over the remaining year in Los Angeles: Carol calls, in a dire, wheedling voice implores me to drive up to where she lives in Goleta one Saturday when the rains are so violent the radio warns of possible mud slides on the PCH. When I arrive at her motel-like apartment complex, she refuses to let me in, as if she never made the call and I have rudely invaded her privacy. She orders her boyfriend, a spineless teahead with shoulder-length hair, twenty years her junior, to shove a gift package into my hands in the doorway. All the way back down the coast, the car skids and slides over lakes of pounding rain, the wipers useless, the sheets of iron mesh holding various canyon walls in check threatening to burst at any moment, sending an avalanche of shit down the hills to fling the car into the Pacific.

  I pull into Dart Square as the typhoon tapers down to a heavy drizzle, in front of the Rexall’s where Aldous Huxley first dropped mescaline. I tear off the ridiculously festive wrapping paper and rip open the box to find an ashtray commemorating the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, an Indian beaded belt, and a paperback collection of William Carlos Williams poems: what on earth does it mean?

  Meanwhile, Ferd inquires, with urgent secrecy, if I’m willing to “store” something in my apartment. Something “we,” meaning he and his commune, need to “keep somewhere else.”

  “It depends what it is, I’m not living in Versailles, you know.”

  “It’s nothing big, it’s the size of an Army foot locker, something like that. Like a steamer trunk. It would probably fit under your bed.”

  “You mean to say you don’t have enough space for a trunk? I thought you guys had a house.”

  “It isn’t that we don’t have room … see, it’s full of papers and stuff that—if we get raided, it’s material that, you know, could be considered incriminating.”

  “What material? Diagrams of a hydrogen bomb?”

  “Just underground papers, reports, minutes of meetings, but you know yourself, if they want to bust you for something and make a case—”

  “Look, Ferd, if it would incriminate you, it would obviously incriminate me.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, let’s hear that old Cartesian reasoning, I dare you.”

  “For the simple reason that you’re not doing anything suspicious. You’re not under surveillance.”

  “And you are? Are you sure you’re not paranoid?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he says with a shrug.

  “If I agree,” I tell him, “and you aren’t paranoid, how do I know I won’t end up like Kirilov in Demons?”

  “I promise you won’t,” Ferd says. “Really, you won’t.” Then adds, Jesuitically, raising one drooping eyelid, “But isn’t it exciting to think you might?”

  The mysterious chest, a pigskin affair with metal corners, with a cheap padlock in front, was duly delivered, by Ferd and a tall bearded guy in overalls. We jammed it into a closet. I believe it was full of weapons, but I never opened it. I knew I was taking a stupid risk. I knew that most normal people would report a plot to blow up a building. I wasn’t wired that way. I wasn’t in the habit of calling the police about anything. I preferred to think nothing would happen. I was also curious to see if something would. Like many people at that time, I had no strong moral objections to the idea of terrorism, however messy its actual practice was.

  A month later, two strangers from the commune showed up to recover the chest. This cryptic object and its secretive shuttle through the city seemed a logical part of the narrative, however indecipherable. The International Women’s Conference came and went without explosion.

  I sensed that things were advancing, despite the static atmosphere of that summer. Some missing pieces of the picture would click into place, the answers to barely formulated questions would rain from the skies. I could feel it the way you feel weather in your bones after a fracture.

  Before the trunk removal, Dane was touchingly exercised about its presence in my apartment.

  “You don’t even know the fuck’s in it,” he said. “What if it’s a bomb and it goes off and kills you? I’ll help you throw it out if you want.”

  It showed that he loved me a little, enough to feel protective, which counted for something. Since Dane was elusive and seldom around, and went through the world with the bright confidence and self-absorption of men hung like horses, I felt lucky when he surprised me with proprietary affection, although the affair was basically over. It had been agreed from the jump that it wouldn’t be a long-term thing, that we would never constitute a “couple.” But he had become something like a friend. He was leaving Los Angeles, either for Austin, where he had friends, or Miami, where they had bugs. He was anxious, he said, not to get “locked in” to one city, and if he could someday manage it, thought he might even move to Amsterdam, where you could buy hashish in a café and live on a houseboat. There was no shortage of household vermin wherever you went.

  The thought of Dane leaving town was more distressing than the idea of never sleeping with him again. I had a horror of being left behind, of remaining stuck in a prison of habit while friends made bold changes in their lives. It seemed many people I knew were laying plans, plotting out futures, preparing to stake some claim to real existence in the ebb and flow of things, while I floundered like a formless blob, failing to acquire any consistent identity. I lacked the imagination or the will to abandon everything and fly to Amsterdam or Istanbul and figure out how to survive after getting there, which might have defined me in a more legible way, at the least as “an expatriate.” I had published a few things, in some obscure places, but couldn’t really call myself “a writer.”

  I hadn’t accomplished a single thing. I continued my daily shuttle from Watts to Westwood, continued mooning over Don at Chatterton’s, hitting the Masque on weekends, weekdays racing to the Detour and the One Way and the Spike to strike expressive poses in the two hours before closing, pick up strangers, fuck between two o’clock and four, and wake after three hours’ sleep to jump on the hamster wheel al
l over again. Pasolini’s Salò ran as a midnight movie at the Pico that season. As I knew the manager, I watched it about twenty times on a comp. Salò confirmed my view of the big picture: a world of slaves forced to eat shit by large, unattractive men.

  My sole achievement at the time was a stapled, four-page xeroxed zine called Teeny Duchamp Arrested for Shoplifting, which I put together at the office and handed out at the cavernous Elks Hall during the now-legendary benefit for the Masque, which was losing its lease on the basement club off Hollywood Boulevard. It was a strange evening, in what was basically a retirement home reminiscent of Gloria Swanson’s mansion in Sunset Boulevard, that started with a set by The Go-Go’s and ended with a mini police riot that dispersed not only the benefit, but the seething nihilist energy that had been driving the punk scene. Actually, the scene continued, but for me the air leaked out of that particular balloon that night. I had made a timorous effort to insert myself into things, but could never shake the feeling of being somehow too odd, too inhibited, too gay, or too boringly intellectual for people to really accept me.

  The Bryson was undergoing unpleasant changes, another sign of things drawing to some conclusion. Stephanie was fired. The building owners installed a preposterous couple, a pair of nosy, creepily Norman Rockwell–looking Okies to run the hotel. Ignorant, malevolent Dust Bowl hicks from central casting: a skinny crone with a sharp, evil face and her dithering, flatulent husband. They weren’t even Californian Okies, but the genuine article, grafted from some invasive vegetable species in the high-wheat country directly onto the furniture behind the reception desk. (The tableau they presented every day in the lobby was reproduced note-perfectly in The Grifters thirteen years later—even more weirdly, the bizarre shotgun accident depicted at the beginning of Magnolia occurs through what used to be my living room window at the Bryson.)