Come Back

by Sky Gilbert

  But the birth of gay marriage — the kindly gay priest swathed in rainbow colours — this was normalcy; the dance of death for gay identity. For gay was, and always had been, tragic. Gay was Blanche DuBois, Death in Venice, the coughing, sputtering Greta Garbo in Camille. Those who lived, married and somehow managed to produce a successive generation were no longer gay. Certain post-AIDS fags quite hopelessly clung to the tragic paradigm. Dash King is perhaps not the most brilliant, but is certainly the most characteristic, example of a generation of men who, though there was undoubtedly a medical cause for their disease (which has now become only as serious as diabetes), were also seduced by a suicidal paradigm that AIDS fit right into. I am not the first to theorize this; I have found an obscure essay by Casper G. Schmidt, a psychoanalyst from South Africa who died of AIDS in the 1980s. He theorized that AIDS was a kind of mass hysteria, a suicidal complex shared by gay men as a result of their treatment at the hands of the religious right. In The Stonewall Experiment, Ian Young proposes that gay men have believed their own negative publicity to such an extent that they marched to their own death.

  This is not to say that AIDS didn’t exist. But one notices that the construction begins not to be associated with homosexuals after the turn of the century. This is because homosexuality was at this point dead as a cultural force. AIDS had become, along with the cancer battle, anti-terrorism and environmentalism, a global issue. This means it became a family issue — focused on hope and the future, as all issues are these days. We know now, of course, what happened to environmentalism. One wonders not so much at the stupidity of mankind but at its naïveté and self-centredness. It was sentimental to imagine that we could save the world or that our human lives were, in fact, the centre of it; instead we had to settle for science and cybernetics, which has allowed us to live on a dying planet in unreal bodies that, increasingly, do not require air to survive.

  And then, unfortunately, the so-called terrorists won. (Well, I know they were not really terrorists, but they were Arabs, and dressing like terrorists, so they might as well have been.) But that may not ultimately have been such a bad thing. No one could have run the world without some compromise. I am trying to fit my analysis of Dash into a larger worldview. You have deemed it essential that I prove I am obsessing over him because I have something of scholarly import to say, not because I am neurotically and perhaps dangerously attached to his story. Well, here goes. . . .

  Dash’s life proves both Wilde and Foucault correct, while at the same time establishing an emblematic example of the failure of postmodernism and post-structuralist theory: our constructs eat us. What is the next step once we are aware of this perilous fact? Are there to be no more constructs? Or must we simply acknowledge those constructs? But how do we do that when they are so hypnotizing? This is what post-post-theory must deal with. But the fact that I have finally, through Dash King, arrived at the threshold of post-post-theory is, I hope, for you, promising. I will even go so far as to say that your concern over my actions actually warms my heart — what’s left of it — despite my fear of abandonment. When I finally banish the panic, I can see your affection for what it is.

  I’m going to float another boat here, one I sincerely hope you won’t find upsetting. I would like to suggest that I have a, perhaps, inappropriate attraction for what I wish to call the real. I think you would agree. Or maybe you would say that I have not fully adjusted to the cyberworld. This is my problem and a problem for anyone who loves reality: the real is being phased out. The reason most lives are essentially lived in cyberspace now is partially because living in the real is nearly impossible. No one wants to be there. It is inhospitable, whereas cyberspace is the land of pleasure. My inability to immerse myself in cyberspace has always been an issue for you. Why, especially in this advanced stage of decrepitude, shouldn’t I take advantage of the life I can create for myself sitting in my chair (or doing as close an imitation of sitting as possible)?

  Of course I should, and it is for this reason that I am, paradoxically, considering making a final visit to the Tranquility Spa. I can hear a strangled cry coming from you; I know you will find this upsetting, and it might even lead to more threats. (My darling, I know you don’t and can’t mean them.) Let me be clear. The desire to go back there one final time is to prove the kind of power the place doesn’t have over me. In other words, I want to go back to prove that it doesn’t matter whether or not I go back. I want to make a practice of my resistance to the past and all its toxicity.

  I did not mention something that happened just as I was about to leave the Tranquility Spa. I left it out because I did not want to upset you, and yet I fully expected to tell you. I am thinking now that, after taking in my analysis of Dash King, solid proof for your cast-iron brain of my commitment to analysis, not emotion, you will just drop the notion that I am flirting with the past. Know instead that I have arrived at a new level — one in which old temptations mean nothing to me. How am I to be a scholar if I can’t cultivate the distance between self and reality that is de rigueur? It is only by putting myself in the very centre of a ring of fire — by risking a scalding — that I can move forward and change my life.

  It’s been nearly one hundred years! Think about that; it’s been nearly one hundred years since I was a drug addict. I am a different person. And it’s time for me (and for you) to stop fearing the past. As if I will suddenly implode — or explode — from my exposure to the heat. We know that the real is of less and less importance. I use the phrase the real instead of reality because it can be argued that because so many people now live in cyberspace it might, arguably, be what is now reality. After all, many no longer leave their houses, for many reasons — the dangers of temptation, difficulty breathing, even superstition. The fact is, what used to be called cities have become withered husks dotted with hypocritical museums like my Tranquility Spa.

  So why would I leave my house, especially when it proves so difficult for me to ambulate? Precisely because there is still a shadow over my life — a lingering, lurking, pestilent fog reminding me that I may “regress” again. I won’t. You may say drug addicts cannot “visit” drugs. I am not suggesting that. I never would. But it is very important for me to confront bravely the ambience, the breeding ground, of so much past trouble. Those sights, sounds, smells and, more importantly, ideas are still, for me, associated with the past. To know them is to resist them — with the full confidence that such resistance is possible. When I have resisted, and know I can resist, I will be more empowered, to use an antique term, and be able to, as Wordsworth (alarmingly, I am quoting him) said, find “strength in what remains behind.”

  So this is what I did not tell you. As Allworth and I were about to leave the Tranquility Spa, I heard a remark that perhaps was — or perhaps was not — delivered in my direction. It came from the woman with the cantilevered face. Whether or not it was said to me, or not just to me, and not just in my direction — and whether or not, in fact, I heard correctly what was actually said — is a substantive issue. But then again, not really. For even if I have imagined the implications of what this creature uttered (for she is definitely a creature — not of appearance, but of personality), then the power that such an imagining potentially has over me is still important to confront.

  The woman with the cantilevered face looks, as I mentioned, like a monster. There are things sticking out of her skin — though they’re still under — that should not be. And those projections are not bone. They are something else: plastic, spit, putty — perhaps tumours. Who knows? Of course, some tumours cannot be surgically removed. I am fully aware of that. It is more dangerous to attack them than to leave them be. I presume she had had her eye on one of the other male creatures at the bar (or those resembling males). I presume this from her remark. I think it was aimed at the handless fellow. At any rate, it was he who left just before her remark. And I thought (though I may have imagined it) that she had been looking at him out of the
corner of her eye. This is an odd and funny expression in her case, because her eye really did have a corner. There was a gigantic, almost pointed, bump that jutted out of her face just atop her eye at the end of her heavily made-up brow.

  Upon his listless, desultory exit, she, who was sitting in close proximity to me, turned to the bartender and said, with a committed conspiratorial glance, “There goes the man that got away.”

  I guarantee I would not have remarked on this, indeed would have let it pass, if she hadn’t also glanced at me. Why? Here is the conundrum. Of course she could have done so simply because I was in her line of vision. But this is contradicted by the fact that her line of vision, in terms of myself, was obstructed by the protrusion above her eye. To look at me, she had to make a specific effort. This she definitely did.

  But the meaning of the remark may depend on her age. Certainly it was impossible to be sure of how old anyone in that bar might have been. Though none are ever as old as I. If she was young, let’s say under one hundred, then it is unlikely she would be making reference to me or that song, at least not consciously. But if she was over one hundred, then it is completely possible that she knew to what and to whom she was referring.

  But, another hurdle: even if her remark was a reference to the song, was she aware that the person who once sang it so famously was sitting next to her, disguised as a malformed lump of flesh in a dress? It is highly unlikely. Reflecting on circumstance like this might seem, at first thought, to be unfortunate or even, frankly, desperate. I know what you are going to say. Did I go to the Tranquility Spa expecting or indeed yearning for such a moment? Is it my fondest dream to be remembered? Is that world of fame — where I once lived and dreamed and carried on so brightly — a part of me that I pine for? And has the loss of that world made me half the woman I once was? I am certainly half of what I once was physically, barely even a woman. In fact, the quantity of real flesh and guts still attached to me is probably less than half of what there once was.

  This is perhaps the most important thing for you to understand. But it’s difficult for you, for anyone, to comprehend. Fame is now so very over. Everyone is famous, and no one is famous. Everyone is an author and an expert, and so nobody is. The cyberworld makes us each at once invisible and renowned, each celebrated in our own way, though often anonymously. So I can understand how you and many others might be ignorant of the machinations of what used to be called fame.

  In the distant past I made pronouncements about my duty to my fans. I think I may even have said, “My fans are my life” or “I live only for my fans.” I’m not saying that these remarks were nonsense. It’s simply that their meaning has been misconstrued in a romantic, not pragmatic, manner. What should be remembered most of all is that I was a worker — perhaps not in the strictest Marxist sense. After all, Marx had a famous disdain for performers and artists, calling them effete. Nonetheless, I am a practical person. I was brought up that way by my horrific mother and by the famous absence of my father. From the first moment they pushed me onstage until my last appearance at the Palace, I was singing for my supper. And if some saw in my performances an urgency, a life-and-death quality, there was a reason. I was literally hungry. Of course, I am not denying that there was artistry in my work. Far from it. I crafted all of my phrasing and pitched the meaning (or just threw stuff away) with enormous precision, sometimes even subconscious precision. But even the crafted pain was part of the act.

  This is where it gets complicated. When you are a performer like I was, the act is not an act. It is real for the time you are doing it. You are living it. You are there, onstage, you are not somewhere else. You do not “phone it in,” as we used to say. But how can I make you understand that my all-encompassing, nearly Buddhist live presence was not fulfilling any need inside myself for love? I often think how sexist this notion is! How often do they say, still, that Frank Sinatra was enormously talented? Quite often. (He was also literally enormous, according to Ava Gardner.) But do they ever suggest he was singing because he was lonely, or simply desperate for love, or affection, from the masses watching him? I’m not questioning Frank’s honesty as a performer. I certainly don’t question the sheer virtuosity of his delivery. God knows how he found it or sustained it. But no one ever suggests that his artistry was a pathetic plea for attention. Yet they do this — have always done this — to me.

  Of course, one might theorize that something transpires psychologically inside a performer after she has appeared onstage night after night, managing to be fully present. The performer begins living her life onstage as much as off. The two states become, in a sense, interchangeable. But does not the surgeon who is fully present at the operating table live in his work as much as I lived in mine? And if he was working nearly twenty-four hours a day, as many do, would he not begin to confuse his art — surgery — with his life? For what I did, ultimately, was work. It was a job. People forget that because I was so good at it that I made them forget. And by calling it work, I do not wish to demean it. I can think of nothing more fulfilling for my life or any life than to be consumed with productive work (my puritan undergarments are showing).

  If I were to miss anything about being a star, it would be the work itself. That is why toiling as a scholar is so fulfilling, because it is merely another kind of work I may throw myself into or against, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. When, in interviews — and remember, publicity was part of my job, after all — I went on about my love for my fans, I was still working. I wasn’t lying. I loved those fans and needed them, because they put food on the table. One can’t understand this if one wasn’t brought up in vaudeville. The cheque from the hands of the theatre manager re-materialized as food. When my mother left me, the fear of abandonment was real, but it wasn’t only emotional abandonment that frightened me. My mother had been responsible enough a harridan to drill into me that at any moment we might all starve. My true fear of being cut out of the act that day in the hotel room wasn’t just a fear of being alone, but that I might end up dead on the street. Such lessons never leave you, especially during a depression — even if you end up at MGM.

  So, am I going to try to convince you — with all of this talk about craft and work and practical considerations — that fame meant nothing to me? I will not. But it meant far less to me than you might imagine. At a certain point I realized that if I could reduce fame’s importance in my life I would develop a real personal life. During the fifties, when I struggled with my weight, it was actually a struggle with this very thing. After Vincente and Sid, I came to the understanding that both of these men were married to the “star” as much as they were married to me. There was nothing wrong with them. They were both fine fellows in their own ways. But they certainly were fellows, in my eyes, and still are. And is that the way you talk about a man you love — or did love once?

  Vincente was so very much like my father in all the shamefaced debauchery that took place — though most of it was in his imagination. I knew (how could I not?) what was going on — I’m not that dumb. If you look closely at his movies, you will notice something about the male extras. They are all beautiful — like the hothouse-flower ushers that curled their tendrils around my father. In fact, that is the way one can differentiate the work of a homosexual film director from a heterosexual one: examine, closely, the walk-ons. You will notice that in a heterosexual director’s work the male walk-ons are undistinguished, hardly noticeable. But the little typist, or the girl who is passed on the street on a cold snowy night? These figures are of a radiant beauty, striking, earth-shattering, dumbfounding, nearly alarming. In a homosexual director’s oeuvre, the tiny parts played by typically young men are populated by distinctly unforgettable youths. In Vincente’s case, they were lithe and also dark — very like the ones so favoured by my father.

  This didn’t upset me. I was so wrapped up in my work that I had little time to be concerned about love. Although I did think I was in love with Vin
cente then. I think I was unconsciously drawn to him. And this is what they all say, but it happens in this case to be actually true. The closeness I desired from my father, but didn’t achieve, was certainly a factor. But this was not, as some have suggested, because Vincente was a father figure. Quite the opposite was true: I had enormous pity for him. I noticed his pain, his anguish and his shamed faces immediately. His desperation to prove himself by giving me Liza touched me so much that I would have done anything to make him happy. After all, I was making Vincente happy, not so much by pleasing him, but by loving him in spite of it all. Vincente knew I knew, and I knew he knew I knew.

  Sid, on the other hand, was the end of the line, romance-wise. I sensed I needed something, and the easiest way to get what I needed was through my work. Ergo, I married my manager. Thank God he was a helluva manager. I kind of missed the fact that he wasn’t shamefaced and vulnerable. However, those were two of the many things missing. But after Sid I realized I was over being attracted to men who wanted to manage my career. Mark was definitely the last straw when it comes to husbands who were in love with the star.

  With Mickey, at last, I found someone who was responding to me. Although it’s important to remember that if you were famous the way I was, when fame meant something (I sound very old now because I am), you could not eradicate that element completely from relationships. On one level my identity — because I spent so much time onstage — was my work, my famous persona. So they would only love a part of me if a partner were to ignore that aspect. But there were still people at that time I knew — June Allyson was one of them — who didn’t believe that Mickey was in love with the “real” me. Or perhaps she hated him because he was in love with that? Nobody ever wants you to change, even if staying the same means decaying and dying. “But he’s a kid,” June said. “A sweet kid, but still a kid.”