Revertigo

by Floyd Skloot

  It was feasible to have the brakes repaired. But by the time they failed, there was enough wrong with my Rambler to make getting rid of it a more attractive option. Maybe someone who appreciated cars and the virtues of a Rambler would want to take it into the seventies. I placed an ad in the Lancaster newspaper and was contacted by a young woman, a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital, whose father had owned four Nash automobiles and had taught her to drive on a ’55 Rambler. Father and daughter arrived on campus together, inspected the car for a half hour, and agreed to my price on the spot.

  Then, with a little financial help from Julius and my mother, I bought a stripped-down 1966 two-door Ford Falcon coupe. The cheapest option I could find for a brand-new car, it had a standard transmission with the gear-shift lever mounted on the shaft of the steering wheel, a radio, plastic seats, and an ample trunk. To this day, that Falcon is the loudest car I ever owned, with floorboards perhaps thinner than my fingernail. It was a soft pastel color my mother called baby blue, Julius called sky blue, and my Mennonite girlfriend called light cyan.

  That was the car in which I moved to southern Illinois for graduate school, gaining still more distance from home. One day, three years after I bought the Falcon, I stopped for gas along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, returning from a visit to Baltimore. I asked the service station attendant to check my oil and water, then pulled back onto the turnpike, accelerating to sixty, and the hood—which had not been properly closed—flew open and wrapped itself around my windshield, blinding me just as the road turned. I managed to lean far enough out of the window to see my way over to the shoulder, where I stopped and leaned back in my seat until breath returned.

  The hood had to be hammered back down toward flatness, though it retained all sorts of waves and wrinkles, then wired to its latch. Never properly closed, it would lift and howl threateningly in the headwind. I drove on to school, keeping the speed under forty for the next nine hundred miles across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

  Part Two

  ON AND OFF THE PAGE

  * * *

  4

  * * *

  PLAYING THE COCK

  Th’ Cock’s comin’! … Into your houses, shut to th’ windows, bar th’ doors!

  Sean O’Casey,

  from Cock-a-Doodle Dandy

  For two weeks in the winter of 1968 I spent my evenings as the incarnation of erotic power. I was a lifesize dancing figure of fertility and sexual temptation, the dark prophet of the life force, the proud prancing Cock who embodied the sex-call, the active spirit, the sheer joy of living. I was a badass bird who seduces the women, alienates the men, and precipitates a crisis of community morals.

  It was exhausting work. I lost ten pounds. Covered in bruises and rashes, I shed feathers, smelled funky, couldn’t sit down because my tail was too stiff and long. My face itched but I couldn’t scratch it because of how my wings worked. After the first week, my shanks sagged and I stepped on my spurs when I whirled. I had a sore throat but still had to crow with sexual urgency.

  Here’s what I was supposed to look like: He is of a deep black plumage, fitted to his agile and slender body like a glove on a lady’s hand; yellow feet and ankles, bright-green flaps like wings, and a stiff cloak falling like a tail behind him. A big crimson crest flowers over his head, and crimson flaps hang from his jaws. His face has the look of a cynical jester. I did have the prescribed huge, handsome crimson comb, and was yellow from hock to claw, but my wings weren’t green. They matched my black plumage and that plumage puffed far out from my body, more like an umpire’s chest protector than a lady’s glove. My yellow beak blinded me when I jumped or turned my head.

  To boost my spirits, the director who cast me said the Cock was the title role in the play. The lead. But the leading actor in Sean O’Casey’s 1949 play, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, is a big rooster, described by an O’Casey biographer, Garry O’Connor, as the beautiful and effective symbol of the cock who says nothing, only crows: the Lord of Misrule, the pagan Oisin. He is an expressionistic device, the epitome of those instinctive and creative urges which men suppress at their peril. O’Casey himself said the Cock symbolizes the desire of man for a woman and the desire of woman for the desire of man.

  I had no lines to speak, only—according to the stage directions—a mixture of sometimes lusty, sometimes short and sharp, or violent and triumphant, or loud exultant, or mighty crows. Also some cackling with a note of satisfaction, even victory in it. I had to master the nuanced cock-crow and cackle.

  I also had to dance and prance, perform a goose-step march, glide and weave around various obstacles and people, spring over walls, run atop narrow, steeply sloped stone fences, pirouette, appear out of nowhere and vanish back into it. I had to sprint directly toward the audience and stop in a flash without skidding off the stage. I had to transform into a tall hat. Wearing a bulky forty-pound costume with a heavy tail and slippery cock-footed yellow tights, with my hands strapped to flapping-sticks sewn inside long wings, and with that blinding beak, I had to portray the glory of erotic power. Had to be a human sized bird-like creature exuding grace and sexual energy.

  This was not how I saw my career as an actor progressing. I was a junior at Franklin and Marshall College, and Cock-a-Doodle Dandy was my second role in the school’s acclaimed Green Room Theatre, which has spawned such stage and film professionals as James Lapine, Roy Scheider, Franklin J. Schaffner, and Treat Williams. In the fall, I’d played Pompey in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and fancied myself, with no basis in reality, as a promising young comic actor possessing an as-yet untapped capacity to play romantic or dramatic heroes. Being cast as the Cock did little to encourage such fancies. Though it was a role that would be performed the next year on Broadway by Barry Bostwick, who went on to originate the role of Danny Zuko in Grease and win a Tony award, and though it would also be played at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre by a woman, the Irish television star Martina Stanley, I failed to see its transformative possibilities. Upon learning that I was to play the Cock, I felt humiliated and thought about quitting. After all, I had a full load of classes to deal with and a daily job as the reader for the chairman of the English Department, who was blind. Did I really need to add six weeks of nightly rehearsals to my schedule? To play a speechless, screeching Cock?

  With the cast—jittery and unsure of this strange, farcical play—scattered in seats throughout the theater, I opened the first read-through with a cackle that, apparently, sounded more like a chicken’s chattery squawk than a cock’s lusty crow. Everyone laughed, and I remember thinking that’s it, I’m done. But in the next moments, I realized that the mood had shifted, the cast seemed more relaxed and high spirited. I’d gotten the sound wrong, but I could already see that the Cock’s weird presence might have power over the proceedings. Still, did it have to be me?

  Afterward, the director sat next to me in the theater’s front row and put his arm around my shoulder. He looked at the empty stage rather than at me, as if to focus my imagination on the work ahead, and told me playing the Cock would be excellent for my development as an actor. Be a Brilliant Bird! Also, since I’d been a ballplayer, I could think of this as playing out of position for the good of the team. Put on the mask! He said I needed to go out and do some field work so I could come up with a better cock-crow, but shouldn’t even consider quitting. And then he said the sort of thing I would hear, in various manifestations, for the next two months: rise to the challenge, oh Cock.

  As part of my next-great-star fantasy, I’d been reading about Method Acting. How would Marlon Brando approach the role of the Cock? I needed to immerse myself in cockness! That would, according to the theory, let me find the emotions and memories required to manifest pure sexual joy in every movement and sound. Unfortunately, at age twenty I was in need of further research in this area. When the director had ordered me to conduct fieldwork, I knew he didn’t mean what I wanted him to mean. He meant I should get up before dawn, drive out to the Ami
sh farmland around Lancaster, where the theater was located, and listen to cocks greet the morning. It seems that remembering the sound of cooped chickens in my father’s kosher poultry market would not be adequate preparation.

  Cock-a-Doodle Dandy is a play about the consequences of sexual repression. A critic reviewing a recent production in Scotland called it “one great rumbustious raspberry in the face of the whole creeping pack of whingeing, hypocritical busybodies, terminal, superstitious stick-in-the-muds and thin-lipped moral guardians.” O’Casey himself said it was “a secular hymn to life.”

  The play is set in the small village of Nyadnanave, which means “nest of saints” but sounds like it means “nest of knaves,” a place where being joyful or exuberant, especially in matters of desire, is considered sinful, threatening, evil. Where men believe “a woman’s always a menace to a man’s soul. Woman is th’ passionate path to hell!” The plot is simple: The Cock materializes at various places in the village, his actions spreading disorder and disruption, leading to outbreaks of wild dancing and flirtation and kissing and drink-fueled licentiousness. Altar lights and holy pictures are damaged. Removing him becomes the local priest’s obsession. Driven out at last, the Cock departs along with all the village women, one of whom declares as she leaves: “a whisper of love in this place bites away some of th’ soul!”

  Most of the male characters are terrified of the Cock. They hide from him, cast spells, consider him a demon, utter elaborate nonsensical curses against him (ubique ululanti cockalorum ochone, ululo!), try to kill or capture or drive him out of town. Tormented by his sudden appearances on their property or inside their homes, they fear “th’ cock rampant in th’ disthrict, desthroyin’ desire for prayer, desire for work, an’ weakenin’ th’ authority of th’ pastors and masters of your souls!” Their talk only serves to ratchet up one another’s anxiety: “Big powers of evil, with their little powers, an’ them with their littler ones, an’ them with their littlest ones, are everywhere.”

  The female characters, along with one male character—a singing, dancing charmer known as the Messenger—embrace the Cock’s presence. “There’s no harm in him beyond gaiety an’ fine feelin’.” They invite him to appear, offer to hang a wreath of roses around his neck, seek to protect him from harm, dance with him. They also realize that the Cock is a bringer of light into the gloom of their lives: “th’ place’ll lose its brightness if th’ Cock’s killed.” The women are all horny and eager (“only to see his face again, only to hear him crow!” one chants). The great Cock unleashed in their midst completes them in a way nothing else in their lives seems to.

  So it was up to me to trigger and affirm desire by personifying carnal energy. While dressed in a chicken suit. This was not a comic role, though the play was a comedy and it was easy to laugh at a giant rooster and his capers.

  It was also up to me to oppose the chief source of repression in the play: the Catholic Church in Ireland. Me, the Kosher Cock, against Father Domineer, the church’s representative in the village, and also against the terrified male residents called “oul’ life-frighteners” by one of the feisty female characters. My function was to counter the darkness and heaviness of repression. My cavorting and cawing, and the way people reacted to it, revealed a malignant sickness at the heart of modern society and exposed a theocratic community driven to hysteria by puritanical leadership. I couldn’t very well do that timidly.

  After that pep talk from the director, I went to the library and read up on cocks’ crowing, then drove into the countryside to hear them in person. What I discovered from my reading was that no one really knows why cocks crow. It may be a territorial declaration, or a warning to intruders seeking to damage the flock, or a cry of authority. It may be a response to rising light, even though a cock’s crowing isn’t confined to dawn. What I discovered from listening to the actual sound was that it tends to be four rather than five syllables (er-er er ER, rather than COCK-a-doodle do), and seems to come from the bird’s whole body, not just the throat.

  As I drifted past farms and heard the cocks, I thought about how to use what I’d learned. What was my territory in the play? Sure, the town of Nyadnanave, its life-force choked, its inhabitants thwarted. Also, and more particularly, the women living there—my flock—whom I both claimed and needed to protect. But it was more than that, too. I was claiming and protecting the joy of natural expression, with the cock-crow and cocky dance representing passion, appetite, creative energy. I was there to provoke, to show up wherever I wished—fields, yards, kitchens, bedrooms. If I crowed in response to rising light, it was the rising that mattered. The Cock was all about rising. After listening to the cacophony of cock-crows, I thought of the sound as song: these were birds, after all, and their raucous chorus was nothing less than an anthem of joy over another day in which to be strutting and bringing cockness to life. Better work on those loud, lusty, exultant crowings.

  We were staging the play at a time—early 1968—when the spirit of the Cock seemed rampant everywhere. The Beatles were singing Why don’t we do it in the road! This was the time of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical and John Updike’s Couples, of the sex-crazed cartoon character Fritz the Cat, and the seductive Mrs. Robinson. As Morris Dickstein says in Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, “There’s no question that the period saw dramatic changes in American sexual behavior—above all in public sexual expression—and especially in the younger generation.”

  Our rehearsals for Cock-a-Doodle Dandy began only four months after the Summer of Love ended, when over a hundred thousand young people gathered in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to celebrate sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. In 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, Mark Kurlansky writes of the larger culture’s widespread impression “that these young people were having a lot of sex. Sex was now called ‘free love,’ because, with the pill, sex seemed free of consequences.” In Hippies: A Guide to an American Subculture, Micah L. Issitt says, “Within the culture, sexuality was cast in a new light as the hippies rebelled against the ‘dirty’ or ‘shameful’ view of sex while promoting sex as the ultimate expression of unity, compassion, and love … something to be celebrated rather than hidden.” Singer-songwriter-poet-novelist Leonard Cohen remembers the sixties this way: “If any two people had any kind of sexual affinity for each other they had to sleep with each other immediately, otherwise it was a terrible betrayal and waste.”

  According to Annie Gottlieb in her book Do You Believe in Magic?, “the Love Generation” believed “we could recapture the animal innocence of the body.” She says, “In the compressed lexicon of the Sixties, love-making was like hitch-hiking, one of those all-purpose gestures.” If it’s true, as Philip Larkin declares in his poem “Annus Mirabilis,” that “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three,” then it came of age in 1968.

  But not with noticeable effect at Franklin and Marshall College. Mine would turn out to be the last all-male class in the college’s two-hundred-year history, with the first women admitted the year after we graduated. We were also among the first classes for which morning chapel attendance was no longer mandatory. Franklin and Marshall was a tradition-bound place, huddled on two hundred acres in conservative Lancaster, and it encountered sixties licentiousness gingerly. Our well-behaved, sparsely attended “be-in,” cited in a recent history of the college as a prime example of a campus counterculture’s emergence in the sixties, took place in Buchanan Park on the campus’s south end, a small patch named after the only bachelor U.S. president. There were a few arrests for drug possession. I remember seeing a few couples holding hands under the glowering statue of Buchanan. One classmate lay on a blanket beside his young bride, sharing a slice of shoofly pie. We had the drugs and rock ’n roll, but not so much the sex.

  Which is why I initially became involved in the Green Room Theatre. I hadn’t been having anywhere near the amount of sex that the era of free love promised, or that I desperately wanted. If you weren�
��t in a fraternity, if you didn’t have a girlfriend back home somewhere, the theater was one of the few places to meet women because, when a play required actresses, the directors had to recruit them from the Lancaster community. I was, two years after arriving on campus, finally starting to date: a woman in the cast.

  So things were lining up. If I looked at it properly, as a surprise, a challenge, an opportunity, playing the Cock may have been exactly the role I needed.

  There’s a Wikipedia page dedicated to Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. It describes the play as “a darkly comic fantasy in which a magic cockerel appears in the parish of Nyadnanave.” But a cockerel is a young rooster, and the Cock in O’Casey’s play doesn’t seem young, a kid jazzed up on hormones and high spirits. He’s savvier than that, experienced enough to vary his tactics, sophisticated enough for O’Casey to see him as a cynical jester. The Cock manages his great sexual energy for heightened effect rather than letting it run rampant. He’s purposeful, a man in his prime rather than a rowdy adolescent, and that’s how I would think of him. Don’t call me a cockerel!