A Child across the Sky

by Jonathan Carroll

  When we got to Los Angeles, we rented an apartment together on Mansfield Avenue in Hancock Park and started trying to become famous. It didn't work. Both of us ended up getting nowhere with our careers and consequently waited tables at different chic restaurants in Beverly Hills.

  In the middle of this confused and disappointing time, I published a collection of poetry. Unknown to me, Phil went around to bookstores from Venice Beach to Hollywood Boulevard, pushing it on any store that had a poetry section. In true movie fashion, a person who worked in development for an independent production company heard me give a reading at one of these stores. Coming up afterward, she said she liked my "dialogue poems" and asked if I'd ever thought of trying to write a film. That's how I got started. It wouldn't have happened if Phil Strayhorn hadn't gone on the road and convinced the skeptics my book was worth ordering.

  I was lucky. I rewrote – scripts and then did an original. Phil heard every line of every one of them and was a clear and helpful critic. My original, "Cold Dresses," was handed around for a full year before someone said yes. They gave me a lot of money for it, but the film was never made. This new financial security did allow me to slow down and rethink things, which was exactly what I needed. The result was the skeleton of my own first film, The Night Is Blond.

  Why am I talking about myself when this is Phil's story? Because he was trying as hard as I to break through, but without success. We'd always pooled our money, but he refused to take any from my rewrites when it came in. He said it was mine. No matter what I said, he shook his head. I could take him out to dinner but nothing else. When I bought him a good pair of Leitz binoculars for his birthday, tears came to his eyes.

  There are some people in the world who aren't saints but almost unconsciously put themselves second to those they love. They don't do it as a sacrifice or for credit, but simply because they love. What is all the more heartbreaking is their surprise when some of that love or consideration is returned. I don't think they feel unworthy of others' concern; only astonished that another would think of giving it back to them. Most beneficent people are startled (as well as touched) by others' generosity toward them.

  His bad luck went on and on. Those of us who cared for him tried to help however we could, but the long months were Phil's "slap-in-the-face days": his image. He said he woke in the morning already cowering from a hand he knew was going to come out of somewhere and start batting him back and forth across the floor of his life. He could duck sometimes, but this hand invariably seemed to find him. Maybe there were even two at work.

  He was dating a woman who liked him in her bed whenever possible. That kept him calm and funnily goldfish eyed, but she also did a zigzag array of heavy-voltage drugs. Phil was too low in spirit not to be tempted by her tabs of "Purple Haze" acid and her experiments with freebasing cocaine. One afternoon they smoked a few joints of psilocybin-soaked grass from Colombia. His hallucinations were so strong he walked out of her house backwards and went – blocks down the street that way.

  Then, thank God, he met the pig.

  Her name was Connie, and she was a Vietnamese hanging stomach pig. Imagine a wild boar without tusks, a back that drops in a hairy swaying U from shoulders to hipbones, a stomach that licks the ground, an appetite that craves M&M candies, a very clever mind, and you have Connie.

  Phil was one of those people who's never put off by anything, so when this creature appeared in our backyard one evening after we'd grilled outdoors, he only bent over and asked if it had come for dessert.

  I asked what the fuck it was, and he said a Vietnamese hanging stomach pig. I didn't ask how he knew that, because Strayhorn knew something about everything. He was the only person I've ever known who'd read through entire encyclopedias for fun, turned down a full graduate fellowship to Cal Tech in physics to be an actor, and kept books like Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-philosophicus by his bed for a light read before going to sleep.

  The pig wore an ornate leather dog collar with its name, "Connie," and a telephone number scratched on the side. I went into the house to call the number while Phil fed it Raisinets.

  Fifteen minutes later a merry-looking old man appeared on our patio. He was short and compact, with the florid look of someone who spends time outside. A face as round as his body, talc-white hair in an army crew cut, quick bright eyes. He looked like a man who owned his own truck or worked in a plant where big guys used their hands and sweated out a quart a day.

  "There you are, Connie! Hello, boys, I'm Venasque."

  Phil's recovery had begun.

  Venasque lived down the block in his own house with the pig and an old bull terrier named Big Top. They walked around the neighborhood – times a day, although neither of us had ever seen them before. Since they hit it off from the first, Phil began to join their parade whenever he could.

  The only thing the old man clearly did for Phil in the months to come was teach him to swim. But obviously more was going on that I knew nothing about. The closer they became, the less was said. Yet it was plain from the first that the chemistry between them was very good.

  Sometimes it is the smallest thing that saves us: the weather growing cold, a child's gesture, cups of excellent coffee. When I would ask what they did that day, Phil would smile and say vaguely, "swam." "talked," or "played with the animals."

  Venasque was from France but hadn't been back there in thirty years. A Jew who'd fled the Nazis, he settled in California during the war because it reminded him of his home outside Avignon. He'd been married but his wife was dead. Years before, they'd owned a successful luncheonette across the street from one of the film studios. No matter when you went over to visit, he always asked, as soon as you came in, if you'd like a sandwich. They were hard to resist.

  Phil and he spent more and more time together. At first I was perplexed, then a wee bit jealous. I asked what he saw in the old guy, but Phil said only "He knows things" – the greatest Strayhorn accolade of all.

  Whatever Venasque knew, it made my friend happier and more at peace with himself. He stopped seeing the drug queen, quit work at the restaurant, and began doing professional research. For a time he had a small part in a dreadful sitcom that kept him busy and paid his many bills. Like me, he loved things and bought them whether he had money or not (he joked the words above the American Express or Master Charge offices should read "All Hope Abandoned Ye Who Enter Here"). Somewhere in our shared past we'd agreed that good therapy in the middle of a depression was to go out and buy something extravagant. So what if you didn't have any money – a new briefcase or first edition would cheer you up a little.

  I got involved with an actress and made the mistake of moving in with her. What with that, my own career, and Venasque, Phil and I saw much less of each other for over two years.

  He lived alone in our apartment a few months and then, to my surprise, moved in with the old man. It sounded like a fairy-tale household – the old man, the scholar, the dog, and the pig.

  Time talks behind our back. To our face it's friendly and logical, never hesitating to give more of itself. But when we're not looking, it steals our lives and says bad things about us to the parts of us it's stolen.

  Youth? You could have had a much more successful time of it if he'd worked harder. Friendship? No matter how much time I gave him, he never wanted to give you enough. Twenties? You could have been a contender if he'd only used me the right way. We hear these words from different sources, most particularly our inner voices, which gossip incessantly, only too happy to tell what they've heard from enemies.

  Strayhorn and I wanted to be in the movies; we wanted to live interesting lives. Perhaps that's the difference between our generation of post-World War Two babies and others: Right or wrong, we came to expect as part of our birthright to have at least a fighting chance at creating a personal environment that makes it possible to wake in the morning eager and curious about what the day will hold.

  But time was beginning to whisper. I made The
Night Is Blond in 16 millimeter. No one had made a 16-millimeter film in so long that just the number made for smiles and raised eyebrows. It was black-and-white, perverse but tender. In my favorite comment, Phil said it was as hot and strange-tasting as horseradish. People argued about it as they walked out of the theater. You can still see it sometimes at places like the Thalia in New York, where it's usually on a double bill with films like Elephant Man or Stranger Than Paradise.

  Before I left for Europe to make Babyskin, Phil and I kept a vow we'd made to each other the day we arrived in Hollywood: Whenever one of us really broke through to success, we'd go out together and get tattoos. We knew the tattoo parlor wouldn't have what we wanted, so we took an illustration we'd agreed on years before: a big black crow. Our skin birds. We had them injected high up on our shoulders to make it look like they were making the long curved flight up our backs.

  When I returned from Europe five months later, Phil picked me up at the airport with the script of Midnight in his hand.

  The morning accompanied Wyatt and me across country. The sun shone only early white light, and even thunderclouds over Colorado looked new and clean. We would land in Los Angeles at noon. Finky Linky still hadn't told me about Pinsleepe.

  Getting up to go to the bathroom, I suddenly felt a terrible scratching, pulling pain in my back. It was so bad I yelped and grabbed myself there. Wyatt and the people nearby stared at me, but it was too difficult to say anything then. I was under attack; some huge mouth was trying to suck the skin off my back or something; I'd never felt anything like it before.

  Walking fast down the aisle, I looked at the lights over the bathroom doors and gratefully saw one of them was vacant. Slipping into the phone-booth-size stall, I snapped the lock shut. What the hell was it? Before I had a chance to pull my jacket off, I felt something new and utterly frightening under my shirt back there. The pain had stopped, but what was moving right where it had been? Something big, big as a hand, scratching and scraping to get out.

  I lost control. Ripping at my clothes, I managed to pull my jean jacket off and the shirttail out in a few desperate jerks. I think I was making noise too. I'm not sure what I was doing except getting hysterical. You know the feeling of a bug or something else small and unknown under your shirt or skirt in summer, when anything has a chance to land or walk there. Multiply that by ten or twenty, make it jerk around, give it fur or something else. Play with the idea. It was that bad. Really.

  And then it was out. It flew straight over my shoulder and into the mirror. The crow. My tattoo. Our skin birds; mine was alive. Off my back and alive, scared, flying in a little metal room five miles off the earth.

  I broke its neck. Not thinking, I grabbed the bird out of the air and, fumbling with its sharp flutter, squeezed. Snap! It stopped moving: from stiff and crazy to soft and curved in an instant.

  5

  There is so much Weber doesn't know. Where should I begin? With Venasque and his pig and bull terrier that understood everything you said? Or with Pinsleepe and the crow tattoo?

  Venasque. For thirty years of hungry customers, he was only a chatty Frenchman who made delicious sandwiches because he liked to see people eat. Other things he liked? His animals, cooking, watching television, magic.

  Venasque the shaman, the most powerful I ever met. He didn't know where the magic came from, but he used it well and selftessly. He taught his animals to understand, taught me to swim (particularly through the black water of my past), taught Sasha Makrianes who she really was, taught other things to other people.

  If you needed to fly, he would teach you. Yes, he could do that if he thought it necessary. But most people don't need to fly. Venasque's greatest magic was helping you discover the discipline that would eventually save your life. Often it was something entirely trivial.

  Harry Radcliffe told one of my favorite Venasque stories. After he won the Pritzker Award for Architecture and was on the cover of Time magazine, Harry had a nervous breakdown.

  It manifested itself in an original way: In the middle of designing an important building for the 750th anniversary of Berlin, he stopped all work on it and began assembling an elaborate miniature city in his living room.

  At first it consisted of paper models of the Secession Museum in Vienna, Richard Rogers's Lloyd's of London building, Aldo Rossi's Teatro del Mondo. Then he added thirty or forty schlocky souvenir statues of places like the Eiffel Tower, Seattle Space Needle, and Statue of Liberty. Stir in six chrome teapots designed by Michael Graves, a modified Chinese wok that served as part of the Spaceport for visitors from other planets, assorted other models, toys, and clay figures Radcliffe made or collected, and you have a whiff of what was going on.

  Through friends, Harry's wife heard about Venasque and asked him to come over. The story goes he arrived at their Santa Barbara house with the pig sitting next to him in his jeep.

  In the living room, Connie crushed half of Harry's city by walking over to the table that held his lunch. Venasque kicked over the other half, saying, "He's got enough buildings. Get him a clarinet."

  The old man didn't know how to play any instrument, but he made Harry learn from a four-dollar book they bought together that day, along with the used clarinet.

  I have read Pauwels, Lйvi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Castaneda, and Mircea Eliade on magic and shamans. But what they say is essentially wrong for one simple reason – those who can, do; those who can't, talk (or write) about it. When I first began to see what Venasque was capable of doing, I naively asked him one day if there were people who could fly.

  "Yes."

  "Walk on water?"

  "Sure. You want more tuna salad?"

  "Why wouldn't they show the world?"

  "Why should they? You think they care if you know? You're smart, Phil; you want everybody to know you're a smartie?"

  I smiled. "Yeah, I like it when people know."

  He winked. "That's the difference between you and the guy who can walk on water. He does it to find a place on his map, not to get on the Tonight Show."

  In the six months he allowed me to live with him, I learned about my "map" from Venasque and how to find certain coordinates on it. I learned I would be successful but that handling success was far more difficult than getting it. I learned how to swim. I learned how to die. I heard the name "Pinsleepe" for the first time in a dream I had while sleeping in the ocean one night. Yes, I did that too. He showed me how. It didn't help.

  Sasha Makrianes has a peculiar face. From the front she's great – thick brown hair, high cheekbones, full mouth, deep-set eyes that watch carefully but openly. Her whole expression says, I'm listening. Tell me everything before I make a judgment. Not many people do that these days. Look around and see how skeptical most eyes are, how many mouths set hard and tight into "Absolutely not!" before you've ever said anything. Sasha is the old throwback – she wants to like you. Her face says she hopes she will.

  That's from the front, but her profile unfortunately says other things. A short, soft chin and down-curved nose throw your first impression off. Her forehead is not as high as you thought. It is the side view of a weak person, someone not completely trustworthy. She said that about her face soon after we met in Vienna, and she was right. In Hollywood (especially behind a movie camera) it is immensely important to notice, but I was in Europe as a flaneur, not auteur, and wasn't looking at people's angles that way. It made life easier and me less critical.

  When Wyatt and I moved through the last door at Los Angeles airport and saw her, she looked exhausted and ethereal, as if she might float off the earth in the next instant. Her face was Kabuki white, her long hair swept up and gone into a tight bun behind her head. She wore jeans and a white T-shirt under Phil's only sport jacket, the one he'd bought years before at Anderson & Shepard in London. When I asked him why there, he said because it was Fred Astaire's favorite store.

  Sasha knew he loved it. I felt such a smash of love and pity that I wanted to hug her until we both cried
from the embrace and our loss.

  She wouldn't get near either of us. "It's my hands. I don't want to touch you with them."

  I noticed for the first time. They were blush red, broken out in many scattered, ugly sores, looking like she'd pulled them out of a wreck almost too late.

  "I'm sorry. This hasn't happened since I was a kid. Whenever I got terribly upset, my hands broke out like this. I know it's disgusting, but the doctor said I should keep them out in the air and not cover them with gloves. I'll wear them for the funeral though. . . .

  "Hi, Wyatt. I didn't know you were coming."

  He dropped his bag and pulled her to him anyway. She looked at me over his shoulder and her eyes said, I'm okay. I've just been crying a lot.

  Outside, the sun was an old warm friend. Sometimes I think California owns all the beautiful weather in the world – or is at least in charge of handing it out to the rest of the world after it's used there.

  Wyatt bumped into a woman who'd worked on his show. When he stopped to say hello, Sasha said we'd get the car and bring it around.

  She walked straight out into the traffic without looking. I snatched her back. "Take it easy, Sash. Slow down." We looked at each other, then I aimed us across the whizzing street, still holding her arm.

  "Will you stay at my place, Weber? You're not going to take a hotel room, are you?"

  "Not if you don't want. Sure I'll stay with you."

  "Good." She wouldn't look at me. "Sometimes I sleep okay. Sometimes 1 go through the whole night and have no dreams. But you know what I do when I can't sleep? Watch Finky Linky tapes. – o'clock in the morning laughing at old videos of The Finky Linky Show. That's why I was so surprised to see him here. It was as if he'd just stepped out of his bread shoes into my living room. They were Phil's tapes. He watched them all the time."