by John Haskell
The characters in Petrushka, because they have consciousness, don’t believe they’re puppets. They know they occasionally put on a show, but the lives they lead outside the show, however circumscribed, are completely real to them. The emotions they feel, the love and hate, although they’re puppet emotions, are the same ones we all feel. Or I do. Petrushka’s desire to create a new life, to escape the life he’s somehow gotten himself into, is perfect for breaking his heart, and it was breaking my heart but because it was the only life I knew there was nothing I could do. I thought I hated the Commodore, and I probably did, but what motivated my hate was the fact that I hated myself for being a puppet.
I was sitting in the front seat of the Cadillac, between the accountant, on the driver’s side, and Freddie, on the passenger side, who was patting my thigh, saying to me, bravo, you made it. The Commodore, Seymour, and the crew-cut guy were sitting in the backseat and the car was parked in front of the club. They weren’t negotiating at this point, or suggesting, they were telling me what I had to do. And partly because I’d been beaten up, and partly because they were all talking at the same time, giving me instructions, although they were probably all speaking complete sentences, I heard their words like a kaleidoscope, or like a Cubist painting, the various parts all represented but none of the parts were in the right place. Or in the normal place. I didn’t know who said what but I was told about where the Chinese guy had his clubhouse or fortress, about the henchmen or bodyguards who lived in an A-frame house in front of this fortress. I was told about the dogs I’d have to placate, and how to placate them, with meat, and what breed they were, Doberman, and they asked me which gun. What? Which gun did I want to use. I was offered a choice. They had a .45 caliber and a .38, and my choice wasn’t about whether to use the gun to kill the bookie, it was about which gun I preferred to use. That I was killing the Chinese bookie was a given, kill him or something happens to me, and Freddie advised me to use the .38 caliber because a .38 never jams. I’d only touched a handful of guns in my life, but I picked the .45 because forty-five degrees is a right angle and he pulled one out of the glove compartment. It was wrapped in white cloth. When you’re done with the gun, Seymour said, wipe it and throw it away. I put the gun, which was heavy, in my pocket, and then they told me about my vehicle. They’d procured a car for me, stolen it, and it was hot-wired so Freddie warned me not to stall. Seymour, in the backseat, opened a map, pointed to marks on the map but it was dark in the car, plus the map was upside down. Take the freeway past Ventura Boulevard, he said, go under the bridge and get off at Rossmore, the Rossmore exit. Go three blocks up the hill and park the car. It’s all marked on the map. I took the map and he gave me a key, and then the accountant pulled out a manila folder. In it was a piece of paper, the piece of paper, what they called my marker, signed by me, for twenty-three thousand dollars. It’s yours now, he said and he handed me the paper and the Commodore told me to rip it up. Go ahead, he said, you can rip it up, and after I tore the paper in half we all got out of the Cadillac. Like a cow or a sheep, an ungulate like that, I was herded up the street to another car, a Pontiac. It wasn’t a Bonneville and it wasn’t new, but I was told, this is your baby, which made everyone laugh. I didn’t laugh but I got in the car, which was running, and there wasn’t a key, just some wires hanging down under the dashboard. Seymour opened the passenger door, bent over as if he was going to tell me something, some last instruction, and then he smiled, shut the door, and waved to me through the window. Then they all walked away. And then there was nothing to do but shift into drive, take my foot off the brake, ease out of the parking spot, and the only direction to go was forward so I drove in that direction. I could see them in the rearview mirror watching me drive off, and the direction I was going had been decided for me, and was it the direction of happiness? Or the direction of actually killing someone? I didn’t have time to think about that. The first thing to think about was surviving, and then the second thing and the third and fourth and everything else follows from that. You make adjustments to where you thought you were going, and who you thought you were, and this is my direction, I thought, the direction I find myself going, and what I have to do, or what I have to be, or somehow what I am, is ahead of me.
Before he was a famous choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky was a dancer. In 1911 he danced the original Petrushka, choreographed by Michel Fokine, and in it he incorporated all the entrechats and échappés that were part of traditional ballet, but he went beyond that. He let his body jerk and convulse, his toes pointing in instead of classically out, and although some considered it unbecoming, it was perfect for expressing the sadness of Petrushka’s struggle. Nijinsky felt the sadness because in his own life he was struggling for control, and because he was losing the struggle, the madness that would later take over his life was already evident. He was, for a time, Diaghilev’s lover, and referring to Diaghilev in his diary he says, I began to hate him quite openly, and once I pushed him on a street in Paris. I pushed him because I wanted to show him that I was not afraid of him…. I pushed him only slightly because I felt not anger … but tears. When, as Petrushka, he sat alone in his room he would soothe himself by imagining the ballerina he loved, caressing her imaginary body and then his own body, touching himself like a child who’s learning to pleasure herself, and I say herself because he danced in a way that crossed the line between male and female. Like a lot of dancers he was androgynous, and he was able, according to his wife, to place himself in the soul of a woman. And because his soul was full of sexuality, and because his sexuality was part of his madness, when he exhibited his madness on stage his performances were scandalous. In his diary he talks of his struggle with chastity and with vegetarianism, and he records, along with his bowel movements, a variety of sexual fantasies. And when those who supposedly loved him, and probably did love him, wanted to cure him of these fantasies, he didn’t understand. I will not be put in a lunatic asylum, because I dance very well and give money to anyone who asks me. He was a human being, and human beings have thoughts, both known and unknown, and psychologists refer to schizophrenia as a breakdown in selective attention, meaning that a person, in the middle of a thought, makes a connection with another thought, which connects to another, and they seem like random associations, which is why it’s called madness, but sometimes it’s called the only way to deal with a situation.
Your dancers are like the artist’s tubes of paint, with the great difference that they must be both willing and receptive. That’s what Haskell says, and I don’t know about the artist’s tubes of paint but when I pulled out of the parking space, drove down Hollywood Boulevard and merged onto the freeway, I was like a tributary joining the current of a larger river. Freeway driving, at night, was always relaxing, the taillights in front of me, the headlights behind me, and since I was already driving south, whether it was inertia or my fighting inertia, I decided to keep going, all the way to Mexico. I could live off the land down there, that’s the expression, take my life into my own hands, which was what I thought I was doing. I literally had my hands on the steering wheel, and although the seat was uncomfortable and my stomach was sore, knowing where I was going was pleasant. And driving on the freeway was pleasant, something I’d done a thousand times. Not in this particular car, but in any car you hold the wheel, one foot on the gas, mirrors looking back at the receding world, windshield displaying the approaching world, and as a driver you’re in the middle, not part of the past where you’ve been, and not quite yet to the place you’re going, and not knowing what will happen when you get there. The hum of the engine, and the hum of the tires on the road, and the hum in the back of my brain, or the buzz, whatever it was I found it soothing, hypnotic but not soporific, and that’s when I heard the pop. The tire. The right front tire exploded like a popping tire and the car was suddenly hard to steer. The engine lost power and the car slowed down and it wasn’t just the tire. The gas pedal didn’t seem to be affecting the pistons, which stopped humming, and smoke
began seeping out from under the hood, up near the tire but not the tire, billowing back to the windshield and making it hard to see. And then the car stopped moving. And there was no key to start it again, if it would start, and I was in the middle lane of a three-lane freeway, cars passing on my left and right, and the cars behind me were swerving around me, the pitch of their horns rising and falling in what I thought was the Doppler effect. And because the lights of the car turned off when the engine turned off, it was possible the cars approaching from behind, not seeing the car, would hit the car, so I waited until there was a relative break in traffic, then I opened my door, ran around the dead car and it must’ve been a four-lane freeway because I had to cross two lanes to get to the shoulder, that’s what they called it, not that I counted them, I had to dodge the on coming lights. And trucks were also on the road, long multi-wheeled trucks and my car was out there, a smoking piece of metal, waiting to be hit, or explode, and I wasn’t asking myself what I was doing. I wasn’t thinking about Mexico, or crossing the border, or killing someone. Thoughts were entering my stream of thoughts but the stream was moving too fast to actually stop the thoughts and hold them in my mind. All my life it’s been other people, the Commodore or the Charlatan or whoever it was they were thinking my thoughts, and I didn’t think because I never had time, although I could have made time, but now my heart was beating too fast. My blood was doing the thinking now, moving inside my veins or my vessels, or both of them, stretching those veins and I was just doing what it told me to do, which was, first of all, breathe. I was standing on the gravel at the side of the nighttime freeway, the dust whirling in eddies as the cars sped past, and of all the thoughts I might have thought the one I started thinking was, I should raise the hood of the Pontiac. The emblem of a Pontiac was an image of Chief Pontiac, in silhouette, long hair, strong shoulders, and it wasn’t because of Chief Pontiac, but I decided I should alert the passing drivers that an obstruction existed. A flare would’ve been ideal but I didn’t have a flare, so I waited for a lull in the traffic, or to be poetic, in the ribbon of cars, the lights like a ribbon of crystal, or more like a necklace, or really more like water, that old standby, the freeway becoming a river like everything seems to become a river, a fast-moving river in this case, and I waded across the current of the river, got to the front of the Pontiac, unlatched the hood, lifted it up, and because it was dark the car was invisible, and therefore vulnerable, so I ran back to the shoulder. Cars were passing, their horns blaring, and instead of staying put and waiting for help to arrive, or police to arrive, I started running. There was an exit up ahead and I ran past the plastic cups and matted socks and mainly it was dirt, and I ran along the guardrail at the side of the freeway until I came to an off-ramp. I followed its spiraling slope down to a fairly deserted part of the city, nothing open at this hour except a gas station, an Economy Self-Serve, and I wasn’t running, I was walking now, past the pumps to an area with water hoses and air for tires. I stepped inside a phone booth next to the bathroom, and when I shut the phone booth door a fluorescent light above my head turned on.
Like me, Petrushka had been given a chance to escape. Like me, he’d been a good boy, going along with the program as they say, allowing himself to be used by the people who did the using, and there was no ballerina to distract me, and no Moor to beat me, and when the operator came on the line I asked for a cab. I didn’t care which one. Able Cab or A-1 Cab or ABC. I told the dispatcher where I was and then I made another call, to the Crazy Horse. It was Cosmo I was calling, not sure what I was going to tell him or ask him, not sure if I was going to ask him anything. What should I do? I could’ve asked him that. Or what can I do? That’s more like it. Either way, it was putting my life in Cosmo’s hands, which I was trying not to do, but when Sonny picked up the phone I asked him if Cosmo was home. I said home but I meant in the club, and Sonny said what sounded like yes, but the connection was bad and I said, can I talk to him?
Fine, he said, go ahead. No, I said, can I talk to Cosmo? Put Cosmo on the line. I could hear in the background a show going on, the Vienna number it sounded like, and I said, how’s the show? There was a pause on the line. Cosmo? Is that you? But Sonny must have put the phone on the bar, the black phone on the dark bar next to the rag that wiped the bar, and I said into my end of the phone, Hello? I was thinking someone would hear me. Hello? And it was definitely the Vienna number. Teddy’s ersatz Austrian accent was audible in the background, and I was trying to figure out, from what Mr. Sophistication was saying, where they were in the number, expecting to hear Cosmo’s voice on the phone any second. Cosmo? Is anyone there? I enunciated my words. Can anyone hear me? Teddy was singing now, Falling in love again, and I found myself singing along, never wanted to, like Marlene Dietrich, what was I to do, singing into the receiver attached to the cord attached to the booth, standing under the sharp fluorescent light. I was looking across at the gas station pumps, the freeway behind me, and I didn’t know who was on the other end of the line but I was singing to him, or her, that there was nothing I could do, that I was helpless, and then a cab pulled up in front of the phone booth and I hung up. When I walked to the cab I kept my head down, as if it was raining, but it wasn’t raining, and when the cabbie, without looking in his mirror, asked me where I was going, I told him I’d know where it was when I saw it.
The Moor has invited the Ballerina into his room. It’s a lavish room, with hookahs and rugs and the Moor doesn’t know about love, or care, but because the Ballerina is flirting with him he responds with the kind of aggressiveness she pretends not to like but obviously does. She plays a toy trumpet for him, seductively. She dances for him in her seductive costume. She sits on his lap, and there used to be an expression, heavy petting, and that’s what they’re doing when Petrushka throws open the door. He’s a Pierrot, a character that originated in the commedia dell’arte, and like any Pierrot, when he falls in love he falls deeply. And like Pierrot, when it comes to expressing that love, he’s a buffoon. He’s full of hope and naïveté, and because the Ballerina enjoys attention she encourages his, toying with his affection until, losing interest in the game, which is her game, she dismisses him. Which doesn’t make sense to him because he loves her. And feeling that love, unless there’s an object to absorb that love, to relish it and possibly return it, the love, having nowhere to go it, starts to drive you crazy. And that’s when the Ballerina turns from him, turning her attention to the handsome Moor.
I was sitting at the bar at a neighborhood bar and grill, not drinking a drink because what I needed now was meat. And this particular bar had a takeout menu, and hamburgers were on the menu, and that’s why I was talking to the waitress. What can I get you, she said, and I said, twelve hamburgers, and she was quick. Having a party? I was sitting on a stool, facing forward, and she was to my right and I didn’t respond to her joke because what did it mean that I ordered the meat? That I was going through with this? My errand. I wasn’t necessarily going through with anything. One step at a time, that’s all I was taking. One small step didn’t necessarily lead to a leap, and because the bar wasn’t busy she stood there, with her weight on one foot, and I told her, no ketchup and no mustard. And no buns. You just want the meat of twelve hamburgers. She said it not as a question but as a way, by repeating the words, to get them to make sense. The bartender was washing glasses behind the bar but she seemed to be the person on duty, and normally, after writing down my order she would’ve delivered it to the kitchen where they would’ve cooked up whatever she’d written but now she wasn’t moving. She managed a small smile. How do you want your meat? Rare, I told her, trying to be as clear as I could. I didn’t say raw because, although dogs like raw meat, maybe I wouldn’t be feeding the dogs. Maybe the actions I was taking wouldn’t lead to other actions made possible by the first action, and she wanted to know if I wanted my buns on the side. She’d be happy to wrap them. Her mascara was blue, and she was lingering over my order, not because it was complicated but she was making
it complicated. Let’s see, she said. Twelve hamburgers, no lettuce, tomato, ketchup, no mustard, and no buns. That’s it, I said, and I noticed the smile that had been on her face had gotten replaced with the musculature of a smile, a mask she maintained as she turned and walked to the kitchen with my order. Leaving me alone on my stool. And it took a second before I noticed the warmth of the bar. It was smoke filled, humming with the noise of jukebox songs and ice cubes and conversations that had nothing to do with me. And it was soothing, letting the conversations swirl around me, letting my limbs get soft and my thoughts, about the job I was supposed to be doing, get replaced by other thoughts. Which is why I could easily imagine myself stepping off the bar stool, and there was a phone booth in the bar, against a wall by some tables, and I seem to have walked to the booth and now I’m sitting on a small folding table, reaching up and sliding my quarter in the slot. I say seem because, although my thoughts are like memories they aren’t memories, which is why I have to imagine them. And when I hear the ringing on the other end, when she picks up, I know why I’m calling. And the chitchat is part of the dream, I guess, and my ex-wife had a name but I’m not calling her, I’m calling my daughter. And my daughter is busy, that’s what I’m told, and I can hear my ex-wife’s lack of interest as she questions me about what I’ve been doing, and nothing, I tell her because what’s the point. And then my daughter comes on the line. Hers is the voice I need to remember, filled with life, and the curiosity of life, and she wants to know what I’m doing, right now. I tell her, I’m talking to you, which I am, and I ask her what she is doing right now. Her toys. Her grandmother gave her some Russian dolls, and she starts explaining how one doll lives inside another which fits inside another, and language was still new to her and her voice, I wish I remembered it better but I remember its innocence and its purity, and her love, which was also pure, was the only love I’ve ever been completely sure of, hers for me and mine for her, and it wasn’t just the reciprocity of love, although that was part of it. It was the moment in my life when joy existed for me, as an offering, and because I didn’t appreciate it then, or didn’t know I appreciated it, I can’t just let go of it. And it won’t let go of me. Even after all these years I feel it, expanding in my chest, and I could say expanding like warm steam but it’s not like anything. It’s her, and I listen to her unpack her wooden dolls, breaking them apart, and now I’ll put them together, she says, describing her work, so serious, and she was always serious. When she was a baby I would watch her maneuvering her way through what must have been an unknown universe, the first human soul to walk and eat and figure out which shoe went on which foot. And everything we do becomes a habit, including the habit of not paying attention, which is why I’m paying attention now, to this angel, my child, and it’s also myself I want to remember, and because I feel her inside me I can hear, in the singsong intonation of her voice, the life I can’t forget. And I refuse to forget. Or say good-bye. But I have to, that’s what time does, and knowing the conversation has to end, and because it has to end, although I would like to stay inside this phone booth forever, that’s when the waitress tapped my shoulder. And now it’s over. The waitress was back and phone booth is gone and now I was back in the world of the waitress. There seemed to be a problem with my order. Not a problem but my hamburgers weren’t ready. She wasn’t sure she’d gotten my order right. She knew what people ordered in a bar and grill, and twelve pieces of hamburger meat wasn’t it. I was either joking with her or she wasn’t hearing me right, and although she seemed to want to understand, it was more like a refusal to under stand, and to get the idea to lodge in her brain I had to be the kind of guy who wasn’t the kind of guy I was. Cosmo had been that kind of guy and now I was standing, looking down at her brown hair, my voice rising in intensity, and because she was friendly she assumed that I would be friendly, or hoped I would be, a reciprocity that might normally get her through the day or night but I didn’t have time for reciprocity. I told her to cook my fucking hamburgers. I don’t give a fuck about fucking condiments or fucking buns, and maybe I didn’t say fucking quite that much, but when I told her to get her goddamned nose out of my business, although I noticed moisture near her blue mascara, I had to do what I was doing. I had to get to my destination, wherever that was, and I wasn’t yelling, but whatever I said, when I said it, I could see the moisture coalescing into almost a tear, a tear she probably tried to hold back but couldn’t. And the bartender had been listening like bartenders listen, with one ear, but one ear was enough, and I wanted to get this over with so, fine, I said, the buns. I’ll take the buns. And when I said it she smiled, a smile of relief, an honest smile this time and I sat on the bar stool, my arms on the bar, my eyes looking down at the water stains or beer stains or the circular mark of a glass on the grain of the wood in front of me. And when the burgers arrived the grease was already leaking into the brown paper bag. I paid the bartender because the waitress was busy, or pretending to be busy, and I went outside, dumped the buns in a garbage can, and the cab I’d told to wait for me was waiting at the curb.