by Tim Bowling
Was it any wonder that the ghost of Keaton finally reappeared to walk along just ahead of me? I saw him there, kept my eye on him. Keaton rarely walked for long before he broke into a run, and if he ran, well, I was going to follow. By now, I figured he cared as much about me as I cared about him. When you come right down to it, death is really just a state of mind.
No! Of course it isn’t! Should a man who has such thoughts really be responsible for any part of any young person’s education? How could I possibly help them to secure solid financial advice? Death is death, movies are movies and a train is not a streetcar, not quite. I stumbled upon the northern terminus and read the little sign that proclaimed the schedule. The streetcar operated right through September, making its fifteen-minute run across the High Level Bridge to the neighbourhood of Old Strathcona, where I lived. I had travelled on this charming blast from the past many times before, always delightedly staring out from yesterday at today, as if the boy in me looked out at the man. Were there tears in those eyes? Of course. But a man’s tears, not a boy’s. Today I vowed I would ride the streetcar in a new way, for a new reason: I would ride it with Buster Keaton, and I would ride it to escape.
But not until my first working hour. I needed another strong cup of coffee to help me and Buster bide our time.
I WANDERED BACK to Jasper Avenue, my mood expectant yet wary. The sky’s flush of light disturbed me somehow; it was like the colour coming back to the cheeks of Lazarus. And – deny it if you will – there’s always a Lazarian quality to a morning rush hour. How many of these ordinary Edmontonians that I now passed, who now passed me, were Buster Keaton heading to the film set in 1920? How many were Philip Larkin heading to the main library at Hull University in 1964?
The curious truth is most people must work for a living, yet we live in a culture that celebrates only the escape from work. The way most of us spend our lives is scorned and dismissed. Is it any wonder, then, that we should rise as if from the dead to take up our toil? Why, even the desire to work harder has negative connotations – several of these sober-faced citizens are probably workaholics throwing themselves into the busyness of labour in order to avoid the emotional, psychological and domestic aspects of their lives. The Great Stone Face himself, who claimed he never smiled when he acted because he was working and concentrating so hard, very likely took any job he could get after 1935 because it kept him off the booze. Workaholic alcoholic – the former often drinks to come down from working so much, the latter is despised partly because he loses the ability to function as a worker. North American society is nothing if not confused. Think of it: most of us will spend our lives working, and working hard, as our parents did before us and as our children will do after us, and yet the very activity is belittled. What is the first and usually lasting public response to any labour dispute? Blame the workers, blame those who are seeking to improve or protect their own condition of suffering! Why has the word union become so demonized? The unseemliness of workers banding together in their immigrant garlic sweat and general misery to complain about what we all must endure. Labourers. Workers. Unions. What has this to do with the dreams of who we really are? Yes, I have a job, but I’m not a labourer. That was the slightly stifled cry I saw in the eyes of the working masses on Jasper Avenue. Masses? Nonononono. The individuals who will one day own the franchise where they currently sell crullers to the Enbridge executives who will one day be the CEOs. And what of the thirty teenagers stirring now and preparing for their first day of university? They expected to work but not to be workers. They would relax on the Labour Day long weekend, but they were not labourers. No, they were on their way to the professions, to the wearing of the white collars not the pink and the blue, not those colours we happily give to the newborn girls and boys they so recently were. Confused? This is only the beginning.
At Jasper and 107th Street, I came upon a mass of exposed nerve endings muttering away in his sasquatch stink. He stood beside a shopping cart bulging with blue recycle bags full of plastic bottles. The bags were piled up like cumulus clouds; they hung off the sides of the cart like ballast that couldn’t quite keep the man connected to our more sensible version of earthly existence. Yet the recycling bags bulged with empty bottles and cans. Clearly this scrap of human flotsam had worked to gather what we had tossed away. He probably had a route that he worked every day, garbage can to garbage can, Dumpster to Dumpster, in the pre-dawn hours, battling the cold and the competition as fierce as any in a boardroom. But for what stakes? For the stakes to survive another day, for the common human stakes.
I didn’t meet his eyes. I didn’t stop and speak with him. Studs Terkel was dead, and who would walk through the twenty-first century urban jungle with the ghost of Studs Terkel at his side? I wasn’t a lunatic. Indeed, I was a product clanked out of the machine of my place and time. To step out of the body of the daily lot, as Keaton stepped out of the body of the lowly projectionist, was to be a filmmaker, an actor, an artist of sublime imagination and daring. I had stepped halfway out; I had one foot on the platform, the other foot on the train (okay, the streetcar, and I wasn’t going back to New Orleans, even if I was wearing a ball and chain), and I knew I had the sympathies of many. I could feel the common human will pounding in my breast even though I knew the idea of poetry was anathema to my culture. It was the Great Escape; it was freedom before fifty-five; it was living so differently that you didn’t even have to come up with the expected third part of the trinity structure of the metaphor. Studs Terkel was no kind of escape at all. Way back in the 1960s and ’70s, he authored a number of bestselling tomes about the lives of ordinary working people. If he tried to do that today, he’d wind up like this urban balloonatic, shyly picking bottles out of the city’s sleepy shadows. And what about James Agee, the film critic who helped resurrect Keaton’s career? The book that brought Agee – and still brings him – attention is ironically titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ironic because it is a portrait study of the desperate lives of southern sharecroppers. Not even J. K. Rowling could sell such a pitch to the multinational conglomerate publishing companies of today.
Still on the sidewalk, I stood and let the great Thoreauvian tide swirl around me. Henry David Thoreau, nineteenth-century American who stepped out of the mainstream in order to live simply at Walden Pond and then write about it, author of the famous line “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The quiet desperation flowed and pulled, but I held my ground. And the balloonatic, with his blue ballast, held his just a dozen feet away. I closed my eyes. Now my stillness and my shut eyes separated me, for it takes very little to disturb the sane balance of North America in its contemporary hurry. And though the passing masses, the walking commuters, couldn’t see it, I had risen free of my own body again, and was playing the film of the mind and spirit in which, this time, the real-life Buster Keaton starred.
IT WAS EARLY IN 1917, and the Three Keatons were in turmoil. Papa Joe, who had been miserable about growing older for at least the past half-dozen years, now drank so much that the family rough-and-tumble act was an embarrassment. Buster, by then a young adult of twenty-one, tried to hold everything together. First of all, he petitioned the owner of the Pantages west coast circuit (the Keatons had been blackballed out of the big-time eastern circuit due mostly to Joe’s belligerence), Alexander the Great, that tough old Greek, to let the family do two shows a day instead of the contracted three. Buster explained how gruelling the Three Keatons’ performances were, what a physical toll they exacted. No soap. As Buster himself put it, Pantages’s “experiences in the Frozen North had not made him very benevolent.” Indeed, like many bosses who have risen from nothing, he had a lovely, self-serving hypocrisy about him. “You signed to do three shows a day,” he informed Buster, “and that’s what you’ll do.” Never mind Klondike Kate and that old breach of promise suit, never mind that the tough old Greek agreed to love for a lifetime and then skipped out with his pretty violinist. This was business, not personal life; t
he separation goes straight to the heart of North American society.
So, Buster soldiered on, covering up for his drunken father’s vanished timing. Finally, there was nothing to do but break up the act, which Buster did in Los Angeles. Along with his mother, who had never really cared about performing, he travelled by train to New York, leaving Papa Joe to emerge from his drunken stupor, accept the truth and then subside not uncomfortably into his drunkenness at the family getaway in Muskegon.
Now what? Buster decided he would have to go solo. This was no easy matter. Oh, it was easy enough, because of his fame, to get work. Almost immediately he signed on to a popular Broadway revue at two hundred fifty dollars a week for six months. The problem was, he couldn’t quite figure out how to do a solo act. He had worked all his life with his father as a foil, and now he had to come up with a different version of onstage fate to struggle against. Of course, he was also facing the practical challenge of the imagination at the same time he was dealing with the psychological and emotional turmoil of having abandoned his father (but Keaton never spoke of that). So there he was, in a New York hotel room, desperately setting up chairs and falling over them, working out the pratfalls; he had stepped out of his father’s drunken body on the wooden vaudeville stage, yet there was no waiting reality for him to step into.
Then, one day, he began walking the streets, looking at the window displays without seeing them. He turned a corner, his head down, and someone called his name.
“Hey! Bud!”
Bud? I searched the Keaton biographies in my mind’s eye, but could find no typo. In fact, Bud was a pretty significant typo for Buster. Then I felt a tug on my sleeve, just as a swirl of cigarette smoke, booze and sweat-stink assailed my nostrils. I opened my eyes.
The homeless man, detached from his floating balloon of nonconformity, stood beside me on the sidewalk, his bloodshot eyes tossing like a pair of burning dice.
“Hey, bud,” he repeated, his voice nasally as if he’d found just the tiniest bit of helium in a Dumpster and ingested it. “You got kids?”
Why is it that homeless men so often seem to address strangers as Bud or Pal? Is it because these terms are blue-collar, originating in the working classes where, once, a very long time ago, the common struggle made every stranger a buddy or a pal? Wasn’t the theme song of the Great Depression called “Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?” Come to think of it, didn’t the down-and-outer of that still haunting ballad have something to do with railroads? Yes. “Once I built a railroad, now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?” Brother, not buddy. But brother implies an even greater closeness, as if we were all carved from the same ur-stone.
“Er, yeah,” I said, blinking away the New York of 1917 and trying to focus on the Edmonton of 2012. “Three kids.” The Three Kids. What an act it was, but with certainly more than three performances a day. They routinely brought the house down.
Almost shyly, he handed me two objects out of his cart. The first was a toy plastic horse about the size of a small loaf of bread. It was grimy and a large crack ran from its mane to its hindquarters, but from a considerable distance away (in time, in time), I began to recognize it. How could I not? For the horse’s insides – its skeleton and organs – were visible. It was one of those transparent models that taught the science of biology. I might have owned one as a boy, or perhaps a friend did. I seemed to remember a human version, as well. Suddenly I was relieved that the balloonatic wasn’t handing me a miniature version of my own vascular system.
As I pondered the horse’s dim, dirt-hidden heart, the homeless man pushed the other object into my free hand. This was heavy and also a toy, a cast-iron piggy bank, except it wasn’t in the shape of a piggy. It was a magician with a black top hat and a green coat. The colours were surprisingly sharp. Looking closer, I admired the details of the magician’s face, right down to the waxed goatee and red lips. But the most intriguing quality of the bank was, much like the transparent horse, how it worked.
“You gotta use small change,” the derelict muttered, gently taking the bank from me and placing it on the busy commuter sidewalk. We knelt together. Do you think that any of the dozens and dozens of rushing pedestrians also stopped? No, but many of them looked. They flowed around us like water going around a rock in a current.
“A loonie’s too big,” he continued, and pulled a nickel from somewhere out of his malodorous rags. He placed it on a little circular depression on the table in front of the magician, which served as the base of the bank. Next, he pushed a spot somewhere behind the magician, and the magician doffed his top hat, covered the nickel and – clank – the nickel disappeared. Fantastic! My heart, which no one could see, not even a biology professor, gave a little doe-leap.
“That’s really something,” I murmured, and set the transparent horse down, found a coin in my coat pocket and tried the bank myself. Clank. Five cents to be admitted to a surprising moment in a lifetime of moments. The Keaton story flowed past. What was it Buster’s decidedly wrong-footed, high-kicking father had said to squelch his son’s first chance at a movie career in 1912? Responding to the wealthy William Randolph Hearst, he of Citizen Kane notoriety, who wanted to put the Three Keatons in the movies, Papa Joe had said, “We work for years perfecting an act, and you want to show it, a nickel a head, on a dirty sheet?”
I had some genuine sympathy for Old Joe: technologies could hurt, and right in the pocketbook. Hadn’t my own writing career suffered financially because publishers now sold thirty-dollar print books as ten-dollar e-books? I was no accounting genius, but twenty-five percent of ten is considerably less than fifteen percent of thirty. What? I work for years perfecting a text, and you want to show it, a ten spot a head, on a flickering screen? Joe Keaton was wrong in 1912, and perhaps I was just as wrong a century later. The technologies, in any case, were going to win. “Stay green, never mind the machine,” wrote the poet R. S. Thomas. “Live large, man, and dream small.” The words were powerful, and, whether on vellum or a plastic screen, they hit hard. But what exactly did it mean to live large in the twenty-first century?
Well, my situation wasn’t the Keatons’ in 1912, nor Buster’s in 1917. In the first place, no multi-millionaire business moguls were offering me a contract for the e-text of my next book. I didn’t even know any moguls. In the second place, I wasn’t anywhere close to famous and successful. By the standards of North American society, I was on the brink of complete failure, unable to face – or at least contemplating avoiding – my only source of semi-reliable income.
“Hey. Bud.”
He turned a corner. Someone called his name.
Hey, Buster!
It was 1917, and a great artist was about to meet his fate. Perhaps I was a great artist, too, and this homeless man with his Dumpster-bin treasure was my fate.
My mind cut like an edit. Medicine show to vaudeville to silent film to sound film to television – and Buster bows out. Television to computer to home computer to the Internet – will I bow out, or will I survive? From 1917 to the late 1920s, Keaton revelled in silent film just as a generation before, Van Gogh had revelled in paint. In New York City where, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, someone once called out, “Hey, Buster!” and a period of genius began. When sound came to the movies, bringing structural and economic changes, lye was thrown in the artist’s eyes. Keaton himself became a major victim of the technological shift, primarily because his onscreen inability to communicate with the world was the whole basis of his comedy. According to film historian Walter Kerr, Keaton was like “a man from an alien world, quite unaccustomed to human logic and foibles, he floundered around, overlooking the obvious, harnessing the equipment of the world to his own ends.” Like a man from an alien world, floundering around, overlooking the obvious. That sounded about right. That sounded just about too damned right. Then again, what was art, how was it made? Uniformly, efficiently, by machine?
“A penny for your thoughts, Bud.”
I blinked
into the homeless man’s face, which was as close to me now as a bee’s feet to a loaded sunflower. No more overlooking the obvious, I vowed. He was a man approaching fifty, like me. White, like me. He even had my full lips, and there might have been some watery blue between the bloodshot streaks in his eyes, as in mine. But he wasn’t my long-lost twin, or doppelgänger; we hadn’t stepped out of each other’s bodies à la Sherlock Jr., and entered a new reality, unless every moment is indeed a new reality, which it probably is. No, this man, this urban misfit, bum, panhandler, vagrant, down-and-outer, tramp, hobo, jungle bum, drifter, derelict – he wasn’t me. I didn’t know him from a hole in the ground. I didn’t know him from Adam. I didn’t know him from Adam standing in a hole in the ground. He was just a human being old enough to know the expressions I’d picked up in my childhood. A penny for my thoughts? A penny? The federal government had just discontinued the little brown circle – how long would it take for those millions, perhaps billions, of tiny brown eyes to stop blinking out at the twenty-first-century sky? Most of them had vanished already.
“Oh, I was just thinking I’d better get going, that’s all.” I leaned back from his face.
He nodded understandingly. “Late for work, huh?”
Not yet. Not yet. Then it struck me. The man was roughly bearded, the hair the colour and texture of mange. Where the skin showed, it was dark, as if some street artist had charcoaled parts of his face. Now that I had noticed this, I couldn’t overlook it. As I couldn’t overlook the crisis in my life, a crisis he’d no doubt already been through. I simply couldn’t face the face of suffering humanity because I couldn’t begin to take its measure. Suffering might not have been his condition at all, of course.