by Tim Bowling
The commuter morning had grown louder, as if the cars, like birds, had to greet the rising of the sun. It was time for business, and the homeless man, the man from an alien world, got quickly down to it.
“I’ll take a toonie for the both of them.”
I believe his spine even snapped to corporate attention as he stood.
Despite everything, I was a man of my culture, and I knew a bargain when I heard one. The magician bank was old, solid; they didn’t make toys in China out of cast iron. That whole burgeoning nation was awash in plastic, right down to the fish and the lettuce now shipped in their chemical tonnage to sit on our local grocery shelves. I suddenly felt the kind of magnanimous generosity that a man feels when he’s on the verge of a seismic change. Here, have my whole life, all the silent memories worth a penny a head on the dirty sheet of Time.
I pulled out my wallet, and hesitated. Did the homeless have Interac? Did they take Visa? I never used the former, and I didn’t have a pin for the latter. How long would it be before actual paper money disappeared? That time would certainly come, and sooner rather than later. There was no sense in overlooking the obvious. Ah well, given the prime ministers we’ve had over the past few decades, I’d prefer not to see their smug corporate mugs every time I pulled out a ten. Then again, maybe one day we’d have the CEOs of Shell and Apple and Walmart plastered across our plastic cards. But one day wasn’t this day. I gave the bum the purple bill, told him to keep the change, and took my little horse of guts and my magician in my hands and began once more to walk the streets.
The derelict, who had not tugged on his forelock and exclaimed, “Bless ya, guvna,” returned to his floating balloon of blue recycling bags. I looked back once and saw him shuffle away, rather splay-footed. There was, in fact, something familiar about his gait, something as antiquated as his language; it didn’t fit the twenty-first-century day at all. But there was dignity in the way he moved precisely because of that. The dignity of the downtrodden. Jesus, where had I seen that kind of movement before?
The answer came to me when I stopped at an intersection and scowled nonchalantly at the faceless rush hour masses who stole glances at the Secretariat and Houdini dangling from my hands. Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin. His Little Tramp, still more famous than Keaton’s persona, walked exactly like that. All the balloonatic needed was a bowler and cane.
Suddenly I wanted my ten dollars back. Suddenly I felt cheated. For I’d never really liked Chaplin all that much. Or, at least, I’d lost my taste for him over the years, just as I’d lost my taste for candy – Chaplin’s sentimentality hurt the teeth of my spirit, you might say. But what it really boiled down to was the difference between manipulation and art – Chaplin could be phony where Keaton was never that. Here’s Keaton himself on the fundamental difference: “Charlie’s tramp was a bum with a bum’s philosophy. Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a working man and honest.”
I stared at the intersection’s pedestrian light, and there appeared Keaton’s little fellow, much more lovable to me than Chaplin’s Little Tramp. And Keaton’s little fellow was, like the pedestrian figure, just as white and pure, right down to the way he walked.
Keaton’s walk always suited his particular filmic needs. In Sherlock Jr., for example, that incredibly agile quick step he perpetrates right on the heels of the villain is a masterpiece of comic timing that rises directly out of a gag. Whenever I think of Keaton walking, I think of humanity walking; there’s such an ordinariness about his stride as he breaks from a saunter to a quick step and, inevitably, a hell-bent-for-leather run. The combination of slightly controlled panic and defiant optimism was, in fact, all around me on Jasper Avenue this morning. Chaplin’s iconic gait, however, existed only as a shadow in one street person, and probably only because that person felt that he had just gotten away with murder by earning ten bucks for a skinless horse and a piggy bank without the piggy. The point is, people move like Keaton all the time, and nobody ever moves like Chaplin. As Geoff Nicholson points out, “by the time a walking style has become recognizable it has also become absurd.” But then, Nicholson, like me, was no Chaplin fan. He finds the Little Tramp’s walk unbearable because of “its cuteness, its faux humility, its feverish attempt at ingratiation.” He then defends his position by referring to a contemporary opinion, that of Wyndham Lewis, who, in 1928, published a novel, The Childermass, in which characters in the afterlife are forced to perform routines from Chaplin’s movies. Lewis, who remains largely unknown, but who is probably one of the most clear-sighted and truthful writers of the twentieth century, loathed phoniness.
As I walked along the avenue, trying not to be self-conscious about how I walked along the avenue, I observed how others walked along the avenue. Purposeful, mostly. Yet is there not always a degree of the false in our sense of purpose? Just how important were all these destinations? These dozens upon dozens of human bodies, male and female, moved like salmon on the way to the spawning beds. No, of course salmon don’t walk. I mean the urgency, the sense of following a star-charted course. Ah, but surely some of these people felt about the world as I felt about it, surely they had come to question the wisdom of the stars. That tall, skinny man there, with his bony jaw slightly raised – did each long stride of his not contain some of Keaton’s fundamental cosmic hesitation? And what of the many men and women whose walks had been slowed by the technologies in their hands? The little screens reduced their walking speed but did not divert their purpose. In fact, these people were doubly purposeful in the disturbing way of sleepwalkers, who inhabit two worlds at the same time – yes, like Keaton’s projectionist in Sherlock Jr. Except, here, on the avenue, these walkers had stepped out of their real lives without even leaving their real bodies. Perhaps they were watching videos of themselves walking somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t on the way to work. Perhaps they were watching Sherlock Jr. Anything was possible.
Just then, I noticed the sunlight. It was ambery, klieg-intense, and I stepped straight into it, bearing my strange material and psychological burden. Do you know, in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy leaves black-and-white Kansas behind, the black-and-white cyclonic Kansas of Keaton’s birth, and lands in Oz, and the whole screen blazes out in Technicolor? I marvelled at the change, and then I marvelled at being marvelled. As long as a heart and spirit can still lift at the presence of the sun . . .
“Hey, Buster!”
He was walking along Broadway, “down along Eighth or some place,” and an old vaudeville actor named Lou Anger called his name. It was a Monday morning, dark, windy, cold and full of rain. The newsboys were shouting headlines about the war that America hadn’t entered yet. Gloom and pressure. Keaton’s walk was just human, like anyone else’s. He looked up.
“I’m heading for the studio,” Anger said. “It’s just a few blocks over on Forty-Eighth. Why don’t you come along?”
He did. He came along to the magic of the motion picture, to his art and his fame. It was as if someone had said to Vermeer one dreary seventeenth-century Dutch morning, “I’m heading to this shaft of sunlight. Why don’t you come along?”
They proceeded to the Schenk Studios, an old warehouse between First Avenue and Second. They stepped out of the dark and the rain and the sinking of ships and the bicycling of cablegrams to the parents of slaughtered young men. They stepped out of the black-and-white of history into the black-and-white of art. There, in a great barn-like loft, a space still dark but oh so different, three movies were being produced. The klieg-light islands floated along in the unquiet hush of making. Keaton was seduced immediately. He passed one island, then another and finally reached the Island of Riotous Racket, with a set representing the interior of an old country general store. Here, the company was filming a two-reel slapstick short. Bodies sprawled all over. Then the noise stopped. Someone shouted, “Break!” The bodies disentangled and stood. A slate emerged from the light. On it was scrawled “Butcher Boy Scene 3.” Keaton looked past
the words to the famous figure heaving into view, the two-hundred-sixty-pound hilarious mass of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.
The rest, as they say, is history. But who are they? I was not they, because history is as unreliable as it is undeniable. In some versions of the Keaton legend, Fatty Arbuckle is walking along with Lou Anger down Broadway, and it’s Arbuckle who invites Buster to the studio, but not on that morning. Keaton gave an interview in 1958 in which he says that Arbuckle invited him to come to the studio the following Monday. A whole week in between! That’s certainly not as dramatic as heading straight over to the studio and stepping out of the rainy, history-torn dark into film legend’s glorious lights.
But, one way or the other, Keaton did walk into that studio, and it was a defining moment. As he puts it in his autobiography, “It was like being in a great entertainment factory where different shows were being manufactured at the same time.” Even when remembering, Keaton always spoke like a worker. Factories and manufacturing. His little persona who’d struggled so often with machinery came from the imagination of a man who was fascinated by machinery. In fact, Keaton’s only regret about his unschooled upbringing was that he’d never had the chance to pursue the other career that intrigued him: civil engineering.
So he went along to the Schenk Studios, accepted Fatty Arbuckle’s invitation to do a bit in The Butcher Boy, and his destiny changed; he left the past behind and boarded the train for the future. And this wasn’t just a professional turning either. That same day, or so the legend has it, he also met his future first wife, Natalie Talmadge, the least famous of the three Talmadge sisters. From that meeting, his two sons would emerge, stepping out of the sleeping body of the life that got away from him in the late 1920s. But that tragic sadness did not appear in the klieg lights in 1917. Even if it had, Buster’s eyes were too full of the flour from the huge sack that Arbuckle hit him with in The Butcher Boy to notice. Indeed, Buster Keaton’s eyes were always too full of his art for him to notice much else. Or, if he did notice, he chose to look away. How else to explain what happened to his money and his first marriage? This is so often the artist’s fate – when a spider spins its web, the rest of the spider’s life naturally falls into place: the living and the mating, the whole being of the creature, are not separate from the wondrous spinning skill. Not so for us humans. By the time Keaton made Sherlock Jr. in 1924, as intricate and delightful as any arachnid performance, he was no longer sleeping with his young bride. Natalie’s powerful stage mother, and the girl’s interfering, famous older sisters, continually undermined Buster’s authority, eventually to the point where his sons would be stripped of his name, redubbed Talmadge and removed from his presence for most of their childhoods. As biographer Rudi Blesh so succinctly puts it, “Even from a distance there is always a deep sadness about the old, foolish, tragic scenes of the human comedy.”
The divorce and the advent of the talking picture and the alcoholism – the three straps of the straitjacket not even his intense vaudeville observations of Houdini could help him untangle – lay more than a decade ahead. In 1917, covered with flour and molasses, Buster was in his glory. His vaudeville skills translated so smoothly into film that his first-ever celluloid take, his first appearance in The Butcher Boy, exists as a permanent piece of cinematic legend. And perhaps, given what would befall Keaton eventually, it makes a logical, circular, comic sense that his introduction to moviemaking would involve him taking a heavy sack of flour straight to the face and being knocked to the floor. There he is, a customer who walks into the general store just as a yokel fight breaks out. Arbuckle heaves the sack, from a six-foot distance, at another actor, who ducks, and – wham! – Keaton’s childhood of slapstick on the vaudeville stage becomes his young adulthood of slapstick in the silent movies. The transition, though violent, was smooth. For a considerable cut in pay (the Broadway revue paid him two hundred fifty dollars a week; the movie work for Schenk Studios started at forty dollars a week), Keaton chose to throw in his lot with the art of the “dirty sheet” that his father so despised. His mother wrote to him shortly thereafter, “Glad you’re in the movies. Should have done it a long time ago.”
It wasn’t a simple case of transferring the rough-and-tumble of slapstick to the rough-and-tumble of the comic two-reeler. Or, rather, that simplicity wasn’t the point. Keaton immediately grasped the greater possibilities of the film medium. Oh sure, in The Butcher Boy, he got bit by a dog, and spent a hilarious, madcap time trying to retrieve a quarter from a bucket of molasses, an escapade that had him and Arbuckle and co-star Al St. John smeared with the sticky sorghum. But, in a way, that was old hat, and Buster was on his way to the future legend of his crushed porkpie hat. Between his first film appearance in 1917 and his direction of Sherlock Jr. in 1924 – a mere seven years – Keaton transformed himself into a genius. He owed the transformation to film. As he says in his autobiography, “The greatest thing to me about picture making was the way it automatically did away with the physical limitations of the theatre. . . . The camera had no such limitations. The whole world was its stage.”
No wonder, then, that on his very first day as a film actor, Keaton asked Arbuckle to explain how the camera worked. Together, the two comic legends took one apart, and Arbuckle showed Keaton how film was developed, cut and then spliced together. The first technical steps on the way to the technical brilliance of Sherlock Jr. had been taken. The art of the film, like the art of the spiderweb, begins in the guts. Gags were the strands; film was the instinct that spun them.
I STOOD ON Jasper Avenue in the sunlight and considered the horse’s guts. I knew nothing about a horse’s anatomy, let alone my own. If you take a man apart, piece by piece, you’d learn nothing. Even if you take his life apart, as so many try to do with the famous, like Keaton and Arbuckle, you’ll still learn very little. What have all these material lumps and twists and turns to do with the power in a horse’s gallop or the ferocity in its eyes? Idly, I tried to locate the bladder.
A horse couldn’t be so very different from a goat, and it was a goat’s bladder that gave the world the term slapstick. Indirectly, anyway. For in the early vaudeville days, the comedians used a curious prop, a goat bladder stretched on a stick, in their acts. One comedian would hit another with it, accompanied by a loud noise, and the other would fall. Not exactly sophisticated, but the human race is not exactly sophisticated. The simplicity – even primitivism – of slapstick still has mass appeal. Just consider TV shows such as America’s Funniest Home Videos, where the laughter stems directly from physical humiliation. The clichéd gag of the unsuspecting walker slipping on a banana peel bears investigation in this regard: what does it say about us? Most people – let me make this clear – do not enjoy seeing others get hurt. However, who among us doesn’t at least chuckle inwardly if we see some stranger trip on a curb and almost fall down? And just add a loud, unexpected splatting noise to the image – God swinging His slapstick – and Buster’s your uncle. Why, even if it’s an old person who falls, we’ll laugh (inwardly), as long as it’s obvious that Grandma or Grandpa isn’t really hurt. The sudden, random humiliation of others – we enjoy it to the point of cruelty. When Fatty Arbuckle was falsely accused of rape in 1922? Oh, the fun the public had in ripping his fame apart, whole mobs of men and women yelling at the fat man they had loved so much a few weeks before, “Murderer!” “Big fat slob!” “Beast!”
But then, the fun had been replaced with a different kind of pleasure: viciousness. Keaton referred to the Arbuckle trials as “The Day the Laughter Stopped,” which is accurate, but, true to his nature, he does not dwell on what moved in to take laughter’s place. There’s nothing very funny for very long about a pool of blood around a banana peel tossed on the cold sidewalk of the human condition.
We don’t live in the world of goat bladders and banana peels anymore. On this crowded rush hour avenue it’s urban everywhere now, which means a greater distance from the base material of animal bladders and fruit skin than an old vaud
evillian such as Buster Keaton could have ever imagined. Can people slip on a plastic Starbucks coffee cup? Would that be funny? What if I hit that smartly dressed young woman on the head with her iPhone and made a loud bone-cracking noise? Ha ha ha.
I located only the horse’s heart, the ventricles and atriums forming what resembled a tiny bagpipe. Staring at it, the loneliness rushed in and tightened around my own. A century before, horses – their power, grace, musky smell – would have been familiar here on this avenue, though their time, even then, was ending. Now we’re haunted by equine ghosts, those of us who love history, or, rather, attend to its quiet music. A steam engine huffs up to a station, a horse lifts its head in a meadow, the meadow buzzes with the sound of gathering bees, an unschooled comedian hand-cranks a Bell & Howell camera. Husha, husha, we all fall down. And there isn’t any sound at all.
I entered a Second Cup, and, with the transparent horse tucked under my arm, the magician bank in my other hand, ordered an Americano. The woman before me had ordered something that sounded like a milkshake with a bit of coffee breathed onto it. The drink was so large it needed a runway to arrive safely on the counter. I super-gulped as the woman hefted the frothy concoction to her red lips and sipped. At that rate, it would take her until the next rush hour to finish, and the idea made the toad, work, croak on my shoulder. It was still several hours until my first class, and to the first run of the streetcar. Despite my desire to escape, despite the silent urgings of my complicit Keaton Sherlock, I still couldn’t step out of the heavy body of the responsible man. It was a burden, one not easily unburdened. In James Thurber’s comic story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” the protagonist exists in a wild imaginary world of daydreams, but is a henpecked husband and obedient citizen. For the life of me, I couldn’t recall the ending. Hadn’t Walter Mitty somehow imagined his way into a different life? I remembered something to do with fantasized episodes of heroism while he trailed his wife around a department store, trying to shut out her nagging. And then what?