Forward to Glory

by Brian Paul Bach

  ‘Our restless age! Our attention-deficit-disorderly approach; the soullessness of such an impatience… But is it A.D.D. or, is it, um, just plain EGO?’

  Here was an actor who was saying things no one else dared to – off-script and from the heart. Plain declarations instead of artifice. Realism without pretension. Suddenly, Butterbugs commanded the attention of intellectuals and persons of advanced perception.

  His efforts were beginning to actually transform the Industry. From this new standpoint, film stood to become a much more immediate and subjective medium, carrying the same overt impact, but with heightened sensitivities and more progressive holistic technique, practice, and effect. By his rebel declarations, Butterbugs was to be credited for conceptually raising the medium to the next (higher) level.

  ‘Messianic’ was a term bandied about by goofball hacks, but it was hardly applicable to either Butterbugs or his phenomenon. However, simple ‘clarity of truth’ was certainly appropriate. He was not one to propagate any cult of personality (though some form of it was bound to happen), but he as a person was emerging as a revealer of truth on a Newtonian or Einsteinian plane. Well beyond Cartesian thought (bruising French susceptibilities somewhat), but with the same steadiness.

  His was a truth so evident that accepting it was wholly natural act. Attractive, sensible, and couched in right action. It was a Great Clarity, as if a centuries-long miasma had cleared, and it was possible to breathe deeply again. If the entire truth was not yet revealed, then a major step in moving towards it had been achieved. The lucidity was not overly emotional, which was in itself a revelation, but entirely lacking in possessive fervor or bound up in any limitations of creed. Upon consideration, historians associated him with Rousseau, religionists with Krishnamurti, and philosophers with a benevolent and loving Nietzsche (not an oxymoron). Yet he was none of those things.

  ‘I act in picture shows’, was his usual humble statement.

  A ‘New York & Budapest Times’ editorial waxed effulgent:

  ‘He acts in picture shows. Indeed! But a role has been revealed to us in the form of something new, something unexplainable, something beyond words. He proclaims Truth without the need to necessarily articulate it. It cannot be properly described here. Or can it? He is the Torch of the Universe, as revealed to us in its newness. And where is God in this? He is there, but behind the scenes now. As Executive Producer, most likely.’

  In the light of such glare, Butterbugs played it low-key. Alliance Francaise pronounced it ‘inutile’ that he take any more French classes. Surely a Légion d’honneur presentation was just around the corner.

  Aside from the hoopla, his reconstruction was coming along quite nicely. In his house was healing, and no blessing was taken for granted.

  Reading, always reading. Certainly it was the reading that made his discours possible. He was more into Flaubert than he was Balzac (he howled out loud when reading ‘Bouvard et Pecuchet’ on the lawn), and all of ‘The Dictionary of Received Ideas’ was better than any of Daudet or Michel Butor.

  Soon he was spending more time in the metropolis than the château. He was even toying with the idea of visiting the Pathé Studios near La Défense.

  Then one day he gave the Vicomté a ring.

  ‘Tout clair.’

  And he packed up and moved to the 6th Arrondissement, leaving the château full of roses.

  64.

  Le Bugs De La Buttier

  There was no doubt that the actor was under the influence of something wonderfully strange when he entered the portal of St. Sulpice. It was not a hallucination, because Butterbugs no longer experienced anything remotely akin to hallucinogenic occurrences. It was the église itself. Titanic but oddball. Under-known but inextricably Parisian, with a grey stone interior, its pillars so lofty that it was impossible to dust the top of swags and volutes, making its mass appear made of Mannerist muscle and bone. Or perhaps week-old ivory ice cream. Or more precisely, like the marble of Michelangelo’s ‘Moses’ in the black and white cinema of Bob Flaherty’s ‘The Titan’ (UA, 1950). Perhaps it was the Delacroix chapel, filled with Jacob’s wrestling with an angel that generated something singulier. Or the dim aisles, vast and shrouded in the late afternoon, cast with unstained light. Or the twirling piping-up of organ notes, lightly-touched, emanating from the architectonic console, way up there somewhere.

  He wandered around for some time. Those few in the church, had any taken notice of him, might have thought Butterbugs an abbé or even a laicized padre, so brooding was his mien, in cloak and long greasy hair. In the cold light of the ambulatory, he sat for quite a while on one of the wicker prayer chairs. Then, meditating on possibilities, he decided to give Sartre a ring.

  ‘Ah! Jean-Paul, my dear fellow, I caught you at home.’

  ‘I’m pleased whenever you call, Butterbugs. I always know it’s you, and the timing is naturally always significant. Your progress, your odyssey! Which isle are you on now?’

  ‘Almost on your boulevard: the aisles of St. Sulpice.’

  ‘Have you heard the organ?’ Jean-Paul asked.

  ‘Only a flourish –’ was all Butterbugs had time to say before the entire nave was blasted with rather more than a flourish, as if the pressured air was passing through every pipe of the hoary behemoth above. Though it may have been the hour of practice, the organist nevertheless embarked on a Lisztian symphony of such battleship pyrotechnics that the term ‘showpiece’ was entirely inadequate to describe it.

  Butterbugs huddled in the far corner of the Delacroix chapel so that he could hear Sartre, coming from the other end.

  ‘Ah! Now you’re in the midst of it! Good timing. That should set us in the mood.’

  ‘You are inspired?’

  ‘I am easily inspired.’

  ‘This could be the setting…’

  ‘How about this: a film. Two films: one each about a musician. Associated with the building that surrounds you. You have uncovered a subconscious desire in my mind.’

  ‘To do…’

  ‘Musician pieces. Gênet always ribbed me about my Flaubert obsession. He said I could have done better with fewer words if I’d taken up Berlioz instead.’

  ‘You still could.’

  ‘No, you have, at just this instant, shown me otherwise. I’ll do one script on Widor and the other on Vierne. I’ll let you know when they’re ready.’

  ‘Thank you, Jean-Paul.’

  ‘All right then. I’ll set to.’

  ‘Oh, Jean-Paul?’

  ‘Yes, my friend?’

  ‘I also at this instant have received a message of clarity, perhaps not subconscious, but previously obscured by my, er, errors in odyssey-pursuing.’

  Jean-Paul’s voice betrayed a smile.

  ‘Please confide, Butterbugs!’

  ‘Well, at this moment, I know that I should take up my career again, this time in earnest. Your efforts honor me, and support this message.’

  ‘You see, symbiosis is better than being or nothingness; they cancel each other out by creating creation, in spite of the odds.’

  ‘Will my odyssey always be one of self-correction?’

  ‘I wouldn’t use that term, but, as Camus told me, when your existential side is wearing thin, enter a tall ecclesiastical building and render yourself willing to put on an act.’

  Butterbugs laughed, and because the organ piece was in intermezzo now, his laugh echoed in the chapel, sealing the joy he suddenly felt.

  ‘I’m glad the timing was indeed significant, Jean-Paul.’

  ‘All right then, I’ll set to.’

  Faun d’Poire was his constant companion now. She, along with Sartre, engineered his return to acting. Justy and Saskia were pleased. Now they could return to Vinejuice in LA, fulfilled and confident that their teamwork had returned Butterbugs to the fold that mattered.

  Indeed, once he paid full attention to Faun’s message (past her obvious sex appeal), Butterbugs found a stimulating and insightful intellectual, equally
at home with Jack Lang and Yves St. Laurent, not to mention Jerry Lewis, who did some trolley imitations for everyone, one evening at the George V.

  It was good to be back in the rainure again. Back in front of the camera, with a good script. Transition! Back to what he should do, and must do. In Paris, it was all so much more fitting than anywhere else. Odyssey-following was simply better here.

  Every age group since Ernie (Hemingway), who charted the post-Great War’s lost generation’s grab onto the Parisian gravy train of civilized, stylized sweetness, has deposited (if not in the ‘lost’ context, then at least as flotsam and jetsam) its inheritor sons and daughters of Américain stock onto the quais of the Seine, whether they be Martinique-ized with seductive beach sand or not. Some of them are writers, perching in the dark cubby holes of Shakespeare & Co.’s booky nooks. Others are pinwheels on rollerblades, trying to conquer the cobblestones of Boulevard St. Michel. Others still are holding down the fort as lowly Paris bureau staffers of Hollywood cinema plants.

  One such was Barrel Pretzschluss, a Hollywoodian via Weehawken NJ, who was first magnetized to Paris by a Hemingwayesque fantasy that quickly blew out, based on associates’ tales of easy Tinseltown risings, big bucks and big tits. Besides, what was Paris worth now, anyway? Why, bat-piss beer and petite, tiny-chested chicks who wear snazzy shoes. Right?

  Well, the very single and very-probably-remaining-single Barrel wanted back to Hollywood pretty badly, so he hit up Sonny Projector as one who had some inside jizz on Le Grande Butterbugs. He had in fact spent an afternoon with the actor while he relaxed after some rescheduled shooting on the Vierne picture, at Pathé.

  Opportunist that he was, Barrel sidled up to Butterbugs, who was reading Huysmans’ ‘A rebours’ at the little studio café. So long away from this kind of dude, Butterbugs humanely indulged the chunky goof, feeding him a few relevant factors to build his opportunistic fantasies. He saw no harm in a homesick kluck trying to earn his passage stateside, albeit in tramp steerage, out of Le Havre.

  Back in his office, Barrel concocted an angle to pitch to Sonny, waited for the time zone to work in his favor, and rang the mega-agent’s private mobile number, generously supplied by Butterbugs.

  [sic passim:] ‘Sonny! My fave super/mega agent! Huh? Paris is good! Good for you-know-who! Not me, baby (hell, I’m only sleeping with a 26 volume set of Maupassant, and have been for some time). No, it’s great for our golden boy, Bb, isn’t it? Well, ah em delighted to hear that that swell kid is doin’ the ‘boulevardier’ trip and diggin’ it, baby. OK, lemme lay it out for ya. Let’s get a concept here. I’ll use Bb as the protagonist, but you get the picture. The script? Hell, Petey Viertel might take it on! Johnny Sturges could helm it! Bobby Wise, maybe? But listen, just listen. OK. This guy, right? Swingin’ with the Existential crowd. You know: Gene-Pall, Albaire Camoo, C-moan, and the gang. Meanwhile, back on the Left Bank, the withered, sickening voice of La Eddith Pyaf is heard, for some crazy reason, in the Rue Mucus. A tin gramophone recording? Maybe. Or Julie – y’know, Grecko (if we kin pry ’er away from Darryld) – singin’, ‘Who put ze eggs in eggs-zi-stential…!’ Huh?? Hell, I’ll do the lyrics. Just hook John Hallyday ’n’ Surge Gainsbirg to tune it. Jool Styne, maybe. Aaaaanywaaay. But here’s some script treatment. Our kid gets his real name used in my Highest of Concept rendition to you, for now. For convenience. OK. Butterbugs pauses for a second, inhaling the fresch kwa-sahw boo-kay from the nearby pat-tisseree which mingles – get this – with the stale ripeness of the sewer fallout at the end of the gutter. Atmosphere. The streetsweepers, all with requisite Zhitanes butts in their Algerian lips, brandish their witch brooms and sweep lahst night’s party waste into the Seine-bound tide. (Nice, huh?)

  ‘‘Bonjour M’sieur Butterbugs!’ rasps the voice of the aged crone who serves as the Young, Upstanding American’s concierge. Concierge, right? She’s from Toulouse (know where that is?), but speaks with this strained Parisian accent she’s been trying to master for the past six decades, only to fail totally. (I’m talking character ‘de-vell’ here, Sonny.) There she is, still regarded as a southern hick by her ha-ha-haughty neighbors. So, to wreak havoc on these ‘hated associates’, Madam Picpus (that’s her name, whaddaya think, huh?) has grudgingly but doggy-dly learned English by the questionable light of a guttering candle (good garret scene potential, huh?), so that she can show off – in a foreign tongue, no less. Butterbugs’ words to her are in Frentsch, as he, you know, thinks it appropriate (like, ‘when in Rome’, ya know?). So: ‘Bawn-jewer Mad-damn Pick-pus-s. Kommun-tally-(ho) – I mean – voo?’ Yellow-tint subtitles, just for a few reels; shouldn’t send anyone away.

  ‘The crone-cum-concierge, who’s in her basement chamber, looks out from her jail-barred window, which gives a gutter-eyed view of the sidewalk (and the whole world in general, y’know?). She chirps a reply that signals, you know, alarm to the young Amurican. It’s a – wait till you hear it – buzzard-like shriek, such as he had heard during a terrible but glorious time when he was homesteading in the Funeral Mountains (wherever that is!, but it sounds good!). Now, it really gets going, baby. Listen. It’s got the big beef-up treatment dead ahead, let me tell you that, right now!

  ‘But here, today, away from the excuse of geologic grandeur to influence the savagery of those beings who interacted with it, here are bedrock, basement, and palisades of whore-ish man-made Old Europe, with an ickiness that, in this particular rue, might rival some of the more drippy corners of, I don’t know, Anvers or something. Or somewhere. Here, this shriek, so fearful in its decibels as to make the gargoyles, far up the UltraGothic spire of St. Nectaire de la Framboise (which keeps the sullen rue in perpetual shadow), crack and fall as stone dust, to be blown by clammy winds unto the great gravel grounds of the Toolerrease Pallay.

  ‘So look, right now, can ya dig it? Seeeeerious stuffffff alla thuh sudden! The Yung American is indeed alarmed! Suddenly a claw thrusts out from between the bars and seizes Butterbugs’ ankle. Yeah! But wait. But let me tell you. Her grip is fierce – like an iron clamp to be found in any one of a given French château’s most industrious dungeons (Angers, I should think! Hoo-hoo-hoo!). OK: La Grip Picpus, as it’s known. That gives it credibility, huh? You know, having a Frentsch name like that. For one thing. For one – Anyway. She’s indeed a hideous legend in this here arrondis-moh, for the sidewalk is, you know, scattered with disintegrating skeletons – her victims from the ages past.

  ‘OK. Butterbugs knows he’s in a squeezed spot. Surely this is not happening to him. He can’t believe it. He had to meet Francine et Kenny in exactly fifteen minutes in order to have a hot beer at Café Kongo-go-go-go. So, the countdown begins. Now, Butterbugs is a sizable dude, ya know? Not just really, but in this treatment. Yeah, really, Viertel’s shown some interest in scripting this thing. Yeah, really. I’ll have him wire you his… thing. Anyway, this character, the one of Butterbugs, OK, he’s won 6 gold mentions at the XXI Semi-Olympiad in Hanoi for weight-pushing, and he’s been severely involved with moving the cathedral church of St. Jon the Divine in NYC a few blocks, so he’s one husky fella. Never before, though, had he felt La Grip Picpus (audiences will really ‘get it’; can you imagine guys flinging around ‘La Grip Picpus’ after they get out of the picture? Huh? Franchises, here we come!!). So anyway, he’s scared, a’course.

  ‘OK, now, let’s get in close. Her hot fœtid breath bathes him in misery, and the terror of being shockingly close to her milky eyes and basilisk face (I like that!) shakes his frame so that the sidewalk becomes dented by his thrashings. Yeah, I know, it gets pretty wild here. Even the Jonn-Darm who is at his post in the Jon Dharm Kioske up at the corner of Avenue du Président William Henry Harrison flees the scene in – stark horror. Oui-oui, Butterbugs has to face his fate alone. Even Le Président – Zhack Sheerack / Nick Sar-Koh-ZEE / Francis Hauland / Tony Lemons, whatever – has left the city for the fastness of Vursigh, to leave the Yung Amurican to his dark sorta situation. OK, as this thing goes on, the city grinds
to a halt. Young people who were buying yellow notepads at Gibbair Zhone nearby, cease their jabbering. Can you imagine?? The sky dims until it’s covered – yeah, really, covered – by a seemingly perpetual half-light. The towers of Noter Deighm become increasingly gothic as silhooettes in this, the Last Sunset. Then he says, ‘Paris! Paris hath betreighed me!’ That, wailing Butterbugs, in crisp American Yinglish. He continues: ‘I came. I saw. I got conquered! What a rip-off! I spent all my Old Dad’s Lauder’s Scotch money to come here, and I really got burned!’ Without warning, the insipid peep of a Finnish-designed (and assembled in Annam – which is good, cuz it’s a former Frentsch colonial possession – Butterbugs has that going for him, in case the French people get mad) Nohkeea sell-fone begins to erupt from the inside of Butterbugs’ therapy tunic.

  ‘‘Yoe!’ the Yung Amurican answers. It’s his Old Dad, see?

  ‘‘Funny you should call, Big Guy. I wasz just thinking of you, jolly old fellow.’

  ‘‘Li’l Ward…’ (or some corny handle) comes the halting reply from another, lesser continent. (You like that?)

  ‘‘The Little Guy! Are you, thus, having fun?’ Old Dad then asks timidly. ‘Are you getting enough chocolate milk? I read in the ‘Daily GradGrind’ that there is some trouble in Perris. Are you – in some kind of trouble?’

  ‘OK, we can work out the time passage, but now Butterbugs is extremely irritated at this sort of phone call, so he – get ready – hangs up, making sure to switch off the high-voltage breaker that controls the portable power plant he tows behind him, which supplies juice for his sell-phone, plus a portable beverage container, which allows him to have a cold beverage whenever he wishes. (Chance for product endorsements, huh?) Flipping this high-toned breaker will seal him off into strict privacy, ensuring that the ringer of his wonder-fone will not sound again, thus distracting him from this tight situation that currently rages around him.