Mighty Unclean

by Cody Goodfellow

  And finally, he played a curling mist that was every dream that never will be.

  He was playing a song. And I knew it was “Lanna’s Song.”

  He was still playing, variations on an end theme, as he walked stiff-legged into the waves.

  That was how it had to be. So I let it be. And it seems I heard “Lanna’s Song,” the echoes of it, even when there was no reason to hear it anymore.

  There are times I know I hear it still.

  I Am Your Need

  By Mort Castle

  I

  August 4, 1962

  The Brentwood Section of Los Angles

  arilyn Monroe lies naked and dying.

  You can see it there, at that spot on her forehead where electrolysis permanently removed her widow’s peak. Just beneath the skin’s surface, a blue black flower grows.

  It is Death.

  There is the promise of finality in her every tentative breath, the sporadic sighings, the intimation of ending.

  Marilyn Monroe is dying.

  I am her death.

  And I will die, too.

  That is, when she dies, I have to assume I will also cease to be.

  Marilyn Monroe. She was born in the flesh and of the flesh.

  Like you.

  And I?

  I was born of her need.

  I am her need.

  II

  February 6, 1961

  New York

  I could not bear it. I could bear no more, anymore. I wanted to die.

  No, I need to die. That is what I thought.

  The address of the Lonesome Capitol of the world is East Fifty-Seventh Street: The Millers’ apartment, now my apartment. His typewriter was gone, his Oxford Unabridged was gone, his leather bound copy of Madame Bovary, the first “quality book” he ever bought, his underwear, his Schick electric shaver, the silk tie he wore when he testified before HUAC… He did not take the picture of me I had given him, the one in which I wear white gloves (hiding my ugly hands, my ugly, ugly, ugly hands) and a hat that Mamie Eisenhower might have worn. I looked “demure” in the picture, he said. I looked regal and contemplative and lovely, he said. I kissed him regally and demurely and even contemplatively, and then I fucked him until his eyes rolled back in his head and he screamed some things none of his characters will ever be allowed to say on stage.

  I stood at the living room window. Below, the city. (The Asphalt Jungle! The Naked City! Broadway, the busiest and loneliest street in the world! All the clichés of popular culture are true!) It was a perfectly cold, perfect blue sky February afternoon. You cannot be more alone than that.

  It seemed Death was summoning me. My marriages were dead. My marriage to Jim Dougherty, Just Plain Jim, the sweet Irish merchant marine. To the jealous and sweet and mean Yankee Clipper, my slugger, my Joltin’ Joe.

  And now, to the New York Jewish Liberal Intellectual, Arthur. I called Arthur “Pops” or “Popsie.” I consider The Crucible his best work. He was surprised, you know, that I understood the play so well, that anyone as blond as I could possibly comprehend metaphor and symbol. I got mad when he told me that. I cried. I told him I wasn’t stupid. I told him I understood metaphor and symbol, understood better than he, because I goddamned good and goddamned well was metaphor and symbol and the way he looked at me then, the way he looked at me, that clever observing way, I knew the bastard someday would use what I had said in a play.

  I loved Arthur Miller. Arthur Miller loved me, but, when you realize something like that, no, you cannot stay married to a man.

  There were other voices beckoning me, calling me to the Nation of the Dead.

  My children. I don’t know how many had been scraped out of me, poor little blobs, you have to force yourself to lose track of statistics like that, but all those children died and they cursed me: They cursed my tubes so I could never have sons or daughters. They left behind a dead womb.

  The dead call out…

  There, the insane contralto of Della Monroe, dear old Gram, who muttered she smelled strange smells in the house that nobody else could smell, burning silk, fish oil, lye soap, and something she called “the putrid stink of black flowers,” There were men in wool suits, men with gray hats and well shined shoes, they had to be men from “the agency, that’s who they were,” and they followed her. They sat behind her on street cars. They held the door for her when she stepped into a department store. They had accents, but the accents kept changing, French, Spanish, Eastern European…

  You know, it’s weird, but if you really try, I bet you can remember everything, everything, no matter how young you were, and I can remember Gram’s lopsided determined smile as she pressed a pillow down on me (I can still summon that wet feather taste – in my nightmares I taste it) I was maybe 14 months old or so when Gram tried to kill me.

  Someone stopped her. Mama? That I can’t remember for sure. Maybe I have not tried hard enough. I might need more analysis. It might have been my mother. Poor Gladys, and sometimes you think she had to be doomed because she was named Gladys (I chose my name, I choose my names, Marilyn Monroe, Zelda Zonk, Journey Evers, but I cannot run away from the what I am!); not all that long after Gram played “Baby want pillow,” my mother went crazy herself; one day, instead of just looking nervous, with her hands flying this way and that, she sat down and started crying. “I can’t, I can’t, I just can’t…” She kept saying that and she went off to the asylum and that’s where you will find her today.

  Family tradition: Gram got packed off to the insane asylum and died there.

  (Was the Monroe Madness my inheritance? I’ve frequently discussed that with my psychiatrists. We talk about “nature and nurture,” genetic tendencies, then they prescribe new drugs – I give the Demerol four stars, but forget that Seconal: leaves you with a cotton brain and the flavor of a day old Dr. Scholl’s corn pad in your mouth – but mostly my therapists want me to talk about fucking. A couple have wanted to do more than talk.)

  Oh, and by the way, my movie was dead.

  It was/had been called Something’s Got to Give. I had insisted on a tasteful swimming pool nude scene, so tasteful that tasteful stills had tastefully been carried in the always tasteful Life magazine, pictures which tastefully showed my tasteful tits, the top of my tasteful tush crack (a far cry, don’t you think, from such digest size stroke mags wherein my image used to appear as Caper, Dizzy Winks, and Hotcha Babe!) but the production was all shut down, boomthudboom. Studio lawsuits against me. Countersuits against the studio.

  All right, the script was dreck a la dreck. That did not matter. Some Like It Hot is the kind of “filmic vehicle” that might have starred Gale Storm with Moe, Larry, and Curly, had they had a better agent, some luck, and the ability to read. As it is, Hot was perfect for me: I became a respected comedienne (accent it properly, if you please), a “luminous and gifted comic actress with impeccable timing and commanding presence,” said Archer Kellbourne in the New York Times.

  Something’s Got to Give could have been my salvation.

  No. I did not want salvation.

  Something’s got give and the something is me.

  Okay. Grandiose, I know. Self-pitying shit.

  Solipsistic.

  Does it surprise you that such a word is in my vocabulary? I have, after all, despite its aging, what has been appraised as a “million dollar ass” by no less an authority than Hollywood raconteur and celebrated ass connoisseur Groucho Marx. With an ass you can take to the bank, why, mercy on my Pie O My, why ever would you even need a brain?

  Pay attention, s’il vous plaît (she said multilingually, which has nothing to do with giving you a blow job): Here are other words I know and can properly use: insouciant, ontological, nonsequitur, dialectic, moribund, phlegmatic, truculent…

  May I not say, “Seurat’s pointillism never descends into perfunctory technique or mannerism”? Do you think, “That guy sure painted pretty with those little dots” is the MM style?

  Maybe you are ri
ght. Maybe I am a dumb blonde. After all, I did give Yves Montand a blow job.

  The hell with it.

  The hell with it already.

  It was time to die, time to stop concerning myself about what I truly was and what people thought I was and…

  It was time to die.

  My first thought was to step out onto the ledge, to take that deepest of breaths as I sucked in clean winter air, to look up at the sky and to see it with the utmost clarity and then to leap.

  Step out onto the ledge…

  My god, that would be like a scene from I Love Lucy. “Looseeee, choo get back in la casa muy pronto! You got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

  I wanted to die.

  I did not want to be ridiculous.

  So I opened the living room window as wide as possible. And then I backed up.

  I would run and hurl myself out. A swan dive (just like Esther Williams – to her credit, she never attempted to act – or think), only sans water. I had heard that jumpers lost consciousness before they landed and there was an appeal in that.

  I clenched my fists.

  I licked my lips. They were dry and rough. My mouth felt cottony. Nembutal and Dom Perignon and chloral hydrate, an always interesting aftertaste.

  I could hear my heart beat but not feel it. That was curious, I thought.

  And then I ran but it was not so much running as floating, and I didn’t know if I could really do it, if I had the force of will to kill myself.

  Then just before the jump, I looked down, and there was someone out there, someone down below on the sidewalk, someone looking up at me

  —and I knew him, I could see his face, despite the distance, and I knew him even though I did not know who he was

  —Daddy?

  —(you have had the feeling, haven’t you, maybe just once in your life, but you have experienced it and so this is not a delusion of mine or a paradox for you, is it?)

  —and I said, “N…Nuh-No-No.”

  (I stuttered as a child. Sometimes, even though I am now all grown up, I still do.)

  I changed my mind.

  I made a rational decision: I did not have to die. I was meant to live. I was a survivor.

  But momentum or destiny or something worse carried me on, carried me toward the cold and the window and then I thrust my arms out, locking my elbows, and the heels of my hands smashed hard against the window sill and the shock went all the way up into my teeth and I went reeling backward.

  I did not die.

  A day later, I checked myself into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic at New York Hospital, where I was classified as suicidal, which was neo-Jungian, post-Freudian, Harry Stack Fucking Sullivan bullshit.

  Fuck that, Freddy.

  Marilyn Monroe is a survivor.

  III

  If it can be said that I am capable of surprise, I am often surprised by all that I know and by all that I do not know:

  For example, I can intelligently discuss existentialism, possibly win an argument with Jean Paul Sartre himself if need be. (Existence before essence, yes, albeit not in my case.) Let the subject turn to the aesthetics of cinematography, and I will explain the importance of the Eisenstein montage and the Gance panorama. Shall we focus on the universal themes of Osip Mandelstam’s modernist poetry or the immensity of suffering in Picasso’s “Guernica” or the myriad subtleties of vocal shading in the performances of June Christie?

  Marilyn needed me to be smart, to be intellectual and artistic. You were no dunce, Marilyn, no dimbulb bimbo, no sackready starlet with a VACANCY sign on her forehead and HOT TO TROT on her round heels. You needed intellect and that is what I became (in part!) and what I am.

  I am your need.

  Yet I have no idea how to write a check. That is because you had others to take care of that. On an afternoon kiddy TV show, I heard the word hygrometer; I have no concept of what it is, what it does, why it is needed, anymore than do you. You thought Sukarno was the president of India, not Indonesia; you had no idea of the history, the culture, or even the location of either country and so, neither do I.

  And of course I had to be “political” because you were involved in your own way in politics. I guess you would have to call me a Democrat. Here I always aver, Marilyn, to your reasoning:

  Jack is a damned clever politician and progressive thinker and not such a bad lay, say a six or seven, but he’s more in love with himself than he could ever be with anyone else (poor Jackie, poor, poor Jackie), or with the country for that matter and Bobby Kennedy is a good man, usually, even if being Catholic has made him nuttier than most Catholics, and he is so smart that he doesn’t feel threatened by a smart woman and so it’s good to talk to him and he is a good politician and maybe he will be able to help people the way he wants and maybe Jack can help him, if Jack’s ego will permit, and you know what is really nice is that he really does love his wife and kids, so no matter how bad he wants to put it to Marilyn! Monroe! and wants to even more because Big Brother has greased the gears, no matter what, Bobby probably won’t do it – and you do have to respect a man who won’t fuck you…

  Here is what else I know, Marilyn.

  You needed me.

  And when the need was powerful enough, when it was pure ferocity of need, then, like magic, like dream, like aneurism or lottery, like the roll of the dice, the whirl of the Great Mandela.

  I am.

  With no burden of personal history, with no more clue to my beginnings than had any fleabite scratching caveman, there I am!

  I am

  your need

  I AM

  IV

  September 4, 1958

  Early afternoon

  San Diego is the best city in California and perhaps in the United States. The weather is always so near to perfect that you do not think at all about the weather. The youth are golden and smell of sea water and lotions and if you see one of them frowning it is noteworthy. Old cars have no rust, no wrinkles, no dents, nor do old people. Dos Picos Park is the favorite park of San Diego’s residents. The oak trees are majestic as only oaks can be and the shadows cast by their limbs are not frightening. And there are the ducks waiting in the pond. The ducks like visitors.

  She liked being here, squatting at the water’s edge, tossing oyster crackers to the appreciative ducks. She should have been in makeup and costume, should have been on the set at Coronado Beach, but she had decided to be difficult, a star turn and how do you like it, you assholes. She could not stand to be with Mr. Billy Wilder, a certified prick (figuratively speaking) but without the sensitivity of a prick (literally speaking); and she couldn’t stand to be with Curtis, who told her, “The script says I kiss you, but kissing you is like kissing Hitler.”

  Curtis probably would delight in kissing Hitler. The uniform and the leather boots and all. Curtis definitely thought he could out-beautiful her. She thought he’d look like a mummified drag queen when he got old, and that wasn’t in the least ironic because…

  Oh, God, she was so afraid, she was so afraid. The mind was going: Tilt! That’s all, Folks! Right into the Mad Mad Monroe Maelstrom.

  “It’s me, Sugar.” That was her part, her only line, for yesterday’s scene. “It’s me, Sugar.”

  Here is the Reader’s Digest Condensed version of what she said:

  I.. i.it’s sugar, me.

  Sugar me

  It is I! Cigar!

  It’s just me, sugar pie.

  It’s just fucking sugar shit fuck fuck…

  It required 37 fucking takes for her to say, “It’s me, Sugar,” 37 takes to synch brain with mouth to get out words that Lassie could have managed with one hand cue from trainer Rudd Weatherwax and the promise of two Gaines biscuits.

  And there was Billy Wilder, looking like he hadn’t had a dump in three weeks and had no hope for the future, and Mr. Tony “I Feel Pretty” Curtis throwing his hands in the air.

  She had to get away, had to, had to be alone—

  —did not want to
be alone, so alone—

  Incognito time. Easy, surprisingly easy. Forget Max Factor and Maybelline, slip on the kind of dark glasses that sell three for a dollar at the Texaco station and tie a scarf over the blondness, and a far too big UCLA sweatshirt (Tits? Tits? In this potato sack?) and the kind of shapeless skirt that would embarrass a Jehovah’s Witness, and you disappear, you become nobody

  I’m nobody. Who are you?

  I’m nobody but I need to be somebody and I need to show them show them all that I am somebody and I need to be loved and need to be somebody’s and I need and I need and I need—

  V

  I take her elbow, feel that tremoring within like a too tightly wound clock spring. She is not surprised that I am here.

  I am her need, corporeal, need now made manifest, though I have always been with her.

  We sit on a bench. “The crackers,” she says. “Whenever I go to a restaurant, I always take the crackers for the ducks. I love animals.”

  I know.

  I know she needs to tell me about her love for animals, needs me to hear about this goodness in her.

  “I’ve always loved animals.”

  I know.

  “Want to hear a funny story?”

  She needs me to hear a funny story, needs to remind herself of a time when her life could be safely compartmentalized in funny little stories, mundane events no larger than life and nothing in the least crazy.

  “My first husband, Jim, it was when we were first married. We went off on this weekend. He had friends near Van Nuys and they had this small farm. They called it a ranch ‘cause everything’s a ranch in California, but it really was a farm.

  “So we went out to their farm and they were our age, well, Jim’s age, he was five years older than me, you know, and we played gin rummy and danced to the radio. We were drinking Blatz beer. I remember that ‘cause it was the sponsor of the radio remote we were listening to, ‘Live from the Congress Hotel in Chicago,’ with Eddy Howard and his orchestra.