white: yin and yang. And no rhythm. Tight in places and loose, would you believe, in others? A chiller, dig? As if a small flounder has tried to swallow an overly large starfish. Bad example!”
His ears cupped and cusped (“O surely,” you say, “grok Maxim’s inheritance right there: the pointed ears of a saboteur!”—but there are questions, and I’m getting to that). His cornute elbows and horned hips, from the sharp hang of nose to the hang of . . . Some limitations imposed, babaloos, in light of Lady Chatterley and the trouble they had importing The Ginger Man. But yes, a child conceived when I was cannot deny: Siemen’s Roszak’s aquiline character seemed to me focused down there.
. . . Pausing momentarily to observe through the window of the schoolhouse Principal Bull-bull going off to uncoil the school hose with which the lay preacher returned to stand ready beside class dripping, hoping What? to extinguish the explosion. “That man has a frontal lobe problem,” whispered illuminati, a wry smile now above his pointed and tremendous jaw. “Bull. Bull. Bully bull.” He checked his watch, realized he has been inside the dweeb zone too long, and made for the front of the classroom before the jig was up. Chalk in hand he did not hesitate but wrote across the blackboard in thick letters the size of the youngest kid: LIES! LIES! LIES! And then he disappeared, back out the window.
No explosion then, except for a verbal one. But this would be enough to set things in motion. Three words and one meaning. Siemens Roszak would leave his father’s home and the Nissen on The Corso and shortly rent a room in Columbia. No longer in the early days of charismatic priesthood. A memory of pulpits almost erased. His career as a groovy Rev. Billy Graham never begun, though at times his clothes took on the shape of vestments. By and large, he was putting charisma behind him and entering his postgraduate years with a dull and unwritten slate. He tricked up the accelerator with the overhang of his shoe and spun down the hill to The Corso. The day was hot. The afternoon sea-breeze was blowing hard from the north east. And, that would be that . . . Except that two young men set in rapid motion are unlikely to stop on a dime (statistics to prove: 1.25 million lost in collisions in 1960 alone and all because of the impelling force of testosterone). On the BBC World Service Garrison O’Grady attempted a wrap up, revealing Spy Plane Discovered and Submarine Nears Bottom of Rosiana Trench but the signal was weak and the TV sets in the window of Mr. Yo’s Electrical were attracting more of an audience. No one quite sure what to expect: but Frontierland was coming, Adventureland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, a mouse, a duck, Professor Ludwig von Drake. Pastpresentandfuture combined. Davy Crockatt. Space Mountain. Utilidor. To the tune of Cornell’s alma mater:
Down below the Disney railways
And the Merritt Island sand
Lies the well-known Utilidor
Branch of Tomorrowland.
With promises of more: A Wonderful World of Disney. The Prince and the Pauper. While O’Grady, with a voice not unlike that of a crooner departed, predicted we would shortly witness the Archbishop of Canterbury paying a call on the Pope for the first time in 400 years. Man! Real weak: a signal no more than static on engineer daddio’s DeSoto radiorama. Meanwhile, outside Mr. Yo’s Light and Electrical: “How handsome, whatdoyousay, is Mr. Brian Henderson and his Bandstand show?” . . .”Have you recently got an eyeful of Wyatt Earp?” . . .”Did you watch those cave whatchamacallit Flintstones?” . . . And two young men in their prime on a collision course as camera begins to cut from one to the other. Back and forth. Revealing Tito Livio: curly-top shortie with legs pumped like drumsticks and hands so tight knotted. Recording Siemens Roszak: ears like the King of Spades, the phosphorous of sabotage on his breath. Suspense building. Theme music in the fun pier close by: “Come On-a My House” “Sixteen Tons” (music always entering Maxim Trymelow’s life at significant junctions). Audience thrusting forward onto the edge of their seats as DeSoto swings onto Raglan Street, in sight now of the ocean which is whipping to a froth; surferboys huddled beneath a teepee of surfboards; The Hogwinders opposite winding up their motors while Dutch Hoyle looks on, the ink not yet dry on his fingers; Mr. Leacon nose out from his newsagency, tapping his sharp feet waiting for the sight of his paper-selling son; and now Tito Livio comes into view, pounding the pavement, streaming venom. The most likely point of impact being Johnny Dogs on The Esplanade. Great fracas of Keen’s mustard and ketchup and Johnny (whose real name, I believe, was not Johnny at all) scrambling in the sand for his weenies and bunyips which catch a breeze and animate (the director on this scene being Kubrick after all) and away go the strutting bunyips with weenies springing in pursuit. Just as quickly, the immediate danger is past as DeSoto and dunnyboy’s legs contrive to move the scene further to the south. Past Leacon’s and Dutch Hoyle’s in one frame and snoring Columbia and the hospital in another. Down hill and up. The camera trucking back and switching to, High Shot: DeSoto caught behind wagons reversing as the wind becomes moist and clouds slither and roll into frame, and with this hint of tropic squall a crowd heaves-to and makes for cars: coconut oils, golden sunhats, Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikinis, call now for: “Rain on cue!” (a crowd the soon-to-be lodgers observe rising up from below, bodiless at first and then in degrees of sublime undress) . . . Too-pert little bellies which make bids for independent lives, aged biddies draped with several lifetimes of themselves, mothers peeling away layer by layer as if they will soon reveal . . . sunworshippers everywhere (heating things up), and the appearance along with them of genies, flibbertigibbets and brine swirling up from cracks in the pavement and (now panning) to black curls tangled in a short crowd at Snow Cone’s, bright red kids stoically holding their places in the line, clutching pennies, bare footed. The local theatre with its two mock Dionysian columns pasted with news of nativity next week. And now DeSoto is free and moves on. Its big bumper parting the crowd and, from the long shot angle of Tito Livio, also parting sunworshippers. Audaciously. Conspicuously. Young man filming in terms of shape and color. The DeSoto appearing as a cavorting alien sphere, a UFO, and this is its color: silver. With the sun glinting off it as if from the slats of roller blinds and the crowd colorful, blooming, covered in dew which raises them up as it steams away (a young man’s dyslexia later to prove beneficial when during labor I am introduced to barrels of jalapeños and bags of black turtle beans, but in this instance . . . ). And finally the split screen returns to a wide shot and DeSoto fresh from verbal sabotage pulls into a space between council building and municipal library reserved for: Chief City Engineer. In sight, that is, of dunnyman’s boy who perceives, due to an affliction (which is also a blessing) that the spaces are a complicated and uncommunicative grid.
So one young man climbed from the driver’s seat. The day was tropical, the afternoon sea-breeze was blowing hard from the nor’ east, and he was craggy and charged by the miraculous vision of a Charismatic school principal trying like the Devil to brandish a dribbling hose-pipe. He strode, striding, toward the marble steps of the South Steyne Municipal Library to enter the specious world of books; when, from out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a bird. A big bird, broad, and its wings were short and its legs likewise and it swooped from the direction of the theatre, catching the wind in its black mop top, glittering in the golden epaulettes of its plumage, swooping and dropping white feathers (which seemed surely to have been plucked viciously from seagulls), full-flexing, leaping, flapping onto the steps, giving off a peculiarly attractive, earthy scent, and the bird’s squawk was this: “Lies! . . . Lies! . . . Lies!” Eyes seeing ears. Ears hearing: “Lies!” And Bobby Allen Zimmerman is hurrying now, on his way to Columbia too.
Zimmerman
On December 2, 1960, as everyone knows, the wolfhounds Pcholka and Mushka plummeted to Earth, entered the atmosphere too sharply, and burned up. The next day, Chief Rocket Designer Korolev suffered a heart attack and was diagnosed as suffering from nephritis and pyelitis, common kidney ailments in survivors of the gulag. On such a Sea of Infinite Fertility anything was possible. . . . After all, was not Clark Gable dying quietly in his sleep, but close enough to Sylvia Pankhurst to prove that irony knows no frontier? Were not three young men about to read the same advertisement and so telephone an unknown impresario whose husband
