Marv sat in my living room. I hadn't seen him since New York City, long ago. He'd been trying for seventeen years to complete his PhD thesis. Either he had dyslexia or smoked too much ganja. He'd never finish it. I'd read early drafts and they were indecipherable. Even Alan Turing, the British mathematician, who broke crucial German codes during WWII, wouldn't have cracked Marv's writing. Marv was like a painter, unable to make up his mind, covering the canvas with too many colors until only a muddy brown showed. Marv's work was beyond even murky. Unsalvageable, a better term.
Marv received two stipends, two different disability benefits, and two union pensions each month. Why couldn't he live on his 20-acre farm and pitch horseshoes? Marv had a theoretical and impractical mind, whose single achievement was memorizing Finnegans Wake. At best, he could earn a fine living touring, reciting Wake, traditional Irish ballads backing him up. No Pogues or Black 47 for him. Strictly a purist, Marv.
Aside from the thesis, he'd written a 800-page historical novel set in Ireland, which none of the 46 literary agents he queried accepted. He'd researched the novel, going diligently to the NYC 42nd Street library, copying only the headlines of Irish newspapers of the period.
"Yes, lots of information in those old-time headlines," I said. I asked about publishers. Marv rose his huge body from the couch, and stormed toward me.
"Those arrogant, shit-eating dickheads," he bellowed.
"Take it easy, man. This room's too small for high decibels," I said.
I persisted, asking about getting an agent to represent him.
"They're nothing but a pack of curs," he screamed, only much softer, about the decibel level of a Clancy Brothers concert.
I told him I was working (writers "work," as if they'd pick fruit for ten straight hours) on a memoir. I detailed it, perhaps too much, explaining my dysfunctional family (All Families Are Psychotic—Douglas Coupland's recent novel—Why wasn't he around in the fifties when I needed him?), the brutal suburban emotional life, the freezer-cold hearts of Mom and Dad, a father who told me that three prominent men in town said I was a Communist (If anything, I was Baseballist). I couldn't connect the dots; it had no narrative flow, only a series of existential moments. Marv's expression showed he despised that crap.
Yet, I was his token WASP, since most of Marv's friends were Irish, and not the hyphenated kind, either. He used to move tons of rock back in Ireland during his formative years. That seemed the leitmotif running through his conversations. Marv's crooked spine attested to the pain of the real Irish life. He subdued pain by smoking mass quantities of high-THC weed.
"You have real dignity," he said, as he toked another one. No one ever said that about me. Either the sensi opened neural pathways undiscovered, or his mind was overwhelmed by impurities in the home-grown pot. The grow-lights were powered by a gas generator. The toxicity levels could have been higher than even Marv. Dignity?
He began reciting Finnegan's Wake. "thigging thugs were and houhnhymn songtoms were and norgels were pollyfool fiansees," he sang, like Homer, like Jesus, like Yeats. Forty minutes he unloaded his memory of Wake, soon singing off-key, slowing down, pot warping the melody.
"How can you write a novel with high THC levels in your system?" I asked. I tried writing under the influence, always finding the next day how awful the stoner-genius bardic tome was.
Coming back from the kitchen, I brought some warm Guinnesses.
"Room-temperature only," I said.
"Yeah." Marv toned down after he chugged a bottle.
"The fall of civilization began with the invention of ice cubes," he said, relaxing, his head tipped back on a soft foam pillow. I turned on the computer, clicked Accuradio, then Celtic music, and clicked female singers. A synergy of spirit and eroticism drifted through the room, into our beings, letting melodies overpower us. I thought of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. McCourt was a true wordsmith, infatuated with both text and his hard-wrought vanity.
"Angela's Ashes must be in its fiftieth printing," I said. "It's why everyone's writing memoirs these days."
Marv slammed the bottle on the end table, rose, and stormed toward me.
"I screwed that guy's daughter in an orgy on the Upper East Side before anyone knew the hairs of Frank's arse." Some kind of Irish penis war, especially against those who'd succeeded.
"Easy big fellow" I said, hoping Marv wouldn't sack and torch my apartment.
"I can't stand your groveling," he yelled, his big-framed, muscular body heading toward the door.
As he left, I couldn't resist a Parthian shot.
"You're truly a literary giant."
"Fuck off." He walked out. I never saw him again.
Books.
I stand before my reflected image in front of Gottfried Helnwein's Lucite-encased print, Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I see myself distorted in the famous left-hand side. I understand better now, more profoundly than previous viewings of Edward Hopper's original, Nighthawks. Life is best sustained in deserted spaces, in uninhabited zones, stranded, without comrades, brothers and sisters.
It's inconsolable, yet I realize that for reasons of state, we must live sealed off, isolated from other Americans. The security of the nation depends on life engulfed in solitude, accepting this 21st Century panopticon, under perpetual surveillance. Every tiniest gesture or incidental, spoken word has implications. We could be committing treason without this eternal vigilance.
Rather Hopper's original diner, Helnwein paints in four classic stars. "Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today," James Dean remarked, and soon the mythic death-crash. Had anti-homosexual haters set up the crash? It was on a lonely stretch of highway, it could've been a message to gays: Careful, you may be next.
Dean sits alone, with Marilyn and Bogie together on the counter's other side. Dean: Clean, optimistic, his face stronger than he really was. Marilyn: Druggy, lively, a well-rehearsed, throw-her-back laugh, before the overdosed-death conspiracy, and who stood to gain. Bogie: Pondering In A Lonely Place, what a creepy, miserable guy he was, conjuring that every American is drunk with inner rage, its paranoia, and conceivable violence. Against whom? Perhaps like a fired employee, he shoots and kills corporate executives, as well as innocent civilians. Powerful men who didn't like him asking for a justifiable salary increase. After all, this could spark a trend. Elvis: Too happy doing trite chores behind the acclaimed sweep of the counter. Elvis chose ultra-strong painkillers, over-dosing during tense negotiations over Panama gaining control of the Canal. Elvis's death served to overshadow crucial White House dealings many Americans opposed. Paranoia or policy, this distraction?
I observe vacant stores and desolate, second-floor apartments, down the street to nowhere. "I have the imagination of disaster—and see life as ferocious and sinister," Henry James said before the outbreak of WWI, the Great War historians chortle about. It's patriotic, walking down that well-known, dark street on the left-hand side. Taking that walk, you'll join ranks with The Disappeared.
Isn't that where the four painted celebs ended: Notorious and dead.
Everyone, sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Isn't it wonderful, all that morale boosting, fighting wars against terrorism. But I must proudly hail. I imagine standing in Hopper's original American left in Broken Dreams. But concealed within that darkness is revolution, solidarity, power. We've been deceived. Not fear resides there, but courage.
How improbable it is to prevail as human without being Zero itself.
