The Labyrinth

I came to in another dank basement-like room. The walls were a strange green color, and I noticed that there were black runes painted on them. A steady dripping noise came from somewhere behind me, accompanied by a heavy breathing and wheezing. It had been a long time since I had been on a farm, but I thought I recognized the smell of a cow. I started to turn around when a voice from somewhere in front of me said, “I wouldn’t do that, old boy. You’ll upset him.”

I looked straight ahead and said, “Mffrmmmgl.” Then I realized that, this time, I didn’t have a ball gag in my mouth and said, “Where am I?”

“You’re in the University’s labyrinth,” said the voice. The man who stabbed me in front of the Missing Link stepped into a small circle of light coming down from the ceiling. I looked up and saw that there was a break in the roof and a small bit of sunlight was streamed through.

“No I’m not,” I said. “The labyrinth’s that shitty pathway near the footpath—this is underground. Where am I?” I thrashed in my chair. Though they didn’t gag me, they still made sure to tie me up.

“You utter prat,” said the man, walking up and slapping me in the face with a package of uncooked spaghetti noodles from Sainsbury’s. (Sainsbury’s, taste the difference.)

“Ow.”

“Silence,” said the man. He snapped his fingers and an Irish Wolfhound padded into the circle of light. It had a padded seat—the sort you can rent at a baseball stadium—tied to its back. The man sat down on the dog. “Your CABAL has another task to complete.”

There was a sneeze from behind me and my neck was coated in a fine layer of sticky saliva. I groaned.

“Bless you,” said the man.

There was a grunt from behind me.

“What’s behind me?”

“Why, the minotaur, of course,” said the man. “Judging by that colorful expression, you don’t believe me. Very well. Minotaur, show yourself.”

A third being then entered the circle of light. It moved from my back brushed past me, and stood next to the giant dog. It was a minotaur. The black bull’s head sat on top of a tall, extremely muscular man’s body. In his hands, he held a large Viking axe. The sort of thing with one sharp edge and then a big hunk of iron on the back that could only be used for blugeoning what didn’t die of fright from seeing the sharp bit. Greek lettering went down the edge of the blade, and, for some reason, I memorized the letters to ask Zaf what they meant. Seemed like a good idea.

“There,” said the man in the bowler cap. “The University has a minotaur and a labyrinth. Proper labyrinth. Not that £50,000 piece of shlock on the hill.” He shook his head. “What these people do in order to stand out is downright shocking sometimes, do you agree?”

“Sure.”

“Right,” he said. “Minotaur, you may go back to your original position. If he tries to make a break for it, decapitate him.”

I gulped.

The minotaur nodded. Ites red eyes looked at me and, at that moment, I figured that, if they wanted to, bovines could make for a terrifying carnivorous species. It walked out of the light and resumed its previous position of standing at attention with an axe at the ready.

“So,” said the man, scratching the wolfhound’s ears, “as I said, you have a mission, you and your CABAL.”

“No,” I said. “You got it wrong. I’m not the guy you’re looking for. I’m not The Stalker. The Stalker’s the one who be—”

“Will you please be quiet?” asked the man. “It doesn’t matter if we have the right one, the wrong one, or the kind of okay one. What matters, you ignoramous, is that we have, simply, one.” He leaned forward. “Do you agree?”

“Sure.”

He stood up off the wolfhound, walked forward, and backhanded me across the face. “Do you agree?”

“Yes!”

“Is my dog the best little puppy pupperton in the world?”

“What?”

He backhanded me again. “Is he or isn’t he? This is of paramount importance!”

“Jesus! Yes. He’s the best widdle puppy pupperton in the world. Lookit him, being a widdle pup pup pupperton.”

The man smiled and folded his hands behind his back. “Good. Excellent, even. Now for your mission.” He walked back to the dog and sat down again, scratching its head this time. “You are to join the play Fiddler on the Roof. You are to be—”

“You asshole!” I shouted. I thrashed about in my chair, but stopped when I felt the cool blade of the axe graze the back of my neck. “I’m in the fucking play! You kidnapped me for no goddamn reason, shit for brains.”

The man blinked. “Terribly sorry, I don’t think I caught that. You mean to say that you—you’re already in the play. As in, you’ve been given a role.”

“The role. I’m Tevye. Yaidle-deedle daidle, daidle dum. If I were a rich man, to life, to life l’chaim, do you love me, fucking Tevye!”

The man scratched his chin. “I see. Well.” He sat up straight and took out a black notepad and a quill pen from his jacket. He scribbled something and then put them both away. “It seems there has been a slight delay in intelligence on our end. Agent Zed will perish for this, I shall assure you. Yes, perish terribly.”

“You’re going to kill someone?”

The man blinked. “Oh, heavens no. We’re going to let him go without a pension. What do you think we are, old bean, the Mossad or the CIA? While we can’t have dead weight—not in our organization—that would be no cause to kill a man. Well, now what to do about this little misunderstanding?”

“You could untie me and dismiss the circus freak at my back.” This was probably not the smartest thing to say, as the minotaur swung with the axe and gave the top of my head a much-needed haircut. Oh well, all the more reason to wear a hat. “That,” I said, “may have been a slightly out-of-line thing to say, and I apologize.”

The minotaur grunted.

“No,” said the man, “I’m afraid we can’t let you out right now. You might do something rash and get your head lobbed off. Then what good would you be?”

The dog barked. The sound bounced off the walls of the room and gave me an instant headache.

“Brilliant idea, Delphi,” said the man. “We shall continue as normal—except for Agent Zed, who will be sacked as soon as I return to headquarters.”

“Where is that, exactly?”

“Deep within the Registry. Anyway. You will be in this play, and you will report upon the actions of all of the cast and crew. We have an interest in a few of them, and you will be our source of information.”

“Information for what?”

“Leave that to us. You will report, we shall decode, and a certain wager shall be solved. And, hopefully, the world will continue much as it has for these past four hundred years—since our inception, you might say.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“You leave that to us and don’t worry your pretty little head about it.” He dismounted the dog and made his way to me, He reached into his jacket, pulled out the needle again, and said, “And now for baby’s medicine.”

“I’ll sue yo—”

Then I blacked out.

The First of Many Readings

The readings take place in a building behind Darwin called The Missing Link. The Missing Link was divided into The Peter Brown Room and a few seminar rooms. The Peter Brown Room, in which the Creative Writing readings were held, was a kinda-sorta circular-looking room. The department had arranged a few rows of chairs facing away from the entrance and towards a bunch of windows, and a thin, somewhat stooped-over older woman in a black sweater and thin glasses sat on a table drinking wine and flipping through a book.

The Writer and I walked into the Room and dropped a couple two-pound coins in a pink bucket. (The Writer, I was beginning to think, never changed his clothes.) “Isn’t that hilarious?” he asked me, pointing to the bucket. He shook his head. “Man, you get some fantastically witty people in this department. I mean, who but a Writer, an Emissary of the Muse, would refer to this—as Susie does—as The Infamous Pink Bucket?” He chuckled, took his glasses off, and rubbed his eyes. “Ah, humor. Yes, Narrator, I’m positive you’re going to learn some things tonight.”

“I’m sure I will,” I said. I regretted dressing nicely for this event. Looking around at all the epople in their black shirts and polished shoes, I realized I looked too much like them. What I should have worn was a NASCAR wife beater. Shaken up their world a little.

            [Redacted. Cause: Aaron is spineless.]

We were spared from more of this by the sweeping arrival of a portly woman at the front of the room. She introduced herself in a manner I felt was repugnant and lacking in any sort of humor, but everyone in the place ate it up like it was cake. A few people, and I’m not kidding, said, “Oh, how frightfully witty.” Then she introduced the thin woman on the table as a poet from New York City who started off in the 70s and gained her literary fame from being a part of the reaction against the death of the hippies. She moved aside and the woman moved forward.

The first thing she said was that New York was a special place. So special, she said, that being an aging lesbian was a normal thing. “Ah ha,” I thought, “that’s her gag. That’s her connection to an alternate audience, something that’ll make her stand out from being a normal aging poet.” Her pre-reading talk was about the 70s and how great it was being part of a counter-culture, and how bad it was that the youth of today just didn’t care, and that she hoped we’d wake up because, and this was the truth, she cared about us. And, of course, she looked at every young person in the room at this point. I almost gagged. It was the same sort of spiel every older generation gave to every younger generation. It seemed, though, that I was the only one in the place turning a skeptical eye to what this woman was saying. To my right, The Writer was nodding along and on the verge of bursting into applause whenever the woman spoke. The goateed, corduroy-draped bastard thought she was smart. This went for everyone else in the audience. They lapped up her faux-sage tone delivered by a low-volume voice and thought it was the most original stuff in the world.

After a few minutes of standing on a worn-down soapbox, she reached behind her onto the table and picked up a well-thumbed edition of a book of poetry. She said the obligatory bullshit about how she hated readings and delivered some quasi-humorous adage about one time she was reading a poem in front of a live audience in The Village. (I had to take issue with this insistence that no writer likes reading their own stuff. It’s a lie of the highest caliber: a lie told to make the liar look humble. No writer would hate readings—they’re too much like performing on stage, and, really, what is writing except for something waiting to be performed: either on stage, screen, or in the minds of someone?)

Then, she cleared her throat, took another sip of water, and started reading. The poem was about making an omelette. Yes, an omelette. Now, I’m in favor of taking joy and pleasure out of the small things, I am. There is a certain poetry in the way a well-timed summer breeze may drive a man to sanity on a hot day, or in a child’s laughter, or whatever you want to say. But an omelette? And people were laughing! As if they, too, had made an omelette and felt moved to compose ballads upon the joy and frustration of getting it perfectly right.

I sunk in my chair and groaned. The Writer shot me a brief look and returned to gazing upon this woman who he would, no doubt, refer to as A Worthy Muse Vessel or some shit. I started trying to figure out what exactly this woman was on about. Was she trying to say that the omelette was a metaphor for--what? Sex? Sex was the most obvious, but nothing I’d seen in lesbian porn had made me think of omelettes. Maybe she was bi and had—but omelettes? Money, then? Money buys omelettes, but that doesn’t necessarily pertain to making omelettes, unless you’re also paying someone to watch them make the omelette. But that would be weird. Death? Well, a chick embryo has to die in order for this omelette to be made, but that’s too obvious. I shook my head. I didn’t, I decided, have the time for poetry.

She finished reading that, looked up, blinked behind her giant, magnifying glasses and said, “That’s called ‘Omelette.’” People laughed again. They were so far up her ass that she’d be constipated for a year. She flipped through the book to another page, marked by a yellow Post-It Note and happened upon a poem she called, “Why Couldn’t I Have A Bar Mitzvah?”

“Because you’re a chick!” I shouted.

People turned.

I sunk into my chair and pulled my hat over my eyes. Luckily, I’d worn a ballcap.

“Right,” said the woman, blinking. Other than that, she ignored the comment, and so did most of the other people—except for The Writer, who punched me so hard I thought that he must, after all, have some cajones on him. She started reading the poem and, even if it had been written in the 70s, the fact that she was reading it in 2009, told me that she was gleefully ignoring the changes in Reform Judaism that took place, oh, at its inception in the 1870s. One of which was that women could have Bat Mitzvahs. (The name change was necessary, as having a Bar Mitzvah would have meant the woman was probably a tranny.) Now, yes, I understand that the woman was making A Point about disenfranchisement of women, and it’s a good and important point to make and good for her, but, Jesus Christ, really, lady? I figured these goy would walk away thinking all Jews in the world were the Orthodox ones they saw in North London with the funky hats.

She read one more poem after that, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what it was about. I zoned out after hearing some line in the Bar Mitzvah poem like “You preach about seeking knowledge/But how can I when I can’t read Hebrew?” I spent the rest of the time thinking, “Go fuck yourself, you hack.” Eventually, she stopped rambling about her persecution complex and started the Q&A session.

The Writer was the first one to shoot up his hand. “Brilliantly done,” he said, in the same English accent. “Where do you get your Inspiration?”

“Coffee,” the woman said. That was probably the first honest thing she said the whole night. There were a few chuckles.

There were more questions, and a lot of them were vapid and the same sorts of shit creative people ask each other, like, “Don’t you hate the business side of things?” We’re all guilty of it, and I do it just as much as anyone else, but, damn it, that doesn’t mean I don’t get to twitch when I hear other people do it as well.

The woman from earlier—Susie with the terrible sense of humor—stood up and demanded a large round of applause, which, of course, we gave her. Just because she lied about not wanting to do a reading doesn’t mean it takes chutzpah to actually do it. It’s the same as acting, once again. Everyone really wants to be up on stage, but once you’re there, there’s an initial five minutes of mortal terror.

I stood up to leave and The Writer said, “I’m going to go apologize for you.”

“What?” I asked.

“What you did earlier. That was unforgivable. You won’t apologize, so I will.”

“Look,” I said, “do what you want, but if I see her on the street again, I will call her a charlatan and demand that she writes a story about space monsters. You can apologize for me all you want, but I’ll still hold the beliefs I have.”

“Whatever,” he said. “I hope you get knocked out and raped on the way back to Woolf.”

I blinked. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

“No, not at all. You disrespected a Vessel of the Muse.” He turned and walked to the front of the room to push his way through to the woman at the center of the crowd of writers.

I shrugged and walked out of the Peter Brown Room, through the front doors of the Missing Link.

Then I heard, “Ello, guv. Do you have the time?”

I turned to my left and saw a man in a black suit, white shirt, black tie, and a bowler cap. In his hand, he held a hypodermic needle. He squirted it and flashed me a grin.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

There wasn’t any pain as the needle went clean through my pea coat, broke the skin, and the warm flush of tranquilizer once again entered my bloodstream.

A Sincere Apology to Anyone Who Reads This Blog

Hey there.

I'm aware I haven't made any updates for a while--sorry about that. In my defense, I have to get up before six in the mornings and get back home around eight nowadays, so I'm getting used to this newfangled adult-type schedule.

The next post will be, ah, edited more than usual. It concerns some individuals who... well, might not find things funny. So, I'll wait until certain predicaments have passed and repost the entry in its full, non-edited form. Trust me, it's good. It'll probably be your way at some point in the next couple of days if I can manage to get my laptop through London without it being stolen or broken.

Cheers,
Aaron

The Town of Whitstable

“Does it occur to you that you’re freaking out about this way before the fact?” asked The Traveler.

 “Better to freak out about this now rather than later,” I said.

“That makes so little sense they wouldn’t be able to analyze it with a microscope.”

We were walking down the High Street of Whitstable the next day. It was starting to get ungodly cold, and, of course, the English rain made everything all the more unbearable. Yet, I was starting to get used to it and, though I learned to bury myself in my coat whenever I walked outside in the morning, I had accepted that this was going to be the state of things for the season. The Traveler, of course, didn’t complain about it at all and, walking down the street with me as if it were seventy and sunny outside.

Whitstable’s High Street is just about all there is to the town. In length, it’s about the same size as Canterbury’s, without all of the chain department stores. The town is situated right on the beach and, naturally, there are plenty of fish and chips shops, fisheries, and butcher’s shops. The landmarks—in my mind—of the High Street are The Playhouse Theatre (where we’d be performing Fiddler come April), a church with trees that look like they belong a few hundred miles south, a large pub called the Captain’s House, and, of course, the beach.

We walked up in front of The Playhouse. It used to be a church (when I found this out, I grinned a little bit, the atheist in me cheering on the slowly lessening ground of religion to the forces of Acting and Alcohol), had the sort of paint job on the front that made it seem like it grew out of the beach and simply found itself on the High Street one day. I stood there, staring at it and nodding. I thought, “Come on, you son of a bitch, I will defeat you.”

The Traveler, staring at me with the look of a psychiatrist watching a longtime patient, bore it patiently for the first fifteen minutes, then said, “Okay, we’re going now.” He wore a jacket, his usual cap, jeans, and held an umbrella. Rain pattered on the top of it.

I did not bring an umbrella. Instead, I trusted my pea coat and hat to keep me free of rain. This was a stupid idea.

“No,” I said, staring at the windows at the top of the theatre. “I’m not done studying my enemy. I need to know every—”

He grasped my shoulder and pushed me along towards the beach. “You need to know how to sing, is what you need to do. Staring at a building’s not getting you anywhere. Besides, you’re not going to be performing on the walls of the entrance, you’re going to be on a stage.”

“You’re right,” I said, moving past a grocery store. “I need to break in and study the stage.”

“Nope,” said The Traveler. “We’re going to the beach, then getting some fish and chips, then heading back to Canterbury.”

We moved down a side street, following a signpost that had beachfront written on it. “But my mission for today was to study my enemy,” I said.

“There is a lot wrong with you, and none of it, I think, can be treated by what psychiatrists and –chologists currently know about the human mind. Look, beach, whee.”

We stood on a wooden footpath leading to a pier. The ocean out there was not the sort of ocean that made me want to go for a swim. The water looked grey, choppy, and unwelcoming. White crests formed on top of the small waves that lapped up on the shore, and the grey, heavily-clouded sky made the scene look even more like something out of an old Gothic painting.

The beach was pebbly. It stretched for just about as long as you’d expect a beach to stretch, and a few people walked their dogs up and down the waterfront. About a quarter of a mile west of where we stood, what looked to me like a fleet of fishing boats were tied up to docks. A few of them had Whitstable Oyster Company stenciled on the sides, underneath the ship names, but it looked like the majority of them were owned by residents of the town.

I looked over at The Traveler and saw he had a large, content grin on his face. Even with rain pelting down on us and gusts of cold, cutting wind hitting us from the ocean, he was happy. “The hell you smiling about?” I asked as a few drops of speeding rain maneuvered underneath my hat, over my glasses, and hit me square in the eyes.

“Just listening to the waves on the shore.”

Yeah, the waves were making audible noise, but so were the seagulls a little ways away fighting over a folded-up package of chips. “Man,” I said, eyes still closed, “how you get this Zen in the face of disgusting weather, I don’t know.”

We walked down the seaside, passing some stacked crates, trash, a few people walking black Labs, and then a group of three chavs being harangued by a man in a white toga with dark skin, a big head of curly black hair, and a large beard. I listened in while The Traveler just looked around him.

“No,” said the man, just a hint of some strange accent seeped through, “that’s not what I said. What I bloody said, you idiots, is that the bird was dead. How could I put the bird around my neck if it were fucking alive?”

“Oi,” said one of the chavs—in a black track suit, his ginger hair gelled up in the crested bird fashion, “watch it mate. You about to feel some pain.”

“Aren’t you!” shouted the man, now jumping in frustration. “God damn! Speak the language.”

One of the chavs went to punch the man, who dodged, popped his arm up, grabbed the chav’s forearm, twisted it until there was a loud, reverberating crack, and then dropped it. “There.”

The chav dropped to the rocky beach screaming in pain and the other two bolted off towards town.

By the time that happened, we were long past, and I was walking backwards in order to watch. “Holy shit,” I said, “did you see that?”

“Don’t get involved in other people’s business, Narrator. Doesn’t end well.”

“But the dude just snapped the other dude’s arm!”

The Traveler shrugged.

“But the action! Bone-snapping action!”

I looked back and saw the man in the toga shake his head, fold his arms in front of him, and walk eastward. “What are you doing this week?” he asked.

“Not seeing a dude waste another dude,” I said, then sighed. “I dunno, The Writer wanted me to ‘attend a reading,’ as he put it.”

“When’s that?”

“Tomorrow night. Apparently it’s a world-famous poet.”

“World famous?”

“In the world of the literati, that means over a thousand people in two countries know who the person is. He insisted that it would be good for me, hearing a legitimate writer talk about the Art of Writing.”

The Traveler nodded. You’re going to punch him by the end of the night.”

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

“I’m starting up a betting pool. Twenty to one says you will.”

“Twenty to one? I’m that angry?”

“You can tell.”

We walked into a fish shop and stood looking at the chalkboard on which dozens of options concerning fish were present. I expected there to be “Good Fish” and, if they were honest, “Bad Fish.” But here, there were fish I’d never heard of. Granted, the only fish I ate was tuna and salmon, but still. “I met a guy in Edinburgh during the festival up there a few years ago who reminded me a lot of The Writer. See, h—”

“A few years ago?” I asked. “How old are you, man?”

“Old enough.”

A woman in a black polo walked up to the counter and said, “Hiya.”

The Traveler ordered something called haddock—which I was pretty sure was actually a town between Canterbury and London, but who was I to correct them? I walked up and ordered cod—a safe bet—and waited with The Traveler at a table. “Anyway,” he continued, “the guy was a hipster, right? Exactly, that face you’re making is the same he inspired on anyone who saw thick black glasses and see-through white t-shirts on men as repellent. Anyway, he spent the entire festival talking about how the bands on the stages should have done this, or done this, or that, and, eventually, a couple Turkish guys who—I guess—had pretty good English went up to him and beat the shit out of him. Literally. There was poop coming out of this man’s trousers.”

“What’d you do?”

“I laughed. I mean, come on, the guy referred to one band as—hold on.” He pulled a little black Moleskine notebook out from his jacket pocket and flipped back towards the beginning. “He referred to them as, ‘Trying desperately to utilize Dylan’s early work, but, like an old woman with arthritis, Jumping Fish can’t quite grasp the important aspects of the work. The humanity of Dylan.’” He shut the book and put it back in his jacket. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t watch someone have at the guy for a while.”

“Doesn’t that contradict your ideals of compassion for other people?”

The Traveler shrugged. “They stopped after the hipster soiled himself—really, about four seconds after the first punch. After that, I helped him up and he was quiet for the rest of the festival. Everyone won.”

We got our food and walked towards the bus stop.  On the way back to campus, we discussed the multitudinous things that could be discussed in the reading, and happened upon the conclusion that the most likely of them all would be a thinly-veiled allegory of sex.

In Which The Stakes Are Shown

After the film ended, and people groaned from sitting in the same spot for three hours and listening to klezmer-inspired music (a feat of strength for goyim everywhere), Laura took to the front of the room and told us just exactly what we signed up for.

See, and I didn’t know this, the last production the society had put on was in one of the dining halls of one of the colleges on campus. They performed it on a stage about twenty feet by twenty feet and had to combat a thunder storm and raging rain. Moreso, they hadn’t run through the show until the night before. In a dramatic, violent shift towards professionalism, this time, everything would change.

First of all, we’d be performing in a theater in the nearby town of Whitstable. It was a 189-seat auditorium. She showed us pictures, and I had to think to myself, “Holy crap, this looks respectable.” The interior was... Edwardian. I think is the term. Basically, the place looked nice. The sort of establishment you’d go to and expect the actors to know what they were doing and treat drama seriously.

Next came the rehearsal schedule. Now, allow me to preface this by saying that, sometimes, I am remarkably bad about putting myself in other peoples’ shoes. Sometimes I forget that not everyone has the life of a grad student. So, when I saw that we’d have two or three rehearsals a week, I thought, “That’s it?” and then went on a minor interior monologue about how these people were plebians, and how they couldn’t possibly expect to put on a show worthy of—then I remembered that a) I was the only postgrad in the room and that b) some of these people were in legitimate degrees.

I calmed down a bit and sat back. Laura continued going through the particulars, when we’d get librettos (a new term in my vocabulary: the book that contains the lines and vocal sheet music), when we’d have dance rehearsals, yadda yadda.

Then Lizzie the music director stood up and said she’d get a show-worthy voice out of all of us. I almost took this as a challenge to disappoint both her and myself, but then realized such a thing was beyond stupidity and, wisely, decided that I wouldn’t do that after all.

I turned to Dixie and said, “Man, it’s like I’m going to actually have to try.”

Dixie furrowed his brow. “You weren’t going to before?”

“I—er, well, I was.”

“Then why did you say that?”

“Cause it was a—”

“Who’s Tevye?” someone up front asked. I was a bit surprised that they hadn’t asked it earlier, to be honest.

I raised my hand and squeaked, “I am.”

The people in the room turned to face me, clothes shuffling audibly against against seats.

I was on display and, unconsciously, I sank down a little bit more in my seat as someone said, “Huh.”

Shortly after that, we all filed out—most people to go drinking. Dixie and a couple other people went back to his to play beer pong. He invited me, but I thought back to the last time we played beer pong and declined. (The events of that night may or may not have included me shouting, “Yes, I killed Christ, and I’d do it again if I had the chance!” It was, to be fair, a very drunken night and there were just one too many Jewish jokes being thrown around.) Instead, James the Greek and I meandered down to Rutherford bar for a couple pints to close out the place.

Along the way, I got the first of what I consider to be my singing lessons. Much as I thought, I found it really hard to pitch by myself. But I found what did work: mimicking. And while that wasn’t the correct way to go about learning something, it worked. Kind of. Some of the time.

Anyway, I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about in the bar, but I do remember deciding that I’d go to Whitstable the next day and check out this theater. Know my enemy, so to speak.

The Film Viewing, or Several Brief Moments of Panic

It was dark by the time I got up to campus, and I checked my watch, saw that it was only half past four, and knew that England was going to provide a fun, fun winter. This being late November, I figured that, come December, it would be dark at four in the afternoon, and I would be sitting in my room, staring out at this unending twilight, and wonering why I hadn’t stayed closer to the equator. At any rate, I went back to the flat to prepare some food.

After a brief, conversation about Magic the Gathering with Zaf while beef sizzled in a frying pan and spaghetti boiled in my pot, I ate and headed out to the lecture theater that had been reserved for the viewing.

Now, I’m one of those people who’s really bad about leaping in and meeting people. When I’m introduced to someone, there’s no problem. But, if I’m at a party, and there’s someone right next to me, I can’t make the first move. For the most part, it’s because I start running through every joke I’ve ever heard, rejecting them, then thinking about the best way to say “Hi” without sounding like a sex offender, madman, avid church goer, or any number of other things. By this time, the person has retreated somewhere else in the room and I’m safe to wander around, red Solo cup firmly in hand, until I get bored and leave.

Outside the lecture theater, a group of people stood around in a clutter, talking. I’d recognized them from the showcase, but I couldn’t go up and say, “Hi, I saw you in the showcase. That is, I was watching the showcase. Not in a creepy way, because that would be weird. But I bought a ticket. To the showcase. That’s what I did, because I don’t really like musical theater, but I figured it would be an interesting thing to see, and, wow, how about that, here I am. I mean, you know, I’m not attacking you when I say I don’t like musical theater, it’s just a personal thing. I enjoyed the showcase, but not because of you. I mean, you were good, don’t get me wrong. I saw it because my friend Gary, Dixie—what do you know him as? Gary? Gary was in the showcase, and he invited me along, and so, yeah, I figured that I’d go, and then, hey, wouldn’t you know it, bam, I’m in a production. Weird how the world works, huh?”

Of course, by the time I got to the end of that in my head, I was sitting down in the mini-auditorium and really wishing I had brought a drink. I looked around. There were about ten other people in the room, and, holy shit, I’d forgotten just how loud drama folk could be when they wanted. They had the vocal strength of five yodellers each and filled the room with conversation.

I sat back, propped my feet on the seat in front of me, and started making popping noises with my mouth.

Eventually, a tall guy walked in. I recognized him as one of the other guys who had gone for Tevye and nodded to him. He sat down a few seats down the row, and we had a very brief conversation boiling down to “Hi.” Laura—the director, remember her?—walked in with a few other people I’d seen before—like her friend, Lucie—and then did something that made me wonder just what the hell parallel universe I’d stumbled upon: Out of her big black bag, as she was saying something about how Campus Watch were bastards (I think), she pulled a Granny Smith apple and placed it on the table.

“Snacks,” was the first thing that popped into my mind. Then, as I saw what was on the face of the apple, my mouth dropped open. Into the front of the apple was carved eight Greek letters.

My mind flashed back to the train from London, with the husband and wife, and, from there, to the warehouse where I was drugged and fitted with a ball gag. Giraffes, part of me thought, may or may not have been involved in some way.

I whimpered. The man to my left—Adam, it transpired—asked if I was okay. I turned and said, “I’ve been drugged, confused, and made privy to the secret arms deals of the elderly—all because of that fucking apple.” I pointed to the table.

Adam looked over and said, “What apple?”

I looked back. There was no apple.

“Fuck,” I said. I looked around me. No one was wearing a bowler hat. No one was looking at me. From what I could tell, no one was about to leap up and jab my arm with a hypodermic needle filled with some sort of tranquilizer. Regardless, as the computer in the front of the room started sounding like it was going to overheat because of the DVD, my heart started pounding and I was on the verge of leaping from person to person and shouting, “Hail hail hail hail hail, Eris Eris Eris Eris Eris!” to see what sort of reaction I’d get.

I was saved from doing such a thing by Dixie’s sudden arrival. “Thank God!” I shouted. A couple people looked up.

Dixie walked up to the row I was in and sat down next to me. He pulled out a bottle of the same cheap wine present at Thanksgiving dinner, and the movie started.

If you’ve never seen the film version of Fiddler on the Roof, go see it, and you’ll be struck by how dated some of the visual effects are. For instance, back then in the 70s, it was not yet known that sudden zooms, random cuts, and sudden, uncomfortable close-ups (the sort that are so detailed that you can see individual pores on someone’s face) should only be used in Sergio Leone films. However, Fiddler breaks that rule—notably during the “Tradition” sequence. What you’ve got here is Tevye on his cart delivering his spiel about, you guessed it, traditions in Judaism.

Now, you know in the song, how you’ve got the spoken monologue bits, and then a bit of a YUH-DUH NUH NUH, DUH vamping sort of thing before the chorus chimes in with “Traditio-o-o-o-o-n!” in order to deafen the audience? Well, during the instrumental section, the film cuts to random bits of Judaica sprinkled around the village of Anatevka. The result, if you know nothing about Judaism, is confusion. If you know about Judaism, it’s overkill. And, if you’re in the middle ground, as I’m guessing most of these people in the society were, then the only reaction you can come up with is to shout, “Jew!” at the things on the screen.

And that’s what they did.

And that’s what made me flash back to when I first moved to Tennessee and it came out that I was Jewish. The people out there didn’t know how to react. They had a bona fide Heeb in their presence. One guy turned to me and said, “Do Jews have electricity?”

This was before I knew about sarcasm, so I said, “Yes, of course.”

He turned to me and said, “Oh. Cause I saw Fiddler on the Roof, and they didn’t have electricity.”

After that, I figured that anything was fair game, so I made it a habit of telling people who asked about Judaism that we worshipped snakes and sacrificed Christian virgins on the Sabbath. Thinking about it, it’s a wonder I had friends in Tennessee.

So, as a group of people towards the front shouted “Jew!” at Lazar Wolf on screen during the fathers’ bit, I sunk in my chair and took a swig of the wine. But, aside from flashbacks to middle and high school, I started thinking about how I could play this character. Everyone likes Topol as Tevye, but I always thought he emphasized the drama. I didn’t want to do that, drama meant emotion, and emotions are terrifying. So, then, my other option was Zero Mostel. Of course, I’d never seen anything with Mostel in it, other than a few clips of him on The Muppet Show, so this meant, of course, that I’d have to go about the nasty business of coming up with my own interpretation of the character and—then, suddenly, I was hit the the realization that I was freaking myself out and overthinking things. I thought back to my guitar lessons:

When I started high school, my mom bought me a black Squire Stratocaster with—I think—a maple neck and peal inlays. The thing still works. At any rate, she bought it on the caveat that I’d take lessons for at least a year and a half—a request I gladly acquiesed to.

My guitar teacher was a music student at MTSU who managed to get into the school without taking either the SAT or the ACT. Mitch was a tall, lanky guy with long blonde hair, glasses, and a habit of playing the “Jeopardy” theme song whenever I was trying to figure out the best way to play a scale. His method of teaching guitar was letting me choose what song to learn and then, being quite a good teacher, taking a technical lesson from even the most mundane things. (For example: “Blitzkreig Bop” turned into a lesson on the theory of power chords.) Another great thing about Mitch was that he was easy to sidetrack. Whenever it comes to lessons about anything, I pay attention for about fifteen minutes, at least grasp the mechanics and theory of what we’re talking about, and then talk about something irrelevant. But, all that aside, the most important thing about Mitch was that he taught me two valuable life lessons:

1) Set your expectations as low as possible—that way you’ll never be disappointed. I tell people this, and, more often than not, their reaction is something along the lines of, “Dear God, that is depressing. I shall go kill myself now.” And, while I can understand how people can see that philosophy as depressing, that’s not exactly what’s going on. Essentially, it’s almost Zen. By building up expectations, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment, because nothing can really live up to the fantasies we come up with in our imaginations. So, the trick becomes to see when you’re doing that, take a realistic approach to the situation, and, generally speaking, you’ll be happier with the result. You may not be as ecstatic as you would be thinking that the date you’re going on this weekend with the gorgeous redhead with the green eyes will lead to wild, tantric sex, but the reality of the situation will be much more of a let-down when she gets annoyed that you’re staring at her breasts the entire time.

2) Just let it roll, man. In other words, sometimes the best ideas and performances come from living in the moment and little to no preparation beforehand. Throw in a little chaos, and you’ll find that, just maybe, the end result will be a whole lot more fun.

So, sitting in the dark room with Topol and... the other guy singing “To Life,” I figured, what the hell, I’ll let it roll.

The Epilogue to The Drunkard's Second Tale

The Student burst into laughter as The Drunkard signed off with his signature sit-back-and-swig. “Holy shit,” he said. “I remember watching that and thinking of that plot to dose Nixon with acid.”

“Juvenile,” said The Writer. “Absolutely juvenile.”

“Well fucking done,” said The Stalker. “Hackem got what he deserved—wanting to station police officers in mosques throughout the state. Absolutely disgusting”

“Hackem?” asked The Traveler. “I don’t know him.”

“Really?” asked The Drunkard. “Where were you through the entirety of last year?”

“Southeast Asia,” said The Traveler, “doing charity work.”

The rest of us hung our heads, being shown to be the self-centered Westerners we clearly were.

“Now, what I don’t get,” said The Writer, “is why you felt the need to work in this Cloyd character.”

“What?” The Drunkard said.

“Come on. This kid with his ‘gul dernit’s and his overly-rural shtick? Really? You expected us to buy that? No one talks like that. People in cartoons don’t talk like that any more. I mean, we’ve already established that I’m as anti-populist as the rest of us, but I’d never stoop so low as to—”

The Drunkard groaned. “When was the last time you weren’t in a city?”

“—think that—what?” asked The Writer.

The Drunkard leaned forward. “When was the last time you weren’t in a city?”

“Well, I could hardly call Knoxville a city,” said The Writer. He leaned back and folded his arms—body language that reminded me of a turtle retreating into his shell. “It’s such an anti-cosmopolitan place that—”

“How many people live there?” asked The Drunkard.

“’Bout three hundred thousand,” said The Student. “Oh, and it recently had a Broadway production of some musical with puppets.”

“Broadway,” said The Drunkard, “puppets, population in the six-figures, sounds like a city to me. Know how many people lived in Eldritch? Just over a thousand. Two thousand, counting students. So, answer the question. When was the last time you weren’t in a city? When was the last time you lived—held residence—in a place that could be described as Bumfuck, Tennessee?”

“Well,” said The Writer. “Not... that is to say, I haven’t. But, I think I—”

“Let me tell you,” responded The Drunkard, “about a guy named Jim-Bob. And that was his actual name, and I swear on my mother’s life that I’m not making this up, and everything I’m going to tell you about J.B. was true.

“Jim-Bob was a Marine. Now, right there, that places him at the top of the totem pole in rural Tennessee. Anyway, out in Iraq, J.B. and his platoon were incredibly bored—this was during one of the lulls after the first troop surge. So, they picked up a few bazookas and started target practice—using camels instead of bull’s eyes.”

The Student and I started laughing. The Traveler furrowed his brow and, probably, started thinking about the injustices of the world that such people who would fire upon innocent camels with heavy weapons would escape without retribution. I admired him, I really did, but sometimes he didn’t see the humor in situations. The Writer shook his head. “What’s your point?” he asked.

“Hold on there, hopalong,” said The Drunkard. “Before Iraq, J.B. got married to a girl from down the street and had a couple of kids. J.B. was nothing if not a decent father, so he decided that, damn it, his kids deserved a swimming pool. Went out back, started digging a pool. J.B., like many people in the area, didn’t trust chemicals, so he never bothered to put any treatment stuff in the water. In a couple of weeks, his makeshift pool was covered by a spongy mildew and mold the likes of which you would not expect to see on the surface of the most grungy lake in the country.

“So, in answer, J.B. figures that the best way to handle such growth is to buy trout to eat all of the ickiness. You might call this the organic approach, Writer, but then you, perhaps, wouldn’t want to give credit to such a plebeian approach to the problem, so you’d double back and say that the man was an imbecile—or something to that effect.”

I looked over and saw The Writer open his mouth in order to answer, then stop himself.

“Anyway,” said The Drunkard, “as fish are living beings, they need to defecate after eating all that delicious growth. And where does all the poop go? Into the pond. So, J.B. goes out to Wal-Mart, buys a couple of fishing poles, and gives them to his kids. And so, the family ate fish.”

The Student and I laughed again. The Traveler grinned and raised his glass. “To J.B.,” he said.

The Stalker raised his glass and clinked with The Traveler.

“My point in all of this,” said The Drunkard, “is that there are, quite clearly, individuals who prop up these stereotypes. Cloyd, that magnificent bastard, was one of those people by virtue of being one of the most innocent and hickish people I’ll ever come across if I live to be a hundred and twenty.”

“That does not excuse the use of such boorish dialogue,” said The Writer.

“Oh?” asked The Drunkard. “Everyone has to sound the same? Hey everyone, let’s chop sentences up and have them stop and end places where they should be joined by fucking commas. What’s that? You want to use slang? Here’s a list of Establishment-Approved™,” at this, The Drunkard actually said ‘tm,’ “folksy terms. Use only them, or you’ll be seen as a hack.”

“Sat in on a writing class recently, Drunkard?” asked The Traveler.

The Drunkard nodded solemnly. “I felt a part of my soul die. The pretension was suffocating in that room. If I heard one more story wherein the hero gains some fucking realization about life via eating a pretzel in a park or some shit, I would have brought a fucking Glock to the next class.”

The Writer shook his head. “None of you understand Art. Understand anything that matters. You just don’t care. Don’t observe.”

“You see!” shouted The Drunkard, shooting up out of his chair. “It’s disgusting when you try to sound like that.”

I checked my watch. I had a cast viewing of the film version Fiddler on the Roof that night, and had arranged with Dixie to bring a couple bottles of Jack Daniel’s. It was, after all, an incredibly long movie. “Well,” I said, standing up, “as much as I would love to sit here and debate writing with you guys, I’ve gotta run.”

“Oh?” asked The Traveler. “And do what?”

“Wait,” said The Student. “Let me guess. You’ve gotta go update your blog. Perhaps, tonight, we’ll learn more about that bespectacled vixen from your Ranting in Literature class.”

“‘Bespectacled vixen?’” asked The Drunkard.

“His words,” said The Student. “You know, I might have to use that when Rebecca and I have a row. She might like that.”

The Drunkard turned to me. “‘Bespectacled vixen?’”

“I don’t have to make excuses to you!” I shouted.

“Yeesh,” said The Traveler. “Don’t get defensive.”

“I’m not getting defensive!” I shouted.

“Oi!” shouted the bartender. “You! Out!”

I left the pub to the sound of my friends laughing as The Student read out a list of horribly out-of-context quotes from my blog. I hated him, true, but, at the same time, I was one more hit a day closer to a wide audience. And no publicity is bad publicity.