Oh Fame Oh
Agin for Lynn
In the Year of the Ox our boy gets an Academy Award, Oh yes, he’s that good, he’s so good, he’s so good … and for an audition yet. What will it say, “Best Actor in the Capacity of Try Outs For Parts” … and the Oscar goes to … well, where is that boy?
I’ll tell you where, I’ll tell you. He’s stuck in a tunnel somewhere behind the curtains is where. I had to pee. I told the usherette (Oh, she’s buxom fluxom, fat is what, yes, I like them fat, like flesh, like the security of love handles for when you’re flying through the air in the sex act, whoopee!), I told her it’s urgent, do you understand, if I don’t get to the bathroom soon I shall spasm, I shall spasm, you wouldn’t want that, not a sweet thing so young as thee, thou, I should say, see, I should say, you should see, whee-hee-hee! Yes, nervous, very nervous …
“You’re nervous. Because of the award. You’re new at this, I see?” she said all this, yet she guided me, holding her large flashlight like a baton of … yes, of VICTORY, my son!
“It’s kind of hid away from everything so nobody can know about it or I mean smell it harrdeeharrharr.”
She directed me through a metal door, swinging metal doors, I should say (well, shouldn’t I? shouldn’t I?), with port holes like in old ship galleys, told me up the steps, take the steps up, you see.
So much was happening. I ran through the day … had it been only a day that all this had happened? Well, a day and a night, then another day, that’s two, fuck me if I’m wrong. It was Roger got me in for a try out. I tried for the role of Perry, boy psycho, famous role in a play only now they are making an inferior movie: STARRING ME! I got the part. They gave it to me. There is evidence on film. It’s in cans somewhere, in vaults. Rent the DVD, you fools, rent it right away!
Yet I was getting lost thinking about all this. There are doors, you know, really, doors in reality itself. Here at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre … where there are actual Chinese. Open a door and they are at war … or it’s a parade AFTER the war, it’s the Cultural Revolution and now we can take off those goddamned servile masks, the white painted smiles and smiles of Oh yes but it’s Natural Hierarchy do you see, he is Emperor who unites the Heaven and the Earth and you must serve him. Help me, will you? To serve him. Serve him now and go buy, buy, buy, you fool. This world, ah, this world is now GONE, son. Shut that goddamned door. Kiss that Natural Hierarchy goodbye. Goodbye Goldwyn, goodbye Twentieth Century Fox, even Disney is not permissible here, son, he is a counter revolutionary. Good. Yes. Good. Lesson learned. I close the iron door on you, my good old days of oppression …
But I am losing myself. Oh, I am always doing that, silly me. I’m old. Getting there anyway. Over the hill. Past it. When I was down stairs waiting for my award, which I already had in my hand (why didn’t I read the plaque? I’d know then what it was for), well, there was my pal the young director, Brad, the young director. He got me the role. He insisted. I am the one. Roger didn’t even have to press him with bills. No, unnecessary. And I didn’t have to blow anybody, Oh what a wonderful world it is! He warned me. I stole his towel for fun. Jumped off the stage and pulled his towel off the seat in front of him, all of us were issued them and I took his, so I had two towels haha, and Brad had none. He’d sweat and sweat heehee. When he went up to be a presenter he’d look like he’d been swimming in the fountain out front, swimming after some bulbous Swede with a cat clutched to her … her bulbs, holding the cat up, squeezing her impossible lips so they popped out in impossible flowers of love and went smacko! Kiss that cat! And Brad is swimming for her, poor Brad, he’s got such a letch for this balloon, it’s too funny … but I’m getting lost, lost. He told me he could pull the plug on my part at any time. That was his fearsome warning to me. So here I’d be getting my Academy Award for a part that didn’t exist. Best Actor in a Role That Doesn’t Exist, love it, Oh baby that is awesome… He told me this for only swiping his towel. That is how cheesy and small great power is in this town. Look at it. All of these silly guys in their clipon ties (they still have them here, Oh and Polyester too, it’s so thrilling)… and we’re all stuck behind curtains, lining up behind an old candy counter, and Brad runs up. “That’s my towel, I believe.” He fiercely rips it off my neck. Does he realize what welts that shall leave? Such a turd he is. Power has gone to his head. Earlier I had watched him directing. I saw him fire a guy right in the middle of the scene. I thought that was so brave. Only hours ago it was brave. Now it is ridiculous! Well, he’s new at this. As I am. Hell, I’m so new at this I’ve gotten myself tucked up in a crevice behind the curtains and I’m about to piss my pants, O my! So Brad. Yes, Brad. He grabs his towel and I ask him then, “Hey, how old is Perry? You know, the nutcase, Perry, just how old is this kid?”
“Oh, twenty-four, twenty-five, the Union doesn’t specify.”
“Well, Brad. Hehheh. Do you know how old I am, Brad? I’m more than twice that. Who’s going to believe an old wattled ham playing crazy boy?”
“Well, you look young,” he explained. “Also, you know, the insane age quickly. They don’t have much life expectancy and everything. It’s like that with the insane, you know.”
“I didn’t know that,” I told him. “I didn’t know that, Brad.”
“Well. Hang in there,” he said, and vaulted over the counter. It was like Jack the Ripper somehow. I thought of him in that role. Wrong of course yet somehow right. That eternally twenty-four year old preppy face of his: he must be forty-five and a half by now, the squeaky dick!) … Oh I am lost, lost for sure.
She led me. Up the ramp. Told me to go through the door. The swinging metal doors with the port holes. Inside there were cooks slinging hash, and beyond that a circling dining room with millions of sequined and painted people at their eats, it was sushi eats, all gooey and ricey and just too chichi, and the rice was falling out of the seaweed wraps and getting all over their dresses, their tuxes and twee little ties. Cleavage stuffed with sushi, how sad it is, sushi crotches, layer upon layer of just chichi sushi, it goes round and round, the dining room, the dining room, it overlooks the Atlantic Ocean which has much grander waves than we do here, and they are cold waves, dear heart, they are so cold. When I drown myself finally I shall try to do so there, in the grand Atlantic, yes …
I go on, looking for the bathroom. There must be dozens here, and with little old men with towels draped over their arms, servile men from before the Cultural Revolution, silly, reactionary men who still wear ducktails, the wads. But she assured me there was only one. The buxom usherette that I’d surely enjoy for several hours, perhaps a day or two overlooking the Atlantic, stuck in our bed of sushi which always sticks to us, glues us together in sexual union, Oh how just so Tantric.
But listen. I am stuck up here. How is it so? I will miss out on the show. When they call my name, when they say, “And the Oscar for Best Sixty-Five Year Old Actor in the Role Of a Twenty-Five Year Old Nuttso goes to … goes to …”
“There’s someone up there behind the curtain,” whispers the tall and muscular man now gone to flab who played the body of Darth Vader (I was promised the voice but was castrated at the last minute so my understudy, James Earl Jones, was given the part; can you imagine? Squeaky James Earl Jones? That man is a whiskey tenor who sucks eggs, he does, sucks them in the dark).
What happened is … I’ve lost the sequence again here, sorry, I do that, age, you know, and a failure of ideology. Finally having passed the Atlantic Ocean and having been waved to by all these riced out fools I don’t know from Angelina Jolie whose lips are plaster, I arrived at the spiral stair way – she had warned me, “It’s a spiral one, watch your ass, I want that ass intact for later so I can grab it when we do the bump, eh, grandpa?” – and betook my way round and round and round, my shiny shoes sticking to the rungs because of all that rice they think’s so nice, all that chichi sushi rice, the billowing ignorance of this world, Hollywood, fame, glory, cheap suits made to look like silk suits, it’s all phony, it’s only phony, lad, and you’ve bought it all your life, bought jokers like Jolly Roger in his ascot and his goatee, his voice he forces into lower registers to be cool (king of cool he is, he’s jazz cool, old cool from JFK LA, James Bond, don’t-bruise-the-gin type cool, yogurt and onions cool, Oh he’s so cool he’s just so cool I could sell him into Poverty Row making gorilla flicks staring gabardine girls who suck donkey dicks even in their dreams they do) … Oh. Lost. Lost. But look, I know where I am. It’s the stair, the turning stair. Then the first left, she said. Still lost. Lost, I tell you.
I kept thinking back there, back down there behind the candy bar, or was it a juice bar, yes, that’s cooler isn’t it? A Juice bar for juicers? Gotta be a juicer here. I was an alcoholic by the time I was Perry’s age, no, sooner. I kept a bottle of Jack Daniels in my locker at school, why hell I sucked it outa my mom’s titties, I did. Never mind. We’re turning left here, son, left for liberal, filthy-atheistic-communist left. Red, remember? They were Red. What a yuk. Now all the lofty and sniveling degenerate Bush’s of this world are better Red than dead, and we are the Bluecoats. The Bluecoats are coming, the Bluecoats are coming, being lead by an actual African American who surfs fer chrissakes, Oh I love the spinning contradictoriness of this world. It’s like that stair back there. Stairs, contradictory stairs, yet have I ever left them? Am I not lost always, lost on stairs and stairs going nowhere. I thought to fame and glory and the little golden guy my mums wanted me to have, that little golden guy in the sky, Oh look at me now, Ma! Top of the world, eh, Ma!
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” I hear the announcer announcing. “He’s a young fraud. A sixty-five year old fraud playing a twenty-four-year-old fraud name of Perry who’s playing psychopath in order to escape from his lessons in school. A malingerer, he is. A malingerer from way back. Saw him in the film One Million BC when he was tossing papier mache boulders down into a canyon filled with writhing iguanas. What a crotch he is. He lowers his voice by means of whiskey. Eats sushi to cool off his guts. He hangs out in bars which go round and round. Take that statue away from him. Yank them curtains, Uncle, show us the fair haired boy all lost in tunnels, hoping for fraudulent bathrooms and dreaming of fame before he’s even been in a picture. Stone him. Stone the fool.”
Alas, it is lost. My beautiful career. My life of boulevards driving in long cars with girls clawing at my crotch, clawing their way through the sushi to get at my prosthetic penis, Oh it is gauran-goddamned-teed to please, girls, swift and long and spring loaded so it’ll go boing against the womb door when such is needed, just at that moment when the shiver of orgasm would take you just a little way up the road, well BANG, you come paradisial, you come BIG, sister, it is the lovedeath, the grand Atlantic wave of orgasm which will carry you all the way up Hollywood Boulevard to the True Paradise, the one that’s bought and paid for, unmortgaged, undead, unold, forever and ever, hallehluya, halleluya!
