I got involved with an actress and made the mistake of moving in with her. What with that, my own career, and Venasque, Phil and I saw much less of each other for over two years.
He lived alone in our apartment a few months and then, to my surprise, moved in with the old man. It sounded like a fairy-tale household – the old man, the scholar, the dog, and the pig.
Time talks behind our back. To our face it's friendly and logical, never hesitating to give more of itself. But when we're not looking, it steals our lives and says bad things about us to the parts of us it's stolen.
Youth? You could have had a much more successful time of it if he'd worked harder. Friendship? No matter how much time I gave him, he never wanted to give you enough. Twenties? You could have been a contender if he'd only used me the right way. We hear these words from different sources, most particularly our inner voices, which gossip incessantly, only too happy to tell what they've heard from enemies.
Strayhorn and I wanted to be in the movies; we wanted to live interesting lives. Perhaps that's the difference between our generation of post-World War Two babies and others: Right or wrong, we came to expect as part of our birthright to have at least a fighting chance at creating a personal environment that makes it possible to wake in the morning eager and curious about what the day will hold.
But time was beginning to whisper. I made The Night Is Blond in 16 millimeter. No one had made a 16-millimeter film in so long that just the number made for smiles and raised eyebrows. It was black-and-white, perverse but tender. In my favorite comment, Phil said it was as hot and strange-tasting as horseradish. People argued about it as they walked out of the theater. You can still see it sometimes at places like the Thalia in New York, where it's usually on a double bill with films like Elephant Man or Stranger Than Paradise.
Before I left for Europe to make Babyskin, Phil and I kept a vow we'd made to each other the day we arrived in Hollywood: Whenever one of us really broke through to success, we'd go out together and get tattoos. We knew the tattoo parlor wouldn't have what we wanted, so we took an illustration we'd agreed on years before: a big black crow. Our skin birds. We had them injected high up on our shoulders to make it look like they were making the long curved flight up our backs.
When I returned from Europe five months later, Phil picked me up at the airport with the script of Midnight in his hand.
The morning accompanied Wyatt and me across country. The sun shone only early white light, and even thunderclouds over Colorado looked new and clean. We would land in Los Angeles at noon. Finky Linky still hadn't told me about Pinsleepe.
Getting up to go to the bathroom, I suddenly felt a terrible scratching, pulling pain in my back. It was so bad I yelped and grabbed myself there. Wyatt and the people nearby stared at me, but it was too difficult to say anything then. I was under attack; some huge mouth was trying to suck the skin off my back or something; I'd never felt anything like it before.
Walking fast down the aisle, I looked at the lights over the bathroom doors and gratefully saw one of them was vacant. Slipping into the phone-booth-size stall, I snapped the lock shut. What the hell was it? Before I had a chance to pull my jacket off, I felt something new and utterly frightening under my shirt back there. The pain had stopped, but what was moving right where it had been? Something big, big as a hand, scratching and scraping to get out.
I lost control. Ripping at my clothes, I managed to pull my jean jacket off and the shirttail out in a few desperate jerks. I think I was making noise too. I'm not sure what I was doing except getting hysterical. You know the feeling of a bug or something else small and unknown under your shirt or skirt in summer, when anything has a chance to land or walk there. Multiply that by ten or twenty, make it jerk around, give it fur or something else. Play with the idea. It was that bad. Really.
And then it was out. It flew straight over my shoulder and into the mirror. The crow. My tattoo. Our skin birds; mine was alive. Off my back and alive, scared, flying in a little metal room five miles off the earth.
I broke its neck. Not thinking, I grabbed the bird out of the air and, fumbling with its sharp flutter, squeezed. Snap! It stopped moving: from stiff and crazy to soft and curved in an instant.
5
There is so much Weber doesn't know. Where should I begin? With Venasque and his pig and bull terrier that understood everything you said? Or with Pinsleepe and the crow tattoo?
Venasque. For thirty years of hungry customers, he was only a chatty Frenchman who made delicious sandwiches because he liked to see people eat. Other things he liked? His animals, cooking, watching television, magic.
Venasque the shaman, the most powerful I ever met. He didn't know where the magic came from, but he used it well and selftessly. He taught his animals to understand, taught me to swim (particularly through the black water of my past), taught Sasha Makrianes who she really was, taught other things to other people.
If you needed to fly, he would teach you. Yes, he could do that if he thought it necessary. But most people don't need to fly. Venasque's greatest magic was helping you discover the discipline that would eventually save your life. Often it was something entirely trivial.
Harry Radcliffe told one of my favorite Venasque stories. After he won the Pritzker Award for Architecture and was on the cover of Time magazine, Harry had a nervous breakdown.
It manifested itself in an original way: In the middle of designing an important building for the 750th anniversary of Berlin, he stopped all work on it and began assembling an elaborate miniature city in his living room.
At first it consisted of paper models of the Secession Museum in Vienna, Richard Rogers's Lloyd's of London building, Aldo Rossi's Teatro del Mondo. Then he added thirty or forty schlocky souvenir statues of places like the Eiffel Tower, Seattle Space Needle, and Statue of Liberty. Stir in six chrome teapots designed by Michael Graves, a modified Chinese wok that served as part of the Spaceport for visitors from other planets, assorted other models, toys, and clay figures Radcliffe made or collected, and you have a whiff of what was going on.
Through friends, Harry's wife heard about Venasque and asked him to come over. The story goes he arrived at their Santa Barbara house with the pig sitting next to him in his jeep.
In the living room, Connie crushed half of Harry's city by walking over to the table that held his lunch. Venasque kicked over the other half, saying, "He's got enough buildings. Get him a clarinet."
The old man didn't know how to play any instrument, but he made Harry learn from a four-dollar book they bought together that day, along with the used clarinet.
I have read Pauwels, Lйvi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Castaneda, and Mircea Eliade on magic and shamans. But what they say is essentially wrong for one simple reason – those who can, do; those who can't, talk (or write) about it. When I first began to see what Venasque was capable of doing, I naively asked him one day if there were people who could fly.
"Yes."
"Walk on water?"
"Sure. You want more tuna salad?"
"Why wouldn't they show the world?"
"Why should they? You think they care if you know? You're smart, Phil; you want everybody to know you're a smartie?"
I smiled. "Yeah, I like it when people know."
He winked. "That's the difference between you and the guy who can walk on water. He does it to find a place on his map, not to get on the Tonight Show."