"But that's not true. Dragons and monsters don't wait for courage and beauty. Only loss. Only death. There are people like that too."
If it were the beginning of his film, you would see the actress Violet Maitland, an infant in her arms, cross an airy, pastel living room to open balcony doors. Whispering sweet goo-goo sounds to the baby, she walks out onto her wide sunny balcony. The view from this high, expensive vantage point is splendid.
After a moment to allow us to share both the view and a delectable taste of her world, the woman heaves the child off the balcony as hard as she can. The only sound is her hoosh! of breath doing it.
But we weren't watching the film. We were several hundred standing around a gravesite with our separate thoughts about a man who was about to be covered up with a couple of hundred pounds of dirt for the rest of time.
Why had he done this? What was the purpose? Read alone, the quote from Rilke would have been moving, both because it was his favorite poet and the sentiment was very appropriate to Strayhorn. But to include the entire opening speech from that grisly film was tasteless and perverse.
Sasha gave me the envelope as we were riding to the cemetery. When I started to open it, she put her hand over mine and said that in his suicide note Phil had asked that it not be opened or read until the correct time. I'd assumed that meant he had something to say he wanted all the mourners to hear at the same time, a final important message. But not this. Not a macabre joke at his own dead expense in the last minutes many of us would ever have for him.
What else did his suicide note say?
At a certain point, I loaded my boat with all the important possessions I thought I wanted to take with me on the final trip to the old days of my life, across an ocean thirty or forty years long. All the things that were important – people, objects, ideas. But because of recent events (storms!), I've had to toss one after another of these things overboard until now, when my ship is so light that, amazingly, it has begun to float above the waters, which means there is even less control, even less possibility of reaching my previously set destination.
If Weber comes, please ask him to read the enclosed at my funeral. I would prefer that no one, including you two, see what it says until the ceremony. I'm assuming you and my parents will want me to have a funeral, but it makes no difference to me. My only request is that I be buried rather than cremated.
I'm sorry about this, Sasha. Please know it is in no way your fault. You have always been the peace and intimacy of a whisper to me. I love you.
There was more of Phil's graveside statement to read. I was about to go on when the first shots were fired.
Unlike the "eyewitness" accounts you hear on television from bewildered or distraught people who "thought the shots were just cars backfiring or firecrackers going off," these sounded like gunshots. – pows very fast. In the instant it took to turn in their direction, I noticed almost everyone had turned that way too. As if we all knew exactly where to look, exactly where the trouble came from.
"There he is!"
"It's fucking Bloodstone!"
He came straight at us in a slow gliding jog, black pants and shirt, silver Bloodstone face. The gun in his hand looked big as a block of wood. He was laughing and shooting at us. A woman across the grave went down, then a man. Hit? People were running everywhere. Finky Linky pushed Sasha into the grave and went in after her. I ran at Bloodstone without thinking. His high keening laugh. Pow!
2
We beat the shit out of him. Somewhere a woman's voice kept yelling, "Stop it, stop it! You'll kill him!" But that's what we wanted. All of us punching and kicking this son of a bitch till he died and never got up again. I love to fight but had never done anything like this – twenty (or so) to one, him on the ground, us standing over and whacking away at his unmoving form whenever we saw an opening.
"Kill the sick fuck!"
"Break his head!"
I kicked him and felt something hard go soft.
Scuffling and pushing, we were a pack of crazy starved dogs on a small prey. Each wanted a bite, our own bloody fresh piece. My dark funeral suit was dirt brown and scuffle-dust gray. Someone bent down and tore the silver mask off.
The man beneath looked like a teenager. No more than twenty. In less than a minute, his young face was a mess of ripe fruit color: shiny apple and grape, white where it shouldn't have been. Bone.
It was a blank gun. He had got off one more shot – straight at me – before I ran into him and kicked his balls. He was laughing when he shot at me, laughing on the ground being beaten down into wet rags by a lot of traumatized mourners.
I don't think I've ever been so angry in my life. When he was laughing I would have happily killed him. Pull a person's true anger out and it's impossible to put it right back in. Scare us enough and we'll do anything.
The police came fast, but there was a near riot as they tried to pull us off and get him out of there.
Who was he? I forget the name. Sasha wanted me to read an article on him in the newspaper the next day, but just hearing he was a "Midnight fan who wanted his hero Philip Strayhorn to go out 'as good as his movies'" was enough.
My anger scared me. My fear too. Riding back from the cemetery with Sasha and Mr. and Mrs. Strayhorn, I didn't say anything when the old man started piping off.
"I'm sorry, but I'm not surprised. He was my son but I'm not surprised this happened. You cannot make films like Philip's and expect your audience to be sane. They were depraved, both the films and the people who paid to go see them. What happened was a result of that depravity."
"What do you think is a good movie, Mr. Strayhorn?"
He wasn't used to being questioned, especially by a woman, so he looked Sasha over carefully before answering her.
"A good movie? Citizen Kane. The Seventh Seal. Even North by Northwest is a good film, maybe even a great film."
Facing him in the limousine seat, Sasha sat far forward so they were very close. "Tell me some good books."
He didn't like her closeness but wasn't about to be topped. "Oh, I don't know. Kipling's good; I've just been rereading him. Evelyn Waugh. Why do you ask?"
"What about good paintings?"
Mrs. Strayhorn touched Sasha's knee. "Why are you asking, dear?"
"Your son was trying to make something strange and new and vital with his films, but all you have to say about his life's work was it was depraved?"
Mr. Strayhorn crossed his arms and smiled scornfully. "You've been reading too many reviews, Sasha. Philip became a very rich man pandering to the twelve– and thirteen-year-olds in this sad country with about an ounce of imagination and a year's supply of chicken blood.
"There was nothing 'vital' about Midnight. Who do you think you're kidding? Yes, throwing a child off a balcony is strange, but not strange in the wonderful way of Fellini's 8 1/2.
"I respected Philip's success. He did what he chose to do well. But those of you who mistake his 'achievement' for something real and artistic, even worthwhile, are either blackly cynical or stupid.
"Good films? Weber made good films. Watch Wonderful carefully, and you see love and originality spread across the whole two hours, like good chocolate icing on a cake. The Midnight movies are cleverly filmed, and they scare the bejeesus out of you, but they stink."
"Why, because they 'pander' to our animal instincts?"