Tom was shaken awake by his father, a big man with familiar hands.
“What have I come home to?” Tom’s father said.
Tom could hear his mother crying in the other room.
“We’re taking your mother to the emergency room,” said Tom’s father. He pulled Tom to his feet.
Tom lay in the backseat with the back of his hand against his slick forehead, blearily watching the streetlights’ swoop, and the moon, which seemed to stay in the same place as his father swept through the traffic, an expert. His mother had stopped crying so much about the chemical burns on her scalp and spoke with some courage about what fun it would be to buy a hat.
Your Cat Can Be a Movie Star!
NO MATTER HOW I SEARCH MY MEMORY, I CANNOT RECALL WHEN Sandy Baker Jr., bartender at the Green Bear, first mentioned in passing that his cousin in Hollywood was a high-level “animal wrangler”—a gruesome phrase for a noble profession!
Have you ever enjoyed the sight of a chimpanzee on roller skates and wearing human clothing in a motion picture? Perhaps the chimp has donned a beanie as well, and the brightly hued plastic propeller on top spins around and around as he skates merrily along.
You would be a heinous prevaricator of the highest order or else a withered misanthrope with a heart of stone were you not moved to the loftiest realms of entertainment by such a sighting of the playful primate in question. It is a little known fact I read in a magazine or saw on TV that Clint Eastwood’s highest-grossing film is not one of his brooding contemplations on the nature of violence and the decay of the body, but the one with the orangutan who gave everybody the finger. It is a mark of the popularity of such films that I recall the orangutan’s name as Clyde, whereas my brain has retained no memory whatsoever of the name given to Clint Eastwood’s character who liked to hang around with Clyde.
Now, how do you think the chimpanzee (or in Clint Eastwood’s case, orangutan) who has given you so much joy got to work that day? Did he ride the bus? It is highly unlikely, though I have no doubt a chimpanzee could be taught to count out correct change for bus fare.
You guessed it! Mr. Buttons (for that is what we will call our hypothetical chimp “chum”) arrived to the set right on time, his grateful belly freshly filled with ripe bananas, thanks to the tireless efforts of an animal wrangler.
That’s all well and good for the ape family, comes the logical rejoinder. I imagine an ape or a monkey could be a real handful. But what about the spider in Annie Hall? They probably just found a spider walking around on the ground.
Wrong again, on several counts. First of all, there is no spider in Annie Hall. I believe you are referring to the eminently touching scene in which Diane Keaton would like to get back together with Woody Allen after a breakup. She calls him on the phone, weeping, and tells him about a large spider in the bathroom. An amusing scene follows in which an outmatched Woody Allen, armed with a tennis racquet, attempts to vanquish said spider, which he describes as being “as big as a Buick,” using the humorous methodology of hyperbolical speech. The spider, however, is never seen. Characteristic of Woody Allen’s filming techniques, Mr. Allen is visible only in part through a doorway, his frantic, half-obscured motions indicating his mammoth struggle with his arachnid foe, probably to save money on animal wranglers. For yes, a spider would have required a spider wrangler, as amazing as that may sound.
In Europe there are no animal wranglers, which is why every European movie has a scene that starts with a live duck getting its head chopped off. They don’t build up to it with some dramatic music that goes dum-dum-DUM. There might be a couple smooching or some people walking in a field, then BANG! A duck getting its head chopped off.
There is a reason no one wants to know “how the sausage is made.” How the sausage is made is terrible.
Let’s get back to this spider for a minute, you may understandably insist. It concerns me that an animal can be implied in a movie. How do I know that Hollywood will make room for my cat, whom I wish to turn into a movie star, if they are so big on leaving everything to the imagination? In fact, isn’t the pioneering 1940s horror movie named after cats, Cat People, all about what is left off the screen, in the darkness of the viewer’s imagination?
Fair enough! But there is good news concerning your cat’s movie star potential. For you see, a cat is often used as a substitute for the darker forces being explored. In other words, you can imply a spider, but a cat is the implication, and therefore cannot in itself be implied. Is there a murderer lurking about? Then certainly a cat will knock over a garbage can and give everyone a scare. This happens in Pickup on South Street and numerous other films. Even in Cat People, which you mention, an innocent kitten serves as visual counterpoint to the mysterious and otherworldly “Cat Lady,” who is never exactly seen except in her sultry and all-too-delectably-human form. Did you know that actress dated George Gershwin? He was a lucky guy! Until he died of an agonizing brain tumor just at the prime of his young life.
Movies would be nothing without cats, whereas spiders (with the notable exception of Kingdom of the Spiders) are almost wholly dispensable. Even the greatest movie spider of all is never seen. Do you recall, in Through a Glass Darkly, when Ingmar Bergman’s heroine reveals that God crawled on her face and He was a horrible cold spider? Of course you do! Well, we never saw that spider, did we? To see it would have defeated the point. There is no way any individual spider is going to become a movie star.
Most of my conversations with Sandy Baker Jr. on this admittedly inexhaustible subject must have occurred at some point in my enjoyment of the fruits of his labors as a bartender. Nor was the relative viability of various animals breaking into the film industry the only subject upon which he proved to be a perceptive and appreciative sounding board. I recall telling him about my idea for a children’s book about Scriabin. I imagine the conversation may have gone like this:
“Who’s this Scriabin character?”
“As a young boy he used to kiss and hug his piano.”
“If you say so.”
“He was a visionary composer who wanted to bring about the end of society with his cataclysmic music.”
“How’d that work out?”
“Before he could finish, he picked at a pimple on his face and the next thing you know he was dead of gangrene.”
Sandy took to calling me “The Old Idea Man,” and hinted that he, by contrast, was a man of action. He put such wild things in the air as the veiled suggestion that he had once had to eat part of his own body to survive.
Well, this guy is obviously full of beans, comes the swift judgment.
You didn’t know him, with his compelling line of talk and wet, hypnotic eyes.
No, he was no buttoned-down milquetoast, scared of braggadocio. Is that what you want in an advocate? I knew from the start that Sandy Baker Jr. was a volatile type, the sort of person who in the worst-case scenario becomes a petty demagogue or tells his followers to eat poison so the UFOs can come get them. I was warned about him.
As may be imagined, the old farmer who frequented the Green Bear tavern was stoic and in tune with the cycles of nature. Naturally, he was wary of people from the “me generation” or “generation X” or the “flower people” or “young rowdies” or “potheads” or whatever it was that Sandy Baker Jr. apparently represented to him. I should have guessed as much. I suppose I was fooled by my own image of the bar as an oasis full of the cheerful barbs characteristic of masculinity as it is practiced in the United States and on the classic sitcom Cheers. It is instructive to consider how many times the character Cliff Clavin would have committed suicide in real life had he been subject to such bullying as he endured on that show.