A rare congenital deformity had left the Lobster Boy with fingers and toes fused tightly together in a manner that resembled large claws. Depicted on banners as an actual, regular-size lobster with a human head, lolling on a seaside rock to the stunned amazement of bikini-clad bathing beauties, he was able -- in the days before political correctness roamed the earth -- to turn his misfortune into a fairly lucrative sideshow career. Walking with difficulty, he spent much of his time offstage confined to a wheelchair. He was seated in that chair watching TV when he was shot in the head by an eighteen-year-old Gibsonton neighbor, hired for the job by Mrs. Lobster Boy, who in court (her trial ran concurrently with the O. J. Simpson trial and was far more interesting) offered a spousal abuse defense. She claimed that every time she squeezed past his chair (they lived in a trailer where space was tight), he would reach out and pinch her with his “claws.”
Let’s try not to picture the act of conception, but the Lobster Boy fathered four children, two of whom, a boy and a girl, inherited his deformity, becoming part of a living sideshow tableau, the Lobster Family. Another son, adopted and anatomically normal, is, to the best of my knowledge, still performing on midways, ballyhooed as the Human Blockhead. In his act, he hammers nails and shoves ice picks up his nose. I guess showbiz just gets in one’s blood. In any case, the people who knew the Lobster Boy regarded him a cruelly mean alcoholic and few mourned his violent demise. Still, he was a major midway attraction for many years and I hope they at least thought to embalm him in melted butter.
Considering Gibsonton’s oddities and wonders, it shouldn’t be surprising that my wife Alexa and I were intrigued when on one of our visits there we came upon a crude handmade sign announcing a yard sale. We set out immediately for the address, and while we were to find no quaint or colorful carnival memorabilia, the yard sale did provide, in its quirky brand-name exclusivity, an experience reminiscent of Richmond’s Pepsi-only store.
The “yard” proved to be a vacant lot adjoining a gas station. Upon it were three long banquet tables. The tables were separated by enough distance that there appeared to be no connection between them or to the lone individuals who stood behind each table. Actually, only two were standing, the third person was not built to be comfortable for long in an upright position. From a sturdy chair, she confided to Alexa that she had been billed as “the Ton of Fun” in a carnival sideshow before an illness caused her to lose more than two hundred pounds. She was still about as big around as the average kitchen refrigerator, though no longer so fat that rubes would fork over cash money to ogle her blubber. The woman’s table was piled high with Butterfinger candy bars. Only Butterfingers. Hundreds of them. Hundreds! In bulk. For sale. We had to wonder if she was liquidating her personal stash.
Another table was equally loaded down with new blue cotton work shirts, all from the same manufacturer, Girbaud. On the third table there was nothing but stacks and stacks and stacks of Metamucil.
And there, folks, you have your yard sale: a specific brand of work shirt, candy bar, and popular over-the-counter laxative, each in massive quantities. Readers of my novels can be forgiven if they think I’m making this up, but Alexa is my witness, and if I exaggerate may the Human Blockhead pound frozen Butterfingers up my nostrils.
20
roll over, rossini
The very first time I attended a concert by a symphony orchestra, it was in order to review the performance for a leading metropolitan daily newspaper. The first time I ever went to the opera, it was for the very same reason. And in both instances, my critiques were published, presented to the public as if they were the reasoned and insightful opinions of an experienced musical authority. I suppose I owe it to readers, especially any who unlike me are classically cultured enough to tell spezzati from spaghetti, to explain how this charade came about.
When you blow up a major life situation, as I did on two fronts before leaving Richmond, the explosion can leave a hole in your psyche. Nature abhors a vacuum, however, and over time the crater is almost certain to fill in with new wisdom -- or fresh folly. Sometimes it can be a challenge to tell the difference. For example, my metamorphosis into a critic, indeed my first thirty months in Seattle overall, was a mingle of transformative revelations and screwball circumstances.
Susan, little Kendall, and I had arrived in Seattle on a Friday afternoon following a cross-country drive that lacked only a team of sled dogs to successfully re-create a scene from Nanook of the North. From western Pennsylvania to eastern Montana, Old Man Winter had a stick up his butt, punishing animal, vegetable, and mineral alike (cars count as “mineral,” don’t they?) with lashing winds, deadly low temperatures, and a great suffocation of snow. Unaccustomed to driving on ice, I braked abruptly at the lone stoplight in Perham, Minnesota, and went skidding into the rear of a farm truck. The truck shrugged it off and the damage to our Valiant was largely cosmetic, but the collision caused an air vent under our dashboard to stick open, permitting swirling snow, mile after mile, to blow up my pant leg. By the time we’d traversed North Dakota, the family jewels were so frozen they wouldn’t have looked out of place on Michelangelo’s marble statue of David.
Eastern Washington, while considerably more benign, was nevertheless chilly, its brown fields lightly dusted with snow, but once we crossed the Cascades and began our descent into Seattle, there’d been a dramatic shift, meteorologically and chromatically. It was like being gulped down the open throat of an emerald. A famous Italian journalist once began her interview with Muammar Gaddafi by asking the Libyan dictator if he had a favorite color, to which Gaddafi replied, “Green, green, green, green, green, green, green . . .” on and on, over and over, for nearly five minutes, she said, before she could get him to stop. The interviewer thought he was crazed but I think he was channeling Seattle.
Seattle, the mild green queen: wet and willing, cedar-scented, and crowned with slough grass, her toadstool scepter tilted toward Asia, her face turned ever upward in the rain; the sovereign who washes her hands more persistently than the most fastidious proctologist. These days, Seattle is not radically dissimilar to other large cities in California or back east, but in 1962 it was a magical metropolis, wrested from moss, mildew, and mud; animated more by chain saw and chi than by commerce and chutzpah; and although I would miss Richmond and miss aspects of it still, I was thrilled to the bone to have landed into this clam-chawed outpost where one might mix metaphors with impunity, bathed in oyster light beneath skies that resembled bad banana baby food. That darkening afternoon, watching Seattle’s hills begin to sparkle as if mounds of damp silage were being set upon by a trillion amorous fireflies blinking Morse code haikus that no Virginia cockroach could appreciate or understand, my heart informed my head that I had found my new home.
We’d traveled that northern route across the U.S., so fraught with wintry perils, neither out of innocence nor a craving for adventure but because I simply couldn’t afford the extra fuel required to take a warmer, drier southern route. As it was, I’d arrived in Seattle with only a hundred dollars in my wallet, three bodies to feed and house, and no clear prospect for fattening the kitty.
Barely had we entered the city, however, when, driving along Boren Avenue, precise destination unknown, I glanced up a side street and spotted a “For Rent” sign on a 1930s-era brick building. I made a quick right turn, parked on the northwest corner of James and Minor, went inside and handed over eighty-five dollars for the first month’s rent of a clean, roomy apartment. The landlord was Japanese American, which I took as a favorable -- even exciting -- omen, since, if truth be told, its connections and relative proximity to Japan were the reasons I’d sought out Seattle in the first place.
With the remaining fifteen bucks, I walked to a little corner market and stocked up on cheap, filling foods such as rice, beans, cereal, and a few decidedly non-Zen items like Dinty Moore beef stew. For a celebration, I splurged (it cost a whole ninety-nine cents) on a six-pack of beer. For several minutes, I studied the labels
on Olympia and Rainier, debating which local brand to test-drive. Eventually, influenced by its label alone, I selected Olympia. It was the wrong choice. Everything else, however -- for days, weeks, and months -- was to go so miraculously well that events seemed choreographed by the gods.
The next morning, armed with a gracious letter of recommendation, believe it or not, from John H. Colburn of the Times-Dispatch, I found my way to the offices of the Seattle Times. Even though it was a Saturday, I chanced that there might be someone in the newsroom with sufficient authority to answer my inquiry about the possibility of a part-time job. I was received by none other than managing editor Henry McLeod, who, after studying the letter (it evidently made no mention of Sammy Davis Jr.), informed me that an assistant features editor at the Times was about to depart for Europe on a six-month sabbatical and as yet no replacement had been hired. I started to work at the Times on Tuesday.
One of my assignments in the features department was to edit the daily advice column, Dear Abby. When its author, Abigail Van Buren, would visit a city whose paper carried Dear Abby, it was her habit to drop by that paper’s newsroom to pay respects. At the Seattle Times, she specifically requested to meet the person responsible for the headlines on her columns therein, as they were, she said, most unlike the Dear Abby headlines in any other paper (and there were scores of them) that published her. I believe she used the adjective “colorful.” Thus it was that I came to shake the hand of the woman who’d comforted more brokenhearted lovers than all of the booze in all of the gin joints this side of Casablanca. In our brief conversation, though, I neglected to ask Abby what I might do about my new wife, to whom I was experiencing greater difficulty adjusting than to my new city.
The features department was located next to the much smaller arts and entertainment department, and toward the end of my projected six-month stint at the Times, I had an unobstructed view of a parade of little blue-haired ladies in tennis shoes coming by to interview for the recently vacated art critic position. It was a freelance position, actually, the Times art critic was not on staff, and as I watched the dilettantes and Sunday watercolorists sashay in and out, I remember thinking that visual art in Seattle was about to be smothered with a perfumed hankie. The threat had nothing to do with gender, mind you (women such as Barbara Rose, Lucy R. Lippard, and Rosalind E. Krauss were already among the most illuminating modernist critics in the business), but, rather, that these would-be arbiters of taste gave off a vibe clearly indicating an approach that would be reactive rather than analytical; that when evaluating art they’d consistently favor the traditional over the unfamiliar, the pretty over the rigorous, the decorative over the expressive, the fully clothed over the naked, the prudent over the bold.
At some point in the lamentation, it also occurred to me that once I started grad school -- I’d been accepted by the University of Washington -- I’d still need to augment the modest salary Susan was commanding from the brokerage firm where she’d just been hired. So, bending once again to impulse, and maybe even imagining myself a knight on a white donkey, I gathered a sampling of the art reviews I’d written for the Proscript at RPI, strolled into the office next door and plopped them down on the desk of arts and entertainment editor Louis R. Guzzo. “Why not me?” I asked.
Why not, indeed? A month or so later, after giving myself a crash course in Northwest art history (it helped a bit that we’d discussed painters Mark Tobey and Morris Graves in my aesthetic classes at RPI), I was being paid to look at paintings and sculptures, to think seriously about them, and propagate my opinions thereof, never mind that those opinions were only intermittently supported by deep knowledge or keen insight.
Soon there was another development. Lou Guzzo’s right-hand man, the assistant arts and entertainment editor, left for greener pastures (though what besides Gaddafi’s mania could be greener than Seattle?), and I was offered the job. I would be expected, in addition to my art beat, to attend and review those cultural events that were deemed not blue chip or mainstream enough to warrant Guzzo’s attention; to cover, for example, the UW drama department, various hootenannies, traveling ice shows, pop music, and foreign films. How cool was that?! I set about convincing myself (foolishly, as it turned out) that I could handle the load and still become fluent in Japanese.
Naturally, I accepted the offer. To be a reviewer, even for B-list events, on just about any newspaper is a dream job, and I’d sometimes fantasized about it when reviewing student plays and musical theater at RPI. Now I’d fallen into it like a drunk hobo falling into a vat of champagne. In fact, so many things had fallen into place, one after the other, in the nine months since I’d left Richmond that I began to suspect that Satchmo, Sammy, and Pearl Bailey, never mind the gods, were watching over me, moving the pieces.
And then . . . and then there was another unexpected development. (Was Pearl Bailey practicing voodoo?) My unsturdy shoulder had been to the arts wheel a scant few weeks when Lou Guzzo was hospitalized with a hemorrhaging ulcer. He’d come close to dying (easy with those pins, Pearl!), and wouldn’t return to work for nearly two months, during which time I, a raw rookie, was the arts and entertainment department of the Seattle Times, B-list and A-list, the whole enchilada: talk about a baptism by fire! And that, patient reader, is how Tommy Rotten came to publish authoritative critiques of the first opera and the first symphony concert he’d ever in his life attended.
For its mid-winter concert, my symphonic cherry popper, the Seattle Symphony, had announced a Rossini program. It was a vaguely familiar name, Rossini, but I could no more have identified one of his compositions -- What? Rossini wrote the William Tell Overture? I would have sworn that was Tonto -- than I could have named the stars in the Crab Nebula. Nothing to do but head to the downtown branch of the public library and look him up. (Yes, the library: in 1962, “google” was the word for something obnoxious that clowns did with their eyes.)
There was a picture of Gioachino Rossini in a music encyclopedia, and I was immediately struck by how closely the composer resembled movie actor Robert Mitchum. They each, Rossini and Mitchum, projected an air of dreamy menace, primarily due to their heavy lids. “Bedroom eyes,” some might describe them, although in Mitchum’s case it was rumored that he looked perpetually sleepy because he was perpetually stoned, an opinion advanced by Hollywood gossipmongers after the actor was busted for smoking pot. There was no mention in Rossini’s biography of the composer having suffered a similar invasion of his privacy, but he was widely known as a “gourmand,” a polite French word for someone with the chronic munchies, and it’s easy to envision him raiding the pantry late at night in search of chocolate chip cookies. Moreover, Rossini had a reputation as a cynical wit and for hiding behind a mask of indifference, both characteristic of the film noir sensibility for which Mitchum was longtime poster boy. For composing the Stabat Mater, the ten-part work the Seattle Symphony performed that snowy evening, Rossini had received from his patron a gold, diamond-encrusted snuffbox (Really? “Snuff”?) and the music itself is as dark and expressionist as the best film noir, except for one quartet part that is strangely almost danceable.
Okay, I may have been reaching, but what else could I do? At the end of the concert I rushed back to the office and pecked out for the next day’s paper my assigned review, but because the musical knowledge I’d suddenly acquired in my library research was hardly adequate to fill the allotted space, I padded the critique with a few comparisons of Rossini and Robert Mitchum, their personas and their work, on a variety of fronts, real and imagined. Mostly imagined. Then I waited.
I waited for the reaction -- but there was none. Not a single symphony buff threatened to cancel her subscription, and although Rossini’s Stabat Mater was based on a Roman Catholic poem about Mary’s grief for Jesus, not one irate Christian petitioned to have me crucified. Curious. Especially so because my art reviews, which were a tad more conventional and a lot more knowledgeable, were generating considerable feedback. At any rate I decided to take
silence as an affirmation, and thus encouraged, in my virgin review of an opera (I’ve forgotten which one) a couple of weeks later, I hinted that the performance would have been more riveting, more relevant had the chorus worn black leather jackets, the soprano been a biker chick, and the basso profundo a Hells Angel on speed. Impressed by the music but bored by the opera’s stuffy, stilted ambience, I seem to recall expressing regret there hadn’t been Harley-Davidsons onstage.
Doubtlessly influenced both by my recent purchase of a motorcycle and my abiding admiration for The Threepenny Opera (when I’d seen the über-edgy show in New York in 1961, it had knocked my socks off and fanned searing anti-establishment flames in my heart -- though, of course, by traditional standards the Threepenny is an opera in name only), this review, like the Rossini, provoked not even the mildest public rebuke. Mind you, I wasn’t actively soliciting punishment: I, a thin-skinned Cancerian, harbor not one masochistic cell in my body. My critiques were unorthodox simply because when confronted by my supreme ignorance of the subjects I was obliged to evaluate, I had little choice but to play the one wild ace that was always up my sleeve: my imagination.
My next symphony review, one in which I riffed on a piece by the Brazilian Villa-Lobos, liberally sprinkling my article with phrases such as “dense underbrush,” “hot oozing rhythms,” “predatory jungle cries,” and “sophisticated savagery,” also failed to elicit reader fury: nary a hot oozing letter or a predatory phone call. I did, however, receive soon afterward an invitation to a private afternoon cocktail party at the home of Milton Katims, the esteemed conductor of the Seattle Symphony orchestra. What the . . . ?