Read Trials of the Monkey Online
Authors: Matthew Chapman
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail
Trials of the Monkey (21 page)
An inexorable calm settles over the Magnolia House. As Gloria extracts her life from it, so she diminishes its power over her. The choice has been made and most of the work done; Gloria rests in a gap between her past and future, the one too poignant for reflection, the other too frightening to contemplate. I leave her upstairs in the den, wandering around picking at things, and
go downstairs to type out some notes. When I return an hour later she’s prone on the couch, the dim light flickering down on her through the fan. The TV is on and she’s switching back and forth between two Westerns, in search of Brodie, the last decent man in her life.
go downstairs to type out some notes. When I return an hour later she’s prone on the couch, the dim light flickering down on her through the fan. The TV is on and she’s switching back and forth between two Westerns, in search of Brodie, the last decent man in her life.
The light starts to die and now it’s time to go say goodbye to Aunt Ruth. We drive up the hill again on Route 30, which, I now find out, is in fact ‘The Trail of Tears.’ It seems appropriate.
We drive past the farm and turn off onto a one-lane road. To one side is a Christian camp. A sign reads, ‘Pay at the office to ride the blob,’ and the blob can in fact be seen, a large brightly coloured rubber float tethered in a small lake. Above the camp’s entrance is a picture of an angry skull with a rifle. The man who runs the place describes himself as ‘A black belt for Jesus.’
Aunt Ruth’s house is a low-slung California-style house with vertiginous views over the valleys of eastern Tennessee. Down below, the Tennessee River meanders among the hills, and in the distance there’s a nuclear plant crouched in haze. Aunt Ruth shuffles slowly to the door and lets us in.
‘I’ve prepared a soufflé, but it’s going to take another hour.’
‘I told you not to cook anything!’ says Gloria, an edge of panic in her voice.
‘I don’t have to do what you tell me,’ Aunt Ruth replies, keeping her head down and moving back toward the stove, where she’s stirring melted cheese.
Gloria, unable to face a long goodbye, had indeed told her not to cook and now negotiates the old lady down to a sandwich. The bubbling cheese is abandoned as Aunt Ruth sets off toward the refrigerator. I sit and watch as they talk. For the first time, I feel I might really be performing a useful function, if only that of distraction. Gloria says Aunt Ruth’s birthday is coming up. She’s going to be ninety, but she doesn’t want a party. ‘What’s the point … all that fuss and bother,’ says Aunt Ruth. Gloria rolls her eyes and tells me in a loud voice that when Aunt Ruth’s husband died some time ago, the old lady had her own gravestone put up next to his, already engraved with her name and
date of birth, leaving only the date of her demise to be filled in.
date of birth, leaving only the date of her demise to be filled in.
‘Why did you do that?’ I ask in astonishment.
‘Well, I wanted it to age at the same rate as his,’ Aunt Ruth tells me. ‘I thought it would be neater that way.’
I’m silenced for a moment and so are they. Eventually, I ask Aunt Ruth what Gloria was like as a kid and get a portrait of idyllic rural youth—days running free in the hills, ticks and jiggers the only danger, under-age driving with Ruth’s complicity, the red light Gloria ran, and the unbelievable coincidence of Uncle Wallace happening to be there,
right there at the light,
can you believe that, right
there
? But at the conclusion of each burst of memory lies silence, the drag of sorrow.
right there at the light,
can you believe that, right
there
? But at the conclusion of each burst of memory lies silence, the drag of sorrow.
As we eat our sandwiches, Gloria applies artificial respiration to the dying hour (‘Oh, you still have those great old TV dinner trays!’), but only artifice survives. Gloria wipes her lips and sets down her napkin. Aunt Ruth’s hands rise involuntarily to her mouth, first one, then the other clamped on top of it, and she stares at the Formica counter.
‘Well …’ says Gloria, standing.
Aunt Ruth looks up at her.
‘We ain’t gonna say goodbye,’ she says, trembling, ‘we’re going to say, “See you along the road.” ’
But they do say goodbye, Gloria tearfully, Aunt Ruth with resolutely muted sorrow. She must not cry, must be maternal even now when shrunk and Gloria, a woman, must be the adult or become the orphan. But the effort compels the hands back to her mouth again and her eyes glitter fearfully above their knotted veins. I turn away in shame at watching from outside.
As we drive away, her frail figure hangs behind the screen door, ghostlike.
This too is the consequence of failure and Gloria knows it, and later, as we drink heavily up in her crepuscular den, she curses her ex-husband for battering her Magnolia dreams, which will, officially and forever, die tomorrow.
Home Is Where the Heart Is
As so often happens, the drama of Gloria’s departure from the Magnolia House is mercifully diminished by practical details. Garbage bags, the unplugging of TVs, packing the car. There are no tears. The last guest writes the last message in the guest book. ‘The Magnolia House is beautiful but not as beautiful as your spirit,’ or words to that effect.
I help her settle the dogs in the back of the car and then give her a kiss on the cheek. She lights a cigarette, hoists the ubiquitous cup, and sets her knee for Pennsylvania.
I drive out of town to Evansville, some five miles north of Dayton, where Darwins are rumoured to be buried. I find a graveyard on a hill above the high school. There is a plot of Darwins. I set my camera up and photograph myself sitting on one of the stones.
I need to take a piss and walk to a distant edge of the cemetery overhung by trees. When I’ve finished, I notice some red beads hanging in the branches. I look down and see an old unmarked grave, more red beads, and a small modern sign which I’d almost urinated on. I pick it up and turn it over.
It says, ‘Eleanor Darwin.’ Having not at this point concluded there’s almost certainly no connection between me and this bunch of Darwins, I intone the obligatory ‘Wow’ and walk away.
I drive to the Chattanooga airport and eat a sandwich filled with moist barbecue pork, which is the best food I’ve had since the start of the trip. On the flight back to New York I’m sitting next to a gastroenterologist. He tells me how frustrating it is when patients expect you to know everything and be able to cure
anything, because you know enough to know you don’t know much, while your competition, the New Age practitioners, who know almost nothing, happily give the impression they know everything, and as most diseases cure themselves and others are psychosomatic, often seem to succeed in a way scientific doctors don’t.
anything, because you know enough to know you don’t know much, while your competition, the New Age practitioners, who know almost nothing, happily give the impression they know everything, and as most diseases cure themselves and others are psychosomatic, often seem to succeed in a way scientific doctors don’t.
‘Your chakras are out of alignment.’
‘Gee, I feel better already.’
Soon I’m in the back of a cab, rising up out of Astoria on the approach to the Triboro Bridge.
Manhattan. The shock of the monumental city. It should be spelled
Man!
?hattan. You look at it and think:
man
did this? It seems more like a natural phenomenon, giant crystals thrust into the sky by a billion years of … thrusting. It’s beyond belief. I’ve only ever met one New Yorker who doesn’t, even after years, feel a surge of awe and affection at this sight and he used to be in charge of the bridges and tunnels and so maybe saw the sight too often and with collapse and dilapidation in mind.
Man!
?hattan. You look at it and think:
man
did this? It seems more like a natural phenomenon, giant crystals thrust into the sky by a billion years of … thrusting. It’s beyond belief. I’ve only ever met one New Yorker who doesn’t, even after years, feel a surge of awe and affection at this sight and he used to be in charge of the bridges and tunnels and so maybe saw the sight too often and with collapse and dilapidation in mind.
Next morning I walk to my office and everything is angular, sharp, clean and solid. The old buildings in Tennessee tend to have a rickety quality and the new are merely shoddy.
I call my lawyer.
‘How was the trip?’ he asks.
‘Fine,’ I tell him, ‘but I’ve got bad news. We’re going to burn in hell.’
‘I was afraid of that,’ he says.
I’ve got a month before I return for the re-enactment of the trial. I am absolutely sure now that the comedy of the re-enactment will be the centrepiece of the book, the event around which everything revolves and out of which I can shoot whatever digressions I want.
I settle on the idea and explain it to my publisher, Tom Hedley, who loves it. I am about to get to work on the book when my rewrite of the New York script is approved.
When I write a script, I take no days off. I work seven days a week for as long as it takes. It’s a question of momentum. If I
stop for a day my memory of what a character was feeling thirty pages back fades. I used to have a problem working, now I have a problem not working. I wake up at six to be at my office by seven. I work all day and when the night comes I stop for dinner and then go back to work; the characters are in me and I want to return to them. I took an acting class at the Strasberg Institute once and the Method was explained to me. I’ve always been sympathetic to actors, admired their nerve, indulged them. Now I saw why. I had been doing this for years, looking for techniques by which I could trick myself into a mood and hold myself inside it.
stop for a day my memory of what a character was feeling thirty pages back fades. I used to have a problem working, now I have a problem not working. I wake up at six to be at my office by seven. I work all day and when the night comes I stop for dinner and then go back to work; the characters are in me and I want to return to them. I took an acting class at the Strasberg Institute once and the Method was explained to me. I’ve always been sympathetic to actors, admired their nerve, indulged them. Now I saw why. I had been doing this for years, looking for techniques by which I could trick myself into a mood and hold myself inside it.
But it’s hard. I can feel myself running out of money. I get up even earlier. Soon, I’m drinking so much coffee, my liver twitches. My drunk-driving problem is looming closer. What am I going to do? If I don’t have a licence, how am I going to get around when I go back to Tennessee?
I hire a researcher to try and find out what happened to Rappleyea after the trial. She turns out to be a Christian Scientist and I get some tracts, but she also turns out to be pretty effective. We find out he had some legal problems and got sent to jail somewhere in the South.
Sometimes I go out to dinner and talk about my trip; but as soon as I begin, the eyes lock on too fixedly. My friends pay attention, and then drift. It’s all so alien, so preposterous, dismissable, a cartoon, not so much America as Americana. When I tell them about the jail preacher or about Leland with his baptismal Jacuzzi, they laugh. They’ve seen it at the movies. When I tell them about Kurt Wise, they become irritated and wave their hands around in a brushing aside motion. What a fool, what a joke. Sometimes I find myself defending him, but it’s impossible. Defence rests in who he is, in a sideways glance, the quality of his laugh, and I’m not a good enough raconteur to conjure up the poignancy of the whole man; I cannot seduce my friends into the humanity behind the cliché.
‘You had to be there,’ I say apologetically.
You had to be there at Leland’s church, had to see the shacks
along the road, smell the unleaded gasoline of the dispossessed, hear the train hooting and rumbling through. You had to look into Kurt’s eyes. You had to feel the rough, gouging sweep of history through the valley, the thousands of miners who scrabbled beneath the ground to make clean-fingered men in London rich, or picture Rappleyea strutting down Main Street and knocking open the door of Robinson’s Drug Store, or imagine the requisitioned houses beneath the waters of the TVA, or see the end result of it all, Aunt Ruth trembling behind the screen door, Gloria with her wayward, uprooted laugh.
along the road, smell the unleaded gasoline of the dispossessed, hear the train hooting and rumbling through. You had to look into Kurt’s eyes. You had to feel the rough, gouging sweep of history through the valley, the thousands of miners who scrabbled beneath the ground to make clean-fingered men in London rich, or picture Rappleyea strutting down Main Street and knocking open the door of Robinson’s Drug Store, or imagine the requisitioned houses beneath the waters of the TVA, or see the end result of it all, Aunt Ruth trembling behind the screen door, Gloria with her wayward, uprooted laugh.
I stop talking about it.
At one point, one of the studios flies me out to L.A. for two days to discuss another script I might do. On the way back, I’m sitting in First Class when Muhammad Ali steps gingerly in with his wife. He walks slowly and deliberately across the aisle and starts to sit down right in front of me. In spite of his uncertain walk and his shaking hands, in spite of a mask-like quality in his face, he is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. As he shuffles into his seat, he turns and looks at me. He puts out his hand and I reach to shake it, but he’s merely trying to steady himself on the seat and I’m left touching the back of his hand, like a Catholic toadying up to the Pope. He smiles at me, twists, and drops out of sight.
We’re stuck on the ground for a while and I can hear him talking to his wife. It is hard for him to talk, each word is pushed out against his body’s will. At one point, she says, ‘Don’t be so anxious, Muhammad.’
Anxious
?! Muhammad Ali? How dare she!
?! Muhammad Ali? How dare she!
I have never asked for an autograph but I want to get one for my daughter. The first time he goes to the bathroom, I ask his wife if it would be all right and she says, ‘Sure, go ahead, do what you like.’ He comes back. I’m too embarrassed to ask. Why shouldn’t the guy get some peace? Then I hate myself. An hour later, he gets up to go to the bathroom again. The same laborious process, bend at the waist, ease up, grasp the backs of the seats—freeze. He stands there motionless for five seconds as if calculating
the push and pull of all his muscles and then straightens up. He exits the row and stands. His shoulders are very broad, his hips narrow, and now he walks like an athlete, slow as he is, that stiff but rolling walk, the arrogance and implied menace.
the push and pull of all his muscles and then straightens up. He exits the row and stands. His shoulders are very broad, his hips narrow, and now he walks like an athlete, slow as he is, that stiff but rolling walk, the arrogance and implied menace.
When he comes back, I get up and ask him for the favour. With great effort, he dedicates a piece of newspaper to my daughter and signs it. I thank him effusively and sit down. I remember a friend of mine in L.A., Paul Getty, who was kidnapped, had his ear cut off, and then, having survived that (and who he was to begin with), fell victim to a drug overdose. Now he cannot talk or move and is strapped into an electric wheelchair. All you can offer in this circumstance is to be as entertaining as possible. So, when Muhammad and his wife stand up again and are in the aisle, I get up and start talking to them. I tell them I’ve just come back from the South, how I’m a descendant of Charles Darwin, and how I’m writing a book about an old trial down there. Muhammad leans in, smiling faintly, nodding now and then, intrigued.
When I’ve spoken for a few minutes he asks, ‘Where is this?’
‘Dayton, Tennessee.’
A smile—a smile of mischief I’ve been watching since I was ten—spreads over his face and he looks at me sideways.
‘Bible Belt,’ he says, and shakes his head, laughing.
I’m so embarrassed about the drunk-driving thing, I’m taking no risks. I hire a lawyer whose last big case was defending one of the terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center. He has an office in the Woolworth Building, an old, ornate, peculiar building downtown near City Hall. He collects expensive antique watches. He has a hard time getting excited about my problem.
‘Hey, I’ll deal with it.’
And, for three grand, he does. I come out of court with a choice. Lose the licence for ninety days, which will complicate matters in Tennessee, or keep some provisional version of it and attend a series of alcohol education classes, which will complicate matters in New York, emotionally because I cannot stand to be
talked down to and will become infuriated, and practically because it will cut deeply into my writing time. Nonetheless, I decide on the latter, the classes. I go down to the DMV and a woman behind the counter spells it out for me. It’s ten classes, one a week, and each one takes a couple of hours.
talked down to and will become infuriated, and practically because it will cut deeply into my writing time. Nonetheless, I decide on the latter, the classes. I go down to the DMV and a woman behind the counter spells it out for me. It’s ten classes, one a week, and each one takes a couple of hours.
‘Take the licence,’ I say. ‘See you in ninety days.’
Later that week, I remember I still have a British licence. I find it and look at it. It’s valid for another twenty years! Ah ha …
Insofar as I can drag myself out of the script, I begin to anticipate going back to Dayton with an almost furtive pleasure. I wonder about the re-enactment. How many people will come to the town? What kind of people will they be? How can they tell the story without making William Jennings Bryan—and thus everything they believe in—look ridiculous? How bad will it be? How amateur? How distorted?
As exhaustion sets in, there are more and more mornings where I wake up at three, sweating, convinced of my mediocrity. The hour of the wolf. During the daylight hours, I can ignore his scratchings on my psyche’s door, but at night he creeps in and whispers how I made the wrong decisions; another life was mine, I let it go. He compares me unfavourably to other more successful men, gnawing with unerring subtlety at whatever confidence or hope is left. I wake up and stare at the black windows, try to flush him out, banish his scent, but only work can drive him away and seal back the door. I wait until four and then get up. By five I’ve walked the cold, deserted streets to my office, crossing sometimes with women stumbling out of cabs in evening dress or men with ties askew, and find myself back among friends whose sufferings, unlike my own, I can manipulate and control.
Another movie I’ve written based on a Donald Westlake book called
What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
looks like it might get made, but now there’s the problem of hooking a director, actors. I make calls, I take calls. I buy plane tickets back to Dayton in a thirty-minute gap prised out of the middle of a day.
What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
looks like it might get made, but now there’s the problem of hooking a director, actors. I make calls, I take calls. I buy plane tickets back to Dayton in a thirty-minute gap prised out of the middle of a day.
I try to spend time with my daughter, but I’m distracted and she’s too smart not to notice, and hates me for it. My million-and-a-half-dollar
sale runs into problems. I’m not going to get all the money without a fight. I can see a lawsuit shambling down into my life, malicious and well funded. When my wife, Denise, calls and asks me to take care of some small domestic detail, I feel my scalp tighten around my head (Not more! Please not more!) and then an even tighter feeling as if I’m being zipped into a bodybag. I hyperventilate, I sigh, I gasp for air. I’m killing myself, I know it. The wolf has made his burrow in my brain and my heart is ready to blow.
sale runs into problems. I’m not going to get all the money without a fight. I can see a lawsuit shambling down into my life, malicious and well funded. When my wife, Denise, calls and asks me to take care of some small domestic detail, I feel my scalp tighten around my head (Not more! Please not more!) and then an even tighter feeling as if I’m being zipped into a bodybag. I hyperventilate, I sigh, I gasp for air. I’m killing myself, I know it. The wolf has made his burrow in my brain and my heart is ready to blow.
Denise and I are not getting on well. It’s nothing serious, she just hates me. She hates me for attacking and damaging her faith, for undermining her optimism, and for my tedious and pervasive whining about the fact that I have been forced by our excessive life to work day and night for years on end without rest. She has a quick temper. Sometimes it explodes in my self-pitying face and I walk around wounded for a week, unable to forgive, stepping aside when we cross in the corridor of our apartment.
But she is wounded in a more profound way.
When she first went to see Thomas Green Morton, her forkbending guru, Denise’s twenties had come to an end, concluded by the death of a child. Believing in Thomas, she recovered from this and found peace. When we first started living together, she had mantras and prayers and meditational techniques which he’d taught her and they seemed to work.
Uneducated though I was, I knew enough about science to know that if the ‘miracles’ Thomas performed—the ‘phenomena’ as they were pretentiously called—were genuine, then all the laws of science were meaningless. I also knew enough about human nature, having inhabited the margins of a criminal life, to recognise Thomas for what he was.
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