The Afterlife Can Wait

There are moments, amidst the shit that makes up 90% of our life, when the sky opens up, when animals talk to us, when life is in Technicolor. Sunday was one of those days. My brother and I took my Dad to see the Raiders play the Denver Donkeys at Invesco (still Mile High to those of us who are old enough to think that that kind of name for a stadium is as beautiful a thing as a 20 year old virgin) Field. The beer was cold; we were wearing Raider gear and were prepared for a drubbing at the hands of what, I thought, should have been a better team--God intervened. I'm not big on the concept of God, though there was a period of my life when the idea helped me sleep, but it's hard to describe what happened last Sunday without thinking of the divine. Perhaps we just slipped into that alternate universe that my doppelganger enjoys, where everything goes my way and chicks dig me. That the Raiders destroyed the Donkeys is an understatement. It was 28 to O after the first quarter. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or strip my clothes off and run through the stadium shouting, "You fuckers have always sucked. You have never beaten us this bad. My brother, father and I deserve this moment." And, we do. We do deserve the occasional reprieve from the life that sucks the life out of us. As Blanche DuBois said, "sometimes, there's God, so suddenly". While it may be more than a little gay to quote Tennessee Williams to describe what happened at a football game, it just works. Somewhere, between the beers and the brats and the cigarettes and the chick fight we saw on the way out of the game, My brother, father and I felt that God had smiled, for one brief and everlasting moment, on our lives. Fuck the Broncos.

Livin' in the fatherland

When I was 15, my father cut his own thumb mostly off. He was putting incredibly tasteful wood paneling, in a diagonal pattern, on my bedroom wall. He slipped while cutting the paneling and nearly severed his thumb with an Exacto knife. I wasn't home, but my stepmother, brother and step siblings were. In total, there were four people, other than the man in question, who could have taken my dad to the hospital. He asked for a towel, wrapped his dangling thumb in it, and drove 10 miles to the local E.R. for treatment. This is my father. He's not one of those weird medical miracles who doesn't feel pain, he just doesn't want anyone's help when he does. And, while he was no monster of a parent, he naturally expected my brother and me to not bother him with trivialities like severe poison oak, burns, ingrown toenails so infected that I couldn't wear shoes, etc. That pissed me off as I child. I had friends whose parents would take them to the doctor for a cough and I sat at home for a whole day with a broken collar bone to see if it got better--it didn't.

My dad could pick my brother and me up at the same time, one in each arm, when we were in high school, all of his 5'8" bulging and reddening. He had a temper and was prone to threatening us that he would, "knock our heads through a goddamn wall". To his credit, he never did. He thumped us and smacked our heads on occasion and that was enough. He was less tame in dealing with others. As a kid, I never saw my dad take any amount of shit from anyone. Scratch that; I have yet to see it. About 10 years ago, after my first son was born, my 60 year old father chased one of his neighbors down the street for questioning the legality of our fireworks display. In short, he is not to be fucked with, but he will never go out of his way to fuck with you.

On the contrary, he is one of the most likable people anyone would ever meet. He has always been generous to a fault, incredibly funny and truly tolerant (if we leave off politics). I never left my house without money in my pocket when I lived with my dad, either because he gave it to me or because he never busted us for stealing his change out of the chicken bank on his dresser. My father was loving too. He was a traveling appliance salesman, so he was gone much of the time. Still, he would find a way to show up to baseball games, band concerts, etc. Once, when I was in Santa Barbara, an hour from where I grew up, attending summer camp and staying with my Grandmother, my dad showed up. He was coming back from Santa Maria on a trip and he found where I was. This was in the time before cell phones, so I know it was no small feat for him to find me, sitting with my friends at West Beach, eating lunch at camp. My dad came walking across the field in his suit and my heart leapt. I knew he didn't need to be there, he just wanted to see me. I was 10 years old at the time and I still see him, his 1978 white afro, his three piece brown suit with an open collar exposing a gold coin medallion necklace--he was cool and at the height of his "disco" Mike phase.

Now that he's getting older, my dad has slowed down. He lives in Denver and doesn't come out. A few years ago, he had a heart attack. Naturally, he refused to call an ambulance and drove himself to the hospital, or should I say two hospitals. The first one had no emergency room, so he drove to another one that did have an E.R., but no free parking. Needless to say, he drove a block away, parked the car and staggered into the lobby where a flabbergasted doctor said, "You're having a heart attack" to which my father replied, "I know." Some things never change.

My brother and I are going to see him in a week or two and I'm excited. We're taking him to the Raider-v-Bronco game. My brother and dad haven't seen each other for a year or two, so it will be good. For my part, I'm going because of that day in Santa Barbara, because he showed up to my public defense of my dissertation, because he called me twice on Sunday to rub in the fact that he was killing me in our fantasy football league, because I love you, Dad.

The Gang's All High

Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1939) is as strange, wonderful and psychoactive as any film ever made. I showed it today in my Intro course and the kids reacted as they always do--technicolor. I sat there with my Cinerama smile watching them watching Berkeley at his whisky fueled, kaleidoscopic maddest. This film should not work. It has a razor thin plot, some of the worst acting in Hollywood history and Alice Faye sings the same song 5 times. None of this matters. The minute the first 6 foot banana comes out and Carmen Miranda starts to dance in her 8 inch heels, all is forgiven. The overhead shot of the aforementioned bananas being lowered onto a group of girls holding gigantic strawberries over their crotches is as filthy and delightful as any shot in any movie. And the film goes on, much like that, for nearly two hours.
It's a back stage musical, so I think my students are more likely to accept all the singing, as am I. I've never really liked the walking down the street, breaking into song MGM bullshit anyway. Not that there's anything realistic about Berkeley's film except the reason for the singing. The final scene in the movie is more surreal, and a lot more fun to watch, than Un Chien Andalou and nobody gets her eye cut in half. The "Polka Dot Polka", which opens with young children singing with dubbed soprano and deep bass, builds to an amazing Berkeley sound stage piece utilizing neon rings, insane costumes and, I kid you not, a kaleidoscopic shot of women dancing. It's celluloid LSD. The film ends with disembodied heads singing Alice Faye's favorite song one last time on a field of blue. And everyone in the audience claps, every time.
Why Berkeley was not a more prolific director is understandable; he was an insane drunk. Still, he left us with an amazing body of work and reminds me, every time I watch this movie, that film is sometimes best when watched with your mouth open. That 18 year old kids like it too restores my faith in humanity.