Sketch: Dinner Party

I was at a dinner reception several years ago when I found myself next to a documentary videographer. A lifelong pacifist, he shot primarily industrial films, videos meant to prevent accidents when working around the gauges and digitized monitoring systems that represented the bulk of contemporary machinery. As the night went on, he told me about some of his earlier works, about his first forays in the industry, about the make-up effects he cut his teeth with, the false noses and prosthetics that dominated film, at least for a period. Soon enough we ended up talking about one film for which he had remembered a particularly bout of exhaustion, the exhaustion coming about for one scene which required the extras to eat human flesh. Although specifically he made sure to point out this was not a film about zombies, nor was it going to be real human flesh, but rather an early post-colonial work primarily shot in the rain forest, primarily focusing on the aborignals and the rampant beliefs both that cannibalism was widespread and that this type of savagery somehow alleviated the savagery of what was then international (he specified white, western) intervention. They had finally settled on cold cuts for the sequence, sliced roast beef and pre-cooked sausages for their visual look, and bathed each in a combination of dyed-red corn syrup and mustard powder for the color. But the extras, a good half of them, could not keep it down, so much so that on several of the rehearsal takes they would keep buckets to the side, so much was the overall simulation of the take that the extras had had a hard time keeping the prop down. He had worked and worked on the recipe, trying to figure out exactly how to make it the most palatable, or at least to remove the mental association of the fiction with the reality, even reminding the cast fruitlessly that most of the items had rather come from a catering truck, until at last they had devised a way to burn incense just off the screen, positioning it so that the smoke would not be caught on camera but still close enough so that the actors would have a floral association which in turn would help with to complete the dissociation. And it worked, the documentary videographer said. In fact, the incense was so important to the finishing of the production, that it had been given a credit in the final roll. Fascinated, I asked him if he could remember what the scent was. But he was at a loss for words: he couldn’t immediately recall.

Sketch: The Broadway Beacon

One day, as I was digging my way through even more coursework, this time in a seaside town along the Maryland eastern shore, some locals told me the story of two boys, twins, who had stopped going to school and began building a tower from anything they could find and re-use, old rakes and broom handles and wooden deck chairs and planks from doors and broken ladders and the blue-hued tops of desks, they built this day and night until one day it was too tall for their ladders, in fact, too tall for any ladder, and so they erected scaffolding, then stitched together a tarp using the same general model—these two boys who were previously only remarkable for their shared stupidity—and after the tarp was included one could almost see the spire from space, or so the twins had insisted, and yet because of their ambitious plans, they had also completely run out of supplies, the tower stopping midway through the next level so that the last post from a neighbor’s fence stood naked, its splinters hard and bristling from the afternoon winds, and in fact the winds themselves had become a menace, as with every gust the structure moaned and creaked and whistled throughout the cul de sac.

When a retired insurance adjuster happened upon the structure, he was immediately filled with thoughts of making it an attraction, of removing the tarp for all eyes to behold the grandeur after paying the appropriate admission; he bought it outright, he went to work on a name, first the “Pikesville Pylon” then the “Recycled Tower of Babel” then the “Backyard Broadway Beacon”–not that it was anywhere near a Broadway, but rather he felt the name added a certain strength and panache, so enormous were his thoughts that he had already christened it the Eighth Wonder and placed ads as far as his pension would allow, he had booked radio time and local news and a photographer to record, and in a sixty mile radius had papered all available billboard space because the adjuster was dead set on making this thing a sensation, he had plans made to have it gilded, or if not gilded, then at least strung with lights—meanwhile the rains had wilted the ground and the twins had vacated the house and along with the rest of the neighborhood, now gushing its residents, none of them waiting for the sheer slope of the tower to collapse under the weight of all this bluster.

As the story goes, on the day the last one left, the tower did.

Sketch: Cat Names

It wasn’t until the day after my grandfather’s funeral that I remembered this story, having nothing to do with his death but rather the infection that had laid me low, at rest in my bed in cold sweats. While traveling, on a bus because it was all my youthful budget would allow, I met a man who had just been let out from prison. He had served his sentence, that his time was up and so was moving to Portland for a fresh start. This was around 2001, before the coffee and preciousness had formed a film like a fine soot. He was arrested for stealing a pair of sneakers, although when he really thought about it he was caught because he had been smoking a joint a few blocks from the store, and the police had only found the sneakers as a matter of happenstance. While he had been in prison, he had had infrequent visitations from a woman he had been seeing, when I say infrequent visitations really I mean that she had regularly visited every three weeks, but this seemed like an eternity in their elongating interims, because the man wished back for a taste of home. After about five months, she altogether stopped, or at least, the gap grew first to four weeks, then to six, then she altogether disappeared. He had become coarser throughout, and he chalked it up to that. After about four months had passed between the visits, he received a letter from this estranged paramour, initially stumbling but then quickly shifting to apologetic. She said she had wanted to stay in touch, but in the interim it had become too painful, that she had had a miscarriage shortly after the sentencing had come through, and that with the subsequent internment she had felt it was inappropriate to pile onto his situation, that it was fine anyway because she had decided to abort regardless, and that she had only decided to come clean, to clear her conscience, as it were, because around the same time, the cat had run off only to be found dead, hit by a car, an old Pontiac that released black fumes when the pedal was depressed, the letter went on about how her decision fraught but felt to be the right thing, and that now they should both focus on moving forward with their lives and forgetting. He relayed this story to me, only stopping to give me the cat’s name, specifically Chevy, specifically a name he had always had misgivings about because he'd never liked his original Chevy and thought it might have led to exactly such an untimely end, and to show me the tattoo he’d had installed while incarcerated. As the morning began to break and we pulled into the Portland station to separate, he asked me if I had any money for his next leg. In the idling bus, while the other passengers pushed past to get out of the confines, I gave him the twenty dollars I had on hand and wished him luck.