Felix waited to let the
imagined thunderous applause resonate in Adam's head, then said
conversationally, "Or maybe I'll turn the Paradise into a movie theater."
Adam blinked and cocked his head,
blinded by the spotlight, deafened by the din of rapture. Finally he could make
out that Felix had moved from the back of the theater to the orchestra pit
during his Hamlet soliloquy. "Felix! Not movies!" he exclaimed. Felix came to
the stage and held his hand to Adam who hauled him up. "Felix, not the movies,"
Adam repeated as he helped Felix straighten his suit coat.
"Hah! I've been in some movies
myself, you know. Watch what you say! Seriously, Adam, I'm getting old, you
know. I could hire a manager. It'd be easier. The manager could hire a
projectionist. I could leave the Paradise in the hands of technicians and
administrators."
Adam felt a
strong and accustomed urge to drop out of this argument, but he threw the
feeling off like a coat on a hot day. "But you could get a manager anyway. But
for plays, Felix. I love movies. I adore movies. But the Paradise should be for
plays. Live, living plays!"
"Okay, Adam. Tell me. Why'd you let those bastards in Hollywood run you over?
You could easily have sued. And you let the rights to your plays go. Adam, what?
What happened?"
Felix really knew
what had happened. What had happened was that Adam hadn't believed his own
press. He'd in as many ways as possible given away, thrown away his riches, his
gifts. But he was so abundantly endowed, and the wealth of his talent, as
intrinsic and as replenished as his heart's beating, he hadn't been able to
spend it in any other way than to spend all of his time not using his talent. As
good a little St. Francis as he was, he couldn't give away his possessions to
the poor. His metaphors and images, his eye for deep conflicts, and crystalline
expressions of them, his sharp but humane insights into character wouldn't stop
being produced by his mind, any more than his body could stop producing a
shadow.
But Adam had lost the
framing ability. The capability to make whole machines where all the little
clock works could relate and move. He had let so much time lapse between the
writing of the second play and an attempt at a third, that he forgot how to
suspend, and balance, all the little insights like stars, all the statements
like earths, all into an ordered galaxy that is a play. He'd fooled around in
Hollywood and in a utopian society listening searchingly for an authoritative
voice, outside his own, for so long that he forgot how to hear himself. His
craft and his talent became estranged from each other. His brilliance and
knowledge got beyond his ability to craft them into plays. His experience over
the years had shifted his vision, but he hadn't kept pace in the practice of his
art. This is not the craft that can be delineated in a book. This is the
personal craft that each individual artist has and must exercise. It is known as
purpose; drive.
All in all, in
lay terms, Adam was scattered. His vision was fragmentary. Good vision, but for
discrete pieces. The components were greater than the whole. He could talk and
write astonishingly about all the little woes and joys, but not in a context
larger than the immediate now. The passion of the hour crowded the canvas to the
frame. But sometimes, he could see the greater structures of the world. But
detail failed him then, would not link up. Sometimes he had the leashes
stockpiled, the equipment to bring detail and the great forms together. But then
he could not find detail, or the great forms were out of his reach. Reality and
perforce, his writing, flaked apart like a croissant.
He did write poems. Long
blindingly passionate poems. Delicate. Sublime. Witty. Bitter. Quite
intelligent. Quite sane. Unfashionable poems that had a great deal to say about
the way reality ran itself. Not once was there the mention in his poetry that
burning leaves carry in them the scent of autumn. Not once was there an Anglo
Saxon sexual term. Not once was there a romanticized, justified pimp. It was
just poetry, apolitical and lacking in cliché. Real poetry. Adam's hedge against
all-out, bona fide insanity. Some yogis take their intestines out of their
bodies and wash them. With his poems, Adam bathed his psyche. But these
launderings fell sadly short of giving him an adult's sense of whole projects
brought to successful conclusions. Particularly in light of the early successes
Adam had had.
And, now, hearing
the word Hollywood out of Felix's mouth made Adam shake. Hollywood represented
Adam's failures at projects since the time of the early successes that Felix
represented. The overlap was unbearable. Adam had to sit down. He sat on the
edge of the stage and Felix joined him.
"I did figure it out the other
day," said Adam.
"Mmmm?"
"It's really very simple. Here's
the accompanying maxim: The more you run, the deeper inside yourself you drive.
That's okay. You get to see a lot of the world that way. Being adept at
psychosis is an even better travel plan than joining the Navy." Adam paused
considering which story to tell, which way to tell it--and, indeed, if he should
or could tell it. Felix hadn't laugher or sniggered over the Navy. Adam wanted
to calculate and effect, but since he had no motive, no effect he desired, he
just plunged in. Felix was on his own. "In 1973, I met some people in Mendocino.
The coast north of San Francisco where I had a cabin. These people had these
utopian notions. Very heady stuff. Or at least I thought so at first. What a
young stupid punk I was! We'd talk long hours. Into the night. Fires in
fireplaces. Men and women. At first there were half-a-dozen couples and a few
single folks. The census shifted, grew a person or two here and there. It was so
much fun. In the evenings there were the talks. Fires. Children sleeping on
parents' laps. Grass being passed around. This thick bread with butter and honey
on it. Tea. Plato. Aristotle. Marx. Freud. Martin Luther. Martin Luther King.
Thoreau. Malcolm X. It was intoxicating. And there was this girl, Kiki. I loved
her. God...Kiki... It all seemed like manifest destiny. My life seemed
connected. Everything that happened in that period seemed as significant as each
part is to the whole in a work of art. I thought all of life could become as
coordinated as my plays... I had the delusion that this was adulthood. You know,
I went from childhood to Broadway to Hollywood to hippie heaven..." Adam stopped
to see what reception this old fairy tale was getting. "I'm sorry. You've heard
this one before..."
"No, no. Tell
me."
"We were going to change the
world." Adam laughed hysterically until tears ran down his cheeks and he was
choking.
"Go on," said Felix when
Adam had a semblance of control.
"There was this caravan," said Adam. He waved his hand indicating the pageant as
if it were painted across the orchestra pit. "Volkswagen vans, campers, school
buses that looked like kindergarten papers. We all went to Kentucky because of a
dream Angelo McGuire had. Angelo McGuire was the leader--is the leader still.
Anyway, we all went to Kentucky to start the world anew. There were exactly
twenty-seven breakdowns cross-country. Everyone said they were high all the time
despite the trip being so herky-jerky because of breakdowns. That the breakdowns
were tests. You know, God as a quizmaster? The angels fraying fan belts and
blowing cylinders in the middle of the night, testing whether this nation so
conceived and so dedicated could long endure?
"Anyway, the breakdowns were so
debilitating of the group's funds that by the time we got to Kentucky, there was
only enough money for a few month's rent on a farm. The group needed to buy the
farm. I had already given what I had left of my money to them. You'd be amazed
how much money thirty-two people need, even when they're living below poverty
level. Anyway, after we'd been in Kentucky for a few weeks, Angelo McGuire came
to me and asked me to kick in my plays. He was a printer by trade, and had
brought a printing press from California. He was very fond of passages in Marx
about seizing the means to production, especially the printing presses, in order
to reshape society and take over the world. It was on that inspiration that I'd
bought the press for McGuire.
"Anyway, so we printed my plays to sell copies, and I forgot to retain my
copyrights."
"Oh!" Felix groaned.
"And so this commune messiah owns your plays?"
"Yeah. Good old Angelo McGuire. I
didn't know what I was doing. You, my father, Jamie, my attorney--I never
handled any of the legalities.
"But that wasn't even the bad thing that happened. What happened was, I wanted
to talk and think and write. But not long after we got to Kentucky, this grim
silence set in. There were no more theoretical discussions. The doctrine was
set. Everyone settled down to a craft and the conversations--what little there
was of them--became wrapped around compost heaps, grades of clay and wood, and
selling and trading goods with the natives."
"Seems like a lot of fodder in
that for a writer," Felix suggested.
"Oh, yet! And I learned the
beginnings of several trades. Things I never had access to in my childhood. I
can garden and throw a clay pot and saw and nail a board neatly. But for one
thing, these activities can't occupy me fully. They are just fodder for thought.
"I mean, I'd look at these
sunflowers. There was this huge garden of just sunflowers at the end of the
first full summer in Kentucky. It was this ecstasy. A Van Gogh ecstasy. These
gentle yellow giants. Sunflowers are full of humor. So huge and innocently
garish. Comic soldiers, to use your image. Sunny warriors.
"And I would stand and take this
vision in, this whole acre or so of sunflowers, several times a day and from
several viewpoints. And if someone talked with me their emphasis would be the
protein the farm members would get from the seeds, or the triumph of taking an
agricultural stand in the midst of an industrial bureaucratic nation of consumer
slaves. And all that's fine. But what about just the flowers for themselves?
Nobody could just see the flowers as they were. They were emblems of labor and
ego--or, what was really scary, emblems of something mystical--depending on who
you spoke with. And if I tried to talk about splendor--and I know it's silly to
talk about it--people would walk off scowling or smiling as if they'd pat me on
the head like a child. The real ball-breaker was the statement, 'Of course
they're splendid. But if you have to say it, you aren't feeling it.' And there
were the comments that the flowers were God's sign that the sun shined bright on
this new Kentucky home. That the good crop was a blessing on the commune.
"But it wasn't just sunflowers.
It was a hundred-thousand things. But it boiled down to
doctrine-versus-intellectual inquiry. McGuire's conclusions about life and his
rules for living and the battle that pitched the group against all the rest of
the world were doctrine. Hard-set by then. I hadn't realized that the show of
intellectual speculation back in California was a temporary state. A
pre-condition for settling down happily under McGuire's dictatorship."
"Everyone but you knuckled
under?" Felix asked.
"Oh, no! A
lot of people left. But most, yeah. Most of the originals are still there. And
there are always new members. Some people couldn't take it and wandered off to
other lives. Some people are kicked out for alcohol and rape. One woman was
thrown out for smoking cigarettes after the edict came down that everyone had
six weeks to quit tobacco or leave the farm."
"Why did you stay, Adam?"
Adam looked at Felix, astonished
that the old producer had to ask. But then he realized he hadn't been clear on
the point. That Adam felt his passion for a woman tangled all through his
description of the commune, but that he hadn't illuminated the feeling. "Because
of Kiki, this woman. She wouldn't leave. And so I stayed. Until I was drummed
out of the corps, finally. But even Kiki stayed then. She'd been having an
affair with McGuire all along, I learned..."
"Terrible," said Felix.
"I went on trying to engage
people in conversation about ideas. I became compulsive about it. Confused. I
could no longer tell after a while, what was normal with me, compulsive, or
contrived. At any rate, all my talk was considered neurotic. I suppose it was.
It was hostile to the group, McGuire said. Subversive. He wouldn't print my
poetry. Too opulent. Neurotic. Not earthy enough. Too complex. Elitist. McGuire
went to great lengths criticizing my writing, even though profits from my plays
were underwriting the entire operation. It took them three years but they
finally drove me out. McGuire took me aside one day and told me all about sex
with Kiki."