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"Injuring Eternity" is a chapter from my nonfiction
book, Fission Among The Fanatics, which is soon to be
available at
Spuyten Duyvil (NYC).
INJURING ETERNITY by Tom Bradley
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. —Thoreau, Walden Every morning I killed all the sinners on earth. —Psalm 101. 8 One early morning, back when I was in elementary school, the local television station made a mistake and actually broadcast something stimulating. It was a silent short subject, one of those ancient slapstick orgies, the first I’d ever seen. The proper frame-rate to run such movies hadn’t yet been recollected from the misty past. Everyone thought they were supposed to be fast-motion and jerky. That false quality caught my eye, and I asked my dad what in the hell I was looking at. “Watch the language,” he said. (For a second, I thought he was referring to the titles.) “It’s an example of primitive movie making.” Dad’s antepenultimate was one of my buzz-words. The other was heuristic. I was in a serious do-it-yourself phase. It was the pre-rental video era, yet I had managed to see The Swiss Family Robinson seven times. That’s how many different grownups I’d pestered into driving me all the way downtown. (This was also the pre-suburban mall era.) “Like how primitive? Could I make a movie like that by myself?” “Well...” “I mean with just stuff in the backyard.” Dad was holstering his slide rule and heading toward the door on his way to support the family. But he paused a couple dutiful seconds and rubbed his freshly scraped chin. “Backyard stuff, eh?” he said. “Are you including the old Bridgestone tires and the jugs of lawn chemicals? And that broken Frigidaire the neighbor kids like to play house in? Or just Swiss Family Robinson-type stuff?” He knew where I was headed. I had read Defoe’s contribution to this genre of prepubescent male fantasy, probably the kiddy version, as well as Lord of the Flies. At such an early point in our father/son heart-to-heart, I wasn’t thinking of much more than twigs and tendrils in various combinations. In that halcyon period before the eighth grade and excessive LSD, educators tended to tell me I was “borderline-precocious.” But I needed a nudge from novels and movies into the anchored empiricism of physical substances and processes. I would oblige Dad to give me my nudge, even if it doomed him to miss his usual jump on the morning rush hour. “Interesting question,” he said, and sat down, his briefcase poised on his knees for a speedy exit. And he murmured it once again, more vaguely. “Interesting question.” (Was he trying to convince himself?) “Hollywood on a shoestring. Minus the plastic ferrule.” He winked at me. But I didn’t know what a ferrule was, so I didn’t wink back or chuckle or anything like that. I probably should have. “Well,” he said, sitting up a tad straighter, “we moderns have a considerable technological history behind us. To be fair, you’d have to give yourself a sort of racial amnesia, and start with no prior knowledge of the properties of materials. Or that they even had ‘properties.’ You’d need to do an awful lot of research very quickly. In your shoes, my boy, I would fail immediately.” Without quite standing up, he reached out his extraordinarily long arm and groped for the knob on the door. I wonder, in hindsight, as they say, if such a ready admission of fallibility on the part of my lifetime default role model shocked little Tommy, me. I don’t recall any emotional reaction to that paternal caving-in, except maybe impatience. I detained the old man and somehow, with my boy-level locutions, got this general idea across to him: the way I saw it, there was no obligation to “be fair” and “start with no prior knowledge of the properties of materials.” I could remain the modern youngster that I was, with a more-or-less clever pre-teen layman’s knowledge of technological history—but with an admittedly peculiar need to make art from absolute scratch. “Obviously,” I piped (or words roughly to this effect), “poetry and painting and song and dance are simple to arrange. A movie is more of a challenge.” “’Challenge’ is putting it mildly.” “And I’m giving myself the maximum believable luck.” “Which you’ll need. Especially with regard to the animals, vegetables and so forth that we could scrape—or, rather, you could scrape—?” Dad looked at me in an odd sort of way. Was he offering to pitch in, or trying to be gentle about begging off? He and I always did have a rough time communicating our basic desires and motivations to one another. “—that one could scrape from the trees or dig from the dirt.” Maybe he was just hoping to scare me off in time to get to his classroom before his beloved disciples wandered off. It was difficult to tell. I followed my father’s glance as he averted it from my face to the tube. It was turning out to be a downright Mack Sennet festival. Someone at the TV station—it was a Mormon outfit—must have had a nervous breakdown and become non compos mentis. Here it was, kiddy-narcotizing hour, yet the “Augie Doggy and Doggy Daddy” cartoons were nowhere to be seen. I could swear, in retrospect, that they were even forgetting to insert the breakfast confection commercials. But that’s impossible. In apparent dismay, Dad watched five or six rickety Model-T’s barreling down a Los Angeles back street. They wove in and out among themselves in fast motion, like a squad of basketball players on drill. His voice took on a slightly pleading tone when he said, “How about if you just did the screenplay? Your big brother and I laid some flagstones around the sort-of patio, and I could show you how to make a nice Cub Scout fire for charcoal, and you could scribble—I mean, write—” He knew it was no go. No red-blooded American boy wants to be seen, out of doors, frittering away his vitality on the wimpy alphabet, to go around with people snickering cruelly behind his back, “There goes a print man,” and applying to him that most contemptuous of modifiers: bookish. Far better to be called a Nancy-boy. Whatever reading and writing I did was a death secret outside the house. Without acknowledging his suggestion, I told him what I wanted. For example, tearing branches off the trees and ornamental pyracantha bushes for fuel, melting the contents of the sandbox to manufacture camera lenses— “—and, also, I guess, I’ll need to siphon off some glass to make insulation for my generator and electrical components, since rubber trees will not be available, and I’ve declared the old tires off-limits—” I was trying to stick to Thoreau’s ideal, yet couldn’t picture the operation without electricity. A generator seemed requisite. But Dad said, “Whoa back, Trigger.” (He thought I was still on Roy Rogers.) “I can tell you right off the bat, kid, that home-made electricity will not be plausible.” Thus, with that single flat and unqualified pronouncement, my dream was shattered to shivers, like substandard glass. Throttled at birth. I couldn’t believe such summary betrayal was possible within the nuclear family. What was this, Attic tragedy? Just from the way he enunciated the words home-made electricity, Dad made my whole idea sound so unworthy of consideration. Building a generator involved too much. Everyone should know that, should have it pre-wired in his brain at birth, if not braided in his DNA at the moment of conception, for Christ’s sake, as a basic rudiment of the common sense God gave a newt. My ambition of from-the-ground-up electronics was so infantile and preposterous, evidently, that I decided not to bother to ask him why. But, I asked my sullen self, what was so insuperable? Dig up a little iron for the magnets, some copper for the coils, insulate where necessary with home-made glass—I wasn’t planning on mega-watts here. I assumed that the old man was just getting, shall we say, mature and unambitious. Or, even more unforgivable, he was withholding permission for fear of my electrocuting myself. I elected to pout like a teenager in a movie. That pout brought forth a weary sigh. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” he groaned in body language. He took his briefcase off his knees, set it down on the linoleum, and plugged the distant percolator in, barely unbending his phenomenal arm. “Do you really think,” he said, “that you, or we, or anybody, confined to the backyard, without the aid of shovels and picks—” I decided that Dad was being defeatist. Or else he was just coming on like the typical absent American father, unconcerned with his own spawn’s intellectual development. This guy was not heuristic. “—and, even if you dug deep enough, straight down to bedrock, and somehow hacked through that, using your fingernails presumably, and scritched and scratched and nibbled and bothered your way clear down to the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, do you honestly reckon, son, that you could come up with the ingredients for this generator? And collect enough of the various metals for your electronics? I don’t mind telling you that it’s highly unlikely—” My face fell. I was not quite past that stage of development where tantrums are effective. Large as I was for my age, I could throw some elemental doozies. The whole block lived in dread of my hissy-fits. “Careerist,” I hissed under my breath as Dad stole a furtive glance at his watch. “—but not altogether impossible,” he hastened to add, in a higher pitched voice, yanking his cuff down over the crystal. “I mean, if we’re talking theoretically now.” “Theoretical is good,” I said, in a soft but intense voice. I looked ominously down at my feet. “After all,” said Dad, sounding like a slightly depressed shoe salesman, “our backyard is situated within coughing distance of the world’s largest open-pit copper mine, right?” “And all I want is a little buzz,” I moaned. “And you’re probably right about glass insulation—” He gave me a “there’s my bright boy” cuff on the side of the head, as a sort of consolation prize, mussing my imitation Beatle haircut with patronizing affection. “But,” said Dad (and he accompanied himself with stealthy motions of the shoulders, trying to ease the following notion into my little brain without chafing against any raw edges), “the result will be such a big cumbersome thing, won’t it? Such an inefficient generator will need a giant crank, don’t you think? No, a treadmill. Some animate creatures will be required to provide traction. I don’t see any oxen grazing out there.” He waved his arms in what he obviously hoped would be a gesture of broad preposterousness. “What would you do? Enslave a few dozen of the neighborhood children?” Now, I am sure that his conscious reason, at any rate, for saying the above was to discourage me further. As the official report card signer, he knew I was bringing home C-pluses and even an occasional B-minus in civics class. This was one American lad tolerably well indoctrinated in human equality and human dignity and human freedom and that shit. But Dad’s voice had placed altogether too much emphasis on the key word not to introduce at least a few complications. “That’s fine,” I said. “I can enslave.” I was still just normal enough, in those pre-Purple Haze and Orange Sunshine days, to have friends. They visited our backyard frequently enough to be considered natural constituents thereof, and thus comprised an exploitable resource, if one were willing to stretch a point. So, Father’s helpful suggestion posed no special difficulty at all. It was but an afterthought, especially compared to the technical questions we had yet to grapple with. Not to mention the cosmological puzzles that would soon envelop the Bradley household. Nor would press-ganging enough warm bodies to rotate the treadmill pose any particular physical challenge for the likes of young Tommy. I was busily expanding to my present six feet, nine inches, three hundred and twenty pounds. (Can’t help it: basketball family, you know. My father holds a plausible claim to having invented the hook shot when he was a pro in a cage in Chicago, way back in the olden days; my second-cousin Bill Bradley played for the Toledo Twats or whoever, and then went on to become one of the next presidents of our nation; and my Mormon nephew Shawn Bradley is currently the NBA’s premier shot blocker or something. I have no idea what team he plays for, but he’s seven-foot-six, so he gets to be in Bugs Bunny movies. It’s not fair). I chose to be no less systematic with the problem of human bondage than with my more scientific quandaries. An economy was being built here, as well as a motion picture studio. Introducing slaves into that economy required, of course, a source of calories for those slaves to burn. I informed my dad (his face blanching the while—he was a Kennedy Democrat and a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Utah chapter) that I would feed my livestock on the crab apples that casually fell on our side of the redwood fence from the laden boughs of the neighbors’ tree, which esculents we Bradleys rightfully owned, according to something like Anglo Saxon common law, probably. This was getting serious for Dad. I could tell by the various colors his face was turning. Babies in bondage in the backyard, Simon Legree for an heir: it was time to wax seriously dissuasive. “Turn back, oh man, forswear thy foolish ways” is what they sang in the non-Mormon church we were supposed to be members of but never went near. But he knew better than to appeal to my higher nature and impulses. Any alert parent who understands the sheer contrariness of little boys’ minds will choose indirection in a situation like this. “Tommy, hang on. I mean, it’s very good that you’ve provided for your, er, employees’s dietary needs. But why don’t we back up a tad, shall we? Just for a moment. Don’t you think a fellow might run out of fuel pretty quick making all these fires, lots of huffing and puffing, to prepare the copper? And especially the iron? There’s only two trees out there.” Two and a half, actually. They were black locusts, and they filled the whole block with seminiferous things every year that caused the Mormons to resent us. Popularly known as a “trash tree,” the black locust is a loosely organized being, the farthest thing from hardwood, and couldn’t be a more inefficient source of fuel for very hot fires. Dad was right. The sorry organisms would be cakes of dead carbon in no time. If I was a scribbling poofter we might have something to talk about here. But I most emphatically was not. So even something as simplistic as a blast furnace was proving no less impermissible than the generator itself. My dreams and ambitions of artistic self-expression, still sparkling with the moisture of youth, were popping like spit bubbles. I said nothing. Instead I just let my little face fall, once more, to tummy-button level, with that disappointment, that disenchantment, so chilling to a parent of future teens. “This is not heuristic,” I whispered. Father yet again backed off from his dismissal. He was turning out to be one of those modern American parents who have difficulty saying no and sticking with it. Instead he tried gently to persuade his impulsive boy from such a dead-end path. “You may tear down and set fire to the redwood fence—” “Thanks, Dad.” “—if it’s not too adulterative for your program.” “What’s that supposed to mean? Thou shalt not—?” “No, no. Outside stuff, you see. Not occurring naturally within your topographical perimeter. Violates your own ground rules. That fence has been creosoted and varnished and painted god knows how many times, with the devil only knows how many different store-bought compounds. For Hell’s sake, creosote comes from the destructive distillation of coal. And do think, if coal was anywhere near our backyard, Brigham Young wouldn’t have caused this whole neck of the woods to be gutted long ago?” He paused and looked at me with a peculiar sort of intensity. I couldn’t tell if his question was rhetorical. “Um,” I said, “well—” “But, let’s say you loosen up a tad on your no-outside-stuff requirement (your big brother would say ‘cop out’), and go ahead and consume the fence. Even still, depending on how many sequels and prequels the entertainment market will bear, you may wind up needing to grow more trees. And you know what that takes.” “Time?” “You said it.” With the finality of a coffin maker driving home his ultimate fastener, he intoned, “Time, my boy, is one commodity that can’t be stretched out, or fudged on, or substituted for, or snuck past. Time’s unlike creosote. You can’t cop out on that.” “Time’s unlike creosote? Can I quote you?” “You have only so much. And I have almost none.” Dad looked at the clock. Pavlovian class bells would be ringing now at his place of employment. He visibly fought the conditioned reflex to reach into his briefcase and fetch his roll book. “Time’s no problem,” I said—and learned that fact only as I uttered it. I had no idea why it was true, or why I’d been assuming it so deeply that I hadn’t bothered to verbalize that requirement (or lack thereof) before now. It gave us both pause, this odd little utterance of mine. My father heard it well enough, and nodded in agreement, with a similar lack of consideration. We didn’t even glance at the television. I said it again: “Time’s no problem.” Not forgetting to feign another sigh of resignation, Dad looked at me with unmaskable pleasure in his eyes. He took pains to restate my notion, his boy’s new insight, so that it would sound as nearly rational as possible—for now. This was still supposed to be merely a scientific discussion. “Of course,” he said slowly, “time’s no consideration. I mean, not for someone your age, right?” “Right, Dad. Us kids have no sense of—” “Time. Right.” His roll book, for the moment at least, was forgotten. “Especially,” I added, “since, unlike you, Dad, I’ve got nowhere in particular to go today.” I beamed a proud grin at him, which his own face reflected like a convex mirror. I was undergoing my most recent suspension from school, a regular thing for me. I am fortunate to have undergone brat-hood in the days before Ritalin and Prozac and Luvox. Otherwise I would have been doped into submission instead of banished. Not a bad boy, exactly, I was just following parental orders when I refused to stop arguing the origin of species with a certain sacerdotal functionary who spent his weekdays posing as a public school teacher. (This guy, incidentally, was never one of the educators who told me I was “borderline precocious.”) It was this crew-cut crypto-proselytizer’s “Utah history” class from which I was continually being ejected, because my fourth- or fifth-generation excommunicated Jack-Mormon atheist dad sent me there each morning with a bad attitude and a head full of amino acids, primordial soup and other evolutionary decoctions, and a directive to challenge the “Elder” on the doctrines of Creationism. This was just one of the several ways in which Dad, in his own words, “systematically corrupted” me, his priceless boy. He had started the process early on, trying to subvert my socialization already in kindergarten. Filling my head with locally heretical doctrines would help ensure my never backsliding into some “hare-brained throwback Latter-Day-Saint crapola” as my nephew Shawn Bradley did. Bugs Bunny’s co-star hawked the faith of Brigham Young in Australia for two years when he could have been earning about sixteen million bucks getting his nose and collarbones broken by ebony elbows in the NBA. The fans throw bottles at him and call him The Great White Ope because he looks and acts and sounds like an elongated version of Andy of Mayberry’s fair-haired boy. Rather than allow anyone in our branch of the clan to be sucked into such a downward spiral, Father was bent on getting me officially and publicly expelled from the second most potent disseminator of Mormon “culture,” the Utah public school system. He would cite my permanent record to embarrass me into relenting if I ever, by some freakish twist of circumstance or some gross overdose of mind-bending drugs, decided to get baptized by full-immersion, and convert, like my seven-foot-six clown cousin, to the sect that had spilled and nearly expunged our very Bradley blood in one of the many episodes of savage tyranny that have since been deleted from the pages of early Utah State history. So I cut my rhetorical teeth facing down the “Elder.” He was a textbook paranoid-schizophrenic who had ninety-eight percent of the Book of Mormon memorized, and who, in order to be able to keep his own animalistic self contained in his polygamist pants, simply had to believe that he bore no relation whatever to the naked chimps that hung their private parts between the bars at the zoo and flung excrement at people. So far, my limited debating skills had only managed to get the lunatic to kick me out for brief periods. But I intended to be an obedient child, and to continue rubbing the rock salt of natural selection into the open sore that was the “Elder’s” psyche, until I got an outright parole from formal education (every real boy’s dream). When and if I ever succeeded, I wasn’t sure if Dad was planning on coughing up the exorbitant tuition for Episcopalian parochial school, or on home-educating me, as our friend Mr. Singer did with his own children before the state authorities came and shot him to death on his front porch for such lawless presumption. Speaking of which, the ancient comedy flickering in front of us now jerked in a very big way, right off the reel. It stopped altogether, browned, and started to bubble, as it got stuck in whatever hot contrivance TV stations utilize to put film on the air. Someone at the station downtown, presumably the mad Mormon who’d started this sepia jamboree in the first place, acted fast, gave the thing a good thump, and got it going again, after only five or six seconds of the televisual equivalent of dead air. “Still and all,” said Dad, shaking his head slightly, like someone who’s just been nudged awake in an auditorium, “um, as you said, time’s no problem... yet, be that as it may... yes, even with the, er, scheduling restraints loosened up a tad...” He cleared his throat. “Even taking your, let’s say, boyishly inchoate sense of time into consideration, there’s still one bugaboo, one utter perplexity.” “A bugaboo.” “The sheer size of the energy requirement here. You could place the entire student body of your elementary school under the yoke, for Christ’s sake. Stake out a space as big as the whole block for them to twirl your treadmill—and that last bit’s by far the most implausible: Brigham Young wouldn’t allow your great-great-great-grandparents enough dry dirt to die on, in blatant violation of the Federal Homestead Act of 1862—” He was back on track, and pouring coffee, oddly, into two cups. “—but I still seriously doubt you’d be able to get the amounts of energy, of light, you’d need for a movie. Tommy, I’ll have to go with my previous statement that no dynamo would be practicable—” Again, my face fell. I was starting to feel stretchy around the hairline. But, before I could throw myself on the floor and start howling, he quickly said, “—or necessary.” But I didn’t hear that promising qualification, because I was holding back tears (or maybe pretending to), and very obviously grasping for means to salvage not only the project, but my budding sense of self-esteem. I hiccoughed, bravely, “Well, gee-whiz, Dad. What about a wet cell?” The “Elder” had shown us how to build one in pseudo-science class the previous year. (Such tinkering was devoid of overt cosmological implications and hence permissible.) I knew the salt requirement for a wet cell could be easily met. All I had to do was glance out the window at the blighted landscape of my birthplace. Neighbors of Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon descent, but with the faces and hands of Essenes, squeaking past in brand new cars, undercarriages already rotted away. Salt was no problem. I could maintain an ample supply just knocking deposits off the rain gutters after the briefest of April showers. “Well,” my father replied, with monumental amounts of patience in his voice, “let’s talk about that, okay?” He felt obliged, like the competent nurturer he was, to tell me what was good about my fancies before giving them the thorough trashing they deserved. “It’s true—and I am so proud of you for learning this at school, Tommy—that a saline solution is needed for a wet cell. But it would have to be even bigger than the generator. It would have to be a continental wet cell. Did I hear you wrong, or did you not say just the backyard? I thought this backyard thing was a spatial restriction, too. Was I wrong? Are you going to spread the contents of our god-damn garden clear across the—” He was getting a bit frustrated and starting to treat me like another grownup. That was no good. So I said, “Teacher says the Great Salt Lake is a wet cell battery. That’s not continent-sized. They bisected it into halves of unequal salinity with the causeway, and—” “And it generates about one thirty-thousandth of a volt every year.” Father fanned his arm toward the window, at the dead sea on the horizon, which suppurated under its customary shroud of sulphur dioxide. “You’re really going to get great picture quality with that. Talk about film noir. Your teacher has his head up his sea gull-worshipping ass.” Dad got serious now. It was time to light up a cigarette. Being the most emphatically non-Utahn of all mainstream tobacco products (designed and marketed, as they were, to appeal to African Americans, whom the Mormon scriptures describe as “black and loathsome”), Kools were what he smoked, in those days before experts decided all that extra menthol crystallized the lining of the lungs to no wholesome effect. “Tommy,” he huffed secondhandedly in my face. “Son. My boy. Think of a movie. Think of all of the brightness coming from a movie. That’s a reflection of what the projector is sending to the screen. Today’s screens are efficient reflectors. Your screen would be the backs of large pieces of bark or mold. How would you go about getting light to pass through the image with enough power so that you could actually see it? That would be about two intensities of a typical overhead projector. Just a whole damn bunch of light, Tommy. Bags and bags of light. Powered by proportional amounts of electricity. And it must follow, as the night the day, and all that crap, that your wet cell is an even dumber idea than—” “We could use magnesium,” I countered. “I bet there’s some out there. Teacher says it’s the eighth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. Or else I could derive it from the chlorophyll in the plants.” Even though he must’ve known, as a full-time professional educator, that sarcasm rarely works on the young, and certainly never twice in rapid succession, he couldn’t curb the irony. “Magnesium? That would be a very strange and short movie.” “Fuck it,” I said. Little Tommy commenced skulking off to his bedroom to assemble model airplanes with that seductive-smelling glue. Dad was on the verge of losing his son, a nation-wide malaise in that epoch. His tardiest beatnik grad-students would have been accumulating among the rows of desks about then, yet he felt constrained to reach out and buttonhole me. To all appearances, he started warming to the task. But that was deceptive, a desperate job of play-acting. He began talking fast, trying to haul his boy in and fasten him to his side with ropes of words. Dad had a counterproposal. “No, no, no, no, no. Don’t fuck it, son. Not just yet. Watch the language,” he remembered to add. “Electricity is not necessary. I’m thinking solar. You know, Save the Trees. Your big brother and all the other cool college kids eat this stuff up. Sunshine, not that dark subterranean shit from Hell that you have to melt just to get it to behave. I’m thinking of the nice easy things ol’ Sol helps to grow every day.” “Twigs?” “Tendrils as well. Like that. Like our little plywood playhouse we built together in an earlier and less, um, complex period of your youth. Fond memory, right? Let’s do that again. We’d build a small shed, like our playhouse, but with light seals all around, fashioned from tree sap and mud, and a small hole in a wall or two. If we could get a good beam of sunshine through this Latter-Day-Saint smog, that would project nicely. Oh, and we need bearings for the hut, because it’s set on a rotational device so it can follow the sun, while the mice are turning the twig-and-tendril cage wheel to run the images through. This is going to look more like Jacquard’s loom than Edison’s Kinetoscope.” I decided that I liked the sound of that. The idea of a clickety-clack affair appealed to me. It was better than some hot sputtering thing, truer to my Flintstone roots, more like The Swiss Family Robinson. It had taken some doing, but this little representative of the newest generation of Bradleys was successfully weaned from directed drifts of electrons. “A hut cinematique!” I hooted. Father saw the habitual tension leave my face, and felt emboldened to say, “Now, son, by this time you will have manumitted the neighborhood kids from generator detail, as in free the slaves.” Hearing that, however, made me petulant again. I should have known there was a social program lurking behind this. “You never want me to have any fun,” I whined. “You know that’s not true!” he cried, desperate to swap his social conscience and political convictions for some filial affection. But he failed to demur quickly or ardently enough to prevent my retiring, like Achilles, to sulk in my figurative tent. I consulted the television in silence. It continued inexplicably to serve an uninterrupted stream of pre-Depression slapstick, from a time when the majority of rank-and-file Hollywooders were bumpkins—like my extended family, come to think of it—and had thick-skulled and unenlightened notions of what was amusing, and what was permitted. I only just consciously noticed something that my eyes had been registering for several minutes about these silent short subjects: most of the interest lay around the edges of the frame, where palm trees blew mournfully in an odd gray haze. It was an opportunity to see what southern Californian vacant lots looked like, back in the days when most (instead of today’s mere many) members of the Bradley tribe were still living like the Flintstones, deep in the Utah mountains. One of my buzzwords, as I said, was primitive, and I came by it honestly. It wasn’t just The Swiss Family Robinson that piqued me. It was the Deracinated Family Bradley as well. In the 1850’s Mormon missionaries had enticed us all the way across the Atlantic from the coal mines of Sheffield, England (I don’t know how we could have fit in the tunnels; maybe we worked behind the counter in the company store, fetching hardtack off high shelves), only to kick us almost immediately out of their territorially omnipotent church, and drive us naked into the wilderness. We howled at the moon and subsisted like Neanderthals and interbred for two generations, or maybe three (amid such genealogical chaos, spouses and spawn are difficult to differentiate), self-creating in a literal sense. Unlike Mr. Thoreau, who was back east at the time having his camp-out, we did not hear at night “the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge.” We had to listen to grizzlies and timberwolves beating the hell out of each other just outside the glow of our campfire. And there were no trains within eight hundred miles. It was only in the past sixty years or so that we Bradleys had begun to shamble back down from the federally designated Primitive Area, high and deep in the Rockies, where it’s still legal to kill anything not worshipped by the aboriginals as long as you eat it. We’d stealthily settled among the very folks who had, for reasons still in dispute, chased us off like flatulent pets so long ago. Keeping a low profile, not receiving the benefit of the Mormon welfare system, the Bradleys were socially ostracized (thank Christ almighty: I’d have made a horrifying missionary). The only career opportunities open to the likes of us were sordid positions among the communists and alcoholics and other deviants at the non-Mormon university. If my boyhood’s backyard was to be a self-contained unit, it would be modeled on my clan. Only that summer we’d planted a great-grandma (or great-great-auntie—nobody knew) who, before senility claimed her, could sputter a few spasmodic syllables of the private language her cousins (siblings?) had invented among the stalagmites, Brontes without the basic literacy skills. Ours was one family that had not forgotten its victimological heritage. Primitive was the buzzword, even like my father, still, in the most important parts of himself. He was a professor at that time, but remained a troglodyte under that thin tenure-track veneer. And it was starting to come out this morning, I could tell. Waylay the old man long enough, get him sufficiently bored and irritated with some insoluble problem, and the sagebrush lycanthrope would poke its damp snout through. Briefly bring out the Bradley, and then the instruction would start in earnest. “Someone will have to be outside, rotating the hut cinematique, won’t they?” asked Dad, not removing half-closed eyes from the screen. A little man with a big black hat and beard was being dunked head-first in a rain barrel. “’Manumit most of the neighborhood kids’ is what I should have said.” “Yeah,” I grinned. “We’ll need hut rotators.” “You can withhold freedom from two or three children,” Dad sort of leered. “Selected for tractability more than strength, as this hut won’t be all that difficult to move, if we get the bearings smooth and nice. I see a sort of pivoted roller system, using logs from the two and a half black locust trees. But they will need patience, these kiddy-chattels, to follow the sun, and steady little personalities. Real bourgeois types.” On television, raunchy mayhem was being perpetrated upon minor characters, carefully recruited by the casting director and enticed with alcohol from Los Angeles skid rows. Their congenitally abnormal faces had been enhanced with pancake makeup and mascara to haunt you like details from a repressed childhood trauma. I couldn’t have been more enchanted. We were looking at a division of the tribe who’d stumbled a little further west than the rest of us. “I suggest,” said Dad, “that little Latter-Day-Saint next door who wears glasses.” “LaMar Jacobsen?” “And his plump sister. The one whose kitty-cat uses your sandbox as a latrine.” “Tiffany.” At the mention of that lugubrious name, Dad regressed even deeper into an atavistic back-tunnel accent. His upper canines began to chaw at his lower lip. “Named after the famous maker of favrile glass. Later we’ll have a special use for her.” “How do you mean?” He failed, or refused, to acknowledge my request for clarification. “We build the hut for, say, seven people. Six customers and the exhibitor (you, I assume). I think we should also install a pedal device as a backup so that you, the exhibitor, can rotate the hut, just in case the wretches toiling outside die from sunstroke or malnutrition, or organize a strike, or burrow under the redwood fence while you’re at the movies with your—um, where’s the audience coming from?” “Fishing for an invitation to the world premiere?” “Not necessarily. But, if you plan on selling tickets, or, rather, bartering them off (as there’ll be no currency that I’ve been informed of), shouldn’t the population pool from which these patrons are drawn be a natural occurrence of the backyard?” He was driving at something I was too young to cotton on to readily. I didn’t pursue it, and neither did he, for the time being. As usual with such subjects, it was very tantalizing, but somehow better left alone. He did appear to be genuinely warming to the task this time. As the pre-World War Two inhumanity escalated further on the television, Father was unable to avoid injecting himself a bit more assertively into the scheme: “You’ll do all this?” he said with his eyes and arms. “We’ll do it?” He was ready to get this pesky pronoun question out on the table, finally. It was time to firm up the duty roster. He was prepared, maybe eager, to jump in. But he seemed willing to concede that this production might be qualitatively different from the playhouse we’d knocked together. It was little Tommy’s individuality being produced from the ground here. Father himself was an already finished product, for better or worse, and now must act only in an advisory capacity, and as chief financial backer. Also caterer. Since I wasn’t planning to live like my human cattle on crab apples, I assumed I’d be coming indoors on a regular basis for a sandwich or so, maybe some macaroni and cheese, composed of ingredients bought with the salary earned on the job from which my demand for parental attention was keeping my father. Kindly, indulgent, he didn’t trouble me with this obvious fact, which had so conveniently slipped my boyish mind. He would remain my victualler, steadfastly and without comment, for the aeons required to grow my fuel trees and produce my equipment and make my masterpiece from scratch—because, as he always said, he was immortal. Whenever the big question came up (and it often did, with a morbid tyke like me underfoot), he pleaded deathlessness. And it wasn’t just the untarnished posthumous reputation guaranteed the inventor of a major advance in human culture, such as the hook shot. Dad was talking corporeal permanence. Not a really deep thinker, my old dad: denying the basic fact of everything, the prime condition of organic existence, from whose pondering comes all serious and headlong action; ignoring when not explicitly contradicting this most obvious of all obviousnesses, up until his sixty-fifth or seventieth birthday, when his own experience finally started making it undeniable, even to himself. I got my cockamamie ideas about time’s unimportance from him. Just to check and see whether it was a generational thing, I’ve since asked several friends and acquaintances of my approximate age if their own fathers staked this mightily wrong-headed claim for themselves. Nobody said yes. It seems to have been a peculiarity all my dad’s own, this notion of a personal earthbound incorruption. But still I suspect it was more offhanded than hubristic, more Far-Western, somehow, than megalomaniacal. So, the Bradley lad’s nourishment was indefinitely provided for, and he had settled on an alternative energy source, and was actually quite content to allow the nearest yellow main-sequence star to project his movie. But, project it via what medium? It was no longer possible to put off dealing with a certain indestructible synthetic compound, as undying in fact as my father fantasized himself to be in person. This needed subtlety. “All right, we’re set,” I said, enunciating with pursed precision the first-person plural for the first time today, deliberately roping Dad into it. (I knew that, with the sinister shit I was about to moot for consideration, adult supervision was recommended.) “We have just about everything we need,” I chirped. “We have manpower and some fashionable, vitamin D-enriched sunshine. Oh, and, also, Dad, not to forget—we’d better get ourselves a supply of something transparent to put the pictures on, to shine the sun through. Right? Um, Dad? What’s the name of that plasticky stuff real movie guys use for—” But before I could go any further, or recollect the name, he jumped to his feet, spilling both cups of coffee, and blurted, “Do you know what the earliest photographs were made on?” “Huh?” “Plates of glass, Tommy!” “Blades of—?” “Plates. Of beautiful, clear, biodegradable glass.” He was being a bit too emphatic in contradistinguishing glass’ relative purity and simplicity with the toxic convolutions of the material that had just been on the tip of my tongue. For unknown reasons Father suffered from a violent and unreasoning prejudice against the plasticky stuff. This animadversion evidently overrode his need to go to work and his responsibility to discourage me from time-wasting enterprises. I found myself wondering what sort of childhood trauma he could possibly have suffered in the ancestral cavern, involving the dreadful concoction. “Yes, and we can even,” he panted, supportive parent that he remained even under stress, “use your smart sandbox idea. For this glass, you know? You’ll have to comb out the shit of Tiffany Jacobsen’s cat. Tidy little beast.” “’—comb the shit out of—’?” “No, no. From the sand. Comb out. Remove the feline excrement. As in impurities.” “Clean the latrine. Gross.” “Nobody said science was fun. Unleash her brother from the hut bearings and have him do it—oh, damn.” “What? What?” “Niter.” For a moment I was delighted. Was this a new secret dirty word from the universe of grownups? Perhaps an epithet? “Niter?” I said, eagerly. “I suppose it’s not impossible that our small backyard might yield niter to supplement the sand for primitive glass manufacture. Although I’m not sure of this at all. I guess,” he said, vaguely looking toward the room where we threw most of the books, “we could look it up...” “... Naw-w-w,” we said in unison, after no undue pause. This was just a casual dad-son conversation between two amateurs with no particular scientific bent. Dad was a professor of economics. The slide rule was for figuring out goods and services, inputs and outputs, greed and need, human stuff, not the physical universe. “Anyway,” he said, “you’ll have to round those slaves back up to dig for niter. Maybe, while they’re at it, you could ask your youngsters to scratch up a little manganese, too, if it’s not too much bother, like the Phoenicians did. They invented the process by accident. A ship laden with niter wrecked on their shore, and the gentle Mediterranean surf blended the spilled cargo with the sand, which later, at low tide, was subjected to heat when the sailors set their cauldrons on the beach for a cook-out. Or something like that. I don’t know if they always had cook-outs after shipwrecks, but there you have it.” “Subjected to heat? I thought you said—” “I changed my mind. We’ll have to get your smelting operation back on line. Since you insist that we are blessed with the history of materials and ability to use them, we’ll have to invent the blast furnace, just as you suggested earlier. My bright boy,” he beamed, giving credit where credit was due, and mussing my fair hair again. So, just like that, by arbitrary adult fiat, my dad declared my blast furnace permissible after all. Little Tommy, who had barely adjusted himself to less flammable techniques, complained that he was being taken on an emotional roller coaster ride. “Speaking of rollers,” said Dad, “you will recall that the bearings for the hut are logs, which leaves you that much less fuel. We’d probably only need one batch of glass if we did a good job. Nevertheless, son, I’m afraid that our beloved little playhouse, which we worked so hard together to build, will have to be razed. For the plywood.” “I don’t want to be sickeningly sentimental or anything, Dad. But wouldn’t it be easier to just cook up some of that plasticky stuff real movie guys use for—” “Silver!” “Huh?” “We need some.” “But I thought this was a barter economy.” “Primitive photographs were silver halides prepared in the dark and exposed to light on glass plates. Do you have fillings in your teeth?” “You know I do. You pay for them.” “I mean silver fillings. We need them for the halides. Do dentists still use silver these days? My head’s packed with the stuff. How about yours? The sadistic pederast down the street charges like he’s using platinum.” It was not mere oral hygiene being bandied about here. The removal of dentition in dreams, says you-know-who’s much maligned book on the interpretation of same, always signifies patriarchal castration: the Father attempting (not consciously, but as an involuntary function of his very biology) to subsume and absorb, which is to say emasculate the son, according to basic psychoanalytic theory. I was not enthusiastic about this proposition. Unsure as to what alloys had been tamped into my own reamed-out molars, I crossed my little legs and said, “Hey, Dad! I know. How about if, while my slaves are digging for the niter and the magnesium—” “Manganese.” “Whatever—” “Not ‘whatever.’ You’d better get that one right.” “—what if the kids come upon a hoard of old silver Mormon pioneer-type coins, and we use them instead of my—” A shudder, stemming not necessarily from either of my yet unshaven jaws, shook the last word off. Desperate to avoid, or at least postpone, the ultimate Oedipal showdown, I was willing to stretch yet another point. I reckoned its having been buried in our backyard for more than a hundred years would somehow render this bullion permissible—unlike the old Bridgestone tires and the broken Frigidaire, which had only lain there rotting for about a decade. I was prepared to disregard any treasure trove statutes that might exist on the Utah law books. “A hoard of Mormon specie?” scoffed my dad. “Untithed? Left unpillaged by Brigham Young, the greedy son of a bitch who nearly had us all killed over a couple acres of scrub oak?” “But Gr’auntie said it was because we—” And the phrase recurred: “Very unlikely, but not entirely impossible. Yes, I suppose you could get sufficient silver halides off this sad pittance left by the voracious cult. We’re assuming a single-take operation, anyway. Due to paucity of fuel, we’re only going to have one chance at our blast furnace. But, these few coins would be seriously defaced, I think, by the process. What about the archaeological interest?” We both got a chuckle out of that. They weren’t exactly owl drachmas. “So,” said Dad, appearing nearly tension-free for the first time all day (that shared chuckle must have been therapeutic), “if we were to be satisfied with a negative image movie run on glass plates, we could stop now, and I could go to work and get there just in time for lunch. My little ears perked up, like a doggy’s. Did this process end in a negative image? Why was I the last to know? That struck me as superb. It would look like death, which, as our morning confabulation progressed ever closer to lunchtime, asserted itself more and more as the theme of my production—though I wouldn’t at that point have been able to say why. It does seem to me now that I was a little young to have death on the brain. “Oh, boy! A negative image would be swell, Dad! Real avant-garde, and like that!” “Remember,” he said, confidently gathering up his briefcase, “we’re looking at some really lousy picture quality here. You’ll probably wind up with just vague gray shadows hulking around on the wall. Plato’s cave-type stuff.” “I don’t care.” I wasn’t aiming for a sequel to Cleopatra with Burton and Taylor. Something more along the lines of very early Little Rascals before Farina grew testicles. Cinema naivete. “And, it’s all very, very unlikely—though not altogether impossible.” “That goes without saying.” “Good,” said Father, “it’s settled then.” He lunged for the door on his first-string center legs. And here I thought we’d just been talking in principle. I said, in a firm enough voice to arrest his progress, “One eensy-weensy question. About the silver—um, things.” “Halides. Silver halides.” “How do we get them to stick on the glass?” “Oh, they’re suspended—” He caught himself up short, and shoved another Kool in his mouth to impede the flow of indiscretion. I’m sure my ears did another cocker spaniel twitch. “Suspended from what? In what?” “Nothing.” “Even I’m suspended from something. Today, at least. Or is it suspended in nothing? That doesn’t sound heuristic. What the fuck are you talking about, old man? He was cornered. Once again the door knob left his giant fist, and the chair received his buttocks. He sent his briefcase sailing across the room. Hook shot. The pleasant look left his old face, the enthusiasm seeped from his voice, and he murmured, just audibly, “Gelatin.” “Yeah? So? What’s the big heart attack? Wait till the Mo-mos have a picnic, slide a twig through the fence slats, latch onto a plateful, suck out the tiny marshmallows, and it’s show time.” “That’s jello. What we need is gelatin, not just any old colloidal guck. It’s animal jelly.” Dad paused, in the forlorn hope that such a notion would elicit an “Eeeew, for ick,” and put his child off the cinema altogether. But it was no sissy-pants he was raising. Every regular boy loves mucus, in all its incarnations. “Heuristic!” I crowed. “Earthworms are animals. We could use earthworms. It’s easy to grow masses of earthworms if you know how. You would just stick your hand into the mass and withdraw it slowly, like when you’re about to go fishing. Then you could harvest maybe enough animal snot for mixing with the tooth decay filling crap.” Dad spoke quietly. “You honestly don’t care about picture quality. Do you?” “Maybe I should go into TV.” “No! Gelatin is derived from the connective tissue of vertebrates. Not the secretions of annelids, you little—” “Oh, I do beg your pardon if you please. And this nectar can be had by? From? How?” “Not every man is blessed with a job he really enjoys,” said Dad, his face filled with longing. “Yeah, but don’t you want your favorite son to do heuristics?” “Hooves are the best source, pound for pound. I imagine most is cow now. Used to be horse. The glue factory. We’d have to skip just a whole bunch of work and sit around on our butts and wait for a herd of one or the other to stampede across the street and down our driveway. Or listen for large numbers of some sort of wild ungulate to clatter by, and make inroads, migrations, establish habitual trails. A hole of appropriate size would have to be kicked in the redwood fence. I feel like doing that now.” “I thought we burned it down already.” “Figures. I doubt many hoofed creatures were wandering past before Big ’n Hung and his ninety-seven wives showed up with their ox carts. Just lizards and Utes and pumas and hanta-virus rodents. It was desert the Mormons made bloom, not green pastures. And it’s not exactly dromedary country, is it? Are camels hoofed, anyway?” (The poor old guy was showing signs of exhaustion: he asked himself questions out loud.) I tried to bring him back on topic, or at least to the right continent. “I guess buffalo are out these days.” “Since time is not of the essence, Tommy, maybe you could wait for a giant asteroid to come along and knock our planet out of kilter, just enough to adjust our backyard into a clime and latitude more appropriate for the harvesting of animal jelly. Such as Brazil. I always thought tapirs would make nice gelatin. Kind of amber-colored.” Dad got dreamy for a second. He was getting mature on me. It was downright foreboding. The day would come when I’d have to say goodbye to this old soul. “Dad? Hey, Dad, how about small inoffensive animals? Would the feet of small inoffensive animals yield this dreck? Like, could I render appreciable amounts from Tiffany’s cat? What if I were to be conscientious about pulling out its claws by the roots every time it comes to defile our glass works?” “Assuming cat claws can produce gelatin, which they most definitely cannot, sure, why not?” he said, ambiguously enough. After a brief, silent moment of shared puzzlement, Dad decided it might be better to clarify the question a bit further. It was decided that I could cause Tiffany Jacobsen to have a birthday party with a rental Shetland pony, whose little feet I could mutilate, then dole out the residue, pickled or jerked, to my niter miners and hut rotators as a treat to forfend that general strike. I’d entice the creature to the redwood fence with a fistful of velvety, fragrant clover, or whatever constituted our lawn. On TV was a violent silent, eyes poked out and heads cracked open with billiard balls. The star did some authentic juggling and instigated a revolting mud fight, which metastasized gradually to encompass a whole neighborhood and scores of strange-looking people, including a dozen Bradleyesque pituitary cases. “And grab a pygmy pony foot or two—” “With a snare—” “Contrived of plaited tendrils—” “Of course.” “—and tear the hooves off.” “With one’s teeth—” “None left. Sacrificed for the emulsion.” “My father and I are one,” says Jesus in the gospel of his beloved disciple. Mine and I were getting carried away—no, galloping off together, united under a yoke of hereditary lawlessness. “Hack the hoofs free from pinto ankles with a crude stone implement.” “Dislodge a flagstone from the patio. Crudely bonk it against the foundation till you get a jaggedy edge for sawing.” “Yeah. Dislodge all the flagstones. Scatter them. Grind the Nancy-boy charcoal underfoot. Fuck the screenplay.” “Language!” cried Dad. Frowning dutifully, he made a two-handed move like a symphonic conductor coaxing a diminuendo. The television cooperated, quite coincidentally. After the messy orgasm of the mud fight, the on-screen activities were getting a little calmer. The Bradley grizzlies were coaxed off-screen with chunks of raw pork. Some crude exposition was being laid down, in preparation for the next access of post-Gold Rush bestiality. “That pony,” Dad reminded us both, “comes all the way from the Shetland Islands.” “Damn. That’s right.” “I mean, the Shets, or whoever, speak English. I guess. But that’s still way, way out. Ultima Thule. Long way from the old backyard you know so well.” “Adulterative,” I agreed, and cast about desperately some more. I was on the verge of wondering out loud whether LaMar Jacobsen’s fingernails might be in any useful way similar to the homologous bits on horses and cows, when our eyes met, and I knew Dad was having the same thought, or one equally impermissible, even for a Bradley. Well, it should come as no surprise that my father and I came very close that morning, on moral grounds, to an outright rejection of gelatin as a recourse. Animal products carried too many implications. And glass itself wound up faring not much better. “Hold on, son. Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that you and I somehow managed to cough up copious amounts of primo animal jelly. And we got the images onto glass. It would have to be a pretty remarkable glass, wouldn’t it? Not just bubbly, cat-shitty melted sand. And the frame rate would be ridiculously low, about one and a half per second. Say we were able to sneak a pinch or two of manganese in there. Still, any glass the likes of us could fabricate in such a place as our backyard would probably show a fatal tendency to shatter, even at that snail’s pace. So we’re talking really jerky picture quality here. Make old Harold Lloyd look like little Miss Seen Yer Hynie, or whatever that curly-headed skater’s name was. We’d provide our audience with barely the illusion of the motion that gives motion pictures that certain moving quality from which movies take their mobile name, if you take the hint. It would be more like ‘Pictures at an Exposition’ for easily bored people.” “Glass pretty much sucks, doesn’t it, Dad?” “That it does.” He was primed and ready. I would try again with the unhallowed preparation. It was getting too late in the day for emotional blackmail to be necessary. I remained cheerful and spoke frankly. For the third time (and you know how often things have to happen in fairy tales and dirty jokes), I asked him, “So what’s the name of that plasticky—” “Hey, I thought kids these days were supposed to be lazy. Why are you making everything so difficult? Why do you need to produce and direct and shoot your own? Don’t I drive you downtown whenever some Walt Disney pig-and-rat show comes around?” “—stuff they use for film?” Theretofore he’d succeeded in distracting me. But now I’d gone and said the F-word. Supportive, kind and gentle, and liberal, he didn’t want to nip a young person’s dream in the bud. He didn’t want to pee on my parade. But— “Celluloid?” he gasped. He sighed. Or did my father moan? I hope he didn’t whimper; in any case, I refuse to depict him doing so. “We need something see-through, and we’re agreed that glass bites, right, Dad?” “Are you sure you’ve received a true vocation for the cinema? Is this going to be like the bass clarinet and the ham radio? You don’t really like movies that much, do you?” He knew very well what my future slaves must never find out (particularly the males among them): that I secretly preferred reading—with the exception of The Swiss Family Robinson, which is a genuinely vile book in every respect. But, in prosperous countries, youngsters must be given, must be force-fed, if necessary, the opportunity and the wherewithal to pursue even their most fleeting and halfhearted interests. These are little human beings forming themselves, after all. Just that year I’d already gone through astronomy, cartooning, sandal making, ventriloquism (lessons mail-ordered from the back pages of a Sergeant Rock funny book) and the cello. If such an institution had existed back then, Father would have offered to mortgage the house and send me to film school after I got myself expelled from the publicly funded Mormon seminary-in-disguise, if I’d only let him go to work in the meantime. “For celluloid I’ll need, obviously, cellulose.” “Obtainable from trees or little boys’ cotton underpants,” came Dad’s muffled words. In dejection he had folded his leg-long arms into an ostrich-sized nest and buried his head. He moaned, “And you’ve just got to have some alcohol, I suppose. There’s something fermentable out there, don’t you fret, Tommy. But no drinky-winky.” Even without being able to see his face, I could tell there was something else. Those mammoth shoulders shuddered at the very idea of the unnamed stuff. He tried to tuck it deep as a hemorrhoid pad, presumably for later, in case he hadn’t succeeded in putting his son off creativity altogether in the interim. Dad unburied his head, for there was an announcement to be made. “Coming by the third ingredient for primitive plastics manufacture is going to be a problem, kid. The third ingredient, I’m afraid, given the perimeters and parameters you’ve established for yourself—” “Who said I established them for myself?” & |