Work in progress, number 9....

LIGHTS UP
NARRATOR SITS ON A DIRECTOR'S CHAIR ON AN OTHERWISE EMPTY STAGE
TITLE:

IX
Current Events

NARRATOR: I do not understand why, but one essential ingredient of “recovery” appears to be guilt.

Maybe it’s part and parcel of the Calvinist underpinnings of American society; an insistence that you need to know that you’ve sinned before you can go and sin no more. Whatever…

When you commit a crime involving alcohol your punishment at certain points along the way will involve being lectured by various organizations. The most well known of these organizations is the monolithic M.A.J.A.F.E. [SPOKEN, “ma-JEFF-ah”], or Mothers Against Just About Fucking Everything.

PAUSE

With one foot planted in Catholic school and the other in the Women’s Temperance movement of the early 20th Century, M.A.F.A.F.E. [ma-JAFF-ah] now has chapters in every State except Hawaii, where it remains too relentlessly pleasant for people to get all that upset at anything.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or M.A.D.D., was one of the last great populist political movements. M.A.D.D. is a text book example of the potential of grass roots political action. Started by a small group of women that no politician took very seriously, by the time they became known nationally they accomplished the most difficult task of all, they changed the culture.

Before M.A.D.D., a DUI arrest over the weekend meant a $500 fine and some embarrassed laughter around the water cooler on Monday morning. After M.A.D.D., it was five thousand dollars and you prayed no one would find out. The culture of alcohol was forever different.

It happened in the early days of the new century that some members of that group, who were also active in anti-pornography, anti-music, anti-poetry, anti-tobacco, anti-anime, anti-comics, anti-theatre, anti-fast food, anti-evolution, anti-union, anti-show tunes, anti-dancing, anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-video games, anti-abortion, anti-Santa Claus, anti-Halloween, anti-New York Times cross word puzzle, anti-Harper’s Index, anti-literacy, anti-New World Order, anti-gambling, anti-Catholic, and anti-Islamic groups, [CATCHES BREATH] spun off to form the mother of all aunties.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, most were also members in good standing of M.W.S. (Mothers Who Spank) and S.O.W.T. (Support Our White Troops). It is these women who are tirelessly engaged in monthly letter writing marathons, sending cards, small Bibles and candy bars to our boys on the front lines in the struggle to bring freedom to Iran and Syria as it had been finally brought to the handful of surviving Iraqis still hanging on in the decontamination camps on the border of the [SPOKEN SLOWLY WITH EACH WORD PUNCHED FOR EMPHASIS] great glass desert.

LIGHTS DOWN
END OF PART ONE
INTERMISSION MUSIC PLAYS

I knew I was done when....

My career as a college professor ended in 1997 after about 16 years in classrooms at four universities. I was rooting around on the web earlier today and something someone posted on some forum for some reason (it's amazing how these things work) suddenly triggered a memory of the classroom I was in the moment I knew I wasn't going to make it in that profession.

It was in February of 1992. I can't remember the class other than it was an upper level undergraduate class full of Communication Studies majors. At some point a discussion started about the conviction of boxer, Mike Tyson, on rape charges. The crime had taken place at a downtown Indianapolis hotel; the trial had just concluded a day or two before at the downtown Indianapolis courthouse, and both of those places were about a mile or less from the classroom.

The discussion among white and black students and male and female students plunged into questions of race and justice and sex and celebrity and was moving along quite nicely until one student offered this explanation:

They had to find Mike Tyson guilty because William Kennedy Smith had just been acquitted (about a month earlier) in another highly publicized rape trial.

There was a pause, and then - and this was the moment for me - every single student agreed with him.

And I remember suddenly feeling a wave of hopelessness wash over me. It seemed to me that to believe in the sense of that brought with it epistemological and ontological requirements that could take decades to fully suss out.

It still does.

It suggests a worldview in which everything is controlled somehow by a cabal of celebrity rapist Illuminati charged with maintaining a delicate balance of celebrity sexual assault.

For the next five years I tried to work through it, or work around it, ignore it, and I just never could. My friends who still teach are all better at it than I ever was or was ever going to be and I don't mean any of this as any kind of indictment of the profession. It's just the story of what happened to me.

Work in progress, parts 7 and 8....

LIGHTS OUT
LIGHTS UP
TITLE:

VII

The Possum Pillow

NARRATOR: A direct result of my early release and indirect result of my smart mouth was that I began attending both Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. There are three things you ought to understand before we proceed.

One, I am not an alcoholic.

Two, I am not a drug addict.

Three, I am not “in denial,” thank you very much.

I like to drink and, on occasion, have drunk too much. But after attending a series of AA meetings I can say I am not in the same league with the people I’ve met there. In baseball terminology, I’ve dabbled a bit in double-A ball, while these boys have had whole careers in The Show.

I remember a cold November morning; the usual suspects were joined by an old man, maybe in his 60s, and who had the grizzled quality of a long-ball hitter. Loving our last remaining addictions, everyone stood around for a while before the meeting started, chain smoking cigarettes and drinking cup after cup of a half and half mix of strong black coffee and sugar. After the meeting started, the old man walked to the front and explained that he’d thought about coming to meetings on many occasions in the past but had never done so. But then something happened that changed his mind.

A short time ago he’d come into a little money and was celebrating with some friends. They started at a couple bars and things got a little blurry after two or three in the morning.

Two days later about six-thirty in the morning he woke up. He was covered with snow that had fallen the night before and slept across the railroad tracks at a downtown crossing.

And, he was using the frozen body of a dead possum as a pillow.

PAUSE

Still drunk, half frozen himself, he was taken aback when the possum suddenly opened its eyes and spoke to him with what he recognized as the voice of Robert Young on the old TV series “Father Knows Best.”

NARRATOR USES CALM REASSURING VOICE FOR POSSUM AND GRIZZLED OLD GUY VOICE FOR “CARL”

“How are you, Carl?” The possum asked.

“Uhhhh… not too good. Kinda cold.”

“Head hurt a little, does it?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“I’ll bet. Listen, Carl….”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t mean to lecture or put any pressure on you but… well… look around.” The possum said.

Carl looked around.

“Do you think it might be time to go to one of those meetings, Carl?”

Hard as he tried, Carl couldn’t think of an argument to offer the possum.

PAUSE

The story circulated among my friends for the next month or so and became our code for someone getting a bit too familiar with recreational intoxicants. “Now there goes a candidate for a possum pilla.” One of us would say. “I heard that.” Someone would add.

LIGHTS OUT
LIGHTS UP
TITLE:

VIII

Kathy with a K

A WOMAN IS SITTING IN THE FRONT DESK 2ND ROW

NARRATOR: Kathy with a K sits at the front, sort of in the middle of our angry little group. Kathy with a K teaches English Literature at an area high school and is in her fifth year of finishing her doctoral dissertation. She has had four short stories published and is working on a novel, a secret she keeps from her dissertation advisor.

She has a younger brother and an older sister. Kathy’s father died about seven years ago. Her mother still lives in the house they all grew up in. Her brother lives in Ohio and owns a failing record store. Her sister lives in Los Angeles and is married to a man who is a successful casting director.

If name-dropping were an Olympic event her sister would be the captain of the US team.

Kathy’s sister spoke as if everything she said was a part of an impossibly long sentence that would only end when she died.

KATHY’S SISTER: [OFF STAGE, SPOKEN AS FAST AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE] SowewenttoSpagotohaveanearlylunchwithMartyScorseseandSeanPenncamebythetableanditwasmaybeaquartertoonebuthewaseitherdrunkorstonedorwhateverandashelefthebumpedintothetableacrossfromusandspilledwateralloverthatnicegirlfromwhat’sthatshowwithDavidSpade?.Anyway,sothenthatguyfromAmericanIdolwhowasatthebarwithwhat’shernamefromthatshowohyouknowtheone….

KATHY WITH A K: [VOICE RISING TO COVER THE LAST BIT OF HER SISTER’S RUN-ON SENTENCE] Arrrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!!! [PAUSE]

What I want to tell my sister is that I’m happy that blind luck tossed her into the path of the same idiot that blind luck tossed into the path of a good job, and happy that the lack of condoms in extra-extra-small has her ankle-deep in enough yuppie larvae to make California’s community property laws seal the deal.

Let’s hear it for the wonders of a thoroughly random and impersonal universe.

But, like so many people who find themselves beaten with the good end of the luck stick, she talks about her good fortune as if it was the result of thought and effort, complex planning, years of hard work!

I understand that I am not the first person in class to say this, but [ALMOST PLEADING] I am not a violent person!

PAUSE

The holidays are hard enough, aren’t they? I’d had a few drinks before we all sat down, a couple glasses of wine during the turkey and yams and the traditional bean casserole. I was so close to escaping into a nice tryptophan coma when she gets into this manic lecture mode – I swear she was doing coke in the goddamn bathroom all through dinner – and suddenly, this… this… moron who represents everything I detest about Twenty-First Century America is explaining to a room full of our relatives everything I’m doing wrong with my life…. [PAUSE… THEN PICKING UP SPEED AGAIN] And in this screeching fingernails-toenails-finishing nails-roofing nails-on-a-chalk-board-voice…. [PAUSE]

I just wanted her to shut up.

I just wanted her to stop talking.

I just wanted her to finish this inventory of my bad life choices.

[SHE STARTS SLOWLY BUT QUICKLY BUILDS TO A SHEER EXPRESSION OF RAGE] I just wanted her to tell everyone that she has her life because she regularly sacrifices Girl Scouts to Satan and that the simple reason that most major motion pictures suck beyond the realm of suckitudeness is because everyone involved in the industry is the exact same in-bred El Lay dip-shit mouth-breathing mentally defective dick-head that her idiot husband is!!!

PAUSE
EMBARASSED BY HER OUTBURST AND ASHAMED BY HER CONFESSION
EYES DOWNCAST

But I… um… I didn’t say anything. There was this serving fork for the turkey on the table in front of me and I… uh… picked it up and jammed it right into her Botox-filled forehead. [NERVOUS LAUGH AS IF STILL THRILLED BY THE MEMORY]


LIGHTS DOWN ON KATHY

NARRATOR: It was a superficial cut, but head wounds bleed profusely and as the blood poured onto the dishes and tablecloth and her sister screamed, Kathy with a K threw the fork on the floor and started shouting at her mother that there was Botox on the fork now and she could never use it again.

Her brother-in-law called the police who arrested Kathy and took her away in handcuffs as the paramedics loaded her sister into the ambulance with her husband.

Her mother and her brother sat on the couch drinking Grey Goose vodka straight from jelly glasses.

As her mother lifted the glass to her lips the blue and red flashing lights from the police car fell on the painting of Wilma Flintstone on the side of her glass.

She was wearing a spotted dress and she was smiling.

She seemed happy.

LIGHTS DOWN

Work in progress, parts 5 and 6....

LIGHTS DOWN AND UP
TITLE:

V
Confusion Reigns Supreme

NARRATOR: On our first Saturday morning Ms. Peaksbury asked me…

LIGHTS UP ON DESK WHERE MS. PEAKSBURY SITS

MS. PEAKSBURY: How did you feel when you were smashing those computers?

NARRATOR: [TO AUDIENCE, GAINING SPEED] In my mind I scanned a word list: audacious, blissful, bodacious, courageous, exhilarated, ecstatic, fearless, glowing, heroic, indomitable, inviolable, justified, noble, resolute, righteous, stalwart, strong, sublime, unafraid, unassailable, undaunted, valiant, vindicated, warm, wonderful, and… human.

[TO MS. PEAKSBURY] Confused.

PAUSE

[TO AUDIENCE] And so it was that “confused” became the angry person’s mantra. It wasn’t plucked from the defiant word list that threatened one’s graduation – which is to say, it was not the truth.

It was not “angry” or “mad” which, for some reason, were considered unacceptable answers. Nor was it an obvious uncloaked word of submission that had dominated since it became clear that the truth would, under no condition, set us free. It was not “wrong” or “immoral” or “bad.”

MS. PEAKSBURY: But Robert, if you felt it was wrong and immoral, why did you continue to drive into the other cars until the police shot your car?

LIGHTS OUT
WHEN THE LIGHTS RETURN THE NARRATOR IS AT DESK STAGE RIGHT
ANGRY BOB IS IN DESK A ROW IN AND TOWARD CENTER

TITLE:

VI

Angry Bob

AS THE NARRATOR SPEAKS TO THE AUDIENCE ANGRY BOB IS LOOKING TOWARD MS. PEAKSBURY’S DESK

NARRATOR: Angry Bob is thirty-nine years old, married with three angry kids and a house on the city’s west side. For the past seven years every day Angry Bob drove through the rush hour traffic that slowly made its way toward his downtown office.

Every city believes it has the worst drivers in the world and this city is no different. But Angry Bob actually found the perfect way to express the attitude at the very heart of the city’s motorists.

ANGRY BOB: People here drive as if their families were being held hostage and, if they allow any of the cars behind them to get ahead of them… their families will die.

NARRATOR: Angry Bob’s car was some maroon late-model Ford with 130,000 miles on it and a bit of a knock in the engine. While the interior bore the tell-tale signs of parenthood, the body was in excellent shape with no rust and almost no dings or dents.

Everyday the traffic backs up to a crawl, and everyday people weave their way in and out of the lanes as if they really believed chaos theory was bunk and it was actually possible to anticipate the random flow of traffic.

In the process Angry Bob’s bumper would be bumped and an occasional fender scraped, horns would blare, fists would wave. Taken as whole, it was like some post-modern opera by John Adams or Phillip Glass; Angry Bob On the Beach.

PAUSE
ANGRY BOB SPEAKS….

ANGRY BOB: What annoyed me the most was the attitude of entitlement on the part of the drivers who cut in and out of my lane. They all cross over with a certain confidence, as if they know I’ll hit the brakes rather than hit them.

[ALMOST IN MONOTONE, RAPID] Every morning. Every evening. Coming and going. Squinting into the rising sun in the morning. Squinting into the setting sun in the evening. Breathing in the exhaust. Sweating in the summer heat.

All the time moving so slowly that what was left of my air conditioner threatened to overheat the engine that knocked and sputtered [MIMICS THE KNOCKS AND SPUTTERS HITTING DESK AND STUTTERING]

Day in day out. Week after week. Month after month. Coming and going to a job I don’t like…

PAUSES AND LOOKS AWAY

…to a family that didn’t seem to like me anymore.

Thirsty. Hungry. Tired. Hot. Cold.

And then there’s that one afternoon when a young kid in a shiny sports car cut in front of me, and I hit the brake hard enough to smack my forehead on the wheel as the car behind me tapped my bumper and leaned on its horn.

I looked at the sports car in front of me and, reflected in the tiny rear view mirror, the kid’s eyes meet mine and I watched as the kid mouthed the word…

“Asshole.”

BECOMING MORE AGITATED, ANIMATED

I didn’t smash the sports car, not at first, not like the newspaper and TV said. No, I eased on the gas and gently made contact with the bumper. I saw the kid react and saw the brake lights come on. I slowly pressed on the accelerator and began pushing the sports car.

Now, the sports car could beat my car in zero-to-sixty, no contest. But the sports car was no contest for a full-sized Ford slowly crunching it into the delivery truck ahead of it.

I saw that smug entitlement on the kid’s face downshift into panic.

OBVIOUSLY RELISHING THE MEMORY AS HE RELIVES IT
THROUGHOUT, HE USES HIS DESK AS IF IT WERE HIS CAR PUSHING IT SLOWLY INTO THE DESK IN FRONT OF HIM

The back bumper of the truck was just high enough, and the front of the sports car just low enough, so that the car was slowly being shoved under the truck.

The hood of the sports car started to crumple; the back lights come on as the kid thought to throw it into reverse.

The car behind me was a mid sized Japanese number, silver gray, probably thirty grand. The driver was a woman who reminded me of a friend of my wife’s named Janet.

I’d never done anything to Janet. I’ve never spoken coarsely, never been rude; yet she always looks at me with the look you get when you taste something unpleasant.

The modern world seems stuffed full of women like Janet.

Forty-something, anorexic-thin, carrying water bottles with them everywhere, always in front of me at coffeeshops where all I want is a simple cup of coffee… but they order complex drinks that take a half-hour to make and require machines that looked like they’d been salvaged from old steam locomotives and fifties sci-fi films…

…and every one of them looks at me as if I remind her of the ex-husband who took her youth and then left her for the young girl in the tight uniform making the damn coffee.

PAUSES… RETURNS TO STORY

SHAKES HIS HEAD

So… faux-Janet hits her horn, though why she did is still unclear. It’s as if she needed to express her disappointment. She did this at the exact moment that I decided I wanted some more room in back of me as well.

As the sports car grrrrrinds in reverse in front of me, I throw the car into reverse and slam into the silver car behind me…

PUSHES HIS DESK BACKWARDS SLAMMING INTO DESK BEHIND HIM

…and it’s hood crumples and it rear-ends the mini-van behind it!

Now… the mini-van was driven by another soldier in the Army of Janets.

Faux-Janet had a look of confusion and despair as she looked into the eyes of Janet Three in the mini-van behind her and saw the disappointment looking back at her.

[EXCITEDLY] Disappointment and condescension smashed into each other at the speed of light and released particles of moral superiority and smugness impacting everyone within a mile of the event.

ANGRY BOB SLUMPS DOWN ONTO HIS DESK
THE LIGHT ON HIM IS KILLED AS THE LIGHT ON THE NARRATOR COMES UP

NARRATOR: But by then, Angry Bob was smashing into the sports car again, and again into Faux-Janet, back and forth, three more times. The other drivers around the commotion were now tooting their horns nervously as well. After clearing a space in front and back of him Angry Bob now decided to leave the pack; in his mind was a cartoon of a silver sardine busting through the tin walls of the can… and he smiled.

For the next fifteen minutes, just as Warhol had predicted, Angry Bob drove down the shoulder of the road, intermittently crashing into the cars on his left as he went. Some choices were obvious, cars that edged onto the shoulder to block his path. Some were less obvious. He hadn’t realized, for example, how much he hated SUVs until he found himself crashing into every one he passed.

During his rampage, Angry Bob smashed and crashed into a grand total of seventy-four vehicles. The television news footage shot from a circling helicopter showed the rows of state and local police and sheriff cars that converged on the bashed and battered maroon Ford. As I watched it all unfold live on the local news I saw the cops, guns raised, arms extended stiffly, slowly approach the car as it sat, wheels spinning. When I saw the police open fire I thought I was watching the driver die in a hail of bullets; it wasn’t till later, when I watched the footage endlessly repeat, that I realized that the police had shot the tires and the engine of Angry Bob’s weapon of mass destruction. At the end of his twenty-three minutes of fame Angry Bob’s Angry Ford had been shot over one hundred and nineteen times and had broken both axles. In one newspaper photo the Ford looked just like the car at the end of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.

I watched the legend of Angry Bob unfold on the communal TV in jail. It was a long room filled with orange-clothed fans of Angry Bob, cheering him on.

One of the inmates was a fifty-something black man named Lateef who reacted to every news story involving a Caucasian criminal with a recasting of the story that began “If he’d been black they’d a shot his ass.” Whenever he said that, his constant companion Byron would always add, “Yeah.”

Lateef told us, “I knew a brother in Pittsburgh back in seventy five named Louis Watson; we called him L.G. for ‘Long Gone’ after his habit of disappearin’ any time we sent him to the liquor store. L.G. was semi-famous when Jimmy Johnson up in Chicago wrote a song for him, the “Saint Louis Blues”…

EYES CLOSED
SINGING 12-BAR BLUES MEDIUM TEMPO
TAPPING DESK TOP IN TIME
THE WORDS “SAINT” AND “SENT” SHOULD BE SUNG SO AS TO SLUR INTO EACH OTHER

“I got the St. Louis blues, as blue as I can get.
I got the St. Louis blues, as blue as I can get.
We sent Louis to the liquor store, and [STOPS TAPPING, IN HIGHER VOICE DELIVERED AS PUNCH LINE] Louis ain’t been back yet.”

PAUSE

[CONTINUES IN LATEEF VOICE] Anyway, he’s drunk, stoned, whatever, one night about four in the morning and he rear ends this cop car at a red light.

They shot the brother nineteen times!”

[IN NARRATOR’S VOICE] Lateef paused for effect and let his gaze crisscross the room.

Then he concluded, [IN LATEEF’S VOICE] “I’ll tell you what, he’s long gone now.”

“I hear that.” Byron added.

Work in progress, parts 2-4....

TITLE:

II
The Prison Notebooks

SOUND EFFECT – METAL DOOR CLANGING SHUT – VERY LOUD
SOUND EFFECT LOUD VOICES DOWN AND OUT

For those of you who’ve never been to prison – [ASIDE] which, today, is to say, haven’t been yet – here are the three things you should know: [HOLDS UP ONE FINGER] One… the noise. It’s never quiet, not even for a moment. Not ever. [HOLDS UP 2 FINGERS] Two… the smell. There’s a sort of very thick industrial cleanser smell that never quite manages to cover up layers of far worse smells underneath. [HOLDS UP 3 FINGERS] And three… [SHUDDERS] the food.

If you gave a room full of monkeys some eggs, flour and a whisk they would produce something edible at least occasionally. No; the only way you can make food this bad is on purpose.

PAUSE
CONTINUES MORE SERIOUS IN TONE

This relentless assault on your senses – the constant din, the pervasive stench, the numbingly horrible tastes, and the all-encompassing boredom of the place – these things combine in their effect like some enormous low-voltage Taser with no “off” switch. Most of the time you’re not asleep, you spend stunned.

PAUSE
CONTINUES WITH RETURN TO MORE UPBEAT TONE

My own time was served in the county lockup, which, in some ways is worse than the big state prisons up north. The lockup is always fifty or sixty percent over capacity which makes it more prone to sudden outbursts of violence.

But it was that overcrowding and my lack of prior criminal record that got me an early release. And it’s the memory of the sound, smell and menu choices that keeps me coming early to the meetings… sitting quietly… and mustering all the sincerity I can as I confess and repent my crimes again and again.

TITLE:

III

George Orwell in Anger Management

NARRATOR: We will read now, from the Anger Management Handbook:

“Unexpressed anger can create other problems. It can lead to pathological expressions of anger, such as a personality that seems perpetually cynical and hostile. People who are constantly putting others down, criticizing everything, and making cynical comments haven't learned how to constructively express their anger. Not surprisingly, they aren't likely to have many successful relationships.”

[PAUSE] Hmmm….. [BEMUSED] Now that someone is actually working on my biography I’d kinda like to meet him, clear up a few things, double check some dates, the usual stuff.

WALKS BACK TOWARD BIG DESK
SITS ON THE EDGE

See…. My problem is this: What if cynicism is the only sensible response for the true romantic in the postmodern world? Which is sort of what Oscar Wilde was asking in his famous quotation: “Only someone with a heart of stone can look upon the death of Little Nell without laughing.”

PAUSE
DISMISSING THE THOUGHT, HE CONTINUES

The whole culture of counseling has a certain… Smurfs vibe to it.

You remember the Smurfs, right? The tribe of tiny animated blue people who preached the joys of cooperation to the very generation of people who, now in their thirties and forties, seek to make me more cooperative?

The only Smurfs who had individual personalities were those portrayed as incompetent curmudgeons who would inevitably see the error of their ways and return to the safe conformity of the greater blue pack.

Just as AA refuses to allow for the possibility of a glass of good Bordeaux with a nice beef carbonade, so too does anger management fail to recognize that a punch in the nose or swift kick in the balls might be the proper response in some situations.

I’m not a violent person; I don’t believe in corporal punishment in schools

– except for college, but that goes without saying –

I’m against the death penalty, dog fighting, cock fighting… I’m not that sold on prize fighting or the NFL or NHL for that matter. But I do believe in the possibility of righteous anger.

NARRATOR TAKES A BOOK FROM HIS DESK AND OPENS IT, FLIPS THROUGH SOME PAGES TO A MARKED SECTION

A few weeks after George Orwell had gone off to fight in the Spanish Civil War he wrote in his diary, “I’ve been here for two weeks and I haven’t killed my first fascist yet. [PAUSE EYEBROWS RAISE] If we could each kill one fascist they would quickly become extinct.”

Maybe his math needs updating, but he has a point, and his anger was a righteous anger.

CLOSES BOOK, PLACES IT BACK ON HIS DESK, CONTINUES

Woody Guthrie’s banjo had, written around the edge of the top, “This machine kills fascists.” I just don’t mention that to Ms. Peaksbury.

NARRATOR WALKS STAGE RIGHT
ALL LIGHTS OUT BUT THE LIGHT ON THE DESK ILLUMINATING THE “Ms. Peaksbury” NAME PLATE

LIGHTS UP
TITLE:

IV

Big Black Dookie Eater

In prison, a guy who’s pretending to be crazy by eating his own feces is called a “dookie eater.” This always reminds me of the moral of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Mother Night,

“You are who you pretend to be, so you must be very careful who you pretend to be.”

For no apparent reason, a couple years back my dog, Butchie, a black Lab mix, suddenly became a dookie eater. One day in the middle of winter out in the snow he found a frozen dog turd… and the poopsicle was born.

Now I have to search the yard before I let him out and shout at him everytime he stops to examine the ground. The problem has not affected my pit-bull, Sundance, who has become the main supplier of the yard snacks. I don’t know how long this will go on. I suspect that at some point either he will stop eating it or I’ll stop caring that he does. This is how most of my problems get solved.

I’m telling you this because in jail there was this 20 year-old four hundred pound black kid with a row of big gold teeth in front who smiled all the time in this odd way that was as if he was hearing the voices of dead stand-up comedians…

NARRATOR ROLLS HIS HEAD A BIT AS HE SAYS

…Nipsy Russell, Godfrey Cambridge, Red Foxx, Richard Pryor….

He would smile, mutter to himself and roll his head, but never actually look at anyone. He was being held in the county jail temporarily before heading up north for good to a maximum security lock-up.

His name was Maurice Maurice Morris, his street name was “Two Times,” and he’d killed six people; four in his family and two more later that same day. After I got out I looked up the story in the newspaper.

The paper said he had the mind of a very large and very strong six year-old child and had developed a problem with crack cocaine. The first four people who died were people who told him that he should stop using crack when that was the last thing he wanted to hear. The last two people who died were people who wouldn’t share their crack with him.

I don’t know what it could feel like to have your life be completely over, but still find yourself alive and stuck inside it.

I wonder if there are ghosts, and if that’s what they feel like.

Or, maybe when your life turns to shit, eating shit just seems somehow logical, I don’t know.

As I was being processed before my release I was put in this small room that had two wooden benches and one door. I’d been there for about twenty minutes when the door opened and, for some reason, they brought this kid in, sat him on the bench across from me, and left us there. When they brought me in they handcuffed my left hand to a metal bar by the side of the bench. The guard who brought the kid in just told him to sit and be quiet and left.

Now, the words [AS IF SPEAKING TO PRISON GUARD] “Uh, excuse me, but shouldn’t you handcuff this huge dookie-eatin’ mass murderer, or give me back my bat?!?” never got past my chest, regardless of the volume they played at in my head because, in the movie that was playing in my head, when I said them the guard stopped, looked at me, looked at the kid, said “Now you behave,” smiled, and left.

So I didn’t say anything.

Maurice Maurice looked at me and smiled. He laughed softly to himself. Rolled his head, he looked at my handcuffed arm. For some reason his gold teeth seemed...

enormous,

out of proportion to the rest of his face.

Maybe there’s some primal connection between shit-eating and cannibalism because I sat there with the “pa-WOOSH pa-WOOSH” sound of my own heart pumping blood roaring in my ears, trying not to seem concerned and trying to imagine how I might fend him off when he jumped on me, and what it would feel like when those big gold teeth chomped down on my throat.

We were together all of three minutes when they returned and took him away.

I never saw him again.

Work in progress....

Below is the first section of a work in progress. It began as a short story developed in a writer's group a few years ago. In an exercise we each took the first line from a song off the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album to use as our first line. Later, at the suggestion of a friend, I reworked what I had into the form of a stage play. As I continue to work on this I want to use this blog to post some sections and solicit comments and reactions.

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The set is very simple. A large desk and a few student desks suggest a classroom.

Scene titles are introduced by the NARRATOR who can do so with some flip cards or something similar.

The character of the NARRATOR is the voice of the play; it is through that voice the story is told and unfolds. The NARRATOR is the voice of EVERYMAN [used in a non-gender specific way] and throughout the play a series of actors, male and female, can play the part of the NARRATOR. They can be of various races and ages. Some sections will be more appropriate for some actors than others, but the use of multiple actors both signifies the “everyman” concept and makes manageable the amount of dialogue any one actor must learn.

TITLE: 

I

Lucy in the Sky (With Diamonds)

NARRATOR: [IN SLOW, CALM, HYPNOTIST’S VOICE] Picture yourself on a boat on a river…. All you see is the blue sky… all you hear is the sound of the water and birds…. all you feel is the gentle motion of the boat…. [PAUSE]

BACK LIGHTS UP SLOWLY TO REVEAL THE SET WITH EMPTY DESK AND CHAIRS

LIGHTS UP SLOW ON NARRATOR SITTING AT DESK IN FRONT STAGE CENTER RIGHT

NARRATOR’S DESK HAS A COUPLE BOOKS AND NOTEBOOK ON IT

NARRATOR: [TO AUDIENCE, AS IF COMING OUT OF THE TRANCE HE JUST PUT HIMSELF IN, SHAKES HEAD, COUGHS] So… we sit here, eyes closed, and concentrate on our breathing in this high school class room on this Saturday morning.

[LOUDLY SCOOTS CHAIR AROUND TO FACE FRONT AT AN ANGLE]

An even dozen of us, here for different infractions: A couple of barroom brawlers, a scattering of spousal abusers, a couple NBA fans; a woman who stabbed her sister in the forehead with a serving fork at the family Thanksgiving dinner; a frequent flier whose carry-on luggage was lost; a rush hour driver who, much like Popeye before him, [IN POPEYE VOICE] “had all he could stands till he couldn’t stands no more,” and a biker, who threw onto the roof of a nearby church, the gun, mace and club of the cop who stopped him. Having made clear the things he would not allow happen, he let himself be arrested and taken away quietly. Which, if you think about it, sort of makes him the poster child for “anger management.” [PAUSE]

And me.

Like most chapters from the Book of Bad Decisions, my story begins, “So anyway, I was drinkin’….?”

You can call me a Luddite if you want, that’s fine. Just don’t call me a “technophobe.” I don’t fear technology, a fact my crime will readily attest to. No one who fears computers would break into a store full of computers.

The store claims I did over six hundred thousand dollars worth of damage before the police arrived but my lawyer is working on that. For me, the night is still a bit of a blur. All I can really say for sure is that, after you take a full go-for-the-cheap-seats swing with an aluminum baseball bat and connect,

NARRATOR TAKES SWINGING BAT MOTION

[SPOKEN WITH WISTFUL AFFECTION]…after you watch those first shards of beige plastic fly… in slow motion… turning in the air….

PAUSES… LOOKS OFF INTO THE AIR

It’s true, the Bible does say “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” But I think that anything said in the pre-computer age has to be taken in context. I do believe that, had Microsoft been around in ancient Samaria, we would find “Blessed are the PC smashers, for theirs is a righteous anger.” Right there in the Sermon on the Mount.

NARRATOR STANDS AS HE SPEAKS AND PRODUCES AN ALUMINUM BASBALL BAT WITH WHICH HE TAKES A FEW PRACTICE SWINGS, SMACKS IMAGINARY DIRT FROM HIS SHOES, FLIPS BAT IN THE AIR ONCE OR TWICE

In my own memory of that evening I see myself as a Ninja warrior in a martial arts movie. The invincible swordsman; the masterless Samurai. The silver bat my sword, the tables and shelves of PCs, soldiers in the enemy’s overwhelming force.

Once I gave myself over to the experience, it was indescribably beautiful in the way that violence can become something beautiful, if the heart is pure.

NARRATOR SWINGS, SLASHES, STABS IN MOCK MARTIAL ART MOVES

NARRATOR REMIANS IN MOTION THROUGHOUT THIS

I am somewhat large and was brandishing a shiny weapon at the time and it is a not-so-minor miracle that I didn’t die that evening in a hail of hollow-point cop bullets as I spun around, startled by the shouts of…

FINALLY SMASHING A DESK, HARD

… “FREEZE!!!” [SHOUTED VERY LOUD]

NARRATOR STANDS, FROZEN IN PLACE, OUT OF BREATH

A whole bunch of police were standing there, .40 caliber Austrian-made semi-automatic hand guns trained on my chest.

PAUSE

THE NARRATOR LEAVES THIS FANTASY/REENACTMENT, GETS RID OF THE BAT AND CONTINUES, SITTING

Now this had the immediate effect of ripping me out of my own private Hong Kong action movie like a cop’s flashlight – WHACK! – to the back of the head.

NARRATOR STANDS NOW SPEAKING OFF TO THE SIDE, HANDS CLASPED IN FRONT OF HIM

Your honor, I’m not making excuses for what I did. It was… the… [FINDING THE WORDS] unfortunate intersection of a profound hatred of computers, and a corresponding affection for single barrel bourbon and hydroponic marijuana.

NARRATOR LOOKS DOWN QUICKLY

PAUSE

NARRATOR RETURNS TO SEAT

[TO AUDIENCE] One of my many problems is that I often sound like I’m smarting off, even if that’s the farthest thing from my mind. That was a particularly good example of that.

Now I have to attend AA meetings, NA meetings, and an anger management class, all of which are hands down more enjoyable than prison so I shouldn’t be complaining.

And, while I believe in my heart that the wanton destruction of a half a million dollars worth of PCs should count towards the 400 hours of community service the judge added to my sentence, I know enough to not bring that up.

LIGHTS OUT
SOUND EFFECT - CROWD OF PEOPLE TALKING - ENTERS VERY VERY LOUD

Ike....

Ike and Tricky, mid-1950's.

 "Oh, goddammit, we forgot the silent prayer." - Dwight David Eisenhower, remark at a cabinet meeting, as quoted in Since 1945 : Politics and Diplomacy in Recent American History (1979).