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Entry 4
By Steven Paul Lansky
"The Mermaid or The Train"
I won’t tell about arriving at a dark passive monolithic Art Deco station that few even know still serves the train traveler. It’s been a museum for over a decade now. Built as train travel declined, a complex combination of Cincinnati’s river trade and Chicago’s increase of rail centralization, kept this landmark from full utilization; the mosaic tile murals above the rotunda depict on a grand scale the pioneers and Indians facing industrial captains in sharp suits and ties. After midnight , wandering through a cavernous dome, I found the chains all down across the Amtrak counter, so I walked, pushed open a series of doors out to the platform. Steel clanged behind me. I was locked out. A disembodied voice from an electric megaphone scolded me. Surrounded by concrete and metal, tracks with cinders and buried wooden creosote ties. Electricity smelled like diesel to me that cool damp night, as I paused to decide if it were moist or damp, as a writer would, if he were again, trying as I thought I might, to go to New York City by federal transit. What if there was an air strike? All the madness of weather in the country had left me stranded in airports a year before. This time I was primed for rail travel.
A man in the coffeehouse, Alex, had talked to me about vintage train cars. He was a film director. A compact Brazilian with a devil-may-care grin, a perpetual sweat, a shock of salt and pepper hair, and the fire of a racecar driver, he listened to me tell of scripts that he might develop. He wanted a script with train travel. He gestured with small strong hands, putting a finger first in my chest, then thrusting at the air. Alex had an accent even when he paused between rapid, warm, unexpressable angst ridden blessings. His afternoon habit was to drink into the evening.
As I stood on the platform, the voice came again. The Brazilian’s voice in my head, the disembodied railroad voice of authority clipped an electronic switch and told me to pull a door handle. I was back in the terminal. A man appeared, then another. They pulled the chainlink barrier up from the counter.
After a long chat with these two laconic men beyond their prime who each had developed girth and facial grit that proved near social obsolescence. Peering over their hidden mainframes, their nearly cosmic tie to a secret network, I had secured a round-trip Amtrak ticket with my Discover Card. It had train numbers, times, covering a loop that would take me to New York City through Washington, DC and Philadelphia with a return path north through Cleveland, and Chicago, arriving back in Cincinnati in less than a week. Altogether it was a fine document. Who was to know how important that red slip of paper with its carbons and smelly ink would become to me? In those wee morning hours I debated when and where to sleep. I knew I didn’t have time to get a full night before the train departed. I had been the cause of the raising of the chain fence over the ticket counter. Now, would I dare to wait there in the station three hours? No. I knew I should call my Case Manager and cancel our appointment for tomorrow. Let him know I was going away for a few days. But, I figured he’d leave a note and I’d call him when I got back. He comes to the house, and he trusts me, and I’d mentioned the possibility last week of going on this trip. I stood at the pay phone. I could leave him a voice mail. I chose not to.
I walked back out into the night through the concourse with the mosaic tile above, the dome looking regal as though the thirties were yesterday, as if Spain had just come out against Franco and Mussolini. As though no one knew that a slumbering Ohio was waiting for me to come to my senses and say good-bye to the big green fountain a few miles away. The heart of downtown Cincinnati is the Tyler Davidson Fountain, designed and built by Greek immigrants, it anchors a town that is provincial in its hilly urban and suburban neighborhoods. Over forty feet tall, topped by a sculpted woman, water spraying from her outstretched hands to tiered platforms, complete with nymphs and cherubs, the woman called by some, the Genius of the Water, presides over a square. She’s been moved and turned more than once, now she greets the Western visitor, when once she faced the East.
My Toyota had a yellow daisy in a Stewart’s Orange Creamsicle bottle in the drink holder. I’d had an amusing date with a raven haired, fair-skinned damsel, named Raia, nearly a week before and the flower had lasted. On seeing her in the coffeehouse, I had invited her to an opera. Precocious and salty, she seemed older than she was, and I was willing. We had seen Rusalka, in Czech, translated by Kvapil, or was he the librettist? The opera played on the campus of the University of Cincinnati in this marvelous new facility that I had difficulty finding. I think the two of us radically lowered the demographics of the audience both in age and income. The young lass studied Stanislavski, and I had been working on the myth of the lake. It’s the dream that puzzled me. In the dream the mermaid requited the love of the hunter. Raia had the milky-white cleavage that tempted my eyes, ah, her cool and scalding blue eyes; I was enticed by the cut of her dress. I felt the charge of excitement, a light intoxication in her company. Her eyebrows were thin arches that danced when she spoke. She stirred in me the recollection of a girl from my own dream, a princess from my teen years at college who had not requited my advances.
Finding Raia’s step-mother’s house in the suburbs had shaken my balance, as I had driven around listening to Cephas and Wiggins performing live on A Prairie Home Companion on my car radio. Young Raia was knowledgeable on Piedmont Blues, as her mother was from Charleston , South Carolina landed gentry and her dad was a Russian immigrant. I told her that I played blues harmonica. Her parents sounded deeply fascinating as she talked, one a Freudian analyst, and the other a Feminist Literary Critic. Raia had been studying theater at the Royal Academy in London . Her step-mom was another Freudian analyst. We also got onto the topic of our own rehabs and hallucinogenic experiences. Her dad was a contemporary of Jerry Rubin and knew him from Walnut Hills High School.
We were disputing the origins of the word: homogeneity, as the curtain came up on the second and final act and I had taken a rather adamant position. A stuffy English professor type hissed for us to quiet and she razzed him. Her lips pursed and a raspberry blatted out. This was one moment that had endeared me to the lovely Raia, seeing this girl razz a stuffy older academic. Further inspiration came with the long walk, her barefoot, sandals in hand, across Nippert Stadium’s fake grass field while she smoked a cigarette after the final curtain. It had been a delightful summer night. The only thing that marred the date was her continuous chewing on her painted fingernails. I drove her back to Ludlow Avenue, down the street from the coffeehouse where she met a friend with whom she would spend the rest of the evening. In parting on the sidewalk in front of a Latin Restaurant called Habañero, we hugged and kissed on the lips. Oddly our faces were not centered on one another so my lips caught half face and half, moist, half-open smooch.
As I say, I had forgotten all about that date until I saw the daisy. I drove through the night-dampened Cincinnati, found a parking spot and hiked over the uneven curbstone in heavy iron-toed shoes. At the downtown Fountain Square water sprayed over my long gray, uneven and flowing hair, sprinkling on my round glasses and catching in my black beard. I knew I would be away for almost a week and I was hoping to get another date with Raia when I returned. Meanwhile I was musing over the coming adventure, advancing a plot for the train rides. Would all the passengers be going over for the same reason? Would each of us be heading into destiny? Why did I choose to go to The New Yorker Festival, this time? I had this indisputable sense that God was pulling me forward, not against my wishes, but truly and obviously thwarting all the advice I had not asked for. I had made my intentions known to many, but no one with any authority, in any capacity to provide for my well-being considered this a necessary journey. The water shifted from the internal flow, to the external. I’m not sure how it works, but there’s a diagram somewhere. I let my mind become empty and my eyes followed the streams as they sometimes leapt and other times grew, guided by a hand of man? Or water pump? And are water pumps gravity driven? I felt my pulse in my temple, the moisture on my epidermis, saw light in the translucence of dream.
Night, both dark and gleaming like a pistol under the moon, or a rifle with a mother-of-pearl inlay on obsidian, a flash of time enhanced by lack of rest. Cincinnati had been under siege. Police sirens were quiet tonight by comparison. I had heard that Federal Investigators were moving in to control the population. The Feds would monitor the Cincinnati Police. My relations with protesters and police had become unworkable.
The day before, I studied on film and sketch ideas after the debacle at the elegant dining kitchen, Tink’s, when I had trumpeted my concerns to a teacher, Pete, who was a lawyer as well. He was a compact, fit man, with a clear voice, handsome brown hair in a young student’s cut, sharp blue eyes, a jaw that jutted a bit when he spoke, and a tendency to sound a bit whiny when he complained. His skill as a writer was most evident when he trumpeted the concerns of the oppressed and he managed to do this in inventive and spirited ways. One story was about an African woman attacking an army tank with a wooden staff. Pete was a brilliant writer and teacher. He had been a student of André Dubus. (He was fussing over $450 and trying to get the Chair of the English Department to give him compensation, over a negligence claim for leaving a window open in faculty housing he had previously occupied, raising an electric bill. I was attempting to get the Chair to help fund my New York adventure. We compared notes on unreturned phone calls.) Pete gave me some information about hostels to stay at in New York, and otherwise advised me not to go. Meanwhile, I watched. It seemed that everyone but me was busy.
The Thursday, or was it Wednesday, before I left, which I hadn’t done yet, I had taken my Madrid guitar to the coffeehouse, to air it out, play a song, and stretch out. While I had the instrument, a fine mahogany classical gut string, on the side of the windowseat a very dark-skinned black man with matching dark helmet-shaped hat and clothes, began an odd display outside the storefront window on Ludlow Avenue. Sam had a wide flat nose, and his darkness made his teeth and the whites of his eyes blaze. I couldn’t hear anything but his curses, but it looked to me as if he was protecting, or fighting a demon that no one else could see. I met him seven years before, at least, and had watched him move around the community. He did not belong in this kind of civilization. Kung fu Sam was a man out of time. I became convinced that he was protecting my guitar. He made a display on the sidewalk, and into the traffic, at times, to distract attention from the value and beauty of my hands, and the instrument I am prevented from playing by all the pain inside. I meditated on a mantra while he danced to a rhythm that he could hear. I counted his steps, watched where he hitched to the left, flailed his arms, and gestured up and down, a finger moving quicker than I could follow. As he moved and picked up energy, he paused, gathered himself, and then parried forward seven to fourteen counts, though I could not see his feet. Perhaps he could have been a pretty good fencer, in a time when fencing mattered. Today, he would be arrested.
As he danced off the sidewalk into the bus stop where commuters waiting moved aside to accommodate his rhythm three police cars came, with as many officers, two men, one woman. They triangulated in their blue pants, starch white shirts, hats perfectly in place, pistols on belts, steady hands calming him, and put him under control. He let them cuff him and then plead in a voice I could not hear. I thought he said that there is a Madrid guitar that is waiting to be touched, and needs protection and I am guarding it and I wished he knew that it were truly gut string. He asked freedom from bondage. They denied him freedom.
After the police left the village café protected, Kung fu Sam in custody, I tucked my leather belt over my thumb. A friend, Steve, like me, he had a rasta name (I don’t), but we call him Steve, or Stephen, of West Indian descent, maybe Jamaica, but I think Haiti, as his accent was French. His eyes were too dark for a rum country, said to me, in hip-hop, as if with hands gesturing, but rather with fingers. Said to me, said, “Could I?” He had short dreads, and a warmer complexion than Sam, a long face, tall forehead, and kept his eyes cast down, although he was as proud a man as I’ve met. (All of those Caribbean Islands are rum countries?) A nephew, perhaps, with him had a torn shoe. I suggested quietly to myself, or was it another? I’m not sure, it was a few days back. (I create this journal to keep myself occupied between reading books, when I sketch and create verbal likenesses to keep the faces of my friends clear in memory while I do not have the laptop handy.) The nephew was old enough to earn for his own shoes. And I remembered when I was spending money for weed instead of shoes, and the ‘78 campaign, searching for change in marijuana laws, going to smoke-ins had been hard when I had young legs. Anyway, Kung fu Sam had been taken, and I was worried about young Steve because he too was of color, and tended to beg in certain ways in and outside the coffeehouse. The black men in our neighborhood are not all in poverty looking for a handout, or jabbing in space. This fellow, Stephen would try to sell Nag Champa at a high price, and I had plenty of incense because the proprietor of the curio shop gave it to me. When I explained that I had enough Nag, Steve would just ask for a dollar. Usually, I’d give him one. But today, he wanted guitar. He wanted to play. He could not have been more honest, but I did not share Madrid guitar with him this day.
So, I returned to the deep night Art Deco train station with its mosaic scenes of pioneer days. I left the daisy in the Stewart’s bottle in my car drink-holder unprotected. The train left on time, with many passengers, arching with an aching timeless music that had no refrain into a wet morning along the Southern banks of the river that is named Ohio.
It will help to know. I’m protected for a little while, more each day. Then there are periods when I have to test the men and women who work all day and all night to see these kinds of pictures. The two-day period before I left Cincinnati for New York City was one of viewing and leading. After Kung fu Sam came up, was arrested and disappeared the teacher I mentioned, whose name is Pete, and I, were caught up in a wrangle. I gave up on the Chair of the English Department then. Looking back, I think I believed that Pete also had knowledge of Kung fu Sam’s arrest and Pete, in his role as lawyer, became involved. (Remember Pete was a lawyer and English teacher. He rented my spare room for a study. He lived with his girlfriend, black-haired Dantia, a few blocks away.) Maybe this was the beginning of the loss of my mental stability. Pete might have been helping Kung fu Sam with his legal problems. I think that I became concerned over the plight of these marginal black men of my generation who begged in the neighborhood.
I had another friend, Frank, with whom I used to work. This friend, a Social Worker, as I was at the time when I knew Frank best, was a lawyer, too. Frank was round and bulbous, his voice mushy and often slurring. He walked with a limp, shirttail nearly always untucked, though he often put effort into replacing it when he stood up from his desk. His features were non-distinct, and he worried that he would never amount to much. In fact, he had compassion for his clients out of proportion to the expectations of his supervisor, so was often defending random acts of kindness. Kung fu Sam had been one of Frank’s social work clients and because Sam was always getting arrested for jaywalking, my friend Frank intervened with a judge at one point. Frank had alleged that Kung fu Sam was a crack addict and needed treatment not jail time. So, these two comrades, both colleagues and lawyers, seemed to somehow get jumbled up in my mind with the case of Sam. I think I was just so disturbed by seeing this arrest that I began to get confused.
I gave up all my local gear, leaving laptop, books, and guitar at home. I prayed for better days, or at least more, and went to see a movie. Now this is rather odd reconstructing the past and I am sure I saw Songcatcher after my return from New York. The films at the Esquire Theater became part of my life so subtly that I lost the ability to discern the place of various moments in time. So, I must have just been consumed by worries just before I left, given the censorship issue hadn’t surfaced yet either. I’m not sure why I was so worried, but let’s attribute it to general paranoia. I had heard about the film The Center of the World by reading a review in CityBeat and had gone to the film’s website. The site purported to be interactive, allowing a kind of chat with a stripper. In fact it was fake. When I returned to Cincinnati, after The Center of the World had been censored by the owner of The Esquire Theater, the film critic for CityBeat was banned from the theater because of his remarks about the act of censorship. Apparently in the film, a stripper put a lollipop in her vagina and then in her mouth. The theater owner clipped out the lollipop scene. (Interestingly enough the owner’s Fiancée was my Case Manager’s supervisor. Small world, eh? I met Amy, the supervisor, on the street in front of the theater one evening as she was lighting a cigarette. She was cute with big eyes, wide lips, and big curly hair that parted in the center. At first I was trying to pick her up, maybe to go for coffee next door. At least this flirtation was more age appropriate than that with Raia. Amy’s shelf life as a prospective date was short-lived, as she mentioned the theater owner within only a few minutes. As we started chatting, soon enough, I learned she was in training to be a Case Management Supervisor, and the team she was on, etc. My Case Manager was known to both of us.) So, there was a protest which involved individuals going to the theater to see Songcatcher while all wearing name tags bearing the name of the banned film critic.
My sense was that the whole thing was about increasing publicity around film. The banning, the protest, the whole she-bang made for a huge movie audience, and Sitwell’s, the coffeehouse next door, was doing a great deal of business before and after the movies were shown. (Keep in mind this was all after I returned from New York City. It’s relevance here is somehow clear in my mind as I try to keep film and reality separate. As if the police video of Kung fu Sam being arrested and the coffeehouse surveillance camera above the cash register, which watches me come and go are irrelevant. And the way I would go to the film, The Man Who Cried again and again to see the girl, who was looking for her father, ride the bicycle through the night streets of Paris chasing men on horseback. All the while I imagined I was her father in real life.) I got into a conversation with Lisa, with the curly blonde hair and classic movie star looks. She’s the owner of the coffeehouse and she suggested I write a letter to CityBeat when she heard me talk about the censorship thing. I did. This is how the letter appeared in the newspaper:
-A Letter About the Esquire, We Think-
Is the Esquire an art house (“Esquire Theater’s Operator Explains the Naughty Bits,” issue of June 14-20)? Is pornography decent? Do community values mean anything to adults when their children are watching crap TV? What books are made into movies? Is violence better than sex? Sexual violence? Is grammar and age a continuum?
In a welfare society, the newspaper isn’t where people learn about sex. I rode a bicycle to school when I was a teen-ager. I recall a community grocer who delivered. Or did she? Milk came in bottles, left on the porch. I worked when I was too young to vote. I drank before I was of age.
But, simply put, movies were a part of my development. The independent grocer in my community supported Sunday matinees for those under 11, or was it 12? Weird, great old art kids’ films out of an era of Hollywood that scared the beejesus out of us. Black and white Batman for six or eight hours. Would you believe four? It was a white community.
Let’s commit the community to supporting kids’ movies on Saturday afternoon at the theater without adults and fund it with a re-investment in The Center of the World, uncut, uncensored, three weeks advertised and full discounts.
Art is more than a few genres, a few kinds of films, a few good actresses. And, while you’re at it, two turntables in every radio studio or FCC regulations.
- Steven Paul Lansky, Clifton
When I went to see Songcatcher I saw an old friend in the lobby, a publicist for the film committee, a man in a straw hat, a yuppie friend, a former instructor, eighth grade science, you see this is a close community. He was a prankster. I learned that the nametag caper, to ridicule the theater owner for banning the critic, was his idea. He sported a cheese-eating grin. We communed briefly over journeying. (Back from New York I was then about to take another trip, this time to visit my brother in Burlington, Vermont.)
The people who made this film about the woman musicologist and her lesbian friends are to be honored. As a juror on any review, this one ranks above any film made the year before. The question I have is how the people brought it to market and timed it with the post Civil War Era, and science developments brought on by industry. The mulatto child, a female, who sings with rhetoric above elocutionary Appalachia, is proof that “rue int,” the iamb, comes to ruint, and the Latinate and French spellings demonstrate that moon cycles are part of making film. (Now, I have digressed horribly and exposed momentarily the weakness of the autodidact. I have studied some on language, and sort of made up the rest, so don’t worry if scientifically, and linguistically you disagree, as I have no knowledge of Germanic language roots. Anyway, “roue” in French is wheel and “rue” is street. To a Frenchman these are as distinct as “wheel” and “street” to an English speaker, but to an English speaker, the sounds of the rolled r’s and the difference between “oue” and “ue” are frighteningly subtle, indistinguishable without true study. Yet, among Appalachians “ruint,” is slang for drunk and I think rue is the English word, such meaning “I rue the day.” Ruined. But, given my lack of understanding I can digress nearly a half-page merely to negate a point that never needed making. I think I was fascinated with the word “ruint” because of my deep connection to Appalachian writers with whom I commune in the spirit of cooperative artistic expression. A popular discourse among my friends involves the seven stages of drunkeness or intoxication. “Ruint” is one such stage.
As for the part about moon cycles, it really only mattered if they were shooting at night and wanted that real light and I don’t know enough about filmmaking and natural light to even begin to discourse on this. But, to retain continuity while filming, scenes with moonshots need to be in a believable sequence so that the proper phase appears at the appropriate time. I know that I believe that the summer sounds so alive on full moon nights that I have theorized light and sound do affect together in some mysterious way that I cannot ruin.) In fact the child is lip-synching with the real singer. I hope the reader finds this rather technical and boring part of the film analytical lore interesting.
I’d like the reader to look also at the positioning, not of the lens, or the camera obscura, but where the people are looking in relation to the eye projections that they see in front of the fields. (i.e., The field is the body, the bodhi, etc.) What I mean here is that each individual can only see within the field of his or her vision and yet the camera has a different field of vision. The film director must take into account the field of vision of each actor, as well as that of each camera. The finished product must show each gaze consistent with each camera shot, both when the shot takes a wide view and when a shot takes a view that is intended to be seen as the gaze of an actor.
What can be tracked through this chapter, from the train to the Mermaid, the lake not mentioned, the light so special, with Raia and the fountain on separate summer nights is that I am a lonely man who is losing clarity of conscious focus. Sam is likely in a jail cell, or somewhere riding a bus. His focus, longer gone than mine, still affects me as I am losing focus rather gradually and in a harmlessly charming way, I hope. Which is why I am a good writer and why people enjoy following this to the next part.
I have so much to say, and I would like to get back to detailing the train journey from the Union Terminal on the CSX limited, but I dare not describe how I came to know that the train would be the best way to avoid access. Maybe I should come out and say it? I’ve been thinking and chatting at the coffeehouse about making films and may have imagined that now, with the train adventure to come, I was actually in a film. The director fellow with whom I’ve dialogued, Alex, suggested trains for atmosphere. “Write a film that takes place on a train,” he said.
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Links
· The Citizen Archives
· About Steven Lansky--QCF Magazine March 2005
· QCF Magazine homepage
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