the mockingbird had been following the cat
all summer
mocking mocking mocking
teasing and cocksure;
the cat crawled under rockers on porches
tail flashing
and said something angry to the mockingbird
which I didn’t understand.
yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway
with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,
wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,
feathers parted like a woman’s legs,
and the bird was no longer mocking,
it was asking, it was praying
but the cat
striding down through centuries
would not listen.
I saw it crawl under a yellow car
with the bird
to bargain it to another place.
When I first graduated from college, I decided that I was going to be a novelist. The closest big city was Los Angeles so I found an apartment there with two roommates. My rent was $275. Since I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have any idea how I could possibly make that much in a month. I hadn’t written anything but I figured I would at some point. I didn’t have a computer to write on, but I figured I would just save up to buy one. Otherwise, I could just write my novel out longhand.
I had worked several jobs: I worked at my father’s grocery store as a teenager, printed tee shirts, waited tables, tended bar, washed dishes, prepped for chefs, and was a janitor in my college computer lab. All of those jobs ended with me getting fired, including the job working for my own father. There was no use in putting together a resume.
But I did have education: I had a degree from the lowest-regarded school in the University of California system and I was going to use it to my advantage. I ironed my best Dockers pleated-front slacks. I even put a tie on the finest dress shirt I could find at Target. I splashed on just enough aftershave to cover up the smell of pot.
I walked into the temp agency without calling ahead of time and insisted on speaking to the supervisor. I told her that I had just finished a degree in Analytic Philosophy and English and that my honors dissertation, “Is Nothing Sacred?” was an expose into the philosophy of language and existentialism, namely how linguistic confusion lent into Sartre’s concept of nothingness, néant. I was an accomplished academic who was on my way to becoming a successful writer, I explained, and I insisted that I be given a job to match my abilities and potential.
The next day they gave me an assignment assembling office furniture. It was for a cable television company at the Santa Monica end of Pico and I would get paid $7 an hour. I did the math and figured I would only need to work 39 hours to pay my rent for the month. I put together about a six chairs before lunch, taking a cigarette break after completing each one.
Once, when I was smoking, a thin black man was outside smoking, too. He was in his 20s and wore tinted glasses. I said hi and we started talking. His name was Keenan and he was a customer service rep. He would answer phones and schedule cable installations for new customers. Otherwise, he would field complaints about outages or set up refunds. He told me he made $11 an hour. It sounded like he had it made.
He asked me what I was doing putting together office chairs. I told him it was just to pass time. I had signed a lucrative book deal, I said, and I was just sitting at home living off of my advance. I was bored and wanted to see how the common man lived so I took this job. He gave me a funny look and never spoke to me again.
Burt managed the paper routes around town, a 45-year-old man with a regular gang of 10-year-old boys. He came to my 5th grade class to recruit us. Mom thought it was a good idea to get me out of the house, and the extra $40 a month bought me all the things I liked the most: comic books, pro wrestling magazines, and Queen LPs. The route wasn’t bad–I delivered papers on six streets around the neighborhood and made it home in time to still watch cartoons. The only hard part was collecting money from the subscribers. They usually weren’t home. If they were, I was so shy I couldn’t really talk to them. Instead I just held up a bill and an envelope with a pleading look on my face.
I went to Burt’s to pick up my $40 paycheck. He answered the door in a stained white ribbed tee shirt stretched over his belly. His brown hair was greasy and combed back from his face. His greedy mustache covered his entire mouth.
“Hey you like rasslin’, right?”
“…sure…I guess…”
“Who’s yer favorite?”
“…I dunno….”
“You like Rick Martel?”
“…I guess he’s good….”
“He’s on the TV right now. Why doncha watch it with me?”
“…I just wanted to get my check. Mom wants me back….”
“It’s just gonna be ten minutes. Just watch with me.”
“…okay….”
We sat and watched his old black and white TV. The rabbit ear antenna was held in place with aluminum foil. Rick Martel was about to fight King Tonga.
“So you wanna make an extra five bucks?”
“…I don’t know…”
“C’mon it’s easy. Just sit on my lap and let me kiss you on the cheek.”
King Tonga slapped Martel across the chest. It left a red welt and he winced in pain as I climbed up onto Burt’s lap.
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Elton John, “Grey Seal”
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Edison Lighthouse, “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)”
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Queen, “If You Can’t Beat Them”
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I’d like to say that my love of teen angst started with that first red paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye, but it probably actually started someplace a lot more embarrassing, like with a library copy of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders or, worse yet, Judd Nelson in the Breakfast Club. In either case, no one did it better than Truffaut in my favorite movie of all time, The 400 Blows.
A young teen, Antoine Doinel, struggles at school where the instructor sees him as a troublemaker. At home, his mother sees him as an annoyance, especially when he witnesses her affair with a coworker. His father is friendly but detached, preoccupied with his car club.
After a series of troubles at school, including getting accused of plagiarism, he runs away from home and turns to a life of petty crime. He steals a typewriter from his father’s workplace and, after being unable to pawn it, gets caught trying to return it. He ends up in a juvenile detention center where he confirms to a psychologist that he was an unwanted child: that he spent his earlier years with his grandmother because his mother refused to care for him, that his “father” was in fact his step-father, and his mother originally planned to abort him.
He escapes from the center and runs until he gets to the ocean, which he earlier admits to having never seen before. Standing ankle deep in the water, he looks into the ocean and back to the land, caught in between the alienating world and the unknown.
The movie’s so many things at once: organic, stark, elegant, and dark. I feel the same impact and gravity as I did the first time I watched it. Who wouldn’t prefer to live on the streets of Paris to living at that cold apartment? Who doesn’t feel the weight of that iron typewriter? And who doesn’t want to run through the countryside without stopping? Truffaut probably said it best:
“I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.”
Amazon.com has the Criterion Collection DVD for sale here:
