Glass Woman Lunacy by Myles Boisen |
| MOULDY LOVE
by Paul S. Nelson Do not lovers alwaysIn the cave, the Crown Theater, I first saw Jane, arched back on the grassy bank, shaking her wet hair, laughing while Tarzan hauled himself dripping from the croc ridden lagoon with the same old rural grin, Cheetah, jumping up and down, all gums, screeching at the croc on Hero's heels. I didn't care what happened to either. It wasn't exactly love; Jane was too perky, entirely too patrician, but it was a start at competition, i.e. with that major fake, Jon Hall, capturing the flashy eyes of Maria Montez, in garish Technicolor, who captured me with her lop-sided, sex-implicit smile and exotic accent I now know was ordinary Mexican, not Tahitian, or Arab. The one worse lover than Jon was Victor Mature, of the goopy, spaniel eyes, who strayed in a Biblical dream with Hedy Lamarr, as much Delilah as I could imagine at the time, but Montez made me stoic with ineptitude. I recall in the serious foolishness of advanced age, The Mummy's Ghost, when film life was all shadows, my guy dragging his right leg (my hip titanium) his left arm forward, hand in choke position, still in rapt, mouldy love with Princess Ananka (Ramsay Ames), oblivious to æons but ready to annihilate any obstruction to past love that I can share, in Kharis' case an apparent re-incarnation: the skunk-locked secretary in the Department of Antiquities, the old boy infused by nine "Tana" leaves simmered in a saucepan high in the ice-house where he "slept," upright in a sarcophagus, his servant-priest (John Carradine, later, George Zucco in the sequel) stirring the wispy brew, mumbling to his ancient deity, Osiris I assume, folks always trying to find their way back to sarcous life, that way, across the river. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, thinking back to his young years, of girls and women missed, remembered a drunken, intellectual night, trying for the essence of The Odyssey, concluded as "the fallacy of nostalgia." The battered guy, afraid of sleep, talked all night in the olive bed, already set upon leaving. Dante had him say that he never came home at all, but kept on going like Ahab, stumping along, another "oudeis," fey angry flame in a Canticle Hell. Sinbad was a happier soul, unlike Wilde, no Oscar, just Cornell, poor actor. I knew the priest had sent the loaded sarcophagus up the ice-block conveyor to the top loft. I had watched men saw, haul and load ice all one winter long at Steven's Pond , the ice-house vaster than the Crown, but no more full. An Egyptian in skimpy windings, up in that gelid air! No wonder he was wry. Ananka loved the Assistant Professor (Robert Lowery) but something in her blood longed for desert sand, evenings and muck by the Nile, royal flirting at the edge of Kharis' lower class gene pool, and with me, my frayed love, tongue cut out by priests, as punishment for yearning. They've torn the theater down, replaced it with virtual reality, a mall that deep in moonlight might be fine for shuffling along, three thousand years old, looking at teen-age girls in hip-hugging shorts, lower than the sarong Maria wore, little halters, tattoos, and wanting to choke somebody, especially the deity that placed me in this world and they in theirs, as if I've been forever in the movie house with old, gray stars, to choke the entrepreneurs, the producers and directors for violating the dark, peaceful tomb of recollection, The Crown, in which I house my beloved bitterness, first love, loves, imagining one face at a time and vowing to find her, somehow, among these young, pierced embodiments, then chase, grab and carry her home, sinking again with her in primordial gloom, the toxic swamp behind the mall, where no one will dig us for awhile. Samson had it easy. He was as dumb as his shoulders were square; his thought line struggled in his plump lips, lax as his biceps, armlets that would fit Delilah's ankles, dumb as Tarzan, too, last seen romping in Pampers, trying to yodel in Acapulco and looking for vines, never to be born again, his idiotic buoyancy belying ALS, disease the antidote to Jane's charm … to not remember her name or his real love's, Lupe Velez, who, deserting, ran off with Gary Cooper in real time. But that is all the past where the best movies happen, that second to last scene, the English patient, gathering her from the cave, flying her mummy off in a Yellow bi-plane, to crash into memory, like a dune, wind up swaddled, tended by another Beauty, never to whiff the sacred, nine "Tana" leaves. |
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