Vine: An Urban Legend Read online

  Thalia: Oh, don’t we all, girl? But this year will be different.

  Clio: Or so he says. Last December he decided to direct a huge, preposterous Faust for the summer season. His old friend George Castille in the title role. Devils and apes, a romance and conjury, impossible to stage much less to cast. He pitched it disastrously to the powers, who thought it was too fragmentary and hard to follow, and well… yes…

  So now a Bacchae, kindled in stealth and beginning to flourish in his vengeful imagining. It will be fresh, he tells himself, and most of all disturbing.

  Melpomene: The story, after all, is hard. King Pentheus of Thebes tries to put down the new worship of Dionysus, a cult that is turning the heads of his female subjects. Pentheus imprisons the Great God, dismisses him. For such disrespect, of course the divinity exacts revenge. Dionysus persuades the poor king to dress himself in the garb of the Maenads—the female devotees of the god. Dressed in regal drag, he may witness the sacred mysteries. Or so the god tells him as he leads the tressed and fabulous king into the mountains, handing him over to the Maenads, who tear him limb from limb.

  Polymnia: The moral is this: Imprison the god, and he returns on you with heavy duty. Push him down and press him back, stand up for wholesomeness and family values until you can’t help it and the photos emerge of your meth-sotted overtures to a twelve-year-old boy in an airport restroom. So it goes, sisters, when you can’t match what you want to be with what you are. And Stephen claims no such paradox, though he has some of his own, his life contracted to bathos and mild substance abuse. Because his life is disappointing, he has concluded it is therefore authentic.

  Clio: Now he takes a hit from the joint, passes the gingko tree and the landmark stone at the park entrance, and heads for the covered promenade, the slope of maples and taxus, the graveled amphitheatre and the ruinous stage.

  Plodding past dogwalks and picnic tables, past the upper tiers of the amphitheatre, where a coterie of drunks lie sprawled and dozing, Stephen is buoyed by ambition, by lazy inspiration and THC. He waxes paunchy and prophetic as the landscape hums and receives him.

  Thalia: Time to fill clothes with people, to cast the play.

  George Castille his usual choice, an actor ready and willing to go completely over the top in our service, tuned to our drama and happy-sad masks. He’s played everyone except Godot and Lady Macbeth, even debuted a critically savaged Hamlet the previous summer. What the critics had not said was that Hamlet didn’t play well as a fat-ass pushing seventy. So of course long-toothedness rules George out as the teenaged king and the even younger god, but Stephen will ply him with praise and merlot, wedge him into the role of Tireisias, the blind androgynous prophet twining the thyrsoi, wearing the fawn-skins, and crowning his head with ivy branches.

  For the god and the tragic Pentheus, Stephen will go afield, casting his nets for youth in the high schools and community colleges, steering away from the university’s drama department, where production is underway on a Noh version of La Cage aux Folles. There are youngsters abundant who dream of celebrity, and even if it means conversation with Dolores Starr at the high school, Stephen will brave years and resentment to reel in actors.

  Polymnia: The pathway winds and silvers in front of him, like the track of a huge hunting snake. I see it all from my perch cherubic in the statue. I have a good idea where this is headed.

  I slip through the seams of the putti, the Valentine Cupid, and follow the piriform figure as he wades the shadows of the park. A warm wind lofts me, upon it the whiff of blood and wine and madness. I catch him by the topmost row of the amphitheatre, commingle with the cannabis and drift into his lungs, from where I might stir his speculations.

  Inspiration, they call it. When they inhale the smoke of muses, O kapnós tou moúsa. For the gods stalk the premises where the actors wait like statues of hollow bronze, for immortal insufflations.

  And ours are not the only eyes on Stephen Thorne. He knows by primal reliance on touch and smell. I prod his imaginations, grafting him to the tremors in the air, to the spoiled smell from the wings of the stage. In the shadows his sight is useless, but he does catch the glint of moonlight on the tomfoolery of mirrors left over from Castille’s Hamlet. Nothing there but watery coronas spreading across the stage, tidal and bearing a feral smell, as though an animal is trapped back there, is threatened by his approach.

  He marks off the feeling to the drug, backs away wisely. The lights from the court beckon across a wide and deceptively tranquil bay, so he climbs back up the tiers toward the road and the fountain and the brightness. He remembers ascending the stairs from the cellar of the old house he and Muriel had rented in the South End back in the ’50s, how he took the topmost steps with a long stride, a runner’s gait, imagining the darkness rushing behind him like an entangling current …

  Yes, I know what he remembers, inveigled as I am in his lungs and motherwit. For who but Memory is my mother, when all is said and done?

  Stephen breathes much more easily under the first streetlamps, his heart rising as his lungs prickle in the humid spring night, and exhaled I slide free of definition, swallowed by a darkness in which my senses recovered clarity and focus, in which I join my masked sisters, intent on the stage and its attendant derelicts.

  Back in the park, the Boss lies snoring on the topmost tier, covered in a dismantled cardboard box and pages of the Sunday Courier, stinking of Richards and stale piss.

  Melpomene: You should have let me at the actor. I would have permeated his heaviness, sent him home gibbering with visions of the infernal Styx…

  Polymnia: Girl, you are eat up. Practice on the Boss.

  Thalia: And so the aethereal leavening begins. Melpomene hovers above the hulking, lamé-clad T. Tommy Briscoe, the park’s resident pervert and flaneur, self-appointed Boss of the Midnight Choir. She slides down his throat, lamenting the malodor of his breath as she draws him toward wakening. T. Tommy stirs, then, his lamé refulgent, sitting upright and speaking in no tongue this Muse has heard as his entourage approaches from the shadows, gathering substance from the clammy air.

  5 Parodos: Antistrophe: T. Tommy Briscoe and the Brischords

  T. Tommy: Shondala. Those who talk in tongues say Shondala.

  Brischords: Ha ta bo ho si ko lo. Bo ho la ta. Shondala.

  T. Tommy: One of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, they tell us. Another of them gifts the interpretation of said speaking in tongues.

  Gather around me, children, for another revelation.

  Here. Up on the stage. Stay away from them mirrors, Daddy Chrome, and stop looking at your mullet, which like Jesus is with you always: business in front, party in the back.

  I know the fat man come too close to us. I know, DJ Mel, that all we need is some pot-smoking fucker to get in trouble, to run into us, and you know they won’t let us stay here then, that we’ll be forced into the shelters or something worse…

  But he ain’t coming back. Not just yet. So tarry a while.

  Listen to what he took away with him. Zepp’s “Kashmir”—the lurch and ritardando of Page’s guitar, riding the wind off the hilltop. That dark surge before Plant lays down the vocals over it. Squirrels in the overhead branches, birds up in the balcony where Lady Macbeth was unsexed by spirits intent on mortal thoughts, where the old invert caught glimpse of himself in a mirror and imagined his father’s ghost, imagined himself all Prince of Denmark.

  Listen to the ground doves break cover, and listen backstage where the old boy stirs.

  Brischords: To sit with elders of the gentle race,

  this world has seldom seen.

  They talk of days for which they sit and wait,

  all will be revealed.

  T. Tommy: Can I get a witness? The assent, the uh-huh of the Jordanaires, like they sung behind the King?

  Y’all are my Brischords, children. Join in the revelry.

  Brischords: Oh, father of the four winds,

  fill my sails, across the sea of years…
r />   T. Tommy: It’s like that, the speaking in tongues. They say Shondala on account of it sounds pretty. Because there are no words for that strong blind current, that gust of wind that bears along our rudderless boats. We stand on deck and watch. We interpret, but we don’t translate. And by the time we interpret, it sounds like something we wanted to hear all along. It becomes what we expected, and it shores up our main hope, children, our hope that we don’t have to change nothing on account of what it told us. My body is a ship, is flowing water, my hair a winding current, tangled up in high grass and brilliantine.

  I’ve been here through thirty Thunders and a Curfew Law, through busing riots and a tornado. I toured with the Doors and played the Fairgrounds on Halloween Night. I row-boated through the suburbs as the Ohio swelled in ’63. And the waters flow into earlier waters, back before all your times, and I remember despite myself the whole town sinking in ’37 as I headed to the Highlands ahead of the cresting river…

  And it is only a step from that flood to another tornado, back to the Exposition and back farther, to the whiff of an antique war, hurdling flood and tempest and flood again, and farther back to the youth of the god, to a soft boy drinking with Aristaios on a hillside that was and was not Kentucky, to honey commingling with wine and youth with age as the two reclined drunkenly…

  The Exposition. And why in the fuck am I remembering an Exposition, a hundred and god damned twenty years ago?

  Believe me or don’t. It ain’t that I’m lying, but more that the truth gets diverted when it passes through me.

  It’s partly the smell of this place, I promise. The odor from the theatre. I caught a whiff of it this morning while I watched from in the wings, rubbing one out over them spandexed girls on the sidewalk. Half-coppery reptile stank making me stop in mid-contemplation.

  The Southern Exposition. Reptiles in untended ground.

  Great blistered mother of the god if they ain’t back.

  Brischords: Ha ta bo ho si ko lo. Bo ho la ta. Shondala.

  Vae puto archetypus fio.

  T. Tommy: I think…I am fixing to become an archetype.

  6 Episode: The Origins of Stephen Thorne

  He claimed to be Orpheus, torn apart by women.

  But it was more complex than Stephen imagined. Women and country and self-rending all conspired to leave him tattered.

  Precocious and indulged son of a mother too smart for the good of either of them, he was Muriel Thorne’s performer and trophy in his early years. He was gold, salvaged from a wrecked marriage and abandoning father, reciting random passages from plays, films, and television shows. He was clever from the time he could talk, a smart child but by no means the immortal that Muriel imagined in her fantasy: he was no god to erase all indignity, to carry his mother out of the dark netherworld in yet another predictable rescue story.

  Muriel knew as much by the time he graduated high school, but Stephen did all right for his nurture. He graduated somewhere near the head of his class because the standards were low and nobody took that well to reading in his sports-besotted school, or in his community, for that matter. Only one other in his class headed to college out of state, and Stephen went there with relief, left Kentucky and shook the dust from his feet, bound for the East and drama school, where his mother’s early delusions had pointed him before she gave up and turned back to thinking about herself.

  He arrived in the fall of ’67, joining an incoming class of indulged, lazy children, their talents also magnified by doting parents. They would change the world like rock musicians. And it was here Stephen was found out, unmasked like a dropped disguise in an old comedy: he was clever, pretty much, in things he should have outgrown by eleven or twelve, or should have pressed further into, into something deeper and wiser. And though Yale Drama was neither all that deep nor all that wise, it took only a term to weed him out, to transplant him back into harsh country, into this ground hard as tombstones for the real article, but enough to fool most anyone else.

  His bus left New Haven in early ’68, harbored in the disappointment of every mother.

  Kent was a kind of halfway house when Stephen arrived the next September. Muriel let it be known, lets it be known unto this day as if her listeners care, the strings she pulled somewhere in the vast theatrical fabric to get him admitted to the program. Before he could thank her, Stephen was on the bus to Ohio, sure and forever to be reminded that he was salvaged by his mother’s efforts. This time an education degree, because, as she reminded him, those who don’t, teach.

  He stalked the margins of Kent State’s Theatre Arts program. Auditioned for Streetcar and Death of a Salesman, worked the lights for a local production of The Music Man. Sat perplexed in the audience of an Alternative People’s Theatre as the first Bacchae he ever seen proved to him that alternative sometimes means god-awful. Still, the Passion of Isaac Clarke, as he came to call it later, lay fallow in his thoughts until home country and this summer forty years after.

  In later years he told of brushes with famous afterthoughts. When everyone was talking Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen remembered long talks with its author, though in truth only once did he think he saw the man, at a distance on that hill by the architecture building. And when the Next Generation of Star Trek came out—the Next Generation, not the one with Shatner and Nimoy—Stephen siphoned hipness from two magnified conversations with Jon De Lancie, and his students’ eyes widened because, as he had found, teenage drama students believe most anything.

  But he did know Sandra Scheuer, if only in his thoughts. Dark hair, and as he recollected her, a late-’60s-yearbook kind of pretty, though his nostalgia and his story might have magnified her beauty. She studied speech therapy, but maybe he read that somewhere. And in the aftermath everyone discovered how little the war involved her, though she was against it in a vague and gentle fashion.

  Later he imagined her as his girlfriend. He was not sure now, standing at the edge of another knoll, in a park three hundred miles and forty years from Kent.

  He had slept in on that Monday morning. Woke up to the sound of what they had come to call the Victory Bell. The Guardsmen had been there since April 30 or May 1, or at least that was how he remembered it. He followed the ringing, made his way up the south side of the hill by the architecture building. As he got almost half way up, following the wall, the Guard come up the other side and crested the hill. Some of them squatted down so the others behind them could shoot over their heads. One of them trained his gun on Stephen. He could not see the man’s face for the gas mask.

  Then the column turned, fired at something behind Taylor Hall. The Guardsman took his gun off of Stephen, and the line of armed men began to stir around. Stephen had to go right by them, and he smelled upon them their psychic disarray, although this part he would forget later, forget that they were swept along in the same current, the weight of what they did sinking, no doubt, to a deep and alien bed.

  So he gave dimes to two girls, who rushed off to call for ambulances. Then he looked down at the parking lot beside Prentice Hall, where someone sprawled on the pavement, a stunned group of students circling her.

  Later, he imagined himself closer to Sandra. Present at the moment of her passing, at the loss of light in her eyes, though he was not there and he was too late for that veiled and quiet intimacy. And he was even more removed in the days to come. For although he did not know it in May of 1970, Stephen Thorne had begun to leave the campus.

  7 Episode: Of Returns and Classroom Scandals

  By now it would be hard to tell Stephen that he did not know her, that at most he met her only in passing or in memory or in dreams.

  As Sandra Scheuer passed into myth, Stephen tumbled from job to job, from record shops and book stores to Fotomat and Convenient, waiting in the meadow for a light to develop out of events. Eventually he saw that waiting was not enough to evoke the wondrous. So he came back to Louisville in the fall of 1973.

  He was caught in the current now. It was the god
that marshaled him, and Stephen could only watch where he was headed and believe that watching mattered and would help him.

  By the time Bicentennial came around, he was teacher-certified and working. His mother praised him on the outside and hated him inwardly. After all, he had traded in her large dreams: he was teaching English and Drama at North High School, up in a third-floor classroom directing the Senior Play. The long flow of the godly river had turned to a bourgeois trickle.

  Stephen pretended he was all right with it. Now and then when he couldn’t sleep, he thought that it was best for him, that careers in the bona fide were for those for whom the dice fell. He should be pleased with where he was ending up, he told himself on those nights. He should cast things into the comfort of past tense.

  But all the while he was miring himself deeper, until the god’s rescue could come only through violence.

  She was sixteen and Dolores Webb at the time: not all that attractive, but thin and blonde and disastrous for a man who yearned for female attentions. She was eager in his drama class, quick to the major role in his production of Our Town (she shared the last name of the character she played; only he seemed to notice). Dolores seemed the perfect promising student until a policeman’s casual flashlight sweep of idling cars at a park overlook discovered teacher and student intertwined, Dolores in dishabille, Stephen with his pants opened and dismantling his career in the act of cupping her firm and exposed little breasts.

  Suspension first. Then dismissal, and the two of them shrank into exile. Stephen left the school and went back to small supporting roles at the Iroquois Amphitheatre musicals, a job at the Fotomat, and moving in with Muriel, who was appalled by it all. Dolores went through the motions until her graduation. The couple saw each other secretly while the scandal persisted and the Webb family threatened legal action, then on and off several years more. They parted for good, and in no friendly fashion, on stage.