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I malfunctioned once. A singer trapped in a tv set in a store display. People outside watching, concerned. I was pleading to get out. I was on mute. People outside couldn´t tell. No subtitles. It was… — Read and discuss this story with the author and others on ManyStories

Worried, embarrassed souls huddled together. To share a prayer. Let it flutter with trembling wings like a parting dove. Some were bitter. Some still yearned to believe. They were the last ones in… — Read and discuss this story with the author and others on ManyStories

( One SOB´s Plea). “God Got Old” is published by Rodrigo Bahadian. — Read and discuss this story with the author and others on ManyStories

As you know, I try to do whatever´s required of me. To the fullest. Never let anyone down. I´ve been known to try to sneak in a line or two, to improvise and to creatively interpret, sometimes, but… — Read and discuss this story with the author and others on ManyStories

Maybe I wasn´t actually born there, but that´s a matter of opinion. Writing about her is almost desecration. The more you talk, the more it wears off, and I could never make it justice with words… — Read and discuss this story with the author and others on ManyStories

Don´t look for tourist guides in this city, just follow the children.

Purchase my life. Return to sender. One size fits all. Batteries not included. Prices are so low. It´s insane. Cancel my apologies. 5 million served. Read the fine print. Bought objects may seem… — Read and discuss this story with the author and others on ManyStories

Look at the child. He´s wearing a sack. His face is permanently hooded. An angry crayon drawing by some bully all over his face and skin. This same bully branded him with that permanent shadow… — Read and discuss this story with the author and others on ManyStories

Richard Pryor meant it. You just didn´t get it

A Pré-Adolescente (on Wattpad) https://my.w.tt/9ZkLOfAQi5 Uma garota, sequestrada, estuprada, violentada, sobrevivente. Coisas da vida

#sequestro #violncia #short-story #books #wattpad #amreading

Hard work is fine and all, but to do anything creative, especially writing, you must be on the cusp of ecstasy. Like a child overblown with a shower of joy going down a water slide. Especially on… — Read and discuss this story with the author and others on ManyStories

We put her in the fridge. She kept dripping. The freezer was the wisest choice. Mainly cause I didn´t have to open it and see the results taking shape. It would shatter my illusions in progress. I… — Read and discuss this story with the author and others on ManyStories

I´m a male practicing psychiatrist for 23 years. This is an account of a recent patient who appeared in my office distraught and complaining, initially of insomnia. Being a psychoanalyst herself, she was hesitant at first. Typically in cases like these a certain amount of disassociation is to be expected in the patient´s account, hence the switch from third to first person.

In my work, you never judge :

It had to have a simple explanation. The simpler the better. She just couldn´t believe that most people spent most of their days worrying. But her profession made a lie of these beliefs. Anyway, that was you, not her. She got distracted, that´s all. Her patients were taking to much space. She had a special hidden trapdoor, in her mind where she did her real thinking. Everything else was automatic. It was work. The usual nemesis. Work overwhelming the rest of her day.

Maybe she didn´t really care about her patients bitching about their problems. She couldn´t tell, really. She was a professional. She did her best. But she was no prostitute, no. She wouldn´t let work pin her down to the floor and have its sweet way with her. She was a psychoanalyst. A psychoanalyst who started looking over her shoulder, as if someone, or something, hovered right behind her. Stalked her at all hours. Called her at odd hours. As if all this person really desperately wanted was to tap her on her shoulder. Her problems. Like smiley faces painted on balloons floating all around her. In the streets. Whispering she knew not what.

It could be anyone. She had 17 patients. Seventeen toddlers. A bunch of whiners. Throughout her career she wore a mask. She was well- covered. Embalmed from any real penetration. After all, she wasn´t a whore. An actress, more likely. She wasn´t about to lay her body down for you.

One thing about angst, it will never leave you feeling abandoned. Angst, what a word! Do thoughts become real? Tap your brain? Intruders, adolescents fucking with you, tip-toeing in your house, leaving you refrigerator bare, always leaving a note, some stupid joke, and not even touching her as she slept. Sometimes the jokes were so old they seemed written in archaic English. She started sleeping with music on.

She´ll dance. That´s it. It´s been a while. She twirled solo naked in her apartment, but if that´s what they wanted from her, she´ll give it to them. She wasn´t whoring if it was done with intent. Or at least that´s what she thought she thought, most of the time.

If you really want to get to the bottom of things, it began when she started to dance alone. When she was a kid, dancing was camouflage. Covert action hiding sex. Listen to her talk,now. When she was a kid… When the hell did I stop being a kid?

My husband fled with someone he mistook as a younger version of myself. He was never an original, never a pioneer in anything, much less dancing. I danced solo for years wrapped in his arms, our bodies rubbing together, until that bastard patient got in the way. That was when I first started hearing the dripping, the rummaging in the refrigerator, my thoughts heavy enough to take action. My divorce never meant a thing. I was never monogamous. It was like having a haircut. It´ll grow back.

I wish I were a whore. It would be more honest. Aren´t whores spreading love and helping people. Maybe I became an analyst because I was too chicken.

I let them talk, that´s all I do. They can walk all over me, while think of something else, while I steal a look at the clock. I pretend, but much more like a whore than an actress. Because it´s automatic. I was born with it. That´s why they keep coming.

A smiley face painted on a balloon was stuck on the living room ceiling as I woke up from the couch. I´m divorced, leaving alone, but I´m the one banished to the couch. I can´t sleep in my bed anymore. My new patient lies dead underneath it.

He came back. He´s not exactly new. I worked with him for over a decade, then things got a little more personal than they should, then I told him to leave, and then, a year later, got divorced. We all have our secrets, I thought. I thought of him every night. Nobody had to know about it. Not even myself. In the morning I was fresh and ready to go.

Every session I paid attention to his body. An old trick. He was too witty, too mature, to talk about how he wanted to love me everyday. But he did, once in a while. And then, talk was futile. We used to hug and grab each other in a clandestine, covertly way. I had sex with my clothes on every time. He just dreamt about it. But the talking was done. He was there just to grab my body and I was there to play the receiving end. Not literally. I never turned all the way around. I let him have his fun and then it was easy to deny it all. I´m not a doctor. I´m not a whore. I´m more of a spy turned double. I would lie to myself and believe it.

Before I get naked and in bed, it´s easy for me to deny anything. That was the way with my ex-husband. I would deny I was thinking of somebody else in bed, I would deny I wasn´t really listening to him, I would deny to myself I was still his wife. I was never naked with him. He was never able to push over the table at dinner and yell at the top of his lungs, and this is what this adolescent patient of mine did. He saw through me. Then he threw everything about. He would laugh like a clown and throw tomatoes all over the walls of my skull. Smear ice cream all over my made-up professional face. Lick it up. Press his tongue against my cheek as if his intent was to clean them off. Rub my lips with his fingers as if signaling me where he would nibble and kiss. Press his groin against mine as if we were practicing dancing steps. And what the hell were we doing practicing dancing steps in my office.

He scrambled my mind. My bedroom was my office, my office was my bedroom where I should be laying with my husband. The therapist couch was my king-size bed. Once I told him to stop. Stop what, he said? Stop coming on to me. But I´m not doing anything. We had a session talking about problems. As he was walking out, he grabbed me towards him and whispered in my hear “How can I stop, it´s beyond me, I just can´t.”

I hear problems every-day. They are the tools of my trade. Listening, empathizing, pretending. But they never followed me home.

My office is about 15 to twenty Manhattan blocks from my brownstone. Throughout this account she had a justification for everything she thought. She walks home but just can´t pretend anymore. She sees faces. She sees people making faces, or she sees people grinning at her. Then simply walking away. The other day she was in the kitchen. Stocking up on food. These past days she told me she got rid of anything that could be of any harm, knives, anything with points or edges. She got rid of her record collection. She got rid of her computer because of streaming. At night she took a sleeping pill, because she could here some tapping, then some knocking. Being a doctor herself, she knew it must be a hallucination, so she waited till she fell asleep. There were rats in the apartment. A simple, reasonable explanation for the stolen food. New York rats faced it all, they weren´t afraid of the cold, or a freezer. She then felt someone tapping on her shoulder. Every time she would try to sleep, she kept telling me, she heard someone tap her shoulder. Being an M.D she knew that to be another hallucination. Sleep wouldn´t come. She took some more pills. She decided never to have to sleep anymore. It was too exhausting. The simpler conclusion to this problem was never to have to wake up anymore.

She thought of all the help she brought and all the help she could still bring to the world and these poor kids, then remembered the old term we used to have for barbiturates. Mother´s little helper.

This is what I told my soon — to — be — stupid son while he finally felt asleep after moaning.

Hey, Chip, Chip? Are you awake? You can face me, son, it´s alright to be scared.

Hey, Chip, don´t bury your face in a pillow. Listen to your old man talk so I may feel heroic for a while. Sorry about neglecting you all night. It´s a tic I got from the war, or Life. Neglect of civilian life. Maybe I may feel of service while you burrow in your rabbit hole. I got a confession to make. Being a veteran doesn´t help. It just makes you ruminate things at night. I´m glad you finally got to sleep.

Hey, Chip? Forgive your dad but I had to do it. You can learn something out of the old suffering and strife. Joaquin Phoenix´s Joker turned out to be essential. A sort of litmus test for your manhood. What we learn about ourselves in the battlefield, we carry to the grave. No I´m not trying to be funny. It´s easier to get scared now, when you´re a kid, then later in life. And it´s better to feel scared after watching a movie. Preparation, boy. Bootcamp. I´m conditioning you for anxiety. I knew from the first there wouldn´t be any superhero to save your day, boy. This is war.

You millennials, have social media and I´m deeply sorry for that predicament but I had nothing to do with it and try to be the least involved possible.

Technology? They take our taxes and funnel it into the Pentagon. For what, you´d ask, if awake? Research and Development. The cold war is over and the Taliban or ISIS wasn´t much. Your grandfather had Vietnam. When you´re drafted from your living room straight to the jungle, you´ll grow out of videogames. Hell, you´ll grow out of Pornohub.

Back in the day, some people showed the courtesy of being famous just out of the happy accident of being born famous. That was tough, kid. A world you never want to see again. A cartoon Vietnam. The enemy was finally home. You want terrorism? Have people pretend street culture ain´t manufactured. Hip Hop survived for a measly second. That´s the Nam. That´s napalm drilling a hole in your core. Vietnam had a better soundtrack than suburbia, kid. I apologize for America. But it is what it is. Soulless. Reality has its side effects.

Have you heard of the assembly line, son? Of dear old Mr. Ford. Well, he was chicken feed to Steve Jobs. Again, I´m sorry. It´s my fault I put you into this world, but I´ll take you out. Not out of this world. I´ll take this world out of you. Even if it kills me. But it will take more than ammo and bombs. There´s no one to shoot. Those assembly lines crossed the boundaries of Mr. Ford´s factory and now you carry that assembly line in your baby hands. Your smartphone, son. Whenever you´re online,son, you are enslaved to the treadmill, building nothing out of nothing, until it gets bigger and bigger and leaves you small and emptier. You see the progression. From the whip to a passive existence building a machine that will build another you instead. Your phone will eat you up. At least, in the first circle of hell all a man had to lose was his self-respect, down to the second circle of hell, all he had to lose was his humanity, down this third circle of pure hell you are annulled. You will cease to exist by an algorithm that never learned existence. Life can´t be computed by a virtual world. Life ceases to exist because it becomes invisible When a man spends all day at the factory, he knows where the line is drawn. He is bound to do the opposite once that freedom bell clangs.

When your great- grandfather immigrated to the land of the free, I refuse to add “brave”, you could see the country. Can you see it now? Or do you see concrete and malls? Steamrolled countryside. First, they mow your lawn, then then they´ll cut your balls.

Excuse the language, son. I know you´re asleep. You got other things to dream about. I can see computer games coming out of your ears. One difficulty level at a time. You´re dreaming of a dream girlfriend. They don´t build those anymore. But you get the picture.

I´m nagging. I´m just an old man to you. But I´m also a veteran. Experience breeds respect. No, you´re right. It doesn´t. I´m just spare parts. Not even. I missed the last upgrade. I´m not fit to be a human being. But I´m damn capable of being your father. They say you are independent and creative, that´s what they would tell the house boy slave. They got you in so deep, they have found a way for you to build your own maze. You carry it with you, at your fingertips. Each day you create a new corridor, new twists and turns. Your phone isn´t an extension of you. You´re not even an extension of it. Both of you have ceased to exist. They don´t need you, Chip. And they don´t need bullets to delete you. All they need is to upgrade the con. There is nothing better for the maHpresume it. He had an investment to increase. So, back in those days, you just couldn´t just go out and pick up an instrument, they made up such a thing as a professional musician. You left your guitar at home and saw somebody else play it. You stopped daydreaming and had a factory of dreams to provide you with them. And anything that will accommodate man´s unwillingness to move will make you rich. Wasn´t it Steve Jobs who said that man doesn´t know what he desires. Well, he does only he´s forgotten throughout the years. Steve Jobs is only a decadent upgraded version of a ral pioneer bitch like Mr. Taylor and Ford. He had the scheme laid out for him already. You buy your fun, boy. You don´t have it.

Have you seen that schematic design that shows you were to fit batteries. Well, that´s your country. Rectangles and squares crossed with straight lines. Do you think your great-grandfather needed to be whipped? He had a square lunch box he carried with him straight to hell. Do you think his grandfather ate at designated hours? He ate when he was hungry. He slept when the sun went down. He looked for his fun just like a dog will ferret out a rabbit hole. Now fun is designated as well. Defined by you who have lost your mind, ages ago. Oh yes, these things are hereditary. Conditioning is the white man´s burden. He´ll condition himself to the prom, marriage and the grave. It wasn´t always that way son. Corporations crossed the line. There´s your smartphone. And now, we finally get to the Joker.

Voluntary futility, boy. You can´t be whipped into it, you have to be born with it. Remember like I said people inherited fame in my time. Today they found a way to make things easier at the supply side. They made reality shows. But they waited their sweet time before they had the gall. They waited until you TV- fed beasts had enough entertainment, lived and learned your life experiences by show and tell through TV, went through all your coming of age rituals in your living room couch strewn with Cheetos and Doritos all over your stomach to be good and ready to learn every single lesson about life laying down. And then they superimposed it, Life, with Reality. Reality shows. Why hire real people to provide your life lessons when your own boring self broadcast on the screen could do the job. Don´t you get it? The age of reality shows is when the bombs fell. You don´t need napalm to be deformed.

And that´s the theme of the Joker. The joke, if you will. Look at me. Look how I´m talking. I don´t even sound like myself. I sound like the Cosby Show. Remember him? The nation´s daddy? Propofol? Remember Eddie Murphy? He told your jokes for you. He made you work less. You could repeat what you saw on TV and copy and paste. Now I´m talking about myself. Sorry, son. I know you´re asleep with your Roblox. It´s all my fault. I had one day of fun and I was drunk and now I got you on the couch with cheerios sprinkled all over. It wasn´t real fun. It was what they taught me.

So the Joker is about the total banalization of celebrity culture. Remember that scene when his social worker said nobody cared about him. She said nobody cared about her too. Nobody cares. Back in the day, we just cared about Clark Gable. Clark Gable lived in the mist of a glossy magazine. We envied the bastard. He had to walk in feather clouds and smile through his pipe overlooking a pool that looked real to us, the magazine swimming hole. Now Clark Gable, thanks to Mr. Zuckerberg, is your neighbor. So we can feel inadequate about him too. As much as we know his timeline is full of shit we can´t repress that animal feeling of inadequacy at the comparison. Your neighbor´s got the pool now. And the wife, and the car, and the reality show. After all, it´s about nothing and everything, isn´t it? It´s about forged envy. Even our jealousy is a compound of fake news. We made it now, son. Why fight terrorists. We terrorize ourselves.

Well, I got news for you. Your nightmares will last but not if I can do something about it. Celebrities have their lives documented by these phones, they can´t take a piss without being blamed for golden showers and orgies they can´t even brag about. We even elected the Mcdonald´s clown. Orange hair and all. Smiling little cruelty. He´s too inadequate to be a horror show. The real horror show is your envy and hunger for something that´s lost its flavor. And when celebrity culture loses its appeal, when it comes crashing down like a stale joke, then we´ve gone full circle. We´ll need a Michelangelo and a Da Vinci for the least credit. We are so sick of chasing fame, fame is chasing us. And you can only run so fast. Son, here´s the deal. A little metaphor. the 1% who have all the money creates a sense of poverty for those with two tv sets and Cadillac cars that a social revolution should be in order. But it will only come when not even a revolution can be romantic. When that 1% is your neighbor, then there´s a real revolution. The revolution of the sane and the hungry and the need to pluck and pick your own guitars. We need new riffs. It will bowl over. Here´s a secret. What makes man move isn´t hunger and strife, it´s pure boredom. And when the American Dream can´t find a way out, then look out!! Look out Da Vinci! look out Michelangelo! Look out Robert Johnson!!!

Strictly For The Birds

( Holden Caulfield at 80 )

Holden Caulfield was you when you were fourteen. Now he knows you´re a phony. The difference is erudition. It´s impossible to be a close reader and read the Catcher in the Rye. A closer reader is a doubting reader. He has read much and knows enough to double-guess first-person narrators. When you´re fourteen you take Holden at his word. That is Salinger´s big joke. Your education has wrecked you as an aesthete. You were better off deaf and dumb. At least you could listen to Holden Caulfield. Your aesthetic values are based on your education instead of your knowing. You are hell-bent on psychoanalysing characters. There is no common trust. You got to the point where you even look to study Holden´s idiomatic speech. J.D Salinger writes to the reader you used to be. It only took you a couple of years to be a phony. You cannot pretend to be a blood brother of Holden´s anymore. The more experienced you become as a reader, the worse off you are for Salinger. It is almost as if he sticks his tongue out at you for having spent the better part of your intellectual life reading the canon, the experimentalists, the post-modernists, Faulkner, and Robbe-Grillet. Your education has taken you adrift. You catch yourself wondering if he would apply himself to his next school come next September. You remember that you knew exactly the answer when you were fourteen. But it is now a fleeting remembrance, a dispersed feeling. You can hardly remember what you thought, because you keep trying to remember what you felt. The discrepancy in your two readings of The Catcher - one at fourteen, and one at forty - is the distance you have neglectfully trodden. Salinger´s portrayal of Holden as genuine and anti-phony comes across in the way that Holden sounds. Salinger, in order to create Holden´s character could not hit one wrong note. It is much akin to what John Lennon said about Bob Dylan. If you want to know the truth, if you want to get to the bottom of it, you have to listen to how he sounds, more than what he says. Holden´s song is lost to the deafened years of erudition. You have betrayed Holden´s trust.

He is a case study to most, that´s what critics do to human beings. Here´s more :

On July, 16 1951, The Catcher In The Rye was published to a profusion of reviews and sales went up as time caught on. By 1963 it was surmised that critics had written more about the Catcher than any other contemporary novel. BY 1965 it had sold 1,500,000 copies and by 1975 it had sold 9,000,000. Certainly, Holden had hit a nerve, and while Salinger once made sure to dedicate one of his books to the few dwindling “amateur readers” still out there, criticism abounded. Everyone had a word to say. Every word seemed extra, seemed off. What needed to be known was well explicated in the book´s text. It is hard to be more on target than loving a girl for keeping all her kings in the back row. Critics aimed and tried. Nash K. Burger said “ Holden´s mercurial changes of mood, his ‘ stubborn’ refusal to admit his own sensitiveness and emotions, his cheerful disregard of what is sometimes known as reality are typically and heartbreakingly adolescent” S. N Berman for the New Yorker wrote that “ Holden is not a normal boy. He is a hypersensitive and hyper-imaginative” while Harvey Breit for the Atlantic thought the opposite “ [Holden is a] bright, terrible, and ´possibly´ normal sixteen year old. The “possibly” is how a critic plays it safe.

The fact is that criticism centered on two basic points : whether Holden was what we all were once in our inner lives or whether he was a depiction of an eccentric and possibly disturbed young man. The other point of curiosity was whether Holden would resolve his problems after ending up interred in a mental hospital. This is a much wider and essential question. It pokes at your very sense of self and society. It pokes at your discomfort of giving in to that society, selling out that which is only yours to sell, your sense of self inside the society you imagine yourself to be in and how much being a part of that society really takes you apart from yourself. This belongs to the realms of psychology or the spiritual, depending on the critic´s intellectual dependences. Critics are people too and they mostly agree with the amateur readers that Holden was a sensitive person – as we all are or were – and was going through the trials of growing up. But a critic ponders and moils about this. All that is implicit is put to discussion by criticism, when itshould be left to settle inwardly, as a matter of course, as a matter of decency. A critic vacillates. If you really want to hear about it, where Holden was born and what his lousy childhood was like, you´re too old.

Maybe the greatest achievement of the Catcher In The Rye is that it is really a token to literature. It couldn´t be sung or put to music.

The Catcher needs to speak to you. It needs to speak to you when you are alone. Nobody else is watching, waiting to see your impressions. You can lend yourself to it. The book is a brother, as you were Holden´s Allie. And he hopes to God you won´t end up like D.B, the brother prostitute writer.

Simple when you were fourteen, it is now deceptively simple when you hit forty. It was direct, because it was your voice, not a performance of your voice.The voice that speaks to you when you are quiet. That screams amidst the silence when you were growing up. The voice which told you a certain kid in school was cool and everything and a great friend if you wanted to be more popular, but not the real deal. It was the voice that spoke to you as a young bilingual kid as you rested before sleeping, thinking seriously about whether “maison” sounded better than “home” and deciding on “maison”, because everyone in America is housebroken. Americans went a little adrift. They were obviously too self-conscious about being “cool”.

Kids, young teen-agers, the younger they are, know when you pretend. They know to pretend is pretentious.

Dylan stopped being Woody Guthrie and deemed him his last idol when he took notice that Guthrie was a phony. Surrounded by statesmen and kings and leaders of every ilk.His music a national treasure. Woody was a phony just as he tried his hardest not to be one, but that´s when you knew he couldn´t remember how. A wrong word will bind you in shackles and pronounce you guilty.

The suggestion is that you were Holden because he sounded not just like you but like your very best friend. It was in his idiom, in the way that he talked. Before he even told you the facts of his life, you were aware of them, and accepted them. Because you both spoke the same language. It is like spotting a friend in a crowded room before you even get to know him. Language to Salinger is like a knowing glance.

The Catcher was book written for kids.Salinger´s kids. Kids old enough to teach you everything you forgot. The fact that they are kids only makes it easier for them to preserve that knowledge from contamination. Socialization, for Salinger, is having the cowardice to adapt yourself. Cut a piece out to fit in. This is perfectly summarized in a set of short lines. In the end of the book, Holden responds to the psychiatrist´s archetypal prodding, searching for the cure, suggesting he should apply himself and receiving the only sensible answer. “ How do you know what you´re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don´t. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it´s a stupid question.” The psychiatrist will tend to see Holden as caught up in a crossroads. The psychiatrist will try to empathize with the boy that is growing up. The psychiatrist is a critic who forgot how to read.

Holden can either grow up and adapt, or he can be true to himself and end up in a loony bin. Of course another alternative would be seeing him ending up in the crest of a mountain as a sage. Another one, still, would see him living on, one of many millions in the city streets, having resisted the fold in his teens and never having betrayed himself ever since. These are diametrically opposing paths. They are survival choices. The real tribulation, the crisis of adolescence is a test to see if you will be able to grow up to be yourself. To understand rationally, or outwardly, what you knew innately as a child. But now you speak and sound like the critic, not like the fourteen year old you once were. The real dilemma, of course, is that Holden´s crisis stopped being important and was almost forgotten until you re-read the book almost 30 years later. It is in how fast you forget that makes you reach for the nearest bottle.

It was feeling affection for a girl that leaves all the kings in the back row while playing checkers, which is also akin to thinking about your poor mother the moment you are packing up your belongings after “given the boot again and having to leave another school” and thinking of how she must have asked a million questions to the person selling the ice skates that she wanted to give to you which ended up being the wrong ones, anyway, and left in a corner of your closet in your boarding school as a relic of her caring. The skates she wanted her son to wear while swooning over the ice, playing hockey with his friends. It is exactly the same as wishing to relive the memory of the girl which made you smile when she would just leave the kings in the back row because she liked the way they looked or something.

It is like being angered at the fact that a common flashy fool like Holden´s roommate, Stradlater, is very possibly having sex with her, after chatting her up quite easily, with the same lines he uses with every girl. Holden apparently doesn´t understand girls. He repeats that he doesn´t understand girls. He stops necking when she play-acts telling him she is not ready. He cannot get involved if he doesn´t genuinely like the girl. But then, by the next day, he is necking with another one he genuinely doesn´t like and life goes on. Holden doesn´t understand girls because of the unfairness of an unworthy person being attractive to them. As if the evaluations and assessments were based on the same prerogatives as friendships. That one lusts for whom one feels affection. To Holden it is an injustice that tops off the general corruption. The icing on the cake. An injustice he is liable to commit. Holden is running the mortal risk of growing up. Sex would shut out the child and usher him promptly into manhood.

The problem, the glaring attestation of Holden´s personality and that he is much older than what most critics shunned him for is his humor. Holden is hip, attuned to the absurdity of all around him and when the world does not smother him he is willing to leave it with a laugh. And not just a sneer.A good laugh. The typethat will make your opponent throw in the towel and hand you your victory in the end.

The facility for making jokes is to sense the disjointedness in what is purported to be real and the obvious truth. It is to shred away the pretense. One example : After being enraged with Stradlater´s inane yet effective gifts at womanizing, Caulfield calls out to him as he is going to the bathroom “ to stop off on the way to the can and give Mrs. Schimdt the time. Mrs. Schimdt was the janitor´s wife.” This is appropriately toilet humor. Rowdy humor.Like hearing Brown Sugar for the first time in a honky-tonk. Any rumor of childishness was a gross misinterpretation. Holden´s way of talking has the natural lash of the wit. To bleed the victim vacant. Holden has the natural lash of the wit. His humor, however, is not restricted to a specific understanding of a precise idiom. It is not borne in time, or trapped in its streets. It makes the whole world laugh whether it finds it constructive or not. It makes the Upper East Side of New York seem universal. More evidence : “ I´m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It´s awful.If I´m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I´m going, I´m liable to say I´m going to the opera. It´s terrible.” The analyst would say Holden lies to overly protect that which is most vulnerable : his true nature. One that is on assault, almost contagiously-prone to the phoniness, or let´s be clear, the pure mediocrity of being a sheep. The problem is that the analyst is never as clear as Holden. Holden´s jokes keep you on your feet. You almost start talking like him. The critic waivers between what he should sound like and what he has grown to sound as.

Holden isn´t a child for cherishing a girl who keeps her kings in the back row, Holden isn´t just loving a girl that he kissed all over as he saw a undisguised tear fall on her cheek hard as a stone when she saw her stepdad, an insensitive, distant, and for that very fact abusive- aberrant to the core of human sensitivity - for nothing more than his distance, for choosing not to care for a child who no longer belongs to anyone, the helpless girl Holden caught and kissed all over “ anywhere – her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows and all- her ears – her whole face except her mouth.” Except the mouth…Stradlater´s date.

On second thought, the notion that Holden confuses sex with the stain of a loss of innocence say perhaps a little more about other people´s notions about sex than Holden. He says he is extremely horny. Maybe he kicks himself for being attracted to a girl who he doesn´t like simply because he doesn´t enjoy half-measures. He´d prefer to keep love and lust attached.Maybe you´re the one who is innocent.

Phoniness goes deeper than a lost innocence, or a love for the unself-conscious simple gesture of truthfulness as I understood Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker critic, implying in a Charlie Rose interview commemorating Salinger´s genius. Phoniness is the innate, the natural, the commonplace, human and (humane) ability to hear when somebody strikes the wrong note while playing the game of life wrongly, or half-assed, or cowardly as is often the case. Phoniness is a cop-out.

“ The band was putrid. Buddy Singer. Very brassy, but not good brassy, corny - brassy” ( Pg. 69 Catcher In The Rye – Little, Brown and Co. Edition). Or Ernie, the pianist “ He was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass.” The show-offy ripples are the same as prodded laughter. Audiences laughing on cue are more than a betrayal, they are a disappointment for betraying themselves.The superficial difference is in the fact that while Ernie was doing the entertaining, trying to impress an audience with his playing, an audience that laughs uproariously at any joke in a movie is trying to accommodate One comes with the other. One size fits all. It is still the sheep needlessly scared of the shadow of their own kind. Thinking they have missed something, they try to keep up with the bleating and the laughter, missing the fact that nothing is being said, nothing is being played, nothing is being written. The sheep are afraid to stand still. Stay silent.

(People who would rather laugh their hearts out at stupid movies or critics who care extensively about the correct academic annotations are also one of the same. They are facsimiles of the Stradlaters who you are told to laugh at because he thinks that being able to mark commas in the right places is part of fine writing.)

Art appreciation is perhaps the most discernible measure of the true ability to detect phoniness. Or as in the Taoist tale Salinger has Seymour read to a baby Franny, in the beginning of Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters, it is the ability to tell a superlative animal from one that just looks good. Without hesitation.Scarcely even looking. And Franny, at tenmonths old, is expected also to know the difference. You were born knowing. You choose to forget.Blinded by the faux-gold and the flash of a grin.Deafened by words like “faux-gold”.

The critics see meat where another man sees a goldfish. They speak of “adolescent disaffiliation” – ( Carl F. Strauch, Pg. 65 “ Kings in the Back Row : Meaning through Structure – A reading of Salinger´s The Catcher in the Rye” and of a “thoroughly pessimistic novel”. “ The phony world of corrupt materialism and Holden´s private world of innocence” ( Carl F. Strauch; Pg.65; Pg, 66) “ Phrasings (that) transcend their merely conversational usage and become psychologically portentous.” ( Carl F. Strauch Pg. 68). Phoniness is, - according to S. N Berhmam ,as quoted by Carol and Richard Ohmann ( Reviewers, Critics and The Catcher in the Rye; Pg. 125) “ a heading under which he {Holden} loosely gathers not only insincerity but snobbery, injustice, callousness to the tears in things, and a lot more.” Phoniness is in a lot of things, including in its being overstated. What it isn´t is a loss of innocence or a fall from grace. You are expected to know what it is. It is self-explanatory. It is found more easily in the voice of one who is desperately trying to be heard, or who is completely oblivious of being heard at all. Both ways will work.

Little Shirley Beans. -“ It was a very old terrific record that this colored girl singer Estelle Fletcher made about twenty years ago. She sings it very Dixielandand whorehouse, and it doesn´t at all sound mushy.”(Catcher, Pg.115; italics mine). In fact, it is incredible how much art criticism Salinger wedges in the book, not even bothering to fictionalize examples. Holden says how Lawrence Olivier plays Hamlet “like a goddam general instead of “ sad, screwed-up type of guy” ( Catcher, p. 117) Salinger doesn´t fictionalize, as if he were dying to put his point across. At the point of a bayonet, Holden is man enough to laugh if he wants to, if that is what needs to be done. Or holler and cry.

Even the informality shown to highly respected artists is more than the homage many understand it to be, the wish to call an author up on the phone after reading his book is like a secret handshake between men in the know. Salinger´s realistic optimism is in his undying faith that you know, and that you are, uniquely, one of his own. As a book is addressed to anyone willing to read it, Salinger is embracing everyone, personally, body after body. It is the natural facility in literature, the reading in silence, that makes it the only art that treats everyone, individually, as the same. And Salinger knows you will agree with Holden, if you will only reciprocate the gesture. If there is the same implied propensity for treating someone you have just met with recognition and respect. Someone who won´t criticize, someone who isn´t forty, anybody who just “reads and runs” (Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction, dedicatory passage.) Holden will state the bare-faced obvious -if you want to know the truth, if you´ll give him time, if you´ll just let him talk.

At school, that biggest killer of artistic affinity, Holden was taught in a public speaking class never to digress, when he tells, passionately hurt, that what he liked most about the class was when somebody digressed, when somebody went with an idea and let it carry him in its gust.“ I (Holden) was still feeling sort of dizzy or something and I had a helluva headache all of a sudden. I really did. But you could tell he was interested, so I told him a little bit about it ´It´s this course where each boy in class has to get up and make a speech. You know. Spontaneous and all. And if the boy digresses at all, you´re supposed to stop and yell ´Digression´ at him as fast as you can. It just about drove me crazy. I got an F in it (…) The trouble with me is I like when somebody digresses…it was terrible because he was a very nervous guy (…) his lips were always shaking whenever it was time for him to give a speech (…) When his lips sort of quit shaking a little bit, though, I liked his speeches better than anyone else´s (…)It is in those unguarded moments that not only you show your nature, but what great art is made of. Great art is made of artists who did not look askance for approval and went with the ebb and crest of their inspiration. Art is not performed for anybody else. To digress is to free yourself from duty. To scream for joy. Salinger, through Holden, seems to say that great art is a feverish gush, or a little girl brushing her hair out of the way and creasing her forehead, paying attention, in earnest, to what her big brother is awkwardly trying to say. Great art is to convince yourself no one is ever watching. Great art is when you stop explaining yourself “He {Kinsella}´d start telling you all about this letter to his mother got from his uncle, and how his uncle got polio and all when he was forty-two years old, and how he wouldn´t let anybody come to see him in the hospital because he didn´t want anybody to see him with a brace on. It didn´t have much to do with the farm- I admit it –but it was nice. (…) I don´t know it´s hard to explain.’ “ I had this terrific headache all of a sudden.”( Catcher Pg. 184)

(Holden´s descriptions of his psychic pain come always muted, as if he didn´t quite understand himself where they came from. Psychiatrists will say anxiety. Sages would say they come from the moldings of the soul. He just says he had a terrific headache. All of a sudden.)

Perhaps Mr. Antolini is the most ambivalent character in 20th century American Literature. Holden is shocked when the man with whom he seeks advice and - why not? - salvation) accidentaly wakes him up while tousling his hair, soothing his head. Holden runs away like acur from hell. But maybe Mr. Antolini recognizes the adorable likeness of the boy he also once was from the distance of the man he turned out to be. Maybe Mr. Antolini seeks to protect a boy coming of age who is impossible to protect. It is in the design of life that these people are impossible to protect. They shouldn´t be. They shouldn´t be guided at all.

Maybe Mr.Antolini agrees with Holden, maybe he doesn´t. Maybe he wishes he could feel himself like Holden, maybe he is happy he has grown up and doesn´t. Maybe he suffers still. Maybe he´s gay. The most meaningful passage in the book, however is a quote by old Antolini quoting a psychoanalyst named William Stekel“ The mark of the immature man is that he wants do die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one”.

Oriental sages lived long lives in silent repudiation. Forget Oriental sages. Billions of people lived, anonymously, until the day they died without raising a stink about themselves while following a way to peace of mind, to generosity, to the humble sacrificing of losing face in public but never to themselves.

Throughout this article you have intermingled Jerome David Salinger with Holden Caulfield as if author and character were the same person, throughout this article you have committed that which is the ultimate sin and the fatal blow of the critic. Age will do that. While, the truth of the matter is that, at best -risking a guess – Holden can be viewed as someone with a choice to make, a definition, he is at that crux of the moment where he can go along – which many critics and psychoanalysts call “growing up”, or he can grow up maintaining his true self, his innate abilities to discern between the real and the false now evolved into a conscious knowledge of having irrevocably made his choice and lived with it.The wise man is the one who has an inner child brightening his eyes. Billions of people have died with that knowledge firmly grasped in hand. From J.D Salinger, who died at ninety, to a teen growing up in New York. The immature man is the one who sacrifices himself nobly and publicly for a cause. Kills himself. It took Him three days in his assisted suicide. Jesus never lasted it out in the ring.

It is important to note that you don´t fight for innocence, you fight for yourself. Holden liked whorehouse music. The Holdens of today can tell the truth from MTV darlings. There is a salaciousness to truth, a wicked malice. Being truthful is not “ I cannot tell a lie” speeches common to George Washington and the politician subspecies. Their place is up in the screen. Living life like a puppet masquerade.

“ The goddamn movies. They can ruin you” – Holden Caulfield

Perhaps the timely aspect of the Catcher In the Rye, that which traps itself in a certain period of time, is this rolling and tumbling with the movies. The tear and wear to keep your identity with so many facsimiles of personalities being applauded and lauded. Badly constructed characters as models for the living. It is this constant doubt about what is truly yourself and what you have added on from so many movies that is the real failure of today, as it was in 1951, when the Catcher In The Rye was published.

(At least, in 1951, even city kids like J.D played stickball in the streets while today´s monetary interests reach into your house and trap your kids at home in front of a computer.)

(The pervasive discrepancy of a life which included a childhood and one which doesn´t is the contrast between yourself and what you see on the screen. It doesn´t show up in exams and college applications, but it is easily seen in art.)

Holden knows how corrupted he is by the movies he has seen. He has enough wisdom to know how they stray him from how he feels, how they fabricate feelings and sensations he has not picked up in direct experience from the streets. As every non-conformist he knows how much of his core has been dictated and formed by unworthy forces. But, nevertheless, he cannot help but have fun with them. In the most emotionally-laden moments of the book, in the moments when he is feeling physical pain, he resorts to the movies. His imagination is filled with scenes once concocted and purported for a profit. The secondary reason for the movies may well be to entertain.But a distant second.And within boundaries.Of the moral kind and the marketing portfolio.

Holden´s imagination is corrupted and he must flail and hit against it to keep whole. Perhaps the tendency to interpret this as a yearning for innocence and purity is the trap. It is the exact opposite. There is nothing threatening about blearing sheep and dogs that lose their bark. You see Holden as a child clinging to childhood when you have already long forgotten what it is to be a man. When you have so far lost the constant battles of staving off what you gather from touching and feeling to what you perceive you are really seeing from second-hand experience. It is living in a time when the phrase “keeping it real” is repeated and accepted without a hint of irony.

Contrary to the aforementioned Taoist tale told by Seymour Glass to a ten-month old Franny – the one where the sage can see a roan horse for the superlative animal he is without even bothering to look - is that this sage only sees what he wants to see. He can filter the world, the good from the rotted. Holden´s angst stems from his inability to filter, he is overcome, he is bereft with the abundance of fakery : “ I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I´d hate it. I wouldn’t´ even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player. I´d play in the goddamn closet.” (Catcher, pg. 84).

Please don´t you think he´s being bashful. It is self-preservation. Or even more, just good taste.

If conscience had good manners having to hide yourself from gratuitous applause would be a direct correlative to keeping your kings in the back row, to being able to differentiate good looks from Yearbook Stradlater good looks, hating people who laugh themselves silly at any dumb movie; From being depressed while being expelled, again, from school,and packing your stuff, picturing your poor old mother taking all her great motherly cares in picking out the ice skates which you never used and were the wrong size anyway, to calling for a hooker and seeing a little girl named Sunny.To suffer and suffer with every wrong note a so-called artist plays or performs, to loving writing about your young dead brother´s catcher´s mitt in which he wrote poems just so he could read something while wasting time deep in left field. And warmly smiling at the memory of that kid brother who let himself go so much he would laugh with all the joy of the world at a joke somebody happened to make at the dinner table.

Being able to digress, play and sing and dance to the point where you don´t even feel the girl´s back against your outstretched hand, kissing her everywhere, the neck, the throat, even the eyes more endearingly while avoiding her mouth, feeling at the hip and gut the whorehouse bawdiness of a song hurled with feeling, crying about where the ducks at a pond in Central Park would spend the winter because if there is no shelter or cover for them there might be no Master Plan for us, and for, ultimately, trying to make it all work true in the madman fantasy of wanting to catch children before they fall. For a living, as a means for survival.Holden said he reads a lot, yet is illiterate. He said this in the same way he kept confusing the definition of the word intelligence for intellectual.But, don´t we all. At forty, the best critics can hardly read while pumping out pieces on the meter and measures of style. At forty you have gone to the finest schools and have turned into an intellectual while becoming more and more stupid. At forty you are a phony and the transference or relinquishment of the promise you were born with that held you together has been sold in an affair hardly of notice to even yourself. It was done smoothly, while the wool was being pulled over you, your eyes conscientiously shut until the transaction was complete. Holden was hurt with affected jazz players. We are stuck with Justin Bieber.

At forty it is somebody else´s world. And concern. As a flash of hope we remember the old Taoist tale that opens Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters, where the aging Chiu-fang Kao “sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not to be looked at.” Perhaps like Holden, you, like everybody else, had the same eye for treasure but too angered by the overladen torrent of mediocrity that got you so mad you wanted to flee, play deaf and dumb, anddie, ever so nobly. You had to be able to filter. Holden loved too much. That is what angered him. He saw the lost potential.

At forty, you psychoanalyze the excessive anger at words such as : “ The next part I don´t remember so hot. All I know is I got up from the bed, like I was going down to the can or something, and then I tried to sock him, with all my might, right smack in the toothbrush, so it would split his goddam throat open” ( Catcher, pg. 43. Italics mine. Obviously not Holden´s).

Agression occasioned by the suspicion that roommate may have partook in sexual intercourse with close childhood companion.

Boy also confuses old horny song about meeting somebody in the rye with catching a body in the rye. Transplants casual sexual encounters intosalvation.A real nut job.

Or:“ I slept in the garage the night he (Allie) died and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken (…) It was a very stupid thing to do, I´ll admit, but I hardly didn´t even know I was doing it, and you didn´t know Allie.” (Catcher,pg.39Italics mine)

Outlandish violence, unleashed fury.. Indications of (P)ost (T)raumatic (S)tress (D)Disorder which likens the rites of passage from childhood to adolescence. The mention of the dead brother a feeble attempt at overcompensating with insufficient explanation.

At forty everything is aberrant, agitated, and violent. When you were fourteen you understood, perfectly. Without even looking, or batting an eye.

The Catcher in The Rye is self-explanatory for those who really love to read. The universal and timeless amateur readers who read and run. You don´t need more analysis.I am sneaking the book inside your son´s room. I hope to catch him at dawn reading under the lamplight. If he´s like you at all…

Maybe he will, maybe he won´t.

Mixing Up The Medicine

The fanfare is over as soon as you get back home. You traveled to the end of the world and you´re still home. By 1957, the world had shrunk in proportion to our ever bigger screens. You thought people would be less tolerant. You thought it would be harder to fool them. You play at being different people, you expect others to be real. Nothing is more claustrophobic than running away from home, going to the farthest stretches of the earth and be asked for your autograph. To your deep chagrin, it is even more deliberate in Japan. Back in Illinois, your fragile waif of a mother dreamed looking flakily at the sky while your father went binge-drinking and whore-fucking. Or at least, that´s how it would be shown, in a blockbuster. Starring as other people and averaging out suffering. The role in life you played was that of a little boy acting for a living. Always the consummate professional.

Mimicking people for laughs. Laughs as a wedge to break up the internal fighting between your parents. Laughter as a pause for intermission. A break. Laughter as a hail-mary attempt for wishful thinking.

The problem still stands that movies and real life are separate. Not even as a kid you were at the slightest fooled about at its tomfoolery as you tried to bridge the two. Make one fantasize about the other. Not for fun, less for entertainment. It was survival. A talent honed and developed due to the otherwise neglect of your parents. It was before the world saw you enlarged in the big-screen. It was before life became larger-than-life. And, people, correspondingly, ever so smaller. If you could act your life out everything could be kept under control. Things would be kept to a simmer and you would only explode on cue. If only when you were a kid it were possible for someone else to play-act yourself and another two actors to stand in for you parents. Life could be a play. But in Japan, in 1957, you expected people to have a little more taste. At least on the other end of the world. You expected the world to be enormous enough and bigger than your own head. It is an American sickness to imagine the rest of the world as exotic.

You knew who could play your mother. She´d be someone of a different time and place. Your mother looking out her kitchen window at a vast, level field of stunted prairie, cows mewing in the distance, horses lame, the dribble of spit on a dog´s snout. Equal mouthfuls of boredom for fodder. The slow, repetitious, endless, emptiness while gazing out the kitchen window at the span of your life stuck with telephone poles marking the years you have lost, the adjacent field dotted by distant cows chewing and grazing and stunted paralyzed while remaining in her mind forever like her dying sunlight. In the flash of a camera it would stay still forever. Your husband and your sun around somewhere, your son would sometimes have to pick you up and carry you back home. She was wrong about her son, though. She was as wrong as people were back in the time when stars were just holes in the sky.

Before Capote´s model 1957 magazine profile, The Duke in His Own Domain,exposed Marlon Brando, Brando had stated to the press his desire and intentions for Sayonara, the new movie he was headlining. At a press conference that Brando conducted upon his Tokyo arrival, Truman Capote states in his article on Brando that “he informed some sixty reporters that he had signed on to do this role because ´it strikes very precisely at prejudices that serve to limit our progress toward a peaceful world. Underneath the romance, it attacks prejudices that exist on the part of the Japanese as well as on our part,´” and also he was doing the film because it would give him the “invaluable opportunity” of working with Joshua Logan, who could teach him what to do and what not to do.”

Capote fought hard for his trend-setting 1957 interview with Brando. He had in mind a further twist to the typical magazine profile. This piece would be a warm-up for what he called - apparently without irony – A “non-fiction novel”. It entailed, in essence, that he would set his reporting in the wider confines of story-telling. He would free up the magazine profile, flesh it out and spread it in a setting which originally was only allowed for drama. His magazine piece would have the breadth of fiction-writing. It would consider development of character, a setting and a plot stone-set in reality. But, It wasn´t really inventing a new genre. It was more of a matter of redefining definitions. He was loosening up unnecessary ties. He would combine prose writing with journalism. Smudging the division which separates both genres. Keeping his balance with one foot on romance writing and another on journalism. He could make use of narrative tools to create drama in a non-fiction situation which the added convenience of already providing him with characters and plot. A non-fiction novel, a real-life story. He made the best of both worlds, standing in the middle. The objective journalistic eye for detail would be subsumed by a first-person narrative that, while maintaining a safe distance from its subject, would substitute detachment for a cruel surgical account further molded and shaped for fiction-reader consumption. The finishing touches and improvements all sprinkled over for effect. The argument was that this effect would add, rather than reduce the realism of what was reported. We see everything through a focused eye and ear, not the unmanned, neutral camera of journalism. Capote, instead, cuts thinly, piece by piece with hidden appetite something with more stuff than just gossip. He would make a book out of the premier Hollywood star.

During the whole event, we only see Capote in his description and observations of other people, and of Japan. We can only see Capote indirectly, suggested by his tone, his off-handedness, his asides, his opinions, his snickering. So much for objectivity… Capote´s journalism is that of a scientist who develops a taste for the monster he is cutting apart. A psychopath sporting a white lab coat.

Both men had enough talent that manipulating others is simply second nature. They do not just possess the tricks of the trade. They are artists not tricksters. They are brilliant . And the very nature of their art implies distortion and deception. One is a Hollywood actor, the other is a writer trying not to be a hack. They wear the same mask, the same costume. It is a waiting game. The most disillusioned, the most hopeless is always victorious. It is a token of the ones who least believe in others and in themselves.

Obscure, shaded, unsheltered men. Tender, vital men. Marlon Brando and Truman Capote. Tender men with their tender skin bruised. With injustice. With a mother having to be picked up in Chicago´s skidrow drunk out of her mind, or a little queer boy whose life has taught him how to sock somebody straight in the mouth. After being continuously slapped in the face while holding your arms out for a hug. A punch to the stomach for expecting that hug. It is while he bleeds that a man comes of age. The shedding of blood is O.K. It comes by way of an education.

Hell was home. Paradise was the farthest from home you were able to go. In every street-smart criminal with an attitude and a sharp knife is a kid who once bit the dust.

Capote knew Brando. He was an outcast, by default, out of necessity almost by birth. Living in the outskirts of wherever he was, attempting not only to find his way, but to find a highway right to the heart of the matter. Oh, he knew Marlon Brando too well. A stranger in his family. A stranger to his world has only two options. He could lose, or he could concoct a win. An orphan being raised by people other than his parents, is nothing but a boy being raised by parents who were meant to have different kids. An orphan who despises the fact that he is an orphan will be expected to try to show the whole world that we are all orphans, and that our parents are just blood. You are a child who lives with people who, no matter how they act, not matter how much people say they are your parents, semblance and likeness in every way, you know you are living in a house of unstable landlords and strangers. We are all orphans, in a way. We can be all orphans. You are the head of the orphanage, paid for by your suffering, paid for by your disillusionment. You are the key bearer. And by your credentials you will make a better mother and father than your own. You will be a better mom and dad to yourself. There is more in being a parent than neon nights, early morning road houses, sawdust and confetti strewn on the floor. Nude girls wanting to be actresses, lazy strip shows, boozing and lipstick. A wailing demon-child, or a cold calculating one, is the result. The whole world is your home and everyone in it is your extended family. People are all the same.

In this non-fiction fiction, instead of focusing on Brando, Capote is really focusing and writing about himself. Or, better said, he is creating his own persona, much like a fiction writer would create a character. And he will use all the tools available to a writer to make his characters as real as possible. His success in making Marlon Brando and his own persona believable can be compared to Brando´s brilliance in playing a role. The allure of a “non-fiction novel” is in the reader´s uncertainty about which part is fiction and which is real. After all, it allows for both. Furthermore, much like some first-person narratives in fiction or in the setting of a play, we are not exactly privy to his thoughts but, rather, to his language, his manner, the qualifications he makes about the objects and people populating his world. Opinions and observations he shares with the reader, but not with Brando or any of the other characters. Capote expects to win us over as equals, equal snobs - we could only hope to be as such - and, with equal discrimination and discernment to know that Hollywood is nothing but cheap entertainment. Like great media manipulators, Marlon Brando and Truman Capote know that the truth is in the making. And in this arena, it is the writer who has the last word.

The true-to-life Brando we are given is a naked man. One that is not, at least in the very beginning, aware that he is under such astute observation. Capote describes his mannerisms. We recognize them in the roles that Brando plays: “Resuming his ( Brando´s) position on the floor, he lolled his head against a pillow, drooped his eyelids, then shut them. It was as though he'd dozed off into a disturbing dream; his eyelids twitched, and when he spoke, his voice—an unemotional voice, in a way cultivated and genteel, yet surprisingly adolescent, a voice with a probing, asking, boyish quality—seemed to come from sleepy distances…” The fact that we have seen Brando act in this fashion does not, in any way, whatsoever, diminish the writer´s artistry or make his job any easier. It is the struggle to find the exact words to fit into an internationally known and broadcasted acting performance, which ups the ante. It is much like having a known actor play a known person. It is able to encapsulate Brando by defining his art minutely. He does it so deftly that he does not only score points on Brando but establishes his art- writing – as superior to what our famous Holllywood boy can do on the screen. He gives us Brando as frosting, as the topping of all his other successes build up in his journalistic masterpiece.

He strikes further “The voice went on, as though speaking to hear itself, an effect Brando's speech often has, for, like many persons who are intensely self-absorbed, he is something of a monologuist”. Apparently Capote must have said something to Brando about his tendency to act perennially, pointing him out, throwing away his whole show. Capote is no cub reporter. He is no teen groupie. Capote is not a fan. We gather this not from anything said by Capote explicitly but by Brando´s reactions. Once again we see Capote through Brando. Or rather, we see Capote through Capote´s Brando´s impressions of Capote as written by Capote. It is at this junction, at this hour of the night that we are led to sense that Brando notices that he let his guard down too long. We are not shown how Capote talks and acts towards Brando because an interview is not an exchange between friends. Interviews are competitive fighting. No holds-barred. Brando side-steps. Lightens up the mood as is his wont. Backing up defensively he jokes in self-deprecation "People around me never say anything," he says. "They just seem to want to hear what I have to say. That's why I do all the talking…" Capote must have sneered too early.

One should never bullshit a bullshitter, the saying goes. But that is if you are not prepared to win. To be king you must dethrone the other. To win the belt you got to beat the champ. And with genius iconic figures like Marlon Brando and Truman Capote, you can´t lose by points we have to be shunned off the ring.

During Capote´s strikes we cannot help but admire Brando´s cajoling. The same imaginative, wit he uses when answering other reporter´s questions on acting. Anyone can act, some are better cheaters. And in the end, he is just another brick in Holllywood´s estate in the need to typecast personality, diminishing life into plot, and controlling behavior. He has the experience to know that fighting the system won´t take you very far. The way to not play the game is by making fun of it. Right at the outset of his career he was telling reporters he was only acting because he lacked the moral courage to refuse the money and look for real work. There was really nothing to acting. People did it all the time. People did it in their sleep. Hollywood would just dream for you. When you´re caught smoking marijuana by a cop, you put on a performance. All we need to be actors is the opportunity provided. Some cry in funerals of forgotten friends. Some say they are having a fine morning before jumping off a cliff. As in any activity some have had the need to perfect it a bit more. And looking for truth in an actor is like searching for love in a whorehouse. We all act, because we are all liars. You got to admire his stance.

It only makes people wonder aloud how he is able to perform so well. And he dismisses the whole thing. Besides making critics like Capote feel like idiots. Instead of pleading your case you seem to agree with your critics, hitting them back on their heads with their critiques, treating raves with dismissive contempt. You not only block another sucker punch, you laugh them off the ring. But Capote can slither his way back in. And he´ll give up a round or two for the benefit of the snickering hypocrisy he thrives so much in while playing the pale buffoon.

On the other hand, what we have in Brando is the fullest embodiment of a technique, of the Method, as taught by Stanislavsky, on film. A method which believes in burrowing deep within yourself to look for answers to the problems involved with the impersonation of someone else´s feelings and actions. Understanding yourself as a treasure trove and having the charity to sacrifice it to exposure. Your thoughts and feelings will back you up or prop you up like pegs on a wall to the point where you resurface as someone else. In short, it is through self-knowledge that you learn about acting like somebody else. Some actors instead of subsuming their personality will make a career of doing the exact opposite. Marlon Brando sometimes believes in acting, sometimes he doesn´t. When he didn´t there would be a sort of symbiosis between what people thought of as the actor as a person with the role the actor played. Generally, the actor is not confused. Audiences and women will hope there is no difference. Men will find it easier guiding themselves on well-received performances than finding out for themselves how to be men.

To frustrate even more the situation, what is copied is a question of style, not of substance. One cannot relive the role played in a specific movie since one´s life differs from the script. Who Marlon Brando really is might have or might not have been caught on tape, imagined, or been contrived by the viewing public who is spending a considerable time mimicking his mannerisms he was paid a healthy sum to play. In other words, Brando is the only man left laughing. Or snickering, because you can´t really laugh uproariously at such a situation when only you and your acting buddies know that kind of con is being set.

People started slouching in supermarkets, on dates, eating their meals. Marlon Brando became a performance, an institution. He could be a gun, or a badge. The orphan, Brando. People stopped pronouncing words and preferred mumbling. It was taken for realism.

*****

By this time, you thought Japan was far enough from home. But it was too late. You were never given the chance to escape. After a world war, and two atom bombs and a need for cash, Japan not only was not so different anymore, even when it was still Japan it didn´t look too different. Hollywood had twisted it into mirroring what fawning eyes expected to see. The only ones who knew Japan now were very old people.

Besides thinking up exotic places, it is another American sickness to stereotype so hard that even what they see as diversity is well-defined in advance. They expect diversities where there are none and overlook the real ones by expecting them to be in the places they assign for them. It is a veritable strangled blow to kingdom come by Hollywood´s big screens.

Truman said that “Proportionately, the number of premises purveying strong liquor is higher than in New York, and the diversity of these saloons—which range from cozy bamboo closets accommodating four customers to many-storied, neon-hued temples of fun featuring, in accordance with the Japanese aptitude for imitation, cha-cha bands and rock ’n’ rollers and hillbilly quartets and chanteuses existentialistes and Oriental vocalists who sing Cole Porter songs with American Negro accents—is extraordinary.”, yet the Japanese probably don´t see eye to eye with him, because, despite pecuniary concerns, they might not be in on the joke. They are not acquainted with the value system that deems this a little ridiculous because nobody told them about it. Now, that is exotic.

Despite the good fun around the set, Sayonara was doomed because the producers and the director Joshua Logan could not employ Japan´s famed Kabuki Theatre, the No players and the Bunraku puppeteers, the Holllywood men were wishing for to provide a touch of antiquity and class. But the same change that Capote noticed in Brando meeting him after 12 years - the lost vulnerability in his gaze, the rebel flash now tamed, the thirst and hunger of a man finally arriving at the opportunity to rise above himself and the whole world - vanquished. A man who made his way in the stage, as the whole world saw his soul screaming. As Pauline Kael said about his performance in Streetcar, she was embarrassed for him. She thought she was watching a young man having a breakdown right on stage. And then she noticed that the young man was acting. Walked right off and went into the night.

He revealed your feelings scarred in his own face. The spotlights and the headlines of Marlon Brando were for us all. At our best, we felt what he showed us, every day, on that stage, playing Streetcar . We needed a stage, a screen to show us what we were. The fact that we have in us blood that rushes through our bodies and keeps us alive.

Sayonara had big plans. At the onset of filming, spirits were high. It seemed that Hollywood was setting its spell, or its trap - depending if you´re standing East, or West - to prop up their staging of Michener´s lovelorn romance between an American and a Japanese woman crushed as soon as it blossomed, by bigger outside forces way beyond their control. Politics. Two atom bombs. The fact that the Japanese are brown.

But, as it were, in spite of the cultural differences, the understanding and love between two people will always supersede the webs and traps and complexities of our world which inevitably interfere to thicken the plot, like fate would intercede in Greek plays. Prejudice and racism is never personal. It is group-thinking. Politics are cold. And the teaser was having the Bunraku puppeters and the ancient art of the Kabuki theater as the bread and sausage for another Hollywood hotdog.

Japan at first said yes, but then reneged. Some Japanese applauded the decision claiming that they needed to protect their heritage, others denounced the decision as a step backwards, a forlorn cherishing of the past, a hindrance to a cosmopolitan future. A milllenia-old culture standing in front of a cosmopolitan shiny future. Japan held its own and said no. Negotiations would heat up as people thought to themselves of prices and tickets being sold. In the meantime, Marlon Brando, the star, started losing interest. And he started making fun of himself again. Maybe when he said it was a movie that would truly underscore cultural differences and racism on both sides, he was kidding his ass off. In fact, he now said “ with a snort ‘Oh, ‘Sayonara,’ I love it! This wondrous hearts-and-flowers nonsense that was supposed to be a serious picture about Japan. So what difference does it make? I’m just doing it for the money anyway. Money to put in the kick for my own company.’” If he was a bleeding heart the conman in him would provide bandages and band-aid. Get back in the ring !

For a con man to be any good, he has to leave you guessing all the time if he is speaking the truth or not. To be totally convinced shortchanges the fun. Our con man just needs others to tend to believe in his con, or, in other words, to tend to believe in him. And the more convinced he is of his own act, the more real it would appear. A con can never be too obvious. But it cannot be so invisible in order for the people who have been conned not to know it. There is no con if nobody gets disillusioned. His biggest prize is your cherry.

“ I give up” says Brando after the initial hassle with governments and producers “. I’m going to walk through the part, and that’s that. Sometimes I think nobody knows the difference anyway. For the first few days on the set, I tried to act. But then I made an experiment. In this scene, I tried to do everything wrong I could think of. Grimaced and rolled my eyes, put in all kind of gestures and expressions that had no relation to the part I’m supposed to be playing. What did Logan say? He just said, ‘It’s wonderful. Print it!’”

Capote will not hesitate in presenting Brando in all his charm and glory. He states what Joshua Logan said “Marlon's the most exciting person I've met since Garbo. A genius.” He cites Elias Kazan´s praise “Marlon is just the best actor in the world.” Despite making sure to distance himself, “Since the most fervent of movie-star fans are the people who themselves work in the film industry, Brando was a subject of immense interest within the ranks of the "Sayonara", he does not underplay Brando´s hold in the imagination of the public or his magnificent creativity as an actor. He definitely wants to make sure that Brando is the world´s best actor in order to knock him down and tries very hard in making sure, we the public, won´t confuse him with what Brando calls “ the people with pencils”. Downplaying Marlon Brando would not only minimize his certain incontrovertible victory that we anticipate, but would also be completely inconsistent with the opinions of anyone who has seen Brando act. Apparently making a point of deflecting any high opinion Brando might make of him - the hiding reptile prone for the kill - Capote´s inquiries to Brando are purposefully obvious and Brando is lulled into handing out his pat answers. In other words, Capote makes him act, and relishes in the fact that Brando does not see that Capote knows the difference, letting him “talk and talk…” “What’s so hot about New York?” when asked about a return to the stage “There aren’t any parts for me.” In another hushed aside, Capote smirks “Stack them, and the playscripts offered him in any given season by hopeful Broadway managements might very well rise to a height exceeding the actor’s own.” The implication is obvious. Brando´s ego surpasses any attempt to limit him to a role. We snicker with Capote, we are his accomplices.

Capote´s masterful and lasting journalistic piece begins almost haphazardly, as he shows up a half-hour late to the interview he was actually barred from conducting by the movie´s director. The fact that he showed up late is something he would like for us to know. We are taken through his act as he hides his scalpel-sword under his coat, cutting and sorting out inch by inch every expressive tissue of the “guileful salamander” turning him around, letting him crawl over his hand and under his sleeve. We sense the danger. But we have no idea about its size. We are led on. We take the risk.

“ Most Japanes girls giggle” is how Capote starts his article.

It is indirect and it is in keeping with his purported lack of interest with his subject´s world while being atrociously snobbish, belittling those who he simply doesn´t understand and seemingly finding no point in trying. A snob away from home loses his bearings. Capote the man, the persona, is left so unbalanced he needs to ridicule Japanese girls as silly uncontrollable gigglers who suffer, off and on, of a “ quaint hysteria”. He is not in Kansas anymore. It is very hard to be witty when you don´t speak the language.

The snob Capote has his whole act turned over, but he won´t spill a drop of his martini while he knows that there are still people listening. The reader is his crutch. The reader is his fellow traveler. We are with him on his trip away to Japan. Yet Capote is more than a persona, he is a writer. A good writer. No good writer can really be a snob.

Like those Russian dolls in which bigger identical dolls cover smaller ones, Capote the writer is much bigger than Capote, the persona, to the point where the persona or the man cannot stain or diminish the writer in any way. They are two different beings, born out of different natures, and breadth. Capote the pompous snob is a cover, less of a cover, not even garment he can cover himself with, less than a nightie. Capote the writer towers over the snob. As a writer he has to be able to disagree or even betray his pettiness. Because a writer cannot have the same hang-ups as a man. It is impossible for a real writer to be a racist. It is impossible for a real writer to think of race as he sees color.

The writer does not care about snobbery, Hollywood or even Marlon Brando. All he cares about is his craft. He cares about turning a magazine profile into something bigger that will stand the test of age. His descriptions are masterly in their precision and conciseness. He is a conjurer waving his wand at the objects he chooses, making gems out of these objects that, when enchanted by their new description, make the old words seem mute. A lesser writer needs to make a display of italics to make a spell of magic.

“The Miyako,” he writes “where about half of the ‘Sayonara’ company was staying, is the most prominent of the so-called Western-style hotels in Kyoto; the majority of its rooms are furnished with sturdy, if commonplace and cumbersome, European chairs and tables, beds and couches.” But, for the convenience of Japanese guests who prefer their own mode of décor while desiring the prestige of staying at the Miyako, or of those foreign travelers who yearn after authentic atmosphere yet are disinclined to endure the unheated rigors of a real Japanese inn, the Miyako maintains some suites decorated in the traditional manner, and it was in one of these that Brando had chosen to settle himself.” The slicing of irony made ever so thin. Yet the mockery is never an end to itself. Every analogy is many-layered, packed loosely. Every metaphor reveals more and more with a simple change of the lens. Capote continues“ Without the overlying and underlying clutter of Brando's personal belongings, the rooms would have been textbook illustrations of the Japanese penchant for an ostentatious barrenness. (…. ) In these rooms, the divergent concepts of Japanese and Western decoration—the one seeking to impress by a lack of display, an absence of possession-exhibiting, the other intent on precisely the reverse—could both be observed, for Brando seemed unwilling to make use of the apartment's storage space, concealed behind sliding paper doors.” Truman Capote is circling around, nearing one of his major themes. The forced bridging and conciliation of two very different cultures, Japanese and American, is not the only implication made out of the mess of a faux-japanese hotel room occupied by an American, there is the further mess inside Brando´s head. And the confusion of suits and ties and jackets strewn around is just another portrayal of the clutter of a man trying to sort out his head in a world that seems to fit in the nutshell created by the movies he and others have starred in. You have traveled all the way to Japan. Maybe the Japanese could oblige and be sincerely exotic.

It seems hysterical that to get away, Brando had to settle in Tahiti at a time and a place where he was one of the first white many people there saw. A place where his acting and mannerisms played to an unshakable audience. As another 50´s hero said over and over with the gravity that such foresight can bring in a man that is trying desperately to cling to a reality that is being lost, someone not quite a man yet, an adolescent, but much more ancient, much older than the men who weren´t even able to witness their own betrayal and selling-out - men of all trades and pretenses – the very doctors who, in their medical judgment, preferred to look for labels to stick in their pill-boxes an adolescent who couldn’t´, because he simply didn´t want to, couldn´t forget the world he glimpsed when was born in it, the world he knew existed, the world that made sense before he had to think about these things, the world he quite clearly saw as a child, being sold without a sound, without a sparing look, sold out, to every single bidder, in its every forgery, in the plays and in the movies, in the cries and fake laughter, in the faces people make and the words they all say, making absolute sense but missing completely the heart of the matter and the aim of a soul. Fellow men who acted criminally augmenting his own disillusionment. Grown men who fake. Phonies. There is no point, there is no credit in living and prospering in such a world. A Marlon Brando or two would spring in a field of rye, but not any longer. A highway has been paved in all directions and both Marlon and Truman helped set the concrete out of fear of being seen naked in the face of impeding laughter. Lest we forget, neither man lost their lives to the funny farm. They were both very successful. But I will wager anything that Marlon Brando is afraid of being fooled by that huge heart of his.

When he says he´ll “ walk through the part.” And when he says “ Sayonara – that wondrous hearts-and-flowers nonsense.”…

There wouldn´t be so many errors and mistakes made if the world lacked the technology for the totality and assault and control inherent in mass media. And it is the nature of mass media to simplify and copy while stressing appearances. Nothing could be better for Hollywood and worse for the rest of us. Selling art like soap will only increase your stink. From America to Japan and everywhere in between, you might have known someone as charismatic and intelligent as Marlon Brando. You might even have known two. But it would never have crossed your mind to think he was larger-than-life. We were even lucky enough he took things seriously enough to try to be true in his own role-playing. He played us with originality.

Now the problem is not only that the charm and charisma and intelligence have been downgraded and sold as merchandise, but that, exactly because of this very fact, it is impossible for you to meet another Marlon Brando. Too expensive. Talent is scarce, work is heavy. The CEOS of the entertainment industry have scoured their country for more fodder, Styrofoam puppets to substitute the people who first showed up with talent, after they ascertained, to their credit, that most people will not cry and holler at the incipience of this tragic state of affairs, but only in due time. When someone finally breaks down and has another fit, out of boredom, we will see if the talent is really all gone? And, anyway, who will stand up for us? Lulled and disconnected enough in a place where art is appraised as pretty good if it is pretty real. That shouldn´t be a problem. It should be a given.

Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

By 1957, this would sound absolutely absurd but these men became very well- paid actors. By the 80´s we were getting very screwed. The signs weren´t so hard to make out, even if they seemed normal. But how could we fool ourselves thinking that Industry-based, assembly line, conveyor belt, mass entertainment ,commercial onslaught would not bite us in the ass. We may wish to consider, for instance the case of Steven Spielberg, and his comic-book, fast-food, cheap imaginings. Our kids cheering for an extra-terrestrial on a bike, pitching a toy, speak and spelling his way home and getting the fuck out. We liked our Speak-and-Spells.

Instead of climbing trees and running and swimming, kids had their fun ready-made and supplied to them. It saved them effort. And their parents knew they weren´t up to any mischief.

What we have is well-behavior posing as non-conformism. The whole world´s admiration will not fill every hole in your body. It won´t fill the holes in your music, in your smile, in your screams, in your head as a leather-jacket motorcycle boy, a hole in pin stripe suit, you are a hole winning Oscars sipping your champagne full of holes. A hole screaming its lungs out for everyone to stop for a while, step out of line.

Copies sell just as well. And the screen focuses attention. And it is flat enough to acquiesce the horror.

Copies and posers don´t just stand for the real thing. They substitute it. They stamp it out. Any telling of people and reality is too messy and incongruous to fit in a story. Model performances are a forging of reality. Just like the limits and boundaries of a magazine profile which chooses which details will be summed up. Instead, it only abbreviates. Too much detail is excised and, to put it even more bluntly, it is not a question of downsizing , it is a question of wrongfully portraying reality. But you get your performance. Life spills over, sticks out. Life swears and charges. Life never fits, if you make it real.

Our times have killed personality. Walk down the street and you can almost guess which people are pretending to be what roles in their heads. People live as if there were an invisible movie reel incessantly turned on while we fill in the blanks in our scripted lives by daydreaming parts of scenes and parts of people. We don´t even have to conjure up an actor or think clearly about some favorite scene in a movie, we automatically follow the rules and codes of the general narrative that glues us in. It seems impossible to stop this. And if one of us stopped pretending no one would notice, anyway. Because of our love for a buck we have submitted our best feelings to a mass industry construction which keeps breaking new records of output and surplus cash. In consequence, it has reduced human personality to style, it has diminished style to soap and it has sprayed soap into a stinking detergent. In Japan, Marlon Brando only goes out with glasses and a surgical mask. This in a country which bred people who committed kamikaze attacts to preserve their culture. It wasn´t enough. Hollywood scared them witless. Brando is a star in Japan and he doesn´t know why and if you grill a Japanese groupie she may not know why either. While he is fucking them all into their “quaint hysteria”.

Capote said that Brando said “"Spencer Tracy is the kind of actor I like to watch. The way he holds back, holds back—then darts in to make his point,” . And to that we can safely infer that we are getting another clue about Truman Capote´s writing as he likes to talk about himself by way of answers to stupid questions. Much has been said about Capote´s pacing and rhythm in this article. We are slowly pulled in, slightly interested, almost as if we were starting to play with an outmoded toy. But much like Brando we don´t quite put off Capote. There is a thread of interest that leads us on, until we are slowly entangled, quite aware of the knots being set but still we keep off putting off Capote. You drink a little sake, you listen to yourself talk, and he is close to you like your closest enemies, close like a brother, but you are far away from home and it is good enough to have someone you can talk to, while listening to yourself talking, someone who will listen to you and who knows your language. Someone who lingers.

Towards the end, it is hard to know if you are talking to yourself or to someone else. Just like it is hard to separate fact from fiction, the truth from your imagination.

And the writing is masterful.

“I retired to the sun porch, (…)Below the windows, the hotel garden, with its ultra-simple and soigné arrangements of rock and tree, floated in the mists that crawl off Kyoto's waterways—for it is a watery city, crisscrossed with shallow rivers and cascading canals, dotted with pools as still as coiled snakes and mirthful little waterfalls that sound like Japanese girls giggling. Once the imperial capital and now the country's cultural museum, such an aesthetic treasure house that American bombers let it go unmolested during the war, Kyoto is surrounded by water, too; beyond the city's containing hills, thin roads run like causeways across the reflecting silver of flooded rice fields. That evening, despite the gliding mists, the blue encircling hills were discernible against the night, for the upper air had purity; a sky was there, stars were in it, and a scrap of moon. Some portions of the town could be seen. Nearest was a neighborhood of curving roofs. The dark façades of aristocratic houses fashioned from silky wood yet austere, northern, as secret-looking as any stone Siena palace. How brilliant they made the street lamps appear, and the doorway lanterns casting keen kimono colors—pink and orange, lemon and red. Farther away was a modern flatness—wide avenues and neon, a skyscraper of raw concrete that seemed less enduring, more perishable, than the papery dwellings stooping around it. Brando completed his call. Approaching the sun porch, he looked at me looking at the view. He said, "Have you been to Nara? Pretty interesting."

“I had, and yes, it was.” “Ancient, old-time Nara,’’

“An hour's drive from Kyoto—a postcard town set in a show-place park. Here is the apotheosis of the Japanese genius for hypnotizing nature into unnatural behavior. The great shrine-infested park is a green salon where sheep graze, and herds of tame deer wander under trim pine trees and, like Venetian pigeons, gladly pose with honeymooning couples; where children yank the beards of unretaliating goats; where old men wearing black capes with mink collars squat on the shores of lotus-quilted lakes and, by clapping their hands, summon swarms of fish, speckled and scarlet carp, fat, thick as trout, who allow their snouts to be tickled, then gobble the crumbs that the old men sprinkle. That this serpentless Eden should strongly appeal to Brando was a bit surprising. With his liberal taste for the off-trail and not-overly-trammelled, one might have thought he would be unresponsive to so ruly, subjugated a landscape. Then, as though apropos of Nara, he said, ‘Well, I'd like to be married. I want to have children.’ It was not, perhaps, the non sequitur it seemed; the gentle safety of Nara just could, by the association of ideas, suggest marriage, a family.

Marlon Brando died famous as one of Hollywood´s biggest lovers. He had slept with more than a thousand women. At the time of this article he had married Anna Kashfi who people at the time either had her conflated to be a Darjeeling-born Buddhist of the purest parentage or simply the daughter of an English couple born in India called O´Callaghan.

When finally asked about James Dean, who tried to copy Brando on and off the screen, even going on to play the bongos, Brando said he hardly knew him. He was no friend of Dean. Once he met him in a party. Dean was striking it big. When he saw Brando step in he started showing off, acting just like him. Brando waited, embarrassed for him. Then he took him aside and told him that he should look for a psychiatrist, he had a few numbers he could call right away. “Listen to me, kid. Can´t you tell you´re sick?”

My mother. I took care of her. Wanted to. She could have stayed in my apartment. She could have stayed in New York.

Before Brando became an actor, he was kicked out of school, expelled from the army, he needed food stamps, he was an elevator boy, he even thought of being a priest. As Capote quotes from hearsay “ He (Brando) needs to find something in life, something in himself, that is permanently true, and he needs to lay down his life for it. For such an intense personality, nothing less than that will do.”

"Marlon," Capote quotes his friend Elia Kazan, "is one of the gentlest people I've ever known. Possibly the gentlest." Kazan's remark had meaning when one observed Brando in the company of children. As far as he was concerned, Japan's youngest generation of lovely, lively, cherry-cheeked kids with bowlegs and bristling bangs—was always welcome to lark around the Sayonara sets. He was good with the children, at ease, playful, appreciative; he seemed, indeed, their emotional contemporary, a co-conspirator. Moreover, the condoling expression, the slight look of dispensing charitable compassion, peculiar to his contemplation of some adults was absent from his eyes when he looked at a child.

People who knew him before he became Marlon Brando knew him as Bud. Some said that when living in New York and studying at the New School his apartment would always be filled with people. People who seemed to have strayed inside. Nobody seemed to know each other. There would be someone asleep, some girl dancing by herself , someone moving chess pieces on a board, but, from time to time, there was the drums, sound of drums everywhere. Bud banging away. He had fun, in intervals. He brooded by himself, and then he was wild, seemingly by himself, as well.

My mother. I tried so hard for her. My mother just broke like a piece of porcelain.

It is so very ordinary. The child of an alcoholic couple, Bud was raised in Libertyville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. As a child he was eager, extroverted and fun-loving, always looking to compete playfully with whoever would hold their breath longest, for instance, or who could eat more hot dogs? His parents were unstable. Both drank too much. They fought. Still just a boy, Bud would run away from home several times, always coming back. His father, as far as Bud thought, never really saw anything in him. He was always distant. Maybe the boy was just a burden, a millstone. Bud was defiant, protecting his mother. Maybe the boy reminded the father too much of himself. Later on, as a teenager, Bud lived, ostensibly, the life of the All-American boy in the All-American high school , but the flip side as well, the muck-stained tragedy of taking mom to Alcoholic Anonymous, witnessing the dire reality of people striving and failing, drunks right outside the AA with worms crawling out of their bare legs, bums giving up on pleading for just a break. It was the flip side of Harry Truman´s America, the squeaky clean America of preppies in polo shirts, even the motorcycle gangs he impersonated in The Wild One were too clean. Brando knew he was lying. As a teenager the extremes of his feelings for his parents were almost dialectical. His mother was a dreaming, lost, poetic, princess unsuited for the life of stink and mud his father sprang from, who in turn forced Bud to dig ditches and shovel manure. Like another Hollywood leading man, Richard Burton, Bud grew out of manure.

“ Listen, already. It´s a disease. Can´t you tell how sick you are…?”

Being insecure, feeling like the shovelfuls he sold for extra pay, even after first moving to New York, Marlon picked the kind of friends he thought he deserved. Nobody could ever match his intelligence, his brightness, his talents. They were low-lives who maybe would return his kindness. He seemed to be hiding, not from anyone, more from himself. He was covering himself up, slinking his way through the anonymous New York streets. It was too ordinary. Maybe it is because it is the stuff of real life, real people. Or maybe we just saw it in a movie.

His grandma said that Bud always seemed to pick on the cross-eyed girls for dates. The Hollywood heartthrob. When did he stop being Bud? Has he ever? Who is Marlon Brando? After he turned famous, he wanted, at least, to make one great movie about the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, the people who were swept away.

Capote twirls his scalpel. Snickers at the guileful salamander who can pretend to be anyone. Who has exchanged the dirt for Hollywood beds and linen. He looks at his dirty little worm, stone-faced. Almost losing his cover as a scientist, an unattached observer. They were too alike. The lies were too much, filling his head. He quotes another person from hearsay:

“If you’ve noticed, Marlon can’t, won’t, talk to two people, simultaneously. He’ll never take part in a group conversation. It always has to be a cozy tête-à-tête—one person at a time. Which is necessary, I suppose if you use the same kind of charm on everyone. But even when you know that’s what he’s doing, it doesn’t matter. Because when your turn comes, he makes you feel you’re the only person in the room. In the world. Makes you feel that you’re under his protection and that your troubles and moods concern him deeply. You have to believe it; more than anyone I’ve known, he radiates sincerity. Afterward, you may ask yourself, ‘Is it an act?’ If so, what’s the point? What have you got to give him? Nothing except—and this is the point—affection.”

He had to have everything over–the-top for feeling so low. It is the same act, his friends would say. For compensation. Maybe Marlon Brando was really acting for himself.

“He listened to me. He knew he was sick. I gave him the name of an analyst, and he went. And at least his work improved(… ) this glorifying of James Dean is all wrong. That's why I believe the (Marlon´s) documentary about him could be important. To show he wasn't a hero; show what he really was—just a lost boy trying to find himself.”

“Listen, don´t you know how sick you really are …?

It is too cruel. Because worse than the man who beats someone to a pulp is the man holding the camera. Harder than the actual pain, is its reflection on the screen, the actor making faces, and meaning nothing. The worst thing about bloody movies is that it is fake blood. The screams are all out of synch, and so is the hurting.

Capote is ruthless, as if he blamed Brando. For Hollywood, for his fans, for pop culture, for something huge. Because the harshness, the manner in which he chose to end his piece is much like the scenes of a horror movie a child doesn´t want to see. But he makes you see. Your eyes are wide open. And then the child´s fear simmers down when he sees the credits. You see who did the lighting, the director, the names of the producers , the actors, everybody involved in the crew, and you learn that it was all make-believe. You felt so much for nothing. Little by little, it carries on to real life. People learn about themselves watching actors interact on the screen instead of naturally interacting among themselves.

Worse than a drunk mother and drunk father is a movie about them. It is so empty, so fleshed-out. There is something blasphemous in reenacting something deeply felt. There is a lot of lying going on, when the aim is for us all to have the same specific feeling. And this is when you feel Capote´s rage. When you feel his hatred and anger that he can hardly control. The scientist letting all his grisly beasts out of the cage to devour each other in the lab. The man in a white coat punching and jabbing and slashing away at the dead body in the autopsy room. You want your child to be immune from all that you have seen, you want it to be different than when you were a kid, and you tell him fairy-tales at night when he can´t sleep, you tell him fairy-tales at night knowing against all hope that he will grow up and stop believing in your stories. You hope he sleeps right through the sufferings and pain in life which could turn him, perhaps, into a successful actor or leave him raging and mad kicking a wounded body, breaking bottles at night. And then, maybe when it is too late, you come to find that the worse that could happen is rather than going through the pain and troubles, your boy keeps believing in your dreams. Even if they are just imaginative fairy-tales. The real danger is losing yourself in a dream.

“She broke clean. Like a piece of porcelain. So I stopped caring.”

“You mad, crazy, fool…”

Capote is shameless. He was a monster. He was a HeHHHhwriter trying to make it. This is how he finishes his opponent off : “Brando has not forgotten Bud. When he speaks of the boy he was, the boy seems to inhabit him, as if time had done little to separate the man from the hurt, desiring child. “My father was indifferent to me,” he said. “Nothing I could do interested him, or pleased him. I’ve accepted that now. We’re friends now. We get along.” Over the past ten years, the elder Brando has supervised his son’s financial affairs; in addition to Pennebaker Productions, of which Mr. Brando, Sr., is an employee, they have been associated in a number of ventures, including a Nebraska grain-and-cattle ranch, in which a large percentage of the younger Brando’s earnings was invested. “But my mother was everything to me. A whole world. I tried so hard. I used to come home from school . . .” He hesitated, as though waiting for me to picture him:” And this is where the shock comes, when we feel the cut. Capote describes Marlon´s suffering as if he was giving scene directions, turning it obscene, as if he were illegitimating a man´s inner core of suffering. As if he was making another man´s life into a great big lie. “Bud, books under his arm, scuffling his way along an afternoon street. ‘There wouldn’t be anybody home. Nothing in the icebox.’ More lantern slides: empty rooms, a kitchen. ‘Then the telephone would ring. Somebody calling from some bar. And they’d say, ‘We’ve got a lady down here. You better come get her.’ Suddenly, Brando was silent. In silence the picture faded, or, rather, became fixed: Bud at the telephone. At last, the image moved again, leaped forward in time. Bud is eighteen, and: ‘I thought if she loved me enough, trusted me enough, I thought, then we can be together, in New York; we’ll live together and I’ll take care of her. Once, later on, that really happened. She left my father and came to live with me. In New York, when I was in a play. I tried so hard. But my love wasn’t enough. She couldn’t care enough. She went back. And one day’—the flatness of his voice grew flatter, yet the emotional pitch ascended until one could discern like a sound within a sound, a wounded bewilderment—I didn’t care any more. She was there. In a room. Holding on to me. And I let her fall. Because I couldn’t take it any more—watch her breaking apart, in front of me, like a piece of porcelain. I stepped right over her. I walked right out. I was indifferent. Since then, I’ve been indifferent.’”

Brando could be acting. Maybe he is the real winner. For what it´s worth, if this was an act, I guess one could say he is the world´s best actor.

We can choose to see the curtain falling, or the screen fading to black. Or maybe we can read the article as Capote meant it. One or the other was left bowing for applause. The trick is to figure out which one. For their sake. After this article was printed in the Nov. 9, 1957 edition of the New Yorker, it quickly turned into a model for magazine writing. An early proponent of New Journalism. Every student learned the ins and outs of it. A model of technique, a model of characterization. It is, in fact, a forgery. Just like a movie. Capote´s The Duke In His Domain is too careful and it is too deliberate. Locked within its limits and confines. It is much too neat. And life is rough. Life is rasp. Life is amplifier feedback. People stand out. People are spiky. Capote forges reality. Why not give it one more twist, choose a different ending, inconclusive, one that preceded the last few paragraphs. One that is messy. One that pounds right through the drum skin. One that thrills and loves. One that is alive.

“ You know, it took me a long time before I was aware that that´s what I was – a big success.” said Brando “ I was so absorbed in myself, my own problems, I never looked around, took account. I used to walk in New York, miles and miles, walk in the streets late at night, and never see anything. I was never sure about acting, whether that was what I really wanted to do; I´m still not. Then, when I was in ‘Streetcar’ and it had been running a couple of months one night- dimly, dimly – I began to hear this ROAR!”

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