Turret

[This is from an autobiographical fragment offered to me absolutely by chance. I have come to assume that the fragment was in fact written by Brinkerhoff and that he was telling the truth, and not embroidering it as he would a note, a note of music. I have formed my own opinion, which I will not impose on Brinkerhoff's life, at least at the moment. -- The Producer]

I grew up in a turret. I always thought of its crenelations and machicolations as attachments to my head, halos around my hair, St. Simon with his arrows and a crown of architectural thorns. My turret's leaded windows, replaced here and there by more mundane, Currier & Ives versions of the plainer world, inculcated in me a sense of an outside fishable fishbowl of a landscape shaped like an Edvard Munch painting, twisted, bent, strangely sunsetted by tints bled in from the edges, all the angles wrong.

    Trees curved like Van Gogh, skies had coral greens and cutglass, cutlass blues I never noticed later, in my post-turret years, when the cubed world was as splintered as those window panes, as fragmented as those cozy, plump cubist paintings suggest, while resting safely in their warm domestic frames.

    But in my youth, it was mowers in the morning, the fresh cut grass flooding around me like facets of a diamond or pictures in a kaleidoscope as I slept, until I imagined myself in a sea of limpid, translucent blades, the roar of the Locke like the surf.

    To me, the great cantankerous tank of the Locke lawn mower was the perfect machine, the Daimler of mechanical scythes, as intrinsic to my sense of self and safety as the sound of the forced-air heat coming on at night, until both were replaced with a pneumatic fixation on shiny trumpets, footloose organs, and, later, the satanic satin of glossy black pianos with their dangling gas pedals and cast-iron casters.

    The Locke was immense, bestriding the lawn like a whole showroom of mowers, with dozens of adjustable valves, wires, carburetors, small turnbolts that made unnoticeable adjustments to nature itself, to the very texture of the manicured terraces. The Locke had terrifying black blades like the strainer gills of a blue whale, and wings, additional teeth that could be linked to the sides so the Locke widened like a picnic table to present a whirring phalanx to the lean, lawny expanse, camouflaged in deep ominous green, so that the Locke outlawned the lawn, that luscious and lascivious tousled lake of sprouts and tangles towards which the Locke had only the darkest, most Jacobean intentions..

    The turret had its Lockean aspects, with its assemblage of working parts and ancillary quarters, the combustion chambers where I organized my childhood books (whose page corners I would nibble as I read, foxing my way through the night under the covers with a red flashlight), Ken Holt on one shelf, Rick Brant (science detective) on another, young and old Tom Swifts above the glow-in-the-dark covers on my astronomical shelf, Fred Hoyle's cavernous Frontiers of Astronomy next to George Gamow's cozier One Two Three Infinity.

    Fu Manchu was an evolving identity, new dimensions of the demon doctor arriving every month as the literary personification of my illiberal allowance, monstrous monographs culled from exotic grumps who dealt in adolescent arcana in distant cities, and on whose churlish communiqués I hung as if they were letters from E. Wallis Budge himself, the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum, estimable translator of the necromantic Egyptian Book of the Dead and my pen pal, who took my suggested demotic emendations seriously from the heights of his hieratic stool, and responded good-naturedly to my eight-year-old correspondence on the refurbishment of the "elfin marbles" and the cabalistic significance of cuneiform chippings.

    I used to dream of teetering pillars of unobtainable Fu Manchu books materializing in the morning by my bed, stacked like pancakes, over which I spent so much anticipatory time procrastinating, wallowing in the delectation of sheer type fonts on the title page, that the books themselves had dissolved into the carpet by the time leaded light assimilated me into the dishearteningly Bobbsey Twins school morning.

    Sax Rohmer's Brood of the Witch Queen must not be prudishly withheld from talented young satanists by aroused librarians. What a man Sax was. He used to hold black masses in the living room, complete with virgins, while his wife was upstairs snoring through the delicious runes, rites to which I later aspired, although the virgins would always run away at critical moments. Sax was a complete phony, that is to say, a man at peace with himself. He met a man once who predicted his death. I met a man once who predicted that I would die of sex. He should have been in jail, but I have dutifully believed him, and lived in bubbling but dashed expectations for years.

    I had pasted labels on each bookshelf to assure cooperation among my fictional companions, crowding their chaotic personalities into the child's alphabet of my suburban gardens, but, like all my attempts to arrange the world, my little Bodleian perished under the same suspicious circumstances that erased my youth not so many years later.

    My mahogany stereo chest which some clever carpenter had arranged to be surreptitiously a storage bin for the same thin, deciduous disks it transformed into fat, full-blown orchestras, droned out Mazeppa, Les Préludes, and Scheherazade ceaselessly, as I had bought multiple copies of each so I could layer them on the changer and hear those triumphant progressions over and over without changing record sides. I would listen to Richard Burton's Coriolanus and Hamlet as I read Sir Richard Burton, to the point where my accent became so duplicative that a linguistics teacher used me as a perfect example of triple-tonguing in college, although I was an entirely bogus product of lower Broadway disk-pressing sweatshops.

    Like all imitation British lifestyles which require quilted robes inside stilted new-built castles, ours was not heated, or at least my own dank dungeon was not, being immediately over the keep where the cars were equally if silently imprisoned. I would jump out of bed, Captain Commando in PJs, and promptly hide under my desk, where the only heat for half a mile would weakly dribble out of the chipped grill, like the umbilical smile of a vast dark haunted fort weaving its intestinal way through the inner vestibules and foyers of the tannic paneling to spy on me, dressing in a squat and soaking in the tepid zephyrs which sporadically emanated from the leering gorilla grid.

    The room had been originally intended for prisoners, I was told by someone who may have been, memory is haughtily dismissive of certain people, one of those invidious hangers-on who flocked to our family squabbles which the servants charitably decorated as if they might have been intended to have once been parties and not merely festive hangings, hung with Italian-movie cornucopiousness around a succession of lacy tables under the misted, euphemistic oaks, rivulets rushing to escape, willows still weeping from last week, meadows stretching towards my uncle's quartz quarry in the distance, as we hid in holes in the tarry trunks and ran giddily through mazes in the labyrinthine overgrown gardens, the sun ambering the hay at the end of the endless day and glinting off the colored glass in the bays and nooks of the monstrous stone facade lurking hungrily behind, a facade we called home, that confused well of fieldstone, mullions, copings, pediments, lintels, Doric heaven and Ionic hell which the educations of three architects had merged ignorantly together, a hodgepodge of such unrelentingly lowering Machiavellian energy that it could not be seen in its entirety from any spot on our twelve thousand acres.

    It was a house in the sense that Pegasus was a horse, and of course it had a name, like a horse. Once in Wales where I was stalking a well-known Welsh actor, the mistaken object of my transatlantic Shakespearian affectations, I stumbled on a small village where all the miner's cottages were named San Simeon, Blenheim, Tara, Yasnya Polyana, and so on, and I could never look at a house afterwards without making up names for it, like Motel 6, or Père Lachaise. But absurdly Anglicized adolescence sinks like countries into the melting pot of unforgettably cruel experience, and our lives are sometimes real in indirect proportion to the falseness of our childhoods.

    But back to the ranch. I spent so many years trying to live down and apologize for an uncontrolled architecture for which I deserved nothing but genetic blame, I must exorcise the transplanted plants, the Braille of a hundred rails, the foul-smelling once-trendy moldatorium in the nether caverns where you could swim in water so black it had obvious parallels with Milton and Dante, watched always by burly envious bored butlers standing like waiters with towels, silhouetted against the burl of the underground world.

    A guest so inclined could wander down garden paths perfumed with pollen, spilling yellow maniac forsythia monsters which I felt hopped around the lawns all night, trellises of 'Sconset roses as intense as strawberries, to timbered cottages which housed various surprises, such as those half-coach, half-couch hybrids called cabriolets, and which no longer exist, as they required whomever was driving, usually one of several ludicrously liveried former or future gigolos, to sit in the rain while the passengers exchanged annoyed glances. A doomed mode of transportation.

    Mostly we traveled about the insulated globe of our family life in sulkies, brakes, hansoms, phaetons, and other arcane forms of horse-drawn equipages, which had their own ivy-covered museums down the pebbled lanes which led to higher meadows yet.

    Other pleasures dallied behind the Tudor half-timber: half-open open-reel movie rooms dedicated to indolent lounging under the passive moth-filled projector beam in the warm evening air, bird calls punctuating and sometimes replacing actor's lines; an all-white den of torture where I was mocked, bullied, beaten, and hit by my father, and which I only years later learned was a game actually condoned by society called squash; a former chapel, now sporting a basketball net where a cross had been; separate cottages growing up around abandoned billiard tables, to the endless embarrassment and inevitable mockery of my understandably infrequent small sleep over friends, as you had to specify between, and still, although later life has compensated for those early unsought and energetically avoided advantages, I hesitate to mention it even as I swear it was none of my doing, between various billiard cottages. How could anyone with such an architectural blot on his character be anything other than insouciant, subject to the envious loathing of a lifetime of false friends, and, indeed, you yourself would not be mistaken should you despise me for the sins of my elders, I despised myself for years until later life equalized opulence with misery, but I must continue the litany, my rosary of expensive offenses.

    A rare visitor who had the energy and hubris to attempt a cursory inventory of the labyrinthine passageways and their appendages, although it was hard to say if the rooms were the justification for the halls or the other way around, guessed (as guests do) that there were a hundred bedrooms, which dismayed my parents, who felt there must be rooms missing, or that the guest was mathematically deficient, and in either case should never be allowed to stroll, if at all, without a watchful eye.

    I had a frightening, dusty, dark room filled with unexplained noises, no doubt the ghost of the unhappy architect who was found hanging in this very room when my parents returned from Europe, probably due to a misunderstanding about a mantelpiece. I remember expressing that he had set a favorable example for the other two architects and being consequently locked in the above mentioned room for two days to teach me the value of decency. I discovered by this exercise that my parents lacked it, and was thus well insulated against those subtle hypocrisies which we reserve for the more important moments in life, the funeral orations delivered by strangers whose clichés would have appalled us in life, the tongue-in-cheek toasts to the cheating bride.

    Vast grassy runs bled off into the dusky bosks on all sides, as if we lived at the epicenter of tree-bashing cyclones which had at various times made a beeline for the hulking collection of pediments and coppices we called home. The benefit of an unseemly familiarity with the vast countrysides of Capability Brown and Le Nôtre had inspired various mustachioed ancestors to toy with our own pastoral elements to produce, in the backcountry north of New York, a monument to egocentric folly similar to those which had cost generations of aristocrats their lives, their wallets, and their free time, captive as one is to such pomposity, whose continual upkeep deprives heirs of the time needed to make the money to be able to afford the upkeep, thus instigating the eventual loss of the inheritance, such a gift being a two-edged sword which in effect contradicts its own essence.

    But still, these immense cuts into the shaded groves, fibrillating lackadaisically in the lazy summer afternoons, veiled with heat and midges, provided me with the kind of security Sleeping Beauty must have felt in her impregnable fortress of thorns, as when the camera climbs to the sun, pulling back from the intense meadow, to reveal all around, as far as the eye can see, nothing but more meadow. Not a road in sight in my youth, no people either, there were only crickets, tree frogs, frogponds, timbered beams and the timber where they originated, and the piano.