Naked Close-Up (April 24, 2009. New Moon. Issue 4)

An excerpt from the Roman-a-Clef

Chapter 10
Perennia Describes City Scale, A City-Wide Happening
(Names Have been Changed To Protect The Guilty, but this event actually took place in San Francisco in 1962)

And score it we did, down to every tiny detail, from Toots Kelpster, the trombone player in the Broadway tunnel to the reappearing lovers in the broken-down convertible to the storefront-window soprano in bathrobe and curlers. By then Norm and I had accepted Walt's involvement as inevitable and were warming up to his fierce enthusiasm and unique brand of creative insanity. Norm overcame his doubts about City Scale the day we unrolled the score in front of him and he agreed to appear in it as tape-composer-hard-at-work. He would record the audience as they arrived and have a sound-collage of their voices ready to play back mid-way through the evening.

The weather cooperated by presenting us with a crystal-clear December weekend, the city sparkling from the rains of the previous week, a
pre-Christmas mania in the air. Sarah sat in the front entrance nursing Baby-Boo the evening of the program and directed our audience around the house to the kitchen door. There they were signed in and locked in the kitchen closet to answer aloud a set of questions tacked to the wall.

'How do you get by?'

'Duplicate your favorite sound.'

'Name your choice of the person you would choose to be locked up in a closet with and tell why.'

Norm recorded their answers and Ted ushered them into the living room where they were handed crayons and brushes and turned loose on the butcher-paper-covered walls. Once we had assembled a roomful, we handed out maps directing them to a little park four blocks north of Jones Street on top of a hill facing North Beach. Livvy mounted her scooter and zoomed down to the Columbus Avenue Safeway parking lot where four cars and drivers waited to perform the Car Ballet. A crisp evening glittered over the city, and in a few hours an almost-full moon would clear the Berkeley hills across the bay.

Headlights covered with colored gels, the cars dispersed on their predetermined routes while on a rooftop in the financial district Walt began to project liquid shapes on the blank wall of the ten-story Wells Fargo building, mixing them with some of his films.

Up in the park, the audience gradually became aware that something unusual was happening in the panorama below them. Walt's projections were spotted first and a set of flares that lit up a North Beach rooftop. The cars were merely odd pairs of colored moving lights in the traffic until they formed up single file and climbed Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower. In the parking lot they lined up facing us and blinked. That was quite spectacular! And when the drivers scattered into the hillside bushes to set off sparklers and firecrackers, a chorus of Fourth-of-July 'oohs' and 'ahs' went up.

The park was right over the Broadway Tunnel and the trombone player's blasts echoed beneath our feet like a subterranean whale sighing for its mate. On the walk back to the Lab, the storefront songstress sang Debussy chansons to no one in particular while her accompanist hammed it up at the piano in white tie and tails. No one was sure if she was part of the program or just a neighborhood character. We had hoped for this to happen, for our events to blend into the environment and thus encourage the audience to study everything they encountered that evening with a sharpened awareness. Thus the normal zaniness of a San Francisco Saturday night would merge with our
program.

The reappearing lovers in their broken-down convertible appeared for the first time in front of the house, K.K. the 'woman at the wheel,' in a blond wig and cocktail dress; Oren, her friend, teaching her how to park. They were arguing over the location of reverse gear in strident tones.

"Up to the middle and then over and up!" Oren shouted.

K.K. struggled with exaggerated gestures, managing to grind gears most horribly before stalling the engine.

"Clutch, clutch!" Oren wailed.

"But-I'm-doing-everything-you-told-me-you-big-gorilla-so-there!" K.K. shrieked, jumping up and down in the seat and blasting the horn.

We served coffee and cookies during a short intermission while Norm played back the sound collage he had prepared from the recorded comments. He had wound the tapes through the Ampex 403 by hand at various speeds, laying down four separate tracks on the other machines. The result sounded like feeding time at an interplanetary zoo but individual voices were still recognizable enough for their owners to identify them.

"Wonderful, Norm," I said, giving him a few strokes.

He smiled and blinked his eyes, flattered. "Not bad for a quickie, huh?" he said. "I might use it in my next piece."

When the first of two two-ton U-Haul trucks pulled up in front, I began to shoo people outside again. Ted stood by one tailgate to boost passengers into the cavelike darkness. There was no way anyone could see where we were taking them. The reappearing lovers were half in, half out of their parking space. K.K. had Oren in the trunk and was seated on the lid, pounding on his outstretched arm with her purse.

"Beast!" K.K. shouted. "Gruesome beast! I'll clutch you a good one!"

First stop was the Mime Troupe headquarters in an old church in the Mission.

Elias Romero, one of the early pioneers of the liquid light show, put on an exquisite performance. Amoeboid shapes flowed across the walls, merging with each other in sexy, cellular ways while spattered colors swirled in response to his tilting the convex clock faces he used as dishes on the overhead projectors. An hour later we piled everyone into the trucks once again, off to the North Beach Cinema where we were treated to a bull-fighting movie shown slow-motion through a Cinemascope lens that elongated the bulls into squat-legged monsters of distorted dimensions. Walt had befriended the owner and the idea for the showing had originated in a newly-hired projectionist's mistake.

Afterwards, we handed out old books to everyone and walked a few blocks down Broadway to City Lights bookstore for a book-returning event. So many books had been stolen from the store over the years that we had decided to donate some, placing them on their appropriate shelves. The usual Saturday night crowds jostled past the strip joints and we were now participants in the scene we had watched from the hillside park, a unifying element in our composition, I thought.

On the corner of Broadway and Columbus, Livvy sat on her toilet again, this time fully clothed, in the doorway of the Bank of America. Walt stood in front of her dressed in a doorman's uniform, a roll of toilet paper under one arm, his mustache waxed and curled, waving people past.

"All right, move it along," he kept saying, "Just move it along.

"I can't if you look!" Livvy wailed whenever tourists stopped to stare.

An overheated con vertible ­ hadn't we seen it somewhere before? ­ stalled in the street. The reappearing lovers stood on the front seat shouting at eachother while traffic piled up behind them.

"First is not down!" K.K. screamed. "First is back! I'll show you first!"

A police car turned the corner a block away. The convertible's engine suddenly sputtered and they moved in a series of head-snapping jerks through the intersection towards the Broadway tunnel.

Reloading everyone on the trucks on bustling Columbus Avenue was an event in itself. "All aboard!" I kept shouting, hoisting bodies inside.

"Where you goin'?" A young man asked, obviously drunk.

"Never you mind," I said. "Just hop in."

He kept pestering me with questions while we picked up speed on the Embarcadero Freeway.

"Traffic's so bad on Saturday nights that we set up an underground bus service underground," I said with a sober expression.

"Wow!" He was impressed. "Where's your first stop?"

"Not quite sure," I said, "but hang in there. It's bound to be interesting."

It was now past midnight but everyone seemed eager for more, caught up in the boisterous spirit of the occasion. The final event of the program awaited us on top of Potrero Hill where a tree-lined park overlooked the Mission District to the west. Ted parked and I jumped out to open the rear doors. To my amazement, the park was already full of leather-jacketed youths. Two groups were squared off on the grass, glaring at each other, armed with baseball bats and chains. With howls of delight our audience ran towards them, arms outstretched, convinced they were part of the show. I tried to shout a warning but my voice was drowned in the cheers and hollers. Just then two huge weather balloons came bouncing around the corner. They had been filled by a volunteer who had attached them to the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner. Such strange, powdery spheres in the moonlight! They looked like Martian super-amoebas. At our arrival, the potential rumble had
faltered and with the appearance of the balloons it dispersed. Our second truck arrived and emptied, everyone running towards the balloons with glad cries. A game of surrealistic volley ball began, the steady western breeze against everyone else, the teenagers watching open-mouthed from the edge of the trees.

One balloon quickly burst in a huge puff of dust ­ the vacuum cleaner's bag had not been emptied beforehand ­ transforming the three nearest people into grey statues. This appealed to the teenage sense of humor and the gang members doubled up with laughter just as three squad cars wailed around the corner and skidded to a stop beside the trucks.

Unh-oh, a hysterical neighbor had probably called them before we arrived, I thought. Lights came on in a few houses and people's heads began sticking out. But instead of the reported riot the cops found a circle of chortling teenagers watching a group of adults making complete fools of themselves, rolling on the grass and chasing a ten-foot sphere around the see-saws.

The sergeant scratched his head with his ball point tip while his men checked I.D.'s. By then the youths had either merged with our people or
vanished into side streets.

"What are you?" one cop asked. "Some kind of church group?"

Ted gave him the Lab's name and described how we were concerned about making the city safe for everyone at night and had formed our own zany tactical squad. He was very earnest and laid it on nice and thick, spreading it evenly into the corners.

The cop listened in silence and I went around getting everyone back into the trucks. The cops are real," I kept saying, "even if we're not!"

"Hey, man, you people're all right," one teenager said with a self-conscious sneer. "Does your club accept new members?"

"Sure," I said and handed him a program. "Look us up sometime. We have concerts every month."

It was a new experience for me, functioning as a beneficent social force.

Walt was also very impressed.

"Imagine it!" he shouted over the roar of the engine. "A tactical squad composed of artists and clowns! We could surround a group of rioters with huge balloons filled with laughing gas. When the balloons burst, people would begin to giggle and tensions would dissolve into fun and games!" His eyes sparkled. "Look how well it worked this evening! And we didn't even plan it!"

Exhausted but happy, we bade good night to our patrons and gathered for a final cup of tea in the living room. Walt expressed his sorrow at not having filmed the evening.

"But we have the score," I said. "It could be repeated anywhere again."

"Only in San Francisco" Livvy said.

"I just hope we don't make the papers," Norm muttered. "I'd hate to have to explain this one to my Department Chairman!"

Our affectionate music critic Alfred Frankenstein had phoned the day before to ask if it was a musical event. I had explained it was planned as Total Theatre and he had begged off, somewhat too frail for bouncing around town in the back of a truck. But a day or two later there was a report in the evening paper of our role in dispersing the street gangs. The police sergeant was quoted saying that, although our methods were 'unprofessional,' the city would be 'a safer place for everyone if there were more groups as socially conscious as we were.' That would look good in our scrapbook, I thought, especially when we tried to hit up local sponsors for money. Livvy and I lay awake until morning replaying scenes for each other, laughing over remarks startled bystanders had made. For a few hours we had transformed the city into a magical wonderland. Now if only there was some way it could be an on-going thing, so that San Franciscans would never know when we would strike again. It would keep them on their toes, alert for the extraordinary, a potent antidote to the drudgy humdrum of daily existence.

"It'll be really hard to top this one," she said, snuggling closer. "We'll have to dream up something special!"