Picture Palace Page 18

  The Lamar Carney Pig Dinner

  FLORIDA’S HOT EYE was shutting on the Gulf, confining us in a black after-image. We were on the porch, sitting together on the glider, kicking the floor. The regular swinging was like thought.

  Hornette said, “You don’t know what you’re asking, girl.”

  “What am I asking? Tell me, and I won’t say another word.”

  She gave the porch an emphatic kick. “Carney don’t want you to see it.”

  “That’s the point,” I said. “That’s why I want to.” Hornette considered this. She said, “I can’t help you.”

  We rocked in blind night.

  “So you do everything he says.”

  “I do not,” she said crossly, making her eyebrows meet.

  “Then help me,” I said. “Get me in—or else tell me what I’m missing.”

  “I ain’t talking,” she said. She braked the glider by stomping on the porch. She looked around, then whispered, “You’ll have to see for yourself. But it sure ain’t going to be easy.”

  The next morning, Mr. Biker knocked on my darkroom door. “Maudie!”

  “Don’t come in—I’m processing!”

  “There’s someone wants you out on the porch.”

  I finished off the negatives (Boca Grande, alligator wrestler, swamps, and a nice one of a dog in a green celluloid eyeshade being walked by a tubby man wearing the same get-up on his head). Downstairs, I saw Mama on the glider.

  “Maude,” she said, “who was that extraordinary man?”

  “That’s Mr. Biker.”

  “Is there something wrong with him?”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “He’s terribly small,” she said. She frowned at the porch. “If I’d known it was like this I would have made other arrangements for you.”

  The voice of the patroness; but I let it pass. “I like it,” I said. “I’m going to town here. I’ve fixed up a darkroom in the attic. Mama, why are you dressed like that?”

  She wore smoked glasses, a wide-brimmed hat and gloves. Instead of her usual handbag she was carrying a wicker basket.

  “This is my traveling outfit. I’m taking a trip,” she said. “Coral Gables. That’s why I stopped in—I thought you might want to come along.”

  “What about Papa?”

  “He never comes.”

  “You’ve been there before?”

  “Every year,” she said. “Papa stays behind for the dinner.”

  “Why don’t you go to the dinner?”

  “Don’t be silly.” She tightened the strap on her basket. “It’s all men. I wouldn’t like it. It’s just Carney and his men friends. Besides, we’re not allowed. The Pig Dinner’s famous for that.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “That’s how special it is,” said Mama proudly. “Now how about it? Coral Gables—just the two of us.”

  Come on, daughter, she was saying. Put that old camera aside and start living. But I had made my choice.

  “No thanks.”

  After she went away Mr. Biker looked rather curious, as if he wanted to ask who she was. I wanted to be spared having to deny that she was my mother, or to explain that I had taken this trip to prove to my parents that I wasn’t theirs. If he had asked, I would have said, “She’s another Guggenheim.” He didn’t ask. He was small, but he was a real gentleman.

  And he had, as I saw, other things on his mind. A change had come over the boarders. The people who had been so nice to each other, and just grand to me, got in the grip of a kind of tension. They quarreled, complained to Mrs. Fritts, slammed doors, that sort of thing. Brainless anger: they weren’t smart enough to argue, so they banged. Mrs. Fritts said nothing. When there was trouble, she studied the messages on her poker-work mottoes. One lunchtime, Digit smacked a ketchup bottle so hard with the finger he used in his act it flooded his scrambled eggs in red goo. He cursed it and flung the whole plate out the window, which mercifully was open. Then he went off, banging.

  “He jess thew it out the winda,” said Orrie.

  “Shit on him,” said Mr. Biker. He picked up the ketchup bottle, and seeing that it was nearly empty, said, “We ain’t got but one of these.”

  “Don’t mind them,” said Mrs. Fritts, taking her eyes from YE ARE OF MORE VALUE THAN MANY SPARROWS. She breathed at me, “It’s the Pig Dinner.”

  Mr. Biker looked smaller, Orrie more mangled, Digit fretful and foul-mouthed. The acrobats paced back and forth and threw themselves into chairs. This was the frenzy of circus folk; I had forgotten they were performers. Under pressure they had become grotesquely grumpy; they carried violence around with them; there was a threat of danger in their silences. And they excluded me: it was like blame, as if I represented that other world, the public, and was responsible for them making fools of themselves. At night, in my darkroom, I heard shouts and the sound of crockery smashing and “I ain’t doing it!” and “You gotta!” and little wails, like a child trapped in a chimney.

  For my own peace of mind I printed pictures: Boca Grande, the boogie-men, the rain, Green Eyeshades; and when I heard the screeches I turned on the faucet hard to drown them. It was so strange: the loud footfalls in my ears and those peaceful footprints in my pictures. But that contradiction showed me how far my work had diverged from my life. “You still serious?” said Hornette the next evening.

  I said I was.

  “Cause I worked it out,” she said. Her voice was conspiratorial; she was secretive, with a bundle of clothes in her hands. “Try these on for size.”

  She gave me a man’s jacket, a pair of striped trousers, a derby hat. I put them on and looked in the mirror. I was a man. She said, “That’s so they don’t eat you up.”

  “I barely recognize myself.”

  “It’s a damn good thing you ain’t pretty.”

  “I hope you realize I’m going to be taking pictures. And I might exhibit them later on.”

  “Girl,” she said, “I want you to show them all over creation.”

  “You might get into trouble.”

  “Sure thing,” she said. “Or Carney might. It’s his show, ain’t it?” And in her laugh I identified the little chimney-wail I had heard the previous night.

  The Lamar Carney Pig Dinner was held in the tent I had seen being hoisted on the grounds of that so-called palace my first day in Verona. I was in my suit, but I think if I had been wearing a sandwich-board and snowshoes I would still have gone unnoticed, because the others were benumbed and rode in the back of the van like people being taken out in the dark to be shot.

  I smelled cooking—an odor of woodsmoke and burned meat—as soon as we entered Carney’s grounds. After we parked, I peeked through the flap in the tent and saw them all, with red faces, shouting and laughing and finishing their meal. There were about a hundred of them, men in tuxedos, seated at tables which were arranged around a circus ring. In the center of the ring were embers in spokes, the smoldering wheel of a log fire; and on a spit the remains of a cooked pig, hacked apart, and only its tail and trotters intact. It was not hard to identify Carney. He had the place of honor and in front of him on a platter was a pig’s head, his spitting image, one meathead above the other, dead eyes in the thick folds of gleaming cheeks and that expression you see on the faces of the very fat—dumb swollen pain, as if the scowl has been roasted onto it.

  I wanted that picture.

  “You just keep out of sight,” said Hornette. “But don’t worry—no one’ll see you. They’ll be looking at us.”

  “What are you doing here?” It was Harvey.

  “She came along for the ride,” said Hornette.

  I said, “The whole thing was my idea.”

  “Go on home,” said Harvey.

  “She can’t,” said Hornette, “on account of they’ll see her leaving the grounds if she does, huh.”

  It was true: we had passed through a number of checkpoints on the way in and surly guards had waved us on. Now we were in a small tent, an anteroom
to the big top in which the men were eating.

  “Show starts in ten minutes,” said a man dressed as a ringmaster. He was wearing tails and a silk hat, and he had a whip which he cracked at nothing in particular. “Positions,” he said, “positions.”

  “That’s Millsaps,” said Harvey. “If he squawks I’m not taking the blame for you.”

  I smelled animals, the steam of fur and feet, but it didn’t come from the cages—it was the circus folk who had started taking off their clothes.

  “Get on up there,” said Hornette. She motioned to a tower of scaffolding just inside the tent. “And don’t forget what I said—all over creation.”

  I slipped through the tent flap and climbed a tall ladder to a platform, where there was a cubicle and a rack of spotlights. I could not have been in a better place than this crow’s nest, in the darkness behind the lights. I had a view of everything and yet was made invisible by the lights’ glare.

  A moment later I was joined by the lighting engineer: baseball hat, screwdrivers tucked into the belt of his dungarees. The canvas tent-top slumped near our heads and the smoke and chatter rose to the height of the poles.

  The man said, “You got authorization? You can’t stay here if you ain’t got authorization.”

  “This is my authorization,” I said. “Smile.”

  He did, and I snapped his picture. After that he was nice as pie. His name was Monk.

  “Shift,” he said and signaled for me to move. “Look at them.” He jerked the lights into position. “I wish I had me a gun. Ain’t they the limit?”

  Ain’t this? I thought, as Monk slashed the diners with light. And I knew I had passed a frontier and had left all the other practitioners behind. Where were they, anyhow? Out goofing off, shooting sourbob trees and dingbats, rubber tires, storefronts, cottages, snow, Abandoned Playground, Ragged Beggar on Wall Street, Torso with Tits: embalming quaintness for the next generation. But this was different; it smelled different and had art’s startling flaw as its beautifying scar. It was flesh and riotous, a cannibal feast in tuxedos, an event which no previous photographer had drained of its light. By a combination of luck, risk, and gumption I was its first witness.

  But I almost cried at my bravado, for down there not ten feet from Carney, clouting his food and moving his hands to his mouth, and with an eater’s squirming motion—his back turned to the world and gobbling like the rest of them—was my original patron, my father. If he had not been there I might have seen it as less momentous, this pattern of hogs merely a piece of news. He made me hesitate; he made me act. What a long way I had come to catch him!

  His was the first picture I took. I half expected him to keel over from the shock of it—-just pitch back with his face missing and his feet sticking up. Nothing happened. But I knew I had started something: my Third Eye told me. Not skirmishing with the picturesque or tinkering with technique, but acting on the raw conviction that, alone in this tent, I was leading an attack on patronage.

  They had finished eating when the band marched in, going oompah-oompah and wearing blue uniforms with gold braid. Millsaps was a blur on the bass drum. It was the brandy and cigars phase of the dinner, and while the music was playing—the diners banging spoons—two blacks came on and shoveled the remains of the barbecue—the burned logs, the carcass of the pig—into a barrel and carted it away. The band continued to march. And there was a new sound, a whistling and fluting—this was the steam calliope puffing on a horse-drawn wagon. It was a beautiful contraption, smoke and steam and flute notes: a man was seated at an enormous red and gold pipe organ and beating the trays of keys while the pipes shot jets of steam out as whinnying music.

  But that was not my picture, for as the band took their seats under my scaffold (and now I could hear them blowing spit out of their instruments) the steam calliope turned in the ring. I could see an old man stoking a furnace at the back end of the organ, getting up the steam by heaving coal into the firebox. He was reddened by the flames and roasting on his little platform like a pig. So my Stoker, which everyone took for a portrait of a fireman on a train, was actually a stoker on a steam calliope, a man feeding a fire to make music: the underside of all art. I don’t believe there was a photographer in America who would not have preferred the calliope player to the stoker, but I knew the fickle tyranny of patronage—I had a point of view, and I was aware that at the top of this scaffold I was doing my magnum o.

  “Good evening, gents!” shouted Millsaps the ringmaster, strutting to the center of the ring as the calliope beeped away. He flourished his whip and said, “Once again, the Millsaps Circus is proud to perform for its bennyfactor, Mister Lamar Carney and his esteemed friends. As in other years, we are privvyledged to be invited to do our stuff for the Pig Dinner—”

  He went on in this vein, saying what a pleasure it was, flattering the banqueting cigar-puffers, and I saw Carney beaming with each compliment, the pig’s head beneath his similarly grinning. But that was not the only resemblance. There were multiple images: Millsaps was also a version of Carney, and there was something of Stieglitz in his whipcracking swagger—even something of Papa and the rest, gloating in their tuxes. Then and there I decided it was how Jack Guggenheim himself looked, a creature of snuffling assurance who believed moolah was power and power license—and sittin on his fat ass and trafficking in taste.

  Carney grew impatient and interrupted Millsaps’s arrogant fawning. He didn’t shout. He sucked the cigar out of his mouth and said sharply. “Cut the crap, Milly, and start the fucking show.”

  “Music, maestro!” said Millsaps, and another crack of his whip brought clowns tumbling into the ring. Among them was Mr. Biker, dressed in a Lord Fauntleroy suit; Mr. Biker—the solemn little person from Boarders, who had been so nice to me—with his face grotesquely painted; Mr. Biker—whom I had also done on Mrs. Fritts’s sofa with the big tomcat on his lap—now riding a child’s tricycle, now leapfrogging the other clowns, his tiny legs working like mad and tipping him from side to side when he ran. One would not know from his work that this fool was a man.

  This wasn’t what the men wanted. Led by Carney, they booed the clowns; they booed poor Orrie who expertly juggled five oranges—booed so loudly Orrie panicked and dropped them; they booed Digit, they booed Turko the weightlifter, and they howled so furiously at a dog act the little mutts scattered yapping out of the ring.

  All the while I was doing pictures: Carney, the pig, the drunks in tuxedos, the catcalling. And it dawned on me that the whole purpose of the dinner, like the purpose of patronage, was a meal ticket to mock, to sit in judgment upon people whom money had made into clowns. They craved a chance to boo, and I saw Papa laughing with the rest of them. I didn’t mind doing his picture anymore, because this was the truth. Each picture made me ever more solitary: photography was something that rid me of images by disposing of the visible world, a lonely occupation that made me lonelier.

  It was about fifteen minutes after these acts came on, with the band crashing and the men booing, that the others started. There were trumpets and drum-rolls. I saw them enter; I verified them in my viewfinder, then I looked at Monk, who was working a spotlight at them. Monk was nibbling his lip and though I was not in his way he was saying, “Shift, shift.”

  I couldn’t believe my eyes, but I believed my camera. First, Harvey and Hornette, galloping in on a white horse; then the Flying Faffners, Kenny and Doris, prancing back and forth on the high wire; then a girl named Glory, whom Millsaps introduced, as he had the others, by screaming her name and cracking his whip. The circus ring was in motion and up above, Glory was swinging on a trapeze over the heads of the men at the tables.

  The men had gone silent. They craned their necks at Glory. No boos for this; the only sounds were the horses’ hooves, the band playing “The Loveliest Time of the Year” in a muted quickstep, and the squeak of the trapeze ropes; and the reason was the costumes, for they had no costumes.

  They were stark bare-ass naked, Harvey and Hornett
e wobbling on their horses, the Faffners upstairs on their wire—their bums shining in Monk’s spotlight—and Glory, a stripped doll on her trapeze swooping with her legs open. The nakedness alone didn’t shock me; it was their movement—they were endangered white figures and looked unprotected in their skin. Glory flung herself backward, started to fall and caught her ankles on the bar, hung briefly like a side of meat and then came at Carney reaching and so fast her breasts were yanked and I could hear the wind rushing against her navel.

  There were tumblers. They came in a small jalopy and piled out, twelve of them, boys and girls, with springy bodies, doing cartwheels and handstands—such a splash of energy it was hard to tell they were naked except by the tufts of hair between their legs. They tumbled in pairs, linked in a brisk double image, repeating around the ring, miraculously missing the horses’ hooves.

  Harvey and Hornette drew level on their horses and Harvey vaulted behind Hornette to a corn-holing posture. The watching men found their voices and rooted loudly. At first all the mounted brother and sister did was canter. As they rode into Monk’s green light I noticed their flesh and the horse’s, the way their straddling legs clutched the blanket-folds of his muscles and looked so frail and damp. The cries increased, and the band’s braying; Hornette stood up and raised her arms, and her breasts jogged as Harvey held her flanks. He got to his feet and around they went, one behind the other, naked on the slippery horse.

  Glory had swung to a rope. There was a red stripe on her buttocks where the trapeze bar had cut her. She slipped one foot in a stirrup loop and upside down scissored her legs open—and pulled a length of magician’s scarves, knotted end to end, out of her mousehole. She arched her back, and as Monk painted her in light she slipped the other foot in and spun herself to a blur.

  The young tumblers made themselves into a pyramid. They pitched forward somersaulting and rolling in the sawdust in brief copulatory gymnastics, the girls on all fours throwing their hair from side to side as the boys rushed them from behind making little slaps as they met the squealing girls.