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“The only advice I can think of is that it’s only the work that counts. Don’t read about yourself. Don’t have big discussions about your work. Just keep your nose to the grindstone. And don’t think about any of the perks. Don’t think about the money or laudatory things. The less you can think about yourself, the better. It’s like being a baseball pitcher; the less you’re conscious of your motion the better you pitch. Just do good work, don’t waste time thinking about anything else, don’t join the show business circus, don’t pay attention to the distractions that people send your way, and everything else will fall into place. If people don’t like your work, keep doing your own thing and either they’ll wise up or you’ll find yourself out of work and deserving to be. If people hate your work, let them – they may be right. Or not. And if people even call you a genius, it’s very important to run because you have to ask, if you’re a genius, then what is Shakespeare or Mozart or Einstein? With me it’s always modified downward – ‘a comedy genius.’ I’d say a comedy genius is to a real genius what the president of the Moose Lodge is to the President of the United States.” 

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How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left

here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting’s not so blue

where’s Lana Turner
she’s out eating
and Garbo’s backstage at the Met
everyone’s taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive

the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)

and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

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“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve
just gotta fight your way through.”

It was noon when I came to, awoken by a clatter in the kitchen. There was a Kenzo named Jay Caufield sitting shirtless at our table. Jay was counting bills out by denomination, scribbling notes out with a pencil. I took a seat, and then whispered, “How’s it going?”

Jay Caufield neglected to respond.

I lumbered across the kitchen, crackling limbs in constant protest. I rinsed a tumbler neath the spigot, filled it up with lukewarm water.

Jay wandered over to a closet, disappeared into it briefly. He re-emerged cradling what appeared to be a suitcase. Jay emptied its contents, assembled them bare into a balance. He stood the balance on our table, pulled out a big bag of cocaine. Jay broke the bag down into nickels. He broke the balance down and placed it back into the suitcase. Jay washed his hands beneath our spigot. He stashed the suitcase in the closet, and then he hurried out of our apartment.

***

Jay Caufield spent the summers oiled and shirtless, ill-fitting T draped like a rag across his shoulder. Jay gelled his hair like vinyl grooves, and he spoke with a North Philadelphia dialect. “What the fuck?” became “Whut da fuck?” “That’s the motherfucker,” became “Dat’s da mudderfucker.” I had no idea where Jay Caufield lived, or whether Jay even had an apartment of his own. I only knew that he was bound to come around, and that he had somehow gotten permission to stash his cocaine inside our closet.

Bobbi Jean and I had been living together for three weeks at that point, and the compound strain of living and working together had already taken its toll. Bobbi Jean complained that I did not clean up after myself; that I did not chew with my mouth shut or towel off after showering. I, in turn, complained about Bobbi Jean allowing a guy who she had just started seeing to move in. That guy was Chris

That guy was Chris Pascal – one of several Two Streeters living in an apartment downstairs. Chris Pascal was a scoundrel, particularly skilled at reeling in rock-bottom prey, slow and steady, like an angler. Chris had started sleeping at our apartment come the first week in June. When Chris and his friends got evicted, he moved all of his belongings upstairs into Bobbi Jean’s room. Bobbi Jean did not consult me on this point. And for a time, I did not make a fuss. Bobbi Jean was my boss, three years my senior, responsible for securing our two-bedroom apartment, as well as brokering a deal that allowed us to pay off our rent in weekly spurts.

Bobbi Jean got Chris a job as a caramel-corn cook along the front of Surfside Pier. Chris accepted the position, then called out sick three times in the first week. A few days into the second week, Chris left an hour into his shift, complaining of nausea. I happened to be at the apartment on that evening, sitting in the kitchen with my girlfriend when Chris came walking in the door. Chris was carrying a new pair of sneakers. He was holding hands with an uber-tan blonde.

The situation was uncomfortable, rendered all the more so given that all four of us were now resigned to sitting around the kitchen table. There was no couch in our apartment. There was no love seat, or upholstered chairs. There was only my bedroom and a hidden staircase leading up to Bobbi Jean’s room, which, in turn, led to an outdoor porch along the roof. Chris did not dare take the blonde girl upstairs to Bobbi Jean’s room. And so the four of us sat and we talked until I left to walk Meghan home.I did not tell Bobbi Jean. I did not want to be involved.

***

By the time Bobbi Jean and I got home from work the final Friday in June, there were gym bags strewn about the kitchen and an unfamiliar car parked in the driveway. There was a frizzy-haired dude passed out in my bedroom, and another Two Streeter passed out shirtless across the kitchen floor. Bobbi Jean evicted Chris at the end of that weekend, citing several pieces of jewelry that had gone missing from her drawer. Forty-eight hours later, Chris Pascal was living with a mother of two in an apartment next door.

***

Come the first week in July, Chris’s friend Frannie showed up at our door, insisting that he’d left a bag of his clothes inside our apartment. When I couldn’t find the bag, Frannie became adamant that I had stolen it.

Frannie stood 6’4. He kept a news clipping in his wallet, recounting the night his golden-glove father had beaten a man to death outside a bar. On the afternoon that Frannie confronted me, he threatened to knock my teeth down my throat. “I’ll knock your teeth down your throat,” is what Frannie had said. Frannie had been standing in our driveway at the time with a contingent of his friends blocking the available exits. Frannie was staring down at me from above.

“Look, man, I don’t want anything to do with this,” I said.

“You should’ve thought about that before you stole my clothes,” Frannie said.

“I didn’t steal your clothes,” I said. “I never asked for this.”

Frannie stepped to me so close that I could see his nostril hairs.

“Leave him alone,” a voice called. That voice belonged to Julie, who was one of our neighbors. Julie was carrying a garbage bag full of clothes. She hurled that bag forward like a gunny sack. “He didn’t steal anything,” Julie shouted. She turned her back and disappeared behind a screen door.

***

I asked around for Jay Caufield’s address. I headed over to his place after I clocked out later that same evening. As it turned out, Jay lived alone back by the bay, behind a shack without a lawn. I opened the door. Jay was sitting next to a table. His eyes ran wide and weeping, like weighted bags or purple sores.

“What’s goin’ on?” I wondered. I slapped my palm against the table.

“Justice,” Jay shouted. His head popped on a spring. “Bob motherfuckin’ Justice.”

“So this is your place,” I said. I took a gander around. “Not bad. I think I like it.”

I wandered over to the spigot, grabbed a tumbler from the rack. I poured myself a cup of beer from a quarter keg inside the fridge.

“I heard you’re upset,” Jay called from behind.

“Upset?” I said.

“Huh?” Jay said.

“Nevermind,” I said. I took a seat across the table. “Who told you I was upset?”

“Who told me dat?” Jay Caufield said, first quietly, then loud. “Who told me dat?”

“Bobbi Jean?” I said.

“Bobbi Jean,” Jay said. He was nodding his head in approval.

“What else did she tell you?”

“She told me you were being a prick,” Jay said.

“Is that right?” I said. I took a long sip of my beer.

“Don’t be upset,” Jay insisted.

“Why not?” I said. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“You don’t get it,” Jay told me. His head was hanging low beneath the light. “She’s not doin’ it for me. She’s sure as fuck not doin’ it for me. I can tell ya dat.”

“OK,” I said. I wasn’t entirely sure what we were talking about. “Then who exactly is she doing it for?”

“She’s doing it for Fes,” Jay Caufield said. “That whole thing wit da closet and keepin’ all our shit at your place, that was Gerry’s idea.”

“So what?” I said, slightly taken aback. “That gives her the right to cast me in the middle of her bullshit? To treat me like some low-level employee whenever I summon the guts to confront her?”

“What about you?” Jay Caufield said. “It seems to me you can give just like you get.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

“It means I’ve been comin’ up to dat boardwalk for close to a month now, inviting you down here to drink. It means that every fuckin’ time you blow me off like I’m some goddamn rat. Meanwhile, you’re always correctin’ my grammar like you’re my goddamn grandmother or some shit. I mean, I know you and shit so it’s cool, but I can remember way back in the day, I kind of wanted to beat your ass.”

And so I sat, considering whether Jay Caufield might’ve had a point. It dawned on me that Bob Justice – the nickname I had earned during my first summer in Wildwood – was actually a dig on my self-righteous verve.

I finished two beers, then helped Jay Caufield into bed. I made no stink about him stashing his cocaine in our apartment. There were angles worth considering, and ample muscle had its draw.

Day 245

***

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

Way back in the early 60s, Behavioral Psychologist Stanley Milgram embarked upon a decade-long series of experiments, geared toward confirming the majority of human beings are more prone toward obeying orders out of a rote sense of fear or responsibility than they are toward making conscientious decisions based upon sound principles and logic.

In the most famous of Milgram’s experiments, he placed 40 test subjects alone in a booth – one at a time – and ordered them to push a corresponding series of buttons that they were told would administer a shock to another participant on the opposite side of the wall (These non-visible “participants” were actually Yale undergrads, all of whom were in on the experiment).

As the voltage levels rose higher, Milgram’s “participants” were instructed to protest, cry out, and, eventually – once the shock levels began to exceed 400 volts – stop responding altogether. Every time a test subject protested, Milgram and his assistants would insist that it was OK to proceed… that they were all just following orders … that it was really just part of a university experiment … that every subject had a contractual responsibility to see the experiment through to its conclusion.

Here’s the real shocker: Roughly 65% of Milgram’s original test subjects – most of them highly-educated, ivy league students or colleagues – continued zapping all the way up to the 450-volt mark. This despite the fact that all corresponding participants on the opposite side of the wall had long since been rendered completely unresponsive.

It’s this very same dynamic that lies at the crimson heart of Craig Zobel’s Compliance – a dark and ultimately despairing drama that dares to ask the question, “Just how far would you go?”

Compliance is brilliantly constructed … set in a non-descript, Podunk town where you get the sense people wouldn’t actually be in the habit of questioning authority, let alone flat-out refusing to do what they were told. What’s more? There’s already considerable Oscar buzz for both Ann Dowd and Dreama Walker, the latter of whom takes a very gutsy left turn about a quarter of the way through this film … the irreversible kind that can ultimately make or break any aspiring movie actor’s career.

The only major drawback here is that Compliance is based almost entirely upon a premise that delves deeper – all the while proving more cringe-worthy – as the movie rolls along … approaching levels of sheer absurdity as the film inches toward its climax (pun intended).

In fact, it’s the exact type of absurdity that might lead one to dismiss a film like Compliance as being completely too far-fetched. That is until one got home and conducted a quick Google search under the film’s name, only to find the broad premise was actually based on a true story … suggesting – once again – that perhaps Stanley Milgram had it right all along.

(Compliance opens in select cities nationwide tomorrow.)

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“Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognize him or herself in you and that will give them hope. It’s done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it. It has profound importance in my life. Give that to the world, rather than selling something to the world. Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do. Try not to. This is from E. E. Cummings: ‘To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.’ The world needs you. It doesn’t need you at a party having read a book about how to appear smart at parties – these books exist, and they’re tempting – but resist falling into that trap. The world needs you at the party starting real conversations, saying, ‘I don’t know,’ and being kind.”