PLAGUE DIARY 40: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Speak Easily (1932)
I’m not sure how this one will turn out. I have no clear idea of how it might finish (sometimes I have a vague idea). I went for a walk through my neighbourhood in Hamilton after seeing Speak Easily, just to think. I walked past a house that I have never walked past at night — I’m kind of afraid of that building — because it’s apparently a halfway house for men who are on their way out of Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre. Once I saw a man come out the door who had one of those tear drops — you know — tattooed — beside his eye. That means he killed someone, doesn’t it? I’ve never killed anyone. Although I dream that I have quite regularly, and even feel as if I need to admit something now. I wrote a novel about that. Not sure where that comes from. Guilt. And next door a girl was sitting on the porch singing, and a man started chatting with her. That’s an idea. Maybe I should try this at my guest house in Toronto. If she’s the one I think she is, she’s on crack — the whole house next door is on crack. Two people have died there. One was kind of my friend. I’ll never forget taking a bath and looking out the bathroom window and seeing one of those yellow police banners — ‘do not cross’ and knowing that something very bad had happened there. I found out it was a crack house because a cab driver told me. I kind of knew before, but the cab driver confirmed it. 'So you’ve got a crack house next door’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘Oh you can tell, anyone can tell, by the way people run in and out of there.' Apropos, I was thinking today of how sex has driven me into extreme situations. (For me, living in Hamilton is more about love than sex.) But once I was in Phoenix, in a dirty video store that was in the wrong part of town. Well I found out later that in the USA when they tell you it’s the wrong part of town and you should never go there, it just means poor and black. I asked a cab driver (as you may have noticed, I get a lot of my information about life from cab drivers) that all the ‘dangerous’ parts of these American towns are quite often not dangerous, just poor and black. The cab driver said ‘you won’t get killed there, but somebody may try and sell you drugs.’ That’s seemed fine to me. Well anyway I ended up in this dirty video store in Phoenix trying to get laid, and I did, or I achieved some sort of impersonation of it. I’ve often end up like that, on my knees somewhere, asking myself  how did I get here? And then I realised it was desire. Or compulsion, or something. Not sure….. A therapist once tried to figure out if I was sexually compulsive. He said he was going to ask me a couple of questions. ‘Do you ever find yourself having sex when you’e not horny?’ ‘Oh yes, all the time.’ That was it, confirmed as a sexual compulsive after the first question. I live with that, try and struggle through, try not to be compulsive. But can you ever really change yourself? Perhaps you can modify things…somewhat? Buster Keaton stars in this movie and he plays, well — me. He’s a professor, obsessed with Aristotle. I happen to be completely lost in Greek rhetoric right now (it’s a Shakespeare thing). And somebody comes into Keaton’s office at the university and says “It’s a drag day.” I’m sure that meant something different to Buster Keaton than it now means to me, but still, I identified, because Keaton said “I’d rather sit here and read Aristotle.” And really at the moment I’d rather read about the Greek sophist Gorgias than do anything else. But I also happen to have read the only book that — I think — exists, about Gorgias, so that’s done. And frankly I’ve played all the operas I love, and now I have to go back and play the ones I love, again and again. Will I stop loving them? I often wonder that. I wish there were more operas. At least there will always be new young men, who — even if they don’t want to look at me — I can look at. So Buster Keaton in Speak Easily (which is wordplay on 'speakeasy,' and the film was made during Prohibition, and is madcap slapstick, which I like even less that I do screwball comedy )— is me. I’d rather be writing this, or reading a book, than actually living. Keaton’s friend says about him “He’s learned everything except how to live.” I don’t expect to ever know how to live. But then Keaton’s friend says to him “If you’d only go out and find life you could live it” Which is impossible now, as you know with COVID-19, and that’s why I’m scared I guess. Because I’m a sexual compulsive which means I don’t really care about having sex with anyone, and people do, ultimately scare me, and sex scares me, and I’m so terrible at it anyway. And what worries me is what I kind of like about isolation is I can just bury myself in books and writing and avoid living altogether. So now you don’t have any sympathy for me at all. (That’s fine because I probably did kill somebody without knowing it because I dream it all the time, and often write that I did. Or maybe I just like confessing?) But believe it or not this is not about me. It’s about my neighbours and the guy with the teardrop tattoo who might be living down the block. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to them, and believe it or not I am concerned — as the economy collapses. They’ve just figured out in the good ol’ U.S.A. that black people are ‘inordinately affected’ by COVID-19. Wow, brilliant, is it really such a revelation that the oppressed are automatically more oppressed — by virtually everything — than anyone else? When Keaton’s friend analyses him he says “being constantly alone creates an inferiority complex.’ Well quite right it does. Because ‘people who need people are the luckiest people’ as Barbra says. And I do remember my mother pulling me aside once: ‘this song has a very important message.’ Sad, because my mother generally hated people, and alienated them at every turn. But I guess what I’m saying is that even people like me, who are somewhat misanthropic, and who stumble through life like Buster Keaton, and are bad at everything, need people. (Thelma Todd keeps asking Buster Keaton to ‘have tea’ with her, and he has no idea what she is talking about, and I think he would just actually be quite willing to simply have tea with her, in any case.). Well I still don’t know where this is going to end. And I have to end it soon. Shall I say, even if we we are just stumbling through this mess we call life, we need flesh and blood people to stumble through all this with? (What is consciousness? I asked myself this morning, as I stepped out of the bathtub.Rreally I did, I’m not trying to sound profound -- because I do think it’s an important question, that no one has quite yet answered.) We need people, even if we don’t know how to deal with them. How do I treat them, the ones I love? I always thought entertaining them would be enough. Writing this -- well it's  the way I show my love. It’s the only way I know. I’m sure when Buster Keaton falls over a couch over and over again, he’s just, in his own way, saying ‘I love you.’ It was Terence who first said “I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me. And then Tennessee Williams had Hannah Jelkes say the same thing in Night of the Iguana: “Nothing human disgusts me, Mr. Shannon, unless it is unkind or violent.” She says this, after telling a story about how she met a man in a darkened movie theatre who asked her if she would give him her underwear. These are random acts of kindness. And believe it or not, that’s what this is trying to be.