Wait It Gets Better

One of the things I love about my cellphone camera is the unreal quality of the photos it takes, like an old Polaroid. Here is Holly. Absolute dreamy, don’t you think? It isn’t easy to get a picture like this. To get the right effect, you often have to point at something very dark or bright, then, to get the color just right, whip back to your subject before the camera adjusts the metering, the result being more or less blurred.

Yesterday, a perfect day in breezy Santa Barbara at the zoo and by a pool with Holly, Graham, his friend Ella, and Ella’s sweet dad, David. Then the return to sweltering LA. Last night, this dream: Holly and Graham are gone. I am living alone and abandoned in an apartment. I try to make friends with some guys. It’s nice, but something is missing. I must learn all I can about Frank Sinatra. Albums of his arrive in the mail, albums I have never heard of, albums with grainy, cellphone camera pictures. They tell the whole, sordid story: women, booze, women, booze, women. In my loneliness, I have to understand it. I get in my car. I drive somewhere, looking for clues, any clues.

I wake up, Holly and Graham next to me.

Go figure.

*

Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

– Bette Davis

*

You could say it was an ordinary July 4th at a friend’s — some sparklers, a few red devils, a little too much beer. I thought so too, until I got home and developed these pictures. All I can say is what appears in the photographs is not what I thought I was seeing at the time. Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see — that’s my motto. Yet how can I discount the evidence of my own hand? You be the judge, dear reader.

Word spread quickly through the crowd that this was to be no ordinary night. Here see the rapt few awaiting manifestation

which comes as the sound of pipes, then a flame.

The Attic diety Hermes alights, sweeping doubt away.

Moved, the crowd re-enacts an ancient ritual. And then

the Archangel Gabriel appears. Note the child in the foreground.

The Angel touches the girl. Instantly she begins reciting whole passages from Finnegan’s Wake, a book she’s never read.

Inexplicably, a pit opens in the earth emitting a strange light. The elders confer and decide to seal the opening — and not a moment too soon, as thereafter

the True Cross is brought forth from the waters, and

the Ancient of Days, I Am That I Am, reveals himself

to the ecstatic celebrants on the shore.

And yet one more wonder: just an ordinary looking guy lighting a sparkler, right? Wrong. This man has been positively identified as the Wandering Jew, and is 2,000 years old. True to form, he was not invited to the party, but arrived unannounced and joined in when nobody was looking.

Exhausted by events, Graham seeks the shelter of his mother’s arms. The reclining figure above him to the right is the Holy Virgin — the giveaway is the drapery by Michaelangelo.

And I only am alone escaped to tell thee …

So this is what I’m into lately. See, Holly has this album of his with the cheesy title, “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers.” Not swinging, but swingin’, which means really swinging, maybe a free martini or something (so you wouldn’t want to miss out)–o’ lethal apostrophe! Anyway, ignore all that; listen to the album. Then listen again. I’ll loan it to you. There is a David Austin rose called Abraham Darby, which you must inhale the scent of. There are Big Sur and Florence, to which you must go. There are, I suppose, a thousand other things I would tell you about. But there is also Sinatra, incandescent in his Capitol years. Here: try this. Or samples of this. It probably won’t inspire a great play, although, who knows? But it will make you happy.