Thomas Sullivan: KHAKI MAN & THE PEANUT BUTTER PLAYERS
Guess this qualifies as one of my Cannibal Essays, because I’m going to tell you about three living people who were collected, dissected, digested and eventually resurrected in fiction. I’m also trying to respond to David Niall Wilson, who posted the following comment on a column of mine [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/10/16/thomas-sullivan-agent-bingo-the-cannibal-snowman/]:
“You can’t write about life if you live out in the woods…unless you’re Sully or Thoreau…but it would be interesting (just for perspective) to see a similar piece sometime about someone lost on the inner streets of somewhere, gray walls, too much traffic, alleys and backwaters of civilization.”
He was referring to my penchant for using nature as story content. I answered then that most of what I know about people was learned from slumming angels and tarnished philosophers down on their luck in just such concrete jungles. Could dress up my boyhood pedigree a little by telling you about the exiled European prince who used to take me to the circus, and about how Evita used to pat me on the head at embassy functions in Buenos Aires, and a raft of other delights and intrigues in exotic and opulent places, but before and after the dozen countries I grew up in, there was Detroit. I was born in the inner city. We lived in one of its most notorious neighborhoods – Fullerton between 12th and 14th streets. And though I simply thought of it as my safe and secure “home” at the time (and still believe it was), I was cracked over the forehead with a pistol at age 7, saw my first murder at age 9 (committed with a railroad spike by a kid three years younger than me), and coal dust and alleys still have the power to fill me with nostalgia. And David is right, there is more living close to the bone and honesty in those environs than almost anywhere else. Desperate living sometimes, but should a writer — or anyone who wants to know life for that matter — miss that?
And yet you will miss it, even if you grow up there, unless you discover the individual lives with all their range of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, strength and weakness. You must see it as it is, not in the politically correct terms of a social agenda. If you strip it of its societal issues, you have a chance of discovering the timeless truths of human nature. If you choose to see it only through the trendy prism of your times, you may be relevant for the moment, but you will miss the absolutes, the universals, the ephemeral qualities of life, which are always subject to interpretation and have nothing to do with physical, academic, media-driven, social, religious or political circumstances at any given moment. Of course, if you are a journalist, then trendy and relevant may be what you are after. But if you want enduring truths, you must see things as a child. A writer for all times sees things as a child. An informed cosmic view has a great deal in common with not being over-informed by the present.
I think I got that much as a child and that it is one of the reasons I turn to nature for truth I can trust. The relativeness of my boyhood home on Fullerton was an early object lesson. How could we have been poor? I was happy, secure, and life was full of adventure and promise that had only to do with freedom and imagination. We had no car, no TV, and our single rug was tracked threadbare, but no one told me we lacked for anything. We had refrigeration, central heating, indoor plumbing. The king of late 18th century France had none of those amenities, and yet he was king. State of mind. If you go to the Louvre Museum, you will see King Louis 16th’s ornate carriage with the hole in the seat that allowed him to relieve himself in transit. Must have been quite the sign of wealth and privilege at the time (and hell for companions of the road). Status is subjective and relative. You can see yourself as a “have” or a “have not” pretty much at will and make a case for it. It can be said that America was discovered because of rotten meat. When Columbus bumped ashore he was looking for a shortcut to the West Indies for the spice trade, because spoiled food in an age without refrigeration made spices worth more than gold. I say I was lucky to be poor in 20th-century Detroit where cold cuts stayed cold in the ‘fridge.
Not many years after going out into the world, I revisited my former neighborhood and found it blighted. Same houses, but nothing was painted, refreshed, maintained. It was not the kind of poverty you see in Suweto, or the patina of despair in the tunnels under Bucharest, but for the first time my boyhood castle looked poor to me. I wondered if the people inside thought they were poor. Perhaps they had never been to the Louvre and seen King Louis 16th’s ornate carriage or thought about the relative nature of being a “have not.” I have not been to the Louvre either, but as a child I saw a picture of that carriage in a magazine. A few years later my boyhood home was burned to the ground in the Detroit riots.
Now, I’m not telling you this to disparage definitions of poverty, but only to loosen you up to the open-minded view I got of certain down-and-outers later in my life and what they taught me. Like all people, they were beautiful and tended to live up or down to whatever expectations surrounded them, and if it was the latter, they still found their moments of redemption in subtle ways that “successful” (whatever that means) people never know.
Take khaki man.
Scene shift. I am taking you back to when I am a parent and my seven-year-old son is an actor in a children’s troupe called Peanut Butter Players. Owing to the consummate skill of Joanne Lamun, the woman behind PBP, the child actors are quite good and many will go on to film and Broadway, like Best-Actress Tony award winner Sutton Foster. We are performing outside today at Detroit’s New Center, and I am setting up props and being my usual irreverent self along with my irreverent buddy, the colorful piano player and musical director C. J. Nodus. The urban plateau where we have chosen to perform, surrounded by tall buildings, is treacherous with gritty gusts that threaten to blow over our flats. A number of homeless people are wandering about, and one of them – a tall scarecrow of a man in khaki pants with white hair flowing in the wind – is dispensing Broadway advice to the young performers, who are already Detroit’s media children. Joanne is nervous. “What’s his story?” she asks me about khaki man. She is not being paranoid. We have been beset by at least one stalker previously, and
we seem to be plagued by itinerant carnival workers, one of whom is there at each of our dozens of performances. Another of our young actresses has received fan letters, ostensibly from a 15-year-old boy, whose OCF return address turned out to be Ohio Correctional Facility. But there is something about khaki man. He is not focused on anyone, as if for him the play has already begun and he is the star, delivering his lines to the wind. I check him out for a while and return to Joanne. “That’s me twenty years from now,” I say. She gives me a funny look and we drift apart. The show must go on.
Later, when the set is struck and loaded to travel, I stroll across the street to a parking lot set up with chairs. A rock ‘n roll band, The Larados, with a big honking T-sax, has drawn me like a moth to a flame. Maybe 50 people are scattered among a thousand chairs, so I sit down behind them in the parking lot. Pay attention, please. I am about to change. The writer in me is still trying hard to glimpse something beneath the cynicism of the encounter with khaki man, and perhaps it takes something external to get beyond that context and into the humanity I mentioned earlier.
Because suddenly there is khaki man.
He sashays in from stage right between the band on the platform and the chairs and grabs up one of the street people sitting in the front row. She is gaudily dressed, perhaps 200 pounds. She could be 25 years of age or 35. She looks the latter, but dances as if she is the former. Maybe it is because of khaki man. He has his left arm around her, canting her slightly backwards, creating the illusion that she is light as a swan. He whirls her, stutter-stepping. Her head lolls back in the bright sunlight. Face glistening, beginning to drool, one eyelid half closed, you know then that she is mentally handicapped. But there is also pure unadulterated joy in that face. She has lipstick smeared around her lips, and so she still thinks of herself as a woman. And so does khaki man…
Not so the four teenagers sitting a dozen rows in front of me who have noticed the rictus of her expression. They point and hoot like chimps in the wild. I was one of them once, maybe just a few minutes ago, but I am seeing through khaki man’s eyes now. The second impression I had of him returns: that he speaks to the wind, dances in the past, perhaps lives in the future or in a timeless place of his own invention. All of us who regard ourselves as “normal” have shunned him or viewed him with suspicion, and, therefore, we are missing something. He cannot be indicted by the present.
I am not trying to tell you that he wasn’t a shooter, an alchi, or a person who by choice drops off the rail we all cling to; I am only saying that at that moment it didn’t matter. Give him the worst of your judgment. I gave him the worst of mine. But whatever the sins of that poor bastard, he redeemed at least a few of them when he expounded on things thespian or swept up an object of derision and found grace and beauty dancing in his arms. And sitting a few feet away, I felt him enlarge my soul.
Khaki man helped awaken me to the complexity of human beings. A writer, or any seeker of truth, cannot afford to build walls. If you want to see all the way to the horizon, you should go outside your walls, and that is an inherently risky business. Most writers – maybe most people – view walls as protection when as often as not they are imprisonment. In our best moments, we expand to a certain point and set new walls and then live within those limitations. I don’t like limits. And you know, I’m a really cautious guy. Seriously. I am cautious. It’s just that I’ve discovered that most walls, like risk, are more smoke than fire. I am a writer.
There is a postscript about khaki man. A year after that show there was a fire in a halfway house near New Center. Some people died. Several times after that I found myself driving through the Cass Corridor, New Center, and other areas of the city where rootless people drifted. I never saw khaki man or his dance partner again. And I stopped looking when I began to fear the worst. Still, they are vivid in my memory. I can hear the music, I can see them dancing, and that makes them entirely possible in eternity. There. I have written them down for you. They are yours.
And I have writ enough for this month. Not going to be able to finish with the other two people I mentioned today, so this is now officially Part 1. More next time. May I wish you the cheeriest of holidays and a grand new year? Thanks to the dozens of people who suggested Dragon NaturallySpeaking as a solution to my carp ‘n’ tuna surgery aftermath. I’m using it. It just may keep my new novel, THE WATER WOLF, from dying of neglect, now that I can promote again. As a paperback release timed to be a stocking stuffer, it’s been frustrating not to be able to pitch that. It should have pretty broad appeal, being a global quest into ancient mythologies that keys off of an unusual romance. If you’d like to read a free sample chapter, my web site is below.
Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
