WEIRDLAND TV

[WEIRDLAND TV]

Vintage mall interiors.

(This is a follow-up to THIS post.)

My parents were used to the old-fashioned familiarity of neighborhood shops. Local clusters of friendly retail and service establishments, where every shopkeeper knew your name. To them, malls were ominous abominations. Dark terrestrial city-caves of the future. My mother would say something like, “Welcome to Depression Valley” whenever we stepped inside the large new mall that had sprung up a few miles from where we lived. I heard her say it, but I didn’t feel it. Malls, like airports, felt like home to me. I had fantasies of living inside a mall.

(Heaven, to me, is a huge labyrinthine mall designed by Piranesi.)

I feel this is going to be a long post. Whenever I mentally transport myself inside that mall, I just don’t want to leave anymore. I’m not going to edit anything, it will all come out the way it comes out, tangents and all.

I was browsing a bookstore when I picked up a copy of Bridge of Terabithia. I had never heard of it, just something about the cover drew my attention. Suddenly this woman who seemed to have been following me around said, “That’s a really good book. My kids love it.” She didn’t look at me, just sort of glanced in my direction. There were no kids with her.

The blond elf-like girl who fascinated me so much. A sighting of her always was the biggest reward of the day. I didn’t know her name, nor did I know where she lived. But I knew where to find her. Not just her hair was blond, her skin was too; head to toe, she seemed to have been sculpted out of pure blond sandstone. One late afternoon, most people had gone home, she was sitting on one of the stone benches that ran alongside the sunken sitting area, alone. A filtered sunlight came in through the skylight above her, lighting up the thin fuzz on her bare legs. She was like a white vision in the dark space of the mall. A fleeting creature made out of thin phantom light. As I walked past her she smiled at me. It lasted less than a second, but I’ll never forget it. It wasn’t personal: she would have smiled at anyone walking past. But right now she smiled at me. I nodded, maybe I smiled back, like an alien trying to mimic human behaviour. Our paths crossed and then they diverged again.

(Years later I did learn her name. It was an ugly name: a crooked combination of harsh sounds that didn’t befit this shimmering being.)

My cousin was a nerd. The real thing, not the ironic kind. I was feminine, strangely angelic, and considered pretty with my long eyelashes and bright blue eyes. I was always kind of embarrassed to be seen with my cousin. I was underweight, tall, he was overweight, small, and there wasn’t a second I wasn’t aware of the comical difference between us. We were like the reflections of two funhouse mirrors that had come to life. But then I was always overly, ridiculously aware of myself and of everyone and everything around me anyway. I couldn’t take one step without seeing myself taking that step. We went to INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE at the mall, and the opening, young Indy with his heavy friend, reminded me of me and my cousin: there we were on the screen, having adventures. My cousin went to visit the comic book store afterwards, I tagged along. I loved going there, but not with him. He kind of lumbered through the store, buying comics, apparently against his will. Everything he did seemed to be against his will. He was alive against his will. He didn’t lumber just through the store, he lumbered through life. Back home, he didn’t seem to be happy with the comics he bought. He stored them somewhere and went on to play a computer game, against his will.

Evening at the mall. The weak twilight, the empty cars in the parking lot, gloomily reflecting the street lights, the people with their nondescript faces, everything seemed hollow to me. Like a shadow world that never sees daylight. We went to see BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II: me, my brother, and his friend Marcus. Marcus, who was black, was a movie buff. He was always going on about Spike Lee. He told me once that the Emperor from Star Wars was a clone, he said it like everyone knew that except me. He pronounced “Jedi” like “Jay-dee” for some reason. He could be outrageously funny, but whenever you tried to remember afterwards what exactly had been so funny, you could never really pinpoint it. Marcus’s humor didn’t manifest as specific jokes or quotable oneliners, rather he provided a general air of hilarity, where everything around you suddenly seemed like the absurd products of pathetic human endeavour. He saw right through hypocrisy. He was one of those people who could have become anything they wanted: surgeon, rockstar, landscape architect, comic book artist.

BACK TO THE FUTURE II. We were waiting for the movie to begin. In the row behind us, there were three girls. Who knows how those things start exactly, but suddenly Marcus and my brother were turned around in their seats and talking to the girls, teasing them, flirting maybe. One of the girls said “smartass” to my brother, he grinned. I hadn’t said a word, but as the friendly confrontation wound down, and Marcus and my brother turned to face the screen again, I felt a tap at the back of my head. It was the girl who sat in the middle. She had tapped me with the point of her boot. She looked like she might be a somebody at her school, not because of her looks, which were robust, but because of her confident attitude and her two wingmen. She looked at me and said, “Hey. You.” It sounded like a challenge. Or like she couldn’t really figure me out. I didn’t reply, and she left it there. Her friends laughed now and then during the movie, but she herself remained silent throughout.

All of this took place in the year of Our Lord 1989. These stories don’t go anywhere, they don’t conclude with a funny punchline or a weary sigh and words of wisdom. They are merely fragments of the Cubist jaggedness of life, where things just happen, or not. We all carry a mental library of such images and scenes, some random, some significant, and when we die, they die with us. These however, these 30-year-old glimpses, have now been saved from sure extinction, as, like everything we do online, they will be digitally stored forever—they will outlive all of us, and it amuses me to think that someone in the year 2137 might come across this post and read these very words with a kind of puzzled interest.

[WEIRDLAND TV]

My grandparents had a large, old house, a dark house, a mansion on a hilltop, overlooking the village. I was there often, and spent many hours roaming the wild gardens around it. The gardens seemed to exist in a shadow, there were no seasons, the sun shone and it rained at the same time. I think everyone has a “secret garden” in their lives, a magical place, a Strawberry Fields, and this was mine. I’ve seen things there you’ll never believe. I’d roam and observe, and listen to the birds, the strange voices, the whisperings. My brother and I once buried a plastic toy soldier there deep in the ground, to punish him for being such an ugly toy. My brother then left again to watch a movie, but I’d always stay, preparing for something.

There was an abandoned barn in these gardens. Marjory the Trash Heap lived behind it. Sometimes you could hear the ghosts of children giggling from behind its half-opened doors. Mostly it was very quiet. On one of the walls, tucked away, there was a poster of someone who looked like a good faerie to me. She had a pink towel wrapped around her and one arm raised. I understood the pose was meant to be alluring—I didn’t feel it, but I understood it; I understood human behaviour quite early—and I wondered who she could be. Whenever I came near the barn, I had to go inside and look at the poster and mentally greet it. It was always there. It stared at me from another world. Unlike the barn, which was falling apart, the poster was remarkably well-preserved, like it still had something left to do in this world.

I come from a small, religious village; everyone was strict and serious, artless. There was nothing except the dirt on the ground and the Lord above. Then, one day in kindergarten, she appeared: an intern, a free spirit, who knew the art of laughing. She had luscious, lionesque blonde hair and cat-like eyes, and she took a special interest in me—she saw it. And she knew that I knew, as young as I was. She marvelled at my drawings and raved about them to everyone in the village. Most teachers were stern, sparse with compliments—they thought of themselves as worms in the face of God—but not she: she was kind, and generous with generosity, and she made you feel there were a million great things to live for. In my mind, she had something to do with the poster. Because that was me: I saw glowing strings, veins and nerves everywhere, everything was connected with everything: I suspected John Lennon had been killed on the gloomy parking lot of the local supermarket, and Elvis had done a puppet show singing “Wooden Heart” on the football field that bordered my grandparents’ gardens.

This intern left when I left, and I never saw her again; many years later I heard she had been married and divorced. “She looked sad,” my friend said.

“Brigitte Bardot,” my mother said in a slightly amused voice, bringing her face closer to the poster to inspect it. Other family members were scattered around the property, some were in the barn, others were walking around in the gardens. “This will all have to go,” my father said, making a gesture that indicated the whole barn. It was snowing, my grandmother had died (my grandfather had preceded her years before), and my parents were making plans to take over the house. I guess my mother had never seen the poster. She glanced at it, smiling as if my grandfather had played a posthumous trick on her, then joined my dad.

They never took over the house. Too much work. Whenever I can’t sleep, I think about those strange, uncertain weeks that followed my grandmother’s death. I hear myself trying to convince my parents to go through with it—move in, we belong here! But I said nothing, and now it sometimes feels I’ve abandoned the sisters of fate, who so desperately were trying to arrange it so that I could keep watching over the secret garden, and the poster.

“Brigitte Bardot”. Of course, that had to be her name. It couldn’t have been Gertrude Hicklestein, or Deirdre Mudd. —Brigitte Bardot, Brigitte Bardot, the name sounded like a song to me. Suddenly she started to appear in my life: I caught one of her films on TV, someone referenced her somewhere, there was an article in a magazine. I started to understand she had been very, very famous once, probably the most famous European in the world. That didn’t surprise me. To me though, it felt as if the destruction of the barn—the new owners demolished it, first thing they did—had unleashed her upon the world. No longer confined to the barn, she was everywhere now, her magnificent spirit roamed free.

My great-grandmother once said, out of the blue, “I have an obsessive personality.” And I thought: “Damn, that’s me too.” I’ve shown that photo recently of George Harrison’s house that I took during a visit to the UK: I have that pilgrim side, I’m someone who expresses their admiration. I like altars and pedestals. I never see the point of scheming or manipulating, or holding back. So naturally, I wrote a fan letter to Brigitte Bardot once; her hand-written reply, accompanied by a loose, graceful drawing of a flower, is displayed in a glass cabinet in my bedroom (it glows when I turn off the light at night). I’ve learned to be kind, and be generous with generosity, and make people feel there are a million great things to live for. When I marvel at something, I’ll rave about it to everyone, and this blog currently is my special place for such inspired, magically overcooked ramblings. So when someone is so interwoven with my life as Brigitte Bardot, you’re going to notice it in my little corner in cyberspace here, and that’s why you see photos of Brigitte Bardot every day.

My grandparents’ mysterious garden is where I was born, and it’s where you can find me long after I’m gone.

Want to see her films but don’t know where to start? I made a post about that HERE.