flowers from the
asylum’s clown
by
Douglas Messerli
Hope
Stansbury (screenplay), Andy Milligan director Vapors / 1965
Andy
Milligan’s 1965 half-hour film, Vapors, is or at least ought to be
an absolute disaster. Shot on a 16mm Auricon newsreel camera, the film roars
through a series of what critic Michael Koresky describes as hisses, “camera
whirs, and echoing room ambience” filmed in a seedy empty building near his apartment
on Prince Street that pretends to be the Saint Mark’s bathhouse, wherein two men,
one middle aged (Robert Dahdah, the director of the then-off off Broadway
venue, The Cino West Village theater) and the another younger man with thinning
hair (Mulligan’s roommate, Gerald
Jacuzzo) sit on a bed and a chair in a cubical that, in such places stuffed
with gays for a weekend series of transient trysts, is usually reserved for the
joys of a good fuck.
These two, both evidently new to the place—although
the Jacuzzo character at first lies, claiming that he comes there regularly—do
little but share in a long rather melodramatic conversation, written with what
almost appears with camp intentions by Hope Stansbury, whose claim to fame is that
she, so legend goes, helped create the Candy Darling superstar persona for the transgender
actor who played in Warhol films such as Trash and Women in Revolt
and later on stage in a Tennessee Williams play Small Craft Warnings.
Indeed, many commentators on Milligan’s
film describe the dialogue as sounding a bit like warmed-over Williams,
although one might say that many critics of the day felt Williams’ own plays to
be warmed-over or at least consisting of leftover ideas that didn’t live up to
his great plays. As I’ve written elsewhere, I find his late plays as being
often somewhat surreal and almost always very funny (see my review of his last
play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere, in My Year 2012.)
But, in fact, Stansbury’s script reminds
me less of Williams than it does of Edward Albee, particularly his 1960 play The
Zoo Story, although obviously without Albee’s humor, wit, and, most
importantly, the bitterness of the character Jerry for all things mundanely heterosexual.
But if one were to turn the tables, so to speak, allowing the Peter figure to
be the central speaker while imagining the bed to be a kind of park bench upon
which the Jerry character, the youthful homosexual, sits, you might observe
numerous similarities between the two short works.
Like Jerry in the Albee play, Mr. Jaffee
as he prefers to be called, interrupts Thomas (the Jacuzzo character) while he
is waiting, door open, for a trick, before he unceremoniously enters and
proceeds to endlessly talk, with the affable Thomas sitting out—or in this case
reclining throughout—his new friend’s onslaught of heterosexual blather.
After explaining that his only reason for
visiting the baths represents an attempt to get away from his wife, he also makes
it apparent that he doesn’t at like the place in which they are now encamped.
Just as the “park” in which Albee’s homosexual figure suggests the police are
out in full force bringing down the fags out of the trees and bushes, so Mr.
Jaffee declares that he finds his new surrounds to be like “an insane asylum
for mad homosexuals.”
Nonetheless, after they clear the way with a
few awkward introductions, together they proceed to transform the usual den of iniquity—which
throughout their conversation four queens intrude to remind them of the proper
necessity of opening and closing the door and the more common use of that space—into
a kind of confessional box.
Indeed, after a quick drink of communal
wine (coke and 7-up in this case), Mr. Jaffee gets down to business, like Albee’s
Jerry telling two stories, the first about his terrible wife who each night puts
her hair up in curlers and lathers her face in “lard.” After 19 years in this
unhappy relationship he would simply like to be free of her ugly feet pocked with bunions since she insists upon squeezing
into the smallest of shoes; he has even suffered a dream about her feet of
which he shares with Thomas, a nightmare that has made him unable to even share
the same bed with her for several nights.
Thomas’ feet, on the other hand, he finds
beautiful, asking if he might touch them, absurdly reciting the Mother Goose
song of “This little piggy” as he manipulates the toes, as if his new acquaintance
were like a child—“This little piggy went to market, This little piggy stayed
home…,” etc.
His misogynistic accounts of his wife are
indeed very similar to Jerry’s story of his landlady and her dog, a kind of
nightmare beast who, like Cerberus guarding the gates of hell, makes his
voyages back and forth to his tiny apartment wherein he resides next door to “a
colored queen” who does nothing but pluck her eyebrows, equally nightmarish.
Jerry’s flirtatious landlady is described
as a “fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of
garbage,” which, by comparison, makes Mr. Jaffee’s wife almost a beauty, yet both
are clearly disenchanted with their relationships.
Soon after Jaffee comments about Thomas’
soft skin. My son had soft skin, he states, asking if he might touch his friends
check. Thomas grants him permission to do so.
In the Albee the play, Jerry’s second
story is about his day at the zoo, clearly not a very pleasant day, but the tale
of which he is never permitted to finish. We suspect, however, since Jerry
declares that Peter will soon be hearing about it on the nightly news, that it
must involve something rather horrific concerning Jerry’s actions. He has
previously described attempting to poison the dog owned by his landlady.
Mr. Jaffee’s story is more of a kind of
urban legend such as the repeated fable of alligators living in the New York
City sewers. After carefully describing the absolute beauty and athletic
prowess of his son, Jaffee describes how his boy and a couple of friends went
to a nearby water hole to cool off, his son diving in first. Almost immediately
the others knew something terrible had happened as they waited for him to
return to the surface. It was like a vacuum, Jaffe reports, that had sucked his
body down.
When the water is siphoned away by
authorities later that day, the find the boy surrounded by thousands of snakes
who had literally eaten away his body.
The story I grew up hearing repeatedly
in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was about three country boys who also sought out comfort
in a local swimming spot, the first one diving in and drowning, In this case it
was dozens of water moccasins who bit the swimmer to death.
Thomas, however, believes Jaffee’s story
and is pained to hear it, as the father, who clearly adored his son, goes on to
express the fact that he burned most the flowers which were sent for his child’s
burial, unable to face being reminded of his son’s beauty. But one flower, in
particular, he found truly appropriate, a sunflower sent by an unknown admirer.
The sunflower, we recall, represents the adoration and unconditional love of
the sender, and, obviously, here there is the pun of sun/son.
Unable to go on any longer, but touched
by Thomas’ empathy for his loss, he tells his cubicle mate that he has a gift
for him, and will be right back as soon as he retrieves it.
This is perhaps the most surreal of all
events in this extraordinary series of confessions. But Thomas, always
seemingly ready to play along, waits patiently until the gaggle of queens returns
with a box in hand, ribbon wrapped around it, a gift they tell him which the
man who suddenly left the premises asking them to deliver it.
Why would the stranger have brought
along a gift, one can only ask, for a man he has never before met? In any
event, Thomas opens it, discovering within a large Papier Mâché sunflower.
Thomas is so touched that he weeps for moment or two.
But, as viewers of this strange series
of happenings, we are not only puzzled but the question of why anybody might
have brought a sunflower to a male bathhouse, but simultaneously almost laugh
at the outsized flower reminding us of those large and smaller flowers which
are regularly sported by circus clowns.
It also calls up for me a scene from
another Albee play, where after a rather violent scene between George, Martha,
and their guests, George suddenly pulls out a rifle, pointing it at Nick, who
has just come down from Martha’s bedroom; he shoots while all watch in terror,
as a smaller bouquet of just such flowers pops out from the end of the gun’s
barrel.
It is almost impossible, accordingly, not
to take Mr. Jaffee’s offering as anything other than a kind of comic jest, as
if he had suddenly become the clown in this asylum offering his new boyfriend a
silly simulacrum of what someone once sent to the man’s dead son, alerting us that
in Jaffee’s mind Thomas symbolically speaking, has now become his son.
At almost the same moment a new man
enters Thomas’ cubicle to wonder why he might be crying. At first it appears
that the young man is going to send him away, but he quickly calls him back,
asking him to close the door, the proper expression that those within are engaging
in sex.
The new guest, (the role credited to Matt
Baylor in the British Film Institute’s DVD credits) according to Koresky, was Gary
Stone, whom Milligan described as “very attractive street guy…known for his big
dick” and whom Milligan first met “hanging upside down in a doorway” at an
S&M party on Prince Street. Stone quickly disrobes revealing in the
original that reportedly large cock, which, during the premiere showing of Milligan’s
film at the Bridge theater on St. Marks resulted in a police raid, resulting ever
since a large black bar blocking our view.
It doesn’t really matter since we are
more than assured that Thomas will finally get what he was seeking. Yet, oddly,
we now perceive that his odd encounter with Mr. Jaffee was far more sexual that
we first might have perceived. What Jaffee has performed in his simple touches
of the younger man’s feet and cheek plays out a deeply Oedipal dream that
permits Thomas to return to the physical world. The confessional box has
reverted to its carnal purpose.
Milligan when on to make at least 29
other films, most of them concerning deviant behavior with titles that included
words like “bloodthirsty,” “degenerate,” “torture,” “incest,” and other incidents
of slasher-like gore, as if his genteel conversation between the spiritual father
and son in this film let loose some inner depravity. In the future, I’ll see if
I can obtain a copy of his drama of incestuous murder, Seeds.
Los
Angeles, September 16, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review and Queer
Cinema blog (September 2020).
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