When my ex-wife Lisa called from
L.A. in August of 2002, after being out of touch for several years, to announce
that she was planning a trip to Boston, she asked that I contact our old and
mutual friend Danny Panagakos to inform him about the trip. She was working on
a new video project, a kind of autobiography, and wanted to compare and
contrast then and now versions of important people and
places. She was very fond of Danny. His voice advised her. His image lived in
her heart. To Lisa, Danny was a vampire god of the avant-garde. He referred to
her as “Miss Georgette.” I hesitated.
Lisa would not take “no” for an answer. “I’m not sure Danny wants to hear from
either one of us,” I said.
Lisa was fond of Danny. But was he
also fond of her—or of his parents, or even of his wife, Salma? It was not
clear to me that Danny could be truly fond of anybody. Danny and Lisa had, in
fact, slept together during the hallucinated days that preceded our divorce, a
fact about which Danny wasted no time in informing me. He did not want to place
roadblocks on the freeway of our open communication. Did I care? No. It was an omen
of the end of an anachronistic drama. As such, it was welcome. I was, however,
puzzled by this need for confession on the part of someone so incapable of
guilt.
I had no clue as to his motivations
then, at lease none that was allowed to pass my threshold of awareness. Do I
have one now? I don’t have an explanation but I do have a suspicion, and again,
it has to do with drama. There is little reason to apologize to an entity that
does not exist, but, even in the labyrinth of mirrors, the false self needs a
cast of supporting actors. The job of the supporting actors is to chant that
the narcissist is the Minotaur, the devouring god, the black hole at the center
of the labyrinth, towards which virgins of both sexes must converge.
Transgression and loyalty collaborated to feed the appetite of the growing
supernova.
***
After a number of false starts, I
finally managed to track Danny down at the main branch of the Webster Public
Library, where he had worked his way to the top. Founded by Samuel Slater in
1812 and located on Lake “I’ll Fish on My Side and You Fish on Your Side and
Nobody Fishes in the Middle,” as the translation from the Nipmuc goes, Webster
is an old mill town, once famous for the manufacturing of shoes and textiles,
which had been reimagined as an upscale bedroom community, with a
stage-set-style Main Street, during the high-tech “Massachusetts Miracle” of
the 1980s.
The paint on all of the scenery is
fresh. You will not find any worn spots on the railings. There are ordinances
against pigeons pooping on the statues, and for this reason, they have set up
tiny rest rooms. Even the manikins look like Stepford versions of themselves.
As odd as it might seem, such life-like verisimilitude can be spectral, and
such micromanaged quaintness can be more than a bit disturbing. You would think
that you were living in the 1920s, at the latest, and that Norman Rockwell
might, at any moment, wander into the Owl Smoke Shop for tobacco.
Danny was now Director of Library
Services for the town—an odd position for a flamboyant avant-gardist. I stopped
to wonder at how my friend could pour so much energy into library science,
which he hated, and so little into his artwork, which, supposedly, he loved. This
was also one of the last places in which you would expect to find the Minotaur.
A mastery of the Dewey Decimal System was not a classically recognized
attribute. The library was, however, like the labyrinth, a hermetically-sealed
environment, in which the Minotaur could enforce the centrality of his role. A
high percentage of discordant feedback could be purged. Any leakage of his
occult hungers could be plausibly denied. Few traces would be left. Amid the
coolness of the well-lit shelves, the beast’s rage would be more difficult to
detect than the whisper of air from the AC units.
After a wait of two minutes,
Danny's assistant put me through. “Hi Danny, this is Brian,” I said. “Lisa is
planning a trip to Boston next week, and she asked if I could arrange a time
and place for the three of us to meet. She’s working on a kind of video
autobiography, incorporating some Super 8 footage from 1978, in which we were
all doing our best to act experimental. She was hoping to interview both of us,
to revisit some of our favorite places and to cut back and forth between the
present and the past.”
D: “Tell her that I'm busy.”
B: “Lisa is traveling 3,000 miles,
and it’s been eight years since her last trip. Are you sure that you can't set
aside an hour for lunch?”
D: “Salma and I are building a
house in Belize. I'm really very busy.”
B: “Belize! Why Belize?”
D: “I’m disgusted with America. It
has Americans in it, who disgust me. My grandmother died last year. She left me
all of her money, as well as all of her real estate holdings. Money is not an
issue anymore. I've worked enough. Salma and I are planning to retire next
year, in Belize, where small, brown-skinned peasants will worship the ground we
walk on.
“Are you still living on Hemenway
Street, or have they thrown you out yet?”
B: “I moved when I got married
seven years ago. We own a house.”
D: “A house! My, that really is
impressive. Have you published anywhere, or are you still the ne'er do well
that my father always called you?”
B: “I've written four books since
the last time that I saw you. I've published here and there. What about you,
Danny? Are you doing any writing or art?”
D: “I am, but I don't want to talk
about it. You might steal my ideas again. Did you know that I have a radio
show? They pay me to destroy movies.”
B: “Steal your ideas! You've got to
be kidding. You've never actually shown me any of your work, except for that
black matchbook with your name inside.”
And so the conversation went. There
was no rapport, no play of curiosity, not the slightest trace of affection.
“Lisa is going to be disappointed,” I said. “Perhaps you could give her a
call.”
D: “No. You talk to her. She's your
ex-wife. I have no interest in ancient history.”
Towards the end of our conversation
Danny confided, with considerable self-satisfaction, a bit of information that
I found amazing. He said, “I no longer feel inhibited about being a bitch. I
make sure that people know what I think of them. I don't hide my feelings
anymore.” He presented this as though
such an attitude were the sign of some new maturity, as though rudeness were
not the most ancient of weapons in his arsenal. I could not remember a time
when Danny did not feel free to taunt or mock others without the slightest of
provocations. Friends did not get special privileges. Passersby were not
exempt.
I thought back to a lunch at
Bangkok Cuisine that occurred perhaps 12 years before. Our mutual friend Janet
was visiting from New York, and as we were waiting for our Pad Thai and Green
Duck Curry, Danny decided to entertain us with a series of sarcastic improvisations.
He was quite inventively vicious, brilliant in his pantomime of the diners’
gestures and actions. He did not speak quietly, but projected his lines as to
the top seats in the balcony of a theatre. One especially outrageous comment
took Janet by surprise. She snorted, with explosive force, covering Danny with
a large amount of shrimp and lemongrass soup. The man sitting at the next table
turned to him, and said, “I'm glad that she spit on you! I was about to do it
myself.”
Danny was special. Humans were
stupid. Contempt was the most appropriate response to the opinions and activity
of others. As Adam Smith, in The Wealth
of Nations, wrote, “All for ourselves and
nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the
vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” There were those who saw such
“selfishness” as a bad thing. Danny was not among them.
Illustration: Felix Labisse, Hommage a Gilles de Rais,
1957
Continue reading at: https://www.scene4.com/0723/briangeorge0723.html
Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of
Omnipotence, my first book of essays, is available through Untimely books: https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/
