Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Thursday, February 24, 2005 The Pitch: It's like Where The Buffalo Roam meets The Wizard of Oz! Weird the way an eye arranges images in a frame. I was struck by the fact that Hunter S. Thompson died on Sunday night, and Dr. Gene Scott died on Monday afternoon. They seem almost bloodbrothers to my mind, and I can't imagine anyone who went to college when I did was able to escape exposure to either.Sadly, I have more to say about Gene Scott than I do about Thompson, although that is probably unsurprising, since Scott--by virtue of his crazed religious broadcasts--could be more directly experienced en masse. I have stories of friends who wrote their early articles for the college paper like Thompson, or who would tell me the inevitable tragic ending to a Thompson signing: I remember one, at Stanford, where a student hollered "Hey, Hunter!" and hurtled a can of beer. Thompson, on sheer autopilot, caught it and then pitched it back, clocking the surprised student straight in the face and causing a legendary spray of blood, beer and university-directed lawsuits. But Gene Scott...my last roommate in the dorms was fixated on Gene Scott. Mark would sit indoors all day, shades drawn, nursing a hangover, and would watch Gene Scott. When I would come back from class (or, later, began my own depressed tour of duty of that tiny room as the relationship I left proved nearly impossible to escape), I would sit there, in the gloom of a blinded day, and watch Mark watch Gene Scott. Scott provided a valuable service for those of us who had yet to go into a bar, or lacked a certain kind of alcoholic parent: Scott would wordlessly sulk with all the attendant charisma of the apathetic drunk. For young men unable to avoid being engaged in the world, there is a genuinely mesmeric quality in a man sitting unresponsive to all around him--and that power is heightened when done in front of television cameras. Televisions never shut up, you know: a minute of dead air is a minute of sheer terror to those in programming, a minute where viewers can change the channel, or turn off the talking box, or can leave their darkened room and return to the world. But Gene Scott would sit, staring, either directly into the camera or off to a corner of the stage, collecting his thoughts, or tending the fires in his soul. After a minute--or two--or three--he would break out with a tirade of extended disgust, toward the Godless, or the penniless, or the makers of second-rate cigars. (I must have also walked in on the middle of one his fund-raisers, where he would stare into the camera and refuse to speak until a certain goal was met, although I must have arrived before they started and left before they ended: I only know about them from reading the obituary I linked to.) Sometimes before cutting, finally, to commercial, he would show videotape of horses in a field. (Or perhaps those were the commercials, I can't remember anymore.) What strikes me now is Mark--hairy, unkempt, smoking cigars--pointing and laughing derisively at Gene Scott--hairy, unkempt, smoking cigars. It's not my memory that twins them, I'm sure of it: one was a strange mirror version of the other. Mark, to what I'm sure he thought of as his credit, kept himself to himself--he barely went to classes, barely left the room--and perhaps this is why he laughed as he did at Gene Scott. Mark had an unhappy filipina girlfriend (on whom he cheated at least once with his unhappy filipina ex-girlfriend) but apart from leaving the room for her, he was in the room all the time--bearish and naked, the light of the television playing off his glasses, smoking the glasses and frequently hooting and pointing at Dr. Gene Scott's unfocused glower. Everyone on our floor only knew Mark as a presence of cheap cigar smoke, lacking corporeal form. And so maybe no one else remembers Dr. Gene Scott quite the way I do--as something like a hologram, a figure smoking cigars in the blue lit center of our room, surrounded by the haze of cigar smoke. Something like the Wizard of Oz as the Wizard was and must have been--a scowling man disappointed by the world, surly and silent in his displeasure, occasionally coaxed to manic heights of laughter, derisive laughter, as he scrawled equations he never explained, and talked excitedly of impending ruination. This, then, was Dr. Gene Scott, and this was my roommate, Mark. And although I left them behind, it appears they stay with me still. Not even death, at least for now, will undo that. posted by Jeff Lester | 11:25 AM | |
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