A Ghost, a Girl, and Solid Gold False Teeth

That night in bed, Suzie and I shared a cigarette and talked. We often had long, rambling conversations in bed together. We’d always been able to speak our hearts, and listen to each other as best friends do. 

We knew… at such times dreams can be born. 

We were happy together. We’d been around the world together, had fun together, been tested together, could rely on each other. Suzie lived for the moment and adored life as it came, a true gypsy soul untethered and free. I was enjoying the present but, still without a job in animation in New York, brooding a little about the future. 

I listened while Suzie quietly talked of her mother in South Africa, whom she missed. She spoke of her brothers and sister and their life before her father went “crazy mean with his dopp,” meaning the booze, and she cried a little for things that were lost. Suzie didn’t often cry, but sometimes, after lovemaking, she was more emotional than usual. (Who isn't?) She naturally had a very loving heart and our act of love had set it astir.

After a long pause, she whispered, “I saw him again.”

“Who?”

“My father. He was sitting on the edge of our mattress.”

While we lived in the shared apartment on Seventh Avenue, we slept on a mattress on the floor. For privacy we had hung a row of curtains around. I sat up and looked down towards my feet. 

“When did you see him?” I asked. 

“Yesterday. Just after you left the apartment.”

“Oh? You sound okay. Is everything all right?” 

She had seen the ghost of her father before, in every place we had ever lived. Australia, Africa, New Zealand, and now New York. He was a well travelled ghost, this father of hers, I had to admit that. I had never seen him, but this did not stop me from believing wholeheartedly that Suzie had. He appeared at times when Suzie was by herself. She would walk into a room and he would already be there, sitting quietly with his hands in his lap. He wore a look of inner reproach on his haunted face, as his anguished eyes followed Suzie’s every move.  

He never spoke a word, just sat there on the end of the bed and stared with haunted eyes at his daughter. The way Suzie thought of it, her father was the one who was being haunted, not her.

“He was just checking up on me, to see how I was getting along in the big city,” said Suzie quietly. The little girl who used to be, wanted to believe in the protective father who never was. 

Laying next to me in the dim light, Suzie’s eyes glistened with tears, tears not for herself, but for her tortured father. She believed he suffered the fate of being an unhappy ghost because of the unhappiness he caused other people while he was living, with his violent alcoholic rages and especially the murderous intentions of his ghastly suicide. She blamed his ghostly troubles on his addiction to alcohol when he was alive and held her father, now that he was dead, virtually blameless, at least as far as his soul went, the thing of him that was his essence and that really mattered. 

Within Suzie’s small frame beat a giant’s forgiving heart.

“Had you seen him lately?” I asked. It had been a while since she had mentioned her father and I was curious. Suzie could be casual about things, and sometimes she failed to mention that, oh, by the way, I saw the ghost of my dead father again the other day. 

“No,” she said. “Not for ages.” She thought for a minute. “He’s never been to America before.”

“Did he try a pretzel while he was here?”

Suzie laughed quietly and her splendid white teeth showed. We both detested the twisty, salty things sold on every NYC street corner.

I pulled her to me and gently kissed her mouth. Her cheeks were damp with tears.   

“Goodnight, Suzie,” I whispered.

“Goodnight, dahling.”

She snuggled into me with her long arms folded on my chest. I held her close as she fell asleep. How innocent she looked when asleep. Like a child. 

My heart swelled with love for Suzie. 

Laying there, listening to Suzie breathe and looking up at he ceiling, I thought some thoughts to myself in the night.

So, Suzie had seen her father’s ghost sitting on the bed. Well, that had happened before and would probably happen again. So long as Suzie was okay about it, why should I worry? I stared up into the dark and allowed my mind to wander. Suzie. It was fun in the bathtub tonight. Even after twelve years together, I found her as exciting a lover as ever. It was always no holds barred! Life was fun at the apartment, with friends all around, but it would be good to have our own place, if we could ever afford it. At least I had a job working as a messenger, but it was hardly worth it. The work itself wasn’t too bad, the people I worked with were friendly and interesting, but the money was terrible. No matter how much I worked, there was never enough. It was grinding us down and making life tough. When would animation work come my way? Would it ever come my way? Somehow, I knew it would. It was just a matter of not giving up, of that I was convinced. It was just a matter of persistence. Of believing blindly and carrying on! 

That, and luck. Plain, old, dumb luck.

Well, I thought, I’d always been a lucky bastard. Ask anybody. As my father-in-law Mick used to say, “Rusty lad, if you fell into the toilet bowl headfirst, I swear you’d come up with a set of solid gold false teeth! Ahaw haw haw!”

I smiled to myself and closed my eyes.

Soon I was fast asleep.

Letter to Santa Pt 3

Well Santa, I went off to boarding school.

Which was pretty horrible. 

Being only twelve I was one of the younger boys and with my uselessness at sports and such I didn’t make friends easily. Plus I wasn’t the boarding school type, I guess, so my teachers were generally pretty disappointed in me too.

I felt lonely and dumb.

The one bright spot was art class, where I could draw.

One day after class the art teacher looked at my drawings of Bradbury the axolotl and said he saw promise in me.

I was so happy!

Then he touched me between my legs.

He told me how handsome I was and how he could see that I was a sensitive, loving kind of boy.  

That we could be special friends.

No one had ever spoken to me that way before, Santa.

So I let him kiss me and put my penis in his mouth and I have to say that it felt good.

Although I felt guilty about it later.

He used to make me stay after class so we could be alone. We did many things together which pleased him and I loved him with all my heart. 

He told me I was his special boy, but we have to keep it secret.

Of course it ended badly.

Another boy he was doing things with told his parents and it all came out. 

I had to leave school.

“Ugh! How could you?!” said my stepmother when I arrived home. “Doing it with a man. Little pervert!”

“I didn’t know it was wrong,” I said. “Really he was a nice person.”

“Little sissy,” said my dad and this time I knew he meant it.

We didn’t speak much after that.

But Boris, my stepmom’s brother who took over my room, he looked at me funny and that night he came to me where I was sleeping on the couch and said he wanted me to do the same things with him that I did with the teacher.

I said please no it got me into trouble but he just put all his weight on my chest pinning me down and told me to start doing it.

Then he called me some nasty names while I did what he wanted.

I was so scared my dad would catch us I used all my skill so that Boris would finish quickly.

He moaned and quivered and clutched me tightly.

I kept going till he was done.

Then he pushed me away and told me never to tell or I’d be sorry.

I was sorry already.

Boris visited me every night and even caught me in the bathroom a few times.

I remember the rug on the bathroom floor and Boris looking at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t like the art teacher, who was kind and said nice things. Boris was rough and called me names.

Like he hated me for what I let him do to me.

At least he stopped beating me up.

Luckily, I was soon sent to live with my aunt in Texas.

My father couldn’t stand the sight of me anymore, said my stepmother.

“So long, kid,” she added. “Good luck.”

She handed me $30 and put me on the bus to Amarillo, Texas.

My father didn’t even see me off.

My aunt picked me up at the station in Amarillo.

Her name, believe it or not, was Sissy.

Which made me laugh!

She laughed too. She had kind eyes like I remember my mother had so I gathered my courage and told her my story and how I came to be on her doorstep.

“I know,” she said softly. “Your daddy told me.”

“He thinks I’m a sissy,” I said.

“What do you think you are?” asked my aunt.

So we talked about it and I told her everything that I’d kept locked in my heart until then.

“It’s okay,” she said when I finished and it was the best thing she could have said.

Christmas that first year with aunt Sissy was fun. She had a daughter older than me away at university who came home for the holidays and with aunt Sissy’s husband Roger we all decorated the tree and had a grand time! 

It was the best Christmas I ever remember!

You brought me books that year, Santa, including one that became a favorite, James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl.

I suppose I identified a bit with James.

But then, don’t we all?

After awhile living with my aunt and her family I sort of forgot about Boris and the art teacher and the things I’d done with them.

I became a boy again. 

Aunt Sissy encouraged me in my drawing. She took me to the rodeo where for the first time ever I drew a live horse! She looked at my drawing and said my mother would have been proud of me.

Boy! That was a great day! 

Over the years aunt Sissy and uncle Roger became like my mother and father.

They loved me and treated me with kindness.

And I was a good son to them, making them proud mostly. 

I left Texas when I was nineteen, and went to New York where I hoped to become an artist.

“Don’t go, Rusty,” said aunt Sissy. “Stay with us and go to school here. You can go to New York later if you still want to.”

But I had wandering feet.

“I have to try,” I answered. “The bright lights of the big city beckon. I love you and uncle Roger and I’ll be forever thankful, but something calls me and I have to go.”

To be continued…

Doctor’s Orders

   There are many reasons for a writer to write. 

   I write because I enjoy entertaining people and as a way to deal with the world around me. To try to understand and have a laugh at things that to me are incomprehensible and somewhat sad. Of course, it might be said that cooping myself up in a room for days at a time writing is not dealing with the world at all, as my wife often suggests, but is it any different than practicing yoga or working in the garden or playing golf or the millions of other things people do to deal with, or escape from, life? 

   Anyway, whatever the reason, a writer’s first responsibility is to write!

   The reason I’m writing this particular blog today is because I’m under orders, after a stay in hospital, from my doctor. 

   Don’t worry though, I’m okay now. Except for these damned doctor’s orders. 

   Yes, doctor’s orders. He got a court order, him and his lawyers, with a lien on my house and a garnish on my income, demanding that I pay my overdue hospital bills. There’s a restraining order in there too, somewhere. And let’s not forget alphabetical order and the Franciscan Order, I think he’s got them lined up against me also. 

   But the joke’s on him. Ha! Ha! 

   You see, being a writer, I don’t have any income.

   He wasn’t much of a doctor, as it turned out. 

   I could go on and on, listing his defects and having fun with that (fact is, I’ve spent the entire morning doing so with much hilarity on my part, but alas, to little purpose, they being so mean-spirited as to be completely unusable here) but let us just agree to say that his idea of overdue, and mine, are two very different things. 

   I have every intention of attending to his bill, by the way, but I have a strict rule of paying my bills in the order they arrive. It’s only fair. Dr. X (my publisher forbids my using his real name) is way down on the who-gets-paid-when list, and if he keeps on having these ‘agencies’ calling me, demanding money and threatening me in the middle of the night, he’s going to drop further down the list. Or maybe I’ll take him off it entirely. 

   That’ll show him! 

   I don’t know why I should even be paying him anything. After all, it wasn’t me that left his gold Rolex wristwatch inside the patient at the hospital in Orlando, next to the pancreas.

   I mean the Rolex watch was next to the pancreas, by the way. 

   Not the hospital. 

   That’s on Lakemont Ave. 

   

   May I take a moment and encourage the reader to admire my deft use of product placement in that last group of paragraphs? Smooth, huh? It’s a new thing we’re trying. Please watch (no pun intended) for further subtle placements like this, dotted throughout my blogs. 

   My publisher suggested it when she read my latest manuscript. 

   She insisted, really.

   “It’s good business,” she said. “You need the money, don’t you?”

   “Yeah, sure. But what about my art?” I whined. “Won’t people think I’m selling out?” I always end up whining when I’m in her office. 

   Whining, or crying. 

   “Remember my rule?” she said sweetly but somehow threateningly. “People will think what I tell them to think!”

   “Yes, ma’am.” I also become timid and meek in her office. I think it’s something they put in the coffee, because the coffee is truly horrible. Or pump in with the air conditioning in the freezing-cold reception area, where she always keeps me waiting before she sees me.

   “So, you want to be an artist, do you?” she asked me.  

   “Yes, ma’am.”

   “You’re such a hotshot writer, work in some goddamned Ferraris then!”

   She shook my manuscript in my face. Three year’s work, flapping angrily at the end of her arm. 

   “I have to stay true to my art, don’t I?” I asked.

   “Art, schmart! What about GM, the NFL or the Food Network? How about some freakin’ Nike, Apple or American Express?”

   “Okay, ma’am, if I can.”

   “And would it kill you to mention the new Honda? My daughter’s sixteenth birthday is coming up!” 

   “Yes, ma’am.”

   She glared at me.  

   “I mean no, ma’am.”

   I didn’t know what I meant. Confused and flustered, I looked up at the ceiling, then down into the half-empty coffee cup in my hands. It’s something they pump in with the air conditioning, I decided. The coffee can’t taste this bad and be doctored. That would be too obvious and they’re much too smart for that.

   But if that's the case, why wasn't she affected?

   Was she immune? Or taking an antidote? Or, and this is my favorite, was she some sort of alien? 

   “Here!” She tossed my MS into my lap. Three year’s work, crushing my testicles. “There’d better be some goddamned Ferraris in there next time my freakin’ assistant reads this!”

   “Yes, ma’am.”

   “Anything else on your mind?” she asked.

   I shook my head no.

   “Then hadn’t you better be getting back to work?”

   "Yes. ma'am." 

   With the briefest of adieus, I was dismissed.

   I was so happy to be out of there, I stopped for tree martoonis on the play to the scubway station where, feeling as flight as a leather and possessed by love for my mellow fan, I handed an incredulous panhandler a twenty-dollar-bill for good luck!

   “Hey!” he said. “That’s a twenty, Mack! You crazy or something?” 

   “Take it, my friend!” I told him. “Consider this an offering to the gods.”

   “Huh?” he asked.

   “It went much better with my publisher than usual today!”

So Much Better Than Here

   My first day of school in New Zealand wasn’t going very well. 

   Me being a tall, gawky kind of kid freshly arrived from America, I didn’t fit in.

   After causing much hilarity in Geography class, where I knew nothing of the southern hemisphere and couldn’t pronounce the Maori place names, and History class where it was the same thing, I got along to my next class, 5 Ac II English. 

   English. At least I spoke that. But guess what? Only having been in New Zealand a couple of weeks I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. They spoke so fast and used words I didn’t recognize. 

   My usual response to any question was, “Huh?”

   Which made everyone laugh at the dumb yank new boy.

   Unlike morning Assembly, with its repressive atmosphere, or Geography or History where I didn’t know what they were talking about, I enjoyed Mr Olinski’s class. He was a good teacher, I thought, and the hour in English flew by on wings.

   Mr Olinski was speaking to the class, when in through the door stepped Henry. As Henry waited to interrupt Mr Olinski his eyes scanned the classroom. Seeing me, he laughed derisively.

   “Blimey!” he guffawed. “What happened to you?”

   The class looked from him to me and they laughed.

   I had got a terrible haircut, that’s what had happened to me. It made everybody laugh.

   I had met Henry before, last week when we had taken an intelligence test to see which form we would be placed in at school. We were both new students. He was from England, I was from America. At sixteen-years-old, he was two years older than me.

   I had had a haircut since we had met and it was my haircut that had surprised and shocked him. It had surprised and shocked me too. It was a hideous haircut, called a ‘short back and sides’ but no name could do it justice. On the day I had taken the intelligence test I had been ordered by the assistant headmaster to get my hair cut before I would be allowed to attend school. 

   Unfortunately, a joke had been played on me and I received a haircut normally reserved for inmates of the lunatic asylum. 

   You might have read about it in the book I wrote, HOLD THE BEETROOT.

   Henry handed Mr Olinski a slip of paper. In that instant, while Mr Olinski’s head was down reading, Henry twisted towards the class and made a silly face, screwing up his nose, crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue. 

   The class erupted in raucous laughter. Mr Olinski looked up at the class, then over at Henry. By then Henry had composed his face. Now, with his innocent eyes gazing heavenward and a look of modesty adorning his face, Henry looked every inch the pious schoolboy.

   “Very well,” said Mr Olinski to Henry, unimpressed. “Please take a seat.”

   Henry took a seat and the lesson continued. 

   There sat Henry, slouching in his chair with one leg outstretched and his chin in his hand. He looked bored. I noticed his hair had been cut since I had seen him, but it wasn’t cut by much. It was nowhere near as short as mine.

   But then, nobody’s was.

   I laughed to myself when I recalled that Henry had predicted, before the intelligence test, that he would easily be in a class higher than me, two classes higher probably, when the bell in the hallway outside started ringing. 

   Class was over. 

   I gathered up my things. Before I had even managed to get to the door, Henry had caught me up and was jabbering away.

   “Blimey! Who butchered you?” he snorted, indicating my hair. “And how’d you get in the advanced class with me?”

   We weren’t in any advanced class. It was just 5 Ac II English with Mr Olinski. I changed the subject. “I’ll tell you if you tell me how you passed the haircut inspection this morning.”  

   “The what? Haircut inspection? Missed it, I reckon. I got here late.”

   “Oh?” I asked. 

   “Trouble at home mate,” he explained. “Wif me Mum. Missed Assembly completely. When I got to school I was told to report straight here, and here I am.” 

   He made a theatrical bow. It was a natural gesture, with tremendous charm.  

   Standing up, Henry sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “I won’t be in this bloody school long, anyway,” he bragged, looking around him with disgust. “What a dump! I’m just killing time here until me Mum goes back to London. She’s got a posh new boyfriend back home and I’m going to live with them.”

   Henry breezily told me all this in his cocky way, as if he were a movie star allowing me a glimpse into his beautiful, fabulous, jet-setting life. It sounded like a tall tale to me, especially with the braggadocio with which Henry told it, but I suppose stranger things have happened. He talked about how good things were going to be back home in England.

  “Then it’ll be the sweet life for me, mate!” Henry bragged. “London. It’s so much better than here!”

   ‘So much better than here.’ That comment stung me, because I realized I was beginning to think that way myself and I didn’t like the way it sounded when Henry said it out loud. I noted it’s negativity and snobbishness, two things I detested, and imagined how insulting it would sound in a New Zealander’s ear. Of course, Henry didn’t think he was being insulting or snobbish or negative. He wasn’t even bragging. He was just giving me the facts, enlightening me as best he could while preoccupied as he was with his own sweet life.   

   “Yeah, he’s loaded,” continued Henry. “Owns a cinema on the High Street and a pub on the Lower Side. He’s promised me me own car, too, soon’s I get a license. Yeah, that’s nuffink to him. A little motorcar? Nuffink mate!”

   By now we had reached the end of the hallway.   

   I pushed open the doors and stepped outside into the sunlight.

   “Sounds great,” I said. “What kind of car do you think you’ll get?”

   It was lunchtime. Students gathered to sit together at tables or under trees.

  “Hey you wanna have lunch together?” asked Henry.

   “Sure,” I replied. 

   My first day of school in New Zealand was half over.

We Stand Upon the Shoulders of Giants

   I had lunch with my friend Rachele the other day. We met at a restaurant by the marina on the lakefront in St. Cloud, not far from where I used to live. They make a pretty good blackened grouper sandwich there, and the beer’s not too expensive. The only gripe I have is the overly friendly approach the staff adopt. Not being originally from the South, in fact having grown up in New Zealand, a place where people are more reserved socially, I always wince whenever my server calls me, “Hon.” 

   I know they don’t mean it that way, but I’m nobody’s hon.

   My second wife and I used to live in St Cloud. 

   She’s not the wife I blog about and fight with all the time. That’s my current wife. My pugnacious muse, you might call her, and, although I often wince when she speaks to me, she never calls me hon.

   No, the wife I used to live with in St Cloud is the wife who went a little cuckoo and started wearing tinfoil on her head, to keep out the voices that she heard. She also threw all her possessions into the street, ripped up every floorboard in the house, and installed video cameras in the attic, looking for the demons who were torturing her. And more nutty things, but why mention them? She did all this, by the way, well after we’d got divorced. So you can’t say, as some might, that I drove her crazy. When I lived with her I had no idea she was destined for such a fate. 

   Nobody knows for sure what their destiny will be, do they?

   She was a sweet-natured person, completely undeserving of the pain and confusion she was given. I feel badly, because towards the end of our marriage I wasn’t much of a husband. Some restless devil seemed to grab hold of me, and I couldn’t be happy with what I had. 

   Maybe I was the one who was cuckoo. 

   If you’re reading this, my dear, please accept my apologies. I’m sorry for the pain I caused you, and I hope your life is good now, and that you are happy.

   Anyway, about my lunch with Rachele. I hardly recognized her, she’d lost so much weight. One of the few of us in America who is reversing the trend. She used to run the training department at Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida, and was a popular ‘mother’ figure to the young interns that came through the place. They were usually nervous in the beginning, these interns, for it’s not an easy thing to be an animation artist for Walt Disney. There’s so much heritage and history, and at the time we were making the best animated movies in the world.

   They had yet to learn what every artist must learn; to trust themselves. 

   Occasionally I was called upon to instruct these interns. Animation cannot be learned from books, but, provided one is diligent, observant, and persistent, from trial and error. One has to make many thousands of terrible drawings, before the good drawings start to flow. And, if you’re lucky, animation is learned by a sort of apprenticeship to a more experienced animator. My original mentor had been my father, whose name, for you historians, is John Ewing*. He had worked for Disney, where his mentor had been John Lounsbery. Lounsbery** was one of Disney’s Nine Old Men, as Walt christened them. These nine men virtually perfected the art of character animation as we know it today. (I met the surviving members of this most exclusive of clubs, Marc Davis, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Ward Kimball, as well as production designer Ken Anderson, layout artist Ken O’Connor and sound effects man Jimmy McDonald,*** shortly after the Florida studio opened in May of 1989. I was one of the Florida studio’s original crew members. I’d met Mr Lounsbery when I was a child. We, that is my family and I, visited his ranch for a picnic, where I rode a horse for the first time. My sister and brother were too young to ride, and I remember my mother was anxious, for I was still her little boy and knew nothing of horses or riding them.) 

   Thus I can trace my animation heritage, winding through the Disney company, all the way back to the 1930s.

   After the Disney execs came out from Burbank and casually laid us all off (closing the Florida studio in 2004), I taught animation at Full Sail University. During my years there, I taught thousands of students. Some of them even worked hard enough to have learned something, and to begin upon their own journey as animators. 

   Now they can trace their heritage back through me, and my father, and John Lounsbery.

   We stand upon the shoulders of the giants who came before.

*His Disney credits include 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword and the Stone (1963), and The Jungle Book (1967).

** Whose mentor had been Norm ‘Fergy’ Ferguson, the artist credited among the first to show an animated character ‘thinking’ on screen. That character was Pluto, and he was thinking about flypaper.

 ***Inventive sound effects artist and the voice of Chip from those wonderful Chip and Dale cartoons of the 1950s. He was also the second voice, after Walt, of Mickey Mouse.