The giant lady just looked at me, but not the way Darwin did. She didn’t move. She sat there like a statue and didn’t blink. She didn’t write anything down. She just looked, and now I was pissed, because I had given her a great answer. I knew this because, after thirteen grammar schools, I knew how to deliver a professional, precocious answer—how to build those extended point-by-point analogies that boosted your score on the tests they gave you when you came to a new school. But June Cleaver wasn’t buying. She turned over a piece of paper and asked me about the Road Runner cartoons. Did I like them? Yes, I did. Did I identify with the Road Runner or the Coyote? Again, I wanted to tell her that I didn’t identify with cartoons. They were just cartoons. But, in truth, I sympathized with the coyote, so I said, “Wile E. Coyote.”
Wrong! Clearly, wrong again, from the look on her face, but I was committed and I wanted to win, so I pressed on. I identified with the coyote, I said (like a pitiful slut), because he was always sending off in the mail for stuff from ACME that didn’t work, like when I sent off for that Lone Ranger Badge and Secret De-coder, and when it came, it was just this dumb piece of cardboard. Again, I considered this a very suave, precocious kid answer. But again, nothing. She didn’t write anything down, and I couldn’t believe it. I was flunking a quiz on cartoons! So I withdrew into sullen hostility. This was my standard response to intransigent adults. My little brother, on the other hand, being a little brother, invariably turned silky sycophant, so I have no doubt that a few hours later he was sitting there smiling away at June Cleaver, saying yes, our home was pretty much a Satanic cauldron.
I folded my arms and stuck out my lower lip. June turned the page and asked me if I liked Tom and Jerry. A testy nod from little Davey. And was I ever, perhaps, frightened by the violence? she asked emphatically. A moment of thought and then, with an edge of icy sarcasm that would have impressed even my mom, I said: “Oh yeah, I’m always terrified.” And she wrote this down! Thus, I discovered virtue’s invulnerability to contextual irony. And I couldn’t take it back! For years, I would replay this scene in my head, wishing that I had said something more sophisticated, like Claude Rains in Casablanca: “I am shocked, shocked!” Something like that, but I didn’t, damn it. I had never felt quite so betrayed by the adult world—until six months later when the “results” of this “study” hit the news nationwide.
Even Dave Garroway talked about it on The Today Show, and he was shocked, shocked. Children were being terrorized by cartoons! We trembled at Donald Duck in the role of an abusive parent. We read the Road Runner as an allegory of fear. And, worst of all, we were terrified and incited to violence by the aggressive carnage we witnessed in The Adventures of Tom and Jerry. And maybe so. Maybe some kids actually said this stuff, but speaking for the student body at Santa Monica Elementary I can assure you that we were mostly terrified and incited to violence by those enormous, looming ladies. They were real, not cartoons, and we knew the answers they wanted. But like good, brave little Americans, we were loathe to provide them, since they did not coincide with our considered opinions as citizens of this republic.
So, we did our best, you know. We told the truth and were betrayed—for our own good—and I am being perfectly candid when I tell you that this experience of betrayal was more traumatic and desolating to me than any representation I have ever encountered. All of the luxurious freedom and privacy I had felt in California dissolved in that moment. Because those ladies, in their presumption that we couldn’t distinguish representations from reality, treated us like representations, to be rendered transparent and read like children’s books. What’s more, we kids knew whereof we spoke. We held symposia on “issues of representation” at recess, and it turned out that everyone knew that if you ran over a cat with a lawn mower, the cat would be one bloody mess and probably die. Thus, when the much-beleaguered cartoon, Tom, was run over by a lawn mower and got only a shaved path up his back, we laughed.
It was funny because it wasn’t real! Which is simply to say that the intimidated, abused, and betrayed children at Santa Monica Elementary, at the dawn of the nineteen fifties, without benefit of Lacan or Lukács, managed to stumble upon an axiom of representation that continues to elude graduate students in Cultural Studies; to wit, that there is a vast and usually dialectical difference between that which we wish to see and that which we wish to see represented—that the responses elicited by representations are absolutely contingent upon their status as representations—and upon our knowledge of the difference between actuality and representation.
What we did not grasp was just exactly why the blazing spectacle of lawn-mowered cats, exploding puppies, talking ducks, and plummeting coyotes was so important to us. Today, it’s clear to me that I grew up in a generation of children whose first experience of adult responsibility involved the care of animals—dogs, cats, horses, parakeets—all of whom, we soon learned, were breathlessly vulnerable, if we didn’t take care. Even if we did take care, we learned, those creatures, whom we loved, might, in a moment, decline into inarticulate suffering and die—be gone forever. And we could do nothing about it. So the spectacle of ebullient, articulate, indestructible animals—of Donald Duck venting his grievances and Tom surviving the lawn mower—provided us a way of simultaneously acknowledging and alleviating this anxiety, since all of our laughter was premised on our new and terrible knowledge that the creatures given into our care dwelt in the perpetual shadow of silent suffering and extinction.
So, what we wanted to see represented were chatty, impervious animals. What we wanted to see, however, was that wall of vibrant, moving color, so we could experience the momentary redemption of its ahistorical, extra-linguistic, sensual embrace—that instantaneous, ravishing intimation of paradise that confirmed our lives in the moment. Which brings me, by a rather circuitous route, to the true occasion for this essay: a moment, a few days ago, when I looked around my living room and realized that, for once, the rotating exhibition of art I maintain there was perfectly harmonious. Even the painting sitting on the floor, leaning against the bookcase, worked. The whole room hummed with this elegant blend of pale, tertiary complements and rich, bluey reds. I even recognized the palette. Flipping open a large book on my coffee table, I found it displayed on page after page in the paintings of Pontormo.
I found this perfectly amazing. Since I never consciously “arrange” things, the accidental harmony spoke of some preconscious, developing logic in my eye, and I loved the idea that after years of living with color I would end up with Pontormo. Not such a bad place to be, I thought, but it spoke of more than that—since I realized in that moment that I had, indeed, spent a good portion of my life creating, discovering, or seeking out just such color-saturated atmospheres—in my glowing, scented room in the house below the Palisades, in art galleries, artist’s studios, museums, casinos, and cathedrals—at the old Criterion in Santa Monica, in the Bishop’s residence at Wurzburg, and on the beach in San Diego, standing with the water around my knees, peering through the surf spray at some extravagant orange and teal sunset that flashed back in the glassy curl. Even as I considered this, another such spectacle, the Las Vegas Strip, was blazing away right outside my windows.
I already knew, of course, that the condition of being ravished by color was probably my principle disability as a writer, since color for a writer is, finally, less an attribute of language than a cure for it. But it was a disability that afflicted most of the writers I loved, so I took comfort in it—and in the thought of Flaubert in North Africa, of Djuna Barnes in the salons of Berlin, of Fitzgerald in St. Tropez, DeQuincey in his opium dreams, Stendhal in Florence, Ruskin and Henry James in Venice, and even Thomas Jefferson, my old companion in self-indulgence, who was physically discombobulated by the gardens at Versailles. In my own life, I could pinpoint the moment I came into this knowledge. When I was very young, my grandparents had a little flower shop in south Fort Worth, the centerpiece of which was a large walk-in refrigerator for storing fresh flowers. The refrigerator had glass windows and doors. The first time I stepped into it, closed the door behind me, and stood there amidst all that color, coolness, and scent, with the light streaming in, I was like Dorothy transported to Oz. I knew why