Thomas Disch: On Wings of Song

The Rally was to be at eight o’clock, which gave them another good five hours to kill. Eugene suggested that they see a movie. Daniel was amenable but he didn’t want to be the one to suggest which one, since they both knew, from the ads that had been appearing for months in the Star-Tribune , what it would have to be. They asked the way to Hennepin Avenue, along which all the moviehouses clustered, and there on the marquee of the World, spelled out in electric letters big as table lamps, was the unacknowledged golden fleece of their questing ( not General Donnelly, not for a moment): the last legendary musical of the great Betti Bailey, Gold-Diggers of 1984 .

The movie had a considerable effect on Daniel, then and thereafter. Even if the movie hadn’t, the World would have, being so grand and grave, a temple fit for the most solemn initiations. They found seats at the front of the theater and waited while wild sourceless music swelled about them.

This, then, was what it was all about. This, when it issued from within you, was the liberating power that all other powers feared and wished to extirpate: song. It seemed to Daniel that he could feel the music in the most secret recesses of his body, an ethereal surgeon that would rip his soul free from its crippling flesh. He wanted to surrender himself to it utterly, to become a mere magnificence of resonating air. Yet at the same time he wanted to rush back to the usher with the handsome gold braid hat and ask him what this music was called so he could buy the cassette for himself and possess it forever. How terrible that each new rapture should be a farewell! That it could only exist by being taken from him!

Then the lights dimmed, motors parted the shimmering curtains on the stage, and the movie began. The very first sight of Betti Bailey extinguished every thought of the music’s ravishments. She was the spitting image of his mother — not as she was now but as he first had seen her: the fingernails, the bra-ed-up breasts and mane of hair, the crisp ellipses drawn above the eyes, the lips that seemed to have been freshly dipped in blood. He had forgotten the impact of that meeting, the embarrassment. The horror. He wished Eugene weren’t sitting by him, seeing this.

And yet you had to admit that she — Betti Bailey — was beautiful. In even, strangest of all, an ordinary way.

In the story she was a prostitute who worked in a special brothel in St. Louis that was only for policemen. She didn’t like being a prostitute though and dreamed of being a great singer. In her dreams she was a great singer, the kind that made the whole audience in the movie theater forget it was only shadows moving on a screen and applaud her along with the audiences of the dream. But in real life, in the brothel’s big red bathtub, for instance, or the one time she went walking through the ruins of a Botanical Garden with the interesting stranger (played by Jackson Florentine), her voice was all wobbly and rasping. People who listened couldn’t help cringing, even Jackson Florentine, who (it turned out) was a sex maniac being hunted by the police. By the time you found out he was already working at the brothel, since it was one of the few places people weren’t bothered about their I.D. He did a comic tap dance in black face with a chorus line of real life black cops, which led into the big production number of the show, “March of the Businessmen.” At the end of the movie the two lovers hooked into a flight apparatus and took off from their bodies for an even bigger production number, an aerial ballet representing their flight north to the icebergs of Baffin Island. The special effects were so good you couldn’t help but believe the dancers weren’t verily fairies, especially Betti Bailey, and it certainly added to one’s sense of its gospel truth to know that shortly after making Gold-Diggers Betti Bailey had done the same thing herself — hooked in and taken off, never to return. Her body was still curled up in a foetal ball in some L.A. hospital and God only knew where the rest of her was — burning up inside the sun or whirling around the rings of Saturn, anything was possible. It did seem a pity that she had never come back just long enough to make another movie like Gold-Diggers , at the end of which the police found the bodies of the lovers hooked up into the apparatus and machine-gunned them with the most vivid and painstaking cinematic detail. There wasn’t a dry eye in the theater when the lights came on again.

Daniel wanted to stay and hear the music that was starting up again. Eugene needed to go to the toilet. They agreed to meet in the lobby when the music was over. There was still plenty of time to get to the Donnelly Rally.

Coming on top of the movie the music no longer seemed so impressive, and Daniel decided that his time in Minneapolis was too precious to bother repeating any experience, however sublime. Eugene wasn’t in the lobby, so he went downstairs to the Men’s Room. Eugene wasn’t there either, unless he were inside the one locked stall. Daniel bent down to look under the door and saw not one pair but two pairs of shoes. He was shocked silly but at the same time a little gratified, as though he’d just scored a point for having seen another major sight of the big city. In Iowa people did not do such things, or if they did and were found out, they were sent away to prison. And rightly so, Daniel thought, making a hasty exit from the Men’s Room.

He wondered whether the same thing had been going on when Eugene had been down here. And if so, what he’d thought of it. And whether he dared to ask.

The problem never arose. Daniel waited five, ten, fifteen minutes in the lobby and still no sign of Eugene. He went up to the front of the theater as the credits for Gold-Diggers came on and stood in the flickering dark scanning the faces in the audience. Eugene was not there.

He didn’t know if something awful and typically urban had happened to his friend — a mugging, a rape — or if some whim had taken him and he’d gone off on his own. To do what? In any case there seemed no point in waiting around the World, where the usher was obviously becoming impatient with him.

On the theory that whatever had happened to Eugene he’d be sure to try and meet back up with Daniel there, he started walking to Gopher Stadium on the University of Minnesota campus, where the rally was to be held. For a block before he got to the pedestrian bridge across the Mississippi there were squadrons of students and older sorts handing out leaflets to whoever would take them. Some leaflets declared that a vote for Roberta Donnelly was a vote against the forces that were destroying America and told you how to get to the Rally. Other leaflets said that people had every right to do what they wanted, even if that meant killing themselves, and still others were downright peculiar, simple headlines without text that could be interpreted as neither for nor against any issue. As, for instance: I DON’T CARE IF THE SUN DON’T SHINE. Or: GIVE US FIVE MINUTES MORE. Just by looking at their faces as you approached them you couldn’t tell which were undergoders and which weren’t. Apparently there were sweet types and sour types on both sides.

The Mississippi was everything people said, a beautiful flat vastness that seemed to have swallowed the sky, with the city even more immense on either shore. Daniel stopped in the middle of the bridge and let his collection of colored leaflets flutter down one by one through that unthinkable space that was neither height nor depth. Houseboats and shops were moored on both sides of the river, and on three or four of them were naked people, men as well as women, tanning in the sun. Daniel was stirred, and disturbed. You could never fully understand any city of such extent and such variety: you could only look at it and be amazed, and look again and be terrified.