Lunar Follies

RICCIOLI

Buffalo gals in deerskin doublets edged with lace doubloons, old dog Tray pissing up a rope, sweet Betsy from Pike doing the dirty dongola as only she can do it, waiting to come while her love lies dreaming. “Oh, happy day,” proclaims the balloon afloat above the iconic scene. The three kings of the Orient waltzing ’round the mulberry bush, nearer, or so they seem to holler in their barbaric tongue, their God to something. The banners proclaim HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! LORD GOD ALMIGHTY! and Maryland my Maryland, Christ knows why. The vacant chair, direct from Killarney, that wee broth of a skibberreen o’rooney darraghmaight, is here too, upon which rests an authentic McChughrghaighch who looks a good deal like Johnny Schmoker, the idiot savant inventor of the Sweet ’n’ Low brassiere (“Make His Eyes Pop the Fuck Out!”). Dixie, while pining away in the midst of a magnolia morass for the dumbo Johnny, is being ogled by old black Joe, who not only saw sweet Nellie home, but threw her one, yet it’s never enough, is it? never, never enough for the dark secret blood bubblin’ an’ boilin’, like animals! half-African and a yard long! Good to know that vacant Johnny will pen a note that begins “Just before the battle, Mother,” so the foxed diary here exhibited proveth, testament to the fact that he’d probably forgotten, blessedly, old Joe’s hot, bloodshot eyes glued to his snow-white Dixie’s delectable diddles, all p-proud and unashamed in their noble nakedness. A beautiful dreamer was young Mr. Schmoker, thus his ass got blowed off by a can of goober peas used in lieu of grapeshot by General La Paloma, the scourge of the upper Potomac, the lower Potawotamie, the Elysian Fields, and the Dakota Breaks. And here, by jinkies, is the “Iron Dove” hisse’f, tenting on the old campground, in a rather shockingly frank sepia study. Who woulda thunk that “the old brown church” was army slang for reckless poguing, much of it having to do with manly yet lissome young recruits from fabled Texas, land of arroyos and coños? Who? (The catalogue, usually explicit, does not hint at what “dry bones” refers to; nor does it suggest a possible reading of the barracks activity referred to as “the ould sod shuffle.”) Sweet Genevieve Muldoon, in her best whorehouse finery, is depicted pissing into a little brown jug, as a participant in a famed contest held each year in the midst of the Vienna woods, under the auspices of “whispering hope” Schutz, who is depicted, in a series of linoleum acid-stencil “renderings,” costumed as Romeo and Juliet, Reuben and Rachel, Liza Jane Patkowitz, the Fisk Singers, Frankie and Johnny California, Amos and Andy, Joe DiMaggio, and Fiorenza Ziegfeld. These were taken, from the life, as they say, during various stages of Miss Schutz’s exhilarating career of bump, tickle, slap, grind, frig, suck, hump, and bugger. For some as yet unexplained reason, the disturbingly graphic images of Miss Schutz “in action” are collectively entitled “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” In the second gallery, a bartered bride, clad in nothing but black silk stockings, blue garters, and pink satin pumps is performing a “John Henry” on the entire Mulligan Guard, two or three at a time already! “Silver Threads among the Gold” is its wholly opaque title, and tells us nothing of the bride’s feelings; although one might surmise that she hankers for the life of the carefree cafonella, the Vienna woods be damned! She is, as some wag once noted, home on the range in these captured moments of sweaty bliss, that is, quoth the sly dog, “heating up a fellow’s dinner is her constant delight.” And even grandfather’s clock rang its ancient chimes at the sight of the flushed bride in her gentle squirm atop the stove. “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,” for this was Miss S.’s handle, was the astonished cry of the libido-frenzied youths, each wearing the hats their fathers wore, each with a rose of Killarney in his buttonhole, each lost in impure fantasies in the gloaming. “What a friend we have in Jesus,” a muscular fellow unaccountably murmured, and was immediately set upon by a chopsticks-wielding Oriental lad, who crooned, during the attack, something that sounded like “aloha oe, aloha oe,” later translated by the captain of the H.M.S. Pinafore as “where [was] Moses [when the] lights [went] out?” Nearby this fascinating and instructional panorama, we may descry a curious figure, jocularly called Little Buttercup, a lad of progressive secular tastes for his time, and one highly conversant with the contents of The New York Times Book Review (known in the review industry as “The Skidmore Fancy Ball”), and The New Yorker (smiled upon as “Songs My Mother Taught Me and Taught Me and Taught Me”). Little Buttercup, when he was but a tyke, along with some of the other “babies” on the block, wore golden slippers, and in the evening by the moonlight heard, oh heard dem bells! (Dey be old black Joe’s bells.) This was, of course, long before Buttercup hit the old Chisholm Trail and discovered that the notion that there was but one mo’ ribber to cross ‘fore Loch Lomond, Californiay, hove into view, was no more than a canard, a fib, a runaround, an editor’s rejection letter, a “Norwegian steam engine,” and a shocking lie. Yet Buttercup pressed on, as numerous photographs show us, dressed now as a Spanish cavalier, now as an estudiantina, now as Stéphanie Gavotte, “La Pajera.” “Goodbye, my love, goodbye!” someone supposedly sobbed, while the passionate crowd threw sweet violets, Nellie’s blue eyes, voices of spring, a pansy blossom or two, and a handful of earth from Mother’s Grave (this last but a figure of speech known as a “clementine”). Climbing up the golden stairs to the third and most breathtaking gallery, the viewer is immediately struck by a tableau showing — to the life — Polly Doodle strolling through the park one day on white wings, so to speak, heading toward a big rock candy mountain because of what the catalogue notes term “the letter that never came.” A muscular gladiator follows Miss Doodle like a swan in España, or like Little Annie Rooney, or perhaps like Scheherazade, his eyes flashing the message, “if you love me, darling, tell me with your eyes.” He guessed, surely, in his bursting Eyetalian heart, that love would find a way like a big pizza pie finds its ineffable way down Santo’s t’roat, hey! Sadly, the way, for him, was long and over the waves. Semper fidelis was the brawny rogue’s motto, credo, dado, and blitzen, along with his favorite question to the fair sex, one that clings perpetually to his lips: “Where did you get that hat?” He was a reg’lar down-west McGinty. Next to the winsome and somewhat sad tale of Miss Doodle and her doughty admirer, is a small epic, housed in a glass-topped case, and entitled, rather puzzlingly, “The Thunderer.” Here is a photograph of Jimmy “Throw ‘im Down” McTater, doing a Polovetsian dance in the garb of his native Bowery, with a denizen of that infamous purlieu, Molly O — short for O’Spud. This is the notorious photo concerning which a pardon came too late to spare the lensman, little “Boy” Blue, from being trampled to death by the march of the raging dwarfs. Another image from that era of loose morals, tight trousers, and see-through skirts shows McTater and Molly as two little girls in blue, both wearing flattering huckleberry “do’s.” When the roll is called up yonder, so Vesti LaGiubba cracked, they’ll be admitted as the waltz of the flowers—“one a peach and the other a pansy.” The final presentation, a photocollage, recreates the frenzied world of Dunderbeck, Texas, home of the honeymoon march, sometimes called the humoresque halfstep, or, more crudely, the pull-me-off-in-Buffalo. Shown are women whose lovely hair is hanging down their lovely backs, each protected, in a manner of speaking, by the pseudonym, “Margery Daw.” One is revealed in shamefully demeaning acts of routine housework, much of it in the kitchen with Dinah (whose Rastus is, yassuh! usually on parade). The streets of filthy Cairo saw no harsher labor, the sunshine of noisome Paradise Alley illumined faces no sweatier or grimier, not even, for goodness’ sake, on Poverty Row. There were, clearly, no creatures more badly used than the poor sluts and pot-wallopers who slaved as “Margery Daw,” each and every one. America, beautiful America, is what they yearned to see, or to but hear the bells and ogle the belles of Avenue A; but “King” Cotton March, a vile lecher and taskmaster, urged them to backbreaking labor. “Your sweetheart,” he would mock, “your only sweetheart’s the man in the moon, you little pussies,” he would bellow at each exhausted girl as he mounted her, while she continued her labors. It is quite obvious from these disturbing images that nothing was done to assist these young women, for one can see, if one looks closely at the last photograph of the series, a group of sullen musicians herded together for the monthly Dunderbeck football-and-strawberry social, directed by one Cotton March, Esquire. And the band played on.

[MONTAGES ARRANGED ACCORDING TO BURLOWSKI’S “THEORY OF CHANCE ALIGNMENTS”]