FUN TO BE DEAD, FUN TO BE DEAD
DEPT.: Wednesday
afternoon, four o'clock, the dentist shoves the
needle into my lower gum just past the last molar,
pushes his plunger and by-God wiggles the fucking
thing--or is that my head wiggling--pulls it out with
an audible click, takes a fresh one, shoves that down
the right side of my upper gum, and stuck in my head
inches away from those sour-tasting scraping needles
in my flesh a Bob Flanagan mantra, "He's got
nerves of steel and he can take it without flinching,
whatever it is...can take it without flinching,
whatever it is..." from the soundtrack to Kirby
Dick's Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan,
Supermasochist, now sitting on top of the stereo
console back in my old life before I had these new
holes. I flinch quite a bit--"Sorry," the
bright-eyed doctor murmurs, fingering his next
implement--but so does Bob in the movie, and while
most of us are gonna get numbed gums at some point a
perhaps smaller-sized sample of my readership will
come to feel a larger-than-baseball-sized ball shoved
up your hoop ("No way," I implacably gasp
in the theater, "that ball cannot go up that
man's hoop, there is a ball-hoop discrepancy here,
then Sheree Rose shoves and Bob barks hoarsely and
presto, no more ball), and when the gentle dental
assistant finished with the polishing and the
good-cop part of the hygiene lecture--"Bleeding
gums are not normal, you gotta brush and floss until
they don't bleed anymore"--and held a hand
mirror to my increasingly flabby, increasingly
middle-aged face, I gazed in the mirror with
something like exasperated affection, reminded as I
was of Bob's cheeks as they dimpled from a slap, sat
bisected by a ball gag, or puffed gently around the
death bed oxygen mask. I turn on my yoga breathing
and don't worry too much about the breath getting in
the doctor's face. I can take it. Whatever it, is.
Comforting, perhaps, to imagine
that I'm feeling what someone you admire has felt or
learned a coping mechanism from that person. But it's
folly to imagine that you've gotten to know the
person from ninety minutes of film. I'm inspired to
know Bob Flanagan, poet, artist, performance artist,
and insatiable (until near the end) masochist dead at
the age of 46 from cystic fibrosis; given the
impossibility, not just statistical but physical, of
that inspiration, I must judge the film successful.
("You never forget having someone like Bob in
your life," sighs Sheree just subsequent to the
hoop episode, and no, you don't get to see the ball
coming back out.) It shares its one substantial flaw
with the human experience; I wanted more than ninety
minutes could give me. My heart went out to Mr. and
Mrs. Flanagan, Bob's parents--how and when did Mr.
and Mrs. Flanagan find out about their son's
proclivities? Did they cry the way Chet Baker's
mother cried, on camera, when the filmmaker asked if
Chet had been a disappointment as a son? Where's the
rest of Sheree's family? Where's Bob's other brother,
John? (His other other brother, Tim, spins a droll
remembrance of growing up queer and afraid in a
strict Catholic household, cackling that he didn't
even do buttsex in his own fantasies, and all the
while Bob across the hall tied himself up or swung
from coathanger wire in his closet.) I could watch
six hours of Bob testifying in front of S&M club
meetings, plunking a guitar, singing about masochists
who really can't take as much pain as they avow; it's
bragging, but since I haven't knowingly met anyone
who can take the ball-hoop conundrum, I shall hold
onto my stones. (Well, maybe I have. The woman I saw
the film with the first time remarked that she'd
either participated in or watched all the activities
shown and had no problem with anything save the piss
and scat play. Oh, and the death. But we'll get to
that.)
I could not know him through
any true means of knowing, because even the simplest
human being does not exist in the form of ninety
minutes of film or even 150 hours of tape, the source
material.
Sick hardly recalls the resume
of its film/sound editor, Dody Dorn, who worked on
Silverado, The Big Chill, and Children of a Lesser
God; transferred video footage (much of it shot by
Sheree as part of the couple's play) is the rule, the
grain of the television lines stand out, interiors
and exteriors and California freeways and Flanagan's
dark olive eyes look dull somehow (and may look dull
to the power of two when the TV images come out
through an actual TV, which I guess is how most of
Seattle will have to see this). You watch Bob reading
his own obituary, flubbing it at first, then getting
it right top to bottom, then see him as a younger,
leaner bon vivant bright-eyed, open-mouthed, gasping
with gusto in "Wall of Pain," a succession
of stills all snapped at the point of impact between
his ass and those implements, and you see him in the
early sixties on the Tonight Show with Steve Allen, a
small boy with sharp features blasted blurry in the
overload of the black-and-white lights, holding up a
mixed-media sculpture showing Steve on a TV. "I
don't go to school right now, I just got out of the
hospital," he says, a little shy. In later life
he came to resemble Christopher Walken a bit; the
piercing eyes, the clipped, slightly didactic tension
of the voice. "She's a lousy nurse," says
quadriplegic Walken in Things To Do In Denver When
You're Dead, "but I keep her around because I
experience, I can't prove it but I believe,
erections, in her presence." Bob did not have
that problem.
Comparisons to Crumb best be
gotten out of the way here although they're not out
of line but rather further down the line; where Crumb
probed the impossiblity of escaping childhood
damnnations, Sick gives us grown-up love, love
between a man and a woman who paddled into their
damnations and tried surfing over them. Sheree wanted
a slave, Bob wanted a master, and from 1979 to Bob's
death that is how the dance went. Towards the end,
spurred on by the filmmaker, they let the camera in
on everything. Bob can't submit to Sheree
anymore--"I can barely breathe here"--and
she can't understand that, and over and over they
go--"Why can't you submit to me mentally?"
and Bob's eyes bulge more than usual and this could
be an argument that, minus a few words, most people
have had. In the end I suppose that's the big lesson
of Sick, that "those people" do not escape
the intractables of life, namely death and the
mechanisms of love, they just might writ it a little
larger.
"I make her come, I make
her smile, I make her laugh," says Bob on a
soundtrack bit not found in the final film, "but
I can't, and I never have, and I never will, make her
happy."
I could not honestly believe
Bob was going to die, knowing it nonetheless for
fact, beforehand, and I could not not honestly
believe he was dead in the pictures Sheree takes, the
face free of its oxygen-pumping protuberances for the
first time in years. My date, that first time I saw
Sick, says she sometimes wakes up in the middle of
the night wondering what it's like to die. She
doesn't seem afraid of anything, normally. Not a
thing. And that is only the human condition writ a
little larger.
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