Or was that Dylan? Might have been — Dylan was the big expert on drinkers, wasn’t he, dying as he did face down in the gutter — lucky beast! — not fifty paces from the Tired Horse Tavern where he came up with his biggest and best — “All the Tired Horses” (of course!), “Knockin’ on Fern Hill’s Door,” “The Hand That Signed a Paper Got to Serve Somebody,” and, my personal favorite, “Do Not Go Gentle into Those Subterranean Homesick Blues.” “Rage, rage against the leaders, watch the parking — ”
Sorry, sorry, sorry! I can barely hold still, this is such an exciting time for me. I think my man Dylan put it best when he said, “I sang in my chains: everybody must get stoned.” One of his most evocative lines, at least for me. Even now, long, long, long after I first read it, it still stirs up for me the sensation of that state where you’re practically thrumming in excitement, and the only thing that keeps you from flying up in the air and dragging the whole world after you like a cape tied around your shoulders is the incontrovertible fact of your just-that-much-too- heavy flesh —
Sorry again! The human condition tends to make me wax poetic. Rather, it makes me want to wax poetic, except I can never think of the poetic counterpart to words like “incontrovertible.” Got a drink now? Good, good, sit, sit. Did you smell anything you liked? No? Ah — you must tell me the truth here: did the aromabar intimidate you, or are you just not olfactory? I vow that either way, I’m not insulted, truly I’m not. Not all senses can be our senses, can they? And when you’re retro besides — well, some people can get that so wrong.
Like the other day. Packed in my usual buzzbomb was a silly tag from one of my sillier friends telling me that everyone was saying behind my back that I was the most retro creature they’d ever heard of. I tagged back to tell Old Sillyhead that not only were they saying it behind my back, but also behind my front, too, and in front of my back and all that, and so what.
Anyway, it’s not like I’m detoxing and then relapsing just for the wallop that first sinful sip will give you. I know people who have gone through three and four livers that way, even with top-of-the-line blood-doping. But I don’t consider them drinkers. And personally, I think Teflon™ on the central nervous system is cheating.
And in spite of what you may have heard, the aromabar really is just for amusement, I don’t do aromatherapy of any kind. Of course, anyone who does is welcome to mix themselves a bouquet with my essences and if they want to claim it gives them some kind of therapeutic fizz, I’m not going to argue with them. After all, we all sing our own particular song in our chains, don’t we.
But you’ll want to know about the last remake, won’t you. That last remake. Everybody always wants to know about that. I swear, I’ll do a thousand projects before I go gentle into my subterranean homesick blues and the one thing I’ll be remembered for is that damned remake. Everyone’ll still be mad at me for one of two reasons and by god, they’ll both be wrong.
So, one more time, for the record and with feeling: I did not rediscover Little Latin Larry, and I didn’t kill him.
Who did?
Well, I was afraid you’d ask me that.
First of all, let’s get all the facts we know — all right, all the facts I know — straight. You’ll pardon me if I go over to the bar and fix myself a few memory aids. This brown stuff here, this is an esoteric drink called Old Peculier, which is the liquid equivalent of wrapping yourself in a comfy blanket on an uncommonly bad day. Fair Annie — you wouldn’t know her, she liked the low-profile life — introduced me to it. But this other stuff that looks a lot like, well, frankly, urine — it’s no-class lager. Cheap beer was the term for it then and it was sought after for both its cheapness and its beerness, if you see what I mean.
The Old Peculier is for drinking, just because I like it. But the lager is for smelling, because I can remember Larry best when I smell cheap beer. It was just about the only thing you ever smelled around Larry.
And let’s get something else straight: the full name of the band was Little Latin Larry and His Loopy Louies, His Luscious Latinaires, and His Lascivious Latinettes.
Little Latin Larry was, of course, lead vocalist, conductor, arranger, and erstwhile composer. Which is to say, for a while, he was trying out some originals on the playlist. I’ve heard them. They weren’t too bad, you know; they were just meant to be songs to dance to, or jump up and down to, or puke to, if you went that way (not like the Bulimic Era stuff — that was later, and didn’t have much to do with having a good time). But every time Larry tried to slip in an original, everyone would just kind of stand there looking puzzled. There’d be some people dancing, some people nodding along, a few of the hard-core puking, but most of them just stood around with these lost expressions, and you could tell they were trying to place the song and couldn’t. So Larry forgot about being even a cheap-beer ditty-monger and went back to covers. There were skintil-lions of bands that played covers for anyone who hired them, but when Larry and the band did a cover it was…I could say that when Little Latin Larry and Co. covered a song it was, for the duration, completely their own, as if no one else had ever sung it. And if I did put it that way, I would be both right and wrong. Just as if I said, when they covered a song, it was a complete tribute to the original artists. That would be right and wrong as well.
It was both. It was neither. It was an experience. It was all shades of one experience, a million experiences in one. In other words, you had to be there. Yes. You had to be there at least once.
But no, I won’t try to wiggle out on that one. Even if there is so much truth to it that most people were there once. Whether they were there or not.
I don’t expect you to understand me. I’m a visionary. No, just kidding, just shaking your leg, as (I think) they used to say.
All right, back to it, now. The Larry people came to me. I don’t care what they told everyone later about my chasing them over hill and dale, or chip and dale, or nook and cranny. The Realm of the Senses Theatre kept me busy enough that I didn’t have to chase anyone. People were always beating down the door with sense-memories. My staff at that time was a mad thing named Ola, about three and a half feet tall — achondroplasia — who usually kept most of her brain in her sidekick, and vice versa. Half the time, you never knew exactly which was which. It wasn’t really any kind of intentional thing, or a statement or anything. Ola just went that way. A happy accident. Happy for Ola. So she mated with a machine, so what. I may be retro, but I’m not that retro; I certainly wasn’t then.
Ola put off a lot of people for a variety of reasons — she was doing the jobs of several people and so depriving them of jobs, cyborgs were against Nature or the Bible, or she wasn’t enough of a cyborg to claim the title (which she didn’t in the first place), or she was too spooky, too feminine, not feminine enough, not spooky enough, for god’s sake. People, my god; people. Nature gave them tongues, technology gave them loudspeakers, and they all believe that because they can use both, whatever they say is important.
I suppose that was why I started Realm of the Senses Theatre. The watchwords of the time were “custom,” “customizable,” “individual,” and “interactive.” Heavy on the “interactive.” What the hell did that mean, anyway, “interactive”? I used to rant about this to Ola and her sidekick all the time. Who the hell thought up “interactive,” I’d say; your goddam shoes are “interactive,” everyitem of clothing you put on is “interactive,” your car is “interactive,” what is the big goddamn reverb on “interactive,” goddamn life is “interactive” —
And Ola would say, Oh, they don’t want to interact, Gracie, they want to kibbitz. Everybody’s got to have a little say in how it goes. Do it in blue; I want it in velvet; it would be perfect if it was about twice as long and half as high. You know.
So that was what Realm of the Senses Theatre did. It gave people a say in their own entertainment. You could have it in blue, in velvet, half as high and twice as long, so to speak, and if you didn’t like it, it was your own lookout. But old retro Gracie — yes, even then I had a retro streak a mile wide — old retro Gracie used to think about staging some kind of event that people couldn’t interfere with, couldn’t amp up or down, or customize in any way — an event that you’d just have to experience as it was, on its own terms, not yours. And then see what happened to you afterward. So I started thinking about something called High Sky Theatre. I was calling it that because I was thinking the event would be like the sky — you could see it, even get right up in the middle of it, but you couldn’t change it, it rained on you or it didn’t and you had to adjust yourself, not it.
And then, synchronicity, I guess. I was just toying with a few designs for the logo — High Sky Theatre in floating puffy holo cloud letters — and the Larry people got in touch with me.
Right at the outset, they told me that they were all direct blood-positive descendants of the band and it was the first time that they had managed to get one of each — i.e., one of Larry’s descendants, one descendant of a Loopy Louie, one of a Luscious Latinaire, and one of a Lascivious Latinette. And even a descendant of someone who had been in the audience when Little Latin Larry and the
