768: “The show . . .”
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 57 concludes
“The show that I always think of as the Ralph Kramden show was on, and although I had never cared much for him or his foolish schemes or his eternal whining and bullying, I left it on and sat on the sofa with my back to them, hiding in the most private spot I had in the house. I think they tried to resist watching the Kramden show, tried to listen through the dialogue and noise to find me, to see if I was sighing or sniffling or cursing under my breath, but Kramden could really fill a room, even when he was only six inches high in black and white, and it was a relief to hear them, giving in one by one, laughing out there behind me, drowning me out. I could tell right away, the moment Ralph came through the apartment door with a cagey smile on his face, that this was going to be one of those episodes in which his ego, his conviction that he could be someone more than he was capable of being, would get him into horrible trouble and make life a little bleaker for him and the unbelievably forgiving Alice, but that Alice would forgive him, again, unbelievably, unforgivably, and that at the end of it all, after that poor woman had forgiven him, he would say, in a voice breaking with contrition and humility, a voice that I never believed, not for a minute, “Alice, you’re the greatest,” and, as always when an episode ended that way, I would get a lump in my throat for the misery of that poor woman who couldn’t (why? why?) bring herself to put her old cloth coat on, tie her kerchief around her head, take all the money from the canister beside the refrigerator, and buy herself a one-way ticket somewhere, and when I thought of the way I was going to get choked up, I began to get choked up, way ahead of time, and when I swallowed hard to try to keep from crying, I could hear them sigh and sniffle and when I burst into tears they did, too, and I knew it wasn’t poor Alice or loud fat Ralph who had made them cry. I had done it. Ralph may have warmed them up, but they were crying with me.
“So. They loved watching me watch TV, and then there was the war, and suddenly the television was full of images of the war, and those images made me sick. The killing would start, and the blood would run, and I would start to cry, and my head would begin to float and my stomach would start to spin, and I’d run to the toilet and throw up. They loved it. For a while, it seemed that I couldn’t turn the set on without being made to witness the summary execution of one of the enemy—a spy or a general or a smuggler or whatever. Another man, who looked as if he could have been the victim’s brother, pulled him into the street, pointed a gun at his head and killed him. And I threw up. Every time. As I said, they loved it. She cried! She threw up! What a night! What theater!”
Silence, broken here and there by a nervous cough.
She said, “It was disgusting. I mean, it was disgusting, the way rotting meat is disgusting. Audience participation, now. Picture a plate of rotting meat in front of you. Look into your lap—there! See the plate? Audience participation! See the plate!”
She was at the edge of the stage, speaking directly to the audience.
“Put your hands on the edges of the plate. Feel it. Now look at the meat. See the maggots, the grubs, those little white worms crawling out of it. Smell it—that rank, sharp, sour odor. The odor of something dead. Now pick up your fork. Take your knife in your hand. You, sir—you, too. Cut a bite. Cut a piece of that meat. Worms and all. Fork it. Bring it up in front of your face. Come on! Don’t be shy. Don’t feel embarrassed. I want you to get something back. I want to give you something—something of yourself that you may have lost—or that may have been taken away from you. I want to teach you to be disgusted again. Come on! See the flies buzzing around that piece of meat? See the little white worms in it? Smell the sharp and tangy smell of death? Now put it in your mouth. Oh, disgusting! It’s—soft—mealy. The horrible bitterness of it, the vinegar stink of it. You may not spit it out! I won’t let you spit it out! Chew it! Come on! Chew that meat.”
People were leaving their seats, here and there. Others laughed nervously. Many squirmed, and the old stadium seats creaked all around the auditorium.
Ariane threw me a look of triumph. She was proud of the control she could wield when she wanted to.
“You’re not finished,” she said. “Stay with me. I’m going to help you. I’m going to give you back the feeling of revulsion you ought to feel when you watch the news. Taste that meat in your mouth! Taste it! And now I want you to imagine that before you put that meat into your mouth your tongue—imagine your tongue—was ripped—torn from your mouth. The pain! Oh, the pain. Your mouth full of blood, the raw mess of the root of your tongue.”
Blood began to run from the corners of her mouth. When she spoke again, she seemed to be choking on it. People began retching. More of them left their seats, many grumbling, some shouting.
“You’re choking on your own blood and on this maggoty meat. Are you sick? Does this make you sick? It should make you sick. It makes me sick. That’s the way the war made me feel. And that’s the way I feel when I see those awful bloody movies that Greg Tschudin made out of my life.”
A long pause. She went to the kitchen and spat into the sink, rinsed her mouth, wiped her face with a towel. From her mouth she took the remains of the gelatin capsule that had held the false blood, displayed it, and threw it into the sink.
“Sorry,” she said. “I upset you.”
A little uneasy laughter.
“I made you uncomfortable. I made you squirm. Well, ‘don’t be scandalized by this gravity amid the frivolous.’ I’ll be amusing again in a while.”
She turned to me and winked.
She turned back to the audience and said, “Did I make you feel sick? Were you disgusted? Did you want to tell me to shut up, to stop it, to leave you alone? Well, now you know how I felt about the war.”
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 768, Mark Dorset considers Personages, Fictional: Ralph and Alice Kramden and Allusion, Quotation from this episode.
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