Between Two Lines: A Memoir

By Gerald Thomas

Gerald Thomas is the perfect mixture of a streetwise kid and a highbrow intellectual, a blend that is bound to create something intense. From the cheerful samba sessions in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, which he attended enthusiastically, to the cerebral opera houses in Germany, which he scandalized with his exceptional performances, everything in the life of this enfant terrible sounds like a human parade you want to join immediately, a Dionysian feast to which even Apollo would plead for admittance. Whether the focus falls on the dark or enlightened aspects, the horrific or pleasurable dimensions, his memoirs—finally out in book form—are an irresistible read, a page-turner in fact.

Born into a Holocaust refugee family and an offspring of the counterculture movement, Thomas, writing at 62, claims to be in tatters. But it’s precisely his caustic yet hopeful view from which he distills an entire celebration of life, of existence as a constant experiment, of the avant-garde as a viable, redemptive utopia. As he notes, “I see the world in a comic way. A sardonic comedy, of errors or not, that destroys all that lives and rebuilds its optic from the bottom of the ashes.”

For six years, he sat in a Parisian café with Samuel Beckett, dated Hélio Oiticica, washed Jean Genet’s feet, collaborated with and became a close friend to Philip Glass as they created operas, illustrated the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, and dedicated 80 percent of his time and soul to the off-off-Broadway theater scene under the wings of La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart. Not to mention, of course, the tediousness and excitement of driving ambulances in London and a relentless frisson toward the intriguing women with whom he got involved. Phew!

Invariably provocative, restlessly lucid, Gerald manipulates these pages as if they are actors on a stage and so grabs the reader by the throat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9780998321516

Gerald Thomas

I am a high-school student studying in Brooklyn, New York. I started writing poetry at the age of 12 years old. I continue to express myself through poetry. For years, I have been fascinated by the Asian culture. I constantly listen to Japanese, Korean, and Chinese music and one of my favorite hobbies is watching Asian dramas. This Asian influence can be felt within my poetry. The literature written within this book expresses my own abstract nature and reveals experiences of a more personal nature. I hope this book helps you to find the next step in your life. I hope it helps you to find your own Nirvana.

Book preview

2016

INTRODUCTION

This stage has given me the best and the worst of times; made me loved and hated and nothing in between.

This stage has placed me on a list of the most-wanted inventive minds of my generation. Yet, I have always told the truth and nothing but the truth here in this place, on this platform, looking at you.

As for my life outside this theatre, I’ve lived a very interesting one. Beyond interesting. Fantastic. Beyond fantastic. Almost always caught and dead. But not quite!

That’s who I am.

I’m here to tell you my story.

The powerful men and women who inhabit this planet of mine are part of a strange organization, a weird play, a never-ending script. They are also part of a global conspiracy, my own, a shadow organization that spans across every continent and has for the last six decades. Some say this group wanders between two lines. Others call it: the theater.

I want you to follow my life and live in the world I want you to think you live in.

They start wars, create chaos.

I start wars, I create chaos. I solve them.

And when it suits them and when it suits me, it’s all resolved.

In Between Two Lines, all characters are real and, unlike any other biography or autobiography, they’re physical as well as metaphysical, functional and will move more money in the next quarter than the World Bank will in the next year. Stage money. Fake currencies.

Their alliance affects sea change, climate chaos in every aspect of human life – the value and distribution of commodities, money, weapons, water, fuel, the food we eat to live, the information we rely on to tell us who we are.

Let me be clear. In the end, The truth will come out.

Let us begin.

Ah, yes: before the lights go on and the sun sets in this room, I will kindly ask you to switch your cellphones off. And NO chatting. Please concentrate. I’m in ruins and am hard to follow!

I belong to nothing. That’s what they always told me, Prepare to gather your valuables QUICK!!! We’re fleeing.

We’re fleeing.

As a kid I always believed that my family was a family of criminals. Or else, why would we always be prepared to flee? It took me a while, but then I learned the truth. And the truth was so sad to learn that I almost wanted to go back to the belief that we were criminals.

Please concentrate. I’m in ruins and hard to follow!

I shaped myself into something nobody would ever be able to grasp or hold accountable. I was, as it were, above the law! Did that make me a criminal? No. I’m not talking about that kind of law.

The law I’m referring to is the law of commonality, the law of ig norance and the law of hosts. Hosts of prejudice and hosts of values that only destroy.

Philip Glass explains me (and my life’s work) in the following manner:

An all round theatrical being.

HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! That is funny, Phil. That’s funny! And that’s what I am.

I see the world as THEM and never as US.

-THEM, the Germans.

-THEM, the English.

-THEM, the Brazilians.

-THEM, the Americans.

Yes, one could say that I am an American by choice, by birth, by chance or by fate. Chance. L’azar. Azar in Portuguese means bad luck.

I’m never included in the picture because I AM the stage. I look on, as you watch.

Throughout my life, and especially here on this stage, I am THE artist as a PUBLIC persona, a BEING who belongs to the public eye and that is a basic premise! Therefore, the very notion of keeping a private life is, in itself, absurd. Yes, I’m talking about THE artist as the creator, the illuminator!

Everything about THE artist (in the eyes of Saul Steinberg or Artaud, Duchamp) is what moves that being to exist, his or her FUEL, their idiot-syncs and so on. Plus, THE artists get their feedback from the public reaction to tantrums, antics, often fueled by secret potions and obsessions and compulsions! To censor them would be to dissect the human body and exclude the spinal chord or a vital organ. Albeit that my feelings are obviously personal, when expressed and externalized, they now belong to you and no longer to me.

So, don’t worry. I won’t take it personally. Attack if you will. Attack! I’m ready.

This stage is my face and my face is, mostly, a neutral place, a platform, from which to start.

My genitals are my rehearsal rooms, the backstage is my dick and ass, and my mind is a comprehensive mosaic of the images unfolding and the spoken words, words, words.

I do believe in characters, in how we all play a twisted and heroic role in this incredible attempt to comprehend it all, comprehend life, comprehend the science of a lifetime or a death sentence, depending on what one believes in or not. It’s all make belief. It’s all acting.

But, in this acting, the truth will come out.

I DO Believe in Death. That’s where the curtain draws, that’s the only time when the acting stops!

Truth? You’re obviously thinking: a role. A bad one. It impresses me how much these world characters – from revolutionary leaders to philosophers, from warriors to refugees, believe in their roles! It’s all historically a great manifestation of hysteria – a telephony without a listener –, yet (surprisingly enough), people pretend to listen but what they really do is… They transform their beliefs and project them on to a narrow path they call: thinking.

PLEASE listen and PLEASE stop coughing!!!!

Thank you!

Tribal wars, leopard skins, winners and losers, all the uniforms, soldiers, generals: all formidably bad roles! Who wrote them? Roles and costumes, traditions played out like a terribly badly written script. Who wrote it?

It’s a sinister vision of myself as a stage and not as a person, yes, I realize that.

What was it? Harold Bloom’s The Invention of the Human? In my case, it would be the reverse or the opposite. The opposite of the hu man or, better still, The Killing of the Human within the Microcell.

In more than certain ways, I see the world in a comic way. A sardonic comedy, of errors or not, destroys all that lives and rebuilds its optic from the bottom of the ashes. And that is who I am.

I keep saying this: And that is who I am.

Maybe it’s because I’ve lost you at some point or…. someone coughed over my pinnacle death sentence: the truth will come out.

Maybe, before I continue telling you my life story, I ought to say – this is who I was.

This is about someone who used to be. A biographyby a dead man who intends to…well, intends to survive a little longer by telling it as it is in real time. I know it’s hard.

I live to voice my vision and my vision is shaped by a very strange way of perceiving the world. Yes, please pay for your ticket at the box office.

So, it may be presumptuous of me to say that my face is a stage and that I am the theater. OK.

It’s maybe more fair to say that I am a blueprint for such. A sketch of a map for a stage.

Oh! Something is happening. I can’t get up. I mean, I can…but am dizzy. Legs swollen, arms not reaching out and head exploding.

Will you please excuse me? I need to go out for a quick walk. Back soon. Let’s take a seven-minute break. Thank you.

CHAPTER 1

A diary divided up into seven days and seven tableaux – adapted for the stage. Day One (dismembered parts of a human body in a busy street. Head, center stage, speaks)

Sound of sirens and people on sidewalks and that strange thrill one gets when all the emergency services rush to a crime scene. I am lying in a pool of blood, my own blood (it must be). Out of the pupil of my right eye I can see all the police isolating the area. I can hear nothing. Slowly everything becomes blurry and the sounds become octaves lower than in fact they are… I am numb and no longer… Someone touches me and rips open my jacket. It’s freezing cold. Someone throws a Tom Wolfe book at me. Paralyzed as I am, there’s nothing I can do. Just like the bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, I remain in the same position, except that half my face is now covered with a heavy, very heavy Tom Wolfe hardback. Ouch!

Hell! Today a little blind boy came to me at the corner of Cornelia Street and Bleecker to ask me for directions. I bent down and asked him what he was doing there to begin with. Holding a dead flower in his right hand he simply asked me where Great Jones Street was. I told him that it would be very difficult to explain the geophysicalgraphicalogical whatever and that, if he wanted, I could take him there. He refused and walked away, strangely. Strong chest pains, chess pawns too, knights, Queens in Brooklyn, nights awake and in mash puree nightmare. Checkmate, yet stalemate. Inertia. I was still on the ground, I believe. Yes.

Down on the ground, people hanging over me: Are you alright, Sir? Need any help? Anyone down needs help, especially on a crowded sidewalk. A hand. I took it and, slowly, very very slowly, I was back on my feet. This expression, you see… I could feel it for the first time. First one foot touched the ground and grabbed it, as it were. Then the other came following a little more timidly but grabbed it too. The boy… I could see him disappearing in the distance. Chest pains strong as roasted nuts, as if scissors were cutting me open without all the medical and paramedical team and blurred visions of going nuts on a street corner in Saint-Germain Depressed in Paris. The blind boy.

And, as he walked away, without a stick to guide and glide him or protector project him, I had my doubts whether or not he was really really really blind and followed our fellow for a while. I was feeble and weak. On the corner of Bleecker and some street, Sullivan, I think, he came to a complete stop, a break, a HALT. This lasted – by my watch – exactly ten long, exhausting, despairing minutes. Without ever turning his body around (do I not deserve a bit of suspicion? None? Not a bit?), after the ten minutes elapsed, someone showed up to meet him. To meet him. This sounds funny: meet him. Meet with him. They met up and…

Suddenly, the two of them turned around. I froze. Naked. No. Not true, not naked at all, but it felt so. I just stood there not knowing whether to stay or go or look or disguise the looks or cross the street or cross myself or jump in front of a cab. I ran. Iran, Iraq, yes, the boy was an Arab boy. And so was the man that met him. Boy! Conspiracy! I am approached by a blind boy asking for directions which he then refuses. I’m down on the sidewalk with strong chest pains. He then takes off but not before making sure I follow him. For ten eternal minutes he stops and I stop and Kronos stops. Yes, these are, surely terrorists trying to lure me into some… thing… some…

Christ! I must leave. But something is holding me back. It’s his face. The boy’s face, I mean. It’s innocent and convincing, somehow. Bullshit. Not innocent at all. Not convincing either. Rather macabre. What is it with Great Jones Street anyhow? The Fire Station? The La MaMa rehearsal Studios? Basquiat’s old painting studio? What is it? I started to run.

Stop, Sir, the boy cried out. I stopped. Stopped and I could still feel the strange way in which my bones made the strange effort to stop. Quick memories of the Challenger exploding right after take off and please don’t ask me why. My body landed in an awkward position. My muscles didn’t seem to fit the bones or nerves or skin they were under, and during this abrupt moment I tried looking somewhat cool. We’re all so fucking stupid in the end, paying attention to detail. I adjusted my scarf while… some French words came to my mind. Don’t remember what they were now. All I remember is a press conference about human rights in French and torture and violation of human rights and pictures regarding that subject matter… But why?

Why?

Then suddenly no more was said. Mahler’s Second Symphony resurrected in my mind for some split moments, split seconds later, split as the body tried readjusting its content to its form, or vice versa. I noticed as they… The Resurrection – Mahler at his best. Nothing like it. Nothing in the universe like it. And when the chorus closes it with its grand finale, there isn’t a single dry eye in the audience. I wonder if blind boys cry real tears when they listen to music or is it that their lives aren’t tragic enough already? Music would probably sound completely different to them and this is a sensation I will never be able to experience: the yellow (as Borges described it) or dark universe of a blind person. It must feel so hollow and so punctuated by sounds that its richness matches nothing else that we know.

They both approached me. The boy handed me a note. Ouch! What an acute pain now. As if a knife has gone right in. This can’t be! Please someone help me. No oxygen. A stabbing is taking place. It stops. There one second, gone the other. A white folded piece of paper is given to me, and they both leave, swiftly.

No. No such thing. I’m in the Middle Ages hanging there in Marble Arch and I can see them walking up what once will become Edgware Road. STAY, as much as I tried (the noose prevented the word from coming out loud), stay please, I whispered, my throat half cut…but nobody could hear me because Marble Arch is also the final stop of all those Double Deckers, the Routemasters, that enter Oxford Street and rip London apart like a zipper on a pair of Levi’s, like a surgery done to one of the biggest American icons.

A piece of paper? I am shaking because of a piece of paper? Come on! Give me a break. But that’s the truth. Dry mouth, dry skin, dry opera and a piece of paper in my hand that looked as if it could have been delivered by a bottle floating in the ocean. I sure felt as lonely as one of those islands that receive messages in bottles. And those messages usually sting.

I slowly opened the note, which read:

You are trapped.

I folded the paper thinking that I had received a threat. A threat of sorts. After a short while and a short breath, I unfolded it and continued to read what was written on the note: This is not a threat of any kind nor is it an extortion or blackmail attempt. It’s just kind, very kind advice from an old, old friend. You are trapped in a philosophical ‘time loop zone’ and I am a living symbol that can be interpreted in whichever way you want.

Well. I paused. I reflected. I looked at my joints and couldn’t see a thing. The pool of blood. I came to my senses. Where was I? Which was the real one? Was I lying in a pool of blood or had I long gone and this was hell? Or the better part of the deal? Jews don’t believe in any of this stuff. I just wanted to know where the fuck I was.

GREAT! INTERPRET it in whichever way you want, said the note. This…to me…is perhaps as great a punishment as when Beckett begins his novel Company by telling his character, You are on your back in the dark and you’re your only company. I mean, I can read things into things and those things yet into thousands of other things, so interpreting would keep me awake for just about two years, no additives, if you get my drift.

This must have been a practical joke poked into my retina by a friend of mine. I looked around. The eye tends to do that, I find, look around. The message must have or could have been delivered to the wrong person, after all the boy was blind, eyes wide open but insensitive (or were they?) or wide open, who is to tell? At that point I realized that the countless corners of where I was standing – Bleecker and Sixth Avenue, Downing Street and the little one that Banana Republic is on, Minetta Lane I think it’s called, had all been taken over by dozens of replicas of the little blind boy, literally dozens of them, all with a dead flower in their hands. Dozens of them if not more! As if in a Poe story or in a Borges book. No, no quoting. Yes, no. No need to ask. Of course, I was sweating, you fool, although the temperature was in the thirties.

Reflecting back on what was written on that piece of paper – as I have a million times over –, every word in it makes sense. I am caught up, trapped in a period, time zone, era, and I can’t get out.

But who might this old, old, old friend be?

I had no old, old, old friends! That’s the truth. I had known some old, old people. Were they sending me messages from abroad? Christ! Christo! Blaine! Help me! Was I receiving messages from the beyond from old, old friends right here on the Avenue of the Americas? How appropriate! And on Columbus Day! What else was supposed to happen? Maybe a taxi was to pass me by from a company called Vespuccio!!! Are eggs supposed to be dropping from the skies now to prove some kind of point? Was I supposed to catch one egg and stand it up straight and proclaim to have discovered something? Why am I saying all of this?

I walked away from that scene when the first egg dropped. By the time I had reached Houston Street, I looked back and the place had become a mess, or a mass, or a mash, a religious deluge of eggs, with NO Noah’s Ark in sight. I cannot make anything out of it. Can you? I’ve heard of fish falling out of the sky, airplane parts dropping down and dead birds falling as if just as their feathers…. but thousands of eggs!!!???

Pause – same day (someone comes in and sticks a few umbrellas into the ground).

As soon as I saw it, I thought we are in the presence of a very special piece of a very special door, Harry Tzalas, the historian who heads the Greek mission, said. There was no way that such a heavy piece, with fittings for double hinges and double doors, could have moved with the waves, so there was no doubt in my mind that it belonged to the mausoleum. Like Macedonian tomb doors, when it closed, it closed for good.

Doc? What are they talking about? Greek mission? What is this for? This Harry Tzalas guy… Is this all to do with the note I was given? Doc? Hey, Doc, tell me something: I’m trapped means what to these people? That I might end up like…at the bottom of a pyramid or a Macedonian tomb or am I beeing threatened by some terrorist organization? WHO IS BEHIND THIS? Doc? Who’s even placing me here?

Ever since that day, matters have become worse in my life and certainly not better. In these three months since that event took place, I have tried to revisit the area every day in the hopes of finding the little blind boy, or the boys in the plural, but, to no avail. Traces of the egg-mash/rain shower were still there. The Sanitation Department hadn’t entirely cleaned up in all this time and I wonder why. Whichever may be the case, that corner has become a rat and pigeon paradise.

Those who imagine that the course of cosmic evolution is a rat and pigeon paradise are paranoid and are slowly leading up to some consummation pleasing to the Creator. They’re logically committed (though they usually fail to realize this) to the view that the Creator is not omnipotent or, if He were omnipotent, wait. Who’s thinking this? Why is this coming to my mind? To begin at the beginning… I’ve heard that somewhere in my young youth but where and how? Rats, pigeons, bats, baits, Bait Man. A man hanging upside down being tortured to death because he has found a rare collection of wine bottles. To be precise, not the wine itself but the dates on the bottles: 1933 and 1945. Barolo 1933 and Brunello 1945, the rise and fall and in the bottles, instead of wine… human blood. Should that not have sufficed, not only human blood, but the blood of all philosophers and writers of the 20th Century. Oh, Bait Man. You wander in a deserted area, a sandpit where boxes of human bottled wine are symbols of such significance that all those boxes you received just after September 11, 2001, containing sensitive material have almost now been forgotten? Is that how it plays out? Is that how you’ll present it to the Creator?

The Creator could decree the end without troubling about means. I do not myself perceive any consummation toward which the universe is tending. Tending? According to the physicists, energy will be gradually more evenly distributed and as it becomes more evenly distributed it will become more useless. Gradually everything that we find interesting or pleasant, such as life and light, will disappear – so, at least, they assure us. The cosmos is like a theatre in which just once a play is performed, but, after the curtain falls, the theatre is left cold and empty until it sinks in ruins. And ruins fall upon a theater. It all fails and falls and they stand up and applaud while we go back alone and find ourselves thinking alone having pleased or annoyed thousands.

The resonance of the multitude of sounds from the audience still echoes in my ear and, yet, I will be alone with the brightest stars sinking into a hole, as we all tend to do, as one and the same with the Universe.

What is it with that blind boy, the note, the flower, the Creator and the directions he was asking for? Am I in the middle of a plot about to unfold?

CHAPTER 2

Day Two (Humphrey Bogart-like scene. Film Noir. Rain and wind. Man in trench coat standing on a street corner desperately trying to light a cigarette)

And as I commit this to paper, this story seems to solidify, meaning, come to an end, a conclusion concluding, or colluding if you will, leaving all the leads up in the air, stirring the confusion even further, leaving the knots even looser and… the string theory, the leap some quantum or, to the inmates, San Quentin, the idea of being trapped inside of your body because you’re blind and young has moved me to insanity and, sometimes, to tears.

I have realized how grateful I am, or amful to have good eyesight. Vision! What a blessing! Yet…

Today is probably the most unhappy day of my life. As I wake up and look at the alarm clock, I’m alarmed myself. Is it the most unhappy in the 61 years that I’ve been around. Round may indeed be the most incredible concept ever. The Planets, the spherical dance in this immense universe, sensually being tanned by the sun and one by one, being sucked in by the black hole. What a concept. What an idea, and we just take it for granted!

I’m thinking: I must go to a café in Istanbul and find the blind boy. I’m also thinking. The minute I get there, that is, to Istanbul, I’ll go to the first café I find. And the boy will be sitting there. And what? What is far too simple a question.

WHO IS SPEAKING THIS? IS IT BEING SPOKEN BY A GHOST WRITER? Am I being predestined to follow in the footsteps of whatever he or she writes? Have I no personality at all?

Sitting around (please notice the around and not IN) a Zurich café, I read a newspaper: …But even more amazing than the sphere is the man-made box. That is – indeed – the most representative of what we are and all of which we contain. A mere fold it yourself corrugated cardboard box: that’s what we are. And in its hollowness we reside and we remain and we refrain from exploding when we see what we see, i.e. INJUSTICE everywhere, box upon box upon box, layers and layers of it until someone called… Nothing. I’m sick of concluding every thought. This one speaks for itself. We are boxes, can’t you see the metaphor?

Okay, I say to myself. That’s the sign. That’s the green light I’ve been waiting for. Bellevueplatz out of all places, near the Opera House right next to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Now, it all makes sense. I must try to rip out this page and decode it. Sphere is the man-made box, whatever that means. I must find out what that means.

Images of the last two nights in London come back to me. Who did I see? Who did I speak to? Who was I approached by as I walked alone in Hyde Park at 7 in the morning or, even later in the day in Primrose Hill? Was the cab driver who picked me upat home at Lowndes Square in anyway suspicious? Yes? No? I just called the usual number, 0207 436… and someone called Ross picked me up and took me to Luton airport. Ross?

What about New York, three nights before that? Who was that Dial 7 driver? He also looked awfully familiar. This cannot be a conspiracy and I cannot be taking it all in as if I’m becoming paranoid. But he did look awfully familiar, that Pakistani man from Islamabad.

Three nights before being picked up at Waterside Plaza, New York. The man discussing the matter with me on the corner of 10th Street and First Avenue punched me right here. Can you see? Right here, half an inch below my right eye. I picked the wrong guy to have a metaphysical argument with about what and who we are. He was a homeless guy who lived right out of a box. Sorry! So humiliating that I put my tail between my legs and walked a block north to Veniero’s and ask for an ice cube to put over my eye. They charged me a dollar.