Outside the Dog Museum Read online

  “Then why do you charge five thousand dollars for a chair that you call ‘Bobo Brazil,’ Mr. Radcliffe?”

  “Do your homework, Ms. Neville. I don’t charge anything for the furniture I design—the company does. And they aren’t charging for the chair or lamp, they’re charging for my name. Anyway, I come cheap—Knoll charges ten grand for a Richard Meier chair.”

  “Don’t you feel immoral being involved in that when you know so many people are suffering in the world?”

  “Don’t you feel immoral writing for a magazine that’s only bought by pseudo-intellectuals and rich people who don’t give a shit about the poor?”

  “Touché. What were you doing at the Luxor Baths?”

  “I was with my father, who was a Turkish bath nut. He believed you could do anything you wanted—drink a bottle of brandy or carouse all night, so long as you went to a Turkish bath the next day and sweated out your transgressions.”

  “Transgressions?” She smiled for the first time.

  “I believe in words of more than one syllable.”

  “You like language?”

  “I believe in it. It’s the only glue that holds us together.”

  “What about your occupation? Doesn’t the human community depend on its physical structures?”

  “Yes, but it can’t build them unless it can explain what kind it wants. Even when you’re only making grass huts.”

  “What do you think of your work, Mr. Radcliffe?”

  Without missing a beat or feeling the least bit guilty, I stole from Jean Cocteau once again. This time replacing only one word—“architect” for “writer.” “‘I believe that each of my works is capable of making the reputation of a single architect.’”

  “You don’t believe in modesty.”

  It was my turn to sit forward. “Who do you think is better than me?”

  “Aldo Rossi.”

  I waved him away. “He makes cemeteries.”

  “Coop Himmelblau?”

  “They design airplanes, not buildings.”

  “Honestly, don’t you think anyone is better than you?”

  I thought for a moment. “No.”

  “Do you mind if I quote you?”

  As obnoxiously as possible, I slid into my father’s Basile, Louisiana, drawl. “Aww now, Fenny, do you really think that’s going to hurt me? Every interview I give, they quote that. Know what happens? I get more commissions! People like hiring a man who’s sure of himself. Most particularly when you’re responsible for a few hundred million dollars!”

  Which was true. While talking to Fanny Neville that first time years ago, I was also thinking about the three projects on my desk: the Aachen, Germany, airport, the Rutgers University Arts Center in New Jersey, and the house I was building in Santa Barbara for Bronze Sydney and me.

  Footnote: Bronze Sydney was my second wife. Bronwyn Sydney Davis. Bronze Sydney. We started out as partners, then married, but quickly realized we functioned better together as professional colleagues. A calm divorce followed. We are still partners and friends.

  Both the Aachen and Rutgers projects came about because I’d assured specific people I was the best. That self-confidence, along with my plans and proposals, convinced them. I don’t think the designs alone would have done it, although they were very significant and appropriate.

  Ask anyone about the high point of their life. Odds are, whatever they say, it’ll have something to do with being busy. I felt comfortable answering Fanny’s question so bluntly because at that time I was a hurricane named H. Radcliffe, Important American Architect. I did feel like one of those tropical storms that builds in the Gulf of Mexico and scares everyone when the weather man says ominously, “Hurricane Harry is still biding its time out there, just growing bigger. But batten down those hatches, folks. This one is going to be a doozy!” I was a doozy, and getting bigger all the time because of the buildings we were putting up. There was fame, money by the pound, jobs designing anything I wanted. Bronze Sydney and I were working too hard, but loving the full-tilt feel of our lives. When we went to bed at night, we were still so wired that we’d often fuck for hours just to ground some of the electricity, angst, excitement, anticipation … that’d built up in both of us over the day.

  Then the storm hit, all right, but me, not the mainland.

  MONTHS LATER, AFTER I’D won the Pritzker Prize (the second-youngest recipient in its history, let me add), the real honor came when I was invited to participate in the seven hundred fiftieth anniversary of the City of Berlin. As part of the celebration, the city fathers had intelligently decided to ask prominent architects from around the world to design new buildings with which to give that fearful, nervous city a face-lift.

  A late twentieth-century city perched like a crucial and formidable lighthouse on the edge of communism. I thought it was as noble and utopian as we were ever going to get.

  They asked me to design a section of the Berlin Technical University. Within an hour of the request, I knew what to do: What could be more appropriate for a technical university than a robot, seven stories high? I kept a collection of toy robots on my desk, and friends knew if they ever saw an interesting one to pick it up for me.

  After spending the better part of two days with the door closed, all calls held, and the desk lamp tipped to illuminate the various figures, I began sketching a building that looked like a mixture of Russian constructivist collage, the sexy robot girl in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and a “Masters of the Universe” doll. It was brainy, but not exceptional. I needed more stimulus.

  There’s a store in Los Angeles on Melrose Avenue that sells nothing but rubber spiders, Japanese robots, horror movie masks … . Your typically overpriced, chic kitsch paradise where the pile of rubber dog shit you bought as a kid for forty-nine cents now costs seven dollars. Truth be told, I’d spent much time and money at that place when searching around for ideas for a new building. A thirty- or forty-dollar bagful of glow-in-the-dark werewolf fangs, little green-rubber-car pencil erasers, get-the-ball-in-the-hole puzzles … spread out together in front of me usually helped, for some unique reason. Mallarmé got his inspiration from looking at the ocean. Harry Radcliffe got his from a fake fly in a fake ice cube.

  The owners of the store gave me the heartiest of hellos whenever I came in. I think they were nice people, but I’d spent so much money there in the past that I could never tell if they were really nice or only money-nice. Money-nice lasts as long as you’re a good customer.

  “What’s new?”

  “We just got something I think you’ll like very much.” The man went to the back of the store and waved me over to him. I walked back as he was reaching down into a box on the floor.

  “Look at these.” He held out two handfuls of vividly colored little buildings, each about four or five inches long. I picked one up and gave a tickled yelp. “It’s the Sphinx!”

  “Right. And here’s the Empire State Building, Sydney Opera House, Buckingham Palace … all the famous buildings of the world as pencil sharpeners! Aren’t they great? We just got them this week from Taiwan. Don’t they look like pieces of bubble gum?”

  I reached into the full box and rooted around for samples of each. A cobalt blue Leaning Tower of Pisa, vermilion Statue of Liberty (was that a building?), green Roman Colosseum. There were a surprising number of different ones. Taking a few to the front of the store where there was more light, I held them up and looked carefully at the detail. Superb.

  I bought two hundred and fifty.

  There was no screech of tires, screams, or thunderous crash when my mind went flying over the cliff into madness, as I gather is true in many cases. Besides, we’ve all seen too many bad movies where characters scratch their faces or make hyena sounds to indicate they’ve gone nuts.

  Not me. One minute I was famous, successful, self-assured Harry Radcliffe in the trick store, looking for inspiration in a favorite spot. The next, I was quietly but very seriously mad, walking out of that shop with two
hundred and fifty yellow pencil sharpeners. I don’t know how other people go insane, but my way was at least novel.

  Melrose Avenue is not a good place to lose your mind. The stores on the street are full of lunatic desires and are only too happy to let you have them if you can pay. I could.

  Anyone want a gray African parrot named Noodle Koofty? I named him on the ride back to Santa Barbara. He sat silently in a giant black cage in the back of my Mercedes station wagon, surrounded by objects I can only cringe at when I think of them now: three colorful garden dwarves about three feet high, each holding a gold hitching ring; five Conway Twitty albums that cost twenty dollars each because they were “classics”; three identical Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs albums, “classics” as well, twenty-five dollars apiece; a box of bathroom tiles with a revolting peach motif; a wall-size poster of a chacma baboon in the same pose as Rodin’s The Thinker … other things too, but you get the drift.

  My car was so loaded down in back that one might have thought I was transporting bags of cement. But all I was carrying was the alarming evidence of my dementia.

  Why did it happen? How did I end up driving a station wagon full of plastic garden dwarves and Conway Twitty albums when I was at the height of my success? Believe me, I’ve thought about it since I recovered, and that’s a long time. The standard explanations could be used to good effect—I was overworked, there was too much pressure to succeed, my marriage with Sydney was beginning to hiss and spit ominously at its seams … .

  Or none of the above.

  After Venasque introduced me to the journals of Cocteau, I came across a passage which touched me deeply.

  “Then I realized that my dream life was as full of memories as my real life, that it was a real life, denser, richer in episodes and in details of all kinds, more precise, in fact, and that it was difficult for me to locate my memories in one world or the other, that they were superimposed, combined, and creating a double life for me, twice as huge and twice as long as my own.”

  When I showed that to Venasque, he patted my shoulder.

  “Exactly. That should answer your questions, Harry. You needed to go nuts! Most people do it either to hide, or because they can’t cope. But you did it because no matter how much you thought you were doing things right, you weren’t. And something inside knew it.

  “Look at it this way: Your dream side decided you and it needed a vacation from your awake side, so it bought the tickets and packed bags for both of you. And off you guys went, leaving your awake side at home.”

  It was nice of the old man to call them my “dream” and “awake” sides when we both knew he meant Crazy Harry/Sane Harry. Yet what he said makes more and more sense the further removed I am from that turbulent time of my life. Some people do need to go crazy. To live fully in your “dream life” a while is like putting all the weight on your left foot when your right is exhausted. I wasn’t crazy very long, but in certain specific ways those months adrift in “Lu-Lu Land” gave me two of the most important things in my life: a fuller, more balanced vision, and the indispensable Venasque.

  I’m moving too fast. Rerun the tape to where Noodle Koofty and I and our inanimate friends in the back of my Mercedes station wagon are tooling up the Pacific Coast Highway, some of us mad and some of us still, all of us enjoying the sunset over my first day in bedlam.

  Suddenly the thought of all the magnificent things I’d bought overcame me. I had to share my enthusiasm with someone, so I pulled off the road at a phone booth to call Bronze Sydney.

  Later, she said I sounded like a public-address system announcing departing trains. What I took to be wild enthusiasm, according to her, came out sounding half-dead: “Just described what you’d done in this dead monotone,” she said. “I-went-to-the-trick-store. I-bought-yellow-pencil-sharpeners. I-am-very-happy … like that.”

  “I sounded that creepy?”

  “Yes. I thought you were doing one of your funny voices.”

  “What was I like when I got home?”

  “Very pleasant and friendly. Back to your old self. Remember, the really bad things didn’t start immediately.”

  Sydney liked the parrot and thought the other objets were a part of some labyrinthine plan I was cooking up. She was used to me arriving with whoopie cushions, joybuzzers, or boxes of toy soldiers which I’d take into my study and play with or stare at until the message I needed from them arrived. To her full credit, the woman didn’t even bat an eye the time I spent a quiet evening at home gluing animal crackers together.

  One image that’s remained is of my wife’s back as she carried two of the garden dwarves under her arms into our house. She was wearing a black dress and bright orange stockings. The colors reminded me of Halloween.

  After we ferried all of the new goodies into my room, Sydney went back to her book. While I, hands on hips like a pirate-ship captain, surveyed the lay of the land.

  My “desk” is a round Danhauser dining table, perpetually overloaded with stuff. That night for the first time in recent history, I removed this stuff from the table. After placing it in careful piles on the floor, I set to work building the world.

  In no time I had all two hundred and fifty pencil sharpeners arranged across the mahogany table. But that was uninteresting, so I took one of the dwarves and plunked him down in the middle, a giant alien-invader centerpiece.

  Some hours later I reemerged into the light and land of the sane to ask if there was anything to eat. Both of us hated to cook. As a result, meals at the Radcliffe home were either vile, bizarre, or not at all. I was informed there was a bucket of fried chicken in the kitchen.

  Mrs. Radcliffe later said she started suspecting something strange was up when, minutes later, she saw me come out of the kitchen wearing a full-length apron and carrying a long barbecue fork in each hand.

  “How do you want your chicken? Well-done?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How do you want it cooked?”

  “Harry, that’s Kentucky Fried Chicken. It already is cooked.”

  I smiled enigmatically and returned to the kitchen.

  Ten minutes later the smoky tang of barbecue drifted into the room. She found me out on the patio, flipping chicken pieces on the grill.

  “What are you doing?”

  “How do you want yours cooked?”

  She looked carefully at me. I remember that. She looked for so long that I finally got embarrassed and went back to my chicken flipping.

  “How’re you feeling, Harry?”

  “Good. A little tired. I haven’t eaten much today.”

  “Then why don’t you go lie down awhile? I’ll finish here and bring it to you when it’s ready. Okay?”

  “You don’t have to do that, Syd. They’re almost done.” I pointed to what was once a chicken wing but was now only a smoking lump of black.

  “Okay.” She went to the nearest phone and called our doctor/ friend/neighbor, Bill Rosenberg.

  I WAS ALL RIGHT for a while after that. Bill said I was overworked and suggested that I take these pills and go up to San Francisco for a few days’ rest, which we did. We stayed at the Mark Hopkins, ate red pasta at Ghirardelli Square, stood outside the old Fillmore West and talked about Janis Joplin … a nice trip—romantic and restful.

  There are several American cities to choose from if, in secret, you really wish you were living in Europe: San Francisco, New Orleans, Seattle. Their buildings are quirky and original, bakeries make things like baguettes and Dinkelbrot, and there are long harbor views from the smallest windows.

  And bridges. How I love bridges. There is a stern precision and authority to them that you see almost nowhere else in architecture. Unlike buildings, they are there to serve only one purpose. Form limited to function in the most succinct way. Design it wrong, you’re headlines.

  After we’d made three trips to the Golden Gate Bridge, where I stared at it like Moses at the burning bush, my wife reasonably asked what was going on.

 
“I need toothpicks!”

  Sydney’s mistake was not having me committed then. Or outside the supermarket where I bought thirty boxes of toothpicks and seven tubes of glue. Or back at the hotel where, tongue outside my mouth, I began the toothpick bridge.

  Enough was enough! Sure, she was used to me buying plaster lawn dwarves and Sam the Sham records, but hadn’t I already cooked the cooked chicken? Covered a table with yellow pencil sharpeners?

  Know what Cocteau says about situations like this? “It is easy to behave well in disaster. That is when a good education shows. The hard thing is to behave well in good fortune, that is the proof of real spirit.”

  Now look, you know by now I already had my head up like a panicky spaniel, sniffing the ripe air madly. But the madness was my problem. Sydney’s was to see that cocked head of mine, gleaming eyes, robot voice back on my tongue … .

  Later, she said there was nothing uncommon about what I was doing, but I disagree. Do you know where your children are tonight? Do you know where your mate’s sanity is tonight? I am sure if Bronwyn Sydney had gone as demonstrably mad as I did those days, I would not have sat there and watched television while she crawled on the floor, making something that looked like a spiderweb spun by an arachnid on LSD.

  The ex-Mrs. Radcliffe disagrees. That is one of the reasons why we share an office now but no longer a life.

  Anyway, back home in Santa Barbara it became all too apparent that I was hanging-ten way out over the edge of the real world and something had to be done.

  If you’re rich or famous, they don’t come with butterfly nets or giant syringes full of sedatives to subdue you till they can get you to a padded cell. In my case, during the infrequent moments of clarity that whizzed through my mind like hummingbirds, I remember being asked by serious types if I felt “all right.” But hell, I felt great—the view from my window was interesting!