Outside the Dog Museum Read online

  At this point Sydney did something truly inspired and for which I will be forever indebted. Every doctor I saw said something different about what was wrong with me. Overwork and stress were the preferred villains, although my favorite came from one German with porcupine hair who said I was suffering a kreislauf collapse.

  But the only thing I sincerely regret about that time was that no one photographed what I created with teapots, yellow pencil sharpeners, a Chinese wok, a black bird cage (and bird), rubber bands … in the space of about a week on our living room floor.

  I have visions of it being a cross between the 1939 New York World’s Fair, one of the lost cities of the Incas, and most disturbing of all, perhaps the most visionary work I have ever done. The pisser is, I remember nothing about it except how much fun it was to do. Sydney says it was only a drooler’s maze of nonsense, bad Gaudi and our largest kitchen utensils. I’m not so sure. When I asked why she didn’t at least take pictures, she said, “Harry, dear, it was bad enough living with you. You looked like the guy in a science fiction movie who sees the monster first. That was enough for me. I wasn’t in the mood to get out a camera. We weren’t on vacation!”

  I certainly was. While in Pakistan a few years ago on a project, I twice saw naked men walking down the street in Islamabad. Nobody paid any attention. It was explained that the insane there are considered “touched by God,” so they are left alone.

  I wish they’d left me alone. On the other side of the world, Sydney was told the best thing would be for me to spend a few months in an exclusive home with a bunch of other “exhausted and confused” souls who could afford the thousands of dollars a week it cost to reside there. Personally, I was happy as a clam at home, building my city on our living room floor.

  But my good and open-minded wife didn’t do what the “experts” suggested, bless her.

  At that time there was a notorious show on the radio in Los Angeles that both of us loved. It was called “Off the Wall,” and the title puts it all in a nutshell.

  Five nights a week the host interviewed various screwballs, zealots, and 100 percent looney tunes from the area. My favorite segment was the one where a group from Pasadena was on, claiming to be the lost tribe of Israel.

  Once, after we’d made love and were in the midst of that slow parachuting to earth that follows, I turned on the radio in time for “Off the Wall.” The host, Ingram York, was interviewing a man who spoke with a European accent.

  “Have you actually taught people to fly, Mr. Venasque? Or are we speaking metaphorically now?”

  “You ever thought about how many times you’ve heard ‘Chopsticks’ played wrong? Probably the world’s simplest piece to plunk out on a piano, but people get it wrong every other time. Then they laugh, like, who cares if I played this dumb thing wrong? It’s the same with what we know about ourselves, Ingram. ‘We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardian of that angel.’

  “Sure, I’ve taught people to fly. But that’s only because they had it in them already. They’d just been playing their own personal ‘Chopsticks’ wrong all along and accepting it.”

  “Could you teach me?”

  “No.” There was a pause before Venasque continued. “Because you don’t have it in you.”

  “What would you do if I came to you for help?”

  “Cook you lunch and watch how you ate it.”

  Sydney and I looked at each other and both slid closer to the radio so we could hear this guy better.

  “How would eating my lunch tell you anything?”

  “What you like tells me something. How you want it cooked tells me something. The way you eat it.

  “People look for wonder and for themselves in the wrong places, Ingram. In church, or when you’re dying, when a child’s being born … But those things are too strong. When life expands like that, when we’re overpowered by a moment or an event, the small things go away. Whether you believe me or not, I’m saying the most important facts are in those small things.”

  This “Venasque” went on talking like that, and more than anything else, Sydney and I were charmed by him. He mentioned being the child of a circus family in France, his pets, and how much he enjoyed watching television and cooking. Yet very little about his “magical powers,” although he clearly came across as both a learned and canny man. We liked him. He sounded like the perfect next-door neighbor.

  So, after I’d seen all the doctors, and their unanimous verdict was to pack the celebrated architect off to a madhouse, Sydney contacted the producer of “Off the Wall” and asked for Venasque’s telephone number.

  The first time I saw my savior, I was playing with my toys. Imagine a very large living room with an ocean view that leaves you breathless. Imagine me on the floor of that room with my Heavenly City set up and ever-expanding. By then I’d assembled a bunch of scale models of famous buildings—Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s of London, the Secession Museum in Vienna, the Brandenburger Tor, and set them down among the other chaos there.

  Suddenly light fell across the room. The front door had opened and there were hellos. When I looked up, this big hairy gray pig came oinking and trotting into the room. Right past me, crushing and scattering buildings, pencil sharpeners, the wok … right over to the sandwich I’d been eating. It was on a table exactly level with the pig’s mouth. One “shloooop!” and my lunch was gone.

  “What was it, Connie, a peanut butter?” Were the first words I heard Venasque say.

  “Hey, what’s going on here?” he said next, walking into the room, hands on hips. “You got enough buildings, Harry. We gotta get you a clarinet.”

  HE AND THE PIG (a “Vietnamese pig”) and a dog moved into our guest house out back. Poor Bronze Sydney: a mad husband, a shaman, a pig, and a bull terrier named Big Top all under her roof.

  Big Top and Connie the pig were inseparable. They spent much of their time in the kitchen hoping something edible would happen. Which often did because Venasque took over all the cooking—one of the few pluses for my wife. The meals he created! Even in my wonkoed condition I realized what he was serving us was Mozart to the tongue. It came out later that he and his wife (long gone) had for years owned a very successful diner in L.A.

  That first afternoon after talking to me for a few minutes, he wrote out a grocery list and asked Sydney to go to the store immediately for those things. When she returned, he made us “a real lunch” and then went out to the car for his bags. The animals naturally followed close behind. I asked Sydney if he was going to stay with us. She said she guessed so.

  For the next two days, he sat with me on the floor and together we slowly took my city apart. Once in a while he would ask me what something was. I’d say “a fork” or “ballpoint pen” and he’d nod as if just learning the word for the first time.

  “You were crazy then, Harry. I held up an orange once and you said it was a book. I almost kissed you. What you knew about the world and how you saw it was unique and specific. Never in a million years would I have seen a book in that orange, but you did. I kept an orange on my dresser for a while to see if I’d ever be lucky enough to see the book in it.”

  “You sound like R. D. Laing in The Politics of Experience, Venasque: Only the nuts are sane. Very 1960s stuff.”

  “Wonder doesn’t fit in a book, Harry. It’s too big.”

  I HAVEN’T DESCRIBED HIM yet, have I? I always assume the people I know well are just as familiar in strangers’ minds as they are in my own.

  He was a round old man. Short white hair, a large, always smoothly shaven face that looked its most comfortable listening or considering. He had green eyes but once told me the color had changed as he grew older. He wore overalls a lot because he didn’t like belts or suspenders. Overalls and running shoes. He loved running shoes and must have owned twenty pairs.

  When the Heavenly City was dismantled and put back in its rightful drawers (or garbage can), and the living room floor was visible again, the old man took me outside.


  We sat by the swimming pool and ate M&M’s chocolate candies, which were the animals’ favorite snack. Venasque said nothing; only spilled M&M’s into his hand from the jumbo-size bag and doled them out to the three of us. I was content to sit there, look at the still blue water and enjoy the sun on my legs. The only noise was the snuffling of the pig and dog as they ate their shares.

  The old man got up and walked two steps to the water. Once there, he turned the bag upside down and shook it over the pool. The candy flew out like buckshot across the surface, plink-plopping into the water like the beginning of a rain shower. Since I’d taken a Valium just before leaving the house, this strange act didn’t bother me a bit.

  “Come on, Harry, get up. We’re going for a swim.”

  We were already in our bathing suits, so Venasque took my arm and led me to the shallow end of the pool. The animals preceded us and, fearlessly walking down the steps into the water, floated out together. A white head, a hairy gray one.

  I felt the first cold stab of water on my left foot. The pig was in the middle of the pool, shoveling up M&M’s with an open mouth.

  “Connie, leave those candies alone!”

  He kept hold of my arm and moved us out. We kept bumping into candy buttons, which were already beginning to lose their color, in bright, unraveling swirls, to the pool’s chlorine.

  “Okay, here.” Venasque stopped us and put his hand over my face. Through the heavy velvet curtain of Valium and madness, I felt something extraordinarily vital and new open inside me.

  “We’re going down now, Harry, and we’ll stay down awhile. Don’t get scared, ’cause you’ll be able to breathe. Let’s go.”

  We settled like stones at the bottom of the pool. He pointed to the surface. Besides the wavering shimmer of the bright world on the other side of the water, I could see the many dark dots of M&M’s that had survived Connie’s mouth.

  “Look at those candies, Harry. Arrange them in your head. Look for a connection and tell me what you see.” His words were clear and distinct, as if we were sitting by the pool and not in it.

  What I saw was music. Music I could instantly read although I didn’t know how to read music then. The dark brown M&M’s were notes on the wavering “note paper” of the surface and it was all instantly, completely recognizable. Sublime music that made the greatest sense. Venasque later said it wasn’t music, it was me, “written properly.”

  “That really sounds 1960s! Who arranged it like that, while we were at the bottom of that pool?”

  “Don’t always be a wiseguy, Harry. It’s like a plaid jacket that goes good with some outfits, but with others it looks like shit. You want to ask an important question, ask it. Don’t always hide behind a plaid jacket.”

  “Sorry. Who wrote the music on the water?”

  “God.”

  “I’m sorry, Venasque, but I don’t believe in God.”

  “Then who do you think spread them over the water like that, Mantovani?”

  “You, Venasque. You’re the closest to a God I’ve ever gotten, although I used to think a great building was God. You know, stand near the Treasury in Petra, or Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, and that’s as immortal or in touch with the Almighty as we will ever get.”

  He shook his head as if I was a slow fool. “Someone said, ‘It is easier for an imagination to conjure architecture than human beings.’ Know why that is, Harry? Because buildings only go up so high. No matter how big they are, they stop somewhere. God doesn’t stop. Neither do human beings, given the right direction. Immortality doesn’t mean a hundred or two hundred floors. It means forever.”

  ONCE VENASQUE DETERMINED I wasn’t seriously insane, he drove me into Santa Barbara to buy a clarinet. “Serious crazies are very industrious, Harry. They cut their own roads and then drive up and down them, alone, all day long. You only took a detour to see what the countryside was like off the main turnpike.”

  Never in my life had I had any desire to play a musical instrument. In college I dreamt of being in a rock group, but that was only because of the girls that came with the occupation. Other than that, I was content to listen to music as background while working or for a mood boost when I was feeling sexy or depressed.

  Venasque said the twentieth century generally doesn’t like quiet, and that’s why there is so much annoying or useless noise (and music) surrounding us constantly.

  “Some centuries are happy being quiet and looking at the sky. Ours spends all its time trying like crazy to fill that sky up!

  “There’s no silence left: a minute when you can think or be still awhile. How about places like elevators or the ‘hold’ line on a telephone: Elevators used to give you those few precious moments when you could stop in between floors and think about what you were going to say or about what’d just happened in your life. Now you walk into a little box full of ‘Strangers in the Night.’

  “It also ruins the whole idea of music, which is something you should pay attention to, not resent or ignore while you’re waiting for your call to go through!

  “I’m going to teach you to read and play music, Harry, both so you’ll learn more about yourself, and as something to focus on when you start losing it again.”

  “Will I lose it again?”

  “Only if you want. Other people can’t help it. You have the luxury of choosing if you want to be crazy or not.”

  A FEW MONTHS LATER Venasque and I saw the film The Karate Kid on television. What ant shit. The sagacious old man from the mysterious East who can both chop a board in half and guide a teenager down the Yellow Brick Road of enlightenment via aphorisms and apothegms that sound pretty good, until you realize ten minutes later you could have thought them up yourself.

  However, Venasque liked it, as he did most things on TV. I have never met a person who liked television more, which certainly wasn’t in keeping with what I’d learned about the man in the time we’d been together.

  “What’s the matter with a movie about a kid finding his center, Harry? So what if it’s a little ‘Hollywood’? That’s what we watch movies for.”

  “But you, of all people, know how that process really works. Doesn’t it piss you off to see enlightenment served like fast food? Pull up to the drive-in window and order some nirvana, with fries, to go?”

  “Close your eyes, Harry. It’s time to travel again. I want to show you something.”

  “Traveling” was Venasque’s term for the way he made one return to their past. He’d tell me to close my eyes and moments later, I’d be back in some obscure moment or corner of my life, experiencing things I hadn’t thought about in twenty years.

  THERE IS AN ART to falling down, you know.”

  I continued looking at the camera, afraid to let my eyes click over to him as he got up off the floor. His assistant stood nearby, but obviously knew he wanted to get up alone; to achieve the small victory of rising after the large defeat of falling down for the third time since I’d entered his studio with my father.

  Robert Layne-Dyer was the first homosexual I had ever recognized, if that is the correct word. Since I was only eight, I had no idea what was “with” him, other than his gestures were more theatrical than what I was accustomed to in other men, and his speech was overly precise, his voice too sweet. I knew my father’s Southern accent and elbows on the dinner table. I was used to my dad’s friends, who talked about money and women, politics and other things, with the same appreciative deep-chested chuckles and rumbling growls of indignation or anger.

  Layne-Dyer was a flit. That is not a nice word to use these days because it’s like calling a woman a “bimbo,” but let’s face it, there are flits and bimbos in this world. However, the flit who had me posing for him was one of the most famous photographers in the world. Thus he was allowed, back in those dark Republican days of the 1950s, to wave his homosexuality like a mile-long banner at the world. When I think now how much courage it must have taken for a man to behave like that in 1957, it’s awe-inspiring.


  My father, who even then was rich and influential, had decided it was time I had my picture taken. A devoted and voracious reader of magazines, he leafed through Mother’s Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar almost as carefully as she did. On the basis of photographs he’d seen there, he chose Layne-Dyer to immortalize me.

  After due inquiry and negotiation, Dad and I arrived one July morning at the door of an attractive brownstone house in Gramercy Park. On the cab ride over, I was told the photographer was probably a “fag,” but that I shouldn’t let it bother me.

  “What’s a fag, Dad?”

  “A guy, backward.”

  “‘Guy’ backward is ‘yug.’ ‘Fag’ is ‘gaf.’”

  “You’ll see what I mean when we get there.”

  What I saw was a very sick man. He answered the door and, smiling, shook hands with both of us. But there was so little light left in him. He reminded me of a lantern with only a very small flame inside.

  He was about thirty-five, middle height and build, with a blond wave of hair sweeping down over his forehead like a comma. His eyes were green and large but rather sunken in his face, diminishing their size until you looked carefully. Which of course I did because I kept looking for the “fag” in him. He was also the first person who ever called me “Mr. Harry.”

  “So, the Radcliffes have arrived. How are you, Mr. Harry?”

  “Fine, Mr. Layne. I mean Mr. Dyer.”

  “You can call me either. Or Bob, if that’s more comfortable.”

  Then he fell down.

  Just boom! No warning, no tripping or flailing of arms—one moment up with us, the next down on the floor in a heap. Naturally I laughed. I thought he was doing it for me—a crazy kid’s joke. Maybe that’s what Dad meant when he said fags were guys backwards.

  My father gave me a jab in the ribs that hurt so much I cried out.

  Layne-Dyer looked up from the floor at him. “It’s okay. He doesn’t understand. I fall a lot. It’s a brain tumor and it makes me do some strange things.”