When I was thirteen, we had a “balloon debate” in history class, a kind of staged argument where you had to pretend to be a famous person from history. The premise of this game was that a number of important historical figures were passengers in a hot-air balloon that was rapidly losing steam, and only one could survive. You had to make the case why you were more important than the other people in the balloon, and everyone got to vote on who should be thrown overboard. I won the debate by a resounding majority, managing to convince the rest of the class that I, Bela Lugosi, was of far more importance to the course of history than any of my fellow passengers, including Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, Henry VIII, and Bob Marley.
I loved Bela, and I believed in him. Bela was more than a man. To me, he had glamour, in its original sense: the casting of a spell. Bela had me enraptured. I imagined going to stay with him in Castle Dracula. A coach would pull up outside my house, driven by a mystery coachman, all in black. Its door would open slowly. Nothing would be said. I’d climb inside, and be taken away from my dreary life forever.
Imagine my dismay, then, when the spell turned into a curse. One day, rooting through a used bookstore, I came across a copy of Kenneth Anger’s scurrilous Hollywood Babylon, with its startling tabloid shots of a washed-up, gray-haired Lugosi. Aghast, disbelieving, I was devastated by Anger’s bitchy, lubricious amount of how Bela was so hard up when he died that his current wife and an ex-wife collectively could hardly scrape together the money for a funeral. He was a ghoul after all, it turned out; not a vampire but a dope fiend, fatally hooked on morphine. I’d imagined him living in a huge Gothic mansion in the Hollywood Hills, not unlike Castle Dracula, but it turned out he lived in a cheap rented apartment in a dodgy part of Hollywood. Dracula was a junkie. I was sickened – not just by the seedy pictures, unassailable in their starkness, but by the sudden unwanted intrusion of real life into my private world, and by (of all things) a book. Books were my friends! Books were the fuel that fed my fantasies, not the source of their destruction. I had enough of that in real life.
Et tu, Brute?
I bought Hollywood Babylon on the spot, and read it so often I came to know the snide photo captions by heart. It was a book of tremendous importance to me. It was the first book to stop me in my tracks, the first to make me reconsider things I’d always accepted without question. Instead of giving me refuge in a fantasy world, it helped me to see things as they really are, all the insects crawling under the stones.
Behind the scenes [fragment]
uit: The solitary vice : against reading - Mikita Brottman
