Outside the Dog Museum Read Online Free PDF Page B

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