Leaving the Planet

"Air" and "The Monitor"
Two Short Teleplays

by Robert Locke,

about 1980

Read AIR on the Web.

Read The Monitor on the Web.

I am pretty sure that I am going to be leaving the planet pretty soon. Almost all of December, 2014, leading up to my 70th birthday on the antepenultimate day of the year, boy was I sick. Tremendous, crashing head pains for three weeks straight. I think it was probably viral meningitis, but the docs didn't agree. Still, I lost my sense of smell during those three weeks. All that remained was this pretty constant smell of old grease burning on a hot skillet in another room; not pleasant one bit.

All of that said, I must confess that I have been pretty sure many times previously that I would soon be leaving the planet. You can read here Our Last, Real Estate about the time in 1983 that a doctor —whom I chose because he was gay and would therefore be gentle with me about the cancer in my neck that I believed I had detected a few months earlier— said to me, "No, you do not have cancer. What you have is a disease we don't have a name for yet. Gay men in L.A. and S.F. and N.Y.C. are showing up with swollen lymph nodes like yours and within six months they are dead."

So, no, not since then has death been far from the old brain. But to my surprise, still alive all these years later. I helped my brother through AIDS and into death in 1986, and still alive am I. But it lingers in my head, the idea of it, meandering among the ever slower brain cells.

And with that sickness last December, it really came home to me. I am more quickly losing faculties I once had in abundance. Now worry about Alzheimer's is more and more prevalent. Yes, I must get things in better order.

Suicide, too —such a grim word for really a pretty healthy concept when you think about Socrates and others who have faced it rather than tortures unknown— doesn't hold for me the same horror that it holds for so many. I tried it once when I was in my early 20s in Peace Corps in Liberia, and I really meant it, too. I couldn't bear the thought that I was going to live the rest of my life as "a queer" and that was now completely apparent (after I made an unwanted pass at dear sweet Isaac, my houseboy) that indeed I was a horrible kind of monster in the eyes of my society.

Thank goodness that has changed a lot in recent years. Bravo America! Bravo other civilized nations! Bravo young people for leading the way to a brighter future for LGBTQ people. (I just found out that Q stands not for "Queer" but for "Questioning". Bravos all around again!

I remember (back in 1970 or so) that week of being so sick after an overdose of antihistamines. One pill had always put me into a sound slumber, and so I hoarded them for many months, adding to the pile each time I went into Peace Corps headquarters in Monrovia, having convinced Comfort --as the Peace Corps nurse was so aptly named-- that I needed them for a skin rash that I did indeed develop after a terrible sunburn. I was pretty sure the entire pile would kill me, but in fact the night that I swallowed all of them, determined to bring my life to an end, they made me so feverish that I kept drinking water and that made me throw up.

But I did sincerely try. I didn't throw the pills up on purpose, having decided at the last minute that I really wanted to live. And I did take the entire lot of them. It made a huge green clump, I remember, in the vomit all over the floor. That vomit along with the diarrhea spray that was hippopotamuslike in its volume and enormous fan really made a mess of my room. Having dressed myself in my finest African shirt and cleaned my room and put a beautiful African blanket on my bed so that my housemate, John Guzauskas, would find me the next morning looking my best, that was an unexpected disappointment.

Ha!

John, now long dead of AIDS since having strived (and barely achieved) to attain the goal of reaching his 50th birthday, told me when we saw each other back in Boston more than a year later, "Oh, yes, Bob, I passed by your room the next morning, and that smell was really something."

I remember that week afterwards, too sick to go back to the Episcopal Mission where I was teaching the Liberian students all sorts of subjects that I was ill-equipped to teach, for example BIBLE and Physical Geography. (Since I was from California, I taught them that in the U.S.A. it never rains in the summertime. How little did I know.) I don't remember cleaning up the room immediately, and it's hard to imagine I was able to do so for a few days, and I do hope that Isaac did not inherit that horrible job. But I don't remember. I only remember being so sick and coming to the realization that I had had no right to do that terrible thing to my body.

And all because I was different from most people? Ridiculous, but true.

There was a snap. It went snap in my head. And for my entire life afterwards I was never again appalled by simply being "gay", a word that was only just then beginning to be applied to people such as myself. I realized I was a good person and would always be a good person, and that Isaac would indeed forgive me for the quiet little pass that I had made at him. By the way, it was only a note that I wrote to him, not the kind of pass that most people would make. And he wrote me a sweet note back, trying to explain how to masturbate —the mechanics of which, trust me, I knew intimately and well. But how sweet and innocent of Isaac.

I did write him a second note, more of a pleading kind of note. And he also wrote me a second note which with a quite firm no, added that if I asked him again he would leave the house and never come back.

That's what drove me to the suicide attempt. How could I have put poor Isaac into that position? But I got over it. And I knew that Isaac would get over it, too. And he did. We remained good friends and he continued to work for John and me.

But let's see, the point of that story --which I have often told myself I needed to put onto my website in case any gay young people intent upon suicide should happen upon it and take from it a lesson-- is that REASON suddenly went snap in my head. That's what it took for me to come to my senses about being a gay person vis a vis being a good person. I was both. And I could live with that.

What I cannot live with now, or so it seems to me, is getting closer and closer to extreme forgetfulness which I fear will turn out to be Alzheimer's. I can't bear the idea of being taken care of by anyone.

Further, and this I know is extremely selfish of me, I can't bear the idea of taking care of anyone else, or of not being able to. Of seeing all of my friends going downhill toward old age. I saw my mother through it until she was 93, and I helped her see my father through it until he was 86, and helped her see my brother through all his AIDS problems until he died at age 55. I do not want to help anyone else through it. I want to leave the planet before that comes to pass. I can't endure all of that. Not again.

So, feeling face-to-face with death in the several weeks last December, I did make the decision to finally put all my writings onto my website and prepare a flashdrive for the Archivist at University of Southern Mississippi who told me that she would welcome the housing of all my works. I also want to try to convince the Archivist at California State University, Sacramento, to accept such a flashdrive. I imagine that there will come a time when the CSUS ITT folks will find that my website has grown so big and has sat free upon their server for too long, and they will take it down.

Now, too, I have finally figured out what "The Cloud" is. And I'll try that. And there is also something called ARCHIVE.org, I have been told.

Since December and the face-to-face with Old Mr. Death I have been going full-tilt at trying to reconstitute all the writings that I can find on their various CDs and 3X5 floppies where I have put the files as I have gone from computer to computer through the years since my first old computer way back in 1982. What a pile of work!

July 19, 2015

I wrote that stuff yesterday fast and furious and careless, and I don't much care. I a€™m not feeling at all well about myself and my brain especially.

I did walk yesterday, though, to get some exercise and much needed Round Table Pizza Buffet. My ankle threatened to buckle several times along the way. My leaving the planet is going to come none too early, but I've got all this clean-up work to do.

For example, I was going to finally get to retyping "Air" and "The Monitor" yesterday in the afternoon, but I couldn't bear it. Well, I started on "Air" which I am quite sure that I wrote before "The Monitor", perhaps about 1980. I'm pretty sure that I got the idea for one continuous shot teleplay featuring TV inside TV inside TV ad infinitum from Rudyard Kipling's short story "Story", where people in dire straits —like impending massacre on the savage frontier— tell each other a story beginning with, "This reminds me of that time when ..." And then that story becomes another story about being reminded at a moment preceding disaster of "a time when ..." and onward and onward, the stories never getting entirely wrapped up, as I remember, story within story within story. Brilliant concept, brilliantly achieved, but where alas is that product?

Hmmm. I may not remember that so well. I thought it would be easy to google "rudyard kipling" along with "story" and get a hit, but I didn't succeed. Maybe it was some other writer, or maybe some other title than "Story".

Anyway, that is what propelled me to write "Air" to begin with. I liked it at the time, but yesterday as I started to retype it I found myself beginning to revise it in all kinds of ways that I couldn't stand. I think I wanted to update the technology as well as make the visuals more understandable to the prospective film maker. In any case I abandoned the effort. Then during the night I decided to let you, my reader here if any, see the brief effort at revision and therefore I would retype the entire teleplay as it was from the early 80s. You can compare the two versions if you want to.

I really need to hurry up and get off the planet and on to another plane, if any. This is all so tedious.

Here is as far as I got yesterday and —trust me or not— I do not think that it was the idea of the old man committing suicide that was so off-putting to me. It was just the tedium of revising. Retyping should be lots easier.

"AIR"

a one-shot half-hour teleplay

by Robert Locke

© Robert Locke about 1980

retyping in 2015 I soon abandoned the job because I was doing revisions (ugh)

ALTHOUGH THERE ARE NUMEROUS CHANGES OF SCENE AND CAMERA ANGLES, THE ENTIRETY IS ONE-SHOT.

FADE IN:

INT. SHABBY APARTMENT

An OLD MAN is committing suicide.

In the f.g. the old man makes his meticulous preparations while in the b.g. an early model TV sits centrally, playing a soap-operatic scene. The old man is sitting in his armchair with his back to the camera, picking up pill bottles one by one, examining each, and either opening it and pouring the contents onto an end table, or setting the bottle aside. There are already several discrete, colored piles of pills on the table, also a large bottle of Jim Beam bourbon and a full glass of bourbon, from which he takes sizeable sips.

Meanwhile on the TV very dramatic dialogue and music have been playing. TV FATHER and TV MOTHER are warming to a family crisis. TV BOY, their son, has gotten in their way, has been rebuked by both parents, and has now taken up a position of retreat in the living room in front of his late model TV, which he now turns on to reveal a commercial for TVs.

WHAT WE SEE FOR ONE BRIEF MOMENT — SHOOTING FROM BEHIND THE OLD MAN in the armchair, we see the back of the old man’s head and in front of him his TV showing the boy lying down in front of his TV which shows a commercial featuring its many TV sets, TVs within TVS to infinity.

The old man sips on his glass of bourbon and puts the first of the many piles into his mouth, tilting his head back to swallow.

SLOWLY ZOOM over the old man’s shoulder to come at last into a CLOSE SHOT of the old man’s TV screen so that the two frames conjoin. Over the sound of the TV advertisement on TV BOY’s TV comes the sound of TV MOTHER and TV FATHER arguing violently in another room. The Father is packing to leave forever. TV BOY hears all of this but turns up the volume on his TV.

Sequential CLOSE-UPs of TV BOY watching his TV, the light of the TV flickering on his face.

Finally, in frustration at not getting enough volume from his TV, the boy rises from the floor, walks to the stereo and sets a record playing. It is the “Hungarian Rhapsody Number 2�.

Back to July 18, 2015

Oh, yes, I did google "tom and jerry" and "hungarian rhapsody number 2" to see if YouTube might have it, and the old cartoon was there, and it was only just okay, it now seems to me, even though it did win the Academy Award for 1947 for Best Animated Short Film. I remembered its being lots funnier, but then I've grown lots grimmer. Still, since one of the things that "AIR" attempts at a later point in the teleplay is an audio-visual link between this cartoon and TV BOY's record playing on the stereo, I thought I should see how the cartoon holds up and applies.

Technology. Record. HiFi. Stereo? See what I mean? It's all changed so much since 1980. Can't keep up. So anyway, I did retype “AIR� and I put it onto the website under Robert Locke>Plays, although it is a treatment for a teleplay. Go take a look if you want. It's imaginative, I guess. It is at: AIR

And where does "The Monitor" come into the story? I think that I remember that in Los Angeles I did get a writing gig to write soft-porn. I had a young agent at Creative Artists who got fired and as a last effort in my behalf, he turned me onto a producer who wanted to do a series of 10-15 minute heterosexual soft-porn features. I wrote several, and the producer really liked them and wanted me to tie them together as one full-length feature. I did do all of that, and it was kind of fun, and I think I remember calling the final full-length film "Romantasy". No doubt I have that on paper somewhere since those were the days before computers, but it hasn't turned up in many years. I can’t imagine why not.

Anyway I also did retype “The Monitor� and put it under Robert Locke>Plays also. You can compare it to “AIR� if you care to. You can find it at: The Monitor

I think I also got a gig through this same producer to do a rewrite on an Australian full-length screenplay called "The Reaper" but that screenplay also has gotten lost in my paper files. I must have it somewhere on disk because I remember that my only payment for my work was the software program "Scriptor". I imagine that that screenplay is on the 5 1/4 inch floppies that I do still have but can't read because the technology advanced past them very quickly. Yes, I can still transfer my 3X5 hard disk floppies from the Mac SE30 that I graduated to after my original computer --an "Eagle" computer with the 5 1/4 inch floppies-- went kaput.

But really, I'm not about to go through all of that. I think my original intention was to go back and retrieve all of those efforts in all of those formats, but at the moment, I'll just commit to retyping "AIR" and "The Monitor" since they are short.

I also ran across the paper script for "CRYSTAL" a "Pilot for an Episodic Drama" that I wrote around the same time, late 70s or early 80s, and I may commit to reading that. But I don't think I'm up to retyping something that long. I'm retyped-out.

But I really should add that on the title pages of all of these titles, "AIR", "The Monitor", "CRYSTAL" I see that they were represented by Kurt Busiek at the Scott Meredith Agency in New York. I remember really liking Kurt because he had a genuine enthusiasm for my works and he really seemed to get them. He loved the Siamese Twins in the libretto of "HOWLING TWAIN", I remember, and the fact that they were both running for the same office of Mayor and were about to be unsurgically separated by the crowds pulling them in two directions. Good taste, Kurt. And also he really liked "THE BLOOD GOSPELS" (although that was just a screenplay at that time, and its title was simply "BLOOD".)

To my dismay, Kurt told me that he was leaving agenting and that what he really wanted to do was draw cartoons.

My thought at the time was, "Oh, no, what bad luck. My agent at Creative Artists, whom I liked so much, got fired from the agency, and now Kurt is leaving agenting in order to draw cartoons. I cannot get a break. And agenting can't be all that great a job."

So this morning I googled "kurt busiek" thinking it a unique name and that if he had been successful in cartooning then I would get a hit.

Big time! If I followed cartooning at all, I would no doubt have seen his name and been overjoyed for him. Google him and see that indeed Kurt was extremely successful. Good going, Kurt! What a great decision you made!

And now, Bob, poor sap, onward. Get these little things tidied away onto your website. Type, type, type.