Tracey Flagler flew the coop, whether to heaven or hell or to nothing at all nobody alive really knows for sure, although wishful people lie about such destinations or about nothing at all. If we are to believe her diaries, Tracey was seldom satisfied with whatever she had on Earth:
“I am so deeply disappointed. The gap between what I have and what I believe and desire is so big that I wish I were dead so I could feel relief. I want to experience myself as a powerful creator so I can have whatever I want, so I can just fulfill myself with what I am seeking here, with joy, joy, and more joy! All I want to have is fun, and that and only that is the true meaning of life. But if I look back on my life I see there has been a lot of joy but I always thought it would lead to something provable or recognized by society and that would make me matter, make me valuable. If I listen to Abraham, I do matter, because just by my being here I move the universe forward.”
Tracey obviously did not want to enjoy joy all by her lonesome self: she wanted to be recognized by others, which would, according to her diary, require obtaining a great deal of stuff to impress them with. And of course she wanted to be loved unconditionally; that is, loved for her substantial self regardless of her qualities, which were attractive to men indeed: she was, as we already know, the stand-in for Charlize Theron, a movie star declared by Esquire Magazine to be the sexiest woman alive, and Tracey would have been that star herself but for a twist of fate. A fellow named Abraham is frequently mentioned in Tracey’s notes, someone she met at a concert in San Francisco while filming Sweet November. If her diary is a faithful record of the truth, she enjoyed many nights with him, although there is nothing explicitly sexual to be found within.
Abraham taught her that life is supposed to be fun because her natural self is joy. He taught her that she could be, do, and have anything she wanted, create her very own reality by simply imagining it so the universe could reflect it right back at her. The universe, he said, adored her, and knew her intentions, and in fact moved according to those intentions. If only she would relax into her natural state, all would be well for her, and she would live in her unique path of joy, a path of everlasting life paved with money and bliss. And, since her self was everlasting joy, and since she had chosen the body she inhabited, it stood to reason that she could discard her present body painlessly, without being sick at all, and choose another one at will.
No man is good enough for idealistic women. She listened to Abraham and did her best to have faith in his line, but the stuff she wanted did not appear forthwith, and she wound up hating him so much she wished him dead along beside herself, because he kept telling her it was her fault for not creating the world she said she wanted, making her feel guilty and look like the bad one instead of the victim:
“I hate what has happened and mostly I hate it because I look like the bad one, as if I screwed up, like he is my victim instead of me his victim. I just want to scream at him and choke him and say to him before he strangles, If you co-created this with me, you asshole, I want to just leave and find a new boyfriend, but dammit, I want that same feeling I had with your presence, so I am angry at all men, and that anger makes me feel powerful, makes me feel better than feeling powerless. I have had all of your self-created universe that I can stand, and I wish you were DEAD and I were DEAD!”
The more I delved into Tracey’s anguished soliloquies, the more I began to think that Abraham was an imaginary lover, a figment of her flighty imagination, especially when he was mentioned in context of other planets in other galaxies. “Is it possible to be brainwashed by aliens?” I speculated. Women and men are not from different planets, but that is not to say that we are not visited by aliens. Fools may take figures of speech too seriously, but the fact of the matter is this: men are not from Venus and women are not from Mars, nor are Earth feminine and Sky masculine. Men and women are in fact from the same planet although not determined by the same element. The essential male ascended on all fours from the mud, while the essential female descended from the air. In fine, men evolved from some sort of thick and flat mud-fish that developed legs and arms, and emerged from the slime to plod along in the muck, while women slithered lizard-like from the water. They grew long back legs to run from the brutes; their front flippers, vestiges of amphibian life, turned into the wings of the tiny dinosaurs that took flight. The flying-dragon girls were so frightened by a colossal hurricane that they panicked and returned to Earth, where some became discombobulated chickens, and others found large, web-footed lagoon creatures stuck in the mud to cling to. One lagoon ape was as good as another but none were good enough for them. Wherefore humankind evolved. Women’s hips and breasts eventually grew so large from childbearing that they could no longer take flight no matter how much they wanted to. Physiognomy still accounts for their flighty disposition. Witness the vestige of their airy origin, the bird-like features of their bony arms and shoulders.
Real men know very well that women are flighty. For instance, a middle-aged, paunchy man sporting a gold Rolex watch at Starbucks on Lincoln Road shook his head as his wife flew out of the door. He turned to me and said, “She’s flying off to shop; she doesn’t need the coffee to fly. Women are flighty, you know.” “Oh?” I responded. “Haven’t you noticed? I love women, but women are plumb crazy by nature.” He had a point, I thought, thinking of my friend Helene: she was blown out of her nest at the Waldorf; or rather she was beaten out of it by a rich and powerful con man who looks like a horned and hairy toad and who consorts with duplicitous neocons. She landed in South Beach, a hedonist’s resort, where she cannot relax long enough to get laid, and I can’t say that I blame her, knowing what she’s been through at the muddied hands of muddled men in general. The slightest mention of sex on my part gives her cause to panic and go into hysterics. She would like a “generous” and “passionate” beast to cling to, but no man is good enough for her, particularly if his passion is between his legs. I’m afraid that in a moment of desperation she might just say yes at random and wind up with the Creature from the Black Lagoon – at least Dr. Frankenstein’s monster would really love her. She has taken up with lesbians since she loves power and lesbians have plenty of it on South Beach. Not that there is anything wrong with lesbianism, which might be one of God’s plans for humankind: it is said that the Y chromosome was once as large as the X chromosome, but the Y has greatly diminished over the millennia, and in 150,000 years will vanish. Given the right mutation, such as that had by a certain kind of lizard, all human beings will be females. Like those lizards, humans will still have to stimulate one another to procreate parthenogenetically, hence one might suppose that every one will have a greatly enlarged clitoris. Of course Helene, who is at heart an old-fashioned woman, would find this sort of science-fictional speculation repulsive, but boys will be boys and bring toads home from time to time.
But better evidence can be had from a celebrity than from a nobody like your present author. Oriana Fallaci, during a 1967 interview with Dean Martin, asked: “You respect men more than women, don’t you?”
“Oh, yeah! I mean, I also have some women friends. Ursula Andress, for instance, and Shirley MacLaine and Barbara Rush…. But apart from these ladies, I’m more relaxed with men… ‘cause men are down-to-earth and more honest, and I can get a repartee with them, have fun. Women instead are crazy, crazy, crazy, and they’re flighty, and they are always looking for somethin’, and they always tell you how good they are.”
Oriana Fallaci’s ‘Sixteen Surprising Interviews’ with famous people are happily collected in a book entitled The Egotists, published by Henry Regnery Company. It is certainly must reading by all those who think they might find the secret of becoming rich and famous and powerful in such books. Of course they will notice that the secret changes with the fashions. One constant is that gods and great men are usually forgiven for their crimes, or may even be admired for them. And the works of gods and heroes allow for great mysteries; for instance, how boxing is not violent and how stabbing your wife in the belly can be a crime but not a violent act:
“The knife in my wife’s belly was a crime,” admitted the late Norman Mailer to Oriana Fallaci. “It was a grave crime, but it had nothing to do with violence. As for the fights, well, boxing is not violence. It’s a conversation….” You see, a boxer is a noble artist who transforms violence into something beautiful. A violent person picks fights, starts fights.
“Nor can I remember ever having hit a woman – a strange woman I mean. I may have hit a wife, but that’s different. If you are married, you have two choices: either you beat your wife, or you don’t…. I like to marry women whom I can beat once in a while, and who fight back. All my wives have been very good fighters.”
Sean Connery, the representative he-man of his time, was asked to name three men and three women whom he admired. Nikita Krushchev, Stanley Matthews, and Pablo Picasso were the males he picked. As for women, he could not think of single woman he admired, although he liked women a lot. “A character like me, who loves life and appetite and strength, can’t get away from sexual desires. And so, when he stops to assess a woman, he can never make out where that things finishes and pure admiration beings.”
No doubt Tracey Flagler, if she were still with us, would be happy to know that the Duchess of Alba, reputedly one of the richest women in the world, did not even know how many rooms her palace had, or how many millions her art masterpieces were worth, nor could she have cared less about the value of her jewels:
“I do have a few jewels, the family jewels. But I don’t know what they’re worth, I really couldn’t tell you. I never bothered about it. Oh, all this talk about money. I find it affreuse, disgusting, hateful. I hate money, I never bother about money. What use is money, so long as you have enough to live well? The necessities. What’s the use of having more?”
Tracey did not know the Duchess, but she made this little note in her diary: “What if I can just talk and feel myself into joy without a lot of stuff to prove how valuable I am? Is that enough? What if I am joyful but I just live a simple life, pay my bills and live in my beautiful little South Beach studio, to not worry about anything, like I’ve already retired, or that I am a noble woman with just enough stuff. But when I think like that I feel I have failed, because I need a mission in life and somebody to do it with to feel more connected. Why, really? To have fun, that’s why, instead of being pulled into other people’s stupid visions, which are fine for them, but not for me, but I am pulled into the vortex anyway, pulled by my selfish intentions, and at bottom all my hopes and dreams are ground down to nothing, there is nothing but nothing, I can’t find anything to hold on to, I just want to be dead unless I can have that eternal perfect moment, that joy and fun promised by Abraham. Now I am so angry. I HATE this whole situation. I feel weird, hopeless and stupid. I intellectually understand what Abraham says, but I don’t understand emotionally. No matter what I have, no matter how much I appreciate it, just enough stuff to live on is just not enough, I cannot lead a simple life. Abraham promised me JOY. He lies like them all. I HATE Abraham, I HATE me. I HATE all you con men! I HATE you!”
Tracey might also be please to read that Geraldine Chaplin’s dad thought that a girl of twenty should support herself, and so did she, so she rented a room in a basement, went flat broke, didn’t ask her parents for anything, and then, “Luck came to my rescue,” she told Oriama Fallaci. “I happened to meet a photographer friend.” He invited her to a shoot, “and in those four days I earned no less than two hundred thousand francs.”
Now that was a fabulous sum in the early Sixties. What was two hundred thousand franks worth then, in terms of today’s depreciating dollars? Was it the Name that rescued her, or was it Charley Chaplin providing funds behind the scenes? Or was it that fickle lady of fortune, Lady Luck?
Oprah Winfrey would no doubt say that poor Geraldine Chaplin was graced by the divine albeit not necessarily religious source. “Why then, was not Tracey Flagler thus graced? Is not Flagler a famous name? Was not her father rich?” I asked a crab spider as I took a shower and gazed out the bathroom window into the window of her former apartment across the way. It is now occupied by a Haitian. He sits or lies on the floor when he is at home – he has no furniture, which he could easily get for nothing from South Beach alleys, where a couple of hundred vagrants stretch out on discarded chairs and couches from time to time.
The crab spiders are truly amazing. They are triangular creatures with humped red backs and horns on the edges. Their flat underbellies look like white faces with black eyes. The rapidity with which they can elaborate symmetrical webs between palm tree leaves and buildings is truly astonishing – I have knocked down some that that got in the pathways, only to discover them rebuilt a few hours later. Sometimes I gaze into one of the faces suspended in the air and ask a question, such as, How come Tracey Flagler did not get rich and famous?. Tracey Flagler, who was suspected of being a witch by her downstairs neighbor, spun many webs in her notebooks, in the form of spoked wheels, the spokes expressing related desires emanating from an affirmative “I” in the hub.
“I feel satisfied with my place in the now and my place in eternity,” affirmed the “I” around the hub at the center of one wheel. “Spoke 1. I do believe what Seth and Abe & Emmanuel say about being eager. Spoke 2. I would like them to just do it for me. Spoke 3. It is not that I don’t want to exist eternally; it’s just that I want to enjoy what I have now, not worry about the eternity in the moment. Spoke 4. The universe wants fun for me, for me to be secure in joy and to have stability just because it feels good. Spoke 5. I like living the best of both worlds, enjoying my now and maintaining what matters to me. Spoke 6. I love seeing my internal joy outwardly manifested in a cool home, $ $ $ and freedom and abundance etc. Spoke 7. I can focus on whatever I want to focus and bring it to me. Spoke 8. I believe that the universe responds to my focus and matches my expectations. Spoke 9. I do believe that being is eternal, that being is enough & that I will exist eternally.”
We might believe that Tracey was just spinning her magic wheels, and that great expectations, planted in her by false prophets who would have been stoned to death in Jeremiah’s day if the law had been dutifully enforced, led to her depressing demise by her own hand. But we of little faith might be wrong. Perhaps her only fault was her feminine flightiness; or rather in the fact that she flew her coop altogether instead of expanding on it as the little spiders outside her door do. If only Tracey had stuck around, built a larger web and stayed poised in its center, lots of juicy things might have come along in due time. Durability might have been the key to her success.
“Durability means something that lasts because it wants to last, not because it is built to last,” Mary Hemingway told Oriana Fallaci. “A scrap of iron exposed to the wind and the rain and the sun is not durable because it needs no effort to be so. But a spider’s web is durable. It looks so frail, but it resists the fiercest storms and winds and rains…. In the garden of our house in Cuba there were always lots of spiders’ webs, and one obviously thinks they’ll be swept away by every storm. Tropical storms are ruthless in their violence, they destroy trees and roads and houses. But they don’t destroy spiders’ webs. Spiders’ webs wave in the wind, letting the rain drops through the mesh, and when the storm is over one always finds them in the same place, practically untouched.”
Mary Hemmingway spoke truly. Our flighty little birds in South Beach get killed off by the hundreds in our storms, but our spiders and their webs stay put. That is, unless one deliberately knocks them down with a broom handle. And then they bounce right back. May Tracey Flagler bounce right back from the netherworld, if there is such a place, and, if not, may someone else do so in her place. Now that would be an enduring epic story worthy of Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement, and not the ephemeral journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and film writing that Ernest Hemmingway thought it best for a great author not to waste his time on.
