The Holly King, Part 4

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In which Carson shares the mess of his family through the high fidelity of  homemovies, which is no different from anyone else's, very much.

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Another year, another Hancock homemovie. On Carson's soundtrack, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is not done. They’re sending "O Holy Night" to a glorious finish.

O night divine ....

A baby girl, maybe two years old, dressed like a pink elf, sitting on the floor like all babies do, with a sack of potatoes balance. Pale womanly arms with fine black hair enter, placing toys all around her: brand new yellow rattle; a wind up long-legged bird; teething rings – red, purple, blue, green, yellow, white – stacked like a cone, blocks and fuzzy dice (the mother turns and grins at this one); a Look-Around Crissy doll with enormous Stygian eyes and long long long red hair; a box of SuperElasticBubblePlastic; a big Rousseau-colored frog with top hat, and more. It’s a parental Hancock in-joke, heaping all the world’s toys around their littlest, oblivious baby girl.

A boy races in and takes the SuperElasticBubblePlastic. Mother’s arms reach for the boy trying to take hold of the box. He is indignant and keeps holding it. She tries to reassure him it’s just for a moment. He refuses. The father obviously speaks because the child looks up to the camera and fatally relaxes his grip for a moment. Mother pounces, grabbing SEBP. Duped and betrayed! An enraged explosion of tears. Indignation! Mother holds onto SEBP with one hand while the other hand holds up a rational finger: just wait one moment. The boy trudges off camera, a redfaced retreat.

Still on the baby girl, eyes wide with trouble, not daring to move, her little soul surging with confusion.  The breakdown is coming.

Just then a wooden broom pushes a pile of other toys, matchbox cars, a GI Joe, Smash-Up Derby cars, a Slinky, a paint set, crayons and Major Matt Mason so that they pile up to and on top of the girl’s lap. The camera jiggles – Daddy is laughing – and he whips left to Mommy who’s laughing too, drinking from her champagne glass and leaving red lipstick behind. Leaning against the broom, she blows a kiss.

Before their in-joke fades, something alarming grabs mommy's attention off camera. The choir lifts itself higher with escalating chimes, trumpets and cymbals as the camera whips down to the boy kicking through the toys and kicking the baby too.

Fall on your knees!
O, hear the angel voices!
O night divine, the night when Christ was Born;
O night, O holy night, O night divine!

Revenge is his.

Freeze. The child in mid-destruction.

© by Trisha Romance

Carson speaks: “This may seem gratuitous, using the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to underscore my family’s Christmas distress. But countless other families like ours had this playing in the background at some point on Christmas back then. They probably still do. Their technicolor pageantry added a luxurious counterpoint to our mess. It was my mother’s favorite holiday album.”

Slow resume. The child delivers a thunderous Dr. Dentoned kick as the baby girl releases her fear and confusion into hysteria. The mother grabs the boy and lifts him, his little hams in full, slo-mo kicking gyrations as we close out that year with a steady fade to black. 

Other Christmas memories as Carson finishes his thought. “Like a lot of families, the fighting between my brother and sister didn’t really have a starting point or underlying cause.”

The boy and the girl, Humphrey and Shannon, are older, playing in snow though the camera seems to sit on something uneven, like a tree stump, its angle up and over the heads of the kids. Somebody just left it there. A Nerf football lands nearby. A guy runs over to pick it up and is mobbed by other guys, including Carson’s dad. The camera, bumped, falls over so that the lens is flecked with snow. Everything now is angled up hill and no one cares.

“Hostilities rose and fell without warning or motive. As if everything around them was so unbearable the only possible reaction was aiming a finger at the eye of the other one.”

The pile of guys breaks up merrily, revealing, way off, the girl pushing the boy down and throwing snow on him. She kicks him, and Dad comes running over. A hand reaches for the camera.

“And exactly why things were so unbearable is a mystery to me and even to them, to this day. Except that their behavior then was real and uninhibited.”

Finally: a living room, circa 1986 or so. Tape stocks change; it’s now  blanched silvery Super-VHS. They’ve moved, too. A Neutra home and the phosphorous winter sunlight of Los Angeles lands with blown highlights behind everything the camera sees, putting faces and the fronts of bodies into shadow. But there’s sound now.

Competing with the Mormon choir as they glide morosely into “O Come O Come Emanuel,” is the faint thrashing sound, hushed by a closed door somewhere, of The Germs’ “We Must Bleed.”

1980.

“Who’s up? Who’s turn is it?” Father asks. “Dianne?” The camera lands on Mother. She’s in her chair with a wine glass in one hand. Older. Skin enhanced. A pink streak in her hair, very New Wave Susan Sontag.

“You’re being ridiculous,” she says, but not to the camera. She’s talking to someone off camera. “I never thought anyone could be so selfish.”

Shannon, teenaged, answers: “Selfish?” 

“What’s going on?” Father asks. “Where’s Hump?” The camera swirls again, passing young Carson sprawled perpendicularly in the lap of an armchair, reading and ignoring. It settles on Shannon, supremely vexed, in a black torn t-shirt and gray jean skirt, the widest gauge and torn fishnet stockings, her hair long in stiff girlrocker bangs and lots of cheap 80s jewelry. He asks: “Where’s your brother?”

As if poked by a stick: “Can’t you hear? Open your ears for Chrissakes.”

“That’s enough,” Dianne says off camera. “I told you weeks ago, no concert tickets.” The camera pans away again, as if it’s heard this a thousand times. It lights upon middle school, buttoned up Carson.

“Where’s your brother?”

Not looking up, a lanky arm points inaccurately.

The mother and daughter battle continues, receding as we go looking for Hump. Sunlight gets clipped by the hallway, peeks occasionally from reflections on the walls as we head deeper into the Hancock home. We stop at a closed bedroom door. The camera drops down; that is, Father lowers it, keeping it on, holding it, I imagine, like a picnic basket.

We stare at the closed door in the dark while Father knocks, asking for Hump. The Germs and Darby Crash throw themselves against the closed door, splintering through the frame and moulding: “I’m not one I’m two I’m not one I’m two.”

“Humphrey!”

Long, failure of fatherhood wait. Another knock. “Humphrey?”

“I’m done!” Hump outshouts the music. “I made my appearance!” Suddenly the door flings open, revealing the clothes-strewn floor of his room and the unfiltered high volume of four chord, descending scale guitar, drum delirium and the mess of Darby Crash I want out now I want out now I want out now. 

Except it’s Humphrey venting his anger in front. “I lived up to my end of the bargain. You do the same.” Whoosh. Door closed.

Long pause. Resignation. Camera trudges back, Mormon Tabernacle somehow sounding consoling and facetious at the same time. We bump with the camera as he walks.

Returning to the living room, Mother – Dianne – is still neck and neck with daughter. “You couldn’t find it in you to compromise and let your father chaperone you and your little friends ....”

But we’re headed to Carson, reclining across the armchair. Jolting to a desultory stop against his father’s leg, the camera dangles downward, at Carson’s eye level.

Carson glances at it. “You know it’s still on?”

“I’m letting the tape roll on. Take it. It’s yours.” Carson looks up at his dad, wide-eyed: Really?

His father drops the camera on Carson’s lap and he trudges away. Meanwhile, in the background we’ve been hearing:

“Let me tell you something about gifts, mother. When someone asks for something, and it’s not given to them, that’s a signal. And that signal is ‘Go Fuck Yourself!”

And the soundtrack sings “Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,/And death’s dark shadows put to flight / Rejoice! Rejoice ....”

Fade to black. 

“And yet, yes. I actually like Christmas,” Carson says. “It surprises me every year how much I look forward to it. Even when it arrives and I see all these ways to make fun of it.”




/continued

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"The Holly King" © CMMartin 2011