Autobiography

ALEXANDER

Hi all. I just wanted to give you a quick heads up that this episode is a little different, and it goes into some fairly serious subject matter, including death of a parent, addiction, and child endangerment. If you need more detailed content warnings, you can find them in the show notes below.

[THEME MUSIC--CIRCUS VERSION]

ALEXANDER

You are listening to Exercises in Sound, and exploration of narrative sound design.

JAMES

All right, so let's do a run through of the the alternate script, Autobiography. we'll run it as a sort of the instinctual run, and then we'll make some adjustments after.

[END MUSIC]

[FADE IN TO APARTMENT]

[Exercises in Sound: Bedtime Story Narration plays on television.]

[Character A wakes up.]

CHARACTER A [JORDAN STILLMAN]

Oh, what? I guess I fell asleep. Hey, you let me fall asleep!

[No response. Movement in armchair.]

Hello?! Where’d you go?

[A key in the lock, then the door opens. Character B enters, carrying a paper bag.]

CHARACTER A

There you are.

[Character B removes jacket and shoes as he talks.

CHARACTER B [FELIX TRENCH]

Ah, we’re doing that again, are we? Themes of absence? It always comes back around to that with this writer, doesn’t it? Usually he’s writing about absent fathers. Fathers who disappear, fathers who die, fathers in prison. All the autobiographical variations. Most of his memories of his father are arrivals. No sustained memories of presence, just moments of appearance. His father entering through a door with a garbage bag full of fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck gifts, or spotting his father from a distance and running to him across a field. Well…a prison yard. Family day at the prison. They had a craft fair. His father gave him a hug and some art. The grass was green. That’s part of the memory. Once you put that detail into a script, it immediately becomes the laziest fucking metaphor you could imagine, but still, it’s a real detail of his memory. Green grass in the prison yard. Sheets thrown down on the ground for a picnic. Nice to see you, Daddy, hope to see you again when you get out.

[Character B exits to kitchen. Character A follows. Character B is putting away groceries. A crosses to table and sits down.]

But that doesn’t really work here, does it? There’s no “father” role in this script. [To A] You’re an adult. You’re fine. [To the audience.] But maybe the writer wants to do a version where Character A is a child. Maybe he already has. That would fit. That’d be right on point. But even so, it’s more themed around a fear of abandonment, not a truly substantive absence. Just a few minutes. Not days or weeks of disappearance, or months of incarceration, or the 41 years and counting since the writer’s father actually died. Fuck. He’s been dead one year longer than he was alive.

CHARACTER A

You were here when I fell asleep, but then I woke up and couldn’t find you. You left me all alone.

CHARACTER B

But is that really such a bad thing? For a long time, the writer thought mostly of how he missed his father. How he wished he could have known him. And he still thinks those things. He does. But you know what else the writer thinks about pretty often these days?

[Character B washes his hands, then peels and chops an onion.]

He thinks of how dramatically his own odds of surviving to adulthood improved because his father died.

His father occasionally abducted him. Disappeared with him for days or weeks at a time. He doesn’t remember any of this, but he knows the story. Three years old and getting dragged around to all the places petty thieves and heroin addicts liked to go in the 1970s. Inevitably, his father would get so high he’d forget he had a kid with him at all, and just leave him behind wherever they happened to be. The writer’s mother would have to track him down like a private detective. To the home of some random family she’d never met before, two hours away. Or to the dilapidated building full of addicts and dealers, where the writer’s father went to score his junk, and shoot up, and leave behind his pre-schooler, and disappear, not to be heard from again for weeks.

[Character B retrieves eggs from fridge, cracks and beats them. Heats a frying pan. Cooks the onions, adds the eggs, occasionally stirring.]

CHARACTER A

I wish you’d left a note.

CHARACTER B
He did though. The writer’s father left a letter for him, along with a journal in a marble notebook. Both written in prison, when the writer was two and a half years old. The writer’s mother gave them to him in 2004. She didn’t keep them from him, she had just saved them until he was old enough. And by then, they were packed away in the attic somewhere, to be remembered only upon being found. Not that it matters, even now he still hasn’t read them. For over twenty years, he’s left them in a drawer in his desk, unopened. At least, he thinks that’s where they are. Does he intentionally let himself forget where he keeps them, or is it just his usual ADHD bullshit? Does it matter?

When I tell you he hasn’t read them, do you assume it’s because he’s afraid it’ll be just too much for him? That he’ll be overwhelmed with emotion? Those would be reasonable, but nevertheless wrong, assumptions. That’s not how he is. He gets more emotional watching Ted Lasso than he does in response to anything in his real life. Ted Lasso makes him cry. A letter from his dead father? Not likely.

Do you want to know the reason he’s never read that letter or journal? He’s never admitted this out loud to anyone, so I’m giving you a real scoop here.

He hasn’t read them because every time he thinks about them, he thinks about the great resource they’ll be for making art. Not about hearing what his father had to say to him, or about feeling closer to his father, or understanding him better. No, he thinks about what amazing raw material they’ll be, how he can *use* them to make something of his own, something really *personal*, and won’t that be a beautiful artistic *achievement*? And he feels guilt about that. No, not guilt. Shame. That his feelings aren’t sentimental enough. That he just wants to scavenge his father for his own purposes. To make “ART”.

As if he doesn’t have every fucking right in the world to do exactly that. Full stop. As if it isn’t the same damn thing in the long run anyway. As if he’s not already doing it, literally right now, at this moment, as he’s typing these words right fucking here.

[He plates the cooked eggs and serves them to Character A. He gets her a fork. She eats as he continues.]

But still. It makes him feel cheap, this impulse he has. So he doesn’t read them.

He gives his attention to other gifts his father gave him. Things he can treat with as much sentimentality as he can muster. All the sentimentality he can fake. All those arrivals, and every time, a present.

CHARACTER A

What kind?

[Character B turns on the faucet and washes dishes.]

CHARACTER B

A giant, four-foot-tall stuffed frog that he used to ride down the stairs like a sled. Some paint-by-numbers Disney prison art. Pluto the dog. Gepetto holding a soggy Pinnochio, his donkey ears and tail dripping into puddles of blue foil. Some real irony in that one. The misbehaving boy and the devoted father. And there’s a knock-off plastic Twicky from Buck Rogers with a big red button that’s supposed to make its chest light up, but the light never worked. That one is standing on his desk right now. He sees it almost every day.

Oh, and a couple of educational stamp books. Pages of simple facts and incomplete pictures with dotted-line silhouettes of the things being described. Two whole workbooks of absences. Find the right stamp on the full-color sheets in the back, tear it out, give it a lick, and bring back the thing that’s missing! One of the books was about reptiles. The other was about rocks. Just…rocks. Find a silhouette of a rock, fill it in with a picture of a rock. I guess silhouettes to fill in with the missing father would have been a little too on-the-nose.

Those books were the last gift his father gave him. Last time they saw each other before his father died. The distance he’d run across to get a hug was just a few feet of sidewalk that time. Then an elevator ride up to Nana’s condo, where his father’s mother and sister lived for all the years he knew them. Did his father live there too? He never really knew his father to live anywhere that he can remember. But that’s the place the writer most associates with his father. It’s where he saw him most and saw him last.

[B turns off water and dries his hands.]

Incidentally, he doesn’t expect to ever see that condo again either. He was just there this past Christmas, to visit his aunt, his father’s only sibling. But she’s dead too, now. Four days gone as of this writing.

[B sits down at the table with A.]

“Incidentally.” Sure. He’s had this script on his to-do list for months, but he says “incidentally,” as though it’s just coincidence that he finally sat down to write it in the same week that his last living blood connection to his father has died. No, no, it’s just that he’s got a break from work, it’s the first he’s really had the time. Uh huh.

Just like how the flavor of ice cream in these scripts is a big fucking coincidence too. Rum raisin. He had already written the template script, recorded it forty times, and completed a dozen finished episodes before the thought hit him, “hey, wasn’t there someone I knew who liked rum raisin?” And he literally spent days wracking his brain, trying to remember who it was. 

CHARACTER A

So…?

CHARACTER B

I mean, it’s obvious right? It was his father. Rum raisin was his father’s favorite flavor of ice cream.

Rum. Raisin.

CHARACTER A

Oh.

[Fade out]

[Closing theme.]

Exercises in Sound is created, written, and sound designed by Alexander Danner and directed by James Oliva.

Featuring performances by Felix Trench and Jordan Stillman. 

Theme music by Katherine Seaton.

Tile art by Sam Twardy. 

Exercises in Sound is inspired by Raymond Queano's Exercises in Style and Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story, which conducted similar experiments in the forms of prose fiction and comics respectively.

Funded in part by grants from HeartLife NFP and Emerson College. 

Find episode transcripts online at exercisessinsound.com. 

For access to an ad-free feed for Exercises in Sound, you can support the show at thirdSight.memberful.com. 

For news and updates, sign up for the Third Sight Media newsletter, Link in the show notes. 

Exercises and Sound is a ThirdSight media production.