SPEAKING OF FEMMES FATALES

SPEAKING OF FEMMES FATALES ...

Louise Lorringer was most definitely a Femme Fatale. You wouldn't guess it to look at her -- she seemed so clean-scrubbed and rosy Mid-West -- a 22 year old UCLA co-ed--- a blushing all-American Rose from Wilmette, Illinois... but when you got done getting wrung through the meat-grinder of her affections you didn't have to go see any films-noir -- You were living in one!

Louise was undoubtedly the great love of my life -- (from September 1966 to March 1968 -- a total of some eighteen months all told) -- but there's no telling how many other young lives she was also the great love of ... and the one that put her out of her misery -- and mine as well -- for good --was José Gonzalez, the handsome film student from Argentina and East L. A. -- who cut her life short at the age of 24 with many plunges of a kitchen knife -- "I would never have killed her if she would of let me fuck her that day --José told me years later -- "but she didn't, and then she fought like a tiger for her life" ... Those were José's exact words when I met him seven years later after they let him out of the nut-house in Atascadero -- and we became friends again, sort of ... in L. A. in 1975 ...

So, how do you tell a femme-fatale? -- from, say, your ordinary run-of-the-mill attractive female who is not necessarily hell-bent compelled to destroy every male she comes in contact with, and just wants to get married or nicely fucked... Well, there are various hallmarks and danger signals. For one thing, they like to introduce one boyfriend (or lover) to another, just to see if they will clash and try to kill each other over her. Like, take Ronnie – the sandy-haired little fag from the Russian department at UCLA – the day that she and I were still going strong at RAND, and I made a date to meet her after work at Olivia’s Soul Food Kitchen over on Ocean avenue (the one the Doors did a song about) – and with no previous warning she shows up with this harmless looking little wimp in tow -- (it turned out later that he was gay but I didn’t know that then, and later she actually moved in with him!) – Ronnie –and, of course, I should have said right then and there, „Hey – I thought this was supposed to be a dinner for two – and I really don’t give a shit about meeting a new boyfriend of yours from school” – at which point I should have split and left them both there with dropping jaws ... But, no – I was already far deeper into Louises’s fatal clutches than I realized – So, I just sat it out – squirming internally throughout the entire dinner – trying to act cool, as if I didn’t mind that she’d brought a friend along – She wanted him to meet me, she said, because I was a hot-shot Russian linguist at RAND and Ronnie was such an enthiastic student of Russian at UCLA – Yeh, sure, just what I need – to meet every new student of Russian at UCLA who is seriously interested in the Instrumental Case ...and in Louise! – How the fuck did I ever let myself be taken on that trip! – but I wanted to be perceived by her as „cool” and able to rise above bullshit situations such as this – however, the web of femme-fatality bears bitter fruit as we shall see.
I don’t think it was too long after this that she picked up with my best friend of the time –José Gonzalez – needless to say, I was the one who introduced them... Oh yeah – That’s another trait of the femme fatale –They start fucking your best friend right under your nose, and act like it’s just a friendly handshake –and she’ll get back to you as soon as she’s had enough of him. And then she moves in with him – to a cheap apartment on lower La Cienaga –and let’s YOU fuck her in THEIR apartment – with a little help from some LSD – the little white pills then known as „pure Ousley”.

But I’ve already gotten way ahead of my story -- the story of Me and Louise and José and the psychedelic sixties. The whole thing actually started on a beautiful day at the end of the summer of 1966 – September the First, to be exact – the day I started my new job at the RAND Corporation on the bluff in Santa Monica overlooking fabled „Muscle Beach” – the job of my dreams – and thought I had it made for the duration. I was hired on at RAND by David Hayes, a somewhat maverick, droopy-eyed linguist from Tennessee who had his own private linguistic theory which he called „Dependency Grammar”, as a creative thinker on the RAND Russian Language Project.of which he was the guiding light. I had just spent a couple of years at UCLA as a graduate student of Chomskian linguistics – the school of linguistics which was then all the rage – but I hated the dry, bloodless, formalistic, tree-structure Chomskian approach to the study of language, and was on the verge of dropping out of the masters degree program when suddenly this job – a high-powered job in linguistics, but not of the nauseating Chomskian kind – suddenly fell into my lap almost out of the blue. How this happened is a bit of a digression, but a necessary one in order to understand the background of everything that happened later.

In the summer of ’66 there was a kind of world series of linguistics held on the UCLA campus for some eight weeks during July and August. This was the annual Summer Institute of Linguistic, an academic event held at a different campus around the country every year and attended by students from all over the map. But 1966 was a very special year at UCLA because Noam Chomsky, the then undisputed superstar and king of linguistics – at the very peak of his academic fame and fortune – would not only be there in person, but would be giving two lectures every afternoon expounding his latest theories of „Transformational Generative Grammar” to a captive audience in the largest hall available – the audience composed mostly of graduate students in thrall before the new Guru of the discipline, but also by a large contingent of the most prominent linguistic specialists in the world – psycholinguists, neurolinguists, experimental phoneticians – you name it – as well as all the major theoreticians, some of whom had language theories somewhat divergent from those of Chomsky – but who were nevertheless keen on hearing the latest Chomskian formulations straight from the horse’s mouth. – the new Gospel according to Chomsky, direct from M.I.T.

The atmosphere in the spacious Psychology Building lecture hall every afternoon from four to six (with a coffee break in-between) was something like getting a double dose of the Sermon on the Mount – and you were even able to fire a few questions at the Messiah at the conclusion of each sermon. The proceedings were moderated by Dr.Robert Stockwell, a wiry bespectacled blond-haired intellectual Bible-Belt-nik from Oklahoma, who was acting head of the UCLA linguistics department, (official sponsor of the institute) and having discovered the real Messiah, did just about everything but bow down and lick Chomsky’s shoes on every possible occasion. He preached Chomskyism in the UCLA linguistics department and seemed to think he was Jjohn-the-Baptist during the lectures making sure that The Word was properly heard. Never mind that hardly anyone in the audience could actually figure out what Chomsky was actually saying. When the word is coming from above you pretend to understand and nod in agreement even if you don’t. There was one guy at the back of the hall – a traditional linguist from Michigan, who would get up and regularly point out apparent contradictions in Chomsky’s formulations – but he was regularly shouted down as if he were a heretic farting loudly in church. Those were heady afternoons – to witness two hours of amazing double-talk by one of the cleverest double-talkers of the century, Noam Chomsky -- being passed off and accepted by a highly sophisticated academic audience as the absolute Gospel Truth.
Since this was also the height of the Viet-Nam protest days, Chomsky would also make a couple of unscheduled and unpaid political speeches that summer at hastily organized campus Anti-War rallies known as „Teach-Ins” featuring such other luminaries as Prof. Herbert Marcuse, retired veterans of the war, former RAND researchers, etc., etc. (names to be filled in later). This man, Chomsky, while looking like a mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet, was so incredibly glib that – come to think of it – he could have taken a position in favor of the war -- and would have sounded every bit as convincing! Too bad somebody didn’t stage a debate at some point between Chomsky and Billy Graham – that would have been one for the books – two True Believers and genius bullshit-artists going at it head-to-head.

Budapest, August 12, 2OO6
To be continued ...