[menu]

Tyrone Power Remembers His Childhood and Adolescence

by

j jackson



He sits in the back bedroom of the old Inselbrick house, waiting for people to get out of the bathroom. He has to go really badly. He feels this same way years later in the reality of his life as he almost awakens in the night to detect his physical state. He almost remembers his past, dreaming.
It's early morning. Other people are in the bedroom with him, his mother and his sister? Possibly. He remembers them being in the bedroom a lot when he was in there, and he remembers them being around shortly, later on that same day.
Finally, he gets his turn in the bathroom. Something about the toilet fascinates him. It's not the old white one that was there, but a shiny new ivory one. It's a state-of-the-art commode. As he sits on it, his mother comes into the room, preventing him from allowing himself to let go.
In an alternative memory/explanation/experience, he is alone and unable to go, despite the fact that he has to really badly. As a child, he suffered from a self-inflicted constipation, not that he could not go, but that he liked the feeling of holding it in, that delicious joy that spread through his body, that sense of ultimate control expressed as a physical pleasurable sensation. He learned to restrain himself, as a result of the influence of a domineering mother against whom he intuitively rebelled.
He remembers his mother advising him about how to go to the bathroom. Not how to go into the bathroom, but how to actually go. He remembers other people being in the bathroom too, but he doesn't remember who. He remembers his mother leaving and a young girl entering.
Or maybe he imagined this. Yes, probably he imagined it. She bends over the tub. No. He didn't imagine it. It actually happened, but years later. She seems almost to be standing on her hands as she prepares something in the tub. He can't see what she's doing. Is she preparing to take a bath? But she isn't running any water.
Either she is naked or, when she bends over, a nightgown or dress she is wearing lifts up to reveal her beautiful undercarriage. He likes the view. He stands up and puts his face between her legs, which she allows him to do, almost as if she pays very little attention to him as she preoccupies herself with what she's doing.
He sticks his tongue into her twat, which is very tiny and cute. She is maybe about 18 years old, older than he is, but her twat is like that of a very young girl. He enjoys this a lot, even in memory, but she pushes him away, not angrily, but as if he's beginning to annoy her.
She leaves the room and his sister comes in. She's a teenager and naked. He touches her nipples, which she doesn't seem to mind. She's followed shortly by their mother who stands beside him. He reaches back behind his mother's back to caress his sister's nipples. They are having a great deal of fun hiding their actions from her.
His sister and his mother leave the room. He goes to the window and looks out between the houses. He knows who he is now. He didn't always know that he was the Tyrone Power.
This is a fifties or maybe a sixties film, but Tyrone (as if he is a character different from himself, standing off, disembodied, watching) has a seventies style haircut, long (for a fifties film actor, but short for a seventies hippy), the kind of style that comes down over the ears only very slightly and is just too long to be fifties acceptable. He thinks that he should look older than he is, being in this seventies Technicolor film. He should be in a fifties film in black and white.
Outside the yard at the fences, fans try to get his attention. He waves at them from the window and shouts a few words of response to their shouted questions. He is Tyrone, an older man now. People are attracted to him because of his macho, mature appearance and demeanor. Formerly, as a youth, he was attractive, but in a different way, more as an object of innocence. He combines both of these aspects into a package that (some; many?) women find irresistible because he does not pursue them, and so they instead pursue him.
Fans, mostly young girls and younger women at the fence, are more naive than older women who have learned the "dangers" of pursuing men, trying their best to convince him to chase after them instead. But he will not, which makes them at the same time both more attracted and put off by his inaccessibility, as if it's an insult to them, as if they are not attractive enough to convince him to pursue them, when in fact they are very attractive, but he knows the game too well and does not want to become involved in a losing proposition.
He lets women come to him, which they do.
He never chases women any more.

Back inside the bathroom, memories abound. After everyone has left the floor except for his sister, he decides that he will go into the bedroom and ask her if he can have sex with her. He rationalizes that it's okay, since she's only his half-sister, and he figures, what the hell, the worst she can do is say no. There is no way she would tell their mother.
But when he asks her, she says yes, of course, any time he wants to. He imagines the act, then and many times later in his life. But it doesn't happen. They never get the opportunity because too many people threaten to interrupt them. They go into the bathroom, but their mother's boyfriend, a guy who looks like Robert Downey, Jr., whom Tyrone never really knew, is standing at the top of the stairway. They slip past him when his back is turned and enter the bathroom. But his presence outside the door is a threat. He might decide to enter. There is no lock on the bathroom door. Holding onto each other's forearms behind the door, they agree to do it later. Now, they have to get back out of the bathroom past the guy at the stairs. They can't let him know they were in the bathroom together. She goes first, telling Tyrone that if the guy sees her, she will cough.

Several weeks pass before they get back together. They are at his father's offices. They sneak off into the bathroom. There is a small room off the back of the bathroom, and they go in there, but a door from it opens into a complex of offices. There are no locks on any of these doors either. The door is slightly open and Tyrone is afraid to close it for fear of attracting attention. And any one of a large number of people could walk in at any time. They never get to do it, and he regrets it for the rest of his life.

§ § §

He's looking down over the hillside into the woods, standing on a roadway. Something down below, or on the hillside, fascinates him. He can't remember what it was. A farm woman on the bank behind him across the road doesn't know who he is.
As he tries to look through the trees to see what it is that holds his attention in the woods, he's aware of activities down at the fire hall, below him far to his left. The fire hall shares a building with a diner/restaurant that Rita, a woman friend of his, manages.
He lives in a small town that sits at the base of huge hill that could almost be a mountain. It's a low class rural mill town that has more of the ambiance of a suburban village than the decrepitude of many of the coal towns near the place where he was born.
He sees Rita and her friend Denise almost every day at the restaurant. Denise works in the restaurant with Rita. He likes to sit around and drink coffee and watch them work. They are both older than he is. He's always had a thing for older women.
Still possessed of some kind of an awe of the hillside, Tyrone begins to walk down toward the fire hall. At the top of the hill, just as he is about to descend it along the roadway, he meets Denise. They walk along together, and they begin to talk. He feels a bit honored that she will talk to him. They never managed to talk too much, probably because they felt too much of a mutual identity. It can be a frightening proposition, to be so much like someone else. He knows she feels in awe of him, the same awe that he felt at the hillside, he thinks. Maybe she is what he was looking for.
He had to admit, remembering, that he felt in awe of her too, although at the time he hardly paid any attention to her. She was just someone to avoid, because he was already in way over his head with Rita and with other women and didn't need to become involved with her and her personality at that time. They would have overwhelmed each other, each struggling to win a battle of wits and nerves, and he was already overwhelmed enough. None of this was conscious at the time. He only knew he had to stay away from her, but he never thought to try to understand why.
As they walk along the road on the flat above the restaurant, he begins to feel a great affection for her. Meanwhile, a young guy comes up from behind them (from where, he doesn't know; maybe from the woods down over the hillside). As they begin to descend the steep hill, this guy tries to wrest Denise's attention away from him. He's kind of mildly retarded and is bestowing his affections on her, trying to get her to be nice to him. As he walks along, he insinuates himself between them. Tyrone allows himself to drop behind them. Denise gives him a look of chagrin over her shoulder, as if she's asking what is she supposed to do but tolerate this guy. Tyrone gets the idea that the guy wants to ask Denise for a date. But he does not, probably because he doesn't get the right signals from her, despite the fact that she tries to be nice to him. She is nice in a token manner while she tries to keep him at an emotional distance.
In his later life, Tyrone realizes that it was he, not the guy, who wanted to ask her out. He was the one who didn't get the right signals.
Finally, Tyrone pushes between Denise and the guy, edging him out of the way. And he walks beside her to the restaurant. But nothing more.

§ § §

The house is full of people. Tyrone's ex-wife has returned and is cleaning and organizing the house. He likes what she's doing, but he becomes concerned that she will begin throwing things out that he wants to keep. He wants to tell her to set everything aside that she wants to throw out so that he can see it first, but before he can tell her, he sees that she has set aside a small pile of books and folders and other stuff beside his desk for him to go through.
In the living room, she has cleaned off the shelf along the outer southern wall (where he keeps his trophies). He likes the uncluttered atmosphere she is creating. One of the people in the house is a woman in calf-high, olive drab, rubber boots. She has borrowed them from him without his knowing it. Probably, his ex-wife said that she could wear them. He's concerned that she will not return them. He thinks he has seen her before, but he can't remember where.

In a well-lit empty storefront on the main street of his hometown, two guys and a woman talk heatedly, spaced apart, moving in on and walking away from each other. One of the guys is the husband of the woman who was in his house; the other is her brother. Both guys are twenty-something. Years later, they would have been described as yuppie-looking, except the husband is definitely not a yuppie, but more working class, but well dressed, though casually. The woman is plain, no make-up, good-looking, but homely in a West Virginia hills sort of way.
Tyrone had been standing nearby at a bus stop watching the fracas. But when they seem to be getting violent, when the husband appears to be threatening the woman, he intervenes. He enters the building. He thinks he has seen this woman somewhere before.
As he remembers it later, it seems to him that his presence doesn't add another person, like he is, maybe, taking the place of the brother, except that the brother shows up later while he is there, after the husband leaves. So, it is like he is taking the place of either the husband or the brother, at different times.
The husband has been abusing the woman for some time, the woman reveals in the course of their awkward three-way conversation, and she has begun recently to make overtures of leaving him, which he resents. A part of him knows that the only way he can get her to stay is if he stops the abuse, but another part of him adamantly refuses to admit that he has been wrong.
Tyrone's presence is a factor in the woman's decision to leave her husband. He knows this, and the husband knows it and is hostile toward him for it, threatening him with his presence. The man is almost a head taller than Tyrone and obviously physically stronger, and Tyrone feels threatened by him, but he does not back away from him.
Tyrone knows that he also intimidates the man, not physically, but mentally, by his education and intelligence. The man is afraid that, if he would attempt to physically attack him, Tyrone's superior intellect will perceive his intent ahead of time and act to thwart him in some way, to the man's detriment. Finally, the husband, in a fit of disgust, leaves. Tyrone accompanies the woman and her brother home when he learns that they are from his neighborhood. He realizes who she is, where he has seen her before. She was the woman on the hill the day he met Denise.
The woman, her name was Fran, stands on the gradually sloping hillside embankment above the roadway with her brother. From a distance, Fran, standing near her brother, says goodbye to Tyrone on the road below. She thanks him for his help.
They live in an old farmhouse that stands in the distance, off to the left, down a long slope, as if, instead of being located in a small town, it existed in the hills of West Virginia. It's the only house around, sitting in a pocket of barren land surrounded by trees that are surrounded by residences.
After she thanks him, Tyrone begins to leave, but she beckons him back as her brother departs to leave them alone. He ascends and stands on the embankment above the road and she walks down the gradual slope toward him. She repeats her thanks, and he accepts it graciously. But as he prepares to leave again, she comes down next to him, apparently intending to thank him again. It becomes obvious to him now that they are very attracted to each other. Their faces are close. She thanks him in a more intimate way. Then she kisses him gently on the cheek. He prepares again to leave, but he hesitates, and they kiss fully. It's not so finally sexual as he would have liked, but it's nice.
He saw her a few days later outside her farmhouse wearing the same olive drab rubber boots that the woman in his home years later borrowed. He reminded that woman that he wanted the boots that she was wearing returned when she no longer needed them. She assured him that she'd return them, but she never did. He loved those boots. He'd bought them because they reminded him of Fran.


[top] [menu]