Y^{ou Too Can’t Help Falling
by Anthony Cristofani}

The show was ending and the man in the platform shoes and gold lamè suit looked lonely, huddling in on himself as if in the rain, singing “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love.” The man on the stage was not Elvis, though Mr. Blue Suede Soul’s sincere Las Vegas verisimilitude of sincerity was still in the building. Elvis never played L.A.’s Dodger Stadium, never dedicated a concert to Charles Bukowski, and never traveled with what looked like the television studio of the entire Western World as his stage.

Elvis sang the original song like a lullaby, serving it up in a sonorous purr, poured with spirit syrup intoxicating enough to move one past wondering if there is anything problematic in its profluence of lyric love. That night, our rock star was only accompanied by a slightly drunken electric guitar—plucked with Hank Williams lonesomeness—and the impetuous, impending democracy-through-mass-media of 1992 that saturated his stage. He wavered there on the pier of a mini-stage, which extended from the prodigious main stage into the center of the sea of heads and hands, singing in a tenuous falsetto high enough to stir both angels and demons from their slumber. As Mephistopheles’s makeup ran down our satyr’s face in the heat of the spotlight in which he hugged himself, up through the stage seeped the darker grounding of the song:

Myriad television screens of all sizes had stormed our senses for over two hours, perpetually flashing with pop images, icons, and lovely blue static like the background of the flag of the European Union with its corona of (super)stars. This Tele-Vision Chorus was competing with the pop star for our attention—call it the survival of the best lit, in a heady concoction of tongue-in-cheek and heart-in-hand. One large video screen on stage is merely decadent…but thirty? Now we’re dealing with a supporting symphony of framed faces, hips, canyons, gun conventions, game shows, Iraq and Tibet, crosses and cricket matches, MLK and Mercedes…all turned into light and released into the night by satellites of love, if not love itself. Maybe if you change the channels fast enough, you can blur everything into something resembling the general programming of the universe, like looking into, (or rather, squinting obliquely at), those computer-generated pictures composed of dots until the three-dimensional shape appears. (You are a fool if you think you can perceive the divine by staring directly into that which lies between the welcome-to-the-west arch of the coveted). What shape will manifest in the manifold broadcast, a circle? Probably, especially if you throw in an extra twenty or so television sets to call attention to the process of broadcast and reception, as opposed to the particular programs.

Can I keep this night captured in light, connect to its broad cast by remote control the next time she massacres history, throwing a little light on the situation. Throwing a lot of light on the situation, throwing a vast array of situations on the situation. A satellite feed for our insular, world-starved little struggles, taking us overground. Maybe if I can keep this multiplicity-channel open in a screen-within-a-screen vision of Celeste and my final, screaming exchange, I will create a new channel for others to watch: see her now holding my hand only fools rush in and see her later, in her apartment in Portland, listening to me cry out through the ring of her phone…ringing, ringing, she is ringing in the new year with a complete obliteration of last year, of this concert.

But no I refuse to let it slip into the dark, and so I turn back to that stage, now gone dark, everything turned off except him and us. I watched Celeste watching him, static in her blinking eyes. I decided that I didn’t regret (I can’t help) falling in love with her, my girlfriend of one year. I turned my gaze on her fourteen year-old sister, Carissa, and I wondered who would be (I can’t help) falling in love with her. Hands clasped to her chest in fanatic fan fashion, she swayed, sanctified in his uncertainty. Her shirt, her brassiere, probably even the show, were too big for her. Feeling the weight of older-man eyes, she glanced up at me. (Was that habitual, perhaps to gauge moments through my visage, or did she really feel my eyes upon her?) Carissa smiled. It was a nervous smile, like most fourteen year-olds’ smiles (Take my hand…) in the face of seventeen year-old role models. I was her babysitter; she was my charge. Some truths I told her, and in the face of other truths I’d hold her (Shall I stay…?). We communicated half-consciously through an esoteric series of slightly varying subtle movements: skimming the kneecap with a pinky finger, brushing the waist with a forearm, meaningfully useless shifts of weight or position. I liken it to the miniscule, seemingly random rotations that revenant honeybees perform upon the honeycomb stage, in order to reveal to the hive in which direction lies the pollen.

Meanwhile, our rock star was revealing his dependence upon the audience. We were to take his hand, and his whole life, too. Carissa’s eyes stretched wide open with the effort. What a way for this über-spectacle to end! Is this how it always ends—on the knees, lights out, folk singer soul sighing itself out of a rock star stage? I couldn’t decide if he was more exposed with or without his Mephisto mask, with or without us. He looked so naked it made me feel self-conscious. “It takes a crowd to cry,” he cried softly, and 5000 watts amplified his private little moment up and out to the three of us at the edge of the arena. Celeste groped for my hand and looked up at me, the last lights of the show reflected in one side of her round peach face. Availing myself of the artificial light, I could see myself, (not quite make myself out but certainly make myself), darkly there in her nearly pupil-less glassy eye. She continued to stare and I followed suit. I liked to think that I was looking into her eyes with the vulnerability of that man down there underneath the gold lame’ suit, but in the end I think I only succeeded in following gold lame’ suit—my strong suit. Never naked. Never just her and me. It was her, me, and the great Greek chorus of my mind, not just commenting on but creating the action. I needed a crowd to cry.

'It’s alright,' I am told by those who conflate acceptance and apathy, ‘It was just a stage.’ But I am tired of that word, psychology’s clumsy contribution to the personal time line: all the world is a developmental stage. No, we should stage-dive. I should have stage-dived. Not for seven years and three emotionally unrequited girlfriends could I speak in the truth of that falsetto, on that stage.

Back in 1992, the song and the concert were doing what songs and concerts do so well—ending. The singer left us with these words: “Elvis…is still in the building.” Even as he spoke I could make out the strains of Elvis’s morally unconflicted version of the song surreptitiously overtaking us and our twilight idol through the sound system. It was all too easy as I took my girl into my arms and we began to slow dance. The heavenly female chorus chimed through us and went to my head, with ooohhhs and aaahhhs that gave divine right to all lovers in the dark stadium that night, no matter their duration. No narcotic is this overwhelming, this addictive; buzzed with this music I could slip into marriage like a slip into sleep under the willow tree. Elvis had returned in the end, of course, to lay his blanket over us, to tuck us in with the song recently rift by our now-exited rock star. It left most of the audience feeling cozy, resolved. The most American of them had already begun to stand and stretch and bustle and drone.

But for me, coming as it did at the end of a night in which the rock star had given us our very own live television broadcast, casting his broad lines and chords even beyond the arena walls, digitally romancing us with cameras, satellites and video screens, revealing beneath the stars of ten mirror balls and behind bubbled opaque shades that love is blindness, deploying every rock-n-roll weapon in the arsenal to crack open the rock-n-roll mystique, cracking open this inviolate love song in his falsetto…coming as it did at the end of a show that had revealed how grotesque and confused a middle child is Love in the nineties compared to in Elvis’s time (always 4/4)—it all left me restless. No single channel or song or angle did so, but it all left me restless, waiting, naked for the great Now What. I didn’t want to go home and go to bed. Ever.

While my partner and I danced, Carissa murmured ‘Omigod’ over and over like a mantra, eyes glazed over, fixated on the vacated corner of the stage where her man last manifested. Finally, she gave us a quick glance askance, then let her eyes fall towards the concrete floor. I let go of Celeste and began to dance with Carissa. Her frame was so small I enveloped her (Like a river flows, slowly to the sea), but she knew how to dance. I opened my eyes. She giggled over the space for which she had not yet developed words or other armor. I turned my gaze from the dwindling spectacle to the trembling spectator in my arms, but she was looking at her sister for a sign. All of a sudden the profane world assaulted me as the house lights flooded the stadium with crass light and the sea of seats was once again rendered candy-blue. The last strains of the song faded into the murmur of the ruptured crowd reacting to the lights being turned on them for the first time. A nice gesture, but the lighting was all wrong for the tone of that last song. The violent light had jolted the remaining stragglers out of their trance, and now all was blue. The moment, the design, the pathos, the focus, the image the canvas the memory the spirit the shadows: everything was bright blue-washed; hangover ensued. People remembered their identities again under the house lights, and responded by shuffling feet, reaching into pockets, groping for sweaters and handbags and flat pop, shifting from oceanic mode to individual mode, eyes scrupulously fixed on their companions and only their companions, moving in the practical vectors of those who know where to go next.

No. It wasn’t enough—the lights had turned to us. Hasn’t the neon baton been passed? I wanted to slow dance with the whole audience, to the urgent pulse of the satellite television glossolalia. I wanted to dance with the brightest blondest one to the deepest darkest song. But now I was left with this media graveyard, past prime time.

I released Carissa. She turned back to the vacated stage; I turned back to my girlfriend. The prom was over, and the prom queen was backstage exploding champagne. Los Angeles awaited us outside, without a soundtrack. So inexorably vast, this City of Angels, how could Celeste and I be equal to its task? She was looking at me now, expecting some sage summary of the spectacle we had witnessed together, or at least next to each other. I embraced her in order to bypass the space for which I had no words, and perhaps no wisdom. Over the shoulder of the high school junior by whom I translated all love songs, I stared at the city lights, holding their own against the galaxy’s lights beyond our venue. I couldn’t help (Like a river flows) falling in love with them.