I Get You, Norma Desmond
Keats called it Negative Capability, Lorca called it Duende. That’s my religion if I have one.
~ Diane Seuss
we suspect, is why. In college I was cast as Death in Euripides’ play about a tortured spouse who must surrender his life to the underworld should he wish to see his wife again. I danced & skirted the edges of Berkeley’s monstrous Greek theater. I dressed in black OshKosh overalls & had at it—twirling, miming, winding my way through the audience & stadium seats. A silent Salome-like pantomime. My mane of bobbed blond curls whipping wind behind me as I spun whimsical, fatal tableaus. Admetus desperate to retrieve his beloved Alcestis wedded to oblivion in the mosh pit below. Her morbid journey, her finish halted when madman Heracles descends in perfect deus ex machina to make it all right again. Tragedy blighted. Life won. This was 1982 and my director George House took his cue from Fosse—All That Jazz a recent hit with the sultry Jessica Lange playing angelic reaper. An ultimate seduction. A fever dream desire & no escape. Sex & Death at the rabbit hole’s end. George was rotund, loved opera, boys, chain- smoking & bourbon. Also, professional wrestling he’d watch for hours from his decadent bed of vermillion caftans & gold embroidered kimonos—otherwise naked in his low-lit, baubledbedroom. I cleaned his house once a week when I wasn’t in class, rehearsal, or scoring drugs & vintage clothing off Shattuck & Center. He was a slob, a diva, a Norma Desmond in drag & I loved him. Even the toilet bowl scum, rancid fridge & sauce crusted stove I was forced to scrub. The scuffed floors & laundry loads & liquor bottles. I didn’t mind. I just wish I’d been there when his heart stopped & he toppled, alone, to his end—tabby cats circling, meowing for their dinner. I would have been there—his Max—his deus to descend or direct, to worship or revive or sweep up. Long after the reaching has stopped. Here’s the thing. I’m ready for my closeup. When it comes to life, when it comes to art—once it starts—the reaching never ends. All those beating, homo sapien hearts. All those wonderful people out there in the dark.
Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Grantee and is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Heavy Feather Review, Split Lip, National Poetry Review, Catamaran, ONE ART, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Fall, 2025. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.