Perspective

by J Hobart B

Waking up from sleep this morning, I was instantly and profoundly struck by the startling way the world appeared around me. Something was wrong here, very wrong --The shapes of things, the shape of the room, were all grotesquely warped and seemed to undulate around me. I frowned, squinted, gazed about in a desperate search for some shred of familiarity. The scale of everything was somehow horribly, impossibly misshapen and distorted, and I couldn't, for the life of me, recognize my surroundings or even place myself, spatially, in relation to them.

I felt drunk and stoned and some kind of awful third thing that I couldn't define, but I hadn't been out the night before. I didn't go out ever anymore. There was a time when I would go out, but not anymore, never again. Not since the show took off, and I could no longer take five steps outside the studio without some hideous grinning ape waving his arms at me like a retarded windmill and parroting a joke from one of my bits back to me. God, there's nothing like a keen, unfiltered understanding of humanity's boundless stupidity to put you off socialization for the rest of your lifetime.

So no, this wasn't a hangover. This was something else entirely, something altogether different. I gripped my bedpost and blinked, rubbed my eyes, shook my head, blinked again harder, slower. Whatever had changed was not just a symptom of grogginess, but a very real, happening thing. I shook, started to sweat.

Though naturally, I couldn't possibly put it all together at the moment, I can tell you now, as I've since come to understand it, that what I was experiencing was, in essence, a complete and total inversion of my visual perspective. That is to say, rather than the normal way a person perceives the universe, wherein objects fade to a distant, common point on a horizon line, my perception had somehow been totally reversed. The further away something in my line of sight stood, the larger it appeared to me in relation to the points around it. The closer the object was to me, the smaller it looked.

If the concept seems difficult to envision, that's because it is. It took literally hours for me to recognize what had occurred, hours laying there, half propped up in bed, gripping that post as though it were the only thing keeping me from flying off the earth's axis, my head spinning and bobbing and making me seasick. I stared at my arms -- long, spindly things now, shrinking to almost nothing toward my shoulders as they sloped from swollen, unwieldy hands. The bed frame was only slightly skewed, and I took its gentle wrongness, its comforting ability to warp only slightly smaller in scale to what I would normally see, as a pleasant respite from the madness of the remainder of the image. That relative bit of lucidity was little consolation, however, as the bed was no less dwarfed by the details of the room around it.

The far corner of the room, where the walls met, was bent the wrong way, so as to appear convex rather than concave. The portions of the wall closest to me seeming to recede toward the outside rather than expanding into my periphery. My bay window appeared flipped 180 degrees horizontally as in a mirror, the Manhattan skyline outside that I had seen everyday for the past six years rendered nearly completely unfamiliar. The Brooklyn Bridge, normally stretching gracefully across the backdrop of the city, seemed close enough for me to abrade my face against the pavement, albeit still obscured in patches by the smaller buildings in front of it.

Slowly, through sheer force of will, I pulled myself out of bed and watched as the ceiling seemed to slide further from me as I turned vertical. Should I call out from work? Was I sick? It struck me that this was only the second time in the six years I'd been on the air that I'd even considered the option. But sticking it out once makes it easier to duplicate the feat next time, and the third, and so on and so on. I'd never missed a show yet, never once called on a guest host. The idea of someone else's form standing against the curtain, delivering jokes penned by my staff, inflecting them with some different, entirely wrong sense of timing, always just seemed absolutely surreal to me. No, no, there was just no way. Whatever this was would soon pass. At the very least, I would have to make the effort to come in.

Washing up was the first major challenge. Having successfully navigated the task of crossing the floor of my bedroom, and managing not to crash headlong into the thimble-sized bathroom door that seemed an eternity away from me, I stretched out my arm and watched as my hand expanded to grip the knob, turned it, and somehow managed to pull it (away from me?) so that I could pass through.

The hardest part turned out to be brushing my teeth. Though I had already essentially gotten the idea, I couldn't resist, through sheer force of habit, trying to chase after my toothbrush as it appeared to retreat from me, and thrust my head out toward it only to have the thing immediately crash painfully into my gums. My other senses all seemed frustratingly unchanged -- In my mouth, the size of the brush felt right, the soft minty foam filled my maw in the usual proportion. It seemed almost all the more unfair -- If I had to endure this insanity, couldn't all aspects of my perception at least cooperate in their defiance? Why just the one betrayal? Why not outright mutiny?

Out on the street in front of my building, I became aware of how clownlike I must have appeared. Walking around in this new absurd world was virtually impossible, my strides either wildly broad or timidly short and staggered. I held my arms out around me to stop from tipping, but could not really be sure if this was only adding insult to injury as I struggled to keep myself on the sidewalk.

The people around me, distant giants revealing themselves as fleas as I passed by, smirked and stared at the idiot, glancing furtively away so as not to appear rude but unable to keep from gaping. I've no doubt that at least most of them recognized me. I was in plainclothes, sure, rather than my usual suit and power tie, and my hair may not have been as ruthlessly stretched and combed into the plastic hardshell pompadour to which they must now be so accustomed. But when you're in someone's home every night, there's only so much you can do to disguise yourself.

I imagined them all at work, or coming home with their groceries, or whatever godawful slice of miserable existence they were anticipating in the coming minutes and hours -- "Oh, no, it was definitely him, I'm sure. It was Dick Fontaine, from the tee-vee, and I've never seen anyone so drunk in all my life! Oh, honey, you absolutely would have died, you should have seen the way he was walking!"

Har fucking har, fuckers.

Now, I've tried several times to explain what was going on here, and the one thing no one seems to be able to grasp is that it is only the perspective of my vision that had changed. I did not suddenly wake up with the superhuman ability to see incredible distances. I cannot look down the street and see children flying kites in Australia. An obstructed view is an obstructed view. A chair obscuring a portion of wall is still obscuring that portion of wall, it's just that it appears, just the chair appears, further in the distance than it is, but by the same ratio, only reversed.

Um. Okay.

Try to look at it this way:



In this image, there are pictured: Two sets of railroad tracks, several telephone poles, and a structural frame of some sort. The lines that make up each object lead to one of three separate vanishing points. The first such point, on the center of the horizon line, is the "focus." All this represents the way you see, the way most people see, the way I saw until this morning. But now imagine that you are that focus point, and the focus point is where you are, looking at the image now. You have switched places with it, except the way you see the image is the same. The only difference is that now that small, itty bitty place where the railroad tracks meet is right in front of your face, and the bigger, fat, stretched-out end is in the distance. If you stood on that track and a train were coming toward you, it would appear to have shrunk to nothing just as it was colliding with your gaping, disbelieving face.

This is the only way I can think to describe it, and that's what I tried to communicate to the miniature-faced doctor who was now shining his almost microscopic flashlight into my eyes as he stood against the vast expanse of his 7'x8' office. I drew that goddamned diagram no less than four cocksucking times for this insufferable dweeb, he the whole time just opening and closing his mouth like the mechanical alligator on the last hole of miniature golf, each furrow of the brow digging new trenches in the leathery tarp of his forehead.

He was a short, stocky, roundheaded twat of a man with the thickest stalks of ear hairs I'd ever born witness to in my life. I couldn't keep my wretched, apparently-fucked-to-hell eyes off the tiny pockets of spittle that had amassed in the corners of his mouth, bubbling and throbbing like a tar pit but never seeming to pop.

"Uhhhhhpp," he kept saying. "Ahhh, hwwwmmm." As if the more incoherent the sounds he uttered, the less resembling actual words he could make them, the closer he would eventually come to comprehending what I was so desperately trying to communicate. He wanted to understand, god bless him, that much I could see. He wanted to grasp what I was saying, wanted to know how to solve my problem, wanted to know what he could tell me that would make it all okay. But above all, much more than all that, he wanted this raving lunatic out of his office and into the life of someone more qualified to handle these matters.

My nausea increased. The sweat was running down my face in sheets now, and I watched as it plummeted from my hair to the floor, each drop growing enormous as it fell further from my head before splashing into a virtual sea below me. I stared at the blank, milquetoast face of this most unhelpful doctor. I wanted to destroy him, wanted to unleash all my confused hatred on him at once. I imagined shredding his face against a cheese grater, grinding his fat head down like an onion and watching the red and purple pulp accumulate on his immaculate countertop while he whined and squealed like a teakettle.

God, what an awful thing to think of. I know, you must think I'm a shit for thinking it, and you're right. But it's a remarkably useful tool in my trade, having thoughts like these. I've come to depend on them, to call them up to mind with barely any effort at all. I have to, you see. It's what makes my job bearable.

Every night on my show, Dicking Around with Dick Fontaine, I chat with celebrities. From the best and brightest, most fabulously expensive faces in Hollywood to the most stunningly average, overwhelmingly underwhelming D-listers, it's my job to prop them up, to make them appear charming, interesting, witty and worthy of your admiration. I fondle them, stroke them, laugh at their every juvenile one-liner, touch their knees at exactly the right moment, telepathically fellate them for five to seven minutes until it's time to cut to commercial and they go backstage and return to the realm of fantasy images.

It's a fantastically depressing existence. Fun for a year or two? Sure. But the longer you've been on the air, the more the interview segments run together, the more the faces lose their features, the more identical the lighthearted giggles and casual, calculatedly inadvertent moments of physical contact become, and the more the boredom turns to outright contempt.

So this is the method I developed to keep the show on the road -- All through the segment, all through the smiles and patter and behind-the-scenes anecdotes, I imagine myself murdering or dismembering the guest in the most gruesome ways I can muster. Each time is different, as I try to discover new depths to my psychotic abilities and shock myself into guilt. That's the important part -- The guilt. I've sliced Julia Roberts's buttocks off her body with razor wire and plugged up her mouth and cunt with them. I've ripped Josh Hartnett's chest inside out by the nipples and collapsed his head through his collarbone. The most difficult part is rendering the mental images realistic enough to be genuinely disturbing. In order to achieve the desired effect, they must be vastly superior to the special effects in any movie.

And the reason is the guilt. The deaths I imagine for these pathetic wastes must be so graphic and horrific as to invoke in me a genuine remorse for having done it -- I must be able to look them in the eyes and think, "Jesus, how could I dare think such a thing about this poor, gentle creature?" If I can hate myself enough for being such a twat, then I can empathize with the person sitting on the couch next to me, perhaps even feel genuine love for him, and suddenly the fawning and indulging isn't so forced.

I thought about all of this as I sat in my dressing room with a washcloth over my head. The doctor toward whom I had so successfully forced myself to feel goodwill recommended I try to just relax, stop shaking and sweating, and "de-stress," in hopes that my problem would solve itself. I took it as good advice. Bullshit, of course, but good advice nonetheless in its own way -- At least they were directions I could attempt to follow with some semblance of hope, and conveniently lacking any kind of time frame within which to expect results. Not bad qualities in a platitude.

He recommended I call in sick to the show, go home and rest. Naturally, I told him I would, but there was no bloody way. I haven't missed a show in six years. I wasn't going to start now, not for this. Still, I decided to split the difference and I did come in late. I'm always late, but especially so tonight. Usually I don't show up to the theater until three o'clock. This gives me just enough time to glance over the jokes the writers have prepared, review the write-up and talking points for the guest, get in makeup and wardrobe, briefly pop into the greenroom to make nice and exchange small talk with the guest, and get backstage in time to hear my name announced for the taping at five. Today I came in at four thirty, put on my suit and tie, and collapsed backstage, hoping for this nightmare in my head to all be over before I went on.

It wasn't. The band played the opening theme and I crouched backstage, feeling sick and rubbing my face with my tie. I hadn't even gone through makeup. I didn't have time, and couldn't bear the thought of having to watch it be done in this state, so I'd just locked myself in the dressing room and didn't allow anyone inside until the start of the show. I clutched the curtain in my fist and watched as the cloth undulated and waved, so very fat and massive up where it hung from the ceiling, so tiny where it came down in front of my face, and the bit in my hand shrinking and expanding depending on how close my face got.

"From New York City, it's Dicking Around with Dick Fontaine!"

Oh, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck, SHIT, what am I doing here. Why the goddamned shit did I come in today?

"Tonight, Catherine Zeta Jones! Comedian Patrice O'Neal! And musical guest Fallout Boy!"

I watched as the towering hulk of a 19-year-old Production Assistant scampered down the hallway and gradually passed by her normal size to become a terrier just in front of my face. She started to ask me if I was okay, if she could get me anything. I imagined sinking my teeth into her neck, feeling her flesh break and spray thick, black blood down my chin as she gasped and sputtered and my fingernails dug into her sides. My fear and frustration gave in to guilt, then to love and empathy, and I called her a sweetheart and told her I'm fine, just some pre-show jitters. She giggled, rubbed my back, told me I'd be great, and I watched her scamper back the other way as she turned back into a yeti at the other end of the hall.

"And now, a man who doesn't know the meaning of the word bedtime, it's Dick Fontaine!"

And the band played me onstage. I staggered like an idiot on stilts out onto the stage, those oversized lights blaring in my face. I started to fall backwards, put out my foot to stop myself, tripped and fell. The audience, thinking I was doing some kind of physical bit, howled with laughter. The applause was maddening. I put up a hand, tried to communicate that they all needed to stop, they needed to let me get my bearings. I forced myself up off the floor, but too fast, couldn't handle the sight of the floor apparently rushing toward my face as I got up.

"Wait," I said weakly. "Wait, okay?"

The audience ate it up, roared like baboons. I looked out at them, a thousand enormous, bulbous spotty faces all filling my line of vision while the cameras and crew darted around like fireflies before them. I could pick out pimples on the face of a fat man in the back row.

I caught balance, tried to read the cue cards. My mouth started moving, sound coming out, but not words. Certainly not jokes.

"Wh.... I, uh.... Prheeehbb.........."

I swallowed. I was sweating again. My unmade-up face probably looked gray and clammy under the lights. Those goddamned lights! Jesus! Why did they have to be so big? I stood there wobbling. Stopped trying to form the words. Just tried to stand still and focus on a camera. Just stared into it and stared into it and stared into it. The laughter faded. The applause ended. Finally the studio fell silent and everyone gazed at me, waiting in anticipation for something to happen. Anything.

I leaned over and puked my guts out onto the stage. A collective gasp from the crowd, a murmur, and a few isolated guffaws. I puked and puked, dry heaved and coughed, then collapsed in the puddle. I heard the Floor Director communicate from the booth that we had gone to commercial. Heard footsteps rush to the stage, recognized voices from all levels of production on the show crowding around me, bicker with each other, asking me if I was okay and pushing and prodding at my shoulders.

I softly nodded, looking at my own pink and orange, sunset-colored vomit like an old friend. I smiled and turned around, saw all my coworkers' faces as tiny pinpricks in front of me and stared up at those incredible, giant lights hanging from the ceiling, and I understood everything.

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