A Man and Alfred Hitchcock

The Poem I Didn't Think I Could Write: A Man and Alfred Hitchcock

In a review of Donald Spoto's biography of Alfred Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius, I read for the first time of an incident that I found deeply troubling. The brilliant director bet a property man a week's salary that he would be too frightened to spend the night handcuffed to a camera in a darkened, deserted theater studio. The man agreed to the wager. On the appointed night, Hitchcock offered him a beaker of brandy, telling him it was "to ensure a quick and deep sleep."

Then the man was handcuffed. The cast and crew left the bound man there until they returned in the morning to find him, as Spoto wrote, angry, weeping, exhausted, and humiliated. There was a "joke" in the brandy: it was laced with the most powerful available laxative.

For years, this vicious act preyed upon my mind. I thought of a human being, alone, trapped, and helpless, in pain and uncontrollably befouling himself, only to be exposed in this state of filth and degradation to all the people he had worked with. I was struck, too, by the fact that this was an extraordinary cruelty committed by a have, a man with great advantages of talent and affluence, against a have-not.

I wanted to write about it from the victim's viewpoint but did not believe it was possible.

The major obstacle was that of humor. The basis of humor has often been said to be surprise. That is what Hitchcock played upon when he promised a quick and deep sleep from what he knew had been made into a weapon of agony and shame. I told this story to many people and when I got to Hitchcock had laced the brandy with the most powerful available laxative, about half burst out laughing. That is to be expected since these individuals were surprised -- and were not the victim of that surprise.

It simply would not be possible to write about this trick without making people laugh at its victim rather than sympathize with him, I believed.

The possibility of writing about this incident and making the reader sympathize with the violated man opened up when I read of a similar, although less extreme, occurrence in Christopher Nolan's Under the Eye of the Clock. Nolan has severe cerebral palsy. He is mute, has no control over his limbs and must talk and write with the aid of typing stick attached to a band around his forehead. Under the Eye of the Eye of the Clock is his autobiography but is written in the third person with himself as Joseph Meehan so he can tell his life story without being maudlin.

One day his mother was invited to speak before a group on disability issues. His sister Yvonne promised to hold the fort while mom was away. Unaccustomed to being separated from their mother, the teenaged Nolan did not have a bowel movement when his father took him to the toilet that morning. Over his objections, Yvonne made her brother take two big spoonfuls of Milk of Magnesia.

The laxative went to work while Nolan was in school. He could not bring himself to ask a friend to take him to the toilet and valiantly tried to hold himself back while beset with fierce cramps. Finally, he wrote, the role of clown bullied and bashed a boy until he surrendered. Now he felt humanly hurt, his was the shame, his the humiliation.

Reading that, I knew the subject could be written about without snickering by someone but I still did not think it could be seriously written about by me. Christopher Nolan has literary gifts that dwarf mine. So I still did not try to write about the worker's ordeal even though I thought it was a story that needed to be told from his viewpoint.

Then, quite awhile later, an image burst into my mind: that of an animal freeing itself from a trap by gnawing off its own paw. I imagined that if the trapped property man had only had such a sharp, heavy knife nearby on that horrible night, he would probably have cut off his hand.

I went home and wrote A Man and Alfred Hitchcock.

* * * * *

A Man and Alfred Hitchcock

A man of modest means,
he worked in a theater but
was not a star, not even
an actor.
No career, just
a job and
    a job's
          weekly wages.
Property man:  drag this here
     and put that there.

Alfred Hitchcock was a genius:
creative,
gifted,
and rich.
A name known ‘round the world.
His first name and
last and
familiarized form:
Hitch.

A week's salary -- said
Mister Hitchcock.
A week's salary,
     I dare ya!
A week's salary said the man whose
name we all know:  the first
and the last
and the familiarized form.
A week's salary
Held out to a man
working at a job:
     put this here
      and drag that there.
A week's salary,
said Hitch,
who liked a joke
and had the power to
     play some good ones.

Sitting on a chair,
the man drank
    proffered brandy.  
Click the handcuffs,
     off the lights.

Everyone went home
save one.
He remained: in a chair,
in darkness, trying
to sleep sitting up.
He drifted off, then woke.
He woke
     in pitch;
he woke
     in a chair,
         handcuffed
      to a camera,
     unable to move.
Awakened by that
     familiar knock
     in the bowel.
A man in darkness,
alone, he tightened
his sphincter,
   not knowing,
     not realizing:  
not yet.

His guts squeeze, then
roar.  A cold clammy
sweat breaks on forehead,
upper lip, the back of his neck.

Dizzy in darkness, he feels
a bottle of acid
break across the back
of his scalp and he knows:
laced with laxative.

Terrified, he screams; knowing,
knowing, he screams.
No one hears.  No one rescues.
He pulls
     on handcuffs,
      pulls    pulls    pulls
as his own waste like rocks with
     sharp     jagged     edges
pummels him from inside his stomach.

A human, not a badger
or beaver -- so blessed -- caught
in a trap.  His teeth cannot
tear painfully through his own
flesh     veins     muscle    tendons
     to set him free.
His teeth cannot
          break
     bone from
     bone
to save a shredded
fragment of his dignity
     or
the meanest modicum
       of cleanliness.

But his teeth gnash and grind and
bite down on his lower lip, hard,
as he is beaten from within his belly.
Sweat      sweat     sweat      runs
cold and clammy as misery.
Defeated by defecation,
the man is dirtied in the private
place between his buttocks,
        dirtied
dirtied   dirtied   dirtied.  

Fierce pains, attack after attack.
For hours    
     for hours
               for hours
Excreta    runs   and   sticks
down his thighs,
    the back of his knees,
     calves, and ankles.   

Crying, he bends his wet face of
fire into his palm as shit
like lava dries and burns on
the skin all down his legs.  Crying,
his neck curved down
     for hours
into the inescapable stink.

In the morning, the door opened.
The terrible odor,
the sound of the man crying.
Then:  light: gasps.
       Hands cover
          mouths.

Because Alfred Hitchcock,
a genius,
creative,
gifted,
and rich,
liked a joke
and had the power to
     play some good ones
like the time he tricked
and trapped and
      shattered a man
whose life was
     drag this here
        and put that there.