Breaking Rocks in Prison
from
The Autobiography of Buster Keaton
by Alan Clinton

My girlfriend of the time told one of her students that she was dating someone who reminded her of Buster Keaton. Then she told me about the incident, perhaps thinking I would find it amusing. In actuality, it opened up a gigantic void in my psyche, something akin to an air bubble (I am certain that Lacan has a diagram of something like this in one of his seminars). Although I didn’t, or couldn’t, admit it to her at the time, I had never actually seen a Buster Keaton film. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I had ever seen Buster Keaton. I’d heard the name several times, of course, descriptions and allusions to his significance, and for some reason these instances always evoked the image of a hobo in a tattered top hat, thick-lipped and unshaven. Whenever this image came, I was pretty sure it was just something my psyche had thrown together, but even though I knew it was wrong, I couldn’t stop the image from coming. What is even more bizarre, this image had the effect of so absorbing my attention that, inevitably, whenever someone began to talk about Keaton, it sounded like someone talking underwater. So when my girlfriend mentioned the incident, I had no way of knowing if she was referring merely to a shared physical appearance, or to something more significant about our lives. Although I put it off for some time, perversely allowing the void to become larger, I eventually went in search of my doppelgänger. We did look a lot alike: the lazy eyelids, the prominent nose, the questionable posture. As I investigated further, and his life slowly became an obsession, I found that we had far more in common than mere appearance.
We seemed to lead parallel, if not overlapping, lives. Neither of us, for instance, was very good at breaking rocks in prison. We were both too gentle, not treating the rocks as rocks, but as if we were looking for some kind of circuitry inside. I can’t speak for Mr. Keaton, but I actually was searching for something inside the rocks. I was looking for the reason why my father, himself a prisoner, had never taught me this skill. Then one day, throwing up my hands in exasperation (while still holding the hammer), I hit myself in the head and knocked the strangest memory loose. My dad had, in fact, taught me how to break rocks, had in fact showed me many times. He would bring rocks home from prison specifically for the purpose of showing me how to break them. Unfortunately, the prison would only allow him to bring home, at most, one rock per day. Also, my father was in fact too good at breaking rocks—if this can be believed—to adequately teach someone else how to do it. Out of concern for my safety, he would make me stand fifty feet away from the rock, at a point where I could barely see the rock in the first place. Then, as soon as he thanked the Lord for the rock He had provided, the hammer came down and it was gone, just like that. As the dust cleared, I could see my father pulling what must have been fragments of rock from his bleeding face. Before I could ask for a more detailed explanation about how he did it, he had already excused himself to the washroom in order to properly cleanse his wounds.

Once, while he was teaching me how to survive a nuclear war, I asked my father where he had learned to break rocks so well. Rather than looking perturbed at my interruption of his current exposition, he proudly announced that he had learned to break rocks from reading a book, that one can learn how to do almost anything from reading a book, even how to play ping-pong. He could not remember the name of the book, however, which he had read in college, a time when he seemed to do most of his reading. There was no way of locating the book, and to this day neither Buster nor myself are very good at breaking rocks in prison.

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Curtain Call: A Metaphorical Memoir by Alan Ramón Clinton
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