Sonny

Monday, July 26, 2022

Ever since I was a child, I was drawn to the nighttime world, in which the Blake Edwards’ show “Peter Gunn” expressed my need for shadows and cool jazz.    As a teenager, I imagine my life as Gunn, where I had a beautiful mid-century apartment with a gorgeous fuckable girlfriend who seemed to visit him in the middle of the night.  Gunn seems to be only active at night when he frequents a jazz nightclub called “Mothers” in a city that is not defined but appears to be a dock town.  The surroundings strike me as unnatural, even fake-like, making me love the TV series even more.  Throughout my life, I tried to find a jazz club like “Mothers, ” but realized that’s impossible because here, the imagination rules, and I follow the rules of dream logic than the waking man’s reality.

I love the idea of a contained environment, for instance, the Korova Milk Bar, where one goes to get loaded on milk laced with drugs, where one can drink the milk with knives in it.  It will sharpen you up.  I went there to take mescaline, and as I sat on a couch resembling a woman’s ass-cheeks and back, I let my mind wander into a shapeless world and waited for my ego to break down. That will never happen. Nevertheless, I left Korova and went to the Owl Drug store on Beverly and La Cienega to look at the displays of shampoo, hair creams, combs, and all sorts of beauty products.  I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I felt I saw these objects in a new ‘enlightened’ light.  “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.  For man has closed himself up.  Till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.” The essence of moving among the buildings in the night, clearly I was looking for happiness, but one knows that “happiness would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

Around 3:30 in the morning, I arrived at my home, which over time, I tried to design as Peter Gunn’s apartment, but I neither had the money nor the shopping skill to make this work.  Yet, in my attempt to reproduce what I saw on television, it became a new interior.  Not even influenced by, but more of a tribute that only I can see.  I put the song “Sonny” on the turntable, written and performed by Bobby Hebb, but I prefer the Manfred Mann instrumental version.  Hebb wrote it as a reaction to the John F. Kennedy assassination and his brother, who was killed a few days after the Kennedy death.  He was inspired to write something that was ‘light’ and uplifting when his world (and others) went to hell.  I admire the beauty of someone changing their perception of the world because if there is going to be a fundamental change, one needs to start with themselves.   Or, we flow with the crowd, but that I don’t recommend whatsoever.