The Orgy Moment: Cascading Pay-Offs

The Sustained Ecstasy

Amy Hempel Once Wrote

That true love feels like the Moment When All the Ronettes Come Back In At the End of Be My Baby. That’s at 2:10. It’s the moment right after the drop-out, when all the elements quickly come back. Here it’s at the moment 2:50. Here, it’s at 3:15. All of the basic elements have been carefully established — the beat, the lyrics, the choruses — and they only need to be combined in a final climax.

Another way to look at it: The baseball game is underway, and the suddenly a player hits a ball into far left field. Players are stealing bases. Outfielders are running. The managers and coaches are shouting and tearing their hair. The fans are going wild. So many elements that have slowly, slowly plugged along — in moment-by-moment (play-by-play) “recording angel” scenes — all of these are established in your reader’s mind. And finally you can use all of them — at the same time. Do it right, and it feels like ecstasy. It’s Not a montage, because a montage is a quick-cut sequence that elapses time. Or, a montage allows the reader/viewer to reevaluate reality by revisiting past plot points. This will help you deal with montages.

But what we’ll consider here are sequences that pay-off a long series of set-ups. When so much corn finally “pops” the reader is overwhelmed with the joy of relief. So much resolution!

The polite rules of writing break down. A slight confusion is permitted.

Pay attention to the following:

• Enjoy the repetition of vowel and consonant sounds.

• Note how the author builds tension with sentence fragments before giving us the respite of a full sentence. Tension and pressure build.

• Note how objects or references repeat and morph, but they build importance as we know them better each time they reappear.

• Check out how names — proper nouns — are used like abstract bits of absurd poetry or nonsense. Names don’t age well, but Cheesey Crescent Twist-Ups stick in our head. Here, names don’t pretend to be actual people. They’re landmarks at best. The particular spell cast by each makes it a landmark to catch your attention.

• Note the moments of complete surrealism (“like a giant egg slicer”). The tempo is so fast that we haven’t time to reject a bad simile. We’re barely holding on to this rocket of language.

• Most of all, feel the VERBS. The run-on action of frugging and bobbing and jiggling and bouncing.

• Note the rejection of pronouns. Few if any ‘it’ or ‘him’ or ‘her’ words; instead, the noun is repeated. A wonderful trick often used by Cormac McCarthy. The repeated noun becomes like the repeated note in a song, or the beat of music. Please look at how ALL of the repetition works.

• Above all, note how the camera is almost always pointed Out There at something other than the author. The DFW sequence isn’t a great example, but by the end of this essay he is fully distracted by the final action, and he no longer centers himself as the narrator.

• Note how thrilling these sequences feel. Like in music, we are carried along.

Now the examples¹:

From The Girl of the Year by Tom Wolfe

Finally the Stones come in, in blue jeans, sweat shirts, the usual, and people get up and Mick Jagger comes in with his mouth open and his eyes down, faintly weary with success, and everybody goes downstairs to the studio, where people are now piling in, hundreds of them. Goldie and the Gingerbreads are on a stand at one end of the studio, all electric, electric guitars, electric bass, drums, loudspeakers, and a couple of spotlights exploding off the gold lame. Baby baby baby where did our love go. The music suddenly fills up the room like a giant egg slicer. Sally Kirkland, Jr., a young actress, is out on the studio floor in a leopard print dress with her vast mane flying, doing the frug with Jerry Schatzberg. And then the other Girl of the Year, Caterine Milinaire, is out there in a black dress, and then Baby Jane is out there with her incredible mane and her Luis Estevez jump suit, frugging, and then everybody is out there. Suddenly it is very odd. Suddenly everybody is out there in the gloaming, bobbing up and down with the music plugged into Baby baby baby. The whole floor of the studio begins to bounce up and down like a trampoline, the whole floor, some people are afraid and edge off to the side, but most keep bobbing in the gloaming, and — pow! — glasses begin to hit the floor, but every one keeps bouncing up and down, crushing the glass underfoot, while the brown whiskey slicks around. So many head bobbing, so many bodies jiggling, so many giblets jiggling, so much anointed flesh shaking and jiggling this way and that, so many faces one wanted so desperately to see, and here they are, red the color of dried peppers in the gloaming, bouncing up and down with just a few fights, wrenching in the gloaming, until 5 A.M. — gleeeang — Goldie pulls all the electric cords out and the studio is suddenly just a dim ocher studio with broken glass all over the floor, crushed underfoot, and the sweet high smell of brown whiskey rises from the floor.

Note the great comic book onomatopoeia. Pow! And how “gloaming” seems to peter out into “gleeang” as the electric power is cut and the sound winds down.

Doing so, Wolfe’s not just declaring “it was chaos.” He’s pushing the language to breakdown and shwoiing chaos. Typos can be your friend.

From Baking Off by Nora Ephron

Chaos. Shrieking. Frenzy. Furious activity. Cracking eggs. Chopping onions. Melting butter. Mixing, beating, blending. The band perking along with such carefully selected tunes as “If Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake.” Contestants running to the refrigerators for more supplies. Floor assistants rushing dirty dishes off to unseen dishwashers. All two hundred members of the working press, plus television’s Bob Barker, interviewing any finalist they could get to drop a spoon. At 9:34 a.m., Mrs. Lorraine Walmann submitted her Cheesey Crescent Twist-Ups to the judges and became the first finalist to finish. At 10 a.m. all the stoves were on, the television lights were blasting, the temperature in the ballroom was up to the mid-nineties, and Mrs. Marjorie Johnson, in the course of giving an interview about her house to the Minneapolis Star, had forgotten whether she had put one cup of sugar or two into her Crispy Apple Bake. “You know, we’re building this new house,” she was saying. “When I go back, I have to buy living-room furniture.” By 11 a.m., Mae Wilkinson had burned her skillet corn bread and was at work on a second. Laura Apis had lost her potholder. Barbara Bellhorn was distraught because she was not used to California apples. Alex Allard was turning out yet another Honey Drizzle Cake. Dough and flour were all over the floor. Mary Finnegan was fussing because the crumbs on her Lemon Cream Bars were too coarse. Marjorie Johnson was in the midst of yet another interview on her house. “Well, let me tell you,” she was saying, “the shelves in the kitchen are built low…” One by one, the contestants, who were each given seven hours and four tries to produce two perfect samples of their recipes, began to finish up and deliver one tray to the photographer. There were samples everywhere, try this, try that, but after six tries, climaxed by Mrs. Frisbie’s creation, I stopped sampling. The overkill was unbearable: none of the recipes seemed to contain one cup of sugar when two would do, or a delicate cheese when Kraft American would do, or an actual minced onion when instant minced onions would do. It was snack time. It was convenience-food time. It was less-work-for Mother time. All I could think about was a steak.

Note that such sequences tend to occur near the end of a piece. They exhaust the reader and the narrator and signal a quick wind-down.

From Getting Away from Being Pretty Much Away from It All by David Foster Wallace

There’s a neon-bordered booth for something called a RAINBOW-VAC, a vacuum cleaner whose angle is that it uses water in its canister instead of a bag, and the canister is clear Lucite, so you get a graphic look at just how much dirt it’s getting out of the carpet sample. People in polyester slacks and/or orthopedic shoes are clustered three-deep around the booth, greatly moved, but all I can think of is that the thing looks like the world’s biggest heavy-use bong, right down to the water’s color. There’s a predictably strong odor surrounding the Southwestern Leatherworx booth. Likewise, at Distressed Leather Luggage (missing hyphen? Misplaced mod?). I’m not even halfway down one side of the Expo’s main floor, list-wise. The mezzanine has still more booths. There’s a booth that offers clock-faces superimposed on varnished photorealistic paintings of Christ, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe. There’s a Computerized Posture Evaluation booth. A lot of the headsetted vendors are about my age or younger. Something ever so slightly over-groomed about them suggests a Bible-college background. It’s just cool enough in here for a sweat-soaked shirt to feel clammy. One vendor recites a pitch for Suzanne Somer’s THIGHMASTER while a lady in a leotard lies on her side on the fiberboard counter and demonstrates the product. I’m in the Expo Bldg. almost two hours, and everytime I look up the poor lady’s still at it with the THIGHMASTER. Most of the Expo vendors won’t answer questions and give me beady looks when I stand there making notes in the Barney tablet. But the THIGHMASTER lady — friendly, garrulous, violently cross-eyed, in (understandably) phenomenal physical condition — informs me she gets an hour off for lunch at 1400 but is back on her side all the way to closing at 2300. I remark that her thighs must be pretty well Mastered by now, and her leg sounds like a bannister when she raps her knuckles against it, and we have a good laugh together until her vendor finally makes her ask me to scram.

Note how the all-CAPS word THIGHMASTER becomes a landmark.

From Demolition by Chuck Palahniuk

Right off the bat, Mark Schoesler, in the Turtle, loses a rear tire. Mean Gang-Green and J&M Fabrication butt headers. The BC Machine, Silver Bullet and Beaver Patrol throw dirt in the air, chasing one another in a circle. The engines roar, and you breathe in the exhaust. Mean Gang-Green’s rear tire gets popped. J&M Fabrication’s rear tire gets popped, and the driver, Justin Miller, looks to be in trouble, stuck in one place and ducking down, disappearing into the engine compartment of his combine. The Silver Bullet is stopped dead and declared out by a judge, the driver Mike Longmeier drops his red flag. Beaver Patrol has a rear wheel completely torn off, then its rear axle, but it keeps going, dragging itself through the dirt with just its front wheels. Then Red Lightnin’ crushes Beaver Patrol’s rear end. The engine housing pops open on Mean Gang-Green, and the smoke pours out. Red Lighnin’s engine catches fire. J&M Fabrication comes back to life, Miller reappearing in the driver’s seat. Beaver Patrol drags along in the dirt. J&M rips the rear end off the Turtle. The beer keg falls off Mean Gang-Green. The rear axle rips off the Turtle. And Miller is stopped dead again. The judges wave the Turtle out, and Schoesler drops his red flag. J&M Fabircation is out, Beaver Patrol is out, and Mean Gang-Green is the winner.

In my case, the demolition derby was comprised of four such heats. Each sequence becomes longer as we see the victors proceed to the next round, and the final sequence is too long for even me to re-key. For this reporter — not to mention the animals that were penned next to the noise and smoke — that was a very long day.

To wrap up the topic, I’ll treat you to my favorite example.

From The White Album by Joan Didion

Music people never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat. Spending time with music people was confusing, and required a more fluid and ultimately a more passive approach than I ever acquired. In the first place time was never of the essence: we would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven-thirty, or we could order in later. We would go down to U.S.C. to see the Living Theater if the limo came at the very moment when no one had just made a drink or a cigarette or an arrangement to meet Ultra Violet at the Montecito. In any case David Hockney was coming by. In any case Ultra Violet was not at the Montecito. In any case we would go down to U.S.C. and see the Living Theater tonight or we would see the Living Theater another night, in New York, or Prague. First we wanted sushi for twenty, steamed clams, vegetable vindaloo and many rum drinks with gardenias for our hair. First we wanted a table for twelve, fourteen at the most, although there might be six more, or eight more, or eleven more: there would never be one or two more, because music people did not travel in groups of “one” or “two.” John and Michelle Phillips, on their way to the hospital for the birth of their daughter Chynna, had the limo detour into Hollywood in order to pick up a friend, Ann Marshall. This incident, which I often embroider in my mind to include an imaginary second detour, to the Luau for gardenias, exactly describes the music business to me.

First, wow. Just wow. Second, I’ve spent time enough with music people to admit that the chief benefit of knowing music people is the getting of free drugs. Writers are far too stingy to share their drugs.

Third, look at how the sequence reads like Dusk in Fierce Pajamas by E.B. White. Details spiral and plunge into absurdity like in My Life with R.H. Macy by Shirley Jackson.

Now you’ve been introduced to The Glorious Cascading Pay-Off Sequence. Another tool you can — but won’t fully — forget. It will come in handy. Trust me.

1. Also note that I had to key in each of the above samples. Forgive me for any typos.