THE WONKAVATOR
That when it came to the two things I loved more
than anything else in life (namely books and beer, oh, and women) I could more
than hold my own.
The only rule to adding to the WONKAVATOR was that every beer cap had to be culled from the crown of a different brew and that no beer caps could be displayed more than once.
At its height there was close to 2000 different beer caps, each one chugged by a certain impecunious author with an overstuffed manuscript and an intractable liver, doting the interior of my kitchen cabinets like unblinking eyelids or failed political campaign buttons.
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| original wonkavator.... |
Don't fuck with me when it comes to Willy Wonka.
When I left my apartment and moved back to West Peoria in early 2009 the Wonkavator was officially retired although I kept the beer caps in a vacant coffee can and once (when I was drunk and going through a serious Carl Jung phase) made a mandala out of them.
I hadn’t sifted through the collection of caps in
three years. While scanning caps for this entry I was emotionally awash on a shoreline
of sentimentality. There was the cap culled from the six pack of Spatens
The Killians my friend Scarlet planted outside my door on St. Patrick's day and told me it was from a Leprachaun.
The Shiner Bock I stole from my friend Matt Brown's fridge in Dallas when I was 19 and smuggled on the flight back home.
There was the aquiline cap from the bottle of Imperial beer my brother Nick gave me when he returned
from Costa Rica. The Alfred Hitchcockesque silhouette saluting the top of the Thomas Hardy Ale which I thought I would enjoy more.
There was capped emblems from the (perfect )shipyard and the stalled
evolutionary shark cosigning dogfishead, two of the best known IPA’s ever to
have grazed the lips of mankind.
There was the numerical cap derived from the Fullers 1845 bitter which I drank in the spring of 2007 which just destroys me. The feral feline coating the top of LION stout (from Sri Lanka) which was indelible. The Utenos cap which looks like it comes replete with a zipper. The New Belgium Fat Tire which I submit is completely overrated nutty and disgusting, like using a fecal sample in lieu of mouthwash (and also a testament to keen marketing).
Each cap seemed to be endowed with its own narrative. Each cap seemed to ferry its own story. Like the buttons on Willy Wonka's elevator, each beer cap reeled me slantways to a lost epoch of the past.
There was the numerical cap derived from the Fullers 1845 bitter which I drank in the spring of 2007 which just destroys me. The feral feline coating the top of LION stout (from Sri Lanka) which was indelible. The Utenos cap which looks like it comes replete with a zipper. The New Belgium Fat Tire which I submit is completely overrated nutty and disgusting, like using a fecal sample in lieu of mouthwash (and also a testament to keen marketing).
Each cap seemed to be endowed with its own narrative. Each cap seemed to ferry its own story. Like the buttons on Willy Wonka's elevator, each beer cap reeled me slantways to a lost epoch of the past.
There was the cap from the Pilsner Urquell I slipped
in my side jacket from my friend’s Jasna art reception and drank the whole
night as we walked around Bloomington-Normal lost in the crinkle of autumnal
leaves. The Amstel Light I drank a shit ton
of cause my cousin Larry was peripatetically crashing with me because that was
the only import that the gas station sold. There was the Ruddles which got
frozen in our cooler the time myself and my best bro Hale partied in Chicago—Hale,
unable to sleep, jacking the A/C so high in the hotel room that the ice INSIDE
the cooler froze and we had to chisel the libations free and place them in the
bathtub to thaw before consuming.
I have no recollection of drinking an Indian beer
called Mahbaria or a Tazmania beer or any kind, which meant that I must have enjoyed them very much indeed.
There were sentimental caps. The vintage BLATZ cap that my cool girlfriend Tara made into a necklace for my birthday. The bottle of LaBatt Blue I was drinking in Traverse City Michigan when I got drunk and called my girlfriend from a payphone and told her I loved her.
The nostalgia. Slamming Leinenkugels on my backporch
while listening to the SMITHS’ on summer nights. The Moose Drool I drank to
divert the bartender’s attention so I could steal a Guinness chalice at Ulrich’s
the night after Sully died.
The Grolsch with the bottle rocket cap I was slamming when the White Sox won it all in 2005.
The New Holland beer cap culled from the Mad Hatter
IPA I was drinking when I kissed the proverbial one-that-got-away-elbow-nugde-to-the-rib-cage-eh-there-son
girl of my dreams (there was candles lit) in my apartment. We were listening to
Jospeh Campbell lectures on metaphysical realizations realizing that you and
the other are one…it was autumn and wind was splashing through the lip of the window
as if the seasons were getting off....What could be more sexier…more timeless…and
I’m just talking about the beer.
The memories.
The memories.
...of course, sometimes liquor is quicker.
***
In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory the protagonist Charlie
is emblematic of the hero’s journey.
From the outset of the narrative Charlie finds himself
fatherless (movie version) pining for the elusive gold that is the rudiments of
his telos. He also finds himself (as all hero's do at the outset of their journey) enduring ashes and living in spiritual squalor. Even the name itself Charlie Bucket implies arduous work and
hard times. In the beginning of Iron John poet Robert Bly, “The story says that
once one goes down one has to work with buckets. No giant is going to come
along and do the work for you: That magic stuff is not going to help. A weekend at Easlen won’t do it. Acid and
cocaine (note and probably beer) won’t do it. The man has to do it bucket by
bucket. This resembles the hard
discipline of art. It’s the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and
Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work requires much more work than most men realize.”
This is our hero Charlie Bucket. Going inside himself on a
quest in search of fairy tale gold, beginning with the color of his name.
Bob Dylan knew about Buckets.
It is interesting to note that it is only after Charlie
psychologically divorces himself from the possibility of ever finding gold that he
locates the last golden ticket (an alchemical sugary mixture of dreams and destiny) at the moment, in the poetic patois of Thoreau, "unexpected in common hours." This is reminiscent of the
Gnostic Gospels in which when asked when the end of the world will appear
Christ comments, “The Kingdom will not come by expectation. The Kingdom of the Father
is spread across the land and men do not see it.” This is a psychological
realization of opening one’s self up to the radiance of being that is all
around us. It also implies “letting go and letting God.”
Being driven by spiritual desire by being divorced from earthly
wants.
It is also of note
that the elders’ in Charlie’s life are bed-ridden and psychologically
inert. It is only when Charlie goes
looking for gold (the creativity that is already latent inside of each of us) that
he not only gives his life meaning but also
animates and influences the life of others’-- Grandpa Joe is able to walk
again.
When we find what it golden latent inside of each of us others
are healed and are able to realize their full potential and are able to fly.When Charlie is selected to enter the Chocolate factory it
is intriguing that Willy Wonka makes tourists sign an illegible pact. Hey many of us, when
we convene on a journey, whether it is becoming an artist or a cementing nuptial
contract, have no clue what the hell it is we are signing. We are blind to the
fine print.
"You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else's path.
You are not on your own path.
If you follow someone else's way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.”
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else's path.
You are not on your own path.
If you follow someone else's way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.”
En route to the chocolate room (the earthly paradise of
exacted human potential) the bevy of characters find themselves surfeited in an
elevator that appears not to move when it is moving the whole time. A narrow
plume then appears disconcerting the construct of periphery, “He’s getting
smaller. No he’s not, we’re getting bigger.”
If this were to happen today everyone would be texting “OMG” and
calling Wily Wonka a creep, perhaps even suing-him from trauma-inflicting
psychological discomfort in a Kim Kardashian sort of way.
Change requires discomfort. Being born again into a life of creativity requires, as Nietzsche
said, “ A break from sociological norms.” And when the path is narrowest and
there is no exit is sight suddenly we find ourselves, if just for a moment,
entering a chasm of bliss, or, in the case, the chocolate room, the earthly
paradise.
“Woman can change the embryo into a boy, but only the
initiation of another man can change a boy into the man he is destined to
become.” At the end of the movie Charlie finds himself dealing with a mercurial fisted Willy Wonka (note the duality/the halves/the evident yang in his office). Charlie is not fully formed. His last trial is (unselfishly) giving the gift of eternity back to its creator at which point the creator gives Charlie every thing he could ever want. The gift-return of the ever-lasting gob stopper is the final sloughing of ones ego, "DEATH TO THE INFANTILE EGO, BIRTH TO THE MATURE."
Charlie has passed the test, he has given back the gift that freely was given to him and, in doing so, he ascends (a la no beer wonkavator) into echelons of greatness he could never before fathom, a place where the pure dalliance and imaginative dance of his every dream will come true.
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