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isaysimplewords) wrote2015-08-28 03:06 pm
isaysimplewords) wrote2015-08-28 03:06 pm
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OOC: Summary and discussion of Cal Chandler's canon, "The Fix"
Cal's canon, The Fix, is a fairly complicated one. It's a satire, so the plot takes a lot of twists and turns and things tend to get laid on pretty thick. This, for me, is all made more interesting by the fact that I do not have access to the entire canon. The Fix was not particularly popular when it debuted in London in 1997; the American debut was better received (as one might expect for a play about American politics), but it didn't exactly set the world on fire, either. It's very rarely staged now. As a result, it's not one of those plays where you can buy a scriptbook or find a DVD. The only part of the play that is easily accessible is the soundtrack, which is missing a couple songs and seems to vary slightly depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on when you buy it.
The play's story is not entirely told in its songs; the summary in the liner notes provides a complete enough picture to pull the story together and make sense of what you're hearing, but it's very sparing of the details. This, with the addition of a few random clips from a bootleg of the London show, gives me a strong enough portrait of Cal's character that I feel very comfortable writing him for Milliways, but it's also left me with having to extrapolate, fudge, or just plain make up a lot of stuff.
So this post is about offering information about Cal's canon for people who want it. The first cut is a copy of the liner note summary, just to give you the basics. The second cut is a hilariously futile effort on my part to make sense of The Fix's slippery timeline, compounded by my accidentally Millicanoning Cal as being probably a few years younger than he actually is at the start of the play. Oops. Don't worry, though, eventually I just gave up and started analyzing things.
Act 1
Forty-eight hours before the presidential election, front runner Reed Chandler dies between the leather-clad thighs of his mistress. the nation grieves. Among them, Reed's ambitious widow Violet, and his Svengali-like brother Grahame, crippled by childhood polio, on crutches and a stutterer just for good measure. The Chandler Compound plays host to a posh and spectacular post-funeral reception, while upstairs Reed's son Calvin sits in his room, playing virtuosic air guitar, smoking a joint, and expressing his philosophy of life (One, Two, Three).
After the guests have gone their way, Violet tries to convince Grahame to shepherd Cal through the ranks of political office. Grahame protests, even going so far as to question the boy's true paternity and stirring the memory of a man from Violet's past, Bobby "Cracker" Barrel. Not easily dissuaded, Violet taunts Grahame with his unnatural attraction to his own nephew, and eventually enlists his aid. The plot is hatched (Embrace Tomorrow).
Cal, a spectacularly unambitious slacker with a poor public profile, is promptly enlisted in the army. Guarding a minefield in a desert one night, and tripping on acid, Cal is visited by Reed who extols the joys of politics to his son (Control).
Once back at home, Cal is married off to a perky debutante and polished to a seemingly high gleam, all the while snorting coke to keep his energy level up (America's Son). Easily elected to the City Council, Cal delivers a scrupulously vapid speech to great acclaim (I See the Future).
Escaping to a seedy strip club afterwards, Cal meets up with the exotic Tina McCoy, the club singer (Lonely is a Two-Way Street). Avoiding the mob types who own the club, Tina quickly latches to Cal.
Cal shows up minutes before a press conference the next morning, unshaven, hung-over, and reeking of a woman who is clearly not his wife. Grahame fumes. Cal snorts. business as usual. But when the word "fuck" inadvertently finds it's way into Cal's pre-approved vocabulary of buzz words, the press is shocked. Left to sink, or swim, Cal somehow turns this embarrassment to his advantage, wounding Grahame's pride in the process (Simple Words). Violet, brandied lips to her son's ear, advises Cal to keep his Uncle Grahame happy at all costs.
As the race for Governor heats up, Cal seeks escape in the arms of Tina, who for her part finds herself falling in love with Cal. She comforts him, eventually introducing him to the seductive joys of heroin (Alleluia).
But when blackmail photos are taken of Cal and Tina "flagrante delicto", it is up to Grahame to take care of the problem. Seeing that his uncle wants to wash his hands of the campaign, Cal brazenly manipulates Grahame, walking an oh-so fine line between familial affection and provocative seduction. Grahame ashamedly comes back to Cal's side.
Grahame renews the family's long-buried relationship with mob boss, Anthony Gliardi, who gladly welcomes the soon-to-be Governor and his family in the fold (Dangerous Games).
Act 2
In a head-spinning celebration of bad taste, Grahame fills us in on some family background (Two Guys at Harvard). But at his yearly physical, reality catches up with him. Weakened by age and stress, he is consigned to a wheelchair (First Came Mercy).
Shortly after his wife gives birth to a well-timed son, Cal is elected Governor. But his continued drug use and corruption are making him harder and harder to control. Even Tina feels helpless as she watches Cal slip away from her (Bend the Spoon/One, Two, Three-Reprise).
Facing the possibility of losing the U.S. senate nomination, Violet takes matters by the balls. With the help of Peter Hale (Chief of Security, and God knows what else), she banishes Cal to his room to dry out (Cleaning House).
Grahame, vindictive and a tad jealous, sets out after Tina. Barred from the apartment in which Cal has placed her, Tina comes running to the Compound for help. Producing some personal and highly persuasive proof, Grahame manages to convince Tina that Cal has given her up to lead a straight life. Tina leaves in tears, believing that Cal wants nothing more to do with her.
Cal, in the meantime, has escaped from his room, and is leading Security on a merry chase as he searches the grounds for a hidden stash. Once he is captured, Grahame confiscates the drugs. Desperate for his fix, and eager to keep Grahame silent, Cal resorts to a proven tactic (Upper Hand).
Violet has been drinking. A lot. And up in her room, she celebrates the joys of the battle (Spin). When Grahame comes to her with his umpteenth threat to resign, she just laughs at him. Incensed, Grahame once again conjures up the memory of Bobby, who bursts through into Violet's reality to tell us all the tale (The Ballad of Bobby "Cracker" Barrel). "Make one mistake, and they never let you forget it!" Violet complains. Eye on the Senate, and Jack Daniels in hand, she refuses to budge.
Cal, alone in his room, reflects on his mistakes (Child's Play). Sober at last, he gives another press conference. In a bizarre turn of events, Cal comes clean to the press abut his family's secrets. Controlled now by no one but himself, he even implicates and exposes Anthony Gliardi. Cal becomes a media darling once again, and as the law closes in on the mob, the mob-in turn-closes in on Cal.
But Tina, having nowhere to go and thinking she has been abandoned by Cal, has returned to the mob where she started. Under orders from Gliardi, she lures Cal away from his family on his birthday. Cal, still in love with Tina, happily agrees to the rendezvous. Tina changes into a cheap Halloween Marilyn Monroe costume for Cal's benefit and goes to meet him (Mistress of Deception).
Cal is overjoyed to see her again, but a happy ending is not on the cards. A pack of hitmen interrupt their reunion. A betrayed Cal and an equally betrayed Tina are gunned down.
Once again, the nation mourns. The United States is once again cheated of a natural born leader. Yet at the funeral, Cal's son makes a devastating appearance. Even Cal, in attendance himself, is impressed. A beautiful three-year-old boy stands, solemn, at his father's grave, an exquisite tear trailing down his tender cheek. And damn, if the future doesn't look half bad (Finale).
Okay. So. The story of The Fix, for my money, starts when Grahame comes down with polio. This leaves him crippled and cheats him of the life he was supposed to have, putting it in his brother Reed's hands instead. (Why, I don't know, you'd think FDR's presidency would have proven to the Chandlers, and especially to Grahame, that the public is willing to elect a President who is not entirely physically sound. Maybe FDR didn't exist in this universe. Anyway.)
So Grahame and Reed end up attending Harvard together, where they meet Violet. There is SO MUCH I want to know about this period in their lives, like whether Grahame went on ahead or his parents made him wait until Reed graduated high school so they could go together, or how long it took for Grahame and Violet to just sit down, admit to each other what was really going on in terms of their respective ambitions for themselves and Reed, and forge their unholy alliance. But none of this is, in the long run, relevant to Cal, so let's move on to Reed marrying Violet and ascending to the Senate under Grahame and Violet's careful management.
And then there is Bobby. "The Ballad of Bobby 'Cracker' Barrel" is crucial in providing both the only solid piece of timeline information, and a bit of background for the Chandlers that I've used in Millicanon.
Bobby is Cal's biological father. Canon is very clear on this. I mean "YEAH OKAY I GET IT" clear on this. The song contains a reference to the make and model of Violet's car, a '59 Capri. Either it or Bobby's truck is where Cal was conceived. There is no doubt in my mind that Violet Chandler owns only the newest and the best, and that that car is fresh off the dealership lot. So, if we assume that the new cars came out the year before, the way they do now (you know, the 2009 models being released in 2008), Cal's birth year can be pinned down as being 1959.
(As an aside, I don't believe Cal learns the truth about his paternity. Grahame is the only one clearly established on the soundtrack as knowing about Bobby, and there's no indication that either he or Violet ever tells Cal. I doubt this will ever come up in Milliways, unless the odds are defied and I somehow end up with canon-mates.)
This will be the last time any of the timeline makes any sense.
I have also used "Ballad" to establish as Millicanon that Reed and Violet used to live in the South, as the circumstances described in the song are so stereotypically Southern that it would be silly to try and avoid it. But I moved them to New York after Bobby's execution (oh, yeah, he's a serial killer. No, really. To adapt a phrase, The Fix means never having to say I'm kidding) and Cal's birth, playing it as Violet getting antsy and fearing a potential scandal if the truth should come to light. I picked New York mainly because it just seemed like the kind of place they would choose, being as it's a large, high-profile state. Plus, none of the characters have Southern accents.
So then there are like twenty intervening years where the Chandlers do whatever it is Chandlers do. Reed sleeps with political groupies and probably fails at his job, Violet probably also sleeps around and keeps an eye on the social climate so she can adapt the family image accordingly, Cal is probably raised by a succession of nannies (at least during the periods when it is politically acceptable for the Chandlers to hire a nanny), and Grahame keeps Reed's career afloat and develops inappropriate feelings for his nephew. I am placing the beginning of that at around Cal's sixteenth or seventeenth birthday, since Grahame's attraction to him never flags and thus presumably has nothing to do with any sort of pedophilic tendencies. (I love my canon, you guys.)
And then the play begins! I've Millicanoned Reed's death as taking place when Cal was nineteen, which is already failure on my part, since there's a clip of Cal's first song, "One, Two, Three" with dialogue in which Cal claims to be studying for the bar, which would put him at least in his mid-twenties. But I have decided I don't care, because the extra five or six years does not actually make anything any easier, and the events of the play feel to me like they unfold over a longer span of time.
There's a whole thing with Cal spending, like, five minutes in the Army. There's a clip of "Control" which ends with the minefield Cal is guarding coming under some sort of aerial attack, and I read a review/recap of the play somewhere that mentioned Cal receiving a Purple Heart. I have incorporated this into Millicanon, because otherwise the brevity of his military career would not look good to the public at all. I can't even begin to guess at the circumstances, because at this time, be Cal nineteen or twenty-five, the US was not at war. In my timeline it's 1979 and Cal missed Vietnam by four years. So I have Cal's memory of that night as being jumbled due to the acid he was tripping on - he's not sure what really happened and what he hallucinated, and of course he's never dared ask. He just figures that his altered state of mind led him to action brave enough to earn his medal (and traumatic enough for an honorable discharge to be granted), and leaves it at that.
Then Cal's political career begins in earnest. At this point, I think, he's in it willingly. He's excited, he's charged up from the vivid hallucination of Reed, and he's also on a lot of coke. But after he wins his first election, he rapidly comes to see that politics is a lot of lies and bullshit, and comes crashing down into reality. Cal, perhaps inspired by the perception of him as a hero after the events in the military, wants to be a good man who tells the truth. This is how he connects with Tina - she, too, values the truth, or at least seems to. He even tries to establish himself as a truthful politician and simple man in "Simple Words," which is where I got this journal's name.
But Cal has never learned how to truly stand up for himself or his beliefs, and while he is in constant conflict with Grahame, he can't fight against Violet's ambitions for him. So when his affair with Tina becomes a danger to his career, he swallows his pride (what little of it he has) and goes to Grahame for help. Grahame is on the verge of quitting Cal's campaign, but Cal needs him to save his career, so he openly manipulates Grahame's desire for him until Grahame agrees to stay. This is a pivotal moment in Cal's descent into addiction and misery for a couple different reasons. First, it sets the stage for the events of "Upper Hand," and probably isn't the only time he acts as though Grahame might have a chance if he just does as Cal asks. (Grahame has to know that it's never going to happen, but he allows it to work anyway, even though resisting his lust for Cal has probably been a point of pride for him, and this is one of many. many reasons why Grahame Chandler breaks my fucking heart and if I thought for a second I could pull it off, I'd have applied to play him in Milliways instead.)
Second, it's what gets the mob involved in Cal's career. Once Grahame has finished making deals with Gliardi, there has been at least one death to cover up Cal's mistakes, and Cal's soul is no longer his own.
Much of Act Two is Grahame's story. On the soundtrack, Cal's story is dropped entirely after "Dangerous Games" and not touched on again until "Bend The Spoon/One, Two, Three (Reprise)." By then, Cal is a mess. He is, thanks to Tina, addicted to heroin, and so despondent over his life and career and his lack of any kind of control that, without any intervention, he probably would have gone on to overdose accidentally on purpose. But Violet learns of his addiction, and as far as I'm concerned, "Cleaning House" contains the creepiest lines in the entire play: "Get the child and let's restrain him/Hold him till the poison's gone."
Who wants to join me in NOT imagining what it must be like to not only go through heroin withdrawal without any medical supervision (which can be FATAL, like, way to do your homework, Violet), but do it tied up?
SHUDDER.
So, yes. In Millicanon, Cal has a fear of restraints and mild claustrophobia as a result of his forced detox. These are some more things I don't really expect to become much of an issue, but that I also couldn't just ignore.
And then there is "Upper Hand." So much happens in this song, in terms of character and completion of arcs and I could write a paper, I swear. This is when Cal, desperate and at rock bottom, finally follows through on the sexual promises he's been making to Grahame for years. This is when Grahame - who, judging by the way he chased Tina off, has fallen in some sort of miserable love with Cal by this point - gets what he's wanted and is destroyed by it. And, given his pleas with Cal for mercy, he knew he would be. But he can't fight Cal off any more than Cal has ever been able to fight him or Violet off, and Cal knows it and takes fierce pleasure in the reversal of power. I don't mean to paint Grahame as the blameless victim here by any means - he's never treated Cal with any sort of kindness and he played a major role in taking control of Cal's life away from him. But, in Milliways, Cal doesn't see that. He only sees himself turning into everything he never wanted to be and laying waste to Grahame for the sheer pleasure of it. There are plenty of issues stemming from this encounter alone - Cal is devastated with guilt that, as established in the last OOM before his death, he never got any closure on, and he's intensely uncomfortable with any kind of sexual contact with men. If Cal could take one thing back, one thing out of all the things he screwed up, it would be this seduction and destruction of Grahame.
Grahame more or less disappears from the story after this, as focus shifts fully back onto Cal. I think it's safe to assume that, overwhelmed with shame, he did finally quit Cal's campaign and even moved out of the Chandler home. In Millicanon, he was unable to hear, much less accept, an apology from Cal and they did not see each other again before Cal died. This left Cal with a lot of guilt and no absolution, or belief that he deserved any.
In fact, Millicanon comes heavily into play at this juncture in general, because on the soundtrack, Cal goes from the rage of "Upper Hand" to the regret of "Child's Play" without a single clue about what got him there, and the liner notes aren't any damn help either. I have my doubts as to how much the play even addressed this. So, when I started playing Cal, I used Milliways to fill the gap - check out the OOMs to see how. Milliways helped push him past the worst of recovery from his addiction, and forced him to see how far he'd fallen. I've put a span of about six months between that first visit and Cal's death, which he used to try to forge a real relationship with his son, to try to repair things with the rest of his family (with limited success; the Chandlers are just too damaged), and to work up the courage to turn on the Gliardis. He knew it was likely to get him killed, but he also knew it was something he could not avoid doing if he could ever hope to become even an echo of the good, truthful man he always wanted to be.
So he did it, and he died (I've placed his death in 1997, since that's when the play debuted, which makes Cal thirty-eight when he died), and that brings us up to Milliways and also the problem of Tina. Here is the problem of Tina: I have absolutely no idea how much Cal knew in the final moments before his death. Did he realize Tina had betrayed him? Did she tell him what Grahame had done? I don't know, and those are such important questions that I don't want to make it up, in case it ever do find the answers. So, in-game Cal doesn't remember his death. The last thing he remembers is thepress conference he held to expose the Gliardis day before his death. [Update: Yeah, I screwed that up.] He's pretty sure that's why he's dead, but he has no idea that Tina is dead. The Millicanon on this is because Milliways is interfering a little; Cal can remember Tina, but can't think too deeply about her in any way that would spark his memory, because he's fragile enough emotionally and mentally. Right now, realizing that Tina is dead and didn't make it to Milliways with him would shatter him. So there are references to her in the thread narratives, but nothing really significant like there is about Violet and Grahame and his son. The drawback of this is that learning that Grahame's machinations led to Tina's death would most certainly mitigate Cal's guilt over what he did to Grahame, but that wouldn't balance things out enough. Should I track down a reliable source, I will do a story where Cal's memory starts to come back, but for now, he just doesn't remember and isn't likely to.
I think that's all for now - I'll edit if more things occur to me or other questions crop up. OH, and if anyone knows where I can find a full copy of The Fix, in any form? PLZ HALP. Thank you.
The play's story is not entirely told in its songs; the summary in the liner notes provides a complete enough picture to pull the story together and make sense of what you're hearing, but it's very sparing of the details. This, with the addition of a few random clips from a bootleg of the London show, gives me a strong enough portrait of Cal's character that I feel very comfortable writing him for Milliways, but it's also left me with having to extrapolate, fudge, or just plain make up a lot of stuff.
So this post is about offering information about Cal's canon for people who want it. The first cut is a copy of the liner note summary, just to give you the basics. The second cut is a hilariously futile effort on my part to make sense of The Fix's slippery timeline, compounded by my accidentally Millicanoning Cal as being probably a few years younger than he actually is at the start of the play. Oops. Don't worry, though, eventually I just gave up and started analyzing things.
Act 1
Forty-eight hours before the presidential election, front runner Reed Chandler dies between the leather-clad thighs of his mistress. the nation grieves. Among them, Reed's ambitious widow Violet, and his Svengali-like brother Grahame, crippled by childhood polio, on crutches and a stutterer just for good measure. The Chandler Compound plays host to a posh and spectacular post-funeral reception, while upstairs Reed's son Calvin sits in his room, playing virtuosic air guitar, smoking a joint, and expressing his philosophy of life (One, Two, Three).
After the guests have gone their way, Violet tries to convince Grahame to shepherd Cal through the ranks of political office. Grahame protests, even going so far as to question the boy's true paternity and stirring the memory of a man from Violet's past, Bobby "Cracker" Barrel. Not easily dissuaded, Violet taunts Grahame with his unnatural attraction to his own nephew, and eventually enlists his aid. The plot is hatched (Embrace Tomorrow).
Cal, a spectacularly unambitious slacker with a poor public profile, is promptly enlisted in the army. Guarding a minefield in a desert one night, and tripping on acid, Cal is visited by Reed who extols the joys of politics to his son (Control).
Once back at home, Cal is married off to a perky debutante and polished to a seemingly high gleam, all the while snorting coke to keep his energy level up (America's Son). Easily elected to the City Council, Cal delivers a scrupulously vapid speech to great acclaim (I See the Future).
Escaping to a seedy strip club afterwards, Cal meets up with the exotic Tina McCoy, the club singer (Lonely is a Two-Way Street). Avoiding the mob types who own the club, Tina quickly latches to Cal.
Cal shows up minutes before a press conference the next morning, unshaven, hung-over, and reeking of a woman who is clearly not his wife. Grahame fumes. Cal snorts. business as usual. But when the word "fuck" inadvertently finds it's way into Cal's pre-approved vocabulary of buzz words, the press is shocked. Left to sink, or swim, Cal somehow turns this embarrassment to his advantage, wounding Grahame's pride in the process (Simple Words). Violet, brandied lips to her son's ear, advises Cal to keep his Uncle Grahame happy at all costs.
As the race for Governor heats up, Cal seeks escape in the arms of Tina, who for her part finds herself falling in love with Cal. She comforts him, eventually introducing him to the seductive joys of heroin (Alleluia).
But when blackmail photos are taken of Cal and Tina "flagrante delicto", it is up to Grahame to take care of the problem. Seeing that his uncle wants to wash his hands of the campaign, Cal brazenly manipulates Grahame, walking an oh-so fine line between familial affection and provocative seduction. Grahame ashamedly comes back to Cal's side.
Grahame renews the family's long-buried relationship with mob boss, Anthony Gliardi, who gladly welcomes the soon-to-be Governor and his family in the fold (Dangerous Games).
Act 2
In a head-spinning celebration of bad taste, Grahame fills us in on some family background (Two Guys at Harvard). But at his yearly physical, reality catches up with him. Weakened by age and stress, he is consigned to a wheelchair (First Came Mercy).
Shortly after his wife gives birth to a well-timed son, Cal is elected Governor. But his continued drug use and corruption are making him harder and harder to control. Even Tina feels helpless as she watches Cal slip away from her (Bend the Spoon/One, Two, Three-Reprise).
Facing the possibility of losing the U.S. senate nomination, Violet takes matters by the balls. With the help of Peter Hale (Chief of Security, and God knows what else), she banishes Cal to his room to dry out (Cleaning House).
Grahame, vindictive and a tad jealous, sets out after Tina. Barred from the apartment in which Cal has placed her, Tina comes running to the Compound for help. Producing some personal and highly persuasive proof, Grahame manages to convince Tina that Cal has given her up to lead a straight life. Tina leaves in tears, believing that Cal wants nothing more to do with her.
Cal, in the meantime, has escaped from his room, and is leading Security on a merry chase as he searches the grounds for a hidden stash. Once he is captured, Grahame confiscates the drugs. Desperate for his fix, and eager to keep Grahame silent, Cal resorts to a proven tactic (Upper Hand).
Violet has been drinking. A lot. And up in her room, she celebrates the joys of the battle (Spin). When Grahame comes to her with his umpteenth threat to resign, she just laughs at him. Incensed, Grahame once again conjures up the memory of Bobby, who bursts through into Violet's reality to tell us all the tale (The Ballad of Bobby "Cracker" Barrel). "Make one mistake, and they never let you forget it!" Violet complains. Eye on the Senate, and Jack Daniels in hand, she refuses to budge.
Cal, alone in his room, reflects on his mistakes (Child's Play). Sober at last, he gives another press conference. In a bizarre turn of events, Cal comes clean to the press abut his family's secrets. Controlled now by no one but himself, he even implicates and exposes Anthony Gliardi. Cal becomes a media darling once again, and as the law closes in on the mob, the mob-in turn-closes in on Cal.
But Tina, having nowhere to go and thinking she has been abandoned by Cal, has returned to the mob where she started. Under orders from Gliardi, she lures Cal away from his family on his birthday. Cal, still in love with Tina, happily agrees to the rendezvous. Tina changes into a cheap Halloween Marilyn Monroe costume for Cal's benefit and goes to meet him (Mistress of Deception).
Cal is overjoyed to see her again, but a happy ending is not on the cards. A pack of hitmen interrupt their reunion. A betrayed Cal and an equally betrayed Tina are gunned down.
Once again, the nation mourns. The United States is once again cheated of a natural born leader. Yet at the funeral, Cal's son makes a devastating appearance. Even Cal, in attendance himself, is impressed. A beautiful three-year-old boy stands, solemn, at his father's grave, an exquisite tear trailing down his tender cheek. And damn, if the future doesn't look half bad (Finale).
Okay. So. The story of The Fix, for my money, starts when Grahame comes down with polio. This leaves him crippled and cheats him of the life he was supposed to have, putting it in his brother Reed's hands instead. (Why, I don't know, you'd think FDR's presidency would have proven to the Chandlers, and especially to Grahame, that the public is willing to elect a President who is not entirely physically sound. Maybe FDR didn't exist in this universe. Anyway.)
So Grahame and Reed end up attending Harvard together, where they meet Violet. There is SO MUCH I want to know about this period in their lives, like whether Grahame went on ahead or his parents made him wait until Reed graduated high school so they could go together, or how long it took for Grahame and Violet to just sit down, admit to each other what was really going on in terms of their respective ambitions for themselves and Reed, and forge their unholy alliance. But none of this is, in the long run, relevant to Cal, so let's move on to Reed marrying Violet and ascending to the Senate under Grahame and Violet's careful management.
And then there is Bobby. "The Ballad of Bobby 'Cracker' Barrel" is crucial in providing both the only solid piece of timeline information, and a bit of background for the Chandlers that I've used in Millicanon.
Bobby is Cal's biological father. Canon is very clear on this. I mean "YEAH OKAY I GET IT" clear on this. The song contains a reference to the make and model of Violet's car, a '59 Capri. Either it or Bobby's truck is where Cal was conceived. There is no doubt in my mind that Violet Chandler owns only the newest and the best, and that that car is fresh off the dealership lot. So, if we assume that the new cars came out the year before, the way they do now (you know, the 2009 models being released in 2008), Cal's birth year can be pinned down as being 1959.
(As an aside, I don't believe Cal learns the truth about his paternity. Grahame is the only one clearly established on the soundtrack as knowing about Bobby, and there's no indication that either he or Violet ever tells Cal. I doubt this will ever come up in Milliways, unless the odds are defied and I somehow end up with canon-mates.)
This will be the last time any of the timeline makes any sense.
I have also used "Ballad" to establish as Millicanon that Reed and Violet used to live in the South, as the circumstances described in the song are so stereotypically Southern that it would be silly to try and avoid it. But I moved them to New York after Bobby's execution (oh, yeah, he's a serial killer. No, really. To adapt a phrase, The Fix means never having to say I'm kidding) and Cal's birth, playing it as Violet getting antsy and fearing a potential scandal if the truth should come to light. I picked New York mainly because it just seemed like the kind of place they would choose, being as it's a large, high-profile state. Plus, none of the characters have Southern accents.
So then there are like twenty intervening years where the Chandlers do whatever it is Chandlers do. Reed sleeps with political groupies and probably fails at his job, Violet probably also sleeps around and keeps an eye on the social climate so she can adapt the family image accordingly, Cal is probably raised by a succession of nannies (at least during the periods when it is politically acceptable for the Chandlers to hire a nanny), and Grahame keeps Reed's career afloat and develops inappropriate feelings for his nephew. I am placing the beginning of that at around Cal's sixteenth or seventeenth birthday, since Grahame's attraction to him never flags and thus presumably has nothing to do with any sort of pedophilic tendencies. (I love my canon, you guys.)
And then the play begins! I've Millicanoned Reed's death as taking place when Cal was nineteen, which is already failure on my part, since there's a clip of Cal's first song, "One, Two, Three" with dialogue in which Cal claims to be studying for the bar, which would put him at least in his mid-twenties. But I have decided I don't care, because the extra five or six years does not actually make anything any easier, and the events of the play feel to me like they unfold over a longer span of time.
There's a whole thing with Cal spending, like, five minutes in the Army. There's a clip of "Control" which ends with the minefield Cal is guarding coming under some sort of aerial attack, and I read a review/recap of the play somewhere that mentioned Cal receiving a Purple Heart. I have incorporated this into Millicanon, because otherwise the brevity of his military career would not look good to the public at all. I can't even begin to guess at the circumstances, because at this time, be Cal nineteen or twenty-five, the US was not at war. In my timeline it's 1979 and Cal missed Vietnam by four years. So I have Cal's memory of that night as being jumbled due to the acid he was tripping on - he's not sure what really happened and what he hallucinated, and of course he's never dared ask. He just figures that his altered state of mind led him to action brave enough to earn his medal (and traumatic enough for an honorable discharge to be granted), and leaves it at that.
Then Cal's political career begins in earnest. At this point, I think, he's in it willingly. He's excited, he's charged up from the vivid hallucination of Reed, and he's also on a lot of coke. But after he wins his first election, he rapidly comes to see that politics is a lot of lies and bullshit, and comes crashing down into reality. Cal, perhaps inspired by the perception of him as a hero after the events in the military, wants to be a good man who tells the truth. This is how he connects with Tina - she, too, values the truth, or at least seems to. He even tries to establish himself as a truthful politician and simple man in "Simple Words," which is where I got this journal's name.
But Cal has never learned how to truly stand up for himself or his beliefs, and while he is in constant conflict with Grahame, he can't fight against Violet's ambitions for him. So when his affair with Tina becomes a danger to his career, he swallows his pride (what little of it he has) and goes to Grahame for help. Grahame is on the verge of quitting Cal's campaign, but Cal needs him to save his career, so he openly manipulates Grahame's desire for him until Grahame agrees to stay. This is a pivotal moment in Cal's descent into addiction and misery for a couple different reasons. First, it sets the stage for the events of "Upper Hand," and probably isn't the only time he acts as though Grahame might have a chance if he just does as Cal asks. (Grahame has to know that it's never going to happen, but he allows it to work anyway, even though resisting his lust for Cal has probably been a point of pride for him, and this is one of many. many reasons why Grahame Chandler breaks my fucking heart and if I thought for a second I could pull it off, I'd have applied to play him in Milliways instead.)
Second, it's what gets the mob involved in Cal's career. Once Grahame has finished making deals with Gliardi, there has been at least one death to cover up Cal's mistakes, and Cal's soul is no longer his own.
Much of Act Two is Grahame's story. On the soundtrack, Cal's story is dropped entirely after "Dangerous Games" and not touched on again until "Bend The Spoon/One, Two, Three (Reprise)." By then, Cal is a mess. He is, thanks to Tina, addicted to heroin, and so despondent over his life and career and his lack of any kind of control that, without any intervention, he probably would have gone on to overdose accidentally on purpose. But Violet learns of his addiction, and as far as I'm concerned, "Cleaning House" contains the creepiest lines in the entire play: "Get the child and let's restrain him/Hold him till the poison's gone."
Who wants to join me in NOT imagining what it must be like to not only go through heroin withdrawal without any medical supervision (which can be FATAL, like, way to do your homework, Violet), but do it tied up?
SHUDDER.
So, yes. In Millicanon, Cal has a fear of restraints and mild claustrophobia as a result of his forced detox. These are some more things I don't really expect to become much of an issue, but that I also couldn't just ignore.
And then there is "Upper Hand." So much happens in this song, in terms of character and completion of arcs and I could write a paper, I swear. This is when Cal, desperate and at rock bottom, finally follows through on the sexual promises he's been making to Grahame for years. This is when Grahame - who, judging by the way he chased Tina off, has fallen in some sort of miserable love with Cal by this point - gets what he's wanted and is destroyed by it. And, given his pleas with Cal for mercy, he knew he would be. But he can't fight Cal off any more than Cal has ever been able to fight him or Violet off, and Cal knows it and takes fierce pleasure in the reversal of power. I don't mean to paint Grahame as the blameless victim here by any means - he's never treated Cal with any sort of kindness and he played a major role in taking control of Cal's life away from him. But, in Milliways, Cal doesn't see that. He only sees himself turning into everything he never wanted to be and laying waste to Grahame for the sheer pleasure of it. There are plenty of issues stemming from this encounter alone - Cal is devastated with guilt that, as established in the last OOM before his death, he never got any closure on, and he's intensely uncomfortable with any kind of sexual contact with men. If Cal could take one thing back, one thing out of all the things he screwed up, it would be this seduction and destruction of Grahame.
Grahame more or less disappears from the story after this, as focus shifts fully back onto Cal. I think it's safe to assume that, overwhelmed with shame, he did finally quit Cal's campaign and even moved out of the Chandler home. In Millicanon, he was unable to hear, much less accept, an apology from Cal and they did not see each other again before Cal died. This left Cal with a lot of guilt and no absolution, or belief that he deserved any.
In fact, Millicanon comes heavily into play at this juncture in general, because on the soundtrack, Cal goes from the rage of "Upper Hand" to the regret of "Child's Play" without a single clue about what got him there, and the liner notes aren't any damn help either. I have my doubts as to how much the play even addressed this. So, when I started playing Cal, I used Milliways to fill the gap - check out the OOMs to see how. Milliways helped push him past the worst of recovery from his addiction, and forced him to see how far he'd fallen. I've put a span of about six months between that first visit and Cal's death, which he used to try to forge a real relationship with his son, to try to repair things with the rest of his family (with limited success; the Chandlers are just too damaged), and to work up the courage to turn on the Gliardis. He knew it was likely to get him killed, but he also knew it was something he could not avoid doing if he could ever hope to become even an echo of the good, truthful man he always wanted to be.
So he did it, and he died (I've placed his death in 1997, since that's when the play debuted, which makes Cal thirty-eight when he died), and that brings us up to Milliways and also the problem of Tina. Here is the problem of Tina: I have absolutely no idea how much Cal knew in the final moments before his death. Did he realize Tina had betrayed him? Did she tell him what Grahame had done? I don't know, and those are such important questions that I don't want to make it up, in case it ever do find the answers. So, in-game Cal doesn't remember his death. The last thing he remembers is the
I think that's all for now - I'll edit if more things occur to me or other questions crop up. OH, and if anyone knows where I can find a full copy of The Fix, in any form? PLZ HALP. Thank you.