Coda (the lost chapters of "Dear Miss Landau")

Fitting, somehow, that it finished and began in the church where I was named Anthony.

Differently Wired fills out the tale of our last ten years, which began with a vampire flatmate (Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) whose story had to be told (Drusilla’s Roses), went on to an email correspondence with a Hollywood star (Juliet Landau) and led to a once-in-a-lifetime trek across America to that violent city on the edge of forever, Los Angeles. Then there was the publication of Dear Miss Landau (DML) and creation of DML’s stage musical, the scripting of three sequels to the original Drusilla’s Roses, resurrection and successful publication of my Great Scottish Novel, The Legend of John Macnab (second sequel to John Buchan’s original work), publication of eighty-odd blogs and articles for the Huffington Post UK et al., seven meetings with Miss Landau at comic-cons...

And other treks. In 2012, 2013 and 2016. Providing traces of answers to the questions some asked after I met Juliet that sunny Sunday on Sunset Boulevard in March 2010:

What happened next?

Or, as Hugh McIlvanney wrote after Muhammed Ali’s last inglorious fight:

“As was said after that Roman heavyweight was done in, when comes such another?”

(McIlvanney on Boxing, Stanley Paul, 1982)

Meeting Miss Landau that day on Sunset did indeed feel like the Alpha and Omega of it all. For geeks and Trekkers (of whom I am one), it really did feel like I’d stolen the Enterprise much as Kirk did in Star Trek III, virtually run out the guns like a captain at sea and crossed a continent for my Helen of Troy like a knight of old.

A parade of clichés, you may say. But you weren’t there that day, when I first saw the lines of the ship sent to take me across the Atlantic for the first time...

Once, I was asked what it was all about, and I floundered for a moment ‘til the answer came clear and simple:

“There were reasons and motives and rationales, more than I can say; but once I was on the road and crossing, all that meant anything was she and I, and getting there.”

If the crossings were like a personal crusade, the comic-cons were like an arena of friendly gladiatorial combat into which, despite my autism, I gladly strode (try to have a quiet personal chat up in front of two hundred people and see how you feel) and somehow, while it became public, it also stayed private. The impossible made possible.

And there was real redemption. In my case I’d failed badly in the past, decided my personal redemption could only be achieved by publication on merit and with this epic experience I’d actually achieved it!

As if I’d fallen from the path I was meant to follow, and Drusilla had, quite roughly, jerked me back onto it.

I don’t think I was the only one destined for such redemption.

But the damnable thing is, Man has free will.

Or in this case, woman.

I was named Anthony, after St. Anthony of Padua, in a church in Shifnal, Shropshire. He is the saint of lost people, lost things and even lost spiritual goods.

And never was there a soul more lost than Drusilla.

I think Dear Miss Landau was our destiny, but it’s been my experience that destiny ain’t democratic and it don’t do debate...

So there are the words written for Juliet that day on Sunset Boulevard (DML, p. 175), which she has never heard me speak, a good stage musical for that great stage actress, languishing, and the Dru quartet (as I call it) still unpublished. A second shot at stardom, fading away...

That’s what you’ll find in Wired. Echoes of what should have happened and now may never be. Like the last blog written on that long road:

Welcome, Welcome to LA...

If, seven years ago, someone had told me that today I’d be in a coffee house in Needles, last leg on the road to LA, I’d have been a little sceptical.

My guide along the way is home on Avalon. If Drusilla found her chosen one, she’s satisfied, for what she wanted I have done.

Four tales of Dru:

‘Drusilla's Roses’

‘Drusilla's Redemption’

‘Drusilla Revenant’

‘Spike & Dru : the Graveyard of Empires’.

All written like Dear Miss Landau, the latter two concluding Joss Whedon’s story arc and well able to turn the Buffyverse on its head.

Joss has copies, delivered by me one February. Like a stick of literary dynamite, they’re probably sitting somewhere in a stack, the words on the page waiting for the light they lack.

Now they’ll know, those who read, who I was and where I went. A book is forever, a fact undreamed by many; made true only for the very few.

There may be a stage musical, too. I wonder who’d play me. James Marsters might well do.

Truth and reality can be cliché, and when a man is young tomorrow is another day. I will take the last train for the coast: Needles to Union Station in LA.

My cup is full. The last trek done, or nearly so.

I should feel like a teenage broncin’ buck. Full of luck, full of bull.

But I don’t think so.

Seven years, what did we do?

Oh my dear Miss Landau, whatever happened to you?

Did you go the way of Peggy Sue?

I remember how it was that day.

On Sunset Boulevard, it’s not so far away.

Your hair, raven black in the light.

I remember the hours and miles and years it took to see that sight.

I worry for you every day.

I do not know if, even now, you’ve found your way.

But for here, for now, there’s nothing left for me to say.

Except these words:

Welcome, welcome to LA...

 (Written in Juicy’s Famous River Café, Needles, on 5th December 2013 and revised 11th May 2016; acknowledgement to the works of Don McLean)

They say time and life is circular, though they also say you can’t go home again; but I faced her one last time, just this year at a comic-con near Shifnal.

It was a Sunday, and I stopped by the church where I was christened before I set out on the road. I talked with the minister, and he spoke some words for Juliet before I took the field that final time.

So I faced her, and I told her Dear Miss Landau was her destiny.

And then I went away.

When comes another, who can say?

 

James Christie                                                                                                                

26th August 2018