B008J4PNHE EBOK (2 page)

“Irony is so easy, though, Samuel. It’s so simple to pull out the rug and make everything bleak and awful. Isn’t it more interesting to try and dig down into the hard dirt and scrape out that precious nugget of possibility? Of redemption? Of humor? Of hope? Cynicism is the predictable route. Now: something hopeful! That would shock an audience, knock them back in their seats.” Booth stood in the middle of the kitchen as he delivered his homily. He was dressed in a gigantic pair of sky-blue pajamas. A big man in his youth and an enormous man in these later years, he had the legs of a monument and the torso of a snowman. Sam was tall, but his father towered over him. “Certainly, there are many amusing moments, but it leaves an acutely bitter taste. You should at least give your characters a chance at happiness, don’t you think?”

Sam thought his father was completely wrong, about everything. He thought, I don’t like you very much. He thought, It’s too early in the morning.

A part of Sam wanted to yell, to just yell unintelligibly, until his father shut up and went away. He had to concentrate hard on maintaining a tranquil front. With exaggerated care, he set his brimming coffee mug on the counter. “Hold on, Booth. Just—hold it.”

For as long as he could remember, Booth had been Booth. Sam was aware that people found it off-putting that he called his father by his first name—that it came off as severe or pissy or both, which, admittedly, it pretty much was—but to call him Dad would have felt like giving in.

“You know—” Sam searched for a way to concisely summarize the man’s gall. To commit adultery was one thing. To break promises to your children was another. To do the things that Booth had done in movies—to rant and to brood and to stalk around like a tin-pot dictator on thousands of movie screens—was another. But to be guilty of all these trespasses, and then to carry yourself as though you were a serious person—The Most Serious Person—was something else altogether.

It wasn’t as though he had expected Booth to like the script, let alone understand it.
Who We Are
was about the hard reality of how quickly the
days sped up, how suddenly you weren’t a kid anymore. Booth’s movies had nothing to do with reality. They had to do with killer rats and the car-wash mafioso and the outbreak of werewolf attacks in ancient Greece. It annoyed Sam that he was annoyed by his father’s opinion, which was a meaningless opinion, and which he could have predicted.

There was so much he could have said, and wanted to say, and there was Booth in his gigantic pajamas with that look of concern, as if he were not only entitled to offer his critique but actually cared. The words and the arguments became jammed up somewhere in Sam’s chest. “Who asked you, anyway? And why the fuck are you going through my laptop bag?”

Booth made an innocent face. “I was going to write you a nice note and put it in there.”

“What was it going to say?” asked Sam immediately, eager to catch him.

“That I was proud of you! You’re a college man now.”

“Booth. Who looks in a bag to put in a note before they’ve even written the note?”

“I needed paper to write my note.”

They stared at each other. The clifflike brow that hooded his father’s eyes gave him a haunted aspect. It also made him invincible in staring contests.

Sam broke away and snatched his coffee mug from the counter. A splash of hot liquid fell across his hand and fingers. He hated feeling like this, like he was a son and Booth was a father and they were arguing about whether curfew was eleven or twelve. It was embarrassing. “You know what? I want to go and drink my coffee now.”

“Samuel, I am not trying to offend you!” The exclamation was drafted in Booth’s Voice, the resonant declamatory tone that he adopted to lend credence to things that were ridiculous, such as killer rats and the carwash mafia and the werewolves of ancient Greece. “I am trying to help!”

His father blinked, very slowly, and in spite of all his experience, Sam found himself swayed to consider whether this once the man might mean what he was saying. The hot coffee dripped over his hand and plinked onto the floor. Around them, the machine guts of Tom’s house ticked and hummed.

“Samuel.” Sam’s father cleared his throat, shook his head, and lifted the hem of his pajama shirt to absently swish a finger around in the
gray-haired nest of his belly button. “I am your father, and I only want the best for you”—Booth glanced down at the small meteor of hair and lint that he had mined from his navel, momentarily considered it, then carefully placed the artifact on the kitchen counter—“and that means that, above all else, I must be honest.”

Honesty had, in the twenty-two years of their relationship thus far, not proved the slightest burden to Booth. He had taken every “chance at happiness” that he ever wanted—fucked anyone he wanted, said whatever he wanted, left whenever he wanted.

“What?” asked Booth, reading the look on his son’s face. “What is it?”

What was it? It was everything about him.

“That,” said Sam, and flung out a hand to indicate Booth’s gut.

“All right, all right.” His father dropped his shirt and put up his palms. “All better?”

 ■ ■ ■ 

His father claimed that the edge in their relationship dated from their earliest meeting, in a hospital room in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1979. A nurse had handed him a bundle containing his son and, Sam’s father would recall, “You peered up at me with your little scalded face, and you did not cry, did not make a single peep. You were enrobed in a kind of rough brown cloth, such as an extra would wear in a biblical production—you resembled a leper, a tiny leper. And you made no fuss at all, just squinted at me with those fierce blue eyes. You looked aggrieved, terribly aggrieved.”

At this point in the telling, he would inevitably pause, taking the theatrical hesitation that could be so persuasive on the stage or the screen and so irritating in person. Booth’s delivery seemed to suck up the entire atmosphere, stealing away even the air that was already in your lungs. Sam had been gagging for years.

“It was,” his father would at last declare, frowning greatly, “most disquieting.”

The story was undoubtedly an exaggeration if not an outright fabrication. Booth had been in the business of cheap entertainment for so long that he had gone native. In his telling, everything was a sensation, a shock, a crisis, a betrayal, amazing bad luck, or an unforeseeable confluence. When Sam was younger, his father had let him down. Now that Sam was older, his earlier self’s stupidity mortified him: how could he
have expected anything else from a man who relished any opportunity to tell strangers that his infant son looked like a leper? Booth’s fallaciousness was right there all the time, as inherent as the nose on his face.

 ■ ■ ■ 

In 1969 Booth Dolan had produced, directed, written, and starred in
New Roman Empire,
a no-budget horror movie about hippie teenagers brainwashed by a cornpone Pied Piper. It was a naked allegory wherein Booth’s character, Dr. Archibald “Horsefeathers” Law, appeared as the wicked hand of Nixonian politics, sending dazed hippies to their deaths à la Vietnam. It had been a modest success on the drive-in circuit and to this day maintained a certain cachet, primarily among B-movie superdorks. (It was telling, Sam felt, that along with their enthusiasm for Booth Dolan, this breed of cinephile could be relied upon to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the monsters that had fought Godzilla, Ed Wood, and women-in-prison films.)

Booth had parlayed the minor triumph of
New Roman Empire
and his performance as the charlatan Dr. Law into a career spent mugging and shouting in the lowest category of B-movies. His particular, gassy flair had spiced clunkers from virtually every genre with bathos: horror, western, blaxploitation, sexploitation, sci-fi, fantasy, animation, and any combination thereof. A daylong retrospective could begin with the Nixon-era paranoia of
New Roman Empire
(1971); continue on to
Black Soul Riders
(1972), in which Booth played a racist judge named George Washington Cream and adopted a chicken-fried Southern accent to say things like “Wuhl yer an awl-ful buh-lack wan, ain’cha?”; followed by
Rat Fiend!
(1975), infamous for its utilization of miniature sets in order to make normal rats look gigantic, and featuring Booth’s performance as a grizzled “sewer captain” with a “sword plunger”; going next to
Hard Mommies
(1976), wherein Booth’s car-wash mafia messes with the wrong group of PTA moms in belly-baring tank tops; and, as the main feature,
Devil of the Acropolis
(1977), arguably the crowning example of Sam’s father’s artistic offenses, for his portrayal of Plato as an expert in werewolf behavior (as well as a howling example of Hollywood’s regard for historical accuracy: Plato is killed by the werewolf in the second act); then put a bow on the day with the first episode in the
Hellhole
trilogy (1983), the title of which said everything a person needed to know, except maybe that Booth’s character, Professor Graham Hawking Gould, was a “satanologist.”

Even such a condensed list of Booth Dolan’s inanities threatened his son with the promise of a crushing migraine. The idea of an expanded two-day retrospective, meanwhile—including such milestones as his father’s voice-over turn as Dog, an all-knowing talking cloud, in what had to be the nadir of druggy cinema,
Buffalo Roam,
about a Nam vet leading a white buffalo to the Pacific Ocean; as well as Booth’s role as a lovable ass-squeezing brothel owner and leader of cowboy prostitutes in
Alamo II: Return to the Alamo—Daughters of Texas
—held lethal implications. Sam would rather have killed himself or someone else—Booth, hopefully—than suffer through such a sentence.

While the old man’s star, such as it ever was, had faded in the late eighties before pretty much winking out completely in the nineties (along with the majority of the B-movie production houses), the earlier films in particular continued to play on cable. To this day, on the highest movie channels, the ones that are all gore and tits and robots, a black-haired Booth can still be found battling evil with a plunger.

 ■ ■ ■ 

The acorn of Tom Ritts’s mansion was a four-room Sears kit house that dated from the fifties. Since the contractor had purchased it in the eighties, he had expanded it, horizontally and vertically, by a room or two every year, and now it had more rooms than anyone cared to count. Tom’s ability to build, indeed, had outpaced his wherewithal to furnish. Only a potted plant or a single folding chair occupied the newest six or seven rooms. Bats and squirrels had a knack for getting trapped in the less trafficked wings of the mansion, where they expired of thirst or starvation, to be discovered as webby, desiccated corpses months later. From the exterior, the building looked like something that a very intelligent and precise twelve-year-old might have built from LEGOS. It was a grandiose hobby for such a humble-seeming man. (“None of the choices on pay-per-view sound very interesting, and the next thing I know, I’ve got my measuring tape out and some drafting paper, and I’m planning a new bathroom or something,” he once said apologetically to Sam. “It passes the time. Maybe someday I’ll have a family and we can play hide-and-seek.”)

The house had gone as far backward as it could. Perched above a steep embankment and upheld by cement pillars, a redwood deck extended to the edge of the property, where the forest cropped up and the land
became the town of Hasbrouck’s. On a clear morning like this one, the view was glorious; the rustling canopy of orange, red, and yellow swept away for miles, to the umber-colored shapes of the mountains.

Sam leaned against the balustrade and inhaled the crisp air and, as he released the breath, attempted to exhale his irritation along with it. A grand, towering sugar maple stood before the deck. On a branch just a few feet from the deck’s railing, a bluebird perched in a resplendent tuffet of leaves and twittered. Sam had a dismal recollection of the anthology horror film
A Thousand Deaths
: Booth had played a barbarian chieftain and bitten the head off an obviously rubber pigeon, which had produced a geyser of fake blood from its neck and drenched his face in syrup.

“But I am being honest! You must admit that the whole story is heavy. There is, throughout, a sort of funereal drumbeat.” Booth refused to give up. Showered and dressed, he had tracked his son to the deck and sidled right up beside him, almost shoulder to shoulder at the balustrade. On his way through the house, Sam had laid what had seemed a sure trap to divert his father’s attention, setting the television in Tom’s study to the Turner Classic Movies Channel, but Booth must have walked by during a commercial break.

“Okay, okay. What if, like, a gigantic hole opens up in the middle of the campus and it swallows all the characters?” Sam asked. “Could there be some fun in that? And suppose if there were mimes, too, a visiting mime troupe, and we put them in the gigantic hole and let them mime for their lives. How about that?”

“This poor young man who becomes a drug addict, for instance, and a little later, abracadabra, he turns into a little puddle of clothes. It is so harsh. And I do understand that college isn’t all fucking and giggles, but it’s certainly more fucking and giggles than you make it seem. I also think that young people are more self-aware than you give them credit for being. In fact, most young people I know, especially the young females, are—”

“Do you listen to anything I say, Booth? Because I have this impression that, to you, my voice is on the same frequency as a dog whistle.”

“No, no. Samuel, I listen to everything you say.”

“Because I was just being sarcastic. About the clowns. Did you catch that?”

Booth raised an eyebrow at him. Errant gray hairs stuck out from the
eyebrow like frayed wires. Several of the wires had dandruff. “I thought they were mimes.”

“Yeah.” Sam dumped the last of his coffee over the side of the deck. The bluebird alighted.

Sam was aware that he was not an especially relaxed person. He was reactive. Optimism was not among his favored emotions. But Booth brought out the worst in him. Sam just wanted him to butt out. It was 2002, and Sam was twenty-two. He thought he had earned the right to finally have a bit of his own space. “Can you move away an inch or two, Booth? There’s a whole deck over that way. We don’t have to share this one spot.”