Boys of Life (17 page)

Lots ot his movie ideas came from driving around the country in that van of his—which at a certain time in his life was one ot his

rite things to do, though now he was too busy ever to leave New York with the one notable exception ot that trip that took him through Owen, Kentucky—I always figured, no wonder he didn't travel much after that. Just too risl

I always tried to imagine the Carlos back then, but I didn't meet with too much success. I only had the stones he told.

"There's this house in Nebraska," he told us, "near the Platte River—ordinary old farmhouse, but there's a secret. You go down into the cellar, only it's not a cellar, it's a cave—the house is built over a cave. You go down these steps that are carved into the side of the rock, maybe two hundred feet down you go, and then the steps disappear into water. Just at the water line, though, there's a cave room— rhev call it the blue room, because when you turn off the lantern or flashlight vet light you've taken down there with you, the room gives off this faint blue glow.

"The water level's always steadv, though it must've been lower when the house was built, because it you look down in the water you can see the St< muing down out of sight. And once, in the nine*

D PAULRUSSELL

teen thirties, according to the old woman who lues in the house, the

water Started to rise. For no reason. It flooded the blue room and came all the way up the stairs—it just kept coming, rising about five feet a day, till they thought it was going to come ri^Hr up to the cellar door. But it stopped just below it. and staved there tor a couple ot days, ,\n<\ then receded again. No explanation.

"I want to make a movie about that old woman living alone m that house with that cellar that goes down who knows how deep.

"Then there's a man I met once, in Wyoming—it must Ye been nineteen sixty-seven. He claimed he had a petrified woman in his pos-

>n. I didn't believe it, but he took me there: 1 saw it, 1 touched it. It was a Stone woman all light. He found it in the nineteen twenties up in the mountains. An Indian woman, hundreds ot yean old, calcified into solid stone. He wanted to sell it to me tor five hundred dollars but

who has five hundred dollars? I wonder—is he still alive? I can't even

remember where he lives—it was this little tin shack up a steep dirt road. I remember, he had the petrified woman laid out on a long low table. There's a movie there—he's m love with the woman: living out there alone has put the zap on him. 1 le tends to her, he starts to believe

all sorts ot crazy things

I think he ntUSt've had a million movies .ill going .it once inside

him, and he was always incredibly frustrated because actually to make just .»single one took so much time and energy thai " meant a hundred other movies were newr going to happen. So it you look at it one way,

most ot his best films never got made. I he\ were all up there spinning

nd m his brain, and maybe In ee them but the rest ot us

lid We only heard him tell us what they looked like to him.

Actually shooting the movie wis always the t.isn-si pan ot the

trios he shot movies the way some hungry person'll gulp

meal. It was getting the money togethei t>>i the mo* le and then

• down th.it drove him crazy, because by the

time he- was editing he already had the whole thing In his head an

letely Impatient to go on to the next m less it he

•i.id the i im* i twenty (out rv

the ni' 'no would be there and the ! just ha| lu-

□ PAUL RUSSELL

down in my face and water running all over me and looking over at those guys drinking beers and watching us. I thought, looking down at my dick sliding in and out of Carlos's mouth, This is totally crazy, this is the craziest thing I've done yet. But then when I came, I remembered I was so into the feeling of it that I let out this Tarzan yell you could hear half a mile away. When those guys heard that, they started veiling, "Bravo," and applauding like we were some kind of show, which I guess we were, and yelling "Encore, encore." Then one oi them yelled to Carlos, "Fuck him, fuck him!" and the other one did too, like a chant with their hands clapping, and before I knew it Carlos had me bent over and was fucking me like they told him to.

That was the summer of 1980, and though I didn't know it then, I guess it was a pretty wild summer for everybody; and nobody knew it at the time, but it was one of the last wild summers there was.

If you ask me, Did it bother me to get fucked with those two guys watching me and jerking off on that other fire escape.' the answer's no. In tact, I could get pretty excited thinking about somebody wanting to jerk off while they were watching me. It made me feel like 1 did under those power lines that very first time, when I felt hooked into a million volts oi power. And that was exactly what Carlos said when we finished and he was drying me off with a towel. "Powerful, powerful," he kept saying, like he'd felt the exact same thing.

I wondered why th.it could be—why fucking in full view oi a couple oi strangers, instead oi making me feel clammy and squirmy, made

me teel powerful instead.

I ^uess we must've had sex out tlure, with thos t - two guys watch' ing, about fifteen times that summer, and though they'd call out tot us : to their apartment so we could all gel stoned and

h. WC never did.

In the- afternoons, lots oi tunes, we'd go up to Central Park and

play ii this ^re.it big open meadow with these tall buildings

rising up where c:.irlos s.ud only people uh<> wen- Incredibly rich lived.

n uuk h i Ise really. hut th.u summei

I LN>r to really like it. I u<>t to really like running around and sweating

• out <>t breath. It didn't feel so ure.u when you were ^>"> hut ■ «tul and •■■■tt oi bright Inside, and th.u

it turned OUt he pl.ned uhen

ill his life, and ht it

ould |ust

B O Y S O F L I F E D

been with Puerto Ricans before. Carlos was friendly with them; it seemed like he knew a lot of them and they were always slapping him

on the hack or catching his arm to talk to him in between plays or while we were resting.

I used to imagine those rich people standing on their balconies and looking down at us playing soccer in that meadow in Central Park, and wishing they were down there with us instead of up there on their balconies, and I'd look up there and try to imagine how they were living their lives and stuff up there but I couldn't really. It was like they were living in some totally different city than we were. Which was tine—we probably both liked it better that way.

"So I didn't know you were such a soccer freak," I told Carlos one night after we'd been going up to the park for a few days. We were sitting up on the roof of the apartment watching the sunset.

He sort of laughed. "There's lots you don't know about me."

Which was definitely true—sometimes it made me dizzy to think about all the things I didn't know about him.

"So maybe it's time to change that," I said.

He just looked at me.

"It was a suggestion," I said.

"No, you're right," he told me. "I may be a criminal, but I got nothing to hide." Sometimes he went into this fake country drawl, which maybe was to imitate the way I talked or maybe not.

"Come on, you're not a criminal."

"You never know," he said.

"You wish," I told him.

"Yeah, I wish."

"So come on, give me the dope," I insisted.

"The dope?" He smiled, the way you smile when you think about things you haven't thought about in a long time. "Maybe I'm not so different from you," he said. "Did you ever think about that. 7 "

I hadn't, because with a name like Carlos Reichart I figured there

no telling what his story was. I mean, where he came from and • up and everything-

"Would you believe Ann Arbor, Michigan?" he said when I asked where.

I'd never heard of Ann Arbor, Michigan, but I told him, "Til believe anvthing. You know that. Go ahead, make up something inter-esting. You know I'm jusr some teenage kid who ^ets bored."

□ PAUL RUSSELL

"As far as I can tell," Carlos told me seriously, "you've got this very great capacity not to be bore J."

It was one of those things he'd say even once in a while, like he wanted to throw me ofT-guard. And it always felt like that tir>t swig of whisky, the way it lights you up from the inside out.

"But I really was born in Ann Arbor," he went on. "My father worked at the university. You could say he was a part-time janitor and a full-time alcoholic. It was terrible—back in the thirties he was a labor organizer, a real socialist with causes and ideals, but then after the war he just lost it. He got completely disillusioned with Russia and communism, and at the same time he was disgusted with things In this country, how everything seemed to be shutting down around him." We had this bottle oi scotch we were drinking from, and I handed it to him to take a swig. I guess he was in some kind of mood that night, because after he took a swig he started to talk some more.

"My father drank himself to death." Carlos said. "1 remember coming home from school m the afternoons and he'd be sitting on the

front porch with a halt-gallon bottle of the cheapest gin you could buy. He'd get up in the morning and drink till he passed out, which wai usually around three m the afternoon. On really bad days he'd be sitting

there with a shotgun across his lap and the bottle at his feet, because

on those days he'd get up in the morning and announce vtt) calmly

\ mother and mv brother and me at the breakfast table. I'm going to kill myself today. Then m\ brother. Adrian, and I'd go oft ro school,

and Wt wouldn't know whether when we came home he'd have shot himself or our mother Of both

worried, and I retneml lay, 1 mi.

in the fourth or fifth grade, there wai this thunderstorm in the

lo weather, and 1 suddenly ervous, because I had

nuredihk vivid feeling m\ father I m\ mothet

himself and home attet the StOfTO and

•hem tb. keep still 1 kept lumping up From m\ desk

tO flu- u indoWl ami wan h

the wind wai drhIn n down flu- street In

pt it-Urn ind l would, but

I'd lump

Irinlf 1 Ic had what ft

BOYS O P LIFE D

M\ mother found him dead in that chair on the front porch. It's ^dd— • n he didn't have his shotgun with him that day. I gUCSS that morning he was feeling hopeful.

"It wan verv difficult for mv mother, because she'd been afraid of

him hut she also loved him—though she'd spent ten yean Wishing he'd

go on and die if that's what he wanted, because he made life so impossible for her. She cleaned houses to support us—the houses of her friends who felt sorrv for her and gave her money. These were the friends she had hack when she first got married and mv father was soher and held a regular joh and they were just like everybody else on the block.

"They hroke my father," Carlos said. "They." He laughed.

mething hroke him. The world we live in, I guess. What d^ the Irish say? The world'll hreak yout heart. My mother was Irish. Is Irish, I should say. Hey, did I ever tell you how I got mv name.' Carlos."

"No, you never did." I said

Carlos was getting drunk. There was also this amazing sunset going on, thouuh by now it was pretty much over—hut earlier there were these big in shooting out from hehind the clouds, only it wasn't

so much ra\s of sun as these sort of hlue-gray shadow rays, <\nd if you were in the rmht mood that sunset was just plain scary it was so out of control.

"Not exactly what you'd expect some socialist Jew to name his kid, nyht? Carlos." He said it the way I uuess the Spanish say it, rolling it around in his mouth and then spitting it out like he was uar^linu. "But it was the Spanish Civil War," he went on, "and my father was following it in the papers, magazines, any way he could—I think it he

't married he'd have heen in the Ahraham Lincoln Brigade in .in instant. But he couldn't he, though he had some friends from Detroit and New York who were, and rhev all got killed."

He stopped and it seemed like he was thinking of something.

About everybody getting killed, maybe.

u were telling me who you got named tor," I reminded him. "Oh, right," he said. "Carlos Hue | communist organizer

in B mv father had met him once when he was in America

me internationa] lahor meeting, and when Franco's men

killed him in '36, it made a great impression on my father. So when I carru couple weeks later he named me Carlos. I'm proud of mv

name. All mv movies are made for Carlos Huesca, it you want to know the truth. That's not completely true of course, hut it's partly true. 5 I'm carrying around certain obligations on this pis

□ PAUL RUSSELL

The sunset was pretty much completely gone now— it was in tatters like it ripped itself apart, it couldn't stand heing so gorgeous. It we'd packed our scotch back downstairs and gone to bed right then, I'd have woken up next morning amazed at how much I'd gotten out of Carlos. But it turned out he wasn't through, he was only revving up. He chugged some scotch and wiped his mouth and sort of leaned back so his head was resting in my lap—I was sitting crosslegged on a beach towel we kept on the roof since it was tarry and sort of gross up there.

"I never told you about Adrian either, did I?" He had his eyes closed, and I looked down at his face, which from all the whisky looked peaceful.

"That was your brother," I said. I'd stopped drinking a while ago— a sip every now and then, but it was basically Carlos who was doing all the drinking.

"Did I tell you about Adrian?" He opened his eyes and looked at me.