Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (11 page)

Which created an additional
complication. Like most independent people, minor illness made Kit
bad-tempered, and I soon realized she wanted me the hell out of there so she
could snuffle in peace.

But where would I go? Was Edgarson still in my
apartment? I dialed my number, but only heard my own confident voice on the
machine. I left me no message.

Then I remembered Big John Brant, the movie
director. He was in town, and I was supposed to phone him this morning about
our interview. So I called the Sherry-Netherland, and soon had Brant on the
line, sounding gruff but friendly. I identified myself, and reminded him of the
interview, and he said, “Well, what about right now?”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m
downtown.”

“Then come uptown,” he said, and
chuckled, and broke the connection.

I pocketed half a dozen of Kit’s Valiums, my
own supply being in captured territory. “Get well soon,” I told Kit,
and kissed her irritable cold cheek, and went out into the disgusting world.

*

Q: “In your film,
Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow
, what is the symbolism of the repeated
appearance of the small black dog in the background of so many of the
shots?”

A: “Oh, yeah, that damn dog. Well, I’ll
tell you, that’s a funny story. That was Sassi’s dog,
you know. Wha’d she call that damn
thing? Rudolph, that was it. Anyway, that was her
third—no, second—her second feature with American Artists. She was shacked up
with Kleinberg then, you know, so he’d give her anything she wanted. She wasn’t
even supposed to be in that picture, only Kate said she wouldn’t work for
Kleinberg for any amount of money, and Kleinberg left the script around in the
bathroom or some damn place, and Sassi read it and said, I wanna do that
picture. So we were stuck with her. And she had this shitty little dog,
Rudolph, and that dog wasn’t trained at all Run around, you couldn’t control
it, and finally I just said shit, I said, let the damn little thing stay in
there, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Just so it doesn’t get in the airplane
sequence, that’s all, and you know, it damn near did. Just about the end of the
picture, the shitty little thing got itself run over by an Oregon state trooper. Sassi tried to get the
fellow fired, but Kleinberg didn’t run Oregon, so that was that.”

The interview was not going at all well. I
suppose it was mostly my fault, since I was distracted by the problem of
Edgarson, but Big John Brant wasn’t helping very much. No matter what I asked
him, from the broadest possible questions about thematic undercurrents to the
narrowest points of technique, all I got back were these rambling reminiscences
about nothing in particular. Scatology and gossip seemed to be his only
subjects.

And I’d spent sixty dollars on a cassette
recorder to preserve this tripe. It wasn’t until after I’d left Kit’s place
that I’d realized I was carrying none of my normal interviewing tools, so when
I’d reached midtown I’d bought a pen and a pad and this cheap little recorder,
and all I was recording so far was sex and shit.

Nevertheless, it’s my own conviction that a
bad interview is never really the interviewee’s fault. There are two
participants in an interview, but only one of them is supposed to be
professional. I’ve interviewed actors with an IQ of seven and managed to make
them sound at least competent, if not brilliant. It was the Edgarson business
that was clouding my mind, with the result that I was permitting Brant to
maunder along with virtually no guidance at all.

The setting also encouraged this feckless
informality. Brant had a high-floor suite here at the Sherry-Netherland, with
windows overlooking Central
Park and the
Plaza, where the still-falling snow made the world look like a Currier &
Ives Christmas card that had inadvertently gone through the washing machine. A
tall and slender and mind-crunchingly beautiful girl came into the room from
time to time to add another couple of logs to the fire. Brant and I both sipped
bourbon over ice as we sat before the crackling flames, and the contrast
between this warm beautiful room and the cold snowy aspect of Central Park almost demanded a discursive droning
conversational style, in which nothing could get accomplished.

Brant, too, was a problem. An old man now,
with liver spots on hands and forehead, with great knobby knuckles and wrists,
with that old man’s style of sitting as though he were a sack of rusty machine
parts, his best work was behind him and he no longer kept his brain tuned to
the sharp clarity that had given the world such films as
Meet The Gobs, All
These Forgotten
and
Caper
. He was garrulous and relaxed and perfectly content
to bend a young stranger’s ear for an hour or so while the snow fell outside
and the beautiful girl performed her function of keeping his old body warm.

But something had to be done, if any useful
material at all were to come out of this meeting, so finally, after the memoir
of the dog Rudolph, I decided my only choice, since Edgarson persisted in
distracting me from my job, was bring him into the interview. Maybe he would
help us get moving in a more useful direction.

Q: “I’d like to ask you now a more or
less specific question of technique, based on a film other than one of
yours.”

A: “Somebody else’s picture?”

Q: “Yes. This is a work in progress being
done by a young filmmaker here in New York. I’ve seen the completed portion, and I’d
like to ask you how you would handle the problem this young filmmaker has set
for himself.”

A: “Well, I’m not sure I get the idea
what you want here, but let’s give it a try and see what happens.”

Q: “Fine. Now, the hero of this film is
being blackmailed in the early part of the picture. But then he gets rid of the
evidence against himself, but the blackmailer keeps coming around anyway. He’s
bigger than the hero, he threatens to beat him up and so on, he even moves into
the hero’s apartment, he still wants his blackmail money even though the
evidence is gone. The hero doesn’t want to go to the police, because he’s
afraid they’ll get too interested in him and start looking around and maybe
find some other evidence. So that’s the situation, as far as this young
filmmaker has taken it. The blackmailer is in the hero’s apartment, the hero is
trying to decide what to do next. Now, if this was one of your pictures, how
would you handle it from there?”

A: “Well, that depends on your
story.”

Q: “Well, I think he wants the hero to
win in the end.”

A: “Okay. Fine.”

Q: “The question is,
where would you yourself take it from there?”

A: “Well, what’s the script say?”

Q: “That doesn’t matter. That’s still
open.”

A: “Open? You have to know what happens
next.”

Q: “Well, that’s up to you. What would
you have happen next?”

A: “I’d follow the script.”

Q: “Well, they’re doing this as they go
along.”

A: “They’re crazy. You can’t do anything
without a script.”

Q: “Well…They’re working this from
an
auteur
assumption, that it’s up to the director to
color and shape the material and so on.”

A: “Yeah, that’s fine, but you got to
have the material to start with. You got to have the story. You got to have the
script.”

Q: “Well…I thought the director was
the dominant influence in film.”

A: “Well, shit, sure the director’s the
dominant influence in film. But you still gotta have a script.”

Well, that wasn’t any help. What was I
supposed to do, go ask three or four screenwriters for suggestions? Is the
director the
auteur
or what the hell is he?

I did keep trying along in this vein for a few
more questions, but they didn’t get me anywhere. So far as I could see, Big
John Brant’s career had come down to this; he was the fellow who told the
cameraman to point the camera at the people who were talking. And to think how
high in the pantheon I’d always placed this man.

The script. Only a
hack
cares about the goddam script. What I needed was to talk to a
real
director; Hitchcock, or John Ford, or John Huston, or Howard Hawks.
What
happens next?
That was my question. Sam Fuller would
have an answer to that. Roger Corman, even.

Well, it was all hopeless. The interview with
Brant meandered along, being of no use personally and damn little
professionally, until Miss Fireperson came in a little after twelve with a
pointed reminder: “Don’t forget your luncheon appointment, J. T.” So
I also wouldn’t be getting lunch. I gathered up my paraphernalia, shook hands,
smiled, said some lies, listened to just one more scatological anecdote, and
took my departure.

*

As far as the hotel bar, where I swallowed
another of Kit’s Valiums with bourbon and water, ate a handful of peanuts for
lunch, and gradually came to a decision. I could no longer spend my life
wandering through a snowstorm from one reluctant haven to the next. I had to
reclaim my own home. I had to get Edgarson out, and me in, and I had to do it
now.

I had one more bourbon
to confirm this decision and to warm me for the trek uptown, and then I left
the hotel and turned toward home. Since I lived less than ten blocks from
here—up four and over five, approximately—and since traffic was utterly
snarled by the snow, there was no point trying to find a cab, so I walked. I
was dressed warmly enough, except for my shoes, and I simply kept stumping
through the slush, irritable but determined.

There’s something both lazy and inexorable
about a major snowstorm. No wind, no real storm at all, just billions and
billions of wet white smudges floating down like Chinese armies, and after a while
there doesn’t seem to be any reason why it should ever stop. Maybe that low
gray-black sky contains unlimited quantities of these wet white smudges, maybe
they’ll just keep drifting down like this forever. Maybe human fife developed
on the wrong planet.

Along the way, I bought a chainlock at a
hardware store on 3rd Avenue. I couldn’t help remembering Bart Ailburg, whose door had been armed
with a lock like this but who had been murdered anyway. However, no true
parallel applied. Ailburg had been murdered by a loved one, which in my case
was not the issue.

At the house, I spent ten minutes searching
out Romeo, the super, and finally found him drinking wine in the tenants’
storeroom in the basement. He wasn’t drunk, I was happy to see, but he was surly.
“I doan wuk Sahdy,” he told me, trying to hide the brown paper bag
with its cargo of Hombre or Ripple.

“You don’t work ever,” I informed
him. “But you’ll come upstairs with me now or I’ll call Goldbender and tell
him I found you drunk in the basement and lighting matches.”

Surliness turned to a kind of clogged outrage.
“I ayn drunk!” Then he comprehended the rest
of my sentence and was, for just an instant, completely baffled. Innocence
bewildered him, he didn’t know at first what to do
with it. But he soon enough recovered, crying out, “Motches? I doan got no
motches! I doan
hob
no stinkin motches!”

“And,” I went on, wanting to be
certain he understood the threat I was making, “I’ll tell Goldbender that
I intend to call the police about a super being drunk and fighting matches in
the basement.”

Maddened by this maligning of his virtue,
Romeo waved his arms in the air, slopping wine on himself and on the stored
possessions of the tenants as he cried,
“I doan hob no motches!”

“Goldbender is going to think about his
insurance,” I pointed out, “and—”

“I doan hob no
motches!”

“And,” I insisted, “he is going to fire you. Particularly,” I added,
“when he smells you.”

Romeo became aware of the spillage and began
fretfully to pat himself with his free hand. “You makin me nervis,” he said, and he sounded as though soon he
might cry.

“Come along, Romeo,” I said.
“Put your lunch down over there and come along.”

“This ay muh
lunch.” He frowned from the bag to me, and returned to an earlier worry.
“An I doan hob no motches.”

“Come, Romeo.” I turned away, not
looking back till I reached the stairs, when I saw that Romeo, however much he
might be bewildered and mistreated, was also sensible. He was coming along.

As we plodded up the several flights of stairs
together, me squoshing in my cold wet shoes, Romeo said, “Wha jew wan,
anyway?”

“Just come along,” I told him.

What I wanted from Romeo was his presence. We
would enter, Edgarson would approach me, Edgarson would see the witness, Edgarson would depart. The details would work themselves
out, but at the finish Edgarson would definitely depart.

Except that he wasn’t there. Gingerly I let
myself into the apartment, Romeo snuffling in my wake, and nothing moved in the
semi-darkness of the living room. I switched on lights, I looked quickly in
bedroom and kitchen and bath, and the apartment was empty. Edgarson had vacated
on his own.

Romeo had remained by the door, shoulders
hunched against injustice, and when I emerged from the kitchen he said,
“O.K. Here I am. Wha jew wan?”

“That’s fine, Romeo,” I told him.
“Thank you very much, I won’t be needing you any
more.”

Then, of course, he didn’t want to leave. At
first he’d been bewildered and surly when I’d brought him up here, and now he
was bewildered and surly when I released him. There’s no pleasing some people.

But he did finally go, and I immediately
brought out my hammer and screwdriver from the storage cabinet under the
bathroom sink and proceeded to mount the chainlock. It was in two parts; a
metal plate from which dangled a six-inch chain with a metal ball on the end of
it, and a longer metal plate with a long slot. The plate-with-chain I screwed
into place on the doorframe at about chest height,
then stretched the length of chain out horizontally and marked on the door how
far the ball would reach. Next I fixed the longer plate onto the door in the
right position, slipped the ball into the wide space in the slot, and
experimentally opened the door. When I did so the chain tightened, because the
ball was stuck in the narrower part of the slot, and the door wouldn’t open
more than four inches.