Life Goes to the Movies (12 page)

Dwaine snores, twitches, coughs. The surf makes a hushed sound like the murmurings of a movie audience. A smell of ozone hangs in the sea breeze. I
feel us both in Vietnam, the beach our foxhole, flashes of distant heat lightning mortar fire,the enemy everywhere and nowhere, lurking in
ambush, silent, cunning, deadly.

The Shore Patrol helicopter churns its way toward us down the shore. I brace for the bright tungsten beam, the sandstorm, the loudspeaker imperative,
Dwaine’s scream. Helicopters and blood: they’re the stuff of Dwaine’s dreams.

The helicopter flies right past us. It doesn’t stop.

18

Back at the Paradise a thundershower erupts. Ominous clouds darken hotel facades. Raindrops pock dunes, bounce off cabana chair cushions. After the
storm has blown out to sea a double rainbow forms, arching over the horizon. “Did you know that Van Gogh dreamed in color?” Dwaine says as
we watch it from the cabana. “It’s true,” he says. “To Vincent colors were a form of prayer. Red and green for rage, blue for
solitude, yellow for madness and despair. The man painted himself into a state of grace.”

We’ve made up our minds: tomorrow morning we’re flying back home. There’s nothing left for us down here in Florida, nothing but
cocktails, melanomas, and death.

“Please,” says Nando. “No leave me here wid dat stronzo.”

“Come with us,” says Dwaine.

“Yeah. You can be our still photographer.”

But Nando can’tleave. Duncan holds his ticket hostage.

“Please,” he pleads with us. “I no want to die in Florida. Who will bring me flower if I die?”

Dwaine tells him not to worry.

He has a plan.

19

Swipe-cut to all of us making our way up a floodlit pier to the Wet Dream, a seventy-eight foot twin-diesel-powered floating dildo, her
fiberglass hull twinkling with waterborne moonlight. Reggae music braids dreadlocks into the marijuana-scented dusk.

Halfway up the dock a security guard checks Archie’s credentials. Shoulder to shoulder (Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and those other two guys inGunfight at the O.K. Corral) we march toward the gangplank.

Medium shot: the party in full swing. Men in breezy linen blazers worn over pressed and laundered T-shirts, women in skimpy cocktail dresses with
shoelace straps. Close-ups of cigarette ashes being flicked into canapé and oyster shells. Quick-cuts of Archie working the tennis set on the
foredeck, Nando frolicking with a pair of Cosmo-cover redheads on the poop deck, April, June and I bending over the starboard bow to watch a pod of
dolphins leap by. Dwaine nowhere to be seen. All the while Bull Duncan casts us withering glances from amidships, Nando’s ticket held hostage in
his tuxedo pocket.

At midnight, precisely on cue, Nando wades into Duncan, demanding his airline ticket, which Duncan naturally refuses to surrender, whereupon Nando
launches into a feverish tenor recitativo in Milanese dialect, of which Duncan understands not a jot. Which is where I come in.

“He says,” I translate, “give me my airline ticket, or else.”

“Or else what?” says Duncan.

“This!” Dwaine swoops down from the quarterdeck, grabs Duncan around the waist. Archie takes one leg, I take the other, and together
we heave the son of a bitch overboard. But not before rescuing Nando’s ticket from his pocket.

Cross-fade to Don Knotts, Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster hightailing it down the long floodlit pier. Don Knotts brings up the rear, Nikon
held high over his head, yelling: “I got peecture! I got peecture!”

The Pure
Truth
(Road Movie)

GREETINGS FROM
THE HOTEL MONTECIDO
Hotel of the Stars

T
he postcard shows a deco white hotel perched on a Hollywood hillside, photographed in sepia. A ’36 Duesenberg Boattail Speedster with Gary
Cooper—or someone who looks an awful lot like Coop—at the wheel, breezes up to the hotel’s portholed doors, which are flanked by
braided doormen. On the flip side the water-blurred message says:
Four days of cursing, merciless rain have drowned this Irish filmmaker’s dreams. Offer of support accepted if still standing. Will provide
means.

Signed: Archibald Flynn.

Under the signature are two phone numbers, Flynn’s hotel room in Hollywood, and that of a man in New Jersey with a drive-a-way car.

Our pockets stuffed with laundry quarters, Dwaine and I run through banks of dirty snow to the corner pay phone, where Archibald’s flu-congested
Irish brogue comes to us all the way from Hollywood. He says if he sells his movie (Dwaine tells me with the phone buried in his pea coat) he’ll
make us part of his new production team.

“And if he doesn’t sell it?” I say. “How will we get home?”

Archibald’s tinny telephone voice answers: “Tell your fine fickle friend to stiffen his backbone, come out with his dreams, and take his
chances.”

2

The next day at the No Name Café, the diner on 57
^th
Street where I serve bland meals to a parade of geriatrics who slide, shuffle,
wheel and otherwise convey themselves in from the retirement hotel next door, I can’t seem to concentrate, my mind is so taken up with thoughts
of Hollywood. Warner Brothers, MGM, Paramount, Columbia, Twentieth Century Fox … The famous names spin around in my head like
a toy Lionel train around a Christmas tree. I screw up everyone’s dinner orders, serve Father Lester Gringold his tea with milk instead of lemon,
neglect to keep Miss Tyson’s coffee cup refilled. The coffee shop’s mirror-tiled walls compound and disseminate my copious errors. When I
forget to rinse the stainless steel frappé container after serving Beverly the Weight Watcher her strawberry malted, the night manager, a
hare-lipped Ozone Park lug with a passion for GTO transmission swaps, snarls, “You got your brains in your underwear DePoli, orwhat?” But it’s no use. I can’t get my act together. When I spew Redi-Whip all over Beverly’s dietetic lime Jell-O,
that’s it, I’m history.

I find Dwaine soaking in our tub, doing his Moby Dick impersonation, surfacing, spouting, submerging.

“So?” I say when he surfaces. “Do we phone the guy in New Jersey, or what?”

“We’ll be Archibald’s slaves,” Dwaine warns. “His palace eunuchs, sampling his food and powdering his concubines.”

He points a dripping finger at the Pertinent Movie Quote Wall:

Supply List for Tinseltown Express
•Sunglasses
•Cigarettes
•Umbrellas
•Machete
•Grapefruit
(pink Florida seedless)
•Dreams
•Chances

3

We roll across Pennsylvania, the drive-a-way convertible Bonneville’s odometer having barely broken a hundred, its trunk filled with Indian River
Isle of Merritt ruby red jumbo grapefruit, two hundred dollars in drive-a-way funds tucked into the glove compartment. Though it’s mid-February
we ride with the top down, warmed by our twin surplus pea coats and mutual enthusiasm, as shiny with optimism as the Bonneville’s four hubcaps.
The number in New Jersey looked like Wallace Beery and called where he lived Seakawkus, as if to emphasize that it was by the sea, by the sea,
by the beautiful sea, when in fact it was by the Holland Tunnel. We have three days to deliver the car to his daughter, a UCLA social sciences
undergraduate living in Marina del Rey.

We’re both wearing sunglasses. Dwaine wears mirrored aviators; I wear a pair of cheap Wayfarer knock-offs. Halfway across the state line into
Ohio my right lens falls out.

Zooming toward Akron I peel Dwaine a grapefruit. He has boned up on the health-giving properties of grapefruit, how they increase circulation, tighten
the skin, reduce fever, quench thirst, kill germs, promote salivary and other gastric functions, relieve constipation, reduce fatigue, prevent
infectious diseases (like dysentery, typhus and enteritis) and also cure influenza, malaria, and scurvy.

I’ve never been west of the Water Gap. The whole western half of the United States of America is mythic to me, a land of buffaloes roaming and
Conestoga wagons drawn into tight circles, a place to get ambushed and scalped. I long for spacious skies, amber waves of grain, fruited plains, and
buttes, whatever they are.

We see America at eighty miles an hour, our vision hindered by the uncouth rear-ends of tractor trailer trucks (How’s My Driving? Dial
1-800-EAT-SHIT), flying past land formations older than the dinosaurs. I picture our car as it might appear from space, a silver flea traversing the
nation. May this highway never end; may it unwind forever. Meanwhile Dwaine drives with an elbow out the window and one hand on the steering wheel,
looking totally unimpressed by the passing scenery, like he drives across the country for milk every morning.

4

While riding we swap movie quotes, with Dwaine’s knowledge of contemporary films (“I’ll give you a dollar if you eat this
collie”—Martin Sheen, Badlands) trumping mine, while I’m more than a match for him when it comes to the classics (“You
can’t write good with handcuffs!”—Nick Adams to Andy Griffith in No Time for Sergeants).

“Man,” he says (after I stump him with “They’re makin’ me run”—Gary Cooper, High Noon), “how can
you stand to sit through all those boring old black-and-white movies?”

“Since when don’t you love black-and-white movies?”

“Boring,” says Dwaine.

“High Noon, boring? It’s one of the greatest movies ever!”

“It’s like watching grass grow without the benefit of color.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Okay, so I’m nuts.”

“Black-and-white has it over color ten ways from Sunday. Why do you think Kazan shot On the Waterfront in black-and-white? AndStreetcar—and Viva Zapata!—and A Face in the Crowd?”

“Because he was too cheap to use color.”

“Because it’s more realistic! Because it’s grittier! Same with Frankenheimer.The Train, Seven Days in May, Bird Man of Alcatraz.”

“Bonnie & Clyde, The Godfather, Badlands—those are gritty movies.”

“Black and white is the color of drama. Not only is it more psychologically realistic, it’s more morally realistic! White for good,
black for evil. And every shade of gray. Black and white are the soul’s true colors!”

“Horseshit,” Dwaine says.

“Know what your problem is?”

“No, babe, what is my problem?”

“Your problem is you have no appreciation of the classics.”

“Wrong. My problem is that you don’t know what a classic is. Badlandsis a classic, Zabriskie Point is a classic.Blow Up’s a classic. High Noon isn’t a classic, it’s a relic. It’s the difference between a ’62 Corvette
and a … a … a … ”

“A Stanley Steamer.”

“A Stanley Steamer. Exactly. Thank you.”

“But it’s not!”

“A Stanley Steamer: chugga chugga chugga chugga … ”

In spite of my biases and thanks to a keen memory I manage to guess where most of the lines Dwaine tosses my way come from, which infuriates him, until
halfway through Ohio, when he stumps me with, “Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more
satisfying.”

“Gene Hackman,”I guess. “The Conversation.”

Dwaine makes a buzzer sound.

“Brando? Night of the Following Day?”

More error noises.

“I’ll give you a clue: it’s a classic and it’s in black-and-white.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You don’t know?”

“No, I have no idea. What’s it from?”

“You don’t fucking know?”

“Tell me, dickweed!”

“The Seventh Seal.”

“Never saw it.”

“Seventh Seal? Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death? You never saw it?And you call yourself a moviegoer? Hah!”

It takes Dwaine fifty miles to get over the fact that I’ve never seen The Seventh Seal. The whole way he doesn’t say a word to me,
he just stares through the bug-spattered windshield, shaking his head, smiling, sniffing and sighing ironically. He does this all the way to the
Indiana border, where his fury at the state trooper who pulls him over for doing eighty replaces his disgust for me.

5

I’ve brought another item along for the ride, one of Dwaine’s black books. For the last few weeks I’ve been secretly reading them,
boning up on my best friend’s background. One night while he went out for one of his Mystery Walks I looked in his room and saw one of the books
lying there, spread open on his serape covered bed like a lover waiting for sex. I went in, picked it up and started reading. It was a bad thing to do,
I know, but like Peter Lorre in M I couldn’t help myself. Besides, the way he left the notebook lying there like that made me think hewanted it read, that he was giving me tacit permission to do so.

At first I told myself I’d read just one sentence, that’s all. Then I read a whole paragraph, then another, then a page. Soon I was gulping
down pages, bent over Dwaine’s notebook like a graduate student with a candle burning and a mug of tea. The notebooks held a jumble of
storyboards, notes and scenes for screenplays-in-progress, newspaper clippings, pen sketches and journal entries, most of the latter scrawled in
jagged, hard-to-read handwriting, much of it barely intelligible, to wit:

March (on) 2
^nd
, 1978.
Never mind the date gap discrepancy (that will be explained later on down). This entry is declaratory[sic] in gender as I implode, this will not
become the secret journal, written on the run and in the rain away from home, away from the paid space, the co-inhabited space, the now in the
process of becoming space, the not yet shyed [sic] from space due to uncofortability [sic] and conflict of interest, style, dress, purpose, aim,
taste of environment for art space, the ‘who is chic and who isn’t’ question space, not yet and it won’t, can’t,
caint [sic], won’t, because if it does, it will become a battlefield of confestation[sic], and I won’t let it be so.

Like those mirrored disco balls suspended from dance hall ceilings, Dwaine’s notebooks whirled flashes of light more dazzling than illuminating.
Still, I hoped that by reading enough of them the individually puzzling entries would add up to something coherent, and reading them might help me gain
some understanding of Dwaine’s past, especially of what happened to him in Vietnam.