Life Goes to the Movies (16 page)

The rest, presumably, are left to their own devices.

“Don’t worry, babe. Things will break for us. And soon.”

So saying and using a small magnet Dwaine fixes one of Madame Helena’s yellow flyers to the door of our refrigerator, which, save for a dozen
triple-A flash unit batteries, a jar of B-12 vitamins, a bottle of extra-strength parasiticide, an ice water-filled quart grapefruit juice bottle with
a half lemon floating jellyfish-like inside, three plastic tubes of duck sauce, a jar of Mrs. Fanning’s Bread & Butter Pickles (juice only),
and a rubbery celery stalk, is empty.

We’re six weeks behind in the rent.

Dwaine refuses any work not having to do with movies. “We don’t do shit jobs,” he says. “We’re the Two Greatest
Filmmakers in New York, remember?” And holds up a symbolic pinky.

Since coming home from Hollywood we’ve been unemployed. Dunning notices darken our tenement mailbox, chilly legal instruments laden with phrases
like “affidavit of service” and “admission of liability” that prod my chest like a stern lawyer’s stiff finger.

True, I could appeal to my parents in Connecticut, to Mamma Lasagna and Dear Old Papa, they’d bail me out. Better still I could toss in the towel
and go home, back to Barnum and dead brick hat factories.

But what about Dwaine? He has no family to run to, no ripcord to pull in case of emergency, only the hard city pavement to land on, splat. Besides,
he’s my pal, my buddy, my chum. I can’t just abandon him, can I, just like that? No. I’d rather live out the starving artist myth,
Rudolpho and Marcello huddled in their Long Island City garret, feeding masterpieces to the wood stove.

Only we have no wood stove.

And no masterpieces to feed to it.

We were two mountain climbers roped together, Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner in The Mountain,our rope wound from the frayed stuff of artistic
dreams.

2

Sometimes the movie of our lives together was in sunny color, sometimes in black-and-white. Lately it had been bluish-gray: the grainy gray of an old
black-and-white movie; the blue of Technicolor past its prime. The blue-gray of a damp November sky. Or of cheap cigar smoke.

The cigar belonged to one Demitris Demetropoulos, a.k.a. The Horror Movie Man, who hired us to make posters for the horror movies he produced and that
had their single yet highly profitable runs in those once glorious but gone-to-seed theaters lining West 42
^nd
Street.

“Okay, fellas, let’s see what you’ve got.”

The Horror Movie Man’s office is in the old Paramount building, overlooking Times Square. Where visible through eddies of cigar smoke its walls
are covered with horror movie posters, their titles oozing green slime and dripping red blood. Staggered piles of scripts with covers of all different
materials and colors crowd the room, leaving just a narrow path for Dwaine and me to approach the Horror Movie Man’s desk: an old-fashioned
rolltop behind which the Horror Movie Man sits in his high-back black leather Herman Miller lounge chair, his hairy fingers laced over the pinstripes
of a double-breasted Nathan Detroit suit. Arabesques of bluish smoke rise from the cigar clamped between yellow teeth to dance around his flat,
Boris-Karloff-as-Frankenstein head. A cubic clock radio dispenses stock quotes and classical music.

Bearing the cardboard portfolio we advance.

We’ve been up all night long working on the poster by candlelight, the ghouls at Con Edison having nixed our electricity. Dwaine took charge of
the background while I concentrated on the poster’s focal element: a partially decomposed human hand bursting through a mound of graveyard dirt,
shedding loose gray slabs of flesh like chicken parts left too long on the boil. In the background, as I worked on the hand, Dwaine rendered other
zombies in various states of putrefaction rising from their graves, all trailing hideous bits of themselves. Background and foreground alike are lit by
a pus-colored moon.

When we finished, by the light of the morning sun as it rose over the East River, we stood side by side admiring it. There could be no doubt: our
poster for Dawn of the Deliriouswas a masterpiece. It had better be, we both agreed as grayish dawn brushed the tin eagle sign next door, since
the first three posters we’d done for Demetropoulos were all rejected. The vampire’s fangs in Eve of the Eviscerated weren’t
sharp and bloody enough; the werewolf’s palms in Dusk of the Decayed weren’t sufficiently hirsute; the lagoon-dwelling creature inTwilight of the Drowned didn’t ooze and drip enough slime and muck. In all three cases The Horror Movie Man paid us a kill-fee of fifty
dollars (out of an agreed-upon three hundred) and insisted on “holding onto” the posters in question for “matters of
copyright.” (“You understand, now, don’t you, Fellas?”)

Before packing it in the portfolio, to protect it from the freezing rain that’s been soaking the city for two days now, we sealed the poster with
layers of garbage bags and duct tape, so it takes some doing to unveil. In the meantime The Horror Movie Man snuffs out his cigar in a novelty ashtray,
takes another from a cedar box on his desk, decapitates its tip with a gold-plated miniature guillotine, and lights it with a silver lighter in the
shape of a coffin. Hands folded in front of him again, he sits back at his desk.

(That rolltop desk, by the way, is the one tidy thing in The Horror Movie Man’s office, no coffee rings or cigar burns, a can of Scott’s
Liquid Gold kept handy for the occasional quick polish.)

The last wrappings finally come off. The Horror Movie Man scrutinizes our latest effort, working the stogie from one end of his square mouth to the
other. He squints, snorts, sniffs, makes little uncategorizable groaning sounds, taps a gold fountain pen against his desk blotter, sits back again,
re-laces his fingers, sighs, shakes his head.

“Fellas, I’m sorry, but it ain’t exactly what I’m looking for.”

We look at each other, Dwaine and I.

“It’s the hand,” the Horror Movie Man decides. “The fingernails —they’re too long. It looks like abroad’s hand.”

“You wanted realism!” Dwaine protests. “Fingernails and hair keep growing after they bury you! We know; we looked it up!”
1

“Fellas, I’m no scientist. All I know is it don’t look right. Tell you what: I’ll make it a hundred this time.” He slides
open his desk drawer, pulls out a check ledger. “Remind me, who do I make this out to?”

That’s when I see the look on Dwaine’s face, the one that tells me he’s about to do something we’ll probably both regret, or I
will, anyway. By now I know the look well; God knows I’ve seen it enough times. And I know once that look comes into his face there’s not
much—in fact there’s not a damned thing—I can do to stop whatever’s about to happen.

1
Fingernails and hair do not keep growing after you die; we hadn’t looked up anything.

3

Dissolve to us taking turns dragging a sopping cardboard portfolio along West 42nd Street in the freezing rain.

“Damn it, Dwaine. What did you have to do that for? We could have used that hundred dollars! We could have paid the electric bill! We could have
paid some of our overdue rent!”

We’re stopped at the traffic light at Seventh Avenue, our shoes sloshing in gray storm sewage. For the first time I feel myself truly at odds
with Dwaine, thinking that maybe our friendship isn’t the best thing for my financial and mental wellbeing. But there’s still that frayed
rope connecting us.

“Don’t you see, babe? If we let fuckers like him walk over us, then what’s the limit, huh? We’ve got to stand up for
ourselves!”

“You call that standing up?”

“What do you call it, sitting down?”

“I call it climbing on someone’s desk and pissing on it!”

“Well—he deserved it!”

“That is not the point,Dwaine.”

“Of course it is; of course it’s the point.”

“No—it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is! Don’t tell me what the point is or isn’t, babe. You saw what that motherfucker tried to do! And not for the first time,
either! And it’s not just us that I’m thinking about. Nossir. It’s not just myself I stood up for. It’s all artists everywhere.
It’s you, babe. I did it for you.”

“Spare me,” I say.

“Hell, babe, you think for a second that Greek ghoul could’ve drawn that hand? No way! That Hellenic whoreson couldn’t draw his way
out of a wet paper bag! That Demonic demon couldn’t draw bees with honey! That Athenian asshole couldn’t draw water from a wishing well
with a two-gallon galvanized bucket! That Peloponnesian pudthumper couldn’t draw a crowd in Times Square with the Rockettes high-kicking
buck-ass-naked—”

“All right already, I get the idea!”

The light changes. I take off, splashing through puddles.

“Good,” says Dwaine following me. “Because to tell you the truth I was starting to worry.”

I pick up my pace, pretending that Dwaine’s not right there behind me, wishing that I’d never heard of Dwaine Fitzgibbon. Dwainewho? He grabs me by my pea coat sleeve.

“Without us, babe, the Bull Duncans, the Archie Flynns, the Dexter Groons, the Demitris Whatshisnames—they’d all be nothing,nothing! Don’t ever forget that. In their heart of hearts they want to be artists, just like us, but they don’t have the time;
they’re too busy getting in touch with their inner stockbrokers. Do you see what I’m saying?Do you? Huh?”

“Yeah, yeah, I see what you’re saying.Jesus …”

“They’re the real zombies; they eat the flesh of human dreams!”

All this time he’s tugging at my sleeve. I pull free.

“Fine!” I say. “But did you have to piss on his desk?”

“What can I say, Ollie.Nature and dutyboth called simultaneously. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.Tell you what,
I’ll give you one Our Father, six Hail Marys, and a novena. Will thatmake you happy, dear artificer?”

We’ve stopped at another intersection. He grabs my sleeve again and gives it a tug. I turn around and face him, our chins almost touching, so
close I can feel his winter breath on me and see his razor burns and feel the heat as he lasers me with those aluminum-shard eyes of his. When he looks
at me like that I swear he could shoot his tongue out and swallow me like a lizard swallowing an insect, whole.

“Know why they want to fuck us, babe? Huh? Know why?”

“Because we’re beautiful,” I submit dully.

“Exactly: Because we’re beautiful.”

Umbrellas blot out the sky. As I hurry along Dwaine falls behind. I turn and see him standing on the opposite curb, rattling his tooth with his pinkie
high in the air: we’ve got more talent,etc., Dwaine’s pep-rally cry, the life saver he throws overboard in times of strife.
Only I’m not grabbing it, not this time, uh-uh, not taking the bait, nossir. I keep walking, ready and more than willing to leave him behind,
abandon him to catch pneumonia or whatever it is that a person catches from standing like a fool in the frozen rain, and start to do just that when my
resolve melts and I turn and he’s still there, still standing there rattling that goofy front tooth of his. I shake my head, re-cross the street.
As I get to him he does an about-face and peers into the window of a Hoffritz knife store, his breath frosting the glass as he admires a flotilla of
Swiss Army knives.

“Check it out, babe. Third one from the left. Can opener, cigarette lighter, hacksaw, jumper cables, back hoe …”

By the arm I escort him back to the curb. As we get there a taxicab passes, heaving up a puddle of water that broadsides the cardboard portfolio and
soaks us from the waist down in brown storm sewage. Dwaine throws his laughing head back.

“And—CUT!” he says.

A
Pre-Victorian
Bathtub
(Adult Feature)

“Made it, Ma. Top of the world!”
—James Cagney, White Heat
The Pertinent Movie Quote Wall

S
moking in the tub, combing the classifieds in Variety after a meal of garbanzo beans and chopped celery in soy sauce, Dwaine chances upon the
following notice:

Wanted: experienced artist/ designer to work on independent feature film. Contact: B. Huffnagel, Production Mgr, Priapus Pictures.

“Huffnagel!” In a deprecatory smoke cloud Dwaine expels the name of my erstwhile antagonist. “Do you believe it? That fat fucking
slob is a production manager and we’re eating garbanzo beans!”

“It’s movie work,” I say.

2

We meet Huff at Joe Allen’s in the theater district. Since our student days he has lost most of his excess weight, down to a feathery two hundred
pounds. He’s trimmed the Rasputin beard, too, and traded his horn rims in for contact lenses. But his breath still smells like dead worms in a
jar. And he still looks like a central casting heavy.

“It’s an adult feature,” he explains, downing a Rolaid with his diet ginger ale. “You guys will be in charge of sets, props,
clean-up.”

Dwaine pounds a fist on the table. “The fuck we will. We’re the Two Greatest Artists in New York. No way are we doing grunt work on a
goddamn skin flick!”

“It’s not a skin flick,” says Huff. “Please do not call it that. We’re producing an adult feature.”

“It’s a lousy smut film, is what it is.”

“Fine, if that’s how you feel about it.”

Huff tosses a twenty down on the tablecloth. With a wailing scrape he pushes his chair back. He’s about to go when I grab his camel hair sleeve
and turn to Dwaine, my eyes speaking eloquently of dunning notices, unemployment agencies, and garbanzo bean suppers eaten by candlelight.
“It’s movie work,” I remind him under my breath.

“How much does it pay?” Dwaine asks Huff.

“Ten an hour,” says Huff. “That’s five a piece if I hire you both.”

“Make it twenty and we’ll think about it.”

“Five,” says Huff.

“Ten,” says Dwaine.

“Five.”

“We’ll take it,” I say and turn to Dwaine who says nothing.

“You’ll see,” says Huff. “It’ll be just like the old days.”

“The dark ages, you mean,” says Dwaine.