Life Goes to the Movies (19 page)

17

Dawn. The warehouse phone rings. Huff wants one of us to drive up to Nyack, where the director lives, and pick up a vial of prescription drugs from his
partner. I remind him that there’s a blizzard out there.

“Do it,” says Huff, “or you’re fired.”

“Kiss my ass,” I say and hang up.

“What did you just do?” Dwaine stands there wearing a blanket.

“I got us fired, what does it look like?”

“Call him back.”

“You call him. I quit.”

I grab my coat.

“Babe, where are you going?”

“You’d kill your own mother if it landed you a movie job.”

“Only if they let me rape and torture her first.”

“You have no morals. You’re sick. You’d eat the sludge out of a vampire’s belly button if he had one.”

“You know what they say, preach the gospel at all times, if necessary use words.”

“You should be put back in the womb and fucked for again!”

“What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?”

“Shit head!”

Then I’m gone, out the warehouse door, running straight into a blizzard, each frozen breath an ice pick to my lungs. I don’t know or care
where I’m going. My boots kick through snow. I’ve run at least four blocks when a horn sounds behind me and I turn. High beams blind me.
Then I see the production van. The passenger door flies open.

“Get in,” Dwaine says.

Venus slides over onto the transmission hump. All around us black plastic garbage bags mount up to the snowy sky. The van radio splutters.Pope’s visit postponed. Mother Theresa wins Nobel Prize.

Dwaine drives us back to our apartment, helps me pack my things. He knows where I’m going; he doesn’t have to ask. Back to Connecticut, to
Barnum, to the land of picket fences and hat factories. We stand in the detritus where the bathtub used to be, an oval patch sprinkled with copper
filings. A smell of burned bridges hangs in the air.

18

We’re just about to cross the Brooklyn Bridge when Venus points out the inverted triangle of smoke filling the salmon-colored eastern sky. Dwaine
makes a U-turn and heads for it. Back in Corona, swirling red lights ring the burning warehouse. Venus chews her fingernail. “Know what? I think
I may have left the kerosene stove on.” I see the burning wings of angels rising with the flames that lick the stars.

We sit watching until the roof caves in, then Dwaine throws the van into reverse. We’re crossing the East River again when the sun breaks
rapturously through clouds.

The Blizzard of ’79 is over.

At the 125th Street Metro North station Dwaine helps me with my things. As he does I apologize for calling him immoral.

“Apology unnecessary. Of course I’m immoral.” He shrugs. “I’m a product of the times.”

He grabs a box of Jujubes from the glove compartment and hands them to me. “Little going away present,” he says. “Each colored bead
contains water from the miraculous Fountain of Lourdes. Guaranteed to cure gout, lameness, and non-specific, twentieth-century malaise.”

We take turns hugging. The van radio splutters on, announcing the end of the sanitation workers’ strike. Within a fortnight the city will return
to its original state of filth. While hugging Dwaine I look down and see him and Venus holding hands. The train whistle blows. As I rush up the station
platform stairs Dwaine shouts: “Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough!”

“John Huston,” I shout back, running. “Chinatown!”

The
Building
(Home Movie)

I
n Barnum I worked for a company called Chem-U-Solve. I wore a scarlet jumpsuit and drove a yellow truck from gas station to gas station, exchanging
used drums of parts cleaner solvent for supposedly brand new ones. At the end of the day, with the sun setting and mosquitoes feasting on my spaghetti
sauce flavored blood, I’d empty the drums into a scummy ditch, wipe them clean with a rag, and refill them with filtered cleaning solvent from
the same scummy ditch.

I took courses at the state university, working toward my degree in advertising. I made a dwelling for myself in my parents’ basement. Though
moldy and thick with furnace fumes, I preferred it to my bedroom upstairs, with its ocean liner curtains and other frayed relics of my childhood.

When not working or studying I wandered around. Towns and cities look different when you no longer know anyone there. My hometown was a Picasso cubist
painting in browns and grays that I colored in with my loneliness, an exotic loneliness that bubbled and swirled like those Maurice Binder credit
montages that opened the early James Bond movies, with naked women undulating in plasmas of shifting spectral color. Somewhere out there men sailed the
Greek Islands, swam the Hellespont, parachuted from strutted biplane wings, and awoke with naked lovers on balconies facing the Bosporus. If I walked
long and far enough sooner or later I’d join them.

Though I missed Dwaine and our desperate bounding about in search of artistic fortune and fame (the Bohemian Rhapsody of our shared days), I tried not
to think too much about it. I tried to see our friendship for what it was, or what it had been: a passing young person’s phase, something to look
back on with a wan indulgent smile.

I missed Venus, too. God I missed her. I even dreamed about her. In one dream we’re walking down a street like the streets of Barnum, but with
every house painted a different bright primary color. As we pass them by Venus’s pigmentless skin turns the same colors as the houses: red, blue,
yellow. We come to an open field. Against the open sky her forehead and cheeks blush sky blue. Clouds float across her eyes.

2

Dwaine sent me letters. My father, who still pedaled his rusty Raleigh to the post office and back, would bring them home in his handlebar basket. Some
were long and rambling, others no more than a few quick lines on a postcard.

Occasionally Dwaine would attach newspaper clippings, a random sampling of which might include Virgin Mary sightings, an elderly couple arrested for
clamming in the waters of Jamaica Bay, men caught having sex with kidnapped chickens in a Mississippi motel room, and Aborigines attacking Australian
police with frozen kangaroo tails.

He teased me for quitting New York in favor of small-town life, a move that he insisted could not possibly be permanent. Seriously, babe, he
wrote,
when are you coming back home? This is your home, after all, or do you plan to spend the rest of your life in that scummy little guppy tank up
there? New York misses you,
Imiss you! So ditch the Nutmeg State and get your city-slicking ass back down here, okay???

O.O.T.T.G.A.I.N.Y.*

*One Of The Two Greatest Artists in New York**

**Other famous showbiz teams: Martin & Lewis, Nichols & May, Abbot & Costello, Burns & Allen, Ozzie & Harriet, and Rosey Grier
and Ray Milland in THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED MAN.

3

One day a larger than normal parcel arrives in my father’s handlebar basket. Inside it is one of Dwaine’s black books, one I’ve never
seen before. No letter, no explanation, just the black book.

I’m in the middle of finals. I have two papers due, one on ethics and problems in advertising, one on the principles of marketing statistic
analysis. With no time for it I put Dwaine’s black book aside. I tell myself whatever’s inside can wait; I’ll get to it later.

But after twenty minutes of boning up on discriminant function analogues and stepwise multiple regression, or trying to, I shove my schoolwork aside
and pick up Dwaine’s notebook.

4

Though the pages still look fresh and white, the notebook is dated 1974, with the words BELFAST, IRELAND written in thick marker across the top of the
first page. The notebook contains the usual motley mixture of drawings and newspaper clippings, interspersed between scrawled entries, some plain and
clear, others illegible, indecipherable, or a mix of both.

So I await the train to the ferry, with blind drunkenness not suited [sic] alternative to the cold, my goals right now being to weather a third cup
of tea from the Indians at the counter and take charge of the Euston Station day, still a good three hours from daylight in this magnificence [?]

Dwaine arrived in Belfast on Easter Sunday, 1975. As his Irish luck would have it he got there just as the Protestant Orangemen were gearing up for
their parade.

Yes, lads, the Tims and Huns have broken out their colors to loudly proclaim the history of their tireless faith in colorful clashes and killings
via fresh clashes and killings. That’s Easter in Belfast for you. And here I am, folks, one American with a camera around his neck
[illegible] Orangemen get it up for their parade of force, thunderous drums, torch-like plumes, and other boisterous intimidations readily[sic]
guaranteed to drive many an Irish Catholic saheeb back to the black hole of Calcutta…

Dwaine arrived to streets teaming with police, soldiers and armored vehicles there to protect the loyalist marchers … 
Now the parade has started, and the drumbeats ring through the streets, and the orange plumes burn, and teenage girls in the sidelines scream,
“koooo-kooooo”—grinning at the decked-out patriots. Do mine eyes decieve[sic] [?]there more soldiers and armored vehicles
guarding here than ever I saw in Vietnam?…

Eager to see the Catholic version of the Easter festivities, Dwaine ran ahead of the marchers to a place called the Cowley House, headquarters of the
Greenmen, who had gathered for their own demonstration, their leaders giving speeches from a podium set up on an appropriately green patch of lawn in
front of the house.

A fellow named Sam Steele, the Irish American chairman of NORAID, the heavily banned, super-militant faction of the IRA, is going to make a speech
guaranteed to, shall we say, liven up the festivities? So cheer up, Virginia, there really is an Easter Bunny.

But it seems I’m getting ahead of myself, or rather ahead of the parade, here, running out of patience, camera clutched to my chest to keep
it from swinging wildly into some Brit gob face, eager to get a glimpse (while I can) of Mr. Steele, who’s easy enough to glimpse. If
provocateurs were paid by the pound Mr. Steele would be one very wealthy provocateur. He’s tall, too. One of his henchmen has to adjust the
mike for him. Then the speech begins.

It’s a fine speech, lads, a very fine speech, and effective as gasoline on a banked fire. Someone cries, someone curses, someone throws a
rock, someone kicks, someone punches, someone smashes a window, someone sets a car on fire: yes, lads, a typical peaceful demonstration in the
North of Ireland … The police stop slapping their batons against their black leather gloved palms and bring them down on Catholic
heads, breaking shoulders and skulls at random as the Brits roll in their halftracks … 
[Illegible matter.]

… the rubber bullets start flying, with the cops targeting five- and
six-year-olds. I see one boy get struck point-blank in the chest. As he’s being picked up and hauled into the Cowley House I see the blood
pooling on his green shirt.

And that’s when it starts getting scary, lads. See all this time I’ve had my face buried in my camera, shooting away, not really
thinking that anything that I’m seeing is actually happening. But now all of a sudden things get, uh, real. The iron side gate to Cowley
House opens. A woman sticks her head out. Good-looking, red hair, a fresh face decked out with freckles. She yells, “Does anyone out here
have any medical experience?”

And damned if she doesn’t look straight at me. Next thing I know I’m being helped through the crowd and led into what was the Cowley
House living room, only now its[sic] a MASH unit packed with injured bodies, mostly by rubber bullets, with everyone crying, screaming, hysterical.
Broken arms, burn and puncture wounds, broken legs. It’s like a doll reject factory, or a slaughterhouse for human cattle. I help a girl
whose forearm is broken, a compound wound that spurts bright marrow blood. Meanwhile Mr. Steele, the big-bellied blob who set this whole thing off,
through the window I see his handlers hustling him away. Then the cops go wild, shooting baton rounds through the windows, the rubber bullets
leaving thick welts where they ping off the walls. I’m on top of this little girl, not doing what you think, you gutter-minded fucks.
I’m protecting her, pushing her down to keep her from getting shot, her face and mine to the floor, waiting for the baton rounds to stop,
thinking for sure we’re all going to be killed, yes, lads, every one of us: tomorrow morning the rest of the world will eat us for breakfast
in the papers.

Then, just when I’m thinking things can’t get worse, the soldiers and cops start with the smoke bombs. CS, they call the stuff. Method
of transport: grenade. We’re pulling our sweaters and shirts over our heads, coughing and gagging into them.

Then the shooting stops, the smoke clears. Nobody moves. A door smashes open and soldiers and police storm in, their rifles drawn, telling us all
to freeze, like we’re not frozen already. They throw me in a chair and slap my face until I whip out my passport, God Bless America, and wave
it in their faces, shouting, “Back the fuck off, Jack!”—or something to that effect. Which must have worked, babe, because they
let me go.

So then it’s back out to the Fall Road again, with me stumbling past broken glass and burning overturned cars like a scene out of god knows
what, with no idea where I’m going or why, like I even give a shit. I just keep walking, feeling as twisted up and upside-down as I’ve
ever felt in my life (oh, and by the way, the cops took my camera, yes they did, they tore the film out of it and then they kept it for good
measure: such considerate blokes). You see, lads, by then I was in what they call a state of shock. And then I see this blue door. Tell me, what is
it about blue that’s so inviting in times of stress? The blue of the ocean, of the Caribbean on a warm breezy June day. So I knocked, and
kept knocking, until this lady answers, a nice lady, a very nice lady who just happened to be blind: worse, she had no eyeballs in her head, none
at all, just these two sunken bowls of wrinkled flesh where her eyeballs should have been. “Who is it?” she says. “What do you
want?” I say, “I’m an American, a friendly American, and I’m scared.” “Come in,” she says. I spend the
next forty minutes there, having shortbread cookies and tea, listening to her talk all about her son, David, of whom I apparently remind her,
though she can’t see me. He was killed the year before in an identical riot, the same riot that left her blind. A rubber bullet passed
through her skull from ear to ear. She had the scars on both sides of her head to prove it. I kid you not. Right, lads: I couldn’t believe it
myself.