Life Goes to the Movies (26 page)

“H-have you g-got any a-a-aspirin?” he said. “My head’s s-splitting.”

“Hell, I’m in advertising. If it’s an analgesic I’ve got it. Come on.”

He slept on my sofa that night. I was glad to have him there, glad to have anyone to fill the space vacated by Venus. I sat in my rocking chair
watching him sleep, remembering the last time I’d done so, when he asked me to film him bleeding.

3

Almost a year passed before I saw him again. Just after Christmas the agency lost two of its biggest accounts, and everyone was scrambling to stanch
the wound, leaving me with little time to think about, much less visit, Dwaine. Meanwhile his letters to me grew more and more sporadic, until finally
they stopped coming completely. I started to wonder if something was wrong. When I called the hospital to see how he was doing, I always got the same
answer:

“He’s doing fine.”

Then a letter came, written on both sides of sheets of construction paper, the kind they give you to draw on in first grade. Dwaine’s
handwriting, more jagged and hurried than ever, was especially hard to read. What follows is my deciphering.

4

For the record, babe, after enlisting in the U.S. Army on August 2, 1971, I was assigned to the medical corps, where I worked mostly on
helicopters, doing what they called mop-ups, picking up wounded soldiers from the field. Along with my waterproof canvas M5 medical bag I carried
an M1911A1 pistol, but I never fired a shot in anger. Still, I served my country, or tried to, anyway, until two days after Christmas, 1973, when I
gave the first of two lethal injections to soldiers wounded in the field.

The first was a Marine Lance Corporal named Pennington who’d stepped on a Claymore mine. Both his legs were blown off at the hip. His stomach
looked like a freshly plowed field. But that didn’t concern
him as much as his manhood. “Is my manhood still there,” he kept saying. “Tell me, doc, is it? Cause if isn’t I’d
just as soon die here and now.”

Normally I’d have said anything to calm him down. I’d have fed him some line of bullshit, “don’t worry, everything’s
going to be fine,” some crap like that. But something about this guy, the way he looked at me, made it hard for me to lie to him. Instead I
looked down at the bloody shredded mess that used to be his fruit basket and shook my head.

“
Then please, please kill me,” he said, grabbing my arm and shaking it. “No one will ever know. It’ll be our little secret, yours
and mine.”

I hadn’t slept all that week. None of us in my unit slept very much. We put in forty-hour days, fueled mostly by pot and adrenaline and sick
jokes about wounds and body parts … oh, yeah, and baseball metaphors, we loved baseball metaphors, first base being a lost limb,
second base two lost limbs, third base an arm and two legs, a home run all four limbs, and a Grand Slam gone to that big baseball stadium in the
sky. I was dead tired. Meanwhile the lance corporal, he keeps smiling this yellow-toothed smile up at me, like he knows that I’m his
salvation, his personal Angel of Death. Next thing I know, without even having to think that much about it, I’m reaching into my rucksack and
giving him three, four, five syrettes of Mother M—that’s morphine, in case you don’t know, about twenty cc’s worth, more
than enough to grant him his wish.

The second soldier was an army sergeant who’d taken a sniper’s bullet to the jaw. His name was Sergeant Ed Myers, of Yankton, South
Dakota. Half his face from his nostrils down was gone, with the rest of his head a mask of iodine stained gauze. He didn’t beg me to kill
him. He couldn’t, having no mouth to beg with. Whenever he tried to talk this wet sucking sound came out, along with a fine spray of blood
and spit, and tears would roll down his one solid cheek. When I OD’d him, it was as much to end my own suffering as his.

The next day I refused to report for duty. I was put under house arrest pending a court martial and confined to my barracks. After a day or two
they transferred me under guard to a detox ward where twelve addicted soldiers went cold turkey without so much as an aspirin tablet to get them
over the hump. Twenty-four hours a day, three weeks straight I listened to their screams, moans, howls and whimpers. Meanwhile I applied for a
conscientious objector discharge. If the C.O. papers came through in time, I’d get an honorable discharge. If not, I’d be
court-martialed.

I had been under house arrest for a month when the war ended, supposedly. Over Armed Forces radio a sexy-voiced lady announcer described the
lowering of the stars and stripes over headquarters in Saigon. As she did I wandered onto the tarmac and watched a squad of camouflaged
B-52’s take off roaring into the sky. I sat on an oil drum and started laughing. The war was over, but the killing went on and on. I laughed
until an MP drove by in his Jeep, saw me and said, “Get a grip on yourself, soldier!”

The next day my C.O. papers came through.

They loaded me on a transport and shipped me home.

Fragged, tagged, and bagged, as we used to say.

That’s how the war ended for me, so I thought. I didn’t know it would follow me home, that it was inside me, like some radioactive
isotope. Being a good little Catholic, I still felt that I needed to save the world, that or die for its sins. So I tried out for the priesthood,
and when that blew apart I joined the Peace Corps. But it wasn’t until I got to Belfast and helped blow that hotel lounge to smithereens that
I saw just how alive the murderer in me still was.

When I returned from Belfast to New York my parents had downsized to a one-bedroom, their closets crammed with jugs of Ernest and Julio Gallo.
Peggy and Jack Sr. seemed shocked to see me. It had only been two years. My mother looked like a ghost. It seems Jack had come home, too. By then
the Feds were on his tail. They’d already seized his hacienda, his planes, everything.

“Where is he?” I said.

“
Your father and I don’t know,” she said, “and we don’t care. Your brother is a filthy drug addict! We want nothing to do
with him!” Spoken with booze on her breath.

A few days later I saw him. I was coming out of the Russian baths down on Fulton Street when I heard my name being called. I turn and see this
skeleton looking at me. “It’s me,” the skeleton says. “Jack! Your brother!”

Without a how-de-doo Jack tells me he needs a favor. I’m thinking he’s going to hit me up for some cash, but no, he wants me to score
for him. He’s too sick to go uptown, he says. He tells me where to go. He writes it on a piece of paper.

So I go. He’s my big brother, after all, it’s the least I can do, right? I take the subway to Dyckman Street, where Jack’s
supplier threatens me at gunpoint. It took some doing, but I managed to come back with both Jack’s fix
and my life.

I met him at the squat house where he was living, if you can call it that, a gutted brownstone on East
Fourth. A band of addicts lived there with him, all of them copping and fixing together. Jack’s room had ugly sky-blue wallpaper with brown
water stains all over it. He had a mattress with a filthy blanket, a hot plate, some paperbacks, an alcohol lamp, an eyedropper, a box of cotton,
and a spoon—like in the first movie we made together, remember?

Have you ever watched someone fix? It’s like watching them masturbate, that’s how private, personal and pleasurable an act it is. So
fixing for someone else—what’s
thatlike? And how about fixing foryour brother?
Day after day for the next two weeks I copped and fixed for Jack, cooking his heroine in a spoon over the alcohol lamp, sucking it up into a
syringe, finding an undamaged vein somewhere on him, injecting him. I was his private nurse, his personal medic, his brother in chemical
masturbation.

I told you Jack died of an overdose. True. But I didn’t tell you he died in my arms. Street heroin is usually sold cut with quinine, codeine,
sometimes even sugar. The difference between cut smack and pure horse is like the difference between heaven and a heart attack. The last time I
cooked up for him, when I lit the alcohol lamp and put the spoon over the flame and melted the powder and drew it through a cotton ball into the
eyedropper, it was the same amount of shit, but ten times more potent, potent enough to kill him twice over.

Jack had tied up and held the rubber tourniquet while I drove the needle into the one good vein he had left, two inches from his balls.

“Here you go, Jack,” I said.

I watched Jack’s blood drift up in a brownish-pink cloud in the eyedropper, then injected again. I did it a few times to make sure it hit
hard.

It hit hard, all right. Jack turned blue and died in my arms.

As I walked out of that building into the bright sunshine I swear I didn’t feel a thing, no remorse, no guilt, nothing. I was Death’s
Angel, doing God’s work, or something like it. I’d sent Jack to heaven—or hell. Either way, it was someplace a lot better than
where he’d been.

As I left the East Village, headed nowhere in particular, it struck me that I still wasn’t through doing the Lord’s work, I still had
one more person left to kill, myself. Why hadn’t I thought of it sooner, you ask? Well, as they say, better late than never. By the time I
got to Union Square I had everything all figured out. I’d go to the movies, catch a matinee, then walk to the East River, smoke a last
cigarette and jump in.
That was my plan.

Taxi Driverwas playing at the Coronet, at Third Avenue at 59
^th
Street, just a few blocks from the river. Perfect, I thought. How was I supposed to know that movie would change my life?Taxi Driver
blew me away. It was like the sky opened up and light poured down on me. From the opening shot of that taxi moving through red steam clouds like
some glazed yellow apocalyptic beast slinking its way through the inferno, I was hooked. And Travis Bickel, the loneliest, least heroic hero ever,
talking to himself, holding his fist over a gas flame, piloting his Stygian taxi across the River Styx. I never dreamed anything so beautiful could
be made from loneliness, violence, alienation, despair, murder, perversity, boredom—all the things I had been experiencing. I identified with
Travis, sure, but I identified even more with the director, Martin Scorsese, the guy who turned all that blood-soaked rage and loneliness into a
thing of beauty. An hour and thirteen minutes later when I staggered out of that theater, I felt like Moses must have felt when he staggered down
Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments tucked under his arm. I knew then that I was going to make movies; I was going to be a filmmaker. I’d
still be playing God, true, but without having to kill anyone, including myself.

A few days later I enrolled at Pratt Institute, which is where we met and which is where you come into the picture. What happened from then on I
won’t bother going into here, since you’ve already seen
thatmovie.

Now I’m here, in another kind of ‘institute,’ in this place where all my emotions are guarded and weighed like the gold in Fort
Knox, for which I happen to be
veryglad. And you should be glad, too, dammit.

That’s it, babe, that’s my whole story, the Pure Truth. If all of the above makes me a coward, so be it. But I’m also pretty
damned tired, and as General Macarthur said, “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”

Yours in Everloving Madness,

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

5

I saw him the day before Halloween, his birthday. I left work early and took the 12:35 train to Montrose. I didn’t announce my visit. I assumed
if I called ahead I would be given the bum’s rush from him or from his institiutional keepers, and so I just went. When I got there, as expected,
the authorities put me off, or tried to. I sat in a chair and refused to leave until they gave me an audience with their charge.

An hour or so later Dwaine appeared. Seeing me sitting there he drew back in shock and pointed at my hair.

“Babe—what happened to your Dukes and Earls?”

“My what?”

“Your curls. What did you do to them?”

“Oh.” My cheeks prickled with warmth. “I had them relaxed.”

“You did what? Nigel DePoli without his curls! Man, what is this world coming to?”

Though Dwaine still wore the brown pinstriped robe and a plastic ID tag with his social security number on his wrist, everything else about him looked
changed. His shaven hair had grown back. It was almost completely gray now. The gray curls looped over his ears. In place of the soft blue slippers he
wore a pair of sparkling white athletic sneakers. The formerly pocketless hospital robe now featured a pocket from which a quintet of writing
implements protruded. His aluminum gray eyes gleamed. He looked suntanned, muscular, fit, like he’d just wound-up a two-week stint at Club Med.
He shook my hand, his grip that of a university dean greeting freshmen on Orientation Day. “So—to what do I owe this unexpected
honor?”

6

His voice has changed, too. The syrupy quality is gone. He smiles. I’m carrying a briefcase stuffed with comps for my latest advertising
campaign. He stoops to smooth a palm over its leather surface. “Italian? Nice, verynice.”

I give him a box of pens, a notebook, three packs of cigarettes. He needs none of these things. As for cigarettes, he has quit smoking. “It
raises hell with my lap swimming. I’m down to a twenty-two minute mile. Not bad, huh?” With an arm around my shoulder he leads me down the
hallway to a small kitchen where there’s a coffee machine. He asks me how I take mine. I say milk and sugar. He wags a finger at me. “Sugar
in suspension, worst thing for your system. Let’s step into my office, shall we?”

Dwaine’s “office” is the same conference room where Venus and I met with him on our last visit, with the same view through the same
barred window of the same beech tree. The walls are adorned with crayon drawings mostly of combat scenes, of exploding tanks, plummeting paratroopers,
and soldiers brandishing spouting flamethrowers. Dwaine explains that he has been conducting workshops there in drawing, journal keeping, and
screenwriting.