Life Goes to the Movies (28 page)

2

“You’re aware, gentlemen, of course, that Coca-Cola was the invention of a Civil War vet seeking a cure not only for his chronic pain, but
for his addiction to the bitter crystalline alkaloid of opium better known to us as heroin? That’s right, gentlemen: Coca-Cola was a gift to our
great nation from a drug addicted war veteran. And I say to you now, gentlemen, now at last the time has come for us to return the favor.”

From there I launch into the specifics. The first time I say “Vietnam” jaws drop. No sooner do I allude to hospitalized veterans than an
invisible Novocain cloud drifts into the conference room, numbing critical faculties on either side of the teak and granite table. I take advantage of
this sublime moment of corporate stupefaction to unveil our campaign’s most daring aspect, the singular stroke that will either propel it up into
cloudy heights or weigh it like an anchor in diatomaceous muck.

To the theme from Rockybooming from a ghetto blaster I fling aside the royal blue chintz cloth covering the easel, revealing the
campaign’s logo: an eagle in silhouette, its dark wings spread across a stars and stripes backdrop, talons clutching our client’s flagship
product in 10-ounce bottles and 12-ounce cans. Indeed, the eagle bears a more than passing resemblance to the Eagle Electric Company mascot. But what
are the odds of anyone in this room knowing that?

Under the logo Yankee Doodle style block letters spell out:

THE SOFT DRINK OF AMERICA

With palms sweeping over the screen of an imaginary TV set, I read the disclaimer:

The Preceding Advertisement Has Been

Produced, Written, Directed and Filmed by

Disabled Veterans of the War in Vietnam

3

Slow dissolve to a convoy of trailer and box trucks passing by a miniature lighthouse, winding up the long, steep driveway toward the Dwight D.
Eisenhower Veterans Administration Medical Center. The trucks haul lights, cables, reflector shields, generators, cameras, sound equipment, cases of
film and recording stock, brutes, dollies, folding tables and chairs, coffee and tea samovars, boxes of doughnuts and pizza and dozens of cases of
Coca-Cola in bottles and cans (to serve as both props and refreshments).

Yawning, I watch the trucks roll by, a scene highly reminiscent of the opening title sequence in The Great Escape,when the truck convoy carries
its cargo of fresh POWs to Stalag Luft III.

I haven’t slept much, having spent most of the night before in a cemetery. At three o’clock in the morning, with a line from one of
Dwaine’s letters echoing in my head, I switched on my bedside lamp, got up and found the letter still folded and tucked in my jacket pocket. I
re-read it, searching for the phrase. There it was. “… both Peggy and Jack Sr.”

Peggy and Jack Sr.

An hour later I had boarded a subway headed for Hunter’s Point, Queens. From there a gloomy walk took me to Calvary Cemetery, where I located the
caretaker’s stone shed just as he, the caretaker—a gruff-faced ringer for Jack Warden in Donovan’s Reef—arrived. With a
pen on a map of the cemetery he circled grave number 837, Section 4-B.

As I followed the map dawn broke, sneaking up behind low buildings. Overhead the Long Island Expressway roared with traffic rushing toward Manhattan. I
cut through a field of tombstones as crooked as a bum’s teeth. It didn’t take long for me to find what I was looking for. The bronze flower
was still there. So was the inscription:

John Daniel Fitzgibbon

b: October 15, 1946

d: February 14, 1975

Beloved Son of Sean and Irene

Beloved Son of Sean and Irene.
I checked the letter again, to be sure. As the shadows lightened around me (revealing a sea of jagged tombstones) I sat on John Daniel
Fitzgibbon’s stone wondering if everything Dwaine had ever told me about himself is a lie, if I had been nothing more for him than a repository
for his cinematic fictions, the Peoria where the grim feature of his life had played so very, very well.

Then I wondered: does it matter? So what if Dwaine’s past isnothing more than a series of hyper-gritty movie scenes? Does that make it
any less frightening, or real? One thing was for sure: Dwaine’s darkness was no lie. His passion was real and so was his pain. And those were the
things that I’d loved him for. And even if they weren’t real, even if they were products of one of our overheated imaginations, so what;
what differencedid it make? Movies, too, are made up: that doesn’t make them any less loveable or moving. Whether Dwaine’s past was
the stuff of myth, madness, or movies, didn’t matter. What mattered was that I’d believed in it. I checked my watch. Six a.m.

I hurried to catch the subway.

I had a commercial to shoot.

4

Dwaine wears a waist-cut slate Eisenhower jacket over camouflage fatigue pants. He has handpicked his crew of twelve: five black, five Hispanic, one
Irish, ten Purple Hearts, five Bronze Stars, one Congressional Medal of Honor. In all, his crewmembers lack seventeen body parts: three legs, one arm,
two eyes, two kneecaps, one testicle, six fingers, and two thumbs. Miguel, Dwaine’s cameraman, has twenty-six confirmed Viet Cong kills to his
record. Earl, his key grip, keeps a box of desiccated V.C. ears next to his inpatient bed. He sleeps better with them there, presumably.

I stand on the grassy hilltop watching Dwaine direct his scruffy platoon of defunct soldiers, his orders followed by sharp cries of “Yes,
sir!” accompanied by crisp, stiff salutes. An equally stiff breeze scuffs whitecaps into the Hudson River below. Hands in pockets I stand there,
wedged like a toadstool into my uselessness (question: what do we think about when we think about nothing?), aware, somewhere way back in the recesses
of my fungoid brain, that however many miles of footage Dwaine and his crew shoot, the result is destined to be whittled down to sixty pithy seconds,
riddled with product logos, and sweetened with a cloying choral soundtrack scored by a team of rapidly aging British pop composers, an awareness
designed to enhance my already monumental obsolescence.

Still, I try to make myself useful in little ways. But the few times I try to give Dwaine any kind of advice he brushes it off like dog hairs from his
Eisenhower jacket, saying to me, “Not now, babe.” Not now, babe.

So I stand there, hands deep in the pockets of my Coke-bottle green linen Bill Blass blazer, inert as a spore-bearing fruiting fungus. Until the
sailboat passes by.

5

She’s an old-fashioned, square-rigged schooner, sailing upstream, her sails blown stiff as eggshells by the breeze, backlit by the sunlight that
streams—or seems to—like a golden waterfall over the Palisades. I’m reminded of the Cutty Sark ads I’d cut out with scissors as
a kid. I run to tell Dwaine, who is setting up a shot with his cinematographer. A temporary volleyball court has been rigged up for a staged
tournament, outpatients versus orderlies. I tap his shoulder.

“Not now, babe,” Dwaine says. I remind him that he’s working for me and for my client. “Yeah, well these are my
clients,” he says and points to a line of residents in wheelchairs, their missing legs hidden under scratchy blankets. “It’s them
I’m working for, not some dippy-ass goddamn soft drink. Now if you don’t mind, babe, I’m making a movie here.”

I grab his sleeve. “I do mind,” I say. “And don’t call me ‘babe.’ I hate it when you call me that. I’ve
always hated it. The name is Nigel, Nigel DePoli. And in case you’ve forgotten, I happen to be in charge here.”

“In charge? That’s a laugh.” Dwaine snorts and does his best Brando.“You’re an errand boy sent by a grocery clerk to collect a bill.” The line is from Apocalypse Now, and it has what I
assume is the intended effect. I lunge.

6

We’re all over each other, grabbing, grunting, hitting, clutching, rolling. Grass, sky, river, buildings and beech trees swirl like kaleidoscope
chips, as voices shout, snarling, “Get him, Fitz! Kick his ass! Whup his butt!”We roll down the grassy slope to the memorial
garden, where oxidized bronze generals watch me pin Dwaine to the lawn and straddle him, his forehead reddening as he twitches with laughter. Stop it!
I say. Cut it out! But he won’t. I draw back and hit him with my open hand. Still he won’t stop. So I do it again, and again, trying to
force some feeling other than sarcasm out of him, but he just keeps on laughing, like my blows tickle him, the snorts bursting through blood bubbles in
his nostrils. We’re still rolling down the lawn. We roll halfway to the Hudson River.

Then a flurry of arms—including Miguel’s singular but very strong arm—pulls me through a crowd of stupefied faces, sits me down in a
patch of grass. My throat, my arms, my ears burn. Voices ask if I’m all right.

You all right, there, Mr. DePoli?

Yeah, Mr. D, you okay?

I see Dwaine being helped to his feet by his crew, his face a striped mask of blood (like Marlon Brando’s at the end ofOn the Waterfront). As they hold him I stand up and yell—the words tearing out of me like a magician’s colored rags,“You son of a bitch—you bastard. You had me mugged!”Miguel grips me harder.
“You thought I forgot, did you? You think I don’t remember? Well I remember, you bastard; I didn’t forget, you son of a
bitch!”
Everyone stares, including Dwaine, who wipes the blood off his face.

“You slept with my wife,” he says.

“
Because you decided to go crazy! You never loved her anyway! You only married her to fuck with me, like you’ve always fucked with me, from
the very beginning! I bet you never had a brother! I bet you were never in Vietnam! Black Irish my ass!”

They keep staring as I take off my jacket, tuck in my shirt, and start walking. As I pass by Dwaine he says something, I’m not sure what,
I’m too dazed to hear much of anything beyond a buzzing in my ears that may be the blood rushing through my skull, or it may be the aural version
of vertigo. With my jacket slung over my shoulder I walk back up the hill for my briefcase, then walk back down again and keep walking, all the way to
the Montrose train station where, as I sit on the platform, a sudden sun-shower falls. With its falling a rainbow vaults across the river, beautiful. I
sit with the back of my head resting against a movie poster for Wall Street, starring Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen.

7

Splice by splice, we murdered Dwaine’s movie, a death of a thousand cuts. Grim scenes of chronically institutionalized vets cursing, moping,
spitting, yawning, shuffling, pissing into corners and banging their heads into walls were replaced with uplifting footage of veterans in and out of
wheelchairs shooting hoop after hoop (swish, swish) on the basketball court, to converge afterwards around a gleaming Coca-Cola machine like
truth seekers around an oracle. Of Dwaine’s gritty documentary not one single grim frame remained.

By the time I leave the editing bay it’s already dark out. A harvest moon—or what substitutes for a harvest moon in the city—shines
through a raggedy blanket of clouds. Not ready to go home, I wander around, down streets and avenues haunted by moonlight. My wanderings take me to
Beekman Place, where I stand looking across the East River, at the Pepsi-Cola sign on its far shore, remembering how, ten years ago, Dwaine and I stood
in this very spot looking across the very same river at night. I remember the smoke rings Dwaine was constantly blowing, gray doughnut ghosts wavering
into the air. I have a sudden craving for a cigarette. I put a finger to my lips and taste something sticky, salty, and sweet.

Blood from a film cut.

8

I schedule an emergency editing session. For four and a half hours I sit behind the console of a Steenbeck flatbed, reinserting many of the trims and
outs Donny and I had extricated two days before. Done with the footage, I turn to the soundtrack, and am hard pressed to choose between the theme from
Peter Gunn and Gershwin’s Lullaby for Strings. In the end, though, I opt for silence. What could be grittier?

Done, I drop the result off at the lab for transfer to video.

I order two copies. Make it three.

Back at my apartment, I pack Dwaine’s aluminum trunk with his belongings—letters, black books, screenplays, 8– and 16-millimeter
short films, rubber bullet, Academy Award (the Oscar is damaged; the statuette tilts twenty degrees from its base and is sticky with duct tape
residue), then pack some clothes and toilet articles into a duffel bag for myself. I phone a car service. While waiting for the livery I empty and
unplug the refrigerator, leave its door yawning, and give a good soaking to my snake plants and spider ferns.

The driver helps me with the trunk. From the processing lab he takes me to Grand Central, where I seal one of the tapes in a jiffy envelope addressed
to Dwaine S. Fitzgibbon care of the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Montrose. I drop it in a mailbox. With the other tape in my briefcase I
rush to the Danforth Building.

9

When I step out of the elevator Donny’s there, scowling at me, thumbs hooked under fat rainbow suspenders, an unlit cigarette bobbing between his
lips.

“Kid, where the Christ have you been? We got a presentation to make here, or did you forget, you were so busy jerking off?”

I hand Donny the videotape. “Last minute touches,” I say.

Donny eyes the cassette dubiously, then looks at me and shakes his head. “You’ve got some pair on you, you know that, kid?” He turns
and starts toward the screening theater where our clients await the presentation. Seeing me not following him he stops, turns. “Now what?”

“I don’t feel so hot. No shit, Donny, I—I think I’m gonna puke.”

I dash to the men’s room and bury myself in a stall. I let a few minutes pass before poking my head into the hallway to see Donny gone and the
coast clear. Then I sprint to the elevator and—just as the brass doors are about to close—jump in.