Life Goes to the Movies (4 page)

“You’re a late bloomer,” she told me in response to one of my many failed efforts to woo her. “Ten years from now, I bet
you’ll be ripe for picking then.”

“So I’m some sort of fruit, now, am I?”

“Not that you’re not a perfectly nice person, Nigel; you are; I like you a lot. It’s just that you’re so young.”

“The spurned lover will now disembowel himself.”

“You just need a little more time, is all.”

“You misjudge me,” I said. “I’m much older than I look. My wrinkles are all inside. My internal organs look like a box of
stewed prunes.”

“When you’re twenty-eight maybe try me again.”

“I’ll phone you dead and decomposed from deep down in my grave,” I said.

“ ‘Age is the price we pay for maturity.’ I’m not sure who said that, either Brigit Bardot or my mother when she was half
sober and still living.”

“ ‘Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ Saint Augustine.”

13

We were interrupted by Dwaine, who ordered us back into bed to complete our lovemaking scene-in-progress. We were shooting our sixth movie, titledIn Flagrante Delicato, about a seminarian who gets caught having sex in his dorm with a girl from town. Huff played the sanctimonious resident
priest who catches us in the act, and offers his silence in exchange for a roll in the hay with my date, whereupon I castrate him with the machete that
hangs on a hook over the door of my room.

To kiss Venus with Dwaine watching us through a series of camera lenses, yelling out orders, telling us what to do with our hands, our eyes, our lips
and other body parts, would’ve been strange enough, but doing so knowing that Venus was only acting while every fiber of my being ached for the
genuine thing was a special torture, exquisite and unheard of. The paradoxical result being that her performance was much more convincing than mine.

“Come on, babe,” Dwaine yelled from behind the camera. “Put a little French into it! She’s not a nun, for chrissake. And
you’re not a priest—yet!”

14

When I asked him what he did for money, Dwaine said he worked as a location scout for a small, independent film company. Pressed for details he said he
couldn’t divulge any, that he’d been sworn to secrecy, that if he said anything more his ass would be grass.

Secrecy notwithstanding, on several occasions he took me location scouting with him. From the Battery to its northernmost tip (where, as Dwaine pointed
out, the city was still a green mound of virgin forest just as the Reckgawawanc Indians had known it) we explored the world’s most famous island.
Dwaine showed me the rusty swing bridge by which New York Central line trains traveled from the Bronx into Manhattan over the turbulent waters of the
Spuyten Duyvil. In Brooklyn, in the Arabic shops sprinkled along Atlantic Avenue, we sampled sticky halvah and plump figs crusted with sugar, and from
there rode the A-train to its terminus, to watch snowy egrets soar over the mudflats of Jamaica Bay.

Dwaine loved the city where he was born. For him it was like a humble backyard, while to me it remained as exotic and daunting as the control room of a
nuclear submarine. Though I had visited New York with my father as a child, the city seemed entirely different to me now. Before it had been a museum
of ocean liners looking like gargantuan banana splits in their berths, and skyscrapers lit up like Christmas trees. At the cut-rate hotel where my
father and I slept, a black lady with fire engine red hair let me man the elevator whose caged brass doors opened at each floor to reveal different
patterns of hallway carpeting. I remember how each of those carpets was like a city unto itself, its teeming arabesques of pattern and color mirroring
the thrilling, multi-hued chaos outdoors. It had been so thrilling for me back then, the city, so modern yet so old, its hydrants and fireboxes layered
with thick coats of time, its skyscrapers leaping into tomorrow, the subway’s roar as fierce and rank as a lion’s. Now, though, the city
crushed me under the weight of its excesses, made me feel hopelessly, helplessly small, inept and orphaned. I had no idea how to exist there. Not a
clue.

Dwaine showed me the curious parts of the city, its intimate shadows and nooks, the parts that, had the city been a woman, you would have most wanted
to kiss. As if it were a confection he had spent his whole life concocting he shared his hometown with me. He taught me to savor the city’s
garlands of scent, from shoe polish to Xerox toner to the smells of money and fear wafting off people’s bodies in the subway. He could even
distinguish between doughnut smells, from old-fashioned to honey glazed. From dry cleaner chemicals to brass polish, he had a nose for every city odor.
Walking down Broadway from 125
^th
to Wall Street, he could name every business on every block with his eyes closed.

At the Russian baths on East 10
^th
Street we doused each other with buckets of ice water and flailed each other’s bare backs with oak
branches holding crisp brown leaves. While doing so, I noticed the two quarter-sized fat cysts on Dwaine’s back. His “Lucky Lumps,”
he called them.

15

When summer came around I decided to stay in the city. It was my first summer alone in New York, my first summer away from home anywhere. It happened
to be the summer of the Son of Sam, that moonfaced postal employee who, on orders from a neighbor’s barking dog, shot his victims dead in parked
cars while they necked at sundown. When my mother heard about it on the TV news she phoned me up immediately, hysterical, begging me to please come
back home. It took me over an hour to convince her that the odds of this particular psychopath drawing a bead on her precious creatura di dio
were small indeed—especially given that I had no car to smooch in, and no girlfriend to smooch with.

“Okay, fine,” my mother said. “Do like you want. Maybe someone come here an shoot me, if I lucky. Maybe then you come home to see me
to my funeral, if it no asking too much, if you no too busy. Pffff.”

“Mom, please—”

“Eh, va bene: I no give a goop.”

16

Some good movies came out that summer. Dwaine loved Black Sunday, but hated Close Encounters of the Third Kind, especially the last part
where the dumb heavenly chandelier descends. And while That Obscure Object of Desire bored me stiff, Dwaine pronounced it a masterpiece (he was
right, of course).

And though I never found a movie so bad I had to walk out on it, Dwaine walked out of many. Halfway through Star Wars (which he condescended to
see in the first place only because I wanted to), as the Death Star loomed into view, he stood up, said, “That does it,” and made a beeline
for one of the Exit doors.

I caught up with him in the street.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, panting.

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”

“So why did you walk out?”

“Because: fuck that shit, that’s why.”

“Why? What was wrong with it?”

“Oh, babe, you know you really disappoint me at times, you know that?”

“Why?”

“Do I really have to explain?”

“Yes! I mean, what was the problem? What didn’t you like about it? It was entertaining, wasn’t it? And it wasn’t stupid. Was
it?”

“Fine. Then go on back, if that’s how you feel. No one made you leave.” All this time he kept walking, fast, with me keeping up with
him, or trying to. “It’s a free country, that’s what they tell me, anyway.”

It was late afternoon, but dark clouds hung all over the city, making it look like evening. I wore the button on my lapel, the one they had given us in
the theater lobby, the one with the words MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU printed on a sky blue background. I caught up with Dwaine.

“What didn’t you like about it?” I asked.

“It’s a goddamn blockbuster,” is all he said.

“So it’s a blockbuster. What’s wrong with that?”

He stopped walking then and faced me, burning me with those gray metal shards in his eyes. “Are you serious, babe? Are you truly serious?
Mindless entertainment? Cunning escapism? That’s what you want, huh? That’s all you care about, isn’t it?” I stood
there. “Christ,” he said. “Well you may go to the movies to have the brains sucked out of your skull, but I don’t. I go
to be redeemed. I guess that’s the difference between you and me, babe. You want to escape from your sins; I want to be redeemed from
mine. But that’s not what I hate about that movie. A little harmless entertainment now and then isn’t so bad. Only what we just saw in
there wasn’t harmless. What we just saw is a doomsday juggernaut, the cinematic equivalent of a gigantic shopping mall. Someday, movies like that
are going to take over everything! They’re like Godzillas flattening the landscape. And when they do, trust me, there won’t be a
thing left for the likes of us, of you and me.”

He smiled then, as if to make light of it, but it was a tight, castigating smile, a smile blending pity with scorn. Then he turned and kept walking.

I hurried to catch up.

17

That was also the summer of the famous Blackout of ’77. For twenty-four hours starting on a sweltering July evening the whole city went as dark
as the sheets of newsprint Professor Crenshaw made us blacken with charcoal. In the forced darkness old people sat listening to themselves breathing in
chairs, lovers embraced by candlelight, kids pulled fire alarms, looters smashed store windows and shouldered frozen turkeys and TV sets.

When the lights went out I phoned Venus. I had a bottle of Chianti in my room that I’d been saving for just such an occasion, and asked her if
she would care to share it with me by candlelight. Predictably she made up some excuse. Rebuffed, I took the bottle with me over to Dwaine’s
place.

With no lights on anywhere the whole city felt like one of those sensory deprivation tanks. I couldn’t see the sidewalk under my feet, or tell
where the curb was, or say for sure what block I was on, or even what city I was walking in, in what country, on what planet, in which universe. I felt
like an astronaut spacewalking without a lifeline.

When I got there I pressed Dwaine’s lobby buzzer, which of course didn’t work. So I stood in the street looking up at his third floor
window, which framed more darkness. I was about to give up and go when a gloomy shape stumbled toward me on the sidewalk. He stumbled right into my
arms.

“Jesus,” I said.

Somehow I got him upstairs to his apartment. All the way up the dark stairs he kept on making terrible sounds, his breath rattling through the snot or
whatever it was that clogged up his nose. I took his keys out of his pocket and let us both into his apartment, where I found some candles in a kitchen
drawer. By their light I saw the blood draining from his nose and from his eye—real blood, not the fake stuff. Plum-like bruises ripened on every
branch of his face. I said, “Jesus—what happened?”

“Get—get the camera,” he said.

“What?”

“The camera,” he said. “Get it.”

He wanted me to film him bleeding.

The camera had its own battery-powered light. It felt weird, filming him, like Dwaine and I had traded places, with me seeing him as he had so often
seen me, bleeding profusely through a series of lenses. I kept saying, Should I stop now? Is that enough? Do you want me to keep on filming? I
exposed a whole roll.

I took off Dwaine’s shoes and stretched his serape over him. I tended his wounds with cotton and iodine. Then I sat there, on the edge of his
bed, not sure what to do next, watching his face by the candle’s guttering glow.

He said, “What the hell are you doing, babe?”

“Nothing. Just sitting here,” I said.

“Stop feeding on me!”

“Huh?”

“GET OUT OF HERE! GIVE ME SOME AIR!”

I was halfway home, walking through streets as black as a coal mine when I realized where I’d heard those words before.

Paul Newman, Cool Hand Luke.

18

September. School had started again. We spent the whole day shooting at the Bronx Botanic Garden, at the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory—a scene fromBottle in Front of Me, our latest masterpiece, about a mental patient whose sinister psychiatrist (Huff) talks him into getting a frontal
lobotomy to cure him of his murderous rages. We spent most of the day shooting the nightmare sequence (all of Dwaine’s movies seemed to have
nightmare sequences), wherein the protagonist dreams that he has turned into a hothouse flower. An orchid.

I was headed home, carrying our new/used movie camera—a beautiful Beaulieu 16-millimeter bought with my mother’s money (its chrome-accented
body parts anodized to a milk chocolate brown) along with a shopping bag full of exposed film. The sun was setting, deepening in color as it crouched
behind a bank of unimportant buildings. A gang of kids rushed me, all wearing ski masks. They came at me out of nowhere with nudges and shoves that
seemed almost playful at first. Then they were all over me, branding my body with red-hot fists, kicking it with burning feet until I let go of the
camera. Then they took off.

When I opened the door to where I lived Captain Nemo stood there, holding a Medaglia D’Oro coffee can with a yellow dishwashing-gloved hand and a
disgusted look on his face. He said, “Do you mind explaining this?”

“It’s a Medaglia D’Oro coffee can,” I observed shrewdly.

“I know it’s a coffee can, Nigel. I’m well aware that it’s a coffee can. Can you tell me why there happens to be urine in
it?”

“There happens to be urine in it because you never let me use the goddamn bathroom, that’s why. You’re too busy trying to scrub the
mortal sins off of yourself, or whatever the heck it is that you do in there.” I was not inclined toward tact.

Captain Nemo shook his fuzzball head. He wore a puffy mound of frizzy gray hair that made his head look like a dandelion gone to seed. I stood there
tasting my blood. He started to say something, but before he could I pushed past him and his antique organ into the apartment. I went straight to the
phone. I had no idea who I was going to call. The cops? My mother? Dwaine? I knew he’d never forgive me for losing that camera, which cost us a
hundred dollars. True, my mom’s money paid for it, but what difference did that make? It was still Dwaine’s camera, just like they were his
movies; he called them ours but they were Dwaine’s, and he and I both knew it. I just acted in them. That’s all.