Life Goes to the Movies (7 page)

12

Though we no longer made our own movies, whenever we could afford to we still watched them, old ones mostly, at revival houses—the Thalia, St.
Marks, Bleecker Street … Watching movies with Dwaine was a mixed blessing. On the one hand you benefited from his knowledge and
enthusiasm; on the other you had to put up with his constant elbow-nudgings, and with a steady stream of critical and historical commentary much like
the kind provided on DVDs today. Did you know that, when making The Train, Burt Lancaster actually pulled a ligament in his knee while playing
golf between takes, and that’s why he limps through the whole last third of the picture?—esoteric comments that could enhance my viewing
pleasure. But even when I found it edifying, still, the others in the audience hardly welcomed Dwaine’s erudition. They would shush him
extravagantly to no end.

We’d come home with lines of dialogue lodged in our heads, tossing them to each other like Frisbees. Those movie lines that struck us as
particularly apt or memorable we would, using a thick black Magic Marker, commit to the wall between the refrigerator and the kitchen stove. This
became the Pertinent Movie Quote Wall. Whoever soaked in the tub would dictate while the other transcribed. We kept a gallon of Dutch Boy flat white
latex handy to paint over the quotes we grew tired of. Some quotes (“It’s lamb on a stick, you should try it!”—Panic in the Streets) lasted only a matter of days, while others (“I can’t help myself!”—Peter Lorre, M.)
survived all tests of time.

13

That Christmas I went home. I owed my parents, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year, a visit. And to be honest I’d been feeling a bit
homesick. I asked Dwaine if he wanted to come with me, but he demurred.

“No Chaldean rune worship for this fallen Christian,” he said. “Besides, I hate Christmas so much I’m sure I’d spoil it
for your entire family.”

I recall riding the train home from Grand Central, the series of wind-up toys I’d bought for Christmas presents riding on the baize seat beside
me, the winter landscape flashing by beyond the green-shaded window like frames in a movie. To the train wheels’ steady kachumps my mind
flashed its own mental movie frames, horrific images of Dwaine dangling from the light fixture in our kitchen, or half-floating in a tub cloudy with
red water. Why these images came to me I had no idea; I had no reason to believe, back then, that Dwaine would want to harm himself.

14

I visited my mother in the bridal boutique where she worked. She made no effort to hide her displeasure at my having quit college and, as if that
wasn’t bad enough, choosing to stay in the city for no good reason rather than come home. She blamed Dwaine, of course, whom sight unseen she had
taken a dislike to. “Cretino,” she said of him, snatching a fistful of fake pearls from a cardboard box filled with them on her back
room worktable. But most of my mother’s accusations against Dwaine weren’t made explicitly, using words. She preferred dirty looks,
eye-rolls, shrugs, heavy sighs, and other gestures swelling with innuendo, a language she spoke (still speaks) much more fluently than she speaks
English or Italian.

“I no mind. I am use to be left alone to worry about my son while he risk his life in dat maledetto city. Per che cosa? So he can
be a movie star! Pfff! Maybe I come down there; maybe you friend he make of me a movie star, too. Pffff!”

“Mom, don’t do this to me, I beseech you.”

“Do what? I no do nutting. Is you life. Ma figurati! Non me ne frega niente.
I no give a goop.”

Of Barnum’s nine thousand-plus inhabitants, my father and I alone were immune to the charms of my mother’s Italian accent, as thick and
pungent as a Genovese salami, and which, like a witch’s brew, could transform air into hair (as in “first I put hair in my
tire, then I go get an air cut,”) and shirt sleeves into leaves (as in “roll up you leave when you go rake de sleeve.”)
When not abusing words on an individual basis my mom tortured whole phrases, turning all of a sudden Japanese (“allowassan”), and
mangling “I couldn’t care less” into the less grammatical but more onomatopoeic “I no give a goop.” Together with her
accent my mom’s movie star looks—a fusion of Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, with Magnani’s fierce gypsy eyes and Loren’s
sensual lips—made her a local cause célèbre. Which might have been impressive had the locality been, say, Boston and not Barnum,
possibly the dreariest town in the universe, with its crumbling hat factories and all-too-symbolic white elephant mascot.

I felt sorry for my poor Italian mother, trapped up there in that brick hellhole, sewing bridal headpieces for nitwits with nothing better to do than
instigate their own weddings. With her good looks she could have been a real movie star. She could have been courted by exiled Baltic princes, or
entertained aboard pale yachts captained by toad-faced Greek shipping magnates. Instead she married my bicycle-peddling inventor papa, who dragged her
off to Barnum, to divide her days between the bridal boutique and the First National supermarket (her shopping cart a Venetian gondola, the frozen food
aisle her Grand Canal).

15

I dropped into my father’s laboratory, a stucco shack at the bottom of our driveway. My mother called it The Building, as if it were the only
standing structure in the world, let alone in Barnum, Connecticut. A sign on the door said, “Please enter by window.” The window was open.
I climbed in and entered my father’s laboratory to find him bent over his bench, working in a cone of dusty light, wearing his ratty cardigan and
deerstalker hat and smiling the little potato smile he always wore when concentrating. I approached cautiously, my sneakers sending up ruddy puffs
where they broke through floorboards.

“Watch your step, my boy,” said my father. “This is one very holy shrine.”

With its frankincense of solder smoke, sawdust, scorched metal, and orange rind, The Building was a kind of shrine, the place where as a child I
came to worship my absentminded genius papa, to gaze in wonder and awe upon his Miracles.

“What’s wrong with the front door?” I asked.

“Ah!” He lowered his soldering gun. “I’ll show you.”

He led me to and opened the vestibule door. There, sunning just inside the main door in a patch of light from the window, was a black snake at least
three feet long. “He lives under the floor boards. I feed him a loaf of bread once a week. He seems happy and we leave each other alone.”
He closed the door and led me back to his workbench.

“Have I shown you my latest?” he said, nodding toward a device the size of a toaster, with a Pyrex dish suspended over a lens opening on
top. The dish held a spoonful of a pasty brown substance that I recognized immediately as one forbidden to me as a child. “I call it the P-B
Analyzer,” my father explained. “It measures the color, texture and consistency of peanut butter. Loathsome substance,” he added,
grimacing. “Whatever its consistency, it is consistently loathsome.”

As a boy I loved watching my father work. I especially loved watching him at the lathe, his metal-stained fingers curved over the spinning chuck, his
other hand turning an array of chromium dials, guiding the bit that sliced like a clipper ship prow through copper, brass, and aluminum seas, spewing
steaming turnings that I’d sweep up off the floor afterwards, saving the longest and brightest for a collection I kept in a little wooden box by
my bed.

“Wasn’t it Henry Thoreau,” I noted wisely, “who said that all of our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved
end?”

“Have an orange, why don’t you, old boy?”

While peeling it I saw that my father’s zipper was—as usual—down. I pointed this out to him. “Ah, so it is, my boy, so indeed
it is,” he said without looking up from the circuit he soldered. “Well, as Churchill said, a dead bird never fell from its nest.”

Like Churchill before him my father is a dedicated Sunday painter. His latest work-in-progress rested against a table-mounted easel, a landscape with a
Mission style building with white stucco walls and a red, clay tiled roof. Below the building’s bell tower there was an odd, star-shaped window.

“That’s Hudson Priory,” my father explained. “A monastery in New York State. I go there now and then for the peace and quiet.
One thing I’ll say for those Trappists, they know how to keep their bloody mouths shut.”

When it was time for lunch we walked up the steep driveway, stopping along the way for a ritual piss. As we emptied our bladders into the milkweed and
Queen Anne’s Lace my father said to me, “The last time I visited the monastery it occurred to me that I ought to have been a monk. A few
chores, a prayer or two, a bowl of rice and a clean bed. Who could ask for more? …”

Like brass turnings from his lathe my father’s urine spun and glittered. As a child I marveled at the thickness and height achieved by my
father’s stream, at its lofty gleaming goldenness, and wondered would I ever piss so high, so far? It was a marvel equivalent to his inventions,
and to the parts that went into making them: the relays, the lenses, the capacitors, the tubes and solenoids and potentiometers boxed and stored on
shelves in The Building’s dusty back room. For me the parts in those boxes were like the planets, moons and asteroids of the solar system, with
my father the sun at its center.

“That’s what I should have done, isn’t it, old boy?” my father said, packing his uncircumcised tool away. “I should have
been a bloody monk. True,” he added, pursing his lips and nodding, “I would have had to believe in God and salvation and all that crap. But
I could have faked that. Most do, I’m sure.”

With these words spoken in the equivalent of a sigh my father wiped my mother, myself, and all future generations of our family off the face of the
earth.

Dear Old Papa: why hast thou forsaken me?

16

After two years in New York I found Barnum unbearable. I felt like a ghost wandering its streets, streets that reeked of the past—a moldy, dusty
smell. I threw away the Christmas presents I’d bought for my old friends. I didn’t even bother looking them up. What for, when every cell
in my body had changed? Compared to those of New York, the streets of my hometown looked gutted and radioactive, as if a nuclear bomb had been dropped
there, one of those bombs that levels dreams but leaves buildings and people standing. Compared to the streets of New York those in my hometown seemed
deserted. The few faces that darted into them looked nervous and suspicious, like the faces one-armed Spencer Tracy runs into in Bad Day at Black Rock.There was nothing worth filming there. The houses were tombs; the stores were museums of empty shelves. The town’s
only movie theater, having shown porno films for a few years, turned briefly into a Christian Science Reading Room before closing its doors for good.
It amazed me that I, Nigel DePoli, movie actor and best friend of Dwaine Fitzgibbon, had sprung from such inauspicious beginnings. After two days I
couldn’t stand any more.

I left Christmas on morning. I told my parents I was sorry, but that I had some important things to do. My father reacted with his usual absentminded
indifference; my mother laid on the guilt, sobbing her way through a Puccini tragedy about a mother whose son has become a total stranger to her.

“Go, go! Leave me stuck wid your useless father! Go back to you maledetto friend! Pfff! I no give a goop!”

Then I was back on the train again, sitting on a lumpy baize seat watching the green world pass by, rewinding the film of my journey back to Grand
Central Terminal, to Long Island City, to Extra Alley, to our apartment, the gruesome images of before drawing closer and sharper until they hung clear
as movie stills in the theater lobby of my mind.

In place of a dead body and a suicide note I found a newspaper-wrapped package waiting for me on the tub/table, adorned with a ribbon made out of a
yard of exposed film. Inside: a framed photograph of Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. To the second best actor in the world,the attached note read. Merry Christmas, Bud Brando.

I hadn’t gotten Dwaine anything. In a panic I rushed to the Strand, where, among the dizzying stacks of used dusty books there, I found something
I thought he might like, an oversized coffee table book published by Time-Life, stuffed with pictures of movies and stars, titledLife Goes to the Movies.

I left it, gift wrapped, on Dwaine’s bed.

17

But Dwaine’s real present didn’t come wrapped in anything. On New Year’s Eve, after we’d eaten a shoplifted steak and drunk
half a bottle of cheap champagne, as I was getting ready for bed expecting him to go off alone on one of his mystery malks, Dwaine stood in my doorway.

“What’s up?” he said.

“Going to bed,” I answered. “Why?”

“Get dressed. I want to show you something.”

As we passed through the kitchen he pointed to the champagne bottle (actually asti spumante) on the tub/table.

“Grab the bubbly.”

I had no idea where we were going, and didn’t ask, aware that this was a time for blind faith. We both wore our pea coats, purchased at
Guiseppe’s Thrift Emporium, mine with blue plastic buttons, Dwaine’s with shiny brass ones embossed with anchors. We walked into the harsh
headwind that met us under the highway overpass, whose whooshing traffic sounds echoed ominously between pylons. Out of the darkness Dwaine told me
about his brother, Jack. I didn’t know he had a brother; he’d never mentioned having a brother before. Then again, he’d hardly said
anything at all about his family. As we walked he explained that Jack had been one of the biggest narcotics dealers in the country, that he’d
owned a huge compound in the Arizona desert, with a fleet of tractor-trailers, four Cessna planes, and a small army of paperless Mexicans. When Dwaine
last saw Jack he had just gotten back from “overseas” (I assumed he meant Vietnam). On his way to New York from Oakland he’d stopped
in Arizona to pay Jack a visit. Like his parents, Dwaine had been operating under the impression that his brother was an undergraduate philosophy
student at the University of Arizona. Instead when he arrived there he found a compound patrolled by armed guards and surveillance cameras.