Life Goes to the Movies (8 page)

“One of the guards tells me my brother’s waiting out back,” said Dwaine. “I turn the corner and freeze. There’s like a
hundred people camped around the biggest swimming pool I’ve ever seen, all naked and smoking swagg. My brother, he comes out of the cabana hut.
He’s grown enormous, three hundred pounds, with a thick beard. He looks like Huffnagel. ‘Meet my new family,’ Jack says, throwing his
fat arms around me. Just then this little kid with no clothes on walks over to the edge of the pool and pees right into it. My brother laughed,”
said Dwaine. “He thought it was hysterical.”

Dwaine went on to tell me how Jack gave him a tour of the place, including the giant Quonset hut where a crew of paperless workers dried, cut and
packaged cocaine paste, while a smaller group of University of Arizona chemistry majors synthesized Quaaludes and LSD. His brother handed Dwaine a
sheet of windowpane acid, hot off the press. “‘Take as much as you want,’ Jack says to me. ‘There’s plenty more where
that came from.’”

As we kept walking Dwaine lit a cigarette, offered me one. He knew I didn’t smoke, but not wanting to break the air of intimacy between us I took
it anyway. He even lit it for me, his fingers forming a cup of orange flame under my chin. He told me how, after his visit, while Jack drove him to the
airport, he asked Dwaine if he cared to go partners with him.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I said no thanks. My brother, he looks at me like I’m the dumbest ass to ever walk the face of the earth. I’d never seen such a
disgusted look before, not counting my father’s face after he found out about my Army discharge.”

Dwaine fell suddenly silent then, like he’d said too much, or maybe it was just one of those dramatic pauses he was so good at, or maybe he just
wanted to get past the sounds of cars avalanching on the expressway overhead as we walked under it. It occurred to me then that he drove my curiosity
the way some people drive a car, flooring it or hitting the brakes, nothing in between. He pulled a shiny silver flask from his pea coat pocket, one
that I’d never seen before, drank from it and handed it to me. The chilled liquor burned my lips and carved a warm tunnel deep down into my guts.

We jumped a spiked iron fence to land with solid thuds on the frozen cemetery earth, and kept walking, passing the shiny flask back and forth. When he
started talking again I listened the way I always listened to Dwaine, as if every word was a door being opened to let in more of the world. Drug
dealers! Compounds in the Arizona desert! To think I knew someone who knew, had known, such criminals; that my best friend’s brother had been a
world-class drug dealer. Dwaine might have said that he knew John Dillinger, or that Al Capone was his brother, or Buffalo Bill! The whole illicit
country seemed to have spilled from Dwaine’s lips and landed in a bright gruesome puddle like vomit at my feet. Only it was good vomit; it was
All-American vomit, it was just the sort of vomit I craved, the corrosive kind that could completely dissolve my immigrant son’s sense of being
an alien nobody from nowhere.

The sky went from cobalt to Prussian blue. Maybe it was the booze in my belly, but the colors of that night seemed to generate their own light without
any help from the mercury vapor lamps or the moon. Was Dwaine drunk, too? If so he didn’t show it; he never did, while I felt every drop sloshing
around inside my brain like Shelly Winters in a rowboat.

18

We crossed an ocean of fancy graves to drift into a bay of plain tombstones bearing mostly Irish names: O’Rourke, O’Connor, Doherty, Doyle,
Fitzgerald … Dwaine picked up speed. Soon we stood before a grave with a Distinguished Service Cross sprouting like a bronze
sunflower from it:

John Daniel Fitzgibbon

b: October 15, 1946

d: February 14, 1975

Beloved Son of Sean and Irene

“That’s him?” I said, and Dwaine nodded. “Your brother was in the war, too?”

“Infantry,” said Dwaine. “Two tours. Jack got drafted; I didn’t. He always believed it was because of the color of his skin.
See, he had darker skin than me. Black Irish, some people call it. It made no sense to me, but it did to him, and I think he held it against me, too,
in his way. Jack was like that. When he got pissed off he’d call me a little Irish nigger. Projection, the shrinks call it.”

“How’d he die?”

Dwaine’s face went through at least three transmission shifts there in the dark before he answered: “Narcotics overdose related cardiac
arrest”—as if it were something he’d been brainwashed into saying by ruthless Chinese operatives.

Then, unzipping his fly, he undertook what apparently was the crowning ritual of his graveside vigils, and peed a steady stream onto his
brother’s grave mound.

“ ‘Dwaine,’ my brother said to me last time I saw him, ‘if I ever overdose I want you to promise me you’ll piss on
my grave.’ Well …” Clouds of steam rose from the wet earth as rivulets formed around Dwaine’s boot caps. “A fitting
tribute,” Dwaine added, zipping his fly, “to a guy who pissed his life away.”

19

We left Jack’s grave. As we did Dwaine said: “Have you ever wondered, babe, why so many things starting with the letter D are bad?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like Death. Disaster. Despair. Depression. Disease. Denial.”

“What about Dreams?” I said. “And Daylight?”

“…Disenchantment, Depravity, Drunkenness, Dishonor…”

“…Destiny, Delight, Determination—”

“…Destruction, Defoliation…”

“…Doughnuts? Dominoes?”

“…Destitution, Dogma, Divorce …”

“…Dogs, Daisies, Dill Pickles?”

“…Dysentery, Dropsy, Defenestration…”

“…Dolphins? Driftwood?”

“Driftwood?” said Dwaine.

“Driftwood’s great! You light beach fires with it. It floats!”

“Sometimes you worry me, babe, you know that?”

20

By then I was staggering—the champagne, the late hour. With Dwaine’s arm around me for support we made our way to the mausoleums. The
family names on the bronze doors were mostly Italian. We gazed in awe through barred windows at altars glowing in whisky-colored light, at the stained
windows depicting the Stations of the Cross.

“You Wops sure know how to die, I’ll grant you that,” said Dwaine.

“I wish our apartment were this nice,” I said.

“Yeah. Some people have got it made.”

We both laughed then. For the first time I felt us both on the same level, almost. It gave me a weird mixed feeling, the kind I’d get on
Christmas mornings after opening all my presents and finding that the colorful wrappings had been the best part.

21

We came upon a freshly dug grave, the raw earth piled up beside it under a tarpaulin. The hole went at least eight feet down. An aluminum ladder lay
stretched alongside it. I dared Dwaine. “Darers go first,” he said.

So I climbed down. Being the son of an atheist, I didn’t believe at all in heaven or hell, and had no reason to fear a hole in the ground. As I
went down Dwaine made werewolf sounds.

“Very funny,” I said.

“Not at all,” said Dwaine. “In fact it’s rather grave.”

I reached the bottom.

“Step off the ladder,” Dwaine urged, and I did. He withdrew it.

“Good evening,” he said with his hands cupped around his mouth. “
We hope that you are enjoying your stay at the Club Inferno. Tonight at midnight we will have bingo in the Seventh Circle Lounge with prizes
complimentary to you. Free wailing and gnashing of teeth instructions are available. See Moloch in the cabana.”

Suddenly Dwaine stepped out of sight. Still I wasn’t afraid. What was there to be afraid of? In fact I thought it was funny, and started laughing
despite not having been in so dark a place since my mother locked me in the attic for smashing a shaving cream pie in the family dog’s face. Then
my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw something jutting out of the dirt beside me, a milled corner casting a slivery gleam of moonlight, a
coffin’s edge. I said, “Dwaine?” And then I screamed, “Dwaaaainnne!”

He peered down.

“You rang?”

“Get me out of here!”

“Why? Did you see Lon Chaney, Jr.?”

“There’s dead people down here!”

“Who were you expecting, the June Taylor Dancers?”

“Goddammit, give me that fucking ladder!”

My feet hardly touched the rungs as I bounded. When I reached the top Dwaine pulled me out the rest of the way, Hercules pulling Cerberus from the
infernal regions. I fell panting against a nearby tombstone.

“How bold of you,” said Dwaine, quoting Dante or Virgil or whoever,“to descend into the depths where the futile dead live on without their wits.”

“Screw you!” I said.

“Hey, come on, it couldn’t have been that bad.”

“How would you know?”

“Believe me,” Dwaine said with a smile. “I know.”

22

From there we rode the subway all the way to Times Square. I’d never been to Times Square on New Year’s Eve, but had heard tales of crowds
and muggings and of people getting shot and stabbed. Dwaine assured me that crowds wouldn’t be a problem.

“Not where we’re going,” he said.

As much as Dwaine hated Christmas, he put great stock in New Year’s Eve, as if the mere turning of a calendar page could usher in bright
prospects while eradicating all evidence of the botched, abortive past. Having exited the subway, we made our way through the throngs already gathering
along 42
^nd
Street, passing below the bulky marquees of once illustrious movie theaters now gone to seed, the Empire, the Liberty, the Lyric,
the Harlem, the New Amsterdam, the Selwyn … pagan cathedrals where, as Dwaine saw it, people went to be delivered from their dull,
pathetic, and often painful lives, and had their prayers answered immediately, if only for an hour and a half. Now half of those grand old theaters
were boarded shut, while the other half showed only porn and slasher flicks.

“Such a shame,” said Dwaine.

As the crowds grew ominous and ambulances prowled the streets Dwaine pulled me off the sidewalk and into the arcade of a building where a disused
subway entrance sat blocked by planks, several of which he did in with a swift kick of his boot.

“After you,” he said, bowing.

We headed down a flight of stairs, dark and dripping, so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Dwaine lit his cigarette lighter. It
hardly made a dent in the darkness. My legs shook.

“Don’t be scared,” Dwaine said. “Just pretend you’re in a movie. Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”

At the bottom of the stairs Dwaine put out the lighter and took a small flashlight from his pocket. He pointed it at a mildew-covered mosaic on the
wall. I saw the bite-sized tiles spelling 42
^nd
STREET.

I asked, “How long has this been here?”

“Since ‘38. It was built as a crossover station just before the Second World War, but was never actually used.”

“How do you know these things?”

“Hey, I live here.”

Though windless the subway tunnel was as cold as the street. I shivered in my surplus pea coat. En route to other places trains roared through the
station. Dwaine looked up and down the platform, then jumped down into the tracks, telling me to do the same and warning me to watch out for the third
rail.

“They say one of the most efficient ways to commit suicide is to piss on one of them things,” he said as we started walking, headed uptown.
“Seven hundred volts up the urethra, zzzzzap!”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Don’t. Nothing’s worse than the smell of fried piss.”

A train light appeared, highlighting old newspapers and scampering rats. We flattened our backs into a maintenance notch. The train roared by. Dwaine
walked another dozen yards then he stopped. A rusted ladder climbed toward a matrix of pink dusty light. He went up first and I followed him, into a
crawlspace under a grating that lead us on hands and knees into a chamber about eight feet long by six feet wide by five feet deep. There was an old
fruit crate there, so coated with wax drippings it looked like something growing at the bottom of the sea, and a filthy mattress, and a wooden box of
candles—long, tapered ones. We stretched out on the mattress and looked up through the grate at the lights of Times Square, pulsing away like a
heavenly pinball machine, tinting the air with bright circus colors.

“The Stonehenge of the New Millennium,” said Dwaine, looking up. “Or the asshole of the world, depending on your point of
view.”

“Is this where you go when you don’t come home?”

“Maybe. Sometimes.”

“Don’t you get bored? Don’t you get lonely?”

“I am lonely, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

“I mean what do you do down here?”

“What do I do?”

“Yeah, what do you do?”

“Nothing. I don’t do anything, babe. That’s the whole point. You’re not supposed to do anything in a sanctuary, and
that’s just what this place is, a sanctuary. I come here to get away from all the crazies up there.” He pointed up. “To be safe with
the alligators and the sewer rats. Listen.” He cupped a hand over his ear. “Hear that? That’s the OM, the gut-rumble of the New World
Order.” (I listened; I didn’t hear a thing.) “Listen … ” He made the sound for me. And then I heard it: a
steady hum, like the sound a refrigerator makes when it’s on. “They say there’s a Moog synthesizer down here somewhere, right here in
the belly of civilization. They say that it gives off a special frequency designed to calm human nerves. They say it’s been humming that one note
since 1971, since the day I signed a piece of paper solemnly swearing to defend my country against all enemies foreign and domestic. Right up
there,” he pointed, “in the Armed Forces Recruiting Station in Times Square, that’s where I signed on the dotted line.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you enlist?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Because my father dared me to. Because I was sick of him calling me a pussy. Because I wanted to be John
Wayne in The Green Berets. Or maybe it was the OM that drew me there, like a snake charmer’s flute. It still draws me to this day.
Listen.” We both listened. “They say that OM is all that’s holding this city together. Supposedly if it should ever stop for any
reason the forces binding civilization together will dissolve and the citizens of Gotham will go wild, rampaging, screaming bloody naked in the
streets, tearing each other’s throats out like werewolves. Someday, babe, OM or no OM, it’s gonna happen, the other shoe is gonna drop. And
when it does, man, right here—that’s where you’ll find me.”