Flicker (7 page)

And we didn't. Five minutes farther along and the film caught fire in the midst of its grand, gory climax: an impaling scene of extraordinary vividness, the camera spiraling down upon the doomed vampire lord as if it were the very stake on which his life would expire. It was a dizzying, nauseating effect; I welcomed seeing it vanish from the screen before the blood gushed. With a curse Clare shut the projector down. “Worst thing is: somebody amputated all the credits. They do that on television with garbage like this. Leaves more time for commercials. There's some striking camera work—like that last shot. I wonder who did it.” She carried the reel to the rewind table. “Damn their eyes for mutilating this!”

“But it's crap, isn't it?”

“Oh? Is it? You saw less than ten minutes of it, and you're so sure.”

“Well, you said so.”

“And you just go along with whatever you hear, is that right?”

“But aren't vampire movies crap?”

“Carl Dreyer made a pretty good one, as I recall.”

Dumb mistake. Clare had shown
Vampyr
only last month. “Well, yes, I guess … I mean … ”

“Think for yourself, Jonny.”

“Actually, I sort of like horror movies.”

“Which are, by and large, crap. But this one … there are some interesting bits. Like that final sequence—I wish I could've seen the whole thing.”

“The impaling? Pretty extreme.”

“Yes, wasn't it? But unusually extreme. Something about the twist he gives the camera … makes it seem the shadows are coming up to swallow you. Never saw anything like that before. I don't know … maybe the man had something.”

“Dialogue sounded really clunky.”

“Awful. But that wouldn't have bothered you if you'd seen the bedroom scenes a little earlier. You know, vampire seductions. Very explicit. I could swear there was actual fornication. Odd about that. When I looked again, I couldn't find it. Even so, I'd like to know how they snuck that part past the censors back then. Must have been 1937, 1938. Olga Tell was in the film. Would-be Garbo of that period. I didn't know she appeared in trash like this.”

“I'd like to see those bedroom scenes,” I told her. “Just for scholarly purposes.”

“Out of luck, lover. That's the part that got burned up.” Clare inspected the film and wagged her head. “This'll never make it through the machine again. I'm not even going to bother rewinding.” She dropped the reel in its canister and dusted her hands over it. “We've got better stuff to watch.”

As Clare began to load another movie, I asked, “If this is such trash, why do the French think it's so good?”

“The
French!”
Clare laughed. “You mean my two visiting friends and maybe a couple of their friends back on the Left Bank? That's probably the size of Castle's following. Of course, in France that counts as a 'movement.' ”

“Well, anyway, why did they say it was important?”

“Defensive pretension. The froggies are like that about American
movies. They can't just enjoy something because it's funny or exciting or clever—not if it was made by money-hungry philistine slobs. If
they
like it, it's got to be 'important.' So they wrap it up in miles of theory.”

I wanted to ask more, but Clare was growing impatient. She had
Twentieth Century
ready to go on the projector and insisted we get down to some “real movie making.” So we did. But I had the clear impression she was rushing us along to other things, trying hard to dismiss
Feast of the Undead.
Why, I wondered. And what to make of her strange indecisiveness about Max Castle?
“Maybe
the man had something… .”
Maybe
had no place in her critical vocabulary. Usually she made fanatically final judgments, trusting her first impression all the way.

One more thing I couldn't easily shake off. All the while we sat together laughing our way through Howard Hawks's hard-boiled little farce, I kept remembering how reluctant Clare had been to take her eyes off that vile vampire flick, how she'd shrugged me aside to return to it with such concentration. What had she seen in that sadly tattered sample of Castle's work that I had missed?

A day or so later, wondering how much more I might be able to see of
Feast of the Undead,
I approached Clare asking where she'd stashed the reel. She shot me a disapproving look. “I told you it was scrap. I disposed of it.”

“You threw it out?” I'd never known her to do that. She'd once told me that no film, whatever its quality or condition, should be destroyed. Movies, in her view, were scarce and fragile cultural documents; they ought to be preserved down to the last withering frame. I started to ask, “Weren't there any parts that might be …” but she cut me off.

“Forget it. I don't serve slop like that in this house.”

That shut me up. But it left me more curious than ever. The next time I heard the name “Castle,” I'd be sure to pay attention.

The education I received from Clare was generous in its proportions and passionately imparted, but it didn't come free of charge. As I soon discovered, I was expected to work it off. A modest tuition to begin with but it soon grew. When Clare asked the first time if I would mind sweeping out The Classic one Saturday morning, I assumed she was asking a special favor and eagerly complied. God knows, the theater needed it. I would have guessed it hadn't been swept for months. But from that time forward, sweeping up became my regular Saturday chore. A few weeks later and I found myself scrubbing down and repainting the theater's closet-sized unisex toilet; soon after that, I was running errands of all descriptions.

Before long, I was asking myself how a tiny, hole-in-the-wall operation like The Classic could possibly require so much work. What with repairing, replacing, purchasing, cleaning, polishing, picking up and delivering, my unpaid labor was soon snowballing into a full-time job, most of it menial drudgery. Each morning at breakfast, as strictly as a general marshaling her army of one, Clare would tick off the chores I was expected to discharge that day. Order more coffee for the espresso machine, buy more toilet paper, replace the burnt-out light bulbs, fix the broken seats, tack down the carpet in the lobby, chase to the printers, the distributors, the post office, the bank. There came a point when I began to wonder if our love affair was really a way for Clare to make up for years of neglect to her capital investment with the benefit of cheap labor. So I complained, if feebly, reminding her that I did after all have classes to attend and assignments to do.

She dismissed the protest, insisting that my real education was happening at The Classic and included the slave labor I was performing. She never apologized for what she asked of me, never so much as said please. It was all work she'd done herself in the past to keep The Classic going. She simply ordered it done, and done cheerfully.

“It all belongs to the movies,” she told me. “The pictures need a theater, the theater's a human habitat. Sure, this place has always
looked pretty crummy. That's because there's only so much I can do, and there's nobody to help. If I could afford to make it a picture palace, I would. Believe me, the art of the cinema begins with scraping the chewing gum off the seats.”

Apologizing abjectly, I surrendered and did as I was told.

There was only one task in all the lot that was remotely intellectual. When Clare learned I was ten fast fingers on a typewriter, she at once put me to work typing her program notes. This assignment, what with all the revisions Clare now took the liberty of producing, often kept me up into the small hours of the night; but it meant that I'd be the first to read each new installment of her work. With me to take over the dog labor of cutting stencils, mimeographing, collating, stapling, her writing began to grow in length. Soon she was adding a monthly essay to the notes, several dense paragraphs of film history, criticism, and comment on the passing cinema scene. While I was no more than the hands that typed the words, I now felt I was some significant part of The Classic's cultural role; I'd given Clare the chance to unfold thoughts she hadn't the time to gather before.

It wasn't until well into the second year of my semivoluntary apprenticeship that Clare began to introduce me to the higher mysteries of programming, as well as accounting and budgeting—the “business end” of things. These she discharged from a cubbyhole office just above the theater where she kept her files, her personal archives, her legal papers and ledgers. Clare regularly spent two or three hours each working day on the telephone tracing films and bargaining with distributors. “Listen and take notes,” she instructed me. “It's the only way to learn.” And I'd glue my ear to the extension phone while she went about the tedious, time-consuming toil of securing the movies that were The Classic's staff of life. In those prehistoric days, when repertory and revival theaters were rare phenomena, the task of tracking down old and unusual films, finding decent prints, negotiating for them with hard-nosed and mercenary distributors often required the combined talents of a detective and a diplomat.

About this time, an envious Sharkey put in his bid for more of my services. Convinced that he was cruelly overworked in the projection booth, he saw no reason why he shouldn't share the slave. But Clare said nothing doing, turning his request away with a snappish finality that Sharkey never challenged.

At first I had the impression this was a matter of snobbery on Clare's part. As captain of the good ship Classic, she regarded the mechanical
side of the enterprise as below decks and Sharkey as the hairy ape who stoked the boilers. Not that Clare couldn't handle the apparatus herself if the need arose. She took charge of the projectors whenever the two of us had a viewing session. Even on those occasions, however, she insisted on keeping me away from the machines. I assumed that, out of some uncustomary sense of kindness, she was sparing me the dirty work I ought to view with principled repugnance. But I was getting things wrong. Clare's seeming disdain for the projectionist's trade was simply a reflection of her rancor against Sharkey. If she was determined to keep me out of his domain, it was only because she felt that Sharkey had unloaded too much work upon her as it was. Her orders were absolute. “I don't want you lifting a finger to help that bum.”

One day, without warning, Sharkey failed to report in. I arrived at the theater that evening to find Clare setting up for the scheduled screening, hefting film canisters, testing the projectors, and cursing Sharkey an inspired streak. It was hot, heavy work, but, stripped down to a clammy tanktop (in which she cut quite a sexy figure), she was going about it with complete self-assurance. “May I help?” I asked.

She refused. “If that son of a bitch knows you can run these fucking machines, he'll never show up. Goddamit! It's
his
job.” I was assigned to the ticket counter and espresso machine.

Though Clare chewed him out royally when he returned, Sharkey's erratic absences continued, culminating in a week-long disappearance. We later discovered he'd spent the time in a Tijuana jail, charged with drunk and disorderly conduct. Clare had no choice but to hire a replacement; that was costly. The price of a union-scale projectionist could wipe out a week's worth of the theater's earnings. After that, she decided it was time for me to learn the projectors, even though she knew that once Sharkey had trained me, he would feel even more license to goof off. As eagerly as I looked forward to assisting Sharkey, I was troubled by one unresolved issue that lay between us. I had, after all, taken his woman from him … or at least that was the self-congratulatory slant I privately placed upon things. A man like Sharkey was bound to be hurting over that. Should I apologize … make excuses to save his pride? I needn't have worried. Without being asked, Sharkey put the matter to rest on our first night in the booth.

“Listen, pal, I want to thank you for helping me out with Clare.”
He dropped the remark as he pulled on the frayed undershirt that served as his official projectionist's uniform. As far as I can recall, this miserable little rag, sweated yellow front and back, was never sent out to be washed. “I've been hoping somebody would take the old girl off my hands for a while.”

“Oh?” I said, shaping the vowel to mean
is that what I'm doing, helping you out?
And “Oh?” again, meaning
for a while?
Sharkey, assiduously polishing the projectors, failed to hear the implied questions.

“Seems like what our Miss Swann needs is something more on the effete side, you know? Lots more sex in the head. You're just the man for the job. See, the woman just never did know how to be an animal. God knows I've tried to warm her up. But it's like trying to move a glacier with your bare hands. Myself, I'm strictly a steak and potatoes man. And you can hold the potatoes, serve the meat raw. Now, Clare … like you've probably noticed, she's happy just to read the menu.”

I'd noticed nothing of the sort. If anything, I found Clare's sexual appetite voracious, and her erotic imagination nearly overwhelming. But if that was the way Sharkey preferred to see it …

I remember distinctly the impression I carried away from that first lesson on the machines. Now that I was to lay hands on them in earnest, I realized what strange instruments they were. The picture out front on the screen that evening was Cocteau's
Beauty and the Beast,
a gossamer-fine fairy tale that came as close as any film ever has to capturing true magic. But here inside the dark, tiny hotbox at the rear of the theater was a brace of wheezing, rasping, thirty-five-millimeter projectors with no more magic to them than a couple of broken coffee grinders. And there was Sharkey, sweating over his task like some frenzied demon toiling in the bowels of hell, muttering away, pleading with these rattletrap monsters to please be on their best behavior. How could the delicately wrought elegance of such a movie emerge from these infernal contraptions? In the sweltering booth the machines, which broke down regularly, snagging and singeing the film, seemed at war with the hapless movie that was forced to run the risky gauntlet of their pitiless gears and wheels. From their menacing look and sound, the projectors might almost be intent on devouring the fragile artistry entrusted to their care.