Life Goes to the Movies (11 page)

By the time the credits roll only a handful remain in their seats. Dwaine stands up and shouts, “Bravo! Bravissimo!” I stand too,
but only because Dwaine has nudged me up with his elbow, saying, “Don’t you know a goddamn masterpiece when you see one?” (When it
comes to movies I know better than to argue with Dwaine.)

As we leave the hotel bound for another night of sandy dreams, Dwaine falls into a reverent silence. I’ve seen him fall mute like that only twice
before, after Dog Day AfternoonandOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, movies that left Dwaine bleeding inside, with silence the next
best thing to a tourniquet.

The surf roars. The breeze spits up cottony flecks of foam.

Dwaine grabs my hand and holds it. He does it nonchalantly, the way you might pick up a bright shell from the beach. I don’t say a thing or react
in any way, I’m too surprised to react. After a while it seems perfectly natural, him holding my hand that way, like we’ve been holding
hands forever, since we were five years old, like we were born to hold hands, Dwaine and I.

We walk a quarter mile or so and then Dwaine stops and takes his clothes off, handing me cufflinks, studs, bow tie and suspenders, turning me into his
valet there on the beach. He drops the rest and runs, plunging like a fullback into the surf, tackling waves, paddling beyond them toward the horizon,
adding his mystery to the other mysterious blue shapes floating way out there.

12

Afterwards, as we lie dozing, Dwaine talks in whispers that blend with surf about Night Vision and why he likes it so much, how it combines
Scorsese’s street poetry with Peckinpaw’s nihilism, Schlesinger’s satire, Terrence Malick’s starkness, and Truffaut’s
nursery school charm. As his voice fades into snores I ask myself: why do I like him so much? Is it that brooding whale of a forehead? Is it those Gary
Cooper heat-seeking missile eyes? Is it the Technicolor nightmares that haunt his sleep, the dark terrors saturating his black Irish blood?

Unable to sleep, I wander off into the Miami night and find myself downtown, where deco buildings burrow under the same moonlight that winks off car
hoods. Except for the all-night porno theater everything’s shut down. The ticket clerk, the spitting image of the lady in the Palmolive
dishwashing liquid commercials, refuses me admittance because a) I have no I.D. on me and b) I’m wearing my bathing suit. “But I’m
twenty years old!” I swear to her. “Here, look at my wrinkles!” I insist, pressing my forehead to the Plexiglas, but this cuts no
mustard with Madge. “I wish I could oblige you, dear, but I’d get my ass fired.”

Madge directs me to an all-night coffee shop, one of those stainless steel marvels overflowing with grease and light. I’ve got my black book with
me and sit staring through my reflection in the dark glass, wondering: will Dwaine and I ever really be famous? Are these but the inauspiciously dim
early days of a dazzlingly bright future?

13

We’re sunbathing in the cabana the next morning when Bull Duncan charges up to us, waving a fistful of forged room service chits.

“You snakes in the grass! I’ll have your balls boiled!”

“Excuse me.” Dwaine waves him away. “But you’re blocking our rays.”

Duncan catalogues a series of bodily threats, the majority of which involve dismemberment by hired professionals, all of which Dwaine shakes off like
dew from the bull’s beard. Emboldened by his effrontery, I rummage in my beach bag, where—after some deliberation—I press the
Insultomatic’s blue button. Wise to me this time, Bull Duncan pulls my hand from the bag, exposing the device, which he snatches from my grip.

“Nice,” he says, dropping it to the cabana deck where he grinds it to smithereens with the heel of a white Bally. Then he storms off, only
to return moments later with a bevy of hotel security personnel, including Mr. Sombrero. We’re about to get the heave-ho when a voice blending
Popeye and Cary Grant intervenes.

“One moment. These gentlemen are with me,” says a stranger, handing Mr. Sombrero a crisp folded twenty.

Mr. Sombrero in turn presents our savior with the balance due on Bull Duncan’s hotel tab, advancing a figure in excess of two hundred dollars.
“Charge it to my room,” says the stranger, showing his festival pass. “It’s the least these bastards can do for dragging me
down here.”

Duncan and the security guards head back to their silos.

The stranger looks familiar. Then I realize: he’s the star/writer/director/producer of Night Vision, the guy who played Gus. In real life
he looks taller, gaunter, paler and balder than on the screen. Even under the influence of the Miami sun his pale features look like a mortician has
had something to do with them. He wears a Claddagh ring just like Dwaine’s, but gold. “Flynn,” he introduces himself in the
backhanded manner of Mr. Bond. “Archibald Flynn. And what brings you to this sunny cemetery?”

“We’re filmmakers,” I say.

“So you’ve entered a film in this farce of a festival?”

“Our movie’s not made yet,” Dwaine explains.

“It’s a work in progress.”

“We’re shadows flickering across a screen.”

“We came with Bull Duncan.”

“We were part of his international press entourage.”

“Right, and I’m a bloody secret agent.”

Flynn reaches into his beach bag, pulls out a frazzled toupee and slaps it on his head. “Have you two had lunch yet?”

We shake our heads.

“My treat. It’s not every day I get a standing ovation.”

14

From the lobby of the Fontainebleau, amid bellhops in firing-squad regalia and a swinging ’60s decor of woggles, boomerangs and beanpoles, the
maitre d’ escorts us to our table in the Côte d’Azur lounge. Soon as we’re seated the sommelier (Clifton Web inMr. Belvedere Blows His Whistle) takes our drink orders. When Dwaine asks for water he takes offense. “Water?” The sommelier
gives him a frown and gestures with his towel-draped arm toward the ubiquitous ocean view. “Monsieur, there is water everywhere, why would
anyone want to drink it?”

“Water,” Dwaine insists.

“It will grow fish in your belly! It is for those who have sinned!”

“I’ve sinned. Now bring me some goddamn water.”

“Make it your best bottle,” says Flynn.

Over crabs parysis, trout amandine and veal cordon bleu Flynn fills us in on his theatrical past, explaining how he first fell in love with
American movies via Alan Ladd in Shane. “I wanted to be just like Alan Ladd, but taller,” he tells us, then goes on to say how he
had achieved half of his wish, sprouting to six-foot-four by his eighteenth birthday, when a wealthy octogenarian he’d been tending in a Galway
nursing home went to her glory, leaving him enough cash to go to America and pursue the other half. “I became a United States citizen just in
time to receive greetings from Uncle Sam.”

Unlike Dwaine, however, Flynn got no closer to Vietnam than Fort Dix, New Jersey, where according to him he contracted alopecia areata from a recycled
army helmet (“My war wound,” he tells us, tapping his toupee). But Flynn’s real war would be fought later in Hollywood, a war
against the forces of stereotyping that saw him cast in dozens of bad-guy bit roles, his handsome Irish face ending up, more often than not, on the
cutting room floor. Thirty-three years old (“like Jesus”), two-thirds bald and totally typecast, he bought a bottle of Cutty Sark and
carried it up into the Hollywood hills, intent on jumping off the fabled sign.

“Which letter?” Dwaine asks.

“What difference does it make?”

“Oh, it makes a difference.”

“I don’t know. H for Hell, I suppose.”

“Like Penny Entwistle!” I note with enthusiasm.

“So—then what happened?”

“I had a better idea.” Flynn sips water, wipes his thin Irish lips. “Flynn, you old fool, I said to myself, why not make your own
blasted film? And that’s what I’ve done, gentlemen. All I need now is a bloody distribution deal, for which I must re-enter the belly of
the beast.”

“Back to Hollywood, you mean?”

“That’s right. Back to Hollywood. Back to hell.”

“When will you go?” I ask.

“Soon as I get out of this particular hell.”

“I know two guys who would be glad to go with you,” says Dwaine with a kick to me under the table.

“You do?” says Flynn.

“Two really good guys,” I say.

“We could provide moral support,” says Dwaine.

“Could you?” says Flynn.

“We could,” I say.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Flynn says. “You especially.” He prods Dwaine’s chest with a gaunt, stiff finger.
“You think Vietnam was bad, do you? Don’t look so surprised. It’s obvious that you were there; I’ve seen that look too many
times not to know it. Well trust me, friend, till you’ve done battle with the Victor Charlies of Sunset Boulevard, you don’t know themeaning of war. Ambushes? Booby traps? Friendly fire? Hollywood’s got ’em all and Walt Disney, that antichrist, him and his
squeaky, verminous idol! People say this country is desolate. They’re right: it’s as desolate as a petrol station at night. But where
desolation meets decadence—that’s Hollywood.

“Make no mistake, gentlemen:

“Hollywood is a cursing, merciless tyranny!”

15

Dissolve to us barreling down I-95 in a stretch limo, blue sky above, blue water below, everything between a variation on a theme of pink. That’s
me behind the wheel, wearing a chauffeur’s cap, while the chauffeur, Dominic, rides in back with the others, all of them laughing over some joke
about the Pope driving a limousine. But they’re also laughing because they think it’s funny, me up here driving, and I guess it is,
considering I don’t even have a driver’s license.

We hop from club to club, all with names like Fifth Avenue, Central Park, California … “Is it just me,” Dwaine
observes, “or do any of you get the feeling that the locals would rather be somewhere else?”

At a club called Gracie Mansion we run into Bull Duncan, burning us looks as we practice our bossa nova steps on two local girls named April and June
(“How’s that for a couple of dates?”—Dwaine). The girls are in a celebratory mood. They’ve just been hired as
Playboy bunnies at the Miami Mansion. They tell us all about training week, about memorizing their liquor categories, learning bumper pool and the
Bunny Dip and how to apply eyelashes and carry service trays in three-inch stiletto heels, knowledge likely to serve them well for decades. As
fascinated as I am by their Playboy pedigrees (will they one day soon be airbrushed, folded and stapled?), I’m more intent on watching Dwaine
flirt with them. I’ve never seen Dwaine flirt before; I’ve rarely seen him interact with the opposite sex, though he seems to be doing
quite well at it, all bright smiles and devastating dimples. While I twirl June he cuts the rug with April, doing a salsa. The club is hot. Under the
shifting lights June’s cheeks glow with sweat. Unlike my three feet which never know what they’re supposed to do, Dwaine’s patent
leather tuxedo shoes slide softly across the dance floor like shuffleboard disks. The music switches from whatever to disco as Nando, there with Bull
Duncan, joins us on the dance floor, a piping brunette having tapped him for a tango.

“I can no stay long,” he shouts at us over his partner’s shoulder and the loud music. “Meester Duncan, dat stronzo, he
want me to go to airport an photograph Mizz Brooke Shield.”

“Brooke Shields?” says June.

“The Brooke Shields?” says April.

“Oh please please please please take us with you,” says June.

“I’ll give you all a ride if you do,” says April.

“She’s got a Porsche,” says June.

“We’ve never been around any real movie stars,” says April.

“Unless you count Dom Deluise,” says June.

“Which we don’t,” both of them say.

16

We squeeze into the back of April’s vintage Porsche, equipped with a Playboy metal bottle opener and tube radio. Nando rides on June’s lap.
Miami rolls by in waves of stucco and neon. By the time we get to the airport (having stopped on the way to retrieve the Bolex H16-RX-V from the
Paradise safe) dawn glows as pink as the inside of a conch shell.

Paparazzi swarm the arrivals terminal. We jam our way through the outer banks of media parasites to run headlong into Bull Duncan, who asks us what the
hell we’re doing there.

“What you hired us for,” says Dwaine, holding the Bolex high.

“And what’s with the hookers?” Duncan points to our dates.

“They’re not hookers,” I note. “They’re Playboy bunnies.”

Brooke Shields arrives, flanked by her mother, her director, and a trio of double-breasted bodyguards. She wears a flamingo-feathered gown and smiles
for the cameras, her teeth slamming back the lights of several dozen flash units. With the Bolex propped on his shoulder Dwaine pushes his way toward
her and starts filming. Nando, eager to prove to the world that he’s more than just Bull Duncan’s sad Milanese flunky, rides my shoulders
piggyback. He flashes away joyously, rapturously, orgasmically … until his Nikon jams.

“Porca miseria!” he says, his fingers squirming like worms as they try to unjam it. Dwaine meanwhile has vaulted over the security
cordon to film within inches of the pert starlet’s eyes. He keeps filming as Brooke Shield’s bodyguards hustle her into a waiting Lincoln.

Dwaine tosses Bull Duncan the exposed reel.

“Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

17

I wake up in a cubist painting of body parts, arms, legs, bellies, all batter-dipped and basted with beach sand. Who’s foot is that? Who’s
arm? Whose ass? I inventory my surroundings. No hotels or dunes in sight, no landmarks at all other than a concrete structure that looks for all the
tea in China like the pillbox in The Guns of Navarone. Miami Beach is gone, washed away by a tidal wave. Or something.

Somewhere in this tangle of bodies Dwaine lies with me. I harbor distinct memories of sexual grunts and sighs blending with surf sounds. Dwaine’s
arm is around April’s neck. A smile curves his lips. Seeing him smile I smile, too.