Life Goes to the Movies (17 page)

Huff heads for the door.

“But no clean up!” Dwaine shouts after him. “We’re not standing around with hot towels and garbage bags. Got that?”

“Fear not,” Huff says from the breezeway. “I won’t ask you guys to do anything I wouldn’t do.” And leaves.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” says Dwaine.

3

Dissolve to the temporary headquarters of Priapus Pictures, a series of unplastered office spaces at 1600 Broadway. The Two Greatest Artists in New
York sit at a folding table, collating the shooting script for Angels in Heat: a stack of index cards in no special order, indicating the number
and gender of cast members, set and lighting specifications, props (if any), and giving a brief summary of the action:

ANGEL #1 and ANGEL #2 give ANGEL #3 a BATH

I hand Dwaine an index card. He enters the card’s number into a ledger, puts a check mark on it, then sends the card fluttering down into a
cardboard liquor box on the floor. A nearby shelf sags with soundtracks to old movies.

“Look,” I say, pointing to one of the soundtrack cans. “There’s the soundtrack for Midnight Cowboy. I wonder what
it’s doing there?”

Dwaine doesn’t answer. He’s not speaking to me. He hasn’t spoken to me since I talked him into taking this job.

In an improvised reception area out in the hallway interviewees await their interviews. While waiting they share cigarettes and gossip.

Did you hear about what happened to Johnny Holmes?

Oh, isn’t it awful?

Accused of six murders!

Yeah, and they say he only killed three!

So unfair …

I hand Dwaine another index card. He checks it off and sends it fluttering into the cardboard box.

4

At a warehouse in Corona, Queens, we meet the First A.D., Huff’s sister-in-law, who has a Long Island accent and looks like she’d be more
at home on the set of a Hellmann’s mayonnaise commercial. She shows us around inside the warehouse.

“This,” she says, pointing a frosted fingernail at a pile of canvas flats stacked up against a wall, “is going to be the Fantasy
Room. It gets painted flat black, with mirrors and day-glo lights.” Dwaine and I both nod. “This here,” she points to another pile of
flats, “is going to be the Jailhouse. It gets painted battleship gray with lots of splotches and graffiti. And this—” she points to a
third set of flats piled in a corner—“is going to be the locker room. It gets painted green.”

“What shade?” says Dwaine.

“Use your imagination,” says Mrs. Huffnagel. “And this,” another corner, “will be the Whorehouse. Painted whorehouse red,
naturally.”

“Naturally,” says Dwaine.

“And last but not least …” the First A.D. points to a big mound of chicken wire and bags ofpapier-mâché. “Over here’s gonna be Hell. You need to make it look like underground walls, textured and sponged. You also
need to get hold of a pre-Victorian bathtub. Don’t ask why. It’s what herr director wants and it’s what herr director is going to
get.”

5

We spend the rest of the afternoon hauling, hammering, painting, plastering and papier-mâchéing. We’re especially proud of our
underground walls and jailhouse graffiti, trump l’oeil stuff (with a nod to Max Ernst and the Surrealists).

Clothes spattered with black, gray, green and red paint, we step out into the Corona dusk. Walls of bloated black garbage bags crowd the sidewalks. The
sanitation workers have gone on strike. Rotting food smells taint the cold damp air.

At the local doughnut shop we squeeze in among the blue collars at the counter and order doughnuts, Dwaine’s chocolate, mine honey-glazed, with
our coffees. A radio splutters.
Shah’s Nephew Slain in Paris. Picasso Mural Found. Sanitation Workers to Go on Strike. Pope John Paul II to Visit City. Blizzard Predicted.
We cross ourselves.

“Think they’ll throw the Pope a parade?” I ask Dwaine, who is speaking to me again, thank God.

“Not unless they can get all the garbage off the streets.”

“Maybe the Catholic Church will help.”

“The Catholic Church doesn’t pick up garbage, it only dispenses it.”

Dwaine, who still dips into philosophy now and then, has brought along a paperback book. “Thus Spake who?” the off-duty transit cop
on the stool next to him asks.

“Zarathustra,” Dwaine tells him. “He’s a prophet who comes down from the mountains to tell people God is dead and teach them
how to be Supermen. Whatever will break in our truths, let it break. Many a house has yet to be built.”

6

The next day it starts snowing. I sit in the double-parked production van on Broadway, waiting as Dwaine and Huff do stuff in the office. In the
driver’s seat, sipping a container of tea, I watch pedestrians through the snow-blurred windshield. A few yards down the block businessmen in
trench coats slink in and out of the Circus Cinema, where a double feature, NASTY NURSES and TALK DIRTY TO ME, plays. Under the big marquee letters a
smaller sign announces:

NOW HEAR THE SOUND OF LOVE

IN DOLBY STEREO

I’m reminded of the first porno film I ever saw, back in Barnum. The X-rated cinema had recently opened its doors to vociferous protests. Among
the protesters out front my best friend Clyde and I, who had just turned seventeen, recognized quite a few faces, but inside we recognized quite a few
more. The title of the movie had the word Beethoven in it. Of it’s plot I remember absolutely nothing, though I wouldn’t soon forget the
face that first demonstrated to me, on a wide screen and in glorious full color, the precise meaning of the word fellatio, with giant lips encompassing
a male organ the size of a sequoia.

Suddenly everyone on the sidewalk is a porno actor or actress—businessmen, secretaries, children, bums and cops—no exceptions. The whole
city is one big porno set. Everyone out there is having sex, or is about to, or has just finished doing so. I’m obsessed. I can’t stop
thinking of Sex: X-rated Sex, Times Square Sex, Sex that leaves a film over the eyes. The cameras haven’t even started to roll yet and already
I’m delirious. I try telling myself it’s just a job—a degrading, demeaning, deplorable, detestable job. But the libido has its own
way of seeing things. So I sit here with a hard-on pulsing under my jeans, sipping tea from a to-go cup, mulling over the potential irony of jerking
off into a vessel marked IT IS OUR PLEASURE TO SERVE YOU.

Dwaine takes my place. Up in the office Huff hands me a pile of call sheets and tells me to go to a certain address on Eighth Avenue to have them
photocopied. I run down streets already painted with snow, looking for 630 Eighth Avenue. 629, 632, 634. No 630. I run into the Film Center Pub and ask
the ruined souls slouched there if any of them by any chance know where 630 Eighth Avenue is? The ruined souls all stare. I run back to 1600 Broadway
and take the elevator up to the office where Huff yells, “It’s six-thirteen, not six-thirty!” and out I go again.

It’s freezing out. I left my pea coat back in the van. By the time I get to the address I’m shivering so hard my teeth chatter. A lady in a
body-hugging, black leather Emma Peel outfit answers my knock. Something about her eyes, the bend of her jaw, the angle and shape of that upper lip,
reminds me of someone. Then it comes to me: she’s the star of the first porno movie I ever saw, the one in Barnum, the one about Beethoven. Only
it can’t possibly be her. Can it? She looks older, of course, more sophisticated, less careless, like she’s since gone on to raise a
family and earn a degree in one of the social sciences.

“Can I help you?”

“Byron H-H-Huffnagel sent me. T-t-t-t-to ph-photocopy the-the-the c-c-c-call sheets.” I hand them to her.

“Where’s your coat?”

“Oh. I g-g-g-guess I f-f-forgot it.”

“Poor thing, you must be freezing. Come on in.”

She shuts the door behind us and takes the call sheets over to the copy machine. I watch as she bends to load in a fresh ream of paper into the paper
tray, her tight leather clothes stretching to accommodate the full roundness of her body. My cheeks prickle and flush. Must be the cold. “You
want ’em collated, sweetbuns?” she asks.

The copy machine has no collator. Next thing I know we’re on all fours next to each other on the gray industrial carpeting, slapping pages down.
I feel the gusts of animal heat radiating from her body as it works next to mine, our parts all but touching to sounds of pages slapping and the
swishes of skin-tight leather. Now and then on its way to deliver a sheet to its pile her hand and mine intersect, bolstering the hard-on I’ve
been carrying around with me ever since leaving the production van. I picture the same hand reaching over to undo the clasp of my belt, sliding the
zipper of my Levi’s down, springing my swollen dick from the damp jungle stockade of my Fruit of the Looms, and guiding it gently, oh so gently,
between …

“Here you go, sweetstuff.”

Having plopped the collated, staggered call sheets into my arms, with a wink suggesting that I haven’t fantasized alone, Mrs. Peel sends me and
my boner back out into the cold.

7

When I get back at the double-parked production van I find Dwaine eating a slice of pizza, a droopy bridge of mozzarella connecting him to it. In his
free hand he holds his paperback.Do you not smell the slaughterhouses and ovens of the spirit? Does this town not steam with the fumes of slaughtered spirit?

8

On the way to the warehouse the next morning we swing by Astoria to pick up the costume designer, none other than Veronica Wiggins, a.k.a. Venus.
“Fancy meeting you two here!” She wears a fur-collared winter coat, the same reddish purple as the fake blood Dwaine and I spilled in many
a Scorsese-inspired movie: blood on snow. Her hair is cut in jagged blue spikes, like she lost an argument with a pair of hedge clippers. A punk albino
angel.

She carries a notebook in her shoulder satchel. “I think it’s every artist’s obligation,” she says climbing into the production
van, “to experience some form of degradation, don’t you?”

“I prefer the disagreeable to the agreeable,”says Dwaine, “and this is the sane part of me.”

“We’re in it for the Degradation,” I say.

“Another D word,” says Dwaine.

“What?” says Venus.

“Nothing.”

“Mind you, I’ve got nothing against pornography, per se,” Venus informs us while wriggling her way onto the transmission hump.
“It’s vulgarity I can’t stand.”

“Nothing is alien to us,” I offer.

Dwaine blows smoke rings.

“So—how did you guys end up here?”

“It’s a long story,” I say.

“We’re between pictures,” says Dwaine.

“We just got back from Hollywood,” I say.

“Hollywood? What were you doing there?”

“Rubbing shoulders with moguls and movie stars.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It was great.”

“Great,” says Dwaine.

“I see. And now you’ve rubbed your way into this?”

Dwaine floors the gas pedal, lays a long patch of disgruntled rubber.

It has stopped snowing, at least for now, though the forecast calls for ever more lavish spectacles of snow. From a landscape of two-family brick homes
packed like encyclopedias on a shelf the van rumbles into one of truck lots and welding sheds, the sort of place where mobsters routinely drop bodies
dead. While it rumbles Venus fills us in on how, shortly after graduating from art school, Huffnagel produced his first movie, the one about the
Collyer brothers. When the movie didn’t earn back a dime its shady financiers, associates of Huff’s Boston laundry (or was it carting?)
service uncle, conceived the present, uhm, enterprise as a means of recouping their losses.

“They’ve given Huff fifty grand and five days to win himself back into their good graces,” Venus explains with a queasy smile.

“Or else?” I say.

“Or else …” Venus mock slits her snowy throat and then she smiles. I’m pleased to report to myself that she still has
that endearing little chip in her front tooth. I want to make love to her, but then I’ve always wanted to make love to her; I’ve never
stopped wanting to make love to her.

9

With the sets (except for the pre-Victorian bathtub) complete, we wait for the director to arrive. Cast and crewmembers smoke cigarettes, drink coffee
and mineral water and huddle around the portable TV set up in an improvised lounge.

Squatting on the Whorehouse floor, Dwaine, Venus and I play Scrabble on Venus’ travel edition, equipped with a textured board to keep the tiny
wooden letters from drifting.

“Quahog,” says Venus, reading from the small dictionary that comes with the game. “A thick-shelled American clam.”

While playing Venus tells us how she went back to Virginia to tend her dying father, president of the second biggest coal mine in the state and one of
its wealthiest citizens. “Also one of its dumbest,” she says. “See, Daddy inherited the mine, he never did a thing to earn it. He
couldn’t hammer a nail or count to ten without using his fingers. But he could carry a tune. In fact he could remember just about any song ever
written, from an obscure aria in Wagner’s Ring cycle to the theme music for Run, Buddy, Run. Remember that TV show? About a guy being
chased around by the Mob after overhearing the words ‘Chicken Little’ in a steam room? The guy who played Buddy—what was his
name?— the lead trumpet player for the Johnny Carson band. Anyway, my dad was probably the one person left on earth who could still hum that
tune.” Venus hums a few bars. “That was it, his one talent. Now he’s gone and so is the money (he cut me out of the will,
wasn’t that sweet of him?) and all that’s left is that silly tune going around in my head.”

“Is ‘pigging’ a word?” says Dwaine.

“He couldn’t stand me, my father. Couldn’t stand to touch me. It made him cringe. It was like he was afraid to sully me with those
coal-stained hands of his, or maybe he was afraid that my white skin would stain him. He never looked me in the eyes. I never figured out what
he was so ashamed of. If it hadn’t been for his stroke we’d have never gotten to know each other, then it was me touching him, feeding him
with a spoon, turning him over in bed so he wouldn’t get sores, wiping him. By then he’d already written me out of his will. He left
everything to my sister, who also won’t speak to me. Oh, well.” She shrugged. “I never wanted any of his dirty old coal money
anyway.”