Life Goes to the Movies (3 page)

We were sitting on the steps of the dormitory, next to the spot on the pavement where a dummy stuffed into my character’s clothes lay in a pool
of dashed calves’ brains and other organ meats donated by the local Gristedes, doused with fake blood. Venus threw me a smile. I couldn’t
get over how pretty she was. The only other albinos I had known were ugly: the Hoppenthaler Twins, Kevin and Keith. They went to my high school. No one
liked them, mainly because they loved each other so much and didn’t seem to care about anyone else, but also because they were so fantastically
ugly, with their long drooping faces and noses like melting vanilla ice-cream cones and hair like corn silk. We called them the Double-Headed Vanilla
Monster, though never to their faces, since they were as short-fused and strong as they were hideous. To equate them with Venus was absurd, yet I
couldn’t help doing so.

I asked, “How long have you known Dwaine?”

“Since the start of last term, when he asked me to be in one of his movies.”

“Were you always interested in movies?”

“Not really. I used to want to be a ballerina.”

“What happened?”

“I couldn’t stand on my toes.”

“Why not?”

“It hurt. I have delicate toes.”

We watched Dwaine arrange the camera for the next scene.

“Where does Dwaine get the money for all this?”

“The film department supplies him the film.”

“And the rest?”

“Beats me. You’d have to ask him that, though I doubt he’d tell you. In case you haven’t noticed, he can be very
secretive.”

She smiled. I imagined her looking deep into my eyes, wanting me. With those dark glasses on her I could imagine whatever I liked.

8

When It’s So Good Don’t Even Try It Once had its premiere in Dwaine’s filmmaking class, I saw myself transformed. That was me,
Nigel DePoli, up there on that pull-down movie screen, me writhing as the dope needle drew my suffering fake blood, me being chased across a rooftop by
a fat bearded guy in a white Mister Softee uniform with a machete, me plunging eighteen stories into the white arms of an albino angel. Only itwasn’t me, not the usual me; as a matter of fact I hardly recognized myself. I looked bigger, taller, stronger, with broader shoulders and
a thicker, sturdier neck. The guy up there on that screen looked less Italian, more American, as if the process of being filmed at thirty-six frames
per second had flushed away some of that olive-oily immigrant blood. No, it wasn’t me up there; it wasn’tNigel DeDago, Nigel De-Wop, Nigel DeGuineaof Barnum, Connecticut.

It was someone bigger, better.

As we stepped out of Dwaine’s film class he threw his arm around me. “So, babe,” he said, “still want to major in advertising?
Don’t answer too quickly. Think about it. After all, someday you just might sell somebody the perfect underarm deodorant, or the ideal laxative,
or the ultimate brand of toilet paper.Try New Improved Bottom’s-Up brand toilet tissue: soft as air, sweet as honey. You can’t wipe your butt with it, but so what?”

He jiggled his weird tooth at me.

9

We kept making movies.

In Pig Iron Junkie I played a bodybuilder. I used my own set of rusty barbells, which kept company with the dust bunnies under the bed in my
room in Captain Nemo’s apartment. Whenever I did curls and Navy lifts with them the barbells made a noise like an old-fashioned printing press.
The movie consisted entirely of close-ups of clanking barbells and sweating, bulging, straining muscles, recapitulated ad infinitum thanks to a
clever arrangement of mirrors installed by Dwaine in his one-room apartment. Between sweaty close-ups (some of the sweat mine, the rest faked with
glycerin drops) Dwaine spliced in subliminal fake newspaper headlines:

MAN WEEPS ON STREET CORNER

BUTTERFLY SEEN IN CENTRAL PARK

In Dust Off I played an exhausted Army medic who can’t see what he’s operating on because a punctured artery keeps squirting him in
the eye.

In Toothpaste I played a guy who brushes his teeth to death. While brushing he pulls out a loose tooth, then another, and so on, until
he’s spitting out handfuls of teeth and gobs of foaming bright fake blood.

In Blood Tickets a botched pawnshop holdup left me riddled with bullets and bleeding to death under a window stuffed with used cameras, Spanish
guitars, and saxophones. (To my bullet-riddled Clyde Venus played Bonnie.)

We dubbed ourselves—or Dwaine dubbed us—the Proto Realist Filmmaking Society. Our mission: to make movies so damned realistic (meaning so
damned grim and violent and horrible) that you couldn’t tell them from real life. We went through gallons of fake blood, which in real life looks
a lot more purple than red, and dozens of squibs: miniature explosive devices filled with fake blood, taped to the skin under my clothes and detonated
off-camera to produce gorily realistic bullet holes. Dwaine said I bled beautifully.

I wondered why Dwaine’s movies were all so violent, and guessed it had something to do with his wartime past, with Vietnam. Personally I had
never known any real soldiers, had never known anyone who had been to war. My father avoided fighting in both of the World Wars that he’d lived
through. The whole concept of war was as foreign to me as the dark side of the moon. I longed to ask Dwaine outright, “What was being in a war
like? What did you do? What did you experience?”

One day I put it to him straight. I asked him, “What was it like?”

Dwaine said, “What was what like?”

“The war.”

“Which one, babe? There are so many.”

“Vietnam,” I said.

Dwaine blew a smoke ring. He was an expert at blowing them. We were sitting against a wall in his apartment, the one with the mirrors on it. I watched
the smoke ring waver up and dash itself into the ceiling light fixture. “What was it like?” he said. “What was it like?
An exploding dog, that’s what it was like. Vietnam was like an exploding dog.”

And that’s all he would say.

10

As clam-mouthed as he was about Vietnam, Dwaine could be voluble on the subject of movies. “What is the dream of every red-blooded American
boy?” he asked us all one day coming home from a day of filming.

“To be President of the United States,” Venus guessed.

“Wrong. Try again.”

“To pitch for the Yankees,” Huff tried.

Dwaine shook his head. “One more guess.”

“To cure cancer,” I said.

Dwaine made a buzzer sound. “Wrong again. The dream of every red-blooded American boy is to make movies.”

We were crossing City Island Bridge. We’d just wrapped up Buster Gets Axed, my fifth Dwaine movie, about a short order cook suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder who suffers a flashback when a customer orders a runny egg on his breakfast sandwich.

“Forget Methodist, forget Baptist, forget Lutheran, Episcopal and Congregational and even Seventh-Day Adventist,” Dwaine said.
“Movies—they’re are the only valid form of divine sacrament left to us in this culture, the only church worth going to
anymore.”

It’s dusk. To our left the sun sinks like a burning ocean liner into the waters of Eastchester Bay. To our left the lights of Manhattan twinkle
in bluish-gray crepuscular light, a Whistler nocturne. Dwaine walks slightly ahead of us, making me wonder if that’s what born leaders do, walk
slightly ahead of everyone else, if that’s what makes them born leaders.

“When people go to the movies, it’s like a form of prayer,” Dwaine asserts. “The theater’s the cathedral, the
screen’s the altar, the colors flickering across it are the modern equivalent of stained glass windows. In medieval times that’s how the
church told Bible stories, through stained glass.”

“What are the people praying for?”

“They’re praying that in an hour and fifteen minutes or however long the movie is when the lights come back up and they leave the theater,
they’ll still be in a movie. The streets, houses and buildings will look real, but they won’t be; they’ll be made of plaster and
plywood.” In the dim air above us gulls wheel and shriek, their squawks blending with Huff’s locomotive chuffs as he labors alongside us in
three-piece suit and Burberry trench coat. Through the bridge’s steel mesh dead fish and brine smells rise.

“What about all the people in the streets?” Venus asks.

“Extras,” Dwaine submits.

“All of them?”

“All of them.”

“And the sky and the trees?” says Huff, puffing.

“One big rear-screen projector fake.”

“And the sun burning in the sky?” I say.

“A crane-mounted Musco light. The thing is,” Dwaine continues, not really wanting or needing to be interrupted, “for the average
moviegoer, the whole point is to escape from reality, because reality is unbearable. So they run off to the only place they can afford to run off to,
which is the movies, which is why no one ever gets anywhere or learns anything. Which, by the way, is exactly how the church works, how it’s
always worked. People keep going and nothing ever changes, which as far as the church is concerned is a good thing, since if people were to really
change, if they were to actually find anything like salvation, the church would go out of business, wouldn’t it?”

“You’ve got a point there,” says Huff.

A foghorn moans. A boat whistle toots. The brine smell grows stronger as the tide ebbs (or does whatever tides do).

“Salvation may be good for something,” says Dwaine, “but it doesn’t make the world go ’round. Anyhow nobody really wants
to be saved. They want to be lost. That’s why they go to the movies: to lose themselves in some totally made-up bullshit that has nothing,
absolutely nothing, to do with real life.

“Ah,” Dwaine adds wistfully, “but supposing—supposing the movie wasabout something real?Supposing it was convincing?—so convincing it could change a person’s whole life? Consider the possibilities! Instead what have we got? Mindless
corny bullshit! Flagrant wish fulfillment. Sentimental escapism. Full-length, big-budget car commercials! The world’s most powerful artistic
medium being used as a pacifier!”

“It’s a shame,” says Venus.

“It is! It’s a crying shame! But we Proto Realists are going to change all that, aren’t we?” He puts his arms around me and
Venus (Huff being way too big to hug). “We’re the four greatest filmmakers in New York.”

11

I got to know a little more about Dwaine. I learned that he had no family, none that he had anything to do with anymore, that he’d disowned them,
or they disowned him—I couldn’t tell which. “Don’t you miss them?” I asked.

“About as much as I miss having scarlet fever,” he replied.

He called himself “black Irish,” a term that intrigued me so much I went to the campus library to investigate it. According to one
encyclopedia the phrase described a race of dark-complexioned Irish people descended from the Spanish Moors. Another source maintained that the black
Irish were a legacy of African slaves imported from the island of Montserrat in the British West Indies. Yet another source claimed that the expression
was a derogatory one applied by Irish Protestants to Irish Catholics and had no ethnic origins whatsoever.

I knew that he’d studied for the priesthood, briefly, and that he’d been a champion ice-hockey player—which is how he lost his real
front tooth, which he kept at the bottom of the same mayonnaise jar that held all those pens. A dentist replaced the lost tooth with the removable,
rattle-able, single-tooth bridge, but obviously didn’t match the color very well. (Had my Papa been consulted, the false tooth would have matched
perfectly, for he would have availed himself of The Identikon,his inventionfor comparing the color of false and real teeth.)

And I also knew that he drank. I saw the brown Budweiser quarts lined up next to his bed and, while scrounging ice cubes one day, the Smirnoff pint
tucked deep into a glacier of freezer frost. Neither of my parents drank. The bottles of vermouth and gin that my mom kept in her closet grew thick
mantles of leaden dust. Beyond what I’d gathered from movies like The Lost Weekend with Ray Milland and The Country Girl with Bing Crosby, I was totally ignorant of the ways of alcoholics.

About his love life Dwaine was as tight-lipped as he was about Vietnam. One day I asked him if he had a girlfriend. We’d gone to Hunter’s
Point, to the rail yards there to shoot some B-roll footage. We were taking a short break, sitting on the ends of a pair of boxcars facing each other
when I put the question to him. Dwaine threw his head back and laughed. The sun was angled low in the sky. Its coppery rays burnished the laugh lines
in my director’s face, making him look all of his twenty-six years. He said he had “no time for all that stuff.”

I asked, “What stuff?”

“Holding hands, eating out in fancy-ass restaurants, buying flowers and birthday presents, whispering to each other in squeaky cartoon voices
between bouts of predictable sex. Besides, when it comes to women, this city is one big psycho ward.”

“It is?”

“Are you shitting me? Man, open your eyes, look around you.”

I looked around, seeing nothing but rows of boxcars and gleaming rails. Between one set of rails a pair of mongrel strays frolicked in the low-pitched
sunlight. One of the dogs was missing a leg. The other dog sniffed at the legless dog’s hindquarters, making it hop away. Dwaine made an
exasperated sound and shook his head. I realized then that it was a stupid question. Girlfriend indeed! For a guy like Dwaine, a genius with so many
more important matters to attend to, to waste his time in pursuit of the opposite sex would have been crazy indeed: it would have been practically if
not criminally irresponsible, I told myself, and felt ashamed for having put the question to him.

12

Unlike Dwaine, I had yet to rise above my own trivial pursuit of the opposite sex. On the contrary, my crush on Venus grew stronger by the day. And
though I tried getting her to go out with me, it was no use. I was too young, she claimed, though less than a week divided our birthdays. Her
resistance only amplified my desire. For some reason I liked everything about her, from the sheer cotton skirts that she wore draped to the pavement
(so when she walked she appeared to float on clouds of fabric) to the endearing little chip on one of her two front teeth (suggesting impulsiveness and
hard candy) to the sweet pale vanilla smell that she gave off and that, along with her skin, made me think of white chocolate.