Life Goes to the Movies (5 page)

I held the receiver to my lips, getting blood on it, trying with no success to remember Dwaine’s phone number when it dawned on me that he had no
telephone.

A nasty thought came to me then. It grew like a tough weed out of Captain Nemo’s Persian rug, reaming its way up through the souls of my
sneakers, climbing my legs into my guts. Captain Nemo was yelling at me for getting blood all over everything. I put the phone down, pushed past him
again and hurried back out the door.

19

The last traces of light had vanished from the sky. I squeezed Dwaine’s buzzer. No answer. I stood in the street yelling like Stanley Kowalski up
at his black window:

“DWAINE! DWAAAAIIIINNNE!”

A man came out of the Chopsticks Express. He wore a white apron and had a square head. He looked like Odd Job in Goldfinger. He asked what I was
yelling about. Just then a woman in a boiled wool coat stepped out of the building. I squeezed past her and let myself in. The Chinese man followed me
as I ran up the stairs. Dwaine’s door wasn’t locked. I stepped into his apartment.

The desk was still there. So was the Taxi Driver poster. So were the wires strung across the room for hanging strips of exposed film. But all of
the film cans and editing equipment were gone. So was the poster of Robert DeNiro. So was the machete. So was the rubber bullet, and the mayonnaise
jar, and the pile of notebooks. And the aluminum trunk. I felt all of the planets of the solar system spinning out of orbit.

I staggered to the chair in front of the desk and sat there, head in hands, hearing but not understanding or really listening to anything the Chinese
man was saying as he stood in the doorway, panting, telling me all kinds of things. All I heard was He gone! He gone!

Eagle
Electric
(Film Noir)

A
few weeks after Dwaine disappeared and two shy of his graduation, Byron Huffnagel left New York for Boston. He had gone up there hoping to raise the
money for a movie he wanted to make about Collyer brothers, the famous shut-ins who, in 1947, made headlines when their decomposed bodies were
discovered in a Harlem mansion crammed with newspapers and junk. Huff’s family lived in Boston, including an uncle who worked in the carting
industry and had mob connections. Less than a week after Huff took off, Venus’s coalmining father suffered a massive stroke, and she left to care
for him down in Virginia.

I was on my own.

2

I took a job in lower Manhattan, at a tavern called the Rosinante Grill, where I peeled potatoes, washed dishes, wiped off the beer and soda taps, and
patched holes in the cement floor of the basement where, on any given day, no fewer than two half-dead rats twitched in traps set by the owner, Graham,
an Australian. He would point to the bloody furry lumps and say to me, “Right, there, mate: let’s get that cleaned up, for a start.”

I tore the collars off my shirts, I wore a dark vest, I bought a black hardcover notebook. I smoked Newports. I wandered the city just as Dwaine and I
had wandered it together, but minus our strong sense of passion and purpose.

Without Dwaine the streets and avenues lost all of their meaning, practically. What little significance might have attached to them was sealed off and
indecipherable. It was like watching a foreign movie with no subtitles.

I considered going home, back to Barnum, but there was no home left for me to go back to, really. By then I had all but disowned my small-town
heritage, my un-cinematic, passionless past. The past was a room I had vacated, swept broom-clean for the next tenant.

Between dishwashing shifts I’d scribble away in my black book. Graham, who carried the same smelly bar rag slopped over his shoulder day after
day (his “lucky mung rang,” he called it), was forever teasing me, saying things like, “So, Shakespeare, what are you scribbling on
about now? To be or not to be? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times? Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m William Fucking
Shakespeare and, uh, screw you?” (Oh how I yearned to break a bar stool over his head.)

Quite a few good movies came out during those days.A Bridge Too Far, The Last Wave, The American Friend, Looking for Mr. Goodbar … Sitting alone in dark theaters, I
couldn’t help wondering what Dwaine would have thought of them. I missed his lavish whispered comments and annoyed sighs and even his constant
sharp elbow in my ribs.

3

The Rosinante Grill had an open kitchen, with the dishwashing station facing the bar. If a decent-looking woman sat in the last stool, I’d flirt
with her, and sometimes end up in her bed. The women I met that way were mostly a lot older than me, some of them divorced, others married, their
husbands away somewhere on business. Some had kids, in which case they would ask me to leave before daybreak.

Sleeping with those older women in their big beds with too many pillows, I’d think of Venus, of her soft pigmentless sweet-smelling skin and that
chipped tooth smile, and feel miserable. As I lay next to whomever’s lumpy, sour-smelling body, staring up at a strange ceiling, who could blame
me for wishing Venus there with me instead?

One foggy night, having vacated some lady’s midtown apartment, I stood on the sidewalk in the fog in front of her building trying to decide
whether to schlep back to Brooklyn. The doorman, who had a big drooping mustache, kept casting me these evil glances, his arms buried under his scarlet
cape coat. It must have been October, around Halloween. The spire of the Empire State Building was haloed in orange fog. The doorman went on staring at
me, giving me increasingly suspicious looks. After the third or fourth look I spat a wad on the sidewalk and turned to him and said (in my deepest,
most truculent voice), “What the hell is your problem?”

Then, for no reason at all that I can think of—unless it was to try and run away from the ghostly grayness that I felt spreading through
me—I took off running through the fog. I ran over a hundred blocks, all the way down to the Fulton Fish Market, where men unloaded icy crates of
fish from the backs of big white trucks. I stood at the railing of the Brooklyn Bridge, looking down through air frigid with the smell of dead fish,
watching a gang of fishmongers warm gloved fingers over an oil drum fire. They wore black and red Terry Malloy jackets with metal hooks clawing their
shoulders. As I stood there watching, Leonard Bernstein’s theme to On the Waterfront coursed through my cold head.

4

I’m sitting in an East Village diner, eating a bowl of cabbage soup, when I hear tap tap tap on the glass and look up and there’s
Dwaine Fitzgibbon. He wears sunglasses, a black fur-collared coat and a matching black fur cap. He looks like a paramilitary Eskimo. I’m thinking
I must be seeing things, one of those rear-screen projections, or maybe a hologram. He breathes a gray ball of condensation onto the glass then presses
his tongue into it.

It’s Dwaine, all right.

I wave him inside.

“Babe, where the hell have you been?” he asks.

“Me? Where have you been?”

“Since when do you smoke?” He snatches the cigarette from my lips, puts it in his. “You’ll give yourself cancer,” he
says, puffing away. Seeing my look he says, “Don’t look at me like that, babe. It’s too late for me to quit. I quit now I’ll
lose all my benefits.”

He’s lost weight. Dark circles pull down his eyes. He stares at my bowl of soup. I push it to the center of the table. I ask him what he’s
been up to. Where did he go? In answer he whips out his latest black book and flips it open to a page of photographs of the East Village, the same East
Village where he sits slurping my bowl of soup, but at night. I don’t see anything special about the photos. “Look closer, babe.”

I look closer. Then I realize: it’s not the real East Village at all but a scale model of the East Village made out of clay. Clay buildings, clay
buses, clay taxis and newspaper kiosks, clay fruit stands and delicatessens, clay punks and babushkas jaywalking across clay streets. Dwaine explains
how he spent two months holed up in a former firehouse in Venice West building the claymation set for a producer named Groon, who paid him pin money
plus room and board, the rest of his payment to be deferred pending sale of the finished product.

Dwaine finger-whistles the big-boned, heavy-treaded Ukranian waitress, orders another bowl of soup. “Make this one a beef barley!” he
shouts at her. He tells me more about Hollywood, about how, with nowhere to go and no money left in his pockets, he took to breaking into cars and
stealing change from their utility trays, and how he broke into and slept in an abandoned bungalow on Venice Beach, until the cops finally nabbed him
there. They arrested and charged him and put him in jail. While in the can Dwaine wrote his first full-length screenplay, A Terrible Beauty,
about an ice hockey playing seminarian who becomes an IRA operative and ends up blowing his own father to bits in a Belfast hotel lounge. Before
releasing him the cops confiscated the screenplay.

“‘This ain’t no fucking writer’s colony,’ the dickhead cop says as he throws my script in the garbage. But that’s
okay.” Dwaine taps his temple with his pen. “I’ve got the whole thing tucked away safe right here, in the gray matter, where not even
Sigmund Freud can get to it. Soon to be a major motion picture.” He smiles his face-eating smile. “And you, babe? How about you? What have
you been up to? Having fun without me, I bet? You’ve lost weight; you’re skinny. Are you not eating well?”

5

We leave the diner and walk uptown. A cloudy late November day, the sun a pale festering wound in the wet, colorless sky. As we walk Dwaine tells me
more about Hollywood, how it’s so different from New York, how if New York is the country’s brain or maybe its congested lungs, Hollywood
is its perverse, decadent, oversized heart.

“The curbs are blood red,” he observes with something approaching glee. “It’s like living in a never-ending Fellini movie.
Everyone gets to play a starring role in his or her own spiritual death. You should see it for yourself one day, babe. Really. You’d love
it.”

As we walk up Third Avenue Dwaine tells me how he rode a beat-up old train all the way out there, how his compartment had a little flip-down stainless
steel sink and no air-conditioning, how in the desert just outside of Phoenix the train derailed, how he and all the other passengers nearly died of
suffocation and dehydration while waiting for a bus to pick them up. He explains how, as soon as he got off the bus in Hollywood, he headed straight
for Martin Scorsese’s Arabian-style mansion on Mulholland Drive, intent on prostrating himself at the famous director’s feet and asking him
for a job, any job, on his next movie.

“And?” I say.

“Alas,” says Dwaine, shrugging, “Marty wasn’t around.”

Frame by frame as we keep on walking uptown Dwaine narrates his screenplay-in-progress, gesturing to indicate camera angles, the cigarette in his mouth
bobbing, threatening to set the collar of his fur coat on fire. I listen distractedly, not yet quite convinced that Dwaine is there, right there
walking beside me. I should be angry at him for skipping out on me the way he did, without a word, but his very presence erases all traces of anger,
along with any doubts and suspicions, forgives all past sufferings and sins. Cloudy sky or no cloudy sky, being with Dwaine feels like walking out of a
dark movie theater where a depressing film is playing and into a bright, clear, sunny day.

6

At the corner of 34
^th
Street a crowd gathers to watch a game of Three Card Monty. Dwaine asks me to loan him five dollars, then pushes
through the throng. My eyes follow the three cards being swirled by nimble black fingers on a makeshift cardboard table. When they stop swirling Dwaine
slaps the five down. And loses.

“Another five,” he says, snapping his fingers.

“Forget it,” I say. “You know these games are rigged. There’s no way you can win.”

“Just give it to me. Don’t worry; I’ll pay you back. Promise.”

I give him another five. He slaps it down. And loses again.

“I told you,” I say as we walk away. “Why did you do it? You should know better.”

“Should me no shoulds, babe. Once you start lining up all the shoulds in the world there’s no end to it. Besides,” Dwaine says.
“Every so often a person has to do something crazy, or he’ll go nuts.”

7

Dusk falls. We stand on the overlook up at Beekman Place, looking out across the river, at the lights of Long Island City shattered in black waves.
“If I ever get tired of this view,” says Dwaine, “please do me a big favor and put a hollow point in the back of my neck. I’m
dead serious.” He mashes out the cigarette that he’s been smoking, lights another, blows a smoke ring. I smell booze in the smoke. Though
cloudy above us the sky may as well be encrusted with diamonds, that’s how thrilled I am to be with Dwaine again. With him I feel safe, protected
not so much from the world as from myself, from my lonesome insecurity and lack of passion.

“So, did you miss me, babe?”

“A bit, I guess.”

“Only a bit? You guess? Hell, I missed you a lot more than that.”

“You did?”

“I did indeed.”

“So why did you leave without even saying goodbye?”

“Oh, that. Well, see, I owed some people a pile of money and—well, they aren’t the sort of people you can argue about things like
that with, if you know what I mean. I hurt your feelings, didn’t I, babe? I didn’t mean to. I figured you of all people would understand.
You understand, don’t you? Life’s exigencies, and all that.”

I say I understand.

“Anyway now that we’re back together nothing will tear us apart again, ever, right, babe? I knew you’d find me. I knew we’d
find each other.”

I remind him that our “finding” each other was a sheer coincidence.