Life Goes to the Movies (9 page)

“Here?” I asked.

“That’s right, babe. Here.”

“In this hole under the city?”

“You call it a hole now. But when the time comes it will be the closest thing on earth to Paradise, relatively speaking.”

“You’ll be here all by yourself?”

“Most likely.”

“And you still won’t be lonely?”

“On the contrary, babe, I still will be lonely, but again I ask you what that has to do with the price of fish in Kentucky?”

“Wouldn’t it be better if you had someone with you?”

“What for?”

“I mean some company, some companionship.”

“Oh, companionship. No, it wouldn’t be better,” Dwaine said.

“Why not?”

“Because there are certain things that should be experienced in private, alone. A walk on the beach is one, a good bowel movement another,Last Tango in Paris a third. The end of the world is one of those things. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, and I won’t share
it with anyone, if I can help it. Least of all with all those murderous motherfuckers up there. As for being lonely, George Orwell said that loneliness
is just another word for being part of a very small minority. And that’s just what we are, babe, you and I. We’re part of a very small
minority. We don’t fit into the system and we never will. We’re type-B cells swimming around inside a type-A bloodstream. Of course
we’re lonely! Would you have it any other way?”

I shook my head; I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The candle spluttered. Through the overhead grate I saw the gaudy Times Square colors shifting and swirling, like St. Elmo’s fire. We lay there
listening to the OM humming discretely below the sounds of fireworks of jubilation being set off high above our heads. The countdown began; the bright
burning ball of auld lang syne or whatever the hell it was descended. When the moment arrived Dwaine took the half-finished bottle of champagne
(asti spumante) and two plastic cups from the satchel he’d been carrying.

“To us, babe, the Two Greatest Artists in New York.”

We toasted with Dixie cups of ersatz champagne, with me feeling as though we’d passed over a threshold, that Dwaine and I had at last entered the
sacred space of true friendship. Sure, there were things wrong with him; there were things wrong with everybody, especially with artists; especially
with great artists. And I believed Dwaine was a great artist, or would be someday, as soon as he saw fit to generate some great art. I needed to
believe it in order to believe that I might myself be great in some way, which beat the hell out of believing that I was wasting my life.

“This will be our year,” Dwaine assured us both. “Count on it.” He held up his pinky, as inWe’ve got more talent in our pinkies than most people have in their whole bodies.

22

Later that morning, as I drifted drunkenly off to sleep, Dwaine, naked and smelling of metabolized sweet alcohol, climbed under my sheets. At first I
thought he was pulling some sort of prank. “What gives?” I said, laughing. “What the hell are you doing?”

But Dwaine wasn’t laughing. He sat there, smiling in the dark, his features lit fitfully by the red neon sign winking across the street. I heard
what at first sounded to me like plumbing noises, rumbles and gurgles, until I realized they were coming from Dwaine’s stomach, like he was about
to get sick. “Are you okay?” I said.

“I’m fine,” said Dwaine, his voice hard to hear. “Fine.”

I reached up then and switched on my lamp. A mistake. He screamed. “Turn it off! Turn the goddamn fucking light off!”

I did, but not before seeing the erection that Dwaine hadn’t had time to cover up, its tip as red and glossy as a fireman’s helmet.
Grabbing my bed sheet and wrapping it around himself he rushed out of my room. By the time I said, Wait! he was already gone. For a long time I stood
there, feeling the bones of my face, all sound (including that of the subway train which chose that dramatic moment to roar by) edited out of the scene
as in a violent sequence where everything turns to silence and slow motion before going black.

There are times in our lives that change us forever, or could have. Had I not been a square insecure small-town kid from Connecticut this might have
been one of them. Instead I had to switch on that light. Why? I should have let Dwaine get into bed with me; I should have let him do whatever it is
that he wanted to do. Again why? Because it would have done no harm. Because we were both lonely animals burrowing in the dark, seeking warmth,
comfort. Because life is short and that night especially was going to be long, very long. And because, when you get down to it, aside from changing my
life completely, it would have made no difference.

I stopped feeling the bones in my face and called tentatively into the darkness: “Dwaine?”

Stepping into his room I felt the breeze from his open window against my bare ankles. I climbed the fire escape to the roof where I found him wrapped
in the bed sheet, huddled close to the edge, the remains of a dead pigeon like a sacrificial offering at his feet. He looked up.

“I’m not a homo,” he said.

“Neither am I.”

“But I am fucked-up.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes I am, babe. You bet your ass I am. I’m fucked up and so are you. Only I’m too fucked up and you’re not fucked-up
enough.”

A subway passed, its roar and lights splashing. Over our heads a police helicopter flut-flutted, the whole scene lit intermittently by flashes of red
neon. Dwaine gave a weird laugh then and slid himself closer to the brink. I dove and grabbed him, pulling him into the stairwell shed where I held him
close and he burst out crying.

“You’re my only friend,” he said through a stream of tears. “My only friend in the whole goddamn world. It’s funny,
isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s funny, babe? I think it’s hysterical!”

I held him, feeling the clammy patch of skin between Lucky Lumps. If he’d been a woman I would have kissed him then, oh yes, I would have.
Instead I silently, secretly prayed to the eagle electric manufacturing company sign across the way, wishing it would swoop down and protect us, shield
us with its tin wings.

The Two
Greatest Artists
in New York
(a Farce)

“You get me to Florida.”
—Dustin Hoffman, Midnight Cowboy
The Pertinent Movie Quote Wall

P
icture this: The Two Greatest Artists in New York sprawled on the sands of Miami Beach. It’s five in the morning, something like that, and
I’m awake, perusing the seascape, trying to decipher those mysterious blue shapes floating way out there.

Mountains? Waves? Whales?

We’re wearing tuxedoes, Bull Duncan’s tuxedos, a pair of return airline tickets to New York tucked safely in Dwaine’s breast pocket,
boarding passes to Mutiny.

Behind us: a wall of luxury hotels stretching as pale and frothy as the waves that break along the shore: the Hyatt, the Hilton, the Konover, the
Fontainebleau … And the Hotel Paradise where, in a deluxe penthouse suite, Literary and Film Agent Bull Duncan dreams sweet dreams of
exclusivity, oblivious to all conspiracies being hatched in the sand.

It’s 1978. I’m barely twenty (though it seems old to me), barely a year out of art school. Subways and winter are both as far away as can
be as I lie here, watching my best friend sleep, dreaming his own not-so-sweet dreams of sniper fire and ambushes (lips contorting, limbs bucking and
twitching, forehead bubbling with sweat).

Suddenly a sound like a swarm of swirling kitchen knives slashes its way toward us down the shore, an airborne Cuisinart headed our way, intent on
slicing and dicing us both to smithereens. It gets to us and stops, hovering right over our heads, spewing up a tornado that makes it all too clear why
beach sand is used for sandpaper. Dwaine, my friend, my bosom buddy, cinematic Telemachus to my Mentor, lurches awake, wide-eyed and scared stiff as a
stop sign, screaming an otherworldly scream to wake the Greater Miami dead.

The Cosmic Cuisinart shoots a cool blue beam down into our eyes.

From the heavens an amplified voice commands:

Get down off the beach! Get down off the beach!

Dwaine keeps screaming, aluminum-shard pupils popping from his skull as I hold him, saying, “It’s okay, it’s
okay… ”

The whirling death machine churns on, scattering light, sand, and terror down the shore.

2

We were going to be famous, that was the plan. Dwaine would write and direct movies, and I’d star in them. Like Scorsese and DeNiro we’d
ride waves of simulated gore to cinematic fortune and fame. We’d serve up bleeding slabs of grim realism to a public starving on a rabbit diet of
Mindless Entertainment. To famished moviegoers we would dish out that rarest of delicacies, the Unvarnished Truth, and get famous doing it.

But first we needed to make some connections.

3

I was sitting at a corner table at the Rosinante Grill, bits of dead lettuce, raw hamburger meat and squashed French fries clinging to the crags of my
work boots, scribbling away in my black book between dishwashing shifts when a guy who looked like a stubby bearded Klaus Kinsky strutted over and
handed me his business card. “Who knows?” he said. “You could be the next William Goldman.”

The card showed a bull in silhouette rearing up on its hind legs, its tail switching back like a whip.

Bull Duncan’s office was a den of bulls. There were bull ashtrays, bull bookends, bull paintings, lithographs, sculptures and bull bas-reliefs,
bull tapestries, inkwells and paperweights, bull lamps, bull coffee mugs, bull coasters … On a bull-pelted loveseat winged bulls
stitched in gold soared across the faces of fat red velvet pillows. A curio cabinet with beveled glass doors shimmered with bulls haughty and heraldic,
furious and ferocious, pompous and proud, some encrusted with jewels.

Wearing a red silk kimono embroidered with bulls, Mr. Duncan sat behind his African mahogany desk carved with bull heads, doing isometrics while
talking on his speakerphone. Before he had looked like Klaus Kinsky, now he was Claude Rains in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, orNotorious, with his sly calm smile and white brushed-back hair, waiting for the poison in the tea to do its job. As the voice in the
speakerphone squawked he looked at me standing there and said, “Talk to me. What credentials have you got?” I said, “I could be the
next William Goldman.” And he hired me.

For two-fifty an hour I read submissions, typed rejection letters, answered the phone, made post office, copy shop and Chinese laundry runs. Bull
Duncan meanwhile spent most of his time on his speakerphone trying to land exclusive deals. “Exclusive” was one of his favorite words,
second only to “deal,” a spice he sprinkled on every other sentence he spoke.I’m going for the exclusive. This calls for an exclusive. I’m only interested in an exclusive. Though only forty, he wore dentures
that slipped so whenever he said “exclusive” it came out “exsclushive.”

Another assistant worked for Bull Duncan, a Columbia postdoctoral literature candidate named Esther Schmidt. Duncan called her his “eyes.”
She read everything that came into the agency “over the transom,” which was agent talk, I learned, for unsolicited scripts.

One day I had Esther read the latest version of Dwaine’s screenplay-in-progress, the one he had been working on since he got arrested in
California, the one about the hockey player who becomes a priest and winds up working for the IRA, then somehow ends up blowing up the lounge of a
Belfast inn that his father happens to own. He had written six drafts. With each new draft, Dwaine gave his screenplay a fresh title. All his titles
came from the same poem, The Second Coming,by William Butler Yeats. The first title wasA Terrible Beauty. After that it wasThings Fall Apart, then The Widening Gyre. The draft I gave Esther was called The Center Cannot Hold. I didn’t tell her my
friend wrote it. I wanted Esther’s honest opinion.

Along with a pile of other scripts Esther took Dwaine’s home with her that weekend. She did most of her reading stretched out in bed, she told
me, with a cup of hot ginger tea with honey. The thought provoked me. I imagined her naked, sipping tea and turning pages. She was a good-looking lady,
about thirty, I guessed, with short legs and a blond butch hairdo. She reminded me of my middle school teacher, Mme. Grover, who wore linen suits and
dark pantyhose that I constantly peeled down with my eyes while seated in the front row of Level I French. Esther’s oversized prescription
glasses gave her a shocked feminine fruit-fly look that enhanced her scholarly sexual appeal.

As soon as I saw her again on Monday I said to Esther, “So, what did you think?” forgetting that Dwaine’s screenplay was but one of a
dozen she had taken home with her, and that she might not have even gotten to it yet. She went down the whole long list of screenplays and novels
she’d read, telling me all about every one of them. Esther spoke in a whisper, no matter where she was or what she was doing, as if the whole
world were a library presided over by a severe, bun-headed, bifocaled crone. I had to bend close to hear her, which I didn’t at all mind doing,
since it gave me a chance to peer down into the tawny shadow of her cleavage, her whispers half-drowned out by the growls of a garbage truck parked
outdoors.

Finally, she got to Dwaine’s screenplay, the plot of which she summed up in a few deft sentences.

“And?” I said. “Did you like it?”

“Well, no, I wouldn’t say liked.”

“What would you say?”

“I’d say he has talent.” I waited but she didn’t elaborate.

“But?” I said.

“But boy—!” She shook her small head, its smallness magnified by the big glasses. A thought occurred to her then. “You
don’t know this person, by any chance, do you, Nigel?”

“Know him? No, no. I’m just curious, that’s all.”

“Did you read it?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. I sort of scanned it. You know, quickly.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought it was … interesting.”