Memphis Movie (16 page)

And to its jerrybuilt structure he had added two aperçus and one bit of poesy that he filched from an old Lawrence Ferlinghetti paperback.

Was this how I used to write? he asked himself. Yes, I always kept open books next to my legal pad, words of thaumaturges and friends and poet-priests. It's called inspiration. It's called seeking inspiration. Yes, yes, this was just.

Now, he had become intrigued with the liner notes to a Dylan album. He was immersed in the nonsense lines. Something there turned a key, a rusty key.

Camel inserted a line of dialogue into a conversation on
page 13
of the script.

Page 13
.

Camel stopped and thought about that.

The number 13 held no special significance to him. He was not triskaidekaphobic. And yet—yet—why poke the sleeping demons, even if they were not your sleeping demons.

He erased the line he wrote.

Somehow, at some point, the record had stopped emitting music. He looked long and hard at the turntable. The record was still spinning, the needle lost in some dead groove. The sound was not unlike what a raven makes asking to be let in, scraping its beak upon your bust of Pallas.
Scritch, scritch, scritch
.

He knew a woman named Pallas once. She was lovely in her bones, a deep-souled Southern woman with legs like a spectral dobbin. Pallas Something. Another bird, Camel thought. Pallas Gnatcatcher? No, it was alliterative. Pallas Pipit? Pallas Plover?

Too puzzling.

Screenplay. He must concentrate on the screenplay. He tossed the Dylan album cover aside. Once there had been a record inside that sleeve, a record wherein lyrics were enunciated and proclaimed with the cauterizing voice of an ancient scop.

An album. A record.

Camel considered the words, their many meanings. What was missing?

The music.

He rose, reluctantly, and pulled a record from the derelict crates that housed them. He reached in at random, trusting providence to deliver to him the music that he needed at that particular time.

He didn't even look at the disc. It spun. That was important. He placed the needle carefully at the beginning of the record.
This was crucial. Begin at the beginning. Not that Camel believed by doing so one could find the straight path through.

No. Nothing was that simple.

The music began. Gypsy muscle music. Music from the fen.

A droning voice. A song called “I Just Sit There.”

Yes.

Whose voice? Not Dylan, Dylan-lite. David Blue? John Kay? Janis? Perry Como? Camel knew this voice. Was it Sonny Bono? Sonny, dead now, Camel mused, telling him, from the beyond, to just sit there.

Camel returned to his chair and just sat there. He trusted the message as it had come to him through honest channels.

And as he sat he cleared his mind. There was no more clutter there now. No more random seekings after names that alliterated or did not. No more woolgathering. No more lines of poetry.

No more lines of poetry.

No more writing.

No more writing.

Camel put his face in his hands and wept. He wept.

Later, he used the telephone to call a friend.

“I have to get out,” he said. “I have been locked in this detention center by men in suits, alcaides with money, Baal worshipers with their deceitful gods and corrupt dreams, dreams that twisted and warped and bled. I have to get out.”

His friend said that she would come right away.

Camel sat back in his chair. It would be better now. There were people alerted and they were coming. They would take Camel out of the house and show him the variegated world and how he could fit back in. He would be shown that even the most outside outsider has a place in the human parade. Camel began to smile.

And then to laugh.

When his friend got there Camel was sitting in his chair laughing like a moonstruck amadan.

36.

Eric left Mimsy's bed grudgingly.

And, upon finding himself outside her apartment building, he couldn't remember how he had gotten there. Cab? Or his driver? No, not that.

Oh, Mimsy had driven him. Should he go back and remind her? No, actually he felt like walking a bit. It just might clear his head. And it just might reconnect him to this city. He figured he could hail a cab when he got tired.

Downtown Memphis at night was quite a sight. Not what he remembered. It seemed to hum with life and glow with neon light. He walked east on Madison, heading away from the river and the city lights.

After a bit of walking he found himself inhaling the smell of baking bread. It hit him like a madeleine. The Wonder Bread factory. Does one call it a factory? He remembered it from his elementary school field trip there, where they gave you free samples at the end of the tour. He remembered how disappointing the little hunk of white bread was after imbibing that smell. It was like a stolen sip of vanilla. But, surely they weren't baking bread now, at nearly one a.m. Was this sense memory? Or the ghost of his youth returning with olfactory hallucination? He laughed to himself and thought of that crazy Ricky Lime.

Eric realized pretty quickly that he was bone-tired and that to walk, even another mile, would lay him out. He also realized—or recalled—that one doesn't hail a cab in Memphis. There are no cabs to hail. His choices were calling Mimsy and taking the chance on waking her up and having to explain to her why he was a couple of miles from her apartment building. Or he could call a cab company, which meant finding a phonebook. A fairly daunting task. Or Jimbo—no, he wouldn't call Jimbo. Or he could call Hassle Cooley. He wasn't sure how that worked except that poor, moonstruck Cooley was on call 24 hours a day.

He chose the latter.

“Cooley,” Cooley answered.

After Eric explained where he was, Hassle Cooley didn't even ask why.

“I'll be right there. Lemme slip my pants on. Oh, I have something to tell you anyway,” he said.

As Eric continued to stroll eastward on Madison Avenue the streetlights glowed like Christmas morning and the street, nearly deserted, seemed to shimmer like a desert mirage. Eric saw Cooley's car approaching from a great distance. Cooley was speeding his way, pedal to the metal, the cavalry arriving where, really, no cavalry was necessary. He passed Eric, braking hard, spun 180 degrees and pulled alongside the pedestrian, screeching to a full stop. He was grinning madly.

“Boss!” Cooley shouted as Eric entered the back seat.

“Don't call me that, Cooley,” Eric said, suddenly so tired he laid his head against the cool glass window.

“How's it going? You didn't need me today? I was ready. You see how much I was ready?”

Eric neither answered nor opened his eyes.

“How's the movie? That's the important thing, am I right? How the movie is going.”

Eric opened one eye. It was amazing that Cooley could keep the car on the road since his attention was mainly on the back seat.

“How much have you filmed? Get anything good? How's Dan Yumont to work with?”

Hassle Cooley was jangled on something stronger than caffeine.

“I'm tired,” Eric said.

“Right,” Hassle Cooley said. And he gave Eric about 30 seconds of silence in which to relax.

“I had a weird dream,” Hassle Cooley said.

Eric had heard enough. This jobbernowl was about to iterate a dream as a basis for Eric's next film. How many fools had he suffered thus?

Eric said, with some heat, “Cooley, dammit. To say you had a weird dream is kinda redundant, don't you think? I mean, dreaming itself is weird, a gateway into otherness. And, if you think for one minute that a dream makes good drama, that it can be transcribed into a boffo screenplay, you're sillier than even the most addlepated cabbie.”

This came out a little uglier than Eric had intended.

Cooley let his eyes rest on Eric's for a tense second. Then he drove on, his concentration seemingly only on the road home.

After his gorge had subsided a tad Eric thought he should offer a mollifying comment, something interesting from his day, something about film. A scrap to the begging dog.

He could think of nothing.

“We haven't started filming yet, of course,” Eric said.

Cooley glanced briefly toward the rear seat.

Fuck him, Eric thought. So I've hurt his feelings. Poor driver.

The hum of Midtown Memphis was buzzing past outside. Eric saw many places from his past, many haunts that were still haunted. Zinnie's, Huey's, Paulette's. Overton Square, which, when
Eric was a young man, was the hottest spot in town, clubs, restaurants, music halls. He saw Billy Joel there before Joel broke big. He saw the Mark-Almond band after their one-hit fame had dissipated. Now Overton Square was three-quarters deserted. Why? Eric pondered.

But there was something new, something that made Eric smile. A movie multiplex. Studio on the Square, which sat just off Madison Avenue, like a cake at the end of a banquet table. He had heard talk about this new space, with its wine bar and welcoming lobby. And every small theater with the new stadium seating. No bad seats! It put Eric in a friendlier frame of mind.

“Look, Cooley,” he offered. “I'm sorry. It's been a rough day. A couple of rough days.”

“Sawright,” Cooley said, tersely. But the evidence of thaw was observable.

Eric smiled to himself. He was doing well. He was making with the small talk when, really, all he wanted was bed and oblivion. He did not live in an ivory tower, or mansion. He was still a regular guy.

“So, I've got another idea for a movie,” Hassle Cooley said now.

“Of course,” Eric said. “Tell me all about it.” He lay back and closed his eyes. Behind his lids another movie was taking place. In it Mimsy Borogoves was slipping her silky slip off, letting it slowly fall from her perfect, glossy tabernacle.

“Ok,” Cooley said. “It's a sequel, sort of.”

Eric swallowed a groan. Mimsy, Mimsy . . .

“I'm thinking now that there is a huge ethnic market, right? I mean, with some of the top box office stars being black, there's a whole new audience, I mean, one that was there all the time but untapped. Will Smith, Sam Jackson, Ice Cube, Halle Berry. You know what I'm talking about. So, I'm working on this ultimate ethnic cash-in movie.”

The pregnant pause was meant for something. Eric wasn't following the script.
Sam
Jackson?

“And the title—” Cooley said.

Eric opened his eyes. He smiled his readiness.

“It's called
The Color Purple Rain
.”

37.

At 2 a.m. Dan Yumont found himself kissing his teenage lover good night. He kissed her long and hard, their tongues alive, their eyes wide open. Dan gripped her in all her curvy places and pulled her close.

“Good night,” Dan said, a sweetness to his face heretofore unseen.

“Good night, Dan,” Dudu said, and rolled over.

Dan looked at where he was. Inside the birthday cake, shadowed like some film noir, frilly coverlet pulled up to his goozle. Ridiculous, he thought.

Yet, there was this woman-child, body like Monroe's. She stirred him. There it was. Simple and not so pure.

She now pushed her lovely rump against his hip, body language for “spoon me.” Dan wrapped himself around her, his well-used Johnny almost springing to life one more time.

But, no, no. Sleep beckoned. Tomorrow they were going to actually attempt to shoot a scene. Dan didn't know whether he trusted his director to actually pull it off. Dan Yumont took a laissez-faire attitude toward most of his moviemaking time. He did his job; he limned the complex characters written for him. He was a master at it.

Still, he wanted, occasionally, reassurances that the project was moving forward, that there was a vision involved.

Tomorrow he would see. If the movie was to become a movie much would be told by the first scene shot.

This was what Dan was thinking as sleep began to engulf him and the 16-year-old girl inside his spoon began to hum a Justin Timberlake tune. Dan had no idea what the song was but it carried him, like a rocking child, into dreamland.

38.

Eric came home to an empty house. He was too tired to worry about where his paramour was sleeping these days.

He sat on the edge of the bed and undressed. When he was down to his skivvies he repaired to the bathroom for end-of-the-day duties. Then he turned out the light, caught his hip painfully on the door jamb and shuffled into the kitchen for some milk. On bad days he took a glass of milk with a shot of bourbon in it. It was medicinal.

He went through the house turning out lights. The idea that he was not anticipating Sandy's return was too depressing for him.

Back in the bedroom he found the ghost of his father sitting on the edge of the bed in the identical posture he himself had occupied only minutes before. At first Eric thought he was seeing himself, an eidolon that was the result of his fatigue, or his bisected feelings toward this current movie. Then his father raised his head and it was the careworn face Eric knew from the last days of his father's life, the times when he was in and out of the hospital. Eric feared that face. He imagined the face exhibited fear, fear of the coming cessation of life and what that might bring. His father, a stoic like his entire generation, showed little emotion throughout his life, but, there, at the end, he seemed to be caving in like a poorly constructed tower, one built originally to safeguard the keep, and one that now appeared to be made of decomposing pastry.