The Film Club (16 page)

I didn't think he'd last four days as a dishwasher.
Un
plongeur
. Not that he was a quitter or a sissy, but that job—the lowest on the unforgiving restaurant ladder, eight hours of dirty dishes and encrusted pots—I just couldn't imagine him getting out of bed, getting dressed, going on the subway to do that till midnight.

But I was, as you often are with your children, wrong again. You'd think you know them better than anyone else, all those years up and down the stairs, tucking them in, sad, happy, carefree, worried—but you don't. In the end they always have something in their pocket you never imagined.

Six weeks later, I could barely believe it, he got up one afternoon, bounced into the kitchen with that heavy-footed, happy walk of his and said, “I got a promotion.” Jack, it turned out, had quit to cook in another restaurant and he, Jesse, was the new prep chef. Something in me relaxed about him. Hard to say what it was. Simply the knowledge, I guess, that when he had to, he could do even the shittiest job and make a go of it. (Unlike his father.)

Winter came down, early darkness smudged the windows. In the middle of the night, I noticed a fine dusting of snow on the roofs; it made the houses look a bit fairy-taleish, like pastries in a store window. If a pedestrian had approached my basement windows after midnight, he might have heard the angry voices of two tall boys, chefs by day, rappers by night, giving voice to the indignities of growing up in the ghetto, shooting heroin, robbing stores, selling guns; daddy a dealer, mommy a crack whore. A perfect portrait of his childhood! (Jack's father was a born-again Christian and conscientious churchgoer.)

From where I stood at the top of the basement stairs (partially eavesdropping), I couldn't help but notice they were starting to sound sort of—I don't know—cool. They had good chemistry, those gangly boys in their loose-fitting clothes. God, I thought, maybe he's got talent.

One clear, chilly night, an aura of excitement issued from the basement. Loud music, strident voices. Corrupted Nostalgia (as they now called themselves) exploded up the stairs in baseball hats, bandanas, floppy pants, sunglasses and oversized, hooded sweatshirts. Two very bad dudes on their way to their first gig.

Could I come along?

Not a chance. Not even
remotely
a chance.

Out they went, somewhere, Jesse's head thrown back like a black man dealing with an L.A. cop.

And very quickly, it seemed, they performed again; and then again and again; grubby clubs with low ceilings and unenforced smoking regulations.

“What do you think of our lyrics?” Jesse asked one day. “I know you've been listening.”

For weeks I'd known this was coming. I closed my eyes (metaphorically) and jumped in the water. “I think they're excellent.” (Just water the plant and keep the T.S. Eliot to yourself.)

“Really?” His brown eyes moving over my face, looking for a fault line.

“May I make a suggestion?” I said.

His face darkened with suspicion. Watch your step now. This is the stuff people remember—and write about—fifty years later. I said, “Maybe you should try to write about something a little closer to your own life.”

“Like what?”

I pretended to reflect for a moment. (I'd rehearsed this part.) “Something you feel strongly about.”

“For example.”

“Like, say, um—Rebecca Ng.”

“What?”

“Write about Rebecca.”

“Dad.” This in the tone of voice one reserves for a drunken uncle who wants to take the family car out for a midnight “spin.”

“You know what Henry Miller said, Jesse. If you want to get over a woman, turn her into literature.”

A few weeks later, I happened by the top of the stairs when he and Jack were discussing where they were going to play that night. An after-midnight show (along with a half-dozen other acts) at a place I went to thirty years ago to look for girls.

I waited until just after eleven-thirty, then I slipped out into the frosty air. Cut across the park (I felt like a thief), through Chinatown (garbage night, cats everywhere), then up the street until I was almost at the door of the club. A dozen young men waited out front smoking cigarettes, blasting lungfuls of smoke into the night air, laughing boisterously. And spitting. They were all spitting.

And suddenly there he was, a head taller than most of his friends. I slid into a coffee shop across the street where I could keep an eye on things unrecognized. It was Saturday night in Chinatown; electric-green dragons, exploding cats, all-night eateries with that ugly fluorescent lighting. Across the street, the city's miserable milled about in blankets in front of the Scott Mission.

Five minutes went by; then fifteen; one of the boys bent over; he appeared to be talking to someone on the stairs, just inside the club. Then Jack emerged. Such a fresh-faced kid. He looked like a choirboy. All heads pointed toward him. Frosty breath. Shivers. Then suddenly the whole bunch of them rushed inside, the last boy flicking his cigarette butt in a long, graceful arc into the traffic.

I waited till the coast was clear and then nipped across the busy street. I went up the stairs cautiously; you could feel the air change; it got warmer, smellier (like puppies and stale beer) with each step. I heard recorded music from a backroom. They hadn't gone on yet. Stay out front till they start; then slip in. I got to the top of the stairs and turned the corner; a young man on a pay phone looked up and caught me right between the eyes. It was Jesse.

“I'll call you back,” he said into the receiver and hung up. “Dad,” he said, as if he was hailing me. He came toward me smiling, his body blocking the way into the hall. I peeked over his shoulder.

“Is that the place?” I said.

“You can't come in tonight, Dad. Some night, but not tonight.”

He turned me around very gently and we started down the stairs.

“I think the Rolling Stones played there,” I said, looking hopefully over my shoulder, his strong arm (how powerful he is!) leading me downwards, ever downwards, until we got to the sidewalk.

“Can't I just stay for one song?” I pleaded.

“I love you, Dad, but tonight's not your night,” he said. (Hadn't I heard that last bit in
On the Waterfront
, Brando talking to his brother in the back of the cab?) “Some other time, I promise,” he said.

Slipping quietly into bed twenty minutes later, I heard my wife turn over in the darkness. “You got caught, eh?” she said.

11

It was a chance remark that Jesse made one night; we were walking home from dinner and lingered for a moment in front of a one-storey, wonky house where we'd lived when he was still a child with purple hair and a little stick girlfriend down the street.

“Do you ever stop here?” I asked.

“No. I don't really like it since other people started living in it. It always feels a bit invaded.”

The house hadn't changed at all, not a right angle to it, a beat-up picket fence out front. “I never realized how small it was,” he said.

We stayed a while longer, talking about his mom and that time he got arrested for spray-painting the wall of the school across the street; and then, warmed by all this, we drifted southward toward home.

That night, still under the spell of our conversation, I nipped into the video store and rented
American Graffiti
(1973). I didn't tell him what it was, I knew he'd protest or want to look at the DVDand then find something about the package he didn't like or that made the movie seem “too old-fashioned.” I hadn't seen it in twenty years and worried that its charm and lightness had aged badly. I was mistaken. It's an entrancing film, profound in a way that initially escaped me. (Good movies are more intellectual than I used to think, at least the process by which they come into being.)

American Graffiti
isn't just about a bunch of kids on a Saturday night. When a very young Richard Dreyfuss drops in on the local radio station, there's a gorgeous moment when he catches Wolfman Jack doing his gravel-voiced routine. Dreyfuss suddenly understands what the centre of the universe
really
is: it's not a place, it's the embodiment of a desire to never miss out on anything—not somewhere you can
go
, in other words, but rather a place you want to
be
. And I loved the speech the hot rodder gives, about how it used to take a full tank of gas to “do” the town strip but now it's over in five minutes. Without knowing it, he's talking about the end of childhood. The world has shrunk while you were looking the other way. (Like the wonky house had for Jesse.)

I didn't want to wear out my welcome by talking about Proust and
American Graffiti
, but how else can you look at that beautiful girl in the Thunderbird who keeps appearing and disappearing at the edge of Dreyfuss's vision, except as an example of the Proustian contemplation that possession and desire are mutually exclusive, that for the girl to be
the
girl, she must always be pulling away?

“Do you think that's true, Dad, that you can't have a woman and want her at the same time?” Jesse said.

“No, I don't. But I used to when I was your age. I could never take anyone seriously for long if they liked me too much.”

“What changed?”

“My capacity for gratitude, for one,” I said.

He contemplated the empty television screen gloomily. “Rebecca Ng is like the girl in the Thunderbird, isn't she?”

“Yeah, but you have to remember that it cuts both ways. It's like your old girlfriend Claire Brinkman, the one on the in-line skates. How do you think she saw
you
after you broke up?”

“Like a
guy
in a Thunderbird?”

“Probably.”

“But doesn't that imply, Dad, that if I hadn't broken up with her, she wouldn't have liked me so much?”

“It implies that your unavailability may have made her like you a lot more than she might have normally.”

Another thoughtful pause. “I don't think Rebecca Ng cares whether I'm available or not.”

“Let's hope not,” I said, and turned our attention to other things.

I asked David Cronenberg one time if he had any “guilty pleasures” at the movies—things he knew were trash but loved anyway. I set the framework for his reply by admitting a weakness for
Pretty Woman
(1990) with Julia Roberts. It doesn't have a believable moment in it, but it's a disarmingly effective piece of storytelling, one pleasant scene spilling into the next, and very hard to turn away from once it has you in its idiot grasp.

“Christian television,” Cronenberg answered without hesitation. There was something about a puffy-faced southern evangelist working a crowd that mesmerized him.

Fearing that the film club was getting a little starchy (we'd done five
nouvelle vague
films in a row), I drew up a list of guilty pleasures for our first week in February. I also wanted to steer Jesse away from the vulgarity of not being able to have a good time at a cheesy movie. You have to learn to give yourself over to these things.

We started with
Rocky III
(1982). I pointed out the cheap but irresistible excitement of the sweating Mr. T doing sit-ups and pull-ups in his foul little crawl space. No mushroom carpets and faggy lattes for him! Followed by Gene Hackman's 1975 film noir
Night Moves
, which features an eighteen-year-old Melanie Griffith as a lecherous nymphet. Watching her from a distance, her “older” boyfriend says to Hackman, “There ought to be a law.” To which the deadpan Hackman replies, “There is.”

Then on to
La Femme Nikita
(1990). A ridiculous movie about a beautiful junkie turned government hit man. Yet there's something about this film—it has a certain epsilon-minus appeal, probably because it's so terrific to look at. Luc Besson was a hotshot young French director who seemed to understand in his blood cells where to put the camera, who went for the bang-bang of a visual experience and did it with such verve that you forgave him the dumbness and implausibility of the story.

Watch how the film begins, three guys coming up the street, dragging one of their pals. It's like a rock-video, lysergic-acid hallucination of Gary Cooper's
High Noon
. And talk about a shoot-'em-up: watch the gunfight in the drugstore: you can practically feel the wind from the bullets yourself.

But
La Femme Nikita
was just a warm-up. Now we were ready for it, the king of guilty pleasures, a real piece of trash that makes you ashamed for people to see it in your house. Prurient, inept and ugly-minded,
Showgirls
(1995) is a take-no-prisoners film. It leaves the audience shaking its head with incredulity: what, we ask, could
possibly
come next in this tale of a young girl who leaves home (and what a home!) to make it in Las Vegas as a showgirl. There's lots of skin for those who care but by the end of the film, you don't. You can't.

“
Showgirls
,” I said to Jesse, “is something of a cinematic oddity, a guilty pleasure without a single good performance.”

When
Showgirls
opened, it was greeted by howls of disbelief and derision from critics and the public alike. It scup-pered the career of its star, Elizabeth Berkley, before it even started; veteran actor Kyle MacLachlan (
Blue Velvet
, 1986) disgraced himself with a leering, moustache-twirling performance as the “director of entertainment.” Overnight
Showgirls
leapt to the top of everyone's worst-film-of-1995 list. Screenings went interactive, with strangers shouting rude remarks at the screen.

But the ultimate compliment came from New York's gay community where drag queens put on re-enactments of the movie, lip-synching the words while the original masterpiece played out behind them on a giant screen. It was simply the most fun since
Mommie Dearest
(1981).