The Ravine (22 page)

“Hmm?”

“I’m transitional, baby. I’m surfing the continuum.”

“Oh. Is Carson City, Nevada, the best place to be for a person like you?”

“The clinic is here.”

“Ah.”

“And it’s not like there’s any nightlife. It’s not like I ever go out, anyway, except to pick up meds. Pee-Pee and I stay inside, in this fucking adobe hut. We watch television. All day and all night long. We have a satellite dish so huge that at least once a month extraterrestrials land in the backyard seeking to make contact. We have video, DVD, hey, we have a goddam Beta player. So that’s what we do, all day, all night long. We watch television.”

“Do you ever see that show, um,
The Twilight Zone?”

“Sure. Around here that’s like reality teevee.”

“Ever see the one where this librarian …”

“McQuigge, you’re attempting to change the subject.”

“No, no, I was just conversing …”

“So we see this listing one night. You know.
‘Padre.
A clergyman tries to tame the Wild West.’”

“Only two people in the whole United States watched the show, just my luck it’s you guys.”

“And Pee-Pee watches for a few moments, you know, and then he says,
That fucking cunt.”

“Let me remind you, young, um, person, that Father White was only a secondary character.”

“In the
movie
, yeah.”

“How so?”

“Did you never read the novel?”

“No, and kindly remove that sanctimonious tone from your voice. Do you think I haven’t tried to find it? I have searched every used-book bin in this city. I have hired a book search service, it cost me hundreds of dollars, I believe the young man was ultimately, I don’t know, devoured by crocs somewhere in Africa. So don’t get shirty with me.”

“Mea culpa.
The point is, Father White is the hero of the novel. Johnny Mungo isn’t even
in
the book. He was just added for the movie.”

“Who added him?”

“Well, Pee-Pee did. But it was not an aesthetic choice. It was, um, look, the fact of the matter is, Mark Goode was his little bumboy. And you know what love can do. Turn our heads a-fucking-round.”

“What’s that?”

“Hmm?”

“What’s that sound? It sounds like a toilet flushing in some inter-dimensional black hole.”

“I have entered the teevee room. I have put on the speakerphone. That sound you so eloquently describe emanates from Mr. Peter Paul Mendicott.”

“Hello, sir!”

…
¿

“I’ll tell you who it is, Pee-Pee. That is Philip McQuigge!”

“!”

“Uh-huh. I managed to track him down for you …”

“Hey.”

“Play along, Phil. The old fart rewrites his will about eight times a day.”

“Mr. Mendicott. Here’s the thing. When I was a small child, I went with the other rankers to the Galaxy Odeon.
The Bullet and the Cross
was the matinee. We watched that movie, sir, and we, um, cried. We wept. And I guess I decided then, on that day, that
that
was what I wanted to do with my life, make, you know, art that made people weep. I haven’t done that. I have not accomplished that.

“Anyway, when I had the opportunity to create my own show, this idea popped into my mind,
Padre
, and I was too, I was too, I don’t know, self-absorbed or egotistical or some damn thing to ever
consider that it wasn’t my idea. And I’m sorry. And not only that, not only that, but my one success for the stage,
The Hawaiian
, well, what happens is that this girl, who was played stunningly by my estranged wife, is taken hostage, gun to head type of thing, and she, well, she does what Father White does. I stole it. And I kind of stole it for what turned out to be the last episode of
Padre
, but I changed it, but the actor, his name was Edward Milligan, he … well, it was very, very sad. At any rate, I apologize to you. Sir. I am very sorry. I just …”

“It’s all right, Phil. He’s gone.”

“What do you mean, he walked out of the room?”

“No. No. I mean, um …
release.”

“But that’s… that’s terrible.”

“Are you kidding? Are you kidding, Phil? Release is what we’ve been waiting for.”

“You’re telling me that he just died? Just now? As I was talking to him?”

“I’d better go. I’ve got things to do. Procedures to follow.”

“I feel just awful.”

“Don’t. Don’t at all. You just did a good thing. Try to make it the first of many.”

ALL RIGHT, I SEE NOW THERE IS A PLATE I HAVE TO SPIN. THOSE OF YOU
who don’t quite grok the metaphor never spent Sunday evenings watching
The Ed Sullivan Show.
That is how my family spent its Sunday evenings, or so I assert, with a large measure of wilful self-deception. For although I sat cross-legged in front of the television set, my hands cupping my chubby knees, the rest of the family was otherwise occupied. My mother would be on the sofa behind me, reading a novel, drinking a drink. My brother, if he was in the house at all, would be, I don’t know, conducting little experiments; for example, he spent many hours trying to ascertain exactly how malleable his face was. Jay would invert his eyelids, fold his ears, pinch his nostrils, tug at the edges of his mouth. Sometimes he would wrap Scotch tape around his massive head, flattening and deforming all of his features. Although this may sound like the result of bottomless boredom, that wouldn’t account for the absorption my brother found in such activities. Anyway, if he was just bored, why didn’t he watch television like a normal kid? “Hey, Jay!” I would holler, as soon as Mr. Sullivan had completed his introduction. “It’s Topo Gigio, the cute little Italian mouse!”

“Hey, a lion tamer!”

“Hey, a plate spinner!”

Plate spinners were my favourite. The stage sprouted long wooden poles; the performer would enter with a stackful of plates (or else have the plates tossed to him by his assistant, who wore a little leotard that cleaved the backside and revealed many square inches of bare buttock, which went unmentioned, seemingly unnoticed except by me) which the plate-artiste would set, one by one, atop the poles. He’d place a plate, flick the rim a few times, set the thing into motion and centrifugal suspension, and then move on. A good plate twirler might have as many as twenty-five plates and poles, and as he worked on, say, the fifteenth, the first would be slowing and wobbling and threatening to drop and shatter, and the performer would dash back and give it a few quick flicks. Then on to the sixteenth, back to the second (give that first one a little extra torque, just for good measure), back to the seventeenth (for some reason the eighth would need some quick attention!), and soon the man was dashing all around the stage, and plates were spinning and wobbling and, oh!, every so often one would drop and the man would dive and catch it before it hit, an act the audience awarded with great huzzahs. It has only just dawned on me now that I was receiving, not just entertainment, but some skewed notion of how to live my adult life-to-be. Maybe it was the presence of the bare-buttocked assistant. (And of course, I never considered what happened after Ed Sullivan threw up his hands and invoked applause, I never considered that behind the fallen curtain every single fucking plate was shattering to little bitsies.)

At any rate, plate-twirling certainly has an analogue in novel-writing, and I see now that a plate is wobbling, so let me rush back, let me remind you of the scene in the makeup trailer, on the set
of Padre
, wherein I more or less dared Edward Milligan to read the Bible. Okay, you got that? (Flick, flick.)

Now we can proceed to an evening perhaps three days later. I have crawled into bed beside Ronnie, and, despite the fact that I have
just recently spent my seed (you’ll soon appreciate the Biblical tone) with Bellamy, I reach up under my wife’s nightshirt and cup her right breast in my hand. Ronnie stirs, purrs, presses herself back up against me (although she remains an awfully long way from wakefulness) and I am content. I have these small moments of contentment, they are really all I can hope for, because if I were to look around I would see naught but wobbling plates.

The telephone rings, and I leap out of bed, wondering who the hell it could be. My brother, Jay, is my best bet, as he sometimes misplaces time at the bottom of a whiskey glass. So I snap up the phone in the master bedroom, press it tightly against my face and whisper, “Hello?”

“Phil? It’s Ed.”

“Milligan?”

“Yeah, sure. Milligan.”

“You have to be on the set in four hours.”

“Yeah, I know, but I can’t sleep. Listen, listen to this.
A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side.”

“Ed? Why are reading me this?”

“The priest passed by on the
other
side.”

“Yeah. Okay, listen. Take that dope you have, flush it down the toilet. Actually, save a little bit for me to try, it seems to be really top-notch …”

“I’m not doing any dope, Phil. I was just lying in bed here, and I thought I’d look at this Bible. Okay, so then a Levite passes by on the other side. But the Samma-ritten, I mean the Samaritan, um,
he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.
I didn’t know wine was good for that sort of thing, you can really learn a lot from the Bible.”

“I don’t think it really functions very well as a first-aid manual.”

“Look, Phil. Don’t, you know,
mock
me. Please don’t mock me. Because this story, it’s like … you know, you try to divide the world up into good and bad people. You know? It’s like this choice you’re given,
You gonna be good, you gonna be bad?
And it’s easier to be bad, right? It’s more fun. But in this story, the good person, the priest, he just passes by on the other side. So like, where does that leave us? There are no good or bad people, there are just people and some can be moved by this, this,
compassion.
Doesn’t that make you feel better?”

“Why would it make me feel better?”

“Because you think you’re such a bad person.”

“I don’t think I’m a bad person.”

“Bull-fucking-whipdip. You think you’re the lowest of the low, and the only reason you can stand having me around is that I’m a lot worse than you are.”

“Look, Milligan, I was in bed.”

“With your wife, your beautiful wife?”

“Yes, with my wife, my beau—my wife.”

“Do you love her?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then why are you laying the pud to Makeup?”

“Milligan!”

“I’ll tell you why. Because it’s a monstrous thing to do,
ergo
, you’re a monster.”

My wife, my beautiful wife, is struggling to resurface into the land of wakey-wakey. “Phil? What’s going on?” I think I woke her up when I whispered/bellowed, “Milligan!”

The next day, on-set, Milligan seemed to be his old obnoxious self, and I was convinced that his nocturnal phone call was the result of space-age pharmaceuticals. I found him fighting bitterly, savagely,
with Jimmy Yu,
Padre’s
most frequent director. “You’re whacked!” Milligan was hollering. “Just totally fucking whack-o.”

I couldn’t read all too much into that particular statement, given that it was incontrovertible. Jimmy possesses no grip on sanity, doesn’t even attempt it. One only has to look at him; they say appearances can be deceiving, but in my experience this is not the case, certainly not the case with Yu. Jimmy sports a kind of inverse monk’s tonsure, shaving his head except for the crown, from which blooms a thick plume dyed on a daily basis, although amateurishly, so that it is mottled and variegated. He is the only person I’ve ever encountered whose spectacles are thicker than my own. My lenses make my eyes look distorted and large. Jimmy’s cause his to disappear, and when you look at him head-on, you see nothing but flesh-coloured clouds where the orbs should be. He’s fortunate in that nature saddled him with a huge pair of ears and a prodigious nose, as anything smaller would be unable to deal with the specs.

Jimmy is from Hong Kong originally—specifically, a film studio in Hong Kong, one that specialized in martial arts movies. His father was a director and his mother an actress (indeed, his mother was Nan Yu, famous for her role as White Breast, a fierce warrior who often battled with a breast exposed, I suppose for tactical reasons), and although there was a family apartment nearby none of the Yus ever left the sets. Not young Jimmy, at any rate, who still doesn’t truly believe that there is existence beyond the sound stage. We (by “we” I mean the producers
of Padre)
supplied him with a hotel room, quite a nice hotel room, but he went there only reluctantly, after being tossed out of the production facilities by Security. (Despite which, he managed to run up an astronomical pay-per-view movie bill.) When he is editing (Jimmy is truly a filmmaker, he does it all himself and trusts no one) he sleeps and eats in the editing suite, although only to the tune of twenty-odd minutes a night and a few handfuls of peanuts.

This may sound like artistic dedication rather than insanity, but trust me, it’s insanity. Jimmy is in the grip of the illusion that he is reinventing cinema, marking his page in movie history, every second of every day. Therefore, the simplest shot (Milligan standing in front of his little parish church, for example) is undertaken with Eisensteinian enthusiasm. Yu will mount huge attacks; he will holler into being a phalanx of klieg lights and booms; he will lead the charge himself with the 35-millimetre camera raised above his head. Again, this may sound admirable but it is fundamentally irritating, and finally maddening, because Jimmy lacks both age-appropriate social skills and much of the English language. Although he’s lived in North America for ten years, he abandoned his acquisition of the tongue after mastering, oh, thirty-five words, not all of which are applicable to the film and television business. (“Buttocks,” for example, which he employs in a variety of ways. When angry at the grips, Jimmy will shriek, “Buttocks!” We don’t know if this is the part of their anatomy he is threatening or if it is just an all-purpose cry of frustration.) The word he shouts most is “Right!” which serves duty both as “correct” and, although it is racially insensitive to mention this, “light.”