Boys of Life (38 page)

lied down through those pages like they were some kind oi time-lapse movie about the days passing and passing, and then before I knew ir I'd stumbled on the first oi a whole scries oi articles, starting at the beginning oi April 1987 and going to the end of May, about Carlos's trial, which was taking place in Hermillosa, Mexico.

Here, tor the record, is one of those articles —thanks again to Earl,

who found it in the microfilm section in some library in Albany, and

who, I keep telling him, should get some Job as a detective. But he won't do it—he likes being a prison guard too much. I guess he likes being around people like me.

BIZARRE CASE IN MEXICO

HERMILLOSA. Mexico, May 18-

A Mexican court today acquitted the American film director Carlos Rci chart of charges of kidnapping, assault and reckless endangcrment in the 1986 death of Theodore Blair, a rold actor who had worked with Reichart on several films

The trial attracted considerable attention hoth in Mexico and in the United States, due in part to the lingering myitery surrounding the ac tual events of Blair's death.

Blair was admitted to the Hospital Santa Maria de Los Angeles on July 1. suffering from numerous lacerations and contusions which appeared, according to doctors, to have stemmed from some type of ritual mutilation. Also present were massive internal injuries

Contradictions

r Blair's death. Reichart surrendered himself to Sonoran au thonties. claiming that he had held Blair captive for a week in which he repeated!) sodomized and tortured Blair According to Reichart. Blair managed to escape his captiv -itv when a door was left unlocked

Complicating the case, however. WU .i signed statement bv Blair, deposited with Dr. Hermann Perez of the Hospital Santa Maria de Los Angeles shortly before Blair's death, to the effed that Carlos Reichart was m no wa> responsible for the events which led to Blair's death

Further confusing the situation is the tact that sources at Santa Maria de Los Angeles indicate Reichart accompanied Blair to the hospital

on Jul> l. and was with him frequently during the next several davs. Blair died on Julv 9

At first reluctant to pursue the Cue, Mexican authorities report edlv decided to prosecute when Mr Reichart\ past became more tullv known to them In I9K4 Reichart was charged b> the state • York with soliciting minors lor the purposes of filming ohsccin The charges were Liter dropped In ^legations surfaced that in Rekhlfl had held two bovs virtual prisoner tor several davs. and had forced them at gunpoint to perform sexual tCtl 1 he were allcgcdlv filmed, though a seaah of Reichart \ Manhattan apartment failed to uncover anv ev

287

□

□

PAUL RUSSELL

idence of this. No charges were ever filed in connection with the allegations.

Death by Method Acting?

Reichart's insistence on his own guilt was contradicted by testimony from various of his associates, several of whom remarked on Mr. Blair's self-destructive propensities.

The Mexican court ruled today that the evidence in Mr. Blair's case indicated death by misadventure rather than any demonstrable criminal misconduct on Reichart's part. The judge admonished Reichart, however, that "grave misjudgments of conduct" had been made by Reichart and his associates, and that many of his actions, while not necessarily illegal per se, nonetheless carry with them "a volatile moral taint that provokes disgust and outrage."

At 23, Theodore Blair had attracted considerable critical attention in three films by Carlos Reichart, Zouf.', An American Purgative, and TheO'Porn-Kolossal His striking physical bcaut\ com bincd with an air of romantic dis-solution was compared to such heures as Nijinski. Sal Minco and Antonm Artaud. Some critics COD sidered him the most brilliant member ol The Company, thai

extraordinary ensemble ol acton Reichan ■stemMed beginning in the late 1960s, which provided him

with a seemingly endless pool of talent. The Company also included in its ranks such celebrated performers as Netta Abramowitz, the transvestite Verbena Gray, and the late Samuel Finckelsztajn.

Extreme physical hardships, orchestrated mental duress and other techniques imposed on his actors served to create what Reichart called "a theater of reality"—a heightened method of improvisa-tional acting.

Controversial Career

Reichart, 49, self-proclaimed "anarchist, theologian and pornog-rapher." is the director of a number of critically acclaimed films including Mother Chicago, Ur, The Only Bitterness of Anna, and Creeping Bent. These lively, hallucinatory films have often shocked even sophisticated audiences, especially Reichart's more recent work. His 1987 film. Theo-Porn KoloSSOl, was named b\ the New York Film Critics Circle as "perhaps the DlOSl important liulepen dent film of the last decade." The film's explicit homoerotic and sa

domasocnistic content, however,

caused protest at screenings in se\

era) American citiei in 1984 Reichart was iwarded i

special medal for litetime achieve

menl it the Barcelona Film Festival

in Spain

tiinm h».w you can get used to something Maybe It was be till totally exhausted and In some kind oi ihock from the night It lei I felt t aim, like I wt

ething that took place a long time ago. Vou probably a/ant m< ■ ■ howling but I wasn't I guesi somewhere In the night thii !. and I knen ht n't an) mote

ut him being dead than I'd I Abraham I kncoln

ittet anyb d) wh id ■ hundred

like i ti iiintain

I nh then it In tht

JHH

B O Y S O F L I F E D

where I expected it to be, that I realized I hadn't thought of her once

since everything started to come down. On the kitchen table there was this note saying she was at her parents, please call. It said she was worried sick.

I know I should've called—because as it turns out, in the year since then I've only talked with her through her lawyer, and I understand why she feels that way. But that morning—what was I going to say? That the Tony she thought she knew was just this thing pasted over some other Tony, and now it's come unglued. 7 That this other Tony had things he needed to do that didn't have anything to do with anything she could know about? Nothing I could say to her would even begin to make any sense.

So instead I took this long hot shower. It felt really good, and I just stood there in that water luxuriating for a while, getting the soreness out of my body from the night before. That same electric focus still had me in its grip. I put on some clean jeans, and a black T-shirt, and I reached way back in the back of the closet and pulled out those snakeskin boots Carlos got for me once, back in some other life.

□ PAUL RUSSELL

pissing down on them while they ate their fancy meals and yelling, "Eat the rich!"

When I got to the top of the stairs—still piss-smelling after all these years—I waited there at the door, which, if Carlos was still living there, I knew would be unlocked. There'd never been any doorhandle on it, and still wasn't. When I'd caught my breath, 1 just pushed and the door swung open like it always used to.

Carlos was standing at the front windows with his back to me.

"It's funny," he said, almost like he was talking to himself. He didn't turn around, but I knew he was talking to me. "I saw you coming. I saw you walking up the street. I don't know why I walked to the window just then, but I did. And I saw you coming."

He turned around.

"So how're you doing, Tony?"

It took me totally off-guard, his saying that. Maybe he did see me, and maybe he didn't. With Carlos you just never knew. But already, like always, he had all the advantage.

I noticed somebody'd taken the plastic down off those windows, and it was true—you could see out them like you never could all the time I lived there. They were open wide and a breeze was coming through.

I didn't say anything—I just stood there looking at him, which must've made Hun nervous. He grinned that grin oi his that Hashed

and then went sad, and held his hands out, palms up like he was

showing me he didn't have anything to offer. "I had d 1 finally said.

"I knew von would,'' he told me, "sooner or later. I'm clad you

Wh.tr came next |ust burst out of bun. "Tony, lony, lony," he (Hi, it's apod to see pou." I think it wrai the most sincere I evei

irlos in .ill m\ \iul I Completely believed bun not th.it

it was going to make any difference. Bui I still believe he was happiei • me right then than he' I n to see anybody In his whole

And I w.is happy to see bun too. 1 had tins insane idea that no* th.ir th him i rything was going to tx ho*

ind living bat I in ( hven, lot"< arloi ReU hart And i

.s .md 1 left ofl )

ago like nothing had » things r

D

B O Y S O F L I F E D

"Can't we get out oi this apartment?" he asked, like it was suddenly this idea he had. "The heat's killing me."

"Okay," I told him. "We should walk." I'd always hated that apartment, and to be there again brought back all those winter days I i^ed to sit there feeling trapped—by the city outside the windows, and by Sammy, and all that whisky I used to drink every day. The streets were where I'd always escaped to. Out there, I felt in some kind oi control again—and I think Carlos knew that.

You know how murderers claim they don't remember anything? Well, I remember everything. I remember every word we said that night, the whole time we were walking up Broadway toward Central Park, and then when we were in the park, and everything else. You might expect me to say I wish I didn't remember it— but I don't say that. It's important to me to be able to remember it. Not because it makes me feel any better, or any worse either, but just because I think you have to look at life whatever it looks like, and you can't ever look away from it because when you start to do that, you start to die. Carlos knew that—it was the one terrible lesson he taught—and I learned it from him. Whatever you might think about that, it's something nobody that ever learned it can go and unlearn. And so I remember everything.

Neither of us even knew where to start. I'd rehearsed all this m mv head about a thousand times on the drive up from Tennessee, hut ot course all that just disappeared once I was back in Carlos's presence. He was older, I could tell—he'd always seemed younger than somebody in his forties, more like somebody who was thirty, but now that he was fifty his age had sort of caught up with him all at once. Plus he'd lost weight, not that he ever had that much extra to lose. Rut it made his face look older.

It took a while for us to figure out what to say. He was the one that finally got it started, of course.

"Sammy passed away from us," he said. It was as good a starting place as an v.

"I know," I said. "But tell me about it anyway."

"Well, it was a couple of years ago. He and Seth went U] Poughkeepsie to visit this friend. They took the train, and when the) got to the station in Poughkeepsie Sammy said he was verv tired and could he sit down and rest? So he sat down on a bench in the waiting room, and Serb went 0111 to uvr .1 taxicab, and when he came back Sammy was lyin^ down on the bench. Seth tried to wake him up hut he couldn't."

□ PAUL RUSSELL

I knew that train station—I'd been in and out of it a lot when we were filming Creeping Bent up on the Hudson, back in the tall of 1982. I could see the benches where Sammy would've laid down, and the high ceiling and grimy red brick—it was this big empty depressing room. So that was the last thing he saw, after everything else he'd seen in his life. I felt sorry for Sammy, but I also felt—I don't know why—glad tor him that he was finally gone off this planet. Even though he Loved being alive, I think he was probably glad too—not to have to go through being alive anymore.

We'd turned onto Broadway and were walking uptown. It was a warm night, lots of people were out, and it was great to be back in the city after all those years.

"He said he wrote you," Carlos said. At first I thought he was still talking about Sammy.

"After he got your card he wrote you a letter." Neither ot us broke our stride even for an instant. We just kept on walking up Broadway. "But you never answered back," Carlos said.

"I never got any letters," 1 rold him. I remembered how 1 waited tor Ted to write me back after I sent him that postcard all those \ ago, but he never did, and I finally gave up waiting and decided the card never got to him. I also remembered how happy I'd been to write

Ted and tell him I was m this movie, and how 1 was going to be famous.

I remember actually believing that—that 1 was going to be famous be

cause I'd been in that movie.

Carlos ihrugged. "Nobody ever delivers any mail to thai ipart* mem," he laid. "It's whj the rent's so cheap. Even the postman's on drugs. He probably threw those letters m the trash can. But it's bettei

i. didn't you- how it's .ill better now.' tientnticd. 1

could make .» fortune n thai dump." He grinned lus (

Ins grih, md neither of us kneu it hut th.it wai the List time he'd I ynn I

think l'\ uthtul." he Mid ahmpih

m were always truthful with me," 1 told him, md 1 meant It

en when I was hem^ ,i moiw< \\A, "I wis .« truthful

I told him I thought about it "Definitely," I had to say. • ivhi< h .i lot of the time

•iiet. ind 'hti up but here ive were walk

B O Y S O F L I F E D

tag up Broadway toward Central Park and the night was muggi even though ir was the end o( Septe m be r , tail-end oi the hottest summer m yean.

l4 Oi course I know it," Carlos said. "I've always known it. Anybody who tries to he truthful in this country nets turned into some kind ot monster. That's whv I let you go. 1 didn't want to just shoo you away, because then you'd come hack. 1 a anted you to go tor good,