Fade to Black (2 page)

On the miniature screen of Eric’s Sony, stony-faced Marines were standing at attention beneath a waving flag while the “Star Spangled Banner” played over the cookie-sized speaker. It was that nether time between the late, late show and the early, early movie, when the airwaves were given over to test patterns, preachers, and the crackling gray fuzz of dead air.

It was only fifteen minutes before
Public Enemy
came on.
Public Enemy.
James Cagney. Four stars. A fave.

To kill time, Eric turned to the information channel, where a camera incessantly panned back and forth across an overgrown dashboard of gauges and panels providing viewers with everything from the weather to the time in Tokyo, all against a background of classical music.

While the music softly played, Eric went over to his night table and filled his antique silver fountain pen with black ink. He went through his desk drawers and took out a candy bar from its place of concealment beneath his Argyle socks. Taking the pen and candy bar back to bed, he plopped down on the rumpled covers and prepared to block out his viewing schedule for the upcoming week. He unwrapped the Snickers bar and bit off one end, chomping happily in anticipation of a much-needed sugar rush. He mumbled out loud to himself as he went through the
TV Guide,
mostly to keep himself awake. He had to stay up. He couldn’t let Cagney down.

He skimmed the separate columns of the magazine, his trained eye stopping on each movie and scanning the titles for something worth watching.

“. . . To Have and Have Not.
Bogart and Bacall. Boy, they were magic in that one . . . Hmmmmm, it’s Cagney week, three
P.M.
every day, Channel Nine. That’s perfect . . . If I can just get the old bag to turn off the tape machine. Jesus . . .” Eric had a Betamax hitched up to the large console downstairs, for use in building up his film library.

Eric laughed as he came to an unrated film.
“Planet Nine from Outer Space.
That was the worse. Worse director, Jesus, what a turkey . . . oh, I can skip that one . . . The big ape again. Tuesday at five, old
King Kong.
I’ve already got that one . . .
Dracula’s Daughter,
one-fifteen. Oh, I can’t make that one.
The Big Sleep’s
on at the same time. Chandler and Hawks. What a combination that was . . . They don’t make these kinds of movies any more. I gotta see it again. I mean, Bogart in that bookstore. God . . .
Reefer Madness
on Fifty-two. Horrible. Seen that twice. I think that’s enough of that one . . .”

He still couldn’t figure out why it was that most stations only played the good movies late at night or early in the afternoon. Three times last week he’d been up until three in the morning, making sure he’d catch a couple of classics. It didn’t make any sense. There was so much trash on prime time. What the hell was wrong with people, anyway?

Eric circled the films he would be able to watch with a solid line. With a broken line, he marked off those he’d have to appeal to Aunt Stella to tape. He tried to keep those to a minimum. The way she ranted, you’d think he was asking her to produce the damn things, not just snap a few switches.

He suddenly brightened. “That’s the one!
99 River Street,
with John Payne. I should tape that one . . .” It was an obscure gem. Payne as a cabbie caught up in a diamond heist. Good stuff for a B-thriller. Top-notch atmosphere, too, Eric thought. The kind of setting he had in mind for his own film, the one he’d been tinkering with for years. He’d get around to finishing it one of these days.

Evelyn Keyes was in
99 River Street,
too, Eric recalled, making her perennial bid to rise from the long-cast shadow of being Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister. It had worked some, after all, Eric figured. Got her a role in
The Seven Year Itch,
even if it was just second-fiddling Marilyn.

Marilyn.

Eric smiled at the thought of her. He closed his eyes to remember her in
The Seven Year Itch,
cavorting sensually through dream sequences with Tom Ewell.

Marilyn.

He lay back a moment and stared up at the ceiling. She looked back at him from a life-sized poster, basking in the neon glow of the colored lights around her.

Of all the stars lording over Eric’s room, Marilyn Monroe was the most widely represented. From her walk-ons in
Dangerous Years
and
Ladies of the Chorus
to her dubious swan song in
The Misfits,
Marilyn’s image adorned the room, world and mind of Eric Binford.

The first time he’d met her was in an old issue of
Life
magazine. June, 1962. He’d just been a kid then, at the curious stage when a magazine found hidden behind a clothes hamper was a treasure trove of forbidden fruit. Marilyn had been on the cover, smiling vibrantly, looking away from the camera. Her hair had been disheveled, and she had stood at the edge of a swimming pool, her body well-hidden behind a large, gray bathrobe. She had looked the way Aunt Stella strived to look, and succeeded in every way Aunt Stella failed. Eric had locked himself in the bathroom and looked through the pictures of Marilyn, seeing things he wasn’t supposed to look at, according to his aunt. There were shots taken from film footage of what was supposed to have been Marilyn’s next picture. A night scene, with her skinny dipping.

Eric’s imagination had been set afire, and when, less than two months later,
Life
came out with a second cover story commemorating the career that had led to Marilyn’s untimely death, the obsession had been set into motion. Over the years he had begun to track down old magazine articles, watch for her movies on television, and seek out any other clue to be found about this love of his life who had died days before he had learned of her existence.

His first job had been as an usher at the Fox Venice theatre, less than a mile from his home. He had volunteered to work for free his first week, when they were featuring a Marilyn Monroe film festival. His first day on the job, he had sat down with the crowd and stared mesmerized through the first showing of
Niagara,
her first major dramatic role. He had watched the rest of the festival as a paying customer, having been fired before he was even on the payroll.

His passion for Marilyn had soon branched out into a love for all movies, good or bad. He had developed his own set of idols, the foremost being James Cagney. Jimmy. He was tough. He was cool. Never took any shit. Like John Wayne, only more Eric’s size. Cagney was greater than Wayne, Eric thought, because it took more guts to be tough when you were just a little guy.

If Eric were to cast his life with a free hand, he would have been James Cagney, and Marilyn Monroe would have been his wife. They would have had a nice place out in the mountains somewhere, near one of the old studio lots. They would have amused themselves by going down to the lot, donning costumes, and making up new characters to play. They wouldn’t have had any kids. Just each other.

But Eric wasn’t in a position to run his life like a top-rank producer. He was only a dreamer, one among thousands of troubled souls languishing in the outskirts of Hollywood who found life a pale imitation of the movies, lacking sufficient drama, short on snappy dialogue, poorly directed, and ineptly cast. He felt that any life that went on outside of the movies was an out-take, spoiled footage best left ignored on the floor of the editing room. And so his room reeked of the cinema, a carefully controlled environment, down to the special Velcro clips he’d placed along the side windows to hold strips of cloth over the edge of the shades, preventing sunlight from creeping into his domain.

In his room and in the movie theatre were the only places where Eric felt he truly belonged, where he was among real friends and family. The movies had raised him, taught him all he knew.

Just like Peter Sellers in
Being There.

Almost.

CHAPTER •
2

It was dawn when Aunt Stella awoke, disoriented long enough to jerk back from the vanity and knock over the glass near her elbow. She shrieked as the beet juice raced along the table top, soaking into the facial puffs and cascading over the edge onto the bathrobe draped across her immobile legs.

“Eric!” she cried out. “Eric!”

Receiving no answer, she fumed to herself as she cleaned off the table and poured herself another glass of the tepid juice, downing it greedily like a happy-hour alcoholic.

Some of her makeup had come off on her bathrobe where she had propped her face on her arms while she slept. She looked at herself in the mirror, rubbing arthritic fingers across the smeared streaks of her left cheek.

“Stella, you need a facial,” she told herself, calming down.

Her wheelchair was motorized, with a control box mounted at the front end of the right armrest. She wrapped a pudgy palm over the round knob of the gearshift and powered herself back from the table and across the room to her closet.

Midnight rose from the bed and pranced across the covers, easily clearing the distance to the wheelchair. Halfway through its purred greeting, the cat found itself swatted back into the air by the back of Aunt Stella’s hand.

“How many times have I told you about pouncing like that, you little panther!” Stella screamed, not joking. Midnight quickly came to its feet and ran off into the kitchen.

Given the choice of making the best or worst of her handicap, Aunt Stella had chosen the latter. As far as she was concerned, the world had played a despicable trick on her, and, by God, they would be made to pay for it. Unfortunately for Midnight and Eric, they were the only world Stella made contact with these days. She hadn’t left the house any more than a dozen times in the past few years.

As such, her wardrobe was stocked primarily with bathrobes and housecoats. Vivid pinks and greens, a few blues, most of them simple terry cloth but a few fashioned of other material. She chose one of the pinks and took it with her into the bathroom, where she cursed her way through the complicated motions of her morning toilette.

When she wheeled back out, her face was plain and haggard, her hair a mop of limp waves spilling over the crown of her head. She turned on her radio and tuned into her obligatory Sunday services, letting the room fill with unheard platitudes while she positioned herself before the vanity. She spent the next hour and a half reconstructing the foundation and layered touches of makeup, then worked at her hair with a brush, blow-dryer, and aerosol can filled with a combination of cosmetic glue and fluorocarbons meant to hold the assembled wreckage together.

Braced to start another day, Aunt Stella wheeled out of her room, ignoring the paper left at the foot of her bed, and went to the hallway. Her roving chair hummed like a vacuum cleaner running on high octane.

She and Eric had lived here on Market Street for more than twenty years. The mortgage payments were low, and there were other conveniences, foremost being the special touches that had been added to the house to accommodate Aunt Stella’s confinement to her wheelchair. Between her bedroom and the inside staircase, an elevator the size of a glorified dumbwaiter had been installed to give her easy access to the second floor and Eric’s room, much to his chagrin.

As she rode up the elevator, Aunt Stella tightened her grip on the baton resting across her knees. She was seldom without the staff. It was of negligible use to her as a handicap aid; she employed it more as a means of dissipating nervous energy, much in the way others smoked, cracked their knuckles, or toyed with wedding rings. At various times, she would wield it like anything from a general’s riding crop to a bishop’s sceptre to a magician’s wand.

By the time she opened the elevator door and wheeled herself into the upstairs hallway, Aunt Stella had worked herself up into another frightful mood. She knocked on the doorframe to Eric’s room and called out his name as she came in.

He was asleep, still dressed in his clothes on top of the covers, bathed by the glowing eye of his television set.

Aunt Stella stopped at the foot of the bed and leaned forward, supporting herself on the baton braced across her armrests. She screwed her face up, baring an insidious grin.

“Well, look here,” she cackled, “Mister Smart fell asleep with his nose buried in the screen again. That one-eyed monster’s going to wreck his eyes, much less soften his brain!”

Eric stirred with a groan. The fountain pen was still in his hand, draining ink into the television magazine. He set the pen aside and replaced it with a cigarette.

“You spend all your time daydreaming and watching those silly movies,” Aunt Stella continued, belaboring the obvious.

Eric had been all through this routine before, more times than he cared to remember. He leaned over and snapped off the television, wishing he could do the same to his aunt. He saw the crumpled candy wrapper he’d left on the bed and rolled over on it, working it into the folds of the sheets.

Thinking he was trying to fall back asleep, Aunt Stella pulled away the cloth strips over the window frame and yanked on the drawstrings of the Venetian blinds, letting sliced light charge into the room. She maneuvered her way across the room to the stereo, snapping the FM tuner on and turning up the volume of Korngold’s
Sea Witch,
conducting the rousing orchestration with her baton. For the briefest second, there was a flash of contentment on her face as she absorbed herself into the music.

“Morning,” Eric told her grudgingly, stumbling out of bed to his feet and padding across the room, taking care not to step on the mess strewn across the carpet. He felt terrible, even after patting his stomach and belching free a pocket of trapped gas. His mouth was dry and foul-tasting from smoking, and his throat was raw, parched. He coughed his way to the dresser, where he had left a can of Dr. Pepper with a few stale sips left. It pacified his throat long enough for him to take another drag on his cigarette.

“Have you looked at yourself lately?” Aunt Stella asked him, lowering the baton. “You look like hell!”

Eric stared at his reflection in the wall mirror, surrounded by rubber masks of creatures who looked only slightly worse off than him. He was thin and gaunt. Dark circles arched beneath his bloodshot eyes. His pale face was framed by stringy, unwashed hair the color of a used paintbrush. A hell of a sight, he had to admit. He slowly twisted his features, trying on a few favorite impressions. Cagney, Bogart, Widmark.