Life Goes to the Movies (10 page)

“Interesting is an interesting word. In my experience it usually means lousy.”

“I didn’t mean that!”

“What did you mean, Nigel?”

“I meant—interesting.”

“Well, one thing is for sure, whoever wrote this is very, very angry.” She gave the script a sharp slap, like a mother slapping a
misbehaved child. “This reads more like a vendetta than a screenplay.” She described the writing as by turns maudlin, sentimental, and
pornographically violent. “I would not want to have the author over to dinner, that’s for sure.”

“But—I mean, is it any good?”

“It has power,” Esther said. “It definitely has power. But so does a mudslide. So did Joseph Stalin. So did Attila the Hun. I
certainly would not recommend it. It has zero commercial potential.”

4

Two days later Esther was fired. Duncan arrived at his office one morning to find a human turd, still reeking and glistening, deposited in his
vestibule like a votive offering. It might have been left there by one of the many homeless people who roamed that part of the city at night, or it
might have been a symbolic gesture on the part of one of Duncan’s more disgruntled clients; very possibly it was both. When Esther arrived Duncan
ordered her to clean it up. This she refused to do, and so Duncan fired her. I saw the whole thing. It made me sick. It was like watching a lion tackle
a gazelle on one of those nature shows.

A few days later I learned that Bull Duncan was putting together an entourage to take with him to the first ever Greater Miami International Film
Festival. The festival would be packed with Hollywood stars and their directors, he told me. There would be nightly screenings, receptions and cocktail
parties. Martin Scorsese would be there, so would Bobby DeNiro, according to Bull Duncan, who needed an experienced cameraman to round out his coterie.
I said I knew just the right person, a guy who could handhold a 16-millimeter as steady as a Steadicam, who had his own equipment and who would work
for carfare.

Three weeks later Dwaine and I found ourselves packed into the tail section of a Douglas DC-8, among colicky infants and people whose concept of high
fashion was a T-shirt that said “I’m with STUPID.” In the luggage bin over our heads: a brand-new/used Bolex H16-RX-V sprung from a
Third Avenue pawnshop. Flying ahead of us in First Class Bull Duncan sipped a complimentary mimosa and stretched his stubby legs. Before leaving he
reminded us that we would not be paid anything, that we would have our sustentative needs provided for, that our compensation otherwise would consistexclushively of the privilege of serving Bull Duncan, King of Literary & Film Agents.

We didn’t mind. We were going to Florida; we were going to be Famous.

Famous and Florida: like champagne and orange juice those two words blended, forming Mimosas of the Mind.

5

While Dwaine dozed in the window seat I struck up a conversation with a man across the aisle, a Culligan water softener salesman from Des Moines, Iowa.
When the steward charged him for a second Bloody Mary, a voice from nowhere hissed: Fucking jerk. Moments later, when the lady in front of him
reclined her seat deep into his ample lap, the same tinny voice from nowhere sneered, Eat shit.

Finally, the salesman revealed his secret: a palm-sized device bought in a Las Vegas novelty store. The Insultomatic had three buttons, a red button, a
blue button, and a green button. Each button was color-coded to a different affront.

“Take it,” said the salesman, pressing the device into my palm. “I’m sick of the damn thing. Besides, I got something even
better.” Reaching into his attaché case, he pulled out a Fart Detector.

We landed in Miami to learn that a hotel bed did not qualify as a sustentative need.

“Sleep on the beach,” said Bull Duncan.

I pressed the red button.

6

Gulls wheel under a dome of powder blue sky. Dwaine hacks city smog and cigarette smoke from his lungs. Strands of seaweed cling to our tuxedoes. The
morning sun invests everything with a lemony, prehistoric glow, the kind of light that I picture dinosaurs trouncing through. With its bare dunes and
mausoleum-like hotels the landscape feels oddly menacing, like walking into a De Chirico or a Dali.

We march up a dune toward the Paradise. As we do a man in a sombrero and mirrored sunglasses finger-whistles us to a halt.

“How did you get off on the beach?” the sombrero wants to know.

“You mean how did we get on to the beach?” Dwaine, a stickler for grammar, corrects him.

“No,” says the man, “I mean how did you get off on the beach?”

“We’re still on the damn beach,” Dwaine tells him. “We didn’t get off on anything. We’ve been on the damn
beach all goddamn night.” Dwaine’s mood could stand improvement.

“That is not what I am asking you,” says the man in the sombrero, who looks exactly like Lee Marvin in Hell in the Pacific, and
whose voice sounds like a machine for grinding rocks. “I’m asking how did you get off on the beach?”

“We swam,” I submit, flicking bladder wrack off Dwaine’s tuxedo shoulder. “We’re fish; we just decided to evolve. See? No
gills.” I lift up my arms, point to where my gills should be.

The sombrero is not amused. He asks to see our identification. We flash our gold V.I.P. First Ever Greater Miami International Film Festival Press
Corps Passes. Their gold laminate fails to dazzle. The sombrero man asks us what hotel we’re registered with. I point over the sand dune to the
Paradise. He asks me which room number. “Thirty-two-oh-eight,” I say, thinking fast. But not fast enough. The Hotel Paradise is only twelve
stories.

“This beach is private property,” says the man in the sombrero. “If I see you two out here again I’ll have you arrested. Good
morning.”

7

Good Morning, Good Morning, a suntan-oil slathered feminine voice greets us over the hotel P.A. system.
We hope you are enjoying your stay at the Hotel Paradise. Today at eleven thirty we’re offering bingo in the mezzanine lounge, with prizes
complimentary to you. Sailing and waterskiing instructions are also available. See Hank at the cabana to reserve your time slot.

We ride the express elevator to Bull Duncan’s penthouse suite, where we find our boss sitting up on a king-sized bed, talking into a phone,
saying
Right, Sheila, right: I totally understand, but a deal’s a deal, right? You said exclusive, didn’t you? That is what you said,
isn’t it?
Seeing us walk in, he buries the receiver in the folds of his silk pajamas, gold bulls charging over a royal blue background. “Gimme a
second,” he looks up and says to us. “I’m dealing with an Grade-A Class-1 Premium Deluxe pain in the ass here.”What’s that, Sheila? Sheila, listen, sweetheart, I can’t do this right now. I’ve gotpeople here, very important people—. He mimes jerking off. Right, Sheila. Right, pussycat. Love you, too. Bye-bye. He hangs up.
“God, what a festering cunt! So, guys, tell me, how was the beach? Beautiful, right?”

A fourth body crowds the suite, the international component of Bull Duncan’s press entourage: a short skinny photojournalist from Milan named
Nando, his Italian accent as thick as my mom’s. He wears striped pajamas with socks and looks like Italy’s not very good answer to Don
Knotts. He looks up at us from the floor by Duncan’s bed where he has apparently spent the night. As Duncan goes back to his phone, Nando shakes
his head and mutters, “Dis is a shit.”

8

From the start the festival is a fiasco. Most of the stars don’t show up, including Scorsese and DeNiro. The few stars that do appear are of such
dim wattage they barely outshine our patent leather tuxedo shoes, which after three nights of sleeping on the beach are beginning to look like Hush
Puppies.

Each morning Duncan loads us into a rental van and sends us off with his benediction (“You three pussies’ll have the Enquirer eating
out of your hands!”) to the airport to greet and photograph the arriving stars. Each day the three of us stand there, at the arrivals gate, Nando
with his Nikon, Dwaine with the Bolex H16-RX-V propped on his shoulder, me with boxes of additional film stock, all of us keeping our eyes peeled for
Hollywood stars or directors, or anyone dressed all in black and wearing sunglasses indoors. Meanwhile the flights from Los Angeles keep coming with no
one at all famous aboard any of them.

“Christ,” says Dwaine, watching yet another stream of unfamous faces deplane. “Get a load of all these nobodies! Man, how can theystand it?”

“We’re not exactly famous ourselves,” I remind him as the latest plane’s ultimate passenger, an oxygenated old man in a
wheelchair, rolls by.

“We are so famous, babe,” Dwaine corrects me. “It’s just that no one knows about it yet.”

“Dis is a shit,” says Nando.

9

We have a choice. We can fly back to New York, back to gray slushy streets and subways as windy and cold as Vostok, Antarctica, back to our drafty
fourth floor Queens tenement with kitchen tub/table. We can fly back to the known misery of our lives, or we can stay in Florida and mutiny.

We mutiny.

We swim laps in the Hotel Paradise pool, sun ourselves in the cabana, jog along the beach that is our bedroom, breakfast on mini Danishes and espressos
at the Veranda Grill, make appointments with the kayaking, the windsurfing, the bossa nova, the flamenco dance instructors. We avail ourselves of the
hotel’s full complement of skilled, courteous staffers, courtesy of Bull Duncan, whose signature Dwaine forges masterfully on an endless series
of room service chits. To where I start wondering if maybe we’re going just a tad too far.

“Hell no,” says Dwaine. “That dick-faced ex-boss of yours owes us at least this much for dragging our sorry asses down here. Besides,
man,” he waves a freshly manicured hand across the cabana hut, “look around you, what do you see?” I look around, seeing other hotel
guests stretched out on long chairs with puffy yellow cushions, sunning themselves, older people mostly, their faces as red as lobsters under snowy
retired heads. “People with money,” says Dwaine. “Too much money. And where do you suppose they got all of that money? Huh?Huh? They stole it, naturally,” he answers before I can wager a guess. “Or else they killed for it, or both. Compared to
these people, man, you and me are nothing but pilot fish swimming in a tank full of killer sharks.

“Trust me,” he adds, sipping a grenadine and soda, “it’ll take more than a manicure and a few tango lessons to catch up with
these fuckers. Ease up on the cuticles a bit, miss, do you mind?”

I’ve never seen Dwaine looking better, suntanned and healthy, not drinking or brooding at all. He seems transformed, his rough edges softened by
repeated soakings in Miami Beach saltwater, his dark moods brightened by the Florida sun. Since we arrived here he hasn’t lit a single Newport,
or swallowed a drop of booze. Those metal shards that normally swim around in his eyes? They look more like silver than aluminum now. I would even go
as far as to say that they sparkle.

Yes, they sparkle, they really do.

The one surviving relic of the old Dwaine are his screaming nightmares, aided and abetted by the Miami Beach Shore Patrol, with it blinding blue
tungsten beam and loudspeaker imperative:

Get down off the beach! Get down off the beach!

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay…”

10

At pre-screening cocktail parties we gorge ourselves on jumbo shrimp dunked in silver tureens of spicy red cocktail sauce, and crackers or melba toast
straining under mounds of fois gras, gray beluga caviar, and cheeses runny, stinky and crumbly, all washed down with ash-dry, nose-tickling
champagne (me) or pale ginger-ale (Dwaine). Bellies stuffed, whistles whetted, gold V.I.P. passes pinned to tuxedo lapels, we step into the theater and
head straight for the roped-off seats, where we sit and wait for the hoi polloi to mistake us for stars. They hand us their festival programs,
ask for our autographs. We sign away, basking in fame’s transitory glow.

But Dwaine isn’t satisfied with such minor ruses. He starts naming pictures, elucidating their plots. “Our latest feature is calledDon’t Lean on Me,” he tells a pair of starry-eyed snowbirds. “It’s a tragicomedy about these two crippled con artists
who escape from Sing-Sing. See, they each have one leg that’s missing. Sam’s missing his right leg, and Sid’s missing his left leg,
but they’ve got only one crutch between them, which they have to share, see, since they lost one during the escape, but still they somehow manage
to get away with it because it’s so hard for anyone to believe. See, the whole premise of the movie has to do with what’s called the
willing suspension of disbelief, and with how these two con artists have got it figured out that the more unbelievable a thing is the more people are
likely to suspend their beliefs to believe it.”

“Where can we see it?” one of the snowbirds wants to know.

“So far it’s been released only in a few select theaters in the Republic of Tuva,” Dwaine answers over his shoulder as we toss aside
paper signs saying RESERVED and make ourselves comfortable. “But it should be opening in local theaters any—”

A bow-tied old coot of an usher points his flashlight at our un-famous faces. “Sorry, boys, but those are reserved seats. You’ll have to
move.”

11

On offer that evening is Night Vision, an independent feature about two Vietnam veterans living on the fringes of Hoboken and insanity. In the
pivotal scene Gus, one of the two vets, licks an ice cream cone while the other, Rufus, tortures and kills a social worker. Having disposed of her body
in a garbage dumpster they sit side by side on their crumbling stoop, their faces as droopy as the pizza slices they’re eating. After a few
dreary beats Rufus turns to Gus and says, “What’s eating you?” “I don’t know,” Gus replies. “I just feel empty.” As the film plays on more and more people rise from their seats and leave. “Night soil is more
like it,” one disgruntled viewer mutters on his way to the exit.