Life Goes to the Movies (15 page)

“Spotcha a whisky, pardner?”

We twist through barbed wire and NO TRESPASSING signs. Bowlegged and ready to draw we stagger through the swinging doors to find ourselves in a
dripping void of pavement and sawdust. We belly up to where the bar isn’t but ought to be. Slamming his fist on it, or pretending to, Dwaine
orders rotgut while I, his trusty sidekick, settle for Sarsaparilla. We draw pretend six-shooters and gun each other down and live to laugh about it.

Somewhere out in the rain a dog barks. Through the gap in the swinging doors I see a wet black animal charging toward us, its teeth bared, only to
jerk, yelp and strain at the end of a runner chain. A security officer in canary sansabelt pants bounces after it in an umbrella-covered golf
cart—Broderick Crawford in The Last Posse. Before he can arrest us we hoof it back to the rental hearse, where Archibald checks his
wristwatch.

“T-minus twenty minutes and counting.”

By then the moguls have gotten to the scene where Rufus murders the social worker. If they get past that, I’m thinking—we’re all
probably thinking—there’s hope.

Oh please distribute Archie’s movie! Fill our jars with moonbeams!

We roll on past a series of hangar-sized soundstages and circle back to the screening trailer. The three film canisters sit on the sidewalk in the
rain.

The red light over the blue door is dead.

Archibald sneezes.

9

PINK PUSSYCAT

PINK PUSSYCAT

PINK PUSSYCAT

10

We’ve just about lost hope when the candlestick phone rings. Thinking it’s the brass at Columbia, the one studio that sat through all ofNight Vision,calling with an offer, Archibald lurches out of bed to answer it. But it’s not Columbia. It’s the hotel manager
telling us to report at once to the lobby, that there has been “an incident.”

The elevator is out of order. I rush down the stairs to find Dwaine seated in an upholstered lobby chair with the manager and the concierge standing
nearby, his right arm swaddled in a bloody towel. Shards of glass dazzle the lobby floor below where a fist-sized crater ventilates one of the front
door’s porthole windows. Scattered among the shards are what look like the pages of a screenplay.

“I saw him,” says Dwaine.

“Who?” I say.

“Marty,” he says.

“Scorsese?” I say.

“No, Martystarring Ernest Borgnine. Yes, Marty Scorsese.”

“And?”

“I asked him to read my screenplay.”

“Cool. What did he say?”

“He said fuck off, what does it look like he said?”

11

Archibald gives us twenty-four hours to vacate. Between us Dwaine and I don’t have candy bar change.

Dwaine’s not worried.

He’s got a plan.

12

The lights of the firehouse burn softly. We wait on a bus bench.

“Describe him to me again.”

“He’s bald, fat, with no neck and a face like a gopher.”

“Gotcha.”

An hour passes. In the shadow of a billboard for Apocalypse Nowwe take turns emptying our bladders. Ducks quack in a nearby canal. A
faint rustling of palm fronds clings to the breeze.

“Maybe he left town.”

Dwaine shakes his head. “He’s here. I can smell him. That faint earwax odor? That’s Dexter’s smell.”

Another hour oozes. We’re about to give up when a tomato red Austin Healy pulls up to the curb. The driver wears a camouflage fatigue jacket and
looks familiar.

“That’s him,” Dwaine nudges me. “That’s Dexter Groon.”

No it’s not, I say to myself, it’s Peter Lorre.

Dwaine nudges me again.

“Okay, okay: I’m going; I’m going.”

I proceed with The Plan, my part of it. The Plan: I get Groon to open the firehouse door. Dwaine will do the rest. I straighten the knot in
Archibald’s necktie, then cross the street as casually I can, noting, in so doing, that the streetlamps in Venice West are different in color
from those in New York, that they’re cooler, more blue, less pink. I also notice that the Austin Healy has an unorthodox hood ornament, a toy
Oscar welded there like a gunsite. Seeing me approach, Groon eyes me warily but without apparent concern. I toss him a smile: a mistake. My smile must
tip him off—or maybe it’s Archibald Flynn’s reckless taste in men’s neckwear—but all of a sudden Groon’s softboiled
eyes go sunny-side up and crying, “My God—no!” he takes off.

Peter Lorre or Dexter Groon, he’s not built for speed. Yards from the firehouse door I catch up with and grab hold of him.

“I just want to talk,” I say, gripping the sleeve of his fatigue jacket.

“Well I don’t!” he says.

“Well I do!”

“Well I don’t!”

Shouting, “Help, police! I’m being attacked!” Groon breaks away and runs into the street, the fatigue jacket sliding like
something greased, along with a blue Hawaiian shirt, off his shoulders into my hands. I’m standing there like a fool holding his clothes when it
occurs to me that I’ve just assaulted a man, that he is summoning the police, that at any moment now they will arrive, sirens blaring, guns
drawn, shooting first and asking questions later. My stomach churns. As it does a man leaps from the shadows and stands there, slicing the air where
Dexter Groon stood with a tarnished machete.

“What the hell happened?” Dwaine asks.

“He got away from me.”

“And youlet him?”

“What was I supposed to do, bust his kneecaps?”

“As opposed to doing absolutely nothing, yes.”

“Jesus Christ, Dwaine, we’re artists, not muggers.”

“Don’t be splitting hairs on me, babe.”

A siren jellies the air. We split and run.

I’ve run a hundred feet when I realize I’ve still got Groon’s clothes. I toss them into the bed of a Toyota pickup truck.

13

I’m first to arrive at Buffalo Chips, where we agreed to meet in case we were forced to split up, and where a ceiling matrix of piano wire snares
everything from a covered wagon to a fiberglass bison. I go to the bathroom to take a leak and end up puking my guts up, squatting there on the smelly
floor, arms wrapped around the old-fashioned toilet, like the one Al Pacino takes the gun out from behind in The Godfather, with a wooden box
with a handle dangling from a beaded chain.

Everything having whooshed out of me in an ochre flood I rise slowly, my eyes coming level as I do so with a publicity shot of Randolph Scott inRide Lonesome. I look at Scott’s face in the photograph (tanned, squinting, chiseled, heroic) then at mine in the men’s room mirror
(curly-haired, layered with baby-fat, flecked with butterscotch-colored puke) and bend to heave into the bowl again.

At the bar Dwaine joins me, slapping my back.

“You were gawjuss, babe, absolutely gawjuss. A regular hooligan. An Italian Burt Lancaster.”

With stolen tips he buys us both beers. We’re about to drink a toast when Dwaine’s eyes go blurry and his nostrils start twitching.

“Earwax,” he says.

We swivel in our stools. A half-naked, shivering Peter Lorre stands there.

“May I please have my jacket back?” says Dexter Groon. “You Easterners may not realize it, but L.A. can get damned chilly at
night.”

14

It takes us a while to find the Toyota pickup truck. Dwaine hands Dexter Groon his clothes.

“My keys,” says Groon, rifling the fatigue jacket’s pockets. “I had a bunch of keys in here.”

Dwaine dangles them.

“What do you want me to do, write you a check?”

“Hell no. Your checks bounce as much as your belly, probably.”

“What, then?”

“Oscar,” says Dwaine.

“Oscar?”

“Oscar.”

“MyOscar? Is that what you guys are after?”

“No, shithead, we’re after my Oscar! I built that set with my two bare hands while you sat around scratching your balls. That Oscar
is mine; it belongs to me! Your Best Short Animated Feature is your dick.”

He carves the air in front of Groon’s face. Groon cowers, but not nearly as much as Peter Lorre would have.

15

Inside the firehouse: a wooden floor marked with duct and gaffer tape. A push broom leans drunkenly against varnished wainscoting. The fire pole
gleams.

“Where’s the set? What did you do with it, fucker?”

“Relax,” says Groon flicking a light switch. A bay door opens. There’s the Lower East Side, from 14
^th
to Delancey, running
the length of a hook and ladder, all made out of clay. Dwaine’s eyes go misty. Then the set’s profane new centerpiece, a McDonald’s
with golden arches gleaming, comes into view and his shard-wreathed pupils narrow to disdainful slits.

“Don’t look at me like that,” says Groon. “I needed the money. Hell, just because I won an Oscar doesn’t make me
Onassis.”

Dwaine orders the set lights switched on. Groon obeys. A thousand Christmas bulbs gleam in as many windows, headlights and streetlamps. Dwaine pries
off Archie’s cowboy boots and tiptoes in ventilated socks down Second Avenue, the machete swinging at his hips, squatting to read 6-pointDaily News headlines, squeeze BB-sized clay cantaloupes, and greet tiny clay cabbies.

“Hey, there, little guy. How’s it going?”

“Come on, Dwaine,” I say. “Let’s get this over with, okay?”

16

In Dexter Groon’s office, the former fire chief’s office, on a steel desk dating from the Eisenhower Administration, there it stands: the
golden phallus, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Award. Dexter Groon writes out a receipt and hands it to us to sign. “If you
don’t mind,” he says.

He’s just about to turn the statuette over when Dwaine snatches it, gripping it to his chest like a BaMbuti tribeswoman suckling her newborn.
He’s holding it like that when a shrill insistent bleating echoes through the firehouse.

“You guys didn’t think I’d just let you walk out of here with it, did you?” says Groon with a watery Jell-O smile. “Use
your heads.”

About now is when I wish I were in a plush theater seat with a tub of buttered popcorn in my lap. This time, though, in my opinion the movie istoo realistic. As for whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy, that remains to be seen. It depends on the ending. Will the two protagonists
come out smelling like roses—like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting? Or will their exploits culminate in a freeze-frame of them
running, guns drawn, into a hail of municipal bullets—like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid?

With my eyes closedI mull over these and other intriguing possibilities, and open them in time to catch Oscar’s reflection in
Dwaine’s pupils as, gripping the statuette in his bandaged claw, he lifts it high into the caged fluorescent lights and swings it in a golden
rainbow onto the back of Dexter Groon’s skull.

Groon does an actor’s fall and lies there. And keeps lying.

“Dig this fucker, acting dead. Now that’s worth an Oscar!”

“Jesus, Dwaine, now what have you done?”

I kneel and cradle Groon’s neckless gopher head, its short hairs tacky with bright blood. But it can’tbe blood, not real
blood. Nothing out here is supposed to be real, right? On the other hand the blood lacks the telltale purple color of the fake stuff, meaning a
concussion at the very least, while leaving open the possibility of paralysis, brain damage, aphasia, coma, manslaughter. Mandatory jail sentences.
Does California have the death penalty? Holy shit, we’ve gone and murdered a man!

Dwaine takes Groon’s pulse, pries open an eye.

“He’ll be fine,” he says.

“How do you know?”

“I was a combat medic, remember?”

“Damn it, Dwaine, this isn’t Vietnam!”

“That’s what you think.”

17

Groon stirs, moans—just like in the movies. In a glaze of fluorescent light his gopher head twists back and forth. Dwaine finds a roll of duct
tape, winds it around him. Help me out here, he says. But I don’t, I stand there, I can’t move. I’m stuck in my plush seat watching
as Dwaine drags Groon’s mummified body down Avenue A and deposits him in a vacant lot at the corner of East Houston Street. With what’s
left of the duct tape roll he mummifies Oscar.

We’re about to haul ass out of the firehouse when, as the alarm keeps swooping, Dwaine doubles back to flatten the McDonald’s, removing
golden arches, crowning Dexter Groon with them.

Then we’re off, hightailing it down the rollerskating path, hoofing it past overflowing storm sewers and canals, down boulevards flanked with
stereoscopic palm trees. Night rises in blue waves over Hollywood, over the studios and sets and soundstages, over Schwab’s Drugstore and the
Garden of Allah. Pale rats dust the soggy heavens as stars scurry to build their nests in palm fronds. We run until we find ourselves by the ocean,
lying in wet sand looking up at where the stars are supposed to be, seeing nothing but the bottoms of clouds. Dwaine hoists the swaddled statue up into
the dark air and—panting, doing his best Cagney doinghis best George M. Cohan—says: “My mother thanks you, my father thanks
you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you!”

Then he grabs and kisses me, hard.

“What was that for?”

“Because you’re beautiful, Ollie, that’s what. We’re both beautiful. It’s why everyone wants to fuck us.”

He kisses me again, harder.

Like lovers in a cheesy old movie we gaze into each other’s eyes. His sparkle: there’s no other word for it. I’m pulled in by them
and almost want him to kiss me again when he starts laughing and so do I, I can’t help it.

We’re cracking up laughing there on the dark wet Pacific sand. My gut hurts, I’m laughing so hard. We have to hold onto each other,
that’s how hard the two of us are both laughing. I’m still laughing when I lurch away to puke in the sand.

The
Horror Movie
Man
(Horror Movie)

DON’T GIVE UP!

S
uch is Madame Helena’s advice, and she should know, hailing from the Land of Miracles. According to the slim yellow flyers taped to lampposts,
mailboxes and phone booths, strewn like ginkgo leaves along sidewalks, one short visit is all it takes to HELP THOSE WHO’VE BEEN DOUBLE-CROSSED,
HAVE FAINTING SPELLS, CAN’T HOLD ON TO MONEY, WANT LUCK, WANT THEIR LOVED ONES BACK, WANT TO STOP NATURE PROBLEMS or WANT TO GET RID OF STRANGE
SICKNESS and/or WISH TO GAIN FINANCIAL AID, PEACE, LOVE and PROSPERITY.