Life Goes to the Movies (2 page)

“A little,” I lie.

“Take off your jacket. Roll up your sleeve.”

“What for?”

“I need to see your arm.”

“What do you need to see my arm for?”

“Would you mind just rolling up your damn sleeve, please?”

I take off my jacket; I roll up my sleeve.

He looks at my arm.

“What are you doing first thing tomorrow?”

I shrug. “Not much.”

“Congratulations, you got the part.”

He scribbles something on a corner of his notebook page, tears it off and hands it to me. “Be there at six thirty a.m., sharp.”

He shuts his notebook, stands and smiles down at me. I see that front tooth again, the one that doesn’t match the others. Seeing me noticing it,
he jiggles the odd tooth up and down in his mouth. It makes a thin metallic sound as it rattles against his other teeth. Then he picks up his duffel
bag and goes.

It’s So Good
Don’t Even
Try It Once
(Student Film)

I
grew up in two countries, the Europe inside my house in Barnum, Connecticut, and the United States of America outside. Inside were books in foreign
languages crammed onto shelves, along with my inventor father’s sloppy solid paintings of fountains and statues. Outside were baseball diamonds,
woods and white picket fences. Inside was the dust of the Old World (not that my mother failed to keep a clean house; this was the dust of centuries
that no amount of Lemon Pledge could annihilate); outside were five and dime stores, hamburger and rootbeer stands, and the crumbling ruins of hat
factories.

Inside, my parents spoke in clashing foreign tongues, my father’s adopted Oxbridge colliding with my mother’s salami-thick Milanese.
Outside, the neighborhood kids spoke mainly with balls, fists, and spit. I could never get the football to spin like Lenny P., or spit through a gap in
my teeth like Sean A., or blow giant pink Bazooka bubbles like Chucky S. I couldn’t whistle through my fingers, or get the tilt right on my
baseball cap. At being American I was hopelessly inept. That my mother sent me off to school with spaghetti and omelet sandwiches and creases in my
jeans didn’t help.

America was a foreign country. It scared me. Even the flag scared me. The stripes were snakes and whips; the stars had teeth. The flag wore a huge chip
on its broad square shoulder and said, “I dare you.” But I didn’t dare. I was too meek, too diffident, too European to dare.

Since my father was an atheist we never went to church, so churches scared me, too. So did crosses. So did steeples. So did the words
“Lord” and “Savior.”

I had nothing to pray to.

2

The next day I got up at six o’clock. Since there was no space left in the dormitories for me, I rented a room in an apartment belonging to a
retired church choir conductor. His name was Mortimer Creedle, but I thought of him as Captain Nemo, since he kept an antique church organ in his
vestibule and played Mozart requiems to raise the dead.

The apartment had only one bathroom. Captain Nemo had the habit of taking hour-long showers every morning, as if not merely washing himself but trying
to expunge from his flesh all of the sins of this fallen world. I kept a Medaglia Coffee can in my room that I used as my “thunder mug.”
That morning, while Captain Nemo showered, I pissed into it. Then I brushed my teeth over the kitchen sink, and hurried out the door.

3

Truthfully, I’d never acted in a movie before. I’d never done any acting, really, aside from non-speaking parts in a few high school
musicals, a Shark in West Side Story, a pinstriped spearchucker in Guys and Dolls.

The only real acting I’d ever done had been in my head, in front of the bathroom medicine cabinet mirror, pretending to be my favorite movie and
TV stars. They were my role models, my pagan surrogate gods. From them I hoped to learn how to be—or at least act like—a real American.

To the medicine cabinet mirror, that’s what I’d pray to. I’d pray to make these overstuffed brown eyes of mine paler and squintier,
to make my shit-colored curls fairer and straighter, to bleach the olive tinge from my skin and save me from being permanently typecast as the only
child of eccentric Italian immigrants born and bred in a crumbling Connecticut former hat factory town.Nigel DeWop, Nigel DeGuinea, Nigel DeDago …

4

It was still dark outside, and cold. Leftover Christmas lights strung on stoops shed cheerful colors that failed to soak up the darkness and gloom. I
ran with my gloveless hands in the pockets of my checkered On the Waterfront jacket. An icy wind blew in solid gusts from the East River,
sucking tears from the corners of my eyes. By the time I got to the address on the slip of paper my ears were frozen.

Dwaine lived over the Chopsticks Express, a Chinese takeout place, one of those lowdown joints with a pair of tables no one ever sits at. As I climbed
the stairs the cooking smells grew stronger. I knocked on a door painted so thickly brown it looked like it had been dipped in fudge. The door opened
and Dwaine stood there. He looked at his watch.

“You’re seven minutes late,” he said.

He had me change into my “costume,” which consisted of my very own dishwater gray Fruit of the Loom briefs. The apartment was freezing.
Goosebumps coated my arms and shoulders. I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. Dwaine took light meter readings off my chin, my ears, my
goose-bumped body parts.

5

The movie was titled It’s So Good Don’t Even Try it Once. It was about a heroin addict. (Now I knew why he’d been looking at
my veins). I knew nothing at all about drugs. I’d smoked pot three or four times, that’s it. Dwaine showed me what to do, then he stood
behind the camera and started filming. I’d never felt more nervous. Like a network of invisible wires self-consciousness attached itself to every
one of my limbs; every way I tried to move, the wires pulled the other way. I shook all over, and not just from the cold.

“Relax,” said Dwaine, handing me a mug of tea. “There’s nothing to be nervous about. It’s just you and me and this piece
of shit Japanese camera.” He pointed to the super-8 mounted on its spindly tripod. “Just be yourself. You’re made for this
part.”

Still, at first I found it hard to relax. Being filmed for real felt less like standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror than like sitting on a
doctor’s rubber-padded examination table. It took me a while, but I finally managed to calm down and even started to enjoy myself. By the time we
got to the part where the character I played fired up his “works,” cooking the confectioner’s sugar we used as a substitute for the
real thing in a bent old spoon over an alcohol lamp, I forgot that the camera was even there.

Between scenes and takes my eyes roamed Dwaine’s apartment. There wasn’t that much to see. It was the kind of room that poets commit
suicide in. A few sticks of furniture, a desk covered with film cans and editing equipment, strips of film dangling from strings strung along the
walls, a pile of notebooks stacked under a mayonnaise jar full of pens, a poster for Taxi Driver showing a Mohawked Robert DeNiro posing in
front of his Checker cab, tacked to the bathroom door. Over the poster, dangling from a leather shoelace snaring a bent nail, was a machete with a
long, curved, deeply tarnished blade.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A machete.”

“Really? Where did you get it?”

“In Thailand.”

“What were you doing in Thailand?”

“Fighting mosquitoes.”

“With that?”

“It was a gift from some pirates.” Dwaine handed me another mug of hot tea. Pirates, I thought, sipping, nodding, like that was a perfectly
logical explanation.

One other object caught my eye: five-inches long, black, bullet-shaped, standing upright on the stack of notebooks next to the mayonnaise jar.
“Pick it up,” said Dwaine.

I did. It was made of rubber.

“I call it The Black Dildo from Hell,” Dwaine explained. “It’s a rubber bullet, used by police to stun people without killing
them. That’s the idea, anyway. It so happens that this one passed through a lady’s brain. Enough beauty parlor chitchat, babe. Let’s
get back to work.”

6

Dwaine worked from storyboards, black-and-white sketches like panels in a comic strip. Like Alfred Hitchcock he followed them slavishly. We shot
through the morning and into the afternoon. I cut three of my classes. Making that movie seemed suddenly much more important than color wheels, the
mechanics of typography, and principles of advertising design. Though I liked to draw and was good at it, I didn’t have whatever it took to be a
real artist. Something was missing. Passion: that was the missing ingredient, the emotion for lack of which I often felt like a ghost haunting myself.
That may be why I preferred the old black-and-white movies. I loved the dramatic intensity evoked by the collision of those two non-colors, along with
the endless shades of gray existing between them, how through rapidly shifting unequal intensities of light the stories unfolded. But my inner world
wasn’t black, white, or gray; it was simply colorless, like the bricks that built the hat factories of my hometown—bricks so dull they
seemed more gray than red.

By the time I headed home from Dwaine’s place dark had fallen. The streets had an odd glossiness to them. The lights in apartment windows cast a
warm, peculiar glow that swung down to kiss the surface of the pavement at my feet. For the first time since moving to New York, I felt as if those
streets had something to do with me and I with them. The chilled air hummed with purpose, with passion.

7

Six hours later, after eating and taking a nap, I was back with Dwaine again, on the roof of one of the twin high-rise dormitory buildings, shooting
the nightmare sequence to It’s So Good Don’t Even Try It Once. In the sequence I’m pursued by a machete-wielding, gas-masked
Mister Softee vendor, who chases me over the edge of the roof and into the arms of an angel who arrives just in time to save my soul. Byron Huffnagel,
a graduate film major, played my nemesis, the man in the Mister Softee uniform. Huff, as we called him, weighed something like three hundred pounds.
When not in costume he wore three-piece pinstriped banker’s suits and perspired heavily. Even in cold weather Huff perspired. He carried a silk
handkerchief with which to mop his brow.

“Fitz tells me that you’re from Waterbury, Connecticut?” he said between takes on the roof. “That’s where they’ve
got all the screw and brass wire factories? The place with the big brick Florentine clock tower, right? I pass through there all the time on the way to
visit my uncle in Boston,” said Huff.

“Actually,” I corrected him, “I come from Barnum, next door.”

“Oh, Barnum. Yeah, yeah, I know Barnum. Sure. That’s where they got the white elephant, right?” He referred to a sculpted elephant
perched over the town square on a tall granite column. Huff wiped his forehead. He had a thick black beard and wore thick Buddy Holly horn rims that
accentuated his fat cheeks. His face was like one of those magnetized toys with metal shavings that you manipulate to achieve various distributions of
facial hair. His breath smelled like the cages where they kept laboratory snakes and mice in my high school biology department storage room.

“So, what do you think?” He nodded toward Dwaine, who was setting the camera up for my next scene. “Think he’s—”
Huff twirled a fat finger by his ear.

“Why would I think that?”

“He was in ‘Nam. You know that, don’t you?”

“Was he?”

“Where do you suppose he got the machete?”

“He told me he got it from some pirates in Thailand.”

Huff shook his head. “He was over there, man. Trust me. That look in his eyes, that thousand-yard stare? My cousin Sylvie, he had the same look
when he came home. And I’d hate to tell what happened to him.” Huff paused, expecting me to ask. When I didn’t he told me anyway.
“Jumped off a twelve story building. Only no angel caught him. Landed on a convertible MG with the top up. The top broke his fall. Now he’s
quadriplegic living in a V.A. hospital. Poor guy never did have much luck. Put all his money in Western Union stock. Western Union—can you
believe that? Like who the hell sends telegrams anymore? My cousin suffers from BLS, Born Loser Syndrome.”

“What’s all this got to do with Dwaine?”

“Nothing. I’m just saying—he’s a little, you know.”

“What?”

Huff shrugged. “Nothing.”

The third member of our crew, the one who played the angel who rescued me, was a theater arts major named Veronica Wiggins, but who went by Venus. And
though her specialties were costumes and props, Venus acted, too. She made the perfect cloudy angel, since she was an albino. Her hair was the same
pale color as her skin, which was the same color as her teeth, which were the same color as her pillowy lips, like all parts of her had been soaked in
a vat of Clorox. The only parts of her that bore any trace of color were her fingertips, rosy from her chewing on them constantly, a nervous habit. To
shield her pigmentless nearsighted eyes from the sun she wore prescription sunglasses. Behind her back other students called her Casper the Friendly
Ghost, Snow White, and Fluorescent Face, but I personally found her very attractive.

“So,” she said to me, “you’re Dwaine’s new leading man?” She had a faint southern drawl. A southern Albino angel.

“Why? Have there been others?”

“One or two.”

“I thought Dwaine was a new student?”

She shook her head. “He’s been here half a year at least.”

“Really? I haven’t seen him around.”

“He’s like an owl, he usually only comes out at night.”

“What happened to the other leading men?”

“The usual,” she answered with a shrug. “Thrown off of buildings, hacked to pieces, overdosed, lobotomized, riddled with
bullets …” She curled a strand of white hair with a white finger. “On film, that is. In real life I guess Dwaine just sort of
wore them out.”