Life Goes to the Movies (27 page)

“The screenwriting workshop is by far the most popular,” Dwaine says. “People are going nuts to get in.” He mimics a rim shot.
“Seriously, next month we’re going on a field trip to the new Vietnam war memorial they just built down in D.C. You know—the
Wall?” From a cardboard box in the conference room closet he unfolds one of the T-shirts he designed and had silk screened for the occasion. It
shows a line of soldiers in formation, silhouetted in white on a black background. WE’VE BEEN TO THE WALL.

“Looks like you’ve been keeping pretty busy,” I note.

“Yeah, my dance card’s pretty full, all right.”

I explain that I’ve been busy myself following a major shake-up at the agency. Donny pulled what in the advertising industry is called a
“palace coup,” raiding a rival agency’s reject drawer to win over their biggest client with a campaign its officers had snubbed a
mere six months earlier. Thanks to this act of not-so-petty larceny my mentor and I have escaped dog food purgatory to enter Coca-Cola Heaven.

“Cola wars!” Dwaine says, shaking his head. “Man, Ilove it! When not sponsoring genocide in Third World countries
they’re going at each other’s throats at home! So tell me, babe, what’s the latest advertising campaign in the works? Displacing red
wine at French dinner tables? Brainwashing voodoo priestesses into substituting cola for their witch’s brew? Down with coffee, tea,
mother’s milk?”

“Those were last year’s crusades,” I submit dryly.

“The Liquid Messiah,” says Dwaine. “Come unto me all ye that travail and I will refresh you. Face it, babe, your clients
won’t rest until their dark tonic has conquered the stars.”

“Maybe, but I suspect they’d settle for a three percent market share increase.”

7

We make small talk. When I ask him when the heck he plans to get out of there, Dwaine gives me a funny look. “Now why would I want to do a crazy
thing like that?”

“But you seem healthy. You look great.”

“Oh, I’m doing just fine,” he says. “In fact I feel eighteen years old. Best of all I’m not killing anyone, including
yours truly.”

“So what’s the problem, then,” I say as casually as possible. “I mean, sooner or later they’ve got to discharge you,
right?”

“Oh, really? Says who?”

“I mean—isn’t that the whole point?”

Dwaine throws me the indulgent smile, the kind grammar school teachers routinely apply to earnest yet dim-witted pupils. “No, babe, that is not
the whole point. It’s not even half the point. The point isn’t even for me to get better. It’s for me notto get worse, which
means staying right here.”

“You wantto stay here? You can’t be serious!”

“You always say that, babe. You always say I’m not serious. What do I have to do to convince you? I’m as serious as a maladaptive
pancreas. Please believe me, for once.”

“So you’re just going to stay here forever, is that the plan?”

“That’s sort of the idea, as of now.”

I shake my head. “But you can’t, Dwaine.”

“Why not?

“For a start they won’t let you.”

“You don’t think so? Listen, babe. I can stay here as long as I want. See, it all depends on whether or not I continue to pose a quote
potential threat to myself and others unquote. Meaning the minute I feel the lid starting to come off I just need to act out a wee bit and down it
comes again, shutting me in nice and tight. I’m manning the controls here. It’s my baseball; I’m on the pitcher’s mound. Yanks
lead, four nothing.”

A warm wetness spreads itself like wintergreen oil across my shoulders and back. The conference room walls close in on me. Sunlight screams through the
barred window, slicing the opposite walls into a dozen glowing white bars. The air in the room turns as dry as vacuum cleaner dust. “Dwaine, this
isn’t funny,” I say. “This is your life we’re talking about. Tell me you don’t ever want to get out of this
goddamn place!”

“I don’t want to get out of this place.”

“But you don’t mean that!”

“But I do.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a bloodbath out there, that’s why. How many times do I need to tell you that? Don’t you understand, babe? Of
course I’m getting better; that’s not the point. The point is the world is getting worse! Hegal said, ‘History repeats itself the
first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ We’re up to about the twentieth time here. We’re way past farce! We’re living
in a George Grotz etching! Excuse me; you’reliving in a George Grotz etching! You’re the one who’s in the nuthouse,
not me. They call this place a mental hospital, and true, there happen to be some crazy people in here. But here at least there’s somesupervision. All you’ve got out there is a bunch of soldiers and cops and other armed maniacs as bad or worse than the people
they’re supposed to be protecting. I should know, babe; I used to be one of the so-called protectors. The first sane thing I ever did in my life
was to come here. Believe it.”

“The world’s not as bad as you make it out to be, Dwaine.”

“So yousay, babe. And you’re entitled to your opinion. But look where that opinion is coming from: from out there,from deep
inside the George Grotz etching, which is to say that you have noperspective, none. Remember what Kerouac said?”

“No,” I answer wearily. “What did Kerouac say?”

“Kerouac said ‘life will be over when there is that blue-gray glow of television coming from every living room window in every home, and
with everyone in them watching the same channel.’ What channel are you watching, babe? Me, I’ve tuned into Looney Tunes, as you see. When
this thing completes itself, which will be soon, hopefully, when the last shoe drops, will you just leave, like those bourgeoisie Jews in Berlin,
leaving their less fortunate brethren behind to their gristly fates? Will you always play it safe? Will you stay ‘above the fray,’ the
unsullied advertising executive launching his pristine TV campaigns from up in the clouds? They didn’t just gas the poor Jews, you know; these
monsters took out a lot of socialists and writers and painters, too, for the record. When they come for you, where will you be, huh? Having aparty? Aboard your yacht docked in Portofino? It may have escaped your notice, babe, but there’s a class component to all of this, a
hard-wiring, a kind of cultural DNA rooted in history. There’s also a highly regarded German social psychiatrist—his name escapes
me—who postulated that in times of tremendous stress organisms seek like organisms. Which is to say, dear Ralph Waldo, that the question is not
what I am doing in here, but what are you doing out there?”

As always in times like this Dwaine has me totally confused. On the one hand, it’s clear to me that he’s stark raving mad; on the other, it
seems to me, despite my inability to understand this latest onslaught of paranoid gibberish, that he’s entirely right. “And what about all
the things you hoped to accomplish in your life?”

“Such as what, babe?”

“Such as being an artist. Such as making great movies. Such as waking up the world. Have you given up on all of that?”

“You don’t get it, do you, babe? You really don’t get it.” He taps his skull. “I’m not giving up anything.
I’m still making movies. In here, where the budgets are unlimited and where I can cast all the stars in the universe, living and dead. Marlon
Brando? He’s mine for the asking. Bogart, Bacall, Fatty Arbuckle—name your favorites; I’ve got ’em—right in here. Here,
where I don’t need a camera or lights or film or a distribution deal or a theater or an audience or that disgusting popcorn smell.Here,” he keeps on tapping, “where I’m in charge. I’mthe mogul;I’mthe director;I’mthe producer, I’mthe art director, the key grip, the best boy, the caterer. My life,that’s the movie.Le cinema, c’est moi!”

“You really are crazy,” I put in softly.

“So I’m told, babe; so I’m told … ”

There’s no point arguing things any further. Is there?

No, there isn’t.

I pick up my briefcase and go.

8

Cut to Donny Colosimo’s backyard. A crisp November morning just days before Thanksgiving. The lawn, cut fairway-short and flanked by clouds of
brittle brown hydrangeas, slopes down to a reflecting pool, its black waters prowled by plump orange fish, passing, en route, a mauve reflecting ball,
a birdbath in the shape of a giant mollusk, and a flagpole. Behind us, Donny’s kidney-shaped pool squats under a blue tarpaulin.

We take turns shooting clay ducks. Donny wears his Ralph Lauren moleskin hunting jacket with leather shoulder pads, and his Abercrombie & Fitch
knickers with genuine horse bone fly buttons. Except for the clanking of the halyard against the pole, the wind sighing through trees ablaze with
autumn colors, the skeet launcher’s cartoony boing and the earsplitting report of a Mossberg P-835 Ulti-Mag, there’s not a sound to be
heard. I ask, “Don’t your neighbors complain?”

“Kid,” Donny answers while reloading, “I got eighteen watershed acres here. I can shoot what the fuck I want.”

Skeets burst into puffs of ruddy dust. Donny lowers the rifle to gaze wistfully at the patch of blue sky where a clay duck has known brief flight.
We’re here not mainly to shoot skeet, however, but to brainstorm a television advertising campaign for our soft drink client, who is sponsoring
this years’ Winter Olympics. Their rival, having snared the even more greatly coveted Superbowl sponsorship, has launched its own ad campaign
wherein—via digitized special effects— gridiron legends of yore in vintage black-and-white footage guzzle from dewy, full-color cans and
bottles of its flagship product. It’s up to us to come up with something different and better.

We have the weekend.

Donny hands me the Mossberg. Per his instructions I aim thirty degrees ahead of my target, await the boingand dispatch three of four skeets.
The recoils vibrate my molars. With each blast the hydrangeas surrender a snowstorm of petals.

We break for lunch. Donny eats only cold foods. Chilled gazpacho, assorted cool deli meats, cheeses and pickles, tepid German potato salad. Afterwards,
clutching ice-cold bottles of Coca-Cola, we stretch out on his tan Naugahyde sofa and watch videotaped footage of the space shuttle Challenger
exploding over and over again, in fast and slow-motion, the snowy plumes parting from the doomed spacecraft like peels from a heavenly banana. With
each explosion Donny nods his snowy pompadour and gives the thumbs-up, like a Roman senator at the ludi gladiatori.

ButI’m not really paying attention to Donny or his VCR. I’m thinking about Dwaine, of him locked up in that loony bin. It’s
not Vietnam or booze that put him there, not Claymore mines or booby traps or Post Traumatic Whatever, not Bob McNamara or Henry Kissinger or General
Westmoreland or the staff sergeant on duty at the Armed Forces Recruiting Station at Times Square, not his mother or his black Irish father or his dead
drug kingpin brother or the Catholic Church or the Pope or Ireland or the IRA or the British Army or the Peace Corps.

It’s movies. Movies put him in there.

And only movies can get him out.

9

Using his prize AK-47 Donny machine-guns a half dozen more skeets. With every clay duck launched and obliterated an ad campaign concept is likewise
discharged and dispatched.

By sundown we’ve blown our last skeet.

We’re about to call it quits when a flock of Canada geese flies overhead. Grabbing the Mossberg, Donny gets off three shots; as many geese fold
and fall. One lands with a wet slap on the blue pool tarp. The second touches down with a stagnant splash in the concrete birdbath. The third comes to
rest with a heavy dull slap in Donny’s satellite dish.

A breeze flutters the flag. I watched it flutter, snap and furl, thinking:
America, the Something of America, the Cola … the Soda … the Soft Drink … the Soft Drink: The
Soft Drink of Amer-ica … The Soft Drink of America …

Cola
Wars
(TV Commercial)

“Napoleon blew it, Hitler blew it, but
Coca-Cola is going to pull it off.”
—James Cagney,
One Million Years B.C.
The Pertinent Movie Quote Wall

G
entlemen, let’s be honest with each other: what in the world can we tell the citizens of America about our flagship product that they
don’t already know? That it’s brown? That it’s fizzy? That it tastes good? That it comes in ten-ounce bottles and twelve-ounce
cans?”

Facing me across the teak and granite inlay conference room table: a battlement of graying heads and padded shoulders beyond which the spires of
midtown Manhattan float dreamily a silent quarter mile above the prosaic earth. The heads gape at me, eyes blinking, brows beetled, minds drifting onto
fairways and putting greens, dreaming of sweet spots, birdie-birdies and scotch foursomes.

“We can’t say it’s cheaper, since it isn’t; we can’t even claim that it’s any better, since that’s a matter
of taste, for which, as we all know, there can be no accounting (witness our rival’s recent market share increase) …”

Cue polite laughter. Though I’ve rehearsed this pitch a dozen times with Donny as audience, he warned me that nothing would prepare me for the
real thing, that I would find myself operating on sheer gall, or not at all. “You’re Philippe Petite walking a tightrope,” he
explained. “The trick is don’t look down or forget to breathe.” I take a deep breath; I don’t look down.

Prior to the pitch, in the men’s room, as I dimpled the knot in my tie, straightened the part in my straightened hair, and popped a spearmint
Lifesaver to mask the odor of gin, Donny pulled a crisp twenty from his wallet and told me to do the same. I said, “What for?”

“Just do it, kid.”

I took out a twenty.

“Now crumple it up and shine your shoes with it.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Kid, I never kid at a time like this.”

I crumpled the twenty and shined my shoes with it. Then, per Donny’s instructions, I flushed the ruined bill down the toilet.

Donny put out his hand. As I reached to shake it he withdrew it and faked a jab at me instead. “Just try not to make an ass of yourself,
okay?”