The Film Club (13 page)

Talent, as I had said earlier to Jesse, does indeed take hold in strange and sometimes undeserving nooks. Fried-kin may have been a cretin, I point out, but you can't knock his visual sense. Every time that camera starts up the stairs to the child's room, you know it's going to be something new and horrible and worse than the time before.

Jesse slept on the couch that night, two lamps on. Next morning, both of us mildly embarrassed about the horrors of the evening before, we agreed to suspend the festival for a while.
Great Comedies
,
Bad Girls
,
Woody Allen
,
nouvelle
vague
, anything. Just no more horror. There are moments in
The Exorcist
, the little girl sitting on the bed, very still, speaking calmly in a man's voice, when it feels as if you are teetering on the brink of a place you should
never
visit.

9

In reading over what I've written, I realize that I may have given the impression that I had little else going on in my life except watching movies and kibitzing at the side of my son's life. That wasn't the case. I was getting a little work by now, book reviews, a documentary that needed polish, even a few days of substitute teaching (dismaying by implication, of course, but not the vanity-smashing experience I'd feared).

I sold my loft in the candy factory and with the windfall that came with it, my wife and I bought a Victorian house on the edge of Chinatown. Maggie finally returned home. Such happiness; it had been more than a year. She still, however, felt Jesse needed to “live with a man.” So did I. So, mercifully, did my wife. At a family party over Christmas, a diminutive, sparrow-voiced aunt, the retired principal of a high school, had told me, “Don't be fooled. Teenage boys need as much attention as newborns. Except they need it from their
fathers
.”

Jesse followed me and Tina across town with three industrial-strength garbage bags of clothing and dozens of caseless CDs. He moved into the blue bedroom on the third floor, from which you could see all the way to the lake. It was the best room in the house, the quietest, the best ventilated. I bought him a print of John Water-house's naked maidens swimming in a pond and hung it on his wall between posters of Eminem (a homely-looking fellow when all is said and done), Al Pacino with a cigar (
Scarface
) and some thug wearing nylons on his head and pointing a 9mm pistol in your face, the caption reading:
Say hello to da bad guyz
.

In fact, as I write this, I am only a few yards down the hall from Jesse's blue bedroom, empty now, one of his discarded shirts still hanging on the back of the door. The room is tidier these days, a DVD of
Chungking Express
ranged away in his night table alongside
Middlemarch
(still unread), Elmore Leonard's
Glitz
(at least he didn't sell it), Tolstoy's
The Cossacks
(my idea) and Anthony Bourdain's
The Nasty Bits
, which he left here the last time he and his girlfriend spent the night. I find the presence of these things comforting, as if he is still here, in spirit anyway; that he will, indeed, be back someday.

Still, and I don't want to get maudlin here, some nights I walk by his bedroom on the way to my study and I take a peek inside. The moonlight falls over his bed, the room is very still, and I can't quite believe he's gone. There were other things we were going to do to that room, other prints, another clothes peg for the wall. But time ran out.

Fall in Chinatown; the leaves turning red in the giant forests north of the city. Gloves appeared on the hands of the women who rode their bicycles past our house. Jesse got a part-time job working the phones for a pair of telemarketing slimeballs who raised money for a “fireman's magazine.”

Early one evening, I stopped by the “office,” a grungy little joint with six or seven compartments in which sat a dead-end white kid, a Pakistani, an overweight woman with a tub of Coke in front of her, all working the phones. Jesus, I thought. This is the company I've dropped him into. This is the future.

And there he was, right at the back, phone to his ear, his voice hoarse from hustling seniors and shut-ins and gullibles at dinnertime. He was good at phone sales, you could tell. He got people on the phone and held them there and charmed them and made them laugh and kidded them until they coughed it up.

The bosses were there too, a runt in a yellow windbreaker and his smoothie partner, a good-looking con named Dale. I introduced myself. Jesse was their top boy, they said. Number one on the “floor.” Behind us, I heard snatches of barely comprehensible English, an Eastern European voice with an accent so thick it sounded like a sitcom; Bengali drifted over from a different booth; then a woman's nasal voice, punctuated by the sound of someone sucking ice cubes through a straw. It sounded like a shovel on cement.

Jesse came over, that jaunty walk he had when he was happy, looking left and right. He said, “Let's go outside for a chat,” which meant he didn't want me talking too long to his bosses, making inquiries about the “fireman's magazine.” As in, Is there a copy I might have a look at? (There wasn't.)

I took him to dinner at Le Paradis that same night. (If I had an addiction, it wasn't booze or cocaine or girlie mags; it was eating in restaurants even when I was broke.)

“Have you ever actually
seen
this fireman's magazine?” I asked. He chewed his flatiron steak for a moment, his mouth open. Maybe it was the poorly digested nap I'd taken that afternoon, but just the fact of him eating with his mouth open after I'd told him four thousand times not to plunged me into an irritable despair.

“Jesse,” I said, “please.”

“What?” he said.

I made a rather coarse gesture with my lips.

Normally he would have laughed (even if it wasn't amusing) and said sorry and gone on with things, but tonight there was a hesitation. I saw his face go slightly white. He looked down at his plate as if he was making a decision, a tough one, to overcome a bodily sensation. Then he said simply, “Okay.” But you could feel the heat still in the air. It was as if I had opened a furnace door and then shut it.

I said, “If you don't want me to correct your table manners . . .” I began.

“It's fine,” he said, waving it away. Not looking at me. I thought, Oh God, I've mocked him. I've offended his pride by making that stupid face. For a moment the two of us sat there, him chewing, staring at his plate, me looking at him with crumbling determination. “Jesse,” I said gently.

“Huh?” He looked up, not the way you look at your father, but rather the way Al Pacino looks at an asshole. We had passed a stage somewhere. He was sick of being scared of me and wanted me to know it. In fact, the balance was shifting even more dramatically. I was becoming intimidated by
his
displeasure.

I said, “Do you want to go outside for a cigarette; cool down.”

“I'm fine.”

I said, “That was coarse what I just did. I'm sorry.”

“That's all right.”

“I want you to forgive me for it, okay?”

He didn't answer. He was thinking about something else.

“Okay?” I repeated softly.

“Okay, sure. Done.”

“What?” I asked, even more softly. He was dangling his napkin from his hand, just brushing it back and forth, back and forth over a spot on the table. Was he remembering that scene with James Dean twirling the rope? Saying no to whatever was being asked of him.

“Sometimes I think you have too big an effect on me,” he said.

“How do you mean?”

“I don't think other kids get so—” he looked for the word “—paralyzed by having a fight with their dads. Some of them tell them to fuck off.”

“I don't ever want us to be like that,” I said, nearly breathless.

“No, me neither. But shouldn't I be a little less
affected
by you?”

“Are you?”

“It's why I don't get in trouble. I'm terrified of you being mad at me.”

This was not the conversation I had planned when I had invited him out to a dinner I could not afford.

“Terrified of what? I've never hit you. I've never—” I stopped.

“I'm like a little kid.” His eyes misted up with frustration. “I shouldn't be so nervous around you.”

I put down my fork. I could feel the colour flee my face. “You have more power over me than you think,” I said.

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

“Like when?”

“Like right now.”

“Do you think you have
too
much power over me?” he said.

I was having trouble catching my breath. I said, “I think you want me to think well of you.”

“You don't think I'm just a little baby who's scared of you?”

“Jesse, you're six foot four. You could beat the—forgive my language—shit out of me whenever you wanted to.”

“Do you think I could?”

“I know you could.”

Something in his whole body relaxed. He said, “I want that cigarette now,” and went outside. I could see him moving back and forth on the other side of the French doors; and after a while he came back in and said something to the bartender who laughed and then came up through the room, a dark-haired university girl watching him carefully. I could see he was happy, looking left and right, a bounce back in his step, settling back down at the table, picking up his napkin, wiping his mouth. I've given him what he needs for now, I thought, but he'll need more soon.

I said, “Can we talk about the fireman's magazine?”

“Sure,” he said, pouring himself a fresh glass of wine. (Usually I poured.) “I love this restaurant,” he said. “If I were rich, I think I'd have dinner here every night.”

Things were definitely changing between us. I knew down the road, not that far, we were going to have a shootout and I was going to lose. Just like all those other fathers in history. It's why I picked our next movie.

Do you remember those words: “I know what you're thinking—did he fire six shots or only five. Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you gotta ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?”

When the good Lord calls Clint Eastwood home, that speech will turn up on every six o'clock news show around the world, Dirty Harry looking down the barrel of his gun at an out-of-business bank robber and giving him the business. That movie—if not that speech—shot Clint Eastwood into the front rank of American leading men, up there with John Wayne and Marlon Brando. Two years later, in 1973, a screenwriter phoned Clint Eastwood, said he'd been reading about the death squads in Brazil, rogue cops killing criminals without bothering to take them to court. How about Dirty Harry discovering the presence of death squads in the LAPD? They'd call it
Magnum Force
. The movie was on; when it opened during the holiday season the following year, it sold even more tickets than
Dirty Harry
; in fact, it made more money for Warner Brothers in its first weeks than any previous film in its history.

Magnum Force
is by far the best of the
Dirty Harry
sequels and cemented the love affair between movie audiences and the gun that can “blow the engine block out of a car at a hundred yards.”

“But,” I said to Jesse, “that's not why I'm showing it to you.”

“No?” he said.

I stopped the film in midframe right near the top where Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan steps off the sidewalk of a sunny street in San Francisco and approaches a murder victim's car, the body inside, major head wound. Behind Eastwood, on the sidewalk, is a long-haired, bearded man.

I said, “Do you recognize him?”

“No.”

“That's my brother,” I said.

It was indeed my estranged brother who happened to be passing through San Francisco when the film was being shot. He had driven West in a wild flurry, four days, to join a religious cult, I've forgotten which one. But when he knocked at their door he was refused entry. So he bought a ticket for a live taping of
The Merv Griffin Show
and did that instead. Then just as fast as he'd arrived, he took off back to Toronto. But sometime that first day, he wandered into a film shoot.

“That's your uncle,” I said.

We both scrutinized the screen; behind the shaggy hair and beard was a handsome young man, twenty-five years old, who looked like Kris Kristofferson.

“Have I ever met him?” Jesse asked.

“Once, when you were little, he turned up at the door. Wanting something. I remember sending you back inside.”

“Why?”

I looked again at the screen. “Because,” I said, “my brother had a genius for stirring up trouble between people. I didn't want him poisoning your ear when you were fourteen and ready to hear some bad things about me. So I kept him from you.”

Then we turned the movie back on; the freeze frame melted, the movie moved forward and my brother disappeared from the screen.

“But that's not the only reason,” I said. “The real reason is that when I was smaller than him, he scared the hell out of me. And you end up hating people who scare you. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't want that to happen with us,” I said. “Please.”

Just that “please” gave him something a hundred apologies or explanations couldn't.

There was no fireman's magazine; it was a scam. A few weeks later, when Jesse went into “work,” the place was locked up, Dale and the runt were gone. They beat him for a few hundred dollars but he didn't seem to care. The job had served its purpose, the first steps in a break from his dependence on his parents. (He understood intuitively, I think, that financial dependence cements emotional dependence.)