The Film Club (15 page)

As if the chain on an anchor has snapped (you can't quite remember where you were or what you were doing), you notice suddenly that your thoughts are your own possession again; your bed no longer empty but simply yours, yours in which to read the newspaper or sleep or . . . dear me, what
was
it I was supposed to do today? Ah, the front-door key! Yes.

How to get Jesse there?

And looking around the subway car (a young woman eating a bag of potato chips gets on), I noticed that Paula had gone. Had gotten off at an earlier stop. I had, I realized with mild surprise, forgotten that she was there, the two of us whistling through darkened tunnels, the two of us so engaged
elsewhere
that we—I was sure this applied to her as well—had gotten used to and then indifferent to the presence of the other, all in a matter of five minutes. How—
what
? Odd. I suppose that's the word. But even that thought was immediately replaced. As I walked my bike along the platform, the train moving away from me, I noticed that the girl with the potato chips had braces on her teeth. She ate with her mouth open.

Jesse got up before noon one day, an event which I celebrated by showing him
Dr. No
(1962). It was the first James Bond film. I tried to explain to him the excitement those Bond movies caused when they first appeared in the mid '60s. They seemed so urbanely scented, so naughty. There's a certain effect films have on you when you're very young, I explained; they give you an imaginative experience in a way that is hard to recapture when you're older. You “buy it” like you can't really later.

When I go to a movie now, I seem to be aware of so many more things, the man talking to his wife a few rows over, someone finishing their popcorn and throwing the bag into the aisle; I'm aware of editing and bad dialogue and second-rate actors: sometimes I watch a scene with a lot of extras and I wonder, Are they real actors, are they enjoying being extras or are they unhappy not to be in the spotlight? There's a young girl, for example, in the communications centre at the beginning of
Dr. No
. She has one or two lines but I never saw her on the screen again. I wondered out loud what happened to all those people in those crowd shots, those party shots: how did their lives turn out? Did they give up acting and go into other professions?

All these things interfere with the experience of a movie; in the old days you could have fired off a pistol beside my head and it wouldn't have interrupted my concentration, my participation in the movie that was unfolding on the screen in front of me. I return to old movies not just to watch them again but in the hope that I'll feel the way I did when I first saw them. (Not just about movies either but about everything.)

Jesse looked shaky when he came outside onto the porch. It was November again, a few days till his eighteenth birthday. How was that possible? It seemed like his birthday came every four months now, as if time was indeed giving me the bum's rush to the grave.

I asked him about his evening; yes, all fine, nothing special, though. Dropped over to see a friend. Huh-huh. Which friend? Pause.

“Dean.”

“I don't know Dean, do I?”

“Just a fellow.”

Fellow?
(You hear language that out of character, you want to call the police.) He could tell I was looking at him.

“What did you do then?”

“Not much; watched some television; it was all a bit boring.” There was in his answers the feeling of somebody trying to stay off the radar screen, of somebody not wanting the conversation to catch like a shirt on a nail. A woman with a prematurely aged face passed by on the sidewalk.

“She should dye her hair,” Jesse said.

“You seem a bit fragile today,” I said. “What were you drinking last night?”

“Just beer.”

“No hard liquor?”

“A bit, yes.”

“What kind?”

“Tequila.”

I said, “Tequila leaves a very bad hangover.”

“It sure does.”

Another silence. It was a strangely motionless day. The sky white as a board.

I said, “Were there any drugs involved during this tequila evening?”

“No,” he said offhandedly. Then: “Yes, there were.”

“What kind of drugs, Jesse?”

“I don't want to lie to you, okay?”

“Okay.”

Pause. The windup. Then the pitch. “Cocaine.”

The woman with the old face came back this way carrying a little plastic bag of groceries.

“I feel so terrible,” he said. For an instant I thought he was going to burst into tears.

“Cocaine can leave you feeling very sordid,” I said softly and rested my hand on his thin shoulder.

He sat up quickly as if responding to his name being called out at roll call. “That's it, that's exactly it. I feel so sordid.”

“This was where, at Dean's?”

“His name's not Dean.” Pause. “It's Choo-choo.”

What the hell kind of a name is that?
“What does this Choo-choo do for a living?” I said.

“He's a white rapper.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Absolutely.”

“He's a working musician?”

“Not exactly.”

“So he's a coke dealer?”

Another pause. Another rallying of troops that had long since decamped. “I went back to his house last night. He just kept bringing it out.”

“And you kept doing it?”

He nodded, gazing numbly down the street.

“Have you been to Choo-choo's house before?”

“I don't really want to talk about this now,” he said.

“I don't give a shit if you want to talk about it now or not. Have you been to Choo-choo's house before?”

“No. Honest.”

“Ever done coke before?”

“Not like this.”

“Not like
this
?”

“No.”

I said, after a moment, “Didn't we have a talk about this stuff?”

“About coke?”

I said, “You know what I'm talking about.”

“Yes, we did.”

“That if I caught you doing drugs, the deal's off. Rent, pocket money, all of it, over. You remember that?”

“Yep.”

“Did you think I was kidding?”

“No, but one thing, Dad. You didn't
catch
me. I told you.”

I didn't have an immediate answer for that one. After a while I said, “Did you phone anybody?”

He looked surprised. “How did you know?”

“That's what people do when they're on coke. They get on the phone. And they're always sorry. Who'd you call? Did you call Rebecca?”

“No.”

“Jesse?”

“I tried to. She wasn't in.” He slumped forward in his chair. “How long is this going to go on?”

“How much did you do?”

“All night. He just kept bringing it out.”

I went into the house and got a sleeping pill from my sock drawer and brought it back outside with a glass of water. I said, “This is a one-shot number, okay. You do this again, you're going to have to suffer through it.” I gave him the pill, told him to swallow.

“What is it?” he said.

“Doesn't matter.” I waited till he swallowed and I had his attention. I said, “We're not going to talk about this right now. You understand what I'm saying?”

“Yep.”

I kept him company until he got drowsy from the sleeping pill. It made him a little loose-tongued.

“Do you remember that speech in the
Under the Volcano
documentary?” he asked. “Where the consul is going on about his hangover, about hearing people coming and going outside the window, repeating his name scornfully?”

I said I did, yes.

He said, “That happened to me this morning. Just when I was waking up. Do you think I'm going to end up like that guy?”

“No. But this isn't the time to talk about it.”

Then he went upstairs. I tucked him in. I said, “You're going to be a bit depressed when you wake up.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Yep. I am.”

I hung around the house that afternoon. He came downstairs sometime after dark. He was famished. We ordered Swiss Chalet. When it was done, wiping the grease from his lips, from his fingers, he lay back on the couch. “I said some pretty stupid things last night,” he said. Then he went on, as if he needed to torture himself. “I thought I was some kind of a rock star there for a while.” He groaned. “You ever do something like that?”

I didn't answer him. He wanted, I could tell, to lure me into some kind of complicity. But I wasn't playing.

He said, “It was just getting light when I left Choo-choo's. And there were all these pizza boxes lying all over the place, this really shitty apartment, excuse my language, a real dump. I saw myself in the mirror. You know what I was wearing? Some kind of bandana around my head.”

He pondered it all a moment longer. “Don't tell my mother, all right?”

“I'm not going to keep secrets from your mother, Jesse. You tell me something, I'm going to tell her.”

He took it calmly. Slightly nodding his head. No surprise, no resistance. I don't know what he was thinking; remembering something that got said the night before, some grotesque posturing, some unattractive vanity one is always prudent to keep private. But I wanted to sweeten his soul, to banish the image of pizza boxes and crappy apartments and all the ugly things he must have thought about himself coming home on the subway at the crack of dawn, everybody else around him fresh and awake to a new day. I wanted to turn him inside out and hose down his insides with warm water.

But how sunny
is
he inside there? I wondered. This boy with the jaunty walk. Do I have any idea what the rooms in that mansion
really
look like? I fancy I do but sometimes, listening to him on the phone downstairs, I hear a foreignness in his voice, a harshness, even sometimes a coarseness and I ask myself, Is that him? Or is that a posture? Or is the face he turns to
me
a posture? Who was that kid on coke in the crappy apartment, coming on like a bullying rock star? Do I ever see
that
guy?

I said, “I got something I want to show you,” and went over to the DVD player.

In a very fragile voice, a voice that wants trouble from no one, a voice that expects perfect strangers to slap you in the face, he said, “I don't think I can watch a movie right now, Dad.”

“I know you can't. So I'm just going to play you
one
scene. It's from an Italian movie. My mother's favourite. She used to play the soundtrack over and over at our summer cottage. I'd come up from the dock and hear this music coming from our house and I'd know my mother'd be sitting on the screened-in deck, drinking gin and tonic and listening to this record. I always think about her when I hear this music. It always makes me happy, I don't know why. It must have been a good summer.

“Anyway, I'm going to show you the very last scene in the movie. I think you'll figure out why pretty fast. This guy—he's played by Marcello Mastroianni—has been drinking and whoring and generally pissing his life away night after night; and he ends up on a beach at sunrise with a bunch of party-goers. You reminded me of it with that business about the pizza boxes lying all over Choo-choo's apartment.

“So there he is on the beach, hungover, still in his party clothes, and he hears a young girl calling him. He looks over, sees her but he can't hear what she's saying. She's so beautiful, so pure, it's like she's the embodiment of the sea and the bright morning, maybe even the embodiment of his own childhood. I want you to watch this scene and remember: This guy, this party guy, his life has already peaked, he's on the way downhill; he knows it, the girl on the beach knows it. But
you
, your life, it's just starting, it's all ahead of you. It's yours to throw away.”

I put on Federico Fellini's
La Dolce Vita
(1960) and jumped to the last scene, Mastroianni walking ankle deep in the sand, the girl fifty yards away calling to him across a little patch of water. He shrugs, makes a gesture with his hands: I don't understand, it says. He starts to walk away, his friends are waiting. He waves goodbye to the girl, this funny little wave, his fingers sort of bent. It's as if his hand is somehow curdled.
He's
curdled. The girl watches him walk away; she's still smiling, first with kindness, with understanding, but then with firmness. She seems to be saying, Okay, if that's the way you want it. But then very slowly she turns her glance straight into the camera. And you, the glance says to the audience, what about your life?

“The one thing I want to say to you about cocaine,” I said, “is that it always ends up this way.”

We watched
It's aWonderful Life
(1946) the next morning. I knew he'd hate it at first, the overenergized acting, its falseness, James Stewart's self-conscious adorableness. Jesse wouldn't buy any of that. Particularly in that state, seeing the world like some kind of—what did we call it at his age—oh yes, seeing the world like some kind of “cosmic bargain basement.”

But when the movie turns dark, and James Stewart darkens with it (how disturbing he is, like somebody throwing a drink in somebody's face at your parents' party), I knew Jesse would be hooked, in spite of himself. He'd have to know how it ends, he'd have to know for his own sake because, by that time, the story on the screen would have become
his
story. And can anyone, even a depressed teenager with a cocaine and tequila hangover, resist the film's final moments?

He got a job washing dishes in a restaurant up on St. Clair Avenue, just on the lip of the neighbourhood I grew up in. The prep chef, a tall boy with red cheeks, got it for him. Jack somebody. A “rapper.” (Everybody, it seemed, “rapped.”) I still don't know his last name but sometimes after the night shift, they'd turn up at our house in Chinatown; you could hear them riffing and riming and “being bad” in the basement. Unimaginably violent, vulgar (not to mention borrowed) lyrics. You've got to start somewhere, I suppose. No point in playing them “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”