The Film Club (22 page)

“A shitty thing to do,” I said.

The doctor came in; young Italian guy, goatee and moustache; very solid; I said to Jesse, “Can you be candid with the doctor if we're here?”

“That's important,” the doctor said as if someone had just made a clever joke, “being candid.”

Jesse said yes. The doctor asked some questions; listened to his heart and his back. “Your body doesn't like the coke,” he said with a smile. “Doesn't seem to like the cigarettes either.” He straightened up.

“You haven't had a heart attack,” he said. He explained something I couldn't follow, making a fist with his hand to show a heart stopping. “But let me tell you this. Whenever anyone your age
does
come here with a heart attack, it's always because of coke. Always.”

Then the doctor left; three hours later we left too; dropped his mother off at the subway. I took Jesse back to my house. Just as we pulled into the driveway, he broke into sobs again. “I miss that girl so much,” he said. “So much.”

Then I started crying too. I said, “I'd do anything to help you, anything.”

We sat there, both of us sobbing.

15

And then a miracle occurred (but not a surprise). Chloë, the upwardly spiralling careerist, appeared to be having second thoughts. Morgan, rumour had it, had been dispatched. Feelers were put out. Her best friend “ran into” Jesse at a party, told him that Chloë “really, really missed him.”

The colour, it seemed to me, returned to his features; there was even a difference in the way he walked, a bounce which he was unsuccessful in hiding. He played me another song; then another; Corrupted Nostalgia appeared to be, as they say in show business, on a hot streak. They performed in a bar down on Queen Street. I remained exiled.

Sensing that his interest was cooling for our Buried Treasures program, I looked further afield. Something to do with writing since he seemed to be leaning in that direction now. And there it was, as obvious as the proverbial nose on my face: we'd do a program of movies that were inordinately well written. We'd do Woody Allen's
Manhattan
(1979) again. Take another look at
Pulp Fiction
(1994), making clear, though, the distinction between fun writing and true writing.
Pulp Fiction
, immensely entertaining as it is, spiffy and glittery as the dialogue is, doesn't have a real human moment in it. I reminded myself to tell him that story about Chekhov watching Ibsen's play
A Doll's House
in a Moscow theatre, during the course of which he turned to a friend and whispered, “But life isn't like that at all.”

So why not show him Louis Malle's
Vanya on
42
nd
Street
(1994)? He's too young for Chekhov, it might bore him, yes, but my guess was that he'd love Wally Shawn's whining, complaining, romantically smitten Vanya, particularly when he's ranting about Professor Serybryakov. “We can't all be speaking and writing and spewing forth work like some farmmachine!”

Yes, Jesse would like Vanya. “Excellent weather for suicide.”

Then for a sort of dessert, I'd show him
To Have and
Have Not
(1944). What credentials: based on the novel by Hemingway (loony by then, swilling martinis and popping pills and writing nonsense at four o'clock in the morning); screenplay by the Lolita-loving William Faulkner; with that great Bogart/Bacall scene upstairs in the seacoast hotel where she offers herself to him with this speech: “You don't have to do anything or say anything; or maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” Show-off writing of the best kind.

Speaking of which, show him David Mamet's (now there's a show-off)
Glengarry Glen Ross
(1992). An office of third-rate real estate salesmen, losers to a man, take a verbal whipping at the hands of a “motivator.” “Put that coffee
down
,” Alec Baldwin says to a stunned Jack Lem-mon. “The coffee is for closers.”

This was what I planned. And then maybe we'd do some more film noir,
Pickup on South Street
(1953). . . . It was all ahead of us.

Then came the Christmas holidays; nighttime, Jesse and me outside, snow lightly falling. Searchlights bouncing around the winter sky looking for God knows what, celebrating God knows what. He hadn't seen or talked to Chloë Stanton-McCabe, no phone calls, no e-mail, but she was due to return any day now to spend a week with her parents. There was going to be a party. He would see her there.

“What if she does it again?” he asked.

“Meaning?”

“Goes off with another guy.”

I had by this point learned not to make wild, trust-me-on-this-one predictions (I certainly never saw Morgan coming).

“You know what Tolstoy says?” I said.

“No.”

“He says that a woman can never wound you the same way twice.”

A car drove the wrong way up our one-way street; we both watched it. “Do you think that's true?” he said.

I gave it serious consideration. (He remembers everything. Be careful what you promise.) I did a speed-tour through my personal list of departed lovers (surprisingly long). It was true, yes, that no woman had wounded me as much the second time she left as the first. But what I also realized was that for the most part, if not entirely, I had never had the
chance
to be wounded twice by the same woman. When my unhappy lovers headed for the hills, they tended to stay away for good.

“Yes,” I said after a bit. “I think it is.”

A few nights later, Christmas only a few days away now, I was tinkering with the tree, the lights flashing off and on, some working, some not, an unsolvable puzzle of physics only my wife could fix, when I heard the customary crashing down the stairs; a smell of vigorous deodorant (applied with a bicycle pump) filtered into the room, and the young prince set off into the cold air to discover his fate.

He didn't come home that night; there was a masculine, adult-sounding message on the service the next morning; a floor of fresh snow lay on the lawn, the sun already working its way in the sky. Sometime later that afternoon he returned, the details of his evening mercifully brief but telling. He had indeed gone to the party; had made his entrance late with a number of the lads, a phalanx of baseball hats and oversized T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts; and there she was, in the smoke-crowded living room, the music deafening. They had spoken for only moments when she whispered, “If you keep looking at me like that, I'm going to have to kiss you.” (My God, where do they learn this stuff? Are they all at home reading Tolstoy before these parties?)

After that he was vague (which is how it should be). They had stayed at the party; suddenly there was no hurry, not for either of them; odd but true, as if the last few months had been vaguely unreal, had never really happened. (But they did and there would be plenty to be said about
that
later.) For now though, it was like gently coasting down a hill on a brakeless bicycle; you couldn't stop the momentum even if you tried.

When I think about the film club, I can see now that that was the night when it started to end. It set in motion a new kind of time, a fresh chapter in Jesse's life. You wouldn't have thought so at the time; at the time, it looked like business as usual, as if, Well, now that's out of the way, we can get back to the film club. Uhn-uhn.

Yet even in writing these words, I'm cautious. I remember my last interview with David Cronenberg during which I made the rather lugubrious observation that raising children was a series of goodbyes, one after the other, to diapers and then snowsuits and then finally to the child himself. “They spend their young lives leaving you,” I observed when Cronenberg, who has adult children himself, interrupted. “Yes, but do they ever really leave?”

A few nights later, the unthinkable happened. Jesse invited me to watch him perform. He was playing at that club around the corner where the Rolling Stones had once played, where the ex-wife of our prime minister had gone home with one of the guitar players, I believe. The place Jesse had kicked me out of a year earlier. It was, in a word, chock full of history.

I was told to arrive a few minutes before one in the morning at the front door and to behave myself, by which he meant no awkward demonstrations of affection, nothing that might diminish his aura of danger and heterosexual, hard-bitten “street cred.” To which I readily agreed. Tina was not invited; two adoring, misty-eyed adults— that was too much. She also agreed happily. She is a slim woman with little fat on her bones and the idea of stepping into the freezing air, of possibly waiting in a line for forty-five minutes in the early hours of the morning while icy blasts from Lake Ontario whipped and gusted up the street, relieved her of even the most urgent curiosity.

So at twelve-thirty that night I ventured out onto the icy sidewalk and slipped across the park. I made my way down a deserted street in Chinatown, cats nibbling at unspeakable things in the shadows. Turned the corner, the wind goosing me from behind, until I arrived at the front doors of the El Mocambo. The same group, it seemed, of young men waited there as before, smoking cigarettes, swearing, laughing, gusts of frozen breath hanging like cartoon bubbles just before their faces. Jesse hurried over to me.

“You can't come in, Dad,” he said. He looked panic-stricken. “Why not?”

“It doesn't look very good in there.”

“Whatever do you mean?” I said.

“There's not that many people; they let the act before us go too long; we lost some of the audience—”

That was enough for me. I said, “You got me out of a warm bed on a freezing night; I got into my clothes and huffed my way over here; it's one o'clock in the morning, I've been looking forward to this for
days
and now you're telling me I can't come in?”

A few minutes later he led me up the stairs, past the pay phone where he'd once caught me. (How fast time is passing.) I went into a small, low-ceilinged hall, very dark with a small square stage at the end. A few skinny girls sat in chairs to the side of the stage. Kicking their legs and smoking cigarettes.

He needn't have worried; over the next ten minutes the doorway darkened with stocky black kids in hairnets and long-framed girls in black eyeliner (they looked like haunted raccoons). And Chloë. Chloë with her diamond nose ring and her big blond hair. (He was right, she did look like a movie star.) She greeted me with the cheerful good manners of a private-school girl encountering her principal in the summer holidays.

I sat in the far corner among giant, black cubes (I never found out what they were, discarded speakers, packing cases, who knows). It was a zone so black I could barely make out the features of the two girls beside me. Although I could smell their perfume and hear their mirthful, obscenity-littered exchanges.

Jesse left me there with the admonition, unspoken, to stay put. He had “some business” to take care of, he said, before he went on.

Sitting in the darkness, my heart thumping with almost unendurable anxiety, I waited. And waited. More kids arrived; the room heated up; finally a young man stepped onto the stage (Was that where Mick Jagger had stood?) and enjoined the audience, amidst a barrage of hoots, to get their “fucking shit” together and “give it up” for Corrupted Nostalgia!

Corrupted Nostalgia no less. And out they came, two lanky boys, Jesse and Jack; the beat for “Angels” started, Jesse put the microphone to his lips and out came those damning lyrics, the howl of Troilus against Criseyde, Chloë standing with her back to me (no Morgan in sight), a range of hands reaching toward the stage.

And there he was: my beloved son, detached from me, nothing to do with me, pacing the stage with natural command. This was a different son; this one I'd never seen before.

On and on went the lyrics, bitter, demeaning, Chloë standing in the middle of the swaying crowd, her head turned slightly to the side, as if to avert the violent onrush; the assault, the arms of the audience stretching like tree branches toward the stage, waving up and down . . .

For Jesse and me, all manner of things lay ahead: a few months down the road, he made a video of “Angels”; Chloë played “the girl” (the actress who'd been hired for the part went on a coke binge and didn't turn up). There were more dinners at Le Paradis, more cigarettes on the porch with Tina (I can hear the conspiratorial rise and fall of their voices even as I write this), more movies, but in theatres now, the two of us sitting on the left-hand side of the aisle, nine or ten rows up, “our spot.” There were tiffs with Chloë Stanton-McCabe, brinksmanship and operatic makings-up; there were hangovers and patches of sloppy behaviour, a sudden affection for culinary writing, a prickly apprenticeship with a Japanese chef and a humbling “invasion” of the British music scene (“They have their own rappers over there, Dad!”).

There was also a suspicious birthday greeting from, who else, Rebecca Ng, currently in her second year of law school.

Then one day—it seemed to come out of the blue— Jesse said, “I want to go back to school.” He signed up for a punishing three-month crash course, math, science, history, all the horrors that had defeated him years before. I didn't think he stood a chance, all those hours and hours and hours of sitting on his bum in a classroom. All that homework. But I was wrong, again.

His mother, the former high-school teacher from the prairies, tutored him in her house in Greektown. It didn't all go smoothly, especially the math. Sometimes he rose from the kitchen table shaking with rage and frustration and stormed around the block like a madman. But he always came back.

He started to sleep there—it made things easier in the morning, he explained, “to get right to it.” Then he quit coming back to my house altogether.

The night before his final exam he phoned me. “No matter how this turns out,” he said, “I want you to know I really tried.”