Life Goes to the Movies Read online

  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.”

  We were sitting on the steps of the dormitory, next to the spot on the pavement where a dummy stuffed into my character’s clothes lay in a pool of dashed calves’ brains and other organ meats donated by the local Gristedes, doused with fake blood. Venus threw me a smile. I couldn’t get over how pretty she was. The only other albinos I had known were ugly: the Hoppenthaler Twins, Kevin and Keith. They went to my high school. No one liked them, mainly because they loved each other so much and didn’t seem to care about anyone else, but also because they were so fantastically ugly, with their long drooping faces and noses like melting vanilla ice-cream cones and hair like corn silk. We called them the Double-Headed Vanilla Monster, though never to their faces, since they were as short-fused and strong as they were hideous. To equate them with Venus was absurd, yet I couldn’t help doing so.

  I asked, “How long have you known Dwaine?”

  “Since the start of last term, when he asked me to be in one of his movies.”

  “Were you always interested in movies?”

  “Not really. I used to want to be a ballerina.”

  “What happened?”

  “I couldn’t stand on my toes.”

  “Why not?”

  “It hurt. I have delicate toes.”

 
We watched Dwaine arrange the camera for the next scene.

  “Where does Dwaine get the money for all this?”

  “The film department supplies him the film.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Beats me. You’d have to ask him that, though I doubt he’d tell you. In case you haven’t noticed, he can be very secretive.”

  She smiled. I imagined her looking deep into my eyes, wanting me. With those dark glasses on her I could imagine whatever I liked.

  8

  When It’s So Good Don’t Even Try It Once had its premiere in Dwaine’s filmmaking class, I saw myself transformed. That was me, Nigel DePoli, up there on that pull-down movie screen, me writhing as the dope needle drew my suffering fake blood, me being chased across a rooftop by a fat bearded guy in a white Mister Softee uniform with a machete, me plunging eighteen stories into the white arms of an albino angel. Only itwasn’t me, not the usual me; as a matter of fact I hardly recognized myself. I looked bigger, taller, stronger, with broader shoulders and a thicker, sturdier neck. The guy up there on that screen looked less Italian, more American, as if the process of being filmed at thirty-six frames per second had flushed away some of that olive-oily immigrant blood. No, it wasn’t me up there; it wasn’tNigel DeDago, Nigel De-Wop, Nigel DeGuineaof Barnum, Connecticut.

  It was someone bigger, better.

  As we stepped out of Dwaine’s film class he threw his arm around me. “So, babe,” he said, “still want to major in advertising? Don’t answer too quickly. Think about it. After all, someday you just might sell somebody the perfect underarm deodorant, or the ideal laxative, or the ultimate brand of toilet paper.Try New Improved Bottom’s-Up brand toilet tissue: soft as air, sweet as honey. You can’t wipe your butt with it, but so what?”

  He jiggled his weird tooth at me.

  9

  We kept making movies.

  In Pig Iron Junkie I played a bodybuilder. I used my own set of rusty barbells, which kept company with the dust bunnies under the bed in my room in Captain Nemo’s apartment. Whenever I did curls and Navy lifts with them the barbells made a noise like an old-fashioned printing press. The movie consisted entirely of close-ups of clanking barbells and sweating, bulging, straining muscles, recapitulated ad infinitum thanks to a clever arrangement of mirrors installed by Dwaine in his one-room apartment. Between sweaty close-ups (some of the sweat mine, the rest faked with glycerin drops) Dwaine spliced in subliminal fake newspaper headlines:

  MAN WEEPS ON STREET CORNER

  BUTTERFLY SEEN IN CENTRAL PARK

  In Dust Off I played an exhausted Army medic who can’t see what he’s operating on because a punctured artery keeps squirting him in the eye.

  In Toothpaste I played a guy who brushes his teeth to death. While brushing he pulls out a loose tooth, then another, and so on, until he’s spitting out handfuls of teeth and gobs of foaming bright fake blood.

  In Blood Tickets a botched pawnshop holdup left me riddled with bullets and bleeding to death under a window stuffed with used cameras, Spanish guitars, and saxophones. (To my bullet-riddled Clyde Venus played Bonnie.)

  We dubbed ourselves—or Dwaine dubbed us—the Proto Realist Filmmaking Society. Our mission: to make movies so damned realistic (meaning so damned grim and violent and horrible) that you couldn’t tell them from real life. We went through gallons of fake blood, which in real life looks a lot more purple than red, and dozens of squibs: miniature explosive devices filled with fake blood, taped to the skin under my clothes and detonated off-camera to produce gorily realistic bullet holes. Dwaine said I bled beautifully.

  I wondered why Dwaine’s movies were all so violent, and guessed it had something to do with his wartime past, with Vietnam. Personally I had never known any real soldiers, had never known anyone who had been to war. My father avoided fighting in both of the World Wars that he’d lived through. The whole concept of war was as foreign to me as the dark side of the moon. I longed to ask Dwaine outright, “What was being in a war like? What did you do? What did you experience?”

  One day I put it to him straight. I asked him, “What was it like?”

  Dwaine said, “What was what like?”

  “The war.”

  “Which one, babe? There are so many.”

  “Vietnam,” I said.

  Dwaine blew a smoke ring. He was an expert at blowing them. We were sitting against a wall in his apartment, the one with the mirrors on it. I watched the smoke ring waver up and dash itself into the ceiling light fixture. “What was it like?” he said. “What was it like? An exploding dog, that’s what it was like. Vietnam was like an exploding dog.”

  And that’s all he would say.

  10

  As clam-mouthed as he was about Vietnam, Dwaine could be voluble on the subject of movies. “What is the dream of every red-blooded American boy?” he asked us all one day coming home from a day of filming.

  “To be President of the United States,” Venus guessed.

  “Wrong. Try again.”

  “To pitch for the Yankees,” Huff tried.

  Dwaine shook his head. “One more guess.”

  “To cure cancer,” I said.

  Dwaine made a buzzer sound. “Wrong again. The dream of every red-blooded American boy is to make movies.”

  We were crossing City Island Bridge. We’d just wrapped up Buster Gets Axed, my fifth Dwaine movie, about a short order cook suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who suffers a flashback when a customer orders a runny egg on his breakfast sandwich.

  “Forget Methodist, forget Baptist, forget Lutheran, Episcopal and Congregational and even Seventh-Day Adventist,” Dwaine said. “Movies—they’re are the only valid form of divine sacrament left to us in this culture, the only church worth going to anymore.”

  It’s dusk. To our left the sun sinks like a burning ocean liner into the waters of Eastchester Bay. To our left the lights of Manhattan twinkle in bluish-gray crepuscular light, a Whistler nocturne. Dwaine walks slightly ahead of us, making me wonder if that’s what born leaders do, walk slightly ahead of everyone else, if that’s what makes them born leaders.

  “When people go to the movies, it’s like a form of prayer,” Dwaine asserts. “The theater’s the cathedral, the screen’s the altar, the colors flickering across it are the modern equivalent of stained glass windows. In medieval times that’s how the church told Bible stories, through stained glass.”

  “What are the people praying for?”

  “They’re praying that in an hour and fifteen minutes or however long the movie is when the lights come back up and they leave the theater, they’ll still be in a movie. The streets, houses and buildings will look real, but they won’t be; they’ll be made of plaster and plywood.” In the dim air above us gulls wheel and shriek, their squawks blending with Huff’s locomotive chuffs as he labors alongside us in three-piece suit and Burberry trench coat. Through the bridge’s steel mesh dead fish and brine smells rise.

  “What about all the people in the streets?” Venus asks.

  “Extras,” Dwaine submits.

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  “And the sky and the trees?” says Huff, puffing.

  “One big rear-screen projector fake.”

  “And the sun burning in the sky?” I say.

  “A crane-mounted Musco light. The thing is,” Dwaine continues, not really wanting or needing to be interrupted, “for the average moviegoer, the whole point is to escape from reality, because reality is unbearable. So they run off to the only place they can afford to run off to, which is the movies, which is why no one ever gets anywhere or learns anything. Which, by the way, is exactly how the church works, how it’s always worked. People keep going and nothing ever changes, which as far as the church is concerned is a good thing, since if people were to really change, if they were to actually find anything like salvation, the church would go out of business, wouldn’t it?”

  “You’ve got a point there,” says Huff.

  A foghorn moans. A boat whistle toots. The brine smell grows stronger as the tide ebbs (or does whatever tides do).

  “Salvation may be good for something,” says Dwaine, “but it doesn’t make the world go ’round. Anyhow nobody really wants to be saved. They want to be lost. That’s why they go to the movies: to lose themselves in some totally made-up bullshit that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with real life.