“There are days like that. Lord, I been up here most of the day, enjoying the clouds, wanting to live forever, because of last night, the words, and you.”
He must have sensed my swallowing hard for he looked down and touched my head.
“Oh, oh,” he said. “You going to tell me something will make me drink again?”
“I hope not, J. C. It’s about your friend Clarence.”
He snatched his hand away as if burned.
A cloud covered the sun and there was a surprising small spatter of rain, a total shock in the midst of a sunlit day. I let the rain touch me without moving, as did J. C., who lifted his face to get the coolness.
“Clarence,” he murmured. “I’ve known him forever. He was around when we had real Indians. Clarence was out front, a kid no more than nine, ten, with his big four-eyes and his blond hair and his bright face and his big book of drawings or photos to be signed. He was there at dawn the first day I arrived, at midnight when I left. I was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!”
“Death?”
“Smartass.” J. C. laughed. “Death. High on my bony ass on my skeleton horse.”
J. C. and I both looked at the sky to see if his Death was still galloping there.
The rain stopped. J. C. wiped his face and went on:
“Clarence. Poor stupid, dependent, lonely, lifeless, wifeless son of a bitch. No wife, mistress, boy, man, dog, pig, no girlie pictures, no muscle monthlies. Zero! He doesn’t even wear Jockey shorts! Long johns, all summer! Clarence. God.”
At last I felt my mouth move.
“You heard from Clarence … lately?”
“He telephoned yesterday ….”
“What time?”
“Four-thirty. Why?”
Right after I knocked on his door, I thought.
“He telephoned, out of control. ‘It’s over!’ he said. ‘They’re coming to get me. Don’t lecture me!’ he screamed. It curdled my blood. Sounded like ten thousand extras fired, forty producer suicides, ninety-nine starlets raped, eyes shut, making do. His last words were ‘Help me! save me!’ And there I was, Jesus on the end of a line, Christ at the end of his tether. How could I help when I was the cause, not the cure? I told Clarence to take two aspirins and call in the morning. I should have rushed over. Would you have rushed, if you were me?”
I remembered Clarence lying in that huge wedding cake, layer upon layer of books, cards, photos, and hysterical sweat, glued in stacks.
J. C. saw my head shake.
“He’s gone, isn’t he? You,” he added, “did rush over?”
I nodded.
“It was not a natural death?”
I shook my head.
“Clarence!”
It was such a shout as would shake the field beasts and the shepherds asleep. It was the start of a sermon on darkness.
J. C. leaped up, head back. Tears spilled from his eyes.
“. . . Clarence …”
And he began to walk, eyes shut, down the Mount, away from the lost sermons, toward the other hill, Calvary, where his cross waited. I pursued.
Striding, J. C. asked:
“I don’t suppose you got anything on you? Liquor, booze. Hell! It was going to be such a sweet day! Clarence, you idiot!”
We reached the cross and J. C. searched in back and snorted a bitter laugh of relief, pulling out a sack that made liquid sounds.
“Christ’s blood in a brown bag in an unmarked bottle. What has the ceremony come to?” He drank, and drank again. “What do I do now? Climb up, nail myself, and wait for them?”
“Them?!”
“God, boy, it’s a matter of time! Then I’m spiked through the wrists, hung by my ballistics! Clarence is dead! How?”
“Smothered under his photographs.”
J. C. stiffened. “Who says?”
“I saw, J. C., but told no one. He knew something and was killed. What do you know!?”
“Nothing!” J. C. shook his head terribly. “No!”
“Clarence, outside the Brown Derby two nights ago, recognized a man. The man raised his fists! Clarence ran! Why?”
“Don’t try to find out!” said J. C. “Lay off. I don’t want you dragged down with me. There’s nothing I can do now but wait—” J. C.’s voice broke. “With Clarence killed, it won’t be long before they think I put him up to going to the Brown Derby—”
“Did you!?”
And me? I thought. Did you write to ask me to be there, too!?
“Who was it, J. C. They, who is they?! People are dying all over the place. My friend Roy, too, maybe!”
“Roy?” J. C. paused, furtively. “Dead? He’s lucky. Hiding? No use! They’ll get him. Like me. I knew too much for years.”
“How far back?”
“Why?”
“I might be dead, too. I’ve stumbled on something but I’m damned if I know what. Roy stumbled on something and he’s dead or on the run. My God, someone has killed Clarence because he stumbled on something. It’s a matter of time before they figure, What the hell, maybe I know Clarence too well, and kill me, to be sure. Damn it, J. C., Manny’s shutting the studio for two days. To clean up, repaint. God, no. It’s for Roy! Think! Tens of thousands of dollars out the window to find one crazy goof whose only crime was living ten million years back, who ran amok with one clay beast and has a price on his head. Why is Roy so important? Why, like Clarence, does he have to die? You. The other night. You said you were high up on Calvary. You saw the wall, the ladder, the body on the ladder. Could you see the face of that body?”
“It was too far away.” J. C.’s voice shook.
“Did you see the face of the man who put the body on the ladder?”
“It was dark—”
“Was it the Beast?”
“The what?”
“The man with the melted pink wax face and the fleshed-over right eye and the awful mouth? Did he shove that fake body up the ladder to scare the studio, scare you, scare me, and blackmail everyone somehow for some reason? If I must die, J. C., why can’t I know why? Name the Beast, J. C.”
“And really get you dead? No!”
A truck veered around the studio backlot corner. It ran by Calvary, throwing dust, blowing its horn.
“Watch out, idiot!” I yelled.
The truck dusted off.
And J. C. with it.
A man thirty years older than I, running fast. Grotesque! J. C. a-gallop, robes flapping in the dusty wind, as if to take off, fly, shouting gibberish to the skies.
Don’t go to Clarence’s! I almost shouted.
Dumb, I thought. Clarence is too far ahead. You’ll never catch up!!
48
Fritz was waiting with Maggie in Projection Room 10.
“Where you been?” he cried. “Guess what? Now we got no middle for the film!”
It was good to talk something silly, inane, ridiculous, a madness to cure my growing madness. God, I thought, films are like making love to gargoyles. You wake to find yourself clutched to the spine of a marble nightmare and think: What am I doing here? Telling lies, pulling faces. To make a film that twenty million people run to or away from.
And all done by freaks in projection rooms raving about characters who never lived.
So, how fine now to hide here with Fritz and Maggie, shouting nonsense, playing fools.
But the nonsense didn’t help.
At four-thirty I excused myself to run to the Men’s. There in the vomitorium I lost the color in my cheeks. The vomitorium. That’s what all writers call restrooms after they’ve heard their producer’s great ideas.
I tried to get the color back in my face by scrubbing with soap and water. I bent over the washbasin for five minutes, letting my sadness and alarm rush down the drain. After one last session of dry heaves, I washed up again, and staggered back to face Maggie and Fritz, thankful for the dim projection room.
“You!” said Fritz. “Change one scene and you screw up the rest. I showed your last las
t supper to Manny at noon. Now, because of your goddamn high-quality finale, he says, against his better nature, we got to reshoot some up-front stuff, or the film looks like a dead snake with a live tail. He wouldn’t tell you this himself; he sounded like he was eating his own entrails for lunch, or your tripes en casserole. He called you words I don’t use, but finally said put the bastard to work on scenes nine, fourteen, nineteen, twenty-five, and thirty. Hopscotch rewrites and reshoots. If we reshoot every other scene, we might fool people into thinking we got one half-ass fine film.”
I felt the old warm color flushing my face.
“That’s a big job for a new writer!” I exclaimed. “The time element!”
“All in the next three days! We’ve held the cast. I’m calling Alcoholics Anonymous to dog J. C. for seventy-two hours now that we know where he hides—”
I stared, quietly, but could not tell them I had scared J. C. off the lot.
“Seems I’m responsible for a lot of bad this week,” I finally said.
“Sisyphus, stay!” Fritz leaned to clap his hands on my shoulders. “Till I get you a bigger rock to push up the goddamn hill. You’re not Jewish; don’t try for guilt.” He thrust pages at me. “Write, rewrite. Re-rewrite!”
“You sure Manny wants me on this?”
“He’d rather tie you between two horses and fire off a gun, but that’s life. Hate a little. Then hate a lot.”
“What about The Dead Ride Fast? He wants me back on that!”
“Since when?” Fritz was on his feet.
“Since half an hour ago.”
“But he can’t do that without—”
“Right. Roy. And Roy’s gone. And I’m supposed to find him. And the studio is being shut for forty-eight hours to rebuild, repaint what doesn’t need repainting.”
“Jerks. Dumb asses. Nobody tells me anything. Well, we don’t need the stupid studio. We can rewrite Jesus from my house.”
The phone rang. Fritz all but strangled it in his fist, then shoved it at me.
It was a call from Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said a barely restrained woman’s voice. “But do you happen to know a man who calls himself J. C.?”
“J. C.?”
Fritz grabbed the phone. I grabbed it back. We shared the earpiece:
“Claims to be the Ghost of Christ reborn and newly repentant—”
“Let me have that!” cried another voice, a man’s. “Reverend Kempo here! You know this dreadful anti-Christ? We would have called the police but if the papers found that Jesus had been thrown out of our church, well! You have thirty minutes to come save this miscreant from God’s wrath! And mine!”
I let the phone drop.
“Christ,” I moaned to Fritz, “is resurrected.”
49
My taxi drove up in front of the Angelus Temple just as the last stragglers from a few late Bible classes were leaving through a multitude of doors.
Reverend Kempo was out front, wringing his rusty hands and walking as if a stick of dynamite was up his backside.
“Thank God!” he cried, rushing forward. He stopped, suddenly fearful. “You are the young friend of that creature in there, yes?”
“J. C.?”
“J. C.! What a criminal abomination! Yes, J. C.! ”
“I’m his friend.”
“What a pity. Quickly, now!”
And he elbow-carried me in and down the aisle of the main auditorium. It was deserted. From on high came the soft sound of feathers, a flight of angel wings. Someone was testing the sound system with various heavenly murmurs.
“Where is—?” I stopped.
For there, center stage, on the bright twenty-four-karat throne of God, sat J. C.
He sat rigidly, eyes looking straight out through the walls of the church, his hands placed, palms up, on either armrest.
“J. C.” I trotted down the aisle and stopped again.
For there was fresh blood dripping from each of the cicatrices on his exposed wrists.
“Isn’t he awful? That terrible man! Out!” cried the Reverend behind me.
“Is this a Christian church?” I said.
“How dare you ask!”
“Don’t you think, at a moment like this,” I wondered, “that Christ himself might show mercy?”
“Mercy!?” cried the Reverend. “He broke into our service, yelling, ‘I am the true Christ! I fear for my life. Gangway!’ He ran to the stage to display his wounds. He might as well have exposed himself. Forgive? There was shock and almost a riot. Our congregation may never come back. If they tell, if the newspapers call, you see? He has made us a laughing stock. Your friend!”
“My friend—” but my voice lacked luster as I climbed up to stand by the ham Shakespearean actor.
“J. C.,” I called, as across an abyss.
J. C.’s eyes, fixed on eternity, blinked, refocused.
“Oh, hello, junior,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“Going on?!” I cried. “You’ve just made yourself one helluva mess!”
“Oh, no, no!” J. C. suddenly saw where he was and held up his hands. He stared as if someone had tossed him twin tarantulas. “Did they scourge me again? Did they follow? I’m dead. Protect me! Did you bring a bottle?”
I patted my pockets as if I carried such items all the time and shook my head. I turned to glance at the Reverend, who with a burst of invective scuttled behind the throne and shoved some red wine at me.
J. C. lunged, but I grabbed and held it as lure.
“This way. Then the cork comes out.”
“You would dare talk to Christ like that!”
“You would dare to be Christ!?” cried the Reverend.
J. C. reared back. “I do not dare, sir. I am.”
He arose with a jaunty attempt at hauteur, and fell down the steps.
The Reverend groaned, as if murder moved his heart to move his fists.
I got J. C. up and, waving the bottle, led him safely up the aisle and out.
The cab was still there. Before getting in, J. C. turned to see the Reverend in the doorway, his face blazing with hatred.
J. C. held up both crimson paws.
“Sanctuary! Yes? Sanctuary?”
“Hell, sir,” shouted the Reverend, “would not have you!”
Slam!
Inside the temple I imagined a thousand angel wings, knocked free, sifting down the now unholy air.
J. C. stumbled into the cab, grabbed the wine, then leaned forward to whisper to the cab driver.
“Gethsemane!”
We drove away. The driver glanced at his map book with one eye.
“Gethsemane,” he muttered. “Is that street? avenue? or place?”
50
“Even the cross isn’t safe, even the cross isn’t safe, anymore,” mumbled J. C. crossing town, his eyes fixed to his wounded wrists as if he couldn’t believe they were attached to his arms. “What’s the world coming to?” J. C. peered out the cab window at the flowing houses.
“Was Christ manic-depressive? Like me?”
“No,” I said lamely, “not nuts. But you’re in the bowl with the almonds and the cashews. What made you go there?”
“I was being chased. They’re after me. I am the Light of the World.” But he said this last with heavy irony. “Christ, I wish I didn’t know so much.”
“Tell me. Fess up.”
“Then they’d chase you, too! Clarence,” he murmured. “He didn’t run fast enough, either, did he?”
“I knew Clarence, too,” I said. “Years ago …”
That scared J. C. even more. “Don’t tell anyone! They won’t hear it from me.”
J. C. drank half the wine bottle at a chug, then winked and said, “Mum’s the word.”
“No, sir, J. C.! You got to tell me, just in case—”
“—I don’t live beyond tonight? I won’t! But I don’t want both of us dead. You’re a sweet jerkoff. Come unto me, little chil
dren, and, by God, you show up!”
He drank and wiped the smile off his face.
We stopped along the way. J. C. fought to leap out to buy gin. I threatened to hit him and bought it myself.
The taxi sailed into the studio and slowed near my grandparents’ house.
“Why,” said J. C., “that looks like the Central Avenue Negro Baptist Church! I can’t go in there! I’m not black or Baptist. Just Christ, and a Jew! Tell him where to go!”
The taxi stopped at Calvary at sunset. J. C. looked up at his old familiar roost. “Is that the true cross?” He shrugged. “Just about as much as I’m the true Jesus.”
I stared at the cross. “You can’t hide there, J. C. Everyone knows that’s where you go, now. We got to find a really secret place for you to stay in case there’s a call for retakes.”
“You don’t understand,” said J. C. “Heaven is shut and so is Hell. They’d find me in a rathole or up a hippo’s behind. Calvary, plus wine, is the only place. Now, get your foot off my toga.”
He put the rest of the wine down his cackle, then moved out and up the hill.
“Thank God, I’ve finished all my major scenes,” said J. C. “It’s all over, son.” J. C. took my hands in his. He was immensely calm now, having veered from the heights to the depths and now steadied somewhere between. “I shouldn’t have run away. And you shouldn’t be seen here talking to me. They’ll bring extra hammers and nails and you’ll play the second extra thief on my left. Or Judas. They’ll bring a rope and suddenly you’re Iscariot.”
He turned and put his hands on the cross and one foot on the little climbing peg on one side.
“One last thing?” I said. “Do you know the Beast?”
“God, I was there the night he was born!”
“Born?”
“Born, dammit, what did it sound like?”
“Explain, J. C., I got to know!”
“And die for knowing, you sap,” said J. C. “Why do you want to die? Jesus saves, yes? But if I’m Jesus and I’m lost, you’re all lost! Look at Clarence, the poor bastard. The guys that got him are running scared. And, scared, they panic and when they panic they hate. You know anything about real hatred, junior? This is it, no amateur nights, no time off for good behavior. Someone says kill and it’s kill. And you wander around with your stupid naïve notions about people. God, you wouldn’t know a real whore if she bit you or a real killer if he knifed you. You’d die, and dying, say: oh, that’s what it’s like, but it’s too late. So listen to old Jesus, fool.”