I did what I could, prompted by an incipient sadness about two people I didn’t really know, and yet I knew. From the small local synagogue I got the name of the almost smaller graveyard and for reasons confused and half-known went one late afternoon to look in, feeling like the twelve-year-old goy I once was, peering into the temple in downtown L.A., wondering what it was like to be part of all that chanting and singing, with all those men in hats.
In the graveyard I found what I knew I would find. The old woman was there, seated next to a stone bearing his name. And she was talking, talking, talking, touching the stone, talking to the stone.
And he? What else? Was not listening.
I waited, heard, shut my eyes and backed away.
With the sun gone and fog coming in with night I passed the bench. It was still empty, which made it worse.
So what can you do?
I called Sid.
“About that tape recorder of yours?” I said. “And some of those tapes?”
On one of the last nights of summer, Sid and I took our usual stroll down the kosher esplanade, passing the fine pastrami and cheesecake emporiums, stopped for some of that and walked on near the two dozen benches by the sea, talking and greatly contented, when Sid suddenly remarked, “You know, I have often wondered—”
“What’s to wonder?” I said, for he was looking ahead at that bench, which had stayed empty for almost a week.
“Look.” Sid touched my arm. “That old woman?”
“Yes?”
“She’s back! I thought she was sick or something, but there she is.”
“I know,” I smiled.
“Since when? The same bench. And talking like crazy.”
“Yes,” I said, and we walked closer.
“But,” said Sid as quiet as he could, “there’s no one there. She’s talking to herself.”
“Almost,” I said. We were very close. “Listen.”
“You give me the same smarts. Arguments, who needs?” the old woman was saying, leaning forward toward the empty half of the bench, eyes fiery, face intense, mouth in full motion. “Arguments, who needs? I got plenty. Listen!”
And then, even more astonishing: a reply.
“Give a listen, she says!” a voice cried. “For what, how come?”
“That voice!” Sid exclaimed, then whispered. “His voice. But he’s dead!”
“Yes,” I said.
“And another thing,” the old woman said, “look how you eat. Sometime, watch!”
“Easy for you to say!” the old man’s voice shot back.
“Go ahead, say!”
There was a click. Sid’s eyes slid down. He saw what I saw, his borrowed small handheld recorder in the old woman’s palm.
“And another thing,” she said, alive.
Click.
“Why do I put up with this?” his voice cried, dead.
Click.
“I got lists you wouldn’t believe!” she cried, alive.
Sid glanced at me. “You?” he said.
“Me,” I said.
“How?” Sid said.
“I had your tapes from all those nights,” I said. “I cut them together, him talking, and put spaces between for her to yell back. Some places he just yells, no answer. Or she can click him off so she can yell, then click him back on.”
“How did you know—?”
“She was in the graveyard,” I said. “I couldn’t stand it. Her just talking to that cold piece of marble and no answers. So I recopied your tapes, just his raves and yells, and one late afternoon looking into the graveyard I saw that yes, she was there and might be there forever and starve and die being there. No answers. But there had to be, even if you don’t listen or think you don’t, so I just walked in by the grave, turned on the tape, handed it to her where she sat by the stone, made sure he was yelling, and walked away. I didn’t look back or wait to hear if she yelled, too. Him and her, her and him, high and low, low and high, I just left.
“Last night she was back here on the bench, eating some cheesecake. I think she’s going to live. Isn’t that swell?”
Sid listened. The old man was complaining. “Why do I put up with this? Someone tell me! I’m waiting. So?”
“Okay, smartie,” the old woman cried.
Sid and I walked away in the late summer night. Her high voice and his deep voice faded.
Sid took my arm as we walked.
“For a goy,” he said, “you make a fine Jew. What can I do you for?”
“Pastrami on rye?” I said.
THE DRAGON DANCED AT MIDNIGHT
Remember the Aaron Stolittz jokes? How they called him the Vampire Bat because he was a fly-by-night producer? Remember his two studios? One a piano box, the other a cracker bin? I worked in the cracker bin near the Santa Monica graveyard. Great! Dead, you just moved ninety feet south to a good address.
Me? I plagiarized scripts, borrowed music, and edited film on Monster, The Creature from Across the Hall (my mother liked it, it resembled her mother), The Mobile Mammoth, and all the other Elephantine Aphid and Berserk Bacillus films we shot between sunset and sunrise the next day.
But all that changed. I lived through that great and awful night when Aaron Stolittz became world-famous, rich, and nothing was the same after that.
The phone rang early one hot September evening. Aaron was up front in his studio. That is, he was hiding in one two-by-four office, beating vinegar-gnat sheriffs off the screen door. I was back splicing our latest epic film, using stolen equipment, when the phone buzzed. We jumped, afraid of bill-collector wives shrieking long-distance from forgotten years.
Finally, I lifted the receiver.
“Hey,” a voice cried, “this is Joe Samasuku at the Samasuku Samurai Theater. Tonight at eight-thirty we scheduled a genuine Japanese surprise studio feature preview. But the film has been waylaid at a film festival in Pacoima or San Luis Obispo—who knows? Look. You got ninety minutes of film any way resembles a Samurai widescreen or even a Chinese fairy tale? There’s a fast fifty bucks in it. Give me the titles of your latest somebody-stepped-on-Junior-and-now-he-looks-better-than-ever pictures.”
“The Island of Mad Apes?” I suggested.
Uneasy silence.
“Two Tons of Terror?” I went on.
The manager of the Samasuku Theater stirred to disconnect.
“The Dragon Dances at Midnight!” I cried impulsively.
“Yeah.” The voice smoked a cigarette. “That Dragon. Can you finish shooting, cutting, and scoring it in … eh … one hour and thirty minutes?”
“Monster apple pie!” I hung up.
“The Dragon Dances at Midnight?” Aaron loomed behind me. “We got no such film.”
“Watch!” I snapped some title letters under our camera. “As The Island of Mad Apes becomes The Dragon Dances et cetera!”
So I retitled the film, finished the music (old Leonard Bernstein outtakes run backward), and jockeyed twenty-four film reels into our Volkswagen. Usually films run nine reels, but, while editing, you keep film on dozens of short spools so it’s easier to handle. There wasn’t time to rewind our epic. The Samasuku would have to make do with a couple dozen cans.
We dented fenders roaring to the theater and ran the reels up to the projection booth. A man with a dire pirate’s eye, and a breath like King Kong’s, exhaled sherry wine, grabbed our reels, slammed and locked the metal door.
“Hey!” cried Aaron.
“Quick,” I said. “After the show may be too late, let’s go grab that fifty bucks and …”
“I’m ruined, ruined!” said a voice, as we went down the stairs.
Joe Samasuki, literally tearing his hair, stood staring at the mob as it jostled into the theater.
“Joe!” we both said, alarmed.
“Look,” he groaned. “I sent telegrams warning them off. There’s been a foul-up. And here comes Variety, Saturday Review, Sight and Sound, Manchester Guardian, Avant-Garde Cinema Review. Give me poisoned American
food, go on!”
“Calmness, Joe,” said Aaron. “Our film ain’t all that bad.”
“It’s not?” I asked. “Aaron, those supersnobs! It’s Hari-Kari Productions after tonight!”
“Calmness,” said Aaron quietly, “is a drink we can buy in the bar next door. Come.”
The film started with a great explosion of Dimitri Tiomkin themes upside down, backward, and super-reversed.
We ran for the bar. We were halfway through a double glass of serenity when the ocean crashed on the shore. That is to say, the audience in the theater gasped and sighed.
Aaron and I raced out, opened the theater door to gaze in at whatever dragon happened to be dancing that midnight.
I let out a small bleat, whirled, and leaped upstairs to beat on the projection-room door with my tiny fists. “Nincompoop! Louse! The reels are reversed. You got the number four reel in where it should be reel two!”
Aaron joined me, gasping, to lean against the locked door.
“Listen!”
Behind the door a tinkling sound like ice and something that wasn’t water.
“He’s drinking.”
“He’s drunk!”
“Look,” I said, sweating, “he’s five minutes into the reel now. Maybe no one noticed. You, in there!” I kicked the door. “You’re warned! Line ’em up! Get ’em right! Aaron,” I said, leading him shakily downstairs, “let’s buy you some more calmness.”
We were finishing our second martini when another tidal wave hit the coastline.
I ran into the theater. I ran upstairs. I scrabbled at the projection-room peekhole. “Maniac! Destroyer! Not reel six! Reel three! Open up, so I can strangle you with my bare hands!”
He opened up … another bottle behind the metal door. I heard him stumble over tin cans of film strewn on the concrete floor.
Clawing my scalp, like a scene in Medea, I wandered back down to find Aaron gazing deep into his glass.
“Do all movie projectionists drink?”
“Do whales swim underwater?” I replied, eyes shut. “Does leviathan plumb the ocean seas?”
“Poet,” said Aaron reverently. “Speak on.”
“My brother-in-law,” I spoke, “has been projectionist at TriLux Studios for fifteen years, which means fifteen years in which he has not drawn a sober breath.”
“Think of that.”
“I am thinking. Fifteen years seeing day after day the rushes for Saddle of Sin, the rerun of Sierra Love Nest, the recut of Pitfall of Passion. The concussion alone would give a man bends. Worse in long-run theaters. Imagine, the ninetieth time you see Carroll Baker in Harlow. Think, Aaron, think! Madness, huh? Up-the-wall panics. Sleepless midnights. Impotency. So? So you start drinking. All across night America at this very hour, conjure up the little settlements, the brave small forts, the big neon cities, and in every one, this second, Aaron, all the film projectionists, no exceptions, are drunker than hoot owl skunks. Drunk, drunk, drunk to a man.”
We brooded over this and sipped our drinks. My eyes watered, imagining ten thousand projectionists alone with their films and bottles far across the prairie continent.
The theater audience stirred.
“Go see what that madman is doing now,” said Aaron.
“I’m afraid.”
The theater shook with a temblor of emotion.
We went out and stared up at the projection-room window above.
“He’s got twenty-four reels of film there. Aaron, how many combinations can you put together out of that? Reel nine for reel five. Reel eleven for reel sixteen. Reel eight for reel twenty. Reel—”
“Stop!” Aaron groaned, and shuddered.
Aaron and I did not so much walk as run around the block.
We made it around six times. Each time we came back the shouts, squeals, and improbable roars of the crowd in the theater got louder.
“My God, they’re ripping up the seats!”
“They wouldn’t do that.”
“They’re killing their mothers!”
“Movie critics? You ever see their mothers, Aaron? Epaulettes down to here. Battle ribbons across to there. Work out at the gym five days a week. Build and launch battleships in their off-hours. Naw, Aaron, break each other’s wrists, sure, but kill their mothers …?”
There was a gasp, a hiss, a long-drawn sigh from the midnight dark within the California architecture. The big mission dome of the theater sifted dust.
I went in to stare at the screen until the reels changed. I came out.
“Reel nineteen in for reel ten,” I said.
At which moment the theater manager staggered out, tears in his eyes, face all pale cheese, reeling from wall to wall with despair and shock.
“What have you done to me? What are you doing?” he shrieked. “Bums! Bastards! Ingrates! The Joe Samasuku Samurai Theater is ruined forever!”
He lunged at us, and I held him off. “Joe, Joe,” I pleaded, “don’t talk like that.”
The music swelled. It was as if film and audience were inflating themselves toward a vast ripped-forth explosion which might tear mind from matter as flesh from bone.
Joe Samasuku fell back, pressed a key in my hand, and said, “Call the cops, telephone the janitor service to clean up after the riot, lock the doors if the doors are left, and don’t call me, I’ll call you!”
Then he fled.
We would have dogged him out of his old California patio and down the mean streets had not at that instant a huge stolen chunk of Berlioz and a cymbal smash straight out of Beethoven ended the film.
There was a stunned silence.
Aaron and I turned to stare madly at the shut-tight theater doors.
They banged wide open. The mob, in full cry, burst to view. It was a beast of many eyes, many arms, many legs, many shoes, and one immense and ever-changing body.
“I’m too young to die,” Aaron remarked.
“You should’ve thought of that before you messed with things better left to God,” said I.
The mob, the great beast, stopped short, quivering. We eyed it. It eyed us.
“There they are!” someone shouted at last. “The producer, the director!”
“So long, Aaron,” I said.
“It’s been great,” said Aaron.
And the beast, rushing forward with an inarticulate cry, threw itself upon us … hoisted us to its shoulders and carried us, yelling happily, singing, slapping us on the back, three times around the patio, out into the street, then back into the patio again.
“Aaron!”
I stared down aghast into a swarming sea of beatific smiles. Here loped the reviewer of the Manchester Guardian. There bounded the mean and dyspeptic critic from the Greenwich Village Avanti. Beyond gamboled ecstasies of second-string film reviewers from Saturday Review, The Nation, and The New Republic. And far out on the shore of this tumultuous sea, in all directions, there was a frolic and jump, a laughing and waving of columnists from Partisan Review, Sight and Sound, Cinema, multitudinous beyond belief.
“Incredible!” they cried. “Marvelous! Superior to Hiroshima Mon Amour! Ten times better than Last Year at Marienbad! One hundred times greater than Greed! Classic! Genius! Makes Giant look like a Munchkin! My God, the New American Wave is in! How did you do it?”
“Do what?” I yelled, looking over at Aaron being carried for the fourth time around the lobby.
“Shut up and ride high in the saddle!” Aaron sailed over the ocean of humanity on a sea of smile.
I blinked up, wild strange tears in my eyes. And there in the projection-room window above, a shadow loomed with wide-sprung eyes. The projectionist, bottle in numbed hand, gasped down upon our revelry, ran his free fingers over his face in self-discovery, stared at the bottle, and fell away in shadow before I could shout.
When at last the hopping dancing dwarfs and gazelles were exhausted and laughing out their final compliments, Aaron and I were set back down on our feet with: “The most tremendous avant-garde film in histor
y!”
“We had high hopes,” said I.
“The most daring use of camera, editing, the jump-cut, and the multiple reverse story line I can remember!” everyone said at once.
“Planning pays off,” said Aaron modestly.
“You’re competing it in the Edinburgh Film Festival, of course?”
“No,” said Aaron, bewildered, “we—”
“—planned on it after we show at the Cannes Film Festival competition,” I cut in.
A battalion of flash cameras went off and, like the tornado that dropped Dorothy in Oz, the crowd whirled on itself and went away, leaving behind a litter of cocktail parties promised, interviews set, and articles that must be written tomorrow, next week, next month—remember, remember!
The patio stood silent. Water dripped from the half-dry mouth of a satyr cut in an old fountain against the theater wall. Aaron, after a long moment of staring at nothing, walked over and bathed his face with water.
“The projectionist!” he cried, suddenly remembering.
We pounded upstairs and paused. This time we scratched at the tin door like two small, hungry white mice.
After a long silence a faint voice mourned, “Go away. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Didn’t mean it? Hell, open up! All is forgiven.” said Aaron.
“You’re nuts,” the voice replied faintly. “Go away.”
“Not without you, honey. We love you. Don’t we, Sam?”
I nodded. “We love you.”
“You’re out of your mother-minds.”
Feet scraped tin lids and rattling film.
The door sprang open.
The projectionist, a man in his mid-forties, eyes bloodshot, face a furious tint of boiled-crab red, stood swaying before us, palms out and open to receive the driven nails.
“Beat me,” he whispered. “Kill me.”
“Kill you? You’re the greatest thing that ever happened to dog meat in the can!”
Aaron darted in and planted a kiss on the man’s cheek. He fell back, beating the air as if attacked by wasps, spluttering.
“I’ll fix it all back just the way it was,” he cried, bending to scrabble the strewn film snakes on the floor. “I’ll find the right pieces and …”