'Oh, I'm sorry,' he gurgled, thinking how he'd lived for the last few days on beer.
The stewardess stood, holding her skirt up, making a tray of it, and smiled, or tried to. He said again, 'Oh, I'm sorry.'
She told him sweetly, 'Pleeze, don't vorry about it.'
But Bogus Trumper didn't hear her. He saw the blackness out his window and hoped it was only the sea. He said again, 'Really, I am sorry ...'
The stewardess was trying to get away from him to empty her skirt. But he caught her hand not looking at her and staring out the window fixedly, and said again, 'I really am sorry, really! Fuck it, anyway, damn it! But I am! So very fucking sorry ...'
The stewardess knelt awkwardly in the aisle beside him, balancing her skirtful of slop. 'Pleeze, you ... hey, you!' she crooned. But he began to cry. 'Pleeze don't even tink about it,' she pleaded. She touched his face. 'Look, pleeze,' she coaxed. 'You von't believe me, but dis happens all der time.'
21
Home Movies
KENT RAN THE projector. It was a pretty beat-up print of the original which Tulpen had crudely spliced together so they could see how the concept was working.
Trumper ran the recorder. His tapes were as crudely cut as the film; they weren't always in sync, and he kept having to ask Kent to slow down the projector or speed it up or stop it altogether, and he was constantly fussing with the speed of the tape too. Altogether, it was about as amateurish an operation as Trumper had been privileged to see since he'd started working with Ralph. Most of the camera shots were hand-held, as jumpy as a TV newsreel, and most of the film was silent; the separately taped sound track would be laid over later. Ralph had practically given up on using sync sound. Even the film itself was substandard - high speed, grainy stuff - and Ralph, normally a wizard with light, had overexposed and underexposed half of the footage. Ralph was also a very patient genius in the darkroom, yet some of the footage looked as if the film had been handled with pliers and blotched with chemicals invented for the removal of rust rather than the development of film.
An excellent film craftsman, Ralph had done all this on purpose; in fact, some of the light holes in the film had been handmade with a jackknife. Since there wasn't a speck of dust in his darkroom, Ralph must have swept half of New York with the reels to achieve the mess he had. Perhaps when the film was distributed, if it ever was, Ralph would stipulate the use of a crushed plastic lens on the projector.
When Packer wanted to run through the whole crude beginning again, Trumper felt he'd had it.
'It's looking good,' Ralph said. 'It's looking better.'
'You want to know what it sounds like?' Trumper said, slamming the buttons on the recorder. 'It sounds like it was taped in a tin-can factory. And you know what it looks like? It looks like your tripod got stolen and that you were so poor you had to pawn your light meter to be able to buy the cheapest film stock in Hong Kong.'
Tulpen coughed.
'It looks,' said Trumper, 'like your darkroom was in a windowless building being sand-blasted.
Even Kent didn't say anything. He probably didn't like it either, but he had great faith in Ralph. If Ralph had asked him to load a camera with Saran Wrap, Kent would have tried it.
'It looks like home movies,' Trumper said.
'It is a home movie, Thump-Thump,' Ralph told him. 'Can we run through the first reel just once more please?'
'If this tape will even hold together,' Trumper said. 'I ought to copy it. It's got more splices than actual tape. It's about as stable as a pubic hair,' he said.
'Once more, Thump-Thump?' Ralph asked.
'If I have to stop it just once,' Trumper said, 'the whole thing will fall apart.'
'Then we'll run it straight through, OK, Kent?' Ralph said.
'The film might break too,' Kent suggested.
'Let's just try it, shall we?' Ralph said patiently. 'Just once more.'
'I'll pray for you, Ralph,' said Bogus. Tulpen coughed again. Nothing was meant by it; she simply had a cold. 'Ready, Kent?' Trumper asked.
Kent advanced the film to the opening frame and Trumper located the sound he wanted. 'Ready, Thump-Thump,' Kent said.
The name was reserved for Ralph's use alone; Trumper didn't like being called Thump-Thump by fucking Kent. 'What did you say, Kent?' he asked.
'Huh?' said Kent.
Ralph stood up, and Tulpen put her right hand in Trumper's lap, leaned across him and with her left hand flicked the tape to PLAY. 'Go, Kent,' she said.
The film opens with a medium shot of Trumper in a delicatessen in the Village. It is a big, crowded lunch-counter, and you can pick out sandwich makings as you move along, ending up with a whopper at the cash register. Trumper moves slowly, scrutinizing the pastrami, pickles and spiced ham, nodding or shaking his head to the men behind the counter. There is no sync sound.
The voice-over is Packer's, narrating, from the tape. 'He's very cautious now - like someone who's been stung has an eye open for bees, you know?'
Trumper looks suspiciously at his sandwich, 'It's natural, I guess, but he just won't get involved in anything.'
Ralph's voice-over rattles on about Trumper's lack of involvement until we cut to another angle: Trumper standing by the condiment counter, applying mustard and relish. A pretty girl is looking self-consciously at the camera, then at Trumper to see if he might be someone famous. She also wants the mustard. Trumper slides it along the counter to her without looking at her, then carries his sandwich out of frame. The girl stares after him, as Tulpen's voice-over says, 'I think he's very careful with women. A good thing, too, by the way ...'
Cut: Trumper and Tulpen are entering her apartment, both of them lugging groceries. There is no sync sound. Ralph, voice-over, says, 'Well, naturally you'd think so. You live with him.'
Tulpen and Bogus are putting groceries away in the kitchen; she is chattering in an apparently normal monologue; he is sullen, throwing an occasional irritated look at her, then at the camera. 'I mean, he's just nice with me,' Tulpen's voice-over says. 'I think he's aware of the dangers, that's all ...'
Walking straight into the camera's lens, Trumper makes an obscene gesture.
Cut: a series of stills, family photographs of Trumper, Biggie and Colm. Ralph's voice-over: 'Well, he ought to be aware of the dangers, of course. He was married before ...'
Tulpen: 'He misses the child.'
Ralph: 'And the wife?'
Cut: Earphones on, Bogus is working on the tapes in Ralph's studio. There is no sync sound. The sound track is a montage of fragments we've already heard from the various voices-over: 'It's natural, I guess ...' 'I think that's a good thing ...' 'You live with him ...' 'And the wife?'
Trumper appears to be switching these fragments on and off by his fingerwork at the tape recorder. Then Tulpen comes into frame, says something and points to something out of frame, just beyond the two of them.
Another angle: with the bits from the voices-over still the only sound, Trumper and Tulpen are looking at a tangled mess of tape which has spun off a reel and is spilling into a great wormy pile on the floor. Trumper shuts something off: clunk. With this noise, the frame freezes to a still. There continues to be no sync sound. Ralph's voice-over says, 'Stop it, right there! Now the title - hold it right there ...' Then the titles for Fucking Up appear over the frozen image. 'Music,' says Ralph's voice-over, and in turn they appear over the frozen image: Bogus Trumper, in stop-action, is stooping to attempt to untangle a mess of spilled tape. Tulpen is looking on.
22
Slouching after Overturf
HE WAS VERY lucky to hitch a ride from Frankfurt Airport to Stuttgart with a German computer salesman who was proud of his company's Mercedes. Trumper wasn't sure whether it was the drone of the autobahn or the salesman's own peculiar drone that put him to sleep.
In Stuttgart he spent the night at the Hotel Fehls Zunder. Apparently, from the rows of photographs in the hotel lobby, Fehls Zunder had been a diver in the German Olympic Team of 1936; ther
e was a photo of him in midair at the Berlin Games. The last photo showed him on the deck of a German U-boat, leaning on the port rail beside the Fregattenkapitan; FEHLS ZUNDER, FROGMAN, LOST AT SEA, read the caption.
There was also an unexplained photograph of dark, empty ocean, the shoreline - France? England? - in the distance. A white X had been painted on the crest of a heavy swell. The caption, ripe with irony, said: HIS LAST DIVE.
Trumper wondered where Fehls Zunder had learned to swim and dive in Stuttgart. From his fifth-floor window, Bogus contemplated a double-gainer which would have placed him precisely in the middle of a glistening puddle in the tram tracks below the hotel.
Bogus's longest dreams are about heroes. Accordingly, he dreams of Merrill Overturf sterilizing his hypodermic needle and syringe in a little saucepan, and boiling a test tube of Benedict's solution and pee to check his urine sugar. Merrill is being almost dainty in some impossibly large American kitchen; it's the kitchen at Great Boar's Head, where Bogus has never seen Merrill. Dr Edmund Trumper is reading the newspaper and Bogus's mother is making coffee as Merrill squeezes a medicine dropper of pee into a test tube, plinking exactly eight drops into the Benedict's solution.
'What's for breakfast?' Trumper's father asks.
Merrill is watching the timer on the stove. When the little bell rings, Dr Edmund Trumper's soft-boiled egg is done, simultaneously with Merrill's urine.
Merrill cools his pee in a fancy spice rack while Trumper's father fingers the steaming eggshell. Merrill shakes his test tube; Dr Edmund strikes the egg a glancing blow with his butter knife. Merrill announces that his urine sugar is high. 'At least two per cent,' he says, waving the opaque reddish mixture. 'Clear blue would be negative ...'
Something hisses. Actually, it's a large Mercedes bus below Trumper's Stuttgart window, but Bogus concludes that it's Merrill loading his syringe.
Then the three of them are sitting around the breakfast table. As Bogus's mother pours coffee, Merrill lifts his shirt and pinches up a small roll of his belly. Trumper smells alcohol and coffee as Merrill rubs his bit of fat with a cotton wad, then flicks the needle in like a dart and smoothly pushes the plunger.
Another hiss, louder than before, and Bogus rolls over and bumps into the wall of the Hotel Fehls Zunder; for a moment, the kitchen at Great Boar's Head tilts and slips off the bed. Hearing the crash, and other hiss, Trumper wakes up on the floor, with a fleeing vision of Merrill pumping himself full of air.
Now Merrill floats near the ceiling of Trumper's strange room, at the Hotel Fehls Zunder, and somewhere, dimmed by the hiss of the bus doors opening and closing outside, Bogus hears his father say, 'This is not a usual symptom of insulin reaction ...'
'My urine sugar is too high!' shrieks Merrill, skidding like a helium balloon across the ceiling to the transom above the door, where Bogus sees the girlish face of a total stranger peering through one of the transom's tiny windowpanes. Actually, the glass is in splinters on the floor of Trumper's room, and the embarrassed hotel maid, on her hall stepladder, tells Trumper that she's sorry for the disturbance; she was just wiping the glass when a pane fell out.
Bogus smiles; he doesn't catch the German right away, so that the maid is forced to carry on. 'It just fell right out when I was wiping it,' she explains, then tells him she will come back with a broom.
Trumper dresses himself in the bedsheet; draped in it, he moves suspiciously to his window, trying to locate the real hiss. Whether the Mercedes bus looks so new and shiny and inviting, or whether he actually notes how much money he has, he splurges and takes such a bus to Munich - riding high and drowsily on the sightseeing deck through Bavaria; dreaming vaguely a sort of stepped-up cycle to Overturf's careless treatment of his diabetes. Merrill shooting the insulin, watching his urine sugar plummet; Merrill suffering an insulin reaction on a Vienna Strassenbahn, jangling the dog tags around his neck until the conductor, who's about to throw this weaving drunk off the tram, reads the bilingual messages printed on the tags:
Ich bin nicht betrunken!
I am not drunk!
Ich habe zuckerkrankheit!
I have diabetes!
Was Sie sehen ist ein Insulinreaktion!
What you're seeing is an insulin reaction!
Futtern Sie mir Zucker, schnell!
Feed me sugar, quick!
Merrill gobbles sugar, Lifesavers, mints, orange juice and chocolate, raising his fallen sugar count so that he's out of insulin reaction and headed in the opposite direction, toward acidosis and coma. Which requires that he take more insulin. Which starts the cycle over again. Even in dreams, Trumper exaggerates.
Coming into Munich, Bogus tries to be objective; he unearths his tape recorder and on the bus records this statement: 'Merrill Overturf and other irregular people are unsuited to conditions demanding careful routines. Diabetes, for example ...' (Thinking, Marriage, for example...)
But before he can shut the recorder off, the man next to him asks in German what Trumper is doing, fearful, perhaps, of an interview. Feeling the tape is already botched, and sure that the man understands only German, Trumper keeps the tape running and replies in English, 'Just what is it, sir, that you have to hide?'
'I speak English rather quite some well,' the man replies, and they ride in deathly silence into Munich.
To make peace, at the bus terminal Bogus lightly asks the offended passenger who Fehls Zunder was. But the man expresses some distaste for the question; not answering, he hurries off, leaving Bogus to endure the stares of several nearby eavesdroppers, for whom the name Fehls Zunder seems to have rung an unpleasant bell.
Feeling foreign, Trumper wonders, with considerable surprise, What am I doing here? He bumps awkwardly along a strange Munich street, suddenly unable to translate the German shop signs and voices garbling around him, imagining all the terrors that could be taking place in America at this moment. A run-amok tornado lashing the Midwest lofts weighty Biggie forever out of Iowa. Colm is buried by a blizzard in Vermont. Cuthbert Bennett, drinking in his darkroom, accidentally swallows a highball glass of Microdol-X, retires to the seventeenth bathroom and flushes himself out to sea. While Trumper, isolated from these dreadful events, drains a heavy beer in the Munich Bahnhof, having decided to take the train from here to Vienna. He is aware that he's been waiting for the point in his trip when he'll be suddenly exhilarated, struck with the adventure of returning.
It's not until he arrives, still unfeeling, in Vienna that he considers the possibility that adventure is a time and not a place.
He wandered down the Mariahilferstrasse until the awkwardness and weight of his tape recorder and the other items in his duffel wearied him into waiting for a Strassenbahn.
He got off the tram at Esterhazy Park, near which, he remembered, there was a large secondhand shop; here he bought a secondhand typewriter with odd German symbols and umlaut keys. For his purchase, the shopkeeper agreed to give him a generous exchange of schillings for his German marks and US dollars.
Trumper also bought an ankle-length overcoat; the epaulettes had been torn off the shoulders and there was a neat, small bullet hole in the back, but otherwise it was in stunning shape. He proceeded to outfit himself as a sort of postwar spy, in a baggy, broad-shouldered suit, several yellow-white shirts and a six-foot purple scarf. The scarf could be arranged in various ways and made a tie unnecessary. Then he bought a suitcase with more straps and buckles and thongs than it had room. But it fitted with the rest of his attire. He looked like a traveling spy who had been a passenger on the Orient Express between Istanbul and Vienna since 1950. Finally, he purchased a hat like the one Orson Welles wore in The Third Man. He even mentioned the film to the shopkeeper, who said he must have missed that one.
Bogus sold the duffel for about two dollars, then lugged his recorder, extra shirts and the new typewriter in the spy's suitcase through Esterhazy Park, where he ducked into a large bush to pee. His rustling in the hedges alarmed a passing couple. Her look was anxious: A girl is b
eing raped, or worse! His reaction was a sneer: A couple with no better place to do it. Trumper emerged from the hedge alone and with great dignity, lugging the suitcase in which a severed body could be stuffed. Or was he a parachutist who had just made a quick change out of uniform, his dismantled bomb safely hidden in the suitcase, now making his casual way to the Austrian Parliament?
The couple hurried away from his ominous costume, but Bogus Trumper felt just right. He felt the way he ought to look for an Overturf hunt through Vienna.
He took another Strassenbahn to the Inner City, riding around to the Opera Ring and leaving the tram at Karntner Strasse, the city's biggest nighttime alley, smack downtown. If I were Merrill Overturf, if I were still in Vienna, where would I be on a Saturday night in December?
Trumper stalks quickly through the little streets off the Neuer Markt, looking for the Hawelka, the old Bolshevik Kaffeehaus still popular with assorted intellectuals, students and opera cashiers. The coffeehouse gives him the same cold shoulder he remembers - the same lean hairy men, the same big-boned sensual girls.
Nodding to an apparent prophet at the table by the door, Bogus thinks, Years ago there was one like you, dressed all in black, but his beard was red. And Overturf knew him, I think ...
Trumper asks the fellow, 'Merrill Overturf?'
The man's beard seems to freeze; his eyes dart as if his mind is remembering all the codes it ever learned.
'Do you know Merrill Overturf?' Bogus asks the girl who's sitting nearest the frozen beard. But she shrugs, as if to say that if she did, it hardly matters now.
Another girl, a table away, says, 'Ja, he's in films, I think.'
Merrill in films?
'Films?' says Bogus. 'Here, you mean? In films here?'
'Do you see a camera running?' asks the fellow with the beard, and a waiter passing between them cringes at the word Kamera.
'No, here - in Vienna, I mean,' Trumper says.
'I don't know,' says the girl. 'Just films is all I heard.'
'He used to drive an old Zorn-Witwer,' Trumper says to no-one in particular, searching for identifying marks.