“The sewing circle?”
“Yes, dear. That was the euphemism for the lesbian stars in our industry. Dietrich, Garbo, Bankhead, Stanwyck—to name a few.”
Okay, but what if I’m not flipping out? What if these spooks are real? It could be a win-win for me, couldn’t it? A scholarly examination of Weber’s contributions to filmmaking could burnish my reputation, but a Hollywood Babylon–type tell-all could do wonders for my bank account. Ah, the lure of the low road.
“Of course, the scandals to which I refer would be off-topic in a book about moi. It can all be sorted out at a later date, of course. But look, Felix. I’ve brought you something that I imagine will be of great interest to you.”
I follow her translucent pointing finger to the film canisters stacked up against the wall of the mezzanine lobby—a couple dozen of them, it looks like. Had they been here before? I walk toward them. Each one is labeled “Funicello, F.” and they’re dated: 1954, 1959, 1965, and so on. I shrug. Tell her I don’t understand.
“Welcome to your life, Felix Funicello! Films such as these are usually only available to those of us who have crossed over, but I’ve pulled some strings, called in some favors from the higher-ups, and an exception has been made.”
“An exception? What kind of—”
“Your past has been preserved on film and is ready for viewing. Open a canister, take out a reel, thread the projector, and voilà. And these films come with a special feature that, for all the technological tricks available to today’s moviemakers, supersedes anything they can make happen in the living world.” Miss Dove puts a hand on her narrow hip and nods in affirmation.
“Special feature?”
“Yes, dear. Whenever you like, you will have the ability to reenter your past, not just view it on the screen. To access this feature, just walk up onto the stage while the film is playing, then face the screen and touch it gently with your fingertips.”
“What would happen if I did that? Which I’m not saying I would do.”
“You would be pulled back into whatever episode of your life is playing. Depending on what’s being projected, you could be seven again, or seventeen, or thirty. And, of course, you can come back to the present whenever you wish. Just turn your back to what’s on the screen, extend your arms with your palms out, and you will be delivered back to the present, safe and sound. It’s all very fluid and flexible, dear. Very ‘user-friendly,’ as you moderns like to call things. And now, my dear, if you’ll excuse us, we must make our exit. Billie is taking tea with her old friend Mr. Valentino, and I have a bridge game with Elizabeth, Monty, and Mr. Selznick.”
“Mr. . . . You know David O. Selznick?”
“Indeed I do, but it’s his father, Lewis, who is our fourth in bridge. He was in the motion picture business, too, you know.”
Billie’s ghost blows me a kiss and starts to fade away like fog. Then Lois’s ghost waves and begins to disappear as well.
“But . . . Wait!”
Lois’s disintegration arrests itself. “What is it, Felix?”
“My daughter? Aliza?”
“Yes, what about her?”
“Is she okay?”
“I should imagine so. Why?”
“Because I’m . . . I mean, if I’m . . . Where is she?”
“I suspect she’s at work, writing the article she’s been assigned. Isn’t that what you suggested she do? Work diligently in silence and let her writing make the noise?”
“Yes but . . . Are you sure I’m not dead? Because she’d be . . . And, well, you know. I’ve always imagined that when and if she gets married, I’d walk her down—”
“Relax, Felix. You’re alive and well and your daughter has no reason to grieve your loss. Now if I were you, I’d stop worrying and start viewing your films. No one knows better than we of the shaded realm that one’s time as a living is not to be squandered. I may stop back from time to time to offer a little direction if necessary, but other than that, you’re on your own. And so, I bid you adieu.”
“Stop! I have one more question.”
“Yes?”
“Why have I been chosen to . . . These films you want me to see. Didn’t you say it’s only the dead who . . . Why has an exception been made for me? Is it because you want me to write that book about you?”
“Well, that would certainly be self-serving of me, wouldn’t it? It would be lovely if you took on such a project, but no. This opportunity is not an attempt to bribe you, dear boy. You’ve been selected because you’ve been deemed educable.”
“You mean educated? Because I have a doctorate?”
She throws back her head and laughs. “Good heavens no. Your academic pedigree is beside the point. You’ve been chosen because you grew up with sisters, Felix, and because you are the father of a young woman who has entered the fray of modern life. We feel you have great potential.”
“Who’s we? Potential for what?”
Instead of answering me, she says she hopes that I have an illuminating and fruitful experience. And with that, she fades away to nothing.
THREE
I stare at the spot where, a minute before, both ghosts had been. Or hadn’t been, more likely. Communing with the spirit world, Funicello? Really? . . . But if they were nothing more than pipe dreams, then how the hell did . . . ? And hey, Steve and Maura saw ghosts, too. We can’t all be nuts. That coffee I drank: it had to have been laced with something. Because whatever I thought I saw—whoever I thought I was talking to . . . You know what? I need to get the hell out of this theater. Go home and sleep off whatever this is. Am I okay to drive? I feel okay. A little agitated maybe, but under the circumstances, why wouldn’t I be? Maybe I should get some blood drawn first. Have it analyzed and sue the pants off Dunkin’ Donuts if—
Ow! Goddamned son of a bitch!
I look at what my knee’s just slammed against: those stacks of film canisters. I rap my knuckles against the metal. The ghosts may have been vaporous, but these things feel and sound solid. So maybe the films she was talking about . . . Okay, I guess there’s only one way to find out. “Funicello, F. 1959,” this one says. I open the canister and count the reels inside. Four of them. I grab the one marked “July–Aug–Sept” and lug it up the stairs to the balcony. Unlocking the door at the back, I climb up the narrow steel steps to the projection room. Take out reels one and two, unspool a foot or so from each, and hold the celluloid to the light to make sure there’s something there. There is, and as luck would have it, neither reel is “tails out.” Whoever ran these reels through a machine before believed in “Be kind. Rewind.”
I load the first reel onto projector number one and the second onto projector number two. Hit the On switch and kill the lights. On the big screen downstairs, the grainy countdown begins: 10, 9, 8, 7 . . . I do the math.
In the summer of 1959, I had just turned six years old. The countdown finishes, the title comes up: The Life of Felix Funicello: July–August 1959. And then . . .
Wow! It’s the downtown New London of my childhood. The three-decker parking garage they put up across from the train station in the mid-seventies doesn’t exist yet. Instead, the bus depot is back, undemolished. Inside was where my father made our family’s living. I look around to see if Lois and Billie are back. Nope. It’s just me and this inexplicable film of the past. My past. It’s strange, surreal . . . but so astonishingly cool.
Lots of coming and going the day this was filmed. A train’s arriving from New York, a Greyhound bus is pulling away from the depot on its way to Boston. Good god, look at the size of the cars everyone drove back then. That eight-cylinder lavender showboat with the gold fins is a Plymouth Fury. And there goes Chevy’s answer to the Volkswagen Beetle: the “sporty” rear-engine Corvair that, five or six years from now, Ralph Nader’s going to warn is “unsafe at any speed.” My mother’s not going to want to hear that. She loved that Corvair Pop bought her.
Oh man! Check out that red convertible with the vertical front grille
in the showroom window at Fontanella Ford. The infamous Edsel. That banner proclaims it’s Ford’s “car of tomorrow, today!” Ha! It’s about to become one of the biggest flops in the industry. Gas guzzlers, all these models. But at that Esso station up the hill, they’re pumping gas for twenty-five cents a gallon and that’s with an oil check, plus a windshield washing courtesy of a paid employee in a uniform, not some homeless guy with a squeegee and a crack addiction. But to be fair, none of these drivers has heard of hydrofluorocarbons or greenhouse gases yet. So put the pedal to the metal, daddy-o. America is invincible and ignorance is bliss.
Okay, the camera’s going inside the depot. I hope Pop’s around. And maybe Uncle Iggy. He hung around the lunch counter quite a bit after he and Pop buried the hatchet. I might even see Ma. She used to make my sisters babysit for me so she could go down there and do the books, pay the bills. I’m excited to see my folks as they once were, but a little hesitant, too. I know how things are going to end and it’s not pretty. I was with both of them when they passed—Pop in 2001, Ma four years later. Neither had it easy during their long last years of dementia (Ma) and physical diminishment (Pop). Parenting my parents against their will was rough. That time I insisted Pop hand over his driver’s license and he burst into tears? Man, I felt like a total heel.
Thwocka-thwocka-thwocka-thwocka . . . Now there’s a sound you don’t hear much anymore: the rickety rotation of those old ceiling fans. Air-conditioning was already around, I remember, but it wasn’t ubiquitous yet. You could enjoy “refrigerated air” at the movies or in your home if you could afford the 300-pound monster and stand the noise. But in the car, you still rolled down the windows on a hot day. And in public buildings like the depot, your best bet was to stand under one of these ceiling fans and catch a breeze as the blades above you sliced the warm air.
There’s Blanche in the ticket booth. Her walking was pretty compromised even with those braces she wore—not that you’d notice once she was stationed at her window. I was told that Blanche contracted polio when she was a kid. I remember her struggling down those bus steps when she came to work. Makes me think about the time my sisters and I stood in line at that United Workers clinic to get our polio shots and I kept whining about how it was going to hurt. Ma finally got fed up and said, “You’d better thank your lucky stars that you can get a shot, Felix. How would you like to have to walk like poor Blanche? Or be forced to breathe with an iron lung?” Not realizing she was talking about a ventilator, I pictured them cracking open my rib cage and installing some heavy machine I’d have to lug around in my chest for the rest of my life. So Ma’s mission was accomplished: I shut up. And although I may have had a quivering lip and tears in my eyes when we got to the front of the line and they stuck me with that needle, you couldn’t really call it crying.
But I’m tearing up a little now, to tell you the truth, because here’s the lunch counter just as I remember it. There’s Albie Molinaro at the grill, but where’s Pop? He was usually out here in front, too. Oh, hold on. The wall clock says it’s 2:46, so he could have been over at Whaling City Savings making a deposit. Banker’s hours back then; no ATMs. If you showed up at 3:01, you’d be shit out of luck.
Albie started working here after he quit high school a month shy of graduation to join the army. When they rejected him because of his flat feet, Pop hired him as a favor to Albie’s uncle, Frido Molinaro, who he played cribbage with down at the Italian Club. “Useless”: that was my father’s nickname for Albie. Pop used to fire him periodically, then feel guilty and hire him back. Funny thing is, Albie and his younger brother, Chino, eventually bought the business after Pop let go of the fantasy that I was going to take it over from him. The Molinaro brothers pretty much ran things into the ground, which didn’t really matter because the city seized the depot by eminent domain, demolished it, and put up that parking garage. As for what’s happening on the screen, though, Albie’s frying burgers for those two sailors parked on the stools. They must have been stationed at the sub base across the river in Groton. According to the prices posted on the wall, those “anchor clankers” had to cough up seventy-five cents each for their burgers, eighty-five if they ordered cheeseburgers, or a buck and a quarter if they got the deluxe platter that came with french fries, a beverage, and a scoop of ice cream or a piece of pie for dessert.
Albie’s flipped the burgers and he’s cutting a few slices off that block of Velveeta, so I guess those sailors sprang for the cheeseburgers. Oh god, look at that! The camera’s just gone to a wide shot and there, at the other end of the counter, is one of the lunch counter regulars, Cindy Kowalski. She was a salesgirl at the S&H Green Stamp redemption store. Or was it the Plaid Stamp store? The First National gave out Green Stamps with your grocery purchases and the A&P had Plaid Stamps. Ma traded at both places, depending on which store had better specials that week, so she collected both. Cindy had a crush on Albie, I remember. Look at the way her eyes follow his every move. But he’s obviously not interested, probably because Cindy’s what my mother used to describe as “pleasingly plump.”
Funny thing is, although Albie pretty much ignores Cindy now, in another five years, he’s probably going to be one of the guys who’ll be paying a cover charge to see her dance at the Hootenanny Hoot over on Route 1. Cindy became something of a local celebrity around here. Sad story, really. She packed on another hundred pounds and reinvented herself as Cindi Creamcheese, dancing the jerk and the Watusi on the bar in a shimmy dress, taking tips and catcalls without ever fully realizing that the clientele was making fun of her. Her overworked heart gave out in the middle of a performance and she tumbled off the bar, crash-landed, and was dead by the time the ambulance got there. Such is the not-so-humorous underbelly of irony, I guess. But on the summer afternoon when this film was shot, she’s on lunch break from the stamp redemption store, enjoying a grilled hot dog, a vanilla milkshake, and some sneak peeks at Albie’s ass as he slides those cheeseburgers onto a couple of toasted, buttered buns.
No Pop yet. Maybe he went to place a bet with his bookie, Tootsie Utley. Ma was never too thrilled that Pop played the ponies, but he worked from 5 a.m. until eight at night, with or without catching a midday catnap in the back when Albie was on. Gambling and smoking were my father’s only vices, so Ma didn’t say too much. She would have squawked a lot more if he’d had a drinking problem—or if she knew how much those two packs of cancer sticks a day were screwing with his health. But Pop was true blue, far as I know, and limited himself to a couple of Rheingolds on the weekend and a little anisette in his coffee on holidays. Back when they filmed this thing, the tobacco companies were still squelching the information that cigarettes could kill you; the surgeon general’s report wouldn’t be published for another five or six years. On the gambling front, it would be another three decades before the Wequonnoc, Mohegan, and Pequot tribes opened their casinos, making this area a destination area for gamblers of all stripes. Once those places were up and running, everyone with get-rich-quick dreams was down there, pulling on the one-armed bandits, shooting craps, playing roulette—plus buying stacks of tickets from the state lottery. The Tootsie Utleys of the era I’m looking at were put out of business when the State of Connecticut became the bookie.
The term “gambling addiction” wasn’t even in the lexicon around here back in 1959, but it’s woven into the fabric of our area now. Not long after the casinos opened, a lot of the elderly began gambling away their retirement funds. Accountants and comptrollers started embezzling from the companies and towns that employed them, always with the intention of paying it all back once they hit it big. Then there was the story about some poor desperado who, unable to stay away from the roulette tables, lost his savings, his family, and his house. He checked out by checking into the casino’s high-rise hotel with a suitcase filled with bricks. He hurled said suitcase through the window of his room on the twenty-sixth floor, then followed it down. It made the national news.
Speaking of which, the camera’s pa
nning the news rack. Wow, look at how many different papers there were back then. Hard to believe that in another fifty years, most of these venerable rags will have gone digital or gone bust. The mastheads on all those front pages say it’s August 14, 1959. Check out the headlines: IKE PROCLAIMS HAWAII 50TH STATE . . . ARKANSAS GOVERNOR SUBMITS; FIVE BLACK STUDENTS INTEGRATE LITTLE ROCK SCHOOL . . . POLL SAYS 94% OF WHITE AMERICANS OPPOSE INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE. Good god. But that was the way it was back then, in the North as well as the South. I remember Uncle Iggy’s theory that the NAACP and Martin Luther King were just out to cause trouble, and that the Communists were behind it.
Sports Illustrated has the White Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio on the cover; he was as good a base-stealer back then as Ellsbury and Rajai Davis are today. If I have my dates straight, Chicago went on to win the pennant that year. . . . Looks like Nixon’s made the cover of Time. This must have been right around the time of that “Kitchen Debate” he had with Khrushchev. The cover headline says he’s the front-runner to be the Republican nominee next year. Well, we know how that one’s going to turn out. He’ll lose the election to Kennedy from Massachusetts. A couple of election cycles later, he’ll win against Hubert Humphrey in a squeaker, then get reelected in a landslide against George McGovern. Strange how neither Kennedy nor Nixon ended out their respective terms in office—one in his first because he was assassinated, the other in his second because he resigned in disgrace.
There’s Pop! He’s just come out from the back. I’m . . . oh god, he looks so young. He was born in 1917, so he was in his early forties when this was filmed. It’s tricky, watching this. Look at him, going about his business, innocent of what’s coming. He starts mixing up a batch of his signature ham and pickle salad. Stops to light up one of the Kools that will eventually kill him. Atherosclerosis: heart, not cancer. Must be a Friday because the dinner special he’s just posted is fish and chips. (Catholics hadn’t yet been given the good news that eating a burger on Friday wouldn’t send them to hell after all.) My mother must have been in the back, because Pop’s just called to her, “Hey, Marie? You want something to drink?” She does, she says: a Coke. It’s strange to hear her voice again. Pop puts down the tub of ham salad, puts his Kool in the ashtray, and grabs a glass. Slides it under the syrup dispenser and hits the button. At the lunch counter, sodas are still made the old-fashioned way: syrup on the bottom, then add seltzer and stir. One time, my sister Frances got in big trouble when Pop caught her sticking her face under the spigot, hitting the button, and filling her mouth with Coke syrup. Ma said it served her right when, the next time Frances went to the dentist, she had to get four new fillings.