Because a small man in a black trench coat, a snap-brim hat yanked over his brow, had just tucked his shoes in Rattigan’s footprints.
“Jesus God,” I gasped. “They fit!”
The small man gazed at his tiny shoes. For the first time in forty years, Rattigan’s tracks were occupied.
“Constance,” I whispered.
The small man’s shoulders shrank.
“Right behind you,” I whispered.
“Are you one of them?” I heard a voice say from under the large dark hat.
“One of what?” I said.
“Are you Death chasing me?”
“Just a friend trying to keep up.”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” the voice said, not moving, the feet planted firmly in the footprints of Constance Rattigan.
“What’s it mean?” I said. “Why this wild goose chase? Are you scared or playing tricks?”
“Why would you say that?” the voice said, hidden.
“Good grief,” I said. “Is this all some cheap dodge? Someone said you might want to write your life and needed someone to help. If you expect that to be me, no thanks. I’ve got better things to do.”
“What’s better than me?” said the voice, growing smaller.
“No one, but is Death really after you or are you looking for a new life, God knows what kind?”
“What better than Uncle Sid’s concrete mortuary? All the names with nothing beneath. Ask away.”
“Are you going to turn and face me?”
“I couldn’t talk then.”
“Is this some way of getting me to help you uncover your past? Is the casket half-full or half-empty? Did someone else make those red marks in your Book of the Dead, or did you make them?”
“It had to be someone else. Or else why would I be so frightened? Those red ink marks? I’ve got to look them up, find which ones are dead already, and which are just about to die but still alive. Do you ever have the feeling everything’s falling apart?”
“Not you, Constance.”
“Christ, yes! Some nights I sleep Clara Bow, wake up Noah, wet with vodka. Is my face ruined?”
“A lovely ruin.”
“But still—”
Rattigan stared out at Hollywood Boulevard. “Once there were real tourists. Now it’s torn shirts. Everything’s lost, junior. Venice pier drowned, trolley tracks sunk. Hollywood and Vine, was it ever there?”
“Once. When the Brown Derby hung their walls with cartoons of Gable and Dietrich, and the headwaiters were Russian princes. Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck drove by in their roadster. Hollywood and Vine? You planted your feet there and knew pure joy.”
“You talk nice. Want to know where Mama’s been?”
She moved her arm. She took some newspaper clippings from beneath her coat. I saw the names Califia and Mount Lowe.
“I was there, Constance,” I said. “The old man was crushed by a collapsed haystack of news. God, it looked like he died on the San Andreas fault. Someone pushed the stacks, I think. An indecent burial. And Queen Califia? A fall downstairs. And your brother, the priest. Did you visit all three, Constance?”
“I don’t have to answer.”
“Let me try a different question. Do you like yourself ?”
“What!?”
“Look. I like myself. I’m not perfect, hell no, but I never bedded anyone if I felt they were breakable. Lots of men say hit the hay, live! Not me. Even when it’s offered on a plate. So with no sins, I don’t often have bad dreams. Oh, sure, there was the time I ran away from my grandma when I was a kid, ran away and left her blocks behind, so she came home weeping. I still can’t forgive myself. Or hitting my dog, just once, I hit him. And that still hurts, thirty years later. Not much of a list, right, to make bad dreams?”
Constance stood very still.
“God, God,” she said, “how I wish I had your dreams.”
“Ask and I’ll give you the loan.”
“You poor dumb innocent stupid kid. That’s why I love you. Somewhere, at heaven’s gate, can I trade in my old chimney soot nightmares for fresh clean angel wings?”
“Ask your brother.”
“He threw me downstairs to hell long ago.”
“You haven’t answered my question. Do you like yourself ?”
“What I see in the mirror, sure. It’s what’s inside the glass, deep under, scares me. I wake late nights with all that stuff swimming behind my face. Christ, that’s sad. Can you help me?”
“How? I don’t know which is which, you or your mirror. What’s up front, what’s beneath.”
Constance shifted her feet.
“Can’t you stand still?” I said. “If I say ‘red light,’ stop. Your feet are stuck in that cement. What then?”
I saw her shoes ache to pull free.
“People are staring at us!”
“The theater’s closed. Most of the lights are out. The forecourt is empty.”
“You don’t understand. I’ve got to go. Straight on.”
I looked up at the front doors of Grauman’s, still open, with some workmen carrying equipment inside.
“It’s the next step, but God, how do I get there?”
“Just walk.”
“You don’t understand. It’s hopscotch. There must be other footprint paths to the door, if I can find them. Which way do I jump?”
Her head moved. The dark hat fell to the pavement. Constance’s close-cropped bronze hair came into view. She still stared ahead, as if afraid to show me her face.
“If I say go, what then?” I asked.
“I’ll go.”
“And meet me again, where?”
“God knows. Quick! Say ‘go.’ They’re catching up.”
“Who?”
“All those others. They’ll kill me if I don’t kill first. You wouldn’t want me to die right here? Well, would you?”
I shook my head.
“Ready, set, go?” she asked.
“Ready, set.”
And she was gone.
She zigzagged across the forecourt, a dozen fast steps to the right, another dozen to the left, pause, and a final two dozen steps to a third set of prints, where she froze, as if it were a land mine.
A car horn hooted. I turned. When I glanced back, the Grauman’s front door swallowed a shadow.
I counted to ten to give her a real start, then I bent down to pick up the tiny shoes she had left behind in her footprints. Then I walked over to the first set of prints where she had paused. Sally Simpson, 1926. The name was just an echo from a lost time.
I moved on to the second set of prints. Gertrude Erhard, 1924. An even fainter ghost of time. And the final footprints nearer the front door. Dolly Dawn, 1923. Peter Pan. Dolly Dawn? A fleeting mist of years touched me. I almost remembered.
“Hell,” I whispered. “No way.”
And got ready to let Uncle Sid’s fake Chinese palace swallow me with one huge dark dragon swallow.
Chapter Twenty-One
I stopped just outside the crimson doors, for as clearly as if he were calling, I heard Father Rattigan shout, “Lamentable!”
Which made me pull out Rattigan’s Book of the Dead.
I had only looked for names, now I looked for a place. There it was under the Gs: Grauman’s. Followed by an address and a name: Clyde Rustler.
Rustler, I thought, my God, he retired from acting in 1920 after working with Griffith and Gish and getting involved with Dolly Dimples’s bathtub death. And here was his name—alive?—on a boulevard where they buried you without warning and erased you from history the way dear Uncle Joe Stalin rubbed out his pals, with a shotgun eraser.
And, my heart thumped, there was red ink around his name and a double crucifix.
Rattigan—I looked at the dark beyond the red door—Rattigan, yes, but Clyde Rustler, are you here, too? I reached and grasped one brass handle and a voice behind me announced bleakly: “There’s nothing inside to steal!”
A gaunt homeless guy stood to
my right, dressed in various shades of gray, speaking to the universe. He felt my gaze.
“Go ahead.” I read his lips. “You got nothing to lose.”
Plenty to win, I thought, but how do you excavate a big Chinese tomb filled with black-and-white flicker film clips, an aviary of birds shuttling the air, fireworks ricocheting a big ravenous screen, as swift as memory, as quick as remorse?
The homeless man waited for me to self-destruct with remembrance. I nodded. I smiled.
And as quickly as Rattigan, I sank into the theater’s darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Inside the lobby there was a frozen army of Chinese coolies, concubines, and emperors, dressed in ancient wax, parading nowhere.
One of the wax figurines blinked. “Yes?”
God, I thought, a crazy outside, a crazy in, and Clyde Rustler moldering toward ninety or ninety-five.
Time shifted. If I ducked back out, I would find a dozen drive-ins where teenage waitresses roller-skated hamburgers.
“Yes?” the Chinese wax mannequin said again.
I moved swiftly through the first entry door and down the aisle under the balcony, where I stared up.
It was a big dark aquarium, undersea. It was possible to imagine a thousand film ghosts, scared by gunshot whispers, soaring to flake the ceiling and vanish in the vents. Melville’s whale sailed there, unseen, Old Ironsides, the Titanic. The Bounty, sailing forever, never reaching port. I focused my gaze on up through the multiple balconies toward what had once been called nigger heaven.
My God, I thought, I’m three years old.
That was the year when Chinese fairy tales haunted my bed, whispered by a favorite aunt, when I thought death was just a forever bird, a silent dog in the yard. My grandfather was yet to lie in a box at a funeral parlor, while Tut arose from his tomb. What, I asked, was Tut famous for? For being dead four thousand years. Boy, I said, how’d he do that?
And here I was in a vast tomb under the pyramid, where I had always wished to be. If you lifted the aisle carpets, you’d find the lost pharaohs buried with fresh loaves of bread and bright sprigs of onions; food for far-traveling up-river to Eternity.
They must never ruin this, I thought. I must be buried here.
“It’s not Green Glade Cemetery,” said the old wax Chinaman nearby, reading my mind.
I had spoken aloud.
“When was this theater built?” I murmured.
The old waxwork let loose a forty-day flood: “1921, one of the first. There was nothing here, some palm trees, farmhouses, cottages, a dirt main street, little bungalows built to lure Doug Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford. Radio was just a crystal matchbox with earphones. Nobody could hear the future on that. We opened big. People walked or drove from Melrose north. Saturday nights there were veritable desert caravans of movie fanatics. The graveyard hadn’t yet begun at Gower and Santa Monica. It filled up with Valentino’s ruptured appendix in ’26. At Grauman’s opening night, Louis B. Mayer arrived from the Selig Zoo in Lincoln Park. That’s where MGM got their lion. Mean, but no teeth. Thirty dancing girls. Will Rogers spun rope. Trixie Friganza sang her famous ‘I Don’t Care’ and wound up an extra in a Swanson film, 1934. Go down, stick your nose in the old basement dressing rooms, you’ll find leftover underwear from those flappers who died for love of Lowell Sherman. Dapper guy with mustache, cancer got him, ’34. You listening?”
“Clyde Rustler,” I blurted.
“Holy Jesus! Nobody knows him! See way up, that old projection room? They buried him there alive in ’29 when they built the new projection room on the second balcony.”
I stared up into phantoms of mist, rain and Shangri-la snow seeking the High Lama.
My shadow friend said: “No elevator. Two hundred steps!”
A long climb, with no Sherpas, up to a middle lobby and a mezzanine and then another balcony and another after that amid three thousand seats. How do you please three thousand customers? I wondered. How? If eight-year-old boys didn’t pee three times during your film, you had it made!
I climbed.
I stopped halfway to sit, panting, suddenly ancient instead of halfway new.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I reached the back wall of Mount Everest and tapped on the old projection-room door.
“Is that who I think it is?” a terrified voice cried.
“No,” I said quietly, “just me. Back for one last matinée after forty years.”
That was a stroke of genius; upchucking my past.
The terrified voice simmered down.
“What’s the password?”
It came right off my tongue, a boy’s voice.
“Tom Mix and his horse, Tony. Hoot Gibson. Ken Maynard. Bob Steele. Helen Twelvetrees. Vilma Banky …”
“That’ll do.”
It was a long while before I heard a giant spider brush the door panel. The door whined. A silver shadow leaned out, a living metaphor of the black-and-white phantoms I had seen flickering across the screen a lifetime ago.
“No one ever comes up here,” said this old, old man.
“No one?”
“No one ever knocks on my door,” said the man with silver hair and silver face and silver clothes, bleached out by seventy years of living under a rock in a high place and gazing down at unreality ten thousand times. “No one knows I’m here. Not even me.”
“You’re here. You’re Clyde Rustler.”
“Am I?” For a moment I thought he might body-search his suspenders and sleeve garters.
“Who are you?” He poked his face like a turtle’s from its shell.
I said my name.
“Never heard of you.” He glanced down at the empty screen. “You one of them?”
“The dead stars?”
“They sometimes climb up. Fairbanks came last night.”
“Zorro, D’Artagnan, Robin Hood? He knocked at your door?”
“Scratched. Being dead has its problems. You coming in or out?”
I stepped in quickly before he could change his mind.
The film projectors stood facing emptiness in a room that looked like a Chung King burial chamber. It smelled of dust and sand and acrid celluloid. There was only one chair between the projectors. As he’d said, no one ever came to visit.
I stared at the crowded walls. There must’ve been three dozen pictures nailed there, some in cheap Woolworth frames, others in silver, still others mere scraps torn from old Silver Screen magazines, photographs of thirty women, no two alike.
The old, old man let a smile haunt his face.
“My sweetheart dears, from when I was an active volcano.”
The most ancient of ancient men looked out at me from behind a maze of wrinkles, the kind you get when you search the icebox at six A.M. and take out last night’s premixed martinis.
“I keep the door locked. I thought you were just here, yelling outside.”
“Not me.”
“Someone was. Outside of that, nobody’s been up here since Lowell Sherman died.”
“That’s two obituaries in ten minutes. Winter 1934. Cancer and pneumonia.”
“Nobody knows that!”
“I roller-skated by the Coliseum one Saturday 1934 before a football game. Lowell Sherman came in whooping and barking. I got his autograph and said, ‘Take care.’ He died two days later.”
“Lowell Sherman.” The old, old man regarded me with a new luster in his eyes. “As long as you’re alive, he is, too.”
Clyde Rustler collapsed in the one chair and sized me up again. “Lowell Sherman. Why in hell did you make the long climb up here? People have died climbing. Uncle Sid climbed up once or twice, said to hell with it, built the bigger projection booth a thousand yards downslope in the real world, if there is a real one. Never went down to see. So?”
For he saw that I was casting my gaze around his primeval nest at those walls teeming with dozens of faces, forever young.
“Would you like a rundown on these mountai
n-lion street cats?” He leaned and pointed.
“Her name was Carlotta or Midge or Diana. She was a Spanish flirt, a Cal Coolidge ‘It girl’ with a skirt up to her navel, a Roman queen fresh out of DeMille’s milk bath. Then she was a vamp named Illysha, a typist called Pearl, an English tennis player—Pamela. Sylvia? Ran a nudist flytrap in Cheyenne. Some called her ‘Hard Hearted Hannah the Vamp of Savannah.’ Dressed like Dolley Madison, sang ‘Tea for Two,’ ‘Chicago,’ popped out of a big clamshell like the pearl of paradise, Flo Ziegfeld’s craze. Fired by her father at thirteen for conduct unbecoming a human who ripened fast: Willa-Kate. Worked in a chophouse chink joint: Lila Wong. Got more votes than the president, Coney Island Beauty Pageant, ’29: not-so-plain Willa. Got off the night train in Glendale: Barbara Jo, next day, almost, head of Glory Films: Anastasia Alice Grimes—”
He stopped. I looked up. “Which brings us to Rattigan,” I said.
Clyde Rustler froze in place.
“You said no one’s been up here for years. But—she came up here today, right? Maybe to look at these pictures? Did she or didn’t she?”
The old, old man stared at his dusty hands, then slowly rose to face a brass whistle tube in the wall, one of those submarine devices that you blew so it shrieked and you yelled orders.
“Leo? Wine! A two-dollar tip!”
A tiny voice squealed from the brass nozzle, “You don’t drink!”
“I do now, Leo. And hot dogs!”
The brass nozzle squealed and died.
The old, old man grunted and stared at the wall. A long, terribly long five minutes passed. While we waited I opened my notepad and took down the names scrawled on the pictures. Then we heard the hot dogs and wine rattling up the dumbwaiter. Clyde Rustler stared as if he had forgotten that tiny elevator. He took forever opening the wine with a corkscrew, sent by Leo, from down below. There was only one glass.
“One,” he apologized. “You first. I’m not afraid of catching anything.”
“I got nothing for you to catch.” I drank and handed the glass over. He drank and I could see the relaxation move his body.
“And now?” he said. “Let me show you some clips I glued together. Why? Last week a stranger called from down below. That voice on the phone. Was once Harry Cohn’s live-in nurse, never said yes, but yes, yes, Harry, yes! Said she was looking for Robin Locksley. Robin Hood. Searching for Robin of Locksley. An actress took that name, a flash in the pan. She disappeared in Hearst’s castle or his backside kitchen. But now this voice, years later, asks for Locksley. Spooked me. I ran through my cans and found the one film she made in 1929, when sound really took over. Watch.”