by Jack Livings
And so it was. Three hundred pounds of Bronx-born fury lunged at John, who slid back off his stool, pipe and tobacco in hand, as if to avoid a spreading spill on the counter, one that in this case was swiping at him with a hairy arm while making sounds that, although unrecognizable as postlapsarian language, were nonetheless wholly comprehensible to everyone in the diner. Blood would be spilled. John recognized it, too, and while his assassin was still beached atop the counter, roaring, perhaps overdoing it, for what is rage but a release, and who doesn’t enjoy it just a little, John, gripping the pipe with his left hand, closed his right into a fist and crouched down, just out of reach. From there he slowly, with excruciating truculence, erected his middle finger, held it there like an exclamation point, still as the sun in the desert sky. The counterman made an epic swipe, a game-winning pitch that John evaded by scrambling backward over the salted floor, his left hand, holding the pipe, coming down hard behind him, and a sharp sting of pain shot up his arm as his knuckles smashed into the serrated surface of the salted floor, a stunning flash of agony. He instinctively retracted his hand and went tumbling sideways.
The counterman was having his own difficulties with gravity. The violence of his grab for John had unseated his considerable mass from the counter, and he was in a nosedive, but with his arm crossed over his chest, which meant he couldn’t break his fall, and his forehead hit the floor with a crack. His eyes blew open and he went silent. John, still scrambling, crashed into a table, its pedestal rivets groaning, managed to get a hand on his coat, then sprung to his feet and made for the door, shoulder down in case there were any heroes between him and escape.
Inverted, motionless, the counterman was wedged between two stools, breathing onto the filthy linoleum, his toes resting on the counter. A dim light glowed deep within the cave of his brain, a fire tended by two of his hairy ancestors whose shadows were thrown in monstrous relief onto the ceiling as the quartzite in the walls flickered. They were plotting against a third hairy ancestor, the one who stood outside the cave counting his chattel. Murder. The counterman needed to murder someone good, but who? Then, out candle, out, a blank.
For that moment after his brain got smacked silly against the forewall of his skull, there was quiet. He was not transported to happier days. No first kiss or Wonderwheel rides, no recollection of the hot tarmac at San Francisco International, where he smelled the salty bay and got down on his knees and kissed the concrete slab, unfreezing blood that had been frozen tight in his veins for the year he was stationed in Truong Lam. When he hit the floor, he remembered nothing; he became a rolling blankness, a deep, briny Arctic channel.
In the seconds following a sudden act of public violence, paralysis often strikes bystanders, and it was only to pay bravado its due that John had dropped his shoulder as he ran for the door. The waiters, in no hurry to put themselves in the path of trouble, couldn’t have backed up any faster if he’d been waving around a pistol. The owner, whose mushroomed girth prohibited him from a livelier reaction, swung his fleshy arm in John’s direction, clearing the checkout counter of the mint dish and check spike, a crack, tinkle, and clatter to accompany the shrieking of the door’s aluminum frame against the salty jamb as John charged onto the sidewalk in a spy’s karate crouch.
It was dark, the street clogged with cabs, exhaust, steam pumping out of manhole covers, pedestrians exhaling plumes of white. John zagged through the crowd to the curb and, keeping watch on the door, buttoned up his coat, clapped his hat on his head, and carefully wrapped up his neck. If he was meant to be killed by the savage counterman, he would perish with a warm neck. A cold body led to constricted cords, caused tension everywhere that threw off the tone and turned a vibrato into a warble. Even worse, obviously, was illness—a cold, an oozing sinus, congestion, god help him, bronchitis. Breath control vanished. The limbs became leaden, the diaphragm weak, the bellows clogged, the sound cut off at the tap. Singer muted.
A thought whipped past as if on a stock ticker: Go back and fight. Be a man. Fight. He stepped toward the diner and saw the waiters tending to the counterman, whom they’d comforted into a booth. It was not big enough to contain his sprawling mass, his lolling head. The counterman was facing away from the window, and John moved yet closer to the glass and watched as Nikos applied a bag of ice while another waiter planted pats of reassurance on the man’s back, broad as a Volkswagen. He would have ripped my head off, John thought.
A man and a woman, the woman in a long cashmere coat, her shoulders padded with snow, passed John on their way into the diner. They were just inside when they saw the huddle at the booth, and they turned right around and left.
Nikos glanced back at the door, and saw John through the glass, the nice young man with manners, peering in at him, his face desolate. Why would he behave this way? Every day Nikos watched customers flow in and out, mostly regulars, dependable people. A boy disappears for years. He returns and … this. Who could explain such behavior? He lifted his arm from the counterman’s back and shooed John away, the same threatless gesture his father had employed to rid his café of the poor boys who begged five lepta coins from the customers back in Patras. Such a life, here in this stupid filthy flat city. Such a life, that he should find himself here, working in this place, nursing the broken head of this maniac.
A normal person, having incited a stranger to murderous rage, having possibly broken some part of his own hand in the process, might find his own thoughts to be as thrashingly wild as a flock of geese frightened into flight, but John, forged in a Caldwell-brand furnace, was tempered to resist chaos. He had it to thank for his controlled performances—he never missed a cue, never botched his blocking. His body was under control. He kept his voice under control, no matter the venue. But it had turned out that audiences wanted a wild man, not a record player.
He inhaled a sharp bellyful of February, his face a Kabuki mask. He waved farewell to Nikos, and as he did, he realized that for a few minutes he’d forgotten his son.
He walked south on Broadway. A flotilla of gray cloud was dragging across the jagged reef of high-rises. Wind barreled down the avenue, bending the saplings planted in the center divider, and John sank deeper into his collar. Northbound, southbound, the avenue was awash in hazy taillights, red dots and dashes transmitting an endless, meaningless telegram.
His chest was tingling and his blood was flying around inside his limbs. A man must maintain dominion over himself. His appearance is his calling card. Things his father said.
What would it feel like, he wondered, to grab the wrist of anyone who sat across from him—even Nikos—and pull that person to him in a tight embrace? How great the gift of another person’s attention, how unthinkably loving. He’d gone the wrong way with the counterman, but he’d had his attention, just for a moment.
John ducked into a tobacconist’s, not his usual. The man behind the counter, his pilled brown sweater zipped up to his chin, strands of white plastered to his shiny scalp, was yelling into the phone, And, and, and you think you have time to wait for the next goddamn thing to just fall into your goddamn lap, like you have all the goddamn time in the world?… You’ll see what happens? How can you say that?
The shop was one of those miraculous closets that occupied gaps between the city’s plusher retail offerings, with only enough room inside for a counter along one wall and a corresponding corridor wide enough for a single customer. The tobacco was under glass, and stacked to the ceiling on shelves behind the register; cartons of cigarettes were stacked high on the counter and to the ceiling on shelves behind John. From somewhere among the boxes a transistor radio played Ravel. The owner yelled, I’ll call ya back!
Never work with the public, had been Albert’s advice to John. The old man had got that much right.
Evening, John said.
The man raised his considerable eyebrows without uttering a sound.
Sir Walter Raleigh Aromatic in a pouch, John said.
John heard the glass door slide, and th
e man’s arm appeared in the case at knee-level, felt around for the blue pouch, his eyes on the ceiling, upper lip curled slightly, the face of a doctor conducting a digital probe.
A sharp medicine, the man said.
I suppose, John said, opening his wallet.
A physician for all diseases and miseries, the man added, standing, stabbing at the cash register’s gray keys.
John held out the money.
Sir Raleigh’s final words, addressed to the axe that separated his head from his shoulders, the man said, taking the money, stabbing the keys again, the cash drawer shooting into his gut.
Is that so? John said.
A poet to the end, the man said.
This was the problem with people, John thought. They were always springing traps to make you listen, but they never listened in turn, like a preacher in a pulpit.
You don’t say, John said.
Ya, the shopkeeper said, waiting. When John only stared dumbly back at him, the man relented and dropped the money into his hand. This pleased John, to have broken him, and sympathy surged up to fill the empty space annoyance had vacated. What did this old man have but his little brown box of a store and someone to yell at on the phone? Why spoil his fun? And where else did John have to be, and who else did he have to talk to? But he couldn’t think of how to make it right, and he dropped the change into his pants pocket, slipped the pouch of tobacco into his coat, and said, Good night. The man’s finger was already in the phone’s rotary wheel. Didn’t matter whose ear he was chewing, as long as someone was forced to listen. Up crept a bitter snarl into John’s throat, a wild desire to tell the old man to shut the fuck up for once in his life. What a pain in the ass he must be to his family, alternately barking disapproval and dispensing unsolicited lectures on subjects useless and obscure. Cuts of tobacco, biographies of colonial governors, the history of the Tariff Act. If he’s so goddamn smart, what’s he doing running a smoke shop? Brains didn’t get you very far, not in this world, did they, pal?
John paused at the door and took his time arranging his scarf. All he needed was to catch the old man out, all he needed was a touch of spark to tinder and he could give the guy a piece of his mind. He’d be doing the world a favor. He listened to the rip and burr of the wheel as the man dialed. This city was a petty tyrant’s paradise, its citizens ever open to assault from distemperate delivery guys and short-fused butchers, the asinine ministrations of bagel shop proprietors.
He couldn’t linger any longer. In or out.
Louise? Louise? Put your mother on, the shopkeeper said.
John was ready. The speech was writing itself. The man’s accent—Louweese? Louweese?—was an assault, the conversion of an innocent wisp of a word into a boot-clad lout.
John had struggled in diction class with Edith Braun, the German octogenarian who taught from a nubby green recliner, perspective rendering her face the same size as the oblong soles of her size-four feet, the student forced to sing directly at that oval trinity because Braun was deaf and corrected pronunciation by eye. John’s exercises for her were abominations, his mouth a flopping mess, and he’d drilled hours a day to adopt a stage voice that was part Olivier, part machine, and in the end wholly unnatural. He’d become, in the process, as intolerant as Braun of imperfect pronunciation.
Hello? Nora, is that you, love?
The word thumped John in the chest. Love, rolled flat as dough. He glared through the glass door. February, whore of a month. This weather, the city’s punishment for glib April, when the sidewalks flooded with people concussed by the air and sun, incapable of walking a straight line, dumbly following their noses toward the new grass in Sheep Meadow, the Great Lawn. February was when everything died. Even January offered up empty blue skies, but February was a dark, Norse month of ice and cold.
Hold on, the man said into the phone. Do you need something, captain?
John raised his hand no and went out. The new snow fringed the dirt around the skinny black tree trunks, frosted the manhole covers, telephone booths, clung loosely to black-coated shoulders and the crowns of men’s hats. Unless he looked into the streetlights he couldn’t see it coming down, but he knew it was there. He pulled his collar tight and turned downtown.
19.
Sal Fumoso ran only one film a day at the decommissioned Penn Yards YMCA. He spliced reels and taped them end to end in a single continuous loop that ran on a platter system, like a celluloid cat’s cradle. You could watch an entire film six, seven times in a sitting. No intermissions. What minuscule profit he might have scraped together was eaten up by the endless boxes of carbon arc lamps needed to keep the projector lit for ten hours straight. Only mechanical malfunction put a stop to the proceedings, and even then, like audiophiles who shushed everyone else in the room to listen to the pre-song pops and crackles on some beloved LP, his customers watched the darkness as avidly as the light. They considered him an artist, the old YMCA his studio.
Sal had been the projectionist at the Japanese Gardens until he’d gotten drummed out of the Local 306 for repeatedly supporting outliers during officer elections, candidates who were not really leadership material, guys who thought that John Berger was, like, the man, and who advocated for lectures before, during, and after the showing of movies. He’d appealed to the International and spent most of his settlement on a used DP70 and sound system. What was left he gave a sailmaker in Port Jeff to cut him a screen, which he installed in the abandoned YMCA, rent $10 a month. With the rest he bought boxes of bulbs. He showed whatever he could lay his hands on.
He was drawn to this work by a youthful experience (file under Abduction, Alien), not so much a trauma that needed working through as an event that he likened to being taken backstage at a production of life itself, and the whole reason he believed it was necessary to untie time from its frame and let it flap free in the whistling breeze.
If his method of showing films amounted to an ethos, it was this: After multiple viewings, even the worst film would become sublime. Same as when a child repeats a word until it becomes a clot of alien sounds, the film has to break loose from its prison of meaning. After five consecutive viewings, metaphor loosens and slips off like a snakeskin, revealing the clean unadorned weirdness of the world beneath the imagined dream. No longer does artifice conceal art. Art reveals artifice. Actors grasp at their chests, emoting death throes while silently cursing craft table tacos; stuntmen tumble off roofs into well-worn crash bags. Knives plunge into themselves, no longer piercing the pearlescent flesh of the showering beauty while her wounds squirt the sweetest Iowa corn syrup. Patrons of Cinema West embarked on an intentional attempt to view not the artificial but the actual, to reach a state of communion with the actors on the screen, not with their characters.
This was film as projectionists saw film, the daily cycle of the early bird special followed by the matinee and then the two and four o’clock shows, then the date crowd. Projectionists were forced to watch: they could not look away, timing the cuts from one reel to the next, checking focus. They loved A Clockwork Orange for the method of Alex’s rehabilitation. Why, then, did they come to Sal’s? To watch, finally, the full loop, to complete the revolution, and complete it again, and again. It was the breaks that soured the commercial experience, the artless previews and dancing tubs of popcorn, and the gray screen, the void between shows, the audience chattering blithely in their seats, stupid-faced, warming up their coughs, testing the creak of their chairs.
And what happened after days of uninterrupted viewing? Take the Gill-man from Creature from the Black Lagoon. Standard zoomorphic substitute for the adolescent male whose happy childhood has, thanks to puberty, given way to disenfranchisement, anger, fear, whose only desire is to touch a girl and relieve himself of the ignominy of solitude. Submerged in the depths of the Black Lagoon, the wretched aquatic monster lurks, so far beneath the bronzed girl on the boat. She enters the water, and from his nest on the lagoon floor, the creature looks up and sees an angel flying above him,
soaring beyond his mortal reach, yet he dares swim upward, extending his webbed monstrosity of a palm toward her foot. Oh, Grendel, oh, Icarus, oh, Elephant Man—mustn’t we feel sympathy for this poor, sublime fool who only wants something more than himself? Who is this outcast but us?
Yet, watch again, and then again, and again. Note the staggering, unsteady gait of the aquatic monster as it tries to navigate the terrestrial world. You see that it is so like your own staggering passage through the world. Watch again, however, and you will come to recognize that the monster’s gait is a mechanical issue, the result of stuffing a man into a rubber suit that chafes at the crotch, rips the hair from his legs, boils him in the sun, drowns him in his own sweat. The suffering is not metaphorical. Ben Chapman, the man in the suit, suffers for all to see. The story is about his imprisonment. Do you choose to see, or will you continue to look away? And if you choose to see, what then? Could you begin to see the transparent world, the truth?
Or Psycho. After five loops, the rise and fall of Norman’s knife loses its fury, the stabbing as becalmed and as predictable as water dripping from a flower petal. Meaning peels away like a label from a bottle. Image surrenders its authority, reverts to its ephemeral origins, shadow and light. Watch again. The images change again and become memories. Watch again. They become secrets, stories related in strictest confidence, then confessions, then, finally, a crushing banality, a fact from which you can’t turn away, no matter how bored. Truth emerges, and becomes, always, boring. But like monks at meditation, Sal’s audience strained to transform boredom into a sublime calm, an effortless state of existence.
And that was why John, first taken to Cinema West by a Juilliard classmate, a trumpet player who liked to eat red devils and settle in for the cycle, visited that night: to join the disciples who sublimated themselves to the great flickering modern god, lord light, while their high priest at his pulpit, monitoring the take-up sprocket, the focusing knob, the racking knob, tending to the splice and tape, conducted worship with his whirring machine. Those poor slobs, those agents of a new age of light and screen, maybe they were onto something.
