by Dale Bailey
I never saw him alive again.
* * *
I kept knocking back beers until everything grew fuzzy and my vision narrowed to a dim tunnel. At some point I stumbled off to bed. I woke up after noon, hungover, my memory of the night before an oily void shot through with stark eidetic flashes—rewinding Ghoul for yet another viewing, trying to concentrate on Lugosi’s performance, though my focus slipped for seconds, minutes, half an hour at a time; sitting at the card table, staring blindly at Denny’s screenplay, as if the title page alone could reveal some truth or explanation that I hadn’t noticed before. But if any truth was there, I could not in the light of morning recall it.
I got up, scrubbed the moss off my teeth, and washed down a couple of Tylenol from the medicine cabinet. In the living room, I ejected Ghoul and returned it to its case. I swept a dozen beer cans off the kitchen counter. When I carried the garbage bag out to the dumpster, I saw that I’d parked the Cavalier halfway up on the sidewalk. I had a vague memory of going out for more beer. I was lucky I hadn’t killed someone.
I stashed Ghoul in its hiding place in Denny’s closet, and headed back out to the car. I spent the next couple of hours at a nearby mortuary, chosen for its proximity to the apartment as much as anything else. The undertaker was professionally solicitous. He expressed his condolences, asked about a burial plot, tried to sell me a casket and set up a service. I nixed the service and opted for cremation instead. I was out of there in less than two hours, but the experience brought Denny’s death home to me with a raw finality that transcended even that of the photos in the case file. I kept thinking about the way we’d been when we were kids, before we drifted apart—before Lugosi and the doom he’d brought down upon us.
I passed a park, and pulled over. The air was warm, but not oppressive, as it would have been in Knoxville. The foliage was in riotous bloom. I found a bench and turned my face to the sun, letting the warmth burn away the hangover. Denny’s words came back to me, paradoxical: to become the self you aspire to be, you must inhabit that self from the moment you imagine it into being. Maybe that had been the difference between us. I’d always been more or less content being me. Denny, for whatever reason, had longed to be someone else, had sacrificed everything on the altar of that dream. I wondered if he might have achieved it if I had given him the money he’d asked for. I’d been frugal with my half of Mom’s inheritance. It was true that I had planned to go back to school—had indeed done so—but it was also true that I could have spared at least enough to keep him going for a while. What might have happened then? What might he have become? And underneath these questions, others, troubling in different ways. How had he acquired the movies? And having come into possession of them myself, what was I to do with them?
Where was Dimension Video?
I had a small epiphany then: I’d never intended to return the movies, not really. How could I relinquish them? But I was desperate to see the rest of the store’s collection. Denny would have felt the same way, of course. For him, the desire might have been more pressing still. After a decade in Hollywood, he’d never seen a single word he’d written appear onscreen. But what if in some other time or place—some place where Ed Wood had gotten the financing to shoot The Ghoul Goes West and Marilyn Monroe had survived long enough to finish Something’s Got to Give—Denny too had found success? What if his own movies, the movies he’d only dreamed of, were waiting on the shelves of Dimension Video?
The question was absurd. Impossible. But, then, the whole thing was impossible.
I tried to puzzle out some sense or logic in it, some explanation for the entire episode, but by the time I returned to my car—hours later—no answers had presented themselves. I stopped for a sandwich on the way back to Denny’s apartment. Afterward—by impulse—I swung the car into the lot of the Video Hut. Maybe the owner was in.
She was.
The guy behind the counter directed me to an office at the back of the store. She stood when I introduced myself: a tall, angular woman in her thirties with a cap of close-shorn blond hair, not pretty exactly, but you wouldn’t soon forget her. Her name was Louise Roth—“but everyone calls me Lou,” she said, settling me in the molded plastic chair opposite her desk. She listened attentively as I explained my dilemma: my brother had left some rental tapes I’d like to return, but the rental boxes had no address or phone number—just a name, Dimension Video.
“Dimension Video, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“I’d let it go,” she said. “No one’s going to come looking for them. Lost tapes are the price of doing business. I’m sure you have bigger fish to fry with your brother’s death. What was his name? Danny?”
“Denny.”
“Right. Tall guy, dark hair, lived down at the Paradise Arms, is that right?”
“You knew him.”
“Not really. I remember him, though. He used to come in and pick up a movie once in a while. He had good taste.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most people, they want the new releases or the adult films. Your brother went a little deeper—he was always hunting up some obscure movie or other. Mostly we didn’t have what he was looking for. But he stuck around to talk once in a while. We both had a fondness for old horror movies. Not a lot of people want to talk about I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, you know what I’m saying?”
I laughed. “That was Denny, all right.”
“Funny thing is,” she said, “he came in not too long ago asking about Dimension Video himself.”
“Well, he seems to have found it.”
“Finding it wasn’t the problem,” she said. “Finding it again was another thing. He was looking to return the videos he’d rented there, and the place had just evaporated. So he said, anyway.”
“That doesn’t make sense. If he’d rented the movies there in the first place—”
“Exactly.” She leaned back in her chair, steepled her hands under her chin. “He said it specialized in hard to find stuff. Really hard to find. That true of the movies he left behind?”
“You could say that.”
“Care to tell me what you have?”
I hesitated. “You ever hear of an old Marilyn Monroe flick, Something’s Got to Give?”
“Doesn’t exist. Not the whole film, anyway. She died and they never finished it.”
“I know,” I said, and after that neither of us said anything at all.
Finally, I stood. I thanked her for her time.
She accompanied me out through the store. The evening rush was just beginning, the aisles filling up with nine-to-fivers looking for something light to kill the evening. I wondered what they’d think if they knew that somewhere out there a store called Dimension Video was renting out movies that didn’t exist. I suspected they wouldn’t much care. Lou, on the other hand—Lou walked me all the way out to the Cavalier.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” she said as I slid behind the wheel. “I don’t know what he was into—or what he’s gotten you into—but if that movie did exist…” She shook her head. “Well, I would give a lot to see it.”
“Thanks again,” I said. “Really.”
She stepped back. I closed the door, started the car, and pulled away. I glanced in the rearview mirror when I got to the light at the end of the block. She was still there, watching me.
* * *
There was a girl in Denny’s apartment.
I heard her when I swung open the door: a rustle in the gloom, a silence that felt like waiting. I switched on the light. Everything was as it had been: the books and the mismatched chairs, the TV, the video tapes stacked on the table. Imagination, nothing more, I thought, but I checked the bedroom all the same.
She was cowering on the other side of the bed—a slender blonde. I put her in her mid twenties. In that light it was hard to be sure.
“Don’t hurt me,” she said.
She said, “You look like Denny.”
She said, “I miss hi
m.”
“I miss him, too,” I said, and the statement struck me with the force of revelation: I’d been missing Denny for years. I hadn’t even known it.
* * *
We ate at a diner down the street—Luke’s, a place that didn’t look much more promising than the Paradise Arms. Booths of torn green vinyl. Chipped plates and peeling laminate on the tables, a dead fly on the window seal. Fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead. In the flickering yellow glare, she looked weary and brittle, older than I’d thought she was, haunted by the ghost of her own beauty, which was utterly conventional. At home in Wisconsin, she’d have been a stunner. In Hollywood, she was just another pretty girl—and that was before time and care had begun to take their toll. Her blue eyes were dull, bracketed by fine lines, her lips pale, compressed by weariness. She was too thin in a town where it was impossible to be too thin.
Her name was Julie and she’d come to L.A. to be a star. She’d become a hostess at a steak house instead, making the round of open-call auditions for more than five years, in which time she had scored only one part—if you could call a single line (“Is that a dachshund?”) on Girl’s Best Friend a part. The only positive in the whole experience, she told me, had been meeting Denny, and even that was debatable. “He quit the show two weeks later,” she told me. “He said writing lines for a talking dog was beneath him.”
So there went that chance—for both of them.
She kept up with the auditions. He kept tinkering with screenplays. Eventually, they moved in together. I never knew anything about it, of course. So much of Denny’s life had been hidden from me. Another secret didn’t seem to matter.
“Was he using drugs?” I asked.
She shrugged. The shrug was eloquent. This was Hollywood. Weed, coke, pills, you name it: one thing led to another. Nancy Reagan could have predicted it. It hadn’t happened overnight, but when the money began to run out, they’d broken up. She wasn’t cut out for the Paradise Arms. She didn’t like heroin. She moved in with a girlfriend from the restaurant. She didn’t see Denny much after that. But she missed him constantly. She worried. She checked in two or three times a week.
“You were the one that found him, weren’t you?” I said. “You called it in.”
She sighed. “Don’t tell, okay,” she said. “Please. I don’t need the trouble.”
“How’d you happen to be there?”
“He called me. Said he wanted to say good-bye. I asked him want he meant, but he didn’t say. He just told me he loved me. He’d never said that before. Never. It scared me, so…” Another eloquent shrug. “I had a key. Just in case, he used to say. You never know. And when I let myself in…”
“He was gone?”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re saying it was intentional. Suicide.”
She pushed food around on her plate.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “He was always leery of the stuff. He used clean needles. He was careful about dosing.”
“But why would he do it?”
“Why does anyone do it? You come here with all these plans, and you wind up seating tourists in a shitty restaurant instead. And the thing is, you can’t go home. Because you didn’t make it, right, and that’s the last thing you want anyone to know. This place is supposed to be paradise, but it feels more like purgatory to me. Everybody drifting around in limbo. I should have gone to college, become a nurse or whatever. An accountant.”
“It’s not too late.” This from the professional student.
“Sure it is,” she said, pushing her plate aside. “Listen, thanks for dinner, but…”
“Julie, why’d you come back to the apartment?”
She looked down. “There’s this ring,” she said. “He used to let me wear it on special occasions. It was like a thing between us.”
“You find it?”
She hesitated. And then, meeting my gaze, she dug into her pocket and laid it on the table between us. My mother’s engagement ring. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just … I wanted a keepsake, something of Denny’s, you know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I understand.”
I didn’t say anything after that, and she didn’t either. The clamor of the diner filled the air around us: the clink of silverware and the muted hum of conversation and someone calling out an order in the kitchen. I thought about Denny, all I didn’t know about him, all I never would. He’d told this absolute stranger to me—he’d told Julie—that he loved her. He’d called her at the end to say goodbye.
Our exchange at the airport came back to me. Take care of yourself, I’d said.
You too, Ben, he’d responded. But I guess I don’t have to worry about that.
I slid the ring across the table to her.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“He’d have wanted you to have it,” I said, and I wondered if it was true.
* * *
Outside the diner, I asked her about the video tapes. She laughed. “You, too, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“The last time I saw him, we had lunch. That’s all he could talk about. These movies he’d gotten ahold of. What’s so special about them, anyway?”
I pondered how to tell her that they were impossible, they didn’t exist. “They’re pretty rare,” I said. “Do you know where he found them?”
“He didn’t know where he’d found them.”
“What do you mean?”
“He said he rented them from this place near West 65th and Broadway. But he must have gotten the address wrong, because when we drove down there he couldn’t find the place.”
“He wanted to return the tapes.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think he wanted more of them.” Then: “Listen, I have to run, okay. Like I said, thanks for dinner.”
“You mind giving me your number?” I asked.
She thought about it for a minute, and then she scrawled it out on the back of a receipt she dug out of her purse. She thrust it into my hand, wished me luck, and started off down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. When I called her a few days later, the number was out of service. I never saw her again, either.
* * *
We expect our movies—and I’m not talking about experimental films here, I’m talking about movies, I’m talking about Hollywood, I’m talking about stars—we expect our movies, we want our movies, to resolve themselves, perhaps because life so rarely does. Plot threads should be neatly tied off, character arcs completed. Consider the case of William Faulkner, who came to Hollywood in 1932 and returned, intermittently, for the next two decades. Faulkner turned out to have a genius for the movies. He received screen credit for just six pictures, but he put his stamp on many others. His single most famous movie, however—an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep—achieved its notoriety in part because it doesn’t come together as neatly as we’d like it to. No one could ever figure out who killed the chauffeur—not Faulkner or his collaborators on the screenplay, not the director, not Chandler himself (“They sent me a wire asking me,” he later wrote, “and dammit, I didn’t know either”).
I include this anecdote because the conclusion of my own story—Denny’s story, and the story of the impossible movies that he left behind—is a lot messier than I would like it to be. The morning after I ate dinner with Julie, I drove down to West 65th and Broadway. Dimension Video wasn’t there. As far as I have been able to determine, it was never there. No one I’ve talked to recalls it. It does not appear in municipal archives. No business license exists. There are no tax records. I hunted for the place for weeks, broadening my search street by street. Nothing. It simply wasn’t there.
By the time I gave up, I realized that I’d given up on my thesis, as well. The Ed Wood I was writing about no longer seemed entirely real to me. There was another Ed Wood—a ghostly doppelgänger who’d directed a ghost of a film starring the ghost of a man who’d died of a heart attack a year before The Ghoul Goes West ever went in
to production. I couldn’t sort out who was real and who wasn’t. All I know is that I camped out in Denny’s apartment so long that I ended up taking over the lease. A month passed, and then another. I ate takeout pizza. I ate Chinese. I ate at Luke’s. I drank too much beer. I drank until I was sick of myself, and then I woke up hungover one day and poured all the booze in the apartment down the sink. I showered, ate a slice of cold pizza, and walked to the Video Hut. Lou was in her office.
“I have some movies I think you ought to see,” I told her.
We watched them that night on the sofa where my brother died. She gazed at the flickering images in rapt silence. “Where did these come from?” she asked at one point, never taking her eyes from the screen. “I don’t know,” I said. After that, Lou and I took up the search for Dimension Video together. Somewhere along the way we started seeing each other. I suppose it was only a matter of time. We have a lot in common—almost as much as Denny and I did.
Which brings me back to Denny. Denny and Lugosi.
In the final scenes of Denny’s screenplay, Ed Wood wraps The Ghoul Goes West and the cast retires to the Cameo Club to celebrate. Autry buys rounds for everyone—“I have plenty of money, anyway,” he tells Lugosi—but is otherwise morose. Bela shares his dolor. “I have not even that solace,” he says, and though the screenplay doesn’t describe his thoughts, one can easily imagine him ruminating about the cramped apartment on Harold Way. Awash in morphine and Autry’s top-shelf scotch, he might have drifted for a time, lost between Hungary and Hollywood, the career he’d had and the career he could have had, scraps of old dialogue straying through his mind: Listen to them, the children of the night, what music they make and I never drink wine and, most of all, I am Dracula, the phrase that had made him a star. Perhaps he would have recalled a fragment of his monologue from Bride of the Monster, the previous picture he’d made with Eddie Wood. Home? he might have said. I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal! The jungle is my home. But I will show the world that I can be its master!
Except he couldn’t, of course. The world mastered him. Denny’s screenplay ends with Lugosi’s death—not from the heart attack that killed him in reality, but from a deliberate morphine overdose. He’d found fame as Dracula, but his success never reached the height of his ambition and he spent the rest of his life watching it slip away.
