by Dylan Hicks
After locking up, I went to the hipper record store across the street, where a party had sprung up. Maryanne was there, taking crouching hits off a one-hitter behind the imports rack, or so I thought for a moment, but it was just someone who looked vaguely like her. She and Wanda’s friendship had developed quickly like a Polaroid, and now they saw or at least talked to each other every day: they took long afternoon constitutionals leading to the earliest happy hours; sat on opposite ends of our sofa, reading in silence save for explanations of hmms and chuckles; browsed the books from Maryanne’s erotic-art class while I sat on the floor trying to fix a wah-wah pedal; chatted on the phone while watching TV; talked at the Formica table about dentists from their girlhoods (the dentist from Maryanne’s childhood was kind but big-fingered and hairy-handed, the one from Wanda’s gruff with his assistant, who did all the work).
I spent about an hour and a half at the party before calling home. Wade picked up. “It’s really snowing,” I said. By then the snowfall was getting closer to its ultimate twenty-eight inches (it looked like thirty). “What’s this it”? he said. I told him I’d be home in about an hour, maybe longer since I planned to walk and it’d be slow trudging. Wanda’s shift at the call center had been canceled too, he told me. “Listen,” he said, “if there’s a video shop still open, could you pick up some movies? Stuff from the past ten years.” I asked if he could be more specific. “Good stuff from the past ten or eleven years,” he said.
“But I need more direction.”
“Try to get a dozen or so. Anything you get, I won’t have seen. I have to catch up on film before my expatriation. No one reads anymore, even in Germany, is my understanding, so I’ll need to hold my own on cinema if I want to be taken seriously.”
“I thought you said the idea was not to be taken seriously,” I said.
“People have to take you seriously before you can convince them not to.”
“So should I be getting German movies?”
“It doesn’t matter. Cosmopolitan.”
“But art movies?” I said.
“Highbrow or low, just nothing in the middle.”
The walk home was dark and windy, strange and slippery—no, first crepuscular, then dark, I now remember. When I think of that walk, I don’t recall any of the discomfort I must have felt from the cold and the wind and the hole in my left galosh; I just remember a pacific dreaminess or nonmaniacal euphoria, the show-biz flakes in the streetlamp beams, how the Marxian snow leveled the parked cars (though you could still gauge their ages and values by their shapes), how the snowbanks were like the giant wave in Hokusai’s endlessly reproduced woodblock print, though that’s silly: they would have been nowhere near that size. The sidewalks were hard to navigate, so for most of the trip I walked in the tire ruts in the middle of the street, including the city’s busiest street, like a lonesome protest marcher. Once in a while I had to step aside for a slow-moving car or truck, but no one got angry, even the honks were Samaritan little pips. Three or four times I helped someone push into an alley or out of a parking spot. Part of me wanted to walk the city all night pushing cars.
(I feel obliged to add here that people were hurt by the storm: there were meals lost to undelivered AFDC checks, fingers lost to snowblowers, shovel-clutching grandparents lost to driveways.)
The independent video store was still open and doing good business, so I spent an hour picking out a dozen movies from the eighties and incipient nineties. When I got home, Wanda was reading Z magazine and playing a Scrawl album too quietly for it to do its work. She was sitting in the sand-brown wing chair Wade had rescued from an alley and set among his record boxes in the living room. He was dozing on the couch, an open library copy of The Ashley Book of Knots resting like a cottage roof on his chest, his cream cowboy shirt (new, I think) mostly unsnapped. Without opening his eyes, he pantomimed knob-turning and made other gestures till I gathered he wanted me to turn up the stereo. “Certain volumes are an insult to music and to silence,” he said hoarsely.
“I thought you were sleeping,” Wanda said.
“Sorry, I was kind of sleeping,” Wade said. They went back and forth like this some more while I went to the bathroom, where it took a lot of rusty hot water to warm my feet.
Wade had seen only three movies of the eighties, he was explaining when I returned to the living room, and two of those, screened as a double-feature at a pornographic house in Kansas City, “were not seen in their entirety.” (He often used the passive voice when relating embarrassing anecdotes that clearly embarrassed him not at all.) He had, then, seen only one wide-release movie of the eighties, the coolly received Gavel & Leisure, about a vagrant (Bruno Kirby) who gets mistaken for a judge. I’d put the bag of videos in the upright fruit crate that held Wanda’s TV, a red-white-and-blue bicentennial model she’d had in her bedroom as a girl. Wade reached into the bag and picked a video (Sherman’s March) at random, put it in the player, and took a seat in the middle of the sofa. He didn’t seem to mind sitting on the crack between the two cushions, or maybe he just wanted to be in direct line of the TV. It was a small TV (one inch of screen for each original colony) but precious, I suppose, in that it was one of those rare black and whites modded into color, its guts having been replaced at Wanda’s request and considerable expense by a perplexed but masterly Russian repairman. It seemed like a silly project to me, but in the end the picture made its own case, the image sharp but not cutting, the colors warm and tingly, particularly attuned, I thought, to the oranges, reds, and yellows often seen through eyelids on swing sets.
After Sherman’s March, we watched Cautious of the Moon, then Stranger Than Paradise. This last movie I’d first seen with my mother at Chicago’s Fine Arts Theatre during a Christmas ’84 stay with my aunt and uncle in one of the city’s northwestern suburbs. It was sleeting on the night we went to see the movie, so the drive downtown took us even longer than expected, and once we got there we couldn’t figure out where to park. “We should’ve taken the train,” my mother said, a dig at me, since I’d pressed for driving. We did find a place to park, though not in the underground ramp that we later realized would have been much more convenient. We jogged gingerly on the slippery sidewalks that led to the theater, occasionally conquering a patch of ice by spreading our arms like a scarecrows. I especially remember the brown-gray wetness of the Michigan Avenue sidewalk in front of the theater’s glass doors, and how my mother bent over and fluidly opened the right door as if she were ending a dance routine. All the actors were great, she said on the way home, hardly actors at all. Wade seemed moved when I shared this anecdote. “We played a show in Chicago around that Christmas,” he said. “I might’ve been in town that same night, just a few miles from y’all.” He reflected on that coincidental proximity, as if a chance meeting in a strange city would have made any difference, as if my mother and I had been missing all that time and he’d nearly found us. My mother and I had never been hard to find in Enswell or in Minneapolis. It’s true that we moved into a different Enswell rental a year after Wade left, but Enswell is a small city and my mother was always in the phone book, which back then, I mention by the way, also listed the citizen’s occupation and whether he or she was a homeowner, householder, or roomer. I was reminded of that while poking around the Enswell Public Library last year. My mother’s entries read: “Deskin Marleen T [to economize space, no periods were used after middle initials] secretary Tuttle Ag Pumps,” followed by the standard directory info. (When asked, my mother always called herself a “gal Friday.”) In the 1971 phone book I found: “Salem Wade D cook Bey’s …” He was missing from the directory for several years, then returned in ’76: “Salem Wade D driver AAAA Vending …” And in ’77: “Salem Wade E [sic] attendant ARE Parking …” He disappeared again until ’87, but by then the phone book no longer listed occupations.
We finished Stranger Than Paradise around two a.m. Wanda had fallen asleep on Wade’s shoulder and later drifted or was subtly lowered to his lap. When
the movie ended, she stumbled off to bed. Wade and I moved to opposite ends of the couch, and were soon reclining on these opposite ends, his long legs resting on the back of the couch in his faded Erizeins, my not-as-long legs hanging in twill toward the floor. We stayed up to half-watch San Pedro Cards & Gifts (underrated), during which he started talking about Los Angeles, about the first time he’d gone there, in July of ’77. Because it was so late and we were both tired, or because he was in a contemplative mood, he spoke at first with unwonted slowness, and in a deeper, softer tone than usual, a lulling tone, though I was tired and might have been lulled by Minnie Pearl’s voice, besides which Wade’s voice had a soothing, cello-like timbre even when he was more energized and the hours weren’t so small. It was easy to grasp his appeal to a radio station’s program director. His pace picked up and his voice got more voluble as he continued, but not alarmingly so, and I floated into a shallow sleep as he talked, though I believe I caught most of his reminiscence:
Wade had gone to Los Angeles to exchange five thousand not easily saved dollars for three ounces of not egregiously diluted cocaine, which he kept on the plane ride home to Enswell via Denver in his carry-on, in a baggie concealed, entomed as it were, in James Michener’s Centennial, a Christmas gift from his mother. He had hollowed out Michener’s book while watching TV in the Motel Hacienda. He’d brushed the book’s shavings off the bed, but then envisioned the shavings as evidence and got on his hands and knees to pinch them off the musty olive carpet. The Motel Hacienda, it turned out, was not a nice place to stay. The soda machine’s sold-out lights glowed orange for every brand except Diet Rite, whose column, he discovered, was also empty. The motelier coldly demanded payment up front and was missing a hand. In the parking lot, her uniformly tank-topped kids played at war, using steak knives wrapped in medical gauze and balloons filled with their own tears. It was the right thing to do, there being a drought under way. Nearby a man chained himself to his sprinkler, running full blast at midday in defiance of city orders, and drowned before the police could haul him away. A heat-crazed housemaid was caught trying to dip a soup ladle into a Hockney swimming pool; at hospital she got a gnomic telegram from the artist himself, followed by a visit from the ABC affiliate’s top dispatcher of broadcast-closing human-interest stories. Someone in Santa Barbara flew a yellow box kite into a high-tension power line, setting off sparks that lit the dry brush and gathered into a wind-cheered fire that consumed two hundred homes, some of them said to be worth a half-million dollars. “Looks like God done switched sides in the class war,” quipped a (white-sounding) community-radio deejay, who apologized insincerely during the next break. A pair of young, otherwise normal-seeming suburban men was off to jail for having hijacked a school bus. In his notebook Wade noted the confluence of yellow: yellow box kites; yellow buses; yellow balloons (some of them were yellow); yellow scoop-necked shirts on gallery owners; yellow notebooks; yellow pencils; yellow diving boards; pungent yellow paperback pages in West Hollywood bookstores; the yellow, nicotian teeth revealed by the motelier’s provocative smile. Sometimes skin turns yellow when it’s stretched over a person who’s about to die. Of course, if you’re looking for death or prophecy, it’s not so hard to pick and choose images, perhaps especially in Los Angeles, where paradoxers of an apocalyptic Eden or Edenic apocalypse have the best shtick going. It’d be dishonest to omit how good Wade felt walking past a toy-strewn yard (one of the toys a yellow Tonka truck) where a man with wild salt-and-mustard hair was bent over playing Charlie Christian spirals with high feeling on a no-name guitar under the chicken sun. Wade’s trip could have taken a day, in which case he could have made the Bolling Greene show at the North Dakota State Fair, a show his attractive upstairs neighbor, he’d overheard, would be attending with her vaguely poignant son. Instead he stretched his errand into a week of lonely tourism. Neither his disappointingly dull L.A. connection nor anyone else invited him to the bacchic party he’d imagined on the plane. Although for the most part Angelenos weren’t as stylish as he’d anticipated, he often felt like a conspicuous provincial. He walked and drove and drove and walked. He often got lost on the highway and his shouts bounced around the protractor part of his rented steering wheel. He ate peanuts in front of Watts Towers, saw Call Me Angel, Sir! at an ironically named porn theater, waited in a depressing line at the Roxy to see priapic SoCal rockers Sideswipe, whose performance made him nostalgic for the line. He went to the UCLA campus, where he smiled enviously, contemptuously, and longingly at the students, sat tailor style before Lachaise’s hermaphroditic Standing Woman, admiring her grapefruit breasts and watermelon hips, her impossibly thin waist, presidential head, shot-putter’s arms, pianist’s fingers not unlike Wade’s own. If music is the breathing of statues, as Rilke had it, she was breathing Das Rheingold out of her mouth, “Muddy Water (A Mississippi Moan)” out of her nose. He went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he lingered at one of de Kooning’s famous, infamous women—this one relatively gentle, partly pastel, but still strangely headed, moderately frightening. To a young, heavily lipsticked woman also looking at the drawing, he noted that in ’53 Rauschenberg turned one of de Kooning’s women into a kind of shade, by erasing the drawing and calling the palimpsest his own work. “Erased de Kooning it’s called,” Wade said, with an attempted sniff-laugh. The woman, in some kind of Continental accent, said, “Such gestures quickly grow tiresome,” but which gesture did she mean: Rauschenberg’s cheekily Oedipal response to the anxiety of influence, or Wade’s pedantic come-on? He moved to another room. Modernism had been institutionalized long before Wade could get to it; so-called postmodernism was being institutionalized immediately. It was impossible to stand outside the mainstream in any meaningful way. Even a drug dealer stood outside only in technical and situational terms—the street dealer must stand outside, that being where streets are kept, but he’s no genuine outlaw, only a nuisance or mirror or mirror nuisance, as the crime movies had so proudly discovered. Wade’s criminal life led more plausibly to jail than to riches, but a straight, middle-class future was still an option, he thought, especially if he set his sights on the lower middle. Anything was possible. The upstairs neighbor seemed to have excellent taste in music.
Festival
GETTING IN AS MANY MOVIES AS POSSIBLE OVER THAT blizzard weekend became a kind of game, for which we all invented and argued rules: As long as two people were in front of the TV, we agreed Saturday morning, the festival went on, lest things be stymied by someone’s work shift or a run to get groceries or more movies. Intermissions were limited to five minutes. There was no rewinding for missed lines, no pausing for bathroom breaks—Wade had to pee with pitiable frequency, so efficiency particularly depended on this last rule. Sometimes during his stay with us, I heard him projecting horselike streams into, on, and around our toilet (in certain light, spots of dried urine gleamed on the white tile), but other times, especially when I was awake in bed, I heard him expelling what must have been mere tablespoons, only to return to the bathroom five minutes later with the same paltry offering, sometimes again and again like that till he or I fell asleep.
After Tapani, I think we watched Wings of Desire, then The Eton Boy, Collaborators, Lisa in Slippers, Melvin and Howard, Liberty Farm, The Point of Boiling, Concrete Washout, Switcheroo—in truth the order escapes me, but I’m pretty sure all those were in there somewhere. That afternoon (“It was evening all afternoon,” Wallace Stevens wrote, “It was snowing / And it was going to snow”), Maryanne came over with a bag of day-old baked goods and some suggestions for the festival. She was dressed in an actual snowsuit, a tight old lavender thing that Wanda had to help her shake and twist out of. The bag of pastries, Maryanne explained, was a gift from one of her former colleagues. She was still out of work (her job-hunting seemed short of tireless). I ate a baby-face-sized cookie, ignored the film suggestions. I was less the cineaste than Maryanne but didn’t want a shared curatorship, mostly because Wade had praised a few of my selections. Undern
eath the snowsuit, I see now from a photograph snapped that day, Maryanne wore ragg-wool socks; her white jeans; a cotton sweater with wide black and ochre stripes; and a probably secondhand silk scarf with olive, fingerprint-like markings on a cream background. Her arrival had upset the seating arrangements, and with no deliberate maneuvering I landed between her and Wanda, lightly touching Wanda’s left shoulder and Maryanne’s right hip. I was careful not to disrupt this equilibrium, and later suffered some neck and shoulder pain connected to prolonged stillness.
After sitting through two and a half movies, Maryanne confessed to antsiness and suggested we all go sledding. The rest of us were committed to the festival, though, or in Wanda’s case had to leave soon for a short shift at the public-radio catalog. Besides, no one had a sled or could come up with a suitable makeshift. Maryanne proposed cookie sheets, but that seemed unrealistic. Her antsiness started to rub off on me, however, and I spent a long time tracking the apartment for the source of an irregular whistling squeak, mistaking what was by consensus a hot-water pipe for some frightened animal. Wanda left for work, and a certain Thanksgivingish torpor set in for a few hours. At some point around dusk, Maryanne pulled a reporter’s tape recorder from her bag, and began to rotate it in her hands, swinging it by its little strap, waiting, it seemed, for someone to ask about it. A moment later she told me the recorder was left over from her not quite two semesters in journalism school. “I just kind of stumbled on it the other day when I was looking for spare change in drawers,” she said. “I’m gonna use it to record overheard conversations, like at coffee shops and on buses and stuff. Then I’ll transcribe the better ones and edit them, tighten ’em up, and leave the edited transcriptions at coffee shops and on buses.”
