We were too jacked up to go to bed or to watch television. To be honest, I was dying for a drink. “Maybe we should go see if we can get a beer,” I said.
We waited ten or fifteen minutes and peeked out the hotel door; no sign of Yellow Shirt. We hurried along the near edge of the park, past the shopping plaza to the Calle Obispo, and headed down the narrow street toward the ocean. The old city hung in a silent ball of heat. “That’s where Ernest Hemingway used to drink,” I said as we passed the darkened El Floridita. “It’s a tourist trap now, ten bucks a beer, but back in the ’50s, it was supposed to be the best bar in town.”
We passed a couple of caged-up cafés, places that had been screeching with life and strumming guitars and cigar smoke a few hours earlier. Then an old-fashioned drugstore, dark wood, row upon row of clay jars along the back wall.
Soon we were standing outside Hemingway’s old hotel, the Ambos Mundos, at the foot of the street. “He wrote some of his worst stuff up there on the fifth floor,” I said.
“Is he worth reading?” Jesse asked.
“What the hell were you thinking back there, Jesse?” I said. “Going off with those hustlers like that?”
He didn’t answer. You could see he was racing around inside his head, ripping open doors and cupboards, looking for the right thing to say.
“Tell me,” I said gently.
“I thought I was having an adventure. Smoking a cigarette and drinking rum in a foreign city. You know?”
“Didn’t you feel like there was something off, those guys being so friendly at three in the morning?”
“I didn’t want to hurt their feelings,” he said. (How young he still is, I thought. That tall body, that good vocabulary. It can fool you.)
“Those guys are used to making people feel guilty. They do it all day long. It’s their job.”
We walked a while longer down the street. Yellow lamps overhead; balconies looking down; laundry hanging motionless, like people waiting. “If you’re going to read Hemingway,” I said, “read The Sun Also Rises. A few of his short stories too. The rest gets a bit nutty.” I looked around. You could smell the odour of decaying masonry; hear the ocean smashing against the seawall on the other side of the Avenida del Puerto. But no bar. “They say you can get anything anytime in Havana,” I said, “but apparently not.”
Inside the Hotel Ambos Mundos, you could see the night clerk talking to a pretty girl.
We followed a narrow cobblestone street east, the crumbling pastel apartment buildings rising on both sides; thick vines trailing down, a bright full moon shone overhead; no stars, just this single bright coin in the middle of a black sky. Night was at its peak. We came out into a square, a dirty-brown cathedral squatting at one end, a lighted café on the other; three or four tables sitting near the middle of the square. We sat down. A white-jacketed waiter disengaged himself from the brightly lit interior and came over.
“Señores?”
“Dos cervezas, por favor.”
Out they came, two ice-cold beers at four o’clock in the morning.
“I’m sorry about that business back at the hotel,” Jesse said.
“There are a couple of inviolate principles in the universe,” I said, suddenly chatty (I was delighted to be where we were). “One is that you never get anything worth getting from an asshole. Two is when a stranger comes toward you with his hand extended, he doesn’t want to be your friend. Are you with me?”
As if a thirsty genie had joined us, the beers vanished in their bottles. “Maybe we should go again?” I said. I held up two fingers for the waiter and swirled them around in the soupy air. He came over.
“How do you keep them so cold?” I asked. I was having a good time.
“Qué?”
“It’s okay, no importa.”
A bird twittered in a nearby tree.
“First one of the day,” I said. I looked over at Jesse. “Everything okay with Claire Brinkman?” He sat forward, his face darkened. “None of my business,” I said mildly. “Just chatting.”
“Why?”
“She looked a little distraught when we were leaving, that’s all.”
He took an aggressive plug of his beer. For a second I saw in that gesture how he drank when he drank with his friends. “Can I talk to you frankly, Dad?”
“Within reason. Nothing gross.”
“Claire’s a little bit on the weird side.” Something cold, something not so nice crept into his face like a rat in a new house.
“You want to go a little gently with Claire. She hasn’t had an easy time of it.” Her father, a sculptor I’d known in high school, had hanged himself with a clothesline a few years before. He was a drunk, a bullshitter, an asshole, to boot. Just the kind of guy who would off himself without the slightest thought for his kids, how they were going to take it.
“I know that story,” Jesse said.
“Then tread softly.”
Another bird started up, this one behind the cathedral.
“I just don’t like her that much. I should but I don’t.”
“Are you guilty about something, Jesse? You look like you just stole your grandmother’s necklace.”
“No.”
“It’s not fair to be mad at Claire because you don’t like her more. Although I understand the temptation.”
“Have you ever felt it?”
“It’s disappointment.”
I thought it might end there but it was as if there was a thin wire extending from him at that moment, that it needed a tug so the rest—whatever it was—could come out. Which silence seemed to serve.
By now the sky had turned a dark, rich blue, a red bar running across the horizon. Such extraordinary beauty, I thought, all over the world. Is it, you had to wonder, because there was a God or was it simply how millions and millions and millions of years of absolute randomness looked? Or is this simply the stuff you think about when you’re happy at four o’clock in the morning?
I called over the waiter. “Do you have any cigars?”
“Sí, señor.” His voice echoed in the empty square. He produced a pair from a jar on the counter and brought them over. Ten bucks each. But where else would you get a cigar at this time of the morning?
“I’ve been phoning another girl,” Jesse said.
“Oh.” I bit off the end of a cigar and handed it to him. “Who?”
He said a name I didn’t recognize. He looks furtive, dishonest, I thought.
“Just a couple of times,” he said.
“Huh-huh.”
Puff, puff. Face averted. “I’m too young to settle on one person, don’t you think?”
“That’s not really the point, is it?”
A moment later we heard a soft strumming. A young man sat slumped over a guitar on the cathedral steps, slowly running his fingers over the strings. In the blue morning light he reminded me of a Picasso painting.
“Do you believe that?” Jesse said. “Have you ever seen anything so . . .” he looked for the word “. . . so perfect.”
We smoked our cigars in silence for a moment, the chords hanging in the soft summer air.
“Dad?” he said suddenly.
“Yes.”
“It’s Rebecca I’ve been phoning.”
“I see.” Pause. Puff. Chirp. “Not that other person you mentioned.”
“I didn’t want you to think I was a loser. That I was obsessed with Rebecca Ng.”
The sky softened to a lighter blue; the moon fading; strum, strum. “Am I obsessed by Rebecca?” he asked.
“Nothing wrong with being obsessed with a woman, Jesse.”
“Have you ever been?”
“Please,” I said, “don’t let me commence.”
“I haven’t told my mom. She’ll start crying and talking about Claire’s feelings. Are you surprised?”
“About Rebecca? No. I always thought you had a second act there.”
“Do you think so? Is that right?” The idea excited him and I felt a sudd
en pang of dread, as if I were watching him drive a slowly accelerating car toward a cement wall.
“Can I just say one thing to you?”
“Sure.”
“Love affairs that start in blood tend to end up in blood.”
The waiter came over and collected a few chairs from the table next to us and took them inside the café.
“Jesus, Dad.”
5
When I got back from Cuba, I was mildly surprised not to find a phone message from Derek H. The first shoot of the Viagra documentary was supposed to start in a month; we had no final script. I waited a day, then another and sent him a jolly e-mail. (I loathed its tone of phony camaraderie.)
His answer came almost immediately. He had been offered a two-hour documentary on Nelson Mandela; full interview access to him, to his ex-wife, even some of his cronies from prison. There was a time factor at play, Mandela was eighty-four years old, surely I could understand. He was, Derek concluded, terribly sorry, but he had just “run out of time.”
I was floored. Not to mention broke after the “celebratory” trip to Cuba. I also felt that I’d been “had.” Lured into a frivolous, undignified piece of work that made me look like a fool. I remembered my words to Jesse in the cathedral square, the missionary’s zeal with which I’d delivered them. “You never get anything worth getting from an asshole.”
I stomped up and down the living room with my fists clenched and swearing revenge; Jesse listened quietly, numb with guilt, I imagine. I went to bed drunk; woke up at four in the morning to pee; just as I flushed the toilet, my watch slipped from my wrist and whirled down the chute. I sat down on the toilet seat and had a small, private weep. Here I’d let Jesse drop out of school, I’d promised to look after him and now it turned out I couldn’t even look after myself. A bullshitter, just like Claire Brinkman’s father.
By morning, I could feel a kind of terror spread through my chest like poison, my heart raced; it was as if a belt was slowly tightening around me. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. Just to do something, to move, I climbed onto my bicycle and rode downtown. It was a funereal summer day, muggy and full of unattractive people. I was walking through a narrow laneway, when I crisscrossed a bike courier riding cautiously my way. He was wearing sunglasses, a big bag thrown over his shoulder, gloves without fingers. But what interested me about him was that he appeared to be my age. “Excuse me,” I said. “You’re a courier, yes?”
“Yes.”
I asked him if he had time for a few questions. How much did he make? About $120 a day. A day? Yep, if he hustled. I asked who he worked for, he named the company. He was an easygoing fellow with perfect white teeth.
“Do you think it might be possible for me to get a job with your company?” I asked.
He raised his sunglasses and looked at me with a pair of clear blue eyes. “Aren’t you the guy from television?”
“Not at this moment.”
He said, “I used to watch you all the time. I saw you interview Michael Moore. What a prick that guy is.”
I said, “So what do you think?”
He looked down the alleyway and frowned. He said, “Well, we have an age limit. You’ve got to be under fifty.”
I said, “Are you under fifty?”
“No, but I’ve been there a long time.”
I said, “Could you do me a favour? Could you speak to your boss on my behalf? Tell him I’m not fooling around here, I’ll stay for at least six months, I’m in good shape.”
He hesitated. “That’s going to be a pretty weird conversation.”
I wrote down my phone number and my name and gave it to him.
“I’d be really grateful,” I said.
A day went by; then a few days; then nothing; I never heard back from him.
“Can you believe this?” I said to Tina. “I can’t even get a job as a fucking bike courier.”
In the middle of a silent breakfast the following morning, I rose from my chair and went back to bed, fully clothed. I put my head under the covers and tried to get back to sleep. A few moments later I felt a presence like a small bird alight on the side of the bed.
“I can help you with this,” Tina said, “but you have to let me. You can’t fight with me.”
An hour later she gave me a list of twenty names. Newspaper editors, cable television producers, people in public relations, speechwriters, even a local politician we vaguely knew. She said, “You have to call these people and tell them you’re available for work.”
“I already have.”
“No, you haven’t. You just looked up your old pals.”
I looked at the first name on the list. “Not that fuck-weed. I can’t call him!”
She shushed me. “You said you wouldn’t fight about this.”
So I didn’t. I gave myself a day’s respite and then I sat down at the kitchen table and started making calls. And to my surprise, she was right. Most everybody was pretty decent. They didn’t have anything for me for the moment, but they were friendly, encouraging.
In a moment of energized optimism (phoning is better than waiting), I said to Jesse, “This is my problem, not yours.” But he wasn’t a lout or a parasite and I could feel him tiptoeing around “the situation,” could feel him almost wince when he asked for ten dollars for this, ten dollars for that. But what could he do? He didn’t have a bean. His mother was helping out but she was an actor, a stage actor at that. And it certainly wasn’t up to Tina to crack into her savings (started when she was sixteen) to support my son whose free-floating, it’ll-happen-dude posture I had so confidently encouraged. In the middle of the night (when little good comes from thinking about anything), I wondered how unpleasant things were going to get, how toxic the atmosphere around money, if my luck didn’t change soon.
The film club resumed. To lure Jesse into watching more movies without making it too school-like, I made up a game of spot-the-great-moment. This meant a scene or a bit of dialogue or image that snaps you forward in your seat; makes your heart bang. We started with an easy one, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), the story of a failed writer (Jack Nicholson) who goes slowly mad in a deserted hotel and tries to murder his family.
The Shining is probably director Stanley Kubrick’s (Dr. Strangelove [1964] and 2001 [1968]) best film. But Stephen King, the author of the novel, loathed the movie and disliked Kubrick. A lot of people did; Kubrick was famous for being a finicky, self-adoring man who made actors do things over and over with questionable results; when Jack Nicholson ambushes Scatman Crothers with an axe in The Shining, Kubrick made them do it forty times; finally, seeing that the seventy-year-old Crothers was exhausted, Nicholson told Kubrick that was enough takes, he wasn’t going to do it again.
Later on in the filming, Jack pursued his knife-wielding wife (Shelley Duvall) up the stairs fifty-eight times before Kubrick was happy. (Was it worth the work? Could the second or third take have done as well? Probably.)
But more importantly, Stephen King felt that Kubrick just “didn’t get it” when it came to horror, didn’t have a clue how it worked. King went to an early screening of The Shining and came away disgusted; he said the movie was like a Cadillac without an engine. “You get in, you can smell the leather, but you can’t drive it anywhere.” In fact, he went on to say he thought Kubrick made movies to “hurt people.”
Which I sort of agree with; but I love The Shining; I love the way it’s shot and lit: I love the sound of the tricycle wheels going from carpet to wood to carpet. It always scares me when the twin girls appear in the hallway. For my great moment though, I picked the scene where Jack Nicholson hallucinates a conversation between himself and a hotel waiter, a stiff, British-butler type. It takes place in an almost blindingly lit washroom—electric orange and white. The dialogue begins innocently enough but then the waiter warns Jack that his young son is “making trouble,” that maybe he should be “dealt with.” The waiter (Philip Stone) steals the scene with his precise stillness and quiet line
readings; watch the way he closes his dry lips at the end of each phrase. It’s like a delicate, vaguely obscene punctuation mark.
He too had problems with children, the waiter confides. One of them didn’t like the hotel and tried to burn it down. But he “corrected him” (with an axe). “And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I corrected her.” It’s a letter-perfect performance. Unlike Jack’s, which has not aged so well since I first saw it in 1980. Here he seems hammy, almost amateurish, surprisingly bad, especially alongside this exquisitely controlled English actor.
That wasn’t Jesse’s great moment, though; he chose the scene where the little boy steals into Jack’s bedroom early in the morning to retrieve a toy only to find his father sitting on the side of the bed with the thousand-yard stare. He summons his son over, who sits uneasily on his lap. Looking at his father’s unshaven face and bleary eyes—in a blue dressing gown Nicholson’s as pale as a corpse—the little boy asks him why he doesn’t go to sleep.
After a beat comes the chilling response: “I’ve got too much to do.” Meaning, we intuit, chop up his family just like the waiter did.
“That’s it,” Jesse whispered. “Can we play it again?”
We watched Annie Hall (1977) for, among other reasons, the scene where Diane Keaton sings “Seems Like Old Times” in a dark bar. Keaton is shot slightly from the side and appears to be looking at someone off-camera. It’s a scene that gives me goosebumps—she seems to be singing the song, making its dramatic points with her eyes. It’s also a moment of self-realization for her character, Annie Hall, a fledgling musician, who is taking apprehensive but certain first flight.
Some films let you down; you must have been in love or heartbroken, you must have been wound up about something when you saw them because now, viewed from a different trajectory, there’s no magic left. I showed him Around the World in 80 Days (1956) which, with its glorious shot of a balloon floating over Paris at sunset, had knocked me out when I was his age but now seemed appallingly dated and silly.
But some films still do it, still give you a thrill years and years later. I showed Jesse Mean Streets (1973), a movie that Martin Scorsese made at the very beginning of his career. It’s about growing up in New York’s violent, macho Little Italy. There’s a sequence near the beginning I’ve never forgotten. With the dramatic chords of the Rolling Stones’ “Tell Me” in the background, the camera follows Harvey Keitel in his passage through a red-lit bar. Anyone who has gone into a favourite bar on a Friday night knows that moment. You know everyone, they wave, they call out your name, the whole night is before you. Keitel snakes his way through the crowd, shaking hands here, exchanging a joke there; he’s dancing slowly, just in the hip, to the music; it’s a portrait of a young man in love with life, in love with being alive on this Friday night with these people in this place. It also bears the signature of a young filmmaker’s joy, a moment of transport, when he’s doing it, he’s actually making a movie.
The Film Club Page 5
