I sold my loft in the candy factory and with the windfall that came with it, my wife and I bought a Victorian house on the edge of Chinatown. Maggie finally returned home. Such happiness; it had been more than a year. She still, however, felt Jesse needed to “live with a man.” So did I. So, mercifully, did my wife. At a family party over Christmas, a diminutive, sparrow-voiced aunt, the retired principal of a high school, had told me, “Don’t be fooled. Teenage boys need as much attention as newborns. Except they need it from their fathers.”
Jesse followed me and Tina across town with three industrial-strength garbage bags of clothing and dozens of caseless CDs. He moved into the blue bedroom on the third floor, from which you could see all the way to the lake. It was the best room in the house, the quietest, the best ventilated. I bought him a print of John Water-house’s naked maidens swimming in a pond and hung it on his wall between posters of Eminem (a homely-looking fellow when all is said and done), Al Pacino with a cigar (Scarface) and some thug wearing nylons on his head and pointing a 9mm pistol in your face, the caption reading: Say hello to da bad guyz.
In fact, as I write this, I am only a few yards down the hall from Jesse’s blue bedroom, empty now, one of his discarded shirts still hanging on the back of the door. The room is tidier these days, a DVD of Chungking Express ranged away in his night table alongside Middlemarch (still unread), Elmore Leonard’s Glitz (at least he didn’t sell it), Tolstoy’s The Cossacks (my idea) and Anthony Bourdain’s The Nasty Bits, which he left here the last time he and his girlfriend spent the night. I find the presence of these things comforting, as if he is still here, in spirit anyway; that he will, indeed, be back someday.
Still, and I don’t want to get maudlin here, some nights I walk by his bedroom on the way to my study and I take a peek inside. The moonlight falls over his bed, the room is very still, and I can’t quite believe he’s gone. There were other things we were going to do to that room, other prints, another clothes peg for the wall. But time ran out.
Fall in Chinatown; the leaves turning red in the giant forests north of the city. Gloves appeared on the hands of the women who rode their bicycles past our house. Jesse got a part-time job working the phones for a pair of telemarketing slimeballs who raised money for a “fireman’s magazine.”
Early one evening, I stopped by the “office,” a grungy little joint with six or seven compartments in which sat a dead-end white kid, a Pakistani, an overweight woman with a tub of Coke in front of her, all working the phones. Jesus, I thought. This is the company I’ve dropped him into. This is the future.
And there he was, right at the back, phone to his ear, his voice hoarse from hustling seniors and shut-ins and gullibles at dinnertime. He was good at phone sales, you could tell. He got people on the phone and held them there and charmed them and made them laugh and kidded them until they coughed it up.
The bosses were there too, a runt in a yellow windbreaker and his smoothie partner, a good-looking con named Dale. I introduced myself. Jesse was their top boy, they said. Number one on the “floor.” Behind us, I heard snatches of barely comprehensible English, an Eastern European voice with an accent so thick it sounded like a sitcom; Bengali drifted over from a different booth; then a woman’s nasal voice, punctuated by the sound of someone sucking ice cubes through a straw. It sounded like a shovel on cement.
Jesse came over, that jaunty walk he had when he was happy, looking left and right. He said, “Let’s go outside for a chat,” which meant he didn’t want me talking too long to his bosses, making inquiries about the “fireman’s magazine.” As in, Is there a copy I might have a look at? (There wasn’t.)
I took him to dinner at Le Paradis that same night. (If I had an addiction, it wasn’t booze or cocaine or girlie mags; it was eating in restaurants even when I was broke.)
“Have you ever actually seen this fireman’s magazine?” I asked. He chewed his flatiron steak for a moment, his mouth open. Maybe it was the poorly digested nap I’d taken that afternoon, but just the fact of him eating with his mouth open after I’d told him four thousand times not to plunged me into an irritable despair.
“Jesse,” I said, “please.”
“What?” he said.
I made a rather coarse gesture with my lips.
Normally he would have laughed (even if it wasn’t amusing) and said sorry and gone on with things, but tonight there was a hesitation. I saw his face go slightly white. He looked down at his plate as if he was making a decision, a tough one, to overcome a bodily sensation. Then he said simply, “Okay.” But you could feel the heat still in the air. It was as if I had opened a furnace door and then shut it.
I said, “If you don’t want me to correct your table manners . . .” I began.
“It’s fine,” he said, waving it away. Not looking at me. I thought, Oh God, I’ve mocked him. I’ve offended his pride by making that stupid face. For a moment the two of us sat there, him chewing, staring at his plate, me looking at him with crumbling determination. “Jesse,” I said gently.
“Huh?” He looked up, not the way you look at your father, but rather the way Al Pacino looks at an asshole. We had passed a stage somewhere. He was sick of being scared of me and wanted me to know it. In fact, the balance was shifting even more dramatically. I was becoming intimidated by his displeasure.
I said, “Do you want to go outside for a cigarette; cool down.”
“I’m fine.”
I said, “That was coarse what I just did. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
“I want you to forgive me for it, okay?”
He didn’t answer. He was thinking about something else.
“Okay?” I repeated softly.
“Okay, sure. Done.”
“What?” I asked, even more softly. He was dangling his napkin from his hand, just brushing it back and forth, back and forth over a spot on the table. Was he remembering that scene with James Dean twirling the rope? Saying no to whatever was being asked of him.
“Sometimes I think you have too big an effect on me,” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t think other kids get so—” he looked for the word “—paralyzed by having a fight with their dads. Some of them tell them to fuck off.”
“I don’t ever want us to be like that,” I said, nearly breathless.
“No, me neither. But shouldn’t I be a little less affected by you?”
“Are you?”
“It’s why I don’t get in trouble. I’m terrified of you being mad at me.”
This was not the conversation I had planned when I had invited him out to a dinner I could not afford.
“Terrified of what? I’ve never hit you. I’ve never—” I stopped.
“I’m like a little kid.” His eyes misted up with frustration. “I shouldn’t be so nervous around you.”
I put down my fork. I could feel the colour flee my face. “You have more power over me than you think,” I said.
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
“Like when?”
“Like right now.”
“Do you think you have too much power over me?” he said.
I was having trouble catching my breath. I said, “I think you want me to think well of you.”
“You don’t think I’m just a little baby who’s scared of you?”
“Jesse, you’re six foot four. You could beat the—forgive my language—shit out of me whenever you wanted to.”
“Do you think I could?”
“I know you could.”
Something in his whole body relaxed. He said, “I want that cigarette now,” and went outside. I could see him moving back and forth on the other side of the French doors; and after a while he came back in and said something to the bartender who laughed and then came up through the room, a dark-haired university girl watching him carefully. I could see he was happy, looking left and right, a bounce back in his step, settling back down at the table, picking
up his napkin, wiping his mouth. I’ve given him what he needs for now, I thought, but he’ll need more soon.
I said, “Can we talk about the fireman’s magazine?”
“Sure,” he said, pouring himself a fresh glass of wine. (Usually I poured.) “I love this restaurant,” he said. “If I were rich, I think I’d have dinner here every night.”
Things were definitely changing between us. I knew down the road, not that far, we were going to have a shootout and I was going to lose. Just like all those other fathers in history. It’s why I picked our next movie.
Do you remember those words: “I know what you’re thinking—did he fire six shots or only five. Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you gotta ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?”
When the good Lord calls Clint Eastwood home, that speech will turn up on every six o’clock news show around the world, Dirty Harry looking down the barrel of his gun at an out-of-business bank robber and giving him the business. That movie—if not that speech—shot Clint Eastwood into the front rank of American leading men, up there with John Wayne and Marlon Brando. Two years later, in 1973, a screenwriter phoned Clint Eastwood, said he’d been reading about the death squads in Brazil, rogue cops killing criminals without bothering to take them to court. How about Dirty Harry discovering the presence of death squads in the LAPD? They’d call it Magnum Force. The movie was on; when it opened during the holiday season the following year, it sold even more tickets than Dirty Harry; in fact, it made more money for Warner Brothers in its first weeks than any previous film in its history.
Magnum Force is by far the best of the Dirty Harry sequels and cemented the love affair between movie audiences and the gun that can “blow the engine block out of a car at a hundred yards.”
“But,” I said to Jesse, “that’s not why I’m showing it to you.”
“No?” he said.
I stopped the film in midframe right near the top where Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan steps off the sidewalk of a sunny street in San Francisco and approaches a murder victim’s car, the body inside, major head wound. Behind Eastwood, on the sidewalk, is a long-haired, bearded man.
I said, “Do you recognize him?”
“No.”
“That’s my brother,” I said.
It was indeed my estranged brother who happened to be passing through San Francisco when the film was being shot. He had driven West in a wild flurry, four days, to join a religious cult, I’ve forgotten which one. But when he knocked at their door he was refused entry. So he bought a ticket for a live taping of The Merv Griffin Show and did that instead. Then just as fast as he’d arrived, he took off back to Toronto. But sometime that first day, he wandered into a film shoot.
“That’s your uncle,” I said.
We both scrutinized the screen; behind the shaggy hair and beard was a handsome young man, twenty-five years old, who looked like Kris Kristofferson.
“Have I ever met him?” Jesse asked.
“Once, when you were little, he turned up at the door. Wanting something. I remember sending you back inside.”
“Why?”
I looked again at the screen. “Because,” I said, “my brother had a genius for stirring up trouble between people. I didn’t want him poisoning your ear when you were fourteen and ready to hear some bad things about me. So I kept him from you.”
Then we turned the movie back on; the freeze frame melted, the movie moved forward and my brother disappeared from the screen.
“But that’s not the only reason,” I said. “The real reason is that when I was smaller than him, he scared the hell out of me. And you end up hating people who scare you. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want that to happen with us,” I said. “Please.”
Just that “please” gave him something a hundred apologies or explanations couldn’t.
There was no fireman’s magazine; it was a scam. A few weeks later, when Jesse went into “work,” the place was locked up, Dale and the runt were gone. They beat him for a few hundred dollars but he didn’t seem to care. The job had served its purpose, the first steps in a break from his dependence on his parents. (He understood intuitively, I think, that financial dependence cements emotional dependence.)
There were other, worse jobs around and before long he found one. Another telemarketing gig, this one selling credit cards to poor families in the Deep South, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi. I wasn’t invited around to meet the boss this time. Some nights when he returned home, his voice ravaged from talking and smoking, I’d quiz him. I’d say, “Explain to me why MasterCard would entrust a bunch of young guys in baseball hats to sell credit cards. I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I, Dad,” he said, “but it works.”
Meanwhile there was not a hint of Rebecca; not a sighting in a club, on the street, no phone calls, nothing. It was as if she had developed a kind of radar that warned her when Jesse was nearby and she simply vanished. When she said, “You will never see me again,” she had been true to her word.
I awoke one night for no particular reason. My wife was asleep beside me with an expression on her face as if she was trying to solve a math problem in her head. Wide awake and mildly anxious, I looked out the window. There was a circle of mist around the moon. I put on my dressing gown and went down the stairs. An open DVD box lay on the chesterfield. Jesse must have come in late and watched a movie after we went to bed. I went over to the machine to see what it was but as I drew closer I experienced a kind of foreboding, as if I was crossing a line into a dangerous zone, that I was going to find something I wouldn’t like. A gruesomely pornographic movie maybe, something to shore up my confidence in the effectiveness of my child rearing.
But perversity, annoyance, a sense of supervisory impatience, I don’t know what, overcame my caution, and I popped open the tray. And what came out? Not what I expected. It was a small Hong Kong film, Chungking Express (1994), which I’d shown Jesse months before. Images of a celery-stick Asian girl dancing alone in a stranger’s apartment. What was the song? Oh yes, “California Dreamin’,” the Mamas and the Papas hit, sounding fresh and big in a way it never did in the ’60s.
I felt a peculiar alertness, a tugging at my sleeve, as if I was staring at something but couldn’t recognize what it was. Like the priceless stamps in Hitchcock’s 39 Steps (1935). What was it?
Somewhere in the house, I could hear something very faint, a clicking. I went up the stairs; it got louder; then up to the third floor. I was going to knock on his door—you don’t go into a young man’s bedroom in the middle of the night unannounced—when I saw him through a crack in the door.
“Jesse?” I whispered.
No answer. The room was washed in a green light, Jesse at the computer, his back to me. The sound of insects coming from the headphones on his ears. He was writing somebody. A private moment, click-click, click, click-click, but such a lonely one, four o’clock in the morning, writing to some other kid thousands of miles away; talking about what? Rap, sex, suicide? And again I saw him standing at the bottom of a glistening well, mortar and brick all the way around, no way to climb up (too slippery), no way to break through (too hard), just an eternity of waiting for something to appear overhead, a cloud, a face, a rope dangled down.
And I understood suddenly why the movie had caught my attention, why that particular movie, Chungking Express. Because the beautiful girl in it reminded him of Rebecca; and watching the movie was a little bit like being with her.
I went back downstairs and went to sleep. Terrible dreams. A boy in a damp well, waiting.
He didn’t get up until my third call the next afternoon. I went upstairs and gave his shoulder a gentle shake. He was sleeping too deeply. It took him twenty minutes to make it downstairs. Peta
ls fell from the trees in the late afternoon sunlight. Almost a marine look, as if, with the bright golds and greens, we were underwater. A pair of running shoes (a prank) hung from a power line overhead. Down the street were more. A boy in a red T-shirt cycled by, swooping in and out of the little piles of leaves. Jesse seemed listless.
I was going to say but didn’t, “I think you should start going to the gym.”
He pulled out a cigarette.
“Please, not before breakfast.”
He sat forward, rocking his head slightly back and forth. “Do you think I should call Rebecca?” he said.
“Is she still on your mind?” (Stupid question.)
“Every second of every day. I think I made a big mistake.”
After a moment I said, “I think Rebecca was big trouble and you got out before the house burned down.”
I could see he wanted a cigarette, that he wasn’t going to concentrate till he had one. I said, “Light up if you want to. You know it makes me ill.”
Calmer once the smoke filled his lungs (his complexion even greyer it seemed), he said, “Is this going to go on forever?”
“What?”
“Missing Rebecca.”
I thought of Paula Moors, an old heartbreak of my own; I lost twenty pounds in two weeks over her. “It’s going to go on until you find someone you like as much as her,” I said.
“Not just another girlfriend?”
“No.”
“What if she’s just a nice person? That’s what my mom says.”
That remark—with its attendant implications that a “nice” girl would make Jesse forget his sexual longing for Rebecca—captured a side of Maggie that was both endearing and maddening. Here was a woman who had taught high school in a small Saskatchewan farming community, who, at the age of twenty-five, decided she wanted to be an actress; quit her job, bid her family a tearful, train-station goodbye, and came to Toronto—two thousand miles away—to do it.
When I met her she was appearing, with green hair, in a punk musical. But somehow when she talked to our son about his life, especially his “future,” she forgot all that and became instead spouter of breathtakingly simpleminded counsel. (“Maybe you should go to math camp this summer.”) Her worry, her concern for his welfare novacained her intelligence, which was normally intuitive and considerable.
The Film Club Page 10
