American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  Beau watched. Beside him Udo sucked in his breath. Even when he wasn’t playing a vampire he resembled one, with his puffy cheeks and pouty lips. His looming presence intimidated everyone on the set.

  HECTOR

  I’m just gonna step in there and hit the can.

  WIND. Hector takes three strides toward the diner and stops. The sign sways above him. He turns back to the GTO and pulls a machete out from under the seat.

  HECTOR (CONT’D)

  I might shave, too.

  On it went. Mitchell’s script was fathomless, yet apart from the shuddersome beginning and the end, not much happened. Morrison wanted to shoot the thing chronologically and then reshuffle the deck again—and again—in the editing room. He talked about releasing radically different cuts.

  “That girl, she is ruining everything.” Udo folded his arms across his chest. His S’s and digraphs hissed, G’s clinked like a true German’s. “Beau—”

  “Shh.” The producer lifted his hand. Li walked out of the diner, dressed in her denim short shorts and gingham shirt. “We’ve waited for this long enough, Udo. Let’s not screw it up ourselves.”

  Principal photography was done before Memorial Day. They shot altogether too much, as Morrison’s melancholy Teutonic style met Mitchell’s overlong script. The director called it an “Existential Road Western.” Inside the movie’s diner/saloon, people wore pocket watches and talked with rugged civility. It was Western like Heaven’s Gate would be, not like Peckinpah. Outside, the gas station itself was a platform for violence. The two worlds didn’t overlap. The rest of the material consisted of footage shot on the highway, and was mostly speed, solitude, pebble-kicking, and wind. Davis pissing against a cactus in silhouette. You could see his cock. Years later, Severin and I would watch it and find the film not transgressive but inscrutable. Too thoughtful to be awful, too drab to be anything else.

  In June, Morrison Groom returned to Los Angeles and began his own process of assembling the rushes. So few people had been involved in the film’s making, and fewer still had seen even a frame. From dailies, Beau could determine nearly nothing. Davis and Bryce had chemistry; there was that. The psychopath (Davis) comforted the shy brother (Bryce), which was another of Mitchell’s sly reversals: that Davis played the killer instead of Bryce was a stroke of the unexpected. But what would happen was anybody’s guess. The director took up residence in a post house in the Valley, a brown building on Ventura Boulevard that looked like a fifties apartment complex. It was half a mile from the Burbank gates and fully worlds away. Peter Konrad, Morrison’s editor, was there too. Beau spent his afternoons on the couch, catnapping, and his evenings scrubbing his eye sockets with his fists while Morrison and Peter examined take after take after nearly identical take. Occasionally Beau would venture forth to give an ignored opinion, or would stagger across the wide, hissing stream of Ventura Boulevard to eat steak in an ancient chophouse. The two rooms were equally dark, the restaurant and the editing booth, and the one was distinguished by decrepit waitresses and shitty food while the other was lit by Udo Kier repeating, in variant Teutonic ways, the film’s climactic line: Not this head! This is the wrong fucking head! After which the frame would appear to burn through and Morrison hoped to create a Möbius loop with sound, the word blurring with Bryce’s pronouncement of the same during the first scene. Beau was tired. Sitting inside the Coach House with his martini, or in the editing booth, which was the only one occupied of the facility’s three, he wasn’t sure what kind of movie he’d made: good, bad, or—and, he supposed—indifferent, since it could’ve been all of these at once.

  “This one.”

  “Zis one?” Morrison was German too, born Maurice Grumbach. “Peter, it’s wrong. Udo steps on Davis’s line—”

  “Look where he is in the frame.”

  “Huh?”

  Peter was Ukrainian, born in the same town, Berdychiv, as Beau’s father.

  “Just look. Here. It tracks better with the previous shot.”

  Beau lay on his back on the black velvet couch, pinned between Europeans, chest heaving with boredom. Someone had tacked a Gunsmoke poster to the ceiling, James Arness pointing his pistol right in Beau’s face. A low table held out-of-date, thumb-smudged issues of Playboy and Variety beside a Styrofoam cup of coffee that preceded their arrival. A solid skin had formed on top, furred with bluish mold.

  “Huh.”

  “See?” Peter said. Greasy, bearded Peter, whose vegan diet sometimes filled the booth with an intolerable stench. “There, right there, see how he enters from the right.”

  “Not this head! The wrong fucking head!”

  “Christ, his reading’s terrible.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Look.”

  He hunched forward to indicate something, lank hair falling around his face. They worked on a Steenbeck flatbed. Morrison crowded in beside him. Cigarette smoke, too, filled the booth.

  “So this one.”

  “Yeah,” Peter said. “This one.”

  Morrison let out a dry cackle. Pudgy, short-armed, he wore his dark hair slicked back and round glasses just like Mitchell’s; lately, he’d affected a Western shirt and bolo tie. He looked like a deranged game show host.

  “I see. Yes.”

  Beau cleared his throat. Morrison turned.

  “Does the producer haf an opinion?”

  The two men hated one another by now. Looking over the tops of his glasses, Morrison was happy to play the cartoon German with Beau.

  “None fit to print.”

  Amazing how all this went into the film too, how off-screen tensions were part of its texture. Udo’s frozen, ravening glare filled the frame.

  “I’m going home,” Beau said. And the director and editor turned back to one another. The inscrutable image rested, still, between them.

  The director settled on one cut, then the next. The studio had scheduled the film for release in November, yet no one there had seen a frame of it. Jeremy had turned his back in private, although he continued to enthuse about the movie to any Variety reporter who bothered to ask. Most didn’t, and maybe Jeremy could bury this picture between successes. Death Wish was his, and The Odessa File, so who cared if the impossible German—he’d never make another studio movie, at least—fucked up a bit of inexpensive art-house fluffcore? He’d written the production off from go. Beau moved back to his apartment, in a two-story building just south of Olympic. He couldn’t live at Beller’s forever. In the little efficiency unit, its gray carpet as mangy as a long-haired terrier’s fur, he spoke on the phone with Rachel, begging, hectoring, pleading.

  “Rach, please.” Agent or no, this mode was his life. He leaned on the kitchenette’s counter, bare arms pressing against Formica. “I just want to see them.”

  “I never said you couldn’t.”

  “What?” Was his ex-wife losing her mind? “You said—”

  “I worried about your influence.” She sighed. “Come to New York.”

  “I can see them? What made you change your mind?”

  Silence on the far end of the line. He thought of Morrison locking him out of the editing room, locking everyone out except Peter. You hostaged your treasure. Rachel knew that as well as anybody.

  “I don’t know. They need a father.”

  “Can I bring them out for a visit?”

  Silence, again. This place had one bedroom and it was pristine, laid out just so. Beau slept on a mattress that drifted on the living room floor like a raft. There were piles of scripts, cartons of takeaway, voluminous white underwear drying stiff on the windowsill. A cracked piano, left by the last tenant who’d died intestate.

  “All right,” Rachel said at last. “For a weekend.”

  If he’d listened a little harder, perhaps, he’d have heard something else, a dislocation that had crept into her tone. But even when they were married and he’d felt she understood him, had she ever felt that way about him?

  “Thank you.” His kitchen window looked down at the co
urtyard’s swimming pool, its surface spotted with brown leaves. Two elderly neighbors puttered crab-like around its kidney-shaped edges. “Thank you, Rach.”

  “How soon would you like to come get them?”

  To what could he owe this volte-face? Did it matter? It was twilight, that hour when the Hasids began to walk along the avenues toward the synagogues on Fairfax, on Pico. Beau loved this time of day, the men in their wide hats dappling the street like blackbirds. His life’s disorder suddenly seemed a form of joy. The bills, the unread scripts, the letters from creditors, the greasy chopsticks jutting out of their cartons. Few people even knew he lived here. But when he came here to sleep, he plunked down on the mattress and let the room spin overhead. He’d stand out on the balcony, the narrow terrace that circled this third floor of an eighteen-unit complex, and consider a swan dive to the concrete below, the mottled lip of the pool whose salted coping looked like pitted skin. This was his life. And in the midst of it he kept dreaming of order, imagining a way his kids would become part of it. The extra bedroom here was the only thing he looked after, twin pallets running under the two windows, the air sparkling while the rest of the place smelled like mildew and dirty socks and old food. It was a life fraught with chaos no child could resist, and for a moment it seemed he’d already lived it, that the hours spent leaning over to watch Kate play “Tea for Two” beside him had, in fact, actually happened.

  “Friday,” he said, now, on the phone. “I’ll come get them Friday.”

  V

  BEAU PICKED THEM up at Rachel’s apartment, standing out on the stoop while they filed past an unknown housekeeper to greet him. He hadn’t had an unsupervised visit in three years. Both were so somber! A pair of serious six-year-olds who barely deigned to recognize him. Severin butted him with a shoulder, a half hug for a greeting, while Kate sat apart, staring out the cab window as they pulled away.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I—I live there, remember? Do you remember?”

  Shrugs. They rattled around in the backseat alongside him, headed for LaGuardia. Severin seemed preoccupied with a comic book he was carrying (Fantastic Four #45, “Among Us Hide the Inhumans!”) along with a copy of Huckleberry Finn. Kate fiddled with her hair, dry and black as a horse’s tail.

  Beau looked at his son. “You’re six years old and you’re reading Huckleberry Finn?”

  “Yep.”

  “You’re your mother’s.”

  Severin gazed at his lap. Kate leaned into Beau a little. He put his arm around her puffy parka. The twins wore identical ones, but otherwise had grown very much unalike. Severin’s hair was clumpy, and he was thin like a carrot, and tufted on top. He wore hornrimmed glasses, and sniffled as he stared down at his comic. Kate’s face was wider, her large eyes a liquid green.

  “You don’t need those,” he said. The cab raced toward the airport. “Where we’re going you won’t need jackets.”

  Severin kept his on. Underneath it was a shirt for his T-ball team, the Lions.

  “You play baseball?”

  He did. What position? Center field, just like Don Hahn, inexplicably his favorite player. Did Beau know Don Hahn hit the first inside-the-park home run ever at Veterans Stadium? Beau, no more a jock than he was an intellectual, just shook his head. Sev seemed to know a lot about the game, as he did about several things already at that age. Geography, for example, and dates. He was an avid consumer of almanacs. He had a strange obsession with Idi Amin.

  “Did you know Amin was a boxer?”

  “I—the Ugandan? Him?” Beau blinked at his son as they strode through the departure terminal, Kate having taken his hand and Severin lugging a little suitcase on rollers. “I did not know that, no.”

  “Yep. An athlete.”

  “Ah.” Beau didn’t know what to say. Cool? Was that what you said to a six-year-old lugging a cracked plastic suitcase who suddenly began talking about a military dictator? Beau knelt down.

  “I’m not scary, you know.”

  Severin just looked at him. Again shrugged, like this wasn’t the question he’d asked.

  Kate thawed first. On the plane, she draped herself over his lap and fell asleep. They flew the old Pan Am. Severin peered out the window at the golden beds of clouds while Beau sat on the aisle, leaned his seat back and drank scotch while his daughter napped.

  “The weather patterns are changing,” Sev said.

  Beau gave him a heavy-lidded, confidential stare. He had a strange son, was his thought, though God knew Sev’s weirdness was beginning to grow on him. He’d have talked about Idi Amin all day if it meant he could stay sipping scotch with fifty-pound Kate dozing in his lap, while the cabin filled with afternoon light. His hand shook when he reached down to touch her cheek.

  “So what do you like, besides genocidal maniacs and meteorology?”

  Yet another shrug.

  “Surely you must like something. Tom Sawyer. The Inhumans, there.”

  “The Beatles. I like the Beatles.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “Beatles for Sale is my favorite.”

  “Really?” Another heavy, sidelong glance. “You’re a weird kid, Sev.”

  “I like being a weird kid.”

  “I hated it. You want a soda?”

  “Mom won’t let us drink soda.”

  “You want some of this?”

  “What is it?” Severin sniffed. “I don’t think so, it smells like . . . like a doctor’s office.”

  “You sure?” Beau pulled from the plastic cup, just plain scotch with a little ice. “It’s good stuff.”

  “No, it’s sting-y. It smells like it does when they give you a shot.”

  “Oh, OK.” In his lap his daughter’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell. “Sometimes I have bad ideas, you know? That was probably a bad idea, offering you liquor.”

  “It’s all right.” Severin cracked a smile.

  “You won’t tell your mother?”

  “No.” Smiling at him like a tiny adult, like this was what he’d wanted all along, to find the seam of his father’s vulnerability.

  “I never know,” Beau muttered, “sometimes I just don’t know. But I try, I try to do right.”

  He finished the rest of his scotch. Severin carefully tucked his comic book back into its glassine baggie. Beau closed his eyes and listened to it crinkling, even above the vast gasp of the plane.

  It was the happiest weekend of his life. It was better even than being married, better than any dream he’d encountered. He and his children landed and he whisked them off to a derelict theater in the Marina where they were still showing Sleeper and Bananas, the same two movies over and over for nearly a year and a half. They went to Ship’s Coffee Shop, with its individual toaster in each booth, and built towers of cinnamon bread. On Sunday afternoon they went to Roxbury Park and played tag, then drifted around the city in a rented limousine. In his fridge were a jar of peanut butter and a gallon of milk, but it didn’t matter how busted he was. They should have everything. On the red-eye back to New York they flew first class. Profligate, he watched them, their tiny bodies sprawled out, one on each side of him.

  “I want to see Freebie and the Bean.” Now they waited in the arrival terminal at LaGuardia, where Rachel was picking them up, and Severin petitioned his father to see a movie that wasn’t due for several months, whose release had been pushed back.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “Violence.” Beau grunted. “I don’t mind you seeing things that are over your head, but I do mind things that you shouldn’t see at all.”

  “What about your movie?”

  “Never. Not until you’re an adult, Sev.”

  Kate sat in her purple skirt, thin for what was still winter in the city. A pair of sunglasses was propped atop her head. She was chewing Fruit Stripe gum and reading Vogue.

  “Come on, guys, let’s go meet your mother. C
ome on.”

  They didn’t want to leave him. A single weekend wrought this impossible change. Severin clung to his stubby wrist, his thick paw, and Kate ambled along detached. Some plastic perfume she wore made her smell like a French courtesan.

  “Daddy.” She perched on the edge of the baggage carousel, arms outstretched.

  “Yep?”

  “Don’t leave.”

  He kissed Severin’s cheek. The early issues of The Inhumans, which he’d tracked down at a comic shop in Santa Monica, were tucked under his son’s arm now as well.

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  Rachel startled him. He hadn’t seen her in a year and a half, and her head was shaved like a Krishna’s. She was skinnier even than she’d been and looked luminously unwell. He studied the sinews on her neck, the skeletal tilt of her head.

  “Have you gotten to a nunnery?”

  He’d wondered for an instant if she was sick, but he could see as she drew closer across the concourse floor that her physical health was fine.

  “Have you discovered women? I could’ve told you before we were married and saved you a lot of aggravation.” He gave an ingratiating smile. He was never less charming than when he was trying for charm, never more boorish or coarse.

  “Thank you for bringing them back on time.”

  Her voice hadn’t changed, at least. It was still flat, imperious, and annoying.

  “You wanna have coffee?” he said.

  “I’m fasting.”

  So they sat in the terminal and she had hot water while he ate a Danish and the kids flocked around them both. The novelty!

  “Did you guys have a good time?”

  They nodded, mute in the airport’s drab and timeless light. In their mother’s presence, they became shy before their father again. Kate sucked her thumb.

  “They had a good time. I had a good time. I really want to do it again.”

  “Do it twice a month if you’d like. I’ll adhere to the original agreement.”

  Beau eyed her. “What is this?”

  She sighed. There was something she wasn’t telling.