The Man In The Seventh Row

by Brian Pendreigh

  'You're dad's a butcher with asthma,' said Jumbo. 'And your story's mince. The only thing your dad ever dropped was sausages.'

  Roy was hurt.

  Because he didn't get to see The Dirty Dozen, his mother took him and Stephen to the pictures the following week in Edinburgh. They went to see The Wizard of Oz. Judy Garland was not Lee Marvin, and the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow presented little threat to the Third Reich. No self-respecting 11-year-old could admit to liking the Munchkins, with their silly squeaky voices and songs about yellow brick roads. But Roy did like them and for years to come, whenever he saw a rainbow in the sky, he would think of Dorothy and the place she dreamed of and wonder what the end of a rainbow was like.

  It all seemed so innocent then, a little girl and her dream, before he found out about Judy Garland's drug dependency, her nervous breadkdowns and her suicide attempts, before he read reports of orgies and rowdiness among the midgets who played the Munchkins, and before he found out what did lie at the end of a rainbow. How different it might have been if he had seen The Dirty Dozen, his mother had never taken him to The Wizard of Oz and he had never developed a fascination for chasing rainbows.

  6

  Los Angeles, March 1996

  An indistinct figure makes its way through a misty pine forest and looks down upon a patchwork of lights. Go back, go back, the man in the seventh row shouts silently. The little figure seems to purr in wonder, but still we do not see him. There is a roar like a lion as a vehicle grinds to a halt. Other vehicles appear all bright light and violent movement, shattering the tranquillity of the misty night. They seem to encircle the figure.

  The man in the seventh row remembers how Rosebud shook her head, eyes never leaving the screen when he asked her if it was too scary. He would hold her hand and assure her everything would be alright.

  On screen the little figure screams, like a cat, in alarm. The ferns dance wildly as the figure dashes through them. It seems to give off a light as it goes. Torches cut the night air like light-sabres. The men from the cars pursue the half-seen figure as it dashes towards the point where it knows its friends are waiting. Almost there.

  'Quick, hurry,' Rosebud would entreat, having watched the film numerous times. She knew the figure was hurrying back to the spaceship, but she refused to accept that it would never make it. Maybe this time. Maybe this time it would get there in time. Oval like an Easter egg, lit like a Christmas tree, the craft rises above the pine trees.

  And E.T. is left behind. Alone.

  'Don't worry. Everything will be alright,' the man in the seventh row would assure Rosebud.

  The man in the seventh row sits alone now. And he sobs too. Great, heaving, silent sobs that shake his shoulders and grip his whole body. Tears stream down his face. He rises and makes his way to the exit. He can watch no more. He can take no more.

  The man from the seventh row stumbles out into the day, momentarily blinded by his tears and the shock of bright sunshine after the darkness of the cinema. He was alone in the cinema with his thoughts. Now he is a figure in a busy urban landscape. He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. Two young men watch him with little curiosity. Tiredness shows in his face and sunshine glints on three-day-old stubble, black in stark contrast to the hair on his head. He pulls mirrored sunglasses from the inside pocket of his crumpled black linen suit. One youth says something to the other. The man starts to make his way along the sidewalk and the youths follow him with their gaze.

  He walks unevenly, as if slightly drunk or shell-shocked. Perhaps sensing a kindred spirit, an old man silently proffers a brown paper bag to the passing stranger, who ignores or does not see the outstretched arm. He keeps walking as if in a daze, leaving it for others to get out of his way, until he reaches a newspaper dispenser at the side of the road. Through the window of the contraption he stares at the headline in the Los Angeles Times – 'City gripped by new terror' – but it is unclear whether the words register. He puts several quarters into the slot, hesitates and walks on without taking his paper. A blue Ford pick-up blares its horn when he steps out onto the road, the sound quickly lost in the din of men drilling and traffic moving. The aroma of bacon and coffee drifts out into the sunshine from a diner. He climbs the steps of an old stone building and enters beneath the sign 'Police'.

  His stride seems surer now. He walks with a new determination, along a white-walled corridor towards an inquiry desk. Just short of the desk he stops and asks a uniformed officer a question. The policeman glances at the newcomer and resuming his previous conversation gestures with a thumb over his right shoulder. The man follows the direction indicated, down another long corridor, at the end of which is a door marked 'Homicide Division'. He enters.

  Plain-clothes officers are sitting around desks. The man asks to see someone in charge. He is shown into a room, where a middle-aged officer in a suit is sitting behind a desk considering some papers.

  'I want to report a murder,' says the visitor.

  'Sit down,' says the man behind the desk. There is a hard edge in his voice. He is a man who says no more than is necessary, sometimes not even that much.

  'Who was murdered?' he asks.

  He looks at the newcomer and the visitor pauses, like a professional actor attempting to crank up the tension and heighten the sense of expectation. The man behind the desk looks at him impassively, and waits for him to speak. Murders in Los Angeles are about as remarkable as tulips in Amsterdam. The man behind the desk has heard it all before, and seen it too.

  His visitor takes a deep breath, considers the question 'Who was murdered?', and weighs up his response.

  'I was,' he says.

  The policeman's face shows not a flicker of reaction. He picks up another piece of paper and begins to read it, as if the topic of discussion has turned out to be too trivial to warrant any further attention.

  'Do you want to hear my story or not?' asks the visitor. 'I don't have much time left. A day, two days, a week at the most. And then I will be gone.'

  'Where?' asks the policeman.

  'The movies,' says the man.

  The policeman raises a quizzical eyebrow. Now it is his turn to pause. 'You're going to the movies?' he says, his voice rising only very slightly at the end.

  'I'm disappearing into the second dimension,' says the man. Quickly reconsidering the melodrama inherent in his comment, he feels he must elaborate. 'The movies are taking me over,' he says. 'Taking over my thoughts. Taking over my body. I can walk and talk but I have no life of my own anymore, no life outside the movies.'

  The policeman frowns and raises a hand to his chin; as if he does not know whether to laugh or cry for assistance. The policeman is not someone to whom laughter comes easily. And he never cries.

  'Name?' says the policeman.

  The visitor appears to be considering whether he should tell him. They sit looking at each other, the impassive grey-suited policeman sees his own image looking back at him from across the desk, reflected in the sunglasses the stranger is still wearing. Instinctively, the stranger reaches up to the glasses and takes them off. For the first time the policeman looks into the tired blue eyes of the other man and is struck by the beauty of the face. He reckons the man is in his mid- to late-thirties, but there are still signs of youth in the delicately chiselled features, an angelic, innocent quality in a city that was named after angels, but long ago lost the last traces of whatever innocence it may once have possessed. The policeman can appreciate beauty in a painting, in a passage of music, in a woman, in another man's face, even. He appreciates them in secret. In the eyes of this man who thinks he is being taken over by the movies the policeman sees a child.

  Most people in this city are taken over by the movies. That is why they are here. Serving beers. Waiting tables. Just waiting. Waiting for the big break that will turn them into the next Tom Cruise, or the next Julia Roberts. But more likely the only movies they will ever make will involve sex with strangers filmed by other strangers. They ar
e no more than children when they come to LA. They quickly grow old, lose their looks and mislay their innocence. Every day the policeman sees people who have been taken over by the movies. They live in trailer parks and dirty, cramped apartments, and they turn tricks on Sunset Boulevard until their own suns set. He has looked on their corpses, abused by drugs and sexual perversion and sees a dream that turned into a nightmare. They were dead long before they were taken to the morgue.

  He looks into the blue eyes of this stranger. And he sees something entirely different. The policeman used to go to the movies, quality films, arthouse films, that his buddies on the force would never have heard of. He went in secret. The visitor is British and he reminds the policeman of a young Terence Stamp as Billy Budd, when he has killed the dreadful Claggart. The policeman looks into the blue eyes of this stranger and says nothing.

  The man from the seventh row looks at the policeman.

  'The name's Batty,' he says at last. 'Roy Batty.'

  The policeman turns away.

  'I can't help you,' he says, shaking his head. 'There's nothing I can do.'

  His voice suddenly hardens again. 'Go on, get going.'

  The man turns and the policeman watches him leave.

  7

  On Hollywood Boulevard, among the fast-food joints and souvenir shops, stands an ancient temple with a green sloping pagoda roof like a fancy, exotic hat, and bright red pillars and canopy. Stone dogs or lions or some hybrid of the two bare their teeth at the pilgrims who come here with bowed heads to pay homage to their gods. The pilgrims gather in small groups and pose, smiling, to record the moment for friends back home in Japan or Germany or Italy. They press their hands into marks made by Bogart in the cement before they were born. Though he is dead now he has left his gospel on celluloid and his handprints in concrete, just like Christ left his gospel in a book and his image in a shroud. But there is a lot more certainty about Bogart. He said he stuck his neck out for no one, but he always did in the end. The tourists climb back onto their bus.

  Anna Fisher walks across the cement blocks bearing Bogart's hand and foot prints and the message 'Sid may you never die till I kill you'.

  'The Chinese Theatre was built by Sid Grauman in 1927,' says an enthusiastic young guide in matching yellow short-sleeved shirt, shorts and baseball cap. 'It was built in the style of a Chinese pagoda,' he tells a huddle of Japanese, young and mainly female.

  The guide came to Los Angeles to get into the movies and he has made it, for half a dozen video cameras capture his every gesture. He addresses them in turn, offering each a few words and a smile as big and white as Tom Cruise's.

  'Actress Norma Talmadge visited the construction site and accidentally trod in the wet cement, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Senior followed her example at the premiere of King of Kings and the greatest stars still come here to record their footprints and handprints in the sidewalk for your enjoyment.' He pauses to allow his audience to digest the enormity of what they are hearing and prepare themselves for the possibility of further dramatic revelations.

  'And in that year, 1927 AD, not only did the Chinese Theatre open, but the very first talkie was released.'

  'Aaah, Aaahl Jolson,' murmur the group, with much nodding of wise oriental heads.

  'And things would never be the same again,' adds the guide.

  It was also the year in which Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Communist Party, thinks Anna, who teaches 20th Century European history at UCLA. It was the year Hitler addressed his followers in Nuremberg, while Jolson told his to wait a minute, they ain't heard nothin' yet. The young man in the yellow outfit was right; things were never the same again. The movies lasted longer than the 1,000-year Reich and today German tourists come to measure their hands against those of Bogart and buy maps purporting to guide them to the homes of today's stars a few miles away in Beverly Hills.

  'There were lots of glamorous premieres here,' says the guide. 'Thousands would turn up just to catch a glimpse of the stars. Has anyone seen the Gene Kelly musical Singin' in the Rain?'

  There is much nodding of heads.

  'That begins with a premiere at the Chinese Theatre in 1927,' says the guide. 'But in the story they decide to go off and remake the film with sound.'

  Anna passes the tourists and enters the shade of the temple, as ancient as anything in these parts, old and yet not old, tangible and yet not real. It is not Grauman's Chinese Theatre anymore, but Mann's Chinese Theatre, part of a chain. They took Sid's name off the cinema, but they cannot take his name out of the concrete.

  Anna makes her way to Cinema 2 and sits in the seventh row of the near-deserted auditorium. Few tourists venture inside. Their time is limited. They can see films at home. Only here can they see Bogart's handprints.

  There is a roll of drums and a crash of cymbals as the film begins, an old grainy black and white print.

  'Harry M. Popkin presents,' says the opening credit across the picture of a high-rise building, little squares of light in a few of its windows helping differentiate it against the black night. A figure walks into view. The audience gets only a brief glimpse of his back before the title credit D.O.A. fills the entire screen. It is an old film and the picture is the shape of a television screen, only slightly wider than it is high.

  Anna had never heard of D.O.A., but it is part of a festival of old films. It had been recommended in the 'Times' and she did not have anything special to do. She never has anything special to do since she split up with Brad three months ago.

  The figure moves towards the building and the camera follows him down a white-walled corridor towards an inquiry desk. Just short of the desk he stops and asks a uniformed officer a question. The policeman is talking to a man in a fedora. The officer glances at the stranger and, resuming his previous conversation, gestures with a thumb over his right shoulder. The man follows the direction indicated, down another long corridor, at the end of which is a door marked 'Homicide Division'. He is shown into an office, where a middle-aged man in a suit is sitting behind a desk considering some papers. 'I want to report a murder,' says the newcomer. 'Who was murdered?' asks the man behind the desk. For the first time we see the other man's face. He is a man in his thirties, unshaven, with a heaviness about his jowls and thick, dark hair greased back from his forehead. She is not sure if she would have recognised the actor as Edmond O'Brien if she had not just read the credits, though she knows she has seen him in black and white movies she has watched on television on weekend afternoons and late at night when she can't sleep.

  O'Brien pauses for dramatic effect after the question 'Who was murdered?'

  'I was,' he says.

  Great beginning, thinks Anna. Great beginning.

  The policeman turns away and looks at a sheet of paper. The man asks if he wants to hear his story or not, for he does not have much time. The policeman asks if his name is Frank Bigelow. The man's mouth drops open in surprise. He confirms he is Frank Bigelow. The policeman instructs a colleague to send a message that they have found him, and invites Bigelow to tell his story.

  A misty whirl transports the viewer back in time. Bigelow is an accountant. Medical tests reveal toxin in his system and he is told he has only a few days to live. He discovers that one of his clients has unwittingly involved him in a convoluted web of deceit, betrayal and murder that will cost him his life. He can still talk, he can still walk, but he is no longer alive. He tracks down and shoots his own killer, tells the police his story and dies. The police classify him 'dead on arrival'.

  8

  The lounge bar of the Roosevelt Hotel is unusually busy for early afternoon. Tourists coming, going, hanging around. Anna has a choice. She can sit at the table of the loud, middle-aged people, who seem to represent a curtailed tour of the islands of the northern hemisphere in their costume of Hawaii shirts and Bermuda shorts. Or she can sit next to the young bedenimed Mexican couple, holidaying, perhaps honeymooning, absorbed in their Rough Guide itinerary and their love. Or she ca
n choose the seat opposite the man in the plain black tee-shirt and black linen suit, who has just drained the brandy balloon and is now rubbing the rim of a cold Rolling Rock against his bottom lip. Angelic blond hair and blue eyes are offset by the dark stubble on his chin, the furrows across his brow and the downturn of his mouth. His hair is dyed blond. There is something slightly dangerous about him, as if he has just walked out of Reservoir Dogs, or maybe just something ever so slightly sleazy.

  He has been watching her, hoping she would not sit at his table, and then hoping she would. She moves elegantly between the tourists, with her cup of coffee balanced on its saucer. Her brown eyes sweep the bar area, ascertaining there are no tables free. Her hair is cropped short and tinted with henna. As her face turns to him he notes the suggestion of a smile, not quite a smile, not nearly a smile, just a suggestion. She is younger than him, early thirties, maybe even late twenties. The brandy wants her to sit down.

  'Is this seat free?' she asks Roy.

  Her voice is matter of fact. He says nothing, but nods, and gestures with his open palm towards the empty chair. She sits and sips her coffee and watches Roy sip his beer. He sips his beer and watches the Mexican couple chatter over the Rough Guide.

  Roy never knew what to say to an attractive woman he had never met before. What would Bogie say? Woody Allen had written an entire play with Bogie as the ultra-cool role model for picking up babes.

  Roy racks his brains, but all he can remember is Bogie telling a dame that when he slaps her she will take it and like it ... Bogie's most memorable lines are not exactly small talk. He never seemed much good at opening conversations with women, or indeed relationships, just ending them. He packed Ingrid off on a plane in Casablanca and buggered off down to Brazzaville with Captain Renault, for a beautiful friendship. And, offered romance with Mary Astor at the end of The Maltese Falcon, he turned her over to the cops to face a murder rap instead. Of all the bars in all the world she had to walk into mine.