Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  “If it wasn’t for Carlos,” he told me, “I wouldn’t have gone into detox like I did. How’s that for an answer?”

  I didn’t know how that was for an answer.

  “You’re saying he’s the one who got you off drugs? But he was selling drugs, wasn’t he? That’s how he came up with the money for his movies. He sold drugs to little kids. Tell me I’ve figured it out.”

  It was something that just hit me one day after we’d finished making The Gospel, and though I thought about it a lot, I knew I couldn’t ask anybody in The Company. It’d get back to Carlos, and if it was something Carlos didn’t want me to know about, then maybe it was because he was protecting me, and I had to respect that.

  “Beats me.” Scott shrugged. “I don’t know anything about making movies. All I know is, they’re expensive. But everything’s expensive. And you know why? It’s the Japanese. Where I work, this sushi restaurant, I take a look around me, and all my bosses—you know, the guys with the money—they’re all Japanese. All I hear is Japanese, and I think—so this is just what it would be like if the Japs won the war.”

  There was a rip in my jeans about halfway up my thigh, and while we talked he slid his finger in that hole and sort of rubbed my skin. It felt nice, though his finger was still as ice cold as it used to be. He looked up at me and kind of laughed.

  “So how about it?” he said.

  I hadn’t seen Scott in about a year—I’d run into him a total of maybe five times since we finished the movie back in 1980 and this was, I think, the winter of ’82. He looked a lot older. He wasn’t nearly as cute as he used to be.

  We went back to his apartment—this tiny little room with nothing in it but a mattress and a lot of fancy stereo equipment—and I fucked him, and then because by that time he was off the junk that’d kept him from being able to keep a hard-on the whole time we were doing the movie, he fucked me too.

  That was the last time I saw him, because not too long after that I left the city for good.

  CREEPING BENT IS THE NAME OF SOME KIND OF plant, but that didn’t have anything to do with the movie Creeping Bent. Carlos just liked the name. He thought it sounded spooky, so he took it and made it into The Company’s biggest production ever—bigger even than the city Verbena built in the warehouse.

  This old lady named Mrs. Jarique owned a huge mansion about seventy-five miles up the Hudson River from New York—somehow Carlos had talked her into letting us use the place. I mean, move up there for the months of August and September and live with her, and film a whole movie there. Some people say she was just some crazy old lady Carlos took advantage of—and maybe she was crazy. Anybody who’d let The Company live in their house for two months has got to be crazy, right?

  Friulia, the place was called—the biggest house I ever saw in my life, three stories that rambled along the top of a hill overlooking the river. There were towers and turrets, and balconies jutting out all over. Even though it was down on its luck, still you could tell it’d once been something. There was fancy carved wood everywhere, and marble, and Persian carpets that Sammy, who knew about carpets, got all excited over and told us to be careful not to ruin. The only time I ever saw him yell at Carlos was when Carlos started to track mud across one of those carpets one day—not paying attention, because Carlos never paid much mind to things like that. And it was interesting how Sammy could turn Carlos into a little kid with just a couple of words. Carlos went slinking off with this look on his face I’d never seen before, like Sammy’d caught him at something. Caught him in the act of being Carlos, maybe. But after that day, the carpets started to figure in Seth’s camera work—all those tight little curls of design, where anything could be hidden in them and you wouldn’t know it. In fact, the movie starts and ends with a carpet—all those vines and flower shapes shown close-up, so they fill up the screen, and then gradually pulling back to show how the design’s all locked in together.

  Mrs. Jarique was so old she couldn’t walk—there was this very nice black man named Maurice who wheeled her around. Not that she ever wanted to go anywhere much—but sometimes, when it was nice out, she loved to sit on the terrace and look at the river. It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time doing—not looking at that river, but at the Mississippi—and I know how nothing can make you think like looking at the way a river goes by. How it just keeps on going and nothing can stop it. There’s worse to do than looking at a river.

  I think she liked me, Mrs. Jarique, though she couldn’t ever remember my name—she called me Tommy or Tim or sometimes names that weren’t even close to Tony. Phillip was one of her favorites. And she called me Matthew sometimes. I never knew whether those were people she knew once upon a time, and she was so old now that everything blurred together, or whether she just plain couldn’t remember my name.

  She was always startling me with the things she said. I’d be walking by her wheelchair and she’d sing out, “Have you ever been in Guatemala? I went dancing in Guatemala once. My father’s ship anchored off the coast for a month, and we went dancing every night.”

  I think probably most of what she said was true—who’d make up a story about dancing in Guatemala? She was so rich—at least she had been at some time in her life—that she’d probably been everywhere she said she had.

  We moved right in on her. After all those years cooped up in that dingy apartment on Avenue C, it was terrific to be out in the country, and have all this space around you, and green trees and a huge empty lawn with nothing cluttering it up. There were about twelve, maybe fifteen of us in all who went up there for the movie, and we each had our own separate bedroom. That was how huge Friulia was.

  Some of those rooms hadn’t been used in ages. In mine, there was this bouquet of flowers that must’ve been there twenty years. All I had to do was breathe on it and those flowers fell apart. The outside wall had leaked water over the years, and the wallpaper—this red velvet stuff, all fuzzy to the touch—had ugly splotches on it.

  I remember the first day we where there, we were comparing our rooms. Sammy was saying how his room had a whole suit of armor in it, and he saw a mouse too, which ran under the bed. Verbena’s room had a balcony off it, and a set of secret stairs that went up to a locked door.

  “Well,” I told them, “I got fungus from outer space living all over the wall in my room.”

  Carlos wasn’t paying too much attention to us—he was writing things down in his little spiral notebook. But when I said that, he perked up. “Let’s see,” he said. “Let’s see, let’s see, I knew this would happen”—and we all went traipsing up to my room, which was on the third floor. When he saw that wallpaper, and the big water stains that’d turned the red velvet black and green, he went wild. “It’s perfect,” he said. “The fungus from outer space. Of course, of course,” he kept saying, and dancing around the room in the way he’d sometimes do when he saw something happening on camera that he hadn’t expected, but that once it happened he loved to see.

  None of us knew at the time what the movie was going to be about—Carlos never told us anything till he started shooting. His movies always made themselves up as they went along. I don’t have to tell you how the fungus from outer space ended up playing a major part. In some way, I guess you could say it turned into the creeping bent the movie’s name was about.

  In the movie, the house is some kind of way station for these creatures from other planets, or another dimension, or maybe they’re just dreams—like in all Carlos’s movies, you’re never sure. It’s done with puppets—great big puppets Verbena designed. I helped her sew them down in New York, sitting in her kitchen listening to salsa music come through the wall from next door.

  The aliens—if that’s what they are—have been passing through the house for years. It’s something Sammy and I, who live there, have gotten totally used to. They’re real to us—we have conversations with them, though they don’t exactly talk back to us. But now something’s happened, something’s gone wrong, and they’r
e trapped here on their way through to other places. Stranded.

  And the house keeps getting bigger. Outside, it stays the same—but inside, there start to be all these rooms Sammy and I never knew were there. Somehow, by trying to get out, the aliens keep adding new rooms on the house. Every morning, Sammy and I find new rooms, or a new staircase where there wasn’t one the night before—it leads to a floor of the house that’s impossible to be there, but it’s there anyway. The house isn’t a hundred times, it’s a million times bigger than we thought.

  We go in one room and it’s the inside of an opera house—we went down to the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie to shoot that scene. Another time we find a room that, when we go inside it, is like being outdoors in a field—only it’s still just another room in the house, and at the other end of the outdoors there’s another door that leads you back into another room. And the puppets are everywhere—they’re part of the furniture, the walls, they’re in the air. When I open up a jar of mustard, the aliens—or whoever they are—come spilling out, inflating up to full size right before my eyes.

  It’s Carlos’s most gorgeous movie, because of the house, which Carlos somehow makes seem to have more rooms than it does, and also because of Verbena’s puppets. I wish I could paste some pictures in here of those puppets, because if you’ve never seen them then you can’t know how bizarre and pretty they were. Sort of like huge jellyfish, only decorated all over with seashells and half-moons and old lace. Like somebody’s gone and dipped a jellyfish in a vat of trinkets from a junk store.

  Mrs. Jarique loved the puppets. She’d sit there and applaud when we did scenes with them, and she’d shout things at them. “The Great Wall of China,” she’d shout. “Madame Li, 1923. And the spoiled gown. Egg stains. The Great Wall.”

  Carlos didn’t mind, since we never did sync sound anyway. She could yell her head off at those puppets for all he cared. And I think he kind of liked it that she yelled like that—it got us all in some kind of mood.

  While we were filming up there, a hurricane came through. What it started out as was this tropical depression in the Atlantic Ocean that Verbena somehow took notice of. She was always skittish about the weather: she’d lived through a tornado when she was a little girl, and the man who lived next door got killed when the wind picked him up and slammed him into a tree. Verbena saw it, or that’s what she always said. For some reason, she got fixated on this one particular tropical depression: she said she had a feeling about it, right from the start. None of us paid it any mind till it got upgraded into a tropical storm and started heading north. When Verbena heard that, she made us keep the radio on the whole day, tracking it while it turned from a storm into a hurricane out over the water somewhere and still kept moving toward New York.

  “Just you wait,” Verbena said. “We’re sitting in a natural hurricane funnel here. The Hudson Valley. You look at any map and you’ll see. Storm’ll come gusting up that river,” she predicted.

  What especially worried her were the suspension bridges we saw out the train window on the way up. Every one of those bridges was going to buck and sway and finally break loose in the storm. Barges were going to get tossed around like toys in a bathtub.

  For two whole days, while the hurricane moved closer, she kept us going.

  Even Mrs. Jarique got into the act. “Tierra del Fuego,” she told us. “Land of fire. We were sick for days. Seasick. Ask him.”

  Sometimes she thought Sammy was the captain of the ship we were all sailing on.

  “It’s true,” he told everybody. “We were all seasick, every one of us. But we made it, didn’t we?”

  “Naked Indians,” Mrs. Jarique said. “Go ahead, tell them.”

  “Naked Indians,” said Sammy, like he believed every word of it.

  As the storm got closer, the radio talked about it more and more.

  “If it’s going to be so bad up here, what about New York?” I asked the rest of the group.

  We all tried to imagine the streets underwater, like Verbena said they’d be.

  “Phone booths’ll be floating down the streets,” Seth said.

  “Beds with people in them,” said Sammy.

  “Thousands’ll drown in the subway,” Verbena told us. We were all a little giddy with being out of the city after living cooped up there so long. The open space got to us, and we were doing what I’d never have thought: we were missing New York.

  It was a way to let off energy from the movie. We knew that. Every movie we made, there was always something we came up with to keep the craziness down in between scenes, whether it was that endless mission we were always on during Gomorrah to find Sammy a coffeeshop, or the time we spent with a Ouija board when we were making The Only Bitterness of Anna, trying to get in touch with spirits.

  When the hurricane finally came, it was nothing—a rainstorm that went on all night, and some trees that got knocked down. We woke up the next morning and the sun was shining, and it was cool.

  VERBENA WAS THE PERSON I HUNG OUT WITH MOST during those years from 1980 to 1983. I went over to her place in Brooklyn a lot. Not the place with the pigeons on the roof. That building got torn down, and T.J and his pigeons moved to the Bronx, where his cousin lived in a high-rise that had a perfect roof for pigeons.

  Verbena’s new apartment was on the same block as the old one, but it was totally different. Nothing from the old place was there anymore—the pot plants had died, and she’d given everything else away. It was something she did every couple of years—to “keep from getting stale,’’ she said. In the new place, there were books everywhere—I wouldn’t’ve said Verbena was much of a reader, but it turned out she was always reading books on magic and astrology, and she knew all about casting spells and reading palms and doing people’s birth charts. On the walls she had posters showing the planets and the various stars that influence you, and also the body and all the systems inside the body.

  There was a card table by the front windows that was completely covered in plants—leggy things with big strange blossoms that smelled up the whole apartment. There was always some kind of incense burning too, and underneath the smell of the flowers and the incense there was this other smell that I have to call the Verbena smell, this moist sweet sweaty smell that was the smell of her big body. It was a smell I kind of liked—though probably most people wouldn’t. But it made me feel at home, if that makes any sense—a homey smell.

  There was this window in her kitchen that looked out across the empty lot full of bricks and broken bottles where her old building had been. By day it was pretty ugly, but come late afternoon it was an open space that let the light in. I’d sit there, and she’d cook rice and black beans, which I loved, and slice some raw onions to go on top. It was very peaceful, just the two of us and the little TV set that was always running but with the sound off—“my fireplace,” Verbena used to say. We’d talk a lot, and she’d smoke jimson, this stuff country people used to smoke back in Kentucky when they had colds. Verbena said it was better than pot, once you got used to how strong it was—plus it was completely legal, not that that made any difference to her. She had some cousin of hers send packets up from Alabama, and she kept it in a mason jar on the kitchen table.

  Every time I’d go over there she’d roll some and offer it to me, but I never joined in—I’m one of those people who’s never been able to get high. Not that I didn’t try over the years. I used to completely disgust Seth when we’d sit up half the night smoking—he’d be so stoned he couldn’t even talk, and nothing happening to me except a headache. The couple of times I tried jimson, it was the same. Verbena always teased me, though: “Shy girl,” she’d say, “you’re getting high just like everybody else. Your brain’s just not fine-tuned enough to know that’s what happening to it.”

  “I’ve always been a clod,” I admitted.

  “Some clod,” she said. “This clod is definitely high heels all the way.”

  It didn’t matter to me that I couldn’t get high, though it m
ight’ve been fun to get buzzed with Verbena once in a while. But by the time I was hanging out with her, I was pretty much straight all the time. It was like I’d had this other life we could both sit and look back on.

  She told me one evening, “You know how we was all of us pulling for you.”

  She was sitting in this bright blue robe she used to wear, and her hair was pulled back from her head in this tight bun. The jimson smoke made the kitchen smell like some field had just been mowed.

  “Pulling for me how?” I asked her.

  “I mean, to see you make it through,” she said. I knew she must be talking about Carlos.

  “Through to the other side,” she said. She sort of cocked an eyebrow while she looked at me.

  I understood how it meant “through to the other side of Carlos.” Because there were people who didn’t make it through, and they fell away, they got lost. But if you made it through to the other side, like Netta and Sammy and Seth and Verbena had done, then you were there for good.

  “Sometimes I want it to be like it used to be. Before I made it through.”

  “You miss him,” she said.

  “I miss getting fucked, if you want to know the truth.” I’d always been able to be completely open with Verbena. Part of it was just who she was—the most generous person in the world. And part of it was remembering her shooting fire out of her butt, because if you can’t talk to somebody like that about getting fucked, then who can you?

  Most of the time we didn’t talk about Carlos—but it was like she was sitting up with me till missing him wore off. It was like some assignment he gave her to do. In the meantime, she kept me entertained telling me all about herself—which could be pretty wild, at least when I was in the mood to believe what she was saying.

  “I was raised up on conjure,” she told me one night. “My daddy was Doctor Jim Jordan. Don’t pretend you never heard about him—he was the most famous root doctor in the whole South. Even in Kentucky they heard about him. And he was growing me to follow in his footsteps.”