by Steve Berman
One month they went to Santa Monica Pier for dinner. Not any particular restaurant. Eric grabbed a corn dog, and Andy got fish and chips from a stand. They walked along the pier past the carnival games talking. Andy stuffed a ketchup-soggy fry into his mouth. “Hey, you want to try some of this? It’s surprisingly good.”
Eric shook his head. “I hate fish.”
Andy smirked. “That’s something I expect Mahogany to say. She wouldn’t eat her own kind.”
Eric shook his head. “Just because I serve fish realness three times a week doesn’t mean I feel like being at the top of the food chain.”
Andy stuffed a bit of fried cod into his mouth. “Your loss. Hey, wanna do that test your strength thing?”
“I’ll win.”
Seven carnival games and three stuffed animals later, the two of them sat in companionable silence on a bench overlooking the ocean. Darkness had settled in somewhere between the water-gun races and the darts. Andy put an arm around Eric. “It’s weird. I hated that job at The Study, but meeting you came out of it, so being called Chinese for a year-and-a-half was worth it.”
Eric smiled. “I’m glad you were there to keep me from being kidnapped by some OG with a thing for girly-boys.”
Andy stirred. “I always loved this place. It reminds me of being a kid. Reminds of when I thought everything would work out all right, you know?” He slumped forward and his shoulders sagged.
“Hey? Something up?” Concern limned Eric’s eyes.
Andy sighed. “Yeah. My mother. She’s a tough old bird. But the cancer’s come back, again. And each time the chemo’s worse.” His voice cracked. “I don’t know if she can handle it again.”
Eric turned to face Andy and squeezed his shoulder. “You got friends who love you. We’re there for you.”
Andy leaned in to kiss Eric. Eric kissed back, parting his lips, crushing them against Andy’s teeth. The stubble on Andy’s chin scraped against the smoothness of Eric’s skin. Yes, Eric thought. He was hungry for this. Then, abruptly Eric pulled back.
Andy’s eyes widened in confusion. His cheeks were still flushed and lips plump with arousal. “Is there something wrong?”
Eric smiled and covered Andy’s hand with his own. “No everything’s okay, I just need some air.” He stood up and half-stumbled away from the bench.
Eric walked to the edge of the pier, a balloon tied to his left wrist, holding a teddy bear in his right hand. He looked over the railing at the black water below with the lights from the Ferris wheel and the carnival rides reflecting back like a parody of the night sky. He called out over the shrill music of the carousel and the popping of airguns, “Flounder, flounder in the sea, come up from the depths to me…”
The music cut mid-note. This time the sand dab loomed in the surf as big as a Volkswagen bug.
“Four years. Doing better than most. I imagine that little trick I taught you got some use?”
“What can you do about someone who’s dying?” Eric shouted, although the world was still and quiet.
“I cannot resurrect the dead. But dying is another matter. I can cure someone who is ill. But there is always the cost.”
“I need you to heal Andy’s mother! Fuck the costs.” Eric shouted. He felt an itching and a coldness down his left arm. Then pain in pinpricks. He rolled up the sleeve of his shirt in time to see iridescent scales push themselves through his skin to lie down flush like tiles along his arm.
The fish sank beneath the waves. “Granted.”
Andy moved to Denver about a year after his mother went into spontaneous remission. Eric and Andy kept in touch, although Mahogany’s schedule remained full, and grew fuller as drag returned to mainstream attention via reality shows. Mahogany went on tour, and after a packed show before a Denver audience, Eric met with Andy for dinner at an all-night taco joint.
While nibbling on a carne asada taco with extra chile verde, Andy remarked, “I’m not used to seeing you all glamorous for dinner.”
Eric, still made up as Mahogany, laughed. “I’m not crazy about it, but I went straight from the airport to the club where I did my makeup for three hours, and I’m famished.” He illustrated this by cramming an entire carnitas taco into his mouth without smudging his lipstick.
Andy whistled. “If I knew you had such skills, I mighta hit that.”
Eric slapped him playfully on the upper arm. “You had your chance.”
After dinner they walked arm-in-arm together along the banks of the Platte River, laughing and remembering old times. Eric’s eyes were luminous and sad. “Sometimes I feel like you’re the only one I can be real with, Andy.”
“Even dressed like this?” Andy squeezed one of Eric’s birdseed breasts.
As they walked past stoner hill, a figure lurched out of the bushes. The sodium glare of the streetlights did him no good. He was fifty-ish and squat. He had a Fu Manchu style mustache that made his mouth look droopy and petulant. His greasy Jheri Curl hair reminded Eric of seaweed.
Eric clutched Andy’s hand nervously; the strange man was carrying a crowbar in his right hand, and a car stereo in the left. The man’s skin was pockmarked and his shoe-leather brown complexion had an ashy grey undertone to it.
“We don’t want any trouble,” Andy said, holding his hands out.
The man smiled. He held out the car stereo. “Y’all want to buy this? Like brand new. Only been used once.”
Andy shook his head. “Naw, man. We don’t want to buy stolen goods.”
The man slurred, “Why you think it’s stolen? You think you better than me?” His eyes narrowed at Andy. “You gooks always tryin’ to steal good black women with your one-inch peckers.”
Eric curled his hands into fists. “Not a woman, bruh. Leave us be.”
The man’s face contorted and he spat on the ground. “Faggot!”
He moved towards Eric with surprising swiftness. Panicking, Eric projected desire at the man. Want. The man’s eyes widened for a moment and his jaw went slack. Then his face contorted again and he slammed his crowbar into Andy’s face. The crunching sound was sickening, and as Andy slid to the ground, Eric fell to his knees in horror.
It was a precious few moments before Eric could compose himself enough to call 911.
After an ambulance took Andy away, and the police
had questioned Eric and promised an APB, Eric found himself in the blue-grey waiting room of the Trauma Unit at the nearest hospital. Half-dressed and all numb he stared at a cup of hot chocolate someone had brought him hours ago. It had gone cold and congealed. His lipstick was still perfect.
A tired-eyed doctor in faded orange scrubs hovered at Eric’s shoulder. “You were Andrew Kim’s friend?”
The “were” in that sentence slammed down in Eric’s chest like a stone. He stood up, poised with his head held high, and walked towards the door. He did not wait to hear the doctor say, “I’m sorry.”
Outside of the sliding doors to Emergency an EMT was taking a furtive smoke break. Eric walked near him and forced a smile. “Hey, what’s the nearest body of water? Big body of water?”
“Sloan’s Lake,” the EMT pointed vaguely north, “That way a ways. But it’s not safe at night. Especially dressed like that.”
Eric broke out into a run.
After the fish sank into the murk of Sloan Lake, Eric stood and felt tiny pinpricks all along his spine. Good, he thought. He sniffed the air particles wafting above: gasoline, sweat, cheap tacos from the down the road. He opened his mouth, ran a tongue over sharp barbed teeth that had sprouted just behind the set he had capped, cleaned, and straightened after adolescence. Without knowing how he knew, he knew where his prey was. Swifter than he would have thought possible, he darted along the shore and headed inexorably towards Federal Boulevard. He avoided cars and early morning pedestrians.
There. Across the street from him was a little yellow house. A Chevy Impala stood on blocks in the driveway. He knocked on the door forcefully three times. He heard stirring.
The door creaked open on its chain. Fury rose up in Eric, its intensity driving all color from the world. The same piggy eyes. The Jheri Curl. The stupid Fu Manchu mustache. He forced his snarl into a smile and projected at the man. Want.
The man’s face slid into a lazy smile. “So, you came here without your gook? You wanna play? I’ll tap that ass if you can keep it on the downlow, baby.”
Eric made his hips sway. He lowered his eyelids and parted his lips. “Oh, I got something that will sho’ nuff set your world on fire.”
The man rubbed his crotch. “Well hurry in baby, before someone sees you.” He opened the door wide enough for Eric to slide in.
The door shut behind them with a slam. He grabbed Eric’s ass and kneaded it. “I knew a bitch like you would want some of this.”
“Yes,” Eric said into his ear, feeling his new teeth lengthen. “What do I call you, Daddy?”
“Mm. Daddy. Yeah. Big Daddy is just right. Big Daddy got something for that ass.” He slid his hand up from Eric’s ass to reach for the zipper on his dress. Spines soundlessly ripped through the taffeta, and dripping with fluid, rose to meet Big Daddy’s hand.
“Ow! The fuck!” he cried.
Eric shoved him back and opened his mouth. Human teeth cascaded to the floor, revealing sharp, spiny, barbed things.
Big Daddy screamed in terror, even while clutching his hand that had already begun to swell and purple.
“His name was Andy, not gook, you fuck.”
Eric walked out the door, stately as if in a procession, even as he felt the cold, familiar prickling of scales sprout up his right arm. He ignored Big Daddy’s howls of fury as he turned back towards Sloan Lake, trailing the tatters of his red dress behind him.
The skin between his fingers itched and tightened as they fused into fins. Once clear of the Impala, he broke into a run, not out of fear, not in fury, but for the sheer joy of it, even as the skin beneath his jaw opened up and feathery gills sprouted.
He returned to Sloan Lake, gasping for breath from a mouth twisting sideways, fell into the water with a resounding splash and disappeared beneath the surface, leaving only a ribbon of taffeta red as blood behind him.
SOME KIND OF WONDERLAND
RICHARD BOWES
On a Sunday afternoon Gilda Darnell and I are in her living room, phoning in one last conference call. I tell the host, “We two have been buddies since we were both in Scott Holman’s Alice film Some Kind Of Wonderland, back in 1965. She was the Duchess. I was the Cheshire Cat.”
With the show’s fiftieth anniversary/resurrection scheduled for Monday evening, we’ve chased down every promotional opportunity we could find.
Gilda says, “Some Kind of Wonderland came out early in 1966. The Village Voice had us on the front page. ‘Hippy Alice Hits The Big Apple!’ was how they put it. We got lots of downtown Manhattan attention but so many underground films got released around then. And Scott Holman our producer/director had passed away. But I never forgot about it. A few years ago I managed to buy the rights from the Holman family and got The Film Annex interested in restoring it.”
She nods to me and I say, “Scott Holman had this off-kilter perspective—like the Alice books themselves. He caught New York at a certain moment. And he created the cast out of people he found. His Alice was a young model he saw on a fashion shoot.”
Gilda says, “I’d been in a couple of Off-Off Broadway shows but I came to his attention because I was the mouthiest waitress in all the West Village.”
“And what were you, Justin?” the host asks me.
“A street boy who got very lucky,” I hear myself say as the interview ends.
Gilda gets a call from a publicist she hired. This one actually works on Sunday. “The approach is: ‘It Was Worth The Wait,’” she says.
Things I learned working on Wonderland led to my nice gig as a location scout and fixer for movies and TV shows shooting in New York. But Gilda has managed to learn the ways of Manhattan real estate and politics. She’s my hero.
While she talks strategy, I look down at the world from her twentieth story windows in Tribeca. Below is the intense green of Washington Market Park. Late afternoon sunlight bounces off the Hudson.
I love the way she doesn’t forget the actual past. Prominent in her living room are framed black and white photos from fifty years back and more. They show a stark, corroded highway, a junk-riddled Hudson riverbank, and the wrecked warehouses where this building and other high-rises now stand.
This had been the thriving, sprawling Washington Produce Market. The neighborhood that fed New York until the city abandoned it in the 1960s. Bringing those ruins to Scott’s attention was my proudest contribution to the film.
Gilda has a photo of Scott Holman displayed prominently. The writer/director/producer wears black-rimmed glasses and a Borsalino hat like a European auteur. But underneath that you can see a young guy staring intently at something off camera. I want to believe he’s watching me.
The editor of an online entertainment site calls Gilda. At the same moment Lucinda Gold comes out of her room and floats through the apartment in dark glasses and a lovely green kimono. Gilda is Lucinda’s partner and care giver. Lucinda was Alice in the film. She’s gone a few rounds with addictions and had a stroke a decade or two back. The glasses hide a dead eye and she speaks a bit haltingly.
We go out on the balcony and watch the sun set. I sit on her good side and catch a hint of the lovely kid for whom I once was a body double.
She’s kind of excited by the revival and tells me, “Gilda tries to appear so cool and professional. Actually, she’s gaga. I hope you invited all the freaks and monsters?”
I start to run down the list of invitees. Then I recall a recent confrontation that I’m not sure wasn’t a nightmare and blurt out, “I got asked about Bonibo and how I killed Scott.”
“Oh Justin, I’m sorry.” She looks like she’s ready to cry. “Everyone who matters knows how much you loved him.” I feel bad about having stupidly upset her and try to lighten things.
“He may have loved me but he wanted to be you!” I say and somehow we laugh. With an early spring night falling on the city, I kiss her and wave goodbye to Gilda.
At ground level, the gathering darkness and the absence of pedestrians could give a minor chill. But this is Tribeca, now the safest of Manhattan neighborhoods, not the bombed-out wreckage where we filmed much of Some Kind of Wonderland.
On a cobblestoned side street leading away from the river I pass the eighteenth century two-story townhouse we once used as the White Rabbit’s home.
Fifty years back it was on a different street, with faded tradesman signs over the door and shingles falling off. Now it’s been moved and refurbished. A light is on in a second floor window and a figure stands talking on a cellphone. He turns slightly and reveals rabbit’s ears.
Someone walking her dog stops and stares. A male couple snap cell phone shots. The light goes out, and I wonder if this is something Gilda’s created as publicity for the revival.
I also remember Scott telling me, “It’s a kind of leakage. A story spreads out into the world around it. Even someone who’s never read the Alice books remembers a song or once saw a drawing.”
As I walk uptown through Soho and into the Village, I remember thumbing my way to Manhattan from South Jersey when I was seventeen. People back home said I talked and walked funny. Everyone knew my mother drank and did drugs and that my father was nowhere to be found.
On my way to the city, I dumped that prior life.
When the last lonely driver let me out of his car on Bleecker Street, I took one look around and knew this was my place. I wasn’t the hottest boy but I wasn’t stupid. I used whatever charms I had. And I learned to talk to everyone, forget nothing, and smile a lot. I could be trusted to run errands, keep my eyes open, and be discrete.
One night, I was filling in for the busboy at the Village Gate and caught the eye of a young man in glasses sitting with some other
guys When I paid an unnecessary visit to their table, he said, “You’ve got a smile like the Cheshire Cat.’
Because I’d gotten a really lousy education, I had no idea what he was talking about. The night after that he came alone and met me at closing time.
We went out drinking. Scott was his name. He’d just graduated from Yale and moved into the city. Scott took me to his apartment on the first floor of an old brownstone on a quiet old street.
My trip from Gilda and Lucinda’s leads me down that street and into the apartment where I’ve lived ever since.
Yes, I’m lucky and, yes, it’s haunted. There’s a mirror over the unusable fireplace. When I flick on the light it catches my favorite Scott photo on the opposite wall. My lover sits twirling his horn rim glasses, smiling at me. I walk closer, kiss his reflection on its lips then wipe it clean.
On Monday evening at The Film Annex we’ve turned out a crowd. The theater seats about two hundred, and there are standees. A curator tells the audience how editors managed to reconstruct our nearly lost Manhattan Alice film. She describes the mid-sixties explosion of New York’s underground cinema, cites stuff like Anger’s Scorpio Rising, Chafed Elbows by Robert Downey Junior’s father, and the rise of Warhol’s publicity machine. “It seems Some Kind of Wonderland got lost in the melee,” she says.
Then it’s my turn to stand before the screen in my best suit and talk about Scott Holman. The world has changed for certain when an aged former rent boy is called on to explain a director’s work.
The first thing I say is, “When we first met, Scott called me The Cheshire Cat. All I knew was that he was magic.
“For me it was magic that he was able to devote every minute to what obsessed him. And his obsession was a movie about Wonderland, but with New York grit.
“He was shocked that I’d never heard of Alice. He read the first part of Alice in Wonderland aloud to me. I read the rest—first book I ever finished. Within a few weeks I found myself immersed in that story.
