Is he, is your brother crying?
MCQUIGGE
Yes.
HOOPER
Why?
MCQUIGGE
I think because the song is too beautiful.
HOOPER
You didn’t say hello to him or anything when we came in here.
MCQUIGGE
He’s not talking to me. He’s mad at me.
HOOPER
Why?
MCQUIGGE
I think because I fucked up my life. Can we talk about my novel?
HOOPER
It’s not a novel. There’s no kind of thematic unity. I mean, there’s kids getting terror ized, then you start going on about the television set.
MCQUIGGE
The television was important, well, significant in my life.
HOOPER
You know, I think the novel, the form, is sacred. Sacred.
HOOPER repeats this word too loudly, in hopes that the WAITRESS will be somehow impressed that he is speaking about sacred things. And, in fact, the WAITRESS is, which is yet another reason why McQUIGGE hates HOOPER.
HOOPER (cont’d)
You were seduced by the novel’s sexier—and less bright—sisters. By the theatre. By television. So why you now think that you’re capable of writing one is, well, I feel that it’s unreasonable.
MCQUIGGE
Okay. I’ll take out some of the stuff about the television.
HOOPER
Your brother’s mad at you for fucking up things with Ronnie, do you mean?
MCQUIGGE
I think so.
HOOPER
There is no man alive who could not have fucked things up with Ronnie. You made it, what, twelve?—
MCQUIGGE
Thirteen.
HOOPER (cont’d)
—years, which is a testament to your patience and fortitude. Oh, hi, what is it, Amy?
HOOPER reads the name tag on the WAITRESS’s shirt correctly.
WAITRESS
You don’t often hear that word “sacred” in this place.
MCQUIGGE
He says that the novel is a sacred form and that I am vio lating it.
WAITRESS
Are you?
MCQUIGGE
Probably.
WAITRESS
You should stop, then.
MCQUIGGE
But it’s all I have. All I have left in my life is this idea, this notion, that I can write a book. About my life, and how I lost it.
WAITRESS
You should keep at it, then.
HOOPER
There’s a lot in his book about a television.
MCQUIGGE
But the television is important, because I ended up working in television.
WAITRESS
You work in television?
MCQUIGGE
I used to.
WAITRESS
What show?
MCQUIGGE
Padre.
The WAITRESS reacts.
WAITRESS
That guy, what’s his name …?
MCQUIGGE
Edward Milligan.
WAITRESS
He was cute.
All right, enough. Although we stayed for more drinks, very little got said after that. Hooper left fairly early, claiming he had a rendezvous with, I forget what, a diplomat or a runway model or something, some international woman of intrigue, possibly even a secret agent.
I stayed on in the lounge until the bitter end. By that point my brother had given up any pretense of playing popular tunes; he’d moved on to the French composers he so adores, Satie, Fauré and Poulenc. Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess was a crowd pleaser—Jay became completely undone. It was not so much that he wept, because he’d been weeping, on and off but mostly on, all evening. But the Pavane caused his hands to tremble (although he missed or flubbed no notes) and his chest to heave. His head jerked convulsively; sometimes its sheer weight made it plummet, and once or twice he came within an inch of knocking himself unconscious on the keyboard.
Then, with a quick little flourish full of mordents and pralltrillers, Good evening, friends!!, he was done.
There was a smattering of applause, but Jay rose without acknowledging it and disappeared into the shadows. I know that he backed through a small doorway and mounted a flight of stairs to a little apartment above the lounge. There he lay down on a small bed. He rested his heavy head upon a thin pillow and waited for sleep to come.
Myself, I went home and dreamt of Milligan.
In my dream, Milligan is dressed in his Westernized garb, a beaded buckskin jacket over his soutane, a large white stetson over the golden curls. His boots are made from snakeskin, his blue jeans flared slightly to fit over them. Otherwise, his denims are so tight that he seems to have been vacuum-packed into them.
It is not all that odd that I dreamt Milligan this way, because 1) I was dreaming, after all, and 2) he dressed in wardrobe a lot, even when he wasn’t due on set for hours, even when he was nowhere near the studio. On occasion he even went out to the bars dressed that way. He’d check his belt and holster, assuring the bouncers that the guns were merely replicas, although that wasn’t always true. Edward Milligan had a vast collection, revolvers of a mostly historical significance, from the Old West circa 1880. In my dream, Milligan and I are down in his rumpus room, and it is a very strange place. Mounted vintage revolvers cover three of the walls, the fourth wall is a huge plasma television screen. The broadcast image is of a group of naked women going at each other with huge strap-on dildos. They have smaller dildos, too, which they use to penetrate smaller orifices. The rumpus room contains a well-stocked bar, well-stocked to the extent that it contains things like árbol de los brujos, or sorcerer’s tree, and various exotic fungi. All of the horizontal surfaces—the bar top, a coffee table, a few shelves—are mirrored, the better for their employ as conveyors of cocaine.
Now, I want to admit to you, this isn’t all dreamt up. Indeed, it is a fairly accurate depiction of Milligan’s rumpus room, which I had occasion to visit a couple of times. The only thing that may be a little fanciful is that I don’t think his bar actually had any árbol de los brujos, because that particular hallucinogenic concoction is a little hard to come by. (The only reason I’ve even heard of it is that Milligan often bemoaned the fact that it was extremely rare and oh-so-illegal.)
Okay, so there we are in the rumpus room and Milligan has taken some guns from the wall, and he is demonstrating his quick-draw and gun-spinning techniques. This is something of a lost art, you know. We often saw it as youngsters, sitting in the gloomy plush of the Galaxy Odeon (you shall hear more of the Galaxy Odeon, indeed, it’s coming right up). Cowboy heroes, even though their lives were on the line, would often take a few nanoseconds to orbit their revolvers around their trigger fingers, first this way, then that, before popping off a lethal round. Milligan was excellent at this. He is demonstrating his technique, high on árbol de los brujos, and I have guns, too, and then (it’s a dream) I start shooting. I shoot at the plasma screen, and naked women start to scream and to bleed. I’m not aiming the guns, but every bullet I fire seems to find a perfect trajectory. The bottles behind the bar explode with a stately rhythm, pop-pop-pop!! Milligan doesn’t seem to notice that I’m shooting up his rumpus room, as he’s concentrating on his gun-twirling. And then, of course, one of my bullets hits Milligan, and explodes his skull, and I wake up and go to get a drink.
6 | THE BULLET AND THE CROSS
HOOPER’S NOT GOING TO LIKE THIS, BUT I THINK IT’S TIME I TOLD YOU about The Bullet and the Cross. It explains much. I mean, it’s almost embarrassing for me to admit this, but if you know about 1) the “incident” in the ravine, 2) my addiction to television and 3) the movie I’m about to recall, you’ll understand pretty much everything about me. You’ll understand my current situation, which I’m gearing up to describe in some detail. Hey, you’ll even understand certain details in the pages of what you’ve already read—for e
xample, why I thought that distraction-by-knot-tying might be an effective escape strategy.
The Galaxy Odeon lay on the outskirts of our survey, surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings. Rainie and her mother lived in one of these buildings, so on Saturday afternoons my brother and I would go into the lobby and press the button beside the name “Van der Glick.” Then we would wait. There was never any staticky communication from above, never an inquiry as to our identity or an admonition to wait patiently, so we would just sit there in silence and in a few minutes the elevator doors would open in the lobby and out would step Rainie.
One time, I remember, I buzzed and there came a curious clicking sound, repetitive and insistent. (I was calling on Rainie alone, which was rare but not unprecedented. Jay was sometimes elsewhere, and no one knew where that “elsewhere” might be.) I understood that someone upstairs was releasing the lock on the big glass door that separated the vestibule from the lobby, and without thinking I pulled it open and entered. The elevator waited and I stepped inside and pressed the button numbered “14.” Rainie and her mother actually lived on the thirteenth floor, but the designers and architects were unwilling to acknowledge that fact. I rode up—I recall that a very thin man dressed in pyjamas got on at the fourth floor and ascended to the fifth—and then I wandered the hallway until I came to 1412. I knocked lightly at the door and almost instantly it was opened, but not all the way. The security chain was still attached, allowing a crack of perhaps five inches. That afforded me my only impression of Rainie’s apartment, namely: it was very dark inside, full of shadows, and what light there was flickered, as though produced by candles. There was a painting on the wall opposite the door, and I could see some of it, an aggressively geometric abstract. And then Mrs. van der Glick’s face filled the opening, gaunt and heavily made up. She wore only a nightdress. “What do you want?” she demanded.
“Is Rainie in?”
“Leave her alone,” said Mrs. van der Glick, closing the door and throwing a deadbolt.
But what usually happened was that Jay and I would wait in the lobby, Rainie would appear and the three of us would head toward the Galaxy Odeon Theatre for the Saturday matinee. We would pay our fifty cents, regardless of the fare, and the fare was wide-ranging. There were war movies, although they were occasional, as they tended to overexcite the children. There were films about pirates and knights, and these were Rainie’s favourites, although she complained constantly about historical inaccuracies. She also disliked the overtly romantic moments—the kisses and tearful farewells—which caused her to squirm in her seat. Having typed these last sentences, I realize it’s hard to credit that period dramas were Rainie’s favourites, but they were. As soon as she saw a foreign land—a Saharan desert or a tempest-tossed coastline—she would smile and, for a while, cease to be the tightly twisted little ranker she was.
Yes, Rainie was a ranker, and I can call her that because I was a ranker, too. The term may be particular to the Norman Ingram Memorial Grammar School, but the concept is universal. As any sociologist will tell you, there is a definite pecking order in any system—this is especially true of grade schools—and when we use the term “ranker,” we are speaking of those at the very bottom.
I was included in the number largely because of my spectacles. They were massive and cumbersome, so much so that the temples ended in wire hooks to prevent gravity from hauling the things from my face, which gravity was always threatening to do. I had to wander around with my hand plastered across my brow, as though thinking great thoughts or wanting to vomit. Either activity was bound to garner ranker points.
Mind you, I shouldn’t attribute my status solely to my spectacles. I earned a lot of points from the fact that I was related to the very bizarre Jay McQuigge. Jay’s strange behaviour was well-known throughout the school. On his first day of kindergarten he refused, tearfully, to nap during naptime. He called his teacher “Mommy” (and continued to do so for months). I had done this myself once or twice—it is a fairly common gaffe for a little kid to make—but in Jay’s case it created a problem because his teacher was a man, Mr. Raleigh. That Mr. Raleigh was undeniably effeminate did not cause the stigma to fade in any way.
But what really got me the huge tallies was the fact that my best friend at school was not only a ranker, she was a girl. She was a scrawny girl with a strange name, Rainie van der Glick. The name alone would have consigned her forever to rankerdom. The first name was ripe for punning, and the three components that followed made her an outcast in the public school system, forever unable to line up in alphabetical order. And Rainie was the only person at Norman Ingram Memorial with vision-ware anything close to mine. I cannot recall meeting her for the first time, but I’m sure it was this that drew us together, two little kids wearing their weakness, their weirdness, right on their faces for all the world to see. Rainie had rhinestone-encrusted wingtips, fancy and fashionable, which only made the distorted fish-eyes swimming in the lenses all the more rank.
And for a few bonus points: my mother often wandered across the ancient cow pasture that separated our little house from Norman Ingram. She typically came at morning recess, moving slowly, a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. The drink was usually coffee, but on one or two occasions she clutched a glass tumbler. My mother would come within fifty feet of the school, stop and watch. She was searching out neither Jay nor me, because when we presented ourselves she merely waved, and vaguely at that, as though she could not quite remember who we were. After a few minutes she would turn and saunter back to the house.
The issue here was not so much that my mother’s behaviour was odd, it was that her behaviour was conspicuous. Rankers shared this characteristic, mothers who were notable. It would be impossible, really, for a kid to be a ranker all on his or her own, no matter how weird and damaged he or she might be. You needed to be sponsored, in a sense, by your mother.
Rainie van der Glick’s mother was an extreme example; she was about as crazy as a rat in a coffee can. She came to the school on a daily basis to confront the administration, with such fury that she might as well have been toting a battering ram and bazooka. Her complaint, at least originally, was that Rainie was a bona fide genius and that the school was not serving her special needs. No one disputed this, but the principal, Mr. Bowman, explained that there were no provisions made for genius, and Rainie was obligated by law to sit in the classroom all day. Somewhere along the line it got personal; Mr. Bowman said something that stepped on all the twigs in Mrs. van der Glick’s mind. After that, she simply came to do battle. The police were called more than once. For a time Mrs. van der Glick was legally enjoined from stepping onto school property, although this was quashed during one of the many trials held to settle all the suits and countersuits. There were two rumours that captured the imagination of all the schoolchildren. When Mr. Bowman appeared with his foot in a cast, it soon became common knowledge that the damage had been done by a thug, at Mrs. van der Glick’s behest. We would brook no other explanation—although one was delivered over the PA system, concerning a gardening mishap. And the other rumour was that someone—and the identity of this kid changed with each telling—went to the office on an errand, and saw Mr. Bowman lying across his desk. Mrs. van der Glick had her skirts hiked and was sitting astride, pumping merrily.
Mr. van der Glick committed suicide around when Rainie was born, although I doubt if he hanged himself as she was being born, which is what Rainie believes.
Myself, what I liked at the Galaxy Odeon were the westerns.
Indeed, I was a pretty big fan of the genre in general. Some of my favourite programs on television were westerns, Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel. You know, it’s an interesting thing about that latter show, and something not commonly known, but the story of Paladin, the jaded and educated gun-for-hire, was actually developed by the playwright Clifford Odets. The author of Awake and Sing! and Waiting for Lefty, the great young hope of the American theatre, ended his life in Hollywoo
dland, drinking too much, dabbling with various illicit substances, robotically screwing young starlets and writing for the boob tube.
I’d kindly ask you to remember this as I write down the details of my life.
I also really liked, I want to mention, those episodes of The Twilight Zone that were of the western genre. They were not infrequent, although apparently Rod Serling insisted these episodes be shot in Death Valley, where the actors and crew suffered from dehydration and even delirium. (That’s my kind of show-runner!) The most memorable was “Mr. Denton on Doomsday.” It was about this schoolteacher who finds a Colt.45, which keeps misfiring when he holds it. He accidentally kills a rattlesnake at fifty yards, and shoots the revolver out of the hands of a notorious gunslinger. So Mr. Denton is accorded a fearsome reputation, even though he is, in reality, a quiet little man. Serling seemed to understand that we are not always responsible for our actions, although that does raise the question Who, exactly, is?
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