‘Um. Please. My father? He has a very small and irritable bladder.’
For the first time Spencer and the policeman look at each other face to face. The policeman is older than Spencer had expected and is proud and careworn. He also looks as if he suspects Spencer of making fun of him.
‘I need a leak,’ his father says.
‘Oh. OK. We can do that,’ the policeman says.
Spencer sets about getting out of the car but the policeman pushes him back down again.
‘Stay where you are, sir, and leave your arms where I can see them.’
Spencer feels that this is a little unfair, as he has his arms in plain view, and he is troubled at the prospect of retrieving his wallet from his back pocket in order to show the policeman his driving licence while keeping his arms still.
‘I was going to help my father.’
‘We’ll take care of it, sir.’
His father is looking less panicky, almost smug. The policeman speaks into his walkie-talkie and soon they are joined by a second policeman, who opens the front passenger door, and courteously, solicitously, eases Spencer’s father out of the car and to the edge of the hard shoulder. Discreetly, he stands with his back to Spencer’s father and holds his jacket out wide to shield the undraped man from the view of other motorists.
‘Your licence, sir. Slowly, sir.’
Spencer eases forward to reach into the back pocket of his jeans and pull out his wallet. He finds his driver’s licence and presents it to the policeman, whose name is Porrelli.
‘I’m English, this is an English licence,’ Spencer says.
‘So I see.’
‘Look. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. What’s the problem? Was I speeding? I don’t think I was speeding, I’m used to English roads where the speed limits are higher. I—’
‘This is not about speeding, sir.’
‘Oh. Good. I mean. Oh. Then. Oh, I get it. Littering. It’s the business with the phones isn’t it? Some highway ordinance, I’m sure. I told my father—’
The other policeman escorts Spencer’s father back to the car.
‘You see?! I told you something would happen,’ Spencer says.
‘No one likes a whiner,’ Spencer’s father says.
‘I’m sorry,’ Spencer says. ‘I told him not to, I said we’d get into trouble. I should have gone back and looked for them, but he needed to make a…a rest stop, you know, men’s room, comfort station, he has a small and irritable bladder, and I didn’t think we had the time, so I’m very sorry. Is there a fine for this sort of thing?’
‘She’s always been a whiner,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘When she was a baby she used to bang her head.’
‘Sir, does your father have any ID?’
‘Dad? Could you show this gentleman some ID?’
‘Absolutely.’
His father does not move. ‘Dad. Your wallet.’
‘What about it?’
‘Can I have it for a moment?’
‘What is this? They want money?’
‘He, this gentleman, the police officer, just wants to see some ID.’
‘Forget about it. They’re not getting a nickel.’
His father crosses his arms stubbornly across his chest.
Wildly, Spencer considers tickling his father. Before his neuropathy set in, he had always been very ticklish.
‘Sir. We need to see your father’s ID.’
‘Yes yes, I know.’
If this were an independent film, what would happen? They would end up as best friends, just for one night, the four of them in a roadside bar drinking beer and discovering astonishing synchronicities; or it would turn into torture and labyrinth, the hint of unspeakable horrors in a rural cellar where no light shines and nothing is real except for the imminence of pain and execution. If it were one of Spencer’s films, then not much would happen, he has to admit. The day would pass, night would fall, morning might break upon this frozen tableau.
‘Not a red nickel,’ his father says.
If this were one of Rick’s films, if this were one of Rick’s early films, a shoot-out would probably ensue, or a song, bright colour pastiche, stolen emotion and borrowed resonance. Spencer has never received the credit that he had avoided taking for Rick’s early successes. He had scripted them and shot them and done it all with a freedom that was unavailable to him for work he produced under his own name. If this were one of Rick’s, as the fawning critics like to say, mature works, what would happen? Something casual and opaque that hinted at philosophical depths because Rick did not have the intellect or the technique to reach into them directly. He could only imply and hope, no, know, that the critics and the audiences would pander to his engorged sense of his own capacities.
‘Sir,’ says Officer Porrelli.
‘What’s going to happen? Is there a fine or something?’
‘Sir?’
‘Littering, I suppose it would be. He threw it out of the window, and I—’
And Spencer feels guilty. Why should he give up his father in this way? Was this going to be the start of something?—anything that goes wrong in his life, he would blame his father because his father was sick and vulnerable and couldn’t look after himself.
‘He threw what out of the window, sir?’
‘This isn’t because of that?’
‘Of what?’
‘You haven’t said sir.’ ‘Excuse me?’
‘Sir. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’d got used to you saying sir in every sentence.’
The look in Porrelli’s eye is the one that he had had before, when it was accompanied by grip and restraint and barroom pizza-parlour breath and the threat of the bad things that policemen are entitled to do to fathers and sons who have put themselves in opposition to the law.
Long ago, when he was in his father’s company, in Long Island summers on his father’s boat, or at meals where gruffly self-made men would display their chests and their women and pretend to be humorous by pausing with silver carving knife to brusquely interrogate the other males at the table whether they were leg or breast men, Spencer had felt any part of himself that had the potential for power or extension in the world become small and timid, looking for, expecting, protection from his father’s strength. As a child, Spencer had always made the mistake of confusing self-assurance with knowledge. Ever since his father first became sick, Spencer had grown into some kind of adulthood. He could not trust his father’s strength. And his father’s self-assurance could be most vehement when it was most obviously wrong.
Spencer has given up any thought of help from his father, so he is surprised when his father reaches for his wallet and with scrabbling neuropathic fingers manages to prise out his driving licence and pass it to Spencer.
‘Give this to the gentleman,’ his father says.
Porrelli compares his father’s driving licence to Spencer’s. He steps away from the car and lowers his chin to speak into his walkie-talkie.
‘It’s her,’ his father says.
‘Who?’
‘Your mother,’ his father says.
Spencer’s mother died years before, surprised by death similarly to how she had been disappointed by life. For a moment, he struggles with the notion that his father has been granted something additional and perhaps compensatory, that he is drifting into the shade between this world and the next, which means, contrary to all Spencer’s knowledge and intuition, that there is an afterlife, and that his father, in some kind of senescently sentimental dance, is back in step with his lost, dead, under-loved first wife.
‘She called them. Your mother.’
And he realises that it is his stepmother that his father must be referring to. And indeed, when Porrelli returns to the car, he tells them that his father had been reported by his wife as a missing person.
‘He’s not missing. He’s with me,’ Spencer says.
‘Your mother reported him as missing. Sir.’
‘She’s not my mother. She�
�s my stepmother.’
‘You might want to make a call to your mother.’
‘I would. If I—’
And his father looks at Spencer and looks at Porrelli and in an effort of recollection, of recohesion that makes Spencer wonder how much psychic and physical energy it will have cost him, says,
‘I am taking a drive with my son. My wife is crazy. Frankly her credibility with me right now is zero. No one should listen to her. I am sure you have many important duties to to to. To do to.’
It is a courtroom speech, a summing-up to convince judge and jury and witnesses. Apart from its stuttering conclusion, it is a masterly performance. Porrelli hands back the licences—to Spencer’s father rather than to Spencer.
‘Have a good day sir,’ Porrelli says.
‘Thank you,’ Spencer says.
‘Enjoy New Jersey.’
‘Goodbye Charlie,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘Let’s move it.’
After their escape from the New Jersey troopers, the mood is lighter, easier, this is something father and son have done together, think what they could do now, a murder spree, a daring bank job, get jobs as ferrymen on a lonely river, discover philosophy and wildlife in the tranquil rhythms of their trade—and the film that they could be making, Danny DeVito as Spencer, Walter Matthau as Jimmy, except DeVito is too old and Matthau is dead. Fantasy casting is an easy game to play—Kirk and Michael Douglas, Henry and Peter Fonda, Lee J. Cobb and Frank Sinatra—but this one could be real.
‘You remember Lee J. Cobb?’
‘Who?’
‘Lee J. Cobb, the actor. On the Waterfront, remember?—Johnny Friendly, the union boss. Big guy, sort of brooding and scary. Always intimidated me. Reminded me of you, to be honest. Lee J. Cobb.’
‘Lee Cobb,’ his father says, and the gap between words and their meaning is so wide that chasms open up in the car that the world and its weather fall into. Leaving Jimmy Ludwig alone and cold with his back pain and his bladder condition and his constipation, and Spencer has ruined the mood.
‘Lee J. Cobb,’ Spencer insists.
And something happens. Words to ear, an internal percussion drums into the cochlea, electricity pulses, neurons spark, synapses connect to dendrites and axons of neighbouring cells, and somehow, in Jimmy Ludwig’s brain, there are still enough willing neurotransmitters to ferry the electricity across the synaptic gaps, and the name Lee J. Cobb continues on its difficult route, detouring around the cells that died in 2001 when Jimmy Ludwig suffered his stroke, and memory comes alight. In some dingy place of his recollection, a movie star’s face and manner and name are suddenly apparent and accessible, and this is one of the miracles of film.
‘Yes! Sure! Lee J. Cobb!’ Spencer’s father says, and his ensuing smile is open and broad and he rests a wavery hand on Spencer’s arm in gratitude.
‘His real name was Leo Jacoby,’ Spencer says, regretting this instantly, concerned that the extra information will open up the chasm again.
‘That’s terrific,’ his father says. ‘My name used to be Izio.’
‘I know,’ Spencer says. ‘The teeth.’
‘What’s that?’ (What’s dat?)
‘The teeth.’
‘Yes,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘T’e teet.’ Spencer’s tired heart is filled with love, and the road slides down to the ocean.
Chapter Four
‘What are we?’ Spencer’s father asks, meaning where.
‘Atlantic City, always turned on,’ Spencer says.
The skyline is hardly Las Vegas, and it’s hardly Louis Malle either, the casino resorts stubbing out into the greyness of the ocean sky, but Spencer feels the familiar lift of excitement that he always has whenever he reaches a place dedicated to gambling. He never expects to feel it, which is maybe why it is so reliable.
‘We’re looking for a place called the Horseshoe. Keep your eyes peeled.’
‘What is this? Vegas?’ his father says. ‘Atlantic City,’ Spencer says. ‘A dump,’ his father says.
Already Spencer feels protective towards the town. If any place tries this hard to make something happen, even if it is only its own profiteering, then he thinks it should be given a chance.
Tropicana, Taj Mahal, Caesar’s Palace, Golden Lion, Ballys, Wild West, the road pulls away from the ocean, which they can still smell, its salty tang of seawater and waste, the billboards assert this is a place for fun, welcoming not gamblers but gamers, they drive past an empty street of high-end boutiques that looks like a set from a zombie movie, the capitalist system dead, the world void of consumers, and all there will be left is unwanted products and hollow people, the theory of surplus anti-value, and there is the Horseshoe, concrete and shimmer, a hermaphrodite of a building with its five-storey ring surrounding a high tower. They follow the sign to valet parking, and a man older than Spencer in orange shorts and jacket runs to the El Dorado to open Spencer’s father’s door.
Jimmy Ludwig grunts and twists and succeeds, on his third attempt, in heaving himself out of the car. The valet offers an experienced arm, which he ignores, preferring to rest his diminishing weight on the hood of the car. Spencer gathers up their belongings, the backpack and backgammon set, his father’s cane, the baggies with provisions, and manages, adroitly, he is getting better at this, to exchange a dollar bill for a ticket stub from the valet and sweep up the oxygen cylinder before his father tugs it cataclysmically along behind him, and give his father his shoulder to lean on for the short walk to the Horseshoe entrance, all without breaking stride or sweat or wind.
The lobby desk is an optimistically long counter to which red velvet ropes mark out different lines for silver, gold and platinum customers. The only queue is the one for silver guests, at which a huddle of old people wait bovine while the desk clerk deals with a gold couple who seem set on questioning every aspect of their accommodation.
‘Ocean view,’ says the man.
‘You have an ocean view,’ the clerk says.
‘Not from the bathroom,’ the woman says with the manner of an expert negotiator accustomed to clinching every transaction, financial or personal, to the detriment of her opponent, a way of being that Spencer is familiar with in his stepmother.
He is wondering whether he might just push into the platinum line where an unoccupied clerk gazes forlornly out, when he and his father are approached by two people, one male, one female, similarly rotund and black haired and small, and dressed identically in black Converse sneakers and black jeans and black T-shirts that have a white-line drawing of the Atlantic City Boardwalk and the legend Short Beach Film Festival 2008 across their lumpy breasts. They each carry clipboards and film festival plastic bags.
Spencer is gratified until they both walk past him to take hold of his father. One tries to kiss him, the other grabs his hand to pull it up and down.
‘Sir,’ says the male.
‘An honour,’ says the female.
Slightly panicked, Spencer’s father retracts the pieces of his body that had been occupied and looks to Spencer for assistance.
‘Dwight?’ says the male.
The overworked desk clerk elegantly raises an eyebrow and smiles with a glint of white and gold.
‘Will you look after these gentlemen? Your best possible care.’
‘Of course,’ Dwight the desk clerk says with an impressive implication that he would consider it a spiritual failing to intend any less.
‘This is your itinerary,’ the male says. ‘And your goody bag!’ the female says. ‘I…’ says Spencer.
But he is hushed with a brisk dismissive handshake from the male and a present of a goody bag from the female.
‘Mike and Cheryl are devastated,’ says the female.
‘That’s Mr Baumbach and Mrs Baumbach. The festival organisers.’
‘Devastated that they can’t be here to greet you in person.’
‘They are so looking forward to meeting you.’
‘Gala.’
‘On Friday.’
<
br /> ‘You’ll be at the top table.’
‘Of course he will. That goes without saying.’
‘I was just letting him know, the male says, somewhat petulantly.
Inside the bag is a guidebook to Atlantic City, two pens with the Short Beach Film Festival logo and the same T-shirt these two reps are wearing. Spencer likes black T-shirts. He will wear just about any slogan and condition of black T-shirt.
‘Have you come direct from Tirana?’ the male asks.
‘Absolutely,’ Spencer’s father says.
‘You must be tired after your trip.’
‘Sure, absolutely.’
‘I can’t say—’
We’
‘We can’t say what an honour this is.’
‘Wow. Just. Wow.’
‘We’d like to show you the press pack we have.’
And Spencer is jealous of the attention that his father is getting which is meant to be his. He hadn’t known quite what he was expecting from their arrival, but it certainly isn’t this, to be standing unregarded with oxgyen tanks and rucksack and backgammon set. His father has even eaten the Milano biscuits that his stepmother had packed for him.
‘I’m Spencer Ludwig,’ Spencer says.
‘Are you his interpreter?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘He speaks very good English, doesn’t he?’
‘Up to a point. But look—’
‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Is. Is. Ludwig. Spencer Ludwig.’
‘That’s a coincidence.’
‘Really? What is?’
‘One of our guests has that name. He’s a director too.’
‘I think that’ll probably be me.’
‘Well that is a coincidence, isn’t it? We had no idea. Dwight?’
The festival reps visit the desk and talk to the clerk.
‘Who are these jokers?’ Spencer’s father says.
‘They seem to think you’re somebody important. How’s your Albanian?’
After the reps have flurried away, Spencer receives room keys from the desk clerk. Looking at his father leaning with difficulty on the desk, Spencer asks if a wheelchair might be available.
A Film by Spencer Ludwig Page 7
