Mutter held a child in his arms while two other children, older, naked from the waist up, hung on him in a human cape. His smile never left as he moved into the crowd that slowly began to resume work with glittering eyes still on his return. How had this happened? How could they so welcome a stranger? How had these people compressed a lifetime of the familiar into a few hours? The crowd parted slightly, and at the apex of the thronging bodies an old woman stood with a squat young woman. The old woman was no taller than me, and two cigarettes were stuck in her shriveled face, each burning at different lengths, insurance against her hoop of smoke never being broken. She nodded and the young one, blushing when she peered at Mutter, handed us tin bowls of a rich, gamy broth. I saw pieces of spicy bark and aromatic leaves floating in the steam, and in the bottom of my bowl, proudly submerged, was a paw, the skinned knuckles glistening bluish in the greasy liquid. Dog soup. The traditional celebratory meal, as common to them as birthday cake. Mutter raised his bowl to his lips with one hand, drained it in a single swallow, and handed the baby back to the younger woman, who placed a caramel pudding–colored breast in its mouth and took Mutter’s hand. I watched them merge into the teeming activity, watched his massive form become integrated, quelled by the daily life of the studio Indians whose job it was to threaten with rubber tomahawks and fall from slugless bullets. How had it happened?
That night, they lit a bonfire in the body of a rusted-out Model A and beat drums stolen from the studio’s prop house. Men leaped around the curling flames, shaking the tips of their J-toed cowboy boots in the dust, some in dungarees, others still in the hair pipe and buckskin of the day’s wardrobe. Mutter, shirtless, his slabs of muscle rippling like water under a strong wind, howled phonetically the chant the other men knew by heart. The young woman stood with several others, the black pits of her baby’s eyes kicking hard yellow in the firelight. She grinned and whispered to her friends, her lips and eyes curling in union each time they took in a cycle of Mutter’s passing.
“He will make some girl very happy,” the old woman whispered to me as she sat down. She offered me a cigarette, which I took but did not light. I watched as she crumbled a cigarette in her rooty fingers, sprinkling the loose tobacco upon the ground before she stuffed two more in her mouth.
I watched her shuffle through the flap of a teepee and then turned back to the dancers. I was passed a bottle of solvent-smelling fluid. I passed it on to another watcher who drank deeply from it. There was heat from the fire if I cared to feel it, heat from the bodies around me if I cared to join them, but I felt neither heat nor cold. They were objects that reflected light, moist tubes that made sounds, faces that pulled and dipped and wrinkled into the semblances of feeling. They were like all the others, the stuff of stories, marionettes of meat and tears whose lives only mattered to me if captured on film. This made me a purist and all purists are alone.
But Mutter was different. My feelings for him were different. It cut to watch him happy without me. Yet this made no sense. With what was I feeling? He was a habit, a condition occasioned by his proximity that brought an illusion of continuity, of comfort. But I loved him. Against reason, against the tangled retrograde of my state, I loved him. I was not jealous of his new friend. That was something I could provide no one and thus could not begrudge him. He was nature to me, my last piece of home, and I realized I could not remain but neither could I simply leave.
“Maddy,” he said behind me. He sat down sweaty, his great chest heaving. Had he heard my thoughts? “Maddy,” he said again. “Friend.” And he thrust forward a puppy, mottled brown and white, still smelling of bitch’s milk.
“I hope you don’t expect me to eat that,” I said.
He grinned. “Friend. For you.”
I took the creature, feeling it quiver coldly in my arms.
“What about you?” I asked, looking up at him.
“Always friend,” he said. He did not sense my conflict. The puppy was a party favor, not a proxy.
“I cannot stay, Mutter.”
“But this is where we stay. This is home now.”
“Not for me.”
“But why?” His voice cracked and a thick finger brushed his nose.
“No pillows,” I said, smiling, and he read my real reasoning there, I think. I handed him back the puppy.
CHAPTER 26
Weeks passed, and each time I met Mutter for coffee or lunch, he was tanner, healthier, somehow more handsome, even though he had fallen out of the habit of wearing his cap. His speech improved. He was filled with stories of camp life, of rivalries and reunions, of births and injuries sustained in the dangerous stunts that comprised most of the Indians’ work. He mentioned names as if I were acquainted with their owners, as if I knew John Little Foot, who had crushed the head of his humerus leaping from his horse onto a runaway stagecoach. Or Mary Iron Feather, who had just given birth to triplets.
The father of Mutter’s girlfriend’s baby returned to camp after being on extended loan to First National Pictures. His name was Benjamin Pope but he was known as Big Ben due to his extreme size. He was one of the few Indians who had broken the traditional mold of generic savage and was routinely cast as an Italian gangster. He had worked as a two-bit fighter at local fairs throughout the West and had a single cauliflower ear and busted nose to prove it. His rage at being replaced in camp, not to mention in the bed of the mother of his child, cleared a circle around the two rivals within minutes of his arrival. They would vie for Jane’s favor, for Jane was the only name Mutter ever called her, and the winner would take all.
There was a carnival atmosphere to the competition, whose only event was the bending of metal wheel rims pried loosed from the spokes of an old wagon. Ben, with biceps writhing like pythons, twisted his into a cold pretzel. But Mutter, taking his cue from the romantic theme of the prize, cajoled his into the shape of a heart and thereby won the day. The two had since become as close as brothers, Ben teaching Mutter to ride and Mutter showing Ben how to shoot. Ben even said he would put a good word in for Mutter to Uncle Carl, as the studio was always in need of big fellows who didn’t mind wearing a little rouge when taking a hard hit to the jaw for a dollar a day.
And where did I spend my nights and early mornings when not cutting with Lois? I realized after the camp dance with Mutter that my chosen refuge needed to be near the business, inside the business. The only night skies I cared to sleep under were studded with twelve-watt bulbs. My sunsets glowed from forty-foot cycloramas flamed to life by carbon arcs. There needed to be no locks on my interior doors, no secrets behind them. Candy glass could never cut me when it shattered in my windows. There were many stages to choose from, but most had muslin skins for ceilings to allow for shooting in natural light. Only a handful were “blackout” boxes, and the one I chose, the one known, before they tore it down in 2014, as Stage 28, I chose for personal reasons. Lon had told me at our first dinner that on this stage was built the opera house set for Phantom. It had once accommodated the grand staircase but after shooting only the stage and theater boxes remained, soon to be repurposed as opera houses from all over the world. It smelled like a swamp in there, for half the stage had been flooded during shooting to create the Phantom’s subterranean sewer. It had never been thoroughly drained and had doubled as a toilet for a weary crew not allowed to leave the set. The uric reek and ashy stink of drowned cigarettes still lingered. At first, the smell had whispered lovingly of ancient burials in peat bogs, of sleeping mummies, necks broken or neatly slit, tanned tea-colored beneath their boggy quilts, and perhaps my Celtic roots tempted me to forever brine myself in what remained of the foul slosh. But that horsehair-and-plaster facade of the theater boxes provided a safe, reliable pocket that might keep me just out of nature’s reach. It was the opera house set that kept me close to Lon, or at least his belief in me.
Even with no key lights to make it sparkle, I was enamored of its gold leaf, its incredible attention to detail, its breathless, graceful enormity. It had b
een made by Italian master craftsmen who had constructed a working replica of Venice for the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco, slow artisans who spoke no English and moved in the refined cadence of craft only they could hear. Uncle Carl had paid them each a dollar twenty-five a day plus board and promptly fired them once the set was completed. As testament to his managerial methods, one could still see on the camera-shy surfaces loud protests of profanity, all in Italian, labeling “Uncle” Carl Laemmle as a fucker of pigs, of crippled cows, of cross-eyed whores, of his own cursed and booted mother.
I spent my evenings in one of the theater boxes. Box five. The Phantom’s box. I would lie on my back in a nest of rat droppings and racing forms, gazing lovingly at the dark rippled irises of the hung lights as if they formed the figure of Orion. It was quiet in there, cool and hollow and huge, but it gave me the feeling of being tucked in a papier-mâché womb. It was abandoned most of the time. But once in a while a producer or scout might wander in and knock on my delicately molded boxes or stroll my collapsed stage wondering aloud, “You think this joint could double for the Albert Hall?” I was proprietary of the building. It was my home after all. And on those occasions, when I heard a foreign footfall, tentative upon the damp silence, voices lowered as upon entering some ghostly church, I could not resist a moan. I’d wait until they were beneath me, then will my dry lungs to fill. With slow pressure, trying not a grin, I’d let out through my parched throat a long and sinuous death rattle. It filled the enormous space with an almost ecclesiastical dread.
“Jesus, you hear that?”
“Cheese it, brother!”
My ridiculous wail was not diminished by my hollow laugh as I heard those shoes recede at speed. I guess that’s how the legends started. It got to the point where all I’d have to do was tap on the walls or let a yellowed Santa Anita racing form flutter to the ground like a grim autumn leaf in the spectral half-light. One night it rained. And a couple came in. Young dress extras from some eighteenth-century melodrama. She righted her powdered wig from their run. He pulled his brocaded pantaloons from his crotch. They were wet but not soaked. He pulled her to him. She playfully slapped his face. I don’t know why they interested me. Maybe because there was no coin in their affection, no real barter in her flirtatious slap. But that wasn’t it. It was them. Their youth, cold and wet and still burning. The math was simple. Without even having to count I knew they were my age, if I had been allowed to age. All those years offering up myself in payment to Volker’s insight had not put me off wanting to be touched. To be looked at like that. I longed to be one of them. I hated them. And I peered over the edge of my box and watched them wrestling there on the damp concrete. The cheap satin of their costumes rasped loudly where they made contact, filling the stage with the loud and ironic sound of silencing ghosts. I filled my lungs and let out a slow rattle, my moan staying just inside the sonic signature of their grappling bodies.
“Did you hear something?”
“Come on, help me with this damn thing.”
“Henry, Jesus! Stop it! Did you hear that?”
The silence rang, stoked only slightly by the sound of their increased breathing.
“Nothing.” His hands dipped beneath the heavy drape of her skirt.
“Henry! Stop it!” she said sharply, and I could not resist.
“Yeeessss, Henry,” I wailed dryly. And I jumped up on the rim of my box and screamed, screamed with all my frustration and fury. “Keep your goddamned mitts to yourself, buddy!” The sound I made would all but rival a neglected gate hinge, and with balls of rat turd clinging to my face like some medieval pestilence and my hair plastered to the extreme bias of what passed for my sleep I must have looked like some narcoleptic brat suddenly awoken from a nap in her breakfast cereal. They stiffened instantly. He ran before she did. But there was no comedy. Only a residue of longing. There had to be more to my existence than the tedious hopscotch of studio politics and balled ambition. For many nights after that I would lie in my box and try to picture a face, a young man’s eyes, stolen from some slouching grip, a pair of hands from a junior gaffer. And I’d fumble in the rubbery and confused darkness beneath my skirt but nothing stirred. Without reference to the actual sensation there was no icy fire. The closest I got was remembering the tang of a lemon ice with the artist’s wife a lifetime ago in Vienna. But a child’s confection was not what I wanted.
AFTER THREE MONTHS OF MUTTER LIVING LIKE A GENUINE RED INDIAN AT his camp and me terrifying the occasional trespasser from my box, the cut of Phantom was finally locked and we had our first screening with the changes I had made. I didn’t even bother informing Lois of my final cuts. I simply drowned out yet another of her meandering sermons on the necessity of the non-narrative montage in conveying the spiritual aspects of cinema while I waited for the seams to dry.
Chaney by that time was at war and smart enough to know it. He knew Uncle Carl was bound to reject any cut merely to prolong the star’s tenure at the studio, thereby preventing his return to Metro in the hopes that he’d default back to Universal. So Chaney needed a hit, a big, fat-titted hit that would unequivocally close his Universal chapter. To do this he needed consensus; he needed an audience. So he took a risk, an enormous risk in hindsight.
“You knock this out of the park, you’ll never look for work again,” he said to me in the lobby of Grauman’s Egyptian, where he had rented the entire theater for the preview.
“Mr. Chaney, I had no idea an audience would be seeing this now.” If I’d had a heartbeat, it would have been thundering like a hummingbird’s.
“Of course not. If you knew that, you would have tried to only please. You wouldn’t have done your best work.”
“But I can’t guarantee—”
“Who can, kid? We’ll know in the first reel, right? This town wouldn’t be any fun if all the dice were loaded.”
We took seats in the back row. We could see just the tip of Uncle Carl’s thinning pate several rows ahead of us as we waited for the lights to dim. Classical Bach on a roller rink Wurltizer, the picture seemed to be playing well. Not much shifting. A few coughs, but the heads were quiet in silhouette, attention rapt. Then it came. Christine couldn’t take any more guessing. She sneaked up behind the Phantom, the anticipation palpable. The theater seats creaked like wooden ships in roughening water. Then she did it. She ripped the mask away.
Chaos.
Laemmle’s wife screamed. Another fainted. Two grown men leaped on the seats of their chairs. The rest of the movie played like the Sea Serpent at Pacific Ocean Park. It didn’t let up until the final scene, where there was a collective sigh of released tension. Lights up, then silence. No one said a word. Slowly, people rose from their seats. Laemmle’s wife, head down, was the first to leave the theater, followed by patrons wiping their brows, wringing their dresses, murmuring. And beneath it all, Chaney grinned like a working-class cat with a golden canary. He finally turned to me.
“Kid, you just bought yourself an official straitjacket in the looney bin,” he said, and I beamed. At the time, exchanging my white coat for such a restrictive garment seemed a definite upgrade.
The theater emptied of all but Uncle Carl. He stopped by Chaney. I’d slunk into the confines of my chair, invisible.
“Quite a picture, Lon,” Uncle Carl said in his comic German accent.
“I’ll say,” Chaney replied, lighting his fiftieth cigarette of the day.
“However, there are a few things—”
“Bullshit, Carl.”
Uncle Carl bristled. Few had this license.
“You heard ’em,” Chaney continued. “I suppose that scream your wife let out was German for ‘What a stinker’?”
“Now, Lon, I wouldn’t say that. It’s a perfectly fine effort . . .”
“It’s a solid gold fly over the fence, and you know it. Now you’re going to do what you do best. You’re going to release this picture as is. Not a single change. Not one edit. And after you get the feeling back in your a
rms from raking in your killing, you’re going to put this kid under contract.”
Uncle Carl looked to me with a rubbery shock on his face.
“Don’t worry, Uncle,” Lon smirked. “You’ll thank me.”
We never discussed the picture again, never pondered its finer points, the cutting on the axis, the building of tension with increasingly closer coverage, the way I’d made the Phantom appear a complex, tragic, even romantic figure. It was all understood. Hollywood never discusses. It simply rewards.
CHAPTER 27
There is comfort in the places of rot, silence in decay, a soothing lull as wood returns to its softness in soil, metal dims its shine, and bodies disassemble back to the belly of the world. And it was here, in one such place, beneath the pilings of the Santa Monica Pier, well after midnight, where the mildew and brine purred like myrrh from the sodden piles, that I thought of love again. There was a contour in the damp sand, a cold shallow pit of compression where two bodies had lain, the imprint of an ample ass that feathered backward up the beach, dipping into two gentle divots where the balls of shoulders had been. I spread my small fingers over this hollow, sensing the lost sounds that might have synced with the action, a silk rustle of hemline cresting to midthigh, a creak of cartilage from the joints that had held him poised, breath in tandem then peppered with laughter or what was taken as laughter before the intentions changed and the words no longer mattered.
On her back, what had she felt? Thought? Prayed? Had she known his name? Had they been promised or just met? Was his breath of liquor or cotton candy or had she even noticed? And as the bodies moved now in my mind, I slithered into that shallow grave dug by at least some variety of affection and slipped my fingers between my cold thighs and waited for a flush that would give flesh to the image. I heard my name. I saw the familiar lace-up boots. Chaney stood there with a flashlight in one hand, shining the light in my unblinking eyes.
Only the Dead Know Burbank Page 15
