by Daniel Kraus
I was named in the story whether I liked it or not—and I did like it, if you want to know the truth. Less enamored of the attention was my roommate. Leather’s saw had perforated Church’s left lung, leaving him with a clattering cough that soiled his every shirt with blood. Co-starring in a splashy news story came with no financial benefits and we hadn’t the war chest for the operation he required. Instead he rambled about the apartment unfit for work and spitting up lung tissue.
Expectoration or accusation? I could not tell. I lived in flinching fear that Church’s ether-murked memory of the Cotton Club would come rushing back. Already he’d learned from McKenzie’s articles how I’d hidden from him my pursuit of the Bird Hunter, and it had confused and upset him. He’d risked all to protect me in France and still I had not trusted him?
The penance I paid was to navigate the city, night and day, to scrounge paying gigs—and in the interim keep my friend stocked with clean handkerchiefs to tidy his spritzed blood. Just such proletariat scrabbling occupied me when I received a most startling proposal. It manifested as a Western Union telegram from Hearst Metrotone, the newsreel service of the Fox Film Corporation, one of the biggest movie studios in Hollywood. The unbelievable contents were as follows:
MR. ZEBULON FINCH
NEW YORK (NEW YORK)
READING WITH GREAT INTEREST OF YOUR RECENT CIRCUMSTANCES STOP DESIRE TO PURSUE ARRANGEMENT WITH YOU TO APPEAR IN ONE-REEL FILMED PICTURE ABOUT ROLE IN MURDERS STOP CAN OFFER COMPENSATION OF $35 FOR YOUR TROUBLE STOP KINDLY CABLE RETURN LETTER AT MY EXPENSE STOP YOURS MOST SINCERELY
ED MANN
CULVER CITY (CALIFORNIA)
You know I am starry-eyed; I do not dispute it. Allow me, though, to dazzle you with a pendant of benevolence. Thirty-five dollars was a goodly sum, and every penny could go toward Church’s medical care. Noble enough for you? Good. Now, Dearest Reader, let me to gibber like a little girl. Hollywood! Wanted me! For a picture show! I had to hug a lamppost so that I could bear the imposing vision of myself as a black-and-white god flickering across the colossal screen of some columnated picture palace.
Because the enterprise seemed gauche considering Church’s suffering, I kept the news to myself. I cabled Ed Mann that very day, I did, picturing in my mind’s eye the broad-chested stallion who might go by such a name. Further briefings followed, each one studded with specifics, the most fabulous of which was that my film was to be one of the fashionable new talkies!
I was sick with nerves on production day. At noon I reported to a gentleman’s club on the Upper East Side, a solemn four-story structure that blinded me with its polished mahogany surfaces. Luckily, a club steward presented himself, took my coat and hat, and led me into a well-carpeted smoking room, where I was greeted by the first of what would prove to be three or four dozen disappointments.
Ed Mann was an eel who looked as if owed a year’s worth of sleep. He licked stray luncheon off his fingers and offered me a sticky handshake while checking a pocket watch with his other hand. My story, griped he, was the first of three scheduled for the afternoon, so there was not one second to spare. He shoved me out the door with his three-person crew in pursuit, sacking my premeditated plan to impress him with rapier wit.
Our first location was a street corner down the block. For a Depression-era pittance, Mann had availed himself of the services of an elderly Jewess whom I was tasked with helping across the street. Mann snatched the woman’s gnarled hand, pressed it to my forearm, checked his pocket watch, and scurried back to look through the camera.
“Terribly sorry,” said I, “but what relation has this to the murders?”
“You’re a doer of good deeds!” shouted Mann. “We’re just establishing that with filmic shorthand!”
Filmic shorthand, eh? That sounded quite elaborate! I took the invigorating deep breath due a saint such as myself and patted the hand of the poor, wrinkled crone. True, I’d be more likely to elbow this slowpoke from the sidewalk rather than help her along, but who cared—the movie mechanism had begun to wind! A burly sort lowered over my head a long pole with a microphone attached on the end while bewildering slang began to sling.
“Sound ready?”
“Ready.”
“Camera ready?”
“Ready.”
“Roll sound!”
“Sound rolling.”
“Roll camera!”
“Camera rolling.”
“Zebulon Finch, Roll One, Scene Five, Take One. Mark!”
“Scene Five?” asked I. “What of Scene One through—”
The slate board cracked! I jumped.
“And action!” cried Mann.
The camera purred like a huntress lynx. I, the prey, retracted into a defensive crouch. As luck would have it, the biddy clinging to my arm was a born ham; she clutched my cold fingers and sang, “Oh, angel, it is so kind of you to help a sickly grandmother like me across this dangerous city street!”
So that’s what I did, feeling as natural as if being filmed toilet- papering my ass. But after Mann bellowed, “Cut! Print! Moving on!” I heard no complaints. I searched about, suddenly hungry for feedback, but Mann was cursing his watch and storming toward the next set-up. Which involved, if you can believe it, me ruffling the revolting hair of some lice-ridden street urchin, which was followed by a shot of me extracting a hissing cat from a tree and handing over the flailing monster to an indebted housewife. This fraudulent flimflam continued until at last, per Mann’s schedule, we looped our way back to the club for a concluding interview.
Here, Reader, is where you first joined us beneath the blazing kliegs: your hero caked in women’s cosmetics, costumed in a smoking jacket and cravat, and posed just so against a splendiferous hearth while the accessory of a gourd calabash pipe was wedged into my palm. This was a Zebulon Finch whitewashed to fit the vanilla palate of the moviegoing masses—but, gee, anything for the movies!
With camera a-whir, Mann began to toss questions so soft they barely qualified as such. Can you describe your heroic resolve in catching the Bird Hunter? It was concern for the safety of others that drove you, is that right? Their design precluded anything but the doughiest of replies. I obliged, feeling a bit peppery, while Mann checked his damnable watch.
At length a displeasing odor permeated the room.
Mann, for the first time, paid attention. He sniff-sniffed.
“What the dickens is that? Smells like turned meat.”
The klieg lights—the heat upon my dead flesh—how embarrassing.
“Sorry, gents.” I cleared my throat. “I’m afraid that would be me.”
Mann’s crack team of dunderheads misunderstood. Believing that I had caught aflame, the sound recorder produced a brass fire extinguisher and ran toward me operating the pump. His foot caught on an Oriental rug, the extinguisher went airborne, and he reached for the nearest light stand for help. It was slapstick worthy of Harold Lloyd: the light toppled and smashed to pieces against the hearth, a comical hair’s breadth from my casually propped elbow.
Into the room blundered the steward followed by a pride of club elite. An argument about the damage erupted. It was during the top-volume squabble that I noticed a large glass shard from the klieg jutting from my left thigh. I sighed, for they were my best trousers. I removed the glass and held it up so that I might curse it—this was hardly the debut of which I’d dreamt—before noticing that the assemblage had suspended their row to stare.
I hid the shard behind my back like a child.
“It is nothing,” said I. “Recommence your quarrel.”
Mann’s pocket watch made no further appearances. His later appointments were forgotten. A dormant newsman’s instinct awakened and when the interview resumed, his questions were of higher quality. Pinned like a butterfly to an entomologist’s board, I stammered a series of dodges. Don’t you feel pain, Mr. Finch? Of course I fee
l pain, it’s just, you see, my thigh, it has nerve damage from the war. But you are too young to have fought in the war. Did I say war? Well, I meant “war” as metaphor—the war with the Bird Hunter. Ah, so you admit that the Bird Hunter knew of this ability of yours?
Mann promised me a fifteen-dollar bonus when at last he ran out of film.
I nodded my appreciation but felt no elation. What had I done?
Weeks later I received my check, cashed it, and cornered Church while he was taping the handle of his fractured cane prior to heading out on a hundredth futile job hunt. From my pocket I pulled the fifty bucks. The instant steeped to an essence all that was sour between us: he flinched as if expecting a stiletto, and I flinched at his flinching. Still smarting from Ed Mann’s shoot, I lied that I had come upon the cash in the park, and wasn’t that the niftiest luck?
His eyes, full moon at first, slivered, leaving me feeling smarmy. Of course the honorable Burt Churchwell would never accept money he judged as unclean. His gaze, however, was not one of disdain. Glistening from his concave cheek was a puddle of tears. The display of emotion made me fidgety, seeing how I’d once again hidden from him the truth.
“I thought,” said I, “you might put it toward mending that discommodious cough.”
He wiped his nose with his sleeve.
“Shucks, Private. I got a better idea. I been talking to some real stand-up fellas in the soup line and they’re organizing soldiers to march on Washington in a couple weeks. I been meaning to tell you. Don’t know why I haven’t. I guess we’ve both been busy. But how about you and me join them?”
“A march? Whatever for?”
“They’re calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force cuz of how the government owes them their service certificate bonuses. That’s a lot more than fifty bucks, little buddy, and me and you are owed it too. It ain’t American that we starve before they decide to pay up.”
“True, but—”
He snatched the cash.
“This’ll get us there. And then we can march together, just like old times. You and me, brother. Heck, all of our brothers. We took down the Huns, didn’t we? I think we can handle them boys in D.C. How ’bout it?”
Months of excruciating suspicion had at last generated this fresh scion of friendship. I grabbed at it and held tight to it, nodding, smiling, and basking in my friend’s large, bruising embrace. Had only I recognized the symbolism of the hacking cough that ended the hug and the black spots of blood that spattered the floor.
The day before the march was a sunny, hopeful one. The local chapter of the Bonus Army had reserved a bus destined for the capital, and Church and I had agreed to rendezvous at the station for the 4:30 p.m. departure. He was picking up our pressed Marines fatigues while I’d been tasked with obtaining victuals for the road. I was en route to the market when I made the fateful mistake of lingering before a movie theater.
Ever a sucker for promotion, I was boning up on a Warner Brothers picture called I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang when my eye strayed from the kissable lips of actress Glenda Farrell and landed upon a boxed insert touting the “Added Attractions.” Squeezed between a “Farce Comedy” and a “Cartoon Comic” was the “Talking News,” the highlights of which were fired in bullet points:
• Manhunt Continues for Kidnapped Lindbergh Baby!
• There Is a Vaccine for Yellow Fever!
• Meet the Strange Central Figure in the Bird Hunter Case!
“Merry Christmas,” gasped I.
The 2:45 matinee started in minutes, leaving plenty of time to see what Ed Mann had made of me. I slapped down thirty cents for a ticket, claimed a seat near the back for a quick getaway, and drummed my seat so impatiently that a woman summoned a colored usher to beg me to stop. One hundred years later, the projector wheezed to life; one thousand years later, the insipid comedy short faded to black. At last came the bracing fanfare of Hearst Movietone News and “the top news of the day”—the top news!—began.
In a snap, it was over. My screen time hadn’t exceeded two minutes and yet I sat in the dark stunned while a disfigured moll called Betty Boop hijacked the entertainment. Had it really been me up there, gesturing with my pipe and insisting that I cared deeply about the welfare of my fellow man?
The pièce de résistance had been the glass shard being pulled from my leg. Captured by an unprepared camera, the shot was jittery and off-kilter; moviegoers stroked to complacency by smooth dolly shots cried out in unison. I did not budge when I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang began. The plot followed an unfairly condemned man pursued across the years, but it was my face I saw lingering upon that screen.
I exited the theater in a fog. Moviegoer chatter centered not on actor Paul Muni’s gutsy performance but rather on that curious fellow from the newsreel. Was that business with the shard real or Hollywood effects? They did not know, but agreed it deserved a second look.
The Excelsior ticked like a tapped foot. From my coat I removed it and registered a time of 4:45—fifteen minutes late. If I ran, I might still make the bus that Church was no doubt holding. Taxi after taxi passed the theater; I did not hail a one. The lure of plodding alongside the indignant injured in Washington was no lure at all when compared to the red sparkle of the marquee above, the yellow dazzle of the lobby beyond.
I felt low about abandoning Church like that. I did.
But from my trouser pocket I fished another thirty cents.
II.
ON JUNE 27, 1932, I received by post an invitation to a Fourth of July dinner. It was printed in gold foil upon creamy stock the likes of which I hadn’t felt since being handed Dr. Leather’s business card three decades prior. I read it over and over, struggling to swallow a single delectable crumb.
I had been invited, or so read the absurd text, to Pickfair, which I knew from Church’s celebrity magazines to be the sprawling Beverly Hills home of the first couple of the silver screen: America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, and the King of Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks. The letter, penned by a third party in their employ, claimed that Mr. Fairbanks had viewed my newsreel and was keen to add me to a guest list that, historically, was second only to the White House in its litany of luminaries.
A valedictory paragraph indicated that a reservation had been made in my name for an American Airways flight scheduled to depart from Floyd Bennett Field on July 2. I had to sit down. Zebulon Finch in an airship, dashing among the clouds? For the millionth time since my death, I wished I could have a drink—very stiff, if you please.
When the glow had subsided some six or eight hours later, I confronted a predicament. There had been no word from Church since I’d jilted him at the bus station, even as the papers reported each travail of the beleaguered Bonus Army. After erecting a Hooverville along the Anacostia River with which to shame President Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur’s U.S. Army—the irony, it scathes!—set upon the squatters with bayonets and tear gas. One would think that these were Germans saboteurs being dispelled, not American heroes.
Two men had been killed in the fracas and cameras had caught it all. Of late I huddled by the telephone like an Army wife, waiting for Church’s cry for help that would, at the same time, indicate his forgiveness. But the bell did not ring. I toggled the rotary dial and drew patterns in the handset dust. Perhaps, thought I, the Bonus Army’s strife had trawled memories of the Cotton Club. If so, he might prefer his apartment empty when he returned. In fact, his prolonged absence might be his quiet Midwestern way of holding the door open for my exit.
The notion might have inspired me to jump into the Hudson River were it not for the invitation card’s caressable embossment. Wasn’t it possible, even probable, that I might better help Church from afar? I’d earned fifty dollars, an astronomic sum, for a half-day’s work in Ed Mann’s picture. Perhaps in Hollywood, the one town in America unaffected by the Depression, I might work a full day, a full week,
a full year, many times over, and mail every penny of it back to my friend until I had purchased his lung operation as well as his forgiveness.
I’d intended to help John Quincy’s family and failed.
This time, swore I, Zebulon Finch would come through.
So it was with an anvil heart that on July 2 I put on my last surviving suit and hat, stomped a mouse on my way out of the apartment, locked the door, and slid beneath it my key. It was only then that I agonized that Church, upon his return, might worry. I scrounged the lobby for a handbill and found a chip of coal with which to write. The paper I slipped beneath the door offered two words in a caveman scrawl:
GONE, HOLLYWOOD
My plane was a Ford Tri-Motor—“the Tin Goose,” the pilot called it—and in this goose’s belly were ten wicker rattan chairs and little else. Take-off was a thing of white-knuckle terror and I might have kicked out a window and dove for land had there not been two delighted children right behind me. Once aloft, the ride was not unlike that of a boat, except for the noise, which was deafening, and the vibration, which was numbing, and the quick drops in altitude, which were pants-pissingly scary—well, it was nothing like a boat. The view? I cannot say. It was bright white panic for twenty-five-hundred straight miles.
We landed in a town called Burbank and I emerged from the flying coffin into a seventy-two-degree heaven of palm trees and blue skies. A taxi took me to Hollywood, where I asked a sunglassed bloke in a straw boater for the nearest hotel. He fast-talked directions but all of the stucco buildings looked the same, and I wound up cutting through an alley. I turned a blind corner and came upon a man squatting amid debris.
“Say, friend,” said I, “I wonder if I might bother you for . . .”
I left the request dangling. The man was having himself a shit on the concrete. His mucky clothing betrayed his derelict nature and the twitch of his face conveyed mental derangement. He glanced my way, not much perturbed, and boosted the volume on the song that he was singing: “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from the Walt Disney cartoon, which, by that year, had become a sarcastic anthem of the Great Depression.