by Ray Succre
How different Larry now seemed to Emery, how unique and disciplined and even triumphant. The man had kept something so strongly personal, so overwhelmingly odd and terrible, to himself, telling no one but his wife, taking it even to the grave with him… that form of resolve was a thing Emery respected greatly, and he felt that he, himself, could never possess the strength for such a thing.
According to Helen, who had not prepared to be so revealing and candid at the funeral, Belmont was the name of a villain in a comic book Larry had stolen in junior high. He had tried playing football with the other kids, but they were not accepting of him, and he began wanting to be someone else. Not Evelyn, not Lawrence Nutts. Someone with a fresh start and no connection to the past troubles he had experienced. He dropped out of high school in his sophomore year and ran away. The manner by which his mother clung to him and the bizarre environment in which he was raised in the isolated mountains precluded he stay forever with his family.
“He said he would have rather been dead. I think he would have, too,” Helen said.
Larry planned his escape with much detail, concocting a few fake documents, and then snuck off in the middle of the night. He had been made to feel like a small, ignorant child, even into his teenage years, and while the threats had ceased working on him, his mother’s crying had begun, something Larry had fallen prone to with ease. In the end, with both resolve and panic guiding him, Larry gathered up a few belongings and left under moonlight, making a slow, hitchhiking adventure across three states. When he entered Louisiana, he was exhausted and hungry, and not wanting to beg, Larry sought out the nearest recruiting station and joined the military at sixteen-years old. He did so with a handful of fake papers that exhibited, for the first time in print, the name of Lawrence Belmont. This had been his last resort, and he had planned on the possibility of having to join the ARMY.
After three years of uneventful service in the late 1940’s, which saw him writing a great many stories in his spare time, Larry Belmont exited the military and moved to Los Angeles. That same year, he was published in the inaugural issue of Playboy. This was where Larry’s past life met with the life Emery had known.
Larry’s absence had wreaked a quiet havoc on his family back home. Letty had panicked when her son/daughter did not come home, and, after two days, she sent Jones on the mission to find his missing sibling. The older brother had gone looking for him, numerous times over the course of a year, and did suspect the young man had entered the service, but there was no record of enlistment for either Lawrence or Evelyn Nutts. Neither Letty nor Jones would ever see Larry again. Jones’ presence at the funeral, with his uncle, was due to a guilt-heavy and likely turmoil-induced clause in Larry’s last will and testament, which had guided Larry’s attorney to search out and contact Letty and Jones Nutts. One would prove to be no longer with the living.
Emery knew the rest of Larry’s story, somewhat. After the ARMY, Larry began publishing his stories while going to school on the G.I. Bill, and when Larry left school, without graduating, he already had a decent career free-lancing. Emery and Larry had a similar start in the television business, with the exception that Emery had helped to create certain aspects of the television programming world, having joined into it when television was quite young, while Larry had enlisted in television once the ball was rolling. It was a newly established career that Larry had taken up, one that could be read about, asked about, but with Emery, the rise into the world of television had been an unmitigated field of the unknown. One sort of person had paved the way for another, and with only a handful of years separating them. As the funeral bore on, Emery found himself thinking over certain aspects of Larry’s personality, and specific instances in the past that might have alluded to such a troubled childhood. Some of the awful outbursts, near the end, when Larry was no longer Larry, had contained ample hints.
Don’t touch the little girl! She fucks like a boy!
Emery thought back on a story Larry had pitched during the second season of The Other Side, one in which a young man living in a world where homosexuality was enforced by law falls in love with a young woman, and is subsequently caught, beaten, and jailed for having an affair with her. Emery now wondered with direction whether that story, as well as several other gender-themed tales Larry had concocted over the years, had been based on true, inner turmoil and the harking back of his mind to childhood. Emery had thought these stories wondrous and imaginative tales, ground-breaking scripts and themes, but now knew they had flowed from a particular fountain that resided deep in Larry’s disturbing past.
FADE TO:
Exterior, the MOON. We see a ninety-year old LARRY BELMONT in a C.U., standing alone on the desolate, gray surface. There is no sound, no wind, just ominous stillness. LARRY looks slowly about, seeming lost, as we PULL BACK to a distant shot, showing the isolated nature of his location.
CUT TO:
CLOSE UP of LARRY again. He looks down and we follow his stare. In the dust near his feet extrudes a set of typewriter keys, out of order, in varying heights within a few inches of the ground. LARRY kneels and starts hunt-and-peck typing on the disarrayed keys. Still silent, we see him tiredly look upward then.
We CUT TO a wide angle shot of Earth in the black of space. We see this for a few seconds before the Earth begins to go dark.
In slow-motion, We CUT TO LARRY as he turns his head and looks out of frame at another object. We stay in slow-motion for the remainder of the scene.
Larry’s face grows dim and we CUT TO a wide angle shot of THE SUN. The brightness and vivid color begin fading however. We watch as the Sun goes out, cutting back and forth between Larry on the moon and the Sun as it all grows dark. Over several of these quick shots, LARRY transforms into a little girl in a light-blue dress. She lies down and begins making a snow-angel in the moondust. The scene continues darkening and we CUT finally back to the Earth. We see it slowly vanish in the ever-dimming light. After a moment, in the pitch black, we hear what sounds like an interview fading in. When it reaches normal volume, we hear the voices of CALVIN MOFFAT and his interviewer, WYATT MANN.
WYATT MANN:
When did you first start to realize that Lawrence Belmont was sick, with his changing behavior and illness?
CALVIN MOFFAT:
Oh, it was slow at first. He was forgetting things and being flighty, but I always thought he was just hitting the bottle too hard and it was taking a toll. We were collaborating then, and he did drink a lot. The first time I realized something else was happening was when we got together one afternoon and I remember thinking he looked older than me. Which was very new, and I asked him if he was okay and he just told me he was hungover. I bought that, but it kept happening. He was in a hospital for it, maybe a few weeks later.
As we listen to the audio of the interview, small amounts of gray fade in at the edge of the black frame.
WYATT MANN:
What did they think of his illness?
CALVIN MOFFAT:
Well, they had no idea. Larry was ill and after a few months, they thought it was Alzheimer’s. Then it was Pick’s disease. There were a couple others they were checking on but they never came back with anything. Larry thought they were ignoring his calls for awhile, there. I think they were stumped. But then he was back in the hospital and his skin started to go, and he was forgetting all sorts of things. Weird things, and everyone knew there was something very wrong with Larry, then.
As the interview progresses, we pull back from the black to reveal we’ve been looking into a grammatical period mark on a manuscript.
WYATT MANN:
If you could pick a few favorites from Larry’s work, what stands out to you most?
CALVIN MOFFAT:
I recall Larry coming over in... probably February of 1960, after a day on the set of Other Side, second season, and giving me a copy of “The List of the Bow”. I was stunned by how good it was. Larry had a soft spot for immigration... like the plight of coming here, I mean, and
the way he captured the uncertainty of the occupants of that boat just shocked me. He knew a lot about boats, too. For a couple of minutes there, I felt like I’d just made the trip over, myself.
WYATT MANN:
And that story was the first ever piece of fiction to appear in Modern Gentleman, when they started collecting. Was there ever any rivalry between you two or with other writers you knew?
We’ve pulled back enough to see several typed words. They are not indicative of anything, just the end of a random sentence.
CALVIN MOFFAT:
With me? Not at all. We wrote together quite a few times. Other writers usually liked Larry a lot. He and Asher used to play a kind of fake rivalry, maybe. Only a little and it was all for fun. But I wanted to say, that story you mentioned wasn’t actually the first one in Modern Gentleman.
WYATT MANN:
No?
CALVIN MOFFAT:
No, the first Modern Gentleman story was another one of Larry’s. “Within a Forest Dark”. Title was a line from Dante, and they printed it a few years earlier, but you’re right that “The List of the Bow” made it in there, too. Just later. Larry was the very first to be printed in Modern Gentleman. And he was in there a few times. Mostly he did articles they contracted for him. He had a love of sailing. I never saw him sail, but I know he was keen to get out on the water every month or so. His articles were usually about that.
We can now see several lines of text, crooked in frame.
WYATT MANN:
Having read many of his early stories, as well as many early works of all the Other Side writers, you and Emery Asher, and Joe Collery (who has an excellent short story collection, I think), but I read Larry Belmont’s early stories and I’ve always been really taken aback by the unsavoriness Larry Belmont could work with. Very subversive work, especially since many of them were written in the Red Panic and the conformist gestalt of ten years ago. All of that was in high gear but he didn’t seem to abide by it much.
CALVIN MOFFAT:
Most of us ignored all that. We had to. It was bizarre and ignorant.
WYATT MANN:
I remember reading “After Supper”, where this cold-hearted father forces his little girl to live as a boy. And it was amazing. Another Playboy story, “You are Here, Mr. Steadman”, was surprisingly affecting, too, because he has this sex bar in the future that’s only for homosexuals, and homosexuality is the way the world has become in that future, and heterosexuality is banned as aberrant and perverted there. Larry Belmont detailed that with a lot of intricacy and it’s a really out-there story. Did he always have that in mind, being subversive, or-
CALVIN MOFFAT:
Not really, no.
WYATT MANN:
...or else maybe just trying to get to a favored taboo or out-there place when he wrote?
We can see the majority of a paragraph now, full of details and lines, some smudges in places, and dried correction fluid beneath certain phrases. We also see some handwritten notes and a few scratched out words. Editing.
CALVIN MOFFAT:
No, people think that but Larry was one of the most grounded writers I knew, and he wrote many things. The more risque stories got the attention, but he wrote other things, too. He was very level unless he had a couple of drinks in him. Larry’s energy and his wilder side came out after that. He’d get adventurous and want to go do things, see things... sail. He was eager then. And his accent would come out a little.
WYATT MANN:
Did any of the Other Side writers ever go sailing with him?
CALVIN:
No, I don’t think so. Banry did, I think, once.
WYATT MANN:
Did Larry and Orson Banry spend much time together?
CALVIN MOFFAT:
Not outside the Orange Grove. Once or twice, they might have met somewhere, but with other writers from the group, too. Larry was sort of the black sheep of those people after the second season of Other Side.
WYATT MANN:
Because of his involvement with Emery Asher and the “I Sing of Arms and a Man” script. Do you think Banry saw a lot of talent in Larry?
We can see most of the page at hand. It is full of revision marks, whiteout, smudged ink, and a stain on the upper corner. We do not get to see the entire page, just the disjointed nature of partial text and one edge of the paper.
CALVIN MOFFAT:
Sure. Of course. Larry’s talent was easy to spot.
WYATT MAN:
I think what strikes me the most was that, at a young age, he seemed to be able to put forth these fascinating tales that just aren’t like the other writers of the time. They’re unique and touching stories, in his own way, and I think they’re not afraid to speak intimately to readers.
We see smoke start to drift over the page, likely from a cigarette just out of frame.
WYATT MANN (CONT.):
There are all these dark stories, and he was rewriting the roles people play, featuring homosexuality, and toying with what gender means or- or just is. Really amazing work. I can’t stress that enough.
CALVIN MOFFAT:
Yes, Larry wrote some excellent fiction.
CUT TO:
Non-fiction. Parker Funeral Chapel. A service. There were several per day. As the cloud cover moved across the sky, the morning occasioned to brightly saturate the grass and trees beside the chapel, and these short stunts of sunlight and clarity lifted the bereft mood of the chapel’s occupants.
At the behest of both Emery and Calvin, Helen agreed not confront the brother, Jones, or the uncle, who had not given his name, for being present at the funeral. To many, including Helen and Beth, having not been a part of Larry’s adult life meant that Jones and this silent uncle should neither be a part of his death. Emery and Calvin, however, seeking to avoid a scene, convinced Helen to say nothing. Emery conceded that at a funeral, even one’s enemies were somewhat welcome, if their purpose was to say goodbye in a sincere and respectful manner. This was the tragic stipend of having lived, and Larry would not have had his brother sought out and invited if he did not want his brother to attend. Perhaps this was Larry’s way of letting those he cared for learn about his past, allowing them to discover the truth of his life.
Jones did seem upset, but the sort that bore more confusion than distress. He was out of his element and felt his purpose was to be candid about Larry’s past, and explain things to those present. He was furtive when spoken to, and was not used to the sort of people Los Angeles fostered. It was obvious he did not feel welcome. This was somewhat correct. Most felt, after hearing the stories of Larry’s childhood, that no one from Larry’s early family should have been allowed to stay at the funeral. Why had Jones not intervened with his mother? The answer to this was likely the same as the answer to why Larry had changed his name and run away in the night: Escape. Who knows what odd things Jones had undergone as a child. He wasn’t speaking about it. He was speaking only about Larry. This may have been indicative that the madness of Letty had been far-reaching and devastating in a variety of ways. In Jones’ youth, there was a father present, as well. Had this man, dead before Larry’s birth, served to monitor and balance Letty’s behavior, or had the husband compelled it?
Larry’s uncle said nothing, even when asked a direct question. This was Letty’s brother. The old man was somber and quiet and breathed loudly through his nostrils when approached for conversation. He was hidden and judgemental, looked quietly ornery, and was most certainly not a metropolitan sort of being. A closed-mouth, nasal sigh was his response to questioning. His old eyes demonstrated a sort of regret, yes, but also a strange sort of zeal, possibly that sort of rare individual who enjoyed grief, who felt most alive when given a reason to be stricken with sadness. He was the sort of person that the popular term ‘hillbilly’ described. He had dressed in a fair suit, but it did not fit him much and his mannerisms and posture, his face and general standing, was out of place. The uncle’s eyes relayed a near manic sense of being elsewh
ere, a different world for which none present beyond Jones and the deceased might understand. Emery could see the resemblance to Larry, especially in the Uncle’s eyes, though other resemblance was slight. Jones, however, was a perfect match for Larry’s ears and chin.
The Nutts were a mountain family that had a long history and a resilient kinship, until a member escaped. Once that happened, the deserter was considered to have abandoned the family, a traitor and renegade, and was then never spoken of, as had happened with Larry. Emery found it horrifying that Larry might be considered the ne’er-mention of his family, a disgrace, when Larry had so clearly survived its condition expertly, having fostered an amazing career and a potent, though short, life. Larry’s family must have seemed as if captors to him. The uncle was nearly one of Larry’s brooding, plotting characters come to life.