The Long Take
Page 3
Burt and Miss De Carlo.
We start shooting in Los Angeles this spring.’
He goes over to the jukebox with a look on his face
and puts on the same song again: ‘I’ll Remember April’.
After a couple more drinks, a bunch of questions
about working the waterfront, he says:
‘Look, Walker, I like you. You’ve got what we call
deep focus. Long eyes for seeing.
Here’s my number out there. The name’s Bob.’
*
Nothing moved but the wind, nagging at the edges of the island. This was the month of the great storm, when so many sheep died the shepherds built walls with the carcasses, just to keep the snow from the few beasts left alive.
*
The dust and litter
whipped round in circles, whirlpools
at the feet of the towers,
between the cliffs of buildings
he walks through: shadowed; lit;
shadowed; lit.
A ladder in the center of a maze
he climbs to see where he is,
where he went wrong.
From the top of the Empire State
the city fog like smoke after battle;
you can barely see the cannon,
the palisades, the armies massing,
just the black gorges, bluffs
and spiring towers of Manhattan.
But beyond the boroughs of New York
there were lights, now, and water
reflecting them, and he could see
that the city was finite after all.
Like the Cape Breton Highlands, the forest
stretched to the edge and stopped.
*
The old girl looked around the diner, then
leant over, conspiratorially.
He knew what was coming.
‘It ain’t the same, this place:
full of kikes an’ spics an’ niggers everywhere.’
‘And me,’ he said, getting up. ‘But I’m leaving.’
*
He couldn’t go back – not now,
not with this burning in him:
it would be like
climbing back into a vice.
If he stayed here
he’d end up in the East River, or Hart Island
with the stillborn, the nameless, the indigent dead.
He could feel the coal seam crackling underground.
He’d leave now. Tomorrow.
He’d try to get out.
*
Grand Central. Down below to the Oyster Bar
for a farewell dinner of Moonstones, Bluepoints, Wellfleets,
some littlenecks and cherrystones
and a plate of Malpeques from home – just there across the water.
A carton of Chesterfields for the journey, two quarts of Dundalk
and a one-way ticket out west – and that was him, cleaned out,
all he’d saved from a year on the docks.
The huge cathedral light angles down
– in long smoking buttresses –
from the starred blue ceiling to the concourse
and its information booth
ornate in marble and brass,
tiny as a pyx
or a jewelry box.
He waited in the light;
in the floating dust there
like the beam of a projector:
a still figure in hat and coat
with his old green army duffle bag,
among the traces of passengers, ghosts
passing through each other.
The flittering of the station-board
announcing platforms
with the flight of birds.
*
Ten minutes out
and it was like the moment your ears unblock.
He turned in his seat
to see the city appear,
suddenly behind him, ablaze.
1948
The ride west,
like his life, going by too fast
– barreling through
towns in the dark – trying to read
each station’s name –
or far too slow,
in the wastes of
Pennsylvania, Ohio,
dozing off and waking up with the same view
all day, still looking out on the same state
since whenever it was it got light.
But Chicago, when she came at last, looked beautiful, rising red
out of her lake, shimmering on that far shore.
Six hours to kill, he headed east
from the station, across the river,
and found LaSalle, for his next train, that night.
Checking his bag, he got some coffee, food,
watched the Midwest open up in front of him,
before he stood to stretch his legs
then kept on walking. It was the smell of the water.
And soon enough, there it was: the lake, like a sea
– going out farther
than Money Point to Newfoundland –
and all these pretty lights strung out along the bay.
Then he turned south to some gardens
and saw this water-spout like a whale-blow – this fountain,
like twenty humpbacks bubble-feeding,
breaching together, in a crown –
all lit from below, and the spray from it
wheeling white as the herring gulls up north.
Twelve hundred miles from here. Maybe more.
*
Aboard the ‘Golden State’: this red-and-silver streamliner
that would take him, in just three and a half days,
to another coast, a different ocean.
He slept from Bureau, Illinois, to Centerville, Iowa.
Prairie and plains. Prairie and plains.
He looked at his map, stared out the window.
Flat as hell for ten hours through the night,
all the way to Kansas City.
Kansas City . . . Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins,
Ben Webster, Charlie Parker. And all he could do
was wave out the window toward 18th and Vine.
The low moan of the train’s horn in the night
calling back to the rows
and rows and rows of coaches,
a rhythm of breathing
held in a line there, rolling, long and slow.
*
Out walking, looking for signs: the first shoots of green in the trees round the lee of Lake Ainslie, and they’ll be there – you just need to see. Stand still and listen, and you’ll hear the silence fall back into shape; you’ll hear the birds, you’ll see the green.
*
Flat for days; clipping the top of Texas, into New Mexico,
the grass thinning to scrub; then dipping into Texas again
at El Paso, just after midnight,
across the Rio Grande to Arizona.
And the air had changed and the scrub thinned to desert,
the colors all red
along the border to Mexico
and he could feel the heat through the skin of the carriage
at Bisbee, where morning broke
and the ground rose
among the mine-workings,
and it looked like some frontier town out of a book.
*
You forget how it feels: the sun on your face. The heat drawing back in to the land. The land unclenching. The speckled alder and pin cherry, the spring birches in Strathlorne, each leaf
distinct and clean as a green coin, new-minted.
*
Cactus started giving way to palm, crossing the Colorado
at Yuma, and into California at last: cutting north-west
with mountains on one side and a lake on the other,
its surface-glint like chainmail. He stared harder
and saw it wasn’t water, but dead fish floating,
and the silver beaches weren’t sand, just heads and bones.
An hour down the line, he saw grass. Green grass
in the desert; fairways and flags.
He’s read about this. How,
impatient with Nature,
California just took control and built Palm Springs:
a resort for the rich and the old
to winter by their pools and play golf.
The Sonoran Desert
lapping at the edges of the green.
In this place, the sand-traps are the only things that are real.
Orange groves as far as you could see,
trees lined all the way to the mountains.
Then bulldozers rooting them up, levelling the ground.
Then the flat red scars.
Then the building work.
Then lines of tract homes all the way to the mountains,
grids of houses and roads –
and bright cars everywhere,
the moveable parts in some electric model of the future.
Clear, grade and pave, he heard it in the rails,
Clear, grade and pave.
*
And an hour of suburbs, before the public-address announcement
and the signs outside as it started to slow:
Welcome to Dreamland, Welcome to Wonderland,
Welcome to Hollywoodland. Welcome
to the City of Angels.
*
Pulling in to Union Station, he climbed down, unsteady,
like a sailor too long out to sea. The leaflets called it paradise
and they were right. He walked into warm sun, through gardens,
stands of orange trees, avocado trees, jacaranda, eucalyptus,
in to the concourse, clean and cool and high,
with chandeliers, and marble from France
and Belgium – the leaflet said – Vermont, Montana, Tennessee,
and out through a walkway of olive and pepper trees
to look back at it: a mission dressed with Mexican fan palms,
the bright gateway to a new future –
a new American future, it said – a paradise in the sun.
*
Across Alameda Street was a whole other country
– Chinatown – and Ferguson Alley was the door:
Hoysing Market, Si Chong, Soochow Restaurant,
but he settled for Jerry’s Joynt on the corner,
a big plate of ribs, a cup of rye and a beer chaser.
He’d arrived. Somewhere.
Cloves, aniseed, ginger and cinnamon, paper lanterns
strung down the lanes in red and gold.
He’d done it: crossed America – sea to shining sea –
and he swallowed a mouthful of beer as a toast to himself,
took the whiskey nice and slow.
Ewan Ferguson, back east, would have loved this:
a street named after him.
Ewan, the kid he grew up with,
who lost three fingers down the mine
from rockfall, hasn’t walked right
since a runaway cart went over his ankle,
lungs shot with silicosis,
who’s never even crossed the Strait of Canso.
Never will.
He’ll take the whiskey nice and slow.
*
What he needed now was a bed. With twenty bucks left
it was a rooming house or the mission, so he headed downtown
into Wonderland.
And there was City Hall,
just like in the movies but bigger, whiter,
lit up like God, and here was Main Street
stretching underneath it, block after block, in a smear of neon.
This was it. This was the city.
A magnesium strip; a carnival
on one long midway; a flaring
of something blank and feral, just unleashed
– panting on the sidewalk – ready to feed
off these hot, stinking bodies: drinking the light.
* LIQUOR * GIRLS * DANCING * CLEAN ROOMS * CHEAP EATS
* RIFLE RANGE * READ YOUR FORTUNE * MONEY TO LOAN *
BURLESQUE * 4 SHOWS DAILY * PENNY ARCADE * BEDS * BAR
* FOLLIES THEATER * COCKTAILS 15¢ * WE BUY SELL & TRADE
* DIAMONDS * BEER * MORE FOR LESS * GAYETY THEATER *
STAR THEATER * VACANCIES, $1 A NIGHT * BEER * JOYLAND *
DREAMLAND * DANCE-HALL * GIRLS * LIQUOR * VACANCY *
Six blocks of fairground, spilling out on the street: eyes
red as tail-lights, servicemen, longshoremen, oilmen,
Chinese, Japanese, Negroes, Filipinos, Mexicans, Indians,
even Hindus and Sikhs; streetcars, automobiles,
horns going; the panhandlers, streetwalkers, kids rolling drunks;
scuffles down the alleyways; saloon doors
swinging open to jukebox music
and a gash of laughter;
police cruisers; the calls of hot-dog sellers,
whispers from the pimps and the whores,
the dealers; the cops out on the corners,
the soldiers and sailors, their whistles, shouts,
broken bottles; reefer smoke, beer and sweat.
This was the city. Like Marseilles, perhaps,
or Casablanca. This was city life.
He walked for hours, up and down Main,
watching it flex and swell, feeling the crowd’s edge
of fever and delirium, friction and threat: its black pulse.
He stopped in a bar and bought himself a ten-cent whiskey, then
figuring that an all-night picture-house was cheaper than a room
slid a quarter to the girl in the ticket cage and went in –
halfway through something good with Charles Laughton
and Ray Milland, then The Naked City
all shot in Manhattan, where he was on Tuesday
– was it Tuesday? –
Fulton Market, the El, McCormick’s Bar,
the Williamsburg Bridge and the East River.
It looked hot as hell.
Felt like twenty years ago.
Most people around him were sleeping in their coats:
winos, the homeless, guys on the lam. The back row
was for couples, making out, thinking no one noticed.
He woke to the credits for The Big Clock,
saw what he hadn’t seen, then slept some more.
He dreamt of France and the brigade getting stuck at Villons;
digging in, under tracer bullets all night long.
Together, under fire.
He missed all that, he realized; he realized he missed the war.
Looking around him, at the lonely deadbeats,
the drunks, he got up to go.
*
5.30, Sunday morning,
a man with a hose preceded him up Main Street,
fanning an aisle through the Styrofoam, food wrappers,
cigarette packets, torn shirts, snapped stilettos and the sour mulch
of broken glass, blood and butts and sick –
moving like a priest with a censer,
hosing the center down.
*
>
The rating with the bilge-bucket is swilling off the puke, and what was left of Joe McPherson who hadn’t timed it right, his jump from the nets to this landing craft below.
*
Sunlight blooms in one window – five – ten – twenty – fifty – and the city was a field of standing light.
April, 48
*
So he went to the Union Mission.
They checked him over, gave him a meal of chicken, gravy,
mashed potatoes, a voucher for the Panama Hotel, E. 5th Street,
and some ideas for getting fixed up:
the address of the Labor Exchange,
where to pick up his twenty bucks a week from the GI Bill,
how you can eat for free at Clifton’s on Broadway.
*
It was different in daylight. The taste of dust in the air;
The marshy smell of piss, spilt beer; the brown
stars of blood leading down the alleys.
Huge palm husks, lying there like twisted canoes.
Some people still staggering about,
some still drinking, others just folded in doorways.
Between 3rd and 5th, where the burlesques were,
he hardly recognized a thing in this thin, bitter fog:
signs switched off, shutters down.
He turned east at the Hotel Rosslyn, and past the King Edward,
and things got worse with every block. People sleeping out
under anything they’d got, or nothing at all;
blacks, whites, young and old, curled up on newspapers,
their bottles lined beside them, the rest in a gunny sack
or a cardboard suitcase or a paper bag.
The East Side. Skid Row.
And here, between Wall and San Pedro, the Panama Hotel.
‘Welcome, my friend! Welcome.
I’m Billy, by the way. Billy Idaho.’
He was black, small and wiry, bright-eyed.
‘I got a voucher.’
‘I’m sure you do. You an ex-soldier, huh? Thought so.
Where d’ya serve?’
‘Normandy, then Belgium, Holland.’
‘Who with?’
‘The North Novas, eh. How about you?’
‘4th Infantry. Utah Beach. The first to land, they say,
but I didn’t get as far as you. Sainte-Mère-Église is all;
got shot up good.’
‘And welcomed home as a hero, I bet.’
‘Yeah. Just look at us now: two heroes in a hostel on Skid Row.’
His eyes narrowed, changing his face.
‘You know something . . .
The war made sense at the time:
all in black and white, good and evil, they said.
We came back to somewhere different