The Long Take
Page 8
and Widmark running, sweating, skittering through a city
turned against him: scrambling over rubble and ruins
to a fatal dawn, and his final descent.
The place he remembered best in London,
but couldn’t remember what happened under it:
Hammersmith Bridge.
‘The things I did! The things I did!’
‘But the wrong things, always the wrong things.’
*
Going down the steps from the Sunshine to Hill Street,
there was a kid’s balloon
floating overhead, drifting on
past Royal Liquor on the corner, down
to 3rd and Broad –
a red-brick office-block he’d never noticed before,
right across from the Million Dollar Theater.
More filming, he could tell, with lighting trucks and generators,
rigs and power lines, floods and spots.
It said BRADBURY
over the high doorway that he walked straight through.
And he was suddenly inside: there
inside the chest of this giant body – exposed
and displayed, with its balance, its symmetries –
staring up
at this great atrium and the missing hearts
of Los Angeles: two elevators
working up and down in their open cages.
Stairwells, skylights, gantries, balustrades.
The French filigree wrought-iron framework,
the stairs of Belgian marble climbing to the vaulted sky,
all the Mexican floor-tiles, glazed brick, the polished
Californian oak
basking in a hall of light, a hundred feet high.
A miniature city inside a city: intricate,
efficient, and exactly to scale;
perfect in its inner workings, its geometries of light.
Stage machinery, with the grillwork balconies,
roped proscenium, bright acoustic, the light-well drop.
This hidden dream of another century’s Europe
here, right here on Broadway; this delirium.
How this city might have been;
or how it is, perhaps, if you gaze with the fever of Piranesi
and see the elevators as scaffolds, guillotines
with their cords and pulleys, the toothed wheels
and hanging cables, the block and tackle.
See the deep arches, chains and iron gratings, the high
surveillance walkways, these flights of stairs going nowhere,
streets in the air. A Carceri d’invenzione
here in Los Angeles: a limitless maze, prison, theater;
beauty and dread under the bright, unsleeping eye.
The pointless Californian sun.
All hope lost, along with all perspective.
*
Sometimes Los Angeles seems like a series of forts, fenced by freeways, heavily policed and lit by flood-light, search-light, torch – and all watched over by City Hall, the lidless stare of that white panopticon.
June, 50
*
Three men in shirtsleeves stood outside the Bradbury Building:
the tall one, high cheekbones, German-looking, was in charge,
talking to the silent European with the light meter;
next to them, watching, was a big guy with glasses,
sucking in the world like he might explode.
‘Bob,’ said the director, ‘Calm down.’
*
Where the Margaree reaches Lake Ainslie there’s a set of pools, shadowed with trout, stashed with sunlight. We would lie there on the bank, feeling our bodies healing from the months of cold, swimming in the long pools. I remember the day I slid in, like a wave through the shallows, low over your shallow form, coming slow to run aground in you, docking.
On the still lake, that evening, the swan rode out on her reflection like a shield, sending back slow chevrons to the shore.
*
‘Shave, mister?’
‘Nah, just a trim’s fine.’
‘You got it!’
Bing Crosby on the radio.
‘You live round here, right? Local?’
‘Sunshine Apartments.’
‘Sunshine in the sunshine, right?’
Walker looked at him in the mirror.
The barber stopped and met his gaze:
‘Can’t believe we’re in a war again.’
*
Cole’s was crowded for mid-week. He caught Jimmy’s eye:
‘Rye, with a short beer chaser.’
‘Comin’ up, pal.’
Mickey Cohen was in his usual seat in the corner, with a club soda,
glowering at his thugs, the glassy scar under his left eye
flaring sometimes from the neon outside.
‘Here you go, friend.’
He took a mouthful of the whiskey and looked around.
‘Hand-painted ties, tailored suits, the works.
Not flashy, y’know: classy . . .
Bought me these earrings, see?
Peeled off two C-notes for a silver-fox jacket from Bullock’s.
He took me out to the Strip last weekend,
dancing at Villa Nova – he says it’s better than Ciro’s –
and we’re highballing along – you follow? – getting friendly
in the back seat of his Cadillac Coupe de Ville
when this rummy stumbles by and chucks up all over the hood.
He flips. I mean, he really snaps his cap.
Gets out of the car and goes over to the guy,
pulls out a .45 and blows his freaking face off.
I mean: can you believe that?
You think I should ditch him?’
He took his drinks down the other end of the bar,
settled in there on the corner. ‘Pack of Camel plain, Jimmy,’
slipping him a quarter. ‘Keep the change.’
‘Set her up in the Marmont. Two, three years ago.
When I heard, I drove right over there, you know?
Gave her money for Mexico, choice of doctors.
What more could I do?
Got no ill feelings, in any way whatsoever, for that evil bitch.
She was a B-girl when I met her, that broad. Now look at her.
She’s got it all.’
There was a stand-off on the way to the can:
‘Our boys are going out to die –
being slaughtered in Korea because of traitors like you!’
‘How’s that again?’
‘Saw you writing out names in your little book! Fuckin’ Commie!’
Jimmy had her arm by then, leading her out to 6th Street,
‘Say – what’s the big idea? Get your paws off me!’
The door slammed shut, the conversation
closing over her like water.
*
Out looking for Billy, down on St Julian, he saw a face he knew
sitting out by a dumpster, in a dance of flies.
Velma waved one bandaged hand, tried to get up
but couldn’t,
asked his name and waved again.
She looked in her pocketbook; shook it out empty, and stared.
He asked how she was,
and she said her mind had been snowing,
and it made the past so beautiful, now.
Said it was hard, though, to see them:
all the kind faces she used to know,
so many changed or covered over in the fall,
the enormous whiteness, so many just
drifted away.
*
The morning light blades into the room,
and he leans over for a cigarette.
The blinds make planes of sunlight and dust, slices of smoke.
Rita pours herself in through the window, claws
tickering on the linoleum, then stops to watch
a spider, winching itself down from the lampshade.
This is home.
He walked up the Hill, past old folk sitting out in their porches,
up past the Elks Club, the Lovejoy, the Grand,
the pavement still wet from the evening fog
and he went to the little park of benches by the Alta Vista
at 3rd and Bunker Hill Avenue.
He could smell the desert, feel Mojave sand under his feet
from last night’s wind.
‘Good morning! Beautiful day.’
He looks up at the couple passing, and smiles:
‘Sure is. Good morning to you.’
Back down by the Nugent deli, they’re filming again.
Same crew: the broad guy with glasses, dark suit, pacing around,
the other two talking. The actor is playing
‘The Hall of the Mountain King’ on a whistle, very slow
and halting, to a little girl, blond hair in bunches,
holding a balloon on a string,
who laughs and laughs and laughs.
By the Angels Flight Pharmacy
he gets a paper from Red, the one-armed guy.
He watches that fine-looking woman reach out and touch
the ‘L’ of the Lucky Strike sign
like she does every day.
*
Late September.
Fire season: that hot, dry wind that gets people edgy,
listless, ready to fight but too tired to try, temperatures swinging
and this yellow light from the north
from the smoke of the wildfires burning
up in the tops of the canyons. You can see them at night
like necklaces, tightening.
*
The time Corporal Murray went mad: climbing on top of a trapped German tank, riding on the turret – shouting his head off – waiting for a hatch to open so he could drop in phosphorus or a 36 grenade.
*
The heat was gone. They could feel it.
There was a hectic joy downtown, a release. King Eddy’s
six-deep at the bar and still coming.
‘Okay, guys. Best killing in the movies.’
‘Tommy Udo! It’s gotta be Tommy Udo!’
‘That’s up there, sure, but how about Raw Deal
when the broad gets the flambé in the face?’
‘Didn’t kill her, though.’
‘What about T-Men,
when The Schemer gets cooked in the steam-room?’
‘Nice . . .’
‘That other film of his, the Western, what’s it called?
Border Incident! That’s got a death by tractor.’
‘Or Union Station, half a mile away – death by cattle stampede!’
‘I like that shoot-out in the hall of mirrors . . . ’
‘Nah, too classy. I’d vote for Decoy – Jean Gillie
crushing her boyfriend with her car.’
‘Yeah, or that chesty dame with the ice-pick, Janis Carter.’
‘He survived . . .’
‘I’d take Raymond Burr in Desperate. Great movie.
The way he goes over the stair-rail at the end
and drops four flights. That’s a lulu.’
‘Well, if you’re talking stairs it’s gotta be Tommy Udo, c’mon . . .’
‘Yeah: hard to beat that – tying an old lady to her wheelchair
then pushing her down a flight of stairs.
Widmark’s first film, and he was dynamite.’
‘Okay. All agreed? Right. Kiss of Death. Udo gets the cake.’
*
He remembered the German on the barricade who took a magnesium flare in the chest and went up like a bonfire: so white you couldn’t look, but you couldn’t quite look away.
*
He dreamt the mountains were on fire
and the flames were gliding down the sides like lava,
the mountains were slipping into the sea which was on fire,
into the city, which was also burning,
and the ground opened up then
and he dreamt that he walked away,
streets full of stones,
and he saw a black man black with flame, black leaves
falling all around him: a black autumn, coming down.
And Pike, he dreamt of Pike,
pinning him by the throat to the ground, with a knife.
And then he woke.
*
There was a new crack through the tiles in the bathroom,
running in a straight line from the window to the door.
*
He was working nights at the Press, nights out on the street,
sharpening now after the turn in the year, the air
loosened after the rain, the pavement black and glinting.
There were parts of the city that were pure blocks of darkness,
where light would slip in like a blade to nick it, carve it open:
a thin stiletto, then a spill of white; the diagonal gash
of a shadow, shearing; the jagged angle sliding over itself
to close; the flick-knife of a watchman’s torch, the long gasp
of headlights from nowhere, their yawning light – then
just as quickly
their falling away:
closed over, swallowed
by the oiled, engraining, leaden dark.
He hears someone running
but there’s no one there.
His shadow folds into the wall, then along it.
Then gone.
*
‘Hey, Walker. Wanted in Overholt’s office.’
He went through, past the juniors: Pike, talking over
the top of everyone, repeating his punch-line
louder each time, harder.
The old man was checking finals, but he pushed them aside.
‘Very well, Walker, you can go this summer. Up to San Francisco.
I like what you’ve done here on this homeless issue,
so we’ll use you as a stringer, see how it goes.
I want a big piece on this, on the whole thing.’
‘You mean the destitute?’
‘Yes. Out on the streets
while the mayor and the police commissioner
are fine-dining in Chasen’s or Musso’s Back Room.
I mean the fact that two thirds of this city
is a fenced-off ghetto;
that there’s graft and corruption running right the way through.
I mean the fact that this is a country where there aren’t enough homes,
enough jobs, where one in six Angelenos are ex-servicemen
and they’re lying out on Skid Row –
but all anyone ever talks about is watching for Russians,
HUAC locking up half of Hollywood,
the government building more bombs.
We won the war, but we’re living like we lost it.’
He stood, and went to the window.
‘Things are hotting up, Walker. It’s a good time to go.’
*
Pike just wouldn’t stop moving.
Now he was biting his nails: turning his head
to get better purchase,
like he was pulling at a spare-rib
not his own finger, glancing up like Saturn
now and again,
from this useless mess,
his own frayed edge: his only quick.
When he saw Walker he stopped, looked around,
gave the room one of his fascinating smiles.
*
Loch Ban’s deep pools and waterways host what light there is, and you can almost hear the shoots rustling up through the dead leaves left from the fall, the buds in the trees, their green snapping open.
Father said the same words every spring. ‘Let this year bring the luck of milk to the shielings, the luck of fish to the shores.’
*
He went down to the May Company to find some new clothes:
a sharkskin suit, semi-drape in medium blue,
with two pairs of pants, double-pleated, cuffed.
Some fresh shirts, a better hat, a decent pair of shoes.
Had it all sent over to the Sunshine,
then went to Levy’s Grill on Spring
for their one-dollar dinner and a drink.
Thought he’d keep walking afterward, fix this city in his head.
Down Center Place, between Spring and Main
round back of the burlesques and crib-houses,
a girl on the corner, red flower in her hair:
‘Hello, sweetheart. You lonesome?
You look lonesome, honey. You want a good time tonight?’
‘No. No, thanks.’
All the way north to 1st
and up past the Times, and police headquarters,
then west, climbing hard to the Gladden Apartments,
cutting in back
past Olive Court, that weird little neighborhood tucked away,
then rising again
to that space on top of the 2nd Street Tunnel
– on 2nd above Olive
where the streets splay open to the sky –
the Argyle on one side, the Claridge on the other,
the Mission Apartments across from it, and the Dome
way on up there, at the top of the Hill.
Its bright white stucco
and that onion cupola, in terracotta red:
a weathered signpost for the heights of home.
*
There was a message on his desk the next day with a number:
‘RING ME,’ it said.
The voice was the same, just older.
‘How are you, Billy?’
‘What say we drop over to Cole’s tonight? Or Charlie O’s?’
‘Sure, but not Cole’s, eh . . . Make it Charlie’s at eight. That okay?’
It was under the Hotel Alexandria: a crummy dive, but he liked it.
And so did Billy: there in the corner, already started.