Marilyn Monroe on the front, rolling it up,
quick as a shot, and making for the john.
*
In the bar on 2nd, he could see Sherwood and Rennert
busy over a bottle in one of the stalls, talking
loud enough to hear:
‘You can’t get an angle on Walker, y’know?
He’s a tricky bastard – not easy at all.
Like trying to catch a dropped knife.’
‘Yeah – you’re on the nose there, buddy.’
‘And you know what?
Ain’t nothing lucky you can do with a knife.’
*
Rennert was right about knives.
The Kraut in Nijmegen he ran
with his bayonet, leaving his lung agasp –
those minutes watching him sink down slowly into his own blood.
That crib-joint killing in San Francisco:
the black man kneeling, head arced back,
neck wounds bubbling like those
fountains in that Garden of Allah
they show in the magazines.
And then that other time. In France.
The things he’d seen. The things he’d done.
*
Walking faster, nearly dancing now
through the battlefield: with a clip of money
and a book of matches he was looking for fun
or looking for trouble, gasoline
and a body double, a decent drink and a girl maybe,
just looking to get lost –
like how that Chinese place,
The Pacific Shell, on Main and 1st, had lost
the neon for its ‘S’ and now was a gateway to his world –
and next door to it a bar lousy enough for him,
and he watched
as the cops went in, pulled out a drunk,
smacked him around, and only then, when the heat took off,
only then could he cross the street, push open the door
on the mess he needed.
Blacks, whites, hopped-up Mexicans shouting
to each other over the music:
‘Para todo mal, mezcal! Para todo bien, también!’
He got himself some shots and it was all
smeared grins, spilled drinks and sliding eyes
then sudden stand-offs:
‘Wise guy, huh? Got something to say ’bout it? Huh?’
Card-sharks and streetwalkers, men out
running drugs and cutting corners,
packing a good piece – blued steel with a walnut stock –
soda-jerks with blades,
kids carrying can-openers – all they could find –
you can’t see it but you know it’s there.
There’s a guy stretched out, in his own puddle,
two others wrestling by the pool table, so drunk they barely move.
His church. His sacraments of whiskey, cigarettes.
A guy loomed up at him, face seamed like a baseball:
‘Say, don’ I know you?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You wanna make somethin’ of it?’
‘Again – I don’t think so.’
‘I don’ wanna fight you.’
‘You’re right. You really don’t want to fight me.’
Scarface flickered then, and blinked:
pushed off from the bar, shouldered his way
muttering through the ruck.
By the pinball machine, down the side of a door,
he saw a pile of emptied billfolds and pocketbooks:
business cards, old railroad tickets, photographs.
And he noticed a girl, over by the jukebox, dancing
on her hindlegs, tipping her toes like a cat
at the end of a rope.
Behind the counter
there was something under a beer crate, turning it
in hard, heavy circles, moving it slowly across the floor.
*
He saw the North Nova’s corpse with emptied pockets,
a rifled wallet and a scatter of photographs.
*
He wanted delirium and he wanted it now,
taking a standing drink in any bar he could,
moving through downtown, block by block, through new
blares of neon, streetlights, headlamps,
store-window displays, all
blurred in long exposure: the lights leaving
wavering tracers of red, green,
white gold – like Jackson Pollock
those light trails,
through streams of people, swaying retinal flares.
Main Street, was he on Main?
Every street a one-way street, every alley blind.
This was Werdin Place now, was it? Back of Dreamland,
the Burbank Theater. Too dark to see. Just sit and get a smoke.
Rain had set a gleam into the cobbled stone
that lifted with the ragged light coming in from 5th,
or whatever street it was down there.
The dark compressed, impacted: it had a texture,
granular and grave. It tasted of clinker.
The shadow building hung above him
oblique and sharp as a guillotine blade.
A white splinter cut the alleyway in two: two walls of black
closing on a split world.
Occasionally, a swing of light
arced open
(a piece of blackness
goes spinning through)
and then closed.
There was something rooting in the bins at the dead-end;
it paused; started again. It came
scampering past, then stopped: light
held in the eyes, green-gold.
He stretched his hand to make it stay
but it never does. The coyote.
*
Downtown was quiet and damp from the fog,
the five-globe streetlights
clicking off as it came to dawn.
He toiled up 4th to Clay past rows of palm trees,
their clumped dead leaves hanging underneath the green
like gray goiters.
In his room, he worked out where he’s been
from the match-books in his pocket,
the drinks by the gap in his dollars,
the hole in his life by his eyes in the broken mirror.
*
It rained most days until March: acrid rain
siling down through the smog
that sat there in the low Los Angeles basin like a milky swab.
People went to work in the rain, came home in it:
the bowed heads, shuffling gait of the drones in Metropolis.
The raindrops arrowing down and the sidewalk’s million mouths
opening and closing for them;
the men’s hats and shoulders darkening,
the women’s fur coats sleeked like otter pelts.
He went out with Sherwood and Rennert
in their gray Studebaker, with the windshield streaming
and the tail-lights up ahead,
red and guttering, that hypnotic tick of the wipers
swiping thock, thock, thock.
Following the trails of the dead,
taking shots of them, telling their stories.
Looking at their corpses, tagged and cold on the pull-out tray:
bloodknots in the hair, still, and a blue
under those eyes that were never quite closed.
Cotton plugging the mouth, nostrils;
the wounds dry, and heav
ily sewn.
Or that time, in Mercury Court,
down between the Athletic Club and the Warner Theater,
the rain still going – thock, thock, thock –
when the cops pointed them on, up the stairs
to the cordoned, unlocked room
and there was this guy sitting against the wall,
like he’d dozed off,
wearing dark-red bib-and-brace dungarees,
an old cigar in his mouth.
They got closer, and saw he was actually naked,
that the thing in his mouth was his cock.
*
Mackintosh took up a Sten gun, shouting, spraying it like a hose at the Germans. He ran out of ammo, turned back toward us, then we saw how his chest just spat – then petalled open – and with a great convulsion he flopped down dead.
*
First dry weekend and he’s walking, south along the river
– which finally has some water in it now –
trying to avoid those streets dead-ended by the freeways
where the cars slide slowly, nose to tail,
hour after hour, like a production line.
He wanted to see the ocean again, but it was all just concrete:
highways, surface streets, slums, then a toytown called Lakewood,
rows and rows of new identical homes, white homes, then
suddenly, rising up, a mile away,
what looked like a hill covered in trees but couldn’t be.
It was oil-wells, lining up on Signal Hill, and more
out east to Huntingdon Beach, and west to Wilmington:
geometric forests right down to the sea –
derricks, pumpjacks, power plants,
mostly tapped-out wells, rusted in the salt air,
but hundreds of the jacks still moving, like shore-birds feeding,
dipping their heads to the sand.
*
Back on the Hill, he went to Dr Green’s
to get something for his sleeping,
his house and surgery up along Grand by the Frontenac Hotel
a kind of second home for these toothless pensioners
sitting stiffly in his waiting-room, hats on their knees,
chewing on their empty mouths.
They look up at each new patient joining the circle,
half-raising a loose hand in greeting, nodding hello.
He watched each of them, slow and careful, most having
made an effort – brushed their hair, then their shoulders,
checked in the mirror – others long stopped:
rheumy-eyed and shaky; greasy neckbands and stained ties,
cuffs frayed, fingernails broken and black.
If they talked it was about the heat, or their ailments:
bad backs, feet, their joints, cold sores, constipation, teeth –
all waiting to be called by Mrs Green
and shown through the doctor’s sliding door.
He got his prescription filled by young Mr Mellon,
bought a paper from Red, standing as usual in his place in the shade,
and saw a woman he recognized, reaching out
with a tremor in her hand
to touch the ‘L’ of the Lucky Strike sign, for luck.
He went up to the benches to sit in the sun, high over the city.
The news was all about McCarthy, still.
Back in March he’d watched Ed Murrow, taking him down,
right there on television in the Amigos bar,
and then the hearings started
and the army counsel, Joseph Welch, was lifting his sad eyes
to the junior senator of Wisconsin, and repeating,
slow and firm: ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?
At long last, have you left no sense of decency?’
He’d forgotten about the old man, curved as a coathanger,
who walks here every day and only ever sees the sidewalk.
He’s hooked as an r, a fishing barb,
gnarled and bent
like the thorn on the cliffs of Broad Cove;
each hawthorn tree’s baroque twisting
with all the winds’ histories worked into it.
The sun hammering back
off the sides of the Alta Vista, and the benches all emptied now,
and no one even out driving, way down there
underneath on 3rd Street,
and the dogs had disappeared: hidden in crawl-spaces, tongues
thick, breathing fast and heavy.
A smell of cheese and brine from the delicatessen,
milk going off in the grocery cans, the metal
too hot to touch, warping, buckling in the heat
so the lids sprung off with a prang. The city
trembling below like a gasoline spill.
*
Skid Row was bigger than ever now. The drunks in the park,
curled fetal on benches, or lying out on the dead grass,
almost invisible there
like driftwood on a beach.
Hundreds on the streets out east of Main.
Some jacked on heroin, some plain crazy, most just blown
on Thunderbird, Lágrima de Cristo, Old Monterey.
Flies browsed the broken flesh, sweet smells
hatching from their rags as they turned over, shouting out
at some crime remembered then forgotten,
tongues black from the Gallo wine.
No sign of Velma here, or Billy. But who could tell,
under the coarsened hair, the grime,
they all looked like soldiers painted-up for war.
As someone wrote somewhere: same faces, different names.
*
Out with Sherwood and Rennert,
just after Labor Day, over by Union Station,
driving round the gasworks on Ducommun and Center.
Good place for slacking off; good place for trouble.
A few years back, they’d found a circle of girls,
tripped out, cross-legged, naked,
carefully passing around
– instead of a reefer or a pipe – a gray coonhound pup
and its rough tongue, parched and slabbering.
One night, there was a Buick sitting there, under the gas-holders.
Two Indians it looked like, with a shape tied up in the back
and moving; what it was, he couldn’t see.
This afternoon there was a film-shoot going –
all the regular stuff, generators, cables, lights on tripods,
camera tracks, grip stands, hangers, wardrobe rails –
and there was Cornel Wilde having a smoke,
talking to this short guy, so they all strolled over, friendly like,
to say hello. Rennert wanted to talk about Leave Her to Heaven
and Gene Tierney, so he did,
and the actor was smiling and nodding,
so Walker turned to the other guy,
who said: ‘Hi, I’m Joe.’
‘Are you in the picture?’ Walker said.
‘Nah,’ he smiled. ‘I’m just making it.’
Then it clicked. He’d seen his face in Photoplay.
This was the man who shot Deadly Is the Female –
Gun Crazy, as it came to be.
This was Joseph H. Lewis.
‘How did you shoot that sequence, eh?’ he was asking, suddenly,
‘Y’know, from the back of that getaway car?’
‘Well, son, I’ll tell you –
if you tell me a decent bar on Main Street
near the Banner Theate
r. We’re there tonight.’
‘Easy. The King Eddy’s on the very same block, east on 5th.’
*
It was around seven when he made it over there.
A few older guys at the tables, chewing the fat; some couples.
Nice and quiet.
Till he saw that familiar beanpole at the counter’s end,
head down: mantling round a glass and brandy bottle.
The jittering knee. That hank of hair. Pike.
He’d never seen him in here. Didn’t even know he drank.
Settling over in a corner at the other end, he waited for Joe
and didn’t notice him come in, sports shirt and sailing cap,
even smaller than he remembered. Big grin on his face:
‘So howya doing? Walker, right? Get you a drink?’
‘Let me, please. What’ll you have?’
‘Just a milk, thanks. Heart attack a few years back.
You believe that? At forty-six! Gotta take it easy.’
He had all these questions for Walker: where he was from,
how did he get here, what was he doing.
He was a regular guy. On the level.
‘So, you were going to tell me about that getaway scene . . .’
‘Okay, yeah. Yeah. Okay: picture this.
You see Peggy Cummins driving toward the bank,
John Dall, shotgun, talking her through it, but behind them
five guys, including me, in back of this opened-up Cadillac –
two on top, button microphones under the sunshades,
the cameraman right behind the actors
on a jockey’s saddle on a greased plank
– like dolly shots, y’know? –
near three-and-a-half minutes straight through with no cuts,
no re-dubs and all ad-libbing.
Jiminy . . . That was fun.’
‘And the actors?’
‘Well, both great, but Peggy Cummins was in charge. Laurie Starr.
She was the soldier Bart never was.
Always ready to kill. Happy to, really.’
Over Joe’s shoulder, there was Pike at the bar, eating a sandwich
like he had something against it:
pulling back his head, then lunging in again.
Joe turned to look.
‘Say, that kid at the counter,’ he laughed, shaking his head:
‘Reminds me of a young John Dall!’
‘Forget about him,’ he threw back his whiskey quickly,
‘What about the movie you’re shooting here?’
‘Well, it’s all in the studio really. Chaplin’s old set-up
on La Brea and Sunset. Before HUAC drove him out.
We wrapped on the location work today.
Just finished a street scene outside a burlesque. Looking real good.
The Long Take Page 12