Chuckerman Makes a Movie

by Francie Arenson Dickman

  “You think you are telling it like it is when you say it’s not a problem to live in Los Angeles without knowing how to drive?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she asked, “Why do you care so much?” Her head was bent over her pretzel, which she’d been separating into miniature pieces that she was eating one by one. She was more reserved with the pretzel then she’d been with her egg roll, which I found disappointing.

  “Good question,” I said. And it was. Why did I care? Because I grew up caring? The story of my car, she would soon see, if I kept writing and she kept reading, was caused by my caring about my grandmother—who, like Laurel, was scared to drive. “Let’s just say the idea of a woman not being comfortable behind the wheel of a car doesn’t sit well with me. It makes me anxious.”

  “Interesting,” she said. She popped another piece of pretzel into her mouth. “You’re really layered, Chuckerman.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She said she’d give a whole lecture on layered characters in class in a few weeks.

  “I’m not a character,” I told her, taking a piece of pretzel. “What does layered mean in real life?”

  “It means that you are a piece of work.”

  Maybe I was. Hadn’t Marcy expressed essentially the same sentiment on the day of the Birthday Ride? Hearing it from Marcy’s mouth, however, I’d been insulted. From Laurel, I felt proud. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” I said. “You are floating between religions and between coasts, and you wish your dad had flung himself off a bridge.”

  “So you see now why driving a car is the least of my issues.”

  “I think, actually, it might be the key to your salvation.”

  “Yeah, as much as your mother believes that Schindler’s List is the key to yours.”

  I told her we would see, and that I might not even attend the next class, given that I had no desire to see Schindler’s List. Nor did I see a need, given that she’d already taught me about sequencing at the 3 Woos.

  “That was just an overview,” she told me, and added that based on the pages I’d handed over to her at the bakery, which she’d apparently looked at when I ran Estie and Ryan into their building, I didn’t even grasp the basic concept. “You can’t just schlock scenes together and call it a sequence.”

  “Schlock?” I asked. “Is that a technical term?”

  “I used it well, didn’t I? The rabbi says I have a flair for Yiddish vocabulary. He’s teaching some to me on the side. A biseleh—a little bit,” she translated. “It’s very onomatopoetic.” She crossed one leg over the other so that her boot came to rest on my leg.

  I stared at it. Marcy had said to not lay a hand on her, but she’d left unaddressed a scenario in which Laurel set a foot on me. Slowly, as if to sneak by myself, I wrapped my hand around the ankle of the boot. Not wanting to see her reaction, I stared at my hand, at the scar running down my pinkie. When I was four, my finger got jammed in the door of a Tilt-a-Whirl car. My finger’s extraction required the ride to temporarily shut down. Its repair required five stitches. Sometimes I wonder if this calamity at my first carnival wasn’t the catalyst, to borrow a term from Laurel, of my doom-and-gloom mindset. Or maybe mindsets are genetic. Who knows?

  What I did know was that Laurel had a striking command of Yiddish, as she was now throwing around Yiddish expressions with the fluency of the folks in Imperial Towers Building 100.

  “What kind of rabbi teaches Yiddish on the side?” I asked as I removed my hand and returned it to my own lap.

  Laurel, who seemed far more interested in her pretzel and her language skills than in me, showed no reaction to this move. She was now pulling off even tinier pieces than before and tossing them to the birds. As she did so, she explained that the rabbi was a former student of hers. “He gave me permission to take the conversion classes for research. But now he’s really pushing me to convert.”

  “Interesting. You’d be a Jew in cowboy boots,” I said, gesturing toward her feet. “Actually, that’s not a bad title for a movie, Jews in Boots. Maybe you should try that instead of the Mormon suicide flick.”

  Laurel rolled her eyes. “Don’t you take anything seriously?”

  I stirred the straw in my Coke as I explained to her that I take everything seriously. I told her my theory, that history repeats itself. “I’m sure another Holocaust is somewhere around the corner, which is why I refuse the catharsis of Schindler’s List and why I make the jokes. In the end, what else can you do? Life is going to play out the way it’s going to play out. One can only hope to survive the ride.”

  “Wow,” Laurel said. “Catharsis.” She stared at me for a few awkward seconds. “It’s dark beneath your Cubs hat.” She hit its brim. “Chuckerman has a dark side. Who would have thought?”

  I repositioned the hat on my head. “Practical, not dark,” I said. “Which is why you really ought to know how to drive. Forget getting groceries, you never know when you might have to get out of town quick.”

  A year earlier, we might have bantered about emergencies, discussed them as fictional scenarios. The kind of thing that happened in movies. We knew better now.

  “What if there’s another 9/11? A nuclear attack?” I asked. Amid the green of the trees, the spray of the fountains, the blue of the sky, a nuclear attack admittedly did not seem imminent. But then again, neither had 9/11.

  “If there is a nuclear attack,” she told me, “I’ll be throwing myself off the Verrazano Bridge.”

  “Really?” I asked. “It was that good, huh? Well, I’ll be in the Caddy. Windows up, doors locked, because if there’s one thing that can survive the big one, it’s that car.”

  Laurel adjusted her pompom of hair atop her head and raised her brows. “So we won’t be going down together? No Titanic ending for us?”

  “Almost,” I told her. “Except that in our movie, you’ll be jumping in, and I’ll be going down with the ship. If we’re lucky, we’ll meet up on the other end.”

  “Romantic.”

  I shrugged. “That’s me.”

  CHAPTER 7:

  Sequencing and Seeing the Forest Through the Trees

  “If you just string together scenes, your movie won’t move,” Laurel told us during Class 3, the one to which I am now referring to as The Holocaust.

  “To keep things forward-moving, your scenes need to flow so seamlessly that the audience doesn’t notice where one ends and another begins.”

  I felt like she was speaking directly to me, as we both knew stringing had been my plan of attack. Her ponytail swung with enthusiasm as she fiddled with the VCR, readying the class for the much-anticipated film clip, our first visual of the session.

  Curiously, she was wearing a bathrobe over her clothes, a bright pink number with colored flowers scattered around it. Even more curious, Estie’s sequined hair band secured her sky-high ponytail. The getup did not say “Schindler’s List Day” to me, and as I watched her adjust the TV, I prayed that she’d decided to switch the movie to Grease. She definitely resembled Sandra D, I thought, as she continued talking.

  “In order to flow, each scene must have a reason to exist,” she said.

  “How do you know if a scene has a reason to exist?” I might have asked had I not been distracted by her outfit and work.

  I’d had a rough day at the office. My fragrance chemist—a woman named Ezmerelda Rich, a perfume pro who used to work for Chanel, had a gift for essential oils and a sniffer like you would not believe, and was the genius behind all my scents—was having a problem with the Omnipotence concept. She, like Laurel, felt the concept was cheesy, and she didn’t want to attach her name to the project. According to Ezmerelda, her process was an art. Using her oils and odorants on anything other than human skin—like concert tickets—would compromise the integrity of her work and, ergo, her good name—which, by the way, I created for her.

  I begged Ezmerelda, formerly Lizbeth Klonsky, to take the chance on the concept and if the venture went sou
th, we’d get her a new name. She told me that this wasn’t a joking matter. “You either need to find another chemist or get me a lot more money,” she threatened before she walked out the door.

  As I thought about all this, Candy stole my question. “How do you know if a scene has a reason to exist?”

  With a shove of a tape into the VCR, Laurel answered. “Ask yourself this: ‘How does my scene fit into the big story I want to tell?’ A movie is about relationships, not just between characters or between various plots but between the whole story and the individual scenes. Whether your movie flows depends on how well each scene fits in with the one that comes before it and the one that follows.” She yanked the strap around her waist tight and began to walk up and down the aisles. “Take a close look at my robe as I pass by you,” she said as she paced.

  As the student body admired hers, Laurel explained that her mother, a woman named Darlene, knit and embroidered as a hobby. “She makes her stuff during the winter, and during the summer, she travels around to art fairs to sell it. That’s basically all she does,” she said, “except for going to church every Sunday.”

  Laurel picked up the bottom of the robe and lifted it straight out. “The robe is made up of thousands and thousands of stitches, but you can’t see them, can you? That’s because my mother is an expert, the Steven Spielberg of seamstresses. You only see a robe, or an afghan, or whatever it is she’s made. No stitches. No seams.” She made her way back to the front of the room, where she dropped her arms, grabbed her copy of Schindler’s List from her desk, and waved it at us. “The same is true of a well-made movie. When you write, your eye needs to stay focused on the big picture. The individual scenes should be so fluid that they are not noticeable. Sequencing helps with this.” She picked up the remote and started pressing buttons. “It helps you see the forest through the trees.”

  I groaned. Internally. Seeing the forest through the trees has never been my forte. Where I come on strong is getting ensnared in minutiae. I glom onto occurrences that are insignificant to the normal human eye—random remarks or behaviors, like Laurel’s use of Estie’s ponytail holder. I retrofit. I take trees and I build a forest around them.

  Flash forward, for example, to our family dinner on the Sunday following this class, where I declared that Laurel’s choice of dress and film clips proved that she could never assist me with personal growth. “Talk about the blind leading the blind,” I told Marcy and Broc. “She’s definitely got screws loose. She wore a cheery pink bathrobe and Estie’s matching ponytail holder while she showed us clips from Schindler’s List. Including the worst part, the Ghetto Massacre, when the Nazis liquidated—”

  “I know the part, David,” Marcy said.

  “Not only did she play it,” I said, “she replayed it.” Then I explained the whole rundown of events.

  Well, not the entire rundown. I left out the part where Don asked me if I’d scored with the teacher. This question came as the first clip got underway, as smoke from a lone Sabbath candle morphed into smoke from a steam engine and the picture shifted from color to black and white. I didn’t answer Don. I pretended I was watching the screen but in reality I was squirming in my skin, preparing myself for the Liquidation, which didn’t come as quickly as I’d anticipated. I squirmed as we watched a few other sequences that were supposed to shed light on Schindler’s character and show his evolution from self-serving asshole to savior. Laurel, all the while, sung Spielberg’s praises as a master of imagery and character development while Don sang his own praises as master of the opposite sex. He yakked about how he and I were cut from the same cloth, we were both players, and if I had any sense, if I could see the forest through the trees, I’d have a fling with the teacher.

  I nodded but stayed quiet, primarily out of respect for the millions about to get massacred on screen but also for myself. No need to tell Don that I wasn’t much of a flinger. He wouldn’t believe me. Based on my bachelor status, the girls I’ve dated, the clothes I wear, people often assume that I conduct my personal life in the same slapdash manner in which I’m writing my movie, that I string one girl after another without thought. But that’s not the case. I’m not a one-night-stand kind of guy. I date my clients, generally, and although they are in no position to get serious, that doesn’t mean I don’t take our relationships seriously. I’m invested in their careers. I care about them as people. The sex eventually ends, but our relationships carry on ad nauseam. Just this week, I gave hours of free counsel to Share and to Mini Francis, my first discovery, who is now debating whether or not to star in a Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun. Beneath the expensive suit, I’m a softie who tends to carry the weight of everyone else’s worlds on his shoulders—which was why the Liquidation sequence was too much for me to bear.

  I told this to Marcy. How for sixteen minutes, we watched a sequence depicting the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. How, a few minutes in, Candy started crying. How Judd, the dude with the long hair who sits next to her and now apparently dates her, squeezed her hand and wiped a tear from her face. How the class sighed. How at Candy’s request, Laurel replayed the Ghetto Liquidation sequence for closer study. How at my request, Laurel allowed me to sit in the hall during the replay, because once was enough. I didn’t need to see any more.

  “It was awful,” I said as I sat at Marcy’s kitchen table and helped Estie spread paper plates around it.

  “So awful that when she came to check on you in the hall, you asked her if she wanted to make out,” Marcy said.

  Laurel must have told her this tiny detail, because I certainly hadn’t.

  “I was just lightening the mood,” I told her. “Making a joke.”

  “David, it was Schindler’s List.”

  “Exactly,” I said as the pizzas descended upon the table. Estie, Ryan, Marcy, Broc, and I gathered around, as we did every Sunday night, for slices and a conference call with the faction of my family that remains in Chicago. “I assumed she’d seen Seinfeld. Who hasn’t seen Seinfeld?”

  “Laurel, obviously,” Marcy said.

  “I don’t see how it’s possible for someone to not know Seinfeld. It’s like someone from Elizabethan England not knowing Shakespeare.”

  “Maybe Mormons don’t watch TV,” Broc suggested.

  Marcy told her kids not to listen to their father.

  “If you ask me,” I offered, “it’s in poorer taste to make out during Schindler’s List if you haven’t seen Seinfeld. At least if you’ve seen it—”

  Broc told his kids to tune out the entire conversation.

  “She didn’t make out with you, David, she gave you a peck.” Clearly, Laurel had gotten to Marcy.

  “I don’t know where you are getting your information, but that kiss was full-on. Lips. Tongue. The works.” I took a bite of pizza, and with a full mouth, continued with my interpretation of events. “She was all in. I didn’t know what hit me.”

  This was true. One minute I was making a wisecrack, and the next Laurel’s hands were on my shoulders and her lips were pushing against mine.

  “By the time my mind caught up to reality, the moment was over. The door was opening, and the Mormon Rodeo was guiding me through it.” I told my family that I watched the final minutes of the Liquidation oblivious, numb, anesthetized to the gunfire lighting the sky, to the bullets ringing out. Estie and Ryan laughed, but I was speaking the truth. Amid the cacophony of ghastly sights and sounds, while Laurel lectured about how Spielberg used the sequence to contrast Schindler to Goethe, how he used cinematography to illustrate the turning point for Schindler, while my classmates dabbed their eyes, there I sat, stunned and thinking about sex with the Mormon Rodeo.

  “God cannot not be pleased,” I said as I helped myself to another slice of sausage and onion. “He’ll find a way to punish me. It wouldn’t surprise me if He tanked the Omnipotence deal.”

  “You are pathetic if you think that souring a business deal is the worst thing God can do.”

  No
one listened to Marcy. The jokes about the demise of Melman, Inc. due to a botched Seinfeld reference kept rolling. We were still laughing when the rest of the Melman family—my parents and my sister Rachel and her family—rang in from Chicago, as they do every Sunday night. “What’s so funny?” my mother asked.

  And just like that, my relationship with Laurel became a family affair. This, obviously, was the worst thing God could do.

  I groaned again. This time externally. I didn’t need a sequencing class to see that my personal life had become a sequence run amok. My class, my teacher, my family, even my movie were all starting to seem like a seamless flow.

  “I love her already,” my mother said after Marcy filled her in on the necessary details.

  The phone rested on the lid of the pizza box in the middle of the table. I leaned over it and questioned my mother. “What do you mean, you love her? You don’t even know her.”

  “What else do I need to know?”

  “For one thing, she’s Mormon.”

  “So what?” my mother countered. “She’s seen Schindler’s List, which is more than you can say for yourself. And she was bold enough to make the first move, which shows she’s comfortable in her own skin.” My mother, queen of the quick fix and, as such, a lover of platitudes, has always been big on being comfortable in one’s own skin.

  “She’s also moving to Los Angeles,” I announced. “So let’s not get too excited about her.”

  Broc interjected that he thought the move to LA was reason to get excited about the Mormon Rodeo. “No strings attached. Right, Pete?”

  Peter, Rachel’s husband, asked Broc who the Mormon Rodeo was while Marcy yelled at Broc for egging me on.

  Ignoring them both, my mother asked when she was moving. “I hope she’ll still be in New York when we come in October for Yom Kippur.”