As I lay sprawled on my soggy mat, I realized that taking the yoga class was akin to force-fitting scenes, the same as searching for Estelle in Miami. Yes, I was exhausted from the yoga, I was even proud that I’d participated without incurring significant embarrassment, but I felt no more inclined to give up my car now than I had before. The correlation between the yoga class and the Cadillac seemed even more tenuous than the correlation between the film writing class and the Cadillac. Although I wouldn’t admit this to Laurel. She’d obviously put energy into the yoga idea. Plus, she’d bought me the mat. For her benefit, I’d pretend I was on the fence, I decided in the silence of nap time, while I waited and hoped for something to happen that would make my next move clear. In other words, I’d try to stay cool and, as Slip advised, wait ’til the cards came to me.
THE CHASE SCENE
OUTSIDE. MORNING. NORTH MIAMI BEACH. HALLANDALE BEACH BOULEVARD TOWARDS 163RD STREET
I believe I left off with Slip’s monologue—which, according to Laurel, I should try to break up, since monologues are hard to pull off on screen. So I think Slip will be seen on screen at times. But for the most part, the audience will simply hear him lecturing us while they see, for example, Grandma Estelle coming home, heading west down Miami Gardens Drive and then south down 163rd Street.
The audience will see the Caddy come to a crawl atop the 163rd Street bridge (every great movie needs a great bridge scene, I told Laurel), where Estelle will pray as she drives that the bridge doesn’t lift, because she’s not sure of the protocol.
She’d seen the bridge lift thousands of times from the pool deck. She’d traveled over it hundreds of times as a passenger. But she’d never paid attention to what type of warning signal drivers got when a lift was imminent. A horn? A red light? As the audience hears Slip talking to us about staying cool, they’ll see Estelle turn off her music and roll down her window in case a horn gives the signal. The thought of sinking to death and dragging the Cadillac down with her gets her heart racing for the first time all day.
Luckily, the bridge stays down. The audience will see Estelle smile in relief as she rides over it, going even slower to glimpse Imperial Towers 100 from the other side, from the driver’s seat, before she gently presses her Adidas to the accelerator.
Perhaps some tinkering will need to be done to the timing of Slip’s speech, because ideally when he calls my parents panickers, we’ll cut from Estelle glimpsing the exterior of Imperial Towers 100 to the building’s lobby and the scene between my folks and Eileen.
I didn’t witness this. But I feel confident that, drawing from the account my mother later gave us, I can take my audience there, to the enormous black desk that stood at the entryway to Imperial Towers 100. The desk was divided into two sections. Eileen used the first section as her outpost, which she rarely left because she could view all public areas 24/7 on the black-and-white television monitors below her desk. Thanks to them, she knew my parents were on their way down to the lobby long before the elevator doors opened.
Here’s what I think the audience ought to see: my parents talking over the side of the high black desk with Eileen on the other side—except that, due to the great height of the desk (or perhaps the great shortness of Eileen), Eileen will not be visible to them, or to the audience. So they will see my parents seemingly talking to no one. But they’ll know she’s there because they’ll hear her voice, loud and clear, telling my parents, “Yeah, I saw Estelle leave. She waved and headed to the garage. A few minutes later, Slip’s car pulled out of the driveway and headed out.”
“Did she say where she was going?” my mother will ask.
“Nope.”
“You do realize that Estelle doesn’t know how to drive.”
“I do.”
“Well, she hasn’t returned.”
“God bless her. Living with that hoodlum, I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner.” There will be a pause while Eileen gives a raspy laugh. “May your mother live and be well.”
At this point, the audience will see my father pull his wallet from his back pocket. A twenty will cross over the counter and Eileen’s pudgy fingers will reach up to accept it. Then they’ll hear her use her walkie-talkie to radio Franklin, the security guard, and order him to get in the security vehicle—a golf cart with a flashing yellow light atop it. “Do a sweep of 159th Street,” Eileen will command him. “Go from Imperial Towers 100 to Imperial Towers 800 in search of a yellow Cadillac, Florida license plate SLIP 07.”
So, in the movie, as Estelle’s car makes its return trip down Collins toward 159th Street, the security vehicle will be setting out on it. Per Eileen, Franklin was to go twice around the palm-tree-lined street while my parents waited in the lobby, Slip sat in the apartment, and my sisters and I headed to the pool deck.
I hope the movie director will have the good sense to flip from locale to locale—from the Caddy to the guard to the lobby to the apartment to the pool—in order to build the requisite drama and suspense. Not like a grand assassination plot was about to be carried out. Nothing that rises to the level of action flick excitement. But then again, as Laurel likes to remind me, I am not writing an action movie. I am, apparently, writing about human relationships. Impossible, I tell Laurel. If anyone is unqualified to speak in any genre about the nature of human relationships, it is I, as I have only failed ones to my credit. In fear of the imminent addition of Laurel to my list of failures, I haven’t yet told her about the car chase scene.
It’ll be a slow-speed car chase—with music, of course. You might think this spot is prime for the big orchestral clashing of symbols, the subtle building of the strings, the ominous rumbling of the drums. But I’d suggest going with the song playing on Estelle’s radio, “I Write the Songs.” It was, she knew, by Barry Manilow, and had a melody she enjoyed.
After she clears the bridge, Estelle will dare to turn the radio a bit louder. Slowly, she will make the turn onto Collins, the home stretch, marked by the giant Coppertone Tan–Don’t Burn sign, the one with the little girl with the naked tush who, she said every time we passed, reminded her of Marcy as a baby. And as she deliberately turns the steering wheel to pivot the car onto 159th Street, she’ll allow herself to hum, an expression of victory.
Estelle will still be humming a minute later as my grandfather falls asleep on the couch, as my sisters and I stand at the end of the pool deck throwing bread to the birds, as my parents pester Eileen to radio Franklin for a status check, and as Franklin simultaneously radios to Eileen that he’s hit the jackpot. Without waiting for her response, he’ll hit the gas and take off in pursuit at maximum golf cart speed.
The Cadillac will be about two or three palm trees away from the building when Estelle first notices the flashing yellow light in her rearview mirror.
She was certain she wasn’t doing anything wrong. The speed limit near the entrance to the building reduced to twenty miles per hour, but she was only going fifteen. Nonetheless, she was unlicensed and needed to get pulled over like she needed a hole in the head. So, as she reached the driveway, Estelle decided to take a page out of Slip’s handbook.
“Okay,” she’ll say to herself. “Let’s lose him.” She’ll switch off her radio and press her Adidas to the gas, and her speed will go up to twenty-five as her car turns into the parking garage of Imperial Towers 100 and begins to wind its way up the ramp to her space on the top floor of the structure, above which is the pool deck. The very section of the pool deck from which we’re throwing bread.
And so, aside from Estelle, Marcy, Rachel and I will be the first to feel the impact of the Cadillac as it charges through the wall that separates the parking spot from the sky and, below it, the Intracoastal.
It was a “where were you?” moment. Right up there with the explosion of the Challenger and September 11. (For me, high school soccer practice and, as I’ve said, the dentist’s office, respectively.) I’m sure anyone who was in Imperial Towers 100 on December 26, 1977 could tell you where they were
when Estelle, in her rush, panic, and inexperience, brought her foot down on the accelerator instead of the brake as she maneuvered the Caddy into its space.
Most vacationers hadn’t yet come down for the day, but walkers and shuffleboarders were on deck with us, and they felt the blow too. The reverberations brought all other activity to a halt. (If this is not a spot for the slow-mo camera, I don’t know what is.)
The audience will feel the tremble and see everyone come running in our direction. Everyone except White Lips, who either didn’t feel the impact under the water or, as we speculated, did not exist outside of it.
I remember one of the women, a walker, saying, “I think it’s an earthquake.”
To which her partner, a woman wearing a shower cap, replied, “You ninny, earthquakes don’t strike Florida.”
No one postulated a bomb, as certainly they would today. These days, terrorism would be everyone’s first reaction.
By the time the crowd had assembled around the wall, Marcy, Rachel, and I already knew that neither Mother Nature nor faulty structural design (as one shuffleboarder speculated) had played a role in the crash. We knew because, unsupervised by adults, we’d plugged our shoes into the uppermost cutouts of the cinderblock wall and, with our bodies hanging over its edge, peered straight down the side of the parking garage. We knew because we could see all of the cars lined up in their slots, like the Matchbox cars in my carrying case—except for the Cadillac, whose big silver bumper and pale yellow hood were sticking out like a sore thumb.
We knew the crash, the crunch, the reverb had all been caused by one small woman: Estelle Melman.
The audience will hear Marcy scream, “Grandma!” over and over again.
They’ll hear Rachel say, “Be quiet. You’re embarrassing me.”
As I whip myself down from the wall, fearing some sort of domino-effect collapse, they’ll hear me ask, “What should we do?”
After a beat of silent communication, rare for Melman children, we did what we always did. We ran as fast as we could toward family—our parents and Grandma Estelle, now hovering over the Intracoastal in the Cadillac.
Details spun as the story spread, like a fire sweeping from the pool deck up the balconies, until in minutes, it seemed, almost everyone in the building believed that Slip had had a heart attack behind the wheel of his car, lost consciousness, and plowed straight into the Intracoastal. In some versions, he died from a heart attack. In others, he drowned. But in all, speculation existed as to who—the condo association or the Melman family—would be responsible for repairing the damage.
We’ll have the cameras close in on the silver Cadillac emblem, ruined, dangling from its cord over the front bumper, before they slowly move toward the front windshield, through which my Grandma Estelle will become visible. At first, the audience will see only the top of her silver hair matted against her forehead. Her neck will bend toward her chest because, as they will see next, she will be quickly applying lipstick in the mirror of her little silver compact. Whether she’d suffered whiplash or anything more severe, she didn’t know. But she was going to look presentable when, whether by cop or by paramedic, she got dragged away.
Franklin the security guard arrived on the scene first, followed closely behind by my parents and Eileen, and then by the sirens.
The sound of sirens. Could it be that after ten years in New York, the city of perpetual sirens, I’ve become immune? Because I hear them now, and they are cacophonous, a disturbance, and, since September 11, jarring. But the whirring and blaring and honking no longer makes me pause at the prospect of personal calamity. The red lights are no longer an advertisement for imminent death.
I found out later that Eileen had called the emergency responders because Franklin had radioed to her that damage to the vehicle and the building had been sustained, with possible trauma to the driver, and protocol mandated that she do so. He was unsure of the severity of the injuries because, as he reported over his walkie-talkie, the victim refused to get out of the car until her son, my father, arrived.
In the movie, I think we’ll see a cop knocking on the glass, yelling, “Yo, ma’am. Can you hear me? Please exit the vehicle if you are able.”
For a moment Estelle will play deaf, busying herself with her compact. Then she’ll crack the window and, without looking up, state, “I’m not going anywhere until I speak to my son. He’s a doctor and I might be hurt.”
By the time my sisters and I make it to the parking garage staircase, the sirens will be blasting. I remember thinking how much louder sirens sounded when they were coming for your family. My mind went to my Grandma Estelle. If the impact hadn’t killed her, this noise would.
“Hurry up,” Rachel will holler as we race up the concrete steps.
“I am hurrying,” I’ll answer.
“I was talking to Marcy,” Rachel will scream. We’ll dash across the lot toward our parking space as a squad car races up the ramp.
My greatest fear was coming to fruition. Death was coming to our door. Worse, so were the crowds. People began to hover from all angles. In the garage and above on the pool deck, hanging over the wall like they were watching a ship go down.
I noticed first a policemen doing crowd control, ordering anyone who was not heading to his or her car to leave the vicinity. Among the loiterers, I saw my Grandma B and Aunt BoBo. They’d heard from Gladys Greenberg, who’d been in the lobby when the call came in, that Estelle was involved in a car wreck.
I remember another cop talking to Franklin, who was taking full advantage of his fifteen minutes, cooperating with relish, giving his statement with grand gesture and minute detail.
My mother was speaking to a paramedic, who was taking notes on a clipboard.
My father was in the passenger seat of the Cadillac, talking to Estelle. In the movie, I’ll run straight for the passenger’s window and press my nose against the glass, like Marcy had pressed hers against the door of the toaster oven.
“Not right now, Davy,” my father will shout through the window. He’ll shoo me away with his hand, but not before my grandma looks up at me.
She’ll wave with her fingers, lift her doggie bag from my father’s lap, and mouth, “Are you hungry?”
Obviously, the gesture indicated that her injuries, if any, had not impacted her regular course of thought, and I was glad for that. But instead of the usual watering, real tears were coming from her eyes, and she didn’t smile at me, as was her usual way. Her lips were smudged with her pink lipstick.
Eileen was hollering, “Where is Slip? Somebody go get Slip.” Her face looked worried, not hostile. My Grandma B volunteered to get him—uncharacteristically altruistic of her, I thought, until I realized that she was being forced to leave the premises anyway.
Feeling dizzy, I turned my head the other way, but that direction was no better. Through the hole in the wall I could see the silver bumper hanging off the front of the car and pieces of cement floating where the breadcrumbs had been. The scene was chaos. Crowds and chaos.
I’m sure the movie crew will step up their game here in order to bring the audience into that disastrous morning of my ten-year-old, petrified self. Although the accident didn’t happen to me, I’m the one who relives it. I’m the one who retells it. It’s my story, so the camera should be on me.
After they capture the scene, the camera crew will have to bring focus to the young actor who plays Davy and subtly blur everything else into the background. From his twisted facial expressions and tottery physical gestures, the audience will be able to feel his heart knocking in terror against his frail ribcage, as a kid’s heart is wont to do when he is scared to death of death, nauseated by destruction, and can’t get it out of his head that the driving lessons were his idea.
They’ll see him step, lily-livered, toward the broken wall, his hands running along both the hood of the Cadillac and the rental car next to it for support. Behind him the back door of the ambulance will open, and a stretcher will come clattering to
the ground. At that—his glimpse of the stretcher rolling toward the Cadillac—the screen will cut to black, as cutting to black is, according to Laurel, the go-to film technique for when the point-of-view character passes out.
CHAPTER 18:
The Resolution
On Thursday night, four evenings after the yoga class, we were at Laurel’s favorite piano bar on the Upper East Side for Show Tune Night, which was again being headlined by the Barbra Streisand impersonator.
“I’ve got good news,” Laurel said as soon as our pitcher of beer arrived. “I sold my movie.”
“Really?” I said, pausing mid-pour. “That’s fantastic.” And it was. Not only for Laurel, who could now afford to stay in New York, but for me, who might now get away with keeping my car. For some reason, I assumed that Laurel’s Cadillac ultimatum only kicked in if Laurel ended up staying in New York because of her relationship with me. If she sold her movie, and therefore remained here independent of me, logic dictated that I’d remain an independent agent too. I finished pouring our beers and raised my glass to toast the news. “Who bought it?” I screamed over the singing.
“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that,” she shouted back, leaving my toast hanging. “I was going to tell you later, but . . . David, they not only optioned the script, they green-lighted it. They want to make it into a movie.”
“Shows you how much I know about movie writing,” I said. “You couldn’t have paid me to make your movie.” Again, I raised my glass for a toast. “I bet they’re paying you a boatload. Maybe you can get a new apartment.”
Chuckerman Makes a Movie Page 31