by John Grant
"Your father – he had a terrible accident. He mistook himself for a clump of dandelions, and before I could find the lawnmower's off-switch he'd reduced himself to a heap of tuna melts."
"Now, mother," I'd say sternly, "there is no need to lie to me. Where did you bury what was left of the old bastard?"
"Well, I didn't so much bury the bits as hammer them into the ground with the back of a shovel. Can you ever forgive me for having deprived you of a parent?"
"Break out the beer."
I shook my head, grinning at myself. Mom would never say a harsh word about my father, let alone murder him. It wouldn't be "nice."
~
The next week was spent in the usual hamster-wheel of study, although my mind was constantly being distracted by anticipation of Monday afternoon at the Rupolo. The owner didn't announce in advance what movies he'd be showing: he assumed the addicts and the adulterous or underage couples would just turn up anyway and be happy to take pot luck. This actually suited me well: knowledge of what movies were going to be screened would probably have dulled the keen edge of my expectancy. As it was, I could dream of unknown glories without being shackled by any fetters of the realistic.
That second Monday, one of the two movies was in color – a great disappointment to me, because more even than the subject matter it was the black-and-white ambience of these movies that had so rapidly addicted me. The offending movie was The Man Who Never Was, a tale of British intelligence officers outwitting the Axis by inventing a personality and grafting it onto an anonymous corpse, which they then arranged to have discovered by the Germans; the point of the story was that planted on the corpse were all sorts of faked secrets, so that German efforts would be misdirected. As with The Dam Busters, all this was absolutely absorbing as an item of forgotten – at least by me – history, and yet for a very similar reason it all seemed rather remote and irrelevant. It was as if I were watching a swarm of angry hornets from behind the safety of a sealed window, so that the fury could be impressive and perhaps even slightly frightening but at the same time so distanced by the presence of the glass that it could be appreciated intellectually rather than emotionally.
That was the second of the two movies shown. The first was in trusty, much-loved black-and-white, and was called Reach for the Sky. In it a British fighter pilot managed to lose both legs in an accident, yet with the aid of prosthetics was able to take to the skies once more and continue his career of shooting down Axis planes. He was shot down himself and spent some time in reassuringly familiar territory – a prisoner-of-war camp. There were some great flying shots, and the story had considerable human interest. The fact that much of the acting was as stiff as a clergyman's collar didn't detract from this – if anything, it added to that ambience I had so swiftly come to adore. A lot of the slang, being veddy British, meant nothing to me, but I was able to muddle through and get the general sense of it all.
That evening I didn't make the mistake of eating one of Mr. Perkins's hot dogs, but instead bought from him a couple of ham sandwiches with lashings of salad. I have never liked lying to my mother, and in fact have never been terribly good at it, so I thought it'd be handy during our weekly Monday-evening phonecall to be able to tell her truthfully that I'd had a – relatively – healthy supper.
I needn't have worried. Mom could talk about hardly anything except the latest hot news, which was that in the intervening week it had leaked out that Glenda Doberman was pregnant, and had thereby suddenly slipped out of the "nice" classification, being now worthy of no adjectives at all. I was reassured that I had had a lucky escape; the words "whore of Babylon" lurked somewhere just off-stage, but would forever remain there. My own theory was that Glenda, in a mad burst of frictional enthusiasm that excelled even her own many earlier efforts – which had earned her another nickname, The Human Tuning-Fork – had finally succeeded in melting the condom.
"And what have you been up to, Kurt?" asked Mom after several excited minutes, more by way of form than out of any true interest.
"Oh, nothing much. I went to the movies this afternoon."
"Shouldn't you have been studying?"
I explained to her about Monday afternoons and the undergraduates and the labs and the library and Mrs. Bellis's soap operas and the fish market. She sniffed cynically, but accepted the explanation. I told her about Reach for the Sky and The Man Who Never Was, and the silence at the other end of the line told me she was dutifully pretending to listen – that's what moms are for, after all: to listen to their sons. She'd listened to me all through my childhood and adolescence, doing the listening job of two parents because my father never saw it as his responsibility. She'd bought me my first baseball bat and glove, and spent hours in the back yard hitting the ball or pitching for me; she could have been fairly good at it if she'd ever taken the game seriously, but she showed no signs of disapproval when I proved to be quite hopeless. She drew the line at football, but she would shoot baskets with me for hours, or go out fishing on the lake with me, letting out perfectly genuine whoops of enthusiasm on the rare occasions when we caught anything. In homework she explored with me the equally torturous topics of algebra and the Punic Wars, never grumbling. But, more than all this, she'd listened to me when I explained my little-boy concerns as I'd discovered the world and my place in it.
"Such imaginations these moviemakers have," she said when at length I dried up. "It's so long since I've been to the cinema." There was a wistful note in her voice. "Your father doesn't believe in it. Says it's all Sodom and Gomorrah. And he's right, of course ..."
I felt like shouting at her that she should ignore the prejudices of an ignorant old bigot, but bit back the words. They wouldn't have done any good; all they'd have done was upset her.
As ever, the phone conversation ended in an unsatisfying tangle of desultory well-wishings. I returned the receiver to its hook at the bottom of the stairs, then climbed back up to my dreary little apartment. It was too late for soap operas, so Mrs. Bellis was watching cop shows instead. Someone was getting the shit beaten out of him in the interrogation chamber by a couple of cops who were convinced he was part of a communist plot against someone or other. In the middle of him screaming for mercy the broadcast segued into a commercial for diaper cream. Even over the din of the tv set I could hear Mrs. Bellis cursing and shuffling as she hunted for the remote. She liked a good torture scene – I'd learned that much about her through the walls over the past few months. I wondered if she'd ever had any use for diaper cream herself, but came to the conclusion she hadn't. I couldn't imagine her husk-like body ever having borne children, ever having suckled them to her nightmarishly visualized breasts. She might have harbored the occasional pupa, but even that I doubted. She was, however, capable of the loudest farts I have ever heard from any man or woman. Sitting in front of her soap opera or cop show, presumably secure in the false knowledge that anything she did would go unheard because of the walls and the boom of the tv set, she not infrequently let rip with the most astonishing noises. The first time I heard her I assumed she must have started stripping wallpaper. I'd grown to know better.
I went over to the window – it required only about two paces – and looked out. On the other side of the road was a little park with swings and slides where kids were playing in the evening sunlight, their yells coming to me muffled through the glass. Their mothers were sitting on benches chatting animatedly to each other or sitting alone with books, some of them idly rocking a stroller or a baby carriage with a spare hand, soothing the next tidal wave of children who'd be playing on the swings and slides.
At any other time the scene would have appeared normal enough to me, but I was in a peculiar mood that evening, and something about it seemed subtly wrong – somehow unnatural, as if it had all been staged for my personal benefit, as if I were the sole member of an audience watching an enormous, worldwide play, a play in which everyone except myself was performing. I was the only one who, having been designated once and for
all eternity "audience," wasn't permitted to take a role in this play. It was a curious feeling of dislocation from reality, and it took me a while to put my finger on what was causing it.
Then I realized. The scene I was watching through the rectangular frame of the window was in color. I had become so immersed in watching scenes in rectangular frames that were in black-and-white – and this after seeing only three movies this way – that now it was the mundane reality that seemed artificial, the flickering monochrome images on the Rupolo's small gray screen the true reality. I was more at home in a world where cardboard-faced actors with implausible British accents called each other Chips and Frobisher than I was here, where the kids were yelling names like Duane and Randy and where every vowel didn't have to be contorted before being uttered.
I shook my head irritably, but the sensation persisted of being on the outside of a performance in which all the rest of the world was taking part, and I couldn't prize it loose. In the end I gave up, and went to bed with a book while the sky was still full of twilight. Not long afterwards, I fell asleep, and stayed that way until my alarm clock woke me in the morning.
~
The following Monday the double bill consisted of two black-and-white movies – no color this week, thank heavens. The first one – and the better of the two, I then thought (and still do, in the eye of memory) – was called I Was Monty's Double, and it told of a cunning British plan to use an impersonator in place of their Field-Marshal Montgomery for public appearances and the like, thereby foiling any possible plot to assassinate him, while at the same time misleading the Axis concerning his whereabouts and therefore his doings. Montgomery was for once a historical figure I'd heard of, although I couldn't remember much about him save the name and that he was reputed to be a quite brilliant military general – the Allied equivalent of Rommel. I made a mental note as I hung on the edge of my seat, watching the story unfold, to go look him up in the library's encyclopedia the next day, to find out if he had survived the war and, if so, what had eventually become of him; but this was something that in the event I never got around to doing until years later, by which time my interest was no longer so poignant. (As I now recall it, he did indeed survive – until the mid-1970s sometime – living in seclusion as an honored but largely ignored figure.)
Whatever the historical veracity, the movie was engrossing – for the first hour or so, anyway. After that it became more like a standard adventure thriller ... or, at least, that is my recollection of it.
The second feature, Mrs. Miniver, was less interesting to me. Again it centered on the British experience of the war, but this time at the domestic level. The eponymous character was a housewife in England, and she and her neighbors pluckily came through Axis bombings and the like. I wasn't surprised at the end to discover it had been an American movie, despite its British setting, because throughout I had been troubled by the stylistic differences between it and the others. Something about it had just not rung quite true. Traditional Hollywood England, like traditional Hollywood Arabia, is a strange otherworld that never really existed outside the moviemakers' imaginations.
My phone conversation with my mother that night was brief, covering only the basics: who the father of Glenda Doberman's unborn baby might be (a matter on which Glenda herself was apparently pretty vague, as I might have guessed) and whether the girl might be wise to get an abortion; the latest stop-the-presses news about my father's indigestion (no change); the question of my fruit and vegetable intake; and the insistence that I shouldn't be wasting my life sitting in stuffy cinemas the whole time but should instead be either studying or running around playing ball in the fresh air, or preferably both at the same time. It was a conversation I could have scripted myself by cutting and pasting fragments from previous phonecalls, and the sensation I'd had the previous week of being dislocated from the rest of reality returned in full force. And, once more, it persisted. Long after I'd put the phone back on its hook and retreated to the relative sanctuary of my single room I still felt as if the walls and furniture around me were no more real than movie props, that if I bumped against them too hard they'd ripple or collapse.
And the feeling extended to people as well. Was Mrs. Bellis, with her overloud television set and her farts and all, actually real? I hardly ever saw the woman – I saw her as little as I possibly could, if the truth be told – and so, for all I knew, all the rest of her existence might just be as a soundtrack blasted through the intervening wall to torment me. Mr. Perkins at the deli, the intense old guy at the Rupolo, my colleagues and peers at the university – all of them seemed to me suddenly to be puppets or special effects, all controlled by some unseen, insane director. Sitting on my lumpy, thin-mattressed bed, I began to concoct fantasies about this director, the quasi-god who had brought all of this false display into existence, the puppet-master who made the people around me perform the charades they did. He was called Qinmeartha – I have no idea where the name came from – and he was the only one among the gods who had thought creation was a worthwhile enterprise. For going against their jointly expressed opinion and bringing the universe into existence, he was punished by being constantly mocked by the failure of his creation ever to achieve full, one hundred per cent reality. Always it remained just this side of fully convincing, even to him. Always his creatures remained puppets, or two-dimensional projections on the flat screen of his universe, their true reality forever being somewhere else. The only key that could change this situation was another aspect of him, called – again the name came to me from nowhere – the Girl Child LoChi, but she didn't wish to be a part of Qinmeartha any longer, and had fled from him. A further part of the curse the other gods had placed upon him for his audacity was that for the rest of eternity he would chase the Girl Child LoChi but, even if he located and trapped her, would never be able to persuade her to rejoin him and thereby make the universe fully real.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, which displayed a map of some of the more obscure parts of Canada, or maybe Scandinavia – somewhere with plenty of fjords, anyway. Two cops were arguing heatedly about the morality of shooting traitors in cold blood. The fish market was noisily closing for the night. (In all my time in that apartment I never once bought fish from the market, even though it was almost directly downstairs. The fish looked good and smelled good. I think it was the constant daytime noise of the staff and customers shouting at each other, a noise that started at five in the morning and went on until seven at night, that engendered my aversion to the produce.) A kid bellowed, presumably having fallen off its swing. Were there fjords in Canada? I couldn't remember. Maybe the map could be of a bit of New Zealand – I was pretty certain there were fjords there ...
And once more a deep and dreamless sleep took me into its arms.
~
And so the weeks went by and went by, each of them following very much the same pattern. Christmas, with its excruciating visit home, came and went. Although I continued to work hard at the university – my parents had made sacrifices to get me there, so it was my obligation to do so – I found that more and more I was living for my Monday afternoons at the Rupolo, that veterinary science was being shifted off towards the edge of my preoccupations. Only during those three and a half hours each week when I was sitting in the Rupolo, with or without popcorn (more usually without), did I feel that my mind was truly alive, and enlivened. It was the genesis of a lifelong passion, one that has molded the man I now am.
Of course, at this distance of years I cannot possibly recall the titles of all the movies I saw during those Monday afternoons, and, although I can remember great tracts of their plots, sometimes I suspect they have all become jumbled each among the others, so that what I bring to mind are not individual movies but just some gigantic composite, a sort of huge metamovie. Most of the movies were British, or at least centered on Britishers, and generally the Britishers were in conflict with the Germans; but there were a few that featured Americans, and their struggl
es with either the Germans or the Japanese or both. The movies were generally from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, although occasionally the Rupolo's owner saw fit to show something a bit more recent. A few of the titles that I do remember are Albert RN, The Great Escape, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Colditz Story, Ice Cold in Alex, Stalag 17, Sahara, D-Day, Gallipoli, Danger Within, Foxhole in Cairo, The Captive Heart, The Mackenzie Break, The Purple Heart, The Longest Day, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Hannibal Brooks, King Rat, The Password is Courage, The Betrayal, Prisoner of War ...
I suppose I should make a confession here. I am not an unusually stupid man, and several decades ago, when I was studying for my doctorate, I was undoubtedly brighter and sharper than I am today. However, I have to admit that, while I followed the plots of these movies keenly – others might snore during a Rupolo Monday matinee but not me – it took me a long time to realize that a composite was emerging from the whole sequence of movies that was, well, distinctly ... odd. I still cannot understand why it took me such a while to notice this. Nor can I understand why it was that, for all my genuine and unbridled passion for these features and by extension for cinema as a whole, it never occurred to me until near the end of that academic year to do more than simply watch the movies – never occurred to me that the university library must contain scores if not hundreds of books on the cinema in which I might revel between one Monday afternoon and the next. I suppose the truth is that I was at the stage of being merely a fan; my awakening as a student of the cinema was for some reason delayed. Or maybe it was the subconscious notion that, the moment I began to take my devotion more seriously, as symbolized by my starting to search out books on the subject, would also be the moment I had to confront the fact that my interest in veterinary science, to which I had sacrificed nearly a decade of my young life, had ebbed to such a degree that all that was left was a darkening of the sand.