A Child across the Sky
Page 6
They traded insults for most of the meal and then agreed on a deal: Phil's script stayed as it was, and he would play Bloodstone. In exchange, he asked for very little money but a nice guaranteed piece of the gross.
They got a young man straight out of USC film school to direct who knew just about every horror film ever made, including such howlers as Plan 9 from Outer Space. But they were lucky because they'd found a genuine aficionado and fan of the genre who also knew what he was doing.
It took twenty-nine days to shoot Midnight in a northern California town where the entire six-hundred-person population was delighted to have a movie crew setting fire to their streets and flinging fake body pieces out their windows.
Matthew Portland and half the crew played roles. Phil played three (including Bloodstone). The director was a perfectionist who pissed everybody off but whose enthusiasm for what they were doing kept people afloat.
At a sneak preview of the film in Hibbing, Minnesota, a teenage girl had a heart attack and died. It made national news and was the best free publicity they could have wanted.
Millions were made. T-shirts and posters were licensed. Merchandisers and distributors and major studios started licking their lips and rubbing their hands together for what they saw as a possible long and happy marriage between gold and a new ghoul.
The furor grew. It was understandable. Midnight is a kind of masterpiece, but it is also immoral and too convincing, too real. Horror films are fun to watch because they're usually so outrageous or hyperbolic you spend half the time smiling at all that red silliness.
Midnight is different. For one, it is a very smart film. Although Phil said it was inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's work, I know a great deal of it came from his own utterly unhappy childhood. Not the horror so much as the almost tactile sadness that sits on the movie like the night demon on the sleeping woman's chest in that famous painting by Fuseli. Pauline Kael said it first when she wrote the wonderful review comparing Midnight to De Palma's Carrie and Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. That gave the intelligentsia permission to go to the film, much like Leonard Bernstein did in the seventies when he said he liked the Beatles.
"Do we really live in the world that Bloodstone haunts? If so, then he isn't the real monster in the story – our own mediocrity is, our silence and exile from ourselves. Forget the cunning." She also quoted the artist Robert Henri. "Low art is just telling things; as, There is the night. High art gives the feeling of night. . . . Here is an emotional landscape. It is like something thought, something remembered." In fact, "Something Thought, Something Remembered" was the title of her essay, which, with its faint reference to Proust, added even more prestige.
Years after I saw the film for the first time, I heard Spalding Gray do one of his monologues. In the middle of it, Gray said something that was also part of the essence of Midnight: "One of my brother's biggest fears was the basement of our house. When our parents would go away he'd turn out the lights and crawl on his belly from the bedroom down the front stairs, then down the basement stairs, and with his eyes closed he would feel the basement walls, every crack, feeling his way around the entire room until he either died or didn't die."
Somehow Phil Strayhorn had created a story that made his audience face their own basement fears with all the lights off and no weapon handy.
When Phil was a boy, his father used to tell him and his sister "bedtime stories." Not a nice man, Mr. Strayhorn probably thought of it as a good way of making up to two children he neither liked nor helped. According to his son, the stories were long and good but too often unnecessarily frightening or sad.
"He'd scare the shit out of us and make us cry. Then the bastard'd put his arm around us and say, 'It's okay, it's okay. Daddy's here! Daddy'll protect you.' He wanted both our fear and our love. That's not fair, man."
If you have seen Midnight Too, you're familiar with this scene. Only in the movie, Daddy is Bloodstone in disguise, and what happens to the children isn't okay. Phil and his parents stopped speaking after it came out. But he said too bad; they didn't like the story because the parts about them were true.
M.T. was three times as successful at the box office (and video counter) as its predecessor. As a result, Phil and Matthew Portland formed Fast Forward Productions and started looking around for other properties to develop.
One of the funnier results of the first film was the surprising popularity of Matthew Portland, actor. He received so much fan mail for his portrayal of Paul Eddoes, town mayor and professional dumbo, that he and his new partner decided to keep Paul around for the second and third parts of the series. Matthew was thrilled.
That third part was Midnight Always Comes, but by the time they got to the end of filming, Phil was calling it "Midnight Never Leaves." He was tired of Bloodstone, tired of gore, tired of signing autographs because he was a beloved mass murderer,
"I don't want to go off-off Broadway to do King Lear, Weber, but it would be nice to act in something other than a bloodbath for once."
I was shooting Wonderful then and asked if he'd like to play the small role of the transvestite, Lily Reynard. He quickly said yes and was damned good in it.
Not long afterward, the earthquake came and Phil saved my life. If he hadn't pulled me out of the restaurant as soon as the tremors began, I'm sure I would have been crushed with the others when the roof fell in with one big, horrifying whump!
Tired and empty and still shaken by the sound of that roof, I left for Europe as soon as I finished Wonderful. I wanted out of California and was already half sure I wanted out of my life there. Europe was the green light at the end of my dock. I was convinced being there would at least give me some perspective.
I didn't hear much from Phil in my year overseas, except for a few postcards saying vague things like he was looking into possibilities.
When I came back he showed me The Circus on Fire. A fifteen-minute video he'd been commissioned to make by the rock group Vitamin D, the film is a beauty, a small Joseph Cornell box of wonder and deceit. You can watch it five times in a row and hope for a sixth. In many ways it's the best thing he ever did, but the thugs in the group thought it was too heavy and said no. They'd expected Bloodstone to make them a video like Midnight. What they got instead was some weird thing with almost no music and puppets speaking ancient maps.
Without a word he put it in a drawer and went back to work on Midnight Kills. When I asked how he felt about that, he said working on the video had given him a superb idea for a new film. After playing Bloodstone again, he'd have enough money to finance the whole project himself. What was this new idea? He wouldn't say. That was a good sign.
About this time two very different things happened to him. The first was meeting Sasha, the second were the killings in Florida.
Many newspapers tried to call them "The Bloodstone Murders," but luckily the nickname didn't stick. A seventeen-year-old lunatic in Sarasota saw Midnight too many times. Then, while babysitting one night, he killed his little brother and sister the same way Bloodstone got two people in the film.
4
The dead glow. I still don't know why, but they do. There is much love, warmth, and companionship here . . . all the good things, plus we have – or rather we are – this soft light. It is not so different, but you can't help smiling in the beginning when you look and see you have a lot in common with fireflies.
Those children Weber spoke of are here. They are quiet and sweet, and I try hard to be their friend.
I must, because it is my fault they're here. I didn't believe that when I was alive, but now I understand. That is part of the process. You are taught to understand.
There is a life review, of course, but it was so much more interesting than I had ever imagined. For one thing, they show you how and where your life really happened. Things you didn't experience or weren't ever aware of, but which dyed the fabric of your life its final color.
I was shown the night my parents slept together and conceived me (my fath
er came so quickly, Mother patted his back and fell immediately asleep).
Unknown pieces of the real pain, surprise, and love that lived inside the walls of our growing-up house, our younger hearts: my parents', my sister's, mine.
I have seen it all now: Jeffrey Vincent murdering his little brother and sister, Sasha finding my body on the patio, even the death of Weber's mother.
I was permitted to show him that, although they say they've rarely done that before: allowed someone to see any part of their complete truth while still alive. It is an essential part of the job of living to alone find what we can of these ruins within and translate their hieroglyphics. The archaeology of the heart is the only important study.
For instance, there is a photograph of me (among others) on Weber's dresser in New York. I am in his comfortable old leather chair, hands in lap, one leg crossed over the other. My face is its usual expressionless thin spade with hair on top. On the floor next to the chair are four of those Bloodstone masks that were once popular. I'd brought them to Weber that day as a joke.
I am sitting there looking very self-satisfied in my Anderson & Shepard sport jacket, a silk ascot wrapped in a pompously correct knot around my throat. On the floor are those identical silver faces, strewn at random.
Weber has looked at that picture often, carefully or nostalgically, happily. . . . We have so many ways of looking at a photograph that means something to us. But although he has looked, he has never seen what's important there. Not that it's easy.
Why do we photograph, why do we look, why do we remember so little but forget so much? It isn't coincidence. The ancient Romans discovered what to do: haruspication. Studying the entrails of dead animals, the order and form of anything in the world, they hoped to decipher clues to the future within that order.
They were right. If Weber were to look at that photograph correctly, he would see so much of what will happen to him. Not because it is a picture of me, but because of the way the masks sit on the floor, the tight knot in the silk, the half-light across the side of my face. When he took the picture, he kept saying, "Turn your head. Move your hands. Look a little away. I have to get the masks in too. . . . That's it!"
Why was that it and not something else? Because in some part of him, my friend knew he was about to capture a splinter of his future on film. Unfortunately, his other parts didn't know how to see it, so he only framed the splinter and put it on the shelf with others.
This is true about everything. The cigarette he is about to smoke: how he holds it, the number of puffs he will take. So many answers floating lazily in the air above our lives, like the gray smoke at the end of Weber's face.
"Did Phil ever tell you about the dog and the time death came into his room?"
"Wyatt, what happened to Pinsleepe the angel? I thought you were going to tell me about that."
He pursed his lips and nodded. "I am, but we've got another – hours to go.
"That's what I like about The Decameron and Canterbury Tales – everyone sat around telling sensational stories, since there was nothing else to do while the plague was raging outside or there were another hundred miles to ride till Canterbury.
"First let me tell you about the dog and death. It has something to do with Phil and Pinsleepe anyway.
"When he was a boy, Phil's family had a dog named Henrietta. They let her run free on the streets, so she had puppies pretty regularly. She slept in a corner of Phil's room, and when it was time to have the babies, she went over to her bed and just let them come.
"One time she had a litter with one real sick runt in it. Phil said you could tell from the first it was going to die, but Henrietta was crazy for the pup and treated it best of the bunch. Which is queer, because animals usually ignore or even kill a runt.
"But Henrietta loved it and made sure it got enough to eat and had lots of licks. . . . For a while it looked like the puppy was going to surprise everyone and actually pull through, but then it got worse somehow and started dying.
"While doing his homework one night, Phil looked up because he heard Henrietta start growling. She wasn't a growler, and when he looked around he saw there wasn't anything to growl at. But she wouldn't stop. Grrrr! On and on. Besides that, she kept looking toward one window in the room. Phil checked there too but didn't see a thing. Her tail was wagging like mad, she was snarling: all the signs of a dogfight about to start. But there was nothing there!
"Suddenly she jumped up and just stood there, back legs shaking, teeth showing, tail whipping back and forth. She was still looking toward the same corner of the room, but then her head started moving slowly, as if watching something cross the floor and come toward her.
She'd been lying next to the puppies, giving them dinner, but now all of them were staggering around on –day-old legs, searching blindly for Mom. Except for the runt. It was so weak it couldn't move.
"Phil said he felt something in the air: not some cold wind or creepy hand on his neck, just something else. It might even have been pleasant; he didn't remember. But whatever it was sure made its nearness known to both boy and mother dog.
"For a couple of seconds Henrietta went stiff and silent. Frozen. Then she began whimpering and looking at the puppies. They were wiggling and whining, all except the sick one. It was dead. Very obviously dead."
"Death came in the room?"
He nodded. "That's what Phil thought. He said the mother watched it cross the room right over to the puppy, which was dead a moment later. How else would you explain it?"
"It's a scene out of Midnight."
"Exactly what I said. I asked how come he'd never used it. He thought it was too beautiful to use there. I think he planned to put it in Tiddlehead,' though."
"What does it have to do with Pinsleepe?"
"Pinsleepe was the Angel of Death."
Strayhorn was rich, famous, and under forty. He'd survived an earthquake and been called an eminent artist by one of the most influential critics in America. He wrote a column about whatever suited him for a celebrated men's magazine.
Other people's lives come in two sizes, life size and dream size. Phil had the latter. What's more, he remained a good and sensitive man till the end of his life, which is not typical Hollywood.
I haven't said enough about Phil's humanity, and that's altogether necessary before I describe his involvement with Pinsleepe.
We lived together four years at Harvard, and there were enough late-night bullshit sessions for me to get a clear perspective of his dismal and touching childhood.
His parents cared but not enough. They substituted authority for concern, and strong adult handshakes when hugs should have been given. It's an old story and boring too, if it weren't for Phil's reaction. When they offered to shake his hand, he jumped in their laps and tried to make them laugh. They were such dour people that he considered their smiles and rare laughter to be the only true signs of their love: his real success with them. That might be why he and Finky Linky liked each other so much. It wasn't "make 'em laugh" or "all the world loves a clown" but more – if you grin, I can breathe; if you laugh, I have enough food in me to go another couple of days.
Mr. Strayhorn had a fountain pen store and for a hobby raised poodles. He'd gone to Harvard but graduated with only a diploma and the silly haughtiness that often accompanies a first-rate education to get him through the rest of his life. But after a couple of years or a first job, the world doesn't care where you went to college, as long as you succeed. The old man couldn't, so he retired from the real world on a pension of arrogance and dismissal that kept him minimally alive until he contracted cancer in his early sixties and became even more difficult.
His wife was no better. A small-town girl who never got over being grateful to her husband for marrying her, Betty Strayhorn believed what he said, no matter how outrageous – "Your father went to Harvard, remember" – but when he was wrong she kept her mouth shut. Her favorite phrase was "for the peace of the family." There was peace in the Strayhorn f
amily, but only because Father knew best about everything and you got smacked if you ever tried for the last word.
Phil did everything "right," his sister Jackie everything wrong. He studied while she got into trouble. He made their parents laughing and proud; she made them scared and furious. He told his father he got all A's, she told the old man to fuck himself. The two kids fought together like rabid dogs but protected the other's flanks whenever the parents swooped down for a kill.
Jackie is unmistakably the model for Janine, the heroine of all the Midnight films. They even look alike. Although he was never clear about how he did it, over the years Phil helped her climb over all this self-destructive rebellion and straighten her life out. She became interested in science in her teens and went on to become a biologist. She gave full credit to her brother and none to their parents.
"He taught me one thing I've never forgotten, Weber. Once when I'd really fucked up again with the parents, we were talking about it. I said I was going to kill myself because life was so useless and unfair. He didn't get mad or shake me. Just said, 'Remember this, sister. The world doesn't need anything from you, but you need to give the world something. That's why you're alive. Kill yourself now, and you're proving the majority right – you're no different from the billion other skulls under the ground. Give it something, no matter how short– or long-lasting, and you've won."
Phil went on trying to keep his family together and smiling until the day he graduated summa cum laude from college. His father shook his hand and gave him a Sinbad fountain pen from his own collection.
When Phil told them later that summer he was going to California to try to become an actor, his father called him a ridiculous ass and walked out of the room. Mrs. Strayhorn told her pride and joy to go and apologize to Dad. Phil packed his bag and left. They didn't speak again for two years.