A Child across the Sky
Page 9
I went to Matthew's house at Malibu and watched the ocean for – days. Nothing doing. No inspiration in sea breezes.
After trudging back home discouraged, I found what I needed in a postcard from Weber. In Europe he had discovered the work of Elias Canetti and had been sending me cards with quotes from the writer, sometimes as many as – a week.
The outer bearing of people is so ambiguous that you only have to present yourself as you are to live fully unrecognized and concealed.
I read those words – times, then turned out the only light in the room and smiled like a happy hyena. Blood was rushing into my head, and it felt like I was glowing in the dark.
What if this time I put Bloodstone out on the street in a conservative blue suit, a tattered Bible in hand: Puke Puss set in the earnest sweat hypocrisy of a television evangelist? What if this time he was worshiped for what he was, not feared?
Worshiped by a society that wants God and salvation to be as plain and filling – accessible – as a deluxe cheeseburger with French fries. A bread-and-miracles saviur.
Only in Bloodstone's case, he would present himself as the other side of salvation.
Look at me, brothers and sisters! I went the wrong way, and witness what happened! I've seen Hell, the end, the No Exit place. Yes, it is as bad as you thought. Yes, there are devils – look at me. Flames? Look at my face. Check me out; I'm a living visa from those countries. Ground zero for your worst fears. Okay, stare, but listen to me; I've been there. I can help you through.
Leo Knott. That was the name, folks, a plain American name, as American as your best friend. As American as you.
Leo Knott. That was my name. That was me.
Not the Bloodstone you see now. Not this human scream with a face like puke and a soul that stinks of old perfume and meat.
"No, only Leo Knott, a minister of God who started out going in the right direction. But then something happened, folks. Suddenly Leo Knott saw he could use whatever powers of persuasion he had to get what he wanted. Not what the Lord God wanted, what Leo Knott wanted.
Did I use it to get women? My house was filled with blondes. Had to take the phone off the hook, they were calling all day and all night. I owned two black address books!
Did I use it to get money? I had so much money in my pocket, it looked like I was carrying a couple of sandwiches in there all the time!
That's the trick, you see. Say the name "God" and good people come running. They'll sell their farms and businesses and send you the checks. When they believe, they open their hearts and you can reach right in and take whatever you want.
That's what I did. I took their best parts and didn't think twice about it. I took their love, I took their trust, and, yes, I took their money as well. Not for God, for Leo Knott.
I spent it all! Spent it in fancy stores and fancy beds. Spent it on nights I couldn't remember the next day except for the full ashtrays and pink lipstick stains on the whiskey glasses.
You know what I'm talking about?
That's how Midnight Kills begins: Bloodstone confidently pacing the pulpit of a flyblown church in Watts, his audience a rotting array of junkies, bums, one-foot-in-the-graves, nothing-lefts on a Tuesday afternoon at the end of their lives, listening to a freak wail God at them until the free soup is served.
We'd chosen the men and women from the worst we could find on the street. I wanted them looking as real as possible: their faces, their clothes, their broken-cup hopelessness.
As I spoke to them I felt no need to act or play. Outrageous as he appeared, Bloodstone was easy to "be" because his hatred was pure and sharp as the smell of shit. He was shit: no subtlety, no calm, no mask. Only hatred that came in one aroma, and too bad if you don't want to smell it; it's right here in your face.
I knew him because I knew my own wild hatred. It'll disappoint you, however, if you think I'm going to say I was my monster, that I was Bloodstone. Never. I never walked a street with curled Dracula fingers and stone heart looking for victims. Nor did I dream of his sins and wish I had the courage or kink to commit them.
But I'll tell you something. The heart of darkness or banality of evil is no more than interest. The fact we don't stand in wonder at the honors some people do today is proof enough that the dark things interest us too much.
What did Goethe say: "I can't imagine a crime I wouldn't commit in certain circumstances"? Update that to "I can't imagine a crime that doesn't attract me somehow" and you have our world. People "loved" Bloodstone and the nightmares he did because he took our few moments of crazed, invigorating anger and turned them into a lifetime. Rest in Piss.
The first day on the set didn't go well. The crew made many foolish mistakes getting used to one another. But that was usual when you began shooting a film.
More importantly, in the middle of my "sermon " one of the bums in the audience was supposed to fart loudly. I even remember the man's name, because he was famous in the neighborhood for being able to fart at will: Michael Rhodes.
When I said, "Any man who thinks his heart well is a fool and a liar," Michael Rhodes was supposed to do his stuff. In rehearsal everything had gone fine. I'd say, "a fool and a liar," and he'd let fly enough wind and sound to flap a sail.
But when the cameras started rolling and Michael's big moment arrived, his tail winds died. Not one toot, although the squeezed, panicked expression on his ruined face said he was certainly trying.
The first few takes it was funny. But you can laugh only so many times at a slipup. Then it gets boring and frustrating and hardens permanently into plain failure.
The fifth or sixth time nothing happened, I was about to call Cut! when someone let zap a blast that sounded like a tugboat crossing the harbor. Everyone on the set cheered.
Looking out over the congregation, I did a double-take when I saw a new face that hadn't been there before. Who's dat?
A little girl, but what a little girl! Short hair, gorgeous features. She stood out from those rats like a small but brilliant acetylene flame. Smiling wickedly, she held her nose with two fingers the way kids do when something stinks – P.U.!
Pinsleepe.
"You were here when Phil killed himself?"
Pinsleepe shook her head exaggeratedly from side to side, a child saying no too hard. "I told you – I came up here to fix him lunch but he was dead."
"You found him or Sasha found him?"
"I told you, Weber, it's the same thing! We're each other."
"Explain that." It was maddening. One moment she spoke with the aplomb of a career diplomat; the next she was only a little girl, crabby from too little sleep or too much stimulus. How was I going to find out all the things I needed to know?
"I have to go to the bathroom." She jumped up and left the room. I looked out the glass doors onto the patio. There was the chair he'd died in. There was –
The telephone rang. I heard the bathroom door close just as that first ring stopped. An extension was nearby so I picked it up.
"Weber? It's me, Sasha. Are you almost finished there?"
"Wait a second, Sash. Hold the line." Dropping the receiver on the couch, I moved fast for the bathroom door. If I caught the kid on the pot, tough. I had to see. The door swung open onto no one there. No Pinsleepe, no Sasha. An empty room.
I have a friend whose cat always knows when the phone is going to ring before it actually does. The child jumped up right before the ring and was out of sight by the time I heard Sasha's first words. Standing there, my hand still on the doorknob, I heard the girl's last words.
"It's the same thing! We're each other."
"A long long time ago this terrible thing happened. . . ."
Dumbfounded, I looked up from the paper. Across the grave, Sasha stared at Phil's coffin, an expression of dulled, empty sadness on her pale face. Wyatt Leonard stood on one side of her, Harry Radcliffe on the other. The two men were looking at me, surprised, but Sasha continued to gaze at the open hole in front of us.
I retu
rned to the paper and the words Phil had asked that I read at his funeral, the words that were the voice-over beginning to Midnight.
"A famous poet once said, 'Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage, Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.'
"But that's not true. Dragons and monsters don't wait for courage and beauty. Only loss. Only death. There are people like that too."
If it were the beginning of his film, you would see the actress Violet Maitland, an infant in her arms, cross an airy, pastel living room to open balcony doors. Whispering sweet goo-goo sounds to the baby, she walks out onto her wide sunny balcony. The view from this high, expensive vantage point is splendid.
After a moment to allow us to share both the view and a delectable taste of her world, the woman heaves the child off the balcony as hard as she can. The only sound is her hoosh! of breath doing it.
But we weren't watching the film. We were several hundred standing around a gravesite with our separate thoughts about a man who was about to be covered up with a couple of hundred pounds of dirt for the rest of time.
Why had he done this? What was the purpose? Read alone, the quote from Rilke would have been moving, both because it was his favorite poet and the sentiment was very appropriate to Strayhorn. But to include the entire opening speech from that grisly film was tasteless and perverse.
Sasha gave me the envelope as we were riding to the cemetery. When I started to open it, she put her hand over mine and said that in his suicide note Phil had asked that it not be opened or read until the correct time. I'd assumed that meant he had something to say he wanted all the mourners to hear at the same time, a final important message. But not this. Not a macabre joke at his own dead expense in the last minutes many of us would ever have for him.
What else did his suicide note say?
At a certain point, I loaded my boat with all the important possessions I thought I wanted to take with me on the final trip to the old days of my life, across an ocean thirty or forty years long. All the things that were important – people, objects, ideas. But because of recent events (storms!), I've had to toss one after another of these things overboard until now, when my ship is so light that, amazingly, it has begun to float above the waters, which means there is even less control, even less possibility of reaching my previously set destination.
If Weber comes, please ask him to read the enclosed at my funeral. I would prefer that no one, including you two, see what it says until the ceremony. I'm assuming you and my parents will want me to have a funeral, but it makes no difference to me. My only request is that I be buried rather than cremated.
I'm sorry about this, Sasha. Please know it is in no way your fault. You have always been the peace and intimacy of a whisper to me. I love you.
There was more of Phil's graveside statement to read. I was about to go on when the first shots were fired.
Unlike the "eyewitness" accounts you hear on television from bewildered or distraught people who "thought the shots were just cars backfiring or firecrackers going off," these sounded like gunshots. – pows very fast. In the instant it took to turn in their direction, I noticed almost everyone had turned that way too. As if we all knew exactly where to look, exactly where the trouble came from.
"There he is!"
"It's fucking Bloodstone!"
He came straight at us in a slow gliding jog, black pants and shirt, silver Bloodstone face. The gun in his hand looked big as a block of wood. He was laughing and shooting at us. A woman across the grave went down, then a man. Hit? People were running everywhere. Finky Linky pushed Sasha into the grave and went in after her. I ran at Bloodstone without thinking. His high keening laugh. Pow!
2
We beat the shit out of him. Somewhere a woman's voice kept yelling, "Stop it, stop it! You'll kill him!" But that's what we wanted. All of us punching and kicking this son of a bitch till he died and never got up again. I love to fight but had never done anything like this – twenty (or so) to one, him on the ground, us standing over and whacking away at his unmoving form whenever we saw an opening.
"Kill the sick fuck!"
"Break his head!"
I kicked him and felt something hard go soft.
Scuffling and pushing, we were a pack of crazy starved dogs on a small prey. Each wanted a bite, our own bloody fresh piece. My dark funeral suit was dirt brown and scuffle-dust gray. Someone bent down and tore the silver mask off.
The man beneath looked like a teenager. No more than twenty. In less than a minute, his young face was a mess of ripe fruit color: shiny apple and grape, white where it shouldn't have been. Bone.
It was a blank gun. He had got off one more shot – straight at me – before I ran into him and kicked his balls. He was laughing when he shot at me, laughing on the ground being beaten down into wet rags by a lot of traumatized mourners.
I don't think I've ever been so angry in my life. When he was laughing I would have happily killed him. Pull a person's true anger out and it's impossible to put it right back in. Scare us enough and we'll do anything.
The police came fast, but there was a near riot as they tried to pull us off and get him out of there.
Who was he? I forget the name. Sasha wanted me to read an article on him in the newspaper the next day, but just hearing he was a "Midnight fan who wanted his hero Philip Strayhorn to go out 'as good as his movies'" was enough.
My anger scared me. My fear too. Riding back from the cemetery with Sasha and Mr. and Mrs. Strayhorn, I didn't say anything when the old man started piping off.
"I'm sorry, but I'm not surprised. He was my son but I'm not surprised this happened. You cannot make films like Philip's and expect your audience to be sane. They were depraved, both the films and the people who paid to go see them. What happened was a result of that depravity."
"What do you think is a good movie, Mr. Strayhorn?"
He wasn't used to being questioned, especially by a woman, so he looked Sasha over carefully before answering her.
"A good movie? Citizen Kane. The Seventh Seal. Even North by Northwest is a good film, maybe even a great film."
Facing him in the limousine seat, Sasha sat far forward so they were very close. "Tell me some good books."
He didn't like her closeness but wasn't about to be topped. "Oh, I don't know. Kipling's good; I've just been rereading him. Evelyn Waugh. Why do you ask?"
"What about good paintings?"
Mrs. Strayhorn touched Sasha's knee. "Why are you asking, dear?"
"Your son was trying to make something strange and new and vital with his films, but all you have to say about his life's work was it was depraved?"
Mr. Strayhorn crossed his arms and smiled scornfully. "You've been reading too many reviews, Sasha. Philip became a very rich man pandering to the twelve– and thirteen-year-olds in this sad country with about an ounce of imagination and a year's supply of chicken blood.
"There was nothing 'vital' about Midnight. Who do you think you're kidding? Yes, throwing a child off a balcony is strange, but not strange in the wonderful way of Fellini's 8 1/2.
"I respected Philip's success. He did what he chose to do well. But those of you who mistake his 'achievement' for something real and artistic, even worthwhile, are either blackly cynical or stupid.
"Good films? Weber made good films. Watch Wonderful carefully, and you see love and originality spread across the whole two hours, like good chocolate icing on a cake. The Midnight movies are cleverly filmed, and they scare the bejeesus out of you, but they stink."
"Why, because they 'pander' to our animal instincts?"
"No, because they don't love those animal instincts, which are so much a part of us. At best, they make fun of them. Ever think about that, Sasha? I'm sure not.
"Knowing my son, I'm sure he astutely explained their complete etiology and 'semiotic importance' to you
: all the intellectually swank and blah-blah terms that are spread over society's opinions like expensive jam nowadays. But when you bite into it, it's still a shit sandwich, jam or not. People like Philip invent those terms to spread over their work so we don't realize. . . .
"Listen, I know he hated me –"
Mrs. Strayhorn put a hand on his arm and cooed to calm him down. He ignored her and kept spitting bullets at Sasha.
"– but that was his right. Maybe we raised him and his sister wrong. That could be. I'll tell you something, though – I feel sad he killed himself, but not guilty. He believed perfection was possible. All his life he said that. But that was his trouble. I'm sure he made those movies as a 'strange and vital' way of telling people they were dangerous and in trouble, so they'd better start looking inside to find out why they liked films like Midnight I understand that. It's one way of doing it. But he made the money and success knowing his work was popular for all the wrong reasons. He continued to show us again and again how utterly evil and disgusting we can be to each other. That's what people came to see, not preposterous, tacked-on moral endings with smiling faces and false sunrises. The slime and the crackpots like that man in the cemetery ended up buying all the tickets.
"I noticed Pauline Kael didn't say anything about the last film, did she? You know who did? Fangoria magazine. Their review ran next to a full-color photo of someone in a pig mask covered with blood, carrying a chain saw. You know what they called my son's greatest creation, the being he wanted to instruct the people with? Pus Puss."
"Puke Puss." His wife corrected him.
"Excuse me. Puke Puss."
Sasha sat at her kitchen table while I made lunch. She'd changed into a bathrobe and bedroom slippers.