The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  Most people didn’t know China girls existed. The lab technicians knew. The projectionists knew. They had favorites, faces of obsession, and even if I liked the idea of my own fleeting by, I knew the technicians looked at the frames more closely, and I liked that, too. I was and was not posing for them. Pieces of film leader were collected and traded like baseball cards. Marvin and Eric preferred a polished look. “The problem with the girl-next-door thing,” Marvin said, “is that with recent Kodachrome it’s actually the girl next door. Her name is Lauren and we grew up together in Rochester.” The girls, mostly secretaries in film labs, weren’t exactly pinups, but the plainer-looking China girls were traded just as heavily. The allure was partly about speed: run through a projector they flashed by so fast they had to be instantly reconstructed in the mind. “The thing suppressed as an intrusion,” Eric said, “is almost always worth looking at.” Their ordinariness was part of their appeal: real but unreachable women who left no sense of who they were. No clue but a Kodak color bar, which was no clue at all.

  Twice in the first few weeks of working at Bowery Film, a waste container of nitrate film spontaneously burst into flames. Marvin said that when nitrate film decayed, it turned into a flammable, viscous jelly, which then solidified into crystals, and finally crumbled to dust. Jelly to crystals to dust. Marvin had been employed for a while by the Technicolor plant on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. His job sometimes involved getting rid of huge quantities of old and flammable file copies of films the studio had processed and released over the years. They were reference copies, Marvin said, for the studio to have a record of the correct densities and color for prints they had manufactured. All day long, Marvin and two other men took rolls of film out of canisters and mutilated the film rolls with meat cleavers, and then tossed them into a gigantic trash bin behind the studio. Marvin spared a few things from the meat cleavers for his own private collection. A thousand-foot roll of trailers for The Naked Dawn, by Edgar G. Ulmer, one identical copy after another. Pieces of imbibition stock, or IB, which was a different texture than regular film, according to Marvin, thicker, but still pliable. He also got a roll of “scene missing,” which was cut into a print to mark a gap.

  I learned a lot about film working with Marvin and Eric, and they let me process my own films basically for free, so I was coming in with sixteen-millimeter footage I shot with my Bolex from the film department at UNR, mostly scenes I filmed from the fire escape on Mulberry. The films weren’t all that good, but they did capture something. I made panoramic sweeps of the Sunday morning chauffeurs, one to the next to the next, black limousines and white drivers, their faces on zoom revealing little, just dulled patience, as if nothing could surprise them and nothing did. Did they wait like that out of loyalty? Fear? Good wages? Or was it pride, docility, boredom? Who knew why they waited, I thought, understanding that I, too, had it in me to wait. To expect change to come from outside, to concentrate on the task of meeting it, waiting to meet it, rather than going out and finding it. My camera grazed their faces as they stood at attention, a secret parade on public view, pretending as they waited that time had no value and what a lie. A lie they didn’t mind. They were on the clock, being paid to forsake time’s value by standing under the sun like they had all day.

  The filmed footage of their patient faces reminded me of how I felt that morning after the unnamed friend of Thurman and Nadine’s had departed while I slept, leaving me alone, hungover, bereft.

  Marvin and Eric loaned me a projector, and I showed my film to Giddle on the wall of my apartment. She liked it, but said it might be better to get a job as a chauffeur. To have to wait like they did, she said. As a kind of performance. But who would be the audience? I wondered.

  “No one,” she said. “You’d merge into an environment. Film it and you will never join it. You’ll never understand your subject that way.”

  This was her own method, I was beginning to understand. Giddle, who was a waitress but also playing the part of one: girl working in a diner, glancing out the windows as she cleaned the counter in small circles with a damp rag. Life, Giddle said, was the thing to treat as art. Once upon a time she had hung around Warhol’s Factory and would have been too cool to speak to me, much less serve me a meal in a hole in the wall with a grease-coated ceiling, handwritten signs (“cheeseburger and fries $1.25”), and humpbacked men and women lurching toward each other in the vinyl booths. “Personne,” that Factory crowd had said to one another, assessing people as they filed into Rudy’s. “No one. Don’t bother.” Giddle had been offered a role in one of Warhol’s films, of a girl sleeping on a bed. “How do I prepare?” she’d asked him, and he’d shrugged and said maybe sleep a lot, or don’t sleep much so you’ll be tired. The day her life changed she was in Hoboken, New Jersey, going to thrift stores, looking to find the right outfit for the role, a lace peignoir. Giddle went into an old chrome diner for coffee. It was winter and freezing. She started talking to the waitress. There was something suspicious about this waitress, Giddle told me. She wore glasses and had a dour and educated New Englandy face. She didn’t seem like someone who would work at a diner in Hoboken.

  “So I pressed her,” Giddle told me. “And she admitted she was actually not a waitress, but a sociologist, and that she was living for one year on minimum-wage jobs to gather data on how difficult it was to get by in that life, to understand and expose a kind of American ugliness.” So it’s like a performance, Giddle had said to the woman. You’re performing the role of a waitress. Giddle was a performer herself, and it was what most interested her. The woman insisted, No, it’s sociology—I don’t care about performing. I infiltrate to study this world.

  “But that is performance,” Giddle said to me. “She didn’t see that, but I did. She was performing, as a real but not actual waitress. She was rushing from table to table and clipping orders on a little metal wheel that the cooks spun around, and calling out sides of biscuits and gravy and carrying stacked dirty plates one-two-three up the inside of her arm, which I still have not learned to properly do. I can’t quite explain what happened next. I was in a strange mood that day. I was all alone. It was February. The sky was very white. The trees were bare. The diner was warm and humming with a kind of life that seemed new to me. I watched the sociologist smooth her apron and slide a pencil in her hair and share a knowing smile with the cook, who called her by her server number, forty-three. When she came to refill my coffee cup, I said, ‘I’d like to work here. Are there any openings?’ And she said that there would be, because her research was almost finished, and to come back in a week. I had a strange feeling, like I’d decided to go over a waterfall in a barrel. I rented an apartment nearby, a studio with a Murphy bed. It was over an old shoe-repair shop. Neon blinked into my window all night long, startling me from sleep. At first I thought I would hate the neon, but I began to like it, the way it lent this air of tragedy to my so-called life, my performance as a waitress, neon flashing into the room, making me feel as if I were living inside a film about a lonely woman who threw her life away to work in a diner. And I was that woman! But the whole thing was in quotes. I styled my hair in a bouffant, like the white women in the South who responded to civil rights by teasing their hair higher and higher and lacquering it into place. I wore a uniform, not actually required. The other ladies just wore black pants and an apron, but I purchased a pink uniform with a white Peter Pan collar. I thought I was very camp and ironic. The sociologist had finished, although she still came in now and then, sat at a table and did follow-up interviews. She didn’t want to talk to me because I was a downtown hipster and I might screw up her data. She pretended I was invisible since I wasn’t authentic.

  “But the thing is, I became authentic,” Giddle told me. “Little by little. My performed life grew roots. I was lonely, and the work was demeaning and hard. I wanted to go get drunk as soon as I was off shift, and so I was always hungover and barely keeping it together. I discovered that being a waitress was not about the un
iform, or the cook calling you twenty-six, which at first I thought was cute. I even thought, what if I fuck the cook and he calls me twenty-six? Hilarious, right? What a riot. I did sleep with him and he called me Patricia, which was what I’d put on my name tag, and it was unpleasant. The next morning I had to face him every five minutes to pick up my orders.

  “I moved back to New York a year later. Everyone asked where I’d been. Andy thought it was amusing, or so he claimed, but perhaps he was only making fun of me. Andy preferred the Automat, where there were no waitresses, just clear display windows for meat loaf and pies that slid open when you inserted coins. Never again did he ask me to be in a film, and something in me had changed. I no longer had the drive to make it with that Factory crowd. I told myself I was more extreme than they were, these haughty upper-class bitches who didn’t have to work. There was no risk for them. They could always go home to Mommy and Daddy’s on Park Avenue. One or two pitched themselves off Mommy and Daddy’s Park Avenue balcony, but seriously, anyone can do that.”

  * * *

  New York was getting colder. I went to a bar in the Meatpacking District with Giddle one October night, my birthday, actually. There were bagels scattered all over the sidewalk, a heavy and rancid animal smell in the air. We stepped over puddles of lamb’s blood as we crossed the street to the other side, where there were more bagels. Giddle began kicking them like hockey pucks, and so did I. We were on Gansevoort Street, where carcasses were loaded into the meatpacking plants on pulleys. Giddle led us into a bar around the corner on Ninth Avenue, a dive filled with men who probably worked in the meatpacking places and I thought, Why are we here? Giddle opened her purse and tried to buy our drinks with fake money she’d gotten in Chinatown, oversized bills with a denomination of ten thousand. The bouncer came over to speak with her. She insisted her money was good and that it was my birthday, and as she made more of a scene, he escorted us out.

  Why is she my only friend? I wondered, this woman who is so alone. I meet no one through her and she thinks I should forget making films and become a Mafia chauffeur.

  Giddle herself was considering her next act, another life, a new performance. She was planning to go to mortuary school, she told me. She went to see an autopsy as research and came to my apartment after. She glowed with excitement and stank of formaldehyde. I kept back a certain distance, and asked how it was.

  “Difficult to even talk about,” she said. “I feel changed. Like, say my mind is a sweater. And a loose thread gets tugged at, pulled and pulled until the sweater unravels and there’s only a big fluffy pile of yarn. You can make something with it, that pile of yarn, but it will never be a sweater again. That’s the state of things.”

  * * *

  Winter came early. It was November and the water jeweled itself to a clear, frozen dribble from the fire hydrant in front of my building. Sammy, who had been sleeping outside, was gone. Henri-Jean, with his striped pole and sandals, no longer sat in the park, only hurried along in a ratty peacoat. Once I saw him dart into a building on Mott Street with groceries from the cheap bodega where I also shopped. The Italian kids wore big puffy jackets and blew into their hands to keep warm. I had been in New York four months. I had my job, and I was making films and learning a lot from Marvin and Eric, but I was lonely, eating candy bars for dinner with my coat buttoned up because my radiator was broken and Mr. Pong did not return calls.

  One day Marvin mentioned that there was a guy asking about me. I wondered if it was the unnamed friend. When Marvin saw the pleasure in my face, he rolled his eyes. Marvin and Eric were verging on neuter. They didn’t want girlfriends. They got excited over discontinued Kodachrome stock. Imbibition stock. Scene missing.

  “He wants to meet you,” Marvin said distractedly as he examined prints for imperfections.

  “How does he know who I am?”

  “The girl cut into the leader, wouldn’t you say she’s as much a part of the film as its narrative? Her presence there in the margin, her serving to establish and maintain a correct standard of appearance, female appearance. These are aspects of a single question that deserve thought.”

  “What is that question, Marvin?”

  No answer. I went out for my lunch break.

  “He saw you coming in,” he said when I returned. “It’s this guy Sandro Valera. Artist. Italian. Lives around here.”

  It wasn’t the unnamed man. But I knew the name Valera, of course, because of the motorcycles. The unnamed man had mentioned knowing one of them. I didn’t know who Sandro Valera was, but when I asked Giddle, she said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake. He’s famous. Go to Erwin Frame Gallery—he has a show up right now.”

  I went to the gallery. The woman behind the counter nodded toward me severely as I came in, glancing up through eyeglass frames that were black and round like little handcuffs. Sandro Valera’s artworks were large aluminum boxes, open on top, empty inside, so bright and gleaming their angles melted together. I knew enough to understand that it was Minimalism, meant to be about the objects themselves, in a room, and not some abstract or illusory thing they represented. The boxes had been made in a factory in Connecticut. As I got to know Sandro, I understood that even if the works were stamped by the factory that produced them, they had little to do with the assembly line imagery they implied: the factory, Lippincott, only fabricated artists’ works, by hand, and very, very carefully. One of the aluminum boxes was being moved by two gallery assistants in white cotton gloves. I thought of the gloves the boy driver of the Cadillac had worn, too large for his young hands as he worked the giant wheel of that car. The difference was the difference of this warm, quiet, bright place, this snobbish woman behind the counter. Calm reserve. The creak of old wood floorboards. Art that was four metal objects that shone like liquid silver. The gloves the assistants wore were not a curious nod to old-fashioned ideas about service and formality. They were to protect the milled aluminum from fingerprints, which, because of the oils on human hands, would be impossible to remove from the delicate finish. The gloves fit the assistants’ hands. They picked up one of the boxes. Moved it a few inches and set it down, stepped back. Looked at it.

  Giddle chided me again when I told her I’d seen the show and realized he was a major artist, with work that was subtle, mathematical, grand, and expensive, everything in the gallery sold, the air of the place making me feel like an interloper just being there. I didn’t understand why an older and famous artist was seeking out someone young and invisible. “Hmm. Let’s see. Why is an older man seeking out a younger woman? Who isn’t established in the way he is? Gosh. What a mystery. Oh, for fuck’s sake once again,” Giddle said. “He’s a man. Practically middle-aged, and you’re young.”

  “You’re saying he’s the type who is into younger women?”

  “Sweetheart, that’s all men,” she said. “All men are that type.”

  I might have been proud to be the object of universal attraction, at least according to Giddle, but I only felt irritated for being treated as if I were too naive to understand. Giddle sensed this and added, as if to soften her condescension, that Sandro Valera was hot for a middle-aged man. By the time I met and began dating him, I chose to forget Giddle’s theory. Like all people who fall in love, I took the attraction between me and Sandro as singular and specific, not explainable to types and preferences. Once I asked if he preferred younger women and he said he preferred me. He said he saw me come and go from Bowery Film and I looked so open and lovely that he could not resist. “Could not resist what?” I had asked. “Becoming your boyfriend before someone else did,” he said. Which bothered me but I let it go. He had a way of talking about our courtship that presumed there was choice to it. Perhaps this was simply a difference between us. I did not experience love as a choice, “I think I will love this or that person.” If there was no imperative, it was not love. But Sandro spoke as if he’d seen me on the street and simply made his selection.

  * * *

  The woman in the handcuff eyeglass
es at the gallery that day was Gloria Kastle. Gloria who haughtily said, when I later met her properly through Sandro and mentioned I’d seen her working at Erwin Frame, that she most certainly was not working at Erwin Frame that day. She was merely helping him out, just as she sometimes helped Sandro out, “when it’s useful to him,” she’d said. Sandro had given her a quick, cold look. Their exchange was oblique to me, and I did not try to interpret it beyond assuming she had some proprietary attachment to him, sisterly, perhaps, since she was married to Stanley, who was one of Sandro’s oldest friends. But then again, maybe not sisterly, and yet I knew she was not a threat to me, and that it would be a mistake to consider her one. Not even after I began dating Sandro in a serious way did I worry about Gloria. Not even when I moved in, six months after we began dating, and Sandro left a box by the door for Gloria to pick up, items that were personal—a scarf, some books. I did not care to speculate on their friendship. If there was some complicated dimension to it, that aspect was being ended by Sandro when I moved in. She came to get the box and glared at me like we were two tomcats facing off in an alley. I was replacing her in some way. I didn’t understand quite how but I didn’t need to. I was with Sandro, and our relationship was neither secret nor illicit nor complicated. Whenever I saw Gloria, I smiled and hoped not to get scratched or bitten.

  With my permission, Marvin gave Sandro my telephone number. He called. We met. He was beautiful, which I hadn’t expected, with a strange stillness, curiously both present and remote, with those eyes that were blanched of compassion but magnetic all the same.

  On our first date, we walked through Chinatown, stopping for lotus paste buns. “Diaphanous,” he said, and had me take a bite of his. It was the closest our two bodies had been, in an afternoon of walking side by side, each careful not to touch the other. The lotus paste had more fragrance than flavor. Later, I was never able to re-create that taste, after visits to bakeries all over Chinatown.