Memphis Movie

by Corey Mesler

  Eric realized pretty quickly that he was bone-tired and that to walk, even another mile, would lay him out. He also realized—or recalled—that one doesn’t hail a cab in Memphis. There are no cabs to hail. His choices were calling Mimsy and taking the chance on waking her up and having to explain to her why he was a couple of miles from her apartment building. Or he could call a cab company, which meant finding a phonebook. A fairly daunting task. Or Jimbo—no, he wouldn’t call Jimbo. Or he could call Hassle Cooley. He wasn’t sure how that worked except that poor, moonstruck Cooley was on call 24 hours a day.

  He chose the latter.

  “Cooley,” Cooley answered.

  After Eric explained where he was, Hassle Cooley didn’t even ask why.

  “I’ll be right there. Lemme slip my pants on. Oh, I have something to tell you anyway,” he said.

  As Eric continued to stroll eastward on Madison Avenue the streetlights glowed like Christmas morning and the street, nearly deserted, seemed to shimmer like a desert mirage. Eric saw Cooley’s car approaching from a great distance. Cooley was speeding his way, pedal to the metal, the cavalry arriving where, really, no cavalry was necessary. He passed Eric, braking hard, spun 180 degrees and pulled alongside the pedestrian, screeching to a full stop. He was grinning madly.

  “Boss!” Cooley shouted as Eric entered the back seat.

  “Don’t call me that, Cooley,” Eric said, suddenly so tired he laid his head against the cool glass window.

  “How’s it going? You didn’t need me today? I was ready. You see how much I was ready?”

  Eric neither answered nor opened his eyes.

  “How’s the movie? That’s the important thing, am I right? How the movie is going.”

  Eric opened one eye. It was amazing that Cooley could keep the car on the road since his attention was mainly on the back seat.

  “How much have you filmed? Get anything good? How’s Dan Yumont to work with?”

  Hassle Cooley was jangled on something stronger than caffeine.

  “I’m tired,” Eric said.

  “Right,” Hassle Cooley said. And he gave Eric about 30 seconds of silence in which to relax.

  “I had a weird dream,” Hassle Cooley said.

  Eric had heard enough. This jobbernowl was about to iterate a dream as a basis for Eric’s next film. How many fools had he suffered thus?

  Eric said, with some heat, “Cooley, dammit. To say you had a weird dream is kinda redundant, don’t you think? I mean, dreaming itself is weird, a gateway into otherness. And, if you think for one minute that a dream makes good drama, that it can be transcribed into a boffo screenplay, you’re sillier than even the most addlepated cabbie.”

  This came out a little uglier than Eric had intended.

  Cooley let his eyes rest on Eric’s for a tense second. Then he drove on, his concentration seemingly only on the road home.

  After his gorge had subsided a tad Eric thought he should offer a mollifying comment, something interesting from his day, something about film. A scrap to the begging dog.

  He could think of nothing.

  “We haven’t started filming yet, of course,” Eric said.

  Cooley glanced briefly toward the rear seat.

  Fuck him, Eric thought. So I’ve hurt his feelings. Poor driver.

  The hum of Midtown Memphis was buzzing past outside. Eric saw many places from his past, many haunts that were still haunted. Zinnie’s, Huey’s, Paulette’s. Overton Square, which, when Eric was a young man, was the hottest spot in town, clubs, restaurants, music halls. He saw Billy Joel there before Joel broke big. He saw the Mark-Almond band after their one-hit fame had dissipated. Now Overton Square was three-quarters deserted. Why? Eric pondered.

  But there was something new, something that made Eric smile. A movie multiplex. Studio on the Square, which sat just off Madison Avenue, like a cake at the end of a banquet table. He had heard talk about this new space, with its wine bar and welcoming lobby. And every small theater with the new stadium seating. No bad seats! It put Eric in a friendlier frame of mind.

  “Look, Cooley,” he offered. “I’m sorry. It’s been a rough day. A couple of rough days.”

  “Sawright,” Cooley said, tersely. But the evidence of thaw was observable.

  Eric smiled to himself. He was doing well. He was making with the small talk when, really, all he wanted was bed and oblivion. He did not live in an ivory tower, or mansion. He was still a regular guy.

  “So, I’ve got another idea for a movie,” Hassle Cooley said now.

  “Of course,” Eric said. “Tell me all about it.” He lay back and closed his eyes. Behind his lids another movie was taking place. In it Mimsy Borogoves was slipping her silky slip off, letting it slowly fall from her perfect, glossy tabernacle.

  “Ok,” Cooley said. “It’s a sequel, sort of.”

  Eric swallowed a groan. Mimsy, Mimsy . . .

  “I’m thinking now that there is a huge ethnic market, right? I mean, with some of the top box office stars being black, there’s a whole new audience, I mean, one that was there all the time but untapped. Will Smith, Sam Jackson, Ice Cube, Halle Berry. You know what I’m talking about. So, I’m working on this ultimate ethnic cash-in movie.”

  The pregnant pause was meant for something. Eric wasn’t following the script. Sam Jackson?

  “And the title—” Cooley said.

  Eric opened his eyes. He smiled his readiness.

  “It’s called The Color Purple Rain.”

  37.

  At 2 a.m. Dan Yumont found himself kissing his teenage lover good night. He kissed her long and hard, their tongues alive, their eyes wide open. Dan gripped her in all her curvy places and pulled her close.

  “Good night,” Dan said, a sweetness to his face heretofore unseen.

  “Good night, Dan,” Dudu said, and rolled over.

  Dan looked at where he was. Inside the birthday cake, shadowed like some film noir, frilly coverlet pulled up to his goozle. Ridiculous, he thought.

  Yet, there was this woman-child, body like Monroe’s. She stirred him. There it was. Simple and not so pure.

  She now pushed her lovely rump against his hip, body language for “spoon me.” Dan wrapped himself around her, his well-used Johnny almost springing to life one more time.

  But, no, no. Sleep beckoned. Tomorrow they were going to actually attempt to shoot a scene. Dan didn’t know whether he trusted his director to actually pull it off. Dan Yumont took a laissez-faire attitude toward most of his moviemaking time. He did his job; he limned the complex characters written for him. He was a master at it.

  Still, he wanted, occasionally, reassurances that the project was moving forward, that there was a vision involved.

  Tomorrow he would see. If the movie was to become a movie much would be told by the first scene shot.

  This was what Dan was thinking as sleep began to engulf him and the 16-year-old girl inside his spoon began to hum a Justin Timberlake tune. Dan had no idea what the song was but it carried him, like a rocking child, into dreamland.

  38.

  Eric came home to an empty house. He was too tired to worry about where his paramour was sleeping these days.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and undressed. When he was down to his skivvies he repaired to the bathroom for end-of-the-day duties. Then he turned out the light, caught his hip painfully on the door jamb and shuffled into the kitchen for some milk. On bad days he took a glass of milk with a shot of bourbon in it. It was medicinal.

  He went through the house turning out lights. The idea that he was not anticipating Sandy’s return was too depressing for him.

  Back in the bedroom he found the ghost of his father sitting on the edge of the bed in the identical posture he himself had occupied only minutes before. At first Eric thought he was seeing himself, an eidolon that was the result of his fatigue, or his bisected feelings toward this current movie. Then his father raised his head and it was the careworn face Eric knew from the last
days of his father’s life, the times when he was in and out of the hospital. Eric feared that face. He imagined the face exhibited fear, fear of the coming cessation of life and what that might bring. His father, a stoic like his entire generation, showed little emotion throughout his life, but, there, at the end, he seemed to be caving in like a poorly constructed tower, one built originally to safeguard the keep, and one that now appeared to be made of decomposing pastry.

  “Dad,” Eric said, weakly.

  “Hello, my son,” Eric’s dad’s ghost said.

  “I, I guess I didn’t expect you. At this time,” Eric said. He took a chair opposite the bed. In the dim grey of the bedroom this tête-à-tête seemed to be happening underwater.

  “I’ve always been here,” his father said.

  This seemed astonishing to Eric.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said.

  “I know, son. But, listen. I wanna ask you something.”

  “Ok,” Eric said.

  “This movie. It seems a mistake to me.”

  Eric was pulled up short.

  “That’s not a question,” he said, a bit peevishly, as if this were a debate and he was looking to score points.

  “The question is why,” his father said.

  “Why? Why am I making this particular movie at this particular time?”

  Eric took the silence to mean that he had hit the proverbial nail on its proverbial head.

  “Dad, I had to.” That seemed simple enough to Eric, plain to see.

  “You don’t, of course.”

  “I was practically tarred and feathered,” Eric said. “I was run out of Hollywood on a rail.”

  “Hollywood,” the ghost spat. “That faux city, that non-place. Eric, stand up straight. You don’t need Hollywood any more than you need fame. You want to wear the suit of lights, that’s up to you. But don’t hand me that horseshit about ‘You had to.’ Whatever you do you’ve decided to do.”

  Eric was thinking, is this my father? Is that the way he talked in life, so blunt, so full of rock-solid advice? He honestly couldn’t remember.

  “Dad, I—”

  “Eric, when you were younger, you were the golden boy, the kid that was always accomplishing things, precocious things. By college it was already predetermined what you would become, what your destiny was. We all saw this as a good thing, a remarkable thing. Who gets such a solid future at such a young age? Who is promised this? But, now, I’m thinking, you feel like it all was your due, which has now become your cage. You are damned to fame.”

  Eric was sure his father did not know that this was the title of a biography of Beckett, his Beckett. It was only one of life’s useless coincidences.

  Now, Eric smiled ruefully. His father had come back to help him steer this rocky part of his life, this whitewater stretch.

  “When nothing seems beyond your grasp, you lose your rootedness, you lose the earth beneath your feet. What do you really need, Eric?”

  Eric’s father’s ghost was losing his voice. His words sounded gargled.

  Eric rose and stepped toward the bed. His father wavered like bad TV reception and just when Eric reached him he disappeared with a distinct pop.

  “Pop,” Eric said to no one. The room was as silent as a crypt.

  There was nothing to do but go to bed, perchance to dream, perchance to wake in a city called Home.

  39.

  Interior bar. Low lights. Jukebox music.

  At the Lamplighter Lounge Camel and his friend, Carla Binnage, were sitting in a booth, quiet the way best friends can be together. Carla had been through the wars with Camel, a front-liner who in the 1960s was known in the movement as Carla Starla, committed street fighter and heavy advocate for peace, women’s rights and free love. Her lovers included John Sebastian, Don McNeil and, briefly, but most famously, Stokely Carmichael.

  She had moved to Memphis in the 1990s to be near her mother, who was dying of Alzheimer’s. And she and Camel had rediscovered each other. Camel’s attention to Carla’s mother, his near-communication with her sad and diminished state, had created a bond between the old comrades that was more solid than red bricks. Carla would do anything for Camel and Camel knew it.

  Now, she was swirling her finger in some spilled beer. The jukebox was playing Johnny Rivers. Carla’s grey hair, which swept down her back like a cataract, had not been cut since Abbie died, her personal tribute.

  “You wanna tell me what triggered this tonight? You ready to talk about it?” Carla said, laying her hand on Camel’s.

  “Bad juju,” Camel said. He looked into Carla’s grey eyes. They were almost the same color as her dramatic hair.

  “Mm, hm,” Carla said.

  “Movie madness. Film dumb.”

  “Ah. You saw a movie that set you off? What was it?”

  It sounded logical.

  “Red River,” he said.

  “Uh-huh. What about Red River?”

  “Stealing sugar can kill a man,” Camel said. Yes, that was it.

  “Hm,” Carla said. She appeared to think this over. “It’s true,” she said.

  “Exactly.”

  “So, now what?”

  “I don’t know. Now what? Sheesh, that’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Whew. Now what?”

  “Another drink?”

  “Sure. Are they trying to close?”

  “Let ’em try.”

  “Right.”

  “What is that you’re drinking, by the way?”

  “They call it a Salinger here.”

  “Hm. What—”

  “Ketchup in the rye.”

  “Oh. Oh—ha! Camel, that—ha!—that’s priceless.”

  “Is it?” Humor is one of the first disconnects, a signal of real trouble.

  “Camel, really. It’s not Red River that’s bothering you.”

  “No.”

  “What then—think—what is it?”

  “I’m writing for the movies. I’m writing again. That is—wait—I think I’m writing again.”

  “Jesus, Camel. You can’t write for the movies. You hate the movies.”

  “I do. I loved Red River.”

  “I know. I mean, you hate the kind of crap movies Eric Warberg makes. Whatever possessed you to—”

  “They asked me.”

  This stopped Carla’s rant. She rubbed Camel’s hand again.

  “Of course,” she said. “Of course.”

  “They asked me,” Camel repeated.

  40.

  Morning. Pyramid interior—on set. Coffee, sweets. Mingled conversations, some grumbling, some vacant stares.

  Eric is holding the blues, the sheets of dialogue Camel had sent over first thing. That curious little hippie chick, barefoot and grimy, who was living with Camel brought them. She smiled as if she were delivering honey, or a peace accord. What was her name? Laura?

  She skipped away like a sprite, down the middle of Front Street. The sun was a ball of white light into which she skipped, like a Bacchante. Then she wasn’t there anymore. Eric rubbed his eyes. Morning mist, he told himself, eyes full of sleep. A skipping hippie chick doesn’t dematerialize. Of course, one’s dead father doesn’t rematerialize either, but, for now, Eric was putting that on the psychic back burner.

  Eric was trying to decipher Camel’s hand, which was spidery and tight as if he had been holding the pen in a death-grip fist. Small black marks like mashed ants. And in pen yet. Perhaps he should send a computer over to Camel’s and teach him how to email his work in.

  Even as Eric was able to decipher some of the script his head goggled. It was either the most surrealistic flights of genius anyone had ever tried to shoehorn into a movie or it was unintelligible crap. Eric wanted to believe the former even as his sinking sense of just how badly this movie was going was telling him otherwise.

  And, practically speaking, he couldn’t imagine Dan Yumont saying, “I don’t think peace is just for chimpanzees.” It was an absur
d line. Was it supposed to be?

  Eric also realized that Sandy was scrutinizing him, anxious to see just how far he would let someone bastardize her script. She couldn’t wait to get her hands on the blues.

  So he pretended to read and reread in deadly earnest. His coffee cooled on the table next to him. He was only partly aware of the cast milling about, some clearing throats and running lines. He was only partly aware of Kimberly Winks practically standing on Ike Bana’s feet. She was dressed like a hooker—her skirt was impossibly brief and showed off her outstanding legs, legs that seemed to have stood the test of time. Eric’s crotch stirred with deep memory, the kind of wasted energy that causes ulcers and wars. He couldn’t tell whether Ike was buying her act or not. What man wouldn’t at least play along?

  Now he read: “Hoagy Carmichael’s cigarette wants to take you home, staying till the eggs run out, underneath buttermilk skies, in the land of the unfortunate colored man.”

  It’s a beautiful line, Eric thought. But, dammit, it wasn’t even clear from Camel’s notes who was saying it . . . and why. Eric sighed and looked up. Sandy’s stare was a gorgon’s.

  “Ok, ok,” he said, tossing the pages onto the table. “You try and make sense of this. And when you’re done you decide whether the Camel experiment has already failed. Ok? I’ve got to get this first scene set up. I’d like to get one scene shot today. I think it would make us all feel better, feel more like we have a movie simmering here, inchoate, yes, but a story begins with one line, right?”

  Eric hadn’t intended to make a speech but when he was through he realized everyone had stopped and was looking at him. Hope Davis smiled her encouragement and he was gone. This was what he did, he thought. He made movies. This is how we create something from nothing.

  And as he stood up he noticed two things: Kimberly had her tongue down Ike’s throat. And standing next to Dan Yumont was the cheerleader who had busted into yesterday’s session.