Forward to Glory

by Brian Paul Bach

  The kid showed up in order to answer an ad in a Spanish-language newspaper, printed on mealy paper, that had been brought to his attention by Esteban the Cerveziac, who, hanging about behind Yniguez Terrace, and having technically witnessed Butterbugs’ fabled Tailgate Performances, thought he would do him this service, even translating the text for him.

  Therefore, Butterbugs expected that the partially shattered marquee (with a backlight of old-style milky glass, with cast metal letters) would read in the Hispanic tongue (even though this was an entirely mixed-grille neighborhood).

  But nay, the clunky script read: ‘Music Hallelujah!’

  The pukey hog-woman in the airless box office stared snottily at him through her massive 1980s television-screen glasses and indicated that he should repair to the back stage door, where enquiries for employment were properly dealt with.

  Despite the forbidding atmosphere of imminent crises (he passed an LA Times box that headlined: ‘EX-VICE-PRESIDENT DENIES HAVING SIGNED STALIN PICTURE IN WALLET’) there was not a little excitement in his heart about dealing with such things as a backstage door. The iconography of this legendary gateway to stardom was solely imprinted on his mind, via old picture shows about The Biz, because the nether side of the Goth Theatre in Carstairs had been no place for a po’ boy to hang.

  So here he was, in a particularly seedy ’hood of LA, approaching an incongruity: a live stage show venue, somehow surviving in a non-Vegas environment. So he guessed.

  There were a few sullen idlers back in the alley, though they demonstrated nothing remotely threatening. Butterbugs did not exactly appear upright enough to cause too much consternation on their part, so when he saw the metal-strapped fire door that accessed the Realm Where Fantasy Reigns – a bit askew, but nevertheless open – he abridged his exterior presence and sought sanctuary within the walls of Entertainmentia.

  Crestfallen was he then, when he saw the backstage area: a shapeless yet cubic area of indeterminate dimensions. Slatted gloomlight from a roof vent, entering at an extremely steep angle, barely allowed the slowly growing-accustomed eye to travel down the bare walls, revealing a torn and sallow picture show screen, suspended in the modest stage house. Behind it, chained to the pipes above, a genuine Racon horn, certainly original, from early talkie days. Moody corners of shadow apparently hid nothing, and the scrap paper and dust kittens on the boards themselves revealed the bitter truth that this wasn’t a stage theatre at all, just a neighborhood flicker house. A couple of dim, partially burnt-out exit lamps, the votive candles of the cinema, could just be detected in the gulf of brown night that was, without a doubt, the auditorium itself, yonder.

  ‘Whut-chuh-wann-heer?’ boomed a voice in back of him, followed by a more muted ‘Aannywaay?’

  It was Bim, the Old Dutchman, a dreary replica of, say, Burl Ives, his beard flecked with beer foam and possessing a nose inflamed with a solar system of shattered capillaries: the watchdog for this most out-back of backwaters.

  ‘Sir, pray, I’m here to answer the advert –’

  Butterbugs presented the Mexi paper, with its smudged little entry about the open gig.

  Bim, proceeding with no less hostility externally, but privately liking the manners of a rare polite kid in these parts, grabbed the scrap of paper, glanced at it, and let out an Al Hirt-style belly laugh. He kept looking at it and making guttural sneering noises. At last he simmered down.

  ‘Would you take beer?’

  Bim asked the question gruffly.

  ‘N-No, thanks,’ stammered Butterbugs, taking note of the white-hot 11:00AM sky outside that pushed in through the fire door and surrounded Bim with a fearsome aura.

  ‘Would you take wine?’

  Bim shifted a tad and asked the question roughly, drawing aside a ratty drape, to reveal a few screw-top (previously opened) partials of StormCone and Engadine ‘wines’.

  ‘Sir, no.’

  Not only was the morning putrid, so was the enzymatic reaction in Butterbugs’ mouth.

  The kid having rejected his hospitality, Bim had no further need to be nice.

  ‘So, you gonna grabba broom, Cap’n?’

  Butterbugs suddenly grew sardonic (rare).

  ‘What, for the witches’ brew scene?’

  Who knew, this might be where an amateur group theatre was going to do ‘Macbeth’ or something like it. A worthy effort, assuredly. Might be fun, doing the Bard in this dingy environment. Roman Polanski, eat your heart out!

  ‘Why you –! No, Mr. Fancy Pants highbrow bratface!’ spat Bim. ‘I spose yu think thaz thiz old place iz ’neath you, or sump’un!’

  ‘I just wanted to get a job in show business.’

  ‘Broom Boy!’

  Butterbugs then plucked up enough courage to ask:

  ‘So what’s the deal, then?’

  ‘Can’t read Spic-talk, huh?’

  ‘Well, can you?’

  Obviously not. Bim evaded.

  ‘Part mestizo, ain’t ya?’

  Butterbugs was nonplused at the mass stupidity of this waste-of-time’s presumption.

  ‘No!?’

  ‘Part Injun?’

  ‘You are a saucy fellow. Sirrah!’

  ‘So, Mr. Johnnie Cardsharp, why you here then?’

  He took another gulp from his demijohn of greenbeer.

  A trace of impatience escaped, forming the tonal impression of the inquirer’s next utterance.

  ‘I need a job!’

  Bim simultaneously belched and farted.

  ‘So what’s the job??’ Butterbugs persisted.

  Bim grudgingly let it out.

  ‘Local Dotrs of ’Merican Rev-lution Granny Club, right? They wants one of them ‘nostalgia’ shows. One shot. Old-time stage show, OK? Amateur hags with k-set sound. Like that Chink Kerrie-Oakie Jap junk. Hell, nobody’s gonna come.’

  ‘So, they need a… performer?’

  Smug silence.

  ‘A director?’

  More.

  ‘Stage crew or something?’

  That had to be it.

  Bim could no longer contain himself, and out splattered another beery belly-laugh.

  ‘Hell, boy, this here broken down show don’t need any a that. They need a sweep-up boy! Like I saidz! Gheezus X. Cleaver-Chryszt, why you think they lookin’ fo some wetback fo?’

  Suddenly Butterbugs got it: Esteban the Cerveziac was having a bit of sport with him.

  His return to Yniguez Terrace was devastating. You know, like that scene in the ’59 ‘Ben-Hur’ (MGM, 1959), when Judah re-enters his derelict household and the heartache of the purposeful past and the tragic present are both in front of him, in heavy-handed and relentless guises. If there had been a mezuzah next to the DeSoto’s driver side door, he would have kissed it in tears.

  It was that same evening, when Butterbugs received a message-o-gram from the answering service he hadn’t paid for in who knows how long.

  But it still delivered. It was something he’d set up as a backup to his Kall Kard expectations, which had gone so far south. The term of coverage had expired a full week before, but an office sub-laborer, a tubercular minority woman of inexact origin and residency status, who happened to remember that she liked Butterbugs because he was kind to her when he had come in to pay his last delinquent bill, made a gesture.

  She broke the rules and dared pass along the message-o-gram of a no-longer-paying customer, fashioning it herself, surreptitiously smuggling it out of the firm’s strip-mall headquarters, and, because she could never obtain a driver’s license, and had absolutely no money for an auto – or even a bus ride – she couriered the message-o-gram herself, on foot, in the face of her dire condition, to the specified address, which was the alley behind Yniguez Terrace. The distance was close to twenty LA mega-blocks away, and she braved the monoxidized winds without the slightest equivocation, thinking only (in her possibly Honduran dialect):

  ‘Poor boy, I feel so sorry for him. A good boy…’

  And placing
it under the detritus-encrusted wiper blade of the DeSoto, then humbly crouching in the obscurity of a mush-bush nearby until she made sure that the boy, returning, found his message-o-gram, and, seeing the unutterable joy on his face as a response, faithfully stole away in all privacy to return to sweeping up the answering service’s floor, full of new hope, only to be fired by the beastly franchise supervisor for sneaking out on the job. A woman of destiny, she expired ten stark days later as a result of her untreated illness, leaving three dirty-lipped children, who somehow crossed the great desert to Graggby, Nevada, where they eked out an existence handing porno flyers to Anglos in casino parking lots and by-lanes.

  [***SPOILER*** It would be decades before Butterbugsian scholars would discover the woman’s existence – the whole generation of her offspring having been consumed by that time, with no known issue – and realize the key role she played in the future of the world… ***end of SPOILER***]

  On that FullVue windscreen, unfolded with deliberate motions by his angelic answering service servant, was a message that would become another major turning point in the young man’s existence on this here planet.

  And the message was… And the message read:

  Sir:

  I now have the privilege to offer you, sir, if you are inclined to take it, the principal role in my new picture, ‘I, Doughboy’. Color by a reputable laboratory, and cinematographed in a wide-screen process. I await your reply, which must be delivered up unto me no later than noon tomorrow. I am pressed by offers for the role from other agents and their clients, which include Tom Cruise, Blam Forcoszt, Knobby McKendricks, Liam Neeson, Brad Pitts, the guy who starred in ‘Master and Commander, The Far Side of the World’ (20th-Fox), and Ashton Kutcher, among many, many others. My director, whom you may know, is one Slæœr Thøåoærx, of pageant fame. For references, I can wholeheartedly declare, I am in partnership with one Samuel Goldwyn, producer. Mr. Jesse Lasky is a silent partner in my endeavors, which consist of a package of some 60 photoplays, as is Mr. Florenz Ziegfeld.

  In light of these and other facts though, and under firm recommendation from my auteur, I offer the role to you first. I must trust his demands, lest I be wrong. Please advise, as requested above, at earliest.

  (signed)

  J. Terrible Flokkstoddr, Producer, located at The Selznick Studio, Culver City, which is where you should report. Directions hither are readily available upon application at most post offices, gas stations, and hospitality shops.

  All Butterbugs’ intentions (formulated during the long march back from NE Downtown), of giving Esteban the Cerveziac a good thrashing, with the possibility of leaving his mutilated body in the nearest Mel-Fry-stained dumpster, suddenly melted into the æther.

  Ahead of him, spotlit with lofty light, lay his ascent.

  13.

  Not So Shy-lock

  ‘Will you please say it again?’

  ‘Thiertre.’

  ‘You mean ‘theatre’.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Theatre.’

  ‘Yes. Thiertre.’

  ‘I cannot change him!’

  ‘It’s OK, Del. I’ll…’

  Del Nind, associate, withdrew.

  It was best to choose patience.

  ‘Butterbugs, do you know who that was?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Del Nind.’

  ‘The famous talent artist?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘Sonny Projector.’

  ‘Yes –’

  ‘Agent.’

  ‘Things are returning. Coming back now.’

  ‘I didn’t know what –’

  ‘It’s a good thing we found you just then.’

  ‘Found me at –’

  ‘Let me remind you. Do you know… How it can happen that, say, you meet a stranger, male or female, it doesn’t matter which, in a bar – or in your case, a café. OK. The encounter is amiable, with no agenda or ulterior motives attached to it. OK. Perhaps there’s some memorable conversation, perhaps it’s only pleasantries that transpire. I don’t know, but you get the picture. OK. In the process, you establish a memory of this person, and the certain way they appear. After the encounter is past, even well past, you still remember them in the same unique way, because it is the only memory you have of them. Naturally, most of these encounters are completely forgotten, but particular ones remain. OK? And that’s the way we leave it. Maybe the person in question, for some reason, made a big impact on you, but for very little apparent purpose. You simply don’t know why. All right? You know the speech made by Everett Sloan as Mr. Bernstein in ‘Citizen Kane’ (RKO, 1941), when he mentions the young lady in the hat…? I can see you’re literate in cinema. Probably more so than I am, and I have to make it my business. Believe me, it helps. You wouldn’t believe how many bozos – I mean, personages – in the Industry know nothing about it. History, that is. Our own history. Barbara Tuchman called history ‘the lamp at the stern of the ship’, or something like that. It shows where we’ve been.

  ‘At any rate, to return to the recognition bit. I have to tell you that, it wasn’t until a little before noon today that I was able to assemble all the pieces. The pieces in this ‘thing’ I was subconsciously trying to figure out. About you, OK? Don’t look so modest. You’ve made an impact, Butterbugs, and you haven’t even realized it. Nor do you have what it takes (yet) to ‘realize it’ in the cinematic sense. What are you trying to do in this tin-can town, anyway? Be an actor? Yes, well, of course. We’ve just made significant progress toward that goal today. But the other thing is, you’ve apparently not been idle. Nor were any of the elements in play within a single stroke of luck. You’ve put in some hard effort, and, in this town, there’s nothing that isn’t hard.

  ‘From my end, all the pieces have been funkadelic – I’d say weird, even. You’re the one that started it, though. You were the one on the screen. The one face – the one face I noticed, and kept noticing. We have to start with the face, you know. That 20th logo mob scene. It was an impact I’m not sure I can describe to you, because when I tried to do so with many others, they had no idea what I was yakking about. But I can only tell you that it was a mind-altering experience. A revelation? Hey, maybe! Mystical? Not likely. Magical? That’s more like it. The Industry is more comfortable with words like that. But why should I try to figure all this out in such terms? The ink is drying!

  ‘The next piece of intelligence is more suspect, and not very magical, though it is mysterious. I could have sworn that I saw you at Greaser’s Carnival – that sicko source for hundreds of Nightmare Alley and Dave Lynch pictures. Inexhaustible. If it was you I saw there, in whatever capacity, I won’t ask what your business was, for there are many shady reasons why all different types are there, for their dark purposes. I’m – not explaining all of this to you so as to justify my strategy in providing you representation in Hollywood. It’s just that, I have hundreds of clients in the Industry, most of whom, you may know, are highly prominent, and I don’t wish to detract from their standing or what they mean to me. And it’s not just money, baby. It’s only that, I think you display a somewhat interesting and worthwhile challenge for me, at this point in my career.

  ‘I was, uh, getting around to reminding you how all this came about this morning. I don’t blame you for being stunned. You are stunned, I know. I have that effect on people. So, a reality check, perhaps?

  ‘How do you think you came out of obscurity at such a time as this? What made you think that there was any chance you might actually reach your destination? Well, I have read your message-o-gram and your legitimacy is secure, but there is no way in God’s green hell that you would’ve made the deadline.

  ‘All right, you have told me in no uncertain terms that, had you failed in reaching the studio at noon, you would have made An End in Hollywood. That’s the title of a fantasy I have about this town. We can talk about it if you want, but
the name should say it all. You’ve been there, naturally, but that’s not the point. Now, I’m not sure if that exactly means that you would make an end of yourself or if you would have just washed your hands and gone back to Spangletown or wherever it is you’re from. Many have gone ahead of you and ne’er returned. What was it that Stefan Zweig wrote before he nobly slew himself: ‘I’m going on, alone’? All that matters is that we got to you in time. In time! What then, has time to offer us? Only the reminder that it runs, it flees, it escapes…

  ‘Del Nind! What do you think the chances were that Del Nind would be in my Maybach today? He will ride in nothing else I own – and I am not ashamed to mention that I have a considerable carriage house – so when he casually glanced across the street and noticed your figure, emerging from the shadows of the alley next to Truxton Tucker’s Truck Tiffins, he couldn’t resist doing what he always does: make a comment on character.

  ‘Do you know what he said to me, upon seeing you? He said: ‘The Losers and the Lost!’ I believe that was the title to a Magna picture he produced – one of ’59’s biggest hitters. What he was saying was that your appearance apparently met his criterion for those who do not make it in Hollywood. What’s more, in this case, he was virtually correct. Not so?

  ‘What’s yet more, if Del hadn’t reached over and pressed the aire-horn button to razz you – for Del has no mercy on those he brands ‘losers and lost’ – he wants them all deported – you wouldn’t have turned your head so that I could see your face. And what I found especially remarkable was the fact that your face had the same, the exact expression, as you had in that 20th logo promo.

  ‘I instantly thought, ‘that man is not lost, nor is he a loser’.