Image Decay

by Mark Lisac

  13.

  “YOU HAVE TO GO ALL THE WAY BACK TO UNDERSTAND,” Ostroski said.

  “All the way back to Rochester. That’s where I grew up. My grandfather moved there from Worcester, Massachusetts. He didn’t want to work in a shoe factory all his life after growing up on a farm. Bad enough to be born a peasant feeding pigs, he’s supposed to have said, worse to be a peasant making shoes in a factory and owning nothing.

  “He heard there were jobs at Kodak in Rochester so he moved his family there. It worked out for him. The plant was expanding, there were different kinds of jobs to try, and he ended up being a foreman. It wasn’t a bad place to live, either. He said the housing was better. There was open country close by. And there was the lake to swim in on hot summer days.

  “My father followed him into the plant. The old man worked in shipping but my father had some high school and learned some of the technical side. He worked in film production. Who knows how many weddings and kids’ birthday parties and babies and picnics ended up on film that he made?

  “It was a decent life. I could have followed them both into the plant. Kodak was a good place to work. The pay was steady. Bonuses every year. But I got stars in my eyes. My father was a little too old to be drafted into the war, I was a little too young. Not too young to go to the movies, though. That was back in the days before television. Only a few years before but it was a different world. We wouldn’t have been able to imagine what was coming. We had radio, but anyone with ten cents to spare would go to the movies, often once a week.

  “It was the movies that got me. The stories came and went. A lot of them weren’t that good. But the photography pulled me in. I’d already been taking pictures. It was natural with Kodak in town. I went into it bigger than my friends, though. I guess there were a lot of people getting famous taking stills for magazines or for art. The pictures in Life magazine impressed me. What really got to me was the way the best cinematographers handled the camera in the movies. Some of them captured images as good as the best still photographers could do. Some of them were great at action. The best were inventive and flexible, without being obvious about it.

  “I liked Joe LaShelle, the way he made small spaces look big in Laura and Fallen Angel. And the way he framed the actors. He also did a swell job a lot later with The Apartment. Should have won an Oscar for that one. But it was his early pictures that got me to thinking I’d like to go to Hollywood and give the movies a try.

  “So I got on a bus with a bit of money I’d saved from a part-time job. My mother wasn’t happy. My dad, I’m pretty sure he thought I might be back before too long but he thought it was time one of the family saw the world outside Rochester. I started hanging around the studios and eventually got a job as a camera assistant at RKO. It was simple work but it let me get on the sets and watch the way the cinematographers worked. The basic rule there was to get the film made fast and cheap. You could still learn a lot watching how they did it. Every now and then they’d throw in a neat trick, too, if it didn’t take too much set-up time or look too arty. I even got to meet Joe LaShelle once. He was working at Fox. He told me how he’d started in a print department and worked his way up to camera operator before they let him direct photography. That was all the extra encouragement I needed and I figured the movies would be my life.

  “About that time I met Norma Minton. She was an extra who worked part-time as a secretary on the side. She was from Connecticut. She’d decided she wanted a little more excitement in life than working for an insurance company. That was Norma, always willing to have a little fun. She was better looking than a lot of the extras, had this gorgeous dark brown hair and a cute little nose. I was never sure how serious she was about acting. She took voice lessons, but she made remarks sometimes about it being a fairly silly way of making a living. She also thought it was hard on young women. She saw a lot of them come and go. Most of them didn’t last long even if they’d looked good in a film or two.

  “Norma was always ready to go out for a drink and a dance at one of the nightclubs we could afford. We spent a lot of time on the beach at Santa Monica. That didn’t cost anything aside from an occasional hot dog. I took some pictures of her, too. Those are some of the ones I want back, or at least kept private. But they’re not the ones I really want kept private.

  “We were having a good time together. I even thought I could get serious about her, although I was too young to be sure. Wasn’t sure about anything then. All I knew was that maybe she liked me enough to get serious or maybe she didn’t. Maybe I could get somewhere in the movie business. Or maybe the first signs of trouble showing up for the studios in the late Forties were only going to get worse.

  “Turned out I didn’t have to worry about planning for the future. Uncle Sam took care of that for me. I was drafted late in ’50. We wrote to each other a couple of times while I was taking basic training. It was always a surprise to get a letter from her. It always made me feel good, too. I couldn’t make up my mind whether she was just being friendly and I shouldn’t get my hopes up. But the hopes were always sneaking around. I halfway fooled myself into thinking she wouldn’t meet anyone else and I could go back to her in a couple of years.

  “The writing stopped when I got shipped out to Korea. I was lucky in a way. Didn’t get there until the situation had got stabilized. It was still bad but at least units weren’t getting overrun the way they were in the first couple of months of the war. Some of the older guys, the sergeants and some of the officers, they’d been in the big war. They said as bad as things were in Korea, they could have been worse. The Germans were better soldiers than the Chinese and North Koreans, and the Japanese were more fanatical. All I knew was my guts cramped up whenever they opened up with a lot of mortars. A couple of times we saw a whole battalion coming at us, trying to wipe us out through sheer numbers. Thank God for the artillery and the Air Force.

  “The fighting was bad enough. The war was worse in other ways. You saw civilians getting shot to pieces or burned up or just forced out of their homes and down the road to nowhere. And then there was the whole business of sitting there trying to hold a line. You didn’t go forward and didn’t go back. You sat there accomplishing nothing while your buddies were getting killed. It was a real mess. You know, they made that movie called Pork Chop Hill in the Fifties. It was about a real battle, one of the handful we clearly won. But it was still as phony as most of what you see in the movies. The part about a brave American unit staking a claim on an important hilltop was true. But the movie made it look like the battle made the Chinese accept that we were willing to fight and decide to agree on an armistice. What really happened was they took the hill back from us a few months later, before the armistice was signed. That was Korea, nothing ever really got done and a lot of good guys got killed not doing it.

  “I was pretty fed up by the time I came back. It always makes me laugh to think how much of a fuss was made over Vietnam vets throwing away their medals. In Korea they gave away medals like candy. They thought it was a cheap way of keeping up morale. I threw mine off the troopship coming back across the Pacific. A lot of the guys I was with did the same.

  “We were supposed to be going home. I found out a couple of years away meant home wasn’t the same. The movie business was shrinking. The time I spent in Korea was when TV really took over. Norma was going out with the sound engineer from Paramount by then. No medals, no girlfriend, no job.”

  Rabani didn’t want to interrupt but couldn’t let the casualness pass. He raised his eyebrows a touch and kept his voice neutral but commented, “Doesn’t sound like losing Norma Minton left you badly broken up. Why is it so important to keep her photos out of public circulation?”

  “You don’t believe in privacy?” Ostroski replied. Rabani thought he looked almost like he was winking.

  “She was a good kid. Why should her pictures be available to a bunch of gawkers just because I wanted to keep a few to remember her by? But no. She wasn’t the centre of my
life. I wanted to have more time with her. She was a lot of fun to be with and a good person in a lot of ways. But if it was just her, I’m not sure I’d be willing to get into all this trouble. Maybe I would. I don’t mind making trouble for guys who think they’ve got the world by the tail. Maybe I wouldn’t. You don’t know whether you’ll cross a bridge till you come to it. There are other pictures. Of someone else.”

  Rabani leaned against the back of his chair. He looked at Ostroski and decided he wasn’t seeing the usual flicker of amusement. He wasn’t even sure that Ostroski would go on. His client was on the brink of telling the real story. It was going to hurt. Rabani saw Ostroski look down at the floor. That had never happened before. Ostroski looked people in the eye. He kept looking down, apparently deciding whether to finish the story.

  Rabani waited until he thought he had a better chance of hearing what had happened if he gave a little nudge. He said, “It’s up to you, Jack. I’m a lawyer but I need to know only what affects my ability to represent you. You don’t have to tell me about your life if you don’t want to. I think, though, I can represent you better if I know what’s going on.”

  When Ostroski looked back up, Rabani saw a different gaze. Ostroski was looking at him but also seemed to be looking through him. He seemed ready to talk. But would he really be talking to Rabani? Or to himself? It didn’t matter to Rabani. Listener or eavesdropper, he wanted to know why his client was willing to hold a dog hostage on a bridge and probably conduct a form of blackmail against the government, which meant he was capable of doing other unpredictable things as well. He wanted to know more about why he had begun to feel like he was standing on a high ledge himself, unsure what winds were blowing or what strangers with malevolent intent might be near.

  Ostroski said, “I could use a beer. You want one?”

  “No thanks, Jack.”

  The small fridge that held rolls of film also held a few cans of beer at the back. But Rabani had never seen Ostroski drinking or smelled beer on his breath.

  Ostroski walked into the back room, took a can out of the fridge, walked back to his chair, popped the can open, and regarded the tab as he slowly bent it back. He looked again at Rabani with an expression half engaged and half focused on something far away. Then he plunged into his memories.

  “I was at loose ends. I got lucky. The movie studios were laying people off but the TV studios and local stations needed people who knew their way around cameras. A friend of mine got me a job as an assistant operator on a Western series that looked like it was on its way out but was going to be in production for another couple of months. Then I got luckier still and ended up working on a news program for a station down in San Diego. After that I was employable. I could handle both film and live production.

  “I stayed there long enough to learn the ropes. Then I went back east. I’d thought about going to see my folks after coming back from Korea but I wasn’t ready then. After a year, I was. I spent a few weeks visiting them and other family. Working at Kodak still wasn’t my idea of a career and I had what I’d learned about film and TV in my back pocket. I started looking around. Then a job came up in Buffalo. It was close enough to my family but just far enough away. And really far from California. I admit I was still thinking about Norma from time to time and wondering if I’d made a mistake letting her get away, not that I had much choice what with the draft.

  “People sometimes laugh at Buffalo. For a guy from Rochester it was a down-to-earth place. Factories, a lake port, one end of the New York Thruway just getting built. Bowling alleys, taverns, and cheap restaurants where they knew how to fill you up. Parks all over the place, too. And TV stations. Mostly they were a way for the owners to get rich feeding off the carcass of the movies. Now and then they pretended to deliver culture. And WKJ was the pick of the bunch. Not because it was the best. It was the most original. That was because of the owner, Kirby Jenner.

  “He made his money in insurance. He thought he could make a lot more by getting in on the ground floor of television. But he had an entertainer side to him. He was a Shriner and he liked to drive the cars in the parades. He was nuts about Jack Benny, too. Sometimes I thought the chance he might find another comedian he liked as much as Benny was almost as important to him as the money.

  “He ran an operation that was about as close to family as a TV station could get. It was mostly a great bunch of people except for the finance manager, who was a real prick. We used to go out to Miller’s Tavern at the end of a week and have a good time together. Some of us started going bowling before we went to the tavern. The two guys who ran the orchestra for the Polish polka show on Sundays started that. Jenner didn’t go to those get-togethers. He was downtown with the crowd that went to charity dinners and concerts at the auditorium. If he wasn’t in those places, he was invited to some private home where they could afford caterers.

  “He was pretty approachable at the station, though. We had a lot of laughs watching him fume at the advertising one of the other stations ran. Their promo material featured a couple of little elf-like characters. The elves were supposed to be like the eyes and ears of the station. They called them Iris and Earis. Old Jenner, he’d get so worked up about them you’d think he was dealing with the imps of hell. Some of it was jealousy. Every now and then he’d say if he could have a couple of leprechauns shilling for WKJ he’d clean up. Course, that could also have been part of his poverty act. He paid us decently enough, but he always made out that he was stretching the budget thin. He paid us decently. He didn’t want to pay us well.

  “Those were the days when you could still do crazy things on air. I remember once Bill Gracey, who did the weather, tried to do a spot on water skis out on the Niagara River. There weren’t live remotes back then. There weren’t even satellites. We had one truck that took a film camera out to fires and accident sites. Gracey arranged for it to do his water skiing. Every trip cost a lot of money. That one also cost us coverage of a big warehouse fire. Old Jenner blew his top at that one and he didn’t show his temper very often. Everyone was laughing about a week later, though. I always thought Jenner did too, although he never admitted it.

  “Some of what was going on was more serious, if you thought about it. One of the things was the border with Canada was being blurred. A lot of Canadians used to come over to Buffalo in those days. It was their idea of an exciting getaway. Kind of like a northern version of Tijuana, I guess, except tamer. Well, they couldn’t go every day but they could watch TV every day. I didn’t have a good notion of it then, but later on I’d talk to people from the other side and find out they were learning about everything from breakfast cereal they couldn’t get in Canada to the names of senators and congressmen. Some of them said they started knowing more about American politics than about Canadian. Eventually, we could catch some Canadian stations in Buffalo but we didn’t watch as much of their stuff as they did of ours. Only the hockey fans tuned in to their stations regularly.

  “The bigger thing was the way that television was eating up the past. I told you Jenner was nuts about Jack Benny. Well, think about that. Benny and a bunch of other stars of that era came out of vaudeville. Then they got into movies and radio. Then they moved into television. TV was so hungry for material in the early days that it kept raiding the past. First some of the big stars, then every movie made since the silent days. Not all the movies were available at first. It started out with old serials and B Westerns. But gradually, more and more movies got released to television. By the Sixties, they were all used up. Most of the ideas for TV shows were getting tired by then, too. Even Star Trek didn’t last long. There was a kind of tombstone for the whole business sometime around ’70 or ’71. The Schlitz beer company put together a film made up of short clips from old shows going right back to the early days. It had just about everything. Ran for several hours. They distributed I don’t know how many copies around college campuses. It was an advertising thing for them. But what it really meant was that television had got
used up. First it used up vaudeville and movies and radio, and in the end it used up itself. Then the movie producers started making films with language you couldn’t put on television for another thirty years. And the TV shows started recycling old stars and old story ideas. TV had used up everything that came before it. Then all it could do was to keep bringing stuff around a second or third time and chewing on what it had already swallowed. Like a cow. There wasn’t anything left. Why do you think there’s nothing on TV anymore even though they keep starting more channels?”

  Rabani didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure what a more or less correct answer would be. Nor was he sure that all the theorizing would stand up to careful scrutiny. But he knew the question was just a sidetrack. He stared at Ostroski until the monologue started again.

  “Yeah, okay, I’m beating around the bush. That’s beside the point as far as Becker’s concerned.

  “The point is Gloria. That was her performing name. The only one she needed. She did call herself Gloria Sandring, but she was just Gloria as far as everyone at the station and anyone around Buffalo was concerned.

  “The first time I saw her was on television. You could have knocked me over. I’d just got to Buffalo and wanted to have a look at this station I was going to work for. The apartment I’d rented had a set in it. I turned it on the afternoon I got there and the kids’ storytime show was on. Only they weren’t showing the story just then. They were showing the fairy princess who introduced the stories. That was Gloria. She was in a flouncy white dress. It had sequins that sparkled so much they played hell with the cameras. She had a tiara on her head, full of zircons that glittered like diamonds. She had one of those wands with a star at the end in her right hand. And you probably won’t believe it, but she had magic. It helped that the picture even on the best sets was a little fuzzy in those days, lent a blurry kind of half reality to everything.