‘I got a bit lucky there,’ Spencer says.
Sleep is always more available following a victory than a defeat. Spencer, unable not to follow certain rules of etiquette, particularly if they are related to poker, stays at the table for a polite twenty minutes before returning to his room.
His sleeping father is puffing out his cheeks and blowing, as he used to do in moments of impatience or stress. Spencer fans out his winnings on the bedside table, and lies in his bed, falls asleep to the lullaby of the thuds of music from the room next door and the sounds his father makes at night, the rumbles and snores and sharp catches for air, and the muttering that has no clear cause or resolution.
In the morning, Dwight has a surprise for them.
‘Gentlemen! A superior mode of perambulation!’
Interrupting their arduous journey back from the All-You-Can-Eat! breakfast death-buffet, Spencer and his father make their way to the front desk. Dwight places a finger against his lips like a parent at Christmas trying to still the anticipation of a child.
‘Shut your eyes please, no peeking.’
Spencer’s father dutifully closes his eyes. Spencer keeps his eyes open, with arms ready to catch his father if he should fall. ‘De-da!’
And in front of them is a motorised wheelchair, gleaming silver and black, its engine gently purring.
‘Allow me to regale you with some its specifications. Puncture-proof tyres, easily foldable for transport and storage, manual freewheel function, battery range twenty-two miles, cushioned upholstery for extra comfort, powerful rear drive delivers excellent power and acceleration, swivel seat with reclining device and safety belt, off-board charger, maximum speed fourteen miles per hour. What do you think of this baby?’
Spencer’s father still has his eyes tightly, patiently, closed.
‘Uh, sir? You can look now.’
Spencer’s father opens his eyes and squints and focuses. Spencer expects a graceless response and is not disappointed.
‘How much you burning me for?’
Dwight has the grace not to be offended.
‘Gratis, Mister L, all part of the hospitality. Pro bono. Please. Asseyez-vous. Investigate the potential and capacity of the powerchaise.’
Spencer’s father deigns to lower himself into the chair. Gingerly, he taps a button on the control pad and the chair whizzes into the front desk, inscribing two neat dents with its aluminium footrests. He taps the opposing button and whizzes backwards, scattering an early morning cleaner, who performs an impressive leap of escape, using his floor mop as a pole to vault with.
‘There may be a requisite orientation period,’ Dwight allows.
Spencer’s father executes a sharp turn, a burst of speed towards the glass doors that lead on to the Boardwalk, another turn, a barely controlled figure-of-eight that leaves him breathless through his oxygen tube, and he is back at the front desk, his silver hair flapping wild.
‘Beautiful. I thank you. You’re a good man,’ he says.
The oxygen cylinder travels in the front basket. Spencer’s father zooms away again, heading towards the outside world, the ocean. Spencer jogs behind, the latest message from Michelle in his hand, struggling to keep up. His father makes no allowances for anyone of a slower pace, or even for physical obstacles. If it were not for a stranger’s hand, opening the plate-glass door to the Boardwalk, allowing his father to leave the building unimpeded, Spencer would have had to spend the rest of the morning picking glass out of his father’s wounds.
The day is lovely, spring sunshine, soft breeze, boating weather. Spencer had been about to ask his father whether he misses his boating days, but he is still chugging behind and his words would be lost between them, and anyway he is becoming mistrustful of these conversations that begin with Do you miss…? and Do you remember…? and What was the name of…? What is transacted between them should be about here, now, this day, us. Spencer despises flashback.
When his father consents finally to pause, stopping at the wooden ramp that crosses the beach to the ocean, he wipes his brow with his handkerchief and grins at Spencer.
‘You want to go down to the sea?’ Spencer asks.
Carefully, the wheels of his father’s chair churning up sparkles of sand, they make their way to the water’s edge. His father removes his surgical collar and, before Spencer can protest or intervene, the oxygen nozzles from his nose. He breathes in deep, he shuts his eyes, he opens them wide, a kind of ecstasy.
Spencer tries to reach the same feeling or at least make an approach to it. He breathes in and out, letting things drop away. He aims for utter thoughtlessness; his father is teaching him something here, the value of the moment, the air and sunshine on his skin, just to be. But Jimmy Ludwig operates on a schedule that allows no time for Spencer’s nirvana.
‘Come on. Turn me around.’
They make the climb back up to the Boardwalk.
‘Don’t fuss,’ his father says as Spencer hops behind him to pull away a plastic bag that has become wrapped around a wheel of his chair.
They promenade along the Boardwalk, the casinos on their right, the ocean on their left. They pass other, dissimilar couples, middle-aged husbands and wives, rickshaw riders killing time visiting each other in their cabs, drunks and junkies sharing cigarettes. Spencer suggests that they try a game of crazy golf, but the shape of the course would be difficult for a wheelchair to traverse and anyway Jimmy Ludwig has his eye on a more glamorous sport.
‘You got the balls?’ he says.
Spencer’s father pulls up at the ticket office of an outdoor go-kart arena.
‘Sure,’ Spencer doubtfully says. ‘But are you going to be able to manage a go-kart?’
‘Who needs a go-kart?’ Jimmy says.
And it is true. Some of the other customers complain, but a twenty-dollar bill slipped to the custodian works wonders. The rest of the track is cleared, leaving the course clear for Spencer and Jimmy. Spencer has some initial difficulties with his kart, it stutters beneath him, but inspired by the sight of his father in his wheelchair zipping around the course, racing through the hairpin bend, the caroms and skids, he plucks up the courage to push his kart into top gear and catch up.
He tries to pass his father going into the widest bend, past where the custodian stands, but his father swings from side to side, blocking Spencer each time. One moment Spencer thinks he has him, he draws almost level, Jimmy Ludwig leaning over his handlebars, his face utterly cold and fierce, until he wrenches his wheelchair to the side to sideswipe his son. Spencer pulls out of the collision at the last moment, kicks down at the brake, sending himself into a spin that he manages to come out of with only one bounce into the safety wall of stacked tyres.
His father is nearly half a lap ahead. Spencer, renewed, speeds back on to the circuit, never touching the brake. Jimmy Ludwig is growing complacent up ahead, relaxing his vigilance, looking from side to side, the line of disgruntled children waiting for their turn, seagulls swooping over the pier, the dull daylight anti-glitter of casinos.
Spencer has his chance on the final lap, entering the stretch of straight track going towards the finishing line. He leans over his wheel, coaxing every possibility of speed out of his machine. His father is slowing down, one hand on the handlebar, the other casually resting in his lap.
‘Coming to get you!’
Spencer’s shout alarms his father, whose smile of pleasure is replaced by confusion, he pulls the wheelchair in one direction, then the other, it topples slowly towards its side, rolling only on its left wheels, Spencer is level with his father now, he could go past him if he chose, he wants the taste of this fine victory, the finishing line is ahead, the custodian waves a tired chequered flag. Spencer’s father bumps back on to all four wheels again, is jolted against the handlebars, bounces once. He shakes his head, winces at the pain this causes in his back and neck. Spencer slows his go-kart and stops beside his father.
‘Are you OK?’ he asks.
Jimmy ruefully rubs his
neck.
‘I’ll be all right,’ he says.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
He is not entirely all right: something is affecting him. He rubs his neck, he puts his hands back on the handlebars. He looks at the sky and Spencer looks up with him.
‘But—’
But Spencer’s words are interrupted by the sound of the wheelchair whirring into action again, and his father looks back at him with sneaky sly triumph as he races to the finishing line to take the chequered flag. The watching children cheer and clap, not entirely ironically, which Jimmy Ludwig acknowledges with a crisp military salute.
Spencer putters after him. He can hardly begrudge his father this victory, even if it was won by using Spencer’s good nature against him.
Their Atlantic City idyll continues. They buy milk shakes at an ice-cream parlour that is decorated with images from the Monopoly board. They eat pizza on a Boardwalk bench. They drink margaritas and play low-stakes blackjack at a casino decorated like a Wild West saloon. They both win, twenty dollars to Spencer, thirty dollars to his father. A fat man runs across the casino floor and Spencer and his father watch his bulky elegant process and they both make the same shape with their mouths. Jimmy Ludwig rests a fatherly hand on his son’s shoulder and Spencer feels about ten years old. Or seventeen, or three, or forty-two.
‘I’ve just had a revelation,’ Spencer says.
‘A what?’
‘Revelation. An epiphany.’
His father’s hand drops away. He shakes his head in incomprehension.
Their dealer falters as he delivers a second five to Spencer’s hand. His eyes meet Spencer’s. Dealing cards on behalf of the casino, delivering up his humanity for wages to become part of the machinery that so efficiently separates poor people from their money—who will meanwhile tip the instrument of their own destruction—might lead someone of a vaguely spiritual bent to develop a hunger for epiphany and revelation.
‘I’ll hit,’ Spencer says.
The dealer nods, flicks an ace to Spencer.
‘Soft twenty-one,’ he says.
‘I’ll stand.’
The dealer has a four. Spencer’s father makes the correct decision to stand on thirteen. The dealer deals himself a king and then a seven. Twenty-one.
‘Disgusting,’ Spencer’s father says.
‘Sir?’ the dealer says.
‘I think we’ll sit out the next hand. Thank you.’
Spencer tosses a red five-dollar chip to the dealer, who catches it expertly, raps it against the table and drops it into his gratuities tin.
‘Thank you sir,’ he says, fixing upon Spencer a look of utter hate that might be the product of a sense of self that requires larger tips than five dollars, or the deprivation felt by the spiritual seeker who has been thwarted on the road to his enlightenment.
Spencer and his father gather up their chips and leave the blackjack table.
‘Let’s sit here a while,’ Spencer says.
It’s the Sports Book. Banks of television monitors show baseball games, basketball, horse racing, ice hockey. A large screen displays lists of names and numbers that are indecipherable to Spencer beyond a recognition that they have something to do with competition and odds. He always finds the Sports Book the most tranquil place in a casino. In Las Vegas, he would sometimes sit for hours in the Sports Book to read and write. The Captain’s Grief was written in the Sports Book of the Mirage. When Spencer had his greatest poker triumph, going deep and cashing in the Main Event of the World Series of Poker, the Sports Book of the Rio was his resting zone.
‘What were you saying?’ Spencer’s father asks. He rubs his eyes. He yawns. He takes off his surgical collar, placing it in the wire basket at the front of his wheelchair, and his head sinks down further.
‘You should have a rest. We should go back to our room and you should have a rest.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ Spencer’s father says.
‘No. I know. But we’ve done a lot already and you haven’t taken your medications.’
‘Bullshit,’ Spencer’s father says.
‘I’m inclined to agree with you. But anyway, I’ve got an interview to do this afternoon. Magazine interview. I should get back to the hotel.’
Spencer’s father doesn’t quite grasp the substance of what Spencer is saying but he takes from it the meaning that Spencer is using his frailties as an excuse for something that he wants to do that excludes him.
‘Bullshit,’ he says again.
And Spencer is returned again to the child whose throat would raw at the intimation of a severe word from his father, whose eyes would well with tears at the slightest harshness from his father. In summer, Mary always sneezes when she walks into the sunlight. It means nothing, just a reflex. Spencer used to try telling himself that his fragile response to his father’s words was just a reflex too, but he could never believe that to be true.
‘When I’m with you,’ he says, ‘sometimes I feel very grown up and sometimes I feel like the most dependent child.’
‘You want some money?’ his father says.
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Well you should!’
Jimmy Ludwig crumbles, his faith in money sustains. And this is at the crux of Spencer’s revelation. We are a jumble of competing, accidental selves, and our sense of continuity is in the constancy of our feelings. When Spencer fell out of love with Mary’s mother, he became a different person. When his father dies, Spencer will grieve for a man he used to be.
Jimmy Ludwig has an enviable constancy. He has always believed in himself and, ever since the War at least, he has always believed in money.
And what does Spencer have, beyond the influences he was born to? The films he’s made, the films he is going to make, his daughter, and maybe more important than anything, movie moments made by others, the particular images that have occupied and shaped his internal landscape.
‘What happened to your friend? How’s she doing?’
‘Which friend?’
Spencer knows perfectly well who his father is asking about. Few aspects of his life registered with his father, even before he suffered his stroke. And his father likes very few people. His attitude to other people is predicated on the disappointment he expects to receive from them. But he liked Rick Violet. He had pronounced him charming.
‘Your friend. She able to get you any work?’
‘She probably could. If I asked.’
‘Then you should ask.’
His father’s logic is inevitably faultless. It just does not allow for emotion.
‘I need to go my own way,’ Spencer says.
‘Bullshit,’ his father says. ‘The poor despise the rich.’
‘Really? Is that the way it is?’
‘That’s the way it is.’
‘Maybe I just reject all that. Maybe I reject money!’
A few faces glance dully at them in the Sports Book, but emotion can hardly compete with sports betting and they look back to the big screens again.
Spencer’s father shakes his head even though it costs him pain to do so.
After they had made their third film together, Spencer was the coming man. He had displayed his gifts, unshowily, in the service of art. He could write, edit, direct, produce. Rick had been the nominal director, but everyone knew that Spencer’s was the talent that lay behind it all. That summer after film school, warmed in the glory of his achievement, the aura of his future that was already being written, lazily half listening to offers of work while he waited for it, the real job, his great expectation, which arrived, as he knew it would, it was all understood—the world was a place of straight lines, unbroken promises and clear directions—a feature-film adaptation of a story he loved, Julio Cortázar’s House Taken Over, to be made with American money but no interference.
The producer—a rakish young Londoner who worked in LA, and had already become his friend, they understood each other so well—invited Spen
cer to take part in a cricket match. The night before the game, Spencer was called by the producer. The team was a man short, could Spencer suggest anyone? Generously, already feeling sentimental about his former colleague whom he was leaving behind, Spencer brought Rick Violet to the game.
Spencer had been a good cricketer, a pugnacious middle-order batsman, a crafty spin bowler, a decent fielder. He knew how to play cricket. Rick, though, was something special. He played with elegance and ease, a public-school grace. After the game, the team’s captain, Spencer’s new patron and producer, asked for Rick’s number.
‘It’s the Hollywood Exiles, they always beat us. With your mate in the team we’ll take them this year. Cheers, Spence. We’ll be talking soon.’
Spencer, in his supposedly charmed naivety, had passed on the number, glad to be helping out. And he never heard from his new employer and friend again. Spencer was not given the job; Rick was. So a team of actor dilettantes could be beaten in a game of cricket, Rick Violet was put on the path that had been meant for Spencer. As they say in the poker world, it is better to be lucky than good.
‘You tired?’ Spencer asks. ‘Maybe we should go back.’
His father ignores him. He stops a passing waitress and asks her for a bowl of cereal. He might not want a bowl of cereal but that is what he is going to get.
While Spencer was still at film school, he worked with a Marxist collective, Cinema Praxis. The group was a funded (BFI, Channel 4, trade unions) leftover from a previous age. It believed in revolution, the eventual withering-away of the state, an advance guard of intellectuals exposing the contradictions of capitalism, raising the consciousness of the oppressed working class. Spencer carried a boom microphone while the leader of the group, a grey-bearded Alsatian who had done something glamorous and dangerous in the 1968 Paris riots, barked questions in parlour rooms in Keighley and Nottingham at miners who had lost their jobs.
‘If you’re not a communist when you’re a teenager then there’s something wrong with you,’ his father had said.
When Spencer’s father was seventeen he was a boy communist, a disaffected, malcontentish type of youth. He and his friend Benny sneaked across the border, leaving behind German-occupied Poland for a dreamed-of utopia. Life was here, and yet it was elsewhere. If they made it to Moscow for the May Day celebrations of 1940, then they would find the promised land.
A Film by Spencer Ludwig Page 10