‘Oh you should, man. It’s beautiful. The girls are hot.’
‘Or Argentina. I’ve always wanted to go to Argentina.’
‘Yeah. Well. Argentina,’ the Brazilian boy says.
‘I’m going to travel,’ Spencer says. ‘I’m going to go places. And I’m going to make sure I take notice of everything I see. And I’m going to get healthy, sort out my diet, get into regular exercise. And I’m going to be a better father, and kind. I’m going to be a kinder man.’
‘Hey, Self-Improvement Guy,’ the dealer says. ‘The action is on you.’
The grinder has reraised. Spencer does not like this. A little meekly, Spencer calls.
The flop comes down with the ten and six of clubs, and the queen of hearts. Spencer has top pair, and if another club falls he has the nut flush. The grinder bets, Spencer calls. The real action can come later. The turn is the king of clubs. The old grinder checks, Spencer bets his flush and the grinder calls. The river is the six of diamonds. The grinder checks. Spencer makes a small value bet, and the grinder check-raises all-in.
He wants to call, but more importantly, the old grinder wants him to call. Spencer can feel it, the ache of desire in the grinder’s implacable stillness.
Sometimes, Spencer would throw his chances to the winds, the vertigo of surrender. It is easier, more nourishing, to throw yourself into the abyss than to be a bystander at its edge. But Spencer makes himself take a little longer over the action than he would choose to. He looks again at the old grinder.
‘I pass,’ Spencer says, throwing his cards into the muck.
The grinder is surprised, cheated of his consummation.
‘Good fold, son,’ he says, graciously showing his pocket tens for a full house and gathering in the chips that are so much fewer than they should be.
And Spencer, surgeon, duellist, artist, is back to raising and bluff-reraising and dodging and twisting and using his chips as a blade and a scalpel and a brush.
The Brazilian is getting short-stacked. He goes all-in. Spencer calls with ten-eight of spades. Lumpy boy calls as well. No one bets on the flop, which is ace, ace, ten, all different suits, rainbow. Lumpy boy bets the turn, which is a six. Spencer doesn’t trust lumpy boy, who is a better player than Spencer would like him to be. Spencer calls. The river is a two. Spencer checks. Lumpy boy announces he’s going all-in. Spencer will have a few chips left over if he calls, but hardly any, and there is little reason to risk his tournament life now.
‘He’s got bubkus.’ It is his father’s voice, low and resonant.
‘That’s Yiddish for nothing,’ Spencer says, and looks hopefully up from the table, the hands of his opponents, the veins upon them, muscles flexing as they fiddle with their chips, the dealer’s stillness, and lumpy boy’s eyes as he removes his sunglasses to reveal something milder than Spencer had expected, close to Jacksie’s look of perpetual hurt, the rail birds watching the tournament, and Spencer is hoping for a flash of a canary-yellow polo shirt, his father’s smile, the whir of an electric wheelchair. But Spencer’s father is not there. No one has heard what he has heard, and Spencer’s translation is taken for British eccentricity, or the angle-shooter’s unorthodox attempt to gain some response and information from lumpy boy.
‘I call,’ Spencer says.
It was a bluff. His father’s voice was right. Spencer wins the pot, knocking out the Brazilian as well as lumpy boy, who doesn’t even bother to show his cards as he gets up from the table and reaches for a beer from a similarly shaped friend. The other table has lost a player as well. One more elimination and play will be over for the day. The next hand—but there is no next hand. The world intervenes, announcing itself in the bulky shape of Jenny De Soto. She is trying to make her way to the tournament area, but a floor man is blocking her way.
Spencer Ludwig learned to lip-read watching silent movies. At an early age he recognised that the lines the actors were speaking seldom bore any relation to the words posted up on the inter-titles: I want a hamburger…What are you doing later? Even the infamous moment, in a Mack Sennett comedy, Who’s got the cocaine? And the floor man is saying, You got to check your bags, ma’am. And Jenny De Soto, her face bobbing up over the shoulder of the floor man, has finally found where Spencer is sitting and she is saying to him, repeating the same two words,
Your father. Your father. Your father.
Decisions, not results is the old poker maxim. That is what you are judged by, maybe even in his father’s court. Spencer leaves his chips where they fall and his bag of nuts behind.
His father lies in a hospital bed, rigged up to drip bags and oxygen tank, eyes closed, the bed cover pulled poignantly up to just below his chin as if this is a child lying here, who needs protection both from inside and out, the viruses that threaten his fragile body, the shadow creatures who haunt his imagination at night. An arm flutters from beneath the covers to wipe something away from his nose, and there is hardly any flesh on the arm, even the area between thumb and forefinger is wasted away, a deep hollow between bones.
‘Dad,’ Spencer says.
He is ready to mourn. His stepmother was right, this has all been madcap murderous, he had no business removing his father from a world of medical appointments and jigsaws and silence, Jimmy’s constitution is not strong enough to bear any disruption to his routine.
‘Get me some,’ his father says with his eyes still closed as if he might be dreaming.
A father’s job is to provide and protect. Jimmy Ludwig always prided himself on being a good provider. But how could he be an adequate protector if he was the one who caused most alarm?
‘It’s OK. You don’t need to talk.’
Perhaps Spencer’s voice soothes him. His father falls silent again.
Spencer calls Mary, hospital telephone to mobile. The bill for this is unthinkable but he needs to speak to her.
‘Hey.’
‘Hi Daddy.’
He doesn’t have anything to say to her, even though he longs to prove that he can protect her, as he sits watching his sleeping, drugged, betubed father, he just wants to hear her voice. He asks her questions about Poppy and Lily and Rose and Jasmine, and falls in love again with the timbre of his daughter’s voice.
He realises that he is looking for a benediction from his father. What his father has taught him: how to fold a towel and a T-shirt, how to roll up a hosepipe and a rope. His father has given him a gold watch, a sense of history, and a partial, distempered view of his first marriage. He wants more. His father once advised him, Don’t shit where you eat, and tried to impress upon him the importance of a good credit rating. Spencer never quite understood the first advice, failed to follow the second, and he wants more fatherly wisdom than that.
‘Don’t promise more than you can deliver,’ he says to his daughter, interrupting a description of some inexplicable school event that seems to involve a piano, a football and someone called Dijon. And, when there is no reply, he adds, ‘Inspiration is what happens when you don’t know what you’re doing but you’re doing the best you can.’
He should be able to come up with more, but he has time, he supposes he does. Here they’re reaching the end. If his father should wake again, and speak more cogently, it might be their last conversation, or the next to last. Doesn’t that mean it should have more weight to it? Aren’t there things you’ve longed to say? Sins you’ve wanted to confess? But Jimmy Ludwig is not a Christian, he does not believe in redemption, he hardly believes in love.
‘What’s that?’
‘Are you playing poker?’
‘Well, no. Yes. Sort of.’
‘Are you winning?’
‘I was, but…hold on, I better go. Papa Jimmy is stirring.’
Spencer’s father is sitting up in bed. He’s swinging his legs to the floor. He stands, totters, sits down again, his robe open at the back, almost hairless legs, a flat pale arse, gaunt except for the waves of flesh above either hip.
‘Need a leak,’ he sa
ys.
‘You don’t have to, it’s all taken care of.’
‘Disgusting,’ his father says, looking sourly at the tubes leading out of his body into the bags, yellow, red, brown and gold, the colours of the flag of a failing principality.
With a heave and a push and a grab at the trolley, Spencer’s father, defying gravity and weakness, has hoiked himself to his feet.
Jimmy Ludwig takes a step, forces his chin and eyes up as high as they will go, plans his route ahead.
‘It’s not necessary. It’s all done with drips and catheters,’ Spencer says.
He watches, in a kind of awe, his father roll the trolley along the floor, steering and leaning on it to reach the bathroom. Spencer follows, ready to catch him if he should fall, unable to intervene. Jimmy Ludwig stands at the toilet bowl, legs slightly turned in at the knees. He fumbles at his crotch, and notices something for the first time, the catheter that is installed into his penis, says Huh, in a surprised way, as he commences nonetheless to piss, the urine spraying around. Somehow—skilful fingers (he was an engineer before he was an attorney), the absolute will to urinate on his own terms—he manages to disengage the plastic tap and tubing that had been fixed into his urethra. His urine flows in a straight line now and he leans against the bathroom wall, as if posing in his triumph.
A nurse helps Spencer return his father to the bed. She reinstalls the catheter.
‘What a naughty boy,’ she says. ‘You know I’ve never seen anyone do that before. Your father is a remarkable man.’
And a sick one. He had been rescued in the hotel lobby, looking for his son, lurching from palm tree to front desk, waving his arms in the air, unable to breathe.
‘And how is he now?’
‘He’s stable. Let him rest a while. You can take him home tomorrow.’
Where is this home that she talks of so lightly? It could be their hotel room, which, in a will-to-sordidness, is daily resisting the efforts of the maid to clean it. (Spencer has had two conversations with the maid, whose name is, she seemed to claim, Cuba. Spencer had asked her if she would consent to be filmed, because if Spencer could borrow a camera he would like a session with her for his project, The Invisibles, whose only criterion for subjects’ inclusion is that they must live some kind of public life that most people ignore. Their second conversation consisted largely of him apologising for the misunderstandings he had caused in the first.)
Maybe home could be found elsewhere in Atlantic City, with Jenny De Soto and the mother she probably lives with, a world of film references and, he suspects, cats, or in some modern mansion that belongs to a nervous man who owes a favour to Gambler Bob, or further along the road, a future mark on an unread map, a dot on the horizon that grows towards their fast-moving car.
Or, the sensible thing, return his father to Manhattan and Museum Tower, jigsaw puzzles and decline. And Spencer will go off again, accommodated to his discontents, otherwise this has been nothing significant, just a detour.
Or this is it, Jenny De Soto’s option three becoming manifest, they’ve tasted too much, put themselves out of reach, the nurse was appeasing the moment with her airy talk of home, and wherever that could have been, it’s long ago—and maybe Jimmy Ludwig never had one—and there is only one way to end their movie, ‘the usual one’, but Spencer does not want it to be here, a hospital bed in the Frank Sinatra Wing.
And what is Spencer without his father to look after, to fight? He might be set free, but to do what?
His father makes efforts to talk, to make himself understood, beneath the drugs, through the tubes. He weeps in his frustration. His arm falls exhausted to the bed.
‘Try again,’ says merciless Spencer.
‘This is like…’ his father says.
‘Like?’
‘The man’s hands.’
‘Who?’
‘Going away. The man’s hands.’
‘What?’
‘Your play.’
‘Film?’
‘The hand. The man’s hands.’ ‘Whose hands?’
Then he sees it, perhaps as his father does, the final image of Robert W’s Last Walk. And he wonders if this is what he became a film-maker for, to create an image that would burn in his father’s imagination.
‘And.’
‘And what?’ Spencer says.
But his father is sinking beneath the weight of his medication. He mutters words that Spencer cannot decipher. His eyes flutter closed again, and open, coquettishly, blink, and shut.
‘No animals were harmed during the making of this picture,’ Spencer says.
He has always wanted that as a tagline to one of his films, and he resolves that his next will have it, whether or not there are any animals involved. Spencer has always had trouble with his endings. Maybe the reason he likes Robert W so much is that the film and its ending justify each other more aptly than anything else he has made.
Red River ends with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift fighting, Walter Brennan grinning in the watching crowd, delighted that the (adopted) son is finally giving the ‘father’ the beating he needs—until it’s broken up by a gunshot, Montgomery Clift’s girl (and we know that in Westerns young women are the embodiments of virtue and the repositories of, among other things, truth) standing with a shotgun. ‘Stop it! Stop it. Stop making a holy…[she fires another shot]. Stop it, I said. I’m mad. I’m good and mad and who wouldn’t be!’ And it goes on, her speech, outraged woman righteousness. When finally her energies are spent and she quits the scene, Wayne and Clift, abashed, sitting bruised in the dirt, look at each other. ‘You better marry that girl, Matt,’ Wayne says. Their dispute is over, the father finally recognises the son as his equal, and he draws the new brand for their ranch in the dust, both their initials together, like lovers’ carved into a tree. ‘You don’t mind that, do you?’ ‘No.’ And both smile, then look away, feeling an equivalent truth, an equal love. John Wayne looks at the brand he’s drawn. ‘You’ve earned it,’ he says.
The movies might promise it, but it can’t happen here.
In A Year of 13 Moons ends with the dead transsexual’s family, neighbours, friends, nemeses, wandering disconsolately, standing, in the hall, rooms, stairway, of the apartment house, Elvira’s voice speaking over it, the camera tracking around the interiors, past her body, and finishing, motionless now, it has nowhere else to go, with a shot of the empty staircase and Elvira’s voice superseded by Connie Francis singing ‘Schöner fremder Mann’, the German version of ‘Handsome Stranger’ (‘Handsome stranger, the time will come one day/When all my dreams become reality…’), until that gets stuck too, perpetually playing on a scratched groove.
The Big Heat, Glenn Ford telling the dying moll Gloria Grahame his sentimental domestic memories of his murdered wife. His face intent, his hair neatly greased, he doesn’t even realise that Grahame has just died, her head turned to one side, so the ruined half of her face is hidden against her fur coat. But that’s not the ending. He’s back at his desk, reinstated, the awfulness is over, a helpful subordinate passes him a sharpened pencil, he sits down, ‘How about some coffee, Hugo?’ ‘Coming right up, Sarge.’ The telephone rings. ‘Homicide? Bannion.’ He picks up the pencil to make notes. It’s a new case. A hit-and-run over on South Street. He takes his hat off the coatstand, walks out of the office. ‘Keep the coffee hot, Hugo.’ ‘OK, sir.’ The world keeps turning.
Which is why Spencer prefers Fassbinder to Lang, 13 Moons to Big Heat. Some things should change the world, or finish it, its characters, the audience.
The Passenger might be closer to this road movie, even if Jack Nicholson was the driver, and now he’s dead, leaving Maria Schneider alone, adrift, in southern Spain, seen through the bars of an old railing, waiting for the police car to arrive, and here it is, a bustle of policemen surrounds the wife of the character whose identity Nicholson had taken up; the camera watches them go into the hotel and we’re outside on the street, looking at Nicholson’s body on his hotel-room
bed, again seen through bars, those of his window. ‘Mrs Robinson,’ a policeman says, ‘do you recognise him?’ The woman in a white trouser suit approaches the bed, briefly crouches beside the body, ‘I never knew him,’ she says; and the policeman turns to Maria Schneider, ‘Do you recognise him?’ ‘Yes,’ said so simply, and the next shot, a taxi drives away, leaving a twilit Andulasian village street, the mountains in the distance, the Hotel de La Gloria in the foreground, an old man walks his dog, another man stands in front of the hotel, a woman comes out to argue with him, as guitar music plays. She goes inside, he shouts derisorily after her, lights a cigarette and walks away. She comes back out, to sit on the step and do her knitting.
Spencer makes films so he will make another one. This is what he does.
The window in Jimmy Ludwig’s intensive care room has no bars and neither does it offer a view of mountains. Spencer can see the backs of several Boardwalk casinos, their unbusiness ends, heavy unadorned blocks of concrete and brick, naked of lights or murals or promises.
The incantation of money. Spencer looks at last at Michelle’s messages. It takes him a while to grasp that a cereal company is intent on paying him large amounts of money for stealing something from him that he didn’t know he had: intellectual property, a television commercial; One Door Opens, and so does a corporation’s very large wallet. The offers get larger with each message. They accuse Michelle and Spencer of playing hardball, which is not a game that Spencer thinks he knows the rules of. He goes to the window, tugs and pushes at the latch, and the more force he exerts, the more likely it seems that the latch is going to come away in his hands.
Alerted by the noise he is making, the nurse rushes back into the room.
‘What are you doing? They don’t open,’ she says.
‘Just wanted some air,’ Spencer says, blushing under her scorn, thwarted in his aim of throwing out all Michelle’s messages and watching them float or fall. Instead, he might have to humble himself to accept what he is offered.
‘Your father’ll be out a few hours,’ the nurse says. ‘We’ve given him a kiddie-dose of morphine, just so he can relax and breathe. You might want to take a break yourself.’
A Film by Spencer Ludwig Page 18