Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  “Pretty fair motion picture here, wouldn’t you say, Skinny?” Quin had recovered a little from his anger.

  “They don’t make movies about labor strife,” I said. “Too political.”

  “Then they’re bigger idiots than I thought.”

  Violence itself was so far from what I knew that before I’d become frightened it had indeed been a movie to me, like a clamorous dream where I felt present but not really engaged or endangered, almost in the posture of an anthropologist. Here are the oppressors and their helpers, here are the aggrieved and their sympathizers: see police battle strikers while you hold on to your detachment and safety as participant/observer. Mostly observer. You will report your findings, as Margaret Mead did, to Franz Boas at the Museum of Natural History. You’re in a little danger but not much, especially after you and Quin perch upstairs with the Chinese family, who are also participant/observers with better detachment credentials. When the squad cars drove away and the wounded strikers were loaded into paddy wagons, Wun Chew led us downstairs.

  All this could be reported to Dr. Pogo, my Franz Boas who wished me well on my field study among the natives; he could analyze it as a dream. I wasn’t entirely sure the battle had an existence outside my imagination of it.

  Dreamland Auditorium the night before had been more real. I’d been to contentious studio meetings as well as gatherings where the writers were trying to form a guild. Yancey Ballard, before he ever heard of Grandmother O’Hollie, had helped form the first Screen Writers Guild. I understood meetings. Violence was something else. I’d never seen any violence at all outside of movies. Yet this had happened and I could even read about it in tomorrow’s papers. When I thought I had a tomorrow. Before the fracas with the stevedore that was shortly to end my life. My killing: my erasure: hardly worth an oratorio but perhaps a little fugue from Mike Quin.

  I was trying to grasp the novelty of violence when Quin said he was off to write about what we’d witnessed, and he’d see me later. Foolishly, I decided to go over to the union hall to see how the members were doing after their pitched battle.

  So many longshoremen were milling around the entrance I didn’t go upstairs. The acrid tear gas had not yet completely blown away. It was still early afternoon, but outside union headquarters it felt as though the battle had raged all day long. One man was unscuffed and wore a spotless suit with a well-blocked fedora. He was across the street from most of the strikers. They looked so upset I didn’t want to bother them. Since the unscuffed man looked like what I thought of as respectable, I went up to him and asked how the men were holding up. The innocent, ignorant mistake that costs a life.

  “No damage to them they didn’t bring on themselves,” he said, which shocked me because I’d thought he was a union man himself or at least a sympathizer. “No one hurt bad,” he added, “more’s the pity.” He scrawled a few words on a piece of paper and asked who I was. “Well, just a bystander,” I said. “You ought to go bystand yourself somewhere else,” he said. Then he disappeared. I crossed back over to the union side and saw Widdelstaedt and Cromartie, the two men Quin and I had talked to the day before in the union hall. Widdelstaedt had only a small cut on his forehead, but Cromartie could barely stand, a rivulet of blood came from his nose, and one of his eyes was swollen shut.

  I was about to ask if I could help when Widdelstaedt swung backhanded at me and knocked me down. I was more amazed than hurt. “You’re with the cop snoop,” he accused, “and I saw you upstairs in headquarters yesterday, spying on us.”

  “No, no,” I said, getting up, “I was just asking how you guys are. Today was awful. I saw a lot of it with Mike Quin.”

  “Quin, hah! He can be a dupe too. That guy across the street was a dick, and you were giving him info.” He knocked me down again.

  “No, I wasn’t,” I said as I brushed myself off. How foolish to try to reason with someone in a rage. The stevedore—it was Widdelstaedt but I’d forgotten his name in my fright—came at me and I saw a knife flash out of his pocket. He backed me against a car. Pinned there, I saw my death in his dim bloodshot eyes. He raised the knife and I caught his arm, but he was far stronger. I ducked. I ran. He caught me. That’s when he sliced my leg. I hopped away. He lumbered after me as the men at the union hall laughed at both of us, no doubt their first laugh of the day. I turned a corner and saw a narrow alley. I’d lose him in there. But he followed me down the alley. It led nowhere, a dead end. I jumped for a fire escape ladder but couldn’t quite reach it. Several garbage cans were lined up, and I wanted to stand on one to reach the ladder, but their tops were all gone, used as shields, I supposed, by the union men. Nothing to stand on: the story of my life.

  Steve was upon me. The hulking Widdelstaedt. He lunged and gashed my arm. He was in the power of his anger, and once he had dealt me the slice in my leg, his anger became hunger. The very blood running down my pantleg and spilling on the ground enhanced his lust—like a shark, like Ajax—for my extinction.

  Every discovery at twenty-four is intense and fragile. By sight, by habit, by experience, new things become known, fresh material is fed into the psychic oven to be baked until risen to the level of wisdom. Now I’d never have that. Here he came, knife pointing at my eyes.

  He trapped me against a brick wall under the fire escape ladder. Raised his arm to deliver the death blow. I grabbed his wrist and kicked him in the knee, which made him yelp but that was all it did. His eyes were full of a bright dullness. I was the target of the rock bottom truths in this man’s life. Not only his eyes but his whole face was an accumulation of logical, everlasting, conclusive hopelessness. He had identified the enemy, and I was it. I saw his point: privilege versus penury. I wanted to live anyway. When I couldn’t hold his wrist any longer I squirmed away. He moved nimbly for a big man and quickly had me against another wall.

  Four, three, two, one, and it would be over. He lunged, I darted. Each time he missed he backed right up so I couldn’t dash for the alley’s open end. I was wearing down, and he was playing with me, dog and cat, cat and mouse, bird and worm. He didn’t mind if it took him five minutes or half an hour to carve me; he knew he had me trapped against the literally dead end alley and the garbage cans. I’d be his revenge for every deprivation he’d endured in four decades or so, the stand-in for all the forces ranged against him. My tongue was sour felt. I heard rapid breathing and a cry of Help! Someone yelled Help again. I barely recognized the cries as my own. The giant stevedore was measuring me now as I backed into a garbage can. He took his time. Two frozen images: my mother gleamed up behind him, Mossy was a ghost behind her. I looked at the garbage can—Christ! Why hadn’t I thought of this before. All my training had been to clean up messes, not make them. I was almost too tidy to save my own skin.

  What would Dr. Pogo think—this raced through me again. The abbreviated childhood I’d moaned over was about to become a far more abbreviated adulthood.

  But here was my life preserver, the garbage can. Faster than I’d ever moved, I upended the can, jumped on its bottom and reached the fire escape. Banana peels and coffee grounds and fish bones and a cat corpse scattered in the alley. As soon as I’d climbed to the second floor I pulled the ladder up, though it didn’t make much difference. Widdelstaedt wasn’t interested in the effort. He stood beneath the fire escape bellowing and threatening while I climbed up one more story and found an open window, disappearing from his attention.

  I ran for the hotel, home base in this hide and seek contest of unequals. It might have been ten blocks away or thirty, but I was there before I knew where I’d been. My jacket was soaked with my exerted, scared, determined, panicked but finally preserved sweat.

  Quin was waiting in the lobby, wondering what had happened to me. He told me many strikers were in the hospital, many in jail, and thanked a whimsical god no one was killed. He looked at my leg, bloody, gashed. I was panting too hard to make much headway in my story when he said, “Movie Mogul, why don’t you get your eager but inconsequenti
al ass out of this town before your luck runs dry.”

  17

  Mossy Swims

  His first day out of the hospital, Mossy, ever wily, invited Nils Maynard to his home for a swim after the day’s shooting was over. He still wanted Nils to use Pammy in the picture they had argued about. Nils didn’t want to swim, didn’t want to go up Coldwater Canyon to the Zangwill manse, didn’t want to discuss the Pammy issue any more. But he also didn’t want to be unfriendly to the presumably convalescent Mossy. He had never been at Mossy’s home as the only guest. The lavish garden itself intimidated Nils, a feast of nature, overdone, aspiring to encompass the entire plant kingdom, defying compliment. Mossy greeted Nils at the door and shrugged off solicitude about his health. “Damned painful at first,” he said, “but in the end it was all precautionary.”

  Mossy told Nils he thought the script for his next picture needed tightening and he wanted the two of them to agree on changes before bringing back the screenwriter. Relieved not to be talking about Pammy, who he still firmly thought would be miscast in his film, Nils said sure. Maybe he wouldn’t have to swim and could simply leave when they finished a brief talk about the screenplay. He was still suspicious.

  They agreed to remove a talky scene between the husband and an old doctor who treats what he refers to as the wife’s vapors. A description of the wife’s behavior was far less dramatic than the behavior itself. Mossy said, “As Shakespeare put it, show don’t tell.” “By all means,” Nils agreed. They cut an ugly scene where the wife coldly sends her stepdaughter off to boarding school. The scene is a good one, Nils thought, but he’s still trying to make the wife more palatable so I’ll agree to take Millevoix, who’s exactly wrong for this. All right, for the sake of getting out of here. He told Mossy cutting the scene was fine, expecting the boss to bring up Pammy again.

  “Fine yourself,” said Mossy. “Let’s refresh ourselves with a dip.”

  “Are you sure the doctors want you to exert yourself this much?” Nils asked.

  “Absolutely. Exercise is the best thing for what ailed me.”

  Nils remembered he hadn’t brought a bathing suit. Freudian slip, he told himself.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Mossy said. “Gable left his a couple of Sundays ago.”

  As he related this to Tutor Beedleman and me later, Nils put on Clark Gable’s suit, a very slight piece of material, and prepared to swim. Mossy emerged from the bathhouse in a bright zebra-striped suit. This was silly, embarrassing. Nils felt exposed in Gable’s fig-leaf suit, but they plunged in. The water was bracing and Nils enjoyed himself at first. He swam up and down, a little breaststroke, a little Australian crawl. Nils had always been an excellent swimmer, swimming being one of the few vigorous activities that his mother had allowed her hemophiliac son. Perhaps, Nils thought, he could impress the boss with his physical prowess, so he swam faster and faster. But he was wondering why Gable had been there. That was exactly what Mossy wanted him to do. He wouldn’t ask. Had Gable even been there? Nils swam as fast as he could.

  Mossy did a swan dive off his springboard, just missing Nils as he was moving toward the deep end of the pear-shaped pool. There was no talk, which unsettled Nils, but he didn’t know what to say to break the silence. Mossy treaded water after his dive. Surely he was about to say something. He said nothing.

  “Dumbly,” Nils told us, “I swam underwater. When I came up, Mossy had swum to the shallow end and was lounging against the steps that led up to the flagstones surrounding the pool. Ah, I thought, the swim is over, and I can leave. I went under one last time. As I blinked through the chlorinated water, I became aware of Mossy sitting on the steps at the far end, doing something because his legs were moving even though he stayed in the same place. When I surfaced, I saw he was taking off his trunks. Oh Jesus.”

  When Nils described this scene I was confused, uncertain what the point was.

  “Mossy proceeded,” Nils said, “to dive in from the shallow end and swim languorously up and down his pool, not exhibiting himself particularly, just naked. A frog stroke, a surface dive, a slither past me where I treaded water not knowing what to do. I couldn’t look at him, I couldn’t look anywhere else. We’d each been trying to upstage the other, Mossy with his silence, I with my speedy swimming. But he trumped me when he took off his bathing suit. Flashing by me, slicing through the water like a barracuda. His torso a compact missile, limbs like knives.”

  “So Mossy’s a secret fruit cup?” Tutor Beedleman offered.

  “Hardly,” Nils said. “Mossy just naturally wants to own the other guy. He takes all the space. I know this as a magician. Doing a magic act means you take the stage and hold it, like a commanding actor. On my sets, as a director, I’m in charge. I know how to do this. But Mossy, everywhere he goes is his own set. He wants to invade you until you say I give, I cave, what do you want me to do? He won’t stop until he has you.”

  “That’s not one man raping another?” I asked.

  “Yeah, fucking his mind,” Nils said. “Mossy doesn’t bother with your body. He skips right over that and leaps into your mind.”

  18

  Re-entry to the Kingdom

  Sunlight glinted off the fronds of the palm trees and the hood ornaments of the other cars, especially the expensive ones. Relieved to be safe at home, I’d awakened very early on Sumac Lane and even with my bandaged leg did a kind of hopping run down to the ocean to make sure it was there. I was still so anchored to what had happened—and almost happened—in San Francisco it was a happy surprise to see the Pacific rolling, boiling, slapping away at the sand. Southern California was the Kingdom of Heaven.

  Driving to the studio, I felt I’d been in a fierce wind that left me wrong in the head. What was Mike Quin doing on that sidewalk? Was that Widdelstaedt himself driving the car next to mine? It wouldn’t have shocked me if the stevedore had jumped out at a stop sign and broken my windshield. Yet I was free of all that now; the owners and longshoremen could fight until the redemptive sun turned to ice. I drove along Sunset, uncrowded at that early hour, cranky little cars putt-putting along, beeping cheerily at each other occasionally, gardeners hosing the bougainvillea and chrysanthemums, sprinkling the lawns because it would likely be a scorcher.

  Passing the pink stucco Beverly Hills Hotel and turning down through the allée of palms on Canon Drive, I fancied myself in Jerusalem. Ideas churned on how to do what the studio wanted and also convince them to do what I wanted. I was taking the long way to work to assure myself of the glories of this Eden. This presumed Eden, as Yeatsman never failed to remind me.

  Reaching Olympic Boulevard, I remembered I had an appointment with Dr. Pogorzelski and doubled back a few blocks. Trapped in the alley the day before, I’d assumed Widdelstaedt’s carving knife would cause Pogo’s couch to lie bare this morning. When he summoned me from the waiting room, I settled in by saying how glad I was to see him though I wasn’t really seeing him but staring at the Florida-shaped crack in his ceiling. I spilled it all out. As the huge longshoreman pursued me, I told Pogo I felt I was looking straight into the next world. I gave a blow-by-blow of Widdelstaedt chasing, slashing at me until I finally leaped out of his grasp onto the fire escape. Dr. Pogo was silent, waiting for me to continue. Finally, I said, “That’s it, that’s the whole thing.”

  “Umm,” he said. “What do you think it means?”

  “What do I think what means?”

  “What do you think your fantasy means?”

  This is what always puzzled me about psychoanalysis: tension between reality and the imagination. Perhaps it is the same tension that exists in writing. How much are we mining, how much are we making up? Dr. Pogorzelski was certainly a good and compassionate doctor. Though he’d gone from Cracow to study with the master in Vienna, he never pulled apostolic succession on me nor, I gathered, on his less fortunate colleagues. Unslavish about psychoanalytic dogma, he was secularly open to whatever varying interpretations or theories I would bring him. Early on, in the firs
t or second session, he had said our analysis (and he did say “our,” impressing me with the collaborative nature of my treatment) would consist eclectically of present concerns, memories of the distant past, dreams, fantasies, word associations, and the relationship between the two of us. Our twin goals would be to try to untie inhibitors preventing full expression of what I wanted to be and do and say and write, and to retrace the beginnings of neurotic behavior so that it need no longer be repeated.

  So far so good. But I was never too sure how Pogo—or other members of his profession—dealt with reality. In-your-face occurrences. Here I’d just told him of a narrow escape from death in my encounter with the distressingly real would-be killer Widdelstaedt, and his response was to ask me what the fantasy meant.

  I swiveled on the couch and looked at him where he sat, his knees possibly eighteen inches from my head. I was like a small gun going off. “Are you n … ? Doctor, every word I’ve just told you is exactly what happened to me in San Francisco! Exactly! Please! Not a shred of it was my imagination!” I swiveled back into my usual supine position, jerking my head and folding my arms over my chest as if to say, Take that.

  “Oh, of course, sorry,” Dr. Pogo said. “I hear so much of people’s violent dreams and fantasies I’m afraid I lost myself. It’s a staggering experience. Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right. The guy cut my leg. Other than that, okay.”

  “Did this terrible incident remind you of anything?”

  “It reminded me I want to stay on this planet for a while. It reminded me I’m glad I’m not a stevedore. It reminded me how oppressed workers are by owners. It reminded me of what scapegoat means. That guy would kill someone who’s not even close to being his true enemy. It reminded me of what your profession means by displacement!”