"If I say go, what then?" I asked.
"I'll go."
"And meet me again, where?" "God knows. Quick! Say 'go.' They're catching up." "Who?"
"All those others. They'll kill me if I don't kill first. You wouldn't want me to die right here? Well, would you?" I shook my head. "Ready, set, go?" she asked.
"Ready, set."
And she was gone.
She zigzagged across the forecourt, a dozen fast steps to the right, another dozen to the left, pause, and a final two dozen steps to a third set of prints, where she froze, as if it were a land mine.
A car horn hooted. I turned. When I glanced back, the Grauman's front door swallowed a shadow.
I counted to ten to give her a real start, then I bent down to pick up the tiny shoes she had left behind in her footprints. Then I walked over to the first set of prints where she had paused. Sally Simpson, 1926. The name was just an echo from a lost time.
I moved on to the second set of prints. Gertrude Erhard, 1924. An even fainter ghost of time. And the final footprints nearer the front door. Dolly Dawn, 1923. Peter Pan. Dolly Dawn? A fleeting mist of years touched me. I almost remembered.
"Hell," I whispered. "No way."
And got ready to let Uncle Sid's fake Chinese palace swallow me with one huge dark dragon swallow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I STOPPED just outside the crimson doors, for as clearly as if he were calling, I heard Father Rattigan shout, "Lamentable!"
Which made me pull out Rattigan's Book of the Dead.
I had only looked for names, now I looked for a place. There it was under the Gs: Grauman's. Followed by an address and a name: Clyde Rustler.
Rustler, I thought, my God, he retired from acting in 1920 after working with Griffith and Gish and getting involved with Dolly Dimples's bathtub death. And here was his name-alive?-on a boulevard where they buried you without warning and erased you from history the way dear Uncle Joe Stalin rubbed out his pals, with a shotgun eraser.
And, my heart thumped, there was red ink around his name and a double crucifix.
Rattigan— I looked at the dark beyond the red door-
Rattigan, yes, but Clyde Rustler, are you here, too? I reached and grasped one brass handle and a voice behind me announced bleakly: "There's nothing inside to steal!"
A gaunt homeless guy stood to my right, dressed in various shades of gray, speaking to the universe. He felt my gaze.
"Go ahead." I read his lips. "You got nothing to lose."
Plenty to win, I thought, but how do you excavate a big Chinese tomb filled with black-and-white flicker film clips, an aviary of birds shuttling the air, fireworks ricocheting a big ravenous screen, as swift as memory, as quick as remorse?
The homeless man waited for me to self-destruct with remembrance. I nodded. I smiled.
And as quickly as Rattigan, I sank into die theater's darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
INSIDE the lobby there was a frozen army of Chinese coolies, concubines, and emperors, dressed in ancient wax, parading nowhere.
One of the wax figurines blinked. "Yes?"
God, I thought, a crazy outside, a crazy in, and Clyde Rustler moldering toward ninety or ninety-five.
Time shifted. If I ducked back out, I would find a dozen drive-ins where teenage waitresses roller-skated hamburgers.
"Yes?" the Chinese wax mannequin said again.
I moved swiftly through the first entry door and down the aisle under the balcony, where I stared up.
It was a big dark aquarium, undersea. It was possible to imagine a thousand film ghosts, scared by gunshot whispers, soaring to flake the ceiling and vanish in the vents. Melville's whale sailed there, unseen, Old Ironsides, the Titanic. The Bounty, sailing forever, never reaching port. I focused my gaze on up through the multiple balconies toward what had once been called nigger heaven.
My God, I thought, I'm three years old.
That was the year when Chinese fairy tales haunted my bed, whispered by a favorite aunt, when I thought death was just a forever bird, a silent dog in the yard. My grandfather was yet to lie in a box at a funeral parlor, while Tut arose from his tomb. What, I asked, was Tut famous for? For being dead four thousand years. Boy, I said, how'd he do that?
And here I was in a vast tomb under the pyramid, where I had always wished to be. If you lifted the aisle carpets, you'd find the lost pharaohs buried with fresh loaves of bread and bright sprigs of onions; food for far-traveling up-river to Eternity.
They must never ruin this, I thought. I must be buried here.
"It's not Green Glade Cemetery," said the old wax Chinaman nearby, reading my mind.
I had spoken aloud.
"When was this theater built?" I murmured.
The old waxwork let loose a forty-day flood: "1921, one of the first. There was nothing here, some palm trees, farmhouses, cottages, a dirt main street, little bungalows built to lure Doug Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford. Radio was just a crystal matchbox with earphones. Nobody could hear the future on that. We opened big. People walked or drove from Melrose north. Saturday nights there were veritable desert caravans of movie fanatics. The graveyard hadn't yet begun at Gower and Santa Monica. It filled up with Valentino's ruptured appendix in '26. At Grauman's opening night, Louis B. Mayer arrived from the Selig Zoo in Lincoln Park. That's where MGM got their lion. Mean, but no teeth. Thirty dancing girls. Will Rogers spun rope. Trixie Friganza sang her famous 'I Don't Care' and wound up an extra in a Swanson film, 1934. Go down, stick your nose in the old basement dressing rooms, you'll find leftover underwear from those flappers who died for love of Lowell Sherman. Dapper guy with mustache, cancer got him, '34. You listening?"
"Clyde Rustler," I blurted.
"Holy Jesus! Nobody knows him! See way up, that old projection room? They buried him there alive in '29 when they built the new projection room on the second balcony."
I stared up into phantoms of mist, rain and Shangri-la snow seeking the High Lama.
My shadow friend said: "No elevator. Two hundred steps!"
A long climb, with no Sherpas, up to a middle lobby and a mezzanine and then another balcony and another after that amid three thousand seats. How do you please three thousand customers? I wondered. How? If eight-year-old boys didn't pee three times during your film, you had it made!
I climbed.
I stopped halfway to sit, panting, suddenly ancient instead of halfway new.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I REACHED the back wall of Mount Everest and tapped on the old projection-room door.
"Is that who I think it is?" a terrified voice cried.
"No," I said quietly, "just me. Back for one last matinee after forty years."
That was a stroke of genius; upchucking my past.
The terrified voice simmered down.
"What's the password?"
It came right off my tongue, a boy's voice.
"Tom Mix and his horse, Tony. Hoot Gibson. Ken May-nard. Bob Steele. Helen Twelvetrees. Vilma Banky…"
"That'll do."
It was a long while before I heard a giant spider brush the door panel. The door whined. A silver shadow leaned out, a living metaphor of the black-and-white phantoms I had seen flickering across the screen a lifetime ago.
"No one ever comes up here," said this old, old man.
"No one?"
"No one ever knocks on my door," said the man with silver hair and silver face and silver clothes, bleached out by seventy years of living under a rock in a high place and gazing down at unreality ten thousand times. "No one knows I'm here. Not even me."
"You're here. You're Clyde Rustler."
"Am I?" For a moment I thought he might body-search his suspenders and sleeve garters.
"Who are you?" He poked his face like a turtle's from its shell.
I said my name.
"Never heard of you." He glanced down at the empty screen. "You one of them?"
"The dead stars?"
"They sometimes climb up. Fairbanks came last night."
"Zorro, D'Artagnan, Robin Hood? He knocked at your door?"
"Scratched. Being dead has its problems. You coming in or out?"
I stepped in quickly before he could change his mind.
The film projectors stood facing emptiness in a room that looked like a Chung King burial chamber. It smelled of dust and sand and acrid celluloid. There was only one chair between the projectors. As he'd said, no one ever came to visit.
I stared at the crowded walls. There must've been three dozen pictures nailed there, some in cheap Woolworth frames, others in silver, still others mere scraps torn from old Silver Screen magazines, photographs of thirty women, no two alike.
The old, old man let a smile haunt his face.
"My sweetheart dears, from when I was an active volcano."
The most ancient of ancient men looked out at me from behind a maze of wrinkles, the kind you get when you search the icebox at six A.M. and take out last night's pre-mixed martinis.
"I keep the door locked. I thought you were just here, yelling outside."
"Not me."
"Someone was. Outside of that, nobody's been up here since Lowell Sherman died."
"That's two obituaries in ten minutes. Winter 1934. Cancer and pneumonia."
"Nobody knows that!"
"I roller-skated by the Coliseum one Saturday 1934 before a football game. Lowell Sherman came in whooping and barking. I got his autograph and said, 'Take care.' He died two days later."
"Lowell Sherman." The old, old man regarded me with a new luster in his eyes. "As long as you're alive, he is, too."
Clyde Rustler collapsed in the one chair and sized me up again. "Lowell Sherman. Why in hell did you make the long climb up here? People have died climbing. Uncle Sid climbed up once or twice, said to hell with it, built the bigger projection booth a thousand yards downslope in the real world, if there is a real one. Never went down to see. So?"
For he saw that I was casting my gaze around his primeval nest at those walls teeming with dozens of faces, forever young.
"Would you like a rundown on these mountain-lion street cats?" He leaned and pointed.
"Her name was Carlotta or Midge or Diana. She was a Spanish flirt, a Cal Coolidge 'It girl' with a skirt up to her navel, a Roman queen fresh out of DeMille's milk bath. Then she was a vamp named Illysha, a typist called Pearl, an English tennis player-Pamela. Sylvia? Ran a nudist flytrap in Cheyenne. Some called her 'Hard Hearted Hannah the Vamp of Savannah.' Dressed like Dolley Madison, sang 'Tea for Two,' 'Chicago,' popped out of a big clamshell like the pearl of paradise, Flo Ziegfeld's craze. Fired by her father at thirteen for conduct unbecoming a human who ripened fast: Willa-Kate. Worked in a chophouse chink joint: Lila Wong. Got more votes than the president, Coney Island Beauty Pageant, '29: not-so-plain Willa. Got off the night train in Glendale: Barbara Jo, next day, almost, head of Glory Films: Anastasia Alice Grimes-"
He stopped. I looked up. "Which brings us to Rattigan," I said.
Clyde Rustler froze in place.
"You said no one's been up here for years. But-she came up here today, right? Maybe to look at these pictures? Did she or didn't she?"
The old, old man stared at his dusty hands, then slowly rose to face a brass whistle tube in the wall, one of those submarine devices that you blew so it shrieked and you yelled orders.
"Leo? Wine! A two-dollar tip!"
A tiny voice squealed from the brass nozzle, "You don't drink!"
"I do now, Leo. And hot dogs!"
The brass nozzle squealed and died.
The old, old man grunted and stared at the wall. A long, terribly long five minutes passed. While we waited I opened my notepad and took down the names scrawled on the pictures. Then we heard the hot dogs and wine rattling up the dumbwaiter. Clyde Rustler stared as if he had forgotten that tiny elevator. He took forever opening the wine with a corkscrew, sent by Leo, from down below. There was only one glass.
"One," he apologized. "You first. I'm not afraid of catching anything."
"I got nothing for you to catch." I drank and handed the glass over. He drank and I could see the relaxation move his body.
"And now?" he said. "Let me show you some clips I glued together. Why? Last week a stranger called from down below. That voice on the phone. Was once Harry Cohn's live-in nurse, never said yes, but yes, yes, Harry, yes! Said she was looking for Robin Locksley. Robin Hood. Searching for Robin of Locksley. An actress took that name, a flash in the pan. She disappeared in Hearst's castle or his backside kitchen. But now this voice, years later, asks for Locksley. Spooked me. I ran through my cans and found the one film she made in 1929, when sound really took over. Watch."
He fitted the film into the projector and switched on the lamp. The image shot down to flood the big screen.
On the screen a circus butterfly spun, flirting her gossamer wings, dropping, to pull the bit from her smile, laugh, then run, pursued by white knights and black villains. "Recognize her?"
“Nope.”
"Try this." He spun the film. The screen filled with a smoldering bank of snow fires, a Russian noblewoman, smoking long languid cigarettes, wringing her handkerchief, someone had died or was going to die.
"Well?" said Clyde Rustler hopefully.
"Nope."
"Try again!"
The projector lit the darkness with 1923; a tomboy climbing a tree to shake down fruit, laughing, but you could see small crab apples under her shirtfront.
" Tomboy Sawyer. A girl! Who? Damn!"
The old man filled the screen with a dozen more images, starting with 1925, ending with 1952, open, shut, mysterious, obvious, light, dark, wild, composed, beautiful, plain, willful, innocent.
"You don't know any of those? My God, I've racked my brain. There must be some reason why I've saved these damned clips. Look at me, dammit! Know how old I am?"
"Around ninety, ninety-five?"
"Ten thousand years! Jesus. They found me floating in a basket on the Nile! I fell downhill with the Tablets. I doused the fire in the burning bush. Mark Antony said, 'Loose the dogs of war'; I loosed the lot. Did I know all these wonders? I wake nights hitting my head to make the jelly beans shake in place. Every time I've almost got the answer, I move my head and the damned beans fall. You sure you don't remember these clips or the faces on the wall? Good grief, we've got a mystery!"
"I was about to say the same. I came up here because someone else came. Maybe that voice that called from down below."
"What voice?"
"Constance Rattigan," I said.
I let the fog settle behind his eyes.
"What's she got to do with this?" he wondered.
"Maybe she knows. Last time I saw her she was standing in her own footprints."
"And you think she might know who all these faces belong to, what all the names mean? Hold on. Outside the door… I guess it was today. Can't be yesterday. Today she said, 'Hand 'em over!'"
"Hand what over?"
"Hell, what do you see in this damn empty place worth handing over?"
I looked at the pictures on the wall. Clyde Rustler saw my look.
"Why would anyone want those?" he said. "Not worth nothing. Even I don't know why in hell I nailed them there. Are they wives or some old girlfriends?"
"How many of each did you have?"
"I don't have the fingers to count."
"One thing for sure, Constance wanted you to hand 'em over. Was she jealous?"
"Constance? You got road rage in the streets, she had bed rage. Wanted to grab all my lovelies, whoever in hell they were, and stomp, tear, and burn them. Go on. Finish the wine. I got things to do."
"Like what?"
But he was rethreading the film clips in the projector, fascinated by a thousand and one nights past.
I moved along the wall and scribbled furiously, writing down the names under all of the pictures, and then said:
"If Constance comes
back, will you let me know?"
"For the pictures? I'll throw her downstairs."
"Someone else said that. Only it was to hell instead of the second balcony. Why would you throw her?"
"There's gotta be a reason, right? Don't recollect! And why did you say you climbed up here? And what was it you called me?"
"Clyde Rustler."
"Oh, yeah. Him. It just came to me. Did you know I am Constance's father?"
"What!?"
"Constance's father. I thought I told you before. Now you can leave. Good night."
I went out and shut the door on whoever that was and the pictures on the wall, whoever they were.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DOWNSTAIRS, I edged to the front of the theater and stared down. Then I stepped into the orchestra pit, and edged to the back wall and peered though a door into a long hall that diminished into complete night and a night inside that night, where all the old abandoned dressing rooms were.
I was tempted to call a name.
But what if she answered?
Far off down that black corridor, I thought I heard the sound of a hidden sea, or a river flowing somewhere in the dark.
I put one foot forward and pulled back.
I heard that dark ocean heave on an endless shore again.
Then I turned, and went away up through the great darkness, out of the pit into the aisles with everyone gone, rushing toward the doors leading out to an evening sky most dearly welcome.
I carried Rattigan's incredibly small shoes over to her footprints and placed them neatly down to fit.
At which instant I felt my guardian angel touching my shoulder.
"You're back from the dead," said Crumley.
"You can say that again," I said, staring at the wide red doorway of Grauman's Chinese with all those film creatures swimming in the dark.
"She's in there," I murmured. "I wish I knew a way to get her out."
"Dynamite tied to a bundle of cash might do it."
"Crumley!"
"Sorry, I forgot we were talking about Florence Nightingale."
Let's All Kill Constance Page 6