PLAYING IT OUT by Peter Selgin
(from Life Goes to the Movies, a memoir)
1.
Picture this: The Two Greatest Artists in New York sprawled on the sands of Miami Beach. It’s five o’clock in the morning, something like that, and I’m awake, perusing the seascape, trying to decipher those mysterious blue shapes floating way out there. Mountains? Waves? Whales?
We’re wearing tuxedos, Lionel Duncan’s tuxedos, a pair of return airline tickets to New York tucked safely in Dwaine’s breast pocket, boarding passes to Mutiny. Behind us: a wall of high-rise luxury hotels stretching as pale and frothy as the waves that break along the shore: the Hyatt, the Hilton, the Konover, the Fontainebleau . . . And the Hotel Paradise where, in a deluxe penthouse suite, Literary and Film Agent Lionel Duncan dreams sweet dreams of Exclusivity, oblivious to any and all conspiracies being hatched in the sand.
It’s 1978. I’m barely twenty, barely two years out of art school. Jimmy Carter is President, pay phones still take a dime, postage stamps cost fifteen cents. A New York City subway token is still a token and costs fifty cents. But subways and winter are both far away as can be right now as I lie here, watching my best friend sleep, dreaming his own not-so-sweet dreams of sniper fire and ambushes (lips contorting, limbs bucking and twitching, forehead bubbling with sweat).
Suddenly a sound like a swarm of swirling kitchen knives slashes its way toward us down the shore, an airborne Cuisinart headed our way, intent on slicing and dicing us both to bits. It reaches us and stops, hovering right over our heads, spewing up a tornado that makes it all too clear why beach sand is used in making sandpaper. Dwaine, my friend, my bosom buddy, my mentor, lurches awake, wide-eyed and scared stiff as a stop sign, screaming an otherworldly scream to wake the Greater Miami dead.
The Cosmic Cuisinart shoots a cool blue beam down into our eyes.
An amplified voice commands:
Get down off the beach! Get down off the beach!
Dwaine keeps on screaming, his aluminum-shard pupils popping from his skull as I hold him, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay . . .”
The whirling death churns on, scattering light, sand and terror down the shore.
2.
We were going to be famous, Dwaine and I. That was the plan. Dwaine would write and direct our movies, and I would star in them. Like Scorsese and DeNiro, we’d ride waves of fake gore to cinematic fortune and fame. We’d serve up buckets of grim realism to a movie-going public starving on a nutritionless diet of Mindless Entertainment. To the famished hordes we would dish out that rarest of all delicacies: the Truth. And they’d gobble it up like so much hot-buttered popcorn.
But first we needed to make a few connections.
3.
I’m sitting at a corner table at the Rosinante Tavern & Grill, bits of dead lettuce, raw hamburger meat and squashed French fries clinging to the crags of my working boots, scribbling away frantically in my notebook between dishwashing shifts when a guy who looks like a stubby-bearded Klaus Kinsky struts over and hands me his business card.
“Who knows?” he says. “You could be the next William Goldman.”
The card shows a lion in silhouette rearing up on its hind legs, its tail switching back like a whip.
Days later I go to the address on the business card, a building way, way over on the West Side in the lower thirties, by the Hudson River, one of many anonymous warehouse-like buildings casting bleak shadows across weed and garbage strewn lots. In one of those anonymous buildings I stand in front of a desk carved with lion’s heads. Lionel Duncan’s office is a den of lions. There are lion ashtrays, lion bookends, lion paintings and bas-reliefs, lion tapestries, inkwells and paperweights, lion lamps, coffee mug and coasters. . . . On a lion-pelted loveseat, winged lions stitched in gold soar across the faces of fat velvet pillows. A curio cabinet shimmers with lions haughty and heraldic, furious and ferocious, pompous and proud–some encrusted with jewels. Duncan sits behind his desk in a red silk kimono embroidered with lions, doing isometrics while talking on the phone. A few days ago he was Klaus Kinsky, now he’s more like Claude Rains, that slippery smile, the pale, brushed-back hair.
Between jabs of phone banter he casts a look up at me and says, “What qualifications have you got?”
Within a beat I say, “I could be the next William Goldman.”
4.
For $2.50 an hour (tax-free) I read screenplays, type up rejection letters, answer the phone, make post office, copy shop and Chinese laundry runs. Lionel Duncan meanwhile spends most of his time on the phone trying to land “exclusive” deals. Exclusive, I learn quickly, is his favorite word, a spice he sprinkles on every other sentence. He’s only thirty-eight, but wears dentures that slip so when he says “exclusive” it comes out “exsclushive.”
Another assistant works for Duncan, a Columbia literature postgraduate named Esther Schmidt, Duncan calls Esther his “eyes.” She reads everything that comes into the agency “over the transom.”
One day I gave Esther the latest version of Dwaine’s screenplay-in-progress, the one he’s been working on for two years now, about a champion ice hockey player who becomes a priest and then ends up working for the Irish Republican Army, which assigns him the task of gathering information about a Belfast hotel lounge called the Eglantine Inn, a.k.a. “the Egg.” Little does he suspect that Murph, the proprietor, who’s been warned repeatedly not to serve the British officers who are his best customers, is his long lost and presumed dead father. When he finally learns the truth it’s too late: “the Egg” has been blown to pieces, and his father with it.
Whenever he writes a new draft Dwaine always gives his screenplay a fresh title. His titles all come from the same poem, “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats. The last title was Things Fall Apart. Before that it was A Terrible Beauty. Before that The Widening Gyre. The version I give to Esther is titled The Center Cannot Hold. I don’t say a friend of mine wrote it. I don’t want to prejudice her. I want her honest, unbiased opinion. I want it because, frankly, I’m too close to Dwaine to be objective about him or his work. I want an outside, expert opinion.
Along with an armload of other scripts, Esther takes Dwaine’s home with her to read over the weekend. She does most of her reading stretched out in bed, she tells me, with a cup of hot ginger tea with honey. Esther is an attractive woman, short but with relatively long legs. She wears tan linen suits over dark pantyhose. Her large eyeglasses give her a shocked, feminine fruit-fly look.
As soon as I see her that Monday I ask her, “What did you think?”–forgetting that Dwaine’s is only one of a dozen screenplays she’s read. She goes down the whole list, telling me about them all. I forgot to mention that Esther speaks in a whisper, always, no matter where she is or what she’s doing, as if the whole world were a library. Most of the time I have to bend close to hear her, as I do this morning, her whispers half-drowned by the growls and bangs of a garbage truck outdoors. Finally, she gets to Dwaine’s screenplay and summarizes the plot.
“So–did you like it?” I ask.
“Well, he’s got some talent, but boy–!” She shakes her head. She has a small head, its smallness magnified by those big glasses.
“What do you mean?”–I ask a little too anxiously, maybe, Esther’s next question being, “You don’t know this person, by any chance, do you, Peter?”
I shake my head. “Just curious.”
“Well, whoever he is he’s very, very angry. This–” she gives the script a shake “–reads more like a vendetta against society than a screenplay.”
She goes on to describe the writing as by turns heavy-handed and maudlin, sentimental and pornographic. “But it has power,” she says.
“Then again,” she adds, “so does a mudslide. So did Joseph Stalin. So did Attila the Hun.”
5.
Two days later Esther was fired. Duncan arrived at his office in the morning to find a human turd, still reeking and glistening, deposited in his vestibule like a votive offering. It may have been left there by one of the many homeless persons who roamed the vicinity at night, or it might have been a symbolic act on the part of one of Duncan’s many disgruntled clients. Possibly the culprit was both disgruntled and homeless.
When Esther arrived later that same morning Mr. Duncan ordered her to clean it up. She refused. So Duncan fired her.
I was there to see the whole thing. It was like watching a lion kill a gazelle in one of those nature shows. “That bastard!” I said. I tried my best to save Esther, on whom by then I had a crush. I offered to clean up the turd myself. But it didn’t help. Esther had been insubordinate.
Soon afterwards I found out that Duncan was putting together an entourage to take with him to the first ever Greater Miami International Film Festival. The festival would be packed with stars. There’d be nightly screenings and receptions and parties. Martin Scorsese would be there, so would Bobby DeNiro, at least according to Lionel Duncan. He needed an experienced cameraman to round out his coterie. I said I knew just the right person, a guy who could handhold a 16-millimeter as steady as any tripod or Steadicam, who had his own camera and would be willing to work for peanuts.
6.
Two weeks later Dwaine and I found ourselves packed into the tail section of a Douglas DC-8, among colicky infants and people whose concept of high fashion was a T-shirt that said “I’m with STUPID.” Flying in the luggage bin over our head: a brand-new/used Bolex H16-RX-V bought in a Third Avenue pawnshop. Meanwhile Lionel Duncan sat up in First Class stretching his stubby legs, sipping a complimentary mimosa. Before leaving he reminded us that we would not be paid a penny, that we’d have our “sustentative needs” provided for, that otherwise our compensation would consist of the privilege of serving Lionel Duncan, King of Literary & Film Agents.
We didn’t mind. We were going to Florida.
We were going to be Famous.
Famous and Florida. Like champagne and orange juice the two words blended, forming mimosas of the mind.
7.
While Dwaine dozed in the window seat I struck up a conversation with the guy across the aisle, a water softener salesman from Des Moines. When the steward charged him for a second bloody Mary, a voice from nowhere hissed, Fucking jerk. A few moments later, when the lady in front of him reclined her seat into his lap, the same tinny voice sneered, Eat shit.
Finally, the salesman revealed his secret: a palm-sized device he’d bought in a Las Vegas novelty store. The Insultomatic featured three buttons, a red button, a blue button, and a green button, each button color-coded to a different affront.
“Take it,” said the salesman, pressing the device into my palm. “I’m sick of the damn thing. Besides, I got something even better.”
Reaching into his attaché case, he pulled out a Fart Detector.
8.
We landed in Miami to learn that a hotel bed did not qualify as a sustentative need.
“Sleep on the beach,” said Lionel Duncan.
I pressed the red button.
9.
Gulls wheel under a dome of powder blue sky. Dwaine hacks city smog and cigarette smoke from his lungs. Strands of seaweed cling to our tuxedos. The morning sun invests everything with a lemony, prehistoric light, the kind of light I picture dinosaurs trouncing through. With its bare dunes and mausoleum-like hotels, the landscape feels threatening.
We march up a dune toward the Paradise. As we do, a man in a sombrero and mirrored sunglasses finger-whistles us to a halt.
“How did you two get off on the beach?” the man wants to know.
“You mean how did we get on to the beach?” Dwaine–a stickler for grammar–corrects him.
“No, I mean how did you get off on the beach?” says the man.
“We’re still on the goddamn fucking beach,” Dwaine tells him. “We didn’t get off on anything. We’ve been on the beach all goddamn night.” (Dwaine’s mood could stand improvement.)
“That is not what I am asking you,” says the man in the sombrero, who looks exactly like Lee Marvin in Hell in the Pacific and whose voice sounds like a machine for grinding rocks. “I’m asking how did you get off on the beach?”
“We swam,” I answer, flicking a strand of bladder wrack off Dwaine’s shoulder. “We’re fish; we just decided to evolve. See? No gills.” I lift up my arms, point to where my gills should be.
The man in the sombrero is not amused. He asks to see our identification. We flash our V.I.P. First Ever Greater Miami International Film Festival Press Corps Passes. Their gold laminate fails to dazzle. The man asks us what hotel we’re registered with. I point up the dune to the Paradise. He asks which room number.
“Thirty-two-oh-eight,” I say thinking fast, but not fast enough. The Hotel Paradise is only eighteen stories.
“This beach is private property,” says the man in the sombrero. “If I see you two out here again I’ll have you arrested. Good morning.”
10.
From the start the festival is a fiasco. Most of the stars are no-shows, including DeNiro, including Scorsese. The few stars that do show up are of such dim wattage they barely outshine our black patent leather tuxedo shoes, which, after three nights of sleeping on the beach, are beginning to look like Hushpuppies.
A third person forms the international component of Duncan’s press entourage, a short, skinny photojournalist from Italy named Nando, his northern Italian accent as thick as my mother’s. He looks like Italy’s answer to Don Knotts and wears a checkered sports jacket over his shoulders like a cape. When he learns that he is to sleep on a cot on the terrace of Duncan’s suite, and that his V.I.P. benefits don’t come with bar privileges or a chauffeured limousine, he turns to us and mutters, “Dis is a shit.”
Each morning Duncan loads the three of us into a rental van and sends us off with his benediction (“You pussies’ll have the Enquirer eating out of your hands!”) to the airport to greet and photograph the arriving stars. Each day we stand there, by the airport arrivals gate, Nando with his Nikon, Dwaine with the Bolex, me with boxes and cans of extra film stock, all of us keeping our eyes peeled for stars, or anyone dressed in black clothes and wearing sunglasses. The flights from Los Angeles keep coming with no one at all famous aboard any of them.
“Christ,” says Dwaine, watching yet another stream of unfamous faces deplane. “Will you look at all these fucking losers? Man, how the fuck can they stand it?”
“We’re not famous ourselves,” I remind him as the latest plane’s last passenger, an oxygenated old man in a wheelchair, rolls by.
“We’re famous, all right,” Dwaine insists. “Nobody knows it yet, that’s all.”
“Dis is a shit,” says Nando.
11.
On day four we discuss our options. We can go back to New York, back to streets gray with slush and subways as icy and windy as the streets, back to our fourth floor Queens walk-up with tub squatting on kitchen floor, back to making ten-minute movies no one will ever see or appreciate. We can fly back to the known misery and squalor of our city lives. Or we can stage a mutiny.
We mutiny.
We swim laps in the Hotel Paradise pool, sun ourselves in the cabaña, jog along the beach that is our bedroom, breakfast on mini Danishes and espresso at the Veranda Grill, make appointments with kayaking, windsurfing, bosso nova and flamenco dance instructors. We avail ourselves of the hotel’s full complement of courteous staffers, its hair stylists and masseuses, its valets and manicurists–all courtesy of Lionel Duncan, whose penthouse suite number we have committed to memory, and whose child-like signature Dwaine forges on an endless series of room service chits.
At one point I’m given to wonder if maybe we’ve gone too far.
“Are you kidding?” says Dwaine, sipping a tall fruit drink while having his nails done. “That prick boss of yours owes us at least this much for dragging our sorry asses down here. Besides,” he waves a freshly trimmed and polished hand across the cabaña hut, “look around you, man, what do you see?” I look around, seeing other hotel guests stretched out on long chairs with puffy yellow cushions, sunning themselves, older people mostly, their faces red as lobsters under their snowy heads. “People with money,” says Dwaine. “Lots of money. Too much money. And where do you suppose they got it? Huh? They stole it, naturally,” he answers before I can wager a guess. “Or they killed for it, or both. Compared to these people, man, you and me are nothing but a pair of pilot fish in a tank of killer sharks.” He sips his drink. “Trust me, babe.” (When he gets excited, Dwaine calls me “babe,” a nickname I don’t care for much, with its suggestion of downy innocence and more than a touch of Hollywood condescension.) “It’ll take more than a manicure to catch up with these motherfuckers. Ease up on the cuticles, there, would you, miss?”
All of my misgivings aside, I’m happy to be in Florida, happy to be away from slushy streets and dishwashing sinks, happy most of all to be having fun and relaxing with my mentor, seeing him suntanned and healthy and not drinking or brooding at all, as he’s been known to do back in New York. In fact, he seems totally transformed, his rough edges softened as if by soaking in saltwater, his dark moods brightened as if by the Florida sunshine. I’ve never seen him look better: tanned, muscular, fit. Since we got here he hasn’t lit one cigarette. He’s left them, along with his black notebooks, the ones we’re always filling back home, with the rest of his luggage at the concierge’s desk. Those aluminum shards that usually swim around in his eyes? They look more like silver now. I’d even go as far as to say that they sparkle. Yes, they do: they sparkle. It’s a whole new Dwaine.
12.
The only surviving relic of the ‘old’ Dwaine are those nightmares, the ones set off by the Miami Beach Shore Patrol helicopter, with its blue tungsten beam and loudspeaker imperative: Get down off the beach! Get down off the beach! . . .
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay . . .”
13.
At the pre-screening cocktail parties we gorge ourselves on jumbo shrimp dunked in silver tureens of spicy cocktail sauce, on crackers straining under mounds of foie gras and bubbly beluga caviar, on cheeses runny and stinky and crumbly, all washed down with nose-tickling, ash-dry champagne (me) and ginger-ale (Dwaine). With gold V.I.P. passes pinned to tuxedo lapels, we head into the theater and go straight to the roped-off seats, where we sit calmly waiting for the hoi polloi to mistake us for stars. A few people even ask us for our autographs.
“Do you mind?” they say, handing us their programs.
“Not at all.” We sign away, basking in fame’s bright if transitory glow.
But Dwaine isn’t satisfied with such minor ruses. He names pictures, elucidates plots. “Our latest feature is called Don’t Lean on Me,” he tells one starry-eyed couple sitting behind us. “It’s a tragicomedy about these two crippled con artists who escape from prison on crutches, but they’ve only got one crutch, see, which they have to share, but still they get away with it because nobody believes it. See, the whole movie is about the suspension of disbelief, and how these guys have figured out that the more unbelievable something is the more people are willing to suspend their beliefs to believe it.”
Dwaine is in the middle of explaining to the starry-eyed snowbirds that the reason they may not have heard of the movie yet is because so far it’s only been released in Liechtenstein and the Republic of Tuva, when a bowtie-wearing old coot of an usher aims his flashlight straight at our un-famous faces.
“I’m sorry, boys, those seats are reserved. I have to ask you to move.”
14.
On offer one evening: Night Vision, an indie feature about two Vietnam vets living on the fringes of Hoboken and insanity. In the pivotal scene Gus, one of the two vets, licks a Carvel ice cream cone while the other, Rufus, tortures and kills a social worker. Having disposed of her body in a garbage dumpster, they sit side by side on their crumbling Hoboken stoop, their expressions as droopy as the pizza slices they’re eating. Following a few dreary beats, Rufus turns to Gus and says: “What’s eating you?”
“I don’t know,” Gus replies. “I just feel empty.”
As the film played on, more and more people got up and left.
“Night soil is more like it,” muttered one disgruntled viewer on his way to the exit.
As the credits rolled, Dwaine jumped to his feet shouting, “Bravo! Bravissimo!” I stood and applauded myself, but only because Dwaine did, and because he nudged me with his elbow to do so. When it came to movies, I had learned long ago never, ever to argue with Dwaine.
15.
As we leave the hotel theater (bound for a night of sandy dreams), Dwaine falls into a deep silence. I’ve seen him fall mute like this twice before, after we watched The Deer Hunter and Dog Day Afternoon, movies that tore Dwaine up emotionally and left him bleeding, with silence the closest thing to a tourniquet.
The surf roars. The breeze spits up cottony flecks of foam.
Suddenly Dwaine grabs my hand and holds it. He does it nonchalantly, the way you might pick up a bright shell from the beach. I don’t say anything; I’m too surprised and embarrassed to speak, just as I was surprised and embarrassed that New Year’s Eve when he crawled into my bed stinking of asti spumante and with an impossible-to-hide hard-on. But then, after a while, it seems perfectly natural, the hand-holding, like we’ve been doing it forever, since we were five years old, like we were born to hold hands.
16.
We’ve walked about a quarter mile when Dwaine stops and starts to undress, handing me his cufflinks, his studs, his bow tie and suspenders, like I’m his goddamned valet. Then he drops the rest of his stuff and runs, plunging like a fullback into the surf, tackling the waves one by one, then paddling far beyond them, toward the lumpy horizon, adding his shape to the rest of those mysterious gray-blue shapes floating way out there.
17.
Afterwards, as we lie dozing, Dwaine talks in a whispered voice that mixes with the sounds of the surf about Night Vision and why he likes it so much, how it combines Scorsese’s street poetry with Peckinpah’s nihilism, Schlesinger’s satire, Terrence Malack’s starkness and Truffaut’s nursery school charm.
As I listen to his voice fade into snores I ask myself why on earth do I like this man so much? Is it that brooding whale of a forehead? Is it those heat-seeking missile eyes? Is it the Technicolor nightmares that haunt his sleep?
18.
We’re sunbathing in the cabaña the next morning when Lionel Duncan charges up to us, waving a fistful of forged room service chits.
“You stinking thieves! You snakes in the grass! I’ll have your balls boiled!”
“Pardon me,” says Dwaine, waving the King of Literary and Film Agents away. “You’re blocking my rays.”
Duncan proceeds to catalogue a series of bodily threats, several of which involve dismemberment by hired professionals, all of which Dwaine shakes off like dew from the lion’s mane. Emboldened by his effrontery, I rummage in my beach bag, find the Insultomatic, and, after some deliberation, press the blue button. This time Duncan is wise to me. He yanks my hand from the bag, exposing the device, and snatches it from my grip.
“Nice,” he says, dropping it to the cabaña deck, where he grinds it to bits with the heel of a white Bally. He storms off, only to return minutes later with a bevy of hotel security personnel, including Mr. Sombrero.
19.
We’re about to be given the heave-ho when a voice blending Popeye and Cary Grant intervenes. “These two gentlemen are with me,” says a stranger, handing Mr. Sombrero a crisp folded twenty. Mr. Sombrero in turn presents him with the balance due on Duncan’s tab, advancing a figure in excess of two hundred dollars.
“Charge it to my Festival tab,” says the stranger, waving his V.I.P. pass. “It’s the least these bastards can do for dragging me down to this sandy sanitarium.”
Placated for the time being, Duncan and the hotel security guards head back to their silos.
20.
The stranger looks familiar. Then I realize: he’s the star/writer/director/producer of Night Vision, the guy who played Gus. In real life he looks taller, gaunter, paler and balder than on screen. Even under the influence of the Miami sun his pale features look like a mortician has had something to do with them. He wears a Claddagh ring like Dwaine’s, but gold.
“Flynn.” He introduces himself backwards, like James Bond. “Archie Flynn. What brings you two to this sunny cemetery?”
“We came with Duncan,” I explain, nodding in the direction of my ex-boss’ departure. “We were two-thirds of his international press entourage.”
“Right, and I’m a secret agent.”
Flynn reaches into his bag, pulls out a toupee, slaps it on his head.
“Have you two had lunch?”
We shake our heads.
“Come on, then. My treat. It’s the least I can do for a standing ovation.”
21.
From the Fontainebleau lobby, amid bellhops in firing squad regalia and a swinging ’60s decor of woggles, boomerangs and beanpoles, the maître d’ escorts us to our table in the Cote d’Azur lounge. As soon as we’re seated, the sommelier, Clifton Webb, takes our drink orders. When Dwaine asks for water, he takes offence.
“Water?” The sommelier gestures with towel-draped arm toward the ubiquitous view. “Monsieur, there is water everywhere, why would anyone want to drink it?”
“Water,” Dwaine insists.
“It will grow fish in your belly! It is for those who have sinned!”
“I’ve sinned. Now bring me some goddamn water.”
“Your best bottle,” says Flynn.
22.
Over crabs parysis, trout amandine and veal cordon bleu Flynn fills us in on his past, how he first fell in love with American movies via Alan Ladd in Shane. “I wanted to be just like Ladd, but taller,” he tells us, explaining how he’d achieved half his wish, having sprouted to six-foot-four by his twentieth birthday, when a wealthy octogenarian he had been tending in a Galway nursing home went to her glory, leaving him enough money to go to America and pursue the other half.
“I became a citizen just in time to receive greetings from Uncle Sam.”
Unlike Dwaine who did two tours there, Flynn got no closer to Vietnam than Fort Dix, New Jersey, where (according to him) he caught his alopecia from a recycled army helmet (“My war wound,” he tells us, tapping his toupee). Flynn’s real war would be fought later in Hollywood, a war against the forces of stereotyping that saw him cast in dozens of bad-guy bit roles, his handsome Irish face ending up, more often than not, on the cutting room floor. Thirty-three years old (“like Jesus,” he says), two-thirds bald, totally typecast, he bought a bottle of scotch and carried it up into the Hollywood hills, intent on jumping off the fabled sign.
“Which letter?” asks Dwaine.
“H for Hell.”
“Just like Penny Entwistle!” I remark.
“So what happened?” says Dwaine.
“Obviously I didn’t jump. I had a better idea.” Flynn sips water, wipes thin Irish lips. “Flynn, you old fool, I said to myself, why not make your own damn blasted film? And that’s what I’ve done. Now all I need is a distribution deal, for which I must climb back into the belly of the beast.”
“Back to Hollywood?” says Dwaine.
“Precisely. Back to hell.”
“I know two guys who’d be glad to give you moral support,” says Dwaine, tossing a wink my way.
“Be careful what you wish for.” Flynn turns to Dwaine and prods his chest with a gaunt, stiff finger. “You think Vietnam was bad, eh? Oh, I know you were there; I’ve seen that look too many times before not to know where it comes from. Well trust me, friend, until you’ve done battle with the Victor Charlies of Sunset Boulevard you don’t know the meaning of war. Ambushes? Booby traps? Friendly fire? Hollywood’s got ’em all, and Walt Disney–the antichrist!
“Make no mistake: Hollywood is a cursing, merciless tyranny.”
23.
Dissolve to us barreling down I-95 in a stretch limo, blue sky above, blue water below, everything between a variation on pink. I’m behind the wheel, wearing the chauffeur’s cap, while the chauffeur rides in back with the others. They think it’s a gas, me up here driving, and I guess it is, especially since I don’t even have a driver’s license. We hop from club to club, all with names like Fifth Avenue, Central Park, California . . .
“Is it just me,” says Dwaine, “or does anyone else get the feeling that the locals would rather be elsewhere?”
At a club called Gracie Mansion we run into Duncan, burning us looks as we practice our bossa nova steps on two women named April and June (“How’s that for a couple of dates?”–Dwaine). The ladies are in a celebratory mood. They’ve just been hired as Playboy bunnies at the Miami Mansion. They tell us all about training week, about memorizing their liquor categories, learning bumper pool and the Bunny Dip and how to apply eyelashes and carry service trays in three inch stiletto heels, knowledge likely to serve them for decades. As interested as I am in their Playgirl pedigree (Will they someday be airbrushed, folded, stapled?), I’m far more intent on watching Dwaine flirt with them. I’ve never seen Dwaine flirt before; I’ve rarely, if ever, seen him interact with the opposite sex, though he seems to do so quite well, all bright smiles and dimples. While I twirl June he cuts the rug with April, doing a salsa dance. The club is warm. Under the shifting lights June’s cheeks glow with sweat. Unlike my feet, which never know what they’re supposed to do, Dwaine’s know exactly where to go, sliding as softly across the floor as disks on a shuffleboard court. As the music changes from salsa to disco, Nando, there with Duncan, joins us on the dance floor, a piping brunette having tapped him for a tango.
“I must go soon,” he shouts over his partner’s shoulder and the loud music.
“Why?”
“Duncan, dat maledetto, he want me to go to airport and photograph Brooke Shield.”
“Brooke Shields?” says June.
“The Brooke Shields?” says April.
“Oh please please please take us with you,” says June.
“I’ll give you all a ride if you do,” says April.
“She’s got a Porsche,” says June.
“We’ve never been around any real movie stars,” says April.
“Unless you count Dom Deluise,” says June.
“Which we don’t,” they both say.
24.
Somehow we squeeze into the back of April’s antique Porsche, equipped with Playboy metal can opener and tube radio. Nando rides up front on June’s lap. Miami rolls by in waves of stucco and neon. By the time we get to the airport (having stopped on the way to retrieve the Bolex from the Hotel Paradise safe), dawn glows as pink as the inside of a conch shell. Paparazzi swarm the arrivals terminal. We jam our way through the outer banks of media parasites to run headlong into Duncan, who asks us what the hell we’re doing there. “Our job,” says Dwaine, holding the Bolex high.
“What about those hookers?” says Duncan, indicating our dates.
“They’re not hookers, they’re Playboy bunnies,” I correct him.
25.
Brooke Shields arrives, flanked by her mother, her director and three bodyguards. She wears a flamingo-feathered gown and smiles for the cameras, her teeth slamming back the lights of two dozen flash units. With the Bolex on his shoulder, Dwaine pushes his way toward her and starts filming. Nando, eager to prove to the world that he’s more than just Lionel Duncan’s sad Milanese flunky, hops on and rides my shoulders piggyback. He flashes away joyously, rapturously–until his Nikon jams.
“Porca miseria!” he says, his fingers squirming like worms, trying to unjam it. Meanwhile Dwaine has vaulted over the security cordon to film within inches of the pert starlet’s eyes. He keeps filming as Brooke Shields’ bodyguards hustle her into a waiting Lincoln.
“Don’t say I never gave you anything,” says Dwaine, handing Duncan the exposed reel.
26.
I awaken to a cubist painting of body parts–arms, legs, bellies–all batter-dipped and basted with beach sand. Whose foot is that? Whose arm? Whose ass? I take a quick inventory of my surroundings. No hotels in sight, no landmarks of any kind other than a distant hemorrhoid-shaped water tower and a forbidding concrete structure that looks like the pillbox in The Guns of Navarrone. Miami is gone, washed away by a tidal wave.
Somewhere in this tangle Dwaine lies with me. I harbor distinct memories of sexual sighs blending with the sighs of surf. Dwaine has his arm around April’s neck. A smile bends his lips. I smile, too, as satisfied by his lovemaking as with my own.
Dwaine snores, twitches, coughs in his sleep. The surf makes a hushed sound like the murmurings of a movie audience. A smell of ozone hangs in the sea breeze. I feel us both in Vietnam, the beach our foxhole, flashes of distant heat lightning mortar fire.
The Shore Patrol helicopter churns its way toward us up the shore. I brace for the bright tungsten beam, the sandstorm, the loudspeaker imperative, Dwaine’s night-shattering scream. Helicopters and blood: they’re the stuff of Dwaine’s dreams.
The helicopter keeps flying. It doesn’t stop.
27.
A thundershower erupts. Ominous clouds darken hotel facades. Raindrops pock dunes, bounce off cabaña chair cushions. After the storm has blown out to sea a double rainbow forms, arcing over the horizon. We’ve made up our minds, Dwaine and I: tomorrow morning we’re getting on a plane. There’s nothing left for us down here in sunny Florida, only cocktails, melanomas, and death.
There’s one problem, though. Nando. He can’t leave. Duncan is holding his plane ticket hostage.
“Please no leave me here,” he pleads with us. “I no want to die in Florida. Who will bring me flower if I die?”
28.
Swipe-cut to all of us making our way up a floodlit pier to the Wet Dream, a seventy-eight foot twin-diesel-powered floating dildo, her fiberglass hull atwinkle with waterborne moonlight. Reggae music braids dreadlocks into the marijuana-scented dusk.
Halfway up the dock a security guard checks Archie’s credentials. He tells the guard that we’re his guests. Shoulder to shoulder (Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and those other two guys in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral) we head for the gangplank.
29.
Dissolve to a medium shot of the party in full swing. Men in breezy linen blazers worn over pressed and laundered tee shirts, women in skimpy cocktail dresses with shoelace straps. Close-ups of cigarette ashes being flicked into canapé and oyster shells. Quick-cuts of Archie working the tennis set on the forepeak, Nando frolicking with a pair of Cosmo-cover redheads on the poop deck, April, June and I bending over the starboard bow to watch a pod of dolphins leap by. Dwaine nowhere to be seen. Duncan casts us withering glances from amidships, Nando’s ticket held hostage in his tuxedo pocket.
30.
At midnight, on cue, Nando wades into Duncan, demanding his ticket, which Duncan predictably refuses to surrender, whereupon Nando launches into a feverish tenor recitativo in thick Milanese dialect, of which Duncan understands not a jot.
Which is where I come in.
“He says,” I translate, “give me my airline ticket, or else.”
“Or else what?” says Duncan.
“This!” Dwaine swoops down from the quarterdeck, grabs Duncan around the waist. Archie takes one leg, I take the other. Together we throw the son of a bitch overboard. But not before rescuing Nando’s airline ticket from his pocket.
31.
Cross-fade to Don Knotts, Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster hightailing it down the long floodlit pier. Don Knotts brings up the rear, his Nikon held high over his head, yelling: “I got peecture! I got peecture!”
Peter Selgin’s stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Missouri Review, Boulevard, and Best American Essays 2006. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.