Movie Stars Page 8

  “That’s precisely what I’m doing,” said Tom. “What makes you think I’m doing otherwise?”

  “I raised you.”

  “Well, what on earth is that supposed to mean?” Tom put down the hook.

  “Are you mad at me?” said Mrs. Wellingham.

  “No. This happens to be exhausting. My wrist hurts. I believe the cap is defective.”

  “They wouldn’t put a defective cap in the box.”

  “Is the cap supposed to have two layers?” said Tom. “It seems to have two layers. I don’t believe the holes have been properly punched through the bottom layer.”

  “That’s an illusion,” said Mrs. Wellingham. “They have to make it hard for the gunk to soak through. Otherwise, there would be no precision. Your hair would be one big mess.”

  She picked up the hook and started pulling strands of her hair through the holes.

  “What are you doing?” said Tom.

  “I don’t mind. It’s not something you’re used to. I understand. You’ve never frosted Sam’s hair? I think she’d look darling with frosted hair. She and I could be twins!”

  “Do you want a mirror? You’re getting some of the holes without circles around them,” said Tom.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Mrs. Wellingham. “Your new job is to tell me stories.”

  Tom told how he got his job almost by accident. Then he did the one about the day of orientation. They had been working right through lunch when one poor fellow brought a bottle of King Kevin into the auditorium with his sandwich. The instructor stopped in her tracks. The guy had purchased it from a vending machine on the very floor. Mugsy was leasing the building at the time, and they shared it with another corporation. In those days, the stocking of vending machines had been a lax industry. Mugsy had pioneered the stricter requirements that led to the advent of modern automated retail distribution branding. You wouldn’t dream of finding a Pepsi casually stocked in the same machine with a Coca-Cola product, would you? Mugsy’s innovation in that area had led the way, and it was probably all thanks to that poor dumb boob who had brought the King Kevin into orientation.

  “And that poor dumb boob was me,” Tom finished, as he always did.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” said Mrs. Wellingham. “Let’s just frost what we’ve got. Why don’t you mix up the gunk? I’ll keep pulling my hair through the holes until you’re done.”

  Tom put on the plastic gloves. He took the two gunk packets over to the sink and mixed the contents in a little plastic tub. The fumes stung his eyes.

  “It stinks of brimstone!” said Tom.

  “It hardly smells at all,” said Mrs. Wellingham. “They’ve made great improvements over the years. It doesn’t smell nearly as terrible as a permanent wave.”

  When the gunk was ready to go, Tom came over and rubbed it on his mother’s head. First he used the little spatula on the opposite end from the hook, as was illustrated on the instruction sheet, but it proved awkward, so he switched to a manual procedure with his gloved hands. He told his mother about all the foreign objects that had been found in bottles of Mugsy over the years, and the special division of the company that existed solely to investigate all such claims. He told of some celebrated cases in which fraud was proven, and some that turned out to be legitimate, such as the six baby opossums, and how the company had successfully hushed it up while still doing right by all afflicted parties, save for the opossums. He told her about all the trouble that Mugsy had been in with Third World countries. It was politically incorrect to sell a vacuous food item where people were starving to death. So Mugsy had come up with Mighty Mugsy Hercules, a beverage they sold only in Africa. A man could live on six bottles of Mighty Mugsy Hercules a day, and live quite comfortably—and get all his nutritional requirements, by the way. One day Tom’s friend Danny had brought a bottle of Mighty Mugsy Hercules into the office and asked Tom to have a sip. It was terrible!

  That was the funny part of the story, but no reaction was forthcoming. His mother had fallen fast asleep listening to the stories she had claimed to want to hear.

  Tom didn’t take it personally. He went into the pantry and got his father’s wine. The bottle was almost full. Tom chose a big water glass from the drainer.

  He walked into the dark, mysterious dining room and sat at the table. Things glinted at him from a china cabinet in the dark.

  His father had always been a teetotaler, but after his friend Marty suffered a stroke, Mr. Wellingham Sr. had begun having a glass of wine every night, the way the medical community advised.

  Tom drank the wine and it made him think of his conception. The terrible honeymoon night of Mr. and Mrs. Wellingham was a traditional family tale. They had gotten into an argument because Mr. Wellingham was driving through town trying to get the car up on its two left wheels. Later Mrs. Wellingham had stormed out of the room and into the hotel bar, where she discovered a drink called the Tom Collins. It tasted like lemonade. Mrs. Wellingham had never had a drink up until that point, when she had ten of them. Had his mother even been conscious during Tom’s conception? His father would have been cold sober. This was implication of the story that no one seemed to consider amid the merriment of the Thanksgiving table.

  Once he had been at a party with Sam when one of her female friends started going on and on about her mother’s problems with vaginal dryness. What kind of conversation was that? Tom stood there acting as if it were normal. Where did the girl get such information? From her own mother? Dear, dear.

  “I hate my mother,” Sam had contributed at that time.

  He tried calling Sam. She didn’t answer. He had seen her in the act of not answering her phone when people called, people she found distasteful.

  Once Barry Wick had asked Tom where he was from, and Tom had told him. Then Barry Wick said, “Wow. That sounds real huckleberry.”

  What did that mean? It seemed designed to make Tom feel like a fool. Tom didn’t know what to say. Barry Wick had a nice smile on his face. Was it a friendly remark?

  There was an undertone of hostility, Tom thought, but he couldn’t be sure. He still considered it from time to time. It occurred to him that maybe it was something Barry Wick had been saving up to say for a long time, a new piece of slang he had overheard or invented, a line he wanted to try out, and Tom had provided him with a good opportunity. If true, this theory would make Barry Wick a very shallow person, more concerned with how he came off in other people’s eyes than with any real content of his own soul.

  What about the time Sam had hiked her skirt and peed in a parking garage? At the time it had seemed bold. You never think about how much a person pees at one time until you see it spread out on the concrete. It looked like a map of North America. What had Tom found so commendable? Sam and her friends had made a cultish virtue of behaving like infants.

  In their movies, Sam and her friends had a lot of dialogue about how life was about to change because they were turning twenty-four or something. One day they would be twenty-seven. They shook their heads at the thought. In Sam’s movies, every character was worried about turning twenty-seven. Then they stripped off their clothes.

  Often there was a foolish character, a boss or some other authority figure, played by a young man of thirty or so—an ancient. He told boring stories. He talked and talked and the protagonists rolled their eyes behind his back or dozed off.

  A sudden, vivid memory was triggered. Tom couldn’t make a conscious connection, but there it was, from back when he had first joined the Mugsy Beverage family, oh my gosh, twenty-five years ago. He had been considerably younger than Sam was now, but with so much more responsibility.

  His first convention. New Orleans. Everyone was having vodka drinks and rice wine and malt liquor and BC Powder and something called a hurricane that tasted like fruit punch. Everyone was combining each of these things all at once. The drunken mother of one of his coworkers showed up, which didn’t seem entirely professional. She appeared to be interested only in the
free food. The free food was all she could talk about until she grabbed Tom and said, “Do you know who you look like?”

  “No, ma’am,” said Tom.

  “You look like that little squirt on that famous TV show,” said the drunken mother of Tom’s coworker.

  There were a lot of people standing around, listening. Tom tried to think of something smart to say but he was only a young man.

  “Thanks, I guess,” he said.

  “No, it’s a compliment,” said the woman. “He’s going to make a cute little man when he grows up. But your parents didn’t do you any favors when they didn’t have your teeth fixed.”

  If Tom’s mother had been there, she would have said something quiet and gracious, and her simple, nonjudgmental tone would have made the other woman ashamed.

  Tom was glad he had a nice mother.

  Over the years, the incident would pop into his head and he would try to think of what he should have said instead of standing there with egg on his face. The best he had come up with so far was, “At least I’m not an old drunken slattern.”

  Sometimes he even let himself think that maybe the old drunk had a point. Why hadn’t they done something about his awful teeth? Now he wore the braces that Sam had talked him into. They hurt all the time.

  Tom finished the wine. He took off his shoes and padded through the kitchen, where his mother was still nodding on the tall stool at the counter. It didn’t look safe, quite, but he wasn’t sure what he could do about it. He couldn’t pick up his own mother and carry her to bed! There were two more bottles at the back of the pantry. Terrible stuff. Wine from Oklahoma. He opened one of the bottles and drank a good bit of it in the guest bedroom, where he stared at the flatscreen TV, which, as he could plainly see, had never been taken out of the box. Eventually, he passed out.

  Tom was shaken awake by his father, a big man with familiar hands.

  “What have I come home to?” Tom’s father said.

  Tom could hear his mother crying in the other room.

  “We’re taking your mother to the emergency room,” said Tom’s father. He pulled Tom to his feet.

  Tom lay in the backseat with the back of his hand against his slick forehead, blearily watching the streetlights’ swoop, and the moon, which seemed to stay in the same place as his father swept through the traffic, an expert. His mother had stopped crying so much about the chemical burns on her scalp and spoke with some courage about what fun it would be to buy a hat.

  Your Cat Can Be a Movie Star!

  NO MATTER HOW I SEARCH MY MEMORY, I CANNOT RECALL WHEN Sandy Baker Jr., bartender at the Green Bear, first mentioned in passing that his cousin in Hollywood was a high-level “animal wrangler”—a gruesome phrase for a noble profession!

  Have you ever enjoyed the sight of a chimpanzee on roller skates and wearing human clothing in a motion picture? Perhaps the chimp has donned a beanie as well, and the brightly hued plastic propeller on top spins around and around as he skates merrily along.

  You would be a heinous prevaricator of the highest order or else a withered misanthrope with a heart of stone were you not moved to the loftiest realms of entertainment by such a sighting of the playful primate in question. It is a little known fact I read in a magazine or saw on TV that Clint Eastwood’s highest-grossing film is not one of his brooding contemplations on the nature of violence and the decay of the body, but the one with the orangutan who gave everybody the finger. It is a mark of the popularity of such films that I recall the orangutan’s name as Clyde, whereas my brain has retained no memory whatsoever of the name given to Clint Eastwood’s character who liked to hang around with Clyde.

  Now, how do you think the chimpanzee (or in Clint Eastwood’s case, orangutan) who has given you so much joy got to work that day? Did he ride the bus? It is highly unlikely, though I have no doubt a chimpanzee could be taught to count out correct change for bus fare.

  You guessed it! Mr. Buttons (for that is what we will call our hypothetical chimp “chum”) arrived to the set right on time, his grateful belly freshly filled with ripe bananas, thanks to the tireless efforts of an animal wrangler.

  That’s all well and good for the ape family, comes the logical rejoinder. I imagine an ape or a monkey could be a real handful. But what about the spider in Annie Hall? They probably just found a spider walking around on the ground.

  Wrong again, on several counts. First of all, there is no spider in Annie Hall. I believe you are referring to the eminently touching scene in which Diane Keaton would like to get back together with Woody Allen after a breakup. She calls him on the phone, weeping, and tells him about a large spider in the bathroom. An amusing scene follows in which an outmatched Woody Allen, armed with a tennis racquet, attempts to vanquish said spider, which he describes as being “as big as a Buick,” using the humorous methodology of hyperbolical speech. The spider, however, is never seen. Characteristic of Woody Allen’s filming techniques, Mr. Allen is visible only in part through a doorway, his frantic, half-obscured motions indicating his mammoth struggle with his arachnid foe, probably to save money on animal wranglers. For yes, a spider would have required a spider wrangler, as amazing as that may sound.

  In Europe there are no animal wranglers, which is why every European movie has a scene that starts with a live duck getting its head chopped off. They don’t build up to it with some dramatic music that goes dum-dum-DUM. There might be a couple smooching or some people walking in a field, then BANG! A duck getting its head chopped off.

  There is a reason no one wants to know “how the sausage is made.” How the sausage is made is terrible.

  Let’s get back to this spider for a minute, you may understandably insist. It concerns me that an animal can be implied in a movie. How do I know that Hollywood will make room for my cat, whom I wish to turn into a movie star, if they are so big on leaving everything to the imagination? In fact, isn’t the pioneering 1940s horror movie named after cats, Cat People, all about what is left off the screen, in the darkness of the viewer’s imagination?

  Fair enough! But there is good news concerning your cat’s movie star potential. For you see, a cat is often used as a substitute for the darker forces being explored. In other words, you can imply a spider, but a cat is the implication, and therefore cannot in itself be implied. Is there a murderer lurking about? Then certainly a cat will knock over a garbage can and give everyone a scare. This happens in Pickup on South Street and numerous other films. Even in Cat People, which you mention, an innocent kitten serves as visual counterpoint to the mysterious and otherworldly “Cat Lady,” who is never exactly seen except in her sultry and all-too-delectably-human form. Did you know that actress dated George Gershwin? He was a lucky guy! Until he died of an agonizing brain tumor just at the prime of his young life.

  Movies would be nothing without cats, whereas spiders (with the notable exception of Kingdom of the Spiders) are almost wholly dispensable. Even the greatest movie spider of all is never seen. Do you recall, in Through a Glass Darkly, when Ingmar Bergman’s heroine reveals that God crawled on her face and He was a horrible cold spider? Of course you do! Well, we never saw that spider, did we? To see it would have defeated the point. There is no way any individual spider is going to become a movie star.

  Most of my conversations with Sandy Baker Jr. on this admittedly inexhaustible subject must have occurred at some point in my enjoyment of the fruits of his labors as a bartender. Nor was the relative viability of various animals breaking into the film industry the only subject upon which he proved to be a perceptive and appreciative sounding board. I recall telling him about my idea for a children’s book about Scriabin. I imagine the conversation may have gone like this:

  “Who’s this Scriabin character?”

  “As a young boy he used to kiss and hug his piano.”

  “If you say so.”

  “He was a visionary composer who wanted to bring about the end of society with his cataclysmic music.”

  “How’d t
hat work out?”

  “Before he could finish, he picked at a pimple on his face and the next thing you know he was dead of gangrene.”

  Sandy took to calling me “The Old Idea Man,” and hinted that he, by contrast, was a man of action. He put such wild things in the air as the veiled suggestion that he had once had to eat part of his own body to survive.

  Well, this guy is obviously full of beans, comes the swift judgment.

  You didn’t know him, with his compelling line of talk and wet, hypnotic eyes.

  No, he was no buttoned-down milquetoast, scared of braggadocio. Is that what you want in an advocate? I knew from the start that Sandy Baker Jr. was a volatile type, the sort of person who in the worst-case scenario becomes a petty demagogue or tells his followers to eat poison so the UFOs can come get them. I was warned about him.

  As may be imagined, the old farmer who frequented the Green Bear tavern was stoic and in tune with the cycles of nature. Naturally, he was wary of people from the “me generation” or “generation X” or the “flower people” or “young rowdies” or “potheads” or whatever it was that Sandy Baker Jr. apparently represented to him. I should have guessed as much. I suppose I was fooled by my own image of the bar as an oasis full of the cheerful barbs characteristic of masculinity as it is practiced in the United States and on the classic sitcom Cheers. It is instructive to consider how many times the character Cliff Clavin would have committed suicide in real life had he been subject to such bullying as he endured on that show.

  One evening I took my customary walk to the bar a little later than usual. As I recall, twilight was in the air and the weather was cooling nicely. My wife was out of town for work and I felt some mild and pleasant sense of liberty.

  A stranger (to me) was tending bar, a gruff bald man replete with misshapen teeth in sore need of a dentifrice. Some younger people were milling about, a few in lab coats, refugees from the local chemical plant. Sometimes a familiar place can seem like a different world.