B008J4PNHE EBOK (11 page)

On an academic level, Sam would have been curious to observe Brooks using the flatbed, whereon an editor cut the actual celluloid. While this had been the mechanism for film editing across the vast majority of the medium’s history, with the advent of digital, it was suddenly fascinatingly barbaric. Brooks, however, kept the closet locked.

Though the rumors that Olivia had relayed about Brooks’s activities during the shutdown—aka
Brooks Hartwig, Jr.’s, Day Off
—did temper his interest. Sam surmised that it was something along the lines of a snuff movie starring marshmallow Peeps. With his iffy health, he didn’t need the nightmares.

“It’s coming along, I guess. It’s a movie, anyhow,” said Sam. He yawned. It was an evening a few days after the wrap.

“Yeah. Yay, right? You’re happy, right?”

“Uh-huh. I’ve got a big yay in my pants all day long, Brooks. I’m just trying to get over this mono.”

“Right, right.” The AD wet his chapped lips, grinned. Both of his eyelids were twitching slightly.

The situation with Brooks nibbled around the fringes of Sam’s conscience. Recently, as different expenses had come home to roost—rental bills, developing fees, transfer fees, and storage fees—Brooks had, with nary a word of complaint, stepped in to pay. The four days of torrential rain had sent the production plowing into the red, and there had been no other choice. This last-minute outlay, added to what the AD had already invested, came to a number that made Sam tense.

Not for the first time, he found himself wishing that he liked the AD more. Then again, if he had, he would not have been able to make the movie he wanted. If Brooks had been his friend, or hadn’t been so awkward or so uniquely irritating, Sam couldn’t have made such good use of him. Maybe what Anthony had said was true: maybe Sam had gone over the top. But he had needed what he had needed. Given a chance to do it again, Sam thought he would do it the same way.

Except that Brooks wasn’t right. Sam didn’t want to think about that, but sometimes it sneaked up on him. He saw things that other people didn’t see. To be driven and tough was one thing; to continually leverage a person like Brooks Hartwig, Jr., was perhaps another.

The AD began to rub his hands together furiously. His right eyelid abruptly jerked upward, sharply enough to appear painful, as if an invisible fishhook had caught it on a line and an invisible fisherman was reeling him in.

“Brooks,” said Sam. “Come on, man.”

“I can’t help it.”

“I really am going to pay you back,” Sam said.

The AD’s mouth curled down, and he shook his head in a childish, overemphatic way that caused his bangs to flop. “No, no.”

“Yes,” said Sam. “Yes, yes.”

“But you’ve already paid me. In education, right? I’ve learned so much. We’re square. We’re completely square. Right?” Brooks put his hand on the doorknob of the flatbed closet, took it off, put it on, took it off, giggled.

“Okay, Brooks.” He didn’t give a shit what Brooks said; Sam was paying him back. “Don’t kill yourself staying up all night.”

Upstairs, outside, in the gloaming, prepubescent dancers loitered on
the stone steps. They were drinking viridescent energy drinks from tall, unlabeled plastic bottles. One of the girls wrinkled her nose at Sam. “Who are you, anyway?” she asked. The other little ballerinas broke into wild peals of laughter.

“Sam,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “The Famous Sam. That explains everything.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

Twice, Sam watched the assembly. Both viewings took place in the editing room, at the computer station, on the last day of August. On the following afternoon, he was scheduled to screen
Who We Are
for Bummer City.

The first time he was alone. The experience left him nauseated.

He found himself mouthing the lines, and it made him feel like everyone who watched it would do the same thing, because it was all so obvious. In one scene, Linc had a huge, glistening booger in his left nostril, and Sam couldn’t conceive of how they could ever be able to afford to digitally remove the huge, glistening booger, and they had to keep the scene, because the scene was essential, and Linc had a huge, glistening booger in every take. Lots of people wouldn’t have noticed, but to Sam, Linc’s huge, glistening booger was a booger eclipse that blotted out everything else on the screen. More generally, the visual conceit of the film—the high-speed changes to the characters’ appearances, their hair and their clothes—was not always as successful as he had anticipated. Some of the wigs were fine. Some of the other wigs resembled, well, wigs. Some of the hair extensions were fine. Some of the hair extensions looked like they were attacking the rest of the person’s hair. Every male in the cast had, at some point in the story, developed bizarre facial hair, a neck beard or a Confederate mustache or whatever. Why had he acquiesced to that? Was the movie supposed to be set at Russell College or Sasquatch College? The temporary sound track—which Sam had harvested from an award-winning foreign film about a man who is paralyzed in a freak accident, becomes evil and insane, and tortures his sweet wife by demanding that she fuck strangers—suddenly seemed, like the award-winning movie itself, grotesquely unambiguous. Sam didn’t know what he’d been thinking. Up until that morning, he had esteemed the award-winning foreign film far above the rest of contemporary cinema, and considered himself to be in total accord with its
damned representations of love and faith. Now, because of the sound track, the award-winning foreign film seemed superimposed over
Who We Are,
and it threw a pall over what was already palled, so you had two palls, and it was a tremendous downer.
Who We Are
was intended to be downbeat, but it wasn’t supposed to be paraplegic-madman-torments-his-saintly-wife-to-death downbeat.

These issues were piled onto the types of failings expected of an early cut: the occasional yellowish tint where the color-correction guy at the lab had fucked off, which gave scenes a jaundiced complexion; the imperfections in the location sound that muddied dialogue in some places, and in others, because the crummy mikes had picked up nothing from the background—no wind, no footsteps, etc.—created the impression that the actors were performing inside an invisible bubble; and several viscous passages, places where Sam’s efforts to clarify the narrative needed refining.

There was a pervasive stiltedness that he had never noticed. The actors played everything on edge, as Sam had written and directed them to do. They roamed around, constantly testing the edges of the frame; they kicked furniture; the female actors all cried at least once; and the male actors, in their quieter moments, with their abrupt, wiry beards, speaking about their broken families and their no-future hometowns, came off more like rambling drunks than conflicted college students. The unrelenting force was numbing.

It left Sam to contemplate the unnerving prospect that Booth’s initial concern might have been valid. Did the lives of those young, comparatively blessed people warrant such a grave attitude? In a way, didn’t the fact that he himself—whose greatest ongoing problem was that his father was a buffoon—managed to make the movie at all, to pour thousands of dollars of other people’s money into a fantasy, invalidate the story’s concerns? The ozone layer was disintegrating. Animals were wandering out of the last woods to be flattened by Mack trucks. People blew themselves up to kill other people. Israel, Palestine, genital cutting, missing nuclear arsenals, HIV, the World Trade Center, secret wars.

Sam realized that he was a despicable person.

By the time the computer screen faded to black, he was doubled over in the office chair with a trash can wedged between his shoes. His cell phone rang.

His godfather, Tom Ritts, and his nine-year-old half sister, Mina
Whipple-Dolan, were at the train station. Tom had traveled south from Hasbrouck to Penn Station to meet Mina, then accompanied her north to the college so she could visit her big brother, and so Tom could view the rough cut of
Who We Are
.

On a cold but eye-wateringly sunny Saturday morning in the winter of 1989, Sam Dolan was alert for trouble. As the F train shuddered along the elevated tracks into the borough of Brooklyn, he sat on a vibrating plastic bench and squeezed his hands together. His father loomed above him, gripping a crossbar, grinning around at all the other passengers. Booth’s excitement put the boy on edge. They were on their way to visit Orson Welles’s nose.

 ■ ■ ■ 

The boy, aged ten, had long ago come to regard his father as a cause of some concern, and that day’s journey south from Hasbrouck to Brooklyn’s Museum of Cinema Arts seemed tailor-made for mortification. Booth was at his worst in public.

When Booth spoke, his voice had a way of expanding to fill every inch of available space, even if that space was a parking lot; it wasn’t a voice, it was a Voice, like the everywhere-at-once voice that aliens broadcast from their spaceships in movies when they threaten to vaporize the United States. Any person within cannon range could hear it when his father said, “Samuel, will you stand by here, or would you prefer to accompany me to the pissoir?”

At six feet six and approximately two hundred and fifty pounds, Booth didn’t blend in anyway. Sam’s father didn’t walk; he waded, upper body tilted five degrees south of perpendicular, shoulders leading to split through gales no one else could feel.

But to Sam, an unassuming boy genuinely comfortable only in the company of his mother, his plastic figurines, or the dead—there happened to be a very pleasant graveyard up the street from his house—the noise and size of his father were not the worst of it. They were, if anything, merely aggravating factors to the real problem, which was that Booth was so weird.

 ■ ■ ■ 

The train swept into a curve, and everyone shuffled two steps to the left. A dollish, steel-haired man in a neat brown suit and two-tone shoes lost his balance and stumbled into Booth’s gut and bounced off. Booth embraced him in a one-armed hug before he could fall. “Steady, young fellow. I’ve got you.”

“Oh, thanks you,” said the dollish man, regaining his feet. “Thanks you, mister.”

“You are perfectly welcome!” Booth reached out and straightened the man’s lapel. “I’m accompanying my son to see Orson Welles’s nose!” He swung a massive bearded smile onto Sam a moment before the boy could make a point of peering intently to the right, down the subway car, where a lady sat slumped against the wall, asleep inside a tall fur hat.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” said the dollish man.

“They got the man’s nose?” This question came from a disbelieving woman in a silver jacket, holding on to the crossbar a few steps down the car. “How’s that?”

Booth’s chuckle pealed off the steel walls of the car. “It is not Orson Welles’s actual nose, I assure you, madam. It’s just a mold. Welles would have filled it with latex in order to create a theatrical nose, like this—” Booth plowed a hand into his trouser pocket and came out with a yellowish blob. He quickly massaged the prosthetic back into shape and held it for the woman to see—bridge, tip, nostrils.

“You always carry a nose in your pocket?” she asked.

“Yes.” Booth drew back slightly. “Don’t you?”

A dozen or more of the train’s riders were laughing as they went rollicking into another curve.

Sam thought he could feel his soul clenching up, like toes in a pair of cold, wet socks.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Although his parents were married, the arrangement was mysterious. The reasons were twofold: first, Booth was almost never around, kept away in California by his work as an actor for weeks and sometimes months at a spell; and second, Allie was an adult, a normal person who ran a normal business, who could cook things besides pancakes and fried baloney sandwiches, who did not keep fake noses on her person
or use the term “pissoir.” That is to say, she was nothing like Booth, and Booth was nothing like her, but they claimed to love each other, and Sam was the proof.

The boy regarded Allie as his parent, and Booth as his . . . something he couldn’t put his finger on. It bothered Sam, the lack of a word that could explain Booth.

Unlike most fathers, who maintained entire, cranky rule books about chores and grades and not touching the tools in the garage, Booth had only one unbreakable commandment:
Thou shalt not speak during the movies
. (“You cannot watch the movie if you are talking, Samuel. I cannot watch the movie if you are talking. Let your voice be heard only if you are definitively ill. Not if you are feeling a bit peaked. I mean, if you are pervasively ill, on the precipice of vomiting or pants shitting. If this is the case, you may speak.”) What Booth lacked in rules, he made up for in preferences, preferences that he supported with on-the-spot fictions that were frequently bizarre and yet, to a person of Sam’s overcast nature, often painfully compelling.

When Sam was five, Booth encouraged him to stop slamming the car door by explaining that cars had feelings, and the oil stains on the driveway were car tears. Mess demons gained entry to the human world through portals made of dirty laundry, Booth informed Sam at age six. Later, his father explained to him that while the sugar in Mountain Dew was bad for eight-year-old Sam’s teeth, a far greater danger lay in the drink’s main chemical compound, P-S 7—Penis-Shrink Number Seven.

“But you drink it,” Sam protested. The lecture had been precipitated by a request for a sip from Booth’s can of said beverage.

“That’s because it’s too late for me, Samuel. The damage has been done.” Booth popped the tab and swigged. He coughed a few times. “Long before the deleterious effects of P-S 7 were made public, my penis had already dwindled to the size of a pencil eraser. Let it never be said, my boy, that deliciousness is not without its costs.”

It didn’t matter that Sam’s relationship to his own penis was at that time strictly utilitarian; he sensed the organ’s long-range significance and immediately went Mountain Dew–cold turkey. Years after determining that P-S 7 was a figment of Booth’s imagination, he still had not
recovered his taste for Mountain Dew. He continued to endure prickles of empathy toward cars on oily patches of asphalt. The sight of scattered laundry inflicted him with a sense of foreboding.