Flicker (29 page)

“What point?”

“About the
evilness,
like I told you.” He had, of course, told me no such thing. Seeing me draw a blank, he sought to elucidate, enunciating with a beat between every word. “They—wanted—to—prove—about—the—evilness.” And beyond that cryptically ominous pronouncement Zip wouldn't budge. When I tried to draw him out, he waved me off grumpily. “Are we gonna watch this movie or not?” was all he would say. So we settled back to watch our second feature of the afternoon.

Phantom of Murderers' Row
was a grade-Z job Castle had churned out for Republic studios, once again under his pseudonym Maurice Roche. This movie, like a few others he had done, was also passing under an alias. Its original title was
Bum Rap,
the film Joshua Sloan had called “a true stinker” in one of his letters to Ira Goldstein. I'd sat through the film three times with Zip, finally deciding that Sloan's harsh opinion of it was right. The movie had only one thing to offer and that came at the very end: an execution scene that managed to wring more sickly terror out of the electric chair than any prison flick I'd ever seen. Paunchy, sourpussed old Barton MacLane, walking the last mile, is lacerated by shadows every step of the way until the image of the chair itself falls across him—his chest, his brow, his cheek—like the devil's own brand burning his guilt into his hide. He
wilts under the condemnation, falling to his knees, shrinking to the size of an insect as the chair, in several whiplash-quick cuts, swells into a tortuous mass of angles, a veritable alphabet of despair. As in so many Castle films, that one sequence—perhaps two minutes long—imprints itself more deeply on the mind than a dozen other films costing twenty times the money. At the picture's end, I found myself holding my breath. As was Zip. Or so I thought.

I'd become so accustomed to hearing the broken rhythm of Zip's lungs as they hitched and faltered beside me in the dark, that the night he stopped breathing for good, I didn't notice at all. Not until the movie ended and Yoshi brought up the lights. When I turned to Zip, I found him slumped in his chair, his face as gray as the ash drooping from the cigarette that had gone dead in his lips. His eyes were still staring out at the screen, seeing nothing. The last glimmer of light they had witnessed in this world was an image from a Max Castle film. Perhaps Zip would have wanted it that way, but I could think of nothing in
Phantom of Murderers' Row
that would offer a cheering segue into the afterlife. I reached over to feel for his pulse and found his hand already cold. Stepping quietly as if I might wake him, I slipped away into the projection booth and told Yoshi he'd best call an ambulance. He quickly bustled off toward Zip's chair to check for himself. I heard him let out a long, slow moan.

Meanwhile, I went in search of Franny and found her in the cabana stretched out asleep, snoring heavily, a copy
of The National Enquirer
spread across her stomach, a bottle of whiskey and a half-filled glass on the floor beside her. I bent to whisper her name at her ear and, when she woke, led her quickly away upstairs to the bedroom we hadn't used in the last two weeks. I wasn't sure I wanted to do more than hold her close and tell her about Zip as unjarringly as possible. But Franny was easily aroused, and I let her feelings run their course for what I knew would be our last time together. By now, she was no longer the reincarnated ghost of Nylana, but poor Franny herself, one of Hollywood's lesser meteors, long since burned to cold cinders in the dark night of neglect that has devoured many a brighter star.

When we'd finished, I hugged her to me until I could hear the wail of the ambulance siren in the distance. Then I told her about Zip. She took it bravely like bad news long expected, simply wilting in my embrace and letting quiet tears come. “He had a heart of gold,” was all I heard her say.

Once or twice in the course of our last relatively friendly month
together, I'd gotten up the nerve to tell Zip that he ought to give some thought to contributing his film collection to an archive … someday. He was weakening so steadily that I hesitated to talk about the matter in terms of wills or bequests, but he knew what I had in mind. “Don't you worry,” he answered. “I got that all taken care of.”

“Good,” I said. But what did he have planned? “There's a fine archive at UCLA,” I suggested. “They'd love to have the films.”

“Sure, sure. And you know who else would love to have 'em? Them goddam orphans.”

“Would they?”

“Damn right they would. But I ain't lettin' them lay their hands on Max's pictures, you can be sure of that.”

“Well, if you put your collection in an archive, then you could be sure … ”

Zip cut me off sharply. “I told you—it's all taken care of.”

That was as far as I'd gotten in the week before he died. Afterward, I wanted a decent interval to pass before I raised the matter with Franny. In the meantime, there was Zip's funeral to get through. Franny seemed to have that well under control. Zip's death had hardly taken her by surprise; she'd been watching its steady approach for some fifteen years.

The day after Zip's death, she called to say she was holding a small ceremony that weekend and would I please come with Clare and Sharkey. I expected we'd gather in a local funeral home, but the place she named was in the desert near Barstow. “Why there?” I asked. She told me that Zip owned a piece of land; it was where his mother had been laid to rest after living out her last few years with Zip. He wanted the same for himself.

The trip was a three-hour drive, the last fifty miles of it a hard trek over ungraded Mojave roads. The land Zip owned turned out to be an undeveloped stretch of scrub desert marked only by remnants of wire fence and a Private Property sign. Most of the surrounding country was posted as an air-force gunnery range. It was the sort of area where people abandoned old cars. A few hundred yards beyond the boundary of Zip's land, near a clump of creosote bushes, were some mobile homes and a few shacks. I couldn't see that the place had any use except as a grave site. Maybe that was all Zip ever had in mind.

When we arrived, there were a few cars on the lot, one of them a
gardener's van that must have served as a hearse. A strip of black crepe streamed from the radio aerial. A group of about a dozen people were gathered near a mound that held a cheap wooden casket surrounded with flowers. Franny was there, wearing a tight, shiny black dress. Most of the others were Japanese. I recognized Yoshi among them with his two sons, all wearing black suits in the desert heat.

We seemed to be the last guests expected to arrive. After Franny welcomed us, a man stepped forward to speak. Clare later found out he was a minor screenwriter who had been blacklisted into oblivion with Zip in the fifties. Zip had kept him financially afloat until he went broke himself. The man delivered an overly long eulogy in a growly voice. He made Zip out to be an unsung hero of the witch-hunting period, but he said nothing about his films. Most of his words were whipped away by the wind.

When he finished, Yoshi and his sons moved everybody well back from the mound. Then at a signal from their father, who seemed to be in charge, the boys took automobile flares from their pockets, lit them, and jammed them under the riser that held the casket. Their movements were very precise, as if they'd rehearsed for the event. The flares sputtered and seemed to go out. Then there was a puff of smoke from under the riser and suddenly a small bright explosion of flames that swept up around the casket, which took fire immediately as if it had been soaked in gasoline. So we'd come to witness a cremation. Franny, standing beside me, whispered, “It's what Zip wanted.”

We were standing out of the wind, but even so Sharkey caught a whiff of the black smoke that blew by on a wayward breeze. “Nitrate,” he said. That's when I realized. As the flowers fell away, I saw the film reels stacked around the coffin. There were more of them crammed under the riser, already wrapped in thick ropes of smoke. I let out a gasp, just as Franny took hold of my arm. “It's what Zip wanted.”

My heart shrank to the size of a small cold marble. I remembered Zip's ominous words: “That's all taken care of.” I bent to whisper at Franny's ear, “What films are those?” She shook her head slowly as if to tell me not to ask. “Are those Castle's films?” I asked again.

She looked up at me with sorrowful, hollow eyes. “It's what Zip wanted.”

Helplessly, I watched the gray, acrid cloud that was rising above the desert and scattering on the wind. A life's work up in smoke.
Now we all knew. The Lipsky film collection wasn't destined for any archive. In a final act of contempt and defiance, Zip had elected to use Max Castle's movies as the tinder that would burn his tired bones to ash. I turned, stunned and speechless, toward Clare. I could tell she had grasped what was happening. Yet I couldn't detect a sign of distress. I didn't want to believe it, but I could have described her expression as one of relief. I remembered the words she'd entrusted to me like a guilty confession: “If I had my way, I'd see his films burned to fumes.”

For weeks after Zip Lipsky's funeral, I was desolate, all the more so as I came to realize that Clare refused to share my desolation. She wouldn't outspokenly endorse Zip's act of posthumous vandalism; but she wouldn't condemn it either. Nor would she spare me a word of sympathy for a loss that she could see I was taking very personally. Instead, she carried on, perversely, as if there were simply no way I could expect her to know what Zip's celluloid pyre had cost the world. After all,
she
hadn't seen the films.
She
had nothing to go on but my amateurish reports. What did it count for that one Jonathan Gates believed works of immortal genius had been obliterated? What was his judgment worth?

As Clare reminded me, “In 1947, Universal destroyed every silent movie in its library—just to save the storage costs. If I wanted to grieve over all the movies that ever got lost in the shuffle, I could find lots worse disasters to weep for than losing a dozen Max Castles. Hollywood's been treating its heritage like old Kleenex for generations: if you can't sell it, chuck it. Believe me, Jonny, this is a drop in the ocean.”

I agreed but protested, “Aren't we the ones who are supposed to care about that?”

“I care a lot more that old Zip burned up all his better work too. Mint-condition prints of
Glory Road, Prince of the Streets,
the stuff he shot with Paul Robeson. I know what that was worth. Makes it a lot harder to put together a Lipsky retrospective.”

Clare's stubborn pretense of unconcern brought me as close to anger as I'd ever dared to come with her. She seemed to be abandoning me to a terrible isolation. I was alone not only with the loss of Max Castle's work, but also with my appreciation of that work. His films—or at least his lost later films—now survived in my memory only. True, there was Franny, and there was Yoshi. They'd also seen
them; but not with the same critical eye, the same depth of response I knew I'd brought to their viewing. That experience lived on exclusively in me, and with it a burdening sense of responsibility. Shouldn't I do
something
to make good for that loss before the images melted away in my remembrance?

I was into my second month of moping and sulking when the phone call came. It was Franny.

I hadn't parted from her gracefully at the funeral. I didn't want to. Stunned as I was to see Castle's films turning to vapor before my eyes, I couldn't think of what to say to her. I held her responsible for the act of devastation that had taken place. She could have saved what was being destroyed by simply ignoring Zip's vindictive request. But what right did I have at that moment in her life to accuse her? With Clare and Sharkey, I offered her a quick goodbye and left before the pyre had finished smoldering. I hoped my abrupt departure would be the end of our relationship. She'd always seemed pathetic to me. But the image I took away with me from Zip's funeral was that of a ridiculous, destructive slattern. That image had rapidly eclipsed whatever sweet, lingering memories of Nylana I still preserved. When I heard Franny's baby-talk voice on the phone, a sick anger rose in my throat. She wanted me to come visiting again.

“No, Franny,” I said, making my reply as frosty as I knew how. “I don't see any point in that.” Was she seriously proposing that our bizarre little affair go on? The thought was grotesque; I didn't care if my tone let her know it. I think it was the first time in my life I'd been so dismissively rude to anyone.

At the other end of the line, her voice lost its little-girl singsong and grew more sober. “I just thought we could maybe say goodbye a little nicer, you know. I'm selling off the house here and going home.”

“Oh? Where's that?”

“I got family in Iowa. I'm going back.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Des Moines. I'm the farmer's daughter, did I ever tell you?”

“No.”

“My folks disowned me when I ran off to be a movie star. Well, my father mainly. They're very religious people. But when I settled down with Zippy, they sort of forgave me, even though he was a dwarf and all. My father didn't go for that. But at least it was some kind of marriage and, well … ”

I hoped she could hear my boredom in the silence.

“… you see, I thought it would be nice to say goodbye like friends before I took off.”

“Well, Franny, I'm really busy at school just now … ”

“Sure, I know. But just an hour or so? See, Zippy left this stuff I think you'd like to have.”

“Oh? What?”

“Well … the cameras, for one thing.”

“Do you mean the projectors?”

“Cameras, projectors, a whole lot of stuff. I don't know what to do with it.”

“You want to sell them?”