Flicker (55 page)

There was a rising intensity in his voice that sent a shiver along my bones. He related the fate of these distant believers as if their suffering might have happened just yesterday. As he spoke, the images we had seen in the chapel—tortured and broken bodies, faces twisted with anguish—rose in my memory. Seeking to assuage his indignation, I feebly offered the thought, “Well, fortunately the church—the Church of Rome—no longer persecutes you.”

Dr. Byx snapped back with bitter amusement. “It is in no position to do so. Not in Switzerland. Not in Holland, the United States … indeed, nowhere. It has lost the power, that is all that has changed.”

“But we do live in a more tolerant time,” I added.

“A society that does not take religion seriously does not take heresy seriously. We, of course, in our turn, regard the Church of Rome as no less heretical. In the modern world, these doctrinal disputes go on in other forms and by other means. They do not go away, Professor.”

He'd at last managed to make me uncomfortable enough to want to leave. Perhaps that had been the objective of his mild, but unsettling outburst. “I don't want to keep you much longer,” I said. “But there is so much more I feel I need to learn. Can you recommend a few books I might read on your sect?” The word was no sooner out of my mouth than I realized my mistake.

“Sect?” Dr. Byx's eyes flashed at me, then went ice cold.

“Church, I mean.”

He took a deep breath, clearly attempting forbearance. “There are many merely scholarly works on the Cathars. The subject has a certain sensational appeal, the bloodletting and all.” He waved his hand toward the bookshelves around us. “Here you see some. I will be frank with you, Professor Gates. I recommend none of these works, not one. Their superficiality is almost indecent. Every one of them
is filled with gross distortions. Of course, you are perfectly free to visit any library and take home an armful of such books, read them and flatter yourself that you have learned something about our faith. You will be wrong. If anything, your ignorance will have been supplemented with numerous misconceptions.”

He was about to leave me dangling in an intellectual vacuum. “But what would you suggest I do, then, if I wish to learn about your church?”

He leveled his most piercing stare of the afternoon at me. “Because one can ask a question does not mean one will be capable of understanding the answer. You would do our faith a great courtesy and spare yourself great professional embarrassment if you simply put your curiosity to sleep. Pursue your film studies, Professor. Treat your Mr. Castle as what he was—a maker of sometimes clever, often banal, little movies, momentary entertainments for the ignorant millions. I assure you there is no need to implicate our church in your work.”

We exchanged a few more words about
Judas Everyman,
which I promised to send as soon as I could have it copied, and I was soon out the door of the orphanage. And, I assumed, out of Dr. Byx's thoughts. I gave the grim old building one last look as my taxi turned away. More than ever its facade resembled a sorrowful, untrusting face gazing after me with guarded eyes. I was leaving without having learned more than a fraction of what I wanted to know.

On the plane back to California, I pondered where my research stood on the strange case of Max Castle. As I did so, I felt like a man working at a jigsaw puzzle. I'd collected a lot of pieces and fitted them together. But the picture they composed was a Martian landscape; I couldn't make head or tail of it even when it all lay before me assembled. What the picture lacked was something that still lay outside its frame. A motivation. I had no idea why Castle and the orphans were making movies. What were they up to with their secret cinematic techniques? And did Castle and his church share the same agenda? Or were they, as Dr. Byx seemed to imply, working at cross purposes?

There was only one way I could think of finding an answer. I would have to make a date with Shirley Temple.

And meanwhile, back on Fairfax Avenue, in the basement of the abandoned Ritz Theater between Moishe's Deli and Best Buy Yard Goods—not very far from Hollywood—strange and fateful things were happening.

Once Clare had taken off for New York, and once I'd begun to feather a comfortable academic nest for myself, I would have thought The Classic was out of her life and mine forever, a relic of humble beginnings. For me, the grubby little hole-in-the-wall picture house would always be a sentimental souvenir of first love and intellectual awakening. But Clare, tough-minded as ever, nursed no such fond memories as she prepared to make her getaway. For her, The Classic represented too many years of privation and undeserved obscurity. She was only too happy to bid it good riddance. Her final gesture said it all; she simply gave the place away, making a free gift to Sharkey of her controlling share in the theater, no strings attached, no thanks expected.

As she was at pains to explain, I shouldn't mistake this for an act of generosity; it was euthanasia, the neatest way she could think of to kill off this basket case of a business, avoiding all legal and financial complications. With the weight of Sharkey's bombed-out ineptitude added to its ever-increasing backlog of unpaid bills, she fully expected to see the theater sink out of sight in a matter of weeks. I was sure she was right. But I couldn't help feeling sorry for poor Sharkey, who accepted her offer with the eagerness of a starved dog that has been cast a moldy table scrap. “You won't regret this,” he hastened to assure her the last time they met to sign the few miserable papers the transaction required. She gave a contemptuous chuckle as she scribbled her name here and there, not even bothering to correct his misguided gratitude. For Clare, the regrets were all in the past; they attached to Sharkey and to the debt-ridden dump she was bequeathing him where she'd watched herself going bankrupt in spirit
as well as finances. She was signing the theater's death warrant and enjoying it.

After Clare's departure, I continued to drop by The Classic to catch the occasional program, as much out of lingering loyalty as any interest in the films. It never failed to tug at my heart to see the hand-lettered placard Sharkey had proudly displayed in the seldom-washed glass case beside the entrance, where it would remain for years to come growing more dusty and faded: “Under New Management.” Each time I came by, I was prepared to find the program canceled, the doors closed—perhaps permanently—by that new management.

But that never happened. Much to my surprise, Sharkey's new role in life as proprietor of a terminally ill business worked like some miraculous tonic on him. He more or less sobered up and more or less buckled down, at least sufficiently so to drag into the theater each day, never missing a show, and to struggle through all his managerial duties with enough application to keep the projectors alight and churning. He even added a popcorn machine to the refreshment stand in the lobby, something he had (unsuccessfully) badgered Clare to do for years.

Somehow, as if by magic, he kept coming up with last-minute cash to pay the more pressing bills. When he screwed up, which was often, he could usually joke his way out of the ensuing mess. On his own, and with his dope ration voluntarily cut back by half, he proved to have a kind of loony charm that won him favors and reprieves when he needed them. Now and then he succeeded in talking me into lending a hand in the projection booth or scouting out a film he wanted. Maybe he seemed too vulnerable for even the meanest creditors and distributors to come down on hard. People who knew the old Sharkey had the sense they were helping to build the new, improved Sharkey. And they were. So they made allowances, granted concessions, and the good old Classic just kept rolling along.

All very heartwarming. But when it came to programming—which was the artistic heart of the matter—Sharkey was making it harder and harder for me to justify my continued patronage. Liberated from Clare's “tyranny of good taste” (as he called it) his own bizarre and vulgar predilections quickly asserted themselves. Within a year, he'd converted The Classic into a grind house that showed anything likely to draw an audience, provided the films were cheap and easy to come by. Sharkey still ran art films and the old Hollywood standbys. Every
year there was still a Bogart Festival, maybe a few aging New Wave favorites, but these were being steadily crowded out by movies Clare would have refused to show at gunpoint. There was a new species of teenage atrocity film flooding the drive-in circuit, vile little shockers with titles like
Blood Feast
and
She-Devils on Wheels;
Sharkey ran as many of them as he could rent. And there were skin flicks, whose once pulpy core was rapidly hardening into full-frontal gynecological flagrancy.

We were in the later stages of that long forced march into the slough of permissiveness that we remember as “the sixties.” The barriers of censorship were crumbling with astonishing speed, and with them the standards of taste. Sharkey was gleefully in the vanguard of the movement. He challenged the authorities to bust him for staging the Los Angeles premiere of Bill Osco's
Virgin Nymph
and again for daring to show
Mondo Trasho.
His defiance went unrequited. The cops were now turning a blind eye, as he well knew. Emboldened by such malign neglect, Sharkey wasn't above running a program of beaver loops in tandem with some old back-lot titillaters like
Sex Maniac
or
Secrets of a Model,
billing the program as “American Erotica,” as if the fancy title might lend the trash a touch of class.

In time, when Sharkey had prospered sufficiently to leave such items behind him—but hadn't—we had a not-very-coherent talk about the matter, the only kind of talk you could ever have with Sharkey. Why was he still showing stuff like this, I asked with clear disapproval.

“Hey, man, it's a public service. What we're doing is running a how-to, free-for-all, why-not sex-education crusade.”

“Oh come on! You don't believe that.”

“Damn tootin' I do. We're blazing trails here. You know why it is you can take a nice middle-class chick to a legit house to see
Deep Throat?
It's ‘cause the old Classic showed the way.”

“And you really think this is a good thing?”

“Wait and see, pal. Another couple years, the men of this country are finally gonna be gettin' some first-class fellation.”

Even when Sharkey wasn't wading in the muck, most of what I found playing at The Classic when I checked the listings was just plain awful. Evidence, so I assumed, of the new owner's essential and surely lethal incompetence.
King Kong, Mighty Joe Young,
and
Godzilla
had become staple items. So too the Three Stooges, their films sometimes running in twelve-hour marathons through an entire
weekend, a nonstop banquet of witless gags, pratfalls, and the two-fingers-in-the-eyes. There were Scott-Brown westerns in profusion and Wild Bill Elliott retrospectives. Old Saturday serials—all fifteen episodes of
Flash Gordon, The Green Hornet,
and
Batman
spliced together for continuous screening—were also a dependable big draw. Even more so were clunky prewar exploitation flicks like
Wild Weed, Cocaine Fiends, Reefer Madness.
From somewhere in the clammy depths of his distributor's vault, Sharkey had salvaged this celluloid sludge, offering it up as “Vice Squad Week at The Classic.” And, oh God! it was just as bad as the titles told you it would be. On what was for Sharkey the more serious side, The Classic organized America's first Radiation Film Festival, movies featuring such monstrosities of the atomic age as fifty-foot women and cockroaches the size of boxcars. This he considered to be a political gesture.

Now this wasn't the kind of fare a respectable professor of film history like myself would want to be caught dead viewing. Which is not to say that, in my capacity as Sharkey's old projection-booth buddy, I didn't come around to sample what he was offering. I was always welcome to walk in free; Sharkey liked having me around the place. He even invited me to resume doing program notes, a feature that had dropped out of sight soon after Clare left. “Program notes?” I scoffed. “For Larry, Curly, and Moe?”

“You're just the man for the job,” said Sharkey. I knew he meant it as a compliment, but I let him see me wince.

At first, I gave Sharkey—and myself—the benefit of the doubt when it came to finding some redeeming value in The Classic's new orientation. If I tried hard enough, I could just barely imagine a certain nostalgic justification for dredging up these sub-zilch items. This was, after all, part, a big part, of what Hollywood had offered as entertainment to the generation of kids I belonged to—the film equivalent of comic books. That was something to ponder, wasn't it, if only to bemoan the way our tender young minds had been brutally warped by the likes of a Samuel Z. Arkoff with his
Dragstrip Girls
and
Teenage Werewolves?
And maybe, just maybe, one could see the “clap operas” that were one of Sharkey's prime fascinations—U.S. Army sex and hygiene movies from World War II—as marginally significant social documents. But when we reached the “World's Worst Actress Olympics”—the films of Maria Montez, Vera Hruba Ralston, Adele Jergens—I had to face the fact that Sharkey was drilling a hole through the bottom of the barrel.

I made all the allowances I could for such nearly sadistic trash-mongering. I tried to see it as a belated, childish slap at Clare, at the smug high standards she had used for so long to beat the poor guy over the head. But the perversity of what he was doing went farther than that. Registering his howls of delight as I sat beside him through as much of a Rosemary LaPlanche triple bill as I could stomach (about twenty minutes of
Devil Bat's Daughter,
the first installment of the terrible trilogy), I realized that the man sincerely, authentically enjoyed the stuff he was showing. More troubling still, he wasn't alone. He had company. Lots of it. That came as a surprise. The Classic was prospering on such slop. Each time I dropped by, there was a capacity crowd, even after Sharkey had knocked out a wall and expanded his moldy subterranean auditorium by another twenty rows. Kids mainly—college age, even high school, a raucous assemblage of barely housebroken adolescents who showed up to hoot their way through the show. The crummier the movie, the more they enjoyed it. They liked bad movies. They
loved
bad movies. They relished the low-down imbecility. They might horse around a lot in the theater and burn enough dope to overload The Classic's feeble ventilating system (everybody in the theater wound up sharing the smoke) but they also paid attention to the movies. Close attention, wringing every smug and nasty giggle they could from the pitiful stuff on the screen, waiting to see it again, loitering over the incompetence and inanity, the way a scholar might linger over the fine points of Chaucer or Milton. They were veritable connoisseurs of crap.