Reckless Disregard (41 page)

When I reach my complex, I avoid the reporters by pulling into my security garage and hurrying up the stairs. My shin throbs with every step and stings when the ocean breeze hits the exposed wound. I go inside my condo and rip open the first manila envelope. It’s a videocassette tape with a faded label that says
The Boatman
. So someone kept a copy after all. I open the second package—another cassette tape, but this one unlabeled.

The last time I used my antiquated videotape player was two years ago, when Lovely wanted to watch a Parky Gerald movie and I had an anxiety attack when I saw Sanctified Assembly founder Bradley Kelly appear on screen. I’m surprised that the machine turns on when I hit the power button. I take the tapes out of the Redweld folder, insert the one labeled
The Boatman
into the player, and reach for the
play
button, but I can’t bring myself to press it. My finger remains suspended over the device, poised in horrible equilibrium by the opposing forces of curiosity and fear. Is it the anticipation? A primal, superstitious belief in that old movie curse? The unwillingness to bring this game to an end? My hand begins to tremble, and I feel as though I’ve entered a courtroom unmedicated and unprepared. I take a deep breath and press
play
.

There’s a black screen but no credits, so this is a rough cut, not a finished film. Music starts playing. Beethoven’s second movement of his Piano Concerto no. 4, also called
Orpheus in Hades
. I’m partial to alternative rock, but Harmon Cherry liked classical music and made us listen to it because he thought it helped our analytical skills.

Dissolve into the sleazy bar where Hildy Gish as Eurydice Jones is in the restroom, shooting up smack over a toilet. Gish is dark-skinned and sexy, a remarkable casting choice for the still-bigoted Hollywood of the seventies. She was either a superb actress or, as Nate Ettinger testified, injected actual drugs. She makes the act of getting strung out erotic, harrowing, heart-wrenching. She’s one of the cast members who disappeared. Where is she?

On my high-definition monitor, the old analogue picture is elongated, warped, infused with a pixilated fuzziness that can’t live up to the capabilities of my state-of-the-art LED screen. Despite the limitations of the analogue medium transplanted to a hi-def screen, it’s obvious that the movie is beautifully filmed, shot predominately in muted blues and grays, deep-focus clarity, so though the film is in color, the viewer has the crisp, noir feeling of black and white. The director has immense talent.

Eurydice returns to the bar to speak with a forlorn Miles Boatman, who’s playing piano—William Bishop in his mid-thirties, but playing younger and getting away with it. And over the next eighty-seven minutes, the movie plays out just as Ettinger and Ed Diamond’s sources said it did—Boatman’s love of Eurydice goes unreciprocated, so he embarks on a journey to the far side of the universe, becomes a prophet, returns, and rescues Eurydice from hell.

The masterful writing and direction makes the film profoundly disturbing. I want to puke when Bradley Kelly comes on the screen as the corrupt priest, delivering every line in the smarmy, overly dramatic style that made him a pretty-faced hack on the movie screen but a modern-day Mesmer to his real-life devotees. Kelly proved that religious charlatans don’t have to be particularly good actors. The movie’s proselytizing for the Church of the Sanctified Assembly increases my angst—I well know the Assembly’s tenets, and
The Boatman
is a gospel for Kelly’s nascent religious movement. That didn’t stop the film from depicting rampant drug use and graphic sex. Eurydice shoots heroin in three separate scenes. In another scene Miles Boatman—Bishop—snorts what’s supposed to be cocaine. I had a small part as the child of a prostitute, virtually abandoned to the bar patrons and fawned over by Eurydice. In a shocking scene, especially for 1979, a drunk, distraught Boatman and the dissolute priest played by Kelly kiss passionately on the lips. So much for Bishop’s well-publicized opposition to gay marriage and Kelly’s tenet that homosexuality is a curable result of cellular contamination.

Later, Bishop and Gish appear in a lurid scene involving full-frontal nudity and passionate coupling. Bishop has an erection, actual, not prosthetic—reason enough for him to later suppress the film, which would have destroyed his newly minted image as a defender of family and conservative values. Still, Ettinger’s testimony that the film depicted hardcore sex isn’t quite accurate—it’s unclear whether the love scenes are real or simulated, a testament to the director’s skill.

The film ends abruptly, as if Howard Bishop shut down the film just before the director could splice in the end credits. And without the credits, how can I prove that Felicity McGrath directed this? Still, I now understand why someone would want to shut this film down. It blasphemes the Catholic Church. It makes Bishop look like a fraud and hypocrite. His getting a hard-on in that love scene would be enough to make him a laughingstock. Not to mention his kiss with Bradley Kelly.
The Boatman
truly would’ve destroyed Bishop’s reputation.

I eject
The Boatman
and insert the second cassette. The leader runs for so long I conclude that the tape is blank and reach over to hit
stop
. But then there’s the main title—
Satan’s Boatman
—
A Film by Paula F. McGrath
—followed by the same Beethoven theme from the first movie.

The scene fades in to Felicity McGrath—not the 1979 version, but older, the age at which she appeared in her last film,
Meadows of Deceit
. She’s wearing a floppy hat and Jackie-O shades and is sitting with her legs curled up in a lounger. The scene takes place on a deserted stretch of beach. Was this what Boardwalk Freddy saw her filming in Venice?

“Hello, I’m Paula,” she says. “I’m a filmmaker. I was an actress until it all went awry. But I was really something once.” The camera cuts to a still photo of her from
Fragile Palace
. Just like when I watched her earlier films, her voice sounds eerily familiar, aural déjà vu. Even after this bit of dialogue, you know this woman is in control, one step ahead. If this is the real Felicity McGrath, she’s nothing like the ingenue gone wrong in
Fragile Palace
or the English virgin in
Meadows of Deceit
, or the sexy, wise-cracking skank in Poniard’s video game.

“I grew up in Springfield, Illinois,” she says. “I ran away to Hollywood when I was fifteen, escaped my food-stamp mom and her crack and her boyfriends. I met a man who said he could get me into modeling. I was a fool to trust him with all the creeps out here, but I was like a lot of young girls, naive and stupid. The joke is, he was legit. I was modeling at fifteen, doing TV and movies a year later. I had to lie about my age, of course, and some said the movies were porn, even investigated the producers for having me engage in underage sex, but it wasn’t true. I’ve always been an actress, not a slut.” Her full lips are slightly asymmetrical when she smiles. She takes off her glasses and stands. The camera moves backward as she walks forward. “Be forewarned—what you’re about to see, what you’re seeing now, what you’ve already seen, is artifice, a ruse perpetrated on you, the audience. Deceit is the essence of art—the very word
artifice
comes from the Latin
to craft art
. I’m a craftsman—well, crafts
woman
. Our role is to deceive and in that way to expose deceit—and to always be truthful.” It’s a melodramatic Orson Welles–style radio intro, cheesy and old-fashioned even in the 1980s, but it works because of McGrath’s passionate delivery, her candid beauty; she’s not wearing makeup, or maybe the stage makeup makes it seem that way. “This is my film. I’ve operated the camera, set up the lighting, edited the raw footage, written the lines, directed the action. So, if you don’t like our particular truth, blame me.” She relaxes, slumps her shoulders, and says in an almost bored voice, “Cut and print it, e—” Her last words are cut off when the scene shifts.

I press the pause button and rewind. McGrath was probably saying
effect
when she was cut off, a broadcast term. When I hit play again, my suspicion is confirmed—the opening scene transitions by overlapping with the next—a
wipe effect
, it’s called.

The first scene from
The Boatman
from the earlier tape comes on. Or so it appears. But then I notice the differences. In certain scenes Bishop overplays the part, seems smarmy where in the first version he seemed sincere. Hildy Gish is stronger, less a victim than someone striving to heroically change her life. There’s an additional brutal and troubling scene where Bishop forces himself on Eurydice. It’s then that I understand that McGrath reshot and reedited the film to make it not a tribute to Bradley Kelly but an attack on him, an exposé revealing him to be a fraud—not a prophet, but Satan’s Messenger, a devious predator who relies on deception and violence to get what he wants. McGrath was shooting this the very year that Kelly announced the formation of his Church of the Sanctified Assembly. McGrath made Eurydice braver, the victim turned heroine. Former hero Miles Boatman became the villain.

At the same time, she’s protected Bishop’s reputation somewhat. The embarrassing scene showing him sexually aroused is gone. The sex in which he’s involved is clearly simulated, mainstream R-rated fare. And somehow, she’s made him look like a much better actor than he was in the original.

My theory has always been that William Bishop is part of the Sanctified Assembly’s Covert Vanguard. If so, why would he go along with this brutal attack on the divine Bradley Kelly?

At some point,
Satan’s Boatman
loses continuity, becomes a mishmash of unconnected scenes, unedited dailies, multiple takes. McGrath obviously never finished her reshoot. Ninety-two minutes in, the scene shifts to the bar’s kitchen after last call, and though I can’t prove it, I’d bet my condo that this was shot at the Tell Tale Bar in Venice. Eurydice is sitting on a chair, polishing her toenails. Miles Boatman walks in holding a workout bag. He initiates the cinematic ritual that had been reenacted in countless edgy movies since Andy Warhol—no, since Otto Preminger directed
The
Man with the Golden Arm
: liquefying the drug in a spoon by heating it over a stove burner, fashioning a leather belt as a makeshift tourniquet, tapping the syringe to rid the solution of air bubbles, and plumping up the veins in his arm with his fingers. He makes a move to inject himself, but Eurydice grabs his arm and says in a sultry voice, “Ladies first, baby.” He kisses her quickly, preps her arm, and injects the needle into her vein.

There’s no context to any of this, no connection to anything in the plot that’s come before. I hope that the rest of the tape will reveal how McGrath intended to make the film coherent.

Hildy Gish acts out the orgasmic heroin rush. With a junkie’s droopy eyes, she gazes at Boatman and begins panting. A horrible gasp emanates from her throat, so harsh and painful that it sounds like a special effect rather than anything human. When Boatman bends over to check on her, she projectile-vomits all over his shirt. Is this real or a rip-off of the infamous scene from
The Exorcist
? Eurydice’s eyes flutter and roll white. She falls back hard on the kitchen floor. Bishop grabs her shoulders and gives her a gentle shake, and when she doesn’t respond, he says, “Hildy, sweetie, are you OK?”

Once Bishop breaks character, any faint hope that this scene was scripted evaporates. Gish convulses, the seizure rattling her limbs. She foams at the mouth. There’s a hideous gurgling sound of a person drowning in her own saliva. The convulsions stop, and Felicity McGrath, dressed in a work shirt, blue jeans, and baseball cap, runs in from offscreen and puts her ear to Gish’s chest.

“She’s not breathing, Billy. Do you think she swapped the . . . ? I told her not to.”

“No,” Bishop says. “No.” It’s more a moan than an answer.

McGrath administers CPR, while Bishop stands by helplessly, wringing his hands like a frightened, ineffectual child, making whimpering sounds. Seconds and then minutes pass, but neither calls 911. Why didn’t they call 911? Felicity halts her attempts at reviving Gish and presses her fingers into Gish’s neck, searching for a pulse. She drops her arms and begins sobbing. Bishop raises his hands to the sides of his head, elbows splayed like a buzzard’s wings, and lets out a doleful bellow. He abruptly lowers his arms, looks into the lens, and sprints forward. The movie world shakes and spins, and the screen goes dark.

Lovely Diamond answers on the third ring. “We have to talk,” I say.

“About what.”

“Your client. I’ve got proof of his guilt. I wanted to show you first in case . . .”

There’s a long silence. “I don’t believe you. What do you—?”

“We’ll have to do this in person. I’m at my condo.”

“Not there.” She’s right—too many memories.

“The Barrista,” I say. “Ten forty-five. We can do this after everyone has left.”

“That works,” she says, and hangs up.