The Boy Who Never Grew Up (25 page)

“What did she say, Matthew?”

“She said, ‘Would you like to borrow my pompoms, Martin?’
Martin.
Can you believe it? She didn’t even know my name!” He trailed off, glaring at me. “What are you doing, Meat?”

“Doing?”

“Are you … giggling?”

“I do not giggle. I chortle. Occasionally, I guffaw. But I never—”

“You actually think this
funny
!” he cried, outraged.

“It
is
funny, Matthew. It’s excruciating. But, mostly, it’s funny. Did you?”

“Did I
what
?”

“Borrow her pom-poms?”

“Yes. Only, I couldn’t get back inside. They’d locked the door on me. Somebody had to find a custodian to let me in. I was stuck out there for ten minutes. It was like a nightmare. It still makes me shudder, just thinking about it. I—I could never face any of them again. So I quit the team. And that’s the whole ugly story, Meat. Go ahead and laugh some more.”

I tugged at my ear. “That would make a great movie scene, in the right hands.”

“Whose?” he asked scornfully.

“Yours. I’m surprised you haven’t used it, frankly.”

He shook his head vehemently. “I could never film that. Never. Much too painful.”

“All the more reason for doing it. That’s the good stuff generally.”

He considered this, slumped there in his chair fingering his Silly Putty.

“Best way to get over it, Matthew, is to come face to face with it,” I advised. “Just like going to your reunion.”

“I really don’t think I can go, Meat.”

“She’ll be there, Kip’ll be there. It’s a terrific chance for you, Matthew. You’re an idol to these people. They probably tell complete strangers that they once knew you. Hell, they’ll be in awe of you. I don’t see how you can let a chance like this pass you by. It’s your moment of triumph—
Martin Returns: The Sequel
.”

“I wonder what she looks like now,” he said softly, intrigued.

“How do you want her to look?”

“Just like she did,” he said with adolescent longing. He finished his milk, slamming down his glass with fierce determination. “We’re going, Meat. We’re going to the reunion.”

“Good.”

“You’re pleased?” He seemed anxious for my approval.

“Absolutely. I’d hate to think I brought my dinner jacket all the way out here for nothing.”

He picked up the basketball and spun it from his finger again. “Wanna play some Horse out back?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

By out back, of course, he meant the set for the Hayes’s driveway. The garage door with the basketball hoop over it. The clothesline. The fence between the Hayeses’ and the Dales’. I half expected Teri Garr to call us inside for brownies.

“Try this, Meat,” dared Matthew. He dribbled the ball toward the hoop, leaped, and slam-dunked it mightily. Not that this was any rare physical accomplishment. The basket was a full foot lower than regulation so that Johnny Forget wouldn’t look like a midget.

I tried it. I made it. Then I tried a jumper from fifteen feet out. It clanged off the front of the rim.

“Ha!” he exclaimed. “Okay, okay, sucker—try this …” He stood ten feet from the basket with his back to it. Blindly, he tossed the ball over his head. Nothing but net. He fired it at me, cackling with glee.

“This is a whole new side of you, Matthew. And it’s not pretty.”

“Come on, come on,” he said impatiently. “Try and make it, sucker.”

I couldn’t. That meant I had an H. The game was on.

“What did you do with yourself after you quit the team?” I asked.

“I started riding my bike a lot,” he recalled. “Especially that summer. Rode for miles and miles. I was too restless to sit around the house watching TV. I guess my hormones were raging. I used to ride all the way to Panorama. It was still a genuine working lot then. They had whole villages, jungles, lakes, tank battalions. It was this fantastic sort of playground. Except there were no other kids around. Just me. I’d ditch my bike in the bushes and wander around all day, watching them film stuff. Sometimes the guards would catch me and throw me out. But I’d just come right back the next day.” He dribbled the ball. “Okay, make this one, buttwipe …”

“ ‘Buttwipe’?”

He tried a high, arching hook shot from twenty feet out. All net. “Hah!” he cried triumphantly.

My attempt soared over the backboard, the garage, the whole set. The ball ended up in Badger’s bedroom.

“You’d better get it together, Meat,” Matthew cackled, retrieving it. “We’re talking major blowout here.”

Lulu could stand no more. She was too embarrassed for me. She wandered off to the living room.

“There was a TV series they were filming there for ABC,” Matthew recalled. “A youth-oriented Western called
The Groovy Seven.
Remember it?”

“Unfortunately.”

“The director was this one-eyed B-movie maker from the fifties named Ernst Vinkel. He was Austrian. Had an accent. An eyepatch. Wore his jacket loose over his shoulders, like a cape. I loved watching him work. Especially the action sequences. The precise planning that went into them. The horses, the stunts, the dozens of technicians who had to perform their specialty perfectly in order for the scene to come off. The whole process fascinated me. I’d never realized before just how unimportant the actors were. I mean, when I was watching on TV at home, they were the whole show. But during filming, the real action was all happening behind the scenes. Ernst, he was like a general, and they were his army. He was masterly, the way he ran his set. I hung around watching him in awe. I was there at his elbow so much he assumed I was a summer intern—a gofer. One day he sent me out for sandwiches. He liked chicken salad on white with extra mayonnaise. Since he thought I was an intern, everyone else did, too. Before I knew it, I was. Got a pass onto the lot, a hundred dollars a week, and a front row seat. You know who went out of his way to be nice to me? Trace Washburn. He’d just washed out of the NFL and was working as a stuntman, falling off of horses. One of the producers was a big SC alumnus, and got him the job. Trace treated me like a real teammate. I never forgot that. I remembered him years later when I was casting
To the Moon.
Ernst was real nice, too. Gave me his number at the end of the summer and said if there was ever anything he could do to just call him. From then on, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, Meat. I wanted to make movies … Okay, okay, Wilt Chamberlain at the free-throw line …” Matthew spread his feet wide at the line, heaved a huge sigh and shot the ball underhanded, two hands. It went in.

So did mine.

“You got lucky,” he sneered, unimpressed. “You’re still history.”

I was planning to be gentlemanly, Matthew, but you’ve asked for it, and I’m afraid you’re going to get it.”

“Get what?” he wondered, amused.

I moved a good thirty feet from the basket, set myself, and aired out the old javelin shoulder. A low line drive that hit nothing but net. A true Howitzer shot.

Matthew stared at the basket in disbelief. “What the heck was that?”

I tossed him the ball. “Let’s see you do it.”

“Let’s see
you
do it again.”

“If you wish.” I did it again. And again. And again.

Lulu reappeared, tail wagging, man’s best fair-weather friend.

“How many in a row can you make?” he wondered, incredulous.

“My record in college was thirty-six.”

Matthew swiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Gee, I’m kinda thirsty. Let’s go make some Bosco, huh?”

“Does this mean you’re conceding?”

“I’m conceding, okay?” he said sharply.

“Fine. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

We returned to the kitchen. Matthew busied himself with the chocolate milk fixings.

“Had you made a movie yet?” I asked, sitting.

“Nope,” he replied. “But that fall I dug my dad’s old Super-Eight camera out of the garage. He hadn’t used it for years, and didn’t much care if I did. He was in and out of the hospital by then, dying. Ma was working at the accounting firm, running to the hospital to see him, running home to take care of Shelley and me. It wasn’t easy for her. Plus we were broke. Sis had an academic scholarship to SC, otherwise she’d never have been able to go. She lived at home and worked at Shelley’s dad’s shoe store in Van Nuys for her pocket money. It was a pretty rough time.”

“And this was your way of dealing with it?”

He handed me my glass of Bosco and sat with his. “What do you mean?”

“If you place a camera between you and something horrifying, it makes it less horrifying. You’re an observer instead of a participant.”

He thought this over, ignoring the chocolate milk moustache on his upper lip. “Gee, Meat, I never made that connection before. So you think I took up making movies as a way of coping with my dad dying?”

“Possibly.”

“But we didn’t get along,” he reminded me.

“That doesn’t make the experience any easier. Sometimes it even makes it harder.”

He frowned. “Gee, that would mean …”

“That would mean what, Matthew?”

“Dad’s responsible for all of this,” he said, looking around at the sets, “in a weird sort of way …”

“Tell me about your first movie. What was it?”

“My own version of a fifties horror movie,” he recalled fondly. “I called it
The Dog Who Ate Sepulveda.
I used the neighbor’s labrador retriever, Casey, who was always in our yard. Made a bunch of miniature cities out of my old Erector Set and Lincoln Logs, hillsides out of papier-mâché. Then I let Casey loose to destroy them, just like Godzilla. The Shelleys helped me film it one Sunday afternoon. She shot some of it while he and I tried to zap Casey with ray guns. We had a lot of fun. I’d never had such fun.”

“Did the monster die at the end?”

“No, we tamed him. He let us pat him on the belly, and when we did the mutation process was magically reversed and he became dog-sized again.”

“The patented Matthew Wax happy ending.”

He grinned at me. “I got it developed at a camera store on Nordhoff, and bought a splicer and glue and put it together. It was eight minutes long. The Shelleys thought I ought to show it to my English class at Monroe or something. But I didn’t feel like it.”

“But it did get you into SC film school, right?”

He looked at me oddly. “I never went to SC film school.”

“I thought you did,” I said. “I thought you dropped out to work in TV.”

“A common misconception,” he acknowledged. “Repeated in article after article. People have always assumed that since I was a young filmmaker and I was going to SC that I was in their film school. But I never was. I never took one film class. I was a political science major.”

“You were politically inclined?”

“Not in the least. It never occurred to me that you went to school to learn about anything you were interested in. I hated school. But I had to go—to stay out of the Vietnam draft, and because Ma wanted me to. Her boss, Mr. Ferraro, advanced her the money for my tuition. I drove over the hill every morning to class in Ma’s old Falcon. Came straight home. I studied just enough to pass. Never went anywhere near the library. I’m not even sure I knew where it was on campus. I dropped out at the beginning of my sophomore year. By then the war was over.” His face darkened. “And my dad was dead.”

“What was the funeral like?”

“Small. Just the three of us and Shelley and a couple of Ma’s old cousins—the type who always show up at funerals. Mr. Ferraro came, which we thought was nice. No friends or business associates of dad’s. Not one.” He got up and hunted around in the cupboard and came away with a package of Oreos. He tore into it. “After my freshman year I went back to work at Panorama as a summer intern,” he said, chomping. “Ernst put in the word for me. I worked as a gofer on a bunch of different shows. In my spare time, I wrote
Bugged.
All twelve pages of it. It came to me in a nightmare, actually. The idea that you wake up one morning and something’s happened to you, and everyone knows it but you. What I did, I had this nerdy high school kid who wakes up looking normal to himself in the mirror. But to everyone else, he’s been transformed into this giant, ugly insect. He’s a real unpopular kid, the kind who’s always wanted the other kids to pay attention to him. Well, now they do … Everyone I talked to said I ought to make this one in sixteen-millimeter. The pros wouldn’t even bother to look at eight-millimeter. The quality was also much better with sixteen. Only, I needed about seven hundred dollars to rent the equipment and buy the stock. Shelley gave me the money out of his law school savings—no questions asked. That’s the kind of guy he is. Whatever else I needed, I begged or borrowed. It didn’t hurt that I had the run of the Panorama lot.”

“Who played the lead?”

“Another intern there. His mom was a costumer. Real nice kid named Steve. I had him narrate it, like the guy did in
The Incredible Shrinking Man.
His friends around the lot filled in the other parts. We filmed it on a bunch of different standing sets during lunch breaks. His house was the house from
The Brady Bunch.
The street he lived on was left over from an old Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie. The bug costume, which I got from Steve’s mom, had been used in
Land of The Giants.
It took us about a week to shoot it, and a couple more weeks for me to put it all together. Ernst was nice enough to look at it when I was done.”

“I take it he was impressed.”

“He thought it was crude but clever. What impressed him was that I knew how to tell a story, a proper story with a beginning, middle and end. Most young directors don’t.”

“Many directors don’t, period. How come you did?”

“I can’t answer that, Meat. It was instinctive. Maybe it came from watching so many hours of TV when I was a kid.”

“And maybe,” I suggested “you were just extraordinarily gifted.”

He ducked his head bashfully. “I was doing what came naturally, that’s all. Ernst made an appointment for me to see this guy who was second in command of Panorama’s TV production, Norbert Schlom. I was surprised that anyone that important would want to see me—I mean, I was nineteen. But Ernst said the studios were totally desperate for young talent that could bridge the generation gap. The man wanted to talk to me. So I went to the Tower. That’s what they called the old executive office building. It was only eight stories high, but there was nothing else that tall out there in those days. When I got to the office his door was closed and his secretary was nowhere to be seen. I waited around for fifteen minutes, and then I finally tapped on his door. I heard this groaning and gasping in there. After a minute the door opened and this blonde with giant boobies comes out all flushed, straightens her dress, and sits down at the secretary’s desk. I think the two of them were having … I mean, I think they were …”