The space however, the air itself, had lived a life of its own in that fifty years. Like a reservoir, it had received the electric stares of thousands of eyes, of tens of thousands of eyes. Half a century of movie goers had lived vicariously through the screen of the Movie Palace, pressing their sympathies and their passions on to the flickering illusion, the energy of their emotions gathering strength like a neglected cognac in that hidden passage of air. Sooner or later, it must discharge itself. All it lacked was a catalyst.
Until Barberio’s cancer.
TWO: THE MAIN FEATURE
After loitering in the cramped foyer of the Movie Palace for twenty minutes or so, the young girl in the cerise and lemon print dress began to look distinctly agitated. It was almost three in the morning, and the late-night movies were well over.
Eight months had passed since Barberio had died in the back of the cinema, eight slow months in which business had been at best patchy. Still, the late-night double bill on Fridays and Saturdays always packed in the punters. Tonight it had been two Eastwood movies: spaghetti westerns. The girl in the cerise dress didn’t look like much of a western fan to Birdy; it wasn’t really a women’s genre. Maybe she’d come for Eastwood rather than the violence, though Birdy had never seen the attraction of that eternally squinting face.
“Can I help you?” Birdy asked.
The girl looked nervously at Birdy.
“I’m waiting for my boyfriend,” she said. “Dean.”
“Have you lost him?”
“He went to the rest room at the end of the movie and he hasn’t come out yet.”
“Was he feeling... er... ill?” “Oh no,” said the girl quickly, protecting her date from this slight on his sobriety.
“I’ll get someone to go and look for him,” said Birdy. It was late, she was tired, and the speed was wearing off. The idea of spending any more time than she strictly needed to in this fleapit was not particularly appealing. She wanted home; bed and sleep. Just sleep. At thirty-four, she’d decided she’d grown out of sex. Bed was for sleep, especially for fat girls.
She pushed the swing door, and poked her head into the cinema. A ripe smell of cigarettes, popcorn and people enveloped her; it was a few degrees hotter in here than in the foyer.
“Ricky?”
Ricky was locking up the back exit, at the far end of the cinema.
“That smell’s completely gone,” he called to her.
“Good.” A few months back there’d been a hell of a stench at the screen end of the cinema.
“Something dead in the lot next door,” he said.
“Can you help me a minute?” she called back.
“What’d you want?”
He sauntered up the red-carpeted aisle towards her, keys jangling at his belt. His T-shirt proclaimed “Only the Young Die Good.”
“Problem?” he said, blowing his nose.
“There’s a girl out here. She says she lost her boyfriend in the john.”
Ricky looked pained.
“In the john?”
“Right. Will you take a look? You don’t mind, do you?”
And she could cut out the wisecracks for a start, he thought, giving her a sickly smile. They were hardly on speaking terms these days. Too many high times together: it always dealt a crippling blow to a friendship in the long run. Besides, Birdy’d made some very uncharitable (accurate) remarks about his associates and he’d returned the salvo with all guns blazing. They hadn’t spoken for three and a half weeks after that. Now there was an uncomfortable truce, more for sanity’s sake than anything. It was not meticulously observed.
He about turned, wandered back down the aisle, and took row E across the cinema to the john, pushing up seats as he went. They’d seen better days, those seats: sometime around “Now Voyager.” Now they looked thoroughly shot at: in need of refurbishing, or replacing altogether. In row E alone four of the seats had been slashed beyond repair, now he counted a fifth mutilation which was new tonight. Some mindless kid bored with the movie and/or his girlfriend, and too stoned to leave. Time was he’d done that kind of thing himself: and counted it a blow for freedom against the capitalists who ran these joints. Time was he’d done a lot of damn-fool things.
Birdy watched him duck into the Men’s Room. He’ll get a kick out of that, she thought with a sly smile, just his sort of occupation. And to think, she’d once had the hots for him, back in the old days (six months ago) when razor-thin men with noses like Durante and an encyclopaedic knowledge of de Niro movies had really been her style. Now she saw him for what he was, flotsam from a lost ship of hope. Still a pill-freak, still a theoretical bisexual, still devoted to early Polanski movies and symbolic pacifism. What kind of dope did he have between his ears anyhow? The same as she’d had, she chided herself, thinking there was something sexy about the bum.
She waited for a few seconds, watching the door. When he failed to re-emerge she went back into the foyer for a moment, to see how the girl was going on. She was smoking a cigarette like an amateur actress who’s failed to get the knack of it, leaning against the rail, her skirt hitched up as she scratched her leg.
“Tights,” she explained.
“The Manager’s gone to find Dean.”
“Thanks,” she scratched on. “They bring me out in a rash, I’m allergic to them.”
There were blotches on the girl’s pretty legs, which rather spoiled the effect.
“It’s because I’m hot and bothered,” she ventured. “Whenever I get hot and bothered, I get allergic.”
“Oh.”
“Dean’s probably run off, you know, when I had my back turned. He’d do that. He doesn’t give a f—. He doesn’t care.”
Birdy could see she was on her way to tears, which was a drag. She was bad with tears. Shouting matches, even fights, O.K. Tears, no go.
“It’ll be O.K.” was all she could find to say to keep the tears from coming.
“No it’s not,” said the girl. “It won’t be O.K., because he’s a bastard. He treats everyone like dirt.” She ground out the half-smoked cigarette with the pointed toe of her cerise shoes, taking particular care to extinguish every glowing fragment of tobacco.
“Men don’t care, do they?” she said looking up at Birdy with heart-melting directness. Under the expert makeup, she was perhaps seventeen, certainly not much more. Her mascara was a little smeared, and there were arcs of tiredness under her eyes.
“No,” replied Birdy, speaking from painful experience. “No they don’t.”
Birdy thought ruefully that she’d never looked as attractive as this tired nymphet. Her eyes were too small, and her arms were fat. (Be honest, girl, you’re fat all over.) But the arms were her worst feature, she’d convinced herself of that. There were men, a lot of them, who got off on big breasts, on a sizeable ass, but no man she’d ever known liked fat arms. They always wanted to be able to encircle the wrist of their girlfriend between thumb and index finger, it was a primitive way to measure attachment. Her wrists, however, if she was brutal with herself, were practically undiscernible. Her fat hands became her fat forearms, which became, after a podgy time, her fat upper arms. Men couldn’t encircle her wrists because she had no wrists, and that alienated them. Well, that was one of the reasons anyhow. She was also very bright: and that was always a drawback if you wanted men at your feet. Hut of the options as to why she’d never been successful in love, she plumped for the fat arms as the likeliest explanation.
Whereas this girl had arms as slender as a Balinese dancer’s, her wrists looked thin as glass, and about as fragile.
Sickening, really. She was probably a lousy conversationalist to boot. God, the girl had all the advantages.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Lindi Lee,” the girl replied.
It would be.
• • •
Ricky thought he’d made a mistake. This can’t be the toilet, he said to himself.
He was standing in what appeared to be th
e main street of a frontier town he’d seen in two hundred Westerns. A dust storm seemed to be raging, forcing him to narrow his eyes against the stinging sand. Through the swirl of the ochre-grey air he could pick out, he thought, the General Stores, the Sheriff’s Office and the Saloon. They stood in lieu of the toilet cubicles. Optional tumble-weed danced by him on the hot desert wind. The ground beneath his feet was impacted sand: no sign of tiles. No sign of anything that was faintly toilet-like.
Ricky looked to his right, down the street. Where the far wall of the john should have been the street receded, in forced perspective, towards a painted distance. It was a lie, of course, the whole thing was a lie. Surely if he concentrated he’d begin to see through the mirage to find out how it had been achieved; the projections, the concealed lighting effects, the backcloths, the miniatures; all the tricks of the trade. But though he concentrated as hard as his slightly spaced-out condition would allow, he just couldn’t seem to get his fingers under the edge of the illusion to strip it back.
The wind just went on blowing, the tumbleweed tumbled on. Somewhere in the storm a barndoor was slamming, opening and slamming again in the gusts. He could even smell horseshit. The effect was so damn perfect, he was breathless with admiration.
But whoever had created this extraordinary set had proved their point. He was impressed: now it was time to stop the game.
He turned back to the toilet door. It was gone. A wall of dust had erased it, and suddenly he was lost and alone.
The barndoor kept slamming. Voices called to each other in the worsening storm. Where was the Saloon and the Sheriff’s office? They too had been obscured. Ricky tasted something he hadn’t experienced since childhood: the panic of losing the hand of a guardian. In this case the lost parent was his sanity.
Somewhere to his left a shot sounded in the depths of the storm, and he heard something whistle in his ear, then felt a sharp pain. Gingerly he raised his hand to his earlobe and touched the place that hurt. Part of his ear had been shot away, a neat nick in his lobe. His earstud was gone, and there was blood, real blood, on his fingers. Someone had either just missed blowing off his head or was really playing silly fuckers.
“Hey, man,” he appealed into the teeth of this wretched fiction, whirling around on his heel to see if he could locate the aggressor. But he could see no one. The dust had totally enclosed him: he couldn’t move backwards or forwards with any safety. The gunman might be very close, waiting for him to step in his direction.
“I don’t like this,” he said aloud, hoping the real world would hear him somehow, and step in to salvage his tattered mind. He rummaged in his jeans pocket for a pill or two, anything to improve the situation, but he was all out of instant sunshine, not even a lowly Valium was to be found lurking in the seam of his pocket. He felt naked. What a time to be lost in the middle of Zane Grey’s nightmares.
A second shot sounded, but this time there was no whistling. Ricky was certain this meant he’d been shot, but as there was neither pain nor blood it was difficult to be sure.
Then he heard the unmistakable flap of the saloon door, and the groan of another human being somewhere near. A tear opened up in the storm for a moment. Did he see the saloon through it, and a young man stumbling out, leaving behind him a painted world of tables, mirrors, and gunslingers? Before he could focus properly the tear was sewn up with sand, and he doubted the sight. Then, shockingly, the young man he’d come looking for was there, a foot away, blue-lipped with death, and falling forward into Ricky’s arms. He wasn’t dressed for a part in this movie anymore than Ricky was. His bomber jacket was a fair copy of a fifties style, his T-shirt bore the smiling face of Mickey Mouse.
Mickey’s left eye was bloodshot, and still bleeding. The bullet had unerringly found the young man’s heart.
He used his last breath to ask: “What the fuck is going on?” and died.
As last words went, it lacked style, but it was deeply felt. Ricky stared into the young man’s frozen face for a moment, then the dead weight in his arms became too much, and he had no choice but to drop him. As the body hit the ground the dust seemed to turn into piss-stained tiling for an instant. Then the fiction took precedence again, and the dust swirled, and the tumbleweed tumbled, and he was standing in the middle of Main Street, Deadwood Gulch, with a body at his feet.
Ricky felt something very like cold turkey in his system. His limbs began a St. Vitus’ dance, and the urge to piss came on him, very strong. Another half minute, he’d wet his pants.
Somewhere, he thought, somewhere in this wild world, there is a urinal. There is a graffiti-covered wall, with numbers for the sex-crazed to call, with “This is not a fallout shelter” scrawled on the tiles, and a cluster of obscene drawings. There are water tanks and paperless toilet roll holders and broken seats. There is the squalid smell of piss and old farts. Find it! in God’s name find the real thing before the fiction does you some permanent damage.
If, for the sake of argument, the Saloon and the General Stores are the toilet cubicles, then the urinal must be behind me, he reasoned. So step back. It can’t do you any more harm than staying here in the middle of the street while someone takes potshots at you.
Two steps, two cautious steps, and he found only air. But on the third—well, well, what have we here?—his hand touched a cold tile surface.
“Whoo-ee!” he said. It was the urinal: and touching it was like finding gold in a pan of trash. Wasn’t that the sickly smell of disinfectant wafting up from the gutter? It was, oh boy, it was.
Still whooping, he unzipped and started to relieve the ache in his bladder, splashing his feet in his haste. What the hell: he had this illusion beat. If he turned round now he’d find the fantasy dispersed, surely. The saloon, the dead boy, the storm, all would be gone. It was some chemical throw-back, bad dope lingering in his system and playing dumb-ass games with his imagination. As he shook the last drops onto his blue suedes, he heard the hero of this movie speak.
“What you doin’ pissin’ in mah street, boy?”
It was John Wayne’s voice, accurate to the last slurred syllable, and it was just behind him. Ricky couldn’t even contemplate turning around. The guy would blow off his head for sure. It was in the voice, that threatful ease that warned: I’m ready to draw, so do your worst. The cowboy was armed, and all Ricky had in his hand was his dick, which was no match for a gun even if he’d been better hung.
Very cautiously he tucked his weapon away and zipped himself up, then raised his hands. In front of him the wavering image of the toilet wall had disappeared again. The storm howled: his ear bled down his neck.
“O.K. boy, I want you to take off that gunbelt and drop it to the ground. You hear me?” said Wayne.
“Yes.”
“Take it nice and slow, and keep those hands where I can see them.”
Boy, this guy was really into it.
Nice and slow, like the man said, Ricky unbuckled his belt, pulled it through the loops in his jeans and dropped it to the floor. The keys should have jangled as they hit the tiles, he hoped to God they would. No such luck. There was a clinking thud that was the sound of metal on sand.
“O.K.,” said Wayne. “Now you’re beginning to behave. What have you got to say for yourself?”
“I’m sorry?” said Ricky lamely.
“Sorry?”
“For pissing in the street.”
“I don’t reckon sorry is sufficient penitence,” said Wayne.
“But really I am. It was all a mistake.”
“We’ve had about enough of you strangers around these parts. Found that kid with his trousers round his ankles takin’ a dump in the middle of the saloon. Well I call that uncouth! Where’s you sons of bitches been educated anyhow? Is that what they’re teaching you in them fancy schools out East?”
“I can’t apologize enough.”
“Damn right you can’t,” Wayne drawled. “You with the kid?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
&nb
sp; “What kind of fancy talk is that?” he jabbed his gun in Rick’s back: it felt very real indeed. “Are you with him or not?”
“I just meant—”
“You don’t mean nothing in this territory, mister, you take that from me.”
He cocked the gun, audibly.
“Why don’t you turn around, son and let’s us see what you’re made of?”
Ricky had seen this routine before. The man turns, he goes for a concealed gun, and Wayne shoots him. No debate, no time to discuss the ethics of it, a bullet would do the job better than words.
“Turn round I said.”
Very slowly, Ricky turned to face the survivor of a thousand shootouts, and there was the man himself, or rather a brilliant impersonation of him. A middle period Wayne, before he’d grown fat and sick looking. A Rio Grande Wayne, dusty from the long trail and squinting from a lifetime of looking at the horizon. Ricky had never had a taste for Westerns. He hated all the forced machismo, the glorification of dirt and cheap heroism. His generation had put flowers in rifle barrels, and he’d thought that was a nice thing to do at the time; still did, in fact.
This face, so mockmanly, so uncompromising, personified a handful of lethal lies—about the glory of America’s frontier origins, the morality of swift justice, the tenderness in the heart of brutes. Ricky hated the face. His hands just itched to hit it.
Fuck it, if the actor, whoever he was, was going to shoot him anyway, what was to be lost by putting his fist in the bastard’s face? The thought became the act: Ricky made a fist, swung and his knuckles connected with Wayne’s chin. The actor was slower than his screen image. He failed to dodge the blow, and Ricky took the opportunity to knock the gun out of Wayne’s hand. He then followed through with a barrage of punches to the body, just as he’d seen in the movies. It was a spectacular display.
The bigger man reeled backwards under the blows, and tripped, his spur catching in the dead boy’s hair. He lost his balance and fell in the dust, bested.
The bastard was down! Ricky felt a thrill he’d never tasted before; the exhilaration of physical triumph. My God! he’d brought down the greatest cowboy in the world. His critical faculties were overwhelmed by the victory.