The Long Take Page 10

  There was that end-of-season melancholy about the rest:

  the pleasure palaces of the Sutro Baths,

  with its neon sign reading ‘Tropic Beach’,

  and the amusement park, which he wandered through,

  with the wind chasing paper wrappers round in circles –

  Playland-at-the-Beach where Welles

  came to, in the Crazy House,

  and blew out the mirrors, walking away

  past Laff in the Dark and Shoot the Chutes

  and leaving it all behind, heading for the gray Pacific,

  in The Lady from Shanghai.

  *

  The fishermen with the long stares would say the haar is the sea’s breath, and the sea over shingle a dying man’s rattle. It was true for Lachlan from Pleasant Bay, with his face full of shrapnel and the death-shudders. I spaded his pack in after his remains; we were under fire, so a foot-deep had to do.

  *

  On the way to his diner on Columbus

  or one of his bars, La Rocca’s, Tony Nik’s or the Northstar,

  he passed Washington Square.

  The winos are there: sprawled around

  all day with their paper bags,

  before some outrage sets them squabbling like gulls.

  *

  Do they notice the air has sharpened, that the trees are letting go the last of themselves, the maple’s red dress already spilled to the ground?

  The trees in fall like my father: dying from the head down.

  October, 51

  *

  She was sitting up at the counter in an empty bar that afternoon.

  The hydrangea-pink and mauve of her flowery hat

  picked out the redness in her eyes,

  those thread-veins round her nose.

  She was talking to herself, or to the whiskey glass,

  it was hard to tell, but she was in the middle of something:

  ‘He was getting fresh, putting the make on me,

  shooting me some line about being a Hollywood hot dog,

  getting kick-backs from the Mob or something.

  I said, You know what? Are you fucking kidding me?

  Give me a break. And he says, C’mon, don’t be a sap,

  I’m on the square, sweetheart, honest to God!’

  She paused, and took a mouthful, then looked over at him.

  ‘Buy me a drink?’

  He nodded to the barman. ‘Leave the bottle.’

  ‘Say, that’s mighty generous. You’re okay, fella.

  You’re an okay guy in my book!’

  He joined her at the bar, studying her closely.

  She was picking at a darn in the elbow of her cardigan,

  scratching an itch, readjusting her position on the stool,

  eyes fixed on the one still point: her glass.

  He could almost see where she lost her way.

  It’s the first crease in the leather, a fold in paper,

  the way the smile or frown goes

  and the shape is made, the direction taken.

  She was pretty bombed already; started singing

  a verse of a song, then forgot it.

  She looked like she’d been drunk for years;

  a piece of metal

  that’s been worked so often it’s lost its give.

  Next time someone tried to bend her, she’d just snap.

  ‘I’ll remember you,’ she said with a sloping grin.

  ‘Lady, you’ll remember me till the bottle’s gone.

  And don’t forget what they say:

  there’s a message in every one of these bottles.

  But you can’t read it till you got it empty.’

  *

  Cadent rain through paper birch, the days sliding through each other; the search for some way to make a mark, some kind of legible life.

  *

  There’s a film-crew outside The Paper Doll on Union,

  and a framed poster At the Piano – Jean Darr

  but it’s Marie Windsor in the photograph,

  and there’s a bullet-hole in the glass.

  A few days after, they’ve sealed off Filbert Street at Grant,

  and cops with megaphones are keeping back crowds

  at the auto repair shop on the corner.

  He knows the director from a mugshot in the papers:

  Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten,

  back in business after naming names.

  On the cover of Time magazine a week later: Senator Joe McCarthy.

  *

  He heads downtown on a Saturday night, the cable-cars

  clanging through the streets. Long after they’ve gone

  you can still hear those cables, rattling underground.

  At the Powell Street turnaround outside the Owl Drug Company

  he walks west for the Tenderloin, to hear Dave Brubeck

  live at the Black Hawk: to watch

  Chet Baker watching Paul Desmond

  on alto, gliding through ‘Stardust’, ‘You Go to my Head’.

  *

  He strolls the Barbary Coast at night, or where it once was,

  down on Pacific and Montgomery,

  now known as the ‘International Settlement’,

  where the military shore patrols in their overcoats and gloves

  pair up with regular cops

  and watch their boys don’t get into trouble

  in the sex-clubs or queer bars or brothels.

  One time he saw two men bust out of a crib-joint, naked,

  both with knives, it looked like: one black,

  one white – though it was pretty hard to tell as they jabbed

  and parried under Margie’s sputtering bulb –

  and over real quick:

  one slash opened the black guy’s buttock

  like a plum, then this neat stab to the throat

  and with it

  a twisting rope

  so hot it steamed

  as it splashed on the cobbles;

  the blood that ran out of him

  till he ran out of blood.

  It could have been any of us, he supposed,

  weltering in our own muck,

  all bled out in that back alley

  three thousand miles from home.

  *

  I was talking to this North Shore corporal and I’d just looked round to check the road and turned back and he wasn’t there. He was down in the culvert. Sniper got him in the middle of his forehead. The back of his head was gone, brains and everything, gone.

  *

  He thought about Billy, all those men on the street in Los Angeles.

  About Overholt. Even Sherwood and Rennert.

  He tried to remember the Mexican girl,

  how all she wanted was a house in Bel Air –

  to go to Hollywood parties, watch television, and gossip,

  but he couldn’t gather her together in his head.

  It snagged at him every time he thought about her,

  the way of a rag-nail in a pocket’s silk lining.

  Strange that:

  his memory full of holes, hers always tight as a fist.

  *

  He loved having weather again,

  the way it changed every minute.

  They closed the Golden Gate in December, for a tempest

  wrecking boats on Ocean Beach,

  and the next month there was snow.

  *

  He’d been given some name by Overholt: a guy in UC Berkeley

  he should talk to, Walter Friedländer in Social Welfare,

  so he made the call after Christmas,

 
took the Key train over the bay through banks of fog

  so dense he couldn’t see the water.

  ‘Please sit down, Mr Walker. You look tired.’ The tall man

  with clever eyes and a slight German accent

  would meet him many times that year, preferring lunch

  at Spenger’s Fish Grotto down by the marina –

  for the clear light, as much as the shellfish, he said,

  ‘You can see San Quentin from here . . .’

  A Social Democrat and Jew, who’d lived through Weimar,

  got out of Berlin in ’33, knew his history of displacement, tyranny.

  They talked about all the émigré directors and cinematographers,

  writers and actors, and the old man laughed: ‘At last!

  German Expressionism meets the American Dream!’

  He’d worked with the homeless, with ex-soldiers,

  all through the west coast,

  said it would get worse when the Republicans won that year,

  which they would, he knew,

  that he was frightened for the first time here in America:

  ‘McCarthyism is fascism. Exactly the same. Propaganda and lies,

  opening divisions, fueling fear, paranoia. Just like the thirties:

  a state of emergency, followed by fascism, followed by war.

  You’ve just defeated Hitler.

  Can’t anyone see you’ve made another, all of your own?’

  The last time they met, walking round the marina after lunch,

  he said his worry now was the streets would get worse –

  whatever happened in the election – because of mental-health reform.

  ‘They’re calling it deinstitutionalization,

  – which is a hard word for me to say! –

  and the theory is good: close down asylums,

  which are medieval, dirty, corrupt and over-crowded,

  and give community care with cheaper drugs.

  In practice, though, this is all about money. As usual.

  The sick will miss their medication and – how do you say it? –

  fall through the cracks. They will be homeless,

  ending up in prisons or out on the streets.

  There will be thousands of them.

  This is the future, my friend. This is the future.’

  *

  He sees the Dmytryk movie, The Sniper. All filmed round here.

  It could have been him at the end, running uphill,

  running to ground: Filbert between Battery and Sansome,

  the Lower Filbert Steps, Vallejo at Montgomery,

  then up from Union through Varennes to his place, finally,

  an upstairs room at 450 Filbert Street, east of Grant,

  where the cops find him sitting with his rifle, crying.

  *

  The view from the window was west, over to Russian Hill,

  and the bay, and the Golden Gate.

  He doesn’t deserve this city,

  its play of height and depth, this

  changing sift of color and weather.

  The water held in it a shimmy of light

  and the days were warming through June and July

  and the road that threads through the hem of the Highlands

  would now be decked with wild stock, lupins and apple blossom

  all the way to Chéticamp and Pleasant Bay.

  She will be wearing her sleeveless dress, cornflower blue

  and walking away.

  He could not call her back to his life: which is a horror,

  which is the dead calf in the bank-head field, a black flap

  bubbling with maggots,

  ugly and wrong.

  Her clean eyes could not see this,

  what he has become.

  *

  A postcard of Telegraph Hill, to Annie MacLeod, Dunvegan, Inverness County, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Dear Annie, you would like San Francisco I think. It’s very dramatic with all these houses scrambling up over the hills, and the bay and the bridges and everything, but you might not care so much for the crowds. You’ve never seen so many people! It’s not like New York or Los Angeles, mind. Halifax seems like a village to me now.

  Do you ever think of those days, those summers?

  My best regards to your parents, and all those that remember me.

  August, 52

  *

  Summer was closing, and he moved through the last of it,

  finding a park with fairground music

  coming from somewhere behind the trees.

  Walking round, he understood that the funfair

  is nothing to do with cork-shoots or coconut shies,

  the carousel, the booster or the bumper rides,

  not balloons-and-darts, not the cotton-candy,

  ice-cream, salt water taffy or fries – it’s fear,

  it’s the high-wheel of fortune and despair: that

  thin glimpse of joy and freedom, before

  rattling back to earth, loose-legged and spinning.

  The real carnival is the other side –

  beyond the midway, the concession stands, ‘Hot dogs

  a nickel, three for a dime’, the merry-go-round

  with its lights and bobbing horses, the churning calliope,

  shouts, screams, sprays of laughter, gimcracks, baubles,

  stuffed animals, those feather-headed

  Kewpie dolls on sticks,

  the children crying out, the barkers calling.

  Follow the lights:

  the colored electric bulbs strung up

  on spitting wires, the smell of burning fat and engine oil,

  cheap perfume, sweat and food and dung.

  Here are the pinheads, the half-boys, the lobster-boys,

  snake-men, midgets; the cage

  and the geek inside, the man with the horrors,

  waiting to eat the heads off chickens

  for a bed of wet straw and a pint of rye.

  This is not the worst.

  The worst is the hall of mirrors

  where you catch sight of yourself, twisted,

  swollen, unrecognizable.

  Then a beautiful woman – your wife, your lover.

  Then it’s you again: old, crippled;

  her as a turning witch, you as the held man.

  And you blow every piece of your glass apart.

  It’s the worst thing in the world,

  catching sight of yourself.

  The next day, the carnival is gone.

  All that’s left is the flattened grass

  and trodden ground,

  the litter of popcorn boxes,

  Dixie cups and empty bottles.

  It looks like the place

  where some huge, fantastic beast had foraged

  and lain for a while

  before moving on.

  *

  All the tourist films call California a playground, solely designed for our entertainment – colorful, exotic, transporting, like a carnival – and it is just that: a carnival. A crude travesty of childhood happiness: a pageant of loss.

  I feel closer to her here, with the water all around. The light.

  Annie.

  Torn apart, the length of our lives.

  September, 52

  *

  There was a ticker-tape parade in town for Eisenhower:

  A hundred thousand, the papers said,

  the headlines: WE LIKE IKE.

  A month later he was in, on a landslide,

  soldier on a soldier’s ticket: get us out of Korea;

  get the Communists out
of here, and everywhere else.

  *

  The view from the window was gray, tumbling. The fog,

  breaking in waves from the west,

  had already taken Russian Hill

  and only the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge still stood

  above the layer of mist, pouring

  its dry ice into every crack of the city.

  The occasional sunbeams like search-lights; the two-tone

  moan of the foghorn blowing.

  Our boys laid smoke so you could hardly see the beach

  and the black dots. Some of them moving;

  most of them not.

  A sudden blazing, like gas flares from an oil-well, but lateral –

  the flame-thrower tanks

  burning off the sides of the beach – and you could hear nothing

  but the drumfire that beat in our faces,

  shivered our ungrounded souls.

  Only the sea opened its arms to us.

  Welcoming, drinking us down.

  *

  The waters of Loch Ban steam in the white dusk. The pines creak under fresh snow, and squirrels watch as I pass, each holding on to the base of their tree. The gull-like screech of the bald eagles, high in a stand of balsam fir, their blood-call over the wastes where the trout or the rabbit feel the closing claws: their drawing-up and their down-fall.

  *

  When he was working with the derelicts downtown

  he’d taken to using the Hotel Utah,

  a few blocks south of Howard.

  Today was quiet, just a few in, and the owner,

  who sat in the same corner each day,

  staring out, on guard,

  until you got real close

  and saw his trick, how he’d had eyes

  tattooed on his lids – that he was

  asleep, or out cold. Like those

  French façades with the shutters spread,

  not windows at all

  just paint on a stuccoed wall.

  Eyes shut, tight as clams,

  saliva pooling on his vest.

  ‘Howdya like that guy?’

  Some boozehound he’d never seen in before,

  holding grimly onto the counter like it was the gunwale of a boat.

  His mouth moved a bit before he came up with:

  ‘Hey, Mac. Talkin’ to you.’

  ‘He’s the head honcho round here, so don’t make a book of it.’

  A couple in the corner were taking notice. The man strolls over.

  ‘You’re outta line, bud. Take a walk,

  or you’ll be wearing your asshole like a collar.’

  The drunk swings round, eyes loosening:

  ‘You can take your lousy bar an’ shove it, fuckin’ . . .’