yustyoking

DMV Blues

            Hier bist die Reisen af der Raumschiffs Enterprise. Das fümf-jahrishe Auftrag, die neues Welten erforschen und die unberührte Gebiete besteigen, die nie ein Mensch zuvor gesehen hat.

                                                       *                                              

            The goddam Department of Motor Vehicles !

            The DMV is living up to its reputation.

            Mom has a blue handicap sticker. Since she’s always afraid she’ll forget to hang it in the windshield, it would be 1,000 times more convenient to have a handicap license plate.

            Stephanie Rosenthal, who lived next door, got a handicap plate. Steph’ died ten years ago, but her hubby Roger still uses handicap parking. He’s a wowzer, nobody can tell Roger anything.

            It’s not like we’re re-inventing the wheel here.

            I call the DMV at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. “We are experiencing unusually high call volume. Our wait times are in excess of 20 minutes. We are not taking more calls at this time. Try calling on Wednesday or Thursday morning for faster service.”

            Why does this set my teeth on edge? Because the angry DMV fines everyone $5 if they insist on driving down to the office. “Save $5! Use the handy DMV website, the U.S. mail or telephone the DMV at…” say all their announcements.

            Yeah. Right.

            Bastards.

            So I get up at 8 a.m. on Wednesday and call. Once I connect, the first thing I hear— the first recording— is the automated woman’s voice telling me, “We at the DMV can only discuss your record with you over the phone. If you’re calling for someone else, we will not be able to access that person’s record or discuss that person’s record with you… Your wait time is 13 minutes.”

            Followed by a recording of Tchaikovsky’s The 1812 Overture.

            I’m supposed to be grateful? They’re slamming the door in my face! It’s too early in the morning for Tchaikovsky. I hang up.

            The goddam DMV!

                                                       *

            I drive to the DMV. Police officers in immaculate white shirts, holstered guns riding their hips, eye me suspiciously. Their gold badges shine brightly. I, like, totally ignore them. A hundred customers, Latinos and Asians, sit on gray plastic chairs, clutching number slips.  A sign stipulates “No cell phone use,” but a dozen people are on their phones, all imparting the same message: “I’m on line at the DMV!”

            My wait time is six minutes. The room is enormous, the length of the building. The ceiling track lights give off a subtle buzz that jangles everyone’s nerves. School days, I have to bring a note from my momma authorizing me to get her new plates. 

            To their credit, the ladies are extremely helpful and fix me right up!

            “Does she still drive?” Ms. Spaulding, the attractive black employee behind the counter at “window number four” asks me.

            “Oh yes,” I blurt.

            “Did she sign this authorization herself?”

            “Oh yes,” I say, feeling like a broken record.   

            I still have to pay the $5 surcharge to renew the vehicle registration, although I don’t see how I could have gotten handicap plates and changed the registration on-line, over the phone or through the mail. Rules is rules, but some things don’t make sense.

                                                         *

A Titanic Catastrophe, Pt. 1

                        “The Hunger Games isn’t as good as the original:

                          The Running Man with Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

                                                                      –         Steven Simon on Facebook

                                                       *

           Yahoo! News tells me the cruise ship MS Balmoral left Southampton, England on April 8, 2012 with relatives of some of the 1,500 passengers who perished 100 years ago on the RMS Titanic. Leaving port on the exact same day and retracing the original route, the souls on board hope to have better luck this time. Some even wear period costumes. The cruise line expects they will reach the site of the wreck on April 14 and hold a memorial service. Landfall in New York is scheduled for April 18. We’ll wait with baited breath to hear from them via wireless.

                                                        * 

             As a movie, Cleopatra (1963) nearly bankrupted 20^th Century Fox. The film Ishtar (1978), with Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty— a hilariously bad movie— almost broke Columbia Pictures. Both the director and Martin Sheen, the leading male actor, experienced nervous breakdowns during the production of Francis Ford Coppala’s Apocalypse Now (1979). These last two movies have something else in common, the same cinematographer. It’s enough to say that when the director was going bananas, Vittorio Storaro did not exactly function as a calming influence! Kevin Costner’s Waterworld (1995) almost drowned Universal Pictures. For a dream factory, Hollywood has been cranking out nightmarish productions almost from its inception. Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928) included orgies on the set. (His real name was Erich Oswald Stroheim, born 1885 in Austria. He grew up poor as a church mouse in Vienna.) D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) …

             Enough! There is no excuse for what we did.

             Hired by the Sidney Bamf Film Company to originate a screenplay for The Trollop Molly Brown, my partner at Montevideo Films [Marca Registrada] Bruce “Boopsie” Davis and I did our usual exemplary research: We looked up “Molly Brown” on the Web. “The unsinkable Molly Brown” was, of course, a great, charismatic historical figure, best known for insisting her lifeboat mates turn back to the stricken luxury liner Titanic and pluck up more survivors. The ship’s crew rowing the boat demurred, afraid the frantic passengers floundering in the icy water would overwhelm their small boat or that the suction from the sinking Titanic might pull them under.

             (I try not to dwell on my professional failures. I guess the little accident with the cruise ship Costa Concordia off the coast of Italy has been ringing my bell.)

             On-line, Boopsie and I found quite a list of previous productions: two TV documentaries— one from as late as 2005— a TV movie, a TV miniseries, a 1960’s Broadway musical starring Tammy Grimes, and no less than six motion pictures, going back to Thelma Ritter in Titanic from 1953. (Originally called Nearer, My God, to Thee, the studio changed the title. Go figure.) This was a wonderful gold mine, laying the groundwork for an easy $25,000 or a lawsuit for plagiarism.

             Also, Kathy Bates in James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) nailed the personality of Molly Brown for all eternity. Her dialogue (kudos to the screenwriters!!!), her delivery (kudos to Ms. Bates), her scenes (thank you, Mr. Cameron!) provide a textbook lesson in how to deliver a narrative through the development of a single character. And hers was but one of half a dozen sub-plots! The captain, the chief steward, even the heroine’s mother all experience character development.

              Cameron’s Titanic (now released in 3-D) deserves every Academy Award it garnered and then some!

             This set the bar unusually high, but British director Reginald “Reggie” Sweeterman assured Boopsie and me not to worry. “You come up with the proverbial sow’s ear,” he drawled in his Belgravia accent— his one true claim to fame— “and I’ll turn it into the old silk purse, eh, chaps?!”

            “Why does he keep calling us ‘chaps’ ?” asked Boopsie, a child of Montgomery County, Maryland. “ ’Chaps’ is a brand name of the Ralph Lauren Company.”

            “Boopsie, pul-lease,” I begged, “focus on the plot.” The last thing I needed in 2008 was for our one-year-old joint writing venture to founder through inattention. “This is our big break! Let’s not blow it.”

              Up until then, we had been script-doctoring, rewriting drafts of other people’s creations, jumping in and dreaming up individual scenes and dialog on demand. Whatever bones Boopsie’s erstwhile classmates from UCLA Film School chose to throw us. I often felt like a 1920’s gag writer, extemporizing visual puns and writing them in pencil on the celluloid arms of my shirts, the origin of the coinage “off the cuff.”

             “Get in here!” Sidney Bamf (né Barnofsky) barked from the door of his office on Sepulveda. He had the rep of “meanest man in Hollywood.” The very fact that we were so far from Maryland, that Sidney had beckoned us to rush across the Continental Divide to adhere to his side, so impressed us, we overlooked the fact that his location, location, location lay many miles south of Hollywood. His office was, in fact, suspiciously near ARF, the American Rights Federation, a choleric lobby organization representing the Republican side of the industry, but I failed to make the connection at the time.

             Gruff to the point of rudeness, portly Sidney never-the-less sported an immaculate three-piece suit and Italian shoes that made my mouth water. His bald pate and prominent eyebrows gave him the sought-after Yul Brynner look. The understated elegance, his Cal tan, high-end manicure and aviator sunglasses impressed the hell out of me. Anyone who could throw that much money at trifles, I thought, must be loaded.

             Vanity, thy name is foolishness.

            “Sit down!” he commanded. “I don’t know what kind of crap that poofter Reggie Sweeterman has been feeding you, but this company isn’t in the business of floating free-loading dreamers, cretins or schemers. So just forget everything Sweeterman said. Forget it! If you don’t know screenwriting, consider yourselves fired. If you can’t keep to a deadline, you’re dead meat. If you screw up, I’ll see you never get a day’s pay in the industry again. Ever. Those are the terms.

             “Don’t tell me your good intentions. Give me the facts on Molly Brown.”

             His furious expression should have sent us packing, but newbies, we tried to please.

            “Margaret Brown was born Margaret Tobin in 1867 in Hannibal, Missouri. A prairie town,” I explained. “During her lifetime, she was called ‘Maggie.’ The Molly Brown thing didn’t develop until after she died. At the time the Titanic went down, she was 44 years old. She married James Joseph Brown, nicknamed ‘J.J.’ A self-educated engineer, he made his fortune mining silver in Colorado. He opened up an ore seam at the Little Jonny Mine belonging to the Ibex Mining Company. For this achievement, he was awarded 12,500 shares of stock and got a seat on the board of directors.

             “Molly and J.J.’s children were born in 1887 and 1889. The family moved to Denver, Colorado in 1894. Engaging in society functions and the trappings of a lady, Maggie applied herself to philanthropy and higher education for women. She picked up French, German and Russian. She ran for the U.S. Senate in 1909.”

            “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” suggested Sidney Bamf.

            “I can’t find any indication that she ever got elected. Which is why she could be in Cherbourg, France and aboard the Titanic in 1912.”

            “Touché,” growled Sidney Bamf from behind his fine mahogany desk. He chewed on a cigar, but mercifully, he never lit it.

            “The ship hits an iceberg— “

            “No! Really?” Sidney grunts sarcastically.

            “And Maggie’s in a lifeboat and tries to get them to— “

            “I know! I know!”

           “Afterwards, she and J.J. separate. They remain friends. She also gets a settlement that keeps her comfortably within high society. She does charity work in France during World War I. In 1914, she again runs for the U. S. Senate, but her sister Helen marries a German baron and that puts the scotch on Maggie’s campaign— “

            “Does what?”

            “Puts the skids on Maggie’s campaign.”

            “Sinks the campaign?”

            “Yes.”

            “Go on.”

             “In 1922, J.J. dies and, without a will, Maggie and the kids fight a five-year court battle over what’s left of the fortune.”

             “Courtroom drama. That’s good!”

             “She died during the Great Depression.”

             “Find me a beginning, a middle and an ending,” says Sidney.

             “I think we can write and deliver a very adequate screenplay based on this,” I end dryly, purposely playing the self-deprecating card to avoid butting heads with my new boss.

             Wrong move.

             “You don’t sound very enthusiastic,” Bamf complains, looking more and more like a bulldog, crouched behind his desk. He rolls the soggy cigar between his stubby fingers, apparently a nervous tic.

            “Oh, we’re rip-roaring ready to go!” I yelp like a fresh-faced office boy in a 1940’s musical.

            “How many pages?”

            “As many as you need!” replies Boopsie who, after all, went to film school in sunny Cal.

            Wrong answer.

            “You gentlemen haven’t ever written a screenplay,” Bamf exclaims, his voice like sandpaper scratching stone.

            Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!

            Babbling, we name other producers who have used us, directors to whose work we have contributed, references. Even to my ears, we sound like rank amateurs.

            “Considering,” says Bamf, “I’ll pay you scale.”

            “That’s chump change! That’s lunch money!” Boopsie wails.

            Now’s the time we should have run from Bamf’s office like a five-alarm fire.

           “A $10,000 retainer and first rights on whatever we provide,” I suggest. “Otherwise, we’re outta here.”

          “It’s business,” Sidney counters. “Don’t get sore.”

           Behold, he scribbles a contract. He has his secretary transcribe it on her PC while he regales us with tales of other unmitigated disasters. He writes us a check for $5,000 and… we sign.

           “Where are you staying?” he growls.

           Ah, the hospitality of Hollywood producers! I think. They fly you across the country, put you up in their homes. They see you have every convenience. They lend you their ear, their input, their thoughts at the end of every day.

           “We came straight from the airport,” I tell him hopefully.

           “Sounds lame. Find a place,” he belches.

           “We usually work from our office,” Boopsie interjects.

           “Where’s your office?”

            “On Rockville Pike.”

             “Never heard of it.”

             “It’s in Maryland,” I reply sheepishly.

             Gales of laughter! His face going red, Sidney fights to catch his breath. “That’s priceless!” he marvels. “Where’s your office? It’s in Maryland. I’ll remember that one! Now get the hell out of here and write me a screenplay!”

            Checking the cost of motel rooms, we say “To hell with it” and fly home to Maryland. We’ll work out of our office. We write. We edit. We write some more. I email fresh drafts to Sidney every few days. It’s not like he doesn’t have other projects on his schedule.

            We divide Molly’s story into three distinct chapters: her life prior to the Titanic, the voyage, and her life afterwards. I love the fact that she was out West. We have a sod hut on the prairie, a silver mine in the hills, scenes in an old-fashion saloon, gunfights, people cracking whips, people cracking wise, pistol-whippings and lots of Old West dialog. Every three sentences, J.J. either says “Git along, little dogie” or “Ain’t that all get-out?”

            (“The more I read this script,” Reggie Sweeterman will comment, “the more I envision J.J. as the tall, silent type.”)

            The good news is, I am able to salvage a lot of odds and ends that never previously made it onto celluloid. Introducing J.J., for instance, I use this gem left over from a cowpoke picture:

            Wide shot, stock footage of some dude riding a horse across the prairie.

           NARRATOR: (Texas accent) “He was ridin’! Ridin’ across the West! His face was the color of money, honey!… A little green. He’d fried up some prairie chicken eggs and they didn’ agree with him… Next stop, Eldorado! The Colorado silver mines! Fortunes to be made in the mining of precious metals.”

            I don’t want to say we created a masterpiece, but… I’m satisfied.

            Not all of the info I pull from the Net is certifiably accurate.

            LIST OF PASSENGERS (of doubtful authenticity)

            Cedric von Kampf

            Thomas “Piggy” Bankes

            Margaret “Molly” Maguire

            Aston C. Martin

            When evaluating this data, it helps to know that Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, the Molly Maguires were a band of violent Irish-American coal miners who fought the big mining trusts in Pennsylvania in the 1800’s, and that an Aston Martin is a British-manufactured automobile.

           Wikipedia rates a B – . At least they subject their factoids to peer review.

           “What about her later years?!” Sidney demands over the phone. “High society dame forever scarred by the shock of that one night. Amnesia from trying to suppress the horrid truth. Write that.”

          “It’s not… really… historically accurate,” I counter.

          “We’re not making a doc for the History Channel. Write it!”

          As aware of dramatic hooks as the next hack, I stop arguing and complete the assignment.

          “Do either of you boys know anything about Blacksburg, Virginia?” Sidney asks from the West Coast. “I got a good deal on a tax break, but we have to film in Blacksburg.”

          “I don’t… think… there’s an… ocean anywhere near Blacksburg,” I point out.

          “Always the bellyacher!” Bamf bitches. “Find it on a map and scout the damned location!”

                                                        *

          There are many historical buildings in Blacksburg. I particularly like the Courthouse on South Main Street, dreaming up antebellum scenes of melodrama in its spooky corridors.

          “How’s it look?” asks Bamf when I call him on my cellphone.

          “It looks good! I still don’t see any water.”

           “You need a bath? We float a model of the Titanic in a tank. Forget the ocean.”

           “Blacksburg was an area of great Civil War activity,” I offer.

           “There you go again! What a titanic pain in the ass you are!” Bamf howls. “Do you want this job or don’cha?”

           “I like Blacksburg. It’s very convenient. Saves me coming out west.”

           “Yeah, yeah!”

           So, eventually, our trailers are set up in Blacksburg. This, naturally, attracts the law. The sheriff, his deputies, state law enforcement all come sniffing around. “We can provide private security,” they propose, “in addition to upholding the law. Also, we’ll enforce your permits: Hold up traffic. Direct traffic. Hold back the crowds. You need us!”

           They make their pitches to me. Since I scouted the location, I’m a familiar face. I, in turn, direct them to Sidney Bamf’s production assistant Marty Markham, point man on this shoot. Marty cuts some deals and doles out cash incentives.

           We’re in business!

           Cinematographer Vilgot Frölund and I bond over unloading his equipment. We both speak Swedish. “Six different tripods?” I ask.

           “One for every occasion,” he explains. “Ett för varje tillfälle.” Tall, dressed in jeans, brown leather boots and a flannel shirt, a fiery red beard, a full head of hair, squinty eyes, he’s your typical Viking.

            We spend all evening driving around town admiring the light. “I can film here!” Vilgot announces enthusiastically. “Find us a Chinese take-out and we are fit for fight,” he adds, reciting the last three words in English.

             Day Two, the cast drops out of the sky from the West Coast. A small crew, we all help out: I spend my time shuttling new arrivals from the Roanoke Regional Airport, “The gateway to the Blue Ridge” according to the travel brochure.

            “Who are you?” asks Janice Bulova, the blond, showgirlish ingenue, fastening me with her baby blues. Jesus! We’re standing by the baggage carousel and I’m already salivating. “You’re not local,” she surmises. “I don’t hear a Virginia accent.”

           Lugging her suitcases to the van on a cart, I say, “I’m the screenwriter.”

           “You… write?” she asks excitedly, clutching my arm in a vice-like grip. Method actress. I can feel the drama! She widens her eyes. Widens her eyes. WIDENS HER…

            “I-I-I wr-r-rite,” I stammer, leaning against the van to keep from falling over. It’s a perfect day, 80 degrees and sunny.

             “I always wanted to write,” she exclaims, sucking her pointer finger between ruby-red lips and running her wet hand down the side of my face. “You can teach me SO MUCH!” She presses against me, all but raping me with her long legs.

             “Uh, uh…” I gulp, unprepared for dry humping in the parking lot of the Roanoke Regional Airport.

             Her arms around my neck, she whispers in my ear, “You and I are going to be such good friends! “

            “Why don’t I… why don’t I… drive us, you know, to the film set,” I suggest, my pecker tearing a hole in my trousers.

            “Oh! Right!” she replies, jumping nimbly into the van, the view of her tight little derrière forever imprinted on my memory.

           While I drive, we talk shop. If you want to know what she looks like, that’s easy, she’s a dead ringer for Leelee Sobieski, very blond hair, extremely intense blue eyes, a narrow face and a cute nose like a bump on a log. Her beauty is a little too fragile for me, but she lists a long line of credits as a “featured player” in major productions: You get your name scrolled at the end of the film, but you’re nowhere to be found on the movie poster. More than an extra but less than a star.

            I don’t need to tell her that this is her big break, the breakout perf that’ll put her on the radar screen.

            “It’s make or break,” she laughs. “I live on diet cola and vitamin pills. At home, I eat all I want. When I’m in training for a film, I’m hungry all the time.”

             I take her to the trailer she’s sharing with Martha Lloyd, the middle-age character actress who plays Molly after the Titanic. Martha has yet to arrive. I pile the suitcases on Martha’s bed, shrug my shoulders, give Janice a crooked smile and say, “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place as sterile, smelly and empty as a location trailer.”

            “If it was a hotel, I would give the bellhop a tip,” Janice smirks, walking up to me and planting a magnificent French kiss squarely on my mouth. Her muscular tongue investigates my teeth, wrestles with my tongue. Her hands clasp my head, as she massages my scalp. She pulls away with a grin.

            “Very nice,” I murmur thickly. “I’m amazed at the softness of your skin.”

           “Oh,” she chuckles, “about 10,000 gallons of cold cream when I was growing up.”

           “Growing up? You look about 17.”

           “Well,” she smiles ruefully, “I’m 30, wrinkles and all.”

           “You don’t have any wrinkles,” I say, my hands around her waist. “You make me wish I’d gotten into the movie business sooner. You taste good!”

           “That’s a great slogan for my mouthwash,” she teases. “Use PureBreath, you’ll taste goo-o-ood!”

            I take her around and introduce her to the crew. She’s a cooler, more distant presence, quietly checking everyone out from behind designer sunglasses. “And this is what’s-his-face, the writer,” I hear her gamely telling Marty Markham. “He was nice enough to pick me up at the airport.” I find myself wondering if I misinterpreted our steamy embraces.

            “I sent him over there to do it,” Markham grins, taking most of the credit.

            I stomp back to my trailer, muttering darkly about Californians. Boopsie’s holding down the fort at Montevideo Films [Marca Registrada]. I’m on my own down here in the wilds of Virginia.

            Soon enough, I have to drive back to the airport and pick up the next gang of actors and actresses. Molly’s husband J.J. will be played by “Hugo Block,” an Italian male lead with a striking resemblance to Valentino. That’s the plus side. The oily skin and perpetual smell of garlic we can live with. Mercifully, we’re not filming in Smellovision. Every word out of his mouth, however, will have to be dubbed by an English-speaker in a studio recording booth.

          “Why are we using this person?” I ask Marty.

          He gives me a withering glance.

          I crawl meekly back into my trailer. 

                                                        *

          “Where’ll I get my extras?” Reggie asks me that evening over pizza at a local eatery.

           Ah! I’d forgotten. I’m considered the local authority! “Virginia Tech has 28,000 students,” I suggest.

            “Lovely! College birds. Must get into the Colonial spirit. Maybe Molly Brown has some nieces,” Reggie enthuses, drawing a dark stare from Janice Bulova.

            Day 3: We’re using the university swimming pool, at night, to float our plastic model of the Titanic.

            We almost electrocute our grip Eddie Johnson. “It looks very good,” Vilgot insists blithely. He has so many filters over the lens, I’m surprised he can see anything through the viewfinder. “It’s only an establishing shot. ‘See, we’re on a boat.’ We can film the interiors anywhere. As long as there’s gilt, of course. Lots of gilding.”

          I assure him I’ve found some rooms with turn-of-the-century furnishings.

          The Sidney Bamf Film Company has sprung for Airstream trailers. I’ve been assigned a trailer with Vilgot. We play musical trailers: Janice Bulova shares hers with Martha Lloyd, but since Martha is held up working on another picture, I move in with Janice. Vilgot cohabits with Monica Hart, our scriptgirl, affectionately dubbed “Money Heart” by the crew. When I ask Vilgot what he thinks he’s doing with an airhead like Monica, he replies, “She is what we in Sweden call a Pia Pudding. Soft and warm in all the right places but not a lot of cranial activity.”

            Which, I have to say, is the exact opposite of my situation: Not only do I have to coach Janice in her lines during bouts of adolescent sex, she wants to learn all there is to know about Judaism while standing on one foot.

           “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” I suggest, quoting Hillel.

           “What about tacos? Tacos can’t be kosher. You’ve got meat and cheese together in the same dish,” she complains. “What about pizza? Pepperoni pizza!”

           “I never said tacos were kosher!” I bleat like a wounded sheep.

          “Oh, am I too rough?” she asks, full of solicitous concern for my poor cock. “Did mommy pull too hard? We don’t want William to get a back ache and quit on us!”

          Endearments, she has taken to calling my schlong “William.”

           “He’s fine,” I gulp, filled with doubt.

            Janice really keeps me on my toes.

           Every morning, the windows are totally steamed up, from the inside. The cops, hired by Marty to include us on their rounds, feel that we’re setting a bad example. “We screw around, too,” a genial officer comments at 7 a.m. one morning as, bleary-eyed, I march to the showers. “But we’re discreet, y’ know? We don’t make a public spectacle of ourselves.”

           Well, duh.

           No one is having sexual relations with our costume designer cum wardrobe mistress, a butch dike named Patty Waggoner. I like her. She has unbridled enthusiasm and isn’t averse to sitting up all night at her sewing machine. There’s a reason why it’s called a “low budget production.” Everyone wears at least two hats.  

           “Marty tells me you haven’t accomplished a damn thing,” Sidney Bamf berates me over the phone. “Don’t make me come out there!”

          “I’m the screenwriter! How is the production schedule my problem?” I bitch, but Sid and I both understand that, in his absence, I am the adult at the party. No one else is 60 years old! “I’ll get right on it,” I promise.

                                                         *

             Our movie begins with an aphorism: “A shadow that starts in the darkest part of the roof often ends on the brightest side.”

            “What does that mean?” asks Vilgot, the Swede.

            “Look on the bright side?” I suggest.

            “It means our fucking screenwriter is trying to go high-brow,” Marty declares. No one contradicts this assessment. 

             We start filming at 8 a.m. every morning, as soon as the sun rises sufficiently to give Vilgot some semblance of color. He keeps his own scorecard: Prairie scenes— 8 to 11 a.m.— are monochromatic and gray. City scenes—12 noon to 3 p.m.— are bathed in stark yellow sunlight, from almost directly overhead. This produces inky black shadows that add visual tension to the screen. Vilgot uses late afternoon and evening light— 4 to 7 p.m.— for scenes “on board the Titanic,” everything cast in an orange glow.

           “I try to maintain color balance and the same overall lighting for each chapter,” he tells Marty and me. “It won’t do to have too great a shift from one scene to another, that only draws attention to how artificial the film process is.”

           At the beginning of every day, coffee in hand, Reggie is as keyed up, keen and on an even keel as the rest of us. Somewhere around 10 a.m., however, he invariably visits the Porta-Potty out back. When he returns to the set— whether at the university, a mountain cabin standing in for the great open prairie or the fancy interior of a downtown ballroom— Reggie snivels. His nose is running.

           “Do you have a cold?” each of us asks solicitously. He’s the boss, we worry about him.

           “NO, I DON’T HAVE A COLD!” he rants and from then until almost 4 p.m., we get very little work done. Storming around the set, interrupting takes, Reggie complains bitterly, at great length, about the costumes, the background, the smell of the furniture, my poorly written dialog and weak structure. Critique delivered motor-mouth fashion, a mile a minute. “Don’t have her say ‘I see the exploitation of women as unacceptable.’ Have her say, ‘Times are changing and revolutionary Marxism is the only conceivable answer.’”

           “I don’t think we can do that. She’s not Emma Goldman. England and America at this point in time remain wedded to the concept of Empire— “

            “DAMN YOU! STOP ARGUING AND REWRITE THE SCENE!”

            Starts and stops, changes upon changes, disruptions, nothing seems to appease our director.

            “He’s a crackhead,” Janice breathes into my ear over lunch on, like, Day 6.

            “Well, that’s not fair,” I counter. “He may be full of himself and indecisive, but I wouldn’t cast aspersions— “

            “I tripped over him snorting a noseful,” she answers. “That’s why he goes into these prolonged tirades.”

            I sit quietly eyeing my bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, digesting this unwelcome intelligence. “What should we do?” I ask. “You know Sidney Bamf better than I do.”

            “Well, don’t tell Sidney!” Janice counsels me, one hand inside my shirt, the other down my pants. By now, our coworkers expect us to display outrageous expressions of affection. It’s become standard behavior, everyone agrees that  Kevin and Janice can’t keep their hands off one another. “If you tell Sidney, he’ll shut us down!”

            Janice uses her tongue to carwash my earlobe.

            “So we— “

            “We eat lunch. Then we band together as a team. We make allowances, and work with Vilgot and Marty to get this production in the can.” Her breakout op, Janice isn’t about to let something as mundane as a cokehead get in her way.

            “Gulp and double gulp,” I say, but that’s what we do.

            It doesn’t take many days to discover that Marty is as addicted to coke as Reggie. We call them “the flyboys” and try to keep them distracted and off the set, so Vilgot and the rest of us can get our work done. It’s cumbersome and a slow, annoying process. I have better things to do than nurse two drug addicts.

            I also try varying degrees of counseling and intervention, but these dudes have been married to cocaine too long for a newbie, proselytizing novice screenwriter like me to have an impact.

            “I know EXACTLY what I’m DOING!” Reggie insists. “I’ve been making films a damn sight longer than you have! So shut yer pie-hole, chappy!”

            Ugh. I never do get any control over the pharmaceutical aspect of the situation. Eddie Johnson, head grip, and I beat the shit out of Reggie’s local pusher, but the only effect is someone new showing up to take his place. “Supply and demand, have you ever thought about having yourself committed?” I ask Reggie at one point. “If Robert Downey Jr. can go through rehab and stay clean, so can you!” (Yes, I sound like an Army recruiting poster.)

            “That’s under the assumption I got a problem,” he drawls. “I ain’t got no problem!” He then launches into a poor imitation of The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.

            Marty isn’t much better. I like Marty, but he’s a cokehead with a voracious sexual appetite. The rest of the cast and I feel we can work around it. Still, there is something innately dishonest in his character. He comes on shamelessly to the coeds at Virginia Tech, proffering screen tests and movie roles that don’t even exist on paper. He cuts, in fact, such a wide swath among the female student body, the University Provost feels compelled to step in and have a serious talk.

            “We’ve been banned from the campus,” I guess sourly upon seeing Marty’s crestfallen demeanor.

            “Doesn’t matter,” he slurs unconvincingly. “There are plenty of other places around town where we can meet students.”

            I have Janice and Monica troll for likely extras. Successful, we get underway again. Most 20-year-olds are perfectly happy to sit on their duffs in period costume studying math, applied science or English Lit. for $10 an hour, between short, intense bouts of acting. We have more applicants than we can suit up.

            Still, I never know when there’s going to be a massive shouting match either on the set or in the trailer park. Angry voices and slamming aluminum doors no longer keep me up at night. The Romans had an appropriate curse: “May you live in exciting times.”

            “What a shame,” laments Boopsie long-distance from Maryland, always happy to cash the checks and commiserate verbally over the phone. “What a mess. Do we have to return the money???”

            “Not yet. Production continues, only not quite on schedule.”

                                                            *

A Titanic Catastrophe, Pt. 2

         Synopsis: Screenwriter on a film shoot for the Sidney Bamf Film Company, I discover that both the on-site producer and the film’s director have an insatiable fondness for cocaine. Hopelessly behind schedule on this “low budget” vehicle, located in Virginia for tax reasons, I try my best to hold things together amidst a sea of conflicting agendas.

                                                      *

            In order to flesh out our story with superfluous scenes at the cheapest possible price, Bamf orders me to “layer” the script. Thus, our movie opens with Molly sitting in a lifeboat, lost in thought, ostensibly gazing at the foundering Titanic. (Filmed in the middle of the day, on dry land, in a Boston Whaler courtesy of the Old Coast Guard Station on the Boardwalk in Virginia Beach. I’ve always loved this little museum. Marty Markham loves using it for every conceivable setting.)

            The next “layer” comes partway into the film when it transpires that a modern researcher is actually the narrator. Confusingly, a lot of different voices take turns narrating. The more, the merrier, it seems. Usually with a peculiar accent or a crusty / perky / exhausted / resolute / resigned tone of voice (Pick One) to provide depth. Without further explanation.

            “I mean, who is this person?” I keep asking Marty, who keeps ordering up additional narration. “These disembodied voices don’t bode well for our movie.”

            “THAT’S IT!” he shouts excitedly, his aviators all but jumping off his tanned, handsome face. “Disembodied voices! Write that down. ‘Lost souls of the Titanic speak to us from beyond the grave!’ Wonderful. Wunderbar !”

            “I know what ‘wonderful’ means,” I sulk.

            “You’ll narrate!”

            “I don’t have a Texas accent.”

            “Fake it, for Christ’s sake.”

            “I’m a writer.”

            “Congrats! You’ve just acquired another arrow to your quiver.”

            “Analogies— “

            “Set up a scene on deck where an artisan is teaching archery to aristocrats.”

            “A crew member?”

            “Well, duh! Where else would an archery instructor come from?”

            “Are you serious?”

            “Just do it!” Marty commands imperiously in a slave-driver tone that all too often enters our conversations. “That’s where you can plug in the explanatory dialog about…”

            “About too few lifeboats! I get it.”

            “Good boy!”

            Yes, this creative process bulks up the script to feature length, but our movie seems to be metamorphosing into an astronomical number of scenes.

            “I want Charley, the modern-day researcher, to be playing tennis with a sexy young lady whose Great Great Grandfather was aboard the Californian when that steamship saw the flares from the stricken Titanic and blithely kept on sailing,” explains Marty. “Charley drops his racket in mid-swing when she mentions that ‘Family lore has Great Great Grandpa always bitching that Captain Stanley Lord saw the distress flares from the Titanic and didn’t stop to pick up survivors.’ That saves us the expense of filming still another scene in period costume on the deck of a ship!”

            Shrewd bubbe, I think.

            It also gives Marty the op to ogle an endless series of leggy coeds who audition for the part of the great great granddaughter in skimpy white tennis outfits. I don’t complain. I like cheesecake as much as the next guy, but I feel the tennis sequence is a cheap shot that diminishes the quality of the film.

            “Everybody has heard the goddam story a hundred times,” rumbles Bamf from the West Coast. “So the real draw is how you tell it, cinematically. If you’re gonna be a screenwriter, you should know that. Layering!— P.O.V.— I want as many points of view as I can get.”

            “Hey, you’re the producer. You tell me what to write, I’ll crank out the scenes!” I pant.

            “You have my every confidence,” he grumbles in a voice filled with concern.

            Because by now, we’re already rapidly nearing the 21 days of principal photography that Bamf has assigned this vehicle. Whatever dreams Marty had of going back in the script and filming the prairie scenes in a real sod hut in North Dakota, they have by now evaporated with most of the travel budget. We can tool up and down the Virginia coast in our caravan of vehicles, but gas prices keep skyrocketing, killing our mobility. Fortunately, Virginia has a lot of state parks and coastline to choose from. Equipped with generators, purchased locally, and arena spotlights developed to film Olympic events, Vilgot uses the cover of darkness to fake scene after scene portraying the North Atlantic. The Chesapeake Bay never looked so cold and ominous!

            “Half this movie is being filmed in the dark,” I complain. “I feel like we’re filming a sequel to Pitch Black.”

            “THAT’S IT!” Marty enthuses. “Put that in your notes! ‘Tone: A sequel to Vin Diesel in Pitch Black.’ Kevin, you’re a genius!”

            No, I think. You, my friend, are a snowbird.

            So, our two raving cokeheads— the on-site producer and the film’s director— egg each other on, as the storyline grows in complexity and expense.

In a striking example of group cowardice, the actors, technicians and writer are all struck dumb by our communal fear that Sidney Bamf will shut down production. So none of us admit to him over the phone that his chosen representatives are totally out of control.

                                                      *        

            Notified of a controlled burn up in the hills of the Blue Ridge, Vilgot and I grab some pages of dialog, Janice, Hugo, tripods, cameras, battery packs, Wayne the soundman and his trusty Nagra, and assorted reflectors. We drive up there. Jesus, what an effect! A forest fire! We film Molly and J.J. arguing in the foreground. Behind them, a fiery inferno. The wind shifts and we’re enveloped in smoke. “A lucky accident!” chuckles Vilgot, as we trudge back down the mountain, gritty with sweat, our clothes reeking of smoke. “I just took a deep breath and kept filming, filming, filming. Very unusual! The screen fades to white.”

                                                        *

               Scene 34: At dinner on the Titanic, Molly rises from the table, glass in hand, and says

              MOLLY: “Here, here. A toast to Hippocrates and his hypocritical oath. We’re all familiar with that! A toast to the Socratic oath, which is SO cratic. And to Mr. Lincoln, who— although he freed the slaves— knew better than to legislate the ways of the business community.”

              LORD BAXTON: “Alas, Molly, I think you’ve had a bit too much to drink, my dear. The bubbly seems to have gone straight to your head.”

              MOLLY: “Said like a true gentleman!” (With utter contempt, she toasts them all.)

                                                       *

            Because Wayne, our soundman, requires water lapping on the shore, we agree to spend a day at Virginia Beach. We stay two weeks! Yes, there are navy jets constantly flying overhead, but somehow we convince ourselves that dubbing afterwards in a studio is worth the effort if we can grab some good footage. Tom Hanks had to dub all his island dialog in the film Cast Away. Most of our water scenes get shot in or adjacent to the Old Coast Guard Station just off the Boardwalk. We use their side walls as a backdrop. Their Boston Whaler masquerades as a lifeboat. Hanging a black curtain behind it, Vilgot plays tricks with filters in a process called “day for night,” a true throwback in this digital age. “When in doubt,” he tells us authoritatively, “have the women take off their clothes.”

            This advice is directed at Reggie, but since he looks and acts like a zombie 90% of the time, we don’t expect him to respond. “Naw,” he suddenly drawls, his old self, “it ain’t that kind of pitcher.”

            “Picture,” I murmur, glad to see Reginald back among the living.

            “Whassat?” he queries.

            “Nothing! I’m just mumbling to myself!”

            “It would be nice,” Wayne the soundman adds, “if everybody could just shut up so I can get a clean recording of the dialog here!”

            – – –

            “Thank you!” he sighs and Scene 46, Take 3, is officially in the can.

            We bring the Airstreams over to Virginia Beach and set up camp at a trailer park outside of town. Janice and I sort of have a problem. I’m as addicted to her body as she is to mine. Not good. I understand the equation: Since we don’t really have a director, Janice feels insecure in her role as the young Molly Brown. She compensates by doing something she is really good at— fucking the be-Jesus out of Uncle Kevin. This goes on night after night, her hot box a ready refuge for my lonely dick.

            We have a ghost in the trailer. Some alcoholic character actor who passed away one dark, lonely night. We see him all the time, evenings, midnight, mornings. Lying athwart my lovely lady, I look up and meet his ethereal gaze. “Hey!” I shout. “You can haunt the trailer! But don’t come in here when I’m having sex!”

            He gives me such a look! But he respects my wishes. I never see him again while I’m in a clutch.

            Day 27: Word has come down the pipeline. The missing Martha Lloyd is tied up on another project. Replacement: Hot-house flower Edith Colson. Yeah, the opera star. Shee-it. It’ll be interesting to see if we ever get to the post-Titanic footage.

            Under orders from Bamf to include at least one blatant anachronism, I write a ballroom scene where dancers do the Charleston. The jazzy, lush orchestral music fades, replaced by wailing girls’ voices singing

                               Do the hippy, hippy shake!

                               Do the hippy, hippy shake!

                                                                                          © 1959, Chan Romero

            This segues into a modern discotheque where our researcher Charley dances with Janice, who is dressed in a chic black shift. The choreography is also an old favorite: The Hitchhike. Swinging their hips, licking their thumbs, they “do the hitchhike, baby!”

            “The more things change,” a crusty narrator intones, “the more they remain the same.”

            Cut back to the Titanic where Molly stands by the rail gazing at the starry night while a ship’s officer beseeches her, “Madam, don’t be sad. The voyage is still young. A wealth of experience awaits us!”

            Everybody agrees that’s a great line.

            Truer words, rarely spoken? What looks like the ship’s railing is actually a section of wood fencing adjacent to one of the restaurants on the Boardwalk. We also use the outdoor pavilion at The Cavalier Hotel, properly decorated, for both indoor and outdoor scenes. In ballroom mode, it’s not as regal as James Cameron’s, obviously, but it’s functional and all we can afford.

            In our film, at the end of the dance, the passengers stand solemnly together and sing “God Save the King.” Sometimes, historical accuracy corresponds with a satisfying visual and auditory experience.

            Thank God for Virginia Beach!

            This goes on and on. The authorities think we’re nut jobs. When not writing, I accompany Marty— shooting schedule in hand— to Town Hall to apply for another batch of permits. We pay by check. I assure the lady cashier behind the counter that we have funds to cover our expenses.

            “Well, I should hope so!” she replies starchily. 

            In Cameron’s version, the phantom iceberg comes floating out of an inky night like a single ice cube in a sea of cherry cola. Reality wasn’t like that: The ocean was covered with ice floes, thousands of broken pieces of ice forming a jigsaw puzzle in white. And atop all this broken ice loomed a mountain of white that came afloating straight at the ship, inexorably, unstoppable. The ice floes were so bad, the Carpathia had difficulty picking out the lifeboats, small slivers among a thousand jagged shapes.

            “Thank God for CGI,” says Marty Markham. “It was positively made for shit like sea ice. So let’s film our ocean sequences as cleanly as we can. Bamf can dressy-uppy in post-production.”

            What can I say? Having lost all respect for Marty, we ignore him entirely.               

            A relatively complicated scene with a lot of extras, filmed at The Cavalier Hotel’s outdoor pavilion: As the ship sinks, the Irish are on deck singing Auld Lang Syne while the British do Rule, Britannia! The Americans, standing as a group at the back of the ship, are more pragmatic. They call on The Lord for Divine intervention.

                                “…So thank you, God,

                                Please send us the help.

                                 The others need it, too,

                                 But that ain’t your yelp.”

            (Janice looks absolutely enchanting— angelic face, glistening white teeth, golden hair, shining blue eyes— as she sings this last line. “Ah! Good show!” comments Reggie, the Englishman. The historical implication is totally lost on him.)

            Up until now, the Titanic has always been exhibited as an example of income inequality— rich versus poor. There were 370 first-class cabins and only 297 third-class ones down in steerage. We don’t ignore the obvious, but in the melee, in the darkness of an icy night, when women and children are going into the boats, this class-consciousness breaks down.

            Who can blame a Texan for siding with a Texan, a Yank with a Yank, a Brit with a Brit? “Tha’s all ahm sayin’,” says a burly Irishman, his brogue thick as soup, as he helps an Irish lass and her two darling children to clamber over the rail. “Man got t’ think o’ flag an’ country.”

            “Here, there! Wha’ are you doing?” sneers an English officer, pulling a truncheon from his belt. “You have them come back on board!”

            “Not bloody likely!” insists our burly Irishman.

            “Oh, all right! But come up front and help some of the first class passengers for a spell,” orders the officer, pulling the man by his collar. Raised in the British Empire, the officer exerts his authority and the rebellious Irish obeys. Until the next big revolt.

            “Ah, I say,” comments a tipsy British “topper” in greatcoat and top hat, stumbling about the deck. (Keenly played by our very own Reggie in a cameo.) “You officers do know how t’ put on a good show, jolly what?!”

            “Clausss has its priv-e-leges,” answers the officer.

            This is degenerating into a very Marxist movie.

            There are also a lot of little yapping dogs, to heighten the tension and add verisimilitude. “Throw ‘em o’board,” suggests a Chief Mate.

            “Why, I never!” answers another officer. “Some o’ my best friends are toys!”

            “Is a bit o’ a chukka is all ahm saying! Not a lot o’ time for dilly-dallying.”

            The term “chukka” comes from polo, signifying a 7-minute period, kept short in order to replace tired horses.

            “Make haste!” cries a voice in the darkness.

            “Look who’s talking!” comes the reply.

            “That’s my toe you’re standing on,” shrieks a damsel in distress.

            “Beggin’ yer pardon, ma’am!” 

            Our storyline allows us to do something James Cameron could not: We can get ourselves off the damn ship.

            We hire members of a barbershop quartet to impersonate newspapermen. They sport luxuriant facial hair and striped suspenders. We stick them in a broom closet of an office with a bit of old-fashion ticker-tape. We have one rush up to the other and say

            NEWSPAPERMAN: “Ollie! The Titanic is sinking.”

            (Background noise of teletype machines, hustle and bustle of an office.)

            OLLIE: “The whosis is whatsis?”

            NEWSPAPERMAN: “The Titanic. It’s an ocean liner. A floating casket, I tell you. By tomorrow morning, it’ll be the lead in every rag across the country.”

            OLLIE: “I have a good story on the Widows and Orphans Pension Fund.”

            NEWSPAPERMAN: (exasperated) “Ollie! You’re not listening!”

            (Cut back to ship.)                      

            A squiggly line of shiny vehicles, we return to Blacksburg.

            What’s going on? I find myself wondering, adrift in a fever dream of lust in the back of our trailer. It’s 98 degrees, the humidity is 100%. It’s pitch dark outside. The croaking of frogs and buzzing of mosquitoes populates the night. “It’s not like we’re Humphrey Bogart filming The African Queen,” I moan aloud.

             Indeed, helplessly sucking on Janice’s yummy nipples, my hands clutching every accessible inch of her body, bathed in sweat, I’m not sure how much of this experience has a direct bearing on the Hollywood film industry.

             Following our portrayal of the Titanic disaster, we super-impose one of those “Ten Years Later” subtitles to explain why we’re using a considerably older actress. We show Molly doing philanthropy, raising ungrateful children, running for Congress. We get a lot of mileage out of her sister marrying a German baron, a real no-no during the First World War. These scenes have a strident, melodramatic quality not previously encountered, but then, Edith is a very different actress than Janice. Reggie actually stops snorting cocaine in an effort to get her to tone down her perf. “It’s not the Ring Cycle by Wagner,” he pleads. “Please, Edith! We’ve put in too much time and effort to settle for caricature. I know you can do it, darling!”

             The next take is even more hyper.

            “Reg!”

            “What?” he asks. “Camille I don’t mind. It’s the Miss Piggy impersonations I find rather unacceptable.”

            “Just tell her to be herself. She’s trying too hard. Molly Brown isn’t special. She’s an ordinary human being who finds herself in special circumstances.”

            “Right! Tell her that,” he barks.

            Gingerly approaching Edith, I crouch at her feet and make my spiel. “…Besides, you are an interesting person, Edith. You, yourself. People like to see you in films because you interest them. You, Edith Colson.”

            After that, she’s still pedantic, but her presentation is no longer over-the-top certifiable.

            Off-camera, she’s a pussycat, a friend to all the world. On camera, she chews the scenery to beat the band.

             “Oh, well,” sighs Reggie. “It certainly makes for an interesting cinematic experience.”

             Day 35: Boopsie comes down by car from Md. He complains about traffic, worries himself silly about cost overruns, other shit I have no control over. If he can’t help me do the writing, I’ll kick his sorry butt off the set.   

             “No wonder the ship sank!” Boopsie bitches, handing me a print-out. “It’s 1912 and they’re carrying 20,000 bottles of beer on board, 15,000 bottles of mineral water, 40 tons of potatoes, 40,000 eggs— 40,000 eggs! — 1,750 quarts of ice cream, 6,000 pounds of butter and 7,000 head of lettuce.”

            “You’re just hungry,” I admonish him. “Let’s go get pizza.”

            Everybody on the set finds it very amusing that we are filming the last third of the movie last. No modern director would dream of shooting a script chronologically, from first page to last, but Martha Lloyd wasn’t available, we got delayed, and now we’re using the understudy, Edith Colson.

            As soon as we wrap her final set-up and concluding take, Janice Bulova disappears from our movie set and my life. Poof! She’s gone. I mean, I knew we’d part company eventually. I’d heard how tenuous film location liaisons are. We never claimed we were in love. But like any other drug addict, I find myself deep in the pain of withdrawal. Call me an idiot, but I had never given my body so freely to another person to share. We spent literally hundreds of hours, naked, flesh pressed against flesh, all night, every night, mixing our sweat, our saliva and our bodily juices. Not even my marriages— chaste by comparison— were this intensely physical. That’s what you get when you cohabit with a Method actress.

            I come back from scouting a location and find she has left— without scribbling so much as a note. This shocks me grievously. I am shocked that I am shocked! I guess one reason it hurts so much is that I’m a wordsmith. She could have written me something…?

             Janice has flown the coup. I mourn my loss.  

             Day 48: Tomorrow is the last day of shooting. We’re totally over budget. May sink the studio. Saved the best for laughs, the kick-ass bedroom scene. For whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee! I wish Janice was still here.

             Our epic concludes by having the camera slowly, slowly pan right and zoom in on Molly— portrayed by Edith Colson, grande dame of the opera. She is propped up in bed, surrounded by fluffy pillows, meant to symbolize a quick ascent into the clouds, on her way to heaven. She stares blindly into space. Church bells ring sonorously in the background. Lots of echo, a death knell.

             MOLLY: (breathlessly) ”Yes, I see it now! Each of us is a lifeboat, endlessly tacking among the ice floes of our existence. Nothing more, nothing less.”

             The tolling of bells swells in volume as we… fade to black.

            However schlocky the rest of the production— and we’ve had our moments— this creepy ending, based on old-fashioned cinematic techniques, sends a shiver down the spine of the viewer. Yeah, I wrote it. Yeah, that hop-head Reggie directed and Vilgot filmed it. Wayne the soundman did his magic with the playback of the bells. “Heavy on the reverb” he claims. Edith’s acting, however, simply blows away the cobwebs, the junkiness of our production values, the fake Edwardian wallpaper, overriding our combined effort at mediocrity. Her performance is nothing short of brilliant.

            With the addition of several weeks’ worth of CGI at a studio in Santa Barbara, The Trollop Molly Brown all but bankrupts the Sidney Bamf Film Co. Too many set-ups, too many days spent on principal photography, too many takes, too many additional scenes hastily constructed to add weight to a story that never really jells, never comes into its own.

            I’m so frustrated, I am sorely tempted to take up smoking again.

            Instead, a privilege rarely accorded the writer, I am invited out to California to sit with Sidney and his editor, Sam Hall, in the cutting room and piece together the disparate parts.

            “You can do narration,” grunts Bamf accusingly, pointing to the recording booth with a hand clutching yet another unlit cigar.

            “What, again?!” I groan.

            “Fake it.”

            Ugh. Again. That’s how we glue together our screenplay, a disembodied narrator providing expository continuity.

            “You’re a born storyteller,” Bamf counsels me, sounding almost kindly. “Feel free to tell Molly’s story.”

            Sam Hall and I do just that, equally mystified every time one scene effortlessly melds with another. “Your cinematographer really knows his stuff!” says Sam. “We’ll need to make some color corrections in the final print and clean up some of the imagery, but on balance, he grouped his sequences very nicely, indeed. Good continuity. Compliments to the scriptgirl.”

            “Money.”

            “Pardon?”

            “We called her ‘Money.’ We thought she was an airhead,” I admit, embarrassed.

                                                        *      

            “GAAAAAH! That’s some last scene!” Bamf explodes in the screening room as the lights come up. “You write that? You’re a killer!”

            “Yeah,” I say, feeling myself blush.

            “Still, there’s no excuse for using up every dollar in my bank account.”

            “I feel really bad about that, Mr. Bamf— “

            “Marty and Reggie no longer work for this studio.”

            “Please don’t blame the girls,” I tell him, the only thing I can come up with.

            “You dumb schlub, you made me a hell of a movie!” he marvels. “Fucking Molly. Jesus Christ!” He stands in the hallway outside his office, chomping on an unlit cigar, antsy. “I gotta take a meeting,” he says abruptly and presses an envelope into my hands. “Go back home and write me another story!”

            “I was thinking a screenplay about this snake oil salesman Blackie Diamond.”

            “The black guy running for president? In the Democratic primaries? He’s a demagogue. I don’t see how you can write it— it’s way too early.”

            “I’m thinking of calling it The Sorrow Tomorrow.”

            Sidney kind of backs away from me. He gives me an inscrutable look. “Sonofabitch, what a mamzer you are,” he says. “When you’re ready, pitch it to me. Meanwhile, pshol von!  G’bye!”

            I know this last phrase, it’s colloquial Russian for “Shoo! “ What you say to chase away a stray mutt. M.O.T.— Members Of the Tribe— we carry our heritage with us wherever we go.

            I watch him walk into his office. He slams the door in my face. I open the envelope. I find a one-way plane ticket to BWI and… a check that guarantees the life of our screenwriting venture for at least another year!

            Shamefacedly ecstatic, I draw a last cup of water from the office water cooler. Then, I walk out of the building, a goofy grin plastered across my face.

            Nothing beats success.

                                                      *

Alexei Chorvinsky’s Funeral

  

            My mom’s generation isn’t getting any younger. Among the people I grew up with, the Chorvinsky family always held a special attraction. Alexei was the caretaker for The Old Soldiers’ Home retirement community on Columbus Hill. We had the run of the grounds: the woods, an immaculate lawn, a pond where we could swim if you didn’t mind wading the first few feet in brown muck. Most importantly, of all the adults that inhabited our post-World War Two idyll, Alex Chorvinsky was the only one I ever encountered who wasn’t a quivering, fretting neurotic.

            Why this was so, I can only conjecture. I know that Alex had a mild, lugubrious temperament, but why was everyone else filled with such foreboding?

            Let me guess: The Russians had The Bomb, Communism was taking over the world, anti-Semitism ran rampant, Washington DC was a Jim Crow city, and Senator Joseph McCarthy chased after liberal, left-wing intellectuals. “Other than that,” my younger brother Tim liked to say, “what’s the problem?”

            My adult career in the military took me all over the world, so I was the least social of Our Gang. The kids who moved only a few miles from Oxburg to work in Virginia or the District— like my cousin Ricky “Jimbo” Barber— still attended gatherings at The Old Soldiers’ Home.

            We grew up. Our parents aged appreciably, but four couples— including my folks— regularly played bridge, once a month, at each other’s homes. Preceded by brunch at a fashionable eatery, these card games spanned four decades.

            There was once a major snowstorm, stranding mon père and ma mère in the glorious white-out of Oxburg, while the others examined the winter wonderland from their picture windows in Chevy Chase, Bethesda and Laurel. “Who’s got the cards?” asked my mom. Each family set up a bridge table. Mom dealt the hands. Tim and I, just in from shoveling snow, wrote down what was in each. Telephoning the other players, we told them what they had, east-west or north-south. Then my mom got on the phone with Gertrude Chorvinsky, while Aaron Rappaport spoke with Louise Minsker. It took all afternoon, but they made their bids and played out the hands over the phone.

            Bridge was that important to them.

            Of course, that time, they skipped the mandatory brunch. So I didn’t have to hear my mom say:  

            “I swear! For thirty years, Ritva Rappaport has done this! She orders more than anyone else— ham and eggs, waffles, sausage, grits— leaves half of it on the plate and then announces, ‘Well, everybody! I know what! Let’s split the bill!’ Poor Louise Minsker, who only orders coffee and a muffin, has to pay a sixth of Ritva’s meal… I ask you, is that fair?! ”

            I sigh. “You know who you’re dealing with,” I point out. “It’s not like it never happened before.”

            Nerds, our parents took us to plays at the National Theater downtown in the 1960’s. If we mentioned to our classmates that we had been to see a live drama, a stage production, and enjoyed it, they looked at us like we were from another planet. One summer evening, after the show, a group of us children and parents— Our Gang— descended on O’Donnell’s Ice Cream Parlour off East-West Highway in Chevy Chase.

             In spite of having almost no money, my parents sprang for things like theater tickets, coats and ties for Tim and me, a party dress for my sister, ice cream sundaes with Our Gang. We were not to be culturally deprived.

            That night, given the assignment of adding up the bill, dad got each family father in turn to plunk his amount on the table. Collecting assorted paper money and loose silver, dad toted up the total and added a 5% tip. That’s what you tipped in those days, five percent.

            “They’re so friendly at O’Donnell’s,” dad told my mom that night, before bed. “They all waved to us as we were leaving, some with both hands. I waved back!” Taking off his pants, he emptied the pockets… Dollar bills and change, the ice cream parlor bill, all nestled in dad’s pant’s pocket where he had absent-mindedly shoved them. White as a sheet, he said, “Honey, I forgot to pay at the register.”

            The very next morning, mom had him drive to O’Donnell’s and pay the bill.

             On another visit, Talmudic scholar Alexei Chorvinsky ordered a coffee sundae from one of the plump, young, southern waitresses. Diligently, she went behind the glass and chrome counter and began preparing this concoction. Ten minutes later, she came to our table in tears. “Every time I pour in the hot coffee,” she cried, “the vanilla ice cream melts!”

              Never-the-less, for a few years there, while Tim and I were in junior high school, we went to O’Donnell’s at least once a week. Came the time my dad was given the assignment of recording everyone’s order. Borrowing pencil and paper from the cashier, he wrote

                             1 banana split

                             2 strawberry sundae

                             3 fudge bar

                             4 ice cream chocolate sundae

                             5 marble ice cream cake

                             6 butterscotch sundae

                             7 hopscotch pecan sundae

                              8 coffee ice cream cake

            It seemed to take forever for the girls behind the counter to fill our order. “What’s going on?” my dad kvetched, impatient, as always. So Tim and I trooped over to the counter and asked the young ladies— who were at most five years our senior— “Gimme the word! What’s goin’ on?”

            “Well,” gushed a rosy-cheeked young darlin’, peach complexion and starched white uniform, a line of sweat across her brow. “You ordered so much! It’s takin’ forever to prepare it all.”

            “Uh, wait a minute,” said Tim.

            I was the one, chit in hand, who had to return to the table and explain, sheepishly, that the O’Donnell’s staff was in the process of preparing one banana split, two strawberry sundaes, three fudge bars, four ice cream chocolate sundaes, five servings of marble ice cream cake, six butterscotch sundaes, seven hopscotch pecan sundaes and eight portions of coffee ice cream cake.

            We were poor. Money was tight. No one was laughing. Tim acted as our intermediary during the process of deconstruction: Many scoops of ice cream were angrily dumped back into cardboard vats. Wedges of ice cream cake were put back on cardboard platters and returned to the freezer. Mortified, the rest of us sat at our table and wished we’d never even heard of O’Donnell’s. We ate what they served us— it tasted like ashes in our mouths— paid our check and never, ever went there again!

            That was my dad.

            At least I have fonder memories of Alex Chorvinsky! Since my folks were No-wheres-ville and he had two sons of his own, he and his wife Gertrude nurtured me. A pottery fanatic who threw beautiful vases and urns on the wheel, Gertrude wasn’t opposed to letting Tim and me try our hand at pouring clay into molds, coming up with your proverbial coffee and beer mugs. It was fun! Painting, painting, painting on glaze, we would accompany her to the community kiln where, on Thursdays, the staff fired shelf after shelf of earthenware.

            Alex liked to chatter with me in Hebrew, which was a joke, since Tim’s Hebrew outclassed mine by a mile. We also discussed religion, the dietary laws, Jesus Christ and the nature of Christianity, shiksas and why little Jewish boys’ penises stood erect in their presence. (“Samson and Delilah is what we today would call a destructive relationship. She uses Sam to further her own career, but she doesn’t really care about him as a person. Sam likes the seduction, but finds the consequences completely our of proportion. If Delilah really cared about him, she’d help him escape or at least barter his freedom with whatever resources she had. Probably, that would have meant sleeping with X number of tribal leaders among the Palestinians… Once a prostitute, always a prostitute. So watch out!”) Cerebral, Alex made sure these discussions were available to his sons, to Tim and to me. The exact opposite of my dad, Alex was someone totally free of inhibitions. After a hellish childhood in Russia, as well as fighting in the Second World War and Korea, nothing that North America could offer scared Alex in the least.

            In my last year of high school, an Explorer Scout— which was a pretty rare animal, since almost everyone else left scouting behind at puberty— I participated in the Greater Washington Area Scout Olympics. Big deal! You signed up, you were in the event. Knowing my dad, Alexei Chorvinsky insisted I spend that three-day holiday weekend at his house. He drove me into the District to compete in the swimming contests. I was signed up for crawl and backstroke. Where my dad would have brought me nearly to tears with caustic, “humorous” remarks, denigrating my abilities, Alexei simply said, “You’re a swimmer! Go get ‘em, tiger!”

            He didn’t hang around to watch. In retrospect, I realize he felt it might throw me off my stride. Changing into my swimsuit in the men’s locker room, I discovered, amazingly, that I felt good about myself. Since I was lifting weights in front of our fireplace every morning, I had the muscles. Alexei and Gertrude thought I was great. They loved me. That was enough.

            When I got out by the pool, I discovered my classmate Greg Monroe from Oxburg High holding a clipboard. “Yeah, I’m one of the officials,” he told me smugly. “I see you’re signed up for the main event. One hundred meters freestyle.”

            “It’s a sprint,” I told him. “One hundred meters is a sprint.”

            “You don’t stand a chance,” he sneered. “Look over there at that big, black gorilla. He puffs in your direction and you’ll be drowning in his wake! Ha ha ha ha ha! “

            “Yeah, sure, okay, Greg,” I replied. The guy was a prig. I figured he wouldn’t have a kind word to say to me.

            Expecting me to get upset, he gave me a strange look when I didn’t. I walked away. Participating in the event didn’t require me to let Greg Monroe badmouth me, so I figured I could just as well skip that part.

            The black boy was monstrously impressive. All sinew, he was almost six feet tall, built like an eel.

            “I’ll go for it,” I thought, my sense of adventure quickening.

            We competitors jogged in place, did our bending exercises and mounted our blocks. There would be two other heats, but I competed in that first one, against the enormous black fellow. 

            When they fired the starter pistol, we hit the water. I only took four breaths the length of the pool. That’s how I made up for short arms, I spent more time stroking and less time pivoting for air. Even so, I could see that the black boy over in the far lane was yards ahead of the rest of us. At the turn, I caught a glimpse of him rising up out of the water. I kicked off the wall and swam like my life depended on it. When I clocked in, the scout leader taking my time smiled and said, “Unless someone swims faster in the other heats, you’re number one.”

            “Oh, hey, tha’s no good!” the black boy was wailing. “Nobody told me I had to swim two lengths. I thought this pool was a hunnert meters! I been robbed!”

            I kept out of it. Greg was in there arguing that the black dude had a right to a do-over: “Let him swim in one of the other heats!”

            “We already have six swimmers in each,” the coach complained. “Those kids have a right to their dreams, too, you know!”

            They decided the black man had completed his swim in that event.

            The other two heats were an anti-climax. The kids were a lot smaller, younger and had considerably slower times.

            As I mounted the podium and received my medal— even with his mistake, the black boy came in third— I was on top of the world.

            I almost broke my hand clocking in during the backstroke, but in that event, I was awesome. It was my specialty. Nobody swam backstroke like “Windmill Kevin.” Tim had said, “Whatever happens, you’ve got the backstroke stoked,” and I did.

            I finished with two first-place medals. Driving me home, Alexei was pleased. When I showed them to my dad, he gave me a crooked smile and said, “What are they made of, tin? Maybe you can win a medal cutting the grass for a change! Whoo-hoo! Kevin’s won a medal, ain’t he somethin’ !”

            There’s a reason why I beaned him on the head with a hammer at the age of eight. Not wanting to spend time in a boys’ reformatory, I ignored the jerk.

            “Let me see those!” Tim exclaimed. “Dynamite! I knew you could do it! Makes me proud to have you as my bro’!”

                                                       *

            My mom actually talked to Gertrude and Alex Chorvinsky by cell phone from California while I horsed around with starfish and sea anemones at the J V Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in Half Moon Bay outside San Francisco. That was a month ago. Alex was scheduled to have an operation on his intestinal tract. No one wanted to talk about it. Cancer? How bad was the problem? Also, the doctors worried about Alexei’s ticker. Was his heart strong enough for an operation?

            Now, we return from California and Alex is dead. Poof, he’s gone. We’re all in shock. 

            Ritva tells us Alexei will be buried at King Solomon’s Memorial Cemetery in Olney. Let’s face it— screw military honors at Arlington Cemetery— King Solomon’s is the place for our community’s machers to be put to rest. King Sol’s is an Equal Opportunity provider. First requirement, the customer has to be dead. Second, that their estate can afford a burial.

            I loved Alexei. With extreme delicacy, mom asks me if I’ll attend the funeral.

            “Yes, of course,” I tell her. “Alex was a great friend of ours!”

            Telephoning Maria Dexter to discuss theater tickets, mom gets caught unawares when Maria asks, “Have you heard the news about Alex Chorvinsky? He died on the operating table! They were operating on his colon and his heart stopped.”

            “Oh, yes,” chirps mom, surprised that Maria Dexter would know. “He was a very dear friend. His uncle built our house.”

            “Pardon?” asks Maria.

            “His uncle was a Russian immigrant. In 1927, he was a bricklayer at the construction firm that developer Julius Lapidus contracted to do the foundations and bricklaying for the dwellings in Oxburg. Of the 60 original houses, ours was number 16. Before that, Oxburg was a gopher patch.”

            “Wha-at?” asks Maria. She lives in Chevy Chase. “Listen, are you going to the funeral? When is it?”

            “Tuesday at one o’clock at King Solomon’s.”

            “Is Kevin going? Because I’ll need someone to drive me!”

            …

            “You want to go to Alex Chorvinsky’s funeral?” asks my mom.

            “Oh yes! Richard and I were very friendly with Alex at the bridge table.”

            One hundred and twenty people at every game, saying you know someone from the bridge circuit doesn’t signify undying kinship.

            “Well, okay, you can go with us.”

            “Richard will drive me over to your house. Kevin can drive the three of us to King Solomon’s. Richard can’t attend. He has a bridge game on Tuesday afternoon.”

            I’m not exactly jumping up and down for joy. This is all about Maria. We’re in mourning. We intend to pay Alex our last respects. It’s not a social occasion. I understand Maria can’t drive, but why is she horning in on something that really has nothing— nada—to do with her? Alex was not a close friend. Maria is not Jewish. The prayers are recited in Hebrew. The graveside service is extremely regimented and includes such esoteric activities as shoveling dirt onto the casket. There’s very little gossip. It’s a sad occasion.

            “Oh, I want to go!” insists Maria. “I do have a three o’clock doctor’s appointment, but I’m sure Kevin will get us back to my place before three. Actually, he can drive me straight to the hospital. It’ll save me taking a taxi.”

            “What? What? What?” I rant as soon as mom tells me the news.

            “Be nice! She means well.”

            The next morning, mom tells me that she’s not going. “I just realized that I cannot stand for that long. I’ll be keeling over. There’s only one row of seats for the immediate family. Everyone else stands on the grass. I can’t do that.”

            “I’ll go. I’ll represent the Feingolds.”

            Mom calls Maria. Tells her the news. Claims I’m not home. “No, I just can’t stand up that long. First, you have to park two or three blocks away and walk. Then, only the immediate family is provided with chairs, since they may be so overcome with grief, they cannot stay on their feet. The rest of us gather around the grave site while the rabbi conducts the service… No… I’ve never experienced that. They aren’t doing a commemorative service indoors… They don’t have that… Of course I know the routines at King Solomon’s! Half my friends are buried there!”

            After 20 minutes, mom gets off the phone. “Maria claims she went to Larry Kapinski’s funeral and there were 40 seats. She says the organizers put down wooden planks to form a walkway to the grave. She says barefoot young black boys in white shirts and black slacks threw carnations as people approached the grave. A Jamaican calypso band played Ha Tikva. Afterwards, kosher wine was served to the mourners in silver goblets and the celebrity rabbi autographed their printed programs. The guests received goodie bags filled with Larry Kapinski’s two manias, citrus fruit and barbecue utensils.”

            “Why do I somehow doubt this narrative?” I ask.

            “She wanted to know if Larry Kapinski’s estate was bankrupt, since he was buried in a plain pine box. I had to explain that Jewish burials stipulate a plain pine box for everybody.”

            “Maria doesn’t know anything,” I grouse.

            “When I told her I couldn’t stand for 20 minutes, she offered to telephone King Solomon’s and demand that they provide me with a chair.”

            “Yeah. Right! What did you say to that?”

            “I told her not to bother. I told her I’d made up my mind and I’m not going.”

            “This really has nothing to do with you or me,” I point out. “This is Maria Dexter horning in. She sees it as a social event. Tea at the duchess’s lawn party and all that good stuff.”

            “Well,” mom agrees, “she sure is obstinate.”

            “As long as I don’t have to deal with her, I’ll go to the funeral. Without Maria Dexter, thank you very much!”

            Mom and I look at one another and laugh. Bitterly.

                                                        *

            It’s a glorious day, 85 degrees, a cloudless sky. King Solomon’s doesn’t put up signage. You drive around looking for a line of cars parked by the curb, a yellow canopy, mourners. If the funeral you stop to visit isn’t your group, you get back in the car and keep looking. I haven’t gotten much sleep the night before. Hollow-eyed, I drive and drive. Here’s the Vietnamese section. Quân-công. Dáng khen.  (“Meritorious military service. Praiseworthy.”) Ah, the Japanese section! My car is dwarfed by a giant pagoda. The Japanese for “Remember Joyously” works best as a butterfly pattern. I turn around at the first roundabout. I pass a bench inscribed

                               In memory of Aunt Polly.

            I find a couple putting flowers on a grave. Latino laborers do maintenance among the headstones. It’s 10:40 a.m. I envision myself driving around all morning and never finding a single funeral! Finally, I actually locate a building amidst the forlorn figures holding bouquets, the rolling hills, botanical gardens, brutal Stalinist social realist statuary, burbling fountains and gray trucks loaded with manure. I park in the parking lot and go inside.

            The Melvin Holmes III funeral is discreetly announced by a plaque at the first doorway, but ain’t nobody there.

            The Winston P. O’Boogie funeral is similarly announced at the next entranceway, but again, my dance card comes up empty.

            This place has no security at all. It’s an enormous building. I wander from hall to alcove to assembly room without encountering a soul. What a relief to stumble upon a real live reception area, with a man on the telephone behind a counter! The young lady assistant looks up the Chorvinsky funeral and marks it on a printed map.

            I find the grave and, parking two blocks down the road, I mosey on over. At least half the mourners are over 70, but they are also the cream of our Jewish community. I am gratified to discover familiar faces in the crowd! Mostly it’s Alexei’s extended family, of course, but many of mom’s bridge cronies are in attendance, an entire legion of elderly ladies. Whenever someone fails to recognize me, Ritva Rappaport helpfully explains, “Rose Feingold’s son! Kevin!”

             Everybody knows my mom! 

            Gertrude Chorvinsky is obviously heavily sedated, but when I approach to pay my respects, during a lull, she gives me a bright smile and says, “Hi, Kevin! Is your mom here?”

            “No. She doesn’t walk so well…”

            “Oy vey, tell me about it!” she chuckles, pressing my arm.

            I stand to one side of Gertrude as the lady rabbi pins black cloth on each of the grandsons. All four young men give me sour stares, as if to say, “Who the hell are you?”

            “When I finish singing the psalm,” the rabbi instructs, “I want each of you to tear the black cloth. In olden times, after a funeral, people expressed their mourning by tearing the hem of their garments and donning sackcloth and ashes. We use the symbolism of a torn black cloth ribbon.”      

            The lady rabbi is unknown to me, but then, we have many congregations in this part of Maryland. She obviously knew Alexei, first because she keeps choking up, and second from what she tells us. “Alex had three requirements regarding his death. That he go quickly and not linger. That the weather should be perfect at his funeral. That his friends should gather and pay tribute to him. As you see, he lived righteously and all his wishes have been granted!

            “He left us a message: ‘Slow down. Take time to consider the quality of your life. Figure out what is truly important.

             ‘Awaken to each day, not as a challenge, but as an opportunity.

             ‘Be slow to anger. Be willing to forgive. 

             ‘Let laughter leaven your loaf.

              ‘Go forth, in peace, to life.’

              “I see him as a role model of what can be done. Not a perfect person by any means, but someone who never stopped striving to improve the human condition.”

               Together, we recite the 23^rd  Psalm:

                           The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

                           He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.

                           He leadeth me beside the still waters.

                           He restoreth my soul;

                           He guideth me in straight paths for His name’s sake.

                           Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

                            I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me;

                           Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

                           Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.

                            Thou hast anointed my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

                            Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,

                            And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

                The rabbi then chants it in Hebrew in a pleasing mezzo-soprano. It’s hot. The women wearing perfume are using their programs to swat away gnats. If we must say goodbye to Alex, it’s nice that his rabbi can sing.

                Roger, the oldest son, gets up to deliver a eulogy. “I’m sure that wherever my dad Alexei is at the moment, he woke up this morning, read his obit and smiled!

                 “Humor dominated our household. We would get home from school and dad would have us gather around the piano and sing songs based on the rhymes of Dr. Seuss. Dad wrote the music, Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel, wrote the lyrics. I always thought dad should publish those ditties, but he couldn’t be bothered. For him, music was a hobby. He always kept work separate from play.

                “He did invent and patent the Wood, Good Mood, Food Hood, a high-end kitchen accessory for stove or grill.

                “In 1969, my dad bought me a Dodge Charger. This particular car turned out to be a lemon. Rather than keep pouring thousands of dollars in repairs into the car, dad decided to sell it. How do you unload a lemon when everyone in a 100-mile radius knows who you are? So when we vacationed in the Outer Banks, my dad drove the car, with the car title, down to North Carolina and put an ad in the local newspaper. He spent a couple of days showing the car to the locals, and eventually some poor schmo bought it. Back in those days, pre-Internet, pre-cell phone, sales out-of-state tended to be final. We came back up to Maryland and that was the last we ever heard about the Dodge Charger. ‘Always know who you are dealing with,’ said my dad, ‘and don’t jump to the conclusion that everything is all right, unless you have incontrovertible proof.’

                “When it was time to put a new roof on The Old Soldiers’ Home— the building was erected during World War I, after all — dad made sure my cousins got the job. They didn’t low-ball the bid. They did a perfectly reputable job. But there were plenty of other construction firms in the 1970’s who would have loved to get the work. Dad said, ‘If we don’t watch out for ourselves, who is going to do it?’ I think he taught me a lot.” 

                Roger’s younger brother Morton, my contemporary, tells this tale: “… One day, we had a false alarm regarding a break-in, and a police officer went around checking the windows in our house. He expressed curiosity about the water plant in my bedroom. He told my mom and she told my dad. That night, after dinner, dad asked me if there was anything I wanted to tell him. I admitted that I was growing marijuana in my bedroom. ‘Always be honest with me,’ dad told me. ‘Then I’ll know what to deny in a court of law.’

               “Contributions, in lieu of flowers, can be made to the Wounded Warrior Project.”

               As those of us surrounding the canopy begin to sweat, I notice that the cologne on the man in front of me is starting to annoy me. The gnats and pollen in the air don’t help, and slowly, incredibly, I find myself getting both dizzy and nauseous. Getting sick isn’t on my itinerary. My dad, a hypochondriac, specialized in falling ill. Mom and I come from a family of schtarkers, you usually have to set off a bomb to sink us. So, as I discreetly, quietly, back away from the gathering and walk to my car, I am quite amazed. I sit in the shade of the car, drinking water from my water bottle. I begin to feel better. I don anew my suit jacket and return to graveside.

              No sooner do I arrive, amid a slew of prayers, than I feel deathly ill. Now there’s no getting away from it. I’m reacting to mold. The yellow plastic canopy must have been stored wet, and gotten moldy. In this warm sunlight, the mold is releasing spores. Having been contaminated by mold at a French auberge a few years ago, mom and I are hyper-sensitive. Bathed in sweat, I stumble back to my car. I strip down to pants and undershirt. I lie across the front seat. Gagging, I’m grateful I didn’t eat any breakfast. After a few minutes of dry heaves, I crawl across the road and lie down in the grass in the shade of an elm tree. I close my eyes, as the Mourners’ Kaddish drifts down from the funeral:

                   “Yisgadal v’ yiskadash sh’mei rabah. B’almah di v’rah chirusei

                    v’ yamlich malchusei. B’chayeichon u’ v’ yomeichon. Uv’chayei

                    d’chol beit Yisrael…”

                What can I say? This turn of events would not surprise Alexei. He would see the humor in my getting taken ill at his funeral. 

                                                       *

Campaign Speech

  

          Hello, my fellow Americans. This is the 34^th time I am speaking to you from the Oval Office. My wife picked out the new drapes. You’ll notice I didn’t say “Good morning” or “Good evening,” because I wish to address all Americans everywhere and that includes those in other time zones, like Alaska, Hawaii and American Samoa! Just because it’s midday here at the White House, I am not so arrogant as to believe that this is the case in all parts of this great nation of ours.

           I asked my assistant, Dan Sverdlovsky, “When is a good time to address the American people?” Dan said… well, I’ll let Dan tell you! Swivel or turn or swing or pan the camera or whatever you… Yes, that’s it. Over there on my left.

          Dan Sverdlovsky: Thank you, Mr. President. What I said was, “Mr. President, anytime you speak to the American people, that’s an occasion for joy!”

          The President: Thank you, Dan! Uh… bring the… swing back over… yes, I’M OVER HERE!… Yes, not down there, UP HERE! Bring up… Okay.

           Many of you may be wondering why I am now sitting on my desk instead of, you know, behind my desk. Well, I’m trying to be a little informal here. A man behind a desk seems kind of cold. I want to come across as warm and chatty, like, what’s his name… Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His fireside chats assured a troubled nation that all would be well.

           How dare those Republicans ask, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” What kind of a defeatist question is that?! Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats addressed that very same question. My answer is: Of course things are better off than they were in 1931! How dare the Republicans claim otherwise!

           Are you better off than you were in 2009? You may not realize it, but things are getting better. It’s been painful, but we’re on the rebound. Standing as I do at center court, the best I can hope for is a rimshot, but two points is better than no points, even in a pickup game! I call that “The audacity of hoops.”

           Gotcha!

           My wife and I are also aware of the housing crisis! My current domicile is at best a “loaner,” part of my salary package. Sooner or later, my family and I will be asked to vacate the premises. I mean, look at the brouhaha over the newly built president’s house at the University of Maryland! We at the White House have got it easy! But we know our time will come.

            So we were looking at a house in Nova Scotia. Kind of a wild beach. It’s windy, it’s got heather, that Heathcliff feel. And I said, “It’s a great price! Let’s grab it!” We put down a deposit, but when we got back here to— you know, Washington— my assistant Dan Sverdlovsky pointed out that it might not be, like, such a great idea for the president to be buying a property in… you know… Canada. So— like we did in Denver— we got some friends to buy it, and maybe later…

            The point is, we know that housing prices are depressed!

            By the way, I’m not only speaking to Americans! Even resident aliens with green cards are more than welcome to listen in! The 11 million illegal aliens living in the Continental United States are equally welcome. To them, I say, “Buenos dios!” Not that they’re all Latin Americans, but… whatever!

            I can see that Dan is going crazy because I’m ad-libbing. These comments are nowhere in my prepared speech. An excellent speech, if I may say so, prepared with care by Dan and my speechwriters Ted and Alicia, over in the West Wing of the White House. And I promise you, Dan, and you, America, that I will soon get back on message and give that pithy, informative statement. But first, let me just get some things said here!

           I come from Denver, and l don’t appreciate all this carping criticism!

           Firstly, that I never actually SAY anything in my speeches. Well-l-l, today I am going to speak plainly on a number of issues!

            Let’s start with the teleprompter! Today, here in the Oval Office, I am using the Series 2100 Teleprompter, a unit specifically designed for small rooms and television cameras. Positioned ingeniously over the lens, this gadget allows me to stare INTO the camera while surreptitiously reading my prepared text. Is that great or what?

            Am I being plain enough for you???

             I hope I am.

             Next, my seeming fondness for Third World, Muslim nations.  Remember, I lived in Singapore as a child. So stop grousing! I think it was Hamilton Jordan, an assistant to Jimmy Carter, who looked down the cocktail dress of a statuesque woman and said, “Ah! The pyramids of Egypt!” I, too, support the current efforts, in Egypt, to form a flourishing democracy. Warily, I even applaud the democratic participation of the Muslim Brotherhood. So long as they act democratically, they too are a boon to the peaceful process of transition.

             My wife and I are black and I am not ashamed to say so! To those who complain that I’m not black enough, I say: I am as black as barros negros, black as night, black as the hearts of my Republican rivals! I… am… very… black! Listen! “Yo  mama so fat, da po-lice gotta stop traffic when she come down da sidewalk… in bofe directions!” That’s how black I am! I even learn “yo mama” jokes from my daughters Sasha and Natasha. I’m black!

             My mama was a white woman who liked to have sex with black men. She died of ovarian cancer. That doesn’t make her a bad person! Sleeping with black men was the ethos of her time and place. For white people, Hawaii in the 1960’s was a surfer paradise and beach bum hangout. Of course she got into trouble!

             My dad could charm the coconuts out of the trees.

             And don’t forget, my mama got grants to gallivant all over the world. Doing anthropology with her body. She must have had something on the ball, since she did get the money!

            We don’t work in my family. We play. We play hard. That’s who we are!

            I’m like Oprah. I’m special. I’m Blackie Diamond! My life story is, was and always has been compelling enough to sell a lot of books— albeit many were in paperback— and get me elected president! People give me a pass. Like my mama, I get everything served on a silver platter. ‘Cause I’m a charmer. Doesn’t affect my bowel movements. I still sit on the toilet, defecating, like everyone else. But looking at me, you wouldn’t think so. That’s me, that’s my method. As that tax dodger Wesley Snipes once said, “It’s called acting.”

            I sure as hell ain’t Latino! Although, of course, I support the Latino community in their efforts to fully participate in the American dream.

            To those who complain that I have been less than enthusiastic over the Dream Act, pul-lease! That’s politics! In my heart, I want all residents of this great country of ours to progress and enrich themselves as part of the American experience. We’re living in a new millenium, however. You don’t get anything for free. Not even health care!

            You gotta work!

             I may be playing at being president, but even that requires strenuous activity and endless battles with my adversaries in Congress. I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty. The process ages you, but it’s also a lot of fun!

              It’s not like I’m sitting here scratching my privates. If I was going to do that, I’d sit behind my desk, I assure you!

              I’m top dog and don’t let anybody forget it!

             Once re-elected, I intend to hold Congress’s feet to the fire. The blood will be knee-deep in the aisles! Then you’ll really get to see whose lapdog I am. Woof! Woof! So watch out. No more Mr. Nice Guy. I’m a Transformer. Mean Mister Machine is coming to town.

             I might even throw some money toward highway maintenance.

             Now, this whole question of what I did and did not promise the Russkies. All I said was, we are— politically— in a state of flux here and I will be more focused and, you know, flexible, when this mad campaign dashing is over. These are treaties full of technical detail and I don’t feel adequately in position to sink a swish when the opposing team keeps blocking my shots.

            That’s what I’m talkin’ about!

             Israel’s… whatever… is paramount… Enough of this! Why do I have to keep promising my soul to, like, four percent of the population? I know, yada, yada, yada, they’re everywhere. They control the media. I just mean that here is an opportunity for America to embrace a new reality. Instead of having the same old power brokers calling the shots!

             The telephone industry gutted the television industry, swallowing up their broadband. Congress and I went along with auctioning off the frequencies because I want every American to carry a smartphone. Using GPS, we’ll be able to track and pinpoint anyone across the country. Think of it as your 24-hour-a-day babysitter, but also “the eye in the sky” for law enforcement. What a tool that’ll be! Anyone without a smartphone will automatically be suspect.

              Now the wireless industry wants more access, while not even using 100% of the spectrum they already own. They want a major chunk of the frequencies currently used by NASA and our Armed Forces. There are 34,750 registered lobbyists in the Nation’s Capital. The capitalists just keep chipping away until they get what they want. Tough luck for NASA and our Armed Forces! What good does it do to fly the Reaper, Predator and Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, when you lack the bandwidth to communicate with your aircraft? Not too swift, guys!

            So stop criticizing me, America, and write your Congressman about the bandits buying up this country’s legislators. As the lobbyists say, “It’s amazing what a $10,000 campaign contribution can get you!”

           Meanwhile, we have all these weirdoes with tape over their mouths marching around in front of the Supreme Court, protesting health care reform. Don’t you get it? Diamondcare! I don’t care if you don’t like it! I’m Blackie Diamond! I’m the president! Take your best shot! Everybody cross-checks the Prez, baby. Go ahead, catch a bullet! Nudge me over the foul line. Make my day!

           Hey, Mr. Tea Party conservative! I, too, represent a constituency. I rep the people I went to Harvard with. New York investment bankers! The top 1%! So you go ahead and make your bus trip to Washington. Enjoy the cherry blossoms. We control the economy and what we says, goes!

           As you know, “inexplicably,” I have granted permission for off-shore oil prospecting along the eastern seaboard. I will shortly sign legislation allowing the construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline across the very heartland of America. Why??? Well, duh! Because my backers— on Wall Street— the investment bankers I met at Harvard— want these projects. They own me. They made me. I’m theirs. Who did you think I represented? 

           The poor are very nice people. They are warm-hearted and sometimes they vote, but I can’t finance a campaign using good intentions alone. The big money is on Wall Street. I’m their man. So forget the Republicans.

           For all my pretty speeches about idealism and hope, at rock bottom, I’m a hard-hearted politician. It’s who I am! Outside of my wife and children, I am perfectly willing to throw anyone under the bus.

          The Republicans portray me as being a wimp.

          Make no mistake about it, when the hard choices need to be made, I’m as much of an unsentimental bastard as anyone in Congress. I only talk prettier.

           Look how I treated my opponent Myrtle Beech in the Democratic primaries during the last election! And she’s a member of my own party!

           Mr. Slash and Burn, Blackie Diamond, is girding for battle. I’ll malign anybody!

           Maybe I cave for foreign leaders, but domestically, I’m a regular Macbeth.

           Time to take off the kid gloves and get real. Who are these Republican candidates? Mick Nutley is a wuss. Richard Pavalone can go back to his guns and Bibles. Paul Rand needs a psychiatric evaluation. They want unbridled capitalism, but the retina display on the new iPad uses up a month’s worth of capacity in an hour or two. We are engineering ourselves into a corner! The Republicans don’t seem to get it. As John F. Kennedy asked in 1960, “Where do they get these candidates?” Like the French say, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

            My wife and I have been to Paris, France. In the Springtime. Population, two million two hundred thousand. Too many North Africans. Not to be confused with Paris, Texas. There were pretty girls everywhere. I think it’s the inability to choose that makes Frenchmen so testy to deal with.

            I tried to get the French to take back the Louisiana Purchase. Basically, they told me, “You broke it, you own it.”

            Get over it! The Chinese own America. It’s the year of the dragon. Guess what? We rode the back of the dragon and ended up inside. China is America’s preferred moneylender. Their economy dominates our economy. What happens when we can’t pay the vigorish, let alone the principle? What d’ya think happens? America becomes Suzanne Collins’s Panem and my hometown of Denver takes its place among the world’s megalopolises. Sometimes I think you people ain’t payin’ attention. Hunger games, baby! Bread an’ circuses. Read your history books. To quote the immortal Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.”

            Like this speech, it gonna be over soon enough!

            I’m sorry to say our time is up for today. I promised the networks… yada, yada, yada! If you critics start bitching about me makin’ a campaign speech from the Oval Office, I say, “Tough titty!” Every president since Richard Nixon been doin’ it! President “meat prices must not go higher” Nixon!

            I have a beef with the beef industry. To hold down prices, manufacturers have been diluting their product with an ammonia-treated meat filler called “lean, finely textured beef.” Also know as “pink slime.” I understand that the factory in Amarillo, Texas has been producing 200,000 pounds a day of this stuff. The Garden City, Kansas plant has been cranking out 350,000 pounds a day. A factory in Waterloo, Iowa has also produced 350,000 pounds a day. Garden City? Waterloo? Factories producing pink slime? You gotta love these names!

            I travel the country touting job creation, but in this case, I think we’ve got to shut her down, boys! No one should be eating that stuff.

            Finally, in conclusion, I know y’all expect me to come up with this year’s slogan. Last election, we had a three word Kumbaya. This time we got it down to two words:

            Shove it!

            Let the Republicans suck on that one awhile.

            Live from the White House, this has been Blackie Diamond!

            Naw, I’m just funnin’ ya!

            Y’all take care!

            Thank you.

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