Michael Martone - Seeing Eye

French is still the language of diplomacy, I guess. It makes sense since everything they seem to say says the opposite of what should be said. Jerry Lewis is a genius. They use language as a kind of disguise for what they really mean. They praise adults who act like children. Is a genius, Jerry Lewis? I would have studied it in high school, where they made it hard on purpose, all those little la’s and le’s , to weed out the Z lane kids, who were routed into Spanish. I took Latin because it didn’t move around, because it would help me with my English, and because I was going to be a lawyer.

When they were younger, I read to my kids. I took turns when I could and chose the stories with a lot of words and few pictures assuming that, after a while, I would look up and the kids would be asleep, their faces smashed into their pillows, their arms hanging over the sides of the bunk beds. That’s the biggest myth, that reading bedtime stories puts kids to sleep. It revs them up, and after I had closed the book, I had to hang around in the dark and answer questions about the strangest things. They always wanted to know if I was there when the story happened and was the story different when I was their age. I’d rock in the rocking chair while they thrashed in their blankets pretending they were characters from a book, that there was something scary in the closet. “Settle down. Settle down.” I thought of torts and contracts, the stories of the man who falls down an old dry well, posted but uncovered, on a neighbor’s property while he is cutting the lawn as repayment of a previous debt. Who can sue whom? On what grounds? There were ways out of those stories. It ends up being settled. One could walk away, fall asleep.

I could have killed the Little Prince. Reading his story, I felt so guilty for growing up and having no imagination anymore. But one night, I understood that that was the point. I was supposed to feel bad because I no longer had an imagination. The French. This thing they have for innocence. “Go to sleep!” I always wound up screaming. “Pipe down!” I’d storm out of the room, the children whimpering. “Grow up!” I’d yell and yell at them until, one day it seemed, they had done just that, grown up.

I stay away from them now. They have their own lives, their lemonade stands. The Africans must be thirsty. They crowd the table. Somewhere among them are my children refilling their glasses with lemonade that is not lemonade.

Let me try to explain it to myself. Those books never are about what they are supposed to be. Reading transmits a disease that you get through your eyes. A thing like The Little Prince gives it to you. You feel worse. You feel like you have lost something you’ll never get back. But you never had it and that makes you feel bad too. Therefore: Don’t read. Stop now. Don’t even crack the book open. In every story there is a dangerous formula hidden in the forest of the letters. It is there already, always.

I was always one of those who hid in the trunk. You paid by the head at the Lincolndale Drive-in off U.S. 30 on the north edge of Fort Wayne. There was an orange A & W shack across the highway from the entrance. We stopped there just as the sun was going down and drank root beers, sitting on the bumpers of somebody’s father’s car. The parking lot had been oiled, and the heat of the day had squeezed out little blobs of tar breaded with dust. You flashed your lights on and off when you were finished, and a car hop who knew we were from the county and ignored us came over to gather up the mugs. Then three or four of us climbed into the trunk, fitting ourselves together like a puzzle. Two others always rode up front, somebody alone would be suspicious. One of them would drop the lid on us. bouncing it a time or two to make sure it latched.

At first, the dark smelled like rubber, the rubber of the spare tire and someone’s sneaker in my face. The car rolled slowly over the packed dirt of the lot, stepped around the ruts, then made a short burst across the highway to join the conga line of cars leading up to the theater gates. It was hot inching our way up to the box office. The trunk was lined with a stadium blanket. Who knows what we were breathing, the mothballs, the exhaust from the idling car. The brakes clinched next to my head. The radio from the cabin was muffled by the seat. I always thought I would almost faint from the lack of oxygen, and then I would. I went light-headed, floating in space, my limbs all pins and needles and the roof of the world pricked by stars.

“Dan O!” They called me Dan O then. They hauled me out of the trunk by the cuffs on my jeans. The car had its nose up, beached on the little hill that aimed it toward the screen. I slumped on the rim of the trunk sniffing the air, looking at the next swell of dirt, a line of cars surfing its crest, moored by the speaker cords to silver posts. It was wrong. I swore I would never do it again. I staggered up out of the trunk, afraid I was turning into some kind of juvenile delinquent. “Book me,” I yelled to my friends as they filtered between the cars toward the cinder-brick refreshment stand to buy overpriced burgers and fries with the money we saved sneaking in.

I was telling this to Chuck Heston in the greenroom of the convention. The greenroom was a trailer with no windows parked beneath the scaffolding of the podium. The crowd on the floor above sounded like the wind, and Chuck looked scoured and bronzed. He listened intently, his smile frozen on his face.

“Do you remember where you were from in Planet of the Apes?’ I asked him.

“From Earth?” he asked without moving his lips.

“That’s right,” I said. “But where on Earth?” I could see again the inquisitor ape in white robes interrogating the crazed astronaut. This is before we know about the beach with the broken Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. Chuck had been huge on the screen at the drive-in, his head as big and as brilliant as a moon. The screen is now a ruin itself, plywood plates have popped out of its backing, exposing the girders rank with pigeons. The box office is abandoned. The neon has been picked over and scavenged. The high fences are sunk in the weeds.

I saw them all, I told him. Planet of the Apes. Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Battle for the Planet of the Apes . I saw the first one with my high school friends at the Lincolndale that summer after law school. As a joke they put me in the trunk where I rattled around with the tire iron and the jack.

“I could have been disbarred before I was even barred,” I told Chuck. That night at the drive-in, my friends and I sifted through the rows of cars to the playground of swings and seesaws under the screen. I climbed up into the monkey bars and talked with my friends about the future. The huge clock projected above our heads slowly ticked down the time remaining until the movie started.

That night, before I had even seen the movie, I sensed that I was different from the rest, an alien walking among them. I imagined that the amphitheater of parked cars stretching into the dark had come to see me caught inside a cage. I looked out over the expanse of cars. Clouds of dust floating along the lanes were illuminated by the headlights for a moment before they were extinguished. There was the murmur of the speakers, hundreds of repeating messages reverberating in each car. I thought, I’m your man. I’m the one you’re looking for.

Chuck hadn’t moved. He had stared at me while I talked, his face sagging some as I went on with my reminiscence. Above us the convention crowd howled, a gale force. We would be on soon.