Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

Thank you, Hannah, wherever you are whenever you read this, if you do read it some time. Thank you. I needed that reassurance.

We’ve been reading César Vallejo’s Trilce , translated by Clayton Eshle-man. Our group is made up of faculty and graduate students in Creative Writing from local universities. Some Denver residents show up occasionally with a relaxed interest in poetry. All of us write poetry. I am the oldest scribbler in the bunch and enjoy reading Vallejo with people who appreciate the taste of poetry.

The translator is visiting the Naropa writing program in Boulder and agrees to come to Denver to talk about his translation. Thinking about Vallejo is a totally enriching puzzlement. Clayton spends his whole time with us on the first of the poems in the sequence. It starts, “What’s making all that racket…?” We enjoyed adding ourselves to the noise. The Eshleman visit is a neat culmination to our weeks of tussling with Vallejo.

After Eshleman leaves I approach two of the MFA graduate students, in their mid twenties, and remark, “Doesn’t Eshleman look like Edward G. Robinson?” Their expressions are totally blank. They both are culturally engaged, smart young people. I like them both. “Who is Edward G. Robinson?” is their simultaneous response. The dissonance hits me like a giant powder puff. I fall into a geriatric swoon. How can anyone have grown up in the USA, under the great tent of Hollywood movies, and not have heard of Edward G. Robinson — Little Caesar, Double Indemnity, Key Largo , etc. etc? These movies were even somewhat before my time, yet I know them. He was a contemporary of Vallejo, born in the same year.

I tell this story to the woman who hosts these events. She’s a professor at CU in Boulder, where I taught Creative Writing, and a terrific poet herself. The grad students were her students. When I mention Edward G. Robinson she goes blank. “Who is Edward G. Robinson?” I want to holler, but I don’t because it would wake up the kids, “He was an icon of the silver screen. He was big as Bogart, Gable, Bette Davis. But maybe they haven’t even heard of them. Stoke the fires, I think. Wheel out the gurney. I’m ready for the crematorium.

If Edward G. Robinson has disappeared from the scans of these twenty-first century youth, what chance has my work to be remembered five minutes after I hit the exit lane? What chance has fifty years of my writing got to be remembered? Edward G. Robinson inscribed his image across the screens of several generations of moviegoers. He played gangsters often, but was one of the most gentle and cultured of the Hollywood greats. Wheel me out. How will my work invoke even a sputter of recognition? Wheel me out!

B.H. is always ready for a course of minor mischief. So as I’m employed to write a screenplay on the Hollywood fringe he suggests a wily intervention. The project belongs to Leo Garen, an off-off Broadway director from New York. He’s making his first (and last) film. We’re writing it together. This is my first screenplay, and the only one that will ever get made. China is the character in question. She is modeled on a real life China whom Leo married during the reign of Owsley acid, after a passionate encounter in a large closet at Billy Hitchcock’s Millbrook estate. The marriage lasted two long weeks. Her character earned its place in his movie — an icy blonde á la Alfred Hitchcock. She rides an Indian kidney buster bike across the prairie in 1919, with a motley quartet of dudes that make up this Ur bike gang at the center of the movie. It’s like a prequel to The Wild Ones .

My attempts at dialogue for China don’t please Leo. “She didn’t say ‘oooh,’ Steve, not ‘ooooh’ when you fucked her. She was mean. She came from money.” We can’t say “fuck” in a script, though that might help, but not for Twentieth Century Fox. Leo’s narrow view because he held the real China in mind makes my job almost impossible.

B.H. Friedman tries to come to my rescue with a wicked idea. He is a friend of the actual China, knows her from Millbrook and elsewhere. He suggests that he call her, and that we meet, and he will try to get her to say the lines I wrote. She doesn’t have many lines, but they are important to the script.

B.H. hasn’t seen her for a while, and is surprised that she has remarried into the Republican Party, to one of the hidden power brokers, whose name I never got. They have spawned a little girl whom China named China Jr. When B.H. calls her she tells him they are on their way to catch a flight to Gstaad in Switzerland, but B.H. persuades her to meet with us before boarding, at TWA in JFK. He gives no reason for the meeting. Lunch maybe seems possible.

The TWA terminal is the international jet set staging ground, an architectural wonder, a tour de force by Eero Saarinen. We hook up on the balcony at a restaurant table. She is everything Leo described — blonde, trim, self-assured, used to luxury but open to adventure, pretty face carved out of stone, blue eyes opaque. I wouldn’t resist jumping into a large closet for a fling with her. An au pair is in charge of China Jr. The husband in his Armani pinstripe with rep tie knot loosened slightly for comfort on the first class flight, polished black loafers on his feet, hovers impatiently at the bar and eyes us with suspicion. B.H. descended from a successful business career into the art world as a novelist, biographer, art collector, and always looks casually elegant. I am scruffier and bearded and must look suspicious to the husband, like someone of little consequence, maybe even a hippy.

As slick as B.H. is, he can’t get real China to say script China’s lines, whatever they are. She senses something weird going on. That she is a character in the script has to be left unsaid. She has no fond memories of Leo Garen. After a while conversation stops. She doesn’t say anything. We stare into our empty oyster shells. The husband comes over. “Okay. That’s all folks. Gotta catch a plane.” He signals to a man behind him whom I notice for the first time shadowing as part of the entourage. The man approaches. “This is Bobby. Bobby used to work for Bobby Kennedy.” (It’s been about a year since the assassination.) “That’s why we call him Bobby.” I suppose he was the amanuensis of this fat cat. The husband makes a gesture with his chin, and Bobby takes out his wallet and starts to lay some money on the table. The husband grabs his hand. “That’s your wallet, Bobby. It’s not heavy enough to cover this. Where’s my wallet?” Bobby pulls a thicker wallet out of his jacket. “Just checking,” says the husband, and he winks at me. The wink makes me shudder. I know I’ve seen that look on Bobby’s face somewhere else. China’s husband pulls a money clip from the wallet and lays a hundred dollar bill on the table. The entourage takes off, without saying goodbye.

B.H. apologizes for not getting the job done. “That was good enough. It was great,” I said. “I learned a lot. What a crew.”

I suddenly remembered where I’d seen the look on Bobby’s face before, so plundered and blank. It was in Lecce, when we lived in southern Italy, on the faces of the women that La Signora Foti had enslaved as maids. Maybe this wasn’t quite as hopeless. At least he had his own wallet.

The wind comes up suddenly and rips whitecaps off the heavy swells. In our thirteen-foot aluminum boat Nik and I fight to keep the old Evin-rude from stalling out. We are returning from a mission along the beaches of the Western shore of Cape Breton island from Mabou to Whale Cove, a scavenge for driftwood boards to use in our projects. Nik is twelve. He is building a tower. I am not yet forty, and building a driftwood studio. Our thirteen foot aluminum boat is loaded to the gunwales with boards. The prize is a sixteen-foot plank that Nik particularly covets. It hangs way out over the bow.