John Domini - Movieola!

But then early on in the filming—talk about real—the switcheroo from the movie came barreling into his life. Into his life and Spada’s too, the uncanny came walloping, knocking them far and deep across the timeline. And there were no mics, no blocks, no crew. Matty may have caught a faraway blare of the Arkestra, a crescendo of sax, but that was something from the movie, something the people doing the sound had sampled for the players to help them prepare for the next scene. But when Matty heard it this time, he went straight into the impossible. And all he and Spada had done was step out for the evening. Her suggestion; she’d felt it would be good for “the choreography.”

Were they going to dance? He might’ve asked, but before he got the chance, they were whisked away through fluttering kelp.

All they’d done was pose outside the restaurant. Part of the business, the buzz, and Spada wasted no time getting her smile in place, slantwise. It wasn’t for Matty’s sake alone, her bare shoulders, her lamé sack top, as if this were Bowie’s first date with Iman. But then in the middle of the laser flash, that yellow Morse code, the two stuttered away, dah-dit-dah, into old trolley-riding LA, the LA of bungalows and Bakelite. When the visuals stabilized, Matty was wearing a fedora.

And when he spots the woman at his side he needs to confirm, blinking, frowning, that this was his exotic lead, because he’d never seen Spada looking so mannish or so white. He needs to remind himself that women’s suits in those days tended towards the mannish, a lot of shoulder and no waist, though on second thought it strikes him as all the more bazook that Spada should be wearing a suit at all. Where’d her glam thing gone? And when did she get her skin bleached, a Dorothy Dandridge fade? Nonetheless this is Spada, as startled by the jump-cut as Matty himself. Doesn’t take a sorcerer to see that, her looks all at once overripe. She’s never been so easy to read, Spada, her face glowing beneath the tiger-pelt slashes of the shadows of the blinds. The rest of the set’s underlit, the potted plants like black silk, but before Matty can get a decent look his date or his victim or whoever bursts into speech. She gives voice to a wordless and fitful music, full of pain it seems, yet bristling with sarcasm. A woman with a past, turning her pocketful of secrets inside out. Doesn’t take a psychic to see that. Though Matty’s nowhere near sure of himself, even as he tips back his hat and murmurs in hard-boiled understanding. Really, understanding? Where’d he get this stuff? He couldn’t recall seeing any pick-ups tacked onto the script. Not that he doesn’t enjoy it when the woman seizes him in a trembling embrace. Not that he doesn’t enjoy the notion that he’s the last good man standing. Spada seizes him in a terror that might’ve left bruises, and her whimpering might be in Italian, and as they fall into a longing kiss the entire scene starts to tremble. They go to dissolve with no more than a hint of the rollicking seaweed.

And came back to the restaurant. They came back to empty salad plates, Matty and Spada, under a speaker playing “Moondance.” The inevitable “Moondance,” the greatest hit of white wine, and in fact on the table beside the plates there stood two nearly full glasses. Spada was likewise well into some anecdote, something that had to do with the photographers out at the entrance.

If she suffered surprise, dislocation, she took care of it with a gesture. She wiped away something on the air.

As for the wine, this hadn’t been their first. Matty sensed the burring across the underside of his brains.

Intoxication, he recalled, used to work for the soothsayers. They had a swig or took a puff, and then the cosmos revealed its innards. Yeah well, not tonight. Not with the music in the background going from predictable to more so, Tony Bennett, and Spada was no help either. She allowed Matty to drive her back to the Chateau, but she offered zero to his attempts at making sense. What he had to say was mealy-mouthed, granted: Did you notice…? Was that…? Still, the woman didn’t have to spend so much of the ride looking out the window, or where the window would’ve been if he’d had the top up. When she at last turned his way, at the drop-off, she revealed less. Spada gave him the full photogenic glitter, so that Matty’s only fitting comeback could be more of the same. A grin like one billiard ball clicking off another.

He wound up with a club girl. A votive to help unveil the mystery. Over on Sunset he had no trouble scoring a serviceable bit of eye candy, but later, when they had a chance to talk, she creeped him out. When Matty found the words to describe what had happened, through the wormhole into Chinatown , the girl came back with some hand-me-down mumbo-jumbo about how the Divine always appeared in disguise. The Divine might spill its guts, but only beneath a duplicitous screen, a burning bush or the writing on the wall.

Creeped him out, utterly. In the morning Matty treated her to her favorite smoothie, but once again he found himself speaking in tongues. Out of nowhere, he announced that she would be his last club girl.

She didn’t get it anyway. She told him she already had a b.f., on tour now, playing Jim Morrison.

Matty had others he could talk to. He had a therapist, no glamour-puss, a man who worked with the industry people who didn’t buy into Scientology. He had his mom, back on Long Island, and he’d been planning to get in touch with her. He figured she needed to know about his upcoming scene as the sensitive Gestapo agent. Gestapo with a heart of gold, risking everything for the lovely half-caste who might be a spy…. And Mom, though she got her potato pancakes out of Fannie Farmer, had family that went back to the shtetls. But as soon as Matty got her on the phone, he found himself tongue-tied. He stumbled over the first euphemism, and they wound up covering old business, the danger of confusing the work with the life.

The mother asked, sympathetically: You remember Tom Cruise on Oprah ? You remember him doing Mission: Impossible all over the woman’s furniture?

Mom was great, actually. She and Matty hadn’t gotten around to what he’d wanted to talk about, but they’d gotten somewhere. One good resonant pong on the sonar. By the time Matty came back on-set, by the time he slipped into his storm-trooper breeches, he knew that the person he had to do something about was Spada. This movie might change his life, and the nature of the change came down to Spada, and his mama hadn’t raised a boy who couldn’t suck it up and tell the truth when he had to. Tell it even when the person across the table was a jet-set hottie with higher billing. Spada was no more the Lord of Darkness than he was, and she could probably use a hamburger. Tonight, that’s what Matty would suggest—he’d make the invitation—burgers and blues. Tonight he’d do something about the magic between them.

Then as he and Spada headed into a joint he knew of, The Bottom Feed, why shouldn’t they pose for more pictures?

They took a moment outside the club door, enjoying the thump from inside, the tragicomic swing from A minor to B minor. They paused for the cameras, the lasers, and here it came again. The thing, the abracadabra. One moment Matty stood working up a People -worthy grin and the next he’d roiled through surf greenery into the middle of a chanting crowd.

His hair is down his shoulders (a good look for him, with these cheekbones) and he’s chanting himself, his neck straining against the weight of a cast-iron peace medallion. Around his hips runs a fat rawhide belt with a hash pipe as a buckle. The crowd sounds angry and the air smells of chemicals, part pot and part worse, and he has no idea what they’re protesting, he and this fine sistah beside him, her with the Foxy Brown ’do and the ragged jean mini. Are the two of them here about escalation or brutality? The Panthers or the Man? The Movement or the Wall? Matty can’t sort it out, especially with that projectile kiting overhead, so colorful and yet so ominous, maybe a brick and maybe a canister, kiting across the sky and trailing an elongated flicker of cartoon-candy, cartoon-crumple, psychedelia. Now he spies the psychedelics everywhere, bristle and overlap, rotoscoping, except he never signed on for something like that, Waking Life: The Sequel . He must be tripping. Spada beside him must’ve licked the same tab. What else could’ve given her such a maniacal shimmy and pop, dancing the terror down, her chant smack on the groove? What else could’ve so bugged out her eyes? Talk about cartoons, her eyes call attention to how black she’s become, practically cannibals-and-missionaries. She jerks like a Zulu.