The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death - Charlie Huston [30]
A source, one might say of some slight bitterness in years to come.
—And what are you reading these days?
I looked up from the copy of Down and Out in Paris and London that I'd taken from his pile. I'd scooted over to the stool next to L.L. to make room for a couple that was waiting for a table. Full dinner service in swing, Chez Jay went from elbow room empty to sardine can packed in less than an hour. I'd forgotten.
Sitting at his side, reading silently, sipping at a beer, it came back.
Childhood revisited.
I closed the book.
—Horror mostly.
He rubbed his forehead, kept his eyes in his own book.
—Dare I ask by whom written?
—Whatever. Stephen King, Joe Lansdale, Clive Barker.
He winced.
—Web. Ambrose Bierce, Lovecraft, Stoker, for God sake.
I went on.
—Dean Koontz, Kellerman.
—Edgar Allan Poe, ever heard of him? J. S. LeFanu? Algernon Blackwood?
—James Herbert. Straub.
He slammed his book closed.
—Are you trying to kill me? Did you come here solely to antagonize me and rub my face in your ignorance? Certain tales by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton for fuck sake, all horror of the highest order. Dear God, Webster, Henry James! Shirley Jackson! Or in later years, Harlan Ellison, Bradbury, Matheson!
I slammed my own book.
—I'm not looking for fucking enlightenment, I'm looking to turn my fucking brain off for a couple hours!
He rose from his stool.
—Turn your brain off? Turn your?
He began collecting his books.
—Well, I have news for you, Web.
He cradled the books and put his face in mine.
—You have fucking well succeeded at that!
Heads had turned, the manager was coming over.
L.L. took a thick roll of bills from the hip pocket of his faded and baggy madras shorts and flipped a couple hundreds on the bar.
—Sorry about the fracas, Ernesto. My son is a mongoloid, and if I don't speak at a certain volume and pitch he can't understand human speech.
Exit, L. L. Crows, having added to his great legacy of closing lines.
I never heard about how great teaching was when I was a little kid. By then, the mid-eighties, he was one of the senior script doctors of the industry, a go-to guy when a little class was needed on a project, making an obscene living tweaking other writers' illiteracies. All I heard about was how vital the movies were.
People say escapism as if it were some foul bane. As if the denizens of this weary world were not deserving of some surcease and ease. They say it as if that is the only virtue the cinema might possess. As if it is not the great art form of the twentieth century. As if Godard and Fellini and Hitchcock and Cassavetes and Bergman and Altman and Wilder never walked the earth. One movie, one, of only moderate success, it touches more lives than I touched in nearly fifteen years of teaching. The years I toiled in that cesspool of incompetence and mediocrity called the public schools. I shudder, Web. My bowels turn to water when I think of what I might have accomplished. But no regrets, regrets are for small men with minor minds. We, my boy, we are for scaling mountains, you and I. We are for leaving monuments. A movie, a film, it is a testament in light and color and sound, a record of achievement, a projection of artistic vision penetrating directly into the brains of the audience. They cannot help but be touched, changed, when our words vibrate their eardrums, when the photons carrying our images strike the rods and cones of their eyes. Filmmaking, Web, let no one tell you otherwise, is a noble endeavor, the surest way for giant men to leave their marks upon the landscape of human emotions.
Delivered as he drove me around greater Los Angeles in his 560SL, after keeping me home from school so we could go to the NuArt together to see a Michael Curtiz revival, pointing from time to time with the hand that didn't contain a can of beer.