A Graveyard for Lunatics

I entered nowhere, content to smile or laugh as I passed. After all, since I imagined the studio was mine, I could linger or leave as I wished.

But even as I moved into the shadows again, I sensed a certain tremor in myself. My love of films had gone on too many years. It was like having an affair with Kong, who fell on me when I was thirteen; I had never escaped from beneath his heart-beating carcass.

The studio fell on me the same way every morning when I arrived. It took hours to fight free of its spell, breathe normally, and get my work down. At twilight, the enchantment returned; my breathing suffered. I knew that someday soon I would have to get out, run free, go and never come back, or like Kong, always falling and always landing, it would one day kill me.

I passed a final stage where a last burst of hilarity and percussive jazz shook the walls. One of the assistant camera operators biked by, his basket loaded with film on its way to an autopsy under the razor of a film editor who might save or bury it forever. Then into the theatres or banished to the shelves where dead films go, where only dust, not rot, collecteth them.

A church clock, up in the Hollywood hills, struck ten. I turned and strolled back to my cell block in the writers’ building.

The invitation to be a damned fool was waiting for me in my office.

Not chiseled out on a marble slab, no, but neatly typed on high-quality note paper.

Reading it, I sank down in my office chair, my face cold, my hand tempted to clench and wad the note and throw it aside.

It said:

Green Glades Park. Halloween.

Midnight tonight.

Center rear wall.

P.S. A great revelation awaits you. Material for a best-selling novel or superb screenplay. Don’t miss it!

Now, I am not a brave man. I have never learned to drive. I do not fly in planes. I feared women until I was twenty-five. I

hate high places; the Empire State is pure terror for me. Elevators make me nervous. Escalators bite. I am picky with food. I ate my first steak only at age twenty-four, subsisting through childhood on hamburgers, ham-and-pickle sandwiches, eggs, and tomato soup.

“Green Glades Park!” I said aloud.

Jesus, I thought. Midnight? Me, the guy who was mobbed by bullies down the middle of adolescence? The boy who hid under his brother’s armpit the first time he saw The Phantom of the Opera?

That one, yes.

“Dumb!” I yelled.

And went to the graveyard.

At midnight.

3

On the way out of the studio I veered toward the Men’s, not far from the Main Gate, then veered away. It was a place I had learned to stay away from, a subterranean grotto place, with the sound of secret waters running, and a scuttling sound like crayfish backing swiftly off if you touched and started to open the door. I had learned long ago to hesitate, clear my throat, and open the door slowly. For then various interior doors of the Men’s shut with thuds or very quietly or sometimes with a rifle bang, as the creatures that inhabited the grotto all day, and even now late because of the stage-set parties, panicked off in retreat, and you entered to the silence of cool porcelain and underground streams, tended to your plumbing as soon as possible and ran without washing your hands, only to hear, once outside, the sly slow reawakening of the crayfish, the doors whispering wide, and the emergence of the grotto creatures in various stages of fever and disarray.

I veered off, as I said, yelled to see if it was clear, and ducked into the Women’s across the way, which was a cold, clean white ceramic place, no dark grotto, no scuttling critters, and was in and out of there in a jiffy, just in time to see a regiment of Prussian guards march by toward a Stage 10 party and their captain break ranks. A handsome man with Nordic hair and great innocent eyes, he strode unknowingly into the Men’s.

He’ll never be seen again, I thought, and hurried through the almost midnight streets.

My taxi, which I couldn’t afford, but I was damned if I’d go near the graveyard alone, pulled up in front of the cemetery gates at three minutes before the hour.

I spent a long two minutes counting all those crypts and monuments where Green Glades Park employed some nine thousand dead folks, full time.

They have been putting in their hours there for fifty years. Ever since the real-estate builders, Sam Green and Ralph Glade, were forced into bankruptcy and leveled their shingles and planted the tombstones.

Sensing there was a great piece of luck in their names, the defaulted bungalow court builders became simply Green Glades Park, where all the skeletons in the studio closets across the way were buried.

Film folks involved with their shady real-estate scam were believed to have put up so the two gentlemen would shut up. A lot of gossip, rumor, guilt, and ramshackle crime was buried with their first interment.

And now as I sat clenching my knees and gritting my teeth, I stared at the far wall beyond which I could count six safe, warm, beautiful sound stages where the last All Hallows revelries were ending, the last wrap parties wrapping up, the musics still and the right people drifting home with the wrong.

Seeing the cars’ light beams shifting on the great sound-stage walls, imagining all the so-longs and goodnights, I suddenly wanted to be with them, wrong or right, going nowhere, but nowhere was better than this.

Inside, a graveyard clock struck midnight.

“Well?” someone said.

I felt my eyes jerk away from the far studio wall and fix to my driver’s haircut.

He stared in through the iron grille and sucked the flavor off his Chiclet-sized teeth. The gate rattled in the wind, as the echoes of the great clock died.

“Who,” said the driver, “is going to open the gate?”

“Me!?” I said, aghast.

“You got it,” said the driver.

After a long minute, I forced myself to grapple with the gates and was surprised to find them unlocked, and swung them wide.

I led the taxi in, like an old man leading a very tired and very frightened horse. The taxi kept mumbling under its breath, which didn’t help, along with the driver whispering, “Damn, damn. If anything starts running toward us, don’t expect me to stay.”

“No, don’t expect me to stay,” I said. “Come on!”

There were a lot of white shapes on each side of the graveled path. I heard a ghost sigh somewhere, but it was only my own lungs pumping like a bellows, trying to light some sort of fire in my chest.

A few drops of rain fell on my head. “God,” I whispered. “And no umbrella.”

What, I thought, in hell am I doing here?

Every time I had seen old horror movies, I had laughed at the guy who goes out late at night when he should stay in. Or the woman who does the same, blinking her big innocent eyes and wearing stiletto heels with which to trip over, running. Yet here I was, all because of a truly stupid promissory note.

“Okay,” called the cab driver. “This is as far as I go!”

“Coward!” I cried.

“Yeah!” he said. “I’ll wait right here!”

I was halfway to the back wall now and the rain fell in thin sheets that washed my face and dampened the curses in my throat.

There was enough light from the taxi’s headlights to see a ladder propped up against the rear wall of the cemetery, leading over into the backlot of Maximus Films.

At the bottom of the ladder I stared up through the cold drizzle.

At the top of the ladder, a man appeared to be climbing to go over the wall.

But he was frozen there as if a bolt of lightning had taken his picture and fixed him forever in blind-white-blue emulsion: His head was thrust forward like that of a track star in full flight, and his body bent as if he might hurl himself across and down into Maximus Films.