At the top of the street there were some voices, shouting, and when I looked back at the man he was holding out his bottle, saying to me, “Drink it.”
I wasn’t keen on drinking from his bottle, and I suppose I would normally have thanked him and walked away. But what was normal wasn’t obvious anymore, and so I stepped up to the metal shutter next to him. The cement wasn’t filthy so I bent down and sat, my feet on the sidewalk, my back against the shutter. And then I took the bottle.
“Brother,” he said.
“So you say,” I said, and I wiped the lip of the bottle and took a sip. It was sweet, a wine-like liquor, and it wasn’t the wine, but when I sipped the wine and then looked up, the world that I saw seemed different. I suppose it had been different for a while, but now, sitting there, gazing across the deserted street, I was aware of the difference, not sure what it was exactly, and then the man moved to put his arm around me. When his arm slipped off my shoulder he told me to “drink it.”
I told him, “I did drink it,” and that’s when I heard the voices again, the same loud voices, and I looked up and saw a group of young men walking down the middle of the street.
I could see they weren’t bums because their white T-shirts were clean. There were four of them, and it’s funny because, although I didn’t actually feel any fellowship with them, I stood up. I suppose I wanted to indicate that although I was with a bum, I wasn’t a bum myself. And when I stood, that’s when the young men, who were just about to walk past us, stopped.
They stood together and one of them stepped forward and said, “Motherfucker,” and although he didn’t use the plural, it seemed he was addressing both of us, me and the man at my feet. “Motherfucker,” he said, a little louder this time, and because I was feeling a sense of possibility, and because at this moment protest seemed appropriate, I said, “Are you talking to me?” I didn’t say it like some Martin Scorsese wiseguy. I was just asking a question.
“I’m talking to him,” the ringleader said, indicating the Indian man to my left.
I must have looked like Steve Martin to them, like a respectable white man, and when I said, “Why don’t you keep walking,” they were surprised. So was I. And when the one guy stepped forward and said, “Motherfucker,” again, I noticed his boots. I noticed all their boots but I didn’t really care.
They were looking at the Indian man and I was looking at them, and like electrons vibrating, they seemed to be vibrating, with each other and against each other, and they were exciting each other. I heard one of them mutter something about trash on the street. The word trash kept coming up, and then the ringleader said to me, “Back off, Jack.”
“What did you say?”
“Back off.”
Well, I could tell they were about to do something, and I said, “I don’t think so,” and I stepped away from the wall.
In any kind of negotiation, including a physical one, the person with the least to lose is the person who has the advantage, and at the moment. .
“The dude is diseased, man.”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
And when the ringleader said, “What?” it wasn’t about my words. It was something else, about the way I stepped away from the wall, my arms at my sides. I think they still expected me to be Steve, but I didn’t want to be Steve. And I wasn’t. At that moment I didn’t know who I was, and maybe not knowing who I was, I was going a little crazy. Maybe I wanted them to beat the shit out of me, I don’t know.
“I said, Do you have a problem?”
“You got the problem, dude, unless you leave that motherfucker to us.”
The Indian man was behind me, curled up in a ball, and I was looking at the kids. They weren’t men, they were boys, and I said, “Just keep walking.”
“Is he your friend?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s your buddy, huh,” and they all laughed.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s my brother.”
I could see, forming in their minds, a question about what to do. I was ready, as they say, to do battle, and because I was ready, and maybe because the young men could see I was ready. .
“Fuck you, old man,” the ringleader said, as insulting as he could make it sound. Another man said, “Pussy,” under his breath, but as they said these things they backed away. Their body language was already turning, and after that their bodies turned, and with as much swagger as they could imitate, they walked on down the street.
I waited until they were well away, watching them and feeling the adrenaline in my blood. And it felt good. Unfamiliar but good. And I didn’t expect my new friend to thank me, but I was surprised when I turned to him and he looked at me and he said, “Motherfucker.”
This time there was aggression in his voice, and That’s odd, I thought, and in the split second it took to think that, he must have raised his bottle, because the next thing I knew the pieces of it were crashing at my feet.
The man, who had been sitting, now fell to his side, taking the posture I’d seen him in when he first introduced himself. The street was deserted, as it had been before, and as I had been doing before, I walked back to the hotel.
Sunset Boulevard was shot in a style of filmmaking that was brought from Germany, transplanted to Los Angeles, and flowered in 1944 when Wilder teamed up with Raymond Chandler to make Double Indemnity. In the movie, a man makes a deal with a woman, based on their sexual chemistry, to kill the woman’s husband. Beneath his hard-boiled shell, the man is a moralist, and by moralist I mean he knows what he ought to do but can’t quite control what’s happening. Chandler was a writer of detective stories who hated detective stories, a drinker who tried to stop drinking, and although he didn’t write Sunset Boulevard, both movies have a Raymond Chandler aesthetic. Both films show the insecurity behind American optimism, they both deal with femmes fatales, and in both films a character wants to change his situation.
In Sunset Boulevard, after living with Gloria Swanson for a while, William Holden decides he doesn’t want to live with her. He’s ready to leave, ready to get on with his life, but he’s “asked” by Gloria Swanson to ignore that life and the facts of that life and live in a Hollywoodland of the past. I say “asked” because how can you refuse the seductions of a benefactor? How can William Holden protest against the strong desires of another person? She wants him to be something, and although he’s against corruption in principle, it’s easy to tell himself his own situation is only temporary, that he’s only temporarily rewriting her ridiculous movie and only temporarily watching her pathetic imitations of Charlie Chaplin. He tells himself he’s going to leave, but the fear (of the repo people) and the comfort (of being taken care of) are making him, literally, a kept man, and there’s a scene — I’d seen it playing in the Metropole lobby — of Bill Holden and Gloria Swanson driving through the city. It’s a two-shot, and he’s dressed in an elegant suit that she bought for him, looking at a watch that she bought for him, barely aware of the various streets they’re passing, or the stores, or the world that used to be his but isn’t anymore. Until Gloria Swanson gives him some money. She wants a pack of her special cigarettes, and they pull up to Schwab’s drugstore and she reaches into her purse, takes out a bill — a large bill probably — and of course William Holden takes her money. He has none and she has plenty, and so he takes the money, goes into Schwab’s where he meets again the wide-eyed script girl who sees potential in his screenplay. Which gets him thinking. He begins thinking about how he might get free of a situation in which he’s found a certain comfort but lost any connection to what he is.