I’d also been given a script. And the script was fine, as far as it went, but I had my own ideas about what I would do, and be, and when they set the camera behind Luca, looking over his shoulder, at me, I was ready, as they say, for my close-up. I was up against the counter, the gun digging into my rib cage, bruising my skin, but I wasn’t thinking about that. They turned on the sound and then they turned on the camera and I thought I knew what they wanted, but I also knew that repetition was death.
“I can get a better price,” I say, looking right in Luca’s eyes.
“Then you don’t do business in Chicago,” he says, and he comes around the counter, starts slapping my cheek, harder than before, and he’s laughing, “Come on, big shot,” slapping my cheek, getting more animated, saying, “You got a problem with that? Huh? You got a problem with that?”
And I say, “Yeah. I got a problem.”
He stops slapping me. I take Pauly’s arm, I twist the gun out of his hand and I push him away. This isn’t in the script, and he doesn’t know what I’m doing. But I know what I’m doing, and it feels good. I’m becoming my character.
I turn to Luca. And I’ve left the script at this point. “You son of a bitch,” I say, and I grab him by his lapels. I don’t exactly lift him up, but I lift up his jacket, and it looks good from the camera’s POV, I can tell. And I look at him, as intensely as I can, hold the look for about a beat, and then throw him into the electric guitars lined up behind him.
I hear the director yell “Cut.” I watch him put his clipboard on his chair. He walks over to me, and I’m an actor, and he looks at me like that. And I look at him, like a lover.
“Good,” he says. “You were good.”
But you can never tell with a director.
A few scenes later the police stormed into a derelict warehouse, their guns drawn, their flashlights shining, and they found me, limp and dead, hanging from a meat hook.
The next thing that happened — obviously not the next thing, but the next thing I’m going to relate — happened with Jane. As part of my introduction to Los Angeles I wanted to see the Watts Towers, and although Jane had seen them she agreed to come along, and so we drove down, saw the various structures and the pieces of broken glass in the structures. We read the booklet about Simon Rodia, who’d decided he wanted to build something, and spent the next thirty-three years making his imaginary city real. And what I want to relate happened after we’d seen the towers and been impressed by the towers and we were walking back to my car.
“Do you want to get something to drink?” she said.
There was a small store across the street.
“Or do you want to go home?”
I was telling her I’d just as soon go home when a man approached us. He was wearing a dashiki and his head was bald and he was carrying a four-by-five camera around his neck. He asked me if I wanted a photo taken. “Of your wife,” he said.
“She’s not my wife.”
“The two of you,” he said, and he motioned for Jane, who was standing off to the side, to stand next to me.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “But thanks.”
“Why not?” Jane said to me, and then to the man, “How much?”
He told us one photo was five dollars, or three for ten, and he held up a sample of his work, a photo some previous tourist had probably not paid for.
“I don’t want a photo,” I said.
I had enough photos, but Jane was already reaching into her pocket — she was wearing shorts — and was pulling out money.
“To remember the moment,” she said, and she handed the man some money. I couldn’t tell if it was a five or a ten, and then she ran back to me and he positioned us so that the cement-encrusted rebar spires were rising into the air behind us.
“Hold it,” he said.
And that’s when I had a vision. Not really a vision, but there I was, Jane’s arm around my waist and my arm over her shoulder, and I could imagine the frame surrounding us, the rectangular vision of the camera, capturing our knees at the bottom, the air at the top, and the wall made of cement we were standing in front of.
I was Steve and Jane was Jane, and the man said, “Step this way,” meaning toward him, and Jane and I each took one step, together. But then I took another step. We were standing on some dry, barely living grass, and when I took that other step, when I lifted my leg, I lifted it high, high enough to step over the frame I imagined across my knees. I stepped out of the frame and moved to the side. “Take it now,” I said, “without me.”
The man, who had been squatting in the sun, stood up.
Jane held her arm out so that, like pieces of a chain, I would link up with her. She had a picture in her mind and the picture to me seemed false.
“Don’t be coy,” she said.
“Coy?”
“Stand by the lady,” the man said.
They were both urging me to do this thing, and the man looked frustrated and Jane was probably frustrated, and she said, “Jack Cat,” and looked at me in a way I thought was extremely coy.
“What?” I said.
But I knew what. It was what she wanted, and it would have been easy enough to do what she wanted except I wanted to do something else. I felt rebellious.
Around 1960, because of bureaucracy and possibly some complaints, the city of Los Angeles wanted to tear down the towers. They were thought to be unsafe, and an inspection crew was called in. It was less inspection crew than demolition crew, because what they did, to test the strength of the towers, was to try to tear them down. Rodia had built them by hand, with rebar and wire mesh and mortar and pieces of glass. All by himself. He’d already moved away by the time the crew came in, attached a metal cable to one of the lattice-like spires, and using the crane, pulled the towers down. Or they tried to. But of course the towers remained intact. They remained intact then, and also later, during the Watts Riots, and except for a little renovation after a recent earthquake, the towers Rodia built are still there.
And I don’t remember if I felt like the towers, not moving, or like the inspection crew, unable to make the thing move. Whatever it was, I ended up walking over to Jane. I didn’t step up and over and into the frame because I was already in the frame. The frame was a cage, and although it was false, once I was inside it, her arm went around my waist and my arm went over her shoulder. The man focused his camera and took, for five dollars, one picture.
At one point in his career Charles Laughton played the role of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Caliban is a not-quite-human creature, living comfortably in the only comfort he knows, getting along perfectly well until his island paradise is invaded. A storm comes and a ship lands and Prospero takes over. He was a duke in Italy and now the island becomes his personal dukedom. He’s a magician, and he uses his magic as a kind of technology, giving him power and ownership, and because he has power, Caliban becomes his worker. Servant might be a better word, or even slave, but in the beginning Caliban is happy enough. In exchange for his work, he’s learning a language. And it would all be fine except Prospero has a daughter, Miranda. Although Caliban has never even seen a woman, when he sees Miranda he seems to know what he wants. He has access to her room in the cave, but I think the incident that happens, happens by a pool, a spring-fed pool deep enough for bathing. Caliban is hiding behind some bushes, watching Miranda swim in the pool, and when she steps out of the water, stretching her arms and letting the sun warm her naked body, that’s when he stumbles out of the bushes. Miranda looks up, sees him, and Caliban sees her, trying to cover herself with her hands and arms. And because he’s not quite human, he acts. He acts on feelings that exist in the pit of his stomach, and in the pit of his stomach he’s drawn to her, and he goes to her, and he doesn’t know what to do. Except hold her. The urge he has is to press his skin against her very different skin, and when he does, that’s when Prospero arrives. And that’s when Caliban is imprisoned. There’s the actual incarceration, in a cave, and there’s also the incarceration of his newly aroused desire, and in response to both of them, rebellion, which itself is a kind of arousal, seems like a necessary thing.