‘Have you seen The Nascent?’
‘Nope.’
‘Have you seen Anything That Hides?’
‘Not that one either.’
‘Have you seen any of Morrison Roog’s films, Chase?’
‘Not knowingly.’
‘How do you survive?’ he said, not unkindly. ‘How do you even get along in the world, not understanding what goes on around you?’
‘That’s what I have you for. You’re my brain.’
‘Ah, with your looks and my brain, we could go far,’ he joked in a Bogart voice.
‘Exactly.’
Something lit up inside him, then, and he climbed on his chair in his bare feet and performed a small monkey-like dance, singing impromptu, ‘If I’m your brain you’re in a whole lot of trouble… you picked the wrong brain!’ Perkus had a kind of beauty in his tiny, wiry body and his almost feral, ax-blade skull, with its gracefully tapered widow’s peak and delicate features. ‘Your brain’s on drugs, your brain’s on fire…’
Despite this lunatic warning, Perkus took charge of what he considered my education, loading me up with tapes and DVDs, sitting me down for essential viewings. Perkus’s apartment was a place for consuming archival wonders, whether at his kitchen table or in the sagging chairs before his flatscreen television: bootlegged unreleased recordings by those in Tooth’s musical pantheon, like Chet Baker, Nina Simone or Neil Young, and grainy tapes of scarce film noir taped off late-night television broadcasts. Among these treasures was a videotape of a ninety-minute episode of the detective show Columbo, from 1981, directed by Paul Mazursky and starring John Cassavetes as a wife-murdering orchestra conductor, the foil to Peter Falk’s famously rumpled detective. It also featured, in roles as Cassavetes’s two spoiled children, Molly Ringwald and myself. The TV-movie was something Mazursky had tossed off around the time of the making of Tempest, a theatrical release featuring Cassavetes and Ringwald, though not, alas, me. That pretty well summed up my luck as an actor, the ceiling I’d always bumped against – television but never the big screen.
Cassavetes was among Perkus’s holy heroes, so he’d captured this broadcast, recorded it off some twilight-hour rerun. The tape was complete with vintage commercials from the middle eighties, O. J. Simpson sprinting through airports and so forth, all intact. I hadn’t seen the Columbo episode since it was first aired, and it gave me a feeling of seasick familiarity. Not that Mazursky, Falk, Cassevetes and Ringwald had been family to me – I’d barely known them – yet still it felt like watching a home movie. And it led to the odd sense that in some fashion I’d already been here in Perkus’s apartment for twenty-odd years before I’d met him. His knowledge of culture, and the weirdly synesthetic connections he traced inside it, made it seem as though this moment of our viewing the tape together was fated. Indeed, as if at twelve years old I’d acted in this forgettable and forgotten television show alongside John Cassevetes as a form of private communion with my future friend Perkus Tooth.
Of course Perkus paid scant attention to the sulky children tugging at Cassavetes’s sleeves – his interest was in the scenes between the great director and Peter Falk, as he scoured the TV-movie for any whiff of genius that recalled their great work together in Cassevetes’s own films, or in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky. He intoned reverently at the sort of details I never bothered to observe, either then, as a child actor on the set, or as a viewer now. Of course he also catalogued speculative connections among the galaxy of cultural things that interested him.
For instance: ‘This sorry little TV movie is one of Myrna Loy’s last-ever appearances. You know, Myrna Loy, The Thin Man? She was in dozens of silent movies in the twenties, too.’ My silence permitted him to assume I grasped these depth soundings. ‘Also in Lonelyhearts, in 1958, with Montgomery Clift and Robert Ryan.’
‘Ah.’
‘Based on the Nathanael West novel.’
‘Ah.’
‘Of course it isn’t really any good.’
‘Mmm.’ I gazed at the old lady in the scene with Falk, waiting to feel what Perkus felt.
‘Montgomery Clift is buried in the Quaker cemetery in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. Very few people realize he’s there, or that there even is a cemetery in Prospect Park. When I was a teenager a girlfriend and I snuck in there at night, scaled the fence and looked around, but we couldn’t find his grave, just a whole bunch of voodoo chicken heads and other burnt offerings.’
‘Wow.’
Only half listening to Perkus, I went on staring at my childhood self, a ghost disguised as a twelve-year-old, haunting the corridors of the mansion owned by Cassavetes’s character, the villainous conductor. It seemed Perkus’s collection was a place where one might turn a corner and unexpectedly find oneself, a conspiracy that was also a mirror.
Perkus went on connecting dots: ‘Peter Falk was in The Gnuppet Movie, too, right around this time.’
‘Really.’
‘Yeah. So was Marlon Brando.’
Marijuana might have been constant, but coffee was Perkus Tooth’s muse. With his discombobulated eye Perkus seemed to be watching his precious cup always while he watched you. It might not be a defect so much as a security system, an evolutionary defense against having his java stolen. Once, left alone briefly in his place, among his scattered papers I found a shred of lyric, the only writing I ever saw from Perkus that wasn’t some type of critical exegesis. An incomplete, second-guessed ode, it read: ‘Oh caffeine! / you contemporary fiend screen / / through my face – ’ And yes, the sheet of paper was multiply imprinted with rings by his coffee mug.
It was impossible for me not to picture the fugue that eventually produced this writing being interrupted by a seizure of migraine, the pen dropping from Perkus’s hand as he succumbed to one of his cluster headaches. Impossible not to picture it this way because of the day I walked in on him in the grip of a fresh one. He’d e-mailed earlier to invite me to drop by, then fell victim. The door was unlocked and he called me inside from where he lay on his couch, in his suit-pants and a yellowed t-shirt, with a cool cloth draped over his eyes. He told me to sit down, and not to worry, but his voice was withered, drawn down inside his skinny chest. I was persuaded at once that he spoke to me from within that half-life, that land of the dead he’d so precisely evoked with his first descriptions of cluster headache.
‘It’s a bad one,’ he said. ‘The first day is always the worst. I can’t look at the light.’
‘You never know when it’s coming?’
‘There’s a kind of warning aura an hour or two before,’ he croaked out. ‘The world begins shrinking…’
I moved for his bathroom, and he said: ‘Don’t go in there. I puked.’
What I did I will admit is unlike me: I went in and cleaned up Perkus’s vomit. Further, seeking out a sponge in his kitchen sink, I ran into a mess there, a cereal bowl half filled with floating Cheerios, cups with coffee evaporating to filmy stain-rings. While Perkus lay on the couch breathing heavily through a washcloth, I quietly tinkered at his kitchen, putting things in a decent order, not wanting him to slip into derangement and squalor on what it had suddenly occurred to me was my watch – he appeared so disabled I could imagine him not budging from that couch for days. And I’d still never seen another soul in Perkus’s apartment, though he claimed to have other visitors. The dinette table was scattered with marijuana, half of it pushed through a metal strainer, the rest still bunchy with seeds. I swept it all back into a plastic box labeled FUNKY MONKEY – another of his dealer’s brand names – and scooped the joints Perkus had completed into the Altoids tin he kept for that purpose. Then, growing compulsive (I do keep my own apartment neat, though I’d before never felt any anxiety at Perkus’s squalor), I started reorganizing his scattered CDs, matching the disks to their dislocated jewel cases. This kind of puttering may be how I set myself at ease, another type of self-medication. It was certainly the case that blundering in on Perkus’s headache had made me self-conscious and pensive, but I felt I couldn’t go. I made no attempt to conceal my actions, and Perkus offered no comment, apart from the slightest moan. But after I’d been clattering at his compact disks for a while he said: ‘Find Sandy Bull.’