I Remember

I like accidents, ephemeral events, things you catch out of the corner of your eye. Melancholy moods, dark streets, the rain. Redemption. Seeing the old order brought down and chaos reign. Reluctant heroes. Magic and the supernatural. Women who work retail.

Everything is memory, even those recent memories we think of as the present. If you can’t buy that, nothing I say will make sense. My recollections of my own life are exactly like my memories of films. And of my dreams.

A long time ago, I had a recurring dream that lasted for months, the kind of dream you can wake up from, go back to sleep and pick up where you left off. I was a prince in exile on another planet. There was not a trace of the modern world. Everything was medieval, 10th Century maybe. We fought with swords, spears and bows and arrows. With axes. Mostly in the dark. I had a wife and a couple of kids and a band of loyal followers. Sometimes I feel like I just fell to earth.

I was a kid who could read words he couldn't pronounce. And I misunderstood and mixed up half of the things I heard. I thought Pound said "hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but one bordello" and Dylan Thomas said "in my craft of celluloid."

I was born in a Texas Gulf Coast town during the Depression, right before the war. My grandmother was Italian and my grandfather was an Irish cop. My father was a tall bohunk from Pittsburg who was in the Army when he met my mother. He got out of the Army, cut grass and delivered ice until my grandfather got him a job on the police force. He went back into the Army after Pearl Harbor and ended up occupying Japan. My mother had a half-brother, my uncle Bill, who was in the Army Air Corps when the war started. He was the toughest man I ever knew.

My mother and I lived with my grandparents in their house down by the docks. During the Depression, my mother said, my grandfather used to bring home groceries and meat he got from the grocers and butchers on his beat. We'd share the food with my grandmother's sisters and brothers and their families sometimes. My mother emptied bed pans at the hospital down the street until she got a job with the Corps of Engineers.

I don't remember any of that. I remember card games in the dining room, listening to people talking and laughing while I fell asleep, a paper jack-o-lantern that caught fire, and falling off the back porch. Later, I remember the lights were off at night along the beach because of the German submarines in the Gulf. When my dad came home from Japan, he brought me a sword.

My first motion picture theater was the State Theater on 21st Street in downtown Galveston. The ticket window was on the street and there was a lobby with a concessions stand. The “colored section” was a small balcony upstairs. Admission was 20 cents and I got a feature, a cartoon, the news and a Western serial for my money. I’m sure I started out on Disney films, Tom and Jerry cartoons and the Cisco Kid but when I was old enough to take the bus downtown by myself I moved on to films like Storm Warning (1951). I was eleven years old. The movie frightened me, of course, but I sat through it twice. There were other theaters down the street that showed steamy adult movies like The Story of Bob and Sally (1948) and I heard people talking about those movies, but I was too young to get in to see them, so Ginger Rogers getting dressed, Ginger Rogers in a slip, Ginger Rogers’ white shoulders, her stockinged legs, muscular arms and a glimpse of her breasts were probably my first exposure to sex in the cinema. Doris Day, Ronald Reagan, murder, rape, a whipping, burning crosses and white hoods were part of the Storm Warning mise-en-scène, too, although that term wouldn’t have meant anything to me then even if it had been invented.

The Martini Theater down the street from The State was a more toney venue. I went to grade school with the manager’s daughter. They had a color television, the first I had seen. The first television of any kind that I saw, a black-and-white RCA, was owned by the Salinas family down the block. The neighbors gathered over there to watch boxing matches on TV. That was in the late Forties and early Fifties. In Galveston, Texas. Peter Pan (1953) was the last Disney film I saw before high school. The stage version with Mary Martin, televised by NBC a couple of years later, was more impressive.
I handled 16mm film at an early age, threading Barney Google and Snuffy Smith cartoons and short Westerns into a little, grey Keystone projector I had gotten as a present. I don’t remember how old I was, the occasion, or who gave it to me. Thinking back, it seems strange to me now that I should have had a projector like that. I projected the films on the wall in my long, narrow bedroom. I staged plays with prop characters I cut out of comic books and pasted on cardboard. I built a platform in the backyard and talked my friends into improvising scenes on stage. I drew comic strips, mostly about flyers and air battles, because the airplanes were easy to draw. Saturdays, I listened to Let’s Pretend on the radio in the living room and football games in the kitchen. I read Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book more than once. My favorite character was the Yellow Dwarf in East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Looking back, and how much clearer things seem looking back, I see all of that as work that was more important than church, school or family.

When I had measles as a child, my grandmother and her sisters took turns reading to me. I don’t remember a single book. And the only books I remember reading in high school, outside of the books we read aloud in class and comic books of all kinds, are Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane detective stories, a few Reader’s Digest books and Peyton Place. (I vividly remember the Peyton Place scene of a man giving his pregnant wife head.) Somehow, though, young Phaethon, plummeting to earth from the Sun God’s chariot, slipped in and nudged the Yellow Dwarf and his Spanish Cat off of the beaten path.

The summer before I left for college, I set out to read “everything.” But I don’t think I got very far. I enrolled in an American Literature seminar and was laughed at when I named James Michener as an important American writer. I was mortified. But in another seminar I heard Chaucer read in Middle English and snapped to what college and college professors were about. I cut classes to read Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Teilhard de Chardin, Mailer, Algren, Jones, Shaw and Ginsberg. I saw films by Vadim, Truffaut, Godard and Bergman. I moved into a boarding house full of vets going to school on the GI Bill. I made drunken road trips to Mexican border towns. 

I witnessed the advent of color, wide screens, surround sound and Dolby, 3D, theater complexes with tiny theaters, naked women and almost naked men on the big screen in living color and in black-and-white. By the time I had graduated from high school, dropped out of college a couple of times, been drafted into the Army, lived in Germany where I wrote for an American tabloid, and got back to the states, I had been watching movies for over 20 years, but I don’t remember commenting on a single one of them to anyone until, watching Scorpio Rising (1963) sometime late in the summer of 1967, I turned to a friend and whispered: “Did he just say that Jesus was a queer?” And my friend, turning his leering, acid-distorted face my way, replied: “I don’t know. But I like the way he said it.”

That was my first brush with metonymy, a concept that, like mise-en-scène, I experienced long before I had a name for it. Years later, over dinner one night, I tried to sell the importance of metonymy in film to the Greek wife of a museum director. She cut me off. “Man lives by metaphor,” she said.