THE TELEPHONE RINGS.
I pick up, still half asleep.
“Hello,” I say, in a voice alien even to myself.
It’s Cromwell at the other end.
His voice, unlike mine, is showered and shaved and full of bristling vitality.
What, what’s this, he wants to know, don’t tell him (I haven’t told him anything) that I’m still asleep. At this hour! Ha, ha, ha, he laughs, like reveille in a boot camp. Still in bed at this hour!
“No,” I defend myself as best I can. “No, no, no, I’m not.”
I clear my throat and feel around for cigarettes I can’t seem to find.
“Breakfast. It’s breakfast time. I’m downstairs waiting for you. You got my message, didn’t you? So c’mon, put on some clothes and get your ass down here, you profligate bastard. Ha, ha, ha.”
He hangs up laughing.
I check the time. It’s nine forty-five.
It doesn’t matter that I’m late for a breakfast appointment I neither made nor accepted.
I start rushing around. I had fallen asleep on the couch in my clothes, so I’m fully dressed, but I can’t find my left shoe or any of my cigarettes. My rushing is tinged with futility. No matter how much I rush, it’s too late to be on time. I can’t make up for lost time.
First, I find my cigarettes and then my left shoe, and then, smoking, I rush to the master bathroom.
Leila is not there, but I have no time to wonder why not, or where she might be.
There is no time to shower or shave, but I have to brush my teeth.
Toothbrush in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other, I brush away, foaming toothpaste from the corners of my mouth.
There’s a burning sensation in my penis, but there’s no time to relax and play with the probability that I might have to pee. I’m at an age when physiological signals sent out by my body cannot be trusted anymore. My prostate gland is a source of ongoing disinformation. So I don’t really know if I have to pee or not. I only know that I have no time to find out for sure.
I rush out of the suite and rush down the long corridor toward the elevators. En route, I have time to wonder where Leila is, but no time to come up with a likely explanation for her disappearance.
“She’s probably just …”
I rush on.
The restaurant in the hotel lobby is large and almost filled to capacity. The tablecloths are white, the waiters dignified and well dressed, the atmosphere formal. The scent of food, bacon and maple syrup, leaves me in a quandary. Am I ravenous or stuffed? There is no way to arrive at an answer.
I look around for Cromwell and I don’t have to look long or hard.
There he is.
He is talking. His huge head is talking to somebody at the table with him. He is turned on. The power is on. He is smiling, laughing, reaching across the table with his hand to make a point.
Before I’m even halfway there, Cromwell senses my approach. His head, not the rest of him, just his head, much like a giant console TV with a swivel base, turns in my direction. He sees me. He takes me in. He incorporates me.
He waves and smiles.
I smile and wave back.
There were three of us at the table, Cromwell, myself, and Cromwell’s new concubine.
His new concubine was a young black man.
A very young and very slim and very beautiful black man. He was light-skinned, more light brown than black, but Cromwell was determined that the blackness not be lost on me. Nor on the young man himself. Throughout breakfast, he used superfluous phrases to keep the issue of that young man’s blackness alive.
“As my young black friend here will tell you …”
“Although he’s young, my black friend has lived a lot more than …”
“ … my young black friend …”
The repetition became oppressive.
The young man’s most striking feature was his eyes. They were as enormous as the eyes of Byzantine saints and so dark blue as to seem purple.
Despite his youth, he had thinning hair. His reserved semi-Afro was receding at the temples.
He wore a knowing expression on his face, like a sign that read that he was so well-informed and so wise to the ways of the world that nobody could put one over on him.
He was sure that he was way ahead of the game he was playing with Cromwell.
Whatever his name was, and it wasn’t Brad, it went out of my head as soon as I heard it. As far as I was concerned, his name was Brad.
“Doc!” Cromwell stands up to greet me. “Goddammit, Doc, it’s good to see you, even though you look like a human hangover, you old sinner.”
We embrace.
“Sit down, sit down,” he tells me, “you look like you’re having a helluva time standing up.” He laughs and slaps my back. “You really hung one on last night, didn’t you?”
“What can I say?” I say and shrug, my shoulders demonstrating how lightly I bear the reputation that precedes me.
“What did I tell you?” Cromwell tells Brad. “Didn’t I tell you he’d come down here with a hangover?”
He flatters both of us in one sentence. He flatters me that he had taken time out of his busy schedule to discuss me in my absence, and he flatters his young black friend by reminding him that he had discussed intimate details of my life with him.
It is a masterly demonstration of a master host. He flatters us both effortlessly and then rolls on.
“I just can’t get over you,” he tells me, and then he tells Brad, “He’s indestructible. He’s been this way ever since I’ve known him. The man’s a legend …”
A waiter comes. Cromwell orders a fruit plate with plain yogurt and unbuttered toast, Brad a blue-cheese omelette.
I’m still in a quandary about what to have, but Cromwell comes to my rescue.
“I don’t think our friend here is having anything to eat.” He smiles at the waiter. “Unless I’m mistaken, he’ll have a Bloody Mary to start,” Cromwell says and turns to me for confirmation.
I nod once, as if the state of my hangover is such that to nod twice is out of the question.
It is relaxing, playing the image Cromwell has given me to play.
I had forgotten the mindless comfort of being an image instead of a human being.
It’s not a lack of willpower that makes me go along with the charade of playing the image I’ve been given to play.
There are benefits.
I need a break from being.
Everyone, I think, needs an occasional break from being.
Even though I neither was drunk last night nor am hungover this morning, the image of a hack with a hangover is so comfortable that by assuming it I experience the peace that comes from finding a temporary respite from all the meaning crowding into my life.
From Leila and Billy, who mean so much to me.
From all the understanding I’ve had to do in the last few months.
I drink my Bloody Mary and smoke my cigarette and give myself over to Doc. He has fixed and streamlined so many screenplays and characters, transplanted so many spines into characters’ lives and caused so many happy ending to occur that I want the same treatment for myself. Fix me up, Doc. And if you have to hack away, then hack away at me, but fix me up, Doc.
We talk on.
Our talk is talk-show talk.
There’s a rhythm to the talking, an ancient rhythm, and there’s a rhythm as well to the laughter. It’s all very mellifluous and polyphonic, an acoustic massage for the mind. There is no content as such, but the tone is so pleasing that it becomes the content.
We’re neither so loud that we offend the people at the tables around us nor so inconspicuous that we lack an audience.
We attract the proper amount and the proper kind of attention.
Our group image is enhanced by the fact that we’re two white men and one black man (practically a boy) sharing the same table. It speaks well for us. It makes us feel and allows us to be perceived as goodwill ambassadors of some kind, of racial harmony if nothing else. And if the young black man at our table is Cromwell’s concubine, that is not apparent in the image we project.
We’re celebrating something at our table, life perhaps, or perhaps the fact that we’re all in the entertainment business, the unifying religion of our time.
Here I am having breakfast with Cromwell and his young black friend because I was asked to be here and I came. I rushed to come, but there is neither rhyme nor reason for my presence except to be a witness of Cromwell’s fucking of his young black friend.
In order to justify my presence, the topic of tonight’s sneak preview comes up every now and then. Cromwell initiates the topic and he terminates it as he pleases.
He tells me that all the signs point to our having a big hit on our hands.
“Knock on wood.” He smiles and raps the table with his knuckles.
The word of mouth on the movie is to die for. His friends and even his enemies in LA are calling him up and wondering when they can see it.
The ad campaign, built around the copy line “Love, the All-American Pastime,” is going great. He had the copy line market-tested and it tested out even better than the title of the movie.
A sleeper, he’s certain of it. An art movie with mass appeal.
As if as an afterthought, he turns to Brad and tells him that the credit for the copy line belongs to me.
I protest. It was just something I said, I say. I had no idea it was a copy line until Cromwell said it was.
Young black Brad watches us with his big blue Byzantine eyes which bring to mind the portraits of Christian saints.
Our banter, the way we so easily and generously give each other credit, the way Cromwell pats my shoulder, the way I respond, it all has the charming markings of a long and close friendship. A professional relationship, but a personal relationship as well. It is an appealing image we project, of two talented men fond of each other, and the black Brad, I can tell, feels good to be sitting there, being a part of this camaraderie. It is lost on him, of course, that I detest (loathe, hate, abominate) Cromwell, but why shouldn’t it be lost on him when, for all practical purposes, it is lost on me?
But the focus of Cromwell’s enormous forehead and the dammed-up power behind it is not on me. I’m there as a diversion for the real business of this working breakfast, I’m nothing more than an observer who can be counted on to watch Cromwell fuck Brad in public. For a man like Cromwell to fuck somebody in private where only he and the victim are aware of the transaction would be a waste of time. Why even bother fucking somebody if there are no witnesses?
“Mmm.” Cromwell savors the breakfast he’s eating.
He forks little pieces of fresh fruit from his fresh fruit plate and dips them into his plain yogurt bowl and then pops them into his mouth.
“Mmm.”
The zest with which he eats his food makes me doubt my hatred for this man. Makes me doubt my right to hate him. It seems un-American to hate somebody who loves what he’s doing, who relishes who he is.
I have no idea what kind of hard-on Cromwell has for the Brad at our table, nor what part of Brad’s life he wants to fuck. All I know, because I know Cromwell, because I have been repeatedly fucked by him, is that he wants to fuck that black boy, fuck something in him, or fuck something out of him, and he wants me to see him doing it over breakfast.
He has a zest for the life of that black boy.
The boy’s a wunderkind of sorts.
Self-educated. He quit school as soon as he could. Went to work in one little theater after another. Started reading scripts for a large non-profit theater where he became a dramaturg. Cromwell met him at the opening of a play in that theater and took, in Cromwell’s words, an instant shine to him.
“I could tell right away …”
“As soon as we started talking, I knew that …”
“There was no doubt in my mind that he …”
And so on.
All this happened very recently, a little over a week ago. Cromwell asked him to lunch. They had lunch. Then Cromwell asked him to come to Pittsburgh with him to see a sneak preview of Prairie Schooner: So here Brad is in Pittsburgh, having breakfast with us.
Is it the artist in Brad that Cromwell wants to fuck? Or perhaps he wants to fuck the artist out of him. (Cromwell has a hard-on for arts and artists of all kinds). Or perhaps Brad’s offense is that he has no need of Cromwell. Cromwell has a real hard-on for those who have no need of him.
“I need somebody like him in my office,” Cromwell tells me, so that his young black friend can sit there and absorb the delight of being discussed. “I really do. I need the input of youth. Especially black youth. It’s so easy to become insular and cut off, living the white life I live, and I feel a sense of responsibility to represent not just the mainstream white-bread culture but the black experience as well in the films I make. But you know this, Saul. I’ve told you this a hundred times …”
(This is the first I’ve heard of it, but I nod.)
“But I know nothing about movies,” the black Brad-in-the making says. “I don’t even like movies. I don’t.”
“Who can blame you for not liking the junk that’s out there? If you liked it, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking. And as for knowing nothing about movies, you know more than you think you do. You want to know who knows a lot about movies? All those film-school grads with their MFAs, that’s who. They know all about them. I have one of them working for me now and it’s a disaster. They haven’t got the heart or the gut instinct I need. But you do. That play you produced …”
“I didn’t really produce it. All I did was …”
“Oh, c’mon now. Let’s not play games. You produced it and you know you did. It was your play.”
“It was a play, not a movie. I really know nothing about movies,” he says, but with not quite the same conviction as before. “I’m a theater animal, is what I am.”
“If there’s anything our culture needs, it’s an infusion of that animal spirit, that raw vitality that you possess, not as an attribute but as an essence of who you are. That essence is the essence of art, be it film or theater or radio plays or rap or opera.” The power and authority with which Cromwell speaks roll out of him as easily as the acceptance speech of a political leader elected by a landslide. He creates the impression that he knows the greatness in you that you are too timid to acknowledge.
Having been fucked by Cromwell in much the same manner, I now watch fascinated. It is as if I am being fucked again.
Fucked by having to observe this.
I should intercede, I think to myself.
And on it goes.
Cromwell no longer refers to me, looks at me, or acknowledges my presence at the table. He knows I’m there. He knows I’m observing it all. That’s all he needs from me now. The little boost of energy that only an audience can give you.
Cromwell bites off little precise pieces of his unbuttered toast and shamelessly butters up Brad. He butters him up in such a blatant way that it can’t escape Brad’s attention.
And therefore Brad, knowing that he’s being buttered up, wears a knowing expression on his face, as if that will make him immune to Cromwell’s onslaught.
As if he could see through Cromwell with those beautiful purple Byzantine eyes.
Cromwell loves it when you see through him.
“What you have,” Cromwell tells him, “is something so rare that …
“It’s not just that you’re talented,” he tells him, “it’s that you’re also …
“You could be the first black man in the movie business to …”
He offers him image after image. And image after image, Brad refuses with a shrug or a smile or an amused knowing expression on his face.
But each refusal gives Cromwell an insight into the image that’s needed to entomb his young black friend.
“Look,” Cromwell tells him, and the tone of his voice suggests that he understands and accepts ahead of time Brad’s refusal.
“Look,” he says, “you’ve done just fine without me and I’ve done just fine without you, and I wager to say that we’ll both continue to do just fine without each other. But that’s not the point. I understand your reluctance. You, young man, were meant to be a young black warrior. I’m not telling you anything that you don’t know a hundred times better than I do, nor am I about to lie and tell you that to be a young black warrior in the movie business will be easy. Because it won’t. Our country, our society, the whole white corporate structure of the entertainment industry is on automatic pilot to crush they young black warrior whenever and wherever he appears. And so I have to admit that a part of me, the rational part of me, would urge you to stay away from it for your own good. But there’s another, deeper part of me that knows that when young black warriors stop appearing in our society …”
I can see the change in Brad.
Detect some internal reappraising.
This image of himself as a young black warrior appeals to him. Those words have struck a chord.
The image, like some parasite, attaches itself to him as if to a host organism.
Cromwell, with a single glance of his upraised eyes, takes in his new black Brad who, he can see, is now there for the taking.