SCREEN IMAGE:[Royal Emerald Hotel, Nassau]SCREEN IMAGE:[Royal Emerald Hotel, Nassau]Mark Rudman
Viciousness incarnate. Meanness engraved.
Boneless, atomic, he leaned on the swivel
stool. His back to the bar.
To the gilded mirrors inhabited
by a jagged skyline, bottles;
gold labels: Chivas, Cointreau, Cutty Sark. …
Anyone would have noted this presence
even if the man had been
no one, but with his initials
in red on shirt cuffs, cuff links,
lapels, blazer breast pocket, and socks,
it seemed almost disingenuous
for the boy to ask “Are you—?—
but it was the best he could do.
Sloe-eyed, conspiratorial, the actor spoke
out of the side of his mouth
but his gravelly menacing bass
carried kind words. “Pleased to meet you
son. Would you—mind—if I—bought—you a drink?
Bartender—get the boy a—‘Shirley’—”
and then he winked!—a—‘Roy Rogers.’"
They drank in dark and blissful silence.
“Just do me a favor, son; don’t tell anyone
you saw me. I’m here … to get away.”
The warm and intimate way the actor delivered these words
made the boy keen to keep a vow … of silence;
to ignore his chance to shine in the rec-room among the jaded kids
who’d waste no time making sure everyone who could
know would know;
no, he would not tell that freckled snot from Great Neck
who came to Nassau with his own Ping-Pong racquet. …
The actor’s equally glamorous friends,
who’d entered without a sound,
pressed the rims of cocktail glasses to their lips;
knocked down their martinis in one
gulp; hissed: retracted their chins like cobras.
The leather armrests on the bar let out a gasp
which led the two women to exchange quick
I didn’t do it, did you? glances,
as if their rigid posture and breathless
diaphragms betrayed them, along
with their volitionless nylon rustling. …
They were prisoners anyway:
of masklike makeup; tintinnabulating bracelets;
minuscule purses without shoulder straps
and strapless, tight-waisted dresses; umbrella-spined
bras;
nylons, garters, girdles, high heels: glued hair.
(Was the woman who was “with” the actor
reciting a silent mantra
that he himself would never do anything
like hurl boiling coffee in her face
as he did to Gloria Graham
in The Big Heat?)
Silken and silver were the hair and suit and voice
of the man who uttered the actor’s first name.
Wouldn’t “our table’s ready” have been sufficient?
The actor dispersed like liquid mercury—
too early in time to draw some wry pleasure
from the uncanny resemblance
between the “special effect” on celluloid
and his own flesh and blood.
The boy did not move but eyed the party
through the speckled mirror; and though
he was as aware as any American
that whatever the hadn’t done
in real life or was yet to do,
like push the future
President out of a speeding coupe in The Killers …
that he owed his renown to the brazen, indomitable cop
he played on M-Squad, the boy saw him repeatedly
as the itinerant cruelty in The Missouri Traveller
who lashed that boy’s back in the heat-stricken barn
for feeding the skeletal horses extra hay.
He couldn’t remember why he and his father
had gone to this bleak, obscure “sleeper” anyway,
unless, alone together in a place he could not remember,
they had time to kill.