Life Goes to the Movies Read Online Free PDF Page A

she appeared to float on clouds of fabric) to the endearing little chip on one of her two front teeth (suggesting impulsiveness and
hard candy) to the sweet pale vanilla smell that she gave off and that, along with her skin, made me think of white chocolate.
    “You’re a late bloomer,” she told me in response to one of my many failed efforts to woo her. “Ten years from now, I bet
you’ll be ripe for picking then.”
    “So I’m some sort of fruit, now, am I?”
    “Not that you’re not a perfectly nice person, Nigel; you are; I like you a lot. It’s just that you’re so young.”
    “The spurned lover will now disembowel himself.”
    “You just need a little more time, is all.”
    “You misjudge me,” I said. “I’m much older than I look. My wrinkles are all inside. My internal organs look like a box of
stewed prunes.”
    “When you’re twenty-eight maybe try me again.”
    “I’ll phone you dead and decomposed from deep down in my grave,” I said.
    “ ‘Age is the price we pay for maturity.’ I’m not sure who said that, either Brigit Bardot or my mother when she was half
sober and still living.”
    “ ‘Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ Saint Augustine.”
     
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    We were interrupted by Dwaine, who ordered us back into bed to complete our lovemaking scene-in-progress. We were shooting our sixth movie, titledIn Flagrante Delicato, about a seminarian who gets caught having sex in his dorm with a girl from town. Huff played the sanctimonious resident
priest who catches us in the act, and offers his silence in exchange for a roll in the hay with my date, whereupon I castrate him with the machete that
hangs on a hook over the door of my room.
    To kiss Venus with Dwaine watching us through a series of camera lenses, yelling out orders, telling us what to do with our hands, our eyes, our lips
and other body parts, would’ve been strange enough, but doing so knowing that Venus was only acting while every fiber of my being ached for the
genuine thing was a special torture, exquisite and unheard of. The paradoxical result being that her performance was much more convincing than mine.
    “Come on, babe,” Dwaine yelled from behind the camera. “Put a little French into it! She’s not a nun, for chrissake. And
you’re not a priest—yet!”
     
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    When I asked him what he did for money, Dwaine said he worked as a location scout for a small, independent film company. Pressed for details he said he
couldn’t divulge any, that he’d been sworn to secrecy, that if he said anything more his ass would be grass.
    Secrecy notwithstanding, on several occasions he took me location scouting with him. From the Battery to its northernmost tip (where, as Dwaine pointed
out, the city was still a green mound of virgin forest just as the Reckgawawanc Indians had known it) we explored the world’s most famous island.
Dwaine showed me the rusty swing bridge by which New York Central line trains traveled from the Bronx into Manhattan over the turbulent waters of the
Spuyten Duyvil. In Brooklyn, in the Arabic shops sprinkled along Atlantic Avenue, we sampled sticky halvah and plump figs crusted with sugar, and from
there rode the A-train to its terminus, to watch snowy egrets soar over the mudflats of Jamaica Bay.
    Dwaine loved the city where he was born. For him it was like a humble backyard, while to me it remained as exotic and daunting as the control room of a
nuclear submarine. Though I had visited New York with my father as a child, the city seemed entirely different to me now. Before it had been a museum
of ocean liners looking like gargantuan banana splits in their berths, and skyscrapers lit up like Christmas trees. At the cut-rate hotel where my
father and I slept, a black lady with fire engine red hair let me man the elevator whose caged brass doors opened at each floor to reveal different
patterns of hallway carpeting. I remember how each of those carpets was like a city unto