The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen Read Online Free PDF Page A

went out to the lobby and put a nickel in the pay phone and called the sheriff. I didn’t want to phone him from Mr. Carrigan’s office.
    My parents didn’t want me to hear what was decided in the coroner’s report, but that didn’t matter because it was all over town. And besides, I’d seen it, and even at ten, I could figure some of it out.
    Miss Curtwood had gone to Mr. Carrigan’s office as she’d said she would, but she had been joined by the big man with the leather jacket. They had taken everything off, the jacket, her dress, everything. They had lain down on the desk together, after shoving all the things lying on it to the floor.
    When Mr. Carrigan came into his office, they were both there to moan and laugh at him.
    If Mr. Carrigan had laughed too, there was no way of telling. But the sheriff did know Mr. Carrigan had taken a .45 revolver out of a desk drawer and fired five times. Some minutes later, he had pulled the trigger a sixth time, this time with the muzzle tight against his right eye.
    That was just before I’d phoned.
    What I knew, and what none of the other kids at school knew, not even the sheriff ’s bratty daughter, was that most people in town didn’t know everything that must have been in the coroner’s report originally.
    I remembered everything in detail, like a picture on the screen. I didn’t know what it all meant, most of it, until long after. But the images were sharp and clear, waiting for my eventual knowledge.
    The first thing I saw when I poked my head through the light outside the office doorway was the big man and Mr. Carrigan, each of them lying in blood with parts of their heads gone. But what I really remember was Miss Curtwood.
    Now I know truly how much she had become as Mr. Carrigan really wanted her. Her hair was no longer blonde. It was wet and red. She was not a buxom woman any longer. Nor was she tall. Mr. Carrigan had carefully arranged her legs, but you couldn’t ignore the sections that had been removed.
    There were other changes I hadn’t realized he had wanted.
    September evenings are never as crisp and chilly in Los Angeles as they are back home. I miss that.
    I just got back from visiting my sister and her family. After Mom and Dad died, she moved out here and married a guy who works at some plant out in Garden Grove. They have a son and a daughter. The son is what the doctors call disturbed. He goes to special classes, but mainly he sits alone in his room. God only knows what he thinks. The daughter has run away from home three times. The first time, they found her at Disneyland; the last two times, with one guy or another in the Valley. The family pictures look like my sister and me as kids.
    Everything reminds me of something or someone else.
    I bought a .45 revolver just like the one Mr. Carrigan kept in his desk.
    There are times I carry it with me to the movies. I sit in the back row and wonder whether the things I see on the screen are edited just as the director planned. Then I go back to my Hollywood apartment and try to sleep. I am the cutter of my own dreams. The fantasies here have never worked out as I’d hoped.
    Sometimes I think about changing my sister’s life. And perhaps my own as well. After all, our parents’ lives became better, thanks to a late-model T-bird and a drunken real-estate developer. With no dreams left to search for, I have only nightmares to anticipate.
    The Thing waits for me on the other side of the door.
    That which I’ve never told anyone. The knowledge that behind every adult smile is an ivory rictus. Skeletal hardness underlies the warm flesh. My mother told all her friends I was such a happy child. Anyone can be wrong.
    I feel like I’ve built a cage of my own bones.
    Mr. Carrigan was right, of course, in the final and most profound analysis. You can make anything better. Life can be changed. It can become death.
    (for Warren Zevon)

Knee-high grass dominated the scene, thick blades uprooting the foundation of a