THUGLIT Issue Three Page 9

  The spray hit my eyes and filled my mouth, and it was like being doused in liquid fire. Choking, I fell forward onto my hands and knees, and Veronica delivered a solid kick to my side, tipping me off the sidewalk and into the gutter.

  “How does that grab you, pervert?” Her booming contralto echoed off the brownstones the way it used to echo off of movie-house walls. “You like following old women around? Get your kicks that way, do ya? Well, try rolling around in the street for a while with the rest of the garbage.”

  She strode toward me, raising her arm as if to administer another soaking. I rolled away, doing my best to form words with a tongue that was rapidly going numb. Despite my inarticulateness, a few syllables struck home with her.

  She stopped, and lowered her outstretched hand along with her voice.

  “What did you just say?” she asked softly.

  I spat into the road and, after a few deep breaths, repeated as clearly as I could: “Veronica Tate.”

  The blood drained from her features.

  “You’ve made a mistake,” she said. “My name’s Marianne Ockleman.”

  “That’s your real name,” I coughed. Tears were streaming from the corners of my bleary eyes and coursing across my cheeks. “I’m talking about the name Arthur Horner gave you at RKO in 1948. Right before you starred in The Little Mothers.”

  She stumbled back a step, as if she’d been struck. But she quickly steeled herself, dropping the pepper spray into her pocketbook, and straightened her rumpled coat and mussed hairdo.

  “Well, in that case,” she said firmly, almost defiantly, “I guess you’d better come upstairs.”

  *****

  I hunched over the bathroom sink and splashed cold water into my eyes. After nine or ten rinsings, the burning began to ease; and as my vision cleared, the subsiding pain replaced by a growing curiosity. The bathroom was cramped and dank, the green tiles covering the walls faded by age and grime to a sickly olive hue. I cracked open the medicine cabinet and saw a dozen prescription bottles, some old, some new, arranged haphazardly on three glass shelves. The prescriptions were for unfamiliar medications with serious-sounding names like Loxapine and Chlorpromazine and Haldol. The name on all of the labels read: “Ockleman, Marianne.” I shut the cabinet and surveyed the room for any signs of her previous identity—a snapshot hung on the wall, a postcard tacked to the back of the door, a memento from better days hidden in the back of a drawer. I found no hints of Veronica Tate, film icon; all I found was the detritus of one Marianne Ockleman’s troubled, bruised existence.

  When I came out of the bathroom, she was settled into a plush, if timeworn, armchair—a tall glass of scotch in her right hand, Silver Screen Sirens splayed across her lap. The book was open to her picture, and she stared at it with the slightly appalled fascination of one gazing into a funhouse mirror. At first, she didn’t even notice my presence. I slipped into a nearby rocker, the only other chair in the tiny, airless living room. Her third floor walk-up was filled with piles of old newspapers and TV Guides, and the windows were covered by thick brocaded curtains. The curtains were so efficient at filtering out the glow of streetlights and the murmur of traffic below, it was easy to forget we were in the city. Overhead, a single bulb buzzed weakly in the muffled silence. After a few long seconds of listening to the insectile thrum of the bulb mixing with her labored breathing, I cleared my throat in the hopes of drawing her attention.

  She abruptly snapped the book shut, and fixed me with a keen, appraising gaze.

  “How’s the peepers?” she asked. There was something direct and unapologetic in her tone that appealed to me.

  “Still sting a bit, but they’ll be fine.”

  “Good. I wouldn’t want to blind you. You’re lucky I don’t carry a gun anymore. Damned cops took it away from me.” She chuckled to herself, and took a long swallow from her drink. “What the hell were you doing following me around, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. I…I saw you the other day. I guess I thought I’d ask for your autograph.”

  She hooted loudly and slapped the arm of her chair, sending a swirl of dust motes into the thin pallid light.

  “Nobody’s asked for my autograph in…I don’t know how long. Nobody’s even recognized me in years. Christ, you can’t be more than twenty-five. What makes you so sharp?”

  “My mother,” I answered, the words causing me to involuntarily wring my hands in a guilty gesture. “She didn’t think my father was the best influence on me. So when I was growing up, whenever she could, she’d get me out of the house and we’d go to the movies. She loved them, yours especially. She grew up watching you. She’d always keep an eye on the revival houses, and if they were showing one of your films, we’d go see it four or five times. In fact, she bought me that book you’re holding after we saw A Gun for Hire at the Waverly. I was hoping you’d sign it for her.”

  “The last of a dying breed—the diehard fan. She still live around here?”

  “She’s got a little place on Broome Street. We don’t see each other much anymore. At her request.”

  “Not too happy with how the prodigal son turned out, I take it? I know how it goes.” A tremor coursed down her gaunt right arm, causing the ice cubes to rattle in her glass with a musical tinkle. I almost reached out to steady her, but stopped myself. I’d always associated her with the smooth and slippery sheen of celluloid, and part of me was afraid of feeling her fragile flesh and bones. She waited for the tremor to pass, her brow furrowing only slightly—it was an inconvenience, but one she was used to.

  She went on, “Even when I was at my peak and pulling in eight grand a week—which was huge money in those days—my mom always had something to carp about. Greedy bitch. She was one of those showbiz parents that thought every penny I earned was God’s gift to her for spreading her legs for some merchant marine.”

  “You ever have children? It never says anything about it in your bios.”

  The wrinkles crosshatching her neck seemed to disappear for an instant, as if the air in her throat had momentarily frozen and expanded; then the muscles relaxed again, and she washed down the emotion that had just seized her with another sip of scotch.

  “Yeah, a son,” she said huskily. “I got knocked up while we were filming Sullivan’s Travails. By a dolly grip, of all fucking people. I wanted to quit the shoot and take some time off, make sure the baby was okay and all. But Louis—Louis Mayer, I was with MGM by then—said if I broke my contract he’d ruin me. Little prick bastard. They fed me all sorts of pills they said would help with the morning sickness and pep me up. When the kid was born, you knew just by looking at him he wasn’t right. He only lived a few months. The doctors tried to blame it on me, on my drinking. But I know the studio got to them. It was those pills, those pills…”

  She trailed off, and I didn’t follow her. My upbringing had taught me that some memories are better left buried. The radiator across from us began hissing, and we both sat there listening to the heat pour into the room, trying not to think about family and anger and regret.

  Eventually, to break the long silence between us, I asked her what she was going to do for a job, now that she had left the diner.

  She laughed deeply and grinned at me with even, yellowing teeth.

  “God only knows,” she said, her sense of spirit returning. “Who’d want to hire a crazy old hag like me?”

  “You could always try acting again,” I suggested.

  She shook her head so vehemently that a few silver hairs fell out of her loosely wound bun and across her forehead.

  “No chance, kiddo. I like Veronica Tate right where she is. In the past. Where she’s always perfect, always beautiful. Who wants to see the Mona Lisa when she’s ugly and falling apart?”

  “But you’ve still got your talent…”

  “You could put all the talent I had in your left eye and still see clear as day. People didn’t come to watch me perform. They came to watch me pose. Come here, let me show you something.�
��

  With the help of my arm, she pulled herself to her feet, and shakily crossed to her bedroom door. She had to kick a few magazines out of the way before she could push it fully open and switch on the light. Initially, I didn’t notice much difference from the living room: peeling wallpaper, piles of old papers, cardboard boxes strewn across the floor. But then, as my eyes wandered across the rumpled four-poster bed and settled on the top of her dresser, I saw it—and now it was my breath that caught.

  “My God,” I whispered.

  “That’s what people came to see,” she proclaimed, not without pride.

  Facing us, perched on the dresser like a proud bird, was a Styrofoam facsimile of a human head and shoulders. And draped over that facsimile was a long, flowing, lustrous blonde wig with a familiar peek-a-boo swirl.

  I had difficulty speaking without a stammer.

  “I—I never. I always thought…it was real. I never knew…”

  “It was all real, at first,” she explained, moving further into the room. “It was my hair that got me my first job. But it used to take so damned long to wash it and dry it and tease it just right, the studio decided to come up with a bunch of wigs for me to wear. This one was always my favorite—best fit, best material. I took it with me the day I drove off the MGM lot for good. As far as I know, it’s the only one left.”

  “It must be worth a fortune.”

  She smiled ruefully.

  “No,” she said. “Being young and lovely and looking forward to your future—that’s worth a fortune. This…this is just a keepsake from a past life.”

  *****

  It was hope that got me. There I was, strolling in the early autumn sunshine, my newly autographed book tucked under my arm, heading for Broome Street with the misguided belief that today, somehow, things would be different. Today I came with a gift, not a plea for money. Today my mother would see that I was capable of selflessness, and not just self-interest. There was a feeling floating in my chest—not optimism, precisely, but a guarded anticipation that I hadn’t felt in many years, and this newly rediscovered feeling lightened my step and so occupied my thoughts that I never heard the whir of eight speeding bicycles closing in behind me.

  Sly’s boys always rode bicycles. It made it easy to chase welshers down— and, if need be, elude police cars by cutting through parks and narrow alleyways. The boys were all in their mid-teens, the flotsam of shattered homes that Sly had scooped off the streets and placed in his personal employ. He clothed them, and fed them, and put a roof over their heads. They repaid these acts of kindness, the first they’d ever experienced, by executing his will with a single-minded ruthlessness that was surprising even for the Bowery. As they skidded their dirt bikes to a halt, trapping me within a cockeyed semi-circle, and reached for their switchblades and buck knives, I couldn’t help but notice how similar they all looked, despite their varying ethnicities: white tee-shirts, faded dungarees, wan faces and flinty, hard-hearted eyes. It was like being surrounded by the restless ghosts of eight murdered children.

  *****

  Sly Garnett’s office was located in the windowless cinderblock basement of an old bakery. As the boys shoved me into the room and stood me in front of his desk, Sly didn’t smile at them. He never smiled, but his irises sparkled brightly with something resembling paternal pride. He shifted a few papers to a desk drawer, and leaned back as far as his leather chair would allow. All the better to take in the scene before him. The stale air was filled with the sweetish scent of his preferred cologne, and as he slowly rubbed his hands back and forth over his shaven, pale-brown scalp, it made a noise like sandpaper being dragged across freshly burnished wood.

  “Well, well,” he said, his muscled biceps stretching the sleeves of his black Armani jersey. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

  I didn’t respond. My limited dealings with Sly had taught me that the fewer words spoken, the better.

  “Although I suppose,” he mused, “it would be more accurate, and fair, to say look what my little lost boys dragged in. Those lost boys do have a talent for finding people. Wouldn’t you say so, Sonny?”

  “Yes, sir.” Even though Sly was only ten years older than me, I always called him sir—it wasn’t a sign of respect so much as an acknowledgment of the intimidation I felt simply being in his presence.

  “I do have to give you credit, though…you gave them quite the runaround for a while, there. You were giving them the runaround—right, Sonny? You were deliberately avoiding them. Hence avoiding me. Hence avoiding paying me what you owe. Correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I appreciate your honesty. Any particular reason for this unwise course of action? Any poormouth excuse you’d like to offer up? I’ve heard them all.”

  “No, sir.” At this point, I realized, any explanation I offered would only make matters worse. Plus, even if I’d wanted to plead my case, I wasn’t sure my fear-addled brain would be capable of forming a coherent sentence.

  Sly nodded approvingly, and folded his heavy arms across his chest. His dark eyes narrowed, as if he were pondering a weighty question. Behind me, one of his boys coughed softly. I’d almost forgotten they were still in the room.

  “You know, I knew your dad,” he said, his voice dropping a register, rendering it more intimate, more familiar. “Toward the end. He was a real wreck. Almost made it into the doghouse one night. You heard about the doghouse? It’s a room down here I keep filled with pit bulls. Nasty fuckers, too. The walls here are so thick, a guy could scream for days and no one would hear him. In the end, though, I couldn’t go through with it—your old man was so pathetic, crying like a baby. I just broke a couple of his fingers and let him go.”

  He paused, gauging my reaction to what he’d just said. If he was expecting me to jump up and defend my father’s honor, he was in for a long wait.

  Finally, he continued. “I’d hate to see you end up in the doghouse. Wouldn’t you hate that, Sonny?”

  “Yes, sir,” I agreed.

  “Good.”

  Sly motioned to his boys, two of whom took me by the arms. He then turned his attention to a new stack of papers on his desktop, as if he’d just settled one bit of business and was now proceeding to the next.

  Without looking up, he said, “I want my money in three days. As a reminder, I’m going to have them break three of your fingers. Try not to pull away after they break the first one. It just makes them mad.”

  I tried my best.

  *****

  We sat at the kitchen table as my mother reset my fingers and splinted them with the tongue depressors and electrical tape I’d purchased at a drug store around the corner. I’d witnessed her perform the same service for my father on multiple occasions, along with setting his broken nose, bagging ice for his swelling eyes, and dabbing at his scalp with a hand towel dipped in rubbing alcohol. Then, as now, she kept her thin lips pressed tight and colorless as she went about her task—I could never tell if she was merely concentrating, or trying to fight back shouts of condemnation. Probably a bit of both.

  The moment she’d opened the door, I’d seen that familiar pall come over her face; an expression of disappointment and sorrow and maybe even a touch of contempt. I’d envisioned this visit going differently; today was supposed to be a new start. But my mangled hand and pain-stricken features told her an old story. Without uttering a word, she ushered me to a kitchen chair and set about righting my broken bones, the same way she used to right my gambling debts and bail me out of scrape after scrape, until she’d finally had enough—enough, she said, of being ashamed of the men in her life.

  When she was finished with the splints, she threw the rest of the tongue depressors into the garbage and got herself a beer from the refrigerator. Outside, the late afternoon air was growing thick and rosy; and as she settled back at the table, a shaft of light fell through the kitchen window and painted her cheek a deep, livid red. A stranger looking at her now, from this angle, would have thought that I’d slapp
ed her.

  With my good hand, I lifted Silver Screen Sirens off the floor and placed it on the tabletop. After Sly’s boys had let me loose, I’d retraced my steps and found it right where I’d dropped it: on top of a sewer grate on Norfolk Street. Water had eaten through the cover, and most of the pages were sodden and gritty with sand and dirt. As I carefully turned to Veronica’s picture, tiny fragments of paper tore away from each page and molded to my fingertips like wet plaster. Her photo was relatively unharmed—but the dampness had caused her autograph, scrawled across the top of the frame in blue ink, to bleed and blur into an illegible smudge. I spun the book around and showed it to her anyway.

  My mother looked at it once, briefly, and then sipped her beer.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” she asked.

  “I got you Veronica Tate’s autograph.”

  Using just her fingertips, she lifted a corner of the book so she could see the cover and confirm that it was indeed the one she’d given me twenty years ago.

  “You can’t con me,” she said. “I’ve been conned enough.”

  “No, Mom, it’s true. I met her—she lives in the city. I got her to sign that for you.”

  My mother watched as the wind-ruffled branches of a tree brushed noiselessly against the windowpane. She looked like a woman who’d heard the same song so many times she’d passed beyond boredom and into weariness. I felt something shift and sink in me—a heaviness in my stomach that sagged like lead ballast.