She walks past a half-block colony of tentatively erected shacks and makeshift plywood counters selling a mish-mash of used junk — costume jewelry, buttons, bubblegum cards, dog tags, jackknives, chipped china teacups, old newspapers and magazines, devotional candles, bags of marbles, and at the last shack, crumpled old pinups, once glossy cheesecake pictures of long-dead starlets whose names no one remembers. Surprising to her, all these little wooden booths that look like they were thrown up minutes ago have mini TV sets flickering on the counter with the sound shut off. She lingers in front of the last booth, scans the leggy eight-by-tens clipped to a hanging wire run wall to wall. One of the photos — a willowy blonde stretched out on a sofa — has a faded imprint of full lips lipsticked below the model’s signature. Sylvia thinks about buying the pinup from the Asian behind the counter, but the clerk’s attention is consumed by the television and besides, she doesn’t have any money on her. Instead, she wades into the street, waits for a break in the crowd and clicks off a shot of the booth. Through her viewfinder she notices the proprietor is watching a Peter Loire movie. She stands for a second and watches Lone framed inside her camera, framed again inside the TV. It’s the central scene from M, where Lorre and his niece walk past Grosser Mittagstisch and then stop to look in the shop window. The niece notices the chalk-marked letter M that’s been imprinted on Lorre’s back. She tells him he’s all dirty. He turns sideways to look in a mirror and we see him in three-quarter profile. Then the camera tracks in until we’ve got a tight shot of just Lorre’s panic-stricken face, the reflection of his face in the mirror, and the condemning letter M on his back. Peter Lorre’s eyes give Sylvia an honest, awful shudder.
She looks away from the screen, pans to her left, beyond the sales strip, and sees an old Thunderbird convertible that looks like someone abandoned an attempt to turn it into a punkish parade float. There’s graffiti sprayed across the length of the body, a line she thinks might have come from Picasso—good taste is the enemy of art. Two mannequins have been positioned in the rear seats, manipulated into a state of awkward coupling. And a big Liberace-like candelabra is mounted on the hood with all its red candles aglow. Before she realizes how much she likes the scene, she’s already shooting it and wishing she’d brought a starburst filter to fracture the dozens of small flames into mini-novas.
She’s getting charged up now. She flies through the mob to the Thunderbird and climbs inside, stands up on the front seat and faces out to the street and immediately lets her instinct start picking and choosing, lets her fingers find that unison with the eye, lets her eardrum relish the vibration of the shutter’s click-sound. She finds a topless, co-ed tribal dance around an impromptu bonfire and she nails it. She finds and captures the passing face of the 1931 Karloff monster with perfect neck-bolts and facial scarring, sad mouth and anguished eyes. She swings high and traps the pinched features and wrinkled forehead of a middle-aged woman in a dark-colored bathrobe leaning out the window of the brick tenement across the road, maybe wishing she could get some sleep.
A speeding bulldog hauling a severed leash in its mouth and threading through the legs of the crowd.
Click.
A trio of teenage boys, all in camouflage pants, bearing toy carbines up on their shoulders, huddled around a pack of firecrackers exploding on the ground between them.
Click.
A limp toddler helplessly falling into sleep inside the arms of his wobbly mother as mommy drops quarters to the pavement trying to buy cigarettes from a vending machine that’s been pushed out onto the sidewalk.
Click.
The more she looks, the more images come, as if her only limitation is the speed of her shutter finger.
She gets out of the Thunderbird and starts to walk down Goulden. She sees a line of people in black-tie filing into the red-brick are of the Renger-Patzsch Tool & Die Company. She crosses the street and joins onto the tail of the group, but when she gets to the door a bouncer says, “Your invitation, ma’am?”
She stares at him and he adds, “This is an invitation-only event, ma’am.”
She lifts up her camera and shoots a couple frames of his beefy face, lowers the camera slightly and says in a strained-indulgent voice, “I’m from the Spy.”
He immediately steps back to allow entry and says, “Love your costume,” and suddenly she realizes that she hasn’t been conscious of wearing the nightgown since she lost Leni.
She moves inside the factory, which has been closed down for almost a decade but which still houses an awful lot of heavy machinery, big green and black oil-guzzling, ear-rupturing warhorses. The machines look like they’ve been arranged to transform the dance floor into a kind of industrial maze, a heavy labyrinth of cast-iron partitions. Somehow, it’s a little disturbing, watching impeccably groomed people ballroom dancing through these corridors of obsolete grinding monsters that were once gluttons for loose human fingers. Men looking like some elite cadre of movie ushers and women who could give new definition to an overused word like glamour are together in each other’s arms, gliding through a gauntlet of metal hulks that have stubbornly outlived their usefulness.
There’s an enormous banner stretched across the far wall that reads and underneath it is a digital clock with huge red numbers showing, Sylvia guesses, the elapsed time since the start of the marathon. The room is well lit by the hanging fluorescents so she maneuvers to an uncrowded corner and gets ready to start shooting.
The Bella C. Memorial Dance Marathon
to benefit
The Fund for the Preservation of Dangerous Art
shake your booty to break their balls
She watches new dancers report to an aluminum picnic table under the clock and banner where a d.j. is sorting through piles of tapes and CDs. The contestants crouch down as they present their invitations, as if they were second-string ballplayers thrilled and scared at their imminent insertion into a crucial game. The officials behind the picnic table give all the entrants some sort of punchcard to clip to an accessible part of their clothing. Most of the dancers arrive together but there are a few solo entrants leaning anxiously against a side wall, waiting for a partner. It’s this crew she starts shooting, zooming in close on the faces, on the palpable excitement and underlying anxiety. She shoots a husky young guy with ridiculous sideburns as he unconsciously snaps and unsnaps his cufflinks. She locks onto an almost-pretty woman, a little younger than herself, dressed in a fifties-style prom dress that, unfortunately, isn’t enough of a put-on. The woman’s eyes are turned all the way to the left and her tongue is running a chronic circle trying to keep the inside of her mouth moist. Sylvia finds the focus and she’s about to release the shutter when a man dressed like a cross between Zorro and a drug-dealing bullfighter suddenly steps into her line of fire and begins to approach.