Spencer looked shamefully down at the floor and confessed, “I became a Big Brother so I could write a feature article on ghetto youth for the newspaper. I didn’t know any ghetto youth, so …”
His honesty was welcomed with palpable resentment. Yolanda no longer felt the need to use Spencer as a sounding board for her problems with her husband. Under his breath Fariq spoke of a consortium of Jews controlling the world’s media.
“I’m sorry,” Winston and Spencer mumbled simultaneously.
“Winston, what are you sorry for?” Yolanda snapped. “Don’t apologize when you haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I know. But I just feel sorry.”
Yolanda and Fariq waited for him to ask the clergyman to leave. After all, Spencer was his guest. Winston stayed on the couch, hands clasped behind his head, lips pursed, eyes closed. Spencer’s deceit left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth, and Jordy ran around the room in circles, a cherubic ladle stirring the soup of bitterness, disillusionment, and summer heat.
On his fourth circuit he picked up his See ’n Say, pulling the string on the plastic toy designed to teach toddlers the rudiments of farm-animal communication. “The cow says, ‘Mooooo!’ This is how a dog sounds—‘Woof! Woof!’ This is how a turkey sounds: ‘Gobble! Gobble!’ ” After each bark or bellow Jordy would stop in front of his father and try to reproduce the animal’s characteristic call. His quacks and meows were a welcome distraction. For a moment Winston forgot about the dreadlocked rabbi’s duplicity. “The rooster says, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ What’s the rooster say, Jordy?”
“Thabba-thubba-ooo,” mimicked Jordy, yanking on the string.
Winston wondered, if the machine imitated a person, what would be the human equivalent for cock-a-doodle-doo?
Spencer, hoping to make one final stab at a partnership, broke the silence. “Anyone seen any good movies lately?” And Winston had an answer to his question.
“Jewboy, don’t you know when to be quiet,” Fariq said, his patience run dry. “Better yet, leave.”
Tuffy opened another beer. “Ain’t no such thing as a good movie. At least not since the price of a ticket went past seven dollars.”
“Oh, God, now the nigger going to start talking about ‘the film.’ ” Fariq said “the film” in one long wispy breath, as if enunciated by a Public Television cinéaste. Then he returned to passing his magnifying glass over the counterfeit money, occasionally scissoring slivers from spools of blue and red thread, arranging them haphazardly on a bill, and dusting the money with a coat of spray-on polyurethane. “ ‘The film.’ ”
Yolanda whisked Jordy from his aimless rounds and sniffed his diaper.
Spencer could see in the sparkle in Winston’s eye and the wry smile a subtle erosion in the rocky landscape that separated them. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Why do most people go to the movies? To be entertained, right? Maybe to learn something. But most motherfuckers go to guess who the fucking killer is. And it’s always the same person.”
“Who?”
“The motherfucker you least expect, of course.”
“So why do you go? Why waste your money?”
“I don’t even know. I knew when I was little. I went to the show to see some famous movie star’s titties. Now movies is so bad they’ve even ruined that simple pleasure.”
“How?”
“You sit down, popcorn in one hand, soda pop in the other. You wait a bit, look at your watch, and say, ‘Forty-five minutes, and this bitch ain’t showed no titty? This flick sucks.’ If she flash her chichis before forty-five minutes, then the movie really sucks.”
“So any film with a female lead is a bad film?”
“Except for La Femme Nikita. Some of them old Natalie Wood shits is all right too. That bitch was fine.”
“And if the lead is played by a man?”
“If it’s a man, especially if it’s a white man — and it usually is, even if a nigger is the star — then the film has to be about right and wrong. And whiteys is the last motherfuckers on earth to be teaching me about right and wrong. Much less charging me for the lesson.”
“But why do you go?”
“I go for the disappointment, I guess. I’m used to being disappointed, and I know I’ll find it in the movie theater.”
Spencer reached for a unopened beer. Winston didn’t mind.
“Winston, can I ask you something else?”
“Yeah.”
“Why did you call Big Brothers of America?”
“Suppose I knew I’d be disappointed.”
“Maybe subconsciously you did, but that’s not the reason you made the call.”
“True. I guess I really called because I’m looking for someone to explain shit. I don’t understand nothing about life, me — nothing.”
“Kind of like someone to say, ‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch …’ ”
“Yeah.”
“You know, when the Japanese used to show silent films the theater owners paid someone to stand next to the screen and explain the action.”
“For reals? Didn’t they have those cards?”
“Intertitles. I supposed they did, but, you know, sometimes those aren’t enough.”
“That’s true. Whenever I go see one of those silent jammies, Charlie Chaplin or something, I be trying to read the lips. Figure out what’s really going on. So they had a motherfucker lip-reading or some shit?”
“The guy was called a benshi. They’d show Battleship Potemkin and he’d say, ’Note Eisenstein’s simple yet masterful contrapuntal statements in this scene. The rectangular lines of sailors and officers standing on the quarterdeck, bisected by the battleship’s guns — the state’s guns, if you will.”
“I seen that. ‘All for a spoonful of borscht.’ Baby carriage going down the stairs. Good fucking movie. Benshi. That’s deep.” Winston was stalling for time. He was enjoying the conversation. Here in front of him was the only person he’d ever spoken to who’d also seen Battleship Potemkin and was willing to discuss it in detail. But that was no reason to let a dreadlocked Yankee into his life. He asked Spencer why he knew so much about film. The rabbi told him the role of Jews in Hollywood was one of his lecture subjects. He then proceeded to assert that the recent independent film explosion was a Gentile assault on the perceived Jewish domination of Hollywood. This proclamation was followed by a thin segue into the argument that the popularity of the remake was more than a function of the dearth of Tinseltown originality; it was the movie industry’s veiled attempt to recapture its image as art. Moviemaking, once a highbrow craft associated with the creative goyishe genius of Tennessee Williams, Nabokov, Dalí, and Faulkner, was now painting by numbers, dependent on the guile of moguls, computer geniuses erasing the distinction between actor and animation, and a slew of out-of-work nephews.
Winston was having some difficulty following Spencer’s argument — not because he didn’t understand the artistic references or failed to see what Jewishness had to do with what Spencer was saying, but because he was having an epiphany. He interrupted Spencer’s speech. “Hey, Rabbi. Meanwhile, back at the ranch …”
“What?”
“You remember when I told you I was looking for understanding?”
Spencer nodded.
“I now understand that understanding is not something you look for, it’s something that finds you. You understand?”
“What made you think of that?”
“You was talking and for some reason I thought of Fugitive from a Chain Gang. You ever seen it? Paul Moody.”
“Paul Muni.”