Girl of My Dreams (36 page)

The police captain was running back down to the Embarcadero, which made his men pause in their own march up Mission Street. The strikers cheered what they saw as a retreat. They began to advance back down the street, throwing bricks and shielding themselves from billy clubs with garbage can tops. “Like boys playing,” Quin said, “just boys. Both sides, boys.” Several police were knocked down. Wun Chew ran upstairs to hide with us when gunfire raked the street. “This not your country,” he said as he knelt beside Quin and me, “this not my country, this country belong to crazy.”

At the bottom of the street the captain now ordered his cavalry into action. The mounted police trotted in formation up Mission Street toward the dockworkers making their stand. “Jesus living Christ!” yelled a striker who saw the mounted brigade advancing up the street. “Aren't all of us Americans?” The captain, who was not on a horse himself, fired a short-barreled shotgun at the man, who fell in the street. Two friends helped him to the sidewalk, where he slumped against a shop window.

Several dozen strikers apparently anticipated the cavalry charge, because their tactic now took the kind of ingenuity that can't be spontaneous. Some reached into their pockets while others stuck their hands into a sack being passed around. In the next instant the strikers were throwing handfuls of marbles down Mission Street at the horses. The lead horses began to slip on the marbles. Once the front line stumbled, the horses in back of them panicked. They literally turned tail and galloped back down Mission Street.

The strikers whooped like cowboys. But it was all over very quickly after that. Sirens shrieked and squad cars closed in on the vacant lot from all directions, each filled with police firing wildly. Strikers ran for their lives.

“Barbarian bastards,” Quin said furiously. “The Third Reich has come to San Francisco.”

I didn't say anything to contradict him, and by now I was wholeheartedly on the union's side, though it did seem to me the pickets had transformed themselves into an army ready to fight. Maybe the massiveness of the forces arrayed against them demanded that. I felt sorry for the horses. As for the police using firearms, it didn't appear to me they were aiming to kill so much as to scare the pickets into retreat.

“Pretty fair motion picture here, wouldn't you say, Skinny?” Quin had recovered a little from his anger.

“They don't make movies about labor strife,” I said. “Too political.”

“Then they're bigger idiots than I thought.”

Violence itself was so far from what I knew that before I'd become frightened it had indeed been a movie to me, like a clamorous dream where I felt present but not really engaged or endangered, almost in the posture of an anthropologist. Here are the oppressors and their helpers, here are the aggrieved and their sympathizers: see police battle strikers while you hold on to your detachment and safety as participant/observer. Mostly observer. You will report your findings, as Margaret Mead did, to Franz Boas at the Museum of Natural History. You're in a little danger but not much, especially after you and Quin perch upstairs with the Chinese family, who are also participant/observers with better detachment credentials. When the squad cars drove away and the wounded strikers were loaded into paddy wagons, Wun Chew led us downstairs.

All this could be reported to Dr. Pogo, my Franz Boas who wished me well on my field study among the natives; he could analyze it as a dream. I wasn't entirely sure the battle had an existence outside my imagination of it.

Dreamland Auditorium the night before had been more real. I'd been to contentious studio meetings as well as gatherings where the writers were trying to form a guild. Yancey Ballard, before he ever heard of Grandmother O'Hollie, had helped form the first Screen Writers Guild. I understood meetings. Violence was something else. I'd never seen any violence at all outside of movies. Yet this had happened and I could even read about it in tomorrow's papers. When I thought I had a tomorrow. Before the fracas with the stevedore that was shortly to end my life. My killing: my erasure: hardly worth an oratorio but perhaps a little fugue from Mike Quin.

I was trying to grasp the novelty of violence when Quin said he was off to write about what we'd witnessed, and he'd see me later. Foolishly, I decided to go over to the union hall to see how the members were doing after their pitched battle.

So many longshoremen were milling around the entrance I didn't go upstairs. The acrid tear gas had not yet completely blown away. It was still early afternoon, but outside union headquarters it felt as though the battle had raged all day long. One man was unscuffed and wore a spotless suit with a well-blocked fedora. He was across the street from most of the strikers. They looked so upset I didn't want to bother them. Since the unscuffed man looked like what I thought of as respectable, I went up to him and asked how the men were holding up. The innocent, ignorant mistake that costs a life.

“No damage to them they didn't bring on themselves,” he said, which shocked me because I'd thought he was a union man himself or at least a sympathizer. “No one hurt bad,” he added, “more's the pity.” He scrawled a few words on a piece of paper and asked who I was. “Well, just a bystander,” I said. “You ought to go bystand yourself somewhere else,” he said. Then he disappeared. I crossed back over to the union side and saw Widdelstaedt and Cromartie, the two men Quin and I had talked to the day before in the union hall. Widdelstaedt had only a small cut on his forehead, but Cromartie could barely stand, a rivulet of blood came from his nose, and one of his eyes was swollen shut.

I was about to ask if I could help when Widdelstaedt swung backhanded at me and knocked me down. I was more amazed than hurt. “You're with the cop snoop,” he accused, “and I saw you upstairs in headquarters yesterday, spying on us.”

“No, no,” I said, getting up, “I was just asking how you guys are. Today was awful. I saw a lot of it with Mike Quin.”

“Quin, hah! He can be a dupe too. That guy across the street was a dick, and you were giving him info.” He knocked me down again.

“No, I wasn't,” I said as I brushed myself off. How foolish to try to reason with someone in a rage. The stevedore—it was Widdelstaedt but I'd forgotten his name in my fright—came at me and I saw a knife flash out of his pocket. He backed me against a car. Pinned there, I saw my death in his dim bloodshot eyes. He raised the knife and I caught his arm, but he was far stronger. I ducked. I ran. He caught me. That's when he sliced my leg. I hopped away. He lumbered after me as the men at the union hall laughed at both of us, no doubt their first laugh of the day. I turned a corner and saw a narrow alley. I'd lose him in there. But he followed me down the alley. It led nowhere, a dead end. I jumped for a fire escape ladder but couldn't quite reach it. Several garbage cans were lined up, and I wanted to stand on one to reach the ladder, but their tops were all gone, used as shields, I supposed, by the union men. Nothing to stand on: the story of my life.

Steve was upon me. The hulking Widdelstaedt. He lunged and gashed my arm. He was in the power of his anger, and once he had dealt me the slice in my leg, his anger became hunger. The very blood running down my pantleg and spilling on the ground enhanced his lust—like a shark, like Ajax—for my extinction.

Every discovery at twenty-four is intense and fragile. By sight, by habit, by experience, new things become known, fresh material is fed into the psychic oven to be baked until risen to the level of wisdom. Now I'd never have that. Here he came, knife pointing at my eyes.

He trapped me against a brick wall under the fire escape ladder. Raised his arm to deliver the death blow. I grabbed his wrist and kicked him in the knee, which made him yelp but that was all it did. His eyes were full of a bright dullness. I was the target of the rock bottom truths in this man's life. Not only his eyes but his whole face was an accumulation of logical, everlasting, conclusive hopelessness. He had identified the enemy, and I was it. I saw his point: privilege versus penury. I wanted to live anyway. When I couldn't hold his wrist any longer I squirmed away. He moved nimbly for a big man and quickly had me against another wall.

Four, three, two, one, and it would be over. He lunged, I darted. Each time he missed he backed right up so I couldn't dash for the alley's open end. I was wearing down, and he was playing with me, dog and cat, cat and mouse, bird and worm. He didn't mind if it took him five minutes or half an hour to carve me; he knew he had me trapped against the literally dead end alley and the garbage cans. I'd be his revenge for every deprivation he'd endured in four decades or so, the stand-in for all the forces ranged against him. My tongue was sour felt. I heard rapid breathing and a cry of Help! Someone yelled Help again. I barely recognized the cries as my own. The giant stevedore was measuring me now as I backed into a garbage can. He took his time. Two frozen images: my mother gleamed up behind him, Mossy was a ghost behind her. I looked at the garbage can—Christ! Why hadn't I thought of this before. All my training had been to clean up messes, not make them. I was almost too tidy to save my own skin.

What would Dr. Pogo think—this raced through me again. The abbreviated childhood I'd moaned over was about to become a far more abbreviated adulthood.

But here was my life preserver, the garbage can. Faster than I'd ever moved, I upended the can, jumped on its bottom and reached the fire escape. Banana peels and coffee grounds and fish bones and a cat corpse scattered in the alley. As soon as I'd climbed to the second floor I pulled the ladder up, though it didn't make much difference. Widdelstaedt wasn't interested in the effort. He stood beneath the fire escape bellowing and threatening while I climbed up one more story and found an open window, disappearing from his attention.

I ran for the hotel, home base in this hide and seek contest of unequals. It might have been ten blocks away or thirty, but I was there before I knew where I'd been. My jacket was soaked with my exerted, scared, determined, panicked but finally preserved sweat.

Quin was waiting in the lobby, wondering what had happened to me. He told me many strikers were in the hospital, many in jail, and thanked a whimsical god no one was killed. He looked at my leg, bloody, gashed. I was panting too hard to make much headway in my story when he said, “Movie Mogul, why don't you get your eager but inconsequential ass out of this town before your luck runs dry.”

17

Mossy Swims

His first day out of the hospital, Mossy, ever wily, invited Nils Maynard to his home for a swim after the day's shooting was over. He still wanted Nils to use Pammy in the picture they had argued about. Nils didn't want to swim, didn't want to go up Coldwater Canyon to the Zangwill manse, didn't want to discuss the Pammy issue any more. But he also didn't want to be unfriendly to the presumably convalescent Mossy. He had never been at Mossy's home as the only guest. The lavish garden itself intimidated Nils, a feast of nature, overdone, aspiring to encompass the entire plant kingdom, defying compliment. Mossy greeted Nils at the door and shrugged off solicitude about his health. “Damned painful at first,” he said, “but in the end it was all precautionary.”

Mossy told Nils he thought the script for his next picture needed tightening and he wanted the two of them to agree on changes before bringing back the screenwriter. Relieved not to be talking about Pammy, who he still firmly thought would be miscast in his film, Nils said sure. Maybe he wouldn't have to swim and could simply leave when they finished a brief talk about the screenplay. He was still suspicious.

They agreed to remove a talky scene between the husband and an old doctor who treats what he refers to as the wife's vapors. A description of the wife's behavior was far less dramatic than the behavior itself. Mossy said, “As Shakespeare put it, show don't tell.” “By all means,” Nils agreed. They cut an ugly scene where the wife coldly sends her stepdaughter off to boarding school. The scene is a good one, Nils thought, but he's still trying to make the wife more palatable so I'll agree to take Millevoix, who's exactly wrong for this. All right, for the sake of getting out of here. He told Mossy cutting the scene was fine, expecting the boss to bring up Pammy again.

“Fine yourself,” said Mossy. “Let's refresh ourselves with a dip.”

“Are you sure the doctors want you to exert yourself this much?” Nils asked.

“Absolutely. Exercise is the best thing for what ailed me.”

Nils remembered he hadn't brought a bathing suit. Freudian slip, he told himself.

“Doesn't matter,” Mossy said. “Gable left his a couple of Sundays ago.”

As he related this to Tutor Beedleman and me later, Nils put on Clark Gable's suit, a very slight piece of material, and prepared to swim. Mossy emerged from the bathhouse in a bright zebra-striped suit. This was silly, embarrassing. Nils felt exposed in Gable's fig-leaf suit, but they plunged in. The water was bracing and Nils enjoyed himself at first. He swam up and down, a little breaststroke, a little Australian crawl. Nils had always been an excellent swimmer, swimming being one of the few vigorous activities that his mother had allowed her hemophiliac son. Perhaps, Nils thought, he could impress the boss with his physical prowess, so he swam faster and faster. But he was wondering why Gable had been there. That was exactly what Mossy wanted him to do. He wouldn't ask. Had Gable even been there? Nils swam as fast as he could.

Mossy did a swan dive off his springboard, just missing Nils as he was moving toward the deep end of the pear-shaped pool. There was no talk, which unsettled Nils, but he didn't know what to say to break the silence. Mossy treaded water after his dive. Surely he was about to say something. He said nothing.

“Dumbly,” Nils told us, “I swam underwater. When I came up, Mossy had swum to the shallow end and was lounging against the steps that led up to the flagstones surrounding the pool. Ah, I thought, the swim is over, and I can leave. I went under one last time. As I blinked through the chlorinated water, I became aware of Mossy sitting on the steps at the far end, doing something because his legs were moving even though he stayed in the same place. When I surfaced, I saw he was taking off his trunks. Oh Jesus.”