Slow Fade
Rudolph Wurlitzer
SLOW
FADE
DRAG CITY
CHICAGO 2011
DC449
Copyright 1984 Rudolph Wurlitzer
All rights reserved.
Copyrighted & Published 2011 Drag City Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Request to make copies of any part of this work should be mailed to: Permissions Department, Drag City, P.O. Box 476867, Chicago, Illinois 60647-6867, or emailed to: [email protected].
This project was coordinated by Lisa Janssen,
with assistance from Laura Pearson.
The text of this book was assembled in Adobe InDesign CS5.5 by Dan Osborn.
It was typeset and proofread in Chicago, Illinois.
Drag City Web Address: www.dragcity.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2001012345
ISBN: 978-1-937112-03-5 (EPUB)
Cover art and design: Becca Mann
First Kindle Edition
Slow Fade Revisited
by Alex Cox
THE RETURN OF
Slow Fade
is a fine thing. It’s Rudy Wurlitzer’s greatest work of fiction, both as a novel and as a screenplay, and one of the best American books there is. I’ll get to the screenplay in a moment.
Slow Fade
the book is based on Wurlitzer’s personal experiences with noted film director Sam Peckinpah, and also with the American Sixties dharma trip in India and elsewhere. Either subject would have been a fine basis for a novel. Only Rudy’s restless mind could make one story of both, merging two seemingly disparate things into one mad world — one compact, entertaining, edgy, tragic, epic narrative.
One of the underlying themes of Rudy’s Westerns —
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
,
Walker
, and the unfilmed
Zebulon
— is men who became famous heroes by dragging other, less famous men to their deaths. Pat Garrett and Billy are responsible for at least a score of killings in Rudy’s screenplay: shooting deaths that were unnecessary, that could have been avoided, had the protagonists not been so vainglorious. William Walker is even more lethally heroic. The “gray-eyed man of destiny” has a body count in the thousands (not including cholera). And the relentless Captain pursues Zebulon, the mountain man, no matter how great the collateral damage.
So
Slow Fade
’s Wesley Hardin drives his family to its doom. Unable to direct pictures, the old director decides to direct people and events instead, and a fragile, messed-up family situation takes on new dimensions of demented drama. Wesley Hardin’s complex family wasn’t Peckinpah’s; it is Rudy’s invention, and the two men’s careers are notably different. Hardin has directed thirty or forty films in many genres and made a substantial fortune. Peckinpah made a dozen features and lived in a trailer. Yet the character of Hardin is utterly, entirely Peckinpah. Wracked by all manner of ailments and addicted to cocaine, alcohol, and controlling others, Peckinpah was the greatest director of Westerns since John Ford: a contradictory, brilliantly talented, sometimes terrifying man. Rudy wrote
Pat Garrett
for Monte Hellman to direct, but the studio gave it to Peckinpah, the Western guy, instead. He gutted the script, turning it from a lonesome, existential tale whose heroes didn’t meet until the very end into a story of old buddies who betray each other’s code. The screenwriter didn’t necessarily appreciate the process, but what the director was doing was transforming Wurlitzer’s script into a Peckinpah film. Almost all Peckinpah’s films, and all his Westerns, were about old friends betraying each other’s code, and by God,
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
would be, too.
The chapter where Wesley, fired up by a silver bullet full of coke, decides to shoot an unscheduled scene involving Pancho Villa in the middle of the night, knowing it will get him fired and the film shut down, which it does, is a vintage Peckinpah moment. Yet Rudy combines all of this very specific Western madness with something which one might naively associate with serenity: the “mystic East.” His own trajectory had taken him on travels such as these, and so, just as he drew Wesley from life, he writes about the crowded, hectic, disorderly, incoherent world of the dharma bums with some authority. That world, too, of young Americans and Europeans seeking to find spiritual authenticity or just get away from their parents was one Rudy once inhabited, or transited.
Slow Fade
is not a long book, and it is a pleasure to read, but it is by no means “light.” It moves, inexorably, from continent to continent, like a 747, low on fuel, whose undercarriage won’t come down. Disaster looms. And the one character who, if there were any justice, should pay the penalty for this wrecked, calamitous set of circumstances, doesn’t. Wesley Harding just keeps on tickin’. Like Rudy’s Western heroes, he is built of devilishly epic stuff.
Walker, Wesley’s son, provides the story-within-the-story of
Slow Fade
, a narrative of what has happened to his missing sister, Clementine, written for his perverse father in the form of a screenplay. Rudy wrote the book in 1982–3, I think. It was first published in 1984. It has such great characters and scenes that several directors encouraged him to write a screenplay based on it. (I was one of those directors.) He wrote the
Walker
screenplay in 1986, and we shot that film in Nicaragua in 1987. So I’d guess Rudy wrote
Slow Fade
, the screenplay, in 1988.
We wrote some other scripts during that period, together and apart. One was about the trade in infant body parts, and one about the contra war, but none of them, and nothing else, came close to Rudy’s screenplay based on the novel
Slow Fade
. It is one of the best scripts I have ever read, incredibly disciplined in all its choices. The characters it cut, the locations and scenes lost from the book — all its choices were the right ones.
For starters, Rudy took the pages Walker wrote for his father and made them the set-up. The character of A.D. disappeared, becoming incorporated into Walker (as the screenplay son was now known) and giving him more of a desperado quality. Jim became Walker again, luckily. The annoying cameraman Sidney became an even more obnoxious limey documentary producer who wants to make Wesley’s life into a reality TV show. Prescient or what? In the screenplay of
Slow Fade
, the action moves from Beverly Hills to Monument Valley (where Wesley’s last Western is being filmed) to India. It is mesmeric and seamless, and it retains the book’s most marvelous scene, where the young travelers are snake-poisoned and robbed aboard their luxury train compartment. The biggest surprise of the screenplay, for those who have experienced the book, is the self-involved director’s decision not to go to Labrador, but to follow his wife and children to India. This provokes a cataclysm, like all acts of well-intentioned colonialism. And in India, beside twin funeral pyres, the screenplay ends.
Rudy and I worked with a top producer, Lorenzo O’Brien, to try and get
Slow Fade
the movie on. But the obstacles overwhelmed us. The script was a downer, it was set in India, and characters got killed. (Movie stars don’t like to die.) No one would make a film with the commies who made
Walker
. One day Rudy ran into a Thai prince and, like a master chef, whipped up a
Slow Fade
set in Thailand. But the Indian version was the killer, the one we all three wanted to exhaust ourselves on and lose our shirts on once again. The script was that good.
The film of
Slow Fade
has yet to be made. As Joe Strummer observed, the future is not yet written. In the meantime, here’s the original, with a broader canvas than the script, more characters, and more locations, written when the old scribbler was just getting into his stride.
“You’re A.D., right? The doctor or shrink who’s taking care of Walker.”
Sure I am
. . . .
And now it’s time to meet the prototypical, disposable, identity-shifting Wurlitzer hero: musician, road manager, doctor, Hollywood producer, screenwriter, Mr. A.D. Ballou.
Alex Cox
, Southern Oregon, April 2, 2011
Slow Fade
THE PHONE
woke him.
“A.D.,” the voice said. “What twisted little cul-de-sac do I find you in now? It took my secretary an entire week to track you down.”
“Uptown someplace. I don’t know. Should I know?”
It was Arthur somebody. New-age impresario. Record producer. Asshole.
“Are you open for business?” Arthur asked. “I need a road manager.”
A.D. sat up and lit a cigarette. Fuck Arthur somebody. The room looked like it had been shaken down by a junkie. Everything was on the floor, including a two-foot cactus. The girl next to him rolled over on her side, moaning softly in her wretched dreams. He no longer loved her and she no longer loved him. All that had been decided the night before.
“I need you in Santa Fe for two weeks,” Arthur was saying. “A grand a week plus expenses.”
A.D. was already reaching for his traveling shoes.
“Santa who?”
“Fe. The road manager split. The group is Gang Greene. Melissa Greene’s attempt at a comeback. She’s lost her pipes and half her cerebellum as well, but a gig is a gig. Right?”
“Right. Fifteen hundred and I’m your man.”
“Call it twelve,” Arthur said and hung up.
He called his ex-wife and told her he was paying her five hundred of the three grand he owed her. He didn’t make any other calls, not even the necessary ones. He didn’t wake the girl and he didn’t write a note. All of that was understood. He just colored himself gone and flew out to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
In Albuquerque, A.D. rented a Chevy Malibu and drove up to Santa Fe, purple clouds drifting across the evening sky like giant bones. Halfway there he pulled over to the side of the road, inhaling the vast sweet desert. He felt light-headed and goofy although he wasn’t on anything but the intoxication of being snatched out of New York at just the right time. Over the long dirty haul A.D. was an escape artist, not a prime-time player, and he was ready to pull the plug on New York. He had come there six months ago from Miami for a record gig that never happened and he had never found his stroke. He was always half on the street, half in somebody else’s set of descriptions, his days a sullen list of distractions that kept him slightly stoned, hustling the minimum number of gigs to get by, writing a few songs for a few people, never testing his solitude or the courage of any one action. So a roll toward the West was a welcome roll, especially if it ended in L.A. He knew how to survive in L.A. His rhythm felt better, and he could always find work as a studio musician or drift into some semi-hard hustle on the edge of the entertainment world, shooting location stills, best friend to a declining star, shiatsu foot massages for Beverly Hills matrons. If all else failed there was always dealing dope or flying back to New York, honing in on his old action like a mutated animal trying to rediscover a genetic pattern. All of which made him a coast-to-coast man. Except for those miles in between, which he now had to think about.
A.D. always bought his wardrobe on the road, believing that it gave him an edge to wrap himself in something new. In Santa Fe he bought a pair of blue and white Tony Lama boots, a black Levi jacket, and a gray Stetson. He was a large fleshy man in his early forties with an unkempt red beard and pale unfocused blue eyes, and the new threads, rather than cushioning a generally wasted appearance, only made him seem more sinister. Which he liked, he decided, checking himself out in a full-length mirror before he went down to the Fried Adobe on the outside of town.
The Fried Adobe stood between a Taco Burger stand and a Texaco station. Inside, a tired country and western trio sang “Moon over Tulsa” to a table of drunken college kids and two silver-haired businessmen arguing over their bill. After a brandy and soda at the bar, A.D. went back to the dressing rooms. Gang Greene were all there and they weren’t waiting for him.
Melissa Greene lay on a badly sprung couch, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses. Her long legs were wrapped in tight leather pants, her broad shoulders and sagging breasts in a green silk shirt. Her braided hair had been dyed green and her fingers, wrists, and neck were covered with green jewelry. The three members of the band sat around a table, drinking Wild Turkey from a bottle and dipping slabs of roast beef and ham into a large jar of mayonnaise. They all wore green suits with thin green ties and green basketball sneakers. Their dyed green hair was cropped short, all except for an emaciated black man whose oblong head was completely bald.
“I’m the new roadie,” A.D. said.
No one answered or acknowledged him, an attitude that A.D. accepted and even welcomed.
He sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. After he had smoked half the cigarette, he asked what time the set went on.
“No time,” the black man said. He stood up and looked down at Melissa Greene, his eyes full of malignant confusion. “There ain’t going to be no set. No nothing. Nowhere.”
Melissa swung her long legs over the edge of the couch and took off her glasses. Her eyes were flat and glazed.
“You have a contract, Charlie,” she said, looking at the floor.
“I got a contract with myself, baby,” Charlie said. “And that’s the name of the game and that’s it.”
Melissa stood up. Through the layers of makeup she looked old and stretched and burned out.
“Then get the fuck out,” she screamed. “You’ve been sandbagging me from the beginning.”
“You’ve been sandbagging yourself, not that you got that much to sandbag. You’re a psychotic wreck, sugar. I mean that sincerely.”
Melissa picked up the jar of mayonnaise and turned it over, a large glob falling on Charlie’s shoulder.
He stood there letting her do it.
“You always wanted to be an albino,” said the drummer, a thin-lipped man with empty blue eyes. “Green never did suit you.”
The other member of Gang Greene picked up his guitar.
“That cuts it,” he said and left the room.
Charlie watched him go, then ripped Melissa’s silk shirt from her body. He slowly wiped off the mayonnaise before he walked out the door.
The drummer wrapped up the roast beef and ham in a napkin.
“For the road,” he said and followed Charlie.
Melissa went back to the couch and sat down. A small elegant tattoo of a red dagger pointed down between her breasts. She looked at A.D.
“Fuck me,” she said.
“I don’t think that would be appropriate.”
“What’s appropriate?”
“I won’t be able to get it up.”
“You’ll never know unless you try.” She sighed, her impulse over. A.D. asked if he would get paid.
“No,” she said. “Everyone’s on their own from here on out.”
He offered her his jacket, which she absently accepted.
“You can drive me back to the house for my things,” she said. “I’m clearing out.”
Melissa drove. She told A.D. the story of her life but he didn’t listen, having too much trouble with his own story. She turned off the main highway and followed a dirt driveway ten miles to its end. Two station wagons and a VW van were parked in front of a broken-down pickup truck. To one side stood a barn and a corral hosting three horses. Beyond the corral lay the shimmering moonlit desert.
“We’ve been staying here like some fucking commune,” Melissa said. “It’s the club owner’s hobby ranch. The whole thing is a nightmare.”
He followed her around the side of the house where she turned to face him on a brick veranda framed with earthen jars of cactus and portulaca.
“They think I killed the other piano player. Owen.”
“I pass no judgment,” A.D. said. “I just want to get to L.A.”
Melissa sat down on a white wicker couch. Leaning back against a pillow, she shut her eyes.
“I suppose in some way I helped Owen do himself in,” she went on. “In those vicious little ways we all contribute to the general death of a relationship. Can you catch the song in that?”
“Probably,” A.D. admitted. “The melody anyway.”
“Now that my career has gone down the toilet, I’m going to pack and drive to L.A. Why don’t you help me open the new chapter of my life? I’ll pay for your car and your gas and your motels, and you’ll help me drive and explore my needs, which are considerable.”
He accepted but called for a slight delay.
“I’ll take a ride on one of those horses over there and then sleep until I wake up. If you’re still around I’ll drive you to L.A.”
He took his Levi jacket off her shoulders because the night had turned cold and because he wanted to stiff her a little. Then he walked over to the corral and saddled up a bay mare.
Swinging up into the saddle, he walked the horse toward the desert, the first hint of dawn giving definition to high clumps of gray sage. A.D.’s father had owned race horses at one point in his short, checkered career, and that had been a time they had shared together, driving out to the track outside of Cleveland in the early morning. But the horses weren’t fast and his father wasn’t either, and after he was caught bouncing bad checks from Ohio to Iowa, he skipped bail and was never heard from again. He must have had moments like this, A.D. thought, at the mercy of whatever weirdness was coming down the road. It depressed him thinking about his father and how lame he was. His own head felt separate from the rest of his body, as if out of control somewhere on its swivel. He needed to drop anchor, not let a nameless horse carry him over country he felt no connection to. As if to answer this sudden need for a direction, he guided the horse down the banks of an arroyo, but the arroyo came suddenly to an end and he had to hold on to the pommel as the horse scrambled up onto the desert again.
He rode on, prodding the horse into a loping stride, his mood changing as the sun pushed over the horizon like a squashed tomato. He was shaking loose a bit, riding into open space, and fuck the rest. The acrid smell of the sage enveloped him, his mind slacking off as he rode into a dense forest of piñon and juniper. A twisted branch whipped against him, drawing blood across his forehead. But A.D. was so deep into the mythology of his ride that he accepted the pain as initiation, and riding back into the open again, he permitted the glory of the day to elevate him once more. The horse tested the reins, wanting to stretch out, and he let himself go the rest of the way as well, flat out if that was meant to be, and they galloped across the desert and then down along the banks of a stilled green river.
A rifle shot broke the thunder of his ride. Then another.
Heading straight toward him along the banks of the river galloped two runaway horses and their riders. It was an apparition that was never to leave A.D., one that he would visualize constantly, without warning, always in slow motion, the figures swaying toward him as if under water.
As A.D.’s horse bucked up a steep hill, the first rider passed him, her long black hair flying out behind her as she hung grimly on to the horse’s mane, a look of amazed terror on her face.
The second horse swerved up the hill, galloping neck and neck beside him, its rider rising high in the air over the saddle, his elongated arms and legs flopping about in total abandon. He managed to let out a yell and looked toward A.D., a sly smile on his pale emaciated face, as if some part of him was watching over the whole mad plunging ride, even as his body flew over the horse’s neck toward the ground.
A.D.’s horse swerved again and ran straight back across the desert. More shots rang out followed by a line of horsemen appearing over the crest of a hill. It dimly occurred to him that they were Indians and that they were preparing to let fly a volley of arrows in his direction.
A.D. saw the arrow quite clearly as it fell out of the brilliant blue sky and felt the unwavering surge of his horse riding forward to meet it. Then there was total blackness followed by oblivion.