The Ravine (7 page)

Yes, Rainie was a ranker, and I can call her that because I was a ranker, too. The term may be particular to the Norman Ingram Memorial Grammar School, but the concept is universal. As any sociologist will tell you, there is a definite pecking order in any system—this is especially true of grade schools—and when we use the term “ranker,” we are speaking of those at the very bottom.

I was included in the number largely because of my spectacles. They were massive and cumbersome, so much so that the temples ended in wire hooks to prevent gravity from hauling the things from my face, which gravity was always threatening to do. I had to wander around with my hand plastered across my brow, as though thinking great thoughts or wanting to vomit. Either activity was bound to garner ranker points.

Mind you, I shouldn’t attribute my status solely to my spectacles. I earned a lot of points from the fact that I was related to the very bizarre Jay McQuigge. Jay’s strange behaviour was well-known throughout the school. On his first day of kindergarten he refused, tearfully, to nap during naptime. He called his teacher “Mommy” (and continued to do so for months). I had done this myself once or twice—it is a fairly common gaffe for a little kid to make—but in Jay’s case it created a problem because his teacher was a man, Mr. Raleigh. That Mr. Raleigh was undeniably effeminate did not cause the stigma to fade in any way.

But what really got me the huge tallies was the fact that my best friend at school was not only a ranker, she was a girl. She was a scrawny girl with a strange name, Rainie van der Glick. The name alone would have consigned her forever to rankerdom. The first name was ripe for punning, and the three components that followed made her an outcast in the public school system, forever unable to line up in alphabetical order. And Rainie was the only person at Norman Ingram Memorial with vision-ware anything close to mine. I cannot recall meeting her for the first time, but I’m sure it was this that drew us together, two little kids wearing their weakness, their weirdness, right on their faces for all the world to see. Rainie had rhinestone-encrusted wingtips, fancy and fashionable, which only made the distorted fish-eyes swimming in the lenses all the more rank.

And for a few bonus points: my mother often wandered across the ancient cow pasture that separated our little house from Norman Ingram. She typically came at morning recess, moving slowly, a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. The drink was usually coffee, but on one or two occasions she clutched a glass tumbler. My mother would come within fifty feet of the school, stop and watch. She was searching out neither Jay nor me, because when we presented ourselves she merely waved, and vaguely at that, as though she could not quite remember who we were. After a few minutes she would turn and saunter back to the house.

The issue here was not so much that my mother’s behaviour was odd, it was that her behaviour was conspicuous. Rankers shared this characteristic, mothers who were notable. It would be impossible, really, for a kid to be a ranker all on his or her own, no matter how weird and damaged he or she might be. You needed to be sponsored, in a sense, by your mother.

Rainie van der Glick’s mother was an extreme example; she was about as crazy as a rat in a coffee can. She came to the school on a daily basis to confront the administration, with such fury that she might as well have been toting a battering ram and bazooka. Her complaint, at least originally, was that Rainie was a bona fide genius and that the school was not serving her special needs. No one disputed this, but the principal, Mr. Bowman, explained that there were no provisions made for genius, and Rainie was obligated by law to sit in the classroom all day. Somewhere along the line it got personal; Mr. Bowman said something that stepped on all the twigs in Mrs. van der Glick’s mind. After that, she simply came to do battle. The police were called more than once. For a time Mrs. van der Glick was legally enjoined from stepping onto school property, although this was quashed during one of the many trials held to settle all the suits and countersuits. There were two rumours that captured the imagination of all the schoolchildren. When Mr. Bowman appeared with his foot in a cast, it soon became common knowledge that the damage had been done by a thug, at Mrs. van der Glick’s behest. We would brook no other explanation—although one was delivered over the PA system, concerning a gardening mishap. And the other rumour was that someone—and the identity of this kid changed with each telling—went to the office on an errand, and saw Mr. Bowman lying across his desk. Mrs. van der Glick had her skirts hiked and was sitting astride, pumping merrily.

Mr. van der Glick committed suicide around when Rainie was born, although I doubt if he hanged himself
as
she was being born, which is what Rainie believes.

Myself, what I liked at the Galaxy Odeon were the westerns.

Indeed, I was a pretty big fan of the genre in general. Some of my favourite programs on television were westerns,
Gunsmoke
and
Have Gun Will Travel.
You know, it’s an interesting thing about that latter
show, and something not commonly known, but the story of Paladin, the jaded and educated gun-for-hire, was actually developed by the playwright Clifford Odets. The author of
Awake and Sing!
and
Waiting for Lefty
, the great young hope of the American theatre, ended his life in Hollywoodland, drinking too much, dabbling with various illicit substances, robotically screwing young starlets and writing for the boob tube.

I’d kindly ask you to remember this as I write down the details of my life.

I also
really
liked, I want to mention, those episodes of
The Twilight Zone
that were of the western genre. They were not infrequent, although apparently Rod Serling insisted these episodes be shot in Death Valley, where the actors and crew suffered from dehydration and even delirium. (That’s my kind of show-runner!) The most memorable was “Mr. Denton on Doomsday.” It was about this schoolteacher who finds a Colt.45, which keeps misfiring when he holds it. He accidentally kills a rattlesnake at fifty yards, and shoots the revolver out of the hands of a notorious gunslinger. So Mr. Denton is accorded a fearsome reputation, even though he is, in reality, a quiet little man. Serling seemed to understand that we are not always responsible for our actions, although that does raise the question
Who, exactly, is?

But of all the westerns I have seen, the most significant is certainly
The Bullet and the Cross.

Like all of my important memories, it has a potency that has influenced the pocket of time that holds it, so I can remember that particular Saturday afternoon, even though in many ways it was no different from any other. I can remember, for example, what van der Glick was wearing as she stepped out of the elevator, which was a dress covered with clownish polka dots. Rainie would make these heartbreaking stabs at femininity; indeed, she still does. It’s not that
she doesn’t possess a woman’s body now, and didn’t possess a girl’s body then. But clothes never seemed to fit her correctly, and the more girlish they were, the worse they would hang. So on this day she wore a dress, and knee socks although her legs were too thin to support them and they gathered in folds around her ankles. She’d also done something odd to her spectacles. The lenses were darkened, so that her eyes were obscured.

“Are those new glasses?” I asked, although I knew they weren’t, since I recognized the rhinestone-encrusted wingtips.

“Yes,” she lied.

“We’re going to the movies!” said Jay. “Wanna come?”

Jay asked Rainie every week if she wanted to come to the movies, even though we never did anything else. Rainie’s answer was likewise invariable.

“Might as well.” She shrugged. “There’s fuck-all else to do.”

Oh, she had a mouth on her. Still does. Rainie hosts a radio talk show these days, and her speech is peppered with beeps and whistles. She has had a series of careers, proceeding from straight journalism (she spent a few years in Russia as an official correspondent for one of Toronto’s dailies) to somewhat bizarre magazine reportage (when the female press were finally allowed inside the Maple Leafs’ locker room, for example, Rainie took it a step further, actually showering with the lads) to this radio show where she is paid, handsomely, to be cantankerous.

The Bullet and the Cross
was made in 1960 and the director’s name was given as Alan Smithee. What this means is that the real person (or persons) responsible for it were so embarrassed by the results that they chose this default accreditation. Any film bearing the name “Alan Smithee” is by definition bad, just so you can be on the lookout. Perhaps you knew this, but I’ll bet you’re surprised to discover
that the practice dates back to the 1960s. I know I was, when I did this research a few years back. I think it’s possible that
The Bullet and the Cross
was the very first Alan Smithee movie.

The writer of the screenplay didn’t hide behind a pseudonym. His identity is announced with some boldness, given that it contains even a middle name: Peter Paul Mendicott. Moreover, it is repeated on another title card:
Based Upon the Novel by Peter Paul Mendicott.
I have to tell you that I don’t remember this from that viewing so long ago, I know this because I have watched the movie a few times subsequently. I sought out and purchased what seems to be the only extant print of the film. I have screened it in private, renting whole movie theatres, which can be surprisingly affordable, especially if you want to watch something in the dead of night. Edward Milligan watched it with me one time. He fell asleep in the middle, but I should mention that we were both very stoned and drunk.

Not that the film isn’t tedious. The story mostly concerns a lawman named Johnny Mungo, portrayed with mind-numbing inertia by someone named Mark Goode, who was semi-famous as a stock car driver. It may be baffling to you, the kind of productorial thinking that went into designing a vehicle for a stock car driver (I know, I’m sorry about that), but I have been in the business long enough to know the kind of twisted logic that exists. All it takes is someone half-crazy with a little bit of money, and bingo, you got a movie.

The story is basically this: the town is bad, because of the evil and pervasive presence of a fellow named Black Chester Nipes. (He is not a black man, but owns that sobriquet because a gun backfired and the gunpowder stained his face. A nice touch, wholly preposterous.) Mungo comes to town, clears away all of the henchmen and riffraff and finally confronts Nipes himself. Mungo emerges victorious, soupy music fades up and that’s the end.

Pretty unimaginative stuff, for the most part. By far the most interesting thing about the story, at least for me, is the secondary character Father White. He is a young, good-looking clergyman, singularly uncowed by Black Chester Nipes. As soon as he stepped onto the screen, I knew I wanted to be this man. It had something to do with the way he looked, because he had a raffish quality and, although I remain a little uncertain as to what that actually is, I’ve always wanted to possess it.

About an hour into the story, there is a big fight in the town tavern (which is far nicer than the one Nipes hangs out in) and, through various plot machinations on the part of Mr. Mendicott, Father White is there. At one point during the brouhaha, a brace of henchmen approach the clergyman, obviously with mayhem on their minds. Rather than appearing afraid, Father White takes up his Bible and begins reading with intense concentration, concentration that is rewarded by the blossoming of a blissful smile. The henchmen are so intrigued with this that they lean in to see the passage in question, leaving their weapons hanging at their sides. Father White lashes out with the Good Book, snapping it shut on one of the thug’s nose. Then he grabs a whiskey bottle and rather impassively cold-cocks the other guy, dropping him like a sack of wet bricks. The man with the sore nose hightails it out of the barroom, a story contrivance I should have made more note of. I mean, even given the questionable logic and reality that permeated the Galaxy Odeon every week, there was nothing preventing the guy from simply lofting his side arm and drilling Father White a third eye. But I was too taken up with the laughter that sounded in the theatre to reflect on this. My, how the children laughed. Even Rainie van der Glick laughed.

And then, at the end of the movie, when Black Chester Nipes and Johnny Mungo meet on the street for the traditional shootout, Nipes has Father White as a hostage. Nipes presses the barrel of his
six-shooter into the clergyman’s temple and says, “Take another step, Mungo, and I’ll shoot the padre.” (A script editor might have found that dialogue unnecessary, but
The Bullet and the Cross
is full of such on-the-nose stuff.)

What can Johnny Mungo do? Nothing. And indeed he does nothing. Mungo stands there and stares forward with a doltish expression on his face, which is how the actor Mark Goode portrayed most emotions.

It is Father White who acts, reaching up, taking hold of Black Chester’s hand and squeezing. There is no attempt at screen realism here, no exploding skull or blood, but we children, all of us, gasped with terrible shock as the padre slumped to the ground. And then we began to weep.