Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go (15 page)

“You guys aren’t so bad,” I said, and a smile passed between us. “Besides, it’s Lyla, so it’s worth it.”

“You love her, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir. I believe I do.”

“How much do you love her? Do you love her enough to do what’s right for her, even if it means losing her?”

“I don’t follow you.”

Daniel sat back in his chair, looked into the depths of his own yard. “I told you earlier today that I used to frequent that place you bartend in, when I was on the Hill. I don’t know if Lyla’s ever told you the… degree to which I frequented those types of establishments.”

“No,” I said, “she hasn’t.”

“Well, I was quite a regular in those days, in that place and plenty of others. I wish that I could give you the details, but I don’t remember all that much of those years. If it wasn’t for photographs, it would be difficult to recall even the faces of my children as they were growing up. All that wasted time. But I can’t get it back now, so…” Daniel pulled at the errant edges of his beard. “Anyway, things turned out all right, I think. I got myself into a program, managed to see my children become wonderful adults, with most of the credit for that going to Linda, of course, and I ended up doing a bit of good along the way. So I think you’ll understand it when I say, maybe because of the fact that I wasn’t always there for them, that I’m rather fiercely protective of my children to this day.”

“I understand.”

Daniel breathed out slowly, folded his hands on the table, bumped one thumb against the other. “Lyla, she’s always taken on my traits, even as a child. I know you think she looks like her mother, and certainly she does. But I’m talking about resemblances in less obvious ways.”

I didn’t respond.

Daniel kept on: “When Lyla was a teenager, when she used to come home late at night, I could always tell what she had been up to. Her own body, it betrayed her. When she drinks, you know, even now, her ears turn this blazing shade of red. That same thing used to happen to me—in fact, they used to call me ‘Red’ in some of the bars where they knew me pretty well.” Daniel looked me in the eyes. “She’s got a problem with it, you know. It’s hereditary, I suppose, in a gene I gave her. The researchers, they’ve been claiming that for quite some time now. She’s got the same problem that I had when I was her age. And I see it… I see it only getting worse.”

Again, I didn’t answer him or respond in any way. A drop of sweat moved slowly down my back. Daniel leaned in, rested his forearms on the table.

“You’re an alcoholic, Nick,” he said. “You would never admit to it, but that’s what you are. You’ve probably done some binge drinking in your day, but I would say that in general you’re what they call a controlled drinker. The worst kind, because it allows you to convince yourself that you don’t have a problem, and now you’ve managed to bury the thought of doing something about it entirely. I’ve been around enough people like you; I just don’t think you’re ever going to give it up.”

“I know what I’m about.”

“Yes, I think you do. But I’m not responsible for you, so that’s not good enough. Lyla needs someone strong to tell her what she is and to stand next to her and help her through it. You’re just not that person.”

I pushed away from the table and stood slowly from my chair. “It’s getting late. I better be going.”

I began to walk past him, but he wrapped a hand around my forearm. I looked down on him, saw that his eyes had softened.

“I like you, Nick. I want you to know that. I think that you’re a good man. You’re just not good for
her
.”

“Thanks for dinner.”

I walked across the patio in the dying light.

“WHAT WERE YOU AND
Dad doing out back?” Lyla said. We were driving south on Connecticut, to Lyla’s apartment. “What was he, asking about your intentions?”

“Something like that.”

“Dad’s always been tough on my boyfriends.”

“He’s only looking out for you,” I said.

“I know,” Lyla said, and touched the Band-Aid on my finger. “Tough day, huh, Stefanos?”

“Tough day.”

I stopped at Lyla’s apartment building off Calvert, let the engine idle.

“What, you’re not coming up?”

“I better not,” I said. “Got something going on early tomorrow on this Jeter thing.”

“I should chill out, too. My editor left a message on my machine yesterday. That story I’ve been working on, the one I finished and turned in after we had lunch the other day, in Chinatown? He wants to meet with me about it in the morning. Sounds ominous.”

“You’ve always been able to control him. You’ll do fine.”

Lyla leaned across the seat, put her hand behind my head, and kissed me on the mouth. “Love you, Nick.”

“I love you too, baby. Take care.”

I
N D.C., IT’S
tough to find a good clean place to catch an art film anymore, and next to impossible to find consistency in repertory. The near-legendary Circle Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue, where many Washingtonians got their film education, is long gone, its “ten tickets for ten dollars” deal a permanent fixture now in the local nostalgia file. Georgetown boasts the Key and Biograph theaters, but Georgetown has devolved into a slum-out for suburban teens, drunks, and tourists—a guy I know calls it a “shopping mall without a roof”—and a lot of in-towners just don’t care to bother. Out-of-town bookers place the rest of the films in their corporately designated “art theaters,” their unfamiliarity with our city demographics resulting in sometimes laughably illogical bills. It’s true that you can catch some cool stuff at the Hirshhorn or at other galleries or museums, but you have to know where to find the listings, and by the
time you’ve gotten around to checking out the art calendars in
City Paper
and
D.C. This Week
, it’s often too late.

I have a friend named Gerry Abromowitz, whom I’ve known since the club days in the early years of the New Wave—music, not film. Gerry owned his own club for a while, a place called the Crawlspace, a venue for harDCore bands and slammers. Off and on, Gerry went by the name of Gerry Louis, Jr., and even looked into having the legal change. But he stopped short of doing it about the time that the Crawlspace closed down after one steaming-hot summer. A personal-injury suit put a lock on the front door, but in truth, the place was a loser from the word go. Now, Gerry Louis, Jr., was back to Gerry Abromowitz and settling into the beginnings of middle age, working as the owner/operator of a movie theater called the Very Ritzy down on 9th.

The Very Ritzy had just been the Ritz, of course, in its original incarnation, but as usual, Gerry couldn’t resist fucking around with the name. It started out as a burlesque house, and then it was the last of the burlesque houses, and then it was the last of the porno houses, and when Gerry took it out of mothballs on a short-term lease, his intention was to make it an art house. But he soon found out that it was difficult to outbid the more powerful competition for the bookings, and when he could get a decent film, nobody seemed to be interested in traveling to that part of town after working hours. So he quietly took it back to porno for the matinees and made it straight repertory at night, taking in the spillage and the last-call crowd from the Snake Pit and other clubs in the surrounding area. He seemed to make a living from this novel arrangement, though that was probably due to the fact that his skin-flick matinees were all profit; over the years, Gerry Abromowitz had amassed one of the most extensive privately owned sixteen-millimeter porno collections south of Jersey.

“Ge-roo,” I said, shaking his hand. He had agreed to meet me Monday noon at the theater. We stood in the red-carpeted lobby.

“Nick the Stick,” Gerry said. “Lookin’ good. How about me… I gain much weight?”

About forty, I thought. But I said, “Nah.”

“C’mon up. I’m runnin’ the projector. My kid’s up there; I don’t want to leave him alone.”

A man in a business suit walked into the lobby, his eyes straight ahead. An usher—long hair, wearing a black T-shirt and ripped black jeans—took the man’s ticket, tore it in half, then returned to the paperback he was reading without moving from his stool. The business suit scurried quickly through the lobby to the darkness of the theater. I followed Gerry up a carpeted set of stairs.

We hit a landing and then an office area, where a boy just past toddler played with an action figure that looked to me like the Astro Boy of my youth. All four walls of this room had film cans racked and labeled on wooden shelves, with a large slotted area set aside for one-sheets and stills.

“Gerry junior,” Gerry said, tipping his head proudly at the boy.

“Gerry Louis, Jr.?” I said.

“Nick, Nick, Nick,” Gerry said.

I turned to his kid. “What’s that guy’s name?” I said, nodding at his toy.

“Jason the Power Ranger!” the kid said, puffing out his chest and his cheeks. When he did that, the little fats looked a lot like his dad.

“Aw, man,” I said, “I wish
I
had one of those.” That got Gerry junior excited, and he started running around the room, holding up Jason the Power Ranger in the go-fly position. Gerry senior motioned me up another short set of stairs.

We took seats outside the shut door of the projection booth, close enough to hear if something mechanical went wrong. The air was stagnant and warm, but I was in shorts and a T-shirt, and Gerry was dressed approximately the same way. Gerry’s kinky
hair had plenty of gray in it, and he had one of those faces that always seemed to be smiling, even when it was not.

“So what’s on the bill today?” I said. “
The Sorrow and the Pity
?”

“Not quite.
Crotchless in Seattle
. It’s a big title for me this summer.”

“I’ll bet. So the porno’s keeping this place afloat.”

“So far. The associations, the exodus of the law firms moving east into the city, that’s helped. These guys pay their seven bucks, come in for the first show, fifteen minutes, wack-adoo, wack-adoo”—Gerry contorted his face, made a fist, pumped out a two-stroke jack-off mime—“they’re in and out. It’s cheaper than a prostie, Nick. And with the plague out there, it’s damn sure safer. Everyone thought, with videotape rental, the theatrical was gonna go the way of quadrophonic sound. And that was true to some degree, especially with the pervs. But these married guys, for whatever reason—maybe they’re not gettin’ enough at home, whatever—they can’t pop in a porno tape in their own house. What are they gonna tell junior? ‘Keep it down. Daddy’s tryin’ to watch Stormy Weathers give Ralph Rimrod some head’? Excuse me.” Gerry pulled balled Kleenex from his pocket, blew his nose loudly into the tissue. “I’m telling you, this porno thing is a growth market, if you got the right location.”

“Yeah, but who cleans up the theater?”

Gerry smirked. “That kid you saw in the lobby, he came to me, said he wanted to learn the exhibition business. I gave him a bucket and mop, said, ‘Here, go to school.’ Between shows, he does the honors. But it’s not as bad as you think, Nick. These business types are very fastidious—they bring their own socks,
Wall Street Journals
, shit like that. They’re better behaved than my nighttime repertory crowd, I’ll tell you. But even that’s beginning to pick up. Kids are smoking pot again, you know it?”

“Sure,” I said, thinking of the stash in my glove box.

“That helps. Helps the ‘appreciation of cinema.’ Helps
music, and fucking, and everything else, too, right? Anyway, I’m gonna start adding psychotronic midnights on the weekends—”

“Listen, Ger—”

“I know, you don’t have all day. You called because you needed some information.”

“That’s right. I’m looking for a kid, got himself into some local porn action.”

“How old?”

“Seventeen.”

“What genre?”

“Man on boy, what I can make out. Maybe interracial, if that narrows it down. The kid is black.”

Gary scratched behind his ear. “I wouldn’t know, directly. Everything I got here is classic, on celluloid, from the archives. The video business is wide open, man; anybody can do it. Let’s say you want to make a movie with a school theme. All’s you need is a camera, a couple of lights if you want it real clean, some props—a piece of chalk, maybe a blackboard—and you got yourself a real intricate story about a teacher disciplining his student.”