Shambling Towards Hiroshima Page 6

  I’d just finished writing about the Knickerbocker behemoths enjoying their quick little picnic at the bottom of China Lake, when someone started pounding on my door. The intruder proved to be a young woman costumed like a belly dancer, with baggy blue trousers, silver breastplates, and a sequined monkey jacket.

  “Trick or treat!” she said.

  I’d forgotten it was the weekend before Halloween. “Are you with the convention?”

  “Nope, I’m Tiffany with the Starlight Escort Service,” she said, holding up a Gladstone bag. “What convention?”

  “Wonderama. Every monster-movie fan east of the Mississippi is here.”

  “That would explain the giant Gorgantis balloon on the roof. If you’re Marty Kreske, allow me to escort you anywhere you want to go, from the hottest dance club to the deepest reaches of my gravy boat.”

  “Did you write that line yourself?”

  “I wish. My big sister’s in charge of the scripts. Lucy’s got a knack for words. I use my tongue otherwise.”

  “I’m not Marty Kreske.”

  “Really? How come? It says Room 2014 right there on your door.”

  “True enough, but my name’s Syms Thorley.”

  In pursuing our conversation, Tiffany and I soon decided that her intended customer was most likely staying in the hotel but that the Starlight dispatcher had transposed two digits when taking down the gentleman’s room number. I invited Tiffany to use my phone. She called the desk and asked to be connected to Marty Kreske.

  “The horny little sucker’s supposed to be in 2014,” she said demurely.

  The mystery was soon solved. There was indeed a Kreske on the premises, and he had indeed ordered the Seraglio Special, three hundred dollars for two hours of Tiffany’s parted thighs and undivided attention. However, he was just as glad that the dispatcher had turned 2041 into 2014, because he’d recently lost his wallet, probably through carelessness, possibly theft, and the consequent distress had doused his desire for an ersatz Turkish courtesan.

  I was not surprised when, after thanking me for the phone, accepting a glass of amontillado, declining a cigarette, and heading for the door, Tiffany paused at the threshold and said, “I don’t suppose … “

  “You see before you a man who is suicidally depressed,” I told her. “I’m not morally opposed to doing business with you, but I wouldn’t be able to hold up my end of things.”

  “What’ve you got to be suicidally depressed about?” she asked, drifting back into the room.

  “Something I did before you were born. Or didn’t do. This morning, for some reason, it all came home to roost.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “If I gave you a blowjob, maybe that would change your point of view.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  “No, I’m out three hundred dollars.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s happened before.”

  “I should get back to work.”

  For Tiffany a passable paraphrase of “I should get back to work” was evidently “Please make yourself at home,” because now she sauntered toward my desk, seized my Raydo, and, settling onto the green Naugahyde ottoman, scrutinized the statuette with a combination of perplexity and wonderment. “Syms K. Thorley, Lifetime Achievement Award, Baltimore Imagi-Movies Society, 1984,” she read. “Are you a movie director?”

  “An actor.”

  “Really? Me, too, in a way, only except they don’t give out trophies on my side of the street. Have I seen any of your pictures?”

  “Tiffany, darling, there’s over fifty dollars in my wallet. It’s all yours. Where I’m going they don’t accept cash, just indulgences, and then only if you’re Catholic.”

  “Why is the monster attacking a lighthouse?” she asked, caressing the pewter rhedosaurus.

  “The original story is about a lighthouse keeper who discovers that, once a year, a lonely sea-dwelling dinosaur answers the call of his foghorn.”

  “The dinosaur wants a friend?”

  “A friend, yes. But he’s the last of his kind.”

  “That’s so sad.”

  “The idea got lost in the transition to the screen. Ray Bradbury called his story ‘The Fog Horn.’ The movie ended up as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.”

  “That’s a better title.” Tiffany set the Raydo back atop my manuscript, thus resurrecting its function as a paperweight. “The easiest way to kill yourself, I’ve heard, is to tie a plastic bag around your head. That’s my plan if I ever get cancer.”

  “I’m thinking of leaping out the window,” I said, retrieving my wallet from atop the television.

  “I can’t accept your money without giving you something in return.”

  “Consider it a retainer against a future blowjob.”

  “Kind of a down payment?” Tiffany said, her voice rising so I wouldn’t miss the joke.

  I slid all fifty-three dollars from my wallet, and, taking her creamy hand, each finger adorned with silver rings and hot-pink nail polish, pressed the bills into her palm. Come morning, of course, I would need money to tip the shuttle driver and grab some coffee at the airport, but I could always cash a check at the desk on my way out.

  “I go to the movies a lot,” Tiffany said. “I’ve probably seen you on the big screen without knowing it.”

  “Only if you’re a Gorgantis fan.”

  “Gorgantis? The same Gorgantis they’ve got on the roof?” She extended her arm, fluttering her decorous fingers. “You’re shitting me! You’re a Gorgantis actor? I love those movies! My favorite is Gorgantis Strikes Back. Were you in that one?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “What about Fury of Mechagorgantis?” she asked, popping the money into her Gladstone bag.

  “I was in that one, too.”

  “How did they make you look so Japanese?”

  “You’re correct to suppose I needed a lot of makeup — but not so I’d look Japanese.”

  “Huh?”

  “Think about it.”

  Tiffany lit up like a jack-o’-lantern. “Hey, wow, now I understand! This is so cool! I can’t believe I’m standing here talking to Gorgantis himself! I wish I had a video for you to autograph.”

  Driven by my natural Darwinian instinct for self-promotion, I told Tiffany she could acquire such merchandise in the Wonderama huckster’s room on the mezzanine level, but she’d have to act quickly, because it closed in twenty minutes. She spun around and fled my suite. I went back to work, narrating the rest of the briefing bunker scene, Admiral Strickland’s reluctant revelation that President Truman had endorsed the China Lake Petition. A half-hour later Tiffany returned, bearing not only a VHS cassette of Gorgantis vs. Miasmica but an indelible magic marker. I signed the slipcase using my most florid pseudo-calligraphy.

  “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m trying to beat a deadline,” I said, an assertion that, transmogrified by Tiffany’s imagination, became a request that she insert the movie in the VCR and start watching it while sprawled across my bed.

  I resumed my autobiographical efforts, recounting my conversation with Obie as I stood in Hangar A admiring his Shirazuka model. Tiffany thoughtfully kept the soundtrack of Gorgantis vs. Miasmica as low as possible. We took turns hitting the amontillado and the Camel filters. At one point my roommate picked up the phone and, without consulting me, ordered dinner for both of us. Somehow she intuited that I was fond of chicken cacciatore, even the kind they serve in Holiday Inns.

  After the food arrived, we lay on the bed together watching the rest of Gorgantis vs. Miasmica. The picture was better than I remembered. My performance struck me as flamboyant without being overwrought. I’d forgotten how skillfully I did the ju-jitsu moves. Throughout the second-act climax, which involved the monsters trying to stuff each other down an active volcano, Tiffany emitted noises that I chose to interpret as gasps of excitement, though perhaps she was suppressing a laugh. I finished my chicken and retu
rned to my labors, writing about the unveiling of my PRR in the Château Mojave. Shortly after setting down Jimmy Whale’s line, “Practice, practice, practice,” I glanced toward the bed. Tiffany was gone. A piece of Holiday Inn stationery lay on the pillow. She’d written her message with the same indelible marker I’d used to sign the video.

  Dear Mr. Thorley,

  Thanks to you, this was the best Halloween weekend ever. I really enjoyed Gorgantis vs. Miasmica, especially knowing it was you fighting the walking toxic waste dump.

  Whatever you did before I was born, even if it was murdering somebody, jumping out a window won’t fix it.

  I believe that one day the dinosaur will find another of his kind, instead of just a lighthouse.

  Your friend,

  Tiffany Nolan

  The amontillado is nearly depleted, but I’ve still got plenty of ink and paper. The cigs are holding out, too. If all goes well, by midnight I’ll have finished describing our chaotic What Rough Beast rehearsal. Farewell, my adorable Tiffany. I’ll always be a little bit in love with you.

  Practice, practice, practice, Jimmy Whale had said, but Admiral Yordan still detested the idea of my taking the Gorgantis suit home with me, and he remained unsympathetic even after Gladys and Mabel reminded him about the backup PRR in the Quonset hut. For the next hour Whale tried to convince Yordan that I could never deliver a transcendent performance unless I spent as much time as possible inhabiting the behemoth’s neoprene flesh.

  “I don’t really expect you to understand, Admiral, but this is about art,” Whale said. “It’s about the ineffable, the irreducible, the Je ne sais quoi.”

  “I’ve heard quite enough French from you today, Whale,” Yordan said.

  “A convincing performance is always rooted in the body,” Whale said. “The suit must become Thorley’s second skin. Stanislavski discoursed eloquently on this principle.”

  “The next time I want to read a Communist queer, Stanislavski will be my first choice,” Yordan told Whale. “Unless, of course, you’ve written on the subject yourself.”

  “If you’re worried about somebody spotting the PRR, let me point out that the costume is its own camouflage,” Dr. Groelish noted. “Our boy here could put on his lizard rig and saunter down Wilshire Boulevard in broad daylight, and who would ever imagine the thing was designed to spook the Japanese?”

  “I still think it should stay here,” Yordan said.

  “Let’s take it from the top,” Whale said. “If Syms doesn’t become one with the lizard, the game is over.”

  As twilight seeped across the Mojave Desert, Yordan at long last threw up his hands and grunted in resignation. With colossal reluctance he got on the phone and arranged delivery of a Navy panel truck to the atelier, anything with “a cargo bay large enough to accommodate a half-dozen oxygen cylinders and a dwarf behemoth.” While the admiral talked to the captain of the motor pool, Mabel explained that she wouldn’t be fueling my tail until the day of the run-through. She didn’t want me fooling around with Gorgantis’s incendiary capabilities before I’d had a formal lesson in flamethrowing. Meanwhile I should concentrate on walking backward, going gracefully downstairs, and climbing out of private swimming pools with balletic poise.

  When the panel truck arrived, Yordan slapped a Class T gas-rationing sticker on the windshield, thereby entitling me to unlimited fill-ups, just like a senator, plus a coupon book good for a walloping two hundred gallons. He further equipped me with a two-way wrist radio of the sort worn by Ralph Byrd in Republic’s Dick Tracy serials. This one was not a prop, Yordan explained. Between now and the great rehearsal, I must contact Commander Quimby every morning at precisely 0900 hours — the transceiver was preset to Quimby’s identical device — then again at noon, with subsequent calls at 1500 hours and 1800 hours, no exceptions, rain or shine, fair or foul, hell or high water.

  Shortly after midnight, my flesh throbbing with exhaustion, my head spinning with the doctrine of reptilian intimidation, I reached Santa Monica and pulled into my garage: as safe a place as any to store the PRR, I figured. I made my weary way to the bungalow. Darlene sat at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and drawing X’s through certain presumably gratuitous speeches in my Lycanthropus script. My favorite lines, no doubt, but that didn’t mean they deserved to stay. For the next hour I mesmerized her with my adventures at China Lake, repeatedly stating my sincere opinion that she would have given my employers a script far better than Brenda’s formulaic Armageddon. Much to Darlene’s delight, I packed a large quantity of treason into the presentation, until eventually I had no more top secrets to reveal, only perfunctory and jejune secrets, so I ended my unlikely narrative and asked her what she thought of Operation Fortune Cookie.

  “To use a line I promised myself I would never write,” she said, “‘It’s just crazy enough to work.’“

  “If they were planning to overhaul the script, I would’ve brought your name up, but the whole thing’s set in stone.”

  “It’s okay,” Darlene said. “I’m not jealous.” She took a drag on her Chesterfield. “So do you think there’s going to be a sequel?”

  Eight hours later I reported for duty at Monogram. As the morning’s labors progressed, I found myself appreciating the Navy’s wisdom in declining to draft me but instead allowing Revenge of Corpuscula to go forward as planned. Neither Beaudine, Katzman, Dagover, nor Dudley the AD bothered to ask what I’d done during my mysterious Tuesday sojourn in the desert. As long as we delivered our program to the exhibitors on schedule, my trips to China Lake would evidently arouse no untoward curiosity at Monogram or any other redoubt of the home front.

  While I was gone Trixie had secured the necessary orangutan costume. It turned out that Republic was shooting a jungle adventure down the street, and they were willing to lease the suit for only a hundred bucks. Beaudine’s brother-in-law showed up drunk, which I suspect made his performance all the more convincingly simian. Like the patriotic iguana I was, I called Commander Quimby on my Dick Tracy set at nine o’clock, then again at noon, assuring him that Gorgantis and I were both in good condition.

  The afternoon’s shoot proved grueling, the toughest yet on a Corpuscula picture, but by seven-thirty we’d managed to get six pages in the can: scene 18, the alchemical creature convincing Dr. Niemuller to turn Bongowi into a meat-eater, and scene 19, the carnivorous ape’s subsequent assault on Dr. Werdistratus. Later that night, after our usual spaghetti dinner followed by a productive two-hour session that found Darlene and me polishing my Lycanthropus screenplay into a shining B-movie gem, I decided to do my Gorgantis homework, so we hauled the rig out of the truck and dragged it into the parlor. Darlene couldn’t get over the sheer demented brilliance of the thing. She called it “uncanny,” “haunting,” and — she intended this as praise — “perverse.” As she stood behind me on a step-ladder, cradling the great head against her chest, I inserted my feet in the soft vulcanized leggings and my hands in the neoprene claws. After activating the glowing eyeballs, Darlene descended to ground level, seized the pull-tab above my tail, and climbed the ladder again, thus bringing the teeth of the dorsal zipper into alignment. So there I was, encased once again in my scales and talons, a Cretaceous visitation bent on teaching Admiral Nagumo how right he’d been to imagine that his attack on Pearl Harbor had awakened a sleeping dragon.

  “I can’t speak for my entire gender,” Darlene said, “but I think he’s the sexiest monster ever to hit Hollywood.”

  Grasping the knob in my navel, I gave it a quarter turn, and an instant later came the soothing, serpentine hiss of pure oxygen seeping into my suit. “I’m supposed to start out with a few simple exercises. Walking backward, standing on one leg, stuff like that.”

  “No, darling. I need something more from you tonight.”

  “Huh?”

  “My glands are pumping, Syms. We’re going down to the beach.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Men. It’s a Fay Wray thing. Every gi
rl wants a big snorting schlemiel she can wrap around her little finger. We’ll start out with business as usual, Gorgantis kidnapping his leading lady, but eventually she’ll conquer him through sheer nerve and spunkiness.”

  When Darlene got like this there was no sense in resisting, so I waited patiently while she changed into her bathing suit, after which we loaded the lizard rig, Syms Thorley still inside, into the Navy truck and took off, Darlene driving almost as recklessly as Joy Groelish, or so I inferred from all the rocking and swaying to which the PRR and I were subjected. At last the vibrations stopped. Next came the clanking and clanging of Darlene opening the cargo bay doors. I insisted on shambling out by myself. Practice, practice, practice.

  Aided by the full moon, my luminous eyeballs, and Darlene’s hand, I wended my way through the undulating palms of Palisades Park, eventually reaching a broad swath of sand. I lumbered south, the Pacific breakers to my right, Darlene on my left, my tail growing heavier by the minute. Arriving at the Municipal Pier, we took refuge in a dank forest of pilings. We glanced in all directions. The literal coast was literally clear. At two o’clock in the morning, everybody in Santa Monica evidently had better things to do with his time than wandering around on a desolate beach that stank of rotting kelp.

  “Carry me into the water,” Darlene demanded.

  “Why?”

  “It’s romantic.”

  I picked her up and, hooking one scaly arm under her knees while looping the other around her shoulders, began the requested abduction. It was a familiar gesture for me. Kha-Ton-Ra usually made off with the heroine in this fashion at least once per picture, and occasionally the same impulse overcame Corpuscula. But I’d never done it as Gorgantis before, and never with Darlene. Soon I hit the tide line, an undulating ribbon of pebbles and seaweed, then kept on going, wading into the surf — for such was my co-star’s desire — heading in the general direction of Hawaii. The bay rose gently, climbing to my knees, my thighs, my bulbous abdomen. Inside the suit, all was well — Gladys and Mabel had successfully waterproofed the rig — more than well, thanks to the oxygen cylinder: temperate, balmy, sublime.