Life Goes to the Movies Read Online Free

No, it wasn’t me up there; it wasn’tNigel DeDago, Nigel De-Wop, Nigel DeGuineaof Barnum, Connecticut.
    It was someone bigger, better.
    As we stepped out of Dwaine’s film class he threw his arm around me. “So, babe,” he said, “still want to major in advertising?
Don’t answer too quickly. Think about it. After all, someday you just might sell somebody the perfect underarm deodorant, or the ideal laxative,
or the ultimate brand of toilet paper.Try New Improved Bottom’s-Up brand toilet tissue: soft as air, sweet as honey. You can’t wipe your butt with it, but so what?”
    He jiggled his weird tooth at me.
     
    9
     
    We kept making movies.
    In Pig Iron Junkie I played a bodybuilder. I used my own set of rusty barbells, which kept company with the dust bunnies under the bed in my
room in Captain Nemo’s apartment. Whenever I did curls and Navy lifts with them the barbells made a noise like an old-fashioned printing press.
The movie consisted entirely of close-ups of clanking barbells and sweating, bulging, straining muscles, recapitulated ad infinitum thanks to a
clever arrangement of mirrors installed by Dwaine in his one-room apartment. Between sweaty close-ups (some of the sweat mine, the rest faked with
glycerin drops) Dwaine spliced in subliminal fake newspaper headlines:
    MAN WEEPS ON STREET CORNER
    BUTTERFLY SEEN IN CENTRAL PARK
    In Dust Off I played an exhausted Army medic who can’t see what he’s operating on because a punctured artery keeps squirting him in
the eye.
    In Toothpaste I played a guy who brushes his teeth to death. While brushing he pulls out a loose tooth, then another, and so on, until
he’s spitting out handfuls of teeth and gobs of foaming bright fake blood.
    In Blood Tickets a botched pawnshop holdup left me riddled with bullets and bleeding to death under a window stuffed with used cameras, Spanish
guitars, and saxophones. (To my bullet-riddled Clyde Venus played Bonnie.)
    We dubbed ourselves—or Dwaine dubbed us—the Proto Realist Filmmaking Society. Our mission: to make movies so damned realistic (meaning so
damned grim and violent and horrible) that you couldn’t tell them from real life. We went through gallons of fake blood, which in real life looks
a lot more purple than red, and dozens of squibs: miniature explosive devices filled with fake blood, taped to the skin under my clothes and detonated
off-camera to produce gorily realistic bullet holes. Dwaine said I bled beautifully.
    I wondered why Dwaine’s movies were all so violent, and guessed it had something to do with his wartime past, with Vietnam. Personally I had
never known any real soldiers, had never known anyone who had been to war. My father avoided fighting in both of the World Wars that he’d lived
through. The whole concept of war was as foreign to me as the dark side of the moon. I longed to ask Dwaine outright, “What was being in a war
like? What did you do? What did you experience?”
    One day I put it to him straight. I asked him, “What was it like?”
    Dwaine said, “What was what like?”
    “The war.”
    “Which one, babe? There are so many.”
    “Vietnam,” I said.
    Dwaine blew a smoke ring. He was an expert at blowing them. We were sitting against a wall in his apartment, the one with the mirrors on it. I watched
the smoke ring waver up and dash itself into the ceiling light fixture. “What was it like?” he said. “What was it like?
An exploding dog, that’s what it was like. Vietnam was like an exploding dog.”
    And that’s all he would say.
     
    10
     
    As clam-mouthed as he was about Vietnam, Dwaine could be voluble on the subject of movies. “What is the dream of every red-blooded American
boy?” he asked us all one day coming home from a day of filming.
    “To be President of the United States,” Venus guessed.
    “Wrong. Try again.”
    “To pitch for the Yankees,” Huff tried.
    Dwaine shook his head. “One more guess.”
    “To cure cancer,” I said.
    Dwaine made a