Life Goes to the Movies Read Online Free Page B

Life Goes to the Movies
Book: Life Goes to the Movies Read Online Free
Author: Peter Selgin
Pages:
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in New York.”
     
    11
     
    I got to know a little more about Dwaine. I learned that he had no family, none that he had anything to do with anymore, that he’d disowned them,
or they disowned him—I couldn’t tell which. “Don’t you miss them?” I asked.
    “About as much as I miss having scarlet fever,” he replied.
    He called himself “black Irish,” a term that intrigued me so much I went to the campus library to investigate it. According to one
encyclopedia the phrase described a race of dark-complexioned Irish people descended from the Spanish Moors. Another source maintained that the black
Irish were a legacy of African slaves imported from the island of Montserrat in the British West Indies. Yet another source claimed that the expression
was a derogatory one applied by Irish Protestants to Irish Catholics and had no ethnic origins whatsoever.
    I knew that he’d studied for the priesthood, briefly, and that he’d been a champion ice-hockey player—which is how he lost his real
front tooth, which he kept at the bottom of the same mayonnaise jar that held all those pens. A dentist replaced the lost tooth with the removable,
rattle-able, single-tooth bridge, but obviously didn’t match the color very well. (Had my Papa been consulted, the false tooth would have matched
perfectly, for he would have availed himself of The Identikon,his inventionfor comparing the color of false and real teeth.)
    And I also knew that he drank. I saw the brown Budweiser quarts lined up next to his bed and, while scrounging ice cubes one day, the Smirnoff pint
tucked deep into a glacier of freezer frost. Neither of my parents drank. The bottles of vermouth and gin that my mom kept in her closet grew thick
mantles of leaden dust. Beyond what I’d gathered from movies like The Lost Weekend with Ray Milland and The Country Girl with Bing Crosby, I was totally ignorant of the ways of alcoholics.
    About his love life Dwaine was as tight-lipped as he was about Vietnam. One day I asked him if he had a girlfriend. We’d gone to Hunter’s
Point, to the rail yards there to shoot some B-roll footage. We were taking a short break, sitting on the ends of a pair of boxcars facing each other
when I put the question to him. Dwaine threw his head back and laughed. The sun was angled low in the sky. Its coppery rays burnished the laugh lines
in my director’s face, making him look all of his twenty-six years. He said he had “no time for all that stuff.”
    I asked, “What stuff?”
    “Holding hands, eating out in fancy-ass restaurants, buying flowers and birthday presents, whispering to each other in squeaky cartoon voices
between bouts of predictable sex. Besides, when it comes to women, this city is one big psycho ward.”
    “It is?”
    “Are you shitting me? Man, open your eyes, look around you.”
    I looked around, seeing nothing but rows of boxcars and gleaming rails. Between one set of rails a pair of mongrel strays frolicked in the low-pitched
sunlight. One of the dogs was missing a leg. The other dog sniffed at the legless dog’s hindquarters, making it hop away. Dwaine made an
exasperated sound and shook his head. I realized then that it was a stupid question. Girlfriend indeed! For a guy like Dwaine, a genius with so many
more important matters to attend to, to waste his time in pursuit of the opposite sex would have been crazy indeed: it would have been practically if
not criminally irresponsible, I told myself, and felt ashamed for having put the question to him.
     
    12
     
    Unlike Dwaine, I had yet to rise above my own trivial pursuit of the opposite sex. On the contrary, my crush on Venus grew stronger by the day. And
though I tried getting her to go out with me, it was no use. I was too young, she claimed, though less than a week divided our birthdays. Her
resistance only amplified my desire. For some reason I liked everything about her, from the sheer cotton skirts that she wore draped to the pavement
(so when she walked

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