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Celluloid Shadows
San Francisco, 1970
Certain theaters, at certain times of night, seemed to empty almost naturally into certain bars. Not even the ones closest on the same street—a block or two over, perhaps, but the flow was oddly direct, and weekly the bartenders at these places would Scotch-tape the newspaper notices of showtimes beside their registers and watch the twenty-minutes-fast clock in order to brace themselves for the rushes which came like the tide.
Louis knew all this from observation; now that he walked alone, he seemed to be returning to the habits of his youth, and taverns and saloons under any name remained much the same. (Likely molly houses, too, though he hadn’t direct experience there.)
This one was nothing special, a touch shabby even, but he joined the little school of fish moving together towards it. There was a certain risk to exiting after this particular showtime, and he was less in danger and more noticeable than the rest—he made a good stalking-horse for police and muggers, and the men he’d sat among would be none the wiser.
But they all arrived unmolested, this time, and he took his turn ordering a bourbon he wouldn’t drink and tossed cash into the jar. Too much cash, judging by how the young man in his tight low-cut top with its rolled sleeves like a fantasy stevedore looked him up-and-down and raised an eyebrow.
“Something wrong?” he asked, turning the full weight of his attention to the man’s face. It worked often as a deterrent—already the bartender was looking away from him, eyes flitting down his frame for somewhere else to rest. No no, he was assured. Nothing at all.
He took his seat at a low table near the corner as the square little room filled up. There was a door behind him, and high frosted windows in the front, which was a change he still hadn’t adjusted to. In New York these rooms had always been long narrow concrete boxes hidden at the bottom of staircases down in the earth. Louis had heard of fires breaking out, the little respites becoming tombs, but never managed to cross one’s path. Those rooms had appealed to him, as had the way their occupants danced with death for the chance at a stolen embrace. He’d imagined what Lestat would make of it; once he’d even turned his head as if in anticipation of his lost maker’s words:
How do you stand it? There’s not even room to move. You’re not planning to burn it down again, are you Louis? They might actually manage to kill us simply by blocking the exit with their bodies.
Thank you. Fuck you. Çunt.
No, Lestat would have hated it here. He’d be at the discotheques that Louis shrank away from, the dazzling lights and pumping music overwhelming after only minutes. He’d call Louis morbid, or demand that they go to the baths and delight in inviting mortals to touch his skin, draw them close and pretend it was the water making him warm—
“This seat taken?” A young man smiled at him, already half-lifting the empty chair across from Louis.
“I’m afraid—” over the man’s shoulder he saw a cluster of others, too many for the small nearby table and in need of seats. He shook his head.
“You sure?” another asked, frowning slightly; the peacemaker of the group, no doubt. “If you’re waiting for someone, we can figure it out.”
“No, no, by all means,” Louis said, pretending to sip his drink. The ice was a shocking addition, and he wondered how they stood it, cold sliding down their throats along with the burn. Freezing from the inside out. “I’m alone. I shouldn’t have taken a table at all.”
He thought that would be the end of it, but rather than simply taking the chair the man turned it only halfway so that it oddly bridged the space between the two tables. He sat on it backwards, legs spread. No doubt if there were barmaids, they would object to such an arrangement, but maids had little place here.
“You must be new in town, if you’re by yourself. Need company?” the man said, bold as brass, and Louis shook his head mutely and instead directed his attention to the newspaper he carried as camouflage.
(“Rick, leave him alone. C’mon, what do you want?” “Like you don’t know!”)
Louis kept sitting, ears pricked and eyes on the pages he could quote by rote by now, stealing snatches of human lives by proximity. So many little conversations to hear.
(He should go to the baths, really. The place where he stayed had no hot water, and there was something almost energizing in being enveloped by the steam. Participation was not—required, after all. Observation was not…)
“Well, I thought it was excellent. That was the same cast, right? Glad the director kept ‘em on.”
“Sure, sure. I bet Hollywood was leaping to steal those roles.” (One could fair hear the eyes rolling in their sockets.)
“I don’t know how they managed to find that many heterosexuals to fill the parts,” a third drawled. “They had to have searched under every rock in the city.”
“Oh please, you’re telling me Frey isn’t a queen? Look at him. Stanislavski couldn’t make anybody that method.”
This earned a burst of laughter from the table, and the conversation dissipated into other topics for a while as the drinks arrived. Louis prodded the little iceberg in his glass with a finger, letting the words become a formless tide that peaked and dropped with the emotion in the room. When his drink was flat and warm (too soon if not for all the bodies), the talk came round again.
“My friend in Manhattan—”
“Oh your ‘friend,’ that didn’t last long.”
“—he told me they had a hell of a time getting it run. Banged on every producer’s door in the city just to get a stage. And it’s still. Running.” The first man, dark haired with an impressive mustache, banged the table for emphasis.
His friend, heavyset by the standard of the room and waving a cigarette, rolled his eyes again. “All that just to put on a pack of screaming nellies for the longest two hours of my life. If that’s what they think my life’s like it’s a wonder I haven’t slit my wrists.”
“You’re telling me right now you haven’t met at least one Michael walking around this city,” the first one shot back with withering skepticism.
“Yes, and I ran as fast as I could in the other direction—”
“Alright, alright,” Rick held up his hands, then beckoned. “Help us out here.”
Louis froze at the prospect of participation; he was meant to be an audience, invisible and unacknowledged. “You’re asking if I liked the film?” he asked slowly, feeling it out.
“You saw it, right? We saw you,” the smoker said with heavy implication. As though there were some possibility that Louis might disclaim himself, here of all places. “So what’d you think?”
“It felt a bit—different than the stage version. I think that perhaps the camera did it no favors,” he said cautiously, aware that he had difficulty articulating his thoughts about film in English; Cahiers du Cinéma had shaped his views and vocabulary alike.
“So you didn’t like it, either,” the man said as though he’d scored a point.
“It’s not. So simple. Stage and film are very different. I saw both.” Louis frowned. “I’m not certain that one is meant to like such a film. But it does articulate a certain experience, and it holds a morbid fascination, does it not?”
“Morbid because we ‘nellies’ are morbid?” Rick asked, holding up a limp and affected wrist. “What with our endless self-loathing and all.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” said the peacemaker. “I’m Mark, by the way. And the too-good-for-it butch, here, is Dave.”
(They all shortened their names, these days.)
“Then I suppose I must be Lou,” he said with an ill-fit smile. “And I don’t mind assholes. They liven up any conversation, don’t they?”
“Liven up a lot more than that, if you give me a chance,” Rick said to snorts of laughter. Imagine, just saying that—
“But I think, with the play, it’s in the suspense of seeing the dinner party destroyed, made honest; we fear and desire to see what’s underneath this ritual. The film…” here he paused and pursed his lips, oddly aware of how the men were all looking his way now. “I’m not sure.”
“If you saw it live, what are you doing here?” Rick asked. “I never met a Manhattan queen who wasn’t too good for anyplace else.”
“I moved,” Louis answered simply. “I’m familiar with the process.”
“You don’t say, Miss DuBois.” When he saw Louis drop his head, Dave recanted. “Most of us aren’t from here anyway. Fruits and nuts; nothing new there. I’m asking why.”
“The play, I suppose.” It wasn’t all so cut and dried as that. He’d traveled the coast up and down for decades since leaving Armand and Lestat in New Orleans, but as the years passed a sense of ease had started to pervade the very water. Europe was Armand’s still, even if he wasn’t there. It was where Claudia had gone to rest. California had felt like a bolt from the blue.
“Oh god, she had an awakening.” Mark put his hand to his chest, mouth open in exaggerated shock. “You’re what, twenty-two? You’d never thought before?”
“Older than that.” Louis felt like Lugosi, though he wore a cardigan rather than waistcoat and cape.
“That face and good genes, kill me,” Rick groaned.
“My apologies.”
“I’ll forgive you if you back me up.” Rick leaned over to pat his shoulder, not knowing how close his other request was. “So, which of you was up there?”
Louis looked down at his drink, his prop, unsure how to put it into words. Where even to begin. It felt rather like confession, and that he hadn’t done in a very long time. “I had a friend,” (he chose the word deliberately for them, though he’d never have counted it for truth. Had he ever had friends?) “He adored company. I would have liked for him to have seen it…”
He’d attended by chance, the ticket plucked from the pocket of a young man going cold in his arms. He’d sat alone, uneasy with the crackling energy. They’d always had their own private box at the opera, and the cinemas were almost orderly in their social construct of privacy. The little theater had bustled with talk and eyes not quite meeting. So many men.
“That’s a big past tense, there,” Mark said oh-so-gently, appropriate to his rôle.
“It is.” So simple, to say that, and his tongue for some reason longed to wag more—to describe that rotted hovel, the raving dream-wandering husk he’d seen and who hadn’t seen him—but no. “He was my past. I hadn’t given thought, really, to a future. But—if one doesn’t, as they say, off oneself at the end as is customary… What is there?” He shrugged and raised his glass in an affectedly effete manner, just-so and bashfully aware of his own absurdity.
This theater had been full, too, but the energy had differed. The men were almost angry, and chattered over the dialogue as never happened with live actors; courtesy owed nothing to holographs on a screen. They’d laughed loudly, sometimes at the right moments and sometimes—not.
Sometimes at points Louis’d felt held no humor at all, nor irony.
Dave’s eyes were narrowed, considering.
“So that’s it? You just… had a ‘friend’… and now you’re here? And figured you’d sit through all that again? Sounds like masochism to me.”
“Well then, I guess Crowley’s right, isn’t he?” Rick gestured at Louis. “Exhibit A.”
“N’est pas—It’s not masochism,” he said with difficulty, not entirely sure why the denial stuck so in his craw. “I don’t… What I am does not shame me. It’s what I do, and don’t do, and what I’ve allowed to happen, and that’s what Crowley and his men show so well. The little hurts of it all.”
“You really thought he did well?” Mark said, seemingly just to poke the conversation back to life. “I mean, God knows Rick’s right—we’ve all met a Michael or two—but having some bitch come in and read the room just to explain it all to the audience?”
“Haven’t you harbored a fantasy like that?” He watched their looks turn abashed-knowing. “It takes a kind of courage to reopen a wound. Most would rather let it fester than take that step.”
She had been braver than him in that way. Enough to cut away the dead limb when Louis had been prepared to sicken and die with it still clutched green-and-purple to his chest.
“It’s fiction, not reality.” Dave took a long drag.
“All the more reason it should be a fantasy!” Rick was back in it, the two of them feeding off one another without anyone else’s help. They argued, and yet there was a sense that after this they’d leave and agree to meet again, the hostility washed away like dust.
Thank you. Fuck you. Louis envied them.
Yes, he had always known what he was, no matter how he’d worked to live otherwise. He’d bedded women in life, short unsatisfying gasps that he’d put down to the seediness of the brothels he stumbled through and the weakness of his drink-addled body. He had been decades dead before it occurred to him to mourn.
Yes, they’d all met Michael. They sat across the table from him now, a tired Southern Catholic ghost as attuned to a cutting remark as to his own self-loathing. Watching in New York Louis had felt a thread bind tighter and tighter around—inside—his chest, eyes glued to the handsome young actor and his fair curls as the space between them shrank to nothing. He’d had terrible vertigo when the lights rose and all the eyes around him were dry.
(He should invest in a set of those dark glasses, the large ones, to cover his eyes. At worst, people would think he'd been smoking grass.)
"You're all right, you know," he said softly, and the three all turned to look at him with queer expressions. "You're right to avoid Michael when you see him. I'm glad if it doesn't speak to you. There's so much more to life than that. But for me, it was just—he didn't do it, at the end."
The actors hardly looked any older now; it had been only two years. But they'd been altered on the screen. Flatter, bigger, differently composed, and their movements and enunciation had felt contrived when translated.
Theater only worked, perhaps, from that certain delicate distance that allowed one to read the exaggeration as authenticity, the blind stare into the footlights as intimacy. An actor belonged to the Audience, not the individual viewer, no matter how moved one might be in the moment.
“Didn’t die,” Dave clarified, ceding the inch with unexpected grace.
“Yes.” He hadn’t killed, either, but it would do no good to say that here.
“Didn’t call, either.” Dave stubbed his cigarette.
“No. He simply… exists, in the burned wreckage of his own life.” How Michael must have wanted Donald to stop him, or perhaps Louis had only wanted that for him. He’d left that theater with an unbearable loneliness he hadn’t thought himself capable of anymore, a need he had sworn off on the banks of the Mississippi.
“And that’s the end? Bullshit.” Even Mark was shaking his head now.
“My friend would say that good drama inspires action through empathy.” Lestat had been so passionate on the subject.
“Oh, so he was an actor too.” Rick clapped him on the shoulder and nodded in sympathy.
“No, he—” but what was he to say? That Lestat had come from the abyss, made a brief flaming career of fabulous wealth and patronage using Louis’ money, and gone back to that same shadow? Even in eulogy, he knew nothing. “He didn’t like to talk about himself.”
“Not an actor then,” Dave quipped.
It was odd how willing they were to accept him among them, give hearing to his little opinions and filtered sorrows; but then, that had been life, too, hadn't it? Fitting smoothly, so long as all the truth stayed concealed. Different truths, but the same distance.
"I still think the back half's a mess," Mark said. "Harold's hardly even a character."
"Not a character, honey," Rick said. "He's a role. You know those bitches fought over who got to play Joan Crawford."
"He did make a meal of it," Louis admitted. "But… he said he'd call tomorrow."
"They all say that, don't they? I'll bet your friend did." A tiny fleck of beer foam sat on Rick's mustache. "And then out the door with the trade. Nice."
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day…
Louis thought of those pockmarks that were apparently such a shame. They'd hardly been visible at all onstage, but the camera drew closer and made them real in a way he wasn't sure was—right. He wondered what the playwright thought of it; whether the scars and the beauty were supposed to exist outside the words.
“Maybe he did.” Mark was watching him closely as his friends fell deeper in their cups. “Maybe he called and they talked about it.”
“Or maybe they pretended nothing ever happened.” Rick’s voice was laced with his own private bitterness. Christ, was I drunk.
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Louis longed for another drink, just to enjoy the coolness against his fingers. “It could always change. We fear that it won’t. And we fear that it will, more so.”
“Some of us are tired of settling for survival. Some of us want to live!” Dave banged his fist against the table; the crowd was thick enough now that the sound was dampened by the din. He tossed back the rest of his drink. “I’m too old to be anything but a disorderly queer bastard.”
“You’re twenty-seven,” Rick said.
“Might as well be fifty. Might as well be dead.”
“Don’t say that.” Louis was overcome with tenderness for these three men and the glow of their spirits. “Your lives are precious things.”
“A two-beer… philosopher.” Mark smiled.
“I never could keep my head, I suppose.”
“But could you give it?” Dave said, apparently finding yet another innuendo to bat about in Louis’ speech. It was—friendly, despite all the man’s puffed hostility.
Louis shook his head.
“Twenty-seven…” he mused. “I’m older than you are. More tired. Deader.” He held his cheap glass up for the pleasure of seeing the ambered light, the levels and refractions within the ice, the strings of water melting out into the alcohol and disturbing the buoyancy. No fireplace, here, in which to throw it. No flames to consume. “Here’s to you turning fifty. All of you.”
The men looked at one another uneasily, sensing his determined melancholy if not the source of it, but Mark raised his beer and the others followed suit regardless. Louis wondered whether it was bad luck that he couldn’t complete the toast.
Foolish superstition.
He left their company not long after, undeserving of the very pantomime camaraderie he had come for. He was falling into the same habits as his maker, inserting himself into mortal company to leech the warmth from their voices rather than their veins. A specter of death sitting among them, unawares; that’s how Lestat would have put it, and crowed at the irony. He’d so relished what he was; the mere suggestion that Louis sat among them to pretend he could hold that warmth as well would have sent him into a rage.
Louis and Armand had moved through the world in an aura of untouchable light; they’d consumed every painting and play across Europe with an insatiable voracity, and yet the hands that produced them seemed of secondary interest at best. Armand had followed him willingly, now and again, to a dimly-lit cafe to listen to revolutionaries and scholars build sandcastles, but never stayed for long; it had only made sense for Louis to continue going by himself.
And here he was, alone. Sitting silent in a mortal theater and talking to its viewers afterward in the warmth of their little shelter. Even if he revealed himself, he suspected they would consider him the lesser threat.
Old story. Old wound. Old world, guttering out with the footlights; melting under the house lights.