A Graveyard for Lunatics

I swiveled my head to look at him.

?You know J. C. well??

?The muscatel Messiah? I made him! As I made others? eyebrows and bosoms, why not Christ?s hands! So I pared the extra flesh to make his fingers seem delicate: the hands of a Saviour. Why not? Is not religion a joke? People think they are saved. We know they?re not. But the crown-of-thorns touch, the stigmata!? Groc shut his eyes as he almost drove into a telephone pole, swerved and stopped.

?I guessed you had done that,? I said, at last.

?If you act Christ, be Him! I told J. C. I will make you spike marks to show at Renaissance exhibitions! I will sew you the stigmata of Masaccio, da Vinci, Michelangelo! From the Pieta?s marble flesh! And, as you?ve seen, on special nights??

??the stigmata bleed.?

I knocked the car door wide. ?I think I?ll walk the rest of the way.?

?No, no,? Groc apologized, laughing shrilly. ?I need you. What an irony! To get me out the front gate, later. Go talk to Botwin, then we run like hell.?

I held the door half open, undecided. Groc seemed in such a joyful panic, hilarious to the point of hysteria, I could only shut the door. Groc drove on.

?Ask, ask,? said Groc.

?Okay,? I tried. ?What about all those faces you made beautiful??

Groc pedaled the gas.

?They?ll last forever, I told them, and the fools believed. Anyway, I am retiring, if I can get out the front gate. I have bought passage on a round-the-world cruise tomorrow. After thirty years my laughs have turned to snake spit. Manny Leiber? Will die any day. Doc? Did you know? He?s gone.?

?Where??

?Who knows?? But Groc?s eyes slid north toward the studio graveyard wall. ?Excommunicated??

We drove. Groc nodded ahead. ?Now Maggie Botwin I like. She?s a perfectionist surgeon, like me.?

?She doesn?t sound like you.?

?If she ever did, she?d die. And you? Well, disillusionment takes time. You?ll be seventy before you find you?ve crossed minefields yelling to an idiot troop, this way! Your films will be forgotten.?

?No,? I said.

Groc glanced over at my set chin and stubborn upper lip.

?No,? he admitted. ?You have the look of the true sainted fool. Not your films.?

We rounded another corner and I nodded to the carpenters, the cleaners, and painters: ?Who ordered all this work??

?Manny, of course.?

?Who ordered Manny? Who really gives orders here? Someone behind a mirror? Someone inside a wall??

Groc braked the car swiftly and looked ahead. I could see the stitch marks around his ears, nice and clear.

?It can?t be answered.?

?No?? I said. ?I look around, what do I see? A studio, in the midst of production on eight films. One a huge one, our Jesus epic, with two more days of shooting to go. And suddenly, on a whim, someone says: Slam the doors. And the crazed painting and cleaning happens. It?s madness to shut a studio with a budget that runs at least ninety to a hundred thousand dollars a day. What gives??

?What?? said Groc, quietly.

?Well, I see Doc and he?s a jellyfish, poisonous, but no spine. I look at Manny and his behind is just right for highchairs. You? There?s a mask behind your mask and another under that. None of you have the dynamite kegs or the electric pump plunger to knock the whole damn studio down. Yet down it goes. I see a studio as big as a white whale. Harpoons fly. So there?s got to be a real maniac captain.?

?Tell me, then,? Groc said, ?Who is Ahab??

?A dead man standing on a ladder in the graveyard, looking over, giving orders. And you all run,? I said.

Groc blinked three slow iguana-lizard blinks of his great dark eyes.

?Not me,? he said, smiling.

?No? Why not??

?Because, you damned fool.? Groc beamed, looking at the sky. ?Think! There are only two geniuses smart enough to have manufactured that dead man of yours on that ladder in the rain to look over the wall and stop people?s hearts!? And here Groc was taken with a paroxysm of laughter that almost killed. ?Who could model a face like that!?

?Roy Holdstrom!?

?Yes! And?!?

?Lenin?s?? I stammered??Lenin?s makeup man??

Stanislau Groc turned the full light of his smile on me. -