A Graveyard for Lunatics

?Do you really expect me to open my best wine for someone like you??

I swallowed hard and nodded.

He hauled off and swung his fist toward the ceiling as if to pound me into the floor. Then the fist came down, delicately, and opened a lid on a cabinet to pull out a bottle.

Gorton, 1938.

He worked the corkscrew, gritting his teeth and eying me. ?I shall watch every sip,? he growled. ?If you betray, by the merest expression, that you don?t appreciate?ssst!?

He pulled the cork beautifully and set the bottle down to breathe.

?Now,? he sighed, ?though the film is twice dead, let?s see how the boy wonder has done!? He sank into the chair and rifHed my new pages. ?Let me read your unbearable text. Though why we should pretend we will ever return to the slaughterhouse, God knows!? He shut his left eye and let his right eye, behind the bright glass, shift, and shift again. Finished, he threw the pages to the floor and nodded, angrily, for Maggie to pick them up. He watched her face, meanwhile pouring the wine. ?Well!?? he cried, impatiently.

Maggie put the pages in her lap and laid her hands on them, as if they were gospel.

?I could weep. And? I am.?

?Cut the comedy!? Fritz gulped his wine, then stopped, angry at me for making him drink so quickly. ?You couldn?t have written that in a few hours!?

?Sorry,? I apologized, sheepishly. ?Only the fast stuff is good. Slow down, you think what you?re doing and it gets bad.?

?Thinking is fatal, is it?? demanded Fritz. ?What, do you sit on your brain while you type??

?I dunno. Hey, this isn?t bad wine.?

?Not bad!? Fritz raged at the ceiling. ?A 1938 Gorton and he says not bad! Better than all those damn candy bars I see you chewing around the studio. Better than all the women in the world. Almost.?

?This wine,? I said quickly, ?is almost as good as your films.?

?Excellent.? Fritz, shot through his ego, smiled. ?You could almost be Hungarian.?

Fritz refilled my glass and gave back my medal of honor, his monocle.

?Young wine expert, why else did you come??

The time was right. ?Fritz,? I said, ?on October 31st, 1934, you directed, photographed, and cut a film titled Wild Party.?

Fritz was lying back in his chair, with his legs straight out, the wine glass in his right hand. His left hand crawled up toward the pocket where his monocle should have been.

Fritz?s mouth opened lazily, coolly. ?Again??

?Halloween night, 1934??

?More.? Fritz, eyes shut, held out his glass.

I poured.

?If you spill I?ll throw you down the stairs.? Fritz?s face was pointed at the ceiling. As he felt the weight of the wine in the glass, he nodded and I pulled away to refill my own.

?Where,? Fritz?s mouth worked as if it were separate from the rest of his impassive face, ?did you hear of such a dumb film with a stupid title??

?It was shot with no film in the camera. You directed it for maybe two hours. Shall I tell you the actors that night??

Fritz opened one eye and tried to focus across the room without his monocle.

?Constance Rattigan,? I recited, ?J. C., Doc Phillips, Manny Leiber, Stanislau Groc, and Arbuthnot, Sloane, and his wife, Emily Sloane.?

?God damn, that?s quite a cast,? said Fritz.

?Want to tell me why??

Fritz sat up slowly, cursed, drank his wine, then sat hunched over the glass, looking in it for a long while. Then he blinked and said:

?So at last I get to tell. I?ve been waiting to vomit all these years. Well? someone had to direct. There was no script. Total madness. I was brought in at the last moment.?

?How much,? I said, ?did you improvise??

?Most, no, all of it,? said Fritz. ?There were bodies all over. Well, not bodies. People and lots of blood. I had my camera along for the night, you know, a party like that and you like to catch people offguard, at least I did. The first part of the evening was fine. People screaming and running back and forth through the studio and through the tunnel and dancing in the graveyard with a jazz band. It was wild, all right, and terrific. Until it got out of hand. The accident, that is. By then, you?re right, there was no film in my 16-millimeter camera. So I gave orders. Run here. Run there. Don?t call the police. Get the cars. Stuff the poorbox.?

?I guessed at that.?

?Shut up! The poor bastard priest, like the lady, was going nuts. The studio always kept lots of cash on hand for emergencies. We loaded the baptismal font like a Thanksgiving feast, right in front of the priest. I never knew, that night, if he even saw what we did, he was in such shock. I ordered the Sloane