I INHALE ITS velvety smoke deep into my lungs. Wait. I have no recollection of lighting this cigarette. And there are NO SMOKING signs everywhere. Of course there can be no smoking in a film library. I know that. It would be obvious to the smallest of children, even those with no background in filmic studies or oxidation-reduction reactions. I stub the cigarette out, but only after I finish it and another one.
I take a break to add to my running list of words (and/or concepts) to be included in this or future monographs:
coterie
playful
insouciance
hausfrau
endemic
nervous onion
emotional tourniquet
Guy Debord
cultural priapism
societal zugzwang
Magister Ludi
impish neglect
Why can’t I focus on the task at hand? I need to get back to it.
dendroarchaeology
pilgarlic
Shooty Babitt
theybies
Leiomy Maldonado
2008 Passover margarine shortage
BACK IN MY St. Augustine rental, hard at work writing about the wardrobe design in Enchantment. I’m whimsically entitling this section “Return to Gender, a Dress Unsewn,” which is a play on the song “Return to Sender”—written by the great African American songwriters Scott and Blackwell—which contains the lyric: “Return to sender, address unknown.” I am not above being playful in my work.
A violent yelling comes from the apartment of my neighbor directly across the hall.
“Fucking fuck. You fucking little bastard. You sheeny kike little fucker. Do what I tell you to!”
I am taken aback. What poor Jewish soul is the recipient of this abuse? As much as I am not a Jew, I will not tolerate anti-Semitism in any of its many forms. Should I summon the police? Should I mind my business? Certainly a domestic squabble is not a cause for police intervention. And certainly we each of us lose our temper at times. I am new in town. Do I want a 911 call to be my introduction to the neighborhood? Furthermore, due to the general belief that I am a Jew myself, perhaps my interference will be seen as “a Jew protecting a Jew,” which many see as Jews sticking together and therefore frown upon. In that way, it might do more harm than good to the local Jewish community. I must carefully consider all of the potential repercussions.
Then there is a thwack. Then breaking glass. Then a thwack.
I cannot in good conscience not get involved. Remember Kitty Genovese. Or, more to the point, remember Harlan Ellison calling the do-nothing witnesses “thirty-six motherfuckers.” I don’t want to be called a motherfucker by Ellison, even though it turns out he was wrong and the Genovese witnesses were misrepresented and besides by all accounts Ellison was an obnoxious fellow. The point is everyone still thinks the witnesses were not misrepresented, that Ellison was right. And as we all know, perception is everything. Just ask anyone ever wrongly accused of child molestation. Do they ever get their lives back? The answer is no, and I say that as a sympathizer. To be clear, I say it as a sympathizer of the wrongfully accused, not of child molesters, and certainly not as a Nazi sympathizer, if that’s what you’re thinking for some reason. Although I will say that there is a witch hunt mentality in our society in regard to any and all perceived aberrations. We have become a country of politically correct sheep. I realize this view opens me up to criticism from others and, more important, even from myself. Then again, perhaps the definition of courage is forging ahead in the face of self-criticism. But let me take this opportunity to reiterate that I do not support any form of abuse of children, physical, emotional, or sexual. However, I would just add, as a matter of fact, that there is a popular misunderstanding of the term pedophilia. It specifically and only refers to sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Interest in young teens is hebephilia and interest in teens older than fifteen is ephebophilia. Look it up.
I decide I will wait for one more indication of my neighbor’s violent abuse and, if it happens, act.
“FUCK YOU, HEBREW!” he screams.
I grab my key, leave my room, knock on his door.
A very old man answers.
“Oh, it’s you,” he says, quietly.
“Excuse me, I could not help but hear some commotion through our common wall. Is everything all right with everyone over here?” I say, trying to look past him into the dark apartment. I am worried that perhaps someone is abusing this elderly Jew standing before me.
“I am alone,” he tells me. “I live alone. I have always lived alone. I am an old man,” he adds, as if it were germane, as if this were not obvious.
“I heard yelling, someone called a kike. Who were you talking to, if not someone? Or who was talking to you, if you were the one not talking to someone?”
“I was talking to you,” he says, enigmatically.
“First of all, I am not a Jew,” I say, reflexively, defensively. “And besides, I was not in your apartment when you were or someone was calling someone or you a one.”
“I know,” he says. “I’m glad we’re able to finally talk in a civilized manner.”
“I’m sure I do not know what you are saying,” I say. “You and I have never before met. In fact, this is my first visit to St. Augustine.”
“I am old and lonely,” he asserts once more, for no apparent reason.
Then it hits me: OK, here we go. Old man wants a friend. How many times have I found myself in this situation? There should be a psychiatric term for old people.
“I am old and lonely and I do not have much time,” he continues. “Perhaps I have wasted my life in isolation. As a young man, I did not have the confidence to speak to the ladies. Then the years passed, as they must, as they will. And here I am today, never having known the love of a woman, never even having had a friend. And here you are in the flesh, finally. Someone to talk to, someone with whom to share my life and work.”
“Listen,” I say, “I’m in Florida for a very short period and I have a lot of work to do while here. I understand and appreciate your loneliness. Certainly I am on the road to old age myself, as are we all, and, consequently, I just don’t have the time to take away from my writing.”
“Oh? What are you writing about?” he asks, an odd, obnoxious little smile on his odd and uniformly pale face.
“I’m researching a little-known silent movie shot in St. Augustine in 1914.”
“A Florida Enchantment,” he says. It is not a question.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“I was the little boy in it. Ingo Cutbirth. My name is in the credits.”
“There is no little boy in it,” I say, racking my brain to make certain. I am an expert on the film, of course, having viewed it several thousand times, not only forward, but backward, something I do with films that interest me. It allows me to look at the film as a formal construction rather than a story, of course, much like copying a face upside down so that one’s preconceptions of “nose” and “eyes” and et chetera don’t get in the way