“Something cracks in your life. You are finished. The world cracks.”
                                  —Nicholas Mosley

1.

I always like to read what’s playing at the revival houses even when I’m out of town. That’s how I noticed that The Man Who Wouldn’t Die, directed by Herbert I. Leeds, my mother’s brother, was playing at Theater 80 St. Marks. I had never seen any of his films. I tore out the notice. When I got back to the city I called the theater. The man at St. Marks had seen this and one other film by Herbert I. Leeds from the Mike Shayne series, but The Man was the best.

2

The director of The Man Who Wouldn’t Die died by his own hand in the spring of 1954. He was 44 years old.

3

When I pass the apartment where I lived as a child I also pass the Blackstone Hotel, a name whose dark syllables are forever branded on my brain because that is where he shot himself in the chest on May 15th, his stepmother’s birthday.

In my one strong memory of him we were waiting for a table at a restaurant called Tappan Hill, in a place just north of the city called Tappan Hill.  We are sprawled on an immense lawn which sloped down toward a pond.  My uncle, in his bulky tweed sportscoat (why was he dressed so warmly on a warm afternoon?), is showing me how to identify a four-leaf clover. We never found one, but he discounted many of the three leaved ones I plucked with sublime, magisterial patience and tranquillity (qualities my grandfather and mother never displayed). “I’ve got one!” I’d shout and place it in his palm. He’d squint and peel back the petals and say “Look—one . . . two . . . three . . . that’s all.” You have to look long and long at things if you want to see what they really are, he was urging me, the point is to be clear and not hide behind imposture. There is an economy in nature. Anyone can try to push a three-leaf-clover as a four, but it is better to own up to what you’ve got and what you haven’t got. Why embellish, when you can go on looking . . . ? He made me want to search, and not be satisfied with approximations, or things that others might take for the truth because they weren’t interested enough in these details. I could sense he was memorizing my movements, that this was the first time he had ever really payed willing attention to me. (He had a daughter, just a year younger than myself, in a family obsessed with boys. My grandfather, whose nickname was “Tarzan,” called me—and my uncle—”boy.”) The gnats and flies, bees and wasps, danced around our heads. He didn’t swat them away. He liked insects! It must have been the fall before he died. I had just turned five the previous winter. If it had been a year earlier I doubt I would remember the scene so vividly.

.  .  .

     “But his life was—tragic.”
     “That’s right.”
     “Aristotle says the first requirement for tragedy is a fall from a high place...”
     “Your father did that. Not Bert. He did himself in in a squalid hotel room. He did himself in good all right. And I was there to pick up the pieces. And gather up the needles. Discreetly.”
     “Heroin?”
     “Probably morphine.”
     “Any idea why?”
     “I guess he thought he had no future. Things weren’t great between him and Evelyn. He couldn’t find work after the warand had to live on handouts from his father.”
“Evelyn was so pretty.”
“She had a pretty face. But she had piano legs.”

Piano legs. I wish my mother hadn’t said the phrase. Prior to hearing “piano legs” I had seen Evelyn as a beautiful and decorous woman, not as a creature maimed by imperfect—legs. Why should the size of her legs be so important? Even as a child, it disturbed me to break women up into component parts.

Now when my aunt sat across from me on her impeccable beige sofa it was as if her calves had detached themselves from her knees and sat there quietly, stolidly, with the rest of her body which, come to think of it, was strangely immobile. When she crossed her legs, or rose to fix someone a drink, the piano legs remained beside the sofa—in their high-heeled shoes. They had eyes and a mouth, like dolls.

I saw half a dozen Charlie Chan films, some with Sidney Toler, for rent at the Video Store in Manchester last week. I couldn’t help wondering why, since they seemed to have almost the whole series, it had to be City in Darkness that was missing.

  “Sure, we have City in Darkness, both for sale and for rent,” says the man at Eddie Brandt’s. “Anything else I can do for you?”

It’s a peculiar twist of this project that only the films I’m least interested in, like this and other sequels, are easy to find.

  “I’m looking for anything by Herbert Leeds.”
  “What are some of the names of the films?”
  “The Arizona Wildcat . . .”
  “I think we have that. Tell me his name again.” “Herbert Leeds.”

He starts to rattle off the names of the films: he must have brought his name up on the computer.

  “Island in the Sky . . . . Now that’s really hard to find.”
  “Really? I borrowed a print of that from William Everson.”
  “You saw Island in the Sky?”
Now I’m going to hear that this film is well known to cultists? Why wouldn’t Everson have told me that?

  “It was good.”
  “I’ll bet. It’s with John Wayne, right?”
  “John Wayne?”
  “No. This is with Gloria Stuart and Michael Whalen.”
  “Oh. Must be The Island in the Sky. But we have the Ride, Vaquero.” 

I can’t believe my luck.

“Great!” “With Robert Taylor, right?”
“No, Cesar Romero. And it’s Ride On, Vaquero.”
“Oh yeah we have Ride, Vaquero. We don’t rent it, we lend it free under the counter if you rent another film.”
“Maybe I should see it anyway,” given, I think, how I’m using some of these titles; my search for correspondences.
“No problem. We have Bunco Squad too, free.” “Send it.”
“And The Return of the Cisko Kid. That’s also free.”
“And a bunch of Mike Shayne films. But those are all rentals.”

me “Michael.” And it gave her so much pleasure to say that name with its lift in the vowel and extra syllable that I was reluctant to correct her. Perhaps she was thinking of

Mike Shayne
private detective

(In another Leeds film, Just Off Broadway, Mike Shayne is forced to share a hotel room with a fellow juror who asks, "Can I call you . . . Michael?")

Sitting at Tatiana's bedside shortly before she died, I noted a pile of True Detective's on the dresser. "You should read them," she said. "Bert always read the crime magazines. He was always looking for stories." (Everything with the very old and the very young is always.  My little boy will even turn the word against itself and reward into punishment when he'll say, in protest, "well you always want to buy me an ice cream cone.")  Her faint smile was so beneficent when she said Bert's name I still find it hard to believe that she could have willfully wronged him.  How Bert took her presence in his father's life, and as a possibly inadequate replacement for the mother he never had, is another matter.