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Sleights of Hand

Conjunctions, Vol. 65

Conjunctions

Tactics of the Wraith

James Morrow

I had never intended to spend Cinco de Mayo of 1962 cooped up in a seedy little Mexico City screening room watching low-budget horror movies with titles like El Ataúd del Vampiro and La Maldición de la Momia Azteca, but back then my life wasn't my own. Ever since my literary career fell apart, my finances had been keyed to the whims of my older siblings: Oswald Belasco, the hack Hollywood producer-director, and Waldo Belasco, the hack Hollywood writer-producer. If the twins told me, "Get thee to Tenochtitlán, little brother," then that's where I would go.

Mine was a commonplace sort of desperation. Carnage Pastorale, my first novel, received some marvelous reviews, The New York Times calling it "the hypnotic odyssey that On the Road wanted to be." But you can't eat appreciation, and when only a thousand or so determined Lucius Belasco readers appeared in the bookstores, and the public librarians balked at all the fucking, and the paperback deal collapsed, and my editor at Viking told my long-suffering agent, Yvonne, "I think we're going to pass on Lucius's new one," I could see the writing on the wall, even as I admitted to myself that the original Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin narrative, Belshazzar's feast, was considerably more compelling than my second novel, Fatal Laughter. So when Oswald and Waldo offered me a modest salary to leave New York City, drive my VW Beetle to California, and become their official water carrier, wood chopper, and barge toter, I considered myself a lucky man.

No sooner had I landed in Los Angeles than my brothers handed me a bus ticket to Tijuana and points south. They expected me to spend three days as their official emissary to Cinematográfica Calderón and Producciones Agrasánchez, the Mexican equivalents of American International, Allied Artists, and other cheapjack studios north of the border. When I bristled, they offered me a perk. After mailing them my viewer's reports on the latest breakthroughs in el cine de terror méxicano, I could spend two unpaid days vacationing in Cuernavaca.

So there I sat — a notebook in my hand, an empanada on my lap, a smoldering Chesterfield parked in the ashtray — sweating and drinking Dos Equis and coming to terms with The Curse of the Aztec Mummy. By stretching my high-school Spanish to the limit, I managed to puzzle out the plot, as I'd done earlier that day with the three-picture La Bruja cycle, none of which increased my pulse rate, and the two Vampiro pictures, both of which I enjoyed with reservations. Inevitably my mind drifted — this wasn't Citizen Kane or even Kiss Me Deadly — washing up on anxiety's beach and then surrendering to the tide and then coming ashore again. Gloria and I were experimenting with a trial separation. After I accepted the offer from my brothers, she'd elected to stay behind in Manhattan, pursuing her playwriting career (she was fast becoming the toast of Off-Off-Broadway), and she made it clear that divorce was far more likely than détente. When I invited her to join my Mexican adventure, she replied, rationally enough, "Three days of zombies and tamales? Sorry, Lucius, I'm not in the mood."

"You could go shopping," I said.

"I can go shopping in New York," she said.

"You could tinker with your latest play. The atmosphere down there is conducive to creativity, very bohemian."

"I've heard the atmosphere is mostly hot," said Gloria. "Tell me, Lucius, are you prepared to pay for my plane fare?"

"Not exactly."

"Send me a postcard."

Sic transit Gloria mundi.

I had to admit my brothers knew what they were doing with this Mexico scheme. For the past five years they'd been bankrolling their own ridiculous pictures by importing cheesy melodramas from other countries, chopping out the slow parts, dubbing them into English, and distributing them through the drive-in and grindhouse circuits, making sure the posters and lobby cards never emphasized the movies' foreign provenance. The twins had done well with El Barón del Terror, which they'd marketed as A Bucket of Brains, and even better with Misterios de Ultratumba, which became The Black Pit of Doctor M, but to find those gems Oswald and Waldo had to sift through twenty or so 16mm prints of recent 35mm offerings from Calderón and Agrasánchez, the black-and-white images flickering across a bedsheet tacked to the far wall of their claustrophobic Glendale office. (They refused to rent a 35mm screening room and pay a projectionist union wages, and the display on their Moviola editing machine was so small it precluded a fair evaluation of a finished picture's mise-en-scène.) Eventually they realized that instead of having Calderón or Agrasánchez make dupes, crate them up, and ship them north, it would be more economical to dispatch a scout to Mexico and have him spend several days assessing 35mm release prints on the spot.

I didn't exactly hate this assignment. The films I saw on Cinco de Mayo featured skilled actors, crisp film noir cinematography, and directorial flourishes executed in homage to those endearing Universal monster movies of the thirties and forties. Which is not to say the stuff Calderón and Agrasánchez cranked out was essentially derivative. Mexico had its own homegrown spooks — the Aztec Mummy, the Crying Woman, the Volcano Demon, the Headless Conquistador, the Were-Jaguar of Zacatecas, the Succubus of Xochimilco — and the film industry deployed them with an impressive mixture of national pride and commercial savvy.

The Curse of the Aztec Mummy boasted all the virtues of its predecessor, including a snappy pace and a truly scary monster, so when the last reel was over I decided to quit while I was ahead. As the tail leader went flapping about on the take-up reel, I scribbled down my immediate reaction, "Let's take a chance on this one," then told Javier, the nonunion projectionist, that tomorrow morning he could sleep an hour later than usual. All he had to do was mount reels one and two of El Castillo de los Muertos on his pair of cantankerous old Philips FP3s. I knew how to switch on the projectors and focus the lenses, but if I threaded the reels myself the machines would probably eat them alive.

After the first forty minutes of El Castillo de los Muertos were ready to run, I said goodbye to Javier, then ventured into the clotted heat of the incipient evening. My plan was to walk back to my room, subject myself to a cold shower — the Hotel Amigable provided no other kind — then take a bus to the Centro Histórico, where I would drink more alcohol and observe the dancers and mariachi bands celebrating the holiday. I'd heard that the festivities were more colorful in the nearby states of Puebla and Veracruz — the occasion for the merriment being the Battle of Puebla, in which General Seguín had routed a superior French force on May 5, 1862 — but this was Mexico City, after all, where revelry and tequila need never go looking for sponsors.

The rectilinear route to the Hotel Amigable, along Avenida Repúblicas to Calle Miravalle and from there to Camino Egipto, took me through a district in no danger of ever becoming a tourist trap. Prostitutes struck poses on the street corners. Beggars lolled in the doorways. Ranchera songs blared from phonographs perched on windowsills. Redolent of hookers' perfume mixed with a touch of sewage, the side alleys sheltered sleeping drunks.

In anticipation of the next subtropical drizzle, a few of these insensate bums had wrapped themselves in laminated movie posters. As it happened, four such protective advertisements hawked Spanish-dubbed versions of films made by Oswald and Waldo's company, Producers and Artists Releasing Corporation, PARC: initials that, reversed, identified the category to which, by my brothers' own admission, these efforts belonged. (Believe it or not, throughout PARC Pictures' nineteen-year existence, from 1955 to 1974, no journalist or movie critic ever noticed the joke.) I decided not to tell the twins where the Mexican versions of their lovingly crafted twenty-seven-inch-by-forty-one-inch one-sheets had ended up — I'm talking about posters for Squidicus (El Terrible Gigante de los Mares), The Lava Monster (El Monstruo del Volcán), Revenge of the Vampire Women (La Venganza de las Lobas), and Earth vs. the Death Robots (La Tierra contra los Automatas de la Muerte) — since the derelicts had most likely stolen them from the theaters before the pictures had finished their runs, though otherwise Oswald and Waldo would probably have delighted in all this impromptu outdoor advertising.

Upon arriving at the hotel, I entered my suffocating room, changed out of my PARC Pictures ambassadorial attire — button-down shirt, black tie, yellow blazer — and submitted myself as planned to a bracing bout of hypothermia. I pulled on jeans and a black T-shirt (my Jack Kerouac look), then descended to the lobby, ready for a night on the town. As I approached the front door, the clerk handed me an envelope bearing the famous logo of Western Union. The telegram from my brothers was more than a little outrageous, but I was hardly in a position to defy them.

SOMETHING BIG BREWING STOP NEED YOU HERE STOP TAKE BUS TO L.A. AFTER SCREENING LAST TACO FLICK STOP SORRY NO CUERNAVACA VACATION STOP OSWALDO

Something big brewing. No doubt they were alluding to the latest entry in the rash of publicity gimmicks for which PARC Pictures was famous. Who could forget the radio-controlled vinyl bat that flew over the patrons' heads in the final reel of Terror of the Undead? Or the gouts of stage blood dripping from the ceiling and onto the proscenium at the end of Museum of Abominations? My brothers had devised their most outlandish stunt for Abyss of the Devil-Worms, "presented in the magic of Squirm-O-Rama," which meant that whenever a character tumbled into a worm-infested well or culvert or crater, a third of the audience would experience creepy vibrations, their seats having been connected to little electric motors. I wondered what stratagem the boys had contrived for their impending release, Psychotic Eyeballs from Outer Space. Would each patron receive a toy gun and a supply of foam-rubber darts with which to attack the cyclopean monsters in the action-packed climax?

So I had three nights to paint la ciudad red, after which I would again be dancing attendance on the twins. I intended to waste my time astutely. As long as my cash held out, I would down the finest tequila, practice the art of gluttony, buy some under-the-counter weed at a cigar store, and perhaps even venture into the Zona Rosa and attend a striptease show at the Palacio de los Pechos, an entertainment that Javier the projectionist recommended even though the owner "wasn't doing so good meeting the rent." It occurred to me that this failing burlesque house could use the Oswald and Waldo touch. Presented with the challenge of saving the place, how might my brothers respond? Would they resurrect the moribund medium of 3-D movies, projecting stereoscopic tits on the walls while the onstage performers disrobed? When Belasco Brothers showmanship was in its heyday, everybody scorned it, but now that such endearing hokum has vanished from the cultural landscape, I almost miss it.

Oswald and Waldo called it the Corridor of Horrors, twenty paces down a threadbare carpet that, starting in the foyer of the Pico Building in Glendale, took visitors past a cavalcade of framed posters and deposited them in the shabby offices of PARC Pictures. Doing my best to avoid imagining what tedious and humiliating mission my brothers had devised for me, I ran the gamut from Squidicus to Gill-Women of Venus to I Was a Teenage Necrophile to Vampire Beach to Ghouls on the Loose to The Beast from the Deep to Reform School Werewolves until at last I reached the twins' sanctum sanctorum. Flanked by my brothers and cloaked in a yellow silk scarf, a rectangular object lay propped against the desk — a dry-mounted one-sheet, I assumed, waiting to be unveiled. An ancient floor fan oscillated in the far corner, stirring a tentative breeze that caused the scarf to undulate like a specter's shroud.

"My reports from the screening room," I said, handing a manila envelope to Oswald's outspoken secretary, Merle Dexter. "I was hoping to include some snapshots from Cuernavaca" — I inflicted a petulant grin on Waldo — "but it was closed for repairs."

"If things go according to plan," said Oswald, rubbing a hand lasciviously across the top edge of the occluded one-sheet, "we'll soon be out of the taco-flicks game."

"Stop calling them that," said Merle.

"In fact, we'll be forsaking drive-in trash entirely," Oswald continued. "From now on, PARC Pictures makes only quality horror films."

"Maybe we should change our name," said Merle. "How about Distributors League of Glendale? Spell it backward and you get GOLD."

"DLOG Pictures?" said Waldo, taking a drag on his Raleigh. "That's not even pronounceable."

"You just did," said Merle.

Oswald asked me, "I don't suppose you read Daily Variety?"

"Only Daily Racing Form. I've got a hundred bucks on a mudder called Teenage Necrophile running at Hialeah tomorrow."

"There's a new kind of monster movie out there, little brother, and they're all operating in the boffo zone," said Oswald, puffing on his Lucky Strike. "Ever hear of Hammer Films? English outfit. Their first Gothic extravaganza, The Curse of Frankenstein, made back its production costs seventy times over, seventy times, and then they did Horror of Dracula, more actors in waistcoats, plus blood and bodices, another hit. On our side of the pond, meanwhile, A.I.P. has been investing in an Edgar Allan Poe cycle cooked up by dear old Roger Corman. House of Usher hit pay dirt, and so did The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Premature Burial is up next."

"Here's a little quiz for you," said Waldo. "What three elements do we find in Hammer movies and the Poe adaptations that we've never tried at PARC Pictures?"

"Good writing, competent acting, and decent musical scores?" I suggested.

Merle giggled and put a hand to her mouth.

"Period settings, color cinematography, and literary cachet," said Waldo.

"By which you mean cheap literary cachet, right?" I said. "Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker are in the public domain, and so is our friend Mr. Poe."

Oswald said, "Cheap cachet, public domain, exactly — just like the oeuvre of a nineteenth-century Mexican writer named Carlos Ibarra Rojo, whose legendary unpublished horror stories are about to become a series of upmarket Pathécolor chillers from PARC Pictures!"

"Carlos who?" I asked.

"Ibarra Rojo."

"Never heard of him. May I assume he was known only to a small coterie?"

"A very small coterie," said Waldo. "Actually, the main reason you've never heard of him is that he never existed," said Oswald. "We invented him."

"Won't the public know that?" I said.

"The public doesn't know shit, Lucius. Behold!"

In an unbroken flourish my elder brother seized the yellow scarf and pulled it free of the one-sheet, which touted a movie called The Asylum of Doctor Varglom. Of course, the potboiler in question didn't exist yet. Like most of their fellow moguls, Oswald and Waldo routinely commissioned posters for films that were still in preproduction. Even when the iconography was wildly at odds with the content of the final script, it still made sense to run such artwork in Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, as a way to appropriate the cinematic territory in question and maybe generate some word-of-mouth interest. The Doctor Varglom one-sheet featured a color portrait of the ubiquitous Vincent Price superimposed over a fortress-like edifice rising from a dark mountain. My eye gravitated to the tagline, emblazoned across the top of the poster in ninety-point red type, and suddenly I appreciated the literary-cachet component of my brothers' scheme.

FROM THE DEMENTED PEN OF CARLOS IBARRA ROJO, MEXICO'S MASTER OF THE MACABRE ...

"Wouldn't it have been simpler to adapt a real writer?" I asked.

"We thought of the reality option," said Oswald, "but Lovecraft's executor wouldn't play ball, and we couldn't wrap our minds around Monk Lewis or Charles Brockden Brown. We needed a mystique — know what I mean? — a cult thing. We needed Mexico's master of the macabre."

"And you also got Vincent Price?" I asked. "I'm impressed."

Oswald said, "He loved the poster, and when we offered him some biographical nuggets about Ibarra Rojo —"

"In other words, you lied to him."

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Excerpted from Sleights of Hand by Bradford Morrow. Copyright © 2015 Conjunctions. Excerpted by permission of Conjunctions.
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