Sometimes When It’s a Good Movie I Put on My Gray Suit

Lee’s back to work, with a new TV. Will he like what he sees?

I gave the Dope a request list a while back. He was being a punk about filling it.

“I ain’t your bloodhound,” Dope kept telling me. “Watch what we already got you.”

So I went on strike. No movies. The house has never been so clean. Grew some tomatoes. Re-read a bunch of John D. Macdonald paperbacks I found on a bookshelf in the basement. Went up to the local community theater and caught their production of Wait Until Dark, with the mayor as Harry Roat. I shined a pair of boots. It’s been a good summer.

Dope drove up the other afternoon just as I was walking up from the dock with some perch for dinner.

“Uncle,” he cried, but he brought a wink to it. He was carrying a milk crate full of DVDs and Blu-rays, and a big rectangular box he was about to drop until I grabbed it.

“Make us dinner and I’ll get you squared, Lee.” I set about the kitchen and by the time I brought our plates out, Dope had connected a TV three times as wide as the one I’d been working with. We ate fried fish and exchanged Hollywood stories for crime stories.

“Want to stick around for the movie tonight?” I asked as we finished up.

My looseleaf movie list had an asterisk next to Mickey One. You can’t find it anywhere. Starring Warren Beatty as a stand-up comedian, directed by Arthur Penn before Bonnie & Clyde, in black and white. What could it even be like?

Well, we watched it, and I think I can say Mickey One is like itself. Like I said, Beatty plays a stand-up comedian, and he’s pretty funny. But he doesn’t feel like a comic. He’s too at ease in his performance, like he couldn’t care less if you laugh or not. I’ve sat next to Carson when he had comedians on. You could see beads of flopsweat glisten off the studio floor. They care if you laugh. And Beatty’s one-liners all sound like they came out of a musty old joke book. What’s more, his audiences seem to know they’re old jokes and they still laugh. Everybody loves Mickey and wants him to be successful and famous, but there’s something in him that makes him run away. But then run right back into a headliner gig at some dive comedy club. And then runs away again. The pretext is, Mickey owes the mob, and he’s convinced they’ll kill him when he gets onstage. But everyone else in the movie thinks that’s ridiculous. Or are they protesting too much, in on it?

I’d give the Dope a look during some of the mob scenes, but he’d just do the so-so hand gesture. So Mickey One wasn’t “realistic”, but it was beautiful. It’s a black white movie made after color came in. When you get to that point, you’ve really got to want it to be black and white. Arthur Penn really wants it. The blacks are like a big cape. The whites are blinding. The movie was supposedly shot in Chicago, but with that stark photography it could be Poland, Russia. Mickey could be dead, in hell. Mickey One has the perfect look for looking over your shoulder.

Another funny thing. Even though he’s constantly running for his life, Old Warren always has time to pick up a girl. Like a gambler who, would you look at that, keeps finding himself at a card table. But Beatty risks nothing with these women. He treats them like garbage until they leave. Then he can go back to filling his loneliness with laughter from strangers.

I don’t make many people laugh but I’ve pushed a lot away. I don’t wish they would come back — “sorry” stops working after the first few dozen— but I do wish I could control the thing in me that made them leave.

“That was sure worth an asterisk, Lee,” Dope said as he finished off his drink. He clapped me on the back and entered his code on the way out the door. Dope was free in the night, Mickey One was trapped forever in a loop. I was somewhere in between. At least I have some movies to watch.