On Halloween the residents of the Gardens traditionally had a private celebration, stringing the old trees with lights, putting a DJ’s booth outside the house of the fashion magazine editor, allowing the local children to run wild playing trick or treat. Many of the adults, too, dressed up. It was a way of enjoying the festival without venturing into the great crowds that gathered on Sixth Avenue nearby to witness or participate in the parade itself.
Petya might have been happy in the Gardens but Leo the cat wanted to go to the parade, Petya told Murray Lett, and what Leo wanted, Leo was going to get. He was feeling good!, he said, really very good!, he felt he had really emerged from his time of crisis, he could put it behind him, he wanted to embrace life, and life was out there on All Hallows’ Eve on Monday, marching down Sixth Avenue dressed up as skeletons, zombies and whores. “Even with the Gardens party, this house feels so funereal,” he cried. “Let’s find ourselves some kick-ass costumes and kick some parade ass!” His fear of open spaces had ebbed, he said, and besides when the Village was this crowded it didn’t feel like an open space anyway. Murray Lett the Australian had never fully embraced the over-the-topness of the American Halloween. Once he had been invited to a party on the Upper West Side and had gone as Mars Attacks! in a huge Tim Burton Martian head that was hot inside and meant he couldn’t eat or drink. Another year he had been Darth Vader, wearing overly bulky plastic armor that made sitting down difficult, and a black helmet with a voice-changer box, which gave him the same problems as the Mars Attacks! head regarding heat, food, and liquid intake. Nowadays he tended to stay in his apartment and hope no trick-or-treating kids rang the doorbell. But Petya would not be denied. “We will be Romans!” he cried. “I of course, being Petronius, will be Trimalchio, host of the Satyricon feast, and you—you can be a reveler of some sort. Our costumes will be inspired by Fellini. There will be togas! And laurel wreaths upon our brows, and flagons of wine in our hands. Marvelous! We will run toward life and drink deeply at its watering holes and we will be drunk on life by the morning.” When I heard the plan I thought of Gatsby, of course, Gatsby which Fitzgerald came close to calling Trimalchio in West Egg, and that was a sad thought for it brought back to my mind my nights of laughter with my parents, and so also inevitably the dreadful manner of their ending, and I succumbed briefly to renewed sadness; but then Petya’s glee was infectious and I thought, yes, why not, some gaiety after everything, good idea, and if Petya wished to be, for one night, life’s high-bouncing lover, then yes! Let him wear his toga and bounce.
Costumes at short notice were a tall order, but that was what Fuss and Blather were for, and anyway a toga was just a bedsheet with big ideas. Roman sandals were found, and laurel, and a bundle of birch twigs tied with red ribbon—the Roman fasces—which Petya would hold as a symbol of his consular authority. A completely anachronistic fool’s cap and bells were found and offered to Murray Lett and I very much wanted him to choose to wear them so that he could channel Danny Kaye in The Court Jester and practice his tongue-twisters, The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true! But he went for a toga to be like Petya and if Petya was going to hold the fasces then Lett would carry the cat.
So it was; and so imperially attired they went away from the Gardens, away from that house weighed down by death into the parade that celebrated life; and so, running toward life and away from death, they found death waiting for them, as the old story had prophesied, in Samarra, which was to say, on Sixth Avenue between Fourth Street and Washington Place. Death in a Joker costume carrying an AR-15. The gun’s soft chatter inaudible beneath the cacophony of the crowds, the honking of horns, the megaphoned messages, the bands. Then people began to fall and harsh uncostumed reality ruined the party. There was no reason to believe that Petya or Murray Lett had been specifically targeted. Guns were alive in America, and death was their random gift.
And the cat, the alpine lynx. Here, in close-up, the outstretched arm of the dead Roman, the fasces fallen from his grasp. (A deliberate echo, in the framing, of the inert arm of the fallen Kong at the end of the original 1933 movie.) And Leo snarling hatred at anyone who dared come near. And when all of it was done, when the screaming had subsided, when the crowd running, falling, had calmed and been dispersed and those dead and wounded by the bullets and those crushed underfoot by fear had all been taken to their necessary places, when the avenue was empty except for windblown trash and police cars, when it was really over, the cat was gone, and nobody ever saw Leo the lynx again.
And the King, alone in the golden house, saw all his gold in all his pockets all his stacks all his sacks all his buckets begin to glow more and more brightly until it caught fire, and burned.
In truth, I had hoped for a gentler life. Even while I dreamed about arriving, at some wonderful point in the future, at a place of true distinction, I hoped for more kindness while I was making my way along the road. I did not understand then that Scylla and Charybdis, the two mythical monsters between whom Odysseus’s ship had to sail in the Strait of Messina—the one “rationalized” as giant rocks, the other as a ferocious whirlpool—are symbolic, on the one hand, of other people (the rocks on which we break ourselves and founder), and on the other, of the darkness circling within ourselves (which sucks us down, and we drown). Now that my film The Golden House is finally finished and about to make its debut on the festival circuit—almost a decade in the making, and after the upheavals in my private life near the end of that period, finishing it feels like a miracle—I should try to set down what I learned in the process. About the movie business I learned, for one thing, that when a person with money says to you, “I love this project. I love it. So creative, so original, there is nothing like it out there. I am going to back you one thousand percent, to the fullest of my ability, total support, one thousand and one percent, this is genius,” what he is saying, translated into English, is “hello.” And I learned to admire anyone who actually got his or her movie to the finish line and into theaters, whatever it was, Citizen Kane or Porky’s XXII or Dumb Fucks XIX, never mind, you made a movie, dudes, respect. About life outside the movie business I learned this: that honesty is the best policy. Except when it’s not.
We are icebergs. I don’t mean that we are cold, only that we are mostly under the surface, and the part of us that is hidden can sink the Titanic.