You might be surprised to learn that it was Edward G. Robinson, the brittle and faded celluloid star from the nineteen-forties, who appeared in a dream to rescue me — I know I was. It probably shouldn’t have come as a bolt from the blue, though. In a sense I learned everything important about the world in front of a black-and-white TV, with Jeannine, watching old movies.
The two of us used to disappear for long stretches to the disused maid’s room in the wing of the house that had been closed off, where we had found an old television with rabbit ears on a rickety wheeled stand. It was there that life unfolded for me between the ages of eight and twelve. When Father purchased a color model in a handsome wooden cabinet and installed it as the centerpiece of what had once been a sitting room, Jeannine’s and my taste was already firmly established. We preferred to watch the classics in silvery monochrome behind the door of the forgotten maid’s quarters. I don’t know that Mother or Father ever knew about the television, or if they were ever curious about where we would disappear to.
At least that’s my memory. Jeannine was eleven years older and may have wished she could be basking in the garish Day-Glo anarchy of Laugh-In on the new RCA, but she indulged me. Long after Mother and Father retired every night, she stayed up with me in the maid’s room watching the all-night movies. If she fell asleep, I pinched her. Even at the age of eight I could stay awake longer than she could.
We were born at the tail end of the long comet of wealth. Mother and Father may have come from good lines, but whatever inheritance there was had been quartered and halved and so on and so forth, diminished by the relentless math of birth and death and procreation. Divorce, secret families, fecklessness and alcohol entered into it too, so that what remained for our forlorn branch of the family tree was an old name, a large but lesser house on the North Shore handed down from a great-aunt, too expensive to heat or maintain properly, and a modest income. There were rooms of dark, plump furniture and a sprawling, uncared-for lawn, overtaken by fungus after the great, generational sycamores and maples had all but blocked out the sun. Branches fell regularly, denting the spongy ground, and Father periodically had a man come and pull them into a pile at the edge of the woods behind.
At dinnertime Mother and Father drank too much and expected us to have positions on current events. When Jeannine left for college, she returned as infrequently as she could decently get away with. I was bereft. Mother thought I was pathetic with it. I feigned stomachaches, hoping they would excuse me from the nightly debates but they never did. Father mixed more martinis and they needled one another about anything they could think of, and I used my fork to push around my plate the dinner Mother had made, which had by then grown cold.
“You’ll not leave the table until you’ve cleaned your plate,” Father said.
“You’re upsetting him,” Mother said to Father.
One night at dinner Mother turned to me unsteadily and said, “Men are born to be unhappy. I feel sorry for you.” Her face was composed, but her eyes had that animal brightness that I knew well. This was the preferred mode of making a point in our family: categorical statements that couldn’t be assailed by any form of logic. More pronouncement than fact (facts belonging to a class of information looked down upon for being nothing more than a tool of insurance adjusters, bean counters, and similar strivers), or opinion (also looked down upon, by virtue of being subjective), her statement had the weight of something irrefutable. I don’t remember if she said it as a capper to whatever cutting remark she had just delivered to Father, who looked at his plate angrily, or if she was saying I should just get used to Jeannine’s absence and stop moping like a jackass. Jeannine, on whom I had always relied to interpret the ways of our parents, was no longer available to be consulted, and so she had no views that I knew of on the inevitability of unhappiness in men.
“The men in our family, specifically, I’m talking about — moral failures. Not like they used to be. Ask me, I should know,” Mother said. She tilted her head heavily in Father’s direction. “Ask him. Look at him. I feel sorry for you because you’ll be miserable. It’s the family curse”
“Would you listen to that load.” Father rose from his chair and retreated to his den, where he turned on the radio. I can picture him pouring a drink from the bar on the bookshelf there and thumbing through one of his Christie’s catalogs: the soothing Fine English and Continental Glass from the collection of some dead barrister, the monumental Hooper Collection of African and Oceanic Art, the evergreen Late German Expressionism.
Mother drew a slender white cigarette and disposable lighter from her purse on the table. She might have smiled, but it was the thin, pretending smile that came before the quivering chin. She had me to herself then; there were just the dishes, which would wait until the following afternoon. She touched my face melodramatically and dropped her hand to her lap. It was a lot to absorb for a child every night, and I did the best I could. I put my hand in hers.
Her hand fluttered away like a moth. “You needn’t patronize me,” she said. “I want our relationship to be based on honesty. And I want you to tell me, honestly” — she drew deeply on the cigarette — “whom do you love better? Mommy or Daddy?”
With the television on late at night, the odd noises of the house filtered through the heavy plaster walls in the abandoned half of the house. I turned up the volume and watched, in a dreamlike reverie, for hours. Slapstick, horror flicks, B-grade melodramas, cowboy pictures, noir masterpieces, the spectrum of human emotion. To me it was more real than life. Delirious, I drank in the images until I could stay awake no longer, of strong men in black-and-white wearing sneers and Brylcreemed hair, talking in clouds of cigarette smoke and swinging Tommy guns around spraying bullets, and women attired in smart woolen suits and heels, who were tough and mouthy and lipsticked. Those were the figures that populated my dreams.
From earliest memory Father was over-particular. He was prim and privileged, legacy Ivy, club memberships, all that. He had a vindictive sense of judgment and prissy values — smoking was for idiots, gentlemen never wore linen after Labor Day. He was fastidious about his appearance, and when he wasn’t admiring this or that master of some decorative art, he collapsed into himself in a way that was painful to behold. He moved through the house like a cold gray ghost.
I was a surprise baby. You may have guessed this by now. I inherited my parents’ fondness for intoxication, and I’ve the wrecked cars and the divorces to prove it.
***
I think because I have no siblings close in age I never learned how to play games with other children. Marco Polo, for example. I never learned what the game was about, because I never asked to join anything. But I watched, at the club. It involved a lot of bobbing up and down in the water in a crowded pool, and lithe children with braces on their teeth shouting Marco! and Polo! The girls in their two-piece suits were practically naked.
A memory. Mother and Father, 1974. I’m twelve. Every Saturday and Sunday we go to the club. The two of them at a glass-topped table under an umbrella on the patio overlooking the pool. Bloody Marys and cloth napkins strangled and tossed onto plates from brunch. I’m hanging on to the rough concrete pavers that line the edge of the pool. I observe them bickering about God-knows-what; their lips are moving rapidly. His thin lips, pressed together under his thin, precise mustache, Mother’s cupid’s-bow exaggerated like a movie star’s, overpainted with bright red lipstick so that the red crawls up in the tiny smoker’s lines of her upper lip. Their eyes are covered by sunglasses. A teenaged waiter approaches to clear the dishes and Father puts his hand out and says “NOT NOW.” I don’t hear him say this, but from the edge of the pool I see his lips move and I know how it goes. He always treated people poorly.
Charles was the kind of boy that other boys bullied — soft, pale, with breasts, an easy target. His voice was loud and exaggerated. I knew him from school, not that I would ever talk to him there. That summer we became friends, although I knew I would ditch him in September. Charles never got into the pool. But he was smart, and funny.
Sometimes we went off by ourselves to play and talk on the far side of the two tennis courts. Father frowned on this. “That boy. I’d steer clear. He’s so — extravagant,” he said, raising his eyebrows and flicking his wrist, the way I’d seen him do unconsciously a million times before. “Stay away from him.”
It was a rare moment of agreement between my parents. “We only come here for you, so you can learn to be social,” Mother said. “Don’t make Mommy and Daddy regret it. Not to be a misfit — and certainly not a deviate.”
Charles was dropped off in the white gravel parking lot every morning and picked up again at six. He could order whatever he wanted at the club restaurant. He told me I could do the same, and we stuffed ourselves with BLTs and cheeseburgers and milkshakes. Even though Charles didn’t act like the other boys he knew a lot about sex. He talked about which boys were “screwing,” and who he thought had a big one. And he was always ready with a zinger like “If Jack helped you off a horse, would you help Jack off the horse?”
Charles asked me if I realized that there were 101 men for every 100 women in the world, which meant by logic that one per cent of men were gay, and what did I think of that?
“Don’t try to use your contemptible facts on me,” I said, which made him laugh so hard he spewed Coke out his nostrils.
Eventually my parents put their foot down and forbade me outright from even talking to Charles, so every weekend when we arrived at the club I ignored him until after they finished their brunch and several bloody Marys and went home, and I ditched him again before they arrived to pick me up. He seemed to understand this.
One day after we’d finished another cheeseburger and milkshake, he kept pressing his leg against mine under the glass of the table at the club restaurant. “I’ll bet you like hot dogs,” he said.
“I’m full,” I said. “I can’t eat anything else.”
“Is that another of your contemptible facts, sir, or is it just a lowly opinion? I adore hot dogs.” He summoned the waiter who was only a few years older than we were and ordered two for me and two for himself. “You should come over to my house sometime. We can spy on my sister. She’s got tits.” He cupped his hands over his chest, as if I didn’t know what tits were. “I know for a fact that she’s got porno, she’s a real slut. Plus I know where she hides it.”
He bumped my leg again and pulled his second hot dog from its bun. “Mine’s this big,” he said, waving it in the air. “How big is yours?”
My face was hot. “Bigger than that,” I said.
“You must be queer if your dick’s that big.” He laughed and crammed the hot dog into his mouth in two bites. He stood up, scraping his chair and swiveling heads. “Want to see something you won’t believe?”
Behind the girls’ shower there was a window up high with slats meant to block the view of perverts. Charles got on his hands and knees and said “Step on me.” His rounded back had sweated through his T-shirt and he looked like a strange soft-shelled turtle, the backs of his pale, soft thighs like things that had never seen daylight. I climbed on him and his flesh gave like a thick layer of rubber. He grunted. From there I hoisted myself into a tall rhododendron and grabbed the edge of the anti-pervert slats.
“Ow. Yuck. Dirt,” he said, brushing mulch from his knees. “Tell me what you see. Do you see anything? Tell me when you see a pussy.”
“There’s nobody in there.”
“Keep looking. You’re going to see some ass. Tits! You’re going to get a hard-on. I’ll know it, too — I can see right up your shorts.”
I wanted more than anything to see naked girls and get a hard-on. Charles reached his hand up inside the leg of my shorts and messed with my underwear. I felt myself getting hard. His hand found me. His hand was warm.
“Come down,” he said. “I’ll show you what they do in porno movies.” My legs and arms felt weak, and I slid or I jumped from the rhododendron. I gashed my leg and Charles hugged me, and tried to kiss me. He got back down on his knees, saying “Ow” again, and pulled my shorts down and put his mouth on me and I was enveloped by warmth.
I hadn’t yet discovered the pleasures contained in the small pink tip that emerged from my foreskin when I got hard. I knew nothing about sex; when I thought of screwing I pictured a man on top of a woman rotating like a propeller. The idea of a mouth on the thing I peed from was gross. But I liked it. Charles said to touch his. It was firm and hot and rubbery at the same time.
We were discovered by a groundskeeper. He walkie-talkied somebody, and by the time we were walked into the club director’s office it seemed like the whole club knew.
Mother and Father arrived from home stone-faced. “Of course we’ll have to resign the membership,” Father said on the drive home. His back was ramrod straight. Mother periodically dabbed at her eyes. Between dabs she glared at Father. When we got home, as soon as the front door closed behind us Mother began to wail, and Father slapped me with his open hand three times, till my head rang. “Did I not tell you about that boy?” he said over and over, raising his voice each time, until he was practically squealing. “Did I not tell you? You’ll never be normal now!”
And that was that. We never went back to the club. I was grounded for the rest of the summer, which meant I holed it up in the old maid’s room. They even brought Jeannine home to talk to me, and she found me in front of the black-and-white television, watching Double Indemnity. We recited the lines together.
At the end of the summer I was sent away to boarding school, and then to college, where I ruined several cars, and eventually Father used his connections to get me into law school, bottom tier. It turned out I was good at law — specifically corporate law, specifically negotiating on behalf of the large entertainment conglomerates that make the movies we watch.
***
How I recognized him after forty-some years I don’t know. Maybe certain traits are as particular as a fingerprint: the unathletic slope of his shoulders, his soft-looking hands and the flat-footed way he walked, the arrogant half-lidded gaze. For me it would be my careful face, handsome enough, arranged to appear that I’m unaffected by the past, the expensive suit, the good shoes. Cufflinks, for Christ’s sake.
He was at the baggage carousel at LAX, waiting for his luggage on the opposite side of the conveyor. What were the odds? I observed him from a distance. I didn’t hold anything against him — how could I? He’d given me my first sexual experience, even if it was for the wrong team.
I made my way to the other side of the oval baggage kiosk and stood a few feet away, undecided if I should say anything. He seemed to shift slightly in the way that random bodies in an unenclosed area do, as if to accommodate the realignment of personal space around him. I could see the side of his face. It seemed possible he was making it available deliberately; I wondered if he had recognized me too.
“Bumpy flight,” he said, glancing at me and smiling.
Turbulence has never bothered me; there’s pleasure in the violent shuddering of an air capsule at 40,000 feet. It always comes as a temporary relief to give up the idea of wanting to live. “Yes,” I said. “Not too bad, though.”
“I never get used to it. But it sounds like you have.”
“I fly between New York and L.A. a lot,” I said.
“Your family must miss you, then.”
I gave a small laugh. “I’m not married — presently, at least. And no kids, that I know of.” I laughed again.
“I’m not prying. I don’t need to know what made you walk all the way around the baggage thing to come stand next to me.”
Here I was hoping he’d remember me, and he thought it was a pickup.
“I think it’s possible we’ve met before.”
He looked at me closely, almost invasively. His face had the same haughty look he used to have when he’d order lunch for both of us from the boy waiter.
He smiled again. “It’s definitely possible.”
“You are Charles, aren’t you?”
He looked surprised. “Nobody’s called me that since I was a child.”
“What do people call you now?”
He didn’t answer immediately. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“Nothing. I don’t want anything from you. I just recognized you from across the room. I just wanted to say hello.”
“I see. Well hello then. And goodbye. I don’t know who you are.”
He moved away and turned his attention to his phone. Seconds passed, and he looked at me again. His face was a mask. Almost imperceptibly something registered in his eyes. The baggage conveyor groaned and began to move. He walked away and stood at a distance, near the edge of the carousel. Several more minutes elapsed before any luggage appeared.
***
As a child I thought that if I died in a dream it would result in immediate death in waking life too. But it’s not true. Dying in your dreams is like turning the knob on an old television set. It’s like what’s on after all the movies are over, after the station sign-off, after the flag, after the national anthem, after the test-pattern. An unending field of static, a depthless plane of jiggling, hissing black-and-white dots.
I was in L.A. that night for a meeting the following day with the development team from a major studio. A routine piece of business, one of the millions of negotiations that keep the great worldwide entertainment machine going. The black Range Rover provided by the studio delivered me to the W before eleven and I had a drink at the bar, and then another drink, and another, and then a brandy before bed. Three sex workers cruised me over the course of my long nightcap, two women and a man, but otherwise I was left alone.
That night I dreamed I was lost in L.A. The beautiful and sterile city slid endlessly past the Range Rover’s tinted windows as the driver searched for the address of my meeting. As dusk finally fell the driver pulled to the curb and shrugged, smiled apologetically, and handed me a piece of paper with the meeting address written on it, and I set off on foot. Maybe the meeting hadn’t broken up yet.
Up ahead, a figure beckoned urgently. I followed. I followed him down escalators and gray fluorescent corridors, and we descended into the substructure of the city. The figure was always just ahead, gesturing, smiling, and I hurried, unable to catch up with him. At a certain point I realized that it was a trap, and that if I kept going what awaited was certain death. When the figure ahead turned another corner, I ran. The shadowy figure chased me but didn’t catch me, and eventually I found myself back on the street, now deserted, under the light-smeared night sky of L.A.
I walked up and down the empty sidewalks gripping the piece of paper, exhausted, checking the numbers on the buildings against the address in my hand. Between two buildings, where the address should have been, there was a narrow alley. I followed it. The alley turned into a brick path set into spongy earth, with wildly overgrown orange trees on either side, and I had to look down to keep from stepping on the fallen fruit. I came to a stop before a low bungalow in a small grove of jacarandas that had been let grow wild. The bungalow looked deserted except for a faint yellow light behind a window in the thick stucco. I held up the paper to the moonlight. The tin hardware store street numbers that had been tacked to the door frame matched the numbers in my hand.
I pushed open the door and entered. From the recesses of the bungalow emerged a figure from the celluloid past, wearing woolen trousers and sleeve garters and suspenders. Edward G. Robinson. But he wasn’t the snarling gangster with a blazing Tommy gun of Little Caesar, not the movie villain in a flashy suit and pinky ring ready to lay down a rain of death and destruction. He was the soulful everyman of Scarlet Street and Woman in the Window, the flinty, dogged Barton Keyes of Double Indemnity, the decent, redeemed Avery Brown of Tales of Manhattan.
“Come in, come in,” he said. “I was beginning to worry you wouldn’t find me. But I see I needn’t have worried. You’re here.”
In waking life I’ve met my share of stars, and you won’t be surprised to hear that they are almost always small people; I mean to say, in some overwhelming sense they are smaller than life, not larger, the way the screen makes them out to be. But here the effect was exactly the opposite. In my dream, the Edward G. Robinson of my imagination, here in the flesh, short and stocky, his face unhandsome but beautiful, was the most luminous version of a man I could imagine. He was as fleeting as a piece of celluloid.
He put a hand on my shoulder and led me to a small study where there was an old-fashioned desk covered in papers, with a black telephone on it and a half-filled ashtray. There were two leather chairs.
“Please, my boy, sit down,” he said, moving my chair closer to his. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for you. And now you’re here. Here you are. Here you are at last.”
Image by Bashar Alkhouli on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Night Flight to L.A. - August 28, 2026