The cutting room, p.2
The Cutting Room, page 2
Ellen Datlow
November 7, 2013
MY MEMORY IS STILL intact. I remember the scene as well as I can recall any other episode from my childhood. The year was 1951 and I was six years old.
I was right there with the men—the scientists and the soldiers—as they cautiously crept through the dark, close tunnels of the Arctic base. The steady metronome of the Geiger counter clicked ever faster, eventually crackling into a ripping-canvas sound as the probe neared the metal storage locker.
Capt. Hendry paused a moment. The scientists, Carrington and Stern, exchanged glances. The tall, storklike newspaperman, Scotty, didn’t look happy at all. The other men leveled their guns at the cabinet. There was something in there. Something from another world. It was ravenous for human blood, and it had already killed.
Capt. Hendry nodded. The man called Bob gingerly reached forward and flipped the door-catch. The locker opened as the music crashed to a climax and I jumped.
The frozen carcass of a sled dog rolled out and thudded to the floor. I stared. So did the men.
Dr. Stern looked disappointed. Dr. Carrington, I couldn’t tell. Capt. Hendry smiled grimly and shrugged. Crossing to the other side of the room, he motioned for the rest of us to follow.
We were right behind him when he twisted the knob on the door to the next passageway. The door swung open without warning to reveal the creature standing on the other side. It raised its clawed hands and swiped at Capt. Hendry.
I wet my pants.
As I said before, it was 1951 and I was six. I hadn’t read the publicity and hadn’t heard Phil Harris sing about “The Thing” on the radio. I had never heard of John W. Campbell’s story. I didn’t care whether Christian Nyby or Howard Hawks had really directed.
All I knew was I had lived through a scene up on the flickering screen that had branded itself in my brain far deeper than anything that was to come until a few years later, when I sat in the same theater and watched Janet Leigh’s dark blood swirl down the drain in Psycho.
Twenty years after I first saw it, I watched The Thing at a science fiction film festival in Los Angeles. I sat there as entranced as the first time, but now I didn’t wet my pants. There was not even the temptation. The absolutely shocking scene I’d remembered wasn’t there. Sure, there were the components—the dog falling out of the locker and the part where Kenneth Tobey’s character opened the door to the greenhouse and there was the Thing waiting for him. But the juxtaposition that had left me with nightmares for months just wasn’t there. I told a friend about it, but he laughed and reminded me that the human mind does that frequently with books and movies, not to mention the whole rest of human experience. We edit in our heads. We change things from reality. After a while, we accept the altered memories as gospel. It’s a human thing.
Yeah. Right. What I didn’t tell my friend was that I knew for a fact that I had once watched the scene I’d remembered. Frame for frame. I didn’t tell him, but I’d known the man who’d re-edited the movie. Little had Hawks—or Nyby, for that matter—known. I used to work for that man. The cutter.
I had been there the final days. And worse, that last night.
“Well, Robby Valdez,” said Mr. Carrigan. “You’re early again.” He paused and smiled. “You are always early.”
I never knew what I was supposed to say, so I said nothing and simply stared down at my sneakers.
“So how’s your family?” said Mr. Carrigan. My dad was still down in Cheyenne drooling over the new Ford Thunderbird he’d never be able to afford in a million years. He was supposed to be looking for work. I knew my mother was cleaning up after supper and thinking how much money she could win if she could just get on The $64,000 Question. My sister would be in her room listening to her Elvis Presley records and skipping her homework, humming through her cleft palate and dreaming of someone who would never want her. I had homework I needed to do, but I knew I’d rather be down here at the Ramona Theater helping out Mr. Carrigan. How was my sad family? Don’t exaggerate, my mom would have cautioned me.
“Fine,” I said.
Mr. Carrigan wasn’t listening, not really. He was staring over my head and I guessed he was looking at the black crepe he’d draped over the posters for East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, bracketing the signed studio still of James Dean. “So senseless,” he said softly. “Such a terrible waste.”
“Did you ever do any work on those two movies?” I said, meaning the Dean pictures.
Mr. Carrigan looked mildly alarmed and darted quick looks around the lobby, but of course, there was no one here this early. The box office wasn’t even open. The high school girl who ran the concession counter was probably still putting on her uniform and fixing her hair.
“Say nothing of that, Robby. It’s our secret.”
“Right,” I said. I knew very well I was supposed to tell no one of Mr. Carrigan’s genius for changing things. I never confided in anyone. Not even later, after the thing with Barbara Curtwood. After all, what good would it have done then?
“All right,” said Mr. Carrigan. “Let’s get to work. You get the fresh candy out of the storeroom and restock the counter. I’ve got things to do in the projection room.” He smiled. “Oh, and I like the coonskin cap very much,” he said.
“Davy Crockett,” I said. “My aunt and uncle gave it to me. It’s early Christmas.”
“In September.” Mr. Carrigan stopped smiling. “Thanks for reminding me. Barbara’s birthday is soon. I should get her something nice.”
I said nothing. I knew he was talking about Barbara Curtwood. He was in love with her. My mom talked about that. But then so did most of the people in town. Not about Mr. Carrigan and Barbara Curtwood, but about just her and how she ran around. She worked at the dress shop and spent—so my mom said to my dad—her nights either at the bars or somewhere else. I didn’t know what the somewhere else was, because my mother’s voice always dropped lower then and my father would laugh.
It hurt me to think about Mr. Carrigan and Miss Curtwood. Even at ten, I knew how much he loved her and how little she thought of him. About the only thing they had in common was the movies. She came to just about every show at the Ramona. Usually she came with a date. Every week or two, the man she came with would be someone brand new.
Even as young as I was, I had some idea that Mr. Carrigan was about the only man Miss Curtwood would have nothing to do with, and it pained him a lot. But he kept on. Sometimes he’d talk to me about it.
“Think she’d want a Davy Crockett cap?” I said. “I don’t think she came to see King of the Wild Frontier.”
Mr. Carrigan looked at me in a funny way. “I don’t think so. Something a bit . . . more grown-up, perhaps.” His mouth got a little pinched. “King of the Wild Frontier. Now there is a film I could have done something with.”
“You didn’t change it?”
He shook his head. “I was working on another project. A new thriller called Tarantula. I had to move the Disney film right along the circuit. But the monster movie, I was able to get my friend at the distributor’s to send me a print early. I’ve been working on it.”
“Oh boy,” I said. “That’s super. I’ve seen the ads for Tarantula in the Rocky Mountain News. I know it’ll be good.”
“It was good,” said Mr. Carrigan. He looked down modestly. “Now it will be great.”
“I’m sorry I can’t think of anything right for Miss Curtwood,” I said seriously.
“I’ll come up with something.” He went through the door to the projection room. I hauled a carton of stale Guess Whats over to the candy case.
It wasn’t until I was an adult and moved away from my tiny hometown that I realized what a genius Mr. Carrigan must have been. Who else could have taken movies, including some really bad ones, and re-cut them into stranger, more ambitious forms? The score was sometimes a little choppy, but we were a small town and we didn’t really notice or care. We were just there to be entertained. Little did we understand the novelty, the singularity of what we were seeing.
Nobody but me knew what Mr. Carrigan did. And nobody but me knew how he reversed all that work, re-editing the movies into their original form, painfully chopping and splicing the film back into the way it had been, more-or-less, and sending it on the bus to its next stop on the Wyoming small-town circuit.
I guess if he’d stayed in Hollywood, he could have become a star. I mean as a film editor. A cutter, he called it. But something had happened—I never knew what—and he’d come out here and started a whole new life. I always wanted to live in a small town, he’d told me. I’d grown up in one. I thought he was crazy for saying that. But he convinced me he was searching for the best of all possible worlds.
One thing about Mr. Carrigan, he was an optimist. That’s what he called himself.
“Robby,” he said to me many, many times. “You can alter reality. If you don’t like the way things are, you can change them.”
I remember I wanted to believe him. I wanted to change things, right enough. I wanted my dad not just to get a good job, but to keep it. I wanted my mom to get on a quiz show and win more than anybody. I thought, sometimes when I wasn’t hating her, that I’d like my sister to be able to see Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show. I mean all of Elvis, not just from the waist up like the camera showed. But I knew from a year of working after school and on weekends for Mr. Carrigan that it isn’t often a person can really change things. And when you can edit something, sometimes the price is way too high.
We were showing a double feature of Creature with the Atom Brain and It Came from Beneath the Sea that Friday night. After Polly, the high school junior who was selling popcorn and candy, showed up and Mr. Carrigan turned on the marquee lights and people started lining up to get tickets, I stood off to the side in the lobby and just watched. I was supposed to be an usher if some of the older patrons needed help finding their seats. I didn’t think this double feature would bring in a lot of old people.
There were some parents and a number of grown-ups who weren’t here with kids at all. They were mostly talking about “Ike.” I knew vaguely that President Eisenhower had suffered a heart attack and was in a hospital down in Denver. It made me feel sort of strange to know that the president of the whole United States was just a hundred seventy miles south of me.
Tonight people were wearing jackets. This September was more like autumn than Indian summer.
I noticed that the man with Barbara Curtwood had on a leather jacket that must have come off two or three calves. He was a big man and it was a large jacket. I didn’t recognize him, which was a surprise since just about everybody in this town knew everybody else. Anyhow, he bought the tickets, escorted Miss Curtwood to the line at the concession counter, and then went into the men’s room.
I realized Mr. Carrigan was standing right beside me. “Tell Polly to give Miss Curtwood her candy for free. Her soda too. Whatever she wants.”
I stared up at him.
“Now. Do it.”
I did it.
Miss Curtwood got a large Coke, a giant popcorn, and a roll of Necco Wafers. She didn’t even blink when Polly told her it was a present from Mr. Carrigan. She turned from the counter, walking right by him, saying absolutely nothing.
“Barbara,” Mr. Carrigan said.
She stopped dead still.
“Your birthday is coming up.”
“So?” she said, staring down at him. She shook her hair back. Miss Curtwood was a funny kind of blonde. My mom said it came out of a bottle. She was tall and had what my friends later in junior high called “big tits.” Tonight she was dressed in a checkered skirt with a white blouse and pink sweater. Some people thought she was pretty. Me, I wasn’t so sure. There was something about her that made me want to run. She reminded me of the cruel witch in Snow White. The hair color was wrong, but maybe if the witch had bleached it—
Mr. Carrigan smiled at her. “I thought maybe—if you weren’t doing anything—well, perhaps on your birthday we might have supper at the Dew Drop Inn.”
Miss Curtwood actually giggled. Some of the people waiting to get popcorn stared. “You’re kidding,” she said, a little too loud.
“Actually,” said Mr. Carrigan, “I’m not.”
“You’re at least ten years older than I am.”
Mr. Carrigan smiled. “Perhaps twelve.”
“You’re an old pervert.” More people stared.
Mr. Carrigan was starting to turn red. “I think I’d better go see about preparing the projectors.”
Miss Curtwood sneered at him. “Nothing will change, you old creep.”
People in the lobby started to mumble to one another. Parents hurried their children past the popcorn and into the theater.
“Anything can be changed,” said Mr. Carrigan.
“Not how I feel about you.”
“Even you could change.”
“Not a chance,” she said venomously.
“Something wrong, sweetheart?” It was the big man, her date, back from the bathroom. “Is this old square bothering you?”
“He owns the theater,” I squeaked. Both of them glanced down at me.
“Go inside and see if anyone needs help finding seats,” Mr. Carrigan said to me.
I looked from Miss Curtwood and the big man to Mr. Carrigan and back again.
“Now. I’ll talk with you after the show.” His voice was firm. I did as I was told. I noticed that Miss Curtwood and the man came into the auditorium about three minutes later. They took the stairs up to the balcony. The man was red-faced. Miss Curtwood had tight hold of his arm. The people downstairs pointed and whispered to each other.
I was glad when the lights went down, the curtains parted, and the previews of coming attractions began. But somehow I knew that when the double feature was over, I’d have a special mess to clean up by the big man’s seat. There was. The floor was sticky with Coke, and bits of popcorn were scattered all over. Along with all the rest of it, there was something strange, half-covered by the Necco wrapper. It was like a deflated balloon, five or six inches long, with something gooey inside. I didn’t want to touch it, so I used the candy wrapper to pick it up and put it in the trash. I also suspected I shouldn’t ask Mr. Carrigan about it, although I thought I saw him watching me as I looked at the thing. But he didn’t say anything.
After I’d finished cleaning up, Mr. Carrigan asked me to come to his office. He looked older. I’d never stopped to wonder before just how old he was. At that point in my life, I thought all adults were ancient. But now I realized Mr. Carrigan was at least as old as my father. He walked with a stoop I hadn’t noticed before. He moved slowly, as though he were in pain. He asked me if I wanted a Coca-Cola. I shook my head. He asked me to sit down. I took the metal folding chair. He sat down then too, on the other side of the desk, and looked at me for a long minute across the heaps of paper, splicing equipment, film canisters, and the cold, half-filled coffee cups.
“I really love her, you know.”
I looked back at him dumbly. Why was he telling me this?
“Miss Curtwood. Barbara. You know who I’m talking about.”
I nodded, but still said nothing.
“Do you think I’m not entirely rational about this all?”
I kept perfectly still.
Mr. Carrigan grimaced. “I know I’m not. It’s an obsession. I have no explanation for it. All I know is what I feel for Barbara is love that transcends easy explanation—or perhaps any explanation at all.” He put his elbows on the cluttered desk, laced his fingers, and set his chin in the cradle. “She’s not even what I want. Not really. I would prefer her to be shorter and more delicate. She’s not. I love red-headed women. Barbara is a blonde. She is far too—” Mr. Carrigan hesitated “—far too buxom. And there is more which is less apparent. Barbara wished to have no children. She told me this. I would like a family, but—” He closed his eyes. I wondered if he was going to cry. He didn’t, but he kept his eyes closed for a long time. “She is everything I should loathe, yet I find myself fatally attracted.”
Another minute went by. Two. I stirred restlessly on the hard metal seat.
Mr. Carrigan looked up. “Ah, Robby. I’m sorry I’m keeping you. I simply needed to talk, and you are my only friend.” He smiled. “Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome,” I said automatically, not really understanding what I had done for him.
“I’m going to see Barbara on her birthday,” he said, still smiling. “She said so tonight.”
“I’m glad,” I managed to say, wondering if I should be crossing my fingers for him.
“Life is strange, isn’t it, Robby?” Mr. Carrigan stayed seated and motioned me toward the door. “If you wait long enough, you can change things the way you want. If you want things badly enough. If you’re willing to do what needs to be done.”
Later, I tried to remember back, listening in my memory to tell if his voice had sounded odd. It hadn’t, not as best I could recall. Mr. Carrigan had sounded cheerful, as happy as I’d ever heard him.
“She’s going to stay after the last show on her birthday. And then we will go to the Dew Drop Inn for a late supper. She told me so. When her—friend—tried to argue, she told him to shut up, that she knew her mind and this was what she wanted to do. I must admit it, I was amazed.” The smile spread across his face, the muscles visibly relaxing. He looked straight at me. “Thank you, Robby.”
“For what?” I said, a little bewildered.
“For seeing me like this. For being someone who saw my happiness and will remember it.”
I was very bewildered now.
“Good night, Robby. Please convey my best to your family.”
I knew I was dismissed and so I left, mumbling a still-confused good night.
All these years later, I’ve come to live in Los Angeles, and it’s where I’ll probably die. Southern California drew me away from my small town. It must have been the movies. I walk Hollywood Boulevard, ignore the sleaze, the tawdriness, and pretend I move among myths. I tread Sunset and sometimes stop to look inside the windows of the restaurants and the shops. I soak up the sun, even while realizing that the smog-refracted rays must surely be mutating my tissues into something other than the flesh I grew up in.
