Chuckerman Makes a Movie Read online

  Slip brought with him the frame that held the first dollar he’d made when he’d opened the Jackson Street Smoke Shop in 1943. I knew the thin black frame. We all did. It had hung on the wall next to his bed in Florida. Now, for Marcy, he’d removed the dollar. “Put in your own goddamn dollar,” he said with a wink. “Hang it up for good luck.”

  Marcy did hang the frame. No dollar. Instead, she put a photo taken that day of Slip with his arms around Estie and Julia. Every time I look at that photo, the whole day comes back.

  Having pretty much funded the bakery, my grandfather was elected to “christen” (his word) the register. I remember him saying to my nieces, his first customers, “How can I help you two lovely-looking ladies?”

  Estie and Julia held up chocolate donuts and the quarters I had given them.

  Slip held out a shaky hand. The coins landed in his palm, and then Marcy’s hand grabbed them away.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Slip said.

  “You can’t charge family,” Marcy said.

  “They’re buying, ain’t they?”

  “Family eats for free at Knead Some Dough,” Marcy declared.

  “Your own family ain’t gonna be eating at all if you keep up that policy,” Slip replied as vehemently as his last bits of energy would allow. “You can’t be soft and survive in this world.”

  He died of heart failure five months after his visit to New York. Meanwhile, Marcy ignored him, and here she is, nearly a decade later, with the photo still hanging and her business as alive and as well as can be expected for someone who gives free food to family and friends.

  I usually avoid the bakery on Sunday mornings, when it’s packed with women and babies and strollers and the toy corner is crammed with small bodies. The routine is for Ryan and Estie to run out to my car. But this week, the Sunday after my first class, I left my morning basketball game early to allow myself time to find a parking spot near the bakery large enough for the Cadillac. I opened the door to Knead Some Dough just a sliver, careful not to set off the bell.

  Marcy jumped when she saw me. “What are you doing here so early?”

  It was 8:05 a.m., according to the giant donut clock my mother made for Marcy a few years ago. The clock hovers behind the register like a chocolate UFO with colored sprinkles and white hands, dwarfing my grandfather’s photo, which hangs below.

  Marcy was on her knees, loading mini coffee cakes into a bottom shelf. In order to cut down on the financial bleed caused by giving merchandise away for free, she makes the freebies in miniature. Today, so far, she’d stocked mini jelly donuts, mini lemon meringue pies, and mini long johns, which she calls short johns. She looked at me through the glass of the Sunday Special pastry case.

  I bent down to her level and waved my papers. “I’ve come to share my masterpiece.”

  She had no idea what I was talking about. She scrunched her tiny nose, which, along with a slight deafness in one ear, she inherited from my mother, and pressed it farther into the case, presumably for a better look.

  I pressed the title page against the glass. “My script,” I said. “I went to the film writing class Tuesday night, as ordered.”

  Marcy stood up and smiled. “That’s great.” She pulled off her gloves and reached for my script. “I forgot about that. Why are you giving this to me?”

  “As proof of my attendance and my enlightenment.” I directed her to the title, Slip and His Caddy, by David R. Melman, and explained how I’d gotten conned into writing about my car instead of Mort Chuckerman. “But I did it,” I said. “I wrote a whole scene, and I learned a few things, like don’t write what you know and don’t write what you don’t know.”

  “I’m not sure what that leaves,” Marcy said.

  “Me neither, but at least I’m no longer at rock bottom. I’m hovering a level above.” I gave my script a pat and helped myself to a mini meringue.

  “Maybe an inch above,” she said, moving the tray of pastries out of my reach.

  “I hope an inch is good enough for you, because I’m not going back to the class.”

  “Then I was too generous with the inch.” Marcy flipped through the first few pages. “And I think you’re being a bit generous by calling this a script. This looks nothing like a script.”

  “Since when are you such an expert?”

  “There’s no dialogue, David. There are no scene headings, either.”

  “Well, your friend Laurel told us we weren’t supposed to worry about format. We were just supposed to write our story.”

  The bells over the door rang, and I jumped. The two teenage girls who help Marcy serve and clean on Sundays came into the store, and my niece and nephew raced out from the back room, summoned by the bells.

  “What are you doing here?” Estie said as Ryan slapped me on the back.

  They helped themselves to mini Boston creams as my sister explained that I had come early to share my homework.

  Ryan grabbed the pages off the counter.

  “It’s the beginning of your uncle’s movie,” Marcy said.

  Estie, looking at the pages over Ryan’s shoulder, said, “It doesn’t look like a script.”

  I scowled. “It’s just the first assignment, woman.”

  “And apparently the last.” Marcy took my script from Ryan and fanned the pages. “There’s not much here. I don’t think six-plus pages can constitute enlightenment.”

  “Quality, not quantity,” I said.

  “How come it’s the last?” Ryan asked.

  “Because your mother proved her point,” I told him. “I could stand to broaden my horizons. Consider them broadened. I’m a new man. Unfortunately, I have the same old job, which I need to focus on so I can pay the bills. You don’t need to be enlightened to know that this script is never going to pay the bills.”

  Estie took the papers from Marcy. “Let’s read it and see.”

  “It’s the story of the car,” Marcy told her. “You’ve heard it a million times; you don’t need to hear it again.” She put her gloves back on. She also handed a pair to Ryan and told him to put the Boston creams in place.

  “I’ll read it to everyone,” Estie offered.

  Marcy told her to have at it.

  I told her absolutely not.

  “Then why did you bring it here?”

  “Definitely not for a public reading.”

  Estie seated herself at one of Marcy’s tables. “We are hardly public.” She patted the chair next to her, an invitation for me to sit, and dove in.

  “Slip and His Caddy, by David R. Melman. Act One, Scene One, Take One.”

  Marcy interrupted her. “I don’t think the writer is in charge of the takes.”

  “So this is how it’s going to be?” I demanded. “We’re still on the cover page and the nitpicking has already begun.”

  “I’m just saying,” Marcy said.

  Estie, with a clearing of her throat, continued with more authority. “Stage directions. The camera opens on Slip’s brand-new, yellow Cadillac as the year 1977 flashes at the bottom of the screen. The car is shiny and sharp. The hood is perfectly polished, the Cadillac emblem on the front stands perfectly straight, the white roof is perfectly white, the silver-spoked hubcaps (an upgrade) capture the sparkle of the sun.”

  Ryan held up his hand. “Don’t you think that’s a lot of stuff about the car?”

  “The movie is about the car,” I said and motioned for Estie to continue reading.

  “The camera will pull back to reveal the car in a parking structure. The wall in front of the Cadillac is pale pink cinderblock with squares cut out intermittently to create a decorative, airy feel. ‘The Hustle,’ by the late, great Van McCoy, begins to play.”

  Estie put down the script. “’The Hustle?’”

  “You know,” Marcy said. She began to whistle the chorus and do the line dance. “Do the Hustle!” she called out.

  Estie told her to stop, she was embarrassing herself.

  “The song is refl
ective of an era,” Marcy explained. “And it reminds me of my yellow satin disco jacket.”

  “It’s full of motion,” I explained. “Suggestive of a journey on its way.”

  Marcy told me I was already a real Martin Scorsese, and Estie told her to stop talking.

  “If we could continue on the journey,” she said. She sounded annoyed, and it dawned on me that this was her debut, too. Both of my nieces—Estie and Rachel’s daughter, Julia—have the acting bug, and now Estie was working every role in my movie.

  She started to read again. At the same time, the bells rang again, announcing the arrival of the first customer. As Marcy paused to greet the woman and her boys, I headed for the footstool Marcy keeps on the floor behind the register. After signaling my new whereabouts to Estie, I sat down, safely out of view from any customers who might enter the bakery.

  “The camera expands upward from the edge of the parking garage and windows begin to appear,” Estie read, her voice expanding with the camera, projecting through the bakery. “Row upon row. Windows, windows, windows. Until a huge white apartment building comes into focus. Thirty-five stories high and a football field long. As the building becomes clear, the Narrator starts to speak.” She cleared her throat, apparently to shift into the part of the narrator. “This is where my story takes place,” she said, trying to sound like a man. “Even though I haven’t been to Imperial Towers Building One Hundred for over twenty years, even though the residents who’d occupied the little units at the time are gone, the Buildings, all eight of them, survive. They are still going strong, like my memories of those days.”

  Without a pause, she shifted back to her own voice. “Opening credits hit the screen as all eight buildings, four facing four, with a palm tree-lined drive down the middle, come into view. Enormous parking structures hang off the back of each building. The structures are topped with enormous pool decks. The Intracoastal surrounds this entire concrete housing project.”

  “Your grandparents lived in a housing project?” one of the teenage helpers asked Marcy.

  “All of the grandparents lived in buildings like that,” the woman with the boys answered. “Florida was filled with them.”

  At this point, a conversation splintered off about where this woman’s grandparents lived relative to ours. Estie was put on hold, and I leaned back against the cabinet that stored bags, first aid supplies, and other miscellaneous junk. I closed my eyes as I awaited the return to my story, and I wondered whether the image on screen of Imperial Towers Building 100, a block off Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, would convey to my movie-going audience, as well as the one assembling in the bakery, the building’s significance.

  For us kids, it was the only vacation destination we knew. Our trips were a given, a constant, part of the rhythm of the year—yet never taken for granted, because we all understood, as young as we were, that our grandparents were old. Indeed, death, or at least a heart attack or two, was part of every visit. Rarely an evening went by without the paramedics rushing into the card room or an apartment to resuscitate. It was such a regular scene that unless the grandparent being carried out on a stretcher was yours (or unless you, like me, had a fear of sirens), the process barely interrupted the ordinary flow of evening lobby activity.

  For our parents—especially those, like my mother, who were residing with in-laws—the trips were perfunctory. At best, two weeks of so-so weather, deli food, and cigarettes. At worst—well, at the time we didn’t consider a worst. It was what it was.

  Now I know that our annual visits were special. Especially the Christmas break of 1977. If it wasn’t, I thought as the bell to the bakery rang a few more times and Estie’s voice carried my audience into the living room of Apartment 1812, why would anyone bother making a movie about it?

  “Davy,” Estie screamed. “Davy!”

  I almost jumped to my feet—and then I realized that she wasn’t calling me, she was just reading the part of my mother. I’ll have to make a note in the script that the yelling is not intended to be guttural, as my mother wasn’t mad. Yelling was just the most commonly used method of communication at Imperial Towers Building 100. Maybe because so many people were always talking at once, or because most of them were hard of hearing. It clearly had nothing to do with proximity, because we were all stuffed together like little meatballs.

  I assume our closeness will become clear the moment the camera comes into my grandparent’s one-bedroom convertible apartment. During our stay, the bedroom belonged to my grandparents. The rest of us lived in the convertible portion, which was just a room (small, even by New York standards) separated into areas by furniture type rather than by doors.

  I had been sitting that night on my pullout bed organizing quarters and baseball cards when I heard my mother call my name. I immediately knew what she was after. I knew the same way a parent can distinguish his baby’s cries. This was a cigarette yell.

  I stuck my head through the partition to see my mother sitting on her pullout bed in my father’s ratty blue bathrobe, her hair wrapped tight like a tourniquet in a towel to control the effects of the humidity on her thick curls. In the beige towel, my mother’s head reminded me of a giant monogrammed seashell—EMS for Estelle and Slip Melman, my grandparents.

  Estie was doing a fine job in the role of my mother. “Davy,” she said, imitating my mother’s I-have-a-favor voice, “do you think you could be so sweet as to run down to the machine and bring me some cigs? I’ll give you a quarter for yourself so you can play a game of pinball afterward.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I heard myself saying.

  “But bring me the cigs before you go to the game room.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  I remember grabbing the coins in my fist and sliding the extra quarter into a side pocket of my painter’s pants. I had no intention of going to the game room. But my mother didn’t need to know this.

  My two older sisters spent their evenings in the game room (which was really the building’s multi-purpose room, converted for the holidays into a holding pen). I knew they didn’t want me in there any more than I wanted to go in and watch them flirt with the boys. They were eleven and thirteen, so the flirting was in its infancy, and it made me sick. Besides, I had bigger plans for myself that evening, if I could ever make it out of the apartment.

  As I headed to the door, Grandma Estelle grabbed me around my waist and rumpled my hair. “He’s got the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen. Like Raggedy Andy,” she said to my mother as she flipped solitaire cards onto the dining room table.

  Unlike my mother, she was dressed like she was hosting a party—which in a way, she was.

  At this point, I directed in my script, the full dining room area is supposed to come into view, including, at the far end of the table, a woman sitting with her head tipped back and mouth open and a man—my father, Allen—standing over her with his gloved fingers in her mouth. The woman was Gloria from 14, one of my father’s regular dental patients. Although the audience will never guess by looking at her contorted position and the cane next to her chair, she was also one of the dancers in the annual Imperial Towers Building 100 Vaudeville Review. My grandmother, a professionally trained dancer, wore the dual hats of choreographer and star of the show, which took place every year on New Year’s Eve. The show was a source of excitement and pride for everyone, but no one more so than Grandma Estelle.

  Frieda from 9 was also in the apartment; she practiced the routine while my father treated Gloria.

  Estie was now channeling Gloria, who never let the presence of my father’s hands in her mouth deter her from speaking. “Raggedy Andy has red hair. Davy looks nothin’ like Raggedy Andy. Davy ain’t got freckles or overalls, neither.”

  Ryan, now playing the role of my father, answered, “Save the gabbing ’til the cement dries, please.”

  The bakery audience laughed. My niece and nephew always laugh at the many uses of the convertible portion of the apartment, our personal multi-purpose room, but I ex
plain that this activity was business as usual for the Melman family. Many residents of Imperial Towers 100 used my father as their dentist back home in Chicago, and as a perk, he offered them free services during our two-week stay in Florida. My father called it the Melman Special.

  My mother was not a fan of this complimentary dental program. It limited her time out at night. Not that she had many places to go, but while many families spent their evenings at dinner and a movie, our outings covered dinner only. Then we headed home for the Melman Special.

  My sisters didn’t mind. They loved the game room. I didn’t mind. I hated the movies. My grandfather didn’t believe in doing work for free, but he didn’t complain because he had the card room. Day or night, there was no place that Slip would have rather been than in the Men’s Card Room. In this regard, we were exactly the same.

  My grandmother wasn’t bothered by the routine, either. The pride and power that came with wearing the title of Mother of Dr. Allen Melman far surpassed the inconvenience of finishing dinner by six thirty on weeknights. By six forty-five, friends and acquaintances of my grandparents were waiting in line around the dining room table.

  “It’s good for business,” she’d tell my father as she put out a tray heaped with Salerno Butter Cookies and Lorna Doones. Estelle had a sweet tooth the size of my grandfather’s Cadillac. We all knew who the tray was for.

  At this point, with Estie announcing the introduction of another of my grandma’s friends, Ida from 27, into Apartment 1812, Marcy’s friends began to pile into the bakery en masse. Estie paused every time the bell rang. The women, too, paused as they tried to make sense of what was going on.