Groundwork, p.49
Groundwork, page 49
You have been that man, you tell yourself, and what you are watching on the television screen is a precise rendering of what happened to you two days after your mother’s death in 2002: the hammer that descends without warning, and then the inability to breathe, the pounding heart, the dizziness, the sweats, the body that falls to the floor, the arms and legs that turn to stone, the howls that blast forth from maddened, airless lungs, and the certainty that the end is upon you, that one second from now the world will no longer exist, because you will no longer exist.
Directed by Rudolph Maté in 1950, the film is called D.O.A., police shorthand for dead on arrival, and the hero-victim is one Frank Bigelow, a man of no particular distinction or interest, a no one, an anyone, roughly thirty-five years old, an accountant, auditor, and notary public who lives in Banning, California, a small desert town near Palm Springs. Bulky of build, with a fleshy, full-lipped face, he is a man with little else on his mind but women, and because he is feeling suffocated by his adoring, neurotic, obsessively clinging secretary, Paula, the woman he might or might not be planning to marry, he impulsively decides to take a week off from work and go to San Francisco on a solo vacation. When he checks in at the St. Francis Hotel, the lobby is swarming with boisterous guests. It happens to be “market week,” the desk clerk tells him, an annual convention of traveling salesmen, and each time an attractive woman saunters past (all the women in the hotel are attractive), Bigelow turns to ogle her with the wide-eyed, slack-jawed lust of a man on the prowl. To push home the point, each of these glances is accompanied by a comic, slide-whistle rendition of the standard two-note wolf call, as if to suggest that Bigelow can’t quite believe his good luck, that by landing in this particular hotel on this particular day he will in all likelihood chance upon some easy action. When he goes up to his room on the sixth floor, the hallway is hopping with semi-inebriated revelers (more slide-whistle wolf calls) and the door of the room directly opposite is open, giving Bigelow a clear view of a full-scale bash in progress. So the vacation begins.
Paula has telephoned from Banning, and before Bigelow unpacks and settles in, he returns the call. It seems there has been an urgent message from someone named Eugene Philips of Los Angeles, who said it was imperative that Bigelow contact him at once, that they must talk before it’s too late. Bigelow has no idea who Philips is. Have we done business with him? he asks Paula, but she has no memory of such a person either. All during this conversation, Bigelow is distracted by the goings-on across the hall. Women stop in his open doorway to wave hello and smile at him, and he waves and smiles back, even as he goes on talking to Paula. Forget about Philips, he tells her. He’s on vacation now, he doesn’t want to be bothered, and he’ll deal with it when he returns to Banning.
After they hang up, Bigelow lights a cigarette, a waiter appears with a drink, and then a reveler from across the hall, who identifies himself as Haskell, enters the room and asks if he can use the phone. Three more bottles of bourbon and two more bottles of scotch are ordered for the party in 617. When Haskell learns that Bigelow is a stranger in town, he invites him to join in the merriment (a few drinks, a few laughs), and within two minutes Bigelow is dancing a rumba with Haskell’s wife in the noisy room across the way. Sue is a brash, boozed-up piece of work, a frustrated woman looking for a good time, and because Bigelow turns out to be a skillful dancer, he becomes her number one target—not the most intelligent move, perhaps, given that her husband is right there to witness her antics, but Sue is both reckless and determined. Some minutes later, the gang from room 617 decides to leave the hotel and go out on the town. A reluctant Bigelow is dragged along with them, and suddenly they are in a crowded jazz club called the Fisherman, a frenetic place where an ensemble of black musicians is belting out an exultant, high-speed number with the word JIVE written on the wall behind them. One close-up after another shows the sax man, the piano man, the trumpet man, the bass man, and the drum man wailing on their instruments, intercut with wild reactions from the audience, and there is Bigelow sitting at the table with his new friends as the impetuous Sue clings tightly to him. Bigelow looks despondent, he is fed up, he wants no part of Sue or this cacophonous assault, and Haskell looks no less downhearted himself, studying his wife in silence as she throws herself at the stranger from across the hall. At some point in all this, the camera catches a man entering the club from behind, a tall man wearing a hat and an overcoat with an upturned collar, an odd and altogether curious collar, the reverse of which is marked by a black-and-white checkered pattern. The man approaches the bar, and a moment or two after that Bigelow finally manages to extricate himself from Sue and her companions. He goes to the bar as well and orders himself a bourbon, little knowing that the man with the curious collar is about to slip poison into his drink and that he, Bigelow, will be dead within twenty-four hours.
A stylish woman is sitting at the other end of the bar, and as Bigelow waits for his drink, he asks the bartender if the blonde is alone. The blonde turns out to be Jeanie, a jive-crazy rich girl who hangs out in clubs and uses words like dig and easy (i.e., copacetic, swell, no problem). Bigelow sidles over to her, and in those few seconds when he loses contact with his drink, which has now been poured and is waiting for him at his old spot at the other end of the bar, the man with the curious collar carries out his murderous mission, deftly pouring a measure of the toxic potion into the glass and then vanishing from sight. As Bigelow chats with the elegant Jeanie, who is at once cool and friendly, a self-possessed hipster queen, the bartender hands him his now doctored drink, his now deadly drink. Bigelow takes a sip, and instantly his face registers surprise, disgust. A second sip produces the same result. Pushing away the glass, he says to the bartender: “This isn’t mine. I ordered bourbon. Give me another drink.”
Meanwhile, Sue is on her feet, scanning the room for Bigelow, looking anxious, distraught, puzzled by his failure to return. Bigelow catches sight of her, then swings around and invites Jeanie to go somewhere else with him. There are people he wants to avoid, he says, and surely there must be other interesting places in San Francisco. Yes, Jeanie says, but she hasn’t quite had her fill of the Fisherman. Why don’t they meet up later when she hits her next spot of the evening, and then she writes down a telephone number on a piece of paper and tells him to call her there in an hour.
Bigelow returns to his hotel room, pulls out the scrap of paper with Jeanie’s number on it, and picks up the phone, but before he can make the call, he glances up and sees that a bouquet of flowers has been delivered to the room. There is a card from Paula attached to the wrapping paper, and the message reads: I’ll keep a light burning in the window. Sweet dreams. Bigelow is chastened. Instead of going out again to spend the night chasing skirts, he tears up Jeanie’s number and tosses it in the trash, and a moment after that the story enters a different register, the real story begins.
The poison has already begun to do its work. Bigelow’s head aches, but he assumes he has drunk too much and will feel better after he has slept it off. He climbs into bed, and as he does so the air fills with strange, disjointed sounds, the echoing voice of a distant female singer, mental debris from the jazz club, signs of mounting physical distress. When he wakes in the morning, Bigelow’s condition has not improved. Still convinced that he drank too much and is suffering from a hangover, he calls room service and orders a pick-me-up, one of those tart, eye-opening nostrums spiced with horseradish and Worcestershire sauce that are supposed to jolt you into instant sobriety, but once the waiter shows up with the concoction, Bigelow can’t face it, the mere sight of the drink fills him with nausea, and he asks the waiter to take it away. Something is seriously wrong. Bigelow clutches his stomach, appears dizzy and disoriented, and when the waiter asks if he is all right, the fatally ill victim-hero, still in the dark about what has befallen him, says he must have had too big a night of it and needs to get some fresh air.
Bigelow goes out, staggering ever so slightly, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, and climbs onto a passing cable car. He jumps off at Nob Hill, and then he is walking, walking through deserted streets in broad daylight, walking with purpose, on his way somewhere—but what where and to what purpose?—until he finds the address he is looking for, a tall white structure with the words MEDICAL BUILDING chiseled into the stone façade. Bigelow is far more worried than he let on to the waiter at the hotel. He knows, indeed he knows, that something is seriously wrong with him.
At first, the results of the examination are encouraging. Looking at Bigelow’s X-ray, a doctor says: “Lungs in good condition, blood pressure normal, heart fine. It’s a good thing everybody isn’t like you. It would put us doctors out of business.” He instructs Bigelow to put on his clothes as they wait for the results of the blood tests administered by his colleague, Dr. Schaefer. As Bigelow knots his tie in the foreground, face to the camera, expressionless, a nurse walks into the room behind him, too addled to say a word, staring at him with a look that combines both horror and pity, and at that moment there can be no doubt that Bigelow is doomed. Dr. Schaefer enters, trying to mask his alarm. He and the first doctor confirm that Bigelow is unmarried, that he has no relatives in San Francisco, that he has come to the city alone. Why these questions? Bigelow asks. You’re a very sick man, the doctor says. You must steel yourself for a shock. And then they tell him about the luminous toxic matter that has entered his system and will soon be attacking his vital organs. They wish there was something they could do, they say, but there is no antidote for this particular poison. He doesn’t have long.
Bigelow is incredulous, filled with rage. This is impossible! he shouts. They must be wrong, there must be an error, but the doctors calmly defend their diagnosis, assuring him that there hasn’t been an error—which only increases Bigelow’s fury. “You’re telling me I’m dead!” he roars. “I don’t even know who you are! Why should I believe you?” Calling them both crazy, he pushes them aside and storms out of the office.
Cut to an even larger building—a hospital? another medical center?—and a shot of Bigelow bounding up the front steps. He barges into a room marked EMERGENCY, apoplectic, a man about to explode into a hundred fragments, and shoves his way past two bewildered and frightened nurses, insisting that he see a doctor at once, demanding that someone examine him for luminous poison.
The new doctor comes to the same conclusion as the first pair. You’ve got it, all right. Your system has already absorbed it. To prove the point, he switches off the overhead light and shows Bigelow the test tube containing the examination results. It is an eerie sight. The thing glows in the dark—as if the doctor were holding a vial of incandescent milk, a frosted bulb filled with radium, or worse, the liquefied fallout from a nuclear bomb. Bigelow’s anger subsides. Faced with such overpowering evidence, he temporarily goes numb. “But I don’t feel sick,” he says quietly. “Just a little stomach ache, that’s all.”
The doctor warns him not to be fooled by his apparent lack of symptoms. Bigelow has no more than a day or two to live, a week at the most. There’s nothing that can be done now. Then the doctor learns that Bigelow has no idea how, when, or where he swallowed the poison, which means that it was administered by another party, an unknown party, which further means that someone intentionally set out to kill him.
“This is a case for Homicide,” the doctor says, reaching for the telephone.
“Homicide?”
“I don’t think you understand, Bigelow. You’ve been murdered.”
This is the moment when Bigelow snaps, when the monstrous thing that has happened to him turns into an all-out, unbridled panic, when the howl of agony begins. He bursts out of the doctor’s office, bursts out of the building, and starts running through the streets, and as you follow this passage of the film, this long sequence of shots tracking Bigelow’s mad fugue through the city, you understand that you are witnessing the outer manifestation of an inner state, that this senseless, headlong, unstoppable running is nothing less than the depiction of a mind filled with horror, that you are watching the choreography of dread. A panic attack has been translated into a breathless sprint through the streets of a city, for panic is nothing if not an expression of mental flight, the unbidden force that grows inside you when you are trapped, when the truth is too much to bear, when the injustice of this unavoidable truth can no longer be confronted, and therefore the only possible response is to flee, to shut down your mind by transforming yourself into a gasping, twitching, delirious body, and what truth could be more terrible than this one? Condemned to death within hours or days, cut down in the middle of your life for reasons that entirely escape your understanding, your life suddenly reduced to a thimbleful of minutes, seconds, heartbeats.
It doesn’t matter what happens next. You watch the second half of the film attentively, but you know the story is over, that even as the story continues, there is nothing left to say. Bigelow will spend his last hours on earth trying to solve the mystery of his murder. He will learn that Philips, the man who called his office from Los Angeles, is dead. He will go to Los Angeles and investigate the activities of various thieves, psychopaths, and two-faced women. He will be shot at and punched. He will learn that his involvement in the story is purely accidental, that the villains want him dead because he happened to notarize a bill of sale pertaining to a stolen shipment of iridium and he is the only man alive who can identify the culprits. He will track down his murderer, the man with the curious collar, who is also the murderer of Philips, and kill him in a shoot-out on the landing of a darkened stairway. And then, shortly after that, Bigelow himself will die, just as the doctors said he would—in mid-sentence, telling his story to the police.
There is nothing wrong with playing it out like this, you suppose. It is the conventional thing to do, the manly, heroic option, the trope that befits all adventure stories, but why, you wonder, does Bigelow never divulge his imminent fate to anyone, not even to his doting, lovesick Paula? Perhaps because heroes must remain tough until the bitter end, and even when time is running out, they can’t allow themselves to get bogged down in useless sentiment.
But you aren’t tough anymore, are you? Ever since the panic attack of 2002, you have stopped being tough, and even though you work hard at trying to be a decent person, it has been a long time now since you last thought of yourself as heroic. If you ever found yourself in Bigelow’s shoes, you are certain you would never do what Bigelow did. You would run through the streets, yes, you would run until you could no longer take another step, no longer breathe, no longer stand up, and then what? Call Paula, call Paula the instant you stopped running, but if her number happened to be busy when you called, then what? Prostrate yourself on the ground and weep, cursing the world for allowing you to have been born. Or else, quite simply, crawl off into a hole somewhere and wait to die.
* * *
You can’t see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether friends or strangers or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end—at least as far as others are concerned—your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others. Think of what happened to you when you were fourteen. For two weeks at the end of the summer, you worked for your father in Jersey City, joining one of the small crews that repaired and maintained the apartment buildings he and his brothers owned and managed: painting walls and ceilings, mending roofs, hammering nails into two-by-fours, pulling up sheets of cracked linoleum. The two men you worked with were black, every tenant in every apartment was black, every person in the neighborhood was black, and after two weeks of looking at nothing but black faces, you began to forget that your own face wasn’t black. Since you couldn’t see your own face, you saw yourself in the faces of the people around you, and bit by bit you stopped thinking of yourself as different. In effect, you stopped thinking about yourself at all.
* * *
Looking at your right hand as it grips the black fountain pen you are using to write this journal, you think of Keats looking at his own right hand under similar circumstances, in the act of writing one of his last poems and suddenly breaking off to scribble eight lines in the margin of the manuscript, the bitter outcry of a young man who knew he was headed for an early grave, darkly underscored by the word now in the first line, for every now necessarily implies a later, and what later could Keats look forward to but the prospect of his own death?
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
