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They must never ruin this, I thought. I must be buried here.
“It’s not Green Glade Cemetery,” said the old wax Chinaman nearby, reading my mind.
I had spoken aloud.
“When was this theater built?” I murmured.
The old waxwork let loose a forty-day flood: “1921, one of the first. There was nothing here, some palm trees, farmhouses, cottages, a dirt main street, little bungalows built to lure Doug Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford. Radio was just a crystal matchbox with earphones. Nobody could hear the future on that. We opened big. People walked or drove from Melrose north. Saturday nights there were veritable desert caravans of movie fanatics. The graveyard hadn’t yet begun at Gower and Santa Monica. It filled up with Valentino’s ruptured appendix in ’26. At Grauman’s opening night, Louis B. Mayer arrived from the Selig Zoo in Lincoln Park. That’s where MGM got their lion. Mean, but no teeth. Thirty dancing girls. Will Rogers spun rope. Trixie Friganza sang her famous ‘I Don’t Care’ and wound up an extra in a Swanson film, 1934. Go down, stick your nose in the old basement dressing rooms, you’ll find leftover underwear from those flappers who died for love of Lowell Sherman. Dapper guy with mustache, cancer got him, ’34. You listening?”
“Clyde Rustler,” I blurted.
“Holy Jesus! Nobody knows him! See way up, that old projection room? They buried him there alive in ’29 when they built the new projection room on the second balcony.”
I stared up into phantoms of mist, rain and Shangri-la snow seeking the High Lama.
My shadow friend said: “No elevator. Two hundred steps!”
A long climb, with no Sherpas, up to a middle lobby and a mezzanine and then another balcony and another after that amid three thousand seats. How do you please three thousand customers? I wondered. How? If eight-year-old boys didn’t pee three times during your film, you had it made!
I climbed.
I stopped halfway to sit, panting, suddenly ancient instead of halfway new.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I reached the back wall of Mount Everest and tapped on the old projection-room door.
“Is that who I think it is?” a terrified voice cried.
“No,” I said quietly, “just me. Back for one last matinée after forty years.”
That was a stroke of genius; upchucking my past.
The terrified voice simmered down.
“What’s the password?”
It came right off my tongue, a boy’s voice.
“Tom Mix and his horse, Tony. Hoot Gibson. Ken Maynard. Bob Steele. Helen Twelvetrees. Vilma Banky …”
“That’ll do.”
It was a long while before I heard a giant spider brush the door panel. The door whined. A silver shadow leaned out, a living metaphor of the black-and-white phantoms I had seen flickering across the screen a lifetime ago.
“No one ever comes up here,” said this old, old man.
“No one?”
“No one ever knocks on my door,” said the man with silver hair and silver face and silver clothes, bleached out by seventy years of living under a rock in a high place and gazing down at unreality ten thousand times. “No one knows I’m here. Not even me.”
“You’re here. You’re Clyde Rustler.”
“Am I?” For a moment I thought he might body-search his suspenders and sleeve garters.
“Who are you?” He poked his face like a turtle’s from its shell.
I said my name.
