Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

I first met Perkus Tooth in an office. Not an office where he worked, though I was confused about this at the time. (Which is itself hardly an uncommon situation, for me.)

This was in the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, on Fifty-second Street and Third Avenue, on a weekday afternoon at the end of summer. Id gone there to record a series of voice-overs for one of Criterions high-end DVD reissues, a lost 1950s film noir called The City Is a Maze . My role was to play the voice of that films director, the late migr auteur Von Tropen Zollner. I would read a series of statements culled from Zollners interviews and articles, as part of a supplemental documentary being prepared by the curatorial geniuses at Criterion, a couple of whom Id met at a dinner party. In drawing me into the project theyd supplied me with a batch of research materials, which Id browsed unsystematically, as well as a working version of their reconstruction of the film, in order for me to glean what the excitement was about. It was the first Id heard of Zollner, so this was hardly a labor of passion. But the enthusiasm of buffs is infectious, and I liked the movie. I no longer considered myself a working actor. This was the only sort of stuff I did anymore, riding the exhaust of my former and vanishing celebrity, the smoky half-life of a child star. An eccentric favor, really. And I was curious to see the inside of Criterions operation. This was the first week of Septemberthe citys back-to-school mood always inspired me to find something to do with my idle hands. In those days, with Janice far away, I lived too much on the surface of things, parties, gossip, assignations in which I was the go-between or vicarious friend. Workplaces fascinated me, the zones where Manhattans veneer gave way to the practical world.

I recorded Zollners words in a sound chamber in the technical wing of Criterions crowded, ramshackle offices. In the room outside the chamber, where the soundman sat giving me cues through a headset, a restorer also sat peering at a screen and guiding a cursor with a mouse, diligently erasing celluloid scratches and blots, frame by digital frame, from the bare bodies of hippies cavorting in a mud puddle. I was told he was restoring I Am Curious (Yellow) . Afterward I was retrieved by the producer whod enlisted me, Susan Eldred. It had been Susan and her colleague Id met at the dinner partyunguarded, embracing people with a passion for a world of cinematic minutiae, for whom Id felt an instantaneous affection. Susan led me to her office, a cavern with one paltry window and shelves stacked with VHS tapes, more lost films petitioning for Criterions rescue. Susan shared her office, it appeared. Not with the colleague from the party, but another person. He sat beneath the straining shelves, notebook in hand, gaze distant. It seemed too small an office to share. The glamour of Criterions brand wasnt matched by these scenes of thrift and improvisation Id gathered in my behind-the-scenes glimpse, but why should it have been? No sooner did Susan introduce me to Perkus Tooth and give me an invoice to sign than she was called away for some consultation elsewhere.

He was, that first time, lapsed into what I would soon learn to call one of his ellipsistic moods. Perkus Tooth himself later supplied that descriptive word: ellipsistic, derived from ellipsis . A species of blank interval, a nod or fugue in which he was neither depressed nor undepressed, not struggling to finish a thought nor to begin one. Merely between. Pause button pushed. I certainly stared. With Tooths turtle posture and the utter slackness of his being, his receding hairline and antique manner of dresstrim-tapered suit, ferociously wrinkled silk with the shine worn off, moldering tennis shoesI could have taken him for elderly. When he stirred, his hand brushing the open notebook page as if taking dictation with an invisible pen, and I read his pale, adolescent features, I guessed he was in his fiftiesstill a decade wrong, though Perkus Tooth had been out of the sunlight for a while. He was in his early forties, barely older than me. Id mistaken him for old because Id taken him for important. He now looked up and I saw one undisciplined hazel eye wander, under its calf lid, toward his nose. That eye wanted to cross, to discredit Perkus Tooths whole sober aura with a comic jape. His other eye ignored the gambit, trained on me.

Youre the actor.

Yes, I said.

So, Im doing the liner notes. For The City Is a Maze , I mean.

Oh, good.

I do a lot of them. Prelude to a Certain Midnight Recalcitrant Women The Unholy City Echolalia

All film noir?

Oh, gosh, no. Youve never seen Herzogs Echolalia?

No.

Well, I wrote the liner notes, but it isnt exactly released yet. Im still trying to convince Eldred

Perkus Tooth, Id learn, called everyone by their last name. As though famous, or arrested. His minds landscape was epic, dotted with towering figures like Easter Island heads. At that moment EldredSusanreturned to the office.

So, he said to her, have you got that tape of Echolalia around here somewhere? He cast his eyes, the good left and the meandering right, at her shelves, the cacophony of titles scribbled on labels there. I want him to see it.

Susan raised her eyebrows and he shrank. I dont know where it is, she said.

Never mind.

Have you been harassing my guest, Perkus?

What do you mean?

Susan Eldred turned to me and collected the signed release, then we made our farewell. Then, as I got to the elevator, Perkus Tooth hurried through the sliding door to join me, crushing his antique felt hat onto his crown as he did. The elevator, like so many others behind midtown edifices, was tiny and rattletrap, little more than a glorified dumbwaiterthere was no margin for pretending we hadnt just been in that office together. Bad eye migrating slightly, Perkus Tooth gave me a lunar look, neither unfriendly nor apologetic. Despite the vintage costume, he wasnt some dapper retro-fetishist. His shirt collar was grubby and crumpled. The green-gray sneakers like mummified sponges glimpsed within a janitors bucket.

So, he said again. This so of Perkusshis habit of introducing any subject as if in resumption of earlier talkwasnt in any sense coercive. Rather, it was as if Perkus had startled himself from a daydream, heard an egging voice in his head and mistaken it for yours. So, Ill lend you my own copy of Echolalia , even though I never lend anything. Because I think you ought to see it.

Sure.

Its a sort of essay film. Herzog shot it on the set of Morrison Grooms Nowhere Near . Grooms movie was never finished, you know. Echolalia documents Herzogs attempts to interview Marlon Brando on Grooms set. Brando doesnt want to give the interview, and whenever Herzog corners him Brando just parrots whatever Herzogs said you know, echolalia

Yes, I said, flummoxed, as I would so often later find myself, by Tooths torrential specifics.

But its also the only way you can see any of Nowhere Near . Morrison Groom destroyed the footage, so the scenes reproduced in Echolalia are, ironically, all that remains of the film

Why ironically? I doubted my hopes of inserting the question. It sounds incredible, I said.

Of course you know Morrison Grooms suicide was probably faked.

My nod was a lie. The doors opened, and we stumbled together out to the pavement, tangling at every threshold: You first Oops After you Sorry. We faced each other, mid-Wednesday Manhattan throngs islanding us in their stream. Perkus grew formally clipped, perhaps belatedly eager to show he wasnt harassing me.