The Film Club by David Gilmour Page A

explanation these days when it came to Jesse.
    From where I was standing in the living room, I could see Rebecca Ng turn the corner at the top of the parking lot. White jeans, white jean jacket, chartreuse T-shirt, her night-black hair falling just so. The construction crew at the foot of the church wall signalled to each other and one by one they found a way to look at Rebecca when she got abreast of them. A grey fist of pigeons rose and fluttered to the west.
    I was brushing up on New German Cinema. We were doing Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) that day. (Be sure to prepare him for the scene where the conquistador matches his fingers to a bloodstain on a rock.) Sometimes I learned this stuff a half-hour before I put the movie on. Jesse was outside. He was hungover. He didn’t say it but I had smelled it on him when he came up the stairs. One of his friends, Morgan, had gotten out of jail the night before (thirty days, assault) and dropped by. I’d had to kick him out of the house, gently, at four o’clock in the morning and send Jesse to bed.
    It was a fine line chez nous and some days I felt like I was beating back chaos and disorder and irresponsibility with a whip and a chair. Indeed, it seemed as if there was a jungle growing all around the house, that it was constantly threatening to poke its branches and vines through the windows, under the door, up through the basement. More than a year had passed since Jesse left school (he was seventeen now) and there was no sign yet of his charging up the stairs to take the world “by the lapels.”
    Still we had the film club. The yellow cards on the fridge, a line drawn through each completed film, reassured me that something, at least, was happening. I wasn’t delusional. I knew I wasn’t giving him a systematic education in cinema. That wasn’t the point. We could as easily have gone skin diving or collected stamps. The films simply served as an occasion to spend time together, hundreds of hours, as well as a door-opener for all manner of conversational topics—Rebecca, Zoloft, dental floss, Vietnam, impotence, cigarettes.
    Some days, he asked about people I’d interviewed: What was George Harrison like? (A nice guy, although when you hear the Liverpool accent, it’s pretty hard not to start jumping around and screaming, “You were in the Beatles. You must have got, like, a ton of chicks!”); Ziggy Marley (Bob’s son; a sullen little prick if there ever was one); Harvey Keitel (great actor but a brain like an uncooked pork roast); Richard Gere (a classic actor-pseudo-intellectual who hasn’t figured out yet that people listen to him because he’s a movie star, not because he’s a brainer); Jodie Foster (like trying to break into Fort Knox); Dennis Hopper (foul-mouthed, funny, a great guy); Vanessa Red-grave (warm, statuesque, like talking to the Queen); English director Steven Frears (another Brit who doesn’t know when to lay off the aftershave. No wonder a woman can’t put her head in these guys’ laps); Yoko Ono (a defensive, prickly drag who, when queried about the whys and wherefores of her latest “project,” replies, “Would you ask Bruce Springsteen that question?”); Robert Altman (chatty, literate, easygoing; no wonder actors worked for him for a song); American director Oliver Stone (very masculine guy, smarter than the scripts he writes; “ War and Peace ? Jesus Christ, what kind of a question is that? It’s ten o’clock in the morning!”).
    We talked about the ’60s, the Beatles (too often but he indulged me), drinking badly, drinking well; then some more about Rebecca (“Do you think she’ll dump me?”), Adolf Hitler, Dachau, Richard Nixon, infidelity, Truman Capote, the Mojave Desert, Suge Knight, lesbians, cocaine, heroin chic, the Backstreet Boys (my idea), tattoos, Johnny Carson, Tupac (his idea), sarcasm,