Could the hole in the ozone have been created by two movie nuts?
That hole in the ozone layer - could it be the work of just two men?
I often wonder how much ground we covered; all those nights in his car, circling the city, talking movies.
He couldn't do it anywhere else, couldn't talk over pizza in a restaurant or from a comfy chair in either of our living rooms. It had to be on the road.
Then again, he was a salesman. That's where he spent most of his reflective time, going over what to say, how to say it, what words might win he and his wife their next meal; a whole life in a car. So, if that was his special thinking spot, then that, when it came to sharing our tastes in the movies, is quite naturally where we would do it.
It was mostly comedies, the verbal, neurotic sort that populated the era into which he came of age, in the working class land of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and I, as a kid, thought that I would grow into from my squeakier setting in suburban Montreal.
We talked Alan Arkin, Woody Allen, Charles Grodin and a handful of others - any character who, like him, had shun the Old Order's way to happiness and was desperately looking to put their house in order according to new, entirely improvised plan, with wit the only recourse when, more often than not, things failed.
We would recite our favorite lines, a Neil Simon here, a Carl Reiner there, and crack each other up, wearing down his tires all the while.
Curiously, we only ventured to the movies together once, when the pleasure he took in the few things he considered beneath him, like discount production values and limited acting ability, inspired him to take me to a drive-in to catch Lou Ferigno as Hercules. We snacked on licorice bits, and every time something particularly ill-produced arose, he'd throw his head back in a welcome convulsion, exhibiting a tongue as black as the many roads we had traveled.
We were still talking movies on his death bed -a makeshift one set up in his living room - when his face was thin and green with cancer. The heavy morphine he was on was seriously depriving him of his trademark brio, but it wasn't enough to rob of him of the joy he got from the remembrance of a choice comic line, for which he'd come fully alive.
The last I saw of him was when his coffin, after his well-attended funeral, was loaded into a hearse. The hearse turned the corner...and I never saw him, in any form, again.
But...I never saw the hearse stop anywhere either.
I trust it's still on the road somewhere, and that, thanks to some inexplicable miracle, he has managed to spring back to life, is sitting up in his coffin, and is exchanging funny lines with the movie-loving driver.
