Voice Over

THE DIAMOND DOOR

by Roderick Clark

It happened like this. The “summer of love” hit San Francisco in 1966, but in 1967, that invasion of shimmering butterflies had only begun to influence the youth culture of downtown Madison. In those early days of the flower culture, my friends and I changed our identities like we changed socks. We would say: “I’m majoring in English now,” or “I’m delivering pizza,” (or working in a bar, or as a janitor, or in a head shop), “but what I really am is...” —and every week it was something different—requiring a new pose, a new costume, a new vocabulary. Already that year, I had been a poet, a searcher for spiritual knowledge, a poster maker, a political activist and a stage actor.

One Saturday after a shift in the dish room, I sat on the porch of the co-op, skimming an underground newspaper, drinking a beer and digesting some pale blue mushrooms I had scored the day before. As my head brightened, I came across an ad announcing that “The Diamond Door Company” was making a movie in town and needed actors. Since I believed myself to be a brilliant actor, it occurred to me in my Technicolor condition that I ought to be the star of this movie. I immediately hitchhiked over to the near west side, and glided across sparkling sidewalks into the apartment office of the director and producer—a young man about my age. He looked a little startled at first when I walked in with my beads, bright eyes and shoulder length hair. “Look no further,” I declared, “your star is here!” When he discovered that I could deliver lines and create a character (no difficult task for an identity-change artist like myself), he recruited me on the spot.

The Diamond Door Company was a tiny film production company trying to create its first motion picture, a small-town gothic murder mystery called The Diamond Door. I played the star—a straight-laced psychopathic young killer called “Edwin.” The movie was being shot in black and white in sixteen millimeter “negative” film with the idea that it would later be blown up to 35mm. Sound would be dubbed in later—and it would become a black and white cult classic, if we were lucky—just like Psycho.

Of course, I had to change my life to become a movie star—but I was willing to go where the dream led. The character had short hair, so I had to cut mine. He wore an old three-piece suit and big black wingtips, an outfit I took to wearing around town when the evenings were sufficiently cool, terrifying acquaintances who thought I had become a Bible salesman. Other things changed too. I couldn’t get high as much as I had been accustomed to, because the film shoots required a kind of concentration that nothing else in my life demanded. And as the shooting progressed, I had to learn how to do things other than acting: set up lights, apply make-up, learn what “scenes” and “shot breakdowns” were, think like a camera.

The script, it turned out, also needed some work, so I became a script doctor as well. At one point the director asked me to write a scene in which the killer’s mother would reminisce with a visitor about her dead husband, and show that individual an old stereo slide of Edwin Sr. in his coffin. (Ed Sr., of course, I would play myself, with grayed hair and a fake mustache). What would such a woman say to a visitor about the man that she had loved, I wondered? I had taken to scribbling down dialog in an old spiral notebook as I shared coffee breaks with the older ladies who worked at my food service unit. We were short-handed at the time, because my fellow dishwasher, Leroy, a farm-raised lad from a rural neighborhood, had just been killed as a result of driving a little too fast down a dark county lane. As I worked on my scene at the break table one day, the break discussion topic was Leroy’s funeral of the day before. “He looked so nice in his dark blue suit,” my supervisor, Marie, said quietly. And since that was exactly the line I needed for Edwin’s mother, I deftly worked it into the script to honor the memory of Leroy, who had always warned me about the evil of drugs.

My director was delighted with the scene, and began planning immediately to do the shot of Ed Sr. lying in his coffin. He located a small funeral home that existed down on the east end of University Avenue not far from my favorite bar. The guy that ran the place, Ernie, was a friend of his—so we arranged to do the shoot in the evening after normal business hours. A few evenings hence, I found myself lying horizontally in a coffin on the second floor of an air-conditioned funeral parlor with cherry wood at my elbows, white satin at my back—and hot light on my face. The director took an eternity to set up the shot, and my feet were beginning to itch inside the huge black wingtips, when suddenly—the bell rang downstairs.

“Customer!” hissed Ernie, “Quick! Get this stuff out of sight!” Ernie went downstairs and started talking through the door, pretending to have trouble with the lock while I hopped out of the coffin. We grabbed the lights and all the film paraphernalia, removed all traces of our presence as silently as possible, and descended into the basement to wait until the visitors had gone.

The basement was a different world. A short, pasty-looking young ghoul who looked as if he had not seen the sun in years gave us a tour of the coolers, pulling out drawers to introduce us to several stiffs in residence. In addition to the coolers, there was an office with a coffeepot, and at the end of the hall, a small bathroom to which I retreated to repair my film makeup. After a few minutes, the door at the top of the stairs opened, and a snatch of Ernie’s pitch to the newly arrived customers floated down to us.

“Now your cherry casket,” he was saying, “will last you a century or so, but your bronze will last you a thousand years. Now I ask you, if it was you down there, which one would you choose?”

The door closed and we heard steps descending. A fierce-looking little old lady emerged from the stairwell, into the lower hall. She walked past the office to the open door of the bathroom. Inside, with my back to her, I was doing some final touches on my makeup. Her steely little eyes caught mine in the mirror. “You’re wearing make-up!” she bellowed, and what possible response was there to that? Not getting one, she stomped over to the door of the office and looked in on where the ghoul and the film crew were sitting around the coffeepot. “That man is wearing make-up!” she declared indignantly. “What’s it to ya?” said the ghoul, apparently unperturbed by this invasion of a realm where he, invisible pitchfork in hand, was both lord and minion. She turned the gaze of steel upon him and the crew without effect. She looked back down the hall at me. I concentrated on combing my hair. Finally, she issued a loud “Harrumph!” and reascended to the parlor. A few minutes later we heard the coffin-shopping party clumping down the front stairs, and Ernie raising his voice in plaintive pursuit of customers lost.

When we ventured upstairs again, Ernie did not look happy at all. He was turned away from us, thumping his head against the wall and cursing softly. The director of The Diamond Door, however, seemed happy the distraction was over. “Well, Rod,” he said, rubbing his hands together cheerfully, “let’s get back in the coffin. It’s show time!”

My dream of stardom never did come true. The Diamond Door Company went bankrupt, and my face never shimmered across the drive-in movie screens of America while fireflies danced on the windshields of couples in love. Nevertheless, I credit the Diamond Door Company for giving me chances to learn and grow when I had nothing better in my life. What made dishwashing tolerable that summer was knowing that, before long, I would be back on the set of The Diamond Door, slipping into character, waiting for the director to say: “Lights! Camera! Action!” And then I would hear the hum of the camera and step into a world that was silent, and gothic and cool. And out of that purgatory of steam and rattling plates, the dream would slide out, shiny and clean.

ronellis@hughes.net 04/17/08