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Five Movie Endings (I Would Banish from This World if I Were Ruler Supreme of Hollywood)Author(s): STEVEN RAMIREZSource: The North American Review, Vol. 295, No. 3 (SUMMER 2010), pp. 32-36Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25750661 .

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Five Movie Endings

(I Would Banish from This World if I Were

Ruler Supreme of Hollywood) A STORY BY STEVEN RAMIREZ

5. Flashbacks and Fast-forwards.

In the summer of '98, my father took me and Grandpa 'Nando to see Saving Private Ryan, that awful Steven

Spielberg movie that brought nothing new to the war genre except maybe a few exploding intestine scenes in THX. It was a Sunday afternoon. The theater was packed with families that looked a lot like ours. Parent, child, and at least one old

person. This was important: the old person. There'd been

plenty of hype surrounding this movie and I'd heard stories of old men?old white men in particular?proud and indestruc tible veterans of war?being reduced to snot and tears by the time the credits rolled. Of course, this is what we'd all secretly come for. I'd never seen Grandpa 'Nando cry. And if my father had ever seen it, he sure as hell wouldn't have wasted

money, not to mention an entire Sunday afternoon, on a

long-ass Steven Spielberg flick.

But even exploding intestine scenes get old, and halfway through the movie I became bored. I turned to see if Grandpa 'Nando had started crying yet, if the movie had worked its

Hollywood magic. But he was slumped in his seat, asleep, busting ass all over the place. My father must have noticed this too because soon after, he tapped my knee and gestured that we were leaving. Grandpa 'Nando woke with a start, cut another loud one, and followed us out the theater. When we

arrived at the swinging doors, one of the ushers?an old man

himself with several military badges pinned to his vest?took

Grandpa 'Nando by the arm and said, "If you don't mind me

asking, sir. What bomb group were you?" Grandpa 'Nando looked at the old man for a moment.

"Wha-wfoa?" he said.

"Bomb group, sir. You fought in the war, didn't you?" Grandpa 'Nando started laughing. He laughed so loud that

several people in the back rows turned to see what could be so

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funny when, on screen, a group of boys was being ripped to

pieces by shrapnel. "Oh, no, no," Grandpa 'Nando said. He flicked his head

toward us. "I'm with them."

I guess I knew Grandpa 'Nando hadn't fought in World War II or any war for that matter. Certainly my father must have known this. But that's the thing about movies. They're supposed to convince you otherwise, promise you that, yes, you were there, make you feel like a tiny hero each time you leave the theater.

"Hey, Gramps," I said afterward in the parking lot. "You ever shoot a gun?"

"Nope." "You ever know anyone who got killed in war?" "Don't think so."

"What's your favorite movie, Gramps?"

"Rocky." "You used to box?"

"Nope. Just like boxing." When we arrived back at the house, my father turned the

TV to a Sugar Ray Leonard fight we'd seen at least a thousand times. By round six, Grandpa 'Nando was asleep again, busting ass, some real stinkers.

"Gramps!" I said, keeping my nose plugged. "Wake up! Here comes the knockout punch! Wake up, Gramps. Here it comes!"

Grandpa 'Nando didn't move.

"Gramps!" I yelled louder. "You're gonna miss it! Wake up, wake up, wake up!"

My father finally shushed me, told me to stop being a girl and let Grandpa sleep. He scooted his chair closer to the tele vision. I watched him. Of course I did. I was a curious little detective with bad skin. I wondered if Steven Spielberg would one day make a crappy movie for the two of us. And would I take my father to see it? Of course I would! Who was I

kidding? We're talking Steven fucking Spielberg! My father pointed at the screen, let out a gigantic fart.

"Watch," he said, "watch. Keep your eye on Sugar Ray's left hand. Shit surprises me each time."

4. Cliffhangers

One afternoon my uncle Danny, the youngest of five brothers, sold everything he owned and used the money to buy the world's first Laser Disc player. This was in '89, three or four

years before the smaller version went on the market, and Uncle Danny's was about the size of a refrigerator. I don't know how much it cost him, but I do know that he no longer had a television or a living room or house to put it in. Not to mention a family to watch the damn thing with. That was

gone too. Talk about expensive! So he was forced to move back in with Grandpa 'Nando, which mustn't have bothered him too much because that same afternoon, after he'd

plugged in everything, Uncle Danny invited all of us over? me, my father, my uncles, two or three aunts, my cousins, and

even a few neighbors. We crowded into Uncle Danny's room?the room he'd grown up in?and watched the movie that had come free with purchase: Predator.

Of course, what they didn't tell you was that the Laser Disc

player should, in reality, be called Laser Discs player?plural? because for each movie came a stack of trashcan lid-sized discs that Uncle Danny had to change every thirteen or so

minutes.

We didn't mind the interruptions. We were too in awe of this mysterious monolith from the future, buzzing and

blinking before us, and just as the movie was nearing its

end?everyone in the jungle having been slaughtered, leaving only Arnold Schwarzenegger to defend himself against this alien monster?the screen went black. It was time to change discs for the final time. Except Uncle Danny couldn't find the final disc. He looked everywhere, became frantic. He turned the room upside down, checked and re-checked the pack aging, made everyone get up and move at least twenty times. But the ending was missing. Uncle Danny cursed until his face became red. My father and my uncles listened to him. My aunts cried. They told him it was okay, don't worry about it, these things happen.

"I know that!" Uncle Danny shouted. "But, shit! Son of a

bitch, fucking shit! I just had it! That's the worst god damn

part!" On our way home I asked my father how the movie ended. "Don't know," he shrugged. "Never seen it."

"But what do you think happened? You think Arnold killed the monster? Or did the monster kill Arnold? Or maybe it was a tie and they both went back home. Do you think that's what

happened?" "I already told you what I know," he said. "Now shut up. Let

me drive."

Sometimes it's okay for family to lie to each other, make shit

up so that everyone can get some sleep. I wish I could go back in time and tell my father this, that maybe I never owned any Laser Disc player but I was no exception.

3. The Star Child

Today, Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is hailed

by ten out of ten critics as a cinematic, mirror-to-civilization

masterpiece. You'll find it sitting near the top of pretty much

every Best Of list, it continues to achieve commercial success at the DVD and syndicate levels, and it seems, for better or worse, that we humans cannot experience even the slightest moment of realization without hearing the crescendo from the film's Zarathustra theme rise between our ears.

ME: Uh, excuse me?did I leave my sunglasses here? 7-11 CLERK: Um, sir, they're on your head.

ME: Ah!

(cue music) It's official. 2001 has been programmed into our cultural

DNA. Books have been written, documentaries made,

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production notes published, there are entire college courses

designed around Kubrick's two-hundred and twenty-eight minute mind fuck, and if you ever want to get laid at a science fiction convention?or an especially hip grad school party? just introduce yourself as David Bowman and watch the retainers and ironic clothing fly!

But what many people don't know is that when the movie first opened, back in 1968, it sucked.

Or, it didn't suck. It was just unnecessarily confusing as hell. And why would someone spend their hard-earned dollar on a

two-hour-plus migraine when they could just kick back and watch John Wayne kill another bunch of semi-retarded Indians? They wouldn't. And they didn't. 2001: A Space Odyssey was a box-office failure. There's a famous story about the actor Rock Hudson storming out of the film's premiere,

screaming, "Can someone tell me what the hell this is all about?"

My junior year in high school I had to quit football because my bones weren't growing and I was rapidly becoming a midget among men. Unlike most seventeen-year old boys, I secretly thanked God for this wonderful gift of freakish dwarfism, because I hated football. Hated it! I wasn't horrible?I mean, I could catch and throw the stupid thing? but I hated it because I couldn't for the life of me understand it! The patterns and the routes and the holes and the

pockets?what did it all mean? Yes, football was my Space Odyssey, Coach Bart "The Bull" Menendez was my HAL 9000.

BULL 9000: Fernie? Fernie, what are you doing, Fernie? ME: I don't know! I don't know! I don't know! BULL 9000: Fernie, you do realize there is a key difference between the pattern-in, slant-out, cut back and up, and the

pattern-out, slant-in, cut up and back, don't you? Fernie?

Fernie, do you realize that? ME: I don't know! I don't know! I don't know! BULL 9000: Fernie, it might be wise of you to hand over the football.

ME: Yes, sir. BULL 9000: Fernie, it might be in everyone's best interest if you considered another

hobby. Do you agree, Fernie? ME: Yes, sir.

So I joined theater and started smoking a lot of weed. That's the secret behind all us so

called theater brats, we smoke a lot of weed,

pop any pills we can get our grubby hands on?a combination that would make you, too, appreciate the beauty of Katharine

Hepburn over Pamela Anderson?and senior

year, me and a few others got it in our heads to write a stage adaptation of 2001. Since I

was still freakishly small, we all agreed that I'd

take on the part of the Star Child, who, just before the final curtain, would float above the

earth in a cosmic sack of amniotic fluid,

staring into civilization's past, present and

future. Lucky for us, stage crew was on more

drugs than we were, so everything was a go. After our opening performance, I met my

father outside the theater. He'd parked the

truck along the curb. The engine was still

running. "So what'd you think?" I asked. Of course,

I was being cruel. I wanted to hear him

admit that he hadn't been there. But my father surprised me.

"I didn't get it," he said. "I didn't know

what the hell was going on."

"Oh," I said. "Well, you know, it's really more of a concept piece."

WILLIAM JOHNSON

Answers the Lake Gave

This far into the woods, the clang of a dumpster mimics the din of a churchbell in another town.

Out here our shouts either wouldn't be heard or would pass for the muffled laughter of loons. She begged me to walk this path overgrown with aster and fern, my toddler

not-quite-four-year-old, dwarf-child fumbling

in a sweatshirt of her mother's. We could go back? the other world would be so comforting? the cabin with its rocker and potbellied stove, fire crackling over a split larch log. But here

we know night mist, dark thick as wool, no walls and the gossip reserved for frogs? this silence crickets put a mind to. When an owl calls

and we squint impossibly to find it, she answers

moon, moon even as the first sliver knifes through cedar boughs. And now, like a dampered echo, a second owl replies, far off an engine drones

and a boat putters dimly across the bay. In a finger of wake, just visible through trees, the moon

is churned to bronze, like the sparkly tail of a

comet she gawks at, oohing as I lift her to see.

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STEVEN RAMIREZ

A concept piece? What the hell was I talking about? What

language was I speaking? I felt as if I was shouting at my father from across the Grand Canyon.

He shrugged. "Could've used more aliens is all I'm saying. That's what the damn thing's about, ain't it?" He reached below his seat and pulled out two Mountain Dews. We drank

them together. My hands were still sticky from all that fake amniotic fluid.

"What'd you think about the ending?" I asked. "The ending?" He shrugged again. "Ah, I wouldn't worry

about it. You'll get it tomorrow."

Here, I had to disagree with him. It was true, the play was a disaster (there was no drug in the world that could've made it seem otherwise). Our Dawn-of-Man costumes had made us look more like a bunch of B-movie wolf men

running in circles, our Discovery spacecraft had crumbled by the second act, and the music had skipped the entire time,

giving the whole performance a bad remix quality. But the

ending?the moment of true human revelation?had gone

smoothly. After all, my only job had been to stand still and stare at a large globe of the earth (compliments of the geog

raphy department) and suck my damn thumb until the

lights went down. I'd nailed the ending. Nailed the shit out of it.

So I told my father this, spoke to the point of exaspera tion.

"Alright, alright," he said, laughing a little. "Calm down. Shit. I thought you just forgot your lines."

2. And They Were All Squirrels

I studied theater and film at a college known for theater and

film, so I've seen my share of bad student productions (redundant?). I'm convinced that every student film is just another whiny derivative of that one scene from A Street Car Named Desire where Marlon Brando cries like a bitch and

yells, "Stella! Stella!" Then again, even that's a whiny derivative of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. And who

knows?maybe Shakespeare was simply drawing from a moment in our common ancestral past when a horny caveman chucked a stone at a cavewoman and nailed her right in the head.

I recall one student film in particular, shot from the point of view of a mysterious and silent character who, each night, would prowl outside the bedroom window of a beautiful blonde woman. Inevitably, the woman would peer out her window, give our character strange looks, and proceed to throw various items at him. A vase. A roll of quarters. A hair

dryer. This went on for over an hour and my classmates began to theorize on the film's meaning. It's a commentary on class, they whispered. On gender, on desire, on the many nuances of

property law. But at the very end, the point of view shifted and we saw that the watcher?our mysterious and silent hero?had merely been a squirrel the entire time?a really fat

one?minding its own damn squirrel business. At the

moment of revelation, the entire class groaned and booed and threw trash at the movie screen. Of course we did! We'd

placed all of our fears and doubts and anxieties and?most

importantly?our hopes, in the hands of a creature that would eat its own tail if it were hungry enough.

Fuck that squirrel! Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him! But I was no filmmaker. I was an actor. And I only relate the

above story as a point of reference. You see, that very same

year, my big break came with a Botanelli's pasta sauce

commercial?not exactly high art, but a start?and I'd only landed the role after promising the director that I was, in fact, full-blood Italian, which I could only assume mattered.

In the commercial I played a Wall Street type who, one

afternoon, up and leaves the chaos of his job, flies clear across

the Atlantic, takes several goat-drawn carts only to arrive at a

small hut where he enjoys a bowl of homemade spaghetti with his father. Come home for dinner was the brand's slogan and with one arm around this strange old Italian man, I

repeated it to the camera?to the nation?in an accent that would've made Mario and Luigi blush. I'd felt like an idiot

throughout the entire shoot and the night I saw the commer

cial air for the first time, I cried like a bitch. I did. I mean, to

anyone watching it was a shitty pasta sauce commercial; but to me, it was a thirty-second identity crisis. I was Marlon Brando. I was Shakespeare. I was a caveman. I was the moth

erfucking squirrel! Just who the hell was I? I called home in tears. "Dad!" I said. "Dad!" "What? What is it? Why you yelling?" "Dad! I'm in a commercial!" "That's good, ain't it?" "I guess so."

"Why you crying then?" "I lied to the director, Dad. I told him I was Italian. I told

him my name was short for Faranelli"

My father laughed. He laughed so loud I had to hold the

phone away from my ear. "Shit," he said. "To tell you the truth, I don't remember what the hell your name's short for."

"Dad, I'm serious."

"Hey, so am I."

We were silent for a while. I saw my commercial come on

again, in between a sofa clearance sale and the never-ending meat platter at Applebees.

Finally my father said, "Did you know Grandpa 'Nando was an actor?"

"What? Really?" "Yeah, yeah. He was in a movie with John Wayne. But this

was a long time ago, way before John Wayne was really, really famous."

"Wow, what was the movie?"

"Ah, I forget the name. But I remember Grandpa 'Nando

played some Indian chief, and John Wayne some white dude who loves Indians so much?I don't know, because they're wise or something?and all he wants to do is join Grandpa's tribe, and he eventually does, even raises his own little Indian

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I

family, gets his own crazy Indian name, and everyone loves

him, life is good, you know?except at the very end Grandpa 'Nando sticks a spear through John Wayne's chest and tells him that he made a real good Indian, except for the part that he's not a real good Indian, never will be, and that was the main problem, I guess. The end."

"Is that true?"

"Of course it's true."

"Really?" "Okay, well not really. Shit, Fernie. I was just trying to make

you feel better."

"Oh," I said. "Well thanks." I hung up the phone and went to bed early. I'll admit, I did

feel a little better. I wondered how long ago my father had made up that story. It was convincing as hell. Well, except for one glaring error: everyone knows there's never been a time in

the history of the universe when John Wayne wasn't really,

really famous.

1. Hospital Bed Death Scene

One night I woke up with the worst, most painful, most gut

busting stomach ache I'd ever experienced in my entire short

life. Someone had invaded my stomach with a pair of pliers. I

screamed out loud. I hobbled to where my father slept. "Dad!" I said. "Dad!" "What is it? Why you yelling?" "Dad, my stomach hurts. I think I'm dying!" "Take a dump."

"I tried that already. But I just sat on the toilet and the pain

got worse. I don't want to die on the toilet, Dad!"

"Give it another minute," he said, turning over.

It was my father's prescription for everything. I could've been run over by three buses, mauled by a circus tiger, struck

by lightning and my father would've looked at my flattened

and bloody and electrified body and prescribed sixty mean

ingless seconds. Still, I sat there. I grinded my teeth, tried to

outlast it, whatever ft was. I thought about that famous Ridley Scott movie, waited for my stomach to burst open and reveal

my evil, fangy offspring. It was too much. So I pulled at my father's arm and told him there was a god damn alien inside

me. He laughed a little at that one, finally slapped on some

underwear and drove my impregnated ass to the hospital. Once there, the doctor said it was my appendix and it had to

come out. This was nothing, he assured me. He'd done four of

them that day. "You hear that?" my father said as soon as the doctor had

left the room. "Four of them. That means there's four of those

little fuckers running around here, somewhere." I kept my eyes on the ceiling vents.

The nurses had a hell of a time putting me to sleep. Whatever they kept injecting into my IV wasn't working. They told me to count backwards from fifty, then a hundred, then

two hundred. I reached zero each time. Finally they called in

my father.

I

"They need you to go to sleep, Fernie," he said. "So go to

sleep." "I can't," I said.

"You have to. They can't take the alien out if you're awake." The nurses gasped at my father's words. "But what if I don't wake up?" I said. "Don't be stupid. Nobody dies from this. It's like popping a

zit. If you die people will call you the biggest wuss in the world. And you're not a wuss, okay? Not the biggest one,

anyway. Now give it a minute. Count from sixty." The last number I remember is fifty-three. When I woke up, the doctor presented me with a jar and

floating around inside was something that looked like a shriv eled up jalapeno.

"That's it?" I said. "That's it," said the doctor. "That's the alien?" "No. Its an appendix. Everyone's got one. This is yours."

When he left, my father leaned in and said, "Don't listen to

him. It was a damn alien, alright. Meanest thing I ever seen.

But I punched the shit out of it. Went twelve rounds before it

finally threw in the towel. Now here?eat your eggs." I tried but they were too watery. "Was it really an alien?" I said. "Of course it was."

"Oh," I said. "Well thanks."

"Just promise me one thing," he said. "When the little son of a bitch comes for me, you gotta let him have it."

"You think I could?"

"Well, maybe not right now. But one day." Every father tries to raise his own little Sugar Ray Leonard.

It's not a macho thing. It's a basic survival thing. That is, until

Steven Spielberg makes a crappy movie about boxing. Then we're all back to square one.

Epilogue: Half-Assed Ode to Steven Spielberg

But I don't mean to talk so much shit about Steven Spielberg and all his Box-Office hits. In fact, I'm willing to forgive the man for his few tragedies, because it's not like I can say I

didn't sit through most of them. And let's not forget: he has

delivered some serious gems. Like E. T.?the movie responsible for my first imaginary

friend, the one that freaked the shit out of my father, until

one weekend he promised me a dog, went out and caught a

stray, and you bet your ass I named it E. T., except it

wouldn't stay or sit or fetch, but only run like mad around

the yard, smashing its face into walls like some kind of

canine retard.

We watched it do this for three damn days, until we decided

to let it go, send it back into the maze of our neighborhood, and that's exactly what we did. And I know the movies all say this is supposed to be too much for a kid, but for once in my life I wasn't playing any role when I agreed with my father

that E. T. was an asshole.

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