MELVIN AND RUTH. 12-19-05 at 6 am
Rewrite June 27 07
REWRITE JUNE 8 09, wee hours.
Rewrite 20 JUNE wee hoursYour mother wants me to talk to you Melvin.
"I don't want to talk to anyone." Melvin averted his face, staring at a fly spot on the wall and wondering if Arvin Macy didn't secretly work for the FBI.
"You don't have to talk, son, just listen.." Arvin slid into the chair beside Ruth's son and pushed a plate of cake toward him. The boy stared at it. Arvin pushed a fork at his hand. Melvin was an adult but he seemed much younger when asked to do anything and Ruthie was going to ask him to do something, tonight.
"You see, Mel, the problem with being young is that you forget the legends of the old country --if you ever knew them. Your mother is a third generation American. Have I got that right?
Ruthie came in from the kitchen balancing coffee pot and cups. "Arvin honey, I'm second generation. Take your fingers out of the layer cake for a second and count. My father Arnold was first generation, so was Etta my mother. Your basic Immigrant spawn. The group that is born here right? But first generation never gets its sea legs; they live ten to a room. Four to a bed. The mom and pop speak no English. They both work. The kids sit in the street til it's dark and the parents come home on the subway. Both parents switch jobs all the time. That's first generation.
"You switch jobs all the time." In Melvin's mouth it was an accusation..
"What happened to my job at Cranham and Rense wasn't my fault."
Arvin pursed his lips, wondering if she blamed him when he wasn't around.
"Anyway, let's get this straight. My father was first generation American as he was born here. So that makes me and Eddie second generation, right? And Melvin third generation. We were born into comfortable circumstances, comparatively speaking, neither of us slept ten to a bed in a one room apartment with a bathroom down the hall shared with neighbors like my dad did as a child. Eddie and me had advantages.
"The disadvantage was neither you nor your brother knew much about Europe.
"True What I learned I learned at Columbia University. My parents never talked about it. Your uncle Eddie and me were stranded in the embrace of this plush country like two combed kitties on a cushion with pink bows. I wore a starched pinafore to one of the best grammar schools in Brooklyn.Who didn't have it so cushy was my father and Mother.
I knew them both well in their senior years. Arnold Glass was the salt of the earth, a mensch who had every job that a man could have. He was polymorphously talented. He could pickle leather.
They call that tanning, Arvin.
"He tanned and he cooked, he baked, he worked in Hell's Kitchen as a smelter and you told me in the stockyards as a butcher. He paved asphalt. He roofed.
"Yep. He worked every TERRIBLE job. If it said 'terrible' in the newspaper my dad went on the job interview. But you wanna hear bad? His father, Solomon Glass, now he was not a first generation American as half his life he was in Russia. Grandpa Solomon could not get a job for the life of him. Jews didn't get jobs in Russia. Jobs didn't exist for Jews. Peons on plantations, serfs on those huge farms. You know the ones, Tolstoy had 800 serfs. Serfs didn't get land, they just farmed it for the Duke but Jews couldn't do that. They didn't get anything. Innkeepers for a while until the paranoid Russians thought that Vodka was a Jew Plot to kill 'em. But bad as it was, Poland was Acapulco compared to Russia. Germany was the South of France. Until Hitler came along, you could do any job in Germany.
"Is this about me geting a job, Ma?
"No, Melvin. We just want you to get a mise en place."
"A MEES in where?"
A sense of where you are in history. See in RUSSIA my Grandpa Sol got chased around Vladivostok by pogroms on Saturday nights when goyboys got tanked and killed Jews just for fun so they'd have something to confess Sunday morning. The whole country was Russian Orthdox that's sign language for Christian. You murder you confess and you go murder again and confess again. We should only have such a religion. So grandpa Sol was beaten to a pulp and left for dead so many times that he spent half his adult life unconscious with the family making funeral arrangements. Finally Grandpa Sol's mother paid his fare on a boat, God knows how she did it and sent her son to America so he could keep his face. They never tell us the details of the stories. Oh if there was email then. That boat trip. Can you imagine? But our grandparents' mouthes like tombs were sealed. They never murmured a word.True but I can tell you the experience of these people who got off at Ellis Island and found slum housing God knows how and they found jobs and brought their children and wives over. That was the school of hard knocks right here in Manhattan which was a paradise to them, 700 people to the acre down near Houston street, on the Lower East side. And what made the Russian Jews different? They'd been bit by the Bolshevik bug before they left Russia.. They'd all had their basic Marxist training.
"Is that what this is about Ma? You want me to be a Marxist?'
Well, it wouldn't hurt if you learned basic class theory. See squashed as they were, immigrants were activists. They learned to piss upwards! On the next two classes up. More than any book by Marx and Engels, what made them turn their noses up at everything posh was pride in poverty. They took relish in sleeping ten to a mattress.
"Well, Ruthie, not that bad."
Arvin interceded "They made poverty their sacrament. Their prayer was to live poor. It was a contest who could live the shittiest. To buy a potato and share it among ten people was the highest honor. You could dine out for months on that potato. That means you got a story out of it, Melvin.
"I know what dine out means, Mr Macy.
"Arvin exaggerates to be colorful. That's the secret why his books sell." Ruth Glass poured second cups of coffee all rund. "What's true though is that Grandpa Solomon pissed on the new world when you'd think he would bless it. He cursed the bosses in the shops, the fruit vendors in the stores, the bourgeoisie in fine carriages, he sneered at the subruban liberals in their Buick cars. Grandpa Sol recognized that except for the Rosenbergs getting hung and the shirt factory fire, there was no tragedy here. That Americans did NOT know sorrow. The only tragedy was to stay in Europe.
"The better it was here, the sadder it was that other Jews never got out and made it to the new world.. You don't know this but Jews were forced to fight for the Czar. and then stuck with Adolph Hitler was next. God help Europe. Grandpa Sol grabbed the fastest tramp steamer out of Odessa the same day the Czar created the draft (with a special 35 year term of service for Jews). He had no interest in fighting Germans for Russia! He knew who he was -- a Jew first and a Russian last and only with great qualms.
"He left Europe with no attachment to his birthplace and came to a slum dwelling walk up cold water flat with a family of ten the way a meadow rabbit hidden in a burrow to avoid wolves --- he was a cave dweller by default, the forest, meadows and roads not being a sensible alternative. Solomon's son Arnold was born on lower 14th street and followed his father's way choosing 'never to be a soldier for any czar -- straight into menial jobs in the New York factory district. He spent his life carrying barrels in breweries, corpses in slaughterhouses, stoking fires in glass factories and overseeing seamstresses in garment shops.
Well technically, Arvin, he did become a soldier for the czar. He was drafted in 42, fought in France and got shot, got some veterans pension and went right back to working menial jobs. Now his brother got the Veterans bill and studied law after the war, got rich and moved to Riverdale. The czar lifted him up a class. But Eddie and me, we grew up in Brooklyn and got to know nothing about nothing.
"Usually every new generation of immigrants, the Jews especially ---clings to these purposely chosen menial jobs. The ones nobody in their right mind would do. Tanning, Sewing, butchering, smelting, remembering the old country where there were no crummy jobs. The jews were beggars.Under the fat belly of capitalism bright men worked for 2$ a week men with young wives and daughters, later sons. Such a man gets to know about unions and with that goes Marxism.
Ruth sighed. "My father didn't look for crummy jobs. Trust me, that was all that was out there. And he was a torn man. He had kids by then. He couldn't afford to listen to his conscience and picket the bosses. Arnold Glass never took the daring step of becoming a paying union member, much less a placard bearer at a picket. He was a shirker, a worker. The men who evaded paying full dues sort of belonged to the union and were allowed in as 'extras' for crowd scenes, but in truth, Arnold gave nickles where men gave dollars, Arnold sat in the back row and cringed when they announced a picket. And when they asked for volunteers, he shrank down in his seat so that his face could never be seen by the man on the podium.
"Arnold Glass wasn't afraid of being jailed in America. Jail was nothing. You ate in jail. You slept on a mattress with blankets. Now, his father had told him tales of Germany and Russia, where crowds of thousands never made it to jail. They were mown down by the Czar's horse guard for a simple bread demonstration. A generation later, they died in the Gulags, starving and overworked by Stalin.
"My father was not afraid of jail. But he had Eddie and me. He sure wasn't going to gett shot by new York's infamous trigger happy Mick police force. He had no fear for his own skin --- because he'd figured out there wasn't going to be a shred of fun left for him in this life. The second you love someone you're a slave My dad used to say. His concern was for the welfare of my mother Etta and his young daughter Ruthie that's me and later Eddie my little brother. Who would take care of his babies were he not around? My Mom was no shy, slender alluring beauty. She wasn't even plain. As his own mother liked to say, 'cover the mirrors!' (meaning Mom would break them.) So no remarriage there.
"You know how I see it. All the time, Ruth's father Arnold Glass had really been a hero. Just Ruth hadn't known it."
What are you saying? I knew. Melvin didn't like it when they disagreed. It sounded like fighting which made him want to run out of the room.
"Put your hand on a calendar, Ruth. As a child, you'd never seen any sign of sacrifice, you'd only seen a plodder. When your mother and father discussed unions and the battle began, conversations suddenly ran aground. There was a conspiritorial silence. Eyes darted to her then averted totally and sludgy silences filled the dining room and people coughed, got up and turned on the radio. I saw it there when we were first dating. You didn't notice. I saw it. You had a certain contempt for your father.
"Well. He was poor, unkempt, taciturn. And did I say poor?"
You said poor but he wasn't taciturn with me. "
Congratulations. You were the honorary son. Go figure. But truthfully, years after daddy died of extreme tachycardia (nervous heart was fatal in the days before there were pacemakers or bypasses,) Mom explained to me... I was by then at Columbia, an English major, History minor. Mom explained that daddy had been an incredible, secret hero. I was eighteen I say. "A what, Ma? A hero? Like the Scarlet Pimpernel?" I say.
"No," she sez "not like the movies. Daddy was real, he was here for us, ketzala, a hero for us, not for the union." It took me a while to process that information, to read the works of Fournier, Marx, Engels, Bakunin and Michelet left dusty on her father's shelf, and weigh my father's decades of unpaid labor in a factory and compare it to the luxury perhaps you could call it of being part of an heroic underground.
"LIke Vendetta."
Ruth squinted. "Oh that's a movie."
"Natalie Portman. It's terrific."
"There's this masked man who's in the underground."
"Izzat right? Well, I realized that fate had made my father not so much a masked man as a silent witness to historical levels of exploitation of labor and he'd never said or done a thing about it. Then add in his obvious lack of caring for himself, working two jobs til his heart gave out and I crunched the numbers so that I extracted the UN-obvious ('til then) total sum. My father HAD been a hero. He'd known what was going on yet swallowed all kinds of gall at management, gone on smiling and brought home the bacon. He took a job. Any job."So basically this IS about me getting a job."
"Yes, Melvin. You're thirty years old, honey and sittin' around watching daytime tv isn't doin' you any good.
"It was better when we had cable."
"Yes dear, but Mother can't afford Cable any more. Honey?" She put her hand on his. "I gave your your mise en place, now you gotta take the next job you go out on, like it or not. It'll be a personal growth thing. Grandpa Sol and Grandpa Arnold will be right with you, honey. They did it, now you do it."OK Ma. I will. I promise."
Ruth sat back astonished. She had been certain he'd fuss and rage and draw lines and proclaim himself better than work. Had she and Arvin somehow done the trick?Never mind. She embraced him kissing his temple and looking past Melvin to Arvin. "You're a good boy." Arvin looked on and wondered how bottomless her motherly heart had to be to love a little shlmeezel like Melvin. The mother's heart, -- truly a wondrous thing.
CHAPTER II.
Bringing home the bacon was an important part of a Jew's life. Even though the Glass family kept a kosher kitchen and BACON was the last thing one would find at a Glass table, WORK was their bacon and it boiled down to heroicism. Hefty chunks of it. Arnold Glass, this secret Marxist superman who had stayed locked in a Clark Kent persona until his last day, his superman cloak never unfurled --died with work-gnarled hands, the tannery's stench on his body. Lungs that had never inhaled tobacco corroded by acid fumes and this before the days of OSHA and workman's comp so it was straight to the graveyard.
Ruth Glass had vowed that closet activism would never happen to her. When her mother explained that Dad had been a trained, textbook Marxist, Ruth inspected the books on his shelf and realized what her father had known and understood. From that point on, she carried her father's books wherever she moved, reading them in waiting rooms, on buses, dog-earing pages again and again. She began to go to every activist group that appeared, no matter how outrageous. She supported The Free Marxist Theatre with donations from editorial jobs and picketed critics who wouldn't cover the tedious plays until they begged her to back off and actually attended. She'd always make it worth their while buying them hamburgers after and explaining the fine points of the subtext.
Once, she had tried to join the Black Panthers, who wouldn't have her so she'd tried to date black men and get them to read the Confessions of Nat Turner.:Not one black buck ever returned a book. She had to keep buying used dollar copies during her black period. She had turned to writing four-hour long bio plays about the homelife of Marx, Lenin and Bakunin then Tom Stoppard did it with the nine hour Coast of Utopia.Which meant it was a good idea and she had it first, Arvin told her. He admitted she'd asked him to write it with her, "and I didn't and I'm sorry I didn't we coulda beat Stoppard to the punch."
Ruth Glass tried to be a hero. She picketed with every labor union in the greater Tri-state area and was arrested repeatedly. She knew the good cells at the worst jails and the worst cells at the best ones. When she found out about the crowded cement floors in South Philly, she'd organized pickets and the city had to clean them up as Life Magazine got on that story. Ruth had supplied LIFE with artwork photos and secret testimonies from a few lady cops.
Once, she had been held at Riker's Island in solitary while they tried to get her to admit she'd put that whiskbroom up a horses' butt. The horse had reared up and thrown a cop putting the man in the hospital, Ruth wouldn't break and they couldn't prove anything so they had to let her go. They couldn't exactly take fingerprints off a wooden whisk broom, could they? Soon all the activists were carrying whiskbrooms. Cops could no longer run horses pell mell into crowds. The New Chelsea Bakunin Theatre Group sang her praises, laughed at her recountings of grillings she'd survived, wept at her tales of Rikers, an horrific maniac asylum that had once housed the terminally insane on feces-covered cement floors in sub zero weather.
Ruth became Marxist legend at twenty and had won the heart of the dedicated leader of the Chelsea Unit, a redhead named Sergey Mazel and they married and Melvin Mazel had been born with a flaming name, but not with Sergey's flaming looks. He was dark, mild and quiet like Arnold Glass and a slight heart murmur gave his eyes little black circles so that when he stared up at you, he looked like Casper the ghost. When Little Melvin was two, Sergey left them to move in with a big boned hippie folksinger named busty Katie O'Riley, forsaking his activism to create a successful Russian folksinging quartet that sang only translations. They had a few gold records and Sergey went incommunicado and Ruth learned that the Russian language had no word for child support or alimony. Ruth had to leave Melvin with Grandma Etta during the day and find a job. Mandatory child support, AFDC, Welfare and such hadn't been invented in those days. Leftists like her would later see to it that they were quickly enough and all future Sergey Mazels got their toenailed clipped monthly or went to jails which activists like Ruth had seen to were heated.
The surprise was that Ruth Glass Mazel could find work at all for by that time, the feds had her name and dossier; her package looked like Lenin's. It was the tail end of the commie scare era and city cops had secretly begun to feed information to the FBI --yet oddly, big corporations would still hire her. After giving them her resume, she always waited for the other shoe to drop and it never did.
Years later, she'd read her FOIA cume and seen that they had every picket, every play or article she'd published, every meeting she'd been to but somehow they didn't chase after leftists banning them from big corporative jobs. NOT YET. The advent of the Intel chip would make short work of that.
She'd earned a fairly good living at Random House, Simon & Shuster, done a string of children's books that had a secret, Marxist sub-text where little boys shared food and eschewed money and ended up at the small but prestigious Cranham and Rense as a children's editor.
BUT for some mysterious reason, the FBI didn't organize sufficiently to get radical leftists fired from these jobs, jobs that had actual influence if you counted the minds of the children. No, the total inability to work for any book company hadn't shown up until she'd begun to hang around with ARVIN MACY. How did the joke go, 'fuck one little communist........"
Sergey Mazel had been a pathetic lothario dressed as a shrill anarchist, small fry. According to the FBI, ARVIN MACY was genuinely dangerous. Arvin's novels were comedies, dry, witty, salacious but as PINK as RUSSIAN roses in full bloom. His sin, his crime was that HE SOLD WELL. The American reading public could not spot the overt, Marxist message hidden in the ludicrously entertaining, hilarious tales of out-of-work bums, drunks who scorned and pranked the factory bosses, inhabited a slum and chased fast women and scammed for the price of a bottle of Napa red. Hollywood optioned every one of them. A few actually got made but Arvin had grown out of amusing liberals and cashing checks and started writing non-fiction, covering the death of a hundred miners in Pennsylvania and the abuses of the mineowners. His reading public gambled that he might be important and bought those books to sit on shelves for their grandchildren to read so he sold reasonably well until Senator McCarthy turned his name to mud. And my name was infected by contagion. ''
Your mother's worst crime was knowing me, Arvin MACY, the communist writer. But she couldn't give ne up.
"OK I"ve heard enough."He was the real deal and the real deal is always dynamite in bed.
*****************
CHAPTER II. SO WHO AMONG US IS REALLY WELL?
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SYNOPSIS: "Melvin and Ruth"
THROUGHLINE: A NYC blacklisted socialist, NYC typist/editor MOTHER (Ann Bancroft had she lived, would be my choice to play her) has been madly in love with an outrageous Communist writer, ARVIN MACY for years. She has been infected if not by commie contagion then by his being blacklisted by top publishers. She can no longer find a job with a FORTUNE 500 PUBLISHING corporation. She 'takes in laundry', term papers from Students at Columbia.
One day she realizes her gorgeous Brad Pitt Lookalike son, MELVIN, is a parnaoid, delusional schizophrenic. She tries to get HELP for him, the system is all closed doors, the free clinic will cost 75$ the hour. Ruth talks him into getting a job stuffing envelopes, but when she finds out it's for the campaign of a small time Congressman, suggests things Melvin should tell the 'candidate.' Soon he's writing speeches for this congressman. She lets him be crazy, feeds him her old manuscripts and turns him into an agit-prop literary sensation with hilarious results. BEING THERE with a young male hero and his commie leftist mother's hand up his back using him as a handpuppet
SNOWY NEW YORK STREET. Ruth (50) runs for a bus, carrying a load of typed, tied manuscripts.
UPTOWN BUS: RUTH (55) organizes the ragged papers, look out bus window at Spanish Harlem, heading toward COLUMBIA University. As she tells a student in parka, she has a masters in English, works as a typist /editor for college students. Editor? "Yeah, I kind of improve things. Get the B students a few A's, can't hurt anything." She gives the student her business card. "What's an extra fifty bucks for typing if it gets you into Harvard for post-grad?"
COLUMBIA CAMPUS- She visits students' apartments, collects checks for typing theses and term papers.
HER AGENT'S OFFICE: Literary agent returns Ruth's manuscript. "They're essentially Marxist novels, Ruth. Class struggle, union ethics. Look, Labor issues are outdated. Russia is history. There have been no Marxists in New York since Khruschev."
RUTH:"I don't get it; How dumb are Americans. The economy is in the crapper. We've got lumpen proletariat roaming the streets 30% joblessness for the first time since l929. Everything Marx said about monopoly capitalism is l00% proven!" "
"Right, but you've got to call it something 90's", the agent says, "You've got to soft-pedal the Commie slant. Pink is out of style. Give it a candy-colored exterior. Call it Armageddon Syndrome. Publishers love syn-dromes or Millenium Politics--but not the kind of class struggle so elaborately defined by German intellectuals of the twenties but a kind of Tom Wolfe, Esquire Mag syndrome. Something as American and funk pop as Ice Cube. Investigate the politics of youth then re-invent them. Put them thru a spin. Give it a catchy name like the Armageddon Generation. If you piss on them hard enough, I could sell it as a 3-piece New Republic article. But if you want to make money, give issues a rest. Write bodice rippers, schlock romance novels. They suck 'em up in middle America'" "Ahhh, they eat candies in Hell," Ruth murmurs. The agent's final analysis. "so produce candy. Besides, you aren't in a position to sell to conglomerates like Random House. Those romance publishers will never run a trace on your ties with Arvin Macy and you can have a decent income." (We realize Ruth can't get a job at a big publishing company because she once worked for a blackballed writer, a professional litigant, they call him. Ruth was fired from 'Cranham & Raft' because she was Arvin Macy's editor and his star witness when he sued several publishers and the huge conglomerates put his name (and hers) on a black list.)
HER APARTMENT: The living room isn't much but her office has a wonderful window with a view. She comes home with can of minestrone, toasts the last piece of bread, looks out over the roofs to the lights of the river and dines alone until a tribe of cats come mewing to her window. She feeds them. One has kittens. Ruth caresses them. She is a tough woman ---Think Ann Bancroft---She has been a single working mother for thirty years, freelance for long enough to know she can survive without Big Brother; the freelance typing, editing work next to her desk proves it. She refreshes herself kissing and feeding the kitten.
Ruth types. Her only concession to modern times is that she uses a computer. Her next door neighbor, SALLY,(39), blonde, flashy, chesty, good looking, appears in the window. She's come over the roof to get one of the cats, a tomcat. Ruth mumbles that he's the responsible party, was obviously chasing her queen. "With what? Sally sneers. "He doesn't have his wedding bells! He's neutered. Only the knife didn't take the social out of him. You OK?' Sally asks. "Absolutely." Sally comes in through window. Ruth says: "I have 'ecstatic nest syndrome. I love being alone since my son got his own place. "Then you should take full advantage. We should get out some night, meet some fellows. 'Yeah?' Ruth is clearly disinterested. "I know a great singles bar.' Ruth turns. 'You know, I'm supposed to go to youth clubs, investigate their politics. Wanna be tour guide?' Sally says yes, claims she has nothing to wear, borrows a dress. A voluptuous babe, on her, Ruth's 50's dresses look hugely sexy on her while they don't --- as we could imagine them,--on Ruth. Ruth comments on that fact. "You know why? A grand each" Sally says, pointing to her chest. "We all have our priorities. Ruth says drily.
NEW YORK PUNK YUPPIE NIGHTCLUB- Sally schmoozes with guys while Ruth does a head check, investigating punk yuppie politics. She finds they don't vote, don't care, don't believe in campaign rhetoric but they dig Clinton. They admire him as a rascal. " Dude stole beaucoup in Arizona when he was governor. Worked for the CIA transhipping drugs. Guy killed 85 people. Man, the dude's so cool. Girls were giving him blow jobs under the capitol dome. Totally dysfunctional family. Man I'd like to date Chelsea. She totally blows my mind." Ruth scratches her head. She tells Sally: Somehow Ernie Picoli surferdom has penetrated cities where there's no ocean.
HER OFFICE- Ruth writes day and night. Macy visits. An aging, bitter, brilliant alcoholic, he goes straight to her bar. She shows him how she's changing book into 3 part article, theme is PUPPIE POLITICS. The Punk Yuppie Nihilism, Armageddon Syndrome. Macy asks her if she's happy. "Sure" She plays Indian music loud and nobody nags her about ciggies. Her 'typing' career is important to her, it gives her a chance to educate Columbia grads 'without a license' she jokes. She has no HMOS, no medical coverage, has angina and arthritis from drinking tea incessantly but a space bar thumb, (she rubs its pain) but she is having great fun. She considers dating chinese torture, romance a vice. They sit down to get drunk together.
In Ruth we see a character who is alone, poor, creative, dynamic and happy at film's start, even in an urban hell, doing dime typing jobs for students. She laughs with Macy over the cretin student's thesis, saying kids today don't have enough intellect to open a can of conversation. You shoulda seen what was in Columbia when I was in school. Brains like...like laser rays. There must be downers in baby pablum today. Macy asks after her son, MELVIN. "He's still living on his own. Got a job as a pollster for that assemblyman with the thin tie. Guy's too stupid to know it's a social signal. Wide ties are oligarchs, thin ties are jerks. I should visit him." The candidate? "No, my SON." Macy nods, pours a second drink and goes into the bedroom. Ruth turn off the lights and follows him.
THE VILLAGE. DAY. There is an ominous mood of something nasty coming even in the street below her son's apartment where chalk outlines indicate the week's tally of bodies. The boy has chain on door, opens it reluctantly. MELVIN (28) is handsome, hair and beard are overgrown; he seems mildly 'out of it. Photos of a model hang on his walls. Maddalena, he explains, whom he escorts to clubs. Your girlfriend? Mom asks with a big smile? Nah, he answers. A model who uses him to pick up men. Ruth throws open a window, and son BOLTS to close it. Ruth studies poster on wall, for the candidate he works for. A cipher of an assemblyman.
Ruth notes that her son has aluminum foil on inside of his windows. She lifts a corner. He glues it back. She tries to clean the room to his protests. She sees coffee pot on stove, empty six packs in wastepaperbasket in kitchen. No food in fridge. Mom is worried, apprehensive. "German Beer and Starbucks Coffee don't belong to any food group I know". "Neither do Marlboros," the kid rails back, about her smoking.
While Ruth stands in his messy apartment, she has a FLASHBACK. We see Ruth weeping over being jilted by a boyfriend. The little son is weeping with her. And then it's too much pain. The small boy closes up. 'You should have stayed with my Dad.' he says coldly in the vision. She returns to current time. He is railing about cigarettes. She is about to leave when she sees an EVICTION NOTICE. He tells her no rent money. But You have a job? Yeah, I work for this assembly man, polling houses in Queens. I get to talk to the people, but if I share information with them, it gets back to the boss. You see, I'm not supposed to tell voters about the debt issue or the conspiracy by the IMF. I'm supposed to write down their vote, what issues they're sensitive to, but when they aren't sensitive to any goddamn issues I ..I step in. I teach them the issues and then they FUCKING RAT ON ME! I'm not supposed to give my political viewpoint, I'm just a pollster. I attracted attention! She glances to lead window. Yes! They may be watching me so I can't go to work! "Watching you? Is that why the gumwrappers?" He doesn't answer. "What's really going on, Mel? Where will you go?" I'll live on the streets. She feels his feverish forehead. No, you gotta sleep, eat. I want you too come home. You can have your old room. I don't need an office. We gotta sort this out, Mellie."
NIGHT: HER APARTMENT- MOM is in her office moving furniture into the living room. The evicted son enters with suitcases and a ridiculous object, say a cappucino machine or a bicep device. His furniture is moved into her office. She is again in the dark, windowless living room. MONTAGE: He drinks French designer water, eats take-out even though she cooks budget, brown-rice dinners. He spends money like water and when she harps, he slams his door and locks it and puts foil on the windows.
DAYTIME: KID'S ROOM-She goes through his desk. Stacks of credit card bills. She circles figure 17k on paper. He's bankrupt. When she confronts him. "It's just plastic. So the IMF doesn't get my dollar! It's nothing but an electronic blip, a dollar burp or gurgle that doesn't go through the wires. So they don't get my dollar!" "A DOLLAR? SEVENTEEN THOUSAND electronic gurgles!" She tells him he must go to work. He tells her that he can't go out on the streets. He claims there's a hit out on him. Who, MasterCharge? "No. Them". Ruth is jolted by what she recognizes as clinical paranoia. Melvin tells his mother of a planet wide conspiracy to dump two thirds of the population of the planet. It's being accomplished through AIDS and thru the banking system. "They're planning to bankrupt the planet, throw everyone in debtors' prisons or slave camps. The planet is on its way to certain destruction but they don't care because they will be solvent when they dump us. And I know about it and they know I know. Right now, 27,000 children die a day because of these men." "Where'd you learn that figure?" "From Garland." The candidate you work for? she asks. 'No not that mindless, corrupt little sewer rat. Garland Wexler. the true candidate. Ruth looks horrififed.
PARK IN THE BOWERY-Melvin takes his mother to the park to see the true candidate. Mel parrots the teachings of and is under the influence of Garland, a man who lectures in parks on the banking system, organized debt, the Federal Reserve, monopoly capitalism. The hippies are planning an anti-meat festival cum demonstration on the Federal Bldg front lawn. The true candidate is WEXLER, a longhaired madman who rants on and on about how they shot Lincoln and JFK when they tried to take back bank from planetary bankers and how Money is going to be replaced with credit and how 666 is Nostradamus' prediction, that's the little numbers on scanner bars which we'll all have engraved on our wrists.
THEIR APT.-A shaky Mom takes him home, trims his hair and beard, dresses him nicely and says Sally will take you out to a nice night club. Have a designer water. Talk to girls.
GEN X CLUB- Melvin sits at a banquette, talks debt and deficit. Girls listen with blank faces at his intensity. HE GETS UP AND LEAVES. As he exits club alone, suddenly, "they" are after him. THEY know Melvin exists. Three hoods do try to jump him in the street just as another car full of men in trench coats does a U-turn right there, causing the muggers to back off. Melvin gets away. He's convinced the FEDS are helping him. HE RUNS! The car full of men in raincoats are tourists, looking for the UN building or the Trade Towers or Statue of Liberty. The three men coming at Melvin are just ordinary muggers and they give the tourists instructions then hold them up but Melvin's far away and doesn't see this.
AT HOME: At home, Melvin runs to drawer and brandishes a real gun, tells Ruth 'they, the IMF.. they're tapping his phone, following him to kill him but not to worry, he's not afraid to die. She says "Give me the gun." Big scene where she takes gun. Then he says he's also being watched by the FEDS who are protecting him. Ruth doesn't know what to make of this. She tries to reach him with touchy, feely love. He is totally cut off, icy, unresponsive.
PARK- Ruth walks alone in the cold. Xmas tree lights and caroling music, Xmas shoppers are in the streets.
RUTH's APARTMENT/ NIGHT:Ruth's 80 year old mother visits with Xmas presents which go under the small tree. Ruth boils water for tea and tells her mother her grandson is daffy. She waits for an answer. Gram answers "Ruth, you must learn to make tea right. Water between a bath and a boil. You drop in the bags. Let them sit 5 minutes covered. If you boil it, the tea has no flavor.' 'I don't drink it for flavor ma.' Ruth drains a huge mug of it. Pounds chest. "Heart, do your stuff!" In kitchen piled with dishes, Ma says 'Ruth, you need a dishwashing machine. I have an old one in the garage.' "Ma, my son is crazy." "yeah? These dishes would drive anyone meshuganah." "I need more than a dishwasher. Anyway, washing dishes is like my mantra. It centers me, you wanna take that away from me I'll be crazy too. "
RUTH'S APARTMENT/DAY-Melvin is peering out of his window. He wants his gun back. Ruth puts him in bed, calls shrinks, clinics, all want MEGA MONEY. There are two ways to help son. One is emerg. hosp evaluation, 3 days in the nuthouse, then he gets certified as nuts, can qualify for SSI, fed govm't then pays for his treatment of 2 visits a month, medication. "WHAT? Then he's on the record as a loony. Any employer can find out he's an SSI patient. What about his future with that on his record?" The other is worse, Go on Workman's comp, then he will never be rehired until he is certified well. And if he's not well, he can't work for any corporation or business except as an independent contractor. No biz will take someone who's been diagnosed paranoid schizoprhenic. As she hangs up, realizing it's hopeless, doorbell rings. Landlord. Ruth answers in nightie, wool scarf, mittens, lumberman shoes. Parka. She can only give him part of the thousand plus rent. Utilities are on turnoff, 300 plus a month. Ruth goes back to bed but frets. She throws off parka, gets into bed, but insomniac, worried that her son is going to die, realizing it's Christmas, she gets out of bed with wool scarf, mittens, throws on an overcoat.
NIGHTTIME: EIGHTH AVENUE-Christmas shoppers are out. Ruth can't afford to buy or even make gifts. In POSH grocery: she wants to bake fruit cakes but dried fruit is 5$ for a little bag. Muttering, "the fucking IMF" she storms out of shop.
KITCHEN LATE NIGHT: While she bakes a plain cake, her son comes in, looking out windows anxiously, pulling shades in kitchen. Where's my gun? Oh, I gave it to Aunt Lilly to protect her at the old age home. I'm going tomorrow with a cake. I'll get it back. He goes out. She clutches her throat.
NEXT DAY- Ruth subways to Brooklyn, takes the cake to her grand aunt Lilly in the old age home, confides that she's afraid for Melvin, confesses that her kid is meshugenah. But she can summon no love for him -- just worry. But it's an impersonal worry, as if her manuscripts were going to be destroyed. "He's not my baby. he's a creation that's broken, an irritating cuckoo clock.'' She frets that there isn't enough love in her. She tries to summon up a real feeling of tenderness, adoration, like she feels for a baby kitten and can't. This worries her. She wonders if she was a poor mother. The great aunt says 'we all were' and opens the cake.
Ruth apologizes for the fruit cake without fruit. Dried Fruit's 5$ a bag and there's a rumor that everybody spits it out anyway. But it's real butter. If you drink hot tea with it, it'll outclass any cake on the market." Lilly smiles, tells her this inflation is nothing. In Germany an apple could cost 300$. You had to wheel in a barrow with paper marks bills stacked like salad to buy a loaf of bread. Of course salaries were high, too. Maybe you got a wheelbarrow of cash an hour if you were employed. If you weren't....you voted for Hitler who promised it would all go away.
Jews voted for Hitler? Some did. Course when he got in, we realized he'd fooled us. The smart ones left in 33 the way My father did. You hung around with things in that shape, you were in denial" She woman eats a slice of cake. You know,' the woman says as she eats, 'your great great aunt MARGIT died insane. 'I didn't know." "Yes. She pawned the family silver to eat pastries and chocolate, and got big as a house at the height of the depression when no one even had bread. She was a terror, threw contents of her chamberpot out the window into the street. A total embarrassment to father. But Margit lived to 90, never even got the family diabetes, escaped Hitler. Everybody else in the family worried themselves to death. In times like these, madness is a blessing. Let the kid be."
AT HOME: Ruth and Melvin eat breakfast. "Thought of getting a job, Mel?" He shrugs. Adroitly, she convinces him to go back to work. He goes unwillingly.
CAMPAIGN HEADQUARTERS-Melvin's boss tells him to get lost. As he exits he sees the Candidate. He acosts him, tells him the truth about yuppie puppy punk politics, and recommends admitting to his anger and sexuality, as Ruth has been describing it around the house, finishes saying 'Clinton killed 85 people, fucked twice that many, and his numbers doubled." Melvin charges off down the street. The Candidate is impressed. He tells his assistant to change the speech and get that terminology. 'Go after the kid, he'd make a good speechwriter." They pull the kid back in. Melvin immediately says he has one request. Lose the pencil tie. "Don't you know that's like admitting you have a small dick? Nobody elects men with small dicks." The 'suits' are horrified but the candidate loves it. Why didn't YOU ever tell me that??? He's right. Thin ties are for losers," he says, pulling off his tie and throwing it on floor. Women around room stare at candidate's fly, smirking.
A FEW NIGHTS LATER: Melvin brings home the candidate and two suits for dinner. Candidate wears wide tie, looks like Wall Street banker. Melvin's been promoted to head speech writer. The candidate stays for dinner. Turkey and yams. Melvin lectures them on the economy. They don't know he's crazy, so they eat it up, praise her for having such a brilliant son, tell Ruth that kid has already upped the candidate's numbers l5% from one speech. It's on all the T.V's. They put TV on. Ruth is amazed. The son doesn't even notice. He's sticking down the aluminum foil from the yams on the windows.
PHONE CALL TO MACY: Ruth tells Macy of this turn. They'll fire him any second, the second he puts gum wrappers on their windows. It's time to go for the SSI, we confine him--- You gotta come over and together we can grab him. I'll have a cab waiting, downstairs..." 'What?' Macy screams. He's working for a Republican as a speechwriter? A chance like this comes once a lifetime. Ride the horse the way it's going. Train Melvin to be a total communist agitator and use the idiot Republican as a puppet." Macy tells her this great story about 'the Front' who virtually 'took dictation' during the Black Listing period and got the equivalent of emmies. Macy volunteers to help. Says the kid really needs to study this stuff. Let's get him into the New School. I got friends there.
MONTAGE: NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH: Ruth stands by anxious, while Macy's friends examine the kid. He is TUNGSTEN HARDY, (32), a poly sci teacher who looks like a young Trotsky ( Macy's friend.) CLASSROOM: Hardy talks organized debt. Melvin listens attentively in classroom. AFTER SCHOOL. Before he'll go outdoors, he puts brass knuckles under his mittens. HOME: Ruth goes through his notes, adds information to his notes but suddenly she finds something in the notes that's so good, she adds it to her Armageddon book on computer. NEW SCHOOL: Ruth and Melvin sit in class. Afterwards, she asks Hardy questions. He explains. She asks him to read her book.
AFTER CLASS. Macy and Ruth talk to HARDY who holds her book. He sees a convoluted Marxist subtext. She says let's not forget the Freudian subtext. The pressures on the single wage family given by monopoly Capitalism unseats the stay-at-home mother, the abandoned child has displaced rage and oral aggression which he disguises as gourmet food compulsions, designer water. Well, that's Karen Horney not Freud but teacher & Macy say "except for a few details, the book is ready to be published."
AT HOME: Ruth is waiting on phone when Macy comes in, using his key. She points to mouthpiece "I'm going to do the PHONY LITERARY AGENCY act. What's more I'm tackling your biggest enemy in the world. Going to make a total asshole out of him. Someone comes onto the line. "Hello, Mr. Gimbel, this is Sheila at the Hartford agency. Bruce wanted me to call you, we've got an incredible new manuscript, just came in, Bruce hasn't even finished it yet. He's screaming, can you hear him?" she points to MACY. Macy screams enthusiastically. "The author is a speech writer for the Republican candidate. Just like George Gilder or Safire who wrote for Nixon.." Ruth makes an appointment for MELVIN." Macy stops her. She hangs up. "What's this? Melvin didn't write it. YOU DID!" "SO?"
"Didn't write what?" Melvin has come in. Ruth tells Macy and Melvin her sad story: publishers don't want old women. There's geriatric discrimination. But that she's been writing down everything Melvin told her and it's really his book anyway. Won't you talk to this guy who prints books? He's just a schlub, a printer. You go in and ask him to publish it." "Will you let me have ONE beer if I do?" Two, she assures him. Ruth primes him on what to say to the publisher, then dresses him up weirdly, using a copy of Spin magazine to mimic modern-day hip, counter culture dress code. She then gives him her finished manuscript and sends him into the office of her old boss, the biggest publisher in America, at Cranham and Rentz, holding her breath, praying and smoking a pack of cigarettes in the lobby.
LATER: Melvin and the editor sail out of the building to lunch. Mom paces in restaurant foyer watching Melvin at his table, railing and rude. At one point, Melvin comes up to her and says can he have a beer? She says only if you get the contract today. He goes back to the table, rails some more and is a big hit. The kid gets a big book deal. Boss offers champagne. Kid asks for German beer.
A MONTH LATER: Ruth & MACY plan the kid's talk show publicity tour. Macy, a muscular, tough looking 60 year old, has a headset like body guards use. It radios to an earpiece glued into the kid's ear, hidden by his hair and beard. The son is 'the front'; the teacher HARDY, who has tenure, and is afraid to lose it with his daring politics, must stay in the background giving answers to Macy by the screen of a LAPTOP, Macy rewrites it into punchy, slambang language and then radios it to the boy from offstage.
TV STUDIO: On TV, Melvin is an uncouth angry slob with brilliant answers. The CANDIDATE appears with him. He now dresses counter culture and has incorpoated the POLITICS OF RAGE into his rap. He and the paranoid schizophrenic kid debate G. Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and William Buckley. Behind the scenery, Hardy with laptop, MACY with mike are writing his sentences for him. The teacher's brilliant political analysis, and Macy's acerb wording makes Critics exclaim: "a brilliant book by an untutored Wizard, --- how could a boy this age research and compile such a work, not since Colin Wilson wrote 'The Outsider' sitting in the British Nat'l Library, has an mind like an uncut diamond surfaced ....etc."
OUTSIDE STUDIO: The assembly man schnook candidate emerges into street with Melvin and they're mobbed like rock stars. 'Body guards' lead them off. Kids in street rave and yell for autographs. MONTAGE: Suddenly the Assembly man has people flocking to his speeches. The suits trail behind, telling press of his next speaking date. And behind them, the FEDS.
EXTERIOR RUTH'S BUILDING- From POV building across street, We see Ruth put Melvin to sleep, and as they have microphone, we HEAR her clearly as she speaks. Melvin can't sleep. He get up, restlessly RE-SEALS the windows with FOIL. We see this from the POV of 2 feds with a spyglass. FOIL stops all tracking of Melvin's words. Feds curse like sailors.
NEXT DAY/ APARTMENT- Melvin can't sleep, has a total breakdown into babbling paranoid schizophrenia-nuts.
HOSPITAL- the even more insane Emergency Room where she takes him. The state places a 72 hour HOLD on him, and how he suddenly gets a Med-I-Care card and bottles of pills.
RUTH'S APARTMENT- Suddenly, they have doctors and medication. Ruth holds the bottle up. It's supposed to balance the two brain chemicals serotonin and dopamine. HE takes it. LATER:'How do you feel darling?' Wonderful. Can I have some oatmeal? He eats. What do you want to do today, darling? I don't know, he says as he opens all the windows he's kept closed. "We haven't gone to the zoo in a long time. Or we could take in CATS." "I already take in cats. I feed the cats." "No I mean the MUSICAL cats. You used to love musicals, Mom." Tears well up in her eyes. He is loving. "CATS? she says repeatedly? She kisses him. Tears well up in her eyes, flow down her cheeks. Cats?! Melvin's rage suddenly goes away. He's sweet as a buttercup. His torment leaves him. MONTAGE: Daffy duck starts eating meat again. He's happy. Thrilled with being an effective leftist, he no longer needs to drink. Without alcohol, his craziness goes away. He wakes up to the joy of life and outside the theatre, at CATS, he finds a girlfriend!
MONTAGE/ STATUE OF LIBERTY, PARK, BROADWAY. Melvin, POLLY (22) and their courtship. They are in her cute bachelor girl apartment together. He now has a social security check. Montage ends with the new girlfriend, (sporting an engagement ring) and Melvin coming to dinner at Ruth's apartment. So what's new, dear? "I got a job, Mom. I teach high school for the city of New York. History? Politics? "No. GYM." Ruth is dazed but gives her approval of the girl.
RUTH'S HOME: Melvin is on the phone with Polly. His mother comes in so he rings off. 'I hate to talk business but --" Ruth asks Melvin to do another book." "About what?" As a sane man, Melvin has become a total literary dud. "Unemployment, Guerilla Capitalism maybe." "I'm too busy with Polly." "I'll give you a beer." "Mom, I don't want beer. Writing just doesn't fit in my life. I'm a gym teacher now." "Yes, but darling. I've made an appointment for you with your publisher tomorrow morning. They want to give you a hundred thousand dollar advance for this book I promised them so they need to talk about your next book." "It would be under false pretenses. I just don't have any ideas." "Don't worry, sweetheart, give them this manuscript. Just read it tonight and kind of be prepared to talk over these ideas. She gives him a freshly typed manuscript.
NYC BOOK STORE: Signs show that Melvin will be signing copies of the Number One Best Seller "THE COLONY WITHIN: LIFEBOAT THEORY" Colonial Policies of the US Government Vis a Vis its own People" People crowd around him. "Is it a conspiracy?" a woman asks him, panicky. "Now,now, don't be frightened. Take deep breaths. In. out. In Out." He helps the woman relax. Ruth puts her purse over her face.
EXT. RUTH'S BUILDING/ EVENING: Melvin and his PR staff emerge building, onto the street carrying a stack of books. Three CIA HITMEN line up for the hit. BLAMMMMM!. The books are spattered all over snow, their inflammatory pages covered with the boy's blood. Sad dirge comes up on track. The men cooly get into a taxi and drive off.
CUT TO FUNERAL. RUTH WEEPING.POLLY WEEPING.
HER APARTMENT: Melvin's Photo on wall, funeral wreath propped up next to it. Ruth is back to typing manuscripts for students. Mail comes. A huge check for this posthumous book has come. It is a literary sensation and is being translated into nine languages says the note from publisher. 'In death Melvin has become really important. They're talking Nobel Peace prize.'
UPTOWN BUS- Ruth gets off bus in Harlem, spots a homeless, railing, insane, ranting black woman. Cecily Tyson with teeth missing.
"Whitie's great society and New World order are bankers' lies. They're collapsing the raft to drown the vermin. They will swim to shore. We are the vermin, you and I are out not on the raft, we're of the loop." Ruth idly scribbles 'life boat conspiracy." "I see you've read my son's book and remembered it."
Ruth then says, offhandedly, "Racism may be the national agenda. The whole is planned years back, the OJ thing was planned. A Neo-nazi group Christian Aryan underground, Sons of the Gestapo, in Idaho planned it back in June of 1993. Wrote a book saying they would cut the heads off race traitors, off blondes that married black men. Make black bucks a thing of the past. Make 'em hated. See, that group had access to OJ's blood. One of them actually worked at the rich folks' Sinai hospital in the blood lab and belonged to a sister group called White Anglo Saxon Policeman, WASP! That LA cop who found the glove belonged to WASP! AN' where does that cop move after the trial? To WASP headquarters in Idaho, in the same, small town there." The black woman's jaw drops. She hears this, then stands up and repeats this word to word to the entire bus but ends it with a fillip: " You think they're duck hunters but they're patriots every last oneovem!" Ruth cringes, but is happily amazed. She leans over, tugs the woman's patched coat and asks her name. 'Tilda' the woman says angrily. 'Tilda, I like your anger. I like your caring. I liked the improvised bit about the duck hunters. Best of all, I like your memory. Can I maybe buy you a beer?" Freeze frame on Ruth's hopeful smile.