Free Life Goes to the Movies by Peter Selgin Page A

Pickles?”
    “…Dysentery, Dropsy, Defenestration…”
    “…Dolphins? Driftwood?”
    “Driftwood?” said Dwaine.
    “Driftwood’s great! You light beach fires with it. It floats!”
    “Sometimes you worry me, babe, you know that?”
     
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    By then I was staggering—the champagne, the late hour. With Dwaine’s arm around me for support we made our way to the mausoleums. The
family names on the bronze doors were mostly Italian. We gazed in awe through barred windows at altars glowing in whisky-colored light, at the stained
windows depicting the Stations of the Cross.
    “You Wops sure know how to die, I’ll grant you that,” said Dwaine.
    “I wish our apartment were this nice,” I said.
    “Yeah. Some people have got it made.”
    We both laughed then. For the first time I felt us both on the same level, almost. It gave me a weird mixed feeling, the kind I’d get on
Christmas mornings after opening all my presents and finding that the colorful wrappings had been the best part.
     
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    We came upon a freshly dug grave, the raw earth piled up beside it under a tarpaulin. The hole went at least eight feet down. An aluminum ladder lay
stretched alongside it. I dared Dwaine. “Darers go first,” he said.
    So I climbed down. Being the son of an atheist, I didn’t believe at all in heaven or hell, and had no reason to fear a hole in the ground. As I
went down Dwaine made werewolf sounds.
    “Very funny,” I said.
    “Not at all,” said Dwaine. “In fact it’s rather grave.”
    I reached the bottom.
    “Step off the ladder,” Dwaine urged, and I did. He withdrew it.
    “Good evening,” he said with his hands cupped around his mouth. “

We hope that you are enjoying your stay at the Club Inferno. Tonight at midnight we will have bingo in the Seventh Circle Lounge with prizes
complimentary to you. Free wailing and gnashing of teeth instructions are available. See Moloch in the cabana.”
    Suddenly Dwaine stepped out of sight. Still I wasn’t afraid. What was there to be afraid of? In fact I thought it was funny, and started laughing
despite not having been in so dark a place since my mother locked me in the attic for smashing a shaving cream pie in the family dog’s face. Then
my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw something jutting out of the dirt beside me, a milled corner casting a slivery gleam of moonlight, a
coffin’s edge. I said, “Dwaine?” And then I screamed, “Dwaaaainnne!”
    He peered down.
    “You rang?”
    “Get me out of here!”
    “Why? Did you see Lon Chaney, Jr.?”
    “There’s dead people down here!”
    “Who were you expecting, the June Taylor Dancers?”
    “Goddammit, give me that fucking ladder!”
    My feet hardly touched the rungs as I bounded. When I reached the top Dwaine pulled me out the rest of the way, Hercules pulling Cerberus from the
infernal regions. I fell panting against a nearby tombstone.
    “How bold of you,” said Dwaine, quoting Dante or Virgil or whoever,“to descend into the depths where the futile dead live on without their wits.”
    “Screw you!” I said.
    “Hey, come on, it couldn’t have been that bad.”
    “How would you know?”
    “Believe me,” Dwaine said with a smile. “I know.”
     
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    From there we rode the subway all the way to Times Square. I’d never been to Times Square on New Year’s Eve, but had heard tales of crowds
and muggings and of people getting shot and stabbed. Dwaine assured me that crowds wouldn’t be a problem.
    “Not where we’re going,” he said.
    As much as Dwaine hated Christmas, he put great stock in New Year’s Eve, as if the mere turning of a calendar page could usher in bright
prospects while eradicating all evidence of the botched, abortive past. Having exited the subway, we made our way through the throngs already gathering
along 42 nd Street, passing below the bulky marquees of once illustrious movie theaters now gone to seed, the Empire, the Liberty, the Lyric,
the Harlem, the New