The Caveman's Valentine by George Dawes Green Read Free Book Online Page A

arugula-and-tuna salad. All gleaned from some generous cans in front of 28 Corbin Plaza. He popped tidbits of this compost into his mouth as if they were popcorn.
    The images on the TV started to add up.
    They turned into a movie starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. It was set in the fifties, but it had been made in the sixties and it was snappish and airy and callow.
    The movie was called
Prodigy.
    Steve McQueen played a young music student at Juilliard. His family was poor, from the Bronx, but they were strivers. The parents were tough and demanding. No coarseness of speech, no dialect, was permitted about the house, and Steve McQueen’s older brothers were all embarking upon promising careers. Steve’s girlfriend—the Ali MacGraw part—burned up the screen with her beauty. The script was dumb but the music—the pieces the young student composed and played on the piano—these were strong and strange.
    So, was this movie the biography of an actual composer? You couldn’t tell. No names were used.
    Though there were hints that perhaps the Steve McQueen character was in fact supposed to be a young black man. At one point it was let drop that his great-grandfather had been a slave. And when the young composer wanted kicks, he went to Harlem, where he was treated like family. Also, at times it was flashed on the bottom of the screen that this movie had been
    DECOLORIZED FOR POPULAR APPEAL
    The young composer’s music was moving but destructive. He’d take sappy pop tunes and shake them till they cracked open and the syrup poured out of them, till they were rattling carcasses, but bone-lovely. Some of his peers at Juilliard thought he would be the greatest composer of the age. What a joyful jam his life was, and how sharp, mordant, and loving was Ali MacGraw!
    But then came a shot of Stuyvesant’s tower—played, of course, by the Chrysler Building—and a beam of Y-rays shooting out from it.
    Cut to Stuyvesant in his vast aquamarine office up at the top. Stuyvesant played himself. He wore a white cowl, and he had no face at all. His fingers rested on a glowing globe before him. He was receiving Y-ray reports on Steve McQueen.
    He saw that the young man’s music was making a mockery of the
American Heartfelt.
He worried that the
Perfectly Real and Good
was being undermined.
    He muttered something.
    And right away Ali MacGraw got pregnant. Steve McQueen married her, left Juilliard, and went to work in the Domino Sugar plant in Brooklyn. Domino Sugar was owned by a holding company that was held by Stuyvesant’s lawyers, and they saw to it that Steve McQueen’s life was hell. He got angry and poured Domino Sugar into the machinery. He was fired. He got a job as a pianist, playing dinner music at a restaurant. He said to the patrons, “Here’s ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’ for all you mindless racist scum.” He was fired. Ali MacGraw came and begged his boss, and her eyes flashed and she looked like a bird of prey, and the boss took him on again. But he did things to “The Impossible Dream” that the patrons found unbearable, and they threw radishes at him. By now the movie had turned into a melodramatic litany of failure, the script was a pointless grind, and Romulus wished it were Christmas again so he could watch
It’s a Wonderful Life.
    He prayed for an ad.
    But this movie was presented as a public service by the Stuyvesant Fund for Absolute Control, and there were no ads.

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    I nstead he got more of Steve McQueen’s screaming rages, and one job after another, and mental hospitals and halfway houses, and one by one his other brothers coming around and trying to rescue him, but nothing doing, and more mental hospitals and halfway houses, and Ali MacGraw raising their little girl by herself, with her job at the welfare office.
    And then the scene where he didn’t come home one night until about noon, and she said, “Where have you been?” And he said, “I’m a free man, right? I spent the night in a