The Film Club by David Gilmour Read Free Book Online Page B

park, almost running now, Jesse sticking very close to me and then, when we could see the hotel doors, I said, “Run.”
    We ran across the street and under the facade and in through the night door. But they came in after us, into the lobby. Still moving, I said to the guy in the yellow shirt, “You better get the fuck out of here.” But he wasn’t afraid of anything. The elevator door opened; he tried to squeeze in with me and Jesse, his pals hanging back in the lobby.
    The security guys came out of nowhere. There was a commotion in Spanish, the doors shut. We went up three floors, Jesse saying nothing. Throwing me little worried glances. Looking at himself in the mirror, making that face again. He thought I was pissed off at him, which I was, abstractly, but what he didn’t know was that I was experiencing a kind of elation. I had, corny as it sounds, got on my horse and ridden out to save him. Served him well, protected him, done my job. I was, in fact, privately happy at how things turned out. After a certain age you don’t get to do that much for your children; you’ve got all that juice and not enough to do with it.
    We were too jacked up to go to bed or to watch television. To be honest, I was dying for a drink. “Maybe we should go see if we can get a beer,” I said.
    We waited ten or fifteen minutes and peeked out the hotel door; no sign of Yellow Shirt. We hurried along the near edge of the park, past the shopping plaza to the Calle Obispo, and headed down the narrow street toward the ocean. The old city hung in a silent ball of heat. “That’s where Ernest Hemingway used to drink,” I said as we passed the darkened El Floridita. “It’s a tourist trap now, ten bucks a beer, but back in the ’50s, it was supposed to be the best bar in town.”
    We passed a couple of caged-up cafés, places that had been screeching with life and strumming guitars and cigar smoke a few hours earlier. Then an old-fashioned drugstore, dark wood, row upon row of clay jars along the back wall.
    Soon we were standing outside Hemingway’s old hotel, the Ambos Mundos, at the foot of the street. “He wrote some of his worst stuff up there on the fifth floor,” I said.
    â€œIs he worth reading?” Jesse asked.
    â€œWhat the hell were you thinking back there, Jesse?” I said. “Going off with those hustlers like that?”
    He didn’t answer. You could see he was racing around inside his head, ripping open doors and cupboards, looking for the right thing to say.
    â€œTell me,” I said gently.
    â€œI thought I was having an adventure. Smoking a cigarette and drinking rum in a foreign city. You know?”
    â€œDidn’t you feel like there was something off, those guys being so friendly at three in the morning?”
    â€œI didn’t want to hurt their feelings,” he said. (How young he still is, I thought. That tall body, that good vocabulary. It can fool you.)
    â€œThose guys are used to making people feel guilty. They do it all day long. It’s their job.”
    We walked a while longer down the street. Yellow lamps overhead; balconies looking down; laundry hanging motionless, like people waiting. “If you’re going to read Hemingway,” I said, “read The Sun Also Rises. A few of his short stories too. The rest gets a bit nutty.” I looked around. You could smell the odour of decaying masonry; hear the ocean smashing against the seawall on the other side of the Avenida del Puerto. But no bar. “They say you can get anything anytime in Havana,” I said, “but apparently not.”
    Inside the Hotel Ambos Mundos, you could see the night clerk talking to a pretty girl.
    We followed a narrow cobblestone street east, the crumbling pastel apartment buildings rising on both sides; thick vines trailing down, a bright full moon shone overhead; no stars, just this single bright coin in the middle of