Cudd’s music taste was nothing at all like Sean’s. Whenever Cudd would have his bedroom stereo on, if played loudly enough to fill into the living room, Sean would, as I said, pick the music apart.
It didn’t take too long before David adopted Sean’s ears for music as well…
One night the stereo was blasting out of Cudd’s room. Lately, for some reason, maybe some sort of retaliation, he’d been playing his music really loud.
The music thumped the walls – “Boom, boom” – as some of the rattled, angered lyrics trailed in, where Marc, David, myself, Sean and Ed were watching the tube.
David glanced at Sean, in a knowing way, as if saying, “That shitty music again?” Maybe not those exact words - David would rarely swear - but when he looked at Sean this way, Sean simply nodded in silent partner agreement.
(David never really seemed to mind anything before. At least he never showed it. He’d have no agendas out for anything. But that look he gave Dusk – it was as if he now knew what shitty music was. But the fact that he’d actually regarded it surprised me.
And Marc, I noticed, had seen the look too.)
Marc hated the music also, but instead of agreeing with the glance, which wasn’t for him anyway, he just stared at David vacantly.
“Does Cudd think he’s from the Hood or something?” Sean said, referring to Cudd’s hip-hop music.
“He always listens to that stuff,” Ed replied. “God, it drives me nuts.”
“It sounds awful,” said David.
“Why is it,” said Dusk, “that the people with the best stereos play the shittiest music?”
There was no answer and it didn’t matter; it wasn’t really a question - it was more of a statement.
“Boom, boom - thump, thump - boom, boom - thump, thump,” was the gorilla rhythm coming from Cudd’s bedroom.
“One day…” said Dusk.
“Boom, boom - thump, thump - boom, boom”…
“…That music’s gonna get as loud as it possibly can…”
“Boom, boom – thump, thump”…
“And then”…
“Boom, boom”…
“...There’ll be one final BOOM - and that’ll be it…”
“Thump…”
Dusk was “teaching” us about movies. This was not his intention; he was a reluctant mentor, at best. Sean Dusk had no approach - he just knew of certain things and (usually when drinking) rambled about them in a quite easygoing and at the same time entrancing tone…
Ed had sprung for a cable movie channel, much to Sissy’s chagrin - Sissy who was hardly around, anyway. But Ed got the channel set up and it’d play first run movies, straight out of the theater/video limbo, and older modern classics (meaning from 1969 on in Dusk’s opinion) as well. And Sean knew everything about practically every movie: the stars, writers, actors, directors; he taught us the difference between a movie and a film. A film, according to him, has a director. So does a movie, but a film is directed. A movie is merely made.
“When a film is directed,” he said, “the term directed is a verb. An action. When a movie is directed, it’s simply a noun. A subject. It’s directed because it has to be.
“It’s much like art. There are painters and there’s artists - musicians and pioneers.”
In a week we saw things this way. Beyond the acting on screen, we began to notice something was behind a film. And I noticed - David had adopted Sean’s eyes better than the rest of us. And like any good student, he’d ask questions; his eyes would narrow to the screen during the answer.
If it were a classroom, David, surely, sat in front. Marc sat in back, wearing an invisible dunce cap on purpose. He wasn’t that into it. He was back to falling asleep early. He’d fall sound asleep on the floor, sometimes ten minutes after showing up. He was tired, and slightly drunk - true - but I could tell he was sick to death of “films”…
I think he just wanted a “movie” once in a while.
Ed didn’t seem into the noir thing either, but unlike Marc he simply lacked interest – while Marc, without really showing it, contested the new law of FILMS…
Sean Dusk once told me, I think we were outside smoking, just the two of us, that he had had a lonely childhood. There were years when he didn’t hang out with too many people.
He’d been a victim of private schooling, being put into a Christian school in the middle of fourth grade and expelled at the end of his eighth grade year. When he returned to public school it wasn’t an easy transition. He likened it to having lived in a comfortable small town and then, all of a sudden, being thrown to the wolves of the city – that is, without having remembered living in the city at all.
Thus in ninth grade he suffered a very lonesome, tedious year – the worst in his life! Most of the public school kids he’d grown up with hadn’t seen him, or known him, since fourth grade. They’d learned things differently, in and out of the classroom, together in the neighborhood, without him. And his private school friends mostly lived in districts far away.
So he was very alone that ninth grade year. And all he had was movies.
He’d make VCR tapes at home back then, with flicks (taped off of four different cable movie channels), ranging from APOCALYPSE NOW to ANIMAL HOUSE, TAXI DRIVER, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE to CADDYSHACK, STAR 80 to FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH.
He was into books also. He’d always tell us these great quotes from authors. He’d coined Steinbeck’s phrase of childhood, from the novel East of Eden: “Flypaper youth”, describing his ninth grade year.
That year was the peak of his “flypaper youth”, and all the actors, directors - everything about them including the year these movies came out - had really “stuck” to him.
As I’ve mentioned – Marc would sleep during the “films”. It was when Dusk would light up, starting his “lectures”, that’s when Marc would suddenly peter out.
But David loved the movie stuff, for Dusk had an awful lot to teach - what was stuck to him seemed to flow out naturally.
And even through Cudd’s booming stereo open door phase, Sean would spill his particular brand of knowledge as the movies played – whether they were banal flicks or beautiful classics, even during Marc’s snoring Sean Dusk’s cinema “lectures” sustained.
But Marc had his own gifts. He’d show us yet.
And In due time we’d learn plenty about what had, throughout the years, stuck to Marc Sandoval.
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