All Around They're Taking Down the Lights
by Adam Berlin
Tartt First Fiction Award Winner!
 
Binding

ISBN 978-1-60489-379-3, Trade Paper, $19.95

 

 

 

 

Synopsis:

All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights is about men and sometimes movies and the underside of trying to live up to male tropes. The men in these stories hurt and get hurt. They push too hard and not enough. They disappoint others and themselves. Their movie-moves damage. And their small successes, sometimes empty, sometimes meaningful, happen in places away from spotlights, far from Hollywood.

 





About the Author:

Adam Berlin has written four novels: Headlock (Algonquin Books), Belmondo Style (St. Martin’s/The Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award), The Number of Missing (Spuyten Duyvil),and Both Members of the Club (Texas Review Press/Clay Reynolds Prize). He teaches writing at John Jay College in NYC and co-edits the litmag J Journal.

 

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Excerpt from Book:

Hollywood But Not Just Hollywood


Long before the drinking:
When the bathroom’s empty I get the whole mirror. Bulbs instead of spotlights. Slightest eye shift magnified, Richard Gere doing low-key lines from American Gigolo, shift to Brando saying I could have been a contender, shift to Belmondo, he boxed too, rubbing thumb over lips, shift to Gere in Days of Heaven, just the look, just moving my eyes, looking away then fast at.
At the bar:
“That’s what they did, drinking and smoking and driving those smooth roads and everything possible.”
“Tell me some of your favorites,” she says.
“They’re not all great. Some of them aren’t even good. And they’re all way before my time. But they make me feel high, the way they look and even the way they manipulate, even when I see how manipulative they’re being, I still feel it.”
“Tell me some.”
“The Wild One with Marlon Brando and Sweet Bird of Youth with Paul Newman and Bullitt with Steve McQueen and early James Bonds where the villains were characters instead of cartoons and there was more dialogue than special effects, when Sean Connery was Bond and not those others, or lesser known movies with Richard Burton when he was young or George Peppard, those movies when color was Technicolor, and some foreign movies, the ones with that old Hollywood feel even if they weren’t shot in Hollywood, movies with Oliver Reed and Jean-Paul Belmondo.”
“I know most of the names, but I didn’t see those movies. We’ll have to go sometime.”
“We can go drinking and driving and watch a bunch of movies.”
“And you can pretend you’re high.”
“It’s not pretend.”
After the second round:
“Like and movie. I can’t see the first word.”
After the fourth (maybe fifth):
“What do you do?” she says.
“I run.”
“I’m a runner. That’s more than running.”
“I do push-ups and pull-ups.”
“Very disciplined.”
“When I have to be.”
“What are you, a military brat?”
“Are you?”
“I’m a professor brat,” she says, “which is close to a military brat. My dad travelled all over for work. We moved so much I got tired of making new friends and then leaving them, which is why I started running. Instead of playing in whatever neighborhood with whatever new kids there were, I relied on myself and ran. Now I teach that idea when we read The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. I teach and I help out with the cross-country team during the season.”
“I saw the movie. Tom Courtenay. He had a good look. He looked like a smart delinquent, not a Hollywood delinquent.”
“Do you look like a delinquent when you run?”
“Probably. A real one. I don’t love running, but I do it.”
“You don’t get a runner’s high?”
“I don’t.”
“That’s too bad.”
I raise my glass.
“I get a three-count high when I ask the bartender to tip the bottle and pour heavy. And then in the morning I run, even when I’m hung over.”
“Your penance,” she says.
“My penance. I absolve myself and do it all over again.”
I down my drink.
“Another?”
“You’re fast,” she says.
“Fast. Where are you staying?”
“A cheapy hotel called the Belnord.”
“Near here.”
“Near here. You are fast.”
I rub my thumb across my lips like Belmondo.
“Do you know that movie?”
“I do,” she says. “He looks like a Hollywood delinquent.”
“He was a tough guy first. And he was playing Hollywood, so he looked Hollywood, but not today-Hollywood.”
“I believe you.”
“It’s a great movie. It’s like life should be.”
“Let’s leave the car stealing and the cop shooting for the movies,” she says.
“Let’s hold onto the thumb across the lips.”
“We can do that.”