by Carl Cafarelli
She had grown tired of her life in film noir. The time had come for her to burst into song.
Her name was Spillane. She gazed across the light grays and dark grays of the dingy nightclub, and made her way toward the door. Stooge, her hapless thug of a boyfriend, looked on in typical dim confusion as Spillane slapped him with the butt of her .45 and stepped into the technicolor light of the outdoors.
Color!
Spillane had only known color in her imagination. Now, the bright golds and blues and pure, pure whites of the afternoon sky kissed the green of the trees and the sudden red of her own dress, a dress that had been the color of ash mere moments ago. Her hair was still black, but somehow a more vibrant black. Raven. Dark tresses framing the cream of her face. She twirled in the street, a whirlwind of raven and red amidst the green, gold, white, and blue. The music began to swell.
The music was different from the nightclub jazz Spillane knew. It was...happier? Happier. Orchestral, bouncy, bubbly, naive, romantic. Fun. Dancers appeared all around her, pretty girls and pretty boys moving in absolute unity and rhythm, singing, swaying, awaiting the lead vocal of their new leading lady. Spillane opened her mouth to give sweet voice to the verse rising within her.
Before any sound could emerge, her effort was thwarted by a pie in her face.
Stooge had also emerged from the nightclub, dressed now in loud and garish plaids and zigzags, a slapstick figure armed with a stack of custard cream pies and the will to use them. His aim was no better in comedy than it had been in noir, but he'd gotten lucky with his first flung dessert. Spillane sputtered as she wiped away the sticky pie fragments.
But her frown wasn't only born of ire. She looked to the sky that had been so blue and golden. There were ruptures above her, visible scratches...bubbles, hot and viscous. Spillane realized at once that Stooge's sudden appearance as a movie buffoon in her scene--Stooge, like her, a noir character trying to become something else--caused a rip in film continuity. The reels of motion picture styles were colliding, bleeding together.
And then all cinematic hell broke loose.
World War II. Beatlemania. Disaster flicks. Rosebud. A new hope. A prohibition against crying in baseball. Adam motherlovin' Sandler. All at once, all around them. There wasn't enough popcorn in the world to fix the chaos of the movies unleashed.
Her .45 still at the noir nightclub, Spillane grabbed a six-shooter from a nearby cowboy. She fired wildly at Stooge as she jumped on a motorcycle and rode through the rows of choreographed (and now panicked) dancers, seeking distance. Stooge pursued her in a M.A.S.H. chopper, slicing through both a Transylvanian Count and a sweet transvestite from outer space. Spillane swung on vines through the African jungle onto the African Queen, Stooge rode a great white shark. Spillane responded with a bigger boat, ramming him with a luxury liner impaled on an iceberg, then just kept on swimming as an animated royal blue tang. The dancers were still panicked, but still singing, hoping Spillane would join them.
A giant gorilla with Stooge's face grabbed Spillane and dragged her to the top of the city's tallest skyscraper. Spillane became a superhero, shouldering the great responsibility demanded of great power, and broke free, flying higher than the simian could reach. She wriggled out of her cape and tights into a brief X-rating, then hightailed it out of there astride some kind of fire-breathing Japanese mega-lizard, as a now-masked Stooge came after her with a buzzing chainsaw.
She had just wanted to sing.
"Damn you, Stooge!" Her words were in Swedish, subtitled in English. Stooge spoke not at all, a silent figure in black bowler and toothbrush mustache. His silence ceased when Spillane landed a fierce Bruce Lee kick right in his Oscar and his Golden Globes, Stooge's wailing anguish confirming Spillane's belief that clowns were really just loud mimes anyway.
A car chase ensued, their vehicles shifting from Aston Martins equipped with ejector seats to chauffeur-driven 1949 Hudson Commodores to an incongruous pair of Chitty Chitty Bang Bangs. Finally, their twin time-hopping DeLoreans crashed at the beach, crumpled against a partially-buried Statue of Liberty as some crazy guy screamed about damned, dirty apes blowing it all up. Some surfers and their honeys partied nearby, a beach-blanket hoedown Spillane desperately wanted to join. She tried to do that: to sing, to dance, to live in color, but mostly just to sing like she'd always wished to. Stooge caught her instead. And he barked into his high-tech communicator, "Beam us up! Er, OUT! Whatever it is. GET US OUTTA HERE!"
Spillane and Stooge vanished in a sparkling glow. The skies ceased rupturing. The genres retreated to their individual domains. The dancers wished Spillane could come back to sing with them. But she wasn't part of their world anymore.
If she ever was.
No. Spillane was back in the nightclub, with...Stooge. Back in the bar, not even in black and white, but again just in shades of dull, endless gray. The door leading outside was locked. Stooge had denied her the dream, forever.
Thinking himself the hero of the story, Stooge grabbed Spillane, and said, "This is where we belong, Doll." Stooge leaned in for a sloppy smooch.
Spillane's .45 was in her hand before Stooge could blink, and certainly well before he could think. The gun sang even if Spillane couldn't. Stooge crumpled to the floor. With his dying breath, Stooge asked, "How could you...?"
Spillane didn't bother to reply. It was easy, she thought to herself. What do you know? She was best suited to a film noir life after all.
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This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.
The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:
Volume 1: download
Volume 2: CD or download
Volume 3: download
Volume 4: CD or download
Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio: CD or download
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