Magic Hours by Tom Bissell Page A

term “grotesques” for small-town people and inspiring what might best be called the “Up Yours , Winesburg” tradition in American literature.
    But I am left with the nagging feeling that, long after leaving my small town, I remain a small-town person. While suburbs tend to produce protoplasmic climbers for whom ascension to the city is a divine right, small towns leave a deep parochial stamp. I have dwelled happily in New York City for several years yet still
find edgy discomfort in cell phones and being kissed in greeting by acquaintances. I would like to credit my dislike for swanky Greenwich Village drinking holes to high-minded asceticism, but I know it is animated by the same wretched self—consciousness that kept many Escanabans away from the filming. Small-town people live in dread of any substantiation of how out of it they secretly suspect themselves to be. This is why many small-town men dress so hideously, and why many small-town women do such upsetting things to their hair. One never risks rejection when one has made that rejection inevitable.

EXT. NORTHTOWN—DAY
    On my way out the door for the last day of location filming, my father asks where the Movie People are shooting today. I tell him where “we” are shooting and, while driving to the set, marvel at my unthinking use of the first-person plural. My self—election to the parliament of movie-making is not star-fucking solipsism as much as it is an involuntary submission. When your town is incorporated into another reality, your very identity succumbs to the resultant vortex.
    Today the Movie People are filming in Northtown, Escanaba’s economically depressed district. In perfect storybook synchronicity, the division between Northtown and its flusher counterpart, Southtown, is the long stretch of Main Street. Since Escanaba lacks any minority presence, Northtowners and Southtowners are forced to dislike one another. I am from South town. Worse yet, I grew up on its toniest street, Lake Shore Drive, a descendent of an ancien régime Escanaba family whose kingly house overlooks the city park and the oceanic glory of Lake Michigan.
    Today’s scene takes place at Reuben’s house, where he attempts detente with his unhappy wife. The Northtown home the Movie
People have selected to film is a biggish, olive-colored two-story on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue; it is in sore need of a paint job. Despite the fact that it is the coldest day of filming yet, a savage temperature not unlike that of the moon’s solar lee side, a fairly large group of Escanabans has materialized to watch the filming and been corralled into a line across the street. Gary Goldman, in his ever-present sunglasses and white ball cap, paces up and down the sidewalk while talking into his cell phone.
    Two large production trucks pull up and are gingerly emptied of equipment. One guy, loaded with an armful of walkie-talkies, calls alms: “Get your red-hot walkies!” Movie-making might be the only occupation without potential lethality that encourages such rampant walkie-talkie use. Several of the gaffers and grips are wearing “I love Escanaba” buttons on their jackets. Even though they are busy, this inspires me to strike up some conversation. For just about all of them, Escanaba in da Moonlight is their first “feature” experience, though many have done production work in commercials and public service announcements. They are counting on this movie’s success no less keenly than Daniels: the best boy, Hans, is working his way through community college in Lansing at a garage-door manufacturer. I am about to ask whether they truly love Escanaba when I see an old high school friend, Doug, talking with Daniels’s stand-in.
    Doug is both Mike’s cousin and the fullback against whom I concussed myself in that junior-high football game. He is also the only person I know who has been shot for