AFTERTHOUGHT

Lucky Doug

By ALAN BRIEN

Douglas had the unfailing ability to precipitate and crystallise around him, out of clear pure air, all kinds of murky disasters. We were both in our early twenties, over-educated and un4r7 prepared products of the North-East, and we filt ourselves exploited by our employer though we had few talents for the job and rarely did a stroke of work. Officially, we each edited a monthly magazine. Mine was concerned with 16 mm flints of all kinds—advertising films, amateur films, educational films, entertainment films for mobile cinemas—what mattered, in the rigid apartheid of Wardour Street, was the width of the gauge not what was in the frame. My first issues were be- devilled by an announcement which kept going wrong.

According to local custom, the less im- portant the company the more grandiose was the title and I had written an inaccurate and hostile note about one called something like 'Grand Universal British Motion Pictures Ltd.' Obliged to apologise next month, I grovelled to 'Grand International British Motion Pictures Ltd.' Under even more pressure a month later, I corrected my error explaining that, of course, I was referring to 'Great Universal British Motion Pictures Ltd.' The following month I was in hysterics at the

printers, as the presses trembled and I desperately shuffled notes. letters and cuttings while the head- ing 'Great International British Motion Pictures Ltd.—A Correction' swam before my eyes.

It says much for the epic standard for muck- ups that Douglas had set in the firm that this idiocy was passed over with a tolerant smile. His magazine, a supposedly technical publication on all the theoretical and mechanical aspects of film exhibition and production, tended to be a wild. cluttered anthology of upside-down pictures of equipment. transposed formulas, the texts of lectures which came to a stop in mid-sentence and blueprints which were too small for anyone to read the instructions. I suspect the gradual realisa- tion that, despite his efforts, the magazine con- tinued to be printed, and even sold, must have contributed to Douglas's unshakeable conviction that the world outside himself had only a vague and fuzzy reality.

But it was in his private life (if anything could be called private which took place invariably with a small crowd looking on) that the clash between his optimistic fantasies and the pru4levolent fates reverberated with such comic clangour. Douglas saw himself as a dazzling blend of Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and most of his office hours were spent writing toughly romantic short stories. full of foreign words in italics, about exotic parts of the globe he had not yet had time to visit. When one of these was accepted by Lilliput the whole staff was in ferment for weeks waiting for publica- tion day. Then he called us all into his cubby- hole, sat down at his desk and made us look over his shoulder as he slowly turned the pages towards the still damp-inked masterpiece. There it was all right, or almost all right, with a large heading, im- pressive illustrations and a bold by-line. Unfor- tunately. by the kind of mistake that couldn't happen to everybody, the name of his agent had been printed instead of his own.

Douglas had tremendous ambitions to be a lady-killer and he was obsessed with the belief that real prizes in the sport, rich, insatiable and kinky as all hell, were best picked up in the street. He used to hang around the American Express. hoping for a millionaire divorce'e, and he never

lost trust in his opening gimmick ('Do you speak to imperfect strangers?') despite the constant demonstration that no one understood what he was saying.

Once his dream became flesh. A luscious, mink-draped creature in Bond Street, carry-

ing a tiny jeweller's parcel, actually stopped him.

'Would you be so kind as to open my car door?' she asked, looking frighteningly helpless. 'Allow me to drive you.' he insisted in his best Cary Grantbdtanner. It was when he was in the seat and had taken the keys from the scented hand that he realised it was only in his fantasy persona that he knew how to drive. He leapt out silently and ran away with. as he said, tears in his eyes.

After we both left Wardour Street. I used to see him occasionally to be brought up to date on the latest battle in his war against an alien environ- ment. Once he appeared with an enormous bump' on his high, balding intellectual dome. It turned Out that he had just ceased to be beast-man in a circus where his job had been to exercise the animals before the show. 'There was this little tiger with rickets,' he said. 'Well, I got tired walk- ing it round the ring so T nipped into the canteen for a 'ctiffee and tied it up under the table. It seemed quite tame but it scratched one of the girl

midgets in the trapeze act as she went by. Her

family were most unreasonable. How was I to know 'it is an old circus rule—no beasts in the

canteer -What about the bump? 'Oh, that. That's nothing' to do with it. Some idiot dropped a bag orSand on me from up in the roof. You'd think they'd ,,te more careful. It might have killed me.'

I haven't heard much direct from Douglas for a long while now. I sometimes see his short stories

in an evening paper where he is usually described, under his photograph, as 'former journalist, film producer, pearl fisherman, bull fighter and racing

drivers with the additional laconic pay-off--'has

just returned from taming wild horses in the Camargue' or 'recently explored the Gobi desert on a bicycle.' Sometimes I tune in to the middle

of one on the radio where I can usually recognise his style by the bravely reckless inaccuracy of the

local colour -'Jake let in the accelerator and drove without stopping 200 miles due west from San Dies°. A cactus like a crucified baby was silhouetted in the scarlet sunrise ahead. He

reachgd to the spare seat. The tortilla, its blade razor sharp lay comfortingly there. Kasen nteisachos, he thought with a smile.' The last I heard to had been married, on a steamer to the outer isles of Scotland, by a clergyman called the Reverend MacVicar. I believe it.