Zippo converted the Grotto into production headquarters. Entities from his Pratt days returned from the stint in the real world ready to collaborate, just as they’d promised each other years before. They didn’t have much going on. The production designer took “a leave” from her job in the framing store; the soundman hopped a Greyhound from his parents’ house in St. Louis; and Toby Fairchild, a tremble-handed painter who had yet to face that his skills lay elsewhere, got roped into business affairs. Zippo pulled out his money and courted Harlem investors. Offering points—he had a whole pitch. Checkbooks loosened as the cast came together.
Doris, the woman he’d flown across the country for, had a hunch about Lucinda Cole and Roscoe Pope and was correct. Roscoe Pope signed the contract a few days before his concert record Memo from Dr. Goodpussy hit the charts. Good timing. His manager wouldn’t have taken Doris’s calls if it had come out a week earlier. Pope grudgingly agreed to fulfill his obligations for a week of shooting in NYC.
Lucinda Cole tracked an opposite trajectory. Zippo remembered her sashaying to the VIP tables at Harlem night spots, back when she dated local hoods. Next thing he knew she’d hit the big time as the outspoken nun in Miss Pretty’s Promise. Critics compared her confident turn to Dorothy Dandridge’s splashy performance in Carmen Jones and the movie’s theme song, “My Heart Is a Pasture,” made the Top 30, which put Lucinda’s face on the movie mags for a few weeks, even though the studio had dubbed in another, better singer for the movie.
Zippo was young enough to think that if you got a break like that, you were set. Not black women. He caught Lucinda on TV, on Dragnet playing the distraught mother of a teenage junkie （they looked the same age）， as the principal of a community school on The Mod Squad. He was glad to see her and sad to see what Hollywood had to offer her. How did “My Heart Is a Pasture” put it? Sometimes I think I was planted upside down / And that I’ve grown away from the sun.
Lucinda Cole hadn’t occurred to him until Doris suggested her; from that moment on Nefertiti could be played by no other. They held their casting sessions in an eighth-floor room at the Sandbar Hotel in Santa Monica. Lucinda Cole floated in and said, “I think I stayed in this very room the first time I came to LA.” Diaphanous muumuu, white leather boots, sunglasses the size of dinner plates—Zippo didn’t know which persona she was squeezing herself into. But who did these days?
She liked the script. “It’s better than a lot of the blaxploitation garbage they’re stuffing down people’s throats these days,” she said. Was she saying that she didn’t consider it blaxploitation, or that it was of a higher quality? In any case Lucinda Cole was in. Her downstairs neighbor was a disciple of Bong Soo Han, the father of hapkido, and had already agreed to teach her martial arts.
Zippo and Doris high-fived each other in the elevator. It took three attempts. The film was coming together. Doris was perfect at her job, perfect overall toenail to tooth, but Zippo accepted that they’d never be together. Perhaps they’d loved each other four hundred years ago when they were different people, or maybe four hundred years in the future they found each other once again for the first time. The thought lifted his spirits when he was feeling rotten.
Super Fly T.N.T. came out that summer and wrecked him. He was disconsolate to find out that Ron O’Neal had ripped off his title. Zippo remembered telling him about it at a party at Robert Guillaume’s pad and Ron smiling strangely. Now he knew why. He cheered himself up with the knowledge that the film was a flop. And so Nefertiti Jones was born. Needless to say, Zippo suffered a relapse when he walked out of the Broadway–Lafayette subway station a few weeks later and saw the gigantic poster for Cleopatra Jones. He talked too much, that much was clear, and never should have spilled his guts to Max Julien that night at Fargas’s.
Enter Secret Agent: Nefertiti.
Zippo reserved location scouting for himself. He saw the words up there on the screen, the last thing the audience takes in before the lights came up: Filmed Entirely on Location in Harlem U.S.A. He zigzagged through the uptown grid as if led by a dowsing rod, pursuing the buildings he saw in his mind. Back in the motherland. He found Nefertiti’s limestone townhouse—it overlooked the school playground and that younger generation that reminds her of who she’s fighting for. Picked out the bar where the stoolies, hustlers, and other turkeys deliver the word on the street. The stoop where the neighborhood flasher messes with the wrong lady （comic interlude）。 He cast the showroom and office of Carney’s Furniture in a small role.
Sometimes at street corners or next to a vacant lot that had once been a cherished place, he was Aaron Flood again, before Zippo came along. He toured his spots: the playground on 131st, whose gravel or broken glass was still embedded below his knee like war shrapnel; outside Jimmy’s Tap on 135th, where according to family lore his mother first kissed his father. Dewey’s, the soda shop she took Zippo to after his father’s funeral, was a record store now. He’d ordered Rum Raisin in his dad’s honor and forced down every wretched bite. He hated Rum Raisin. None of those places made it into the movie. Everyone maintains a private reel.
Location scouting was no excuse that final night, as the next day was the start of shooting. The pretext served to get him uptown again, wandering his old neighborhood, and then past it. He finally found the place he’d been looking for all along: the perfect location. He was over by the East River, on avenues beyond the map of his experience. The entire block had been bulldozed except for one three-story townhouse. Corner to corner the rubble rose and fell in red waves, flotsam of wood slats and iron pipes breaking the surface. Exposed masonry on the lone holdout’s exterior indicated where the adjacent buildings had been. Zippo imagined they’d been swept away by a river of bricks.
The plywood across the front door proved to be unattached. Others had preceded him. No one was inside now; Zippo searched the building from the basement to the top floor. He chose a former bedroom, third floor, rear. Four blocks away he’d come across a tweed overcoat dangling out of a junker and sensed it might come in handy. It did. He kicked some newspapers on the floor into a pile and added the balled-up overcoat. He withdrew the can of kerosene from his bag. Took a whiff. Naughty-pantie. It brought him back. He heard the sound of the match against the box before he struck it—his audio track was off. As it prospered and fed itself, the fire put him back in sync.
Zippo watched the flames. It had been years. Good luck heat, good luck smoke. The flames tickling the ceiling snapped him out of that old, comfortable delirium and he beat it to the street while he was still able.
Tomorrow when he called Action, the idea in his mind would begin its passage into this world. With art, it wasn’t enough to conceive of it; you had to make it. It was like that with fires, too, sometimes. Sometimes you need it right there in front of you, crackling, dancing, devouring: more alive than you will ever be.
TWO
It all went south after that night in Carney’s Furniture. Pepper had been working security for a week, since Day 4 of shooting. Two tungsten lights—rented—vanished while being loaded onto a production van, disappeared by fleet-footed scavengers. Word had it the criminals swooped down with the speed and ferocity of a seagull snatching french fries from the Coney Island boardwalk.