Singer

by Les Plesko

The girl sang in a foyer, a weak yellow light on her lamb-colored coat. Her hair in a kind of a slipping bouffant and the theater was shut. She sang not to the street, but to the place where the foyer walls met, her hands cupped to her mouth for the echoey sound. She looked plain and sincere as she sang to the wall for herself.

Maximilian’s plan: he had cigarettes, he would offer her one.

He walked past the grates of old stores, dusty posters and books, beauty parlors, and such. His camera dangled from his arm, so it was awkward to offer that damp Tareyton, though he did.

She’d stopped singing by then.

He explained what he wanted to do, though he wasn’t sure what it was.

She didn’t smile; he liked women who didn’t do that.

Well, so, he said, still hopeful, already not young.

Well, so, to begin, he filmed her smoking her cigarette.

Singer, by Maximilian Echs, ©1979, b&w, 63 mins., won a prize in Montreal.

She sings some in it; he must still have been drinking then, hence the verité effect.

He believed he could let himself die once he finished the film, but he bought a car with the prize and it was the girl who had already died. He thought he won not for the film, but her death.


This used to interest him: that she’d never again be the same as the first time he watched her sing. That he’d rather have taken her picture than fucked her; that she’d rather have sung.

Every day, he made his moment of film, kept a list of the takes. Her hair brown, her coat gray in daylight, her grainy ascent of some stairs. Under her coat she wore a light coat; he never found out what she wore underneath. He loved the singer, but she lived to sing, and be sad—her 846 songs and not one was a jig.

She sat by a window and leaned on her elbows where pigeons were gray like the sidewalk and fought in the rain. He has pictures of this, and then it’s the end of the reel and the frames bleed and flare.

Wasn’t he quite finished yet, she would ask, although in a nice way.

It’s like a song you forgot until you hear it again, he replied, though he hadn’t watched even a moment of what he had filmed.


How old she was, where she came from, she never did tell. He never knew about her a single historical thing.

He filmed her in culverts and lobbies where illumination was glum, and he didn’t have lights so he’d have to push the b&w, saturate the color stock, until it was garishly blotched like some Bollywood epic.

He did the voice-overs himself, describing in flat even tones what was self-evident. She always wore the same coat. Her hair was the same mousy brown, with that failing bouffant. She always wore the same hat, a watchcap for the Green Bay Packers, with long woolly threads coming out she would pluck as she sang.

She didn’t care for accompaniment, but he found an upright piano in what had been a fraternal club, a piano on casters that mushed on the rain-soft parquet. She sang “Cry Me a River” three times, then fell asleep on the floor, her hands praying under her head. He covered her up with a Knights of Columbus fake-velvet, gold-tasseled flag. He went to a diner and propped the camera on damp Baltimore telephone books and said: “I am falling in love.”

But she had a pal who played trumpet behind her sometimes. They must have been sleeping together, but where? Maximilian couldn’t be all the time everyplace she went. He didn’t have dibs. He already used her by having her let him film.

She called her accompanist fellow “My Negro Friend Bill.” His trumpet’s acoustic desires were open manholes, subway grates, corridors. Once, Max called him “Bill,” but she said, I don’t call you “Max,” so, Max, please. MNF Bill showed his teeth.

They kicked around; Maximilian was, what? the third pal? the fifth wheel?

In summer, she took off the coat. She wore a faded brown dress the same brown as her hair.

MNF Bill bought ice cream, but didn’t eat it. He said it was bad for his trumpeter throat. Maximilian drank Jack Daniel’s like he had with the woman he lived with before. He mailed postcards that said, Send money for film. He had the girl singer write Please and Peace in her loopy script, for jealousy’s sake. MNFB couldn’t write, but he marked XOXOX, and he added some musical notes.


This was Baltimore’s season of give-me-your-tired-your-poor. Bill blew his horn, passed a hat on the train, and they paid him to stop. Maximilian wrote a big bouncing check to fix the singer’s bad tooth. Its leaky iron taste was part of her kiss and that made it O.K.

It was true, she did kiss him sometimes; after all, he had filmed her so long in all moods.

Even her smiling was sad, though when they strap-hanged on the train, sometimes, she gave him the press of her hip.

Above ground, it was raining again, the Knights of Columbus had leaks, they were going to cover his reels. Pigeons roosted up there, mice chewed the boxes but wouldn’t eat film.

The woman he’d lived with sent Christmas fruitcake with a message on cigarette papers licked into a long rolled-up scroll—if it’s bad, you can come, if you need to dry out—though where she lived, too, it was wet. Anyway, that’s not what she meant.

MNF Bill bought a car with spare change, where they slept until it got snowplowed. The singer took movies of Max shoveling, then she filmed the empty place on the street where the Buick got towed, the oil stain.

Maximilian wrote to the woman he’d loved, These are the happiest days of my life, and he felt like it wasn’t untrue.


Sometimes, he recorded more soundtrack than film, his voice slurred. “Her footprints in rain, I thought I could see them, her shoeprints in slush.” Click. Rewind.

She had ideas: Let’s get jobs. So he worked in a photo developing place, negatives hanging like flypaper strips. Photographs of dressed dogs and nude wives, while she waited on the sidewalk for him.

You can see all this stuff on the film, how she sang at the Belvedere Club, but her voice got sidetracked without lobbies or corners, washed out in the amber spotlight. Where she taxi-danced they wouldn’t let his camera in, so he took pictures of used-up dance tickets and stains on her dress. A time-lapse of her shoes wearing down, worn eyes looking up at the sign.

They went to the movies. He bought her Milk Duds while he stayed in the lobby and read his happy old pal Schopenhauer.

Who knows what all he told her about when he drank? Too much was not left unsaid. She said, why make a clown of yourself: his reindeer-flap hat, his pocket that clanged with a pint against newspaper racks, like a car its alignment gone bust, he pulled hard to the right as he weaved.

He said, I’ve been thinking of France, we could go there. He’d studied philosophy there once, but he’d had no original thoughts. She told him mon povre, je taime, I see France’s underpants. She sang him a song, Chevalier’s leetle breeze how it wheespers Loueese. She bruised the low notes nice and sad....