voice in rassed names, another the dark breaks into an embar- laugh at confusing the two “That’s the common slip,’’ says voice, “we all do that. We call “The Killer-Dude!" shouts a voice from the audience. On the screen, the other boy, taller, muscular, with a calm watchful face, is waving a twenty-dollar bill. “Where’s Walt? I mean Gus?” The Clinton St. Quarterly Mala Noche. Gus Walt and Walt Gus all the time.” The cast and crew, seven strong, of Gus Van Sant’s black and white feature film adaptation of Walt Curtis’ book Mala Noche is watching rushes of the film shot that day. Between reels, actor Tim Streeter considers the reason for the cast’s frequent mental reversal of the book’s author and the film’s director. “Maybe,” speculates Streeter, “it’s that you think of the source of the script, the one who puts the words in your mouth, as the boss. Though Gus wrote the script and is the director, Walt is around the shoot often enough so we think of him as the source of the story. It’s not that Gus and Walt are much alike. Or anything at all alike.” Such confusion irritates a local writer who knows them both. “The only thing they have in common is mania. How could you mix them up? It’s like confusing a locomotive with a Lear jet.” The style contrast is dramatic. Walt Curtis assaults life with the fervent, bellowing exultation of a sensual evangelist. Gus Van Sant is discreet as a cat burglar or a first-class pickpocket. He arrives silently like the Ninja who paralyzes the sentry with a single whispered joke and then melts into the darkness without raising an alarm. Gus is quiet in everything he does. Walt leans toward bombast. Curtis, an Oregon City native, is the patriarch of Portland’s bohemian street poet population. The book, set in Portland and focused on the Burnside desolation, is an obvious outpouring of Curtis' life and emotional experience. Curtis disguises his educated blue-collar heritage in the protective coloring of the poverty that both fascinates and appalls him. He dresses in early Goodwill style, his wiry frame draped in sagging jeans and layers of tattered shirts, in a time-honored Skid Row anti-chill technique. His home is a bare apartment in a decayed rooming house. His car is an aging, recalcitrant station wagon loaded with emotional burdens. “My father drove it for years before he died!” His living is the spartan penury of part-time clerking in the wino grocery stores that have haunted his writing for years. His politics and his religion are inextricable, churchlessly Christian and humane, both expressed in an impassioned rant that alternately moves and maddens his audience. As a prolific writer of prose and poetry, as a scholar of Oregon literature and history, as a painter of wild imagist icons, Walt Curtis may never have understated a topic in his life. Then there is filmmaker Van Sant, low key from his sports jacket, knit shirt and slacks to his immaculate, purring BMW, his carriage house digs in Dunthorpe and his genteel and well-to-do background. Walt parks his car on the way to the weekly open-mike poetry brawl, and grabs a thick blue binder from the sliding piles of paper in the back seat. Hunched to use the light of a street lamp nearby, Walt sits leafing through the pages of a film script. “I don't know what to make of this little fucker Gus Van Sant. He says he wants to make a movie out of Mala Noche. He wrote to me out of the blue. He’s writing the script. He keeps sending me new drafts to read. He’s put in a lot of work. Can he do it? I don’t know. Maybe it's all a joke..." Mala Noche, published in 1977 by Portland’s Out Of The Ashes Press, is a 50-page novella drawn from Curtis’ Skid Road experiences. The story of Mala Noche (the obvious Bad Night is an inadequate translation; think also of “Endless Night”...“Limbo Night”) is told by the voice of “Walt, a clerk in a wino grocery store, who falls into fascinated and futile love with a teenaged Mexican boy named Johnny. With mothlike devotion, the clerk tries to buy the boy’s affection with food, money, rides in the clerk’s battered car, and obvious attention. Johnny accepts and solicits gifts but always dances but of Walt’s reach. Johnny’s friend and traveling partner .is Pepper, another Mexican boy who ekes out the winter gap between farm labor jobs by
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