Fight the Rooster

by Nick Cole

  “The first thing I want to say is everyone, and I mean the crew, is doing a great job. Even that dinosaur Goreitsky. He wanted to do everything the right way. Not that old long shot stuff which is what we were afraid of. But he seems to want to work again, so he’s doing the opposite of what he used to do.” In the muffled background a voice said, “Are you going to need some ketchup for your eggs?”

  “Please,” said the Fox to the voice and then added, “and some Tabasco too, if you don’t mind.”

  Hmm, thought the VP. Nine thirty in the morning and the Fox is putting ketchup and Tabasco on his eggs; obviously the Fox is not meant for the finer things in life. He’s probably spending the money I’m paying him on monster truck shows, chicken wings, and mullet haircuts. That really burns me up.

  The Executive VP fumed at the imagined excesses his money was being put toward. But he made no mention of this as he constructed beautiful artisanal letters, economical and looped, transcribing every word for future trials and accusations.

  “Anyway, something’s come up and I can’t talk about it right now,” mumbled the Fox through a mouthful of food.

  “Yes, you can, you’re eating at a diner, Fox. Now tell me what’s happening!”

  There was a moment’s pause, in which the VP could only guess the Fox was looking around to see how exactly his boss knew it was a diner he was eating in.

  “Michael Eisner just walked in. I can’t talk,” said the Fox quickly.

  “Michael Eisner,” replied the VP. “Michael Eisner, the former head of Walt Disney Studios, just walked into a greasy spoon?”

  “Yes?” said the Fox after a short pause.

  “Fine, Fox. I don’t care. Just tell me what happened.” Now the Executive VP made a note to look into greasy diners as the new power-breakfast spot. He would also need to find out where Eisner stood in the industry’s eyes this week. If he was on his way out then it would not do to be seen there. But if he still had power—if he was still a player—then corned beef and hash would be the order of the day.

  Once the note was written, he decided the Fox was lying to him in an attempt to get him off the line. Still, he could not bring himself to cross out the note.

  What if?

  He snapped a rubber band loudly across the soft underside of his wrist.

  “Well, okay,” began the Fox. “It was all going well in the morning. We set up the shot. The actors show up and we get the first scene in the can. The one with the Indian. Then we move on to the next setup, where we introduce Kurt. Hold on, he’s walking by the table.”

  “Who?”

  “Ichael-may Meisner-eh.”

  The VP distinctly heard a fork scraping across a plate with a little too much zeal. Then chewing accompanied by a strangely joyful humming.

  “Right, Fox! He’s probably going to get some mixed nuts out of the little red vending machine by the pay counter. Wants a little appetizer before Martin Scorsese shows up for their power breakfast, does he?” said the VP angrily.

  “You could be right, boss,” replied the Fox, and then more strange chew-humming.

  “No, I’m not right!” yelled the VP into the phone. “I’m being sarcastic! Now tell me what happened on the set.”

  “Well anyways, Kurt, who I might add looks like a mess, just phones in his first performance like he always does. So the director says that’s fine and asks him to do it again. And again. And again. He just keeps egging Kurt on, telling him that’s great, beautiful stuff, and asks if he wants to try anything else. I’m thinking, man, Kurt’s probably pissed, but no way. He goes for it and improvs like five whole new scenes. We even do another two setups to get coverage on ’em.”

  The VP thought about this silently for a moment, ignoring the chew-humming.

  “That’s not great, but there are positives. I mean, it sounds like Kurt had fun. A happy star who feels he’s doing great work will jack up the Junket Enthusiasm Indices by… let me see…” The VP flipped through a manual he pulled quickly off the shelf behind him. A Tale of Two Actors: Or, How Junkets affect Film Profitability by Dr. R.H. Freen.

  “By…” continued the VP, “it says here, plus eight percent. Which if I factor the precalc of total gross on opening, means…” The VP tapped at an ever-present adding machine on his desk. “Stupendous! Okay, no problem there as far as I’m concerned.” He gave a small whistle and then announced, “I can live with those numbers.”

  The chew-humming stopped. “We’re not moving on today. We’re staying on that scene. Apparently they want to get more.”

  “What?” exploded the VP. “But we’ll fall behind schedule. On purpose even!”

  “I know, that’s what I said to myself. So I thought I’d call you and let you know. Did something just snap?”

  “No, nothing did. We’ve already increased the profit. But, does another day add to the Junket Rating? That’s the question.” The Executive VP began to flip rapidly through another manual. “I don’t know, and the chart doesn’t say.”

  “Maybe it would stabilize the rating?” offered the Fox in a wily attempt to buy more chewing time.

  “I never believed the rating needed to be stabilized. But with that reasoning, we could justify today and add it to the Probable Cause/Failure Worksheet to cover our butts. Just in case!”

  Snap.

  “Sounds like a plan.” The Fox had no idea what the VP was talking about. He was a camera operator’s assistant.

  “Good work, Fox. Keep me informed. Oh, and do say hello to Mike for me.”

  The VP hung up the phone and returned to the ream of printouts he’d been crunching to justify the coming marketing campaign to support Justice for Sale. It looked like they would pull it from theaters and release it early on DVD. Now a large portion of the movie-going audience who had chosen to pass on it the first time would need to be convinced that they had to own it forever.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Great Goreitsky

  The Great Goreitsky did not shiver in the predawn dark or stand next to the warm exhaust from the equipment trucks like some of the other cameramen did. He stood, bouncing imperceptibly from one foot to the other. Tightening then releasing. Side to side, back and forth. He had been doing this for an hour before anyone had shown up to unload the camera trucks.

  He was excited. He had risen early from the bed he shared with his wife in the little RV they had purchased and parked by the ocean in Santa Monica. Since the morning after he had met her, he had never once wanted to leave their bed. He had always done so with reluctance. This morning, early, when the bars were closing and the bartenders were crawling away to the lives they led in the hours between two a.m. and their next shift, Goreitsky was awake.

  At the beginning of the evening, after he and his wife had barbecued chicken breasts on their new hibachi grill, they had sat in their beach chairs and watched the sun go down. It was their new favorite activity. They said nothing. But the silence between them was never empty.

  Now, in the deep of night, Goreitsky was thinking about the day before. Thinking about moving fast. Thinking about shots as he made them up. Craziness, he had thought at first. But the gratefulness he’d felt at being employed made him work hard to master the technique and fulfill the conceptions of the director. This had been his plan from the start. He would do it their way. He would do whatever would make them happy so long as they paid him and he didn’t have to go back to that cold mountaintop and those thankless goats.

  Once, long ago, he’d said that film was dead to him.

  For years he’d decried modern filmmaking’s tawdry nature to anyone who’d listen. He’d spent long hours and much personal credit lamenting its commercialization as one might point to a grand hotel that had burned to the ground. He’d labored the point until no one cared to hear it any longer.

  Now, ironically, he was truly in love with the art of capturin
g light once more. Especially if he was free to be modern. There were challenges to be found in the jumble and confusion of the new technique he’d once held in suspicious regard. There were even moments to be had.

  For many years atop the mountain, he’d secretly wondered if he’d been wrong. Maybe this style was good. Maybe he should have learned it and worked instead of being arrogant and foolish… and prideful. But his father had taught him a lesson long ago on the nature of being wrong. And he, Goreitsky, had learned it too well.

  Just because you’re wrong doesn’t mean you need to go around telling everyone, his father had liked to say.

  His father had been a fisherman in a small village by the Black Sea. He hated the other fishermen for the simple fact that he opposed any idea that ran through the collective consciousness of the village. He accused them of being ungrateful for his wisdom. If the village said, “let’s use this type of pattern for our nets,” the old man berated anyone who would listen about the way nets used to be made. If the village said, “the government is good,” the old man proclaimed that he liked it better under the czars. If the village said black, he said white. He was a hard man, but the village never gave up on him. Always they shared their new ideas and hopes with him, only to have him gut them like so many fish.

  Long after Goreitsky had fled to the west he ran into a fellow villager on the streets of New York. The villager told him of his father’s passing years before. Goreitsky asked who had taken care of the ungrateful old man in his final bitter years, suspecting no one had, due to the bile of his father’s constant invectives. Goreitsky’s mother had died during World War Two, at Leningrad, and there was no one else. In new immigrant English, the former villager, now an American, all his belongings under one arm, told Goreitsky:

  “We did. He was ours.”

  Peace.

  Years later, long after this film, Goreitsky would think about the currency of life. The pennies of goodwill in the pockets of our life, pinched and clutched at, paid out like a miser grudgingly parting with them to no real satisfaction. And in exchange we are swaddled in the gold of a fellowship and a village we seldom deserve. He would think about this as he stood by a grave, alone and looking at his aged hands through sad rheumy eyes, and feeling very lost.

  Sitting in the beach chairs that evening with his wife, he remembered something and was shocked. It was a memory of the shack by the sea he and the old man had shared for so many years. It was filled day and night with the old man’s endless tirades. Goreitsky as a boy was forced to listen to the angry and bitter rants at injustice the old man spouted between mouthfuls of fish stew. And there was always the dream. His father’s dream of a self-righteous isolation, as though it were some reward. The old man had looked forward to a day when he would own a flock of goats and move away from the “stupid village,” as he called it.

  Goreitsky had forgotten the old man’s endlessly talked-about dream.

  The flock of goats in the mountains.

  Years later, Goreitsky had made that dream his own, forgetting it had first been his father’s through all those windswept years by the sea.

  Goats are not a flock. Goats are a herd.

  His father had wasted years wishing for a terrible dream he could not even properly name.

  Goreitsky, unknowingly, had made his father’s bitter dream his own when the life he’d built as an artist came crashing down in the wake of a bad eighties sophomoric comedy.

  By the ocean that evening, next to the RV, Goreitsky nodded to himself as another piece was found and placed in the puzzle of his life. He reached out and took hold of his wife’s hand once more.

  Ours.

  He squeezed.

  She squeezed back.

  Later they went to bed. Settling in for the night, Goreitsky returned to thinking about movies and how to make them in this new way. He wanted to learn everything and to be the best at it. He began to compose shots and setups in his head, making checklists in case he needed them, and without realizing it, he fell asleep. Still lying in his thinking position. His hands behind his head. Dreaming of a dream.

  After a few hours he got up. He would take a cab to the set and look at things. Maybe talk with the night watchmen, or see if any of the camera crew showed up early. These were all lies he told himself as he slowly put on his clothes in the dark. He just wanted to be near the cameras. He wanted to be ready. He wanted to try again today what he had learned yesterday.

  “Where are you going?” said his wife in the dark of the tiny RV.

  “I am thinking I will go to the set. I cannot sleep. I think because… you know, I am older now.”

  “Not to me,” she replied.

  “To everyone else then.”

  “I didn’t know there was anyone else.” She sat up to stroke his whiskered face in the silence and the darkness. “Don’t forget that you love me,” she added.

  “I might as well be to forgetting that I should breathe. Not ever, not even after I have forgotten how to do even that, will I ever forget.”

  Now, back in the dark standing next to the trucks, the burly and shaggy young men have come to work on this movie. They strap on tool belts and pull flannel shirts over the various logo-laden t-shirts they wear. They, too, wait as they bounce from side to side, waiting for craft services to set up the coffee. Goreitsky moves closer to stand near them.

  He is grateful for his village.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Hotel Roger

  For dinner that night, Kurt and Roger ate a soup that Roger’s mother made.

  Kurt was now on his third day of filming and fourth day without drinking. He still felt a little papery. He wanted to attribute the feeling to a mild case of the DTs, but in the back of his mind he knew it was the work he was doing on the film that was making him feel this way. Cleaning him out. Making him feel almost hollow. He wanted to say it was his best work ever. But before his mind could even allow him to articulate the thought, he ladled another large spoonful of tart lemongrass soup with a plump piece of sweet shrimp up into his mouth.

  “You going to have three bowls tonight?” asked Roger, holding up three of his long fingers and waggling them back and forth in front of the movie star’s face.

  “He may have as many bowls of my soup as he likes,” admonished Roger’s mother, a short, middle-aged woman with a curvaceous figure who dressed in stunning Chanel suits, wore gold jewelry, heavy eye makeup, and cooked in high heels. She was a bank manager in Little Saigon to the south. She drove home through traffic each day with just enough time to cook for Roger and Roger’s grandfather.

  “Yeah, well you going to be big movie star for sure. Big fat movie star. You keep eating all our soup.” Roger took one bite every three or four minutes. He spent the in-between moments scribbling, doing continuous addition and subtraction in the little black book he kept.

  Kurt had asked for a loan from his agent to get him through the first week of filming. He had been laughingly refused. The agent knew Kurt’s financial state of affairs better than anyone and reminded him of that. Kurt understood, so later that day he made an agreement with Roger to finance the week ahead. Kurt assumed this meant that Roger, who seemed to possess large amounts of easy cash, would bankroll their stay at the Beverly. But Roger had taken one look at the opulent digs and instructed Kurt that they would be living at Roger’s house.

  Kurt, being in no position to do otherwise, allowed himself to be led to Roger’s family’s home, a modest one-story ranchero-style tract house nestled in a quiet Los Angeles neighborhood. They slept in Roger’s room, Roger clearing away his various video game consoles and boxes so Kurt could sleep on the floor. Kurt didn’t care. All he had to do was make it to Friday. Then the second third of his money from the movie would be deposited. He could move back to the Beverly and be free of Roger.

  Back at the kitchen table, Roger’s mother refilled the bow
l of soup, adding extra shrimp and a topping of freshly chopped green onions that had been missing from the previous bowls.

  “You lucky my mother like you, give you extra shrimp like you beggar or something. Now you have to marry her.”

  “Roger!” exclaimed his mother. For a moment, considering his current state of affairs, Kurt Dalton was willing to believe that he would have to marry Roger’s mother to simply go on living.

  “I just kidding. I not want my mother to marry poor man and very bad gambler. Not to mention not smart enough to know he being cheated.”

  Kurt resumed his concentration on the bowl of soup. When he was finished he asked, “Are you still charging me fifty cents a smoke?”

  “That good price. In jail much higher.”

  “How much for a pack?”

  “Same price I told you on way home. But too late now, we home for evening. Soon you go to bed so we can work tomorrow. Maybe you pay price in morning on way to set and not pout like today. And don’t even ask, I’m not buying you expensive cigarettes. You smoke generic, like me.”

  “Gimme a smoke.”

  “I not give. I sell. Fifty cents. You pay?”

  “I pay.” Kurt nodded tiredly and took his cigarette to the back yard. It was cool on the pavement and the grass felt good beneath his feet. They did not wear shoes inside the house. The furniture was covered in plastic, and the halls throughout the house had long plastic walkways on top of the carpet. Roger had instructed Kurt, to the point of threat, only to walk on top of the plastic walkways.

  The sky was a dark blue painted in purple near the horizon. The first stars of the evening were shining through the last moments of the day. A flight of birds moved across the sky in formation seeking a tree for the evening. A few houses away some chickens stirred before settling in. Roger’s grandfather sat on a log swing hanging from a gnarled jacaranda tree. Every few minutes he would jiggle a piece of string in his hand at the bushes, that lined the back wall of the property.