The Death Scene Artist

by Andrew Wilmot

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  ††

  When I step back from all this and look at what I’ve written, it’s as if I’m peering in on somebody else’s life and I’m left with only the painfully obvious: when it comes to you and me, I lost perspective and I lost it quick.

  Please, don’t mistake this as me admitting I was some warped, star-struck fan or IMDb ambulance chaser, with forensic shots of your bloodied remains adorning the walls of my bedroom – you owe me more than that. What I was experiencing … it was real and you knew it, too. You didn’t hightail it out of my life because I was just another fake or phony looking to ride a barely D-list celebrity’s fame into all the In-N-Out burgers and free milkshakes I could put away. No, D____, when you finally ran away, from us, you did so because I was offering you something you didn’t want – maybe something you’d never had before: a reason to stand still. To embrace the spotlight, if only for a moment.

  That night, after we’d wrapped on A War to Remember, I called Louise and told her about you. She seemed excited for me at first and then she started asking questions: what were you like, how old were you, had you been in anything she might’ve seen. I didn’t know what to say – I’d taken your name from the call sheet, but that was it, that was the extent of the personal details I could offer. When we’d finished shooting for the day I’d gone first to your dressing room, and when you weren’t there I’d asked the girls at makeup if they’d seen where you’d disappeared to.

  “He’s already gone,” said the first woman, somewhat bitterly as she tidied up her workstation.

  “He’s the first in the chair at the end of the day,” said the second. She smacked her gum loudly. “He can’t get out of here fast enough.”

  And that’s how it was. Once they’d stripped you of your 1940s aesthetic you were up and out the door without a single word of thanks. Whether you’d gone on to another job, or even another city, I really had no idea. While people were busily clearing out of the studio, I asked anyone who’d listen if they knew anything about you, receiving only a “come back when I’m supposed to give a fuck” from the former music video director taking his big gamble on what was either going to be a heartstrings-tugging Oscar-bait masterpiece or a disaster that would no doubt sweep the Razzies.

  “So … you think you’re in love with him, but you still don’t know anything about him,” Louise said once I’d finished telling her what little I could about you. She crunched a carrot stick on the other end of the line, each bite crackling through the earpiece like wet static.

  “I know things,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like he’s incredibly talented for one.”

  “Then how come I’ve never heard of him?”

  “Just because he’s not a big name or anything doesn’t mean he isn’t amazing at what he does.”

  “All right, all right, don’t get defensive on me. I’m just concerned you might be moving a little fast here.”

  “Because I said I’m falling in love?”

  “Well … yeah, sort of exactly that.”

  “I know what I’m doing, Louise.”

  She sighed like a bullet into the receiver. “I hope so. This isn’t the first time you’ve uttered the L-word to me after a … was it even a date? It doesn’t sound like it was a date, M_____. But … whatever. I just don’t like to see you falling for difficult guys over and over again. It isn’t healthy.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “There’s a connection between us. I felt it. Really, I did.”

  “I hope so,” she said again. “I really do. For your sake.”

  “Oh, don’t say it like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Mom.”

  “Fucking ouch.”

  “It’s just … you do this. A lot. You know you do it, too.”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Enough then.”

  “M_____, I just worry. I’m allowed to worry, aren’t I?”

  Oh, how that grated. Louise had this way of pitching her voice just right so that it cracked on command. It was like weaponized vocal fry. And it made me feel like such a selfish shit, every time. I breathed into the receiver, guilt seated atop my shoulders. “Yes.”

  “Cool. Now that we’ve established that I’m allowed to feel feelings –”

  “Jesus Christ, Lou …”

  “– I’m going to tell you, in no uncertain terms, that you are, in fact, rushing into things, and that it is going to get you hurt. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but –”

  “Don’t Casablanca me, not now.”

  “I’m not doing this to piss you off, M_____, and I know that you know that. Give me at least a little credit here.” She paused. “Does he know?” she asked, suddenly sombre.

  “Does he know what?”

  “What it was like for you growing up. The bodies, the people you … we … Does he know?”

  And that right there was the million-dollar question. The thing she’d wanted to ask from the very start but didn’t know how to phrase. “Yes,” I said. “I mean, I think so. Given the time we’ve spent together, how could he not?”

  There was a pause. I could hear her pacing whatever room she was in. “You’d better be sure.” She spoke softly, but I could hear it in her voice, that slight twinge of I-believe-you-but-I-don’t-know-that-I-should. “There’s no going back from this sort of thing. If he …”

  She trailed off, but I knew what it was she wanted to say. I didn’t want to tell her to stop caring, or to leave me alone. She was right: I owed her the benefit of the doubt. We’d been through too much together for this to be the moment when shit falls apart; that would happen later. “Louise, it’s fine. It’s okay. I know what I’m doing.”

  “I know, it’s just –”

  “You’re worried.”

  “No, M_____. I’m afraid.”

  8. “Futures Are for the Weak”

  Posted: 11/24/2013

  “The guy’s practically a myth – like, I don’t know, Bigfoot or something.”

  That was Aud – Audrey. She was the hostess at a nightclub near Santa Monica and Wilshire, and one of the first real friends I made in LA, a year or so after I arrived. Aud was another import – half French-Canadian, half Senegalese, black hair tightly braided all the way down to the small of her back. She made a decent enough living compressed, as it were, into a black-and-red strapless polyester-and-spandex halter, threading her Harlot-red and Crest Whitestrips smiles with enough of a behind-the-curtain sneer to announce to newcomers and returning guests alike: “You’re in, which means you’re somebody.” It was an art form, she said to me once. “I’ve gotta look good enough to fuck, but dangerous enough that they won’t think twice about it, ya?”

  The rest of the time, when she wasn’t playing agent provocateur with anyone – man or woman – who entered the club, Aud was filing a second semi-regular paycheque as an extra. Features, mostly – lots of crowd work filling seats at sporting events, looking longingly into drinks or the eyes of people sitting across from her in bars, or pretending to enjoy a nice meal while the leads in the foreground worked and reworked their lines, making a show of spitting half-chewed hunks of bread and meat into spit buckets positioned just below the table, out of sight of the cameras.

  “My mom died last night,” she said to me the very first time we went out for drinks following her shift. “Tragic. Poor little bird fell down two flights of stairs and broke every wretched bone in her body. The paramedics found her at the very bottom, tangled into an ampersand.” She sniffed an exclamation point, dabbed her wine-red eyes with a tissue.

  “Is that true?” I asked.

  “The funeral’s in three days,” she continued, ignoring my question like I was a crumb of dirt she’d flicked out from beneath her half-inch press-on nails. “Naturally, I have to do all the planning
myself. Selfish woman didn’t even bother to write out a proper will. You’ll be there, won’t you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Her funeral. You’ll come, right?” She batted her doe eyes.

  “Uh, sure,” I said, confused and a little baffled at being asked such a thing on a first meeting. “I’ll come.”

  “No, you won’t.” She sipped from the edge of her wineglass, noisily swishing the liquid between her teeth as if it were mouthwash. “She’s fine. As spry as ever, and not looking to give up her grandmother’s expensive bone china anytime soon. That sounded authentic though, ya? I’m still working on getting the tears to come on command.”

  And that was Aud. It was she who first opened me up to this world – told me what I’d always known deep down, that I had an eye for film, and convinced me to enrol in night classes at a local film school, one of those ones you see advertised at bus stops and at video stores, back when video stores still existed. She helped me navigate the unions, smuggled me onto my first-ever set and gave me a taste of what it was all like. That was a long time ago now – nearly half my life. Without her, I don’t know if I’d have ever gotten my foot in the door. I’m still not sure if I should love her or hate her for that.

  Two or three nights after that conversation with Louise, Aud and I went out for Chinese. Almost right away I started bombarding her with questions about D____. I was a little hesitant prior to getting there – Aud had had a front-row seat for my last relationship, with a mealy-mouthed production assistant/Venice Beach dude bro named Daryk (yes, spelled like that, fucking LA parents), who stunk of salt water and suntan lotion day and night. She’d spent the better part of the two months he and I had been together telling me what a fool I was, that he was just having fun, that he wasn’t really interested in me and sure as shit wasn’t going to call me back after the fifteenth message I’d left in the two days since I’d last heard from him, which turned into two weeks, then a month, then she was right and she fucking told me so and why didn’t I listen to her in the first place?

  But. In the decade-plus we’d known one another, there was one key thing I’d learned about Aud: she knew something about practically everyone in the industry. So yeah, I was going to ask about D____. I was going to take whatever avenues I could to learn more about him, enigmatic bastard that he was … is. When I gave her his name, however, it was like watching a loose light bulb flicker for a second, as if trying to turn on, trying to catch a spark.

  “Who?” she said between mouthfuls of sweet-and-sour pork.

  I repeated the name, doing my best not to shout it over the noise coming from the surrounding tables. She hesitated then started nodding, quickly swallowing her food.

  “Okay, yeah, I think I know who that is. I mean we haven’t worked together or anything, not directly, but I think I might’ve seen him around on a couple of shoots. I’ve definitely heard a few things.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “What kinds of things?”

  “All kinds of things.”

  “So forthcoming you are.”

  She gave me the finger. “Anyway, there’s not really that much to tell. Way I hear it he sort of flits around doing death scenes and only death scenes. Never really sticks around a place for too long, ya? Keeps mostly to himself – doesn’t open his mouth unless you’re somebody important, that sort of thing. The guy’s practically a myth – like, I don’t know, Bigfoot or something. Alex – you know Alex, right? Anyway, Alex told me he worked with him once, ’bout a year ago. He said D____ was a bit of a prick – went all Daniel Day-Lewis and wouldn’t break character for anything, even when someone tried to make conversation with him. Alex said he was, like, the Frank Welker of corpses, or something. Every role he gets he’s either a body or will be one soon enough.”

  “Who’s Frank Welker?”

  She didn’t answer and instead cracked a fortune cookie in half, removing the paper from inside. “Fuck!” She dropped the slip of paper and the two empty pieces of cookie onto her plate and reached across the table, snatching the second fortune cookie right out of my hands. She broke it in half, pulled out the paper strip and cursed again, louder this time. Heads turned in our direction.

  “I can’t fucking believe it,” she said, elongating the A in can’t. When Aud lost her temper she also lost her tight grip on her LA accent. “Five. It’s a fucking sign, is what it is.”

  “Five what?” I asked. In response, she took one of the strips of paper and reached back across the table, depositing it on my plate. I picked up the strip and looked at it – both sides were blank.

  “Five times now,” she said, “I’ve gotten snubbed by these fucking Chinese hockey pucks.”

  “Wow, that’s … that’s pretty racist, you know.”

  “What’s racist?”

  “What you just said. Calling them Chinese hockey pucks.”

  “Fuck you, I’ll tell you what’s racist.”

  “Also, when you think about it, they’re a lot more like eggshells than they are hockey pucks.”

  Aud picked up one of the broken pieces of cookie, pinched between her thumb and index finger. “You know what these are, ya? They’re a tourist trap on home soil. They play up some bullshit cultural mystique, convince us they’ve got a bead on tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. But you wanna know the truth?” She slapped the half-a-cookie on her plate, shattering it into several smaller pieces. “It’s a mass-produced middle finger for all of us.”

  “Except you,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a middle finger for us, but not you. Otherwise you’d have gotten a fortune in yours.”

  She stuck out her tongue. “Motherfucker, you didn’t have no fortune in yours neither!”

  “Whatever. I’m not the one thinking five blank fortunes is a sign the entire Chinese nation is out to get me.”

  “I don’t think anything, M_____. I know my shit.”

  “There’s a lot wrong with you. In the head, I mean. More than with most people.”

  “You love me and you know it.”

  “Aud. Fucking focus – I asked you a question before. Who’s Frank Welker?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, finally paying attention again. “Just some actor who’s done a lot of jobs, I think.”

  That was an understatement. Born March 12, 1946, Franklin W. Welker is one of the world’s most prolific voice actors with a career spanning forty years and over seven hundred roles. Even if you didn’t know his name before now, odds are you’ve heard him in something. For fuck’s sake, he was the voice of both Doctor Claw on Inspector Gadget and Megatron on Transformers. So yeah, I can see why Alex made the comparison. You know, apart from all the death and dying.

  “Anyway, what’s with the sudden curiosity in this guy?” Aud asked.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “I did a couple scenes with him recently, and … I don’t know … I thought, maybe, that there was something between us.”

  Aud sighed, shook her head.

  “What? What’d I do?”

  Gently, nervously, Aud tugged at the skin of her wrist as if it were loose. “M_____, you know I love you, ya?”

  “Aud, we’ve been over this. You know we can’t.”

  “No, no, it’s not … I don’t mean that. It’s that you have this weird obsession with death and … I don’t understand it.”

  “I mean, it’s my job to be at least a little interested by death.”

  “I didn’t say interested. I said obsessed.”

  I didn’t respond at first, waiting for her to follow her pronouncement with something more – some shred of evidence, perhaps, to back up her claim. Instead, her eyes drifted lazily down. She just stared at her empty plate, seemingly saddened by what she’d just said.

  “Look,” I said after thirty incredibly uncomfortable seconds, “I didn’t know he only did d
eath scenes when I asked what you knew about him. We shared a moment together on set, and I don’t think I was alone in thinking that it might have been a little more than just that.” I held up one hand as if swearing on an invisible bible. “That’s really all there is to it.”

  But Aud, I realized, had fallen further into thought and lost sight of our conversation.

  Though I didn’t want to admit it, there was truth to what she’d said, about my unfortunate … fascination, I guess, with death. Aud was one of the few people to whom I’d told my life story in full – the yearbook incident, Dad dying from cancer and me skipping out on Mom, all of it. Who I knew I was. Inside. I trusted her with that knowledge not because she was fun to be around but because half the time she seemed about as lost in this city as I felt.

  It was the fourth or fifth time I’d spent the night at Aud’s place after a party, when she was flaked out half-naked on the couch, that I saw the track marks on her arm – a bit of deep purplish-blue in a sea of beautiful dark brown. When I confronted her about it, she cursed at me, threw a lamp at my head and kicked me out of her apartment, only to dial me up the next day feeling hungover and apologetic. She said it wasn’t anything to be concerned about – a breath of fresh air, she called it. Just something she needed to make the days seem a little brighter. After that, whenever I tried to talk to her about her heroin use she quickly shut me down, told me she only shot up every once in a while, called it a chickenshit habit and said it was nothing to worry about. I did worry, though, too much and not enough at the same time. I’d grown up within spitting distance of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and had seen first-hand what that shit did to a person. One night, feeling especially despondent about her situation, I wrote a draft of her future obit and emailed it to her. Two minutes later she was screaming into my ear, calling me a motherfucker, saying that I had no right to do that to her. I tried to tell her it was for her own good, that I was showing her what her family would have to one day read if she continued doing this to herself. She called and hung up on me seven times that night and then I didn’t hear from her again for nearly a month. When at last she came out of hiding, we went out, grabbed a coffee, said our apologies and never spoke another word about it – save for the one time she asked, while drunk, if I’d meant what I had written in her obit, that she was a good person and I was lucky to have known her. That I loved her like a sister. I promised her I had meant every word.