I had to blink once, then again. The squibs were for me. That’s how it is in this business. No courtesy call over the weekend. No notifying my agent. No good-bye party. No Hey, sorry. Cold-ass motherfuckers.
“Sons of bitches…” I couldn’t always find work, and I’d shot a couple of pilots that hadn’t gone anywhere, but I’d never been fired from an acting job.
Elliot rested a brotherly hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, Tin-Man.”
“If they’re killing him off, why’d they hire this kid…?”
Bam. I got it. It was just like in a horror movie: If a character mentions a fiancé or a kid, you can bet they’re about to die. And it was worse than that: Horror and sci-fi movies became notorious for always killing the brother first. Traditionally in Hollywood horror or action films, killing a black man was a cheap death—a little pinch, but he wasn’t quite a real person, a sort of inoculation against the real horror to come: threatening a pretty young white girl of child-bearing age. Of course, even better was if that black man died protecting that pretty white girl, so that the hero could screw her later.
The worst thing about this situation was introducing the kid just in time to leave another black boy without a father! It wasn’t like me, but I was ready to call the NAACP and Al Sharpton.
“How’d you know?” I asked Elliot.
“I knew something was up, and your name was floating around. They’re a bunch of bastards anyway, Ten. Fuck ’em.”
It’s hard to say Fuck ’em when you still remember being broke. Marcela cost three grand a month, and that wasn’t counting Dad’s physical therapist. That wasn’t counting a whole lot. So much for my savings account. How long would the money last before my next job?
I wanted to call April, and I couldn’t even do that. She hadn’t sent me her number yet.
Instead, I tried to call Len Shemin, my agent. He was in a meeting. I left an urgent message, but it was a miracle to get Len on the phone before seven, his last call of the day. I couldn’t bring myself to tell his assistant, Giovanni, what the problem was.
“What’s next, Tin-Man?” The fond sadness in Elliot’s voice made me feel more alone.
I wanted to go home, and in hindsight I wish I had. Fuck appearances. But I was a pro, and a pro does the job. I would stay to spite them, to show them what professionalism looked like. They could take notes and kiss my ass. That’s what I thought.
“Put on the goddamn squibs,” I said.
That day, there would be blood.
I deserved an award for my performance the rest of that day.
All afternoon, I ignored the flimsy, tight-lipped masks hastily slipped over my coworkers’ curiosity. Suddenly, I was the bad luck nobody wanted to rub off on them.
I saw the head writer, Benny, picking over the sandwiches on the catering table, but he made sure I could only see his profile. Most writers are humble folk—an industrywide lack of respect knocks the asshole out of most people pretty quick—but Benny was an exception. He’d always been a pompous ass, and it seemed like the perfect moment to tell him so.
I also wanted to tell the director he had no imagination, the female lead that her hair extensions made her look like a Shetland pony, and remind the male lead that his name hadn’t opened a movie since 1986, so maybe he could stop strutting around like Russell Crowe.
But I didn’t. I did my job.
Television and movie gunshots are fake, usually without even blanks, but no production takes gun scenes lightly—especially since Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon, died after being shot with a blank while filming The Crow. If there is a weapon on the set, everyone has to be present for the safety meeting—just in case. At the scene’s start, Perry and other agents would fire guns with blanks so the gunfire would look and sound realistic. But for my close-up, Perry would switch guns and fire one without blanks against the side of my neck. The assistant director ran us through the motions with two black Glock 22s.40 caliber, standard-issue FBI. One empty, one loaded with blanks.
“Yeah, yeah. Are we done with the hand-holding?” Perry groused to his coffee, loudly enough to be heard. “I’ve done this a hundred times.”
I glared at the wiry, white-haired actor whose performance had once delighted me—even inspired me. He was one or two words away from a plastic surgeon. Like I said, a prick.
“You got a problem?” I said.
Perry shrugged. “This is the biz, kid. You want steady? Get a law degree.”
The director, Avery, gave Perry an irritated look, then he waved his hand over his head in his circular signal for Let’s get moving. Finally. I was ready to shoot the scene and go home before I did something that would make the tabloids.
Avery motioned me to my cubicle on the set before my death scene. He knew I could have made his life hell that day, and he looked grateful I was still there.
“Wasn’t my call,” Avery said quietly, his obligation. He was olive-skinned and balding.
“Whatever. What do you need?”
Avery ran us through the scene: a quiet moment at the office interrupted by gunfire from Kelsey. Finally, with a sigh, Avery pointed to my character’s desk, which was as spare as my undeveloped character. I noticed that someone from Props had added a framed photo of me and Darnell, expertly Photoshopped. Nice afterthought, but it was too little, too late.
“OK, Ten, so it’s bam-bam to the chest…” Avery tapped the squibs strapped beneath my shirt, which would splatter after a radio signal coordinated with the gunshots. Low-rent productions use plastic baggies, but Homeland could afford better effects. “The squibs go off, bloodstains, yada yada, you fall down. Then Perry comes behind you—last bam, to the neck. Left side. Your hand slaps your neck with a squib, splat, you’re dead. And that’s it.”
I could hear the relief in his voice at the idea.
Any other day I would have had a dozen thoughts on how to play the hell out of even a passive scene like that one, and maybe a few questions. Instead, I just nodded.
Considering how hard the rest of the day had been, my last scene was easy.
Sanford is typing on his computer at his desk. Kelsey shouts something. Commotion. Sanford looks up. I never had a chance to say anything, or reach for my gun.
I never heard gunshots, so I was startled to feel the squibs burst on my skin. Like sharp, shallow punches. It wasn’t hard to look surprised and reel backward. No blanks sounded, but they could fix that in editing. I lost my balance when I stumbled back into my desk, which only added to the effect. I tried to imagine how a father would feel knowing he was leaving his son behind, and I fixed that horror on my face. I gasped for air, my last chance to be.
I dropped to the floor.
“Cut!” Avery said. “Where were my sparks?”
Gareth Priestly, the English propmaster who sported red hair and a beard to match, was already checking the gun’s chamber. “Misfire,” he said. “Blanks are there.”
“Fuck it, we’ll fix it in editing,” Avery said. “Give him the empty. Let’s finish.”
I didn’t move on the floor, waiting. I was just glad to avoid going back to makeup.
“Action!” Avery said.
On Avery’s cue, the set became bedlam. More commotion. Shouting. This time, loud gunshots sounded behind me. I heard Perry’s hurried footsteps behind me, his heels vibrating the set’s floor. One step. Two.
Off camera, I nestled the last squib in my hand, ready to slap it to my neck.
I felt Perry’s gun against my neck. Good-bye, you assholes, I thought.
Click. And—
My head exploded. The world exploded. I still don’t know which was worse—the noise or the pain. A fiery lance stabbed through my ear and into my brain.
My shout wasn’t in the script, but I would only find out about the shout later, because I didn’t hear it. I opened my eyes, expecting to see only light, or utter darkness. With all sound gone, I was sure I was dead. My hand and shirt were covered with blood.
I saw Perry standin
g over me, his blood-specked face so pale he looked like a Japanese geisha lost in the prom scene from Carrie. Suddenly he was an old man—a stricken, confused old man. I was fascinated by the sight of his face shaking, the skin quivering from his jaw. Dad had looked that way in his hospital room.
BOOM-BOOM BOOM-BOOM BOOM-BOOM.
I thought the sensation shaking the floor was an earthquake, but it was my heart. My wondering eyes made the life snap back into Perry’s haunted face, and his lips started moving. I couldn’t hear him, but his lips mouthed in eerie slo mo, clear as day:
Somebody get a fucking doctor.
SEVEN
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21
“Messed yourself up good this time, huh, Ten?”
I didn’t need both ears to tell me what Reggie had said. Reggie, my doctor, has always been a smart-ass. He’s my second cousin from a family intersection on my mother’s side, and he used to treat me cheap. Now he was on staff at UCLA Medical School and working for the Lakers, so it’s almost as hard to get a meeting with Reggie as it is with my agent. But this was an emergency, and Reggie is the only doctor I trust. Besides, he’s family.
“Looks that way,” I said.
Reggie leaned closer, shining his otoscope into my ear, and I sat rock steady. I didn’t want Reggie to miss anything. Reggie’s proximity made the roar of silence deafening.
Dad and Marcela watched from a corner of Reggie’s office, and the worry in Dad’s eyes was for me, for a change. I tried not to let myself see it. I was worried enough for all of us.
“How’d this happen?” Reggie’s voice sounded like it was at the end of a long tunnel.
“Some asshole put blanks in a prop gun that was supposed to be empty. Got fired right up against my neck. That’s where that burn’s from. And now my head rings like hell, and I can’t hear shit out of that ear.”
I used to quiz myself when I was a kid—which would you rather lose, your hearing or your sight? That’s a no-brainer. Hearing, hands down. Now that one of my ears had stopped working—and the other seemed anything but reliable—it felt like God had taken me up on my bargain.
I felt Reggie’s sigh against my cheek. “Lucky you didn’t get killed, man.”
“You think I don’t know?”
“(Schibhiwkh).”
I shook my head, and Reggie pulled the little cone-shaped black light out. Usually, I could hear at least faintly out of my right ear, but sometimes words were lost. Instead, there was only the ringing, like three loud bells tolling at once.
“There’s ringing. And I couldn’t make out the last thing you said.”
“Hold still, Ten. Relax. You’re gonna be fine.”
“You hope,” I corrected.
“Yeah. I hope.” Unfortunately, I heard that part fine.
I wish Reggie had been older than two and out of diapers when my mother needed honesty from her doctor. Or that he’d been in the country when Dad had his heart attack. After Dad’s stroke, Reggie got me through the worst moments by being willing to pick up his phone any time of the day or night. I never ran out of questions. Reggie is the finest doctor there is.
“Hold still,” Reggie said again, gently. In my good ear, my right one.
Marcela said something encouraging, but I couldn’t make it out.
I shared a house with a man in a wheelchair, so I knew that life goes on after a disability. As long as I could work, I could handle hearing loss. I could manage a lifelong struggle to enjoy music again—even though so far, my jazz, blues, and funk collection was only a painful exercise in frustration. It didn’t sound the same. Too much was missing. Still, I’d be all right with that.
But I couldn’t handle the ringing.
They say Beethoven heard ringing while he was going deaf. And an artist, Goya, whose paintings I saw when I visited the Prado museum in Madrid with Alice during one of our vacations together. They say that the ringing in their ears drove both of them crazy. The madness in Goya’s work is hidden in plain sight—people shrieking and screaming and eating their young. I’d had the ringing for only a day, and I was halfway to bugnuts myself. Night was hell. Nothing but ringing, hissing, and roaring in my head, keeping me awake. How would I put up with one more night?
Reggie was my last stop before Panic.
“When’s it gonna stop?” I asked Reggie when he straightened up, his exam done.
Dad wheeled himself closer to hear better himself, and Marcela hovered, too.
Reggie folded his arms behind his head and gazed down at me, his lips refusing to smile. “Don’t know for sure, man. It probably will—it usually does—but it might not. I gotta be real with you: It might be gone tomorrow, or it might not be gone for a while. Weeks? Months?”
Marcela muttered in Spanish, shaking her head, maternal worry creasing her brow.
Reggie went on: “In the short term, there are things you can do: Avoid aspirin, caffeine, alcohol. Studies show that they make the ringing worse. And if it’s bad at night, get a humidifier, an air purifier, something that makes low-level noise. That’ll help mask it.”
“Mask it my ass, Reggie. How do I get rid of it?”
That was when Reggie explained there was no known cure. And that the ringing might persist even after the hearing in my left ear returned—if my hearing returned, which was more and more doubtful after sixteen hours, and mine had been gone longer. And he explained that my mission now was to make sure the hearing loss didn’t get worse. And recommended a good otolaryngologist, a specialist at UCLA Medical Center. Recommended some herbs and amino acids I could take.
In other words, there was nothing he could do. Just like the emergency-room doctor said.
Reggie’s confirmation exhausted me. I would have lain down on the table, just let the weight of the knowledge sink down into my bones, except I didn’t want to upset Dad. Or I didn’t want to look weak to him, more likely.
“The gunshot and the ringing are related, but I’m gonna go ahead and look at them as two separate problems,” Reggie said. “It’s rare, but I’ve seen temporary hearing loss up to three or four days. I’m hoping you have what we call a Temporary Threshold Shift—as opposed to PTS, the permanent kind. We don’t know if there’s cell death unless the hearing doesn’t come back, and that only becomes clearer with time. But if you look at your ear’s function as computer hardware, the ringing is more like a software problem.” He smiled as if pleased by the analogy. “It’s a little more complicated. There’s a bigger role that stress plays, for example.”
“So it’s in my head?” I said.
Reggie grinned slightly. “In more ways than one, yeah. So…take it easy for a few days. Chill out. Low stress.”
That would be tough, with April, my job, and my left ear gone in a span of two days.
“(Twhig hie eeziiee), man,” Reggie said with a smile, slugging my shoulder.
I nodded, but I hadn’t heard him. Instead, I’d heard a sound like waves crashing over my brain. The noise wasn’t always a ringing. Maybe I would have to get used to that, too.
When the gun went off, I’d just been relieved that all the blood on my shirt and hand wasn’t really mine—it was only from the squibs. I was so grateful to be alive, I’d made jokes for Chela by the time she got home from school. (“Your turn’s coming, all that loud music.”)
But that had worn off. All I could think about now was the damage.
When I tried to ask Reggie to repeat what he’d said, I couldn’t open my mouth.
“One ear’s better’n none…” Dad said, turning on the TV. Pep talk over.
To Dad, a few words of hard, simple truth and an afternoon of Court TV were the answers to all of life’s problems. Dad had learned how to appreciate what was left instead of fixating on what was gone. Me, I wasn’t there yet.
“I know that.” My teeth were gritted.
“Oughta sue ’em, though…” Dad said.
“Damn right I will.”
Maiming and killing are against the law, so suing is
the next best thing. I wanted to do great damage to the son of a bitch who had handed Perry a gun loaded with blanks. Gareth Priestly. He was the propmaster for Homeland, and that asshole’s carelessness nearly got me killed.
Every hour on the hour, I had to talk myself out of driving to the set to talk to Priestly personally. Okay, I didn’t want to talk to him—I wanted to hurt him. But I couldn’t access the set anymore. I was fired. I was the reason every studio has a guarded gate. After Monday, I was the last person they would let in.
When someone knocked at my door, I let myself hope it was April. She’d changed her mind about South Africa. About me. I was desperate for a change of direction.
I opened the door to see Len Shemin, my agent, and I was almost as happy. My agent had never set foot in my house. If I had realized this was how to get Len Shemin’s attention at one o’clock on a weekday, I would have blown out my eardrum a long time ago.
“Shit—hallucinations, too?” I said, meeting him in the doorway.
“Shut up, you. I was in the neighborhood. You gonna invite me in, or stand there gawking?” Then he hugged me. Another first. “Shitty week, man. Shitty. First the Lynda Jewell thing, now this.”
Every once in a great while, an artist realizes his agent is also his friend. I probably should have guessed it sooner, but it was finally plain. Len Shemin is the biggest workaholic I know. I book lunch with him a month in advance. I could only guess what he’d rescheduled to make time to drive to my house.
“My dad’s here,” I told Len quietly, inviting him in. “We can’t talk in front of him.”
“Roger. But get us alone somewhere.”
I needn’t have worried about how to excuse myself from Dad and Marcela with so much T.D. Jackson news to digest on TV. They were hypnotized by the parade of ignorant analysts making guesses based on nothing. Dad mumbled a greeting at Len when I introduced him, but then Dad only fixed a disapproving scowl on the gel in Len’s bleached-blond hair that made it stand up an inch. Between that and Len’s red-framed Clark Kent glasses, Dad looked like he thought the circus had come to town. Sometimes I think Dad believed his age and infirmity made him invisible.
In the Night of the Heat Page 8
