Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  Except I knew that place—That Obscure Object of Desire in Brentwood—was real. That hottie teen Jezebel from the No, I Don’t Think So series? She could be found at the Object, ten years older now, and would suck you off for a fast fifty. So the stories I’d heard about the Salon were probably not far from the truth. Next problem: no one could get in, get news, or get a clue. No one except celebrities like Mason Stone, who had just invited me to tag along with him, schedule permitting. With my cameras. As “Jules.”

  * * *

  Ever notice how much time people spend talking about food? Was I the only person who found this weird? Maybe it is one of the reasons for America’s much documented all-time high in obesity; or perhaps just one of the few common grounds for communication left to a culture in which fewer and fewer citizens can accumulate any sort of shared experience.

  There’s no such thing as “watercooler conversation” anymore, if you follow. Coffee came from a boutique at five bucks a pop, and mass culture had devolved to YouTube, reality TV, and movies derived from toys and comic books, leaving only a stubborn minority who did not need that whole “reading for pleasure” thing explained to them. Those that still read (or could read), all read different books. But everybody had to eat.

  Across and three down at the lunch table, grips were talking about what they’d eaten, where they ate it, how it stacked up against other things they’d eaten, personal food bests, what they anticipated eating next. It filled the air almost like an actual conversation, or the “how are you, I am fine” rote that fills a page in a holiday letter from, say, one’s grandparents. Empty calories of talk. It was almost as bleak as hearing new parents blather on about their offspring. Listen:

  “I had them pork chops yesterday. This snapper is good. But them pork chops is better.”

  “I like the caraway seeds on ’em.”

  “Yeah, only pork chops I had was as good was on a set in Texas.”

  “They have barbeque sauce on ’em?”

  “Naw, they was just pork chops, but they was good.”

  “They have the seeds on ’em?”

  “Naw. But these are pretty good. Well, they’re not bad for pork chops.”

  “I like pork chops every once in a while.”

  “Yeah, you dunk ’em in applesauce, they’re not bad.”

  Just so you know, these were union men talking. And I was being an elitist snob, dissing classic American table conversation.

  Crew lunch was a brisk forty-five-minute window. Andrew Collier rarely ate at the catering tent, but when he did, he always sat down with the crew, as did Mason Stone. More often Collier sent his assistant out into the wilds of Manhattan, where there are arguably more good restaurants bunched together than any place in the world, for take-out. Every Friday, Mason Stone picked up the check for an à la carte surprise meal for the whole company. One week it was a fleet of trucks from White Castle; the next, a platoon of sushi chefs. This magnanimity endeared Stone to the crews, at least when he was not having one of his prima donna furniture-smashing episodes.

  If Stone could afford that extravagant mobile home, like a yacht on wheels, he could easily absorb the tab for all the crab roll and unagi ninety-five people could wolf down, but it was his willingness to make the gesture that provided a huge portion of his public persona. It was all written off as PR. He kept encouraging my tag along on his sortie to the darkly mysterious Salon, so I wondered at his true agenda.

  Meanwhile, I had other crew members to collar. Michelle Bonaventure, a hairstylist attached to the makeup key, had agreed to trim and color my hair. Char’s news about Joey and meeting Mister Kimber had discombobulated me enough to seek a deeper disguise as Julian Hightower, no doubt about it. On impulse I cited Cap Weatherwax as a model, and we compromised on a sort of brush cut. When we were done I completely did not look like me anymore. My mustache and goatee had been on my face for more than two decades, and I still missed them. Men looked more like men with facial hair, and less like the corporate Aryan wet dreams of fashion photography, at least to my dark-adapted eye.

  Then I had to work up the testosterone to broach my illegal gun to Cap. The smuggled Kimber was still in pieces. I had taken it apart but was unable to puzzle it back together. I brought it up on the heels of a barter arrangement with Cap to provide a detailed photo inventory of the contents of his arsenal truck, which he had mentioned he needed for insurance purposes—a lot of extra work for which we had to steal time minute by minute as Vengeance Is rolled into its second week.

  Every weapon in the truck needed several shots. Left profile, right profile, and a dynamic three-quarter orthographic view, usually in Cap’s hand for scale. Cylinder out; action open. I opened a new project file called Guns and began to fill it. Many of the weapons were flashy in accord with the need of movies to show new and interesting things first, and in the gun subcategory there was a not-so-subtle race to be the first movie to feature name-checked weaponry.

  To elaborate, Cap held up a subnosed pistol. “Nickel-plated .32 caliber Colt Police Positive—Charlie Bronson in the first Death Wish.” Then I photographed a gigantic hand-cannon revolver. “Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum with an eight-and-a-half-inch barrel—Clint, in the first Dirty Harry. Beretta nine, model 92F with a fifteen-round mag, a fucking classic—Mel Gibson in the first Lethal Weapon. It’s supposed to be the premier appearance of the Beretta in an American movie, but John Carpenter got there before Dick Donner. And John Woo got there a year before either of them.

  “Point is, movie guns become iconographic. People see ’em in movies and want to buy them, and sales for that model surge, and when that happens, sometimes the gun companies comp your whole stock, just so you’ll use their brand name.”

  “Just like Coke and Chrysler,” I said.

  “They give you freebies, too,” Cap said. “Check this out; it’s insane.”

  He hoisted up a scary configuration that looked like Dali’s idea of a flowing, Surrealist table leg with a trigger grip only a Martian could grasp properly. “Fabrique Nationale Project 90,” he said. “From Belgium; the U.S. Government version. Bullpup design makes it shorter. It’s ambidextrous. Special fifty-round mag sits flat on top of the gun instead of poking downward like you’re probably used to seeing. Spent shells drop out the bottom so they don’t bounce off your face. Shoots a NATO round slightly better than nine mil. I thought this looked pretty distinctive, wanted to use it for the bikers from hell in this movie, but some other guy working some other movie already beat me to it.”

  Slowly, I was catching on. “What was that gun Pacino had in Heat?” I said.

  “Which one? His duty gun or the rifle?”

  “I remember the rifle.” Nearby everybody did.

  He put the Dali gun down so I could shoot profiles of it. “Same make as this—FNC-80 with a shortened barrel and somebody added a birdcage flash hider, like an M-16. Not that it hid anything. Directors like muzzle flashes, especially the starburst kind. They put ’em in digitally if the camera doesn’t read ’em. Persistence of vision, y’know.”

  Hence the full-powder blanks, during Mason Stone’s miscredited Night of Thunder. At twenty-four frames per second, conventional film could miss the flash, which sometimes came “between the frames,” so to speak. Persistence of vision is what allowed you to perceive twenty-four still pictures as one second of movement.

  “Did those Bank of America robbers use the same guns when they hit that place in North Hollywood?” I said. “You know, the robbery Heat looks like a training film for?”

  “No way,” said Cap. “Those guys had AKs, a Bushmaster, and an illegally converted Heckler-Koch. Their ordnance and footwork were good but their marksmanship sucked. They cheesed away over a thousand rounds but ignored the rules of shoot-move-and-cover—actually, they should have paid more attention to the movie. The guy who blew his own brains out used a Beretta nine. What a miracle, he actually hit something.”

  If Cap was ever to be warmed up, now was the t
ime. I slowly brought the components of the disassembled Kimber out of my work pack and lined them up on the display table. “Can you tell me about this gun?” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes at it first, me next.

  Then, just to show off, Cap assembled the Kimber in about ten seconds. He snapped the action dry—no clip—and then knowingly said, “This thing isn’t papered, is it?”

  Guilt made me look everywhere but at the workbench in the truck. “Papered?”

  He pointed to the stamped Kimber legend on the slide. “Should be a serial number right there,” he said. “But there isn’t one scratched off or etched by acid. It was never there to begin with or this was refinished by an expert. See this? Skeletonized hammer. Match trigger. Those are the sort of mods you get from a custom shop. Now see this? There used to be what’s called a grip safety there, but it isn’t there anymore. This thing has been through several rounds of customization, and not all by the same shop.” He weighed the pistol in his hand. “The loaded balance bears me out. This is a professional’s gun, and I don’t mean a professional target shooter. Hence, unpapered. It doesn’t exist. I should be calling the cops about now, because this is live ammo and we’re connected to a film shoot. Liability.”

  “Somehow I get the feeling you’re not going to call the cops,” I said hopefully.

  “Several reasons.” Cap rubbed his face and raked his hand over his scalp. “First, we’re near the set, not on it. Second, we’re in the truck, not outside. Third, nobody can see us doing this. I have the right to have live rounds in my own personal sidearm.” He patted the Para-Ordnance .45 strapped to his hip. “I can take this on a commercial flight if I want, but I don’t. Concealed carry and a smaller gun works better for travel.”

  I saw a quick flash of the fate of hijackers on any airplane where Cap happened to be among the passengers. “You’re skipping over something,” I said.

  “Should be obvious,” Cap returned. “I’d like to buy this from you if you’re willing to sell it.”

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “Strictly outside Vengeance Is. I’d like you to show me how to shoot it. How to strip it, load it, use it with a purpose. I’d like to be able to hit a target. I’ve never fired a gun in my life. I’m not planning on boosting liquor stores or becoming a gunslinger. Totally for my own protection.”

  “Yeah, I kinda got the feeling that you might be in some kinda trouble.”

  “There’s a man looking for me I think wants to kill me.”

  “That why you dyed your hair?”

  “Partially, yes.”

  “Color looks weird,” said Cap. “Too yellow.” He offered me a diet beer from a little fridge beneath what I took to be a gun-cleaning station in the truck. “This is swill, this lite-beer crap, but I’ve got to skin off a few pounds.”

  I took the chilly can gratefully. He destroyed half of his in one gulp.

  “Okay,” he said. “First thing we’ve gotta do is get you out in the boonies where we test-fire all the practical guns. My schedule is limited for that sort of thing so you’re gonna have to adapt. You might have to jump when I say so, agreed?”

  “Done,” I said, having no idea whether I could make the time fit.

  “Foremost thing is you do every single thing I tell you, when I tell you. Questions are okay but in matters of handling I am God. Good by you?”

  I nodded, remembering what Char had said: Disapproval is not allowed. I was pleased Cap had cut me the same slack.

  “Next is: you leave that thing in the truck,” he said. “Don’t carry it around, don’t flash it, don’t talk about it.”

  “It doesn’t technically exist,” I said, resisting the urge to pick it up one more time. That would be bad. Amateurish.

  “See, I told you and you did it. Good sign. All right, you’ve got a conditional deal, Mr. Hightower.” He winked. “If that really is your name.”

  * * *

  Somewhere out there was a world where people had families and families were enough, because that was what people “did.” I was beginning to prefer film jail to the civilian realm of the ordinary.

  Now Char would haunt me for the rest of my life. She had used her body like a rental car to ascend the career ladder, and now someone else had used it as a canvas, plagiarizing me. It was all over the shit-sheets, luridly printed, suggestive in its blotchy splash spreads and bargain-basement pulp paper repro: CRUCIFIXION HORROR IN GARMENT DISTRICT.

  Gun Guy had followed me to New York City. He collected Char on the same day I had spoken to her, and used Targets #5 as the framing scheme for her death, substituting stab wounds for bullet holes. Traces of commercial lubricant were found, which meant that sometime during the horrific ordeal he penetrated her the other way, using a latex condom to preserve his anonymity. My throat closed up. I hoped Char had not been alive for that violation. Hope was a joke and Char was dead.

  I had known her; made love to her. Loved her, in fact, for whatever that cheap sentiment was worth now. Char would have hated her death to evoke a work of mine she so disliked. Now they would be linked forever. It was a matter of heartbeats before some snoopy dirt-hound found reference on Targets #5 and made the match … then Elias McCabe would have one more offense to answer for.

  Julian Hightower did not know Charlene Glades.

  If I had kept the Kimber with me, reassembled, locked and loaded, I might have stuck it in my own mouth at that moment. But even that sentiment, far cheaper than my delusion of romance with Char, was soiled and untenable because Gun Guy had done that to me, too. Humiliating, all around.

  I sat in my little office, not knowing what to do. My tubes were all plugged with remorse.

  Arly Zahoryin rattled in, sloughing off his orthopedic-looking camera rig. “Tripp just banned all personal cameras from the set,” he said, making a victory fist. “Yeah, baby!”

  “What?” Arly’s face was a white blur to me.

  “Too many leaks,” Arly said, jaunty. “A shot of Garrett Torres in makeup showed up on a coming-soon site and Collier had a shit meltdown.”

  “How’re you going to stop people from taking pictures with their phones?” I asked.

  “You can’t. So, you do it and get caught, your ass is totally fired. The memo will be in everyone’s boxes tomorrow morning.”

  In the main production office, heartbeat central for all things related to Vengeance Is, was a honeycomb of cubbyholes for such directives; I even had a slot bearing my new name and job designation. Half of them (not mine) were stuffed daily with rainbow-colored script revision pages. That seemed strange because there was no actual writer on the set I could perceive, which meant the sheets were being modified as shooting progressed, most likely by Collier, or in committee with the line producer and Gordo the AD. Locations changed, sets were reconfigured, dialogue was altered, whole scenes were dropped, and already shot scenes (or changed text) were denoted by a vertical row of asterisks. Scene 42 became Sc. 42-A-B-B(i)-C. The revisions followed a rigid color code—blue, pink, yellow, green, goldenrod, buff, salmon, cherry, tan, gray, all the way back to white, and started all over again. By the end of production the script resembled an unwieldy catalogue twice its original length, holes punched in the wrong places, some pages jutting out past the trim line (like a mad composer’s fever-dream sonata scribbled while on a laudanum binge), as varicolored as a peacock. When the script was at last in its most complete and final form … nobody needed it, because the project was done.

  And nobody in the outside world gave a damn, either.

  Arly unhinged the tiny monitor screen on his camera and treated me to some playback of his stalking activities. It was less than reassuring.

  The frame was afflicted with the shaky-cam jitters, and underlit in a sodium-yellow monochrome, heavily artifacted, but starring center screen was Andrew Collier in his pastel shirt, wearing a bandana, with goggles perched on his gimme cap, smashing a Bluetooth on the floor near Video Village and then stomping on it like Scrooge McDuck,
screaming about gag orders, nondisclosure, his vision, and who the fuck are you anyway? He was beet-red and spluttering with rage. His voice cracked.

  “You fucking pillock! Who the fuck do you think you fucking are? Do you think we’re spending a half-million dollars a day so you can put pictures on some goddamned knocking-shop fucking Web site when I specifically, specifically said no shots of Garrett Torres under any fucking circumstances?! Who are you, anyway? What the fuck do you do? Gordo, take this arsehole out and fucking shoot him in the head!

  The nondescript crew member was swiftly escorted away while Collier continued to vent for a full thirty seconds more. It was not the director’s brightest moment, but it did become one of his most infamous.

  “Is that classic?” said Arly, pleased with his combat photography skills.

  “But you can’t use it, right?” I said.

  “I already used it.” He smirked. “I pixilated it to look like cell phone footage. Because earlier, I got a shot of the guy, I think he was a grip, shooting Torres in makeup while he was sweet-talking some camera girl. That’s what I showed to Gordo, right after I posted the Collier rant-and-rave anonymously. Gordo showed Tripp and Tripp came unglued. Now all cameras are banned from the set—except ours.”

  “And you’re a player because you exposed a spy,” I said. “Don’t you feel bad that you just lost that guy his job?”

  “To hell with him; he’s a donkey,” said Arly. “Those guys fart around all day and all they do is bitch about overtime and talk about getting shitfaced and going to the beach. They don’t care that they’re on a set. They’re always wandering into a background or making noise when they’re not supposed to, chatting and texting instead of doing their job. They lug lumber and should be fed gruel and chained up at night. They act like its this huge imposition to do anything. They don’t feel honored to be here.”

  Now I saw the lightbulb: what Arly really wanted to do was direct. His camera and mine would be the sole live lenses for behind-the-scenes … at least until Spooky Sellers showed up with an EPK crew, which didn’t actually count to Arly in the universe of cinema.