by John Fusco
She had called him back within ten minutes, said she loved it. This was no run-around, tits-bouncing zombie crap; it was a real scene, she said, a chance to really act, and great material for her reel. But something more was happening out here near Point Dume, late at night, just her, Troy, Louie, and a silent, focused T-Rich, who was lighting and shooting the scene with the 435.
“I want you to try it again,” Troy said, sitting at the back wall near the halogen lamps. “This time, I want you to think about your own father.”
“You think I haven’t been?” she said.
“No, I know you have. Just own it more. Real stuff.”
“Real stuff . . .”
“When you say, ‘How do I even know you’re who you say you are?,’ I want you to see Avi and his BMW, his breakfasts at the Polo Lounge, the big house in the Hills. Is he who everyone thinks he is? Are all his houses really paid for?”
T-Rich eased his eye back from the camera and tried not to be too obvious in looking at Troy. Louie just sat there, firm in his role of Cho the outcast.
“Has your father,” said Troy, “created a web of lies that’s endangered people you might care about, even if you really don’t know you care about them?”
“What the fuck are you even saying?”
“One simple thing: Has he lied to his daughter about who he really is? And are you in deep, fucked-up denial?”
Zoe just stared at him as he went back to his director’s seat behind the camera. “That’s all I’m saying.”
They shot the scene again, and this time she began to improvise, going off-script and, at one point, breaking into cold laughter that was unexpected—and perfect. When Troy called cut, he went to her, kneeled beside her, and gently gripped her arm.
When she looked up, tears dirty on a cheek, she saw that Louie Mo had welled up himself. Just from her reading. In fact, he had to leave his seat on an old lobster trap and go outside.
“I know what my deal is,” Zoe said, her eyes pooled. “But what’s up with him?”
Troy watched through a small window as Louie limped, hunched, toward the moonlit surf. “Might have something to do with why he wanted me to change the son character to a daughter. Only note he gave.”
For a moment Zoe almost felt something for the broken-down stuntman she hardly knew. While she’d been drawing on her relationship with her real father, maybe the guy, Louie, had been playing to a child he hadn’t seen since leaving China or Japan or wherever he was from.
More than that, she felt something for Troy, who brought raw emotion out of them both. Maybe he was a director to watch, like so many had said when he came out of film school. Maybe he was wasting his talent on her father’s high-concept pics.
As for Troy, he felt he had learned something about Avi that had been haunting his sleep ever since the night Zoe came to his bedroom; she had said her father felt Troy could make a low-budget film look like twenty mill. That had stayed with him. It had landed as a compliment but took root as something foreboding.
“How’d we do, T-Rich?” Troy said, standing up and stretching.
“Beautiful shot, man. The light, the wild track, everything.”
“Nice work.”
Louie Mo was back, his eyes clear now. He stood in the doorway of the little bait shop and said, “Martini shot?”
“Martini,” Troy said. Then he looked at Zoe. “You have another one in you?”
She straightened her back, flipped her hair off a shoulder. “How about you, Louie?”
Louie looked at her and knew what she meant, knew she had picked up on some buried feelings. He nodded and took his seat on the old lobster trap.
“Rolling,” Troy said. “And sound . . .”
• • •
Later that night, Troy and Zoe sat on the bar patio at Moonshadows, cooling down after the shoot. They were drinking Hendricks martinis and talking about her scene, which takes they thought were keepers.
Troy had never had a martini before, but after his third beer, Zoe had dared him. “If you’re going to be a player,” she said, “you need to upgrade from keg party fare.” Hemingway drank gin, she footnoted.
“How do you know about Hemingway?” Troy said.
The insult was so blatant that Zoe smiled, incredulous. “Actually, he drank Gordon’s. But if he were alive today? He’d be a Hendricks man.”
“And where’d you get that from, Midnight in Paris?”
“UC Santa Barbara. Before I dropped out.” She took a sip and said, “Didn’t want college to fuck up my education.”
“So, this is what?” Troy said, feeling his head begin to birl. “Just gin and vermouth?”
“Vermouth?” Zoe said. “Hemingway would never commit that sin on a perfectly good martini.”
Troy flagged down the waiter and ordered two more.
“Easy there, big guy,” she warned.
When the fresh drinks arrived, Troy raised his, made a toast to the night’s work. Zoe clinked her glass off his.
“So . . . is this my only scene?” she said. “The bait shack?”
“Yeah, but it’s the money scene. I mean on an emotional level.”
“You really pulled some stuff out of me, I guess.”
Troy sipped, content in the moment. He ditched the cucumber from his drink, breathed in the surf air. “Louie Mo had it going on too, didn’t he? I mean, as much as a stunt guy can.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You wrote the shit, Troy. Where’d it come from?”
“Where’d it come from?”
Zoe studied his eyes in the candlelight, could see he was feeling the eighty-eight proof. “Little NYU rich boy, what do you know about broken souls and abandonment and all that shit?”
“You want to know the truth?”
Zoe bit delicately into the gin-soaked cucumber, waiting on his answer.
“I got it from a movie called The Gunfighter. Gregory Peck, directed by Henry King. You ever see it? It was part of this Western noir thing going on in the early fifties. Kind of weird. But kind of cool.”
“So your life’s just a mash-up?”
“What kind of rude question is that?”
“I don’t think you borrowed that emotion from a Gregory Peck movie.” She leaned closer, took his cucumber, and dipped it in her drink. “My father does have you wrong, doesn’t he?”
“About the shit I do best, you mean?”
“No, about you being some rich film-school brat. He thinks that if you fail, your mommy will bail you out. Pay him back his investment.”
Troy shrugged but lowered his eyes. Zoe caught it. “You know who else was in that movie?” Troy said. “Karl Malden. I always find it unsettling when fucking Karl Malden shows up in one of these—”
“Troy, you don’t have any safety net, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“What about your mother in Connecticut?”
Troy took another sip of the extra-dry gin; his third Hendricks was now close to spent.
“Why is it,” he said, “that whenever people hear Connecticut they always assume you’re from Greenwich or Darien, or someplace. I mean, does everyone from Tennessee play the fucking banjo?” Troy drained the martini then looked over his shoulder toward the men’s room line. He excused himself, a bit unsteady on his sneakers.
• • •
Zoe found him down on the beach, relieving himself behind a cement pylon and singing something that sounded like Coldplay. Normally, he’d get a shy kidney, but for some reason he felt comfortable with her standing there. Mostly because the gin had taken the edge off.
“Compact and portable,” Zoe said. “Hate you guys.”
Troy tried to get past her, told her he needed to go pay the bill.
“I took care of
it,” she said.
“I do have a mother in Connecticut,” he said, hardly realizing that they were walking north toward the lights at the Point. Zoe was feeling the drinks, but Troy was downright wobbly. “She’s the youngest daughter of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia.”
“Get out.”
“That’s what she thinks anyway. She’s been in an institution since I was eleven.”
“For real.”
“When she first started seeing Freemason code in postage stamps, my father freaked out. He ran away from her when I was six. I went to live with my uncle Ronnie. That would be Bridgeport, not Westport.”
It was in an apartment above Harbor Video, he confided, where he spent most of his childhood and teens, surrounded by movies, watching compulsively. Other than school, he rarely left “the vault,” as Uncle Ronnie called it. Yet, he felt like he was traveling constantly, entering movie worlds where characters became like family. He spent his childhood backtracking those films to their sources. Started with Spielberg and Lucas and worked his way back to Howard Hawks and John Sturges, to the spaghetti Westerns of Leone, films inspired by the masterworks of Kurosawa. He told Zoe about the excitement he’d felt when he discovered—just by studying Kurosawa’s use of telephoto lenses, depth of field, and mise-en-scène—that the Japanese director had, in fact, been influenced by John Ford Westerns. He’d sit there for hours, inserting and ejecting and cross referencing. He devoured flicks by Italian B-movie directors with the same insatiable appetite with which he downloaded, in his mind, every shot from every Shaw Brothers movie to come out of Hong Kong in the ’60s and ’70s. Over time, Uncle Ronnie even stopped using the computer to catalog and check DVDs; he’d just ask Troy.
When he was seventeen, watching movies was no longer enough; he hungered to make his own. He used his entire four-thousand-dollar savings to make an HD short on the sordid docks of Bridgeport; it got him into NYU. So did the completed screenplay that would become the template for his bachelor’s thesis—the heist film called Game Clock. The Austin Fest brought him to the attention of Avi Ghazaryan, and now here he was, walking on Las Flores Beach with the producer’s daughter, baring his drunken soul. He didn’t realize, until he was done, that he was holding her hand. She was carrying her heels in her other, which made him suddenly aware that his sneakers were soaked and he didn’t care.
“Hey,” Zoe said, “you’re not that short after all.”
“Not with your eight-inch heels off,” Troy said. She laughed as they strolled on, Troy seeming to sink into another thought.
“The guy with the dolphins,” he said. “When he went up to Alaska, do you think he knew? You think he knew he was feeding himself to the bears?”
“Let’s get you home,” she said. “You’ve got to finish your movie.”
“Which one?”
“Your movie, Troy.”
Troy dug for his keys. Zoe told him they were going to walk to Dog House and he could jog back for his car in the morning. He turned a defensive look on her, clutched his keys in his fist. “I am perfectly capable of driving into a cement mixer,” he proclaimed. Then he surrendered his keys.
At the house, she saw him inside, but they both hesitated when they found someone asleep on the couch. It was Dutch the stunt driver, out cold. She had Louie’s white denim jacket tucked at her chin like a blanket. Troy and Zoe stared at her like she was a stray cat for a second then moved to the bedroom, where Zoe helped him out of his salty-wet sneakers and socks.
“I love you,” he said, with all the conviction of a frat house drunk. Zoe laughed, tucked him in, and left.
18
WAGES OF FEAR
That Sunday they drove—Dutch, Louie, and Troy—way the hell out to Irvine to see an effects guy Dutch knew from the fringe. After meeting him at a warehouse—and Troy writing a fat check from the Dog House Productions account—they were driving back toward Malibu with a trunkful of explosives. Louie didn’t say a word as Dutch maintained a careful, steady forty miles per hour in the slow lane.
“This is totally Le Salaire de la peur,” Troy said from the backseat, as if afraid his volume might trigger the explosives.
“You speaking French back there?” Dutch said. “You’re making me horny.”
“Wages of Fear,” Troy translated. “French thriller from 1953. Ever see it?”
Neither Dutch nor Louie responded.
“Classic. These dudes have to transport nitroglycerine through a mountain pass in South America. You feel like they’re going to blow sky high at any second.”
“How you know all these movie?” Louie said, watching the freeway ahead.
Dutch weighed in, stern: “There’s a hundred and ten pounds of demolition charges in the trunk. We get rear-ended, even a little fender bender, we blow up the 405.”
“Don’t worry,” Louie said.
Something about Louie Mo taking charge put Troy at ease. He asked him then if it was true that he had doubled Jackie Chan a few times but never got credit for it. There was a rumor, Troy said, that it was really Louie Mo who slid down a pole through shattering glass in Police Story.
“Boys together,” Louie said.
“What do you mean, ‘boys together’?”
“Peking Opera School.”
“Opera school?” Dutch chortled. “You never told me you were a singer.”
“No,” Troy volunteered. “He’s talking about Chinese opera. Acrobatics and weaponry and shit.”
“That’s right,” Louie said. “In same school, orphan boys: Jackie, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Corey Yuen, Yuen Wah, Yuen Tak, Little Tai.”
“The Seven Little Fortunes,” Troy said.
“How you know so much?”
“They all left the school to become stuntmen,” Troy said. “Jackie and Sammo became action stars. The others just did stunts, right? The Seven Little Fortunes.”
“Eight,” Louie said, almost as if lost in a memory. “Eight boys.”
“Wait a minute,” Troy said. “You saying that the Seven Little Fortunes were actually eight?”
Louie confirmed with a crafty silence.
“Dude.” Troy sat up. “You’re like the fifth Beatle. That is so cool.”
“Youngest, me. Always I jump from the highest places, make everyone laugh. I did a lot of stunt for the famous ones. Sometimes no credit. Not good to make star lose face, you see.”
“What the fuck are you guys talking about?” Dutch said.
“That’s why this is so freaking cool, Louie,” Troy said. “The Eighth Little Fortune gets his due.”
“I know.”
Dutch laughed quietly and mimicked the lack of modesty. “I know.”
Louie looked at her, offended, but her eyes had darted to the rearview, so he swung a look at the road behind, his eyes narrowing. Troy caught the look, turned full, and saw the black van following.
“Go fast,” Louie said.
Troy slunk down. “She can’t, man. We’ll blow.”
Dutch lowered her window, signaled for the van to pass. Instead, it hugged her bumper. “Do you know who this is?” Dutch said.
Louie shook his head, but his body said differently. Troy saw it; Dutch saw it too. “All right,” she said, steeling herself. She kicked her right sandal off, adjusted her seat. “You want to play chicken, bud?”
She monkey-toed the gas pedal and rocketed forward, coming up fast on a phone company truck. The van stayed with her, its windshield opaque. A foot from the truck bumper, Dutch cut the wheel and swung into a fast lane. Horns blasted and brakes pealed, but Dutch began jumping lanes, picking up speed.
Troy slid lower in the backseat, not breathing. He could see the black van hovering, tailing like a road-rager. Dutch hit ninety, jumped to the outside lane, and gunned it. When brake lights lit up before her, she swerved back to a middle lane, narrowly breaching a ga
p in the skidding traffic.
“Jesus,” Troy yelled. “You’re going to blow us the fuck up.”
“Speak French, why don’t you?” she said, roaring toward the slow lane and a confounding exit, half-blocked by construction signs and dead road machines. The van made the adjustment, stayed with her.
“Who are these guys?” she said.
Troy winced; bad timing for a movie quote, even if her father did double either Redford or Newman on Butch and Sundance. But then he realized she was serious, and rightfully so; she couldn’t shake them, so she grabbed her E-brake and yanked. The Chevy skid sideways toward the exit; Troy almost puked. Flying at them now: a construction sign and white dust. The van kept going but was forced to stay with the southbound traffic, blaring a fitful horn.
The exit ramp came up like a cement floor hitting a drunk in the chin, then it doglegged back around. Troy closed his eyes; he could hear rubber shrieking and Louie making short, emphatic breaths in Cantonese, fully aware of the explosives in the caboose. Then they came to a stop.
“Asshole,” Dutch said, her eyes on the rearview mirror. She was sweating. Unusual for Dutch.
“Who was it?” Troy said. “Somebody you know?”
“In Los Angeles,” Louie said, “so many dangerous people. They are hijacking all the time, right on the highway.”
“Carjacking, you mean,” Troy said, still trying to breathe. He could see Dutch’s attractive eyes in the rearview mirror and noted that they’d gone from hazel to a shade of green. Glassy green.
“Okay,” she said. “That was a hard nine.”
“What you mean?”
“On a scale of one to ten. Cortisol speedball.”
Troy didn’t respond. He was feeling a strange lilt in his gut, not unlike what he used to feel at NYU when he’d cross Washington Square Park and have a close encounter with a mentally ill bag lady. Something was off here, something that fucked with the rules of normalcy. Dutch had told him, that night over sushi, that Louie had fallen on his head from great heights one time too many, had a few screws loose. Now he was wondering just how many, just how loose. And her, those eyes as glassy and tranquil as a heroin addict after a fix—that was weird shit.
