She had e-mailed the great Morrissy Chestnut asking for advice on the problem but the results were discouraging.
Dear Madam,
Had I known the commercial use for which you intended the animals, I would not have sold them to you. Rats are intelligent, sentient animals. Exploiting the irrational human hatred of a species is sadistic. Be a good soul and set them free.
Yours sincerely,
Morrissy Chestnut
P.S. The Baltimore Zoo has expressed interest in the bloodline. Perhaps you could send the litter on?
The e-mail sent Marian into a black funk for days. How dare he take such a tone with her? Hadn’t she fought diligently for rats’ rights for years? Wasn’t she the person who wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times just a month before, pointing out that rats were not, as is commonly assumed, responsible for spreading the bubonic plague—it was the fleas on rats that jumped from host to host. (The city council was debating rat-extermination techniques in the municipal sewer.) True, Would You Rather? was a television show and not a “pure” event like the yearly Manchester Rat Show, but it was certainly better than watching rats grow walnut-sized tumors on their head or endure toxic chemicals dripped into their eyes, or any number of other tortures she had been forced to witness at the UCLA lab. The fact that she had admired Morrissy Chestnut for years had made the blow all the more bitter. She could not help notice that there was no offer to refund the show’s money in exchange for a return of the rats. Not only had she spent a healthy chunk of cash buying the Chestnut rats, she was no closer to solving the original problem. For the time being, she decided to ignore the problem by using the old brown rats. Perhaps Gus Morbane would forget he had asked her to solve the problem? Or maybe nobody would land on Rats!
Harry found the director, Maury Shore, standing in the middle of the set, frowning at “Sam” (short for Samsara), the wheel the contestants spun to decide their task. Initially, they had used an LED display to flash the choices—Rats! Truth Time! Roaches! Random!—but in focus groups, people said they preferred the low-tech spinning of a wheel. Getting the resistance right was, however, surprisingly hard—too much made it too hard, too little made it spin too long.
“Slower,” Maury yelled into a mouthpiece attached to a headphone.
Harry could see it wasn’t a good time to talk to the director, but it was never a good time with Maury, a tall but stooped man with a pot belly that sat weirdly high on his chest, as if somebody had strapped it on from behind. He had come to Hollywood a young man determined to make the plotless existential road movies briefly popular in the 1970s. After a movie starring a mechanical shark broke every box office record on the books, those movies seemed to disappear overnight. While waiting for them to return, Maury had taken a job in television. By not giving a shit about the medium, he managed to thrive. On the rare occasion when his self-loathing got too bad, a few snorts of cocaine could quickly silence the demon roar.
“Do you have a second?” Harry asked.
“Not really, no,” Maury answered, turning his back so that Harry was facing the director’s long gray ponytail. It looked as lifeless as winter wheat. Harry felt the man’s snub like a blow to his gut. He knew he ought to let it go. Be a bigger man and all that crap, but if push came to shove, wasn’t Maury more expendable than he? Who could even name a famous television director? More important, Harry could beat the shit out of him in a fight. That ought to count for something when two men came into conflict.
“I asked you once not to shoot me from below,” Harry said. “It’s Photography 101.”
Maury turned slowly and looked up and down Harry’s body. “You think it makes you look fat?” His voice was silky, intimate, mockingly sympathetic.
Harry could feel the malevolent eyes of the crew on the back of his neck. He and Maury locked eyes. Harry was surprised by the surge of emotion in him. He imagined hitting Maury in the face, breaking his nose, watching the blood spurt as he begged for mercy. It wouldn’t be hard. Knowing that, Harry willed himself to calm down. He took a deep breath, like a hot-air balloon descending to earth.
“Yeah,” Harry let the air out of his lungs, “I do.”
Maury looked surprised. He’d made Harry look vain, like a woman, for caring about his weight, but once Harry agreed, there was no place left for him to go. He shrugged.
“They’re Anton’s angles,” Maury gestured toward a prematurely balding young cameraman with light blue eyes and the large, angled nose of a cartoon witch. Harry vaguely recognized Anton McDonald from the set. Now that he looked more closely, he could see that he was different from the other cameramen. Younger. And he dressed differently, in black Levi’s and black shoes with thick rubber soles. More like a Bohemian than a teamster. He was standing next to a camera, staring at the floor.
“You’ve been doing the handheld?” Harry asked.
Anton McDonald nodded. He had finished film school only six months earlier. His senior project—The Truth About Bathtubs—followed a police detective convinced the majority of the 891 yearly “accidental” drownings in bathtubs were actually homicides. Its deadpan irony and careful attention to the chiaroscuro of classic noir had won it every student award in the school. After graduating, every body assumed Anton would take the usual route of script reader for the studios while he lined up financing for his first feature. But he was a purist. If he read too many bad scripts, he feared he might unconsciously absorb their lessons, like a virus. He believed great movies were built visually, frame by frame, and the only way to understand the eye of the camera was to work in the trenches as a cameraman. Unfortunately, the only two photography jobs available on the postgraduate job bulletin board were for porn in the Valley or a game show at the network. Being squeamish about sex, he had taken the latter. The pay on Would You Rather? was good but the work was frustrating. Whenever Anton tried to find an interesting angle or an expression on an audience member’s face other than manic ecstasy, he’d hear Maury’s voice in his ear: “Cut the artistic crap, Antonioni.” The most he could get away with was shooting Harry unflatteringly from below, and that was only because Maury Shore disliked Harry Harlow.
“Don’t shoot me from below, okay?” Harry said.
“Okay, but—”
“But what?”
Anton swallowed. The words had simply leaped out of their own accord, imprisoned all these weeks by the lonely invisibility of his job. A part of him was enjoying the attention.
“If every thing is shot on the same level, it gets kind of boring to look at.”
“If it’s so boring to look at, why are we the number-one show in America right now?”
Anton blinked. It was a question he, too, had pondered. “I have no idea,” he answered. He’d been aiming for a jokey, insider tone but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he could see he had miscalculated.
Harry’s face turned bright red. It was one thing for the director to treat him like shit, but a cameraman?
“Do you like your job?” Harry asked.
Anton did a quick mental calculation of his assets—$1,803 dollars in the bank, rent of $425 due next week, student loan payment of $83, utilities, food, car insurance, groceries, movie tickets, food, laundry, only fifty pages of his script written. Yeah, he liked the job. “I guess,” he answered.
“You don’t sound too sure.”
In his mind, Anton was saying, “Yes! Yes! I love my job. Don’t fire me.” But somewhere between the saying and the thinking, the words had gotten tangled up, like a duck in an old fishing line. “Uh,” he said.
“You’re fired.” Harry turned and walked away.
Anton’s mouth dropped in surprise. If he were to write the scene in a movie, the violins would swell. His co-workers would stop what they were doing. Someone, probably a black man with large muscles and flaring nostrils, would start to applaud. The others, moved by Anton’s courage, would follow, until a chorus of applause would lift Anton up and carry him away on a wave of love and ador
ation. But life was not a movie. Anton looked around the room. People looked away. They didn’t think he was brave, they thought he was stupid. The show was hugely successful, what kind of an idiot antagonizes the talent like that? Only someone who didn’t need a job, and if he didn’t need a job, that made him different from them. And if he was different from them, he was better off. And if he was that much better off than they were, well, screw him.
“Don’t worry,” Maury said, “you haven’t worked until you’ve been fired.” Anton thought it was the other way around: You couldn’t be fired until you’d worked. But in the last five minutes Anton had learned a valuable life lesson—this time, he managed to keep his mouth shut.
Harry sat in front of the mirror in his dressing room, waiting for Jeannine, the makeup woman, to arrive. He felt like shit. He looked like shit. Question: If a man feels like shit and a man looks like shit, does that mean a man is shit? He leaned forward and smiled at his reflection in the mirror. “Hello,” he said, “my name is Shit. It’s very nice to meet you.” A network of lines appeared on his forehead and cheeks, all connected to one another like the map of a poorly planned city. Calcutta, maybe. He stopped smiling. The wrinkles went away. Salt Lake City. He smiled again. Calcutta. Shit. He really was getting old. Or maybe it was just the lighting? He’d complained about the cheap fluorescent tubes overhead a million times, but Jeannine always brushed him off. “If you look good in this light, you’ll look good anywhere.”
The thing is, he hated firing that kid. Growing up, he’d watched his mother get fired over and over by jerks who said she couldn’t type or came in too late or left too early or talked too much or drank too much. She was always too something. Now he was one of them. A firer. One who fires.
The door opened.
“Hiya,” Jeannine said. Harry half smiled, forming Tokyo, a busy city, but navigable. He leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and moaned her name. “Jeannnninnne.” She stood behind him and put her hands on his head. “Transferring energy,” she once told him. Jeannine had shiny eggplant-colored hair, pale skin, a nose a little upturned, and a mouth a little downturned, giving her beauty a melancholy uncertainty, as if it couldn’t decide whether she was happy or sad, pretty or plain. She claimed to be a lesbian but Harry suspected she made that up so that nobody—including him—would hit on her. Makeup girls were reputed to be the easiest lay on a set.
“What’s wrong?” Jeannine asked. Motherly.
Harry opened his eyes. He was eye level with her breasts.
“Have I ever told you how great your tits are?” Harry asked.
“Every day, perv,” Jeannine answered.
“I fired someone today,” Harry answered.
“Ew.” She frowned, taking a jar of caramel-colored foundation out of the fishing tackle box she used to carry makeup. “Bad karma.” She unscrewed the lid, dipped her fingers inside, and rubbed the cream vigorously between her palms. Warming it, she once explained to Harry, made it go on more smoothly. She applied daubs to his left cheek, his right cheek, his chin, and his forehead, then massaged his forehead with the palm of her hand, working the pigment into the skin. Harry closed his eyes, enjoying the familiar feel of her hands on his skin and the warm buttered-toast smell of her. Yoga-doing, wheatgrass-drinking, patchouli-wearing, cat-owning, psychic-seeking Jeannine might have lived in Berkeley or Greenwich Village a generation earlier, but these were apolitical times. Poverty had lost its allure. After a brief affair with an aromatherapist, Jeannine had drifted into the health and beauty industry, where the quest for perfect skin had gotten mixed up with the Keatsian quest for truth. “‘Truth is beauty, beauty is truth,’” she liked to tell her clients, forty minutes into a makeup session.
From a financial perspective, Jeannine’s timing could not have been better. She earned more than the governor of California, and could have made considerably more if she had taken up a major beauty company’s offer to start her own line. Hairdressers, makeup artists, personal trainers, yogis, masseurs, an entire industry based on the delivery of personal hygiene had, in the last decade, supplanted drug dealers and prostitutes in Hollywood as the receivers of celebrity intimacies. Outsiders had a hard time understanding, but nobody was lonelier than a star. Genuine cover-of-Newsweek stardom required ruthless jettisoning on the way up—family, friends, lovers, anyone who might hold you back or mess you up with their complicating needs. There could be only one person. One career. Yours. If you got successful enough, a life would be handed to you. Parties every night, openings, closings, events, happenings, free clothes, free food, free flights, and lots of people always around whose sole purpose was to keep you happy. The problem was, you had to pay those people. The publicist, the manager, the agent—it was just a job for them. At the end of the day, they went home to their lives of carpools, rosemary bushes by the back door, and pool-maintenance problems only to make fun of you on Saturday night, when their real friends came over and asked, “What is she really like?”
Jeannine was different. One, she had no life to compete with the client. No child, no husband, no house, no pool. Two, Jeannine had perfected an attitude of complete and total acceptance. In her mind, she was a heliotrope gently arcing toward the sun of fame, absorbing every thing that was good and bad. The toxins and the nectar; the nettles and the petals; the vicious, petty complaints; the paranoia, followed by the paroxysms of hysterical affection. She understood. Any idiot could make under-eye bags disappear, but how many people could make a client feel loved? It made her the most sought-after makeup artist in Hollywood. Her best customers would write her salary into the production budget of their latest project, ensuring that she flew first-class, stayed in the hotel room next door, and got a per diem as high as the star’s. Other makeup artists were so envious, rumors swirled about how far she would go to please her clients. In truth, Jeannine did not really care about the money. What she liked was being needed. She doted on the stars and their fleeting beauty. In her mind, vanity was good. It was the desire to stay one’s best, to live up to the gift God had given. Not the God of the Old or New Testament, of course, but the universal God—Allah, Yahweh, and Buddha all wrapped up into one. If it hadn’t been for the constant travel, she’d still be doing it, but even the best hotel rooms—especially the best ones, with the inevitable Regency reproduction armchairs covered in silk damask, the botanical print on the wall, the television and minibar hidden in a mahogany armoire—began to depress her. She might not have children, but she had cats, and she missed them. The cellophane-wrapped trays of room-service food made her want to weep. The unfamiliarity of the views from her window weighed on her. Sometimes she forgot what city she was in. Eventually, her good cheer dried up. The celebrities began to seem like overgrown children clawing at her for attention, like kittens fighting for the mother’s teat, always sucking, sucking, sucking. She felt dried out and used up. Like an old lemon. She began to get as whiney and mopey as her clients. “You’ve changed,” the stars began to note with disappointment. She tried acupuncture and aromatherapy, even a chiropractor. Nothing worked. So when a regular gig on Would You Rather? arose, she signed on. Her cats had never been happier.
“He disrespected the show,” Harry tried to explain why he had fired Anton. “I had to let him go.”
It seemed important that Jeannine understand.
She sharpened an eyebrow pencil and began filling in Harry’s eyebrows to make them darker. More authoritative.
“But you always say, ‘The show is shit,’” Jeannine said.
“I know the show is shit. You know the show is shit. But we can’t go around saying that, can we?”
Jeannine didn’t say anything. Harry sighed.
“He made me look fat.”
Jeannine frowned, suddenly engaged. This was something she could understand. “Have you been doing those exercises?” she asked.
Harry leaned his head back. “A, E, I, O, U.”
“And don’t forget Y.” Jeannine took his chin and gently raised
it to blend the makeup into his neck.
In the control room, Maury Shore watched the set without saying a word. Who the hell was Harry Harlow to fire one of his cameramen? The kid had talent, any fool could see that. All around him, the crew talked in low, subdued voices, avoiding contact with him. They were familiar with his moods, and this was a bad one. Maury had already had four cups of coffee, trying to erase the metallic taste of anger left from the encounter, but nothing was working. He knew the most efficient way to get rid of the feeling was a line of coke. He also knew what his doctor, his ex-wife, and his sponsor at Narcotics Anonymous would have to say about that. Still, it took all his energy to keep his mind from falling into the canyon of memory carved by the craving. He could so easily imagine the straw angled up his nose, the quick, sharp inhalation through one nostril. The immediate chemical taste at the back of his mouth and then the sweet, pleasant flood of relief. It was like a film loop playing over and over in his head, torturing him, needling him. There was something wrong with a universe where bad things felt so good.
As the audience filed into the studio, Anton prowled the floor with his handheld camera, trying to appear normal. Ever since Harry fired him, he’d felt a strange weight on his chest, as if someone were exerting pressure on a vital organ. What was it about him that attracted trouble? He was a mild man. Small. Delicate, even. A bit of a wimp, actually. Not at all the type to start a fight. Violence disgusted him. But all his life, it seemed as if other men took one look at him and developed an instant need to crush him. He thought bitterly of his childhood terrors—the time they stripped him of his pants outside middle school, forcing him to walk home in his underwear. The time they tied a firecracker to his dog’s tail. But then, just as the Mobius strip of self-flagellation was gaining more and more speed, Anton derailed it. Fuck it. What did he care? He was an outsider and that was how it should be. Outsiders see things. They are the artists because they aren’t afraid of the truth. They don’t care about being liked or respected. Not like that cokehead director or the paranoid host. Let them drown in their own sea of mediocrity. If the price of seeing was not belonging, so be it. Anton would pay that price. The more they kicked him, the better it was for his art.
And Sometimes Why Page 4
