Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Though her pubis was Naired clean of any trace of hair, her labia were pierced and protected by a tiny gold padlock. It caught a beam of sunlight and my eye. She smiled when she saw me discover the tiny gold key on the spiderweb-fine gold chain around her neck. She lifted her sheaf of hair to grant me access, her buoyant breasts reaching high, and I lifted the award necklace over her head. I took the little key to Nirvana in my teeth and leaned deep down into Candyland, unlocked the Gates of Hell, and climbed her Stairway to Heaven. There I go mixing metaphors again.

  We explored orifices I never knew existed in the human body with such energy and invention that I was rubbed raw and swollen for weeks.

  The movie was a piece of shit - how could it be otherwise on an eighteen-day cookie-cutter schedule? - but it was a union piece of shit, and I got paid and laid and rolled some film. It got a seven rating, which for any other place is Tank City but for UPN is phenomenal, and put me on their A-list. Of course, die A-list at UPN is like the X, Y, or Z at a real network, but Guild minimum is Guild minimum.

  Lady Hollywood was spreading her legs again.

  But hadn’t I learned? How could I not see the hollowness of this existence, the artistic and moral and downright cynical bankruptcy of my life? Because I was getting lots of money and pin-up pussy, that’s how. The Princess got respectable reviews for the first time in her life, and insisted that I direct any movies-of-the-week that she starred in.

  So now I had sort-of-famous cathode candy on my arm at screenings, offers from the networks to direct really shitty TV movies in Canada with even shittier TV actors, and a glimmer of access to the Lady I truly hoped to make mine again. But nobody in the big leagues of features notices what you’re doing in the world of television. I know that when I had my brief stab at the Big Time, I didn’t.

  I mean, who can watch that shit? Seventeen minutes out of every hour is spent yelling at you to buy some piece of crap you don’t want, don’t need, and would make you sick if you put it in your mouth. It’s the same old stories, the same old rhythms, the same old laugh track, the same old caricatures, the same old shit. But the big cathode eye sits in every room in the house, daring you not to watch it. The programming is just the agar that supports the bloom of mouldy commercials, sticking you in the eye with a hypodermic filled with buy-me poison, drilling products into your pod-person brain so that you cannot resist the urge to purchase them when they present themselves so noisily at your friendly neighbourhood supermarket.

  Following the path of least resistance, I said yes to television, the only club that would have me as a member. I made another MOW with Princess Charming, this one the totally true - no kidding! - story of a feckless young lady lawyer who discovers a ring of body-part harvesters, selling livers and kidneys and eyeballs to high-rolling, incomplete buyers over the Internet. This one we shot in New Zealand, somehow substituting Wellington for Baltimore, and the Princess for an educated, intelligent, progressive lady lawyer. Well, the Princess, for all her charms, is sweet and beautiful and really good company, but her SATs would surely have stood in the way of a legal career.

  We mated madly in her trailer (though I’d worked my way up to a contractual full single trailer of my own, hers was more divinely sized and appointed), and the unlocking and entering was performed with increasing frequency. We tried to keep it to lunch breaks and after wrap, but it was hard to keep it under wraps when the trailer rocked noisily to our samba. It was a set visit from Entertainment Tonight that spilled the beans of our relationship to the national television-viewing audience. Not that it hurt to be publicly outed as the poster-girl-for-nipple-rings’ studly boy toy, but it pissed off her muscular tennis pro/ underwear model husband. It could have got ugly, had the Smoking Gun online tabloid not discovered Mr Thirty Love’s proclivities for hired shemale encounters in the bungalow where John Belushi died at the Chateau Marmont.

  Jesus, is there no morality in Hollywood?

  I continued to be buffeted about by the broken winds of Lady Hollywood, passive and mindless as I fielded offers of one lame MOW after another. I took whatever was offered, knowing at least that I was directing, that I was making movies, that I had not sunk to the depths of series television. Hiatus was over and the Princess was back at her own series, Reno-divorced from Mr Fruit-of-the-Loom, begging me to shoot episodes, but was very understanding when I told her that I could be intractably reversing the course of my career if I did. I kept after Metzler to get me feature meetings at the studio, but he was finally earning some kind of an income off of my television work and was not so motivated. He was, however, able to get me a meeting on a new Jacqueline Smith pilot.

  To this I said no.

  I was working, earning a living, punching a clock, fucking a desirable TV debutante, and leaving my brain empty and sodden. If I allowed any personal reflection, I’d have been so filled with self-loathing that I’d have jumped off the Hollywood sign. So instead, I shaved my already thinning scalp, grew a soul patch and a paunch and dove headfirst into a personal study of alcoholism. It took me a six-pack to even sit through our cast-and-crew screening of Speaking Parts at the TV Academy in North Hollywood. Oh, it was all very chichi, with the finest catering - braised organ meats and the most cunning little cookies shaped like body parts - and an open bar. Everyone was very taken with the Importance of the Film, congratulating one another on its Theme and Performances, high on its Emmy shots, when in truth this masterwork of disposable cinema would be forgotten the day after it aired. They all are. They are the cornstarch binder that holds the advertising cocaine. We try to make movies, but they are just delivery systems for the bleating of commercials.

  When I looked at the sea of agents and actors and journalists and hangers-on milling about, freeloading on ritzy-titzy comestibles in the regal lobby, broadcasting too-loud conversations on their eensy cell phones, and I saw how many of them had gleaming shaved skulls, soul patches and a paunch, I realised in a stomach-dropping moment of truth …

  I had become One of Them!

  I was an interchangeable film-rolling robot, dipped in screenings at the Academy and catered desserts, draped in Hugo Boss and Julius the Monkey, nightclub-hopping at all the right places, memorising the LA-to-Toronto flight schedules on Air Canada, talking about Nielsen shares and ad rates, turning my nose up at series and basic cable movies while wallowing in the lowest headline graveyard true-story pieces of shit. I was just another anonymous first name on Lady Hollywood’s dance card … a name she would never get to by the end of the night. I spoke in terms of act breaks and TVQ and Broadcast Standards and hot series stars and their availability, no matter how wrong they were for the parts. I realised that I hadn’t thought with my imagination since the days before Harlow. I had been embraced, imprisoned and embalmed: a POW of the MOW.

  Just when I was awakening from my pod-guy stupor, just when the pennies started to fall off my eyes, just when I was ready to remind the rest of the world that I was an artist, by God, in other words, just when I was about to fix my world … they stopped making TV movies.

  It wasn’t a subtle shift, either. In the wake of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Survivor, Big Brother, Temptation Island, Boot Camp, Lost, The Mole, Murder in Small Town X, The Amazing Race and all the other so-called ‘reality shows’ - in other words, shows where you don’t have to pay members of the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild of America or the Directors Guild of America, where there are no residual payments for rerun and syndication play - there was no room for my meat and potatoes. Even if the Reality Ratings were not great, compared to their low cost they were extremely profitable. So with a legacy of audience expectations lowered by a diet of cheap-shit, Canadian-cranked dime-a-dozen woman-in-jeopardy TV movies that featured one star from a familiar series and a supporting cast of anonymous Canadian thespians, the networks gleefully jumped to the next lower rung on the ladder of commercial delivery.

  And I was out of work.

  No longer the boy wonder, I was going to tur
n twenty-seven on my next birthday. The prospects were not bright. My resume reeked of mediocrity, the shooting star of my youth gone dark, the fire extinguished by assembly line crap, without a signature or a personality.

  The passion long gone, it took the return of unemployment to realise I had no friends. None. Oh, it’s all kissy-face and love-ya-hon’ on the set, where you are thrown together with a new group of cast and crew on each new project. But when those twenty-some days of prepping and shooting are over, so are your relationships. Princess Charming, of course, was drenched in friends, her little Nokia constantly tweeting with one ass-kiss or another wrapping her in love. But when I wasn’t working, a condition that by now I should have been well-equipped to deal with, I was all alone: just me and my DVDs.

  I was loved by Princess Charming; she told me so repeatedly. But hers was a lalaland love, tuned by the eye of Access Hollywood and E! While she worked on her series (and frankly, I don’t know anyone who has ever seen it), I went to the movies, watched movies at home, sat by myself in the most popular restaurants and wondered what to do with myself. Masturbation was an option, but since that was my career, I just was not so motivated. It started to take more than a couple of shots of Jack Daniel’s to numb me to sleep.

  I stared out of the Marina condo, bored out of my skull, and unable to imagine. I wanted to write, but nothing came out. Not even bad ideas. Nothing. I was used up at twenty-six. Lady Hollywood had sapped me of my vital fluids without even taking me within her most private of parts. Ever teasing, never pleasing. The semen of my imagination was locked within my testicles, and I was getting creative blue balls. So I just opened bottles and emptied them. I felt more creative, but nothing ever got on paper. Or that which did was no better than what I’d sicked up in the toilet.

  Finally, I relented. The Princess was so sweet, her eyes so dewy, the halo of her hair so perfectly framed when she suggested one last time that I could make her show something special, that I agreed to direct the season finale. It was a two-hour special, so I could at least make believe it was something special, and not really an episode: more like an MOW. Exactly like an MOW, at least in the eyes of DGA scale. Eighty-eight minutes of movie sandwiched between thirty-two minutes of bellowing buy-me and network promos flogging their latest ‘unscripted’ monstrosities.

  But this was the new me. Again. No, really. This was my chance to dazzle Lady Hollywood, to grab this homely little piffle of a series by the neck and shake it until it cried uncle. I was a plastic surgeon, and by God, I would carve a beautiful countenance out of its dowdy visage or I didn’t deserve a date with the Lady. I took the script and marked it up with diagrams and designs and ideas. My imagination, unbridled by the ninety pages of soulless, mindless blather, embroidered fabrics of visual splendour. It doesn’t have to cost a fortune to make something look wonderful. The independents do it all the time. So let’s shake things up a little here. I came on like a preacher and managed to get the lazy, tubby IA crew to catch fire, getting everybody on the bus taking us to the best damned Lucky Charms episode ever. And it worked: for once, the crew felt liberated, encouraged to go beyond the beyond. The sets were actually wild and kind of wonderful. It became a sort of acid-dream playground, where we broke all the rules and created a phantasmagoric colour wheel of a movie. I got the actors to really stretch, re-imagine their characters and ground them in what passed for real emotion. It was weird and funny and … well, let’s not get carried away here, but at least it was not like any of the other episodes of Lucky Charms.

  The Princess couldn’t have been more delighted. She loved me, she loved the show, and even the other girls on the show, who hated anything she loved, got into it. And both of them offered me space in their trailers when the Princess wasn’t in earshot. Okay, I did one of them, but not the other. I do have standards … at least when I’m working.

  The brass at the WB were delighted with the dailies, if at first a bit confused. But hell, they’d lost Buffy and Roswell to UPN, and this was all they had left. I had taken to drinking only Fiji water to keep my head clear, and though we shot a few eighteen-hour days, managed to come in on time and only slightly over budget. I actually took pride in this, this episode, and made it something that I actually cared about. Maybe I’d even do one of these again.

  Then it aired. As cast and crew gathered at Residuals and hooted and cheered it around die bar’s big screen, the rest of die nation was oblivious. This very-best-ever episode of Lucky Charms was its lowest-rated. Ever. It was opposite Millionaire on ABC, a Big Brother rerun on CBS, Weakest Link on NBC, a ‘When Bad Drivers Attack!’ special on Fox, and Buffy on UPN. But we weren’t just killed by the big boys;

  even basic cable got better ratings: USA, Fox Family, PAX, TBS, TNT and even TNN all got better numbers than we did. And our Very Special Episode never even got reviewed … not even by the trades.

  No more offers.

  In a life of crashing and burning, this might have been the nadir. At least my popular Princess still loved me. But I was not prepared for what she had to say the next time we coupled. It was a typically sweaty, liquid liaison, an acrobatic, aerobic performance of breath taking quality. The vast picture window of her bedroom looked out over the San Fernando Valley from our perch on the hillside overlooking Studio City. The rain was Biblical, beating against the glass as we pounded against each other. I had bite marks from those little skulls all over my body, and I reciprocated in kind. Ours was a pretzel logic that knew no convention: every orifice was fed and satisfied, no appendage left wanting as we melted together like rubber and road. I was depleted, sucked dry by a vampire that drew pearly white blood and clear sweat from my body. Lying on our backs in a cooling pool of those vital fluids, we stared up at one another in the ceiling mirror that looked down on us. Her meaty breasts jiggled with the pounding of her heart. Our faces were flushed and sheened with perspiration.

  ‘I love you,’ she told me.

  ‘Mmmmm.’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Sure.’ I supposed I did. Why not? She was great.

  ‘What do you mean, “sure”?’

  ‘I mean sure, as in of course.’

  ‘“Sure” you love me?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Then tell me.’

  ‘I just did.’

  ‘No, you said “sure”. I want to hear the words.’

  Why not? I mean, it was no big deal. I loved her. What’s not to love? Okay: ‘I love you.’

  ‘Can’t you tell me without me asking?’

  ‘Okay. I love you. I’ll tell you more often. I’ll bring it up on my own. I love you, Princess.’

  She smiled. She did have the sweetest smile. But I sensed this was leading somewhere. A shadow of dread started creeping across the room towards me.

  ‘Should we think about getting married?’

  Bombshell. ‘Sure; we can think about it all you want. Why?’

  ‘ ‘Cause I love you. And you love me. And ‘cause I’m pregnant.’

  Inside, I screamed. I have a major problem with the whole baby thing. I mean, it’s not like I have a whole lot of experience with babies, but the experience I had with little Asta was all I ever wanted … hell, much more then I ever wanted. No babies. Not for me. No drooling, screaming, sucking, shitting, constantly feeding little squirming pink creatures for me.

  ‘Pregnant?’

  ‘You know, gonna have a baby.’

  Okay, it’s been confirmed. I was terrified. As I think about it now, at least I was feeling something. That was new. But better to be the Hollywood Zombie I had become than confront fatherhood. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to turn. I longed to be an ostrich and jam my head into the sand. Babies are bad enough, but Hollywood babies! She wouldn’t let me look away, her face niacin-rosy, freshly fucked and shining with satisfaction. Truthfully: irresistible.

  ‘How pregnant are you?’ I asked.

  ‘All the way.’

  ‘I mean how
long?’

  ‘About eight weeks.’

  ‘So it’s not too late for an abortion.’

  She just stared at me, those lovely eyes taking on a glinting wetness, filling and spilling as she trapped me in her sight. I couldn’t have spoken a less welcome sentence. I tried to reach for her, to take back the ill-timed, if perfectly logical, statement. But she broke. Her body was given over to wracking wails and snuffling.

  When the sobs subsided and she was able to speak, she spoke. ‘With you or without you, I’m having our baby. I thought you’d be happy.’

  I can’t stand crying. I melt, I give way, I die. I tried to tell her that it just wasn’t the right time. Her career was on the line here. And so was mine. There’s some momentum going here, and a baby would stop everything short. She didn’t care about her career; she had enough money and investments to see her through whatever happened, and Hollywood was shallow and hollow and merely a means to an end. There was life after Lucky Charms. Well, I’m glad she thought so. I’d never considered that there was any other life than the one we’d chosen. But, hey, it was her body. If she wanted a baby, she would have her baby. Still, the thought of a squalling, bawling infant spitting up and shitting up filled me with dread. Not enough dread to give up the Princess and all her charms and career opportunities, but dread. I couldn’t think of myself as Daddy - didn’t even want to — but I couldn’t stop her from becoming a mother, no matter how foolish the notion. As was my wont, I was picked up by the winds of circumstance and blown into the gutter of Hollywood nuptials.