Whenever doubts or reservations about the musical were discussed, Marvin reiterated his lingering fear of legal repercussions.
“My nephew got sued for illegally downloading a movie,” Marvin said. “I don’t want to get sued.”
“We won’t get sued.”
“You can’t guarantee that.”
Simon watched Byron exit the bathroom, but as soon as he came within earshot of the booth, he made a beeline for the bar. Byron probably overheard part of their conversation and decided he wanted no part of it. Soothing Marvin was a real pain in the ass.
Simon laid his palms flat on the table and stood, looming over Marvin. “What we’re doing is protected under parody law. We changed character names, storyline, dialogue, songs. Leprechaun in the Hood: The Musical is a totally different thing than Leprechaun in the Hood or Lep Back 2 Tha Hood.”
“What about the leprechaun?” Marvin said.
“What do you mean?”
“What if they sue us over using a leprechaun in our musical? Maybe I should be a dwarf instead. Dwarf in the Hood has a nice ring to it.”
“We’re not changing shit. I didn’t raise money and spend all this time creating promotional material only to render it all useless at the last minute. Anyway, you can’t copyright a mythological creature. Vampires, werewolves, zombies . . . if all that shit was copyrighted, horror wouldn’t exist as a genre. Leprechauns are fair game. If somebody has a problem, they can kiss my Irish ass.”
“I didn’t know you were Irish.”
“I’m not. You want another beer?”
At the bar, Byron was putting back a shot of whiskey as Kay filled a pint of Pabst. “What was that about?” he asked Simon.
The director sighed. “Same old shit. He’s worried about getting sued when he should be worrying about not fucking this whole thing up for everyone.”
“Tall order for a short man,” Byron cracked.
Kay slid Byron’s beer across the bar and smiled at Simon. “Another PBR?”
“Make it two,” Simon said, trying to smile back at her in a casual, nonplussed way.
“I got this round,” Byron said. He took his beer back to the booth, leaving Simon alone with Kay.
“I like the new tattoo,” Simon said.
“Oh, thanks,” she said.
The two beers foamed over their rims and onto the bar, but Kay didn’t seem to care. She’d locked eyes with Simon. He worried that she could hear his heart pounding in his chest, or spot the nose hairs that had recently begun reaching beyond the rims of his nostrils, into the embarrassing light. He should have plucked.
“So . . . are you coming to opening night?” He said it in a pickup-line sort of way. Oh, man. Could he have come up with anything stupider?
“I don’t know yet. My boyfriend wants to go. If he’s off work on Friday, we’ll totally be there.”
Her. Boyfriend.
Kay had a boyfriend. He was probably big and tatted up, some rockabilly asshole with broad shoulders and a bad attitude. Well, a worse attitude than Simon.
“Can I get a shot of well whiskey, too?” Simon asked.
It was the beginning of another long night of shithead feelings and circular, pointless conversations. Another night getting drunk with his best friend and a dude dressed as a leprechaun, but in a few days, the biggest night of his life would be behind him. After opening night and the subsequent performances spread over the following two weekends, life would return to normal. He’d remember that he was broke and jobless, that he was approaching thirty, prematurely balding, carrying a beer gut incongruous to his beanpole frame, and had never been in a serious relationship. People would see his musical and tell their friends how bad it sucked. He wouldn’t be a hero. He’d be a joke. He couldn’t be sorrier to see this good time go.
Back at their booth, Byron and Marvin had rekindled their argument about Jason X and Leprechaun 4: In Space.
Yeah, just another night.
Waking up was bloody awful.
Between the rotten taste in his mouth, the pounding head, and the lead balloon throbbing in his gut, Simon felt like shit. Bleary-eyed, he attempted to climb out of bed only to realize he was on the floor. He scratched the back of his head and picked a pepperoni slice out of his hair. When had he ordered a pizza?
He rubbed the drunk out of his eyes and assessed his surroundings. He was on the floor of Byron’s living room. An empty pizza box lay open beside him. The grease was wiped clean where his head had rested. Okay, so he’d used a pizza box as a pillow. Not the first time, probably not the last.
Looking around he thought he was alone, before he caught sight of Marvin passed out on the couch beneath a mountain of crushed Pabst cans. Stacking was a favorite game of his and Byron’s. They’d never stacked on a midget before. Nice.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket to take a photo of Marvin only to discover that his drunk self had beaten him to it. He had a dozen texts from as many friends and acquaintances to a photo he apparently took last night of Marvin beneath the beer cans. The responses ranged from Do I know you? Why are you sending me this? and What the fuck? It’s four-thirty in the morning. to Sweet lord, this is righteous. and OMG. MIDGET STACKING. In all, he’d sent the photo to thirty-seven people. Kay was among them, but she had not responded.
He wondered how and when they’d acquired the pizza as he crawled to the bathroom, too hung over to stand. He turned on the hot water faucet in the bathtub. As the water warmed, he pushed himself to his feet and stumbled to the toilet to take a leak.
He’d unzipped and begun the process of trying to go (after a night of serious drinking, the first pee was always hard to get going) when he felt his eyes bug out. The toilet bowl was clogged with doughnuts. They’d gone soggy in the grimy, piss-filled bowl. “Shit,” he muttered. His stream was flowing now. It was too late to stop. He reasoned that since the doughnuts had already been peed on—most likely by all of them—then once more wouldn’t hurt anyone.
“Dammit, Marvin,” he said as he slammed the lid closed. The leprechaun actor had crashed at Byron’s apartment on several occasions, and each time, he’d deposited some sort of food into the toilet. Sometimes the food was flushable. Sometimes, as in the case with these doughnuts, it was not. The first time they caught him they’d questioned him thoroughly and even suggested that he’d be kicked out of the musical if he wouldn’t tell them why he did it. They were more curious than pissed, so when Marvin broke down crying, they let off. They could only presume that Marvin’s eccentric habit had something to do with the movie poster for The Ghoulies.
Bladder emptied, but the hangover fresh in his head, Simon genuflected before the great water faucet and rinsed the pizza grease out of his hair.
A pounding on the bathroom door, accompanied with panicked shouts of “Dude! We gotta go!” startled Simon. He reared up, slamming the back of his head against the faucet. His vision went fuzzy. He felt the back of his head, but it was hard to feel for blood with wet hair.
“What the fuck?” he cried, sounding angrier than he was to hide the pain.
“It’s eleven-thirty,” Byron said. “What are you doing in there anyway?”
“I fell asleep with my head in the pizza box. And Marvin clogged the toilet with doughnuts.”
“Dammit, Marvin.”
“That’s what I said.” Simon stood, found a bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet and swallowed four. He inspected the back of his head in the mirror, saw no blood, and combed his hair with his fingers, brushing down and across, a motion which masked some of the encroaching baldness. Water droplets fell onto his Cannibal Holocaust shirt, which he realized he’d worn for three days straight. Maybe it was fitting. If the musical flopped, he’d be the one with a stick up his ass so far that it would be poking out of his mouth. He’d have to see to it that his cast and crew didn’t fuck this up for him.
“So how’d we end up with pizza and doughnuts?” he asked, wondering if Byron was still standing on the other s
ide of the door. He was.
“The pizza we had delivered. The doughnuts . . . I’m not sure.”
“We’ll have to ask Marvin. Is he awake?”
“I’ll go wake him now. Hurry your ass up.”
Simon checked out the back of his head one last time. It wasn’t bleeding, but it hurt like a motherfucker. Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed it down.
That’s when he remembered the Impala.
They’d piled into Byron’s shitty car and now Byron and Marvin were trying to calm Simon. He’d forgotten to make a replacement for the latest cardboard car casualty. Worse, he’d promised a second car, in case the first was inevitably destroyed. By the time they talked him down from suicidal heights, they were almost at the theater in North Portland.
“It’s Tuesday,” Simon said. “We have today, tomorrow, and the next day, then it’s show time. And now we can’t even rehearse the scene in need of the most work.”
Byron pulled into the theater’s parking lot. He turned in his seat to face Simon. “Don’t worry, man. We’ve got plenty else to rehearse. Just tell them you made a directorial decision to focus on the musical numbers today.”
Smooth, Byron, Simon thought. You always get your way.
“To be honest, I feel that would be most conducive to a positive, productive rehearsal,” Marvin said from the backseat.
“Then it’s settled,” Simon said, but the stress compounded with the motion of the car had left him anything but settled, and he hunched over and puked onto the floorboard of Byron’s car.
“Yo, I just got that cleaned.”
“Come on, we’re late for rehearsal.” Simon climbed out of the car, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his smelly t-shirt, and charged into the building ready to command like all great directors do.
It must have been obvious to everyone that Simon was suffering from the hangover of the century. He didn’t care. At least nobody gave him any shit for being late.
With the whole cast and crew gathered around, he announced their plan of attack for the day. “We’re gonna start from the beginning and place special emphasis on nailing the musical numbers. This means that if you fuck up during a song, we start it over.”
“What about the Impalas?” asked Genevieve, a member of the chorus for “Bitches Be Spooky” and one of the hydraulic victims.
“We’ll be working to that today. It’ll be our starting point tomorrow.”
“Does that mean I can go home?” she asked.
She knew her choreography and had no speaking lines beyond a single, shrill scream as the Impala ran her over, but Simon shook his head no. “This is crunch time,” he said, feeling painfully aware that he sounded like his high school football coach dad. “Every one of us should know the whole musical well enough to perform it all ourselves.”
“I didn’t come here to sit around,” Genevieve said.
“I didn’t come here to listen to you whine,” Simon said.
That was enough to shut down all other complaints for the day.
Leprechaun in the Hood: The Musical opened with a series of commercials for fake products, projected onto a bloody sheet that hung from the stage, barren except for a pot of gold.
Besides renting out the theater, the commercials were the most costly part of the whole production. The first commercial advertised a Hellraiser-themed cereal called Cen-O-Bites. It was arguably the greatest part of the entire show and an idea that Simon had lifted from a Facebook meme.
Onscreen: Meat hooks fly out of a cereal bowl, impaling a small boy, but the boy uses his spoon to break the hooks and regain his bowl of cereal, happy despite profuse bleeding. Pinhead enters the kitchen and sits at the table with coffee and the newspaper, like he’s Ward Cleaver. And the bleeding kid turns to face the camera and says, “What is your pleasure, sir?”
In bloody lettering, the word CEN-O-BITES drips down the screen, spoken as it does so in a Cryptkeeper-like voice.
Applause, laughter, and hoots of approval resounded from backstage. Whatever doubts they harbored about Friday night, nothing lifted spirits like a gore-drenched cereal commercial. Simon leaned back in his seat. He was the lone member of the audience.
The Cen-O-Bites commercial flickered out and the ominous child-whisper of the Nightmare on Elm Street theme song faded in on a dark screen. Freddy Krueger’s familiar claws slashed through the darkness, shedding light on a yard gone wild with grass. The rest of the darkness faded. Among the tall grass, skinny people painted green and wearing green costumes lurked. They were supposed to be grass, but between the initial concept and final product, something had been lost.
An overly loud, used car salesman voice emanated: “HAS YOUR GRASS GONE WILD?” The words appeared on the screen in large, aesthetically ill-advised, sans serif. The grass people began lifting their tops, flashing their “grass tits.” The salesman voice, uncomfortably loud now: “THEN YOU NEED FREDDY KRUEGER’S ULTIMATE GRASS-CUTTING CLAW HANDS.” A person in a shitty Freddy Krueger costume appeared on camera and slashed through the grass, murdering the grass people. The image was replaced by a short, green lawn that was clearly a putting green at the local country club. Freddy Krueger laid out a blanket on the putting green and his date—a young woman in a blood-splattered prom dress—began unpacking a picnic basket. “CUT YOUR GRASS DOWN TO SIZE WITH FREDDY KRUEGER’S ULTIMATE GRASS-CUTTING CLAW HANDS.” Then a more formal, robotic voice announced, “Call XXX-XXX-XXXX to order your Freddy Krueger’s Ultimate Grass-Cutting Claw Hands for just six easy payments of $6.66.”
Simon wriggled in his seat for that one, trying to figure out if he’d seen it too many times or if it really was that sophomoric.
The third and final commercial was Simon’s favorite, even though it was more groan-worthy than even Freddy Krueger’s Ultimate Grass-Cutting Claw Hands.
Byron, dressed in medical garb, appeared onscreen in the lobby of a doctor’s office. The footage was camcorder quality and shaky. In the background, a receptionist gazed at the camera with a concerned expression on her face. Byron began his spiel, rushing in a way that suggested they weren’t supposed to be there. “Haunted by a poltergeist? Pursued through a dark forest by flesh-eating zombies? Is your daughter possessed by Satan? Then you need . . . CONVENIENT-ALL! Convenient-All is the only FDA-approved pill that allows you to overcome your victimhood and conquer your demons by enabling implausible leaps of logic. Near death, in danger of dying, or already dead? Worry no more! You can escape it all with Convenient-All.”
The door that led to the patients’ rooms burst open in the background and a white-coated doctor charged Byron. “What are you doing here? Who are you?” the doctor shouted.
The footage went shaky as Byron and the cameraman, who’d been Simon, bolted from the waiting room, and as they made their escape, you could hear Byron shout, “FDA approval pending!”
Yeah, if only Simon had some Convenient-All. Then he could make the impossible leap necessary to transform this disasterpiece into something special. Maybe he should move the Cen-O-Bites gag to the end of the commercials, finish strong.
The curtains closed so the stagehands could set the scenery for Act One.
When they opened, Byron—in character as Christian hip hop artist Jesus Freak—stood alone, thrusting his hips in time to the opening beats of the musical’s first song, “Get Freaky.” The main riff was stolen from Halloween. In fact, their song was little more than a poor copy of Dr. Dre’s “Murder Ink,” except the lyrics were rewritten to summarize the general themes of the musical: professing love in Jesus while attempting to ruthlessly acquire fame and wealth, and inevitably dying a cruel death at the hands of a leprechaun. Standard lyrics were “Get freaky/get freaky/for Jesus/or the lep will shove a bong up your ass/and smoke you/and smoke you.” Perhaps there were no Grammys in their future, but Byron was the only rapper Simon knew.
While Byron rapped, Marvin in full leprechaun garb materialized from a papier-mâché tree stump in a cloud of fog.
Th
e leprechaun stretched as if he’d been sleeping for a thousand years. In the films, the leprechaun tended to be revived from an immaterial or catatonic state when a human character stole or removed the object that subdued him, but there were no hard and fast rules in the Leprechaun franchise.
Rules were established only to be broken, usually within the same film. In this case, they’d chosen to introduce the leprechaun quickly because that’s what the audience would be paying for, and also because they wanted to keep the runtime short. Did anyone genuinely want to sit through more than an hour of Leprechaun in the Hood: The Musical?
The leprechaun reached back into the stump to retrieve his pot of gold. This part of the play tended to run smoothly, but this time, “Get Freaky” ended and Marvin was still struggling to remove his gold from the stump. Jesus Freak’s posse appeared from stage left, in character and miming Christian hoodlum behavior as the script called for. Unable to improvise, they carried on as if nothing were wrong. But the leprechaun should have been long gone.
“Marvin, what’s the holdup?” Simon stood from his third row seat.
“The pot of gold . . . it’s too heavy.” Marvin held up a lone coin. “Someone switched out the plastic coins for these. They’re heavy as shit.”
Simon hopped onstage and joined Marvin, Jesus Freak, and the posse. They crowded around the papier-mâché tree stump, peering down at the pot of gold.
“Looks the same,” Simon said. He grabbed hold of the pot, figuring Marvin’s arthritis was acting up, and lifted.
He had the pot halfway out when his back kinked up and he dropped it, crushing the tree stump and scattering coins across the stage. The coins jingled as they settled. Simon held his back, twisted up in pain.
“What the fuck?” they all kind of said at once.
“Shit!” Simon kicked the ruined tree stump, distorting it further out of shape. He shouted so that his voice echoed throughout the theater. “Everybody out here! I want all cast and crew onstage. Now!”
Leprechaun in the Hood: The Musical: A Novel Page 2
