by Bruce Wagner
Looking at the calmness of the eerie seascapes was sort of like looking at a chimp an hour before (or after) it tore off the zookeeper’s face. Maybe that was the artist’s point. The chimp was chill. It didn’t take a giant leap of the imagination for Jerzy to see his pix on the walls (his “abstract” snatcherazzo c-scapes hahahahaha) and that instantly made him feel better. Reputation did not precede him, but revelation would. He had already begun to comb thru his image bank—thousands of verité celeb pix taken over the last 5 years. He was looking at the little batch of honeyshot!s too, taken to date.
A soft alarm went off in his head: time to leave the gallery.
(Bad karma to overstay his welcome.)
He was just on his way, when canned-sounding laughter raucoused the air, growing echo-louder as it attached itself to the flurry of bodies walking thru the entrance. A white-haired man of sunny disposition & ruddy, play-doh features emerged from the back & strode briskly toward the entourage as it entered the main room. Jerzy had a Special Moment: it was the man himself: Larry G.
Larry around the Gagosian. Larry Gaga . . .
Jerzy instinctively rapid-shrunk into wallflowered loseraazzo invisibility as Gaga greeted Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, & a close-shaved middle-aged black in button down shirt & Mr. Freedom jeans. King Larry shook hands with Zeta-Jones, Douglas & the black but did not with the two who hover/dangled on the nervous periphery. (They of the Serfdom/Personal Assistant Class; they of the Disposable Intern fortunate enough in these times of financial hardship & gluttonous starfuckery not just to be employed {even if paid nothing or next to nothing} but lucky to be breathing the same fucking air as the celeb employers who rescued them from the shame of their go-nowhere lives; they of the Indentured Class who sign contracts forbidding them to disclose via lawsuit or memoir whatever lame, embittered, perceived perceptions of the famous hands that fed them they might claim to have conjured, enumerating said benefactors’ rudeness, frivolities, unsanitary habits, sexual quirks, unsolicited come-ons, sadistic vulgarity, et alia whilst in defamatory pursuit of financial gain or plain revenge by leakage to TMZ, the DMZ, the NAACP, Triple A or any other outlet including of course blogs & webloids, print tabloids & dying pub houses still trafficking in the hardbacks & paperbooks of yesteryear. They of the parasitical Tolerated Class who eat the chores & errands bacterium that colonize hourly around the mini-industry of any celeb: dry cleaning fetchery, stopped-up toilets, party e-vites, phone sheets, sending of flowers, packing of suitcases, ghost-twittering &tc. For accomplishing those very things, their congenital purposelessness is {amply} rewarded by being lent purpose & {more importantly} identity via the privilege of being allowed a priceless, special education wherein they may vicariously experience what it’s like to have an actual life, meaning one that is fuller, richer & more exciting—more lifelike—in every way than theirs could or ever will be.*
Jerzy, skulking in a corner, watched the sexily muzzled, panicked-obsequious intern-lice crawl upon the skin of whatever host they were grooming, now & again lifting covetous heads to pause in their feast of bacteria, to observe with gimlet eyes the skilled quadrille of the gallerist & his visitors, the easy chummy social network of the rich, famous & powerful; that certain way they have of being googoo gaga for each other, each anticipating the others’ emotional needs. Douglas said he was in town filming, adding that Catherine was shooting a Glee. (Gaga told them he & Shala were googoo for Glee.) From his post, Jerzy quickstudied Larry ’round the Gagosian as best he could, because one day he would be selling himself to the Man—to the impresario, ringleader & tastemaker, to the one-man Gagosian’s 11.
Ogling Douglas’ wife, who looked trampily deep into bipolar meds & high-end anti-aging crêmes, Jerzy thought: Now that is a hot fuck. He wondered if Douglas got his C by being wayback viral throatstroked by papilloma . . . . . seems like a person would have to go down on a boatload of broads to get the HPV in the gullet (well, do the math), if the actor scarfed half as much pussy as dimpled dad Kirk—King Leer, Kirk the lyin’ King—then he just might have qualified.
Gagosian twice cast an aware eye Jerzy’s way, which the speedballing ratsorizzorazzo took as his cue to exit. On the way out, he came within 5 ft of the entourage, both ships passing gas in the night.
“We want to show Antwone how to spend money,” said Douglas. “Cause I think he’s too close with a buck. Don’t you, Cat? Don’t you think Antwone’s too close with a buck? He’s not flashy enough. Fishburne & I are gunna take him under our wing & teach him how to be flashy. He’s gunna learn how to play with the big boys. We’re gunna show him how to spend, how to spend money & influence people.
“Cause it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that bling—right, Antwone?”
* * *
‘Treasure’ hunt ends
432PM PDT by Debi Rheng-Vatos
Douglas set for comedy
“The Treasure of Sierra Leone” locked its final principal lead in Antwone Fisher’s helming debut. Megastar Michael Douglas joins Will Smith, Sandra Bullock, Laurence Fishburne and Hailee Steinfeld in what Fisher calls his “black comedy.” Michael Tolkin penned, from an idea by Frederik “Biggie” Brainard III. Ishmael Beah consults. Ooh Baby Baby It’s A Wild World Films’ Brando Brainard produces. International sales are being handled by MGM/Paramount/Lion’s Gate. The story, taking place in 1995, centers on a con man who needs to raise money for his daughter’s heart surgery. He teaches an African American runaway how to impersonate a ‘lost boy’/child soldier from the Ivory Coast—they hit the lecture circuit and make a bundle. Things begin to go terribly wrong when an Oprah-like character enters the picture and insists on flying the boy back to his Ivory Coast home in order to reunite with friends. (The producers would not comment on the rumor that Oprah Winfrey has privately expressed interest in a “cameo” role, as herself.) Tolkin wrote Robert Altman’s The Player; his last novel was The Return of the Player. Fisher’s recent credits are Let’s Go To Work!, a doc about the black entrepreneur Leon T. Garr, and the bestseller, A Boy Should Know How to Tie a Tie: and Other Lessons for Succeeding in Life (Simon & Schuster). Brainard recently produced the megahit Turndown Service, has just formed a television division, Just Upon A Smile TV.
Contact Debi Rheng-Vatos at [email protected]
* * *
EXPLICIT
[Rikki&Tom-Tom]
Call Me Ishmael*
*AKA Konyshots!
Rikki
couldn’t fucking believe what he found online—Antwone Fisher was directing a movie starring, of all people, Larry Fishburne. (Too bad it didn’t say anything about porndaughter co-ing.) It got weirder: there was a role for a black his age. www.castingcallLA.com said Antwone already saw 100s of boys but hadn’t yet found “the one.” “We’ll know it when he walks through the door,” said Fish (not Fishburne; “Fish” was Antwone’s nickname) in an interview with www.shootingstarz.com.
WTF. Shit was crazy.
The timing was crazy cosmic too, but Rikki was stymied about how to proceed. He talked to ReeRee (somewhat reluctantly hipping her to his general plan; not too many people had ever known about his closely-concealed somewhat embarrassing ((to him)) ambitions to act, maybe just Dawn & Engineer Jim) and Ree tripped on it & loved him for it, because it was so unexpected, & a way of being proactive re them getting a house together, getting a life, getting on with their lives to come. Reeyonna then spoke to her bro who then spoke to his parttime g.f. Tom-Tom, who was truly hip to gaming the Hollywood system. The Treasure of Sierra Leone had a Facebook page & casting link where you could upload your reel from tmblr or wherever. Tom-Tom even found verboten chunks of the script in the shady thickets of the webswamp (www.scriptileaks.com).
She ran down the synopsis for him: Treasure was about a failed character actor (Fishburne) whose estranged teenage daughter gets a virus that severely damages her heart. In order to raise the 300K required for meds & a transplant, Fishburne becomes a grifter. He hook
s up with an old guy (Michael Douglas) recently fired from his job of 35 years—a daytime soap—whose livelihood now pretty much exclusively consists of seducing widows. Douglas never really has the heart to royally fleece the old ladies, settling instead for room, board & pocket $$$ in exchange for platonic companionship. Enter Fishburne, who wants to change all that muy pronto. The duo stage a bingo scam & are nearly out-hustled by a brilliant 15-year-old, an agro Afro-American runaway from some foster home hellhole. Impressed by his mad skills, they take the kid under their wing.
That night, Fishburne watches Oprah interview a former child soldier from Freetown. He’s riveted by the charismatic young boy’s articulate saga of being abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army and brainwashed to be a killer. Inspired, he calls his friend Douglas & proposes they set out on a scam tour of America—with the runaway impersonating a reformed child soldier, Fishburne playing his impoverished, dignified African father, & Douglas trodding the boards as the founder of the NGO responsible for the boy’s rehab & redemption. At first Douglas is skeptical, but when Fishburne bares his soul & says that his daughter will die without the surgery, Douglas needs no further coaxing.
So they set out & the kid’s a natural. Born for the part. As a warm-up, he practices on the widows, who practically hand over their pocketbooks. Fishburne & Douglas begin booking lectures in small auditoriums & concert halls, and pretty soon they’ve got a cash cow phenom on their hands. They’re making local appearances, doing call-in radio shows, county fairs, all that. The fake warrior becomes a burgeoning rockstar on the indomitable-human-spirit circuit, the darling of liberal socialites’ soirées, everybody hungering to hear the lurid horrors of manchild in the unpromised land. The biggest problem becomes how to keep the whole floating crapgame below the radar—Fishburne & Douglas want attention, just not the wrong kind. Because the minute someone starts trying to verify details, the jig, as they say, is up.
Tom-Tom read Rikki an online press release from a few weeks back. It said that Ishmael Beah, the famous grownup child soldier whom the script’s impostor was based upon, signed on as a consultant on the film. The name rang a bell. Weirdly enough, Rikki recalled that some months ago, Beah visited John Crowe Ransom to give a talk about his memoir, A Long Way Gone. The dude didn’t seem too much older than himself. During a special assembly, Beah shared his story of the atrocities he was forced to commit as a young boy. He remembered Beah talking about how the rebels hooked him & his homies on some kind of speed mixed with gunpowder.
Killin & cokin’! Fuckin bitchin . . .
The web was awash with h8trs whining that Beah “went Hollywood”—not only was he cheapening his own story, but the stories of all traumatized child soldiers & “lost boys.” Blahdee-blahdee-blah. The usual devils were busily obsessed with debunking the truthfulness of Ishmael’s journey (http://oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/ishmael-beahs-a-long-way-gone-is-a-long-way-from-the-truth-magazine-says-in-report-raising-serious-doubts-about-memoir/)—but what Rikki really liked was, Beah kept above the fray, rebutting, “sad to say, my story is all true.” In response to his lotusland-sellout critics (http://whatisthewhat.org.african-stories/lost-in-america/ishmael-beah-chronicles-his-role/), he said “sometimes painful truths must be ‘wrapped’ in comedy in order to open people’s eyes so they may learn & understand.”
Tom-Tom thought Rikki’s encounter with Beah, plus the fact he’d already read (listened to, actually) the memoir, was some kind of sign from God. (She was way off into omens & numerology.) But Tom-Tom also knew they were seriously running out of time. Any day now she could get a Google Alert that Antwone Fisher found his boy. She gave them a firm 48-hr deadline, periodically setting out bumps to help Rikki get the job done. Bumpin bumpin bumpin.
Tom-Tom said the most important thing was for Rikki to listen to Beah’s book on the iPod, like over and over, building a baseline of memory in his head of how the dude spoke, his rhythm & intonation, with particular emphasis on the content of stories & anecdotes, cause that was gonna be the source of his freestylin material. The rich, poetic details of Sierra Leone, its fauna&flora, Beah’s friends, family & aborted childhood . . . that’s where the gold was. She really wanted him to master the Beah voice, the glib, syrupy, transatlantic inflection that counterpoised so well with clipped, deadpan tales of random rape, torture & murder. Tom-Tom reminded Rikki that in the movie, Douglas and Fishburne put the (adopted!) boy through a similar crash course, accent & all.
Rikki didn’t go home for 2 straight days. (He slept with Reeyonna at night but during the day Tom-Tom banned Ree from the working area, banned everyone, cause the shit they were up to was too serious to be distracted by people walking in & generally getting in their business.) The dro was dank, the blow was crank & the shit was crackin. They read aloud scenes from the script, a couple times she even jacked him off for real. Rikki wanted to keep it going but she said nope, back to work, maybe they’d fuck when they finished. Tom-Tom was a good improvver, she used to have a boyfriend in 2nd City, & Rikki turned out to have some flamboyant freestyle flair. V. good at voices & impressions. Tom-Tom got way into it . . . she pushed & pushed, and at the end of their mini-marathon told Rikki he was effing awesome, which he was thrilled to hear, he felt good, & came to believe she was telling the truth, too. Tom-Tom encouraged him to get cocky (just don’t let it show), in this situation she said it was totally okay to get his cock on & be stuck-up/superconfident of his gifts. If he really wanted to get the part.
. . .
Rikki was krunked up in the trees, tripping on how no one knew how much Antwone Fisher meant to him.
It seemed like every soul-killing family placement/residential group home Rikki ever was at* had a copy of Antwone Fisher—the movie Hollywood made about Fish (not Fishburne)’s life—tucked into their shitty collections of donated cassettes & DVDs. Which was ironic, because Fish’s spirit got nearly crushed by the foster mom they show in the film beatin on him & calling him a nigger 24/7 (a black bitch, too), & the foster sis (another black bitch) molesting him when she babysat. So Rikki grew up sort of watching a docudrama, kind of, not in detail but in feeling, the story of his own woebegone, borrowed life.
The internet said that the favorite all-time movie of dudes in the penitentiary was The Shawshank Redemption, which was about corrupt & homicidal jailers, but about escape & freedom too—well, that’s how it was with foster kids and the Antwone Fisher flick. Seeing it for the first time, only 7-years-old, Rikki—stomach-punched, face-slapped, nigger-called, dick-in-fostermouth’d Rikki—was old enough to acquire the perverse, eager hope that his life might be survivable. He had fantasies of joining the Marines just like Antwone did; of having a strong man there for him like Denzel was for Fish, in the movie; & of meeting a girl who loved him, just like the girl in the flick did. Of course, they left out a lot of shit from the book. (Rikki kept a worn burnished copy of the autobio Finding Fish in his drawer—Finding Fish was Antwone’s A Long Way Gone—in whatever drawer of whatever terrible transient home he found himself in any given year, kept it hidden beneath socks & underwear, like smuggled treasure.) They didn’t show how Antwone wrote a screenplay of his life then got a job as a guard at a Hollywood studio so he could learn about the Business; or how he struggled to get someone to film his script. That would be a whole other movie.
(Rikki wondered if they ever showed Shawshank or Ant. Fish. up in Pelican Bay, & what maybe his father thought of them.)
. . . during his deformative years, young Rikki watched the sado-surroundsound saga of Antwone Fisher as he caromed from one foster placement to another—the melodrama of abuse on ironic TV room tap for the very kids busy being Rx drugged, beaten & sexed by their keepers, old pros at the foster children reimbursement payment scale game, squeezing every $ they could from their hopeless, helpless, ratfucked human cargo. As he grew older, Rikki grew puzzled too. He was happy for Antwone but couldn’t understand why anyone would want to make a movie about such miseries, a movie that seemed to exist for
the sole purpose of confirming he, Rikki, was a captive resident of fosterfucked Hell, & that what he watched on screen was a mirror/reminder (except with movie s!) of his fosterfuckery life . . . movies were supposed to entertain, he supposed someone thought they might be entertained by watching this boy-to-manchild Antwone trapped in a nightmare different but the same as his own! The motion picture bore the Good Bad Housekeeping Seal of Approval, no doubt. But why? Rikki was sure there was a reason, otherwise Antwone surely would not have allowed this thing to be shot. See, Antwone Fisher was released more than 10 years ago—so maybe there had been an end result he hadn’t heard, say, maybe the production brought Fish’s abusers to justice. He searched online . . . or maybe the movie struck fear in the s of the wicked, forcing them to be kinder, & seek forgiveness of those they murdered & destroyed, to amend their ways . . . but if that were true, what was the DVD doing in all those scarysick dens? (In one home, a retard night supervisor went suckin from dick to dick, while the lil homies watched Ant. Fish on the flatscreen.) Wouldn’t the fostercrooks be afraid that viewing such a film would foment rebellion amongst their charges? What else would be the point of such an adaption to film, if not to inform & overturn? And if Denzel & Antwone & everyone else confabulated it not for political reasons but first & foremost to entertain, with each further viewing Rikki felt there to be something cruel in it: the notion that this movie Antwone Fisher might entertain—might ease the interminable misery of his borrowed days by whispering, Watch & learn that you are not the only one bound by misery, misery is not a thing that can be confined to your stained, stinky couch & stained, stinky little life, no! Misery is all around you . . . misery, ordinary misery, as ordinary & crippling as nausea, ripples ever onward & outward
