“That sounds terrible. John Carpenter made this mess?”
“It was good! All those secret messages were easy to read through the trees. You know what though? You could totally tell it was supposed to be another throwaway Kurt Russell flick. You remember last month when Butch Cassidy had…”
“You mean The Spotlight Kid.”
“…when The Spotlight Kid had that Kurt Russell/John Carpenter Triple Feature? Big Trouble in Little China, The Thing, and Escape from New York?”
“Oh, shit, The Thing! I can’t believe it got pulled as fast as it did. I wanna watch that again right now,” Billy said, sitting up. “I can’t believe people went to see E.T. instead. Did I ever tell you about the rap song I wrote as a tribute? It’s called “The Rap’s The Thing’…”
“‘To Catch the Conscience Of the King?’” Bully mocked. “Anyway, like I was saying, it’s obvious that Mr. Piper was just some bush-league version of Kurt Russell. Good fight scene though. It lasted fucking forever.”
“…and I’ll sing it for you any time you want. It’s my finest moment and the only thing I ever finished and-”
“Nope. Thanks.”
“Oh, okay. It lasted forever, huh? How long is the movie?”
“Not the movie! The fight scene!”
“Oh. How long is forever?”
“The big fight in it lasted, no joke… forty-five minutes.”
“No way,” Billy was skeptical.
“I swear. I would kill to be in a fight like that.”
“Who was fighting?”
“Poor Man’s Kurt Russell! And that black dude… Keith David? David Keith? Whoever. Question! Why hasn’t there ever been a movie starring both David Keith and Keith David? Think of the poster!”
“No idea who you’re talking about.”
“You know the guys I mean. The black one is in They Live, and the other one was that cracker in An Officer and a Gentleman who hung himself when that dumb bitch wouldn’t marry his ass. So, like, the same guy pretty much.”
“Yeah, right,” Billy laughed. Bully got worked up about movies sometimes.
“Imagine the money they’d save on advertising,” she went on. “They could probably splice their heads together on the poster like that ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield’ Star Trek episode. Yo, Hollywood, pay attention!” Bully yelled at the sky. “Keith ‘Keeps Roddy Piper From Forcing Him To Wear Sunglasses For Fifty-Seven Minutes’ David vs. David ‘Still Wants To Marry Worst Woman In Florida After She Lied About Being Knocked Up’ Keith. Clear winner: Keith David for the K.O. No, seriously, though. You have to see this movie before we blow ourselves up this weekend. In that two-hour fight scene, he’s all like, ‘You dirty motherfucker!’ and David Keith really does seem genuinely surprised in that moment. I think those two actors were really fighting. That’s the key.”
“How come people in movies always cough a lot after they get their ass kicked real bad?” Billy asked her. “You don’t give someone a cold when you punch them in the face.”
“I think you’re used to too much WWF bullshit. You need someone to tap out to know it’s over.”
“No, I just…”
“Tap tap tap!” she snapped, rapidly slapping his chest like a wrestling mat.
“…just when I got my ass kicked three years ago, I just crawled under a car.”
“I believe it,” Bully said, kicking at his shoes. “You crawl under shit like a tick.”
At that, Billy finally pulled himself the rest of the way out from under the bike, wiping his hands on his thighs like he guessed blue-collar dudes did at the end of their workday.
“All fixed!” he exclaimed, clapping no puffs of dirt into the air. “So, did you get the goods or what?”
“Yep.” Bully pulled a bright yellow plastic card from her pocket. It read “Wooly and Wily Video” and sported a gorilla with sunglasses cracking a video tape over a furry knee.
“Perfect. Let’s go to work,” he said.
“Real work this time,” she laughed, boxing at his lilywhite hands.
“Action!”
Larry was punching one of his actors in the ear, blood flowing freely from his own split lip all over again, and he was quickly realizing that you never pick a fight with a naked man. Naked people fight harder. Especially if they’re hard. Then they’re damn near invincible. He remembered something one of his gym teachers always said whenever they played Shirts versus Skins in basketball. It had something to do with being vulnerable:
“Skins always win!”
His gym teacher was right. The confusion of bodies in basketball made stripping down necessary, but Larry always wondered why someone didn’t try it in other sports, too. Skins in baseball, with all those cleats and bats, would mean victory guaranteed, right?
“What the fuck is going on here?!”
It was Stevey, the other producer, the one who signed Larry’s checks. He was holding the corner of his sunglasses, but he was too horrified to take them off. Joe Fuck had Larry pinned under one knee, rabbit-punching him in the forehead, fire-engine red cock and balls nodding in enthusiasm with every shot.
Larry shouldn’t have been surprised at his resolve. Joe Fuck always went the extra mile. “Mile” meaning “7 to 9 inches,” depending on the weather. Maybe not as big as some. Hell, some of his regular actors were so long that not only did they actually have that old gag about “Wendy” tattooed on their dicks, theirs started out saying, “Welcome to Jamaica and have a nice day,” but when erect read, “I wasn’t really welcome when I first came to Jamaica and I have no reason to go back, but there’s the thing, the weather is nicer during the weekend, although you’ll be fucking too much to notice on Monday through Friday.” Larry guessed they might still read “Wendy” if it was cold enough. Or windy. But God help you if Joe “gave you roses” when he was through, porn slang for inducing a prolapsed rectum.
Larry tried not to think about such things while he was under the guy, and eventually Glengarry and Stevey broke them up, dragging Joe outside to the pool to cool off and sending Head Breakfast over to Suzie to keep him up to at least quarter-mast. She was pulling double duty as the fluffer that week for the promise of an extra hundred bucks and two tickets to Gustavo Dudamel.
Larry plopped down Indian-legged on the floor, head pounding like a drum circle, a ridge of knuckle marks rising between his eyes like bread dough.
“Larry, what happened?”
He wanted to explain to Stevey that he didn’t know, that he’d just lost it. He wanted to tell him how he’d been setting up a shot that focused on the chest hair of Head Breakfast, since hair like that was rare for a porn set, with bodies so often waxed and oily like little sausage casings. In fact, it was H.B.’s uncontrollable pelt that pegged him as just two or three gigs from a regular Triassic Cock slot. But Larry had gotten lost looking through the lens at that hirsute motherfucker, looking for the gray, thinking about commitment, thinking about his ex-wife, thinking about how he should get a shot of Suzie running her fingers through all that gnarly shit with her engagement ring until they both got caught.
But instead he decided it was a good time to tell his producer how tattoos were ruining everything, especially ones with names. Stevey was sympathetic, up to a point anyway. But not when he got to the part about the names.
“What names, Larry?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“We’ve been through this before. There aren’t any…”
“Listen, I have to have some control over the reality of this film.”
“I know, I know, I know. Come on, I know what you’re talking about, Larry. You need a suspension of disbelief, right?”
“You mean a willful suspension.”
“Huh?”
“Everybody always fucks that up. A willful suspension of disbelief and truth sufficient. Big difference.”
“What?”
“A willful suspension.”
“Hey, can I get a willful suspension of my ball
s?” a pleading voice called out without an ounce of sarcasm.
“Larry, listen up. No one knows what the fuck you’re talking about with this tattoo stuff. Come on, we got cocks falling asleep over here, and...”
“Truth sufficient.”
“What?”
The sound man’s boom started to sag with everything else. Then something was ringing, and Stevey laid a palm on the huge portable telephone holstered to his belt like a six-shooter. They both knew who was calling. Stevey’s voice changed, and now he sounded like he was from Krypton, too.
“We’re burning time and money, and you still think you’re making a fuckin’ movie!”
Suddenly, Larry’s angry itch was back. He stormed back toward Stevey, scratching and scratching so hard that his fingernails started creasing the fabric of his shirt, gouging into his skin like he was tucking a sheet under mattress corners. Then he stopped, heart like a hummingbird, and rolled up a cuff to stare at the trenches he’d dug into his arms and the stains spreading on his clothes.
But the color was all wrong.
He moved under the Tungsten lamps to get a closer look. Underneath his sleeve was not so much the black-and-red ruin of blood and skin as he expected, but instead a strange blue jelly seeping from his pores, surrounded by angry red hives, like a Zen garden on each side of a river.
You can’t be around them that long or...
Bullshit. Sure, they fucked up their backs a lot. And, sure, this AIDS thing was hovering like a thunderhead every year, now that someone in the industry had finally been diagnosed and all fears were realized. They were calling AIDS “the new Ebola,” which was cool because the new acronym finally made sense. But it didn’t help that Reagan thought of it as a weapon. Plus there was the Hepatitis with that other dude last month. But as far as regular STDs, as far as anyone catching anything, it was unheard of these days.
But how about STTs…
Larry couldn’t prove it, but he knew the reason for their luck wasn’t because of any sudden awareness, or the big, new stash of rubbers on the sets. And it wasn’t because of mandatory testing either.
Larry was convinced it was because they’d long since fucked themselves immune.
“Truth sufficient, Stevey!” he shouted, shamefully covering the strange lesions on his arms. “It’s because these people are actual fucking. That’s what’s confusing everyone. Then you add the names? Forget about it. Maybe they should fake it!”
“Just get it done, man,” Stevey growled as he answered his giant phone. Damon’s voice jumped out of the speaker and bounced around the walls like someone had side-armed a tennis ball into a phone booth. A sound guy actually ducked.
Honestly, Damon was a lot easier to deal with since he started drinking. Behind his back, they called him Wild Bill Hiccup. A month back, Larry mistook Damon’s demand to “add more violence” for “add more violins,” and goddamn if Damon didn’t end up admitting it made the movie even better.
But today he was yelling, and Stevey dropped the phone when he flinched, and that’s about the time Suzie laughed and Head Breakfast’s testicle popped out of her mouth a little too fast. He doubled over in pain, and Glengarry flinched, too. He ran for the fridge before anyone had to say it.
“Get him some ice!”
“Get him an ambulance!”
“Get him some breakfast!”
“No, get it done!” Stevey shouted, trying in vain to muzzle a phone receiver wider than his palm.
Larry couldn’t wait until this was all over, when he could throw some more of Stevey and Damon’s money at his crew of hungry, horny moonlighters, for once paying them not to fuck, but to make a real movie in the middle of the night. Like it was his job.
“Planning a crime isn’t a crime, right?” one of them asked.
They had decided to build a neck bomb, just for fun. Just keep working on their scheme as long as they could pay attention. It would be their first secret.
“Uh, probably,” the other one answered, blowing on a slice of pizza. Then after a second, “No, I think it’s still a crime, dude.”
“How many times have you started something but never finished that shit?” It was dark in the car, but this was definitely her asking.
“Every single time,” he smiled, teeth shining.
“Why is that such a relief?” she laughed. “We aren’t really going to do anything, are we?” He didn’t answer.
“Hey, what was Bigbeat talking about with your driver’s license picture anyway?” he asked. “You never explained that sufficiently.”
“It’s an old trick. You stick your tongue out when they take the picture and it accomplishes two things. First, it’s disrespectful to the cop who’s reading it, and second, it makes your features distorted and less likely to be recognized if your records are ever pulled.”
“Do it right now,” he said.
“You do it.”
He stuck his tongue out and goddamn if she didn’t catch the end of it in her teeth like someone had thrown her a grape. Her mouth was salty, delicious.
“Revenge is a dish best served with extra pepperoni,” she whispered, kissing him some more. Then she bit.
For the first time in his life, Billy stopped his car in the middle of the highway. It was 4:00 a.m., no cars in sight, with his headlights shining on roads stained red forever with the comet trails of roadkill. They sat in silence, bouncing on the tires once or twice like a shipwreck on the rocks, and Billy waited for Bully to get scared. She never did.
Instead, she moved as close as she could, and they started playing some games, waiting to see how long they could idle there in the road before another car caught them. He felt beached, unable to move, tires replaced by a broken rudder scraping the stones, the sweat down his back like leaks in the hull.
She laughed and asked what happened. Asked if he was wearing one of those invisible-fence collars and had found the finish line. He shrugged and said he’d get zapped if he touched the gas. The he asked if she was “his.”
“Almost,” she told him, not ready to answer.
So he took her left hand and asked if he could have that instead. She said okay. Then he tapped her knee and asked if it was his, too. “Almost,” she said again.
He slipped a hand between her legs, felt a finger slip up to the knuckle in warmth before she squeezed. He thought he was long past “almost,” but she pushed him out easily without using her hands. Then she tortured him even more by unzipping his jeans and smiling at the red face peeking out to greet her. It shook, nervous and swollen. She thought it looked a lot like a toddler trying not to sneeze.
All his life, people told Billy he always got what he wanted. And it was mostly true. Billy usually got what he wanted, but he rarely got to keep it. He asked how far she’d go, said they had to hurry before there was another car. She wouldn’t answer.
“But tell me this,” she asked. “What’s really going on with your guy?”
“Who?” For a second, he thought she was talking about the boyfriend with the electric t-shirt.
“Officer Bigfeet. Why do you want to kill a cop so bad?”
“You mean scare a cop so bad.”
“Yeah, that.”
“I don’t know. Because I wasn’t ready to tell you those things about me when he pulled us over. Because he just read it all to you off my license. I can’t explain it. You ever read a story where they list too much stuff too early and you start skimming? That’s what happened to us yesterday. And you tuned out.”
“Why would you put accurate information on your fake I.D.?”
“It’s an art form.”
“You’re serious,” she said, backing off a bit, zipper clinking.
“I’m completely serious.”
“Listen, I’m sorry Officer Bigleak spilled the beans and ruined your imagined aura of mystery. But the mystery was kinda solved already.”
“No, it’s not that I want to remain mysterious. It’s you, too. I just don’t want to know too much
about you. Because I will never forget anything.”
“What does that even mean?” She was about a foot away from him now, and he wished he had a chair leg to grab.
“I have a perfect memory, but only with anything that in no way is helpful.”
“I’m lost.”
No kidding, he thought.
He tried to pull her close again, but a car was coming. He looked to the rear-view mirror at the approaching headlights, wincing as he tried to stretch a leg out for the gas pedal. He tried to shift his body quickly enough to line shit up for her hands again, but much like the architectural limitations of the museum that housed the Santa Maria, one of the worst disappointments of his childhood, he found his favorite stone-washed jeans painfully relegating him to half-mast.
“You’re more dangerous than you know,” he told her. “And I’m gonna prove it right now. I’m going to remind you of something that’s gonna freak you the fuck out.”
“Go ahead and try.”
“Remember when you were a baby, and you got your teeth. Then those teeth fell out and bigger teeth came in? Does anyone realize how goddamn strange that is? You’re an animal. We’re animals. Our childhood was motherfucking Shark Week.”
She got a little closer at that, but not close enough. He wanted her more than he wanted those headlights to stop growing. She sighed and zipped him back up, and he put his wrist to his ear, listening for a pulse or the tic of extra time to convince her.
His watch had stopped, but there was no doubt about it. His biological cock was ticking.
Then a big beep ruined everything.
The next day they were together, when they were trying to get Bigbeep’s attention, Billy’s car horn got stuck. They didn’t know it yet, but it would stay on for days.
A horn is an imperfect weapon.
This new development meant three things. First, angry looks from other cars. Second, they couldn’t get that close when they were following their cop. And third, they had to talk to each other that much louder.
The Last Projector Page 7
