Now Playing

by Ron Koertge

  She says, “The rest of us will make up questions using Wikipedia or Screen Rant. You two write your answers down and hold them up when we say to.”

  Conrad points at Colleen. “No input from her. I don’t trust her.”

  “I’m just the banker,” she says.

  The twins come up with the first question.

  “From The Lost Boys —” says Denise.

  And Danielle finishes, “— name any four principal actors.”

  I watch Conrad write fast and then hesitate. It doesn’t take me long. Then we wait.

  Colleen taunts him. “Any time in this century.”

  I eat another stuffed grape leaf. Conrad’s money still looks like a cud. It doesn’t mean anything to him. There’s always more where that came from.

  “Time’s up,” says A.J.

  Conrad pouts. “I’ve got three!”

  Colleen reminds him, “But to win you had to name four.” She looks at me. “Who are they, Ben?”

  “Jason Patric, Corey Feldman, Corey Haim, and Kiefer Sutherland. Among others like Jami Gertz and Dianne Wiest.”

  Colleen grabs for the cash. “Next?”

  The others huddle, then A.J. asks, “In Nosferatu, what was the vampire’s name, and who played him?”

  Conrad and I write fast.

  When A.J. asks, “Ready?” we both nod and show our answers: Count Orlok, played by Max Schreck.

  “Tie,” says Colleen, tossing out another bill. “Double or nothing.”

  More huddling. A.J. taps her iPhone a couple of times. Then she asks, “In Shadow of the Vampire, who played Max Schreck?”

  I can see Conrad’s pen poised over the lined notebook, and I know he doesn’t know. Shadow of the Vampire is a cool movie where the guy playing the vampire might really be a vampire.

  Colleen sinks into the couch and puts both arms along the back of it. Ed, her old boyfriend, used to sit like that, daring anybody to get even an inch into his space.

  Sometimes she stumbled around after Ed like one of Dracula’s pale brides, and he fed off her, in a way. In vampire lore it’s not necessarily blood they’re after. It’s life essence. And she’s got gallons of that.

  “Time,” says A.J.

  I hold up my notebook and say, “Willem Dafoe.”

  Conrad rips a blank sheet of paper out of his notebook and hurls it toward the windows.

  Colleen tosses out another twenty. “Tell me when you’ve had enough.”

  “Bite me,” Conrad snarls.

  “You wish.”

  I wear him down. He doesn’t even know Near Dark, a terrific Kathryn Bigelow film, but we tie with Love at First Bite. I get the question about Cronos, and we tie again with Horror of Dracula, a Hammer film with Christopher Lee and the great Peter Cushing.

  He doesn’t remember that Josh Hartnett was in 30 Days of Night and just freezes on From Dusk Till Dawn, the stupid Robert Rodriguez movie about a bar where the pole dancers are all vampires.

  And then he’s broke.

  Colleen stands up and tells me, “C’mon, baby. We’ve done all the damage we can do here.”

  At “baby,” A.J. does a classic double take. She’d clearly never thought of me as “baby” material before. Just a gimp with a limp who could still hold a camera.

  I hold out my good hand to Conrad. “That was fun.”

  He keeps his powerful mitts to himself. “I’d know all that useless bullshit, too,” he says, “if all I did was sit in my room all day.”

  I nod. “That’s how I did it.”

  A.J. follows Colleen and me to the door. “Not quite the evening I planned,” she says, “but that isn’t really a complaint.” She looks at Colleen. “Nice meeting you. Really. I mean it.”

  “I know you do. I’m an interesting person with many fine qualities. C’mon, Ben.”

  I wish A.J. wouldn’t watch me hobble all the way to the car, but she does, standing in the open door with the light behind her. I have to admit — she and Conrad make the perfect Abercrombie & Fitch couple.

  Colleen starts the car, then lets it idle while she digs around in her purse and finds a joint. Which she immediately fires up. So I ask, “Is this your idea of clean and sober?”

  “Lighten up,” she says. “Old Conrad didn’t know what hit him. You mopped the floor with his privileged ass.” She reaches, pulls me to her, and kisses me hard. Her breath is thick and smoky. “That kind of stuff gets me hot.”

  We make out in front of A.J.’s house for a few minutes. I wish everybody would come out and see us. I don’t want them to think I’m just the handicapped kid and Colleen’s my sexy attendant.

  But pretty soon, she puts the car in gear and we speed away.

  “You like A.J., don’t you?” she asks.

  “She’s nice. The last time anybody asked me to a party, I was five years old and I had to wear a pointy hat.”

  She says, “Guys like you don’t go to her private school. You know that, right?”

  “Gimps don’t?”

  “That’s right. Gimps don’t. She’s curious about you. But that doesn’t make you gimpalicious. That doesn’t mean you’re boyfriend material.”

  I like dueling with Colleen. Compared to her, Conrad was a walk in the park. I tell her, “I thought I was your boyfriend.”

  “That’s right. And don’t you forget it.”

  Colleen hangs a hard right and glides to a stop. The houses all around us are big and mostly dark. Only a light on here and there. Maybe a maiden with her window open, reading by candlelight, half afraid she’ll hear the rustle of wings and look up and there he’ll be.

  Colleen turns the engine off, lights another joint, leans against the door. Sprawls, actually. There are buttons on the front of her dress, and she undoes two of them. She tugs, then peers down. “Oh, my God. Forgetful old me. No bra.”

  I take out my camera and tell her, “Don’t move, okay? Don’t do anything else. You’re perfect.”

  “Give me your hand,” she says. “The sick one. He never gets any action.”

  I love the way the smoke looks pouring out of her nostrils, curling and making letters in the air I can almost recognize. She’s got one arm up over her head, the joint between two fingers.

  “C’mon, baby. What are you waiting for?”

  I can do it — get those maimed and innocent fingers over to her. And I can hold the camera, too. And it watches her lead that hand between the buttons and into her dress.

  “Can you feel that, Benjamin?”

  I nod, too dry-mouthed to really talk. But I manage to croak, “Yes.”

  She widens her eyes and delivers the next sentence like a mad scientist: “It’s alive. Alive, I tell you!” Then she laughs and pulls me toward her. Almost onto her, plenty close enough for her to get her hand in my hair and start kissing me.

  And that’s what we’re doing when a car pulls up behind us and a whirling red light makes the whole scene look like a bloodbath.

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, we’re sitting on a bench in the police station while the cops who brought us in joke around with each other and do paperwork. I’ve got my head in my hands. Colleen just takes everything in.

  “This place is a gold mine, Ben. I’ll go over and stand by the Wanted posters, and you take my picture.”

  I hiss at her, “You were smoking dope.”

  She shakes her head. “When they lit us up, I flicked that roach so far, it’s probably in Santa Monica. What are you thinking — that they’d find my DNA on it? No fucking way. They smelled a little ganja, and now they’re trying to scare us straight. All they’re really doing is calling your grandma.”

  “And your mom.”

  “That could take a while. She hasn’t exactly got her cell phone in her thong.”

  One of the cops comes over. He’s big, and the gear on his utility belt must weigh thirty pounds. There’s a pistol and a radio, pepper spray, a cell phone and a nightstick. He lets his left hand rest on the butt of his gun.

  “Offic
er,” Colleen says, “we want to confess. We’re guilty of desire. But we want to pay our debt to society, then lead upright lives from now on. Maybe buy a little mom-and-pop store, live upstairs and give the beat cops free coffee.”

  Officer Armstrong — he’s wearing a name tag — says to me, “Your girlfriend here’s got quite a mouth on her.”

  “That’s why he likes me, isn’t it, Ben?”

  The cop behind the desk says, “Ms. Minou. Step up here, please. We’re having trouble getting hold of your mother.”

  Officer Armstrong sits down beside me. “I guess I know what you’re doin’ with her, and I can’t say that I blame you. That dress of hers is something else — what there is of it. But she looks like trouble to me, son. You’re a pretty clean-cut kid. She’s the pothead.”

  I like the way he’s talking to me, too. Man-to-man. Not man-to-spaz. He doesn’t ask me how I manage to have a girlfriend like Colleen with only half of me in good working order.

  Just then Grandma comes through the front door. She’s in cashmere, as usual. Something dark to set off the pallor, because I’ve never seen her look so washed out.

  Officer Armstrong goes right to her with his hand out. Grandma takes it and holds on. I hear him say, “He’s fine.”

  “I knew I could count on you.”

  Oh, crap. So it wasn’t man-to-man. They’re in this together. She’s got him in her pocket. He’ll say whatever she wants him to say.

  Grandma turns to the desk sergeant. “Is there anything you need me to sign?”

  He shakes his head. “He’s learned his lesson, Mrs. Bancroft. We won’t be seeing him in here again.”

  She motions for me. “Benjamin, let’s go home.”

  “C’mon, Colleen.”

  Grandma’s voice could quick-freeze vegetables. “That girl is not going anywhere with us, Benjamin. She’s got a mother.”

  “We’re just going to drop her off. Her mother’s working.”

  Grandma takes hold of my wrist. “Come along, Benjamin. My patience is wearing thin.”

  I look at Colleen helplessly.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she says icily. “I can take care of myself.”

  On Monday, I wait outside her English class, but she doesn’t show. At noon, she’s not in the cafeteria. I’m too nervous to eat, so I look in the Pit and by the candy machines. I ask a couple of stoners and then this skate punk who used to hang around with Ed. Nobody’s seen her.

  And then, right after French, there she is. Different clothes from Saturday night, so I know she’s been home. She’s carrying this ugly purse that’s black-and-white and covered with some kind of coarse hair. It’s made out of somebody’s pony, I swear to God.

  “Well,” she says, getting right in my face, “if it isn’t Mr. Chickenshit.”

  She swings that purse at me. I block with my good arm, lose my balance, and go down onto the polished linoleum.

  “What’d I do?”

  The hall goes dead quiet. Everybody watches.

  “It’s what you didn’t do, Benjamin. It’s three o’clock in the morning before the cops figure out my mom’s never coming. I thought I was your girlfriend. Why didn’t you stay with me?” Colleen hits me again, and I curl up. “Jesus Christ, Ben. I finally meet one guy I think I can trust just a little, and look what happens.” She wields that hideous purse like an ax. One blow for every word. “Nobody plays me, Ben. Nobody.” Then she starts to swing wildly. “Why don’t you take a picture of this, you cold-hearted bastard?”

  And she doesn’t stop whaling away at me until some teacher comes storming out of his classroom, gets both arms around her waist, and literally carries her away, kicking and screaming.

  Colleen gets suspended and sent to Alternative School. Dumbbell High. Bad Girl Academy. Vice-principals almost never punish the handicapped, but Grandma puts me in solitary. The Hole. Carpeted and air-conditioned, but I’m totally alone. She and I don’t even eat together. I’ve never seen her so mad.

  A week goes by. Not a word from Colleen. Grandma thaws out a milliliter at a time. We don’t talk about what happened, but we do talk. A little, anyway.

  On Friday, A.J. e-mails and wants to go to the Rialto, but I tell her there’s no way. So she calls Grandma, says how her mom knows Grandma from some board or other. Says she needs to talk to me about this documentary she’s thinking of making. Couldn’t I get a pass for just one afternoon?

  The next day I’m dressed and in the living room, waiting for A.J. like I used to wait for Colleen. Grandma glides up beside me. It’s weird to see her mad like a regular parent. I was always such a good boy. And then I met You-Know-Who.

  “Home by six o’clock, Benjamin, and not a minute after.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “If anything happens, I want you to call me.”

  “Nothing will happen. We’re just going to the movies, and then maybe Buster’s. That’s it. Thanks for letting me do this. Really.”

  She picks an invisible piece of lint off my shirt. This is her way of saying she’s not totally steamed anymore. Grandma was never much of a toucher. When I was little, she would read to me, then tuck me in and almost kiss me good night. Half an inch away. A quarter. Three millimeters. Never all the way.

  Colleen was a toucher. Colleen went all the way and a little past that.

  Grandma says, “I just want you to know that I am still this far from taking your camera away.” Her thumb and forefinger are half an inch apart.

  “I understand. And I don’t blame you. It won’t happen again. Nothing like that will ever happen again.”

  I see Marcie across the street, down on her knees in front of a palm tree.

  “Can I go over and say hi?” I ask. “A.J. can just pull into her driveway.”

  “I still want to meet this young woman.”

  “Sure. Absolutely.”

  Waiting at the curb, I look both ways like a good boy. Marcie sees me coming, stands up, and brushes at her pants.

  “Did you have to dig your way out?” she asks.

  “So you know what happened.”

  “Mrs. B. came over.”

  “I really screwed up.”

  She taps the trowel against the palm, then rubs at it. “Rite of passage. The road to adulthood goes directly through a police station, followed by a dark and dangerous forest.”

  “I just left Colleen sitting there in that stupid police station. She’s never going to talk to me again.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do, too. She would’ve said so, but she was busy hitting me with her purse.”

  “I threw a Calphalon saucepan at my first husband and talked to him an hour later.”

  I take a step closer. “I had a girlfriend, Marcie. A real girlfriend. She trusted me, and I let her down.”

  “You’ll know better next time.”

  “She hates me. I’m never going to see her again.”

  “I meant with somebody else.”

  “Oh, yeah. Girls are lined up around the block. They just can’t wait to take long limps on the beach with me.”

  Marcie glances up the street. “Mrs. B. said you were going out with some friends. Maybe you’ll just do that for a while. Not everybody has a partner.”

  “You don’t understand. I wouldn’t have these friends without Colleen. She made me feel like I was just another guy, maybe with a few problems, but basically okay. If it wasn’t for her, I couldn’t even have talked to them. I’d have thought, What do they want with me? I’m nobody.”

  “Colleen didn’t help you make a movie, Ben. You did that on your own. And it was terrific. People loved it. They loved you.”

  “You helped me with High School Confidential. You told me I was special and talented and all that. But you’re a grown-up. Grown-ups say stuff like that to kids.” I pointed to my heart. “But Colleen made me feel it.”

  Marcie walks right up and puts her arms around me. Holds on for a couple of seconds. Pats me hard. Lets me go
. Says softly, “Talk to me about your next movie.”

  I have to swallow hard before I can say, “It’s called The Adventures of Colleen the Cat.”

  “Because she always lands on her feet, right? Nice title. How far along are you?”

  “I don’t know. Three or four scenes, maybe. But that’s all there’ll ever be.”

  “Want to show me?”

  “My friends are supposed to be here.”

  “I don’t see any friends. What are we waiting for?”

  I get across the street and back in four minutes. Not bad for a spaz. We don’t even go inside. Marcie just finds a shady spot in her yard. She holds my little camera and I watch over her shoulder.

  She starts with Colleen in bed. My bed. Then that scene at the Norton Simon Museum when she melted down, the night at A.J.’s with Conrad and the other kids, and after that when we were parked.

  Marcie sits back. “How did you get that part where you were making out? I mean, you’ve got one hand in her shirt, but you’re still holding the camera.”

  “I’ve got two hands, or a hand and a half. Basically I wanted the shot.”

  “And she was okay with that?”

  “You know Colleen. She’s kind of an exhibitionist, anyway.”

  Marcie frowns. “My guess is that men have used Colleen all her life. Now you’re using her, too.”

  “I was making a movie about her. I can’t do that if she isn’t in it. It’s not like I’m forcing her to do anything.”

  “And you think she knows what’s really in her best interest?”

  I point at the camera. “There’s good stuff in there. That scene with her at A.J.’s party is terrific, and the part where she’s half asleep in my bedroom and the light is coming in. She’s sexy and gorgeous. It’s not like I’m making her look ugly.”

  Marcie nods. “Those are well done. I agree.”

  “But you think I shouldn’t be doing it.”

  Marcie rubs her face with both hands. “I wonder sometimes what Colleen would be like if somebody just loved her and didn’t want anything from her.”

  Just then, a red Honda CR-V pulls up in front of the house.

  “Go on,” Marcie says. “Have a good time. We can talk about this later if you want.”