The Fourth Wall

by Williams, Walter Jon

  I try not to think of the expression on Master Pak’s face. He was so humiliated by my performance that he couldn’t even look at me. The guy was born in the States but is still Asian enough to be turned to stone by the colossal loss of face.

  Christ almighty, I’ve just had my ass handed to me by a brainless loser like Jimmy Blogjoy. Who’s the fuckwit now?

  First thing tomorrow, I decide, I’m going to fire my agent.

  I wash the cottage cheese out of my ears and my pubic hair, then stalk into the locker room. The cheap towel they’ve given me is about the size of a dishrag, and beads of water are still clinging to my skin as I pull on my clothes. The briny taste of cottage cheese hangs in the back of my throat.

  I step to the sink and look into the mirror as I comb my hair carefully over my balding scalp. In the merciless light over the sink I look more freakish even than usual.

  Here I am, I think, twenty-nine years old. For years I’ve been working hard to regain some of the love and respect that I possessed when I was at my peak.

  My peak, when I was thirteen.

  Whoooooo…

  Dimly, above me somewhere in the arena, I can hear the crowd still cheering. Only they’re no longer cheering for me.

  I can’t get any lower than this, I think. The humiliation is complete, the self-respect has completely drained away. Maybe it’s time to give it up. Just walk away, and find something else to do with my life.

  I look at myself in the mirror, the huge balding head with the large brown eyes.

  What? I think. And give up show business?

  Then I take my bag and walk off into the night.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HEAVY LUGGAGE BLOG

  I get emails asking what method—or Method—I use when acting.

  I don’t have any problems with the Method, or whatever other techniques my peers use to jump-start their performances. What I use myself can’t be considered a method, because it’s too diverse.

  I’m a self-taught actor. I was in front of the camera for years of my life, and I found out what worked for me through trial and error.

  I’ve had acting lessons. I’ve worked with some rather well-known coaches. The lessons were interesting, but they didn’t make me a better actor. I think I’d already found my way.

  Controlling show-biz parents insist that their children are only playing in front of the cameras, a falsehood that enables the parents to take sole credit for their kids’ achievements. Even as a child, I knew this was more than just pretending or playing. I knew there was craft involved, and I knew this was work. Fortunately I had a number of extremely good directors, like Tony McCain and the young Joey da Nova, who worked with me very carefully. They cared enough to teach a child, and they knew how to teach me, which a lot of grown-ups didn’t.

  Sometimes I just know the character right away. Brent Schuyler on Family Tree was me, pretty much, only smarter and funnier. Playing a character you know forward and backward is criminally easy.

  For characters I don’t know instinctively, I try to use imagination to build a character. Even if it’s a minor part without a backstory, I’ll construct a whole biography for the character. I’ll try to work out what the character wants, what is frustrating those desires, what schemes the character might have to achieve his goals. Usually none of that is found in the script, and if it is, it never ends up in the final cut—but knowing it helps me find the character.

  I’ve played a serial killer. I don’t know firsthand what it’s like to be in a serial killer’s head, so imagination was important in building that character. I collaborated with the director, the late Mac MacCartney, on the character’s biography, on all the things that made him tick. The character’s biography wasn’t actually in the film, but I’d like to think that you can see it in my performance.

  Of course I’m lucky enough to have an imagination. Some people don’t, and they’ve got to employ some other way to find a character. There are systems for that, and they all work for the people they work for.

  I’m also asked for recommendations for acting teachers. Since even the best seem to have made little impression on me, I can’t really make any recommendations. Ask around.

  Or…what the hell…hire me. I’ll be your personal acting coach! Just a couple thousand a week, and you’re on your way to greatness and fame!

  Comments (0)

  INT. SEAN’S CONDO—DAY

  My first agent, whom I’d had since I was five, fired me when I was seventeen, saying I didn’t have a career left. My second agent fired me a couple years later for the same reason. I fired my third agent myself, after she covered her windows with black paint and refused to leave her house.

  Cleve Baker is my fourth agent. He’s the best agent I could find, which means he’s the sort of agent anyone can find. He has contacts on the lower rungs of the show business ladder: game shows, voice work, infomercials, reality television. Nude modeling, but not for people who look like me.

  People higher on the ladder generally don’t return his phone calls. But then they don’t return mine, either.

  Cleve works alone in a little office on the third floor of a building in West Hollywood. He used to have a secretary but she walked and he never replaced her.

  The only advantage to this arrangement is that I can always get him on the phone.

  I call him the next morning. I’m lying on the old couch in my sad little condo in Burbank, and my skull is still aching from the pounding it got at Jimmy Blogjoy’s hands. My left hand hurts from delivering my useless punches and my back is wrenched in half a dozen places from my attempts to escape Jimmy’s clutches. My coffee table is strewn with match stubs and marijuana seeds and a small pool of bong water, because when I got home I got completely chewed in hopes of being able to forget what had just happened to me.

  The apartment smells as if a dozen old hippies had died in the middle of the living room, and the back of my throat feels as if a brush fire had raged there for several hours.

  I don’t mind. It’s better than the lingering taste of cottage cheese.

  “Baker and Baker,” Cleve answers. So far as I know, there’s never been another Baker in his firm, but he thinks it sounds better if he has a partner.

  “This is Sean,” I say.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I feel like I’ve had the crap beaten out of me,” I say. “How the hell am I supposed to fucking feel?”

  “I heard it didn’t go well,” Cleve says.

  “That’s an understatement,” I say. “Did you hear about the fucking cottage cheese?”

  I’ve got to work my anger here. I know that I can’t fire Cleve unless I’m angry.

  Truth is, I don’t know if I’ll be able to get a better agent. With Cleve I’ve at least been able to earn a living.

  “Yes, they told me about the cottage cheese,” Cleve says.

  “Fucking…cottage…cheese,” I repeat. I’ve got to keep that anger stoked.

  “The show’s regularly beating NBC on Tuesdays.”

  “My cleaning lady dancing the Macarena in a gorilla suit,” I say, “could beat NBC on Tuesdays.”

  Cleve decides to shrug it off. “Well, whatever,” he says. “It was a bad call.”

  Too many bad calls lately, Cleve. That’s what I’m about to say, but he gets a word in ahead of me.

  “I got a call this morning asking about you. Somebody wants you for a feature.”

  My anger fades very rapidly.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “A woman named Dagmar Shaw is producing. I never heard of her—have you?”

  I search my memory and find nothing but the drifting clouds of a marijuana hangover. “I don’t think so.”

  “I looked her up,” Cleve says, “and she’s got some credits—games, mostly.”

  “And she’s going into features?”

  “That’s what she tells me.”

  A predator growls somewhere deep in my Cro-Magnon back-brain. I sit up, i
gnoring the sudden pain in my spine.

  What Cleve just told me was that someone who has made money elsewhere is now getting into the motion picture business. That means exactly one thing: Hollywood is going to take her money, and then take some more, and then go on taking until there is nothing left. It happens to every outsider, no matter how savvy, from Joe Kennedy to William Randolph Hearst to Edgar Bronfman, all so dazzled by the bright lights that they never noticed their pockets were being picked. Or didn’t care, because they were willing to hand over a fortune to be in the most glamorous business on Earth.

  The process of shaking down strangers for all their money is routine and, as far as I’m concerned, inevitable. The main question, therefore, is not whether this Dagmar person is going to lose her money, but how much of this lost fortune is going to go to me.

  “What kind of part?” I ask.

  “The lead.”

  I jump up from the couch and do a little dance, then wince with sudden pain. In the process of losing all her money, Dagmar Shaw might well do me a lot of good.

  “I got offered the lead in a feature,” I say, “and you didn’t call?”

  Cleve’s tone is cynical. “I never heard of her. The call came out of nowhere, and I get bullshit calls all the time. I was going to do some checking before I got your hopes up.”

  “Am I going to have to audition?”

  “She didn’t say. She wants to meet you in person, though.”

  I grin. “Set it up.”

  “I’ll call her.”

  “Did she mention the budget?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can I get a copy of the script?”

  “I asked. She said she wants to interview first.”

  “Well,” I say, “we’d better interview.”

  Cleve says he’ll call her back, and when the call’s over I run to my computer to look up Dagmar Shaw.

  She turns out to be a real person, and her wiki shows that she’s got a long history in the game industry, producing something called “Alternate Reality Games,” or ARGs, for her own company, Great Big Idea.

  I’ve played video games all my life, but I’ve never played an ARG. One of my friends, Julian Jackson, did some acting for an ARG once, and I make a note to call him.

  The wiki features a long list of games produced by Dagmar, along with extensive quotes from their glowing reviews. Most of the games seem to be archived somewhere, which will allow me to check them out.

  It’s some of the later items in Dagmar’s personal history that send my eyebrows crawling toward my hairline. A few years ago, several of her friends were killed in a series of shootings and bombings. The wiki’s cautious report of this isn’t very forthcoming, but an online search produces a number of other articles, all of which contradict one another. There is a determined minority that insists no one actually died, and that all the murders were part of an online game—but on the other hand I remember the bombing of the Hotel Figueroa, and the hysteria about whether Los Angeles had been the scene of a terrorist incident, and I know that was real. And there are also links to original news stories from the period—and unless Dagmar managed to hoax a lot of major news organizations, those killings were clearly not a game.

  A few years later, the wiki informs me, Dagmar was apparently hired by the rock star Ian Attila Gordon to overthrow a foreign government. Dagmar was accused of being a terrorist. I sure as hell remember the fuss over that, especially when the coup actually took place, and Attila paraded in triumph past thousands of cheering, recently liberated citizens all waving CDs of his latest album.

  There were serious plans to make a film based on these events, with Attila playing himself and doing the film score. I think the movie got stuck in development, because I haven’t heard anything about it in a couple years.

  I sit in front of my computer and contemplate the job that may be on offer. In the past I’ve worked for alcoholics, drug addicts, pedophiles, thieves, con men, and megalomaniacs.

  I’ve never worked for a terrorist before. But this is a terrorist with money and the offer of a job.

  And I can understand, from personal experience, how your friends can end up dead, and how it can be your fault, but not really, because you didn’t mean to do anything bad.

  Working for Dagmar seems morally justifiable to me.

  INT. SEAN’S CONDO—NIGHT

  The only news that I watch is the entertainment news. I turned on a news channel later that day and the news was all about the deteriorating climate and the riots in Seoul and the genocide in Fiji.

  I couldn’t figure out how there got to be a genocide in Fiji. Isn’t it supposed to be an island paradise?

  Fortunately I was able to change the channel before the talking heads could get to even more depressing news, and there was the entertainment news, cheerfully floating the rumor of an Andalusian God reunion.

  And then Julian showed up with a baggie of weed, and all was well.

  “Okay,” Julian says. “Imagine a movie—or a novel—that’s online.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  Julian pushes his glasses back up his nose. “But it’s not all at one location. It’s hidden all over the place, and you have to find it.”

  I picture this. “How?” I ask.

  “You follow clues, or solve puzzles. Or sometimes a fictional person will call your cell phone and tell you to do something, and you need to do it.”

  I try to process this.

  “See,” Julian says, “it’s interactive. You can’t just log off and go about your business. The game sort of follows you into real life.”

  I’m not enlightened. Julian is describing the alternate reality game he worked on, and I’m having a hard time working my mind around it.

  Julian looks down at the bong in his hands, which he’s packing with the product he’s brought with him. “This is dank bud, man,” he says. “It’s as good as any Amsterdam shit, I swear.”

  I’ve known Julian for a long time, and he’s part of my circle of former child stars. Julian’s fame hit its peak when he was about five, and he did a series of commercials for Nissan in which he played a cute-but-annoying kid pacified by an SUV backseat video screen. Afterward he starred in a sitcom modeled after Family Tree, but it lasted only half a season. After that he guested on my show a few times, which is how I know him.

  The cute little red-haired kid is now an avocado-shaped adult with a bristly mustache and glasses with heavy black rims. He’s still got the mop of red hair. He’s earning a decent living as a character actor, and has a steady trade playing accountants, deceived husbands, murder victims, sidekicks, red herrings, and innocent, innocuous bystanders who inexplicably get swept up in the action. He’s doing a lot better than I am, but then he looks a lot less freaky than I do.

  I decide to give up trying to figure out how ARGs work.

  “Did you ever meet Dagmar Shaw?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “I worked for one of her competitors,” he said. “They respected her.”

  I nod. “That’s good.”

  “They said that whatever you do, you shouldn’t piss her off.” He gives me a quick, mischievous look through his thick glasses. “She’ll bomb your car, man.”

  I give a laugh. “My car? She’s welcome to it.” Then I see how he’s looking at me, and my laughter dies away. “You made that up, right?” I ask.

  “No,” Julian says. “I didn’t.”

  He’s sitting in my easy chair, which is covered with an India-print throw to disguise the fact that it’s held together with duct tape. My own butt is dropped into my sagging couch, likewise covered by a throw.

  There isn’t much to say about my condo. The carpet is beige, the walls are pastel, and the ceiling is that glittery spray-on popcorn that was everywhere in the seventies, ages before I was even born. The framed movie posters on the walls are sort of interesting. I haven’t put up posters from my own films, because I don’t want to remember most of them.

  Julian han
ds me the bong and reaches for the green plastic lighter on the coffee table. My back gives a twinge as I lean toward him.

  “It’s showtime,” Julian says, and flicks the lighter.

  FADE TO:

  THE SAME—FIVE HOURS LATER

  Julian and I have got into a habit of meeting every few weeks, getting fried, and watching movies. My condo might be a cheap-ass piece of cardboard destined to be condemned after the next earthquake, and my car may have belonged to my mother before she surrendered her material possessions and went into the ashram, but my flat-screen TV gleams with gemlike brilliance, my sound system is powerful enough to raise the Gettysburg dead, and my film collection rivals that of the Smithsonian.

  Lately I’ve become fascinated by the films of the 1970s. Back then, the leads didn’t have to be beautiful—ordinary-looking people like Gene Hackman, Walter Matthau, Al Pacino, and Dustin Hoffman could become big stars. All they needed was talent.

  I’ve become a particular fan of Gene Hackman, so tonight we watch him in two pictures, Night Moves and Scarecrow, the latter of which also costars Pacino. Hackman is brilliant all the way through, in roles that are very different. Pacino is top form. Richard Lynch and the young James Woods and a very young Melanie Griffith are also memorable.

  I look at Julian over the half-full bowl of popcorn and the Amstel empties. I am practically swooning with admiration.

  “These movies break all the rules,” I say. “The heroes aren’t supermen. They aren’t even beautiful. None of the guys has a six-pack. And the endings are complete downers.”

  “Which is why they tanked,” Julian points out.

  “Scarecrow didn’t tank. It was a major motion picture.”

  Julian waves a dismissive hand. “It didn’t do brilliantly or anything, I bet. If it had done a ton of box office, I would have heard of it before now.”

  The double feature still has me on a high. “Did you see how long those two-shots lasted?” I ask. “Some of them must have gone a couple, three minutes. Just the two of them talking.”