“Boring.” The hand-wave again.
“Boring? It’s acting. It’s great acting.” I reach for my Amstel. “You know,” I say, “the women aren’t beautiful, either. Jennifer Warren is good-looking, okay, but she’s not drop-dead gorgeous.”
“But she’s attractive,” Julian says. “And even if Al and Gene don’t look like male models, they’re still attractive men.” Julian, by the way, is a victim of the Hollywood disease where you refer to everyone by their first names, whether you know them or not. He looks at me. “They’re better looking than I am. All the stars are.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “A better haircut and some contact lenses, and you could be at least as good-looking as Danny Bonaduce.”
“Fuck you,” he laughs, then grows serious again. “Fact is, we both lost the genetic lottery.”
“In the seventies—” I begin.
He looks at me levelly. His glassy pupils seem enormous behind the thick lenses.
“A time machine won’t save you,” he says. “You are who you are.”
“Julian,” I say. “I know who I am.”
“Sean,” Julian says, “you know I’ve done a hundred things more important than being that kid in the Nissan commercial.”
Name three, I want to say.
Fact is, I know far too much about him. He left the business and went to college, but dropped out and went back into the business. He was married just long enough for the wife to take all his money in the divorce. He has a reputation for reliability and he works steadily, but none of his parts are memorable. Over the years he’s been a Buddhist and a Catholic and a kabbalist and a pothead. Only the pothead stuck.
He still drives a Nissan. Maybe brand loyalty counts for something.
There is a moment of silence. He plays with the green cigarette lighter while he stares at me, and then he looks down at his hands.
“How’s Mister Baby Head?” he asks.
“The heirs are still in litigation.” My only starring role as an adult, and the producer/director had to go and die without a will. His partners were wrangling in the courts with his ex-wives, his adult children, and a trustee appointed to represent his minor children.
And all the while my performance was sitting in the can, unseen by the world, the whole project worth less and less with every deposition, every motion, every appeal.
“Well,” Julian says. “That sucks.” He sighs and holds up his baggie. “Want some more moon juice before I go?”
“Yeah.”
He packs the bowl, lights up, and I suck in a power hit. My head spins. I hold the smoke in my lungs so long that when I exhale, only a few wisps come out.
Gene Hackman gives me a pitying look from the big flatscreen. I think of Master Pak turning away from me in the locker room, too mortified to speak; and how my agents fired me, and then how I got fired by my family.
I take a swallow of beer to wash away the phantom taste of cottage cheese from my throat. I look at Julian.
“Taking a hit yourself?”
“No. Driving.” He puts the baggie in a pocket, then rises from his armchair. “There’s this thing called Our Reality Network,” he says.
“There’s what?” I’m not tracking him at all.
“For ARGs,” he says. “I’ll send you the URL.”
I show him to the door and then step out onto my postage-stamp lawn to take a breath of fresh air. There’s a faint frangipani scent to the gentle night.
I think about Hackman’s character in Night Moves, the baffled, affable detective so completely unsuited to grope his way through the Hollywood labyrinth, through all the players who so completely fucked him over.
I’m not like that, I decide. I grew up here. I know exactly who’s going to screw me over, and when.
My chief hope is that, if I just hang on long enough, I can get in a position to screw them all right back.
INT. SEAN’S BEDROOM—MORNING
I flail out of sleep to my cell’s ring tone, a feminine shriek I sampled from a horror movie soundtrack. I throw myself out of bed, surfing on a surge of adrenaline, then experience a moment of blinding pain as I stub my toe on a steel dumbbell. Hopping, cursing, I find my phone on the charging stand and answer.
“Help me! Help me, oh God help me!” Panic quavers through the woman’s voice.
“What?” I’m beyond confusion. Pain shrieks through my toe. “Who is this?”
“He’s dead! He’s lying here dead! What do I do?”
My mind totters in disarray. It can’t help jumbling this terrified woman with the woman who just screamed, even though if I were on top of things I’d remember the screaming woman is just the voice from my ring tone.
“Who is this?” I ask. I make a blind thrust into the shadows of my past. “Is this Melissa?”
“It’s Doctor Dexter! Dexter’s dead! What do I do?”
I don’t know anyone named Dexter. Words stumble across my thick tongue.
“I think you have the wrong number,” I say. “I think you should call the police.”
“Oh my God, someone killed Dexter! He’s lying next to the pool!”
By now my brain is beginning to fumble at reality. There’s something about the name Dexter that prods a memory.
The woman wails on in my ear. “There’s a gun! Dexter has a gun in his hand! Should I take it away from him?”
“Aw, shit,” I say aloud.
It’s a game. A freaking game. And the woman on the phone is a recording, and nothing I say to her makes any difference.
Julian sent me the URL for Our Reality Network, and yesterday, just to try to make sense of my possible employer, I subscribed to one of the alternate reality games. In it there is a scientist named Lyle Dexter who had gone missing.
My guess is that someone has just found him.
Sometimes a fictional person will call your cell phone… The game sort of follows you into real life. It’s not as if Julian hadn’t told me what was going to happen.
I bend over and massage my aching toe as the telephone woman continues her hysterics. Now that I know it’s an act, I begin to admire the performance.
She’s an absolute pro, I have to give her that. It’s hard to keep that pitch of hysteria for so long, particularly if you’re using just voice.
The phone call ends with the hysterical woman giving an address—which if I were a dedicated player, alert and experienced, I’d know to scribble down. As it is, I just put the phone back on the charger, scratch my armpit, and limp out onto my balcony.
There’s no weather at all, which makes it a typical LA day. Midmorning California sun diffuses from a featureless opalescent sky. Palm trees stake out the horizon. My hibachi rusts under the overhang next to a half-empty sack of charcoal. Somewhere I hear the machine-gun sound of a diesel engine-braking. I don’t see a single human being, but I see two coyotes sniffing around a plastic garbage can that someone’s left at the curb.
If it weren’t for the sound of the diesel, you could mistake the scene for one of those movies where everyone dies, and the cities slowly revert to nature.
But no. It’s LA, where everyone I know in the business is far more dangerous than those coyotes ever will be.
In a couple hours I’ll be having my lunch meeting with Dagmar Shaw. I’ll have to tell her that one of her games got me out of bed thinking that someone had been murdered.
Or maybe I won’t. Maybe, I thought, she hears that all the time.
I realize that I’m overthinking the meeting. It’s too important.
The lead. In a feature. That possibility hasn’t existed for me since I was sixteen. Even in Mister Baby Head, I was the title character but not the lead.
I step back into the bedroom and consider the dumbbell that I kicked on my way to the phone. It rolled out of its place, and I nudge it back under the dresser.
I consider doing my workout before the meeting. I used to belong to a health club before money problems forced me to quit, and since then I’ve lea
rned to enjoy pumping iron at home, first thing in the morning, or running on a secondhand treadmill while watching an old movie on my television. Used exercise equipment, it turns out, is a lot cheaper than a membership in a club.
I work out nearly every day. Actors need to stay in good shape, particularly in these days when taut abdomens and tight glutes are more important than ability.
But today I don’t have the time. I shower, dress for the meet—blue polo top, cream-colored slacks—then go downstairs to make coffee. While drinking the coffee and eating half a bagel, I go online and check the entertainment news, and there I find out about Dickie Marks’s getting into porn.
Dickie is a few years younger than me. He starred in the hour-long family drama Hooks & Ladders, in which he played Benjamin Hooks, the troubled son of a firefighter disabled on 9/11. The series was set in Queens, but of course shot in the parts of Los Angeles deemed by the camera to best resemble New York. For three years in a row he was nominated for an Emmy. I think he won a Golden Globe.
But after Hooks & Ladders, nothing. I can’t figure out why—Dickie had shown he could act, he was good-looking, he was devoted to his craft, and he remained unattached to any scandals involving sex, drugs, or alcohol. But barring a few guest shots and some theater, he’d stayed unemployed for a decade.
Now he has lent his talent to a porno, using the name Dick Rampant. I can’t believe it. Did he really think that no one would recognize him?
What a miserable tool.
I have his private number on speed dial, and in an act of pure sharklike sadism I get my phone and call. It goes straight to voice mail. I’m not surprised that he’s hiding out.
“This is Sean,” I say. “Dude. What the fuck?”
If the public remembers Dickie at all, it remembers him as the thirteen-year-old on Hooks & Ladders. And—barring a few genuinely disturbed fans—nobody wants to see that kid having sex! Not even after he’s grown.
Plus we should consider the puritanical refusal of Middle America, which consumes billions of dollars’ worth of porn every year, to forgive porn actors their sins.
Dickie has managed to get into a dead-end job and alienate what remained of his fan base all at the same time.
“For chrissake,” I say, “you’ve got to get ahead of the story somehow. Say you were on drugs or something.” Inspiration strikes. “Or tell them you were looking for love.”
That would be a new one, I think.
“Anyway,” I finish, “call me if you want to talk.”
I end the call and for the first time I feel better about appearing on Celebrity Pitfighter. At least I’m not Dickie Marks’s kind of loser. At least I haven’t totally lost my mind.
I put the phone in its cradle, then go back online. I avoid browsing anywhere I can find out about the reception of my episode of Celebrity Pitfighter, which was broadcast last night.
I accept humiliation as part of the job. But I don’t want to wallow in it.
CHAPTER THREE
HEAVY LUGGAGE BLOG
If you saw tonight’s episode of Celebrity Pitfighter, you’ll know that I lost to Jimmy Blogjoy fifty-seven seconds into the first round. I can’t say that I’m happy about this.
I’d like to think that it was all the fault of the cottage cheese. If we’d been sloshing around in chicken noodle soup, I’m convinced that I would have done a lot better.
This loss puts me out of the running for Grand Champion, so you won’t be seeing me in the ring again.
I’m honored to have been given the chance to participate in this year’s tourney, and I wish Jimmy the best of luck. I’d like to thank Master Pak for all his good advice, and all the other teachers who gave of their time and expertise.
I had a great time! Thanks for watching!
Comments (65)
FROM: MaddHaxx
You COMPLETELY sucked! You hit like a little girl!
FROM: HorNyArTie
LMAO when you went dwn for 2nd time. Yoru a pussy, Makin!
FROM: Jaxon31
Blogjoy sez URA fagit!
FROM: Krumble
Kick your ass hahaha
FROM: Verminus
Very interesting. You have an excellent blog. If you’re interested in getting a good rate for auto insurance, please contact me at your earliest convenience.
FROM: HvyMtl
Pathetic. Next time bring a howitzer.
INT. SEAN’S BATHROOM—DAY
Before the interview I walk into the bathroom to give myself a pep talk. I stare into the mirror, and the Watcher stares back at me.
The Watcher is a character from Marvel Comics, a member of an alien species dedicated to the acquisition of knowledge. He’s lived for millions of years on the Blue Area of the moon, where he observes the Earth, takes lots of notes, practices austerity, and occasionally issues a cryptic warning to the Fantastic Four that a cosmic menace is on the way.
He’s very tall, he’s got a huge bald head, and he’s got weird all-white eyes with no irises.
I look just like the Watcher, except that my eyes are larger and prettier, and he looks better than I do in a toga.
I resemble the Watcher because I have a condition called pedomorphosis. Basically it means that while the rest of my body has aged normally, my head has retained the features of an infant’s. Plus my head is really, really huge.
When I was a kid the condition made me cute. I had a big head with huge brown eyes, and my extra-babyish features vastly increased my audience appeal. I always looked younger than my actual age—when I was fifteen I looked twelve or thirteen, all boyish and fuzzy-cheeked, and this hugely increased the number of tween girls who adored me, and massively enhanced my odds of getting sex.
But by sixteen, I was beginning to look a little odd. My dad put it down to an awkward teen growth spurt. By the time I was seventeen, I was two inches over six feet tall and was beginning to look freakish, like a sinister bobblehead doll leering unexpectedly at you from the dashboard of someone’s car.
By the time I was eighteen, it was all over. I looked like something stitched together by Victor Frankenstein, I had no work, my fans had turned away or forgotten me, and my parents had run off with my money.
Even my stalkers deserted me, including the middle-aged grade-school teacher who’d been sending me marriage proposals since I was twelve. I thought I’d never get rid of that old perv.
For a few years I tried to turn lemons into lemonade by trying to produce a Watcher movie. Marvel had other projects it was more interested in. I tried to get myself attached to those projects, playing the Watcher—or Wolverine, or Kraven the Hunter, or Kitty Pryde, not like I cared. Not like I succeeded, either.
My bathroom is small and smells of mildew. I look at myself in the mirror. “You’re a star,” I tell myself. “You’ve got talent. Someday people will notice.”
Affirmations. They’re one of many cliché approaches that actors bring to their craft. I took acting classes at one point, and though I’ve forgotten everything else, the affirmations are still with me.
Maybe it works because actors can’t get enough of hearing praise about themselves.
“This is going to be a great interview,” I say, sincerity glowing like soft candles in my brown eyes.
Actors spend a lot of their lives staring into mirrors. We try on expressions, we try on attitudes, we recite lines, we study how the dialogue looks on our lips.
I look at myself and repeat the encouraging words. My enormous head gazes back at me.
“You’re a star,” I tell myself. In my dreams.
The bathroom lights gleam off my balding scalp, broad as a piece of armor plate. My eyes are huge and luminous, my nose a stubby afterthought. My ears stand out. The proportions are all wrong for an adult.
At one point I grew a goatee to make myself look more masculine. I shaved it off for Mister Baby Head and never grew it back. Another year I shaved off my hair to disguise the fact that I was balding, but it just made my head lo
ok bigger, so I let my fringe grow back.
“You’re going to nail this interview,” I tell myself. “You’re going to kill.”
The Watcher looks back at me, alight with cosmic power. I turn off the light and stalk back into the world.
The Watcher, leaving the Blue Area for Earth.
EXT. RODEO DRIVE—DAY
Floyd Steneri, who played my older brother on Family Tree, is a good guy. He didn’t seem to mind that I became the big star, leaving him as a supporting character. If the situations had been reversed, I would have hated him like poison.
After Family Tree was canceled, he went to college and got a degree in pharmacy. Because he had his Coogan trust, he was able to actually buy a pharmacy in Wisconsin, after which he got married and had four children. He sends me a photo of the family every Christmas—smiling dairy-fed blond Midwestern kids, wholesome as curds and whey. We talk on the phone every so often, and he tells me about taking them to hockey practice. His business is doing well, and he rarely has a bad word to say about anyone.
Somehow I can’t see this as a happy ending. He’s out of the business, he’s even out of California.
Is this a win? It can’t be.
I think about this as I drive to Beverly Hills, where I’m meeting Dagmar Shaw. Even though my mom’s pearl-gray Mercedes S-Class is fourteen years old, I’ve kept it polished and gleaming, because it’s the sort of car a successful person would drive, and I want people to think I am that person instead of victim of fraud, catastrophic luck, and multiple felonies, which is what I actually am.
I find a parking place a couple blocks from the restaurant and walk. Bright icons and animated figures jump and wave at me from the corners of my vision. Because I couldn’t find my regular eyewear, I’m wearing the stupid Aristotle Despopoulos AR shades that I got in the gift bag at the party, and I can’t turn off the icons.
Without the shades I’d see Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, with its palms, its rows of tasteful, expensive shops, its perfect glossy appearance marred only by a clump of tourists visiting the site of a crucial scene from Pretty Woman. But that’s not what I see—instead reality is overlaid by dozens of leaping, cavorting images, doormen touting their shops, ads for adult diapers or sex aids, and the inevitable auditions by actors. The Pretty Woman site, for example, is marked by a glowing, rotating Julia Roberts dressed in the spandex shorts and thigh-high streetwalker boots she wore in the film—but here she’s only one of a couple dozen sex workers competing for my attention, along with an image of the president garbed as the Antichrist, and various political slogans like STOP WAR! and FIGHT SOCIALISM NOW! Many of these were placed by people who can’t exactly spell.
The Fourth Wall Page 3
