The Fourth Wall

by Williams, Walter Jon

  Joey likes to work with the same people over and over. Sometimes that’s included me, though always in a minor role. But Joey always cared about even the minor parts, always tried to give me something interesting to do, even though, in the editing, I was often as not cut out altogether.

  We sit and gossip for the length of my drink. I’d be happy to hang with Jaydee all afternoon, but I’m paranoid about driving while impaired, so I limit myself to the single drink and then leave.

  It’s when I’m piloting the Mercedes out of the parking lot that I get a big surprise. Because that’s when I see Dagmar along down the rows of cars with Deeptimoy Srivastava.

  He’s very recognizable, with his shaggy white leonine hair and white horseshoe mustache, his platinum-rimmed spectacles, his glossy handmade shoes, and his ash-gray Nehru jacket.

  I know he’s something like the sixth-richest man on the planet. I know that he’s an IT tycoon, and that he wired half of India and all of southeast Asia. I know he’s retired from the businesses that made his money and is now devoting himself to charity work. I don’t know this because I read Fortune or anything, but because he’s in the entertainment news a lot, recruiting celebrities to his various causes.

  And now he’s here, in this rented studio in the Valley, and he’s plainly recruited Dagmar, and my antennae are out, twitching in the wind for the scent of money. Because Hollywood is very good at taking money from people, and the question once again is not whether the newcomer will end up lighter in pocket, but how much of it will go to me.

  I drive past them slowly in hopes that Dagmar will see me behind the wheel of the car and introduce me to the billionaire who, in my fast-forming fantasy, will become my patron and bankroll my projects from here to the year 3000; but she’s locked in conversation with Srivastava, both of them very intent. I wish I could eavesdrop on their conversation.

  I pull out of the studio gates and head for Burbank. The Watcher, returning to the moon to do what the Watcher does best.

  Wait.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HEAVY LUGGAGE BLOG

  “You should get into directing.” I heard that recently from an old friend, as I’ve heard it from others over the years.

  That simple sentence, “You should get into directing,” has meant different things over the years. Sometimes it means Your career is over, find something else to do with your life. Usually it’s well-intentioned advice.

  But even when the advice is well-intentioned, I’m still not interested. I’m maybe the only person in all of Greater Los Angeles who doesn’t want to direct.

  There are two kinds of artists: creative, and interpretive. Creative artists include writers, painters, directors, composers, and I suppose architects. Interpretive artists are musicians, actors, singers. Some lucky people are both, so you get singer/songwriters, and composers who are also virtuosos on their instruments. And you get actor/directors.

  I’m an actor. I’m not very creative except when it comes to envisioning and inhabiting characters invented by other people. As readers of this blog have no doubt observed, I’m better at saying lines written by others than at writing the lines myself.

  Directors are creators, or at least the good ones are. I’m perfectly capable of directing a scene—I can work well with the players, and I know lighting pretty well, and I know which end of the camera to point at the actors. Any technical aspects of the craft that elude me can be handled by the director of photography or the cameraman or any of the other specialists who can be found on the set.

  But the end result would be mediocre. It would be a by-the-numbers job. Because I don’t have the director’s gift.

  I have the actor’s gift. Given the choice between being a so-so director and a good actor, I’ll take the acting job. Even if the acting jobs aren’t plentiful, I’ll stick at what I’m good at.

  I’m an actor, dammit! Give me a role, and I’ll burn up the stage for you.

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  INT. SUPERMARKET—NIGHT

  It’s a complete coincidence that I’m in the supermarket the same night as Des Andor. I’m contemplating some wilted bell peppers without enthusiasm, and I glance over and see that he’s putting some eggplant in his shopping bag. I go over and say hello.

  He’s got wavy brown hair, three-day stubble, and the sort of physique that allows him to wear a muscle shirt in public. He shakes my hand with enough gripping power to wrench my arm from its socket. But his smile is genuine enough, and he seems pleased to see me.

  “Still got those bruises, hey,” he says, pointing at my forearms. A televised workout with a Wing Chun wooden man down at the Thirty-Sixth Chamber gave me some colorful souvenirs. They kept calling for more and more takes. Why anyone would spend hours banging their forearms against a long hardwood peg was more than I could imagine.

  “I bruise easily,” I tell him. At least several days of ibuprofen have eased the pain.

  We move along the vegetable bin to the sound of pop hits from decades before either of us was born. The supermarket is full of the sorts of people who shop at ten o’clock: a middle-aged Hispanic in a Southern California Edison jumpsuit who’s just got off shift; a schizophrenic woman mumbling to herself over the honeydews; a couple teenage girls staring at Des and giggling. The de-saturated light of the overhead fluorescents makes them all look like vampires.

  “So we’re scheduled to fight next week,” I say.

  “Yep,” he says. He gives me an under-eyed look as he loads a head of green-leaf lettuce from the organic bin. “No offense,” he says, “but I plan to win.” He shrugs. “If I have to participate in this turd of a contest, I’ll go for the gold.”

  “I understand,” I say. “If it’s all there is, it’s all there is.”

  “I have to wish it was all there is,” Des says.

  There’s something in his tone that sets my back-brain humming. I wonder what he’s getting at.

  “Me too,” I say. “I got offered the lead in a feature, but I still have to train for this farkakte contest.”

  “I got an offer too,” he says. “But the movie’s being shot in Rome. No way I’m going to be able to commute, or keep in training.”

  I consider this for a moment. “You want to get a cup of coffee?” I ask.

  We pay for our groceries and walk across the parking lot to the all-night restaurant. The place was part of a chain that’s been extinct for fifty years, and now it’s just called The Palms. Whatever charm it once possessed is long faded, and the air outside the front door is smoky with the scent of the waitstaff sneaking cigarettes.

  I order coffee and pie from a brawny waitress in a pink uniform. Des asks for herbal tea and settles for Lipton’s. I sip my coffee and contemplate my approach.

  I take a sip from my cup, and wince at the taste of coffee left on the heat for far too long. “I can’t believe how shabby this show is,” I say. “It’s making the martial arts look ridiculous.”

  Des nods. “You’re right. I thought there’d be—I don’t know—some kind of nobility or something. Some sense that this was real competition—but instead it’s nothing but…” He makes a helpless gesture.

  “Stunts,” I say. “It’s just stunts.”

  “Stunts,” he repeats. He shakes his head. “At least it wasn’t me taking a bath in the cottage cheese.”

  “The cottage cheese was a classic, that’s for sure. I can still taste it.” I watch him dip his tea bag into his cup.

  “You know,” I say, “you can make that flight to Rome.”

  He cocks an eyebrow at me. “I’ve thought of that. All I have to do is lose to you.”

  “Frankly,” I say, “I could use a victory around now. And it’s not as if there’s any credibility at all to this competition. From where I sit, it’s a win-win situation.”

  He dips the tea bag, jigging the string up and down.

  “I don’t want to look bad,” he says.

  “I’ll make you look good.”

  He looks up a
t me, his eyes hard. “I want to win the first round.”

  I feel my mouth go dry. If I let him win the first round, and then he decides to go all out and try for victory, I’ll be at a serious disadvantage. And if he double-crosses me, who would I complain to?

  On the other hand, I’d be off the stupid show, and free to make my movie with Dagmar without the distractions of training and fighting.

  “All right,” I say. “And I win the match in the second.”

  We discuss strategy for a bit, and we decide that he’s going to chase me around the ring for the first round, and then I’ll take him out with a guillotine choke in the second.

  “Another thing,” he says. “Since we both have real work now…”

  “Yes?”

  “We don’t throw punches to the face.”

  Relief floats into me like a sigh. If he’s worried about showing up in Rome with a bruised face, I know our deal is for real. I smile.

  “You got it,” I tell him.

  I treat Des to his tea, and we shake hands in the parking lot. He goes off to his car and I start the walk toward mine. I hear a rumble of exhaust, and a squeal of tires, but I pay little attention—I’m walking by myself on an empty stretch of asphalt under the lights, and there’s plenty of room for any vehicle to go around me.

  The engine noise grows louder, and I look to my left just as headlights focus on me. It’s a big vehicle, and it’s coming fast.

  I jog faster to get out of its way, but the tires squeal as the vehicle adjusts its trajectory to intersect mine.

  I feel a shock to my entire body as I realize that I’ve been turned into a target. It’s like a land mine going off under my feet. I begin to run. My heart pounds in my ears.

  Ahead of me is a steel pipe enclosure for holding shopping carts until they can be returned to the supermarket. A few carts glimmer in the light of the lamps overhead, strewn carelessly within and near the enclosure. I run for it so fast that I can almost feel the wings on my ankles. Wind whistles in my ears.

  I throw myself—literally throw myself—behind the barrier. Asphalt bites my palms, and I roll.

  The vehicle—it’s a black SUV, parking lot lights reflecting dully off its dusty finish—swerves away at the last second and clips one of the shopping carts standing near the enclosure. It flies tumbling, bits of it breaking away and scattering over the parking lot like glass from a broken bottle, and comes to a stop fifty feet away.

  I roll to my feet. If there’s one thing Master Pak has taught me, it’s how to fall down and spring back up again.

  I watch the receding taillights and taste sour exhaust on the air. My heart lurches in my chest. Adrenaline shrieks along my nerves, but there’s no way to fight, and no more reason to run.

  The SUV swerves out of the parking lot and accelerates out of sight. It’s only now that I remember the black Ford Expedition that almost ran me down on Rodeo Drive the first day I met Dagmar, and I wonder if this is the same driver, same car.

  And then the next thing I think about is that Dagmar absolutely, completely, can never know about this.

  If she learns that someone’s trying to kill me, she could fire my ass.

  INT. SEAN’S APARTMENT—DAY

  If you’re an actor hungry for work, but not so hungry that you don’t actually have to wait tables or dance around in bear costumes, you spend a lot of time waiting around. For the next week I wait—I play video games, I watch old movies, I go on the Internet to watch naked ladies engage in extreme varieties of interpersonal behavior. I get together with Julian and smoke weed.

  I try to ignore the news about the genocide in Fiji and the Indian task force that’s heading for the islands. I have no idea how India got involved.

  And now there’s a civil war in Ethiopia. When did that happen? At least the riots in Korea seem to have died down.

  I call Tessa and leave a message suggesting we have lunch or something before she heads for Namibia, but I don’t get a call back. I’m used to not getting called back, and it doesn’t much bother me.

  Right now she’s more successful than I am. She doesn’t want to catch the curse of failure from me. I understand this.

  Then I get the call from Cleve that Dagmar has called with an offer. And, considering the fact that I’m an unemployed television actor, it’s a very nice offer.

  As soon as I understand this I jump up from my old couch and start doing my victory dance in the middle of my living room. The Watcher doing the Blue Area Boogaloo, trying not to bark his shins on the coffee table.

  “The problem is she wants you for five pictures,” he says.

  That’s a problem? My dance grows frenzied. My free hand, flung high at the peak of my leaps, brushes the popcorn ceiling.

  “Five?” I ask. “Sign me up!”

  “I’ll try to make it two,” Cleve says. “So that if she wants you for the third, she’ll have to fork over more money.”

  I stop dancing and think about this.

  “I think you can ask for more money up front,” I say. “I found out who’s behind Dagmar’s picture. It’s Deeptimoy Srivastava.” I probably bungle the pronunciation of the name, but it doesn’t matter, because Cleve’s never heard of him. “He’s, like, one of the world’s ten richest men.”

  I sense Cleve’s mind shifting into a predatory mode, just as mine did when I first heard of a game designer’s trying to make a movie. We’re Hollywood sharks, and we’re scenting blood in the water.

  “And this Sri guy is getting into pictures?”

  “I guess. So when Dagmar was talking about the money backing her, it wasn’t bullshit if she’s got Srivastava’s money in her pocket.”

  “Is he looking at scripts?” Cleve asks. Because he represents writers who need work even more than I do.

  “I don’t know. There hasn’t been anything in the news about him forming a production company or getting cozy with a studio.”

  Since I saw him, I’ve Googled the hell out of him to find out everything I can, and there is nothing there. He’s never been involved in show business, except to provide conduits for video on demand to half of Asia.

  “I’ll get back to you about the details,” Cleve says. “I just thought I’d pass on the good news.”

  It’s probably the biggest deal Cleve has ever negotiated. I want to tell him not to fuck it up.

  “Great,” I say. “Let me know what happens.”

  They happen quickly. I get more money and a three-picture deal, and I call Dagmar and ask her if she’d care to meet me in the Hollywood Museum of Film History, eating buttered popcorn and watching a Czech movie from the sixties.

  INT. THEATER—NIGHT

  Clarence Musselwhite is a burly black man a few years past sixty, with long white corkscrew curls hanging over the back of his collar, and a full beard so magnificent that it might well be envied by God. He’s the ultimate film geek, happier in front of a flickering screen than a kitten with a ball of string.

  He was a trial attorney at one point in his life, and made enough money arguing class-action suits—against Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, Big Oil—to leave the law and engage full-time in his hobby of collecting. He has a vast library of films and an immense number of props and other memorabilia, ranging from early Edison cylinders to the special glove that Harold Lloyd wore on his mutilated hand to the C-3PO costume worn by Anthony Daniels in Attack of the Clones. The whole collection is capped by one of the five surviving pairs of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.

  Eventually Clarence ran out of room for his collection, and so he had to open the Hollywood Museum of Film History in order to have a place to put it. In the daytime, tourists wander the exhibits and gawk at the ruby slippers and Ray Harryhausen maquettes. Some nights, Clarence runs film programs in his theater, and other nights his establishment is available for rent to private parties.

  It occurs to me that Clarence may be the only happy man I know. He has no money worries, and he spends every day doing e
xactly what he wants to do. He’s completely achieved his ambitions.

  Maybe I should hate him. Due to an accident of genetics I am denied the satisfaction of making full use of my talents and energies, and I could convert my frustration to fury with ease. I would certainly hate anyone else in his position. But somehow Clarence evades my hatred. He is simply too good-natured.

  Every so often I try to convince Clarence to invest in one of my film projects, but he knows too much about the business and its hazards and just laughs at me. Reluctantly I respect him for this.

  Dagmar wants to see the Kinoautomat and Clarence is always willing to show his collection, so he opens his 150-seat theater for the two of us and fires up his 1911 Paragon popcorn machine.

  The chair arms of one row of the theater are now equipped with the buttons we use to vote. Originally there were light strips on the walls of the theater that showed how everyone had voted, but these were too complicated to rig for an audience of two.

  We don’t start with the movie. You never do in Clarence’s theater. First we have a cartoon in which Popeye sinks a Japanese task force, a March of Time newsreel featuring Amelia Earhart’s solo flight from Mexico City to New York, and a silent trailer for Greta Garbo as The Temptress.

  Clarence is very big on the total film experience. He likes to pretend that his little theater is a giant picture palace of the 1930s, and produces an entire program. We’re lucky we didn’t get a Three Stooges short.

  Eventually we watch Man in His House. It opens with an apartment building on fire, and various cast members zooming down the canvas slide that firefighters have set up to rescue victims of the blaze. We then flash back to the start of the problem, with a woman dressed only in a towel wandering the halls of the apartment looking for shelter.

  Does our hero, the very married Novak, let her in or not? We both vote yes.

  Originally the system required two synchronized projectors, but Clarence has digitized the film onto one huge disk, and all he has to do is type the number of one track or another.