by Dan Bevacqua
Molly looked, the mirror said, like a hooker, or like a groupie at CBGB’s, and not in a good way. Fortunately, the bathroom was a single user.
“Okay, tramp,” she whispered to herself in the mirror. “What are you gonna do here? What to do? What to do?”
Someone in her head began to ask her questions.
What is a commercial?
It is an advertisement for the people and things surrounding a product.
Who are you?
I am a sweaty, gross woman in need of deodorant.
How much money do you have in the bank?
Two hundred and thirteen dollars.
How should you behave?
Like myself.
No! No! No! Sally’s right! Don’t be yourself! This is a commercial! A national commercial!
How then?
Act!
She took a comb out of her purse and brushed away the mousse. She put her hair up in a ponytail. Turning on the faucet, she unrolled some toilet paper and dabbed it in the stream. Carefully, she removed her eyeliner. She used the Rocket to the Moon playbill to gently fan herself. She didn’t want to look sweaty, but like a woman who could possibly sweat, or like a woman who knew exactly when to sweat—meaning only when appropriate, i.e., while working out or fucking. More preferably, she should look like the kind of woman capable of choosing not to sweat during either of those activities.
Okay?
“Okay.”
It was that small little spot of her talking, the best actress in Hollywood nobody had ever heard of. As if possessed by the voice, Molly sat in the outer hallway with the clones, whom she no longer resembled. The other women were studying the promotional material. They perused laminated tri-folds, as if preparing for a test. Molly sat. She inspected her fingernails, and felt the resentment of the women, their frayed, frustrated nerves directed at her. Well, she was frustrated too! she might have said. She didn’t have any money either! Her boyfriend was planning a future for them in Boise! Boise! Can you imagine? Could you point out Boise on a map if you had to? If your life depended on it? But she didn’t actually say or even suggest any of that. Instead, she allowed a half-smile to slide across her face like a wall of sunlight passing through a row of window blinds.
“Molly?” a woman’s voice sang out. “Molly Bit?”
* * *
There wasn’t time enough to worry. She sped the Toyota down the curve of the earth into Burbank, past the creamy exterior walls of Warner Brothers, where beyond the gate her call-back time was fast approaching—there it was—and then it was gone. She pulled into the security lane.
“Molly Bit,” she said to the guard. He was a young guy with cheekbones so high you could dive off of them.
He glanced down at his clipboard. “How do you spell that? The last name?”
“B-I-T. As in, ‘I just bit it.’ Bit.”
“Memorable,” the guard said, handing her a pass. “Park in the green lot.”
She didn’t see the green parking lot (its absence was like a madness passing through her) so she parked in the red lot, grabbed a few headshots, and cut through the outdoor commissary, where suits, technicians, and tourists mixed together. Warners was a factory and a village and an amusement park. In the early afternoon, most of the enormous sound stage doors were open. A line of extras filed behind a girl in a yellow vest. Gaffers with utility belts strapped to their hips walked around like cowboys. Molly found the building. She shot up the exterior stairs to a sign on the door that read Back to Life Auditions, took a second to get her shit together out on the landing, and opened the door.
The same junior assistant sat behind a table, a woman named Erica. Since Molly had last seen her, she’d dyed her hair blond.
“They’re running long,” Erica said. She was filing her nails. “You’re fine. There’s new pages, though.” She handed Molly three sheets of paper.
* * *
Hunger, for whatever it might be—food, love, a part—makes one less choosy. She had read scripts so underwritten as to appear malnourished, and yet she’d managed to read these without judgment. She’d hunt out her beats, the arcs of scenes, motivations, and hardly give a thought to critique, or to whether or not the script in her hands was good or bad or something in between. But this one was absolute garbage. Some writer had pumped it out in five minutes. Sitting down to read the new scene, Molly experienced the acute pang of the professional, where it feels as if no one else in the entire world but you is bothering to do their job.
GIRLFRIEND was blander than ever. Hardly there at all.
GIRLFRIEND
Oh, honey.
GIRLFRIEND
That’s so strange. What do you think it means?
GIRLFRIEND
All I know is, I love you, and that means we’re together forever, babe.
GIRLFRIEND
I wish I could do that!
She’d been up until three in the morning reading Abigail’s script. The experience had spoiled her. That character had nuance. She was neither virgin nor whore. Neither boring nor over the top. She was real. Once you explored a character like that, went down into a person as true to you as anyone in life, you couldn’t go back. To go back would be impossible. You were ruined.
“They’re ready for you, Molly,” Erica said.
The room was darker than she’d expected it to be. The only natural light came in from a half open side-door. The same five men sat behind a long table. A sixth man, someone she’d never met, stood in the corner of the room. He was very short. Maybe five-five, if he was lucky. He spoke into one of those new satellite phones. His black suit fit him perfectly. He didn’t wear a tie.
The show’s creator and prospective showrunner, Roger Mills, sat at the middle of the table. He said, “Hi, Molly. Water? You remember everybody, don’t you?” He said the name of each man. They nodded at her. When Molly smiled, it felt like her face might break in half.
“Hi, Roger. Hi, Dave. Hi, Sam. Hi, Tom. Hi, Mike. I’d love some water, thank you.” (You always took the water if they offered you the water.) “Nice to see you all.” A sudden blast of nervous fear hit her in the bowels.
“That’s Ian,” Roger said, pointing at the man on the phone. “He’s at Warners. He’s hiding from his boss. Isn’t that right, Ian?”
“No,” Ian said, all business. “It’s not.” He pushed a button on his gigantic phone. “That’s over. Whenever you’re ready.” The power coming off of him reminded Molly of the Berlin Wall, of a moment in time she’d witnessed on television where a thick slab of it fell to the ground.
“So you’ve had a chance to read the new pages,” Roger said. “She’s still—we’re growing her, as you can see. We’re growing her slowly.”
“Glacially,” Ian said.
Roger ignored him.
“Any questions, Molly?” he asked. “We’re looking to see what you can bring.”
“Anything at all,” Ian said. “Anything.”
All Molly had were questions, but she didn’t have one that would make Roger Mills feel smart or talented or as if he were really on to something.
“No,” she said. “No questions. I really like the new pages.”
Earlier, there had been too much aggressive feedback in the room for her entrance to have made a ripple. This lack of attention was something Molly wasn’t used to. More often than not, men turned toward her. They looked. They glanced over their wives’ or girlfriends’ shoulders to catch a glimpse. They rolled down their car windows. They scoped her out in the gym mirror. Men were drawn to her, but they were also drawn by her, as if the movement of her body was the hand that sketched them into being. For several minutes, these particular men had been too distracted to recognize who they were dealing with. Having finally gained their full attention, she flicked her switch on. She felt her power dilate like a pupil. To say “she smiled” or “she gave them a smile” would rob the world of its very improbability. It would be a sin, like murder.
The red eye of the
camera clicked. She went through the scene with Roger as her partner. She tried to give the lines some mystery, some depth. She ignored the exclamation marks, and showed the writers how the one-note-ness of them was too constraining. During the scene, without realizing it, she folded the pages in half, and then that half into another half. She couldn’t have glanced down at them even if she needed to. In three minutes’ time, they’d come to the biggest bloc of dialogue. She tried to be a cipher, a tree, no one. It was that bad.
GIRLFRIEND
Who could imagine? I mean you? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with a special… what would you call it? Ability? Is it like déjà vu? Déjà vu always reminds me of a time when I was a little girl. My mother took me to a park. It was in the fall. I remember, I was on top of the slide, and I had this feeling that something bad was going to happen, like something bad had already happened, maybe, and that’s what I was feeling, the memory of it. I went down the slide. I was so little. I shot right off of it. I came off it funny and broke my leg. Ouch. Thinking about it makes it hurt. Is that what it’s like? Is that what remembering your past lives is like?
She’d done the best she could. It was over.
“Thank you, Molly,” Roger said. He betrayed nothing. “We really appreciate your coming in. We’ll let you know.”
To depart an audition, to hear those words—thank you—was the most rapey part about the whole thing. Molly grabbed her purse, politely said who knows what to the men, and went out into another perfect Southern California day. She walked in a daze down the exterior stairs and across the appallingly clean asphalt of the Warners lot and weaved her way through a pack of Rosie O’Donnell audience members. When she got to the red lot, she saw her car was gone.
“No, no, no, no, no,” she said. She stood in the empty space. “No.”
Above her, the sun was at its High Noon peak. She had work in an hour. She didn’t have any money. If she hadn’t been so angry, she would have cried.
“Did they tow you?”
She spun, her purse twisting around her legs, and saw the tiny man, Ian.
“Yes.”
“They love doing that. What’s the license plate number? Maybe we can catch it.”
He had his phone in hand.
“What?” she asked.
“The license plate number.”
Her face said, I don’t know what my license plate number is, and I feel stupid enough already, so don’t…
“What’s the make and model? What kind of car is it?”
“A Toyota Corolla.”
“What’s the color?”
“Tan?” she asked. “An ugly yellow? It’s the color of an old mattress.”
He was a member of that small male minority who still knew the power of a suit. There were maybe five of these men. Six, tops. Grunge had definitely passed him by.
With his pointer finger, he stabbed numbers into his phone.
“This is Ian Brewster… Yes. Me. Put me into parking, or maintenance… I don’t know. Put me into whoever the fuck it is who tows car around here.” He looked at Molly. “Nice audition… Yes, this is Ian. You towed a car. I need it back… Call the driver then… Then call him on the CB… It’s a tan Toyota Camry—”
“Corolla,” Molly corrected.
“Corolla,” Ian Brewster said. “A tan Toyota Corolla. I’m guessing old and shitty.” He was asking Molly. “Is that right?”
“The oldest and shittiest,” she said.
“They put me on hold,” he said. “A very nice audition. But too bad, because when that asshole Roger goes home tonight he’s going to get a call from his agent telling him the show’s dead. Am I still on hold?” He was back with the operator. “What? The red parking area… Yes. Right… They wouldn’t have given you the part anyway… Right, right, yes… The writers in this town are fucking idiots. Once they’re done writing, they should be shot in the face. They annoy me more than the actors… The red parking area.”
He hung up.
“It’ll be here in five minutes,” Ian said. “I love this phone. I make up reasons to use it all the time.”
“Thank you so much,” Molly said.
“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I mean, thank me, but not for the car.”
She didn’t know who he was, or what he did at Warners. She desperately wanted answers.
“I’m casting something,” Ian said. “Actually, I did cast it, but I’m thinking of making a change. I don’t like the lead.”
“Who’s the lead?”
“She’s nobody,” Ian said. “Like you. It doesn’t matter.”
“What is it?”
“Horror. Working title’s Funhouse.”
Jared was going to kill her.
“Great title,” Molly said.
SUCCESS 2001
3
MOLLY HADN’T BEEN TO SAN Francisco in years, not since the spring of ’97, when she’d shot a commercial in a Sequoia grove just north of the city. That was her first real gig, and with the money she’d bought a new car, another first. As she waited in the security line to board the plane at LAX, she thought of the commercial, how she had to crouch on the roots of a Sequoia tree, smiling and sweating through eight consecutive T-shirts. She remembered the line like she remembered her own name. “I need an antiperspirant that’s tougher than nature.” MaxWoman had been a terrible product. Since then, she’d advertised for far worse, but those commercials had only ever aired in Japan. It turned out the Japanese loved horror. They couldn’t get enough of it. In every commercial, whether it was for noodles, or for kitchen cleaner, or for a home pregnancy test, she said her big line from Funhouse: “Time to die… clown face.”
She was four hours early. The world had changed since last she’d flown. State troopers and Marines and what looked like private security guards were everywhere. There were an endless number of leashed dogs. She had never seen so many rifles or handguns. A feeling of tense closeness pervaded the country. Every room felt crowded with memory. The passage of time had been replaced with the voices on the television, with images of first the one plane, and then the other; of the buildings as they collapsed; of the crowds running through the streets, of the dust and the debris; the falling man; the press conference. Over and over again, the anchors said “9/11” like they’d been saying it for years.
She moved forward in line, heading toward the small arches of the metal detectors. The thick, watery light of the day poured through the airport windows, illuminating the dust of the terminal so that the air looked smoky. More often than not, Molly took it for granted, but it was true: the light in Southern California was freakishly perfect. Years ago, during those first months in Los Angeles, she liked to drive on her days off—just drive. She’d go up and down the coastal highway, winding herself along Mulholland and through Topanga Canyon, thinking that the city, and her life in it, didn’t seem real. It wasn’t until she understood that it was the light doing this, the sunlight lying down upon everything with a plasma-like sheen, hazing and burning in a soft glow, that Molly was able to say to herself: “I live here. This is my home.” She’d passed through that strange, certain knowledge that California is the woozy aftershock of a dream.
There was a woman a little ahead of her in line. She was not beautiful in any natural way, but attractive in terms of the Hollywood standard. Her blond hair and exercised body were of the type. Her short-shorts were pink. As the line moved forward, the woman kept looking back at Molly, her mouth forming something like a smile.
At first, she wasn’t sure if she was evaluating the situation correctly. In a Walgreens once, buying paper towels, Molly smiled and said hello to an old man she thought was staring at her. “I thought you were somebody else,” the old man said, before walking down the foot cream aisle.
A critically acclaimed independent movie, a minor supporting role, and some industry chatter about a rom-com whose release date had been pushed back to October, hadn’t made her a celebrity. Hers was one of a thousand eerily f
amiliar faces. If anything, people couldn’t quite place her, but knew they remembered her from somewhere. High school? College? Who the hell was she?
For more than an hour, the woman kept turning around and looking at her. When Molly reached the front of the line, the detector went off—one long, high pitched beep—and a Marine told her, “Step to the right, miss.” A female security guard patted her down: stomach, legs, and ankles. “Turn around.” The guard ran her hands along Molly’s hips and inner thighs. “You’re good.”
Molly found a metal bench, and went about the irritating process of putting her shoes, earrings, and belt back on. She looked up, and the blond woman was standing directly in front of her. The woman held her clutch bag in the crook of her arm. She nervously stroked it as if it were a small dog.
“Hi-ee.”
“Hi,” Molly said.
“Sor-ee,” she said. “But I was just… bleh, God. I was just wondering.”
She said nothing after this.
“Wondering what?”
“Were you in The Matrix?”
“What?” Molly said, shocked. “No.”
“Oh, okay,” the woman said, and walked away.
* * *
Later, Abigail said, “The Matrix? That movie came out like two years ago.”
The two of them were in Abigail’s car, driving out of SFO. South San Francisco looked like an old, broken dollhouse.
“Who were you supposed to be in The Matrix? That doesn’t even make sense. Did she think you were Laurence Fishburne? You look nothing like Laurence Fishburne.”
