by Jeff Lindsay
“Can you say Emmy?” she said to me, smiling.
“Do they give one for best supporting geek?” I asked her.
“They’ll have to now,” she said.
Even with the strain of waiting for my award, the two days and nights went by rapidly. And then the third day of shooting was upon us.
Wednesday was our first day off the soundstage and out onto the warm and wicked streets of Miami. We were shooting downtown, a few blocks in from Biscayne Boulevard, on a side street that bordered a large parking lot. It was my big scene, too, the one where I, as Ben Webster, shuffled off my mortal coil, and Jackie, as hard-boiled detective Amber Wayne, swore dire vengeance over my cooling corpse.
The streets were cordoned off for several blocks in each direction, and the uniformed cops kept a tighter perimeter than they ever did at a homicide scene. Inside the parking lot, a handful of large, air-conditioned trailers had been set up. One was for all the male cast members, one for female—and one, to my surprise and delight, was dedicated entirely to the individual comfort and well-being of Miss Jackie Forrest—and that meant Dexter’s comfort, too. It was a lovely arrangement, even though Jackie assured me that it was standard practice, one of the tangible perks of being a Leading Lady. It was understood that true artists needed privacy in direct proportion to their salary and their billing on the head credits. But as Jackie’s new boy toy, I was welcome to enjoy a little semiprivacy along with her, and I did not allow any antique notions of solidarity with the working class to hold me back from taking advantage of the lush, cool trailer, nor its well-stocked refrigerator. Instead, I dressed in my Ben Webster costume in the bedroom of Jackie’s trailer, and then lounged on the sofa with a cup of coffee and tried not to feel bad about all the other small-part actors who had been crammed into one trailer all together. Somehow, I managed to live through the crushing guilt, and at around ten thirty in the morning, my call came at last.
A very dark-skinned, very excited young man with a Haitian accent led me to the place on the street where I was scheduled to die. I easily could have found it on my own, since it was ringed by people, vans, and trucks—one with a large generator—as well as cameras, lights, and a blue-and-white-striped canopy where a man I recognized as Victor, the director, sat with a few others perched in high canvas-backed chairs in front of some large flat-screen monitors. Victor did not look up as we walked past. He seemed very busy giving instructions to his peeps. I looked for a megaphone, or a martini shaker—anything that spoke of Hollywood’s hallowed traditions—but there were only walkie-talkies, and a huge paper cup of coffee from a nearby restaurant in each hand.
My young guide led me past the command center, explaining to me breathlessly that he was studying communications right here at Miami-Dade Community College, and his uncle Hercule was driving a scenery truck for the show and got his nephew, himself, Fabian, this fantastic job as a production assistant, which did not pay so much, but was a fantastic experience, and if I would just step over here?
I stepped. Fabian led me to a white open-sided van, where a large man with a shaved head and an ornate mustache sat on the bumper. He stood as we approached, and called out, “This him, Fabian? Brilliant!” Even without the “brilliant,” his accent said he was British. He held out his hand, looming several inches taller than either me or Fabian.
“Hullo, mate,” he said. “Name’s Dickie Larkin. I’ve got to get you all blooded up.”
I shook his hand and Fabian vanished at a half trot. And as Haitian Fabian handed me to British Dickie, I had to wonder: Was I seeing an example of good American jobs stolen away by foreigners?
But Dickie gave me no time to brood over socioeconomic paradigms. He took my elbow and led me to the van’s side door. “Shirt off,” he said, and he leaned into the double doors.
“I just put it on,” I said.
“And now you’ll bloody well have it off,” he said. “Got to get you wired, haven’t I?”
“Oh,” I said. “Have you?”
He turned around holding a wire harness with four small red tubes hanging from it. “I have,” he said. “You can’t die properly without your squibs.”
“I thought a squib was a kind of small chicken,” I said.
“That’d be a squab, laddie boy, and it’s a pigeon.” He held up his strange harness and shook it. “This is a squib. Four of the lovely little buggers.” He held them toward me. “Which I can’t bloody put on you if you don’t take the bloody shirt off.”
“Well, then,” I said, and I pulled my Ben Webster shirt off, feeling a little odd to be standing in the street in a seminaked state. But I would just have to get used to such things; I was an actor now, and my body was my canvas, half bare or not. In any case, Dickie didn’t give it any thought. He went to work, whistling cheerfully, and explaining squibs to me as he put them in place.
“It’s nothing but a small firecracker,” he said. “And a detonator.” He nodded into the van. I tried to peer around him, but he was too big. “I’ve got a little black box,” he said. “Hit the toggle and bang-o! Arms up.”
I put my arms straight up as Dickie ran the harness around my back, and then reached behind him for four small plastic baggies, each one filled with something that looked disturbingly like blood. My face must have shown some slight revulsion, because Dickie shook his head. “It’s fake blood, laddie,” he said. “Guaranteed AIDS-free.”
“Okay,” I said. “Is it, um, messy?”
“No worries,” he said. “You don’t have to clean it up.”
He was right, of course, and that was some small consolation—but I really don’t like blood, and the thought of carrying it next to my skin like that was mildly repulsive. But I clamped down on my feelings with iron-handed professionalism and let Dickie do his job. He placed one of the bags on top of each of the little red tubes. “The squib fires,” he said. “That pops the blood bag, and it looks like you’ve been shot. Cheap and lovely. There,” he said, and he stepped back.
“Right,” he said. “Can you move all right?”
I raised and lowered my arms, twisted from side to side, and then hopped up and down. “Yes,” I said. “What, um … what does it feel like?”
“You’ll feel a bit of a spark,” he said, “and that’s your cue to fall over dead, right?”
“How much is a bit?” I asked.
He winked at me. “Won’t kill you, squire,” he said. “I’ve had worse.” It was not a lot of comfort, but apparently it was all I was going to get from Dickie. He made a few small adjustments, then stepped back again and looked at me with satisfaction.
“Done like a dinner,” he said. “Shirt on and you’re good to go.”
I put my shirt back on. It was a little snugger with Dickie’s fireworks strapped on underneath, but he assured me that it didn’t show, and in the wink of an eye I strode over to the street to Find My Mark. Mark was not a person: It was a piece of tape on the floor that showed you where to stand so the cameras could keep you in focus. I had learned all about marks while shooting my first scene, and I felt very professional asking Martha, the assistant director, where mine was. She led me to a spot on the sidewalk, just a few feet from where an overpass loomed up and crossed over the street.
“The car goes by right over there,” she said, pointing to the street. “They shoot, and you fall right here.” She showed me the second taped mark, half in the gutter and half on the sidewalk. “Your head goes this way,” she said, nodding in the direction of the overpass. “Try not to move too much once you’re down.” She patted my arm. “Continuity,” she said, and then she trotted away, talking loudly into her walkie-talkie.
Making filmic art is a lot harder than most of us ever appreciate. You might think that something as simple as filming bad guys killing Dexter would be a very easy thing. After all, look at all the wonderful little movies we all make every day with our cell phones. But the real thing, like we were now making, is much harder. There are many small actions that have to be
coordinated perfectly, lights and reflectors that need to be moved around, sound booms lifted in and out, and several fits of ritual yelling at people by the director. And then finally, when everything is just right, a jet goes overhead and ruins the sound so you have to start all over again.
In the grand scheme of things, my death was a mere plot point, a small and insignificant detail in the larger and more important story of beautiful but hard-boiled Detective Amber Wayne. Even so, it took seven separate attempts before everything happened to the complete satisfaction of the director, Victor. It was tedious, and it was difficult to look convincingly shocked and surprised when the same thing happens seven times in a row. But it was all part of my new craft, and if I worked my way up the ladder to larger parts someday, seven takes would multiply into many more—exponentially more if it was a theatrical feature instead of a TV show. Jackie had told me that on a feature film with a respectable budget, one hundred fifty takes was not uncommon.
So I went patiently through the simple act of looking with surprise at a passing car, over and over, until Victor was happy—and then I had to endure getting shot three times. I’m sure it would have been more if not for the fact that each time the squibs exploded and the blood packs popped, my shirt was ruined, and they had only three matching shirts. So after the third time I went through the harness routine with Dickie, and then performed Dexter the Dying Swan and gracefully collapsed in the gutter, Victor called out, “Okay, that’ll have to do. Get Jackie out here. Stay put, Derrick.”
“It’s Dexter,” I said, feeling uncomfortably like Robert objecting to being called “Bob.” Victor did not respond; no doubt he had many important orders to give.
I stayed put. No one asked me if I was comfortable, which I wasn’t. The sun was hot for an autumn day, and the pavement was hard. But it didn’t seem very professional to ask for a pillow or a parasol, so I lay there and thought my deep dark thoughts. I wondered when Jackie would get here, and I wondered how many takes we would have to do. I wondered whether our eventual audience would be able to see a special bond between me and Jackie in this, our big scene together. I had heard that “chemistry” between actors gave an extraspecial edge to their work, and we certainly had chemistry. Perhaps it would translate to the screen. Of course, I was dead, and that did limit my chemical actions. Maybe this was not the time and place to think about my Emmy.
And I wondered if there would be other scenes together in the future. Was there, in fact, a future for Jackie and Dexter? We had not really talked any more about it since I had so pleasantly changed the subject on the chaise longue on the balcony of Jackie’s suite. Was this a mere on-the-job infatuation, the kind of Hollywood working hazard one always reads about in the tabloids? Or was it more than that, something longer-lasting, a new start in an entirely new setting?
As things stood right now, I would not miss my old life very much; my sister, Deborah, was apparently through with me forever, my home life had become an annoying millstone around my neck, and my job was no more than rote performance of repetitive tasks. I didn’t really have any actual friends—other than my boat, there was nothing to tie me to my life in Miami. Of course, there was the Nighttime Me, the Devil Dexter who delivered the Wicked to their just deserts with a sharp blade and a hearty smile. But that other me was portable, too, and from what I had heard about the movie business, I was quite sure there were plenty of deserving Playmates in L.A.—or, for that matter, anywhere I might go. Human nature being what it is, I could be certain to find quality entertainment everywhere on this tired old globe.
There was one tiny, perhaps important detail—Jackie had not yet invited me to go with her when she left, and I had no idea whether I was actually a part of her plans for any future beyond tonight at the hotel. I have never been able to read humans—especially female humans. Just when I am sure I know exactly what they’re thinking, they say or do something so surprising and outrageous that I can only marvel and realize once more that I am not the only one walking around with a total lie written on my face.
I thought Jackie liked me—and maybe more than liked. If not, she had certainly been giving me a wonderfully convincing imitation. But I didn’t know, and didn’t know how to find out, unless I simply blurted out the awkward question. And if the answer was no, what then? Could I really just shake her hand and walk away, go back to being Dull as Dishwater Dexter?
In the near distance I heard the thump of a trailer door, and then Martha stepped over to me. “Here she comes,” Martha said, and then she leaned over me and said accusingly, “You moved.” She adjusted my left arm, then my right. “Like this,” she said, and then she turned my head an inch to the right. “And here—okay, good.” She disappeared, and a moment later Jackie was standing over me.
“You look so natural,” she said with a small smile.
“It’s much harder than it looks,” I said. “And so is the pavement.”
“Well, then, let’s see if we can nail it in one take,” she said. And then Victor was yelling directions, the lighting people began to move around the reflectors, and the soundman moved in and hovered nearby, holding a long pole with a microphone on the end of it over Jackie’s head.
Jackie looked away from me, and I watched her go through the strange transformation she always did when the cameras turned to her. Her face became colder, harder, and its lines seemed to change subtly until it was not Jackie’s face anymore.
The first take began—and abruptly stopped for no reason I could see before Jackie could speak. So much for nailing it in one.
Take two went a little better. Jackie actually got to the part where she saw my shattered corpse and called out, “Ben! Oh, God, Ben!” and then a motorcycle roared past on a nearby street and Victor yelled, “Cut!”
Take three, and Jackie got all the way to where she knelt mournfully beside my body and said through gritted teeth, “I’ll get the bastards who did this—I swear it!” But instead of looking vengefully off into the distance, she turned toward the director and said, “Goddamn it, Victor, there’s a shadow across my face the whole goddamn time!”
And so it went. Far from nailing it in one, we were still trying to nail it after eleven takes. It was only a few words and a couple of simple actions, but each one required dozens of minute adjustments, and each adjustment took several minutes, and time does not stop, even for the director. Tempers began to fray, even Jackie’s. I had learned that she was a different person during working hours: demanding, impatient, and occasionally—like right now—short-tempered. Not by any means a diva, at least not in my opinion. But she did know what she wanted in very exact terms, and she was not shy about asking for it.
The lighting people fussed about and moved things around, the soundman moved in and out and once or twice yelled some arcane phrases in Victor’s direction, Jackie got crosser, and all the while poor Dead Dexter lay unmoving on the unyielding uncomfortable pavement and wondered when his torment would end, and whether it was time for lunch yet. And finally, proving once more that the sun shines on the wicked as well as the just, I heard Victor yell, “Well, goddamn it!” There was an urgent murmur of soothing voices, and then Victor said, “Shit. All right, people—lunch!”
THIRTY
I WALKED WITH JACKIE BACK TO HER TRAILER. SHE WALKED quickly, with her head down, clearly preoccupied, and I did nothing that might break her concentration. She did not speak until we were settled comfortably onto the couch in the cool and quiet of the trailer. Someone had quite thoughtfully left lunch on the table, and I took a look.
It may seem like a paradox, but even though everything else moves so slowly on a set, gossip travels slightly faster than the speed of light. I had noticed by the second day that people who had ignored me before were now being polite and friendly. Every time I got a cup of coffee or one more small pastelita, someone would praise Jackie somewhere nearby, where I could hear it. Added to the sly looks and small jokes I overheard, it became apparent that everyone knew Jackie and Dext
er were an Item. And so naturally enough, two very nice box lunches had been left in Jackie’s trailer, His as well as Hers.
I opened one box: good, thick sandwich of cold cuts, cheese, lettuce, and tomato. Bag of chips, pickle, plastic bag with a large chocolate cookie.
I looked at Jackie. She sat on the couch, script beside her, arms crossed, a distracted look on her face. “Want some lunch?” I said.
She looked up as if she was seeing me for the first time. “What? Oh—sure, why not.” And then she frowned and looked back into space at the same fixed point on the trailer’s wall, her lips moving slightly.
I took one box, set it beside her on the couch. “Drink?” I said. “There’s soda, iced tea, Perrier—”
“I don’t care,” she said, rather crossly, I thought.
I got her a bottle of Perrier from the trailer’s small refrigerator, twisted the cap off, and held it out to her. She didn’t see it, or me. “Jackie?” I said.
“For Christ’s sake, what the— Oh, thanks,” she said. She took the bottle from me, but didn’t do anything with it.
My phone rang. I had left it in the small bedroom, on the dresser, and I went in to look. In my hurry I tripped over something I really should have seen—the large box of Kathy’s possessions. It had moved into the trailer with us, and now occupied the narrow space between the bed and the dresser. Jackie still hadn’t been able to make herself go through the stuff, but she kept it nearby in case she had an unfortunate fit of conscience. I stepped around it and looked at my phone.
The phone’s face was lit up with the caller’s ID: It was Rita. I hesitated, trying to decide whether I had anything to say to her right now. I looked back out at Jackie, still frowning, staring straight ahead, and moving her lips in some unvoiced conversation with an invisible friend. I looked back at the phone, still undecided, and it stopped ringing. A moment later it bleeped, the signal that Rita had left a voice mail.
