B008J4PNHE EBOK (9 page)

want to rehash the same stories, Polly. I could give a shit about mythology or theatrics. I want to put something on the screen that’s original the way real life is original, and surprising the way that real life is surprising.” Polly yawned and said she wasn’t sure what that meant now, “Oedipal-type deal.” She went on, “When was that, sophomore year? And you’ve been brooding on it all this time? You know, I think that means that I’m your muse, Sammy. Am I? Am I your muse? Refresh my memory about Oedipus?” He told her that Oedipus was the motherfucker. “Oh, right! Duh!” Polly laughed. Sam told her she ought to come visit the set. She could be an extra. “Hey, you know what’s hilarious? That you’ll let the rats improvise but not the actual actors,” said Polly. He conceded that was somewhat amusing. “Listen: are you seeing someone?” Polly said not to be ridiculous. She asked him what he was wearing, told him to take it off, pronto. He locked the door of the kiosk and drew the window shade. There was grumbling about the food, Brooks reported. Big Alex had found some green-tinged turkey in one of the discounted sandwiches; Wyatt had pelted Brooks with a handful of cheddar puffs, and they had stung like rocks. “Just act like they’re kidding,” advised Sam. The day before they filmed a particularly emotional scene—when Brunson tears apart his room looking for a misplaced vial of dope only for the room to abruptly heal itself and Brunson to suddenly develop needle tracks along his arms—Wyatt asked the director how he should prepare. Sam told him to practice his lines. “Is there something I should listen to or something I should watch for inspiration?” asked Wyatt. Sam replied that the script was full of inspiration. “Practice your lines, Wyatt.” The actor wondered if he should post an ad on Craigslist, for a drug addict to hang out with and to help keep him awake all night. Wyatt pointed out that Daniel Day Lewis had learned to scalp people when he was acting in
The Last of the Mohicans
. Sam pointed out that was untrue. Wyatt said it was, he’d read it somewhere, Daniel Day Lewis could scalp a man as well as any Indian brave. Sam yelled for Toughie to bring him an extra-thick roll of script pages. Another $587.34 bill arrived from John Jacob Bregman. It came with a picture of Booth’s puffy nose with the hairy mole. The mole was impressive; it had a single pendulous hair on the tip and a cancerous luster. “I put my heart into this nose,” wrote Bregman. He persisted that it was Sam’s duty to right his father’s wrong. The man was so anodyne in his
entreaty—earnest bordering on holy—that Sam was troubled enough to try calling Booth himself, but of course, his father’s cell phone was still disconnected for nonpayment. Rick Savini arrived for his day of filming at the end of July. “You want to put an obie on me?” The actor had spent a few minutes sitting in his stall, touching the walls, contemplating the space, sitting on the lid of the toilet in different ways, and then announced he was ready to go. An obie was what he called a catch light. Sam made a noncommittal noise. “Good,” said Savini, “me, neither. I hate that Santa Claus crap.” They were on the same page throughout. Savini hit every mark, spoke each line of drug code with the casual assurance of a veteran dealer. The entire bathroom setup was wrapped before four in the afternoon. Sam drove him to the Days Inn, and Savini spent the trip with his hand on the sun visor, tweaking it continuously to keep the glare off his face. “Sorry about the sun,” said Sam, and the actor said, “Ah, never mind my bullshit. It’s all uphill after the solstice. Soon enough it’ll be fall and I can relax.” Rick registered under the alias Steven Pink; they went upstairs together to establish that his room’s air-conditioning unit was functioning (it was), shook hands, and said goodbye without embracing. The next morning Rick Savini was gone. Monica Noble, the tetchy middle-aged makeup artist responsible for maintaining the film’s motif—the actors’ changing appearances—began to weep intermittently. Sam asked what was wrong. She wailed that she was only one single individual person and it was too much. Sam embraced her. “I know you’re not going to let us down, Monica,” he said. “I won’t,” she said. “I know you’re not going to fall to pieces and ruin this experience for these other people who are working so hard for no money at all, and who believe in you and trust you,” he said. “I won’t,” she said. “You can’t,” he said. “Gosh,” she said, “thanks, asshole.” Rain started falling, kept falling. The budget instantly grew precarious; the shoot was on its second-to-last weekend; their rental contract for the Ferris wheel and the carnival games had to be extended. They’d only been able to use them for a day. Everything that remained to be filmed, even the stuff that had nothing to do with the Spring Festival location, was supposed to happen outside. Sam was determined to use the rides, but he didn’t want to film everyone walking around and blinking at each other in a downpour. It would be distracting, and he hadn’t planned on it. They waited; they couldn’t do anything; they couldn’t do shit. On the third straight day of
rain, Sam extended the rental contract yet again, even though it was destroying the budget; he didn’t know what else to do. Water sheeted down the transparent walls of the rented pavilion. The rotten-sweet smell of mud and soaked grass coated everything. Sam prayed for a stranger to burst in and attack him so he could kill someone in self-defense. Why had he not thought of a cover set, the director asked himself, an alternate way to shoot the remaining scenes? The answer instantly materialized: because he was a dipshit. In his willingness to pardon himself for any and all crimes committed in the name of his film, he had failed to recognize that nature was the one player who could not be cajoled, enticed, tricked, guilt-tripped, or smacked across the ear with a cone of script. Nature was an ice-cold son of a bitch. The actors huddled on folding chairs, as removed from the director as possible, and whispered. Anthony lay on his back on a table with the Black Bag—the bag used to cover the magazine when changing film—pulled over his head, as though he had been executed. Julian paced around, thumbing “The Blue Danube” on a light meter at double time. The relative quiet was broken only by the occasional sharp rip of peeling gaffer’s tape as Regular Alex added another length to the mummy-like tape sculpture that he was creating; it was about the size of a toddler, and atop its segmented silver body was a single cheddar puff. The tape sculpture’s working title was “Alien w/ Tiny Yellow Skull.” Brooks sat by himself and burned kitchen matches. “Are you getting this?” he asked the question under his breath, apparently to himself. “Hmmm? And what about this?” One after another from a box he carried in his pea coat, the AD picked out a match, struck, and stared into the flame, shivering. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Sam snatched the box of matches away. Brooks stared at the ground. “Well?” Sam demanded. “A lot, I think,” admitted Brooks, and laughed and frowned and laughed. The last laugh was wistful. “A lot.” Sam commanded him to go outside and stand in the rain. “I need you to report to me the moment it stops.” The assistant director exited between the flaps of the tent, out into the downpour. There was a round of applause from the rest of the crew. “That guy is creeping everybody out so bad,” said Olivia Das, the actress who played Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence. Everyone gathered around to discuss Brooks: the matches, the twitching, the staring, the invisible documentary crew that he sometimes mentioned was following him
around. “I hate everyone here,” said Monica Noble, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin, “but I hate Brooks most of all. I hate Brooks even more than I hate you, Sam.” Wyatt Smithson piped up to suggest that it was Brooks who had stolen Rick Savini’s sword: “It’d be just like the freak.” Someone had stolen Rick’s Sting? Sam was dismayed, angered; that sword was how Rick Savini protected himself! “Othah day I begged for that cun-ed to get something othah than old sanditches, and he just laughed at me,” said Anthony. Through the plastic walls of the tent, Brooks could be seen out in the field, sneakers buried in a rushing brown stream, hands pocketed, blond bangs plastered over his eyes. “Listen,” said Sam, as it dawned on him that a scapegoat might be just what the production needed to pull itself out of its doldrums, “we aren’t going to let the bastard ruin our movie are we?” The crew yelled, “No!” Their united front in the face of rampant idiosyncrasy was stirring, and Sam was finally able to bring himself to grapple with the circumstances. “Okay,” he said, “let’s improvise.” The company worked through the night to create a rave inside the Russell gymnasium. Sam asked Julian if he had keys to the theater department, and although the professor didn’t, he proposed that they try the window of the first-floor women’s bathroom, which was in the back of the building, obscured by a hedge, and usually unlocked. “How do you know that?” asked Sam. Julian said he didn’t. “It was just an idea I had. Intuition. A wild guess. I mean, how could I know something like that? I don’t eavesdrop on women. I don’t listen to their secret talk about their mothers and their lovers,” said Julian. “Okay,” said Sam. “I don’t listen to their demure tinkles,” continued the professor, looking off now, talking to himself. “Stop,” said Sam. “Please stop.” The professor snapped back, his expression offended, but said no more. They boosted Toughie through the unlocked window, and she let them in the door. From the costume closet, they dressed up the extras as pirates and flappers and Bedouins and cardinals. Strobe lights were requisitioned and tapestries were draped. New shots were blocked, the dialogue rewritten, and to catch up with the schedule, Sam rode the crew through fifty-four setups in a single day. When the rush was finished, he had slept one hour out of seventy-two, lowering his average to under three per night since the start of production. The next morning he fell asleep in the lobby of the Days Inn; he was there to meet Wassel and Patch, come north from Astoria to visit the production for the day.
(Sunk into the crinkling embrace of a plastic-covered armchair, beneath a gilt-framed picture of guests enjoying the complimentary breakfast, the director dreamed that he was screening a blank reel for a theater of human-size Nukies.) The weather cleared. Brooks left the field and came to Sam. Black mud caked the AD from shoes to hair; he looked like a swamp monster. “The rain has stopped,” said Brooks. “Thank you,” said Sam, and was about to apologize for not calling the AD in sooner—before appreciating that he might need to utilize the crew’s hatred of him again. “Begone,” he said, and the AD squished off. Wassel and Patch bought all the doughnuts at the local Dunkin’ Donuts. “We have the doughnuts, bitches,” said Wassel. “Dough-nuts!” sang Patch. Patch, who was collecting the state quarters and was, additionally, tremendously high, went around demanding that people let him sift their pocket change. “You ate the doughnuts, now it’s time to pay the piper.” Everyone cooperated. “Look at you, Patch,” said Wassel. “Just look at you, you’re a damned bloodhound for commemorative coinage!” While she was applying some touch-ups to an actor, Monica Noble appeared to Sam to be unusually resolved; she was not, for the first time in days, teary. Sam asked if she was feeling better. Monica chinned toward the producers, who had instigated an impromptu game of leapfrog nearby. “And I thought you and Brooks were hemorrhoids,” she said. They exchanged a high five. That night Sam called Polly again in hopes of a replay but got her machine. There was a call-waiting beep. Rick Savini wanted to talk about his roof. “Can I get another year out of it?” Sam wasn’t a roofer, but he thought it’d be okay for another five years. “All right. Another thing: you owe me a Sting,” said Rick. “Some reprobate lifted it, and I’m pissed.” The director assured him that it would be taken care of. Then Rick surprised him by saying, “You know, I knew your mom.” Sam was aware that Booth and Rick had crossed paths in the eighties. (This was on the time travel–themed anthology picture,
A Thousand Deaths
—the one in which Booth’s deranged caveman chieftain had munched the pigeon. In another segment of the film, Rick had a nonspeaking role as a spaceman.) So it wasn’t totally confounding, but it was out of nowhere. “Yeah?” replied Sam. “Yeah. I liked her,” said Rick. “She was a strong person. I hated it when she died.” Sam thanked him, and Rick said, “Look, Sam, I’m just telling you,” and that was essentially the end of the conversation. Later, strolling the lanes of the campus, Sam
found himself beside the security kiosk. He tried the handle and it was locked. Through the window at the top of the door, Sam saw that the trash can into which he had ejaculated was overturned. A cluster of huge black rats was squirming over the spilled garbage, nibbling on things—probably snacking on his semen, he thought. It was awful, and yet he stood there and minutes passed while he observed the rodents’ banquet. At the apartment complex, his mailbox contained yet another $587.34 bill from John Jacob Bregman. Bregman had included a wallet photograph of his own son, a moppet in a Dodgers cap and overalls, holding out an empty bowl. “My son is begging you,” wrote Bregman. “Be the man your father refuses to be.” The nose Booth had stolen was the void in his son’s belly. Was the frown on the moppet’s face a wince of hunger or of chagrin at being forced to pose as the Tiny Tim of La Honda, California? It was so unnecessary! You bought a nose, you paid for it! What was so hard about that? It was the middle of the night. Sam folded up the letter and the photograph and tucked them into his back pocket. There was nothing to do except watch the Christian puppets until daylight. The episode’s theme was sharing. “Jesus loved to share,” explained a large flocculent yellow bulb with nine wobbly eyes and black lady legs. “He thought sharing was pretty darn cool, Jesus did.” Scenes were filmed and often filmed again, with the actors making the same movements but in slightly different costumes, as well as the changes to their hair and makeup. This provided for the splicing that would create the impression that the characters were growing older in the course of minutes and seconds. The long days became longer. They were well overbudget. Although the video he’d seen wasn’t amazing, there were enough authentically peculiar moments—not peculiar in a forced way, as if he’d cast dwarves as campus cops or something, but peculiar in a true way, like a sneeze in the middle of a screaming argument—that the director believed he could stitch together a fairly compelling whole. It wasn’t exactly what he had imagined, but it was promising. He already felt like he’d pulled it off. By then, the third week of filming, Sam was happy, saner than he’d been in months, and cold all the time. His overriding sense was one of relief, of near-escape, of leaping from a speeding cattle car into the dark, hitting the ground hard, rolling, and coming to his feet to find that, thank God, nothing was broken. No one—not even Sam—seemed to doubt that he was in control. On the eighteenth day of