Cosmo (24 page)

AM
Gold and Casey Kasem, porch-lit jam sessions with William Ray's drier friends who didn't end up snorting
everything
on mid-nineties bar tops and who still enjoyed the night air and the way a guitar met a voice, the way the first and third fingers of William's left hand could spread confidently across the fretboard of his trusty and worn acoustic, his right hand balled to a fist around a pick, a two-year-old Miley sitting at his feet playing with the reflected light of beer bottles and tuning pegs and the amber halo of a single bulb where perhaps her first high-pitched song was sung, the first formative springboard, perhaps, leading to her choir practice and solo work at the Thompson's Station's Baptist Church, her acting debut at age nine, her later acting classes at Armstrong Acting Studio in the wintry grey depressions of Toronto, Canada, her minor stumbling roles on William Ray's incredible television series known as
Doc
(2001–2004) and the Oscar-nominated, Columbia Pictures blockbuster
Big Fish
(2003), and all her persistence in pursuing the Disney character who would change our lives – convincing through dogged insistence those hard-hearted corporate executives and casting agents (who have treated me with august indifference or open hostility, it should again be noted) that she was the one, the true pubescent morning star, the future flagship of the company, the deal-maker of their top-secret series later named
Hannah Montana
to be released in early 2006 about a young girl bearing the unfortunate burden of being an immensely popular singer and entertainer with legions of fans and incredible wealth (though wealth tied intelligently to her wise and mature father, played in the sweetest of turns by Miley's own father, William Ray, who was auditioned at Miley's behest only after she was granted the role) but also determined to live a normal teenaged existence with typical experiences (like studying for exams in tiny denim short shorts, flirting with young male specimens with contemptible hair and gossiping with her loyal friends over the pink telephone), and to try to balance these two divergent and utterly conflicting lifestyles, and, most importantly, keep her pop-star celebrity identity secret and safe so as not to endanger her normal adolescent existence – a show that connected with millions of young children not because of its intricate and unique plot lines or biting dialogue, but because of Miley, that zestful whirlwind of ambition and national pride and bodily health, who was characterized by Disney Channel president Gary Marsh as possessing a ‘natural ebullience,' and the ‘everyday relatability of Hilary Duff and the stage presence of Shania Twain,' and I could go on in praise, the breath is full and moving, but these heads are nodding and shaking, and time has evaporated and made your faces turn sour, brought forth more beads of sweat to spread beneath your arms, has made your asses uncomfortable, and time is playing its game on me, and though brevity is the soul of wit I cannot in any eventuality be discerning, and so for Miley this means everything there is to know about her, every footprint and signature of that rare and robust and developing flower, the great surging abundance of a singular person
in defiance
of information reduced to partial rounds, the unfair impatience of quarters and divisions, of only the bottom line, of making some information the best information when there is no end to it, no end to its fullness, its baffling richness and generosity, no end to each storied detail, to what I can say before I'm dragged perhaps kicking and biting from the premises, leaving the sentence to remain on account of a half-strangled, half-finished appeal, dismissed and aborted in the eyes of the law like so many twisted, discarded, abandoned children, the children of my life and my land, though I in no way have ever acknowledged or agreed to a
single word
of my sentence – a sentence that from the standpoint of reason
cannot
make sense (not that any substitution can make it sensible,
sentences do not make sentences make sense
, I was taught; it's our punishment and a just one, living in a sad and decadent place that can wilfully and systematically ignore that incorruptible beauty, that brief parting of clouds in a low and grey unrolling regiment, a girl who will never breathe or grow or cry those big crystal tears again in quite the same fashion, so here I am to receive them,
proud
to receive those tears and that recorded laughter, receive those one-in-a-million emotions, be witness to this once-in-a-lifetime unfolding rose the way all tween and  teenaged girls are momentary parting petals leaving us lonely and rocking to the radio's ambient whispers, knowing ourselves to be uncomfortable and sad and obscene, shaking in the hours of our starving nights, waiting for our sentence, hoping against formidable despair for the return of our shared horizon, the note and pitch met perfectly, all the jumbled naïveté and fragility of youth transfigured into sense and communion by one song, one note that forgives and heals the guilty chaos of our days, making sense of our loneliness, our perjured feelings, our sickness and our poverty, how we shall never be beautiful, how our heads will run over with unbearable secrets and how we are sentenced to this, serving us right – when the song should end, be cut down, finished, and the singer not go on singing).

LONELY PLANET

 

 

 

I

 

R
yan can't remember his dreams. It's been this way for two and a half years. He used to have so many beautiful, exciting nights – charging with elephants across marshmallow fields, fucking childhood friends in the stands of enormous monster-truck rallies, even dipping into libido-charging bouts of lucidity, wherein he could suddenly fly, melt time, be happy. Now, though, there's nothing – not even the faintest, most ephemeral glimmer. But Ryan's done his reading on nighttime emissions. He knows perfectly well that if you sleep, you dream; knows that he is no exception. And thus he figures these curious memory gaps can mean only one thing: that some seriously malevolent shit must be running amok in his subconscious.

Ryan guesses that if he
could
remember his dreams, he would call them nightmares. He feels he has good reason: despite the gaping dissolves in his memory, each morning is marked by a sense of dread so acute that he whimpers. He whimpers before he opens his eyes, before he is aware of himself as a being, distinct from his sticky mattress, the rattle of his ceiling fan. Whimpers as the sensation of waking life, consciousness, Ryanness, materializes in the slow, plodding minutes of awareness.

After two and a half years, Ryan's sense of dread has reached a rather excruciating pitch. So much so that the word
nightmare
no longer seems sufficient, summoning images and associations that have little to do with his everyday (i.e., California, fluffers, money shots, regret). Ryan reasons his dreams must trump nightmares – that his dreams must be visions of some definitive personal hell (a place without west-coast sunshine, perhaps – a place without gratification of a manic, eternal itch). So he's considered getting help, professional and otherwise – seeking out a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, a psychiatrist. He's pondered reading Jack Altman's
1,001 Dreams
, Graham Masterson's
1,001 Erotic Dreams Interpreted
, paying for a professional Tarot reading and repeatedly changing his diet, eliminating salts and sugars and empty carbohydrates. He's considered raw-food diets, protein diets, regular hydrotherapy and weekly enemas. He's even toyed with wearing runes and power stones, having his apartment smudged by a metaphysician wielding a pungent, metaphysical joint.

And yet Ryan's not entirely sure he wants to remember. All these potential aids in recollection have yet to leave the planning stage – a spiritual healer's cell number scribbled beside his dusty desktop, a chat with a New Agey webcam girl about the various pros and cons of home enema kits. Directly confronting his dreaming unconscious is for now – as it has been for what seems like eons – simply too harrowing an endeavour.

This summer afternoon, Ryan lies prone on a bare, queen-sized mattress, kitty-corner to the open door of his bedroom. Black cotton sheets lie tangled in a mass on the floor, musty with the dry residue of sweat, semen and spilled beer. His eyes open and shut, fluttering rapidly, as he realizes that he is again whimpering, high-pitched and puppy-like, as if in response to something impossibly obscene. So he stops. After a few blind and grasping minutes, he sits up.

He rubs his temples, raking his fingers through a blond crewcut and massaging his shoulders, kneading the sore, suntanned muscles of his chest and back. He sends his hands over his stomach, protruding ponderously over the elastic of his boxer briefs (another sore point for Ryan, who sometimes feels as if this whole lack-of-dreams issue is somehow related to his weight, the weakening of once-turgid muscles, the flabbiness of his thighs). He reaches between his legs and squeezes his penis, finding it tremendously and painfully erect.

Hot summer sunlight – filtered through L.A. smog, but still honeyed, golden – streaks through thin gaps in his blinds, casting rivets of white glare on a thirty-inch television set against the opposite wall. Ryan catches sight of his upper body and face reflected in the screen. Though he is foggy with the residue of sleep, he feels there is something odd in his reflection, some dreamy quality, a trick of the light. Something he can't place.

His Nokia ring tone – an obnoxious, chirping arpeggio – sounds from across the room. He pushes himself off the bed and stumbles over a sea of belt buckles and balled socks, T-shirts, seashell necklaces, mesh-backed baseball hats and wraparound sunglasses. The phone rings five times before he can fish it from the pocket of a crumpled pair of jeans. He flips it open and presses the plastic to his ear.

‘I'm not going to tell you it's half-past.' Don Debris's voice is sore and metallic, a busted bedspring. ‘I'm not going to tell you, but, you know. Now you know.'

Ryan slumps back down on the mattress.

‘Just to let you know why I'm calling. And – I'm not sure why you deserve this telephone call. Just letting you know I'm no longer your personal wake-up service. Night before a shoot, stay at a Holiday Inn or a Super 8. Buy a new alarm clock.'

Ryan swallows, staring at his milky reflection in the television screen.

‘Buy a rooster.'

Ryan's reflected skin is white and smooth, imperfections and blemishes and chestnut-tanned skin softened to a bleached consistency. His nose is a smear of shadow, his eyes black concavities. In the television, his neck appears perilously stick-thin, insubstantial. And there's something else, too – a weird shade or a smudge, hovering a few feet to his right.

‘This is your life, Ry-Ry,' Don says, with something like a sigh.

‘This is straight-up threesome, right? Two chicks, I'm assuming,' Ryan says, squinting.

‘Two chicks.'

A tremor ripples throughout the room: a car stereo blasting Caribbean music somewhere near Ryan's block, the bass despairingly loud.;

He puts down the phone. Stares hard at his reflection.

Thinks,
there's somebody here beside me
.

He holds his breath, his muscles tense, and turns to look, his heart thumping with the passing bass. Certain he's going to find a ghost, a spectre. Something white, and transparent, and dead.

‘Hello?' Don's voice is tinny and small in his lap. ‘You there?'

 

II

 

‘So you may have heard this already,' says Michael Seidenberg, sound operator, short and over-tanned. ‘Stop me if you have. I'm serious. So, this is like two weeks ago. We were shooting a scene with two brunette chicks, one meathead-looking guy with long blond hair. Calls himself Shawn Helmsley, you know this guy?'

Ryan leans against a divider and nods. He glances at a heap of garbage bags piled against the west wall of the warehouse: eight green bags bursting with crumbly muffin stubs, coleslaw, oily paraffin paper and teeth-marked ends of lunch meat. He tries to read the slogan written on the side of the bags but can only make out half the phrase:
Dust to Dust
, written in a cartoon-like, jubilant cursive.

Ryan and Michael stand in a makeshift dressing room beside a complimentary snack table offering a platter of tuna, egg salad and pale ham sandwiches, a stack of plastic plates and cups and utensils, and two-litre bottles of Snapple Lemon Iced Tea. Walls are composed of mismatched cubicle dividers and office panels, mixing taupe with slate grey, tan with cerulean. The floor is concrete and dusty, marked with dark shoe scuffs and mounds of ancient gum.

Ryan rubs his eyes, still feeling the disorienting buzz from the bowl of pot he smoked thirty minutes back. Once the
THC
kicked in, he found it easier to cope with entering the warehouse, thought less worriedly about sucking in his gut or throwing back his shoulders, stopped dwelling on whatever it was in his bedroom reflection that made him uneasy, made goose flesh rise in salute along his upper arms and back.

‘So Helmsley's standing in this bathtub,' Michael continues, his black, six-inch goatee wiggling with each syllable. ‘The shower's on and he's getting head from the two chicks. They're choking on this thing – really, stop me if you've heard this already, it's making the rounds.'

Ryan turns his head, watching crew members and technicians scurry around the set: a circular wooden platform, three feet high and twenty feet in diameter, covered by a base of mossy carpeting. A spongy, ­asparagus-toned blanket lies on top of the carpet, itself partly concealed by a collection of frilly jade pillows. Various potted plants – all rather exotic-looking, by Ryan's estimation – line the far curve of the base, their serrated fronds and leaves packed in a dense semicircle.
Kinda like a swamp
, he guesses.

‘So it's nearing the end of the shoot. We give the cue for Helmsley to come, so he starts groaning and shit. But when he lifts his left leg to get some leverage, he slips and absolutely
bails
. On his way down he smacks his head against the faucet, and
bang
, motherfucker's out cold.'

With the loud
crackle
of high voltage, quartz-halogen bulbs suddenly bathe the carpeted base with blinding expositional lighting. The surrounding floor and background of the set are immediately lost in shadow. Ryan blinks, squinting. And what materializes before him is a moonlit jungle clearing beneath cloud-covered, canopied night, without street lamp or tail light – a lack of illumination that seems subtly sinister and secretive, enlarging the dimensions of the warehouse so as to feel immense, continental. He picks up a sandwich from the platter and begins taking distracted nibbles from a piece of ham.

‘But here's the thing,' Michael says, his voice assuming a confidential tone. ‘Everyone assumes he's still conscious. Nobody knows how he did it, but Helmsley keeps moaning like nothing happened. And get this –
he's still got wood
!'

Despite the loud bustle of crew members lugging equipment (including two set assistants carrying an enormous plastic femur), Ryan listens to the playful echoes rebounding upon the room's darker corners – echoes producing an indistinct, subterranean effect. Without really knowing why, he finds such noises extraordinarily unpleasant; the word
spooky
comes to mind. Turning away from Michael and the platter, he catches sight of David Yost, fifty-one-year-old production manager and almost entirely obsolete, switching on a smoke machine. The squat device begins to billow rich and greasy smoke, giving the interior set the gaseous murkiness of a marsh. Ryan turns back to Michael, wiping sweat from his forehead. The air in the warehouse is exceedingly humid.
Almost tropical
, he thinks.

‘So the chicks keep on sucking and jerking, yadda yadda, and Helmsley comes with this huge groan. The girls finish the scene, we yell
cut
, but then we all realize what's happened – that Helmsley's fucking bleeding from the back of his skull. That he's out of commission. Get it? That he's been unconscious since he fell. Isn't that some crazy shit?'

Michael throws his head back and laughs, wrapping up a length of electrical cable. Still giggling, he glances toward the interior set. Ryan slowly follows his gaze to Don Debris, sitting in his telescopic director's chair, hands folded in his lap, surrounded by tendrils of fog. They make eye contact. Don gives a firm nod and Michael turns back to Ryan.

‘I think Don wants to see you,' he says.

Ryan licks his lips.

‘Break a leg, buddy,' he says, striding away with short, piston-like paces. Ryan wonders, was there a note of mockery, of sarcasm, in Michael's tone? He frowns, thinking. And what was that nod with Don all about? Remembering not to snack between meals, he drops the remains of his sandwich on the floor.

‘You're beautiful,' Don says, walking toward Ryan. They hug, Don's hand slapping between Ryan's massive shoulder blades. He kisses Ryan's cheek, all aggressive camaraderie. Ryan stares, dazed (
you're beautiful
– was that some sort of joke?), into Don's face – a well-worn outcropping of cheekbone and jawline, curled, atavistic brow, ample forehead and dark chocolate eyes. Skin tone the average russet of L.A. and fine black hair kept short and side-parted. Staring into Don's eyes, Ryan is once again reminded of the way Don can stare at distant objects for vast periods of time, exhibiting a watchful, primitive patience, a wariness of horizons. It made him recall a Neanderthal dummy he'd seen in a museum with his dad as a child; the waxy brow, the gaze, the hair – it was all so terrifying.

As a result, Ryan often finds himself sympathizing with the many B-girls who routinely assume that Don is a stunt cock or a gofer. Upon discovering that he is their director, they immediately act simple-minded and shy in his presence: fully committed to the role of bimbo, airhead or nihilist. After several months of working with Debris, they end up calling him Daddy, sitting in his lap and giggling whenever he tickles or bites their necks.

Ryan used to think this was cute – even funny. But that was back when the whole enterprise was still some novel dream – when Ryan was still riding a late-nineties wave of high hopes and heady anticipation, days of Californian sunbathing and careless mornings under the beneficent rays of the internet industry boom. A time when Ryan was just overcoming his first few weeks of excruciating shyness and deference, when his dad, dead then for over a decade, wasn't frowning over his decisions, or lack thereof. Back when Don was still
the
Don Debris – a man known for his unerringly accurate sense of what was good for business, despite his peculiar facial features (which, in the late nineties, merely made him more intriguing). At a hale twenty-three, with boyish looks and a flawless physique, Ryan had just completed the film that would usher in all the glowing industry attention: the Adult Video Network Award nomination for Best New Stud, the flurry of media interviews, the coveted invitation to Vegas for the '98 awards ceremony. And with it all came Don: leaving him raspy messages on his answering machine, slipping him his glossy business card, talking over late-night drinks and lines of coke of Ryan's earning potential, his own line of dvds, his contracts and his successes. A time when things could still be cute, or funny; when girls could sit in Don's lap and Ryan would still laugh, not comprehending when one particular reporter said she found the scene ‘quietly heartbreaking.'