Futureproof (14 page)

June

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…

 

“We're so there, dude,” I tell Splinter. We will be actors. We will be paid scale.

We call everyone, but only Jonas is interested in throwing off the shackles of his workaday life and joining us on the mission. Andie can't participate because she's actually secured a real job. She went to a doctor following the procedure and got some kind of antidepressant prescription that makes it possible for her to interact with others,
even strangers. She works at a car wash. It's not the most prestigious of occupations but she likes it well enough.

The next day at work I tell Johnny, much to his chagrin, that I'm taking a few months off. I try to convince Hank to come with me, explain to him that he'll only live once and other inspirational shit like that. He refuses, despite my oratorical skills, which I like to think of as more than substantial. He's been cancerous for months now but shows no signs of surrender. He's still strong. I tell him to hold my job for me. He laughs demonically. I punch him in the arm.

The next morning Splinter and Jonas and I pack up Jonas' hatch-back and head south. The car is flying through the 5 a.m. darkness past cow pastures and isolated gas stations. The call time is 6. Once there, we are directed with flashlights to parking spaces in a field.

We walk about a half mile to a grouping of circus-style tents. There are hundreds of others just like us. They are eating biscuits and instant oatmeal out of Styrofoam cups, chasing the dream of Hollywood stardom. Or at least escaping the regular life of a no-talent hack stuck in a cubicle all day. I can't decide which group I want to belong to. Both choices sound pathetic.

We grab some food, then stand in line for sign-in. There are postings everywhere saying that it is essential for us to get in this line so that we can get paid at the end of the day.

“Dude, this shit pays
every day
,” Splinter marvels. We are significantly stoked by this revelation.

After that line, the next lineup is for wardrobe. We are each outfitted with a crappy version of a Civil War soldier's uniform. We are to portray imprisoned Union soldiers. They give me a hat big enough on top that I can fit my dreadlocks inside of it.

By the time we get into the makeup line the sun is up and we've stopped shivering. After they smudge up our faces to make us look
“dirty,” we are directed to a large clearing where there are already hundreds of other disheveled-looking extras. There are men standing in front of us with long beards wearing gray uniforms far cleaner and less tattered than ours. They are, we discover, “professional” Civil War reenactors.

One of them yells in a booming voice that we are the scumbag maggot prisoners of the Great South.

“You will all line up double-file in divisions of one hundred,” he booms in military cadence. Then another guy takes over the direction. We wonder if this is part of the movie.

“There is to be no talking among the ranks. If we hear any talking among you, there will be severe penalties.”

“What is this bullshit?” Jonas says.

“No shit, dude,” Splinter adds.

“It's obviously the Stanislavski-Strasberg Method acting approach.” My drama background finally allows a real-world application. Who'da thunk it?

Most of the reenactors are actual vets who can't leave Vietnam behind. They all acknowledge their fallen Nam brethren by boycotting the shoot the day “Hanoi” Jane Fonda tours the set with her media-mogul boyfriend Ted Turner, whose network is financing the whole shebang.

To make up for the lacking number of extras (the prison supposedly held upwards of twenty thousand men at one time during the Civil War), the set crew has created hundreds of cardboard cutouts. These cutouts are life-size photographs of extras that are moved around the set to serve as background bodies. They are kept far enough away from the cameras so that anyone outside the know won't realize they aren't moving.

The entire set is a scaled-down model of the original real-life Confederate prison camp Andersonville. And it could actually function
as a prison. There are literally thousands of twenty-foot-high tree trunks that wrap completely around a one-hundred-acre enclosure.

During the first few days of shooting all the extras are jockeying for position. We try to anticipate where the camera crew is going to move next. We want some face time on-screen, if at all possible. I make it onto celluloid the first day.

It's during a shot that takes place at the crummy little rivulet that runs through the center of the compound. It's supposed to serve as the place where all the prisoners get drinking water and wash their clothes. The director wants the audience to have a firsthand understanding that the water that ran through the prison was polluted. This is my face time—though I can't actually call it “face” time because the shot is taken from behind me. But in that one shot, at least, I am the focal point. And as an added bonus I am—get this—
pissing
. I shake it off, tuck it back in and everything.

But I don't actually piss. That's the best part. It's all
acting
. I'm on-screen for no more than seven seconds before hobbling out of the picture to demonstrate how sickly I am (more acting).

The director yells “cut” and actually takes the time to tell me, insignificant extra, that I provided very convincing urination. I am fulfilled. I don't care that it wasn't actually my
face
portrayed, because at that one point, for those seven seconds, I am the Everyman of the film. I am the example of the filth that people had to live in. Pissing in the drinking water.

Splinter tells me that I'm only slightly blowing the importance of my scene out of proportion. He always yanks me back down to earth, the fucker.

“You're a fucker,” I tell him.

“Let's go smoke a joint,” Jonas says.

Inside the prison compound, Andersonville proper, there are hundreds of makeshift tents, known in nineteenth-century dialect
as “shebangs.” The shebangs are constructed by set crews, pieced together with thick cloth canvas and sticks. They are perfect hiding places for getting high, which Splinter, Jonas, and I use to our fullest advantage. And we soon discover that we are not alone in our quest for enlightenment while at “work.” All over the set there are little tribes of hippies and pot-toking nonpacifists as well who take turns smoking up and then standing watch outside the shebangs, making sure the coast is clear. Because these Hollywood types aren't stupid. They know that anybody here is a loser looking to make a fast buck. Who else could take three straight months off from real work to make a piddling seventy bucks a day? And so, by progression, they know then that every extra who can get away with it is going to take cover away from the unrelenting sun. But this is far from the only reason for our retreat into the tents. Movie shoots are fucking boring, we soon learn. They shoot each scene using only one camera, and then they put that one camera up on a crane and shoot the same scene, again and again, with numerous takes. By the time they finish one scene, every one of us extras knows the lines better than the actors themselves. One scene that'll end up on-screen for two minutes, at best, takes an entire day and a half to shoot. This is monotony in its purest sense. And under the central Georgia sun at that.

But we are getting paid to basically stand around looking pathetic. Normally we do that in our real lives and get paid far less to do it. And we really only take breaks every once in a while to get high. Any time the assistant directors get on the bullhorns and say they need everyone out of the shebangs for a particular shot that pans across the compound or whatever, we are there. Loyal, waiting, and bored.

July

For the next two weeks we're doing night shoots on the film. We are instructed to arrive on the set at dusk since we'll be “working” until 3 or 4 a.m. every night. On the second night Corey comes down to the set. He has pretty much dropped from sight ever since he started dating this girl Janine. She is actually an old friend of Andie's. They both attended the same summer camp for troubled girls back when they were fourteen or fifteen. Like Andie, Janine has mental issues. Corey loves her, though. He says that she helps him stay straight. He rarely comes by Andie's anymore because he says all we ever do over there is get high. I don't know what he's expecting us to do at Andersonville. It's not any different on the set. I don't tell him that though.

We sneak inside one of the bigger shebangs, where Jonas rolls a
fat joint (he's a pro now). Corey skips on it the first three times it goes around. On the fourth pass he hits it and immediately steps out of the tent, walks around it (we can see his circling shadow), then comes back just in time to hit it again. He mutters that he'll see me around and disappears.

When we run into him later he's tripping so hard that he thinks the cardboard cutouts are real people.

“They won't stop following me around,” he says. “Everywhere I go I see this same guy. He has no neck. He has no fucking neck! His eyes follow me everywhere and when I run to a different area he's already there.”

“He's like Pepe Le Pew,” I say, for fun.

Corey laughs and Splinter asks where he got the Acid.

“It's not Acid, man,” Corey says. “It's fucking mescaline. It's so pure I can feel the blood in my veins.”

“Is that a good thing?” Splinter asks.

“Yes.”

Corey pulls out a cigarette cellophane with five tiny pellets in the bottom.

“That's mescaline?”

“It looks small, but this is seriously the cleanest high I've ever had. It's so fucking pure and good.”

“What happened to wanting to stay clean and the straight and narrow and all that shit?”

He puts his finger to his lips. “Shhhhh.”

“Where'd you get that stuff, Corey?”

“Some guy. I don't know who. I can't remember, actually.”

He hands me the cellophane.

Within thirty minutes we're all tripping. Hard. We edge closer to the action. Despite the multiple takes and the dialogue repeated ad infinitum, the shit actually seems real. The assistant directors cor
ral all the extras together and tell us to prepare for some simulated fighting. The “bad” prisoners are going to lead an assault against a band of “good” prisoners who have been attempting to curtail the bad guys' strong-arm tactics. Or maybe the other way around.

Bloody conflict ensues. Rubber clubs and knives are used. But even after the director yells “Action!” none of us can stop laughing long enough to appear as though we're angry and ready to kill for our freedom or beliefs or whatever.

It occurs to me in the mescaline haze that my dad once spoke of a war protest he and my mother had attended back in '69. It's one of the few times he ever said anything about what it was like when they were still in love. He'd said they were in D.C. at the Washington Monument. They were tripping, smoking weed, being peaceful, as was the general hippie tendency. Then these cops came up on horseback and started running down all the peace lovers gathered there. They were assaulting and arresting anyone who looked even slightly “revolutionary” (that's the way Richard said it). He said that one of the cops grabbed hold of my mother's dress and was trying to yank her back out of the car they had jumped into for escape. They barely got away.

I mentioned this incident to my mother once in passing and she denied it ever happened. She can never admit that she ever did anything halfway exciting with Richard. Though she has said that she danced onstage with Jim Morrison at a Doors concert. Richard wasn't there that time though, she said.

“What are you thinking about?” Splinter asks me.

“My parents. My dad told me about a coupla times when they were being stereotypical hippies, opposing war and not bathing and loving the one they were with and all that.”

“Like when?”

“Once they went to a ‘Love-In' or some shit at the Pentagon.
He said there were thousands of them there, all wearing flowers and what-have-you. Have you ever seen the video footage of the hippies putting daisies in the soldiers' gun barrels?”

“I don't think so.”

“Well, that was the same time, I think. Anyway, all these hippies, thousands and thousands of them, completely encircled the Pentagon and using the ‘Power of Love' they levitated the building. Supposedly, I mean.”

“Did it really come off the ground?”

And that's when I see Larry.

Larry as in “I'm Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl.” From the old
Newhart
show. I used to watch that shit religiously after we moved to an Atlanta campground following our last eviction and my parents got backslidden and left the majority of their extremist religious beliefs behind (Mother's occasional outbursts of divinely inspired revelation not withstanding). This was back when they decided that God actually
did
approve of television and wanted his children to own large TVs. With many channel selections. And yea, verily they bought a thirty-two-inch TV and had cable installed upon it.

“Look, you guys, it's Larry!” I whisper reverently, nodding in his direction.

He's leaning against the deadline fence, smoking a cigar.

“Who's Larry?” Jonas says.

I do my best Larry impression, try to make my voice sound like I've just swallowed bugs.

“From
Newhart
?”

“Yeah! That's him!”

“God, he looks old.”

“I've gotta get him to say, ‘I'm Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl.' I can't believe that's fucking Larry!”

I approach him, try not to seem like a crazed fan on drugs.

“Hi,” I say, my right hand extended in a gesture of warmest friendship.

“Hi there,” he says, taking my hand limply.

Fuck yes! Even when he's just talking to regular people his voice sounds exactly like it did on
Newhart
.

“I love your work on
Newhart
. You were so funny on that show.”

An expression crosses his face. I'd almost call it one of annoyance. He is an actor who cannot live down the role. I ignore the look and move on to the business at hand.

“Will you say that line for me?”

“What line?”

“You know, the line from the show that you'd always say when you came on.”

Larry looks at me hard for a moment, then turns his gaze back toward the set hands preparing the next scene.

“No,” he says. “I don't say that line anymore.”

What does he mean he doesn't say that line? That fucking line made his career. He'd be just another washed-up character actor out of a job without that line. He doesn't grasp the ramifications of his own fleeting fame. Does he honestly
believe
that when people tune in to this movie and see him they are going to be like, “Oh, look there, dear! It's [whatever his real name is]”? Of course they aren't going to say that. They're going to say, “Holy shit, it's Larry!” If they recognize him at all.

“You don't say that line anymore?” I ask him.

He doesn't answer, doesn't look at me. He shakes his head no.

“Ooooh-kay.”

I turn on my heel, head back to my boys.

“Did he say it?” Splinter asks.

 

Splinter, Jonas, and I meet this couple at Andersonville. They seem cool, though probably older than us by a few years. The guy, Brandon Stickney (“I'm Brandon Stickney,” he told us by way of introduction, shaking our hands violently), is always joking about people smoking crack. Which is kind of odd because his girlfriend Sherri is a total fucking junkie, of the Heroin persuasion. She's twenty-eight, fairly attractive, pretty good body. Good sense of humor, all that. The topic turns to drugs, as it inevitably does when you're a Head and are trying to find out who else is. I mention that I've always wanted to try Heroin, but that you hear all these negative things about it in the media and high school health class and everything so it's like this really taboo thing. And all the little lily-white suburban kids look at you like you're nuts if you mention it.

But Sherri doesn't.

Her face lights up when I tell her of my secret desire. She asks Brandon Stickney to run to craft services and grab her a cup of juice and a cookie and then she tells me that the only reason she's even at Andersonville is to get away from the junk. She pulls her left sleeve up and shows me track marks like I've never seen before, except in that one Jane's Addiction video where the naked woman has scabs all over her body from shooting dope.

Sherri assures me that the health class videos are all scare tactics. She says that crack is pretty much the only drug that you want to do more of as soon as you get it in your system. Heroin's subtler than that, she says.

“Can you tell me where to get it?” I ask. “I've been asking around about it for the last six months and nobody knows where it's at.”

“That's because there's only about a six-block radius in all of Atlanta where they sell it. I'll take you there. Once.
One time.
I don't
want you getting hooked. I'll take you once and get the hookup. But two conditions: You can't mention anything to Brandon and you have to buy me a bag.”

“That's cool. I don't have to be blindfolded or anything like that, right?”

“I'll take you just this once.” She gives me her phone number and tells me to call her when I get back into the city.

When Brandon Stickney returns we try to act nonchalant, but he can smell betrayal. He acts different, doesn't tell any jokes about seemingly normal people being crackheads. He doesn't say anything. He just stands there drinking his juice from a wax paper cup.

 

I tell Andie about the Great Discovery as soon as we walk in the door. Then we all rush around cleaning the house, throwing out our old soft drink cans and paper plates, making the beds, everything. We swore to each other that if we ever tried Heroin it would be a one-time thing. Just to see what it was like. The house must be clean and perfect for this One Time.

We get the house cleaned in an hour and then I call Sherri. She gives me directions to her house.

“Come by yourself,” she says. “I don't want all these other people knowing where to buy it. And it isn't a good idea to bring five or six people to the ghetto anyway. That freaks the niggers out.”

She's already waiting outside when I pull into her driveway.

“Where's Brandon?” I ask her.

“He's inside,” she says, then, seeing the look on my face, adds, “Don't worry about it. I told him I was taking you down there just this once. He's letting me go one last time because he knows I want to clean up. We're moving to California in a month, so it doesn't matter anyway.”

In the ghetto, or “The Bluff,” as she calls it, there are run-down
buildings and broken glass everywhere, like in that Grandmaster Flash video “The Message.” It's right by the Georgia Dome, the newly constructed home of the Atlanta Falcons.

We pull up next to a three-story brick apartment building with all the windows boarded up. Sherri tells me to wait in the car. I give her the money and she goes in the side entrance. In place of a door there leans a piece of plywood that has to be slid back in order to gain entrance.

The windows are completely fogged up in the T-Bird. I can't see shit, and I'm starting to freak because there are people all over the place and headlights bouncing around and you never know when a cop is going to show up.

In moments Sherri comes back out. “That nigger Pooky says it's cool for you to come in and wait. He has to go down the block to get the stuff.”

“Why do you call him a nigger? I thought you were friends with him.”

“Rule number one down here: Everybody that has any connection to the dope game is a nigger. All of 'em will try to fuck you over, I don't care how long you've known them.”

“So you're not a racist?”

“No. Not at all. When I say ‘nigger' it's only because these motherfuckers down here are tried-and-true
niggers
.” She sees that I don't grasp the logic. “You know, a nigger. Someone who'll fuck you over at the drop of a hat if they think they have the slightest chance to get away with it. Every white person down here is nothing more than a mark for these people, OK? That's why they're niggers.”

“OK.”

The room is completely dark except for a single candle. The place reeks of kerosene. A mattress and box spring sit on top of cinder blocks. A woman is hitting a crack pipe on the bed. Sherri introduces her as Joyce. She exhales some crack smoke and flashes me a toothless smile.

“Do you want a hit?” she asks, extending the pipe to me.

“No, thanks.”

“So, you guys doing OK?” Sherri says.

“Not too bad,” Joyce says. She speaks remarkably well for someone with no teeth.

“Joyce is a pretty name,” I say lamely, an attempt to join the conversation.

“Thank you,” she says, looking up from the pipe she's repacking with another rock. She looks at me in the darkness.

Pooky slips into the room, says that the bags are small and he couldn't do anything about it. You've gotta take what they give you, he says.

“Is that your Christian name?” I ask Pooky. He gives Sherri a stare of annoyance. “This nigga witchoo?”

“Thanks, guys,” Sherri says.

“Pooky's a fucking dick,” she says when we get in the car. “That nigger fucking went down to the dealer's house, bought half the bags we paid for, and then split them up so that he'd be able to pocket the rest of the money. See? A true nigger.”