Johnny Hangtime (5 page)

I
was wrong about Boris Bonner. After I gave him the dollar bill on the first day of school, he didn't return it the next day. Or the day after that. When he came over to my locker after school a few days later, I had my hopes up that he was going to pay me. But all he did was stick out his hand—palm up. I could tell he didn't want me to slap him five.

“Hey Johnny Thyme,” Boris said, “you got a dollar on you?”

“No.”

It wasn't a lie. As it turned out, I
didn't
have a dollar on me. I had spent my extra money buying one of the pretzels the PTA ladies were selling in the cafeteria after lunch. But I was glad I didn't have a dollar, because I didn't want to give it to him.

“All I find I keep,” Boris said.

He stuck his hands in the front pockets of my jeans. With his hands like that, it would have been so easy to punch him or slam my elbow against his head. It was tempting, but I didn't. I was scared. I
didn't want to get into a fight and risk losing my job as Ricky Corvette's stuntman. Boris hadn't actually threatened me, but the threat was implied.

When he didn't find anything in my front pockets, Boris checked my back pockets. I could smell his cigarette breath as he reached around me.

“Lucky you weren't lying, Thyme,” he said when my back pockets proved to be empty too. “It's not nice to lie.”

“It's not nice to steal money either,” I mumbled under my breath.

“What did you say?”

I looked around. The hallway was empty. Nobody was going to bail me out if I got into a fight.

“Nothing.”

“Thyme,” Bonner said, sticking his face next to mine, “I want you to do me a favor. I want you to bring me a dollar. On Monday. Bring it to school first thing in the morning. I'll meet you at the front of the school. Understand?”

“What for?” I asked.

“I'm low on cash.”

“So am I.”

“That's too bad, Thyme. Just bring me a dollar.”

“And what if I don't?”

“If you don't,” Bonner said, making a fist, “I'm gonna beat the crap out of you.”

As Bonner walked away from me, I suddenly realized my heart was racing. I hadn't noticed it while he was shaking me down, but now that he was gone, my chest was pounding. I
never
should have given him that first dollar, I thought. It didn't get rid of him. It only showed him I was weak. Now I'd
never
get rid of him.

 

As I walked home from school cursing myself for being so stupid, I couldn't help but think about Ricky Corvette. How come this sort of thing never happened to
him
, I wondered? Why is it that some kids lead a charmed life where everything always goes right?

I read Ricky's whole story in
People
magazine. When he was just a baby, his mother brought him to a modeling agency. He gurgled and cooed and laughed on cue. The camera loved him. By the time he was three, his picture had been on the package of every diaper, rattle, and stuffed animal in Toys “R” Us.

When he was five, Ricky beat out about a thousand other kids and landed the role of the adorable little boy with the cute voice on
Out of This World
. It was a dippy sitcom about a wacky family who move into the Mir space station after the astronauts move out. It was an instant hit, and suddenly everybody in America knew Ricky's name. The show ran for four years.

Apparently, Ricky's folks had trouble handling his success. His dad was a construction worker, and he didn't like the fact that his eight-year-old son made ten times more money than
he
did. He walked out on the family one day and didn't come back.

A year later, he had the nerve to sue Ricky and Ricky's mom. He claimed that he had supported the family during the years Ricky was growing up, so he was entitled to part of Ricky's future earnings—millions of dollars. The story was all over the tabloids. It was the first time a parent ever sued his own kid. Ricky's dad actually won the case, giving new meaning to the term
child support
.

Getting dragged through the courts made people feel sorry for Ricky. That made him more popular than ever and gave him more publicity. So he made
more
millions, and his dad wanted even
more
money. It was a real mess.

Come to think of it, Ricky Corvette's life wasn't so charmed after all.

Anyway, when
Out of This World
went off the air, Ricky made the jump to movies. He's a terrible actor, but he was in the right place at the right time, as usual.
Skate Fever
hit the theaters just as skate-boarding and in-line skating were getting hot. All across America—and around the world—kids were trading in their balls, pucks, and racquets for Rollerblades, snowboards, mountain bikes, and other tools of the new “extreme sports.”

Everybody in my school went to see
Skate Fever
, some of them over and over again. The movie made hundreds of millions of dollars. Ricky Corvette became a movie star. I was dying to tell everybody that it was
me
up there on the screen, not Ricky. But my contract, of course, prohibited telling anybody.

 

I did all of Ricky's stunts in
Skate Fever II, Skate Fever III
, and
Nightmare in L.A.
Roland directed them all. They were awful movies, but they were all hits. As Ricky became a Hollywood heavyweight, Roland was getting a reputation as the hot new director in town.

In those first few movies, Ricky had to do a lot of acting. But it didn't take long for the movie studio to figure out that audiences weren't coming to Ricky Corvette movies to see him act. They were coming to see Ricky jump off high objects, fly through the air, get himself into impossible predicaments and find a way out of them. All the stuff that I was actually doing in his place.

Every Ricky Corvette movie got more and more action oriented. By the time we made
New York Nightmare
, Ricky was hardly doing any acting at all.

 

So that's why I didn't spend my weekend worrying about Boris Bonner. I spent it risking my life at the top of the PsychoClone, the
biggest and baddest roller coaster in the world.

We were filming a new action flick called
Great Adventure
. Here's the plot, if you can stomach it: The teenage daughter of the president of the United States invites her whole class to an amusement park for the day to celebrate the end of school. Some escaped prisoners who had been hiding out for a week in the haunted mansion find out the president's daughter is coming. They decide it would be the perfect opportunity to kidnap her. They do, threatening to kill her unless the president allows them to leave the country.

The girl finally gets rescued by a kid working in a cotton candy booth. He captures all the convicts and locks them up in the Ferris wheel cars until the police arrive to take them back to jail. The movie ends with the president pinning the Medal of Honor on the cotton candy vendor, who then plants a kiss on the “First Daughter.”

Pretty sappy, huh?

The president's daughter was being played by the beautiful Augusta Wind. The cotton candy vendor was the one and only Ricky Corvette.

The climax of the film was the roller coaster scene. Roland and I worked all day on it. This was no run-of-the-mill dive-off-a-building gag. The script called for me to leap off a moving coaster.

It wouldn't be so tough on most roller coasters, but PsychoClone was no ordinary coaster. There was a sign at the bottom that said:

Roland and I went over every inch of the track. The coaster starts with an eighty-foot lifthill, which immediately drops you into a 360-degree loop, followed by a boomerang, a corkscrew, and seven inversions. The top speed reaches seventy-two miles per hour at one point. At the top of one of the loops, there are three Gs pulling on your body.

If the riders haven't lost their lunch by that point, they still have to make it through six turning vertical dives, a 53-degree, 115-foot drop, and a two-story spiral. Then the whole sequence is repeated—backward!

It's tough enough to ride the PsychoClone when you're strapped into your seat, holding on for dear life. I would have to do it while a guy was trying to strangle me from behind with piano wire.

“It's going to be a piece of cake, Mr. Hangtime,” Roland announced into his bullhorn. “I'll meet you at McDonald's.”

I climbed down from the top and hopped into the first car. The actor playing the convict trying to kill me got into the seat behind me. He had a dummy next to him. A bunch of teenage extras—non-actors who fill out a crowd—climbed into the rest of the seats.

“Roll cameras!” bellowed Roland, and the coaster eased up the first incline. Roland had cameras positioned all over the track so he could shoot the action from many different angles.

We were halfway up the hill when the guy behind me—as instructed—slipped the wire over my head and around my neck. I reached up to protect my throat, and we struggled like that through the 360-degree loop.

While we were spinning through the boomerang, I managed to get the wire off my head. We wrestled with each other as the coaster shot through the corkscrew. In the middle of one of the inversions, I
grabbed hold of the guy and threw him overboard to his death.

Actually, I grabbed hold of the
dummy
and threw
that
overboard, while the actor ducked below his seat. With all the screaming and the scenery flying by, the audience, hopefully, wouldn't notice.

My character appeared to think everything was fine, but during the vertical dive,
another
bad guy in the back car pulled out a gun and started shooting at me. Blanks, of course. I leaned forward and ducked my head. The bad guy fired off six shots. They ricocheted off the coaster. His seventh shot was a click. He was out of bullets.

The coaster slowly started climbing the last 115-foot lifthill. While leaning forward, I grabbed a prop umbrella, which had been placed at my feet. As the bad guy reloaded his gun, I popped open the umbrella and stepped up on my seat.

The coaster was at the crest of the hill now, about to shoot down the drop. Just as the bad guy was about to pull his trigger again, I jumped off the coaster, holding the umbrella. The coaster slid down the drop and I floated gently down.

It was difficult to control the umbrella, which had been specially designed to work like a parachute. When I hit the air bag placed on the ground alongside the ride, I twisted my right ankle and felt a sharp pain shoot up my leg. Right away I knew it was a bad sprain.

“Cut!” Roland screamed. “Awesome! Johnny, you are the man!”

As I hobbled off, I got a nice round of applause from the crew.

 

Meanwhile, Ricky Corvette was at home, probably lying around his pool and working on his tan. Roland would shoot some close-ups of his face later, but today Ricky wasn't even needed on the set.

Augusta Wind was, though. When we finished shooting the coaster scene, a limousine pulled up, and Augusta got out with her mother and her hair stylist. I was in a lot of pain, but like everyone
else on the set I watched Augusta's every move. It was impossible to take your eyes off her.

Augusta didn't say a word to anybody, but her mom started jawing with Roland. She was upset because she had gone over the script and saw that Augusta only had a few lines to say in the whole movie. Roland promised to give her more, and that seemed to satisfy Augusta's mother.

Roland led Augusta to a coaster car that had been taken off the tracks and put on blocks. She stepped into it, followed by an actor holding a knife in his hand. A big fan was turned on to blow Augusta's hair around.

For the next half hour, Roland filmed Augusta screaming her head off while the guy held the knife to her throat. For somebody who hardly ever spoke, she sure could scream.

Finally, Roland yelled “Cut!” He would shoot the background scenes separately and put them together to make it look as though Augusta was on the coaster with the rest of us.

Her work done for the day, Augusta stepped out of the coaster and followed her mother into the waiting limousine. As usual, she didn't say a word to anybody.

My ankle was throbbing, and I should have left the set to care for it, but I couldn't stop staring at Augusta. What does a girl that beautiful think about, I wondered? Does she think at
all
? Can anyone that beautiful have any problems in her life?

I couldn't be sure, and maybe it was just wishful thinking, but as Augusta rolled up the window in her limousine, I thought for a moment that she might have smiled at me.

M
om put ice on my ankle when we got home. That made the swelling go down, but she insisted on taking me to the doctor. He didn't put me in a cast or anything, but he had me fitted with a plastic brace to keep my ankle from moving. He gave me a pair of crutches and instructed me to use them for a week, even if the ankle felt fine.

When I got to school on Monday morning, Boris Bonner was waiting on the front steps. In all the excitement over the roller coaster stunt, I had forgotten that Bonner told me to bring in a dollar to school or he was going to beat me up.

Bonner took one look at me hobbling up the steps on crutches and broke into hysterical laughter. Some of the other kids turned to see what was so funny.

“Wimp!” he screamed gleefully. “Loser! Thyme, I can't believe you would lower yourself to faking an injury so I wouldn't beat you up!”

“I'm not faking an injury,” I said, struggling up the steps. “I sprained my ankle.”

“How?” Bonner asked gleefully. “You don't take gym. You don't play sports. You don't do
anything
!”

“I…tripped on my steps,” I said.

“You are so pathetic, Thyme!” Bonner chortled. “You're not a man, you're a wimp.”

As I hobbled past the line of laughing kids, for the first time in three years, I thought about giving up stunting. If I quit doing stunts, I would be like any other kid. I could take gym. I could go to dances. I could ride escalators. I could do anything I wanted. That included hauling off and socking a jerk like Boris Bonner if he gave me any trouble. And Mom would be thrilled if I quit.

For the time being, though, doing stunts was the one thing that allowed me to get
away
from my problems. The only time I could ever forget about people like Boris Bonner was when I was on a movie set, jumping off a building or doing some other crazy stunt.

I was all mixed up.