The Fictional Man (15 page)

Bob was still fixated on the bird woman. “Niles? Can we talk?” He indicated the double doors to the day room. “Outside, I mean?”

Fred shot him a look. “Well,” Niles said, looking between the two men, “if, uh, if it can’t wait...”

Bob was already walking towards the doors, casting a last nervous glance towards the old woman as he did. Niles smiled sheepishly at Matson. “Sorry.”

Matson shrugged, taking a quick look at Bob’s cards. “Tell him he oughtta fold.”

“I
CAN’T STAY
here.” Bob said, rubbing the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. “I can’t go back in there.”

The author smiled gently. “So, Bob, do you see now that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side?” He slapped a hand on Bob’s shoulder in a fatherly fashion as the foolish Fictional hung his head and admitted that yes, it wasn’t as much fun to grow old as he’d thought. “Good man. Run along to the car.” Smiling ruefully, Bob did as he was bid.

“You’re a good Joe, Niles,” he said, as he left. “You sure are a gosh-darned good Joe.”

Niles did his best not to smile. “Well, it is a bit grim. So, um... do you see –
”

“You don’t get it,” Bob snapped. “That woman over there. The one making those, those godawful
noises –”
He took a breath, shaking his head. “I know her. Knew her.”

Niles blinked. “Sorry?”

“Yeah, you should be.” Bob propped himself against a wall with his arm, staring down at the floor. He looked for a moment as if he was going to be sick. “Her name’s Rose Kittering. She was a makeup artist on the show, the first couple of years. She was my makeup woman – she did the mask, glued it on, all that stuff. She was... I don’t know, in her late fifties, maybe – but she looked good for it. Hell, I’d have put her ten years younger.” He wet his lips, staring into the pattern of the carpet. “Christ. We used to flirt, you know that?”

“Ew.” Niles couldn’t hide the look of disgust at the thought.

Bob shook his head. “It was just
joking,
” he said, not looking at Niles. “She, she used to call me Bobby. She used to say I had a nice ass in the tights – ‘Nice ass, Bobby.’ ‘Back at you, Rose.’ Every day. Every day.” He laughed, in a way Niles found worrying.

“Are you sure it’s her?” Niles put a hand on Bob’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s get you some air –
”

“It’s her. She left the show during the second season. Health problems – wouldn’t tell anyone what. We made her a cake, said we’d keep in touch... and now it’s, what? Twenty years? Only fifteen? And she’s in
this
fucking place, looking like, like
that
...” His voice broke, and he slumped down the wall until his was sitting on the floor. “And I still look the same. Exactly the same.” He looked up at Niles, and Niles saw that he was crying again. “She keeps
looking
at me.”

“Well... you keep looking at
her...
so...” Niles sucked in a breath. “Sorry, that’s not much help, is it?”

“She keeps looking at me. I can’t stand the idea that she’ll recognise me, that she knows who I am, how I’m still the same... I
know
I should talk to her, Niles. I
know.
I just...” He buried his face in his hands as Clarice bustled down the corridor, carrying a stack of blankets.

“He okay?” she said, looking concerned. Niles nodded hastily, and she went on her way without looking back.

Niles turned back to Bob. To be honest, it hadn’t really crossed his mind that the ethical thing to do in the circumstances would be to see how this Rose person was doing – he’d kind of stopped thinking of her as a person when she’d uttered her first bird-like croak – but even if it had, he didn’t think it would be a good idea for Bob to go back in there. “Listen,” he said quietly, “why don’t you, um, go wait in the car? I won’t be long.”

“I’m serious. I can’t stay here.” Bob slowly got himself up from the floor, shaking his head over and over, looking as pale and drawn as Niles had ever seen him.

“I swear,” Niles said desperately, “I’ll be ten minutes. Not even that. I’ll just find out what he has to say about that one episode and then we’ll be out of here.”

Bob stared suspiciously at Niles, then staggered towards the exit, still looking as if he might throw up at any moment.

“Ten minutes!” Niles called after him.

H
ALF AN HOUR
later, Niles had lost nearly sixty dollars to Fred, and Fred had slowly loosened up about how
Door To Nowhere
had been turned into
The Delicious Mr Doll.
Niles couldn’t help wondering if those two facts were connected.

“Hutton Hopper was a guy who lived in the squat for a while – this was in New York, down on the Lower East Side,” he said, flipping another tiddlywink into the ever-increasing pile, “and then later after that all fell apart, which was about the time the ratings for
Door To Nowhere
collapsed and I realised I was out of work, he comes at me with this idea to move to LA and split the rent on a place – me, him, his old lady and this guy Johnny Garfield. He took a lot of bennies. So anyway, I figured,
hey, why not?
” Niles saw the bet, and Fred turned over his cards – an eight and a Queen, joining the Queen, two Jacks, King and seven already in play. “Ladies on top, Jacks underneath – story of my life. What you got?”

Niles sighed gently, turning over a two and a four. “Mind if we stop playing for a while? It’s a little distracting.” Not to mention potentially expensive.

“What, you don’t wanna to win this back?” Fred flashed his gummy, cocksure grin, doing another of his little snickers. “Could be lucky.”

Niles shook his head. He was fairly certain Fred was cheating, but he didn’t want to make any accusations just when the story was getting interesting. “So were you living with Hutton Hopper when he started work on
Mr Doll?
”

Fred nodded. “Yeah, yeah. I was trying to get some short stories published in between working at a deli counter – I wasn’t doing so well at that. The stories, not the deli – you would not
believe
the kind of pussy you can score working behind a deli counter! I could tell you stories that’d curl your damn hair. This one dame, I swear – titties you could bounce a quarter off – she just comes in the door and asks for –
”

Niles started coughing loudly. He’d somehow managed to swallow his own saliva down the wrong pipe when Fred had mentioned the bouncing quarter. He tried to remember what the website had said about “The Doll House” and its exploration of gender roles, but it wasn’t coming to mind.

Fred paused, made an apologetic face, and changed tack. “Well, never mind about that. I was doin’ okay in that department, that’s all I need to say. But those stories – it was the damn
Door To Nowhere
all over again. I’d take a hit of blotting paper, start banging on the keys, send whatever bullshit poured out to
Collier’s
and then act surprised when they didn’t take it. Took me a while to get outta that rut.” He sighed. “Did better than Garfield, though – he got shot pulling a liquor store robbery, did ten years in San Quentin. Hell of a waste, plus it left us in the hole with the rent.” He began to pack the cards away, sorting them into numbered and suited order before they went in the pack. Niles looked at the pile of tiddlywinks sitting in front of him – sorted as meticulously as the cards – and made a mental note never to play poker again. At least not with anyone over seventy.

“Hopper, though... he was doing just fine.” Matson chuckled dryly. “He was knocking out these cheap sex novels every month for different publishers –
Sorority Sinners,
Harlot In Heat, The Man Stealers
, that kinda thing. All different names – Tony Trellis was one he used a lot, and Eva Von Vance, that was for the lesbian stuff. Occasionally he’d do ’em as these serious scientific exposés, slap some fake degrees on the names –
The Lust Equation,
that was the big seller there, he did six more off the back of that one.” Matson grinned, nodding at Clarice as she walked by again.

Niles’ voice was still a little hoarse from the coughing fit. “Didn’t you – sorry – didn’t you have a problem with the ethics of that? The, um, the exploitation factor?”

“What are you talking about?” Matson looked confused. “Hopper groused about it occasionally, sure – even said he was trying to
subvert the genre
a couple times, like an asshole – but hell, it was easy money. Kept us in booze and pills. Anyway, you’re wondering how
Door To Nowhere
comes into all this, right?”

“Right.” Niles leant forward, straining to hear. This was what he’d come to hear – the why of
Mr Doll
, and the how.

“Hopper did these Private Eye novels too – under his own name. He used to do ’em when he got bored of the other stuff, and he’d pack ’em full of blood and guts, y’know, pushing the envelope – I remember the first one was
Man In A Woodchipper,
and then... aw, man, what was the one they almost couldn’t print?”He gave his unpleasant little snicker again.
“A Cleaver For Clara.
He had to cut about ten thousand words out of that one, most of the cleaver action – I remember he got a letter from his editor saying how he nearly called the cops when he read it. He said he was just giving the people who read that bullshit what they really wanted.” Matson closed his eyes for a second, chuckling at the memory. “Anyway, one of these things – and this one’s a little more us-against-the-commies than usual, I think it was called
Sickle Where The Sun Don’t Shine
– one of these things gets to a big shot at Talisman Pictures, and they love it. What’s not to love, right?”

Niles smiled hollowly. Quite a lot, by the sound of it.

“So this bigwig, he gets Hopper’s number and asks if he’s available to work up a screenplay.” His eyes twinkled. “Guess what they wanted?”

Niles wet his lips. “A Bond knockoff.”

Matson nodded, grinning. “Right. Secret agent stuff. And they wanted it hard-boiled, see? But not quite
fella-goes-into-a-woodchipper-on-page-one
hard-boiled. Not
sickle-up-the-ass
hard-boiled either. And they definitely don’t want it too sexy.”

“They don’t?”

“Not yet.” Matson snickered, shaking his head. “So they want Hopper, but they don’t want Hopper to be Hopper. That’s Hollywood, right?”

Niles remembered his meeting with Dean. “...Right.”

“So Hopper, he’s bored right away – like before he even gets started – so he’s putting it off, putting it off... but on the other hand this is the big time, you know? So he’s kind of looking around for something, some idea that’s gonna make it interesting enough for him to start on. And that’s when he finds a bunch of old
Door To Nowhere
stuff. We were” – he was snickering again – “we were using that crap as the lining for a parakeet cage, can you believe it? So he goes to change the parakeet and he starts reading this script all covered in parrot shit... he’s saying,
‘this is blowing my mind, man!’
” He started chuckling, then laughing loudly, a harsh, raucous sound that echoed around the room. Clarice was walking through with a fresh towel and some talcum powder, and she gave him a worried look. “
‘This is blowing my goddamn mind!’
Ha!”

“That was ‘The Doll House’?”

“Right. The one Shatner butchered. Jesus,
that’s
a story for another day.” Matson’s laughter faded, and he gave Niles a long, speculative look, still smiling his gummy smile. “That’s the one you came here to talk to me about?”

“Yes,” the author smiled, “you see, I was wanting to re-adapt it, if you will, for a remake of
The Delicious Mister
–”

“You mean steal it,” the screenwriter hissed. “Like Hopper did. After I used my golden words to clean up after his parakeet!” He drew himself out of the chair, rising to his full height, and pointed an imperious finger. “Get thee hence!”

Niles paused. “...yes.”

Matson raised an eyebrow. “You a reporter? I heard there was a remake in the works.”

“I’m... um.” Niles swallowed hard, staring down at his hands. “I’m a writer.”

“Huh.” Matson grinned. “Well, here’s what happened. Hopper reads the thing, and he tells me it’s perfect for what he wants to do. Apparently it’s full of all this gender-bender stuff, all this queer David Bowie crap – anyway, Hopper wants to... Jesus, how did he say it... he wants to
‘smuggle a conversation’
past the studio people.” Matson rolled his eyes. “I don’t know. So he sits down and does this way-over-the-top take on ‘Doll House’ as this secret agent fantasy, and he’s highlighting all the gender stuff he said was in there – which was all news to me, let me tell you –”

“But...” Niles started, then stopped. Matson waved the objection aside.

“Anyway. Susan Sontag had just written that piece on camp, so I kind of knew what he was going for, but... man, this was
vicious.
Like those movies he made. Vicious camp. He had hate in his eyes for James Bond, you know? Anyway, the studio
loved
it – I could have told him they would – and then they put this crazy French guy on it, or maybe he was Italian, and he put all the sex back in and then a little bit more – I figure he’d read plenty of Tony Trellis – and Hopper got so royally pissed off about what they did to it, he moved to the goddamn desert and started churning out the gore films. He said that’s what the culture wanted, so that’s what the culture deserved.” Matson shrugged, shaking his head with a smile. “Hutton Hopper, God rest his soul. Craziest son of a bitch I ever knew.”

“Wait.” Niles shook his head, feeling completely out of his depth. “You’re saying that you... you never intended ‘The Doll House’ to be about masculinity? About, about war, and the male, um, drive to...” He tailed off. Matson was snickering again. Niles was starting to hate that sound.

“Ah, it was anti-war, sure.” He nodded. “Everything we did then was anti-war. We were seriously considering changing the title to
War Is Nowhere
until management told us we were being assholes. But all that masculinity stuff... ah, who knows where that came from. It’s in there if you want to look for it, I guess.” He shrugged again, looking apologetic, as if he was sorry he couldn’t do more.