Fight the Rooster

by Nick Cole

  “Well, I’m sure there would be that,” said Kip, suddenly unsure if he was even getting paid, much less whether he could offer Goreitsky any compensation. So far Kip had managed to occupy his brain with almost none of the actual mechanics of his job.

  “Really!” began the now excited little elf Goreitsky had become. “Because I have learned thing or two since long ago. I can make the MTV with the jump cutting. I even like the shaking of the camera thing. It is very… how do you say… with it.” Goreitsky leaned closer, not eating. He seemed hopeful that they had received his last sentence well and looked at them with a sort of unsettling expectancy that people who don’t speak your language often punctuate the end of their sentences with.

  “When have you seen these things, Edvar?” inquired his wife, looking up from the plate balanced on her knees.

  “Sometimes… in town below, when I am to be getting things, I see movies.”

  “Really?” she said quietly and continued properly slicing her food, quartering it into delicate bites.

  “Yes reallys!” he said angrily. “I stand in back and I watch what these kids are doing and I think, I am not so old as to be doing same.”

  “I know that,” she said quietly, not looking at him, chewing thoughtfully.

  “And I am to tell you something else. I would be doing it better.” He raised his index finger in proclamation. She finished chewing her meat, then put her silverware on the napkin in her lap. She stared directly at him.

  “I know that too,” she said softly.

  For a long while everyone ate. Goreitsky finished much sooner than the others. Then he began to stalk around the campfire, turning inward, arguing with himself. Soon Summer was clearing the dishes, and shortly Goreitsky seemed to finish the last of his internal debate.

  “I have two things to say. First, I will do your picture. I don’t care if it’s good or bad. I will be doing my best to be making it hip and cool.” At this point he snapped his fingers back and forth to indicate “hip and cool.” “The second thing I have to say is to my wife, but you may hear it, for it is a great thing of shame for me to speak, and for you to hear.” He turned to his wife, standing straight, smoothing his sweater and pants across his slight frame.

  “My lover, I have been very wrong.” He gulped, cleared his throat, and continued. “I hate this mountain and I want to leave it and the goats and never see any of it again. I want to work while I still can. I want us to live by the beach where it is being warm. I want to have a hibachi,” he stated simply. “I hope this is to be acceptable to you now?”

  She threw her plate down and ran to Goreitsky, enveloping him in her arms, for she was much taller and bigger than him.

  “It is! Yes, I want to go far away from here and never see this place again,” she sobbed, crying into the top of his head.

  “Have you felt this way for long?” asked a stunned Goreitsky.

  “Truth?” she asked.

  “Truth!” he demanded.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” she said, weeping harder with each “yes.”

  “That is being crazy. I have felt this way for longest time too.” Then he too began to cry into her shoulders as she wept atop his forehead. He said over and over again that he was wrong and she reminded him over and over again that she loved him. That she had stayed with him and the goats because she loved him. He continued to weep at the depth of her love for him and not for all the years lost in their wilderness.

  ***

  They took a few belongings in a knapsack, and putting on their walking clothes and boots, the four of them departed down the mountain. Goreitsky’s last action was to set free the goats that he kept in another clearing on the back side of the mountain. The goats had been responsible for the mournful cry Kip and Parker had heard below on the broken bridge.

  By nightfall they had reached the Yugo. They piled in and drove off into the night, and Goreitsky did not look back at the lone ribbon of highway stretching off into the dark behind them. Instead he felt the squeeze of his wife’s hand as the little car bumped its way through the night, heading down, heading back, heading into the future again. For a moment he tried to feel sad about leaving the place where they had lived for so long. About turning his back on his failed dream of defiance. But he couldn’t. Instead he thought… is it really leaving when there is a hand on top of yours, going with you to wherever it is you are to be being next?

  Is it?

  As the little red car bumped and skidded its way down the mountain, the heater valiantly defending them all against the chill of the night, Parker, Goreitsky, and Summer stared straight ahead at the headlights on the highway, their eyes as wide as the starry night sky turning above them.

  Kip dozed, convinced that being a producer was an easy thing to do and be. He had accomplished his mission and all he had done was climb a mountain, cross a broken bridge, eat goat, and listen to family grievances aired aloud in a smoky tent. Maybe he had finally found his calling. Maybe there wasn’t so much to being a producer.

  Maybe.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Table Read

  The Great Director had rented a warehouse in an industrial park at the extreme north end of the San Fernando Valley as the site for the first table read. The distant location was a part of LA, in theory. In reality, its distance from Hollywood would make it difficult for the actors and crew to arrive on time. This tactic, hoped the Great Director, would start the working relationship between cast and crew off on the wrong foot.

  The warehouse was comfortingly warm despite the morning chill. In the quiet before anyone arrived, the Great Director imagined Alaska. Piles of snow lay heaped outside the warehouse. Inside, Hollywood and death did not exist. His coffeehouse mocha became a cup of instant hot chocolate made from a packet hauled in with other vital supplies for the long winter ahead. By dogsled.

  This dream of snowy isolation was shattered by the arrival of Langley Banks.

  The hot new actor of the moment, Langley had been grandfathered into the movie by his agency. The studio wanted to secure the right to work with another of the agency’s clients, Marc Hausman, on a different film, so they agreed to allow Langley a supporting role for which he marginally fit the casting; Langley and the fictional character shared the casting requirement of both being male.

  Langley entered, acting. Apologizing for his lateness. Opening a script he pretended he hadn’t touched yet. When in truth he knew every line including those that weren’t his. This was the first phase of his Late Arrival Seduction Plan. He had intended to deliver an epic apology to what he had thought would be a room full of production staffers and heavy-hitting actors. Instead he found only the Great Director and a massive place card-laden table. No cast. No crew.

  The next part of Langley’s Late Arrival Seduction Plan would have been a recapitulation of the previous evening’s social calendar. A contrived series of off-the-cuff star name smatterings guaranteed to make everyone drool and understand that Langley was being courted by the biggest of wigs.

  Being the hot young actor of the moment, he was often invited out by industry clean-up hitters. Not mid-level executives, but the boys and girls who actually said yes to films getting made. Each night Langley would dine with one of these industry big fish at some sumptuous, must-be-seen–at eatery of the moment. Gentle patter served on mother-of-pearl spoons, along with caviar often announced by the host as “the real stuff,” as attempts to contract him for possible projects were discussed. Offering everything, promising little.

  Y’know… Hollywood.

  Afterward, he was off to whatever event the rock and roll industry chose for the night’s pleasure. Here, he cultivated his image by engaging in social and relationship antics sure to make the trades and gossip blogs the next day. Rock and rollers were edgier, flashier, and prone to excesses desperately epic. They enjoyed the young actor crowd for the credibility lent t
o what was yet another excuse for outrageousness and lavish ostentation. One-note actors cast in a publicly unshakeable teen heartthrob mold might change perceptions amid the clutter and chaos of the rock scene. If they survived.

  It paid, Langley often thought when he was alone, to remember that Sunset Boulevard was a two-way street. It led into, and out of, the town everyone called Hollywood.

  The Great Director’s film would be the perfect vehicle for Langley to make the transition from the hunky innocent he’d played on a hit sitcom for three years, to a serious dramatic actor. “Serious Actor” was Stage Three of his career plan. He was not yet at Stage Three. Stage Three required an Important Film. Hopefully some challenging role as an unrealistically optimistic mentally handicapped savant or a desperate redneck serial killer. Either one was career gold as far as Langley was concerned.

  Langley’s “Butterfly Plan,” of which Stage Three was a crucial step, if one wanted to achieve the end-all be-all mountaintop of Stage Six, was currently wallowing in the having-to-make-goofy-teen-sex-comedies of Stage Two. The public loved Langley for his ability to deliver comedy lifted almost verbatim from any episode of Three’s Company and refused, or so his cadre of agents assured him, to see him as anything other than an awkward-comedy-of-errors teen hunk.

  Stage Two felt like a never-ending hell in which there was no exit.

  But recently there were signs that perhaps it was coming to a close—thanks to Hillbilly in Da House. The hillbilly being Langley and the house being an urban reference to inner-city culture, which the film had nothing to do with. The film focused on an upper class African-American family in suburban Chicago who host an exchange student from the Ozarks.

  At this point you might want to ask why there would even be some sort of Ozark-Chicago exchange program. Don’t. You’ll never make it in Hollywood with that kind of negative attitude.

  The cadre of agents who managed Langley Banks were already plugging a new script called Lawyer Dude, but a defiant Langley had refused to make it until he had at least one Important Film under his belt. The agents obliged, and now Langley had his one shot out of the teen sex comedy racket.

  The Great Director’s film.

  Alone in the warehouse with the Great Director, Langley stopped in the middle of his apology.

  “I guess I’m not so late.” He executed a perfectly mischievous smile. If there had been an audience and judges, and for that matter if competitive smiling were a sport, he would have received a row of upraised cards all displaying the number ten.

  “Traffic,” responded the Great Director with a beatific smile verging on deranged. “They’re all stuck in traffic.” His voice was slow, luxuriating in each syllable as though he were dipped into the sweetest and stickiest of syrups and had no intention of getting out of the mess.

  Langley walked slowly toward the Great Director, examining the handwritten cards, searching for his own name. Now the Great Director’s plan of destroying his movie, for which he had no snazzy code name, met Stage Three of Langley’s “Butterfly Plan.”

  In reality, most table reads, depending on the size of the cast, are relatively small affairs. The actors and the director, along with a few key people, sit around a medium-sized table and read through the script. It is a fun event where many friendships are formed and a lot of love and compliments, true or false, abound. It is a great day in the history of the production. It feels like something is finally happening for those who have been laboring, sometimes for many years, to bring their work and passion to the screen. Most people start off in these rehearsals with the best of intentions. They want to do well and they are happy to be working and getting paid. They want to like the people they are going to work with and no one has yet had an opportunity to learn to loathe each other. That will all change shortly.

  As Langley walked around what the Great Director dreamed was the largest table known to man in the history of tables (the Great Director had hoped its immense size would confuse and stifle communication during the reading as people were constantly asked to speak up or say something again), he did not find his name. He expected the names of the stars to be close to the Great Director, but instead, all were placed haphazardly, and well removed from the Great Director. Other, lesser positions were closer to the Great Director. The lead actors were placed between people like The Transportation Captain, The Second Unit Grip, and someone simply named “Ted.”

  Langley at last found his own card at the Siberia end of the table.

  He pulled out his metal folding chair, pulled off his $8,000 suede jacket with fringes along with his $950 Calvin Klein Stetson hat, and sat down. He opened up his script and began to stare at it, thinking and not reading.

  Moments later, crewmembers began to arrive, including Goreitsky, who brought with him an artist’s pencil box and a large sketch tablet. He was wearing a heavy wool knit sweater and a navy blue Greek fisherman’s cap. Humbly nodding and quickly smiling to anyone who cared to engage, he found a chair near the wall and sat with his hands folded atop his tablet, waiting much like a blind date might wait at a family reunion.

  A recently arrived Kip leaned over to Parker and whispered, “See, it’s not that hard. All I had to do was order some snacks and rent a location.” He smiled with an undeserved satisfaction. Then, “Let’s go get high. I wanna feel nice and creative in case I need to give some feedback on the script.” Kip and Parker left by the back door intent on smoking a quick joint and returning in time to start the table read.

  Moments later, walking quickly, Terri McCall, the actress who would play the love interest to the star, Kurt Dalton, entered. Her clothing came in layers. A pale blue Chinese peasant coat. A matching scarf. Beneath that a sweater jacket. Finally, a green ribbed turtleneck, and somewhere below, probably a tank top of some sort.

  Terri had campaigned hard to get this part. And she had prepared even harder for it, as evidenced by her script, which was organized with a variety of colored tabs and cross-referenced against a large black notebook of unknown contents. The notebook seemed to be stuffed with pictures and objects clearly too large to be contained within. There was even a doll inside. A doll she had carried for fifteen years.

  She placed the notebook delicately on top of the table. A ritual of straightening and smoothing worthy of any altar boy followed. Then she began to peel off the various layers of dress until she arrived at her turtleneck. With her hands full of clothes she quickly discovered an itch and attempted to satisfy it by blowing at a piece of auburn-colored hair that lay tauntingly across her pert nose. A moment later she dropped all her clothes on the chair in order to push down on the end of her nose.

  When she was young, the children in her schools—and there had been many because her father had been a marine fighter pilot—had made fun of what the adults had taken to be a perfectly upturned, cute little nose, calling it a “pig nose.” And now, whenever she felt it needed it, she pushed down on her nose as she had done when she was young. Late at night. Crying in bed under the sheets in another foreign part of the world.

  She picked up her clothes and neatly arranged them over the back of her chair, then went to the craft service table to make herself a cup of tea. After tea, she walked over to the Great Director and introduced herself.

  What kind of director would he be? She had worked with the worst, and the best, and even loved some of them. The Great Director thanked her and promised her they were going to have fun, which had been his standard promise since film school. She moved on to the rest of the crew, introducing herself as though no one had ever heard her name before.

  She had been married to one of the biggest stars in the business. He had left her very publicly, and as he would have the world believe, by the soft focus interview he gave Diane Sawyer, very honorably. Proclaiming there would always be a place in his heart for Terri McCall. Except now, three years later, the world hovered two inches off the ground to see if he w
ould marry the twenty-two-year-old “It” Girl he was with. The world waited. Terri McCall did not.

  Her career had always been a serious one. She got started in art films and Important films. Making movies about hard choices made by commonly beautiful people in both rural and urban settings. At first Hollywood wanted her for every role that called for depth and pain. A pretty chameleon. She had been nominated for an Academy Award in one of her first outings. She lost to an alcoholic actress from the old school musicals who had turned in a performance as an alcoholic housekeeper who murders her son’s cheating fiancée in a movie called My Mother, My Lover. Afterwards, Terri McCall continued to offer great performances in small films that went largely unseen by the multiplex crowd. Though she was a name, mega-stardom had eluded her. If the truth were to be told aloud, she was at the end of her run as far as Hollywood was concerned. She had reached retirement. She was thirty-five.

  She was not at the end of her run because of her technique. Or because of her talent. Nor was she at the end of her run because she could not bring arc and depth to the character. She was not at the end of her run because her name had been associated with some unforgivable scandal. She was not at the end of her run because she had made one too many outrageous demands on previous crews or execs. No, she was at the end of her run because she had laughed too hard when her father had thrown her in the air. Tickled her mercilessly. Clowned for her attention. Coveted her giggles. She was at the end of her run because she had not died of pills or in a car accident. She was at the end of her run because she had done well with the living and the working aspects of her life.

  She was at the end of her run because little laugh lines were beginning to show.

  Sometimes the laugh lines turned to sad lines when she looked at the doll she kept in the black binder.