by Tom Perrotta
He told a story about his Navy SEAL days on the cleanup crew for the space shuttle Challenger. He described the debris, the unrecognizable metal, the smell that might have been the smell of space, the intact finger he claimed he’d found and kept for a souvenir.
Gil gave me his card, invited me to visit his ranch in West Texas. We could ride horses across his acres and drink whiskey under the stars. When the film was over I could show up at Gil’s ranch, backpack slung over my shoulder. I’d be his apprentice, learn the trade; my skin would darken; we’d cook baked beans over an open fire. A neighbor girl wore cutoff denim skirts, no shoes. Never met a Jew before. Neil Diamond would visit. We’d sit on the porch and sing “Sweet Caroline.”
Felix hated Gil from the moment he saw him.
“You,” Felix said, “you there with the mustache.”
“Yes, sir,” Gil said. “Gil Broome, hombre.”
“Gil Broome,” Felix said. “I want to talk to you, Gil Broome.”
Gil was standing, eating eggs off a paper plate. He was on set today because of chickens; Francisco kills a chicken in front of Monica. They didn’t really need Gil because the special-effects people were in charge of the fake chicken and its head. Gil was there to judge authenticity and to keep track of the real chickens that wandered through the background.
“No one cares about the dog,” Felix said. “I care about the dog, but the dog’s not what we’re talking about.”
Felix placed an arm on Gil’s shoulder.
“Fuck the chickens too,” he said. “This scene wasn’t in the script anyway.”
“No chickens,” Gil said. “Got it.”
“Yes chickens,” Felix said. “Just fuck them. You see what I’m saying?”
Gil looked perplexed. He took a bite of his eggs.
Felix pointed at the eggs. “All that chickens are good for.”
Gil smiled.
“What we’re talking about is the cat,” Felix said.
“What cat?”
“What cat? I like this guy. What cat? The cat that walks through the burning house in the final shot. The death cat. The beautiful agony black cat.”
“Beautiful agony?”
“Look. You fucked up the dog. Wrong dog, ran the wrong way. I’m over the dog. But it can’t happen again. The cat has to be beautiful. Small green eyes. Completely black. It’s got to move slowly up the stairs. It’s got to look around, smell death. Can you promise me that, Gil, can you promise me the cat will smell death? That when it says in the script, ‘Cat walks up the stairs,’ the cat will dance through that house like he’s Mikhail fucking Baryshnikov?”
Gil put his plate down on a bench, as if, like a cat, he sensed the threat of physical danger.
“Cat can’t read your script,” Gil said. “Cat can’t read.”
Felix’s face went scarily still. Only his eyes moved. He scanned from Gil’s nose to his own clenched fist. Knuckles bubbled and shifted beneath the stretched skin. Felix flexed his biceps; they were tried-and-true weapons for getting his way. I took a step back, but Gil didn’t budge, coughed out a laugh.
“You, Gil Broome, you can read my script. That’s the thing. That’s what we’re paying you for. To read the script and then whisper some Doctor Dolittle whatever the fuck into the cat’s ear so he’ll do what it says in the script.”
“Cat’s not an actor,” Gil said. “Cat doesn’t take notes.”
“So let me get this straight,” Felix said. “Your job title, right, you’re a wrangler, an animal wrangler? Am I correct that that is the title of your job, that on the call sheet it says ‘Gil Broome, Animal Wrangler’?”
“Yes, sir, that is correct.”
“Because as far as I can tell, Gil, Gil Broome, as far as I can tell, you’re just a fucking pet owner. You’re just a guy with a cat.”
“Cat can’t read,” Gil said.
Tipplehorn approached. He was good at his job; he knew when to break up a conversation. “Gil, you’re needed on set.”
I was supposed to hold an umbrella over Monica, shield her from the sun. Her assistant had been fired, sent back to L.A. with a half-decent story, waiting for a call from Francisco that never comes. Monica didn’t need me, but there was protocol. Her skin was gold from an adolescence spent sitting shotgun in drop-tops, joyriding the Outer Banks. Now she was someone and sat in my shade. A website had spotted her finger-picking from the salad bar at Whole Foods in West Hollywood. A true coronation.
“I’m sorry you have to do this,” Monica said. “I know it’s incredibly degrading.”
“That’s nice of you to say,” I said, but she was already back to ignoring my existence. Stared at the script pages, her highlighted lines. I could hear her mumbling. My arm ached. It had only been a minute.
“I could practice with you if you want?” I said.
Monica turned, assessed. I could see my reflection in her oversized shades: peeling nose and stubbly dome, the glop of excess sunscreen on my chin.
“Sure,” she said. “I guess. You do Francisco.”
I read: Baby don’t, baby don’t cry, c’mon.
She read: Oh, fuck off.
Baby don’t . . . I read, and leaned in like the stage directions said. Smelled lavender, honey blossom, a thin strain of uterine blood. My nose against her neck fuzz. My shallow breathing.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Monica said.
“Acting?”
“Jesus Christ,” she said, stood, sauntered off, left me holding the umbrella over nothing.
That night, the storm. One of those passing tropical numbers. Black clouds like Mexican chimney smoke rising up the Gulf, covering the coastline. They get one every summer. Felix didn’t want to shoot in the rain for the same reason that Solstice did—melodrama. Tipplehorn had a more convincing argument—money—and he won. Felix was angry and took it out on the wardrobe guy, who didn’t have shoes the right color for Little Brother. Little Brother was in sneakers, was supposed to be in dress shoes, church shoes. Felix tried to color the white sneakers with black marker. Because everything was wet, the marker wouldn’t adhere. Felix threw the sneakers in the mud. I had to retrieve the sneakers, give them back to the kid who now had to wear wet shoes.
According to Nathaniel, Tipplehorn had run out of cocaine. “I want him off my set,” he said, referring to Felix. He told me to get the DV cam from the camera truck. Tell Felix, he told me, that you’re shooting a behind-the-scenes documentary. Take him under the craft-service tent and interview him for as long as he’ll let you.
I didn’t like deceiving Felix but told myself they might actually use the footage when they saw how Felix opened up to me.
We marched to the craft-service tent, a culinary oasis where Darrell the craft-service chief presided over the cast’s unreasonable requests: Vermont maple syrup, organic soy milk, fair-trade Colombian coffee, and other things you couldn’t get in Corpus.
I struggled with my tripod, which was sinking in the mud. The truck drivers laughed at me from their own tent. They were Texan and in the Teamsters union. Got paid time and a half when it rained. Plus overtime. I couldn’t steady the camera on the sinking tripod, so I just said fuck it and went handheld.
Felix said, “Do you have an agent? You don’t have an agent, why would you have an agent? I have an agent, and I have a manager, and my agent has an assistant, and my manager has an assistant, and right at this moment they’re poring over scripts asking, Is this the next Felix? Is that the next Felix? Because Felix is done and we’ve got money to spend, all this fucking money, and we need an army of Felixes marching the streets of Los Angeles with their Final Draft printouts, their Terrence Malick–inspired voice-overs, their hunger.”
I’d managed to focus but was having trouble getting him in frame. He moved, paced, grabbed handfuls of candy corn and stuffed his face.
“And all these assistants have meetings,” he said, still chewing. “And they meet with the higher-ups, like my agent and manager, and they all wear sh
irts unbuttoned at the collar, like one fucking button too many, just so they can say I have hair on my chest, I do not have breasts, in this shell of a body there is something animal that still exists, that is ruthless, that will ruin other men, and supply my office with a mini fridge and excellent air conditioning. I’m not allowed in the meetings, but I know what goes on: they sit around, and he’s Geppetto. You remember Geppetto?”
The rain came now in sulfuric sheets. Others arrived around us, edged in on our shelter, chomped cheese balls, tortilla chips. Nathaniel had taken over umbrella duty. He escorted Monica to her trailer. Her nipples were visible through her soaked summer dress. Big nipples that took up most of her little breasts. Nathaniel had a hand on the small of her back, but she was a step ahead, almost running. When Nathaniel tried to follow her into the trailer, Monica gave a small shove and said something I couldn’t hear. She shut the door. Nathaniel stood shocked for a moment. The soundtrack in his head played maudlin classical. The camera caught a tear coming down his cheek. The audience empathized. Nathaniel looked out at the horizon before remembering real life and that he was soaking and still on the clock.
My camera kept rolling. Others talked, drowned him out. Tipplehorn, in rain goggles and a white Gore-Tex shell, saying, “What I’d give right now for a soy chai latte.”
Felix didn’t notice. He said, “I’m this little fucking doll, and I’m surrounded by Geppettos, and each one has a different string and they’re pulling my strings, my limbs are flopping everywhere, and they’re saying who’s going to direct? What kind of box office? Maybe if we change the ending?” Nathaniel sidled up to me, clearly still in disbelief. But he was playing it cool. He said, “I’m thinking this thing with Monica wasn’t such a good idea. Actresses . . .”
I shushed him, nodded at Felix.
Nathaniel said, “You wanna get out of here? They’re calling the shoot anyway. Equipment’s too wet. Let’s ditch this and find a couple beers. We can hide out in the hair trailer while they pack.”
“I’m busy,” I said.
The cat wouldn’t go up the stairs. One of the grips had to rush home and get his cat, a gray cat, not even the right color. I put a tin of sardines at the top of the staircase and the grip’s cat got it right. The scene was completed. Solstice said that’s a wrap, and we took cold beers out of picnic coolers and patted each other on the back. We returned to the motel, watched the sun lazily emerge. Day after the rain and everything smelled like wet oil and ragweed. Francisco had his guitar out by the pool, and Kathleen did her best Loretta Lynn.
When it went to DVD, Nathaniel and I were in Brooklyn, sharing the ground floor of a freestanding Victorian in Ditmas Park. We had hardwood floors and original molding, and we got a grand feeling eating cereal under our twelve-arm chandelier. New York was nice; everything was expensive, but you didn’t need money. You could take a girl to the nearest dive, drink cheap pitchers, and tell her about your brush with Francisco Gomez, the way he closed his eyes when he played guitar. The girl would grab your wrist. Then you’d lean in close to talk over the DJ, say something like, “I’ve got a record player and some beers back at my place,” and let her ride sidesaddle on your single-speed bike through the falling snow.
We were finding work, or Nathaniel was anyway. I liked the cold nights, smoking out my cracked window, staring at the empty yellow cabs that lined our block. Off-duty drivers speaking loudly on cell phones in Cantonese and Arabic and Staten Island English.
People came over for the screening—Nathaniel’s idea. Put out cheese and hummus, a jug of Rossi. Crowded onto the couch. Nathaniel was wearing a cowboy hat. The girls appreciated irony; they’d gone to art school. Gwen, Nathaniel’s latest thing, had stringy hair, a shrill laugh, and fingers pink at the joints from New York winter. She wrote for a weekly paper that published blind items about people we knew, or at least that we were friends with on Facebook. Nathaniel had his arm around her. Gwen’s friend Anne sat to Nathaniel’s left, her fishnet legs up on the coffee table. She said the phrase “Shit, man” at all possible instances—when she saw the chandelier, when she saw the TV, when she saw Nathaniel’s Texas-flag tattoo.
Two girls I didn’t know sat cross-legged on the floor. One was beautiful but kept checking her cell phone, awaiting better plans. The other had eaten Adderall and blew gum bubbles she then poked with a mechanical pencil. “Roll tape,” she said, then said it again. “Action,” she said, and Nathaniel dimmed the lights.
Title screen, then open on an empty beach, littered with foil and aluminum, cigarette cellophane blowing in the wind. Pan across to the oil rigs. Long-muscled men, like evolved primates, hang from the machinery’s rungs. And there I am in my brief appearance as an extra. They’d needed people to swell out the crowd. I look ridiculous as a roughneck, draped in too-large Carhartt, hard hat in hand. The camera sees me for only a second. I’m sweating and blotchy, and my shaved head has a bull’s-eye sunburn.
Everyone laughed, and I felt myself blush.
“You look like a dork,” Gwen said. Nathaniel agreed. The other blew a confirmative bubble. But Anne looked over, gave a nod of recognition, said, “Shit, man.”
It was all wrong. What I wanted was the action just offscreen. I wanted Tipplehorn screaming indecipherable instructions across all walkie frequencies; Solstice silly in boots and unnecessary spurs; Kathleen on speakerphone in the hair trailer, oblivious to outside commotion; Nathaniel hidden behind a garbage can, whispering “Cut” to a featured extra.
I looked at Nathaniel when Monica made her debut. They’d given her entrance music, some too-obvious C&W ballad about lost innocence. Monica stands on the porch, watches Francisco watch her from his parked Mustang. Nathaniel’s face didn’t move, but I saw him ball a fist around a skinny hipster hand.
Then the house is on fire, flames reaching up into Texas night. They’d got the colors right, a hundred shades of orange, gray, and blue. We were coming to the cat’s coda, the feline waltz that Felix had dreamed about. I hoped Solstice hadn’t screwed it up in editing. I wanted Felix to have that victory. Anne got up, stretched, shook her curly hair from its bun, and bent to tie a shoelace. She walked toward the kitchen, asked if I wanted another beer. The cat did its thing, but I wasn’t watching. I was in another movie, myself the star, Anne lit by the headlights of a passing cab.
Contributors’ Notes
CAROL ANSHAW is the author of the novels Carry the One, Aquamarine, Seven Moves, and Lucky in the Corner. Her fiction has appeared in Story, Tin House, NOR, and Granta Online, and has been included twice before in this series. Anshaw is a past fellow of the NEA. For her book criticism she was awarded the NBCC Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and divides her time between Chicago and Amsterdam.
• I set out to write a story that was agile and speedy, with shorthanded exposition. As soon as I started working on it, though, all my writerly planning turned out to be beside the point. The whole thing was a gift. It’s as though I opened a box and inside was this story. All I had to do was unpack it and perform some light assembly. This rarely happens for me, but it does occasionally, and I’ve come to think these are pieces I’ve already written in my imagination, carried around in bits and pieces without realizing it, until I have gathered up everything and begin to place it on the page.
TAYLOR ANTRIM is the author of a novel, The Headmaster Ritual, and a senior editor at Vogue. His short fiction has appeared in journals including Terminus, Phoebe, and Black Warrior Review, and online at FiveChapters.com and Esquire.com. Born in Richmond, Virginia, he lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.
• The year was 1998 and jobs in San Francisco were easy to find—even for an English major like me. A college friend, Jonah, invited me to join him and three others at an Internet startup. No thanks, I said breezily, having just been offered an editorial position at a magazine called Wine and Spirits. The pay: $24,000, no benefits. “Not bad,�
�� my dad, back in Virginia, said on the phone.
Jonah was a multimillionaire within six months. He was also my roommate, so I tagged along to his company’s lavish dot-com parties, let him treat me to sushi, and sampled a bit of his weed. My job had perks too, of course: as much free wine as I could drink and good tables at restaurants all over town. Sounds nice to me now. But I was stirred up and unsatisfied most of the time. What was I missing out on? Shouldn’t I be living in New York? I was twenty-four.
The Noe Valley apartment Jonah and I shared wasn’t much—a cramped place with beige wall-to-wall carpeting and an ant infestation. But the building was perched high and we had a balcony with a view that stretched over the city to the bay. The balcony was so narrow that you couldn’t do anything on it except stand there, but the panorama had a quieting effect on me.
“Pilgrim Life” starts with that calming view, that apartment, my millionaire roommate, my wine magazine job. The rest of it I entirely made up (I swear) over a three-month stretch in the midst of the worst financial crisis I’ve ever lived through. Jobs were not easy to find in 2009, and I had recently lost mine. Going back to a charmed year in San Francisco felt like a tonic.
NATHAN ENGLANDER is the author of two story collections, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012) and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases. His translation of the New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, and a co-translation of Etgar Keret’s Suddenly a Knock on the Door were also published in 2012. His play, The Twenty-Seventh Man, will premiere at the Public Theater in November 2012.