He thought about it a while. I could tell he was thinking because the big bloodshot eye blinked a couple times.
“Wait here, smart-ass,” he said.
“You talked me into it.”
The door closed, and a cold few minutes passed before it opened again. All the way this time.
Castile was standing there, outlined by intense light coming from somewhere deep in the place, standing hands on hips, looking cocky as hell, smiling. I recognized him from a picture that had accompanied the girlie magazine interview. He had puffy, styled red hair and goggle type glasses with light brown tinted glass. His jeans were fashionably faded, his short-sleeve sweatshirt black with the word DIRECTOR in white letters across the chest. Around his waist was a heavy black belt bulging with square packets; this was a battery belt, giving the wearer a power supply to operate a portable camera. This I found out later, but at the moment it reminded me of the heavy belts they advertise for women to wear around the house to lose weight.
Not that Castile needed to lose any weight: he was a small man, slender, short, but his slightly manic smile spoke of energy. Lots of it. He looked about twenty-five but was older, probably early thirties. He reminded me of Mickey Rooney at the point in his life when he was starting to look wrong for the Andy Hardy role.
I got a good chance to study him like this, because he was waiting for me to say something, and I didn’t.
Snow was starting to collect on Castile’s DIRECTOR sweatshirt and he seemed to be getting tired of smiling or maybe the cold was getting to him. Maybe he just wanted to get me inside so he could shut the door. At any rate, he finally broke the ice, so to speak.
He said, “What’s your name?”
“Jack Murphy,” I said.
“Never heard of you.”
“If you had, I wouldn’t have landed an assignment like this.”
“True enough,” Castile said, adjusting his smile to one side of his face.
I stood for a while and watched the snow collect on him, like heavy dandruff.
“Well,” he said. Irritation starting to show, but the smile constant. “Don’t just stand there. Come on in. You’re putting me behind schedule enough as it is… though with this shitty snow storm it doesn’t really matter. In, in, in.”
I went in.
15
The inside of the lodge was, like the outside, an odd mix of modern and rustic: rough, unpainted barnwood again, with thick shag rust-color carpeting that looked warm and lush and was about as easy to walk across as the Okefenokee Swamp; brown and white furniture set here and there, made out of plastic mostly, transparent tables, a white cylindrical chair with a seat scooped out and filled with a brown and white striped cushion, a chair that pleased neither the eye nor, I guessed, the ass; paintings, designy geometric shapes of white and brown and occa- sionally orange in shiny metal frames, out of place and proud of it, against the barnwood walls.
The entry area had a rather low ceiling, with an open stairway disappearing into it, over on the right, and another on the left, but soon this room opened out into another, larger area, the ceiling suddenly very high: the central section of the building, a good-size room’s worth, was a shaft that rose to a skylight, which was stuck up among open beams and currently letting in nothing but darkness, thanks to the snow piled on top.
It was as if the building had been cored like an apple, leaving each of the other three floors exposed and incomplete, a skeletal framework of balcony around each floor, where rooms stood curiously open-faced, fronted by two fairly widespread wooden posts joined by a skeletal railing, though each room had a tan shade, a curtain of canvas or something, that could be pulled down to close off the nonexistent front wall of the room, some of the rooms closed off in that manner now, while others gaped like missing teeth in the grinning skeletal mouths of each floor.
The effect of all this-balconies, stairways, open beams, open rooms-was one of spaciousness but, again, only added to that odd combination of modem and rustic, a projection of coldness, despite the pursuit of warmth.
Speaking of which, warm was definitely not the word for the climate in there, and as I followed Castile toward a brightly lit but still indistinct area ahead, a seeming contradiction to the lodge’s otherwise subdued lighting, I said, “Isn’t the furnace working, or what?”
Castile grinned over his shoulder at me, briefly, and then let me watch the back of his head as he said, “It gets hot under those lights,” and he left it at that.
Soon I saw what he meant.
Down half a flight of stairs, in a sunken living room, before a brown brick fireplace that was roaring and throwing off warmth, a couple reclined on a large light brown imitation animal fur rug. The guy was big, in several senses of the word: he was about six two, slimly muscular, with longish brown hair and a brown mustache and handsome if unmemorable features, and naked. He was having the act of fellatio performed upon him, or, as we used to say in the service, he was getting blown. The girl doing the blowing was rather large herself: she was perhaps five ten and had a figure that was very slim, very trim, except for breasts so large and firm nature may not have had everything to do with it. Her hair was light blond, and carefully coiffed, and I refer both to the well-sprayed upswept hairdo on her head, and her pubic hair, which had been thinned and trimmed and shaped into a heart. She seemed to be pretty, as best I could tell, but then a girl doesn’t look her best when she has five of a possible nine inches in her mouth.
The guy was leaning back on his elbows, his head back, the girl in a studied sprawl at his side, leaning over him, and a bald round-faced paunchy man in a gray shortsleeve sweatshirt that said CUBS on it and baggy brown slacks stood operating a massive standing camera over to the left, while a tall, painfully thin young man in a dark blue denim jumpsuit fidgeted behind some lights he would periodically fool with. His hair was pale blond and so was his mustache and he was the guy who’d shown me a sliver of face and not much courtesy at the front door. Over to the far left, sitting at a small table that had been placed in front of a couch that was built into a barnwood wall, a young woman with long dark arcs of hair hiding her face wore headphones and hunched over an oversize tape recorder, from which tangles of wire fell onto the floor and escaped into the maze of various size wires that coiled around the floor like snakes playing dead.
It was warm here. The warmth came only partially from the fireplace: the rest was the lights. Their warmth was exceeded only by their glare. Glare that was, naturally enough, centered upon the actors on the phony fur rug. The lights, of which there were half a dozen of various sizes, stood on metal folding stands like weird sunflowers, their petals black: round bright circles of light surrounded by flaps of black metal. A microphone hovered above the couple, eavesdropping, as they made their sexual sounds, the guy saying little contented things, making little contented noises, a few of which sounded convincing, but not as convincing as the authentic sucking and slurping sounds the girl provided.
“Cut,” Castile said.
The girl wiped off her mouth with the back of a hand, looked up and said, “What about the come shot?”
Castile, either not hearing her or ignoring her, went over to the thin pale blond kid and said, “I’m going to move ’em closer to the fire, over toward the right, and I’m afraid we’re going to get some shadow from that boom mike. And I don’t want to mess with the lights, so swing the boom out of there and use the shotgun mike on ’em, okay?”
The kid said okay and armed himself with a long-narrow metal spear that was, apparently, a shotgun mike.
The girl was standing, now, and had her hands on her hips and didn’t seem to remember she was naked. She was, by the way, pretty, now that she didn’t have her mouth full.
“Jerry,” she said. “I said, what about the come shot?”
“Since when are you looking forward to that?”
“Looking forward to it my butt. I know you, is all. You’re going to want a come shot. Right?”
; “Right,” he admitted. “We’ll shoot an insert later on.”
“Later on when?”
“Tonight. It’s more important we get to the straight fucking, get some good meat shots and save the come shot for the end of the fucking.”
“What’s the deal?” she said, her mouth on sideways. “Can’t this queen get it up again and do ’em both?”
The guy, who’d been leaning back on the rug, to the rear of this discussion, looking bored and a little tired, now sat up and said, “Yeah, and what do you know about it, bitch? All you got to do is spread ’em. I do the hard work.”
“Well you don’t do it hard enough.”
“Yeah? Well look what I got to work with.”
“You said it, not me.”
“You little bitch…”
And the guy was rising. To his feet, that is.
Castile got between them, got caught under the glare of the lights for a moment and pushed his hands out at the air in a conciliatory fashion. “Settle down, kids. Just settle down. Frank, I know you could probably handle doing two come shots in a row, God knows I’ve seen you do it, but it’s just safer, or easier rather, to save the other one for later, as an insert, nice for variety anyway, a nice close-up insert. Now. Can we go on to the fuck scene?”
“Fine,” the girl said. “But he can just get himself ready for that insert and bring me in for the finish. We got plenty of blowjob footage as it is already. I’m not doing this for fun, you know. Not with this cheese-brain, I’m not.”
“Keep it up, bitch,” the guy said, trying to sound threatening and not quite making it.
“Isn’t that what you’re getting paid for?” she said, arching a brow.
“Kids,” Castile said. “Please. We’ve gotten along so well, so far. This is the last day, after all… just this one last tiny fuck scene and one last tiny come shot insert and we’re home free. What do you say?”
Silence.
And then, after a good full minute, the girl said, “Okay.”
And she smiled at the guy.
He didn’t believe her at first, which he shouldn’t have, because she was about as sincere as a used car salesman, only not as good at acting. But then he seemed to buy it. The boy just wasn’t particularly bright. He smiled back and said, “All right, baby. Let’s show ’em how it’s done.”
And the girl smiled again, though there was more than a trace of smirk in it, and Castile said, “Roll,” to the fat man who stood behind the massive black machine that was bigger than any man in the room, including the guy preparing to ball a very naked and pretty girl, and they were both saying, “One, two, one two,” like an after dinner speaker testing his microphone, while the thin blond kid lurked off to the side with his shotgun mike, and Castile looked over at the darkhaired girl at the tape recorder, who nodded at him, and he stepped momentarily in front of the camera and slapped together a pair of hinged boards, a skinny one on top of the wide one that had data written in chalk on it, and Castile said, “Action,” and the couple started fucking.
They started out missionary position and were apparently really getting into it. Both of them were moving together in what seemed to be passion, accompanied by all the appropriate moaning and groaning, and it was amazing how much they really seemed to mean it, especially, surprisingly enough, the girl, who had a very believable orgasm after about five minutes, a screaming, body-shaking orgasm that prompted Castile to come in for some close-up work.
He’d been on the sidelines, waiting to use a small handheld camera with a large magazine that said ARRIFLEX on it, staying out of range of the other, much larger camera, watching the couple on the rug hump each other as if they meant it. He had been, you should excuse the expression, waiting for an opening.
And now he’d found it. He went in for his close-up work, roving around the couple, at one point slapping the guy’s naked ass, which had prompted the guy to put his hands under the girl and lift himself and her off the ground, and Castile got down in for some very close-up, shots of grinding genitals. When he finished that, he slapped the guy’s ass again, and the guy withdrew and turned the girl over, roughly, and entered from the rear. Castile got back out of camera range, while the fire flickered on the sweating naked bodies, and it was real and unreal all at once.
Finally the guy withdrew and laid that slab of nine inch meat across the upper portion of her ass and he came. A long shooting stream of it, and it caught in the girl’s hair, and glistened there, surrealistically.
I looked over at Castile and he was grinning. His eyes were glistening in much the same way as the trail of white fluid that had landed and now hung in her hair, like an obscene Christmas ornament.
“Cut,” Castile said, softly, with not a little satisfaction.
And, with the camera no longer rolling, the girl began to scream.
“You son of a bitch!” she was saying, in the shrill voice of somebody whose finger got slammed in, the door. “You son of a bitch!”
And she threw a nice hard right into the side of the guy’s head-he was still on his knees, in dog position-and he went down for the count.
She stood over him, raving and ranting, her hands balled into fists, her naked breasts jiggling, all of her trembling with rage.
“You shit! You putz! You did it on purpose!” She kicked him in the side of one thigh.
“No, no,” he said, feebly, afraid the next blow would be more appropriately placed.
“You didn’t have to get it in my hair. Do you have any idea how long it takes me to do this hair? And if we’re shooting an insert tonight, I’ll have to get it ready again, before then, wash it, dry it, set it… ooooh! Get out of my sight, you miserable wimp, before I kick your paycheck up around your ears!”
And the guy got to his feet and, doubled over, did as she told him, pausing only to grab a robe from a chair.
The fat cameraman was laughing. The pale blond kid wasn’t. The dark-haired girl was in the shadows.
Castle put an arm around the girl’s shoulder. Smiling, he said, “You were a little rough on that poor kid.”
“Poor kid my butt. He ever comes in my hair again, I’ll kill him.”
“Easy, baby. Easy. I want you to meet somebody.”
And she noticed me for the first time. She smiled a little, looking me over, and said, “I’m sorry about the way I look,” gesturing to her hair.
“Rest of you looks just fine,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” she said.
“This is Jack Murphy, baby. He’s doing a piece on the film for Oui. Braved the storm and everything. Jack… is it okay if I call you Jack?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Jack,” he said, squeezing his star’s shoulder affectionately, “I’d like you to meet my wife.”
16
The bar was the only room I’d seen so far that revealed the original intention of the place: that is, to be a hotel of sorts, a resort. That’s what Mountain Lodge would have been had it not gone prematurely broke. This building was, as I understood it, a prototype, the intention being to put up another one like it on the left-hand side of the plateau, and eventually one or more such buildings at the bottom of the ski slope, over to the sides, one would assume. But the project had never gotten that far: this one building was it, and rumor was that a Chicago businessman bought the place and now used it as a vacation hideaway. Rumor also was the business he was in was the mob.
At any rate, the bar was in keeping with what Mountain Lodge would’ve been, had it ever opened. it was also in keeping with the lodge’s schizoid marriage of rustic and modern: barnwood booths with brown padded seats and backs grew out of barnwood walls, each booth having a clear plastic tabletop on barnwood legs; a large barnwood horseshoe bowed out from the back barnwood wall, which was largely taken up with shelves lined with bottles and glasses; and in the foreground of the room were high round tables with transparent tops surrounded by stools with brown padded seats, similar stools lining the horseshoe bar.
; Castile sat me in one of the booths-the bar was adjacent to the living room where the filming had been taking place-and excused himself; his wife had already said glad-to-meet-you and scurried upstairs to wash her hair.
But the fat guy in the CUBS sweatshirt cornered Castile, before the director could leave the bar area. The thin blond kid made an inadequate shadow behind the fat cameramen, who was asking Castile if he realized just how bad this snowstorm really was.
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Castile allowed. “I mean, we been in here filming all day, Harry. Isn’t that enough to think about?”
“Well, we’re snowbound,” Harry said, “and we’re not filming now. So maybe you better think about that.”
“What can I do about it?”
“You can answer a question. You can tell us whether we get paid for any days we’re stuck here in the snow.”
“I don’t know, Harry. I’m not producing the picture.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m a hired hand just like you I’m being paid through today… which is our last day of shooting… just like you It’s my tough luck… and yours… if we get snowbound.”
“If, shit. We are snowbound. And don’t give me that bullshit about you being a hired hand. You got a percentage.”
“Sure I got a percentage. But I won’t see any of that money… if there is any… until the film goes into distribution, which is months away. So give me a break.”
“Shit.”
“Look Harry. I’ll talk to the money people and see if we can’t get some extra bread to cover any extra time we spend here. But Jesus. It’s April. We’re not going to be snowbound for long. Overnight, maybe. So what say we all just relax, just, you know, just take it easy.”
Harry thought about it, shrugged. A beat later, so did the blond kid, who’d been silent throughout, eyes bouncing from Castile to Harry, Harry to Castile, watching the conversation like a spectator at a tennis match.
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