B008J4PNHE EBOK

by Owen King

  If Sam Dolan had climbed out of his vehicle and deposited the DVD in the garbage, Who We Are likely would have had the good grace to be just another lost film—if anything, a curious footnote on the filmography of Rick Savini. This was hard to think about, so Sam tried not to. He often failed.

  Amputees, it was said, never stopped feeling their limbs. The elderly victim of a boyhood tractor accident still woke in the night, the ghost of his right arch cramping.

  ■ ■ ■

  In ’04 the growing cult phenomenon of Who We Are went mainstream when Bummer City released an official DVD. Their right to do so was arguable, but from a legal standpoint, Sam was outflanked from the beginning. WOUND had gone public by then, and they had too much money to fight. Through Greta—who had risen to the top of the operation and who, Sam hoped, was bilking Wassel and Patch for every penny they were worth—he had gained one concession: the removal of his name from the film’s credits. While a search of the Internet was enough to discover his association, the removal was better than nothing (and as it related to his work as a weddingographer, thankfully, for cost-conscious marrying types, Sam’s impeccable reel and reasonable prices nearly always trumped any reservations about his past).

  Patch and Wassel had hired someone to clean up the assembly—adjusting and brightening the color, hiring a Foley artist to fill in the aural background, etc. The movie actually looked somewhat okay. As Who We Are became a dorm room favorite, special editions had proliferated: the Wood Beast Edition™ came complete with hoof gloves that you could clop together during your favorite parts, as well as a manual of drinking games to play during the film. There was also merchandise: coffee cups, posters, bumper stickers, T-shirts, ski caps, boxer shorts, and a lilac-scented spray sold exclusively at Spencer’s, Eau de Satyr, that promised to “turn your man into a horny devil!”

  A grizzled New Yorker reporter better known for his filings from Chechnya and Afghanistan had set aside his passport long enough to pen an ingenuous book-length essay about the film, setting out to understand what its popularity indicated about the next generation of American adults. “I can understand,” began the introduction, “why some critical authorities have been a tad squeamish in their consideration of Who We Are. The film’s central spectacle is, after all, an elderly man with a colossal penis whose antics include urinating, tree-fucking, and perhaps most disquieting for this author, noodling on the pan flute à la Zamfir. The Bicycle Thief it is not. But try and find an adult college-educated male who has not seen it, or an adult college-educated female who has not bowed to her boyfriend or husband’s insistence that she bear witness also. It is something—and that something is greater than freshman gawping or sophomoric irony.” As far as Sam was able to discern, the gist of what the author came around to say was that an ambient sense of amused disappointment was so commonplace among young post-empire Americans—especially the males of the generation—that, when confronted with an absolutely sincere illustration of sadness (i.e., the satyr, naked, wandering around the forest, speaking to himself in adages), they could not comprehend it, but it cast a spell over them nonetheless. The short book’s title was The Age of Chagrin. The final line was “Lest we forget, it is a naked man we are looking at here.”

  ■ ■ ■

  At the end of the film, the two segments collided in what was arguably the pinnacle of Brooks’s vandalization of Sam’s dream.

  As Roger and Diana stand on the hill and watch the sunrise blaze across the inert bodies of their classmates, a still of the satyr, crudely superimposed over the original image, arms spread in a pantomime of wings, is made to swoop across and around the frame, like a hideous fly. Sam supposed that Brooks filmed the man stretched out on a stool or something, then glued him right on the film. The creature’s penis hung at a slant and actually scraped across the sunlit heads of the somber actors.

  What Brooks had conceived of with his additions and edits was open to vast differences in interpretation, but Sam gradually came around to seeing it somewhat like Greta had at the screening in the Bummer City basement. Brooks was mad, and madness was pain, and pain was everywhere, between every character and between every scene, in their laughter and in their sex; the pain was in the woods; it buzzed just above their heads. Brooks had been crazy and unhappy, so he had made Sam’s movie crazy and unhappy. Who We Are was a joke, but not the happy kind of joke.

  And it did not elude the former director that Brooks’s aims for the film had not been so, so different from his own. They both had tragedy on their minds.

  Why so many people enjoyed something that was so plainly a wreck—well, that was harder to understand, or maybe not to understand but to accept, and anyway, he was working on his second beer, trying to focus on the screen, despite the cacophony.

  ■ ■ ■

  Outside the bar, a young woman stumbled into him. Her T-shirt said WHO WE ARE and had arrows pointing at breasts. The belly button of the shirt was stamped with the Bummer City Productions trademark that marked official Who We Are merchandise: an ovoid picture of the satyr’s face, grimacing and big-eyed.

  “Oops,” said the young woman.

  Sam was sent scraping along the brick wall and knocked over the sandwich board. “Jerk,” he said.

  The young woman put a finger to her lips. “Shhh.” Her smile was wide, and her eyes were wet and stupid. In her sweet, glazed expression Sam read an existence starred with banality-defining passions: for those kitchen magnets that showed fifties-era housewives performing domestic tasks while musing archly about cocktails and naps, for beaded thrift store lamps, for karaoke, for her fat orange cat whose litter she never changed and who fantasized about cutting her throat while she slept. In other words, a typical fan of Who We Are.

  “So this is what you do for fun?” Sam tipped his head in the direction of the bar, the movie, the entire stupid thing.

  “Uh. Yeah,” said the woman.

  The guy behind her, the dope who had jumped on the table and started humping, came forward, a cigarette dangling from between his fingers. Behind the smeared lenses of his glasses, his eyes were hugely dilated. “Chillax, friend.”

  Sam picked up the sandwich board and restored it against the wall. The combination of the fresh night air and the two beers made him feel uncapped, as if his brain were exposed. “Get fucked,” he told the dope.

  “What?” The guy flicked a little ash, and it fell into the fur of his leggings. “I don’t understand.”

  “I mean”—with his index finger, Sam drew a circle in the air that was intended to encompass the drunks in the street, the drunks inside, and everyone who had ever watched the movie—“that you’re a bunch of jerk-offs, and you ought to try and find something better to do with yourselves.”

  The bouncer stepped from the dark of the entryway. “Better move along, big guy.”

  The woman made an unhappy face. “I can have fun.” She turned to her defenders. “Can’t I have fun?”

  Sam put his hands up; he didn’t want a fight. He started for the corner. Behind him, someone asked, “Who the hell was that guy?”

  ■ ■ ■

  There was that: he had not actually appeared in the film. Sam still had his face. No one had ever stopped him in an airport and asked, “You were in that movie, weren’t you? The one with the Cock Monster?”

  Olivia Das, who played Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence, mentioned this incident in the suicide note she mass-e-mailed to her friends and family on July 2, 2007, under the subject heading, THIS IS NOT MY LIFE!! This is not what I auditioned for, she wrote, this is not my life! I wanted to play Hedda Gabler on Broadway!

  The attempt was thankfully unsuccessful (and maybe not completely serious; Olivia had attempted to extinguish herself via an overdose of Mucinex); however, her distress was well earned.

  A Who We Are credit was a plague sign above the entryway of a career. If you were an actor, the association could have an unfortunate effect on audiences, especially if the work was intende
d to be dramatic. In the case of Olivia, when she won a supporting role as a social worker in a Spike Lee picture, the audience at a test screening broke into gales of laughter when her character gave an abused wife a stern talking-to. They weren’t seeing Olivia’s social worker; they were seeing Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence at the Spring Festival, and the quick cut to the satyr, seated on a downed log, humming “The Huckster’s Lament” and dandling his balls. The wrong kind of fame was like inept plastic surgery. It gave your face abstract qualities you never bargained for. Spike had to recast Olivia’s part.

  Rick Savini alone possessed enough of a track record to be excused for his participation. The rest of the cast essentially disappeared from the field.

  For serious people, the kind of people who invested money in films, a professional linked to Who We Are bore an unsavory odor. Professionals were careful and attentive. Who We Are had become a profitable enterprise due wholly to a lack of care and attention. Though Sam Dolan may have been the captain, this line of thinking ran, the swabs ought to have had the wherewithal to notice the water lapping their boots.

  Some of the film’s veterans had sought Sam out for special opprobrium, but not as many as one might have expected. Linc, the actor who played Hugh, had been sending Sam poisonous gifts for years—a dead rat, used toilet paper, a CD of acoustic demos entitled “Sam Dolan: Cancer Man,” etc.—yet most of those associated with Who We Are seemed to view it as a kind of natural disaster and saw Sam as a fellow victim.

  The one time Rick Savini consented to offer comment on the film, in an interview with Rolling Stone, he said only “I don’t feel like it turned out the way the kid intended. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “There’s just too many cun-eds ear,” said Anthony Delucci. “Time ta make a change.” They had stayed in contact until a couple of years before, when the DP gave up his dreams of working in film, left New York, and returned home to Vinalhaven, Maine. Luckily, Anthony’s father had saved him a place on the lobster boat.

  Flight was a common theme among the traumatized cast and crew of Who We Are. George, who played Sam’s alter ego in the film, went home to Minnesota to live with his mother and became involved in Amway. Toughie lived somewhere on the west coast of Canada now, where she had a kid she homeschooled. Quinn the Eskimo was a monk, an actual monk in an alpine monastery; in a picture Sam had seen, he’d been unrecognizable, a flowing beard with black holes for eyes. Some others—the two Alexes, Monica Noble—had disappeared altogether. Sam didn’t know what had happened to them. He couldn’t even find them on the Internet.

  Sam had recently received a cryptic postcard from Wyatt Smithson. The postcard’s picture was of a beautiful beach, faultless save for the bleached tombstone of a broken surfboard protruding from the sand. The message on the back had been brief:

  Dear Sam,

  I ate a piece of dog last night. Just tasted like regular meat. I ate dog. Why did I do that?

  Still trying to figure out who we are, I guess.

  Your friend,

  Wyatt

  Julian, his old professor who had opened so many doors at Russell, had tumbled to the blackest depths of academia—a community college in El Paso.

  ■ ■ ■

  Then there was Brooks Hartwig, Jr.

  Journalists had tracked him to various mental institutions, but Brooks had never spoken. His wealthy family referred all queries about his contribution to Who We Are and his condition to their lawyers. In the last year, a public relations official at Stony Brook Haven, a luxury facility on Long Island, had informed a reporter from the Style section of The New York Times that “Mr. Hartwig Jr. was resting comfortably” and did not wish to comment.

  Beyond which Sam didn’t know any more than anyone else. He didn’t know whether he wanted to. It seemed to Sam that Brooks was not the only one entitled to some rest.

  ■ ■ ■

  The sole participant who might have profited from the enterprise, one Costas Mandell, the satyr himself, chose to shun the spotlight. Perhaps that should not have been a surprise. From what Sam had been able to gather, until the day when Brooks Hartwig, Jr., fixed him in his lens, there had never been any reason to suspect that Mandell—a naturalized citizen, a twenty-year veteran of the Russell College maintenance staff, a decorated member of the local VFD—wanted to perform, let alone to share his grand appendage with the world. Rolling Stone reported that the shy Mandell had declined numerous requests to act as Santa Claus at the Russell maintenance staff’s annual Christmas party, a role for which his snowy beard seemed designed.

  Nonetheless, Mandell seemed, in the wake of Who We Are’s multiplying audience, poised for a lucrative lap on the reality-television freak-show circuit. But a transcript of his sole public appearance, on a famed shock jock’s satellite radio show, revealed profound discomfort:

  Jock: Satyr-guy, what we have here is a mail scale. The kind they have in the post office.

  Costas: Call me Costas, please.

  Jock: Cockstas, did you say?

  Sidekick #1: (Laughter) Oh my goodness! This is outrageous! Is that from the actual post office?

  Costas: No, Costas.

  Jock: Yeah, it’s a real mail scale. And what we want is to weigh Satyr-guy’s cock on it. Now I’ve bet Lou here that it weighs twelve ounces—

  Lou (Sidekick #2): Just his cock? Or also the balls? Because the balls are where the real heft is.

  Sidekick #1: (Laughter) Oh my goodness! This is insane! You’re betting on the weight of his genitals?

  Jock: Ah, no, not the balls, because that would completely throw off my calculations. Satyr-guy’s balls are like cantaloupes.

  Lou: They’re like hairy sandbags, those goddamn things.

  Costas: I’m sorry. I must leave. I’m sorry.

  Jock: Hold on there, Satyr-guy—

  Sidekick #1: Oh, no! (Laughter) Way to go! You creeped him out, guys!

  When Sam thought about the satyr, about Mandell’s rheumy line readings, the real sorrow he conveyed in contradiction of all logic—or illogic, depending on how one’s mind dealt with the visual impression—despite all the damage the man had helped to inflict, he felt some sympathy. Sam could relate.

  Like Mandell, Sam shied from attention. He never wanted to be in movies, and now he didn’t want to make movies. All he wanted, in the words of the saddest soul ever frozen on a slide of silver nitrate, was to be let alone.

  5.

  “You’ve been to that movie thing, haven’t you?”

  Sam had just entered the apartment. In repose on the couch, Wesley looked at him from over his laptop screen. Opposite the couch, the television was tuned, unexpectedly, to the Weather Channel.

  “You’ve got that look you get. That dented look. You look like an old guy who lost his false teeth.” Wesley was wearing his favorite pajamas. They’d come to the Swag Hag from a children’s boutique and were spotted with different-colored Popsicles. He had installed himself in them sometime in July and worn them pretty much every day since. Because of this, the consumer champion smelled like pee and Febreze.

  Sam dropped his keys on the table by the door and stuck his sweaty suit jacket on a hook. “Isn’t ‘Prying into other people’s affairs’ on the list?”

  “Let me check,” said Mina. Nested in the red beanbag catercorner to the couch, Sam’s sister had apparently already been perusing the three pages of wrinkled, laminated, lined yellow notebook paper that constituted Wesley’s personal manifesto, “Seventy-four Things That Caused Unnecessary Fatigue.”

  Hidden among the various boxes and shipping crates that had arrived for the Swag Hag in the recent months and years was a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom, a kitchenette, and brick walls. A warehouse atmosphere hung over the place, a mood of impermanence, of moving out and moving in. Sheets of crumpled packing paper and drifts of foam peanuts had collected around the edges of everything.

  From the short entryway passage, Sam began to wriggle his way toward the kitchenette.<
br />
  “What’s the ‘movie thing’?” Mina’s outfit was her standard: boots, black; ankle-length skirt, black; knit stockings, black with maroon piping; long-sleeve shirt, black, centered with a picture of an armadillo skull; watch cap, purple, the word DOOM, stitched on the band (by Mina) in white thread. Several articles of luggage were arrayed around her: a duffel bag, a knapsack, a duct-taped suitcase, and a sewing machine in a vinyl slipcover.

  “It’s a cult film program at a shitty hipster bar around the corner,” said Wesley.

  “Were they showing ‘The Movie’?” Mina’s disdain was undisguised.

  “Planning to stay awhile?” asked Sam. His sister, not looking up from the plastic pages, flew him the bird.

  He eased between two columns of boxes—from the labels, he could see that one contained books from a publisher, another compact discs from a record company, another packages of microwave popcorn from a food company, while another appeared to be birdseed from a farm supplier. There were four or five others in the stacks that weren’t immediately identifiable, but in any event, it was all crap for the Swag Hag to pass judgment on.

  On the television, a weatherman massaged a cold front across the eastern seaboard. Sam couldn’t remember Wesley ever having put the Weather Channel on, and it piqued his interest.

  A few feet farther and he found himself blocked again: a pyramid of tube socks in plastic sacks—from an athletic supply company—barricaded the way. He considered attempting to ferret his way through a small gap in the sacks, thought better of it, and instead began to wearily pull them down one at a time and reconstruct the pyramid behind him. Experience had taught Sam that it would be far less exhausting to move the bags on his own than it would be to harangue his roommate into cleaning up.

  Wesley was not easily compelled. He did not generally go outside between Labor Day and Flag Day except to receive packages or food deliveries at the door of their building. This was why he had the anemic complexion of a prisoner committed to solitary confinement. It was also why his interest in the Weather Channel was so unprecedented. Only on very special occasions, such as to have his list laminated or to attend the free showing of E.T. a couple of months earlier, did Wesley venture forth.