by Owen King
The wipers started to squeak. Sam switched them off. The rain had stopped again. The phone vibrated some more, beeped another missed call.
Five or so miles out of town, at a right-hand cut marked by two boulders, Booth said it was the place. The gravel lane rattled through the floor of the car. A few hundred yards in, they arrived at a farmhouse, painted red, with several smaller outbuildings of the same color and style huddled around it like offspring. Sam parked the rental in the small paved lot and turned off the engine.
“Did that come off sounding like an excuse?” his father asked. “What I just said?”
Sam was taken aback; self-awareness wasn’t a trait he associated with Booth. “Maybe” was the cautious answer he settled on after a moment.
“I’m sorry, then. Again. Because I have no excuse. I made a joke out of too many things when you were young, and that is undoubtedly putting it far too gently. I was careless. Selfish. Stupid.” The old man shook his head. He opened the passenger-side door but didn’t get out. “I tried to resist saying something like that. It seems to me that it would be awfully greedy to go asking you for forgiveness now. I just—I need you to know that I feel sick when I think about that night you called me and I didn’t call you back. Sick, just sick.”
The glance he threw his son was hooded, his beard closed over his grimacing mouth. Was this what shame looked like on Booth’s face? Sam couldn’t remember ever having seen it in life—or on film, for that matter. It was shocking.
“Forward, Booth. Let’s just keep things going forward.” The words were ineffectual, almost desperate-sounding, but they were all he could find to say.
“I’m just glad to have a little time with you,” said his father.
Sam rubbed a knuckle against his cheek and squinted at the dashboard.
The cell phone rattled. Fresh air blew in through the open door.
“Should you get that?”
“Yeah,” said Sam.
3.
Celebrity Treasures was the name of the Santa Monica–based memorabilia company with whom Booth had signed an exclusive contract. Along with a number of other B-movie veterans and television personalities, Booth autographed posters and movie stills for them to sell, and he licensed his image for other items such as T-shirts and coffee mugs. It was a typical enough arrangement for old semi-famous movie types and a decent source of income. What had turned out to be an especially lucrative sideline for Booth was his more interactive work for Celebrity Treasures—specifically, the recording of personalized messages.
For a fee, fans could have a celebrity from the Celebrity Treasures roster record a message. Each personality offered a list of messages based on lines or catchphrases uttered by characters they had played in movies or shows. Booth’s messaging services were apparently in high demand, a popularity that was easy to understand for at least two reasons: one, the arresting quality of his voice—or rather, his Voice; and two, he had said a lot of crazy shit in his movies.
Take, as an example, the script for the scene in the original Hellhole where Professor Graham Hawking Gould, Booth’s renowned satanologist, sacrifices himself (though not permanently—Professor Gould is reincarnated for both Hellhole II: Wake the Devil and Hellhole III: Endless Hell) in order to destroy Satan’s monkey, Anton.
EXT. NEAR THE PIT—BLOOD-RED TWILIGHT
Professor Gould grapples with the devil monkey, mere feet from the black chasm. The monkey SCREECHES and snaps at him and LASHES its hideous black snake’s tongue.
ANTON
I’ll bite your balls off! I’m the familiar of the Prince of Darkness!
PROF. GOULD
I don’t care whose monkey you are! I’ll be damned to hell before you use that tone with me!
The satanologist clutches the hateful primate to his chest and leaps into the impenetrable darkness of the hellhole.
When producing an answering-machine message for Joe Somebody, Booth adapted his immortal riposte to “I don’t care whose monkey you are! You’ll be damned to hell if you don’t leave Joe a message!”
Inside the red farmhouse, Christine, the fortyish woman who ran the recording studio out of her home, gave Booth a hug and Sam a chuck under the chin. “Love the cape,” she said to the old man.
“My daughter made it for me,” said Booth.
“Aw, that’s sweet.” Christine winked at Sam. “You know your father’s the Olivier of answering-machine messages.”
Booth waved this away. “She’s being facetious, Samuel. I’ll never cease to hone my craft. The art of messages is a lifetime pursuit.”
She inquired after Tom. “Is he lean and rugged?”
“Yes. The son of a bitch is as trim as a snake and as rich as Croesus and only a year younger than I am, though you’d never know it.”
“Tom and Booth are besties,” Christine informed Sam. Her bracelets jingled and clacked as she led the way to the control room. “Which makes it awkward that they’re both so smitten with me.”
The engineer pointed Sam to a leather couch against the back wall. There were silks tacked to the ceiling, and a stick of lavender incense was burning. The vibe was clichéd, but Sam liked it. Christine’s daughter, introduced as Logan, a five-year-old ruddy-cheeked version of her mother, was huddled at one end of the couch in deep communion with a stuffed bunny.
On the opposite side of the soundproof window, Booth settled into a straight-backed chair with his cane across his knees. Pushed to the edges of the recording room were various off-duty musical instruments. Booth held a sheaf of scripts. The arm of a microphone stand was angled to a spot just in front of his face.
The first message was for a man named Alan. Speakers in the corners of the control room’s ceiling reproduced Sam’s father’s voice in crisp stereo.
“It so happens that Alan, after a great deal of study—and a long sojourn in the deepest jungles of South America, where monkeys speak and where the wisest of men walk on their hands”—Booth paused for a couple of beats, his eyes widening clownishly and his cheeks swelling with malevolent mirth, so that through the soundproof glass, Sam saw an aged Horsefeathers Law flicker briefly into view—“is still not home yet!” He coughed. “Leave a message.”
“Got it,” said Christine into the intercom.
“No, no,” said Booth, and he did a second take, and didn’t cough, and it was better.
Sam’s father performed twenty or so messages. The majority of these were adapted from the Hellhole trilogy, but there were others scattered across Booth’s career. On behalf of someone named Pat, Dog, the sagacious cloud from Buffalo Roam, told a caller, “You must get right, my friend, and get along, and get yourself in the celestial way, and—get ready to leave Pat a message.” Don Griese, Booth’s mumble-mouthed, car-wash-obsessed mafia don in Hard Mommies, was more concise: “Vanessa’s machine. After the beep, ya picaroon, youse.”
■ ■ ■
It was odd for Sam to see his father express these different voices, inhabiting characters from obscure twenty- and thirty-year-old films. While the abrupt switches from voice to voice were unnerving, they were undeniably impressive. It was as though all of the characters lived inside his father, inhabiting some remote room of his mind. Sam imagined them in comfy compartments set into a wall, like upholstered morgue drawers. Whenever Booth wanted one, he could descend to this storage area, slide the character out, slap the dust off its shoulders, and pull the string that made it talk.
The old man was totally professional, requesting playbacks, ad-libbing multiple takes if he didn’t feel like the message was punchy enough, redoing any stumble or slip. Probably this shouldn’t have surprised Sam; it was, after all, the man’s business. But what seemed remarkable to Sam was there was no sign that Booth considered the work beneath him. This didn’t seem possible, that he should be able to approach the recording of joke answering-machine messages without giving away at least a hint of boredom, yet Booth seemed totally focused on the task. His son found his humility baffling�
�and interesting.
His father’s movies ought to have been so much fun, all the mugging, the scares that weren’t scary, the abundance of cheesecake, the papier-mâché sets, the stoned extras peering off in the wrong directions—and they were for other people, just not Sam. He had long understood that he was the exception, the grouch who refused to see past the boom in the corner of the frame, the spoilsport who couldn’t find it in himself to care one way or another if a werewolf killed a bunch of Romans living in villas with grandfather clocks and speaking with Valley accents.
In the past it had dawned on Sam that in some cosmic sense, if you considered how many viewers had attended Booth’s films, been relaxed and amused by them, and gone home to perform acts of procreation, there was an ontological argument (of a fairly undergraduate nature, but still) to be made for his father as the patriarch of thousands. While such a notion undoubtedly would have sent Polly into an uproar—Sam could hear her insisting that he needed to see a shrink, and in the next breath demanding that he tell her more, more, more—it left Sam feeling melancholy and reflective.
What had never occurred to him until this moment on this Friday was that Booth had gone to work on these movies like anyone else working on any other set on a “serious” movie. Had Sam thought that Booth went skipping onto soundstages, that he acted drunk? Sam didn’t know. He supposed he hadn’t ever dug that deep.
Out in the car, Booth had seemed sincere. Sam didn’t know what to make of that, either, or what he wanted to do with it. The day had started dire and turned hazy. Sam sat on the couch and crossed his leg over his knee and observed his father’s transformations.
■ ■ ■
When the day’s docket of messages was accomplished, Booth recorded a pitch for a local deli:
“My name is Booth Dolan, and although I’m known as an actor, my first love is eating. And let me tell you, I’ve eaten a few sandwiches! Oh, yes! Torpedoes, heroes, subs, pitas—I’ve devoured scores of them!
“But something unprecedented happened to me the other day, at Bill’s Bomb Shop on Route Seven in Devering. I met my match. I was humbled. By a sandwich! The mouthwatering, stomach-stretching Megaton Meatball proved too much even for me. Heavens! I had to take half of it home!
“My friends, at Bill’s Bomb Shop, hunger is no obstacle. Visit us on Route Seven in Devering, directly opposite Lowe’s.”
Christine wolf-whistled into the intercom. “First take! First take!”
The actor was unmoved. He shook his head, shifted around on his chair. The creaking echoed in the control room. Booth puckered his lips and stared at the script.
Logan, still poised over her bunny, dabbed the stuffed animal’s mouth with a strawberry. “Eat,” she whispered, “please eat.”
Christine shushed her daughter and ran a playback.
“What do you think, Samuel?” asked Booth.
Sam had thought it was shouty, one-note. He shrugged, told Christine to tell Booth it was fine, but the old man knew he was holding out. “Cough it up!” His father’s voice bounced off the control room walls.
Sam sighed and pushed himself up. He went to the board, bent down to the intercom. “You could give a pause at ‘by a sandwich.’ Go softer, maybe. Like, you’ve had all these adventures or whatever in your films, but this amazing sandwich, it’s—you know, it’s bested you, sent you home on your shield, and you can’t quite believe it.”
His father nodded. “By a sandwich,” he said. The profound hush of his delivery indicated shades of awe and incredulity; this sandwich was unlike any other sandwich, was somehow more than a sandwich.
The next take was better, and the third take was best.
■ ■ ■
Before they left, Booth requested a private conference with Logan. Propped by his cane, he leaned over her corner of the couch, and they exchanged whispers. The child did most of the talking. Booth gave the occasional nod. His expression was sober.
The other two watched from the door. Christine explained to Sam that there had been an incident with Bunny involving the driveway and a reversing car. Somehow the concept of gangrene had entered the child’s head, and the stuffed animal was now expiring slowly and in agony.
“Logan’s father,” Christine said, “is useless in these kinds of situations. No imagination.” Her arms were crossed, bunching her bracelets and bangles up to the stars tattooed on her elbows. “God, don’t even let me start.”
Sam overheard Booth say, “Hmm. Yes, yes. I can see that.”
“Look at your father. It’s not this big effort for him to relate to her. He’s patient. He doesn’t try to reason with her, you know? Drag her kicking and screaming. He goes along with it. Which is why she adores him. You can’t expect a little kid to ‘tough it out.’ Because she’s not tough. She’s a little kid.” Christine gnawed at one of her thumbnails. “I bet you had a wonderful childhood.”
“I did. It was like Christmas,” said Sam. “Every day.”
The engineer rolled her eyes.
Next door to the studio was a bright, open kitchen area with a long dining room table. The old man swept off the morning papers and briskly set aside a couple of cereal bowls. He glared around; his eyebrows flared.
Sam bit back a laugh.
“Now, listen. If there’s to be any chance of saving Bunny’s life, I’m going to need a sharp knife, duct tape, cotton balls, a jar of ether, and above all else: complete silence from all those present.”
When the items were brought—a bottle of hydrogen peroxide was found to serve as ether—Logan kissed the stuffed animal and gingerly set it on the table. The creature’s right leg was dirty and hanging from threads at the seam. It was a medium-size bunny with black eyes, furred in tight beige coils. The child’s lower lip trembled, but she was brave and didn’t weep.
Booth scrubbed up at the kitchen sink and made a production of holding his arms wide while Sam helped him into a red apron (a decal on the pocket showed an anthropomorphic egg in a chef’s hat, frying bacon). The old man stepped to the surgical table where Bunny lay beneath a yellow dishrag.
“Nurse,” he announced. “The scalpel—”
4.
Sam told his father he had never seen such a heartwarming amputation.
They were in the car, traveling back to Hasbrouck. After amputating the stuffed animal’s leg at the hip, his father had patched the bunny with a massive wad of duct tape. To stem the risk of infection, he had prescribed a twice-daily regimen of potpourri misting.
“Do you suppose Bunny will live, Booth?” Sam asked.
“He’ll live. Logan doesn’t strike me as a macabre child. If she gives him his potpourri, he should recover nicely.”
“He’ll certainly never hop again, though. Is that any kind of life for a bunny?”
“Bunny never hopped before. He’s a stuffed toy.” Booth grumbled, playing along. “His sole purpose is to be loved by that little girl, and his handicap won’t interfere with that.”
“She’ll probably grow up and marry a one-legged man.”
“She’ll probably grow up and marry a damned dashing surgeon. You get this from your mother, God rest her soul. She loved to razz me, too. That’s fine, I can take it.” He thumped his cane on the floor of the rental. “But I really think you’ll like this movie, the French one. Here’s the nut of the thing: why is this man who is so dull—almost belligerently dull—suddenly irresistible to women? I can’t stress enough, there’s nothing even vaguely impressive about him. The man used to be writer—which makes sense, because writers are the dullest people on earth besides bureaucrats—but this man, our protagonist, he came down with a terrible block, so now he bags groceries. And yet women are fucking him left and right. Fucking him insensate! Parisian women of every stripe are absolutely putting this schnook through his paces—”
“Okay, I’ll see it! Jesus.” It might even be good. Booth’s taste in films—the ones he liked to watch as opposed to the ones that he appeared in—was not inevitably horrible.
However, as well as they were getting along, his father’s musings and reflections on matters sexual nevertheless produced in Sam a feeling similar to that of being nosed in the crotch by a big, slobbery dog.
“Excellent. Quel Beau Parleur! We should see it while you’re here. It’s playing in Kingston.”
A shuttered farmer’s stall slipped by on one side of the road. The steeple of Hasbrouck’s Catholic church sprouted over a rise. The rain had recommenced, falling in fat, irregular drops. Sam’s cell phone jiggled around in the cupholder.
“Maybe you should answer it,” said Booth. “If you’d like, you can pull over and I can get out while you talk.”
“That’s okay.” Sam wondered how mad Tess was at this point, if her wrath could be quantified. Then he wondered if it wasn’t cowardice that was keeping him from answering but the likelihood that once he did pick up, and she did tell him off, that was the last time he’d ever hear from her. His hand started to drift up to his cheek, but he redirected it to ten on the wheel. At least her other self was off enjoying herself with his other self. Where would they get together for a proper date, those alternate-reality lovebirds? If Sam’s alternate-reality self were on the ball he’d suggest they go to a Segway store and test-drive one. Sam thought Tess’s alternate-reality self would love that. The phone beeped another missed call.
Sam abruptly wished he could drop a brick on his other self’s head, drag the smug prick into a panic room, seal it, and leave him to mummify. Some guys didn’t appreciate what they had.
“You’re thinking about her, aren’t you,” said Booth.
“Yeah.” To Sam’s surprise, the observation—especially coming from Booth—didn’t bother him.
His father made an empathetic sound and, unexpectedly, didn’t prod, or advise, or pontificate. He just let the thing be. It was the kind of steady, unexcited reaction a person wanted from his father; the kind of reaction that implied sympathy but, more important, confidence that Sam would figure it out. It was, therefore, highly un-Booth-like. He wasn’t accustomed to his father being so—not normal, that wasn’t possible—acceptable.