by Bruce Wagner
“I’ve never been more excited. This is Academy Award time, Alec, I’m serious.”
“You’re giving me a boner.”
“It’s my AIDS movie. I know that sounds crass.”
“Is there a script?”
“I’m talking to Mamet and Zaillian. And, would you believe, Arthur Miller.”
“The lightweights.”
“I’ll make this brief, ‘cause I don’t want to hector you.”
“Hector away. You know, you should get Hector—Babenco.”
“I love Hector but he’s erratic. Here’s the premise, okay? Well, not the premise—premise, but the context: If you have AIDS and need cash, you can sell your life insurance and collect the money upfront.” A thumb bisects Taj’s thigh, stopping at the back of the knee.
“Your office faxed me the article.”
“Did you have a chance to read it?”
“Very dark—but very interesting.”
“You know, I always wanted to do A Face in the Crowd with you but instead of the music thing, I wanted to set it in Werner Erhard–land.”
“I love that. I never knew you wanted to do that.”
“For years. You were gonna be this con who scams the human potential movement—a dysfunctional Music Man! But one day I woke up and the whole ‘inner child thing’ felt passé—”
“Tell that to my wife.”
“And how is the most gorgeous woman on earth?”
“She’s great. So the character’s one of these insurance guys.”
“‘Viatical settlement advocate’—that’s what they call themselves. He’s down-and-out. Bad karma, like Newman in The Verdict.”
“I loved The Verdict. Where does it go?”
Cradling the phone on his shoulder, Zev puts both hands on Taj’s ass, gently spreading cheeks beneath loose fabric. “He gets involved with an activist, a woman who’s HIV. Sandra Bullock.”
“Your sister’s an activist.”
“Yeah, Aubrey.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Fine. Well. Tough lady.”
“I saw her at the Hard Rock thing in New York. She looked great.”
“This is my gift to her.”
“I’d love to work with Sandra. She’s terrific.”
“Together, you’re perfect. There’s a medical conspiracy thing going on, like in The Fugitive, only a thousand times subtler. I thought of this because I asked a hemophiliac how he got AIDS and he said, ‘I got fucked in the ass by seven major drug companies, honey!’”
“That’s so great.”
“I’m really waiting until we get the writer on board, Alec. I just wanted to feel you out, because to me the character is phenomenal, a classic, towering. It’s cosmic Elmer Gantry. Would this sort of thing appeal to you, Alec? Because I can’t see anyone but you, you’d be brilliant. I just need to know if this kind of guy—a hustler, a parasite who slowly, painfully has his eyes opened to human suffering and comes out from the thing…transcendent—I just need an indication it’s an arena you might like to explore.” Zev slides a finger down the pallid crack and Taj jerks away. The producer contemptuously shoves the assistant toward the desk, where he nonchalantly fiddles with some papers.
“Absolutely. But the article…the article isn’t based on a book—”
“No. The article is an article. What I want to do is graft that information onto the superstructure of Dead Souls, an extraordinary nineteenth-century Russian novel—”
“Right, I know. Tolstoy?”
“Nikolai Gogol. But you win the literary consolation prize.”
“Howard Stern would have known.”
“Howard Stern would think it was Stephen King. Now, when am I gonna see you? When are you coming to L.A.?”
“Jesus, never, I hope. I’m kidding. Probably three weeks.”
“Do you want me to send the book, with coverage?”
“What’s the coverage,” he laughed. “Cliffs Notes?”
“We broke it down. But I don’t want to overwhelm you.”
“I’ve been known to dip into a tome or two. I’m halfway through the new Roth—Operation Shylock. Fucking fantastic.”
“You’ll have book and coverage tomorrow…”
“Bell, Book and Coverage.”
“…and if you have any thoughts or questions, call me, Alec, anytime, day or night. Okay?”
“You are the Monsignor.”
“And thank you for your patience.”
“Thank you for your interest. I’m always flattered, Zev.”
“You flatter me. It’s time we did something together.”
“I flatter you, you flatter me,” he sang, while Zev laughed. “We both flat-ter too ea-si-ly—”
“Goodbye, you nut.”
“Too ea-si-ly to let it show…”
“Is this a concert?”
“Later, Zev.”
“My love to Kimberly.”
Zev hung up, rubbing his crotch as he ogled his minion. “Hel-lo. Anyone home? Ground control to Major Taj!”
“I…I haven’t done the last fifty pages—of Dead Souls.”
“Why not?”
“I had—so much other work.”
“Come here, silly wabbit.”
“Please…”
“I won’t bite. I might suck, but I won’t bite.”
He came closer. Zev grabbed the hips and reeled him in.
“Please don’t.”
“Finish the coverage,” he said, fumbling with the belt. “I really want to know how the thing ends.” Zev unbuttoned the fly, pulling the pants down with the aloofness of a tailor—or sailor. “It doesn’t seem to be heading toward a resolution. There’s an essay in the back by the guy who wrote Lolita. Maybe you could cover that too.”
Taj felt like a child—he wanted to urinate as the underwear shimmied down, hammocking at knees. Bloodless lips fastened around him and the assistant lost balance. Zev’s hands clapped around his rear, steadying. Taj toughed it out, hardening in the hothouse mouth, watching the smooth skull, noting moles, veins and fissures from afar like the book of aerial shots he flipped through at Super Crown: Above Los Angeles.
Chet Stoddard
That night, he went trolling for HIVs at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Van Nuys. Horvitz told him those were good places for leads. Some were restricted to sero-positives, but they were easy to crash—no one asked questions. Chet watched and listened, attuned to money woes. Not everyone had life insurance. Finding out who did was tricky, especially if you weren’t infected yourself; one didn’t want to be tagged a policy-chaser. Sussing out candidates was dicey all around. Though he used an alias, eventually some trivial pursuiter was bound to know him as Chet Stoddard, boob-tube relic. Winding up on the “Where Are They Now?” page of a tabloid wasn’t a pleasant prospect. “ONE-TIME TALKER FULL-TIME HAWKER: ADVANCES $$ TO WALKING DEAD.”
The meeting was lower-scale than Chet would have wished. Lots of bad news bears: sour prison faces, weepy dementia heads, remorseful crack bingers and the usual quota of self-important alcoholics—smug vampires who felt less hopeless hanging with the pozzies. Whenever they stood to speak, you could feel the room’s fatal contempt. Around mid-meeting, Chet realized there was a halfway house next door and that explained it; a pissy, policy-poor crowd if he’d ever seen one, hard-core wraiths who took the RTD to get their methadone. Still, you never knew when that stuntman (Aetna) or production designer (Prudential) might stand and share. Expect the unexpected, Horvitz always said.
Luckily, he remembered the party. Someone started a group for heteros with AIDS and tonight they were having a shindig. Chet fished in the glove compartment for a flyer given him by one of his viatical co-workers: Oakhurst Drive, south three hundreds. That was Beverly Hills, over by Olympic—Persian World. No mansions but sure as hell no halfway houses, either. Sounded promising.
The modest two-story home was probably in the eight-hundred-thousand range. The canapé-eaters were nicely dressed, to be sur
e, and none had the Look except one—a swarthy, charismatic man with thick Yves St. Laurent glasses, a stylish cane supporting sinewy legs and a telltale girth that betrayed (to the trained eye) a set of diapers. Emblazoned across his T-shirt was: I SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM. He was holding court, in the middle of one of those comically anarchic HIV riffs featuring Mothers in Denial, Sado-Healthcare Worker Mayhem, Brides in Dementia on Their Wedding Days and other assorted gruesomely hilarious phantasmagoria. A black-haired boy ran twittering circles around him, mummifying the monologuist with imaginary streamers, like a maypole.
Chet was about to knock at the bathroom door when a woman in a crazy miniskirt emerged.
“This is the hour of lead,” she said, looking straight in his eye. “Remembered, if outlived, as freezing persons recollect the snow…” He smiled and she went on, very dramatic. “First, chill: then, stupor. Then, the letting go.”
“I like that.”
She held an arm toward the toilet, like Vanna White. “You are free to wash—I’m through vomiting.”
He found her in the backyard a few minutes later. Her name was Aubrey and this was her house. She had black hair and twinkly green eyes.
“How long have you known?” she asked, out of nowhere.
How long have you…His mind stuttered: she assumed he was HIV-positive. Chet scrambled up the slick rock of her question—the Question of all Questions, it seemed—trying not to fall into the swallowing sea. “Six months.”
“You’re a virgin.”
“You?”
“Seven years, eight come May. What do you do?”
“I work at the Holocaust Museum.” It was supposed to be a kind of joke.
“No shit, the Wiesenthal? What do you do there?”
“Acquisitions.”
“Well, that makes you the perfect host—for this party, I mean.” She nodded toward the diapered man, expostulating poolside. “Did you see Ziggy’s shirt?”
“Pretty fuckin’ funny.”
“You’re not going to sue, are you?”
She was swept away by new arrivals and Chet milled around, waiting for her to get free. He’d used his real name and was glad about that. After a while he decided to leave, thinking the time they had in the yard was as good as it would get—tonight. On the way out, she slipped a card into his pocket. He didn’t look until he was in the car.
TRYSTS & CONFABULATIONS
Aubrey Anne Turtletaub
(310) 555-1722
Troy Capra
Troy worked feverishly on Skin Trade while keeping an eye toward potential venues, Equity-waivers where he might rehearse and film the performance. The idea of shooting on an “X” soundstage came to mind, but Troy dismissed it as too “on the nose.”
The plan was to film ninety minutes of written material honed at private showcases—technically, a no-brainer. The key, as always, was the writing. The autobiographical vignettes had to stand alone yet be of a piece: a child’s sudden recognition of the sacred, mystic ordinariness of a winter morning; a twelve-year-old boy, marooned in a body cast after being struck by a car, spins tales of chivalry; the sightless cello teacher who set Whitman to music; tender agonies of first love and the eeriness of first death—his bookish father’s, from lupus; mother-son healing on a magical trip to New York, the smell of subways and Broadway and Mother’s Arpège. Troy wanted to pierce the heart of things, to learn, if he could, how it was he found himself—three quarters of a life undone—onstage at this precarious benefit, this fund-raiser for his soul.
If he kept it honest, he couldn’t go wrong—that’s why he decided to begin with a skit of himself directing porn, in pantomime: stooping to invisible actors as he held camera on shoulder, zooming in, panning flesh, cajoling, extolling, a clockwork artist under the fiendish, ticking cock of a come-shot. A naked and bravura opening for the performance of his life.
He made Kiv call the actor a week after they’d met. A week felt about right—a week wasn’t pushy. Troy wanted to play out the connection, keep it alive until he could sit with the star and fill him in on Skin Trade.
When Richard asked if she and Troy were an item, Kiv said, “Off and on.” Very high school—very Beverly. That’s what Troy told her to say and they fought about it but Kiv finally agreed, in the name of Troy’s career. (She couldn’t resist adding, “Mostly on.”) They were supposed to get together for coffee, but Richard was going to England for a few weeks and wouldn’t be able to see her till he got back. She was somehow relieved. Before they hung up, the actor asked if she’d ever been to London. When Kiv said no, he said she should come along. She just laughed and so did Richard, in that famous way. She wondered if he was serious.
A few days before Richard was due home, Troy called the office. He was close enough to finishing Skin Trade to lay the groundwork for drinks. If they could just meet somewhere—Orso’s or the Grill or the Ivy—he’d bring the actor up to speed, dropping the completed script in his lap. He knew that without Kiv, there was little chance Richard would even return his call; maybe that wasn’t even the case. What was he expecting from the star, really? Financial backing? Hosannas and camaraderie? How could he benefit from pimping Kiv? By becoming Richard’s friend? (The pseudo-friendship of a dealer.) Maybe his needs were that simple. Where was the rule that said he couldn’t be Richard Dreyfuss’s friend?
“Hi, my name is Troy Capra. I met Richard at a play…”
“Troy?” asked the astonished voice on the phone. “It’s Betsey—Blankenberg!”
“Jesus! Betsey? How are you?”
“I’m great! How are you?”
“Fantastic!”
“This is so funny.”
“I didn’t know you—you work for Richard?”
“No, I’m stalking him. I break in every few weeks and answer the phones.”
“For how long?”
“Oh God. I’ve worked for Richard four years now.”
“It is such a small world.”
“He told me he ran into you—he said he saw someone from Beverly.”
“He couldn’t have remembered—”
“He barely remembered me and we went out together!”
“I didn’t know that! But how? He was gone by the time we—”
“Way after I graduated. Long, boring story.”
“So you just work for him now.”
“What can I say, I like the bastard.”
“Well, that’s fantastic. Are you married?”
“Divorced with children. You?”
“No way.”
“Tell me what you’ve been doing, Troy Donahue—with your life.”
“I’m still directing theater—”
“I knew that—I mean, you’ve been doing that for years. But I don’t see plays anymore, unless I’m in New York. Even then, I’m not really a big—I’m so ashamed!”
“I do stuff all the time, you should really come.”
“I’d love to see you.”
“Tell me when. But the reason I was calling was…Richard and I met at this Ibsen play and we talked about getting together—”
“Let’s see…he was supposed to be back on Saturday but now he has to go to Dublin, for a wake if you can believe it. He should be home the fourteenth, but I know he’ll be crazed that first week.”
“Can we pencil something in for the twenty-first?”
“Uh huh. Will he know what this is about?”
“Uhm, yeah. When we talked, he asked—”
“That sounded horrible, didn’t it? What I meant was, if there’s an agenda, sometimes it’s good that I know so I can remind him—who knows what manner of jet-lag we’ll be dealing with.”
“Adventures in the Skin Trade—the performance piece I’m working on.”
“Great title.”
“I’m just about done and—”
“Super! You know, you guys should really do something together, Richard loves the theater. He’s doing Medea, in La Jolla—”
“He mentioned t
hat.”
“With Des McAnuff. It’s going to be so wild—Medea meets Sunset Boulevard.”
“Set in Hollywood?”
“It’s called Medea Madness. Medea marries this great director. When his movie goes in the toilet, he leaves her for this Sherry Lansing–type—and you know what happens next!”
“Sounds intense.”
“Practically the whole second act is a murder trial—it’s, like, this great commentary.”
“Have they found someone for Medea?”
“That’s what’s so great: Des reversed all the roles. Richard is Medea!”
“You’re kidding.”
“Isn’t that fantastic?”
Bernie Ribkin
Sitting on the deck chair in his Polo shorts, mezuzah sweating in the snow of chest hairs like a tiny gold traffic light, the producer scanned the printout:
CAR HAS NO REVERSE GEARS. DIS ASSEMBLE SELECTOR SHAFT MECH FROM INSIDE CAR. INSPECT SHAFT AND FORKS OPERATION, R&R GEAR BOX TO REP REVERSE LEVER AND SLIPPER PAD, CH SHAFT POS & GEAR FOR DAMAGE AND OPERATION ADJ REVERSE PLUNGER–BLEED HYDRULICS.
REAR BRAKE LIGHT IS OUT. REPALCE R/STOP LIGHT BULB
WASHERS ARE NOT WORKING. PARTIALLY REMOVE WASHER RES TO CK FOR KINKED TUBE, CLEAR JETS AND ADJ SPRAY
He glanced from the mechanical litany to the ocean—a gorgeous day in the Colony. No one wrote about the fabled enclave anymore, at least not like they used to. The place really used to get the hype. To this sandy Eden, Oberon Mall had come home.
The beachhead was stormed: squadrons of physicians rallied by Rear Admiral Trott, round-the-clock nurses, major and minor domos, ensigns and assholes, commodores, captains and petty officers first class; guerrillas and partisans; shock troops, domestic and culinary; nutrition and therapy corps; cadres physical, emotional and respiratory; voice coaches and snipers, channelers and chanters, WACS and wackos, dune-crawlers, bush-fighters, gossip-mongers and mercenaries; engineers of kitchen, pets, pool and bath; astrologists and masseurs, mediators and meditators and just plain groupies; paraplegic cheerleaders (a sexy stuntgirl among them) and sundry tear-streaked Big Star pre-approved dropovers. Visiting Oberon Mall had become anecdotally correct.