by John Warner
He gets out of his assigned seat and starts walking toward the road, the first steps toward his new life. The sound of the director and cinematographer arguing fades, replaced with the whiz and rumble of traffic. The funny man stands, watching the cars and trucks zoom by, then closes his eyes, raises his hand, and extends his thumb. Nothing happens other than the funny man swaying gently on his feet until he hears a car slow and pull over, tires crunching the gravel on the side of the road. The passenger-side window goes down. The funny man opens his eyes and sees a middle-aged man with a shitty comb-over leaning across the seat. He can smell the alcohol of the man’s aftershave waft toward him.
“Hey,” the man says. “I know you.”
SO BECAUSE HE cannot escape, he resolves to take as many others down as he can. But even this plan is quickly thwarted when at the outdoors store he asks to buy a gun, but because of the meddling federal government, they will only sell him something that shoots paint, so he buys the one that the clerk claims has the greatest stopping power.
“What will it stop?” the funny man asks. It is shaped like an assault rifle and sits heavy in his hand, the metal dull and unreflective. It feels real except for the giant plastic bin for the paintballs jutting from the top.
The clerk scratches his chin. “Guess I’ve seen it put down a woodchuck, or maybe a grackle, starling, that kind of thing.”
“Not a person?”
“No sir, can’t kill a person with that weapon. It’s for sport, you know? Competition? It’s got professional leagues and everything. Could take an eye out, maybe, which is why we recommend protection.” The clerk holds up a face mask that looks like a cross between something a hockey goalie and a snowmobiler might wear. The funny man tries it on and looks at himself in a mirror and sees that he is scary and unrecognizable.
The clerk looks at the funny man more closely. “Do I know you?”
“Nobody knows me.”
“That some kind of riddle?”
“Just the truth.” The funny man points the paint gun down the aisle and sights some of the other customers and mimes pulling the trigger.
“Bang, bang, bang,” he says.
“So you know,” the clerk says, “if’n that was a real weapon, I’m not sure I’d sell it to you, given your look and behavior and all.”
“But it isn’t real, right?”
“Right.”
“So, if I said that I’ll take all of it, you wouldn’t stop me,” the funny man says.
“Nope. I’d ask how many rounds you need?”
“How many you got?”
FOR ABOUT NINETY seconds, the funny man has never had more fun. The eyes of the rats glow red in the funny man’s headlamp (also purchased at the outdoors store) and as they turn to face him, he unleashes a stream of automatic paintball fire their way. They scatter throughout the abandoned diner, diving over booths and under tables, their hard nails scrabbling along the front counter. For the most part they’re far too quick for the funny man to hit, but once or twice he hears a squeal as one of the pellets connects. After the initial burst he stands still and soon the squealing stops as the rats regroup and return to the open. There must be hundreds, maybe even thousands, little pairs of devil eyes flashing wherever he turns.
The gun has an impressive rate of fire and during his second assault he quickly learns that if he leads the scurrying rodents enough, he can usually score at least a glancing blow. His breath is hot under the mask and he hears someone laughing and then realizes he is the one who is laughing in a borderline-crazy way. The funny man knows he’s not crazy, not really, because if he was really crazy he wouldn’t think about being crazy. He would simply be crazy. Still, he feels crazy, or maybe he feels like what it might feel like to be crazy without actually being crazy.
As the first load of pellets drains out of the bin, the funny man reaches for the spare to his side and clicks the ammo into place, but the pause has already leaked much of the pleasure of the adventure out of him. The mask has delayed the smell, but now it oozes around the gaps, an aggressive musk of decay that is so bad he must sniff more deeply to confirm how truly bad it smells. As he turns his head to survey the room, the headlight illuminates a handful of rat near-corpses. Some of them have clearly shattered spines, dragging their useless hind parts behind them as they go for cover. Others lay on their sides, gasping, trickles of rat blood flowing from their noses. None of their unscathed compadres appear willing to lend assistance, which figures. One stares at the funny man, its rat nose twitching, an eye replaced by blue paint that turns purple in the light of the funny man’s halogen lamp. The funny man has an urge to apologize, but that seems really crazy because they’re fucking rats after all.
A group of them have massed near the door and as the funny man heads their way, rather than dispersing they seem to grow tighter, more of them joining the mass. It looks like they are pulsing. They appear to now realize that they have the funny man outnumbered big-time, that if this is the Alamo, they are the Mexican part of the equation. The funny man fires a burst of paintballs into the ceiling.
“Beat it! I don’t want to hurt you. Not any more than I already have anyway.”
The rats stand strong, their numbers increasing by the moment. The funny man levels the gun and fires another burst just above their heads. This separates them momentarily, but in short order they are re-massed. They appear to be stacking on top of each other, a rat pyramid, growing in height, as tall as the funny man, taller even.
“So that’s how it’s going to be, huh?”
The funny man fires directly into the crowd and because they are so densely packed, most of the pellets strike home. Still, the larger population does not budge and in fact, appears to start advancing on the funny man, climbing over each other in their eagerness. He shakes the gun and the container rattles with the final handful of ammunition. Out of options, he turns and sprints away from the rats toward the front window. Earlier in the filming, during the bank heist sequence, he saw a stuntman do what he’s about to do and after watching the scene, the funny man asked him how he did it, and the stuntman replied, “There’s no particular technique or anything. The key is that you’ve just got to commit.” The funny man accelerates and as he approaches the window he crosses his arms in front of his face and leaps and the window shatters and he is outside. The stuntman did not lie. After a barrel roll across the graveled parking lot, the funny man is on his feet and sprinting toward the motel, assuming the rats are in pursuit.
WHEN HE RETURNS to his room at the motel reserved for cast and crew, he opens the door to find his love interest stretched across the bed. She wears short shorts and lays on her stomach facing the television, the omnipresent word search in front of her. She lightly chews the butt end of her pen. She has cranked down the thermostat on the wall-unit air conditioner and the funny man can feel the sweat evaporate from the back of his neck. She looks up at the funny man framed in the doorway and makes no note of the mask and goggles pushed up on his forehead and the empty paintball gun dangling at his side. She is beyond incurious, a blank slate. The funny man thinks that he would actually like to climb inside her brain for awhile, just to, you know, have room to stretch out and relax.
The funny man comes fully inside and leans back against the door. He is tired and sweaty and his clothes are splattered with paint and rat blood. He has come through his window-smashing leap miraculously unscathed except for a slight twinge in his back. The rats have not followed him back to his room.
“I was thinking,” the love interest says, “that we should just go ahead and screw.”
The funny man slides down to the floor, his back still against the door. The coldest air has sunk to ground level. It is like a mini-fog covering the bottom four inches of floor. “And why were you thinking that?”
“Well, you know, because the movie’s almost over.”
“Exactly,” the funny man replies.
“Exactly,” she volleys in return.
“
Wait,” he says. “Why are you saying exactly?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m saying exactly,” he says, “because it doesn’t make sense to sleep together now. Why would we want to start an affair when the movie is almost over?”
“And I’m saying, exactly,” she says, “because now is the best time for us to screw because there’s no danger of having an affair. It would just be a notch in our belts, a deposit for the future.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
The love interest sits up on the bed, her nipples taut against her shirt. They are like scouts searching for targets. “Think of it this way,” she says. “It’s like insurance. Odds are, one or both of us is going to get famous, or more famous than we already are. If we sleep together, at some point in the future, we’ll be able to tell someone about it and when the story comes out, we’ll be linked together and each of us will get a little boost in the press.”
“What?”
“Okay, it’s not really like insurance. I just said that to keep it simple. It’s more complicated than that. It’s more like celebrity arbitrage.”
“I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The love interest says it again, slowly, arbitrage. French-sounding, vaguely dangerous, a Bond villain. “Arbitrage is when you have two markets of unequal value. Think of fame as a market. Right now, admittedly, you’re more famous than me, no doubt. You’ve got some heat behind you with that thing and honestly, you’re the only interesting part of this crummy movie. At the moment, your celebrity value is higher. However, I’m on the rise. My agents say my look is coming into vogue, which is important for an actress. I’m still young, I’m single, and I haven’t done any nudity yet. I’ve got a lot of weapons left in my arsenal. We have every reason to believe that my celebrity is on the rise.”
“You’re not as dumb as I think you are, are you?” the funny man says.
The love interest closes the word search and smiles. “I’m smart about some things.”
“Go on.”
“So, right at the moment, your value is higher, but there’s reason to believe that someday, my value will be higher because honestly, that thing, how long is that going to hold up? This is a classic arbitrage situation. Because you’re more valuable at the moment, I’m offering you a premium, namely, you can just lie on your back and I’ll hop on and do all the work, and I won’t care if you don’t get me off.”
The funny man reaches down and pushes himself up from the floor. He feels each vertebrae click into place as he rises. The back is perhaps more scathed than he initially figured. It takes a good thirty seconds to stand fully upright. He twirls the wedding ring on his finger and thinks about how sleeping with this girl is the kind of thing he should do. It is what a celebrity does and a celebrity is what he is. This not-as-dumb-as-she-seems girl just said so. Why should he not do what is expected of him? Since his marriage he had never taken his ring off until he began filming the movie. It has been one production assistant’s job to hold it while he does his takes. When the director says “cut” the funny man beckons the production assistant back and retrieves the ring and places it where it belongs. He believes in that bond, of course he does. He has long ago ceased to notice the ring’s presence when it’s on, but even in the middle of live action on camera, part of the funny man’s brain would think how weird it felt in its absence.
The funny man puts his hands on his hips and levers back at the waist, trying to stretch some of the stiffness out of his back. “Look. You’re a lovely girl, very alluring, and what you say makes a lot of sense—in the kind of world you describe, anyway—but something I’m realizing is that I want nothing to do with that world, so I’m going to take a pass.” He is proud of himself. This may be the highlight of his life, an act of heroism even, since this love interest will go on to truly incredible heights of fame and is widely considered one of the most desirable women on the planet. The thought that a heterosexual male would pass on sex with her is sinful, criminal even, but at this moment this is what he does, which is about the least believable part of this stupid tale.
Here he starts walking toward the bathroom and a final phrase from his childhood rises in his brain. At that time he thinks it is hugely clever, but he will later come to regret this to the very marrow of his bones. “Tell you what, let’s not, and say we did,” he says, and with that he shuts himself inside the bathroom.
“It’s your funeral, pal,” the love interest yells through the door. The funny man hears her leave the room and he curls up in the bathtub and goes to sleep.
13
BARRY HAS RETURNED from Barbados and called an “urgent non-emergency meeting.” One of Barry’s philosophies, as he explained it to me, is that there is no such thing as an emergency, just varying degrees of urgency. “If you think about it,” he said, “emergencies don’t really exist.” He even said the word like it tasted bad on his lips.
“Break it down,” he continued, “look at the root, emerge. Now, emerge means to come forth, to come into existence, but why should that be a cause for panic? If you plant a seed in the ground, eventually a stalk with emerge, but this should not be a surprise, since after all, you knew the seed was down there and it’s a seed’s job to grow, so when the stalk appears it’s simply an expected arrival. Or babies. Often, when a baby is on the verge of being born it is treated as an emergency, a cause for panic and worry, but again, the root, emerge. The baby, along with some very explicable, very natural goo, is going to ‘emerge’ from the birth canal. Unless you’re talking about one of those self-deluding high school girls that drops the kid behind the Dumpster during lunch, everyone knew the damn thing was in there, right? And at some point it’s got to come out. What is so goddamn surprising?”
“You don’t have kids, do you,” I said.
Barry frowned. This was early on before he had agreed to take me on as a client and for a moment I worried that I’d fucked up the audition. “You don’t choose him,” my manager warned. “He chooses you.”
“My belief,” Barry continued, “is that with proper planning and vision and foresight and vigilance, there will never be an ‘emergency.’ All events are foreseeable. Everything is predictable, not for everyone, but for me.”
“Like a psychic?”
Barry frowned even deeper this time. “No, nothing like a psychic. There is nothing mystical about it.”
“Sorry.”
“Even when you see an ambulance, siren howling, lights blazing, zooming through traffic, all appearances to the contrary, that is not an emergency.”
“No?”
“Look at what’s probably inside, some fat ass who for forty years started his day with a rasher of bacon and half gallon of coffee with cream. Not even half-and-half, cream. That his coronary artery exploded like a sabotaged Iraqi oil pipeline shouldn’t be surprising, should it? Or maybe it’s one of those bike messengers who refuses to wear a helmet and when he flips over a taxi, whoops! There go his brains all over the street. Who could’ve seen that coming?”
Barry had worked himself into a pretty good lather. He wiped the back of his suit sleeve across his chin. Frankly, I liked the passion. I was in a pickle.
“These are not emergencies, they are eventualities and that’s not no voodoo.”
During the months of my trial I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Barry’s little philosophy, about how it manages to reconcile both free will and predestination. In Barry’s world, there are two categories. Barry types who embrace their role as agents of change, influencers of events, controllers of destiny. Then there are others who allow themselves to be nudged inexorably toward their preas-signed fate, their eventualities.
And yet, because he had agreed to take me on after that first meeting, by implication, I was being invited to the other side.
BARRY’S OFFICE IS expecting me and I am shown into a conference room with an even better view than my apartment. The carpet is thick and springy eno
ugh for a floor exercise routine and on one wall I see a buffet that would embarrass the Sunday brunch at the Ritz. There is a carving station with steaming rounds of ham and prime rib, a shrimp tree, and at the end, after a full array of sides of both the starch and green vegetable variety, what looks to be a fully outfitted sundae bar. I am alone in the room.
At first I figure the spread is for some kind of office celebration they’re having later, but when Barry walks in followed by a guy in whites topped with a chef’s hat, I realize what’s going on.
I’m in a pitch meeting.
In entertainment, whenever two parties meet, one of them is empowered to say “yes,” and because that yes turns into action they are very important. That person is the one who is being pitched. On one’s way up the ladder, you do the pitching and when you do the pitching it is necessary to prepare the proper tribute prior to delivering of the pitch. Sometimes this can be dispensed with using mere flattery over a recent creative endeavor, or small tokens like cigars or especially good prostitutes. Other times, you prepare a sumptuous feast like the one in this conference room. I have to say, this is a surprise, because even as I am on trial for my life, Barry has had the final say-so on all matters of tactics and strategy. Until now, apparently.
Barry is clearly excited, pacing the room as our chef prepares and then places a plate in front of me. I am not particularly hungry, but I thank him and Barry gestures him from the room.
“I had a vision,” Barry says.
“Vision?”
“I was on a reef dive, really beautiful, like two-hundred-million-year-old coral there, thinking about your case and it came to me, the perfect defense.”
“I thought we already had the perfect defense.”
“We did, but now this one is more perfect.”