EXPERIENCE ITSELF
1.
Sunken into a wilted lotus position at the centre of the bed, Marta massaged the tender underside of her bare foot. The muted television splashed irregular shapes on the walls of the otherwise unlit motel room, and as she slowly rotated a thumb along the puffed arch Marta felt her eyes drawn away from the broadcast—a cartoon breakfast cereal square dancing and singing, elfin smile set wide and spidery stick arms flailing for a convincing performance of glee—toward the stillness beyond the frame of the open door. The murky space past the asphalt lot might be siren-calling to a reawakening nocturnal instinct, but Marta’s unlimber muscles, tendons, and ligaments wailed louder yet. Simply untying laces had been a chore; after removing the left shoe and sock she’d postponed the bother of the next foot until an indefinite later and chortled at the idea of sleeping through until morning half-shod and fully clothed, like the fiery-bearded vagrant she passed by on workday mornings en route to the campus-bound bus.
Never in her career years had she been so tired; she could imagine individual cells deep within her body howling, their microscopic brows furrowed and nostrils flaring in fierce outrage at the animated cereal square’s infinite joie de vivre, calculation and bloodlust erupting from their tiny pounding hearts. Factory workers in poor countries have every right to malign their bosses, Marta thought, bonded in sisterhood with the truly oppressed for fleeting seconds.
Alongside religious zealots and tabloid devotees across the continent, Marta had long assumed Hollywood’s legendary appetite for cocaine to be symptomatic of a bottomless moral vacuity. And yet after the grueling, eye-opening, and Industrial Revolution-like schedule of Day One—a trial by fire, not one minute under fourteen hours—another strictly utilitarian purpose had been revealed. If I continue on here, Marta concluded with resignation, sugar and caffeine, cocaine’s legal surrogates, are going to become my new best friends. Neither sat in short supply at the production office; stockpiled chocolate bars were there for the taking.
Bleary-eyed and hunched over a cooling foot, she replayed scenes from the inaugural shift, peevish and silently castigating her imagination for being so blithely disconnected from servile, workaday actuality. While a reasonable ignorance of specific details of filmmaking had been made clear from the start, the surprise and dismay resulted from fathoming the inaccuracy’s totality.
In the room’s solitude she realized that if the day had not exactly pummeled her with a series of public humiliations and admonitions—the proverbial spanking in the parking lot surrounded by unsympathetic onlookers clucking their approval—the overall experience had been humbling nonetheless. Relief, such as it was, arrived in the form of awareness that the day’s cautionary tales—conveniently sized and ready-made for Sunday school lessons: pride goeth before the fall, look before you leap, and so on—had played out in the wholly private arena of her consciousness. Through Lora or Jake’s eyes Marta would have appeared no different than any other novice, charging ahead half-cocked and making wrong assumptions left and right. And for them the gaffes and apparent naiveté might have been endearing one minute and irritating the next, but never worse; her raw hubris and patent exceptionalism had been disguised by a professional skin of polite reserve.
Marta saw the distasteful truth, though. The queenly disposition galled her especially. She’d grossly inflated her worth and envisioned a lofty arrival, the rich aura of professional entitlement granting the power to select whatever she deemed suitable—like venerable Dame Such and Such dipping bejeweled manicured fingers into a box of exquisite chocolate truffles. The pearl before swine snobbery looked grotesque, laughable: no to this and indubitably no to that, but perhaps—just maybe—she might dabble here, infuse one cog in the movie-making machine with a patina of unadulterated quality by virtue of a singular gift—penetrating intellect, courtesy of top notch genetics and impeccable ivory tower grooming.
Eyes squeezed shut, Marta saw herself in a sideshow: ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on the philosophunculist extraordinaire!
2.
The day came nowhere close to meeting her expectations. Nor had the discussion with Lora the night before. That exchange had turned out to be less a negotiation than a tipping domino trail of firm negations uttered between cackles—“No way, Jose,” “Good luck with that one,” “Ha, out of the question.”
Marta had knocked on the front door of Joan’s of Oliver happy with her resolve—at last—to lend a hand to the production, but the ensuing conversation only clarified the resounding difference between objective reality and Marta’s fantastic version of it as well as the total unionized rigidity of the enterprise from root to flower.
In no time she’d learned that she lacked seniority of any kind and that scholarly credentials counted for naught; and without any professional affiliation—paid membership in one of several unions, that is: another prerequisite Lora and Jake might have mentioned at the studio—she possessed no real access to the key positions into which she’d generously slotted herself; neither here nor there, she floated, a non-entity. Marta had suggested working with words, naturally, “doing rewrites,” or adding lines and even scenes in the interest of an alchemical elevating of the leaden script.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Lora had replied brightly.
When, grasping for straws, she mentioned Script Supervisor, Lora—all business now, the mask of affable informative hostess secured away—had pounced on the idea: “No go with that, sweetie. You see, she’s already in place, hired on ages ago. And, besides, do you even know what a Script Supervisor does?” Marta didn’t, perfectly aware that the only responses she could give, “Not exactly” and “Supervises the script,” would sound preposterous, so she held her tongue and waited for Lora, whose face appeared avid with ready answers.
The phone rang exactly then, the timing from a drawing room farce. Quick to answer, Lora swiveled the chair and slid open a filing cabinet drawer. She handed Marta a thin volume of stapled paper.
After reading the cover—On Da Set: A Guide 4 Da Green, which featured a hand-drawn daisy character wearing hip-hop pendants and opaque sunglasses; the hipster-flower crashed bull-like through an old-fashioned film set—Marta turned to the table of contents, not alphabetical but a listing of positions ranked by importance. Chaz’s gloomy account of his cur status had basis in fact, she saw: PA stood at the very bottom of the sheet. She flipped to the guide’s mid-point:
“Script Supervisor: The script supervisor (aka, continuity script supervisor), is responsible for many key tasks before, during, and after a film’s production. A script supervisor’s main duty: to document all details surrounding movie scenes—as they are filmed. That means keeping track of everything from (1) the types of lenses cameras operator uses to (2) the exact positions of the performers. A script supervisor also marks lines through the script to keep the director up to date about how many of the scenes have been completed, or covered in film speak.”
I’m way off the mark, Marta had thought. Accustomed to being regarded as knowledgeable as well as to feeling competently informed, Marta felt a blood rush of embarrassment at Lora’s explanation of the job by proxy.
Only later did a fallback occur to her—the flash of insight arriving via the all-purpose adage about life, lemons, and lemonade: she’d branch out and learn a new, possibly valuable skill set. Failing that, a consultancy position, something not mentioned in On Da Set, held promise if only because the uniqueness appeared to excuse it from being subject to territorial union legalities. Script consultant, creative consultant: were those possibilities? One might be, she guessed, although any screenwriter would resent an interloping amateur with a snob’s tilted nose and delusions of literary grandeur.
Once finished with the call, Lora preempted Marta’s case-pleading with a palatable suggestion. “Look,” she began, features arranged to appear tentative and pensive even though any child could see Mom’s mind wa
s set, “before you vote on anything, why don’t you show up tomorrow morning and see how we operate. You can hang at HQ, take the temperature of the place, inhale the funky air of the three-ring circus up close. We’ll get Chaz to ferry you around, take you out to set, et cetera,” she said. Lora’s chirpy afterthought, “It’ll be fun, like visiting Disneyland,” contained the false inflection of a camp counselor’s prediction for an unpopular and skeptical child that “things might just work out, you’ll see.”
Suffused with worry, Marta nonetheless agreed. In the jutting angle of Lora’s jaw she’d perceived a dare, an unasked for challenge. A hard kernel of schoolgirl inside her understood that backing down meant shame and cowardice; without thinking, she met the taunt. Okay, pile on the degradation, she thought, unclear about the nature of her victory.
“Sure.” Her ego smarted from being relegated to the sidelines and deemed burdensome babysitting material for harried Chaz. “I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow.”
She recognized a Hobson’s choice: she could scarcely stamp her precious diva feet, storm off set, and cause the production to fold into chaos: as a non-essential, she could hole up at the Star-Lite in the morning and wait there in vain until sunset for a pleading call, or a concerned knock on the door with an urgent messenger—couriering four words: “We need you, please”—standing outside. A one-shift experience, then. If unpalatable, she’d be packed and ready to slip away without explanation.
3.
The promised visit to Disneyland turned out to be eventful—a complex obstacle course of errands and tasks, in fact—but altogether uninteresting. Throughout, nostalgia for the classroom had appeared, unbidden like a sneeze. Marta had held that feeling at bay, convinced she suffered from nothing other than culture shock.
The production office’s steep learning curve related to connecting names and jobs and positions on the rigid hierarchy to phone voices and a parade of faces stopping by, and Marta began to reconsider an earlier upbeat commitment to climbing it: dedication to the summit of Everest could be construed as heroic; ascending a mountain of rubble could not.
Before noon, she’d been introduced—“____, this is Marta,” as though her name alone, like Charo’s, would suffice to explain character, value, relevance, and purpose—to various brusque department heads and their careerist assistants, as well as to a throng of carpenters, teamsters, couriers, delivery men, electricians, PAs, and a motley assortment of shaggy-haired, instantly forgotten others who dropped in and called with questions, concerns, requests, complaints, or emergencies—all urgent and in need of immediate response.
And she’d sat quietly in the SUV with studio reps and mysterious higher ups as Chaz, adopting a subdued facts and figures delivery persona, drove and conversed between airport, sets, and office. Between the pick ups and drop offs, she’d assisted on runs for office supplies (fans, markers, paper, power cords, and a white board, as well as coffee, snacks, bottled water and diet soda, fruit, and mounds of chocolate) and answered the insistent phone several times, confident that she could at least intone the secretarial phrase, “Please hold, ____ will be available in a moment,” with panache. Even that last, technically a no-brainer, had proven onerous; her lack of familiarity with every member of the crew seemed only to inflame the commandeering personalities emitting from plastic receivers.
The secretarial function had been thrust at her throughout the day, as though she looked the part. When one man, an imperious and pushy extras wrangler with a cell phone perpetually clamped to a portly face, had instructed Marta—“Hey there, honey, would you . . .”—to fix him a coffee, Chaz, a godsend, had intervened and pointed toward the kitchen set up: “Help yourself, man” within earshot and “Douche pile” thirty seconds later. Soon after, he’d explained to Marta “who’s gotta kiss whose ass.”
Marta learned too that a short-term non-unionized consultancy offered a single perk: practical exemption from the Byzantine system of obligations and favours. I’ve already encountered enough of that for a lifetime, she’d thought with relief, frowning at the image of pallid, under-exercised buttocks beneath Tenure Committee woolens.
4.
Marta’s eyes regained focus when a mobile blur interrupted the darkness. Chaz stood at the doorframe.
“Knock, knock,” he stage-whispered. “Wow, you’re pretty zoned out, eh?”
“That would be an understatement.” Marta swung her legs to the edge of the bed in one gymnastic movement. “You frightened me. I guess leaving the door ajar is an open invitation.”
“Don’t give it a thought, I’m a pussycat.”
“That’s reassuring, though I’d guess that any psychopath worth his salt doesn’t announce gruesome intentions up front.” Aiming for lighthearted banter, fatigue had landed her nearer to paranoid accusation. Overworking always brought out an inner scold.
Without further word, Chaz walked into the room. “For you.” He handed Marta a white envelope.
The quiet solemnity bore into Marta, who anticipated a letter of termination: “Attention Professor Spëk: We regret to inform you . . .” The man’s face still shone with moisture, she noted, and now smudges here and there of dehydrated red sauce, likely from the over-salted pizza the office had ordered hours earlier, lent him a boyish appeal.
Chaz waited, leaving Marta no chance for a private viewing. She tore open the envelope and withdrew an illustrated birthday card. The caption exclaimed “Redneck Push-Up Bra” in large copper foil letters; in the foreground of the accompanying photograph a buxom woman stood arms akimbo and wore a homemade brassiere of short ripped strips of pewter duct tape. Befitting the cliché, the woman—who in real life would be called trailer trash—scowled, lustily gap-toothed and plastered with makeup that coarsened her in such a way that a career in subsistence prostitution seemed probable. Naturally, her brown hair was bulbous with beer can rollers. She stood in front of the aluminum screen door of a battered mobile home; a lit cigarette protruded from the corner of plum lips. The only item missing: a rolling pin clutched as a weapon.
“I thought of you when I saw it.”
A surreal puzzlement washed over Marta. Here she breathed, perched on the side of a soft mattress in a no-frills motel room late at night after fourteen hours of work at a strange demi-job in a remote location where an odd man had just handed over a bizarre card months from the date on her birth certificate while making a ridiculous and insulting association that she utterly failed to comprehend.
Stalling, Marta pretended to read the card’s interior punch line, Why? resounding silently. What possible connection could Chaz have made between this card and her? She tallied its qualities—the stacked levels of crude humour, the woman’s pendulous breasts and cartoon Appalachian aesthetic, the overall cheapness—and found no commonality.
“Should I ask?”
“Huh?
“Well, to be honest, this is baffling.” Watching him, she struggled with the degree of tact required and whether to return the offering. “It’s not my birthday and that leads me to conclude that you see similarities between me and this, this vulgar stereotype, and . . .”
Chaz pursed his lips but made no move toward an explanation.
“Let me put it this way,” Marta continued, eyes on his. “If I gave you a card that, for instance, featured an unattractive computer nerd wearing one of those novelty caps that holds two cans of beer, and then said I was reminded of you, wouldn’t you find it just a touch insulting? I mean, what purpose could there be to giving someone a ‘thinking of you’ gift card that could only ever be interpreted as an insult? Or am I missing something?”
“Oh, wow. I guess I’m a ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’ kinda guy.”
“Well, there’s that. I’d say I belong to the ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ camp.”
“Huh, I thought that saying only applied to life during wartime.” Uncomfortable, he adjuste
d his cap. “So I get it, Herr Doktor Freud. Your job is all about interpreting layers of symbols and that, so you read into things when there’s no reason to.”
“I see. So, the association between Appalachian Annie-Lou here”—like an auctioneer’s assistant, she held the card up for a full view—“and me is random and therefore means nothing? You might have just as easily picked a ‘Happy Birthday, Father’ card or a ‘Get Well Soon’ with a photograph of a Hawaiian sunset or a fuzzy kitten and thought of me?” Though Marta felt no actual ire, a biting tone intruded virally into her sentences. “Remind me to decline an invitation to exchange Christmas presents. Or next time, if there is a next time, that is, you may want to choose something with flowers on it. It’s a safe bet; women understand bouquets. Or perhaps there’s something I’ve misunderstood and you can enlighten me? Dadaist humour is a bit much for me to navigate at this hour.”
Chaz started to speak, but stopped, pressing an index finger to his lips. He pried the card and envelope from Marta’s fingers and ripped them into chunky confetti while taking histrionic strides backwards and exiting the room. Curious, Marta watched as his clenched hand reappeared and knocked on the frame.
Marta grinned as she realized Chaz’s ploy. “Hello?”
“Hey, professor. I was on my way to my room when I noticed your open door. How’s it going?” Chaz wore a theatrically false and endearing smile. “Since we didn’t have a spare minute to stomp around on set today, I thought we might do that now. What do you think?”
“Pardon me?” Marta relaxed, admiring the man’s effort. “Now? As in, leave my room and stumble around in the dark after completing a fourteen-hour shift?”
“Bingo and bingo. Desert air, cool wind in your hair, a mini road trip, like that old Eagles song: who could say no to that?”
“You can’t be serious.”
“C’mon, it’ll be fun. I can make you a coffee or something if you need a little pick-me-up.”
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