by Jim Hanas
The Cryerer squirmed on his stool. A few bids came in, and a few minutes passed, and the hostess closed the bidding.
“Sold,” she said, “to the lucky lady in the light blue dress.”
The lucky lady, a woman old enough to be the star’s mother, joined him on the runway where they locked hands and bowed to desultory applause. The Cryerer was next.
The hostess introduced him, detailed his many appearances as the Brother on Sunday night movies of the week and on cable channels well known to the audience. “Remember ladies, it’s for charity,” she admonished before surrendering the microphone.
The Cryerer walked to the end of the runway. He managed a smile — “Good afternoon, ladies” — and began his spiel, which included oysters, cocktails, a walk on the beach, and, he hoped but did not say, backs of knees pressed against elbows, preferably knees not belonging to someone old enough to be his mother.
The bidding was slow. He looked out on the faces of the women perched on folding chairs. There were conversations, women explaining to friends who he was and about his pathetic quality. The explainers whispered out of the sides of their mouths, pointing and looking at him. Explainees nodded and made emphatic faces that said, “Aww. He cries,” and the bidding gained momentum.
“Five hundred.”
“Six hundred.”
“Seven-fifty.”
This is the way it always happened.
“Eight-fifty.”
“Nine hundred.”
Women were curious and concerned. They wanted to help.
“Nine-fifty.”
“One thousand.”
They would be disappointed.
“Two thousand.”
All heads turned to a pale, tall redhead standing behind the rows of folding chairs.
“Do we have a bid in the back?”
“Two thousand,” the redhead said, arms crossed, one foot balanced on a heel in front of the other. She turned away, revealing a jagged silhouette.
“Sold,” said the hostess. “To the woman in the back.”
The redhead joined the Cryerer on the runway where they joined hands and took a bow. Through the applause, the woman whispered, “I’m a really big fan.”
When his mother called, the Cryerer was driving in the Valley, speeding toward Manhattan Beach with the redhead at his side. She wore leather pants and a purple jacket that matched her toenail polish. The Cryerer didn’t answer. He hadn’t spoken to his mother in years.
“So I loved you in The Cryist,” the redhead said, walking long fingers up his leg and smiling. “And in The Crying Man.”
Here was a true fan. Before he’d become aware of the scope of his pathetic quality, the Cryerer had appeared in adult features. It was a turnoff to most — a man who bawled helplessly before, during, and after the act — even to women, among whom the pornographers in Van Nuys thought this display might find a sympathetic audience. To men, it was so implausible as to be upsetting or, on the other hand, so plausible that habitual users reported a moment of clarity that often put them off the trade for good. The redhead was an exception. She leaned over and breathed into his neck. “Do you feel sad?” she whispered.
When his Agent called, the Cryerer was in the fetal position under a bar in Manhattan Beach, a cold brass foot-rail bumping rhythmically against his forehead. He covered his head from blows delivered by a giant man, who — he had managed to gather — played cornerback for Pepperdine. The Cryerer braced and waited for it to stop, trying to protect his face.
“Fucking crying ass faggot,” the giant shouted, punctuating each blow with a syllable. “Fuck-ing cry-ing ass fag-got.” Eventually it did stop and the Cryerer rolled onto his back. The redhead knelt at his side, running purple fingernails through his hair and searching his face for tears.
“Are you alright?” she said.
“I guess,” he said, stretching his body tentatively.
“Go ahead, you can let it out. Let it out,” she said.
It all happened quickly and the Cryerer had not immediately understood. The redhead spoke breathlessly all the way from the Valley, about his movies and about his pathetic quality, and about how these made her feel. In the bar she had leaned very close to him, running single long fingers lightly above her plunging camisole, talking about how excited she was and how she couldn’t wait for the evening to come to an end, which would really be only the beginning. But now, lying on his back, he understood. She had excused herself from the table and returned with the giant man, whom she had told all about the Cryerer and his pathetic quality, about how he was a creep and was bothering her.
“Go ahead, you can let it out. Let it out,” she urged now.
It had progressed very quickly.
“Come on, it’s alright,” she panted. “Give it to me.”
Clearly she was disappointed.
When his Agent called, the Cryerer was lying awake in the Valley. It was mid-morning already, but he was lying there, still and awake, monitoring various pains in his body and wondering what they might mean.
“You better not be in bed,” his Agent said.
“My face is fine.”
“The Colombian?”
“No.”
“Did they love you?”
“Sure.”
The Cryerer stretched his body cautiously, poking at his ribs with two fingers.
“Are you ready?”
“Yeah.”
The Cryerer rolled out of bed and peeled off his suit and the shirt the color of a Band-Aid. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and found his face to be as he had reported, terminally serious but untouched, although his torso was covered with red bruises the size of compact discs. He eased himself into the shower and stood there for a long time.
The phone rang again while the Cryerer was driving in the Valley. The fingers of his right hand were stiff and sore and when he reached for the phone he knocked it under the passenger seat. At a light he reached over the emergency brake in spite of his aching ribs and fished around. The phone rang as he fished, but when he finally located it the ringing had stopped and his hand was smeared with streaks of thin, brown film — random grease from under the seat — and he tried to remember not to touch his mouth or his face, going so far as to retrieve his cigarette pack from his pocket and a cigarette from the pack all with his left hand as he drove to the studio. When the Brazil Nut called, the Cryerer considered the phone and the thin, brown film before answering. She was crying.
“You are where?” she sobbed.
“On my way to the studio,” he said. “Where are you?”
“In darkness,” she blubbered.
“You’ll be fine.”
“No.”
“You’re fine. Take a Valium. Do you have Valium?”
“Already I take.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I am dying.”
“You are not either dying,” the Cryerer said.
“No.”
“I have to get ready. I’m late.”
“No,” the Brazil Nut sobbed as the Cryerer hung up the phone.
At the studio, the guard waved him through with barely a pause. The Cryerer parked the car and sat, wiping his hand on the passenger seat, taking a few moments to collect himself. He dialed a number and let it ring. When the redhead answered — “Hello, this is Alex” — he hung up, relieved she was still alive. He smelled sulfur and heard metal scraping on metal. He recalled yellow gun-shaped controls that sent tiny cars flying around the track, and often flying off the track, at what seemed like impressive speeds. There had been no intensive training and everything was left to chance. Hold the trigger tight and so what if the car, filled with oil from a tiny plastic bubble, comes flying off the track and across the carpet amid smells of sulfur and reckless speed? These were not historic runs.
He remembered the time, four days after Christmas, that the track caught fire, right there under the tree. The scraping of the trigger back and forth, lurching the cars around the track, had set the black plastic pieces of track on fire. Pieces of metal like two wooden sticks scraping together to make fire. The gorgeous smell of electrical fire.
The Cryerer limped into the studio. He had worked with the Sister, the woman playing the Mother of the Baby, before. She had had a sitcom once and had since been in many of these missing baby capers. The director was somber and supportive. He nodded whenever people spoke and looked into their eyes. The Cryerer thought he recognized him from Van Nuys. He couldn’t be sure, but if so he had once been known as the Skin Doctor and he might have the tapes that could wreck that beautiful Malibu wedding.
“So,” the director began solemnly. “You are the Mother of the Baby.” He fixed his eyes on the eyes of the Sister and nodded. “And you are the Brother.” He turned his eyes to the Cryerer, nodding and fixing. “And the Baby is gone.”
Brother and Sister both nodded.
He repeated: “And the Baby” (looking at the Cryerer), “your baby” (looking at the Sister, the Mother of the Baby), “is gone” (looking intently at both).
When the Brazil Nut called, the Cryerer was having makeup applied.
“You are where?” she sobbed.
“I’m at the studio. I told you.”
“I am dying.”
“Can I call you back later? Listen, I’ll call you back later,” he whispered. “You’re fine.”
“No. I won’t be here,” she said. “I’m going away.”
The Cryerer couldn’t remember how long he sat there, watching blankly as the racetrack melted and the Christmas tree dissolved in flames. It was engulfed almost immediately. He was not startled, not even amazed. He sat there on the living room carpet, watching the tree spit bits of itself onto the rug around him. His father appeared, suddenly and aggressively, stomping viciously on the racetrack and headlong tackling the flaming tree in a counterintuitive attempt to make it stop flaming, which (more counterintuitively still) seemed to work. He watched with fascination in lieu of horror, his father wrestling the green, smoking limbs back and forth across the deep-pile carpet before finally standing up and kicking ridiculously at the smoldering branches, sending storms of dried needles across the carpet.
His father, covered in botanical soot, loomed over him. The Cryerer sat awed amid the wreckage, pulling the trigger of the pistol-shaped controller. Metal on metal. Back and forth.
“Put that fucking thing down,” his father boomed, grabbing the cord and snapping the controller out of the child’s hands. The moment the controller left his hand, he returned to the scene. His father looming. The Christmas tree smoldering. He had begun to cry all at once, uncontrollable spasms racking his small body, terminating in a full, open-mouthed blubber.
“Look at this,” his father roared. “You think this is funny?”
The boy shook his head, gasped, and moved his lips in an airless, “No.”
“Quit your damn cryin’.”
Another airless, “No.”
When the Brazil Nut called again, the Cryerer was on the set in the Valley, preparing to embrace and comfort the Mother of the Baby.
“You have a call,” whispered a production assistant who had stepped up gingerly beside him. “It sounds like an emergency.”
The Cryerer excused himself. He stepped behind a camera, put a finger in one ear and picked up the phone.
“What.”
“You know,” she whispered quietly. “I am loving you, David.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know, I am not blame you for anything, David.”
She was not crying.
“Get some rest. I’ll call you later.”
She was singing.
“Am not here later, David,” she sang.
“I’m working,” he said. “Go to bed.”
The Cryerer stood there for moment. He put his head down and closed his eyes. When the director appeared, he waved him off.
“Almost ready,” he said.
His father lay flat on the carpet, peaceful except for the red half-moon spreading around his head from where he had collided with the coffee table, causing a cloud of Christmas cards to erupt and gently float to the ground. It all happened quickly — the clutching, the staggering, the falling — and the Cryerer had not immediately understood. His mother appeared from nowhere. Kneeling amid ashes and drink coasters, she ran long fingers through her husband’s hair and dabbed at his head with a dishtowel. “Are you alright?” she screamed. “Are you okay?” she begged him as the Cryerer muttered a steady stream of airless “No”s.
He passed a forefinger under each eye to mop up tears that had already begun to form. “I’m ready,” he said. A woman in an army jacket appeared and applied a few fingertips of makeup under his eyes.
“I’m a big fan,” she said.
He nodded, managing a twitch.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
It started in his lower back, an intense and knotted throb. It would’ve been difficult for him to sit, and he shifted from foot to foot to keep the spasms moving.
“Places,” the director said, and the Cryerer took his place outside the door. The Mother of the Baby sat inside some sort of a waiting room — it could have been a hospital or a police station.
He tried to stand still with the throbbing growing in his back and contractions, like hiccups, taking hold in his chest. He tried to still his quivering lips.
“Rolling,” the director called from the other side of the door. “And action.”
The Cryerer lurched through the door and his pretend Sister, the Mother of the pretend Baby, rose.
“I came as soon as you called,” he panted.
“Oh, John.”
“What is it?”
“It’s the Baby.”
“Where is she?”
“Gone,” the Mother squeaked, nodding slowly in a protracted wince before burying her face in the Cryerer’s shoulder, the Cryerer himself now coming unglued as the throbs and contractions became no longer local, wrenching his entire body and turning his trembling lips into an eight-shaped, teeth-baring hole. The crane zoomed in to capture the close-up and locked for a moment before panning right, then left, then spiraling gently up and around the entangled bodies of the mourners as the point of view rose, turned, and dissolved somewhere up — up, up, up — and into the slowly rotating sky.
The Audubon Society
It was a scene of real violence, like a fistfight or a car crash. Feathers floated in the air where the pigeon had collided with the railroad bridge and the bird flopped on the road like a ruined volleyball. Then it skidded around, flapping one wing and weaving back and forth across traffic. Very looked like she was going to cry, so I took off my jacket.
We watched while the pigeon exhausted itself, cars swerving to miss the thing, before it finally came to rest against the curb. I threw my jacket over it and scooped it up, careful to fold the broken wing against its body like a kickstand. This is ridiculous, I thought. The bird will die. If Very hadn’t looked like she was going to cry, it would be dead already, hit by a car or euthanized by the feral cats that lived in the prehistoric pickup trucks at the body shop across the street. But now we had it and we had to do something. Very picked at the bundle in my hands and uncovered the bird’s twitching head.
“You’d better wash your hands,” I said.
“You’d better wash yours,” she shot back. “I’ll bet it’s cleaner than you.”
We were polluted — from drinking and fighting and from the already thick morning heat — but that could wait. We walked back to the house quietly, me carrying the pigeon, Very deciding what to do.
On the front porch, I hande
d her the bird. I went inside and found a shoebox under the bed and took it to the backyard. I hadn’t been in the backyard in years. It was always hot, so we stayed inside, close to the air conditioners. The yard didn’t look so good. The grass had grown long and brown. It looked like a scorched cornfield.
We pulled fistfuls of still green grass from a shady place by the back door and plopped them in the box, then rested the bird on top of the pile, jacket and all. It wanted to fly. It wanted to get away from us with every thought in its tiny brain, but we’d seen it try and knew it couldn’t. So we sat with it, hoping — I suppose — for a miracle.
My hands started shaking, so I volunteered to go back to the store. Very wouldn’t admit it, not in front of the bird, but she was shaky, too. I walked to the store, back past the bridge, the body shop, and the mix of restored and decaying brick bungalows (mine was in the latter camp), and returned with two cases of beer, one in each hand — like suitcases. Very had pulled the phone cord through the laundry room out the back door so she wouldn’t have to take her eyes off the bird. She was explaining the situation to somebody.
“It can’t fly,” she was saying. “It’s going to die.”
The person on the other end didn’t care about this any more than I really did. I stuffed the beer in the refrigerator and showed Very that I’d gotten her two packs of the thin, brown cigarettes she’d started smoking again. It didn’t cheer her up though, and it was shaping up to be a crummy Saturday.
Normally we read the paper and drank coffee. Then we sat at the kitchen table and drank, then laughed, then maybe fought, then fell asleep, then woke up and did it all over again until Very went to work on Sunday morning. Not today. Today we would babysit the bird. Very would cry, then decide that we should break up or stop drinking. These ideas would fade after the sun went down, but there was always a chance they would stick.
I brought four beers out and lit the cigarette hanging from Very’s lips. She looked at me with red-ringed eyes and I could tell she was thinking life wasn’t fair. The fact that she’d gotten mixed up with me was Exhibit 1A. She was young and I was old. She was sweet and I was mean. She was beautiful. I was ugly. She was just starting — or had been — and I was done, done, done.