by Lynn Crosbie
I recalled the scandal around the film; its own tag line was “What sort of madman would adapt Jean Genet?”
I bring Flora, my girlfriend, with me, and am so mesmerized I forget to squeeze her ass or insist that yes, of course she is prettier than Deneuve.
My hand falls out of hers and covers my mouth.
Even now, I cannot bring myself to speak of how he managed to persuade me that extreme criminality and ravishing beauty are one and the same; that both reveal themselves slowly, as roses do, to be exquisite fatalities not suited to live once captured and enslaved.
Divine monsters in leg irons; a mutilated rose des vents molesting a buttonhole!
I look up at the end of the credits and Flora is gone, FUK U written on a candy wrapper beneath her seat.
I don’t care. I love it, I love it all.
I see everything he has done, five movies, each of them a strange jewel commissioned by a greedy, mad, and brilliant king for his heavy, listing crown.
Ultraviolence will be the largest gem, part sea urchin, part pink diamond, and I —
My car starts, and as I slowly reverse, Pudge’s roommate, who has thrown on a dress, runs toward me.
* * *
“Mr. Wilde? Can we talk?”
Has Pudge been sleep-violent again? I steel myself.
“Yes,” I say, weakly.
She is Cat, in a charmless yellow frock, and her boyfriend, Cotton, she says, who does odd jobs and is older, has created a screenplay.
“Oh,” I say, not at all happy, but relieved my strange daughter has not punched her while snoring and yelling the selection of deeply offensive German phrases she picked up during a student-exchange program in Munich.
“Is the screenplay in your — ” I want to say “bag,” but she has none.
“No, we are going to improvise. Cotton works best that way. But the plot’s all up in his head,” she says, knocking her skull to make sure I understand what this piece of his anatomy looks like. “It’s about a home invasion, a terror film, a real mindfuck. You’d be the old man who — ”
“Invades the house?”
“No.” She laughs. “You’d be the victim.”
“How much?”
“We’re broke. But we can give you, like, two hundred dollars now, and offer you some of the revenue. It’s pretty obvious you need to make a comeback. This could be your Wrestler,” she says.
“Or my Beaver,” I say, thinking of Mel Gibson, a slimmer, more respectable version of me.
“We start shooting in the next two weeks,” she says. “Cotton thinks we can do your scenes in a day. What do you think?”
She looks so hopeful, it gets to me. And who knows? Maybe Cat is right. What I do know is that if I don’t get my second act soon, I’m done for. I’d thought Annabel would change me, but —
Better not to think of her. I imagine her choking on pasta puttanesca, and let Harford save her.
“I’ll do it,” I tell her. Cat kisses my cheek, hands me some bills, and climbs out of the car.
She waves at me as I twist the key again: the Lady is wide awake.
“O dulce doncella,” I say as I maneuver onto Sunset, thinking about what it might be like to be a star again.
Per via aerea. ESPRESSO.
Via Vittorio Veneto, 125, 00187 Roma, Italy, #786
Dearest,
I spend my days filming: the light is like Hollywood, beatified. Enclosed is some stregoneria: drink it at midnight, when my wolves are calling.
AnWr Xo
She has sent me a vial of sunshine. I drink it that night and, after I have driven to the Hills, it hits and I run wild with golden dogs until morning.
* * *
I call Krishna as I drive, interrupting him occasionally to curse poky old drivers and young ones with death wishes.
“I got you Fan Expo,” he says.
This is a notorious low point for actors: sordid events usually held in cruddy basements filled with crazy-eyed fans in costume.
“You can walk away with a couple of grand, cash,” he says. “Just for being the guy who slept with Darth Vader.”
I did. In Star Wars SexyBack, the most despised in the series and the by-product of an insane, drug-addicted director whose child groom wrote the screenplay.
“There’s a ticket to New Jersey under your door. You leave in a week.”
Why not, I think. I could cover some bad checks and possibly spend some time in New York.
When I get home, I see Krishna has started packing for me. He is clearly happy to get me out of town and away from him.
The last time I asked about new parts, he said, “I can’t hear you. We must have a bad connection.”
I was standing right there.
* * *
Before Expo, I shoot House of Crazy with Cat and Cotton.
All of my scenes take place in a warehouse space modified to look like a typical suburban home.
These modifications include a GOD BLESS THIS MESS needlepoint pillow, a plaid sofa, and a stereo console that leaks Meat Loaf ballads all day.
They blew Cat’s book allowance at a thrift shop and cannot afford to hire any more actors. My wife is a mop.
Cotton divines my lines, then feeds them to me.
I say things like, “You’ll never get away with this,” and “Hey, that really hurt.”
I am spit on by Cotton’s friend, a kid in a snowflake-patterned balaclava, menaced with an axe and a chainsaw, and doused in ketchup and flames.
“I am slain!” is my final line, recited as I stagger to the bucket and embrace the mop.
“Oh, shit, this looks so good,” Cotton says.
He is filming the movie on his phone and will have to edit out the several calls he takes and his “Panda” text tone.
He “drops it” fast, emailing me the link to YouTube in less than a week.
I watch all forty-five minutes of it on my own phone.
My face never moves.
I wrap the phone in a paper towel, then another, and place it carefully in the crisper beside an untouched, viridescent onion.
Then I lie on my belly and fall asleep.
“Why?” I ask God. He is sitting beside me on a small raft in the sea, throwing vegetable chum at a desultory shark.
“Be patient,” He says.
I swim away, and He calls after me.
“I love you like a son,” He says, and laughs His ass off.
“Thank you,” I say, and wake up.
The bedding is shredded. I find a shark’s tooth in my pillowcase.
The phone makes noises. I mummify it more densely and whisper, “It’s a funeral. Show some decency.”
I am leaving for New Jersey in a few hours.
I lower my head and say, “He was not a good man, nor was he evil.”
* * *
It is time to accept my failure with humility, and to endure.
To endure is all!
I take a bus to the airport, make a detour, and, on the plane, learn that Annabel Wrath’s boyfriend is also appearing at Fan Expo.
How wonderful.
My seat is directly beside the rank, stinking toilet, and a frightened woman who keeps spelling BOMB with peanuts on her drink tray.
I rattle the Star-Ledger and learn that Harford is making a documentary about fan conventions that he calls “a poignant look at the American underbelly.”
Creep, I think, yawning.
I tear strips from the paper, make a few cranes, and wonder if she’ll be there.
A drunk guy in the seat kitty-corner to mine interrupts my reverie by leaning back and telling me, “You look really nice.”
I stare at my reflection in the window and see that the crown of my skull is covered with new, Folgers-brown hair; that the thick crease between my eyes has
vanished into a silvery line.
Enchantress, I think, remembering that when we met she said that she would change me.
I try to lean back but cannot: I have forgotten I am in the back row.
Instead, I toast my seat companion with the Crown Royal I slipped on board in a contact-lens fluid container.
“Cheers, darling,” I say, and hastily she reassembles her peanuts to say CHARMED AM SURE.
I keep making cranes. I have 666 to go and need all the good luck I can get.
* * *
The crowne plaza hotel hall is agreeable enough but we, the stars, are relegated to the basement.
I meet people all day, if fewer than Leatherface and Burt Ward, who are seated next to me.
And I pocket a fair bit of cash, mostly for signing Ultraviolence posters and arcane Star Wars memorabilia.
At noon, Malcolm McDowell is seated beside me. He is small and angry and at one point yells at a distressed, middle-aged woman in a ballgown, “I don’t want to read your fucking fan letter, just give me the cookies!” He yanks a package of Oreos from the lady’s gift bag, stuffs several into his mouth, and looks at me.
“Fans, amirite?” he says, spraying me with chocolate crumbs.
Strange men and women try to kiss me and I am asked repeatedly if I am single. After a while this starts to feel good, it is so utterly unlike my life.
And when I look up, there she is, dressed as someone she says is Jill Valentine: tight black rubber shirt and fatigues, head-to-toe body armor, long hair braided under a Yankees cap.
“You’re adorable,” I say, reaching nervously for her hand, still wary after our little date.
She flicks her braid off her shoulder.
“I got dragged back from Milan for this,” she says.
Just then, a fat man in sandals slaps down a sheet of paper.
“Sign it,” he says.
I ask for the money and he is incredulous.
“What the fuck for?”
My Valentine spins and elbows him in the face, takes him down, and, using his prone body for elevation, kisses me.
“You smell like cheap cigarettes,” she says, and films me for a while as I write, laboriously, on photographs of myself in a hot tub with Darth Vader.
* * *
“What’s the book about?” I ask Annabel. “And the movie?”
She, Harford, and I are in Atlantic City, having lethal zombies at Martell’s Tiki Bar on the boardwalk.
“They’re very similar,” she says. “The book is about Ultraviolence as a sequel or coda to A Clockwork Orange. It’s an examination of the ways in which ideas regarding sex and gender are attached to new ways of thinking about the usual binaries, female weakness, male predation. And the film will — ”
Harford is obviously bored. He finishes his mai tai, whispers something to Annabel, and wanders off toward the water.
I look up and the Tiki Cam has captured him and a hula dancer in a clinch below an orange-neon palm tree.
“What did he say?” I ask Annabel to distract her.
“Oh,” she says, coloring. “He has a fairly big part in it, can you believe it? So he thinks I should be more discreet.”
I press a little green sword to my wrist, feel a rush of fatigue and desolation.
“And that talking about it is more tedious than shopping for pantyhose.”
“It’s not,” I tell her, taking all of her in: the crown of plumeria flowers, grass miniskirt and pink combat boots; her pink macramé bikini top.
“Come with me,” I say impulsively.
I steer her to the ocean’s shore and together we release the cranes.
We make wish after wish and she buries the last two in her hair, where I envy them.
“Why do you like him?” I ask, crossly.
“What’s not to like?” she says. “He’s good-looking, he’s successful. He’s you, forty years ago.”
My eyes narrow and she turns away: I slap her ass, hard, and run my hands up and down its glossy rounds, pulling her to me.
“What is happening?” she says, finally, pulling away and breathing hard.
“More to come,” I say, and lead her back to the table. We sit, and she opens my hand with the cocktail sword.
“Much more,” she says.
Harford returns. He yawns and dumps sugar on the table.
Annabel resumes: “The book is,” she says, “completely academic. I may use it as a prop in the film, maybe a weapon.”
“I could make a cameo,” I say, adjusting my plastic lei.
“Why would you do that?” Harford says.
“Because he stars in the original movie,” says Annabel, embarrassed for both of us.
The ocean roars, pitching seals and giant whales into the air and sucking them back into its black velvet mouth. Our mai tais catch fire and I drink mine hungrily, exhaling tangerine flames.
Harford opens his big mouth, a wonder of white coral teeth and codfish lips.
“Right, fuck, sorry,” he says, speciously. “You’re the Weekend at Bernie’s guy. That was surprisingly funny. Didn’t we just watch that on Netflix, Bells?”
He wraps a hairless, inked arm around her and she shrinks into him, nods.
“Yes. I’m the dead man,” I say, draining my drink and wishing, desperately, that I were.
* * *
Drink in moderation. Quit smoking.
These are the first items on the self-improvement list I start the morning of the second and last day of the expo.
“Exercise every third day?” I write as a group of exotics swarm my booth.
“We saw you on Annabel Wrath’s web site,” a young man with illustrated arms says, and the others nod, coolly.
“Is she making a movie about you?” he asks.
“How the fuck should I know?” I say, recalling that people were afraid of me once.
“Yeah,” he says, and the kids stay at my side, alternately intimidating and astonishing people all day.
One of them shows me her web site. Underneath a nicely composed picture of me, taken I know not when, she has written, “Feed me truffles in bed, darling.”
Does she mean that I am a truffle-sniffing pig?
When Annabel comes by, wearing a black suit and heels and pulling a pink suitcase behind her, my heart sinks. She will never kiss me again, I think, noticing for the first time a diamond engagement ring the size of a papaya ripening on her left hand.
My new entourage goes crazy, taking pictures and firing questions at her about a film she has made called Dead Kids Rising, a documentary short about a satanic cult’s seizure of poorly disposed biomedical waste.
“Are you shooting one with him?” a multiply pierced girl says, snapping her fingers at me.
“Of course,” Annabel says.
Her own impressive collection of piercings is not visible — last night, she told me that she was letting them grow over.
“Everyone is tribal now,” she had said, parting her hair to reveal three intricate scars. “But I’ll leave two available for some serious ice,” she said, and winked.
She is wearing big silver hoops today that roll forward as she does something extraordinary: she stands on her toes and kisses me again, letting her candy-pink tongue laze on mine as she emits a small sigh.
“He’s my inspiration — for everything hot,” she says, rubbing her mouth with a hand that comes away cardinal.
“Look at my YouTube,” she says. “He’s all over me. Now leave us be, please. I’m trying to say goodbye. Memorably.”
To me she says, “I do want to shoot you some more. Can we talk when I’m back in L.A.?”
“Of course,” I say, my voice rickety. I write out my number and the email address that Pudge maliciously assigned me: [email protected].
Annabel laug
hs and tucks the slip of paper into her bra.
“You’re a demon,” I say, crossing and uncrossing my legs.
“And you, child, are looking good,” she says, blowing me a final kiss as she turns on those shining heels, a kiss that comes in like a drone and lands on my smooth cheek, painting it the sun-dappled colors of a new plum.
* * *
On the plane I get a good seat. I’m bumped to first class when the ticket agent recognizes me from Ripper the Male Stripper, a straight-to-video film I made many years ago. In it, I play a sex criminal and faded dancer: the women at the club throw rotten apples as I crawl offstage, my serrated feelers aslant.
“Do you remember when you were killing that whore and the bobbies showed up?” he says, drawing heart-shaped amendments on my ticket.
“I do,” I say, politely. We pose for a selfie, a term I learned through brute force this weekend; I board early and am surprised when the attractive stewardess winks at me.
Annabel brings me luck, I decide, as I recline to a near-prone position and signal for one Scotch, with soda water and ice.
Surreptitiously I pull out my compact — yes, I have a compact — and gape. I look ten years younger, at least.
My eyes are clear and vivid, my skin lined, but not gouged, and all of the dissolute red has vanished.
My hair has stopped growing in, but it is longer, darker, and shaped into a cool widow’s peak.
I look around: the seat beside me is empty; the couple across the aisle is asleep. Then I peel up my shirt.
I don’t have a six-pack, but my barrel belly has been deflated and is lightly scored, like the top of a loaf of challah.
Emboldened, I am grabbing my round, firm ass as the winky stewardess approaches and asks if there is anything I need.
“Anything,” she repeats, and I tell her to bring me a glass of still water.
“This tastes like motor oil,” I say, pushing my drink at her and slipping on a pair of white Totokaelo sunglasses I have discovered in the magazine pouch.
I look out the circular window until she leaves.
She is attractive but I swear.