by Corey Mesler
“Ah.”
“I think I was the only one who laughed.”
“A joke too insider to make a ripple.”
“It still makes me laugh.”
“Ah—afterward—at that professor’s house—”
“Yes.”
“You were—well, you were a child.”
“I was 19.”
“Yes, but—”
“I know. Late bloomer.”
“Well.”
“Yes, I just—I wanted to say, that talk that night, it sorta changed my life. I dropped literature as my major and went full-steam into film. I graduated last spring.”
“Well—aren’t you the big girl now?”
There was a pause—and then they both laughed at the ridiculous phrasing.
“You’ve really turned into a beautiful woman.”
“The swan from the duckling.”
“Not exactly that—”
“It’s ok. I’m enjoying blowing off all the guys who didn’t look at me just five years ago.”
“Ha! I imagine that is a distinct pleasure.”
“It is.”
“And now you—you work for Linn?”
“Linn? Oh—”
“How’s that going?”
“Oh, it’s wonderful. I get to do so many—creative things. And I get to meet you again.”
There was a modicum of warmth to that last phrase. Sexual?
“I am happy for that as well,” Eric said. Just in case he faked a flirtatious geniality.
“I got Kimberly Winks put on the picture,” Mimsy added.
12.
Eric rode back to the house alone in the limo. Alone except for Hassle Cooley, whose anxious eyes appeared to Eric like T.J. Eckleburg’s peering down in judgment over the valley of ashes.
The filmmaker-driver outlined one of his many movie proposals. He said he had “scads of ideas, ideas raining down like falling angels.” Eric squirmed at the metaphor.
“Here’s one, and I’m just grabbing one off the top of the pile, so to speak, right?” He was holding Eric’s eye in the mirror. Eric answered quickly, if only to prevent them from plowing into an oncoming car.
“A sequel to The Fly, ok? Except rather than the transformation making the poor mad scientist into something superhuman, and evil, like the Jeff Goldblum version, the fly DNA only makes him pissy and annoying. Get it? He, like, he shows up at dinner time without asking. Or makes phone calls at inopportune times. Or tries to talk to you when you’re like two or three pages from the end of a book. See? Little annoyances. Like he hangs around wherever food is. And he talks in this sort of incessant drone. He kinda hums. He’s just annoying but he doesn’t realize he is.”
Like a wannabe director buttonholing someone in a limousine.
Actually, Eric had to laugh at the idea. It was clever. Of course it would make a one-note movie but there were dozens of one-note movies playing right now. Hollywood wasn’t making anything more complex than this and they were laughing all the way to the bank.
“That’s very clever,” Eric said.
“You laughed,” Hassle Cooley said.
“I’m sorry, I—”
“No, I meant it to be funny. See, it’s a comedy?”
Eric was suddenly very, very weary of the talk. And the constant need for reassurance this poor sap exhibited. They all exhibited this—the wannabes—the draw of Hollywood was too damn seductive.
“I’m very tired,” he said.
“Right. Be there in two beats. One and a half beats maybe at this hour.”
“Thank you,” Eric said.
“No, thank you,” Hassle Cooley said, inflection-less.
Eric couldn’t read the madman’s answers, couldn’t find the correct nuance. Perhaps he was just tired. Or perhaps Hassle Cooley just wasn’t that good at social intercourse.
Eric closed his eyes.
He woke up in Hassle Cooley’s arms. The fool was carrying him to bed.
13.
Dan Yumont woke up in a strange bed. Should you call it a strange bed when he was used to waking up in beds that were not his?
Dan squinted. It was a trademark of his. Dan Yumont’s squint was right up there with Audrey Hepburn’s neck. Or Clark Gable’s pursed lips. Or Jimmy Stewart’s stammer.
He squinted and what he saw was a blonde head on the pillow next to him. Looked like real blonde, too. The light coming in the window was lemonade light. The room was decorated with posters of rock stars and school pictures with glitter hearts around them and red and blue bunting. It looked like the room of a teenager because it was the room of a teenager.
Dan sighed. Her name?
Donna? Zora? Dora? Dudu? Surely not Dudu.
He met her at a bar called the Buccaneer. Now he remembered. She wore a see-through shirt made all but invisible by her sweat. She was really sweating. She was dancing to the music of a band called Great Bear. Now she was naked beside him in a room that looked like the top of a birthday cake. She looked like birthday cake. Dan pulled the covers up to admire her one more time.
He reached for his cigarettes on the nightstand.
“Hello, Lover,” the sleepy voice beside him exhaled.
“Good morning,” Dan said, putting a cigarette in his mouth.
The blonde’s upper lip was stuck to her upper teeth. She looked like a feral dog.
Dan offered her a cigarette.
“I don’t smoke, Sweetie. We talked about that last night. It would play hell with my cheerleading.”
“Of course,” Dan said.
“And, really, if you smoke in my room my mom might smell it.”
Dan Yumont felt ill. He looked at the teen again. She really was pretty, in that Southern Sorority Sister way.
“Listen—” Dan said.
After quite a pause she said, “Dudu.”
“Your name really is Dudu?”
“Nickname.”
“Ah.”
“Oh, real name Sanhedrin. Sanhedrin Orr.”
“Right. Listen, um, Dudu. This is on the QT, right?”
“Sure, Baby.”
“Ok, then.”
Dan pulled the covers back for one parting look. Dudu smiled with the confidence of youth. Of course the man would want to look at her body. She had tits like Marilyn Monroe. Dan thought he had better take her one more time since he would never see her again.
“Ooh,” she said as his intentions became clear. “Remember, really quiet.”
Then after a few moments, just as Dan was digging in, “When are we due on the set?”
14.
Interior bedroom. Grey light.
When Eric Warberg awoke on what was to be the first day of filming he was initially pleased to see that the pillow next to him showed a definite indentation. A head had lain there in the night. Not that he would remember. Upon returning home last night, after extricating himself from the apelike arms of Hassle Cooley, Eric had not so much gone to sleep as swooned. It was the best night of sleep he’d had in ages. He had even forgotten to take his antidepressant before retiring. Which is perhaps why he felt prickly, as if the world were set to bedevil him. It was creating a galvanic reaction upon his epidermis.
He could hear Sandy humming in the kitchen.
Sitting before standing, Eric felt his newfound friend, backache, twist its rusty coil. He stood slowly, awkwardly. He made his way into the bathroom and downed his Remeron. Was it okay to take it in the morning if he missed his p.m. dosage? He couldn’t remember. There was too much cerebration involved in taking a maintenance drug, or three as Eric did. He spent too much of his day trying to make sure his chemical mix was correct.
That was the double-edged sword of medicaments. Would you rather feel bad about having to rely on a drug or would you rather feel . . . crazy?
“Morning, My Little Cabbage,” Sandy said. She was scrambling eggs, or what looked like eggs. Maybe egg substitute or tofu scramble.
“Hey, Sweet,” Eric said, filling his coffee c
up.
“Ready to go?” Sandy positively shone. What was going on behind that crash of sunshine her face offered?
“I hate first days.”
“I know you do. I did some good pages last night.”
“Jesus, when did you have time to do that?”
“Lover, you were comatose when I came home. I worked for a couple of hours in the den.”
“And still woke before me and fixed breakfast.”
“Yeah. Funny, huh? My hunger woke me up. I am ravenous.”
“Is that tofu?”
“Nope. Real eggs. From the supermarket delivery we have been honored with here.”
“Huh.”
“Did a great little bit of dialogue between Hope’s character and Dan’s.”
“Great. Uh, listen. Got some rather awkward word from Eden. Which we can choose to ignore if we are confident that he will only squawk and not raise holy hell.”
“Or we can just weather the holy hell and make the best movie we know how to make. We’ve done that before.”
“Yes, when we were more secure.”
“I see.” A chill entered Sandy’s demeanor. “Maybe you better gimme the word.”
“Yeah. He wants to hire a Memphis writer to supplement what you’re doing, someone with some, you know, local flavor.”
There was a crisp silence at the breakfast table. The toaster ticked. The refrigerator gargled.
“That’s a good idea,” Sandy said. “Got anybody in mind?”
Eric was stunned into aphasia.
“I say, got anybody in mind?”
“Uh, yeah, yes. I thought maybe my old pal Camel Eros.”
“Camel Jeremy Eros.” Sandy said it so flatly it sounded like an idea as absurd as the Spruce Goose or Joseph Smith’s other harebrained schemes, the ones before he hit on a religion in which men could not be monogamous.
“Sure,” Eric said like a sheep.
“Camel Jeremy Eros.”
“Yeah, I said, yes. I haven’t talked to him in ages but he sure knows Memphis.”
“I thought he was living on the West Coast.”
“Word is he moved back here. He and Arthur Lee were making some plans together before Arthur passed.”
“Camel’s a burnout, 1960s roadkill. Like his buddy Skip.”
“It’s worth a shot.”
“Do you have any idea how to get in touch with him? No, scratch that. Of course you do or you wouldn’t be proposing this. Are you proposing this?”
“Yes. My idea is, let’s give the whole crew a day off to get acclimated to Memphis. Let Jimbo continue to scout locations. Let Rica get the city right in his eye. Let Reuben do whatever it is A.D.’s do and you and I will go meet with Camel. What say?”
Reuben Wickring was the A.D. He had been hired by Eden Forbes and Eric had never met him. He had been in Memphis for two weeks already, apparently had even put some film in the can, though that was obviously an inchoate accomplishment since Eric and Sandy had not yet finished the script, nor had they finalized anything to do with the story.
“You’ve already talked to him.”
“No, no, I haven’t. I only found out where he is. I wanted to see how you would take it first. And I must say you are taking it remarkably well.”
“Well, Cabbage, it’s just moviemaking, right? What’s the word on Camel?”
“He’s better.”
Sandy snorted a laugh. “He’s better!” she crowed. “By all means, let’s go see him and cement this deal. It sounds so promising.”
Eric couldn’t help but laugh. At least they were laughing together. At least they were together.
15.
When Dan Yumont saw fit to call Eric’s cell that morning he was prepared for a tongue lashing. It was what he was used to. It ran off him like lick whiskey off a Peabody duck’s back.
Instead all he got was a Pass Go card.
“Hey, Dan,” Eric said. “Listen. Check into your room, ok? And take the day off. We’re doing some other things first. Tomorrow, bright and early at the Pyramid, ok?”
Dan Yumont was grateful. Most directors, even the ones who feared him, at least expressed disappointment or perturbation. This guy, this Eric Warberg, he just might be a cool cat.
Now the day spread out before Dan like a newspaper on a teenager’s bed.
Which was just what Dan was looking at after ringing off.
That and the teenager herself. He had slipped out, running into neither mother nor promised family dog, gotten a newspaper, some coffee and donuts, and returned to find his bedmate showered and looking like an orchard apple.
Now she was reading about the opening party last night and eating a donut as if it were manna. She was yellow as saffron, shiny as burnished metal, with a body that did things even in its stillness. Even clad in a silky Simpsons bathrobe.
Dan sat on the bed next to her.
“Hey, how come we didn’t go to this shindig last night? The Arcade is tops, man. They make the best hummus. How come we didn’t go rub elbows with these famous people, eh? Look, here’s Hope Davis—she’s pretty, isn’t she? And Suze Everingham, wow, she’s like so sexy. She’s naked in every movie, is she gonna be naked in this one, do you know? Do you get to be naked with her, that would make me a little jealous but I understand it’s just a job for you, still, Suze Everingham has a body like Jessica Simpson, you know? Oh, Ike Bana! I love Ike Bana! He’s like so muscleman handsome, you know? Like he could break you or take you, know what I mean? Ike Bana! I didn’t know he was gonna be in town. So how come we didn’t go last night?”
The “we” was like a small scalpel inserted into Dan’s eye socket in preparation for the lobotomy.
“We only met last night,” he said. He put a comforting hand on her hip. Then slid it away.
“Yeah, that’s true. So, how come you didn’t go to that Arcade thing? I mean, I am glad you didn’t because if you had you wouldn’t have been at the Buccaneer and wouldn’t be here now enjoying these tasty sweets with me, right?”
“That’s right,” Dan said and patted her shapely rump through her bathrobe.
“Jew meet Mama?” Dudu now asked.
“No, of course not. I thought this was taboo. I mean, it’s certainly taboo in the courts.” Dan smiled a whiskery smile.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I guess she might freak. But seeing as how you’re a movie star and all, it would probably make it ok. I mean the starfucker thing. I think she would trip to that, you know? I dunno. Did you see Bush?”
Dan assumed Bush was the dog. Named after the president? God.
“No, no Bush,” he said.
“He’s not named after, you know, W. Bush. He’s named after the group. Are you into Bush?”
He had to get out of there fast.
“Listen, um, Dudu, I gotta go check into my hotel room. I was supposed to last night of course. So, thank you—”
“Great!” she sprang up like a spark from an anvil, slopping a kiss across his cheek. “Take me two secs to get dressed.” She had yak breath.
When she closed the bathroom door Dan Yumont quietly left.
16.
Poet Camel Jeremy Eros lived in Midtown Memphis in a ramshackle, remodeled, shotgun house on Rembert Street, amid an overly profuse garden, wherein could be found daisies, rhododendrons, buttercups, zinnias, false asters, real asters, mushrooms, tomatoes and other veggies, and two healthy marijuana plants. There was a colorful, hand-lettered sign amid the profusion: WE’VE GOT TO GET BACK TO THE GARDEN.
Ever since he had moved back to Memphis in 2004 his house had become a haven for runaways, musicians, artists of every stripe, political outlaws and what passed for bohemian culture in Bush’s America. He was the kindly grandfather figure to many young neo-hippies, when he was not the lover to many young neo-hippie chicks who wanted an authentic “beatnik” experience.
Camel’s lifelong love, the willowy artist Allen, she of the boy-chest and drop-dead hips, she of the sculptures that defied both
gravity and grace, had died in 2002 after a protracted battle with cancer. It damn near broke Camel’s heart and, back in Memphis, he was both woeful and tranquil. He had danced with Death. He now saw the downhill of life and it pleased him, though without Allen he was also sad as a neutered dog.
It was a rainy morning that found Eric and Sandy on Camel’s front doorstep. They had called ahead but were unsure whether their message had gotten through. The answering machine said: “Commander Cody’s Air Force and Rehabilitation Union. Please drop your name and maybe someone will pick it up. Then again, there’s the other thing.”
Eric said, “Camel, Sandy and I are coming by this morning. Hope that’s ok.”
The machine cut him off between o and k.
Now, they stood under one umbrella, ringing the doorbell. Faintly, they could hear a vaguely familiar tune.
“What’s that?” Sandy said. “It sounds—”
“Camel calls it ‘Tubular Doorbells.’”
“Ah.”
Nothing happened.
They rang the tune again.
Still nothing.
They turned toward the street and looked around. Between them and the street was the overgrown front yard: Camel’s garden.
There was a rustle amid the cabbages. What looked like a gargantuan toadstool turned out to be Camel’s back in an ecru Macintosh bent to the task of plucking small worms from his Mary Jane plants.
“Camel,” Eric said into the drizzle.
The becoated figure turned.
“I’ll be damned. Craig Brewer!” Camel exclaimed.
“It’s Eric, Camel. Eric Warberg.”
“Of course you are,” Camel said.
Camel Eros looked much older than Eric was prepared for. The death of Allen had taken a great toll on him; his weathered hippie face looked like a map running in the rain. He still favored shoulder-length hair and a vest of many pockets and pants patched with symbols of peace and communion. His mustache hung loose and morose, dripping.
“Come in, come in,” Camel said now. “If I’d known you were coming—”
“We left a message on your machine,” Eric said.
“What machine?” Camel asked, seeming genuinely perplexed.
“Your answering—”