‘Sonny, I’ve never heard you open up like that before.’
Sonny took a larger snort, then unclasped his cape, but did not remove it.
‘I’ve never needed to. I need to, now.’
He then removed the outer garment, which was very light, revealing a Jusé Goozman shirt of black carbon fiber, the finest of its genre.
‘Is democracy – true democracy – still the ideal, Sonny? Still the goal?’
‘Good memory!’ he sighed. ‘Yes. It is. I tell you, it is. Maybe.’
‘Then I have to say, tell me, tell me what’s on your… heart…’
‘The thoughts I have had! The decisions I have considered. The regrets I have felt… Oh yes, the regrets…’
‘Which we all… can experience.’
More revealed, and nearly more recognizable, Sonny stroked his new beard. ‘I have approached you incognito, Butterbugs. On my knees, essentially.’
‘Why so?’
Sonny looked as one who had wandered in a wilderness for some time. He, the greatest agent-ial power in Hollywood, on a lonely road, in search of what?
‘I abided for a time in egg ranch, cis-Reno, in stasis, in toto. Then I lit out for the Malheur country of Oregon Inferior. Past that, up unto Red Deer and the Athabaska marches, did I bend my steps. The dread Uranian gash of tarry extraction nearly killed me with its hellish maw. In terror I – well… fled. Yes, me, the ‘fearless’ Sonny of the Projecting Weapons! Away, to where the wind lives, and further, where no thought of what we do in any Industry has credence, let alone legitimacy. I could not tarry, but nevertheless dwelt, in hunched stillness, within Port Radium’s obfuscation.’
He then removed his shades, and the man was whole in Butterbugs’ eyes.
‘Sonny, you journeyed. Away! After the break with Parker, which you accomplished with such, how do I say it…’ The actor – the professional one – took another pre-brunch sip. ‘With such, everyday finesse.’
‘Oh, but Butterbugs, you are wrong!’
The super-agent unbuttoned his carbon shirt. The progressing sun caught flashes of shiny perspiration on his brow.
‘Yet! You are nothing if not correct! Yes! That’s it, exactly. I acted as if I did such things every hour of my professional life. I can assure you, I don’t, and never have!’
Butterbugs pointed an index finger in the air.
‘Except that once!’
Sonny laughed.
‘Oh yes, yes, Butterbugs. That once! But it was the ‘once’ that mattered most to me. I wasn’t sure… You see, I wasn’t at all sure…’
‘Of me?’
‘Yes indeed. And myself.’
‘Of you, I understand. You were into new territory. Of me, can you explain?’
‘I can. And I will. The thing is, with you, as an agent, I have to admit, I have never encountered anything – er – anyone like you before.’ He grew more solemn. ‘I did not know how to manage you.’
Shirt off, glass half empty (or half full), Sonny appeared to his host to be finally unwinding.
‘Is one actor so different?’ asked Butterbugs.
‘Oh yes. To those of us with inferences, to those of us with insight, into the Industry you now approach so newly and with so much innocence – yes, I use that word. You are indeed different. So very different. Credit you must give me.’
‘I do. But it is difficult, you know, being regarded like this.’
‘Get used to it, actor.’
Sonny untied his Pebble Peak Patent Leather Oxford Graduates.
‘And that’s what I want to do, is act. Act!’ the actor declared.
‘And you are.’
‘With, or without representation?’
‘An academic subject!’
‘Oh, but a valid one!’
‘I admit it. I wanted to capitalize on you. Cash-in on the whole potential. Like that bastard Daveson Leighsor.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘The pig-boy who headed Halliburton, and ended up with death on the spikes.’
Butterbugs felt ill for a moment, when he recalled the awful justice that was inflicted on this CEO when he encountered protesters and got too close to them – fortunately.
‘Oh, Sonny…’
‘Yes, I aspired. To higher glory. With you as the vehicle…’
He looked away in shame. Butterbugs could see his freed toes wiggle in his noir Fantez socks.
‘There is nothing that remains. Of the old days.’ Butterbugs had never made such a consummate statement to Sonny before.
‘No? Are good names restored, but brave new standards thus set?’
En plein air now, the toes stopped wiggling, then marshaled their forces to obey a command to stand. Sonny’s gaze, from the control tower of his full height, could not but strike Butterbugs as symbolic.
‘Sonny, do not make me sound dictatorial just because of my independence. Isn’t that how you look (down) upon me now? A rebel or a protégé?’
‘Butterbugs, really, can you forgive?’
Without warning, Sonny’s jet-black lamé trousers fell to the ground.
‘There is nothing that I am concerned with, that you have to…’
‘If I weep, it is not out of self-pity. It is because I failed to create a skill, a skill for a new…’
‘Such a disdain –’
‘I seek purity!’ the agent replied, with the animation of a new passion. ‘A purity in your eyes. I shed what layers might hide any guile. Practically-naked do I wish to re-enter your world, and I pray that you do not think I have gone too far.’
Butterbugs was speechless.
Sonny continued.
‘Or not nearly far enough?’
Then he slid out of his Antibes-cut boxers and got on his knees, bony caps set upon the tiles like a claw-footed settee’s bottom glass balls. He clasped his hands, looking for all the world like an obscure saint pictured in a chapel icon from his native Bolivia. Oath of poverty, aspiring of humility. The image was unconventionally arresting, however. No Franciscan haloes.
And Sonny had an erection.
Butterbugs flushed.
‘Sonny! I be not gay!’
Better for an actor to choose prudish propriety if his erstwhile agent ever engages in experimental thiertre.
‘Relax, kid. Neither am I. As you so rightly know. My dick goes wood whenever it sees the sun. All my g.f.s in H-wood know it. I thought you would have realized that by now. But I think I’ve made my point.’
‘I think you have,’ agreed Butterbugs. There was something he could say about Pinocchio, but…
‘Fine! Now, how about a bathrobe, or a wrap, or a straightjacket or something?’
‘But wait! Butterbugs, do you have a shaving kit handy? I feel not yet naked behind this garish beard. All barriers must be shed.’
Butterbugs wondered if all pubic hair came under ‘barriers’ in Sonny’s classification system.
‘Uh, I think we’ve established that you have indeed proved your point.’
There was the agent – in John the Baptist pose, waiting for the saber.
Butterbugs was quite agreeably transfixed, as he should have been, as audiences had been, especially when they’d let Cragston Millflup absolutely electrify them when playing the role of the Baptist in the nude, in the legendary all-jugendstil production of Nurdlinger’s ‘Er Reserveé d’Jokanaan’ one night only, in Breslau, 1896. (Zazaramba, of course, played Salome, sans veils of any kind…)
Then Sonny bellowed out a belly laugh – the laugh of restoration. Achieved through (experimental) theatrics, enabled by an understanding audience.
Both were relieved when Sonny reclined in a prop toga, snatched as a souvenir by Butterbugs from the ‘At Last’ set (certainly Bronston wouldn’t scrimp on old costumes for the sequel…), and embraced the life he’d always lived, once again.
Now his guest had become sort of a Bacchus, with beard and tousled hair, holding up his glass thimble for the slanting sun’s rays to catch what gr
ape remained in it.
‘My little show is over, Butterbugs. I glance at my costume there, strewn before me! I couldn’t don those duds again, friend. They were the clothes of my exile. Burn them!’
‘Come, Sonny, let us be bold. Let us get a little tipsy. In this – this day. In the sunshine.’
‘To forget?’
‘To move forward. Into the light.’
‘You mean it? To move past…’
‘Anything that might have smacked of distemper – or, I mean, discord. See? I’m a bit potted myself.’
‘So shall I be, citizen!’
It was a plane of peace, of reflection – but still, and foremost – peace, that they occupied.
In time, a lap-dissolve…
‘See! Look, up, over and away! See, Sonny – the beginnings of the sunset! Isn’t it remarkable? Now comes our time. We of the picture shows, the shows of the eve! The waiting overtures, the expectant audience, the hanging drapes, soon to rise! Within these abodes are our roles unmasked, from our privacy, to the public. Oh, look! On the screen! A picture sheens!’
‘Glowing, and flowing, and, and…’
‘And, lighting the way!’
In suspension they sat and regarded the sky, and by the time the twilight had given way to deep dusk, even here, off in the hills, faint, upthrust beams of sky-flying klieg-light signaled another premiere somewhere down on the plains. And those were their banners, to hail under, and to believe in.
They awoke, sprawled on the tiles, entwined in bottle and cork and ragged garments thus impinged upon. Powdery dawn, with headaches for a time. Then, with bathing and Brumwell’s medicated coffees, they were ready to talk turkey within a new day’s unlimited possibilities.
Purged of his anxieties, Sonny was effulgent in his dexterity, moving past last night’s emotional reconnection to the Butterbugs reality with Sonny-like reliability in renaissance. To him, the whole ordeal had been a loyalty test. His abandonment, the journey, the wretchedness, the self-examination, and subsequent trial. His return, the gathering of courage, and then, exposition and explanation. It had worked.
In their conference, Sonny advocated self-sufficiency, but through informative understanding, leading to cooperation. Yes, it was tough to abolish certain sensitivities which were introverted and harmful, but that was what he was there for. Was that not a simple enough concept, and one indicative of substance?’
‘I agree, Sonny.’
‘I always have to blow town after one of my slaughters,’ the agent added. ‘Sorry pal, but that’s my style. One of my quirks. I’ll try to change.’
‘Not just try, but will.’
‘Therefore and thereupon, I will, sir!’
Butterbugs welcomed Sonny’s easy banter, returned. The self-righteous strip-act had been laying it on a bit thick, but it was full of heart, and he knew Sonny had gone to the very edge of his self-esteem to pull it off.
‘Hail, true, sincere and repentant lord!’
‘I will be neither your valet nor your God, Butterbugs. If that be so, you may seek other representation.’
‘But I believe you, sir!’ To Butterbugs, Sonny’s integrity was indeed restored and would remain intact for the duration. ‘Till all of time is consumed!’
‘Will you, then, return to my stable, Butterbugs?’
‘I have never left, Sonny.’
‘You know what I mean. Can we once again take up the glorious path that was so crudely interrupted?’
‘Most certainly. On three conditions.’
‘Name them! I can imagine that one of them is that you don’t want me to do strip-tease no more.’
‘1) That all my subsequent contractual deals be approved by the Merrymart Office.’
‘Absolutely! Merrymart would not have gotten off the ground without my initial support. Did you, in point of fact, know that?’
‘2) That you don’t refer to your agency as a ‘stable’.
‘Done!’
‘3) That you don’t refer to me as a… ‘stud’.’
‘Even more done! History has been deconstructed, revised, and reformatted.’
‘I am content.’
38.
The Seminal Moment
It was now that the truth came out about Butterbugs.
He was hot. He was exceptional. He just might be a phenomenon.
How it specifically happened was like this…
Word was getting around. His pictures were getting wide release. If that wasn’t enough, the media were finally getting off their sorry asses and paying a bit more attention to actors rather than poseurs, such as Traysha McKerriock McKarktok, Nini Fairsa, and Drepson Mundrun. The particular relationship that gloss-print and rough-print had with these and many other ‘celebrities’ and their accompanying Peyton Place-gewgaws, were all the tabloid rage, hogging choice checkout-line real estate, from Vons to Burkmart to Chegley Stores, and all the way back again. All across the nation, and scattered afield to its satellites.
However, the day when Butterbugs’ portrait hit the right side of the cover of ‘National Enquirer’, a bit more to the center of ‘Almost Midnight’ and an over-the-shoulder Harry Benson shot, taking up the whole ‘Vanity Fair’ fascia simultaneously, it was a red-letter day for Hollywood. Traysha/Nini/Drepson and their ilk were rudely but correctly pre-empted. The dumbing-down trend had run unabated for so long now, that few in the disposable media industry even remembered who Millis Kerritonay was, let alone Rod Steiger. As quiz show contestants, they would be ‘dam-site disgraces’, as the viral expression went.
But, was this a new awareness coming?
Well, someone up in the editorial chambers of Guck Media decided to actually see ‘I, Doughboy’ (Kemmendine) ‘At Last, Hail!’ (Bronston). Plus, ‘Moncka of the Aldridges’ (Paramount), Butterbugs’ latest picture, all on a triple bill at the Tower on Broadway. This someone emerged from the Tower at 3:00AM, and, upon the venerable Tyl-a-Mats at the entrance, duly splayed himself in flagrante, as a result of an inner ecstasy, so as to ascertain whether he really was still on Planet Earth. Electrified, galvanized, electroplated, this editor had seen something new under the sun, and it had sent him into the upper reaches of somewhere magnificent.
But – how to proclaim it? Who would understand? How could the electroluminescence, which he had seen in such a wondrous mise-en-scène parade this eve, be communicated to the public? The public must know. Immediately.
‘Do you need a hand, Señor?’ asked a laborer from the Broadway market down the road, just off his shift. The man on the mat had a look of righteousness in his eyes, as if he were an idler at a station of the Cross, and the laborer crossed himself and offered to do what he could, despite his weariness from stacking boxes for the past twelve hours.
‘Epiphany!’ whispered the editor, eyes cast up towards heaven, in the painterly style of Zurbaran.
Under these garish lights, the Exhausted raised the Transformed, and once they saw eye to eye, there were no further words between them. All the rescued one could do was to stretch out his hand expansively and point. To: framed in quilted stainless-steel lobby card cases, mounted on the public wall – for all to see – graphic upon red background, in ready recognition of the photoplay he represented, Butterbugs’ visage boldly spoke, without words, of the effusiveness within.
The power of the poster needs no further elucidation.
Both laborer and editor drew nigh to the portrait, and gazed long and hard at it. The communicative energies broadcast from the poster created a fugal experience for the onlookers, who were soon joined by many others, on the nocturnal street.
That same night, albeit earlier, over on Pampaste Drive, in a Case Study house with ultra views of the lighted delights on the endless plains below, a party was in session, enveloped in all-cool turquoise, splish-splashed from the centrally-located pool. No one swam tonight, but the glow emanated upwards, bathing the faces of the fascinated as they listened to a speaker of note.
He was Mario Mus
nado, contributor to ‘Our Daily Star’ and scriptwriter of John Sturges’ ‘In Enemy Communicado’ (UA, 1997), as well as Anthony Mann’s important ‘The Antidisestablishmentarianism of Jarrison Flabgarst’ (Columbia, 1998), and many other hits.
‘I tell you, consider the time and tide in which we live! What are we to think of these days?’
His profile, set against the deep brown-and-black sky of sodium-gridded LA away down there somewhere, conveyed the sort of longing in his audience’s hearts that bespoke, ‘This is the way pictures should be again; nobility, truth, and authority are facets worthy of motion picture drama!’
It was not the man himself who inspired thoughts such as these so much as the words he brought forth, and their tone.
‘These days! And nights! Up here, above the land that reaches out below, down where we make our daily bread – but from whence we retreat, sometimes out of despair. Why? What are we doing out here, anyway? Sometimes – daily even, I wonder these things. Do you not? If not, why not?’
‘We do, Mario’, said Starla, a script girl. ‘But we must do what the powers that be wish.’
‘Oh yes, and yes, and more, yes again! Thus, my question: is this what we want to see our Industry unfold as: a purveyor of husks without filling?’
‘This is the way it is, Musnado,’ said Chirves Ron Jender, the hardboiled scriptor. ‘So it has always been. So it will always be. Probably.’
‘I’ve not spent this long in this film town to simply leave it at that, Jender – I mean, Chirves. It is only my dissatisfaction. My daily dose.’
‘Over how things could be, or what they should be?’ asked Harry Flish, a young, idealistic assistant film cutter.
‘Oh yes, my boy. That’s it: what it all could be! Not should. That’s too easy an equation. ‘Should’ means mere desire. ‘Could’ means the possible. I know everyone here tonight thinks as I do. We’ve made pictures together. Some of you are old colleagues. Some are newly-arrived. But I think we have all seen elements of greatness, be they ever so small, as part and parcel of what we have been involved with. And we have strived – striven, we have aspired, and we have labored, to see our visions realized. And our disappointment! It’s everywhere. The failure of the gathered achievement! The thoughts of what could be, if only – Oh, if only… How, then, do we persist? Do we have the stamina?’
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