Leading Man

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Leading Man Page 2

by Benjamin Svetkey


  I thought about striking up a conversation with the brunette I’d been eyeing but a curly-haired guy in his twenties sat down next to her and they promptly began making out. I decided to return to my room. As soon as I got back I crawled into bed and was just about to switch off the light when a revelation hit me: the knocking occurred only in the dark. Whoever or whatever it was that had been banging on my door—a ghost, a prankster, a drunken hotel guest—it never happened when the lights were on. I tested my theory by switching off the bedside lamp. Sure enough, within minutes, the rapping resumed. When I turned the light back on, it stopped. I began to formulate a plan.

  I put the bathrobe on again and headed back to the lobby. I borrowed a flashlight from Nhean—he didn’t seem surprised to see me—and returned to my room. I turned off the light and waited in the dark. When the rapping started, I turned on the flashlight. Just as I’d hoped, it wasn’t bright enough to chase away whatever was making the noise. I listened for a while, noticing how the rapping got louder and louder. I tried to follow the sound to its source. It was definitely coming from near the door, but, weirdly, from my side of it. And from above. I slowly raised the beam of light up the wall to the ceiling, until I saw … a small spotted lizard poking out from behind a light fixture. I stared at it for a few seconds. It stared back at me. Then it opened its mouth. Out came three sharp gecko barks that sounded exactly like someone knocking on a door.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

  “Knock, knock, knock,” the gecko repeated.

  I rushed back to the hotel lobby one more time, excited to tell Nhean about my discovery. Also, I needed someone to come to my room to remove the lizard. “It is considered good luck!” Nhean explained after he heard the story. “It is a good sign to find one in your room!”

  “Good luck?” I asked.

  “Also, they eat the mosquitoes,” Nhean said.

  “What about the luck?” I asked.

  “We call them Chhin Chhos,” Nhean explained. “If you listen to what it is saying, you will have good luck. It is trying to tell you something, monsieur. But you must listen.”

  “Oh really,” I said, a little sarcastically. I was starting to suspect that Nhean was pulling my leg. “And what would a lizard be telling me by making knocking noises at one a.m.?” It was a rhetorical question, but Nhean answered it anyway.

  “I don’t know, monsieur. Maybe it is saying, ‘Wake up!’ ”

  The next morning, DeeDee was shooting a scene in which she’d row a small canoe around a moat protecting the temple. In point of fact, there actually were ancient trenches surrounding the shrine, but most had been bone-dry for centuries. Thanks to Hollywood magic—a fleet of water-pumping trucks—it took only a couple of days to get them filled up again.

  Amazingly, it was even hotter on day two of my set visit, and Katherine the publicist looked even more miserable. “I could be in Prague right now,” she complained, fanning herself with her safari hat. “I could be working on a Johnny Depp movie!” Remarkably, she didn’t seem to have any memory of our conversation in the Elephant Bar the night before.

  To help people deal with the heat, production assistants handed out bandannas that had been soaking in tubs of ice water, which the film crew tied around their foreheads like little air-conditioning units. It made the set resemble a Bruce Springsteen look-alike convention, but I joined in and put one on, too. Even DeeDee seemed to be melting in the heat. When she climbed out of the canoe after she finished filming her rowing scene, I spotted a few dewy drops of perspiration rolling down her neck toward her cleavage. The actress whispered some words to her director, then, surprisingly, headed straight for me. More celebrity interview convention: stars don’t directly approach reporters on a set. If they want to talk to one, they send a publicist or some other underling to beckon him. But this star took matters into her own hands. “I’m almost ready for our interview,” she said as she wrapped a chilled bandanna around her brow. “Why don’t you meet me in my trailer in about twenty minutes? It’s air-conditioned. It’ll be more comfortable.”

  The air was cooler in the trailer, that much was true, but it was hardly more comfortable. On the contrary, I’d never perspired so much in my life. When I arrived at DeeDee’s Star Waggon twenty minutes later, as requested, the actress opened the door wearing nothing but a sheer, soaking-wet bedsheet. “Just stepped out of the shower,” she explained. “Hope you don’t mind.” She sat down on a sofa inside the trailer and crossed her legs, the soaked sheet falling open to reveal a stretch of upper thigh. Then she smiled and offered to answer any question I cared to ask, once I regained the power of speech.

  There were three possibilities for what was going on here. One, the star was trying to seduce me. I thought this highly unlikely. After all, I was a lowly reporter, one or two notches above grip in the social hierarchy of a movie set. Two, the actress was cynically attempting to manipulate a member of the press by using her body as a distraction and diversion. I thought this a distinct possibility. Or three, DeeDee was simply a free spirit who didn’t care that the air-conditioning in her trailer was making her nipples stand out under the translucent bedsheet like No. 2 pencil erasers. That was plausible, too.

  I did the best interview I could under the circumstances. But it took all my concentration just to maintain eye contact, let alone remember my questions. I asked the star about her latest tattoo (“My body is my home—I like to decorate it,” she answered). I asked about her second split from her first husband (“It’s true what they say,” she said, “divorce is more wonderful the second time around”). At one point, I noticed a shark tooth pendant on a thin gold chain around her neck, so I asked about that. “This,” she said, “is my good luck charm. I never take it off. I feel nude without it.” She thrust out her chest to offer a closer look, all but smothering my face in her décolletage. “Don’t you think it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” she purred. I tried to answer, but all that came out of my mouth was a plaintive squeak.

  Later in the interview, though, after my breathing returned to normal, something even more surprising happened. I found myself fixated on parts of DeeDee’s body that weren’t erogenous zones. Oddly, I found myself staring at her arms. They were, I couldn’t help but notice, veiny. You sometimes see it with weight lifters and bodybuilders—low body fat and excessive working out make the veins expand to pump more oxygen to the extremities. DeeDee had obviously been overexercising. She had blood vessels as thick as Twizzlers bulging from her elbows to her wrists. Smaller capillaries made unsightly blue spiderwebs on her biceps. Frankly, it was a real turnoff. Also, what was up with that birthmark on her hip that I could almost see peeking through the wet bedsheet? Or was that another tattoo? Either way, I found it strangely repulsive. How come I hadn’t noticed any of these things before? Okay, I knew how come, but now that I had noticed I couldn’t stop looking.

  Yes, that’s right, I was alone in a trailer with a beautiful, nearly naked movie star. I was being shown skin not meant for mortal eyes. I was living the fantasy of a million male moviegoers. And what did I focus on? The same thing I always focused on whenever I found myself attracted to a woman—her flaws. Her big, veiny, deal-breaking flaws. “What the hell is wrong with me?” I wondered as I stepped out of DeeDee’s trailer an hour later, gasping for air and soaked in sweat.

  2

  I wasn’t born an intimacy-phobic, fame-obsessed a-hole. Nobody ever is. It requires a powerful transformative event to do that sort of damage to a man’s psyche. In this case, the story begins with a lifelong love affair with a superhero.

  I adored Johnny Mars from the moment I laid eyes on him. Of all the eighties action stars of my youth, he was the one I idolized most. I would have given anything to be him, or just a little bit more like him. Sardonic and suave. Dashingly ruthless. A smooth maneuver around every danger, a clever comeback for every situation. Who could forget his classic line in Give Me Death, delivered in his trademark growl, just b
efore his famous FBI agent character, Jack Montana, blows away the bad guy on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (“Glory, glory, hallelujah, douchebag!”). Or that scene in Live Free or Kill, when Montana pushes an assassin out of the landing-gear hatch of Air Force One (“Have a nice flight, dickweed!”). I couldn’t forget them, but then I was still a twelve-year-old boy long after I grew up.

  And then Johnny Mars stole my girlfriend.

  If this book were a movie, right about now everything would get all wavy as we dissolved to a flashback of New York City circa 1994. Dennis Franz is baring buttocks on NYPD Blue. Kurt Cobain is making flannel a fashion statement. Rudy Giuliani is cracking down on jaywalking during his first term as mayor. And I, a rookie reporter in my twenties, am heading for a newsstand near the subway entrance on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, just as I did every morning on the way to work. We are approaching the precise moment in time when my world shatters. The moment I learn that my girlfriend—my true love, the woman I planned to marry, the one who was supposedly spending the summer redefining the role of Anya in a production of The Cherry Orchard at the prestigious Concord Theater Festival up in Massachusetts—has left me for the movie star I worshipped throughout my childhood. And adulthood too.

  My first clue came from the New York Post. As you can imagine, it was subtle. MARS OVER THE MOON! announced a headline on Page Six, above a picture of the hulking actor with his arm around a woman who looked amazingly like my own beloved Samantha. According to the article, the forty-two-year-old superstar had fallen for my twenty-four-year-old girlfriend during rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard. Mars was always trying to prove that he was a real actor, capable of playing parts that didn’t involve battling parasailing terrorists over the Grand Canyon, so he had muscled his way into the part of Lopakhin in Concord’s production of the Chekhov classic. According to the Post, Samantha and Mars had been a “hot item” for several weeks, which would explain the recent lack of phone calls from Sammy. Still, I figured this must be a mistake. I bought a copy of the more reliable Daily News. There was an item in that paper too. Mars, it said, was “swooning” over his new “gal pal,” and was planning on moving her into his Upper West Side penthouse when the festival ended and the couple returned to New York the following week. Getting desperate, I purchased The New York Times. Even the Old Gray Lady was spreading the news. A profile of Mars in the Arts section included a reference to the fact that “Mr. Mars” had become “romantically involved” with one of the actresses at the festival, “a Ms. Samantha Kotter, originally from Westchester.”

  Suddenly, it seemed like the asphalt on Sixth Avenue had turned to rubber. My legs went wobbly and my heart started pounding, and there was something wrong with my stomach, too. I felt like I’d been whacked in the gut with a large carnival mallet.

  Samantha and I had been childhood sweethearts. We met in seventh grade when Sammy spotted me on the playground and introduced herself by whipping a snowball at my head. “Hey,” twelve-year-old Samantha said as she watched me brush the stinging ice from my eyes. “You’re standing on my snow.”

  “Your snow?” I replied, confused, mostly by the fact that a girl was talking to me.

  “I was going to build a snowman where you’re standing, but you’ve ruined the snow. You got your footprints all over.”

  “It’s not ruined,” I argued, stepping gingerly from the spot. “You can still make a snowman.”

  “Well then,” Samantha said, “you’d better help.”

  And so it began, our decades-long love affair. From then on, Samantha would have an above-the-title role in my life. She would become the first girl I took to the movies. The first to hold my hand. The first to let me kiss her. Every first there was to have, I had with her. Every second, third, and fourth, too.

  By our early twenties, we were living together in an L-shaped studio on the fourth floor of a rent-controlled apartment building on a cobblestone street in the West Village. It had a refrigerator that gave an electric shock whenever you touched its handle, and the walls would shake whenever a truck rumbled past the window, but I loved the place. In the morning we could hear birds chirping outside. At night, we could hear the cloppity-clop of police horses on the cobblestones—and also the screeches of transsexual hookers from the nearby Meatpacking District. A freshly minted journalism degree in hand, I had landed my first magazine job. Each day I would jump on the subway uptown to Fiftieth Street, and all but jog a couple of blocks to the glass tower where KNOW’s headquarters were located, on the top floor overlooking Times Square. As a new staff writer, the junior-most scribe, I had a small windowless office next to the men’s room. But it was my own office all the same, with my own name—Maxwell Lerner—stenciled on the door. When I first stepped inside and sat down behind my desk (my own desk!), I knew exactly how Melanie Griffith felt at the end of Working Girl.

  Samantha, meanwhile, was busy auditioning for acting roles. At twenty-four, she was a walking David Hamilton photograph, a fresh-faced poster child for natural beauty, with big brown doe eyes and a mane of silky brunette hair that dangled just above her waistline. She was also a gifted actress and singer. Still, at first the only work she could find was in a children’s theater in Murray Hill. Every night she would arrive back home with her face smeared in clown paint. I would huddle with her over the bathroom sink and gently remove her makeup. Sometimes I’d make jokes about the rubber clown nose.

  “Maybe you could leave this on tonight,” I teased, arching an eyebrow.

  “Acting is so glamorous.” Samantha ignored me, staring dejectedly at her reflection in the mirror. “My next part will probably be a dancing cupcake.”

  “You’d make an incredibly sexy cupcake,” I said, nuzzling her neck, getting clown paint all over my chin.

  “You don’t get famous by playing cupcakes.” Samantha sighed, examining her teeth in the mirror.

  Then it happened: Samantha got her big break in The Cherry Orchard. And she headed up to Concord for the summer, where she finally got famous, although not exactly for her acting. I couldn’t believe how ironic it all was. When I first learned that Samantha would be sharing the stage with Johnny Mars at the festival, I couldn’t have been more thrilled, and made several unsubtle hints about wanting to meet the guy whose action figures I’d obsessively collected as a kid. Sammy was not as impressed. “I might as well be doing Shakespeare with Arnold Schwarzenegger,” she complained. “Or Molière with Sylvester Stallone.” By the end of the summer, Samantha had apparently had a change of heart. She was now Johnny Mars’s number one fan. And I hated his guts.

  I got a dollar’s change from the newsstand guy on Sixth Avenue and looked around for a pay phone. There was no answer when I called Sammy in Concord—just her normal, faithful-sounding voice on the answering machine—so I hung up and continued on to work. I spent the morning sitting at my desk staring at the wall, absorbing the hit I’d taken. During my lunch break, while poking at my uneaten sandwich in a deli, I told my coworker and soon-to-be best friend, Robin, what had happened. A lot of clever wags worked at KNOW, but Robin, the receptionist, was the wittiest of them all. She was a pretty Italian girl with soulful green eyes and long dark hair—sort of like Mona Lisa’s younger, lesbian sister—but she had all the sensitivity of an insult comic. “Wow, that’s rough,” she said. “How can you compete with Johnny Mars? He’s rich. He’s famous. He’s beloved by millions. He’s so handsome even I’d consider sleeping with him.” She paused for a second. “Are you going to eat that pickle?”

  Of course, Robin was right. I couldn’t compete with Johnny Mars—as his number one fan for years, I knew that better than anyone. But that’s not what hurt the most. What stung worse was the fact that I learned the details of my cuckolding from the newspapers. Losing a girlfriend to a celebrity wasn’t just humiliating—it was publicly humiliating. Everybody knew about it. That evening, when I returned home after work, even my landlady made a point of stopping me at the stairwell to giddily show me the item
on Page Six linking my former soul mate—her ex-tenant—with a movie star. People can’t help but be excited when somebody they’ve known in their everyday lives suddenly becomes famous, even if it’s just for dating someone famous. It’s the fairy tale, and you can’t help but root for fairy tales. To my landlady, hell, even to me, it made Samantha loom larger than life, lifted her into a VIP world full of stretch limos and film premieres and paparazzi flashbulbs. And I, the unfamous, heartbroken ex-boyfriend, had been left behind, my nose pressed up against the window just like everyone else’s.

  Samantha must have known that I had learned about her and Mars. Paparazzi shots of the two of them had even made the local TV news that night. There were several messages from Sam on the answering machine when I entered my apartment. “Are you there, Max? I really need to talk to you.” I listened to Sammy’s voice on the tape as I stared at a pair of her crumpled pantyhose at the bottom of our closet. “I’ll be back in New York in a couple of days,” she said, “but I really need to talk to you now. I’m so sorry. Please call me back, please.”

  I didn’t call her back. Instead, I unplugged the phone and turned off the answering machine. I had asked Robin not to tell anyone at the office, but the story was everywhere, and I was sure the other KNOW writers had already propped a cardboard Johnny Mars standup in my chair, and had plans for plenty more jokes designed to remind me that the woman I loved was now sleeping in a movie star’s bed. KNOW writers were clever that way. So for the next few days, I called in sick, stayed home, and tried to cheer myself up. I destroyed old photographs with a Magic Marker, drawing villainous mustaches and devil horns on Samantha’s face. When that didn’t work, I tried throwing out her stuff, the acting books and bottles of moisturizer and whatever clothing she hadn’t taken with her to Concord. But some things I just couldn’t part with, let alone deface. There was a photograph of Samantha at sixteen, a big, sweet grin on her face as she stood in a snowy patch of woods wearing the too-large fisherman’s sweater I had given her for Christmas. I put the cap back on the Magic Marker when I came to that picture. And there was that green ceramic turtle Samantha had made in a fourth-grade pottery class that she kept on our kitchen table—I couldn’t bring myself to destroy that, either. It was just two pinch pots stuck together with a dollop of clay for a head and a slot for saving coins on top, but I really liked that turtle.

 

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