‘You don't,’ said her Mum.
After that things went from bad to worse. There was widespread speculation in the media that what Bernard had said was right—that I wasn't in fact Australia's favourite Idol II: Encore! contestant. That I'd been picked by the producers cynically was how they all put it, just because of my looks. They said that they'd picked wrong, the producers, and now they were paying the price for it. Idol had discovered some great true Aussie talent once upon a time—the likes of Shannon Noll and Wes Carr—but had gotten cocky and cheap and tacky, taken a lousy turn. There were even rumours that the competition's outcome had really been decided based on the sponsorship dollars each contestant had attracted. Daguerreotype, my sponsor, was involved in some kind of ongoing legal trouble, and it was suggested on more than a few blogs that I was simply a publicity stunt gone awry. The show would probably never recover. There are certain things, baby, was what Marcia Hines said in an interview, that you still just can't fake.
Luckily, by the time it became clear that sales weren't going to pick up, no matter how many of whoever's emergency dollars were pumped into promo, I had already headed over to LA. Before all this exploded, my agent in Australia had managed to sign me with Abe Silverman—an agent well known for taking people with a profile in one field and getting them a profile in another. Australians seemed to go well at this. Abe had taken a few people with roles on Neighbours and Home & Away and got them roles on real TV shows overseas.
It felt good to get on the plane, to be going on an adventure again. But I was also sad about what was happening. I've thought about it a bit since, and I don't see how any of it was my fault, despite what they said on The Chaser about how even the most finely polished turd is no less a turd, and how a turd is a turd is a turd is a turd. How could it be my fault, though? Powderfinger were a bunch of bullies, but they were right—I wasn't a musician. I'd never claimed to be. I'd just stood where I was told to stand, sung what I was told to sing. And then there was the fact that I'd spent the whole entire time while the competition was going on totally cut off from the outside world. The studio audiences they'd brought in had been clapping when the big flashing green sign said APPLAUSE!, so what was I meant to think? How could I change anything if I didn't even get what was really going on?
‘Promo’ is an industry word for money you spend trying to get people to love something they don't even like, or to buy it at least.
Luckily, my contract said I didn't have to give the advance back.
I must've done the drive between Katoomba and Sydney about two million times in my life. Every time you notice new stuff. I remember a few years ago, this one time with Belle, after we'd both turned eighteen but before we'd finished school, when we went through the Light Horse Interchange. There's this weird sculpture there, on the freeway's median strip, which represents some horse guys who died in World War I. I didn't get how it was meant to be them. I'd always thought that it was an unfinished construction site.
‘No doofus,’ Belle had said. ‘It isn't.’
And the sky was so big then, on the road out past Penrith, through the flat empty parts which haven't got names—so big and so broad with clouds which were those Microsoft® Windows clouds, and the CD player was turned up loud with the White Stripes on repeat and the windows wound down, and Belle's car, this old Mazda, was whirring in top gear, and there was the look of her hair as the air whipped it round, brown hair with a purple streak always grown out by inches, and the blueness of sky so big and so broad, and that rumble of the long smooth M4 beneath us, ahead of us, behind us, so steady underneath that the only way I can think to say is it felt like we were free and on our way. I know how corny that sounds. But we were free to move and to listen to the radio, and were free in the way that whatever we wanted to do, it felt like there it was for us, and whatever we felt like having, there it was, right at the right time, whatever song, whatever friends at whatever pub, or whatever meal, or a beer or a joint or a day off with nothing to do, just at the right moment, never planned but always right, and it seemed like if this was really how life was, if this was our way, what could ever go wrong for us?
This time, Newtown-bound, I thought about how many times I'd done the drive with Belle under that same sky. And how long it had been since I last had. And I noticed how much I'd missed her. Or was looking forward to seeing her. Or, either way, how much had changed.
And I rolled down the rental car's window and noticed the taste of the air. How it was getting thicker.
Over in LA, me having won Idol II: Encore! in Australia didn't carry the clout I'd expected it would. Which was part of the reason why I was back out here, doing this show, traipsing through the bush. It wasn't Abe Silverman's fault. Abe had got me all the right auditions—TV and film stuff, mainly, because it seemed clear another music gig wasn't on the cards—but nothing was coming together. Once I asked Abe whether he thought my trouble getting work in LA was because of the scandal back home. He said was I kidding? He wished they had've heard of it!
After a while, I started to wish they had too. I was getting pretty down. Audition after audition. Polite smile after polite smile. People not remembering my name two seconds after I'd told them, let alone knowing it before we'd met. Being an aspiring actor is the toughest job in the world, it truly is. I began to seriously worry that it was all for nothing. That really, at the end of the day, not only did I not have a good voice, but I couldn't act either. I said this once to Abe, after a string of rough casting calls.
‘Act?’ he said. ‘Kid, who gives a shit? About three people in this town can act. You can act good enough. Believe me, your acting ain't the problem.’
Little did I know that Abe could say this because he knew from early on what the actual problem was, and he was protecting me from it, trying not shatter my confidence. I should've figured it, though, from his constant suggestions I grow a bit of a beard—which I literally can't—or start working out more, start ‘pumpin’ that iron’. Anyway, the day he finally let it slip was the day he figured he had it solved. I was in his office, sitting on his black leather couch.
‘They're doing this show to compete with Bear Grylls. You know Man vs. Wild?’
‘Never watched it,’ I said. ‘I've heard of it, though. The guy who eats bugs, right?’
‘The guy who eats bugs. Survival show. Only Grylls goes into the jungle or whatever alone. This one, this show, he doesn't go in alone. He always takes some unlikely person—a retarded kid, a celeb, whatever—and he goes into these places with them and makes them survive. It's a fish outta water thing. They go in, they learn about nature, they're put to the test, they eat a couple bugs, blah, blah, blah. He makes a man out of them.’
‘Jesus. I don't know about this, Abe.’
‘Kid, this is perfect for you. It pays well, it's syndicated. Plus it's got a feel-good angle—environmental conservationism and whatnot. And plus, you let HBO try and tell me you aren't butch enough for this thing or that after they see you out in the wild, gulping down a couple of bugs!’
He paused, registered his slip-up.
‘That I aren't what?’ I said.
He closed his eyes. Put his elbows on his desk and made a steeple out of his fingers.
‘Kid, I gotta come clean with you. Reason you aren't getting work. I've heard it too many times now for it to just be a coincidence. This is the reason people aren't giving you work, whether they say it—whether they know it—or not.’
I stared.
‘You're a good looking kid. Maybe too good looking is the thing. There were a few years there, early two-thousands, where with a kisser like yours? A seller's market. But things are different now. Everybody's less about Orlando Bloom and Jude Law. They want Jon Hamm. Jake Gyllenhaal with a five o'clock shadow. They want Gregory Peck reincarnate.’
‘I don't believe this.’
‘It ain't fair,’ Abe shook his head, like he'd just found out his kid had leukaemia or something. ‘It ain't one bit fair. But it's
fixable, kid. This is the benefit of honesty. If we're honest about what we are, then changing it ain't a problem. You with me?’
‘I guess so.’
‘You do this show, you'll be transformed before their very eyes. We'll have footage of you climbing, camping, burning. Hewing! Each ep, the guy jabs his finger into the guest star's chest and says, “I'm gonna make a man outta you”.’
‘Ha.’
‘And he does! He makes a man outta them. Or makes them mannish would be the expression, if they're a woman or whatever. It's incredibly dramatic. People love this kind of story, kid. A transformation. A coming of age.’
I sighed. I thought about how this seemed to be pretty much what people had complained about with Idol, but I had to believe things could change. That maybe it would be different since I was in America.
‘So who's playing the Bear Grylls character?’
‘Ah!’ he said, and the light returned to his eyes. Doogan. Mick Doogan, Australian bushman. He's your traditional man. He's your man's man. A tough guy with a big heart. But doesn't wear it on his sleeve. Salt of the earth. He's an Aussie, you're an Aussie. It's perfect. It's your homecoming.’
‘My homecoming?’
Abe rummaged through the papers on his desk, found an 8 x 10 and slid it across to me.
The guy was ridiculous. The head of a 300-year-old jackaroo pasted onto the body of a 23-year-old body builder. He looked parboiled, his skin was so pink. His teeth looked like bones in a desert.
‘He was Paul Hogan's personal trainer in the late eighties,’ Abe said by way of explanation. ‘He had a hit series of workout tapes. On VHS—antiquity to you. He won some big body-building titles around 2000. Not done much since. I've heard steroids, but he's clean now they say. Basically he's been cast just like you, but he's the real deal. He's a type. A character. Look at his face—look! This guy's been there.’
And then, of course, there was the fact that Hollywood is not a cheap town. My Idol money was dwindling, and there wasn't more coming after it.
‘Where's it filming?’
‘Just outside of, uh—now I just know I'm not gonna say this right,’ he squinted at his computer screen. ‘Fuck it—Katoomba?’
I rang Belle's doorbell and stared through the frosted glass panelling for shifts in shadow. This was my old house, the last place I'd lived before leaving. I rang the bell again. And then the shadows did move, and there she was, opening the door. Standing in the open door. My first thought was that she looked older, that she'd aged, her purple streak grown out completely. My second was that she looked better than I remembered. My third was that I should say hello.
‘Hi,’ I said.
We went out walking in Sydney Park. She'd said no, she didn't want me to come into the house. It must've been a mess or something. I didn't mind.
It was sunny and warm out, and the noise of traffic from the Princes Highway hummed around us. I told her about the last few months, about Abe's advice on doing the show, about the show itself. About Mick Doogan. About Rob, whose baby it was. About how it was the collaborative aspect of the process that I really enjoyed. About the changing taste of air on the drive down. And then we crossed through a patch of shade and I suggested we sit.
‘No. Enough,’ she said. ‘I'm not going to sit. What do you want?’
I squinted and thought.
‘I don't know,’ I said carefully. ‘I wanted to see you.’
‘See me?’
‘Yeah. See you. It's been ages.’
‘Yes, it has.’
‘It's good to see you.’
‘Never called me. Just left. After four years together.’
‘Belle, I—’
‘And even told that slime of an agent not to give me your details. Your fucking phone number, even.’
‘Yeah, but I—’
‘I got rid of it. But you must've figured that.’
The industrial chimneys, three of them. Just over there. Three smokeless old industrial chimneys, pointing up.
‘Did you hear me?’ she said. ‘I walked into that place by myself.’
I looked at my shoes.
‘Strangers,’ she said.
There was something very different about the way Belle spoke these days. Everything she said, she sounded like she'd been saying it for a long time, over and over, and had gotten sick of it.
‘And a woman outside the clinic door with a placard. Do you know what it said on it?’
‘Belle, I—’
‘You want to see me. Like that's somehow good enough. Like that's anything after everything that's happened. You don't—not even in any part of you—you don't think you should have thought that through? Not at all? Her placard said, GIVE UP ON FALSE IDOLS. I started laughing then and there. And now here you are again. As if there's what, a statute of limitations or something? Like you can just show up and punch me on the arm and say it's been ages?’
‘I don't know,’ I said. ‘I thought you might be happy. I thought it might've been long enough.’
‘Listen to your accent,’ she said, a look of disgust now fixed on her face.
‘What accent?’ I said
‘Frank, you've been in the States now for what, six months?’
‘I don't even know what accent you're talking about even!’
‘You just buy and buy and buy your own shit, don't you? Wholesale. You think you really can just show up here. You know what you're like? You're like a baby. Nothing in the world exists for you until you look at it. And the minute you stop looking, you think it stops existing. Well, it doesn't. We're real, Frank. All us other people out here. Hello—we're real.’
‘I miss you,’ I said.
‘You don't,’ she said. ‘You really don't. And you wouldn't know it if you did. You're a fake. A phoney. And I used to think of it as harmless. Jesus, I even thought it was cute at one point. But it isn't. You're a fake. And you're cruel. You want to see me, but the whole problem is that you can't. Not even now. Not even a foot away from me.’
‘I didn't expect this.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You wouldn't have.’
‘You're seeing someone else.’
‘Fuck off,’ she said. ‘You know what, Frank? I actually look forward to seeing this show you're doing. Even the pathetic, sleazy pretence of you becoming a man might be more interesting than the reality. Sorry—Jake.’
On the drive back to the mountains, I noticed how covering a big distance does something weird to your thoughts. I can't explain it. But the faster I went, the more everything fell away outside, and I was watching the movie of my thoughts instead of the movie of the road, and I watched how I thought about how Belle was right. How there was this weird thing about me, maybe this broken thing. It was like even though I'd just seen her, I hadn't. It was like even though it had gone so badly, it was easy enough to feel like it hadn't. Like I hadn't even seen her. Like it hadn't gone on. I'd just walked through a park alone. If I'd walked in a park at all.
The road and the road and the road.
And then it hit me in the lonesomeness of the rental car that maybe it was because nobody had been watching.
I was feeling strange through the whole blur of the next day, out on set, in the heat, as they shifted around the modular bits of bush to create new scenes. An assistant kept going around spritzing the bushes with a spray bottle from hair and make-up, so as to make them look less dry. A serious-looking young guy kept coming in with a rake and going over the footprints we left in the soil, which had been dyed red back in town and then trucked in. Doogan was shorter and musclier than in his picture, and less pink than orange on account of his make-up, which he wore a lot of. We were shooting the scenes all out of order, but it'd make sense in the end, Rob assured me, once all the best bits had been chosen and assembled.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘In the editing process.’
‘Yes.’
But it was still confusing to have time so mixed up. To look like I was feeling the right things whe
n we gazed out over the valley, looking all satisfied with our accomplishment, then abseiled down to the bottom, did the rock climb back up, and when I threw my fists in the air, screaming, ‘I'm the King of the World!’ and Doogan shook my hand. Or when we left the path, heading into the bush, then straight away found the path again. Or when Doogan tasted bits of dirt (props promised that the colourant was non-toxic) and said we were heading in the right direction. Or when he ate a witchetty grub and then, when I wouldn't eat one, said that survival out here in the bush was about a willingness to change your standards, to embrace what wasn't comfortable as if it were the best bloody thing you'd ever been offered—as if it were six-star Hollywood luxury—and then we did the scene again, identically, for close-up reaction shots of me looking disgusted.
When lunch was called, I saw Doogan preparing a protein shake at a fold-out table near the catering van. We hadn't really got to talk earlier in the day, before starting, and he was really professional and serious between takes, which I thought might be part of what was making me nervous. So I approached him, thinking I'd break the ice.
‘Hot, isn't it?’ I said.
‘Ah, not too bad,’ he said. He nodded at the protein powder. ‘Helps me give what they call a muscular performance. You good?’
‘Good, yeah. You okay with everything? What I'm doing?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You just need to relax a bit. We get it. The audience gets it all. You're doing well.’
‘Cool,’ I said. ‘Great. You too.’
There was a pause.
‘It's a great project,’ I said.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘Great for Australia. Tourism. Also the conservation angle I love.’
‘Totally.’
‘It's interesting,’ he said. ‘I've been reading up. The green thing really is the great moral problem of our time. But can a global situation give rise to a local action capable of modifying it? I dunno.’
‘Me neither,’ I said.
The Life You Choose and That Chose You Page 8