He’d been flirting with the bank teller, glancing down and then up to hold her gaze as she sat behind the partition opposite him, when she sat up straight her eyes flickered above the glass pane. Let me just check your account. She wore a lingering smile as she said it, she sounded playful as if they were sharing a secret. He smiled broadly back, toying with the idea of asking her out. Conversely, even pornstars wanted to date, though dates could be difficult when the conversation came round to what he did for a living. Some women thrived on the fact; others were repulsed, their faces wrinkling in horror, hands tightening around their drinks. Occasionally, they simply chose not to believe him. Once, a girl dragged him to the nearest video store; their dinner sat on the table next to hastily scattered twenty-dollar bills, scouring the adult section until she came across one of his films. She stood there clutching the case, glancing from the sleeve to him and then back again in utter disbelief. So like, she asked, are you famous? You’ve answered that yourself, he said, suddenly emptied of excitement or anticipation.
So, anyway, he started to say, nervously fingering the chain on the pen attached to the desk when he felt a shot of pain piercing his back, flaring up between his shoulder blades. Light spilled into his eyes and exited through his temples as the bridge of his nose crashed into the lip of the teller’s desk. He felt blood filling his mouth like rusty spit and caught the panic in the girl’s eyes as he started to slide toward the polished wooden floor.
Down, shouted the voice, everyone down, he smiled sluggishly, wanting to tell this stranger that he was down already, anyone could see that. The stranger stood over him, he was waving a handgun about and he had a red ski mask on that made him look like a paunchy Spiderman, his chins spilling out from under the cotton. We never did a porn superhero, he thought as he lay there feeling supine and warm, he liked the idea of wearing a cape. He had once played a criminal, a kidnapper whose victim had fallen for her captor. Just like in that Almodóvar film, he said to the director who regarded him so blankly that he wasn’t sure he’d heard him and then decided on reflection that he almost certainly had.
The stranger was saying something to the girl, he was yelling, waving the gun around, someone’s beeper was going off. The stranger looked at him, it was his beeper. He waved weakly, tried to form an apology for the interruption and then for a moment there was stillness between them, the stranger regarding him almost quizzically, his head cocked like a parakeet’s. Then he calmly looked away, levelled his gun at the girl and fired, the world fragmenting suddenly in a smoky red cloud. He heard screaming, the sound of people running, more gunshots, he felt warm blood on his face; he heard another beep, he had a message.
He felt the familiar warmth of Kristal’s lingering kiss, he felt the gooey imprint of gloss on his cheek, she whispered good luck before tracing a perfectly manicured, perfectly fake nail across his torso and then the director called out places, and then action. He saw their darting tongues at his dick like lizards tasting the condensation in the air; he felt the pulse emanating from his thighs, the room slowing down in time with its thick beat. A bluebottle making lazy zigzagging shapes in his peripheral vision. Then another silently hovering into view above Bunnie, moving in time with her bobbing head, shifting in space to stay an inch or so above her halo of peroxide hair. He leant forward to wave it away and she shot him a suspicious glance as his hand swept past her head. He tried sitting up, but Kristal pushed her hand flatly against his chest and laid her body against his, easing him back on to the bed. Bunnie, resolute, ran her tongue against him and squeezed his balls a little harder than she might have needed to. She feels slighted, he thought, she thinks I was trying to make her stop. There was no sensation, he was removed and remote, he studied the brass curves of the ornate lamp hanging overhead, the portrait of a woman he didn’t know on the wall. She was smiling keenly, a laugh at her lips as if the painting had been copied from a photograph; the sea was behind her, sand at her feet. He thought about her at the beach, waving into the lens, smiling broadly before she turned and threw herself into the water and towards the horizon, strong, assured strokes breaking the waves. He wondered about the people who hired out their homes to the adult industry, he wondered about the rates, who cleaned up after them, did they come home to the pungent scent of sex and sodomy? The lamp was crawling with flies, the painting obscured, an occasional oil rendered eye appearing through the throng. He felt that the gaze was an admonishing one.
You didn’t even know the girl at the bank, his agent said to him. People aren’t going to hire a guy that, you know. He mimicked a firing pistol with his thumb and index finger. The problem is up here, said his doctor, tapping his forehead with a pencil. He sat there on the examination table, naked apart from his socks and a disposable tunic that wouldn’t quite meet at the back. He swung his feet like a child; the leather top of the table was sticking to his bare legs. It’s trauma, said the doctor, you suffered a terrible trauma, but there was nothing you could have done. He would have killed that girl whether you were there or not. Your beeper going off only delayed the inevitable. You’re not to blame. He looked at his doctor and found he was slowly nodding.
The room had exploded after that first series of shots. The back of the stranger’s too tight leather jacket punctured by bullets; his torso convulsing with the violent rhetoric of the barking guns. He held on to the counter as his body shook, that’s where I hit my face he thought, running his tongue along the inside of his lip, it tasted salty, a tooth felt chipped. The dead weight of the stranger brought him slowly down. He bent at the middle like a folding chair and settled across him, his mask had ridden up a little and he could see that he had a moustache. He reached out and cradled his head, laying his hand along the cheek. Get back, someone said and then more urgently, get back, get back.
He sat home most nights, watching old friends and associates work their sticky magic on his TV set. There was Bunnie at her cheery best; legs taut, mouth in an everlasting O. His hand rummaged in his boxer shorts anticipating the twinge he had always felt in the company of his fellow actors. Sometimes he’d wake up, the cheerful Californian sun blazing across the valley, his bedroom lit in a soft orange light, his dick pushing against the cotton sheets, upright. But a piss would deflate it; a tentative caress would be enough to make it loll sadly to one side.
He drove around at nights, visiting the stores that stocked his films. He locked himself into a viewing booth once, the smell of cleaning fluid pinching at his nose, causing his eyes to water, and fed money into the slot and watched Dick Champ battle evil and rob graves as The Sexy Explorer. He was surprised and impressed by the production values, but not as much as he was by his insatiable desire, his eagerness to consume, his girth, the weight, the heart of him driven on, plunging in again and again.
He sat in the parking lot of the bank and watched the tellers leave for the night. He listened to the clicking of their heels, watched the muted colours of their pencil skirts diminishing with distance into the muggy twilight, their hair pinned up on their heads, loose strands brushing their shoulders. He thought about marrying one of them, but he’d tried dating again; receptionists, waitresses, lawyers, the outcome was always the same. Those who weren’t repulsed by his past (conversely, there were some dates far too eager to relive it, some wanted to watch his films with him and would ask him to pass comment on the parade of blow jobs and girls; he was a DVD extra before such things existed) eventually couldn’t reconcile themselves with it. When, ultimately, they got to the point of intimacy he couldn’t rouse himself – the last time he’d had penetrative sex was with a Texan girl who called herself Red on the set of a film called One Trick Pony – they blamed themselves for not being cast in the porn starlet mould. But ordinary is what I want he’d said once in the gloom between night and the oncoming morning, reaching out and then he caught the girl’s crumpled, trembling features in the dusky light and her wretchedness made him want to cry out. He held her until the day rose in a warm wave along his bac
k and across his shoulders.
He felt his life becoming smaller and smaller, at least the bluebottles have stopped coming, he said out loud and quite alone. In his hands he cradled an old, neo-antique shotgun he’d bought three days before. Guns made him nervous, even replicas that he’d handled on set. He found himself admiring its long, steely barrels, the raised nub that constituted the sight. He’d hold it up, train it along the valley below, trace the line of a car in the distance and imagine himself picking off pedestrians and drivers alike, watching cars careening out of control, the shattering glass and wrench of steel silent and displaced this far away as if none of it were his fault, that his actions had no consequence. Not that this would have the range, he said, admiring the stock and shape of the gun. He broke it open, pushed two cartridges into the twin burnished tubes, closed it again and enjoyed the mechanism, the deft click. Then he put the end in his mouth, placing the butt on the floor. I was seventeen when I first came out here, he thought, I’ll be thirty-three when I leave. He admired the barrels again; they were untiring, hard against his lips. There would be a spark, an ignition and then life and death in one fiery bloom. He tensed his back and closed his eyes and leant forward to depress the trigger to lead him from this world into the next. His hand scrabbled for the key to the exit and there was a moment in which bluebottles swirled and batted against the window and Death sat hunched across from him, his baleful gaze unmoving, the red of his eyes picked out in the black. Then the moment passed, the air was clear and he sat back, tears on his cheek, he looked along the length of the gun before realising with a sound that was caught somewhere between sobbing and laughter that he couldn’t reach the trigger.
Down in the valley a car skidded out of control, people panicked and ran; someone was shooting at the highway.
Chorus
The film was finished and Dick Champ spent when the driver finally woke to find night filling the small oblong window of his room. He rolled over and opened the drawer beside his bed, switching the lamp on into dull life as he did so. He found the phonebook and flicked through the thick swathe of cardboard-coloured pages. His fingers idly traced the numbers.
The last time he’d made an anonymous call, he’d convinced the woman at the other end of the phone that her husband had been downloading child pornography on to his computer.
No, she gasped and he’d heard her grip loosen on the receiver.
But he’s at work all day, she stammered.
They let him go, he replied, weeks ago. After they’d found the pictures on his hard drive. He paused significantly. He didn’t tell you? he asked.
But we have two girls, she said, her voice breaking, punctuated by tears.
I know, he said, that’s why I’m calling you. We’ve got him here, he said, then he paused and then he rang off, falling back on to the motel bed and laughed.
He had a theory, he had a number of theories, he’d tried a few out on his shrink before he’d finally left town, but the shrink would interrupt him (he called it interjecting) to make it clear that he didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. It wasn’t, he’d suggest, healthy. His theories, sometimes formulated in the car on the way to his appointments, were designed with his shrink in mind. He’d long got bored of the sessions, of being asked to reveal pivotal points about his childhood (the shrink would sit forward in his seat when he spoke about being a kid, once he laid a distracted hand on his shoulder), but he enjoyed visiting his therapist for other reasons. He’d begun to treat it as a series of mental exercises. Now those weekly visits were one of the few things he missed about his old life in New Jersey.
He was testing a theory again, one he really believed in. His therapist was making a steeple with his fingers. It was, he thought, the kind of thing the therapist might have seen in a film once and considered iconic, the therapist wasn’t averse to affectation. He wore glasses he didn’t need and always wore his tie loose, his top button casually opened at his throat. His therapist, he had concluded, was an insecure sap; he couldn’t fuck with him enough, but this theory he was expounding was a theory he believed.
Some people, he said, go through life like they’re driving bumper cars. You know what a bumper car is, he asked his therapist. His therapist nodded, he was using two fingers to work the knot loose on his tie.
Like at a carnival! the therapist said.
Right, he said, like at a carnival. Some people treat their lives like they’re driving new cars, others like they’re at the wheel of a hire car, for some it’s the bumper car, do you follow me? he asked, though he knew his therapist didn’t.
How often do people get a new car in their lifetime? he asked the therapist, I mean regular guys, not people like you and me. He smiled as he said it.
They pet that car, nurture it, clean it at weekends, cover the seats in plastic. Ever put plastic on your car seat? He didn’t wait for him to answer. Then they drive the car, he searched for a word, tentatively, give it a name, pat the dashboard, wish it good morning and good night, convince themselves that if they love it enough then other drivers will love and respect it too when it’s out there on the road or parked alone in a poorly lit street. As if loving something hard enough could save it from harm.
The therapist nodded, he was cleaning his glasses.
Why do you have those he asked, indicating the glasses.
I need them, said the therapist and held them up to the light before putting them back on.
Pure fucking theatre, he thought, giving his therapist a level gaze, but he said nothing.
The cars, your theory, said the therapist. It was quiet in the office, they were too high up to even hear the constant thrum of traffic below.
What do you drive? he asked.
I’m not sure that’s important, said the therapist. It hasn’t got a name though. He smiled thinly.
I bet it’s a BMW, he said to the therapist, I bet you tell people you drive a beamer and I bet it has got a fucking name. There was a pause, his therapist wrote something in his notebook.
Why don’t you drive yourself into the city? the therapist asked.
That’s my driver’s job, he said sullenly. He needs the work. Besides, I’m no good in the city. I react badly to other drivers. I like space when I’m behind the wheel, not the constant shuffling of cars idling from red light to red light, it makes me tense.
The therapist examined the back of his head intently as if he’d never seen him or it before.
And how does that manifest itself? the therapist asked.
Do you want to hear my theory or not? he replied tersely. It’s a good one.
He glanced back at him, their eyes met. The therapist nodded.
So, he continued, some people live their lives like it’s a new car they’re driving, they’re wary of every step, assume that the next corner will lead to an accident, they tread, and he paused significantly, carefully. Then the second group, the next group, he continued, life to them is like a hire car, a nick here, a bump there, but not too much, no one wants to lose their deposit, you know.
He looked at his therapist. You ever hire a car and get out of town? he asked him.
Of course, said the therapist, a few times.
Ever take a hire car, hit someone when you’re drunk, maybe kill them and to cover your tracks, set fire to it and run it off a cliff then report it stolen? he asked him.
No, said the therapist.
Me neither, he said.
But for some people, he continued, the hire car, that’s living. Taking a corner too fast, fucking in the back, not caring where you come on the upholstery, smoking at the wheel and dumping the ash down behind the seat. It’s not like you have to valet the thing. It’s the flashes of light that shine down into the darkness of your life, those moments of freedom. People relish that chance of freedom but only once they’ve realised they relinquished it somewhere. Do you think you’re free? he asked.
I’m not sure that’s important, said the therapist. Do you?
> My father’s death made me free, financially at least. Do you want to hear about people who drive bumper cars? They’re my favourite.
The therapist’s nod was almost imperceptible this time.
They go through life with the most choices, he said. Because they choose whether to hit the other cars or not, hell, they don’t even know when they’re going to get hit. They don’t live their lives by any recognisable design, a template, a blueprint, you know. They react to things around them, it’s instinctive, and do you know what the greatest thing about people in bumper cars is? he asked.
The therapist shrugged, conceding he did not.
Anyone can drive a bumper car, he said with relish, all it takes is a run of bad luck or the death of a child, a marriage that’s turned ugly, money problems. Once people tip that first domino and assume the worst is going to happen then it’s easy for them to stop caring about the other guy on the road. A fender bender here becomes a clipped wing mirror there, a drunken fatality, a three-car pile-up. It all starts with one step, one drink too many on the drive home, like any great journey. He grinned recklessly. Come on, he said, you don’t need to wear those fake fucking glasses and tighten up that tie.
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