by Various
But this little-over-the-preposterous-LF-starter-home-ticket townhouse on a manmade lake in Mogera Hills hadn’t come without a price, one which he kept paying to this day.
He didn’t mean his inflated mortgage, either.
As the only kid with an actual British accent to be tapped for Perennial Studios Television’s breakout teen fantasy series very loosely based on Peter Pan, Nico had been kind of a precious pig on the set from the outset. Cast as the second-in-command of Peter Pan’s gang of Lost Boys and the best friend and confidant of the lead, life had begun to imitate art, as it often did in Hillywood. He had become the unofficial leader of his fellow second-tier costars. The dialogue coach had insured the other kids meant to portray nonspecific Commonwealth accents spent a lot of time listening to what he had to say, and they necessarily spent a great deal of time together.
The other Lost Boys had become his mates. There had been George and Jermaine Fokes, the black twins from Atlanta, Henry Traynor Jr., the youngest kid with the biggest laugh on set, nephew of a famous film editor, Mikey Lencher, the Waverly Hills boy from the Frosty Flakes commercials who had narrowly lost the lead role to Jim Cutlass and never let anybody forget it, and the quiet ‘new girl” Alica De La Pena who played Tiger Lily.
Jim, who played the titular role of Peter, had been one of these one-in-a-million Hillywood dream kids. He had come to LF a year before the casting call with his aspiring actress mother from somewhere unbelievable called Wheatfield, Indiana. Jim had only auditioned for the show at all because they were about to evicted from their Vista City flat and, Nico suspected, Ms. Cutlass was contemplating a move into adult films.
Jim had been naturally charming. Good looking, surfer-fit, with those big Elijah Wood blue eyes, clean skin, and floppy blonde bangs that the pervs who bought Tiger Beat for their nonexistent daughters sweated over.
Nico was really surprised at how long it had taken Barry Mezner to make a go for him.
How Barry Mezner had ever lasted as long as he had in Hillywood without getting busted was a mystery. Well, scratch that. It wasn’t really a mystery at all. Barry had friends, and in LF you could be Adolph Hitler and still pull in six and seven figure deals as long as you had friends.
Barry was a producer and the showrunner on Peter `N Wendy. He’d come to Perennial with the concept, mashed it with the teen romance approach and the soft focus look of the show that everybody emulated after the premiere, and he got top record producer Peter Hollis to wrangle his big discovery pop superstar Elton Ormond to record the theme song, which was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for fifteen weeks, in exchange for giving Hollis’ lovely daughter Cassidy the lead role of Wendy (a double coup on his part when it turned out the girl could actually act).
More importantly, he was a pedo. Maybe that was how he’d nailed the demographic appeal of the show so well. He knew firsthand what teen girls liked.
In the years since he’d left West Thurrock, Nico had met a lot of that type in show business. He knew the lingering, sweaty palm on the shoulder, the too-intent stare, the fervent, quiet tone of voice. He could practically spot a pedo, and Barry Mezner had rung his alarm from the get-go. He had one of those man-child faces. Overweight, middle aged, meticulously clean shaven when he should have grown a beard to cover his neck rolls, ridiculous pierced ear, and the kind of clothes a guy ten or fifteen years younger would wear, too tight in the moobs and belly.
Barry had worked his way through the cast the way a pedophile does, beginning with the extras who had no real voice and could be let go any time, and then, by the end of the first season’s production, moving onto the regulars because he simply couldn’t control himself.
Henry Traynor Jr. had been the first to bear the brunt of Barry’s sick attentions. He would drive Henry home from the set on nights when his editor father was working long hours on the latest Mossberg blockbuster, which was most nights, loudly telling everyone that since he and Henry Traynor Sr. were such old friends (they had worked together on the “70s hybrid martial arts western show Karate), it was no problem.
But it had been a problem for Henry. The kid had lost his big laugh not long after Barry had become his chauffeur. Nico had seen the spark go out in his big brown eyes.
But he hadn’t said anything. None of the adults had, so why would he? The show paid well all around. When Peter `N Wendy became a smash after the airing of its first season, Barry bought Nico a Porsche for his sixteenth birthday, slyly telling him it was a good starter car for a kid.
Success emboldened Barry. He moved on to the Fokes twins. With them, he told their parents he was grooming them for more adult parts, because with child actors, he said, you had to look always to the future. For them, he had in mind an action script he’d been developing for years, and could they make sure the brothers ate right and exercised a lot and kept fit? In the meantime, he’d take them around to gyms himself to meet with famous action stars like Anson Schwarzkopff, Paul-Marc Von Demme, and their trainers, and if the brothers or their parents voiced any concern about all the time they were spending with him, Barry just reminded them how hard it was for black kids to get work in this town, and how he was doing them all a favor.
The way he got to Mikey Lencher and Alicia De La Pena was, they had signed a contract stating they wouldn’t fraternize with their co-stars, but being young and full of hormones, and spending so much time together on set, that part of the agreement had naturally fallen by the wayside. Nico had found out much later that Barry threatened to replace them both on the show and sue their parents for breach of contract. What the two of them had had to do to keep all that from happening, Nico didn’t like to think about.
Nico had wanted to tell, but by that time, he had gotten into drugs. He’d pulled his groin in the flying harness during an FX shot on the pirate ship and the nurse had prescribed him Dilaudid, which he’d rapidly developed a taste for. She’d also seduced him upon subsequent visits, and gradually they’d begun doing cocaine together. With hindsight, Nico realized she had been part of Barry’s plan to bring him into the fold. Later, he’d seen her at one of his horrible parties, and the doctor too.
The Lost Boys and Tiger Lily all went to Barry’s parties. They were usually high in the hills, in just the kind of houses Pan had brought down tonight. Here, the cast and other underage hopefuls were basically made available to Barry’s friends, for any and every purpose they could conceive of.
And the thing about Barry’s friends was, as disgusting as Barry was, he was like the tip of a black iceberg. Barry’s various friends, doctors, lawyers, judges, politicians, famous entertainers, clergymen, and TV evangelists, they were the cold mass that hung beneath the dark surface, and Nico was thankful for the drug binges and the cocktails which made most of those parties a hazy nightmare half remembered. Sometimes the parties were huge affairs.
Sometimes, Barry delivered them to a single individual. On those times they took a helicopter, and were blindfolded like initiates on their way to some secret spy meeting.
Those were the worst. This sick fuck kept an accurate mockup of the quarterdeck of the Jolly Roger, the pirate ship from Peter `N Wendy. He’d play the show score over speakers and prance around in a fancy silver and gold mask and hizzoner wig, wearing a laced red Captain Hook coat with nothing underneath but white stockings and those buckled pilgrim shoes. They clopped on the boards like the Devil’s feet, or an upright jackass. He reeked of some awful cologne; he must have bathed in it like a teenager. Every place the bastard touched him would stink of it for days, no matter how much he scrubbed.
They were forced to wear their show costumes for this freak, and do whatever he commanded to him and to each other. These were the most nightmarish of Nico’s hazy memories of those days, the ones he had tried hardest to smoke, snort, and shoot away. He’d never told anyone about them. Not even Jimmy. But they lingered always, the memories of that hook hand, real, not rubber like the prop on the show, the marks he made with it on their bod
ies in places where it wouldn’t show. Sometimes Nico would dream of that garish figure advancing on him, plucking up one of the thick belaying pins from the ship rail and giggling that high, breathless girlish giggle as he saturated it in goopy lubricant from a sticky, hair-covered tube.
The first time the helicopter had lifted them from that hellish, unknown playground, Barry had warned them all not to tell, promised them he would kick them right out the chopper door if any one of them ever said anything.
After the third season finale, Barry took Nico aside and told him he wanted Nico to do him a favor. Like Mikey and Alicia, Jim and his pretty co-star Cassidy Hollis, who, as Wendy, graced the cover of very newsstand entertainment magazine, had begun to develop feelings for each other.
“I’m not sure if they’re fucking or not,” Barry had confided in him. ““I want you to make sure they are.”
Barry wanted Nico to slip them barbiturates, get them ‘in the mood’ and record it. He said their mutual friend, Captain Hook, wanted to meet them, and it could mean good things for Barry if he helped make it happen.
That was when Nico had realized to his misery that Barry’s friends had become his friends.
At nineteen, Nico had been the oldest kid on the show, and even with his Ralph Macchio boy looks, Barry had reminded him every day, jokingly of course, that he was getting too old.
But Jim and Cassidy, they were only fifteen.
As principals, they’d been shielded from Barry’s goings on, both by Barry’s assistants and by Nico himself. They were mostly uncorrupted. Cassidy had dreams of being a serious actress, but she was no shrill prima donna. And although Jim was constantly being worried over by his failed actress mother, who made more and more demands on his behalf, he was just a kid from Indiana, and really had no idea what Barry was putting them through, and certainly no expectation that he was in anybody’s sights.
By this time, Barry had carefully crafted Nico’s image as a party boy on the set. Jim would shake his head and grin whenever Nico took the Lost Boys out on the town, and he suspected Cassidy outright disliked him. She had been on the Hillywood scene just a little longer, and maybe she suspected what was going on. But Barry had worked his magic on her. She thought Nico was the bad influence.
But Jimmy, poor deluded rube that he was, thought of Nico as a good friend. His best friend, he told him one day over the craft table out of the blue.
“You’re my best friend out here, Tink,” he’d said.
It had been after a particularly stormy appearance by Jim’s mother on set. She had loudly decried the action figure deal Barry had negotiated with a toy company for her son’s likeness, and while Nico and Cassidy knew it was all his high-strung mother, most of the crew looked at Jim sideways and rolled their eyes during her meltdown. Her behavior reflected badly on him. Jaded as they all were, they thought she was his mouthpiece.
Nico didn’t remember what exactly had happened. Jim’s mother had been ushered off set with Barry, and Jim had gone to the craft table. One of the service people had slighted him somehow. Nico didn’t really remember how. The server had piled on the condiments on his sandwich or something, and when Jim had sat down and taken that first bitter bite, he’d noticed.
Instead of pitching a fit, he had put his hands to his eyes and sobbed quietly.
“Hey mate,” Nico had said. “Don’t worry about that hash slinger. I know it ain’t you.”
He’d handed over his own sandwich.
“You’re my best friend out here, Tink,” Jim had said.
Nico hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry.
“I told you. Stop calling me Tink.”
Jim Cutlass really was a boy scout. He didn’t know a thing about the subtext Barry was drizzling into the show. He had gotten the job at twelve. All he knew was that he was thrilled to be playing Peter Pan. He and Cassidy were the only two on the show that had actually read the book, besides Donald Renoir, the Shakespearian trained old queen who played Hook and loudly bitched about the banality of the role whenever possible.
When they did personal appearances, Jim was the only one to stay in character. He answered the littler fans’ questions like he was Peter Pan. This had annoyed some of the cast and crew, who thought Jim was overdoing it, but Nico had known it was for real. Jim liked being thought of as a hero by fans, and even though he’d become aware of the nature of all the female fan attention by the second season, it never really went to his head.
And that crazy wild crowing he did always brought the house down. He had brought that to Barry himself. It was something from the book, he said, a kind of battle cry Peter Pan did when he kicked Captain Hook’s arse. The TV critics called it the Johnny Weissmuller call of the new generation. It had even been sampled in rap songs.
Nico had done a lot of soul searching when Barry had come to him with the demand to bring Jim and Cassidy in to the real Captain Hook. Soul searching of course, meant drugs. He’d taken enough to overdose. He’d wanted badly to die rather than to do what Barry wanted.
They’d hushed up the incident to save the show from bad press, and Barry had visited him in the hospital with a fist of flowers.
When they’d been alone he’d said, “Don’t think your little limey ass is gonna get off the hook that easy. The offer still stands. You make it happen or you’re out.”
Out.
That should’ve sounded like paradise, but Barry’s out meant more than extricating himself from the slime he’d been wallowing in. It was baseball umpire out. It meant exposure. It meant he wouldn’t be protected anymore. He’d become Barry’s fall guy. He’d be thrown to the media, called the black sheep of the show, the Devil that had corrupted his poor fellows, kicked out of Hillywood. Burned.
It meant no more sex, not even the kind he wanted. It meant no more drugs. No more money. No more expensive gifts.
Maybe it meant more than that even. Maybe the ‘hook’ was getting his brake line cut and wrapping his Porsche around a pole, or taking that blindfolded dive out of the helicopter. Barry’s friends were like that.
Then Jim had come to see him. The only one from the cast who ever visited. He’d brought him a shredded old copy of Peter Pan.
“You get 50K an episode and all you bring me is a ratty old book? Thanks a lot, mate,” Nico had said jokingly.
“Well, you said you were always too busy to read it. I figured you’d have a little time now that you’re laid up.”
“Where’d you get this old thing? You spot it lyin’ on a bin on the way over?”
“Nah,” Jim had said, grinning easily. “That’s my own copy. It’s pretty old. My dad used to read it to me when I was a kid.”
Nico had stared, not sure of what to say.
“I can’t keep this, mate.”
“No, you can’t. It’s a loaner. I want it back. Tell you what, have it read by the time you come back to set. I’ll take it back then.”
“Cheers, mate.”
Nico had tried to read the damn thing, but it was kiddy pap. Or maybe it wasn’t, but his mind was too caught up with Barry and his friends and that awful Hook bastard to ever get anything worthwhile out of it. What room did he have in his life for make-believe?
So he’d decided to put something real into it.
The day before his release, he’d opened the back page and started to write. First he filled one side of the blank page after the last chapter, then the other side, then the inside back cover. He wrote it all out in a cramped little hand. His confession. Everything he had done for Barry. All the parties he’d roped the other kids into, the drugs. Everything but Captain Hook himself. That, he couldn’t bring himself to write about.
Then he’d vomited into the bin.
The morning he woke up, he was surprised to find Barry there seated at the foot of his bed.
“Rise ‘n shine, Slightly,” Barry had said, smiling.
The book had been nowhere to be seen.
Barry ne
ver mentioned it. He was just there to coach him on his first post-hospital press conference. Nico had listened to the man tell him what to say and what to steer clear of. It didn’t matter much. The media in attendance had all been paid to avoid the sensitive issues. All the while he had thought about the book.
In the end, Barry had told him to get dressed. That he’d be waiting downstairs.
The nurse didn’t know what he was talking about. There hadn’t been any book on his nightstand when she’d gotten there in the morning.
He’d wondered about it all through the brief press conference, smiling vapidly, cracking wise, blinking at the camera flashes.
And in the limo afterwards, Barry had said, “Great job, Slightly. See you on set Tuesday. Oh, and don’t forget that little thing we talked about.”
“Did you ever finish it?”
The voice came from above, pulling Nico from his memories like a thrashing trout from a river bottom.
There was Pan, crouched in the open skylight, dripping rainwater onto the kitchen tiles. It was Jim Cutlass under that mask, but somehow, when it was on, he really was Pan. Not Peter Pan either. Not the imp with the baby teeth from the book or the smiling, smoldering eyed hottie from Peter `N Wendy either.
Just Pan.
Nico was standing next to the bookshelf, a copy of Peter Pan in his hand.
“Why don’t you ever use the goddamned door?” Nico said, putting the book back on the shelf, picking up the remote and killing the Pet Shop Boys, who were now well into Paninaro. “Somebody’s gonna see you.”
Pan slid through and slammed the hatch shut behind him, descending lightly to the wet floor as Nico got the mop from between the refrigerator and the stove and began to soak up the water.
He pulled off his peaked cowl, and there was that same clean-skinned face, those same floppy blonde bangs, those same big blue eyes. Well, maybe the eyes weren’t the same. Not quite. But everything else about Jim Cutlass was the same as the first time they’d met, ten years ago.