The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  The medic looks up and down the scene, blows a weary raspberry through his lips, then strains up on his toes to squeeze the young man’s genitals for a pulse. As he stands there on the ladder, handful of testicles, fingers digging into the big veins at the base of the sack for any sign of a heartbeat, the firemen recoil in horror.

  The medic finally lets the balls drop and snaps at the spectators.

  “What the fuck is your problem? You, yeah, I’m talking to you,” he says to nobody in particular.

  “Are you supposed to be here?” someone asks.

  Jack Grinstead glares at the firemen one last time, then loads the girl into the back of an ambulance. His partner, Rick, wanders over, wiping his hands to indicate there’s no other injury on the scene. They switch places, Jack heading over to the car wreck to peer inside.

  “Daaaaamn. Is that really a Toronado?” he asks it.

  The speakers still pop and hiss, and the display indicates it’s trying to play song number “5” just one more time. Jack backs up and walks to the front of the car, the source of the spotlight on the dead boy. He reaches for a loose headlight and finds a pulse blinking in that instead. He trains it back on the firemen, fighting the urge to shout directions.

  “Jack! Come on!” Rick yells, and Jack runs to hop into the back of the ambulance with the girl. After closing the doors, he leans down to study her face, expecting her twitching eyelids to snap open and explain such a bizarre wreck. He reaches for a syringe, but then freezes.

  As they drive away from the scene, Jack is framed in the back window of the ambulance, scrubbing the back of his head with both hands as if he’s trying to shake loose an idea.

  Then he looks directly into the camera, which would have fucked everything up if they weren’t already so far away from the car with his crew.

  “Take off your fuck faces and put on your cop faces.”

  Six months before Larry would finally lose it on set and crack the eggs on a Head Breakfast, Larry was standing at the base of a tree at the intersection of Florida Street and Kentucky Road, trying to get his actors into a headspace they weren’t used to. The two men were playing the parts of police officers, “Bobby Garcia” and “Joe Stansberries” (one tall, one short), but they were having trouble finding the characters. Without the inevitable sex scene looming, Larry’s two moonlighters found themselves with a case of the giggles. They were bullshitting and barely suppressing their amusement as Larry tried to explain how in the next scene, Joe, the shorter cop, would be scanning the trunk of the wrecked car with his flashlight.

  “Then you’ll say, ‘What the hell? A bear chase him up there?’” Larry explained.

  Bobby, the big cop shrugged. He was “Bobby” in real life, too, and he was so big they called him “B.C.” sometimes, as in “Before Christ,” as in a fucking throwback to the caveman days. Bobby had five long hairs growing straight out of the head of his dick, a horrible detail Larry had discovered late in production and had since made it a point to have a fluffer hit it with the tweezers every time. Tonight, Larry was relieved those five hairs would not be an issue. Cheap and ugly as it was, this was a real movie they were shooting. He was using porn stars, but “No fucking this time!” Okay, they did have that one sex scene in the car, but it would have been way harder to fake it with a song like “Pounding” coming out of the speakers.

  But now it was the part of the movie with all the uniforms milling around, which meant no tattoos. Larry loved it. Disbelief could be suspended indefinitely with a little hint of authority and long sleeves in a movie. And this was all on Damon’s dime, though he didn’t know it. He didn’t even need a script. He was shooting this story from memory.

  Larry had been so patient about locations, and holy shit if it didn’t pay off with the perfect car wreck, a real car wreck, in the woods for them to frame in the distance. This is why a police scanner was a reasonable expense.

  Officer Stansberries leaned back to crack his neck, ready to start complaining. The crew would start calling Stansberries “Small Berries,” now, and Larry hoped it would stick for the rest of his life.

  “Okay, Small Berries, you’ll go, ‘Never try to fuck ‘em while they’re hibernating!’”

  They both scratched their heads at this. Then a real fireman walked up to scratch his head and mock them, and Larry realized his crash scene was quickly becoming a head-scratching pandemic.

  “Let’s try it again!” Larry shouted, and he rolled camera.

  “Did you see that faggot squeezing that kid’s shit?” B.C. asked his partner, probably in character.

  “He was looking for a pulse, dummy.”

  “Well, it was a hell of a crash. Apparently only that shitty Mötley Crüe drummer can drive with his cock.”

  “Goddammit, everyone keeps saying that,” Small Cop sighed. “Watch the video again. He wasn’t really driving the boat. All he did was honk the horn with it. That’s very easy to do actually…”

  “Okay, let me ask you this…” the Big Cop began, spinning his flashlight beam over his head, then finally tracing a lighthouse beacon back to the headlamp of the wreck.

  “Ask me what? Damn. Big ass car. What kind is that? A tornado?”

  “Tor-ah-nay-doe!” Larry hissed from behind a tree.

  “What are the chances of… that?” Big Cop asked, ignoring his questions.

  “The chances of what?”

  “Of this car getting flipped and smashed to shit but landing so that it puts one fucking headlight on that kid in the tree like he’s the spotlight dance on Soul Train.”

  “What are the chances of this being a Toronado?” someone else whispers.

  “Hold on,” the Small Cop mimed some math in the air between them. “36 to 1?”

  “You’ve been playing roulette again, haven’t you? And we just got paid! Oh, shit…”

  He stopped talking as his flashlight beam froze on the tree again. Larry crept up to get the shot of both cops leaning in to see the claw marks on the bark. The red and blue strobes of more arriving officers lit everything up a little brighter.

  But these cops were not extras. They were real, and they were responding to a complaint of suspicious lights in the woods. Oh, yeah, there was a real wreck, too. Larry got low and ready to use them in his scene as long as he could.

  “I wasn’t really gambling, man, so I found a roulette simulator, one of those Tomy Pocket Games. Those soothing, clicking little balls really help keep me off the riverboats.”

  “Why do you keep going to that casino?” the Big Cop sighed. “All that water and cigarette butts makes it smell like open ass.”

  “Closest legal gambling on Kentucky Road. Unless you wanna drive all the way to Florida Street. They get away with it by being on the water. So it’s technically…”

  “Atlantis?”

  “Hey, I’m up three hundred bucks.”

  The Small Cop mimed like he was writing a letter in midair.

  “‘Dear gambler, if you can’t look the ball in the eyes when it stops, it’s time to stop playing roulette…’”

  I looked some balls in the eyes, Larry thought, remembering the flashback.

  “Did you know that roulette means ‘little wheel’?” Big Cop asked him.

  “No shit? So, can you look at a ball when it stops?”

  “Not only can I look at a roulette ball when it stops, I’d happily watch its entire life leading up to that moment.”

  “Why?” the Small Cop asked, nodding at the parade of police exiting their cars like he has a good reason to be there in an ill-fitting uniform.

  “Because then you’d see the pattern, asshole.”

  “Bullshit. You’d see a ball being made in a factory. All shiny, happy to be alive, heading for the riverboat. Until some sorry son of a bitch like you bet his car payment on it.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s life on the wheel.”

  “Oh, ‘life on the wheel,’” he laughed, walking away from his partner. “And what does that mean?�
��

  “It means, spin it enough times and you’ll see that the ball favors one number over the other. It can’t help but do the same goddamn thing, every time. It’ll find that exact same slot, again and again.”

  Real police officers were running up now, looking all authoritative, and Larry captured it all.

  “Cut!” he finally yelled. He couldn’t believe how good porn stars could act. Maybe they all just needed the chance. He didn’t know where some of that casino shit was coming from, but it didn’t matter. He was gonna have a real movie to cut and print in no time. “Cut” and “Print,” Those were the secret words that a teenage Hitler used in Boys From Brazil to command his dogs to kill all three of his fathers and start making movies for real. They were secret words only his Dobermans knew. Larry walked up and scratched the trunks of the trees with his fingernails. His nails were strong from years of scratching himself like he was burying treasure.

  Larry had done location hunting for the stateside half of that flick.

  The police started shouting to clear out of the woods, and Larry gathered up his buddies hiding in the ambulance, taking the cigarette from the mouth of the one who resembled Larry the most. He was a paramedic now for real, and he’d let them film in his ambulance for peanuts. No, seriously, he loved peanuts. He’d probably do it for free. Larry got the idea when he first heard they had cameras back there, to make sure you didn’t do anything wrong.

  But this guy also owed Larry, big time. Someone owed someone from back in the day anyway. Larry smiled and turned up the radio to sing along with Dire Straits’ “Skateaway.” Somebody said something about a real ambulance pulling in, and they moved a little faster.

  The medic who wasn’t singing would be playing “Jack Grinstead,” a name that might have meant something to Larry, but who could remember that many stories? They piled their camera equipment next to the mannequin playing the part of their “girl,” not noticing the plastic sheen of her skin was looking an awful lot like real skin all the sudden, and Larry thought about his cops’ dialogue and how the roulette ball found the same slot again and again, no matter how many spins.

  In the back of the ambulance, Jack is still hovering over the face of the female victim, checking symptoms and talking to himself as he treats her injuries.

  “Systolic blood pressure ninety-nine. Injecting point one milligrams Vecuronium. Applying cricoid pressure, preparing to intubate...”

  Jack stops with the rubber squeeze bladder and mouthpiece in his hand. He stares down at her frowning. The girl is naked, except for her blue-jeans covering her uninjured leg. As he starts to work on her again, he seems to be getting increasingly upset. He checks her splints, then, after a moment, picks up one of her hands and checks the fingernails. The driver turns around.

  “What are you doing, Jack?” his partner asks, annoyed. “Just make sure she stays immobilized. You listening?”

  Nothing.

  “Hey, wasn’t it your turn to drive tonight, Jack?”

  Jack ignores him and pulls back a torn piece of her shirt and looks close. He lays his fingers across a large five-pointed bruise that marks the side of the girl’s stomach. There is a black and blue handprint rising on her skin. Jack’s hand fits inside the pattern perfectly.

  He’s seen this hand print many times. Everyone’s hands fit inside.

  Jack’s eyes are wide in horror as he realizes that something else must have happened to the girl after the accident. He knows from experience it’s a vulnerable time. Being naked by a fire. He mumbles something incoherently to himself as he continues to study her body. Rick turns up their radio on that Seattle shit he loves and loses interest in Jack completely. After looking nervously around the back of the ambulance, Jack seems to be regaining control.

  He makes a decision.

  He uses his own fingernails to clean the blood and skin from under her purple nail polish. Then he begins pulling her remaining leg out of her jeans. Rick stops making guitar noises long enough to screw his baseball cap around, and Jack freezes a moment. The cap has the Chicago Fire’s Dalmatian mascot on it, and its eyes stare accusingly. But Jack continues to clean her body nervously, periodically checking his watch and picking up his pace.

  Suddenly the ambulance jerks to a stop, and Jack almost falls over. Looking to the street over Rick’s shoulder, he’s relieved to see they’re stuck in traffic. Frustrated, Rick starts weaving through the tangle of cars, and Jack grabs a handrail to steady himself.

  “Hey, slow down, man.”

  “What? Wait, did you actually say, ‘slow down?’ You’re fired.”

  Jack crawls up behind the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah, man, slow down. You’re gonna roll this thing. Haven’t you ever played Grand Theft Auto on the Atari 2600? The physics of the fire truck brick and ambulance block are solid. The cop cube is jacked though.”

  Frustrated by the lack of response, Jack reaches past Rick to the small stereo cassette player duct-taped to the dash and turns it up. The song “Heartbreaker” by The Rolling Stones is starting. It’s better than Dire Straits anyway.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Rick is mad, thick finger in his face, and Jack remembers suddenly why they call him Big Rick. He’s a big bastard all right. Furry, too. Once when they were heading for the showers at the hospital, Jack saw him tuck his sunglasses into the hair on his chest like it was the collar of a shirt. And sometimes, on site, he lost patience with the crowds that gathered, even when it was law enforcement. Especially when it was law enforcement. Just last week, a ring of officers leaned in too close while they worked on a boy in blue who’d been clipped by a jack-knifing semi, and Rick finally flipped out. He put a meaty thumb on one badge and walked the guy back a step. Big Rick’s voice always sounded calm, though, even when he said things like, “Officer… Basch is it? Your last name sounds like the noise it makes when I punch your mother in the twat.” Officer Basch turned white, and then he muttered, “My mother is dead.”

  Without missing a beat, Big Rick smiled and explained, “I meant when she was alive.”

  It took Jack and a couple of brown-shirted sheriffs to break them up after that.

  “Don’t you like this song?” Jack asks him, fumbling to get better reception. His elbow hits the switch for the sirens and cuts them off.

  “Oh, shit. Sorry.”

  “Hey, they’re playing my song, let me turn this shit up...”

  Rick glowers and shoves his arm away, then switches the sirens back on. As he slams on the brakes to avoid a collision, Jack returns to the girl, satisfied that he’s bought himself some extra time. He yanks on her jeans, then stops.

  Jack studies her. She’s dark-skinned. Bruised and bloody but beautiful. Jack carefully puts her right foot into her pant-leg, struggling with a splint. He closes his eyes, ashamed and not sure why. He whispers in her ear something like he’s whispered it before.

  “Don’t worry. Nine more minutes and it never happened.”

  Sunrise is cracking the clouds, and the song “Deep Hit of Morning Sun” by Primal Scream kicks in. Mistaking it for the static between stations, or the even more common sunspot disruptions which have, in the past, broadcast live baseball games a full hour before they’ve even started, Rick smacks the dashboard as the ambulance’s siren starts to stutter and warble.

  Jack has heard this song before, too.

  Larry was explaining to his “Jack” and “Rick” that they needed to unload the girl in the emergency room dock. The beauty of using porn guys for a real movie (or porn guys turned paramedics turned unemployed) was that they were so used to aliases, you could give them a new character name and a couple days later there was a good chance they’d roll in with it as the vanity plate on their shitty car.

  Pornography always had a cheaper, more effective method of getting into a role (and covering your ass from disapproving family members). And don’t get Larry started on the Stanislavsky System. But more on that Catch-22 later.

  Larry told th
em both that Rick would frown when he saw a hand-shaped bruise on the girl’s bare stomach. Then Rick would glance up at Jack as an explanation tumbled out of him.

  “You’ll say something like, ‘Yeah, that happened when we were pulling her outta the car. Goddamn cops were too busy cracking jokes and getting in the way. I almost dropped her twice making sure they didn’t,’” Larry told them. “Make sense?”

  “Sure. One thing though…”

  “What’s that?”

  “We got a Pinocchio situation here, boss.”

  “What?”

  “When did this become a real girl?”

  Larry ripped the sheet off their patient.

  “Holy fuck.”

  It was a real girl all right. The girl from the crash. Jack started to panic. Rick started to tell them he thought she was part of their crew. Jack started to go for his throat, saying he knew this kind of shit was gonna happen. He didn’t want to lose his job. But he knew Larry would remind him how he got the job in the first place, and he quieted down. Larry told Jack what he would do.

  “You’re going to do what you’d normally do. You’re going to take this girl to the emergency room.”

  Jack decided that made the most sense, so Larry started directing again.

  “You’ll go, ‘Hey, c’mon, I had no choice! I squeezed to keep from dropping her headfirst onto the road. Don’t tell me you’ve never squeezed someone too hard, you fucking monster!’ Or something. Action!”

  “Are you kidding?” Jack asked, but he said his lines anyway. Rick was really into it now, too, surprised by the tone and the explanation his character never asked for. Frowning, he turned his attention back to the girl as they rolled her toward the building.

  “I just don’t want no lawsuit, brother,” Jack explained. “I’m already on thin ice. Just let me do all the talking, all right?”