Molly Bit

by Dan Bevacqua

  * * *

  “Because her daddy’s black, Roger. That’s half of why I kept her. Maybe she’ll turn out pretty. Where’s the rent?”

  * * *

  He bought a car the same color as the Mongoose. Electric blue. It had a spoiler. His second try he passed the driving test. “Con-gra-ju-la-tions,” the tester said. He’d had a stroke or something. His mouth hung. People were Massholes now. It was a bumper sticker. He’d go into the convenience store on Fifth Street, down from where he lived with his mother and the baby, and there would be a fat woman in the store screaming at the guy. The fat woman’s shorts said HONEY. Others butts said BOOTY, LUCKY, MEOW, HOT, TUFF. His mother borrowed the car and totaled it. Everything was a thing. Tons of heroin around.

  * * *

  They searched his car at the dam. Dogs sniffed around his tires. From the top, he looked down the spiraling road at the cars braking. The sky was red with mountains. Mars. Jupiter. He took the elevator down into the loud hammer of water and steel. It was a group tour. At a certain point they ducked their heads and entered a well-lit tunnel deep under the earth. Later, he drove through the desert. He saw whole towns on the edge. Grass was a plant you could grow.

  * * *

  Everything was closed on the eleventh. Roger understood what was going on. He was always a part of what was large, all-consuming, out of his control. He grew up on Today. He sat on the edge of his bed and stared into the screen. He called up. His boss told him don’t be crazy. They were closed too. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after. Who knew? A war was going on.

  The way he knew time had stopped was when he stuck his thumb out and a car pulled over. He went to the Garden. He’d had that key forever. If a movie didn’t do that well, a distributor might forget about it. There were reels and reels.

  * * *

  After his mother had wrecked the Hyundai, she was in the hospital for two weeks. He watched the baby. He didn’t know what to do with it. It wasn’t exactly his sister. A neighbor lady came over and cleaned her up. Don’t lay her out on the floor like that, the lady said. If she’s cryin’, she’s hungry. You got to use the wipes. Like that, but gentle. Gentle. It was awhile back. He’d missed a lot of work. A lot of movies.

  * * *

  He watched Funhouse all alone on a Tuesday.

  There was a carnival at the edge of the woods. A Ferris wheel rotated against the moon. Aaaaaaah! teens screamed. Three high school girls who looked around twenty-five bought tickets at the booth. A slutty blonde with tits. A brunette too sassy for her own good. The third one had dirty blond hair and eyes that weren’t exactly green.

  If it hadn’t been for the third girl, he would have stopped the reel. She was the only good thing about that whole movie. He liked her face. He liked her neck. He liked her legs. He liked her breasts as they pushed against her white T-shirt. He stared at her with his mouth open as she ran through the woods, the condiment station, the turnstile. She killed the clown by throwing him off the Ferris wheel. By the end of the movie, she was covered in blood. She had a limp. She was beautiful. But for her, everyone was dead. Everyone.

  * * *

  He overhead a guy at work say, “Just google it.” He didn’t know what the guy was talking about. He had to look it up on his computer. Years went by like that.

  * * *

  hellomagazine.com hollywoodrag.com okmagazine.com eonline.com thenationalenquirer.com justjared.com starmagazine.com gossipcop.com radar.com thehollywoodgossip.com celebitchy.com

  * * *

  He’d never kissed a woman on the lips before.

  * * *

  thesuperficial.com laineygossip.com celebgossip.com popbytes.com tabloidcolumn.com intouchweekly.com toofab.com people.com gossipcenter.com egotastic.com showbiz411.com

  * * *

  She was from an hour north. Not even.

  * * *

  celebritypuke.com

  * * *

  He did the last leg. There was a presidential debate on the car radio. The president was the decider. The other guy was married to the ketchup lady. He sounded like his mouth was full of mouth. Roger sat in traffic for so long he had to piss in a Lemon Iced Tea Snapple bottle. Everything was numbers. What was a Cahuenga? For two weeks he lived in a hotel downtown. The street looked like an old dirty wok. Machines turned entire city blocks into holes. There were what sounded like explosions all day long. Men and women with plastic bags shoved down inside their shirt collars and in their socks and up their sleeves tumbled across the street. They pushed shopping carts and dragged wagons stacked six feet high with flat cardboard boxes from one corner to another. Trash blew into them and stayed there. They waited for the bus but didn’t take it. They made beds out of actual mattresses and slept under bridges between enormous cement dividers so that if they fell out on either side a car would run them over.

  * * *

  “California?” his mother asked him. “What are you gonna do out there? You’re gonna end up homeless.”

  * * *

  He tore a stapled flyer off a telephone pole that said BE A MOTION PICTURE EXTRA! MAKE $100/DAY!*. The girl on the phone told him she was quitting. She was going back to Nebraska.

  “This thing’s a scam,” she said. “You have to pay money to get work, and then there’s no work. You really wanna do something like this? Be an extra?”

  He thought he did.

  “Let me give you another number. This one’s real. This one pays you.”

  * * *

  Only one of the star maps had her house listed, but it was an old address in West Hollywood from when she was younger. It wasn’t even the nice part. There were blacks.

  * * *

  The oversized trailer in the valley was next to a junkyard. The old man took his picture eight times and wrote down his measurements. He told him he wasn’t so big. He wasn’t so small. He was average, the old man said, but he had a sort of look about him.

  His phone would ring at four in the morning.

  “We’ve got a call for a John Cusack movie in Tarzana. Restaurant scene.”

  “There’s a Faith Hill music video downtown. It’s mostly crowd stuff. Pays cash.”

  “A pilot about a kid who can talk to horses.”

  “Six Feet Under.”

  He worked eighteen, nineteen, twenty days in a row. He mostly sat around. A lot of the other extras looked sick. They looked tired and thin. Nothing too bad, but some disease that kept them from doing real work. When the PAs told them they could eat, everybody ate as much food as they could. He did TV shows down at this hospital that wasn’t a real hospital anymore. All of the equipment was still there. He sat down in a chair in the waiting room all day and pretended to talk with this Chinese lady who couldn’t speak English. The AD told them to mouth the words “apples and pears,” or “green peas makes me sick.” He did a party scene for a black comic’s movie in Laguna Beach. The comic was dressed up as a big old fat lady. They shot the whole thing in a restaurant called the Crab Shack. The other extras said the comic was having a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t take it anymore. They shaved Roger’s head once and dressed him in a white robe, and then he and four hundred other people prayed in a gymnasium at a God to be later created in post.

  * * *

  Men in vans. Men who smoked cigarettes. Men with great heads of hair but with gutted faces like dried, cracked ravines. Men walking down the side of the highway in camo pants with army duffels strapped to their backs. Men in old trucks that were never rusted but with telephone numbers painted on their sides and under those numbers the words HAUL AWAY or TRASH GUY. The busses were full of Mexican women holding brooms and plastic bags. None of the women seemed to have cars. The men waited in trucks at the bottom of the canyon roads and then the women came walking down the roads at five o’clock in the afternoon. The women spoke to one another in Mexican as they went down the hill and then they got in the trucks driven by the men and they were gone.

  * * *

  He bought a phone that flipped. It
had a keyboard. It sent him news updates he didn’t want. He bought a typewriter in Culver City. He was dumb, his mother used to say, but he knew how to be invisible.

  * * *

  The popcorn machine broke at the hospital. One of the actors liked the movie popcorn with the butter substitute. It was in his contract. You couldn’t read US magazine on set and you couldn’t eat the popcorn unless somebody offered it to you. The popcorn belonged to the actor.

  “Anybody know how?” a pretty Mexican asked.

  Roger was eating a Danish under the canopy by the craft trailer. He put his hand in the air like a child. They took him inside the trailer where they kept the machine. He pulled a small pin out one half-inch. It worked. The bucket dumped.

  The manager said his name was High-May. He asked Roger if he wanted a job.

  “It’s union,” High-May said. “Good benefits, but no dental. This isn’t SAG.”

  * * *

  You didn’t have to go to the movies anymore, but he did. It wasn’t fair to steal her off the internet. People would talk about her at work. She was blowing up, they’d say. She was exploding. She was an ad exec. She was the ex-girlfriend of a drug dealer. She’d gone on a rampage in that one. She’d delivered.

  * * *

  Every morning before work he retyped the letter. It was three hundred and eighty letters before he found her address. The website told him she was selling. It was up for sale. He drove around Coldwater for a year. One day Roger saw her assistant go by him in her BMW. The assistant was a dyke, but she wasn’t. He followed her. The assistant went to the place in Malibu. She came back down the 1. She went to the mansion the new husband was building. She drove to the old place on Coldwater. In the end, it took him four hours. A year and four hours. He sent the letters to every address but for Coldwater. He wanted her to have one place that was hers.

  * * *

  He was with High-May on the Warner Brothers lot. The big one on the other side of Barham. The other lot was yellow. It was TV. Horror was the woods. You could shoot it anywhere.

  “You’re quiet, man,” High-May said.

  They were setting up the breakfast table. The lot was a valley carved up into parking lots and small ranches with actual horses sometimes and soundstages and a racetrack. He liked the smog. He didn’t really care. High-May told Roger he had a daughter he didn’t see much.

  “I used to work in porn,” High-May said. “Boom work. A little post when I could get it. You meet the girls. Some of them aren’t even dumb. Most are. That thing’s a meat grinder. This is much better. Way more civilized. Once you’re in, you’re in. I can get a job anywhere. Like that.”

  * * *

  A year later they were doing the same job at the same place for the same amount of money. Roger and High-May hopped in the golf cart. Macaroni needed getting over. A line of a few hundred men in Civil War uniforms jogged into a soundstage. A pale girl in a red blouse and a black miniskirt walked across the street in front them. The girl carried a big orange binder. She was someone, Roger guessed. She gave them a stare, because you never knew, but it was only them.

  “Fuck these people,” High-May said. “All these people are in the future. That’s where they live. They think they’re somebody else already—some hotshot. Fuck them.”

  * * *

  Time didn’t matter. A year went by. Another. More. He lived in his head.

  * * *

  High-May knew a guy. Roger took the bus to Vancouver. “Mumbles takes the bus!” High-May shouted. He was two days early. He rented a cheap room in a motel downtown. That was what men did, he thought. They rented cheap rooms.

  He walked around downtown Vancouver. He tried to remember that he should call her an actor—that it was sexist to call her an actress. It was hard for him to care. He preferred the word actress. It was a prettier word. It looked like a dress to him. He saw an old movie poster on a building in what he guessed was the cool part of town. Half her face was torn off. The temperature on a digital bank clock was one digit shy of her birth year. He was drawn to numbers now, to strangers, to less obvious forms of coincidence. One afternoon he sat down on a bus stop bench. A girl who looked like her crossed the street and Roger almost passed out.

  * * *

  It was depressing. She wasn’t scheduled to arrive for another two weeks. The crew shot B roll and the scenes she wasn’t in.

  That bitch put it in her contract, Roger heard the director say. She was a real pain in the ass that way, he said. It didn’t matter how nice they were supposed to be or how professional. They were all the same. Hard to deal with. Particular. They acted like they were the whole goddamn movie. My four-year-old can act natural.

  “This coffee’s cold,” he said to Roger. “Can I have some hot fucking coffee? What is this? Am I on set here or what? Where am I? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Roger went to the director’s trailer that night and unplugged his refrigeration line. The next night he stuck a wad of gum in the AC plug. The third night he took a dump on his front step and threw a brick through his window.

  It was all anybody could talk about. It was like they weren’t making a movie.

  A detective came around. He had a moustache. His voice sounded like it was coming out of his forehead.

  “I’m speaking to the entire production the same way,” the detective said. The eight of them had been gathered around the food trailer. “I’m speaking to you like I’m speaking to the actors or to the technical crew. We don’t cast blame here in Vancouver. I don’t care where you’re from.”

  Roger watched the detective smile at all the Chinese people he worked with.

  “So if you’re worried about that, don’t be,” the detective said.

  Four of his coworkers didn’t show up for work the next day. Roger didn’t understand.

  “Immigration,” his manager said.

  That afternoon the detective interviewed him.

  “You’re American. Why are you here?”

  He tried to explain himself.

  “That doesn’t make any sense to me,” the detective said. “Did you have an argument with the gentleman?”

  He didn’t move at all—not even his face or his eyelids.

  “Sure you did,” the detective said.

  He hadn’t even seen her.

  * * *

  There were several routes to get there, but he liked the long way best. Lower Laurel Canyon to Upper Laurel Canyon—across onto Mulholland—and then over onto Coldwater. He drove it every few days. Four or five times a week if he felt the need. He never once understood she was his discipline. She made him better. His internet browser history grew more diverse.

  * * *

  It poured in LA. He drove up the night the rain let up and parked his car on a side street. He parked illegally under a private security sign. He put the laminated orange piece of paper that read LA COUNTY CENSUS on his dash. Holding a clipboard, he walked a half mile until he came to a construction site. He ate a sandwich under some scaffolding as the sun went down.

  He changed into his all-black clothing and took out the pocket shears. He left his backpack behind some drywall at the construction site. When it was dark enough he hiked along the ridge where the plants had it out for humans. If he came across a plant that would have cut him up, he took out the pocket shears. Her house was only a quarter of a mile away, but it took him an hour and a half. Standing outside the back fence, he was impressed with himself. He wasn’t bleeding. He didn’t feel any pain.

  Roger found the control box on a post beside the tree. He used a tiny Phillips head. The switches were labeled. A company never knew who they would send. POWER SOURCE D (CAMERAS). POWER SOURCE B (EXT. LIGHT/SECURITY). The rain shorted wiring out all the time. He wore gloves and clacked the switches down. He climbed over the fence and after twenty minutes, he found a window on the first floor he could lift up. He slid through like an overgrown fat snake into the kitchen. He stood up and looked at the gleaming counter. The maid had left
the key out.

  * * *

  “How many copies should I make?” the locksmith on Ventura asked.

  * * *

  Comic-Con. The People’s Choice Awards. The Venice Film Festival. The Tribeca Film Festival. United Amnesty International Gala Event. SXSW.

  * * *

  He bought an iPhone. The internet was as near to an exact science as he would ever know.

  * * *

  Her bedroom was bigger than his entire apartment. She didn’t have a dresser. All of her clothing was in the walk-in closet organized by color and up on hangers. Her underwear was laid out on shelves, splayed out like cards in a deck. Same with her bras. It seemed like if she wore a thong even once, she didn’t wash it, she threw it in the trash. She had a few hundred dresses. Two hundred and seven. It would have taken all night to count the shirts and the pants. He opened the safe because it wasn’t locked and anyway the code was written down on a Post-it note stuck to the front. She owned pearl necklaces. Gold necklaces. Silver necklaces. Diamond necklaces. Necklaces he didn’t know the types of—pale green stones and blue ones and reds like actual fire. Bracelets. Rings. She had all sorts of hoop earrings she never wore and that Roger wished aloud to himself in her walk-in she would.