Authors: Owen King
■ ■ ■
“I don’t believe you,” Polly said. “You’re such a totally nice guy.” She was in Florida. Sam was on his couch in New York. It was October then, a couple of weeks after he’d seen Booth in Hasbrouck.
“Not about this. You only get one chance. It can’t suck.”
“Why not?”
Since their breakup the previous spring, the parameters of their
relationship had grown murky. Through the end of the school year, they had continued to sleep together on occasion, and since Polly had returned home to live with her parents at their retirement community and take some time off before joining the workforce, they had been having semi-regular phone sex. Sam was careful not to probe too eagerly into the matter of whom besides her parents she had been spending time with, and he was deliberately vague about his own spare hours, not least because there was mortifyingly little to reveal. Since graduating and moving to the apartment, Sam hadn’t done much except work on the script and watch movies checked out from the library. He certainly hadn’t been getting laid.
Polly had the supple, amused voice of a sexy disc jockey, and Sam knew that, unlike a disc jockey, she was sexy in real life. This wasn’t to say she was beautiful—her tits were a little too big, her mouth was a little too big, and her bottom teeth were uneven. Rather, her allure came from her attitude, which was unapologetic, and her perspective, which yo-yoed between sunny and scandalized. Polly’s parents had been in their mid-forties when she was born, too old and tired to put up much of a fight, and their daughter was accustomed to getting her way. At Russell, she had studied to be a preschool teacher. Sam thought she’d be a good one; Polly was smart, not afraid to be silly, but impossible to budge if she didn’t want to budge.
It was true that they shared few enthusiasms. Polly was far more likely to want to curl up on the couch with a novel than go to a movie theater. Fat Russian novels were special favorites because, she said, the combination of sex, violence, and cold weather made her feel “safe and cozy, and so freaking lucky not to be a nineteenth-century Russian person.” Televised sports were another passion of hers that Sam couldn’t match. Pretty much anything besides golf and auto racing, she’d watch and sort of narrate what was happening, a habit that by all rights should have been tremendously annoying but which Sam found endearing. “Oh, look!” she’d exclaim after a football player scored a touchdown and all of his teammates piled on top of him. “They’re so happy!”
Although Sam was fairly sure he didn’t love Polly, he liked her a lot—and couldn’t resist the way she wound him up.
“Why can’t it suck? Is this a trick question?” He could never be certain if Polly was being willfully obtuse in a flirtatious way, or just willfully obtuse.
“No,” she said. “I really want to know. And if you’re going to be crabby about it, maybe I ought to hang up right now.”
Sam sensed that his hopes for phone sex were on the verge of slipping away. He dropped his feet off the couch and sat up. “It can’t suck because it can’t. Because I’m not making it to suck. Who goes into something that they really care about, that’s really personal to them, and thinks, Oh well, it’ll be okay if it sucks?”
“All I can say to that, my dear, is that you’ve clearly never been a woman.”
Sam was prudent enough to refuse the bait. Polly let him hang for ten or fifteen seconds. When she spoke again, he could hear her smile. “Obviously, you’re not making it to suck, but it’s not a matter of life or death. It’s a movie.”
Polly had never been able to comprehend what it was like to have Booth Dolan for a father. Just the opposite, in fact: after years of listening to Sam’s grievances, it was clear that she had come to regard his alienation from Booth as being pretty adorable. Sam didn’t suppose she’d ever understand—and perhaps this was part of the reason why, despite his attachment to Polly, he couldn’t imagine them together in the long term—but after he’d reflected upon his interaction with Booth that morning at Tom’s, it now seemed to Sam that the relationship with his father had suffered a final break.
One needed look no further than the old man’s quintessential role as the diabolical traveling salesman of cures and elixirs,
New Roman Empire
’s Dr. Archibald “Horsefeathers” Law, to understand that a movie wasn’t a matter of life and death. It was life and death.
■ ■ ■
Early on in the film, Dr. Law—Horsefeathers—holds forth before a crowd of skeptical hippies. He is a grinning fat man in a checkered suit, a neckerchief, and a bowler hat.
“I am not a miracle worker!” he cries, removing his hat with a flourish, letting it tumble end over end along his arm. The charlatan casts around, fixing the eyes of each person in turn. In the background, an off-kilter caper begins, plucked on warbling strings. “I am a physician specializing in the deeper body. There is no magic about this. My medicine is, quite simply, a scientific treatment for the soul!”
Perhaps he was a different person before
New Roman Empire,
but ever since—as
long as Sam had known him—Booth had played the part of the magnificent bullshitter ceaselessly. Two busted marriages, two children he saw infrequently, and Booth talked and talked without ever saying anything. Meanwhile, after thirty-plus years in the industry, Sam’s father’s greatest contribution to cinema was, in all likelihood, two days he had spent in 1975 on the set of
Yorick,
one of the many “lost” films of Orson Welles’s cash-strapped late period, as yet and probably forever unreleased. The years had dribbled away for Booth, and despite never being a real director in the first place—real directors did more than get coverage—now he had nothing better to do than criticize his son.
It didn’t matter, as Sam’s best friend Wesley Latsch pointed out, that everyone’s father had cheated on everyone’s mother, and that everyone’s father was mortifying and insufficient in a thousand ways. “You take your old man far too personally,” Wesley said, and Wesley was right. Sam’s resentment was achingly common.
But it just didn’t matter: because Booth was Booth, and Booth was his father.
And because, goddammit, the old fucking pervert had squirreled away a pair of his mistress’s panties for twelve years! And then he had lied about it right to Sam’s face!
Who We Are
was only a small independent movie. It might never find distribution, might never make it beyond a few minor midwestern film festivals. But it was important to Sam. It was his statement, his vision, his movie. It wasn’t supposed to be just a couple of hours of escape, of people running around and splatting each other in the face with pies. To him, it was serious.
Who We Are
was about the costs of growing up—and the costs of not growing up. And that was heavy stuff, and Sam made no apology, not to Booth, not to anyone. Maybe it wasn’t fun, and maybe it wasn’t entertainment, but he was going to show them something real.
■ ■ ■
“I mean, it’s not even a big movie. It’s not like one of these ones with elephants and submarines and everything in it,” Polly went on. “You’re acting like it’s the biggest thing ever.”
“What movie has elephants and submarines?”
“Don’t be a snot. You know what I mean. Like
Star Wars
.”
“Look, Polly, to me, it is pretty much the biggest thing ever. To me, it’s a lot of money and a hell of a lot of work, and I’ve put a lot of thought
into it. And all I’m saying is that if I have to kick some ass to make it what I need it to be, then I’m prepared to do that. I’ve never cared about anything so much, ever.”
“Well, well, well. That’s quite a statement, young man. Ever?”
“Ever.” Sam decided he’d better throw the track switch before Polly started to prod him about his childhood, or his fears, or some other libido-extinguishing subject. “Let me give you an example: if getting this film made requires me to debase myself over the phone, follow the whims of some depraved sex maniac in Florida, I’m prepared to do that.”
“No!” Polly cried. “Absolutely not! I just want to have a nice conversation for once. Besides, you just told me how you were going to squash all us little people to make your opus. I no longer trust your motives.”
“I didn’t say that. I’ve never said the word ‘opus’ in my life.” Frustrated, Sam rose from the couch and began to pace across the twenty or so feet of his apartment’s living space. It had come prefurnished with a desk, a single bed, a strip of maroon carpet remnant, a dusty plant, and a kitchenette, the cabinets of which so far contained one plastic plate and a mostly empty spray bottle of Febreze, both left by the previous resident. The window by the desk offered a view of the parking lot and the identical neighboring sections of the gray-walled, grayer-roofed development. Sam looked out the window and saw a couple of boys spitting into the medicine ball–sized pothole in the parking lot. The huge pothole was the landmark he used to find which part of the development he lived in.
“Let’s just talk about something else. What else is happening?”
Sam asked her if he had mentioned the odd, heady smell of the hallways in the complex, like a drugstore, like Silly Putty, that medicinal-industrial odor. Polly said yes, he’d mentioned it. Had she told him about the dear biddy who lived in the neighboring bungalow and knocked on the door at four in the morning to bring them a fresh-picked gourd? He said she had. They were both so careful to stay clear of each other’s social lives, there wasn’t much left over.
“I was afraid that we’d become old and uninteresting,” Polly said. “I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. What happened to the fascinating boy I went to college with, Sammy?”
“Well, shit, Polly. I don’t know. Hey, are you going to invest in my movie or what?”
Polly shrieked. “Now I feel really soiled! First you want me to help
you masturbate, then you turn dull, and then you ask me for money. What’s next?”
“You give me money?”
“What’s the magic word?”
“Please?”
“More.”
“Pretty please? Pretty, pretty please?”
“See, polite is sexy,” she said, and smacked her lips. “Okay, bitch! Take off your pants, go to the refrigerator, and get out the butter.”
Sam didn’t have any butter—or margarine—but in addition to the plate and the mostly empty sprayer of Febreze, his predecessor had bequeathed him a huge jug of electric-blue liquid soap called the Blue, whose label bore a cartoon of an impressively coiffed shark. Once Sam had retrieved the jug from the bathroom, he yanked down the window shade and jumped onto the bed. He wriggled out of his pants and boxers and squirted out a big handful of blue soap. “Got it. Now what?”
Polly directed him to rub up his stuff real good. “But don’t you dare ejaculate before I tell you! Not so much as a dribble!” Sam was close after four or five hard strokes, so he slowed down, limiting himself to the occasional paddle.
For the first time, Polly mentioned that she was alone in her house. Mr. and Mrs. Dressler had gone to the local clam shack for the early-bird special, and here she was in her panties, and now here she wasn’t in her panties. “Oh, look,” she said, “the dining room table . . .” There was a creaking sound as she climbed on top of it—or somehow, like a Foley artist, concocted a noise that perfectly replicated the sound of a 110-pound woman climbing onto a Shaker-style dining room table, which struck Sam as fairly unlikely. Polly informed him that she was pulling up her skirt, lying on her back. The wood was nice and cool against her ass, and across from the table, on the wall behind her daddy’s chair, there was a mirror. “And I can see all the way into myself, Sammy.”
“Jesus,” Sam said. He had started to speed up again and had to squeeze himself to hold off.
“Sammy.” In a whisper, Polly described how she was fingering herself, sliding her finger up and down, separating the hot, slick folds. He better be buttering himself; she was so incredibly tight, they were going to need all the help they could get. “Sammy, Sammy, Sammy . . .”
The Blue was lathering around his penis and dripping bubbles into his pubic hair, spilling onto the sheets, making a mess. At the same time, he was trying to keep the soap away from the tip of his penis, because who knew what the hell was in the Blue. There was a dangerous tingle along his shaft, which might have been his imagination. But he was huge, digging his heels into the mattress, shaking all over; Sam could see clearly enough that what was exciting was that Polly was telling him what to do, that it was unlike every other aspect of his existence, wherein he struggled to contain and order. He had a suspicion that he was not the only director who, when it came to sex, liked to switch roles.
“Are you filming me? I want you to film this. This is my movie. My movie.”
“Okay.”
“Whose movie is it?”
“Yours, Polly.”
“Good. Are you ready? Are you on your mark?”
“Uh-huh,” Sam managed to say, and when Polly said, “Go!” he was gone.
■ ■ ■
He asked Polly if she came, too. “Eh,” she said.
“Do you want to keep going?” Sam sort of hoped she didn’t. He wanted to clean up before anything dried. Gobbets of blue soap, bubbles, and semen were mixed and spattered on his genitals, thighs, left hand, and the sheets between his legs. It looked like a member of the Blue Man Group had been shanked to death.
Holding a mingled puddle of soap and genetic material in his cupped hand, he maneuvered himself off the bed and around the kitchen bar to the sink. Sam tucked the phone between his ear and shoulder, turned on the faucet with his clean hand, and stuck his semen-and-soap hand under the water.
“Well . . .” she said.
“What?”
“Would you mind asking me again? For money?”
Now it was Sam’s turn to feel soiled, but he had made a promise to himself—he would do what he had to. At least Polly was a friend. So he asked her again, and again, and again, please, pretty please, please with sprinkles.
Three days later, he received his reward in the mail: a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar check from Ms. Polly Dressler. The subject line read, “For the BIGGEST thing ever!!!”