Authors: Owen King
Post-graduation, Wassel and Patch had amassed a small fortune through the development of an image-based search program known as WOUND (We Open Up New Diagnoses). If you were a subscriber and had, say, an anomalous-looking blister on your arm, you could take a digital photograph of it and submit it to WOUND, which then sent you back a series of matching images along with potential diagnoses.
Sam had tested the program by taking a photograph of a smashed pigeon. WOUND had responded by e-mailing several images of hairy men with chest gashes and the advice that he go to the nearest ER. Sort of impressive, he had to admit.
The three men had gathered around one of those enormous wooden
spools that Sam recalled from the basements of his youth. These spools had seemed to hint at the secret pleasures of male adulthood. The fathers who had them in the basement were the same fathers who were liable to have dartboards, neon beer signs, and lots of sports-related knowledge. Sam had fantasized about having one himself someday. In reality, they were shitty tables. The spools were too tall to set your elbows on, and you had to be careful not to let anything fall into the hole in the middle, because if it did, you were never getting it back.
The use of the spool as a conference table exemplified why dealing with Bummer City was so disheartening: Patch and Wassel made him feel like a toy. Before long, he imagined they would be dressing him in a San Diego Chicken costume and demanding he moonwalk, but there was no getting around it. Investors were hard to find, and harder still when your project—an indie film—had no realistic financial prospects. Sam had printed an investment contract off the Internet, promising a minuscule rate of interest; and to make them feel like they were legitimate participants in the process—that Bummer City Productions meant something—he had added a clause that put them above the title. When you got right down to it, however, what he was essentially asking for was a donation.
“Well, who are you thinking about, Wassel?”
“Hoffman,” said Wassel. “Dusty.”
“Rainman,” said Patch. “Ratso.”
“Guys,” said Sam. “That’d be great, but—”
“—John Paul Jones.”
“Yes! He could definitely do it. Good one, Wassel.”
This suggestion momentarily stumped Sam. He was not aware that the bassist of Led Zeppelin had ever acted. He couldn’t even remember which symbol represented the guy. “Really?”
“He’s a great actor.”
“Great, great actor.”
“
Last of the Mohicans,
bro.”
“Ah,” said Sam, understanding that they meant Daniel Day Lewis. He opted not to correct them. If they wanted to believe that the world’s greatest living thespian, whose name they couldn’t get right, might be interested in playing a role that took place entirely in a bathroom stall, that was their privilege.
Wassel presented Sam with a list of other possibilities. It was written in magenta crayon on the back of a crinkled flyer for a shoe store. The third name on the list, after John Paul Jones, was Johnny Deep. Toward the bottom he noticed Meryl Strep, and below that, John Belushi.
Both men dressed like little boys but from different periods. In a checked short-sleeve shirt buttoned all the way up, big black-framed glasses, and a buzz cut, Wassel represented the fifties. Patch was the seventies: jeans with a blooming rose appliqué on the butt, cowboy shirt, Yoo-Hoo baseball cap, and flip-flops.
“These are some great names.” Sam tucked the shoe store flyer into his pocket. He realized that he truly did not like these men. “I can try.”
“You can try,” cried Wassel, “and you can fucking succeed, brother!”
Wassel and Patch exchanged high fives. Patch rode an invisible bucking horse around a circle. “A drink for the Abyss!” yelled Patch, and poured the rest of the Woodchuck cider he had been drinking into the hole in the center of the spool.
Sam could feel his self-respect plummeting like a fat kid shoved off a high diving board. He waited until he heard it hit the water with a flab-scalding
splat,
then said, “So. We have a deal?”
“You get us An Actor, then fucking A, we have a deal.”
Patch broke into an air-guitar solo, culminating in a violent crank of an air whammy bar. Wassel said they’d better get some coke, ASAP.
■ ■ ■
As futile as it obviously was, Sam went ahead and blind-mailed the script to the agents of the twenty-nine living members of Patch and Wassel’s list (changing Merlin to Guinevere for Ms. Strep’s copy), fully expecting to receive zero responses. It was a good-faith effort. He planned to return to Patch and Wassel in a month’s time, tell them he’d tried, and plead for them to forget about getting An Actor, and just to fork over their money.
And then, incredibly, three weeks after the mailing, Rick Savini’s agents notified Sam of the actor’s interest in the part.
■ ■ ■
Savini had played the barfly in the Tarantino movie about all the different gangs simultaneously attempting to break into Capone’s vault; he’d starred in
Clunkers,
the Coen brothers film about the harassed generator salesman with the sick wife and the sociopathic son and the
house with a haunted bomb shelter; Savini had fallen in love with a madwoman in a Soderbergh film; and he’d played an alcoholic dentist for Jane Campion. Rick Savini made Sam think of Jack Lemmon—sensitive, funny, small—but more stepped on, somehow. He was good. He was really good.
In
The Dirt Nap,
a somewhat obscure indie Sam particularly liked, Savini played a doomed numbers runner. Right before Savini is executed by his best friend, the best friend attempts to comfort the numbers runner by explaining that they’re going to bury him in a nice place, in the concrete of a brand-new public swimming pool. A lot of people remembered Savini’s semi-famous response—“Aw, man. Kids are going to be peeing on me for eternity, Lester”—the last words before his friend pulls the trigger. What remained with Sam was the actor’s face, the glum hook at the right corner of Savini’s mouth as he ponders the ice-crusted mud of the yawning rectangular hole in the ground. That look was so smart, and so hurt, that it made the dialogue redundant. You could tell what he was seeing: a murky, eternal view of sky through green water and kicking legs.
Savini had given remarkable performances as conmen, streetwise losers, and ordinary men harried to the brink. The kind of ragged self-awareness that defined the morose, ageless drug dealer was his specialty. Rick Savini wasn’t simply An Actor; he was ideal.
It was a tricky part. Merlin not only spent the entire film in the remote bathroom stall, but he had just one set of lines, which he spoke with slight variations to everyone who knocked on his door.
INT. FERRER MEMORIAL LIBRARY—BASEMENT LEVEL FIVE RESTROOM
Brunson, jonesing, stands outside Merlin’s stall. He gives the door a sharp rap.
CUT TO:
INSIDE THE STALL: Merlin sits on the toilet lid, perusing
The Economist
.
MERLIN
I’m in here.
BRUNSON
I really have to go.
MERLIN
Well, you’ll just have to wait your turn. I’m going to be a while. I ate Peruvian last night. And some Haitian. And some of whatever that stuff is they eat in Seattle. I stuffed my fucking face.
BRUNSON
Peruvian is good.
MERLIN
Indeed it is.
BRUNSON
How long are you going to be? Ten minutes?
MERLIN
Better make it twenty. I got a ten-turd pileup on the intestinal freeway.
Merlin stands. He sets down his
Economist
and removes the cap from the toilet tank. Inside are several rolls of bills, a plastic bag of drugs, and an automatic pistol. From the bag he fishes out a vial of powder.
BACK TO:
OUTSIDE THE STALL: Brunson slips a twenty-dollar bill under the door.
MERLIN (O.S.)
I’m telling you, though, buddy. The Peruvian stuff is good, but it’s serious. I’m not slagging on Peru here. I’m just saying you need to consume in moderation. Take it from one who knows. It goes down a hell of a lot easier than it comes out.
The vial comes rolling out from the under the door. Brunson snatches it and dashes from the restroom.
CUT TO:
INSIDE THE STALL: The drug dealer resumes his seat, opens his magazine.
MERLIN
Can’t say I didn’t warn him.
(It was notable, perhaps, that Merlin was the only specific element in the script that Booth singled out for praise. “The fellow who lives in the restroom stall, the drug dealer, him I did find quite amusing.”)
■ ■ ■
That the agents presented Rick’s participation in the context of his usual salary—a fee well in excess of the forty thousand Bummer City had promised—was irrelevant. Sam didn’t hesitate to respond that it was no problem. It didn’t matter that he had tapped everyone he knew or that it was too risky to press Wassel and Patch for more. (To request additional funding from Brooks was a last, last resort. Dealing with the AD made Sam feel like he was sticking his bare hand in a dark, mossy hole—the guy was just off—and he preferred not to unless there was no other choice.)
He’d figure something out.
Occasionally, Sam allowed himself the release of an evening on campus, where, between sips of frothy beer in plastic cups, he tried to impress girls (usually freshmen, sometimes sophomores) with the details of his endeavor. A (very) few were stirred to invite him back to their vanilla-scented dorm rooms. More often the young women of Russell seemed to find his approach transparent. One comely sophomore, an artfully cracked iron-on of Germaine Greer stretched across her braless and forthrightly nippled chest, told Sam that he made “the art of cinema sound like bomb defusal.” He said that was exactly what it was, “but only if you know what you’re doing.” She smirked and said, “Nope. Nopety-nope-nope-nope.” The result was, that night, and most others like it, too
drunk or too stoned to make his way home to the apartment, he crashed in Brooks Hartwig, Jr.’s, dorm room/lair.
These drop-ins, no matter how late after midnight Sam knocked on the door, were always welcomed by Brooks, who was nocturnal.
“Sleepover!” he said the first time Sam showed up. “Yay!”
Shitfaced, Sam clung to the doorknob and put his finger to his lips. “Down to a dull roar, please, Brooks.”
“You can make a bed out of my laundry, okay?”
“No.” Sam lurched to Brooks’s mattress and flopped down. “You can make a bed out of your laundry.”
“Oh.” Brooks gave an appreciative nod, as if some long-puzzled-over concept had finally clicked. “Right.”
The AD never complained about Sam’s visits—not about the discomfort, or the distraction from his studies, or the intrusion on a potential booty call. Though in Sam’s defense, it became clear that he wasn’t hindering the other man in any way. Brooks was apparently undeterred in his nightly procedure, which did not in any case include studying, sleeping, or amorous appointments.
If he awakened before morning, Sam would inevitably open his eyes to see Brooks, hunched Indian-style on the floor while something foreign and esoteric and creepy played on his laptop: a Dutch movie where everyone moved backward, talked backward, and the subtitles appeared backward; a dubbed Portuguese movie that was a single seventy-two-minute take of an eerily upbeat chef matter-of-factly guiding the viewer through an old family recipe for making soup out of a lonely person. While he watched, the AD rocked continuously, like some kind of holy man. The behavior disturbed Sam but also intrigued him. Where did Brooks find these things? Did he actually enjoy them? What were the names of the drugs that Brooks consumed, and what quantities?
The semiotics of these films, and of Brooks’s own film, struck Sam as baldly psychiatric. He could understand why someone might want to make one—to see if it could be done, as a strange joke, maybe—but he had no earthly idea why someone would want to watch them.
“Brooks,” he demanded one night, “what is the point of this shit?”
Sam lay in the bed, his bladder very full, watching Brooks watch the soup movie, which took place entirely in a large, dingy kitchen with checkered tiles.
Off to one side of the kitchen there is a bathtub, and in the bathtub there is the lonely person, a young woman in a one-piece purple bathing suit, persuasively glum with her straight-ahead stare. The chef, though his dubbed patter is as ebullient and seamless as that of any real television chef and his smiles and flourishes are also in keeping with the genre, evinces a criminal dissipation. Half-shaved, he claps around in ragged flip-flops, and wears a dingy unexplained bandage at the side of his neck. After filling a bucket with water, the chef returns to the bathtub and the lonely person, soles snapping against the linoleum, and explains, “I’m using water. But if you would prefer broth, that is fine, too.”
It was February, a new year. Predawn light limned the edges of the sheet hung over the window.
Seated on the rug a few feet away from his open laptop, Brooks stopped rocking back and forth. He swiveled around to squint at Sam with bloodshot eyes. “Oh, like. Like . . . What do you mean?”
Intoxication tended to inflame Sam’s incredulity. “I mean, if I have to listen to this—whoever—warlock, necromancer—person—explain why the miserable soul should be allowed to soak in a quart of vinegar poured from a chipped pitcher, then you might at least tell me
why
.”
“Why? Uh . . . why not?” Brooks blinked.
“No, Brooks. That is not a satisfactory answer.”
Brooks blinked some more. He scratched at his forehead. “Well, it’s not like anything else, is it?”
“No. Still not satisfactory. Go again.”
“It’s about soup, making soup. What other movie is about making soup, Sam?” The AD scratched his chin and rubbed his nose. For no real reason, he swept a hand through the empty air. “And the main ingredient is a person!” he blurted, as if Sam might have forgotten.
“Let’s add some onion!” The chef dumps a fistful of diced onions into the water at the lonely person’s feet, then makes a show of wiping his hands. “Optimally, the onion should be from the garden of a man who has cancer. At the very least—the very, very least—you should rub your onion on a cancer person.”