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“Do they give one for best supporting geek?” I asked her.
“They’ll have to now,” she said.
Even with the strain of waiting for my award, the two days and nights went by rapidly. And then the third day of shooting was upon us.
Wednesday was our first day off the soundstage and out onto the warm and wicked streets of Miami. We were shooting downtown, a few blocks in from Biscayne Boulevard, on a side street that bordered a large parking lot. It was my big scene, too, the one where I, as Ben Webster, shuffled off my mortal coil, and Jackie, as hard-boiled detective Amber Wayne, swore dire vengeance over my cooling corpse.
The streets were cordoned off for several blocks in each direction, and the uniformed cops kept a tighter perimeter than they ever did at a homicide scene. Inside the parking lot, a handful of large, air-conditioned trailers had been set up. One was for all the male cast members, one for female—and one, to my surprise and delight, was dedicated entirely to the individual comfort and well-being of Miss Jackie Forrest—and that meant Dexter’s comfort, too. It was a lovely arrangement, even though Jackie assured me that it was standard practice, one of the tangible perks of being a Leading Lady. It was understood that true artists needed privacy in direct proportion to their salary and their billing on the head credits. But as Jackie’s new boy toy, I was welcome to enjoy a little semiprivacy along with her, and I did not allow any antique notions of solidarity with the working class to hold me back from taking advantage of the lush, cool trailer, nor its well-stocked refrigerator. Instead, I dressed in my Ben Webster costume in the bedroom of Jackie’s trailer, and then lounged on the sofa with a cup of coffee and tried not to feel bad about all the other small-part actors who had been crammed into one trailer all together. Somehow, I managed to live through the crushing guilt, and at around ten thirty in the morning, my call came at last.
A very dark-skinned, very excited young man with a Haitian accent led me to the place on the street where I was scheduled to die. I easily could have found it on my own, since it was ringed by people, vans, and trucks—one with a large generator—as well as cameras, lights, and a blue-and-white-striped canopy where a man I recognized as Victor, the director, sat with a few others perched in high canvas-backed chairs in front of some large flat-screen monitors. Victor did not look up as we walked past. He seemed very busy giving instructions to his peeps. I looked for a megaphone, or a martini shaker—anything that spoke of Hollywood’s hallowed traditions—but there were only walkie-talkies, and a huge paper cup of coffee from a nearby restaurant in each hand.
My young guide led me past the command center, explaining to me breathlessly that he was studying communications right here at Miami-Dade Community College, and his uncle Hercule was driving a scenery truck for the show and got his nephew, himself, Fabian, this fantastic job as a production assistant, which did not pay so much, but was a fantastic experience, and if I would just step over here?
I stepped. Fabian led me to a white open-sided van, where a large man with a shaved head and an ornate mustache sat on the bumper. He stood as we approached, and called out, “This him, Fabian? Brilliant!” Even without the “brilliant,” his accent said he was British. He held out his hand, looming several inches taller than either me or Fabian.
“Hullo, mate,” he said. “Name’s Dickie Larkin. I’ve got to get you all blooded up.”
I shook his hand and Fabian vanished at a half trot. And as Haitian Fabian handed me to British Dickie, I had to wonder: Was I seeing an example of good American jobs stolen away by foreigners?
But Dickie gave me no time to brood over socioeconomic paradigms. He took my elbow and led me to the van’s side door. “Shirt off,” he said, and he leaned into the double doors.
“I just put it on,” I said.
“And now you’ll bloody well have it off,” he said. “Got to get you wired, haven’t I?”
“Oh,” I said. “Have you?”
He turned around holding a wire harness with four small red tubes hanging from it. “I have,” he said. “You can’t die properly without your squibs.”
“I thought a squib was a kind of small chicken,” I said.
“That’d be a squab, laddie boy, and it’s a pigeon.” He held up his strange harness and shook it. “This is a squib. Four of the lovely little buggers.” He held them toward me. “Which I can’t bloody put on you if you don’t take the bloody shirt off.”
“Well, then,” I said, and I pulled my Ben Webster shirt off, feeling a little odd to be standing in the street in a seminaked state. But I would just have to get used to such things; I was an actor now, and my body was my canvas, half bare or not. In any case, Dickie didn’t give it any thought. He went to work, whistling cheerfully, and explaining squibs to me as he put them in place.
“It’s nothing but a small firecracker,” he said. “And a detonator.” He nodded into the van. I tried to peer around him, but he was too big. “I’ve got a little black box,” he said. “Hit the toggle and bang-o! Arms up.”
I put my arms straight up as Dickie ran the harness around my back, and then reached behind him for four small plastic baggies, each one filled with something that looked disturbingly like blood. My face must have shown some slight revulsion, because Dickie shook his head. “It’s fake blood, laddie,” he said. “Guaranteed AIDS-free.”
“Okay,” I said. “Is it, um, messy?”
“No worries,” he said. “You don’t have to clean it up.”
He was right, of course, and that was some small consolation—but I really don’t like blood, and the thought of carrying it next to my skin like that was mildly repulsive. But I clamped down on my feelings with iron-handed professionalism and let Dickie do his job. He placed one of the bags on top of each of the little red tubes. “The squib fires,” he said. “That pops the blood bag, and it looks like you’ve been shot. Cheap and lovely. There,” he said, and he stepped back.
“Right,” he said. “Can you move all right?”
I raised and lowered my arms, twisted from side to side, and then hopped up and down. “Yes,” I said. “What, um … what does it feel like?”
“You’ll feel a bit of a spark,” he said, “and that’s your cue to fall over dead, right?”
“How much is a bit?” I asked.
He winked at me. “Won’t kill you, squire,” he said. “I’ve had worse.” It was not a lot of comfort, but apparently it was all I was going to get from Dickie. He made a few small adjustments, then stepped back again and looked at me with satisfaction.
“Done like a dinner,” he said. “Shirt on and you’re good to go.”
I put my shirt back on. It was a little snugger with Dickie’s fireworks strapped on underneath, but he assured me that it didn’t show, and in the wink of an eye I strode over to the street to Find My Mark. Mark was not a person: It was a piece of tape on the floor that showed you where to stand so the cameras could keep you in focus. I had learned all about marks while shooting my first scene, and I felt very professional asking Martha, the assistant director, where mine was. She led me to a spot on the sidewalk, just a few feet from where an overpass loomed up and crossed over the street.
