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“Was it the Beast?”
“The what?”
“The man with the melted pink wax face and the fleshed-over right eye and the awful mouth? Did he shove that fake body up the ladder to scare the studio, scare you, scare me, and blackmail everyone somehow for some reason? If I must die, J. C., why can’t I know why? Name the Beast, J. C.”
“And really get you dead? No!”
A truck veered around the studio backlot corner. It ran by Calvary, throwing dust, blowing its horn.
“Watch out, idiot!” I yelled.
The truck dusted off.
And J. C. with it.
A man thirty years older than I, running fast. Grotesque! J. C. a-gallop, robes flapping in the dusty wind, as if to take off, fly, shouting gibberish to the skies.
Don’t go to Clarence’s! I almost shouted.
Dumb, I thought. Clarence is too far ahead. You’ll never catch up!!
48
Fritz was waiting with Maggie in Projection Room 10.
“Where you been?” he cried. “Guess what? Now we got no middle for the film!”
It was good to talk something silly, inane, ridiculous, a madness to cure my growing madness. God, I thought, films are like making love to gargoyles. You wake to find yourself clutched to the spine of a marble nightmare and think: What am I doing here? Telling lies, pulling faces. To make a film that twenty million people run to or away from.
And all done by freaks in projection rooms raving about characters who never lived.
So, how fine now to hide here with Fritz and Maggie, shouting nonsense, playing fools.
But the nonsense didn’t help.
At four-thirty I excused myself to run to the Men’s. There in the vomitorium I lost the color in my cheeks. The vomitorium. That’s what all writers call restrooms after they’ve heard their producer’s great ideas.
I tried to get the color back in my face by scrubbing with soap and water. I bent over the washbasin for five minutes, letting my sadness and alarm rush down the drain. After one last session of dry heaves, I washed up again, and staggered back to face Maggie and Fritz, thankful for the dim projection room.
“You!” said Fritz. “Change one scene and you screw up the rest. I showed your last las
t supper to Manny at noon. Now, because of your goddamn high-quality finale, he says, against his better nature, we got to reshoot some up-front stuff, or the film looks like a dead snake with a live tail. He wouldn’t tell you this himself; he sounded like he was eating his own entrails for lunch, or your tripes en casserole. He called you words I don’t use, but finally said put the bastard to work on scenes nine, fourteen, nineteen, twenty-five, and thirty. Hopscotch rewrites and reshoots. If we reshoot every other scene, we might fool people into thinking we got one half-ass fine film.”
I felt the old warm color flushing my face.
“That’s a big job for a new writer!” I exclaimed. “The time element!”
“All in the next three days! We’ve held the cast. I’m calling Alcoholics Anonymous to dog J. C. for seventy-two hours now that we know where he hides—”
I stared, quietly, but could not tell them I had scared J. C. off the lot.
“Seems I’m responsible for a lot of bad this week,” I finally said.
“Sisyphus, stay!” Fritz leaned to clap his hands on my shoulders. “Till I get you a bigger rock to push up the goddamn hill. You’re not Jewish; don’t try for guilt.” He thrust pages at me. “Write, rewrite. Re-rewrite!”
“You sure Manny wants me on this?”
“He’d rather tie you between two horses and fire off a gun, but that’s life. Hate a little. Then hate a lot.”
