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***
We ran his lines andthen mine on the way to the set. When we arrived, we were greeted by about twenty people, one a lean Black man in a puffy silver coat who hugged Tony as if they’d been long-lost family or something.
“Mignon, thank all the gods you made it,” I heard Tony saying as a tiny girl named Woe led me to the makeup trailer. Oh Mignon. Tony’s personal assistant. Okay, that was safe hugs then. The next hour was one of the most unusual of my life. I was seated in a beautician’s chair—or something similar—and had Woe shave me. Seemed Woe worked in hair and wigs. Never in all my shaving days—and there had been a lot since I had started whacking whiskers at sixteen—had another human being shaved me. It was an electric razor, and she was quite careful around the edges of my beard, but it was strangely intimate. Mostly it was a tidy-up of my facial hair before she brought out the clippers to buzz my already short hair down to the wood. She rubbed some sort of scalp conditioner into my skin, talking away to Happi—with an I, the pudgy Asian makeup artist informed me—as I was shuttled from one seat to another. Tony appeared behind me, Mignon talking into his cell at his side, and plopped down into the chair I’d just vacated.
“Your beard looks razor sharp,” Tony said while Mignon took a seat on a folding chair in the corner. How he found room for his lanky self amid all the wigs and makeup cases was a testament to how badly he wanted to sit down. The trailer was brightly lit with four chairs placed in front of glowing mirrors. Stuff was scattered everywhere. I sat back to allow Happi to tuck some paper into the collar of my uniform shirt. “Mignon, this is my old dear friend Stillman King. He’s the lawman around these parts.”
“Hello,” Mignon replied without glancing up from his tablet. “So, I see that you have totally screwed our social media interaction over the past ten days.”
Tony gave me a wink as Woe began working some sort of pomade into his thick hair. “Internet is terrible out here in the boonies. I’m sure you posted all kinds of good stuff.”
“Not the point, Anthony. Also, I am staying in a home that has a child. Am I expected to engage with the child? Honestly...children. It’s like my own personalSilent Hill.”
Tony chuckled as did Woe. “I’m sure all you have to do is be nice when you see the child.”
“Hmm, well, as long as it doesn’t try to touch me. I really dislike children’s sticky fingers on me.” Mignon crossed one long leg over the other and then looked at me in the mirror. “You’re not at all like I envisioned when Tony told me—”
“Hey, why don’t we run over those lines of yours one more time, Stillman? You were still kind of flat on the way in.” I shot both men suspicious glances. “Unless you’re happy being a wooden cop.”
“Not really,” I slowly said, my sight lingering on Mignon, who had rolled his lips over his teeth. “Okay.” I cleared my throat. “License, insurance, and registration, please.” Woe and Happi grimaced. “Shit. Was it really that bad?”
“Very stiff. Try putting some swagger into it,” Tony said as his PA slithered down in his chair, his tablet coming up to shield his long face. “You’re a big burly he-man cop. Say it like you would if this were real.”
“I did.” I had no fucking clue how to put swagger into a line asking to see an insurance card. Then an idea popped into my head. “Should I try to sound more like a Southern sheriff? I can do a pretty good Buford T. Justice.”
Everyone under forty in the trailer said “Who?” simultaneously. Tony gave them all a good tsk as I stewed. Come on now. Was I really that old?
“Honestly, you kids,” Tony chimed in as Woe patted his nose with powder. “Sheriff Justice was a huge comedic role in the Smokey and the Bandit movies, played to perfection by Jackie Gleason,” Tony explained and got more blank looks.
“Who’s Jackie Gleason?” Happi enquired.
“Oh! Wasn’t she married to that president who Marilyn Monroe sang happy birthday too?” Woe asked, frowning when Tony and I sighed and shook our heads.
“Oh, hold on,” Mignon called out, tapping away at his phone. “Jackie Gleason was an actor who was famous in the fifties for a show about honeymooners,” he read from his cell and then lifted bright brown eyes lined in kohl to us. “Says here he was called ‘The Great One’ but doesn’t say why he was called that.”
I shrugged and looked at Tony. He gave me a wink. “I got this,” he whispered to me and then proceeded to give the young ones—and me—a quick bit of trivia knowledge. “Rumor has it that he was given that name by Orson Welles after a night spent partying and Gleason embraced it.”
“Who’s Orson Welles?” Woe asked. Tony threw his hands up. The kids looked a little flummoxed, but Google quickly came to their rescue. I had never felt older than I did sitting in that chair as a twenty-something smeared something gooey on my face to hide the wrinkles at the corners of my eyes.
When we were freed to go to wardrobe, I rose, thanked the artists who had made me look ten years younger, and followed Tony and Mignon outside. It was a quiet morning, cold and crisp, with little chatter coming over my shoulder mic.
Tony kept glancing back at me. Finally, we stopped outside a massive trailer that was parked behind the courthouse so it didn’t interfere too badly with the flow of traffic on Main Street. Things were clogged at times as it were.
“Okay, so I know I’m not a wardrobe maven, but I think you should wear your own uniform,” Tony said, glancing from me to his PA who had pulled a muesli bar from his shoulder bag and was tearing it open. He took a bite, tipped his head left and then right, and nodded. “See, he agrees.”
“It does have a patch with the town name on it, though,” Mignon pointed out, tapping my bicep with his crunchy breakfast bar. It had big fat raisins and nuts in it that tumbled to the frosty grass. “Oops. Well, the pigeons can have that bite.” He smiled and took a huge bite. “Mm, but...” He held up his hand in front of his face to shield us from seeing him chew and talk. “Gracelyn will not favor you expressing your thoughts on her wardrobe choices.”
Something nibbled at the back of my brain. Then, without warning, the door to the trailer flew open to reveal a woman of about four feet nothing with kinky black hair, thick glasses, and a tape measure hanging around her neck.
“You’re both tardy!” she barked down at us, glowering through her smudged lenses.
“So sorry, Gracelyn.” Tony bowed gallantly to the older woman.
“Pah, try to charm me, you queer bastard,” she grumbled, spun, and stalked off as a young man raced past us carrying a gray goose with a bow tie.
“She’s a charmer,” Tony whispered as I gawked in shock. “But we overlook her gruffness. She dressed Audrey Hepburn.”
“Oh,” I replied, staring into the trailer as if it were the bowels of Hell freshly opened.
