Reality boulevard, p.16
Reality Boulevard, page 16
Calista made the introductions for the Corbin girls. “Demi and Ashley.”
Adrian watched Ashley catch her breath as his eyes trapped hers, honing in on her with determined intensity. Her face was flushed.
“Cutting class?” Rudy asked.
“Just study hall,” Ashley answered with forced bravado, urgently wanting to make some sort of impression on the new heartthrob. “We do it all the time. We got lectured once, but nobody ever does anything about it. We’re juniors, so…”
Adrian looked the girls over. His assessment had been right – Calista was the way in, Demi the passive mark, but Ashley had an Achilles heel of her own. She was insect thin – possibly anorexic – but she didn’t seem to be trying to disappear or revert to the asexuality of childhood, two common themes of that particular disorder. No. He sensed it strongly: Ashley was aching to be noticed. Of all three, Adrian thought, this was the one who most needs to be thought of as important. Ashley might actually be the glue that held this game together.
Theda, however, was still zeroing in on Calista, as per the original plan. “Wow, you’re even more gorgeous up close. I don’t mean that to be weird or anything. I’m not gay.” She giggled.
Rudy laughed along with her, then plopped down on the ground, sitting cross-legged as he sifted the white powder onto a small mirror he pulled from his backpack and began dividing with a razor.
“Are you an actress too?” Ashley asked Theda.
“I’m a dancer. I’m taking a semester off from Juilliard in New York, hanging out at my dad’s. We all graduated from Beverly Hills High two years ago. Paul here –” She gestured toward Rudy. “- is supposed to be going to Stanford but he dropped out. He doesn’t do shit.”
The girls laughed nervously.
“Fuck you,” said Rudy, mock insulted. “I’m taking a break. That’s all.” He passed Theda the mirror with the five neatly divided rows of powder on it. She took a hundred dollar bill out of her purse – Adrian had told her to make sure the other girls noticed that it was a hundred – and rolled it into a straw, from which she snorted a line.
“Nice,” she said, shivering and shaking her head in pleasure. “Now, Peter here -” She pointed to Adrian. “- he’s different. He’s a supermodel. There’s a billboard of him in his fucking underwear in Times Square. He was just on the new season of FantasyLand. The one that’ll air in January.”
The girls’ eyes widened. Adrian was a Somebody.
“My dad got him the gig!” Theda added.
Rudy took his own snort off the mirror and then gingerly passed it to Ashley through the narrow bars of the gate. She looked down at the lines of coke, now down to four. Adrian had trawled all her pages, too. Except for the occasional Adderall pill, Ashley didn’t buy drugs outright because her mother didn’t allow her to have that much disposable income available. When offered cocaine at friends’ homes or parties, however, she would happily accept. She’d reported to friends in status updates and tweets how it instantly made her feel brilliant, confident, and filled with energy, and took away her appetite even better than the Adderall did. But she didn’t dare bring any contraband home with her. Her mother didn’t respect her privacy, and Elena was her watchdog, she complained to her Facebook friends. They would have found it.
“Don’t be shy,” Adrian purred at Ashley. She looked up and saw him smiling right at her, his eyes teasing and inviting. Suddenly self-conscious, she turned away so he wouldn’t witness the unladylike mechanics of snorting. When done, she passed him the mirror. Her hands trembled as they slipped through wrought iron bars, and Adrian touched them for just a moment as the mirror passed between them. He saw her tremble at the contact, and knew his magic was working.
“Seriously,” Theda continued, sounding astonished. “You don’t have agents? None of you?”
Demi and Calista shook their heads. “I’m still deciding,” Calista said with an exaggerated sigh of false nonchalance.
“My mom won’t let me,” Ashley exclaimed bitterly, emboldened by the coke. “She’s like a huge executive for television, but she says she doesn’t want me anywhere near that side of the business. You know, like, the famous side.”
“Who is she to tell you what to do with your life?” Adrian looked at Ashley with interest. He loved how he was always so dead-on about people. This girl was crying out to be appreciated. “You are so beautiful, Ashley,” he said gently. He reached through the bars and touched her arm. “You deserve to be famous.”
Ashley blushed even more deeply and looked at Adrian, then quickly looked away as he met her eyes again. It was a shame, he thought, that this was a one-time-only game. In the early days, when he was perfecting his abilities, he would play single targets like Ashley and toy with them for weeks before moving on. A girl like Ashley presented so many missed opportunities for manipulation, for proof of his superiority.
“God, you three are like Charlie’s Angels or something. My dad should really meet all of you, like, right away. MTV is scouting for a group of girls for another series like the Hills, but younger. And they don’t want trashy girls like Jersey Shore or Teen Mom anymore. They want pretty and talented and classy.”
Rudy laughed again. “Yo Mary, think your dad will finally buy you that Porsche if you do his job for him?”
“My dad’s working from home today. You guys have got to meet him. Let’s hang out. What time do you all get out of here?” Theda asked.
Adrian checked his watch. It was nearly 2:45. He saw Ashley look back toward the school. The last class of day would be letting out any minute. “My nanny’s picking me up,” she blurted, immediately blushing with shame.
“What about, like, next week?” Theda asked.
“Sure”, Calista answered eagerly. “What day?”
“How about a week from today. Thursday. He always works at home on Thursdays.”
The girls looked at one another. Demi, probably knowing her parents would not be home that afternoon and couldn’t care less what she did when they were away, was the first to nod enthusiastically.
“Okay then,” Adrian said to the girls, his voice hypnotic, soothing. “Let’s hook up again next Thursday. Don’t tell your parents and get ’em all squirrely or anything.”
All three girls made exaggerated “Duh” expression with their faces.
“Especially yours,” he looked pointedly at Ashley. “Mary’s getting you in the back door on this and you don’t want your mother to get in the way.”
“No way,” said Ashley, with passion.
“Then I’ll come by here Thursday, right at 2:45,” said Adrian. He handed them a slip of paper. “This is my cell number. Look for a gray Escalade SUV; that’s mine. We’ll all head over to Mary’s house in Holmby Hills. I’ll drive you all home after. But -” He nodded to Mary. “- not before we snag some of your dad’s white-widow stash.”
“Or his oxy script. Mary’s dad is so chill,” said Rudy. “He’s not like a regular parent. It’s party every day at her house.”
“I do have the coolest dad on earth,” Theda agreed, smiling proudly.
All three girls looked down at their feet. Daddy issues hung heavy in the air for all of them; another intuition of Adrian’s. Calista’s father and mother were long divorced and she and her younger sister felt like barely welcome guests in the enormous home he shared with his new 28-year-old wife. Both Demi’s parents were distant mirages in her life, only noticing her, she told her friends, when it was time to parade The Beautiful Daughter out as an occasional trophy. And Ashley had been raised without a father, never quite believing her mother’s overly detailed story about the sperm bank. Since she had become old enough to pay attention, she’d been aware of whispered rumors about other possible culprits. Whoever he was, though, he’d never shown an interest in her.
Theda beamed. “All my dad’s clients love him. Snooki says he’s like a second dad to her. But wait! You guys all have headshots and resumes, right?”
Adrian knew not one of them would, but all three girls nodded enthusiastic affirmation.
“So we’ll see you next week, yeah?” Adrian asked.
“Yes!” all three girls answered in unison.
They walked a little taller as they turned back toward school, buzzing not, he knew, from the cocaine, but from the thrilling promise of this encounter. This was the most exciting thing that would have happened to any of them in a long time. Next week, the glorious recognition their whole lives had promised but never quite delivered would finally be theirs. Peter, Paul and Mary were young like them, but hip, confident, and independent; clearly already Somebodies at such an early stage in their lives.
“It would be, like, just the best thing in the world to be famous,” Adrian heard Calista say before their voices faded.
“You’d, like, never be lonely again,” said Ashley. “If you were bored you could, like, just go out, take a walk, and get all the attention you wanted.”
Beyond the golden doors of Mary’s father’s house, he knew the girls believed, waited the people who had the power to make them into Somebodies, too.
Chapter 9: Façades
Glittering strings of white mini-bulbs framed the trees, the streetlights, the sculpted hedges and the picturesque shop awnings of the town square. Beneath a white wooden, gazebo-style bandstand – also trimmed with tiny white lights – a pianist and a string quartet performed bright baroque sonatas. It was a twinkling postcard of perfection; a slice of small town Americana; Bedford Falls at Christmastime in autumnal Southern California.
This was, however, not an actual town square. The buildings were façades, painted and repainted a thousand times throughout the years, with new names and exteriors to match the needs of the movie or television show filming there at the moment. Tonight, the square – a regular location for the Prime Network’s drama The Cul de Sac – was hosting the final wrap party for Lights and Sirens, the official end of its epic 16-season run. In service to the theme, Prime Studio’s transportation, prop, and costume departments had provided an ambulance with flashing lights as a catering truck and set up well-stocked liquor bars on the hoods and trunks of police cars with red bars blinking. Bartenders, waiters, and waitresses dressed as nurses, doctors, EMTs, firemen and cops wandered the square, serving drinks and exotic hors d’oeuvres. Even the classical musicians were clad in first responder uniforms.
Across the square, a banner hung between trees, resplendent with bright red letters, “Farewell, Lights and Sirens”. Along the front of the bandstand another read “Congratulations, Marty and Crimson!” Marty had found sitting in his final season’s budget two hefty sums: one, for a formal Christmas gala and the other, for the annual end-of-year wrap party. So why not save himself some money and meld Lights and Sirens’ last hurrah with his official engagement party to Crimson? He’d sent out two sets of invitations. The first was a folded red card in the shape of a fireman’s hat, the kind you can buy at children’s party stores. On the outside of the card, it read, “It’s a Party!” On the inside was printed:
Staff, Crew, Friends, and Family of Lights and Sirens:
It’s been a heroic, record-breaking 16 seasons.
Please join us all for a last celebration in honor of one of television’s longest-running and most honored shows.
The second invitation was on delicate ivory colored parchment, engraved with brown inked calligraphy. It read:
Martin Stuart Maltzman
and
Crimson Lucie Fennel
Request the honor of your presence
At a celebration of their engagement.
“Gifts?” Hunter asked.
Hunter, Allison and Dusty had been among the hundreds of people to receive both invitations. Car-pooling to the studio in Dusty’s battered Ford Caravan, they were directed to park in the employee lot - practically miles from the party itself. An anonymous white transpo department van was waiting to shuttle them to the back lot destination.
Allison re-read the invitation, troubled. “It doesn’t say anything about gifts. It’s an engagement party. D’yall think we’re supposed to bring a gift?”
“Doesn’t make sense to me,” Dusty said, squinting at the two invitations as he held them side-by-side. “Combining what’s supposed to be one of the happiest occasions of your life with a wake for a show that’ll send about two hundred people to the unemployment office tomorrow.”
“It makes total sense, Hon, if you know Marty,” Allison answered, playfully fluffing her husband’s thick head of long hair. A quick flash of jealousy stabbed at Hunter as she watched them exchange warm eye contact. She didn’t envy their lives together. How could she? They were so ordinary, so absolutely content with being average. When Hunter thought about romance – even on the rare occasions she thought of marriage – she imagined pain and yearning, agonizing separations, fiery arguments, tears and slammed doors followed by passionate reconciliations and even more fervent declarations of eternal love. She wanted Rick and Ilsa, Scarlett and Rhett, Dr. Zhivago and Lara, none of whom could she ever imagine living in a cramped bungalow in Burbank, going to pee wee soccer games on weekends and dining at Fuddruckers on Fridays. It all seemed so bland and bloodless. On the other hand, Allison and Dusty’s happiness appeared genuine. It was clear that they were a team and had one another’s backs. Would Hunter ever have someone in her life who could be that kind of support for her?
The van arrived at the square and dropped off its passengers. Hunter, Allison and Dusty looked around at the party, still in its early stages. It did seem to be more of a wake than a celebration. Cliques of Lights and Sirens staffers clustered together according to their functions – post-production with post-production at café tables on the faux patio of the Town Square’s garden restaurant; crew with other crew huddled around park benches in front of the façade of a candy store; segment producers and researchers and other office staff claiming the large grassy area nearest the bandstand. They had drinks in their hands but their faces and body language reflected gloom. Tragically symbolic, the “Farewell Lights and Sirens” banner had already begun to sag at one end.
“Okay,” Hunter said. “Where’s the bar?”
Dusty surveyed the scene and pointed to one of the police cruisers.
“How precious,” Allison said.
As they approached the police cruiser bar, Hunter could make out Brett Windsor and the agent, Zev Colsen hovering nearby. She watched as a group of Lights and Sirens office staffers tentatively approached Brett to shake his hand. He was not only gracious but also effusive. As Hunter, Allison and Dusty passed, Brett caught sight of them and, ignoring Dusty, raised his glass in the air.
“Ladies,” he boomed, “may I say, what an honor it’s been working with you lo these many years.” He stepped forward, reached out and gave Hunter a full body hug that was bordering on inappropriate.
“Thanks, Brett,” Hunter responded. Brett reached out for Allison next, but she deftly sashayed out of his grasp. Brett was swaying a little bit and Hunter guessed he’d been staking out that spot near the bar for a long time. It was funny, she thought to herself, seeing Detective Sterling Silver drunk. No matter that she’d been watching Brett perform in front of the Lights and Sirens teleprompter for years; he’d always remain Sterling Silver to her. Possibly, to the world.
Allison, Hunter and Dusty each picked up a glass of champagne and drifted off into the crowd, toward the production department clique over by the benches.
Brett and Zev watched them go.
“Who was that?” Zev asked.
“No idea,” said Brett.
Zev laughed. The blatant antics of über-hetero males like Brett amused him. Zev was not in the closet, but many of his clients were barely aware that he was gay. Chameleon-like since his boyhood in conservative rural Illinois, he’d mastered the walk and talk of the straight majority, the guffaws and swaggers and winks at filthy jokes and passing women’s asses. Zev had been in a committed, live-in relationship with the same gentle man, Richard, for nearly a dozen years, but never spoke about his private life and never brought Richard to parties or awards ceremonies or work-related social events. Behind the scenes, his industry was anything but homophobic, but Zev’s first job in the Unlimited Talent mailroom had reinforced the lessons of his childhood. It was how things appeared on the surface that mattered. He kept his business and personal lives compartmentalized, and was grateful that most of his clients were so immersed in their own egocentric dramas that they never bothered to ask about his.
Zev looked around the lot. He saw Garret Shaw, head in hands, sitting on the faux marble plywood steps of the town hall, running his fingers through his wild, unbrushed hair. His wife, Jillian, tried to budge him from his pose, and it ignited a marital spat that was as ugly as it was quick. Throwing her hands into the air in frustration, Jillian stalked across the square toward the second police cruiser bar, near where the post-production crowd was gathered. Garret hurled the plastic glass in his hand across the lawn, then, looking regretful, stood up and headed toward the ambulance bar. When he saw Zev and Brett, he straightened his sulking posture a bit and once fortified with a double scotch, made his way over to them.
“Marty went all out,” Garret commented.
“Lose a series, get a free engagement party.” Zev said. “Now on to the next show.”
“Not me,” Garret mumbled. “I’ve got to get out of reality.”
“And you will, Gare. You will. This is our time now,” Brett slurred. “It’s been a nice ride all these years, but now it’s done. I’ve got an open deal at Prime Networks, pay or play, and I want you to develop a series for me. Leonard Goldberg still has the rights to Sterling Silver, but how ’bout a Sterling Silver-type character, just ten years older?”
