“See, dumbfuck”—Billy cuffs Mango’s shoulder—“I told you it was leather.”
“Like you know so much about fashion. I bet you ain’t even wearing underwear—”
They swat at each other, start to grapple, but the manager’s gulpy Whoa! calls them off.
“So, hunh. You sell a lot of these?” Billy asks, fingering one of the jackets.
“Five or six a game. When we’re winning we might do better than that.”
“Damn. Your peeps got some juicy cash flow, huh.”
The manager smiles. “I guess that’s one way to put it.”
The Bravos thank the manager and leave. “Dawg,” Mango says once they’re outside. “Six hundred seventy-nine dollars,” he says. “Billy,” he says, then, “Shit.” And that’s all they say about it.
THE HUMAN RESPONSE
“FIFTEEN MILLION,” ALBERT IS saying as Billy and Mango resume their seats. “Fifteen cash against fifteen percent of gross, a star can do that when they’re running hot. And Hilary’s running very hot these days. Her agent won’t let her read without a guarantee.”
“Read what?” Sykes asks. Albert’s eyes slowly track that way, followed by his head.
“The script, Kenneth.”
“But I thought you said we don’t have a script.”
“We don’t, but we’ve got a treatment and we’ve got a writer. And now that Hilary’s interested, we can slant it in a way that really speaks to her.”
“I love it when he talks like that,” says Dime.
“Look, the script’s not the problem, just telling your story’s gonna make a compelling script. The hard part’s getting the damn thing in her hands.”
“You said you know her,” Crack points out.
“Hell yes I know her! We got bombed off our ass a couple of months ago at Jane Fonda’s house! But this is business, guys, everything she reads has to go through her agent, and he won’t let her so much as touch a script unless it comes with a firm offer from a studio. That way she knows if she says yes, the studio’s on the hook. She can’t get turned down.”
“Uh, so, do we have a studio?” Crack asks. He knows he should know this, but everything about the deal seems so abstract.
“Robert, we do not. There’s tons of interest out there, but nobody wants to commit until a star commits.”
“But Swank won’t commit until they do.”
Albert smiles. “Precisely.” The Bravos emit an appreciative ahhhhh. The paradox is so perfect, so completely circular in the modern way, that everyone can identify.
“That’s kind of fucked,” says Crack.
“It is,” Albert agrees. “It’s totally fucked.”
“So how do you make it happen?” asks A-bort.
“By making it inevitable. By making it a goddamn force of nature. By scaring these guys so bad that somebody else is gonna buy it that they have to commit or their heads’ll explode.”
“People,” Dime announces, “I think I just figured out what Albert does.”
Billy and Mango are sitting at the end of the row, then it’s Crack, Albert, Dime, Day, A-bort, Sykes, and Lodis, then an empty seat for Major Mac. Billy has noticed that Albert is never far from Dime. Not that Bravo needed proof of how special their sergeant is, but it arrived anyway in the form of Albert and his instant fascination with the Bravo leader. Billy has decided that Albert is gay for Dime, in a nonsexual sense. Dime interests him, Dime the person and Dime the soldier, the entire phenomenon of Dime-ness loosed upon a square and unsuspecting world. In the pantheon of Albert’s attentions, Dime comes first and Holliday a distant second, and even that seems more of a proximate sort of interest, conditional, complementary, a function of Day’s black yin yoked to Dime’s honky yang. Day deigns not to notice his secondary status, like now, for instance, as Albert and Dime huddle in intense conversation while Day perches on his seat back surveying the field like an African king high on his throne, looking down on all his little subject bitches. And as for the rest of Bravo, they might as well be so many shares of corporate stock that happen to talk and walk and drink a lot of beer. “Dime the property,” as Day muttered to Billy last night, in a rare drunken moment of resentful candor. “The rest a you just the produck.”
Which made Shroom what? Shroom and Lake, were they produck too? Bravo’s talk these days is so much about money, moneymoneymoney like a bug on the brain or a hamster spinning his squeaky wheel, a conversation going nowhere at tremendous speed. Billy would just as soon move on to other subjects, but he won’t call his fellow Bravos on it. The way they obsess, it’s as if a big payday involved more than mere buying power, as if x amount of dollars cooling in the bank could bring your ass safely through the war. He intuits the spiritual logic of it, but for him the equation works in reverse: The day the money comes through, the actual day his check clears, that will be the very day he gets smoked.
So he attunes to the movie talk with pronounced conflictedness. Bravo peppers Albert with questions. What about Clooney? What’s going on with Oliver Stone? How about the guy who said he could get Robert Downey Jr.? Then the distinguished-looking gentleman seated behind Albert leans over and asks if he’s in the movie business.
Albert freezes, head cocked to the side as if he’s heard the call of some rare and wonderful bird. “Why, yes.” he answers sweetly. “Yes I am in the film industry.”
“Director? Writer?”
“Producer,” Albert allows.
“L.A.?”
“L.A.,” Albert confirms.
“Listen,” says the man, “I’m a lawyer. I do white-collar criminal defense and I’ve got a great idea for a legal thriller — type script. Care to hear it?”
Albert says he’d be delighted, as long as the lawyer can describe it in twenty seconds or less. Meanwhile a couple of dozen Cowboys players have taken the field and begin warming up. This isn’t the real warm-up, explains Crack, who played a year of college ball at Southeast Alabama State, but the pre-warm-up warm-up for the guys who need some extra loosening up. Billy’s attention is soon drawn to the Cowboys punter, a slope-shouldered, moon-faced, paunchy fellow with hardly any hair, the kind of guy you’d normally find behind your supermarket meat counter, except this guy can kick a football to oblivion and back. Foom, the soggy thump of each kick resounds in Billy’s gut as the ball rockets off on a steep trajectory, up, up, onward and upward still, your eye falters at the spot where the ball should level off and yet it climbs higher still as if some unseen booster charge has fired and straight for the bottomless dome it goes. Billy tries to mark the absolute highest point, that instant of neutral buoyancy where the ball hangs or dangles, actually pauses for a moment as if measuring the fall that even now begins as the nose rolls over with a languid elegance, and there’s an aspect of surrender, of grateful relinquishment as it yields to the gravitational fate. After seven or eight kicks Billy feels a kind of interior vaporization taking place, a dilution or relaxation of self-awareness. He feels calm. Watching the kicker is restful for his mind. The peak moments give him the most intense pleasure, a bristling in his brain like tiny lightning strikes as the ball sniffs eternity’s lower reaches, strokes the soft underbelly of empty-headed bliss for as long as it lingers at the top of its arc. Billy can imagine that’s where Shroom lives now, he is a citizen of the realms of neutral buoyancy. It’s sort of a childish and sentimental thought, but why not, if Shroom has to be somewhere then why not there? Bravo has long since been reduced to bestselling produck, but even the long arm of marketing can’t touch Shroom now.