Except for all this high drama, it’s a really nice day. This is a warm, sunny day and the front door is open to the porch and the lawn outside. The fire upstairs draws the warm smell of the fresh-cut lawn into the foyer, and you can hear all the wedding guests outside. All the guests, they took the gifts they wanted, the crystal and silver, and went out to wait on the lawn for the firemen and paramedics to make their entrance.
Brandy, she opens one of her huge, ring-beaded hands and she touches the hole pouring her blood all over the marble floor.
Brandy, she says, “Shit. There’s no way the Bon Marché will take this suit back.”
Evie lifts her face, her face a finger-painting mess of soot and snot and tears, from her hands and screams, “I hate my life being so boring!”
Evie screams down at Brandy Alexander, “Save me a window table in hell!”
Tears rinse clean lines down Evie’s cheeks, and she screams, “Girlfriend! You need to be yelling some back at me!”
As if this isn’t already drama, drama, drama, Brandy looks up at me kneeling beside her. Brandy’s aubergine eyes dilated out to full flower, she says, “Brandy Alexander is going to die now?”
Evie, Brandy, and me, all this is just a power struggle for the spotlight. Just each of us being me, me, me first. The murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is the lead.
Probably that goes for anybody in the world.
It’s all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.
Anymore, when I see the picture of a twenty-something in the newspaper who was abducted and sodomized and robbed and then killed and here’s a front-page picture of her young and smiling, instead of me dwelling on this being a big, sad crime, my gut reaction is, wow, she’d be really hot if she didn’t have such a big honker of a nose. My second reaction is I’d better have some good head-and-shoulders shots handy in case I get, you know, abducted and sodomized to death. My third reaction is, well, at least that cuts down on the competition.
If that’s not enough, my moisturizer I use is a suspension of inert fetal solids in hydrogenated mineral oil. My point is that, if I’m honest, my life is all about me.
My point is, unless the meter is running and some photographer is yelling: Give me empathy.
Then the flash of the strobe.
Give me sympathy.
Flash.
Give me brutal honesty.
Flash.
“Don’t let me die here on this floor,” Brandy says, and her big hands clutch at me. “My hair,” she says, “my hair will be flat in the back.”
My point is I know Brandy is maybe probably going to die, but I just can’t get into it.
Evie sobs even louder. On top of this, the fire sirens from way outside are crowning me queen of Migraine Town.
The rifle is still spinning on the floor, but slower and slower.
Brandy says, “This is not how Brandy Alexander wanted her life to go. She’s supposed to be famous, first. You know, she’s supposed to be on television during Super Bowl halftime, drinking a diet cola naked in slow motion before she died.”
The rifle stops spinning and points at nobody.
At Evie sobbing, Brandy screams, “Shut up!”
“You shut up,” Evie screams back. Behind her, the fire is eating its way down the stairway carpet.
The sirens, you can hear them wandering and screaming all over the West Hills. People will just knock each other down to dial 911 and be the big hero. Nobody looks ready for the big television crew that’s due to arrive any minute.
“This is your last chance, honey,” Brandy says, and her blood is getting all over the place. She says, “Do you love me?”
It’s when folks ask questions like this that you lose the spotlight.
This is how folks trap you into a best-supporting role.
Even bigger than the house being on fire is this huge expectation that I have to say the three most worn-out words you’ll find in any script. Just the words make me feel I’m severely fingering myself. They’re just words is all. Powerless. Vocabulary. Dialogue.
“Tell me,” Brandy says. “Do you? Do you really love me?”
This is the big hammy way Brandy has played her whole life. The Brandy Alexander nonstop continuous live action theater, but less and less live by the moment.
Just for a little stage business, I take Brandy’s hand in mine. This is a nice gesture, but then I’m freaked by the whole threat of blood-borne pathogens, and then, boom, the ceiling in the dining room crashes down, and sparks and embers rush out at us from the dining room doorway.
“Even if you can’t love me, then tell me my life,” Brandy says. “A girl can’t die without her life flashing before her eyes.”
Pretty much nobody is getting their emotional needs met.
It’s then the fire eats down the stairway carpet to Evie’s bare ass, and Evie screams to her feet and pounds down the stairs in her burned-up white high heels. Naked and hairless, wearing wire and ashes, Evie Cottrell runs out the front door to a larger audience, her wedding guests, the silver and crystal and the arriving fire trucks. This is the world we live in. Conditions change and we mutate.
So of course this’ll be all about Brandy, hosted by me, with guest appearances by Evelyn Cottrell and the deadly AIDS virus. Brandy, Brandy, Brandy. Poor sad Brandy on her back, Brandy touches the hole pouring her life out onto the marble floor and says, “Please. Tell me my life. Tell me how we got here.”
So me, I’m here eating smoke just to document this Brandy Alexander moment.
Give me attention.
Flash.
Give me adoration.
Flash.
Give me a break.
Flash.
Chapter 42
here you’re supposed to be is some big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, with cameramen and actors and stuffed mushrooms all over the church. This is the summer of 2007, and a film based on my fourth book, Choke, is being shot on location here. In a side chapel a few steps away, Kelly Macdonald’s character is seducing Sam Rockwell’s. Plotwise, her goal is to conceive a fetus in order to puree its unborn brain and use that neural tissue to cure the dementia of Anjelica Huston’s character. All of that sacrifice is being offered to preserve the memories of one person …In real life, Kelly tells me she’s been away from home, filming projects in the United States, and hasn’t seen her husband in months. This big push is so they can get somewhat ahead, so Kelly can stay at home, she hopes, and have a real baby.
The hospital sequences are being shot in an abandoned asylum, the former Essex County Mental Hospital, a complex of thirty-five buildings covering a hundred acres. A ghost town. “Our own back lot,” says the film’s director, Clark Gregg. There are buildings to serve as police stations …buildings that look like private homes …all of them scheduled to be demolished in another month. The landscaping is overgrown, with white-tailed deer wandering the waist-high grass. Rabbits graze in this Arcadian setting, and, at dusk, fireflies hover as winking lights. Left behind are a century of hospital beds and dirty sheets, and the shabby jigsaw puzzles are beyond number.
In Hollywood jargon, everyone has warned Clark that Choke was “very E.D.” By this, they don’t mean “erectile dysfunction.” A comedy about food and death and sex? They mean that the film’s success will be very “execution dependent.” By execution, they mean how it’s told, not how it’s killed.
Jump to midnight in this mental hospital. Anjelica Huston walks toward me down a long hospital corridor, her cheeks smeared with a mask of chocolate pudding, her eyes locked on mine. “You,” she says, pointing at her face, “you did this to me!” We stand and talk while the crew sets up another shot. She tells me a strange, funny story about her father, John Huston, speaking to her a few days after his death. I won’t spoil it or steal it by retelling that story here. Kelly Macdonald talks about learning a Texas accent a few weeks ago for a film called No Country for Old Men. Before that she was working on a project in Chicago. Sam Rockwell talks about his next film, to be shot in England, about a man who lives alone on the moon.